Sweeping powers claimed in the name of “security” and “efficiency.”

One president acting as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge.

No debate. No oversight. No limits.

This is how the Constitution dies—not with a coup, but with a pen.

The Unitary Executive Theory is no longer a theory—it’s the architecture of a dictatorship in motion.

Where past presidents have used executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements to circumvent Congress or sidestep the rule of law, President Trump is using executive orders to advance his “unitary executive theory” of governance, which is a thinly disguised excuse for a government by fiat.

In other words, these executive orders are the mechanism by which we finally arrive at a full-blown dictatorship.

America’s founders established a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in any single branch. To this end, the Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch, which makes the law; the executive branch, which enforces the law; and the judicial branch, which interprets the law.

And yet, despite this carefully balanced structure, we now find ourselves in a place the founders warned against.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat, the president has no unilateral authority to operate outside the Constitution’s system of checks and balances—no matter how urgent the crisis or how well-meaning the intentions.

This is what government by fiat looks like.

Where Congress was once the nation’s lawmaking body, its role is now being eclipsed by a deluge of executive directives—each one issued without public debate, legislative compromise, or judicial review.

These executive orders aren’t mere administrative housekeeping. They represent a radical shift in how power is exercised in America, bypassing democratic institutions in favor of unilateral command. From trade and immigration to surveillance, speech regulation, and policing, the president is claiming broad powers that traditionally reside with the legislative and judicial branches.

Some orders invoke national security to disrupt global markets. Others attempt to override congressional control over tariffs, fast-track weapons exports, or alter long-standing public protections through regulatory rollbacks. A few go even further—flirting with ideological loyalty tests for citizenship, chilling dissent through financial coercion, and expanding surveillance in ways that undermine due process and privacy.

Yet here’s where these actions run into constitutional peril: they redefine executive authority in ways that bypass the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. They centralize decision-making in the White House, sideline the legislative process, and reduce the judiciary to an afterthought—if not an outright obstacle.

Each of these directives, taken individually, might seem technocratic or temporary. But taken together, they reveal the architecture of a parallel legal order—one in which the president acts as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge. That is not how a constitutional republic operates. That is how a dictatorship begins.

Each of these orders marks another breach in the constitutional levee, eroding the rule of law and centralizing unchecked authority in the executive.

This is not merely policy by another name—it is the construction of a parallel legal order, where the president acts as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge—the very state of tyranny our founders sought to prevent.

This legal theory—the so-called Unitary Executive—is not new. But under this administration, it has metastasized into something far more dangerous: a doctrine of presidential infallibility.

What began as a constitutional interpretation that the president controls the executive branch has morphed into an ideological justification for unchecked power.

Under this theory, all executive agencies, decisions, and even enforcement priorities bend entirely to the will of the president—obliterating the idea of an independent bureaucracy or impartial governance.

The result? An imperial presidency cloaked in legalism.

Historically, every creeping dictatorship has followed this pattern: first, undermine the legislative process; then, centralize enforcement powers; finally, subjugate the judiciary or render it irrelevant. America is following that roadmap, one executive order at a time.

Even Supreme Court justices and legal scholars who once defended broad executive authority are beginning to voice concern.

Yet the real danger of the Unitary Executive Theory is not simply that it concentrates power in the hands of the president—it’s that it does so by ignoring the rest of the Constitution.

Respect for the Constitution means obeying it even when it’s inconvenient to do so.

We’re watching the collapse of constitutional constraints not through tanks in the streets, but through policy memos drafted in the West Wing.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. Even the most principled policies can be twisted to serve illegitimate ends once power and profit enter the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

We are approaching critical mass.

The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

Our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

This is how tyranny arrives: not with a constitutional amendment, but with a series of executive orders; not with a military coup, but with a legal memo; not with martial law, but with bureaucratic obedience and public indifference.

A government that rules by fiat, outside of constitutional checks and balances, is not a republic. It is a dictatorship in everything but name.

If freedom is to survive this constitutional crisis, We the People must reclaim our role as the ultimate check on government power.

That means holding every branch of government accountable to the rule of law. It means demanding that Congress do its job—not merely as a rubber stamp or partisan enabler, but as a coequal branch with the courage to rein in executive abuses.

It means insisting that the courts serve justice, not politics.

And it means refusing to normalize rule by decree, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

There is no freedom without limits on power.

There is no Constitution if it can be ignored by those who swear to uphold it.

The presidency was never meant to be a throne. The Constitution was never meant to be optional. And the people were never meant to be silent.

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 time to speak out is now.

As our revolutionary forefathers learned the hard way, once freedom is lost, it is rarely regained without a fight.

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

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

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 Khalil Mahmoud, 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.

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.”

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Don’t allow yourselves to forget.

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.

The post When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John W. Whitehead – Nisha Whitehead.

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.

Elon Musk was not the first supporter to celebrate a Trump victory by evoking Nazi Germany (PBS, 11/22/16).

There’s something about the start of a Trump presidency that makes grown men do strange things, like heiling Hitler.

Eight years ago, after Trump’s first election, white nationalist Richard Spencer couldn’t resist flashing a Nazi salute as he addressed a rally just blocks from the White House (PBS, 11/22/16).

This time around, a more prominent Trump supporter gave a Nazi salute in a bigger forum. “I never imagined we would see the day when what appears to be a Heil Hitler salute would be made behind the presidential seal,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler wrote on Twitter/X (1/20/25).

Nadler was referring to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s major patron. Having spent over $275 million backing Trump, Musk secured a speaking slot at Trump’s Inauguration Day rally at Capital One Arena.

Addressing the crowd from the same podium Trump would soon speak from, Musk gave a passionate Nazi salute. Then he did it again.

‘A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute’

The New York Times (1/20/25) reported “speculation” that Musk had given a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration.

The New York Times (1/20/25) described the moment:

[Musk] grunted and placed his hand to his heart before extending his arm out above his head with his palm facing down. After he turned around, he repeated the motion to those behind him.

“My heart goes out to you,” Musk then said. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”

The Times story was headlined, “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture.”

But speculation wasn’t needed. “Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,” wrote journalist Lenz Jacobsen. His story for the German newspaper Die Zeit (1/21/25) is headlined “A Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute.”

NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat was no less certain. “That was a Nazi salute—and a very belligerent one too,” she wrote on X (1/20/25).

Ben-Ghiat was commenting on a widely shared video posted by PBS’s NewsHour, which reported that “Musk gave what appeared to be a fascist salute.”

In a sign of the dangers that lie ahead for media, particularly public media, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gave Musk a pass for his racist salute, and instead took aim at PBS for posting video of it. Greene wrote on X (1/20/25):

I look forward to PBS NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds.

We will be in touch soon.

Meanwhile, the axe has already fallen on a Milwaukee meteorologist. CBS 58—whose call letters, coincidentally, are WDJT—dropped Sam Kuffel the day after she posted about Musk’s salute on her personal Instagram account (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 1/22/25). Over a picture of Musk, Kuffel’s post read: “Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration.”

‘The actual truth’

The idea that “Western Jewish populations” are “pushing…dialectical hatred of whites” is at the core of Nazi ideology. Musk declared it “the actual truth” (X, 11/15/23).

Reared in apartheid South Africa, Musk is no stranger to extremism. Like many on the far right, a favorite target of Musk’s is George Soros, the Jewish billionaire who funds lefty candidates and causes.

As Israeli newspaper Haaretz (1/20/25) reported:

Much of Musk’s criticism centers around Soros’ supposed role in the racist “great replacement theory,” whose proponents allege that Soros is funding waves of immigration that are meant to deliberately dilute the white population in order to reshape society and its politics. This conspiracy has been cited by white nationalists who have perpetrated deadly attacks in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo.

Soros is bent on “destroying Western civilization,” says Musk, who after making his Nazi salute thanked Trump’s supporters for assuring “the future of civilization.”

Musk has endorsed explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories. He responded “You have said the actual truth” (X, 11/15/23) to a user who posted:

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

Trump, of course, is also fluent in far-right ideology. His first wife, Ivana, said Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed (ABC, 12/20/23). As president, after white nationalists romped through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” in 2017, Trump famously said that some of them were “very fine people.”

And Musk isn’t just backing Trump; he’s also voiced support for far right candidates in Europe. “He has made recent statements in support of Germany’s far-right AfD party and British anti-immigration party Reform UK,” reported the BBC (1/21/25), which noted Musk’s “politics have increasingly shifted to the right.”

‘Musk stirs controversy’

Megan McArdle (Washington Post, 1/21/25) argues that democracy requires us to pretend that those who openly promote Nazi ideology are not actually doing so.

The only word my wife could utter as she handed me her phone Monday night was “watch.” And we did. Again and again, with our stomachs in knots.

My only comfort was knowing that Musk would be excoriated in the coming news cycle. But when I searched our hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, all I saw was a headline that read, “Elon Musk Gives Exuberant Speech at Inauguration.”

The post consisted of a one-minute video of Musk’s “high-energy speech,” and left out the jaw-dropping part: Musk, head on, eagerly giving a Nazi salute for all the world to see. The Post video only showed Musk’s second, comparatively lackluster salute, with his back to the cameras.

By late Tuesday morning, the Post had uploaded a new video that included a straight-on shot of Musk’s first salute, but under the anodyne headline: “Elon Musk Stirs Controversy Over Hand Gesture at Trump Rally.”

By Tuesday night, the Post had finally published its own story, as well as republished an AP story. The latter began:

Right-wing extremists are celebrating Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a speech Monday, although his intention wasn’t totally clear.

Meanwhile, Post columnist Megan McArdle claimed Musk’s salute may have been nothing more than “an awkward attempt to embody what he said next: ‘My heart goes out to you.’” In her column—headlined “The Missing Context From the Elon Musk Salute” (1/21/25)—McArdle wrote that Musk “made other awkward gestures” in his speech:

That may just be how he moves when he’s excited. Musk has said he is mildly autistic, and even high-functioning autistic people struggle with reading, and sending, accurate social cues.

A mogul with prime seating

Jeff Bezos (X, 1/20/25) posted this close-quarters view of Donald Trump’s inauguration, declaring himself “excited to collaborate.”

For the Post, its weak coverage of Musk’s salute comes at a time when the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has been busy supplicating himself before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/22/25).

Just ahead of the election, Bezos personally killed the Post’s endorsement of Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). Since Trump’s win, Bezos and the company he founded, Amazon, have lavished Trump and his family with millions of dollars. And the Post recently spiked a drawing by Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, which depicted Bezos and other tech billionaires groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).

That groveling is what enabled Bezos to view Trump’s inauguration up close. “Donald Trump did everything but invite the tech moguls to join him in taking the oath,” wrote the Post’s Ruth Marcus (1/20/25):

The scene—moguls with prime dais seating inside the cozy Rotunda, while lawmakers and governors and other luminaries were relegated to watching on screens—could not have been more revealing.

Amid Bezos’s politicking, the Post is in freefall, hemorrhaging talent and readers—yet another gift to Trump.

‘Pure propaganda’

Zeit Online (1/21/25) masked an image of Musk’s gesture in deference to Germany’s anti-Nazi laws.

Musk, notably, hasn’t denied that he made a Nazi salute. Instead, he’s lashed out on X (1/21/25, 1/22/25), the platform he owns, blaming the “pure propaganda” media and “radical leftists” for stirring up controversy. Musk also wrote on X (1/20/25) that “the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

But as Vanity Fair’s Kase Wickman (1/21/25) noted, “people weren’t calling him Hitler”:

They were saying that he made a gesture that people who really dig Hitler typically make. It would be very easy to just plainly say that that wasn’t the intention, but Musk just let that pass.

Still, Musk has defenders, most notably Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (X, 1/23/25) and the Anti-Defamation League. The latter claimed Musk “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” Let’s all “take a breath,” the ADL posted on X (1/20/25).

Despite billing itself as a defender of civil rights and the final arbiter on antisemitism, the ADL has long prioritized its right-wing agenda above all (In These Times, 7/21/20).

With its defense of Musk, “ADL opted to gaslight,” Haaretz’s Ben Samuels wrote on X (1/21/25). Samuels’ recent story (1/21/25) is headlined “Musk’s ‘Fascist Salute’: US Jewish Establishment Failed Its First Test With Trump 2.0.”

Much of US corporate media also failed that first test.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Pete Tucker.

• Firefighting in the LA wildfires becomes international effort, as death toll rises to 24; Governor lifts some environmental rules to speed rebuilding
• Biden touts foreign policy improvements in final State Department speech
• Gaza journalists decry genocide, deaths of 222 journalists and media workers
• Nationwide protests planned on Trump’s inauguration
• Supreme Court considers how broadly to apply federal “First Step Act” sentencing reforms
• Democratic lawmakers agree on $50 million plan to “Trump-proof” California
• UNICEF warns of a new era of crisis for children, 1 in 6 live in combat-affected areas

The post LA firefighting becomes international effort; Gaza journalists decry genocide, killings of media workers – January 13, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

Vanuatu has reaffirmed its global leadership in climate action as the first country to launch a technical assistance programme under the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage.

This historical achievement has been announced by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), according to a statement from the Department of Climate Change (DoCC) and the National Advisory Board (NAB) on Climate Change.

“Vanuatu will benefit from US$330,000 from the new Santiago Network to design a loss and damage country programme as a first step towards getting money directly into the hands of people who are suffering climate harm and communities taking action to address the unavoidable and irreversible impacts on agriculture, fisheries, biodiversity infrastructure, water supply, tourism, and other critical livelihood activities. With such a L&D programme,” the statement said.

• READ MORE: Other climate justice reports

“Vanuatu aims to be first in line to receive a large grant from the new UN Fund for responding to Loss and Damage holding US$700 million which has yet to be used.

“Loss and damage is a consequence of the worsening climate impacts being felt across Vanuatu’s islands, and driven by increases in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations which are caused primarily by fossil fuels and industry.

“Vanuatu is not responsible for climate change, and has contributed less than 0.0016 percent of global historical greenhouse gas emissions.

“Vanuatu’s climate vulnerability is one of the highest in the world.

“Despite best efforts by domestic communities, civil society, the private sector and government, Vanuatu’s climate vulnerability stems from insufficient global mitigation efforts, its direct exposure to a range of climate and non-climate risks, as well as inadequate levels of action and support for adaptation provided to Vanuatu as an unfulfilled obligation of rich developed countries under the UN Climate Treaty.”

The Santiago Network was recently set up under the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage (WIM) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) to enable technical assistance to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change at the local, national and regional level.

The technical assistance is intended for developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

The statement said that because Vanuatu’s negotiators were instrumental in the establishment of the Santiago Network, the DoCC had worked quickly to ensure direct benefits begin to flow to communities who are suffering climate loss and damage now.

“Now that an official call for proposals to support Vanuatu has been published on the Santiago Network website www.santiago-network.org, there is an opportunity for Vanuatu’s local Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), private sector, academic institutions, community associations, churches and even individuals to put in a bid to respond to the request,” the statement said.

“The only requirement for local entities to submit a bid is to become a member of the Santiago Network, with membership open to a huge range of Organisations, Bodies, Networks and Experts (OBNEs).

“Specifically defined, organisations are independent legal entities. Bodies are groups that are not necessarily independent legal entities. Networks ate interconnected groups of organisations or individuals that collaborate, share resources, or coordinate activities to achieve common goals.

“These networks can vary in structure, purpose, and scope but do not necessarily have legally established arrangements such as consortiums. Experts – individuals who are recognised specialists in a specific field.”

According to the statement, to become a member, a potential OBNE has to complete a simple form outlining their expertise, experience and commitment to the principles of the Santiago Network.

“The membership submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis, and once approved, OBNEs can make a formal bid to develop Vanuatu’s Loss and Damage programme for the UN Fund for responding to L&D,” the joint DoCC and NAB statement said.

“Vanuatu’s Ministry of Climate Change prefers that Pacific based OBNEs apply to provide this TA because they have deep cultural understanding and strong community ties, enabling them to design and implement context-specific, culturally appropriate solutions. Additionally, local and regional OBNEs have been shown to invest in strengthening national skills and knowledge, leaving behind lasting capacities that contribute to long-term resilience, and build strong local ownership and sustainability.”

The deadline for OBNEs to submit their bids is 5 January 2025.

There will be an open and transparent selection process taken by the UN to determine the best service provider to help Vanuatu and its people most effectively address growing climate losses and damages.

In addition to Vanuatu’s historic engagement with the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage, Vanuatu will also hold a board seat on the new Fund for Responding to L&D, as well as leading climate loss and damage initiatives at the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, advocating for a new Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty, developing a national Loss and Damage Policy Framework, undertaking community-led Loss and Damage Policy Labs and establishing a national Climate Change Fund to provide loss and damage finance to vulnerable people across the country.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

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

Imagine an experienced Ukrainian surgeon breaking down in front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.

Imagine the surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across Western media.

Here, in the real world, the horrific testimony of a British surgeon who had operated on children in Gaza targeted by Israeli drones after Israeli bombing attacks– something that happened ‘day after day after day’ – has been largely blanked.

Professor Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS surgeon who recently returned after working at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said he had ‘never seen anything on this scale, ever’. He has worked in a number of conflicts around the world, including the genocide in Rwanda.

Prof Mamode worked for a month between August and September as a volunteer for the charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians. In a hearing on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he told members of the UK parliamentary International Development Committee :

‘Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, “I was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter [a small, remotely-piloted helicopter drone] came down and hovered over me and shot me”.’

Prof Mamode told MPs he saw children with sniper injuries to the head. He also noted that the pellets fired by most drones were more destructive than bullets which would go straight through a victim’s body. Instead, the pellets would bounce around inside bodies, creating much more extensive damage.

A seven-year-old boy, who had been caught up in an Israeli bombing and then deliberately hit by an Israeli drone, came into the hospital with his stomach hanging out of his chest. He had further injuries to his liver, spleen, bowel and arteries.

‘He survived that and went out a week later. Whether he is still alive, I don’t know.’

The surgeon broke down three times during his testimony. He described one case of an 8-year-old girl who was bleeding to death during surgery: ‘I asked for a swab and they said, “No more swabs”’.

As he spoke to the MPs, he was momentarily overcome with emotion.

Simple medical items, such as sterile gloves and painkillers, are in short supply because of Israel’s blocking of aid into Gaza, said Prof Mamode. This also applies to basic items like soap and shampoo, leading to unhygienic conditions.

He added:

‘I saw I don’t know how many wounds with maggots in [them]. One of my colleagues took maggots out of a child’s throat in intensive care. There were flies in operating theatre landing in wounds.’

He told MPs that he had spent the entire month in the hospital, partly because it was not safe to travel around. But also because, in January 2024, Israel had bombed the guest house used by Medical Aid for Palestinians.

The surgeon believes that this was done deliberately by Israeli forces:

‘All of those guest houses are in the Israeli army’s computers and are designated safe houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the aim behind it is to discourage aid workers from coming.’

He said the same applied to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was in Gaza.

Labour MP and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Prof Mamode if he meant that rogue snipers were shooting at the armoured vehicles.

‘No, no. This is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and deliberately shooting.’

Prof Mamode’s Palestinian colleagues told him that when Israeli forces attacked the hospital in February, they killed members of staff and deposited them in a mass grave with dead patients. Many other colleagues were taken away. The surgeon related one such case:

‘They [Israeli soldiers] just took him away and killed him. That’s what’s going on. As far as I can see, it doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you are a Palestinian in Gaza, you are a target.’

Champion said in her parliamentary summary:

‘The Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now.’

This should have generated massive coverage across national news media, with the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy being bombarded by questions from journalists on what action the UK government would now take. Instead, there has been virtual silence. As far as we can tell, there was no broadcast coverage on BBC News, Sky News or ITV, although Channel 4 News did include an item on Prof Mamode’s testimony, at least on its X feed (we could not find a broadcast item, however, on the Channel 4 News programme catch-up page). We do not have the resources to monitor all television and radio programmes, so we cannot rule out that there was a passing mention on the BBC World Service or elsewhere.

Nor were there any editorials or significant coverage in major news reports in UK national newspapers. Prof Mamode’s appearance before the parliamentary committee was reported in a live Guardian blog about Gaza on 12 November, but his most compelling and harrowing evidence was omitted or glossed over. To his credit, Owen Jones mentioned the surgeon’s account in a Guardian opinion piece.

The appalling lack of serious coverage is actually highlighted by the fact that there was one article on the BBC News website about Prof Mamode’s testimony to the committee (we were alerted to it by a post on X by one of our followers). The article was titled, ‘Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting children’. As is often the case, the word ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli’ – as in ‘Israeli drones’ – was missing from the headline. In other words, the perpetrator of violence was missing. Moreover, rather than refer to Prof Mamode as a British surgeon, he was labelled as a ‘Gaza surgeon’, perhaps implying that he was employed by the ‘Hamas-run health ministry’, the phrase that is routinely deployed in BBC News reports.

But here was the most glaring feature of the piece: rather than being placed on the front page or even somewhere in the section marked, ‘Israel-Gaza war’, a glaring misnomer for an ongoing genocide, it appeared deep inside the BBC’s ‘Local News’ category on the page for ‘Hampshire & Isle of Wight’. (As far as we know, it never appeared in a more prominent place on the BBC News website. But the fact that the bottom of the article contains the line, ‘Get in touch: Do you have a story BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight should cover?’, suggests that it was immediately placed in that section). The same treatment was afforded to an earlier BBC News article in October, shortly after the surgeon had returned from Gaza, but with the most disturbing details about the deliberate targeting of children omitted.

Why place such an important story in the ‘Hampshire & Isle Of Wight’ local news section of the BBC website? The ostensible reason is that Prof Mamode comes from Brockenhurst, a New Forest village in Hampshire. But surely the real reason was to minimise public attention and thus evade pressure from the powerful Israel lobby. After all, as we have mentioned before, senior BBC News staff have admitted to ‘waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis’. The Israel lobby’s weaponising of antisemitism, which was deployed to prevent Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, is being used to suppress or silence criticism of Israel. This has had a crippling effect on journalism and free speech.

Regular readers will recall the dearth of media coverage given to the harrowing testimony provided by Professor Nick Maynard, a UK surgeon who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital, when he returned from Gaza earlier this year. He had described the clear, deliberate targeting of hospital and healthcare facilities; but also the actual execution of Palestinian surgeons and other medical staff.

In April, Prof Maynard said that Israeli forces are: ‘systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.’

He described what had happened to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where he had previously worked, and where around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces:

‘Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].’

He added: ‘And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.’

All of the above, taken together with the media’s recent gaslighting about a supposed ‘pogrom’ against rampaging Israeli football fans chanting genocidal, anti-Arab slogans in Amsterdam last week – disinformation expertly dissected by Richard Sanders for Double Down News – reveals like never before the monstrous, genocide-enabling reality of ‘mainstream’ news media.

Meanwhile, Israel appears able to continue unimpeded in its brutal drive towards a ‘Greater Israel’, openly espoused by Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, which would require the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ‘from the Jordan to the sea’.

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

Mexico is making history today as the country prepares to inaugurate the first woman to be elected president. Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and the former mayor of Mexico City, won a landslide victory in Mexico’s June elections. Sheinbaum is a member of the ruling Morena party and a close ally of outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term ends today. AMLO, as he’s widely known, leaves behind a complicated legacy as Mexico’s most popular president in decades whose approval rating never dropped below 60%. AMLO championed a “progressive reframing of anti-corruption politics that thinks of neoliberalism itself as a form of corruption,” says Edwin Ackerman, sociology professor at Syracuse University, who lays out how the president’s economic policies dramatically increased the economic power of the working classes in Mexico. However, Ackerman says AMLO also faced criticism for empowering the military, increasing the use of fossil fuels and pushing through highly contested judicial reform.

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

Image by Ian Hutchinson.

In Baghdad, the colonnaded streets and labyrinthine alleys of the old downtown are ghostlike by night. Here and there in the sprawling suburbs, hordes of depoliticized consumers swarm around neoliberal monuments of worship, parking their “cool” four-by-fours along Vegas-like avenues for an over-priced dinner of junk food from whatever spot social media influencers decide is in vogue.

At clogged crossroads, haggard children wipe windshields for a penny, unseen. Soldiers, concrete slabs, and images of dead militiamen are the paraphernalia of war and yesteryear’s security regimes, here for a latent state of emergency that lurks underneath a carefully manicured spectacle of a malformed, vulgar Iraqi renaissance.

Twenty-one years since the American-led invasion and occupation of Baghdad, this traumatizing mise-en-scène of a defeated city is a theatre where the obscenities of the corrupt and the nouveau riche play out, a soaring class wound incised deep in society after decades of patronage politics and theft articulating the unannounced.

The war raging far away in Palestine’s Ghezzeh seems like a distant, almost irrelevant phenomenon. A New York Times reporter with a questionable understanding of the region said that, although Iraqis are sympathetic with Palestinians, they “still feel overwhelmed by the aftermath of Iraq’s own conflicts.”

True, Iraqis may seem to be following the news of Palestine and their own country in silence, finding in sarcasm a momentary refuge from the countless indignities of everyday life, the slow death of their beloved cities, and the televised carnage Israel inflicts on the bodies, and abodes of the people of Ghezzeh.

The forced quietude of the Arab street has become a mirror for the Palestinian genocide. Yet in Iraq, this supposed resignation has less to do with an inward-looking, bruised nation than the appropriation and monopolization of every manifestation of solidarity by Shia armed and political factions.

The memories of sectarian violence and concomitant Palestinian cleansing, the state grab, and encroachment over the public sphere by these groupings have pushed Palestine solidarity to an ephemeral cyber sphere and bourgeois emporiums.

George Galloway and other supposed allies of the white Western “left” need to take heed.

In Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and even Riyadh, years of warfare and decades-long political and security backing from the West have left organized opposition wounded, at loss. In both the urban and digital spheres they find a sleepless panopticon. Yet people have nevertheless spent years daring security apparatuses to find effective means of solidarity and peaceful expression.

“If the Muslim world was a real thing,” Galloway wrote on X, after the recent massacre of some 100 worshippers in Ghezzeh, “politically speaking, the massacre of over one hundred worshipers reading [sic] their Fajr prayer in Gaza this morning would be the last straw.”

“Where is the Ummah,” Myriam François, an outspoken journalist, wrote in another absurd X post in Arabic. Does the Palestinian cause concern Muslims alone?

Not only are the specificities of the Arab context made irrelevant, it seems that solidarity in an increasingly Right-leaning West has become an exercise in gaslighting.

Much ink was spilled on the “heroics” of American students and scholars in support of Palestine, less so on their Arab peers. Carrion-eaters in the western hemisphere have turned Ghezzeh, as the entire Arab world beforehand, into a career. Meanwhile, to the members of the tourist club of “Middle East correspondents,” it remains business as usual. There exists no urge to pen an op-ed against a biased, anti-Palestinian industry. Others pen bland columns, blabber on talk shows, and cash in by assuming the spokesman/woman-ship for the Palestinian wound abroad.

But what would it take to listen to, rather than speak over, Palestinians today?

Unrecognizable limbs, more limbs, a bag of charred human flesh and faces of shell-shocked children decorate the social media pages of famed influencers like a prized commodity hanged for legitimation. “How many more headless babies does it take!” goes the disingenuous cry. Aside from the harm inflicted by this guilt-driven urge to do something, white savorism, it seems, remains infectious.

Meanwhile, some diaspora artists and academics went as far as cheering on the “Iraqi Resistance” from the comfort of Berkley and London, leaving Iraqis wondering if these arm-chair revolutionaries would abandon their lives for tenure in Kufa, where they would surely join the downtrodden in future uprisings against the militias of this state-in-violation. Assuming their fluency in Arabic, perhaps they would file vicious tirades to the local press, too, brushing aside fears of a spectacular reprisal.

While Palestinians’ path of resistance is clear, the story is tad different in Iraq. For it is in the very nadir from which militia’s anti-imperialist rhetoric comes that the blood of their victims was spilled before and after the October Uprising of 2019, when thousands of Iraqis rose against two-decades of a lethally-failing US-installed, Iran-dominated political (dis)order.

Alas, it is the South West Asian and North African populations, those who are reduced to exotic objects of seasonal academic inquiry, and whose lands are haunted by the political decisions of diaspora communities, including Muslim voters and loyal state-department servants, who are to blame.

The Arab street has become a testing ground for the latest weaponry, a dream destination for the uninvited experts of America’s Middle East/Arab Operations (sorry, Studies) elite programs, and lastly, a site where a pampered “left” now projects its own impotence.

Leftists in Arab-authoritarianism have their own fights to undertake on their own terms, at the forefront of which is wrestling Palestine off the mediocre discourse of their rulers. They wait for no directives from an aloof “left”, let alone academics, in the West. Spare them your condescension.

The post When Western Solidarity Becomes an Exercise in Gaslighting appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nabil Salih.

South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol appointed Thae, 62, as secretary general of the country’s Peaceful Unification Advisory Council on July 18, making him the first defector to hold a vice-ministerial position in the South Korean government.

Thae was born in Pyongyang in 1962, graduated from Pyongyang Foreign Language Institute and Pyongyang University of International Relations, and was a professional diplomat who worked at the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While working as an attaché at the North Korean Embassy in the UK in 2016, he defected to South Korea with his family. 

Four years later, Thae won a seat in the National Assembly, representing Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam district. He became the first North Korean escapee who had previously served in the North Korean government to join the legislative body.

---

“North Korean residents are also proud citizens of the Republic of Korea,” he said on social media, using the official name of South Korea. “North Korean escapees can hold any position for the country and people without any discrimination or prejudice.”

He said the appointment was meaningful in that it shows the North Korean people that those who have escaped can achieve success in the South.

Since the division of the two Koreas more than 34,000 people have fled the North to resettle in the South, according to statistics from the South Korean Ministry of Unification.

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The news of Thae’s appointment was inspiring to Kim Sukyong, who himself escaped North Korea in 1998 and settled in the United States. 

 “When I heard this, it was clear that South Korea is a democratic country where if you have the desire and ability, you can become anything,” said Kim, who serves as vice chairman of the Unification Education Division of the Washington Chapter of the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council.

She said that North Koreans who learn of Thae’s success will expect more freedom in their own lives.

“People who were begging on the streets in North Korea can come to South Korea and get famous,” she said. “Those who arrive (in South Korea) by boat can study hard there and succeed. It shows that … South Korea offers more opportunities and freedom than North Korea. People in North Korea will come to realize this.”

 A number of North Korean escapees have entered high-ranking public positions in South Korea in recent years.

In May, Ko Yonghwan, a former first secretary at the North Korean embassy in Congo and the first North Korean defector to become a South Korean diplomat, was appointed as the president of the National Institute for Unification Education (NIU) under the Ministry of Unification. 

Ko, who defected from North Korea in 1991, was appointed as a special aide to the Unification Minister in September last year.

Kim Dong Su, who defected in the late 1990s and formerly served as the third secretary at North Korea's mission to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), was appointed as a director of the Korea Hana Foundation under the Ministry of Unification in 2022. In 2023, he was further appointed as a central committee member of the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council.

In addition to the appointed high-ranking officials, North Korean escapee Park Choong-kwon is currently elected member of the South Korean National Assembly, following in the footsteps of Thae, Ji Seong-ho, who also won a seat in 2020, and Cho Myung-chul, who won a seat in the 2012 legislative election.

After his election in April, Park Choong-kwon told RFA that if North Koreans were to learn about the young North Korean elite who became a South Korean National Assembly member after defecting, it would likely be a significant shock to them.

 Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kim Jisu for RFA Korean.

Responsibility for national defense and security matters was transferred from acting President Myint Swe to Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, according to an announcement broadcast on state-run MRTV television Monday night.

Min Aung Hlaing is chairman of the State Administration Council, the formal name of the military junta that has ruled the country since a 2021 coup d’état.

The announcement comes more than a week before the junta’s 11-member National Defense and Security Council must decide whether to renew the country’s state of emergency for another six months when the current one expires on July 31. The acting president must approve renewals.

The junta has extended emergency rule several times since seizing power from the democratically elected government of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, who were arrested and subsequently jailed on what rights groups said were politically motivated charges.

Myint Swe held the post of first vice president before the 2021 coup and advanced to the presidency after Suu Kyi and Win Myint were arrested. 

As acting president, he was essentially a figurehead. But he did sign decrees issued by the junta government, which allowed the military a semblance of legitimacy.

Lately, he has been suffering from neurological disorders and peripheral neuropathy disease that affect his daily activities, according to state media.

‘Behaving like a monarch’

Nay Phone Latt, spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office under the shadow National Unity Government, said it was unsurprising that Min Aung Hlaing would grant himself another position. 

“In essence, Min Aung Hlaing is blatantly revealing to the public that he has no fear of wrongdoing and lacks any sense of moral conscience,” he said.

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Kyaw Zaw, spokesman for the NUG President’s Office, said Min Aung Hlaing’s actions show a disregard for the country and a lack of concern for the people. 

“It is evident that he is behaving like a monarch, treating the country as if it were his family’s sole business enterprise,” he said.

Some political analysts said the National Defense and Security Council, or NDSC, would extend emergency rule for the sixth time, continuing to give the military broad extraconstitutional powers amid ongoing armed conflict by resistance forces battling the army in many parts of Myanmar. 

But a lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said the move was unlikely because of the absence of Myint Swe and Vice President Henry Van Thio, who was allowed to retire in April due to health reasons, from the next NDSC meeting. Both were council members.

If they can’t participate, then the meeting wouldn’t achieve a quorum, rendering it illegitimate and preventing a legal extension of emergency rule, he said.

RFA could not reach junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on Monday.

Translated by Thane Aung and Aung Naing for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

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

On Sunday afternoon, Hassan Zaib, a reporter for the privately owned Urdu-language newspaper Daily Aaj, was in a car with his brother in the northwestern city of Peshawar when two unidentified assailants on a motorbike stopped the vehicle and shot the journalist dead on the spot, according to news reports.

“Authorities in Pakistan must immediately end this horrifying wave of violence and hold the perpetrators of the killing of journalist Malik Hassan Zaib to account,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “The continued impunity for those who attack journalists is creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in Pakistan, which prevents the practice of free and independent journalism.”

Information Minister Attaullah Tarar did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via text message.

At least six other journalists have been killed in Pakistan so far in 2024. Hassan Zaib is the third to die in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in addition to Khalil Jibran and Kamran Dawar. CPJ is investigating the motives behind the attacks.

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

Guilty on all 34 felony counts — that’s the historic verdict delivered Thursday by a New York jury in former President Donald Trump’s hush money and election fraud criminal trial. Trump was charged with falsifying business records to cover up payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in order to protect his 2016 presidential campaign and is now the first former president to be convicted of a felony, facing the possibility of up to four years in prison. Judge Juan Merchan set his sentencing date on July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention, where Trump will become the party’s official presidential nominee. Trump, who can still be president as a convicted felon, slammed the verdict as a “disgrace,” and his defense team plans to appeal. We speak with criminal defense attorney Ron Kuby, who followed the case closely and says there was a “tsunami of circumstantial evidence” that supported the prosecution’s case. “The defense never posed any sort of realistic counternarrative,” says Kuby.

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

Photo: Student protest against BlackRock Vice Chairman and then Pitzer Trustee Robert Fairbairn, on the wall of a Pitzer College dorm in Fall 2019. | Donnie Denome – The Student Life.

On April 1, the administration of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, outside of Los Angeles, announced that it would be suspending its student exchange program with the University of Haifa in Israel. The following day, the Dean of Faculty’s Office claimed in a statement that the decision to suspend the program did not “reflect an academic boycott,” but “lack of enrollments for at least five years, exchange imbalance, or curricular overlap.” The statement could have passed for a belated April Fool’s Day joke, seeing as how students and faculty at Pitzer and other schools belonging to the consortium of Claremont Colleges had been demanding their institutions sever ties with the Israeli economy and academia due to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has killed at least 34,488 Palestinians, including 14,500 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing.

The post Pitzer College Becomes First in US to Call for Academic Boycott of Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Arvind Dilawar.

Ngāti Kahungunu in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Hawkes Bay region has become the first indigenous Māori iwi (tribe) to sign a resolution calling for a “ceasefire in Palestine”, reports Te Ao Māori News.

Reporter Te Aniwaniwa Paterson talked to Te Otāne Huata, who has been organising peace rallies each Sunday at the Hastings Clock Tower.

“I have taken every opportunity at the iwi level to present the case that we should be standing in solidarity with the Palestinians,” Huata (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou, Te Arawa) said.

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• Other War on Gaza reports

“This means we don’t support the ongoing bombing and slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and also the brutal apartheid and occupation that’s happening in the occupied West Bank.”

This initiative started among Huata’s whānau who presented the case to their hapū Ngāti Rāhunga-i-te-Rangi, wider marae and eventually the iwi of Ngāti Kahungunu.

Huata has brought Palestinians into the conversation at iwi events, at hui-ā-motu with Te Kiingitanga and Rātana Pā, and subsequently on the Treaty Grounds.

“Then came to the hui-ā-iwi, last Friday, really with the intention of asking ‘what does kotahitanga look like?’ And what what can we present to the hui-ā-motu because Kahungunu will be hosting Hui Taumata on May 31 at Omahu marae.”

Māori iwi leadership in solidarity
Huata believes Māori cultural and iwi leadership can be used in solidarity with other minority groups and said it was important because all injustices were interconnected.

As part of the kaupapa, Huata choreographed a haka, written by his cousin Māhinarangi Huata-Harawira, “with the intention to not be flashy, or that you had to be the best performer”.

“Really the haka was about how we can all throughout the world stand in solidarity through this vessel of haka.”

Haka mō Paratinia is used at rallies and protests around Aotearoa.

The kaupapa was also brought to the stage this year in kapa haka regionals where Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga Pakeke carried Palestinian flags and messages of in support of a ceasefire.

“Tino rangatiratanga to me is not only self determination of our people, it is also collective liberation, so the oppressions of other marginalised Indigenous groups, are an oppression on everyone else,“ Huata said.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News/Māori Television.

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

Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.

Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:

My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)

Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:

The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.

But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:

The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.

I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.

Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.

In 2013, Simpson opined:

The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…

Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.

Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked

Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy

Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.

The BBC headline reporting this story read:

Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO

Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.

Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:

If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.

Needless to say, that was not to be.

On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.

On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals

Author Assal Rad responded:

Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.

The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’

What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid

And:

Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks

USA Today’s headline was surreal:

112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers

On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:

More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy

The standfirst (sub-heading):

Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush

Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.

It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:

ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104

Compare also its standfirst:

ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries

On 1 March, Associated Press reported:

The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)

The following day, a BBC headline read:

Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza

A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:

After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)

The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:

They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.

And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.

It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.

Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.

On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:

The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.

Brown commented on video footage:

Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.

Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.

“Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”

Brown added:

Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”

Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).

This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.

A BBC report on 5 March stated:

Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.

Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.

Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?

According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:

After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.

Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.

Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:

“It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.

”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.

”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”

CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:

We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.

On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:

UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

The UN added of its experts:

They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.

“Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.

None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:

During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.

Conclusion

It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:

Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:

Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:

The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)

See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’

Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.

We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:

What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)

The answer, of course, was oil.

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

Laurie Giordano stood before a committee of Florida lawmakers in 2020, her hands trembling. She was there to tell the story of her son Zachary Martin, a 16-year-old football player who had died from heat stroke three years earlier.

“No mom should ever drop their kid off at football practice and then never hear their voice again,” she said, pleading for the passage of a bill that would provide heat-illness protections for high school athletes in Florida. 

“Exertional heat stroke is 100 percent preventable and survivable, if we are prepared,” Giordano told the lawmakers. If her son were alive today, she said, he would be fighting for the bill’s protections, like rest and water breaks, which could have saved his life.

The legislators heeded her call and passed the Zachary Martin Act in her son’s honor just two months later. Since then, no student athlete has died from heat stroke in Florida, which now ranks highest in the country for its school sports safety provisions. 

Two years after Martin’s death in Fort Myers, a Haitian farmworker in his 40s named Clovis Excellent died from heat stroke at a farm just north in Bradenton. He had been working for five hours, pulling stakes from tomato beds in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, investigated his death and found that, given the intensity of the work, the temperatures he was exposed to were unsafe without regular breaks in the shade. But Utopia Farms II, like many farms in the state, did not require its workers to take breaks, no matter the heat. 

At least seven other outdoor workers died from heat illness in Florida in the two years between Martin’s and Excellent’s deaths, according to federal fatality records. During that time, labor advocates pushed lawmakers to establish heat-illness protections for Florida’s 2 million outdoor workers. These measures included rest breaks, shade, and water, as well as heat-illness first-aid training. 

But those efforts failed. More worker heat-safety bills have been filed in Florida than any other state, but none has made it past a single committee hearing.

Florida is the hottest state in the country and has some of the highest rates of hospitalization due to heat illness, which kills more than 1,200 Americans a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. The number of workplace fatalities from heat has doubled since the 1990s, averaging over 40 workplace deaths a year for the last five years. While California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington have all passed regulations to protect workers from heat illness, there is no national heat standard; OSHA, the federal agency that regulates workplace safety, is in the process of drafting one, but it could take around seven years and there are no guarantees that it will be enacted.

Heat is already the deadliest weather event, and as climate change causes temperature spikes to become more common and unpredictable, the threat will only increase, especially for those most vulnerable to heat illness. No one can predict how communities will adapt — what investments will be made to prepare for the heat waves of the future and how those protections will be distributed — but the disparities in who lawmakers choose to protect are telling. 

When Zachary Martin, a 16-year-old football player, died from heat stroke, there was widespread press coverage and the Florida legislature voted unanimously to mandate that schools have emergency medical plans to treat heat injuries. 

When Clovis Excellent, a Haitian immigrant in his 40s, died from heat stroke, his name never appeared in the papers, and bills recommending similar protections were largely ignored by lawmakers.

On June 29, 2017, Laurie Giordano was checking her phone in her parked car near Riverdale High School when one of her son’s teammates tapped on the glass. 

“Zach is down,” the boy said. 

Her son Zachary, or “Big Zach,” as his friends called him, had been playing football since he was in eighth grade. The summer before his junior year, he stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighed 320 pounds, and wore a size 15 wide shoe. He wanted to play football in college, maybe even professionally. He worked hard in his classes and pushed himself during preseason practice, determined to be a starting player on the varsity team the next year.

When she got to the field, she saw Zachary seated on the ground. Two teammates were holding his arms and an assistant coach was propping him up from behind. Delgado told Grist that they were trying to keep him upright to prevent him from choking. The boy had collapsed after completing about three hours of indoor training and running drills outside in the 90-degree heat. His coaches and teammates had assumed Zachary was dehydrated, so they offered him water, but he immediately vomited after drinking it. Soon, his condition worsened. 

Zachary was moaning. His eyes were closed; his head, drooping. He hardly looked conscious. 

Giordano was shocked. “Everything in me was saying this was not right,” she told Grist. 

Delgado called 911. The fire department was the first to arrive on the scene, followed by the paramedics, who brought Giordano’s son to the hospital. The doctors determined that Zachary was suffering from heat stroke, a condition that can be fatal.

When a person reaches that stage of heat injury, the body loses its ability to cool itself, and internal temperatures can rise within a matter of minutes to 107, 108, 109 degrees. If the person is not rapidly cooled within the first 30 minutes, their organs can fail. Time is essential.

Zachary made it to the hospital over an hour after he collapsed. The doctors covered him in ice to try to lower his temperature. He was in a coma for more than a week. 

Giordano slept in the hospital every night. She saw him wake up twice: The first time, he tried to pull himself from his bed, half-conscious. It took multiple nurses to restrain him. 

“He was scared,” Giordano said. “He didn’t know where he was.”

The second time, all he could do was squeeze her hand.

Two days later, he died. 

“He fought,” Giordano said. “He fought so hard.” 

On the ride home from the hospital, Giordano remembers turning to her husband. 

“We’re not going to take a loss on Zach,” she told him.

“At the time, I wasn’t even 100 percent sure what had happened.” Giordano told Grist. But she sensed that the school’s response had been inadequate. Days after her son’s death, she set out to discover whether it could have been prevented.

She got on her computer and looked up what heat training Riverdale High School coaches received. The National Federation of State High School Associations certifies coaches throughout the country, and it had provided the training materials for Riverdale’s athletic staff. It had an online course on heat illness, but it was optional. She found that in Florida, no agency ensured that high school coaches were trained in heat-illness prevention.

Watching the online training videos, Giordano found that all the major symptoms of heat stroke — collapsing, disorientation, slurred speech, vomiting — were the exact symptoms Zachary had experienced. She also learned that, if treated quickly, heat stroke fatalities are entirely preventable using a technique called “cold water immersion.” It sounded essentially like dunking someone in a tub of ice water. 

“It can’t be that simple,” Giordano thought.

She looked at resources from the Korey Stringer Institute, a leading researcher in sports medicine that specializes in heat illness, and found that it was. Schools could use “cold tubs” — essentially plastic tubs filled with ice water — to save students’ lives. 

“As soon as I heard the term ‘cold tub,’ I knew exactly what they were talking about. Because I had seen them,” Giordano said.

The week before her son’s collapse, Giordano had seen him outside the high school’s athletic facility loading ice into a large plastic tub filled with water. When she asked him what he was doing, Zachary had said he was helping some teammates who were cramping from the heat. They would sit in the tub after practice to relax their muscles and cool down.

But when Zachary passed out, the tubs were nowhere in sight. And rather than moving Zachary to a shaded area and trying to immediately cool him, which the online training said was critical for survival, his coaches left him on the sundrenched field until the paramedics arrived. 

Giordano realized that the coaches at Riverdale had the tools they needed to save Zachary’s life. But when it mattered, they were not trained to use them.

She learned that the Florida High School Athletic Association, or FHSAA, was responsible for maintaining safety standards for the state’s high school sports teams. She met with its leadership to talk about the possibility of mandating heat-injury emergency plans.

The FHSAA had guidelines about heat-illness prevention but did not mandate training for coaches or the use of the cold water immersion tubs that would have saved Zachary’s life. The agency could investigate schools that were failing to uphold safety standards and penalize them if they failed to do so. But it did not proactively inspect schools, and its enforcement was largely based on self-reporting. The executive director of the organization, George Tomyn, told Giordano that the FHSAA lacked the authority and the capacity to mandate such policies for all of Florida’s schools. 

According to Rebecca Stearns, chief operating officer at the Korey Stringer Institute, many student athletic associations like the FHSAA, which set the statewide standards for high school sports around the country, assume that they are not ultimately responsible for enforcing safety standards in schools. 

“My question to them is always, ‘If not you, then who?’” Stearns said, noting that athletic associations have the medical expertise required to make informed decisions about student safety. Leaving it up to individual schools that lack these resources can lead to negative outcomes, she said. 

The FHSAA did not respond to requests for comment.

Fort Myers’ local newspaper, the News-Press, wrote over a dozen articles about Zachary’s death and the dispute over the FHSAA’s policies. The story was picked up regionally by Fox 4 News and nationally by HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, which ran a 15-minute segment in which they confronted George Tomyn for not mandating the use of cold water tubs, despite training materials their organization provided that recommended their use. 

The FHSAA debated the issue from 2017 to 2019. Their medical advisory board recommended that schools alter practice expectations based on the heat risk and keep cold water immersion tubs available. But the FHSAA decided not to act on the issue. They felt that the state legislature should be the one to enforce such a mandate. 

Giordano attended these meetings for two years. 

“It was heartbreaking,” she said. 

Two months later, Giordano learned that another student athlete, a 14-year-old named Hezekiah Walters, had died from heat stroke during preseason football practice in the state.

While Giordano continued her fight for student athlete protections, a crew of laborers at Utopia Farms II were working in the fields outside of Bradenton, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. They moved along rows of barren tomato vines, yanking out stakes and preparing for next season’s planting. 

A new employee, a man in his 40s who was working under the name Laurant Tersiuf, was struggling to keep up. 
Tersiuf had started at Utopia only three days prior, and his crew leader, Juan Lozano, had noticed him repeatedly sitting down between the rows to catch his breath and complaining of stomach pain. Lozano was unsure whether Tersiuf had worked in tomato fields before and assumed he was simply unaccustomed to the grueling work.

During the harvest season, tomato workers are paid for every pound they pick, with a typical day’s pay around $80. Hunched over for hours, pickers hurriedly yank tomatoes from the vines and drop them into plastic bins. When the bins are full, weighing over 30 pounds each, the workers hoist them onto their shoulders and rush down the rows to hurl their bin onto a truck that gradually moves along a dirt path, setting the pace for the workers. One worker carries over a ton of tomatoes per day. 

Farmworkers routinely avoid rest breaks because each minute spent resting is a minute of pay lost. Some even deliberately avoid drinking water so that they will not need to stop working to go to the toilet, which can be located hundreds of yards away, according to worker advocates.

By summertime, the tomato harvest is over, and workers are paid by the hour, not by the pace of their work, but it’s still one of the hardest seasons because of the heat. In temperatures that easily exceed 90 degrees, tomato workers clear and prep crop beds for the next growing season, often coming into contact with materials covered in pesticide residue. Some wear long sleeves, pants, gloves, and masks to protect themselves from the chemicals, but, according to a report by the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, this can make workers feel hotter by up to 12 degrees.

Work-safety specialists say these conditions can be life-threatening without the ability to take rest breaks, drink water, and access shade. But in Florida — where workers spend over 100 days of the year in temperatures exceeding the limit the CDC recommends before safety measures are taken — it is up to the workplace to decide whether to provide these basic protections.

Lozano told Tersiuf he could take a day off if he was feeling sick, but he would lose that day’s pay. Tersiuf took some Pepto Bismol and returned to work. The wet bulb globe temperature, which accounts for factors like cloud exposure and humidity, climbed to 92.3 degrees, over 10 degrees higher than what OSHA deems high risk for workers performing strenuous labor. At 1 p.m. on June 27, 2019, after working for six hours, Tersiuf asked Lozano if he could sit in the shade next to a trailer and rest. 

Around 3 p.m., according to investigators’ records, Tersiuf was found beside the trailer unconscious. The paramedics who arrived noted that his skin was dry and hot to the touch — a sign that his body had lost the ability to sweat. His temperature was 109 degrees. 

Tersiuf was rushed to Lakewood Ranch Medical Center in Bradenton, but the doctors could not stabilize his temperature in time. His body was so hot that his cells began to break down, leading to organ failure. 

Within two days, Laurant Tersiuf was dead. 

When the hospital went through his belongings, they found identification indicating that Tersiuf’s real name was Clovis Excellent. Like many undocumented immigrants, he had probably gone by an alias to avoid immigration enforcement. And like many undocumented workers, his death was never reported by the local papers. Neither were the other heat-related deaths of farmworkers in the two years between Martin’s and Excellent’s deaths. 

Administrators at Utopia Farms II notified OSHA about Excellent’s death, and the agency opened an investigation. OSHA has no mandated policies around heat exposure, despite demands for such provisions since the first years of its founding in the 1970s. They provide recommendations and educational materials about heat illness, but leave it up to businesses to decide what heat conditions are safe for their workers. And if a business chooses not to notify OSHA after a worker is seriously injured, as they are legally required to do, the agency may not even know about the incident. Injuries among undocumented migrant workers are easier to avoid reporting, because migrants often lack family and community members to advocate for them, are unaware of their rights, and fear retaliation. Researchers estimate that government reports on the number of occupational injuries among agricultural workers miss 79 percent of injuries and 74 percent of deaths.

In this sense, Excellent’s case is exceptional. Over several weeks following his death in 2019, federal investigators interviewed his co-workers and managers and inspected the fields where he worked. The investigators reprimanded the company for allowing their workers to perform such high-intensity work in extreme temperatures without shade or rest during the hottest period of the day. Utopia Farms II had provided fact sheets about the symptoms of heat illness to their workers in Spanish, English, and Creole, but investigators found that they had no plan to gradually introduce new hires — who make up 70 percent of reported worker-related heat fatalities, because their bodies are not acclimated — to the extreme temperatures. Clovis Excellent had been sent into the fields to work a full shift the same day he was hired and died five days into the job.

To redress Excellent’s death, OSHA requested in a citation letter that Utopia Farms II implement a new safety plan to prevent further heat injuries and send their agency a payment of $13,260. After Utopia challenged the fine, it was amended to $7,956. Because the agency has legal limits on the amount it can fine companies, the penalty was typical for serious violations of OSHA’s safety standards under its general duty clause. 

The basic safety measures from heat illness Utopia had failed to provide are ignored by farms throughout the country, in part because OSHA has not mandated their use. They are merely recommended. If OSHA’s proposed heat standard passes, businesses will be required to change their act. But the agency will most likely struggle to enforce the rule because of perennial funding and staffing issues and their limited fines. In Florida, the agency has employed 59 inspectors to oversee the state’s approximately 10 million workers.

For years, farmworkers throughout Florida had been speaking to local labor organizers about the dangers of heat. Jeannie Economos, an advocate with the Farmworker Association of Florida, had heard countless stories of dizzy spells, muscle cramps, nausea, and dark, painful urination workers experienced after long shifts in the heat. Many told her they felt pressured by their employers to keep working no matter how sick they were and felt powerless to protect themselves.

Economos wondered whether Florida could join the few states that had introduced their own regulations to protect workers from heat illness. She knew that it would be an uphill battle. Florida’s legislature was unfriendly to pro-worker regulation, particularly for migrants, who largely make up the state’s outdoor industries, including construction, landscaping, and agriculture. She anticipated the agricultural industry, which she had battled with for years, would try to stamp out any pro-worker reforms, as they had in the past.

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First, Economos wanted to better understand the problem and document its impacts. In 2017, she helped set up a research study conducted by the Farmworker Association of Florida and Emory University’s School of Nursing, which found that 84 percent of the workers they monitored experienced symptoms of heat exhaustion, like headaches, dizziness, and nausea. More than a third developed acute kidney injury on at least one day of work, which researchers say can be caused by heat exposure, potentially leading to chronic kidney disease. 

With their research in hand, the Farmworker Association consulted with other worker groups to draft a bill proposal. They decided that the rule would be voluntary, with no fines or enforcement mechanisms, hoping that by working with industry to address the problem their effort would be more favorable to the Republican majority. They found a Democratic lawmaker who was willing to sponsor the bill, which was first introduced in 2018. It recommended that outdoor workplaces provide access to water, rest, and shade for workers along with training and emergency medical plans to prevent fatalities.

The first two years it was proposed, the bill never had a hearing. Worker advocates tried to find a Republican sponsor hoping that this would encourage congressional leadership to at least consider the issue. They found a new senator named Ana Maria Rodriguez from Miami-Dade County, a bipartisan, Latino district, who was willing to carry the bill in 2020. 

That same year, the legislation for student athletes was being heard for the first time and was garnering attention. After the flurry of media coverage about Zachary’s case, Giordano was able to get meetings with senators to share her story and recommend reforms. The FHSAA had said that without state legislation they had no mandate to act, so lawmakers began to create one. Within months, a bill was drafted that required schools to monitor temperatures and adjust practice routines to adapt to heat levels. It called for regular water and rest breaks, training for coaches about heat-illness prevention, and cold water immersion tubs to treat students for heat stroke onsite.

Karen Woodall, a lobbyist for the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy, who had been working on the heat-illness protection bill for outdoor workers, was watching the progress of the student athlete bill closely. She attended the committee hearings where it was first discussed and noticed that the committee members “were pretty outraged by what they heard.” 

“I got up and said, ‘I know you’re talking about student athletes,” Woodall recalled, “‘but I want you to know that we have a bill about this very thing for outdoor workers.’” 

It felt like the energy around the issue might provide the worker bill with much needed momentum. The AFL-CIO staged a press conference where outdoor workers and their children spoke about the impacts of heat in the workplace and the playing field. One high school athlete, whose father was a migrant farmworker, said he hoped his father would be seen as worthy of the same protections he had been given. 

The bill for student athletes was approved by multiple committees. Representatives and school administrators debated the cost burden of mandating ice tubs and wet bulb globe thermometers, but the consensus was that a significant number of schools were failing to provide critical safety measures, the solutions were simple, and ignoring the issue would lead to more preventable deaths. 

Giordano’s story was a major driver for the issue.

“You meet a parent that lost a son and that’s a pretty powerful emotional testimony to have,” said Senator Keith Perry, a Republican and the owner of a roofing business, who ended up sponsoring the student athlete bill. “That’s why we started to go ahead and run this bill. … This seemed like a really easy solution to a tragic problem.”

Three months after the Zachary Martin Act was introduced, the Florida legislature voted unanimously for Governor Ron DeSantis to sign it into law. 

Meanwhile, the bill to protect outdoor workers went without a hearing for the third year in a row. 

In 2022, with Senator Rodriguez’s support, the bill was heard for the first time in the Senate Agriculture Committee. Senator Perry was a member of the committee. As the owner of a roofing business, he took an interest in the issue. After hearing from workers, business owners, labor advocates, and the widow of a construction worker who died from the heat, he joined the six other members of the committee in voting for the bill. 

The next day, it was sent to the Health Policy Committee, where it sat unaddressed until the legislative session ended.

When asked why the student bill had succeeded while the worker bill, calling for less strenuous protections, had failed, Perry equivocated, telling Grist that he did not remember the details of the worker bill that he had voted for. But, he said, typically students were in greater need of protection than adults, who were ultimately responsible for their own choices. Like many opponents of statewide protections for outdoor workers, Perry noted that OSHA already provides safety recommendations for avoiding heat injuries in the workplace — though it’s left up to individual businesses to act on them. 

Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative who has repeatedly sponsored the worker bill in the House, sees it differently. “We have an anti-immigrant governor who demonizes all immigrants, but especially those that come to our state in search of work,” she said. “Farmworkers are targeted, especially in Florida, by political actors.”

The bill was reintroduced to the Agriculture Committee this year. A workers’ advocacy group called WeCount spearheaded an effort to take up the issue on the county level as well. They helped push for an ordinance in Miami-Dade County that would fine employers in agriculture and construction who failed to provide water and shaded rest breaks in dangerous heat conditions. 

After a heat dome encircled the U.S. South last summer, organizers rallied large crowds to speak in favor of the ordinance at board hearings, and several prominent county officials, including County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, pledged their support. But facing fierce industry opposition, county officials voted to table the bill, and state congressional leaders moved to preemptively block their decision. Last week, a bill was approved that will void any local ordinances that protect workers from heat. The bill says that if federal OSHA does not create a national heat standard by 2028, the state’s Department of Commerce will have to create a statewide standard. But it doesn’t specify what the standard will require or whether it will include enforcement mechanisms like fines.

WeCount’s policy director, Esteban Wood, believes that the bill is intended to block their efforts in Miami-Dade and dissuade citizens and local officials from pushing for protections, rather than ensuring the safety of the state’s outdoor workers. 

“You become a little disillusioned with the process,” Wood said, noting that after years of resistance, it’s unlikely that the state legislature will pass a bill on its own that provides meaningful protections for workers. “It’s a symptom of a larger issue — of a lack of priority for the health and safety of workers.” 

Since Zachary Martin’s death, Florida schools are now required to monitor temperatures to ensure that students are not exposed to unsafe conditions and that cold water immersion tubs are available in case of emergencies. Since it passed, no student athlete in the state has died from heat. 

Since Clovis Excellent’s death, the legislature has taken no steps to protect outdoor workers from heat, while at least five more Florida workers have died from heat illness.

“I’m just a little incredulous that it hasn’t been passed yet,” said Giordano, who has recently begun to collaborate with WeCount in their efforts to pass protections for outdoor workers, while pushing for a national bill to protect student athletes.“If it’s hot, there should be water, and they should be able to take breaks,” she said, whether you are “working out for football or cheering, or someone working on a roof. 

“What does that hurt?” Giordano said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As heat becomes a national threat, who will be protected? on Mar 13, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Nate Rosenfield.

In his first four weeks in office, Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry has filled the ranks of state environmental posts with fossil fuel executives. 

Landry has taken aim at the state’s climate task force for possible elimination as part of a sweeping reorganization of Louisiana’s environmental bureaucracy. The goal, according to Landry’s executive order, is to “create a better prospective business climate.” 

And in his first month, Landry changed the name of the Department of Natural Resources, the state agency with oversight of the fossil fuel industry, by adding the word “energy” to its title.

While the United States and other countries have vowed to move away from fossil fuels, Landry is running in the opposite direction.

Landry, who has labeled climate change “a hoax,” wants to grow the oil and gas industry that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in Louisiana. Environmentalists blame the industry for the pollution that has harmed vulnerable communities in the state and for the climate change tied to increased flooding, land loss, drought, and heat waves in the Gulf Coast state.

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A key indicator of where Landry is headed is the choice of Tyler Gray to lead the state’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources. Gray enters the new administration after spending the past two years working for Placid Refining Company as the oil company’s corporate secretary and lobbyist. 

Before that, Gray spent seven years with the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, or LMOGA, his final two years serving as the lobbying group’s president. During his tenure with LMOGA, Gray helped draft the controversial 2018 law that criminalized protesting near the oil and gas pipelines and construction sites. 

At the time, Gray said the law was needed as protection from individuals who attempt to unlawfully interrupt the construction of pipeline projects or damage existing facilities. Greenpeace USA found such laws — enacted in 18 states — were directly tied to lobbying by the fossil fuel industry and resulted in insulating more than 60 percent of the U.S. gas and oil industry facilities from protest. 

Anne Rolfes with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a grassroots nonprofit focused on accountability in the petrochemical industry, has a grim outlook on Gray’s tenure. Her organization has been involved with many of the protests in question.

“His willingness to suppress people’s rights in favor of that industry is alarming,” Rolfes said.

“He’s been writing laws that favor the oil industry over the rights of people throughout his career,” she added. “But the state has never stood up to the oil industry. Under every administration there is this myopic idea of destroying our state via the oil and gas industry is somehow economic development.”

Neither Landry nor Gray’s office responded to multiple requests for comments.

Landry picks have oil, gas, and coal ties

Gray is one of several former fossil fuel executives Landry has selected to lead Louisiana’s environmental efforts.

Tony Alford, the former co-owner and president of a Houma-based oil-field service company that was accused of spilling toxic waste in a Montana lawsuit, is now the chairman of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection. And Benjamin Bienvenu, an oil industry executive and petroleum engineer, is serving as the commissioner of conservation within the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. 

Landry also tapped Aurelia Giacometto to lead the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. It was reported that Giacometto, the first Black woman to serve in the position, had ties with skeptics of climate science when she served under then-President Donald Trump as head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She currently sits on the board of a coal manufacturing company. 

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And Landry’s pick for the state’s new leader for the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Madison Sheahan, doesn’t have a background in wildlife — or fisheries. She enters the job after serving as the executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party and managing Trump’s re-election campaign in that state. The agency led by Sheahan is one of the state entities responsible for investigating oil spills.

At a recent press conference, Landry said he seeks to expand oil and gas refining in Louisiana, seeing it as the only way to increase job opportunities for the middle class. 

For environmentalists, these are worrying signs for a state that is the site of a boom in proposed liquified natural gas facilities and carbon capture projects that they say threaten to increase Louisiana’s already high contribution of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

In late January, President Joe Biden announced his administration was halting approvals of new liquified natural gas export facilities to examine the need for the additional capacity and the environmental impact of such projects. The temporary delay reportedly affects five projects in Louisiana and one in Texas. 

Louisiana’s ‘sacrifice zone’

Landry’s moves weren’t unexpected, advocates say, given his past actions as state attorney general and his combative stance toward environmental justice issues. 

Gray’s appointment is “disappointing but not surprising,” said Jackson Voss, climate policy coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

“Unfortunately, from our perspective, the history of the [Louisiana] Department of Natural Resources has always been very deeply connected with the oil and gas industry,” Voss said. “In some ways it helps us, because there’s not going to be very many surprises about where Secretary Gray will align on certain issues.” 

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In its latest report, Human Rights Watch highlighted the environmental harms and health-related issues the oil and gas industry is accused of inflicting on predominantly Black communities in the southeast Louisiana corridor known as Cancer Alley. The group is asking state leaders to phase out fossil fuel production and to halt any new developments or expansions to existing fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities. 

Author Antonia Juhasz interviewed dozens of residents living in Cancer Alley who talked about miscarriages, high-risk pregnancies, infertility, respiratory issues and a multitude of other health impacts in their communities. They attribute the maladies to years of pollution and dangerous emissions from the high concentration of polluting industries, especially in southern Louisiana.  

“The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has created a ‘sacrifice zone’ in Louisiana,” Juhasz, senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, said in a prepared statement. “The failure of state and federal authorities to properly regulate the industry has dire consequences for residents of Cancer Alley.”

Landry takes aim at oil and gas limits

As the state’s attorney general, Landry pushed lawsuits against restrictions the Biden administration tried to implement on offshore oil lease sales and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. 

He also sued over the Environmental Protection Agency’s push to better regulate emissions from oil and gas facilities in Cancer Alley.

A Trump-appointed federal district court judge in western Louisiana recently sided with Landry on that lawsuit. U.S. District Judge James Cain said in his opinion that the federal agency’s enhanced oversight of proposed projects in Cancer Alley communities overstepped its powers and that it was “imposing an improper financial burden on the state.” 

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As attorney general, Landry also sued to obtain correspondence between EPA, environmentalists and certain journalists. 

As governor, Landry has opposed Biden’s climate initiatives, including the push to increase manufacturing of electric vehicles. And Landry has claimed that boosting renewable energy in Louisiana, including solar and wind, would force the state into “energy poverty.” 

Oil and Gas Association applauds appointment

Landry’s pick of Gray was lauded by the president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. In a prepared statement, Mike Moncla praised Gray for knowing their industry “backwards and forwards.” 

“This appointment marks the state of a new era for our state’s oil and gas industry,” Moncla wrote. “We know that he will be an incredible asset for our industry.” 

At LMOGA, Gray also pushed back at any efforts to limit offshore drilling and domestic energy production to reduce planet-warming emissions. Gray said the country needed “sound, science-based policies” and solutions to address climate change that also promote “domestic energy development” while not stifling the state’s economy and job market. 

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LMOGA is a staunch supporter of carbon capture and sequestration. The agency Gray now leads recently received primary regulatory oversight from the federal government for the wells used to pump carbon dioxide underground for permanent storage. 

The technology is being touted as the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but debates are ongoing over its safety and effectiveness. 

Environmental advocates argue that carbon capture and storage is just a ploy to prolong the life of the fossil fuel industry instead of transitioning to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar. They lack confidence in the state’s ability to properly permit carbon capture projects with Gray at the helm. 

“With Gray’s appointment and then an already heavily underfunded and understaffed agency, it very much feels like they’ll be sending those permits through instead of truly evaluating them one by one,” said Angelle Bradford, a spokesperson with the Delta chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s once again the usual good-old-boy mentality where we’re putting people in positions who not only won’t follow the rules but create rules that make it harder for the other side, which is us.”

She added, “Louisiana is not taking the climate crisis seriously.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When a climate denier becomes Louisiana’s governor: Jeff Landry’s first month in office on Feb 15, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Terry L. Jones, Floodlight.

The post As GQ Absorbs Pitchfork, Music Media Becomes Even More Male-Centric appeared first on Project Censored.

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

The United States and Britain launched dozens of military strikes on Yemen on Thursday, raising fears of an escalation of conflict in the region. The strikes, launched in response to Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea that have disrupted global trade, left at least five people dead. The Houthi movement began targeting ships in November “essentially using a naval blockade in the Red Sea to prevent the blockade against civilians in Gaza,” according to our guest, Yemeni American scholar Shireen Al-Adeimi. “This is an offensive act. This is a breach of Yemeni sovereignty,” she says about the U.S. coalition’s strikes, which were launched without approval from Congress, and which Al-Adeimi additionally characterizes as “a defense of capitalism.”

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

The Marriage Equality Bill, which saw multiple versions proposed by the ruling and opposition parties as well as through a public petition, received resounding support in the House of Representatives. As many as 369 MPs voted in favor of it versus 10 who voted against the proposed legislation.

“The benefits of this [bill] affirm the government’s commitment to human rights,” Deputy Prime Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said while presenting the government’s version of the bill to Parliament. “We are working to ensure everyone has equal access to family life, free from unfair discrimination.”

“This law should not be seen as belonging to any particular party. It should be a collective effort for the benefit of all Thai society,” he said.

Different versions of the bill proposed by the ruling and opposition parties had only minor differences and had agreement on key issues.

The core feature common to all versions of the bill is the alteration of the marriage definition from a union between “male and female” to “two individuals (of any gender).” 

This change grants “spouses” access to a host of legal rights that were previously exclusive to heterosexual couples.

If approved by the king, the Thai government will publish the bill in the Royal Gazette before it becomes law – a process that would make Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia and only the third in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage.

There is no timeline for completing the process.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin previously announced that the Cabinet had approved a draft amendment to the code regulating civil unions in Thailand.

“This law will enable same-sex couples to engage and marry under the Civil and Commercial Code, granting them rights and responsibilities equal to heterosexual married couples,” he told reporters.

Tunyawaj Kamolwongwat, a member of the LGBTQ community and an MP from the main opposition Move Forward Party, addressed Parliament to share a personal perspective.

“I was born a transgender. Whether I laugh or cry, my transgender identity always remains with me,” Tunyawaj said. “Transgender individuals have a place in society, have rights and dignity, and deserve to live life as they wish, including within a family setting.”

Public support

The bill enjoys overwhelming support in Thailand, with a survey during formal public consultation showing nearly 97% in favor. 

Thailand boasts one of the most vibrant LGBTQ communities in Asia, a region where only Taiwan and Nepal previously recognized the rights of same-sex couples to marry.

Annually, thousands of Thais participate in Pride Month celebrations and tourism authorities actively promote the country’s welcoming environment for LGBTQ travelers.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, an American think-tank, revealed that 60% of Thai adults support the legalization of same-sex marriage. This places Thailand behind only Japan (68%) and Vietnam (65%) in terms of support for such a measure in Asia.

However, discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals persists in Thailand, particularly in employment and health care, advocates say.

Same-sex couples were previously unable to adopt children, make emergency health care decisions for their partners, or access spousal benefits, including tax deductions and government pensions.

If enacted, the law is expected to address many of these issues, said Matcha Phorn-in, a rights activist and executive director of the Sangsan Anakot Yawachon Development Project, an advocacy group led by LGBTQ feminists.

“Looking at the current societal atmosphere, there’s hardly any concern. The principles of all drafts show no hidden discrimination,” she said. 

“However, once the law passes, our next step is genuine participation. The law must not lead to people of diverse sexual orientations becoming second-class citizens through its enforcement.”

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

The Marriage Equality Bill, which saw multiple versions proposed by the ruling and opposition parties as well as through a public petition, received resounding support in the House of Representatives. As many as 369 MPs voted in favor of it versus 10 who voted against the proposed legislation.

“The benefits of this [bill] affirm the government’s commitment to human rights,” Deputy Prime Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said while presenting the government’s version of the bill to Parliament. “We are working to ensure everyone has equal access to family life, free from unfair discrimination.”

“This law should not be seen as belonging to any particular party. It should be a collective effort for the benefit of all Thai society,” he said.

Different versions of the bill proposed by the ruling and opposition parties had only minor differences and had agreement on key issues.

The core feature common to all versions of the bill is the alteration of the marriage definition from a union between “male and female” to “two individuals (of any gender).” 

This change grants “spouses” access to a host of legal rights that were previously exclusive to heterosexual couples.

If approved by the king, the Thai government will publish the bill in the Royal Gazette before it becomes law – a process that would make Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia and only the third in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage.

There is no timeline for completing the process.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin previously announced that the Cabinet had approved a draft amendment to the code regulating civil unions in Thailand.

“This law will enable same-sex couples to engage and marry under the Civil and Commercial Code, granting them rights and responsibilities equal to heterosexual married couples,” he told reporters.

Tunyawaj Kamolwongwat, a member of the LGBTQ community and an MP from the main opposition Move Forward Party, addressed Parliament to share a personal perspective.

“I was born a transgender. Whether I laugh or cry, my transgender identity always remains with me,” Tunyawaj said. “Transgender individuals have a place in society, have rights and dignity, and deserve to live life as they wish, including within a family setting.”

Public support

The bill enjoys overwhelming support in Thailand, with a survey during formal public consultation showing nearly 97% in favor. 

Thailand boasts one of the most vibrant LGBTQ communities in Asia, a region where only Taiwan and Nepal previously recognized the rights of same-sex couples to marry.

Annually, thousands of Thais participate in Pride Month celebrations and tourism authorities actively promote the country’s welcoming environment for LGBTQ travelers.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, an American think-tank, revealed that 60% of Thai adults support the legalization of same-sex marriage. This places Thailand behind only Japan (68%) and Vietnam (65%) in terms of support for such a measure in Asia.

However, discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals persists in Thailand, particularly in employment and health care, advocates say.

Same-sex couples were previously unable to adopt children, make emergency health care decisions for their partners, or access spousal benefits, including tax deductions and government pensions.

If enacted, the law is expected to address many of these issues, said Matcha Phorn-in, a rights activist and executive director of the Sangsan Anakot Yawachon Development Project, an advocacy group led by LGBTQ feminists.

“Looking at the current societal atmosphere, there’s hardly any concern. The principles of all drafts show no hidden discrimination,” she said. 

“However, once the law passes, our next step is genuine participation. The law must not lead to people of diverse sexual orientations becoming second-class citizens through its enforcement.”

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

"World leaders are not listening to the younger generation, so what if we turn young climate advocates into older versions of themselves—into their future voices?" said David Olsson of We Don't Have Time. "Then the demand for ending fossils and accelerating solutions can't be ignored. We encourage everyone to support this message."

The Future Voices website highlights that current children and young adults will suffer the consequences of the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency "to a much higher degree than previous generations," and already, youth worldwide are enduring the impacts of heating the planet and reporting that the crisis is taking a toll on their mental health.

The website features an interactive globe through which users can view video testimonies from campaigners around the world (also included below). One of them stars Swedish Fridays for Future and Climate Live campaigner Andreas Magnusson, who said in a statement that "in the fight against the climate crisis, including and listening to young people is crucial."

Speaking from Sweden in 2050, the AI-aged Magnusson says in his video that "in my hometown, Mockfjärd, I've seen landslide after landslide hit, caused by the heavy raining. And yet, I am not the one who suffers most. I come from a great place of privilege. I come from a part of the world that is not affected by nature's fury like other parts of the world are."

Activists from other parts of the world, in their own video messages from 2050, speak of "vast droughts causing water shortage," more frequent hurricanes, rising sea levels, and "floods and plagues."

Near the end of Magnusson's video, the 2023 version of him warns: "Time is running out. The choices world leaders make today will determine the kind of world we will live in tomorrow. The future is now."

In addition to the AI videos, the Future Voices initiative includes an online hub to help young activists who can't make it to Dubai still participate in COP28. Organizers are planning daily broadcasts with climate leaders and decision-makers.

"We are very proud and happy to be able to offer this opportunity for young people to get access to the most important climate negotiations of the year and deliver their messages to world leaders," said Olsson. "It would not have been possible without our incredible community of youth climate advocates."

Magnusson said that "Future Voices and the youth hub make the discussions at COP28 more inclusive."

"World leaders hold not only our future in their hands, they also hold our present, because we are already today affected by the climate crisis," the campaigner added. "And, frankly, it is youth who most of the time bring bold ideas and the unfiltered truth to the discussions about the future of humanity. Discussions that for 30 years haven't been able to even mention 'oil' in their agreements."

Watch more of the Future Voices videos below:

Nikka Gerona of the Philippines is co-chair of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Regional Young People's Action Team in East Asia and the Pacific.

Isaias Hernandez of the United States is an environmental justice educator and public speaker who created QueerBrownVegan.

Valeria Horton of Mexico founded Green Reconnection and was the Mexican lead negotiator for loss and damage at COP27.

Sophia Mathur of Canada is a climate advocate with Fridays for Future and recipient of the 2021 Action for Nature International Award.

Agustín Ocaña of Ecuador is the founder and chairperson of the Global Youth Coalition.

Anita Soina of Kenya is a climate advocate, politician, and global youth champion for the U.N.-hosted partnership Sanitation and Water for All.

Other featured activists include Farzana Faruk Jhumu of Bangladesh, an advocate with Fridays for Future and Feminist Action Coalition for Climate Justice; Denzel James of Australia, a UNICEF young ambassador; and Madina Kimaro of Tanzania, a UNICEF youth advocate and climate advocacy champion for the Tanzania Girl Guides Association.

There are also videos from Emma Kroese of the Netherlands, a climate advocate with Fridays for Future; Ashley Lashley of Barbados, a UNICEF youth advocate and CARICOM youth ambassador; Geoffrey Mboya of Kenya, a humanitarian, sustainability advocate, and youth adviser of the WeDontHaveTime Foundation; and Joaquín Salinas Atenas of Chile, a socioenvironmental artivist and UNICEF COP26 youth delegate.

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

On Friday November 10^th after a determined, extremely well organized and hard-fought citizens-led campaign that began on November 27^th, 2022, the seaside city of Naples, Italy became the first major city in the world to formally confer honorary citizenship to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who awaits extradition to the United States from the confines Belmarsh Prison in England. The people of Naples like to believe it is a place where miracles happen, under the protective gaze of its patron Saint Gennaro and through the revolutionary will of its citizenry. And for a city dominated by the presence of NATO and the US Empire, it truly seems a miracle has again occurred as Napoli stands strongly for freedom of the press and free expression in the face of US repression in collusion with its British underling. With a new centrist mayor that pales in comparison to the previous Mayor Luigi De Magistris, who helped lead the campaign for Assange, it looked like this important, yet symbolic gesture was going to be almost impossible to achieve.

Napoli is the city where Masaniello revolted against what was then the Spanish kingdom in an insurrection that temporarily seized power from the ruling class and demonstrated the power that can be realized by the rebelliousness of the people when they are truly united in insurrectionary spirit. The story of Masaniello was recounted in historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s, Many Headed Hydra and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Marcus who visited Napoli last year to discuss the revolutionary and utopian spirit of the people from below and the anarchic and collective spirit of Pirates. Napoli is also the birthplace of pizza and is one of the most beautiful cities in the world as it sprawls along the volcanic coast from under the shadows of Mount Vesuvius and through the recently trembling Flegrean Fields. Napoli is also the reigning Italian football champion after a seemingly miraculous season. But there is a growing tension in the air.

The genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States on the Palestinian people is at the forefront of many people’s minds and in Italy street protests and school occupations in solidarity with Palestine and against the policies of the neofascist Meloni-led government are happening almost daily. The economy is in tatters with inflation making it extremely difficult for more and more people to make ends meet.  Climate change is unleashing weather chaos that is always more devastating and unpredictable.  In these dark times, the achievement by the #FreeAssangeNapoli committee was a moment of joy.

Stella Morris -Assange, Assange’s wife and international human rights attorney, was present to accept his citizenship, and Napoli is shining as a beacon to the world for freedom of the press and freedom of expression in the face of the tyranny of the United States government and its British counterpart. The current mayor, Gaetano Manfredi, presided over the ceremony which was also attended by the previous mayor and champion of justice Luigi De Magistris as well as former mayor and current councilman Antonio Bassolino who, with his counterpart Sergio D’Angelo, pushed this grassroots effort led by the #FreeAssangeNapoli committee.

The ceremony was held in the historic port side castle of Maschio Angioino.

The Palestinian community was represented in the audience with its leader and spokesperson Suleiman Mohammad Omar and others holding Palestinian Flags and at one point they led the crowd in a spontaneous chant of Palestina libera! Stella Assange Morris spoke about the intentional killing of 39 journalists (now more) in Gaza and the Israeli military’s intentional assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. She decried these direct attacks on the press as a method of silencing truth and any information getting out of Gaza and compared it to the persecution of Assange and Wikileaks by the US and British governments.

Cities and towns across Italy are mobilizing for similar initiatives and Assange is set to receive honorary citizenship in Roma, Italy in January of 2024. Napoli can be a model for cities everywhere that can join with the community of journalists, activists, intellectuals, artists and everyday citizens in lighting the torch for freedom for Assange and for true freedom of the press and freedom of expression around the world. Now more than ever before the crimes of the US empire are being laid bare before the eyes of the world as our collective resistance rises like never before.

The post Naples, Italy becomes the First Major City in the World to Grant Honorary Citizenship to Julian Assange appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Leonardi.

Michelangelo, Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, c. 1513-15.

Crisis in academia

My friends in academia tell me they are experiencing the most repressive environment of their lives. The campuses of Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Northwestern (where I taught for almost 25 years), and others have been riven by conflict over the Mideast war. Faculty deemed too sympathetic to Palestine have been tarred by trustees, senior administrators, other faculty, and some students as naive at best and anti-Semitic at worst. A few professors have lost their jobs or been subjected to student petitions demanding their ouster. University presidents have been hounded by pro-Israeli, often Jewish trustees, to loudly and publicly condemn criticism of Zionism or Israel, and take additional measures to quash protest.

Pro-Palestinian student organizations have also come under fire, either for insufficient zeal in condemning Hamas brutality on October 7, attributing the attack to a long history of Israeli provocations, or demanding a ceasefire before the Israeli government is ready. A few groups, including Jewish Voices for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine have even been banned from campuses. Students from these groups have been pilloried by trustees and administrators, doxed, hounded, and in a few cases assaulted. Some Jewish students too have been attacked or subjected to verbal abuse for their vocal support of Israel. The hurt and anger on many campuses right now must feel overwhelming.

To be called anti-Semitic is powerful and professionally annihilating. That’s especially true for university professors whose stock in trade is reason. Anti-Semitism arises from libel, trades in stereotypes, and occludes independent thought. It is, as the German Social Democrat August Bebel purportedly said, “the socialism of fools,” meaning that it attributes the suffering of the working class to a small and secretive cabal of wealthy and powerful Jews. For that reason, anti-Semitism is especially reviled by a professoriate that is often liberal or left in its politics and strives to achieve a historical understanding of economic and political oppression. Finally, anti-Semitism was central to the formation of the German Nazi regime; it was the only consistent faith of Adolf Hitler, the greatest criminal the world has ever known.

In an unusual intervention, President Isaac Herzog of Israel, recently sent a letter to American college presidents alluding to the Holocaust. By calling upon them to “publicly and unequivocally” reject “calls for the elimination of a whole country, Israel,” Herzog suggests that current criticism of Israel, which sometimes includes expressions of anti-Zionism, is both anti-Semitic and eliminationist, that is, potentially genocidal. This goes far beyond even the overly capacious definitions of anti-Semitism propounded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (HRA), and the influential Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The latter has written: “While anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism, anti-Zionism is much more socially acceptable than classic antisemitism.” Both clauses are lies, plus the comma in the middle. At its most expansive, anti-Zionism is a rejection of the idea and reality of an exclusively Jewish state on the land of historic Palestine. More commonly, it signifies rejection of the radical expansionism of the current Israeli regime, and its policy of secluding Palestinians behind walls and checkpoints, a system that is plausibly called apartheid. Without skipping a beat, the ADL repeats the demonstrable untruth that anti-Zionism (as anti-Semitism) is widely endorsed. In fact, the mainstream media and elected politicians generally endorse or accept Israeli expansionism, and the HRA and ADL definition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. And they repeat the ADL canard that we are experiencing a wave of anti-Semitism unequaled in U.S. history. Not only is this historically blinkered, it overlooks the genuine danger posed by far-right extremists and gun-rights advocates who have perpetrated or enabled actual murderous violence against Jews and others, such as at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and in Highland Park, Illinois.

Who’s a Jew?

One of the things Jew take pride in — no offense to Catholics — is that they have don’t have a pope. No Jew can excommunicate another Jew: Not your local rabbi, not the President of Israel, not even Sarah Silverman. Though Jews have historically described themselves as “the chosen people” – meaning chosen by God to receive the covenant of Moses – Jewishness today is far less exclusive. (I set aside Hasidic Judaism, which like all fundamentalism, is ethnocentric.) In fact, bars to membership in the Jewish faith are low, especially in the U.S. I’ve had several conversations here in rural Florida like the following:

Him: [Whispered] “So, your name is Eisenman? Odd to meet a Jew here, of all places!”

Me: “Don’t get excited, I’m not very observant.”

Him: “Oh, but you celebrate the Sabbath, no?”

Me: “Nope.”

Him: “The High Holy Days?”

Me: [I shake my head]

Him: “Keep kosher?”

Me: “Sorry.”

Him: “Um, well, do you like bagels?”

Me: “Pumpernickel, garlic, onion – all good.”

Him: It’s always good to be with a Lantzman!

Me: [I nod in agreement.]

The rule that to be a Jew, you must have a Jewish mother is only followed by the Orthodox. For the rest of us, fathers count. And even if no parents are Jewish, and you say you are a Jew, who am I to tell you otherwise? If you are brave or stupid enough to want to join perhaps the most historically oppressed minority in the world, mazel tov!

So, to hear a prominent Jew like Herzog of Israel or Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, tell Jewish protestors, (like the kids in Jewish Voices for Peace), that they are anti-Semitic – essentially, that they are not Jews — is not only chutzpah, it’s un-Jewish, the actions of a shonda. Since when is fervent Zionism a litmus test for being Jewish? What pope made that rule? Who the ___are you to tell me I am or am not a Jew?

When anti, anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism

Anti, anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism:

1) When it denies the Jewishness of any Jew opposed to Israeli policy or the existence of Israel as Jewish state.

2) When it describes the one-state solution – Jews and Palestinians living together in a single, democratic state – as un-Jewish or even eliminationist.

3) When it ignores or denies the anti-Zionism of great Jewish thinkers and writers, including Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Philip Roth.

4) When it conceives of Judaism as a tradition of agreement rather than of dissent. Why do we ask the Four Questions at the Passover seder? To argue over the answers!

5) When it denies the opportunity of young people to struggle, make mistakes, forge new understandings, and challenge their elders. The meaning of the story of David and Goliath is not that a smaller man defeated a larger one, but that a young, hippie musician was forced to take up arms (a slingshot) when his father-in-law Saul, was too cowardly or lazy to take on a bully.

A Jew who in the face of an onslaught of cruel and offensive attacks, challenges Israel’s war of retribution in Gaza, is a mensch, a righteous person of any gender. A non-Jew who similarly demands a ceasefire and negotiations for a permanent settlement, should be considered צַדִּיק (Tzadik) the Hebrew word for a righteous person who sublimates base instincts, such as revenge, to strive for peace and reconciliation.

The post When Anti, Anti-Zionism Becomes Anti-Semitism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman.

“Our general is the wisest of 10 million. Our general cultivates the best paradise with the power of love for our everlasting happiness. His name is General Kim Jong Un!”

So goes the second verse of a song that praises the North Korean leader that is now mandatory for everyone to sing before every social event, residents told Radio Free Asia.

The “Hymn of General Kim Jong Un” will replace the “Hymn of General Kim Jong Il,” the current leader’s father and predecessor. That song had been in use since 1997 when it replaced the “Hymn of General Kim Il Sung,” the progenitor of the three-generation Kim dynasty.

The move to praise the third-generational leader instead of the first or second is an attempt to solidify loyalty around himself by breaking out of his grandfather and father’s shadows, a former high-ranking North Korean official who settled in South Korea in 2019, told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“Since Kim Jong Un has been in power for over 10 years, we cannot continue to live under Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il,” the former official said. “Though they are considered … the origin of revolutionary ideology, that entity must be upheld now by Kim Jong Un.”

‘Ascended the throne’

Orders to change the songs went out this month, a resident from the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“Kim Jong Un, ascended to the throne in a hereditary succession as a 27-year-old following the death of his father in 2011,” the resident said. “He had us starting events with songs about his ancestors even after 10 years in power, [because at first] he had no political base … and wanted to emphasize the legitimacy of his succession.”

Along with starting events with the “Hymn of Kim Jong Un,” citizens will be required to end events with another song, “We Will Defend General Kim Jong Un at the Cost of Our Lives,” he said.

Both songs are not new, according to the resident. 

The hymn was first performed in 2015 by the army during celebrations for the holiday North Korea calls Victory Day, the anniversary of the 1953 signing of the armistice that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War. The song about defending the leader was first performed on stage in 2012, shortly after Kim Jong Un took power. 

The resident said that in the years preceding Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994, the people were made to sing songs praising both Kim Il Sung and his heir, Kim Jong Il. Once the younger Kim took over, the songs praising only Kim Il Sung had been continuously used until three years after he died. Kim Jong Il then replaced them with the songs praising himself.  

‘Mixed reactions’

Though it took 10 years for Kim Jong Un to do the same for himself, the move was expected, a resident from the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“When the event song changed, residents showed mixed reactions,” he said. “While they accept this as an expected procedure since he is a hereditary leader, they still react harshly, because asking residents to sacrifice their lives for Kim Jong Un, the leader who caused the current severe food shortage, is an outrage.”

Complaints about the new songs are many, the second resident said.

“Most people cannot accept the propaganda which idolizes [the leader] and forces us to praise the ‘mighty spirit of Korea’ and ‘the dazzling sun of the century,’” he said – a possible link back to grandfather Kim Il Sung, who is often referred to as “the Sun” in propaganda, including the major holiday dedicated to him, the April 15 Day of the Sun.

“Residents are struggling with more severe living difficulties than during the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il eras,” he said. “However we are told to praise [Kim Jong Un] and defend him with our lives. It’s simply too hard to believe.”

Brainwashing

But the former official said he was saddened that residents have no choice but to comply with the government’s orders to praise Kim Jong Un.

“From the perspective of society and residents, they must comply because they continue to receive brainwashing education from the time when they first open their eyes after birth until they grow old and die,” he said. 

“In their minds, they may be thinking, ‘What is the government doing and what is the leader doing when we live poor like this?’ Still, it is a strangely rigid consciousness that must be followed as instructed by the party.” 

A former North Korean official who settled in South Korea in the mid-2010s said that the change in song goes beyond merely escaping previous leaders’ shadows.

“It seems an effort to break the link between Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and highlight Kim Jong Un as the only great leader,” he said.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

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Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s role in South Carolina’s 2022 redistricting has emerged as a central point of contention between Democrats and Republicans in a racial gerrymandering case to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The case revolves around whether Republicans, who control the Legislature, illegally disenfranchised Black voters when they created new election maps or whether the process was simply partisan politics. A key question is whether the role that the powerful Black Democrat played in the process was enough to inoculate the entire effort.

At the beginning of the process in November 2021, a top Clyburn aide secretly delivered a one-page map to the Republicans. That was the starting point for a formal redistricting plan that went through numerous revisions before the Legislature approved it in 2022. The NAACP sued state Republicans, arguing that the plan discriminated against Black voters. A three-judge federal panel sided with the NAACP early this year and ruled that one congressional district in the plan, the 1st District, is an illegal racial gerrymander and must be redrawn before the next election. ProPublica detailed Clyburn’s involvement and was first to publish his map in a May 5 investigation.

In their legal filings, Republican leaders contend they did not take race into account when they redrew the districts. They say they complied with acceptable redistricting principles. And they contend that Clyburn’s recommendations played a key role in starting the process. If the lower court’s ruling is allowed to stand, they argue, it “would invite federal courts to micromanage political disputes in countless such districts across the country.”

In a recent filing in response, the congressman’s lawyers argue that Republicans are trying to blame Clyburn, a state civil rights leader, for an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander intentionally designed to dilute minority voting power.” He supports the NAACP case and asked the high court to affirm the federal judicial panel.

Clyburn’s redistricting involvement was “routine and circumscribed.” The draft map his aide gave to Senate Republican staffers was only a rough idea for how to draw his district, not a formal redistricting plan for the entire state, his lawyers argue.

The decision will help define a murky point of redistricting law: when a partisan gerrymander crosses the line to become an illegal racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court in 2019 held that it would not interfere in partisan map-drawing. But federal courts have overturned redistricting plans in which racial considerations played a predominant role.

The case is being closely watched by other Southern states facing redistricting challenges. Parties in a federal racial gerrymandering case in Tennessee, for example, have decided they will await the court’s South Carolina decision before beginning their own pretrial document discovery.

In June, the court surprised observers by rejecting Alabama’s redistricting as discriminatory, a ruling that may affect maps in several other states and give Democrats a shot at winning as many as six seats in the South in the 2024 elections.

In South Carolina, race and politics are inextricably linked, and the state has a long history of racial discrimination and violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Republican Party is predominantly white and controls the Legislature, major state offices and six of the seven congressional districts.

Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, South Carolina experienced an influx of people who were disproportionately white. The 1st District, a swing district, had too many people and the 6th District, which Clyburn has held since 1993, had too few.

The case revolves around the question of whether the 1st District was an illegal racial gerrymander. Republicans made it much safer for their party. As recently as 2018, a Democrat held the 1st District. It is now held by Nancy Mace, who ran as a moderate but recently has risen to prominence as one of eight Republicans who voted to depose Kevin McCarthy as U.S. House speaker. In 2022, she won by 14 percentage points.

Republicans made Mace’s district safer by taking Black neighborhoods out and putting some into the 6th District. The result was that Clyburn solidified his hold on the district as its population rapidly changed.

In doing so, they say they followed the outlines of Clyburn’s early map. It had suggested moving neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black into his district and out of the 1st District. It also recommended moving some heavily white neighborhoods into Mace’s district, strengthening the GOP’s hold. Republicans say that Clyburn suggested moving even more Black residents into his district than they eventually approved.

The 1st District ended up with a Black population of 17% in a state where the overall Black population is 26%.

In his brief to the court, Clyburn’s attorney, John Graubert, accused Republicans of trying to “blur the distinction” between the congressman’s rough recommendations and the final plan.

Graubert insisted that Clyburn’s involvement is legally irrelevant to a case that will decide whether the GOP-led Legislature “engaged in intentional racial discrimination.”

The Legislature’s case is being presented by William Wilkins, a former chief judge on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and John M. Gore of Jones Day, who served in the Trump administration as acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

The court is expected to decide by early next year if it will uphold the three-judge panel’s ruling in the case, known as Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

Rick Hasen, a legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, said deciding the line between partisan and racial gerrymandering is a “recurring issue” for the court as both political parties bring cases alleging violations of the Equal Protection Clause.

“When the state says it’s about politics, and the plaintiffs argue that it’s about race, how are you supposed to disentangle those two things?” he said.

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

The resolution is the culmination of years of advocacy by Chrissy and Art Holt, Phil Ateto and Rob Smith, all members of the Maryland Progressive Healthcare Coalition, with support from National Nurses United Progressive Maryland, Our Revolution Maryland and Public Citizen.

Lisa Rodvien, who represents Anne Arundel County's 6th District, introduced the resolution. “This resolution will add another voice to the growing call for Medicare for All,” said Rodvien. “It is long past time to ensure that every American, regardless of income or employment status, has access to comprehensive healthcare.”

Anne Arundel County is the sixth municipality in Maryland and the 125th nationwide to pass a resolution in support of Medicare for All, following Prince George’s County, Montgomery County, Charles County, Annapolis and Frederick.

The Anne Arundel County health department cites the persistence of racial, income, and geographic disparities in health measures for county residents, noting a 15-year difference in life expectancy between the census tracts with the lowest and highest life expectancies in the county. In 2020, COVID-19 caused 19.8% of deaths for Hispanic residents, compared to 5.9% of white residents. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 18% of Hispanics and 6.9% of Asians in Anne Arundel County were uninsured, compared to 3.2% of white residents.

Medicare for All is single-payer, universal healthcare represented by two federal bills: S-1655 in the Senate, introduced by Bernie Sanders (D-VT); and HR-3421, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Medicare for All would be free at the point of service, include dental, vision, and long term care, and cover everyone. Studies have shown that Medicare for All would create better health outcomes, at significantly lower costs, resulting in savings for taxpayers, communities, and municipal, county, and state governments.

“The current health system is not sustainable or equitable,” said Chrissy Holt of Annapolis. “The global COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that we can’t afford not to have universal healthcare. On top of this, Medicare for All makes financial sense. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would provide the American people and our entire healthcare system $650 billion each in savings each year, improve the economy, eliminate all out-of-pocket healthcare costs, and save precious lives.”

"Medicare for All would save our local government a chunk of money and provide quality healthcare to everyone in the county. It really is that simple,” said Phil Ateto of Annapolis.

"Yes, Anne Arundel County has a low overall uninsurance rate, but that hides a lot and we could do better,” said Robert E. Smith, a county resident in Crofton. “For example, according to Health Department statistics, in 2020, 18% of Hispanic residents were uninsured. COVID-19 became the leading cause of death for Hispanics, accounting for 19.8% of deaths. That’s unacceptable. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed shortcomings in terms of both access to and continuity of care within our current healthcare system. Medicare for All would guarantee health care for EVERYBODY and ALL THE TIME with no gaps in that care."

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

The post The Holocaust Becomes a Palestinian Issue appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Davidson.

In a historic move, the resolution calling on the State of California to endorse the call for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty passed today the final vote in the State Assembly, making California the largest global economy to support the proposal. Facing big opposition from oil & gas lobbyists and 40 industry groups, who joined forces in an attempt to block it, the proposal was backed by a majority of 43 votes.

The SJR 2 resolution was introduced by California Senate Majority Whip Senator Lena A. Gonzalez, and co-sponsored by Indigenous Environmental Network, Stand.earth, and SAFE Cities. The resolution calls on President Biden to support Pacific nations moving ahead with seeking a negotiating mandate for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Solidifying its commitment to combating the ongoing climate crisis, the State of California now joins over 100 other governments from around the world in a global effort to make the Fossil Fuel Treaty proposal a reality. From the bloc of six Pacific Island Nations - Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Tonga, Fiji, Niue and the Solomon Islands - to the European Parliament and the Hawai’i State Legislature.

The Fossil Fuel Treaty proposal is gaining significant momentum across the world and across sectors of society, being supported by the World Health Organization, near 100 cities, 2,500+ civil society organizations, over half a million individuals, including Nobel Laureates, 3,000 leading academics, scientists, hundreds of Indigenous, health, youth and faith groups, celebrities and influencers who understand the imperative of this crucial crusade.

California Senate Majority Whip Senator Lena A Gonzalez (D – Long Beach), said: “It is essential that we commit once and for all to ending our reliance on fossil fuels. People around the world, especially low-income people of color, are suffering the adverse health impacts of fossil fuel pollution, from asthma to cancer. The recent devastating fires and hurricanes emphasize the urgency of taking action, to prevent further extreme weather changes. The science has been clear for decades—fossil fuels are responsible for the climate crisis. We can prevent further harm to our communities, and that is why I am proud that California has now been added to the growing list of governments endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is time for our nation to be a part of the solution, to forge strong unity and commitment to phasing out the use of fossil fuels.”

Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said: "This decision of the State of California is a commitment to take down the single biggest contributor to the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry. California joins the millions of voices across Turtle Island and Mother Earth calling on Biden to follow in the footsteps of our Pacific Island brothers and sisters from the small Island states and negotiate a mandate for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the state with the highest population of Indigenous Peoples in the country, it is important to pass legislation that would put a halt to the devastation and destruction of the compounding effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels."

The resolution supports a global plan to create the missing framework for managing fossil fuel production, first by stopping expansion and then carefully phasing out coal, oil, and gas in a way that is fair and fast. It also looks to protect the most impacted workers and local government services through this transition to abundant and clean renewable energy.

As the world grapples with the catastrophic impacts of climate change, and Californians witness the increasing frequency of devastating wildfires, severe droughts, and rising sea levels, it is evident that bold and immediate action is needed. The resolution has the potential to inject a huge wave of momentum into the global campaign for a Fossil Fuel Treaty and build significant pressure on President Biden who earlier this year approved the controversial Willow Project in Alaska.

Alex Rafalowicz, Executive Director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said “As the largest economy to embrace the Fossil Fuel Treaty, California sets a powerful example to the international community, underscoring the urgency of fast-tracking an equitable transition away from oil, gas and coal. This move will catalyze a ripple effect that reaches far beyond state borders. By aligning its immense economic and cultural influence with the Fossil Fuel Treaty proposal, California can accelerate its own energy transition, inspiring global cooperation to safeguard our planet and communities. We hope this move locks in real action on ending the era of fossil fuels in California, and spurs other regions, states, and countries to join forces in tackling the root cause of the climate crisis: the production of coal, oil and gas.”

Nathan Taft, Senior Digital Campaigner for SAFE Cities with Stand.earth and California resident, said:“Los Angeles was one of the first cities in the world to endorse the Fossil Fuel Treaty, and it’s great to see California following its lead by becoming one of the first subnational governments joining this movement to address the climate crisis with the scale and urgency required. At the same time, California must follow this historic resolution with concrete policies that protect its residents and the climate from fossil fuels. At a bare minimum, California should stop issuing new fossil fuel permits, divest its massive pensions from fossil fuels, and implement all-electric building codes.”

The resolution must also be complemented by urgent policy reforms in California to stop all new fossil fuel permits, drop existing oil drilling, and roll out health and safety buffers as clearly stated by the powerful Last Chance Alliance, a coalition of over 900 organizations active in California.

Cesar Aguirre, Oil & Gas Director, Central California Environmental Justice Network, said: "California calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty only holds weight if we see meaningful protections come from it. Of the 97 governments that signed on, only in California did the oil industry mobilize paid lobbyists to fight the endorsement. If we want to be seen as a state that stands up to fossil fuels, setbacks and no new neighborhood drilling should be the first priority."

Fossil fuels contribute to air pollution, respiratory illnesses, and a host of other health problems. By taking decisive action to phase out coal, oil, and gas, California can improve air quality, protect vulnerable communities, and enhance the well-being of its population. Embracing the call for a Fossil Fuel Treaty would send a clear message that California recognizes the incompatibility of fossil fuel dependency with the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Fossil Fuel Treaty proposal has gained significant momentum in recent months, with a bloc of Pacific nation states - Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Tonga, Fiji, Niue and the Solomon Islands – formally and publicly expressing their intention to seek a negotiating mandate for a new treaty. They are now pushing to build an alliance of national and subnational governments globally who can join them in developing the initiative.

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

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

— George Orwell

Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.

To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.

To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one need only foment a revolution.

This is not about whether Rhodes deserves such a hefty sentence.

This is about the long-term ramifications of empowering the government to wage war on individuals whose political ideas and expression challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds.

This is about how the government has used the events of Jan. 6 in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.

This was never about so-called threats to democracy.

In fact, the history of this nation is populated by individuals whose rhetoric was aimed at fomenting civil unrest and revolution.

Indeed, by the government’s own definition, America’s founders were seditious conspirators based on the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth the nation.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been charged for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

“When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

Had America’s founders feared revolutionary words and ideas, there would have been no First Amendment, which protects the right to political expression, even if that expression is anti-government.

No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.

The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.

Every individual has a right to speak truth to power—and foment change—using every nonviolent means available.

Unfortunately, the government is increasingly losing its tolerance for anyone whose political views could be perceived as critical or “anti-government.”

All of us are in danger.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.

Why else would the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies be investing in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

Why else would the Biden Administration be likening those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists?

Why else would the government be waging war against those who engage in thought crimes?

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.

For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to one FBI report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

And then at the other end of the spectrum there are those such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

This is also why the government fears a citizenry that thinks for itself: because a citizenry that thinks for itself is a citizenry that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, which translates to government transparency and accountability.

After all, we’re citizens, not subjects.

For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

A little over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent the Washington Post and the New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Fast forward to the present day, and we’re witnessing yet another showdown, this time between Assange and the Deep State, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.

Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

We’re almost at that point now.

Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we will all be seditious conspirators in the eyes of the government.

We would do better to be conspirators for the Constitution starting right now.

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

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A bill signed into law this week in Colorado prohibits family courts from ordering children to participate in reunification programs that isolate them from a trusted caregiver. Many of these programs purport to offer treatments for parental alienation, a psychological disorder that has been rejected by mainstream scientific circles but continues to influence custody decisions.

The new law, which takes effect immediately, also requires experts who advise the court on custody cases to have training in working with victims of domestic violence and child abuse.

“We have to keep pushing the boundaries of our constitutional power to hold courts accountable for the safety of our kids,” Rep. Meg Froelich, who co-sponsored the bill, told ProPublica.

State lawmakers have credited ProPublica’s reporting for exposing the need for reforms. A ProPublica investigation last year found that Colorado custody evaluators who had themselves been accused of domestic violence were advising the court on disputes involving allegations of domestic violence and child abuse. ProPublica has also reported on court-ordered reunification camps and found that certain programs use physical restraint, threats and the removal of personal items — including food, clothing and shower supplies — to force children to comply with treatment protocols.

The legislation makes Colorado the first state to pass a law based on the federal Keeping Children Safe From Family Violence Act, also known as Kayden’s Law. The federal law, enacted in 2022, is named after a 7-year-old Pennsylvania girl who was murdered by her father during court ordered custody time.

Advocates say they hope other states will follow Colorado’s lead and enact similar legislation.

For Valarie Underwood, a Colorado mother who attended a ceremony for the bill’s signing, the issue is personal. She had full custody of her children until August, when a magistrate in Weld County, Colorado, ordered the children to attend Turning Points for Families, a reunification program directed by New York-based social worker Linda Gottlieb.

Magistrate Annette Kundelius had concluded the children were victims of “severe parental alienation” and the reunification program was needed to repair their relationship with their father. Kundelius was not available to comment, according to her clerk.

They’ve not been allowed to return home or regularly communicate with or see Underwood since then.

Before the magistrate’s order, an arbitrator had, based on testimony from the children’s therapists, restricted the father’s parenting time, saying not doing so would “endanger” their health and “significantly” impair their emotional development. Both children were resisting visitation with their father, according to court documents.

The father asked the court to reevaluate the parenting plan, arguing Underwood had launched a campaign of parental alienation against him in order to undermine his relationship with the children.

In an email to ProPublica, the father declined to comment, saying it would take “a great deal of time” to explain his family's case.

The magistrate agreed with the father and ordered the children to attend Turning Points, after which they would be prohibited from having contact with their mother. Underwood was ordered to cover the program's cost, which is $15,000 for a four-day intervention.

Such orders effectively supersede the court’s parenting arrangement by transfering to the person running the program the power to decide if and when a parent can contact their child, regardless of the court’s previous custody rulings. The “no-contact” period lasts a minimum of 90-days, according to the program’s protocol, though courts frequently give Turning Points counselors the power to prolong treatment indefinitely — until the program counselor determines the treatment has been successful.

Jennifer Harman, an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University who defends parental alienation as a genuine disorder, testified on behalf of the father and advised the court to send the children to Turning Points. Despite never having met the children before her court testimony, she said they had been severely alienated by their mother, according to court documents. In 2021, Harman published an evaluation of the Turning Points program in which she found it to be safe and effective; she later clarified that the program's high success rate was self-reported by Gottlieb, who also helped design and execute the evaluation of her own program.

Harman did not respond to a request for comment.

Underwood’s daughter, then 15, kept a handwritten journal documenting her time in New York and experience in Gottlieb’s program. (ProPublica is quoting from the journal with her permission.) She described the day she had to leave her mom at the airport as “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.” “It felt like a death in the family, tortured with no contact,” she journaled on Aug. 19.

The sessions with Gottlieb, which were recorded “for the court,” took place in her “sketchy apartment,” the teenager wrote. “The plan is just to go with what Linda says so that we can see mom as soon as possible.”

In response to a request for comment, Gottlieb told ProPublica to “keep the publicity coming.” Gottlieb has previously defended her methods and called ProPublica's reporting libelous but not identified any inaccuracies in the reporting. She has told ProPublica that Turning Points only accepts cases by court order, and that demand for her program has prompted her to add new locations in Texas and California.

After they returned to Colorado, both children moved in with their father and the no-contact order with their mother began. During this time, both children ran away from their father’s house and reported that their father was verbally and physically aggressive toward them, sometimes resulting in injuries, according to police reports. Police did not charge the father but reported the incident to the Colorado Department of Human Services, which closed the case with no findings against the father.

The father did not deny the claims. In October, he told police that had to “physically grab and hold” his daughter when he said she would not give him back his cellphone, according to the police report. He told police he was trying to “manage and control his children” because of “behavior issues.”

After 90 days, the court granted the father’s request to extend the no-contact period. The family was ordered to continue the Turning Points treatment with Sharon Feder, an unlicensed psychotherapist who a court spokesperson said was removed from Colorado’s roster of approved custody evaluators for violating the role’s required standards. Last month, Feder authorized Underwood to resume weekly supervised visits with her now-14-year-old son but not with her daughter.

Feder did not respond to a request for comment.

Underwood was one of many parents who attended Thursday’s bill signing ceremony. Because Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is traveling abroad, Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera signed the bill during the ceremony as well as a second bill creating a task force to study training requirements for judges on domestic violence and sexual assault, among other forms of abuse.

Froelich said current court orders to attend reunification programs will not immediately be overturned, but the protective parent will be able to appeal the order based on the passage of the law.

“I’m grateful for this new law and hope future families won’t have to go through what my kids and I have gone through,” Underwood said. “But I’ve also missed out — I’m still missing out — on a critical time in my kids' lives.”

She wasn’t able to attend her son’s eighth grade graduation or her daughter’s golf tournaments. If she’s caught communicating with her kids in violation of court orders, the no-contact order could be extended. When her daughter went to prom in April, she wasn’t allowed to help her get ready or take pictures of her with her date. She stared for hours at social media posts showing her daughter in her powder blue dress, flowers on her wrist, hair pulled back from her face.

“You just don’t get those moments back.”

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

Along with passing forced pregnancy laws and measures to punish parents for supporting their transgender children, the Republican Party is pushing numerous bills to loosen child labor regulations—and on Thursday Gov. Kim Reynolds confirmed she plans to make Iowa the second GOP-controlled state to enact such a proposal this year.

The Republican said she plans to sign Senate File 542, which removes so-called "unnecessary restrictions" that have kept minors from working in hazardous workplaces and from working long hours during the school year.

The bill was given final approval by the state Senate on Wednesday, with just two Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it, defying lobbying campaigns by right-wing groups including Americans for Prosperity and restaurant and construction industry groups.

"Even if this isn't happening in your state, it is coming to your state soon. I promise you."

Under the legislation, businesses will be permitted to employ children as young as 14 for work including roofing, construction, and demolition as long as they are participating in a "work-based learning program" through the state. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds will be allowed to serve alcohol, and teenagers older than 13 will be permitted to work up to six hours a day until as late as 9:00 pm during the school year and until 11:00 pm in the summer. Currently teenagers can only work four hours per day.

Reynolds said the bill is aimed at developing a "strong work ethic" in children and allowing them "to work to get ahead in life or save money for college." Supporters have heralded the legislation as a solution to what they say are "labor shortages"—which labor unions and workers' rights advocates have long said could be solved with wages that keep up with inflation and fair working conditions.

Republicans and the industry groups that back them "will do literally anything—even endangering the lives of children (!)—to keep wages low for restaurant workers," said economic justice group Patriotic Millionaires last month as the bill moved through the Iowa Legislature.

Reynolds announced her intention to sign the bill days after hundreds of children as young as 10 were found to be working at McDonald's locations across Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, and Indiana.

If the bill is signed, Iowa will become the second state this year to eliminate labor protections for children. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law in March rolling back age verification requirements for workers under 16.

Bills proposed in Minnesota would lift restrictions on hazardous work for teenagers, as Senate File 542 does in Iowa, and extend the hours when children can work. Extended hours bills have also been proposed in Missouri, Iowa, and South Dakota this year, and were passed last year in New Hampshire and New Jersey—where a Democratic governor signed the legislation into law.

"Even if this isn't happening in your state, it is coming to your state soon. I promise you," Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, toldThe Real News Network in March.

Debbie Berkowitz, a former policy advisar at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told The Washington Post the Iowa proposal is "the most anti-child, anti-family bill that I've seen."

"This law is an ideological solution when there is no problem," she said, adding on social media that if Reynolds wants teenagers to be able to earn money, "there are plenty of jobs kids can do now" without allowing companies to employ them on roofing and construction projects.

As the state legislative session ended Thursday, the Iowa Senate Democrats tweeted that the child labor bill was just part of a Republican agenda this year that will harm the state's children in multiple ways.

"This session will go down in history as one of the most divisive and cruel ever seen in Iowa," said the Democrats.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little on Wednesday made his state the first in the U.S. to restrict interstate travel for abortion care by signing legislation that aims to prevent minors from traveling to obtain an abortion without parental consent.

The Republican-authored law, H.B. 242, creates a new crime of "abortion trafficking" and establishes a minimum two-year prison sentence—and a maximum of five years—for anyone found guilty of committing it.

The law defines a perpetrator of "abortion trafficking" as "an adult who, with the intent to conceal an abortion from the parents or guardian of a pregnant, unemancipated minor, either procures an abortion... or obtains an abortion-inducing drug for the pregnant minor to use for an abortion by recruiting, harboring, or transporting the pregnant minor within this state commits the crime of abortion trafficking."

"It shall not be an affirmative defense to a prosecution... that the abortion provider or the abortion-inducing drug provider is located in another state," the measure's text states.

Little has said the law, which would empower Idaho's Republican attorney general to override local prosecutors if they refuse to enforce the restrictions, does not bar adults from traveling to obtain abortion care for themselves.

Current Idaho law bans nearly all abortions, meaning the new measure will, in practice, impact those traveling within Idaho to assist a pregnant minor in obtaining abortion medication from out of state and those crossing state lines to help a minor receive abortion care.

As HuffPost's Alanna Vagianos noted, the law "could apply to a grandmother driving a pregnant minor to the post office to pick up a package holding medication abortion or target an older brother driving a pregnant minor to a friend's house to self-manage an abortion at home."

With the draconian restrictions set to take effect in less than 30 days, abortion rights groups are vowing to fight as other states are likely to follow Idaho's lead. Last July, Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would have protected the right to travel for abortion nationwide.

"Everyone across the country should be paying attention to this extreme attempt at government overreach to control our movements in and out of the state, control free speech, and access to information."

Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates West said Wednesday that "yet again, Idaho's governor disregarded constituents and signed H.B. 242 into law, creating the nation's first crime of so-called 'abortion trafficking,'"

"This legislation is despicable, and we're going to do everything in our power to stop it," the group added. "This bill criminalizes an adult assisting a young person accessing abortion care with the intent of concealing the abortion from their parent. While most young people include their parents in the decision to get an abortion, some are in dangerous, abusive situations."

"Idaho lawmakers have slipped under the radar with some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country," the group continued. "Now, they're using an incredibly serious term like trafficking to talk about young people traveling with trusted adults to access a legal procedure in another state."

Idaho healthcare providers and advocacy organizations, including Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, announced Wednesday that they are suing Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador over his claim in a recent legal opinion that Idaho law prohibits medical providers from "either referring a woman across state lines to access abortion services or prescribing abortion pills for the woman to pick up across state lines."

"Idaho law requires the suspension of a healthcare professional's license when he or she 'assists in performing or attempting to perform an abortion,'" Labrador wrote.

The advocacy coalition opposing that interpretation warned Wednesday that it "goes far beyond Idaho's law and is an extreme attempt to prevent healthcare providers from giving information to patients and to prevent Idahoans from accessing legal health care in another state."

"This is a five-alarm fire," said Rebecca Gibron, the CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai'i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky. "Banning abortion wasn't enough for anti-abortion extremists in Idaho; they now want to ban where you go, what information you're legally allowed to obtain, and even what health care providers can say."

"Attorney General Labrador’s opinion is an egregious extension of Idaho's abortion ban. We won't stand for it," Gibron added. "Everyone across the country should be paying attention to this extreme attempt at government overreach to control our movements in and out of the state, control free speech, and access to information. This opinion should worry you even if you don't live in Idaho.”

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

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

Surrounded by students, teachers, and advocates, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Friday afternoon signed into law a bill to provide breakfast and lunch at no cost to all of the state's roughly 820,000 K-12 pupils regardless of their household income.

The move to make Minnesota the fourth U.S. state to guarantee universal free school meals—joining California, Maine, and Colorado—elicited praise from progressives.

"Beautiful," tweeted Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University.

"No child should go hungry for any reason, period."

UC-Berkeley professor and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on social media: "Let this serve as a reminder that poverty is a policy choice. In the richest country in the world, it is absolutely inexcusable that millions of our children go to school hungry because they are living in poverty."

An estimated 1 in 6 children in Minnesota don't get enough to eat on a regular basis. But 1 in 4 food-insecure kids live in households that don't qualify for the federal free and reduced meal program, leading to "mounting school lunch debts in the tens of thousands of dollars," Minnesota Public Radioreported.

Tens of thousands of children are set to benefit from Minnesota's new law, which could be operational as early as summer school in July. Some of them were there to thank Walz at the signing ceremony, where the sense of elation was palpable.

"As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota's working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state," Walz said. "This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen."

The Minnesota House—led by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, the state's Democratic affiliate—first passed the bill in February in a 70-58 party-line vote. The state Senate—where the DFL holds just a single-seat advantage—approved it on Tuesday by a 38-26 margin. The state House rubber-stamped an amended version of the bill on Thursday.

In a now-viral clip from the state Senate's debate over the bill earlier this week. Sen. Steve Drazkowski (R-20) questioned whether hunger is really a problem in Minnesota—even as the state's food banks reported a record surge in visits last year, months before federal lawmakers slashed pandemic-era Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

"I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry," Drazkowski said before voting against the bill. "I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don't have access to enough food to eat."

During Friday's signing ceremony, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (DFL) said, "To our decision-makers who believe they have never met someone who is experiencing or has experienced hunger: Hi, my name is Peggy Flanagan, and I was 1 in 6 of those Minnesota children who experienced hunger."

"By providing free breakfast and lunch to all of our students, we are removing barriers and removing stigma from the lunch room," said Flanagan. "We are helping family pocketbooks, especially for those 1 in 4 who don't qualify for financial assistance with school meals. We are leading with our values that no child should go hungry for any reason, period."

"This is an investment in the well-being of our children, as well as an investment in their academic success," Flanagan added, calling the "generation-changing" bill "the most important thing" she's ever worked on in her life.

"By providing free breakfast and lunch to all of our students, we are removing barriers and removing stigma from the lunch room... This is an investment in the well-being of our children, as well as an investment in their academic success."

As Minnesota Reformerreported: "The majority of Minnesota schools receive federal funding from the National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for each meal served, though it doesn't cover the cost of the entire meal. Under the new law, schools are prohibited from charging students for the remaining cost, and the state will foot the rest of the bill—about $200 million annually."

MPR noted that "the legislation is similar to a program that was introduced during the pandemic to provide meals for all students, but was discontinued at the end of last year."

Last month, The Star Tribune editorial board opined that providing free breakfast and lunch to all of Minnesota's students, including affluent ones, is "excessive."

Pushing back against this argument for means-testing, Darcy Stueber—director of Nutrition Services for Mankato Area Public Schools and public policy chair of the Minnesota School Nutrition Association—asserted that meals should be guaranteed to all kids at no cost, just like other basic learning necessities.

"We don't charge for Chromebooks and desks and things like that," she told MPR. "It's a part of their day and they're there for so many hours. It just completes that whole learning experience for the child."

Minnesota Rep. Sydney Jordan (DFL-60A), the bill's lead author, made the same point to counter GOP lawmakers' complaints following the initial passage of the legislation.

"We give every kid in our school a desk," Jordan said last month. "There are lots of kids out there that can afford to buy a desk, but they get a desk because they go to school."

Walz, for his part, stressed Friday that his administration is "just getting started" when it comes to boosting education funding.

"The big stuff," said the governor, "is still coming."

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

The Seattle City Council voted Tuesday for the first U.S. ban on caste-based discrimination, a move the measure's socialist sponsor hopes will inspire similar legislation nationwide.

The council voted 6-1 in favor of an ordinance by District 3 Councilmember Kshama Sawant of the Socialist Alternative party that adds caste as a protected class to a long list that includes age, race, religion, gender identity, national origin, immigration status, disability, and military status.

Caste discrimination will now be banned in fields including employment, housing, and public accommodation. People experiencing caste-based discrimination will also be able to file official complaints.

Not only is it the first such law in the U.S., it's the first in the world outside South Asia.

"This bill is not technically complicated, it's a very simple question: Should discrimination based on caste be allowed to continue in Seattle?" Sawant said in a packed City Hall before Tuesday's vote.

Sawant, who is Indian-American, called the measure "profound and historic" and expressed hope that it will serve as a "beacon" for other cities to follow.

"If... you marched in the Black Lives Matter movement or you desire to live in a society free of racism, racial discrimination, sexism, or misogyny, then you should be paying attention," she toldCNN before the vote. "Because while caste oppression or discrimination does not affect all Americans, the way it manifests itself is no different than other types of oppression under capitalism."

Emotions and tensions ran high in City Hall before, during, and after the vote. Yogesh Mane, who grew up Dalit—the lowest caste—in India, wept as he heard the council's decision.

"I'm emotional because this is the first time such an ordinance has been passed anywhere in the world outside of South Asia," he told the Associated Press. "It's a historic moment."

The caste system, which has existed in South Asia for millennia, divides Hindus into groups including Brahmins (priests and teachers); Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors); Vaishyas (farmers, merchants, and traders); Shudras (laborers); and Dalits (street and latrine cleaners).

Although India's constitution, whose drafting was led by the Dalit scholar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, officially banned caste-based discrimination, those on the lower rungs—especially the Dalits—continue to suffer endemic discrimination and frequent violence. Such bigotry has been inflamed by the rise of Hindu nationalism in recent decades, and during the tenure of right-wing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Advocates of the ordinance in Washington state's largest city stressed that caste-based bigotry is by no means limited to South Asia.

"Caste discrimination doesn't only take place in other countries," Sawant—who grew up in a middle-class Brahmin family in Mumbai—said in a statement announcing the introduction of her bill. "It is faced by South Asian-American and other immigrant working people in their workplaces, including in the tech sector, in Seattle and in cities around the country."

"We know that caste discrimination has been growing in the United States across many industries, including technology, construction, restaurants, and the service industry, and in domestic work," she added. "Caste discrimination is increasingly a grave contributor to workplace discrimination and bias—data from Equality Labs show that 1 in 4 caste-oppressed people faced physical and verbal assault, 1 in 3 faced education discrimination, and 2 in 3 faced workplace discrimination."

Sawant continued:

Just as racism is not the result of an "inevitable" racial friction between white and Black people, caste oppression has also been maintained by the class structure of capitalist society in South Asia and now in the United States.

Beyond winning reforms such as this one, working people in our city, nationally, and internationally need to unite and build mass movements to fight for a socialist society. Because as long as an exploitative and rapacious system like capitalism exists, oppression will be endemic. The only way to end caste, racial, gender, and other oppressions is for the working class to fight for a different kind of world.

Caste-based discrimination is at the center of a case making its way through a California state court in which a former engineer at Cisco Systems says he was excluded from meetings and passed up for promotions because he is Dalit.

One Seattle-area tech worker, who gave only the name Maya for fear of retaliation, toldTheSeattle Times that she has been the target of workplace caste discrimination because she is Dalit. Maya said her manager rebuffed an offer to volunteer for a work project, telling her, "You better not touch the project because you're ill-fated."

"It might not sound like something major, but for us, it completely resonates with the caste and untouchability because not touching is what all of the dominant-caste people have made rules around for so long," Maya explained. "That's why we are called untouchables. We're not supposed to touch anything or anyone."

"Caste is an evil that has been practiced for more than 3,000 years now," she added. "We carry the genetic trauma of caste for such a long time already. But if we don't have caste protections, then this is going to affect even the next generations."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

After decades of criminalization, Australia's government said Friday that it will legalize the prescription of MDMA and psilocybin for the treatment of two medical conditions, a historic move hailed by researchers who have studied the therapeutic possibilities of the drugs.

Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) said in a statement that starting July 1, psychiatrists may prescribe MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), commonly called "Molly" or "ecstasy" by recreational users, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psilocybin—the psychedelic prodrug compound in "magic" mushrooms—for treatment-resistant depression.

"These are the only conditions where there is currently sufficient evidence for potential benefits in certain patients," TGA said, adding that the drugs must be taken "in a controlled medical setting."

Advocates of MDMA and psilocybin are hopeful that one day doctors could prescribe them to treat a range of conditions, from alcoholism and eating disorders to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

David Caldicott, a clinical senior lecturer in emergency medicine at Australian National University, toldThe Guardian that Friday's surprise announcement is a "very welcome step away from what has been decades of demonization."

Caldicott said it is now "abundantly clear” that both MDMA and psilocybin "can have dramatic effects" on hard-to-treat mental health problems, and that "in addition to a clear and evolving therapeutic benefit, [legalization] also offers the chance to catch up on the decades of lost opportunity [of] delving into the inner workings of the human mind, abandoned for so long as part of an ill-conceived, ideological 'war on drugs.'"

MDMA—which has been criminalized in Australia since 1987—was first patented by German drugmaker Merck in the early 1910s. After World War II the United States military explored possibilities for weaponizing MDMA as a truth serum as part of the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments aimed at creating real-life Manchurian candidates. A crossover from clinical usage in marriage and other therapies in the 1970s and '80s to recreational consumption—especially in the disco and burgeoning rave scenes—in the latter decade sparked a conservative backlash in the form of emergency bans in countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies MDMA and psilocybin as Schedule I substances, meaning they have "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."

Patients who've tried MDMA therapy and those who treat them say otherwise. A study published last year by John Hopkins Health found that in a carefully controlled setting, psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy held promise for "significant and durable improvements in depression."

The California-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—the world's premier organization for psychedelic advocacy and research—interviewed Colorado massage therapist Rachael Kaplan about her MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD:

For the majority of my life I prayed to die and fought suicidal urges as I struggled with complex PTSD. This PTSD was born out of chronic severe childhood abuse. Since then, my life has been a journey of searching for healing. I started going to therapy 21 years ago, and since then I have tried every healing modality that I could think of, such as bodywork, energy work, medications, residential treatment, and more. Many of these modalities were beneficial but none of them significantly reduced my trauma symptoms. I was still terrified most of the time...

In my first MDMA-assisted psychotherapy session I was surprised that the MDMA helped me see the world as it was, instead of seeing it through my lens of terror. I thought that the MDMA would alter my perception of reality, but instead, it helped me see... more clearly... The MDMA session was the first time that I was able to stay present, explore, and process what had happened to me. This changed everything... There are no words for the gratitude that I feel.

Jon Lubecky, an American Iraq War combat veteran who tried to kill himself five times, toldNBC's "Today" in 2021 that MDMA therapy—also with MAPS—enabled him "to talk about things I had never brought up before to anyone."

"And it was OK. My body did not betray me. I didn't get panic attacks. I didn't shut down emotionally or just become so overemotional I couldn't deal with anything," he recounted.

"This treatment is the reason my son has a father instead of a folded flag," Lubecky said in a message to other veterans afflicted with PTSD. "I want all of you to be around in 2023 when this is [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]-approved. I know what your suffering is like. You can make it."

MAPS' latest clinical research on MDMA—which is aimed at winning FDA approval—is currently in phase three trials. The Biden administration said last year that it "anticipates" MDMA and psilocybin would be approved by the FDA by 2024 and is "exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor" therapeutic possibilities of both drugs.

Like MDMA, psilocybin—which occurs naturally in hundreds of fungal species and has been used by humans for medicinal, spiritual, and recreational purposes for millennia—remains illegal at the federal level in the U.S., although several states and municipalities have legalized or decriminalized psychedelic mushrooms, or have moved to do so.

There have also been bipartisan congressional efforts to allow patients access to both drugs. Legislation introduced last year by U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would permit therapeutic use of certain Schedule I drugs for terminally ill patients. Meanwhile, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) passed amendments to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act providing more funding for psychedelic research and making it easier for veterans and active-duty troops suffering from PTSD to try drug-based treatments.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

"There's a clear path forward to avoiding a devastating and completely avoidable recession: Chair Powell and the Fed should stop raising interest rates," Mabud added.

The latest push for an end to interest rate increases came as fresh data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Tuesday showed that wage growth continued to cool at the tail-end of 2022, an outcome that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has explicitly been aiming for even as experts have rejected the notion that wages are responsible for current inflation levels.

According to the BLS Employment Cost Index (ECI)—a measure watched closely by Fed policymakers—wage growth climbed just 1% in the final three months of 2022 compared to the previous quarter, a slower pace than analysts expected.

"The Fed has lost its excuse for a recession," Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, tweeted in response to the new BLS figures. "Over the last three months, inflation has come down exactly as a soft landing would predict, wage growth didn't persist but moderated with the reopening to solidly high levels within late 1990s ranges, and the economy added 750,000 new jobs."

"Too many hard-working families have everything to lose if the Fed stays the course with higher rates that only push the economy closer to a recession."

Though Powell has insisted that Fed decision-making will be driven by economic data, he made clear last month that the nation's central bankers don't think inflation has slowed enough to justify a rate-hike pause or reversal, brushing aside the recessionary risks of more monetary tightening.

On Wednesday, the Fed is widely expected to institute a 25-basis-point rate increase followed by another of the same size at its March meeting, bringing the total number of rate hikes to nine since early 2022.

Even the central bank's own models predict a sharp increase in the unemployment rate—and potentially millions of lost jobs—if Fed policymakers drive interest rates up to their desired range of between 5% and 5.25%.

Recent layoffs across the tech industry as well as data signaling a hiring deceleration have also intensified fears of a Fed-induced economic crisis.

"The Fed has every reason to halt further job-killing interest rate hikes as key indicators show inflation is slowing while the economic recovery remains fragile," said Liz Zelnick, director of the Economic Security and Corporate Power program at Accountable.US. "Too many hard-working families have everything to lose if the Fed stays the course with higher rates that only push the economy closer to a recession."

"Repeated interest rate hikes have done little to curb corporate greed that even Fed economists admit is what's really driving high costs on everything from groceries to gas," Zelnick continued. "The Fed faces a choice: back down and let policy and lawmakers continue to take impactful steps to rein in corporate profiteering—or keep needlessly threatening jobs and an economic downturn with further rate hikes.”

For months, economists and lawmakers have vocally questioned the Fed's aggressive rate hikes and laser focus on the labor market given the myriad causes of the 2021 inflation spike, from pandemic-induced supply chain snags to corporate profiteering to Russia's war on Ukraine to the climate crisis.

Some experts, however, have argued that the Fed's seemingly misguided approach is perfectly understandable when considering that a central goal of the institution is to help the rich "conserve and increase their concentrated wealth."

"Chair Jerome Powell and the Fed are willing to impose significant costs on workers and families in order to reduce inflation," Gerald Epstein and Aaron Medlin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst wrote in The American Prospect earlier this month. "This focus on inflation, by promoting high unemployment, contradicts the dual mandate given to the Fed by Congress."

"Why does the Federal Reserve treat its high-employment mandate so cavalierly when inflation is above 2%?" the pair continued. "The answer stems from the fact that since its founding, Fed officials have seen the world through 'finance-colored' glasses. Financiers do not like high inflation. Like all creditors who lend money today to be paid back in the future, financiers hate getting paid back in dollars that are worth less than the dollars they lent out in the first place."

In a blog post on Monday, Economic Policy Institute research director Josh Bivens noted that the Fed's dual mandate is "meant to balance the risks of inflation versus the benefits of fast growth and low unemployment."

"Right now, the benefits of low unemployment are enormous, and the risks of inflation are retreating rapidly," Bivens wrote. "If the Fed lets the current recovery continue apace by not raising interest rates further at this week’s meeting, 2023 could turn out to be a great year for the economic fortunes of American families."

"The Fed should stand pat on interest rate increases," he added. "If they instead insist on raising rates, this will pose a dire threat to what could be an excellent 2023 for the economic prospects of America's working families."

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

Following the surprise resignation of Jacinda Ardern on January 19, Aotearoa New Zealand already has a new Prime Minister and Labour Party leader: Chris Hipkins.

The handover from Ardern to Hipkins has been achieved with the same efficiency as the handover from Andrew Little to Ardern in 2017. But will it be as successful?

Hipkins entered Parliament in 2008 — along with Ardern. Under Ardern’s leadership, he held ministerial portfolios in education, police and public services, and was Leader of the House.

• READ MORE: ‘The shoes needing filling are on the large side of big’ – Jacinda Ardern’s legacy and Labour’s new challenge
• Ardern’s resignation as New Zealand prime minister is a game changer for the 2023 election
• Jacinda Ardern’s resignation: gender and the toll of strong, compassionate leadership
• Carmel Sepuloni: New Zealand’s new Deputy Prime Minister
• More Jacinda Ardern reports

His role as education minister includes a (not altogether successful) centralisation of all the country’s polytechnics under one administrative umbrella — a form of restructuring typical of this Labour government.

He distinguished himself during the covid pandemic as a hard-working and competent leader who contributed a much-needed clarity and common sense. He is a dependable and intelligent politician who does not mind being an attack dog when it is called for.

As leader with Tongan Carmel Sepuloni as his deputy, however, Hipkins now faces an uphill battle, with his party trailing the opposition National Party in the most recent published polls. But he lacks Ardern’s charisma.

In 2017, there was an instant “Jacindamania” effect when she took the party leadership, and Labour’s polling shot up. One simply can’t imagine a “Chris-mania”, however. But maybe that’s not a bad thing right now.

Game over?
There are two ways this could go now. First, the nightmare scenario for Labour: the government continues to be sniped at over controversial and unpopular policies such as the Three Waters programme and the income insurance scheme, economic problems continue to damage household budgets, the opposition leaders (both National’s Christopher Luxon and ACT’s David Seymour) have a field day.

In head-to-head debates with Luxon once the election campaign begins, Hipkins lacks the fire that Ardern was able to show when she needed it, and becomes political roadkill at the ballot box on October 14.

Labour supporters wake up in a cold sweat.

Carmel Sepuloni: New Zealand’s new Deputy Prime Minister https://t.co/91TMUI2wud

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) January 22, 2023

With Labour’s ongoing slump in the polls, trailing National by around five or six percentage points, this scenario cannot be ruled out. Following defeat, Labour could go into the kind of spiral it endured after Helen Clark’s loss in 2008, with one unsuccessful leader after another.

We can recall the defeat of Labour’s Phil Goff in 2011 and David Cunliffe in 2014 when up against National’s John Key. And, to be fair, National suffered a similarly bad run after Bill English stood down in 2018 and until Luxon became leader in November 2021.

“Chris Hipkins has been part of a government that has spectacularly failed to get anything done and what New Zealanders need is a National government that is going to get things done.”https://t.co/w67vxckHaw

— RNZ (@radionz) January 21, 2023

A new hope?
So is there a dream scenario for Labour? With Ardern’s charismatic — and now rather polarising — personality heading for the exit, the party could turn things around.

New leadership licences a significant cabinet reshuffle and (more importantly) a refresh of policy. Labour could now neutralise (or even dump) some policy proposals that are presently causing public dissatisfaction.

Rather than Hipkins having somehow to fill Ardern’s shoes, he could follow his own path in his own trusty trainers.

An advantage he has is an apparent unanimity of support from his caucus. This suggests his team is focused on beating National rather than beating one another.

But can Labour win back the support of those middle-ground voters who have shifted to the centre-right? It appears many of those who have swung away from Labour actually liked Ardern.

And Ardern remained on top in preferred prime minister polls right up until days before she resigned.

We could infer from this that a leadership change on its own will not suffice to woo these voters back. The loss of Ardern could indeed precipitate a further drop in polling for Labour.

A policy reset
Late in 2022, Ardern had stated that the government’s focus this year would be the economy. And National will inevitably use the line that they (National) are the more competent when it comes to “managing the economy”.

If Labour is serious about winning the 2023 election, then, they need to convince enough voters of the following:

• they are addressing the real economic concerns that are affecting people presently;
• they have taken heed of people’s disquiet over some current policy changes and are prepared to revise them; and
• they are not going any further with controversial matters, especially co-governance with Māori, without first seeking a wider public understanding and consensus.

Hipkins is a competent and reliable person. If he has his party’s backing to revise or backtrack on policy, then he may have some success. With less focus on personalities this time around, his best hope may be to convince people his government is serious about resetting the country’s direction.

Dr Grant Duncan, associate professor, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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

Such policies, Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball said in a press release, “boycott fossil fuels” and “intentionally choke off the lifeblood of capital to Kentucky’s signature industries.” The announcement follows a state bill passed last year directing her office to publish an annual list of financial institutions involved in a so-called “energy company boycott.” 

Kentucky’s efforts are the latest in the Republican Party’s larger campaign against what are known as environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, investing principles. After years of activist efforts to get financial firms to disclose and account for their climate risks, ESG practices — which, in theory, prioritize investments in renewable energy, for example, over oil and gas — have moved from the sidelines to the mainstream, becoming a buzz-acronym on Wall Street. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, the federal agency meant to protect U.S. investors, proposed new rules that would require companies to disclose their carbon emissions as well as the risks posed to their business by climate change. According to the mutual fund research firm Morningstar, 90 percent of all companies now have, or are in the process of creating, ESG strategies.

But over the past year, Republicans have staked their ground against what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called “woke capitalism.” As of last August, 17 states have proposed or adopted legislation to limit business with institutions that consider environmental and social criteria in their investment practices. West Virginia and Texas created similar lists to Kentucky’s last year, and Florida, Louisiana, and Missouri pulled a collective $3 billion dollars out of BlackRock, whose CEO has been one of the most outspoken financial leaders about the value of ESG investing. 

Now, Republicans are using their control of the U.S. House of Representatives as a new tool in their fight against ESG, which they say could harm the fossil fuel industry as well as stakeholder profits. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican representative and new chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, called the SEC’s climate risk disclosure rules a “far-left social agenda” and has pledged close oversight of regulators. Other House Republicans will call asset managers to testify in hearings on their investments. At the state level, Republican state attorneys general have motioned that they are prepared to take the SEC policies to court if the rules are finalized, according to Inside Climate News. 

Yet when you look at the current state of climate-aligned investing on Wall Street, it seems Republicans’ concerns are much ado about nothing. While asset managers have started to invest growing subsets of funds in adherence with ESG principles, which consider things like the effects of climate change and the social impacts of supply chains, most of their money remains in funds that don’t account for carbon emissions. JPMorgan and Citigroup, both members of the United Nations’ Net-Zero Banking Alliance, were among the top financiers of the fossil fuel industry in 2021, according to a recent report. (Vanguard, the largest asset manager after BlackRock, dropped out of the alliance last month following backlash from Republican attorneys general.) What counts as an ESG investment also remains vague and undefined, which can lead to greenwashing; some financial companies’ energy transition funds, for example, can still invest in fossil fuel companies. While last year was the first in history where more money was raised in debt markets for green projects than for fossil fuel companies, Big Oil is still getting more money from high gas prices and private equity, and banks and asset managers appear to remain committed to funding the industry. 

In the wake of Kentucky’s announcement, the 11 financial firms added to the state’s restricted list have 30 days to notify the treasury of their holdings in energy companies, and 90 days to “stop engaging” in boycotts. If they fail to comply, the Kentucky government will pull its money from the institutions. So far, some of the listed companies have asserted their fossil fuel bonafides in response. In a statement to The Hill, a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson said, “We are among the largest financiers of the U.S. traditional and renewable energy industries, including in Kentucky where we serve some of its largest energy companies and utilities.” For Reuters, BlackRock pointed to its investments in energy companies like ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Kentucky becomes the newest battleground in Republicans’ fight against green investing on Jan 5, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Blanca Begert.

The labor council of the Austin, Texas AFL-CIO has passed a resolution urging the Biden administration to terminate a Medicare privatization scheme that is quietly moving ahead despite vocal opposition from doctors, seniors, and progressive lawmakers.

The pilot program, which inserts private middlemen between patients and healthcare providers, was unveiled with little notice during the final months of the Trump administration despite internal concerns about its legality. The experiment has since been largely upheld by the Biden administration, which announced mostly cosmetic changes earlier this year, winning applause from industry groups that lobbied against complete elimination of the program.

"Immediately stop and dismantle the ACO-REACH program, and instead, immediately protect and preserve traditional Medicare.

Now known as ACO REACH, the pilot involves shifting traditional Medicare recipients onto privately run insurance plans without their knowledge or consent in the name of cutting costs and improving quality.

The resolution unanimously adopted by the Austin AFL-CIO Labor Council last week raises alarm over that aspect of the pilot, noting that "ACO-REACH allows doctors and their offices to convert a patients' traditional Medicare choice into ACO-REACH coverage without first informing their patients about the change nor getting their patients' written permission."

"Doctors and their offices will have a financial incentive to convert to ACO-REACH coverage as they will also be allowed to keep up to 40% of their revenue that they don't spend on healthcare services as overhead, resulting in a 'windfall profit' versus traditional Medicare programs that are only allowed to keep the balance of 2% of their revenue after paying for overhead," the resolution continues.

Under the ACO REACH model, which critics warn could fully supplant traditional Medicare if it is allowed to continue, private entities that are accepted as participants are paid by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and allowed to pocket a significant chunk of what they don't spend on healthcare. The newest version of the pilot, which was announced without congressional approval or oversight, is set to formally begin in January and will run at least through 2026.

The CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), which is overseeing ACO REACH, is currently headed by Elizabeth Fowler, the former vice president of public policy and external affairs at WellPoint, Inc.—a health insurance firm that later became Anthem.

The Austin AFL-CIO Labor Council resolution implores the Biden administration to "immediately stop and dismantle the ACO-REACH program, and instead, immediately protect and preserve traditional Medicare plus adding coverage for hearing, vision, and dental care."

The labor council's resolution marks just the latest expression of outrage over the Biden administration's decision to build on a privatization ploy constructed by the Trump administration, which was replete with industry allies hostile to Medicare and other popular government programs.

In August, the AFL-CIO's Alameda, California labor council passed a resolution noting that it is "within the power of the Biden administration to end [ACO REACH] with the stroke of a pen"—and urging it to use that power. Similar resolutions have been approved in recent months by the Arizona Medical Association, the Seattle City Council, and the Texas State Democratic Executive Committee.

On top of opposition from hundreds of local and national advocacy organizations, lawmakers at the national level—including prominent progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—have raised concerns over the pilot, which could allow the private insurance giants that have profited hugely from Medicare Advantage to further entrench themselves in the Medicare program.

"We must immediately end Medicare privatization programs like ACO REACH," Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted in April. "There's no excuse for allowing the same Medicare Advantage organizations to now administer 'care' for traditional Medicare beneficiaries."

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

Denmark on Tuesday became the first member of the United Nations to pledge "loss and damage" funding that aims to compensate developing countries for the destruction being wrought by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis the world's poor played little role in creating.

"It is grossly unfair that the world's poorest should suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, to which they have contributed the least."

After U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres urged governments to tax Big Oil's windfall profits and use the revenue to assist people enduring the devastating consequences of the worsening climate emergency during his opening remarks at the General Assembly, Denmark announced that it will allocate roughly $13 million to Africa's Sahel region and other vulnerable areas hard-hit by extreme weather disasters.

Although this paltry sum pales in comparison to the more than $5 trillion in unpaid damages that fossil fuels are estimated to cause each year, advocates welcomed the landmark announcement and expressed hope that other wealthy countries most responsible for greenhouse gas pollution will follow suit.

"Who will be next?" the Loss and Damage Collaboration—a group of more than 100 researchers, activists, and policymakers from around the globe—asked on Twitter.

Danish Development Minister Flemming Møller Mortensen said in a statement that the pledge was inspired by his spring visit to flood-ravaged parts of Bangladesh.

"It is grossly unfair that the world's poorest should suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, to which they have contributed the least," he said.

Denmark's announcement comes as lives are being cut short and tens of billions of dollars in losses and damages are mounting amid several catastrophes driven by climate chaos and inequality, from the drought-fueled famine in East Africa to the deadly floods in Pakistan to Hurricane Fiona, which has battered Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice at Action Aid International, wrote on social media that "after a year of escalating climate disasters, this is an important signal from Denmark that the issue of loss and damage funding is being taken seriously."

She added that diplomats at the U.N.'s upcoming COP27 climate conference in Egypt "must agree [on] a new loss and damage funding facility to channel much-needed funds in a transparent and multilateral manner."

These points were echoed by the Loss and Damage Collaboration, which stated that if such a dedicated funding mechanism is not established at COP27 in November, "we will not be able to deliver the trillions of dollars more that are needed to support those on the front lines of the climate crisis."

As the Washington Post noted: "Loss and damage funding has long been a rallying cry for climate justice advocates and leaders from vulnerable countries. Wealthy nations, including the United States, have rebuffed those calls, worried that any kind of financial commitment would imply legal liability for climate change's escalating toll."

Earlier this month, more than 400 groups signed Climate Action Network's letter imploring COP27 delegates to ensure that finance for climate-related losses and damages is added to the conference agenda.

During last year's COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland committed just over $2 million to loss and damage funding, becoming the first government to do so. Scotland—which is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and therefore not a U.N. member—was followed by Wallonia, a French-speaking region of Belgium that earmarked about $1 million for the cause.

However, negotiators "failed to secure the establishment of a dedicated new damages fund vulnerable nations had pushed for earlier in the summit," Reuters reported at the close of the event, due to "resistance from the United States, the European Union, and some other rich nations."

Denmark's newly announced investment "includes 40 million Danish kroner—about $5.4 million—to work with civil society groups on addressing loss and damage," the Post reported. "It also sets aside millions for 'strategic efforts' around loss and damage negotiations ahead of the upcoming talks in Egypt."

Although Denmark's commitment is the largest to date, critics warn that it falls far short of what's needed and is structured in a way that could enrich private insurers at the expense of those most in need.

As the Post explained:

Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the nonprofit Climate Action Network, called Denmark's pledge "significant." But he pointed out that about a third of the promised funding will go to the InsuResilience Global Partnership, a U.N.-organized program through which private companies provide disaster insurance to those most vulnerable from climate change.

This setup "will create business for European corporations in the developing countries, eventually making vulnerable people pay for the premium toward losses and damages from climate disasters," Singh said.

Global climate justice advocates, meanwhile, have declared Thursday "Loss and Damage Action Day."

In a blog post published Wednesday, Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argued that "it's past time for the U.S. and other rich nations to acknowledge the terrible, unjust burden they are imposing on communities in low-income, climate-vulnerable countries and fully own their responsibility to address the problem."

"The responsibility of richer nations like the United States is clear: the U.S. alone is responsible for almost a quarter of the heat-trapping emissions fueling climate change, on a cumulative basis," Cleetus wrote. "Meanwhile, it is people in low-income countries like Pakistan, Somalia, Peru, and Vanuatu, who have emitted a minuscule amount of CO₂, who are bearing the brunt of extreme disasters."

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

City lawmakers in Lima, Peru on Monday unanimously passed a motion calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, a proposed global mechanism for tackling the source of most of the greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate emergency.

"It is necessary to take firm action on one of our principal threats, the proliferation of fossil fuels."

Lima councilors voted 39-0 in favor of a FFNPT, making the city the first Latin American capital to endorse the proposed treaty.

Carlo André Ángeles Manturano, the Lima council member who introduced the motion, said the measure shows his "commitment to continue promoting the necessary actions at the local, national, and international level to combat climate change."

"As we face the climate emergency as a society, the lack of firm commitments to action by our authorities and our governments is what brings us ever closer to irreversible damage," he explained. "It is necessary to take firm action on one of our principal threats, the proliferation of fossil fuels, an industry that is projected to produce 110% more emissions than what is required to limit warming to 1.5°C by 2030."

"That is why," added Ángeles, "on behalf of the metropolitan government of Lima, I presented the motion to join this crusade and call for the non-proliferation of fossil fuels in the city of Lima, and requesting the Peruvian national government to replicate this action and endorse the Fossil Fuel Treaty."

Launched in 2020 and backed by hundreds of groups, thousands of scientists, and people around the world from youth to grandparents, the FFNTP is based on three pillars:

• Preventing the proliferation of coal, oil, and gas by ending all new exploration and production;
• Phasing out existing fossil fuel production in line with the Paris agreement's 1.5°C global climate goal; and
• Fast-tracking real solutions and a just transition for every worker, community, and country.

Scores of cities and subnational governments have endorsed the FFNTP, including London, Paris, Los Angeles, Sydney, Toronto, and the Hawaiian Legislature. Last month, Vatican City became the world's first nation to back the treaty.

"Enough is enough," said Cardinal Michael Czerny in announcing the Vatican endorsement. "All new exploration and production of coal, oil, and gas must immediately end, and existing production of fossil fuels must be urgently phased out. This must be a just transition for impacted workers into environmentally sound alternatives. The proposed Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty holds great promise to complement and enhance the Paris Agreement."

In a statement responding to the Lima council's move, FFNTP partnerships coordinator Claudia Campero Arena, said "we are thrilled that Lima has become the first capital in Latin America to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty."

"Given that Lima is the capital of a diverse country that has suffered the harms of fossil fuel extraction," she added, "this leadership is a welcome push for positive change in Peru and the region to a just energy transition away from fossil fuels."

Coastal communities northwest of Lima are reeling from Peru's worst-ever environmental disaster. An oil spill in February spewed more than 10,000 barrels of crude petroleum into the Pacific Ocean from a tanker at a refinery operated by the Spanish firm Repsol, sending poison black waves washing over 27 miles of coastline.

Peruvian climate campaigner Augusto Duran said the Lima council's motion "has a vindictive character since the coast of Lima and Callao has witnessed the greatest ecological disaster in recent times."

"As such, it will initially put pressure on the executive and the legislature regarding the need for policies that strengthen the climate and environmental struggle," he added. "Although the motion as such is a symbolic element, it strengthens these advocacy processes. That is why we want more cities to be able to make the call to the treaty."

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

If there is a glimmer of hope in Papua New Guinea’s violence marred national general elections, then it has to be the elevation of a lone woman to the National Parliament.

It took the People’s National Congress (PNC) Governor-elect of Central Province, Rufina Peter, three attempts to wrest power away from Pangu’s Robert Agarobe at the close of counting last week.

The contest went down to the wire and Peter won on the weight of second and third preferential votes from eliminated candidates to unseat Agarobe.

• READ MORE: Shouldering the weight of four million women: PNG elects its first female MP in a decade
• Other PNG elections reports

She becomes the second woman to win the Central regional seat –– the first being vocal Papua Besena MP Dame Josephine Abaijah. And she is the eighth woman to be elected to Parliament, the first in a decade.

In another major development, the people of Madang are on the cusp of sending a second woman to join Peter in Parliament.

Rai Coast hopes up
In the remote district of Rai Coast –– famous for hosting a Russian anthropologist a century ago – jittery voters are keeping their fingers crossed as distribution of preferences was taking place over the weekend.

These are the same preferences that elevated Peter and given Sawang’s strong lead in the first half of the count, the preferences are hoped to push her to  victory.

Last Friday, she was in second place on 5086 votes after the first preferences were completed from defending MP Peter Sapia’s LLG area, pushing Sapia to 7127 votes.

Counting of preferential votes is continuing at a snail’s pace in Rai Coast as the coasties hold their breath.

More than 62,361 people of Central Province cast their vote for Peter, who polled 3444 more votes against incumbent Agarobe.

She surpassed the absolute majority of 60,640 after the 20th exclusion of Nelson Saroa who had 25,551 votes distributed, which pushed Rufina to collect 6779, making her reach the target with 62,361 votes against Agarobe who had 58,917 votes.

She said at her declaration on Friday night that she was aware of the magnitude of politics played out on the floor of Parliament, the tasks ahead of her, the wrestling she would need to do to give her Central Province people what they deserve.

First woman declared
An economist and Goilala’s first female politician, Rufina Peter is now the first woman to be declared in the 2022 national election.

Peter admitted that being elected as the political head of a province came with great responsibility and she was confident she could deliver to her people by working as a team.

PNC leader Peter O’Neill was first to congratulate the party’s “iron lady”, saying her declaration was a proud moment for the party.

“Rufina Peter’s declaration is a proud moment for our Party. She fought hard and stands strongly for those she represents. It is a pity that the ferocity and aggressive nature of this terrible national general election has sidelined a record number of female candidates,” O’Neill said.

In an interview over the weekend, Peter said Central Province had many educated elites who were instrumental in building the nation on the eve of independence.

“In my five years, I will make that happen again while in office, I will carry my people’s plight, I will fight for our women, our children and the underprivileged,” she said.

Dedicated to ‘female empowerment’
Peter assured the people of Central and PNG women that she stood ready to work with all members-elect in Central and the provincial administration to serve her people in five districts.

The new governor also thanked her predecessor, Robert Agarobe, for leading and governing Central Province over the past five years.

She dedicated her victory to God, the women of Central and male champions of women empowerment.

She acknowledged all security forces and electoral officials for delivering the elections in trying circumstances, and also praised the PNC party for believing in and endorsing her to run under its banner.

Gorethy Kenneth is a senior PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

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

Workers at a Massachusetts Trader Joe's on Thursday voted to become the first of the supermarket chain's more than 500 locations to unionize, a historic development that comes amid a nationwide labor organizing wave.

"Our crew needs to be represented by an entity that is solely dedicated to our best interests."

Employees at the Trader Joe's in Hadley, a suburb of Springfield, voted 45-31 to form a union, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

"WE WON!!! Today, Trader Joe's Hadley became the first unionized Trader Joe's location, ever," the new union, Trader Joe's United, tweeted. "This victory is historic, but not a surprise. Since the moment we announced our campaign, a majority of the crew have enthusiastically supported our union, and despite the company's best efforts to bust us, our majority has never wavered."

Gabrielle, who works at the Hadley store, explained that she was voting for a union because "our crew needs to be represented by an entity that is solely dedicated to our best interests."

"Our worker-led union ensures that we are protected and properly compensated—on our terms," she added.

Another Hadley crew member, Maeg, said she was voting "yes" because "we, the crew, are what keep this company running and profitable. It's time for us to sit down at the negotiating table as equals with Trader Joe's and create a contract that protects and takes care of us as workers."

Labor unions and organizers hailed the Hadley vote, with Starbucks Workers United congratulating the store's crew on its "incredible and groundbreaking victory."

Wen Zhuang, a member of the NewsGuild of New York and Emergency Workplace Organizing, called Thursday's vote "amazing."

"Trader Joe's has a deep history of simply atrocious union busting, firing of organizers, and lots of other shenanigans," she tweeted. "What happened here will most definitely be replicated."

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among the progressive politicians who saluted the newly unionized Trader Joe's workers.

"Now is the time for management to recognize the union and to negotiate a fair contract with decent benefits and safe working conditions," the two-time democratic socialist presidential candidate tweeted.

A Trader Joe's spokesperson said the company is "prepared to immediately begin discussions with union representatives for the employees at this store to negotiate a contract."

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) tweeted that "workers in Hadley just made history by becoming the first Trader Joe's ever to form a union. They join a growing nationwide movement of workers standing up to demand better working conditions and fair pay."

The Washington Post reports:

The union's victory in western Massachusetts follows a wave of successful union drives this year at high-profile employers that have long evaded unionization, such as Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and REI. Union victories can produce a ripple effect across employers and industries, emboldening new workers to organize. Petitions for union elections this year are on track to hit their highest level in a decade, as a hot labor market has afforded workers more leverage over their employers.

In just over six months' time, Starbucks went from having one unionized location in Buffalo, New York to 200 stores with unionized workforces.

Other Trader Joe's crews have taken notice of the Hadley vote, and workers from at least two other stores have already launched their own union drives. More Perfect Union has reported that Trader Joe's is improving pay, perks, and working conditions in the face of the increased unionization activity.

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

[Translated from: जिस दिन कोई आदिवासी महिला भारत के सर्वोच्च पद “राष्ट्रपति” तक पहुंच जाएगी देश में आरक्षण खत्म कर देना चाहिए।]

This quote, along with Dr Ambedkar’s image, has been widely shared on social media. On July 23, a page called We Are Against Reservation shared this quote on Facebook. Another anti-reservation page आरक्षण एक अभिषाप also posted this image.

Several other Facebook accounts have shared and amplified this claim.

Mirroring Facebook’s trend, various Twitter accounts have also attributed this quote to Dr Ambedkar.

Alt News has received multiple requests on our WhatsApp helpline (76000 11160) to verify authenticity of this claim.

Curiously enough, The Sentinel, a Guwahati-based English daily newspaper, also published an article under the “Letters to THE EDITOR” column where a reader opined on reservation based on the alleged quote by Dr Ambedkar. (Archived link)

Fact-check

Alt News performed a search in Hindi and English using relevant keywords. However, this did not yield any credible source of information that attributes this claim to Dr Ambedkar. This was a red flag.

We then looked at the website of the Ministry of External Affairs where all the published writings and speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar are available in separate volumes. To have an understanding of these works, we reached out to experts who were involved in the research and compilation process of this project.

Alt News spoke with Hari Narke, editor of Writings & Speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar from volumes 17 to 22. He was a professor and the head of Mahatma Phule Chair in Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune till 2016. He pointed out, “These volumes include all works and speeches by Dr Ambedkar, including his speeches in the Constituent Assembly Debates.”

On a telephonic call, Narke told Alt News, “My credibility is built on my life’s work on Dr BR Ambedkar and Mahatma Jotirao Phule. It’s worth noting while I was not the editor of the first 16 volumes, I was a part of the research. Based on my research, I can state on record that Dr Ambedkar never said, ‘The day a tribal woman becomes the President of India, the reservation should be abolished in the country’. This is not the first time Ambedkar has been attributed to a fake quote on social media. It is worth noting the one commonality among all such fake quotes — they never attribute when or where Dr Ambedkar made these quotes”.

Narke continued, “First, we must look at the timing of the quote. Prior to the news of Droupadi Murmu being elected as 15th President of India, this quote didn’t surface. Second, Dr Ambedkar didn’t believe in tokenism. I feel the impact on tribal community’s welfare after Droupadi Murmu becomes the president will be similar to the impact Ram Nath Kovind’s president tenure had on Scheduled Castes community in India.”

Old claims with new packaging

This is not the first anti-reservation quote attributed to Dr Ambedkar. It is pertinent to note that in the past, several social media accounts (1,2,3,4) have claimed that Dr Ambedkar only wanted reservations for 10 years.

In 2018, BJP leader Sumitra Mahajan said, “The idea of Ambedkarji was to bring social harmony by introducing reservation for 10 years. But what we do is to extend the reservation every 10 years. There is a shortcoming,” at the three-day Lok Manthan programme in Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi.

In June 2022, Anurag Bhaskar, assistant professor at Jindal Global Law School, published a paper titled, “The Myth of the Ten-Year Limit on Reservations and Dr Ambedkar’s Stance” in Sage Journals, an academic journal that publishes peer-reviewed, original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format.

Bhaskar wrote, “Some individuals, including constitutional office holders, tend to argue that ‘Ambedkar wanted reservations only for a decade’ (Scroll, 2018). It is often argued that reservations were intended to exist only for 10 years. In this article, I demonstrate that the argument of Ambedkar wanting reservations for only a period of 10 years is a falsehood.”

In order to debunk the claim, he stated, “For this, one needs to examine India’s constitutional history deeply from the Poona Pact (1932), as it marked a significant moment for the discourse around special rights for lower castes in political offices and a time limit upon it. In this article, the terms ‘Depressed Classes’, ‘untouchables’ and ‘Scheduled Castes’ (SCs) have been used interchangeably, as all of these appear in Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s writings in different phases of history. Similarly, Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Adivasis have been used interchangeably in this article.” Those interested in reading the entire paper can do so if they have access to Sage Journal.

He concluded, “Ambedkar was not in favour of a fixed time limit of 10 years, even for political reservations for SCs and STs. His demand during the Poona Pact was that after 10 years, there should be a reconsideration of the position of reserved constituencies in joint electorates and that the SCs should decide by referendum if they want to continue with the system. This would mean deciding whether to adopt another method of electing candidates from SCs. Even though this demand was not included in the final text of the Constitution, Ambedkar had left it to the SCs to ‘invent new ways of getting the same protection’ (CAI, 1949e). In effect, without the consent of SCs and STs, political reservation cannot be done away with. The political reservations were a result of ‘mutual agreement’ (Vundru, 2017, p. 57) between SCs and caste Hindus. When it was incorporated into the Constitution, it became akin to a constitutional promise. Though the Constituent Assembly fixed a time limit of 10 years on political reservations, Ambedkar himself had prescribed the method of the constitutional amendment to extend this time limit, if the situation of SCs and STs does not improve (Vundru, 2017, p. 57). The extension of this time limit since 1960 is in consonance with the spirit of Ambedkar’s demands. No time limit was set on reservations for backward classes in public services and educational institutions.”

To conclude, a quote was falsely attributed to Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in the backdrop of Droupadi Murmu being elected as the president. Based on our research and inputs from Hari Narke, editor of Writings & Speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar from volumes 17 to 22, there is no evidence to suggest Dr Ambedkar said that reservation should be abolished the day a tribal woman becomes the President of the country.

The post No, Dr Ambedkar did not say reservation should be abolished the day a tribal woman becomes President appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Archit Mehta.

When the migrant workers from Sichuan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Henan, and Hebei–China’s relatively poorer inland provinces–arrived in the country, however, they soon found themselves living in sheds without air conditioning in desert heat and facing a nightmare of withheld wages, mysterious extra fees, confiscated passports, and dismal food. Many are trapped in Algeria.

Chinese labor lawyers say their treatment not only besmirches China’s reputation, undermining the goals of the nearly 10-year-old Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of infrastructure projects aimed at boosting Beijing’s global profile, but also constitutes human trafficking under international conventions China has signed. The BRI is seen as Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature international policy.

Following up on tips received from workers who’ve been stranded some 6,000 miles (9,200 km) from home, RFA Mandarin interviewed numerous workers employed in Algeria’s Souk Ahras Province, Chinese diplomats, labor lawyers and an executive of Shandong Jiaqiang Real Estate Co. Ltd, the eastern China-based company the laborers accuse of luring them to Algeria under false pretenses.

“When I came here through an agent, I realized the situation is not good. It is worse than in China,” said Worker A, whose name has been withheld to protect him and his family from retaliation.

“The contract is good for two years, and the pay listed on the contract is more than 10,000 yuan ($1,480) per month––between 15,000 ($2,220) and 20,000 yuan ($2,960). After landing here, I made less than 10,000 yuan ($1,480) a month,” he told RFA.

“The pay is far from what was promised,” said a second man, identified as Worker B.  “It is worse than what we earned in China. Here the monthly pay on average is 3,000 yuan ($444).”

When he and fellow workers “arrived here and found out that the situation was far from ideal, we wanted to go home,” said Worker A.

“We spoke with the company, and the company said ‘no.’ They said ‘Because you already signed the contract, if you go home now, that is a breach of contract.’”

According to Worker A, Shandong Jiaqiang Real Estate Co. Ltd. told the workers to “ask your family to wire 28,000 yuan ($4,145) over to pay for the penalty. After you pay the penalty, then you can go home.”

He told RFA wages were only paid every six months, with 70 percent paid, and the other 30 percent withheld until the workers fulfilled their two-year contracts.

That pay arrangement meant the workers “usually have no money to live on” and had to borrow advances against their wages.

“In the process, the workers were ripped off by other costs,” added Worker A, who said the company profited by loaning money to them at an exchange rate to the local Algerian Dinar currency that was about half the actual rate.

Worker B said it took a strike by workers in September 2021 to get the company to pay the 70 percent they were due in the middle of that year.

He said the workers were told by the company: “Feel free to sue. We’re not afraid. Just sue us, go back to China to sue us.”

But a third worker involved in the dispute said that path was impossible for poor workers to take

“The lawsuit costs money. To hire someone costs money. If you file a complaint in China, you’re dragging your family in too. Who can afford to sue? said Worker C.

A chief reason the workers had to borrow money was to cook their own meals because the three daily meals they were promised under their contracts was inedible.

“To say it bluntly, the food was worse than those given to pigs. Sometimes the food was just impossible to eat,” said Worker B.

“In the winter, they gave you marinated cucumber salad or marinated tomatoes, plus two eggs per person. That’s it. Or two eggplants each person,” he said.

“The food we ate was mixed with sand and gravel. The noodles were black,” added Worker B.

“Workers in many construction sites that this company operates received the same treatment. Why? The company does not want to cook the food well, because if it’s delicious, you’d eat more. By offering lousy food, you’d pay out of pocket to buy your own food and cook your own meals,” Worker A surmised. 

The make matters worse, Worker A said, the workforce had to “live in regular sheds, with no air-conditioning, no matter how hot it is.”

“In the summer, the temperature goes as high as 41 or 42 Celsius (105 or 107 Fahrenheit),” he added.

Another grievance shared by the workers in Algeria who spoke to RFA in recent months was the failure to provide return airfare to China as promised.

After checking with the Chinese Embassy in Algiers, workers who were trying to go home were told that tickets to China ran about 22,000 yuan.

“The boss has told them that a flight ticket costs ¥42,000 yuan, and we have to pay our own ticket. He wanted us to pay by ourselves,” said Worker D.

“It seemed that the ticket was around ¥22,000 yuan, and he charged you more than ¥30,000, said Worker E. “’Immigration clearance fee,’ they said,” he added.

Worker D explained that because the company applied for business visas for the workers, when the workers return to China, they have to go through departure procedures at the Algerian immigration, police bureaus, and the courts. That is the so-called “immigration clearance fee.”

“When we were recruited, we applied and submitted our passports to the recruiting agents. The agents then handed our passports to the company, which applied for the visas for us,” said Worker D.

“Supposedly we should apply for workers’ visas, which cost more but allow you to stay for one or two years. But no, the company applied for the business visa, which only allows a stay of three months,” he added.

“I asked the company to give me a work visa, but when we came, we got business visas. Then we became illegal workers. Now we have to pay out of pocket to ‘clear immigration’ and for our flight tickets,” said Worker E.

The company also took away the workers’ passports, several of them said.

“As soon as I stepped out of the airport in Algeria upon arrival, my passport was taken away. They said workers here have to buy local insurance, and they took away our passports and our IDs,” said Worker D.

The boss “keeps our passports with him, and once he has your passport, he has you,” added Worker D, who said eight out of 10 workers eventually ended up with compensation disputes.

RFA reached out to Sun Zongting, the general manager of Shandong Jiaqiang Real Estate Co., Ltd., which had entered the Algerian market in 2013 to provide labor services, asking him about the workers’ complaints.

“There is no such thing. Where does this come from?” said Sun, who also denied the firm was stopping workers from returning to China.

“The reason why they didn’t return to China was because there were no flights available. With regards to payments, this is how it’s being done in Algeria. We do not owe the workers any wages.”

Pressed on the workers’ numerous complaints, Sun asked RFA: “Who said that? Give me phone numbers of those who said that. We can verify.”

“On the third or the fourth day after my arrival, I called the (Chinese) embassy. I told the embassy staff that I felt I have been conned, and that all my documents, my ID and my passports have been taken away. I asked the embassy to help me return to China,” said Worker D.

“The staff then ask me whether I’d signed a contract. I said I did when I was in Beijing. The person at the embassy told me: ‘If you are sick or if he does not pay you for your work, you can call me, but in your situation, now that you’ve come here, and you’ve signed a labor agreement…’

“The embassy staff said they did not dare to let me go,” said Worker D.

Worker D said he and his fellow workers see the embassy as working with the company.

“If you want to go to the consulate for help, for example, when a couple of people go, they’d ask you which company you work for and what your boss’s name is. Then they notify your boss. The boss then comes by car, and he sweet talks you back,” he said.

“This is what happens when two or three people go to the consulate for help. If there are more people that go, say more than a dozen of them or even two dozen, maybe the consulate will help us. Yet when there are only so few of us, it doesn’t work.”

A staffer at China’s embassy in Algiers confirmed that disgruntled workers who spoke to RFA had indeed asked for help and that the mission had helped negotiate some return plane tickets to China.

“The Embassy has helped them negotiate with the company many times, but the Embassy has no managerial power over the company to enforce the agreements, so we cannot force the company to pay up,” the embassy staffer told RFA.

 “Also, the Embassy does not have any jurisdictional powers, and that’s the reason why the embassy is unable to get involved in labor disputes. Therefore, we have asked them to resolve their disputes through reasonable and legal channels in China,” added the staffer.

“We can of course speak with the company, but whether the company listens to us is another matter.” 

Shandong Jiaqiang Real Estate Co., Ltd. had tried to deny it had anything to do with the BRI, but RFA found that the affordable housing project was identified in as part of the BRI framework on the website of Beijing Urban Construction, a state firm, which had also built the Algeria Opera House, a 500-unit public commercial housing tract and a fiber optic cable plant.

Worker D told RFA that the affordable housing project contract was awarded to the 14th Bureau of China Railway, the 17th Bureau of China Railway, China Hydropower, Beijing Urban Construction and other state-owned enterprises, and that Shandong Jiaqiang Real Estate Co., Ltd. was a private subcontractor.

“When the company gets the job, it’s gone through dozens of hands, with only 300,000 to 400,000 yuan left in the budget. Think about it: The profits must have been taken by the state-owned enterprises on the top of the food chain,” said Worker D.

“There isn’t much profit left. What does he do when the profit margin is slim? He exploits the workers. Basically, it’s just like China: Peeling the layers.

“The state-own enterprises peeled away one layer and subcontract the job to small businesses. The owners of small businesses then peeled away another layer, and as a result, we workers couldn’t get our money,” added Worker D.

“Some companies do have the money but won’t pay you. They know that once they’ve conned you over here, you can’t do anything. Whomever you might call for help, that help will not come.”

Lawyers see human trafficking

Peng Yan––a prominent attorney in China with 30 years specializing in state-owned enterprises, private enterprises, and foreign enterprises–told RFA the workers appeared to be in the right in the dispute in Algeria.

“If the employer breached the contract first, then based on the circumstances, the workers have the right to terminate the contract. Since the company is the party that breached the contract, the company should bear the costs of roundtrip airfares for their returns to China,” Peng said.

Yu Ping, former director of the China Office of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, said the workers’ complaint is a serious issue that may even entail human trafficking under the 2000 United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, to which China is a signatory.

“Under the Convention, human trafficking is defined as the act of recruiting, transporting, receiving, and sheltering human beings to another country, as actions that involve coercion, fraud, deception, and as actions whose purpose is for profits,” he told RFA.

“If you apply these three criteria to the case, then you can see that the actions of the recruiting agency, the state-owned enterprise, and the private contractor all constitute the internationally recognized definition of human trafficking,” said Yu.

“In fact, even the recruiting agent is part of this chain of human trafficking, an accomplice, or even a prime suspect. They cannot push off the responsibility to others,” he added.

Yu said the aggrieved construction workers should be able to seek legal redress back in China, which has provisions covering offenses listed as internationally recognized crimes in the UN Convention.

“Even if they lack the financial means to do so, there is an emerging channel called the ‘legal assistance system,’ in which some non-profit legal organizations or pro bono lawyers will go to court for them,” he said.

Yu also recommended that China “establish a regulatory system in the BRI program, which has oversight on the projects and the power to curtail illegal operations.”

Failing to do so, he said, will negate the international influence and goodwill that China aims to generate with the BRI program, and “on the contrary, provide opportunities for lawbreakers to make illegal profits, while China’s reputation is tarnished.”

For the workers caught broke and without plane tickets and passports in Algeria, however, the legal and international issues pale next to the personal cost of being in limbo and missing the weddings of their children or the funerals of elderly parents.

“It’s been more than two years, two-and-a-half years. I don’t know when I can go back. I fulfilled the contract, but it has become a life sentence,” said Worker B.

Translated by Min Eu. Written and edited by Paul Eckert.

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

The post Ditch the Constitution and Start Over: When a Government Becomes Destructive of the Rights of the People appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Mazza.

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has ended in Rwanda with Samoa confirmed as the next host of the meeting.

Samoa’s hosting of the 2024 event will be the first time a Pacific member country will host CHOGM

Samoa’s Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa attended the meeting in Rwanda.

• READ MORE: Commonwealth meet draws attention to Rwanda’s human rights record

CHOGM brings together leaders and delegations from 54 Commonwealth nations from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Europe.

Leaders of Commonwealth countries meet every two years, hosted by different member countries on a rotating basis since 1971.

#Samoa to host the next #Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2024. @RNZPacific @KaiSawaieke @IBIupdate @radioaustralia @samoaobserver
Follow live press conference: https://t.co/9VZSSsmnTM pic.twitter.com/VCm72xxOJR

— Josephine Latu-Sanft (@JoLatuSanft) June 25, 2022

The last meeting was hosted by the United Kingdom in 2018, and this is the first meeting since the covid-19 pandemic delayed the meeting for two years.

The week-long meeting discussed important matters to the Commonwealth family of nations such as democracy, peace, and governance; sustainable and inclusive development; post-covid-19 recovery, climate crisis, new members, and the secretary-general of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

On Saturday, during the Leaders Retreat, Samoa was confirmed as the next host for the CHOGM in 2024.

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

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

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has ended in Rwanda with Samoa confirmed as the next host of the meeting.

Samoa’s hosting of the 2024 event will be the first time a Pacific member country will host CHOGM

Samoa’s Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa attended the meeting in Rwanda.

• READ MORE: Commonwealth meet draws attention to Rwanda’s human rights record

CHOGM brings together leaders and delegations from 54 Commonwealth nations from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Europe.

Leaders of Commonwealth countries meet every two years, hosted by different member countries on a rotating basis since 1971.

#Samoa to host the next #Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2024. @RNZPacific @KaiSawaieke @IBIupdate @radioaustralia @samoaobserver
Follow live press conference: https://t.co/9VZSSsmnTM pic.twitter.com/VCm72xxOJR

— Josephine Latu-Sanft (@JoLatuSanft) June 25, 2022

The last meeting was hosted by the United Kingdom in 2018, and this is the first meeting since the covid-19 pandemic delayed the meeting for two years.

The week-long meeting discussed important matters to the Commonwealth family of nations such as democracy, peace, and governance; sustainable and inclusive development; post-covid-19 recovery, climate crisis, new members, and the secretary-general of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

On Saturday, during the Leaders Retreat, Samoa was confirmed as the next host for the CHOGM in 2024.

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

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

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has ended in Rwanda with Samoa confirmed as the next host of the meeting.

Samoa’s hosting of the 2024 event will be the first time a Pacific member country will host CHOGM

Samoa’s Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa attended the meeting in Rwanda.

• READ MORE: Commonwealth meet draws attention to Rwanda’s human rights record

CHOGM brings together leaders and delegations from 54 Commonwealth nations from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Europe.

Leaders of Commonwealth countries meet every two years, hosted by different member countries on a rotating basis since 1971.

#Samoa to host the next #Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2024. @RNZPacific @KaiSawaieke @IBIupdate @radioaustralia @samoaobserver
Follow live press conference: https://t.co/9VZSSsmnTM pic.twitter.com/VCm72xxOJR

— Josephine Latu-Sanft (@JoLatuSanft) June 25, 2022

The last meeting was hosted by the United Kingdom in 2018, and this is the first meeting since the covid-19 pandemic delayed the meeting for two years.

The week-long meeting discussed important matters to the Commonwealth family of nations such as democracy, peace, and governance; sustainable and inclusive development; post-covid-19 recovery, climate crisis, new members, and the secretary-general of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

On Saturday, during the Leaders Retreat, Samoa was confirmed as the next host for the CHOGM in 2024.

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

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

The post The New Turn in Ukraine: Putin’s War Becomes Biden’s War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard Rubenstein.

The junta’s Ministry of Education that only 312,299 students had signed up for the exams during the 2021-2022 academic year.

The number represented a decrease of more than two-thirds from two years earlier, when 970,759 students registered. It also marked the first decline in registrants in at least seven years, when 632,314 students took the exams in 2014-2015 — a drop from the previous term but a number that is still twice as large as in 2021-2022. Exams were cancelled during the 2020-2021 academic year due to COVID-19 school closures.

This year’s exams, which are scheduled to run until April 9, are being held amid daily anti-junta bombings and public unrest throughout the country, and reports have emerged of the military blocking access to test sites.

A Yangon-based student who took the exam said parents are no longer allowed to wait for their children in front of test centers as in previous years.

“There was a large presence of soldiers and police outside,” she said, adding that students “just gave the answers to the exam questions quickly and left.”

Aung Kyaw, deputy permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education, told RFA that security measures had been strengthened to allow testing to proceed.

“We have coordinated with the health department and the security department,” he said. “All of our education ministry staff are also kept on standby. They are performing their duties. Security measures are in place and teachers have been working nonstop.”

The testing marked the end to a trying academic year. In addition to the coup, schools had to contend with a COVID-19 outbreak that forced their closure for four months. When they reopened on Nov. 1, many students did not return, both in protest of military rule and out of fear that they could be the subject of an anti-junta attack.

In Kayah state, where the military has encountered staunch resistance since launching offensives against armed ethnic groups and prodemocracy People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitaries, only 780 students had registered for this year's matriculation exam. Since the coup, fighting in the region — which is home to around 290,000 people — has displaced more than 100,000 civilians, including many students.

Soe Mya, a student from Ngwedaung village, in Kayah’s Demawso township, told RFA she had to flee her home due to the fighting and was forced to miss the exam.

“Before the coup, I was ready to graduate and continue my schooling. My parents had made accommodation arrangements for me, and I had completed all of the necessary tutoring,” she said.

“Of course, I want to go to school when I see others going. But it wasn’t possible to apply for this exam as we’re currently on the run and sheltering in the jungle.”

Soe Mya said she had seen far fewer students taking university exams this year than in previous ones —particularly in Demawso, where clashes had occurred as recently as Thursday morning.

Boycotts of military-run schooling

Some parents RFA spoke with said that they had simply refused to allow their children to attend school or sit for exams in protest of the military-run education system.

“Many schoolteachers are taking part in the [Civil Disobedience Movement] to protest the junta and we don’t like the teachers who replaced them,” said Khin Than Nu, a mother from Sagaing region, who said she had chosen to homeschool her children.

“We will continue their education when the country is at peace. In the meantime, there are many vocational training courses available on the internet and my children are also learning English online.”

According to the Ministry of Education, Rakhine state had the highest registration rate of students for the academic year at 45,592, followed by Yangon region with 37,560, and Mandalay with 37,202. Kayah state’s 780 registrants was the lowest of any region.

Parents told RFA that despite the number of registrants, they expect the actual number of students who take this year’s university exams will be lower.

When asked how many students had taken the exam on Thursday, a Ministry of Education official told RFA he did not know the exact number.

While Myanmar’s coup and political upheaval have severely impacted access to education for the country’s youth, they have also put them at greater personal risk in their daily lives.

According to Thailand’s Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, authorities in Myanmar have killed at least 1,723 civilians and arrested 10,000 others since the coup — mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests.

A recent investigation by RFA found that more than 100 of those killed were under the age of 18.

Sources described victims that included a six-year-old who died as he slept when junta troops shelled his village in Magway region’s Yezagyo township on the night of March 26, four teenagers who were among 11 people discovered burned to death by soldiers in Sagaing region’s Salingyi township on Dec. 7, 2021, and a 12-year-old boy who was shot dead by authorities in Sagaing’s Shwebo township on March 27 last year.

RFA also confirmed the deaths of youths who were killed while participating in anti-junta protests, while detained on suspicion of involvement with the PDF or the country’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG) and as the result of stray bullets and artillery fire.

A resident of Salingyi’s Dontaw village, where the burned corpses were discovered in December, condemned what he said was the senseless killing of innocent youths.

“These soldiers care little of the rights of children because the junta is trying to do whatever it can to harm the people. They don’t care whether people are young or old,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We do not want innocent people — especially children — to have to suffer anymore.”

Seeking international justice

The number of victims confirmed by RFA are in line with that of the NUG’s Ministry of Women, Youth and Children, which said in a statement earlier this month that 110 youths had been killed between Feb. 1, 2021, and March 1 this year.

Similarly, a report submitted on March 21 to the United Nations Human Rights Council by Tom Andrews, the U.N. special rapporteur on Burma, found that “at least 100 children” had been killed and more than 100 remain missing in just over a year of military rule.

When asked about the deaths, junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun told RFA there was no reason for the military to target children.

“Whenever there is fighting involving countries where these accusers are based, children as well as old men and women are killed. If you don’t believe me, look at what happened during the Vietnam War. Now [these governments] are accusing us of these acts,” he said.

“The current government is working for stability, peace and the rule of law.”

Ei Thinzar Maung, NUG deputy minister for Women, Youth and Children Affairs, dismissed Zaw Min Tun’s claims and said efforts are underway to hold the junta accountable for killing minors in an international court of law.

“In this age of information, their lies will be ineffective. We also have evidence and witnesses,” she said.

“When there is no justice in the country, we’ll have to rely on international justice. So, we are trying to act, through an international court.”

Myanmar ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child on Aug. 15, 1991. In 2019, under the National League for Democracy government, former President Win Myint signed and ratified the Children’s Rights Law to ensure the full protection of children in accordance with the convention, and observers say the junta has acted in violation of the law.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA's Myanmar Service.

Disappearances reported

The user added that "a large number" of people who spoke out about the Feng county scandal had been called in to "drink tea" with the state security police, or just disappeared.

Beijing-based rights activist Ni Yulan said she still worries about Yang.

"I'm concerned about her too," she said. "I saw someone with a chain around their neck and a lock, engaging in performance art [posting it online]."

"I have also seen a lot of paintings, all kinds of them, and I have also forwarded them."

Ni said Yang had lost most of her life to the trafficking gangs and her abusive husband and his family.

"She was unable to live a normal life for 26 years," she said. "She was abducted when she was still so young, and has gone through so much suffering."

"We didn't even have the opportunity to hear her speak," Ni said.

Hubei rights activist Wu Lijuan said many online activists had switched their usual avatar for one depicting the chained woman.

"We need to learn the truth about what happened, if we are to protect everyone," Wu told RFA. "Without that ... there will be no safety or security for any Chinese woman."

Independent journalist Gao Yu added: "Even the Winter Olympics and Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine haven't detracted from the attention of the Chinese public and the rest of the world on the case of the chained woman."

"It's not going to be fixed by the ministry of public security simply announcing a special campaign against the trafficking of women and children," she told RFA, calling on China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC), to take concrete action.

'SOS (Save our Sisters)'

Meanwhile, Chinese film director Hu Xueyang screened a new film on Monday to mark International Women's Day in Paris, supported by Chinese-American writer Yang Geling, her husband Lawrence Walker and Germany-based artist and writer Yoyo.

The film tells the story of a woman who escaped from North Korea and lived in hiding in northeastern China. But instead of being rescued by South Koreans as they had hoped, they wound up in the hands of a trafficking gang.

Forced to become a sex worker in a hair salon, the heroine meets a man who falls in love with her and wants to rescue her. Despite warnings, he goes under cover to discover a number of shady stories at the crossover between the trafficking and organ-smuggling gangs and the corrupt local police officers who collude with them.

The film ends as a North Korean agent posing as a South Korean missionary escorts the heroine back to North Korea, as she sings a North Korean folk song, "The Ballad of Kikyo," moving the agent to the extent that he takes off her handcuffs.

Poet Yang Lian read out a poem written for the Jiangsu chained woman at the film's premiere.

"Please delete the word mother in Chinese," the poem reads. "Because mother has been chained, dragged ... raped, injured, soiled, ruined, hollowed out, trampled, left cold and hungry, bullied, mutilated, consumed, destroyed and discarded."

Hu arranged the screening as a form of protest at the treatment of Yang Qingxia, according to the event invitation.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Fong Tak Ho, Qiao Long, Xiaoshan Huang and Chingman.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: All Incidents and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: All Incidents.

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

• President Joe Biden embarks on cross country tour to tout the American Rescue Plan.
• Civil rights advocates warn hundreds of Republican backed measures to limit voting rights.
• 2nd ranking Senate Democrat calls for ending filibuster to push through party’s agenda.
• Deb Haaland becomes first Native American to lead any cabinet agency, as head of Department of Interior.
• Moderna begins testing COVID-19 vaccine on youth as young as 6 months old.
• Sweden suspends use of AstraZeneca vaccine amidst health concerns.
• Palestinian leaders call for pressure campaign on Israel to vaccinate 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank.
• California lawmaker proposes $3.1 billion bond to help agriculture industry respond to climate change.
• Proposed state legislation would strip badges from police found guilty of serious misconduct.
• Proposed state bill would tax the ultra wealthy to cover social safety net programs.

Photo of Deb Haaland, Department of Interior Secretary, from Insight New Mexico.

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