I didn’t have to sleep on the cold, wet ground, live in a tent; relieve my bowels and bladder in the open like everyone around me; watch my children burn to death or die in my arms because all the hospitals were purposely destroyed; drink polluted water, dodge snipers or hear deadly drones buzzing day and night.

I’m here in New York, a city millions come to visit and where residents pay outrageous amounts just to live.  I drink all the clean water I want, have a warm bed at night, walk about safely, see the greatest buildings and smell the most varied eateries in our land.

With 6 other members of Veterans For Peace and the president of World Beyond War, I stand every day across the street from the famed United Nations headquarters, in front of the U.S. Mission to the U.N., with signs that read Feed Gaza!, We can’t say we didn’t know!, and another that changes slightly every day: “Veterans & Allies Fast for Gaza! Day # ___.”  Tomorrow is #24, heading for 40.

We are the core of the “Veterans & Allies Fast for Gaza,” that will soon have 1,000 participants in the U.S. and seven other nations. We restrict ourselves to 250 calories a day, the average amount reported early this year to be available to Gazans, who now are used as IDF target practice when they go to the rare aid distribution site.

Four days ago our fast met the halfway mark. Without access to quality health care I would have met my end.

I had highly underrated the importance of Potassium, one of those critical elements for life we take for granted. Almost everybody gets more than enough in a decent diet. But unbeknownst to me, the cancer meds I’m on reduce Potassium uptake.

One online health journal says:

A serum (blood) potassium level below 2.5 mmol/L is a medical emergency because it can lead to cardiac arrest and death. The patient will be treated in the hospital with immediate infusions of potassium through an intravenous (IV) line, along with potential other treatments to stabilize the heart rhythm.

At 20 days of fasting, hunger had gnawed at that unknown condition until friends prevailed upon me to I visit the V.A. center “just to get a check.” It revealed unnoticed heart arrhythmia and a potassium level of  2.1 mmol/L, inches from dying…silently, painlessly, quickly…among all the pleasures and benefits of this marvelous city. Without the vomitting, stomach cramps, hellish noises and crushing despair that is killing the children of Gaza.

Almost accidentally, I am writing to you from a clean, comfortable bed on Floor 13 of the Veterans Administration hospital in Manhattan, surrounded by friends and the privileges we assume as our birthright. I survived, escaping with a valuable lesson in human physiology. Today the doctor strongly recommended I quit the fast “at least until we can get you stabilized.” Just now, I finished my first actual meal in three weeks.

I survived and learned much of value. I met my personal goal to do more than hold a sign on a street corner to denounce the U.S. and Israel’s sick savagery against the innocents. That savagery is waged in broad daylight, visible to anyone who wants to see it, including the well-manicured “suits” who long ago let the love of money and power destroy their love of humanity.

They are the ones supplying Israel with the tools to carry out its plans. Netanyahu’s advisers calculated they couldn’t get away with “Final Solution: Plan A” – marching Palestinians to the ovens. They had to choose Plan B, which is coincidentally much more profitable to the Madmen Arsonists who run our country: bomb them, destroy them, incinerate them, degrade them, terrorize them and starve them into submission. Or better yet wipe, them from the earth.

If you’d like to join us and the soon-to-be 1,000 others in the U.S. and in Ireland, Italy, Germany,  Australia and Canada, participating in our cry of anguish and resistance go to this web site, created by our partners at Friends of Sabeel, North America.  Choose at what level you can participate. All are welcome. Come join the beloved community that one day must remake this world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mike Ferner.

Tory leader says the quiet part out loud, admitting that both Israel and Ukraine are fighting for the West

If you have spent the past 20 months wondering why British leaders on both sides of the aisle have barely criticised Israel, even as it slaughtered and starved Gaza’s population of more than two million people, you finally got an answer last week.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said the quiet part out loud. She told Sky: “Israel is fighting a proxy war [in Gaza] on behalf of the UK.”

According to Badenoch, the UK – and presumably in her assessment, other western powers – aren’t just supporting Israel against Hamas. They are willing that fight and helping to direct it. They view that fight as centrally important to their national interests.

This certainly accords with what we have witnessed over more than a year and a half. Both the current Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and its Tory predecessor under Rishi Sunak, have been unwavering in their commitment to send British arms to Israel, while also shipping weapons from the United States and Germany to help with the slaughter.

Both governments used the Royal Air Force base Akrotiri in Cyprus to carry out surveillance flights to aid Israel with locating targets to hit in Gaza. Both allowed British citizens to travel to Israel to take part as soldiers in the Gaza genocide.

Neither government joined South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice, which found more than a year ago that Israel’s actions could “plausibly” be considered a genocide.

And neither government proposed or tried to impose alongside other western states, as happened in other recent “wars”, a no-fly zone over Gaza to stop Israel’s murderous assault, or organised with others to break Israel’s blockade and get aid into the enclave.

In other words, both governments steadfastly maintained their material support for Israel, even if Starmer recently toned down rhetorical support after images of emaciated babies and young children in Gaza – reminiscent of images of Jewish children in Nazi death camps like Auschwitz – shocked the world.

Coded language

If Badenoch is right that the UK is waging a proxy war in Gaza, it means that both British governments are directly responsible for the huge death toll of Palestinian civilians – running into many tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands – from Israel’s saturation bombing.

It also makes it indisputable that the UK is complicit in the current mass starvation of more than two million people there, which is indeed what Badenoch went on to imply in the coded language of political debate.

In reference to Starmer’s recent, and very belated, criticism of Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s entire population, she observed: “What I want to see is Keir Starmer making sure that he is on the right side of British national interest.”

According to Badenoch, Starmer’s implied threat – so far entirely unrealised – to limit the UK’s active collusion in the genocidal starvation of the people of Gaza could harm Britain’s national interests. How exactly?

Her comments should have startled, or at least baffled, Sky interviewer Trevor Phillips. But they passed unremarked.

Badenoch’s “proxy war” statement was also largely ignored by the rest of the British establishment media. Rightwing publications did notice it, but it appeared they were only disturbed by her equating the West’s proxy war in Gaza with the West’s proxy war in Ukraine.

Or as the opposition leader put it: “Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK just like Ukraine is on behalf of western Europe against Russia.”

A column in the Spectator, the Tory party’s house journal, criticised her use of “proxy war” to describe Ukraine, but appeared to take the Gaza proxy war reference as read. James Heale, the Spectator’s deputy political editor, wrote: “By inadvertently echoing Russia’s position on Ukraine, Badenoch has handed her opponents another stick with which to beat her.”

The Telegraph, another Tory-leaning newspaper, ran a similarly themed article headlined: “Kremlin seizes on Badenoch’s Ukraine ‘proxy war’ comments.”

Related wars

The lack of a response to her Gaza “proxy war” remark suggests that this sentiment actually informs much thinking in western foreign policy circles, even if she broke the taboo on articulating it publicly.

To reach an answer on why Gaza is viewed as a proxy war – one Britain continues to be deeply invested in, even at the cost of a genocide – one must also understand why Ukraine is seen in similar terms. The two “wars” are more related than they might appear.

Despite the consternation of the Spectator and Telegraph, Badenoch is not the first British leader to point out that the West is fighting a proxy war in Ukraine.

Back in February, one of her predecessors, Boris Johnson, observed of western involvement in the three-year war between Russia and Ukraine: “Let’s face it, we’re waging a proxy war. We’re waging a proxy war. But we’re not giving our proxies [Ukraine] the ability to do the job.”

If anyone should know the truth about Ukraine, it is Johnson. After all, he was prime minister when Moscow invaded its neighbour in February 2022.

He was soon dispatched by Washington to Kyiv, where he appears to have strong-armed President Volodymyr Zelensky into abandoning ceasefire talks that were well advanced and could have led to a resolution.

Offensive frontiers

There are good reasons why Johnson and Badenoch each understand Ukraine as a proxy war.

This weekend Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, echoed them. He told Fox News that Russian president Vladimir Putin was not wrong to see Ukraine as a proxy war, and that the West was acting as aggressor by supplying Kyiv with weapons.

For years, the West had expanded Nato’s offensive frontiers towards Russia, despite Moscow’s explicit warnings that this would cross a red line.

With the West threatening to bring Russia’s neighbour Ukraine into Nato’s military fold, there were only ever likely to be one of two Russian responses. Either Putin would blink first and find Russia boxed in militarily, with Nato missiles – potentially nuclear-tipped – on his doorstep, minutes from Moscow. Or he would react pre-emptively to stop Ukraine’s accession to Nato by invading.

The West believed it had nothing to lose either way. If Russia invaded, Nato would then have the pretext to use Ukraine as a theatre of war to bleed Moscow, both economically with sanctions and militarily by flooding the battlefield with western weapons.

As we now know, Moscow chose to react. And while it has indeed been bleeding heavily, Ukrainian forces and European economies have been haemorrhaging even faster and more heavily.

The problem isn’t so much a lack of weapons – the West has supplied lots of them – as the fact that Ukraine has run out of conscripts willing to be sent into the maw of war.

The West is not, of course, going to send its own soldiers. A proxy war means someone else, in this case Ukrainians, does the fighting – and dying – for you.

Three years on, the conditions for a ceasefire have dramatically changed too. Having spilled so much of its own people’s blood, Russia is much less ready to make compromises, not least over the eastern territories it has conquered and annexed.

We have reached this nadir in Ukraine – one so deep that even US President Donald Trump appears ready to bail out – precisely because Nato, via Johnson, pushed Ukraine to keep fighting an unwinnable war.

Full-spectrum dominance

Nonetheless, there was a geopolitical logic, however twisted, to the West’s actions in Ukraine. Bleeding Russia, a military and economic power, accords with the hawkish priorities of the neoconservative cabals that run western capitals nowadays, whichever party is in charge.

The neoconservatives valorise what used to be called the military-industrial complex. They believe that the West has a civilisational superiority to the rest of the world, and must use its superior arsenal to defeat, or at least contain, any state that refuses to submit.

This is a modern reimagining of the “barbarians at the gate”, or as neoconservatives like to frame it, “a clash of civilisations”. The fall of the West would amount, in their view, to a return to the Dark Ages. We are supposedly in a life-or-death struggle.

In the US, the imperial hub of what we call “the West”, this has justified a massive investment in war industries – or what is referred to as “defence”, because it is an easier sell to domestic publics tired of the endless austerity required to maintain military superiority.

Western capitals profess to act as “global police”, while the rest of the world sees the West more in terms of a sociopathic mafia don. However one frames it, the Pentagon is officially pursuing a doctrine known as US “global full-spectrum dominance”. You must submit – that is, let us control the world’s resources – or pay the price.

In practice, a “foreign policy” like this has necessarily divided the world in two: those in the Godfather’s camp, and those outside it.

If Russia could not be contained and defanged by turning Ukraine into a Nato forward base on Moscow’s doorstep, it had to be dragged by the West into a debilitating proxy war that would neutralise Russia’s ability to ally with China against US global hegemony.

Acts of violence

That is what Badenoch and Johnson meant by the proxy war in Ukraine. But how is Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian civilians through saturation bombing and engineered starvation similarly a proxy war – and one apparently benefitting the UK and the West, as Badenoch argues?

Interestingly, Badenoch offered two not entirely compatible reasons for Israel’s “war” on Gaza.

Initially, she told Sky: “Israel is fighting a war where they want to get 58 hostages who have not been returned. That is what all of this is about … What we need to make sure is that we’re on the side that is going to eradicate Hamas.”

But even “eradicating Hamas” is hard to square with British foreign policy objectives. After all, despite the UK’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organisation, it has never attacked Britain, has said it has no such intention, and is unlikely to ever be in a position to do so.

Instead, it is far more likely that Israel’s destruction of Gaza, with visible western collusion, will inflame hotheads into random or misguided acts of violence that cannot be prepared for or stopped – acts of terror similar to the US gunman who recently shot dead two Israeli embassy staff in Washington DC.

That might be reason enough to conclude that the UK ought to distance itself from Israel’s actions as quickly as possible, rather than standing squarely behind Tel Aviv.

It was only when she was pushed by Phillips to explain her position that Badenoch switched trajectory. Apparently it wasn’t just about the hostages. She added: “Who funds Hamas? Iran, an enemy of this country.”

Cornered by her own logic, she then grasped tightly the West’s neoconservative comfort blanket and spoke of a “proxy war”.

‘Bracing’ truth?

Badenoch’s point was not lost on Stephen Pollard, the former editor of the Jewish Chronicle. In a column, he noted of the Sky interview: “Badenoch has a bracing attitude to the truth – she tells it as it is, even if it doesn’t make her popular.”

The “bracing” truth from Badenoch is that Israel is as central to the projection of western power into the oil-rich Middle East as it was more than a century ago, when Britain conceived of Palestine as a “national home for the Jewish people” in place of the native Palestinian population.

From Britain’s perspective, Israel’s war on Gaza, as Badenoch concedes, is not centrally about “eradicating Hamas” or “getting back the hostages” taken during the group’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Rather, it is about arming Israel to weaken those, like Iran and its regional allies, who refuse to submit to the West’s domination of the Middle East – or in the case of Palestinians, to their own dispossession and erasure.

In that way, arming Israel is seen as no different from arming Ukraine to weaken Russian influence in eastern Europe. It is about containing the West’s geostrategic rivals – or potential partners, were they not viewed exclusively through the prism of western “full-spectrum dominance” – as effectively as Israel has locked Palestinians into prisons and concentration camps in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

This strategy is about averting any danger that one day Russia, China, Iran and others could unite effectively to oust the US and its allies from their heavily fortified hilltop. Alliances like BRICS are seen as a potential vehicle for such an assault on western dominance.

Whatever the rhetoric, western capitals are not chiefly concerned about military or “civilisational” threats. They do not fear being invaded or conquered by their “enemies”. In fact, their reckless behaviours in places like Ukraine make a cataclysmic nuclear confrontation more likely.

What drives western foreign policy is the craving to maintain global economic primacy. And terrorising other states with the West’s superior military might is seen as the only way to ensure such primacy.

There is nothing new about the West’s fears, nor are they partisan. Differences within western establishments are never over whether the West should assert “full-spectrum dominance” around the globe through client states such as Israel and Ukraine. Instead, factional splits emerge over which elements within those client states the West should be allying with the closest.

‘Rogue’ policy

The question of alliances has been particularly fraught in the case of Israel, where the far-right and religious extremist factions in the government have a near-Messianic view of their place and role in the Middle East.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many of those closest to him have been trying for decades to manoeuvre the US into launching an attack on Iran, not least to remove Israel’s main rival in the Middle East and guarantee its nuclear-armed regional primacy in perpetuity.

So far, Netanyahu has found no takers in the White House. But that hasn’t stopped him trying. He is widely reported to be deep in efforts to push Trump into joining an attack on Iran, in the midst of talks between Washington and Tehran.

Over many years, British hawks look like they have been playing their own role in these manoeuvres. In the recent past, at least two ambitious British government ministers on the right have been caught trying to cosy up to the most belligerent elements in the Israeli security establishment.

In 2017, Priti Patel was forced to resign as international development secretary after she was found to have held 12 secret meetings with senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, while supposedly on a family holiday. She had other off-the-books meetingswith Israeli officials in New York and London.

Six years earlier, then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox also had to step down after a series of shadowy meetings with Israeli officials. Fox’s ministry was also known to have drawn updetailed plans for British assistance in the event of a US military strike on Iran, including allowing the Americans to use Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian ocean.

Unnamed government officials told the Guardian at the time that Fox had been pursuing an “alternative” government policy. Former British diplomat Craig Murray was more direct: his sources within government suggested Fox had been conspiring with Israel in a “rogue” foreign policy towards Iran, against Britain’s stated aims.

Crime scene

The West’s behaviours are ideologically driven, not rational or moral. The compulsive, self-sabotaging nature of western support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is no different – though far grosser – than the self-sabotaging nature of its actions in Ukraine.

The West has lost the battle against Russia, but refuses to learn or adapt. And it has spent whatever moral legitimacy it still had left in propping up an Israeli military occupier bent on starving millions of people to death, if they cannot be ethnically cleansed into Egypt first.

Netanyahu has not been the easy-to-sell, cuddly military mascot that Zelensky proved to be in Ukraine.

Support for Kyiv could at least be presented as taking the right side in a clash of civilisations with a barbarous Russia. Support for Israel simply exposes the West’s hypocrisy, its worship of power for its own sake, and its psychopathic instincts.

Support for Israel’s genocide has hollowed out the West’s claim to moral superiority for all but its most deluded devotees. Sadly, those still include most of the western political and media establishments, whose only rationale is to evangelise for the belief system over which they preside, claiming it to be the worthiest in history.

Some, like Starmer, are trying to moderate their rhetoric in a desperate attempt to protect the morally bankrupt system that has invested them with power.

Others, like Badenoch, are still so enthralled by the cult of a superior West that they are blind to how preposterous their rantings sound to anyone no longer rapt in devotion. Rather than distance herself from Israel’s atrocities, she is happy to place herself – and the UK – at the crime scene.

The scales have fallen from western publics’ eyes. Now is the time to hold our leaders fully to account.

• First published at Middle East Eye.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Bob Marley is one of my favorite artists and he says, “Make love not war.” Love is connected to your purpose here. It’s connected to what we’re supposed to be doing. For me, that’s to make movies. I used to engage in a lot of bickering with folks, particularly around politics, and it never really got anywhere. I felt like I wasn’t really making an impact going back and forth with people. But if I put my perspectives in the form of a piece of cinema or crafted it in the form of art, then the conversation opened up a little bit more. “Make movies not war” is a reminder to myself about the impact I can have if I’m focused on what I’m supposed to be doing.

When did you realize you would become an artist?

I don’t think there was ever a time where I didn’t think I was going to become one. I was raised in a pretty artistic, creative family. My dad is a guitarist and was on the road a lot when I was a kid. He and my mom divorced when I was five because he was always on the road. The only times I would see him were like, backstage at concerts or on tour buses. He and my mom actually met [because] she’s a singer. My grandmother was a concert promoter in Queens, and they met at one of the concerts my grandmother put on. So I was just surrounded by creativity; there was never a moment where I felt I was going to be anything other than an artist.

Although there was a time where I had to kind of push back against my mother’s advice. She was a creative person but she became a paralegal, as a sacrifice, really, to raise me the way she wanted to raise me. Her advice to me was to find a job doing something that could make me money, because that’s what she did and that’s what worked for her. So my first [college] major was business management, to make her happy. [There] was a year where I wasn’t on the artistic path; that was the only year in my life where I felt like I was trying to please someone or make them happy. And I realized that’s not gonna work out for me.

What changed in that year? What brought you back to the artist path?

I wasn’t doing well, and I realized I wasn’t doing well because I didn’t care about the classes. So then I was just like, alright, I’m gonna change my major [to television production], because I wanted to do something that would give me access to cameras, because I fell in love with cameras when I was 15. And that was the beginning.

What inspired you to create your short film My Nephew Emmett?

I did a play about the murder of Emmett Till when I was in college. And then when I got to NYU as a graduate student I wanted to tell that story because I had just become a parent.

What did it feel like when your hero Spike Lee threw your first draft of that film in the proverbial trash?

So what happened was, I wrote a draft and then he basically tore it apart. He was like, “You gotta figure something else out.” So I went back and wrote something else and he read it and he threw the other one in the trash. It was motivating, though, because he’s the kind of person that really doesn’t accept laziness. He doesn’t accept anyone coming up half-stepping. If you say you wanna make movies and you care about the craft, then you should commit to being the best that you can be.

I always love those stories of mentors who are really hard on their mentees, and teachers who are hard on their students. I think it just shapes you into a better artist. And the reason I went to film school was to find mentors who could do that. I moved to New York [to be] exposed to people, artists from around the world… Spike [would] tell you, “This isn’t good enough. You can do better”—but only if he feels you have that potential. And so the fact that I was receiving that from him made me realize that there was something there. So it was encouraging.

Is there anything you learned from him in particular through the drafting process?

He and Kasi Lemmons, who is a very great director as well, [played a big part in] where [the script] ended up. There were a lot of scenes and moments in the script that really pulled us away from the emotional anchor of the story. They taught me how to kill those darlings and only really focus on what we need to focus on to tell this specific moment of this particular story.

What was your creative process for the Chef’s Table episode you directed?

There were big expectations, but we were working with a really challenging budget. It was exciting, though, because I’ve always been a big fan of Chef’s Table. And so I wanted to be a director who contributed to that and elevated it and didn’t bring that reputation down. So I was thinking about all those things as I was trying to find the story.

How did you find the story?

Usually my heart guides me to the story. I usually go in having an idea of what the story could be, but for me, as a director, the things that are most compelling are the ones that really move you emotionally. Something that really can really tug at your heart. You don’t really find that until you spend time with the person, until you spend enough time with them to see how they behave when they’re vulnerable. How they behave when they’re afraid. Or when they’re nervous or anxious or happy, once their guard is down a little bit.

So when I signed on to do it, I called Kwame [Onwuachi] and was like, “Hey, let’s hang out. Let’s figure out what this is gonna be.” So we just rode around the Bronx and walked around his old neighborhood, went to his old spots… That’s usually the biggest part of my process: to find my way to the heart of a human being. And if we can connect at the heart level, then I know how to tell the story.

I’m guessing those days were no cameras, right? It was just you two doing background research?

Yeah, no cameras.

Right now I’m filming in a maximum security prison in New York. When I was approached about the project they were like, “We’re gonna go in and start shooting,” and I was like, “No, you gotta hold off. We gotta spend time with folks, you know? We gotta gain their trust. We gotta get to know them beyond just their status as an incarcerated individual.” So we spent four or five days with them all day, seven hours a day, just hanging out with the guys. And then you realize, “Oh, he’s a grandfather and he actually talks to his daughter every day. She’s an artist, so he’s becoming an artist as well.” So you really get to know people whenever they start to trust you. So that’s what we did with Chef’s Table, too.

Was there any particular moment of your Chef’s Table episode that stems from the background research you did, something that you wanted to ensure made it into the episode?

The biggest one is in the cold open, when Kwame is putting his durag on. I was raised to believe that you’re supposed to present yourself in a certain way. You have to wear certain kinds of clothes, you have to walk a certain way, you have to talk a certain way, otherwise you’re never gonna get anything. We’re often taught you gotta wear a Brooks Brothers suit. You gotta wear Stacy Adams shoes. Kwame was asserting himself as a human being and as an artist and businessman who is successful in a durag—in some spaces, people would call him a thug, you know?

So that moment where Kwame’s like, “This is my space, this is a space I’ve created for myself as a creative, and I’m gonna exist in it the way that I want and gonna show up the way that I want”—that really was inspiring for me. That’s the way I’m able to show up now. When I go on set, I wear what I wanna wear, play the music that I wanna play. I put incense on, I put candles on. I show up as my full self now, and I’m very grateful to be in that space.

There’s a moment in the episode where Kwame and his sister are walking on the streets of New York and she playfully kicks him, and it all happens in slow motion. I’m curious what choices you made to achieve moments like that.

I always felt that the beauty of Kwame’s story was his relationship with his sister… I just told them, “Hey, walk down the street and whatever you wanna do, just do it.” And that’s what they did. There’s also a moment where they’re cooking together with their mom. Those moments are really important for me, because when telling these kinds of stories, sometimes people like to focus on the drugs and the negative aspects of the Bronx. Like, the Bronx is the hood and [has] gang activity. Those things do exist, but there’s also a lot of beauty in the Bronx. There’s actually a warm household in the Bronx where people are making gumbo inside and you can smell it in the hallway. And there’s playing out on the street, and double dutch, and tag. That’s the kind of neighborhood I saw when I was growing up. That’s how I saw the hood when I was growing up. I didn’t see the hood the way Hollywood saw it. I saw it the way I tried to present it in the episode.

I think you achieved that. And my dad was born in the Bronx, so I really loved how you portrayed it.

What has your experience been like as a Black artist in America in these current times, and what do you wish more people knew?

When Donald Trump was elected president the first time, it really reshaped the way I thought about art and creativity, and it really kind of redefined what I wanted to do as an artist. I really want to speak to the things that are happening in our world right now because it’s having a significant impact on so many different communities. And the only way I know how to make an impact and really say anything meaningful about it is through my work.

I guess that speaks to our purpose as artists overall, or the way that I see artistry. We’re here on a mission. We’re not just here to fulfill our own creative ambition. It’s fine to have ambition, to have creative ambition, but I would like to support artists who see their role as an artist as a way of service, you know?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Isa Adney.

Bob Marley is one of my favorite artists and he says, “Make love not war.” Love is connected to your purpose here. It’s connected to what we’re supposed to be doing. For me, that’s to make movies. I used to engage in a lot of bickering with folks, particularly around politics, and it never really got anywhere. I felt like I wasn’t really making an impact going back and forth with people. But if I put my perspectives in the form of a piece of cinema or crafted it in the form of art, then the conversation opened up a little bit more. “Make movies not war” is a reminder to myself about the impact I can have if I’m focused on what I’m supposed to be doing.

When did you realize you would become an artist?

I don’t think there was ever a time where I didn’t think I was going to become one. I was raised in a pretty artistic, creative family. My dad is a guitarist and was on the road a lot when I was a kid. He and my mom divorced when I was five because he was always on the road. The only times I would see him were like, backstage at concerts or on tour buses. He and my mom actually met [because] she’s a singer. My grandmother was a concert promoter in Queens, and they met at one of the concerts my grandmother put on. So I was just surrounded by creativity; there was never a moment where I felt I was going to be anything other than an artist.

Although there was a time where I had to kind of push back against my mother’s advice. She was a creative person but she became a paralegal, as a sacrifice, really, to raise me the way she wanted to raise me. Her advice to me was to find a job doing something that could make me money, because that’s what she did and that’s what worked for her. So my first [college] major was business management, to make her happy. [There] was a year where I wasn’t on the artistic path; that was the only year in my life where I felt like I was trying to please someone or make them happy. And I realized that’s not gonna work out for me.

What changed in that year? What brought you back to the artist path?

I wasn’t doing well, and I realized I wasn’t doing well because I didn’t care about the classes. So then I was just like, alright, I’m gonna change my major [to television production], because I wanted to do something that would give me access to cameras, because I fell in love with cameras when I was 15. And that was the beginning.

What inspired you to create your short film My Nephew Emmett?

I did a play about the murder of Emmett Till when I was in college. And then when I got to NYU as a graduate student I wanted to tell that story because I had just become a parent.

What did it feel like when your hero Spike Lee threw your first draft of that film in the proverbial trash?

So what happened was, I wrote a draft and then he basically tore it apart. He was like, “You gotta figure something else out.” So I went back and wrote something else and he read it and he threw the other one in the trash. It was motivating, though, because he’s the kind of person that really doesn’t accept laziness. He doesn’t accept anyone coming up half-stepping. If you say you wanna make movies and you care about the craft, then you should commit to being the best that you can be.

I always love those stories of mentors who are really hard on their mentees, and teachers who are hard on their students. I think it just shapes you into a better artist. And the reason I went to film school was to find mentors who could do that. I moved to New York [to be] exposed to people, artists from around the world… Spike [would] tell you, “This isn’t good enough. You can do better”—but only if he feels you have that potential. And so the fact that I was receiving that from him made me realize that there was something there. So it was encouraging.

Is there anything you learned from him in particular through the drafting process?

He and Kasi Lemmons, who is a very great director as well, [played a big part in] where [the script] ended up. There were a lot of scenes and moments in the script that really pulled us away from the emotional anchor of the story. They taught me how to kill those darlings and only really focus on what we need to focus on to tell this specific moment of this particular story.

What was your creative process for the Chef’s Table episode you directed?

There were big expectations, but we were working with a really challenging budget. It was exciting, though, because I’ve always been a big fan of Chef’s Table. And so I wanted to be a director who contributed to that and elevated it and didn’t bring that reputation down. So I was thinking about all those things as I was trying to find the story.

How did you find the story?

Usually my heart guides me to the story. I usually go in having an idea of what the story could be, but for me, as a director, the things that are most compelling are the ones that really move you emotionally. Something that really can really tug at your heart. You don’t really find that until you spend time with the person, until you spend enough time with them to see how they behave when they’re vulnerable. How they behave when they’re afraid. Or when they’re nervous or anxious or happy, once their guard is down a little bit.

So when I signed on to do it, I called Kwame [Onwuachi] and was like, “Hey, let’s hang out. Let’s figure out what this is gonna be.” So we just rode around the Bronx and walked around his old neighborhood, went to his old spots… That’s usually the biggest part of my process: to find my way to the heart of a human being. And if we can connect at the heart level, then I know how to tell the story.

I’m guessing those days were no cameras, right? It was just you two doing background research?

Yeah, no cameras.

Right now I’m filming in a maximum security prison in New York. When I was approached about the project they were like, “We’re gonna go in and start shooting,” and I was like, “No, you gotta hold off. We gotta spend time with folks, you know? We gotta gain their trust. We gotta get to know them beyond just their status as an incarcerated individual.” So we spent four or five days with them all day, seven hours a day, just hanging out with the guys. And then you realize, “Oh, he’s a grandfather and he actually talks to his daughter every day. She’s an artist, so he’s becoming an artist as well.” So you really get to know people whenever they start to trust you. So that’s what we did with Chef’s Table, too.

Was there any particular moment of your Chef’s Table episode that stems from the background research you did, something that you wanted to ensure made it into the episode?

The biggest one is in the cold open, when Kwame is putting his durag on. I was raised to believe that you’re supposed to present yourself in a certain way. You have to wear certain kinds of clothes, you have to walk a certain way, you have to talk a certain way, otherwise you’re never gonna get anything. We’re often taught you gotta wear a Brooks Brothers suit. You gotta wear Stacy Adams shoes. Kwame was asserting himself as a human being and as an artist and businessman who is successful in a durag—in some spaces, people would call him a thug, you know?

So that moment where Kwame’s like, “This is my space, this is a space I’ve created for myself as a creative, and I’m gonna exist in it the way that I want and gonna show up the way that I want”—that really was inspiring for me. That’s the way I’m able to show up now. When I go on set, I wear what I wanna wear, play the music that I wanna play. I put incense on, I put candles on. I show up as my full self now, and I’m very grateful to be in that space.

There’s a moment in the episode where Kwame and his sister are walking on the streets of New York and she playfully kicks him, and it all happens in slow motion. I’m curious what choices you made to achieve moments like that.

I always felt that the beauty of Kwame’s story was his relationship with his sister… I just told them, “Hey, walk down the street and whatever you wanna do, just do it.” And that’s what they did. There’s also a moment where they’re cooking together with their mom. Those moments are really important for me, because when telling these kinds of stories, sometimes people like to focus on the drugs and the negative aspects of the Bronx. Like, the Bronx is the hood and [has] gang activity. Those things do exist, but there’s also a lot of beauty in the Bronx. There’s actually a warm household in the Bronx where people are making gumbo inside and you can smell it in the hallway. And there’s playing out on the street, and double dutch, and tag. That’s the kind of neighborhood I saw when I was growing up. That’s how I saw the hood when I was growing up. I didn’t see the hood the way Hollywood saw it. I saw it the way I tried to present it in the episode.

I think you achieved that. And my dad was born in the Bronx, so I really loved how you portrayed it.

What has your experience been like as a Black artist in America in these current times, and what do you wish more people knew?

When Donald Trump was elected president the first time, it really reshaped the way I thought about art and creativity, and it really kind of redefined what I wanted to do as an artist. I really want to speak to the things that are happening in our world right now because it’s having a significant impact on so many different communities. And the only way I know how to make an impact and really say anything meaningful about it is through my work.

I guess that speaks to our purpose as artists overall, or the way that I see artistry. We’re here on a mission. We’re not just here to fulfill our own creative ambition. It’s fine to have ambition, to have creative ambition, but I would like to support artists who see their role as an artist as a way of service, you know?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Isa Adney.

RNZ Nine To Noon

Auckland film maker Paula Whetu Jones has spent nearly two decades working pro bono on a feature film about the Auckland cardiac surgeon Alan Kerr, which is finally now in cinemas.

She is best known for co-writing and directing Whina, the feature film about Dame Whina Cooper.

She filmed Dr Kerr and his wife Hazel in 2007, when he led a Kiwi team to Gaza and the West Bank to operate on children with heart disease.

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What started as a two-week visit became a 20 year commitment, involving 40 medical missions to Gaza and the West Bank and hundreds of operations.

Paula Whetu Jones self-funded six trips to document the work and the result is the feature film The Doctor’s Wife, now being screened free in communities around the country.

20 years of inspirational work in Palestine

Pacific Media Watch reports that Paula Whetu Jones writes on her film’s website:

I met Alan and Hazel Kerr in 2006 and became inspired by their selflessness and dedication. I wanted to learn more about them and shine a light on their achievements.

I’ve been trying to highlight social issues through documentary film making for 25 years. I have always struggled to obtain funding and this project was no different. We provided most of the funding but it wouldn’t have been possible to complete it without the generosity of a small number of donors.

Others gave of their time and expertise.

Our initial intention was to follow Dr Alan in his work in the West Bank and Gaza but we also developed a very special relationship with Hazel.

While Dr Alan was operating, Hazel took herself all over the West Bank and Gaza, volunteering to help in refugee camps, schools and community centres. We tagged along and realised that Dr Alan and his work was the heart of the film but Hazel was the soul. Hence, the title became The Doctor’s Wife.

I was due to return to Palestine in 2010 when on the eve of my departure I was struck down by a rare auto immune condition which left me paralysed. It wasn’t until 2012 that I was able to return to Palestine.

Wheelchair made things hard
However, being in a wheelchair made everything near on impossible, not to mention my mental state which was not conducive to being creative. In 2013, tragedy struck again when my 22-year-old son died, and I shut down for a year.

Again, the project seemed so far away, destined for the shelf. Which is where it sat for the next few years while I tried to figure out how to live in a wheelchair and support myself and my daughter.

The project was re-energised when I made two arts documentaries in Palestine, making sure we filmed Alan while we were there and connecting with a NZ trauma nurse who was also filming.

By 2022, we knew we needed to complete the doco. We started sorting through many years of footage in different formats, getting the interviews transcribed and edited. The last big push was in 2023. We raised funds and got a few people to help with the logistics.

I spent six months with three editors and then we used the rough cut to do one last fundraiser that helped us over the line, finally finishing it in March of 2025.

Our documentary shows the humanity of everyday Palestinians, pre-2022, as told through the eyes of a retired NZ heart surgeon, his wife and two committed female film makers who were told in 2006 that no one cares about old people, sick Palestinian children or Palestine.

They were wrong. We cared and maybe you do, too.

What is happening in 2025 means it’s even more important now for people to see the ordinary people of Palestine

Dr Alan and his wife, Hazel are now 90 and 85 years old respectively. They are the most wonderfully humble humans. Their work over 20 years is nothing short of inspiring.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

Particularly worrisome is di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, or DEHP, a chemical used to soften plastic products. Colorless and nearly odorless, DEHP is found in everything from shower curtains and shoes to medical tubing, and it’s long been linked to health harms like cancer. 

New research indicates the class of chemicals is also causing deaths due to heart disease, particularly in developing countries. According to a peer-reviewed study published last week in The Lancet eBioMedicine, nearly 350,000 people died in 2018 from exposure to DEHP. The research represents the first global survey of cardiovascular mortality from the chemicals, and it attributes DEHP exposure from plastics to more than 13 percent of all deaths from heart disease among adults aged 55 to 64.

One of the researchers’ most striking findings was a strong geographic disparity in DEHP exposure and related mortality rates. Residents of the Middle East and South Asia, for example, are exposed to up to six times more DEHP than their European counterparts. A greater share of these regions’ cardiovascular deaths was also attributable to the chemicals. Researchers found that in 2018, 10 percent of heart disease-related deaths in the United States and 8 percent in Europe were attributable to DEHP exposure. That figure was as high as 17 percent in the Middle East and South Asia and more than 13 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

DEHP and other phthalates contribute to cardiovascular mortality in part because they are endocrine disruptors, meaning they interfere with the body’s hormones in ways that can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. Phthalates also contribute to inflammation, another risk factor for heart disease, and they coexist with micro- and nanoplastics, which were shown in a groundbreaking study last year to increase people’s risk of a heart attack, stroke, or “death from any cause.” 

DEHP-laden plastics are like “a wrecking ball” on human tissues, said Leonardo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics at NYU Langone Health and one of the study’s authors. He said policymakers should do more to reduce the use of DEHP in plastic materials, potentially including restrictions on the use of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, the type of plastic in which DEHP is most commonly found. Some typical products made of PVC include pipes, upholstery, and children’s toys, as well as — in some parts of the world — food packaging. Overuse of these products has contributed to widespread DEHP contamination in air, soil, and water.

The study suggests the geographical disparities may be attributable to regional differences in plastic production, chemical regulations, and “underdeveloped waste management sectors.” India, for example, is experiencing a surge in the manufacturing and use of plastic products, including PVC products, and it only recently began to restrict DEHP in food packaging. 

Many poorer countries also import plastic waste from abroad, creating another potential route for exposure. Countries like Malaysia, India, and Vietnam have received millions of tons of plastic waste from North America and Europe since 2021 — sometimes illegally, according to analyses of global trade data from the nonprofit Basel Action Network. In 2021, the U.S. alone exported 1.2 billion pounds of plastic waste to developing countries. Much of this plastic may be burned or dumped into unregulated landfills, where it can release chemicals such as DEHP.

The paper builds on a rapidly growing body of evidence that the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastic creates an outsize burden for the developing world. In 2023, an analysis from the nonprofit World Wide Fund for Nature found that the life-cycle costs of plastics are at least eight times higher for low- and middle-income countries than they are for high-income ones.

To reach their conclusions, Trasande and his team of researchers modeled phthalates’ contribution to cardiovascular mortality using a survey of phthalate concentrations in urine samples combined with causes of death 10 years later reported in the U.S.’s National Death Index. Then they looked at the total number of heart disease-related deaths in particular countries and regions and determined what fraction wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for DEHP.

Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new analysis, said the research was “consistent with what other studies have found” regarding health risks from phthalates. Last year, a study of one-third of the global population found that bisphenol A, or BPA — used in hard, clear plastic products, like food storage containers — contributed to 5.4 million cases of heart disease and 346,000 strokes in 2015. The same study found that polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs — used as a flame retardant in electronics and some textiles — caused the loss of 11.7 million IQ points.

DEHP is inconsistently regulated globally. The European Union restricts DEHP, along with several other phthalates, to no more than 0.1 percent by weight in children’s toys and clothing, and strictly limits its use in food-contact materials and cosmetics. China has similar restrictions, and Japan has banned DEHP from food packaging and children’s products since 2003. India passed legislation in 2022 limiting the amount of DEHP that’s allowed to leach from food packaging.

The U.S. restricts DEHP in children’s toys and some food packaging but not in cosmetics. In 2022, the federal Food and Drug Administration denied a petition from 11 public health and environmental groups to ban DEHP and seven other phthalates in food-contact materials outright. 

“There’s no evidence for a threshold at which phthalate exposures are safe,” Trasande emphasized.

Trasande said his research could influence ongoing negotiations for the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, set to resume this August. The treaty’s mandate is to “end plastic pollution,” but delegates have increasingly turned their attention to hazardous chemicals in plastic products. Many scientists want the treaty to include lists of plastic types and plastic-related chemicals that must be limited or phased out. Both PVC and phthalates are top contenders for such lists.

Woodruff said research like Trasande’s should also drive home the need to limit overall plastic production, not just the chemicals used in plastics. “That there are important health benefits from capping the amount of plastic production,” she said. “Lowering our exposure to these chemicals in plastics is going to be a critical part of reversing the trend of chronic disease in the U.S.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This commonly used plastic chemical caused 350,000 heart disease-related deaths in 1 year on May 6, 2025.

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

In his last public appearance before he died, Pope Francis addressed Easter Sunday Mass and repeated his call for a ceasefire in Gaza. “Pope Francis’s position on Palestine is just an extension of his theology and pastoral care in general, caring for the marginalized and victims of injustice,” says Reverend Munther Isaac, Palestinian Christian theologian and pastor, who joins us for the second of several segments on Pope Francis.

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

Mhlanga, a journalist for privately owned Heart and Soul Television, has been detained since February 24 on incitement charges for interviewing a war veteran who called for President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s resignation. 

“The repeated denial of bail is yet another example of the injustice that Blessed Mhlanga has been forced to endure for simply doing his job as an independent journalist covering all sides of Zimbabwe’s political story,” said CPJ Africa Regional Director Angela Quintal in New York. “Zimbabwean authorities should stop hounding Blessed Mhlanga and withdraw the charges against him, so that he can be free to report the news.” 

The journalist has been behind bars over offenses allegedly committed in his interview in November 2024 and further coverage in January 2025 of Blessed Geza, a veteran of Zimbabwe’s war for independence from white minority rule, who also accused Mnangagwa of nepotism, corruption, and failing to address economic issues.

On February 28, the Harare Magistrates Court denied Mhlanga bail. After several delays, the High Court dismissed an appeal of the bail ruling on March 21. Mhlanga’s lawyer, Chris Mhike, renewed the bail application in the magistrates court on April 4, but Magistrate Donald Ndirowei dismissed the appeal on Monday. Mhike told CPJ they will appeal the latest ruling.

If found guilty, Mhlanga could be jailed for up to five years and fined up to US$700 under the 2021 Cyber and Data Protection Act.

Zimbabwe’s government, in an effort to silence the press, has been jailing independent journalists and introducing laws to restrict freedom of expression, according to a recent CPJ report.

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

But the very thing that makes them such an amazing climate solution is also their biggest challenge. A common refrigerant called R-410A pumps through their innards so they can warm and cool homes and offices and anything else. But that refrigerant is also liquid irony, as it can escape as a greenhouse gas over 2,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. (This is known as its “global warming potential,” or how much energy a ton of the gas absorbs over a given amount of time compared to the same amount of CO2.) Leaks can happen during the installation, operation, and disposal of heat pumps. 

But this year the industry is rolling out alternative refrigerant formulations like R-454B and R-32, which have around 75 percent less global warming potential. That’s in response to Environmental Protection Agency rules mandating that, starting this year, heat pump refrigerants have a global warming potential of no more than 700. Manufacturers are looking even farther ahead at the possibility of using propane, or even CO2, as the next generation of more atmospherically friendly refrigerants.

“The whole industry is going to be transitioning away from R-410A, so that’s good,” said Jeff Stewart, the refrigeration chief engineer for residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning at Trane Technologies, which makes heat pumps and gas furnaces. “We’re getting lower global warming potential. The problem is, it still has some, right? So there’s concern about ‘OK, is that low enough to really help the environment?’”

To be clear, heat pumps do not release greenhouse gases at anywhere near the scale of burning natural gas to heat homes, so their environmental impact is way smaller. “Even if we lost all the refrigerant, it still actually has a much smaller effect just having a heat pump and not burning gas,” said Matthew Knoll, co-founder and chief technology officer at California-based Quilt, which builds heat pump systems for homes. “I would actually want to make sure that doesn’t hamper the rapid adoption of heat pumps.”

But why does a heat pump need refrigerant? Well, to transfer heat. By changing the state of the liquid to a gas, then compressing it, the appliance absorbs heat from even very cold outdoor air and moves it indoors. Then in the summer, the process reverses to work like a traditional air conditioner.

The potential for refrigerant leaks is much smaller if the heat pump is properly manufactured, installed, and maintained. When a manufacturer switches refrigerants, the basic operation of the heat pump stays the same. But some formulations operate at different pressures, meaning they’ll need slightly different sized components and perhaps stronger materials. “It’s all the same fundamental principles,” said Vince Romanin, CEO of San Francisco-based Gradient, which makes heat pumps that slip over window sills. “But it does take a re-engineering and a recertification of all of these components.”

While Trane has transitioned to R-454B, Gradient and other companies are adopting R-32, which has a global warming potential of 675 and brings it in line with the new regulations. Gradient says that with engineering improvements, like hermetic sealing that makes it harder for refrigerants to escape, and by properly recycling its appliances, it can reduce the climate footprint of heat pumps by 95 percent. “Our math shows R-32, plus good refrigerant management, those two things combined solve almost all of the refrigerant problem,” said Romanin. “Because of that data, Gradient believes the industry should stay on R-32 until we’re ready for natural refrigerants.”

Those include CO2, butane, and propane. CO2 has a global warming potential of just 1, but it works at much higher pressures, which requires thicker tubes and compressors. It’s also less efficient in hot weather, meaning it’s not the best option for a heat pump in cooling mode in the summer.

Propane, on the other hand, excels in different conditions and operates at a lower pressure than the refrigerants it would replace. It also has a global warming potential of just 3. Propane is flammable, of course, but heat pumps can run it safely by separating sources of ignition, like electrical components, from the refrigerant compartments. “It is kind of perfect for heat pumps,” said Richard Gerbe, board member and technical advisor at Italy-based Aermec, another maker of heat pumps.

That’s why Europe is already switching to propane, and why the U.S. may soon follow, Gerbe said. A typical heat pump will run about 10 pounds of propane, less than what’s found in a barbeque tank. Gas furnaces and stoves, by contrast, are constantly fed with flammable natural gas that can leak, potentially leading to explosions or carbon monoxide poisoning. “If you’ve got a comfort level with a gas stove in your house,” Gerbe said, “this is significantly less of a source.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The quest to fix the irony at the heart of every heat pump on Apr 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Mhlanga, who works with the privately owned broadcaster Heart and Soul TV, was arrested on February 24 and charged with incitement for covering war veterans who called for the resignation of President Emmerson Mnangagwa and opposed proposals to extend his term. If found guilty, he could be jailed for up to five years and fined up to US$700 under the 2021 Cyber and Data Protection Act.

Mhlanga remains in pretrial detention at the capital’s Harare Remand Prison, an overcrowded facility with harsh conditions considered “not fit for animals.”

Chris Mhike, the journalist’s lawyer, told CPJ that Mhlanga’s imprisonment has affected his health, with the journalist looking frail and suffering body aches. “There’s no running away from the fact that he has suffered terribly from this episode. His part-time studies are disrupted,” Mhike told CPJ, adding, “after these painful weeks in prison, his health has notably deteriorated.”

“What is happening is actually an attempt to try and make sure that we silence all journalists who are doing their work,” said Perfect Mswathi Hlongwane, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, in an interview about Mhlanga’s detention. “This is bad for the profession, this is bad for the country.”

Sanctions for people who ‘demonize’ the president

Zanu-PF, the ruling party since independence in 1980, is facing internal tensions. The party last year adopted a motion to try to amend the constitution to extend Mnangagwa’s time in office beyond the 2028 completion of his second, final term.

Amid the intraparty strife, government officials have sought to tamp down on rhetoric they view as insufficiently loyal to Mnangagwa, whether from politicians or the media. Home Affairs Minister Kazembe Kazembe recently threatened criminal sanctions against people who “insult and demonise the Office of the President,” while Information Minister Jenfan Muswere warned broadcasters against advocating for the government’s overthrow.

A war veteran that Mhlanga interviewed, Blessed Geza, was among Zanu-PF members who sharply opposed the extension. Geza was expelled from the party earlier in March and has been calling for protests. Mnangagwa says he will leave office at the end of his current term.

In its attempt to silence the press, the government is employing the tried and tested strategies of jailing independent journalists and introducing laws to restrict freedom of expression.

Prominent journalist Hopewell Chin’ono faced repeated harassment and was arrested several times in 2020 and 2021. He was initially denied bail during his latest detention, in January 2021, until Zimbabwe’s High Court freed him after three weeks in prison. Journalist Jeffrey Moyo, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and other foreign media, was also arrested and initially denied bail in 2021. After spending more than a year in prison, Moyo was convicted of breaking the country’s immigration laws and given a two-year suspended sentence.

On March 12, Muswere announced plans for new social media legislation, citing the need to regulate unethical journalism and govern “ghost accounts operated by individuals seeking to demonise their own country.”

Muswere has also sponsored the Broadcasting Services Amendment Bill, which the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, passed on March 4. The bill, awaiting Senate approval, would entrench Mnangagwa’s control over broadcasting by removing requirements that the president consider recommendations from a parliamentary committee in appointing Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe board members.

‘I feel unsafe’

Even when threats don’t come from the government, failure to address press freedom violations can leave journalists fearful.

Three days after journalist Dumisani Mawere published a February 9 report on his local WhatsApp group accusing a private security employee of sexual misconduct with a minor, two of the company’s staff threatened him by phone before seeking him out at his home in the northern town of Kariba. When Mawere complained to the police, they summoned the alleged offenders, who returned to threaten the journalist, he said.

“They charged at me, pointed fingers at me, clenched their fists, and issued direct death threats — explicitly reminding me that ‘Kariba is very small,’ implying that I could easily be killed,” Mawere, a journalist with Kasambabezi community radio station, told CPJ, adding that he was frustrated that the police let the suspects go. “Right now, I feel unsafe and vulnerable in my work as a journalist.”

CPJ’s phone calls and messages to national police spokesperson Paul Nyathi, National Prosecuting Authority spokesperson Angelina Munyeriwa, and government spokesperson Nick Mangwana went unanswered.

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

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Although it was too late for him to benefit, Daniel Kinel felt relieved in December when the Environmental Protection Agency finally banned TCE. The compound, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines, can cause cancer, organ damage and a potentially fatal heart defect in babies, according to independent studies and the EPA. It has also been shown to greatly increase people’s chances of developing Parkinson’s disease.

Kinel and three of his colleagues were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. They all worked in a law office in Rochester, New York, that sat next to a dry cleaner that had dumped TCE into the soil. Kinel was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative condition at age 43, after working there for seven years. His three colleagues have since died. At least 15 of the firm’s partners developed cancers related to TCE.

“It felt good that we were finally getting rid of this terrible chemical,” said Kinel, whose symptoms now make it impossible to type, write or work as a lawyer. “My children and grandchildren would be protected.”

But his feeling of solace has been short-lived.

The ban has been challenged on multiple fronts since President Donald Trump assumed office for a second time in January. Republicans in the Senate and House introduced resolutions to repeal the ban, which was vulnerable to being overturned through the Congressional Review Act because it was issued shortly before the inauguration. Meanwhile, companies and trade groups have sued to stop the ban in court. A Trump executive order delayed the implementation of the ban until March 21. And last week, the EPA asked a federal appeals court to further delay the ban until the end of May.

TCE, short for trichloroethylene, is one of five toxic substances for which full or partial bans put in place by the EPA under President Joe Biden are now under threat. The Trump administration told the courts that it wants to review all five bans to determine whether they should be rolled back. Those banned substances include a deadly paint stripper called methylene chloride; PCE, a solvent that’s similar to TCE; carbon tetrachloride, which is used as a cleaning fluid; and the cancer-causing mineral asbestos. David Fotouhi, the lawyer Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, tried to overturn the asbestos ban in October, when he was serving as an attorney for a group of car companies. The EPA classifies all of the recently banned chemicals as either carcinogenic or probably carcinogenic to humans.

But the EPA’s ban on TCE is in greater peril than the rest because it has yet to take effect. The prohibition on the chemical was to begin this year for all consumer uses and many industrial and commercial uses. The EPA allowed a more gradual phasing out for more than a dozen industrial uses, such as for some aerospace and defense applications. In those cases, the Biden EPA required employers to provide health protections for workers who come into contact with TCE. The Trump EPA’s recent petition to the federal appeals court to extend the ban’s delay would also mean that employers would not be required to implement the new health protections for workers.

Delaying the ban means that people will continue to be exposed to the chemical, which causes liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as holes in infants’ hearts that can be fatal. While safer alternatives now exist for many of its uses, TCE has seeped into the drinking water of more than 17 million people in the U.S., according to data compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Dangerous plumes of TCE have been identified in Woburn, Massachusetts; Wichita, Kansas; and Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base in North Carolina, where hundreds of service members developed Parkinson’s disease and cancer. There is another TCE plume on Long Island in New York, in the district abutting the one that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin represented in Congress.

The idea that people will still be exposed to TCE infuriates Jerry Ensminger. This chemical “needs to go away,” said the retired Marine Corps master sergeant who’s an outspoken advocate for military families exposed to TCE. Ensminger’s daughter Janey died from leukemia when she was 9; Ensminger said Janey was conceived at Camp Lejeune and the family lived there during most of the pregnancy’s first trimester, then returned when she was 6. Ensminger recalled seeing workers on the base dip truck engines into vast metal vats of TCE in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Scientists began raising concerns about the toxicity of TCE almost a century ago. The EPA’s work on the chemical proceeded slowly. In 1987, it deemed TCE a “probable human carcinogen.” In 2001, a draft EPA assessment found the chemical to be more toxic than previously thought and highly likely to cause cancer. The conclusion came under attack from some industry and government scientists. The Department of Defense, which is responsible for hundreds of TCE-contaminated sites, criticized the report as based on “junk science.” Two reviews by panels of independent scientists, however, found the assessment was sound. Still, the EPA didn’t begin drafting stricter regulations on TCE until the end of President Barack Obama’s administration.

Those efforts were dealt a blow during Trump’s first term when the EPA weakened a report on TCE’s effects on fetal heart abnormalities and stopped work on the new regulations. Nancy Beck, who before joining the first Trump administration had been a high-level lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, presided over the EPA’s chemical program when it pulled back from the TCE ban and, more broadly, retreated from rules that the chemical industry saw as burdensome.

After returning to the private sector, Beck was recently named the principal deputy assistant administrator in the EPA’s office of chemical safety and pollution prevention. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Her appointment has left environmentalists despairing over the fate of the long-awaited TCE ban.

“The same industry lobbyist who was in charge of EPA’s chemical program before is in charge of it again,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “When she was there the first time, she moved heaven and earth to weaken the evaluation of the chemical and downplay the hazard TCE posed to people’s health. That appears to be where this is headed again.”

More than 100 groups representing public health, environment and community interests recently sent a letter to Zeldin urging him to reinstate the TCE ban. Referencing Zeldin’s proclaimed interest in clean water for every American, the letter noted that the EPA estimated its rule would produce $20 million in health benefits from reduced cancer rates and said that “delaying implementation of these rules will lead to preventable death, disease and incapacitation and increase medical costs and hardships to families and communities.” This week, environmental and labor groups filed a court brief opposing the EPA’s efforts to delay implementation of the TCE ban.

The EPA did not respond to questions about the TCE ban. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who introduced the resolution to repeal the TCE ban in the Senate, and Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, and Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., who introduced a resolution for its repeal in the House, also did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica. A spokesperson from the American Chemistry Council referred ProPublica to its press release from December, which acknowledged that the EPA had included “important adjustments” in the TCE ban to provide flexibility to affected industries.

In a press release about his bid to repeal the ban, Kennedy said that the “Biden administration waged war against America’s chemical producers,” and he urged Congress to “move quickly to take off the handcuffs that President Biden placed on Louisiana and U.S. businesses.” In the same release, Harshbarger described the TCE ban as “one of many examples of the Biden Administration’s overregulation.”

In a hearing about chemical regulation in the House in January, Harshbarger said that a company in her district, Microporous, which makes membranes used in lithium-ion batteries, is facing an “existential threat” from the TCE ban. The ban made an exception for the use of TCE for this purpose, allowing the battery industry to continue using it until 2044. Microporous, which has challenged the ban in court, did not respond to a question about why it needed 20 years to find a suitable replacement for TCE.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the EPA has been touting its efforts to roll back environmental protections. Earlier this month, the agency announced the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” listing 31 rules it planned to step away from, related to oil and gas, air pollution and greenhouse gases. The agency celebrated the announcement with a 6,500-word press release that included praise from 61 industry leaders, CEOs and Republican politicians.

Still, some who have been focused on TCE were surprised that the Trump administration was delaying and reconsidering the recent ban. “I thought it was a done deal,” said Dr. Sara Whittingham, a retired United States Air Force flight surgeon who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 46. When she heard that the rule might be repealed, she was aghast. “What the heck, how can nobody care about this?” she said. “This should be a nonpartisan issue.”

Whittingham believes her disease may stem from the two years she spent as an aircraft maintenance officer at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, from 1996 to 1998. Her office was above a shop where workers used TCE to clean engine parts.

Last week, Whittingham teamed up with two friends, both Air Force graduates who were diagnosed with Parkinson’s as women in their 40s, to urge people to pressure Congress to drop the resolutions.

“We signed up to go fight for our country,” she said, but now the attitude seems to be, “‘We don’t care about your health, you’ve already signed on the dotted line.’ It’s a kind of a kick in the face.”

Before being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Whittingham had hoped that her children would follow her career path. But recently she discouraged her daughter, who is a senior in high school, from joining the military. The health risks, she said, were too high.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sharon Lerner and Lisa Song.

Janine Jackson interviewed historian David Perry about MAGA and disability for the March 14, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MSNBC (3/3/25)

Janine Jackson: A fair amount is being written about Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications to be secretary of education, except the one that matters: an evident willingness to destroy the department she’s charged with leading. Our guest’s piece for MSNBC.com was one of few, so far, to address the impact of the Trump White House, including McMahon’s appointment, on the rights and lives of people with disabilities.

David Perry is a journalist and a historian; he joins us now by phone from Minnesota. Welcome back to CounterSpin, David Perry.

David Perry: It’s so nice to talk to you again.

JJ: McMahon at the DoE is not the only piece of this story, of course, but we might start with that. There’s some confusion, I think, around what the Department of Education does. They don’t really write curricula, but they do have a role in the school experiences of students with disabilities, don’t they?

DP: Yeah. It’s one of the places where the federal level really matters. It matters across the board. It matters that we have a functioning Department of Education that cares about education. But there are specific things it does, when it comes to students with disabilities—like, actually, both of my kids in different ways—particularly around something called a 504 plan. And we don’t need to get into the weeds there, but there’s two different kinds of ways that students with disabilities get services, and one are things we can call special ed, where kids are pulled out or get really modified curricula, but most people just get small accommodations; that really makes a difference.

Conversation (2/13/25)

If there’s a problem, it is the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, that you appeal to. If there are materials that aren’t accessible—say, for example, you’re blind, and you can’t get materials over audio—you can file an OCR complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and expect to get some kind of response. And certainly under the Obama administration, and even under the first Trump administration, under Betsy DeVos—I’m not a fan of Betsy DeVos, but that office remained functional—and then more recently, all of that was happening. These civil rights offices are not surviving what Trump is doing these first six weeks, and I don’t expect the Ed Department’s to either.

JJ: In your piece for MSNBC, you situate McMahon’s appointment among a number of top-down threats to people with disabilities, and some of it’s old, things people have been pushing for for a while, off and on, but some of it feels kind of new, and some of it is policy, and some of it is, I guess, cultural. What are you seeing?

DP: Yeah, I wrote this piece in MSNBC, and I’ve been thinking about it in some ways since last summer, when I saw this coming. But here’s the version that came out.

AP (3/19/25)

There has been, with incredible amounts of work since the ’50s and ’60s and all the way through to today, the creation of a bipartisan, basic consensus that people with disabilities deserve to be able to work, deserve education, deserve housing that is accessible, deserve healthcare through things like Medicaid.

It has never been a great consensus. It has never been sufficient. The divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or even among Democrats and among Republicans, are vast and important and worth fighting for.

But I do think we achieved that kind of basic consensus, and I do not believe that the current Trump administration supports that consensus, and I have a lot of evidence to talk about it. And we’re going to see more, with the shuttering of Social Security offices, and the things that are coming from Medicaid. And, again, these basic issues around education.

And I think it’s really important for liberals, people like me, to not just say, “Oh, Republicans were always bad on this.” Again, we really disagreed on things, but the example I used is when Fred Trump Jr.—or the third, I can’t always remember their name—the president’s nephew, he has a son who has cerebral palsy and significant needs, went to the first Trump administration for help. He found a lot of people who were ready to help him, who were ready to do important work around access and around medical support.

Guardian (7/24/24)

None of those people are working in the second Trump White House except for Trump, whose famous or infamous response to his nephew is, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if your kid was just dead? It’s too much work. It’s too expensive.” And that’s the attitude we’re seeing now.

And that’s not even getting into what Elon Musk says about disabled people, or RFK, what he’s doing. I mean, we could talk for an hour just about the ways in which anti-disability rhetoric and policy lies at the heart of the second Trump administration.

JJ: It’s so appalling, and so many different appalling things are happening, and yet one can still be surprised to hear people, including Elon Musk, throwing around the r-word. Again, I don’t quite get what is so enjoyable about punching down, but people with disabilities, it seems, are always going to be at the sharp end of that.

DP: It is amazing to me. I’m a historian; I’m pretty cynical about things like progress. I know that things can be cyclical, that things we expect we achieve, we discover that ten, 20 years later, we did not achieve them. We’re seeing that right now with issues of integration, with the attempt to resegregate America racially.

HuffPost (3/14/25)

But I really felt we had gotten somewhere on the r-word, and really basic issues of respect. And all it takes is one billionaire constantly using that as his favorite insult, and now it’s back. It’s back everywhere. I see it all the time on social media. I’m sure it’s being said by kids at school to other kids. That’s something that never happened to my elder son—he’s 18, he’s about to graduate high school—that I’m aware of. I never heard that, but I bet kids following his footsteps are going to be called by the r-word. And I just thought we had beaten that one, and we clearly didn’t.

And I shouldn’t be surprised, as you say, right? I mean, that these things happen. We lose progress. But I’ll tell you that, in my heart, I thought we had beaten at least that slur, and we clearly haven’t.

JJ: I am surprised at my continued capacity to be surprised.

DP: Yeah.

JJ: When we spoke with you some years back, you had just co-written a white paper on extreme use of force by police, and the particular connection to people with disabilities. And part of what we were lamenting then was news media’s tendency to artificially compartmentalize disability issues.

So there were stories that focus on disabled people or on disability, and they can be good or bad or indifferent. They often have a “very special episode” feeling to them. But then, the point was, when the story is wildfires, there’s no thought about what might be the particular impact on people with disabilities. So it’s like spotlight or absence, but not ongoing, integrated consideration.

David Perry: “When you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.”

DP: The thing about disability, as opposed to other categories of difference—by which I mean race, gender, sexuality—is the ways in which people can move in and out of disability, the ways in which disability, while it is associated with issues like poverty, it does transcend it. It’s everywhere. Every family, everyone who lives long enough, if we’re lucky to live long enough, we will experience disability in our own bodies and minds. It is a different kind of difference, is one of the things that I like to say, lots of people like to say.

And so there is no issue in which disability is not part of it, including, as you say, the weather. And one of the things that was cut from my MSNBC story was when the wildfires were raging through California, conservative influencers—and these are not just people who tweet, but people who get to talk to Trump, right? People who get to talk to Musk, like Chris Rufo—started making fun of ASL, American Sign Language interpretation, when it came to wildfire announcements. Like, who are these people gesticulating? Well, there are deaf people who need to know how to evacuate, right? This is not a joke. This is not wokeness, right? This is trying to save lives, and I really do see it all of a piece that when the planes crashed, that first plane crashed right after Trump took office, the first thing Trump did was blame hiring people with disabilities for the FAA.

I think at the heart of their failures around Covid response is a real fear and dislike for disability and disease, and kind of a eugenic mentality. Just again and again, when you start to look—and I never want to say that disability is the only issue, or the most important issue; one of my kids is disabled, but also trans, right? I’m very aware of other ways in which other people are being attacked for different kinds of identities. But when you start to dig into the most harmful things the Trump administration is doing, I find disability there, again and again and again.

JJ: You’re speaking also to this absence of intersectionality in media, and we talked about this last time, too, because, “Oh, police brutality is a Black problem. It’s not a disabled problem.” People can’t be Black and have a disability, right? Media just can’t grok that, because those are two different sections in the paper, so it’s like they can’t combine them.

Indianapolis Star (3/6/25)

And I want to say, I have seen some coverage, not a tremendous amount, but some coverage, of likely and already occurring impacts of things like budget cuts and agency dysfunction on people with disabilities. A lot of that coverage was local: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Garden City Telegram in Kansas, the Indianapolis Star: local folks, local reporters—who are, I guess, just listening to folks saying, “This is going to close this program. This is going to impact us in this way”—seem to be doing the story as kind of a local government function story.

DP: Nine years has been a long time, and I would say that the disability community has organized around both media outreach, around getting disabled reporters into the media. There are things I just don’t write anymore, because there are too many better people working on them, who are—I mean, I’m also disabled. I’m dyslexic and have mental illness. But my primary relationship to writing about disability hasn’t always come from that.

Things have gotten better in the media about talking about disability. It’s still something that gets missed. It still gets compartmentalized and sidelined. There’s a number of national outlets, like Mother Jones or the Indypendent or 19th News, that have people who’ve come out of the disability community and are full-time journalists. But also I think local organizations have gotten very good at working with local media to tell better stories. And there’s social media organization, starting really with Crip the Vote, was the phrase on Twitter a long time ago, with Alice Wong out of the Bay Area….

JJ: And Andrew Pulrang.

DP: Yeah, that’s right. I just want to say, things have gotten better, and they’ve gotten better, in part, because the disability community and these wonderful leaders have pushed very hard. And it is particularly trying to show these connections across areas, so that when we talk about Medicaid, we also talk about Social Security, and we also talk about the Department of Education, and we see—that’s what I’m trying to do in this piece, is I’m trying to say, “Look, there’s a consistent problem here that manifests with these different policies.”

Man of Steele (1/15/25)

JJ: There is a line in your MSNBC piece, and maybe it was cut back from more, because you do say in response to Trump’s wild, weird claims after the plane crash, that “with mental illness, their lives are shortened because of the stress they have.” And you say, “Well, no, their lives are shortened when they don’t have healthcare, when they can’t get jobs, when they can’t get housing.”

And it does have the line, “because when a wildfire rages, no one communicates the threat in a way they can understand.” But that sentence alone does not convey the energy with which right wingers attacked the very idea of communicating to, in this case, deaf people or hard-of-hearing people in a wildfire. So just to say those things don’t exist, I see why that one sentence doesn’t convey quite the pushback on that.

DP: I mean, I could have written an entire essay, and I think other people did when it happened, on Chris Rufo’s specific attack on ASL, and the way they got picked up by Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and these other really influential people online, attacking ASL, right, ASL! It should be the least controversial kind of adaptation, right? We’ve had it for a long time. Everyone understands what ASL is, and yet, here we go.

JJ: It’s like pushing the limits to see what we will tolerate.

CBS Mornings (3/3/25)

Finally, I will have a positive note, which was just a little snippet on CBS Mornings on March 3, where they were talking about cuts to DoE, and they had just a fraction of a moment with a woman whose kid has autism, and she was asked what a downsized DoE could mean if federal oversight, as we’re talking about, goes to another agency, which is of course what they’re saying. They’re not just going to shutter DoE, they’re going to shuffle these things off somewhere else. And she said, “My fear is that other schools, instead of helping a child with a disability get the services that they need in the school, they’re going to fix their football field, and it’s going to be OK, because nobody is regulating special education.”

DP: That’s really, really good. Yeah.

JJ: That’s a real good nugget that pulls together the fact of something that might be portrayed as abstract—budget-cutting, efficiency—the way that that actually falls down and affects people’s lives.

DP: We didn’t talk about it, but my framing for this piece was my son, who was 18, saying my name for the first time, which was an amazing moment, and we’ve had lots of these moments, but what I want to say is, they don’t just happen. They’re not just things that magically happen. It takes work and it takes funding and it takes policy and it takes good government and it takes schools, it takes all these different things, and I just don’t see that work being done. And I see where it is being done, the support being stripped away, and it’s terrible to watch.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with David Perry. His piece, “The Trump Administration Is Ready to Abandon Kids Like My Son,” is up at MSNBC.com. Thank you so much, David Perry, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DP: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Photograph Source: Amada44 – CC BY 3.0

One halcyon spring day in 1903, the 69-year-old anatomist and naturalist Dr. James Bell Pettigrew sat at the top of a sloping street on the outskirts of St. Andrews, Scotland, perched inside a petrol-powered airplane of his own design. Over the course of 40 years, ever since he began his aeronautical experiments in London in 1864, Pettigrew had constructed dozens of working models of various flying apparatus.

From anatomical dissection and observations of animals in the wild and at the London Zoo, Pettigrew had come to conceive of all creatures—whether on land, in water, or the air—as propelling themselves by throwing their bodies into spiraling curves, such that their movements were akin to waves in fluid, or to waves of sound.

Pettigrew’s “Ornithopter”

Instead of driving the wings vertically as in other flying machines modeled on animal flight, Pettigrew’s “ornithopter” emulated the movement that he had discovered to be universal in flying creatures: rhythmic figure-of-eight curves. To permit this undulatory motion, Pettigrew had furnished the root of the wing with a ball-and-socket joint; to regulate the several movements of the vibratory wing—comprised of bamboo cane from which issued tapering rods of whalebone covered in a thin sheet of India rubber—he employed a cross-system of elastic bands. A two-stroke engine’s piston drove this elaborate apparatus of helical biological mimicry.

The ornithopter covered a distance of about 65 feet during its maiden flight before crashing, breaking both the contraption’s spiral whalebone wings and its pilot’s own spiral hip. Convalescence gave Dr. Pettigrew the opportunity to begin work on Design in Nature: Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrangements in the Inorganic and Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life, Growth, Rhythms, &c., Especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals. In January 1908, as he was nearing its completion, Pettigrew looped back at the work’s end to reiterate what he had stated so vociferously at the beginning—the absolute primacy of design by a “Great First Cause” and “Omni–Present Framer and Upholder of the Universe.”

After a lengthy essay considering the antiquity of man—and once again stressing that the human physical form had altered not at all for at least some 10,000 years—he concluded:

Man is not in any sense the product of evolution. He is not compounded of an endless number of lower animal forms which merge into each other by inseparable gradations and modifications from the monera up to man. …

He is the highest of all living forms. The world was made for him and he for it …  Everything was made to fit and dovetail into every other thing … There was moreover no accident or chance. On the contrary, there was forethought, prescience, and design.

Disagreements With Darwin

Across the three volumes, 1,416 pages, and nearly 2,000 illustrations that made up his magnum opus Design in Nature, Pettigrew barely mentioned Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which he found “lame, halting, and impotent.” Though Pettigrew deeply admired the English naturalist—who had on more than one occasion (as had T. H. Huxley, Richard Owen, John Lubbock, St. George Mivart, and dozens of other leading men of science) visited Pettigrew at London’s Hunterian Museumof the Royal College of Surgeons of England to view his state-of-the-art anatomical and physiological preparations—Darwin seemed to Pettigrew only tentatively confident of the very theory he had proposed to explain Nature’s “endless forms most beautiful.”

He expected that, within a generation, few would recall Darwinism as anything other than a passing fancy. What Pettigrew could not excuse were the egregious errors in Darwin’s pronouncement about the spiraling motions of Clematis, Convolvulus, honeysuckle, hops, and many other plants. Whatever positive contributions the retiring naturalist had made with his research on twining plants were undermined by his inexact language and thinking. Pettigrew strenuously objected to Darwin’s use of the term “reflex action” for these plants’ behavior, since this was a phrase used for action in nervous systems—of which Clematis, Convolvulus, and their cousins possessed none.

A Lifelong Fascination With Spirals

By way of a few ingenious experiments—conducted back in 1865, after reading Darwin’s “On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants”—Pettigrew had utterly demolished its author’s “irritability theory” for the movement of the green chimeras. Just as with spiral teeth, claws, horns, muscles, and bones, spirally-turning plant tendrils were in no way the result of external contact. These whirling, twirling structures, as free of contact as the ocean-suspended spiraling egg cases of sharks and dogfish, danced to some wholly invisible music.

Pettigrew confessed himself totally spellbound by the mystery of Nature’s most ubiquitous, liquid, and quixotic form—the spiral. Though he had scrutinized this universal cipher from the macrocosmic spiral nebulae down to the dextro- and sinistro-helical microcosmic molecules of the periodic table, Pettigrew was left baffled by the question of its origin. The best that he could say was that the answer “by no means lies on the surface.”

Overwhelmed as he was by the world’s archetypal whorl, he was sure of one thing—these marvelous spiral arrangements could not be of purely physical origin. A reviewer of Pettigrew’s Lancet series on circulation in plants and animals declared that the distinguished anatomist was a “spiralist” who found that organs were not only constituted spirally, but that they functioned spirally too.

Putting Isaac Roberts’ astonishing 1888 photographs of the Great Nebula in Andromeda and other spiral nebulae to cosmic effect at his argument’s outset, Pettigrew then immersed the reader in a cascade of more humble spiral forms—the mineral prochlorite; ram’s horns; bacteria from the River Thames; fossil algae carpogonia; dozens of figures of spiral fronds, floral bracts, stems, leaves, tendrils, and seeds in plants.

Design in Nature’s plates of spirals in the animal world started with spermatozoa (of crayfish, rabbit, field mice, wood shrike, goldfinch, creeper, perch, frog, rat, and human) and ran up the great chain of being through: frog ganglia; dozens of species of Foraminifera; the exquisite Nautilus pompilius; Devonian, Silurian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and contemporary shells; the horns of goats, gazelles, and antelope; the human cochlea; almost every section of the vertebrate skeleton, from the phalanges of the Indian elephant to the turbinated inner bones of the human skull. The human umbilical cord looked for all the world like a waterspout or the homely and helically aspiring English Hops, those twining stems of Darwin’s go-to research subject.

All these were pictured in the first 50 pages of the book; hundreds more images were liberally spread through the complete three volumes. At times, while reading Design in Nature, the spiral risks losing all significance, so promiscuously ubiquitous is its form.

The Human Heart: A Perfect Spiral Mystery

At the center of this dizzying array lay the sacred secret that had so profoundly occupied Aristotle and Aquinas, Leonardo and Vesalius—the human heart. The heart’s sevenfold spiral structure was the mystery of mysteries, its form preserving perfectly the sense of both its muscular contractions and the interior circulatory patterns of its blood. Pettigrew had himself discovered this as a young medical student at the University of Edinburgh; so impressed had his professor been by Pettigrew’s dissections that he invited him to deliver the prestigious Croonian lecture at the Royal Society of London in 1860.

The University of Edinburgh was, in Pettigrew’s medical student days, at the zenith of its reputation: James Syme was dazzling the world with his bold pioneering surgery; James Young Simpson had—with dinner guests at his own 52 Queen Street table—proved the safety of chloroform as an obstetric anesthetic; with his methodical use of the microscope, John Hughes Bennett inaugurated a new era in the teaching of clinical medicine; Joseph Lister’s careful application of carbolic acid (phenol) to wounds, dressings, and instruments—though mocked initially by his medical colleagues—had revolutionized the practice of surgery.

When Pettigrew reminisced that the rivalry among these stellar physicians had been “a case of diamond cut diamond,” he recognized their fame by employing a most apt metaphor. Cutting—with a varied repertoire of scalpels, lancets, and scissors—was the surgeon’s special art. Pettigrew’s tutor in the art was Professor of Anatomy John Goodsir, who, with his large, powerful, finely shaped hands never failed to wield the scalpel “with a dexterity and grace truly remarkable.”

Innovative Dissection Methods and the Gold Medal

At the end of the 1857–58 winter term, Professor Goodsir gave out as the subject for the senior anatomy gold medal: “The Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart.” This Gordian knot of anatomy had over the previous three centuries foiled the efforts of Vesalius, Albinus, Haller, and others to unravel it.

Back home, between sessions at his family’s country home in Lanarkshire, the 24-year-old Pettigrew at once proceeded to dissect in large numbers every kind of heart within reach, making careful drawings and notes of each. Beginning with sheep, calf, ox, and horse, he found that he had to devise a new mode of dissection that would allow both sufficient hardness to preserve the anatomical structures, and ample softness so as to tease out their multitudinous tissue layers.

Having exhausted a battery of methylated spirits and other chemicals, he hit upon the expedient of stuffing and gently distending the ventricles of the heart with a truly Scottish material—dry oatmeal. Slowly boiling the hearts for four to five hours, he could get rid of all the external fat, blood vessels, nerves, lymphatics, and cellular tissue.

A fortnight to three weeks hardening in a bath of methylated spirits followed, after which he was able to separate and peel off the muscular fibers of the ventricles as if they were layers of an onion. The layers were of two kinds: muscular fibers from the outside of the heart wound in a spiral direction from left to right, progressing downwards; the internal fibers ran in an opposite spiral direction from right to left, upwards.

In fact, the internal and external layers of the muscular fibers of each and every one of the more than 100 vertebrate hearts he had dissected formed two sets of opposite spirals which crossed each other, the crossings becoming more oblique towards the center. These inner and outer layers were further divided into a pair of left- and right-handed spiral sets. There was, especially in the left ventricle, a most perfect spiral symmetry, one that rivaled the Great Andromeda Nebula.

As gifted a model maker as he was a dissector, Pettigrew found this now-exposed double spiral heart to be an anatomical puzzle of the first order, for the external muscle fibers were seamlessly and spirally continuous with the internal muscle fibers at both the apex and base of the ventricles. One day Pettigrew came down to dinner a little earlier than usual, and, seeing a newspaper lying on the table, felt an impulse to roll it up obliquely from one corner—as grocers do in making conical paper bags.

To Pettigrew’s surprise, the lines of print on the layers of newspaper ran in different directions according to a graduated order: the lines on the outer layers ran spirally from left to right downwards, becoming more oblique as the central layer was reached; the lines of print on the inner layer ran spirally from right to left upwards, becoming more vertical as they moved away from the center. The newspaper print on the two layers crossed at widening angles, forming an X, as the center was approached.

The print was seamless at both base and apex of the paper cone, resembling the arrangement of muscle fibers in the heart. There were, in effect, a series of complicated figure-of-eight loops, arranged in a marvelously mathematical pattern of great complexity and beauty. “Here,” he wrote, “was the whole thing in a nutshell. It was a case of the reading turning in or involuting at the apex and of the reading turning out or evoluting at the base.” Pettigrew’s newspaper model showed that the heart’s double-helical structure—now known as the helical ventricular myocardial band (HVMB)—was essentially a triple-twisted Möbius strip.

Crying “Eureka!” Pettigrew ransacked the Lankarshire fish shops for the hearts of cod, salmon, sunfish, and turbot. He also lucked into securing the heart of a monster shark killed in the Firth of Forth. From the large hotels he collected several fine sea turtle hearts, as well as a land tortoise and an alligator. Raiding the poulterers too, he got the hearts of duck, goose, capercaillie, turkey, and one “splendid” swan’s heart.

From fish to frog to turtle, the muscular fiber arrangement—though interesting—shed no light on the complicated arrangement in the ventricles of bird and mammal. (The pattern in the bird exactly matched that of the mammal except that, in the right ventricle of the bird, a muscular valve took the place of the fibrous tricuspid valve of mammals.) In the small hours of the morning, in his humble student lodgings, Pettigrew worked away now at dissections of sheep, calf, ox, horse, deer, pig, porpoise, seal, lion, giraffe, camel, and human—112 dissections and associated drawings in all.

When the day for awarding the gold medal arrived, 400 students crowded the large anatomical theater to hear the altogether unknown Pettigrew’s name pronounced. Professor Goodsir asked Pettigrew to call on him the next day, anxious to win the heart dissection preparations for the University’s Anatomical Museum. The 112 neat glass jars can still be found there today.

He also invited young Pettigrew to report on his discoveries to the Royal Society of London; Pettigrew delivered his address, “On the Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart,” to the Royal Society the very same week that Origin of Species was published by John Murray of Albemarle Street, a short walk from the Royal Society lecture hall. That anyone might attribute such an ingeniously crafted organ as the mammalian heart to mere chance, Pettigrew believed, was sheer madness.

The Spiral in Animal Locomotion

Nature’s variegated spiral structures, with the mammalian heart always for him the epitome, represented but one panel of the triptych that Pettigrew would go on to assemble over the next half century. Volume Two of Design in Nature is devoted solely to spiral movement in circulation (although the circulation section dealt with both plant and lower animal circulatory systems, three-quarters of this study focused on mammals and man); Volume Three to the spiral as locomotion’s characteristic form.

In both arenas of animal physiology, Pettigrew found a spectacular resonance: movement at once precedes and follows structure, the direction of movement in living things being in every instance determined by the composition and configuration of kinetic spiral parts. This resonance seemed to reach right down to the atomic level. Unlike the closed system of the heart, the spiraling lines of atoms and molecules were arranged so that matter could be added in any amount, in unlimited directions. An open flow of energy and form was the basis for growth and progression in all creatures.

Reflected in the vertebrate skeleton, this open attitude also made graceful locomotion possible. Pettigrew quoted his mentor John Goodsir: “The peculiar spiral attitudes into which the human body can be thrown are explained by the spiral curve of the vertebral articular surfaces, and the spiral arrangement of the muscles. No mammal can throw its trunk into those spiral curves which subserve the balance of the human frame and confer the peculiar grace and expression of its movements.”

Only birds—especially his beloved swallows and swifts, which darted round the turrets of Swallowgate, the stone residence that Pettigrew had built at St. Andrews, and across the broad moor leading to the nearby sea cliffs—could rival the poetry of motion executed by the human body, their movements freed in the less resistant medium of air.

The earthbound human body’s idiosyncratic spiraling structure liberated the hands to sculpt clay, tie rope, and grasp chalk, paintbrush, and scalpel in order to go inside the organs of Life and then represent them in color and line. Bony spirals hidden beneath spiral muscles flexed and extended to skip, leap, creep, crawl, wriggle, tumble, skate, march, flip, prance, moonwalk. The polka-ing, pirouette-ing, schottish-ing, waltzing, two-stepping human danced upon a near infinity of corporeal eddies.

When Pettigrew took up the third strand of his argument from design, he began again with structures—the muscular and osseous systems, which he found intimately complimentary. Skeletal plates suggest that each part of our bony frame was but a partial realization of the sort of spiral geometry Pettigrew had discovered in the heart. The halfway twisting femur, humerus, tibia, fibula, ulna, and radius reached their fully spiral apotheosis in clavicle, pelvis, and scapula—each of which approached once again the geometry of the Möbius strip.

The Forgotten Legacy of Design in Nature

Published posthumously, just months before the centennial of Darwin’s birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of On the Origin of Species—celebrations which Darwinians fully exploited to advance a false picture of Darwin as a rabid opponent of teleology—Design in Nature dropped from sight as rapidly as Pettigrew’s ornithopter dropped from the sky over the St. Andrews moorland. The journal Nature’s full-page review savaged the work’s teleological argument, wanly submitting that had Pettigrew lived to complete the editing of his opus, he would have “expunged or modified” its conclusions.

Biostatistician Raymond Pearl was less generous, calling “the ponderous work” “probably the most extensive and serious single contribution to humorous literature which has appeared in recent years,” and declaring Pettigrew’s “spiral philosophy”—that “the Creator fashioned men and corkscrews on the same plan”—as “medieval as any cathedral.” Not a single work of contemporary biology or natural history—including D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), which devoted considerable discussion to spiral forms—cited Design in Nature.

A century on from its publication, however, Design in Nature holds up not only as an unsurpassed survey of biological form, but as a provocative modern inquiry into the causation of form. Pettigrew’s magnum opus is also a phenomenological masterpiece whose lively prose and gorgeous illustrations might serve to inspire a new generation of “spiralists.”

This article was originally published on The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material/. This version was produced for the Observatory by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post Why Seashells Resemble Spiraling Galaxies and the Human Heart appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dr. Kevin Dann.

“It is absolutely shameful that Blessed Mhlanga has been thrown behind bars simply because he gave voice to a war veteran’s criticism of Zimbabwe’s government,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator, Muthoki Mumo, in Nairobi. “Zimbabwean authorities should free Mhlanga unconditionally and respond to their citizens’ concerns, rather than punishing the messenger.”

Mhlanga, who works with the privately owned Heart and Soul TV, said on the social media platform X that three armed men came to his office searching for him on February 17, soon after which the police phoned him to ask him to come in for questioning. On February 21, the police issued a statement seeking information about Mhlanga’s whereabouts. 

Mhlanga responded to the police summons on February 24 and was arrested on two counts of transmission of data messages “inciting violence or damage to property,” according to the Zimbabwe chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights network, and Mhlanga’s lawyer Chris Mhike. 

On February 25, prosecutors opposed Mhlanga’s bail application, arguing that he was a flight risk, Mhike told CPJ. The court is due to decide on his application on February 27.

Authorities allege that the offenses were committed in Mhlanga’s November 2024 and January 2025 interviews with Blessed Geza, a veteran of Zimbabwe’s war for independence from white minority rule, who called on President Emmerson Mnangagwa to resign, accusing him of nepotism, corruption, and failing to address economic issues.

If found guilty, Mhlanga could be jailed for up to five years and fined up to US$700 under the 2021 Cyber and Data Protection Act.

Mhlanga was previously assaulted and arrested in 2022 while covering the attempted arrest of an opposition politician.

CPJ’s phone calls and messages to Zimbabwe’s National Prosecution Authority communications officer Angelina Munyeriwa and police spokesperson Paul Nyathi went unanswered.

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

‘Francisco Goya, ‘Disasters of War’ ‘What good is a cup?’

Naivety can be rectified by experience. Yet stupid, and its attendant willful and belligerent ignorance, is a hazard to all near it. Trump careens down his death-besotted path as the Democrats simply step out of his way.

Democrats, smugly muttering, “I told you so,” will not suffice. Antiduopolists could retort, we warned you against rigging the apparatus of the Democratic Party in an attempt to enthrone Hillary, then, because stupid tends to double down on fuckwit, rigging the process for Biden.

The arming of genocidal Zionists didn’t help you either with citizens who take their conscience into consideration when deciding whether to vote or not.

MAGA will continue to act on behalf of the insatiable greed of oligarchs, and will continue feeding the bloodlust of spiteful soreheads. Yet Democrats will only regret the loss of a status quo that serves no one but their own donors.

Francisco Goya, Proud Monsters

As noted above, stupid cannot be rectified. The only redemption possible is: a movement toward novelty. Two party despotism took us to this dismal spot. Time to chart a new course appropriating a compass constructed of the sublime material of one’s own heart, mind and soul.

At present, the needle of the heart’s compass points towards Palestine.

Impersonal Catastrophes…that feel so damn personal: Tragedy in Palestine, that could well be one’s own: Speaking as the son of a mother who escaped Nazi, Germany on Kindertransport, then delivered into the homes of strangers in the UK, as her father, had been arrested by the Gestapo and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp: I ask — I implore you:

Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?

The news of the cosmos arrives as blood, bone, and other urgent dreams of flesh, soil and breath — thus: Do dispatches from history cause you to recall wild thunderstorms shaking mid-August afternoons? Then silence returns. And what of the ghostly lamentation of empires, risen like sunflowers, teeming in the summer air, then withering and falling within an interlocking eternity of arrivals and departures? Comes a vision risen on the horizon of the World’s Mind: a towering, crimson nimbus laden with the blood of Palestinian children.

Francisco Goya, Enterrar y callar Bury them and keep quiet

At Passover Seder, my family, among our traditional reading of tribal mythos, chanted liturgy and song; we joined voices in the declaration, “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” i.e., “Next year in Jerusalem”.

Thus, turning eastward in the direction of my mythical home: a catastrophe shakes my heart; a decimation of the soul.

Witness/Rebuke — the sneering pride of those in possession of minds made of bullets, of those seething in their death cult wherein rifles, missiles and bombs seemed to be held as liturgical accoutrements.

Mortified/Enraged — compelled to insist the killers and their dissembling apologists answer the following:

How did it come to be that you are driven to attempt to murder all beauty by stabbing at the heart of the world with a knife you have placed on the violated altar of our God — who you have transfigured into a god of death?

I ask you again: Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?

You cannot walk through your house without wading through blood.

Angry ghosts shuffle upon your rooftops. The ceilings of your homes stare down at you in rebuke.

We, the living, bestowed, albeit in reluctance, to be the eyes of Heaven and Hell, continue to witness the unfolding abomination.

We could not forgive ourselves — we would loath the very air agitated by our own words — if we were to turn away.

Francisco Goya, Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer (Sad forebodings of what must come to pass)

Once again we must remind ourselves to consult the heart’s compass: Palestine must be at the present heart of all things…

In places —veiled, everywhere — from sight:
the past refuses to depart,
the dead do not rest,
the unspoken sings in endless stanzas of verse,
musical notes rise as mountains,
and spirits grief and renewal envelop all things in concentric rings.
At this moment, this place is Palestine,
Besieged Palestine, located in the indomitable heart,

Here, now, we are induced to dismantle despair’s ad hoc architecture and begin building living monuments to the grace bequeathed in every breath — the quality known to us humble human beings as compassion.

Blood of the blameless will continue to pool the streets. Bombs will bounce Levant rubble. Lies, thick as Old Testament locust, swarm the air.

Israel, I have stared into your face until I disappeared. I have inhabited the shadow of your mendacity. To this day, I stumble through the landscape of my heart amid ruins left by your campaign of genocide-justifying lies.

I drown everyday in the rising of your blood-tide, unloosed by means of your god-ordained guns and hate-garrisoned pride.

Your children, from birth, fed on lie-rancid milk, have grown rifles for hands; their hearts are now predator drones; their breath meets the world as bombs.

Francisco de Goya, Well-Known Folly

In childhood, I was instructed to plant trees to provide cooling shade for a desert homeland, according to the lore of my people, now regained due to the death agonies inflicted on six million of our tribe.

Trees, you told me, that would serve as living tributes in memory of my murdered kinsfolk in the death mills of Europe. But you watered those trees with the blood of the innocent.

The desert air speaks: The history that made you has become a harvest of shame. The scent of those flowering trees cannot conceal the reek of tens of thousands of corpses.

No matter how innumerable in number — the fragrance of a billion flowering trees will never conceal the reek of genocide.

Go to the dead, those you left in Europe and you have killed in Palestine, and let their ghosts do to you what they will.

Francisco Goya, No hay quien los socorra There is no one to help them

Often, when the crimes of Israel are enumerated, Zionist apologists bandy the assertion, “the history of the Middle East is too complex for such over-simplified critiques.”

The assertion amounts to a noxious and death-besotted display of casuistry. What is complex about starving and slaughtering men, women, and children with agendas of ethnic cleansing?

My maternal DNA relates the history of my Ashkenazi Jewish origins. In brief, out of the Levant, we came, delivered as slaves into southern Italy then, when freed, into the north of Italy then settling into the German Rhineland.

Not a single Palestinian acted in the manner of the various oppressors whose crimes against my ancestors’ humanity drove us ever northeastward across Europe. Not a single Palestinian harmed my ancestors during the anti-Jewish rampages of 1096 across the Rhine river region of Germany, nor shattered glass on Kristallnacht, nor held positions in the Frankfurt-based IG Farben corporation where Zyklon B had been manufactured to be used as an agent of mass extermination against Jews in death camps across the face of Europe.

Yet the Palestinians lost their homeland and are forced to live on their knees in a perpetual state of submission and contrition for the crimes of Germany. Why doesn’t the Zionist state stand in the Rhineland? In this light, Germany’s unwavering support of Israel seems convenient and self-serving, at best.

German and other European leaders’ blinkered reaction ensures the ethnic cleansing inherent to Zionism continues without consequence. Can you imagine any other nation, other than the United States, actions being defended, much less enabled, as they committed crimes against humanity to the degree of the Zionist state?

Goya, Francisco, There is no remedy

My mother, who, as I noted above, escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport, in the final years of her life came to question her Zionist affiliations. I’m certain viewing the overkill, to say the least, a constant in the response of Zionists towards Palestinian acts of resistance, she would express a deep sense of shame, as do I, for the lack of humanity displayed by our troubled tribe in the present day Levant.

My Ashkenazi DNA, carrying my ancestor’s memory of oppression, cries out, from my blood and bones, to stand for and with the people of Palestine.

I possess dual US/German citizenship, because the Nazis stripped my mother’s family of their citizenship — which I have since reclaimed. My ancestral homeland, on the maternal side, at least, is Germany.

The Zionist “right of return” is based on a number of noxious fallacies e.g., 1) the White Man’s Burden-type, racist mindset of European colonialist settlers — who believed that they possessed the “manifest destiny” to dispossess “less civilized” inhabitants of their native lands, in order to, as the Zionist propaganda trope goes, “to make the desert bloom”; 2) The ancient, tribal myths of the Old Testament/Torah.

If you listened to the rebuke of the dead, you would be compelled to do the same. If only such a thing could come to be.

Francisco Goya, They escape among the flames’

As for myself, I have heard an earful. I must affix my attention upon the composition of these words of poetry — or else I might go sobbing into the streets, reeling in lamentation.

On Genocide and Indomitable Feathers

In periodic dreams, all manner of things had wings: Tortoises. Ukuleles. Rocks. Rhinoceros on rooftops. Coffins — migrating flocks of them cast long shadows under the afternoon sun.

Then a crushing tyranny — The Keepers Of The Separation Wall And Perpetual Shackle — stormed the land and seized power. Wings were clipped and confiscated. The earth withered into wasteland.

Phalanxes of police descended on university campuses; once, sanctums where the young were instructed in the art of flight.

Abandoned dreams were converted into slave ships then launched to cross dark, storm-tossed skyways.

The ships docked at islands of imperium in the sky. Therein, forsaken dreams served at the caprice of a brutal regime sustained by the life-force of usurped lives.

The overseers were squads of monsters known as: The Sum of All Fears.

Yet, across the earth, in hidden places, in dreams within dreams within dreams, in sanctuaries of the heart, refuges unreachable to the usurpers, banished imagination brooded, molted feathers, then took flight across internal skies.

Shortly thereafter, great birds of impossible beauty winged westward towards vast reservoirs of the collective soul and in their beaks bore back water to quench the thirst of those stranded in parched lands and restore the memory of flight.

Flights of the indomitable heart such as these are winging, at this moment, to the spaces of the heart where young and old, our wings restored, will continue wage a campaign of conscience to put an end to genocide.

Another thing I know, birds of the restorative heart will not make their nests in the absent heart of either of the present political system’s war parties.

Francisco Goya, Contra el bien general Against the common good

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Phil Rockstroh.

forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and deploying this multilayered PSYOPS of direct and covert operations have been brought to us, partially, by the Edward Bernays of the World … now we are here: Fear and Loathing in Our Delusional and Self-Incriminating Selves! (Haeder, May 28, 2023)

Versus:

Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S.

But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa.

Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up (source)

Now now, I know we can’t in PC/PAEC (Politically Approved by Elites Correct) society point out a spade from a diamond. Ahh, even after Nakba 75? Who stopped it, a celebration-remembrance-sadness of that genocide?

Sorry, but it does matter who controls the levers of power, the narrative, the engines of Press-Propaganda-Entertainment. As well as, politics, marketing, education? Nakba is a lie. You don’t see a pattern here?

In a statement Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said, “We will fight the ‘Nakba’ lie with full strength and we won’t allow the Palestinians to continue to spread lies and distort history.”

Ahh, this commemoration, by the UN, of all organizations, is despicable, according to another Jew, and that is a-okay language, no?

In a recorded statement, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, said that the organization’s decision was “shameful” and would harm any efforts to find a peaceful solution to the generations-old conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.

Asking other U.N. representatives to boycott the commemoration, he said, “[A]ttending this despicable event means destroying any chance of peace by adopting the Palestinian narrative calling the establishment of the state of Israel a disaster while ignoring Palestinian hate, incitement, terror and refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.”

“UN Recognition of Palestinian Displacement Angers Israel” — One headline, and just replace, “…angers Israel” with, “…. angers Christians, Zionists, Israel-Firsters, Members of Congress, Members of the MSM, politicians, AIPAC, etc., et. …”

Shit, recognition of that Liberty, that United States SHIP, and more poison arrows launched by the Isra-Hellions:

Shit, that crime memorial is coming up, June 8 = The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War.

Ahh, can we protest that other anniversary? By virtue of General Assembly Resolution 273, Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949.  In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war , about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands.

Can we remember June 8 without being smeared?

For more information on Israel’s crimes, and the USS Liberty, go here: IAK.

Now transitioning to more racism and bigotry and Big Brother-ism by Jewish leaders, ZioCryptos, and the like, let’s scour the WWW for those attacks on Pink Floyd’s front man: Jews will attack Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, and they will get countless thousands of lies published in countless broken media outfits immediately. Just Google-Gulag search: “Roger Waters and Berlin Fascism.” Hate, pure lies, and the hasbara and powerful Jewish hatred of thinking Rogers is an antisemite!

Again, a concert, and Israel speaks up.

Israel’s foreign ministry later criticized Waters on social media, tweeting on May 24: “Good morning to everyone but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”

 

I am sorry to say that the Jewish folk I have been reading about, listening to, and researching throughout my decades, even from day one of college onward, many (not all)  are indeed a clear and present danger to straight-up research and critical thinking. Then, just move over to the fact in my humble opinion, many powerful Jews hate Russia, Russians, and anyone who might dare question the UkroNazi Proxy War with Russia, started, oh, hell, way before 2014.

Self-proclaimed Jewish criminal, Kolomoyskyi is the dirty banker and the dirty funder of Zelensky:

 

[Photo: On the left, Zelensky in circle behind Kholomoisky. On the right, Zelensky on the campaign trail is followed by one of Kholomoisky’s bodyguards.]

But, read this Jewish rag in Isra-Hell, Haaretz | World News/

“Ukraine Enlists Jewish Leaders to Lobby Israel for Arms”

Ukraine recently requested air defense systems and training from Israel, saying that Iran would use the deployment of its weapons systems in Europe to refine their capabilities. Still, Israel maintains that it would not send military assistance to Ukraine

A senior Ukrainian official close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on world Jewry to push Jerusalem to arm his country with defensive weapons on Wednesday, only two days after Moscow warned Israel that supplying military equipment to Ukraine would “destroy the political relations between the two countries.”

Of course, I am disgusted by any racist group calling on “all Jews worldwide to continue the murder of Russians and Ukrainians in Donbass, and now, throughout Ukraine and into Russia.

This is merchant of death war mongering, and it has to stop, stop first by beginning to call a Jewish Fascist a Jewish Fascist when you come in contact with him or her or them: Here, more lies, blatant valorizing of a corrupt and criminal man, Zelensky!

1. The most important Jewish leader in the world (source)

The past week has turned us all into experts on Ukraine, now at the center of every conversation. Did you know how big it is? (When you lay it over the U.S. map, it stretches from New York to Chicago.) Who knew that we were actually using the Russian city names and not the Ukrainian ones (it’s Kyiv, not Kiev; Lviv, not Lvov; and Kharkiv, not Kharkov). And their president—did you know that he is Jewish?

Volodymyr Zelensky is probably the most admired Jewish leader the world has to offer right now. Before entering politics in 2018, Zelensky was a popular comedian (and you can’t get any more Jewish than that); he does not often speak about his Jewish identity, but he has never tried to hide it. In a country like Ukraine, which is still struggling with a painful legacy of antisemitism, Zelensky’s Jewishness has always been present.

For Jews across the world, Zelensky is now a source of pride: a young, inexperienced leader who is putting his life at risk for his people by leading a nation of 40 million people in opposing a ruthless Russian aggressor.

In his inauguration speech, Zelensky famously told lawmakers not to hang his portrait on their walls. “I do not want my picture in your offices: The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”

True to form, Zelensky maintained his unassuming, direct style when crisis hit. His video messages, posted several times a day, have been helping reassure the Ukrainian people. He spoke from his office and from the streets of Kyiv, even as Russian troops closed in on the capital, and when the fighting intensified, Zelensky candidly shared with all Ukrainians the fact that he has been marked by the Russians as “target number one” and that his family is “target number two.” But when the U.S. offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to somewhere safer, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

I’m writing this column on Sunday, as Russian forces, bogged down and weakened by courageous Ukrainians armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, or sometimes just a large pole they picked up on the side of the street, still threaten the capital. Zelensky is leading the effort to save his nation, though most foreign intelligence services still think he’s fighting a losing battle.

So, this POS war crimes leader, Zelensky, *elensky because the letter “Z” has been outlawed, and Ukraine and Zelensky with the one-two-three punch of US and UK, with their Kill List, you have to imagine that in the USA and Canada and UK and EU and Europe, all brains have been thrown out the window, or the voice of reason has gone where?

Read Caitlin: “Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This”

Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

[…]

One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful.

Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes.

Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so.

But then, this is another form — of propaganda . . . denial, and denigration and plain ignoring alternative views, even those that are consistent and repeated:

But it’s the 74th Anniversary of an illegitimate state, apartheid and ethnic cleansing one albet>  This is how ZioAzovLensky rolls, and even the corrupt CIA-controlled Wikipedia has some facts here on the murderous Jews, Zelenksy’s mother ship, historical grounding, who called themselves Zionists, but I know very few Jews who are not ZIONISTS, overtly or covertly:

A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.

The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the officially recognised Jewish leadership of Palestine, remained cooperative with the British. But in 1944 the Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule, thus joining Lehi, which had been active against the authorities throughout the war. Both were small, dissident militias of the right-wing Revisionist movement. They attacked police and government targets in response to British immigration restrictions. They intentionally avoided military targets, to ensure that they would not hamper the British war effort against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.

The armed conflict escalated during the final phase of World War II, when the Irgun declared a revolt in February 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Starting from the assassination of Baron Moyne by Lehi in 1944, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as the Hunting Season, effectively halting the insurrection. However, in autumn 1945, following the end of World War II in both Europe (April–May 1945) and Asia (September, 1945), when it became clear that the British would not permit significant Jewish immigration and had no intention of immediately establishing a Jewish state, the Haganah began a period of co-operation with the other two underground organisations. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement.

The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets.^[6] The Resistance Movement dissolved amidst recriminations in July 1946, following the King David Hotel bombing. The Irgun and Lehi started acting independently, while the main underground militia, Haganah, continued acting mainly in supporting Jewish immigration. The Haganah again briefly worked to suppress Irgun and Lehi operations, due to the presence of a United Nations investigative committee in Palestine. After the UN Partition Plan resolution was passed on 29 November 1947, the civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs eclipsed the previous tensions of both with the British. However, British and Zionist forces continued to clash throughout the period of the civil war up to the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.

Within the United Kingdom there were deep divisions over Palestine policy. Dozens of British soldiers, Jewish militants, and civilians died during the campaigns of insurgency. The conflict led to heightened antisemitism in the United Kingdom. In August 1947, after the hanging of two abducted British sergeants, there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting across the United Kingdom. The conflict caused tensions in the United Kingdom–United States relations.

Putin and Russians and those of us who actually want Russia to have a safe border, peace, and zero NATO interference, see Zelensky and his Jewish Lords — Kagan Familias, Nuland, Blinken, Yellen, Sherman, Garland, and hundreds of others in the Biden White House and thousands of others in the Military Industrial Expanded (finance, computing, surveillence) Complex and millions more in the world of turning a dollar on death — as the ENEMY. Murderous, conniving, hateful, slick enemies numero uno, those espousing war with China and war with Russia.

I know Dissident Voice is reluctant to publish voices that might lean toward a Pepe Escobar critique of the Israel Hell unleashed on the world. I get it. But, the fact is violence and terror, those are right up Zelensky’s alley, and this war that UK and USA and Five Eyes and EU have unleashed will not end soon, because Ukraine in the minds of many is Israel 2.0. An added “benefit” for these monsters: Expect those weapons that USA taxpayer footed the bill for to bring down some commercial airlines in a neighborhood near-by soon.

 

We are a soiled Western Culture, and we have seeded the rest of the world with our feces — high tech, low tech, money, land theft, pollution, exploitation, consumerism, throw-away mentality, sanctions, blood lust, coups, supporting despots, money laundering and gold theft and assets removal. Loans from Hell, and alas, here we are, in a putrid world, a day before the big Monday Holiday, Memorial Day, and we are straddled by syphilitic monsters running the world and our own populous generally marked for death, marked as marks, these, the billionaires, the fleecers and many left and right, Jewish or not, they are Zionists and Israel-Firsters who have sold us down the Ukrainian toilet.

Israeli newspapers point out the victories?

 

 

These are THEIR graphics, and by me point these out, I am deplatformed, stopped from teaching, pushed to the excrement posts of publishing my books anywhere

But leave it to the Paranoid Former Nazis and the disgusting ADL and AIPAC and Mossad loving Israelis to attack us all attacking them:

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters says Berlin gig controversy a ‘smear’

“The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980,” Roger Waters said.

“I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression where I set it… My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price,” he said.

“Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.”

Waters is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of holding anti-Jewish views. He has floated an inflatable pig emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts. The singer denies the anti-Semitism accusations, saying he was protesting against Israeli policies, not Jewish people.

Ah, those old days, which now would be both considered hate speech and also ground down by the ugly media and the uglier mainstream fools in college, in towns, every where.

Yep, it is a piece of shit piece of cloth for many, representing so so much death, murder, hate, and racism. Cloth, man, and alas, a symbol, for those who cry crocodile tears when they hear the National Anthem, and then for others, it is the greed and murder and Empire of Chaos-Lies-Terror in every red and white strip, every star and bar:

 

This stuff is not allowed on campuses, and not just Guantanamo Desantis’s Florida.

 

This is not anti-DIsney, but it is the Dsneyification of the world, and this is the outcome: bones, immolation, worldwide.

Old school, but you can’t get college students to analyze this without being charged with a Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT.

I doubt you can loosely call for the execution of Corporations, CEOs, what have you. Again, Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT on Haeder.

Ahh, if we are the biggest war profiteers, then we’ll be letting China take first place. Yep, that’s the modern college student’s response.

Ahh, I have been warned that telling my students that I was rapped on the head by cops, in Portland, El Paso, Seattle, and elsewhere, and that protest is dangerous but necessary, and that I would dare use the ACAB as an opening to discuss that Defund the Police Movement — who, what, where, when and WHY — as well as my own work as a police reporter and what I think of cops/pigs, all verbotten! Call SWAT on Haeder.

Hell, you can look this one up in Wikipedia. And babies? 

Read the transcript: with the reason the poster was made, the soldier who was in the massacre!

Oh, no, trigger warnings, vicarious PTSD, verboten.

Partial transcriptof the Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo in which Meadlo describes his participation in the My Lai massacre:

Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?

A. Right.

Q. And you killed how many? At that time?

A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.

Q. Men, women, and children?

A. Men, women, and children.

Q. And babies?

A. And babies.

Ahh, loyalty oaths in how many state legislatures on never saying a bad word about Israel, and no push for boycotting Israeli goods, that’s the power of Jewish Extremism in the USA: But not enough, not enough BDS around the world.  17 BDS resolutions considered and 11 passed at US colleges last year, per ADL report

It is a well-oiled, well-placed, complex, 3-D kind of chess machine, and it is pure killer, pure killer, and most campuses utilized Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, DoD, BOrder Patrol, CIA, FBI, ATF, MONEY. Some of the nation’s most elite universities are deep into defense lobbying, often hiring Washington-based firms to press Congress and the Pentagon to fund their science projects.

Asked whether students or professors ever have ethical objections to working on projects funded by the Defense Department, Zuber said that “no professor has to take money from DoD.”

“We’re a bottom-up organization,” she said. “Professors make those choices.”

She also said that “if there are students who have a feeling that they don’t want to work on defense-related issues, they certainly don’t have to.” But, she added, “a whole lot seem to want to.”

Like MIT, the Association of American Universities, an alliance of 62 of the leading research institutions in the United States and Canada, advocates defense research funding.

 

[Photo: Universities chase defense dollars]

 

The end result is that BABIES, kids, NEWBORNES, women, SENIOR citizens, disabled, PATIENTS in hospitals, youth on PLAYGROUNDS, are mudered, and killed, and imploded, so, then, BABY Killers is just a limited sigh — wedding parties, goat herders, and entire families at gravesites, murdered by universities, colleges, think tanks, corporations, marketing firms, law firms, retail services in the EMPLOY of the USA.

This sign? These youth? Their message? Their no war and stop the escalation and disarmament now, ahh, then, of couse, it’s triple bad, since they are free thinkers and align with New York Young Communist League.

Hood Communist?

 

 

So many more organizations working on it, working on it — no more NATO, no more Arms.

Back to the Jewish thing in Ukraine: And, well, and, who writes the narrative of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of the Jewish Apartheid State supporting the Nazis under Zelensky?

There is no way in hell you will read this story, objectively, anywhere:

The Jews are the ones behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and their goal is to create a new Jewish state to replace the failing Zionist project of Israel, Palestinian Islamic scholar Mraweh Nassar has claimed, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Nassar, whom MEMRI identified as the secretary-general of the Jerusalem Committee of the International Union of Muslims Scholars, made his claims on March 22 while speaking with Channel 9, an Arabic-language TV station in Turkey that the media watchdog says is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

Now now, Dan Shapiro (New Atlanticist, err, Atlantic Council) wrote this one, and again, it’s the NARRATIVE and the MEDIUM is the MESSAGE driver, and then who gets to tell the stories and how the algorithms benefit the propagandists, shit dog, need we look further?.

Speaking to reporters this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the future he sees for his country in unusual terms: as “a big Israel.”

Gone, he said, are hopes for “an absolutely liberal” state—replaced by the likely reality of armed defense forces patrolling movie theaters and supermarkets. “I’m confident that our security will be the number-one issue over the next ten years,” Zelenskyy added.

With Russian forces having withdrawn from around Kyiv, suggesting that Ukraine successfully repulsed the first phase of the Kremlin’s invasion, the time is right for Zelenskyy to contemplate how to prepare for the next—and potentially much longer—phase of this conflict.

But what does he mean by “a big Israel”? With a population more than four times smaller, and vastly less territory, the Jewish state might not seem like the most fitting comparison. Yet consider the regional security threats it faces, as well as its highly mobilized population: The two embattled countries share more than you might think.

So if Zelenskyy really does have Israel in mind as a model for Ukraine, here are some of the key features he might consider for adoption (some of which are already applicable today):

• Security first: Every Israeli government promises, first and foremost, that it will deliver security—and knows it will be judged on this pledge. Ordinary citizens, not just politicians, pay close attention to security threats—both from across borders and from internal sources— and much of the public chooses who to elect by that metric alone.

• The whole population plays a role: The Israeli model goes further than Zelenskyy’s vision of security services deployed to civilian spaces: Most young Israeli adults serve in the military, and many are employed in security-related professions following their service. A common purpose unites the citizenry, making them ready to endure shared sacrific

I ask, “Will one vapid bought-and-brainwashed media person get on with some rejiggering their knowledge:

Here, over at Dissident Voice: “Journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Crimea” by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling / May 25th, 2023

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.

“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”

After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.

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Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.

All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.

To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.

The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.

“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”

Bring back the water potato, help the climate

Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the linchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the U.S. the size of Rhode Island disappeared.

There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.

The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.

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Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.

James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.

“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”

An environmental restoration — and a cultural one, too

On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.

In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.

For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.

Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.

This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”

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While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.

The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.

The tribe has used beaver dam analogs — human-made approximations — to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.

Trees, beavers, salmon, water — they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”

These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.

By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.

“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”

Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.

Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.

Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”

So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The tiny potato at the heart of one tribe’s fight against climate change on Oct 19, 2024.

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

Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889 – Public Domain

125 years after it was first serialized in three installments in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness continues to be widely read and to be scrutinized by teachers, students and scholars. There’s a lot to scrutinize. No work of modernist fiction has been studied more often —according to critic par excellence Harold Bloom. Conrad’s long time friend, Ford Madox Ford, noted that the novella “gained a certain vividness  from its fierce lashings at the unspeakable crew that exploited the natives in the Congo.” But Ford predicted that when imperialism vanished – and by imperialism he meant “spoliation  of subject races” — it would  be read for its “poetry.” No book that traces the lashings of empire and the theft of Third World wealth (ivory and Black labor in Heart of Darkness) is more poetic.

Imperialism was a loaded word, a most unsavory word, in academia in the U.S. in the 1960s when I wrote a Ph.D. thesis about Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad titled “The Mythology of Imperialism.” I was a grad student on a scholarship from “Her Majesty’s Government” at the University of Manchester in England, once near the beating heart of the industrial revolution and the cotton industry, and the city where Frederick Engels, Marx’s comrade, wrote the classic The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

More than a century later, Manchester was still thoroughly working class, though when I asked an English woman, soon after I arrived, if there were wealthy people in the city she said, “Where there’s muck there’s brass.”

I wasn’t the only person in my circle of American friends who went to England in the mid-1960s; Michael Meeropol, the older of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s two sons, went to England and so did Peter Linebaugh and Eric Foner, all of whom I knew from New York. I was 22 in 1964, the year I arrived in Manchester, eligible for the draft. I received a notice from my draft board asking me to report for a physical exam, but I received an exemption because I was a student, and married and living in England.

My wife, Eleanor, also attended the University of Manchester and wrote a thesis on The Masses, the lefty magazine that the U.S. government shut down in 1917 on the grounds that it conspired to obstruct conscription during World War I, which Lenin described as “an imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.” Lenin argued that the “contradictions of imperialism” led to an “inevitable revolutionary crisis.” He certainly did in Russia and Germany.

One of my Manchester advisers and mentors, Frank Kermode, an English eccentric born on the Isle of Man— and the author of the widely acclaimed Romantic Image and The Sense of an Ending— called my thesis “Bolshie,” (short from Bolshevik) which probably said more about him and his life and times than about me and my work. It spoke well for  Kermode that he cut his ties to Encounter magazine when he learned that the CIA funded the publication. He was not a Cold War intellectual, and in that regard unlike Lionel Trilling, probably the Columbia College professor who influenced me more than any other when I was an undergraduate from ‘59 to ’63.

It was in Trilling’s comparative literature class that boasted on the reading list works by Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Marcel Proust and where I first tangled with Conrad’s searing novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), which taught me more about imperialism than Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism or any other book on the subject, including J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902). The Bolshevic leader, V. I. Lenin believed that imperialism was the last phrase of capitalism and would lead to socialist revolutions.

Born in Ukraine in 1857, which was then a part of the Russian Empire, Conrad witnessed the ravages of imperialism in Europe, Africa and Asia. Employed by a Belgian corporation, he traveled up the Congo River in 1890 and saw first hand the atrrocities committed in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II. Workers who didn’t meet quotas had their hands chopped off.

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, says in Heart of Darkness and seems to speak for the author himself. “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river [the Thames] into the mystery of an unknown earth!,” he says to the men who listen to his tale.

Marlow adds, “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.” Perhaps Conrad’s greatest achievement in Heart of Darkness was his creation of Mr. Kurtz, a quintessential imperialist who says he wants to civilize the Congolese and who is described as “an emissary of pity and science and progress,” and who ends up slaughtering Africans and mounting their heads on poles outside his compound.

Of the Congolese men he sees up close, Marlow says,  “they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.”

Some of Conrad’s language is crystal clear and some of it is opaque, as when he writes about, “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” Say what?

Wisely, Marlow leaves it to an African to utter the last words about the “emissary of pity and science and progress.” He says, “Mr. Kurtz – he dead,” a line that T. S. Eliot memorialized in The Waste Land.

Near the end of Marlow’s journey into the heart of the Congo’s darkness he encounters an African woman whom he romanticizes as “ a wild and gorgeous apparition” and who strikes him as emblematic of the wilderness itself and its own “tenebrous and passionate soul.” When he meets Kurtz’s European fiancé he lies to her and says nothing about the atrocities Kurtz has committed.

What Professor Kermode and I had in common was a shared interest in endings, the apocalypse, and millenarian movements, though he definitely didn’t see imperialism from a Leninist perspective as an end game, and didn’t use the word “imperialism,” either. Kermode introduced me to the history of end-of-the-world narratives which are at least as old as the Old Testament if not older.

In the mid-1960. the only writers who were likely to use the word imperialism were Marxists. Maoists and guerrilla warriors like Che Guevara who aimed to topple imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia and might have succeeded if it had not for the intervention of the CIA.

Some Americans, including SDS members who opposed the war in Vietnam began to use the word in about 1965 to characterize American’s role in Vietnam and to express their total condemnation of the invasion and occupation of the South East Asian nation which had been a colony of France until the Vietnamese defeated the French at a place called Dien Bien Phu, one of the most dramatic battles of the 20th century.

Then, the US stepped in and stepped up its role militarily, politically and economically, as the Pentagon Papers would reveal when they were published by The New York Times, thanks mostly to Daniel Ellsberg, whom I called in print a “white collar guerrilla,” much to his delight.

My Manchester Ph.D. thesis tackled the subject of British literature and the British Empire, but the subtext was American colonialism and imperialism in Vietnam. By the 1960s, it was clear to me and to many others in my generation that the British Empire had fallen and that the American empire had taken its place. All empires declined and fell, I concluded, beginning with the Roman Empire.

Some of Conrad’s most vivid images in Heart of Darkness — such as gunboats shelling the African jungle — seemed to anticipate the American bombardment of the Vietnamese landscape.

It made sense to me that when Francis Ford Coppola made his Vietnam War feature film he drew inspiration from Conrad’s novella. Some of the best-known lines in the novella, such as “ horror the horror,” show up in the film, while the words “exterminate the brutes” have been borrowed repeatedly and used as short hand for the way that imperialists and colonists think and act. Call it genocide.

 Trilling assigned my paper on Heart of Darkness an A- and asked on the last page, “Is Conrad’s novella only about imperialism?” I wanted to say, but I never had the opportunity to say, “no, it’s not only about imperialism, but no critic has noticed the obvious, that imperialism is the heart of darkness and the heart of darkness is imperialism.”

Conrad knew it, but psychological critics like Albert Guerard, the author of Joseph Conrad (1947), didn’t see it or if they did they chose to ignore it. For Guerard Heart of Darkness was all about Jungian archetypes. I thought that was a monumental evasion.

I received a BA from Columbia in ’63 and an MA in American lit from Columbia University in ’64. I wrote a master’s thesis about Henry James titled “The Historical Imagination” and focused on the images of the French Revolution which crop up at critical moments in James’s novels when he compares his fictional characters to doomed French aristocrats in 1789.

James, I argued, was much more political than Trilling, the “Jamesians” — the Henry James “mob” or enthusiasts — and T. S. Eliot allowed. “He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,” Eliot insisted. Sorry, T.S., James had ideas.

In the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate, politics was a topic to be avoided at Columbia; real writers, I was told by Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Quentin Anderson—who taught a class I attended on Ralph Waldo Emerson and another on mid-nineteenth century American fiction— were apolitical. Politics contaminated prose and poetry Anderson, Barzun and Trilling insinuated, suggested, and argued ad nauseum and ad infinitum, though around the world and especially in Europe and Latin America critics linked literature and politics as though it was the most natural thing to do.

When I was interviewed by Stephen Marcus, one of Trilling’s protégés, and Daniel Bell, the author of The End of Ideology, Bell asked me “Do you know any communists,” I was shocked and horrified. I stormed from the room and told my friends what had happened.

Given the rejection of Marxism, Marxist literary criticism and even social criticism by America scholars and reviewers, such as Granville Hicks, Maxwell Geismar and F. O. Matthiessen, in the 1940s. 1950s and 1960s, I decided that I’d better not even try to write a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia that would combine literature and imperialism. Professor Lewis Leary recruited me to join the Ph.D. program at Columbia, but I declined the opportunity.

England seemed to offer an intellectual home for young wannabe cultural and literary critics like me. E. P. Thompson, E. J. Hobsbawm and Arnold Kettle, who wrote insightfully about imperialism and literature in his two-volume study of the English novel, taught at British universities, and unlike American lefties weren’t purged.

If there was a Red Scare in England it was much milder than in the States. I became friends with Kettle and visited him and his family in Leeds, where he taught.

For three years, from 1964 to 1967, I read widely and deeply in the fiction and nonfiction about imperialism and colonialism in the main library in Manchester and in the British Museum Reading Room in London. Once a week I met my tutor, R. G. Cox (not C. G. Cox) and read a paper I’d written that week about Conrad’s Victory, Nostromo or The Nigger of the Narcissus.

Conrad, I would realize, embodied contradictions; an anti-imperialist, he tended to be,  but wasn’t always a white supremacist and a believer in the virtues of the British Empire. Though R. G. Cox often dozed while I read an essay, I was not phased. I’d done the work and liked the work I’d done.

I had contradictions of my own. I was writing a politically charged thesis, but I steered clear of everything political: marches, demonstrations and protests. In fact, I settled in England not only because I thought I’d receive a warmer welcome in academia there than in the States, but also because I wanted to be far away from the temptation to organize for civil rights and against the war.

All through my undergraduate days, I’d protested against segregation, the committees that investigated “subversives,” and the paternalism of Columbia, our “alma mater,” where students were treated like children who couldn’t make wise decisions.

I figured that if I stayed in New York, I’d join SDS, CORE or  one of the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs – there were a half-dozen or so small lefty groups in New York in the early and mid 1960s — and become a full time radical. I didn’t see a way to straddle and combine research and scholarship and the causes of the day.

In Manchester, I was having heaps of fun in pubs, at parties, and in the company of Ian, Mike, and Tony —Irish, Scots and Welsh folk singers and poets. The English proved to be elusive. I could understand why Doris Lessing titled one of her books In Pursuit of the English.

 Indeed, one had to search for them, and pry them loose from their Hobbit holes, their drawing rooms and from flats and digs that didn’t seem to be much improvement over the conditions of the working class that Engels described in 1844. Moreover, many of the union officials I met and  got to know were dead set against Pakistanis joining their unions. They wanted white-only organizations and even went on strike to keep Pakistanis out.

During my last year in Manchester, my thesis finally took off, took shape and held together when I stumbled upon a 1919 essay by T. S. Eliot — a self-defined Anglican, a royalist and a traditionalist — titled “Kipling Redivivus” in which he wrote that “Conrad is the antithesis of Kipling. He is, for one thing, the antithesis of Empire, (as well as democracy); his characters are the denial of Empire, of Nation, of Race almost; they are fearfully alone with the Wilderness.” That was all the ammunition I needed to finish my thesis.

Of course, Eliot was also an avant-garde poet when he wrote The Waste Land, and an astute, dialectical critic when he wrote the essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent.

I finished my thesis, defended it before a committee that included Walter Allen, an expert on the English novel. Kermode, the quintessential peripatetic professor, had moved to another university. I attended the graduation ceremony, was awarded a Ph.D. and received a diploma. I was hired to teach at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and returned with my wife to the U.S.

Two months after I returned, I stood outside the walls of the Pentagon with thousands of other anti-war protesters. I joined SDS, served on a panel with Susan Sontag at the inaugural Socialist Scholars Conference and discussed the topic of the responsibility of intellectuals vis-à-vis Vietnam.

Later, I met Professor Edward Said who was teaching Conrad at Columbia and who assigned to students my book, The Mythology of Imperialism, published in hardback by Random House and in paperback by Delta. In April 1968 I was arrested with about 800 students and “outside agitators” like myself at Columbia.

It was as if I had never left the States and gone to England to tackle the subject of imperialism which seemed in 1968 more ominous than ever before.

In 2009 Mythology was republished by Monthly Review Press with an introduction by Columbia professor Bruce Robbins, an afterword by me about Edward Said, and with the original preface in which I meant to channel Sartre and that begins, “We, the readers of literature have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive.” I was angry. I still am.

If I had to select one sentence to exemplify my voice, my style and my point of view I would select the above sentence from the thousands of sentences I have written over the past half-century. I was young, I was brash and I was ready to take on imperialism, fangs and all. Imperialism still lurks at the heart of darkness all over the world and wherever rebels seek liberation and freedom.

Conrad’s tale, flaws and all, still demands to be read and understood. It’s a classic in the field of literature about empire and its indelible corruptions. I think Lenin would have admired it. An astute literary critic, Lenin wrote insightfully about Tolstoy, whom he called “a great artist” riven by “contradictions,” but who created “incomparable pictures of Russian life” and “made first-class contributions to world literature.”

Mr. Kurtz – He ain’t dead. He’s alive wherever men with guns and lies aim to conquer, oppress and exploit men, women and even children who don’t look like them, whether in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe.

The post Imperialism: Conrad, Lenin and Heart of Darkness  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.

The title of this newsletter, ‘My heart makes my head swim’, comes from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). In a chapter called ‘The Fact of Blackness’, Fanon writes about the despair that racism produces, the immense anxiety about living in a world that has decided that certain people are simply not human or not sufficiently human. The lives of these people, children of a lesser god, are assigned less worth than the lives of the powerful and the propertied. An international division of humanity tears the world into pieces, throwing masses of people into the fires of anguish and oblivion.

What is happening in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, is ghastly. Since October 2023, Israel has ordered 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to move southwards as the Israeli armed forces have steadily moved their gunsights across the Wadi Gaza wetlands down to the edge of Rafah. Kilometre by kilometre, as the Israeli military advances, the so-called safe zone moves further and further south. In December, the Israeli government claimed, with great cruelty, that the tent city of al-Mawasi (west of Rafah, along the Mediterranean Sea) was the new designated safe area. A mere 6.5 square kilometres (half the size of London’s Heathrow airport), the supposed safe zone within al-Mawasi is nowhere near large enough to house the more than one million Palestinians who are in Rafah. Not only was it absurd for Israel to say that al-Mawasi would be a refuge, but – according to the laws of war – a safe zone must be agreed upon by all parties.

Ismail Shammout (Palestine), Odyssey of a People, 1980.

‘How can a zone be safe in a war zone if it is only unilaterally decided by one part of the conflict?’, asked Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA); ‘It can only promote the false feeling that it will be safe’. Furthermore, on several occasions, Israel has bombed al-Mawasi, the area it says is safe. On 20 February, Israel attacked a shelter operated by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, killing two family members of the organisation’s staff. This week, on 13 May, an international UN staff member was killed after the Israeli army opened fire on a UN vehicle, one of the nearly 200 UN workers killed in Gaza in addition to the targeted assassination of aid workers.

Aref El-Rayyes (Lebanon), Untitled, 1963.

Not only has Israel begun to bomb Rafah, but it hastily sent in tanks to seize the only border crossing through which aid dribbled in on the few trucks a day that were allowed to enter. After Israel seized the Rafah border, it prevented the entry of aid into Gaza altogether. Starving Palestinians has long been Israeli policy, which is of course a war crime. Preventing aid from entering Gaza is part of the international division of humanity that has defined not only this genocide, but the occupation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank since 1967 and the system of apartheid within the borders defined by Israel following the 1948 Nakba (‘Catastrophe’).

Three words in this sentence are fundamentally contested by Israel: apartheid, occupation, and genocide. Israel and its Global North allies want to claim that the use of these words to describe Israeli policies, Zionism, or the oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to anti-Semitism. But, as the United Nations and numerous respected human rights groups note, these are legal descriptions of the reality on the ground and not moral judgments that are made either in haste or out of anti-Semitism. A short primer on the accuracy of these three concepts is necessary to counter this denial.

Nelson Makamo (South Africa), Decoration of the Youth, 2019.

Apartheid. The Israeli government treats the Palestinian minority population within the borders defined in 1948 (21%) as second-class citizens. There are at least sixty-five Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. One of them, passed in 2018, declares the country a ‘nation state of the Jewish people’. As the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm wrote, through this new law, the Israeli government ‘formally endorses’ the use of ‘apartheid methods within Israel’s recognised borders’. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have both said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians falls under the definition of apartheid. The use of this term is entirely factual.

Laila Shawa (Palestine), The Hands of Fatima, 2013.

Occupation. In 1967, Israel occupied the three Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. From 1967 to 1999, these three areas were referred to as part of the Occupied Arab Territories (which at different times also included Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Syria’s Golan region, and southern Lebanon). Since 1999, they have been termed the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In UN documents and at the International Court of Justice, Israel is referred to as the ‘occupying power’, which is a term of art that requires certain obligations from Israel toward those whom it occupies. Although the 1993 Oslo Accords set up the Palestinian Authority, Israel remains the occupying power of the OPT, a designation that has not been revised. An occupation is identical to colonial rule: it is when a foreign power dominates a people in their homeland and denies them sovereignty and rights. Despite Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (which included the dismantling of twenty-one illegal settlements), Israel continues to occupy Gaza by building a perimeter fence around the Gaza Strip and by policing the Mediterranean waters of Gaza. Annexation of parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the punctual bombing of Gaza are violations of Israel’s obligation as the occupying power.

An occupation imposes a structural condition of violence upon the occupied. That is why international law recognises that those who are occupied have the right to resist. In 1965, in the midst of Guinea Bissau’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2105 (‘Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’). Paragraph 10 of this resolution is worth reading carefully: ‘The General Assembly… [r]ecognises the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and independence and invites all States to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial Territories’. There is no ambiguity here. Those who are occupied have the right to resist, and, in fact, all member states of the United Nations are bound by this treaty to assist them. Rather than sell arms to the occupying power, who is the aggressor in the ongoing genocide, the members states of the United Nations – particularly from the Global North – should aid the Palestinians.

Abdulqader al-Rais (United Arab Emirates), Waiting, c. 1970.

Genocide. In its order published on 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there was ‘plausible’ evidence of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians. In March, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, published a monumental report called Anatomy of a Genocide. In this report, Albanese wrote that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met’. ‘More broadly’, she wrote, ‘they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold’.

Intent to commit genocide is easily proved in the context of Israel’s bombardment. In October 2023, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said that ‘an entire nation out there is responsible’ for the attacks on 7 October, and it was not true that ‘civilians [were] not… aware, not involved’. The ICJ pointed to this statement, among others, since it expresses Israel’s intent and use of ‘collective punishment’, a genocidal war crime. The following month, Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was ‘an option’ since ‘there are no non-combatants in Gaza’. Before the ICJ ruling was published, Moshe Saada, a member of the Israeli parliament from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said that ‘all Gazans must be destroyed’. These sentiments, by any international standard, demonstrate an intent to commit genocide. As with ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’, the use of the term ‘genocide’ is entirely accurate.

Vijay Prashad presents Frantz Fanon’s daughter, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, with a poster of the cover of the new isiZulu edition of her father’s classic, The Wretched of the Earth, in Paris, France, 2024.

Earlier this year, Inkani Books, a Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research project based in South Africa, published the isiZulu translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Izimpabanga Zomhlaba, translated by Makhosazana Xaba. We are so proud of this accomplishment, bringing the work of Fanon into another African language (it has already been translated into Arabic and Swahili).

When I was last in Palestine, I spoke with young children about their aspirations. What they told me reminded me of a section from The Wretched of the Earth: ‘At twelve or thirteen years of age the village children know the names of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in the douars [camps] or in the villages are not those of money or of getting through their exams like the children of the towns, but dreams of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic death still today moves them to tears’.

Children in Gaza will remember this genocide with at least the same intensity as their ancestors remembered 1948 and as their parents remembered the occupation that has loomed over this narrow piece of land since their own childhood. Children in South Africa will read these lines from Fanon in isiZulu and remember those who fell to inaugurate a new South Africa thirty years ago.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

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A Texas state appeals court on Thursday ordered the dismissal of a 2018 defamation lawsuit against ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle brought by famed Houston heart surgeon Dr. O.H. “Bud” Frazier, ruling that a 2018 investigation into the doctor was a “fair, true, and impartial account” of accusations against him.

Frazier was also ordered to pay the publications’ attorneys fees related to the appeal.

Frazier filed the suit in Harris County District Court, challenging a 2018 story and subsequent reporting that examined concerns with the doctor’s conduct, including that a hospital investigation had found that Frazier and his team implanted experimental heart pumps in patients who did not meet medical criteria to be included in clinical trials.

Frazier, a high profile heart transplant surgeon at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and the Texas Heart Institute, claimed that the articles included errors and misleading statements “calculated to falsely portray Dr. Frazier as an inhumane physician.”

The suit also named the stories’ authors, Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Mike Hixenbaugh, then of the Chronicle, as defendants.

The news outlets sought to dismiss the lawsuit under the 2011 Texas Citizens Participation Act, which allows for speedy dismissals of what the Texas Supreme Court has defined as “retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence (citizens) on matters of public concern” or “chill First Amendment rights.”

The appeals court decision potentially signals the close of a nearly six-year legal battle.

In 2018, Harris County District Judge Wesley Ward first denied the news outlets’ motion to dismiss under the TCPA, ruling that Frazier had shown enough evidence to establish his defamation claim. The news outlets appealed the ruling to the First District Court of Appeals in Houston, which determined in January 2020 that the trial court had failed to consider the news outlets’ evidence and arguments and sent the case back to the trial court. Frazier appealed the appeals court ruling to the Supreme Court of Texas, which denied his petition.

In March 2022, the district court once again denied the news outlets’ motion to dismiss under the TCPA. The publications filed a second appeal two months later, arguing Frazier had failed to establish the elements of his defamation claim.

This time, the appeals court definitively reversed the lower court’s decision and on Thursday ordered the trial court to dismiss the case, concluding that the news outlets “established by a preponderance of the evidence their defenses of substantial truth and nonactionable opinion.”

“This is a huge victory for journalism and the truth on an issue of immense public importance,” said Jeremy Kutner, ProPublica’s general counsel. “After six long years, the court found what was clear to every reader of this story. It was fair, accurate and backed up by a mountain of documentation and evidence. However important their contributions to society, pioneering leaders are not above scrutiny.”

Neither Frazier nor his attorneys immediately responded to a request for comment.

ProPublica was represented by Laura Prather and Catherine Robb of Haynes and Boone LLP.

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

Overheard in a coffee shop: A woman and a man are sitting together at a table.  She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book.  Looking at the screen, she says to him, “I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial to full, and the full eclipse lasts just 3-4 minutes.”

The man replies: “And if you’re lucky, the partial eclipse lasts more than 70 to 80 years, because then the full eclipse is forever.”

She acts as if she doesn’t hear him, as if his sardonic humor has nothing to do with her death anxiety or with the media’s celebration of the darkness visible of the total solar eclipse due to occur on April 8th across North America that the media is calling “eclipse mania,” while failing to mention they are promoting it as such.

It is strange how today people revel in the darkness even while fearing it.  Sunsets are far more popular than sunrises, even while death is the great bogeyman and birth deserves cigars and champagne.  Crowds regularly gather in the evenings, cell phone cameras raised, to laud the death of the light that they embalm on their dinguses (i.e.gadgets, just as the atomic bomb was nicknamed “The Gadget”), trying to freeze time, even as they celebrate the death of another day.  This twisted relationship to day and night, life and death, darkness and light is perhaps best summoned up in a few lines of poetry from Rainer Maria Rilke from his Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.

We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.

And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar eclipse is the next great big thing to see.  A plunge into the heart of darkness that is apposite to the dark heart of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless power, craven terror, and pride in killing.  It is uncanny how the darkness of social life today is reflected in the promotion of a natural event as if it were a must-see film that has just won the Academy Award.  As Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness: “Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

And we will die in a flicker if the dark-hearted leaders of this country continue to push against Russia in Ukraine for the nuclear war that they previewed in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is understandable why in retrospect the great Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s first report from Hiroshima was so widely censored and why he was for many years portrayed as a communist dupe, even as twenty years later his honest reports from Vietnam were so important for those interested in the truth that the mainstream media blacked them out.  The exposure of America’s ongoing war crimes was for decades blamed on communist influence, just as today it is blamed on Russian propaganda.

But now it’s time for a flick to give us crocodile tears from the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, with that must-see Academy Award winning film, Oppenheimer.  The imprisoned and executed German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison before he was executed by Hitler for opposing Hitler’s mass atrocities, called such subtle self-glorification “cheap grace.”  It is grace we bestow on ourselves, forgiveness without requiring repentance, feats of self-glorification mastered by Hollywood.

A biopic of one man with all his complicated and twisted personality and scientific brilliance is a far cry from Wilfred Burchett’s article, The Atomic Plague: “I write this as a warning to the world.”  But then the Academy Awards’ ongoing support for Ukraine in its U.S. proxy war against Russia – a war rooted in the 2014 U.S. engineered coup and NATO’s encircling of Russia – is just the opposite: a provocation that makes nuclear war much more likely.  It’s a sick celebrity game.

The creation of the atomic bomb and its use on the Japanese was demonic – pure evil.  Robert Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure as Kai Bird, the coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, claimed last year in The New York Times. As I wrote in “Trinity’s Shadow,” he was “complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future.” Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical and big tech industries, or the CIA, to regulate themselves.  Anyone who would give the name “Trinity” to the site where the first bomb was exploded had a twisted mind.

Oppenheimer, which excludes scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate with flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, recently opened in Japan. The New York Times published a piece about the opening that contains various Japanese reactions, including one from Yujin Yaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, that accurately raises a fundamental issue: the film “celebrates a group of white male scientists who really enjoyed their privilege and their love of political power. We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what it says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in the U.S (and elsewhere).”

Exactly. The issue is political, not aesthetic.  Why it is good to see some flickering images and not others?  Why is night for day and the blocking out of the sun by an eclipse so good but the reminder that we are on the edge of a nuclear eclipse because of the policies of our dark-hearted leaders is not?

We live in very dark times.  There is no need to watch the sun being extinguished and day turn to night in the heart of an immense darkness.  Kurtz’s dying words as recalled by Marlowe at the end of The Heart of Darkness – ‘The horror! The horror!’ are not words we want to utter as we realize we too have gone mad in our souls because we looked the wrong way as the nukes were in their flight.

Chase the light!  As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic lessons in filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing. . . .”

It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.

So if we are to celebrate the dawn of a new day on earth, paradoxical and contradictory as it might sound, we do need to look into the darkness – the heart of the darkest and demonic crimes committed by our heartless leaders – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Gaza, the escalating and expanding war in the Middle East, and the U.S proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, to name a few.

And if the contemplation of the eclipse of the sun disturbs you enough to impel you to do so, a quick peek won’t hurt.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Andy Mahler at home at the Lazy Black Bear in southern Indiana. Photo: Steven Higgs.

A few miles outside the town of Paoli, in the unglaciated hill country of southern Indiana, there’s a 90-acre grove of old-growth hardwood forest called Pioneer Mothers. From 1816 to 1940, the land had been owned by the Cox family, who refused to log even a tree from the grove of titanic oaks, hickories, beech and tulip poplars. However, after the last of the Cox family died, the forest was sold to a local timber company, which planned to clearcut it. A local uprising ensued, led by some of the community’s most prominent women, who raised money to buy the property and donate it to the US Forest Service on the condition the forest would never be logged. The grove, which was named Pioneer Mothers in their honor, is now a Research Natural Area on the Hoosier National Forest and is one of only a handful of remaining old-growth groves in the Ohio Valley.

Forty-five years later another local revolt would take place in the same rural county over plans to clearcut the Hoosier National Forest. This uprising would be led by a man who lived not far from the Pioneer Mothers grove with his wife, Linda Lee, on an inholding inside the national forest, they called the Lazy Black Bear. His name is Andy Mahler, a descendant of the Bohemian composer. The son of academics, Mahler grew up in Bloomington, about 45 miles north and an entire cultural epoch away from Orange County, Indiana. Linda was a school teacher and Andy ran the farm. The couple spent much of their free time riding horses on the forest trails near the Lazy Black Bear. Then in 1985, Andy learned that the new management plan for the Hoosier National Forest had scheduled clearcuts and logging roads on the local trail network. Lots of clearcuts and as many as six miles of logging roads per square mile of land.

And that wasn’t all. The plan also called for oil and gas drilling, gypsum mining and 115 miles of Off-Road Vehicle (ORV) trails. Reflecting the usual cultural insensitivity of the Forest Service, some of the ORV trails were slated for a part of the forest called Little Africa, which received its name from one of the earliest settlements of free blacks and escaped enslaved people in Indiana along Lick Creek. The forest settlement was a refuge from the slave patrollers who roamed southern Indiana looking to kidnap black people and sell them south of the Ohio River. By the time of the Civil War, dozens of black families, along with some white Quakers, lived in the hollow, where the center of the community was the African Methodist Church. After the war, black families began to move out of Orange County to the cities, where jobs were more plentiful and racial animosity less fervent. By 1902, the last black family in Little Africa had sold their land and much of the area, including the ruins of the church and cemetery, was eventually acquired by the Forest Service. In 1985, the agency thought it might be a good idea to turn the entire area into a haven for dirt bikes.

African American cemetery at the Lick Creek (Little Africa) settlement. Photo: Forest Service.

The Forest Service, an agency whose arrogance rivals that of the Pentagon, had no idea of the political landmines it was setting for itself. But it soon found out, the hard way. The Agency was accustomed to encounters with environmentalists from Indianapolis and Bloomington, who’d waged a bruising 10-year-long battle in the 70s and early 80s to win a wilderness designation for a 13,000-acre roadless tract south of Bloomington named after the botanist Charles Deam. But they’d never had to confront a backwoods rebellion from the people who lived in and near the forest. And that’s exactly the kind of rebellion Andy Mahler set about igniting, when he formed a local group to fight the Forest Service called Protect Our Woods or POW.

At less than 200,000 acres (about the size of some ranger districts in the West), the Hoosier is one of the smallest national forests in the country. It doesn’t have sprawling tracts of old-growth forest. It doesn’t have any large predators. It doesn’t have any mountains or whitewater rivers. None of that matters to the forest’s defenders, who note that its ridges and hollows, seeps and rock shelters harbor an astonishingly high level of botanical diversity.

Mahler was able to read and understand the dense and impenetrable prose of the Forest Service plan and Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and explain what it meant in plain language to the people who lived near the forest and hiked and rode horses on its trails, hunted for morels and chanterelles in its hollows, watched the migration of warblers stream through in the spring and the colors of the hills some called the Little Smokies explode in blazing colors in the fall.

But the struggle for the future of the Hoosier Forest soon took on national implications. It was the first plan under the National Forest Management Act to be released in the Eastern Region. The fate of the Hoosier plan was going to set a precedent and the precedent Andy Mahler wanted to set was the end, not just of clearcutting, but the end of logging on national forest lands.

What became known as the Zero Cut movement began in southern Indiana and that scared the hell out of the top level bureaucrats in the Forest Service, then in the grips of the chainsaw mad Reagan administration, most of whom probably couldn’t find the Hoosier on a map.

Mahler and his pals in the backwoods knew some vital things that the Forest Service didn’t. First, locals, even in the most conservative redoubts of a very conservative state, didn’t like seeing their favorite haunts logged and they didn’t trust the Agency to tell them the truth about what they were up to. Also, Andy’s friend Bob Klawitter, a former IU professor who decamped to woods during the Vietnam War, had done a forest inventory of the Hoosier region showing there was more than enough forest on private lands to sustain the needs of the local industry and that subsidized timber sales on federal forests would only depress the price nearby private landowners could get for their timber. Finally, Mahler was able to convince his local Congressman, Frank McCloskey, to include in one of his constituent mailers a survey that asked whether they supported logging on the Hoosier National Forest: 69% said no and the opposition approached 79% for those under the age of 35. “We knew then, we were really on to something,” Mahler said.

Mahler was right. The Hoosier plan was dead, vanquished by an unlikely coalition of urban greens, back-to-the-landers and rural folk. Commercial logging came to an end on Hoosier for the next 30 years. The racist ORV plan was defeated, along with the obnoxious oil and gas leasing and mining projects.

Redbud and rock shelter, Hoosier National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

As the Forest Service began to freak out over the implications of the defeat of their plan for the Hoosier, Mahler began to broaden his vision. The precedent being set, he was eager to extend it. “We began to think bioregionally,” Mahler said. “The boundaries between these forests, and even the states, are artificial. My friend Leah Garlotte said, ‘A river isn’t a border, it’s the heart, the bloodstream of a forest ecosystem.’”

Out of this idea, Heartwood was born. Andy and Linda decided to go wherever people in the Ohio Valley were resisting the Forest Service. “Even if it was one or two people, we wanted to meet them, learn from them and join forces,” Mahler said. The search took them to the Wayne National Forest in southern Ohio and the Daniel Boone NF in northern Kentucky, the Shawnee NF in southern Illinois and the Mark Twain NF in the Ozarks of Missouri. “When we’d finally meet, it was often at the end of what Linda and I began to call a Heartwood driveway,” Mahler said. “A rutted gravel lane that winds through the woods for a quarter of mile to a cabin.”

The gospel Andy was spreading was the end of logging on federal forests and that the movement that could end it was going to be led by the people who lived in and near those forests. The other message Andy delivered to anyone who would listen, and more and more activists were, was that in order for people to trust Heartwood they couldn’t compromise on their vision. “We weren’t going to sell out,” Mahler said. “We weren’t ever going to be complicit in the destruction of forests.”

The next precedent was set on the Shawnee National Forest, where after a bitter struggle to stop the Fairview timber sale, which involved 79-day occupation, mass arrests and a Forest Service logging operation over the objections of the entire Illinois congressional delegation, a permanent injunction banned logging on the forest for the next 17 years. There is now a movement to make the Shawnee the nation’s first national park and climate preserve.

Even as Heartwood expanded into the Alleghenies, Adirondacks,  Appalachians and beyond, its heart remained back in Indiana, where bi-annual gatherings of activists convene for a long weekend of workshops, war storytelling and music at the Lazy Black Bear.  These forest councils are where old campaigns were celebrated and new ones born.

The problem, of course, is that few victories are permanent. As David Brower said, “Our opponents’ victories are usually forever. When we win, it is usually just a stay of execution. That’s why we need to be eternally vigilant.”  And so it is with Andy Mahler. Thirty years after crushing the Forest Service and ending commercial logging on the Hoosier, the Agency is striking back, right in Andy and Linda’s backwoods. In the fall of 2021, the Forest Service unveiled a massive logging, burning and road-building scheme across a 30,000-acre area known as Buffalo Springs. Though the name Buffalo Springs doesn’t appear on any known map of the region, it didn’t take Andy long to detect that the logging and burning was scheduled to take place just down the road from the Lazy Black Bear.

Little Blue River, Hoosier National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

So the old warhorse was summoned out of his stable for one last big fight to protect the forests of southern Indiana. Mahler went to work, doing what he’d done so many times in the past, pouring over the plans, deciphering the new coded language of the Forest Service, where the clearcuts of old were now dressed up as “vegetative treatments” for the seemingly benign purpose of ecological restoration. But it was clear: this project was more of an ecological blitz than a recovery plan that threatened, among others, two endangered species of bats that inhabit the caves of the world’s greatest karst geological zones.

Mahler knew that even after 30 years, people’s attitudes about logging or the Forest Service hadn’t changed. They didn’t like the former and didn’t trust the latter. And many were even more incensed about the agency’s newest menace: prescribed burning–the choking smoke from previous burns had sickened several residents so badly they had to be taken to the hospital. After months of outreach and organizing, the opposition to the sprawling assault on Buffalo Springs began to solidify. Protect Buffalo Springs signs sprouted up in nearly every yard and business across Orange County. Banners were draped from buildings in downtown Paoli and a billboard denouncing the plan greeted travelers on Highway 37, the main north-south corridor through the Hoosier National Forest.

Eventually, the county commissioners came out against it, including three Trump supporters. The Chamber of Commerce now opposes it. And, most significantly of all perhaps, the Farm Bureau, rarely an ally and usually a fearsome foe of environmentalists, announced its displeasure with the Forest Service’s Buffalo Springs plan.

The battle isn’t over. But the odds have shifted and the Forest Service knows it. So the agency may recalibrate and await an opportunity to strike again. But Andy Mahler and Heartwood aren’t going anywhere. This forest is, after all, where they live and its very existence is why they live there.

In recognition of his fearless and innovative approach to grassroots activism in the effort to protect forests, rivers and wildlife across the Central Hardwood region Andy Mahler was named the Grassroots Activist of the Year for 2024 by the Fund for Wild Nature, whose board I’m very glad to be a member of. 

The post From the Heart of the Woods: the Forest Campaigns of Andy Mahler appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

On 4 March, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini presented his startling report on the situation in Gaza (Palestine) to the UN General Assembly. In just 150 days, Lazzarini said, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children. Those who survive continue to face Israel’s attacks and are afflicted with the traumas of war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation – Conquest, War, Famine, and Death – are now galloping from one end of Gaza to the other.

‘Hunger is everywhere’, Lazzarini said. ‘A man-made famine is looming’. A few days after Lazzarini made his blunt assessment, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that child malnutrition levels in the northern part of the strip are ‘particularly extreme’. The UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick said that ‘hunger has reached catastrophic levels’ and ‘children are dying from hunger’. By the end of the first week of March, at least twenty children had died due to starvation. Among them was ten-year-old Yazan al-Kafarna of Beit Hanoun (northern Gaza), who died in Rafah (southern Gaza) on the same day that Lazzarini spoke at the UN. The image of Yazan’s emaciated body tore into the already battered conscience of our world. Story upon ugly story pile up alongside the rubble produced by Israeli bombing. Dr Mohammed Salha of Al-Awda hospital, where Yazan died, says that many pregnant women suffering from malnutrition have birthed stillborn foetuses or have required caesarean operations to remove them – without anaesthetics.

Mohammed Sami Qariqa (1999–2023), from the exhibition ‘Gaza International Airport’, 2022.

A ceasefire is nowhere on the horizon. Nor is any real commitment to get aid into Gaza, particularly in the north where hunger has taken the greatest toll (on 28 February, UN World Food Programme Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told the Security Council that there is a ‘real prospect of famine [in northern Gaza] by May, with over 500,000 people at risk if the threat is allowed to materialise’). A round 155 trucks of aid are entering Gaza per day – well below the 500-truck daily capacity at the crossing – with only a few of them going to northern Gaza. Israeli soldiers have been ruthless. On 29 February, when aid trucks arrived at the Al-Nabulsi roundabout (on the southwestern edge of Gaza City, in northern Gaza) and desperate people rushed to them, Israeli troops opened fire and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. Airdrops of food are not only inadequate in volume, but they have resulted in their own heartbreaks, with some parcels landing in the Mediterranean Sea and others crushing at least five people to death.

As if from nowhere, US President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address on 7 March that his country would build a ‘temporary pier’ in southern Gaza to facilitate the entry of aid through the sea. The context for this decision, which Biden omitted, is clear: Israel is not permitting the bare minimum of humanitarian aid to pass through land crossings, Israel destroyed the Gaza harbour on 10 October, and Israel pulverised the Gaza airport at Dahaniya in 2006. This decision is certainly not from nowhere. It also comes in the midst of the campaign for democrats in the US to vote ‘uncommitted’ in the ongoing primaries to make it clear that the US’s complicity in the genocide will negatively impact Biden’s re-election effort. Although one loaf of bread is better than none, these loaves of bread will come to Gaza stained in blood.

There is a hollowness to Biden’s pronouncement. Once aid arrives at this ‘temporary pier’, how will it be distributed? The main institutions in Gaza capable of any mass-scale distribution are UNRWA – now defunded by most Western countries – and the Hamas-led Palestinian government – which Western countries have set out to destroy. Since neither will be able to distribute humanitarian aid on the ground (and, as Biden said, ‘no US boots will be on the ground’), what will become of the aid?

Fathi Ghaben (1947–2024), Ray of Glory, n.d.

UNRWA has been at work since shortly after UN resolution 302 (IV) was passed in 1949, since which time it has been the main organisation to provide relief to Palestinian refugees (of which there were 750,000 when UNRWA began its operations and of which there are 5.9 million today). UNRWA’s mandate is precise: it must ensure the well-being of Palestinians but cannot operate to permanently settle them outside their homes. That is because UN resolution 194 affords Palestinians the ‘right to return’ to their homes from which they were ejected by the Israeli state. Although UNRWA’s main work has been in the field of education (two thirds of its 30,000 staff work for UNRWA schools), it is also the organisation most equipped to handle aid distribution.

The West allowed for the creation of UNRWA not because of any particular concern for Palestinians, but because – as the US Department of State noted in 1949 – the ‘conditions of unrest and despair would provide a most fertile hotbed for the implantation of Communism’. That is why the West provided funds for UNRWA (although, since 1966, this has come with severe restrictions). In early 2024, most Western countries cut their funding to UNRWA based on an unsubstantiated accusation tying UNRWA employees to the 7 October attack. Though it has recently come to light that the Israeli army tortured UNRWA employees, such as through waterboarding and beatings, and forced them to make these confessions, most of the countries that cut their funding based on these grounds have failed to reinstate it (with the exception of Canada and Sweden, which have recently resumed their funding). Meanwhile, several Global South countries – led by Brazil – have increased their contributions.

Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees who ran UNRWA from 2010 to 2014, recently said that if ‘UNRWA is not permitted to work, or is defunded, I can hardly see who can substitute [it]’. No humanitarian relief programme for Palestinians in Gaza is possible in the short run without UNRWA’s full partnership. Anything else is a public relations sham.

Majd Arandas (1994–2023), My Grandmother, 2022.

Reading about the famine in Gaza, I remembered a poem written by Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) about the Szebnie concentration camp in Jasło (southern Poland), which held Polish Jews, Romani people, and Soviet prisoners of war from 1941 until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in September 1944. Brutal, horrible violence was inflicted by the Nazis at Szebnie, particularly against the thousands of Jews who were killed there in mass executions. Szymborska’s poem, ‘Starvation Camp Near Jasło’ (1962), does not flinch from the wretchedness surrounding her, nor from the possibility of humanity for which she yearned.

Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they weren’t given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It’s a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don’t know.
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed:
a fictitious foetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows,
stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
no one’s spot in the ranks.

It became flesh right here, on this meadow.
But the meadow’s silent, like a witness who’s been bought.
Sunny. Green. A forest close at hand,
with wood to chew on, drops beneath the bark to drink –
a view served round the clock,
until you go blind. Above, a bird
whose shadow flicked its nourishing wings
across their lips. Jaws dropped,
teeth clattered.

At night a sickle glistened in the sky
and reaped the dark for dreamed-of loaves.
Hands came flying from blackened icons,
each holding an empty chalice.
A man swayed
on a grill of barbed wire.
Some sang, with dirt in their mouths. That lovely song
about war hitting you straight in the heart.
Write how quiet it is.
Yes.

The paintings and photograph in this newsletter were created by Palestinian artists killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocide. They have died, but we must live to tell their stories.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Robey’s Idea From Day One”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I Let the FBI Know”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right,” Impola answered.

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

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

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

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

“I Need to Come Play With Y’all”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We Have One Chief”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I Did This Trying to Keep My Undercover Position”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Gaza, the death toll from Israel’s 90-day bombardment has topped 22,600, with another 7,000 people reported missing and presumed dead. As the IDF intensifies its attacks on refugee camps in central and south Gaza — areas deemed by Israel to be safe zones — we speak with Mohammed Ghalayini, an air quality scientist and co-founder of Amplify Gaza Stories, who made the “impossible choice” to flee from Gaza to Britain, where he has dual citizenship. “It was really hard to imagine things getting any worse on any particular day, but they did keep getting worse,” says Ghalayini. “I’m fearful for everyone I know that’s in Gaza, from either meeting an explosive death or a death by trigger-happy genocidal soldiers who are like drunk, obviously, on the power that they are wielding.”

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

One in 50 Fijian children could have rheumatic heart disease and children between the ages of five to 15 years are the most at risk of rheumatic fever.

While revealing these alarming statistics, Health Secretary Dr James Fong revealed the high figures indicated the high screening conducted by the ministry, which was a positive sign in terms of early detection and early mitigation.

Speaking at the World Heart Day celebration in Suva yesterday, he said the ministry was focused on dedicating the best care to those diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease (RHD).

• READ MORE: Other Fiji health reports

It had been proven that with the best medical care, patients of the disease lived a long life.

Dr Fong highlighted the ministry’s advocacy and early detection awareness in the community remained the focus of the ministry, as it saw an opportunity to reach many Fijians as possible.

Meanwhile, Maca Tikoicina, the grandmother of young Jaydee Tikocina who was diagnosed with RHD last year, shared the painful experience their family had endured in the past 12 months.

She stated Jaydee was diagnosed in September 2022 and had to drop out of school as he became too weak and unable to carry out normal duties.

She highlighted that following through with doctors’ consultations, taking the prescribed medicines on time and following the strict injection schedule of one injection after every 21 days resulted in significant improvement in her grandchild’s life.

“When the doctors screened him in March, they noted some improvements in his heart at the recent check earlier this month, we were told Jaydee can play sports again,” she said.

According to Tikocina, sports and other physical activities were some of the many activities and joys that Jaydee was barred from when he was initially diagnosed.

Tikocina urged parents and guidance to get their children checked early and if they are diagnosed, the key was following medical advice.

She also encouraged Fijians to take advantage of the free screening programmes and outreaches organised by the Ministry of Health.

Pauliasi Mateboto is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

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

The prison authorities informed family members about the death of Min Hein Khant on Sunday evening and they went to the Yangon prison to see the body.

A source close to the family said Min Hein Khant was in good health before his arrest, but he was severely tortured during interrogation and did get treated for heart disease in prison.

“I found out that he had a heart attack in May,” said the source.

“He fell down and went to prison hospital. There, the doctors checked and found out that he had a heart attack but he was told to see a specialist only after he was released from prison. There was nothing in the prison. 

“He fainted once again in August and I heard that he was fine yesterday, but he died after fainting. It happened because he could not have proper medical treatment.”

Min Hein Khant was a member of Pazundaung and Botahtaung townships’ Youth Strike Committee and was arrested on Nov. 1, 2021.

He was sentenced to 27 years in prison under the Explosive Substances Act.

RFA phoned the junta’s prison department about his death but no one answered.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

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

A judge on Monday set Donald Trump’s federal trial for plotting to overturn the 2020 election to begin in Washington, D.C., on March 4 — at the height of the presidential primary season and one day before Super Tuesday. Meanwhile, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows testified before a federal judge in Georgia on Monday as part of an effort to move his trial from state to federal court. Meadows is one of Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia racketeering case, and any decisions on his fate could affect the others. Black Voters Matter co-founder Cliff Albright says at the heart of the Georgia case was an attempt to disenfranchise Black people who had helped push Joe Biden over the top in the state’s presidential election. “They were specifically going after Black voters,” Albright says of Trump and his allies. We also speak with law professor Anthony Michael Kreis, who attended Monday’s hearing in Georgia and says Trump’s mounting legal battles present “a real test for our constitutional order and our political system.”

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

The post Always a Carney at Heart appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads?

Apparently, the United States. And we’re not the first, according to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “since the coup of June 2010, Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”

While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Gym Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done by the “coup” within his own party in 2010 is Murdoch.

Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added:

“Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote, and:

“In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted. They’re simply pro-billionaire/pro-oligarch and thus, by extension, anti-democracy.

“In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.
“Given Murdoch's impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it's time to revisit it.”

Here in America, Fox “News” has had such a powerful influence on American politics that its creation, President Donald Trump, apparently even ordered government agencies to show it on their in-house TVs.

MoveOn.org, one of our nation’s top activist groups, launched a petition drive to remove Fox from military bases around the world, an effort supported by large numbers of active duty military. More recently, VoteVets.org has initiated a new, similar campaign, saying:

“FOX hosts’ election lies and disinformation splits the ranks, hurts unit cohesion, and weakens America's national defense. They must be removed from all TVs on military installations NOW.”

Fox and Murdoch’s power come, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug,” former Australian Prime Minister Rudd writes, “who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.
“This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”

When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6th coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6th attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, recent revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.

It tore America apart, set up the violence and deaths on January 6th and since, but made billions for Murdoch and his family. Astonishingly, even as Republican leadership in the United States Senate condemns him, Carlson is doubling down on those lies this very week.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely not a liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”

While Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox did.

“Banishing from polite company” is a phrase that came from a different era, but it’s time to ask if Fox has grown to such destructive dimensions that our government’s press rooms should stop recognizing them as a legitimate “news” organization and our military should reconsider its impact on our troops.

As my SiriusXM colleague Michelangelo Signorile points out, even “real news” guy Chris Wallace has jumped ship.

On average, every cable connected household in America is paying two dollars a month to Fox “News” via their cable company fees. A growing movement, UnFox My Cable Box, is trying to change this.

To continue with Rudd’s metaphor, if our media and body politic are infected with a cancer — driven by an unending thirst for profits, regardless of the damage it does — it’s our responsibility as Americans to call it out and isolate it so it can’t further harm our democracy and, by extension, the other democracies of the world.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

The post Kevin Alexander Gray: A Mighty Heart Has Stopped But It Didn’t Fail appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Several teachers from a Papua New Guinean school in Porgera, Enga province, are now being investigated by police after they allegedly instigated the torture, burning and interrogation of four women over sorcery accusations on the campus.

The four women who worked as cleaners at the school were attacked after one of the teachers died suddenly last week.

According to Enga police commander acting Superintendent George Kakas, the women had been seen chatting with the teacher last week before he collapsed an hour after being seen with the women.

• READ MORE:  Hunt down PNG’s sorcery torture ‘glassmen’ – charge them, says Juffa
• Other PNG sorcery allegation reports

PPC Kakas said the women were then forced into the home of the deceased teacher and interrogated for 11 hours by the colleagues of the deceased and his relatives.

“Last week the teacher collapsed. He was believed to have conversed in a casual meeting with women earlier on in the day and collapsed in the afternoon,” Superintendent Kakas said.

“Relatives and some teachers and public servants accused the four women of practising sorcery and taking out the deceased’s heart.

“They were taken into the teacher’s house and brutally tortured with bush knives, axes and iron rods from about 5pm that evening until 4am the next day when they were rescued by security force members consisting of Porgera police and PNG Defence Force soldiers.

Relatives barred police
“When police tried to have a look at the body of the deceased, his relatives refused to let police near the body, saying that ‘the glasman was seeing the body and that the teacher was still alive’.

Glasmen are men who claim to be able to identify and accuse women of sorcery.

“I commend the work of the police station commander Porgera, Inspector Martin Kelei, who led the team to the teacher’s house after a tip-off and rescued [the tortured women].

“They were all driven safely to Wabag hospital where they are now undergoing treatment. I immediately instructed my OIC CID Wabag to do a postmortem on the body.

“The next day they confirmed the teacher died of a massive heart attack.”

Superintendent Kakas said: “There you have it. It’s a confirmed heart attack, and the ladies were falsely accused, tortured and nearly killed.

“We know the identities of the key instigators of the torture of the four women and are working to apprehend them.

“I will make it my personal business to ensure these perpetrators are arrested and charged.

I have an investigation team working on that through my OIC [officer in charge] sorcery accusation-related violence unit here in Wabag.”

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

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

Adding to the body of research that highlights the deadly effects of air pollution, a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open connects long-term exposure to fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, to heightened risk of having a heart attack or dying from heart disease.

Conducted by experts at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the study comes as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering tougher air quality standards for PM2.5, which comes from sources including construction sites, fires, power plants, and vehicles.

The researchers focused on over 3.7 million adults who were members of the Kaiser Permanente healthcare consortium in Northern California from 2007-16 and had lived in the state for at least a year. They linked each patient's address to a geographical location to establish annual average exposure, then they identified who experienced heart problems.

"Our work has the potential to play an important role in ongoing national conversations led by the Environmental Protection Agency on whether—and how much—to tighten air quality standards."

"We found that people exposed to fine particulate air pollution have an increased risk of experiencing a heart attack or dying from coronary heart disease—even when those exposure levels are at or below our current U.S. air quality standards," said lead author Stacey E. Alexeeff, a research scientist and biostatistician at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

Specifically, they found that PM2.5 exposure at high concentrations, or between 12 and 13.9 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m³), was tied to a 16% increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 10% increased risk of experiencing a heart attack—officially known as acute myocardial infarction—compared with exposure to concentrations under 8 μg/m³.

"We found strong evidence that neighborhood matters when it comes to exposures to this type of air pollution," noted study co-author and Kaiser research scientist Stephen Van Den Eeden. "The strongest association between exposure to air pollution and risk of cardiovascular events in our study was seen in people who live in low socioeconomic areas, where there is often more industry, busier streets, and more highways."

According to Alexeeff, "Our work has the potential to play an important role in ongoing national conversations led by the Environmental Protection Agency on whether—and how much—to tighten air quality standards to protect the public from pollution's effects."

The EPA in January proposed strengthening the annual public health standard for PM2.5 from 12 μg/m³ to 9-10 μg/m³ but is currently accepting public comment on a range of 8-11 μg/m³. The pending rule notably would not change the PM2.5 standards for exposure over a 24-hour period and for public welfare; it would also keep current standards for larger particles known as PM10.

As Common Dreams reported, in response to the plan, Earthjustice attorney Seth Johnson said last month that "though aspects of EPA's proposal would somewhat strengthen important public health protections, EPA is not living up to the ambitions of this administration to follow the science, protect public health, and advance environmental justice."

Alexeeff said Friday that "our study clearly adds to the evidence that the current regulatory standards are not sufficient to protect the public."

"Our findings support the EPA's analysis that lowering the standard to at least 10 μg/m³ is needed to protect the public," the researcher added. "Our findings also suggest that lowering the standard to 8 μg/m³ may be needed to reduce the risk of heart attacks."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Around noon on January 16, in Budiriro, southwest of the capital city of Harare, anti-riot police harassed about 20 journalists, barred them from covering a court hearing, and threatened to beat them, according to media reports, a statement by the Zimbabwean chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), and five of the journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

The journalists had gathered to cover the hearing of opposition party Citizens Coalition for Change Organizing Secretary Amos Chibaya and 24 others charged with holding an unlawful gathering with the intent to incite public violence, according to those sources.

Police only allowed journalists from the state-owned outlets Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and The Herald newspaper to cover the hearing, according to the MISA statement and the journalists who spoke to CPJ.

“Zimbabwean authorities must facilitate open justice in the country’s courts and ensure that journalists’ access is not impeded by baton-wielding riot police favoring state media over privately owned media outlets,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “All journalists should be free to cover cases before the courts and not risk censorship, harassment, and beatings for simply trying to do their jobs to keep citizens informed.” 

The journalists who were barred included those working for the privately owned news outlets ZimLive, TechnoMag, NewsHawks, NewsDay Zimbabwe, NewZimbabwe, Nhau News Online, and Heart and Soul TV, among others, according to the five journalists who spoke with CPJ.

TechnoMag’s Audience Mutema told CPJ that, although the journalists produced press identification cards, police pushed them away with their batons, ordered them outside, and refused to allow them to stand near the court building.

Freelance journalist Frank Chikowore told CPJ that police threatened to beat the journalists if they continued trying to gain access to the court. 

“They asked us: ‘Who invited you here?’ And they then told us, ‘We don’t want any journalists here, go away,’” Chikowore said. “They told us, ‘We will beat you up; get out of here.’”  

The news outlet NewZimbabwe tweeted that some journalists “were even dragged and pushed out of the court,” and that one police officer told a journalist, “I’ll injure you.”

Ruvimbo Muchenje, a NewsHawk reporter, told CPJ that anti-riot police “pushed us around and told us to leave; they said the court was full.”

Later that afternoon, a few journalists were allowed in the courtroom after the intervention of Zimbabwe national police spokesperson Paul Nyathi and the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Mutema told CPJ.

CPJ called and texted Nyathi for comment but did not receive any responses.

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

“China’s foreign affairs are always fascinating, but following you has made my life even more so,” she wrote.

“Niuniulovegungunbaobao” responded with a bit more equanimity. She urged Zhao’s fans to “look at Uncle’s healing smile and bid him farewell properly.”

Zhao, she added, is “just changing a position and continuing to safeguard the motherland.”

That Zhao has developed a fervent fan base may surprise some people outside of China, where online expressions of love and devotion are typically reserved for movie stars and famous musicians – the Ryan Reynoldses and Taylor Swifts of the world as opposed to the Ned Prices (the U.S. State Department spokesman).

But while Zhao’s glasses and conservative sartorial style suggest career bureaucrat more than hunky celebrity, his penchant for slapping down the United States with his tough -- some say offensive -- rhetoric and his ability to stir international controversy through Twitter posts has prompted an online fan group of more than 76,000 members.

Almost daily, Zhao fanatics create music videos highlighting his most swoon-worthy moments, like when he responds confidently to questions at a press conference or adjusts his glasses, a signature Zhao move. His decision to wear a red or blue tie can set Weibo alight with new posts.

“He is always perfect in my heart,” Weibo user Wojiushiwoxiyue said. “Whatever he does, I support it, whatever he says, I follow it.”

The adoration of Zhao fits into China’s embrace of nationalism under leader Xi Jinping, according to experts. The reaction from global leaders, though, has been more mixed, to say the least. While Zhao’s supporters in China appreciate his unusually aggressive remarks in the usually cautious world of international diplomacy, counterparts in other countries have often been put off by the comments.

Wolf warrior

In July 2019, for example, Zhao, then the deputy chief of mission of the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, wrote on Twitter in apparent response to the Chinese government persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang that white people didn’t go to southeast Washington, D.C., “because it’s an area for the black & Latin.”

Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, responded by calling Zhao a “racist disgrace.”

“To label someone who speaks the truth that you don’t want to hear a racist, is disgraceful & disgusting,” Zhao wrote in response, although his posts were soon after deleted, according to news reports.

In 2020, Zhao suggested that the U.S. Army might have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, which is widely accepted as ground zero for the COVID pandemic.

And he angered Australia by posting a fake image of a soldier holding a knife against the throat of an Afghan child, a reference to an Australian Defense Force inspector general’s report on alleged war crimes committed by a small group of the country’s forces.

It’s through these types of posts that Zhao has come to be seen as a chief practitioner of a more assertive, “wolf warrior” diplomacy. The term refers to a series of nationalistic Chinese films about a special forces soldier.

Despite the international ill will Zhao has inspired, it isn’t clear that his announced move represents a demotion. Zhao may not be as much in the public eye as deputy director-general of Boundary and Ocean Affairs, but he will likely play a large role in one of the most sensitive diplomatic issues facing China -- its claims to the South China Sea.

Other countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, say China is encroaching on territory that belongs to them.

The wife

Some online posters, however, have interpreted the switch as a slight to their hero. And they are clear on who’s to blame: Zhao’s wife, Tang Tianru, whom he met while posted in Pakistan.

“You’ve got your wish. It’s like a curse has been brought upon Zhao’s family by bringing such a worthless, untalented, and unkind beast into their home,” Cuicanchulian posted.

That level of vitriol toward Tang is actually not all that unusual within the chat group, particularly among her husband’s more fervent “girlfriend” fans.

Weibo user Youlanfeimo analyzed photos posted online of the two and declared that they didn’t really love one another. Others have criticized Tang for everything from oversharing to wearing a Patek Philippe watch, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

She’s also been pummeled online for appearing in public without a mask despite her vocal support for “zero-COVID” policies and for describing her life in Germany as “plain and true.” She apparently lived in the country for a time during the pandemic, despite travel restrictions.

Occasionally the anger spills over onto Zhao, as when Xiaobabeibei revealed the deep betrayal the relationship had sparked within her. “What sickens me is that your actions completely make me lose faith in love and completely destroys the impression of men in my heart,” she wrote.

A new diplomacy

Gabriele de Seta, a sociologist who has studied celebrity worship, said Zhao’s fan base may be an outgrowth of an effort by Xi’s government to use social media to promote China as it moves to challenge the United States as another global superpower.

Fan participation can help to amplify the messages the government wants to convey. As such, maintaining an active online presence is now part of a Chinese diplomat’s job description, he said.

“It’s how the ecosystem works,” de Seta said. “The fandom is actively creating more content or amplifying it.”

Every spokesperson within the Foreign Ministry has a fan base that on Chinese Weibo coalesce in Super Topic groups. The Zhao Lijian Super Topic has more than 76,000 followers and 39,000 posts. Hua Chunying, the assistant minister for Foreign Affairs, has 60,000 followers. So does Wang Wenbin, another Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Wang Yi, China’s highest-ranking diplomat, has 36,000. 

Bright star

The idea of politicians engendering heated comments on social media platforms is of course not wholly unheard of in the United States. President Donald Trump had millions of followers on Twitter – and millions of detractors -- before he was removed from the platform. (New owner Elon Musk has said he’s welcome back on.)

Trump administration spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany has a Twitter fan club with more than 20,000 followers that reposts pictures of her family and promotes her post-administration accomplishments, like the release of a new memoir.

Michelle Obama has 22 million followers. Her husband has more than 133 million. Zhao has nearly 2 million Twitter followers. 

But the fervency of Zhao’s fans seems to set them apart. 

Zhao has not been seen in public since a December media briefing, which has prompted worries he had contracted COVID (and more nasty comments directed at Tang).

Woshiweilaiyidaoguang urged Zhao to take care of himself. 

“Don’t worry too much about your work during this period, your dedicated and responsible colleagues will handle it well… A diplomatic position needs a vigorous Spokesperson Zhao, and what the fans long to see is also a shining, healthy you.”

Occasionally, a skeptical voice shows up in the chats. A post by Hanliangyishi prompted an incredulous reply and a charge of brainlessness from one commenter. 

“I’ve seen people fawn over singing stars and movie stars, but I’ve never seen anyone obsess over a government official!” the commenter said.

Hanliangyishi wasn’t having it: “Not only are you brainless, but you’re also blind! Can’t you see that Uncle Zhao is a star brighter than any other?”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mary Zhao for RFA.

At about 11 a.m., journalists were interviewing some of the delegates before the congress when a group of MDC supporters assaulted a party member who had allegedly criticized the event, according to the MISA statement and Chengeto Chidi, a reporter with the local outlet Heart and Soul TV, who was at the scene.

When journalists from Heart and Soul, the Open Parly ZW news website, and the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster VOA Studio 7 attempted to record the incident, MDC security staff and party activists threatened them, VOA Studio 7 journalist Mlondolozi Ndlovu told CPJ.

Party members in charge of running security for the event told the journalists to stop filming, and threatened to beat them and seize their equipment, Ndlovu told CPJ.

“They said to us, ‘We thought you are with us. Stop taking pictures, go back inside the venue, otherwise we will beat you up,’” Ndlovu said.

One security officer accused the journalists of inciting the scuffle, and another threatened to confiscate Chidi’s phone, he told CPJ.

Heart and Soul reporter Ruvimbo Nyikadzino told CPJ that security staff also obstructed journalists from interviewing delegates who were entering the congress venue.

Heart and Soul News Editor Blessed Mhlanga went to help the journalists before MDC spokesperson Witness Dube arrived at the scene and cautioned party supporters against threatening members of the press, Mhlanga and Ndlovu told CPJ. Mhlanga said the journalists continued covering the event after Dube’s intervention

Dube told CPJ via messaging app that his party believed in media freedom “to the letter and spirit,” and said the MDC would always facilitate safe coverage of its events.

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

“The battle between good and evil has come now.”
— Senior staff member in the U.S. Senate

1A legion of horribles

A woman draped in an American flag near a broken window in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

2Technophilia

A rioter filming with an iPhone is seen in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

3Freaks vs. squares

Jake Angeli, a self-described QAnon shaman, confronts police officers in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks.

4How to destroy a democracy

A man wearing a helmet and tactical vest listens to a speech by President Donald Trump during the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

5A Meandering Energy

Protesters swarm the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux

“The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Mike Giglio.

His son, Joshua Nascimento joined his mother, Assíria Lemos, in conversation with Monica Grayley, head of our Portuguese service, to talk about the legacy of the footballing great and three-time World Cup winner, who died in hospital in Sao Paulo, on Thursday.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Monica Grayley.

He was the guest of Orient Bio Inc., South Korea’s largest producer of animals for laboratory experiments. Twelve months earlier, a senior Orient Bio executive pleaded guilty to lying to special agents from the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service investigating illicit exports of macaques from Cambodia to America.

Two senior officials from Cambodia’s Forestry Administration (FA) – a department within the Agriculture Ministry – were charged by federal prosecutors in Florida last month with having facilitated illegal macaque exports from Cambodia to the U.S. between December 2017 and January 2022. 

Kry Masphal, director of the Forestry Administration’s Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity, was arrested on Nov. 16 while flying through New York’s Kennedy International Airport on this way to a conference on the trade in endangered species. He was indicted alongside his boss, FA Director General Keo Omaliss, who remains free in Cambodia.

At a court hearing in Florida this morning, Judge Kathleen Williams ordered that Kry be released today to spend the Christmas weekend at the Cambodian Embassy in Washington. From there, he is due to be transferred to Virginia, where he will be placed under house arrest in the home of an as-yet unidentified family to be compensated by the embassy. 

Allusions to Veng

The indictment makes two allusions to Veng’s involvement in the alleged scheme and mentions two unindicted co-conspirators – U.S. companies “engaged in the importation and sale of non-human primates, including long-tailed macaques.” 

Neither company is named, but one, whose place of business is given as Alice, Texas, bears a striking resemblance to Orient BioResource Center Inc., or OBRC, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Orient Bio for the duration of the smuggling allegations contained within the indictment.

The final illegal act alleged by U.S. prosecutors against Kry and Keo took place on Jan. 26. The following day, Orient Bio sold OBRC to Nasdaq-listed Inotiv Inc. for $28 million. The sale agreement was signed by Orient Bio’s CEO, Jae Jin Chang, and Gary Tucker, OBRC’s vice president, the senior executive who had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents just months earlier.

Kry was arrested on Nov. 16. The next day Inotiv released a statement disclosing that its “principal supplier of non-human primates … along with two Cambodian officials” had been charged with conspiring to illegally import non-human primates into the U.S. It went on to note that Orient BioResearch Center had been served with grand jury subpoenas in November 2021 “requiring the production of documents and information related to their importation of [non-human primates] into the United States.”

Guilty plea

Just months earlier, Tucker had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to special agents from the U.S. Fisheries & Wildlife Service during a July 2019 interview about “his involvement in the procurement of long-tailed macaques” from Southeast Asia.

Both Tucker’s guilty plea and sentencing were publicized by the U.S. Department of Justice in two press releases released a year before Veng signed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Orient Bio on Aug. 1. The Justice Department statements both noted that Tucker’s deception had centered on OBRC’s activities in the Kingdom.

The agents had asked Tucker whether he or any other OBRC employees had prepared reports on their visits to macaque suppliers in Cambodia. He denied that any such reports existed, which turned out to be a lie.

“In fact, as defendant well knew, preparation and submission of site visit reports was a standard procedure at OBRC,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

“Defendant was well aware of issues … related to wild-caught primates being ‘laundered’ through purported captive-breeding facilities and ultimately being exported and sold from their countries of origin under false documentation,” the prosecutors added.

Cambodia-Orient Bio MOU

According to a Cambodian People’s Party announcement, the MOU between the Ministry of Agriculture and Orient Bio was “primarily aimed to establish the cooperation on training human resources in the agriculture sector … to help increase the capacity of production and productivity.”

The case against Tucker was led by U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald, who is also heading up the case against Keo and Kry.

Neither Tucker nor his lawyers responded to multiple requests for comment.

Veng appears to be referenced twice in the indictment. First, the prosecutor alleges that FA Director Keo Omaliss was described in a May 4, 2018, email as trying to “persuade his superior to allow collection of the needed monkeys.” As the FA is a department of the Agriculture Ministry, Veng would have been Keo’s immediate superior at that time.

An email purportedly from the following month is subsequently alleged to have relayed a claim by Keo that “the minister had approved and issued the collection quota” for long-tailed macaques. More broadly, the indictment repeatedly alleges unnamed Agriculture Ministry employees participated in the collection and laundering of wild monkeys.

Three days after his sacking, Veng – who did not respond to a request for comment – was appointed delegate minister attached to the prime minister.

Since then, court records show the Cambodian government has retained at least seven lawyers to defend Kry in Florida and New York. Four were previously employed as prosecutors by the U.S. Department of Justice, while another was deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Agriculture Ministry denial

Agriculture Minister Dith Tina has been adamant that there has been no monkey smuggling.

Kry’s defense counsel have been working closely with Cambodian Ambassador Keo Chhea to get Kry released on bail into the embassy’s custody where, they say, he would be better able to prepare his defense.

In a court filing earlier this month, prosecutor Watts-Fitzgerald raised the possibility that the Cambodian government might help Kry to flee the country ahead of trial.

Exiled opposition figurehead Sam Rainsy believes the government is afraid of what Kry might say if found guilty.

“Cambodian authorities now fear that Kry Masphal may be about to spill the beans if he is judged by an independent court outside of Cambodia, such as in the US,” Sam wrote in a tweet. “So, Cambodia’s government absolutely wants to get Kry Masphal back, by first having him transferred to Cambodia’s embassy in Washington. Then they will help him ‘flee the country’ as feared by US prosecutors.”

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jack Adamović Davies.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by David Leask.

The baby in Aotearoa New Zealand whose parents did not want him to receive blood from people who may have had the covid vaccine underwent urgent heart surgery today.

Anti-vaccination lawyer Sue Grey confirmed to RNZ Checkpoint late this afternoon that the baby, known as baby W, had undergone surgery today.

Grey said she had received a text message from the baby’s parents confirming the surgery was finished and the six-month-old was doing well.

• READ MORE: No appeal against ruling in NZ baby blood case, surgery to go ahead
• Other blood case baby reports

Baby W was this week placed under the guardianship of the High Court until the completion of the surgery and post-operative recovery.

Te Whatu Ora asked the High Court to take guardianship of the baby this week to allow the surgery to go ahead with blood from the NZ Blood Service.

Doctors from Te Whatu Ora were made agents of the court to carry out the surgery, including the administration of any blood products, while his parents were agents of the court for all of his other care.

Protesters gathered near Auckland’s Starship Hospital today to support the parents.

Protesters near hospital
About 60 protesters were near the hospital many with signs such as “do not experiment on our children” as they awaited an update on whether the operation had gone ahead this morning.

A new ruling last night ordered the parents not to obstruct health staff at Starship Hospital.

In a statement this morning, police confirmed they were present at the hospital yesterday evening and overnight.

In a statement last night, Justice Gault said he had been informed by the lawyer acting for Te Whatu Ora that the baby’s parents had prevented doctors from taking blood tests, performing a chest X-ray and an anaesthetic assessment.

The parents objected and the hospital asked the police for help.

A new ruling last night ordered the parents not to prevent medical staff from carrying out their work.

The health service said officials would not be commenting on specific details of individual patient care or providing clinical status updates for ethical and privacy reasons.

Person trespassed
Te Whatu Ora Te Toka Tumai Auckland Interim Director Dr Mike Shepherd had said it remained a priority to work alongside the baby’s whānau to care for him.

“In addition, we’re doing everything we can to support our teams through a difficult situation for all involved,” he said.

He confirmed a person had been trespassed from the hospital.

“As general comment, from time to time, it may be necessary to trespass an individual or individuals from our site, sometimes only for a few hours, if they are impacting on our clinical team’s ability to care for patients.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

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

The parents of a New Zealand baby at the centre of a legal dispute that has made global headlines will not be appealing against a judge’s decision to hand guardianship of the child to the High Court.

The four-month-old — known only as Baby W — requires urgent open heart surgery, with both blood and blood products required for the operation and potentially its aftermath.

Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand took the case to court because the parents refused to allow blood transfusions from anyone who might have had the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine.

• READ MORE: Vaccinated donor blood: Parents’ meeting with doctors ‘hijacked’ by anti-vax support person
• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Interview with University of Otago bioethics lecturer Josephine Johnstone duration

The NZ Blood Service does not differentiate between blood from vaccinated and non-vaccinated people, saying there was “no evidence that previous vaccination affects the quality of blood for transfusion”.

A judge on Wednesday ruled in favour of Te Whatu Ora, allowing the surgery to go ahead with whatever product the NZ Blood Service provides. Doctors, having been made agents of the court for the surgery, said on Wednesday afternoon they would be ready to operate within 48 hours.

The family’s lawyer Sue Grey and high-profile media supporter Liz Gunn said this morning there was no time to appeal against the court’s decision, but they had confidence the child would “get the best possible care with the best, safest blood” because “the government cannot afford anything to go wrong for Baby W as the world is watching”.

“The priority for the family is to enjoy a peaceful time with their baby until the operation, and to support him through the operation,” the pair said in a post on the New Zealand Outdoors and Freedom Party Facebook page.

Grey co-leads the party.

The baby will be in intensive care for up to a week and under Te Whatu Ora’s guardianship possibly until the end of January, allowing time for their recovery. The doctors were told to keep the parents “informed at all reasonable times of the nature and progress of [the baby’s] condition and treatment”.

Te Whatu Ora has been approached for comment.

Judge’s ruling expected
The ruling should not have come as a surprise, University of Otago bioethics lecturer  Josephine Johnstone told Morning Report on Thursday.

“This may seem like a very 2022 case and it is in many ways, but it connects to lines of decision over time where there have been disputes about what’s in the best interests of a child that has very serious medical needs,” she said.

“So this is consistent with previous cases around the refusal of blood products for children whose parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses… or refusal of medical care for cancer treatment for children whose parents have alternative health and science[ views, which is sort of similar to this. In many ways it’s consistent with those decisions. It’s not really a break in that way.”

Johnstone said the parents’ authority over their child’s health and upbringing was being limited in only a very minor way.

“The parents still have all of the other decision-making authority that parents have. And parents do have enormous latitude to make decisions about how to raise their children — what religion to raise them, what kinds of beliefs, what kinds of home to create, what kind of traditions, they have enormous decision-making power about children’s [medical treatment], but it’s not unlimited.

“In very rare cases where it’s a life-and-death situation, we can expect the courts to step in — and that’s exactly what happened.”

Johnstone’s view was backed up by Rebecca Keenan, a former nurse who now works as a barrister, specialising in medical law.

Put child ‘firmly first’
“[The court has] put the child firmly first and have gone by the evidence and supported the health board,” she told Morning Report.

“From reading the judgment, you can see that the parents have been taking their baby out of hospital, against medical opinion, and there’s obviously been a real breakdown in the relationship between the parents and the medical staff.”

Wednesday’s judgment outlined a meeting in late November during which the parents’ support person “proceeded to pressurise the specialists with her theory about conspiracies in New Zealand and even said that deaths in infants getting transfusions were occurring in Starship Hospital”.

Johnstone said while having a support person in meetings with medical staff was a right, it was clear in this case they were not helpful.

“One has to imagine that the involvement of some of the anti-vaccine campaigners has escalated not just this case at the national level, but even the discussions between the family and their medical team, so that’s explicitly mentioned in the case and is definitely a factor in how things must have got to the point where a court order would be needed.”

While not an unexpected ruling, Johnstone fears it might further strain the relationship between parents with alternative views on medical matters and their doctors.

“Any family who has these views and has a very sick child, their healthcare providers are going to have to work that much harder to keep them engaged and keep their trust … a big challenge,” she said.

Pleased over care
Speaking to RNZ’s First Up earlier on Thursday morning, Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said he was “pleased” Baby W would soon be getting the care he needs.

“Nobody underestimates the emotion and the challenge and the difficulty here, but we have to do what’s right for the child.”

The case has made headlines globally, with coverage on BBC News, CNN and The Guardian.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

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

Give up?

The name is Dr. Shehadeh “Shawki” Khalil Harb, better known as just Dr. Shawki Harb, from Ramallah. He was born on December 13, 1938, during the Great Revolt between 1936-1939 and, as Dr. Harb recounts, he came on his own, since the midwife could not reach the house in time due to intense shooting in the neighborhood. Born a Christian and breastfed by a Muslim, Dr. Harb embodies the best of both traditions.

If you are from my generation or older in Palestine, you know and respect the person even if you have never crossed paths with him.

I first came across his name during the Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) that started in the year 2000. The Israeli military had decided to directly (since they never stopped occupying in some form) reoccupy all Palestinian population centers, including Ramallah and Al-Bireh where I live. Unlike the Intifada of 1987, which was mostly non-violent, the death and destruction in this mostly armed onslaught seemed never-ending. We live in Al-Bireh on a road that leads to the Ramallah Hospital where ambulances whisked by non-stop to transport the wounded. Ramallah Hospital is the same hospital where Dr. Harb worked for more than a quarter of a century.

As we watched the wounded pile up at the hospital on the news, a doctor in the waiting room–turned triage–kneeled over a young wounded patient. The hospital was overloaded, and Dr. Harb was performing life-saving procedures on this patient on the waiting room floor. From that introduction, this doctor earned my respect, albeit it would be two decades later before I had the honor of meeting him in person.

Today, Dr. Harb is retired and living in Farmington, Utah, in the U.S., but he remains as active as ever. Several years ago, I was happy to find him on the Advisory Board of the United Palestinian Appeal, which I had just joined. I had known and respected this person for some time; now, I could engage with him, at least through video conferencing.

More recently, I learned that Dr. Harb wrote a personal narrative of his life story and was visiting Ramallah. The book is titled, A Surgeon Under Israeli Occupation. I immediately ordered a copy. A few days later, I happily received an email from Dr. Harb announcing his new book. I told him that I had already ordered a copy and that my wife and I would like to invite him and his wife to dinner, along with our mutual longtime family friend and neighbor, Umayma Muhtadi. We were thrilled when everyone accepted.

(R to L) Dr. Shawki Harb, Ms. Heidi Harb, Umayma Muhtadi, Abeer Barghouty-Bahour, and Sam Bahour at Darna Restaurant in Ramallah. (October 30, 2022).

I got my copy of the book and was anxious to read it, especially after I met this legend in person. Early on a rainy Friday morning, I started reading. I could not stop. My wife dragged me to breakfast, after which I immediately returned to reading. By late afternoon I finished. My first reaction was: Why did it stop? I knew Dr. Harb had gone on to be active on many fronts, but books must end somewhere.

The book starts with the period when the British Mandate ruled Palestine, a complicated period when the seeds of decades-long strife were being planted and with which we grapple to this day. Then, Dr. Harb offers a glimpse of what life in Palestine was like during World War II, a time when international affairs were playing out in Palestine, all the while disease and health issues strained the community.

No time is wasted before Dr. Harb introduces the reader to his family. Interestingly, his grandfather, like mine, worked in the U.S. steel industry, his in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, mine 45 minutes away in Youngstown, Ohio.

Then catastrophe struck Palestine. Dr. Harb was caught in the middle of it all and recounts:

“I remember how my hometown, Ramallah, was bombed from the air. It was soon after the United Nations adopted the partition plan for Palestine in 1947. I was then eight years old. The Palestinians rejected this unfair plan, since they were the overwhelming majority and indigenous population in the country. They identified with King Solomon’s wisdom that the real mother would refuse to tear her child in half. This ushered in the events which resulted in what the Palestinians call al-Nakba.”

Before the reader can start to think they are entering a political discourse, Dr. Harb refocuses on his spectacular life: how he went from catastrophe to high school, to medical school in Germany, marriage, to many U.S. cities to complete his specialty training just as the 1967 Six Day War started, to volunteering in Jordan during Black September where he first met the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, then back to the U.S. and finally back home to Ramallah, just in time for the First Intifada and all that followed. Peppered throughout the story are medical nuggets that anyone in the medical profession will find intriguing, especially surgeons.

The second part of the book depicts what it was like for Dr. Harb working at the Ramallah Hospital under Israeli military occupation, from implanting the first pacemaker to establishing the first open-heart surgery unit in Palestine and so much more.

The book ends with ten pages of black and white photos, including a copy of the letter the anti-Arab racist Israeli Knesset Member, Rabbi Meir Kahane, sent to Dr. Harb in 1987, encouraging him to leave Palestine. Reading this account and knowing that 35 years later, in 2022, Israel elected Rabbi Kahane’s disciples made me sick to my stomach.

The book is a light read but offers a full dose of Palestinian reality during several phases of our history. Similar to Fida Jiryis’ recently released family memoir, Stranger in My Own Land, it is a human perspective, par excellence, of a political issue. Seeing more and more Palestinian voices humanizing our suffering and resistance is having a profound impact on how people are relating to the continued Israeli oppression of Palestinians, on both sides of the infamous Green Line.

From the book’s outset, Dr. Harb accurately sets the scene. He writes, “For those who are concerned about the future of the Palestinian people and its conflict with the Zionist movement, I think that the observations that I offer here give some idea of what will be needed to resolve it.” I could not agree more!

Dr. Harb’s book has a general audience, those wanting a peek into Palestinian professional life. But there are several other audiences I can imagine taking a great interest too. Anyone from Ramallah, young and old, will learn a great deal about their city. The healthcare sector in Palestine and abroad can learn how one develops medical services in distressed situations. Medical students everywhere, but especially those in Palestine, should be made to read this book as part of their studies so they do not take any progress to date for granted. Also, anyone who thinks Palestinians lack experience in non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation is in for a mind-opening read.

As Dr. Harb narrates his penultimate chapter titled “Israel Reoccupies Ramallah,” he recounts when Israeli soldiers entered his home in 2001 and used him as a “human shield” as they searched every room of his home. He writes:

“My dream of liberation for all the people of historical Palestine within one secular and democratic state appeared to have vanished. Just as the soldiers were leaving the house, the officer in charge slowed his steps a little, turned to me and apologized for the search, and said that he belonged to an Israeli group active in promoting Palestinian human rights. I sensed a glimmer of hope.”

It seems to have been a faint glimmer tainted by a heavy dose of irony, but one that revealed how the Israeli state is also imposing a heavy moral burden, not to mention human rights violations, on its own soldiers.

Dr. Harb returns to end the book with a message he makes throughout, “the one-state solution from the river to the sea is the future”. Although not my position, yet, due to some cold, hard political realities, it is heard much more often these days as Israel continues to mutilate Palestine’s geography.

The premiere book launch is scheduled for December 19, 2022, at 6 PM in Palestine, co-hosted by The Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem and the none-other-than Ramallah Friends School (launch will be at the upper campus library), from where Dr. Harb graduated and writes about in the book. I was honored to be invited to moderate the event. See you there.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Bahour.

The film is a harrowing inquiry into individual memory and trauma as they clash with the untouchable narrative of a nation that has convinced itself of its purity.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Paul Rogers.

Following Donald Trump's corrupt script, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is encouraging his followers to shut that country down because he is, so far, refusing to acknowledge that he lost the election. This is a crisis for democracy.

That dependence on trust in elections—that vulnerability of all democracies—is exactly what Donald Trump and his fascist followers are aiming their weapons of mass deception at.

Nations have to figure out how they are to be governed. Most of recorded history tells the story of kings, popes, priests, lords, and barons who ruled through violence and imposed themselves on their people rather than the people selecting them.

Ultimately, as we all learned in high school civics, you can have a government chosen democratically with a free and fair vote or you can have a government chosen through brute force and violence. There really aren't any other choices.

That was the great American experiment. Replacing a violent hereditary warlord king with a president and congress elected by the people. Democracy.

But democracy only functions properly when the people trust that its essential mechanism—voting—is honest and true.

And that dependence on trust in elections—that vulnerability of all democracies—is exactly what Donald Trump and his fascist followers are aiming their weapons of mass deception at.

But Trump isn't doing it alone: he's following a script that has played out in multiple countries over many tragic years and wars, and is now possible in America (and is spreading around the world) because of a decision a Republican campaign made in 1964.

Our country is also experiencing this deep crisis of democracy because, in large part, the media hasn't been doing their job about this issue of faith in the security of our vote. There's a hell of a history here.

Republicans have been attacking the heart of our democracy right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about "voter fraud."

It's a phrase they essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy during its later years when they tried to suppress poor white voters who opposed the oligarchy.

No other developed country in the world worries about "voter fraud" because it's been nonexistent in most modern democracies. It's not a thing anywhere except in the United States, and now Brazil. And it's only a thing here because of this strategy that was developed in 1964.

Most countries don't even have what we call voter registration, because they don't want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote.

If you're a citizen, you vote. You show up with your ID and vote at any polling location you choose; in many countries because you're a citizen they simply mail you the ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody gets one.

After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What possible payoff is there to that? And the one time somebody tries to do it at scale—like the Republican scheme a few years ago in North Carolina to buy a few dozen mail-in ballots from low income people in a trailer park—it gets exposed because it's almost impossible to cover things like that up for any period of time. After all, it would take thousands of votes in most places, sometimes tens of thousands, to alter election outcomes.

In all the intervening years since Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack claiming that this "voter fraud" was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we've seen on TV ever since the 60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: they're part of a larger program the GOP has used to suppress the vote—to suppress democracy—for sixty years now.

Probably to keep from offending their white audience, and also to prevent Republicans squeals of "liberal media bias," America's news media has historically treated those long lines and other barriers to voting that conservatives have thrown up as if they were simply a bizarre force of nature.

"Who could imagine why this is?" they seem to say, sometimes noting that the poll workers in Black districts are also themselves usually Black—even though they have no say over how many voting machines or polling places their precincts get from the white-controlled state.

The media's message over the past 60 years has been clear:

"Black people, apparently, can't even figure out how to vote right."

This assault on the democratic system at the heart of our republic has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.

The GOP made this transition after LBJ and his Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act just five months before that year's November election.

In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater—who was running for President on the Republican ticket—openly opposed the Civil Rights Act that President Johnson had just pushed through Congress. He was doubly opposed to the Voting Rights Act that Johnson had teed up for 1965 if he was re-elected.

At the time:

• 35.5 percent of the citizens of Mississippi were Black but only 4.3 percent were able to register to vote. 

• Alabama was 26% Black: 7% could vote. 

• South Carolina was nearly one-third Black (29.2%) but only 9% of that state's African Americans could successfully register to vote. 

• Alabama was 26% Black but the white power structure made sure only 7% could vote.

These were not accidents: from poll taxes to jellybean counting to constitution-interpreting requirements, most Southern states had erected massive barriers to Black people voting.

These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were—by definition—naked attacks on democracy.  

After all, it's not really democracy when a "free and fair" election was held but, in fact, large numbers of people who legally qualified and wanted to vote weren't allowed their voice.

How can that not be a crisis for a nation that calls itself a democratic republic? 

By 1964 people across the country were starting to agree with that assessment, which is why the Civil Rights Act was passed, producing a lot of angry and disaffected Dixiecrats.

Republicans decided it was a great time to pry the southern racist vote away from the Democrats. Their rallying cry would be that Black people were engaging in "voter fraud!!!"

But don't bother looking through newspaper archives to see if the American media exposed this new GOP invention as a fraud itself: they rarely raised the question until the past year or two.

I worked in radio news back in the later 1960s and 1970s and don't recall a single major-story mention of Goldwater's racist vote-suppressing positions and the GOP's sudden use of the phrase "voter fraud" during that era (and I was paying attention: my Dad was an enthusiastic Republican who'd corralled me into going door-to-door with him for Goldwater when I was 13).

Reported on or not, back in 1964 Goldwater and his Republicans wanted to keep Black people from voting. And the media was fine going along with them: after all, this was a time when the only Black faces on TV were portrayed as criminals, minstrels, or buffoons. The advertising money that paid the salaries of television executives was only interested in a white audience.

But Republican efforts in 1964 were complicated by the Civil Rights movement and its leaders like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. African Americans and their allies were marching across the country for their right to vote, and had acquired a strong affinity for and loyalty to the Democratic Party that had just put civil rights into law.

Panicked, consultants on Goldwater's team realized they needed a justification for an ongoing and even amped-up campaign to block the Black and Hispanic vote.

So they came up with a story that they started selling during the 1964 election through op-eds and letters to the editor, in political speeches, and on rightwing radio and TV programs like Joe Pyne's (Buckley would pick it up on his PBS Firing Line show three years later and promote it till the day he died).

This 1964 story was simple:

There was massive "voter fraud" going on, exclusively in America's cities, where mostly Black people were voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump said in 2019, "by the busload" after Sunday church services.

In addition, the Republican story went, "illegal aliens" living in the United States were using stolen Social Security numbers to vote by the millions.

None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to use to this day: a campaign based on a lie of "voter fraud" that the media was more than happy to amplify. This lie to disenfranchise Black and brown people was the original sin that has brought us to today's crisis.

After all, "if it bleeds it ledes" and this GOP assertion that Black and Hispanic people were voting illegally was a juicy scandal that the white electorate ate up.

For six decades partisan Republican pundits have shown up on TV news programs at election time to opine about America's "crisis" of voter fraud.

For six decades, Republican-controlled states have worked to make it more difficult to vote and easier to throw people off the voting rolls in Democratic parts of the state.

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Barry Goldwater, ran against Lyndon Johnson for president. 

Rehnquist helped organize a program called Operation Eagle Eye in his state to challenge the vote of Hispanic and Black voters and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting what would become hours in line to vote.

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

"He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman," Pena told a reporter. "He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they'd lived there—every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people … were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote."

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon, in 1972, to the US Supreme Court, and was elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to Chief Justice, a position he used to stop the Florida State Supreme Court-mandated vote recount in 2000, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

(Interestingly, two then-little-known lawyers who worked with the Bush legal team to argue before Rehnquist that the Florida recount should be stopped were John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by putting him on the Court as Chief Justice when Rehnquist died, and gave "Beerbong Brett" a lifetime position as a federal judge in 2006.)

Rehnquist's Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of hundreds of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States in 1964. As The New York Times noted on October 30, 1964:

"Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent vote fraud in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry 'fraud.'

"The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from 'stealing' the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960."

Keep in mind, this was novel back then. Nobody had been talking about "voter fraud" outside of a few southern states for about a century. Certainly not in national news. The Times article continued:

"The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as 'a program of voter intimidation.' He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

"'There is no doubt in my mind,' Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, 'that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.'"

But that was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican lie. In the fifty-eight years since then, with the exception of the past year or two, no major American news media has seriously challenged the Republican excuses for blocking Black voters or purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp has just done in Georgia this election and last.

And now the GOP has extended their campaign against Democrats voting by making it harder for students to vote (allowing, for example, gun licenses as voter IDs but not state college ID cards) and culling huge numbers of mail-in votes through so-called "exact signature match challenges."

Millions of votes are expected to be challenged this year by the tens of thousands of Republican election volunteers, and in most states those ballots will never be counted unless the voters show up at the Secretary of State's office to prove that their signature is still theirs.

With the blessing of five Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2017, they've also doubled down on caging and voter roll purges, stripping the right to vote from millions just this year alone.

And, as I noted in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, the GOP has expanded its suppression efforts to women:

Those [Republican controlled] states, specifically, are the places where 'exact match' and similar ALEC-type laws have been passed forbidding people to vote if their voter registration, ID, or birth certificate is off by even a comma, period, or single letter. The impact, particularly on married women, has been clear and measurable. As the National Organization for Women (NOW) details in a report on how Republican voter suppression efforts harm women:

"Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband's last name. That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents."

MSNBC reported in an article titled The War on Voting Is a War on Women, "[W]omen are among those most affected by voter ID laws. In one survey, [only] 66 percent of women voters had an ID that reflected their current name, according to the Brennan Center. The other 34 percent of women would have to present both a birth certificate and proof of marriage, divorce, or name change in order to vote, a task that is particularly onerous for elderly women and costly for poor women who may have to pay to access these records." The article added that women make up the majority of student, elderly, and minority voters, according to the US Census Bureau. In every category, the GOP wins when women can't vote.

Again, these Republican crimes against our democracy are laying around in plain sight but rarely mentioned in news stories about elections and election outcomes.

The GOP has to do this today for the same reason they did in 1964: Republican positions both then and now are not generally popular. 

Who'd vote, after all, for more tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, banking and media deregulation, privatizing Medicare, gutting Social Security, shipping jobs overseas, keeping drug prices high, and preventing workers from forming unions? 

On the other hand, corporate America—including the massive corporations that own most of our media—love the GOP for the same reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Which may have something to do with why our media almost never discusses these Republican efforts beyond vaguely quoting Democratic outrage about ambiguous "voter suppression" charges.

This is one dimension of a much larger nationwide campaign of Republican assaults on our democracy executed through the phony excuse of trying to stop "voter fraud." 

This year, and particularly in 2024, they're reviving Operation Eagle Eye to have armed white militia men and DeSantis' dystopian "election police" confront people in their own neighborhoods on election day, all in a craven attempt to discourage minority voting.

Doubling down on that effort, they're also stepping up the rate at which they close polling places in largely Black communities to further stretch out lines and discourage voters. 

And they're putting up billboards across the dozen or so states with anti-felon-voting laws warning that under some circumstances voting is a crime that can land them in prison.

Other states have criminalized registering people to vote; the smallest error can now land you in prison in several Republican-controlled states. These laws have killed multiple voter registration drives in those states; the League of Women Voters recently had to stop their registration efforts in Florida, for example.

When Donald Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being "stolen" after his wipeout 7-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media treated it like a joke for more than a year.

As a result, it's now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans, driving one of them to attack Nancy Pelosi's husband in an attempt to assassinate the Speaker of the House; thousands of other people who have believed this Republican lie of voter fraud were whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump to attack the US Capitol.

This situation has reached today's crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican scam for almost 60 years. Even today, about the only network that covers the work of people like Marc Elias (disclosure: I donate to Democracy Docket) is MSNBC, and even then only occasionally.

Mark Twain is sometimes quoted (probably apocryphally) as saying, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on." Social media has given the saying a whole new meaning, but in this case an updated version may be:

"When a lie is ignored by the media for decades it becomes a believed 'truth' that the liars can then use to pass legislation destructive of democracy itself into law and through the courts."

No democracy anywhere in the world can work if its citizens don't believe their votes are legitimately counted, as we can see today in Brazil. This lie that was merely a convenience around the edges in 1964 is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections, what Thomas Paine called "the beating heart" of our republic.

If it's not debunked and destroyed, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orban-style fascism.

It's beyond time for our media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie the Goldwater campaign buried deep in our collective psyche way back in 1964, before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

The 980 submissions in response to the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill are a testament to the importance — and contentiousness — of public media policy.

Most are supportive of the bill’s goal of strengthening public media, but many claim the new media entity it establishes could potentially distort the market, undermine its commercial competitors, and be subject to political interference.

These are critical questions. Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) will encompass TVNZ and RNZ, with up to NZ$200 million in public subsidies, including a new $109 million appropriation and a further $84.8 million in funds redirected from NZ On Air.

• READ MORE: Merging commercial TVNZ and non-commercial RNZ won’t be easy – and time is running out
• The merger of TVNZ and RNZ needs to build trust in public media – 3 things the law change must get right
• In an age of digital disinformation, dropping level 1 media studies in NZ high schools is a big mistake
• Other ANZPM reports

A key challenge, therefore, will be ensuring the ANZPM public charter is not compromised by the continuing pursuit of commercial revenues. The charter objectives — to contribute to a strong New Zealand identity, te reo and tikanga Māori, an inclusive and connected society, and an informed, participatory democracy — inevitably carry commercial opportunity costs.

Put bluntly, an educational children’s programme, in-depth current affairs or a documentary about Māori culture will attract fewer eyeballs and advertising dollars than an imported drama or a populist reality show like the already controversial FBoy Island.

It may be that the best solution is the creation of an independent regulatory body to oversee charter delivery and the proper use of public funding.

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson cites ‘no trust’ in defence of public media entity https://t.co/oIkJ6opcsZ

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) September 28, 2022

Internal contradictions
Supporting ANZPM’s noncommercial objectives is the primary justification for providing direct public subsidies not available to competitors. This makes the charter the institutional DNA of the new entity; it should be the end to which all revenues — public and commercial — are the means.

The government’s Strong Public Media Business Case recommended a not-for-profit status, reinvestment of surpluses in public media objectives, and free availability of all first-run content.

It also anticipated additional funding over time to compensate for an expected decline in commercial revenues. But none of this is specified in the ANZPM bill.

On the contrary, ANZPM is merely required to make content predominantly free to access, opening the door to new subscription-based services, the scope of which is not defined.

Meanwhile, Budget 2022 anticipated the return of $306 million in surpluses over six years. Other Treasury communications reveal pressure to assert its fiscal disciplinary oversight, and insistence on measures to ensure ANZPM maintains its commercial performance to reduce reliance on public subsidies.

Moreover, beyond 2026, there is nothing in the bill to ringfence ANZPM’s future funding from annual budget scrambles. Any future government unsympathetic to public media could simply reduce or discontinue the public funding.

MPs start hearing submissions after National’s broadcasting spokesperson Melissa Lee lands punches in Parliament. https://t.co/v21h9Yw3oJ

— Stuff (@NZStuff) September 29, 2022

Culture clash
To anyone familiar with Labour’s previous attempt to restructure TVNZ with a public charter, the alarm bells will be ringing. Internal cabinet disagreements and Treasury demands for commercial performance saw TVNZ paying dividends exceeding its public funding and conflicted over its priorities.

Many in TVNZ resented the imposition of the charter, while commercial competitors resented public money being (mis)used to subsidise programming used to compete for ratings and revenue — including outbidding Sky for the rights to the Beijing Olympics.

The policy ambiguity in the balance of commercial and charter functions is therefore a potential risk in the current bill. RNZ and TVNZ have a very different character and philosophy, particularly in their news services.

If ANZPM combines the RNZ and TVNZ news operations and makes delivering eyeballs at 6pm the priority, its journalistic mission would look very different from a public service focus on in-depth reporting of serious issues.

MPs start hearing submissions after National’s broadcasting spokesperson Melissa Lee lands punches in Parliament. https://t.co/v21h9Yw3oJ

— Stuff (@NZStuff) September 29, 2022

Who calls the tune?
Ensuring the ANZPM entity remains independent and prioritises its charter over commercial performance will depend on the governance structure and institutional status. Board appointments and funding are potential vectors of political influence, while the source of ministerial oversight can significantly influence operational priorities.

As internal government communications reveal, the Bill aims to establish ANZPM as an Autonomous Crown Entity (ACE) rather than a Crown Entity Company (CEC). This has the advantage of giving the Ministry for Culture and Heritage primary oversight and limiting the influence of Treasury (which sought to retain a CEC structure).

However, as an ACE, it would be possible for the minister to issue directions in line with government policy — a potential source of political influence noted in several submissions on the bill.

Both RNZ and TVNZ are currently CECs, for which the Minister of Finance and Minister of Broadcasting and Media are shareholders. Although their boards agree business plans and statements of intent with the government, they are not subject to policy directives, while their governing legislation prohibits editorial interference.

The bad news, however, is that CECs are subject to the fiscal discipline of Treasury oversight which can potentially impose commercial performance objectives.

Independent oversight needed
An alternative option would be to make ANZPM an Independent Crown Entity (ICE) which offers greater autonomy from government. But this is usually reserved for quasi-judicial bodies like the Broadcasting Standards Authority and would make delivery of the charter highly dependent on the internal operational culture of ANZPM.

TVNZ remains the larger part of the new entity and the Minister of Broadcasting and Media has already hinted at its reluctance to grasp the extent to which its values will need to evolve as part of ANZPM. (Former TVNZ boss Ian Fraser once remarked that changing TVNZ’s commercial culture would require a “neutron bomb”).

The risk here is that TVNZ will approach its role in ANZPM as business-as-usual plus government funding.

So, the challenge is to insulate ANZPM from political interference, commercial demands from Treasury (which would compromise the charter and risk market distortion), and from internal subversion by those opposed to the public service mission.

To avoid simply choosing between the (not so) good, the bad and the ugly options, we need an independent regulatory body to review charter delivery, ensure the appropriate use of public funding, and evaluate future funding requirements.

Dr Peter Thompson, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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

Kiwi-born and Fiji-raised France rugby centre Virimi Vakatawa has revealed that he has a heart condition that has forced him to retire from the game.

The Naluwai, Naitasiri man made the announcement during the Paris rugby club Racing 92’s media conference last night attended by France coach Fabien Galthié, who choked back tears while giving a tribute.

Vakatawa, 30, said: “Rugby is my passion. The hardest moment of all of this was yesterday in front of my teammates.

• READ MORE: Other reports about Virimi Vakatawa
• Other French rugby reports

“It was very difficult to tell all those with whom I’d spent time both on and off the field.”

The 31 test international arrived in France in 2010 and represented both Racing 92 and the France 7s team as well as playing for France in the 2019 World Cup in Tokyo. He was expected to play a big role in the French team for the Paris World Cup next year.

Racing 92’s club doctor Dr Sylvain Blanchard said that a “cardiological anomaly” had been found in 2019 “just before the Rugby World Cup in Japan”.

It had been monitored closely by the Parisian club’s medical team but its “pathology had evolved” since.

Health in jeopardy
The cardiac problem jeopardised the health of Vakatawa and medical officials have banned him from playing in France.

Dr Blanchard said the condition was first diagnosed before Tokyo in 2019, but it was decided at the time that Vakatawa could continue playing under extra surveillance.

However, the medical experts now say his condition is too risky.

“It is a pathology that is likely to put him at risk in intense sports activities,” Dr Blanchard said. “And, obviously, professional rugby is part of those activities.”

The 30-year-old Vakatawa was born in Rangiora, New Zealand, raised in Fiji — the country of his heritage — and arrived in France at 17.

He was out injured while France won the Six Nations Grand Slam this year but was back as the starting centre in both test wins in Japan in July.

“It’s tough to leave this family, but I never had regrets,” Vakatawa said.

Rodney Duthie is Fiji Times sports editor. Republished with permission.

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

Among the many ironies and hypocrisies leading up to the 2022 midterms, one deserving special mention is Trump's and the GOP's unremitting claim that America has become more violent and dangerous under Biden and the Democrats.

The Trump Republican violence machine is affecting—and sometimes intimidating—election workers, flight attendants, school board officials, librarians, members of the Biden administration, and members of Congress.

"Our country is now a cesspool of crime," Trump said in a recent speech to the America First Policy Institute. "We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable because of the Democrat Party's effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement all throughout America."

The truth is that although Americans experience far more gun violence than the inhabitants of other advanced nations, that's largely because of widespread gun ownership—championed, encouraged, and defended by Republican lawmakers.

As to recent violence, shootings are down 4 percent this year compared to the same time last year. In big cities, murders are down 3 percent. If the decrease in murders continues for the rest of 2022, it will be the first year since 2018 in which they fell in the U.S.

The larger threat of violence is coming from Trump Republicans whose incendiary statements are fueling violence and threats of violence across America. In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, such threats and attacks have escalated.

Yesterday, a federal jury found Barry Croft and Adam Fox guilty in a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer at her summer home and to blow up a bridge that would stop rescuers from reaching her. They hoped to spark a second American Revolution. 

The Trump Republican violence machine is affecting—and sometimes intimidating— election workers, flight attendants, school board officials, librarians, members of the Biden administration, and members of Congress.

In Houston, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of "threats and attacks bordering on violence." His tires were slashed, he was harassed by residents at a council meeting, and followed near his home. "I was afraid what would they do next if I don't step down."

As I mentioned yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his family have received credible death threats and required a security detail. In December, authorities in Iowa arrested a California man with an assault rifle and ammunition, and a "hit list" that named Dr. Fauci and Joe Biden, among others. Congresswoman Liz Cheney has also received credible death threats, and also has a security detail.

Threats have been issued against the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, and against his family.

(In that search, F.B.I. agents carted away boxes of highly sensitive documents.)

During that search—from which F.B.I. agents carted away boxes of highly sensitive material—Trump described his home as "under siege." In the wake of the search, Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, erupted in calls for violence. Twitter saw a tenfold increase in posts mentioning "civil war" (according to Dataminr, a tool that analyzes Twitter data). There was also a spike in social media users calling for "violence toward law enforcement," as Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, and Stephen Lynch, chairman of its National Security Subcommittee, noted in a letter last week to eight social media companies.

Republican lawmakers have fueled the fire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, has accused the Justice Department of being "weaponized" against Trump. Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, have drawn comparisons between the F.B.I. and the Nazi secret police. Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington State, charged (on a podcast run by Stephen Bannon) that "we're at war." Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, declared: "These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the patriots who are working hard to save America," adding that, "if we accept it, America is dead."

The incendiary talk has led to violence. On August 11, a Trump supporter identified as Ricky W. Shiffer mounted an armed attack on an F.B.I. office in Ohio, and was killed. According to a subsequent review of his social media posts, Shiffer was incensed about the search at Mar-a-Lago and wanted revenge.

Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, has conducted half a dozen nationwide polls since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and repeatedly found that between 15 million and 20 million American adults believe that violence would be justified to return Trump to office.

Trump's claim that America has become more violent and dangerous over the last year and a half is true. But this is not because of Biden and the Democrats. It is largely because of Trump—and the Republican violence machine he has created.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert Reich.

We host a conversation about “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire,” which is the focus of an essay by Cornell University law professor Aziz Rana in Dissent magazine. Rana argues for the creation of a “transnational infrastructure of left forces across the world” and says movements of the left need “clear alternatives to the hardest questions” of foreign policy crises, such as the Russian war in Ukraine. We also speak with Darryl Li, professor at the University of Chicago, who is one of many scholars who published a response to Rana’s piece in the new issue of Dissent that highlights the importance of a nuanced and solution-oriented critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy.

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

It was sometime in the late 1990s that I first interviewed Alan Webster about New Zealand’s part in a global Values Study.

It’s a fascinating snapshot of values in countries all over the world and I still remember seeing America grouped with many developing countries on a spectrum that had most English-speaking, democratic and developed countries grouped at the other end.

It charted belief in angels and other supernatural beings.

• READ MORE: Decision on Roe v Wade will not end abortion rights in Hawai’i
• Roe reversal reignites Guam debate over ‘Heartbeat’ bill
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It was a lightbulb moment that has always helped me remember how deep religious beliefs run in the US and how socially different it is from most Western, Enlightenment-inspired countries.

That memory came back to me when I awoke to the news that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v Wade in a 6-3 ruling, eliminating a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion — a right that has been in place since 1973.

Abortion rights will now be decided state by state, with 26 states ready to enact laws that ban abortion, often with no exceptions. That means no abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

It is undoubtedly a landmark moment in US politics and law, the latest step (not the end) in a decades-long campaign by conservative Americans to overturn America’s most controversial and divisive law.

‘Enflamed debate, deepened division’
Writing the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division”.

He’s right, but the implication that this ruling somehow calms the waters is either deeply naive or deeply cynical. It does nothing more than flip the issue, like the handover of the ball in a football game, with what has been the team on defence now going on attack and vice versa.

And because change in and of itself is fuel for any fire, this only ensures abortion remains THE divisive issue in American politics for, well, who knows how many years to come?

Abortion has divided the country for decades; more so than foreign wars, economic policy and even gun control. It is the answer to so many questions non-Americans have about US politics.

Many around the world have been perplexed by the growing divisions in US politics, the loss of civility, the rise of Trump. There are answers there about the influence of money, taxes, changing demographics and more.

But at the heart of US political polarisation, often unspoken, masked or downplayed, has always been abortion.

One of the most confounding of political mysteries in the past decade was why 84 percent of white evangelicals in 2016 voted for a thrice-married alleged sexual abuser as president and why “character” suddenly fell down their list of voting priorities.

Today’s court decision is the answer.

Evangelicals motivated by abortion
Evangelicals are motivated by abortion more than any other issue and Trump’s commitment to swaying the court against it convinced them to vote for him even when it was against their economic interests and compromised other values.

Many in conservative religious circles in the US compared Trump to King David, arguing that God has long used flawed and corrupt individuals to bring about his will.

That faith has been vindicated today and Trump’s status as a moral hero is enshrined, despite his many other sins.

Such is the strength of belief for or against abortion. Its power to divide is so strong because, seen through different lenses, it is so obviously right or wrong to those on either side of the debate.

It is, to those on either side, obvious that they are right and they are horrified — not just perplexed, but horrified — that anyone might disagree with them.

Those celebrating today’s overturn are celebrating the end of mass murder, because to them the decision to abort a foetus is the decision to take a life. (Others, to be fair, see it as a legal issue, one that is not in the Constitution and so should always have been viewed as a political debate not a constitutional right).

Those weeping over today’s ruling do not see a foetus as a human life and rather see the courts telling a woman what she can do with her body, right to the point of that woman’s life and death.

Matter of life over death
When both sides see their view as a matter of life over death, you can understand the depth of feeling and pain on both sides and that, whatever Alito may be hoping, today’s decision will do nothing to heal America.

What’s more, the impact of today’s ruling on US politics will be deep. Three things stand out:

• Reproductive rights will dominate the 2022 mid-term elections and the US presidential elections in 2024. The court has said abortion is not a constitutional right, therefore it is up for grabs politically. Debate over national bans v national rights has already begun. That will mean less political oxygen for pressing political issues such as climate change, China and the Ukraine invasion.
• This could be the start of a conservative pendulum swing in US politics, led by the US Supreme Court. Judge Clarence Thomas in his support of the majority opinion suggests the now reliably conservative court could dive further into America’s moral dilemmas, ruling on same-sex marriage and contraception rights.
• Perhaps most troubling, it undermines citizens’ faith in their major public institutions. A majority of Americans favour at least some rights to abortion and some gun control. This week the Supreme Court has issued rulings at odds with public opinion on both. At a time when core institutions such as Congress and the media are losing the trust of citizens, adding the courts to that list is a major worry. If the foundations of liberal democracy are not serving the people, then those people start to look for alternatives, the baby can be lost with the bathwater and whole systems of law, order and government can start to look fragile.

These are perilous days for the American project and that has implications for all of us. The’s court ruling is yet another polarising decision in these most polarising times and it’s hard to see where the healing can begin.

Tim Watkin is a founder of political news website Pundit, has a long career in journalism and broadcasting, and now runs the podcast team at RNZ. This article was originally published on Pundit and is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

The post Why Peace and Disarmament are at the Heart of Nonalignment appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kate Hudson.

The demand for bovine heart valves to treat cardiovascular disease—the top global killer—is rising, and there is a cruel irony—with which I have firsthand experience—in how the cattle industry has become both the problem and the solution. We rely on medical treatments procured from cows to treat cardiovascular disease in humans, which is largely caused by our consumption of cows and other animals (red meat).

Brilliant marketing campaigns by the cattle industry have shielded us from the ugly truth all along: the cattle industry is only interested in making profits at the cost of our health and well-being and the lives of other animals.

The cattle industry profits from government-funded exploitation of cows under the guise of nutrition and medicine. Corporate giants in the food industry, such as Cargill and Tyson Foods, and medical technology giants, such as Edwards Lifesciences, all profit from the cattle they slaughter for their meat, dairy and tissue.

The government subsidies that the cattle industry receives prove to be dangerous for our health while profiting the corporate subsidy recipients. “‘[C]urrent federal agricultural subsidies focus on financing production of food commodities, a large portion of which are converted into high-fat meat and dairy products’ and other items that increase the risk for cardiometabolic risks in American adults,” stated the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, while quoting from a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University.

Yet “the U.S. government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only… $17 million… each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables,” according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley paper.

It’s a vicious cycle that harms people and animals, and benefits profit-driven corporations. On one side, big agribusiness is slaughtering cows for meat and dairy—foods that researchers have linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. On the other side, medical corporations are profiting from producing bovine heart valves.

Cargill, which is one of the largest beef processors in North America and earned $134.4 billion in 2021, has been dubbed “the worst company in the world” by environmental organization Mighty Earth for its unethical and unsustainable business practices and the environmental damage it has caused. In addition to perpetuating antibiotic resistance, Cargill has repeatedly been the source of multiple outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, such as listeria, salmonella and E. coli, over the years, and is responsible for distributing millions of pounds of contaminated poultry and beef.

Tyson Foods is the world’s second-largest meat processor and one of four companies that control more than 80 percent of beef processing in the United States. In 2020, it earned about $43.2 billion, which is mostly attributed to its sale of beef. In 2015, Tyson Foods recalled approximately 16,000 pounds of ground beef products that may have been contaminated with E. coli and had to recall 8,955,296 pounds of chicken products due to potential contamination of listeria in 2021.

Edwards Lifesciences, with reported revenue of $4.4 billion in 2020, receives pig hearts and cow tissue daily and has federal approval to sell cow-based valves in the United States. It typically takes the pericardium from three cows to create one heart valve. The company has imported more than 100,000 batches of bovine tissue from Australia since 2020. Edwards Lifesciences predicts that “the global surgical structural heart market opportunity will reach $2 billion by 2028.”

In 2012, I received a 23 mm bovine valve from Edwards Lifesciences to replace my pulmonary valve.

At only 23 years of age, I had my second open-heart surgery. My sternum was cut and spread open, my heart muscle was exposed, my heart was stopped while a machine operated in its place, and my pulmonary valve was replaced with bovine tissue. This was the most extreme experience I have ever endured, yet, according to one estimate, the prevalence of heart valve surgery will increase from 290,000 to 890,000 between 2003 and 2050.

I was given the option of a mechanical heart valve but was told that, if I did, I would require anticoagulants for the rest of my life to prevent blood clotting; the other option was getting a biological valve, which was encouraged. Though the risks of clotting in biological valves are downplayed, especially in comparison to the risks associated with mechanical valves, my cardiologists from New York-Presbyterian/Cornell Medical Center have urged me—and others who have undergone similar procedures—to take blood thinners daily for the rest of our lives. With biological valves, which are associated with easy intraoperative handling and minimal suture line bleeding, there is a risk of degradation after 15-20 years due to calcification or inflammation; the course of action if that happens is to replace the valve once it expires.

I put my fate entirely in the doctors’ hands—as most people do—and, desperate to alleviate my symptoms rather than add to them, I chose to get a biological valve made from bovine tissue.

It took almost a year to be operated on, yet no preventative measures were taken or recommended to alleviate my pain. I begged for surgery because I thought it was the only way. But was it?

While many conditions (like mine) are congenital, we can still argue about nature versus nurture.

Research presented by the European Society of Cardiology found that eating greater amounts of red and processed meat is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and death. According to a study conducted by the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, which involved more than 1.4 million people whose health was tracked for 30 years, for every 1.76 ounces of unprocessed red meat consumed per day, the risk of coronary heart disease increased by 9 percent. Heart disease claims approximately 17.9 million lives worldwide annually.

On condition of anonymity, one nurse shared with me, “Healthy people don’t make money.”

“More than 70 percent of chronic illnesses [including heart failure] can be prevented or reversed with a whole-food, plant-based dietary lifestyle,” according to the Plantrician Project. Yet, “the market for replacement heart valves is growing at a rate of about 13 percent every year globally and demand outstrips supply,” according to Stuff, a New Zealand-based news website.

There are about 10.4 million beef and dairy cattle in New Zealand, and the United States constitutes the biggest market for the pericardia extracted from these animals. One source reportedly refused to divulge to Stuff the number of cow pericardia extracted and sold per year, citing “commercial reasons.”

According to new research on the bovine pericardial market, “the market is expected to reach… $4,134.4 million by 2027 from… $1,959.7 million in 2019; it is estimated to grow at a… [compound annual growth rate (CAGR)] of 9.9 percent from 2020 to 2027.”

“[One] hurdle we cannot ignore is that there is no profit in health, while there are immense profits derived from disease; hence, the U.S. has created a ‘disease and disability’ care system, rather than a true ‘health’ care system built on the foundational pillar of prevention,” pointed out the Plantrician Project.

How can we justify slaughtering cows to repair our hearts, when the consumption of cows is what weakens our hearts? While discerning between farming corporations and medical corporations within the cattle industry, one must ask: Is there a difference?

For the good of human health, as well as the health of the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants (especially cows), it is important for each person to listen to their own body, and that they (in tandem with physicians) stay informed and explore preventative measures.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Maureen Medina.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Francesc Badia i Dalmases, Andrés Bernal Sánchez.

The post The Heart is Mightier than the Sword appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Koehler.

They're coming for me!

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It's called, among other things, "white replacement theory"—but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes first. When it finds a name, what a sense of relief that must be: knowing who the enemy is, where the enemy lives. Now you can go to war.

The killer was a blatant racist, who had posted a 180-page, hate-filled manifesto online prior to his assault.

Killing ten people at a grocery store—killing fifty people at two mosques—isn't murder. It's healing.

I take a deep breath. Violence is situation normal, not just in the United States but across much of the planet. Often the violence is simply an abstraction, a.k.a., war, which is always, always necessary when we're the ones who wage it, and the people we kill, including the children, are simply collateral damage. But war always comes home, where the victims are fully human . . . if they actually make the news.

"Once startling and noteworthy," Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in a recent New Yorker article, "mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S. Since January, there have been almost two hundred shootings involving at least four victims shot or killed. . . . This must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S."

These words, of course, were written in the wake of the massacre on May 13 at a Tops Friendly supermarket in a segregated neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Thirteen people were shot (eleven of them African-American), ten of whom died. The killer was a blatant racist, who had posted a 180-page, hate-filled manifesto online prior to his assault. The manifesto, which acknowledged his admiration of previous mass murderers with racist motives, discussed the dangers of "white replacement"—people of color are taking over, claiming the same importance that white people have and, in the process, diminishing the importance of the whites. There's one obvious solution: Go to war!

And because we live in a country where guns are everywhere, and remarkably easy to come by, young boys—the killer was 18—can play war for real, without bothering to enlist. And Payton Gendron decided to go to war.

I mention his name for one reason only: I want to address a moment in his life before he drove 200 miles to Buffalo and opened fire. Last spring, as he neared the end of his senior year in high school, he and fellow students were asked to think about a school project addressing their plans after graduation. Here's what Payton Gendron said: He wanted to commit a murder-suicide.

Oh my God! The "threat" was unrelated to race, but it shocked the hell out of people. He claimed to be joking, but the state police were summoned and the boy, then 17, was given a mental health evaluation and hospitalized for a day and a half.

That's it—a brief, sudden revelation to school authorities of the horror movie on continual rewind through Payton Gendron's brain. According to an Associated Press story:

"The revelation raised questions about whether his encounter with police and the mental health system was yet another missed opportunity to put a potential mass shooter under closer law enforcement scrutiny, get him help, or make sure he didn't have access to deadly firearms."

As I read those words, I felt an enormous squeeze of frustration, which took me a while to begin understanding. As the story pointed out:

"New York is one of several states that have enacted 'red flag' laws in recent years that were intended to try and prevent mass shootings committed by people who show warning signs that they might be a threat to themselves or others. . . .

"The long list of mass shootings in the U.S. involving missed opportunities to intervene includes the 2018 massacre of 17 students at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where law enforcement officials had received numerous complaints about the gunman's threatening statements, and the killings of more than two dozen people at a Texas church in 2017 by a former U.S. Air Force serviceman who was able to buy a gun despite a violent history."

Slowly it started kicking in. What I was reading in this story about another mass shooting in America—the Land of the Free (to kill)—was official cluelessness on full display. We're clueless about the nature of social safety. We think of it as something that is linear and hierarchical, with authoritative action kicking in primarily after the fact.

"Authorities said Sunday that they were investigating the attack on predominantly Black shoppers and workers at the Tops Friendly Market as a potential federal hate crime or act of domestic terrorism."

Prior to the occurrence of the shootings, the best the national imagination can do is come up with a red flag law: If somebody seems unhinged, or spews hate, the state can step in and temporarily confiscate his firearms. Problem solved!

But when I think about the 17-year-old high school senior who momentarily let loose a sarcastic idea for a school project—a mass shooting, followed by suicide—I see a deeply, deeply troubled human being who, in all likelihood, has spent most of his life alone, psychologically if not physically. And here's where my own emotional wounds start to bleed.

What if schools were places where lonely, frightened kids could talk? I think about the peace circle, the concept of Restorative Justice, where all participants sit in vibrant equality, each given the opportunity to talk, everyone else listening. This is catching on in some school districts, but of course it's only a beginning. For a moment I envision a social infrastructure that embraces all of us and doesn't condemn anyone's fear and hatred, but rather, listens to him, values him, learns from him and walks with him into the darkness.

The heart is mightier than the sword. I'm allowing myself to imagine a world where most people believe this.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

Hundreds of people in West Virginia on Saturday plan to blockade a coal waste power plant that directly benefits right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin while contributing to the planetary emergency, with dozens of activists planning to risk arrest.

"We chose this plant specifically because we need the world to know how corrupt Joe Manchin is."

The blockade will target Grant Town Power Plant, which receives coal waste from Enersystems, a company run by Manchin's son. The West Virginia Democrat earned $500,000 from Enersystems last year.

"Participants will put their bodies on the line to highlight the harm from the Manchin family business, protest against the burning of coal waste, and call for a different future for West Virginia," said West Virginia Rising, which is organizing the direct action.

The blockade follows the senator's decision in the last several months to reject numerous climate action provisions in the Build Back Better Act, President Joe Biden's signature domestic economic package, and comes days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on the planetary crisis.

The IPCC report reiterated that "immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors" are needed to limit global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures and avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis, including rising sea levels and increasingly extreme weather events.

"We chose this plant specifically because we need the world to know how corrupt Joe Manchin is," West Virginia Rising said. "He is not some thoughtful, grandfatherly moderate. He is raking in $500,000 per year from his coal company while single-handedly gutting climate legislation."

The group also asserted that when Manchin was governor of the state, he oversaw the raising of electricity rates for working West Virginians "in order to keep his coal business afloat."

West Virginia Rising will be joined by groups including CodePink and the Poor People's Campaign, which this week began a 23-mile march through the state to protest Manchin's refusal to back the extension of the enhanced Child Tax Credit (CTC), paid family leave, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, and other provisions in the original Build Back Better Act.

Research by the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis last year found that among West Virginians who benefited from the CTC in 2021—about 70% of Manchin's constituents—more than half used the credits to buy groceries and more than a quarter used the monthly payments to pay their rent or mortgage.

"Joe Manchin has spent his career making a very lucrative living off the backs of West Virginians while talking about how resilient we are," said Maria Gunnoe, director of Mother Jones Community Foundation and an organizer of the blockade. "West Virginians are tired of struggling only to see others prosper. We deserve opportunities to build a future that our kids can be proud of."

"Joe Manchin clearly has no plan other than more of the same for the future of West Virginia," Gunnoe added. "More of the same maltreatment and exploitation of the poorest people in this country."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

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A congressional oversight subcommittee is investigating the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of a high-risk heart pump, citing safety issues detailed by ProPublica.

The HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device, created to treat patients with severe heart failure, stopped meeting key federal standards as early as 2014. But the FDA took no decisive action even as those problems persisted, and thousands of Americans continued to be implanted with the pump.

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By the end of 2020, the FDA had received more than 3,000 reports of deaths related to the HeartWare device, according to a ProPublica data analysis. A father of four died as his children tried to resuscitate him when his device suddenly stopped. A teenager died after vomiting blood in the middle of the night, while his mother struggled to restart a faulty pump.

“I am concerned by FDA’s slow action, over multiple administrations, to protect patients from this product despite early warning signs,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., in a scathing letter sent Tuesday to the agency’s commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf.

Krishnamoorthi, the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, requested information on how the FDA made regulatory decisions related to the HeartWare device and why it didn’t take further action.

The FDA did not provide comment to ProPublica on the subcommittee’s investigation and said it would respond directly to Krishnamoorthi. It also reiterated its response to ProPublica’s findings and said the agency had been closely overseeing the HeartWare device since 2012, with patient safety as its “highest priority.”

Medtronic, the company that acquired HeartWare in 2016, took the device off the market in June 2021. The company said that new data showed a competing heart pump had better outcomes. In response to the ProPublica investigation two months later, the company said it took the FDA’s inspections seriously and had worked closely with the agency to address issues with the device.

Medtronic declined to comment on the subcommittee’s investigation.

Krishnamoorthi asked in the letter if any steps were being taken to address how patients, doctors and other federal agencies are notified of problems that the FDA finds with medical devices.

Many patients told ProPublica they were never informed of issues with the HeartWare pump before or after their implants. Some people who still have the device said they weren’t told when it was taken off the market. Medtronic said in December it had confirmed 90% of U.S. patients had received notification of the HeartWare discontinuation, but that it was still working to reach the other 10%.

About 2,000 patients still had HeartWare pumps as of last year. The FDA and Medtronic recommended against removing those devices barring medical necessity because the surgery to do so carries a high risk.

In his letter, Krishnamoorthi gave the FDA a deadline of April 5 to respond.

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

On Sunday, March 13, Brent was shot dead in the city of Irpin while covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the second journalist killed since Russia launched its assault on February 24.  Juan Arrendondo, a U.S. reporter working with Brent, was injured in the Irpin attack, underscoring the dangers facing those trying to cover this war.

Brent and his brother, Craig, worked as the Renaud Brothers, and together they won seemingly every broadcast award possible, from the Peabody for “Last Chance High” (2014), about a Chicago high school for troubled youth; two duPont-Columbia University journalism awards, one in 2012 for a moving look at how Partners in Health helped children injured in the Haiti earthquake; another the following year for “Vanguard: Arming the Mexican Cartel,” a riveting exploration of how American gun dealers fueled drug cartel murders in Mexico,

The awards told one story, their work ethic told another. They were always working on the next project.

The Renaud brothers were from Arkansas, graduates of Central High School in Little Rock. That sense of being rooted in a place where the trauma of race had scarred a nation resonated in their work. “Brent really valued people,” said Jeff Newton, a journalist who worked with Renaud often over the last 10 years. “Brent didn’t see war as people killing other people.  He was focused on the suffering. ‘I have to record the suffering,’ he would say.”

Brent and Craig Renaud began their professional career working with journalist Jon Alpert; and their breakthrough film, “Dope, Sick, Love” (2005) for HBO followed two heroin addicts eking out an existence on the streets of New York.  The brothers’ extraordinary access, gained over years, explored the love between two souls in trouble – the love between individuals even in the midst of a drug war.

That film was one of the first documentaries recorded using the small digital cameras which have now become ubiquitous. When “Dope, Sick, Love” aired, the Renauds were already filming “Off to War,” an intimate look at the 39th Infantry Brigade of the Arkansas National Guard and their families.  The three-hour, 10-part series followed the soldiers from Clarksville, Arkansas, from basic training to their deployment to Iraq, explored their burgeoning disillusionment there, and showed the disorienting process of returning from war. It was one of the earliest documentary explorations of the impact of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) – and its cost to society.

Brent went to Ukraine to film a series on the global refugee crisis for TIME Studios. He was supposed to have been gone before the war broke out, but once it did, he remained committed. Brent had 20 years’ experience working in conflict zones; he had taken one of the first courses started by RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues), the organization writer Sebastian Junger founded after photographer Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya. Several friends said they had been involved in helping Renaud find local producers or contacts in Ukraine, but by the time they reached him he had already found someone.

Both brothers had been active in pointing out the security issues facing a news environment where freelancers have to navigate dangerous situations. In a 2013 interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Brent’s brother Craig pointed out that “the most obvious benefit of being backed by a major news organizations is that if something goes wrong and you are kidnapped or in need medical evacuation, you at least have some bit of hope that they might help you out.”

Those who knew him say they are certain Brent would have been wearing his helmet and a flak jacket with the word “PRESS” when he went out on Sunday. That’s part of the drill for every reporter who has worked in hostile environments. But following the drill is no guarantee of protection. Brent got hit in the neck and bled out before he could reach the hospital.

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