Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street

The government of Sir Keir Starmer, despite remaining glued to a foreign policy friendly and accommodating to Israel, has found the strain a bit much of late.  While galloping to victory in the July elections, leaving the British Labour Party a heaving majority, a certain ill-temper could be found among the ranks on his attitudes regarding Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mish Rahman, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, summed up the mood by professingembarrassment “about my affiliation with Labour” in light of the party’s response to the killings in Gaza.  “It was hard even to tell members of my own extended family to go and knock on doors to tell people to vote for a party that originally gave Israel carte blanche in its response to the horrific 7 October attacks.”

The election itself saw Labour suffer losses among British Muslims, which has dropped as a share between 2019 and 2024.  The loss of Leicester South, held by Shadow Paymaster Jon Ashworth, to independent Shockat Adam, was emblematic.  (The seat has a Muslim population close to 30%.)  The trend was also evident in such otherwise safe Labour strongholds as the seats of Dewsbury and Batley and Birmingham Perry Barr, both with a prominent bloc of Muslim voters.  Combing through the Starmer landslide, one could still find instances of Labour’s electoral bruising.

To offer some mild reassurance to the disgruntled, notably regarding arms sales to Israel, the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy promised to revisit the policy, editing it, as it were, to see if it stood the test of international humanitarian law.

On September 2, Lammy told fellow parliamentarians “with regret” that the assessment he had received left him “unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

In doing so, he announced that Britain would be suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licenses with Israel. “We recognise, of course, Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods that Israel’s employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly.”

The measure was one of the weakest imaginable, an example of hightide gesture politics, paltry in effort, and paltry in effect.  Few gains will be noticed from this change in policy, not least because 30 out of 350 is fractionally embarrassing.  Furthermore, UK arms exports to Israel account for less than 1% of the total arms Israel received.  As a point of comparison, UK arms sales to Israel in 2022 totalled £42 million.  The offering from the United States dwarfs that contribution, annually totalling $US3.8 billion (£2.9 billion).

This very lack of effect was explicitly noted by the minister, begging the question as to what any genuine change might have entailed.  The government, he assured the House, still supported Israel’s right to self-defence.  Had the share of UK weapons to Israel been much larger, would such self-defence still have been justifiably prosecuted with such viciousness?

It is certainly telling what the suspension policy on exports spared.  While the new policy covers various components for military aircraft and vehicles, the F-35 fighters, which have been used with especially murderous effect by the Israeli Air Force, are exempted.  This, explained Defence Secretary John Healey on BBC Breakfast, was “a deliberate and important carve out for these modern fighter jets.”

The rationale is thick with splendid hypocrisy.  Because the support of the F-35 is a global program spanning multiple partners, the UK’s role in it had to be preserved, irrespective of what the fighters were actually used for.  “These are not just jets that the UK or Israel use,” reasoned Healey, “it’s 20 countries and around 1,000 of these jets around the world and the UK makes important, critical components for all those jets that go into a global pool.”

Like an undergraduate student failing to master an all too challenging paper, Healey offers the exoneration that cowardice supplies in readiness.  It was “hard to distinguish those [parts] that may go into Israeli jets and secondly this is a global supply chain with the UK a vital part of that supply chain”.  To disrupt the supply of such parts would, essentially, “risk the operation of fighter jets that are central to our own UK security, that of our allies and of NATO.”

Another knotty point was the legal or ethical value one could ultimately attribute to the decision.  Lammy was adamant that the policy revision was not intended, in any way, to cast aspersions against Israel’s conduct of the war, despite an assessment suggesting otherwise.  “This is a forward looking evaluation, not a determination of guilt, and it does not prejudge any future determinations by the competent courts.”  This routine garbling ignored the assessment’s referencesto the inordinate number of civilian deaths, the sheer extent of the destruction in Gaza, and “credible claims” that Palestinian detainees had been mistreated.

This latest gesture of tokenistic principle on the part of the UK government elevates impotence to the level of doctrine. Lammy and Healey was merely taking a line Starmer has courted with numbing consistency: that of the craven, the insignificantly disruptive and the painfully cautious.

The post Craven Tokenism: The UK Suspension of Arms Export Licenses to Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Mish Rahman, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, summed up the mood by professing embarrassment “about my affiliation with Labour” in light of the party’s response to the killings in Gaza.  “It was hard even to tell members of my own extended family to go and knock on doors to tell people to vote for a party that originally gave Israel carte blanche in its response to the horrific 7 October attacks.”

The election itself saw Labour suffer losses among British Muslims, which has dropped as a share between 2019 and 2024.  The loss of Leicester South, held by Shadow Paymaster Jon Ashworth, to independent Shockat Adam, was emblematic.  (The seat has a Muslim population close to 30%.)  The trend was also evident in such otherwise safe Labour strongholds as the seats of Dewsbury and Batley and Birmingham Perry Barr, both with a prominent bloc of Muslim voters.  Combing through the Starmer landslide, one could still find instances of Labour’s electoral bruising.

To offer some mild reassurance to the disgruntled, notably regarding arms sales to Israel, the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy promised to revisit the policy, editing it, as it were, to see if it stood the test of international humanitarian law.

On September 2, Lammy told fellow parliamentarians “with regret” that the assessment he had received left him “unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

In doing so, he announced that Britain would be suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licenses with Israel. “We recognise, of course, Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods that Israel’s employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly.”

The measure was one of the weakest imaginable, an example of high-tide gesture politics, paltry in effort, and paltry in effect.  Few gains will be noticed from this change in policy, not least because 30 out of 350 is fractionally embarrassing.  Furthermore, UK arms exports to Israel account for less than 1% of the total arms Israel received.  As a point of comparison, UK arms sales to Israel in 2022 totalled £42 million.  The offering from the United States dwarfs that contribution, annually totalling $US3.8 billion (£2.9 billion).

This very lack of effect was explicitly noted by the minister, begging the question as to what any genuine change might have entailed.  The government, he assured the House, still supported Israel’s right to self-defence.  Had the share of UK weapons to Israel been much larger, would such self-defence still have been justifiably prosecuted with such viciousness?

It is certainly telling what the suspension policy on exports spared.  While the new policy covers various components for military aircraft and vehicles, the F-35 fighters, which have been used with especially murderous effect by the Israeli Air Force, are exempted.  This, explained Defence Secretary John Healey on BBC Breakfast, was “a deliberate and important carve out for these modern fighter jets.”

The rationale is thick with splendid hypocrisy.  Because the support of the F-35 is a global program spanning multiple partners, the UK’s role in it had to be preserved, irrespective of what the fighters were actually used for.  “These are not just jets that the UK or Israel use,” reasoned Healey, “it’s 20 countries and around 1,000 of these jets around the world and the UK makes important, critical components for all those jets that go into a global pool.”

Like an undergraduate student failing to master an all too challenging paper, Healey offers the exoneration that cowardice supplies in readiness.  It was “hard to distinguish those [parts] that may go into Israeli jets and secondly this is a global supply chain with the UK a vital part of that supply chain”.  To disrupt the supply of such parts would, essentially, “risk the operation of fighter jets that are central to our own UK security, that of our allies and of NATO.”

Another knotty point was the legal or ethical value one could ultimately attribute to the decision.  Lammy was adamant that the policy revision was not intended, in any way, to cast aspersions against Israel’s conduct of the war, despite an assessment suggesting otherwise.  “This is a forward looking evaluation, not a determination of guilt, and it does not prejudge any future determinations by the competent courts.”  This routine garbling ignored the assessment’s references to the inordinate number of civilian deaths, the sheer extent of the destruction in Gaza, and “credible claims” that Palestinian detainees had been mistreated.

This latest gesture of tokenistic principle on the part of the UK government elevates impotence to the level of doctrine.  Lammy and Healey were merely taking a line Starmer has courted with numbing consistency: that of the craven, the insignificantly disruptive and the painfully cautious.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

“Taliban officials must immediately reverse their decision to suspend the broadcast licenses of 14 active media outlets in Nangarhar province that collectively reach millions of people,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ Asia program coordinator. “The Taliban continues to exert pressure on media outlets to control their programming and broadcasting operations in Afghanistan. They must cease these tactics and allow the independent media to operate freely.”

The order also stipulated that the outlets must renew their licenses and pay any outstanding fees or risk having all the outlet’s licenses revoked, according to CPJ’s review of the order, the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group, and a journalist who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity. 

ATRA is a regulatory body that operates as part of the Taliban’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Outlets with suspended radio and TV licenses: 

• Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV
• Sharq 
• Arzasht 

Radio networks affected: 

• The Nan
• Radio Safa
• Meena 
• Radio Dost
• Mazal
• Manar
• Muram
• Haqiqat 
• Hood 
• Spinghar
• Ulfat

CPJ’s text messages to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment did not receive a reply.

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

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A frustrated woman recently called the Utah official in charge of professional licensing, upset that his office couldn’t take action against a life coach she had seen. Mark Steinagel recalls the woman telling him: “I really think that we should be regulating life coaching. Because this person did a lot of damage to me.”

Reports about life coaches — who sell the promise of helping people achieve their personal or professional goals — come into Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing about once a month. But much of the time, Steinagel or his staff have to explain that there’s nothing they can do.

If the woman had been complaining about any of the therapist professions overseen by DOPL, Steinagel’s office might have been able to investigate and potentially order discipline, including fines.

But life coaches aren’t therapists and are mostly unregulated across the United States. They aren’t required to be trained in ethical boundaries the way therapists are, and there’s no universally accepted certification for those who work in the industry.

Simply put, anyone can call themselves a life coach — an industry that is rapidly growing. The International Coaching Federation has estimated that, in 2022, active life coaches generated more than $4.5 billion in revenue worldwide.

But with that growth have come complaints by clients about mistreatment by their life coaches and growing calls for some type of oversight.

In California, a woman sued her life coach in 2020, claiming the coach convinced her to sign over her home to the coach's nonprofit organization. She settled her lawsuit and got the title to her home back. A Connecticut life coach was given probation after he was charged last year with stealing money from a client with a traumatic brain injury. And this year, a Nevada life coach was sentenced to a year in jail after he admitted to taking money from clients that he was supposed to use for investments on their behalf — but that he spent at casinos instead.

In Utah, there’s a heightened sense of urgency after a therapist-turned-life-coach named Jodi Hildebrandt was sentenced to prison for abusing two of her business partner’s children.

One former client, who was not a part of Hildebrandt’s criminal case, also flagged concerns about how she conducted life coaching with him. Ethan Prete told The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that Hildebrandt had ordered him to cut off contact with friends and family, and at one point asked him to live in a tent in order to “humble” himself. He also said Hildebrandt told him she didn’t want to be limited by the regulations therapists have to follow in Utah.

“She was like, ‘Without all these rules and regulations, now I have free rein to actually change peoples’ lives because the system is corrupt,’” Prete said.

Right now, the only Utah rules that apply kick in when life coaches diagnose clients or develop plans to manage mental health conditions. When that happens, Utah licensers can cite them with what’s known as unauthorized practice. But a records analysis by The Tribune and ProPublica shows citations and fines are seldom used and aren’t always effective — some life coaches have been cited for this multiple times.

Prosecutors can also file criminal charges, but a review of court records shows that no such cases have been brought against a life coach in at least a decade.

For more than a year, The Tribune and ProPublica have investigated obstacles that Utahns face when seeking justice against medical providers who they say hurt them — including what happens when they go to state licensers to file complaints. An August investigation by the news organizations showed how patients of a Utah County therapist had reported alleged inappropriate touching to both state licensers and local leaders within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; neither group reported the therapist to law enforcement. Both said they take allegations of sexual assault seriously and indicated that they had addressed the complaints through their own processes. The Tribune and ProPublica’s reporting led to a police investigation, and that therapist was charged last summer with nearly a dozen felonies. He’s expected to enter a plea in August.

In light of the growth of the life coaching industry, Steinagel said he feels there’s a legitimate question that he plans to work with state legislators to address: “Has life coaching become one of those fields where the potential to harm people who are vulnerable is great enough,” he asks, “that the government should step in and regulate it? I think both the Legislature and we — from what we have seen, especially in the last few years — we think the answer is probably yes.”

The scope of what life coaches can offer is undefined and broad: They can promise to help someone lose weight, run their business, change their parenting style, have better sex or improve other aspects of their lives.

Onstage at a recent natural health and wellness conference in Utah, near tables advertising essential oils, drink supplements and chiropractic adjustments, one life coach told assembled audiences she could help women reach their weight loss goals; her yearlong course cost $800.

Next on the program were a couple who, based on their experiences of both twice being divorced, said they could help people “untangle” their emotional “chaos”; another life coach advertised that he could “rewire your brain” to rid yourself of anxiety.

When licensers hear complaints about life coaches, they are most often from the customers themselves, or from a concerned family member or therapist whose patient disclosed past care from a life coach that seemed questionable, said Steinagel, DOPL’s director.

Investigators in his office usually ask dissatisfied clients the same questions: Did they diagnose you? Did they create a treatment plan? Did they treat you for anxiety, depression or another mental health disorder? If the person lodging the complaint answers “no” to these questions, Steinagel said, DOPL can’t do anything.

The public also can’t see any of the specific grievances that have been made against Utah life coaches because of this catch-22: DOPL doesn’t release complaints unless they result in disciplinary action — and DOPL can’t discipline life coaches.

A review of records shows that DOPL has cited 25 people for unauthorized practice in the mental health field in the last decade, a number that included four life coaches and at least one online “influencer” offering “therapy” services.

It appears citations have been successful a handful of times — including with the online influencer, who stopped offering those services on her Patreon account.

But at least two men have been cited for unauthorized practice multiple times and still continue working as life coaches.

One was cited twice by licensers — in 2012, and then again a year later — and now runs a program that trains life coaches. He had previously worked as a therapist, according to public records, but his license had expired. In his second citation, licensers fined him $1,000 after they said he advertised himself as a “psychotherapist” in a marketing brochure for a seven-day retreat.

Another man, Denim Slade, was cited and fined $250 just three months after he surrendered his therapy license after DOPL received two reports that he engaged in inappropriate conduct with female clients. DOPL cited him, according to public records, for advertising that he did “Lifespan Integration Therapy” and could treat trauma in his life coaching business. A year later, he was cited again for unauthorized practice after DOPL received reports that he continued to advertise that he treated mental health issues like depression, anxiety, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. The life coach told a DOPL investigator he didn’t realize those posts were still active after he gave up his license and agreed to remove them.

Slade told The Tribune and ProPublica that he has never conducted therapy or mental health treatment as a life coach. He admitted that, in his therapy practice, he had allowed “some mild boundaries to be crossed” with one client. But he also said the DOPL records did not contain “the full picture” and that he felt pressured to admit to doing something wrong after licensers received a second report years later; he denied that allegation, but rather than fighting it, he decided to relinquish his license and turned to life coaching.

“I was excited at the prospect of working with an appropriate coaching population and transitioning to helping people who were already doing fairly well in their lives and wanting, but not necessarily knowing, how to excel,” Slade said. And he said while he feels there can be “some overlap” between life coaching and therapy, he believes “these are two definably different populations with different needs. I do not think life coaches should be conducting therapy.”

He also said he believes there are already safeguards in place for people doing mental health work that requires a license, and it’s already against the law to practice therapy without a license.

“I think people ought to be able to hire someone to help them with things in their lives that they want extra help with,” he said. "Do you regulate someone wanting to get help organizing their house, teaching art to kids, teaching piano, coaching Little League sports? I don’t know where that line should be.”

Therapist organizations in Utah have been a driving force in advocating for some measure of state oversight of life coaches. “Regulation really keeps them in their lane, us in our lane, and just increases consumer safety all around,” said Sarah Stroup, a licensed therapist who is on the legislative committee for the Utah Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Jessica Black, a licensed therapist who works with the Legislature in her role with the Utah Mental Health Counselors Association, said she sees particular vulnerabilities when life coaches try to help someone struggling with their mental health.

“There’s a difference between a business coach coaching you on how to build a business,” Black said. “But when you’re dealing with somebody’s mental health, or when you’re dealing with their life — that’s how people get taken advantage of.”

There have been Utah therapists who have lost their licenses for misconduct who, despite being deemed unsafe to work with patients, have still been able to continue their careers working in the mental health field — often in the unregulated realm of life coaching.

At least 43 Utah mental health professionals have surrendered their licenses or had them revoked, denied or expired on suspension since 2010, according to a review of publicly available DOPL disciplinary records. Of those, it appears that a third have continued working in mental health, according to searches of LinkedIn profiles and business websites — as mental health “associates,” motivational speakers and life coaches.

Some of those who have continued to work with clients on their mental health or well-being had lost their therapy licenses for serious reasons, DOPL records show. Several struggled with drug or alcohol use. Others lost their licenses after being accused of having inappropriate contact with patients, including Slade, who admitted in 2013 he had an inappropriate relationship with a married client. He gave up his license in 2019 after another patient reported to DOPL that he had engaged in “inappropriate physical and verbal conduct” with her; he denied this accusation in licensing records. A second therapist was charged with sexual exploitation by a medical care professional in Idaho, and a third touched a teenage girl’s leg and torso during a therapy session in an effort to “sexually stimulate” her as part of a therapeutic technique. (This man subsequently got his license back and was again accused of unprofessional conduct; he has now agreed to stop practicing entirely — including as a life coach — while DOPL and the police investigate.)

Steinagel said it’s “very frustrating” when therapists who lose their licenses continue doing mental health work as life coaches. He also said that while licensers can’t prohibit them from working in the unregulated field of life coaching, investigators often keep a close eye on such coaches to ensure they don’t cross into therapy.

In Hildebrandt’s case, it appears she deliberately decided to leave the regulated field of therapy. Over a decade ago, in 2012, promotional materials for her self-help company leaned into her credentials as a licensed therapist and experience as an addiction counselor.

But after more than a decade of running ConneXions Classroom, Hildebrandt had changed her website: References to her credentials as a therapist were gone, and she instead began calling herself a life coach. (At the time, she was still licensed as a clinical mental health worker and could have used that designation.)

“I began practicing in the psychotherapy world, and my patients were not healing,” she wrote on her website in 2022. “When I began empowering people by educating them with principles of Truth (learning to be honest, responsible, and humble), I saw my patients radically change right in front of me!”

Prete, the former client, met Hildebrandt as he was struggling in his marriage during the pandemic and after the birth of their first child. His now-ex-wife wanted to try the ConneXions program, he said.

The help he was seeking came with a cost: To start, he had to pay a monthly charge to participate in a group video call every Saturday morning. He paid another weekly fee to be part of a men’s small group. On top of that, he paid weekly to meet one-on-one with Hildebrandt. In total, he was spending more than $1,000 a month.

“I would meet with her every week for almost a year,” he said of Hildebrandt. “And it was always like, your wife is going to leave you. If you ever want to see her again, you’ll do what I say.”

After Hildebrandt told him to cut off contact with friends and relatives, he said, he was living separately from his family and Hildebrandt told him and his wife not to speak to each other. Hildebrandt, he said, “had complete control.”

Hildebrandt is currently in prison, and DOPL revoked her license as a clinical mental health worker in May in response to her child abuse convictions. Her attorney did not respond to a list of questions sent to him for this article.

In the final days of Utah’s 2024 legislative session, Kevin Franke, the father of the children abused by Hildebrandt, made a plea to lawmakers in a letter, asking them to pass a bill that would require life coach registration.

He wrote about the impact of being a client of Hildebrandt’s with his now-ex-wife, how his marriage ended and how his children were deeply harmed. All of it, he wrote, had been at the directive “of a dangerous mental health professional who believes that she could act outside the ethical balance of her profession by labeling herself as a life coach.“

Franke also asserted that Utah’s culture makes its citizens particularly vulnerable. The state’s attorney general has acknowledged that Utah has held a decades-long reputation for being the “fraud capital of the United States.” That’s in large part because of a local culture of trust in institutions among members of the dominant religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Investment fraud targeting LDS church members, Ponzi schemes and scams carried out in a style that mimics Utah’s significant multi-level marketing industry are prevalent in the state.

Black, the therapist with the Utah Mental Health Counselors Association, said that’s why Utah legislators should lead in regulating life coaches.

“I think it is a national problem. I think Utah’s unique in the sense that they’re very easily bought into MLMs,” she said about multi-level marketing. ”That’s kind of the structure of a lot of these life coaches. The more you pay, the more access you get. The more perks you get.”

Legislators in a handful of other states have tried to enact some oversight, but so far no proposals have become law.

New Hampshire legislators debated a bill in 2019 that would have studied whether life coaches should be regulated. The bill didn’t pass.

Two years later, in Oregon, legislators considered establishing a voluntary registry for those who provide “alternative therapy,” like life coaches. It also would have allowed the state to impose discipline for certain violations. But the measure failed after several life coaches pushed back.

“Coaching is not, nor claims to be, a form of therapy,” one Oregon coach wrote. ”Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

Life coaches are not required to be certified by the International Coaching Federation or any other organization. There’s no Utah ICF chapter, and the ICF did not respond to interview requests.

The ICF did release a statement to The New York Times, which recently reported the experiences of several people who felt they had been tricked into paying for courses to become life coaches as part of a “pyramid scheme.”

Carrie Abner, the vice president of credentials and standards at the ICF, told the newspaper that coaching is a “self-regulated industry,” and clients should make sure they are working with coaches that are trained, are experienced and have credentials. Credentialed ICF members, she added, agree to abide by an ethics code.

In Utah, state Sen. David Hinkins’ bill to require life coaches to register with DOPL never got past a first hearing. State lawmakers, however, are expected to continue the discussion this month during legislative committee meetings.

Franke said in his letter that he was able to get a measure of accountability because Hildebrandt and his ex-wife — who also participated in abusing the children — broke the law and went to prison. But not every ethical violation is a crime. And people who have been taken advantage of emotionally or financially, he said, have little recourse.

“These individuals are literally ghosts,” he wrote, “and are free to sell their supposed life expertise to anyone willing to purchase it.”

Mollie Simon contributed research, and Jeff Kao contributed data reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune.

On May 21 and 22, Guinea’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology revoked the broadcasting licenses of the private radio stations FIM, Espace, Sweet, Djoma, and Djoma TV and Espace TV stations, according to CPJ interviews with FIM editor Sekou Bah, Djoma Média press group’s manager Kalil Oularé, and Kabiné Condé, manager at Hadafo Médias, which owns Sweet FM and Espace Guinée.

Since December 2023, the outlets, as well as Evasion FM and TV, have been blocked by authorities in Guinea “for security reasons.”

“Guinean authorities should unconditionally reinstate the broadcast licenses of FIM, Espace, Sweet, Djoma, Espace TVstation, and Djoma TV, and allow them to resume operating without restriction,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ Africa, in Maputo, Mozambique. “These media outlets have been blocked since last year, and the revoking of their broadcast licenses is an alarming, compounding effort to censor the news in Guinea.”

The ministry’s decision, which was published by local media, cited “non-compliance with the specifications in accordance with current regulations.” Oularé and Condé told CPJ that the ministry did not specify the reasons.

CPJ called Fana Soumah, the Guinean Minister of Information and Communication, who promised to call back after a meeting but did not. CPJ’s other calls went unanswered.

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

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The year 2023 was a banner one for hospice reform. Spurred by media reports, letters from Congress and pressure from lobbying groups, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services increased oversight of end-of-life care. It retooled inspections to focus on quality of care. It made ownership data public for the first time. And, kicking off a plan to visit every hospice provider in the country, its staff made appearances at 7000 sites. Following the tour, the Medicare billing privileges for 46 nonoperational hospices were revoked.

In July, the agency also rolled out a special enforcement program to target hospices in Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas — states with alarming spikes in the number of providers. The increase in hospice numbers had raised concerns inside and outside the agency about fraudulent bills for unneeded services and market oversaturation. During its “period of enhanced oversight,” the agency said, it would scrutinize the claims from new hospices in these states before paying them.

These reforms, however, have done little to slow the region’s hospice boom. CMS data from last year shows that these four states continued to drive most of the growth of new Medicare-certified hospices in the country, with two-thirds of all certifications taking place there. The nation’s leading trade groups for end-of-life care have repeatedly recommended that Medicare impose a moratorium on certifying new hospices in counties that have seen an explosion in questionable startups. This would prevent bad actors from draining Medicare funds, the groups contend, while regulators can investigate fraudulent networks. In response to questions about this recommendation, CMS told ProPublica in a written statement that “if state officials believe there is a hospice issue in their state, they can pursue a state-based hospice license moratorium under their state laws/regulations such as what was done in California.”

California, however, offers an example of why this approach may not be working: Last year, the state temporarily banned new hospice licenses altogether after its auditors found evidence of “a large-scale, targeted effort to defraud Medicare,” with providers charging for patients who did not need hospice care or, in some cases, did not exist. But without a federal moratorium on certifications, the large crop of licensees that were established in the past three years can continue to bill Medicare. “The Department of Public Health is doing a fantastic job of trying to clean it up here in California, but they can’t clean it up fast enough if CMS keeps allowing new hospices to charge for patients,” said Sheila Clark, the president of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, a trade group for providers.

Indeed, the agency’s data shows that last year it continued to certify hospices located in buildings that have been flagged by auditors and journalists as potential fraud hot spots. In 2023, Medicare certified 15 more hospices at a two-story building in Los Angeles that is home to more than 100 hospices. It also certified three new hospices last year at a Phoenix address that purportedly houses dozens of providers, all of which have materialized in the past two years.

CMS said that without “evidence of sanctions” that would authorize it to deny certification, the agency cannot prevent these hospices from entering the program. In a recent blog post it added that “we take our role as stewards of the Medicare Trust Funds seriously, and we work to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent on high-quality, necessary care for each beneficiary.”

Hospice fraud doesn’t just drain Medicare reserves. It also harms patients who are not actually dying, since enrollment cuts them off from curative care. Karen Joy Fletcher, communications director at California Senior Medicare Patrol, which runs a hotline for patients and families, said that hospice fraud continues to be a big problem in the state despite the moratorium.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the hotline received a call from Anna Duran, whose mother has been in a nursing home in Los Angeles County since 2010. Duran was surprised to discover that her mother was unable to get her pacemaker checked because she’d recently been enrolled in hospice by a doctor she’d never heard of. Duran, who holds power of attorney for her mother, determined that no one at the nursing home had enrolled her mother — or thought, for that matter, that she was about to die. She had dementia and high blood pressure, but she was still walking. Each time Duran called the number for the hospice business, no one picked up. An analyst from Medicare has now been assigned to untangle the case, but so long as Duran’s mother is still on hospice, she no longer qualifies for her regular physical therapy appointments. Medicare, meanwhile, has paid the hospice more than $7,500. “Nobody knows how this happened,” Duran said.

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

Tuesday’s decision means that 167 companies have been barred from trading dollars in the past nine months.

The companies include forex firms, travel agencies, airlines, hotels, construction companies, gem traders, financial and trading companies.

They include Yangon’s famous Sedona Hotel and Myanmar National Airlines.

Radio Free Asia phoned the director general of the central bank’s Foreign Exchange Management Department, Nwe Ni Tun, to get details of the latest move but nobody answered.

A source close to the central bank, who declined to be named for security reasons, said the licenses were canceled because companies did not observe the bank’s reference exchange rate.

The central bank’s reference price is 2,100 kyats per U.S. dollar, which has been in force since April last year.

In the external market one U.S. dollar trades for between 3,300 and 3,500 kyats, said a businessman who also requested anonymity.

“When the government set the reference price in April 2022 no one could trade at those prices anymore,” he said.

“Companies had to send reports every day to the central bank.

“After more than a year of not being able to send accurate reports the central bank shut down these companies’ [forex operations].”

One of the travel companies whose license was revoked said that it stopped trading foreign currency since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

“We haven’t done foreign currency exchange for a long time since the COVID-19 period,” said the owner who also declined to be named.

“I think our license was revoked because we haven’t used it for a long time. “There is no problem because we only do ticketing for airlines.”

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

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

Rarely does a new police hire make national headlines. But when Myles Cosgrove got a job at the Carroll County sheriff’s department in northern Kentucky this past April, people had reason to pay attention.

About three years earlier, he and his squad of Louisville police officers had used a battering ram to break into Breonna Taylor’s home during a deadly raid. Investigators later found that Cosgrove was one of three officers who fired their guns. While the Louisville police department ultimately fired Cosgrove for violating use-of-force procedures and not using his body camera, he eluded criminal charges and remains employable as a cop.

That’s because he kept his police certification.

He’s not the only one. Out of 54 officers involved in 14 high-profile killings that spurred Black Lives Matter protests in the last nine years, only 10 had their certifications or licenses revoked as a matter of disciplinary action, according to The Intercept’s analysis of certification documents obtained through public records requests. (Three officers’ disciplinary cases remain pending.) The Intercept’s review begins in 2014 and runs through January of this year. For the first several years of the analysis, none of the officers whose records The Intercept reviewed faced a disciplinary hearing in front of a regulatory board with the power to revoke their license — a bar on being rehired as a cop in most states. That changed after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020. He and three other Minneapolis officers were stripped of their licenses for their involvement in the killing — a turning point in public outrage over police violence, and, perhaps, in formal efforts at accountability.

While experts have described the revocation of police licenses as a “viable remedy” for misconduct, it can be difficult to attain. In many states, a conviction is a prerequisite for decertification, a major obstacle given how rarely even the most notorious cops are criminally prosecuted. And the process varies wildly from state to state. In most cases, local police departments must initiate the process, which is often handled by a state board that oversees police standards and training. The state boards are often stacked with law enforcement administrators, in addition to some civilian appointees. Not all states have a process for decertification, and there is no parallel process for federal law enforcement personnel.

That makes it impossible to conduct a comprehensive national analysis. While limited, The Intercept’s review of licensing records across 11 states demonstrates how underutilized this accountability mechanism is, even though it could go a long way in keeping violent cops off the streets.

“Decertification has to be easier if it’s to work as an independent way to get police reform.”

“Decertification has to be easier if it’s to work as an independent way to get police reform,” said Raff Donelson, an associate professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, drawing a contrast to criminal prosecutions as an accountability mechanism.

“We have one set of rules for figuring out whether to take away your freedom,” he said, and “a different set of rules about whether you should do a job.”

In theory, it should be easier to revoke a cop’s license than to convict a cop of using excessive force, since decertification is a civil process with lower evidentiary standards, Donelson said. In practice, however, decertification is often dependent on a criminal conviction.

Police departments’ discretion over initiating decertification processes is another reason the numbers are low, said Tracie L. Keesee, a former Denver police captain and co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “That goes to tell you about systems, right?” she said. “It’s not just about systems by themselves, but it’s about who’s in the systems that are doing the investigations and that are making the determinations.”

Disparate Criteria

The idea of creating state boards with the power to decertify officers emerged in the wake of abusive police practices during the Black-led rebellions of 1967, with many states passing laws to create such entities by 2001. Today, some state boards have rules that require automatic decertification: for example, if an officer is convicted of a felony. But state regulatory agencies are not required to report when an officer’s license is revoked, making it possible for decertified cops to find jobs elsewhere in the country — or even the same state.

In New York, for example, dozens of officers who were decertified by the state were later rehired by police departments or public safety agencies, according to a 2021 investigation by The Intercept and New York Focus.

The International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training maintains a decertification database that state boards can theoretically reference when deciding whether to issue a license. But because participation is completely voluntary, it has no teeth.

According to IADLEST, some 209 officers are decertified in the United States each month. That figure represents a range of on- and off-duty misconduct and is a tiny fraction of the nation’s over 900,000 law enforcement agents. Randy Shrewsberry, a former police officer who is the executive director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform, said that there should be more decertifications and that the disparate standards are a pressing issue.

“What is the criteria for decertification?” Shrewsberry said. Even if every state doesn’t have a decertification board, “having some understanding of ‘this is what we all agree should be the things for which would decertify an officer’” is what is needed.

In Louisiana, where the laws on decertification are generally weak, automatic decertification is limited to convictions of malfeasance in office or if an officer is stripped of the right to bear arms; it does not apply to most felony or misdemeanor convictions. An investigative series published this past April by the Times-Picayune found that in the last decade, a majority of cops who were convicted of serious crimes like murder and sexual assault kept their certifications.

Louisiana law requires local departments to report officer arrests and convictions based on on-duty incidents, but because there are no penalties for ignoring the mandate, only a slight majority of cases were reported, the investigation found.

Even when a disciplinary case makes it to a licensing board, action is not guaranteed. Arizona’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, which both issues and revokes police certifications, took no action in roughly 32 percent of misconduct allegations that could’ve resulted in decertification from 2000 to 2011.

Some officers who lose their jobs due to misconduct are able to be rehired elsewhere. These so-called wandering officers are more likely to be fired at their next job or receive a “moral character violation” than rookies or veterans who have never been fired, according to an academic study published in the Yale Law Journal in 2020 looking at the records of 98,000 officers across almost 500 Florida police departments over 30 years.

And then there’s the fact that many officers facing misconduct allegations preemptively resign to evade a disciplinary record, noted Thor Morrison, who worked for 20 years as an administrator in various agencies related to Kentucky’s police standards and training. It’s “much too easy based on the structure to let people leave than it is to do the right thing and follow through with preferring charges or going through a formal disciplinary process,” he said.

Brett Hankison, another one of the officers who raided Taylor’s apartment, previously worked at the police department in Lexington, Kentucky. When he resigned from that job in 2002, a supervisor said he “would not recommend him for reemployment at any time in the future” due to habitually violating orders, shirking supervision, and having an overall bad attitude. But Hankison kept his license and simply moved on to another job in Louisville.

Just over 17 years later, Hankison was fired for shooting 10 bullets through Taylor’s apartment window and a sliding glass door, which were covered with blinds and a curtain. He was criminally charged but was acquitted in state court and had the charges expunged from his record. While state records show that his certification is currently inactive, there is no disciplinary bar on him seeking a job as a police officer in the future.

Former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison is cross-examined in Louisville, Ky., on March 2, 2022.

Failure to Act

In addition to Taylor, The Intercept reviewed the records of officers involved in the deaths of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee; Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota; Floyd in Minneapolis; Stephon Clark in Sacramento, California; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Jamar Clark in Minneapolis; Sandra Bland in Hempstead, Texas; Freddie Gray in Baltimore; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.

One of the officers who raided Taylor’s home lost her license through a regulatory process, as did the four cops involved in Floyd’s arrest and death, the officer who fatally shot Wright, and four of the officers who beat up Nichols, fatally injuring him. (One officer, the Texas state trooper who arrested Bland, lost his license not because of a regulatory process, but because he agreed to give it up as part of a perjury case.)

Taken as a whole, the cases illustrate how often it is that officers who engage in excessive, deadly force remain employable in the profession. But the specifics of several of the cases also highlight the deadly consequences of regulatory agencies’ failure to take definitive action against even the officers who are deemed by their own departments unfit to work.

Take Darren Wilson, who killed Brown in August 2014. Three years earlier, Wilson lost his job as a cop in nearby Jennings, Missouri, after the city council disbanded the entire department due to corruption and complaints of racial discrimination by white officers policing the 89 percent Black populace. “Wilson was let go of one police department, and he slithered his way into Ferguson,” Brown’s mother Lezley McSpadden-Head told The Intercept. (Wilson was never indicted for killing Brown, and his police license later expired, according to the Missouri Department of Public Safety.)

Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot 12-year-old Rice in November 2014, got a job last year in Tioga, Pennsylvania, a roughly 700-person township. Because Loehmann kept his license in Ohio, subject to the state’s training requirements, he did not have to apply for a new license in Pennsylvania, which accepts police officer transfers from all states. Kelly May, a spokesperson for the Ohio attorney general’s office, wrote in an email in March that Loehmann’s license “was not revoked as he was not convicted of anything that we were made aware of.”

“What they are doing is leaving officers to commit excessive force in the wild, to inflict their danger upon the rest of us.”

Subodh Chandra, a lawyer who represents the Rice family, told The Intercept that either the decertification boards are not seeking information of excessive force cases or they are not interested in it when they receive it. “And that is cause for concern,” he said. “What they are doing is leaving officers to commit excessive force in the wild, to inflict their danger upon the rest of us.”

Michael Slager, who stopped Scott for a broken brake light in 2015 and fatally shot him in the back as he ran away, was subsequently fired by his police department. In South Carolina, cops lose their certification when they leave a job at a police station, whether voluntarily or after being fired. After he was fired for an allegation of misconduct, the state board wrote to him to remind him of this fact — but left the door open for him to reactivate his license. In a cordially worded letter, obtained by The Intercept, the board wrote, “[S]ince allegations of misconduct have been made against you, once you find employment with another law enforcement agency you must undergo a contested case hearing to determine if you can be reissued law enforcement certification.”

More than two years after receiving that warning, Slager pleaded guilty to depriving Scott of his rights and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Under South Carolina law, the conviction disqualifies him from working as a police officer.

People gather to protest against the police assault of Tyre Nichols, in Times Square in New York City on Jan. 28, 2023.

Creative Reforms

The last few years have seen some progress on the use of decertification as an accountability mechanism.

Back in 2016, over 25 percent of the nation’s officers worked in six states that didn’t have bodies with decertification powers, according to the late Saint Louis University law professor emeritus Roger L. Goldman. Prompted by the 2020 uprisings, three of those states — California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts — created processes for decertification in the last two and a half years.

Meanwhile, in the cases reviewed by The Intercept, none of the 27 officers involved in 10 pre-2020 killings lost their licenses through a disciplinary process. Another 27 officers were involved in the four killings that took place since 2020. Ten of them were decertified, 10 retained their licenses, and no information was released about the final seven. The number of decertifications could increase, as disciplinary cases are still pending for three of the Memphis police officers involved in Nichols’s death. (Of the 10 officers who were decertified, four are white, four are Black, and two are Asian.)

Some experts like Donelson say that more can be done. “One can imagine being really creative about how we create the enforcement mechanisms,” Donelson said. One way could be to harness “qui tam” actions — a provision of anti-fraud law that allows private citizens to sue on behalf of the U.S. government to spur the government to take up a case — to initiate more license revocation processes.

Another idea, included in President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing’s final report in 2015, is for the Department of Justice to partner with IADLEST and expand its database of officers who’ve had their licenses revoked for misconduct with standardized reporting requirements so that those officers cannot easily be hired elsewhere.

Others, meanwhile, say the entire decertification process should be taken out of the hands of police.

“I would definitely like to see more accountability taken when it comes to these situations like my son’s,” said McSpadden-Head. That means electing ordinary people to positions with decertification powers rather than “the police policing the police.”

This story was supported by a 2023 Charles M. Rappleye Investigative Journalism Award from the LA Press Club.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Gabb Schivone.

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In Wednesday’s announcement, the bank said the forex firms had not complied with the central bank’s orders and instructions.

It named the companies as Kannan Trading; Net Change; Thiri Aung Si; Riverwood Group; Global Myanmar Services; D-Gold; Aurum Image; Hi Welcome Travel; & Tours Sweeties Pearls; and Chase Travels & Tours.

Although the statement said the licenses were revoked according to a decision of the executive committee, it did not mention what orders and instructions were violated.

RFA contacted the companies whose licenses were revoked but they did not respond.

An entrepreneur holding a foreign exchange license, who did not want to be named for security reasons, called the central bank’s current forex policy “unstable.”

“They shut [companies] If they want to. We do not know what for,” he said. 

“But there is one thing that they should explain. Why was it not in accordance with the rules and regulations?”

At present, the central bank allows foreign exchange companies to exchange one U.S. dollar for 2,100 Myanmar kyat.

Firms are not allowed to change more than $10,000 per day and must be able to show the transactions list during investigation.

Last March, the business licenses of 20 money exchange companies were revoked for failing to comply with the central bank’s orders and instructions.

And on June 21, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was adding the junta’s Ministry of Defense, and the regime controlled Myanma Foreign Trade Bank (MFTB) and Myanma Investment and Commercial Bank (MICB) to a sanctions blacklist in connection with the Myanmar military’s purchases of arms from foreign sellers “including sanctioned Russian entities.”

The dollar rose 7.3% against the kyat in the following 24-hours.

Two days later, the central bank said authorities had arrested 51 people for allegedly trying to cash in on the sudden spike in the price of dollars.

It said foreign exchange speculators in Yangon and Mandalay, foreign currency dealers, people transferring money and officials from three companies had been prosecuted.

The Central Bank of Myanmar said its currency market monitoring team took action in accordance with the anti-money laundering and foreign exchange management laws.

Also on June 23, in a move aimed at slowing the outflow of foreign currency the junta’s commerce ministry announced that importers at northeastern Myanmar’s border with China would have to pay for goods using their local bank accounts from Aug. 1.

Junta Deputy Information Minister, Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun, told state-controlled media last month that the U.S. sanctions were aimed at triggering a political and economic crisis in Myanmar.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Climate campaigners on Friday condemned the U.K.'s announcement that it will open up a new licensing round for oil and gas fields in the North Sea, saying the decision signifies the Conservative government's blatant disregard for the climate emergency and warnings against fossil fuel exploration from energy experts and scientists.

Claiming new oil and gas drilling will not undermine the country's stated plan to cut its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) said it will issue up to 100 licenses for nearly 900 exploration areas, including several that are known to contain hydrocarbons.

In response to Climate Minister Graham Stuart's claim that the plan is "actually good for the environment" because using fossil fuels in the North Sea negates the need for foreign gas, Friends of the Earth (FOE) Scotland accused the government of "sticking two fingers up to climate scientists and energy experts."

"By encouraging greedy fossil fuel companies to keep looking for more fossil fuels, the U.K. government is denying the reality of the climate emergency," said Freya Aitchison, an oil and gas campaigner for the group. "Instead of new fossil fuels, we urgently need a transition to an energy system powered by renewables, and a mass rollout of energy efficiency measures to reduce energy demand."

"With the cost-of-living skyrocketing due to the volatile prices of oil and gas, it's obvious that our current energy system is completely unfit for purpose, serving only to make oil company bosses and shareholders richer while everyone else loses out," she added.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sent energy prices soaring for households across Europe, but the climate action campaign Paid to Pollute warned that licensing oil and gas fields in the North Sea will do nothing to alleviate the cost of living crisis.

The plan is moving forward "under the pretext of energy security," a campaigner for the group said in a video posted to social media, "but another North Sea licensing round won't deliver U.K. energy security."

"The North Sea is an aging and oil-heavy basin," he continued. "The bald truth? The U.K. has burned most of its gas. Any new gas that is found won't be produced for years and years."

As the U.K. Committee on Climate Change said earlier this year, it takes an average of about 28 years for oil and gas production to begin from the time an exploration license is issued.

U.K. Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay called the news of the latest licensing round "deeply distressing."

"The government's claim that burning ever more fossil fuels from the North Sea will help the U.K. meet its international obligations to become net-zero by 2050 has no connection to reality," Ramsay said on social media.

The new licenses are being offered nearly a year after grassroots campaigners were credited with pressuring Shell Oil to pull out of a plan to drill in the proposed Cambo oil field in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland's Shetland Islands.

FOE Scotland called on Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who opposed the Cambo proposal, to stand up to the NSTA's "reckless plans to expand fossil fuels in the North Sea."

"These announcements risk locking us into a climate-destroying energy system for decades to come," said Aitchison, "entrenching reliance on this volatile industry in places like Aberdeen, and leaving people all across Scotland exposed to rocketing energy bills."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

In mid-August, Sierra Leone’s broadcast media regulator, National Telecommunications Commission, suspended the licenses of privately owned broadcasters Star Radio and Star TV for over two weeks and denied workers access to the broadcasters’ transmitters in Brookfields, a neighborhood in western Freetown, the capital, according to an August 19 commission statement and Philip Neville, the broadcasters’ founder who holds 70% ownership of shares and handles the finances.

Neville, who spoke with CPJ by phone, said that in mid-August, commission officers arrived at the offices of the broadcasters’ transmitters and ordered all the staff to vacate the premises. Neville also said the officers told him that they gave the order because the broadcasters failed to pay about 140 million leones (US$10,000) of allegedly accumulated debt that the broadcasters owed to the commission for broadcast licenses, including some licenses no longer in use. Before the commission officers’ visit and the suspension of licenses, the broadcasters believed payments to the commission were up to date and there was no debt, according to Neville.

“Authorities in Sierra Leone should allow Star television and radio stations to continue reporting the news and provide the public with information,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “Media regulators are too often used as tools to gag the media and the suspension of Star raises concern over freedom of the press in Sierra Leone.”  

The commission’s statement said that the broadcasters failed to comply with sections 30 and 65 of the country’s telecommunications laws. According to CPJ’s review, Section 30 allows the commission to suspend or cancel broadcast licenses for various violations, including fraud, treason, or “where the suspension or cancellation is in the public interest”; Section 65 requires broadcasters to obtain “a general or specific license” to operate a radio transmitter. Neither section indicated penalties for violations and CPJ could not determine how the commission calculated the US$10,000 amount.

On August 25, Neville said that the broadcasters were permitted to resume usage of the transmitters and begin broadcasting again after his office paid 74 million leones, the equivalent of about US$5,300, to the regulator on August 23, adding that the regulator still expected the broadcasters to pay the remaining amount.

According to Neville and a copy of a 2017 letter he wrote to the commission, which CPJ reviewed, authorities granted the broadcasters separate licenses to operate in five regions—Freetown, Mile 91, Makeni, Bo, and Kenema—at the cost of US$700 annually for each radio frequency and US$2,000 annually for one television frequency.

Neville’s 2017 letter also said he had informed the commission that year that the broadcasters no longer used three of the frequencies in Bo, Kenema, and Makeni to reduce production costs, but continued to pay 6 million leones (about US$430) monthly to cover the licenses still in use. However, Neville told CPJ that the commission continued to bill his office for renewal of licenses no longer in use. Neville told CPJ that the broadcasters had always paid for the licenses used. 

Neville told CPJ that he did not understand how the US$10,000 amount had been determined. He added that paying that full amount would place financial strain on the broadcasters’ operations.

Daniel Kaitibi, commission director general, and Abdul Ben-Foday, commission director of corporate and industry affairs, both confirmed to CPJ over the phone that the broadcasters’ licenses were suspended because they allegedly owed the commission US$10,000. Ben-Foday told CPJ that the commission was empowered by law to make access to the licenses conditional on payment.

Neville alleged that the commission’s decision to suspend his broadcasters’ licenses was in reprisal for Star TV’s August 13 airing of an episode of a Facebook talk show “Tell It To Racheal,” by U.S.-based journalist Racheal Bangura Davies.  

Participants on the episode, which CPJ reviewed, blamed the Sierra Leonean government for causing violence that erupted during a nationwide protest on August 10.

Neville said the airing of the talk show episode “did not go down well” with the government, which accused the broadcasters of inciting the public against authorities. The government used the commission to punish the broadcasters, Neville said.

In a text message to CPJ, Sierra Leone information minister Mohamed Rahman Swaray denied that the suspension of the broadcasters’ licenses was connected to the airing of the talk show episode.

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

On Wednesday, June 22, the Kuwaiti Information Ministry announced that over the last two weeks it had revoked the licenses of 90 news websites, and had referred 73 media outlets to state prosecutors “due to violations of the law” including publishing false news, according to news reports and a statement by the ministry.

“Kuwaiti authorities must reverse their recent decisions to withdraw the licenses of nearly 100 news websites and refer dozens of outlets for prosecution,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Authorities should not use the country’s licensing policies to restrict journalists’ work, and should ensure that false news charges are not levied against media outlets.”

CPJ was unable to immediately confirm which news outlets had been targeted by the Information Ministry. CPJ emailed the ministry and its undersecretary and international media office for comment, but did not receive any replies.

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