Narciso Barranco, an undocumented father of three Marines, has lived and worked in the US for over 30 years. On June 21, Barranco was doing landscaping work at an IHOP in Santa Ana, CA, when he was suddenly swarmed by a group of armed, masked, unidentified Customs and Border Patrol agents who chased him down, brutally beat him in the middle of a busy intersection, and kidnapped him in broad daylight. “I believe he was racially profiled,” Alejandro Barranco, one of Narciso Barranco’s sons, tells TRNN. “My dad has never done anything wrong. They had no warrant for him.” In this on-the-ground report, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Alejandro Barranco at the IHOP where his father was abducted about the cruel, terrifying reality of the Trump administration’s immigration raids.

Speakers:

• Alejandro Barranco is the eldest son of Narciso Barranco. He served in the Marines from 2019 to 2023
• Jose Francisco Negrete is a resident of Anaheim, CA, a rank-and-file Teamster, and a member of Labor for Palestine and Teamsters Mobilize
• We spoke with a number of undocumented day laborers near the site where Narciso Barranco was abudcted, including one eyewitness to Barranco’s abduction. To ensure their safety, we have kept their identities anonymous. 

Additional resources:

• Mona Darwish, Orange County Register, “‘I feel betrayed,’ US Marine says of seeing his father punched by federal immigration agent”
• Mona Darwish, Orange County Register, “OC father of 3 US Marines released from immigration detention center after multiple days of delay”
• Vera Institute of Justice, “Profile of immigrants in Santa Ana, California”
• NBC-LA, “Watch: Undocumented father of 3 US Marines speaks out”

Credits:

• Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez
• Studio Production / Post Production: Cameron Granadino

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

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is sowing fear and chaos in communities across the United States, as heavily armed and masked agents descend on workplaces, schools and public spaces. In Los Angeles, dozens of federal agents, including some on horseback, swept MacArthur Park, located in a predominantly immigrant and working-class part of the city. “It felt like an occupation of L.A.,” says Vladimir Carrasco, who works with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA.

Meanwhile, community leaders in Chicago are expressing outrage after federal immigration forces showed up at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture and refused to identify themselves. Although Homeland Security later claimed the agents were at the museum on an unrelated matter, “We know that they were there to intimidate us,” says Veronica Ocasio, director of education and programming at the organization. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

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

Forty years ago today, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship  Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.

People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.

• READ MORE: David Robie: New Zealand must do more for Pacific and confront nuclear powers
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.

Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.

Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.

A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.

In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.

This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.

Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.

The legacy of Operation Exodus
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.

For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.

Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.

“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.

He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.

Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.

What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues?
“Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.

A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.

“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

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

In an effort to fulfill the Trump administration’s daily immigration arrest “quotas,” federal agents and deputized local law enforcement are racially profiling and snatching people off the streets without due process. These arrests, carried out by armed and masked agents, are sowing terror and confusion in communities across the United States. Stephano Medina, a lawyer with the California Center for Movement Legal Services, shares how ICE regularly denies that it has taken people into custody, leading to family members scrambling for information about their loved ones. “It’s arrest now, ask questions later,” adds Dominique Boubion, an attorney representing Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen who was taken by ICE last month in what Velez has since described as a “kidnapping.”

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

On May 16, Nicaraguan lawmakers approved a constitutional amendment that allows the government to strip Nicaraguan nationality fromcitizens who opt for a second nationality.

On May 20, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved a “foreign agents” law mandating that any person or organization receiving funds from abroad register with the Ministry of Interior as a foreign agent.

Read the full statement in English and Español.

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

On May 16, Nicaraguan lawmakers approved a constitutional amendment that allows the government to strip Nicaraguan nationality fromcitizens who opt for a second nationality.

On May 20, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved a “foreign agents” law mandating that any person or organization receiving funds from abroad register with the Ministry of Interior as a foreign agent.

Read the full statement in English and Español.

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

“President Nayib Bukele’s foreign agents law is a blatant move to silence dissent and dismantle what remains of El Salvador’s independent press,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in São Paulo. “By forcing journalists and civil society organizations to register as foreign agents and taxing foreign support, the government is adopting the repressive tactics of authoritarian regimes like Nicaragua and Russia. This law must be repealed.”

Approved May 20 by Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party-controlled legislature, the law mandates that any person or organization receiving funds from abroad register with the Ministry of Interior as a foreign agent. Those designated must pay a 30% tax on all foreign income and submit to extensive oversight, including sworn declarations. Violations of the law carry fines ranging from US$1,000 to US$150,000.

While the government claims the law is meant to promote transparency and protect national sovereignty, press freedom and human rights advocates warn it is intended to intimidate critics and financially cripple the independent press.

Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief of El Faro, told CPJ the law’s vague language grants authorities sweeping discretion. It applies not only to organizations, but also to individuals, so freelance journalists, academics, and trainers who receive honoraria or stipends from abroad could be labeled foreign agents.

“This law is designed to suffocate the press,” said Martínez. “We rely on international donors because local advertisers are too afraid of government retaliation. Now the government wants to criminalize that support.”

Angélica Cárcamo, director of the Central American Journalists Network, called the measure “a tool of persecution.” She told CPJ the law is “intended to shut down NGOs, silence critical journalism, and tighten the government’s control over public discourse.”

CPJ emailed the office of the Salvadoran president for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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

“President Nayib Bukele’s foreign agents law is a blatant move to silence dissent and dismantle what remains of El Salvador’s independent press,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in São Paulo. “By forcing journalists and civil society organizations to register as foreign agents and taxing foreign support, the government is adopting the repressive tactics of authoritarian regimes like Nicaragua and Russia. This law must be repealed.”

Approved May 20 by Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party-controlled legislature, the law mandates that any person or organization receiving funds from abroad register with the Ministry of Interior as a foreign agent. Those designated must pay a 30% tax on all foreign income and submit to extensive oversight, including sworn declarations. Violations of the law carry fines ranging from US$1,000 to US$150,000.

While the government claims the law is meant to promote transparency and protect national sovereignty, press freedom and human rights advocates warn it is intended to intimidate critics and financially cripple the independent press.

Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief of El Faro, told CPJ the law’s vague language grants authorities sweeping discretion. It applies not only to organizations, but also to individuals, so freelance journalists, academics, and trainers who receive honoraria or stipends from abroad could be labeled foreign agents.

“This law is designed to suffocate the press,” said Martínez. “We rely on international donors because local advertisers are too afraid of government retaliation. Now the government wants to criminalize that support.”

Angélica Cárcamo, director of the Central American Journalists Network, called the measure “a tool of persecution.” She told CPJ the law is “intended to shut down NGOs, silence critical journalism, and tighten the government’s control over public discourse.”

CPJ emailed the office of the Salvadoran president for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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

The Trump administration continues to escalate its authoritarian assault on higher education, free speech, and political dissent—and university administrators and state government officials are willingly aiding that assault. On the morning of April 23, at the direction of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raided the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan. “According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items,” Michael Arria reports at Mondoweiss. “Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers from the University of Michigan and Columbia University about how they and their unions are fighting back against ICE abductions, FBI raids, and top-down political repression, all while trying to carry on with their day-to-day work.

Panelists include: Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO); Ember McCoy, a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank-and-file member of GEO and the TAHRIR Coalition; Jessie Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank-and-file member of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC); and Conlan Olson, a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia and a member of the SWC bargaining committee.

Additional links/info:

• Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), University of Michigan website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• TAHRIR Coalition UMich X page
• Legal Fund of Michigan Students for Palestine
• GEO Worker Solidarity Fund
• GEO Press Release: FBI and police raid homes of pro-Palestine activists, including a GEO member
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “FBI and police raid homes of Palestine activists in Michigan”
• Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette, “Harvard files lawsuit against Trump administration”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”

Permanent links below…

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

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our ongoing coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. Things have continued to escalate since we published our episodes earlier in April where I first interviewed Todd Wolfson in Chen Akua of the American Association of University Professors, and then interviewed graduate student workers at Columbia University, Ali Wong and Caitlyn Liss. Now many since then have praised the development of Harvard University standing up and challenging Trump’s attacks in a public statement titled, upholding Our Values, defending Our University.

Harvard’s president Alan m Garber wrote Dear members of the Harvard Community. Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11th letter was sent by mistake. Other statements and their actions suggest otherwise doubling down on the letters, sweeping and intrusive demands which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university. The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 5 0 1 C3 tax exempt status. These actions have stark real life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world. Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.

Now at the same time at the University of Michigan, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies raided multiple homes of student activists connected to Gaza solidarity protests as Michael Aria reports at Monde Weiss. On the morning of April 23rd, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan. According to the group, students allied for Freedom and Equality or safe agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained but eventually released to rear coalition. A student led movement calling for divestment from Israel said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid. A Detroit FBI office spokesman declined to explain why the warrants were executed, but confirmed that the matter was being handled by the Office of Michigan.

Attorney General Dana Nessel. Nessel has refused to confirm whether the raids were connected to Palestine activism thus far, but her office has aggressively targeted the movement. Last fall, Nestle introduced criminal charges against at least 11 protestors involved in the University of Michigan Gaza encampment. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that members of University of Michigan’s governing board had pressed Nestle to bring charges against the students. The report notes that six of eight Regents donated more than $33,000 combined to Nestle’s campaigns after the regents called for action. Nestle took the cases over from local district attorney Ellie Savitt, an extremely rare move as local prosecutors typically handle such cases. Listen, as we’ve been saying repeatedly on this show and across the Real news, the battle on and over are institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump Administration’s agenda will be decided.

And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond, but by how faculty respond students, grad students, staff, campus communities, and the public writ large. And today we are very grateful to be joined by four guests who are on the front lines of that fight. We’re joined today by Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees organization or GEO, which full disclosure is my old union. Ember McCoy is also joining us. Ember is a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank and file member of GEO and the Tare Coalition. And we are also joined today by Jesse Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia.

We are also joined by Conlin Olson, a PhD student in computer science at Columbia, and a member of the Bargaining Committee for Student Workers of Columbia, Lavinia Ember, Jesse Conlin. Thank you all so much for joining us today, especially amidst this terrifying reality that we all find ourselves in. I wanted to just jump right in and start there because since we have y’all and you are new voices in this ongoing coverage that we’re trying to do of these authoritarian attacks on higher ed, I wanted to start by just going around the table and asking if y’all could briefly introduce yourselves and tell us about what your life and work have been like these past few weeks and months as all of this Orwellian nightmare has been unfolding.

Lavinia:

Yeah. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, max for putting this together. So by and large, my life just continues to revolve around research. I’m actually on an NSF fellowship and that means that I basically spend all of my time in the office doing research. That being said, over the past couple of months, especially sort of in the context of organizing, a lot of what I and other grad workers at the University of Michigan have been working on is safety planning and mutual aid efforts related to immigration. And then of course in the past couple of weeks there’s been sort of this really alarming, as you said, escalation in repression by the state government of pro-Palestine protestors. So recently a lot of organizing work has also been related to that, but just to personalize it, the people who are affected by this repression, our friends, they’re coworkers and it’s just been extremely scary recently even just sort of trying to navigate being on campus in this really kind of tense political environment.

Ember McCoy:

So for me, this is kind a continuation of the organizing that I’ve been doing throughout the PhD and before I was vice president of the grad union during our 2023 strike, and there was a lot of infrastructure that we built and organizing models that we’ve changed, that we’ve talked about. Even I think on this podcast leading into the strike, which I think then we got a contract in September of 2023 and then pretty much right away ended up transitioning our work to be very focused on Palestine Pro Palestine organizing in collaboration with undergrad students after October 7th, which I think is really important for some of the infrastructure we built and organizing models we built, thinking about how we’ve been able to transition from labor organizing to pro-Palestine organizing to ICE organizing and all the way back around and in between. On a personal level, this week, Monday morning, I had a meeting with my advisor.

I told him, I promised him I was going to lock in. I was like, I’m going to do it. I need to finish. By August, two hours later, I found out my NSF grant was terminated. I study environmental justice, I have a doctoral dissertation research grant, and then I spent Tuesday trying to do paperwork around that. And Monday morning I woke up to my friend’s houses being rated by the FBI and safe to say, I’ve not worked on my dissertation the rest of the week. So yeah, I think it’s just important like Lavinia said, to think about how, I don’t know, we’re all operating in this space of navigating, trying to continue thinking about our work and the obligations we have as workers for students at the University of Michigan. It is finals week, so the raids happen Wednesdays finals started Thursday. And also not only continuing the fight for pre Palestine, but also making sure our comrades are okay and that they’re safe.

Jessie Rubin:

Hi everyone. It’s really nice to meet you Lavinia and Ember, and thank you so much Max for inviting us to be a part of this. My name is Jessie and I’m a PhD candidate at Columbia in the music department and also a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia. I guess to start off with the more personal side with my own research, I guess I’m lucky in that my research has not been threatened with funding cuts the same way that embers has been, and I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Ember much love and solidarity to you, but my research does engage Palestine. I researched the Palestine Solidarity movement in Ireland and this past year has definitely been a whirlwind of being scared that I could get in trouble even for just talking about my own research on campus, scared that if I share my research with my students, that might be grounds for discipline.

So it’s definitely been this large existential fight of trying to write my dissertation and write it well while also feeling like Columbia doesn’t want me to be doing the dissertation that I am doing. At the same time, I’ve been really invigorated and motivated through working with my fellow union members. I’m a member of our communications committee, which has obviously taken off a ton in the past few months with social media, internal communications and press, and figuring out how we as a union can sort of express our demands to a broader audience in America and around the globe. I’m also a member of our political education and solidarity committee, and that has been really moving, I mean really exciting to see how different members of our community and also the broader union work with other groups on campus through mutual aid efforts, through actions, through all sorts of activity to fight against this attack on higher ed. And lastly, I also joined our Palestine working group last year. Our union passed a BDS resolution, which then sort of necessitated the formation of our working group. And our working group has been working to think about what Palestine might look like in our upcoming bargaining. We are just entering bargaining and Conlin who’s here with us today can probably talk more about what that’s been looking like as they’re a member of our bargaining team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should also be remembered from listeners from our previous episode with members of Student workers of Columbia. Don’t forget that the university expelled and functionally fired Grant Minor, the former president of Student Workers of Columbia, right before bargaining sessions opened with the university.

Conlan Olson:

Yeah, that’s right. This is Conlin. Like Jesse said, I’m a member of the bargaining committee at Student Workers of Columbia. I’m also a PhD student in computer science. I study algorithmic fairness and data privacy, which are sort of terrifyingly relevant right now. And in addition to our current contract campaign, just on a day-to-day organizing level, and we’re all really trying hard to build the left and build the labor movement among tech workers and STEM workers, which is an uphill battle, but I think is really important work. And I think there is a lot of potential for solidarity and labor power in those areas, even if at Columbia right now they feel under organized.

And in our contract campaign, we are currently, we have contract articles ready. We have a comprehensive health and safety article that includes protections for international students. We have articles about keeping federal law enforcement off our campus. And of course we have all the usual articles that you would see in a union contract. We have a non-discrimination and harassment article that provides real recourse in a way that we don’t have right now. And so we are ready to bargain and we have our unit standing behind us and the university really has refused to meet us in good faith. As Max said, they’ve fired our president and then we still brought our president because he’s still our president to bargaining. And the next time we went to schedule a bargaining session, they declared him persona non grata from campus. And so we said, well, we can’t meet you on campus because we need our president. Here’s a zoom link. And Columbia, of course refused to show up on Zoom. So we are frustrated. We are ready to bargain. We have the power, we have the contract articles and the universities refusing to meet us. So we are building a powerful campaign to ask them to meet us and to try to get them to the table and work on reaching a fair contract for all of our workers. Yeah, I think that’s most of my day-to-day these days is working on our contract campaign.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I just want to say speaking only for myself and full disclosure, I am a former GEO member at the University of Michigan. I got my PhDs there as well, and I remember after already leaving the university to come work at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I was still a BD, meaning I hadn’t fully finished my dissertation and defended it. Then COD hit in 2020 and our university was doing the same thing of amidst this chaotic nightmare that we were all living through. My professors and administrators were saying, Hey, finish that dissertation. And I think I rightly said, I rightly expressed what many of us were feeling, which was, Hey man, I’ve earned that goddamn thing at this point. Just give me the degree. I can’t imagine how y’all are still trying to write and defend your dissertations amidst these funding cuts amidst when the future of higher education itself is in doubt. So I would just say for myself and for no one else, just give PhD candidates their goddamn doctorates at this point, man, what are you doing? But anyway, ember Lavinia, I want to go to y’all and ask if you could help us break down the FBI and police raids out there in Ann Arbor Ypsilanti all around the University of Michigan. Can you tell us more about what happened, how the people who were detained are doing, how folks on campus are responding and just where the hell things stand now?

Ember McCoy:

And you did a really thorough job covering the timeline of what happened on Wednesday morning. So on Wednesday between six and 9:00 AM the FBI, along with Michigan State police and local police officers in the three different cities and University of Michigan police conducted a coordinated raid in unmarked vehicles at the home of homes of multiple University of Michigan pro-Palestine activists. And I think that’s very important to name because the attorney general who a democrat who signed these warrants that have no probable cause is saying that in their press release that the raids don’t have anything to do with University of Michigan campus activism, and they don’t have anything to do with the encampments, but the people whose home berated are prominent pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan. So trying to say those things aren’t connected is not at all, and there’s no charges, right? There’s no charges that has happened for these folks whose homes have been rated. And so it’s just a crazy situation to say the least. I would say people are doing as well as they can be. Some of their immediate thoughts were like, I need to figure out my finals and I no longer have my devices or access to my university meme Michigan accounts because of duo two factor authentication.

Yeah. So I mean, I think the organizing of course is still continuing. Another big thing that’s happened. I guess to scale out a little bit, what happened Wednesday is just another thing that has happened in this year long campaign where the Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, is really targeting University of Michigan activists Ann Arbor activists for pro-Palestine free speech. So as you alluded to, there are 11 people facing felony charges from the Attorney general related to the encampment raid. There’s another four people facing charges as a result of a die-in that we did in the fall. And so that is also all still ongoing and very much a part of this. So there’s almost 40 different activists that they’re targeting across these different attacks. And we actually had Thursday, we had a court date coincidentally for the encampment 11, and it was the intention of it was to file a motion to ask the judge to recuse Dana Nessel, the Attorney General.

She has already had to recuse herself from a different case due to perceived Islamic Islamic phobic bias. And she’s a prominent Zionist in the state. And so our argument is kind of like if she’s had to recuse herself from that case, she should also have to recuse herself from this case. They would fall under similar intent. However, when we were at that court case, one of the encampment 11 also was accused of violating his bond. So as a part of their bond, they’re not allowed to be on campus unless for class or for work, though most of them have been fired from their jobs at this point. And he was accused of being, he was surveilled on campus 20 minutes after his class ended and he was walking through and stopped allegedly to say hi to friends. So he was sent to jail for four days right then and there.

The judge and the prosecutor originally said they were trying to put him in jail for 10 days, but they didn’t want him to miss his graduation and wax poetic about how they didn’t want his parents to have to miss his graduation. So instead, they sent him to jail for four days and he got out Sunday morning. And so yeah, it’s been a lot, right? There’s all these different things that are happening, but I think the organizing still continues. People are very mobilized. People are probably more agitated than they were before. And after this, a bunch of us are heading to a rally at Dana Nestle’s office in Lansing. So I would say that it definitely hasn’t curtailed the movement for a free Palestine and the movement for free speech broadly in the state of Michigan. That was long-winded, but lots going on.

Lavinia:

That was such a great summary, Amber. Great. Yeah. I also just want to add that there has been a lot of repression on campus that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal charges or legal actions. Instead, it’s stuff like, for instance, one of my friends was pulled into a disciplinary meeting because he sent a mass email about Palestine or there have been many instances of police deploying pepper spray on campus against protesters. So there’s also just kind of this general climate of fear, which is reinforced in many different contexts on campus, specifically surrounding Palestine.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Conlin. Jesse, I wanted to bring you in here because as we discussed in the recent episode with two other members of your union, Trump’s administration really set the template for this broader assault on higher ed by first going after Columbia. So what is your message to workers and students on other campuses like Michigan who are facing similar attacks? What can we learn from Columbia that may help people at other universities be better prepared for what’s coming?

Jessie Rubin:

Great question. First and foremost, I would say the biggest takeaway is that we help us. It’s us who take care of each other. We can’t expect the university or the administration to protect the most vulnerable among us to protect our international students, to protect our research. It’s us who has to create the infrastructure to keep us safe. For example, it was the union that provided the most robust know your rights trainings and detailed information to support international students on our campus. While the university has pretty much stayed silent and offered completely hollow support, I mean, we saw this with our fellow union member, Ron Boston, who had her visa revoked for totally no reason at all, and the university immediately dis-enrolled her from her program and from her housing. So it’s really clear that the university does not have our safety as a top priority. And if anything, I mean the university’s response to the Trump administration has made it clear that they’re not just capitulating, but they are active collaborators. And I would say that we can expect the same from other universities. And through their collaboration with the Trump administration, through their appeasement, we haven’t gotten anything. Columbia has gone above and beyond here, and even still our programs are getting hit with funding cuts and this continued federal overreach.

Conlan Olson:

And I think this lesson that appeasement gets us, nothing also has a parallel lesson for activists. So as a union, as activists, we can’t just sit this tight or wait this out, we can’t stay quiet in order to survive. And I really feel that if we start appeasing or hedging our bets, we’re going to lose our values and just get beat one step at a time. And this is why our union has really not backed down from fighting for Ranjani, why we’ve not backed down from fighting for a grant minor. And it’s why we’re fighting for such a strong contract with really unprecedented articles to protect non-citizens, to keep cops off our campus, to provide for parents to ensure financial transparency and justice in Columbia’s financial investments. And of course, to get paid a living wage. I think as a union, we could have backed down or softened our position, but I really think this would’ve meant losing before we even start.

We are labor unionists. We are people fighting for justice. If we start backing off, we’re just going to get beat one step at a time. And I do think that our activism is starting to work. So yesterday, Columbia, for the first time named Mah Halil and most of madi for the first time in public communications, and they offered slightly more support for non-citizens. And so to be clear, it’s still absolutely ridiculous that they’re not doing more and really despicable that they’re only now naming those people by name. But we are starting to see the needle moved because of activist campaigns by our union, both to pressure the university and to just provide, as Jesse said, know your rights training and outreach to students on our campus.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ember, Lavinia, I wanted to bring you all back in as well and ask if you had any kind of thoughts or messages to folks at Columbia or people on other campuses right now. I mean, of course this looks differently depending on what state people are in and what university they’re at. But I guess for folks out there who are listening to this and preparing for what may happen on their campuses, did you have any sort of messages you wanted to let folks know?

Lavinia:

Yeah, so I kind of want to echo Jesse’s point that really we keep us safe. Many of these university administrations I think historically are intransigent in their negotiations with students. So for instance, with go, we had a 2022 to 2023 bargaining cycle where the university didn’t really budget all. And I think that in some way sort of set the precedent for what’s happening now, but I think we know in general, sort of the incentive structures for these academic institutions are really not set up to support what protects grad workers or students or really people who are just in the community. So that’s why things like safety planning or for instance within NGEO, we have an immigration hotline, those sort of community infrastructures are so important. So I just really want to advocate for thinking about how you as a community can support each other, especially in the face of new or more exaggerated threats from the government and the university.

Ember McCoy:

And if I could just add quickly too, I think one, I want to name that part of the reason we were so prepared this week is because we are following the footsteps of Columbia and our Columbia comrades. We’ve been able to do similar safety planning and set up these hotlines because we witnessed first the horrors that happened to you all. And I think that’s really important to be able to directly connect with you all which we had been previously, and to help other people do the same. And as Livinia mentioned, the reason we knew the raids were happening at 6:00 AM on Wednesday is because one of the people called our hotline called our ice hotline and our ICE hotline as Jail support hotline and we’re able to get people out because that’s an infrastructure that they knew about to try to suddenly get people’s attention.

And another one of the homes we knew they were being rated because we have a group in collaboration with community partners where there’s an ice watch group and people put in the group chat that there was FBI staging nearby, and then they watched people raid someone’s homes. And that brought out tons of people immediately to the scene. And so those infrastructures, many of them were actually for ice, and there was not ice in collaboration in the FBI raid. But I think it’s really important how those infrastructures which build off each other originally were able to protect us and us safe on Wednesday.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Gang, I wanted to sort of talk about the signs of life that we’re seeing. And y’all mentioned some on your campuses, like amidst all of this darkness and repression, and as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks around the country, a lot of folks that I’ve talked to in higher ed have been really galvanized by seeing the news that Harvard of all places is fighting Donald Trump’s attacks. It may not be perfect, but it’s something right. And I wanted to ask if there are more efforts that you’re seeing on your campus or other campuses that are giving you hope right now?

Conlan Olson:

I just want to say, so I happen to be a Harvard alum also, and I don’t want to be too down here, but I think that the way that we should think about Harvard’s efforts are really what Max called them, which is just a sign of life. I don’t have that much faith in our institutions. I appreciate the Big 10 movement and that we need a diversity of tactics here. But we should also keep in mind that yesterday Harvard renamed its diversity office and cut all of its affinity graduation celebrations in response to pressure from the federal government. Harvard remains invested in Israeli genocide and continues to suppress student protest. They fired the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies last month. And so while I appreciate this sort of sign of life, I really feel that our institutions are not going to save us.

And so these days looking for inspiration, I’m far more inspired by activist movements by students, staff, professors, community members. So for example, yesterday just the same day that Harvard canceled these affinity graduation celebrations, students responded committing to holding their own, and we’re still seeing student protests, we’re seeing increasing faculty support for student protests, which is really important to me. We’re seeing mutual aid projects. We’re seeing legal movements to fight against visa ramifications. And so I think these places really from the ground up and from activism by the people at these universities are much more the things that are inspiring me these days.

Jessie Rubin:

I completely agree with Conland that it’s been so heartwarming to see the power of student movements, the power of working people movements on our campuses. It’s been heartwarming to see encampments starting to pop up again around the country even though the stakes are much higher than they’ve been than ever. Students are putting their bodies on the line, they’re risking expulsion, they’re risking arrest, they’re risking physical injury. And it’s really clear that no matter how hard our administrations try to stamp out dissent, including by expelling core organizers, that students keep coming out in and greater force and developing new tools to keep each other safe. And we see that this student pressure works. Just a few days ago, MIT was forced to cut ties with Elbit systems after a targeted campaign by a BDS group on campus. EL I is an Israeli arms company and has been a target in many BDS campaigns across the globe.

Ember McCoy:

Yeah, one thing I similarly, I similarly don’t want to be a downer, but one thing I think for us that’s been really present on my mind at least this week is the importance of also making connections between not just what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate the targeting of pro-Palestine activists, but what Democrat elected officials are doing in the state of Michigan to help support that. Dana Nessel, who is our attorney general is there’s all these articles and things and she’s coming out being like, oh, she’s a big anti-Trump democrat. She’s taking an aggressive approach to these ICE and these lawsuits. But at the same time, she sent Trump’s FBI to our houses on Wednesday, and she’s continuing to prosecute our free speech in a way that is really important to connect the criminalization of international students or international community members who are then that platform is then going to be able to be used, potentially could be used to by Trump’s administration.

And so there’s all these really important connections that I think need to be made. And for me, obviously what the Trump administration is doing is horrible, but it’s also really, really important that to name that this did not start or end with the Trump administration and it’s being actively facilitated by democratic elected officials across the United States. But I think one thing that’s a bright spot is I do think that activists at the University of Michigan and in our community are doing a really good job of trying to name that and to have really concrete political education for our community members. And I’m really inspired by the ways in which our community showed up for us on Wednesday and the rest of the week and the ways in which people were able to galvanize around us and act quickly and kind of test our infrastructures as successful in that way.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think the threats to academic freedom through things like grant withholding or threatening DEI offices or what have you, are I think waking up faculty in particular to sort the broader power structures which govern universities. And those power structures frequently don’t include faculty. So a lot of them are, I think being, I wouldn’t say radicalized, but awakened to the kind of undemocratic nature of these institutions and specifically how they can threaten their students. I mean, I know especially as PhD students, we do tend to work closely with a lot of faculty. And I think there is sort of an inspiring change happening there as well.

Ember McCoy:

One additional thing about Harvard is I would say I agree with everything Conlin said, and the University of Michigan has the largest public endowment in the country. We now have a 20 billion endowment. It’s $3 billion more than it was in 2023 when we were doing our strike. And part of I think why Harvard is able to make the statement so that they can around resisting Trump’s funding is because they have the resources to do so, and a lot of institutions do not. University of Michigan is one that absolutely does. And so I do think it helps us try to leverage that argument that what is the 20 billion endowment for if it’s not for right now, why are we just immediately bending the knee to the Trump administration, especially on a campus that is known to have a long legacy of anti-war divestment and all of these other really important things.

And two weeks ago, I think it was time is nothing right now, but we got an email from President Ono saying that the NIH is requiring that institutions who get grants from the NIH certify that they don’t have diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And this was a new thing, do not have BDS campaigns, that they’re not divesting from Israel, which is not only obviously one of the main demands of the TER Coalition, but has also been a demand that students on campus that geo has taken stand for decades for over 20 years at the University of Michigan. And so seeing that all being facilitated is really, really scary, and I think it’s really frustrating that the University of Michigan administration is doing what they’re doing. So I think for me, there’s just a little teeny glimmer of hope to be able to use that as leverage more than anything.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as we’ve mentioned on this call and in previous episodes, I mean the Trump administration is using multiple things to justify these attacks, including the notion that universities are just overrun with woke ideology embodied in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, trans student athletes participating in sports. But really the tip of this authoritarian spear has been the charge that this administration is protecting campuses from a scourge of antisemitism that is rampant across institutions of higher education around the country. And of course, like plenty of university administrations have gone along with that framing and have even adopted policies that accept the premise that criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, including Harvard. And so I wanted to just ask y’all, if you had a chance to talk to people out there who are buying this, what is the reality on campuses? Are they overrun with antisemitism and wokeness the way people are being told? What do you want people to know about the reality on campus versus what they’re hearing from the White House and on Fox News and stuff?

Jessie Rubin:

Yeah, I mean, I can start by answering as an anti-Zionist Jew, I would say that the schools are of course not overrun by antisemitism, but instead we’re seeing growing mass movements that are anti genocide movements, that are Palestine liberation movements, and that is by no means antisemitic. And on top of that, these new definitions of antisemitism that are getting adopted on campuses actually make me feel less safe. They completely invalidate my identity as an anti-Zionist Jew and say that my religion or my culture is somehow at odds with my politics.

Ember McCoy:

I mean, I would just echo what Jesse said. I think that’s something we’re definitely being accused of, right at the University of Michigan, like you said, the elected officials are Zionists, right? And so they’re weaponizing this argument of antisemitism on campus and while also persecuting and charging anti-Zionist Jews with felony charges for speaking out for pro-Palestine. I think for those listening really all, it seems so simple, but I feel like it’s just you have to really listen to the people who are part of these movements and look as who’s a part of it. Because I think, as Jesse said, it’s really an intergenerational interfaith group that have shared politics. And it’s really important to understand that distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism that is being inflated in really, really terrifying ways.

Conlan Olson:

And I would just say the encampments, especially last spring and now again this spring and student movements really community spaces and spaces where people are taking care of each other, and that is what it feels like being in campus activism these days. I feel cared for by my comrades and the people I organize with. And I think that when we say solidarity, it’s not just a political statement, it’s also something that we really feel. And so yeah, I would invite people worried about antisemitism or other divisive ideologies on college campuses to just listen to the students who feel cared for and who are doing the work to care for each other.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think one thing that was really wonderful, at least about the encampment at U of M is that there were lots of people who I think did have this misconception that there was some relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and then upon visiting the encampment and seeing the kind of solidarity that was being displayed there, they sort of potentially were a bit disabused of that notion. Unfortunately, I think that’s part of why the encampments in particular were so threatening to university administrations and Zionist officials, et cetera.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Lavinia, Ember, Jesse Conlin, there’s so much more that we could talk about here. But with the final minutes that I have, I wanted to focus in on the fact that y’all are unions and union members, and this is a show about and for workers. And I wanted to round things off by sort of talking about what role unions and collective labor power have to play in this terrifying moment. How can graduate student unions like yours and other unions like faculty unions and unions representing staff workers on campuses, what can labor organizations do to work together to fight this?

Jessie Rubin:

Sure. Thank you for your question. The first thing that I want to say is as workers, the most powerful tool that we have is our labor, and we have the power to withhold labor. We have to remember that we’re not just bystanders who the Trump administration can cross with no consequences. Graduate students, we produce their research that saves lives in human health. We write books that shape American life and we invent the things that America is so proud of. We also teach undergraduates, the university would just simply not run without its graduate students. So a strike poses a threat that simply cannot be ignored.

Conlan Olson:

And in addition to our work in higher education, the whole point is that we believe in solidarity, and that includes solidarity across sectors and across borders. And of course, mobilizing in this way is a huge task, but we’re seeing really inspiring work. For example, UIW Labor for Palestine is a coalition of workers in manufacturing to legal services to higher education, all fighting together against investment in Israeli genocide. And so I think that cross sectoral organizing both between grad students and other unions on campuses, but even unions, not on campuses at all, is really important. And I think working to connect people is a huge part of the work that needs to be done now.

Ember McCoy:

So I think we already little mentioned a little bit at the University of Michigan, what we built during our strike and the organizing model and the networks and community that we built at that time has directly supported our pro-Palestine activism and our ICE organizing and the combination of the two through things like safety planning department meetings, and then literally being the institutions that have resources to do things like set up a hotline or to have bodies that are mobilized and already connected to each other. And so a lot of it is, I don’t feel that we’re even reinventing the real wheel right now, right? It’s like unions are this space where this collective organizing and this solidarity and financial and physical and legal resources already exist. And so we should absolutely be leveraging those to protect ourselves and our comrades. And at the University of Michigan, I know this is not the case everywhere, including Columbia, but until two weeks ago anyways, there hadn’t been a unionized staff member who was fired. So while undergrad research assistants were getting hiring bands and being fired from their jobs, they’re not unionized, grad workers were not being fired. And I think a lot of that is in part because we have an incredibly strong contract. And it would’ve been really hard to fire someone who was a graduate teaching instructor last two weeks ago. There was a full-time staff member who was fired for something or for allegedly participating in a protest that happened before she was even hired or applied to the job.

She is a part of our new United Staff University staff United Union. Is that right? Vidia? Did I? Yeah, I think it’s university. Okay. Yeah. So she’s a part of our university staff, United Union. They don’t have a contract yet though. So she is in a position where she has people that can start to try to fight for her, but then they don’t have a contract. And so I think also for workers who are not yet unionized, this is a really critical time to be able to use that type of institution to protect workers because we are seeing it work in many places.

Conlan Olson:

And just to build on that, I think one troubling pattern that we’ve seen recently is people who are nervous to sign a union card because they’re worried about retaliation for being involved with labor organizing. And just to start, I think that fear is totally understandable, and I don’t think it’s silly or invalid, but I also think that we need to remember that people are far safer in a union than they are without a union. And so in addition to our power to withhold labor, we’re also just a group of people who keep each other safe. So we have mutual aid collectives, we run campaigns to defend each other, like the one that we’re running for Rani. And so lying low is just not going to work, especially in this political moment. And so yeah, I really want people to remember that unions keep you safe.

Lavinia:

I think empirically there has been sort of a duality in the organizing conversations that we’re having for GEO as well where people both see how dangerous the situation is right now and want to be involved, but at the same time, especially if they’re not a citizen, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable exposing themselves, I guess. So I think one thing that’s just important in general for unions right now is providing avenues for people who are in that situation to get involved and contribute, even if that’s not necessarily going to the media or speaking out in a very public way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the last couple minutes that we have here, I wanted to end on that note and just acknowledge the reality that this podcast is going to be listened to by students, grad students, faculty, non university affiliated folks who are terrified right now, people who are self-censoring, people who are going back in their Facebook feeds and Instagram feeds and deleting past posts because they’re terrified of the government surveilling them and scrubbing them. And people are worried about getting abducted on the street by agents of the state losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their research. This is a very terrifying moment, and the more filled with terror we are, the more immobilized we are and the easier we are to control. So I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any final messages to folks out there on your campus or beyond your campus who are feeling this way, what would you say to them about ways they could get involved in this effort to fight back or any sort of parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with before we break?

Lavinia:

I think doubt is a wonderful time to plug in. So for people who maybe previously hadn’t been thinking about unions especially as sort of an important part of their lives or thought, oh, the union on my campus is just doing whatever it needs to do, but I don’t necessarily need to have any personal involvement in their activities, I think right now is when we need all hands on deck given the level of political repression that’s happening. And also just to maybe bring in that old Martin Eller quote about first they came for the communist and I did not speak up because I was not a communist, et cetera. I think it’s also just really important to emphasize that I don’t think any of this is going to stop here. And even within the context of pro-Palestine organizing at the university, it is basically escalated in terms of the severity of the legal charges that are being brought. Obviously bringing in the FB is kind of really crazy, et cetera. So I don’t think that this is going to stop here or there’s any reason to assume that if you are not taking action right now, that means that you’re going to be safe ultimately. Yeah,

Ember McCoy:

And I think I would add, like many of us had said in the call, I think it’s very clear that we keep each other safe. The institutions that we’ve built, the organizing communities that we’ve built are very much actively keeping each other safe. And I think we’re seeing that in many different ways. And it’s important to acknowledge that and see that we’re much stronger fighting together as a part of these networks than that we are alone.

Conlan Olson:

I think as a closing thought, I also just want to say I think it’s really essential that we expand our view beyond just higher education. And so let me say why I think that’s true. So people know about Mahmud and Mosen and Ru Mesa, but I also want people to know about Alfredo Juarez, also known as Lelo, who’s a worker and labor organizer with the Independent Farm Workers Union in Washington state. And Lelo was kidnapped by ice from his car on his way to work in the tulip fields about a month ago. He’s an incredibly powerful labor organizer. He’s known especially for his ability to organize his fellow indigenous mixed deco speaking workers, and he was targeted by the state for this organizing. I think it’s important to keep this in mind and to learn from campaigns that are going on elsewhere and also to contribute to them.

And also I want people to remember that it’s not all dark. And so one story that was really inspiring to me recently was that in early April, a mother and her three young children living in a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario and upstate New York were taken by ice. And in response, the town, which keep in mind is a predominantly Republican voting town, turned out a thousand out of 1300 people in the town to a rally, and the family’s free now. And so we’re all labor organizers. Turning out a thousand out of 1300 people is some seriously impressive organizing. And I think learning from these lessons and keeping these victories in mind is really important. Not only as just an intellectual exercise, but also solidarity is something that we do every day. So it’s for example, why we fight for divestment from genocide. It’s why we do mutual aid. It’s why we engage with the neighborhoods that our universities are in. It’s why we don’t just defend our comrades who are highly educated, who have high earning potential, but we also defend our comrades who are taken, whose names we don’t even know yet. And so I just think expanding our view beyond just higher education is both a source of wisdom and something that we can learn from and also a source of hope for me

Jessie Rubin:

Really beautifully said Conlin. And I just want to add that expanding our view beyond higher education also includes the communities that our campuses reside on. I mean, I’m coming from a Columbia perspective where my university is consistently displacing people in Harlem who have been there for decades in this project of expanding Columbia’s campus continues to this day, and it’s something that we must fight back against. It’s really important that we protect our neighbors, not just on campus but also off campus. It’s important that we get to know our neighbors, that we are truly fully members of our greater community.

Ember McCoy:

If folks listening are interested in supporting us here at the University of Michigan, and I hope our Columbia colleagues can do the same, we have a legal slash mutual aid fund for our comrades who are facing charges and who are rated by the FBI. It is Bitly, BIT ly slash legal fund, and that is all lowercase, which matters. And we’re also happy to take solidarity statements and Columbia SWC did a great one for us and we’re happy to do the same. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Ember McCoy and Lavinia from the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization and Jessie Rubin and Conlan Olson from Student Workers of Columbia University. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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

Said Marc Van Der Hout of Van Der Hout, LLP, who is representing Mr. Khalil along with his partner Johnny Sinodis, “In DHS' filing in immigration court this week, we learned for the first time that the DHS agents who arrested Mahmoud lied to him: they wrote in their arrest report that the agents told him that they had an arrest warrant, but DHS has now admitted in their filing that that was a lie and that there was no warrant at all at the time of the arrest. The government's admission is astounding, and it is completely outrageous that they tried to assert to the immigration judge – and the world – in their initial filing of the arrest report that there was an arrest warrant when there was none. This is egregious conduct by DHS that should require under the law termination of these proceedings, and we hope that the immigration court will so rule.”

The filings were made in response to an April 23rd deadline set by the judge in Mr. Khalil’s immigration case in Jena, Louisiana. The judge in his federal case in New Jersey asked for copies of the filings to be submitted to him today.

Mr. Khalil also submitted an application for asylum that is sealed due to the sensitive nature of the information that could affect his safety in the future.

In the federal court, Mr. Khalil’s legal team is continuing to seek bail, an order compelling the government to return him to New Jersey, and a preliminary injunction (PI) that would immediately release him from custody and allow him to reunite with his family in New York while his immigration case proceeds. If granted, the PI would also block President Trump’s policy of arresting and detaining noncitizens who have engaged in First Amendment protected activity in support of Palestinian rights.

On March 8, the Trump administration and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) illegally arrested and detained Mr. Khalil in direct retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights at Columbia University. Shortly after, DHS transferred him 1,400 miles away to a Louisiana detention facility — ripping him away from his wife and legal counsel. His legal team is arguing that his arrest and continued detention violate his constitutional rights, including rights to free speech and due process, and that they go beyond the government’s legal authority.

ICE denied Mr. Khalil’s request to be at his wife’s side as she went into labor this past weekend, causing him to miss the birth of their son on Monday, April 21.

Mr. Khalil is represented by Dratel & Lewis, the Center for Constitutional Rights, CLEAR, Van Der Hout LLP, Washington Square Legal Services, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the ACLU of New Jersey.

The following are quotes from the rest of Mr. Khalil’s legal team:

Ramzi Kassem, Co-Director of CLEAR:
“The government now finally admits what the whole world already saw and knows: that ICE had no warrant to apprehend Mahmoud Khalil. No one should take seriously the government's patent lie, which it offers for the first time many weeks after the fact, that somehow Mahmoud was anything other than compliant when ICE agents unlawfully abducted him under cover of darkness.”

Samah Sisay, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights:
“ICE has admitted it detained Mahmoud illegally and without a warrant– to justify it, they are now flat out lying with an absurd claim that he tried to flee. At every step of the way, the Trump administration has flouted the law.”

Veronica Salama, staff attorney at the NYCLU:
“The Trump administration's latest motion shows that they are steadfast in smearing Mahmound Khalil to justify his horrific and unconstitutional abduction. We have the receipts: Mr. Khalil was taken from his family with no warrant and in clear retaliation for his protected speech. We will continue to fight for Mr. Khalil's freedom, and defend the right to speak freely about Palestinian rights without fear of detention and deportation.”

Sidra Mahfooz, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project:
“We now know why ICE could not show Mahmoud the warrant he repeatedly requested upon his arrest. They did not obtain a warrant. In its efforts to unlawfully arrest, detain, and target Mahmoud and others for exercising their First Amendment rights, this administration has shown an utter disregard for the most basic principles of legal authority.”

Amy Greer, associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis:
“That night, I was on the phone with Mahmoud, Noor, and even the arresting agent. In the face of multiple agents in plain clothes who clearly intended to abduct him, and despite the fact that those agents repeatedly failed to show us a warrant, Mahmoud remained calm and complied with their orders. Today we now know why they never showed Mahmoud that warrant - they didn’t have one. This is clearly yet another desperate attempt by the Trump administration to justify its unlawful arrest and detention of human rights defender Mahmoud Khalil, who is now, by the government’s own tacit admission, a political prisoner of the United States. Our team, and indeed everyone in this nation, should be fighting for Mahmoud’s freedom, and defending our collective rights to advocate for Palestinian human rights, and express opinions generally that do not conform with government policy.”

Amol Sinha, Executive Director of the ACLU-NJ:
“This latest motion from the government further shows it is determined to persecute Mahmoud Khalil by any means necessary. We know the truth: Mr. Khalil remains unlawfully detained in direct retaliation for his advocacy in support of Palestinian rights. We will continue to defend Mr. Khalil’s freedom in the face of these baseless attacks, and we are confident he will ultimately prevail.”

More information about the case can be found here: https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/khalil-v-trump

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

“Taliban intelligence must release journalist Sayed Rashed Kashefi immediately and unconditionally,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The continued detention of journalists like Kashefi is part of a ruthless campaign to silence independent reporting and intimidate the media into submission. This blatant assault on press freedom must end now.”

Taliban intelligence agents detained Kashefi after he was summoned to the GDI’s Directorate of Media and Public Affairs under the pretext of retrieving his mobile phone, video recording camera, and voice recorder, which had been confiscated in mid-March by agents who suspected him of working with Afghan exiled media, according to a journalist who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisal.

Kashefi, who was previously a journalist for the state-owned English-language newspaper, The Kabul Times, has been working as an independent reporter covering current affairs in Kabul.

He has been detained by the Taliban before. In December 2021, a senior official and his bodyguards held Kashefi for six hours during his reporting in Kabul and beat him.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

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

Over a thousand protesters gathered near Tufts University on Wednesday after masked plainclothes immigration agents snatched Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar, from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Surveillance video shows agents approaching her on the streets near her home Tuesday evening and handcuffing her while she screamed for help. Tufts University’s president said the school had no prior notice of her arrest. Last March, Ozturk co-wrote a piece in the student newspaper criticizing the Tufts administration’s response to Palestinian solidarity protests on campus that were calling for divestment from Israel. Democracy Now!'s Hany Massoud and Ariel Boone were in Somerville at Wednesday's protest. “One of our community members was taken by armed agents of the state who kidnapped her from right outside her home,” said Lea Kayali, an activist with the Palestinian Youth Movement. “People are here to stand up for the movement that she was punished for supporting.”

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

Badar Khan Suri is one of the many pro-Palestine scholars being targeted by the Trump administration. Suri, originally from India, is a Georgetown University professor and postdoctoral scholar on religion and peace processes in the Middle East and South Asia. Last Monday evening, Suri was ambushed by masked federal agents with the Homeland Security Department as he and his family returned to their home in Rosslyn, Virginia, after attending an iftar gathering for Ramadan. Suri was taken into custody without being charged with or accused of any crime. He was told the federal government had revoked his visa. Over the next 72 hours, Suri was transferred to multiple immigration detention centers, and he is currently jailed at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, separated from his wife, a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent, and his three children. Unlike Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate facing deportation, Suri “is not a political activist,” says Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University. “He was just a very serious young academic focusing on his teaching and his research.”

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

Media groups fear the bill, which ruling party officials call an “exact copy” of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), will be used more punitively than in the United States, where the law has rarely been applied to media and civil society groups.

“CPJ condemns the Georgian parliament’s approval in a second reading of an ‘exact copy’ of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act. In the hands of an increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party, FARA’s overbroad provisions and criminal sanctions could wipe out Georgia’s donor-reliant independent press and media advocacy groups,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Georgian authorities should reject any form of ‘foreign agent’ law.”

Parliament passed a “word-for-word” translation of FARA in an initial reading on March 4, with the ruling party saying it planned to simply adapt U.S.-specific terminology to Georgia’s legal framework. Besides such adaptations, nothing substantial was amended during the second reading, and substantive revisions cannot be made in a final reading, which is expected by April 4, Lia Chakhunashvili, executive director of independent trade group Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, told CPJ. Georgia President Mikheil Kavelashvili is expected to sign it once it reaches his desk, according to Chakhunashvili.

Officials say a Georgian FARA is necessary because foreign-funded organizations “refuse to register” under the country’s existing foreign agent law, passed in May 2024, and harsher penalties are needed.

The FARA bill includes a maximum penalty of five years in prison for non-compliance and omissions, as well as fines. The existing “foreign agent” law only established fines as punishment, though none appear to have been imposed, Chakhunashvili said.

The switch to FARA would also extend the law’s scope beyond organizations, to individuals, and could be used to require news outlets to label their publications as produced by a foreign agent.

Analysts said the Georgian bill lacks the “legal safeguards and nonpartisan enforcement” that exist in the United States and will enable “swift and severe crackdowns.”

CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.

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

Immigrant rights activist Jeanette Vizguerra, who has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, was arrested by ICE agents in Colorado on Monday. She was ambushed during her work break by ICE officials and is now being held in a private prison in Aurora. Vizguerra rose to fame during Trump’s first term when she evaded immigration officials by staying in a church basement with her four children and was named one of the 100 most influential people of the year by Time magazine in 2017. “The courts may not save us, but we save each other,” says Jennifer Piper, program director at the American Friends Service Committee, Colorado. “Only the people can save each other and make justice and democracy real.” We also speak with Vizguerra’s 21-year-old daughter Luna Báez, who says her mother had felt under surveillance before her arrest, including by people in unmarked vehicles. “It’s something that is very, very scary,” she says.

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

Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.

— Heather Cox Richardson, historian

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

There’s always a boomerang effect.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

This is how it begins.

Consider that Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

We are all at risk.

History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.

President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.

If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.

If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.

For the record, there is nothing illegal about exercising one’s First Amendment right of speech, assembly, and protest in a nonviolent way to bring about social change by boycotting private businesses. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982) that nonviolent boycotts are a form of political speech which are entitled to First Amendment protection.

The problem, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a president who believes that he can do whatever he wants because he is the law is that anyone and anything can become a target.

Mahmoud is the test case.

As journalists Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin point out, Mahmoud’s arrest for being a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” (note: he is not actually accused of breaking any laws) is being used as a blueprint for other arrests to come.

What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”

Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.

Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

Throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent. The Biden administration equated the spread of “misinformation” with terrorism. Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” and suggested protesting should be illegal. Obama expanded anti-protest laws and cracked down on whistleblowers. Bush’s Patriot Act made it a crime to support organizations the government deemed terrorist, even in lawful ways. This pattern stretches back centuries—FDR censored news after Pearl Harbor, Woodrow Wilson outlawed criticism of war efforts, and John Adams criminalized speaking against the government.

Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.

The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.

Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.

We’ve seen this before.

The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.

Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.

So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.

President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

We are walking a dangerous path right now.

Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.

These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.

We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.

“Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.

We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

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

“Republika Srpska authorities should immediately suspend any plans to enforce this ‘foreign agent’ legislation, which mirrors restrictive measures used by authoritarian regimes to silence critics,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Such laws are incompatible with democratic values, and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s aspirations for European integration.”

On February 27, the National Assembly of the Serb-dominated half of Bosnia and Herzegovina called Republika Srpska passed the Law on the Special Registry and Transparency of the Work of Nonprofit Organizations, requiring foreign-funded groups to register with the justice ministry as “foreign agents” and comply with strict financial oversight and reporting rules. Russia, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan have used similar legislation to criminalize critical voices and the media.

The bill was among several passed by Serb lawmakers in response to the February 26 one-year sentence given to Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik on charges that he disobeyed the top international envoy overseeing peace in ethnically-divided Bosnia. The court in the national capital, Sarajevo also barred pro-Russian Dodik from politics for six years.

Dodik has long advocated for Republika Srpska to separate from Bosnia and Herzegovina and join Serbia. The Bosnian Serb mini-state is one of two autonomous entities — the other is the Bosniak-Croat Federation — created under the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war.

In a statement, 41 local non-governmental organizations described the foreign agent law as “a revenge attack on all critical voices.”

CPJ emailed Dodik’s press office to request comment but received no reply.

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

“South Sudanese authorities must bring editor Emmanuel Monychol Akop before a court, present credible charges or release him unconditionally,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program, in New York. “South Sudan’s security agents have a reputation for running roughshod over the rights of journalists, and the arbitrary detention of Monychol further tarnishes an already dismal press freedom record.”

Monychol was arrested after he responded to a summons to appear at NSS headquarters in the capital, Juba, according to Moses Guot, a manager at The Dawn, and a person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal. The NSS told Monychol’s family that they could not visit the journalist until investigations were complete but did not provide further details, Guot told CPJ. Rights groups have documented multiple allegations of abusing detainees in the NSS headquarters, known as Blue House.

“We are worried about his personal security,” said Guot. “They should allow us to see him, at least to know about his health, and that would be a good start.” 

NSS spokesperson John David Kumuri did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app but acknowledged its receipt on December 10. The regulatory South Sudan Media Authority’s managing director Elijah Alier Kuai did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment via phone and messaging app. Phone calls to information minister Michael Makuei Lueth and the South Sudan Media Authority’s director general for information and media compliance Sapana Abuyi did not connect. 

In 2019, Monychol was arrested after he published a Facebook post criticizing a minister’s dress on a diplomatic visit. He was detained for over a month and freed in mid-December of that year.

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

The signatories voiced their concerns about how the proposed law could be used to silence government critics if passed by the parliament, along with its predictable effects on rights and freedoms in Turkey. They asked the European Commission to “publicly call on Turkey to fully withdraw the bill,” “prioritize freedom of expression in EU-Turkey relations,” and “raise this matter at high-level dialogues with Turkey,” while supporting the civil society.

Read the full letter here.

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

“Unfortunately, Turkey seems to be following the regional trend of establishing a judicial tool for demonizing and censoring independent journalists and researchers who work with foreign partners or receive foreign funding,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Despite the reassurances offered by government officials, there are numerous examples of severe violations against the freedom of the media in neighboring countries that have passed similar laws in recent years present. Members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly should vote against this law in order to not tarnish the country’s already problematic press freedom record.”

The Turkish government first introduced the law in parliament in May but then shelved it until last week over intense criticism from the opposition parties and civil society. The proposed law introduces a new crime “against the security or political interests of the state” and carries a prison sentence of three to seven years for committing a crime “against the security or internal or external political interests of the state in line with the strategic interests or instructions of a foreign state or organization.”

Turkey’s Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç said last week the law aims to combat actual espionage, and would not be used broadly to punish “anyone doing research in Turkey.” 

Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia recently passed similar “foreign agent” laws, which have been used to silence critical outlets.

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

“The Cuban government appears to be engaged in a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the country’s non-state media to force them into silence or exile,” said Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator, from Washington, D.C. “CPJ calls on the Cuban authorities to respect the rights of journalists to freely express themselves and report the news.”

Cuban news website El Toque, which operates from exile, reported that the journalists were summoned as part of investigations into accusations that the journalists engaged in “mercenary” activities, including receiving foreign funding in violation of state security. If convicted, the journalists face prison sentences of 4-10 years.

CPJ confirmed eight cases of journalists being questioned and is investigating more than a dozen others. Four journalists publicly confirmed they were summoned and questioned by Cuban authorities:

• Jorge Fernandez Era, a freelance writer and satirical columnist who works with El Toque, was summoned and questioned twice for an hour, reporting that authorities “expressed concern” about his writings in El Toque.
• Maria Lucia Exposito, a freelance reporter, posted on a colleague’s social media that authorities questioned her for more than 6 hours and confiscated US$1,000 and her cell phone.
• Alexander Hall, a freelance essayist who works with El Toque.
• Katia Sanchez, a freelance communications strategist who has collaborated with El Toque and SembraMedia, a nonprofit that supports digital media entrepreneurs, was questioned and threatened with prosecution by representatives from the Ministry of the Interior for receiving a U.S. embassy grant to train journalists, she told CPJ. Sanchez subsequently left Cuba on September 13.

Several journalists questioned by Cuban state security work for exiled Cuban outlets — including El Toque, Periodismo de Barrio, Cubanet, Magazine AMPM, and Palenque Vision. Government officials told CPJ they consider these journalists and the media outlets to be subsidized by funding from foreign governments, in contravention of Article 143 of the Cuban penal code.

A representative of the Cuban government’s International Press Center (CPI) told CPJ by text message that he recommended investigating whether the U.S. government financed these media outlets and pointed to U.S. law that imposes a public disclosure obligation on persons representing foreign interests. “Investigate and you will find Hypocrisy,” he wrote.

In some cases, the questioning occurred in unofficial locations by plainclothes officers, who pressured the journalists to sign confessions admitting to “subversive” acts under threat of criminal proceedings, according to four journalists who spoke to CPJ. Two journalists told CPJ they faced intense psychological pressure to confess. 

Several journalists told CPJ that officers warned them to stop working as journalists outside of official state media and told them it was a crime to participate in foreign-funded training and support programs, or to receive grants from foreign governments.

One journalist told CPJ they were pressured to become a state security informant and spy on other media and foreign governments. In return, they would be free to continue work outside the state sector.

These acts come as a new social communication law, which bans independent media outlets in Cuba, went into effect on October 4. The new law was promulgated after anti-government demonstrations swept the island in July 2021, resulting in the prosecution of persons who reported or shared videos of the events online.

El Toque reported that between 2022 and 2024, at least 150 Cuban journalists went into exile due to harassment by state security agents.

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

“Taliban intelligence must release journalists Mahdi Ansary and Hekmat Aryan immediately and unconditionally,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “Afghan journalists face unprecedented pressure from the Taliban, who continue to get away with their ruthless crackdown without being held to account. The Taliban must end these crimes against journalists once for all.”

On September 29, Aryan, the director of the independent Khoshhal radio station, was detained by dozens of Taliban intelligence agents from his office in Ghazni city and transferred to an undisclosed location, according to a journalist who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Aryan’s detention is reportedly linked to an alleged discussion on Khoshhal radio about the Taliban’s past suicide operations.

Separately, Ansary, a reporter for the Afghan News Agency, disappeared on the evening of October 5 while returning home from his office in Kabul, according to a journalist familiar with the situation, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Local Taliban intelligence agents initially confirmed Ansary’s detention, but his current whereabouts remain unknown.

The reason behind Ansary’s detention remains unclear. However, the journalist has frequently reported on the killings and atrocities against the Hazara ethnic minority during the Taliban’s rule.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told CPJ via messaging app that both the journalists were working with “banned [media] networks” and had engaged in “illegal activities.”

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

The mission met with civil society representatives and political and institutional leaders and heard the testimony of journalists who cited a growing climate of fear amid a deeply polarized environment, increasingly authoritarian governance, and escalating attacks against the press. Journalists expressed grave concern over their ability to continue operating in the country following the enactment of a Russian-style “foreign agents” law earlier this year.

The mission concluded with a press briefing and will be followed by a detailed report with recommendations.

Read the interim findings here.

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

A federal jury in Florida has found members of the pan-Africanist group African People’s Socialist Party guilty of conspiring with the Russian government to “sow discord” and “interfere” in U.S. elections. They face up to five years in federal prison. In a major victory for the activists, however, the jury acquitted them of the more serious charge of acting as foreign agents. “The trial of the Uhuru Three is proving to be one of the most important First Amendment cases thus far in the 21st century,” says attorney Jenipher Jones, who is on the legal support committee for defendants. “It remains clear that when covert government repression tactics fail against activists, the government will use the overt means of charges and cages against folks that they simply disagree with.”

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

Saeedi, an editor and producer with ANAR Media YouTube channel, was detained along with Sayed Waris Saeedi, a reporter at the outlet who is also his son, and cameraperson Hasib, who only goes by one name, according to the elder Saeedi’s former colleague Khushal Asefi who spoke with CPJ from exile.

Hasib and the younger Saeedi were released after two days but Saeedi remains in detention for unknown reasons in an unknown location. ANAR Media reports on culture, travel, religion, and social issues.

“Taliban intelligence officials must free Sayed Rahim Saeedi and cease their brutal crackdown on journalists in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The media has been decimated since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, forcing journalists to work in a climate of fear and robbing the Afghan people of the right to access information. This harassment must stop.”

Restrictions on Afghan media are intensifying, according to the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group, which recorded 89 media freedom violations since the start of 2024.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

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

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When the Justice Department shut down a secret inquiry into allegations that drug traffickers had funded the first presidential campaign of Mexico’s leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, officials in Washington closed the case forcefully.

Over the years that followed that 2011 decision, U.S. law enforcement agencies continued to hear similar reports, including accounts from at least four high-level Mexican traffickers who said their gangs helped to fund López Obrador’s political machine in return for promises of government protection, documents and interviews show.

But U.S. investigators did not pursue those claims, in part because they saw little support in Washington for a corruption case against an important Mexican political leader, current and former officials said.

“We took our best shot, and they didn’t want to do the case,” one former investigator for the Drug Enforcement Administration said of the 18-month inquiry into López Obrador’s 2006 campaign. “That was it; nobody had any appetite to push it forward.”

López Obrador lost that first presidential race and a second in 2012 before winning election in 2018. A sharp critic of his predecessors’ U.S.-backed “war” on the traffickers, he promised to use social programs — “hugs, not bullets” — to dissuade young Mexicans from joining the mafias. But his presidency has seen organized crime flourish as never before.

The president has denied that his 2006 campaign took money from the traffickers. He blamed recent reports about the DEA inquiry by ProPublica and other news organizations on a conspiracy to weaken his political party ahead of national elections last month. Yet concerns about possible mafia ties to at least one member of his 2006 campaign staff have also emerged within his own government.

The candidate of López Obrador’s party, Claudia Sheinbaum, won the presidential race by a landslide. Although violence was a central issue in the vote, she has signaled that she will follow similar policies in dealing with organized crime.

As ProPublica reported this year, the DEA investigation began in April 2010, after a trafficker-turned-informant gave agents a detailed account of the negotiation and delivery of some $2 million to López Obrador’s 2006 campaign. It ended when the Justice Department rejected a DEA-proposed sting operation inside Mexico aimed at the future president’s political team.

After Justice officials closed down the inquiry, several high-profile drug traffickers who were captured in Mexico and extradited to the United States offered investigators further information about the mafias’ dealings with López Obrador’s political operation. But, according to previously undisclosed government documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, nearly all of that information was filed away or ignored.

Although details of the case were closely held, a larger circle of U.S. law enforcement agents was aware that an investigation into López Obrador’s campaign had been aborted in part because of the perceived risks to the U.S.-Mexico relationship. In other cases, investigators said, they were simply more focused on what information they could extract from the traffickers about their mafia associates and the movement of their drugs. Because of the sensitivity of the case, the officials would only discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.

The American-born trafficker who was said to have donated the $2 million to López Obrador’s campaign, Edgar Valdez Villareal, known as “La Barbie,” was captured by the Mexican authorities in 2010, just as the DEA probe was gaining momentum. But by the time he and two of his lieutenants were extradited, the case was over.

One of those lieutenants, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a tall former police officer known as “El Grande,” gave the most substantial information to American investigators. In a recent book, a Mexican journalist, Anabel Hernández, quotes unnamed sources as saying the trafficker told senior Mexican prosecutors and two DEA agents in the first days after his arrest on Sept. 12, 2010, that he had personally delivered $500,000 to López Obrador in June 2006, near the end of his election campaign.

But a previously unpublished DEA report reviewed by ProPublica makes no mention of that assertion. The two agents’ “Report of Investigation,” dated Sept. 20, quotes the trafficker as saying he “was interested in cooperating with the U.S. Government and would be able to provide valuable information on high-ranking Mexican government officials.” However, officials familiar with the episode said El Grande emphasized that he would only talk once he was safely extradited to the United States.

Several former officials said that it was not uncommon for American law enforcement agents in Mexico to edit out allegations of high-level corruption from reports they knew would be shared with other U.S. agencies. Officials familiar with the López Obrador campaign inquiry said they never heard that El Grande claimed to have personally delivered cash to the candidate.

El Grande did start talking more openly about Mexican corruption on the extradition flight that took him to Texas in May of 2012, officials said. He described huge bribes to senior officials, including Genaro García Luna, a powerful former security minister who was later convicted on U.S. drug conspiracy charges. He also confirmed he attended the 2006 meeting at which La Barbie agreed to fund López Obrador’s campaign. But the officials added that he was not questioned in detail about those donations because the DEA’s investigation had already been shut down.

Three years later, El Grande’s onetime boss, La Barbie, was extradited to Atlanta, where he, too, confirmed some aspects of the 2006 donations, officials said. But the DEA’s inquiry was far enough in the past that investigators did not question him in depth about López Obrador, they added. (Prosecutors also viewed his memory as sufficiently unreliable that they chose not to use him as a witness in the corruption trial of García Luna last year.)

Another Sinaloa trafficker, Jesús Reynaldo Zambada García, has testified in two high-profile New York trials that his faction of the syndicate also donated millions of dollars to López Obrador’s political apparatus. But Zambada’s accounts have been vague and fragmentary, in part because federal prosecutors sought to limit his testimony about Mexican corruption.

Until his capture by the Mexican authorities in 2008, Zambada oversaw the syndicate’s operations in Mexico City, including the elaborate layers of bribes it paid to safeguard cocaine flights that landed in and near the capital.

During the 2018 trial of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Zambada testified that the gang had paid “a few million dollars” to a top Mexico City security official in 2005, when López Obrador was the capital’s mayor. Zambada indicated that the money was a down payment for protection in a future national government run by López Obrador.

In another trial last year, Zambada confirmed that he had told U.S. investigators that his group paid López Obrador’s aide, Gabriel Rejino, “something like” $3 million.

The claim made headlines in Mexico, where both López Obrador and Regino denied it. But the story got muddy after a lawyer asked Zambada if he had once told investigators the cartel paid Regino $7 million for López Obrador’s campaign against Vicente Fox. (Fox was the previous president from the conservative party of former President Felipe Calderón; in 2006, López Obrador ran against Calderón to succeed Fox.) Zambada, who seemed puzzled by the question, denied saying any such thing.

But a previously unpublished document reviewed by ProPublica shows that Zambada did in fact make such a claim — or that the Homeland Security agent who summarized his debriefing on July 6, 2013, in Washington might have confused one conservative president with another.

“López was paid $7 million USD through Gabriel Regino when López was running against President Fox,” states a summary of the interview, which focused mainly on the layers of bribes to police, customs and military officials that Zambada arranged for drug flights into Mexico City and nearby Toluca.

Current and former U.S. officials said some extradited members of two other Mexican trafficking groups, the Gulf cartel and the Zetas, told investigators that their gangs also contributed to López Obrador’s 2006 campaign.

The first of those traffickers, former Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, told agents soon after being extradited to Houston in 2007 that his organization had given money to López Obrador’s campaign as well as to government security officials, two people familiar with his account said. But agents did not ask Cárdenas in detail about those purported bribes because they thought then that there was little chance the Justice Department would try to prosecute a corruption case, these people said. An attorney for Cárdenas, Chip B. Lewis, declined to comment on the report.

Although López Obrador has insisted in recent months that there is “no evidence” behind the reports of traffickers’ contributions in 2006, documents from his own government show that Mexico’s defense minister had serious concerns about the alleged drug ties of a staff member from that campaign.

The concerns focused on a retired army colonel, Silvio Hernández Soto, who was one of López Obrador’s senior bodyguards in 2006 and became a target of scrutiny for both DEA investigators and Mexican prosecutors who led a sweeping anti-corruption case during the Calderón government.

A DEA informant who had worked as a trafficker for La Barbie told investigators in both countries that he had been introduced to Hernández in connection with the 2006 campaign and later sought his help in arranging military protection for drug flights through the Cancún airport. In 2012, Hernández was arrested in Mexico along with several army generals who were said to have assisted with the protection scheme.

In 2013, however, a new Mexican government abruptly changed course, dropped the corruption investigation and freed all the suspects in the case. Although the accusations against Hernández were never disproved, he went on to serve as a senior police official in western Sinaloa state, the heartland of Mexico’s drug industry.

After López Obrador took power in 2018, Hernández was named to a sensitive, high-level post in the Mexican attorney general’s office. But in an extraordinary move that did not become public at the time, the new president’s defense minister, Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval, sought to block the appointment, documents show.

In a letter to the attorney general on Sept. 12, 2019, Sandoval warned there was “documentary evidence” in both court files and military intelligence databases showing that Hernández “maintained ties with members of organized crime.” The letter cites allegations from the Mexican anti-corruption case — which had also been closely investigated by military prosecutors — and incidents from Hernández’s tenure in Sinaloa.

The letter also noted that the senior official who had recommended Hernández for the sensitive post in the attorney general’s office was the president’s intelligence chief, retired Gen. Audomaro Martínez — who had been Hernández’s direct boss during López Obrador’s 2006 campaign.

The defense minister’s letter was first reported by the nongovernmental group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, which discovered it in a trove of Defense Ministry documents made public last year by a hacker group, Guacamaya Leaks.

López Obrador’s chief spokesperson, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, said Hernández was not ultimately hired to the attorney general’s office or any other post in López Obrador’s government. He did not comment on why Martínez had recommended Hernández for the position.

A lawyer for Hernández did not respond to messages seeking comment.

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

That’s cut off a lucrative source of income for the customs agents, suddenly making it difficult for them to repay high-interest loans they took out to weather the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down trade with China, the customs agent said.

“They borrowed at 100% annual interest, so their debt doubles every year,” a customs official, from the border city of Hyesan in Ryanggang province, told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“The reason they cannot receive bribes is because of the tiny cameras attached to their bodies,” he said.

Prior to the pandemic, customs officials were able to pad their paltry government salaries with bribes from smugglers who either imported banned items or lied about the volume of imports to hide profits from the government. 

But when COVID hit, North Korea closed its borders to trade and the customs officials lost their livelihoods. 

To survive, many borrowed money from donju – North Korea’s wealthy class – promising to pay them back once trade with China resumed, the customs agent said.

Many border officials took out high interest loans of 30,000 yuan (US$4,100), and some borrowed as much as 150,000 yuan ($20,500). 

They were used to living the high life and did very little to reduce their spending during the time that the border was closed, thinking it would be relatively easy for them to repay, the official said.

Unexpected twist

In May, trade resumed, but the border officials never foresaw that authorities would require them to wear body cams – making it nearly impossible to collect bribes.

“The reason why cameras were installed on custom officials and security agents’ bodies was because there were many cases of illegal Chinese mobile phones and SIM cards being smuggled into the country through customs trade channels,” the customs official said. 

These Chinese cell phones allow people living near the border to access Chinese networks and call outside the country, potentially letting people pass along information North Korean authorities want to keep control of.

“This is fundamentally to block the path of internal secrets from being leaked outside the country through illegal mobile phones,” the official said.

Meanwhile, the loan sharks are pressing the officials to pay up.

“Hyesan customs officials and security agents are unable to go home at night,” he said. “This is because the donju come to the homes of customs officials and security agents and abusively demand repayment.”

A truck driver who used to drive through the border at Hyesan told RFA that it was easy for customs officials to spot smugglers and their smuggled goods.

“Customs truck drivers smuggled televisions from Chinese truck drivers until 2019,” he said.

He said that since the border reopened, all imported goods come on the backs of Chinese trucks, which are then unloaded into North Korean warehouses on the border.

North Korean workers who load and unload Chinese trucks used to be friendly with the Chinese drivers, sharing cigarettes and having casual conversations with them, but now they are told not to even make any verbal contact. 

“If they say a single word with them, they will be immediately taken to the State Security Department for an investigation and be kicked out of their work group,” the driver said.

In the more unusual cases where North Korean trucks export goods to China, they are allowed to go only 400 meters (yards) into Chinese territory, and once empty back out – and are followed by security guards, he said.

With body cams now a requirement, some of the customs officials are doing whatever they can to transfer to other departments where the bribes might be a little smaller but at more easily accepted, he said.

“Security agents who monitor trade cargo do not hide the fact that they have small cameras attached to their bodies,” the driver said. “They advise cargo loading and unloading workers not to create any problems, as the whole day’s work is being recorded.”  

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

The joint statement urged the European Commission and EU Member States to take immediate and decisive action to protect NGOs and independent journalists in Hungary.

On June 26, Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office announced that it had  launched an investigation into the Hungarian branch of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International and Átlátszó, an investigative journalism outlet that focuses on corruption. The office was established last year as a government authority with broad powers to investigate foreign interference in public life.

The bill creating the office “bears the hallmarks of a Russian-style foreign agent law” and it “could bring a new level of state-sanctioned pressure and chill independent reporting,” CPJ said in a statement last year.

Read the full statement of solidarity here.

Disclaimer: CPJ’s Europe representative Atilla Mong is a former investigative journalist for Átlátszó, currently serving as a member of its supervisory board.

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

The Covid-19 pandemic and the chaos and fighting that have plagued the country following the 2021 military coup have combined to deal a significant blow to tourism numbers.

More than 4 million tourists visited Myanmar in 2019, according to the World Tourism Federation. Those numbers plummeted to 130,000 in 2021 and 230,000 in 2022. 

Even Bagan – a UNESCO World Heritage site that is home to soaring spires and iconic Buddhist pagodas and temples – remains empty of tour groups, according to a tour guide who, like other sources in this story, wished to remain anonymous for security reasons.

“Since the coup d’état, Bagan has had a complete absence of foreign visitors,” he told Radio Free Asia. “Recently, guests from Spain emailed me expressing their desire to explore Bagan, but they also emphasized that Myanmar is not a safe destination given the current situation.”

The Chinese delegation arrived for their visit – officially referred to as the “Myanmar-China Tourism Promotion Familiarization Trip” – on May 10. They were also scheduled to visit the seat of government, Naypyidaw, and the beach resort town of Ngwe Saung.

“The aim is to boost the number of Chinese tourists visiting Myanmar’s destinations and raise awareness of Myanmar’s destinations in the Chinese tourism market,” according to the junta-controlled Myanmar News Agency. 

‘Irreparable damage’ to the industry

But two foreign tour operators said they didn’t think the effort would attract a rush of Chinese tourists.

“If you inquire whether success can be achieved, the answer is negative,” one of the tour operators said.

Most people have already determined that a leisurely visit to Myanmar’s most popular tourism sites would be “impossible” due to the situation on the ground, he said, referring to the armed conflict in much of the country between various anti-junta forces and the military.

There continue to be frequent shortages of electricity – something that has already forced some hotels to close, the second tour operator said.

“Over the past four years, the tourism industry has suffered irreparable damage,” he said. “Unless the underlying issues are addressed, inviting guests won’t attract visitors. After all, why would Chinese tourists risk their safety in an insecure destination?”

More visitors, more currency

International flights resumed to Myanmar in April 2022, more than a year after the coup. Since then, junta officials have attempted a number of tourism promotion strategies, and in 2023, the number of foreign visitors was recorded as 1.28 million.

Junta-controlled newspapers reported last month that Myanmar received 350,000 foreign tourists between January and March 2024, with China being the largest source, followed by Thailand.

But those numbers may simply reflect the type of visas people select when traveling to Myanmar for business or other purposes, several tour guides and travel agencies officials told RFA. It’s easier to enter Myanmar on a tourism visa than with other visa categories, they said.

The increase in visitors – for whatever purpose – brings in much needed foreign currency, a Myanmar’s Ministry of Hotels and Tourism spokesman said.

“The recent surge in tourist arrivals has significantly boosted revenue,” he said. “During the Covid-19 pandemic, tourism came to a standstill due to travel restrictions. But the situation has improved, and visitors are gradually returning.”

The junta has also made efforts to attract Indian and Russian visitors. Last September, it announced direct flights from Yangon and Mandalay to Russia’s third most populous city, Novosibirsk.

Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

“The ruling Georgian Dream party’s decision to push through Kremlin-inspired ‘foreign agents’ legislation despite opposition from Georgia’s president, tens of thousands of protesters, and the country’s international partners makes it clear that the party wants to ensure its victory in October parliamentary elections by using the law to smear and suppress critical voices,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Georgian authorities should immediately revoke this bill, which is utterly incompatible with Georgia’s bid to join the European Union and threatens to push the country into Russia’s authoritarian orbit.”  

On Tuesday, Georgia’s parliament voted to override President Salome Zourabichvili’s May 18 veto of the draft law “On Transparency of Foreign Influence.” Zourabichvili has five days to sign the law; if she declines, parliament’s speaker, a vocal proponent of the bill, is expected to sign it into effect.

Reintroduced by the Georgia Dream party in April following widespread protests that led to its withdrawal last year, the law would require nonprofits and media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power” and submit detailed annual financial accounts. Authorities would be granted as-yet unspecified powers to monitor their activities.

Organizations that fail to register or provide required data would be subject to fines of 25,000 lari (US$9,500) and monthly fines of 20,000 lari ($7,500) for continued non-compliance.

The law text was amended in May to allow individuals to also be liable for such fines, rendering them effective immediately rather than following an appeal.

The European Union has repeatedly warned that the law may compromise Georgia’s EU aspirations.

On May 21, the Venice Commission, a legal advisory body to the Council of Europe, called on Georgian authorities to repeal the law, saying it “has the objective effect of risking the stigmatising, silencing and eventually elimination of associations and media which receive even a low part of their funds from abroad.”

On May 23, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a policy of visa restrictions on individuals “responsible for or complicit in undermining democracy in Georgia” in connection with the foreign agent law, including those responsible for a “campaign of violence or intimidation” to suppress criticism of the bill.

Dozens of journalists were harassed, threatened, and attacked while covering protests of the proposed law.

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

Last week National Post columnist John Ivison claimed the Chinese Communist Party was funding the popular uprising against Canada’s role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Of course he supplied absolutely no evidence. The front-page article headlined “Chinese links to protests fit pattern” began: “the public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada has already established that China tried to meddle in the last two general election campaigns. But, if a new report into the funding of the anti-Israel movement in North America is to be believed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also linked to the protests that are disrupting cities and campuses across the continent.” Notice the hedging? If it “is to be believed”. In other words, there is absolutely no evidence that he is willing to cite.

On X, I responded, “A well-financed foreign focused lobby has employed every tactic short of assassination to scuttle a popular uprising against genocide in Gaza and Johnny boy claims those who don’t want Canada to enable the slaughter are a Chinese Communist Party front. You are beyond ridiculous.”

Ivison retorted, “What’s wrong, Yves? Are your paymasters unhappy at any scrutiny of their funding of Canada’s legion of useful idiots?” CBC and Globe and Mail commentator Andrew Coyne and former Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein retweeted Ivison’s idiocy to which I responded: “You haven’t a scintilla of evidence I’ve been funded by any foreign, corporate or wealthy interest. You on other hand are paid by a paper set up by Conrad Black and currently owned by a US hedge fund. Are you ashamed of promoting genocide and being such a sycophant of power?”

Since campaigning against Canada’s role in overthrowing Haiti’s elected government 20 years ago, I’ve repeatedly been accused of receiving money from Haitian, Venezuelan, Russian, Iranian and Chinese officials. It’s common to claim that internationalists and anti-imperialists are funded by foreign enemies. In a bid to delegitimize the anti-genocide movement, especially the student divestment encampments, there’s been a burst of these claims recently. In “Hidden hand funds Jew-hating protests, rallies, encampments”, Warren Kinsella makes a mockery of himself. The Toronto Sun commentary concluded, “The rest of us know the truth: the Jew-hating protests, rallies and encampments we are seeing are funded, in whole or in part, by outside interests who do not wish to reveal themselves. They are the hidden hand. But the rest of us will not rest until the hidden hand is exposed.”

The imaginary “hidden hand” versus documented apartheid lobby truth. It’s easy to trace at least part of the mammoth sums the apartheid lobby has used to shape Canadian opinion since all taxpayers subsidize the registered “charities” behind their propaganda. Montreal’s Jewish federation has $2 billion in assets. The other federations have hundreds of millions of dollars more. (The federations receive tens of millions of dollars in government grants and tens of millions more in subsidy through tax receipts they offer to donors).

The federations fund a bevy of genocidal organizations and their official advocacy arm is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. CIJA has a slew of ties to Israel with its top lobbyist, David Cooper, a long-time press officer at the Israeli Embassy. The Jewish Federations of Canada (JFC) and its United Israel Appeal (UIA) calls “the government of Israel” one of its “key strategic partners … that act as agents in the delivery of programs in Israel.” Between 1991 and 2022 UIA received over $1.5 billion in donations, which largely came from the federations.

At a broader level, Canada’s Jewish Federations have long been formally tied to the Jewish Agency for Israel (Jewish Agency for Palestine until 1948). Its website notes, “Canadian Federations are engaged in unique alliances with the Jewish Agency for Israel” and “founded in 1929, the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) is a primary agent for JFC-UIA in carrying out our mandate.”

The Jewish Agency for Israel effectively became Israel’s government in 1948 with long-time head David Ben-Gurion its first prime minister. Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, Moshe Sharett, subsequently led the Jewish Agency while current Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, stepped down as head of the Jewish Agency to take that position. Today the Jewish Agency for Israel is a parastatal organization that seeks to further Judaize Israel, especially far-flung areas.

No corporate media ever discusses the federations’ formal ties to Israel. Nor do we hear about the huge sums spent on pro-apartheid campaigning in Canada.

But we know one thing for certain: The paid foreign agents for Israel and its genocide aren’t sleeping in $40 tents.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

On May 16, the prosecutor general’s office banned SOTA, one of Russia’s last independent news outlets, as an undesirable organization, according to news reports and Aleksei Obukhov, SOTA’s senior editor, who spoke with CPJ.

Russian authorities also issued fines against two journalists, at least one of whom lives in exile, and added a third, based in Germany, to its wanted list for violating the foreign agents law, which requires outlets and individuals that the government deems “under foreign influence” or that receive external funding to label their content as produced by a foreign agent.

“Russian authorities seem so frightened of independent reporting that they are relentlessly using their laws on foreign agents and undesirable organizations to suppress critical voices, even when they are based abroad,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should stop this legal harassment of the free press.”

Organizations that receive the undesirable classification are banned from operating in Russia, and anyone who participates in or works to organize their activities faces up to six years in prison and administrative fines. The designation also makes it a crime to distribute the outlet’s content, such as sharing it online, or to donate to it.

The prosecutor general’s office said on Telegram that SOTA “disseminated materials discrediting the actions of Russian government authorities and the military,” which it said were “blatant attempts to destabilize the socio-political situation in Russia.”

SOTA, which primarily reports via Telegram, is known for its coverage of anti-war protests. Some of its staff have been forced into exile but others continue to report from inside Russia, such as posting videos from courtroom trials.

“This is an attempt by the government to make our work as difficult as possible,” SOTA’s Obukhov told CPJ.

Fined for violating ‘foreign agents’ law

Separately, on May 15, Tagansky district court in the capital Moscow fined two journalists with Sota.Vision — a news site founded in 2015, from which some staff broke away in 2022 to form SOTA — for violating the foreign agents law, according to news reports.

Sota.Vision’s founder Aleksandra Ageyeva was fined 10,000 rubles (US$110) and its reporter Mumin Shakirov was fined 30,000 rubles (US$332), those sources said.

The journalists will appeal the court decision as they were not informed about the hearing and were not present, according to Sota.Vision, which was listed as a foreign agent in 2023.

Ageyeva fled Russia in March 2022, one month after she was labeled a foreign agent and Russia embarked on its full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Wanted list

In a third case, on May 17, the Interior Ministry added exiled journalist Bogdan Bakaleyko, who comments on news events on his YouTube channel, to its wanted list, accusing him of violating the foreign agents law, according to news reports.

The Interior Ministry has listed more than 95,000 people as criminals on its online database, which means they risk arrest if they enter Russia.

Bakaleyko was listed as a foreign agent in 2023 and has twice been fined for failing to add that label to his content, as required under the Article 330.1, Part 2 of the Criminal Code, according to news reports, for which the penalty is up to two years in prison.

“It hurts me that some cunning people consider me a foreign agent working under some kind of foreign influence,” Bakaleyko said in a livestream from the German capital Berlin, where he is based, adding that he was “not very comfortable” with the foreign agent label as he worried it could put him in danger.

“If common sense, sound judgment, adequacy, honesty, and sincerity are considered exclusively qualities of foreign influence, then so be it. I believe I am sincere and primarily perform my work for the people.”

Since 2021, Russian authorities have labeled more than a dozen media organizations “undesirable,” including exiled Dozhd TV (TV Rain), independent news sites Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe, and investigative outlets The Insider and Bellingcat. Dozens of media organizations and more than 100 journalists, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, have also been designated as foreign agents.

CPJ’s emails to the Russian general prosecutor’s office and Moscow’s Tagansky court requesting comment did not receive any replies.

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

But Xiao's bid to escape the influence of the Chinese government didn't end there.

He believes the ruling Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is now focusing closely on "cleaning up" opposition voices overseas, and has spotted people he believes to be Chinese agents a number of times at public events in democratic Taiwan.

According to a former Chinese agent who spoke recently to Australian broadcaster ABC, this is exactly what's going on. Former Chinese spy "Eric" told the station that he has been involved in surveillance, abductions and the silencing of targets around the world since 2008.

The Spanish-based group Safeguard Defenders, which has warned the world about China's secret police stations, its network of "consular volunteers" and its targeting of dissidents and activists overseas, has now launched a "one-stop shop" legal advice center to help fight transnational repression by Beijing.

"The Chinese Communist Party kidnaps and threatens people at home, and they do the same thing overseas," Xiao said, in response to a question about the ABC report.

The sight of unidentified people he suspected were agents of the Chinese state filming and recording at pro-democracy events in Taiwan worried him enough that he now stays away from protests, rallies and other public events that are seen by Beijing as "anti-China."

He's not the only one who's worried, either.

"Both the Taiwanese government officials and the human rights groups who have assisted me have said they hope I won't take part in so many activities or give public interviews, which could lead to my whereabouts being exposed," Xiao told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.

"They told me this because [China] has so many political collaborators in Taiwan," he said.

Strange behavior

Li Jiabao, a former exchange student from China who applied for political asylum after speaking out against constitutional amendments allowing Xi to abandon term limits for his own job, said he has been continually targeted by authorities in China since then.

One unidentified person approached Li as he took part in a documentary in 2019 about his life story and situation, demanding that the director delete all footage, he said.

"[The director] didn't even know whether he had captured the person following us or whether he was just a very suspicious sort of person," Li said. "The man seemed very nervous and panicky, and behaved unacceptably, threatening us."

On another occasion, Li spotted someone who appeared to be following him in a park near his home. The man would watch him, but then looked at his phone if Li looked in his direction.

Li noticed people exhibiting similarly strange behavior at rallies he attended in Taipei to mark the anniversaries of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre, he said. Shortly after his denunciation of Xi, someone contacted him claiming to be a journalist, and sent him emails in a bid to have him download an app to his phone.

"He used a disposable account," said Li, who later realized what had likely happened after reading media reports of Chinese agents posing as journalists. "Turns out he was phishing me."

"The main thing they want is to get access to your contacts ... as well as the Telegram, Facebook and other chat records commonly used by dissidents," he said. "They can also be used to track your location at any time, to know who you are meeting, what you did and what activities you took part in."

Money for spying

Li has also been approached and offered money to spy on fellow dissidents in Taiwan, he revealed.

"Someone asked me how much you can make a month in Taiwan, said I must be short of money, and told me to go and film the Falun Gong, and the next day to film dissidents, including asking them how they're doing," he said.

"They told me just to live my life, and that they would contact me via a Hong Kong account if I thought it was too sensitive," he said. "The Chinese want to find out if you're willing to do stuff for them for money. I always refuse."

Xiao said the Chinese agents clearly knew of his love of photography, because he remembers being approached in October 2023 to take photos of planes taking off and landing at Taipei's Songshan Airport, home to a Taiwanese Air Force base that runs the flying service for the president and vice president of Taiwan.

"They give you some simple tasks to do and some financial support, to see if you can be bought, then more work would follow," he said.

Xiao smelled a rat at the time, and turned down the offer.

Threats to family members back home are another key part of the Chinese state security police playbook, according to dissidents overseas.

Li said he once received a message from his family asking if he was "being used by overseas or foreign forces."

Xiao said the authorities back home had visited his mother at her home and tried to get her to call him and find out his whereabouts and future plans.

Abduction threats

Sometimes, the goal is to get the target to a location where they can be handed over to the Chinese police, the former Chinese agent, who gave only the pseudonym "Eric," told ABC.

During the program, it emerged that RFA political cartoonist Rebel Pepper, whose real name is Wang Liming, was one of the targets, with Eric detailing a plot to lure Wang to Cambodia, using a Chinese-owned conglomerate that has become one of the fastest-growing companies in Cambodia – the Prince Group – to carry out the scam. 

RFA has verified that Prince was the company used for the recruitment and has also spoken to “Eric.”

Li has already encountered a similar situation, as his Chinese passport is due to expire in October, and he will soon be undocumented.

He was recently contacted by someone with China connections offering to renew his passport if he traveled to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand or elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

"[They told me] as long as you're willing to leave, we have the connections to renew your passport here," he said.

"He and some of his staff also tried to get me to try walking the line into the United States, via the Netherlands and Ecuador," Li said. "The reason I didn't go is that at least I'm safe in Taiwan."

"Once I leave, who's to know if someone would report my whereabouts to the Chinese Communist Party," he said. "I could be threatened, kidnapped or killed along the way, despite not needing a visa to go [to Ecuador]."

Deception

Li said he is very careful about who he is in contact with, as even fellow democracy activists are suspect these days.

"They sometimes pretend to be democrats who care about China, and try to deceive you ... so I'm usually very careful not to meet with strangers unless it's necessary," he said. 

"The best way to be sure is to talk to them over time, because no matter how good their cover is, sooner or later they will have to carry out work given them by the Chinese Communist Party, so they will be exposed eventually."

Li said he wasn't surprised by the ABC expose about “Eric", and warned: "Be careful not to accept money or contacts from unknown sources."

Xiao believes that Taiwan still isn't nearly tough enough on Chinese spies operating in its territory, saying that sentences handed down to Chinese spies are typically far too lenient, and not enough to be a deterrent.

Taiwan, despite being a democracy, has plenty of people willing to travel to China and be in contact with authorities there, he said, while certain political parties and civil groups actively campaign for closer ties with Beijing.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili said she would veto the bill, but the ruling party controls a large enough majority to override her.

“The passage of ‘foreign agent’ legislation by the ruling Georgian Dream party, despite significant public opposition, is set to stifle media freedom in the lead-up to the parliamentary elections in October,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Georgian authorities should not advance the Russia-style bill any further unless they want to throw the country off the path to the European Union and into the Kremlin’s embrace. European and international leaders must convey to the Georgian government that the country cannot move forward in its EU aspirations if the law goes into force.”

The law — reintroduced by the ruling party in April following widespread protests that led to its withdrawal last year — would require nonprofits and media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power” and submit detailed annual financial accounts. Authorities would be granted as-yet unspecified powers to monitor their activities.

Organizations that fail to register or to provide required data would be subject to fines of 25,000 lari (US$9,500) and monthly fines of 20,000 lari ($7,500) for continued non-compliance.

In a speech on April 29, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder and honorary chair of the ruling Georgian Dream party and a billionaire who is alleged to maintain close business and political ties with Russia, attacked the West and promised legal reprisals and “punishment” against opponents if the party wins the October elections.

Amid renewed mass protests of the proposed law in recent weeks, CPJ documented police violence against multiple media workers and a coordinated intimidation campaign targeting dozens of government-critical journalists.

On May 10, CPJ and 17 partner organizations sent a letter to Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze urging him to withdraw the draft law and guarantee journalist safety.

In April, Kyrgyzstan enacted similar foreign agent legislation.

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

Since May 7, more than 30 journalists covering the bill “on transparency of foreign influence” and public protests against it have been targeted with anonymous abusive and threatening phone calls, journalists from 10 different independent news outlets told CPJ.

On May 9, Nino Zuriashvili, head of Studio Monitor, which makes investigative documentaries, and Gela Mtivlishvili, editor-in-chief of the independent website Mountain News, told CPJ that unknown individuals covered the entrances to their offices with posters and graffiti denouncing them as “foreign agents.” 

Tamta Muradashvili, director of independent broadcaster Mtavari Arkhi, told CPJ that more than 10 of her colleagues had received threatening and abusive calls. She said she believed it was “very clear that the campaign is coordinated by government agencies,” given its scale, the callers’ access to government-held personal data, and the lack of response from the authorities.

“Increasing threats and intimidation against journalists in Georgia are deeply concerning and demonstrate that the ‘foreign agent’ bill not only unjustly restricts and stigmatizes journalists but also makes them more unsafe,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. 

“With the eyes of the world on Georgia over this bill and the country’s hopes of joining the European Union, the authorities should know their reputation is on the line if they don’t conduct a swift and convincing investigation into acts of intimidation against journalists and ensure media workers’ safety.”

Hundreds of critics of the bill reportedly received threatening phone calls, offices of numerous organizations were targeted with posters, and at least six prominent opposition politicians and activists were beaten this week. 

The bill would require media outlets and nonprofits receiving more than 20% of their income from abroad to register as “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” Parliament is expected to pass the bill in a third and final reading by May 17. 

‘No place in Georgia for agents’

Zuriashvili told CPJ that a man called her from an international number on May 7, asked if she was from Studio Monitor, swore at her, and asked why she was critical of the foreign agent bill. 

Zuriashvili posted a photo on Facebook of her office door, showing graffiti that she found on May 9, written “agents’ HQ” and printed posters showing her face, name, and Studio Monitor’s logo, with the words, “There is no place in Georgia for agents.”

On May 10, unknown individuals plastered dozens of posters on the façade of Zuriashvili’s apartment and graffitied her car with obscene images and the phrase “agent who sold themselves for money,” the news website Netgazeti reported.

Mountain News also posted images of dozens of similar posters and graffiti that were found to have been plastered on the walls of Mtivlishvili’s home and the outlet’s office on May 9.

On May 8, Natia Kuprashvili, founder of independent broadcaster TOK TV, said on Facebook that an unidentified caller recited her address and said they were waiting for her at her apartment.

Zuriashvili, Mtivlishvili and several other journalists told CPJ that they believed they were targeted for their vocal opposition to the foreign agent bill and for their outlets’ critical coverage of the bill and Georgian authorities.

Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili said on May 8 that authorities would create a public online register of individuals who were “involved in violence, other illegal actions, threats and blackmail, or publicly approve of such actions.” Muradashvili said such a register would likely be used against critics of the bill and that the authorities’ announcement of the register amid the intimidation campaign demonstrated their repressive direction.

CPJ also spoke to journalists at the independent broadcasters TV Pirveli and TV Formula and at the news websites JAMnews, OC Media, Netgazeti, Batumelebi, and Georgian News who all said that their staff had been targeted with threatening calls.  

CPJ’s emails requesting comment from the ruling Georgian Dream party, and email and Facebook message to the Special Investigation Service, which investigates allegations of crimes against journalists, did not immediately receive any replies. 

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

On April 17, the Georgian Parliament passed a first reading of the “On Transparency of Foreign Influence” bill, according to news reports. 

The bill, reintroduced by the ruling Georgian Dream party earlier this month after mass protests forced its withdrawal last year, would require nonprofits and media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to join a registry of “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power.”

During protests against the bill on the night of April 16, riot police assaulted at least four journalists covering them, according to independent trade group Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics, and the journalists, who spoke to CPJ by telephone and messaging app.

“Georgia’s ruling party looks intent on rushing through ‘foreign agent’ legislation as a tool to brandish against critical media ahead of the October parliamentary elections,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “It would be better if authorities in Georgia showed a commitment to European democratic standards by swiftly investigating allegations of police violence against journalists covering mass protests against the bill and bringing those responsible to justice.”

In an April 17 statement following the bill’s first reading, the European Union delegation to Georgia said that the law “is not in line with EU core norms and values” and its final adoption “would negatively impact Georgia’s progress” in its bid to join the EU.

The proposed legislation would require externally-funded organizations to provide detailed annual accounts, including information about the source, amount, and purpose of any funds received or spent, for a publicly available register. Organizations that fail to register or to provide such data would be subject to fines of 25,000 lari (US$9,500) and monthly fines of 20,000 lari ($7,500) for continued non-compliance.

Georgia’s pro-EU President Salome Zourabichvili, who has previously promised to veto the law, told CNN on April 18 that the law is an “exact duplicate” of Russia’s ‘foreign agent’ law “that was adopted a few years ago [in Russia] and then complemented in order to crush civil society.” Georgian Dream controls a majority large enough to override a presidential veto and has vowed to pass the law by the end of the current parliamentary session in June.

Giorgi Baskhajauri, a reporter for independent news website Aprili, told CPJ that he was covering the mass demonstrations against the draft law near Georgia’s parliament, reportedly attended by about 20,000 people, at around 1:15 a.m. on April 17, when riot police, rushing at protesters, shoved him to the ground and repeatedly kicked and punched him in the head. The journalist sustained a broken nose and underwent minor surgery following the attack, he said.

Baskhajauri said he is sure police knew he was a journalist because he had been standing in front of them, wearing his press badge clearly on his chest and taking photos for around 30 minutes before the incident, and because he shouted that he was a journalist during the assault.

Giorgi Badridze, a reporter for independent Tabula news site, told CPJ that he was filming riot police rushing protesters with his cell phone at around 1 a.m. on April 17 when at least three police officers grabbed and tossed his phone, pushed him to the ground, and multiple officers dragged him across the asphalt and kicked him in the legs for up to one minute. Badridze said he sustained scratches and light bruising. Later that morning, Badridze was filming police chasing demonstrators with a second cell phone but officers again grabbed the phone from him, returning it shortly afterwards, according to the journalist and footage of the incident posted by Tabula on Facebook.

Aleksandre Keshelashvili, a reporter for the independent news outlet Publika, was filming riot police chasing protesters at around the same time when two officers pushed him against a wall, and one hit him in the face with his hand, according to footage of the incident published by Publika on Facebook and the journalist, who told CPJ he sustained minor bruising to the temple. Shortly afterwards, police snatched his phone from him, as he continued to film, but returned it to him quickly, he said.

Nurlan Gahramanli, an independent Azerbaijani journalist, was filming riot police beating protesters when an officer grabbed his phone and threw him to the ground, despite him repeatedly shouting that he was a journalist, according to the Gahramanli and footage of the incident that he posted on X. Gahramanli told CPJ that three or four officers then surrounded him. One of them struck him on the nose with a baton, and another punched him in the face, causing him to sustain swelling, bruising and scratches on his nose and face. 

Badridze and Keshelashvili told CPJ they were wearing clearly displayed press badges, and they believe police were aware that they were journalists.

All four journalists have filed complaints with Georgia’s Special Investigation Service (SIS), which investigates allegations of alleged crimes by law enforcement officers and crimes against journalists, they told CPJ.

CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia and messaged the SIS on its Facebook page for comment but did not receive any replies.

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

“Georgian authorities’ revival of a bill that would smear media outlets as foreign-controlled is deeply concerning and utterly incompatible with their claim of aligning with European democratic standards and threatens press freedom ahead of the October parliamentary elections,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “The ruling Georgian Dream party should withdraw the law and renounce any form of ‘foreign agent’ legislation if Georgia wants to succeed in its bid to join the European Union.”

The draft law, “On transparency of foreign influence,” would require nonprofits and media outlets receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to join a registry and provide detailed annual financial accounts, according to media reports and Georgia’s parliamentary website. Organizations that fail to register or to provide such data would be subject to fines of 25,000 lari (US$9,500).

A statement published on the party’s Facebook page said the bill is largely identical to a bill with the same name dropped by parliament in March 2023 following widespread protests. The only change is that the term “agent of foreign influence” has been replaced by that of “organization pursuing the interests of a foreign power.”

Georgian Dream, which controls a parliamentary majority, vowed in its statement to pass the law by the end of the current parliamentary session in June. The party’s majority is large enough to override Georgia’s president, who previously said she would veto it.

The proposed law, which was previously criticized by CPJ, is similar to Russia’s foreign agent legislation, except that it does not currently require media outlets to label their publications as produced by a foreign agent.

On Tuesday, Kyrgyzstan ratified a Russia-style foreign agents law requiring some nonprofit media organizations to register as “foreign representatives” and label their publications as produced or distributed by a foreign representative.

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

“President Sadyr Japarov’s decision to follow Russia’s lead on ‘foreign agent’ legislation threatens to erase Kyrgyzstan’s 30-year status as a relative haven of free speech and democracy in post-Soviet Central Asia,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “While the law’s current form does not directly target media outlets, it could cripple the work of press freedom groups and nonprofits running several of Kyrgyzstan’s celebrated independent media organizations and must be repealed.”

Similar to Russia’s foreign agent legislation, the law requires nonprofits that receive foreign funding and engage in what it defines as political activities to register as “foreign representatives.” It will go into effect 10 days after its official publication, according to media reports.

Under the law, the nonprofits must label their publications as produced or distributed by a foreign representative. They must also submit to costly financial reporting requirements and extensive state oversight that UN special rapporteurs said “may amount to almost unrestricted administrative control.”

Submitted to parliament in May 2023, the bill drew widespread international criticism, including from CPJ, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The move comes amid an unprecedented crackdown on independent media in the country, which has been widely seen as a regional sanctuary for the free press since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Since coming to power in 2020, Japarov has increasingly sought to control the media. He enacted a controversial “false information” law allowing the government to block news websites without a court order, increased presidential power over the state-funded broadcaster, and targeted key journalists and media, including Bolot Temirov and Radio Azattyk, the local service of U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

In January, Kyrgyz authorities arrested 11 journalists linked to the investigative outlet Temirov Live and raided the privately owned news agency 24.kg. In February, authorities shuttered the prominent news website Kloop.

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

This article was produced for ProPublica in partnership with The Frontier. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Pulitzer Center.

Qiu He remembers sitting handcuffed on her front porch, her two small children huddled next to her, as state anti-drug agents carrying semi-automatic rifles trooped in and out of her house.

Serving a search warrant, the agents had forced open the front door and arrested her after she allegedly resisted them, according to an affidavit. During the raid last April, agents said they found ledgers, bags of marijuana, a loaded .380-caliber pistol and other evidence they collected as part of an investigation alleging that she is a central figure in an illegal scheme involving at least 23 marijuana operations in central Oklahoma.

She spent the night in jail. Almost a year later, authorities have still not charged her with a crime. But a few days after her arrest, a judge signed an order freezing her bank accounts and agents seized almost a million dollars from the accounts as suspected criminal proceeds. She is fighting the state’s action to confiscate the money, saying she did nothing illegal.

The ledgers, He said, were records for her legitimate businesses. Her biggest tenants are marijuana businesses, which deal mostly in cash, as does the clientele of her consulting firm catering to Chinese immigrants. The gun, she said, was legally purchased by her husband.

“At this point, I don’t love Oklahoma,” said He, who also uses the first name Tina. “I don’t feel safe here. I don’t feel secure here.”

On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, she was at the bubble tea shop she owns in Edmond, the upscale suburb of Oklahoma City where she lives. The stylishly dressed 39-year-old wore a fuzzy black baseball cap over her short, burgundy-dyed hair. She was joined by a friend, another entrepreneur in the marijuana business, who asked to be identified only as Sharon, the English name she uses.

The eatery, called Oklaboba, is a cheerful, brightly lit space, and business was brisk. But the conversation at the women’s table was somber. Sharon mentioned the murder in January of an Asian friend: Robbers invaded his marijuana farm in rural Okfuskee County and shot him in the neck. There have been no arrests.

The two women said many Asian immigrants they know invested their life savings in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom only to see their licenses revoked, their crop destroyed and their assets seized when authorities accuse them of operating illegally. They said anti-Asian bias plays a role in the state’s crackdown on marijuana growers and has caused people who are trying to do business legally to lose everything.

Since the number of licensed marijuana farms peaked at more than 9,400 in December 2021, the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control have taken a more aggressive approach toward license compliance.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond also formed his office’s own organized crime task force that regularly conducts raids on alleged illegal operations.

“We are sending a clear message to Mexican drug cartels, Chinese crime syndicates and all others who are endangering public safety through these heinous operations,” Drummond said. “And that message is to get the hell out of Oklahoma.”

Jeremiah Ross, an Oklahoma City attorney who worked with He, said he has represented dozens of Asian clients accused of breaking marijuana laws over the past few years. Ross said he sees a distinct anti-Asian bias in marijuana licensing and law enforcement.

“The white folks and the locals aren’t having any problems with their [license] renewals,” Ross said. “They’re not having armed guards show up at their grow facility and chop all their plants down.”

Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, rejected such allegations. He said the agency “has identified and shut down illegal grows, as well as made arrests on illegal farms tied to organized crime from China, Mexico, Russia, Bulgaria, Armenia and the Italian mob over the last three years, as well as numerous American-owned operations.”

Woodward said he did not have readily available information on He’s case and why she has not been charged.

Porsha Riley, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, said the agency is committed to fairness and equity for all license holders.

“We want to assure the public and the medical marijuana industry that we do not discriminate against any licensee,” Riley said. “Our enforcement and compliance efforts are conducted impartially, without bias or prejudice. We remain dedicated to upholding these principles and ensuring a level playing field for all.”

Sharon, who asked that her full name be withheld because she fears retaliation, said she no longer trusts the state to regulate her marijuana business fairly.

“Tell me it’s not racism, because Asians are absolutely feeling it,” Sharon said. Referring to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, she said, “A lot of people are afraid to poke the bear.”

He’s encounters with law enforcement remind her of the authoritarian regime in her native land, which she left seeking freedom, she said.

“In China, there is one voice and you are not allowed to speak,” she said. “Oklahoma is worse than China.”

Her defiance is atypical in a community that tends to avoid public conflict — and criticism of the Chinese government. ProPublica and The Frontier reported last week that Chinese organized crime has come to dominate the illicit marijuana market in Oklahoma and across the U.S., and that the criminal networks have alleged connections to the Chinese state. He’s story offers a view from inside an immigrant community that she says feels besieged on multiple fronts.

She said she studied business administration and management at Renmin University in Beijing and came to the United States in 2010. In 2020, after years of making good money in commercial real estate development in New York, the economic and cultural disruption of the pandemic made her think it was time for a change, she said.

At the time, she lived in Flushing, a large Chinese immigrant enclave. She was “a city girl” who couldn’t find Oklahoma on the map, she said. But she liked country music and thought a slower-paced life on the plains would let her spend more time with her kids.

“I was thinking I wanted to restart my life,” she said. “So I wanted to go out to see what’s going on.”

She arrived at the peak of Oklahoma’s marijuana boom: a get-rich-quick frenzy of investors, workers, gangsters and money converging from across the country and as far away as China. At first, she said, she wanted to develop ventures serving the burgeoning Chinese population. She opened Oklaboba and bought rental properties in Oklahoma City. Like many other newcomers, she shuttled back and forth with her children to New York, where her husband remained.

She said she got involved in marijuana after helping the owner of a farm who she says had been taken advantage of by a law firm operating a “straw owner” scheme. The 2018 medical marijuana law requires marijuana farms to be 75% owned by residents who have lived in the state at least two years. But some attorneys in the state have paid longtime residents to pose as majority owners to get licenses and buy property. With He’s help, the man was able to get full ownership of the business in his own name and get out from under the straw owner arrangement, she said.

He said she established a consulting firm for investors in the cannabis industry and accumulated hundreds of Chinese clients. Records show she was the registered agent for numerous marijuana and real estate holding companies, and she owned the properties on which many of those companies were located.

She says it was all legitimate. But she soon found herself in the crosshairs of law enforcement. The investigation of a suspected trafficking ring led state anti-drug agents to a New York commercial real estate developer who was an associate of He, court records show. Authorities allege that she was his business partner in marijuana-related activity in Oklahoma, but she said it was only a buyer-seller relationship, as she had bought businesses with active marijuana licenses from him.

Investigators came to suspect that the developer and He were “heavily involved” in the illicit marijuana trade and orchestrating straw owner schemes, court records say. Agents busted a series of illegal grows allegedly linked to He and the developer. When agents raided two sites one morning last April and a tenant called He, she rushed to the property to confront them and demand a search warrant, court records say. What happened next, He said, felt like retaliation for challenging the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

That evening, a well-armed team of agents showed up at her house with another search warrant. The warrant shows it was requested by agents after the confrontation with He at her business and was signed by a judge only minutes before the raid on her house that night.

The raid left her children terrified, her marriage under strain and her house in shambles, she said.

“My house was destroyed,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything. The jail, they were treating me like a criminal.”

Although He said the pistol that agents found was legally owned by her husband, not her, she said she has taken firearms courses and owns a gun for protection in an increasingly dangerous business.

Ross said when he heard that He’s house was being searched, he was surprised. She was a small business owner, someone who helped the Chinese community in Oklahoma City, the mom of two young boys, not some mobster, Ross said.

It was already night when Ross arrived at He’s house to see if she needed help. She and the children were still sitting on the porch as agents continued their search. Ross was denied entry by law enforcement.

The agents “snatched her up, left her kids there, took her to jail and didn’t release her until the following morning. And they never filed a single charge,” Ross said. “Why in God’s name are they going after her? This is out of control.”

Despite her ordeal, He considers herself lucky because other Chinese immigrants don’t have the financial means or the language skills to fight back. Marijuana in Oklahoma has become a “lose-lose” scenario thanks to what she called a byzantine system choked with costly compliance requirements and arbitrary decisions.

“You set up a game and didn’t know how to play it,” she said. “And yet they call me the super game-player.”

Many Chinese investors have lost faith in the Oklahoma authorities, fearing they will be the next target, she said. Once her legal problems are resolved, she wants to go somewhere else. Maybe Maryland, which just legalized recreational marijuana. Maybe it’s time to think big, she said: a marijuana Starbucks, a marijuana Uber.

At the same time, she’s not sure it’s worth it.

“I don’t want to do this business anymore,” she said. “I don’t want the pressure.”

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

On Thursday, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament approved in a third and final reading, without debate, a bill requiring nonprofits that receive foreign funding and engage in what it defines as political activities to register as “foreign representatives,” according to news reports.

Japarov, who recently defended the law in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has a month to return the bill or sign it into law.

The bill, an amended version of a draft law previously criticized by CPJ, does not directly target news outlets but would apply to media rights organizations and nonprofits that run several of Kyrgyzstan’s prominent independent news websites, according to CPJ’s review.

A new provision requires organizations designated as “foreign representatives” to label their publications as being produced by a foreign representative. Other clauses grant authorities sweeping powers of oversight over the activities of “foreign representatives” and allow them to suspend or shutter nonprofits for alleged violations of the law.

“The ‘foreign agents’ bill passed by Kyrgyzstan’s parliament copies many of the worst aspects of Russia’s foreign agent legislation. It is clearly focused on stigmatizing nonprofits working in news media and threatens to hamstring the work of press freedom organizations,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov must show that his stated commitment to free speech is more than empty words by vetoing the bill and withdrawing his support for any form of foreign agent law.”

Submitted to parliament in May, the bill has elicited extensive international criticism, including from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.N. special rapporteurs, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Blinken.

The latest version of the bill, amended by parliament in February ahead of the second reading, removes a controversial clause stipulating prison terms of up to 10 years for vaguely defined offenses, according to CPJ’s review and an analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL).

Under the bill, externally funded nonprofits must apply to a public register of “foreign representatives” if they participate in activities defined by the law as “political”—including “disseminating … opinions on decisions taken by state organs,” issuing public appeals to state organs and officials, and “shaping socio-political views and convictions, including by conducting surveys of public opinion.”

The law would require nonprofits to carry out a costly independent audit report each year, according to the ICNL. It would also grant authorities the right to request their internal documents, to send government representatives to participate in nonprofits’ internal activities, and to check—by as-yet-unspecified means—whether their activities and expenditures correspond to the aims listed in their articles of incorporation, it said. The U.N. special rapporteurs said these clauses “may amount to almost unrestricted administrative control over these associations.”

Authorities would have the power to suspend the activities of nonprofits for up to six months and freeze their bank accounts if they fail to declare themselves as foreign representatives or to label their publications after receiving a warning. Nonprofits that fail to rectify such omissions after suspension can be liquidated by the courts.

In his letter to Blinken, Japarov said Kyrgyzstan needed to ensure financial transparency of media outlets and NGOs. However, Aibek Askarbekov, an independent human rights lawyer, told CPJ that authorities already had full access to financial data of nonprofits, which are required to publish information about sources of income and expenditures online. The bill instead aims at “exerting tight control” over nonprofits, he said.

Parliamentary approval of the bill comes amid an unprecedented crackdown on independent reporting in a country previously seen as a regional haven for the free press. In January, Kyrgyz authorities arrested 11 journalists linked to the investigative outlet Temirov Live and raided the privately owned news agency 24.kg. In February, authorities shuttered the prominent news website Kloop.

CPJ’s emails to Kyrgyzstan’s parliament, lawmaker Nadira Narmatova, who introduced the bill to parliament, and the Office of the President requesting comment on the bill did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

A month before the 2020 presidential election, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose pandemic lockdown measures drew harsh criticism from President Donald Trump and his supporters.

The alleged plot coincided with growing concern about far-right political violence in America. But the FBI quickly realized it had a problem: A key informant in the case, a career snitch with a long rap sheet, had helped to orchestrate the kidnapping plot. During the undercover sting, the FBI ignored crimes that the informant, Stephen Robeson, appeared to have committed, including fraud and illegal possession of a sniper rifle.

The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Those cases too raised questions about whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents and informants.

For the FBI, the stakes in the Whitmer case were high. If defense lawyers learned of Robeson’s role in the kidnapping plot, the FBI agents feared, they’d be accused of entrapment. The collapse of the case, built over nearly a year using as many as a dozen informants, two undercover agents, and bureau field offices in at least four states, would have been a public relations coup for right-wing politicians and news media. Both groups have used the problematic investigation as evidence that the Justice Department has been “weaponized” against conservatives — despite a decadeslong public record proving the opposite — and as fuel for conspiracy theories that the January 6 Capitol riot was engineered by the FBI.

But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward, using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.

The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.

The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado.

The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.

Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.

So on December 10, 2020, agents called Robeson into the FBI’s office in Milwaukee in an apparent attempt to silence him. In an extraordinary five-hour conversation, which FBI agents recorded, one of Robeson’s handlers told him: “A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.

The FBI agents asked Robeson to sign a nondisclosure agreement and proceeded to coach and threaten him to shape his story and ensure that he would never testify before a jury. Their coercion of Robeson undermines the Justice Department’s claim, in court records, that Robeson was a “double agent” whose actions weren’t under the government’s control. The agents also made it clear that they had leverage: They knew Robeson had committed crimes while working for the FBI.

“We know we have power, right?” an FBI agent told Robeson during this meeting. “We know we have leverage. We’re not going to bullshit you.”

Robeson’s role as an informant in the Whitmer kidnapping plot was supposed to be a tightly held secret. FBI agents had written the charging documents to conceal his identity.

But the FBI’s paperwork was sloppy. Supporters of the 14 defendants began to piece together clues from details like the FBI’s descriptions of passengers in a car that had been driven near Whitmer’s vacation home in Antrim County, Michigan. The clues appeared to point to Robeson as a snitch — or, in the FBI’s terminology, a confidential human source. After the October 2020 arrests, a panicked Robeson started calling targets of the FBI investigation and denying that he was an informant.

“So when you call, your intentions are to keep some of the heat off of you, right?” an FBI agent asked Robeson during the December 2020 meeting. “To point people in the other direction?”

“Anywhere but me,” Robeson answered. “Not at anyone specific, just away from me.”

Robeson was talking to Henrik “Hank” Impola and Jayson Chambers, two of the lead FBI agents in the Michigan case. Chambers, who previously played in a rock band that “bases all of its music on the fact that Christians are in a spiritual war,” was the registered owner of a private intelligence company whose purported CEO ran a Twitter account known for right-wing trolling and that appeared to tweet about the Michigan case before it was announced.

The two agents started up a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Robeson. Chambers assured him they had done all they could to conceal his role as an informant. Impola, meanwhile, said they needed to come up with a plausible cover story.

“Robey’s Idea From Day One”

From the start of the investigation, the FBI knew that Robeson, like many paid informants, had credibility problems. Robeson has been in and out of the criminal justice system since the early ’80s, charged with having sex with a minor, writing bad checks, bail jumping, and many other offenses. Robeson also acknowledged to the agents that he was previously a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. “I can’t blame what I did on anybody else,” Robeson told FBI agents of his criminal record. “I’m doing what I hope is better now.”

Sexual misconduct is a repeated claim in allegations involving Robeson, and his handlers at the FBI knew this. A local police report in the FBI’s files describes how a 17-year-old claimed Robeson coerced her to have sex in return for a promise to put her pictures in a calendar. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge.

More recently, according to an internal FBI report, a woman who lived in Robeson’s garage in Wisconsin told federal agents that Robeson pressured her for sex because he said she wasn’t contributing enough to the household. “I would not call it rape,” the woman said, though she acknowledged to federal agents that she did not believe she had a choice. The woman also told FBI agents that Robeson sold marijuana and prescription drugs out of his house, according to internal bureau documents. She reported that she suspected he was selling firearms as well. (The Intercept is not publishing these reports because they contain identifying information about alleged sex crime victims.)

Robeson’s career as a government cooperator appears to have coincided with his career as a criminal. In 1985, he testified that a member of a violent motorcycle gang with whom he had shared a jail cell confessed to him that he had “hit a girl on top of the head” before her body was found in a burned-out bar, which was allegedly set ablaze for insurance money. More recently, in the mid-2000s, Robeson helped police set up a Wisconsin farmer, who wanted to harm a romantic rival, in a murder-for-hire scheme.

Defense lawyers say the FBI used a nondisclosure agreement with Robeson — which they claim was never turned over as evidence in the Whitmer cases — to prevent Robeson from talking publicly about his work as an informant. As Special Agent Chambers reminded Robeson in their recorded meeting: “So when you get asked, ‘Why did you have to go to the FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?’ You don’t have to talk about what we’re talking about here.”

Federal agents were particularly troubled by messages Robeson had sent to Barry Croft Jr., a primary target in the investigation, that alluded to using violence against elected officials. Croft’s lawyer could use those messages to suggest that the kidnapping plot had been Robeson’s idea, not Croft’s, the agents feared.

“This is something that we’re all going to have to overcome,” Impola told Robeson, adding a few minutes later: “It quickly becomes, from a defense strategy, ‘Well, this was Robey’s idea from day one.’”

“I Let the FBI Know”

In the spring of 2020, as the United States grappled with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a “stay home, stay safe” order in Michigan that barred “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Covid-19 skeptics, along with many Republicans, were enraged. On April 17, Trump weighed in with a tweet: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

Two weeks later, as many as 1,000 protesters attended a rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing in what a state senator later described as a “dress rehearsal” for January 6. The so-called American Patriot Rally was organized by Ryan Kelly, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for taking part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many of the protesters inside the Michigan Capitol were armed, including an FBI informant and former Army sergeant named Dan Chappel. The FBI had hired Chappel to infiltrate a ragtag group of gun enthusiasts he’d met through Facebook who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. “I let the FBI know that there was talks of storming the Capitol,” Chappel, known to the militia group as “Big Dan,” later testified.

About 10 members of the Wolverine Watchmen were with Chappel at the state Capitol, unaware that he was working for the FBI. Although he informed the FBI in advance that the Wolverine Watchmen planned to storm the Capitol that day, federal agents did not try to stop them, Chappel later testified. FBI agents knew the militia members had discussed the locations of police officers at the Capitol and how to start “the boogaloo,” code for a civil war. (A year after arrests were made in the Whitmer kidnapping plot, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel confirmed in a podcast interview that law enforcement perceived violence at the Capitol as a real threat. “There was a plan for mass execution that day,” Nessel said.)

The April rally in Lansing was so successful that the same organizers held another, on June 18, 2020. The protesters, including Chappel and other members of the Wolverine Watchmen, milled about outside the Capitol that day, showing off their firearms and military cosplay for the news cameras.

That’s where Chappel first met Adam Fox, who lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop and liked to work out, smoke marijuana, and rant on social media. A stout man with a beard, Fox had already met Robeson, who was the Wisconsin chapter president of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had started working for the FBI as an informant in October 2019, according to the bureau.

Robeson had come to the FBI’s attention in part through a secret program known as Operation Bronze Griffon — first revealed publicly in 2022 to Republican House investigators by a whistleblower who misspelled it as Bronze Griffin — through which Facebook provides user activity information to federal agents without a search warrant or subpoena. According to an FBI report obtained by The Intercept, agents received a Bronze Griffon lead on Robeson for posting “possibly violent rhetoric in support of the militia movement and the Boogaloo concept.” The FBI recruited Robeson to be an informant, and he told agents that he knew of fellow militia members who had spoken about attacking law enforcement officials.

Once on the FBI payroll, Robeson organized and led several militia planning meetings, including one in Dublin, Ohio, that Fox and Croft attended on June 6, 2020.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox at the Michigan Capitol would bridge two federal investigations, known internally as Operation Cold Snap and Operation Kessel Run, and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

Chappel’s face-to-face meeting with Fox would bridge two federal investigation and link two informants, Chappel and Robeson, each of whom was unaware that the other worked for the FBI.

The informants went to great lengths to position Fox as a leader. Robeson suggested that Fox launch a Michigan chapter of the Patriot Three Percenters. On June 21, 2020, just three days after Fox met Chappel, a third FBI informant, Jenny Plunk, created a private Facebook group called “Michigan Patriot III%ers.” (The FBI classifies Three Percenters as a domestic terrorism threat.)

The Facebook group’s first members were Plunk and Robeson, both on the FBI’s payroll, and Fox and his girlfriend, Amanda Keller. Plunk lived in Tennessee, where, according to her FBI cover story, she led a small militia. While Plunk and Robeson administered the Facebook group, Fox invited several Wolverine Watchmen and other gun enthusiasts to join, bringing the group’s membership roster to 28. Although the FBI’s informants had created the Facebook group for Fox, Robeson announced in a welcome message that Fox was the “C.O.” — a military acronym for “commanding officer.”

Robeson often spoke in the vernacular of a soldier. He never served in the military, but he was so gung-ho that he had obtained forged paperwork that made it appear he’d been a Marine, according to FBI reports. Using military lingo, Robeson posted an invitation to the new Facebook group for a weekend tactical training session in Cambria, Wisconsin, about 40 miles north of Madison.

More than 30 people attended that weekend event in July 2020, including Fox, his girlfriend, and a few members of the Wolverine Watchmen. At the time, Robeson was running scams related to a fake charity he called Race to Unite Races, whose mission was “to bridge the racial divide.” Internal FBI reports indicate that Robeson used proceeds from the fake charity to buy supplies to build a shooting range to train in close-quarters combat, known as a “kill house.”

Videos from the FBI files show the attendees shooting at targets in the kill house. Robeson, a firearm holstered at his side, can be seen giving directions. Chappel, who had combat experience in Iraq, also appears in several videos demonstrating tactics. FBI agents gave Chappel permission in advance to share combat tactics with the militia members, telling him: “You can do what’s on YouTube.”

In a group photo from the event, many attendees hold up rifles, offering the reluctant half-smiles of an awkward family picture. Robeson is off to the left, wearing flip-flops, American-flag swimming trunks, and a sleeveless T-shirt that hangs over his large belly. He’s holding up three fingers, the sign of the Three Percenters.

The events of that weekend were critical to the Justice Department’s case, as they appeared to show the men training for scenarios they’d encounter in their supposed attempt to kidnap Michigan’s governor. But by the time the FBI spoke to Robeson in December 2020, federal agents were deeply concerned that the fine details of that weekend might suggest entrapment.

“You’ve got a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenter role-playing the kidnapping with Wolverine Watchman at the training you’ve set up, right?” Impola, the FBI agent, said to Robeson.

“It wasn’t just me,” Robeson said. “I set it up and —”

“These are things we need to discuss,” Chambers interrupted.

Impola told Robeson that the FBI’s case notes show that a Wisconsin agent was aware of the training, but that federal agents did not know that Robeson was the one who had organized it.

“I don’t want to put these words in your mouth, but the question is —” Impola said.

“Did I do it under FBI directive?” Robeson interrupted.

“Right,” Impola answered.

“No, it wasn’t just — What I’m saying is, it wasn’t me. It was Adam [Fox] that asked if they could do that —”

“Yup,” the two FBI agents said in unison.

“It was Barry [Croft] who asked if we could get a joint one together. It was Illinois. And I asked before I said yes.”

“The question becomes: Did a bunch of terrorists Shanghai your training for their purposes, or did you set up a training for terrorists?” Impola asked. “That’s the question, right? There’s a training that happened in which a terrorist operation was planned and played out, and you’re involved in setting it up.”

“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”

Robeson’s organizing and financing of the weekend training in Wisconsin wasn’t the FBI’s only problem.

In multiple videos from the training, Robeson can be seen using firearms. As a felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. But FBI agents apparently believed that handling firearms would be critical to his credibility among the militia members, so they had asked the Justice Department for a waiver to let Robeson handle “nonfunctional” weapons in his undercover capacity, according to internal emails.

The Justice Department said no, reminding Robeson’s handlers that he was prohibited from handling even an inoperable firearm. “Just the receiver satisfies the federal definition of a firearm,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rita Rumbelow told the FBI in a May 21, 2020, email, referring to the tube that houses the firearm’s bolt.

Internal FBI records show that Robeson and his handlers found creative ways to get around the Justice Department’s directive. One month after the Wisconsin training event, the FBI assigned Robeson a new handler, Corey Baumgardner, an agent in Wisconsin. Baumgardner later testified that he collected a firearm from Robeson: an AR-15-style rifle with an illegal suppressor and a launcher attachment. Instead of handing the firearm to the agent, Robeson left it on the ground in front of his truck. Baumgardner collected the gun, without having to see Robeson handle it.

The gambit appeared to allow Robeson and the FBI to have it both ways: Robeson could have access to guns, maintaining his credibility with the militia members, and FBI agents wouldn’t directly see him handle firearms.

Federal agents went to great lengths to maintain this sleight of hand. As part of the sting, the FBI in early August 2020 went to Delaware, where Robeson and Plunk met with a group that included Croft, a truck driver Robeson started messaging online in 2019 about targeting politicians for violence, and Frank Butler, a Navy veteran from Virginia.

Butler had been in contact online and in person with both Robeson and Chappel, and Chappel had discussed with him a fantastical plan to fly an explosives-laden drone into the Virginia governor’s North Carolina vacation home, though the plot went nowhere. Butler, who was never charged with a crime, later told investigators that Robeson and Chappel “were literally brainwashing me” and “weaponizing me.” (Prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing that Robeson had offered to provide money to “purchase weapons for attacks” and “the use of a drone, to aid in acts of domestic terrorism.”)

After their meeting in Delaware, Robeson had something for Croft. Baumgardner, the FBI agent in Wisconsin, had driven the AR-15-style rifle he’d collected next to Robeson’s truck more than 900 miles to Delaware. The rifle had originally belonged to Croft, and Robeson tried to give the weapon back to him. According to internal FBI reports, Croft refused to accept it, saying he couldn’t keep it at that moment. Plunk, the other FBI informant, took the illegal gun instead.

The following month, two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants — Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk — gathered for another training event in Luther, Michigan, with around 26 others, including Croft from Delaware and Fox from Michigan. Plunk secretly recorded audio and video during the training event. In one recording, Robeson proclaimed that he was now the national leader of the Patriot Three Percenters militia and had appointed someone else to run his chapter in Wisconsin. “I’m no longer the state C.O.,” Robeson said. “I’m the national C.O.”

Also during this training event, on the afternoon of September 13, 2020, Plunk gave the rifle to Croft, who, in turn, handed it over to Chappel, according to FBI reports.

The story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation.

FBI agents appeared to view the rifle with an illegal suppressor and attached launcher as a critical piece of evidence in their conspiracy case. But the story of the firearm only revealed the FBI’s heavy hand in the investigation. The illegal rifle made a full circle, from the FBI and back, through the hands of three paid informants, never staying long with any targets of the investigation.

The gun anecdote is emblematic of the larger sting: The FBI’s informants were ham-fistedly encouraging their targets to discuss plots to harm elected officials. Those efforts reached farcical levels on September 12, 2020, during a meeting and training exercises in Luther.

For that meeting, Chappel brought a friend nicknamed “Red,” a slender man with a 187th Airborne sleeve tattoo on his right arm. “Red” was in fact Timothy Bates, an undercover FBI agent who identifies himself in government recordings as “UCE 7775,” referring to his FBI undercover employee number. Just three weeks earlier, Bates had been in Denver, where he encouraged political violence. In Colorado, an FBI informant named Mickey Windecker introduced Bates to a racial justice activist who expressed interest in assassinating the state’s attorney general — a plot that, like the one targeting Virginia’s governor, ultimately fizzled.

Bates and Chappel, both Army veterans, led a close-quarters combat training for the Wolverine Watchmen. Bates also told the group gathered in Michigan that he could supply explosives. The group’s rough plan to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home involved possibly blowing up a nearby bridge to slow rescue efforts.

“So my guy up in Minnesota, he can pretty much get whatever. He has access to whatever one would want,” Bates said in an undercover recording. Bates had brought along several videos showing men assembling and detonating homemade bombs. These videos were all stage-managed by the FBI, with agents pretending to be rogue bomb-makers.

One showed an SUV obliterated by a pipe bomb. “It’s a short video,” Bates told the group.

“Oh, yeah!” Robeson said, laughing approvingly at the explosion.

Bates explained that some of the bombs used C-4 inside pipes, with timing devices. Others used liquid explosives, he said.

“I need to come play with y’all,” Plunk said excitedly.

As he watched the video, Fox asked Bates: “What kind of price tag we looking at?”

“Depending on how big you want it,” Bates answered. “For that right there? That’s pretty cheap — 1,600 bucks, maybe. Maybe a thousand bucks.”

It wasn’t the first time Bates had offered bargain prices. In Colorado, Bates suggested he could hire a hitman for $500 to kill the state’s attorney general. In Michigan, he was offering explosives for pennies on the dollar.

That evening, Robeson, Chappel, Bates, and a few militia members drove near Whitmer’s vacation home. They inspected the bridge they’d bomb, tried to view Whitmer’s home from across the lake, and drove down her road. This apparent reconnaissance trip was central to the government’s case.

But true to form, Robeson mucked up the evidence. Fellow Wisconsinite Brian Higgins was the one who drove past Whitmer’s home — a seemingly incriminating act — but Higgins later told federal agents that Robeson had said they were hunting for sexual predators. In his December meeting with FBI agents, Robeson confirmed that Higgins was not initially aware of the kidnapping plot and instead believed they were out “hunting pedophiles.” But once he was in Michigan, Higgins learned that some of the attendees had a rough plan to kidnap Whitmer. Higgins drove down Whitmer’s road using a dash camera and provided the video to Chappel. After he returned to Wisconsin, Higgins claims he told Robeson he didn’t want to be involved in the plot.

The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

Feeling guilty for tricking him, Robeson tried to protect Higgins from criminal exposure — a fact federal prosecutors admitted to in a court filing. Robeson called Chappel, still unaware that he was also an FBI informant, and told him to destroy his copy of Higgins’s dash-cam video. The FBI’s own informant was telling a man he thought was the target of an investigation to destroy evidence.

During the December 10, 2020, recorded interview with Robeson, Impola tried to coerce the informant into changing his story about what Higgins knew before the drive: “If you’re sticking with the story that [Higgins] was out there on a pedophile ring,” the FBI special agent said, “you’ll be his star witness in the defense. There’s zero options for that.”

“We Have One Chief”

When arrests and charges were announced in the Whitmer plot, the Justice Department portrayed Adam Fox as the leader. But FBI recordings suggest the informants were the ones in charge.

On October 7, 2020, as the government was making arrests in the case, Robeson, Chappel, and Plunk were on a recorded phone line talking about who should make future calls to action — in other words, who should be the leader.

“I mean, I’m good with Robey, because you’re the national guy, the president,” Chappel said, adding a minute later: “We have one chief.”

“We can definitely roll,” Robeson said. “That’s fine.”

The FBI arrested 13 people that day, and the foiled kidnapping plot made national news. (Higgins, the 14th defendant, was arrested a week later.) After the initial arrests, Robeson made a series of calls to Chappel; the girlfriend of one of the militia members; and others who orbited the supposed kidnapping plot. Robeson offered several outlandish claims, including that he believed Croft, a primary target of the investigation, had leaked information that caused the arrests. FBI reports indicate that Robeson again called Chappel, still unaware that he was also working for the FBI, and told him to throw the rifle with the illegal suppressor and attached launcher into a lake. Chappel, however, had already returned the gun to his bureau handlers.

During these calls, Robeson told fellow informant Plunk that he believed Chappel was an informant. Robeson appeared to be flailing after the arrests, pointing fingers to avoid being revealed as a government snitch.

His behavior in the immediate aftermath of the arrests was so concerning to FBI agents that federal and state prosecutors discussed charging him with witness tampering, according to emails that circulated among more than a dozen FBI agents the day after the kidnapping plot was announced. The bureau then began to investigate Robeson, internal records show. Agents reinterviewed the woman living in his garage, who claimed he had coerced her into having sex with him. That woman told the FBI that during the undercover sting, Robeson had an arsenal of weapons in his bedroom; that he was bringing in drugs from out of state; and that he had proposed taking her to rallies and training events in other parts of the country so she could make money, which she described to the FBI as “sex trafficking.”

For his part, Robeson appeared to realize that he had crossed the line from informant to participant in the kidnapping plot, putting himself in legal jeopardy. An internal FBI report said Robeson told another informant that he was worried he could be linked to “product,” by which he meant explosives.

“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”

The Whitmer kidnapping plot has yielded five acquittals, five convictions, and four guilty pleas in federal and state courts. Robeson didn’t testify in any of the trials. When defense lawyers tried to compel him, he told the federal court that he would assert his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The Justice Department claimed that Robeson was a “double agent” whose statements would not be “binding admissions of the government itself.”

The recording of Robeson’s December 2020 meeting with the FBI reveals that the “double agent” ploy was a carefully planned strategy. When Robeson was called into that Wisconsin FBI office, agents described three possible scenarios for him.

The first was that all the defendants would take plea deals, in which case “your name is not on the witness list,” Impola said. The second was that Robeson could be a government witness or, in the third option, a witness for the defendants whose testimony could support their claims of entrapment.

At the time, the agents errantly assumed that option one was the likeliest. “I am fairly confident that when anybody looks at that witness list, they’re not going to trial now because they know the ramifications,” said Impola.

But what he didn’t say was that the second and third options — involving Robeson testifying in court — weren’t real options at all, at least not in the view of the FBI. There was also a fourth option that the agents didn’t mention: The Justice Department could jam Robeson, a felon, with firearms charges for crimes he committed while working undercover for the FBI.

And that’s what happened. On March 3, 2021, the Justice Department indicted Robeson in Wisconsin on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Prosecutors alleged that Robeson bought a .50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms available to civilians in the United States, and later sold it on Facebook — all while working for the FBI.

At his plea hearing, Robeson claimed he’d bought the gun to bolster his FBI cover. “I did this trying to keep my undercover position where I was at and kind of make me look a little more aggressive in the organization,” Robeson said in court.

Robeson was sentenced to probation on a federal felony charge that could have carried a 10-year sentence. He and his handlers knew he had illegally possessed, purchased, and sold multiple firearms in the course of the sting; the single gun charge represented a threat of more to come if he were to testify in any of the state or federal prosecutions.

With that threat, FBI agents stopped the facts from getting in the way of their “good story” about the Whitmer kidnapping plot. In their zeal to protect a career-making case, those federal agents also poured jet fuel on conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the January 6 Capitol riot that will be central to this year’s presidential election.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Trevor Aaronson.

Ralph welcomes Josh Paul, the State Department official who resigned in protest over the Biden Administration’s policy of unconditional arms transfers to Israel in the response to the attacks of October 7th. Then, investigative reporter, James Bamford joins us to discuss his deep dive into how the Israeli government has recruited Americans as foreign agents to troll, dox, and blacklist college students and professors who dare to criticize Israeli policies.

Josh Paul served 11 years in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the US Department of State, before his resignation on October 17, 2023. Mr. Paul previously worked on security sector reform in both Iraq and the West Bank, with additional roles in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, US Army Staff, and as a congressional staffer.

I have spoken with a number of members of Congress in the last few months and—even for those who haven't publicly called for a ceasefire—many are willing to acknowledge behind closed doors that yes, actually, they do believe that Israelis are committing war crimes, but they will not say it publicly. And that just seems to me such a moral abdication of the purposes for which you were elected. If you know something to be a fact, if you know the U.S. to be complicit in facilitating war crimes, but are unwilling to say it because you are afraid of how your donors might react or how your next election might go, why are you even in Congress?

Josh Paul

It is interesting that the United States places control of arms transfers and security assistance within the State Department. That is a different model than most of our allies follow… And there is an advantage to putting them in the State Department, so that they can be considered as tools of foreign policy along with other diplomatic tools such as economic assistance, such as of course diplomatic engagement. So there is an advantage there, but of course there is also inherently by doing so a militarization of foreign policy. Particularly when we look at the massive amount of funding that is provided for military assistance. And of course, the way that that providing that assistance then links us to the actions of our partners, whether we want to be complicit in those actions or not.

Josh Paul

It's been said that in the last three months, the pro-Palestinian people in the United States have controlled the streets, but the pro-Netanyahu people in the United States have controlled the suites in Congress and the Executive branch.

Ralph Nader

James Bamford is a best-selling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker for PBS, award-winning investigative producer for ABC News, and winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his writing in Rolling Stone on the war in Iraq. He is the author of several books, including Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence.

I think some of these (American) groups should be arrested for being agents of a foreign government. I mean, if you're an American and you're contributing money and support to a clandestine foreign operation or clandestine foreign agency of a foreign government, then that's pretty much the definition of being an agent of a foreign government.

James Bamford

[People] get put on this blacklist—the Canary Mission list—and their job opportunities are extremely limited. Because if anybody goes for a job and their employer looks on the internet, one of the first things they'll see is that their name is on this blacklist where they're called a variety of names basically for doing something that's basically honorable.

James Bamford

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

* On Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders forced a vote on Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act, which, if passed, could have resulted in the United States cutting off military aid to Israel, the Intercept reports. While this attempt failed by a wide margin - 72-11 – it did win the support of Senators Laphonza Butler of California, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Peter Welch of Vermont, along with Rand Paul the lone Republican to back the effort. However, as Andrew O’Neil, policy director for Indivisible, put it “It’s frankly historic that this vote took place at all…The number of senators willing to take a vote like this even weeks ago, on the face of it, would have been zero.”

* 384 leaders from around the globe, led by Representative Ilhan Omar and German politician Sevim Dağdelen, have signed a letter calling for “an immediate, multilateral ceasefire in Israel and Palestine, the release of all the remaining Israeli and international hostages, and the facilitation of humanitarian aid entry into Gaza,” per the Guardian. The letter continues “We further urge our own respective governments and the international community to uphold international law and seek accountability for grave violations of human rights.” Further American signatories include Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, André Carson, Greg Casar, Chuy García, Hank Johnson, Summer Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Nydia Velázquez and Bonnie Watson Coleman, who are joined by British progressive icon Jeremy Corbyn  and politicians from Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.

* Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush have issued a statement of support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The representatives write “We unequivocally join world leaders and international human rights organizations in support of South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice alleging Israel violated the Genocide Convention. There must be an end to the violence—and there must be accountability for the blatant human rights abuses and mass atrocities occurring in the region. The historical significance of a post-apartheid state filing this case must not be lost, and the moral weight of their prerogative cannot be dismissed. The United States has a devastating role in the ongoing violence in Gaza, where already over 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 59,000 injured, and millions have been displaced. We must refuse to be silent as the majority of the world is calling for an end to the violence and mass human suffering, and the need for accountability. As one of the countries that has agreed to the Genocide Convention, the U.S. must stop trying to discredit and undermine this case and the international legal system it claims to support. Our commitment to protecting the human rights of all people must be unconditional. The best time to make a conclusive determination on genocide is when there is still time to stop it, not after. We will continue pushing for a lasting ceasefire, full accountability, and a just and lasting peace for everyone.”

* The South African attorney Wikus Van Rensburg has formally delivered a letter to the leadership of the United States outlining that his firm “intend[s] to bring legal proceedings against the U.S. Government based on overwhelming evidence that the [it] has, and is, aiding, abetting and supporting, encouraging or providing material assistance and means to…the Israeli Defense Forces…enabl[ing]...crimes against the Palestinian people.” Legal advocates like Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein have long sounded the alarm that American support for Israel’s actions in Gaza are in breach of international law, but it remains to be seen whether the U.S. will stand trial at the Hague for their support of this genocidal campaign. This from Al-Mayadeen.

* Al-Mayadeen also reports “in a rare show of dissent, US federal employees from nearly 22 agencies are planning a walkout to protest the Biden administration's handling of the war on Gaza.” This report attributes organization of this walkout to a group called “Feds United for Peace” and the walkout is “expected to draw participants from key agencies, including the Executive Office of the President, the National Security Agency, and the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs…[along with the] Food and Drug Administration…the National Park Service, the Federal Aviation Administration…and the Environmental Protection Agency.” Axios reports that Congressional Republicans are planning to retaliate against these workers exercising their free speech rights, with Speaker Johnson, saying “Any government worker who walks off the job to protest U.S. support for our ally Israel is ignoring their responsibility and abusing the trust of taxpayers…They deserve to be fired."

* The Intercept published an interview with teenage Israelis who are refusing conscription into the IDF. These young “refuseniks,” almost all part of the group Mesarvot – Hebrew for “we refuse” –  have been resisting conscription since the large-scale protests against the Netanyahu government last year, when over 230 of them signed a letter stating “The dictatorship that has existed for decades in the territories is now seeping into Israel and against us…This trend did not start now — it is inherent to the regime of occupation and Jewish supremacy. The masks are simply coming off.” However, these courageous young people are facing an increasingly hostile environment in Israel due to their refusal to serve. We offer them our solidarity.

* In a massive blow to journalism, the Baltimore Sun has been sold to David Smith, the Baltimore Banner reports. Smith serves as executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., which owns more than 200 television stations nationwide and has been criticized for pushing uniform, Right-wing narratives through these channels. In addition to the Sun, Smith purchased its affiliated papers, including “The Capital and Maryland Gazette newspapers in Annapolis, the Carroll County Times, the Howard County Times and the Towson Times.”

* The Lever has dropped a stunning report on “How Boeing Bought Washington,” which lays out the influence network the embattled airline has cultivated in the Beltway. The top-line numbers alone are eye-popping, with Boeing & Spirit AeroSystems spending over $65 million on lobbying and campaign donations over just four years. More insidious however is what they got for this money, namely safety waivers enabling them to keep unsafe planes in the sky. This report also touches on the case of Republican Congressman Ron Estes of Kansas, a top recipient of this campaign cash, who pressured the FAA to reinstate the 737 MAX – and Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, who received nearly $200,000 from the company and then dutifully “pushed through legislation to exempt Boeing’s 737 MAX…from a looming safety deadline that would have required changes in their alerting systems…despite concerns from the families of the passengers who died in the 2018 and 2019 crashes.”

* Josh Eidelson, Labor reporter at Bloomberg, is out with two major updates on the United Auto Workers new campaigns. One, Bloomberg reports the union has “signed up more than 30% of workers at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, after hitting the same milestone last month at Volkswagen in Tennessee,” illustrating the durability and success of their union drives at foreign-owned auto plants in the U.S. And two, Bloomberg reports that “Tesla is boosting pay for all US production associates, the latest bump by a non-union automaker following the UAW’s big Detroit wins.” Taken together, one gets the impression that Auto Workers are organized, on the march, and have momentum behind them.

* In Guatemala, Bernardo Arevalo of the Semilla Party has finally been sworn in as the president of that country, beating back multiple attempts by the corrupt ruling elites to undermine his ascension down to the moment of his inauguration. Reuters reports “Arevalo's inauguration was thrown into disarray after the Supreme Court allowed opposition lawmakers to maintain their leadership of Congress, and forced members of the president's Semilla party to stand as independents… [sparking] wrangling in Congress…[with] supporters of Arevalo threaten[ing] to storm the building as police in riot gear amassed in the streets.” Arevalo managed to weather the storm however, in part because he was aided by other countries’ leadership. USAID Administrator Samantha Power, opposing the power grab, tweeted “There is no question that Bernardo Arevalo is the President of Guatemala. We call on all sides to remain calm — and for the Guatemalan Congress to uphold the will of the people. The world is watching.” Meanwhile, the presidents and foreign ministers present at the inauguration released a statement forcefully avowing “The will of the Guatemalan people must be respected,” Progressive International’s David Adler reports. Renowned investigative journalist Allan Nairn added, “What is clear…is that even if Arévalo succeeds in taking power as president he will be governing under siege”.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard

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

“Ukraine is and will remain France’s priority. The defense of the fundamental principles of international law is being played out in Ukraine,” he told a Kyiv news conference alongside his counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, on January 13.

“Russia is hoping that Ukraine and its supporters will tire before it does. We will not weaken. That is the message that I am carrying here to the Ukrainians. Our determination is intact,” said Sejourne, who was making his first foreign journey since being appointed to the position on January 11.

WATCH: After Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a "partial mobilization" in fall 2022, over 300,000 reservists were drafted into the war in Ukraine, which Russia calls a "special military operation." A year later, women formed The Way Home initiative to demand that their family members be discharged and sent back home. The women wear white shawls as a symbol of their protest.

Kuleba thanked Sejourne for making his journey to Kyiv despite “another massive shelling by Russia. I am grateful to him for his courage, for not turning back."

Sejourne arrived in the Ukrainian capital within hours of a combined missile-and-drone attack by Russia that triggered Ukrainian air defenses in several southern and eastern regions early on January 13.

Sejourne's visit represented the latest Western show of support for Kyiv in its ongoing war to repel Russia's 22-month-old full-scale invasion.

"For almost 2 years, Ukraine has been on the front line to defend its sovereignty and ensure the security of Europe," Sejourne said on X, formerly Twitter. "France's aid is long-term."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

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

Ukraine has struggled to secure further funding for its campaign from the United States and the European Union, the latter of which is grappling with opposition from member Hungary.

The French Foreign Ministry posted an image of Sejourne and said he'd "arrived in Kyiv for his first trip to the field, in order to continue French diplomatic action there and to reiterate France's commitment to its allies and alongside civilian populations."

"Despite the multiplying crisis, Ukraine is and will remain France's priority," AFP later quoted Sejourne as saying in Kyiv. He said "the fundamental principles of international law and the values of Europe, as well as the security interests of the French" are at stake there.

Earlier, the General Staff of Ukraine's military said Russia had launched 40 missiles and attack drones targeting Ukrainian territory.

It said Ukrainian air defenses shot down eight of the incoming attacks and 20 others missed their targets. It said the Russian weapons included "winged, aerobic, ballistic, aviation, anti-controlled missiles, and impact BPLAs."

They reportedly targeted the eastern Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions.

RFE/RL cannot independently confirm claims by either side in areas of the heaviest combat.

Air alerts sounded in several regions of Ukraine.

A day earlier, Polish radio and other reports quoted recently inaugurated Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as saying he would visit Ukraine soon to discuss joint security efforts and to talk about Polish truckers' grievances over EU advantages for Ukrainian haulers.

Tusk, a former Polish leader and European Council president who was sworn in for a new term as Polish prime minister in mid-December, has been a vocal advocate of strong Polish and EU support for Ukraine.

"I really want the Ukrainian problems of war and, more broadly security, as well as policy toward Russia, to be joint, so that not only the president and the prime minister, but the Polish state as a whole act in solidarity in these issues," Tusk said.

The U.S. Congress has been divided over additional aid to Ukraine, with many Republicans opposing President Joe Biden's hopes for billions more in support.

An EU aid proposal of around 50 billion euros ($55 billion) was blocked by Hungary, although other members have said they will pursue "technical" or other means of skirting Budapest's resistance as soon as possible.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that delays in aid can severely hamper Ukrainians' ongoing efforts to defeat invading Russian forces.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

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

Humzah Mashkoor had just cleared security at Denver International Airport when the FBI showed up. The agents had come to arrest the 18-year-old, who is diagnosed with a developmental disability, and charge him with terror-related crimes. At the time of the arrest, a relative later said in court, Mashkoor was reading “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” a book written for elementary school children.

Mashkoor had gone to the airport on December 18 to fly to Dubai, and from there to either Syria or Afghanistan, as part of his alleged plot to join the Islamic State. The trip had been spurred by over a year of online exchanges starting when Mashkoor was 16 years old with four people he believed were members of ISIS. According to the Justice Department’s criminal complaint, the four were actually undercover FBI agents. As a result of his conversations with the FBI, Mashkoor could face a lengthy sentence for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

At an initial court hearing, family members said that Mashkoor, who had turned 18 just a few weeks prior to the arrest, had intellectual difficulties and been diagnosed with autism. Despite acknowledging Mashkoor’s family support and his young age, the judge ordered that he be detained while awaiting trial.

“It’s not lost on this court that Mr. Mashkoor is a young man with possible mental illness and the diagnosis of high-functioning autism. It is clear he has a sea of familial support,” the judge said. “But based on this evidence, there’s no reasonable assurance here that the court can simply chalk all this up to the defendant simply being a young man.”

Law enforcement agents first became aware of Mashkoor’s online activities in support of ISIS in November 2021. But instead of alerting his family, Mashkoor’s lawyers told The Intercept, FBI agents posing as ISIS members befriended him a year later and strung him along until he became a legal adult.

“It is appalling that the government never once reached out to his parents, even while they were sending undercover agents to befriend him online starting when he was 16 years old,” said Joshua Herman, a defense attorney representing Mashkoor. “Almost all of the conduct he is alleged to have committed took place when he was a juvenile.”

“It is appalling that the government never once reached out to his parents, even while they were sending undercover agents to befriend him online starting when he was 16 years old.”

More details may emerge on the circumstances of Mashkoor’s ill-fated attempt to join ISIS, but the facts as laid out in the complaint are hallmarks of terrorism prosecutions based on FBI stings: a young man with developmental disabilities, already on the police’s radar due to mental health episodes and conflicts with family, groomed as a minor over a long period by a group of undercover FBI agents. Mashkoor’s case also follows a pattern of FBI sting operations in which a teenager is arrested shortly after their 18th birthday. As in similar cases, the court documents suggest that Mashkoor was limited in his ability to execute a terrorist plot on his own.

“This case appears consistent with a common fact pattern seen in tens, if not hundreds, of terrorism-related cases in which the FBI has effectively manufactured terrorist prosecutions,” said Sahar Aziz, a national security expert and law professor at Rutgers University. “In this case, it was a 16-year-old kid who otherwise would have just sat in his relatives’ basement posting offensive content in a manner similar to a white supremacist or Proud Boy — people whom the FBI does not spend enormous resources to entrap just so they can get a high-profile press release.”

Known to Police

Mashkoor first came onto the authorities’ radar for social media posts around the time of his 16th birthday. According to the complaint, Mashkoor began posting in support of terrorism in November 2021, and a platform he used alerted the FBI of suspicious activity.

In July 2022, local police were called to Mashkoor’s home after he allegedly assaulted a family member during a dispute. At the time, according to court filings, a relative told police about Mashkoor’s mental illness and autism diagnosis. Two months later, Mashkoor began communicating with an undercover FBI agent posing as a member of ISIS.

That agent eventually introduced Mashkoor to three other FBI agents impersonating ISIS members. With their encouragement, Mashkoor developed a plan to support the terror group. Along with extensive discussions of what types of services he might provide ISIS, Mashkoor regularly confided in the agents about his boredom, family problems, hopes of getting married, and struggles with his mental health. He constantly referred to being a minor, complaining that being under 18 and subject to the monitoring of family members made it hard for him to travel or send funds, including cryptocurrency transactions that he could not figure out how to conduct.

Mashkoor’s anxieties come through in the chats included in the indictment — most of which are limited to his sides of the conversations. At one point, he told an agent that he was considering finding a wife who might be willing to join him in Afghanistan, but he worried about the possibility of abandoning her if he was killed.

Mashkoor went back and forth about whether he even wanted to join ISIS.

Mashkoor also went back and forth about whether he even wanted to join ISIS. Throughout the chats with the undercover agents, Mashkoor expressed support for ISIS and fantasized about fighting with militants abroad. But he also shared doubts about joining the group as well as concerns that he lacked connections of his own in Afghanistan and Syria. In one message, he worried that “the brothers there might not support me in getting married and may just strap something on me and throw me out into the field.” He may, he suggested at one point, instead get a job and finish high school.

In early December, Mashkoor failed to show up to a flight he had booked to Dubai. It’s unclear whether his apprehensions played a role; he told the FBI agents that he had come down with Covid.

“The whole case demonstrates the low level of maturity and social skills often found in people who suffer from autism,” said Thomas Durkin, one of Mashkoor’s lawyers. “He is fantasizing and making up plans to go to Afghanistan that he could not possibly realize on his own.”

In their conversations, agents warned Mashkoor that “life won’t be easy” after joining ISIS, while continuing to offer to help plan his journey. Despite second thoughts, Mashkoor eventually appeared to take the FBI up on their offer and went to the airport weeks after he turned 18.

“Staying here even another second is torture and I’ve only been putting up an act to please those around me,” he had told one of the agents. “But what will any of it matter once I’m 18 and gone.”

Security fencing outside FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 22, 2022.

The FBI’s Terror Plan

Throughout the period that he was under investigation, it’s unclear how much meaningful contact Mashkoor had with actual members of ISIS. When he originally came onto law enforcement’s radar, he was alleged to have been in communication with other supporters of the group, some of whom were later arrested in foreign countries.

At one point during the investigation, he gave an undercover FBI agent contact information for someone he said he had found in an online ISIS publication. That individual, unnamed in court documents, solicited cryptocurrency from the undercover agents and appeared to offer them assurances that it was possible to travel to ISIS territories. In conversations with an agent, Mashkoor also alluded to an ISIS contact who had suggested he conduct an attack in the U.S., but Mashkoor said he preferred to travel abroad.

But Mashkoor’s most substantive planning — the actions that landed him under a federal terrorism indictment — took place entirely with the group of undercover FBI agents who were in close contact with him over several months, testing the willingness of a vulnerable young man to commit a crime.

“It’s clearly a waste of government resources,” said Aziz, the law professor. “If there was a serious terrorist threat in America, the FBI would not be spending its time entrapping a mentally ill minor.”

The family member who went with Mashkoor to the Denver airport the day he was arrested had been unaware of his plans, according to court documents, and did not know why he was leaving the country. In one of his final conversations with an FBI agent, Mashkoor had worried about his upcoming trip and the toll it would have on his family. He asked the agent whether it would be permissible to leave behind a message for them. As he told another agent, he had tried “to think of something to say” to his father, but whenever he tried to convey that he was leaving for good, his “throat clenches and nothing comes out.”

“My family know I am leaving but don’t know why and they are very sad and it’s been having a toll on my mental health,” Mashkoor told the agent. “I don’t know how to properly say my final goodbyes to them or how to convey the reasons why I left without compromising myself.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

Trung fled Vietnam for Thailand to apply for refugee status in August 2023 following heavy surveillance by Vietnam’s security forces who forced him to visit police stations multiple times.

Trung has been an activist fighting for democracy in Vietnam for more than a decade. He was arrested in 2009 on charges of “anti-State propaganda.” In 2010, he was sentenced to seven years in prison, along with other prominent activists such as Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, Le Cong Dinh, and Le Thang Long.

After being discharged from prison in 2014, he continued his pro-democracy activities in various forms, including writing commentaries and compiling reports on the Vietnamese government’s human rights violations and sharing them with the international community.

From a refugee camp in the city of Cologne, Trung told Radio Free Asia how he escaped Vietnamese security forces at home and in Thailand.

RFA: Congratulations to you and your family on having arrived in Germany. What are your feelings now?

Trung: I did not plan to come to Germany but the dangerous situation facing me in Vietnam forced me to leave my country.

My feelings are mixed. I am happy because my family has arrived in a safe place but I am also sad for having to leave Vietnam and my colleagues there. 

RFA: What dangers forced you to flee your home country?

Trung: In the early morning of Aug. 18, 2023, when leaving my home [in Ho Chi Minh City] to buy breakfast, I encountered five plain-clothed security officers who came out from a coffee shop at the beginning of the alley to my home. They stopped me and asked me to follow them to the ward office.

I asked whether they had any written summons for me, who they were, and why they stopped me. They replied that they did not have a summons, but I must go to the ward office. They also said that after I went to the ward office, they would send the summons to my home. However, I refused to go, saying this was a kidnapping plot.

After arguing with me for a while, they made eye contact with around five other security officers, who were sitting inside the coffee shop, asking them to come out. When they stood up, I counted them and realized that there were a total of around 10 security officers watching and wanting to arrest me.

Therefore, I had to run back to my home. Fortunately, I ran fast enough and was able to get in and lock the gate. Shortly after that, police officers in uniform came with an invitation, asking me to go to the ward police station for a meeting on the same day. I, of course, did not show up.

It was raining that evening. Noticing there was no one watching me, I decided to leave home and flee to Thailand. 

RFA: In your opinion, what had you done that led to the threat of you being arrested?

Trung: Firstly, for many years, I have always reported the Vietnamese Communist government’s human rights violations to international organizations and diplomatic missions of democratic countries [in Vietnam].

Secondly, I can say that I had put families of many prisoners of conscience in contact with foreign embassies so that the embassies could support them or lobby for the release of prisoners of conscience. This is what I have publically done since I was discharged from prison in 2014.

What I didn’t say publicly was my support for many Vietnamese civil society organizations. I stayed behind the scenes and did not want to reveal myself.

Recently, I was told by my friends that some had been kidnapped and forced to denounce and accuse me of enticing them to fight for democracy. Therefore, I realized they were looking for excuses to accuse me.

As they did not have any evidence to charge me, they planned to abduct me when I was going out to be able to have access to my mobile phone, and they wanted to arrest me based on my friends’ forced statements. That was their conspiracy. 

RFA: Can you tell us about your trip to Thailand?

Trung: I left home on the evening of Aug. 18 and arrived in Bangkok, Thailand on Aug. 23.

Like others, to be able to come to Thailand I had to go through Cambodia. I cannot be more specific as the information about the path to Thailand should be confidential.

RFA: How did you feel when you arrived in Thailand?

Trung: I was glad as I could at least get to the place I needed to go to, which was the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. However, I always stayed vigilant because, as you all know, Vietnamese agents are ubiquitous in Bangkok, and they successfully abducted Truong Duy Nhat and Duong Van Thai. Therefore, I was not that glad.

Despite my vigilance, Vietnamese security agents were still able to track me down in Bangkok. That was why the German government decided to grant me an emergency visa so that I could come to Germany early.

RFA: How did you know that you had been spotted by Vietnamese security agents in Bangkok?

Trung: When I was having breakfast at a market near my home [in Bangkok], I noticed someone was following me and [using Google to search for my photos] … Luckily, the person was sitting with his/her back to me.

When I glanced at their phone, this person turned their head to look at me. Therefore, I was able to see they were searching for my photos to verify it was me. I immediately left the eatery and also moved to a new place to live.

I informed several embassies about the incident and the German embassy decided to help me [leave Thailand] right away. Then I arrived in Germany on Dec. 14.

RFA: Looking back at your journey from Vietnam to Thailand and then to Germany, what do you think was the biggest challenge?

Trung: I think the most challenging time was when I had to cross the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. They wanted to kidnap me on Friday [Aug. 18], and on Saturday afternoon, I had already arrived in the province bordering Cambodia.

My taxi driver received a lot of calls from the call center and the call center was aware that the taxi was transporting me. I realized that the security forces had spotted my taxi, and I had been discovered as the call center was able to describe my appearance in detail. As a result, I had no choice but to leave that border province and return to Saigon [Ho Chi Minh City]. So, I failed to flee Vietnam on that Saturday.

On Sunday, I took another route, and fortunately, I was successful.

The fact that I was spotted and had to return to Saigon made me realize how severe my case was because only the security forces at the ministry level were able to mobilize various provinces’ and cities’ security forces to prevent me from leaving the country. I was very lucky to be able to escape from them.

RFA: During your stay in Thailand, was your family in Vietnam harassed by the local authorities?

Trung: The security forces did ask about me, but my family, of course, did not say anything. Quite a few of my friends were “kidnapped” and interrogated about my whereabouts, as well as forced to denounce me. I knew this as my friends messaged me after being released from police stations.

RFA: Do you know why the Vietnamese government had such a strong determination to hunt you?

Trung: I think there could be several reasons. Firstly, they may find my activities had caused some threats as I supported many domestic civil society organizations with many employees and strong abilities. Therefore, they were determined to wipe me out.

Secondly, the activists, who are good at English, have already left, and I seem to be the last one in Vietnam who can help prisoners of conscience speak up [and communicate with the international community]. Therefore, I was a thorn that needed to be removed.

Thirdly, it might be because Tran Huynh Duy Thuc is going to be released from prison. He is expected to complete his jail term in 2025. I guess that they did not want us to work together to fight for democracy in Vietnam and decided to take action to prevent this.

Those are all my assumptions. I actually don’t know their motivations/reasons.

RFA: Now you are in Germany do you have any worries or concerns?

Trung: As a pro-democracy activist, I, of course, still have many concerns. I don’t know what will happen to my colleagues still in Vietnam. I wish them all safety and security, and I hope that my departure/absence will bring them safety as their leader has left.

RFA: What are your plans for the future?

Trung: I will need to settle in first, then start to learn German to integrate into life here quickly.

Secondly, I will continue to pursue my ideal, which is to fight for human rights and democracy in Vietnam. And, of course, I will have to do it differently from what I did when I was in the country.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

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

On Tuesday, December 12, Hungary’s parliament passed a bill to establish a government authority with broad powers to investigate foreign interference in public life. Parliament has until December 17 to send it to President Katalin Novák, who then has another five days to approve the bill or send it back to lawmakers for consideration, according to Hungary’s constitution.

Although the law does not explicitly mention journalists or the media, the head of the parliamentary group of the ruling Fidesz party, Máté Kocsis, said in a September press conference before the bill was introduced that it would target “those who are selling out our country abroad in exchange for dollars,” including “left-wing journalists,” “pseudo-NGOs,” and politicians.

“Under the pretext of transparency and protecting national interests, Hungarian lawmakers have introduced new legislation with the publicly declared goal to target journalists. The bill could bring a new level of state-sanctioned pressure and no doubt chill independent reporting,” said CPJ’s Europe representative Attila Mong. “The bill bears the hallmarks of a Russian-style foreign agent law and has no place in an EU member state. President Novák should not sign it into law, and instead send it back to lawmakers for revision.”

The Sovereignty Protection Authority will identify individuals and organizations benefiting from foreign funding it suspects of undermining the country’s national sovereignty and label them publicly in its reports as serving foreign interests, according to media reports and CPJ’s review of the bill.The authority will not have legal powers to sanction individuals and organizations, but it can suggest law enforcement and other authorities launch criminal or administrative investigations into suspected illegal foreign interference.

In a joint statement published on Wednesday, 10 independent media outlets called for the law to be rejected. All information about the outlets’ operations, including their finances, are transparent and publicly available, the statement said, with “no hidden funds or subsidies.” The media organizations warned that the bill would only serve to threaten them with investigations, make their operations “difficult or even impossible,” and “severely restrict press freedom.” If the law goes into effect, the Hungarian media would still be able to continue to receive grants from foreign countries, including from the EU and overseas.

In 2017, the government passed legislation requiring organizations to disclose foreign funding, but had to revoke the law in 2021after a European Court of Justice decision. Independent journalists have warned that similar legislation could be revived; in an interview with CPJ in February 2023, Tamás Bodoky, editor-in-chief of investigative outlet Átlátszó, said that campaign to clamp down on foreign funding was being waged “at the highest level” of Hungary’s government.

Since Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came back to power in 2010, his right-wing government has systematically eroded protections for independent media, including through the forcible closure of once-independent media outlets, the use of COVID-19 restrictions to further control access to information, as well as lawsuits, police questionings, and the use of spyware. Following Orbán’s landslide election victory in 2022, the country’s independent journalists braced themselves for an even harsher media climate.

CPJ emailed the office of Zoltán Kovács, the Hungarian government’s international spokesperson, as well as the office of the country’s president for comment, but received no reply.

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

The post #2 – Hiring of Former CIA Employees and Ex-Israeli Agents “Blurs Line” Between Big Tech and Big Brother appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Shealeigh.

On Wednesday, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament passed in a first reading a bill requiring nonprofits that receive foreign funding to register as “foreign representatives,” according to news reports.

Semetey Amanbekov, a member of local advocacy group Kyrgyzstan Media Platform, told CPJ by telephone that the main aim of the legislation is to stigmatize nonprofits as “untrustworthy foreign agents,” saying authorities could use it to target media rights organizations as well as nonprofits that run several of Kyrgyzstan’s prominent independent news websites.

The bill would require organizations to provide regular, detailed reports on their activities, including an audit of funds received from foreign sources and the use of those funds, the composition of their management, and the number of employees and their salaries. In addition, they would have to publish a report on their activities in the media every six months.

Local human rights group Bir Duino said the requirements were “excessively burdensome” and provided “a path to the destruction of civil society organizations,” and the U.S.-based news organization Eurasianet warned that the costs involved could prove “unsustainable” for smaller non-governmental organizations (NGO).

“Amid Kyrgyz authorities’ ongoing campaign to silence leading independent media, plans to copy Russia’s foreign agent legislation threaten to seriously hamper the work of press freedom groups and further restrict the country’s beleaguered free press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Kyrgyzstan’s parliament must show that it still respects its international obligations to safeguard human rights and freedom of expression by rejecting any attempts to stigmatize nonprofits as foreign agents and criminalize their work.”

In addition, the bill introduces a fine or up to 5 years in prison for creating an NGO that “incites citizens to refuse to perform civil duties or to commit other illegal acts,” and a fine or up to 10 years in prison for “active participation” in or “propaganda” of such NGOs. In an October 13 statement calling on Kyrgyzstan’s parliament to reject the law, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called this offense “ill-defined, broad and open to subjective interpretation” and said it could be used for “selective prosecution of legitimate human rights advocacy.”

Under the proposed law, state authorities would also have the right to request NGOs’ internal documents and to send government representatives to participate in NGOs’ internal activities, according to an analysis by the Washington, D.C.-headquartered International Center for Not-For-Profit Law.

On October 6, three United Nations special rapporteurs urged Kyrgyzstan to withdraw the bill as some provisions were contrary to the rights to freedom of association and freedom of expression, the right to non-discrimination, and the right to privacy. It said that proposals to give authorities the right to conduct unscheduled inspections could constitute “a tool of potential intimidation, surveillance, and harassment by authorities, which could be used against organizations that voice criticism or dissent.”

A similar “foreign agents” bill was submitted to parliament a decade ago but was rejected in its third reading in 2016 after facing opposition from civil society. In November 2022, a new version was presented, with the term foreign agent replaced with “foreign representative.” In May 2023, 33 lawmakers introduced the latest draft to parliament for discussion.

The bill defines nonprofits as “performing the function of a foreign representative” if they receive funding from foreign sources and participate in political activities, which it defines as “the organization and conduct of “political actions” aimed at influencing government policy or the “formation of public opinion”—a definition that the U.N. criticized as “overly vague”.

Organizations that fail to declare themselves as foreign representatives could have their activities and banking operations suspended for six months.

CPJ’s emails to Kyrgyzstan’s parliament and lawmaker Nadira Narmatova, who introduced the bill to parliament, did not receive any replies.

This year, authorities blocked and applied to shutter major independent outlets Kloop and Radio Azattyk, the local service of U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and in 2022 prominent Kyrgyzstan-born investigative journalist Bolot Temirov was deported in retaliation for his work. 

In September, Kazakhstan published a register of organizations and individuals, including journalists and media outlets, receiving foreign funding without explicitly labeling them foreign agents.

In March, Georgia’s government withdrew a bill that would have labeled media outlets as foreign agents after public protests.

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

On Wednesday, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament passed in a first reading a bill requiring nonprofits that receive foreign funding to register as “foreign representatives,” according to news reports.

Semetey Amanbekov, a member of local advocacy group Kyrgyzstan Media Platform, told CPJ by telephone that the main aim of the legislation is to stigmatize nonprofits as “untrustworthy foreign agents,” saying authorities could use it to target media rights organizations as well as nonprofits that run several of Kyrgyzstan’s prominent independent news websites.

The bill would require organizations to provide regular, detailed reports on their activities, including an audit of funds received from foreign sources and the use of those funds, the composition of their management, and the number of employees and their salaries. In addition, they would have to publish a report on their activities in the media every six months.

Local human rights group Bir Duino said the requirements were “excessively burdensome” and provided “a path to the destruction of civil society organizations,” and the U.S.-based news organization Eurasianet warned that the costs involved could prove “unsustainable” for smaller non-governmental organizations (NGO).

“Amid Kyrgyz authorities’ ongoing campaign to silence leading independent media, plans to copy Russia’s foreign agent legislation threaten to seriously hamper the work of press freedom groups and further restrict the country’s beleaguered free press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Kyrgyzstan’s parliament must show that it still respects its international obligations to safeguard human rights and freedom of expression by rejecting any attempts to stigmatize nonprofits as foreign agents and criminalize their work.”

In addition, the bill introduces a fine or up to 5 years in prison for creating an NGO that “incites citizens to refuse to perform civil duties or to commit other illegal acts,” and a fine or up to 10 years in prison for “active participation” in or “propaganda” of such NGOs. In an October 13 statement calling on Kyrgyzstan’s parliament to reject the law, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called this offense “ill-defined, broad and open to subjective interpretation” and said it could be used for “selective prosecution of legitimate human rights advocacy.”

Under the proposed law, state authorities would also have the right to request NGOs’ internal documents and to send government representatives to participate in NGOs’ internal activities, according to an analysis by the Washington, D.C.-headquartered International Center for Not-For-Profit Law.

On October 6, three United Nations special rapporteurs urged Kyrgyzstan to withdraw the bill as some provisions were contrary to the rights to freedom of association and freedom of expression, the right to non-discrimination, and the right to privacy. It said that proposals to give authorities the right to conduct unscheduled inspections could constitute “a tool of potential intimidation, surveillance, and harassment by authorities, which could be used against organizations that voice criticism or dissent.”

A similar “foreign agents” bill was submitted to parliament a decade ago but was rejected in its third reading in 2016 after facing opposition from civil society. In November 2022, a new version was presented, with the term foreign agent replaced with “foreign representative.” In May 2023, 33 lawmakers introduced the latest draft to parliament for discussion.

The bill defines nonprofits as “performing the function of a foreign representative” if they receive funding from foreign sources and participate in political activities, which it defines as “the organization and conduct of “political actions” aimed at influencing government policy or the “formation of public opinion”—a definition that the U.N. criticized as “overly vague”.

Organizations that fail to declare themselves as foreign representatives could have their activities and banking operations suspended for six months.

CPJ’s emails to Kyrgyzstan’s parliament and lawmaker Nadira Narmatova, who introduced the bill to parliament, did not receive any replies.

This year, authorities blocked and applied to shutter major independent outlets Kloop and Radio Azattyk, the local service of U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and in 2022 prominent Kyrgyzstan-born investigative journalist Bolot Temirov was deported in retaliation for his work. 

In September, Kazakhstan published a register of organizations and individuals, including journalists and media outlets, receiving foreign funding without explicitly labeling them foreign agents.

In March, Georgia’s government withdrew a bill that would have labeled media outlets as foreign agents after public protests.

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

Federal authorities will not bring charges against U.S. Border Patrol agents who shot and killed a Native American man outside his home in southern Arizona earlier this year.

Late last month, federal prosecutors in Arizona invited the family of 58-year-old Raymond Mattia to meet in Sells, Arizona, a main population center of the Tohono O’odham Nation, which spans large swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mattia’s loved ones and legal team attended the September 19 meeting under the impression that lingering questions surrounding Mattia’s May 18 killing would finally be answered. Instead, the family says they were given general descriptions of the law alongside confirmation that the officers and agents involved in the shooting would not face charges. Federal prosecutors, joined by a tribal liaison and an FBI agent, refused to answer questions as to how, specifically, the government reached its conclusion.

“It felt like we lost him again.”

“It’s kind of still surreal,” Mattia’s niece, Yvonne Nevarez, who attended the meeting, told The Intercept. “It felt like we lost him again.”

Prosecutors gave the family the impression they would have their questions answered at the meeting, said Ryan Stitt, a California-based attorney for Mattia’s relatives. Stitt said the refusal to answer questions undercut new Justice Department guidelines on the rights of crime victims.

“We wanted to have a fact-driven discussion about what happened to better understand their decision not to prosecute,” Stitt told The Intercept. “I was very clear that I did not want to recommend to the family that they come to this meeting if it wasn’t going to be a fact-driven discussion.”

In the absence of answers, Mattia’s relatives plan to file a civil rights lawsuit against the federal government. “It was disappointing and upsetting for the family,” Stitt said. “It puts them in a position where they have to file a lawsuit to get basic questions answered, like who shot Ray and why.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona said, “Department of Justice employees, including supervisory and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys, a victim advocate and an FBI agent, met with Mr. Mattia’s family and the family’s lawyers in Sells on September 19 for more than an hour.”

“The employees explained our conclusion in the criminal investigation — that the agents’ use of force under the facts and circumstances presented in this case does not rise to the level of a federal criminal civil rights violation or a criminal violation assimilated under Arizona law — and addressed questions posed by the family and the lawyers,” spokesperson Zach Stoebe said. “We decline to comment more specifically on the meeting between the family and the Department employees: victims have an inherent right to speak with the press, and to criticize their government.”

Edited Body Camera Footage

Mattia spent the entirety of his life in Menagers Dam, a remote Tohono O’odham village situated directly on the border, where he was an active member of the community, artist, and avid hunter. In June, Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, released body camera footage of his final moments there, compiled in a 28-minute edited video.

Shortly before he was killed, Mattia had exchanged a series of text messages with his sister, reporting that three men — presumed border crossers — had been in his home demanding to use his phone. The confrontation was apparently tense, with Mattia grabbing his hunting knife to run the men off. Mattia told his sister he called authorities to report the incident.

Soon after the exchange, a convoy of law enforcement vehicles rolled into the village. According to CBP, Border Patrol agents were responding to a call for back-up from Tohono O’odham police, who had received a report of shots fired in the area. No names or addresses were given, and the origin of the purported shots was unclear.

The team met in the dark at a recreation center. The Border Patrol agents wore tactical gear and carried rifles. “It’s going to be a little bit of a guessing game trying to find it,” a Tohono O’odham police officer said of their target, according to the body camera footage. “I don’t know exactly where that motherfucker’s at.”

The tribal officer led the agents to Mattia’s home. Mattia stepped out in the dark to greet them. He was ordered to step forward and show his hands. As Mattia complied with the commands, law enforcement officials mistook a cellphone in his hand for a gun. Initial reports indicated as many as 38 rounds were fired. A medical examiner’s report, ruling the case a homicide, said Mattia was shot nine times. The body camera footage indicated that roughly 31 seconds passed from the moment Mattia received his first command to the moment the first shot was fired.

Raymond Mattia, who was killed in a Border Patrol raid in May, as seen in a recent family photograph.

Though Mattia’s family went into last month’s meeting with notice that charges would not be filed, they still had questions. From the outset, the edited body camera footage had raised their concerns.

“We mostly wanted to know why we weren’t allowed to view the entire video,” Nevarez said. “We also wanted to ask if there was something that they saw that we didn’t.”

Additionally, the family sought clarity on the murky circumstances that brought the authorities to Mattia’s door in the first place. They wanted to know if investigators had considered the mindset of the agents who responded to the call. Having reviewed the body camera footage herself, Nevarez thought it looked like less like law enforcement and more like battlefield prep for a night raid on an enemy compound.

“They were all there, hyped up, walking in like a war zone,” she said. “He really didn’t have a chance. They were out to get somebody.”

Victims Rights

Ahead of the meeting, at the request of the assistant U.S. attorney leading the government’s case, Stitt shared a list of the family’s questions. The two sides had agreed that they qualified as victims under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. That meant the family was entitled to rights established in revised guidelines Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled in 2022.

The new rules — which went into effect this year and which Garland described as “victim-centered and trauma-informed” — advise federal authorities that a “strong presumption exists in favor of providing, rather than withholding, assistance and services” to victims. In meetings, the guidelines say, prosecutors should strive to both obtain and share information.

“We were very clear we wanted to assert their rights under the rules as victims to the fullest extent possible,” Stitt said. The questions the family had were neither complicated nor sensitive, he argued. They wanted to know how many shots were fired and if the Tohono O’odham police officer on hand participated in the shooting.

“They would not answer that question,” Stitt said. “They would not answer the question about how many shots were fired or why. They said that all the Border Patrol officers made statements to the FBI but would not disclose any detail about those statements other than they exist.”

At one point, Stitt said, the family was told that the purpose of the meeting was not to gather ammunition for a civil lawsuit. The comment was surprising and unsettling, given that the same federal prosecutor responsible for overseeing the decision to not bring criminal charges in Mattia’s case would also defend the federal government if his family brought a civil suit.

“It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed.”

“No civil case has been filed, and the family is looking for honest questions about what happened,” Stitt said. “We certainly can’t say that they’ve acted unethically, but we obviously have a lot of questions, and we were hopeful to get answers during the meeting. It seems like it was an inappropriate response to the family to treat the meeting as just a way to tell them that no charges will be filed and to provide no further factual explanation why.”

Among the most pressing of the family’s concerns, Nevarez said, was the unanswered question of what — if anything — the federal government intends to do to disentangle the relationship between the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department and the U.S. Border Patrol going forward.

“We feel like we don’t even want to call TOPD or trust TOPD anymore because they can call Border Patrol just like they did for my uncle Ray,” she said. “We’re afraid the same thing would happen to us.”

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

On Saturday, three Taliban intelligence operatives took the independent Radio Nasim’s director, Jawadi, and two of its journalists, Rezaei and Qasemi, from Jawadi’s home in the city of Nili in central Daikundi Province and detained them in an unknown location, according to the non-profit Afghanistan Journalist Center and a reporter familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation.

It was the second time in 10 days that the Taliban detained the three journalists. On September 27, the Islamist militant group’s intelligence operatives raided and sealed Radio Nasim’s office, stopped it broadcasting, and took Jawadi, Rezaei, and Qasemi to the provincial intelligence headquarters, the reporter said. The Taliban freed the Radio Nasim journalists after five hours but retained their mobile phones, the reporter added.

“The detention of Radio Nasim’s director and two journalists in Daikundi Province is another example of the Taliban’s far-reaching—and intensifying— crackdown on the media in recent months in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Sultan Ali Jawadi, Saifullah Rezaei and Mojtaba Qasemi and end this practice of detaining journalists and closing media outlets.”

CPJ could not immediately determine the reason for the journalists’ detention. Radio Nasim reports on current affairs and rebroadcasts content from an international radio network.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

Since the fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021, the Taliban’s repression of the Afghan media has worsened. On the second anniversary of the group’s return to power, CPJ called on the Taliban to stop its relentless campaign of intimidation and abide by its promise to protect journalists in Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The International Press Institute (IPI) has condemned the arrest and interrogation of French journalist Ariane Lavrilleux and demanded her immediate release. She was released after 39 hours in custody.

IPI has also called on French law enforcement authorities to ensure full respect for international media freedom standards on source protection.

Lavrilleux, a journalist with French non-profit investigative platform Disclose was taken into custody last Tuesday, September 19, after a dawn raid on her home by officers from France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, said an IPI statement.

• READ MORE: The Moruroa Files – how cutting edge science, secret documents and journalism exposed a Pacific lie
• State secrets: Disclose journalist taken into custody
• The Disclose website

Her apartment was searched and her computer was confiscated, in the presence of a judge, according to news media reports.

Journalists at Disclose played a key role in a major investigation of French nuclear tests secrecy in the South Pacific in March 2021.

Lavrilleux was taken to the DGSI headquarters in Marseille and questioned for several hours in the presence of her lawyer as part of an investigation into the publication of highly confidential documents in the investigative series, the “Egypt Papers”. She remained in custody overnight and into Wednesday, September 20.

In November 2021, Lavrilleux had co-authored and published the Egypt Papers, about the Sirli operation, an investigative series based on hundreds of leaked documents which revealed how information gathered by French counter-intelligence bodies was abused by the Egyptian military to carry out a campaign of bombings and arbitrary killings of alleged smugglers and innocent civilians.

French state’s potential complicity
At the time, Disclose had issued a statement justifying its decision to publish the confidential information, citing the evidence of the French state’s potential complicity in serious human rights abuses committed by a foreign regime, and the public’s right to know about such matters of public interest.

In July 2022, prosecutors in Paris opened an investigation that was later handed over to the DGSI. They alleged the publication had compromised national defence secrets and revealed information that could lead to the identification of a protected agent.

It is unclear whether any intelligence official was compromised.

“IPI is highly alarmed by the continued detention and interrogation of Ariane Lavrilleux and urges the General Directorate for Internal Security to proceed with extreme caution and full respect for French law and international legal standards regarding journalistic source protection”, IPI executive director Frane Maroevic said.

“Any charges against Lavrilleux must be dropped immediately and all pressure on Disclose and its journalists related to their investigative work must cease.

“The arrest of an investigative journalist is extremely serious, as it has major ramifications for press freedom”, he added.

“Journalists’ right to protect their sources is enshrined in national and international law as it essential for journalists to expose wrongdoing and hold power to account. The public interest defence of revealing the information published in Disclose’s investigative reporting on the Egyptian military is clear.

“IPI and our global network stand behind Lavrilleux and her colleagues at Disclose and will continue to monitor the situation closely.”

First home search since 2007
The arrest of Lavrilleux is believed to be the first time since 2007 that the home of a French journalist had been searched by police.

In a statement released immediately after the arrest, Disclose said: “The aim of this latest episode of unacceptable intimidation of Disclose journalists is clear: to identify our sources that revealed the Sirli military operation in Egypt.

“In November 2021, Disclose revealed an alleged campaign of arbitrary executions orchestrated by the Egyptian dictatorship of President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, with the complicity of the French state, based on several hundred documents marked ‘defence – confidential”.

IPI’s Maroevic added that the institute had been in contact with staff at Disclose after the arrest and has offered to help provide legal support through the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a European consortium which offers legal aid.

He noted that the arrest was the latest in a number of worrying incidents involving the interrogation of journalists from Disclose in relation to their reporting on the Egyptian government, and its sources for those stories.

This statement by IPI is part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism which tracks, monitors and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States, Candidate Countries, and Ukraine. The project is co-funded by the European Commission.

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

“Kazakhstan’s inclusion of journalists, media, and human rights organizations in a published list of individuals and legal entities that allegedly receive foreign funding is too reminiscent of the ‘foreign agent’ hysteria we have witnessed in Russia in recent years. If Kazakhstan wants to walk in the Kremlin’s footsteps and outlaw journalism and activism, it’s on the right path,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “But if it wants to maintain the adherence to its international obligations, the authorities should stop revealing the names and personal data of journalists, media, and press freedom activists and allow them to work freely and safely without fear of retaliation for foreign ties or funding.”

On Tuesday, the State Revenue Committee of the Ministry of Finance published the database, the “Register of persons receiving money and (or) other property from foreign states, international and foreign organizations, foreigners, stateless persons, subject to publication.”   

Currently, the registry has 240 entries, including global news organization Reuters and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting; the local office of Internews; journalists Dinara Yegeubayeva, Ainur Koskina, and Dilara Isa; independent press freedom organization Adil Soz; and journalist and media organizations and news outlets from different regions of the country — the Semipalatinsk City Association of Young Journalists, Uralsk-based newspaper publisher Mediastart 2012, MediaNet International Center of Journalism, Youth Information Service of Kazakhstan, and Malim Media. In the registry, journalists are categorized as individual entrepreneurs, and their personal identification numbers are revealed.

The list also includes human rights organizations Freedom House, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, and the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a prominent local organization.

In 2018, Kazakhstan amended its tax regulations that require filing reports on foreign funding. The subsequent amendments, made into law in 2022 and effective as of 2023, required the revenue committee that collects taxes to publish the list of entities that receive foreign financing, according to reports.

The State Revenue Committee said in April the new legislation is aimed at improving public trust both to the state and to non-governmental organizations.  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On Tuesday, September 19, police officers with the General Directorate for Internal Security, accompanied by an investigating judge, arrived at Lavrilleux’s home in the southern city of Marseille at about 6 a.m., searched the property for 10 hours, and arrested her, according to media reports, statements by the investigative website Disclose, which published Lavrilleux’s reporting, and Virginie Marquet, a lawyer for the journalist and the media outlet, who spoke with CPJ via phone.

The police searched Lavrilleux’s computer and mobile devices and asked questions about her 2021 investigation for Disclose, based on leaked classified documents, which alleged that Egyptian authorities used French intelligence to arbitrarily bomb and kill smugglers on the Egyptian-Libyan border between 2016 and 2018, those sources said.

“France’s General Directorate for Internal Security must immediately release investigative journalist Ariane Lavrilleux, drop all criminal investigations against her, and refrain from questioning her over her sources,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Journalists must be able to freely report on national defense and security issues. Questioning reporters about their confidential sources places them under unwarranted pressure and could have a chilling effect on defense reporting.”

France’s intelligence agency started investigating Lavrilleux in July 2022 following a complaint by the Ministry of the Armed Forces that the leaks could lead to the identification of a protected agent, those sources said. The penalty for disclosure of a national defense secret is up to five years in jail, according to the General Directorate for Internal Security.

Lavrilleux’s lawyer Marquet told CPJ that the journalist and Disclose only published information that was in the public interest and authorities risked undermining the confidentiality of journalistic sources. Disclose described Lavrilleux’s arrest as “unacceptable intimidation”.

CPJ’s emails to the General Directorate for Internal Security requesting comment did not receive any replies.

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

On September 1, the Russian Ministry of Justice added three journalists—including Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov—to its list of so-called “foreign agents,” accusing them of helping create and distribute “messages and materials” from foreign agents “to an unlimited number of people.” 

In addition to Muratov, the Russia-based editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who was awarded the 2021 Nobel peace prize, the list included Denis Kataev, a journalist with exiled broadcaster Dozhd TV (TV Rain) and French broadcaster Radio France; and Ksenia Larina, a journalist with investigative outlet The Insider. Kataev and Larina live outside Russia.

Since 2021, Russian authorities have labeled dozens of media outlets and more than 100 journalists as “foreign agents.” Independent news website Verstka reported that “journalists and media representatives have become the largest professional group” in the foreign agents’ register.

“Russian authorities keep stubbornly using the ‘foreign agent’ designation to undermine independent reporting and obstruct the work of journalists,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities should not contest Dmitry Muratov’s appeal against the designation and immediately repeal their legislation on so-called ‘foreign agents.’”

In December 2022, Russian authorities passed a law that created a consolidated foreign agents register and imposed restrictions on those listed.

Individuals designated as “foreign agents” must regularly submit detailed reports of their activities and expenses to authorities, and their status must be listed whenever they produce content or are mentioned in news articles, according to the law. Noncompliance could lead to a two-year prison sentence.

Russian authorities did not cite any specific reporting in their accusations, but alleged that Larina participated in “activities aimed at forming anti-Russian views,” and that Kataev “distributed unreliable information” about the Russian authorities’ decisions and policies and worked for a French media outlet. Muratov was accused of using “foreign platforms to distribute opinions aimed at forming a negative attitude towards Russia’s foreign and domestic policy.”

CPJ could not determine whether Kataev and Larina plan to contest their listings as messages to the journalists did not receive a reply. 

On Monday, September 4, Novaya Gazeta told its subscribers that Muratov plans to contest the Ministry of Justice’s decision and is stepping down as the outlet’s chief editor pending the court proceedings.

Muratov’s assistant told CPJ that the journalist declined to comment. CPJ’s email to the Russian Ministry of Justice did not receive a response.

In 2007, CPJ honored Muratov with its International Press Freedom Award. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in October 2021 that Muratov would not be labeled a “foreign agent” if he did not use the Nobel prize “as a shield” and did not violate Russian law.

“It is sad that Russian authorities are now trying to silence him. The accusations against him are politically motivated,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in a Monday statement.

Since July 2022, the Russian prosecutor’s office has added Novaya Gazeta Europe, Dozhd TV, and The Insider to their list of “undesirable” organizations. 

Organizations classified as undesirable are banned from operating in Russia, and anyone who participates in them or works to organize their activities faces up to six years in prison and administrative fines. The designation also makes it a crime to distribute the outlet’s content or donate to it from inside or outside Russia.

Novaya Gazeta Europe is a Latvia-based outlet launched in April 2022 by former Novaya Gazeta journalists, many of whom fled following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and subsequent criminalization of “false information” about the Russian military. 

In September 2022, Russian authorities labeled Kirill Martynov, Novaya Gazeta Europe’s chief editor, a “foreign agent” and stripped Novaya Gazeta of its print and online licenses.

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

On Thursday, August 10, officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence, the Taliban’s intelligence agency, stormed the office of the independent Killid radio station in Jalalabad city, in eastern Nangarhar province, and detained its manager Faqirzai and reporter Saleh, according to the non-profit Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC)and a journalist with knowledge of the situation who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban.

Separately, also on Thursday, Taliban intelligence operatives entered offices of the independent Uranus TV network in Kunduz city in northern Afghanistan and detained Hasib Hassas, a journalist at the independent radio Salam Watandar, according to the AFJC and another journalist who spoke with CPJ anonymously due to fear of Taliban reprisal.

CPJ’s journalist sources said that Faqirzai, Saleh, and Hassas were detained on accusations that they reported for exiled media. 

“The detention of journalists Faqir Mohammad Faqirzai, Jan Agha Saleh, and Hasib Hassas just before the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul shows the Taliban is determined to continue their brutal crackdown on the media,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the three journalists and stop muzzling reporting, whether it is conducted for local media or the exiled press.”

The journalist sources said that the three were transferred to an undisclosed location; CPJ was unable to determine their whereabouts. 

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the country’s media have been in crisis, with journalists facing arrests, raids on offices, and beatings. The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence has emerged as a key threat to journalists in the country. Some journalists who fled the country have established media outlets to continue reporting on Afghanistan in exile. 

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

On Thursday, August 10, officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence, the Taliban’s intelligence agency, stormed the office of the independent Killid radio station in Jalalabad city, in eastern Nangarhar province, and detained its manager Faqirzai and reporter Saleh, according to the non-profit Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC)and a journalist with knowledge of the situation who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban.

Separately, also on Thursday, Taliban intelligence operatives entered offices of the independent Uranus TV network in Kunduz city in northern Afghanistan and detained Hasib Hassas, a journalist at the independent radio Salam Watandar, according to the AFJC and another journalist who spoke with CPJ anonymously due to fear of Taliban reprisal.

CPJ’s journalist sources said that Faqirzai, Saleh, and Hassas were detained on accusations that they reported for exiled media. 

“The detention of journalists Faqir Mohammad Faqirzai, Jan Agha Saleh, and Hasib Hassas just before the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul shows the Taliban is determined to continue their brutal crackdown on the media,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the three journalists and stop muzzling reporting, whether it is conducted for local media or the exiled press.”

The journalist sources said that the three were transferred to an undisclosed location; CPJ was unable to determine their whereabouts. 

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid did not respond to a CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app.

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the country’s media have been in crisis, with journalists facing arrests, raids on offices, and beatings. The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence has emerged as a key threat to journalists in the country. Some journalists who fled the country have established media outlets to continue reporting on Afghanistan in exile. 

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

“The brazen detentions of Botswanan journalists Ryder Gabathuse and Innocent Selatlhwa and the seizure of their electronic devices must be thoroughly repudiated by President Mokgweetsi Masisi’s government, and the intelligence agents responsible must be held to account,” said CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, Angela Quintal, in New York. “It is particularly concerning that the journalists have not received their electronic devices back from authorities, given Botswana’s abuse of digital forensic tools that compromise journalists’ sources.”

Authorities arrested Selatlhwa, a senior reporter for the Mmegi newspaper, without presenting a warrant, according to news reports and statements by local press freedom groups.

Following Selatlhwa’s detention, DISS officers raided Mmegi’s office in the capital city of Gaborone on Thursday evening and detained Gabathuse, the newspaper’s editor. According to a tweet by the outlet, one of the officers said “I am a warrant myself” when asked for a warrant during the raid.

Both journalists were released Friday morning without charge, but authorities kept custody of mobile phones, iPads, and laptop computers seized during their arrests, according to news reports and Gabathuse, who spoke to CPJ after his release.

CPJ has previously documented how Botswana has used Israeli Cellebrite technology to extract and analyze thousands of messages, call logs, emails, and web browsing history from phones and other devices confiscated from journalists.

CPJ called and texted DISS spokesperson Edward Robert for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

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

“The brazen detentions of Botswanan journalists Ryder Gabathuse and Innocent Selatlhwa and the seizure of their electronic devices must be thoroughly repudiated by President Mokgweetsi Masisi’s government, and the intelligence agents responsible must be held to account,” said CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, Angela Quintal, in New York. “It is particularly concerning that the journalists have not received their electronic devices back from authorities, given Botswana’s abuse of digital forensic tools that compromise journalists’ sources.”

Authorities arrested Selatlhwa, a senior reporter for the Mmegi newspaper, without presenting a warrant, according to news reports and statements by local press freedom groups.

Following Selatlhwa’s detention, DISS officers raided Mmegi’s office in the capital city of Gaborone on Thursday evening and detained Gabathuse, the newspaper’s editor. According to a tweet by the outlet, one of the officers said “I am a warrant myself” when asked for a warrant during the raid.

Both journalists were released Friday morning without charge, but authorities kept custody of mobile phones, iPads, and laptop computers seized during their arrests, according to news reports and Gabathuse, who spoke to CPJ after his release.

CPJ has previously documented how Botswana has used Israeli Cellebrite technology to extract and analyze thousands of messages, call logs, emails, and web browsing history from phones and other devices confiscated from journalists.

CPJ called and texted DISS spokesperson Edward Robert for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

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

Stationed in every North Korean police station are local police officers under the social security department and state security agents under the ministry of state security. They often butt heads with each other due to the similarity of their mandates.

The police are charged with keeping public order, including by eradicating crime. Meanwhile, the state security agents are like a secret police force that must protect the country’s leader and the regime, as well as enforcing punishment for general crimes. The agents enjoy special privileges and powers that ordinary officers do not.

After the police in Ryanggang province requested data from the agents regarding data from previous cases involving people currently under police investigation, the province’s social security bureau submitted an official letter to the Central Committee over the impasse, a Ryanggang official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA’s Korean Service.

“[The letter] said the state security department is marking its territory and is not being cooperative,” he said. 

Although the conflict between the state security department and social security department is nothing new, it is extremely rare that either group files official complaints about the other.

The police claimed in the letter that state security agents did not transfer data on a group of people it had previously detained. The police caught these people making phone calls outside the country, but were not given access to data for their previous cases that were handled by the agents.

“The police ordered [the agents] to hand over … all materials and subjects of cases,” he said.  “But many state security agents think that the police are incompetent and act with jealousy toward them.”

Despite their internal conflict, the agents and the police appear to be outwardly friendly with each other, a resident from the province, who requested to remain anonymous for personal safety, told RFA. 

“They are actually enemies to each other,” he said. “A few days ago, I personally saw an argument between a state security agent and a police officer.”

The cause of the spat, which happened inside a police station, was because the state security agent tried to get information from an informant working in a case handled by the police, the resident said.

“That day, several residents who happened to be in the police station witnessed the quarrel,” he said. “They mocked both of them afterward. Residents have very negative feelings of police officers and state security agents who give up nothing when it comes to monitoring and oppressing residents.”

Residents fear that the conflict between the two law enforcement factions could lead to competition between each other in how well they can oppress the people, he said.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahn Chang Gyu for RFA Korean.

A damning new database reveals thousands of lobbyists are working for fossil fuel companies at the same time they represent hundreds of cities, universities, tech companies and even environmental groups that claim to be taking steps to address the climate crisis. We speak with The Guardian's environmental reporter Oliver Milman. “It's clear that the wielding of political power and influence is far more important to them than staying true to any kind of ideals of distancing themselves fully from the fossil fuel industry,” says Milman.

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

This exercise of fitting a square into a circular peg is precisely what now guides New Jersey’s contemporary policing regime. The Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), the only Department of Homeland Security-affiliated fusion center within the Garden State is led by a former CIA agent trained in international espionage, not state and municipal law enforcement tactics that must adhere to constitutional rights. As New Jersey's experience makes clear, the way fusion centers operate render them rife for abuse, and offer outdated models of policing.

The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights’ (CSRR) recent report Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System shows how the ROIC wastes limited state resources doubling down on “broken windows policing” – a method consistently rebuked by legal and criminal justice scholars as a tool of mass incarceration. Broken windows models emphasize aggressive enforcement of misdemeanor and non-violent “quality of life” offenses. ROIC intelligence gathering focuses on these methods, as the example of the City of Camden attests. There, ROIC intelligence has given rise to open season on privacy and petty offenses, with police issuing fines for offenses like riding a bicycle without a bell. Invariably, such tactics overwhelmingly target minority communities. Rather than fight terrorism, ROIC intelligence furthers the overreach of the carceral state with little benefit.

This misalignment of input and outcome is not innocuous, but by design. The architecture of the ROIC is not vested in proven or progressive policing, but by the methods native to global spy networks. Indeed, the last two directors of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the body overseeing the ROIC, are former CIA agents.

Over the past six months, CSRR has sought accountability for the ROIC’s overreach, by filing several dozen Open Records Act (OPRA) requests into the ROIC’s relationship with county and state law enforcement agencies. Regrettably, those requests were almost summarily stonewalled, allowing the ROIC and its partners to operate in an accountability-free zone.

Shining a Light on New Jersey’s Secret Intelligence System exposes the extent of secrecy shrouding the ROIC and expansively documents those efforts. The report highlights the lack of transparency, the legal regimes that allow agencies to push back against basic public information requests, and the general apparatus that promotes this wall of secrecy.

Like with so many fusion centers across the country, the ROIC is engaging in mission creep far from its original purpose of fighting terrorism by over-policing non-violent crimes and justifying its budget behind closed-off series of feedback loops.

Open-source research shows the ROIC operating in ways banal and embarrassing – and less than strictly observant of civil liberties and civil rights. But even the most basic questions surrounding the ROIC’s budget and role in local and state information-sharing and structure are routinely ignored by various local, state, and county law enforcement agencies.

Responses from law enforcement to basic questions we posed could have provided an opportunity for public discourse on ROIC’s role, policies, and costs. Instead, CSRR received opaque responses, Kafkaesque riddles, and flimsy legal arguments. New Jersey's law enforcement agencies collectively flouted transparency duties under state open records law with only one law enforcement agency providing one substantive response to exactly one request.

The litany of unpersuasive rejections may have varied in form but the results were the same: obstructive and non-transparent. In one combination of denials, agencies would offer to provide some requested information for an exorbitant sum of money while denying the rest.

The underlying theme put forth was an adherence to a regime of secrecy to protect law enforcement’s long-standing preference of substantially operating in the dark. Law enforcement agencies’ lawyers, across the state, using substantially similar language from various jurisdictions, rely on understandings of case law that, divorced of all the typical chicanery, allows the government to deny a request because the person or group making the request has asked for: (1) something that is too specific; and/or (2) not specific enough.

The irony, of course, is that the purpose of an OPRA request is to shine light into hidden troves being kept from citizens. To pinpoint a specific detailed description of a document when the government entity claiming the exemptions continues to hide behind the same wall of secrecy that gives rise to the request flies in the face of the object and purpose of the OPRA statute.

For example, to date, and despite multiple rounds of open records requests, CSRR could not get a clear answer on what the ROIC budget is, what its basic structure looks like, and what mechanisms are in place to protect civil rights and civil liberties.

This kind of secrecy is precisely what empowers the ROIC’s insidious commitment to broken windows policing. The ROIC serves as what Professor Brendan McQuade describes as an “outsourced intelligence division” for local police departments. Rather than meaningfully contributing to policing, the ROIC’s major efforts are instead aimed at “information sharing” and the creation and provision of “higher level intelligence products” like crime mapping, data on so-called “hot spots,” and predictive analyses.

This sort of language is anodyne and important-sounding but little more than the jargon of spy craft let loose on historically hollowed-out communities of color. Behind all the law enforcement mumbo-jumbo is a commitment to racist broken-windows policing.

New Jersey’s laws meant to ensure that state agencies can be held accountable to the public are failing. It is thus long overdue for the New Jersey legislature to engage in robust oversight of the state’s fusion center – and to reformulate the basic OPRA law at a statutory level to undo years of bad, anti-transparency activist precedent. Otherwise, New Jersey’s Secret Surveillance System will continue to operate with no regard, much less accountability, for civil liberties violations.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Colin Kalmbacher.

“The bankruptcy of RFE/RL in Russia demonstrates how the country’s legislation on so-called ‘foreign agents’ has been used to economically strangle a media outlet,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Russian authorities should stop obstructing the work of RFE/RL, repeal the draconian foreign agent law, and let the media work freely.”

On Monday, March 13, a court in Moscow declared RFE/RL’s local legal entity bankrupt following its alleged inability to pay fines totaling more than 1 billion rubles (US$13.3 million) issued over its refusal to comply with the requirements of the country’s foreign agent law, according to those reports, both published by RFE/RL affiliates.

The bankruptcy proceedings were initiated in 2022 by Russian tax authorities; RFE/RL said at the time that the proceedings were “the culmination of a years-long pressure campaign” against the broadcaster. Authorities previously froze RFE/RL’s bank accounts in May 2021.

Russian authorities have also labeled more than 30 RFE/RL journalists as foreign agents, and a number of the broadcaster’s affiliated websites were blocked after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

CPJ emailed the Moscow Arbitration Court for comment, but did not receive any reply.

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

Starting March 2, law enforcement officers in the capital, Tbilisi, attacked and obstructed the work of at least 14 journalists covering protests against proposed “foreign agent” legislation, according to news reports, statements by the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics and Media Advocacy Coalition local trade groups, the charter’s executive director Mariam Gogosashvili, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and seven local journalists who spoke to CPJ.

None of the journalists were seriously injured, according to those sources. Georgia’s parliament rejected one of the bills and withdrew the other in response to the protests on March 9.

“Georgian authorities must conduct a full and transparent investigation into law enforcement officers’ recent obstruction of journalists covering protests,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “The eyes of the world have rightly been on Georgia during these demonstrations, and authorities have a duty to ensure that journalists can cover these important events safely and without hindrance.”

On March 2, officers with the Special State Protection Service shoved Mikheil Gvadzabia, a reporter with independent news website Netgazeti; Tamuna Gegidze, editor of the independent news website On.ge; and Vakhtang Kareli, a photojournalist with the independent broadcaster Formula TV; and forcibly removed them from Parliament despite them showing passes and accreditations, according to reports, footage of the incident, and Gvadzabia, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

On March 7, Formula TV reporter Mari Tsakadze was filming police when one officer told others to “Get this girl away,” and officers pushed her and held onto her arm for about one minute, preventing her from filming, according to Tsakadze, who spoke to CPJ by phone and shared video of the incident. Tsakadze said she had showed authorities her press card and repeatedly stated she was a journalist.

On March 8, Aleksandre Keshelashvili and Basti Mgaloblishvili, reporters with the independent outlet Publika, were filming police when one officer shouted “Get rid of the journalists,” and another pushed them from the scene, hitting Keshelashvili’s phone and then kicking him in the hip, according to Keshelashvili, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app, and footage published by Publika.

Also on March 8, Gvadzabia was filming protests with his editor, Nestan Tsetskhladze, when a special forces officer rushed at him; Tsetskhladze shouted that the pair were journalists and Gvadzabia was wearing a large press card from his neck, but the officer kicked Gvadzabia, injuring his hand, according to reports and Gvadzabia.

On the same evening, Formula TV reporter Giorgi Kvijinadze and camera operator Davit Mania were filming police beating and detaining protesters when around 10 officers tried to take their camera and then repeatedly punched them on their backs and torso, according to reports and Kvijinadze, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app.

The same evening, police pushed Formula TV reporter Tea Tetrashvili and camera operator Nika Kokaia and tried to take their camera, Tetrashvili told CPJ by messaging app; they also sprayed pepper spray in Tetrashvili’s eyes and threw a scooter at Kokaia, and deliberately fired a canister of tear gas among a group of journalists filming the protests, she said.

Police also covered the camera lens of Formula TV journalist Rati Mujiri and camera operator Giorgi Japaridze and pushed them when they tried to film police beating and arresting protesters, according to reports and Mujiri, who spoke to CPJ by phone. Police also punched Formula TV journalist Nika Sajaia in the head, the journalist told CPJ by messaging app.

The Special Investigation Service of Georgia, the government agency responsible for investigating crimes against journalists, told CPJ via Facebook that it had received 11 complaints from journalists about police actions during the protests and said it would conduct “all necessary measures to ensure an objective investigation.”

Separately, Georgia’s parliament has restricted journalists’ access amid the protests against the foreign agents bill, according to statements by the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics and Gogosashvili. On March 5, parliament suspended the accreditation of at least 10 journalists for one month alleging that they had participated in protests inside Parliament, Gogosashvili said.

In February, Georgia’s parliament introduced new accreditation regulations that allow Parliament to restrict access to accredited journalists on security grounds and to suspend accreditation on vague grounds of violating order, Gogosashvili told CPJ, adding that local advocacy groups are challenging those regulations in court.

CPJ emailed the Georgian police, the parliament, and the Special State Protection Service for comment, but did not receive any replies.

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

In the Globe and Mail Andrew Coyne has written two columns in recent days arguing that the discussion over Chinese interference should focus on “domestic accomplices.” “What we need a public inquiry to look into is domestic complicity in foreign interference,” noted the regular CBC commentator.

In a similar vein Justin Trudeau responded to criticism regarding purported Chinese interference by noting, “We know that Chinese Canadian parliamentarians, and Chinese Canadians in general, are greater targets for interference by China than others.” The prime minister added, “We know the same goes for Iranian Canadians, who are more subject to interference from the Iranian government. Russian speakers in Canada are more vulnerable to Russian misinformation and disinformation.”

Why ignore how Israel and its Canadian lobby use Jewish MPs and Jewish organizations as their agents?

The leading Israel advocate in parliament, Anthony Housefather chairs the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group. That group was previously led by another Jewish Liberal MP, Michael Leavitt, who resigned to head Israel lobby group Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. Housefather and Leavitt have repeatedly met Israeli officials in Canada.

As part of the media frenzy about Chinese interference, there has been significant discussion about Trudeau attending a 2016 Liberal Party fundraiser at the Toronto home of Chinese Business Chamber of Canada chair Benson Wong. Among the attendees was Chinese Canadian billionaire Zhang Bin who is alleged to have donated to the Trudeau Foundation/University of Montréal at the request of a Chinese government official.

But Trudeau has far more extensive ties to pro-Israel funders. Since 2013 the chief fundraiser for the Trudeau Liberals has been Stephen Bronfman, scion of an arch Israeli nationalist family. Bronfman has millions invested in Israeli technology companies and over the years the Bronfman clan has secured arms for Israeli forces and supported its military in other ways. Bronfman openly linked his fundraising for Trudeau to Israel. In 2013 the Globe and Mail reported:

Justin Trudeau is banking on multimillionaire Stephen Bronfman to turn around the Liberal Party’s financial fortunes in order to take on the formidable Conservative fundraising machine…. Mr. Bronfman helped raise $2-million for Mr. Trudeau’s leadership campaign. Mr. Bronfman is hoping to win back the Jewish community, whose fundraising dollars have been going more and more to the Tories because of the party’s pro-Israel stand. ‘We’ll work hard on that,’ said Mr. Bronfman, adding that ‘Stephen Harper has never been to Israel and I took Justin there five years ago and he was referring at the end of the trip to Israel as ‘we.’ So I thought that was pretty good.’

In 2016 Trudeau attended a fundraiser at the Toronto home of now deceased billionaire apartheid supporters Honey and Barry Sherman. The event raised funds for the party and York Centre Liberal party candidate Michael Levitt. In 2018 CBC reported on multimillionaire Mitch Garber attending one of Bronfman’s fundraisers with Trudeau. On Federation CJA Montréal’s website Garber’s profile boasts that his “eldest son Dylan just completed his service as a lone soldier serving in an elite Cyber Defense Intelligence Unit of the IDF in Israel.”

A thorough investigation of pro-Israel Liberal fundraising would uncover a litany of other examples. And they’ve had far greater success. While the Trudeau government has banned Chinese firms, arrested a prominent Chinese capitalist and targeted that country militarily, they’ve been strikingly deferential to Israel. The Trudeau government has expanded the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, organized a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, voted against over 60 UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights, sued to block proper labels on wines from illegal settlements and created a special envoy to deflect criticism of Israeli abuses. During a 2018 visit to Israel former foreign affairs minister Freeland announced that should Canada win a seat on the United Nations Security Council it would act as an “asset for Israel” on the Council.

Part of the Chinese interference story is about funding University of Montréal and University of Toronto initiatives tied to China. But Jewish Zionist donors have set up far more initiatives, including numerous Israel and Israel-infused Jewish studies programs.

Having fought to establish Israel and with major investments in Israel, David Azrieli spent $5 million to establish Israel studies and $1 million on Jewish studies at Concordia University. At the University of Toronto more than $10 million was donated to establish the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israeli Studies. Millions of dollars more have been donated to launch similar initiatives at other universities.

On many occasions pro-Israel donors have leveraged donations to block academic appointments or suppress discussion of Palestinian rights. The hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Israel supporters (Schwartz/Reissman, Peter Munk, Seymour Schulich, etc.) partly explains why over a dozen Canadian university presidents recently traveled with apartheid lobby group, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, to Israel despite opposition from significant segments of their institutions.

Much more influential than the ‘China lobby’, the Israel lobby has largely been ignored in recent discussion about the need for an inquiry into foreign interference. But any serious foreign agent registry ought to include the apartheid state’s domestic accomplices.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

On February 20, the Georgian Parliament approved for further discussion a draft bill that would require media outlets and nongovernmental organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from foreign sources to register as “agents of foreign influence,” according to news reports.

On Monday, February 27, that legislation’s authors registered a second bill, which they described as a direct translation of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili criticized the first bill after the draft was approved, according to news reports. Irakli Kobakhidze, chair of the ruling Georgian Dream party, which together with the bill’s sponsors controls a parliamentary majority large enough to override a presidential veto, said the parliament would pass one of the bills by June after seeking assessments from the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe.

“Tarnishing journalists as ‘foreign agents’ is a trick straight out of every authoritarian regime’s playbook and has no place on the democratic path which Georgia’s government claims to be taking,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Georgia’s parliament should reject any legislation that would brand media as foreign agents, and its government should take concrete steps to demonstrate a commitment to media diversity.”

The first bill, “On Transparency of Foreign Influence” would require organizations receiving foreign funding to provide detailed annual accounts, including information about the source, amount, and purpose of any funds received or spent, for a publicly available register.

Organizations that fail to register or to provide such data would be subject to fines of 25,000 lari (US$9,500). The bill’s text does not oblige media outlets to label their publications as produced by a foreign agent, in contrast to current Russian legislation.

The second bill, “On Registration of Foreign Agents,” is an abridged translation of the U.S. FARA legislation, and its penalties include fines and up to five years in prison for noncompliance. CPJ has previously criticized the use of FARA, highlighted how other governments cite it to justify repression, and called on the Biden administration to stop compelling media organizations to register under the law.

Mamuka Andguladze, chair of the Media Advocacy Coalition trade group, told CPJ in a phone interview that there was “no objective need” for either bill, as information on organizations’ ownership is already publicly available and authorities have full access to financial records, which many organizations choose to publish.

Andguladze said he believed the bills aimed to “stigmatize and suppress” critical media and nongovernmental groups in Georgia, following Russia’s use of such legislation, and that the FARA-styled bill was simply a “communications strategy” on the part of the government.

As of February 28, more than 70 local media outlets had signed a statement describing the bill approved for discussion on February 20 as an insult to their professional dignity and declaring they would refuse to register should it be adopted.

CPJ emailed the Georgian Dream party for comment and contacted People’s Power, the party whose deputies proposed the bill, at its official Facebook page, but did not receive any replies.

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

On January 4, Argentina’s Federal Intelligence Agency, known as the AFI, filed a criminal lawsuit against the independent Buenos Aires newspapers La Nación and Clarín, as well as Morales, a columnist at La Nación, and Santoro, the judicial editor of Clarín, according to news reports and the journalists, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

The intelligence agency accused the journalists of illegally revealing the names of AFI agents, according to those sources. The journalists each covered the AFI for their respective publications, disclosing the names of military officers working for AFI despite Argentina’s legal ban on armed forces personnel conducting domestic spy operations. Morales and Santoro told CPJ that they denied any wrongdoing and had based their reporting off of documents the AFI had provided to a congressional oversight committee.

“Argentine authorities should drop their lawsuit against journalists Joaquín Morales Solá and Daniel Santoro, and the Clarín and La Nación newspapers,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “This effort to intimidate journalists is not acceptable, and authorities should refrain from prosecuting reporters in retaliation for their work.”

If charged and convicted, the journalists could face prison sentences of one to six years, according to Argentina’s penal code. In early February, when Argentine judicial authorities return from vacation, a federal prosecutor will examine the evidence and decide whether to proceed with the criminal case, the two journalists said.

“They revealed the names of intelligence agents that clearly must be kept secret,” Agustín Rossi, AFI interim director, said in a January 4 interview. “We filed the lawsuit so that people comply with the intelligence law.”

An AFI spokesperson, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, told CPJ that the lawsuit aims to protect intelligence agents from having their names revealed to the public, which could put them in danger.

Santoro, who has worked at Clarín for 30 years, told CPJ that the lawsuit could lead to self-censorship, calling it “an effort to intimidate journalists so we don’t ask questions and stop investigating the intelligence agency.”

Morales told CPJ that the AFI “is accusing us of breaking the law because we denounced them for breaking the law.”

In a January 4 statement, the Association of Argentine Journalistic Entities said that because Morales and Santoro were investigating possible crimes by a government agency, their work was in the public interest and therefore protected under Argentina’s constitution, which guarantees free expression.

Martín Etchevers, a Clarín spokesperson, told CPJ that it was “disgusting that the AFI is going after journalists for publishing information in the public interest.” In a January 11 editorial, La Nación described the lawsuit as a “ridiculous” attack on press freedom.

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

Adiyaa, 34, who uses the Chinese name Wu Guoxing on his passport and ID card, fled China on Jan. 3, 2021, arriving in Thailand via Cambodia, after local police started following him and monitoring his movements in the wake of the language-teaching protests in the fall of 2020.

Adiyaa had obtained refugee status from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and was waiting for the UNHCR to arrange for him and his family to start a new life in a third country.

On the morning of Oct. 3, he was in his rented apartment when the landlord knocked on his door with an immigration official who asked to see his documents, Adiyaa told RFA following his release on bail on Wednesday.

"Then they took me, without my documents, to the immigration office and told me China had me on a wanted list for repatriation to China," he said. "I was detained in the police detention center that night."

The following day, he was taken to a Thai immigration detention center, and told on Oct. 8 that Chinese government personnel were en route to bring him back to China.

"The next day, four people were sent from the Chinese Embassy, one of whom was from the Inner Mongolia police department, [two of whom were] from the ministry of public security," Adiyaa said. "They asked me to confess to the facts of my 'crime' in China, and to fill out an application form to return to China and plead guilty."

"They were physically and verbally threatening, and asked me to read out a confession they had prepared beforehand verbatim," he said. "I told them I was a refugee registered with the United Nations and had protection, and they said [that protection] only lasted 15 months, after which the Chinese Embassy could force me to go back to China."

"I told them I didn't want to, and that I wasn't going home."

Mongolian language ban

Adiyaa said the charges against him were related to "illegal business" activities after he set up a private Mongolian-language school in Horchin Right Middle Banner, a county-like administrative division, in the wake of the ban on Mongolian-language teaching in state schools. 

"The government said I was strictly prohibited from continuing to operate ... so I refunded all of the tuition fees to the students and paid all of the teachers' salaries," he said. "The investors had made an agreement to share the risk of the company not being able to operate."

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has imposed policies on ethnic minority regions in recent years aimed at "forging a national consciousness," and the "sinicization" of religious practice, ushering in a nationwide crackdown on Muslims, Christians and Tibetan Buddhists, as well as a ban on minority languages as a teaching medium in schools.

The ban on Mongolian prompted street protests and class boycotts by students and parents across Inner Mongolia, prompting a region-wide crackdown by riot squads and state security police in the fall of 2020.

Tibetan, Uyghur and Korean-language teaching is also being phased out of schools in ethnic minority areas, local parents and teachers have told RFA.

Adiyaa told RFA he believes he was targeted because he took part in a demonstration in Hohhot, the regional capital of China's Inner Mongolia region, which borders the independent country of Mongolia.

"We took part in a demonstration outside the high school affiliated to the Inner Mongolia Normal University; all in all I and a few friends went to three or four protests," Adiyaa said. "Then, the police came and searched my home, and confiscated my mobile phone, computer and external drive ... and the state security police had me under daily surveillance, monitoring when I went out and where I was going every day."

He fled China via Cambodia with the help of a people smuggler, and spent a while in Chiang Mai with his brother and family.

But it soon became clear that Adiyaa still wasn't safe.

"In Chiang Mai, four of us – me, my brother, sister-in-law and nephew – were hit by a car driven by a Chinese plainclothes operative," he told RFA.

Under Thai law, Adiyaa's bail conditions require him to report to the police station once a week, as well as barring him from leaving Thailand, but place him at risk of kidnap and rendition by Chinese agents, he said.

The Southern Mongolian Human Rights and Information Center quoted Adiyaa's sister Turgowaa as saying that her brother holds a UNHCR refugee identification card, but had been told nonetheless that the Thai authorities are actively cooperating with the Chinese Embassy to ensure he is forcibly repatriated.

"It is all too clear that the Thai immigration bureau is ganging up with the Chinese state security authorities, disregarding the United Nations conventions on refugees and human rights," she told the group.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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

An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes.

Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that was passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process last week and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Tuesday, choosing instead to condemn the package's relatively modest but popular tax reforms.

Despite analysts' predictions that the 98.2% of U.S. households with annual incomes of $400,000 or less will receive the same tax bill or a slight cut as a result of the IRA, far-right lawmakers have sown disinformation about how the law's provision of roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding over 10 years—money intended to help the agency crack down on rich tax cheats—poses a threat to every American.

Last week, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) went so far as to claim that Democrats are "using the power of the federal government for armed robbery!" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has made similar allegations.

It's not just fringe members of the GOP who are spreading such falsehoods. One day before Boebert's tirade, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the highest-ranking Republican in the lower chamber, tweeted, "Democrats in Washington plan to hire an army of 87,000 IRS agents so they can audit more Americans like you."

On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—currently a top contender, along with former President Donald Trump, to be the Republican Party's 2024 nominee for the White House—called hiring 87,000 IRS agents "a middle finger to the American public," making clear that he would prefer more "might at the border."

Where does this oft-repeated number of IRS agents come from?

"The 87,000 figure does exist, buried within a May 2021 Treasury Department report when the Biden administration was pushing a bigger spending bill with the same $80 billion IRS funding," Reuters noted Friday. "The report estimated the money could fund 86,852 full-time hires through 2031."

But the actual net increase in staff would be much lower, as the IRS expects more than 50,000 aging Baby Boomer employees to retire over the next half-decade.

In addition to an unspecified number of new revenue agents—there were 8,321 in fiscal year 2021—the agency is looking to hire tens of thousands of new information technology specialists and customer service personnel who can create a user experience more akin to online banking, Natasha Sarin, Treasury counselor for tax policy and administration, told Reuters.

There are 2,100 special agents in the IRS Criminal Investigation branch who are authorized to carry firearms, but right-wing assertions that all 87,000 new hires would be auditors, criminal enforcement agents, or armed are "deeply dangerous nonsense—and false," said Sarin.

"The speed and voracity with which [Republicans] are coming at this is really a testament to how important these resources are going to be—because there are many wealthy tax evaders that stand to lose a lot," Sarin continued.

The GOP's intentionally misleading attacks come after a decade of budget cuts approved by congressional Republicans left the IRS with 16,000 fewer employees in 2021 than it had in 2010.

As ProPublica has documented, the IRS now audits low-income taxpayers at the same rate as the top 1%, but that is a direct result of years of austerity, which have undermined the agency's ability to audit the rich.

The IRA's boost in IRS funding aims to rectify this injustice and to begin closing an estimated $600 billion annual "tax gap"—the difference between taxes paid and owed—by strengthening enforcement against the complex avoidance strategies used by the wealthy, especially those with murky sources of income.

New information technology hires will develop "tools to identify more high-end audit targets," Reuters reported. "To target wealthy taxpayers and handle sophisticated audits, Sarin said the IRS needs mid-career individuals with accounting and often tax law experience."

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the increase in IRS funding will raise $204 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, while the Treasury projects that the real revenue impact will likely be $400 billion over a decade—a substantial portion of the IRA's climate and healthcare spending.

Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen instructed IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig—a scandal-plagued Trump appointee who spent decades battling the agency—to submit an $80 billion spending and hiring plan within six months. Yellen previously directed the agency not to use any new resources to increase audits of people making less than $400,000 per year.

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

On August 17, Shearer and Faizbakhsh were filming in the Sherpur area of District 10 in Kabul–where a U.S. drone strike killed Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri earlier in August–when several security guards stopped them, according to a report by U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Voice of America-Dari and two journalists familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of the Taliban’s reprisal. The guards questioned them about their activities and checked their work permits, ID cards, and passports; they then confiscated the journalists’ cellphones, detained them for a couple of hours, and repeatedly called them “American spies,” according to the journalists familiar with the case.

The security officers then called Taliban intelligence; around 50 armed intelligence operatives arrived, who blindfolded Shearer and Faizbakhsh and transferred them to an unknown location, the journalists familiar with the case said. 

CPJ was not able to verify the reason for the detention of Shearer and Faizbakhsh or where they were being held.

“The Taliban’s increasing pressure and escalating numbers of detentions of journalists and media workers, including the detention of American filmmaker Ivor Shearer and his Afghan colleague Faizullah Faizbakhsh, show the group’s utter lack of commitment to the principle of freedom of the press in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “Taliban officials must immediately release Shearer and Faizbakhsh and stop their intimidation and pressure on the press in Afghanistan.”

In February 2022, Shearer arrived in Afghanistan on a one-month visa after receiving a work permit from the Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs to produce a documentary about the last 40 years of Afghanistan’s history, according to the journalists familiar with the case. Shearer’s film and video work has been shown across the U.S. and internationally in museums and film festivals.

Faizbakhsh works as a producer supporting international journalists in Afghanistan and was contracted by Shearer, according to the journalists familiar with the case.

On March 3, Shearer was issued a one-year work permit by the Taliban’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and was able to extend his visa to stay until September. 

In mid-June, Shearer was summoned to the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi questioned and asked him to present his past work, one of the journalists familiar with the case told CPJ. According to that source, Shearer was told that he was summoned because Taliban intelligence was suspicious of his presence in Kabul. 

In mid-July, several Taliban intelligence agents visited a guest house where Shearer was staying in Kabul and questioned him about his work and stay, according to a journalist familiar with the case, who added that Shearer didn’t know if the visit was routine or if he was targeted because of his presence. 

On August 16, Balkhi again summoned Shearer, a journalist familiar with the case told CPJ. Shearer told the source that he was concerned about the summons and didn’t know if the Taliban would extend his visa beyond September or expel him from the country. CPJ was unable to confirm further details about the August 16 meeting. 

CPJ contacted Balkhi and Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but did not receive a response.

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

A year on from the fall of Kabul, Australian reporter Lynne O’Donnell returned to Afghanistan — and now says she’ll never go back.

O’Donnell returned for three days last month, only to be detained, forced to retract articles, and coerced into making a public apology for accusing the Taliban of sex slavery.

During this harrowing time, she was in close contact with Massoud Hossain, a Kabul-born photojournalist.

• READ MORE: Lynne O’Donnell: Taliban detained, abused and threatened me
• Afghanistan, the Taliban and the liberation narrative: Why it is so vital to be telling our own stories — Pacific Journalism Review
• LISTEN TO RNZ SATURDAY MORNINGS: Lynne O’Donnell and Massoud Hossain describe their ordeal
• See a gallery of Massoud Hossain’s images

The pair have worked together in Afghanistan for years, and both are on a Taliban death list.

Hossain is currently based in New Zealand, where he has been given asylum.

O’Donnell is a Foreign Policy columnist and was Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Associated Press (AP) between 2009-2017.

Hossaini is a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist who joined AFP in 2007. In 2021 he won the William Randolph Hearst Award for Excellence in Professional Journalism.

They talk to RNZ broadcaster Kim Hill on their experiences and how they see the future for Afghanistan.

O’Donnell’s introduction to her Foreign Policy report on July 20:

“I returned to Afghanistan this week, almost one year after the withdrawal of the US military cleared the way for the Taliban’s victory. I wanted to see for myself what had become of the country since I flew out of Kabul on August 15, 2021, hours before the Islamists began what many residents now refer to as a ‘reign of terror’…

“I left Afghanistan today after three days of cat-and-mouse with Taliban intelligence agents, who detained, abused, and threatened me and forced me to issue a barely literate retraction of reports they said had broken their laws and offended Afghan culture. If I did not, they said, they’d send me to jail.”

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

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

Gurjodh Singh was leaning against a rusted vehicle barrier — planted like a giant jack in the sand — at the end of the line of migrants. It was late July, and about 400 people seeking asylum are waiting alongside a gap in the border fence as dawn breaks over the sky in southern Arizona.

Singh is 22, fleeing India for America, without any family, to seek political asylum. Slipping off the vehicle barrier, he joined a huddle of five other Indian men, all Sikhs from the state of Punjab. A Border Patrol agent told Singh he had to move to the back of the line because he didn’t have papers. The rest of the men recovered their IDs after being robbed on a grueling monthslong trek across the jungles of Panama, but Singh still has no ID.

As the minutes tick by, the sky brightens, and the temperature notches steadily upward, reaching above 110 degrees that day. The men are waiting for the agents to begin their processing and load them onto buses heading to a nearby Border Patrol station.

Word has begun circulating amongst those seeking asylum in the Yuma area: Border Patrol is forcing everyone to throw away all personal belongings, except for cellphones, wallets, and travel documents. Agents are demanding Sikh men remove their turbans and are dumping the sacred religious garb in the trash.

Bhupinder, an 18-year-old Sikh man wearing a purple turban, said, simply, “I can’t take it off.” An important expression of Sikh men’s faith is not cutting their hair, and covering their head with a turban.

Border Patrol confiscates shoelaces and toothpaste, among other personal items, as they process migrants in Yuma, Ariz., in late July 2022. Backpacks, toiletries, clothes, religious objects, and sometimes personal documents are thrown away.

Photo: John Washington/Arizona Luminaria

An immigrant discards some of his belongings as he waits to be processed by the U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the border from Mexico in Yuma, Ariz., on June 22, 2022.

Photo: Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by John Washington.

The country’s current foreign agent legislation requires the Ministry of Justice to prove that a person or organization has received foreign funding before it can include them on one of four lists.

A new bill under consideration in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s legislature, would consolidate those lists into one registry and remove the burden of proof from the ministry, according to the text of the bill, published on the Duma’s website, and news reports. The proposed law says anyone who “has received support and/or is otherwise under foreign influence” and whose work is widely disseminated or involves politics or the military would be labeled as a foreign agent.

The bill passed its second reading in the Duma on Tuesday, June 28, according to those reports; a further reading is scheduled for Wednesday, after which it can pass to the upper house of the legislature and then to President Vladimir Putin for approval.

“Russia’s foreign agent law is already one of the government’s favored tools to harass and restrict the press; instead of passing new bills that make it easier to label a journalist as a foreign agent, authorities should pare back the existing law to ensure that the media can work freely,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Journalists cannot do their jobs if they are under a constant barrage of politically motivated and vague regulations.”

The draft legislation requires those added to the foreign agents register to report foreign sources of funding and the amount of funds received, and disclose their bank accounts. The bill empowers the Ministry of Justice to request Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media state regulator, to restrict access to websites that fail to comply with those requirements or those of the current legislation, which also mandates that foreign agents regularly submit details reports of their activities and expenses to the government.

The Russian criminal code carries five-year prison terms for noncompliance with the foreign agent requirements; the draft legislation does not include any changes to that penalty.

The bill also proposes to create a single registry of people “affiliated” with foreign agents, including current or former employees of media outlets that are designated as foreign agents. It does not specify what, if any, the legal obligations would be of those added to the “affiliated” list, but says they are not subject to same requirements as those listed on the foreign agents register.

On June 14, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia’s current foreign agents legislation violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

On June 27, Maria Borzunova, a journalist with the independent TV station Dozhd, was labeled as a foreign agent after she received money transfers from a Belarusian and an American friend as repayments for coffee and meals, according to news reports and a Telegram post by the journalist

CPJ emailed the State Duma for comment but did not receive any reply.

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

On Thursday the University of Calgary School of Public Policy released “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media”. With the exception of a blog by Dimitri Lascaris that dismantled its absurd ideological premises, coverage of the report was almost entirely uncritical. Headlines included: “Canada target of Russian disinformation, with tweets linked to foreign powers” (Globe and Mail), “Why is Canada the target of a Russian disinformation campaign?” (CJAD Montréal) and “Canada is target of Russian disinformation, with millions of tweets linked to Kremlin” (City News Toronto). The report’s lead author Jean-Christophe Boucher was a guest on multiple TV and radio outlets, labeling those who question the role of NATO expansion, the far Right and 2014 coup against an elected president in understanding the war in Ukraine “useful idiots” of Vladimir Putin.

Boucher and his co-researchers claim to have mapped over six million tweets in Canada about the conflict in Ukraine. They claim over a quarter of the tweets fall into five categories they label “pro-Russian narratives”. But they don’t even attempt to justify the five categories. Instead, they simply list the most prominent commentators and political figures promoting these ideas under the rubric of “Top Russian-influenced Accounts”. The list includes leftist journalists Aaron Maté, Benjamin Norton, Max Blumenthal, Richard Medhurst and John Pilger. But no evidence is offered to connect these individuals to Russia.

While “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media” reveals little, it has served its political purpose. It will further insulate Canadian officials from criticism of their policies by suggesting anyone questioning Ottawa’s Ukraine/NATO policies are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Boucher is a product of the Canadian military’s vast publicly financed ideological apparatus, which I detail in A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. He has been a fellow at the military and arms industry funded Canadian Global Affairs Institute and Dalhousie Centre for the Study of Security and Development. He advocates theories amenable to the military’s interests, including “strategic retrenchment: falling back on the people you can really trust”, which is a sophisticated way of saying Canada should deepen its alliance with the US empire. His academic profile says Boucher “is a co-lead of the Canadian Network on Information and Security, funded by the Department of National Defence” while his Canadian Global Affairs Institute bio notes that “he is currently responsible for more than $2.4M of funding from the Department of National Defence (DND) to study information operations.”

The military put up the money to establish the Canadian Network on Information and Security (CANIS) as a joint project between the University of Calgary’s Public Policy Institute and Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies. A 2020-21 DND report labels CANIS among three initiatives “launched to tackle DND/CAF’s most pressing challenges.”

The University of Calgary School of Public Policy is essentially a right-wing think tank housed at a university, according to Donald Gutstein, author of two books on Canadian think tanks. It was set up in 2008 with $4 million from leading oil and gas lawyer James Palmer and launched at a $500-a-plate gala that included a keynote speech by George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The supporters of militarism would like us to believe that anyone criticizing Canada and NATO’s policies on Ukraine is a Russian agent or a useful idiot. But people being paid to promote opinions favourable to arms makers, the US empire and powerful individuals should have little credibility when it comes to criticizing the motivation of others.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

On Sunday, May 29, Karimi and Samiullah were in the Haji Yaqub roundabout of Kabul District 10 to cover a protest by Afghan women for the local Salam Watander radio station when a Taliban intelligence agent approached Karimi, grabbed his hands, took his phone and voice recorder, and pushed him inside a traffic booth, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ via phone, and a report on Salam Watandar’s website. In the booth, the officer demanded to know who he worked for, questioned him about his coverage of the protest, and slapped his face while other agents reviewed the contents of Karimi’s phone, he said. 

“The Taliban must immediately release Jamaluddin Dildar and Mirza Hasani and investigate the detention and attack of Roman Karimi and the detention of his driver Samiullah,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Steven Butler. “The recent increase in arbitrary detentions of media workers and journalists mark a disturbing deterioration of press freedom and the ability of the Afghan people to access accurate, timely information.” 

Karimi told CPJ that intelligence agents then took him by military vehicle to the 10^th directorate of the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) in Kabul. While en route, the agents detained Samiullah, who was sent to pick up Karimi. The two were detained for seven hours, questioned about their work, and released on condition that they would not cover protests or similar events in the future, Karimi said. 

In another incident, on Tuesday, May 24, Taliban intelligence agents detained Dildar, owner and executive editor of local radio station Radio Saday-e-Gardez, at his office in Gardez city of Paktia province and transferred him to an undisclosed location, according to Dildar’s brother Parwiz Ahmad Dildar, who spoke to CPJ via phone, and news reports. The journalist’s brother said that the radio station has ceased operations since the arrest. 

Separately on the same day, Taliban intelligence agents detained Hasani, the former owner and editor of Radio Aftab, a local radio station in Daikundi province that stopped operations amid the Taliban takeover last August, at a checkpoint in District 12 of Herat city, according to a local journalist who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, news reports, and a tweet by Afghan journalist Alisher Shahir. The agents searched Hasani’s phone and, after seeing journalistic posts on his social media accounts, transferred him to the 12^th Directorate of Taliban’s GDI in Herat, the journalist said. The journalist told CPJ that Hasani was being held on accusations of working as a journalist for anti-Taliban militant group National Resistance Front (NRF), but has not been officially charged. 

CPJ contacted Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response. 

CPJ has documented the increasingly prominent role of the General Directorate of Intelligence in controlling news media and intimidating journalists in Afghanistan.

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

Sabiti and Matela told CPJ by phone that on May 18, Freddy Sombo, the head of the National Intelligence Agency (ANR) in the northwestern province of Tshuapa, summoned Sabiti, a reporter for the privately owned Radio Tshuapa for Development, Matela, a reporter for privately owned Radio Liberal FM, and Ngole, a reporter for privately owned Radio Boende, for questioning at ANR’s provincial headquarters in the capital, Boende. When the journalists arrived, Sombo yelled at them and accused them of tarnishing ANR’s image during a May 17 radio program hosted by Matela called “Let’s Talk About Education,” Sabiti told CPJ.

During the program, Sabiti and Ngole were critical of alleged irregularities during last year’s final examinations, which determine if students can go to college, and the prohibitive costs of those exams, Sabiti told CPJ. The three journalists denounced the alleged practice of some Boende schools in bribing teachers, invigilators, police, and intelligence officers to ignore cheating, and opined that the issues would be repeated this year.

Ngole told CPJ that Sombo then ordered his agents to strip the journalists and lock them in the ANR jail cells, where six officers beat the journalists with truncheons and deprived them of food for the rest of the day. Sombo did not answer CPJ’s calls for comment.

“It is intolerable that radio journalists Cédar Sabiti, Samuel Matela, and Junior Batu Ngole were detained and subjected to cruel and degrading punishment by intelligence officers, who acted violently and unlawfully because their boss felt aggrieved about the journalists’ commentary on a matter of enormous public interest,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “The Congolese government must act swiftly to stop the abuse of power by the country’s intelligence agents, who appear to have become a law unto themselves. They should begin by disciplining and prosecuting these officers as a deterrent to others.”

After a night in custody, the journalists were taken to the Boende High Court on May 19, where prosecutor Norbert Mampalanga interviewed them without a lawyer, said Sabiti. The prosecutor then ordered their unconditional release, as they had not committed an offense, according to Sabiti.

Matela was admitted to a local health clinic on May 19 and was treated for three days because of the beatings he endured in custody, according to Sabiti, who added that Tshuapa Governor Pancrace Boongo visited the clinic on May 21 to inquire about Matela’s health. Boongo did not answer CPJ’s calls for comment. CPJ could not confirm the details of Matela’s injuries.

Gaby Kuba, national president of the National Press Union of the Congo, tweeted his condemnation of the assault on the journalists.

Tharcisse Kasongo Mwema, spokesperson for Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi, told CPJ by phone that he was out of the country and that the president was unaware of the journalists’ alleged mistreatment by ANR agents. CPJ’s repeated calls to Mampalanga and Matrick Muyaya, a spokesperson for the Minister of Communication and Media, were not answered.

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

On April 25, Lawrand, a political programs manager and presenter at the independent Kabul News TV station, was summoned to the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), where he was detained, cursed at, and questioned for over two hours, according to the journalist, who posted about the incident on Facebook and talked to CPJ by phone, two activists with knowledge of the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity for fear of Taliban reprisal, news reports, and tweets by a former government official.

The activists told CPJ that the Taliban intelligence agents warned Lawrand that his TV shows shouldn’t criticize the Taliban and that he must not invite critical analysts to appear. The agents also reportedly warned that no one should know about the journalist’s detention and questioning or he would face graver consequences and called him an infidel, evil, atheist, and pig before releasing him.

“Taliban authorities must tell its General Directorate of Intelligence to stop detaining and using intimidation tactics against journalists like Jebran Lawrand,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “The Taliban needs to return to their original commitment to tolerate an independent media and must learn to accept criticism without taking retaliatory action.”   

Lawrand was summoned and detained a day after a Facebook post about his April 24, 2022 show, during which he disagreed with a Taliban supporter.

The journalist and the activists told CPJ that on April 25, while Lawrand was on his way home, several Taliban intelligence operatives from the counter-terrorism directorate told him that he wouldn’t face any further detention because of the April 24 show but could face future arrest or imprisonment if he continued to report the way he did.  

On April 27, Lawrand resigned from his job after 15 years as a journalist and has been in hiding since his detention, according to the activists. The activists said he continues to receive anonymous threats from unknown telephone numbers.

CPJ contacted Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response. CPJ has documented the increasingly prominent role of the GDI in controlling news media and intimidating journalists in Afghanistan.

CPJ is also investigating the alleged expulsion of Marjan Wafa, the only female journalist in Herat city, from a press conference by local Taliban officials on May 20, 2022.

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

On Friday, April 8, the Russian Ministry of Justice labeled three journalists—independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta correspondent Iryna Borukhovich; Ekaterina Mayakovskaya, a reporter for the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russia project Idel.Realii; and Andrei Filimonov, a contributor to another of RFE/RL’s Russia projects, Sibir.Realii—as “media foreign agents,” according to multiple news reports.

The following day, state media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked the independent news websites Holod and Discours.io, according to statements by both outlets. 

Separately on Friday, police briefly detained Yevgeny Levkovich, a reporter for Radio Svoboda, RFE/RL’s Russian service, at his home in Moscow, and charged him with “discrediting the army,” according to news reports and Facebook posts by Levkovich.

And on Sunday, April 10, two unidentified people attacked Vasiliy Vorona, a correspondent with the independent news website Sota.Vision, as he was interviewing people in Moscow, according to a report by Sota.Vision and the outlet’s editor Aleksey Obukhov, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

“Blocking websites, detaining journalists, adding them to the foreign agents list; in Russia, authorities will clearly use all means at their disposal to stifle independent reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must drop all charges against Yevgeny Levkovich, immediately repeal their arbitrary law on so-called foreign agents, and swiftly investigate the recent attack on journalist Vasiliy Vorona.”

Prior to being designated as a foreign agent, Borukhovich had recently covered Russia’s war on Ukraine for Novaya Gazeta. CPJ was unable to immediately locate examples of Mayakovskaya or Filimonov’s work after mid-February. Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24. 

Individuals on the foreign agent list must regularly submit detailed reports of their activities and expenses to authorities, and their status must be listed whenever they produce content or are mentioned in news articles, according to the law. Noncompliance could lead to a two-year prison sentence.

Earlier this month, Roskomnadzor also blocked the media websites Wonderzine and It’s My City, according to reports by both outlets.

In Moscow, police detained Levkovich for about five hours at the Teply Stan police station and charged him under Article 20.3.3 of the Administrative code for allegedly discrediting the army; convictions for that offense can carry a fine of up to 50,000 rubles (US$613).

Levkovich wrote on Facebook that his trial was scheduled for Monday, but he did not plan to attend because he did not “see the point” in contesting the charge.

Radio Svoboda wrote that the charge was likely related to Levkovich’s posts on social media, but did not say whether authorities had specified any posts prompting the charge. On his personal Facebook page, where he has about 36,000 followers, Levkovich recently wrote about Russia’s war on Ukraine.

In the incident involving Vorona, the unidentified attackers broke his glasses and injured his nose, saying that he “seemed suspicious” while he was interviewing people in Moscow about food shortages and other consequences of the war, according to Obukhov and the report by Sota.Vision.

Police detained both attackers and brought them, along with the journalist, to the Yasenevo police station; once there, police asked Vorona if he had any connection to Novaya Gazeta, Obukhov told CPJ.

Obukhov said that police released the attackers later on Sunday, and did not transfer the case to the Investigative Committee, where violations of the criminal code are investigated. Obukhov told CPJ that “police are trying their best to turn everything into an administrative matter.”

He added that Sota.Vision had asked the prosecutor’s office for an investigation into the attack to be opened under Article 144 of the criminal procedure code, which obliges authorities to verify any reports of a crime, but he had not received any response.

CPJ emailed the Russian Ministry of Justice and Roskomnadzor’s press service for comment, but did not receive any replies.  CPJ was unable to contact the Russian Interior Ministry for comment, as its website did not load.

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

On April 1, at approximately 10 a.m., two agents from the Department of State Security, commonly referred to as the political police, stopped Corzo in the street in the Colón municipality in the western Matanzas province, and demanded to know where he was headed and what he was doing, Corzo said in a video statement published by the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and of the Press (ICLEP), a press freedom organization which also publishes and distributes seven community newspapers in Cuba. Corzo is ICLEP’s executive director and was on his way to a reporting assignment, according to Normando Hernández, ICLEP’s general manager, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Corzo refused to answer the agents’ questions and got into a taxi and drove away, when he noticed that two men on motorcycles were following him. As soon as Corzo got out of the car, the two unidentified men dressed as civilians approached Corzo, repeatedly punched and kicked him, and left him lying on the ground, according to an ICLEP report and news reports. The men did not exchange any words with Corzo, nor take any of his possessions, according to the same sources.

“We are appalled by the brutal assault on Cuban journalist Alberto Corzo, which suspiciously occurred just minutes after he refused to provide information to the political police on his way to a reporting assignment,” said Ana Cristina Núñez, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean senior researcher. “Cuban authorities must conduct a transparent and independent investigation into the attack and bring those responsible to justice.”

A driver who was passing by the area saw Corzo lying injured on the street and took him to the Mario Muñoz Monroy Hospital, where staff were not able to do the necessary examinations due to lack of medical materials, Corzo said in the video statement.  

Corzo’s brother transferred the journalist to the Faustino Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a dislocated clavicle and hospitalized to treat his injuries, Corzo said. Corzo was released from the hospital on April 5.

Upon being released, Corzo went to the local police office to file a complaint, but the agent in charge said he could only take a statement, Corzo said in the video. “I accuse the regime, the dictatorship, and the political police of being responsible for the this attack I suffered,” the journalist said.

Cuban authorities have repeatedly targeted ICLEP journalists and outlets with various forms of harassment in retaliation for their independent reporting, including raids, detentions, and other forms of coercion. Corzo has been previously targeted with several intimidation tactics by Cuban authorities, including being arrested and interrogated, as documented by CPJ.

On December 7, 2021, at about 8:30 p.m., two unidentified men with their faces covered broke into the home of Mabel Páez, the director of the community newspaper El Majadero de Artemisa, one of seven ICLEP publications, and attacked her, as documented by CPJ at the time. The identity of the attackers remains unknown and ICLEP is unaware of any action conducted by authorities to investigate this incident, Hernández told CPJ.

“This is the modus operandi that the political police in Cuba are used to, to intimidate those who work for press freedom,” Hernández told CPJ, referring to the Corzo and Páez cases.

CPJ emailed the National Revolutionary Police and the Ministry of the Interior for comment but did not receive a response. 

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

On April 1, at approximately 10 a.m., two agents from the Department of State Security, commonly referred to as the political police, stopped Corzo in the street in the Colón municipality in the western Matanzas province, and demanded to know where he was headed and what he was doing, Corzo said in a video statement published by the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and of the Press (ICLEP), a press freedom organization which also publishes and distributes seven community newspapers in Cuba. Corzo is ICLEP’s executive director and was on his way to a reporting assignment, according to Normando Hernández, ICLEP’s general manager, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Corzo refused to answer the agents’ questions and got into a taxi and drove away, when he noticed that two men on motorcycles were following him. As soon as Corzo got out of the car, the two unidentified men dressed as civilians approached Corzo, repeatedly punched and kicked him, and left him lying on the ground, according to an ICLEP report and news reports. The men did not exchange any words with Corzo, nor take any of his possessions, according to the same sources.

“We are appalled by the brutal assault on Cuban journalist Alberto Corzo, which suspiciously occurred just minutes after he refused to provide information to the political police on his way to a reporting assignment,” said Ana Cristina Núñez, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean senior researcher. “Cuban authorities must conduct a transparent and independent investigation into the attack and bring those responsible to justice.”

A driver who was passing by the area saw Corzo lying injured on the street and took him to the Mario Muñoz Monroy Hospital, where staff were not able to do the necessary examinations due to lack of medical materials, Corzo said in the video statement.  

Corzo’s brother transferred the journalist to the Faustino Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a dislocated clavicle and hospitalized to treat his injuries, Corzo said. Corzo was released from the hospital on April 5.

Upon being released, Corzo went to the local police office to file a complaint, but the agent in charge said he could only take a statement, Corzo said in the video. “I accuse the regime, the dictatorship, and the political police of being responsible for the this attack I suffered,” the journalist said.

Cuban authorities have repeatedly targeted ICLEP journalists and outlets with various forms of harassment in retaliation for their independent reporting, including raids, detentions, and other forms of coercion. Corzo has been previously targeted with several intimidation tactics by Cuban authorities, including being arrested and interrogated, as documented by CPJ.

On December 7, 2021, at about 8:30 p.m., two unidentified men with their faces covered broke into the home of Mabel Páez, the director of the community newspaper El Majadero de Artemisa, one of seven ICLEP publications, and attacked her, as documented by CPJ at the time. The identity of the attackers remains unknown and ICLEP is unaware of any action conducted by authorities to investigate this incident, Hernández told CPJ.

“This is the modus operandi that the political police in Cuba are used to, to intimidate those who work for press freedom,” Hernández told CPJ, referring to the Corzo and Páez cases.

CPJ emailed the National Revolutionary Police and the Ministry of the Interior for comment but did not receive a response. 

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

On April 1, at a hearing at Dorogomilovsky district court in the capital Moscow, the state prosecutor requested two years of correctional labor for the former DOXA editors for allegedly involving minors in rallies, according to news reports. The editors–Armen Aramyan, Vladimir Metelkin, Alla Gutnikova, and Natalia Tyshkevich–were charged in April 2021 under Article 151.2 of the criminal code in connection with a January 2021 video asking authorities to stop intimidating students during political protests, and were placed under home detention, according to CPJ research and news reports.

The verdict in the case is scheduled for April 12, according to DOXA.

After the April 1 hearing, police arrested Tyshkevich, and a court the next day sentenced her to 15 days in prison for allegedly displaying prohibited symbols in 2017, according to DOXA.

Separately on April 1, the Russian Ministry of Justice recognized five more Russian journalists as so-called media foreign agents, according to media reports. On April 5, journalists Yevgeny Kiselyov and Matvei Ganapolsky were the first to be included on the Ministry of Justice’s list of “individuals labeled as foreign agents” for allegedly engaging in political activities funded by Ukraine, according to news reports. 

“Russia continuously resorts to using the arbitrary foreign agent law or fabricated cases to silence dissenting voices in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, from New York. “Russian authorities must stop their persecution of the student media outlet DOXA and immediately repeal the arbitrary law on foreign agents.”

Tyshkevich was detained after the April 1 DOXA hearing and held overnight at Tverskaya police station in Moscow, according to the outlet. Her last words at the hearing included the word “war” to refer to the military clashes in Ukraine, instead of  “special operation,” the government-approved term for the conflict, according to reports.

On April 2, Tyshkevich was sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest under part 1 of Article 20.3 of the administrative code for “displaying prohibited symbols” in a 2017 social media post containing a Ukrainian trident, which police called a symbol of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, according to the outlet and media reports. According to Tyshkevich’s lawyer, who was quoted in the DOXA report, the statute of limitations on this case expired in 2018.

On March 27, Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked DOXA’s page on the Russian social network VKontakte, according to reports.

The five journalists designated as “media-foreign agents” are former Dozhd TV (also known as TV Rain) journalist Maria Borzunova, Mediazona journalist Alla Konstantinova, The Bell founder Elizaveta Osetinskaya, The Bell editor-in-chief Irina Malkova, and Murad Muradov, a journalist for Kavkazsky Uzel (Caucasian Knot) in Dagestan.

Individuals on the list must regularly submit detailed reports of their activities and expenses, and the status must be listed whenever they produce content or are mentioned in news articles, according to the law. Non-compliance could lead to a two-year prison sentence.

Kiselyov and Ganapolsky, who were the first to be added to the list of “individuals labeled as foreign agents,” are two well-known journalists who left Russia in 2008 and 2014, respectively, and now work as journalists in Ukraine, according to a Reuters report. 

The ministry created the registry at the end of 2020, but it remained empty until now, according to reports. The list registers individuals who receive money from abroad, engage in “political activities,” or “collect information in the field of military and technical activities of Russia,” according to the same reports, and requires they indicate their status when contacting state agencies, according to the Media Rights Center, a Russian non-governmental organization. Non-compliance can lead to a five-year prison sentence.

CPJ emailed Roskomnadzor’s press service and the Russian Ministry of Justice but did not receive any replies.

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

“In their attempt to quash all independent coverage of the war in Ukraine, Russian authorities have closed down or otherwise silenced independent media outlets, and have forced journalists to flee from prosecution. Novaya Gazeta has been one of the last bastions of Russia’s free press,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said. “Russia’s draconian censorship tactics must stop. Now more than ever, it is critical that Russian news outlets be allowed to provide unbiased coverage. Novaya Gazeta must be allowed to operate freely.”

In its March 28 statement, Novaya Gazeta said the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had issued a warning over the newspaper’s coverage, and that it would cease publishing in print and online until the end of Russia’s so-called “special operation” in Ukraine.

According to reports by Russian state news agencies, authorities alleged that Novaya Gazeta published material from a group classified by the Russian government as a “foreign agent” without labeling it as such. The regulator previously sent Novaya Gazeta a warning for allegedly failing to mark foreign agent material on March 22, according to those reports.

Under Russia’s foreign agent law, a third warning for such an offense could result in the government closure of the news outlet.

Novaya Gazeta often publishes reporting critical of the Russian government, including the invasion of Ukraine, and recently covered an interview Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave to a group of independent Russian journalists.

Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief and founder of Novaya Gazeta and 2007 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for his work amid government repression.

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

“In their attempt to quash all independent coverage of the war in Ukraine, Russian authorities have closed down or otherwise silenced independent media outlets, and have forced journalists to flee from prosecution. Novaya Gazeta has been one of the last bastions of Russia’s free press,” said CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said. “Russia’s draconian censorship tactics must stop. Now more than ever, it is critical that Russian news outlets be allowed to provide unbiased coverage. Novaya Gazeta must be allowed to operate freely.”

In its March 28 statement, Novaya Gazeta said the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, had issued a warning over the newspaper’s coverage, and that it would cease publishing in print and online until the end of Russia’s so-called “special operation” in Ukraine.

According to reports by Russian state news agencies, authorities alleged that Novaya Gazeta published material from a group classified by the Russian government as a “foreign agent” without labeling it as such. The regulator previously sent Novaya Gazeta a warning for allegedly failing to mark foreign agent material on March 22, according to those reports.

Under Russia’s foreign agent law, a third warning for such an offense could result in the government closure of the news outlet.

Novaya Gazeta often publishes reporting critical of the Russian government, including the invasion of Ukraine, and recently covered an interview Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave to a group of independent Russian journalists.

Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief and founder of Novaya Gazeta and 2007 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for his work amid government repression.

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

On Thursday, March 17, Taliban agents from the General Directorate of Intelligence detained Aman as well as TOLOnews news manager Khapalwak Sapai and the channel’s legal adviser at its headquarters in District 10 of Kabul, the capital, according to BBC Persian and tweets by former TOLOnews journalists.

The former news director Lotfullah Najafizada said in a tweet that Aman remained in custody while the others were released. None of the sources named the legal adviser who was detained.

The Taliban has not confirmed detention of the three. Jawad Sargar, deputy director of the GDI’s directorate of media and publication, denied the detentions in response to a request for comment sent via messaging app.

“The Taliban must immediately release TOLOnews journalist Bahram Aman, and stop its intelligence agency from arbitrarily arresting and intimidating media personnel,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Afghanistan’s once thriving independent media community cannot operate effectively under constant Taliban threats and harassment.”

TOLOnews, a 24/7 news channel based in Afghanistan and owned by the United Arab Emirates-headquartered Moby Media Group, has continued to air news and current affairs since the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021. On Thursday, the Taliban’s Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in an official letter banned the airing of foreign soap operas by Moby Media Group’s TV stations, according to the Instagram page of independent Afghan news site Hasht-e Subh Daily and a Moby Media Group executive who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

CPJ has documented the increasingly prominent role of the intelligence agency in controlling news media and intimidating journalists in Afghanistan.

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

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukrainian journalists covered the war in the face of missile and rocket attacks and their Russian counterparts faced harsh crackdowns on their reporting of the conflict.

CPJ has compiled a weekly timeline of the war’s impact on journalists and independent media outlets in the region. For CPJ’s full coverage, including safety advice for journalists, click here.

February 28 – March 7, 2022

Journalists attacked, injured, killed while working in Ukraine

• RFE/RL Ukrainian Service journalist Maryan Kushnir,  who was embedded with the Ukrainian troops, suffered a concussion during a Russian attack on Ukrainian forces in the town of Baryshivka, east of Kyiv, early March 11.

• On March 6, Russian troops shot at and robbed freelance Swiss journalist Guillaume Briquet near the village of Vodyano-Lorino, in southern Ukraine’s Nikolaev region, according to media reports, a photo the journalist posted on Facebook, and an interview he gave to French TV station BFM TV.

• Ukrainian camera operator Yevhenii Sakun was killed in the Russian shelling of Kyiv’s television tower on March 1.

• On February 28, Russian soldiers fired on a team from the British broadcaster Sky News near the village of Stoyanka, in the Kyiv region. The soldiers shot chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay in the lower back, as well as camera operator Richie Mockler, who was hit twice in his body armor; Ramsay was recuperating from his injuries and his life was not in danger.

• For more details on these and other attacks, see CPJ’s news alerts here and here.

Russia tightens restrictions on journalists, news outlets

• Russia’s State Duma, the lower house of parliament, on March 10 approved the creation of a unified registry of individuals labeled as “foreign agents.” Previously, the Ministry of Justice kept two “foreign agent” registers: one for public associations and the other for mass media groups. The new legislation would create a third registry that could include current and former employees of foreign media outlets, their funders, and employees of domestic groups that receive foreign funding. The bill will be enacted if approved by the upper house of parliament and signed into law by the president.

• On March 4, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading “fake” news about the Ukraine war.   The new law prompted several international news outlets to temporarily suspend work in Russia or pull their news staff from the country, including the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, Italian state broadcaster RAI, Spanish news agency EFE, and The New York Times. Some later resumed operations.

• According to a 17-newsroom survey conducted by Russian independent journalism project Agentstvo,  published March 7, at least 150 journalists left Russia after the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

Russian authorities detain journalists covering anti-war protests

• More than 5,000 people were detained on March 6 at Russian anti-war protests, including at least 14 journalists, according to news reports and CPJ coverage. Numerous journalists were detained, and some were charged, at protests the previous weekend, as CPJ documented.

Russia blocks news websites and social media

• Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor blocked more than 20 news websites on March 6, including regional and Ukrainian sites. This was in addition to numerous Russian and foreign-based sites, as well as Twitter and Facebook, that were blocked the previous week, as CPJ documented.

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

This week, Russian forces in Ukraine have detained dozens of journalists and attempted to force Ukrainian journalists to produce pro-Russian propaganda. In Russia, authorities have detained at least 14 journalists who covered anti-war protests, and have expanded legislation that can restrict the press.

“Whether through the detention of journalists, direct threats to their physical well-being, or the introduction of new legislation restricting media freedom, Russian authorities are using all means at their disposal to establish an official narrative of their invasion of Ukraine,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “We call on the Russian authorities to stop making press freedom yet another casualty of their war.”

Russian harassment of journalists in Ukraine

On Tuesday, March 8, Viktoria Roshchina, a journalist for the independent Ukrainian television channel Hromadske, wrote on Facebook that Russian soldiers had recently fired on her vehicle in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporozhye region.

The journalist wrote that she and her driver came across a column of Russian tanks, and soldiers opened fire on their vehicle; after the pair escaped unharmed to a nearby house, they saw Russian troops open their car, which had a “Press” sticker on it, and steal Roshchina’s laptop and camera. CPJ messaged Roshchina for comment, but she did not reply.

Separately on Tuesday, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Berdyansk, Russian forces detained a group of about 50 journalists in an office belonging to the local media company PRO100, and tried to persuade them to broadcast Russian propaganda, according to multiple news reports.

The soldiers detained the journalists and asked them to collaborate with the Russian army and produce propaganda, according to those reports and a statement by Sergiy Tomilenko, head of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, which said the journalists refused and were eventually allowed to leave.