Palestinian supporters and protesters against the 21 months of Israeli genocide in Gaza marched after a rally in downtown Auckland today across the Viaduct to the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior — and met a display of solidarity.

Several people on board the campaign ship, which has been holding open days over last weekend and this weekend, held up Palestinian flags and displayed a large banner declaring “Sanction Israel — Stop the genocide”.

About 300 people were in the vibrant rally and Greenpeace Aotearoa oceans campaigner Juan Parada came out on Halsey Wharf to speak to the protesters in solidarity over Gaza.

• READ MORE: At least 70 killed as Israel targets food aid sites in Gaza again
• Other Rainbow Warrior protest reports, videos
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

“Greenpeace stands for peace and justice, and environmental justice, not only for the environmental damage, but for the lives of the people,” said Parada, a former media practitioner.

Global environmental campaigners have stepped up their condemnation of the devastation in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories as well as the protests over the genocide, which has so far killed almost 59,000 people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Department, although some researchers say the actual death toll is far higher.

Gaza war emissions condemned
New research recently revealed that the carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza would be greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of 100 individual countries, worsening the global climate emergency on top of the huge civilian death toll.

The report cited by The Guardian indicated that Israel’s relentless bombardment, blockade and refusal to comply with international court rulings had “underscored the asymmetry of each side’s war machine, as well as almost unconditional military, energy and diplomatic support Israel enjoys from allies, including the US and UK”.

The Israeli war machine has been primarily blamed.

The report, titled “War on the Climate: A Multitemporal Study of Greenhouse Gas Emissions of the Israel-Gaza Conflict” and published by the Social Science Research Network, is part of a growing movement to hold states and businesses accountable for the climate and environmental costs of war and occupation.

Greenpeace open letter
Greenpeace Aotearoa recently came out with strong statements about the genocidal war on Gaza with executive director Russel Norman earlier this month writing an open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters, expressing his grave concerns about the “ongoing genocide in Gaza being carried out by Israeli forces” — and the ongoing failure of the New Zealand Government to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel.

He referred to the mounting death toll of starving Palestinians being deliberately shot at the notorious Israeli-US backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) food distribution sites.

Norman also cited an Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz report that Israeli soldiers had been ordered to deliberately shoot unarmed Palestinians seeking aid, quoting one Israeli soldier saying: “It’s a killing field.”

Today’s rally featured many Palestinians wearing thobe costumes in advance of Palestinian Traditional Dress Day on July 25.

This is a day to showcase and celebrate the rich Palestinian cultural heritage through traditional clothing that is intricately embroidered.

Traditional thobes are a symbol of Palestinian resilience.

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

The International Court of Justice heard last month that after reconstruction is factored in Israel’s war on Gaza will have emitted 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A figure equivalent to the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.

It seems somehow wrong to be writing about the carbon footprint of Israel’s 15-month onslaught on Gaza.

The human cost is so unfathomably ghastly. A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet put the death toll due to traumatic injury at more than 68,000 by June of last year (40 percent higher than the Gaza Health Ministry’s figure.)

• READ MORE: Historic climate change advisory: what the case before the International Court of Justice might mean
• Israel’s raid renders Jenin ‘nearly uninhabitable’; 808 trucks enter Gaza
• Other Gaza and climate crisis reports

An earlier letter to The Lancet by a group of scientists argued the total number of deaths — based on similar conflicts — would be at least four times the number directly killed by bombs and bullets.

Seventy-four children were killed in the first week of 2025 alone. More than a million children are currently living in makeshift tents with regular reports of babies freezing to death.

Nearly two million of the strip’s 2.2 million inhabitants are displaced.

Ninety-six percent of Gaza’s children feel death is imminent and 49 percent wish to die, according to a study sponsored by the War Child Alliance.

Truly apocalyptic
I could, and maybe should, go on. The horrors visited on Gaza are truly apocalyptic and have not received anywhere near the coverage by our mainstream media that they deserve.

The contrast with the blanket coverage of the LA fires that have killed 25 people to date is instructive. The lives and property of those in the rich world are deemed far more newsworthy than those living — if you can call it that — in what retired Israeli general Giora Eiland described as a giant concentration camp.

The two stories have one thing in common: climate change.

In the case of the LA fires the role of climate change gets mentioned — though not as much as it should.

But the planet destroying emissions generated by the genocide committed against the Palestinians rarely makes the news.

Incredibly, when the State of Palestine — which is responsible for 0.001 percent of global emissions — told the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, last month, that the first 120 days of the war on Gaza resulted in emissions of between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon and other greenhouse gases it went largely unreported.

For context that is the equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 of the lowest-emitting states.

Fighter planes fuel
Jet fuel burned by Israeli fighter planes contributed about 157,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Transporting the bombs dropped on Gaza from the US to Israel contributed another 159,000 tonnes of CO2e.

Those figures will not appear in the official carbon emissions of either country due to an obscene exemption for military emissions that the US insisted on in the Kyoto negotiations. The US military’s carbon footprint is larger than any other institution in the world.

Professor of law Kate McIntosh, speaking on behalf of the State of Palestine, told the ICJ hearings, on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, that the emissions to date were just a fraction of the likely total.

Once post-war reconstruction is factored in the figure is estimated to balloon to 52 million tonnes of CO2e — a figure higher than the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.
Far too many leaders of the rich world have turned a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza, others have actively enabled it but as the fires in LA show there’s no escaping the impacts of climate change.

The US has contributed more than $20 billion to Israel’s war on Gaza — a huge figure but one that is dwarfed by the estimated $250 billion cost of the LA fires.

And what price do you put on tens of thousands who died from heatwaves, floods and wildfires around the world in 2024?

The genocide in Gaza isn’t only a crime against humanity, it is an ecocide that threatens the planet and every living thing on it.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and his Towards Democracy blog is at Substack.

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

The Singapore cargo ship Dali chartered by Maersk, which collapsed the Baltimore bridge in the United States last month, was carrying 764 tonnes of hazardous materials to Sri Lanka, reports Colombo’s Daily Mirror.

The materials were mostly corrosives, flammables, miscellaneous hazardous materials, and Class-9 hazardous materials — including explosives and lithium-ion batteries — in 56 containers.

According to the Mirror, the US National Transportation Safety Board was still “analysing the ship’s manifest to determine what was onboard” in its other 4644 containers when the ship collided with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it, on March 26.

• READ MORE: Baltimore Key Bridge collapse investigation begins

The e-Con e-News (ee) news agency reports that prior to Baltimore, the Dali had called at New York and Norfolk, Virginia, which has the world’s largest naval base.

Colombo was to be its next scheduled call, going around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, taking 27 days.

According to ee, Denmark’s Maersk, transporter for the US Department of War, is integral to US military logistics, carrying up to 20 percent of the world’s merchandise trade annually on a fleet of about 600 vessels, including some of the world’s largest ships.

The US Department of Homeland Security has also now deemed the waters near the crash site as “unsafe for divers”.

13 damaged containers
An “unclassified memo” from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said a US Coast Guard team was examining 13 damaged containers, “some with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and/or hazardous materials [HAZMAT] contents.

The team was also analysing the ship’s manifest to determine if any materials could “pose a health risk”.

CISA officials are also monitoring about 6.8 million litres of fuel inside the Dali for its “spill potential”.

Where exactly the toxic materials and fuel were destined for in Sri Lanka was not being reported.

Also, it is a rather long way for such Hazmat, let alone fuel, to be exported, “at least given all the media blather about ‘carbon footprint’, ‘green sustainability’ and so on”, said the Daily Mirror.

“We can expect only squeaky silence from the usual eco-freaks, who are heavily funded by the US and EU,” the newspaper commented.

“It also adds to the intrigue of how Sri Lanka was so easily blocked in 2022 from receiving more neighbourly fuel, which led to the present ‘regime change’ machinations.”

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

To lose a child to violence is already one of the most traumatic things a human being can experience. To compound that by seeing those deaths made the center of a seemingly limitless conspiracy theory pushes that suffering to a level that is almost inconceivable.

The Truth vs. Alex Jones (HBO, 3/11/24)

The Truth vs. Alex Jones, a documentary released last month from HBO/MAX, immerses us in the immense pain—and equally momentous bravery—of the parents and other surviving relatives of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, as they take on perhaps the most notorious conspiracy theorist of our age. Through exclusive courtroom footage and numerous emotionally vulnerable interviews, director Dan Reed (Leaving Neverland, Four Hours at the Capitol) brings the viewer inside the survivors’ legal efforts to force Alex Jones to face the consequences of his actions.

On the morning of December 14, 2012, a 20-year old man entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Over the course of about five minutes, he systematically slaughtered 26 people, mostly young children, then killed himself. He had murdered his mother earlier that day.

Through heart-wrenching interviews with first responders and forensic investigators, along with the recollections of the parents themselves, The Truth efficiently establishes the ruthless, inescapable reality of that rampage. However, the focus of the film is on Jones, the far-right talk radio host, and the court cases that the Newtown family members brought against him after six years of misery inflicted by him and his cohort of conspiracy-mongers.

The Truth vs. Alex Jones opens in the earlier days of his work, when he first rose to prominence through spinning conspiracy theories around the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Through a quick survey of clips from his career in the ensuing decade, Reed depicts Jones’ transformation from an Austin, Texas–based public access weirdo into a powerful right-wing influencer who profited handsomely off lies, typically through selling supplements that would supposedly protect viewers from the very fears he invokes.

For example, one sequence shows employees of Infowars, Jones’ video and audio programming network, being sent to the West Coast in search of radiation from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Back in the studio, Jones hawks anti-radiation snake oil. When his employees’ Geiger counters don’t detect high enough levels, he orders them to fabricate the evidence.

According to Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim executive director at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, these formative years for Jones and Infowars set the stage for the Sandy Hook conspiracies, but also the current conspiracy mindset that’s beset the United States as a whole in the era of QAnon.

Carroll Rivas told FAIR that “the early days of his claims around what happened in Oklahoma City, in Waco, and then his just continual drumbeat of lies about Jewish folks, about the Democratic Party, about families of mass shootings, about LGBTQ+ folks” created fertile ground for rampant disinformation. “Unfortunately, much of that damage, it has been done not only to those families, but it’s been done to American democracy.”

Jones’ paper terrorism

The Truth skillfully links these earlier lies—and the associated earnings from them—to Jones’ attacks on the Newtown families. Disinformation about previous tragedies being staged by the US government isn’t far afield from the tales he ultimately told about Sandy Hook—in a nutshell, that the shooting had been faked by actors and the media, led by the US government, in an effort to restrict or seize guns from everyday Americans.

Immediately after the Sandy Hook massacre, Jones and his allies at Infowars began dissecting news stories and other footage from the aftermath, frame by frame, in search of hidden meaning, just as they’d done after other national tragedies. But what might have been erroneously dismissed as eccentric after 9/11 became vicious when applied, unrelentingly, to grieving families.

Sandy Hook parents Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin.

We hear from survivors like Robbie Parker, father of six-year-old Emilie, and Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of Jesse Lewis, also six when he was killed, about how the continuous attacks on the reality of their grief ravaged their mental health, and made healing from the tragedy all but impossible. Eventually, the families felt they had no choice but to take the fight to court, in a pair of defamation cases launched in 2018. Both ended in default judgments against Jones three years later, and ultimately in record-breaking penalties against the broadcaster.

The bulk of The Truth takes place after both default judgments had been made against Jones. This took years of time-wasting and misinterpretation of the demands of the court and prosecutors, as he made a mockery of the discovery process. It’s rare for any case to end in default judgments, much less two of them, but it’s a sign of the extremity to which Jones pushed the court system, something that gets sped over to a degree in the documentary.

For Carroll Rivas, this behavior can be linked to Jones’ ties to other forms of right-wing extremism like the John Birch society and so-called “sovereign citizens” in the militia movement. “He’s situated within the anti-government movement and that movement has a long history of what some people refer to as ‘paper terrorism,'” she told FAIR. “Using government processes to purposely block the system, often because they don’t believe in the system at all.”

Carroll Rivas suggested Jones drew from pre-existing ideas within this movement when he built and promoted conspiracy theories around the shooting:

The idea that the government, particularly a government controlled by the Democratic Party in the US, or by what conspiracy theorists in the far-right would consider the left, that there are those actors that are somehow controlling a situation, either by manipulating the media or finance or by directly infiltrating and pretending to engage in mass violence, has been around for a long time.

She suggested a situation like the Newtown shooting conspiracy was all but inevitable in the atmosphere of mass violence that exists in the US.

Although it is difficult to encapsulate three years of delays into a feature-length documentary, some of the most infuriating moments in The Truth vs. Alex Jones show him making faces in the courtroom, openly mocking the intelligence of a Sandy Hook parent, or offering to let the judge in the Austin, Texas, trial get a closeup look at his fresh dental work. It gets so bad that even normally level-headed agents of the legal system, from lawyers to judges, break down in frustration at his behavior.

Though Jones normally presents himself as a political pundit, or even a documentarian, in a previous court case he attempted to rely on the defense that he’s merely a “performance artist” who is “playing a character” (NBC News, 4/17/17), and does not seriously believe anything he says. These toxic, clownish impulses are on full display in the film.

Beyond Sandy Hook

In one particularly bleak incident, Parker attempted to get out ahead of the rapidly spreading conspiracy theories about his daughter’s death by holding a press conference a day after the shooting. As the cameras rolled, Parker could be seen speaking in an aside to others as he approached the microphone, briefly laughing in response to something they said. Then, as he spoke about the murders, he inevitably began weeping.

Most people would say that it’s normal, even human, to feel a wide range of emotions after any tragedy. But for Jones and his followers, both paid employees and his millions of fans, this switch from brief chuckling to deep grieving signified that Parker was actually a “crisis actor“—in other words, that Parker was someone hired by the imaginary puppet masters of the tragedy to portray a grieving parent, rather than an actual person struggling to come to terms with unimaginable loss.

Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Carroll Rivas said belief in far-right conspiracy theories remains disturbingly commonplace, with the targets of the latest theories often involving other vulnerable groups—a March 22 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch shows that extremists now often falsely blame transgender people in the aftermath of mass shootings.

“Unfortunately, conspiratorial thinking is at a high right now in the US,” said Carroll Rivas, in reference to the SPLC’s research. She continued: “There are still folks who fully believe what Jones put out there about the Sandy Hook families falsely.”

She noted that so much of Jones’ output from this time period echoes in today’s American conspiracy mindset, and many of the same tactics continue to be used:

The manipulators will manipulate and they’ll take any situation, so when they see how successful they’ve been targeting the trans community, they’ll just take this already existing situation of mass shootings, prime the pump with a conspiracy therapy about it, and then whip it into this next level of targeting trans folks.

Dan Friesen, cohost of the Knowledge Fight podcast, which has devoted over 900 episodes to debunking and critically analyzing Jones’ output, told FAIR that The Truth vs. Alex Jones accurately depicts the coordinated attack that Jones launched on the Newtown families, and their bravery in fighting back, including bringing defamation cases against Jones. He highlighted the depiction of Parker’s story in the film as particularly moving.

“Over time, he had started to hate the press conference that he had given, which was, in a sense, a selfless act of trying to take heat off other grieving family members and honor his daughter,” Friesen recalled. However, the documentary suggests that, through telling his story and fighting back in court, he’d begun to “reclaim that piece of himself.”

“As much as there’s anything that can be uplifting about a story like this, I thought that was pretty impactful,” Friesen said.

Jones comeback tour?

Alex Jones (center) in court with his attorneys.

The documentary ends with a title card explaining that, despite the record-breaking defamation judgments against Jones, the courts have—thus far, anyway—been unable to collect any money from him or Infowars. Indeed, Bloomberg Law (9/19/23) reported that Jones is currently living a $100,000 month lifestyle.

Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in December of last year. Most observers believe this to be an attempt to avoid paying the Sandy Hook families, especially given his seemingly extravagant spending. According to court filings, Jones was making a $1.3 million annual salary from Free Speech prior to the bankruptcy, and this isn’t counting his other sources of income. The SPLC previously noted an anonymous $2 million donation to a Bitcoin wallet controlled by Jones.

However, Carroll Rivas stressed that, despite the delays, these types of legal actions can make a difference. “It takes up his time, his energy, and his money,” she said. The SPLC has a history of successfully fighting cases against hate groups in court, and she said, based on their experience, collecting from someone like Jones can be time-consuming, but that doesn’t mean that the courts won’t catch up with him eventually to take his remaining money or property.

“I hope that’s where this ends,” but, she admitted, “it will be a challenge.” She also said that the money spent on the case itself was money he couldn’t spend doing “other things that were harmful.”

Since the trial ended, Jones has been on something of an attempted comeback tour, including returning to the social network X/Twitter, where owner Elon Musk took time to chat with him and listen to his excuses about the Sandy Hook trials.

Unfortunately, as many people have pointed out, conspiracy theories are appealing because they are simple when compared to our complicated, messy real lives. And this allows Jones to spin simple but untrue stories about the trial itself: namely, that he never had his day in court, something he’s repeatedly claimed in encounters since.

“No matter how many times people say, ‘You had every opportunity to cooperate and play by the rules, you could have had the actual defamation trial’ … it’s all done away with by one guy yelling, ‘A judge decided I was guilty,'” Friesen said, summing up Jones’ current favorite talking points. The hours of depositions with Jones’ corporate representatives, the court requests he ignored, the unfulfilled judge’s orders, are “a lot more boring than [Jones’] pithy little turn of phrase.”

According to Mark Bankston, one of the lawyers for the families, millions of people believe, thanks to Jones, that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged. Friesen worried that, after years of disinformation from election lies to Covid denialism, there is the potential for similarly poisonous conspiracies to spread even further today when compared with 2012.

“I wonder how much more it would have spread if it had happened a couple of years later,” Friesen speculated. “I got chills thinking about how our information space has maybe even gotten worse.”

Friesen said the court case remains a weight on Jones’ reputation and his ability to do his work, but much remains to be seen, based on the disposition of his current bankruptcy trial.

“If he ends up getting incredibly lucky, then it’s been an emotionally difficult time for him, I imagine, but maybe he sails through it,” Friesen said. “Conversely, if the consequences end up being pretty severe, then maybe all of this will look different in hindsight.”

The post New Doc Traces Alex Jones’ Footprints on Our Post-Truth Landscape appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Kit O'Connell.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

One of the world’s top leaders and G7 member French President Emmanuel Macron had his one-on–one bilateral talks with PNG leaders at a forest lookout in Central Province today.

Prime Minister James Marape told media at APEC Haus yesterday that Macron himself wanted a walk through the famous Varirata Park in Sogeri and spend a few minutes at the lookout before heading back for more bilateral talks.

With his interest in climate change, Papua New Guinea will seek France’s support for an ultimate climate financing — a suggestion for a “Green Bond”.

• READ MORE: France, Vanuatu agree to sort out ‘southern land’ border dispute
• Macron to ditch Noumea Accord for self-determination and introduce new statute for New Caledonia
• Vanuatu traditional leaders call for Macron to address islands dispute
• Other France in the Pacific reports

Prime Minister Marape presented a ceremonial eagle wood spear with PNG totems to President Macron as a symbol of friendship with a message — “this spear will go with you all over the world and back to your country”.

“It may be just a piece of wood but this is a historical symbol of you taking a piece of PNG with you PM,” Marape said.

“Long live our friendship.”

Marape told media yesterday security and other details for Macron’s visit were all in place.

Forest nation identity ‘amplified’
“Everything is set, police and every security personnel are on standby,” Marape said.

“He himself said he wants to go to a forest. Papua New Guinea is a forest nation, with heaps of tuna, oil and gas.

“We are a forest nation so our identity as a forest nation will be amplified.

“The French President is a big leader in his own right — [leader of] a G7 member country, so him coming here is a privilege for us.

“There are conversations we cannot converse in terms of our forest conservation.”

France is member of the Group of Seven (G7) which is an informal grouping of seven of the world’s most advanced economies, including Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union.

“I had asked him in our Gabon meeting for him to be a forest advocate for the global nations so that’s why we going to Varirata is symbolic,” Marape said.

“We will have a 30-minute walk in the forest and then instead of having a one-on-one meeting here (APEC Haus), we set the Varirata Park and at the Lookout Point,” he said.

“Then much of these will be, you know, for me as a nation, forest is a resource. If we have to conserve, people must pay especially those with big carbon footprints, they must pay for the conservation of our forest.”

President Macron is also visiting Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu on his historic Pacific tour.

Gorethy Kenneth is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

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