describe – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org Independent Media for People, Not Profits. Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:13:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.radiofree.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-Radio-Free-Social-Icon-2-32x32.png describe – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org 32 32 141331581 Beaten to Death: Eyewitnesses Describe Brutal Killing of U.S. Citizen by Israeli Settlers in West Bank https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/15/beaten-to-death-eyewitnesses-describe-brutal-killing-of-u-s-citizen-by-israeli-settlers-in-west-bank/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/15/beaten-to-death-eyewitnesses-describe-brutal-killing-of-u-s-citizen-by-israeli-settlers-in-west-bank/#respond Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:13:48 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=42417388fbd06057c3492911b8f4143e Seg1 sayf3

We go to the occupied West Bank for an update on how the family of a 20-year-old Palestinian American from Florida, Sayfollah “Saif” Musallet, is demanding justice after he was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Musallet and another Palestinian, 23-year-old Mohammad al-Shalabi, were attacked by a group of Israeli settlers on Friday in the town of Sinjil, northeast of Ramallah, where their families own farmland. Eyewitnesses say the settlers brutally beat Musallet and fatally shot al-Shalabi, then prevented ambulances from reaching their victims for hours. Musallet was pronounced dead before he could reach a hospital.

“The settlers and the military don’t only work hand in hand,” says anti-Zionist activist Jonathan Pollak, who was injured in the same protest. “They are part and parcel of implementing the same policy … of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.”

“Palestinians here have zero rights,” adds Nizar Milbes, a distant relative and close friend of the Musallet family, who says settlers have been encroaching on Palestinian lands even more aggressively since October 7, 2023.


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/15/beaten-to-death-eyewitnesses-describe-brutal-killing-of-u-s-citizen-by-israeli-settlers-in-west-bank/feed/ 0 544514 ‘The problem was created by Trump’: Three eyewitnesses describe what’s really happening in Los Angeles https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/the-problem-was-created-by-trump-three-eyewitnesses-describe-whats-really-happening-in-los-angeles/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/the-problem-was-created-by-trump-three-eyewitnesses-describe-whats-really-happening-in-los-angeles/#respond Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:16:00 +0000 https://therealnews.com/?p=334986 A protester poses for a portrait with an upside down American flag during the "No Kings" protest on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Over the last week ICE agents have been conducting raids and arresting undocumented immigrants throughout Los Angeles and the surrounding metropolitan area leading to protest.“What I witnessed is primarily a peaceful protest. It never got violent until the police in riot gear and batons started firing munitions at protestors… This is an American protest. It was not an insurrection. I covered January 6, I know exactly what that looks like.”]]> A protester poses for a portrait with an upside down American flag during the "No Kings" protest on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Over the last week ICE agents have been conducting raids and arresting undocumented immigrants throughout Los Angeles and the surrounding metropolitan area leading to protest.

In Los Angeles, CA, armed, masked agents of the state are snatching and disappearing immigrants off the street, peaceful protestors and journalists are being attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, National Guard troops and active-duty Marines have been deployed to police and intimidate American citizens. Fear and uncertainty have gripped America’s second largest city as a barrage of misinformation obscures the reality on the ground; nevertheless, Angelinos continue to defy the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant communities and authoritarian crackdown on civil rights. In this episode of Working People, we take you to the streets of LA and speak with multiple on-the-ground eyewitnesses to the events of the past two weeks to help you better understand what’s actually happening and where this is all heading.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and today we are taking you to the streets of Los Angeles where federal agents, including many in face masks and unmarked cars, have been snatching and disappearing people off the streets, taking them from Home Depot, parking lots and farm fields. Outside immigration courts abducting them from their homes, leaving lives and families shattered with all the inhumane violence and brutal glee of fascist brown shirts. Unless you have been living under a rock and actively refusing to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening in our country, you have no doubt seen videos of these immigration raids on social media and on the news you saw federal agents tackle and arrest union leader David Huerta, president of Service employees International Union, unite Service Workers West, while he and others were exercising their first amendment right to observe and document law enforcement activity at a workplace raid on Friday, June 6th, you’ve heard the reports of President Donald Trump sending National Guard troops in active duty Marines into LA against the explicit wishes of California officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom.

And Trump is now openly demanding that ICE and other armed agents of the state specifically target and invade other major sanctuary cities with elected democratic leaders to carry out his mass deportation campaign. And you have hopefully also seen and heard the voices of resistance rising from the streets, even with a curfew in place in downtown LA over multiple days, even in the face of militarized police openly violating their first amendment rights and brutalizing protestors, journalists and legal observers alike residents across America’s second largest city, and I’m talking union members, students, grandparents, and retirees, faith leaders and concerned citizens from all walks of life have continued voicing their descent online and in the streets, protesting the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks, rallying support and protection for immigrant communities, filming ice and police abuses and demanding accountability. What is happening in Los Angeles is already setting the stage for what’s to come around the country.

We know what the Trump administration wants to do to immigrants, to protestors, to our civil rights, and to the very concept of state sovereignty. I mean, we are literally seeing it play out in real time. What we don’t know is how much Trump’s plans will be frustrated, thwarted, and even reversed by the resistance that he faces. What happens next depends on what people of conscience people like you do. Now in this two parts series of the podcast, we’re going to do our best to give you a panoramic view of the Battle of Los Angeles, bringing you multiple on the ground perspectives to help you cut through the noise and all the misinformation and to better understand what’s actually happening, where this is all heading, and what you and others can do to stand up for your rights and stand up for yourself, your family, your neighbors, your coworkers, and your community members.

For part one of this series, I spoke with three different journalists who have been doing distinct and equally essential coverage of the raids, the protests, police abuses, and community mobilization efforts happening in la. First I speak with Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, writer, author, and the host of Rising Up with Sonali. Then I speak with Javier Cabral, editor in chief of the award-winning independent outlet, LA Taco, which has been doing vital real-time video reporting on social media throughout the raids and the protests. And lastly, I speak with Michael Nigro, an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia journalist who is among the numerous journalist colleagues who have been assaulted by police while doing his job reporting from the front lines in Los Angeles.

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Hi, I’m Sonali Kolhatkar. I am the host, founder and executive producer of Rising Up with Sonali, an independent nationally syndicated television and radio program that’s broadcast on free speech TV and Pacifica radio stations. I’m also an essayist op-ed writer, reporter, and a published book author, and I’m really excited to be here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Sonali, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I’m a huge fan and appreciator of your work and everyone listening, if you’re not already, you should absolutely be listening to supporting and sharing Rising up with Sonali. It’s really, really essential work and we will link to that in the show notes. And you guys probably, if for any reason you aren’t already following son’s work, you’re definitely familiar with her and her critical voice. It was just a few months ago that Sonali was giving really important updates on news shows around the country, about the fires going on back home in Southern California. And here we are just what, four months later and now we’ve got the National Guard back in my home of LA and the protests that we are covering here on this episode. It’s been a lot and it’s kind of surreal to even be having this conversation, especially as a southern California boy now in Baltimore asking if you can kind of tell me what the hell is happening in my home.

But I really value the perspective that you’ve been bringing, and I know that right now there’s just so much crap and misinformation and bad information floating around online. And it really struck me in the first few days of the LA protests and the police backlash that it was hard to find good information about what was actually happening. And that was a very surreal experience for me to not fully know what was going on back home and to not know exactly where to look. So thankfully, I had folks like Sonali, I went to accounts that I trusted and I knew were doing good work and Sonali is very much one of those. And so I wanted to give you guys access to Sonali and her great work and perspective here. So with all that upfront Sonali, I kind of wanted to just turn it over to you and ask if you could give us a bit of a play by play of the past week down there. What has it actually been like and how has the reality on the ground differed from maybe the unreality that we’ve been hearing from the White House on down?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Yeah, I mean it’s been really interesting. It’s been, as you said, it should be contextualized with the Eaton fires that took place five months ago. And I think LA and Angelinos are kind of a breaking point. And so we, you’re seeing that attitude on the streets in la. It really actually started in San Diego the week in early June when a restaurant was struck by an ice raid and the people who were working in the restaurant were rounded up. The people who were eating at the restaurant were outraged. And then it moved into Los Angeles a week later when on June 6th, ice went into a Home Depot parking lot in Paramount in LA County and also in the Garin District. They went to an outlet that they knew they could find people who were working these jobs. They rounded them up and that started getting people angry and people were mobilizing.

But really what was the turning point was that same day on Friday, June 6th, David Huerta, the president of S-E-I-U-U-S-W, was in a confrontation, verbal confrontation with an ice agent rounding up around a raid and was sort of coming to the defense of one of the immigrants that they were trying to take away. He was very roughly shoved to the ground. His head was smashed against the sidewalk. He was arrested and well, first he was hospitalized and then arrested. And these are ice agents that are not supposed to have any jurisdiction over US citizens, let alone labor leaders. And so David Huerta, he’s a beloved labor leader, his arrest sparked this huge rage and anger in Los Angeles. It’s a strong union town and we are known for, this is the site of numerous UTLA teacher strikes and longshore workers striking and fight for 15 fast food workers.

Striking nurses have done strikes here. We’ve had in recent years, a SAG after strike writers and filmmakers striking. So this is strong labor center, and when they arrested David Huta, all bets were off. It mobilized the crowds of labor rank and file labor. And there was a huge, huge, huge rally on Monday, June 9th, the day that David Huta was arraigned, I went there. In fact, there was something on the order of 10 to 15,000 people gathered in Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles. I walked through that rally people out in a festive atmosphere, but they were angry. They were wearing their union shirts. There was a lot of clergy there as well, who do a lot of solidarity work with labor. There was a massive rally, lot of spoke from the rally. Many, many folks spoke on the stage and people were angry. And then up the street from that, there were a conference, there was the downtown federal building, which is 300 North Los Angeles.

What’s really interesting, max, I’ve been to that building as an immigrant probably two decades ago when I was a green card holder trying to adjust my status and get a work permit. I remember standing in a long line of people to get in and into my appointment. That building now covered with graffiti, California national Guardsmen, blanking it, standing there with their shields and there were angry, raucous protests, people yelling and screaming at them with loud speakers. There was a seven or 8-year-old child. I remember I took a photo of him. I didn’t want to publish it because he’s a minor, but I want to describe it to you. Seven or 8-year-old child standing in front of the national Guardsman, his back to them wearing nothing but a pair of pants and on his chest, Sharpie F ice like diff. I saw 12-year-old kid with a bandana and a face mask on the walls and on the sidewalk.

People were angry, wrapping themselves in Mexican flags. And for anybody who knows la, the Mexican flag is a symbol of protest, is a really common site. I know it’s completely being misinterpreted and misunderstood by the Trump administration. They’re using it as a way to say, look, we’re having a foreign invasion, but every time we’ve had immigration marches in LA, people pull out their Mexican flags as a way to assert their, not just dual citizenship in the symbolic sense or dual allegiance, but their immigrant identity. And it’s a way to say, this used to be Mexican land. It’s a way to say, we are not going to assimilate and bow down to white supremacy. We’re going to be our glorious, colorful, radical, powerful selves that you can’t put in a box because we’re multiple identities. We’re intersecting identities. That’s what that flag represents. And it’s very commonly seen at LA protests that have anything to do with immigration.

So that was happening. And then in front of the detention center where that was being held, people had gathered and there were are cops standing there looking, mean there was no big confrontation because all the confrontations are happening in the evening. They did ara him, they released him. And then of course what’s been happening is there was a curfew put on a one square mile, one square mile area in downtown LA after 8:00 PM but they’re tricking protesters. I have not been there past curfew, but from the reports that I’m reading of people whose work I trust and people are emailing me about their experiences, the cops, the train stops running at seven, which it shouldn’t. The curfew starts at eight, train stops running at seven. The cops around people who are protesting kettle them, which is a term that means that they prevent them from leaving, trapping them, and then have free reign to arrest them after the curfew starts at 8:00 PM saying you are violating curfew.

Now, by the way, this is all in the control of the city, which is supposed to be separate from federal ice agents. And to me, what this movement has really clarified is that there’s no difference between police and ice. Some people would like to think there is a difference. Mayor Karen Bass in LA was trying to suggest that LAPD would not be cooperating with ICE and they’re going to protect people and ice agents are coming into our town. No, the LAPD are part of the spectrum of armed state power. That ice is also part of a spectrum of, they work in tandem and they’ve been showing that they don’t need to have a curfew, they don’t need to be out there riling people up, making it easy for ice to do its job. And frankly, the protesters don’t see a distinction between them. When you’re out protesting the streets, people are saying, the Marines disappeared.

My friend, there was a woman who had been trying to get attention on social media about her friend and others are saying, well, those aren’t Marines, they’re California guardsmen. And she’s saying, I frankly dunno who they are. There are uniformed armed men, mostly men in various different forms of uniform. Some of them, some of them not. Some of them wearing fatigue, some of them wearing black who are just arresting people. And you can’t just arrest people unless you have cause and if you’re arresting them, if they’re undocumented, you need a signed warrant from a judge. But they don’t have the signed warrants. And so it’s literally, this is the definition of fascism. They are going in rounding people up without pretext. And another thing that people aren’t paying attention to is that Trump and Christine Nome have basically explicitly said that they’re sending an ice raid into blue cities, into cities run by democratic mayors.

They’re doing this as a political action. Like, wow, think about that. Right? They’re sending in armed federal agents funded by tax dollars to undermine the leadership of their political opposition, not to suggest that Democrats are doing anything. And then on Saturday we had that, there was the no Kings rally that attracted about 30,000 people. That was the official count. I think it was bigger. I was there and I really couldn’t see the beginning or the end of the march. And that was part of the 2200 plus actions happening around the country that were organized and set up before the ice raids to coincide with Trump’s military parade. But they were just a very nice, convenient outlet for people who were upset about ICE raids. And in LA you saw people wearing kafis to show their support for Palestinian rights while holding up a sign saying F Ice.

And many other very colorful language, lots of Los Angeles centric language involving, I don’t like Isen Ice only belongs in my orta. And very just very unique to LA signage, very glorious, raucous, friendly, angry, big crowds of people who were outraged, angry, tired. And what I’m noticing is different is that no one is, very few people are suggesting that the Democrats are the answer, which I think they’ve realized what a disaster the Biden presidency was, and now there’s such a hunger for something different. So it’s a really important moment for organizing, which I don’t know if we’ll get to that, but just want to put that out there because it’s a ripe moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s definitely make sure that we end on that point, what you’re hearing from folks about where that energy is going and where it’s decidedly not going. And I want to by way of getting there, just like while we have you just maybe take a couple minutes to ask some follow up questions to get some clarity for folks outside of LA who again, are maybe just hearing the latest on the news or maybe they’re hearing Trump posting his insanity on truth social. So I want to just ask them some basic questions here. One is, in your sense have was the National Guard and the Marines sent in because things were so unruly on the ground? Or did those additional troops instigate the upsurge in clashes with police, with violence? I mean, that’s obviously been one question over the week. Is Trump responding to a crisis that needs to be quelled or tamped down or whatever language they’re using? Or is he inflaming it by sending in the goddamn National Guard and the Marines to squash civilian protests?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Yeah, it’s very much a manufactured crisis. It started with the ice raids. And the ice raids were initially, depending upon the time of day, Trump spoke predicated on the fact that immigrants are supposedly destroying our cities and causing violence and mayhem and invading, et cetera, et cetera. When of course in Los Angeles, our communities are so deeply intertwined. Frankly, most of us don’t know or care who among us is undocumented or not. Many live in mixed status. Families live quite happily together with one another. The one common struggle we have is violence of poverty, of inequality. And so immigrants are after the eaten fires. Almost every single person that I encountered to help me fix up my home due to wind damage was an immigrant of some sort, not originally from the us. I was making note of that in my head, like how immigrant LA is.

And so we have not had any, the problem was created by Trump. The problem of immigrant violence in cities is as real as rampant voter fraud in elections fermented by immigrants. So he started the problem, and then when people fought back, when people refused to take it lying down and protested, that was the opening he was waiting for to get the National Guard involved and to claim to send Marines in. And yeah, a couple of cars were set on fire. There’s a ton of graffiti downtown la, almost all of it as far as I could see on federal buildings. And that’s rage, right? It’s a property destruction. It’s not hurting individuals. The cars that were burned down were way more cars. They were AI powered cars. And it should be noted that these are cars that are basically gathering surveillance and sharing it with police.

They’re known to be sharing surveillance with police because they’re outfitted with dozens of cameras. So those were burned, which I think was a very symbolic protest. And so yes, this is a complete and utter fabrication that LA is so out of control and burning that they need to send in outside help. Absolutely. It’s not, I’ve been on the streets of la. I did not for a second feel threatened by anyone other than armed cops. The only threat I felt was from the armed agents of power. And they are going after journalists, by the way. So I was a little scared, not from a single protestor. And that really needs to be clarified. So this is just a manufactured crisis. It’s a way for Trump to lash out, to distract from the fact that his presidency has been an utter failure. His economic turnaround has been an utter failure, and it’s an opening for fascism. He’s trying to see how far he can push. LA is a test case. The last administration, four years ago, Portland was a test case, if you remember where they were sending in the National Guard troops into Portland. In this scenario, LA is the test case much bigger, much, much bigger city. And he doesn’t know what the can of worms that he has opened in LA because people aren’t backing down. He is going to lose in la.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And another follow up question on that front, I think I’ve learned over the past year that in fact, a lot of people don’t know much about la, right? I mean, I was getting into some very heated arguments with people, people on the left during the fires who were sort of celebrating them as if these were all just mansions of the rich in Malibu. And I had to explain to them, I was like, look, bro, I mean, there are houses in Compton for millions of dollars. That doesn’t mean the people there are millionaires. That’s just very, the property values have gone up. Just think a little more about the people you’re talking about. And right now, people are not doing that. And I think they’re not even wrapping their heads around the fact that LA is a massive city. We’re talking nearly 500 square miles in the city proper. We’re talking nearly 4 million people in the city proper to say nothing of the greater LA area. So we’re talking about a big chunk of city here. And right now, again, people outside of California are being told and even regurgitating the notion that LA is a war zone, that it’s just bedlam over there. So I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that. What does LA look like right now to you?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

It’s mostly business as usual, except in some parts of downtown la, right? I live about 25 minutes from downtown LA in Pasadena. We’re seeing regular protests in front of City Hall. They’re all extremely orderly, almost to a fault, but they’re there, which is kind of nice. We’re not seeing, we don’t normally see regular protests in Pasadena where I live, but the people are showing up in front of City Hall. They’re showing up in front of hotels where they think ice agents are staying. But in downtown LA, there is an area right around the city hall area, bridging square, and in between where all the federal buildings are located, where the detention center is. And that is an area that has been kind of closed off. Freeway exists have been shut down. So it’s harder to make it in there, and people are still making it in there.

There are some people who are showing up deliberately showing up in the evenings because they really see this as them holding the line. They’re showing up, they’re protesting. They’re protesting because there’s a curfew and their right to be angry. Why is there a curfew in our city who decided there should be a curfew in our city? Why? Because you want the right and the freedom to just openly tear apart our communities, and you want us to just take it and lay down. So yeah, people are showing up. There are clashes with cops. Nobody is being violent. The cops are not being hurt. And frankly, if the cops are being hurt, they could just leave and then they wouldn’t be hurt. So yeah, it’s not like the whole city is burning at all. The violence of poverty impacts our city much more than anything that Trump can imagine.

We’ve had the violence of climate change from the Eaton fires. We are seeing the violence of policing and of immigration enforcement. Those are the sources of violence. And we should be very, very, very clear on that. And LA may be, LA is a city of contradictions. Even I don’t fully know la, I only know the pieces that I traverse regularly. It’s a city of contradictions. It’s a city of millionaires and immigrants. It’s a city of white liberal Hollywood and radical Antifa union folks and artists and theater people. I mean, it’s everything. It’s such a slice of humanity. And also, we have some of the largest immigrant groups that are living outside native country in, I think most cities in the United States, for example, the biggest Armenian population outside Armenia lives in la, huge populations of Vietnamese, Koreans, massive Korean population, Indians and Pakistanis. It’s so a huge Arab population.

Persians, it is such an incredible sort of multi-layered city that I don’t know, it’s hard to, if you’ve never been to LA, for those people who’ve never been to LA, just come and get a sense of the beauty here. It’s a beautiful city. It’s gritty and it’s also beautiful. It’s slick and it’s gritty at the same time. I can’t describe it. You’ll never know LA unless you’ve spent a lifetime exploring every corner of it, as you said, it’s just huge. It’s massive. And everyone can unite on the one thing they all hate about la, and that is traffic, because we’re so spread out and we have to drive so much, and there’s just too much traffic. So

Maximillian Alvarez:

There you go. Well, I didn’t want to interrupt because you were making a serious point, but when you said that the thing that binds Angelinos is like class struggle, and I was like, and hatred of traffic. Those are the two things. Yeah, that’s what the banners of the proletariat in la. And I can’t keep you for too much longer. And I know you’ve been busting your butt doing interviews all day. So I promise I just got a couple more questions for you. But on that last note though, I wanted to ask the no kings protests, like you mentioned happened on Saturday. And I was here covering the protests in Baltimore. Thousands of folks showed out admittedly as a more white crowd that I think you saw a lot of folks from Baltimore County coming in. But there’s still thousands of folks that I talked to, veterans, young folks, old folks, people like you were saying, kind of a chorus of righteous grievances that were emerging from this crowd, from standing up against the attacks on immigrants to the attacks on democracy and the rule of law to the billionaire takeover of everything, but very much kind of all singing together in this chorus of righteous rage.

And it was a very peaceful endeavor. Some would criticize, it was almost too peaceful, right? There were food trucks there. And it’s just like, I think what people are seeing in LA has gotten everyone maybe a little on Tenter hooks, because it either becomes a litmus test of like, if we’re not as radical as LA, then we’re not doing anything worthwhile. But I caution people out there to just put judgment to the side at this moment in history as we descend into fascism, and just look at the people who are showing up and encourage action where you can and don’t judge people who are taking that first step to speak out. There’s a lot going on right now, and people are meeting this moment coming from a lot of different paths. Right?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Agreed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and on that note, I wanted to just ask, like you mentioned the no Kings protests. I know that there were some violent tactics used by police to try to disperse some crowds. I think there were maybe about 35 arrests as I read. So I wanted to ask, is the police presence, is the curfew, is it slowing down the protest momentum in LA that you’re seeing? And are the attacks on journalists that you mentioned, is that slowing down or making you and your colleagues think twice about going out there and covering?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

I do wonder if the turnout in LA would’ve been bigger had there not been all of this warning ahead of time that the Marines are going to be sent to LA for the No Kings protest. I had a friend who was visiting from out of town, and I said to her, listen, I’m a journalist. I’m afraid you’re visiting, but come with me to the protest. We’ll do a few interviews and go get lunch afterwards. And she was like, oh. But I read and I said, oh, look, this is la. Trust me, it’s going to be fine. And we’ll know as soon as we get on the train. If there’s crowds of people on the train to go into downtown la, it’s all going to be good. If there’s not that many people, then it’s going to be a little bit iffy. And there were a few people.

And then as we sat on the train, more and more came in. And when we got out of the train, there was a sea of people. But I’ve been to a bigger protest in la, huge protest, the first women’s march in 2017, and then 2006, because I’ve been doing this a long time, the massive 2006 immigration rallies when a million people showed up on the streets of LA wearing white and waving US flags and Mexican flags, the subway trains were so, the metro trains were so, so crowded. And the more crowded it is, the more big and glorious it is, and the less fear there is about police violence. And so I would say that there was a little fear of police violence. It was huge in la, but it could have been huger. And I suspect that if people had, I suspect people also remember there were LA is so spread out.

Pasadena had its own protests. Sierra Madre had its own protests. South Pasadena had its own protests. So a lot of smaller rallies were happening in cities in LA County that people were like, well, instead of going to the one big one in la, we’ll go to the one here that’s smaller that we know there aren’t going to be cops freaking us out. So that might’ve been another thing that happened. And I think it’s really, and when it comes to the journalists, I don’t know. I mean, yes, I’ve stayed away from covering the evening protests in part because of practicality, because I’ve kids and I take care of my parents, but also in part because, yeah, I have no wish to be having a flashback grenade hurdle at my head, which is a sorry thing to say. It indicates the sorry state of our democracy when a journalist are slightly afraid to go out and cover these huge protests. So yeah, I think that that’s definitely an important thing to consider.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, it’s pretty damn wild when you can see on camera the police targeting journalists, even foreign journalists and just shooting them with rubber bullets, shooting our colleagues in the head with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. And I don’t want to do the thing where it’s like fellow journalists get, we clutch our pearls and we get really upset when other journalists are hurt, but we don’t speak out when citizens are being brutalized. No, we’re pissed off at all of it. And all of it is an atrocity and an attack on democracy as such, and on the people as such. See, it’s not that hard to walk and chew gum at the same time. But these are very dangerous times that we are living in. And I kind of wanted, as we round this final corner here, again, I just wanted to thank you and everyone who is going out there and continuing to do the important work of reporting so that folks like the listeners of this show can actually know what the hell is going on and not be led astray, not be led to support this authoritarian repression because they are being fed misinformation about what’s actually happening on the ground.

And in that vein, in the final turn, I wanted to circle back to the point that you raised in the beginning. I wanted to ask if we could maybe just survey a bit, the folks that you’ve been talking to, the attitudes that you’ve been picking up on, the things that people have been telling you, like I guess, where are folks right now? Where do you see this going? And where is this grassroots energy headed right now?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

So some of the people that I’ve been talking to are a lot of young folks, people who are showing up in their graduation sashes who are from mixed status families. I talked to high school kids whose families are impacted. And one kid said, I’m here because my grandfather can’t be here because he’s too scared, because he is undocumented, but I’m a citizen, so I’m here on his behalf. I’ve talked to a lot of what’s really interesting, a lot of black folks coming out in support of their immigrant neighbors. So I spoke with Jasmine Abula Richards, who is the leader of the Black Lives Matter Pasadena chapter, who said Babies are being ripped out of the arms of their families. I don’t care what race they are. I’m standing here in solidarity with them, and she is calling on her community to show up for immigrant rights, which I just love.

That’s a lot of lots. So LA’s No Kings Rally, hugely multiracial and diverse, in contrast to the women’s March that took place this year as opposed to the one that took place in 2017. So I went to the Women’s March this year, largely white, although it was still multiracial just because it’s la. But on Saturday, incredibly multiracial. I’ve also interviewed Pasadena City Councilman Rick Cole, whose daughters were arrested in downtown LA protesting the National Day labor organizing networks, Pablo Alvarado, who has been on the front lines of all of defending dayers at Home Depot. Yeah, it’s been, people are really ready to take this on. They are basically drawing the line in the sand saying, no, you cannot do this to la. We’re not going to let you, it’s just not happening because we’re immigrants are too integrated into our society. They aren’t just a part of our community.

They are our community. So I’ve talked to pastors and clergy who are doing solidarity work, union leaders. Oh my gosh, I can’t keep track of the interviews. There’ve been so many interviews, but it’s a great cross section. People who’ve been active for many, many years and who’ve come out for many protests and people just become activated. And yeah, I think I’m hoping that the people who are rising up are also seeing, because what happened the last time people rose up against Trump was it was this feeder into if only we could elect more Democrats than we could get rid of Trump. Well, that was tried and failed. And now what? And I think I am seeing from, at least in la, a sense that we need to expand beyond the two party system. We need more radical leadership in government, and if we want to change the dynamics of power, we need to elect people regardless of which party, and ideally, not really establishment Democrats, independence or whatever democratic socialists who are going to do our bidding as opposed to Wall Streets and the brown shirts. So Yeah’s been incredible. It’s a great time to be a journalist in spite of the dangers. It’s a great time to be a journalist in America. It’s also the worst time to be a journalist because nobody’s newsrooms are being decimated, and our jobs are being outsourced to ai, and we’re trying to survive on Patreon and Substack subscriptions. So yeah, contradictions, and you well know what that means.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that’s as good of a occasion as any to remind y’all before we let her go to please follow Sonali and support her show, check out her work. It’s invaluable in these times. So Sonali, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for all the work you’re doing. Si, I really appreciate it.

Sonali Kolhatkar:

I appreciate your work as well. Thank you so much, max, for having me on.

Javier Cabral:

What’s up, man? My name’s Javier Cabral. I’m the editor in chief for LA Taco.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Javier, thank you so much for joining us today, man. I know you’ve been running your ass off, you and your colleagues over there at La Taco covering the mayhem, the protests, the lifting up, the voices on the front lines of struggle back home. And I just wanted to say up top that the work y’all have been doing has been incredible, vital, and just so, so necessary in this moment when there’s so much bad information, misinformation floating around. I really can’t emphasize enough for folks listening that if you haven’t already, you need to follow La Taco, follow their Instagram, follow their accounts where they’re really posting real time updates on what’s happening back in la. And we’re going to link to those accounts in the show notes for this episode. And Javier, I wanted to toss it to you there before we really dig into what the past week has looked like through your eyes and the eyes of your colleagues and the coverage that you’re doing. I wanted to ask you if you could just tell our listeners a bit more about La Taco, what it is, and the kind of coverage that you guys have been doing, and then I guess tie that into the past week. When did this all really start kicking up for you, and how did y’all respond to the protests to the National Guard to Ice raids? How did you guys respond to that with the coverage that you’re doing?

Javier Cabral:

Sure, man. So LA Tacos started in 2005 as a blog that celebrated tacos, cannabis and graffiti. We thought ourselves as a baby vice, I would say we were, were alternative. This is a time when tacos were illegal in la. There was a big movement called ADA because taco trucks were illegal to park all over the city and pretty much what street vendors are dealing with right now and their battle for legalization and for permits. And in 2017, Dan Danez took over. He was a former vice reporter badass who was in the chapels tunnels and worked for Vice Mexico. He spearheaded our news first approach to fill the void that after LA Weekly got slashed, they fired everyone. And then LA was left without an alternative style publication for a county of 10 million people, which it was crazy. So LA Taco decided to just put our resources and hope for the best. Daniel was the editor for two years before he moved on to LA Times Food, where he is at now. I took over right before the pandemic in 2019, and no one was reading. There was the pivot.

The pivot to that Creator Media was starting to happen and vlogging with a V. And my contract was like, if you can get our traffic up in six months, you can keep the job as long as you have. And it’s been almost six years now. So we’ve really risen to meet whatever crisis or whatever big news story is happening out there because of alternative style approach. And when I say alternative, it just means that we’re, we’re not the opposite of corporate media. We’re not a nonprofit. We don’t have any nonprofit safety net. We are 100% independent. A lot of brands don’t want to work with us because we publish whatever the hell we want to publish. And some of these stuff that we do is pretty damning to corporations or to the police or to any person in power are investigative investigative journalist, Alexis Oli Ray.

He is our ace. He’s always out there keeping police accountable, has been involved of several lawsuits, and we back him up, we back everything because I famously said one time I interviewed by LA Times a little profile on me, and I’m from the hood, right? So literally I said, we have to be prepared to defend whatever we publish in a dark alley if need be. So that philosophy, it’s on my heart and in everything I publish, I’m like, I can, we can’t be ashamed kiss as we can’t be fluffy. I see these people that we’re writing about when I go to backyard punk shows, when I go eat tacos and I speak to ’em in Spanish, whatever I publish, it has to be truthful and it has to just be just 100% something that I can stand behind. So that’s been our approach and this kind of fearless approach to a term, I call this street level journalism.

And that’s been our formula in 2021, we won a James Beard Award for our unique approach to food based, to food based stories. We do more food culture, more food intersections, gentrification, all the stuff that other publications are too scared to publish or too scared to touch because they don’t want a sacrifice their whatever ad sponsor or whatever. But we don’t care. Our tagline, literally for the longest time was we had bumper stickers that it was like, we don’t give a fuck. So with that same kind of punk rock ethos, we’re in 2025 now in this recent ice raids and massive civil unrest because of the fascist regime, because of Trump, because of him terrorizing our communities through these federal forces. So we’ve been covering it all, been covering it, and we’ve been documenting our little team of six reporters has really hit the streets and just trying to do our best to just show exactly what is happening out there and provide context as best as we can. It’s nothing crazy, but in this age of people talking to their phone and not asking any hard questions, I guess that’s crazy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, I’m seeing this in real time. I mean, you’ve been posting videos from the ground in demonstrations showing when just rows and rows of police cars are descending on peaceful protesters and launching tear gas into the center of the crowds you guys have gotten police brutalizing, senior citizens. You’ve gotten those senior citizens on camera talking about it. You’ve done videos on social media reporting on ice raids, on Eros and other street vendors. So I want to kind of talk a bit about that, the kinds of stories that you’ve been reporting on, especially over the past week, right? All the focus has obviously been on the protests themselves, the National Guard, the Marines, this big debate over who’s causing the violence, who’s responding to the violence, yada, yada, yada. And I do want to make time to talk about that, but I wanted to ask what the past week has looked like for you and your colleagues reporting on the stories that you’ve been reporting on. What do you want folks out there, especially outside of LA, to know about what you’ve been seeing happen in your home over the past seven days?

Javier Cabral:

Well, these are the darkest days that I’ve lived in la. I’m 36 years old, so I don’t remember much about the LA riots in early nineties, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as I’ve been doing this, if you’re someone who’s looking from afar into what’s happening, it’s bad. It’s enough to just make everything like your life stop. It’s really hard to not fall in a downward spiral of depression, anxiety, paranoia. If you know anyone who is an immigrant and lives in la, especially if you’re a Latino, brown skinned person, definitely check in on them. Or don’t try to pretend like life is going on as normal because it’s not. It’s what we’re seeing is unprecedented and how LA Taco has been responding is also unprecedented as a leader, as the editor in chief, it’s been crazy. I’ve been very overwhelmed sometimes. I’m not going to lie.

I don’t know. I’m really grateful for my team that trust me. But there came a point where we were getting dozens of tips in our emails and our dms about all these ice raids happening around us just a few miles away. And what people, everyone was just scared. And then there were some stories that we were getting to before our competition, I guess other broadcasts or print publications, because we’re a lot more nimble. But even then, we couldn’t get to it fast enough. So as editor in chief, as a diehard writer, I was like, man, I think we need to get out of ourselves and get out of our business model even. Because as you know, the way that journalism and websites work is we get paid by either impression, but that’s dried up this Google AdSense. It’s not much money or if it’s syndicated on any of these apps, but that’s also a lot of it is very, Penn is on a dollar.

So what we’ve been doing is having a membership approach. People you join our members, and before all these protests, we were at 3,500, no, we were maybe like 3,300 members, and now we just checked it in and we’re over 4,000. So that, for me, it was very risky. So I decided that we needed to go on a social media first approach and employ these tactics that these creators or influencers are doing, but just apply a layer of integrity and ethics to everything and be able to verify everything. So we’ve been doing that, and it was a very risky approach. And my team luckily trusted me, and people have been, they’ve been heating our call, they’ve been responding to us. I frankly just from the bottom of my heart, just a little video, and I was like, look at everyone. Shit’s crazy right now. We can’t keep up with tips.

We’re only a team of six, so we’re going to start doing more videos and we hope that you back us up. We hope that you just don’t enjoy our content for free and you throw us a bone, whatever you can, anything helps. So we’ve actually raised more than $25,000 from just donations too in the last seven days. And it’s, how have we been covering this? It’s all hands on deck people. Sometimes my team doesn’t even ask me. They just go and cover it because that’s how newsworthy everything is right now. It’s just, it’s crazy times. And we’ll think about it after, just go first document and then we’ll think about, we’ll unpack it later. That’s how insane LA is right now with what’s happening with these ice raids and all these protests. I think I went, there was a straight protest for nine days. Nine days of hundreds of people protesting, and then obviously the police escalation that we have all been just seeing on our phones and on tv.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you say more about the raids themselves, just for folks listening? I mean, where are the raids happening? Who’s getting taken the manner in which people are being hunted down and detained again? I want to bring people down to that street level where you guys are, just to give them a sense of the terror that’s being waged against our community right now and what that looks like in the tips you’re getting, the stories that you’re reporting, the people you’re talking to. I want people listening to hear that and know that.

Javier Cabral:

Yeah, so undocumented street vendors, undocumented workers of any kind, even if you’ve been working here for 30 years and you have a home, you own a home, even if you are a functioning member of American society who pays your taxes, who has a complete family, who has made is probably more American than Mexican at this point. And what I mean by that is has adopted more American values. They’re good consumers. They watch a lot of American football. There are people like you and I, and they just haven’t had their legal processing. As some of us know, it takes a long time.

It depends on whatever kind of visa you want to apply for, but it’s very unrealistic for a lot of working people. And the way that these federal agencies are abducting people is very violent, very traumatic. When I say violent, traumatic, there was a video that we shared yesterday where we got some more details on about, it was in the Walmart parking lot in Pico Rivera here in la, which is Pico Rivera is a small suburban Latino community, maybe about 25 minutes from downtown. I call it east of East la. It’s even more east of East la. And it was in the Walmart parking lot. And this I got to interview the daughter of a tortilla delivery driver who worked for Mission Foods. And if you work those jobs, that’s a lot of of seniority to have your route and do it. And he was delivering his tortillas in a stack of ’em in a dolly.

And straight up, I abducted them, left the dolly, his daughter informed me that it was very peaceful, but they left the dolly filled tortillas on the sun. His car there opened with the doors open, completely no description. You know what I tell people, if anyone here has ever seen that satire movie called A Day Without a Mexican, when all of a sudden you just wake up and there’s the street vendor, shoes are just there, but not the human. It is like imagine if people are getting vaporized by the federal government. That’s what it feels like right now, and it’s very violent. That video actually really messed me up. Actually, that video actually was that tipping point for me. And finally getting therapy, because I just felt so many things. It was like a 20-year-old kid who he had stood, he was documenting, and there’s two different sides of this, but I just found out that he’s getting federal charges for obstruction of justice and for assaulting a federal officer was just announced a couple of minutes ago, and this is a 20-year-old kid who was out picking up carts at Walmart and was documenting, and I think probably got in the face of a federal agent.

And they didn’t like that they got him. They violently took him down, put his face to the floor, took away his phone, they took him, no one knew where he was at. And then another federal agent came cocked his gun really loud. I mean, I’m not a gun person, so I don’t know if that’s the right word, cock, but he kind of almost like if you’re playing a video game or something. And I just seeing that on all these unarmed civilians who were just concerned and crying, and then seeing this young 20-year-old kid who looked a lot like me when I was younger, I’m like, damn, that just hit home to me. I was, oh man. So it’s that kind of deep where it’s starting to affect journalists too. I’m trying to look for therapy myself too, because it’s just constant barrage of violence, guns, physical violence in real life at these protests by police, and also that we’re being bombarded with on TV and our phones every day.

And it’s hard to look away because there’s also a sense of fear too, because what if it happens to me tomorrow? I’m going to go on a ride along with a community agency who has formed community. They formed a community coalition that look out for each other whenever there’s ice protests. And this guy just got subpoenaed, I can tell you right now, lemme look it up. He got subpoenaed by the federal courts to hand over his, to hand over his everything, his information, his campaigns, his phone. Otherwise it’s going to be a full, I dunno, I’m sorry. Otherwise it’ll be a federal criminal investigation. And it was like the counter-terrorism unit because they’re trying to say that he’s fueling these protests and that he’s feeling all this, all this, no, but no one’s feeling anything. It’s everyone’s feeling ourselves because everyone is just so just upset at a very deep level because they’re coming here and they’re destroying families and destroying lives, and we’re all just seeing it. So yeah, that’s what I’ll say. And if you’re watching from afar, definitely support independent media support La Taco LA Public Press. They’ve been also been stepping it up, Kalo News, CALO News. They’ve been stepping it up. So there are independent sources that, I mean, they’re also nonprofits, but it’s still good. It’s all for the same goal. But definitely if you know anyone in LA who is from Guatemala, Mexico or El Salvador, definitely reach out to them and see how they’re doing, because I guarantee you that they’re not. Okay.

Michael Nigro:

Hey, I’m Michael Nigro I’m a Brooklyn, New York based photojournalist. I’ve been covering stories in the United States and around the world for roughly 15 years, mainly independent, but I will go and pitch stories of conflict politics and protests.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Michael, it is such an honor to have you on the show, man. I really appreciate you in all the work that you do. And to everyone listening, you no doubt know Mike’s work, even if you don’t know his name yet. But you should. And for those who listened to this show, you have very likely heard Michael’s name because of the reporting he was doing at the protests in LA and what happened to him while he was doing his job and doing his job to inform us the people about what was happening on the ground. And we’re going to get to that in a second. But just to give you guys some context, I actually want to read from a piece from NPR that was published earlier this week by David Folkenflick. And David writes in this piece on Monday, the Los Angeles Press Club and the investigative reporting site status coup filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in federal court alleging that officers at the demonstrations were routinely violating journalists’ rights.

Being a journalist in Los Angeles is now a dangerous profession states. The complaint filed in the Western division of the Central District of California, LAPD, unlawfully used force and the threat of force against plaintiffs, their members and other journalists to intimidate them and interfere with their constitutional right to document public events. As the press consider a selection of the episodes that the press Club has compiled, including some that were captured live in the moment by the journalists themselves, an Australian television correspondent was shot by a law enforcement officer with a rubber bullet during a live shot. As she stood to the side of protests in downtown Los Angeles, the officer taking aim could be seen in the background as it happened. Another instance, a photographer for the New York Post was struck in the forehead by another rubber bullet, his stunning image capturing its path immediately before impact.

A veteran Los Angeles Times reporter by his account says he was shoved by a Los Angeles Police Department officer after reminding him that journalists were exempt under state law from the city’s recently imposed curfew. Several of his colleagues reported being struck by police projectiles. A student journalist says, LAPD officers shot him twice with rubber bullets. One nearly severed the tip of his pinky, which required surgical reattachment. A freelance journalist says he believes he was shot by a deputy from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. A CT scan showed what appears to be a 40 millimeter less lethal munition embedded in a two inch hole in the reporter’s leg. Now, those are just some of the stories that have been coming out of la, and the one that this article in NPR starts with is what happened to Michael. And so Michael, I want to turn it over to you, man, and ask if you could just walk us through your reporting in LA and walk us through what happened when the police made you a target.

Michael Nigro:

So as a photojournalist, you are there to document what is happening, what is occurring. Often, historical moments, not often do I ever want to be part of the story or become the story. However, doing some of the work that I do, sometimes it becomes that. And in the case of First Amendment and police trying to quash or censor what we are doing, then I think it’s really important to step up. So when David Folkenflik called me, I first wondered how he got my number, but what it turned out is that the Los Angeles Press Club is compiling a list of all the journalists who were either shot at or injured or targeted by the police. And the list is long. So that he contacted me out of all those people, I felt that it was a duty for me to actually kind of say, this is what I saw is what I experienced.

Now I am based in New York and I’ve been covering the ice raids inside courtrooms in downtown Manhattan. And there are very few people out in the street, very few inside the hallways trying to stop these kidnappings from happening kidnappings in quotes, but I don’t know what else to call them. They’re disappearing people. And one day at lunch, I walked outside and this French journalist approached me and said, where is everybody? Why aren’t people in the street? And I thought the same thing. I don’t know. Well, as it turned out, it was in la. And so when they called up the military and the National Guard and the win against Gavin Newsom wins against the mayor, win against everybody in Los Angeles, and they sent them there, I’m like, this is where I need to go.

I arrived on Monday the ninth, so I missed the first day. But when I arrived, I had already talked to a number of colleagues of mine, many of whom already been shot with rubber bullets or 40 millimeter sponge grenades or pepper balls, and just said, they’re, look out, they’re targeting us. And if not targeting us, it’s indiscriminate. So I have covered these things for years, protests from in Paris, France, and Hong Kong in the United States. Black Lives Matter, and I was geared up and it’s best thing I could have done is to have a very good helmet, a gas mask with protective eyewear and a flack jacket, all with press, front and back, side and side on my helmets, and that did not deter them from targeting the press. Early on in the evening on Monday, I was over on this bridge right across from the detention center all by myself, trying to get a wide shot.

Flashbacks had already been going off and some pepper, some rubber bullets, and I’m just sitting there with my long lens and all of a sudden I just heard this bing, bing, bing. And they shot right at my head, didn’t hit me, but that was definitely sending a message. I had no idea where it came from, but it was close. So I moved away and the day kind of played on some arrests and I need to be very clear here. What I witnessed is primarily a peaceful protest, primarily a peaceful protest. It never got violent until the police in riot gear and batons and started firing munitions at protestors. At this moment, there was no curfew that called, so they were just exercising their first amendment rights. They were protesting. This is American protest. It was not an insurrection. I covered January 6th, I know exactly what that looks like.

They were not storming buildings, they were not smearing feces on the wall. They were not hitting police with hockey clubs and crutches. This was a standard protest, a real display of anger galvanizing communities. So we were walking through Koreatown at one point and there was a standoff, this kind of cat and mouse standoff, and they decided to target one protestor and shot him with a bunch of pepper balls. I went over to try to grab the angle and document that, and all of a sudden there was a ding that just kind of took me in the side of the helmet. And what has come to light since then is that a lot of these police have red, not infrared, they’re called red dot sensors so they know exactly what they’re pointing. These officers, every officer with a less lethal munition, a weapon is supposed to be trained not to aim for the head, not to aim for the neck, some to aim at the ground and have a ricochet.

These are called less lethal, but they’re not non-lethal. People have been killed by these people have lost eyesights and even one photojournalist in Minnesota ended up losing her eye and then eventually lost her life a few years later from those very injuries. So it was very, very dangerous to be shot with these things, especially a close range. And that’s essentially what happened, which was I feel they’re trying to have a chilling effect on the press and the press that I know that’s out there. They’re tenacious. They were hit once, twice, three times. Not going to stop. This is wrong. We need to be able to document the public has a right to know what is happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You mentioned that you’ve been doing this for years, you’ve been covering protests all over the world, and I wonder how you would compare this to what you’ve seen elsewhere Taking our audience into account. Right, because admit, as a American kid who grew up not knowing shit about the world, like most American kids, it was embarrassingly late in my life when I learned that like other countries didn’t shoot tear gas at their own citizens the way that we do. In fact, tear gas is a weapon of war, that there’s a reason that it’s not shot at civilians the way that we do here in America. But I had no idea at that time in my twenties that this was just something we had been conditioned to accept even though it was so manifestly unacceptable. So I wonder, just in that vein, if you could, using your experience, help put this in context for our audience. We’ve been trained to see this as normal. Is this normal?

Michael Nigro:

Is this normal? I don’t think weapons of war used against American citizens exercising their first amendment. It is anyway normal. However, we’ve militarized the police to such a degree that there are Humvees in the street, there are militarized vehicles in the street. They are practicing and trained in this kind of quashing of protests. New York City has something called the SRG, the Strategic Response Group. They’re supposed to be a crowd control group, but what they’ve mainly become is a protest control group, and they are violent. When you see them come in with the riot gear, you know that violence is about to happen and I’ve covered protests long enough to recognize when I’m up against the front line, what police officers have that kind of look in their eye and that their training or lack of training, they are out to make a point. And that is, I am not in the mind of a police officer, but I certainly see the behavior which is far different from perhaps that officer who maybe is better trained or just doesn’t have that blood lust within them.

But there were a number of officers in my videos that I’ve just squared up with and you could just see it. They’re ready to kick some ass. And it’s troubling to see, especially when you have the majority of the people majority. This was a peaceful march. They are able to do this. I will say that when I think it was Wednesday night when they went back out, there was a contingent of clergy that came probably five or 600 that had a vigil. Then they marched to the detention center where the National Guard was stationed and they prayed. They prayed, they laid flowers, they told the soldiers there that they were praying for them and their safety and the curfew was coming up at eight o’clock. Most of the clergy dispersed, but there were other people there that did not want to disperse. And then even before the curfew happened, they started firing on the crowd, which I don’t know how you piece that together.

And not only on the crowd, but also at the press, which I know this is kind of what we’re talking about, that the targeting of the press seems to be happening more and more in New York. We had to fight tooth and nail to get inside these courtrooms. And what I mean by that is there was a contingent of us that said, we need to go see what’s happening inside these public spaces. Security said no. We said for some amendment violation, they said, we’ll talk to my boss. Boss came down, then another boss came down, another boss came. Finally, I called my lawyer and my lawyer, oddly enough, I called him. I said, look, I’m having this problem in this public space. He goes, I’m oddly right around the corner.

He comes around probably one minute later. I’m like, what are you doing here? He is like, we’re going to get you in. He got us in. From then on, we were able to document all the snatching grabs and deportations or disappearing of these mainly young black men, but also women, some kids that are no one under 18 I saw. But they’re disappearing. These people, some of these people, they’re just, they’re doing what they were told to do, which was come to your mandatory court meeting because your next step is we’re going to get you citizenship. We’re going to get you the green card with you doing law doesn’t matter anymore. And when the law doesn’t matter anymore, it is up to the press to say public, this is what’s happening. And that’s what I think happened in la. The groundswell there became such that people came out and said, we need to protect our community. These are barbers. These are people working at a carwash. These are people who’ve been here for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and that they’ve been paying their taxes, they’ve been paying into social security, which they will never draw from, and they’re part of these communities. And the response to that was so disproportional, but also part and parcel to what the Trump administration wants to inflict across the country. So if you’re in a big city and there’s immigrants, I mean I would fully expect it to be coming to a city near you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I think powerfully and chillingly put, and I am going to toss a broad question at you, but please just take it in whatever direction you feel comfortable. But as journalists at this moment in the year of our Lord 2025, we’re not just documenting the political mayhem that’s happening outside of our windows, but we’re whether we knowingly enlisted or not, we are all in effect kind of soldiers in this battle, this war over reality as such. And so much of what the Trump administration is doing depends on blasting a warped version of reality. Like LA is chaos, LA is bedlam. We got to send in the National Guard and the Marines when folks on the ground are like, it’s not bedlam. It’s a massive city and we’re exercising our first amendment rights. But once that sort of unreality gets a critical mass of people believing in it, it justifies the worst excesses of these authoritarian policies.

And it brings out the worst in people who say, well, yeah, I’m all for sending the Marines in to LA because I’m being told that it’s the protesters who are rioting and yada, yada, yada. So that all is to say that what we do and what you are doing every day is so goddamn important. Your lens is showing people what is actually happening in this country right now to our people. I wanted to kind of end on that broad note and ask if you could communicate to folks out there who are maybe only checking their social media feeds, maybe they haven’t been following your work, maybe they’ve just been hearing this stuff secondhand. What do you most want people to know about what you are seeing and documenting happening in this country right now? From LA to the courtrooms in New York?

Michael Nigro:

It’s those two different narratives that you have coming from a propaganda based White House that is taken essentially what happened on January 6th and lifted it up and plopped it right into LA into a very tiny footprint of Los Angeles. Wasn’t all of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a sprawling, sprawling place. This is downtown la relegated to very few blocks, but Trump basically said what happened on January 6th and he just transplanted into Los Angeles. Why I do what I do is because I hear all the time, well, this is what I’ve heard. This is what I read. A lot of that is just theoretical. I go out and take photos and videos and create multimedia pieces so it’s not theoretical. So you can see what is happening on the ground with the people actually doing, whether they’re protesting or doing hard work of trying to keep immigrants safe.

And that’s very particular to this, but that’s why I do what I do. So it’s an airtight documentation of reality and without it, I feel far too often people are just not realizing that that immigrant that I just shot as being taken away from his loved ones to a very dangerous country, could be their brother, their friend, their coworker, their sister, their brother. That makes it less theoretical to people and I hope that it sits with them. Now of course, I’ll get FLA online and social media with all these kind of talking points of like, this is what I voted for and there’s nothing I can really do to refute that, but except go out and do it again and shoot it and continue to document as a lot of my colleagues are going to continue to do, no matter how much they’re going to try to suppress us.

I think there’s more of us out there trying to show what’s really, really happening and that the city wasn’t burning down. Look, a few Waymo cars, if that’s what they’re called, we burned and no one was hurt. Yeah, it’s illegal, but these are very small instances. May be part of the protest. Perhaps not. I wasn’t there to view it, but what I witnessed there was communities coming together and what happens so very rarely with journalists nowadays is that I had people thanking me, people thanking me, saying, thank you for doing this work. Thank you for coming out here and showing that we’re fighting for our communities, we’re fighting for our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and daughters and sons.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Sonali Kolhatkar, Javier Cabal and Michael Nigro for their vital work and for taking the time to speak with us for this episode. And I want to thank you all for listening and want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/23/the-problem-was-created-by-trump-three-eyewitnesses-describe-whats-really-happening-in-los-angeles/feed/ 0 540676 Iran Under Fire As Locals Describe Fear And Chaos After Israel Attacks https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/17/iran-under-fire-as-locals-describe-fear-and-chaos-after-israel-attacks/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/17/iran-under-fire-as-locals-describe-fear-and-chaos-after-israel-attacks/#respond Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:57:14 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=d3c49824ea0990914ab3f38f673f5a86
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/06/17/iran-under-fire-as-locals-describe-fear-and-chaos-after-israel-attacks/feed/ 0 539425 ‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/a-tremendous-chilling-effect-columbia-students-describe-dystopian-reality-on-campus-amid-trump-attacks/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/a-tremendous-chilling-effect-columbia-students-describe-dystopian-reality-on-campus-amid-trump-attacks/#respond Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:50:03 +0000 https://therealnews.com/?p=333495 Police arrest protesters during pro-Palestinian demonstrations at The City College Of New York (CUNY) as the NYPD cracks down on protest camps at both Columbia University and CCNY on April 30, 2024 in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesIn the span of a year, Columbia University went from being the epicenter of the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment movement to ground zero for the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education.]]> Police arrest protesters during pro-Palestinian demonstrations at The City College Of New York (CUNY) as the NYPD cracks down on protest camps at both Columbia University and CCNY on April 30, 2024 in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

One year ago, Columbia University became ground zero for the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment movement that spread to campuses across the country and around the world. Now, Columbia has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education, academic freedom, and the right to free speech and free assembly—all under the McCarthyist guise of rooting out “anti-semitism.” From Trump’s threats to cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia to the abduction of international students like Mahmoud Khalil by ICE agents, to the university’s firing and expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers union president Grant Miner, “a tremendous chilling effect” has gripped Columbia’s campus community. In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with: Caitlin Liss, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a member of Student Workers of Columbia-UAW (SWC); and Allie Wong, a PhD student at the Columbia Journalism School and a SWC member who was arrested and beaten by police during the second raid on the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia on April 30, 2024.

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Transcript

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our urgent coverage of the Trump Administration’s all out assault on our institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn and work there. Today we are going deeper into the heart of authoritarian darkness that has gripped colleges and universities across the country and we’re talking with two graduate student workers at Columbia University. Columbia has become ground zero for the administration’s gangster government style moves to hold billions of dollars of federal funding hostage in order to bend universities to Donald Trump’s will to reshape the curricula culture and research infrastructure of American higher ed as such and to squash our constitutionally protected rights to free speech and free assembly, all under the McCarthy’s guise of rooting out supposed antisemitism, which the administration has recategorized to mean virtually any criticism of an opposition to the state of Israel.

The political ideology of Zionism and Israel’s US backed genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians just one year ago. Columbia University was also ground zero for the student-led Palestine solidarity protests and encampments that spread to campuses across the country and even around the world. It was exactly one year ago that the first Gaza solidarity encampment began at Columbia on April 17th, 2024 and that same month on more than one occasion, Columbia’s own president at the time minutia authorized the NYPD to descend on campus like an occupying force, beat an arrest protestors and dismantle the camps. Now fast forward to March of this year. On Friday, March 7th, the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia claiming that the move was due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students. The very next day, March 8th Mahmud, Khalil was abducted by ICE agents at his New York City apartment building in front of his pregnant wife and disappeared to a Louisiana immigration jail.

Khalil, a Palestinian born legal resident with a green card had just completed his master’s program and was set to graduate in May. He had served as a key negotiator with the university administration and spokesperson for the student encampment last year. He’s not accused of breaking any laws during that time, but the Trump administration has weaponized a rarely used section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, invoking the Secretary of States power to deport non-citizens if they supposedly believed their presence in the country could negatively affect US foreign policy. Just days after Khalil’s abduction, the university also expelled grant minor president of the Student Workers of Columbia Union, a local of the United Auto Workers, and that was just one day before contract negotiations were set to open between the union and the university. On March 13th, I was expelled from Columbia University for participating in the protest movement against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, minor rights in an op-ed for the nation.

I was not the only one. He continues, 22 students, all of whom like me had been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, were either expelled, suspended for years or had their hard earned degrees revoked on the same day all for allegedly occupying a building that has been occupied at least four times throughout Columbia’s history. And then there’s Y Sao Chung, a 21-year-old undergraduate and legal permanent resident who is suing the government after ICE moved to deport her, following her arrest on March 5th while protesting Columbia’s disciplinary actions against student protestors. I mean, this is just a small, terrifying snapshot of the broader Orwellian nightmare that has become all too real, all too quickly at Columbia University and it is increasingly becoming reality around the country and things got even darker last week with the latest development in Mahmood Khalil’s case as the American Civil Liberties Union stated on Friday in a decision that appeared to be pre-written, an immigration judge ruled immediately after a hearing today that Mahmud Khalil is removable under US immigration law. This comes less than 48 hours after the US government handed over the evidence they have on Mr. Khalil, which included nothing more than a letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that made clear Mr. Khalil had not committed a crime and was being targeted solely based on his speech. He’s not yet scheduled for deportation.

Listen, this isn’t just a redux of McCarthyism and the red scare. It has elements of that absolutely, but it is also monstrously terrifyingly new. I don’t know how far down this road we’re going to go. All I know is that whatever comes next will depend on what people of conscience do now or what they don’t do. Will other universities cave and capitulate to Trump as quickly as Columbia has? Will we see instead faculty, staff, students, grad students, parents, community members and others coming together on campuses across the country to fight this or will fear submission silence and self-censorship went out? What is it even like to be living, working and studying at Columbia University right now? Well, today you’ll hear all about that firsthand from our two guests. With all of this going on, I got to speak with Caitlin Liss, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a member of Student workers of Columbia, and I also spoke with Alie Wong, a PhD student at the Columbia Journalism School, and a student workers of Columbia member who was arrested and beaten by police during the second raid on the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia on April 30th, 2024.

Here’s my conversation with Caitlin and Allie recorded on Saturday April 12th. Well, Caitlin, Allie, thank you both so much for joining us today on the show. I really appreciate it, especially in the midst of everything going on right now. And I basically wanted to start there and ask if you could tell us from your own firsthand experience as student workers at Columbia, like what is the mood on campus and in your life right now, especially in light of the latest ruling on Mahmud Khalil’s case?

Caitlin Liss:

Okay. Yeah, so thank you for having us. I’m happy to be here. The mood on campus has been, you probably won’t be surprised to hear pretty bleak, pretty bad. We found out yesterday that Mahmood Kalila is not going to be released from jail in Louisiana. I think a lot of us were hoping that this ruling that was coming up was going to be in his favor and he would be released and be back home in time to be there for the birth of his baby. And it didn’t happen. And I think it’s just another horrible thing that has happened in a month, two months of just unrelenting bad news on campus. So stuff is feeling pretty bad. People are afraid, especially international students are afraid to leave their house. They’re afraid to speak up in class. I hear from people who are afraid to go to a union meeting and even those of us who are citizens feel afraid as well.

I mean, I wake up every day and I look at my phone to see if I’ve gotten a text message telling me that one of my friends has been abducted. It’s really scary. And on top of the sort of personal relationships with our friends and comrades who are at risk, there’s the sense that also our careers are industry are at risk. So, and many other members of student workers of Columbia have spent many years dedicated to getting a PhD and being in academia and it’s increasingly starting to feel like academia might not exist for that much longer. So it’s feeling pretty bleak.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I would definitely agree. And again, thank you so much Max for having us here. It’s a real pleasure to be able to share our stories and have a platform to do that. Yeah, I would agree. I think that there is a tremendous chilling effect that’s sunk in across the campus. And on one hand it’s not terribly surprising considering that’s the strategy of the Trump administration on the other. It is really a defeating feeling to see the momentum that we had last year, the ways that we were not only telling the story but telling it across the world that all eyes were on Columbia and we had this really incredible momentum. And so to see not just that lack of momentum, but the actual fear that has saturated the entire campus that has indiscriminately permeated people’s attitudes, whether you’re an American citizen or not, whether you’re light-skinned or not, has been something that’s been incredibly harrowing.

I know that after Mahmood, I at least had the anticipation of quite a bit of activity, but between that ranjani the other students and Columbia’s capitulation, it actually has gone the opposite way in that while I expected there to be tons of masks on campus after Columbia agreed to have a total mask ban, there was no one when I expected to see different vigils or protests or the breakdown of silos that have emerged across the campus of different groups, whether they’re student groups or faculty groups, I’m just hoping to see some kind of solidarity there. It hasn’t, and I think it’s largely because of the chilling effect because that this is the strategy of the Trump administration and unfortunately it’s such a dire situation that I think it’s really squashed a lot of the fervor and a lot of the fearlessness that many of us had prior to this moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It feels like a ice pick to the heart to hear that, especially knowing not just what we saw on campuses across the country just a year ago, but also the long tradition of campus protests and universities and higher education being a place of free speech, free thought free debate and the right to protest and lead with a moral consciousness like movements that help direct the whole of society to see that this is what is happening here now in front of all of us. And since I have so much more, I want to ask about the past month for you both on campus, but while we’re on that subject that Allie just brought up about the expectation right now, which I have heard echoed a lot of places online and offline of why aren’t there mass protests across higher ed in every state in the country right now, you would think that the generation of the sixties would do just that if Nixon had tried such a thing. And a lot of folks have been asking us why aren’t we seeing that right now? And so I wanted to ask if y’all had any thoughts on that and also if that would in your mind change things like if you saw other campuses that weren’t being targeted as intently as Columbia is, if you saw students and faculty and others protesting on behalf of what’s happening to you, would that change the mood on campus you think?

Caitlin Liss:

I mean that there’s a few things going on. Part of it is, like Allie said, the chilling effect of what’s been happening is making a really large percentage of our members and people in our community afraid to publicly take action. International student workers make up a really big percentage of our membership, and a lot of those people are afraid to even sign their name to a petition. In my departments. We sent a joint letter to the departments about what was going on, and a bunch of students didn’t want their names appearing on this letter that was just being sent the chair of the departments. So the chilling effect is real and very strong, and I think that that’s preventing a lot of people from showing up in ways that they might have done otherwise. I think that another part of it is just the kind of unrelenting nature of what’s been happening.

It has been one horrible thing after another and trying to react to everything as it comes in is difficult, but I don’t think it’s the case that we’re not doing anything. We are doing quite a bit and really trying through many different avenues to use our power as a union to fight back against what’s happening. We are talking with other unions on campus, we talk to other higher ed unions across the country, and so I think that there is quite a lot going on, but it does sometimes feel like we can’t keep up with the pace of the things that are happening just because they are happening so quickly and accumulating so fast.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I mean I would definitely agree. I think that it’s the fire hose strategy, which has proven to be effective not just on Columbia but across the nation with the dismantling of the federal government attack on institutions, the arts, the legal processes and legal entities. And so I think that again, that that’s part of the strategy is to just overwhelm people with the number of issues that would require attention. And I think that’s happening on Columbia’s campus as well. If we take even divestment as an example where it was a pretty straightforward ask last year, but now we’re seeing an issue on campus where it’s no longer about Palestine, Israel divestment, it’s about immigration reform and law enforcement. It’s about the American dream class consciousness. So many of these different things that are happening not just to the student body, but to faculty and the administration.

And so I think that in terms of trying to galvanize people, it’s a really difficult ask when you have so many different things that are coming apart at the seams. And that’s not to say it’s an insurmountable task. As Caitlin mentioned, we are moving forward, we are putting infrastructure in place and asks in place, but I think it’s difficult to mobilize people around so many different issues when everyone already feels not only powerless but cynical about the ability to change things when again, that momentum that we had last year has waned and the issues have broadened.

Caitlin Liss:

Just in terms of your question about support or solidarity from other campuses, I think that one of the things that has been most dispiriting about being at Columbia right now is that it’s clear that Columbia is essentially a test case for the Trump administration. We were the first school to be and are still in many ways kind of the center of attention, but it’s not just us, but it feels like the way that Columbia is reacting is kind of setting the tone for what other universities and colleges can do across the country. And what Columbia is doing is folding, so they are setting an example that is just rolling over and giving up in terms of what other colleges can do. I think we’re seeing other universities are reacting to these kinds of attacks in ways that are much better than Columbia has done. We just saw that Tufts, I think filed some legal documents in support of Ru Mesa Ozturk because she is a student there.

Columbia has done no such thing for Ranjani, for Uno, for Mahmood. They haven’t even mentioned them. And so we can see other universities are reacting in ways that are better. And I think that that gives us hope and not only gives us hope, but it gives us also something to point to when people at Columbia say, well, Columbia can’t do things any differently. It’s like, well, clearly it can because these other universities are doing something. Columbia doesn’t have to be doing this. It is making a choice to completely give in to everything that Trump is demanding.

Allie Wong:

And I would also add to that point, and going back to your question about Mahmood and sort of how either us individually or collectively are feeling about that, to Caitlin’s point, I think there’s so much that’s symbolic about Columbia, whether it has to do with Trump’s personal pettiness or the fact that it was kind of the epicenter of the encampments list last year. I think what happened with Mahmood is incredibly symbolic. If you look at particularly him and Ranjani, the first two that were targeted by the university, so much of their situations are almost comical in how they planned the ambiguity of policy and antisemitism where you look at Mahmud and he, it’s almost funny that he was the person who was targeted because he’s an incredibly calm, gentle person. He provided a sense of peace during the chaos of last year. He’s unequivocally condemned, Hamas, very publicly condemned terrorism, condemned antisemitism.

So if you were looking for someone who would be a great example, he’s not really one considering they don’t have any evidence on him. And the same thing for Ranjani who literally wasn’t even in the country when October 7th happened in that entire year, had never participated in the protests at most, had kind of engaged with social media by liking things, but two really good examples of people who don’t actually quite fit the bill in terms of trying to root out antisemitism. But in my mind it’s really strategic because it really communicates that nobody is safe. Whether you’ve participated in protests or not, you’re not safe, whether you’ve condemned antisemitism or not, you’re not safe. And I think that plays into the symbolic nature of Columbia as well, where Trump is trying to make an example out of Columbia and out of Columbia students. And we see that very clearly in the ruling yesterday with Mahmud.

Again, that’s not to say that it’s not an insurmountable thing, but it’s disappointing and it’s frankly embarrassing to be a part of an institution that brags about its long history of protests, its long history of social change through student movements. When you look at 1968 and Columbia called the NYPD on students arrested 700 students, and yet it kind of enshrines that moment in history as a place of pride, and I see that happening right now as well where 20, 30, 50 years from now, we’ll be looking at this moment and Columbia will be proud of it when really they’re the perpetrators of violence and hatred and bigotry and kind of turning the gun on their own students. So yeah, it’s a really precarious time to be a Columbia student and to be advocating for ourselves and our friends, our brothers and sisters who are experiencing this kind of oppression and persecution from our own country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Allie, Caitlin, I want to ask if we could again take that step back to the beginning of March where things were this terrifying new reality was really ramping up with the Trump administration’s freezing and threatening of completely withholding $400 million in federal funds and grants to Columbia just one day before Mahmood Khalil was abducted by ice agents and disappeared to a jail in Louisiana thousands of miles away. So from that point to now, I wanted to ask, as self-identified student workers at Columbia University, how have you and others been feeling throughout all of this as it’s been unfolding and trying to get through your day-to-day work? What does that even look like? Teaching and researching under these terrifying circumstances?

Allie Wong:

For me, it has been incredibly scary. As you mentioned, I was someone who was arrested and beaten last year after the second Gaza solidarity encampment raid and have spoken quite publicly about it. I authored a number of pieces around that time and since then and have been pretty open about my involvement being okay serving as a lightning rod for a lot of that PR stuff. And so for me, coming into this iteration of students battles with the university, it’s been really scary to kind see how many of the students that I was arrested with, many of my friends and colleagues are now either being targeted because of their involvement or living in the fear of being targeted because there is an opacity around what those policies are and how they’re being enforced and implemented. So it really does feel quite McCarthys in the sense that you don’t really know what the dangers are, but you know that they’re there, you’re looking over your shoulder all the time.

I don’t leave my house without wearing a mask just because through this whole process, many students have been doxed. Both Caitlin and myself have been doxed quite heavily through Canary mission and other groups online, and many folks have experienced offline behavior that has been threatening or scary to their own physical emotional security. And so that’s been a big piece for me is just being aware of my surroundings, being mindful of when I leave the house. In many respects, it does feel like I am growing in paranoia, but at the same time I consider it a moral obligation to be on the front lines as a light-skinned US citizen to be serving as a literal and figurative shield for my international brothers and sisters. And so it’s an interesting place as particularly a US citizen to say, what is my responsibility to the people around me?

What’s my responsibility to myself and keeping myself and my home safe? What’s my responsibility for sticking up for those who are targeted as someone who has the privilege of being able to be a citizen? And so I think it’s kind of a confusing time for those of us on the ground wanting to do more, wanting to help, wanting to offer our assistance with the privileges that we have and everyone’s level of comfort is different, and so my expectation is not that other people would take the kinds of risks I’m taking, but everyone has a part to play and whether that’s a visual part or a non-visual part, being in the public, it doesn’t really matter. We all have a part to play. And so given what we talked about just about the strategy of the Trump administration and the objectives to make us fearful and make us not speak out, I think it’s more important now than ever for those of us who are able to have the covering of US citizenship, to be doing everything in our power with the resources we’ve been given to take those risks because it’s much more important now in this administration than it’s ever been.

Caitlin Liss:

And I think on top of the stuff allie’s talking about, we do still have to continue doing our jobs. So for me, that is teaching. I’m teaching a class this semester and that has been very challenging to do, having to continue going in and talking about the subject matter, which is stuff that is very interesting to me personally and that I’m very excited to be teaching about in the classroom, but at the same time, there’s so much going on campus, it just feels impossible to be turning our attention to Ana and I hear from my students are scared, so part of my job has become having to help my students through that. I have heard lots of people who are trying to move their classes off campus because students don’t want to be on campus right now.

ICE is crawling all over campus. The NYPD is all over the place. I don’t know if you saw this, but Columbia has agreed to hire these 36 quote peace officers who are going to be on campus and have arresting power. So now essentially we have cops on campus full time and then on top of all of that, you have to wait in these horrible security lines to even get onto campus so the environment on campus doesn’t feel safe, so my students don’t feel safe. I don’t think anyone’s students feel safe right now. My colleagues who are international students don’t feel safe. I had a friend ask me what to do because she was TAing for a class and she wasn’t allowed to move it off campus or onto Zoom, and she said, I don’t feel safe on campus because I’m an international student and what am I going to do if ice comes to the door?

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in that situation. And so the students are scared, my colleagues are scared. I’ve even heard from a lot of professors who are feeling like they have to watch their words in the classroom because they don’t want to end up on Canary mission for having said something. So that’s quite difficult. Teaching in this environment is very difficult and I think that the students are having a really hard time. And then on top of that, I am in the sixth year of my PhD, so I’m supposed to be writing a dissertation right now, and that is also quite difficult to be keeping up with my research, which is supposed to be a big part of the PhD is producing research and it’s really hard to do right now because it feels like we have, my friends and my colleagues are at risk right now, so that’s quite difficult to maintain your attention in all those different places.

Allie Wong:

Just one more piece to add because I know that we’ve been pretty negative and it is a pretty negative situation, so I don’t want to silver line things. That being said, I do feel as though it’s been really beautiful to see people step up and really beautiful to see this kind of symbiotic relationship happening between US students and international students. I’m at the journalism school, which is overwhelmingly international, and I was really discouraged when there was a report that came out from the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about a closed town hall that we had where our dean, Jelani Cobb more or less said to students, we can’t protect you as much as I would love to be able to say here are the processes and protocols and the ways to keep yourself safe and the ways that we’re here to support you, but he just said we can’t.

And he got a lot of flack for that because that’s a pretty horrible thing for a dean to say. But I actually really appreciated it because it was the most honest and direct thing he could have said to students when the university itself was just sending us barrages of emails with these empty platitudes about values and a 270 year history of freethinking and all this nonsense. That being said, I think that it was a really difficult story to read, but at the same time it’s been really beautiful to see community gather around and clinging together when there are unknowns, people taking notes for each other when students don’t feel comfortable going to campus, students starting to host off campus happy hour groups and sit-ins together and things of that nature that have been really, again, amazing to see happen under such terrible circumstances and people just wanting to help each other out in the ways that they can.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Caitlyn, Allie, you were just giving us a pretty harrowing view of your day-to-day reality there as student workers of Columbia PhD working on your PhDs and dealing with all of this Orwellian madness that we’ve been talking about today. When I was listening to you both, I was hearing so many kind of resonances from my own experience, just one sort of decade back, right? I mean, because I remember being a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration and co-founding for full disclosure, I was a member of the grad union there. I was a co-founder of the campus anti-fascist network. I was doing a lot of public writing. I started this podcast in that sort of era, and there were so many things that y’all were talking about that sounded similar from the fear of websites like Canary Mission, putting people’s names out there and encouraging them to be doxed and disciplined and even deported.

That resonated with me because it just ate nine years ago. That was groups like Turning Point USA, they were the ones trying to film professors in class and then send it to Breitbart and hopefully get it into the Fox News outrage cycle. And I experienced some of that. But what I’m hearing also is just that the things we were dealing with during the first Trump administration are not what y’all are dealing with now. There is first and foremost a fully, the state is now part of it. The state is now sort of leading that. It’s not just the sort of far right groups and people online and that kind of thing, but also it feels like the mechanisms of surveillance and punishment are entirely different as well. I wanted to ask if y’all could speak a little more to that side of things. It’s not just the university administration that you’re contending with, you’re contending with a lot of different forces here that are converging on you and your rights at this very moment.

Caitlin Liss:

Yeah, I mean I think the one thing that has been coming up a lot for us, we’re used to fighting Columbia, the institution for our rights in the workplace for fair pay. And Columbia has always been a very stubborn adversary, very difficult to get anything out of them. Our first contract fight lasted for years, and now we’re looking at not just Columbia as someone to be fighting with, but at the federal government as a whole. And it’s quite scary. I think we talked about this a little bit, about international students being afraid to participate in protests, being afraid to go to union meetings. We’re hearing a lot of fear from people who aren’t citizens about to what extent participating in the union is safe for them right now. And on the one hand you want to say participating in a union is a protected activity.

There’s nothing illegal about it. You can’t get in trouble. In fact, it’s illegal to retaliate against you for being in a union. But on the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily feel like the law is being that protective right now. So it’s a very scary place to be in. And I think that from our point of view, the main tool we have in this moment is just our solidarity with one another and labor power as a union because the federal governments does not seem that interested in protecting our rights as a union. And so we have to rely on each other in order to fight for what we need and what will make our workplace safe.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I was wondering, Allie, if I could also toss it to you there, because this makes me think of something you said earlier about how the conditions at Columbia, the structure of Columbia, how Columbia’s run, have sort of made it vulnerable to what’s happening now or the ways that Columbia talks about itself versus what Columbia actually is, are quite stark here. And connecting that to what Caitlin just said, I think it should also be understood as someone who has covered grad student campaigns, contract campaigns at Columbia and elsewhere, that when these sorts of strikes are happening when graduate student workers are taking action against the administration, the first ones that are threatened by the administration with punitive measures including potentially the revocation of their visas are international students. They have always been the most vulnerable members of grad student unions that administrations have actually used as leverage to compel unions to bend to their demand. So I make that point speaking only for myself here as a journalist who has observed this in many other times, that this precedent of going after international students in the way the Trump administration is like didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Allie Wong:

Exactly. Yeah. So I mean I think if you even look at how Trump campaigned, he really doubled down on immigration policy. I mean, it’s the most obvious statement I can say, but the high hyperbole, the hatred, the racism, you see that as a direct map onto what’s happening right now. And I think that’s part of what maybe isn’t unique about Columbia, but as we’re starting to see other universities take a stand, Caitlin mentioned Tufts. I know Princeton also recently kind said that they would not capitulate. So there is precedent for something different from how Columbia has behaved, and I think you see them just playing exactly into Trump’s hands folding to his kind of proxy policy of wanting to make Colombian example. And it’s a really disappointing thing from a university that prides itself on its liberal values, prides itself on its diversity on protecting students.

When you actually see quite the opposite, not only is Columbia not just doing anything, it’s actively participating in what’s happening on campus, the fact that they have yet to even name the students who have very publicly been abducted or chased out of the country because of their complicity, the fact that they will send emails or make these statements about values, but actually not tell us anything that’s going to be helpful, like how policies will be implemented when they’re going to be implemented, what these ice agents look like, things of that nature that could be done to protect students. And also obviously not negotiating in good faith. The fact that Grant was expelled and fired the day before we had a collective bargaining meeting right before we were about to talk about protections for international students, just communicates that the university is not operating in good faith, they’re not interested in the wellbeing of their students or doing anything within their power, which is quite a tremendous power to say to the Trump administration, our students come first. Our students are an entity of us and we’re going to do whatever we can in our power to block you from demonizing and targeting international students who, as you said, are the most vulnerable people on our campus, but also those who bring so much diversity and brilliance and life to our university and our country.

Caitlin Liss:

And I think on the subject of international students, you, you’re right that they have always been in a more precarious position in higher ed unions. But on the other hand, I think that that shows us what power we do have as a union. I’m thinking. So we’ve been talking a lot about to what extent it’s safe for international workers to stay involved in the union, and our contract is expiring in June, which is why we’re having these bargaining sessions and we’re talking about going on strike next fall potentially. And there’s a lot of questions about to what extent can international students participate now because who knows what kind of protections they’re going to have? And I’ve been thinking about the last time we went on strike, it was a 10 week strike and we were striking through the end of the semester. It was the fall semester and we were still on strike when the semester ended.

And Columbia said that if we didn’t come off strike that they weren’t going to rehire the workers who were striking for the next semester. So anyone who was on strike wouldn’t get hired for a position in the spring semester and for international students that was going to affect their visa status. So it was very scary for them. And we of course said, that’s illegal. You can, that’s retaliation for us for going on strike. You can’t do that. And they said, it’s not illegal because we’re just not rehiring you. And it was this real moment of risk even though we felt much more confident in the legal protection because it felt like they could still do it and our recourse would have to be going to court and winning the case that this was illegal. So it was still very scary for international students, but we voted together to stay on strike and we held the line and Columbia did not in fact want to fire all of us who were on strike, and we won a contract anyway, even though there was this scary moment for international students even back then. And I have been telling people this story when we are thinking about protections for international students now, because I think that the moral of the story is that even under a situation where there’s a lot more legal security and legal protection, it’s still scary. And the way that you get over it being scary is by trusting that everyone coming together and standing together is what’s going to win and rather than whatever the legal protection might be.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Caitlin and Allie, I have so many more thoughts and questions, but I know that we only have about 10 minutes left here and I want to use the time that we have left with y’all to sort of tug on the thread that you were just pulling there. Caitlin, looking at this through the union’s perspective or through a labor perspective, can you frame these attacks on higher ed and the people who live, learn and work there through a labor and working workers’ rights perspective, and talk about what your message is to other union members and other people who listen to this show who are working people, union and non-union, why this is important, why they need to care and what people can do about it.

Caitlin Liss:

It’s very clear why it’s important and why other workers should care. The funding cuts to Columbia University and other universities really threaten not just the university, but the whole ecosystem of research. So these are people’s careers that are at risk and careers that not only they have an interest in having, but careers that benefit everyone in our society, people who do public health research, people who do medical research, people who do research about climate change. These are really important jobs that the opportunities to pursue them are vanishing. And so that obviously is important. And then when we’re looking at the attacks on international students, if m kil can be abducted for speaking out in support of Palestine and against the genocide and Gaza, then none of us are safe. No worker is safe if the governments can just abduct you and deport you for something like that.

On the one hand, even people who aren’t citizens are protected by the first amendments, but also it’s not clear that that’s where they’re going to stop. I think that this is a moment that we should all take very seriously. I mean, it’s very serious for the future of higher education as a whole. I feel like we are in sort of an existential fight here. And at the moment, Columbia is just completely welcoming this fascist takeover with open arms and it threatens higher ed as an institution. What kind of university is this? If the Middle Eastern studies department is being controlled by some outside force who says what they can and can’t teach, and now Trump is threatening to put all of Columbia under some consent decree, so we’re going to have to be beholden to whatever the Trump administration says we’re allowed to do on campus. So it is a major threat to higher education, but it’s also a threat I think, in a much larger sense to workers all over the country because it is sending the message that none of us are safe. No one is safe to express ourselves. We can’t expect to be safe in the workplace. And it’s really important that as a labor union that we take a stand here because it is not just destroying our workplaces, but sort of it’s threatening everyone’s workplace.

Allie Wong:

Exactly. That’s exactly what I was thinking too. I know it’s such an overused word at this point, but I think a huge aspect of this has to do with precedent and how, as we were mentioning, Columbia is so symbolic for a lot of reasons, including the fact that all eyes are on Columbia. And so when Columbia sets a precedent for what can and cannot not be done by University of Administration in caving to the federal government, I think that sets a precedent for not just academic institutions, but institutions writ large and the workers that work in those institutions. Because what happens here is happening across the federal government and will happen to institutions everywhere. And so I think it’s really critical that we bake trust back into our systems, both trust in administrations by having them prove that they do have our backs and they do care about student workers, but also that they trust student workers.

They trust us to do the really important research that keeps the heartbeat of this university alive. And I think that it’s going to crumble not just Columbia, but other academic institutions if really critical research gets defunded. Research that doesn’t just affect right now, but affects our country in perpetuity, in the kinds of opportunities that will be presented later in the future, the kinds of research that will be instrumental in making our society healthier and more equitable place in the future. And so this isn’t just a moment in time, but it’s one that absolutely will ripple out into history.

Caitlin Liss:

And we happen right now to be sort of fortunately bargaining a new contract as we speak. So like I said before, our contract is expiring in June. And so for us, obviously these kinds of issues are the top of mind when we’re thinking about what we can get in the contract. So in what way is this contract that we’re bargaining for going to be able to help us? So we’re fighting for Columbia to restore the funding cuts we’re fighting for them to instate a sanctuary campus and to reinstate grant minor, our president who was expelled, and Ronan who was enrolled, and everyone else who has been expelled or experienced sanctions because of their protests for Palestine. And so in a lot of ways, I think that the contract fight is a big part of what we’re concentrating on right now. But there’s also, there’s many unions on Columbia’s campus.

There’s the postdoc union, UAW 4,100, there’s the support staff and the Barnard contingent faculty who are UAW 2110. There’s building service employees, I think they’re 32 BJ and the maintenance staff is TW. So there’s many unions on campus. And I think about this a lot because I think what we’re seeing is we haven’t mentioned the trustees yet, I don’t think, but recently our interim president, Katrina Armstrong stepped down and was replaced by an acting president, was the former co-chair of the board of trustees Claire Shipman. And in many ways, I think what we’ve been seeing happening at Columbia is the result of the board of trustees not caving, but welcoming the things that Trump is demanding. I think that they’re complicit in this, but the board of trustees is like 21 people. There’s not very many of them. And there’s thousands of us at Columbia who actually are the people who make the university work, the students, the faculty, the staff, thousands of people in unions, thousands of non-unionized students and workers on campus as well.

And we outnumber the trustees by such a huge amount. And I think that thinking about the power we have when we all come together as the thousands of people who do the actual work of the university as opposed to these 21 people who are making decisions for us without consulting us that we don’t want, and that’s the way we have to think about reclaiming the university. I think we have to try and take back the power as workers, as students, as faculty from the board of trustees and start thinking about how we can make decisions that are in our interests.

Allie Wong:

One more thing that I wanted to call out, I’m not sure where this fits in. I think Caitlin talking about the board of trustees made me think of it is just the fact that I think that another big issue is the fact that there’s this very amorphous idea of antisemitism that all of this is being done under the banner of, and I think that it’s incredibly problematic because first of all, what is antisemitism? It’s this catchall phrase that is used to weaponize against dissent. And I think that when you look at the track record of these now three presidents that we’ve had in the past year, each of them has condemned antisemitism but has not condemned other forms of racism, including an especially Islamophobia that has permeated our campus. And because everything is done under the banner of antisemitism and you have folks like Claire Shipman who have been aligned with Zionist organizations, it also erodes the trust in of the student body, but then especially student workers, many of whom are Jewish and many of whom are having their research be threatened under the banner of antisemitism being done in their name. And yet it’s the thing that is stunting their ability to thrive at this university. And so I think that as we talk about the administration and board of trustees, just calling out the hypocrisy there of how they are behaving on campus, the ways that they’re capitulating and doing it under the guise of protecting Jewish students, but in the process of actually made Jewish students and faculty a target by not only withholding their funding but also saying that this is all to protect Jewish students but have created a more threatening environment than existed before.

Caitlin Liss:

Yeah, I mean, as a Jewish student personally, I’m about to go to my family’s Seder to talk about celebrating liberation from oppression while our friends and colleagues are sitting in jail. It’s quite depressing and quite horrific to see people saying that they’re doing this to protect Jews when it’s so clearly not the case.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I wanted to ask in just this final two minutes that we got here, I want to bring it back down to that level to again remind folks listening that you both are student workers, you are working people just like everyone else that we talk to on this show. And I as a former graduate student worker can’t help but identify with the situation that y’all are in. But it makes me think about the conversations I had with my family when I was on the job market and I was trying to go from being a PhD student to a faculty member somewhere and hearing that maybe my political activism or my public writing would be like a mark against me in my quest to get that career that I had worked so many years for and just having that in the back of my mind. But that still seems so far away and so minuscule in comparison to what y’all are dealing with. And I just wanted to ask as act scholars, as people working on your careers as well, how are you talking to your families about this and what future in or outside of academia do you feel is still open to you and people, graduate student workers like yourselves in today’s higher ed?

Caitlin Liss:

I mean the job market for history, PhDs has been quite bad for a long time even before this. So I mean, when I started the PhD program, I think I knew that I might not get a job in academia. And it’s sad because I really love it. I love teaching especially, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like it’s a choice to stop speaking up about what’s happening, to stop condemning what’s happening in Gaza, to stop condemning the fascist takeover of our government and the attacks on our colleagues. It’s just I can’t not say something about it. I can’t do nothing, and if it means I can’t get a job after this, that will be very sad. But I don’t think that that is a choice that I can or should make to do nothing or say nothing so that I can try and preserve my career if I have to. I’ll get another kind of job.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I completely agree. How dare I try to protect some nice job that I could potentially have in the future when there are friends and students on campus who are running for their lives. It just is not something that’s even comparable. And so I just feel like it’s an argument a lot of folks have made that if in the future there’s a job that decides not to hire me based off of my advocacy, I don’t want that job. I want a job based off of my skills and qualifications and experience, not my opinions about a genocide that’s happening halfway across the world, that any person should feel strongly against the slaughtering of tens of thousands of children and innocent folks. If that’s an inhibitor of a potential job, then that’s not the kind of environment I want to work in anyway. And that’s a really privileged position to have. I recognize that. But I think it’s incredibly crucial to be able to couch that issue in the broader perspective of not just this horrific genocide that’s happening, but also the future of our democracy and how critical it is to be someone who is willing to take a risk for the future of this country and the future of our basic civil liberties and freedoms.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Caitlin Liss and Allie Wong of Student Workers of Columbia, and I want to thank you for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you Allall back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. And we need to hear those voices now more than ever. Sign up for the real new newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/a-tremendous-chilling-effect-columbia-students-describe-dystopian-reality-on-campus-amid-trump-attacks/feed/ 0 526207 Captured Russian POWs describe North Korean troops in war against Ukraine | Radio Free Asia (RFA) https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/23/captured-russian-pows-describe-north-korean-troops-in-war-against-ukraine-radio-free-asia-rfa/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/23/captured-russian-pows-describe-north-korean-troops-in-war-against-ukraine-radio-free-asia-rfa/#respond Mon, 23 Dec 2024 21:05:15 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=8cc3ea2e57339aaacc1be04b1dc2c28a
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/23/captured-russian-pows-describe-north-korean-troops-in-war-against-ukraine-radio-free-asia-rfa/feed/ 0 507284 Victims, Witnesses Describe ‘Premeditated’ Attack On Georgian Protesters https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/victims-witnesses-describe-premeditated-attack-on-georgian-protesters/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/victims-witnesses-describe-premeditated-attack-on-georgian-protesters/#respond Fri, 03 May 2024 22:04:24 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=1e48ee2b09f545eed9192e2d01c6020d
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/victims-witnesses-describe-premeditated-attack-on-georgian-protesters/feed/ 0 472931 Eyewitnesses Describe Moment A Truck Plowed Into A Crowd Of Children in Kyrgyzstan https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/our-legs-were-shaking-the-moment-a-truck-plowed-into-a-crowd-of-kyrgyz-children/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/our-legs-were-shaking-the-moment-a-truck-plowed-into-a-crowd-of-kyrgyz-children/#respond Fri, 03 May 2024 17:32:51 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=f4d232d986675e0cc4eaf33a4e467839
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/our-legs-were-shaking-the-moment-a-truck-plowed-into-a-crowd-of-kyrgyz-children/feed/ 0 472903 “Dead on Arrival”: Doctors Back from Gaza Describe Horrific Hospital Scenes, Decimated Health System https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/dead-on-arrival-doctors-back-from-gaza-describe-horrific-hospital-scenes-decimated-health-system-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/dead-on-arrival-doctors-back-from-gaza-describe-horrific-hospital-scenes-decimated-health-system-2/#respond Fri, 03 May 2024 16:43:22 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=293d8b62fd234d36990af13b6831e994
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/dead-on-arrival-doctors-back-from-gaza-describe-horrific-hospital-scenes-decimated-health-system-2/feed/ 0 472886 “Dead on Arrival”: Doctors Back from Gaza Describe Horrific Hospital Scenes, Decimated Health System https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/dead-on-arrival-doctors-back-from-gaza-describe-horrific-hospital-scenes-decimated-health-system/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/dead-on-arrival-doctors-back-from-gaza-describe-horrific-hospital-scenes-decimated-health-system/#respond Fri, 03 May 2024 12:38:31 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=e361c25e7c5ebe2be596f0ea99568942 Seg2 bothguestspatients

Nearly seven months of constant bombardment, siege and obstruction of aid deliveries have annihilated the healthcare system in Gaza. Last week, the Palestinian Health Ministry said that around 600,000 Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip no longer have access to any kind of healthcare. The World Health Organization has said that Israel is “systematically dismantling” the health system in Gaza. Only 11 hospitals out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning. At both of Gaza’s largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and Nasser, Palestinians found hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves after Israel raided and destroyed the facilities. Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Ismail Mehr and Dr. Azeem Elahi just after they volunteered at the largest hospital still operating in Gaza, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. “The healthcare system has been always in a noose, and that noose tightens at times when there’s conflict,” says Mehr. “Right now that noose has completely just hung the healthcare system.”


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/03/dead-on-arrival-doctors-back-from-gaza-describe-horrific-hospital-scenes-decimated-health-system/feed/ 0 472866 Locals Describe Chaos As More Kazakhs Forced To Escape Floods https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/04/locals-describe-chaos-as-more-kazakhs-forced-to-escape-floods/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/04/locals-describe-chaos-as-more-kazakhs-forced-to-escape-floods/#respond Thu, 04 Apr 2024 13:49:27 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=32471b36bb36b9504d89f655bcb3d186
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/04/locals-describe-chaos-as-more-kazakhs-forced-to-escape-floods/feed/ 0 468086 Did NVIDIA describe Huawei as its ‘biggest competitor’? https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-nvidia-huawei-03152024152712.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-nvidia-huawei-03152024152712.html#respond Fri, 15 Mar 2024 19:27:24 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-nvidia-huawei-03152024152712.html China’s state-run media outlets claimed that American chipmaker NVIDIA had for the first time listed the Chinese tech company Huawei as its “biggest competitor” in its latest annual earnings report.

But the claim is misleading. While NVIDIA did mention Huawei in the report for the first time, it was only cited as one of a number of competitors, not its biggest.

On Feb. 24, China’s state-controlled Reference News said: “The U.S. chip giant identified Huawei as the ‘biggest competitor’ in its report submitted this week to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.”

Reference News cited a report by the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, or DW, published to back its claim. 

Keyword searches found the report cited by Reference News published on the website of DW Chinese on Feb. 23. It claimed that Nvidia lists Huawei as the biggest competitor in its annual report.

1.png
Chinese official media such as  Reference News claimed that NVIDIA identified Huawei as its “biggest competitor” for the first time in its latest annual earnings report. (Screenshot/Reference News)

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA is a leading technology company known for its powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used in video gaming, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. 

Shenzhen-based Huawei is a global telecommunications and electronics company known for its smartphones, networking equipment, and leading advancements in 5G technology.

While becoming a top producer of both telecom equipment and electronic devices, Huawei was caught in the crossfire of the U.S.-China trade war, suffering a steep drop profit after being blacklisted by the American government for buying unapproved parts from U.S. suppliers.

The claim about NVIDIA listing Huawei as the biggest competitor has been also shared in China’s state-run Global Times. Other Chinese language media such as Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao and Taiwan’s United Daily News published similar reports.

NVIDIA’s report

On page 9 of NVIDIA’s annual earnings report, it does mention Huawei in four of the five market areas where the company faces serious competition, including as a supplier of GPU hardware and as a cloud service featuring in house AI. 

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NVIDIA's earnings report does mention Huawei as a competitor in several market areas, but does not describe it as NVIDIA's “ largest competitor.” (Screenshot/NVIDIA official site)

However, the relevant section of the report does not describe Huawei as either its “biggest competitor” or as a “major competitor,” and instead lists it as one amongst many multinational tech companies such as U.S. companies like AMD and Intel. 

Other Chinese companies mentioned as competitors in the 2024 report  include Alibaba and Baidu. While this is the first time Huawei has appeared as a noted “competitor” in NVIDIA’s annual report, Baidu appeared in the 2023 report while Alibaba was listed as early as 2022.

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

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


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-nvidia-huawei-03152024152712.html/feed/ 0 464577 Back from Gaza, Palestinian Writer Susan Abulhawa Says “Language is Inadequate” to Describe Horror https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/06/back-from-gaza-palestinian-writer-susan-abulhawa-says-language-is-inadequate-to-describe-horror/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/06/back-from-gaza-palestinian-writer-susan-abulhawa-says-language-is-inadequate-to-describe-horror/#respond Wed, 06 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=1a9414b8dc01c19ce4e35063a11f2199
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/06/back-from-gaza-palestinian-writer-susan-abulhawa-says-language-is-inadequate-to-describe-horror/feed/ 0 462473 Gaza women describe Israeli kidnapping, interrogations https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/gaza-women-describe-israeli-kidnapping-interrogations/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/gaza-women-describe-israeli-kidnapping-interrogations/#respond Thu, 15 Feb 2024 17:18:39 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=866b644fc55d25790da3910860e03a0a
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/15/gaza-women-describe-israeli-kidnapping-interrogations/feed/ 0 458859 Witnesses Describe Bloody Scenes At Prague University Shooting https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/21/witnesses-describe-bloody-scenes-at-prague-university-shooting/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/21/witnesses-describe-bloody-scenes-at-prague-university-shooting/#respond Thu, 21 Dec 2023 21:23:06 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=b4cb29e00d31047b460d1ea6008370f8
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/12/21/witnesses-describe-bloody-scenes-at-prague-university-shooting/feed/ 0 447268 How to describe 2023 in two words? Global boiling https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/ https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/#respond Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:45:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=624900
2022

Heatflation, overshoot, soup throwers: 10 terms and phrases that defined our sweltering climate in 2022

2021

Code red, glacier blood, megadrought: The defining words of 2021

2020

Anthropause, ghost flights, spillover: Only a pandemic could bring words like these

2019

Birth strike, flygskam, Pyrocene: And we thought things couldn’t get worse

2018

Firenado, hothouse, smokestorm: The year fires went wild

2017

Hotumn, meatmares, ecoanxiety: Oh, how young we all were then

To say that 2023 is one for the record books is a vast understatement — the year was so out of the norm that you’re forced to go back at least 125,000 years for a point of reference. The last time anyone experienced a year as warm as this one, mastodons and giant sloths roamed across North America during the beginning of the late Pleistocene. Suffice it to say, there weren’t many people around to experience it. 

In 2023, it felt like Earth might run out of records to break. For a stretch in early July, the planet snapped its all-time daily heat record four times, one day after another. It added up to the hottest week ever recorded in what became the hottest summer ever recorded. Then, September broke its previous monthly heat record by half a degree Celsius — a margin so stunning that Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist, declared it “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

Hausfather’s attention-grabbing phrase showed up in the headlines of The Guardian, Wired, and Bloomberg, adding pizzazz to what might have otherwise felt like yet another story about another broken record. As the world overheats, everyone from scientists to TikTok influencers is reaching for a fresh vocabulary to put words to what’s happening, coining new terms and assigning old ones new meanings. It’s a sign that language is catching up to the history-making environmental changes happening around us.

For North America, it was a year of fire and smoke. Canada burned from coast to coast, with 6,500 fires scorching so much land that the 45.7 million acres burned surpassed the previous record by more than 2.5 times. The fires sent a thick haze into cities in the eastern half of the United States that were unprepared for smoke, from Chicago to New York, making June 7 the all-time worst day of pollution from wildfire smoke for the average American. The country’s deadliest fire in a century ripped through Lahaina on the island of Maui in August, killing 100 people. 

Elsewhere in the world, heavy rains forced nearly 700,000 people to flee their homes in Somalia after years of drought; Hurricane Otis, a storm that rapidly escalated into a Category 5, slammed into Mexico, destroying the homes of roughly 580,000 people; and an avalanche triggered an outburst from a melting glacial lake in the Himalayas in northeast India, sending a deadly wall of water barreling down the mountain valleys into towns below.

Every December, dictionary editors sift through the lexicon and pick a word that best reflects the spirit of the waning year. Their selections this time around suggested a modern-day preoccupation with what’s genuine. Merriam-Webster chose “authentic,” the Scotland-based Collins Dictionary went with “AI,” and the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary picked “rizz,” slang for charm or romantic appeal. Some of the top contenders hinted at a changing environment, such as “heat dome” and “dystopian.”

When putting together our annual list of the most notable words in the climate conversation this year, we had plenty of great options. “Global boiling” stood out in such an overheated year, and “El Niño” seemed like an obvious pick, too. We whittled the candidates down to the following 10 that we thought best captured what it felt like to live through a particularly smoky, sweltering year. Though these words and phrases aren’t all newborns, they’re all very 2023.

 

How NYC officials failed to prepare for an air quality crisis. “It’s been a lackluster, underwhelming, frankly problematic response.”

AQI

The Air Quality Index, a color-coded measure of how dangerous the air is to breathe.

The AQI used to be something only air quality nerds cared about, until folks coughing through smoke-filled summers in the West over the past decade began checking the index every morning before heading out for the day. In 2023, wildfires in Canada sent dangerous air to places in the United States that had never seen anything like it in living memory, and the AQI entered the rest of the country’s vocabulary. Google searches for AQI spiked along the East Coast and in the Midwest as people scrambled to understand the new threat. Inhaling the fine particles in wildfire smoke has been linked to long-term effects like heart attacks, lung cancer, and dementia. Public officials in New York City were slow to warn the public and distribute N95 masks, even though the AQI reached 484 in parts of Brooklyn, off the charts of the rating system. Anything over 300, colored maroon on the AQI chart, is considered “hazardous,” even for healthy adults.

Carbon offsets are ‘riddled with fraud.’ Can new voluntary guidelines fix that? Solving credibility issues may require a greater overhaul of carbon markets.

Carbon insetting

Business-speak for companies reducing emissions in their own supply chains; an alternative to carbon offsetting.

For years, companies have been making pledges to go “carbon-neutral,” aiming to offset their emissions with tree-planting projects, usually halfway around the world. But offsetting schemes often fail to deliver on what they promise. An investigation by The Guardian in January found that most carbon offsets from rainforest projects are “phantom credits,” with 94 percent of those approved by the world’s biggest certifier, Verra, offering “no benefit to the climate.” Enter carbon insetting, in which companies attempt to remove emissions from within their own supply chains — the string of activities involved in producing and distributing their products. The practice originated in the early 2000s with companies that rely heavily on agriculture, and it’s now being adopted by Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Apple. Still, experts say that without strong standards, insets will have the same problems as offsets. Offsetting, insetting, and whatever-setting are no substitute for just emitting less carbon in the first place.

 

Starved of new talent: Young people are steering clear of oil jobs. Who wants to work for the brands that brought you climate change?

Climate quitters

People who resign from their jobs over concerns about climate change.

In January, Bloomberg identified a new trend in the workplace: leaving your old job to work on climate change full-time. So-called “climate quitters” included a former public affairs employee for ExxonMobil who now works for a cleantech communications firm and a restaurant reviewer who started a company to plant tiny native forests in cities. It could be a sign of growing discontent at the lack of large-scale climate action. A survey of 4,000 employees in the United States and United Kingdom this year found that more than 60 percent of employees wanted to see their company take a stronger stance on the environment, and half said they would consider resigning if their companies’ values didn’t align with their own. But does it have any effect besides feeling better about yourself? Publicly quitting can create a PR nightmare for companies, Alexis Normand, the CEO and cofounder of the carbon accounting platform Greenly, told the BBC: “It’s an extremely powerful form of lobbying.” Of course, staying at your current not-very-environmentally-friendly job and advocating for sustainability can make a big difference, too.

The great conundrum of the sustainability influencer. Can we escape the growth model that’s built into the influencer economy and fashion itself?

Deinfluencers

Social media influencers who (supposedly) want to convince you not to buy things.

TikTok and Instagram aren’t just for entertainment — they’ve become an advertising ecosystem encouraging reckless consumption. Last year, influencers sold more than $3.6 billion worth of products on the online shopping platform LTK alone, and a study from Meta found that 54 percent of Instagram users surveyed made a purchase after seeing a product on the platform. Manufacturing, shipping, and, eventually, disposing of all that stuff when the next trend takes over has created a huge environmental problem, with discarded clothing piling up in Chile’s Atacama Desert and filling the ocean with microfibers. So-called deinfluencers are pushing back against this out-of-control consumerism, targeting fast fashion and pointless crap that has gone viral. “Do not get the Ugg Minis. Do not get the Dyson Airwrap. Do not get the Charlotte Tilbury wand. Do not get the Stanley cup. Do not get Colleen Hoover books. Do not get the AirPods Max,” TikToker @sadgrlswag said in a video in January. By December, videos with the hashtag #deinfluencing had racked up more than 1 billion views. The trend is already at risk of morphing from discouraging overconsumption to simply recommending one product over another — using the mantle of green credentials to sell more stuff and look environmentally-friendly while doing it.

 

How a looming El Niño could fuel the spread of infectious diseases. The oceanic phenomenon could lead to more pathogen-carrying mosquitoes, bacteria, and toxic algae.

El Niño

A global weather pattern characterized by warmer-than-average temperatures.

One reason 2023 was so hot (apart from climate change)? The arrival of a strong El Niño, which the planet hadn’t seen since 2016, the previous record-holder for hottest year. It replaced La Niña, a cooler pattern that had tempered the heat of the last three years. El Niño brought 101-degree, hot-tub temperatures to the ocean off Florida, steaming coral reefs and fish, anemones, and jellyfish in the Everglades. The weather pattern also tends to fuel the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes, like malaria and dengue, and other pests that thrive in warmer weather. Thanks to El Niño and climate change, it’s easy to make one reliable prediction for 2024: Global temperatures are likely to be even hotter. The World Meteorological Organization predicted in May that the next five years are sure to be the hottest ones yet.

July has been the hottest month in humanity’s history. The heat has claimed lives from Arizona to Greece to China.

Global boiling

It’s like global warming, but way more worrying.

António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, is the Shakespeare of scary climate phrases. In past years, his fiery speeches have brought us “code red for humanity” and dire metaphors such as “We are digging our own graves.” In a year as hot as 2023, Guterres managed to up the ante again. Not only did he warn that humanity had “opened the gates of hell,” but he also declared that Earth had entered the “era of global boiling” in July, the hottest month in at least 125,000 years. The phrase “global warming” has been criticized for sounding too nice — after all, everyone loves summer! The same can’t be said for global boiling, which sounds like it’s going to turn us all into soup.

 

Greenhushing, explained: Why companies have stopped talking about their climate pledges. It’s hard to criticize what you can’t hear.

Greenhushing

When companies go quiet on their environmental commitments.

A few short years ago, even oil companies were assuring everyone that they’d slash their emissions. But things started changing this year. Amazon, which famously named its Seattle sports and concert venue “Climate Pledge Arena,” quietly abandoned one of its key goals around shipping emissions, and oil majors scaled back their climate commitments. The trend of greenhushing has emerged as governments from California to the European Union are crafting regulations to counter false advertising around sustainability (often called “greenwashing”). Given that corporations such as Delta are getting taken to court over deceptive environmental marketing, many executives figure that silence is the safer option. Nearly a quarter of companies around the world are choosing not to publicize their milestones on climate action, according to a report from South Pole, a Switzerland-based climate consultancy that popularized the term greenhushing. While the practice makes it harder to scrutinize what companies are doing, some say greenhushing could be a good thing — after all, it’s stopping misleading advertisements. 

In defense of darkness. Artificial light is polluting the night sky. What do we stand to lose?

Noctalgia

The feeling of missing a dark night sky.

Ever since humans started looking up, they’d see the starry arc of the Milky Way on a clear night. Nowadays, thanks to light pollution from cities, satellites, and even oil and gas production, our galaxy is becoming a rare sight. Artificial light messes with our sleep and confuses wildlife, and the absence of true darkness is also a loss for culture and science. In August, the astronomers Aparna Venkatesan from the University of San Francisco and John C. Barentine from Dark Sky Consulting came up with a new term to express the loss of dark night skies: noctalgia, or “sky grief.” It’s a play on “nostalgia” that uses the Latin prefix noct-, meaning night. “This represents far more than mere loss of environment: We are witnessing loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions, and our ability to conduct traditional practices,” the duo wrote in a comment to the journal Science.

 

The laws that took down mobsters are now being turned against Big Oil. Cities in New Jersey and Puerto Rico claim oil companies are behind a conspiracy to deceive the public.

RICO

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law made for the Mafia and organized crime — now being applied to oil companies.

Eight years ago, investigations found that “Exxon Knew” about the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1970s, but worked to undermine the public’s understanding of climate science, sowing “uncertainty” about its effects. Since then, lawsuits against oil, gas, and coal companies have proliferated, most of them arguing that companies violated laws that protect people from deceptive advertising. But a new kind of climate lawsuit has emerged that uses a relic from the past: a federal RICO law passed in 1970 to take down organized crime. In November 2022, 16 towns in Puerto Rico accused Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies of violating the federal RICO law by colluding to conceal how their products contribute to climate change. Six months later, Hoboken, New Jersey, amended its complaint against Exxon and other companies to allege that they violated the state’s RICO law. Racketeering lawsuits have been successful against tobacco companies and pharmaceutical executives tied to the opioid epidemic. Former President Donald Trump and his allies were also hit with a RICO case in Georgia this year, accused of conspiring to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The fight to define ‘green hydrogen’ could determine America’s emissions future. The Treasury Department’s definition will affect billions of dollars in federal subsidies for the nascent industry.

White hydrogen

Naturally occurring hydrogen found underground.

Hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel that could replace fossil fuels in a range of hard-to-decarbonize industries, from aviation to steelmaking. The problem is that the most abundant element in the universe isn’t normally found on its own, and turning it into a fuel to fly airplanes, for instance, takes lots of energy. There’s a whole rainbow of hydrogens out there, distinguished by how they’re made — expensive “green hydrogen” from renewables, “gray hydrogen” from methane gas, and “brown hydrogen” from coal. Then there’s white hydrogen, which isn’t made from anything at all. Scientists used to think that there weren’t big reserves of hydrogen buried underground, just waiting to be collected, but in recent years, they’ve been discovering more and more. Recently, some scientists looking for oil and gas reserves in France stumbled upon what could be one of the largest reservoirs of white hydrogen to date, containing somewhere within the stunningly wide range of 6 and 250 million metric tons. Untapped reserves in the United States, Australia, Mali, Oman, and parts of Europe could provide clean energy on a large scale — if all goes according to plan. Startups like Gold Hydrogen, based in Australia, and Koloma, based in Denver, are in the early stages of drilling for hydrogen and could be headed to production soon.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to describe 2023 in two words? Global boiling on Dec 13, 2023.


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

]]> https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/feed/ 0 445376 How to describe 2023 in two words? Global boiling https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/ https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/#respond Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:45:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=624900
2022

Heatflation, overshoot, soup throwers: 10 terms and phrases that defined our sweltering climate in 2022

2021

Code red, glacier blood, megadrought: The defining words of 2021

2020

Anthropause, ghost flights, spillover: Only a pandemic could bring words like these

2019

Birth strike, flygskam, Pyrocene: And we thought things couldn’t get worse

2018

Firenado, hothouse, smokestorm: The year fires went wild

2017

Hotumn, meatmares, ecoanxiety: Oh, how young we all were then

To say that 2023 is one for the record books is a vast understatement — the year was so out of the norm that you’re forced to go back at least 125,000 years for a point of reference. The last time anyone experienced a year as warm as this one, mastodons and giant sloths roamed across North America during the beginning of the late Pleistocene. Suffice it to say, there weren’t many people around to experience it. 

In 2023, it felt like Earth might run out of records to break. For a stretch in early July, the planet snapped its all-time daily heat record four times, one day after another. It added up to the hottest week ever recorded in what became the hottest summer ever recorded. Then, September broke its previous monthly heat record by half a degree Celsius — a margin so stunning that Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist, declared it “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

Hausfather’s attention-grabbing phrase showed up in the headlines of The Guardian, Wired, and Bloomberg, adding pizzazz to what might have otherwise felt like yet another story about another broken record. As the world overheats, everyone from scientists to TikTok influencers is reaching for a fresh vocabulary to put words to what’s happening, coining new terms and assigning old ones new meanings. It’s a sign that language is catching up to the history-making environmental changes happening around us.

For North America, it was a year of fire and smoke. Canada burned from coast to coast, with 6,500 fires scorching so much land that the 45.7 million acres burned surpassed the previous record by more than 2.5 times. The fires sent a thick haze into cities in the eastern half of the United States that were unprepared for smoke, from Chicago to New York, making June 7 the all-time worst day of pollution from wildfire smoke for the average American. The country’s deadliest fire in a century ripped through Lahaina on the island of Maui in August, killing 100 people. 

Elsewhere in the world, heavy rains forced nearly 700,000 people to flee their homes in Somalia after years of drought; Hurricane Otis, a storm that rapidly escalated into a Category 5, slammed into Mexico, destroying the homes of roughly 580,000 people; and an avalanche triggered an outburst from a melting glacial lake in the Himalayas in northeast India, sending a deadly wall of water barreling down the mountain valleys into towns below.

Every December, dictionary editors sift through the lexicon and pick a word that best reflects the spirit of the waning year. Their selections this time around suggested a modern-day preoccupation with what’s genuine. Merriam-Webster chose “authentic,” the Scotland-based Collins Dictionary went with “AI,” and the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary picked “rizz,” slang for charm or romantic appeal. Some of the top contenders hinted at a changing environment, such as “heat dome” and “dystopian.”

When putting together our annual list of the most notable words in the climate conversation this year, we had plenty of great options. “Global boiling” stood out in such an overheated year, and “El Niño” seemed like an obvious pick, too. We whittled the candidates down to the following 10 that we thought best captured what it felt like to live through a particularly smoky, sweltering year. Though these words and phrases aren’t all newborns, they’re all very 2023.

 

How NYC officials failed to prepare for an air quality crisis. “It’s been a lackluster, underwhelming, frankly problematic response.”

AQI

The Air Quality Index, a color-coded measure of how dangerous the air is to breathe.

The AQI used to be something only air quality nerds cared about, until folks coughing through smoke-filled summers in the West over the past decade began checking the index every morning before heading out for the day. In 2023, wildfires in Canada sent dangerous air to places in the United States that had never seen anything like it in living memory, and the AQI entered the rest of the country’s vocabulary. Google searches for AQI spiked along the East Coast and in the Midwest as people scrambled to understand the new threat. Inhaling the fine particles in wildfire smoke has been linked to long-term effects like heart attacks, lung cancer, and dementia. Public officials in New York City were slow to warn the public and distribute N95 masks, even though the AQI reached 484 in parts of Brooklyn, off the charts of the rating system. Anything over 300, colored maroon on the AQI chart, is considered “hazardous,” even for healthy adults.

Carbon offsets are ‘riddled with fraud.’ Can new voluntary guidelines fix that? Solving credibility issues may require a greater overhaul of carbon markets.

Carbon insetting

Business-speak for companies reducing emissions in their own supply chains; an alternative to carbon offsetting.

For years, companies have been making pledges to go “carbon-neutral,” aiming to offset their emissions with tree-planting projects, usually halfway around the world. But offsetting schemes often fail to deliver on what they promise. An investigation by The Guardian in January found that most carbon offsets from rainforest projects are “phantom credits,” with 94 percent of those approved by the world’s biggest certifier, Verra, offering “no benefit to the climate.” Enter carbon insetting, in which companies attempt to remove emissions from within their own supply chains — the string of activities involved in producing and distributing their products. The practice originated in the early 2000s with companies that rely heavily on agriculture, and it’s now being adopted by Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Apple. Still, experts say that without strong standards, insets will have the same problems as offsets. Offsetting, insetting, and whatever-setting are no substitute for just emitting less carbon in the first place.

 

Starved of new talent: Young people are steering clear of oil jobs. Who wants to work for the brands that brought you climate change?

Climate quitters

People who resign from their jobs over concerns about climate change.

In January, Bloomberg identified a new trend in the workplace: leaving your old job to work on climate change full-time. So-called “climate quitters” included a former public affairs employee for ExxonMobil who now works for a cleantech communications firm and a restaurant reviewer who started a company to plant tiny native forests in cities. It could be a sign of growing discontent at the lack of large-scale climate action. A survey of 4,000 employees in the United States and United Kingdom this year found that more than 60 percent of employees wanted to see their company take a stronger stance on the environment, and half said they would consider resigning if their companies’ values didn’t align with their own. But does it have any effect besides feeling better about yourself? Publicly quitting can create a PR nightmare for companies, Alexis Normand, the CEO and cofounder of the carbon accounting platform Greenly, told the BBC: “It’s an extremely powerful form of lobbying.” Of course, staying at your current not-very-environmentally-friendly job and advocating for sustainability can make a big difference, too.

The great conundrum of the sustainability influencer. Can we escape the growth model that’s built into the influencer economy and fashion itself?

Deinfluencers

Social media influencers who (supposedly) want to convince you not to buy things.

TikTok and Instagram aren’t just for entertainment — they’ve become an advertising ecosystem encouraging reckless consumption. Last year, influencers sold more than $3.6 billion worth of products on the online shopping platform LTK alone, and a study from Meta found that 54 percent of Instagram users surveyed made a purchase after seeing a product on the platform. Manufacturing, shipping, and, eventually, disposing of all that stuff when the next trend takes over has created a huge environmental problem, with discarded clothing piling up in Chile’s Atacama Desert and filling the ocean with microfibers. So-called deinfluencers are pushing back against this out-of-control consumerism, targeting fast fashion and pointless crap that has gone viral. “Do not get the Ugg Minis. Do not get the Dyson Airwrap. Do not get the Charlotte Tilbury wand. Do not get the Stanley cup. Do not get Colleen Hoover books. Do not get the AirPods Max,” TikToker @sadgrlswag said in a video in January. By December, videos with the hashtag #deinfluencing had racked up more than 1 billion views. The trend is already at risk of morphing from discouraging overconsumption to simply recommending one product over another — using the mantle of green credentials to sell more stuff and look environmentally-friendly while doing it.

 

How a looming El Niño could fuel the spread of infectious diseases. The oceanic phenomenon could lead to more pathogen-carrying mosquitoes, bacteria, and toxic algae.

El Niño

A global weather pattern characterized by warmer-than-average temperatures.

One reason 2023 was so hot (apart from climate change)? The arrival of a strong El Niño, which the planet hadn’t seen since 2016, the previous record-holder for hottest year. It replaced La Niña, a cooler pattern that had tempered the heat of the last three years. El Niño brought 101-degree, hot-tub temperatures to the ocean off Florida, steaming coral reefs and fish, anemones, and jellyfish in the Everglades. The weather pattern also tends to fuel the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes, like malaria and dengue, and other pests that thrive in warmer weather. Thanks to El Niño and climate change, it’s easy to make one reliable prediction for 2024: Global temperatures are likely to be even hotter. The World Meteorological Organization predicted in May that the next five years are sure to be the hottest ones yet.

July has been the hottest month in humanity’s history. The heat has claimed lives from Arizona to Greece to China.

Global boiling

It’s like global warming, but way more worrying.

António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, is the Shakespeare of scary climate phrases. In past years, his fiery speeches have brought us “code red for humanity” and dire metaphors such as “We are digging our own graves.” In a year as hot as 2023, Guterres managed to up the ante again. Not only did he warn that humanity had “opened the gates of hell,” but he also declared that Earth had entered the “era of global boiling” in July, the hottest month in at least 125,000 years. The phrase “global warming” has been criticized for sounding too nice — after all, everyone loves summer! The same can’t be said for global boiling, which sounds like it’s going to turn us all into soup.

 

Greenhushing, explained: Why companies have stopped talking about their climate pledges. It’s hard to criticize what you can’t hear.

Greenhushing

When companies go quiet on their environmental commitments.

A few short years ago, even oil companies were assuring everyone that they’d slash their emissions. But things started changing this year. Amazon, which famously named its Seattle sports and concert venue “Climate Pledge Arena,” quietly abandoned one of its key goals around shipping emissions, and oil majors scaled back their climate commitments. The trend of greenhushing has emerged as governments from California to the European Union are crafting regulations to counter false advertising around sustainability (often called “greenwashing”). Given that corporations such as Delta are getting taken to court over deceptive environmental marketing, many executives figure that silence is the safer option. Nearly a quarter of companies around the world are choosing not to publicize their milestones on climate action, according to a report from South Pole, a Switzerland-based climate consultancy that popularized the term greenhushing. While the practice makes it harder to scrutinize what companies are doing, some say greenhushing could be a good thing — after all, it’s stopping misleading advertisements. 

In defense of darkness. Artificial light is polluting the night sky. What do we stand to lose?

Noctalgia

The feeling of missing a dark night sky.

Ever since humans started looking up, they’d see the starry arc of the Milky Way on a clear night. Nowadays, thanks to light pollution from cities, satellites, and even oil and gas production, our galaxy is becoming a rare sight. Artificial light messes with our sleep and confuses wildlife, and the absence of true darkness is also a loss for culture and science. In August, the astronomers Aparna Venkatesan from the University of San Francisco and John C. Barentine from Dark Sky Consulting came up with a new term to express the loss of dark night skies: noctalgia, or “sky grief.” It’s a play on “nostalgia” that uses the Latin prefix noct-, meaning night. “This represents far more than mere loss of environment: We are witnessing loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions, and our ability to conduct traditional practices,” the duo wrote in a comment to the journal Science.

 

The laws that took down mobsters are now being turned against Big Oil. Cities in New Jersey and Puerto Rico claim oil companies are behind a conspiracy to deceive the public.

RICO

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law made for the Mafia and organized crime — now being applied to oil companies.

Eight years ago, investigations found that “Exxon Knew” about the dangers of burning fossil fuels in the 1970s, but worked to undermine the public’s understanding of climate science, sowing “uncertainty” about its effects. Since then, lawsuits against oil, gas, and coal companies have proliferated, most of them arguing that companies violated laws that protect people from deceptive advertising. But a new kind of climate lawsuit has emerged that uses a relic from the past: a federal RICO law passed in 1970 to take down organized crime. In November 2022, 16 towns in Puerto Rico accused Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other fossil fuel companies of violating the federal RICO law by colluding to conceal how their products contribute to climate change. Six months later, Hoboken, New Jersey, amended its complaint against Exxon and other companies to allege that they violated the state’s RICO law. Racketeering lawsuits have been successful against tobacco companies and pharmaceutical executives tied to the opioid epidemic. Former President Donald Trump and his allies were also hit with a RICO case in Georgia this year, accused of conspiring to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The fight to define ‘green hydrogen’ could determine America’s emissions future. The Treasury Department’s definition will affect billions of dollars in federal subsidies for the nascent industry.

White hydrogen

Naturally occurring hydrogen found underground.

Hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel that could replace fossil fuels in a range of hard-to-decarbonize industries, from aviation to steelmaking. The problem is that the most abundant element in the universe isn’t normally found on its own, and turning it into a fuel to fly airplanes, for instance, takes lots of energy. There’s a whole rainbow of hydrogens out there, distinguished by how they’re made — expensive “green hydrogen” from renewables, “gray hydrogen” from methane gas, and “brown hydrogen” from coal. Then there’s white hydrogen, which isn’t made from anything at all. Scientists used to think that there weren’t big reserves of hydrogen buried underground, just waiting to be collected, but in recent years, they’ve been discovering more and more. Recently, some scientists looking for oil and gas reserves in France stumbled upon what could be one of the largest reservoirs of white hydrogen to date, containing somewhere within the stunningly wide range of 6 and 250 million metric tons. Untapped reserves in the United States, Australia, Mali, Oman, and parts of Europe could provide clean energy on a large scale — if all goes according to plan. Startups like Gold Hydrogen, based in Australia, and Koloma, based in Denver, are in the early stages of drilling for hydrogen and could be headed to production soon.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to describe 2023 in two words? Global boiling on Dec 13, 2023.


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

]]> https://grist.org/words-of-the-year/grist-2023-words-year-language-global-boiling-aqi/feed/ 0 445375 Lao trafficking victims describe ‘hellish’ Myanmar ordeal https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html#respond Tue, 12 Dec 2023 22:03:36 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html The return home for 16 young Laotians who were trafficked to work in a casino in Myanmar did not happen overnight. They first spent two months in a crowded detention center before embarking on a journey via land, air, and river. 

Altogether, their time away from home lasted more than a year, during which they were abused by their employers and housed in crowded facilities while in police custody. The victims described their eventual return to Laos in mid-November as akin to arriving “in heaven.”

“I’m so happy. It’s like I’m now in heaven, out of hell after being detained for more than a year in Myanmar,” one of the returnees told RFA Lao late last month, on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “During the first few months at the casino, we were seriously punished, tased, left standing in the sun all day, and sometimes deprived of food. We worked all day, non-stop with no break at all.”

The returnee, who is 20 years old, said he didn’t know what he was going to do in the near future.

“Right now, I’m getting medical treatment for some kind of pox or skin condition. On the one hand, I think about going back to do another ‘chatting’ kind of job, but I’m too scared,” he said. “On the other hand, I also want to go to a vocational school to become either an auto mechanic or an electrician.”

In Myanmar, the trafficking victims were forced by their Chinese bosses to work as scammers, using chat apps to extract money from their victims. Similar scams have also been reported in casinos in Laos. 

The returnee recalled the day he was freed, saying, “They threw away all of our phones and didn’t even give us our last month’s salary, which was up to 300,000 baht (US$8,000) for some of us.”

To get back to Laos, the 16 returnees had to take a car from the detention center to Yangon, then board an airplane to Tachileik in Shan state, on the border with Thailand. They then took a boat up the Mekong River to reach Laos’ Bokeo province.

“While on the Myanmar side, on the banks of the Mekong River, we were so happy that we couldn’t eat our lunch,” he said. “The Myanmar authorities asked us whether we wanted to eat. We said no, then they put us on a boat back to Laos.”

A second returnee said the group’s bosses released them with no prior notice.

“All of a sudden, they called our names, including mine, and said, ‘We’re sending you guys back home – you’ve worked so hard and some of you have been punished, so take a rest tomorrow,” he said. “Then all 16 of us were released and taken to two separate rooms in the [Kayin state] town of Myawaddy, one room for males and the other for females. We weren’t able to talk to or see each other. The rooms were guarded by two soldiers at the doors.”

His first impression was that they had been rescued by the Lao government, but this was not the case.

“We packed our stuff, walked out of the gate, and were greeted by a bunch of [Myanmar] soldiers,” the second returnee said. “I also thought that the soldiers would repatriate us right away, but they took us to a military camp in Myawaddy. We couldn’t understand each other, so the soldiers used their phones to translate, telling us not to worry, and that we’d be detained first because we entered Myanmar illegally.”

The second returnee described appalling conditions during what ended up being two-and-a-half months of detention.

“We were not allowed to contact the outside, not even the Lao Embassy in Myanmar,” he said. “The men stayed in a small room, very crowded, with no place to sleep and no place to sit. My 4-square-meter (43 square-foot) room housed 58 people with one small toilet.”

He said that he and the other seven men in his group were infected with pox at the detention center. 

“In the casino, we didn’t have any health issues, but in the detention center, there wasn’t enough water,” he said. “We had to wash ourselves with two or three scoops of water and no soap.”

The second returnee expressed relief to be back in Laos with his family.

“Now, seeing my parents and cousins, nieces and nephews, I’m so relieved,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether or not we have or don’t have any money, we’re happy just living under the same roof and eating at the same table.” 

The mother of a third returnee told RFA that she was ecstatic to see her son for the first time in over a year when he returned in mid-November.

“I didn’t know what to do. It’s really a miracle,” she said. “Months ago, I thought I had lost him. Now, we’re together and in each other’s arms.”

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Eugene Whong. 


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

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html/feed/ 0 445298 Lao trafficking victims describe ‘hellish’ Myanmar ordeal https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html#respond Tue, 12 Dec 2023 22:03:36 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html The return home for 16 young Laotians who were trafficked to work in a casino in Myanmar did not happen overnight. They first spent two months in a crowded detention center before embarking on a journey via land, air, and river. 

Altogether, their time away from home lasted more than a year, during which they were abused by their employers and housed in crowded facilities while in police custody. The victims described their eventual return to Laos in mid-November as akin to arriving “in heaven.”

“I’m so happy. It’s like I’m now in heaven, out of hell after being detained for more than a year in Myanmar,” one of the returnees told RFA Lao late last month, on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “During the first few months at the casino, we were seriously punished, tased, left standing in the sun all day, and sometimes deprived of food. We worked all day, non-stop with no break at all.”

The returnee, who is 20 years old, said he didn’t know what he was going to do in the near future.

“Right now, I’m getting medical treatment for some kind of pox or skin condition. On the one hand, I think about going back to do another ‘chatting’ kind of job, but I’m too scared,” he said. “On the other hand, I also want to go to a vocational school to become either an auto mechanic or an electrician.”

In Myanmar, the trafficking victims were forced by their Chinese bosses to work as scammers, using chat apps to extract money from their victims. Similar scams have also been reported in casinos in Laos. 

The returnee recalled the day he was freed, saying, “They threw away all of our phones and didn’t even give us our last month’s salary, which was up to 300,000 baht (US$8,000) for some of us.”

To get back to Laos, the 16 returnees had to take a car from the detention center to Yangon, then board an airplane to Tachileik in Shan state, on the border with Thailand. They then took a boat up the Mekong River to reach Laos’ Bokeo province.

“While on the Myanmar side, on the banks of the Mekong River, we were so happy that we couldn’t eat our lunch,” he said. “The Myanmar authorities asked us whether we wanted to eat. We said no, then they put us on a boat back to Laos.”

A second returnee said the group’s bosses released them with no prior notice.

“All of a sudden, they called our names, including mine, and said, ‘We’re sending you guys back home – you’ve worked so hard and some of you have been punished, so take a rest tomorrow,” he said. “Then all 16 of us were released and taken to two separate rooms in the [Kayin state] town of Myawaddy, one room for males and the other for females. We weren’t able to talk to or see each other. The rooms were guarded by two soldiers at the doors.”

His first impression was that they had been rescued by the Lao government, but this was not the case.

“We packed our stuff, walked out of the gate, and were greeted by a bunch of [Myanmar] soldiers,” the second returnee said. “I also thought that the soldiers would repatriate us right away, but they took us to a military camp in Myawaddy. We couldn’t understand each other, so the soldiers used their phones to translate, telling us not to worry, and that we’d be detained first because we entered Myanmar illegally.”

The second returnee described appalling conditions during what ended up being two-and-a-half months of detention.

“We were not allowed to contact the outside, not even the Lao Embassy in Myanmar,” he said. “The men stayed in a small room, very crowded, with no place to sleep and no place to sit. My 4-square-meter (43 square-foot) room housed 58 people with one small toilet.”

He said that he and the other seven men in his group were infected with pox at the detention center. 

“In the casino, we didn’t have any health issues, but in the detention center, there wasn’t enough water,” he said. “We had to wash ourselves with two or three scoops of water and no soap.”

The second returnee expressed relief to be back in Laos with his family.

“Now, seeing my parents and cousins, nieces and nephews, I’m so relieved,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether or not we have or don’t have any money, we’re happy just living under the same roof and eating at the same table.” 

The mother of a third returnee told RFA that she was ecstatic to see her son for the first time in over a year when he returned in mid-November.

“I didn’t know what to do. It’s really a miracle,” she said. “Months ago, I thought I had lost him. Now, we’re together and in each other’s arms.”

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Eugene Whong. 


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

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/trafficking-12122023170331.html/feed/ 0 445297 Afghan Returnees Describe Dire Conditions In Their Homeland https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/08/afghan-returnees-describe-dire-conditions-in-their-homeland/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/08/afghan-returnees-describe-dire-conditions-in-their-homeland/#respond Wed, 08 Nov 2023 17:17:35 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=21b1d783f26a9adfced209ae9f7bbfd2
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/11/08/afghan-returnees-describe-dire-conditions-in-their-homeland/feed/ 0 438944 Report from Gaza: Two Palestinians Describe "Horror" on 6th Day of Israel Bombing Besieged Enclave https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/12/report-from-gaza-two-palestinians-describe-horror-on-6th-day-of-israel-bombing-besieged-enclave/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/12/report-from-gaza-two-palestinians-describe-horror-on-6th-day-of-israel-bombing-besieged-enclave/#respond Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:35:26 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=086e654b14e0a4e3d6cd2414f30dd845
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/12/report-from-gaza-two-palestinians-describe-horror-on-6th-day-of-israel-bombing-besieged-enclave/feed/ 0 433840 Report from Gaza: Two Palestinians Describe “Horror” on 6th Day of Israel Bombing Besieged Enclave https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/12/report-from-gaza-two-palestinians-describe-horror-on-6th-day-of-israel-bombing-besieged-enclave-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/12/report-from-gaza-two-palestinians-describe-horror-on-6th-day-of-israel-bombing-besieged-enclave-2/#respond Thu, 12 Oct 2023 12:11:25 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=9aa8047787c0aea296e758d05f6cb9f0 Seg1 guests split war horror 2

We speak with two Palestinians in Gaza City about Israel’s devastating bombing campaign while blocking all food, water and fuel from entering the besieged territory. The U.N. reports that all of Gaza’s 13 hospitals are only partially operational due to a lack of fuel and medical supplies as the International Red Cross warns “hospitals are going to be turned into graveyards.” The territory’s only power plant has stopped operating due to a lack of fuel, yet Israeli authorities are vowing to continue the siege of Gaza until Hamas releases the over 100 hostages it seized during its unprecedented attack on Saturday. Yousef Hammash, working with the Norwegian Refugee Council, says humanitarian workers “cannot secure ourselves to start to deliver assistance for the others” and warns locals barely have time to think about political responses as resources run out. “Within days, we will have nothing in Gaza.” While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha asks, “Why don’t they come here and listen to us?” He adds that “Gaza has been the largest open-air prison in the world,” but with the closure of the passage between Gaza and Egypt, “now it has become a prison cell with no window.


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/12/report-from-gaza-two-palestinians-describe-horror-on-6th-day-of-israel-bombing-besieged-enclave-2/feed/ 0 433859 Ethnic Armenians In Nagorno-Karabakh Describe Gunfire, ‘Panic’ Despite Official Cease-Fire https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/21/ethnic-armenians-in-nagorno-karabakh-describe-gunfire-panic-despite-official-cease-fire/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/21/ethnic-armenians-in-nagorno-karabakh-describe-gunfire-panic-despite-official-cease-fire/#respond Thu, 21 Sep 2023 16:23:42 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=6fb8920b16bff15bdf867ec4aca93a80
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/21/ethnic-armenians-in-nagorno-karabakh-describe-gunfire-panic-despite-official-cease-fire/feed/ 0 428822 Eyewitnesses Describe Ukrainian Military Air Crash https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/26/eyewitnesses-describe-ukrainian-military-air-crash/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/26/eyewitnesses-describe-ukrainian-military-air-crash/#respond Sat, 26 Aug 2023 18:50:42 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=ba12a1d928cd13f5c83c090f8706b65d
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/26/eyewitnesses-describe-ukrainian-military-air-crash/feed/ 0 422783 Social media users add communal spin to Odisha mishap, falsely describe temple near tracks as a mosque https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/03/social-media-users-add-communal-spin-to-odisha-mishap-falsely-describe-temple-near-tracks-as-a-mosque/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/03/social-media-users-add-communal-spin-to-odisha-mishap-falsely-describe-temple-near-tracks-as-a-mosque/#respond Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:47:35 +0000 https://www.altnews.in/?p=158096 At least 288 people were killed and 800 injured in a horrific train accident in Odisha’s Balasore district on Friday, June 2. According to information available at the time of...

The post Social media users add communal spin to Odisha mishap, falsely describe temple near tracks as a mosque appeared first on Alt News.

]]> At least 288 people were killed and 800 injured in a horrific train accident in Odisha’s Balasore district on Friday, June 2. According to information available at the time of the filing of this report, around 7 pm on Friday, 10 to 12 coaches of the Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express got derailed and fell over on another track. The Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, plying on that line, subsequently collided with the derailed train, derailing three to four of its own coaches. A goods train was also involved in the crash.

Even as images and videos of the mishap started circulating, certain social media users tried to give the accident a communal twist by claiming that a mosque was located near the spot of the accident.

User The Random India (@randomsena) tweeted an image of a drone view of the spot with an arrow pointing at a white building, the apparent mosque, and wrote, ‘Just Saying Yesterday Was Friday’. By saying this, the user attempted to claim that Muslims were responsible for the tragedy. This particular tweet was part of a thread wherein he tried to establish that the train accident was a planned attack by Muslims. (Archive)

Other users including handles @RajputRanjanaa, @RealVirendraBJP, @abbajabbadabba4, verified user @VIRALKI44722069 and parody account @mdallahwala tweeted the same image wherein the white building was pointed at and claimed that Muslims were responsible for the accident. (Archives- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Click to view slideshow.

This claim is also viral on Facebook.

Fact Check

Upon a closer examination of the spot from different angles, we found that the white structure seen in the viral image resembles a temple and not a mosque. The following image was used in a Reuters report titled, “Deadly Indian rail crash shifts focus from new trains to safety“. We have circled the structure on the image:

We reached out to journalist Tamal Saha who is currently at the spot of the accident in Bahanaga. He confirmed to Alt News that the structure near the accident was indeed a temple. Upon probing further, we found that the temple was the Bahanaga ISKCON temple. A YouTube video of the temple, uploaded five months ago shows that the structure is white in colour and was under construction (although functional) at that time as well.

On our request, Saha visited the temple and sent us an image of the board outside the temple saying ISKCON Bahanaga.

We also received a video capturing the entrance to the temple.

Below is a comparison between a screengrab of the aforementioned video, the portion of the viral image showing the alleged mosque and the previously-mentioned image from the Reuters report. As is evident, all three show the same structure.

Below is another video capturing the road outside the temple.

We also reached out to the authorities of the ISKCON temple in Bahanaga who confirmed to us that the train accident happened on the tracks near the temple. They also confirmed that the structure seen next to the spot of the accident is the ISKCON temple.

Furthermore, after over 12 hours after the mishap, the Railways is looking at the possibility of a signalling error as its prima facie cause, sources told The Indian Express. According to the report, a multi-disciplinary joint-inspection note by supervisors concluded that a green signal was given to the Coromandel Express to pass through the designated main line, and then the signal was taken off. But the train entered the loop line, rammed into a stationary goods train and derailed. Meanwhile, on the down line, the superfast express train from Yashwantpur had arrived and its two coaches derailed.

Hence, it is clear that in the drone-view image of the train accident site in Balasore shared on social media, the white structure partly visible is not a mosque, but an ISKCON temple in Bahnaga. It is baseless and absurd to claim that the proximity of the structure had anything to do with the accident. At the time of the filing of this report, an inquiry is still on to ascertain the exact cause of the mishap.

The post Social media users add communal spin to Odisha mishap, falsely describe temple near tracks as a mosque appeared first on Alt News.


This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/03/social-media-users-add-communal-spin-to-odisha-mishap-falsely-describe-temple-near-tracks-as-a-mosque/feed/ 0 400683 Now Is the Time to Stop Using Dehumanizing Language to Describe Migrants https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/07/now-is-the-time-to-stop-using-dehumanizing-language-to-describe-migrants/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/07/now-is-the-time-to-stop-using-dehumanizing-language-to-describe-migrants/#respond Sun, 07 May 2023 12:58:24 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/stop-dehumanzing-migrants

Last year, my client Susan called me to discuss her immigration case.

During our conversation she referenced the news that immigrants were being bused from the southern border to cities in the North, often under false promises, only to be left stranded in an unknown city.

In confusion and fear, Susan asked me: “Why do they hate us so much?”

While I couldn’t answer Susan’s question, her underlying concern highlights a startling escalation of public aggression against migrants over the past year.

Many outlets describe recent migration through the Americas as a “flood,” “influx,” “wave,” or “surge”—language that reinforces the notion that migration is akin to an imminent, uncontrollable, and destructive natural disaster.

There seems to be a growing “us” versus “them” mentality towards immigrants. This divisive language serves no purpose other than to divide our country, undermine the legal right to seek asylum in the United States, and cultivate a fear of the most vulnerable.

A clear example is showcased in recent media coverage of northbound migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. Many outlets describe recent migration through the Americas as a “flood,” “influx,” “wave,” or “surge”—language that reinforces the notion that migration is akin to an imminent, uncontrollable, and destructive natural disaster.

These descriptions are accompanied by sensational photographs and videos of long lines of brown and Black immigrants wading across the Rio Grande, crowding along the border wall, or boarding Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) vehicles to be transported to detention.

Woven into this framing is the near-constant use of the term “illegal” or “unlawful” to describe unauthorized crossings. As an advocate for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, and trafficking, I’m alarmed by the use of this language to describe a migrant’s attempt to survive.

Moreover, it’s often simply incorrect. A noncitizen who has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country from which they’ve fled has a legal right—protected under both U.S. and international law—to enter the United States to seek asylum.

When mainstream media wield the term “illegal” as though it were synonymous with “unauthorized,” they misinform readers and falsely paint asylum seekers as criminals.

Worse still, they encourage politicians who call immigrants themselves “illegals,” a deeply dehumanizing term. And the more dehumanizing language we use, the more likely it is that we will see immigrants as the “other” to justify cruel immigration policies.

We must retire the use of this inflammatory rhetoric, which distracts from real solutions that would actually serve survivors arriving at our borders.

Migrants expelled back to their home countries are at grave risk of severe harm or death at the hands of their persecutors. Those forced to remain in Mexico as they await entry to the United States are increasingly vulnerable to organized crime or abusive and dangerous conditions in detention.

And those who have no choice but to desperately navigate dangerous routes to the United States to avoid apprehension are increasingly dying by dehydration, falling from cliffs, and drowning in rivers.

The words we use in everyday discourse mean something—they can spell out life or death for those among us who are most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Now more than ever, I’d urge the public and the media to retire the use of sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and misleading imagery and rhetoric surrounding immigration.

Now is the time to apply accuracy and humanity in our depictions of migrants. Let’s not repeat the errors of our past.


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Daniella Prieshoff.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/07/now-is-the-time-to-stop-using-dehumanizing-language-to-describe-migrants/feed/ 0 393122 Tyre Nichols’s Parents Remember Son as "Beautiful Soul" & Describe Video of Beating by Memphis Cops https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/tyre-nicholss-parents-remember-son-as-beautiful-soul-describe-video-of-beating-by-memphis-cops/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/tyre-nicholss-parents-remember-son-as-beautiful-soul-describe-video-of-beating-by-memphis-cops/#respond Fri, 27 Jan 2023 15:05:03 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=dbfb5ab286857e6a46eb201aa0c71f1b
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/tyre-nicholss-parents-remember-son-as-beautiful-soul-describe-video-of-beating-by-memphis-cops/feed/ 0 367774 Tyre Nichols’ Parents Remember Son as “Beautiful Soul” & Describe Video of Beating by Memphis Police https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/tyre-nichols-parents-remember-son-as-beautiful-soul-describe-video-of-beating-by-memphis-police/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/tyre-nichols-parents-remember-son-as-beautiful-soul-describe-video-of-beating-by-memphis-police/#respond Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:35:54 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=c2d5fee7bb1b265fbc06a5aedeb71d24 Seg2 tyre parents split

A day after prosecutors charged five former Memphis police officers with murder over the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, we speak with his parents, RowVaughn and Rodney Wells, about their drive to seek justice for their son. “He had a beautiful soul, and he touched everyone,” RowVaughn Wells says of her son. Nichols was a 29-year-old Black father, amateur photographer and longtime skateboarder who died January 10 from kidney failure and cardiac arrest, three days after he was brutally beaten by the five officers during a traffic stop. The officers were fired earlier this month and indicted on Thursday with second-degree murder, kidnapping and other charges for their role in Nichols’s death. We also speak with civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family.


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/27/tyre-nichols-parents-remember-son-as-beautiful-soul-describe-video-of-beating-by-memphis-police/feed/ 0 367744 In nightmarish account, villagers describe junta raid that left 9 civilians dead https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/killings-01172023174916.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/killings-01172023174916.html#respond Wed, 18 Jan 2023 02:40:00 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/killings-01172023174916.html Daw Aye was cooking rice when junta troops quietly entered her village in Myanmar’s northern Sagaing region – a stronghold of armed resistance against the military since the 2021 coup – and grabbed her three sons.

She dropped everything and ran out to find that the soldiers had forced her sons to lie facedown in the dirt with their hands tied behind their back. 

The soldiers then began kicking them – Aung Ko, 35, San Naing, 21, and Nay Myo Aung, 17 – as they begged for mercy.

“I cried out that my sons hadn’t done anything illegal and begged to let them go,” Daw Aye told Radio Free Asia on video camera in a first-hand account of the attack on Khin-U township’s Ah Lel Sho village on Dec. 28.

It was the start of a six-day nightmare that left several homes burned to the ground and nine civilians killed.

“My sons cried and begged but they went on kicking them with their military boots,” she said, but they ignored her.

Eventually, the soldiers led Daw Aye away with two other women from the village – Win Htay, 45, and Chaw Po, 48. The three were also tied up and made to lie facedown in the dirt.

“I was about to get up when the other two women did and I was told not to. They were taken a little distance away and then I heard two gunshots,” she said. “They were killed on the spot.”

The soldiers then inexplicably let Daw Aye go, and told her not to turn back toward the village.

Some time later, after the soldiers left, she returned to find the charred remains of her three sons’ bodies. 

Over the course of the next five days, until Jan. 2, junta troops killed four other residents, all men. They were identified as Aung Myint Than, 38, Kyaw Soe Aung, 43, and Tun Min and Chit Khin, both 65.

Khin-U township’s Ah Lel Sho village is seen Jan. 2, 2023, after a raid by Myanmar junta forces. Credit: Khin-U Township True News
Khin-U township’s Ah Lel Sho village is seen Jan. 2, 2023, after a raid by Myanmar junta forces. Credit: Khin-U Township True News
Targeted before

Khin-U township, which includes Ah Lel Sho and several other villages, has been targeted by the military multiple times since the Feb. 1, 2021, coup. 

Over the past two years, junta troops have killed at least 254 civilians and members of the rebel People’s Defense Force, in addition to destroying nearly 3,000 houses in 59 of the township’s villages. Around 15,000 people have been left homeless in the attacks.

One elderly woman whose house was destroyed by arson said that she was left with nothing and now must rely on the charity of others.

“I couldn’t salvage anything. Five cupboards [of kitchenware], five clay pots, three brick-walled water tanks, and all of our blankets are all gone. I couldn’t even retrieve the dirty dish towel from the kitchen. About 200 sacks of rice are gone too,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“I am really crushed to have become someone waiting for food shared by donors like this.”

Another woman from the village said that when the column came, she was forced to flee with her two children. She said she left with only the clothing on her back and later discovered that all her belongings had been destroyed by fire.

“I have nothing left,” she said. “Not even pots and pans. I am shaken and I can’t even speak straight. My living situation suddenly turned completely upside down.”

Khin-U is just one of the townships in Sagaing region that has faced the brunt of the junta’s offensives.

Independent research firm ISP Myanmar said in September that at least 1,512 civilians were killed in Sagaing region alone since the coup, while Data for Myanmar, which monitors junta destruction of civilian properties, said in November that at least 27,496 homes had been destroyed by arson in the region since the takeover.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of the end of last year, more than 650,000 people in Sagaing had been displaced from their homes due to insecurity and conflict.

Calls to Sagaing region’s junta spokesman and social affairs minister Aye Hlaing went unanswered on Tuesday.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun previously claimed the military does not kill civilians or burn down their buildings, blaming anti-junta People’s Defense Forces.

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


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

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/killings-01172023174916.html/feed/ 0 365150 Ukrainian Partisans Describe Their Fight Against Russian Forces In Kherson https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/07/ukrainian-partisans-describe-their-fight-against-russian-forces-in-kherson/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/07/ukrainian-partisans-describe-their-fight-against-russian-forces-in-kherson/#respond Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:07:13 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=6b03fc89b1cae77eaefcc03c9bfb92d2
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/07/ukrainian-partisans-describe-their-fight-against-russian-forces-in-kherson/feed/ 0 355928 Liberated Villagers In Mykolayiv Region Describe ‘Cruel’ Russian Occupiers https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/29/liberated-villagers-in-mykolayiv-region-describe-cruel-russian-occupiers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/29/liberated-villagers-in-mykolayiv-region-describe-cruel-russian-occupiers/#respond Tue, 29 Nov 2022 17:24:35 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=2dac5bf4df0fe58d791cef033c4df719
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/29/liberated-villagers-in-mykolayiv-region-describe-cruel-russian-occupiers/feed/ 0 354144 ‘Torture Chamber’: Kherson Residents Describe Brutal Treatment By Russian Occupiers https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/18/torture-chamber-kherson-residents-describe-brutal-treatment-by-russian-occupiers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/18/torture-chamber-kherson-residents-describe-brutal-treatment-by-russian-occupiers/#respond Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:57:06 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=0d3ea7b01bcdd4d5b05a93ca1dbfb298
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/18/torture-chamber-kherson-residents-describe-brutal-treatment-by-russian-occupiers/feed/ 0 351983 Staff at trans charity targeted by trolls describe impact of abuse and doxxing https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/10/staff-at-trans-charity-targeted-by-trolls-describe-impact-of-abuse-and-doxxing/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/10/staff-at-trans-charity-targeted-by-trolls-describe-impact-of-abuse-and-doxxing/#respond Thu, 10 Nov 2022 17:45:59 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/mermaids-death-threats-doxxing-fgm-misinformation/ Mermaids staff received more than 100 abusive calls and messages in the wake of a misleading news article


This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Maysa Pritilata.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/10/staff-at-trans-charity-targeted-by-trolls-describe-impact-of-abuse-and-doxxing/feed/ 0 349685 Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Battle Against Russia’s Vagner Mercenaries Around Bakhmut https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/01/ukrainian-soldiers-describe-battle-against-russias-vagner-mercenaries-around-bakhmut/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/01/ukrainian-soldiers-describe-battle-against-russias-vagner-mercenaries-around-bakhmut/#respond Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:42:24 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=790d0dd56d2760a04aefaff647f23aa8
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/01/ukrainian-soldiers-describe-battle-against-russias-vagner-mercenaries-around-bakhmut/feed/ 0 346932 Hunger Amid Destruction: Ukrainians In Lyman And Kupyansk Describe Life Under Russian Occupation https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/24/hunger-amid-destruction-ukrainians-in-lyman-and-kupyansk-describe-life-under-russian-occupation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/24/hunger-amid-destruction-ukrainians-in-lyman-and-kupyansk-describe-life-under-russian-occupation/#respond Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:41:37 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=5b65849213a131c56b9f07b3227db9a3
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/24/hunger-amid-destruction-ukrainians-in-lyman-and-kupyansk-describe-life-under-russian-occupation/feed/ 0 344156 Izyum’s Residents Describe Desperate Life Under Russian Occupation https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/20/izyums-residents-describe-desperate-life-under-russian-occupation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/20/izyums-residents-describe-desperate-life-under-russian-occupation/#respond Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:46:10 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a11d793d3be801f1df7fc57878e588d2
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/20/izyums-residents-describe-desperate-life-under-russian-occupation/feed/ 0 334693 “We Felt Like Hostages”: Ukrainians Describe Forcible Transfers and Filtration by Russian Forces https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/01/we-felt-like-hostages-ukrainians-describe-forcible-transfers-and-filtration-by-russian-forces/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/01/we-felt-like-hostages-ukrainians-describe-forcible-transfers-and-filtration-by-russian-forces/#respond Thu, 01 Sep 2022 06:01:36 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=406611

When Russian forces took control of Nataliya’s village outside Kharkiv, on the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they offered bus rides to residents seeking to evacuate the area but with a catch: They could only go to Russia. Those hoping to escape to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which remained under Ukrainian control, were not allowed to leave.

For months, Nataliya stayed behind, even as some neighbors chose to go to Russia as the conflict escalated. Then last May, Russian forces occupying the village told residents that a corridor had been opened to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Nataliya and others boarded a bus that they were told was headed to Kharkiv. But when the bus stopped, she realized they were in Shebekino, a city just across the border.

“I suddenly realized that we were in Russia,” Nataliya told human rights investigators. “We didn’t even go through a border crossing.”

Over the next days, Nataliya and others from her village were taken to a motorsport complex turned makeshift transit camp for thousands of Ukrainians, she told investigators. Russian officials photographed her, took her fingerprints, and made her fill out an immigration form. After a few days sleeping in tents, most people boarded buses to other destinations in Russia, but Nataliya managed to take a train to Moscow, then traveled to Poland and back into Ukraine, eventually reaching Kharkiv.

Nataliya’s ordeal is one of several documented in a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday, which paints the most detailed picture yet of so-called filtration and forcible transfers of Ukrainians by Russian forces. Allegations that thousands of Ukrainians seeking to flee the fighting were forced to undergo interrogations and an invasive screening process, and that many were deceived or pressured into moving to Russian-controlled territory or across the border into the Russian federation itself, have emerged consistently over the last several months. But access to people subjected to forced screenings and transfers has been a challenge, making it difficult for investigators to understand their scope and scale. In April, Russian authorities shut down Human Rights Watch’s office in the country along with those of a dozen other human rights organizations, making it impossible for the group to investigate alleged abuses from within Russia.

In the new report, based on dozens of interviews, including 18 with people who traveled to Russia and were ultimately able to leave, Human Rights Watch concludes that an unknown number of Ukrainians were transported to Russia in “organized mass transfers” conducted in a manner and context that rendered them illegal forcible transfers — a war crime and potential crime against humanity. Forcible transfers include cases in which a person consents to move “only because they fear consequences such as violence, duress, or detention if they remain, and the occupying power is taking advantage of a coercive environment to transfer them,” the rights group wrote.

“When Russian forces transfer Ukrainian civilians from areas of active hostilities to areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation or to the Russian Federation, under the guise of evacuations, they are not merely removing civilians from the hazards of war,” the report concluded. “They are implementing policy ambitions articulated by Russia’s leadership in the lead up to and during the current conflict.”

Russian and Ukrainian officials have each pointed to the movement of tens of thousands of Ukrainians across the border as supporting evidence for their narratives about the conflict, but observers argue that the full picture is more complex and nuanced. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said earlier this summer that 1.2 million Ukrainians had been forcibly taken to Russia, including 240,000 children. Russian officials, for their part, claimed that over 2.8 million Ukrainians had entered the Russian federation from Ukraine, including 448,000 children, at least half of which came from areas of Ukraine that had been under Russian control since 2014. The Ukrainian and Russian governments did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept.

While Human Rights Watch documents the forcible transfer of several people, the group couldn’t determine how many Ukrainians have been forced into Russia that way, and it warned against drawing generalized conclusions about the movement of people amid ongoing conflict. Some Ukrainians felt they had no choice but to go to Russia, which they saw as the only way to escape relentless shelling — and a decision made under such conditions, Human Rights Watch notes, amounts to forcible transfer. While in Russia, some of the people transferred there were pressured to sign declarations stating that they had witnessed war crimes by Ukrainian forces, the group added.

But many Ukrainians also made the journey to Russia or Russian-controlled territory voluntarily, either because they held pro-Russian views, had family ties in Russia, or as a way to travel on to other destinations after the Ukrainian government imposed martial law, forbidding most adult males from leaving the country.

“One really needs to be very careful in determining in each case whether a forcible transfer has occurred, and one cannot generalize and say, ‘OK, the Russians are saying it’s 2 million Ukrainians so we then say, 2 million Ukrainians have been forcibly transferred to Russia,’” Belkis Wille, the report’s lead researcher, told The Intercept. “There are some Ukrainians who have chosen to go to Russia, including because they wanted to transit on to Europe. … Even if we had the numbers on how many people went to Russia, that doesn’t mean that that many people were forcibly transferred.”

Human Rights Watch also noted that because reaching transferred Ukrainians remains a challenge, and because many were too fearful to speak to investigators, its report was based almost exclusively on interviews with those with access to social media or to a network of activists who helped them eventually leave Russia. “Their experiences are not necessarily representative of the many other Ukrainians who are still in Russia, who neither went there or remain there by choice,” the group wrote, calling for further research “to understand the full range of abuses that forcibly transferred Ukrainians in Russia may have experienced and be experiencing.”

Civilians flee the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, on March 24, 2022.

Civilians flee the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, on March 24, 2022.

Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Kharkiv and Mariupol

According to the report, most of those who were forcibly transferred to Russia or Russian-controlled territory came from the region around Kharkiv and from the city of Mariupol, which was under siege for 10 weeks before falling under Russian control in May. As several Ukrainian government attempts to evacuate civilians from Mariupol to Ukrainian-controlled territory failed throughout the siege, thousands of residents attempted to leave the destroyed city, escaping at times on foot, under heavy shelling, through streets filled with dead bodies. Many of these civilians were made to believe that in order to be allowed passage out of areas with active hostilities they had to submit to a “filtration” process by Russian forces, which included surrendering their phones and passports, having their biometrics recorded, and undergoing body searches and interrogations about their jobs and political views.

Those with access to private vehicles were often able to skirt the process, Human Rights Watch noted. But thousands of those who were reliant on evacuation buses to flee the violence or who were made to believe that they needed to show filtration “receipts” in order to move through Russian-controlled areas spent days and in some cases weeks in schools, community centers, tents, or vehicles waiting for clearance, often in squalid conditions and with little food. Those who failed the screening because of suspected ties to the Ukrainian military or nationalist groups were detained in Russian-controlled territory and the whereabouts of several remain unknown, according to family members interviewed by Human Rights Watch. The group warned that they may be at risk of torture and enforced disappearance.

Wille, the Human Rights Watch researcher, noted that the mass biometric data collection happening as part of the filtration process was especially concerning.

“It fits into a much bigger thing going on in Russia,” she told The Intercept, noting that Human Rights Watch has documented widespread efforts by Russian authorities to build biometric databases for surveillance and monitoring. “They’re trying to, à la Xinjiang, create something quite similar and comprehensive in Russia. And I think this gives them a big kind of ground for experimentation. … I think the consequences are significant because we don’t know yet what they’re going to be.”

Those who spoke to Human Rights Watch noted their fear and helplessness as Russian soldiers made them board buses and either lied to them or refused to disclose their destination. They described being held in filtration centers that were overcrowded and filthy.

“We felt like hostages,” said a man who was detained while walking in Mariopul to check on his grandmother and was held for two weeks in a schoolhouse in Russian-controlled territory.  “We were afraid they had some dodgy plans for us.”

Another man, who spent 40 days interned in a village outside Mariupol, described inedible food and sanitary conditions that made many people sick. “But more than anything, it was the uncertainty,” he said. “We kept asking, ‘Why keep us there? When will we get the passports back?’ But [the Donetsk People’s Republic authorities] would not tell us anything coherent.”

Historical Precedent

Both “filtration” and the mass transfer of people have precedents in Russian and Soviet history, though the practices have also been widespread elsewhere. “When we talk about filtration, we should not really attribute it only to Russia,” Alexander Statiev, a history professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told The Intercept. “The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for instance, it was a filtration center. The Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, it was also a screening facility.”

Soviet officials established filtration camps during World War II, targeting soldiers who had found themselves in German-controlled areas, to identify suspected defectors and collaborators. “Because of this Stalinist, permanent suspicion of spies and enemy agents, they had to undertake this filtration, this screening process,” said Statiev. Soon, the practice was extended to several million civilians who had been living in German territory.

Population transfers, often along ethnic lines, were also commonplace in Soviet Russia, added Statiev, who pointed to the deportation of 170,000 ethnic Koreans, suspected of sympathizing with the Japanese, from the Soviet Union’s far east to Central Asia.

More recently, filtration camps were a defining feature of the Chechen wars, which started in the 1990s. Some 200,000 Chechens, a fifth of the population, passed through the camps, where they were subjected to widespread and well-documented human rights abuses. “Filtration is a standard counterinsurgency procedure … but if a rebellion is popular — and in Chechnya it was popular — a lot of people support the rebels,” said Statiev, noting that there is no evidence that the filtration currently underway in Ukraine is comparable in terms of scale and treatment. “Russia did it on a very large scale in Chechnya, on a very large scale during the Second World War, but the scale of the current formulation is not really clear.”

The Russian government’s goal when encouraging or forcing Ukrainians to move to Russia is also unclear. Over the last several years, Russian officials dealing with a population decline have been trying to lure citizens of former Soviet countries to regions of the federation facing labor shortages, even though promises of support to those who agree to go often fall short. While some Ukrainians have chosen to move to Russia in the aftermath of their country’s invasion, Russian officials failed to articulate a vision for how the war and the destruction it wrought would serve their ultimate goals.

“I don’t think Russians are clear themselves. The trouble is that they started the war without rationally formulating the end game,” said Statiev. “We don’t really know what they would do with all those people. A great deal of them hate Russia as a state, not so much the people, but Russia as a state. And to find within your state so many people who hate you — what is the point?”


This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/01/we-felt-like-hostages-ukrainians-describe-forcible-transfers-and-filtration-by-russian-forces/feed/ 0 328342 UN Commissioner: ‘Apartheid’ not enough to describe Israeli settler colonialism https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/27/un-commissioner-apartheid-not-enough-to-describe-israeli-settler-colonialism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/27/un-commissioner-apartheid-not-enough-to-describe-israeli-settler-colonialism/#respond Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:22:55 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=04491aaa9e477d3b92921b8ee71bb1d1
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/27/un-commissioner-apartheid-not-enough-to-describe-israeli-settler-colonialism/feed/ 0 318640 Ukrainians Describe Russian Troops Astonished By Basic Amenities https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/26/after-surviving-occupation-kyiv-villagers-describe-russian-troops-astonished-by-basic-amenities/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/26/after-surviving-occupation-kyiv-villagers-describe-russian-troops-astonished-by-basic-amenities/#respond Tue, 26 Jul 2022 17:55:22 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a307cbe9c4509833c9098125dd4b8b2a
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/26/after-surviving-occupation-kyiv-villagers-describe-russian-troops-astonished-by-basic-amenities/feed/ 0 318380 Survivors Of Russian Missile Attack on Ukraine Shopping Mall Describe Chaos https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/30/survivors-of-russian-missile-attack-on-ukraine-shopping-mall-describe-chaos/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/30/survivors-of-russian-missile-attack-on-ukraine-shopping-mall-describe-chaos/#respond Thu, 30 Jun 2022 20:29:45 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=699062858616aa23977be31279ea00ee
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/30/survivors-of-russian-missile-attack-on-ukraine-shopping-mall-describe-chaos/feed/ 0 311559 Donbas Evacuees Arriving In Lviv Describe Shattered Lives https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/30/donbas-evacuees-arriving-in-lviv-describe-shattered-lives/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/30/donbas-evacuees-arriving-in-lviv-describe-shattered-lives/#respond Mon, 30 May 2022 16:18:43 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=b276f580ac43ea0fa0d414a9e7811ae7
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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/30/donbas-evacuees-arriving-in-lviv-describe-shattered-lives/feed/ 0 302933 “This Is America Motherfucker”: Witnesses Describe Border Patrol Killing of Mexican Migrant https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/12/this-is-america-motherfucker-witnesses-describe-border-patrol-killing-of-mexican-migrant/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/12/this-is-america-motherfucker-witnesses-describe-border-patrol-killing-of-mexican-migrant/#respond Thu, 12 May 2022 20:54:15 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=396461

Men who were traveling with Carmelo Cruz Marcos, a 32-year-old Mexican migrant who was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona earlier this year, told investigators that the agent and his colleagues appeared to tamper with evidence and concoct a cover story following the fatal incident.

After months of silence in the case, the Cochise County Attorney’s Office announced on Monday that it had insufficient evidence to bring charges against the Border Patrol agent, Kendrek Bybee Staheli, for the February shooting and that the agent’s actions appeared justified under Arizona self-defense laws. Late Wednesday night, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, the lead local agency that investigated the case, released a 28-page file that formed the basis for the prosecutor’s decision.

In an interview with authorities, Staheli described fearing for his life during his encounter with Cruz, claiming that Cruz picked up a rock as he attempted to take him into custody, causing the Border Patrol agent to open fire. Staheli’s partner, who did not witness the fatal encounter, said Staheli was distraught after killing Cruz and asked to be held.

Migrants who Cruz was traveling with, later interviewed by county officials, provided a more chilling version of events, with one claiming that the agents appeared to move Cruz’s body after he was killed and that Staheli’s partner told him things would be fine so long as Staheli said he was scared and that Cruz threatened him with a rock.

The case has sparked outrage in Mexico, with Cruz’s family alleging that the father of three was “assassinated” by U.S. border agents. In an interview last month, an attorney for the family confirmed that they intended to file a lawsuit in response to the killing.

“He would never threaten the Border Patrol, and it is despicable for the Border Patrol to claim that he did.”

“We totally condemn the use of violence,” Ricardo Peña, head of the Mexican consulate in Douglas, Arizona, where Staheli and his partner are based, told The Intercept in an interview prior to the announcement that charges would not be filed in the case.

The sheriff’s department investigation also confirmed the role of a controversial Border Patrol crime scene response unit, known as a Critical Incident Teams, in the case. Last week, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection announced that the teams, which operate borderwide, were being disbanded after years of allegations of tampering with investigations and evidence in cases involving the deaths of migrants.

In a press release last month, demanding an independent investigation, Karns and Karns, a Los Angeles-based law firm representing the Cruz family, said the use of the units reflects a “glaring conflict of interest.”

“My husband was a gentle and peaceful man trying to provide for his family,” Cruz’s wife, Yazmin Nape Quintero, said at the time. “He would never threaten the Border Patrol, and it is despicable for the Border Patrol to claim that he did. We seek to clear his name, and we seek justice so other families won’t suffer like we are suffering.”

The shooting occurred in a rugged corridor of the Peloncillo Mountains known as Skeleton Canyon on the night of February 19. Cruz was traveling with a group of at least nine other migrants. They wore the camouflage and carpet booties common among migrants traversing the region.

Staheli, who joined the Border Patrol in 2019 following a 10-month stint as a police officer in Utah, was assigned to the agency’s mounted unit, known as the horse patrol. Staheli’s partner, Tristan Tang, is a seven-year veteran of the agency.

Four days after the killing — Border Patrol agents, according to the sheriff’s report, are not allowed to speak with local authorities within 72 hours of a killing — Staheli, with his lawyers present, gave an interview to county investigators. Staheli told them he and Tang were looking for signs of unauthorized border crossers along Geronimo Trail Road when they received a radio call alerting them that a sensor had picked up migrants in the area.

The agents headed in the direction of the sensor. The terrain became rough, so they dismounted and continued on foot. Eventually, they came across the migrants, who fled.

The two agents had apprehended three of the migrants when Tang, with night vision goggles, spotted a fourth in Staheli’s area. According to Staheli’s account, he was between 70 to 80 yards from his partner when he closed in on the migrant. When Staheli reached the fleeing migrant, the report said, the man “turned around and through [sic] a punch at him with a closed fist.”

Staheli told investigators that the man in front of him was shorter than he was but appeared to outweigh him and that he was wearing an “older army style camo” that, in his mind, indicated that he was working for a Mexican drug cartel and thus likely to put up a fight. According to his autopsy, the man in question, Cruz Marcos, was 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 159 pounds.

Staheli claimed that Cruz’s blow glanced off his shoulder and struck him in the jaw. He tackled Cruz to the ground and “told the subject to place his hands behind his back but he failed to comply.” Efforts to pry Cruz’s arms out from under him were failing, Staheli said. As the two grappled, Staheli said he grew worried that Cruz could have a weapon or that his companions might attempt to rescue him, so he began punching him in the face repeatedly. The continuous blows caused Cruz to become “very upset,” the report said, and he managed to buck Staheli off his back.

According to Staheli, Cruz then picked up a rock “seven to ten inches long, oval shaped and bigger than a soft ball,” and cocked his arm back like he was preparing to throw. Staheli told investigators that he thought he was going to die. “He said he then drew his service pistol, pointed it at the subject and fired,” the report said. “He said he fired more than once. He said he fired many rounds but could not recall how many.”

An autopsy confirmed that Cruz was shot four times, twice in the face and twice in the chest. He also had bruising on his right cheek and neck and a cut on his scalp.

After the shots were fired, Tang called out to see if his partner was OK. Staheli yelled back that he was fine. Tang rushed to the scene and told his partner to stand back while he attempted to provide medical care to the man on the ground.

“Agent Tang saw lots of blood,” the report said. The man was lying on his back with “multiple holes” in his body and clearly dead. “Agent Tang then focused back to Agent Staheli to ensure he was still okay,” the report said. “He asked Agent Tang to hold onto him, so he hugged him.”

“Agent Tang said they waited approximately 2 hours for other agents to arrive at their location,” the report said. “He did not talk anymore about the incident with Agent Staheli.”

In Staheli’s account, one of the migrants in custody asked him if he had just killed a man. Staheli confirmed that he had and when the migrant asked why, he said, “Because he tried to kill me.” The migrant warned the agent that he would not sleep well that night, “that he was nervous and shaking and that his spirit was going to follow him, that he would haunt you for the rest of your life, you better watch your back.”

Cruz’s body was removed from the scene the following day. “Although the exact rock which Agt. Staheli described as being used by Carmelo was not recovered many rocks were noted in the area and photographs of the scene were taken which clearly show the rocks,” county investigators noted. “Based off of evidence at the scene, trajectory and angle of shots fired into Carmelo’s body, and statements taken from the agents and witnesses it appears Carmelo was the aggressor in this incident.”

Cochise County detectives interviewed some of the men who were with Cruz the night that he died. Filomeno Ruiz-Martinez recalled little beyond the flash of lights and the English-speaking agent who told him to raise his hands. His companion, Irving Torres Peralta, had more to say.

“He said he observed four lights, he said he remembered three of the people he had crossed with had been apprehended, he said one of those subjects was his brother,” the report said. “He said when they were apprehended he could hear a male subject say in the English language, ‘This is America motherfucker.’”

Torres told investigators that he understood English and that he heard the words while he was hiding with Ruiz-Martinez.

The report noted that Torres attributed the words to Staheli but cast doubt on the veracity of the claim because Ruiz-Martinez did not mention hearing the same thing. Ruiz-Martinez, however, also told investigators that he does not understand English.

Investigators asked Staheli if recalled saying “You are in America motherfucker” before killing Cruz. The agent said he did not.

Carlos Juan Torres-Peralta, brother of Irving Torres-Peralta, was also questioned. Before his interview began, he asked the investigators in Spanish, “Are you going to kill me too?”

Torres-Peralta described being set upon by agents on horseback. One of the agents dismounted, he said, and yelled, “This is America.” That agent also said to his companion, “Stop or I’m going to shoot you.” Torres-Peralta said his companion tried to run away but tripped on a rock. When the agent caught up with the man, he said, “This is America motherfucker.” According to the report, Torres-Peralta was referring to Staheli.

“He said then he heard Agent [Staheli] say, ‘You’re in America motherfucker’ and he heard shots fired.”

“He said then he heard Agent [Staheli] say, ‘You’re in America motherfucker’ and he heard shots fired,” the report said. Torres-Peralta said he saw the flash from Staheli’s service weapon.

“He said he didn’t see anything but believed both agents went to look at his companion and they moved his companion’s body,” the report added. The investigators noted that Torres-Peralta “did not describe what happened prior to what he believes were the agents moving the body.”

Investigators were confused by Torres-Peralta’s claims: “If he had not seen them how could he have made the determination they were moving his companion’s body.” Torres-Peralta went on to say that he heard Staheli’s partner tell him not to talk to anyone. “He said he heard the other agent tell Agent [Staheli] again, don’t worry man, don’t talk with no one and it will be fine,” the report recounted

Horaldo Jimenez-Cruz, who was also interviewed, said he was already in custody when Staheli opened fire and saw nothing of the incident. Ricardo Huerta-Nepomuceno said the same.

Investigators conducted follow up interviews with the Torres-Peralta brothers and the other men, noting that “for the most part that four of the subjects statements were some what consistent with regards to the information they initially provided.” Carlos Torres-Peralta, however, added additional information, telling investigators that after Staheli took him into custody, he told him, “Shut up or I will shoot you.”

The investigators observed that Torres-Peralta was far more fluent in the English language than he initially appeared. He again said that he believed the Border Patrol agents moved Cruz’s body and that he “heard them discussing how they should follow up with statements and not say anything to anyone, and that Agent Tang had told Agent Staheli ‘it would all be ok and that he had his back.’”

“Carlos further said he heard Agent Tang tell Agent Staheli that he should say he was attacked with a rock,” the report said. “Carlos statements would suggest the agents had covered up evidence and would not be truthful with any after action interviews they would have.”

In a letter to the sheriff’s department on Monday, county attorney Brian McIntyre said Staheli’s actions in the Cruz case “appear to be justified under Arizona law,” noting that law enforcement officials can only use lethal force in those instances in which they feel that they — or another person — are facing a deadly threat.

McIntyre added that in Arizona, those officials are afforded the same self-defense protections as anyone else in the state. In Cruz’s case, McIntyre said, there was not only “insufficient evidence” to contradict Staheli’s claims, “Indeed, the evidence appears to support the Agent’s version of events.”

Last month, Dan Karns, lawyer for the Cruz family, flew to Mexico to meet with Cruz’s family and surviving children. In Cruz’s home state of Puebla, Karns found growing outrage over the case, which for many has come to symbolize the systematically brutal treatment of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“They’re pissed,” Karns told The Intercept. “Just the undignified behavior of Border Patrol, consistently, over and over and over again, people are getting really upset in Mexico and who can blame them?”


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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/12/this-is-america-motherfucker-witnesses-describe-border-patrol-killing-of-mexican-migrant/feed/ 0 298371 ‘It’s Hell’: Ukrainians Describe Harrowing Escape From Besieged City Of Mariupol https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/29/its-hell-ukrainians-describe-harrowing-escape-from-besieged-city-of-mariupol/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/29/its-hell-ukrainians-describe-harrowing-escape-from-besieged-city-of-mariupol/#respond Tue, 29 Mar 2022 21:00:29 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=534fd4acdac1f6180a3d85b9215da4c5
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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