The company is part of the wider Huione Group of Cambodia, a conglomerate which operates several “Huione” products, including marketplaces, banking and finance apps.

One of these, a Telegram marketplace, has been identified as a notorious place for crime tied to up to $24 billion in illicit transactions.

Huione Pay’s license was withdrawn owing to its noncompliance with “existing regulations and recommendations that may have been made by the regulators,” a National Bank of Cambodia spokesperson told RFA by email on Thursday.

The spokesperson did not say when the license was withdrawn or what repercussions the company might face if they continue to operate. Huione did not respond to RFA’s requests for comment before publication.

It has previously denied criminal activity– when Huione was identified by the cryptocurrency compliance firm Elliptic to have facilitated millions of dollars in criminal payments, it issued a statement insisting that it was a mere “information publishing and guarantee trading platform” bearing no responsibility for the goods and services others used it to trade.

RELATED STORIES

World’s ‘largest illicit online marketplace’ is just a download away

Report: Online cybercriminal marketplace is part of Cambodian conglomerate

Hun To went after the press; who really won?

(RFA)

However, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, Huione’s Telegram marketplace has become one of the main arteries of illicit commerce in Southeast Asia, a region grappling with an epidemic of human trafficking and internet fraud.

The UNODC’s regional representative, Benedikt Hofmann, welcomed the termination of Huione Pay’s license.

The withdrawal “will send an important signal, especially given the high profile of Huione and its outsize role for the region’s criminal ecosystem,” he told RFA.

Hofmann cautioned, however, that this latest development would not be a cure-all for the region’s crime epidemic – nor would it necessarily mean the end of Huione.

“Huione is in many ways the tip of the iceberg and we will see users shifting to other, similar providers which have emerged in the region,” he added.

Much of the money that was being moved through Huione Pay came from illicit activities linked to cyberscamming, the UNODC found. For more than half a decade the region in which Huione operates has been dotted with compounds housing what the U.N. says are hundreds of thousands of enslaved workers forced to perpetrate a type of cyberscam commonly known as “pig butchering”. The practice is estimated to swindle billions of dollars from its victims around the world every year.

Elliptic, the cryptocurrency compliance firm, traced billions of dollars flowing from Huione Guarantee, the Telegram marketplace, to Huione Pay. This was “likely so that these criminally-derived funds could be cashed out,” firm founder Tom Robinson told RFA.

“I think this will be a blow to Huione Guarantee,” Robinson added. “We have direct evidence of Huione Pay laundering money from scam victims around the world, including the elderly and vulnerable. They are willing facilitators of pig butchering and other fraud, so any regulatory action against them should be welcomed.”

The loss of Huione Pay’s license, which has not been previously reported, does not seem to have curtailed the company’s activities, however. As recently as Thursday the company’s official Telegram channel, linked to on its website, was offering loans to customers. A post on February 27th promoted the launch of a Huione-branded Visa card. Visa did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

News of Huione Pay’s license being withdrawn was greeted as overdue by a former employee who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. They told RFA it was openly acknowledged within the company that there were two sets of accounts maintained.

“They cook the books,” the former employee said.

While the company handled billions of dollars, “close to none” of those transactions were made available to the compliance department, which was relegated to the role of advisors, “ whose advice were never taken seriously,” the former employee said.

One of Huione Pay’s three directors is Hun To, a cousin of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet.

Official censure of a company so close to the inner circle of Cambodia’s ruling family is unusual. But Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime at the United States Institute of Peace, told RFA that the withdrawal of Huione’s banking license should not be read as a herald of reform.

“It all ultimately amounts to a brand switch,” Sims said. “It’s basically an easy thing for the regime to point to and say, ‘Look, we’re cracking down on this’ without doing really anything but consolidating Huione’s available brands.”

For Sims, there’s one way the Cambodian government could show it was serious about cracking down on the crime wave Huione has been surfing: “Arrest all the people involved in Huione.”

Edited by Abby Seiff and Boer Deng

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jack Adamović Davies for RFA Investigative.

The company is part of the wider Huione Group of Cambodia, a conglomerate which operates several “Huione” products, including marketplaces, banking and finance apps.

One of these, a Telegram marketplace, has been identified as a notorious place for crime tied to up to $24 billion in illicit transactions.

Huione Pay’s license was withdrawn owing to its noncompliance with “existing regulations and recommendations that may have been made by the regulators,” a National Bank of Cambodia spokesperson told RFA by email on Thursday.

The spokesperson did not say when the license was withdrawn or what repercussions the company might face if they continue to operate. Huione did not respond to RFA’s requests for comment before publication.

It has previously denied criminal activity– when Huione was identified by the cryptocurrency compliance firm Elliptic to have facilitated millions of dollars in criminal payments, it issued a statement insisting that it was a mere “information publishing and guarantee trading platform” bearing no responsibility for the goods and services others used it to trade.

RELATED STORIES

World’s ‘largest illicit online marketplace’ is just a download away

Report: Online cybercriminal marketplace is part of Cambodian conglomerate

Hun To went after the press; who really won?

(RFA)

However, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, Huione’s Telegram marketplace has become one of the main arteries of illicit commerce in Southeast Asia, a region grappling with an epidemic of human trafficking and internet fraud.

The UNODC’s regional representative, Benedikt Hofmann, welcomed the termination of Huione Pay’s license.

The withdrawal “will send an important signal, especially given the high profile of Huione and its outsize role for the region’s criminal ecosystem,” he told RFA.

Hofmann cautioned, however, that this latest development would not be a cure-all for the region’s crime epidemic – nor would it necessarily mean the end of Huione.

“Huione is in many ways the tip of the iceberg and we will see users shifting to other, similar providers which have emerged in the region,” he added.

Much of the money that was being moved through Huione Pay came from illicit activities linked to cyberscamming, the UNODC found. For more than half a decade the region in which Huione operates has been dotted with compounds housing what the U.N. says are hundreds of thousands of enslaved workers forced to perpetrate a type of cyberscam commonly known as “pig butchering”. The practice is estimated to swindle billions of dollars from its victims around the world every year.

Elliptic, the cryptocurrency compliance firm, traced billions of dollars flowing from Huione Guarantee, the Telegram marketplace, to Huione Pay. This was “likely so that these criminally-derived funds could be cashed out,” firm founder Tom Robinson told RFA.

“I think this will be a blow to Huione Guarantee,” Robinson added. “We have direct evidence of Huione Pay laundering money from scam victims around the world, including the elderly and vulnerable. They are willing facilitators of pig butchering and other fraud, so any regulatory action against them should be welcomed.”

The loss of Huione Pay’s license, which has not been previously reported, does not seem to have curtailed the company’s activities, however. As recently as Thursday the company’s official Telegram channel, linked to on its website, was offering loans to customers. A post on February 27th promoted the launch of a Huione-branded Visa card. Visa did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

News of Huione Pay’s license being withdrawn was greeted as overdue by a former employee who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. They told RFA it was openly acknowledged within the company that there were two sets of accounts maintained.

“They cook the books,” the former employee said.

While the company handled billions of dollars, “close to none” of those transactions were made available to the compliance department, which was relegated to the role of advisors, “ whose advice were never taken seriously,” the former employee said.

One of Huione Pay’s three directors is Hun To, a cousin of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet.

Official censure of a company so close to the inner circle of Cambodia’s ruling family is unusual. But Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime at the United States Institute of Peace, told RFA that the withdrawal of Huione’s banking license should not be read as a herald of reform.

“It all ultimately amounts to a brand switch,” Sims said. “It’s basically an easy thing for the regime to point to and say, ‘Look, we’re cracking down on this’ without doing really anything but consolidating Huione’s available brands.”

For Sims, there’s one way the Cambodian government could show it was serious about cracking down on the crime wave Huione has been surfing: “Arrest all the people involved in Huione.”

Edited by Abby Seiff and Boer Deng

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jack Adamović Davies for RFA Investigative.

As voters across the United States head to the polls, we speak with New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg about how Donald Trump may try to preemptively declare victory and challenge election results. The former president has ramped up claims Democrats are “a bunch of cheats” and preemptively cast doubt on a win by Vice President Kamala Harris, following a similar playbook as 2020 when he baselessly claimed the election was stolen. Rutenberg spoke to pro-Trump election officials in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania who say they are ready to refuse to certify local election results as part of a wide-ranging effort to throw the system into disarray. Rutenberg says after the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021, many in Trump’s orbit had a clear goal for 2024: “We have to go local.” He also discusses the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 that makes it harder to stop the final certification of results.

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

One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.

Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.

When the far-right won the first round of French elections, that was front-page news in the New York Times (7/1/24). When the left won the second round, that was much less newsworthy to the Times.

It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.

Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.

France is in an unprecedented political situation, in which there is no clear governing coalition in the National Assembly. After the snap elections concluded on July 7, the left coalition New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, beating out both Macron’s centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally (RN). (While the sitting president’s coalition won the second-most seats, it actually got fewer votes than either the left coalition or the far right.)

These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party.

Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.

‘Institutional stability’

When someone in a headline “fumes” (Washington Post, 7/27/24), that’s a signal that you’re not supposed to sympathize with them.

Where US corporate media do comment on Macron’s denial of the election, their framing is neutral or even defensive of the president’s equivocations. Critiques are couched as attacks from the left; one AP piece published in the Washington Post (8/27/24) reports not that Macron is denying an election, but simply that France’s left is fuming:

France’s main left-wing coalition on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of denying democracy…. Leftist leaders lashed out at Macron, accusing him of endangering French democracy and denying the election results.

Left unchallenged are Macron’s claims that he is simply trying his best to preserve stability, election results be damned:

On Monday, Macron rejected their nominee for prime minister—little-known civil servant Lucie Castets—saying that his decision to refuse a government led by the New Popular Front is aimed at ensuring “institutional stability.”

AP left out of its story the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), the supposedly most objectionable member of the NFP coalition, even offered to accept an NFP government led by Castets, with no LFI members in ministerial roles, to assuage the fears of centrists. This olive branch did not impress AP, which instead relayed Macron’s call for “left-wing leaders to seek cooperation with parties outside their coalition.”

Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.

‘Scorched-earth politics’

To the New York Times (8/23/24), the idea that a left coalition would try to implement the platform it successfully ran on is a “hard-core stance.”

The New York Times’ reporting (8/23/24) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.”  Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”

She went on to admit, however, that Castets, the NFP’s choice for prime minister, “has softened her position from its original hard-core stance”—that is, that the coalition would implement the program it ran on—and that “she says she would pursue something more reflective of minority government position.”

However, the Times continued, “the biggest party in her coalition, France Unbowed, has a history of scorched-earth politics that makes the pledge for conciliation feel thin.” In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.

The Times seemed to accept an equation between LFI and the RN, which was founded (as the National Front) as an explicitly neo-fascist movement. The paper reported that it was not only a departing minister from Macron’s party, but “many others,” who

consider France Unbowed and its combative leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, to be as dangerous to France’s democracy as the extreme right.

The anti-immigrant agenda of France’s extreme right, as represented by the RN, includes repealing birthright citizenship in favor of requiring a French parent and implementing strict tests of cultural and lingual assimilation. Mélenchon’s LFI, in contrast, favors medical aid for undocumented migrants and social support for asylum seekers.

Despite the Times’ previous reporting (7/9/24) that LFI is a “hostile-to-capitalism” party, the party’s platform only calls for more state intervention in the market economy, with a critique that is more anti–free market dogma than anti-capitalist, per political scientist Rémi Lefebvre.

Whether supporting intervention in the market is as extreme as supporting ethnic determination of “Frenchness” is left as an exercise for the reader. But according to the French government’s official categorization (Le Parisien, 3/11/24), LFI is categorized simply as “left,” while the RN is indeed categorized as “extreme right.”

Despite the sparse and incomplete coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, they must be given credit for covering the story at all. A Nexis review of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS NewsHour reveals next to no reporting on Macron’s refusal to name a prime minister, with no critical reporting whatsoever.

Since July 23, when Castets emerged as the left’s choice, there have been two brief mentions of Macron’s lack of a decision, on CNN Newsroom (7/24/24) and Fox Special Report (8/23/24). Neither program mentioned Castets, much less the exceptional circumstances faced by the French electorate.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Paul Hedreen.

We speak with Israeli American Jewish scholar Raz Segal about the University of Minnesota’s move to rescind a job offer over his comments early in the war on Gaza, when he characterized the Israeli assault as a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal was set to lead the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but after two board members quit in opposition to Segal’s selection and a smear campaign led by the pro-Israel group Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC), the school revoked the offer. Segal says he has been “targeted because of my identity as a Jew who refuses the narrowing down of Jewish identity to Zionism” and calls the JCRC-led opposition a “hateful campaign of lies and distortions” and “crude political intervention.” “This was a completely legitimate hiring process,” states Segal. He says rescission of his offer “spells the end of this idea of free inquiry, of academic freedom, of research and teaching — and all in the service, of course, of supporting an extremely violent state.”

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

"Hong Kong is being rapidly deselected from the East-West trades by all major shipping lines," the Danish-based consultancy Sea-Intelligence said in an April 2 report citing recent data from shipping lines.

Total container volumes coming through Hong Kong fell to 14.3 million TEUs in 2023, the lowest volume since 1998.

While the decline was exacerbated by the closure of Hong Kong's borders during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, cutting off cross-border road links and prompting shipping lines to send containers straight to Shenzhen, political factors including the international reaction to the city's ongoing crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 protest movement also played a role, according to industry analysts.

"Hong Kong enjoyed a special relationship with the United States and other countries, because it was seen as semi-independent and autonomous, with little interference from mainland China in its day-to-day operations," Tom Derry, Chief Executive Officer at the Institute for Supply Management, told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. "That's no longer seen as the case."

"Foreign nationals, both U.S. and from other countries, have been arrested under charges due to the new National Security Law," Derry said. "The rule of law in Hong Kong is seen as being a little more arbitrary today than it was in the past, because national security cases can only be heard by specially appointed justices in Hong Kong, not by the main judicial system." 

"So Hong Kong's ... special status as a preferred port has been eroded. It's to the detriment of Hong Kong and to the benefit of other mainland Chinese ports."

On Jan. 18 RFA Cantonese shot footage of the No. 9 Container Terminal at Kwai Ching, which was once stacked with containers several high, and which is now an empty expanse of concrete.

According to Derry, Hong Kong was hit by the loss in May 2020 of its separate trading status previously accorded by the U.S. government -- a move that was in direct response to the crackdown on the 2019 pro-democracy movement -- and by tariffs imposed on technology products amid a Sino-U.S. trade war begun under the Trump administration.

"Mainland China has 38% market share, the largest in the world, in those particular kinds of firms," Derry told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. "Hong Kong enjoyed a large volume of integrated circuits that were moving to those [electronics] firms in mainland China and then moving from those mainland China firms back through Hong Kong and to their ultimate destinations around the world."

"That has been significantly impacted by the removal of preferential status, and by the later imposition of tariffs ... which has only made those conditions a little bit worse," he said.

Derry said Indonesia, Singapore and Manila will be significant beneficiaries of the shift away from Hong Kong, including Manila due to a significant semiconductor presence in the Philippines.

"Those will be the beneficiaries, and it will be Hong Kong's relative loss," he said.

Meanwhile, a recent network overview from the Gemini Cooperation shipping alliance of Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, revealed no direct deep-sea calls in Hong Kong since the alliance pivoted to using Shanghai, Ningbo, Yantian, Singapore and Tanjung Pelepas as major hubs on regional container shipping routes, downgrading Hong Kong to the status of "feeder" port with cargo trucked or shipped to Yantian in the neighboring mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen.

Hong Kong isn't the only port that will lose direct connectivity under the Gemini network: the northeastern Chinese port of Dalian, Taiwan's Kaohsiung and South Korea's Busan have also been downgraded.

Yet the damage to its status as an international container port will likely be extensive, with the city's port losing throughput traffic from Hapag-Lloyd of around 615,000 20-foot-equivalent units (TEU)  a quarter and around 261,000 TEUs a quarter from Maersk to Yantian, according to U.K. maritime consultancy MDS Transmodal.

Consolidating routes

The developments come as the Alliance, which groups South Korea's HMM, Japan's Ocean Network Express and Taiwan's Yang Ming shipping lines, is cutting the number of direct port calls it makes to Hong Kong from 11 to just 6, Sea-Intelligence reported.

Hong Kong will only be included on one of Yang Ming's 13 regional and trans-Pacific routes from 2025, according to a press release published to Yang Ming's website.

The consolidation of routes "does not bode well for the Port of Hong Kong," Sea-Intelligence commented in its report. "Analysis of network design and network efficiency will show that fewer, but larger, hubs are economically more efficient. Hong Kong appears to be the first major 'victim' of this."

Hong Kong's Transport and Logistics Bureau issued a statement in response to RFA Cantonese reporting on the issue on April 5, calling it "unreasonable."

"Radio Free Asia's unreasonable comments on the rapid deterioration in Hong Kong's status as an international shipping hub have no basis in fact and have been fabricated out of thin air," a spokesman for the bureau said in a statement.

"This is wanton criticism and attack ... and can never be accepted."

Declining numbers

It cited the Xinhua-Baltic International Shipping Centre Development Index Report（2023), a collaboration between China's state news agency Xinhua and the Baltic Exchange, which claimed that the city ranks fourth in the world as an international container port.

However, Lloyd's List ranked Hong Kong 10th in the world in terms of throughput last year, one place lower than in 2022.

Financial commentator Joseph Ngan, a former assistant controller at Hong Kong's i-CABLE News, wrote in a recent commentary for RFA Cantonese that Hong Kong has indeed "lost its role as an entrepôt port," citing figures that showed a 0.8% decline in the city's exports in the year to Feb. 29, 2024 and a 1.8% decline in imports, "far worse than market expectations."

Ngan cited data from the Hong Kong Maritime and Port Board, which shows that the throughput of Kwai Tsing Container Terminal, which accounts for 70% of Hong Kong's total cargo volume, fell for 25 consecutive months to the end of December 2023, the largest decline on record. 

Total throughput fell by nearly 14% for the whole of last year, Ngan wrote, citing a further double-digit decline in February following a brief spike ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in January.

Hong Kong's biggest container terminal operator, CK Hutchison, saw a 9% decrease in its China-Hong Kong port revenue and a 18% fall in its gross earnings last year, Ngan wrote.

"We have seen that the ranking of container terminals has dropped from No. 1 in the world 20 years ago to the bottom of the top 10," Ngan wrote. "It is clear from the data that container throughput has plummeted."

He said Hong Kong officials were choosing to deny the problem in favor of issuing positive propaganda about the city's outlook instead.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

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

Russia is increasing its cooperation with China in 5G and satellite technology and this could facilitate Moscow's military aggression against Ukraine, a report by the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) security think tank warns.

The report, published on March 1, says that although battlefield integration of 5G networks may face domestic hurdles in Russia, infrastructure for Chinese aid to Russian satellite systems already exists and can "facilitate Russian military action in Ukraine."

China, which maintains close ties with Moscow, has refused to condemn Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and offered economic support to Russia that has helped the Kremlin survive waves of sweeping Western sanctions.

Beijing has said that it does not sell lethal weapons to Russia for its war against Ukraine, but Western governments have repeatedly accused China of aiding in the flow of technology to Russia's war effort despite Western sanctions.

The RUSI report details how the cooperation between Russia and China in 5G and satellite technology can also help Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine.

"Extensive deployment of drones and advanced telecommunications equipment have been crucial on all fronts in Ukraine, from intelligence collection to air-strike campaigns," the report says.

"These technologies, though critical, require steady connectivity and geospatial support, making cooperation with China a potential solution to Moscow's desire for a military breakthrough."

According to the report, 5G network development has gained particular significance in Russo-Chinese strategic relations in recent years, resulting in a sequence of agreements between Chinese technology giant Huawei and Russian companies MTS and Beeline, both under sanctions by Canada for being linked to Russia's military-industrial complex.

5G is a technology standard for cellular networks, which allows a higher speed of data transfer than its predecessor, 4G. According to the RUSI’s report, 5G "has the potential to reshape the battlefield" through enhanced tracking of military objects, faster transferring and real-time processing of large sensor datasets and enhanced communications.

These are "precisely the features that could render Russo-Chinese 5G cooperation extremely useful in a wartime context -- and therefore create a heightened risk for Ukraine," the report adds.

Although the report says that there are currently "operational and institutional constraints" to Russia's battlefield integration of 5G technology, it has advantages which make it an "appealing priority" for Moscow, Jack Crawford, a research analyst at RUSI and one of the authors of the report, said.

"As Russia continues to seek battlefield advantages over Ukraine, recent improvements in 5G against jamming technologies make 5G communications -- both on the ground and with aerial weapons and vehicles -- an even more appealing priority," Crawford told RFE/RL in an e-mailed response.

Satellite technology, however, is already the focus of the collaboration between China and Russia, the report says, pointing to recent major developments in the collaboration between the Russian satellite navigation system GLONASS and its Chinese equivalent, Beidou.

In 2018, Russia and China agreed on the joint application of GLONASS/Beidou and in 2022 decided to build three Russian monitoring stations in China and three Chinese stations in Russia -- in the city of Obninsk, about 100 kilometers southwest of Moscow, the Siberian city of Irkutsk, and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in Russia's Far East.

Satellite technology can collect imagery, weather and terrain data, improve logistics management, track troop movements, and enhance precision in the identification and elimination of ground targets.

According to the report, GLONASS has already enabled Russian missile and drone strikes in Ukraine through satellite correction and supported communications between Russian troops.

The anticipated construction of Beidou's Obninsk monitoring station, the closest of the three Chinese stations to Ukraine, would allow Russia to increasingly leverage satellite cooperation with China against Ukraine, the report warns.

In 2022, the Russian company Racurs, which provides software solutions for photogrammetry, GIS, and remote sensing, signed satellite data-sharing agreements with two Chinese companies. The deals were aimed at replacing contracts with Western satellite companies that suspended data supply in Russia following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The two companies -- HEAD Aerospace and Spacety -- are both under sanctions by the United States for supplying satellite imagery of locations in Ukraine to entities affiliated with the Wagner mercenary group.

"For the time being, we cannot trace how exactly these shared data have informed specific decisions on the front line," Roman Kolodii, a security expert at Charles University in Prague and one of the authors of the report, told RFE/RL.

"However, since Racurs is a partner of the Russian Ministry of Defense, it is highly likely that such data might end up strengthening Russia's geospatial capabilities in the military domain, too."

"Ultimately, such dynamic interactions with Chinese companies may improve Russian military logistics, reconnaissance capabilities, geospatial intelligence, and drone deployment in Ukraine," the report says.

The report comes as Western governments are stepping up efforts to counter Russia's attempt to evade sanctions imposed as a response to its military aggression against Ukraine.

On February 23, on the eve of the second anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion, the United States imposed sanctions on nearly 100 entities that are helping Russia evade trade sanctions and "providing backdoor support for Russia's war machine."

The list includes Chinese companies, accused of supporting "Russia's military-industrial base."

With reporting by Merhat Sharpizhanov

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The United States continued to expressed outrage and vow a response to the deaths of American service members in Jordan following a drone attack it blamed on Iranian-backed militias, while Washington and London in a separate move stepped up pressure on Tehran with a new set of coordinated sanctions.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on January 29 doubled down on earlier vows by President Joe Biden to hold responsible those behind the drone attack, which also injured dozens of personnel, many of whom are being treated for traumatic brain injuries, according to the Pentagon.

"Let me start with my outrage and sorrow [for] the deaths of three brave U.S. troops in Jordan and for the other troops who were wounded," Austin told a Pentagon briefing.

"The president and I will not tolerate attacks on U.S. forces and we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops."

Later, White House national-security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that "we are not looking for a war with Iran."

He added, though, that drone attack "was escalatory, make no mistake about it, and it requires a response."

A day earlier, Biden said U.S. officials had assessed that one of several Iranian-backed groups was responsible for the attack and vowed to respond at a time of Washington’s choosing.

"While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq," Biden said.

"We will carry on their commitment to fight terrorism. And have no doubt -- we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing," Biden said in a separate statement.

Details of the attack remained unclear on January 29, but a U.S. official said the enemy drone may have been confused with a U.S.-launched drone returning to the military site near the Syrian border and was therefore not shot down.

The official, who requested anonymity, said preliminary reports indicate the enemy drone was flying at a low level at the same time a U.S. drone was returning to the base, known as Tower 22.

Iran on January 29 denied it had any link with the attack, with the Foreign Ministry in Tehran calling the accusations "baseless."

Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said that "resistance groups" in the region do not take orders from Tehran, though Western nations accuse the country of helping arm, train, and fund such groups.

Earlier, Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations said, "Iran had no connection and had nothing to do with the attack on the U.S. base."

Jordan condemned what it called a "terrorist attack" on a military site, saying it was cooperating with the United States to fortify its border defenses.

The attacks are certain to intensify political pressure in the United States on Biden -- who is in an election year -- to retaliate against Iranian interests in the region, possibly in Iraq or Syria, analysts say.

Gregory Brew, a historian and an analyst with the geopolitical risk firm Eurasia Group, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that the attack in Jordan represented a "major escalation -- and the U.S. is bound to respond forcefully and promptly."

"The response is likely to come through more intense U.S. action against Iran-backed militias in either Syria or Iraq. It's unclear if this was an intentional escalation by Iran and its allies, but the genie is out of the bottle," he added.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton, a vocal critic of Biden, a Democrat, on January 28 said the "only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces.... Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward."

Many observers have expressed fears of a widening conflict in the Middle East after war broke out in Gaza following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, which has been deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. At least 1,200 were killed in those assaults, leading to Israel's retaliatory actions that, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, have killed more than 26,000 Palestinians.

Because of its support for Israel, U.S. forces have been the target of Islamist groups in the Middle East, including Iranian-backed Huthi rebels based in Yemen and militia groups in Iraq who are also supported by Tehran.

In another incident that will likely intensify such fears of a wider conflict, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights -- which has extensive contacts inside Syria -- said an Israeli air strike against an Iranian-linked site in Damascus killed seven people, including fighters of Tehran-backed militias.

The Tasnim news agency, which is close to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), attributed the attack to Israel, writing that "two civilians" had been killed, while Syrian state television said "a number of Iranian advisers" had been killed at the "Iranian Advisory Center" in Damascus.

However, Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, denied the Iranian center had been targeted or that "any Iranian citizens or advisers" had been killed.

Meanwhile, the United States and Britain announced a set of coordinated sanctions against 11 officials with the IRGC for alleged connections to a criminal network that has targeted foreign dissidents and Iranian regime opponents for "numerous assassinations and kidnapping" at the behest of the Iranian Intelligence and Security Ministry.

A statement by the British Foreign Office said the sanctions are designed "to tackle the domestic threat posed by the Iranian regime, which seeks to export repression, harassment, and coercion against journalists and human rights defenders" in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the latest sanctions packages "exposes the roles of the Iranian officials and gangs involved in activity aimed to undermine, silence, and disrupt the democratic freedoms we value in the U.K."

"The U.K. and U.S. have sent a clear message: We will not tolerate this threat," he added.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, Reuters, and AP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

“Ukraine is and will remain France’s priority. The defense of the fundamental principles of international law is being played out in Ukraine,” he told a Kyiv news conference alongside his counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, on January 13.

“Russia is hoping that Ukraine and its supporters will tire before it does. We will not weaken. That is the message that I am carrying here to the Ukrainians. Our determination is intact,” said Sejourne, who was making his first foreign journey since being appointed to the position on January 11.

WATCH: After Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a "partial mobilization" in fall 2022, over 300,000 reservists were drafted into the war in Ukraine, which Russia calls a "special military operation." A year later, women formed The Way Home initiative to demand that their family members be discharged and sent back home. The women wear white shawls as a symbol of their protest.

Kuleba thanked Sejourne for making his journey to Kyiv despite “another massive shelling by Russia. I am grateful to him for his courage, for not turning back."

Sejourne arrived in the Ukrainian capital within hours of a combined missile-and-drone attack by Russia that triggered Ukrainian air defenses in several southern and eastern regions early on January 13.

Sejourne's visit represented the latest Western show of support for Kyiv in its ongoing war to repel Russia's 22-month-old full-scale invasion.

"For almost 2 years, Ukraine has been on the front line to defend its sovereignty and ensure the security of Europe," Sejourne said on X, formerly Twitter. "France's aid is long-term."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Ukraine has struggled to secure further funding for its campaign from the United States and the European Union, the latter of which is grappling with opposition from member Hungary.

The French Foreign Ministry posted an image of Sejourne and said he'd "arrived in Kyiv for his first trip to the field, in order to continue French diplomatic action there and to reiterate France's commitment to its allies and alongside civilian populations."

"Despite the multiplying crisis, Ukraine is and will remain France's priority," AFP later quoted Sejourne as saying in Kyiv. He said "the fundamental principles of international law and the values of Europe, as well as the security interests of the French" are at stake there.

Earlier, the General Staff of Ukraine's military said Russia had launched 40 missiles and attack drones targeting Ukrainian territory.

It said Ukrainian air defenses shot down eight of the incoming attacks and 20 others missed their targets. It said the Russian weapons included "winged, aerobic, ballistic, aviation, anti-controlled missiles, and impact BPLAs."

They reportedly targeted the eastern Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk regions.

RFE/RL cannot independently confirm claims by either side in areas of the heaviest combat.

Air alerts sounded in several regions of Ukraine.

A day earlier, Polish radio and other reports quoted recently inaugurated Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as saying he would visit Ukraine soon to discuss joint security efforts and to talk about Polish truckers' grievances over EU advantages for Ukrainian haulers.

Tusk, a former Polish leader and European Council president who was sworn in for a new term as Polish prime minister in mid-December, has been a vocal advocate of strong Polish and EU support for Ukraine.

"I really want the Ukrainian problems of war and, more broadly security, as well as policy toward Russia, to be joint, so that not only the president and the prime minister, but the Polish state as a whole act in solidarity in these issues," Tusk said.

The U.S. Congress has been divided over additional aid to Ukraine, with many Republicans opposing President Joe Biden's hopes for billions more in support.

An EU aid proposal of around 50 billion euros ($55 billion) was blocked by Hungary, although other members have said they will pursue "technical" or other means of skirting Budapest's resistance as soon as possible.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that delays in aid can severely hamper Ukrainians' ongoing efforts to defeat invading Russian forces.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Power has transitioned from Vanuatu’s government to the opposition in Parliament during the Fifth Extraordinary Session convened to debate a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Sato Kilman.

The opposition held 26 MPs against the government’s 24 with only two government MPs, — Esmon Saimon from the Vanua’aku Pati (VP) representing Malekula, and Wesley Rasu from Malo constituency — present during the extraordinary session on Monday.

The remaining 22 government MPs boycotted the session, denying a quorum.

• READ MORE: Other Vanuatu politics reports

Parliamentary Speaker Seoule Simeon suspended the session until this Friday for the no-confidence motion debate and the election of a new prime minister.

Kilman lost two ministers within a single week — Minister of Sports and National United Party (NUP) John Still Tari Qetu and Minister of Trade, Commerce Samson Samsen (MP for Santo).

Samsen’s presence with the opposition in Parliament confirmed previous allegations of his defection.

The two ministerial positions are now vacant due to the resignations, and an attempt to replace Qetu with Bruno Leingkone, president of NUP and MP of Ambrym constituency, lasted only two days before his seat was declared vacant by the Speaker due to three consecutive absences.

Challenged in court
Leingkone challenged this decision in court but the Supreme Court ruled against him.

The Supreme Court also dismissed Leingkone’s application to stay the Speaker’s announcement on the vacation of his seat. He indicated yesterday that he would appeal against the judgment of the Supreme Court.

With these defections and the vacation of Leingkone’s seat, Kilman lost support within a week, reducing government MPs to 23 compared to the previous 25, while the opposition increased from 25 to 26 MPs.

The opposition now holds an absolute majority of 26 out of 51 MPs. Additionally, a motion to suspend the current Deputy Speaker, Gracia Shadrack, is expected to further reduce Kilman’s support due to the threatening statement he made during a parliamentary session.

The leader of the opposition bloc, MP Charlot Salwai (a former prime minister), told a press conference that Shadrack had publicly threatened to burn down the Parliament House on 16 August 2023 during the Third Extraordinary Session when the Speaker refused to grant permission for Leingkone to vote virtually while he was hospitalised in South Korea.

The opposition said Shadrack’s action had put in question the safety of Parliament and its workers.

MP Salwai expressed confidence in the opposition’s 26 solid votes to remove Kilman as PM.

Kilman had been elected as Prime Minister on September 4, 2023, during a motion of no confidence against then PM Ishmael Kalsakau, just 10 months into his term.

Kalsakau’s removal was secured with an absolute majority of 26 votes out of 51 MPs present, a definition set by the Vanuatu High Court of Appeal upon the application of the current PM.

Kilman is now expected to face the same fate on Friday, as the opposition maintains its support of 26 votes.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

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

Photograph Source: Number 10 – CC BY 2.0

Things did not go so well this time around. When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found fewer open hearts and an increasingly large number of closed wallets. The old ogre of national self-interest seemed to be presiding and was in no mood to look upon the desperate leader with sweet acceptance.

Last December, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials did not have to go far in hearing endorsements and encouragement in their efforts battling Moscow’s armies. The visit of the Ukrainian president, as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated at the time, “will underscore the United States’ steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes, including through provision of economic, humanitarian and military assistance.”

Republican Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, was bubbly with enthusiasm for the Ukrainian leader. “He’s a national and global hero – I’m delighted to be able to hear from him.” Media pack members such as the Associated Press scrambled for stretched parallels in history’s record, noting another mendicant who had previously appeared in Washington to seek backing. “The moment was Dec. 22, 1941, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill landed near Washington to meet President Franklin D. Rosevelt just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Then House Speaker, the California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, also drew on the Churchillian theme with a fetishist’s relish. “Eighty-one years later this week, it is particularly poignant for me to be present when another heroic leader addresses the Congress in time of war – and with Democracy itself on the line,” she wrote colleagues in a letter.

Zelenskyy, not wishing to state the obvious, suggested a different approach to the question of aiding Ukraine. While not necessarily an attentive student of US history, any briefings given to him should have been mindful of a strand in US politics sympathetic to isolationism and suspicious of foreign leaders demanding largesse and aid in fighting wars.

How, then, to get around this problem? Focus on clumsy, if clear metaphors of free enterprise. “Your money is not charity,” he stated at the time, cleverly using the sort of corporate language that would find an audience among military-minded shareholders. “It’s an investment in global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.” Certainly, Ukrainian aid has been a mighty boon for the US military-industrial complex, whose puppeteering strings continue to work their black magic on the Hill.

Despite such a show, the number of those believing in the wisdom of such an investment is shrinking. “In a US capital that has undergone an ideological shift since he was last here just before Christmas 2022,” remarked Stephen Collinson of CNN, “it now takes more than quoting President Franklin Roosevelt and drawing allusions to 9/11, to woo lawmakers.”

Among the investors, Republicans are shrinking more rapidly than the Democrats. An August CNN poll found a majority in the country – 55% – firmly against further funding for Ukraine. Along party lines, 71% of Republicans are steadfastly opposed, while 62% of Democrats would be satisfied with additional funding.

Kentucky Republican and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues to claim that funding Ukraine is a sensibly bloody strategy that preserves American lives while harming Russian interests. “Helping Ukraine retake its territory means weakening – weakening – one of America’s biggest strategic adversaries without firing a shot.”

The same cannot be said about the likes of Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul. While Zelenskyy was trying to make a good impression on the Hill, the senator was having none of it. “I will oppose any effort to hold the federal government hostage for Ukraine funding. I will not consent to expedited passage of any spending measure that provides any more US aid to Ukraine.”

In The American Conservative, Paul warned that, “With no end in sight, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer.” President Joe Biden’s administration had “failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the east.”

Such a quagmire was also proving jittering in its dangers. There was the prospect of miscalculation and bungling that could pit US forces directly against the Russian army. There were also no “effective oversight mechanisms” regarding the funding that has found its way into Kyiv’s pockets. “Unfortunately, corruption runs deep in Ukraine, and there’s plenty of evidence that it has run rampant since Russia’s invasion.” The Zelenskyy government, he also noted in a separate post, had “banned the political parties, they’ve invaded churches, they’ve arrested priests, so no, it isn’t a democracy, it’s a corrupt regime.”

Republicans such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are of the view that the US should be slaying different monsters of a more threatening variety. (Every imperium needs its formidable adversaries.) The administration, he argued, should “take the lead on China” and reassure its “European allies” that Washington would be providing “the nuclear umbrella in Europe”.

On September 30, with yet another government shutdown looming in Washington, the US House approved a bill for funding till mid-November by a 335-91 vote. But the measure did not include additional military or humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In August, the Biden administration had requested a $24 billion package for Ukraine but was met with a significantly skimmed total of $6.1 billion. Of that amount $1.5 billion is earmarked for the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative, a measure that continues to delight US arms manufacturers by enabling the Pentagon to place contracts on their behalf to build weapons for Kyiv.

The limited funding measure proved a source of extreme agitation to the clarion callers who have linked battering the Russian bear, if only through a flawed surrogate, with the cause of US freedom. “I am deeply disappointed that this continuing resolution did not include further aid for our ally, Ukraine,” huffed Maryland Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer. “In September, the House held seven votes to approve that vital funding to Ukraine. Each time, more than 300 House Members voted in favor. This ought to be a nonpartisan issue and ought to have been addressed in the continuing resolution today.”

As Hoyer and those on his pro-war wing of politics are starting to realise, Ukraine, as an issue, is becoming problematically partisan and ripe. The filling in Zelenskyy’s cap is inexorably thinning and lightening.

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

Last December, Zelensky and Ukrainian officials did not have to go far in hearing endorsements and encouragement in their efforts battling Moscow’s armies. The visit of the Ukrainian president, as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated at the time, “will underscore the United States’ steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes, including through provision of economic, humanitarian and military assistance.”

Republican Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, was bubbly with enthusiasm for the Ukrainian leader. “He’s a national and global hero – I’m delighted to be able to hear from him.” Media pack members such as the Associated Press scrambled for stretched parallels in history’s record, noting another mendicant who had previously appeared in Washington to seek backing. “The moment was Dec. 22, 1941, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill landed near Washington to meet President Franklin D. Rosevelt just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Then House Speaker, the California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, also drew on the Churchillian theme with a fetishist’s relish. “Eighty-one years later this week, it is particularly poignant for me to be present when another heroic leader addresses the Congress in time of war – and with Democracy itself on the line,” she wrote colleagues in a letter.

Zelenskyy, not wishing to state the obvious, suggested a different approach to the question of aiding Ukraine. While not necessarily an attentive student of US history, any briefings given to him should have been mindful of a strand in US politics sympathetic to isolationism and suspicious of foreign leaders demanding largesse and aid in fighting wars.

How, then, to get around this problem? Focus on clumsy, if clear metaphors of free enterprise. “Your money is not charity,” he stated at the time, cleverly using the sort of corporate language that would find an audience among military-minded shareholders. “It’s an investment in global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.” Certainly, Ukrainian aid has been a mighty boon for the US military-industrial complex, whose puppeteering strings continue to work their black magic on the Hill.

Despite such a show, the number of those believing in the wisdom of such an investment is shrinking. “In a US capital that has undergone an ideological shift since he was last here just before Christmas 2022,” remarked Stephen Collinson of CNN, “it now takes more than quoting President Franklin Roosevelt and drawing allusions to 9/11, to woo lawmakers.”

Among the investors, Republicans are shrinking more rapidly than the Democrats. An August CNN poll found a majority in the country – 55% – firmly against further funding for Ukraine. Along party lines, 71% of Republicans are steadfastly opposed, while 62% of Democrats would be satisfied with additional funding.

Kentucky Republican and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues to claim that funding Ukraine is a sensibly bloody strategy that preserves American lives while harming Russian interests. “Helping Ukraine retake its territory means weakening – weakening – one of America’s biggest strategic adversaries without firing a shot.”

The same cannot be said about the likes of Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul. While Zelenskyy was trying to make a good impression on the Hill, the senator was having none of it. “I will oppose any effort to hold the federal government hostage for Ukraine funding. I will not consent to expedited passage of any spending measure that provides any more US aid to Ukraine.”

In The American Conservative, Paul warned that, “With no end in sight, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer.” President Joe Biden’s administration had “failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the east.”

Such a quagmire was also proving jittering in its dangers. There was the prospect of miscalculation and bungling that could pit US forces directly against the Russian army. There were also no “effective oversight mechanisms” regarding the funding that has found its way into Kyiv’s pockets. “Unfortunately, corruption runs deep in Ukraine, and there’s plenty of evidence that it has run rampant since Russia’s invasion.” The Zelenskyy government, he also noted in a separate post, had “banned the political parties, they’ve invaded churches, they’ve arrested priests, so no, it isn’t a democracy, it’s a corrupt regime.”

Republicans such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are of the view that the US should be slaying different monsters of a more threatening variety. (Every imperium needs its formidable adversaries.) The administration, he argued, should “take the lead on China” and reassure its “European allies” that Washington would be providing “the nuclear umbrella in Europe”.

On September 30, with yet another government shutdown looming in Washington, the US House approved a bill for funding till mid-November by a 335-91 vote. But the measure did not include additional military or humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In August, the Biden administration had requested a $24 billion package for Ukraine but was met with a significantly skimmed total of $6.1 billion. Of that amount $1.5 billion is earmarked for the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative, a measure that continues to delight US arms manufacturers by enabling the Pentagon to place contracts on their behalf to build weapons for Kyiv.

The limited funding measure proved a source of extreme agitation to the clarion callers who have linked battering the Russian bear, if only through a flawed surrogate, with the cause of US freedom. “I am deeply disappointed that this continuing resolution did not include further aid for our ally, Ukraine,” huffed Maryland Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer. “In September, the House held seven votes to approve that vital funding to Ukraine. Each time, more than 300 House Members voted in favor. This ought to be a nonpartisan issue and ought to have been addressed in the continuing resolution today.”

As Hoyer and those on his pro-war wing of politics are starting to realise, Ukraine, as an issue, is becoming problematically partisan and ripe. The filling in Zelenskyy’s cap is inexorably thinning and lightening.

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

An appeal court in Vietnam’s Dak Lak province on Tuesday upheld an eight-year prison sentence for music lecturer Dang Dang Phuoc, his wife Le Thi Ha told Radio Free Asia.

The 60-year-old instructor at Dak Lak College of Pedagogy was convicted on June 6 this year of "making, storing, spreading or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” 

He was prosecuted under the penal code’s controversial Article 117, which rights groups say is frequently used to suppress free speech.

Police arrested him on Sept. 8 last year after he posted on Facebook in support of activist Bui Tuan Lam, known as “Onion Bae.”

His wife was also questioned about songs he sang and posted on social media, including one by a former political prisoner and another with lyrics about the problems faced by Vietnam under the Communist Party.

Speaking to RFA Vietnamese on Tuesday Le Thi Ha called the appeal a sham.

"There is nothing different from the first-instance hearing,” she said.

“The examiners of the province’s Department of Information and Communication continued to be absent while the court panel did not respect the defenses of my husband and his lawyers."

Over the past 10 years Phuoc campaigned against corruption and for better protection for civil and political rights. He signed pro-democracy petitions and called for changes to Vietnam’s constitution, which grants the Communist Party a monopoly on power.

“Dang Dang Phuoc shouldn’t be in prison for simply calling for better treatment and justice for the poor and vulnerable Vietnamese, and demanding the government provide better social services and a cleaner environment for all,” said Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson, ahead of the appeal.

“If the Vietnamese government cared at all about the welfare of the people, they would be listening to principled activists like Dang Dang Phuoc, not imprisoning him.”

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

Updated to add quote from Phuoc's wife Le Thi Ha.

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

On May 25, Bui was convicted of propaganda under Article 117 of the country’s Penal Code, after being found guilty of criticizing the government online.

Le told RFA Vietnamese she was not allowed to attend Wednesday’s three-hour hearing at the Higher People’s Court in Danang. but his lawyer Le Dinh Viet was permitted to represent him there.

However, the lawyer was not allowed to meet his client on Tuesday at the detention center where Bui is being held so they were unable to prepare for the appeal.

Le Than Lam said hundreds of policemen in uniform and plain clothes were deployed outside the court, filming her and others who had gathered there to wait for the outcome. She told RFA everyone stayed calm when the appeal was rejected, so the police had no reason to arrest them.

Bui, 39, ran a beef noodle stall in Danang. He achieved notoriety in 2021 after posting an online video mimicking the Turkish celebrity chef Nusret Gökçe, known as “Salt Bae.”

The video, which went viral on social media, was seen as poking fun at To Lam, Vietnam’s minister of public security. To was caught on film being hand-fed a GBP1,450 (U.S.$1,830) gold-encrusted steak by Salt Bae at his London restaurant. 

In Bui’s video clip, he dramatically sprinkles spring onions into a bowl of soup, mimicking the signature move of the celebrity chef.

Bui was summoned by Danang police for questioning and arrested and charged in September 2022.

Danang People’s Procuracy claimed Bui posted articles on Facebook and YouTube, including content that was “distorting, defaming people’s government” and “fabricating and causing confusion among people.”

Article 117 of the country’s Penal Code criminalizes “making, storing, distributing or disseminating information, documents and items against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” It is frequently used by authorities to restrict freedom of expression and opinions deemed critical of the government.

On Tuesday, a court upheld the eight-year jail sentence of democracy activist Tran Van Bang, who was also convicted under Article 117.

He is among six activists and journalists who have been convicted on charges of anti-state propaganda by the Vietnamese government since January.

Vietnam has convicted at least 60 people under Article 117, according to human rights groups.

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

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

Foreign direct investment is calculated to have fallen to U.S.$20 billion in the first quarter of this year, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter, when China was in lockdown, according to The Wall Street Journal.  

Initial bounce-back growth in the aftermath of long lockdowns due to COVID-19 is fading as consumers draw back from spending and exports slump. Compounding the pinch is the slow collapse of China’s all-important real estate sector as well as the ongoing problem of accumulated local-government debt.

Beijing has stated it has no money to bail out local government debt due to overspending on COVID-19 mitigation. A massive infrastructure spending spree on the heels of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 saw the construction of roads to nowhere, ghost cities, unoccupied tower blocks and unfinished theme parks.

Local governments have to deal with a debt hangover from years of profligate spending compounded by what is believed to be an 18% jump in health expenditure during COVID-19 and a 23% fall in revenue due to the real estate sector slump.

In the meantime, 2023 was supposed to be the “Year of Investing in China,” as Beijing has hailed it, but foreign investors aren’t buying it, not least because President Xi Jinping’s administration has shown every sign of being determined to make it harder to do business in China, not easier.

Following the implementation of a new counter-espionage law last month, the U.S. State Department advised Americans to reconsider travel to China due to “arbitrary enforcement of local law,” “exit bans” and “wrongful detentions.”

China’s economy grew just 0.8% in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year, and more than a fifth of Chinese aged 16 to 24 are out of work.

Open for business?

Li Qiang, China’s premier and second-highest official, has repeatedly reassured the foreign business community that China is “open for business” at the China Development Forum in March and again more recently in Tianjin at the World Economic Forum.

Reality suggests otherwise. The U.S. and China are at loggerheads over transfers of high technology and the materials used to manufacture semiconductor chips.

Meanwhile, China’s financial regulators have reportedly invited some of the world’s biggest investors to a rare symposium this week, three sources said, with the aim of encouraging investment into the world’s second largest economy.

The meeting, which is due to be held in Beijing on Friday, will focus on the current situation and challenges faced by U.S. dollar-denominated investment firms in China, Reuters reported.

“China’s decision making is as hidden from our view as it has ever been, but China’s economic weakness is obvious for all to see, even China’s leaders, which can’t help but be one source of the recent moderation in foreign policy and willingness to engage Washington,” Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the New York Times.

“The Chinese economy is clearly sputtering," said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University who suggested that China required further stimulus and policy reform. The latter is unlikely to happen in any meaningful way, while Beijing has repeatedly hinted that it is unwilling to throw the kind of stimulus at the economy it has in the past.

“What we all expected was a consumption and service-led recovery. If that is sputtering, then there’s no engine left for the recovery," said Louis Kuijs, chief economist for Asia Pacific at S&P Global Ratings. 

‘Targeted actions’

There are some signs that the U.S. is pressuring China to open up and talk at a time of economic weakness, perhaps sensing a vulnerability.

But on her visit to Beijing earlier this month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was largely pragmatic, voicing concerns over market barriers for American firms operating in China.

She said Washington would “in certain circumstances, need to pursue targeted actions to protect its national security,” but disagreements over such moves should not jeopardize the broader relationship.

“We seek healthy economic competition that is not winner-take-all but that, with a fair set of rules, can benefit both countries over time,” she said.

Nationalist state tabloid the Global Times, in an uncharacteristically positive turn, editorialized at the time of Yellen’s visit that even though U.S. officials were downplaying any expectations from Yellen’s visit, “Chinese experts believe that one major point of significance of Yellen's trip is to keep high-level communication channels open, which may help bilateral relations walk out of their downward spiral.”

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.

Dung protested his innocence loudly in court and demanded to be released immediately, Nghiem Thi Hop said.

She said her husband was escorted out of the courtroom twice for arguing with the judge and shouting “down with the Communist Party.”

Dung’s lawyers argued that he did not commit any crime and challenged prosecutors to re-examine the “evidence,” but they refused, Hop said.

She said the appeal was just a “show trial” with the judge ordering Dung’s lawyers to “speak less and be quick,” while the judge’s comments were barely audible because there was no microphone.

On March 28, Hanoi City Court found 65-year-old Dung guilty of “conducting anti-state propaganda.” 

According to the indictment, Dung gave interviews to U.S.-based Saigon Dallas Radio between 2015 and 2022 that “distorted and smeared Vietnam’s government, propagated fabricated information and caused confusion among the people.” The interviews and video clips were posted on social media.  

The Hanoi People’s Procuracy also accused Dung of storing copies of two books: “Popular Politics” by human rights activist Pham Doan Trang and “Life of People Behind Bars” by former prisoner of conscience Pham Thanh Nghien. The books were allegedly printed and distributed illegally. 

Dung was prosecuted under Article 88 of Vietnam’s 1999 penal code, a controversial law used to target dissidents that rights groups say is one of several wielded to stifle voices of dissent in the one-party communist state.

There are 193 activists in Vietnamese prisons according to human rights group The 88 Project.

“Sadly but not surprisingly land activist Truong Van Dung lost his appeal,” Human Rights Watch Asia Director Elaine Pearson said in a Tweet. 

“So what in the Vietnamese government’s view were Truong Van Dung’s “crimes”? Essentially, he exercised his rights to freedom of expression, association & peaceful assembly.”

Dung participated in protests in Hanoi, including demonstrations against China’s occupation of the Paracel Islands – an island group in the South China Sea also claimed by Vietnam – and protests against the Taiwan-owned Formosa Company for polluting the coastline of four central Vietnamese provinces in 2016.

Public protests even over perceived harm to Vietnam’s interests are considered threats to its political stability and are routinely suppressed by the police.

“Truong Van Dung has experienced years of government harassment and intimidation, including police interrogations, house arrest, a travel ban and physical assaults,” said Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson ahead of the appeal. 

He accused Hanoi of “inexorably adding peaceful activists to the growing list of more than 150 Vietnamese political prisoners,” thereby violating human rights laws and betraying its duty to protect people’s rights as a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“Every time the authorities throw an activist like Truong Van Dung behind bars, respect for human rights in Vietnam takes a hard knock,” Robertson said.

“Donors and international trade partners should be clear that if Vietnam wants growing trade and investment, its leaders need to recognize that people speaking their minds are part of the solution that strengthens, not weakens, the country.”

Truong Van Dung was arrested at the end of May 2022 and held incommunicado for nine months before his trial.

Amnesty International joined calls for Vietnamese authorities to drop all charges against him and spoke out against the country’s judicial system.

“The Vietnamese authorities are yet again misusing the criminal justice system to suppress dissent. Arrested for giving interviews to foreign media, Truong Van Dung should have never been put in prison in the first place,” Amnesty’s Deputy Regional Director of Campaigns Ming Yu Hah said.

Amnesty said Dung’s appeal came as Vietnam cracked down on a growing number of people whose views differ from that of the government, and against independent civil society organizations.

“The unfair charges and inhumane prison conditions [show] the Vietnamese authorities’ willingness to systematically silence dissent in direct violation of international human rights law,” Hah said, calling Vietnam’s ratification of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and its their seat on the UN Human Rights Council “no more than empty gestures.”  

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in war-torn Ukraine lost an important source of cooling water for its six nuclear reactors, spent fuel pools, and essential safety equipment when the Kakhovka dam was breached on Tuesday. Fortunately, the reactors have been shut down for many months, reducing their cooling needs, and the plant may have sufficient water reserves at present. However, this could become a major safety concern over time.

In February, Dr. Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientist, published a paper about what would happen if the Zaporizhzhia plant lost access to the reservoir’s water supply.

He wrote that the water in the plant’s cooling pond would eventually become depleted, at which point the plant would need to tap into alternative water sources such as the city’s fire water system. However, this system would also have to be replenished, potentially by using a suction dredge ship stationed in the Dnipro River.

The International Atomic Energy Agency chief has said that the plant’s cooling pond above the Kakhovka Reservoir may have enough water to cool the plants’ systems for “some months” and called for the pond to be protected.

Dr. Lyman’s paper, “One year later, new dangers threaten Ukraine’s embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant” was published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

###

The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet’s most pressing problems. Joining with people across the country, we combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe and sustainable future. For more information, go to www.ucsusa.org.   

UCS Media Alert

June 6, 2023

Contact: Lisa Nurnberger, lnurnberger@ucsusa.org, 443-668-9219

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by CounterPunch News Service.

The Fiji Rugby Union is expected to lose its seat on the World Rugby Council.

This means FRU loses its voting rights and RNZ Pacific reported that the decision was made in Dublin, Ireland, last night and a statement was expected later today.

However, FRU operations manager and acting chief executive Sale Sorovaki said that the suspension did not hinder Fiji’s chances at participating in World Rugby sanctioned tournaments such as the Rugby World Cup in France later this year.

• READ MORE: Fiji Rugby Union operating illegally

“There will be a media release by World Rugby stating their status on the issue,” said Sorovaki.

“If we lose our seat in the council, it does not stop us from participating at all World Rugby sanctioned tournaments, including the Rugby World Cup later this year and HSBC 7s series tournaments.”

RNZ Pacific reports that it was revealed last month that the FRU board had been operating illegally.

The FRU will not be able to vote on any world rugby issue until its governance and legality issues are dealt with.

Following revelations by the Suva Rugby Union last month that the FRU was not legally operating, the Fiji government — through the Minister of Justice Siromi Turaga — suspended all board members and cancelled the scheduled annual general meeting on April 19.

Filipe Marayawa is a Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jenna Corderoy.

French Polynesia’s President Édouard Fritch has warned of “chaos”, should his party lose power to the pro-independence Tavini Huira’atira.

In last Sunday’s first round of the territorial elections, his Tapura Huira’atira came second, winning 30 percent of the votes against Tavini’s 35 percent.

Fritch’s Tapura has now joined forces with the opposition Amuitahiraa to have a joint list of candidates in next week’s run-off round.

• READ MORE: Tahiti’s pro-independence party tops vote — another winning streak?
• Other Tahitian election reports

Amuitahiraa failed to get enough support to qualify for the run-off but with the list merger, four of its candidates are allowed to stand again.

Fritch said French Polynesia is now in a “state of emergency” and could not be allowed to go towards independence.

The Amuitahiraa leader, Gaston Flosse, who runs the party despite being ineligible because of corruption convictions, has been campaigning for French Polynesia to become a sovereign state in association with France.

In the last elections in 2018, the Tapura won two thirds of all seats.

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.

Chicago-based Democracy Now! co-host Juan González gives an update on the Chicago mayoral race after incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to advance to a runoff election. The two top candidates are now Paul Vallas, the former head of Chicago Public Schools, who has been endorsed by the local police union, and Brandon Johnson, an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union. González says the race pits progressives in the city against centrist and conservative forces and could be a bellwether of where the Democratic Party goes.

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

Son Chhay, vice president of the Candlelight Party, has been ordered to pay more than U.S.$1 million to the Cambodian People’s Party and the National Election Commission. The case stems from comments he made last year following local commune elections, which he said was marred by irregularities.

Son Chhay was not present at the announcement of the verdict by Chiv Keng, deputy president of the Supreme Court and the presiding judge. Several diplomats attended, as did Son Chhay’s lawyer.

“To make it easy to understand, we are living in this country (and) they are using the law against us,” Candlelight Party Spokesman Kim Sour Phirith said. “We have no choice … but we are not satisfied.”

Thursday’s verdict will cause concern among members of the opposition parties and could have an impact on the upcoming general election, scheduled for July, said Sam Kuntheamy, executive director of the Neutral and Impartial Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia.

Son Chhay's comments about last year’s election weren’t defamation, he added. 

"I don't think Son Chhay intended to defame the CPP. The court already convicted him so the compensation should be forgiven," he said.

Intimidation and no monitoring

The Candlelight Party, Cambodia’s main opposition party, won only 19% of the contested seats in local communes in the June 5, 2022, elections.

Candlelight Party candidates and election observers said they were the victims of harassment and intimidation before and during the voting. Nearly all polling stations across the country were closed and locked after 3 p.m., and officials prevented observers from monitoring the counting of votes at polling stations, they said.

The party has said the abuses amounted to vote-rigging.

Son Chhay was convicted by the Phnom Penh Municipal Court in October. The court awarded $750,000 and ordered that his properties in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap province be frozen in case he doesn’t pay the damages. 

An Appeals Court upheld the conviction in December and ordered Son Chhay to pay $300,000 to the CPP, in addition to the lower court’s award.

“Three courts made the same decisions which have given justice to the ruling party, the CPP and NEC,” CPP spokesman Sok Ey San told Radio Free Asia. “We are satisfied with the court.” 

Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

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

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, an ally of current Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, warned the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Thursday that a Russian loss in Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.

"The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war," Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's security council, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. "Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends."

In response, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) tweeted, "Nuclear threats are unacceptable and banned" under the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Russia, the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom—home to more than 12,000 nuclear warheads combined—have expressed opposition to the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021 when it was ratified by 50 governments.

Despite issuing a joint statement last January—prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine—affirming that "nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought" and reaffirming that they plan to adhere to non-proliferation, disarmament, and arms control agreements and pledges, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council continue to enlarge or modernize their nuclear arsenals. For the first time since the 1980s, the global nuclear stockpile, 90% of which is controlled by Moscow and Washington, is projected to grow in the coming years, and the risk of weapons capable of annihilating life on Earth being used is rising.

"Russia's attempt to cover for its illegal behavior by threatening nuclear war must be condemned," ICAN added. "We can't respond to the use of nuclear weapons, we need to eliminate them now."

This is not the first time that Russian officials have threatened to use nuclear weapons since attacking Ukraine last February. Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012, "has repeatedly raised the threat of a nuclear apocalypse," Reuters reported Thursday, "but his admission now of the possibility of Russia's defeat indicates the level of Moscow's concern over increased Western weapons deliveries to Ukraine."

According to the news outlet, "Medvedev said NATO and other defense leaders, due to meet at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday to talk about strategy and support for the West's attempt to defeat Russia in Ukraine, should think about the risks of their policy."

When asked if Medvedev's statement reflected an attempt to escalate the war, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "No, it absolutely does not mean that."

Peskov argued that Medvedev's remarks follow Russia's nuclear doctrine, which permits a nuclear strike after "aggression against the Russian Federation with conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened."

As Reuters noted, Putin has portrayed Russia's so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine as "an existential battle with an aggressive and arrogant West, and has said that Russia will use all available means to protect itself and its people."

In October, U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Russia's assault on Ukraine has brought the world closer to "Armageddon" than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just days later, however, his administration released a Nuclear Posture Review that nonproliferation advocates said increases the likelihood of catastrophe, in part because it leaves intact the option of a nuclear first strike. The U.S. remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, decimating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in August 1945.

On Thursday, Max Abrahms, associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, rebuked NATO for ignoring Moscow's warnings against further arming Ukraine.

Instead of heeding those calls, Abrahms noted, Western elites are "saying the opposite—that only by sending more and more weapons into Ukraine can World War III be averted because Putin is just like Hitler and appeasement begets Russian escalation."

Experts have long sounded the alarm about the ongoing war in Europe, saying that it could spiral into a direct conflict between Moscow and NATO, both of which are teeming with nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the U.S.-led military alliance has continued to prioritize weapons shipments over diplomacy.

Abrahms' criticism comes as the White House is expected to announce Friday that the U.S. will provide Ukraine with another huge military package consisting of artillery, ammunition, and dozens of Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles. According toPolitico, the $2.5 billion package excludes the U.S. Army's 60-ton M1 Abrams tanks due to maintenance and logistical issues, not because sending them would intensify the war. Congress has so far authorized more than $23 billion in military aid to Ukraine.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted last April that the U.S. wants "to see Russia weakened," suggesting that Washington is willing to prolong the war in Ukraine as long as it helps destabilize Moscow.

Peace advocates, by contrast, have consistently called for the U.S. to help negotiate a swift diplomatic resolution to the deadly conflict before it descends into a global nuclear cataclysm.

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

Posting on his Facebook page on Tuesday, a day after the institute’s annual meeting, Dien said the books were “extremely important for national culture.”

The institute said Wednesday the books were among 35,000 volumes it had cataloged and preserved at the request of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

When it inspected the inventory in April 2020, for the first time in over 10 years, it discovered that 29 books were missing. Four of the books were later found on the wrong shelves.

Among the books still unaccounted for are four written by scientist Le Quy Don and two books which record the precise geography, boundaries and borders related to Vietnam's sovereign territory, according to Dien.

Those two volumes could help substantiate Vietnam’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The country has claims in the Spratly archipelago -- also claimed by China, the Philippines and Taiwan – and the Paracel archipelago, where China claims all the islands and has built a military base to oversee the region. 

A report this month by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said Vietnam had been stepping up reclamation work on features in the Spratlys, creating 520 acres (210 hectares) of new land in the past 10 years.

In an article in the Thanh Nien newspaper published on Wednesday Institute Director Nguyen Tuan Cuong said it was hard to gauge the significance of the missing volumes.

"Among the above 25 books, there are books that have been carefully studied and some that have not been studied, so their importance has not been identified. To determine the importance of all 25 books would take a lot of research," he said.

Also missing is the first collection of Vietnamese poems written in Chinese, compiled in the 15th Century by historians Phan Phu Tien and Chu Xa.

“The Viet âm thi tập [Vietnamese poem collection] is a valuable ancient book, not only in terms of poetry and literature, but also a rare document in terms of history, because of the references contained in the book. In addition, it shows the printing technique of Vietnam at that time,” Dien told RFA.

“The most outstanding feature of Viet âm thi tập is the pride it takes in the cultural traditions of the Vietnamese people, especially its unique voice with the beauty and soul of Vietnam.”

Dien said only one person has a key to the ancient library and only the institute’s director has the right to authorize the removal of books from the warehouse and to permit people to look at copies of the books in the reading room.

He said he had asked the director to report the loss of the books to the police but he did not do so.

In an email to RFA, Director Nguyen Tuan Cuong said the institute had posted a statement about the incident on its website.

“Other things are being handled by the organization, there is no official information yet,” he said.

RFA also emailed the institute’s governing body, the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, but has not yet received a response.

The institute said although 25 books have gone missing it has made photocopies and scans of the pages so their content has not been lost.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Written in English by Mike Firn.

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

Katie Hobbs, Arizona's Democratic Secretary of State, has defeated Republican Kari Lake in the battleground's closely watched gubernatorial race, scoring the latest victory over a Trump-backed candidate who openly embraced the former president's lies about the 2020 election.

"Democracy is worth the wait," Hobbs tweeted after the Associated Press called the race in her favor late Monday following nearly a week of vote counting. "Thank you, Arizona. I am so honored and so proud to be your next governor."

In the run-up to the gubernatorial contest, Lake—a former television anchor—refused to say whether she would accept defeat and repeatedly cast doubt on the state's election process, baselessly claiming it is riddled with fraud. Last month, the Republican candidate told CNN, "I'm going to win the election and I will accept that result."

Given her past remarks, the question of whether Lake will ultimately admit her loss was front and center Monday night as progressives celebrated the defeat of yet another prominent election denier.

"One of the most dangerous election deniers and conspiracy theorists in the country—Kari Lake—defeated," wrote MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan. "Now, will she concede?"

The Washington Post reported Monday that "within Lake's war room, where the mood shifted in the past week from giddy anticipation to grim resignation, discussions have centered on how Lake should speak about a loss."

"Among those who have made appearances are some of the biggest names in Trump's orbit, including Stephen K. Bannon and Christina Bobb, a former One America News anchor who aided a review of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County after the 2020 election. Trump himself called in on Sunday," the Post continued. "Discussions have ranged from how Lake could acknowledge a loss to whether she should adopt Trump’s playbook and claim the election was stolen from her. Some want her message to center on problems with printers on Election Day that affected 30 percent of polling sites."

In a tweet late Monday as right-wing commentators urged her not to concede, Lake signaled that she intends to contest the outcome, writing, "Arizonans know BS when they see it."

Arizona became a hotbed of election denial in 2020 after President Joe Biden narrowly carried the state, which was previously a Republican stronghold. As Arizona's top election official, Hobbs was a frequent target of right-wing demonstrations and threats of violence.

But the 2022 midterms have seen Arizona voters reject candidates who vocally peddled lies about the 2020 results. In addition to Lake's defeat, GOP secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem—who was at the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection—lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes and Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Blake Masters fell to incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

"In my view, the five most aggressively dishonest 2020 election deniers who were on the ballot for key state offices were Arizona's Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, Pennsylvania's Doug Mastriano, Nevada's Jim Marchant, and Michigan's Kristina Karamo," reporter Daniel Dale wrote late Monday. "All of them have been defeated."

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Jenna Corderoy.

Photo by Jakayla Toney

Last week, the New York Times published two editorials that presented false comparisons between the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, referring to the two presidents as the “two weakest presidents since the Progressive Era.  This is absurd.  Trump was the worst president in U.S. history.  Biden is a serious political leader, devoting significant time and energy to rebuilding faith in the U.S. government at home as well as credibility in the U.S. presence abroad.  At the same time, Biden has had to rebuild political institutions that Trump politicized, and to advance a liberal agenda supporting public health and the disadvantaged that Trump ignored.

One would think that all journalists would at least be aware of basic differences between the Trump and Biden administrations that have affected their own ability to report the news.  Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, took dead aim at the First Amendment when he secretly pursued email records of reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.  Trump’s constant bleating of “fake news” has created an enormous problem for news gathering in the United States.  Last week, Biden’s attorney journal, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice banned the use of subpoenas, warrants or court orders to seize reporters’ communications records or demand their notes or testimony in order to uncover confidential sources in leak investigations.

The DoJ ban on the seizure of records or notes from reporters is particularly noteworthy. Nevertheless, one of the Times’ editorials charged that Biden “rarely has set policy goals,” and as a result Biden’s appointees have “no idea how the president would want them to make key decisions.”  The new DoJ rules institutionalized a policy that President Biden put in place last year, which certainly qualifies as an example of Cabinet officials knowing what the president wanted as well as an example of Biden knowing what he wanted to do from the outset.  Yet, Yuval Lewin from the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing Opinion writer at the Times,  referred to Biden’s “presidential feebleness.”

On a variety of issues dealing with health care, infrastructure, gun control, and technology, Biden has had a clear legislative agenda that he has carried out despite a virtually deadlocked Senate and a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives.  Biden’s legislative record in his first 18 months rivals that of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, who had huge majorities in both Houses of Congress as well as a more bipartisan atmosphere.

Perhaps, Lewin should have compared the personnel appointments of Trump and Biden, particularly the Cabinet appointees, and would have titled his editorial “What Do Biden and Trump Have in Common?  Weakness.”  Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, allowed the Chinese to harass and intimidate U.S. diplomats; Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, made sure the harassment would stop.  The comparison of Trump and Biden appointees could extend into all areas of governance, particularly the regulatory agencies, and document the vast differences between the two administrations.

The policy differences didn’t start with Donald Trump, however. It has been more than a century since a Republican president actually championed legislation that advanced the interests of the American public.  Theodore Roosevelt conserved natural resources and protected wildlife; pushed for the Pure Food and Drug Act; created the Departments of Labor and Commerce; used the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act to monitor the economy; and prosecuted corrupt Indian agents who cheated various tribes out of land.  There hasn’t been a Republican president with a similar record since Teddy Roosevelt.

Biden’s leadership in the Ukraine crisis, particularly the formation of a united European alliance against Russia, provides an excellent example of the fundamental differences between Biden and Trump.  Biden orchestrated a huge military commitment to Ukraine, which was leveraged to gain commitments from the European Union that exceeded 11 billion Euros in financial aid in addition to significant military assistance.  Conversely, Trump was impeached (the first time) for the abuse of power, which accused him of corruptly using the levers of government to solicit election assistance from Ukraine in the form of investigations to discredit his Democratic political rivals.

The impeachment trial documented Trump’s truckling to Russian General Secretary Vladimir Putin, and demonstrated that the United States was a victim of Trump’s machinations.  Conversely, Biden has led the way against Russian savagery in Ukraine, and brought along very nervous leaders in Europe, particularly France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz.   Biden’s Ukraine policy hardly serves as an example of what Levin terms a “feeble execution of the government.”

Biden took on the Pentagon to get the complete military withdrawal from Afghanistan after a U.S. occupation that occupied three presidents for twenty years.  Barack Obama and Donald Trump wanted to conduct a withdrawal, but they were intimidated by the resistance of the Pentagon’s leading generals and ultimately refused to do so.

It is time for the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, to take advice from Margaret Sullivan, a veteran press critic with both the Times and the Post, and “rededicate itself to being pro-democracy.”  In her new book, “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life,” she notes that “as our democratic norms foundered, much of the mainstream press was asleep at the switch, and seemed perfectly content to stay that way.”  The mainstream media’s efforts to bend over backwards in the name of fairness is intellectually dishonest.  It is our journalists who should be alerting the American public to the challenges that it faces, which is the job of fact-based, public service journalism.  After all, it is a matter of self-preservation of our democratic republic.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

Meantime, Kiev, who, like the West, places great stock on the wiles of hybrid war, virtually acknowledged its hand in the terrorist strike on the Crimea bridge by circulating a stamp that gloated over the incident. The stamp appeared almost immediately after the bridge was blown up.

By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

In the propaganda war the Ukrainian-supplied western media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, have just announced the discovery of a box of gold teeth “in a suspected [sic] Russian torture chamber, prompting claims [sic] they were wrenched from victims [sic] of President Putin’s occupying forces in Kharkov [sic].”

They are concealing that the Ukrainians of Kharkov whose teeth are fully intact inside their mouths can no longer operate their electric toothbrushes. There’s no electricity. Not for torture. Just enough for the allegations to be fabricated, published, and transmitted on the internet.

According to Ukrainian sources, about 1,700 cities, towns and villages, with about 1 million consumers, were without power in mid-March; the most seriously affected were the regions of  Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev and Donetsk. On May 3, Ukrainian and western media reported a missile strike against power plants in the western Galicia region capital of Lvov; sub-stations supplying electricity to the railway system in the region were also hit.  The biggest of the Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity plants was reported in the western press, again quoting Kiev sources, on September 11-12.  Power plants in Kharkov, Sumy, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions were stopped.

A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), issued on October 6, confirms there was a sharp fall in consumer demand for electricity following these attacks; this appears as a gap in the data chart between September 11 and 13. Kiev officials claimthat the generating plants were  repaired and power restored.   The IEA report,  which relies upon and repeats data provided by the state utility Ukrenergo,  claims that just before the Russian strikes,  demand was running at 9.07 GW on Saturday, September 10, and that by the following Tuesday it was 13.56 GW.

According to the IEA, “Ukraine’s electricity demand has fallen by about 40% since Russia’s invasion with no sign of recovery. Demand keeps decreasing slowly every week. The resulting decline in power generation has mainly taken place in nuclear. But coal-fired generation has also decreased.”  An IEA chart of power generation figures shows that from a peak of 21.87 GW on January 25, the production of electricity reported on October 5 had fallen to 11.41 GW – a cut of 48%.
 
However, the same IEA report claims that since a low point was reached on June 26 of 9.13 GW, Ukrenergo has also been managing to restore output by 25%.
 
A North American military specialist in infrastructure demolition and salvage, now retired, says these data are being faked by Ukrenergo. “The Russian strikes also interrupt data recording and reporting. The Ukrainians are not too keen to show weakness as they are anxious to be seen as a reliable supplier of electricity.”
 
Slowly but surely, but also secretly, the war is destroying the electric generation on which the Ukraine depends for everything –  trains, water pumps, sewage treatment, light, heat, mobile telephones, refrigerators, radio and television, not to mention production lines in factories, in abattoirs,  sausage making and other farm and food processing.
 
However, there remains electricity for the Ukrainian military operations to continue on the eastern front, and for cross-border trains to run into Lvov from Poland with fresh arms,  ammunition, and rotating allied military staff advisers, together with NATO politicians and journalists keen to advertise their support.
 
In the wake of the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the electric war can now be expected to escalate.

In this Ukrainian report of March 2022,   the “base installed generating capacity” of the country was reported at 56 GW at 2020 —  64% from thermal power plants, 25% nuclear and 10% hydro. The remaining 1%, offset by some hydro storage, was accounted for by solar, wind and other small generators.

The Sushyk-Shevchenko report says that “due to damage to the electricity infrastructure, as of March 16, 2022, more than 1,679 Ukrainian localities remained without electricity – that’s about 928,000 consumers. The worst situation with electricity supply is in Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev, Kiev, and Donetsk regions.”

 

An earlier background briefing paper from the International Energy Agency (IEA), dated 2021, confirms the pre-war details.  Here’s IEA’s backgrounder on Ukrainian electricity generation, apparently as of 2018.

 

The IEA also publishes daily updated charts of the collapse of Ukrainian electricity production; these are based on data supplied by Ukrenergo. These charts show the losses up to October 9.

The same source also shows this chart of Ukrainian electricity demand; demand responds to the cutoff of coal, gas and nuclear-fired generating plants by increasing use of domestic electrical heaters and back-up electrical generators.

Since 2014 Ukraine has lost a third of its energy generation which had been located in the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Another 10 power plants were lost in 2014-2015, and seventeen more in 2022, according to a new assessment published last Friday in Vzglyad of Moscow by Nikolai Storozhenko.

 

“Zaporozhye NPP [Nuclear Power Plant] stands out among them, of course. But this does not mean that the others are not worth attention. For example, the Zaporozhye thermal power plant (Energodar) has an installed capacity of more than 3,500 MW and can potentially produce 23-25 billion kWh (the annual plan for the NPP for 2022 was 37 billion kWh). In other words, the loss of this energy supply is a hole which, practically, the Ukraine can do nothing to close, and which will largely determine the problems of the Ukrainian winter of 2022/23.”

 

“Ukraine lost another 4% of electricity generation as a result of the fighting from February to September, according to the assessment of the National Council for the Restoration of Ukraine. However, it is obvious that these data do not take into account the blows to the energy infrastructure  which were inflicted on September 11-12 (Kharkov CHPP-5, Zmievskaya CHPP, Pavlodar CHPP-3, Kremenchug CHPP). In general, the damage and reduction in the capacity of the energy system looks enormous for Ukraine and it is not entirely clear how Zelensky manages to sell electricity to Europe against this background.”
 

“But, firstly, sales [to Europe] will soon stop, which Zelensky has already warned Europe about, declaring recently: ‘We will not have enough volume to heat our homes, and this time is approaching.’ Secondly, Ukraine’s energy system is losing power simultaneously with a decrease in consumption…Yury Korolchuk, an expert at the Institute of Energy Strategies [Kiev],  is urging consumers to be ready for five to six-hour rolling blackouts. Rolling blackouts are not news for Ukraine, but the realities of the last few years. Moreover, this year in the reports on the procurement of fuel for the winter, firewood began to appear…and the mayor of Lvov said in August that the city is buying and stocking wood for fuel.”
 

“What about gas supply? In the summer, Naftogaz asked for several billion dollars to purchase 5-7 billion cubic meters of gas – to bring reserves to 19 billion cubic meters. But there was no money for this – and to date, only 14 billion cubic meters have been accumulated. On the one hand, the situation for gas is about the same as with electricity: consumption is falling. Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov regions are either completely written off…, or their supplies will be cut to a minimum. In most cities of Kharkov, Donetsk, Nikolaev,  Sumy, Chernigov regions and Zaporozhye there will be no heating. There will be no gas in winter, there will be light periodically —  such a frightening forecast was published in the Telegram channel…half of this source’s forecasts come true – and they shout loudly about them. The second half does not come true – and no one remembers about them.”
 

“But in this case, the forecast is not groundless….[Ukrainian state] Naftogaz is delaying the conclusion of gas supply contracts with the gas distribution companies in the Kharkov and Dniepropetrovsk regions. At this point, it is worth remembering how, back in early summer, Zelensky’s office directly told the residents of the Donetsk region: go wherever you want, there will be no heating in winter.”
 

“In other words, the Ukrainian strategy is something like this. There are the combat areas and those adjacent to them. There the population has already dispersed or has greatly decreased; there is a risk of attacks on the facilities themselves and fuel depots. So, it is in these areas that it will be hardest to winter. It will be more comfortable for Kiev which has its own thermal power plants and there is an opportunity to add power from western Ukrainian nuclear power plants, and for the Galician region of western Ukraine [Lvov]. Also, there are about three to four million internally displaced people  in Ukraine who have resettled mainly in these regions. Who should be kept without electricity and gas: the half-empty areas of the Zaporozhye region or Kiev? The choice is obvious.”
 

This is how the Ukrainian energy experts view their choice from Kiev. The strategic options for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin remain secret, if not undecided.
 
In the aftermath of the Crimean Bridge attack, Moscow television figures like Vladimir Soloviev have broadcast calls to extend the military campaign westward to Lvov and the Polish border. “It is obvious,” Soloviev said on Saturday, “that the NATO command took part in the development of this [Crimean Bridge] sabotage… What is our plan? Not to follow the enemy’s scenario, but to disrupt their plans, striking unexpected blows in directions where the enemy is not anticipating them. Ukraine should be plunged into dark times. Bridges, dams, railways, thermal power plants,  and other infrastructure facilities should be destroyed throughout the territory of Ukraine. There should be no administrative office building operating in both Kiev and Lvov. And not only that.”
 

Left: a screen shot of a Kharkov substation after the September 11-12 attacks. Centre: Vladimir Soloviev, Moscow broadcaster and advocate for escalation. Russian and Crimean government officials are quieting the tone by announcing that train traffic on the Crimean Bridge has already resumed; that one road span is undamaged and will resume operation shortly; and replacement of the damaged road span will follow.
 
A combined US and European Union (EU) plan to link the Ukrainian electricity grid to the EU system, and thus provide supply back-up in case the Ukrainian grid was attacked by the Russian Army, has already failed. A US publication headlined the attempt “The Race to Rescue Ukraine’s Power Grid From Russia”; click to read.
 
“The test was years in the making, one of the final rituals in a drawn-out courtship between the Ukrainian and European power grids known as “synchronization.” But before it could join with Europe, Ukrenergo first had to prove it could keep the lights on without its connections to Belarus and Russia—in ‘island mode.’ The plan was to reconnect with its neighbours after a few days. Then in 2023 it would switch on the links with Europe.”
 
“That’s not what happened. Instead, on February 24, the same day as the test, Russia invaded. Since noon that day, Ukraine—in coordination with its southern neighbour Moldova—has been powering itself solo. It’s a balancing act. Changing where the power comes from and where it goes means some lines suddenly get clogged with electrons while others dry up. It can be difficult to maintain balance for any length of time. So far, the Ukrainian grid is humming along at a frequency of 50 Hertz—stable, in other words—a Ukrenergo spokesperson told WIRED by email. But it’s risky to continue that way indefinitely, especially during a war. When stuff breaks in the power grid, the whole system has to absorb the shock and rebalance. And right now, a lot is breaking across Ukraine…Last week, Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, said  the group representing the region’s transmission operators, will come to the rescue, potentially within weeks.”
 
This was wishful thinking on the part of the Latvian official in Brussels. For Simson’s record of faking on the EU’s gas substitution schemes, and the Russian response, read this report from October 2021.
 
The assessment of the North American expert on military operations against energy infrastructure focuses on the Russian side’s strategy until now, before considering the military options for the future. In addition to covering up the evidence of power generation losses by the Ukrainians which the source reports from Urkrenergo and IEA, he says the Russians have limited their attacks until now to “a form of reconnaissance by force. Their purpose”, he believes, ” has been to determine what generating capacity remains, what can be repaired, how to interdict the human repair logistics, what is irreparably lost, and then to attrite the remaining Ukrainian materiel and human resources as the winter season approaches.”
 
“It appears to me that the Ukrainians are extremely hard-pressed to maintain and restore their electrical grid, most especially in the eastern regions. They are just as concerned to the point of adding and testing back-up generators at key nodes of the grid, especially in Kiev. By the way, the precedent for the Russian General Staff and Kremlin for destroying a country’s electrical grid was set during the NATO bombing of Serbia and then by the US air bombing of Iraq.”
 
For a history of US Air Force (USAF) strategy in attacking electric generation and distribution grids, read this USAF University thesis, entitled “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems”, dated 1994:   “The USAF has long favoured attacking electrical power systems. Electric power has been considered a critical target in every war since World War II, and will likely be nominated in the future… The evidence shows that the only sound reason for attacking electrical power is to affect the production of war materiel in a war of attrition against a self-supporting nation-state without outside assistance.”

Left: Major Thomas Griffith’s USAF study of 1994. Centre:  Iraqi electric relay unit bombed by the US Air Force in Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91.   Right:  Serbian generating plant damage after the USAF and European bombing campaign of May 1999.

---

The western military source again: “War is war, whether you want to use terms like hybrid war or proxy war. It means destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war.  Shutting off the power in the rump Ukrainian state will do just that to the Ukrainians. If they then start to flee for refuge to Poland and Germany, this will be a disaster unparalleled in recent European history. Just the attendant collapse in telecommunications will make the place a madhouse. You can well imagine the rest. Already there are queues for water in Nikolaev, and who knows where else. How does  queueing for water, if there is any, in temperatures of minus-20C to minus-40C sound?  This won’t be like the blackouts from US sanctions and attacks in Cuba or Venezuela – there they didn’t  have to worry about freezing to death, the pipes bursting, or irreparable damage being done to billions of dollars’ worth of pumping, electrical,  and other equipment due to freezing.”
 
“How many people realize that a sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) circuit breaker,  commonly used in electrical substations, requires an electric heating blanket to be functional in sub-zero weather? Most westerners don’t. They are common in high-voltage substations which ultimately feed the grid lines with power. In the Ukrainian case, I suspect  there is a mixture of those and older style oil circuit breakers (OCB), along with oil-filled large power transformers (LPT),  which are essential to electrical distribution. And guess where most of the oil comes from to fill these devices?”
 
“I suspect that most of Zelensky’s officials and officials in the supporting EU governments have persuaded themselves with their own propaganda. They aren’t daring to think through these questions, any more than they care to understand that the housing of the pumps delivering their water and treating their sewage will freeze and split apart if they are not heated via electrical means. Even if the gas is on — and it won’t be — electricity is needed to ignite, then control, furnaces. How many of these officials understand the long lead times, compounded by manufacturing shutdowns due to high energy costs, which you must have to replace and restore everything?”
 
“Who then will ‘stand with Ukraine’ when the gas and electricity rationing and unpayable consumer bills  roll over the Ukrainian border and into Poland, Germany, France, and the UK, as they are already doing?”
 
“The Russians have been hitting the Ukrainian electrical distribution system for months now. As we know, they started with the rail traction power yards which are largely branches of the wider electric grid. Now they have moved to the substations and so-called ‘thermal power’  plants, hitting them in what seems to be pellmell fashion. I expect that the Russians are gathering intelligence now on repair times, re-equipment availability, deliveries, repair crew composition and coordination.”

Source: https://transformers-magazine.com

---

“So let’s imagine this. Winter arrives. The power is cut in Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Pavlovsk, Nikolaev etc. and due to the unavailability of spares, repair crews, respite from attack, or all three, the outlook for the power outage is indefinite. What do people do? They migrate to where there is power, running water, heat etc… For millions this means west. So off they go. And when enough of them get there, bam! the power goes off there too.”

Source for enlarged view: https://eneken.ieej.or.jp — page 6.

Reading the grid maps of the Ukraine,  the source says “it is obvious that the real vulnerability, in my estimation, lies in the approximately 88 substations for 330 kV distribution and 33 substations for 220 kV distribution. Note the nodes or junctions. Those are substations connecting the distribution lines which crisscross the Ukraine. These substations contain large power transformers, switchgear, DCS equipment [Distributed Control System] and other power quality and control equipment, spares etc. Widespread coordinated strikes on these substations will quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian ability to effect repairs and re-balance the loads on the generation stations. This will create a cascade effect whereby overloaded power plants and distribution gear will ‘trip out’ over wide swathes of the country – if the protection between the Ukrainian and EU grids does not operate in time, or there is wild voltage/frequency oscillations there could be large interruptions in the EU countries being fed from Ukrainian sources.”
 
“Any repair efforts will also be severely hampered, if not crippled, if utility yards where spare cables and other gear, as well as vehicles (bucket and line trucks, cranes, etc.), are stored and parked are struck. Personnel losses among the finite number of utility crew members due to follow-up attacks and the inevitable mishaps that come with interacting with damaged or compromised high voltage electrical equipment, will quickly mount. If the attacks are launched during the hard winter months, the impact will be exponential, increasingly unmanageable and catastrophic as the hours go by.”
 
The above by Editor — John Helmer on Sunday, October 9, 2022.

1. A professional disinformer, identical to thousands of colleagues who work on Western media to produce and spread lies according to the given script from the State Dept. or other power centers in the Western ruling class.
2. The pot calling the kettle black. This from a media platform that like the rest of the US-controlled media around the world, ignored and covered up the deliberate shelling of Donbas cities for eight long years by a Nazi-infested Ukrainian army built, trained and directed by NATO. The dead by now amount to more than 14,000. They are almost all civilians,  including many women and children. Throughout this period, Kiev’s military was also engaged in the deliberate shelling of schools, medical facilities and vital infrastructure: water plants, power stations and so on. Tell us, again, who started this nice clambake? Russia or Washington through its color revolutions and many vassal/accomplices?
3. Yes, tell us about land grabs, please. More glaring examples of double-standard based on US exceptionalism. Since the turn of the 20th century, the US has invaded and occupied many nations, after subjecting them to brutal military attacks and repression. The annexed regions in Donbas were all heavily Russian, historically and culturally, something we can hardly say about the US grabbing the Philippines in the 1900s, or setting itself up for generations in Korea, or illegally occupying one-third of Syria, a nation Washington has been trying to regime-change now for a generation via dirty war using terrorist proxies. We don’t have to mention here in detail the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, two nations that the US and its NATO vassals invaded, occupied and destroyed for at least 30 years, with untold victims, before liberation came to the former thanks to their unrelenting struggle against the “crusader army”, with Iraq still attempting to get rid of the Washington infection. Of course, no mention is made here that these regions rejoined Russia not as a result of some perverse Putin whim, but after a formal referendum, whose validity is certainly no worse and probably a damn sight better than US elections.

The post Russian Army Fires Old Sparky: US Loses the Electric War in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/11/russian-army-fires-old-sparky-us-loses-the-electric-war-in-ukraine/feed/ 0 340473 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/19/blackout-in-puerto-rico-whole-island-loses-power-amid-hurricane-fiona-as-privatized-grid-collapses-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/19/blackout-in-puerto-rico-whole-island-loses-power-amid-hurricane-fiona-as-privatized-grid-collapses-2/#respond Mon, 19 Sep 2022 14:09:48 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=7318f37dbd76d53f4ab79bd617228af9
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/19/blackout-in-puerto-rico-whole-island-loses-power-amid-hurricane-fiona-as-privatized-grid-collapses-2/feed/ 0 334343 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/19/blackout-in-puerto-rico-whole-island-loses-power-amid-hurricane-fiona-as-privatized-grid-collapses/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/19/blackout-in-puerto-rico-whole-island-loses-power-amid-hurricane-fiona-as-privatized-grid-collapses/#respond Mon, 19 Sep 2022 12:16:57 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=7ca2130434ed906f78eb7b82ea21b674

More than 1.5 million people are in the dark after Hurricane Fiona knocked the power out across all of Puerto Rico Sunday, triggering floods and landslides. We go to San Juan for an update from Democracy Now! correspondent Juan Carlos Dávila, who describes how privatization of the island’s electrical grid coupled with a legacy of U.S. colonialism “has really caused the crisis.” We also speak with former San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz as President Biden has declared a national emergency and federal aid pours in. “The distribution has to be robust and has to be people-centered and community-centered,” notes Cruz.

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

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/19/blackout-in-puerto-rico-whole-island-loses-power-amid-hurricane-fiona-as-privatized-grid-collapses/feed/ 0 334332 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/vietnamese-journalist-loses-appeal-08252022015721.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/vietnamese-journalist-loses-appeal-08252022015721.html#respond Thu, 25 Aug 2022 05:58:00 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/vietnamese-journalist-loses-appeal-08252022015721.html Award-winning Vietnamese journalist Pham Doan Trang has lost her appeal against a nine-year jail sentence. She was sent to prison in Dec., 2021 for “conducting anti-state propaganda.”

Trang refused to plead guilty during Thursday’s appeal at Hanoi High People’s Court even though her lawyers had advised her that a guilty plea would be the only way for her to persuade the court to reduce or dismiss her sentence.

Trang has not been allowed to see her family since she was arrested in October 2020, and her mother, Bui Thi Thien Can’s request to attend the appeal was ignored by authorities.

Can went to the High People’s Court on Thursday with her son but they were barred from entering the courtroom, along with diplomats from the E.U., the U.S., the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Germany.

One of Trang’s lawyers told RFA this week she is very ill, suffering from sinusitis after catching COVID-19 and still nursing a knee injury sustained when she was beaten by security forces during a 2015 protest in the Vietnamese capital. Her other health issues include arthritis and gynecological problems.

International groups called for Trang’s release ahead of the appeal. PEN America, an NGO which campaigns for writers’ freedom of expression, issued a statement on Monday calling on the Vietnamese government to repeal Trang’s sentence and release her immediately.

Earlier this month U.S.-based NGO the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) also called on authorities not to contest her appeal. The organization had been hoping to present her with its 2022 International Press Freedom Award in New York in November.

Trang has been presented with many prestigious international awards, including the U.S. State Department’s International Women of Courage Award and the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Prize.

Trang was arrested in Oct., 2020 but the charges were not made public for more than a year after her arrest.

Along with the “anti-state propaganda” charge, she was accused of speaking with foreign media: Radio Free Asia and the BBC, allegedly to defame the government with “fake news.”

Hanoi authorities were also angry over books Trang wrote, such as “Politics for Ordinary Citizens,” and “Handbook for Prisoners’ Families.”

The CPJ’s 2021 prison census ranked Vietnam the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 23 imprisoned for their work.

Vietnamese activists’ appeals are highly unlikely to succeed with another four failing this month.

On Aug. 16 the Provincial People’s Court in Dak Lak rejected the appeal of Y Wo Nie while the Higher People’s Court in Hanoi dismissed the appeal of Le Van Dung.

Y Wo Nie was sentenced to four years by Cu Kuin district court on May 20, charged with “abusing democratic freedom,” for telling international groups about religious persecution in his region.

Dung was arrested in June last year and convicted this March for “conducting anti-state propaganda.” He was sentenced to five years in prison and five years of probation.

On Aug. 17 the appeals of Trinh Ba Phuong and Nguyen Thi Tam were also rejected. They were both arrested on June 24, 2020 and charged with "conducting anti-state propaganda.”

Phuong is serving 10 years in prison and five years' probation, Tam was jailed for six years with three years’ probation.

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

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/vietnamese-journalist-loses-appeal-08252022015721.html/feed/ 0 326279 https://grist.org/drought/as-drought-dries-up-the-yangtze-river-china-loses-hydropower/ https://grist.org/drought/as-drought-dries-up-the-yangtze-river-china-loses-hydropower/#respond Tue, 23 Aug 2022 10:15:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=586125 A historic drought in the southwest of China is drying up rivers, intensifying forest fires, damaging crops, and severely curtailing electricity in a region highly dependent on hydropower. 

The Yangtze River, the third largest in the world, has dropped to half its average water levels, affecting shipping routes, limiting drinking water supplies, causing rolling blackouts, and even exposing long-submerged Buddhist statues. Some 66 rivers across 34 counties in Chongqing were dried up as of last week, Reuters reported. Also last week, the province of Sichuan, which gets more than 80 percent of its energy from hydropower, cut or limited electricity to thousands of factories in an effort to “leave power for the people.” Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, is just a quarter of its normal size for this time of year.

On Friday, China issued its first national drought alert in nine years. Rainfall in the Yangtze River Basin is down 45 percent from last July, the lowest it has been since 1961, according to Bloomberg. Simultaneously, a heat wave has caused scorching temperatures across large parts of the country since early July. Dozens of cities recorded temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit last week; on Monday, state meteorologists issued a “red alert” heat warning for the 11th day in a row. The relationship between heat waves and drought is complicated, but it’s known that as temperatures go up, the sky’s evaporative demand increases, causing it to absorb more water and creating drier conditions on land. 

Sichuan is a major manufacturing hub and the curbing of electricity to factories has had global impacts, affecting suppliers of Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, Intel and Apple, as well as pesticide and solar panel manufacturers. On Monday, companies were asked to continue rationing electricity until Thursday. Toyota has slowly resumed operations using a generator; Tesla asked the government of Shanghai to ensure that its suppliers received enough power, saying it faced shortages of components as plants scaled back production. Other areas that source power from Sichuan have also made cuts, including Shanghai, China’s largest city, which turned off decorative lighting as a symbolic gesture.

Drought’s impact on the agriculture sector has also been severe, with thousands of acres of crops damaged in Sichuan and the neighboring Hubei province, according to the Associated Press. In response, the Chinese government discharged water from several large upstream reservoirs, and the Ministry of Agriculture said it will try to artificially increase rainfall through cloud seeding, as well as spray crops with a water-retaining agent. Climbing temperatures means crops need even more water than usual, as soils dry out. Forest fires also broke out last week in Sichuan and neighboring Chongqing, although officials declared them contained as of Monday.

China is the largest carbon emitter in the world (though the United States is first when considering historic emissions) and the drought will likely impact the country’s clean energy goals. As reported in the Guardian, Vice-premier Han Zheng said the country will increase its coal burning to address the electricity shortages.

Other parts of the world are also struggling with changes in power-generating capacity brought on by drought. Hydropower is the largest source of clean energy in the world, but last year dry spells in places like the southwestern United States, China, and Brazil created significant disruptions in the supply, and the International Energy Agency predicts that global hydropower expansion will slow down this decade. Brazil, which in 2021 sourced 61 percent of its electricity from hydropower had to cut water flows into hydroelectric dams to a 91-year low during its drought that year. “People always thought that water is unlimited, but it really isn’t,” José Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian government’s disaster monitoring center, told Reuters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As drought dries up the Yangtze river, China loses hydropower on Aug 23, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Blanca Begert.

]]> https://grist.org/drought/as-drought-dries-up-the-yangtze-river-china-loses-hydropower/feed/ 0 325746 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/marshall-islands-loses-covid-free-status-with-6-cases-confirmed/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/marshall-islands-loses-covid-free-status-with-6-cases-confirmed/#respond Mon, 08 Aug 2022 22:25:44 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=77546

By Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal in Majuro

The Marshall Islands lost its covid-free status yesterday when tests confirmed six positive cases in the capital, the first known community transmission since the pandemic started in early 2020.

It was not immediately clear the source of the covid-19 spread as Marshall Islands borders have been closed since March 2020 and rules currently require 10 days of government-managed quarantine prior to release.

The six people who tested positive Monday had “no travel history, no contact with anyone who was in quarantine,” said Health Secretary Jack Niedenthal.

• READ MORE: Covid is knocking on the Marshall Islands’ door
• Other Marshall Islands health reports

The government moved quickly last night to announce a halt to the start of the new school year with all island schools scheduled to open this week.

President David Kabua delivered a brief 90-second statement to the nation via an online live stream in which he announced that the Ministry of Health and Human Services had confirmed six people positive in the capital of Majuro.

The President’s short speech was the first official notice of news that in the fashion of a small island had spread several hours prior to his speech.

“I advise people to remain calm and follow the protocols to prevent covid,” Kabua said.

President Kabua advised the country to follow established protocols of wearing facemasks when in public. Kabua wore a facemask while delivering his speech.

Notices on social media went viral in the minutes and hours after people learned of the first-ever covid community spread in this isolated north Pacific nation.

Although there were no rules except for school closure announced by government, within minutes of the official confirmation of the cases, a national basketball tournament game was halted mid-way through the contest Monday night, and some restaurants began shutting their doors.

The Office of the Chief Secretary said that the start of the new school year, which opened yesterday at some public schools and was scheduled to open later this week in private schools, would now be postponed for two months.

While businesses and government offices can continue as usual, hospital services will be modified and masks will be required in public for the next two months, said a statement issued by the government.

The government also announced a halt to travel by plane or ship to remote outer islands in hopes of restricting spread of covid to islands that have only rudimentary medical care services available.

“The most important lesson learned from Palau’s experience with a wave of covid starting in January is to protect the hospital during the initial stages of a covid outbreak,” said Niedenthal.

“This is to protect both the patients already in hospital from being infected by incoming covid patients and, of equal importance, minimising the exposure of hospital staff so they can remain functional and on the job.”

The Ministry of Health and Human Services moved quickly last night to set up previously planned “test and treat” facilities in designated locations in the community.

Niedenthal said the number one lesson learned from watching other nations respond to their covid waves was the priority of “protecting the hospital”.

The goal, he said, is to have people use community test and treat facilities where health officials will perform tests and determine treatment needed.

The entire Marshall Islands has a population estimated at only 42,000 scattered on dozens of atolls and single islands. The two urban centers of Majuro and Ebeye, however, contain three-quarters of the population and many people live in overcrowded conditions ripe for the spread of covid.

Laboratory tests of people who were positive for covid while in managed quarantine last month showed they were all BA.5 variant. And ministry officials said they were proceeding on the basis that BA.5 is what they are seeing.

One local resident said that he was aware of a church member who was confirmed with covid yesterday.

“That means spreading already since yesterday was a busy day at church,” said the person.

Giff Johnson is editor of the Marshall islands Journal and the RNZ Pacific correspondent in Majuro. 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.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/marshall-islands-loses-covid-free-status-with-6-cases-confirmed/feed/ 0 321783 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/24/greenland-loses-6-billion-tons-of-ice-in-3-days-harbinger-of-unprecedented-coastal-flooding/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/24/greenland-loses-6-billion-tons-of-ice-in-3-days-harbinger-of-unprecedented-coastal-flooding/#respond Sun, 24 Jul 2022 11:31:50 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/338524

CNN and The Independent reported this week on a massive ice melt in Greenland, with on the order of 6 billion tons of ice lost in three days. The melting was because of a heat wave at the top of the world, caused by our burning coal, gasoline, and methane gas and spewing billions of tons of the dangerous heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

These sorts of events are directly responsible for sea level rise and coastal flooding around the world and in the United States (which has a lot of coast if you think about it). Often it is the poorest and most disadvantaged who will suffer most severely from disruptions like storm surges, coastal erosion, salt water invasion of lagoons, and urban flooding.

A heat wave in Greenland only makes it about 60 degrees F. (15C), when most of us would still feel the need for a sweater. But ordinarily, according to a climate and weather site, “In July the average maximum daytime temperatures are cold and range from 6°C (43°F) in KapTobin to 10°C (50°F) in Angmagssalik. Nighttime temperatures generally drop to 2°C (36°F) in Angmagssalik and 0°C (32°F) in KapTobin. It is one of the warmest months of the year.”

So, yeah, 60F/ 15C is a stretch.

I think it was René Marsh and Angela Fritz at CNN who came up with the explanation of what 6 billion tons of ice melt looks like, saying it was enough to put the entire state of West Virginia under a foot of water.

A loss of 6 billion tons of ice is worrisome, especially since all this is cumulative. Over time all the surface ice will melt if we go on burning fossil fuels. But we’ve seen considerably worse, say Marsh and Fritz. In 2019, they explain, a hot spring and summer melted away the ice sheet’s surface, sending 532 billion tons of ice into the oceans, raising them permanently by over half an inch (1.5 millimeters).

If all Greenland’s ice melts, it would raise the seas by more than 24 feet (7.5 meters).

We can still halt an apocalyptic scenario like that, which would wipe out coastal cities around the world, if we stop spewing out carbon by 2050. The existing CO2 in the atmosphere will all go into the oceans. That will make them acidic and wipe out a lot of marine life, but temperatures would immediately stop rising and would gradually go back to a nineteenth-century normal.

Average sea level has already risen about 9 inches (24 cm.) since 1880, which has put coastal regions and cities under pressure. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is a lot. It gets magnified if there is a storm surge, and worsens flooding. Moreover, the oceans are not flat — they are higher in some places than others, and some parts rise faster than others. The ocean at Miami Beach is a full foot higher now than even in 1990, and floods on rain-free sunny days are 4 times more frequent than just three decades ago.

The World Economic Forum found that African-American urban communities are most at risk from sea-level rise, with the risk of flooding in their neighborhoods increasing by 20% by 2050.

Flooding currently costs the US $32 billion a year, but that number is expected to increase substantially if the seas rise at a rapid clip.

We’re seeing increasing coastal flooding alerts in places like Maine. Sarah Long at WMTW quotes Meteorologist Donny Dumont: “It makes sense we have more advisories just due to the fact that we are getting more coastal flood impacts . . . Sea level rise is not showing a super rapid increase but it is constant. Every single year we get a couple of millimeters and you add that up over a decade and you’re just getting more coastal flooding than you used to.” Note that a 10-millimeter increase per decade is nearly half an inch.* But as we saw in Miami Beach, at other places the increases are more dramatic.

In Ghana, the Atlantic Ocean has already surged six feet into the country’s interior, threatening to wipe out a whole series of coastal settlements. Coastal erosion is accelerating and the new conditions can interfere with fishing. People’s livelihoods are in danger.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lou Ferreira.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Caroline Molloy.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Deng Xiaoping had promised it could run its own affairs under "one country, two systems," with the city's freedoms preserved for at least 50 years, and with progress promised towards fully democratic elections.

The reality has been rather different. Just 25 years after the  handover, Hong Kong is no longer the world's freest economy and has plummeted in global press freedom rankings following a citywide crackdown on dissent under the national security law.

"People who stayed are like the frog in a pan of gradually warming water," economist Law Ka-chung told RFA. "Maybe some of them think everything's fine, but others see a huge difference."

Today, not a single promise made by Chinese leaders before the handover has been kept. Halfway into the 50-year grace period, Hong Kong is already unrecognizable to many.

"Since the National Security Law came in, there's a lot of things you can't say any more; a lot of things you can't write; even people you can't interview," former Stand News journalist Lam Yin-bong told RFA.

The last races under British rule took place in June 1997. More than H.K.$2.5 billion in bets were placed.

Under "one country, two systems," China promised that "the horses will run as usual, and people can keep on partying."

Now, people's lives may appear similar on the surface, but what was once the world's freest economy no longer gets its own separate trading status.

Once known as Asia's World City, Hong Kong is seen as just another Chinese city now

"Important stuff like politics, the economy, used to be very different from mainland China," Law said. "The way we collected data, our stock market."

"But it all changed gradually until there was no difference at all."

On the day of the handover, the Hang Seng Index closed at 16,365 points. "One country, two systems" meant that capitalism would stay, and that the city would remain a financial center.

In March 2022, the Hang Seng stood at around 18,000 points a rise of only a few percent over 25 years.

According to Law, foreign investment in Hong Kong has fallen in the past few years, and a lot of operations are now being directed from mainland China

"Right from the start, they started bringing in new people to work in important sectors like financial and banking, but not so people would notice that they'd replaced an entire sector," he said. "They did it in the non-profit sector too: in schools, in higher education, where they carried out brainwashing until it was all being run by their people."

"All the university vice chancellors are from mainland China now. Can you find me a single one who isn't?"

The annual vigils for the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were once seen as an important test of the 'one country, two systems' promise in practice.

In the years after the handover, Hong Kong continued to be the only Chinese city to hold them.

On the 30th anniversary of the crackdown, 180,000 people turned out for the once-annual candlelight vigil in Victoria Park.

But by 2022, nobody was lighting candles in Victoria Park on June 4 any more.

Instead, key areas of the park were closed for the anniversary and guarded by police, who warned passers-by to move on.

A COVID- ban on public gatherings was also in place making the lack of vigil less surprising.

"Gathering to remember the Tiananmen massacre is a very peaceful thing to do," a man in a commemorative T-shirt told RFA on the day in the nearby Causeway Bay shopping district.

"The government says it wasn't a massacre but an incident. Whatever they call it they'll find every excuse in the book to stop [any commemoration] from happening," he said.

"If even peaceful events aren't allowed, then what freedom do we have?"

Protests now a thing of the past

Under the terms of the handover, Hong Kong was promised freedom of association, and was once the protest capital of Asia, with wave after wave of mass protests since the handover, including the 2003 march against national security laws, the 2012 movement against the CCP's "patriotic education" program in Hong Kong schools, and the 2014 Umbrella movement for fully democratic elections.

In 2019, millions took to the streets to protest plans to allow the extradition of alleged criminal suspects from Hong Kong to face trial in mainland China, in a mass movement that occupied the Legislative Council and brought international outrage over the brutality of the police response to mostly unarmed young people.

Now, only trams and buses ply the once-familiar march route from Causeway Bay to government headquarters in Admiralty.

The advent of the National Security Law has turned Hong Kong's regular street protests and vigils -- a bellwether for freedom of assembly -- into a thing of the past, with the groups that once organized them forced to close and their leaders arrested.

One by one, prominent civil society groups have been forced to close, including the Professional Teachers' Union, the Confederation of Trade Unions, and the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which once organized the candlelight vigils on June 4.

Dissenting voices are barely heard in public any more.

"We have nothing left now, so I felt I needed to make a bit of a fuss," Italian priest-turned-rights activist Franco Mella told RFA after a brief, protest of just three people.

"A small fuss is better than no fuss," he said.

Mella is scathing about the Hong Kong government's handling of the 2019 protest movement.

"When one million or two million take to the streets, it's the government's job to know why," he said. "An intelligent government would understand that, right? Rather than cracking down and banning stuff."

Many of Mella's friends are now in prison for their activism.

"All they ever aimed to do was to care for others; to guide them in whatever direction," he said. "That's not a reason to send them to prison."

Social activist Tsang "The Bull" Kin-shing agreed, telling reporters on his release from Stanley Prison: "Right now we have lawyers, professors, doctors, students, lawmakers in jail or on remand."

"The Hong Kong we are living in today isn't the old Hong Kong we used to know," he said after serving a jail term for "incitement to illegal assembly" linked to his role in the 2019 protest movement.

Meanwhile, citizen journalist Lam Yin-bong, who covered Tsang's release, said he has been frozen out of opportunities to cover the news because he isn't affiliated to an approved news organization.

"I can't go to regular press events like news conferences with [incoming leader] John Lee," Lam told RFA. "They wouldn't let me in even if I wanted to go to them, because I don't have an official press pass."

"This is government policy. You need that pass to book a place. So, I mostly cover stuff that happens on the street, like political prisoners being released, stuff that mainstream media might overlook or maybe not cover prominently," he said. "I book my place on those stories instead."

Lam has many years' experience in the mainstream media, yet now he posts his stories to his own news page online.

"Gone are the days when we could write for an outlet like Stand News or the Apple Daily and be read by millions of people, and have a huge impact via the pro-democracy press," he laments. "There's no way they'll let you do that now. You do what you can - bits and pieces."

Lam started out as a journalist in 2006, and has worked for several outlets. His last job in journalism was as assignment editor at Stand News, which was forced to close at the end of 2021 as two of its senior editors were arrested.

"I never thought the day would come when just writing articles or saying the wrong thing would be a crime, even objective and factual descriptions," he said. "Now they call it incitement without even saying who the target was; whom you are supposed to have incited."

Hong Kong recently plummeted to 148th place in global press freedom rankings published annually by Reporters Without Borders compared with 18th place in 2002, when the rankings first appeared.

"These rankings are the hard figures," Lam said. "On the ground, everything just kept on getting worse."

"By 2021, Apple Daily, Stand News and Citizen News were all gone. So it's fitting that we rank so low," he said.

Emigrating for freedom

The last edition of the Apple Daily came out on June 24, 2021 as several of its senior editors were arrested and well-wishers came to say goodbye at the soon-to-close Next Digital headquarters.

Stand News followed in December 2021, with two of its senior editors arrested.

"I don't know what total press freedom would look like," Lam said. "But I do know what a total lack of it looks like."

Faced with an ongoing crackdown and changes to the educational curriculum, many have chosen to leave Hong Kong and seek a freer existence elsewhere. Government figures suggest that more than 140,000 people have already gone.

Many Hong Kongers turned out in London to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre in the country that once ruled their city, and which signed the handover treaty with China.

"Hong Kong once seemed pretty free on the surface," a Hongkonger who attended the most recent vigil told RFA. "As long as you didn't cross a few red lines you'd be OK."

"But that all changed."

Another participant said they wouldn't have given an interview at all if they were still in Hong Kong.

"At least now I can answer your questions," they said. "I can give interviews. We have the freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to report and to give interviews."

"And all of this can take place right outside of No. 10, Downing Street. Would that be allowed in Hong Kong? I think we all know the answer to that."

Yet there are mixed feelings among those who leave, and who must now adapt to a new life in exile.

"I'm always aware when talking about Hong Kong, how people back home might feel about it," former doctors' union leader Arisina Ma, now living in the U.K., told RFA. "They are already suffering enough.

"I'm never sure if they will be happy that I'm speaking out for them, or just be even more depressed," she said.

She said many who left told themselves they could do more to help Hong Kong from overseas, but Ma said she was highly skeptical.

"I think this idea that you can fight harder if you go overseas ...maybe some people can manage it -- maybe politicians can," she said. "Someone like Nathan Law, who can't really do anything in Hong Kong now."

"But for most people who come here from Hong Kong, like me, for example, I don't think it's really achievable," Ma said.

There was no historical precedent for the "one country, two systems" idea.

So, what conclusion do ordinary Hong Kongers draw from this 25-year experiment?

"We were pretty naïve to believe that there really would be one country, two systems, or that you could have partial freedom, like economic freedom," a Hongkonger now living in London told RFA. "That was so naïve, really."

Law said the new restrictions take a bit of getting used to for people born and raised in a relatively free environment.

"So much is restricted now," he said. "It's about what you're used to, I guess."

"Someone moving here from Beijing or Shanghai would probably think it was OK."

Lam's assessment is more direct, however.

"The past 25 years since the handover have made it absolutely clear that "one country, two systems" doesn't work," he said. "It doesn't work because the people of Hong Kong have zero trust in the country that rules them."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheryl Tung, Lee Yuk Yue and Amelia Loi for RFA Cantonese.

 Yeang Sothearin, who also worked as a news anchor for RFA’s Khmer Service, was taken into custody in November 2017 along with Uon Chhin, who was an RFA photographer and videographer.

They were charged with “illegally collecting information for a foreign source” after RFA closed its bureau in the capital in September that year amid a government crackdown on independent media. They have since been charged with additional crimes.

If convicted of the first charge, they could face a jail term of between seven and 15 years. They remain out on bail but in legal limbo after a series of appeals have been rejected by courts.

Yeang Sothearin said the court’s decision would prevent him from visiting his ailing father, an ethnic Cambodian living in southern Vietnam, or participating in NGO activities outside of Cambodia.

“I told the court that it has been five years, it is a long time and I don’t know when it will end,” Yeang Sothearin told RFA’s Khmer Service.

“There is no indication from the judge of when the investigation will end and they won’t tell me when my passport will be returned, so how can I live? I will use my rights to demand [my passport],” he said.

He said that he will appeal again by taking the case to Cambodia’s Supreme Court.

The decision not to return the passport violates Yeang Sothearin’s rights because the case has been delayed for many years and has not yet reached conclusion, Ny Sokha, president of the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (Adhoc) told RFA.

He said the delay affects both Yeang Sothearin and Uon Chhin. 

“We don’t see any indication that they want to avoid the court or flee overseas. They have houses here and they want the freedom to travel to make a living. I don’t see any reason to restrict their freedom,” he said.

Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong

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

France's new left-wing coalition picked up enough votes during Sunday's legislative elections to help deny President Emmanuel Macron the absolute majority he needed to ram through his unpopular austerity agenda.

Macron's neoliberal alliance Ensemble won the most seats in the National Assembly with 245 but fell well short of the 289 needed to control parliament.

Meanwhile, the New Ecological and Social People's Union (NUPES)—the recently formed coalition led by leftist MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon—won 131 seats, more than doubling the combined number of representatives that its four parties had in 2017.

NUPES, which brings together Mélenchon's France Unbowed, the center-left Socialist Party, French Communist Party, and Greens, campaigned on lowering the retirement age from 62 to 60, hiking the minimum wage, and freezing prices on essential products—in sharp contrast to Macron's alliance, which is trying to raise the retirement age to 65 and has reduced the corporate tax rate, exacerbating economic inequality and insecurity.

"The rout of the presidential party is complete and no clear majority is in sight," Mélenchon told a cheering crowd of supporters in Paris on Sunday night. "It is the failure of Macronism and the moral failure of those who lecture us."

Clémentine Autain, one of Mélenchon's top allies, said that the election results vindicate the left's strategy and reflect "a gathering of the forces for a social and ecological transformation on the basis of a profound change of society."

Although the strong showing by NUPES has made it the largest opposition force in parliament, a distinction that enables it to chair the assembly's key finance committee, the far-right National Rally picked up 89 seats and has also claimed a right to the position as the largest single opposition party.

National Rally's record showing, which its president Jordan Bardella called "a historic breakthrough," represents an eleven-fold increase in representation for the xenophobic party of presidential runner-up Marine Le Pen. 

In addition to pushing a pro-corporate agenda, Macron's pursuit of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies has legitimized Le Pen's reactionary ideas, progressive critics say.

Some of Macron's allies portrayed National Rally and NUPES as equally extremist. Mélenchon, by contrast, instructed his supporters to "not give a single vote" to the far-right after he finished just behind Le Pen in the first round of April's presidential race, thereby helping Macron win the runoff.

The conservative Les Républicains, which picked up 61 seats, are "likely to become kingmakers," Reuters reported, as Macron's center-right majority seeks out potential allies to overcome France's first hung parliament since 1988.

If Macron is unable to form a stable alliance with Les Républicains, which has a platform "more compatible with Ensemble than other parties" and could give the president an outright majority, he will be forced to "run a minority government that will have to negotiate bills with other parties on a case-by-case basis," Reuters noted.

Les Républicains leader Christian Jacob said his party "will remain in the opposition but be 'constructive,' suggesting case-by-case deals rather than a coalition pact," the news outlet added.

Macron's government is not confining its search for possible legislative friends to the right.

According to Agence France Presse, "Senior Macron officials were on Sunday already trying to drive a wedge through the different factions of the NUPES alliance," accusing France Unbowed of being too rigidly radical and adversarial in a bid to peel off more moderate Socialists and Greens.

"There are moderates on the benches, on the right, on the left," said government spokesperson Olivia Gregoire. "There are moderate Socialists and there are people on the right who, perhaps, on legislation, will be on our side."

If legislative gridlock persists, Macron could eventually call a snap election.

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

Three years ago, when he sank everything he had into 66 acres of irrigated pasture in Shasta County, Davy thought he’d drought-proofed his cattle operation.

He’d been banking on the Sacramento Valley’s water supply, which was guaranteed even during the deepest of droughts almost 60 years ago, when irrigation districts up and down the valley cut a deal with the federal government. Buying this land was his insurance against droughts expected to intensify with climate change. 

But this spring, for the first time ever, no water is flowing through his pipes and canals or those of his neighbors: The district won’t be delivering any water to Davy or any of its roughly 800 other customers.

Without rain for rangeland grass where his cows forage in the winter, or water to irrigate his pasture, he will probably have to sell at least half the cows he’s raised for breeding and sell all of his calves a season early. Davy expects to lose money this year — more than $120,000, he guesses, and if it happens again next year, he won’t be able to pay his bills. 

“I would never have bought (this land) if I had known it wasn’t going to get water. Not when you pay the price you pay for it,” he said. “If this is a one-time fluke, I’ll suck it up and be fine. But I don’t have another year in me.” 

Since 1964, the water supply of the Western Sacramento Valley has been virtually guaranteed, even during critically dry years, the result of an arcane water rights system and legal agreements underlying operations of the Central Valley Project, the federal government’s massive water management system.

But as California weathers a third year of drought, conditions have grown so dry and reservoirs so low that the valley’s landowners and irrigation districts are being forced to give up more water than ever before. Now, this region, which has relied on the largest portion of federally-managed water flowing from Lake Shasta, is wrestling with what to do as its deal with the federal government no longer protects them.

All relying on the lake’s supplies will make sacrifices: Many are struggling to keep their cattle and crops. Refuges for wildlife also will have to cope with less water from Lake Shasta, endangering migratory birds. And the eggs of endangered salmon that depend on cold water released from Shasta Dam are expected to die by the millions. 

For decades, water wars have pitted growers and ranchers against nature, north against south. But in this new California, where everyone is suffering, no one is guaranteed anything.

“In the end, when one person wins, everybody loses,” Davy said. “And we don’t actually solve the problem.”

This parched valley was once a land of floods, regularly inundated when the Sacramento River overflowed to turn grasslands and riverbank forests into a vast, seasonal lake. 

Settlers that flooded into California on the tide of the Gold Rush of 1849 staked their claims to the river’s flow with notices posted to trees in a system of “first in time, first in right.” 

The river was corralled by levees, the region replumbed with drainage ditches and irrigation canals. Grasslands and swamps lush with tules turned to ranches and wheat fields, then to orchards, irrigated pasture and rice. 

The federal government took over in the 1930s, when it began building the Central Valley Project.’s Shasta Dam, which displaced the Winnemem Wintu people. A 20-year negotiation between water rights holders and the United States’ Bureau of Reclamation culminated in a deal in 1964.

Today, under the agreements, which were renewed in 2005, nearly 150 landowners and irrigation districts that supply almost half a million acres of agriculture in the western Sacramento Valley are entitled to receive about three times more water than Los Angeles and San Francisco use in a year.

It’s a controversial amount in the parched state. Before this year, the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors, as they’re called, received the largest portion of the federally-managed supply of water that flows from Shasta Lake. It’s more than cities receive, more than wildlife refuges, more even than other powerful agricultural suppliers like the Westlands Water District farther south.

Their contract bars the irrigation districts’ supply from being cut by more than a quarter in critically dry years. During the last drought in 2014, federal efforts to cut it to 40 percent of the contracted amount were met with resistance, and deliveries ultimately increased to the full 75 percent allocation for the dry year.

But this year, facing exceptionally dry conditions, the irrigation districts negotiated with state and federal agencies, and agreed in March to reduce their water deliveries to 18 percent. Other agricultural suppliers with less senior rights are set to get nothing. 

Growers understand that they have to sacrifice some water this year, said Thaddeus Bettner, general manager for Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, the largest of the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors and one of the largest irrigation districts in the state. But he wondered why irrigation districts in the Western Sacramento Valley draw so much of the blame. 

“I understand we’re bigger than everybody so we catch the focus,” Bettner said. “We’re just trying to survive this year. Frankly, it’s just complete devastation up here. And it’s unfortunate that the view seems to be that we should get hurt even more to save fish.”

Cutting deliveries to growers means that more water can flow through the rivers, which slightly raises the chances for more endangered winter-run Chinook salmon to survive this year.

“They had the water rights to take 75 percent of their allocation instead of 18 percent, and we were anticipating another total bust,” said Howard Brown, senior policy advisor with NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region. “One hundred percent temperature dependent mortality (of salmon eggs) would not have been something out of reason to imagine.”

Yet more than half of the eggs of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon are expected to still die this year, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

State and federal biologists are racing to move some of the adult salmon to a cooler tributary of the Sacramento River and a hatchery.

“We’re spreading the risk around, and putting our eggs in different baskets,” Brown said. “The animal that’s on the flag of California is extinct. How many can we afford to lose before we lose our identity as people and as citizens of California?”

In any other year, Davy would run his cattle on rain-fed rangeland he leases in Tehama County until late spring before moving the herd to his home pasture, kept green and lush with spring and summer irrigation. 

Davy, who grew up roping and running cattle, supports his career as a full-time rancher with his other full-time job as a farm advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension, specializing in livestock, rangelands, and natural resources. 

Three years ago, he sold his home in Cottonwood, on the Shasta-Tehama county line, for a fixer-upper nearby with holes in the floor, a shoddy electrical system and windows that wouldn’t close. This fixer-upper had two inarguable selling points: a view of Mount Shasta and water from the Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District, a settlement contractor. 

This year, without rain, the grass where his cows forage through the winter crunches underfoot.

“This grass should be up to my waist right now,” Davy said, readying a chute he would soon use to transport his cattle. He unloaded hay from his pickup to feed the cows and calves until he could move them — unheard of, he said, in April. 

Forty miles away, his pasture, green from the April rains, is faring a little better — but the green can’t last without irrigation. Thinking about it too hard makes Davy feel sick. 

“I try to stick to what I can get done today, and then assume next year I’ll be okay. I think that’s the mantra for agriculture,” he said: “Next year will be better.”

About 75 miles south of Davy’s ranch, rangeland and irrigated pastures open up to orchards and thousands of acres of empty rice fields. 

“Nothing like I thought I’d ever see,” said Mathew Garcia, gazing at one of his dry rice fields in Glenn, about an hour and a half north of Sacramento.

In any other year, he would have been preparing to seed and flood the crumbled clay. This year, he had to abandon even the one field he’d planned to irrigate from a well. The ground was too thirsty to hold the water. 

Garcia’s water comes from two different irrigation districts with settlement contracts. This year, the roughly 420 acres he farms will see water deliveries either eliminated or too diminished to plant rice. He’ll funnel the water instead to his tenant’s irrigated pasture where cattle graze. 

“Without the water, we have dirt. It’s basically worthless,” Garcia said. “It’s very depressing.”

California is one of the main rice producers in the U.S., and almost all is grown in the Sacramento Valley. It’s an especially water-demanding crop: The plants and evaporation drink up about two-thirds of the flows; the rest dribbles through the earth to refill groundwater stores or flows back into irrigation ditches that supply other crops, rivers, and wetlands. 

Garcia places some of the blame on the weather. But he also blames federal regulators, who allow water to flow from the reservoirs year-round for fish, wildlife, and water quality. 

“Everybody says well, you shouldn’t farm in the desert. Does this look like a desert to you? No. It looks like fertile, beautiful farmland with the most amazing irrigation system that’s ever been put in. And they’re just taking the water from it. They’re creating a desert.”

In the depths of California’s last historic drought from 2012 through 2016, Garcia could still plant his fields. Even with last year’s reduced water deliveries, he planted — filling the gaps in water supply by pumping from his groundwater wells. 

Garcia will survive this year: He credits his wife’s foresight to purchase crop insurance years ago. Without it, he said, he’d be done — he’d have to sell land, maybe find another job. 

“If this drought sustains, I don’t know how long insurance is going to last. And then at what point do you throw in the towel?” said Garcia. “​​There’s a teetering point somewhere. Everybody’s is different. I don’t know where mine is yet.” 

Local water suppliers anticipate about 370,000 acres of cropland will go fallow in the western Sacramento Valley, the result of diminished deliveries to the settlement contractors. Most lie in Colusa and Glenn counties, where agriculture is the epicenter of the economy. Money and jobs radiate from the fields to the crop dusters and chemical suppliers, rice driers, and warehouses. 

And, like the water, jobs for farm workers have dried up. 

For nine years, Sergio Cortez has been traveling from Jalisco, Mexico to work in Sacramento Valley fields. This is the driest he’s ever seen it, and he knows that next year could be worse. 

“Aquí el agua es todo, pues,” he said. “Al no haber agua, pues no hay trabajo.” Water is everything, he said. If there’s no water, there’s no work.

The parking lot at the migrant farmworker housing in Colusa County where Cortez and his family live for part of the year was full of cars and pickups that would normally be parked at the fields. Cortez hadn’t worked in two days. 

For Adolfo Morales Martinez, 74, it had been a month since he worked. And, at the end of April, his unemployment benefits were about to end. 

“Desesperados. Estamos desesperados,” he said. “Pues en el campo gana uno poquito, no? Y sin nada? No mas.” We’re desperate, he said. In the fields, he can earn a little. But now, nothing. 

Normally Morales Martinez drives a tractor, readying rice fields for planting. Now it’s like a desert, his wife, Alma Galavez, said. 

“Eso está desértico, vea. Todo. Nada, Nada. Está feo y triste,” she said. There’s nothing. It’s ugly and sad. 

Environmental advocates and California tribes have been fighting the growers’ and irrigation districts’ claim to California’s finite water supply for years, citing inadequate water to maintain water quality and temperatures for endangered fish and the Delta. 

“People who have built their farms in the desert, or in areas where their water has to be exported to them, need to think about changing. Because that’s what’s killing the state,” said Caleen Sisk, chief and spiritual leader of the Winnemem Wintu, whose lands were flooded with the damming of Lake Shasta.

To Sisk, the salmon that once spawned in the tributaries above the Central Valley signal the region’s health. “If there are no salmon, there will be no people soon.”

Federal scientists estimate that last year about three-quarters of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon eggs died because the water downstream of a depleted Lake Shasta was too warm. Only about three percent of the salmon ultimately survived to migrate downriver. 

“It’s been clear for decades that there was a need to reduce diversions,” said Doug Obegi, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The consequences are just becoming more and more extreme.” 

In 2020, California sued the Trump administration over what it said were flawed federal assessments for how the Central Valley Project’s operations harm endangered species. 

The judge sent the federal plans back for more work and approved what he called a “reasonable interim approach“ that called for prioritizing fish and public safety over irrigation districts. He called the contracts an “800 pound gorilla” that “make it exceedingly and increasingly difficult” for the federal government to be  “sufficiently protective of winter-run (salmon).” 

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson Gary Pitzer said the agency worked with the districts to reach an agreement on how much water to deliver because “it’s the right thing to do, particularly during drought  — one of the worst on record.”

Environmental advocacy groups applauded the reduced allocations to the Sacramento Valley irrigation districts. But they also raised concerns that other irrigation districts with similar contracts elsewhere in the state would still see their full dry year allocations, and cautioned that the temperatures will still kill salmon by the scores this year. 

Wildlife refuges where birds can rest and eat during their 4,000-mile winter journeys along the Pacific Flyway also are receiving significantly less water this year.

Curtis McCasland, manager of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex, expects less than half a typical year’s water supply to be delivered to the refuges this year — cobbled together from purchased water supplies, federal deliveries and, he hopes, storm flows this winter. 

North of Sacramento, the five refuges in the complex are painstakingly tended wilderness in a sea of agriculture. More than a century ago, wetlands fanned out for miles to either side of the flood-prone Sacramento River. Now, more than 90 percent of the state’s wetlands are gone, drained for fields, homes, and businesses. Those remaining in these refuges now depend on water flowing from Shasta Dam and shunted through irrigation canals. 

At the end of April, the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge offered an oasis among the barren rice fields, which normally provide about two-thirds of the migrating bird’s calories. Dark green bulrushes rose from shallow ponds where shorebirds jackhammered their bills in and out of the muck. 

McCasland knows all this lush green can’t last. As he steered an SUV past black-necked stilts picking their way through the water and ducklings paddling ferociously, he braced for another dry year. 

“Instead of being those postage stamps in a sea of rice, we’re going to be postage stamps in a sea of fallow fields,” McCasland said.  

In a typical year, the refuge wetlands that depend on federal water get much less water than the settlement contractors are entitled to — about four percent of the total, McCasland estimates. And he worries that this year, whatever water they do receive won’t be enough to keep all these birds fed and healthy. 

More than a million birds descend on the refuges every winter to rest and find food. More stop in the surrounding rice fields, which are largely dry this year.

“In years where Shasta is at a normal or average level, it should be no problem to get us the water,” he said. “In years like this, certainly it’s going to be terribly difficult.”

The drought may already have taken a toll. Last November, only 745,000 birds landed in the refuge, a decrease of more than 700,000 from November of 2019, although some may have remained farther north because of unseasonably balmy weather there.

The refuges are like a farm, where McCasland and his colleagues carefully cultivate tule, shrubs, and grasses with pulses of summertime irrigations. With less water this summer, these wintertime food sources for birds will dry and shrivel. And with less water during the peak of fall and winter migrations, hungry birds will be packed together in the few remaining marshes — raising the risk of outbreaks from diseases like avian botulism or cholera.

“There’s not a lot of places for these birds to go,” he said. “The Sacramento Valley has always been the bankable piece….They do have wings, they may be able to move through.” But, he added, “the question is, what happens next?”

CalMatters Photo Editor Miguel Gutierrez contributed to this story. 

This article was originally published by CalMatters, and is reprinted with permission. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Everyone loses’: California’s Sacramento Valley struggles to survive unprecedented water cuts on May 28, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Rachel Becker.

Independent photojournalist Josh Pacheco lost a camera during a skirmish while covering a reproductive rights rally that was met with a counterprotest in Los Angeles, California, on May 14, 2022.

JP told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that they arrived at the “Bans Off Our Bodies” rally outside of Los Angeles City Hall at about 11 a.m. to document the event and was heading toward the staging area where speakers were set to deliver remarks.

“I didn’t even make it to the stage because as soon as I got there, I immediately walked into a confrontation,” JP said.

A group of individuals had locked arms to create a barrier to keep counter protesters, who were demonstrating nearby, from engaging with those at the rally. The groups clashed after one individual pushed through the barrier.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The Trump-backed candidate J.D. Vance won the Ohio Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, while former Bernie Sanders presidential campaign co-chair Nina Turner lost the Democratic primary election for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District after massive outside spending and attacks by super PACs. We speak with Andrew Perez of The Lever about what Ohio’s elections mean for the future of the Democratic Party if it actively suppresses candidates like Turner who are critical of the establishment. Given that a majority Democratic Congress and sitting Democratic president have not delivered on campaign promises such as canceling student debt, protecting Roe v. Wade and passing Build Back Better, the party will be in jeopardy in the upcoming elections, says Perez.

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

Le Trong Hung was arrested on March 27, 2021, after declaring his candidacy for a seat in the country’s National Assembly in a challenge to the ruling Communist Party. He was charged with “creating, storing, disseminating information, materials, items and publications against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” On Dec. 31, 2021, after a trial that lasted less than four hours, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

On Tuesday, authorities watched Hung’s house but didn’t inform her of the appeal, his wife Do Le Na told RFA’s Vietnamese Service.

“On April 19, I had no reason to go out of the house, and had no idea that my house was being watched. At 11 a.m., my son came home from school and told me that someone was watching our house,” she said.

“After lunch, a friend of Hung’s messaged me to ask if the appellate trial was being held that day,” Na said.

Hung’s friend told Na that his house was also under watch on April 19 and a security agent told him that the reason was because Hung’s appellate trial was on that day.

Na then searched for news about her husband online but could not find anything. It was not until Friday, when she came to the prison where her husband is being detained, that she was able to confirm news of the trial.

Hung, 79, is a former teacher and founder of CHTV Television, which formerly livestreamed videos on controversial social and political issues.

He was accused of violating Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, which has been widely used by authorities to arbitrarily detain journalists and critics.

The case against Hung was based on four videos posted to his Facebook page covering sensitive issues, including a deadly Jan. 9, 2020, police crackdown during a land dispute in Dong Tam Commune.

Translated by Chau Vu. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By. RFA’s Vietnamese Service.

Open internet defenders cheered this week after a federal appeals court rejected an industry-backed petition to block enforcement of California's net neutrality law.

Internet service providers (ISPs) wanted a hearing before all the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after a three-judge panel of that court in January upheld that the law could go into effect.

"No judges on the appeals court thought the broadband industry's petition for a rehearing was even worth voting on," as ArsTechnica described the appeals court decision.

California's SB 822, described as the "gold standard net neutrality law," was approved in 2018 after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), then led by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, voted to repeal Obama-era net neutrality rules.

Among those praising the appeals court's decison was FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who declared: "This is big. Because when the FCC rolled back its open internet policies, states stepped in. I support net neutrality and we need once again to make it the law of the land."

John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge—one of the groups that filed an amicus brief in support of California's law—similarly applauded the decision.

“As expected," he said, "the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected yet another attempt by internet service providers to overturn California's strong net neutrality law. The California net neutrality law is now undefeated in court after four attempts to eliminate it."

"Net neutrality protections nationally continue to be common sense and popular with the public among all ideologies," Bergmayer said, calling it "good news that Californians will continue to enjoy this important consumer protection, and we look forward to a full Federal Communications Commission restoring net neutrality nationwide."

The appeals court ruling came as progressives urged the U.S. Senate to confirm Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden's nominee to fill the empty seat on the FCC.

Longtime net neutrality defender Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called the appeals court decision "a win in our fight for net neutrality, but all states deserve a free and open internet."

"We need Gigi Sohn... confirmed ASAP to advance access, affordability, and equity in our digital future," said Markey.

But Sohn's nomination, as Free Press' Jessica J. González explained this week, has been thwarted.

"Sohn has faced an ugly and coordinated right-wing media smear campaign, which has been on full display in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and on Fox News, which are both owned by Rupert Murdoch," she wrote. "This campaign has also played out in the Senate, where Sohn faced not one but two confirmation hearings, which is unusual for the confirmation of an FCC commissioner. And at every turn a number of Republican senators have obstructed progress on Sohn's confirmation."

"The Senate must confirm Gigi Sohn without further delay," González said. "The FCC has a lot of work to do, and a dwindling number of days to do so. Senate Democrats cannot allow these democracy-subverting tactics to succeed."

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

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

“The litigation concerning the pipeline is over, but the fight continues,” said EarthJustice attorney Jan Hasselman. Earthjustice has represented the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe since 2016. “We call on the administration to close the pipeline until a full safety and environmental review is complete. DAPL never should have been authorized in the first place, and this administration is failing to address the persistent illegality of this pipeline.” 

The court’s ruling centers on the construction of the pipeline under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River and important source of water for Standing Rock and other Indigenous nations. The pipeline has been vigorously opposed by Indigenous nations and activists since 2016, gaining support from environmental groups, members of congress, and state governments. Despite the historic resistance, construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline was completed in 2017. 

Earlier that year, before construction was finished, the Army Corps of Engineers issued an easement to allow the pipeline to cross Oahe, but in 2020, it was revoked by a Federal judge who said the Army Corps violated environmental laws and mandated an environmental review. Last January, the U.S. court of Appeals upheld that ruling, and in May, a district court denied the tribe’s request for an injunction to shut down the pipeline until the review was completed. 

“The unacceptable risk of an oil spill, impacts to Tribal sovereignty and harm to drinking water supply must all be examined thoroughly in the months ahead as the U.S. Army Corps conducts its review of this pipeline,” Hasselman said in a statement at the time. 

But even the most recent environmental review has met with controversy. Last September, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the Oglala Sioux Tribe called on the Army Corps to restart the Environmental Impact Statement process, calling it “fatally flawed” and pointing to a contractor who is a member of the American Petroleum Institute. The Army Corps’ own regulations prohibit contractors from having any financial or other interest in a project. 

Standing Rock, other tribes, and environmental groups are hopeful that a fresh, unbiased environmental review will lead to the shutdown of the controversial pipeline. In court documents, Energy Transfer said the pending review makes the pipeline “vulnerable to a shutdown.”

The Army Corps of Engineers has said the review is due to be completed later this year. While the review is underway, the pipeline continues to carry 750,000 barrels of oil per day from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to a terminal in Illinois. EarthJustice and other groups have called on President Biden to issue an executive order to shut down the pipeline. The Biden administration has not announced any plans to do so. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Dakota Access Pipeline operator loses legal battle on Feb 22, 2022.

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

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

The post Democracy Prevails in Bolivia after US-backed Government Loses Election appeared first on Project Censored.

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