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Burying Genocide – The BBC, Gaza And The Role Of The UK

Media Lens — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:30:47 +0000

One might naively think that a national public-service broadcaster would inform the public about matters of national interest. Surely no reasonable person would deny that the public has a right to know what the government is doing in our name. But, over and above this basic requirement, a responsible public-service broadcaster should also scrutinize the government’s actions and statements, and challenge them robustly.

Instead, as Declassified UK has reported, Britain’s ‘obedient’ defence correspondents, including BBC journalists, are covering up British spy flights for Israel. The RAF has carried out more than 500 surveillance flights over Gaza since December 2023. The Ministry of Defence insists that the flights, undertaken by aircraft based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, are solely to assist in providing information about Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023. But the British ‘mainstream’ media, which largely serves state-corporate interests, not the public interest, have not carried out a single investigation into the extent, impact, or legal status of these flights.

Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a London-based charity that records, investigates, and disseminates evidence of armed violence against civilians worldwide, has analysed flight-tracking data over or close to Gaza. They found that between 3 December 2023 and 27 March 2025, the RAF carried out at least 518 Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) flights in or near Gaza’s airspace.

AOAV found that the RAF conducted 24 flights in the two weeks leading up to and including the day of Israel’s deadly attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June 2024, which reportedly killed 274 Palestinians and injured over 700. Four Israeli hostages were rescued in the operation.

Iain Overton, the Executive Director of AOAV, noted that:

‘This is not the only instance where UK ISR flights have coincided with major Israeli military assaults. In the two weeks leading up to Israel’s attack on Rafah on 12 February 2024, which killed at least 67 Palestinians, the RAF flew 15 ISR missions over Gaza. Flights continued even during the so-called “limited ceasefire” in early 2025, with six flights recorded in February alone.’

He added:

‘With no parliamentary oversight or public scrutiny, it remains unclear how much British intelligence gathered from these flights has been shared with Israel.’

This is surely a significant question that responsible journalists should be raising, particularly the national broadcaster. But, as Declassified UK has observed, the BBC has essentially remained ‘silent’ on whether these flights are contributing to the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide and war crimes in Gaza.

In an article jointly published by Declassified UK and The National newspaper in Scotland, Des Freedman, Professor of Media & Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, wrote:

‘thanks to dogged work by campaigners, independent journalists and pro-Palestine MPs, we know both that the flights are continuing to operate (as they did even throughout the ceasefire) and that spikes in the number of flights have coincided with especially deadly Israeli attacks on Gaza.

‘The lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream media is perhaps not surprising but it is deeply troubling.’

He added:

‘It’s hard to reconcile this silence with the energy with which mainstream media have investigated Russian spy planes flying over Ukraine and other military manoeuvres related to Putin’s invasion.’

On 7 July, we challenged Jonathan Beale, the BBC’s defence correspondent, via X, linking to Freedman’s article:

‘Hello @bealejonathan,

‘As @BBCNews defence correspondent, why are you covering up British spy flights for Israel?’

Beale was clearly irked and posted this reply:

‘Why are you claiming “cover-up” – without a shred of evidence of what’s supposed to have been covered up? I’m curious as to how a media lecturer at Goldsmiths seems to have knowledge of “intelligence” that no other journalist has seen?’

A few minutes later, having now been alerted to the Declassified UK article, he confronted Freedman:

‘Please tell us Des as to how we can get the classified intelligence only you seem to know about. Why teach media studies when you can clearly scoop us all?’

Freedman responded reasonably:

‘As you know Jonathan, I don’t have access to classified files but to open news databases. Is any of the story incorrect? Instead of a snippy response, surely it would be better to use your contacts to investigate a story that’s in the public interest?’

As Declassified UK said in a follow-up post on X:

‘In a bizarre admission he [Beale] suggests that open source information on military flights is “classified”, raising the question – how do BBC journalists investigate the British military?’

The answer, of course, is that BBC journalists, along with other state stenographers, have learned not to investigate too deeply if they are to retain their privileged position.

When Declassified UK challenged Richard Burgess, the BBC’s director of news content, he gave this response befitting a senior news apparatchik:

‘I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel.’

Why did Burgess say, ‘in Israel’? Did he just erase Palestine? Is he actually unaware that Gaza is an occupied Palestinian territory?

As if that was not already a bizarre and misleading form of words, consider this. Nobody is asking the BBC to ‘overplay’ what the UK is doing; but simply to report it, rather than bury it to the point of invisibility. Whitewashing genocide as ‘what’s happening in Israel’ is wretched BBC newspeak.

Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour Party leader, has called for a public inquiry to determine what the UK government is hiding about its role in Israel’s genocide, including RAF flights from Cyprus. In an article for the Morning Star, he wrote:

‘We have also repeatedly asked for the truth regarding the role of British military bases in Cyprus, concerning the transfer of arms and the supply of military intelligence.

‘When the Prime Minister visited RAF Akrotiri in December 2024, he was filmed telling troops: “The whole world and everyone back at home is relying on you.” He added: “Quite a bit of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time. We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing.” What does the government have to hide?’

Corbyn continued:

‘Over the past 18 months, our questions have been met with evasion, obstruction and silence, leaving the public in the dark over the ways in which the responsibilities of government have been discharged. Transparency and accountability are cornerstones of democracy. The British public deserves to know the full scale of Britain’s complicity in crimes against humanity.’

And the British public-service broadcaster, along with the UK’s other major news outlets, should have been reporting this since October 2023. As Mark Curtis, co-director of Declassified UK, commented:

‘Britain’s national media are doing a wonderful job covering up the extent of British support for Israel during a genocide. It’s their most impressive performance since destroying the prospects of a decent government under Jeremy Corbyn in 2015-19.’

A Devastating Indictment Of BBC ‘Impartiality’

The BBC’s Richard Burgess, quoted above, was speaking in parliament at the launch of a study by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza. The report examined BBC content from 7 October 2023 to 7 October 2024. A total of 3,873 BBC articles and 32,092 segments broadcast on BBC television and radio were analysed.

CfMM’s key findings were:

Palestinian deaths treated as less newsworthy: Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanizing victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs 201 Israelis).
Systematic language bias favouring Israelis: BBC used emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims, applied ‘massacre’ 18 times more to Israeli casualties, and used ‘murder’ 220 times for Israelis versus once for Palestinians.
Suppression of genocide allegations: BBC presenters shut down genocide claims in over 100 documented instances whilst making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements, including Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek reference (see below).
Muffling Palestinian voices: The BBC interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (1,085 v 2,350) on television and radio, while BBC presenters shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective (2,340 v 217).

These findings show that the BBC values the lives of Israelis much more than the lives of Palestinians. This is part of a bigger picture of BBC News coverage conforming to the Israeli narrative, a key feature of BBC journalism going back decades. The CfMM report is a devastating indictment of the BBC’s endlessly repeated, robotic claim of ‘impartiality’.

At the parliamentary launch of the CfMM report, Burgess was also challenged by Peter Oborne, the former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. The exchange was filmed by someone at the meeting. Oborne robustly confronted Burgess with as many as six ways in which BBC News has misled its audiences. Independent journalist Jonathan Cook helpfully detailed these six points, while providing crucial context, which can be summarised as follows:

1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, implemented by Israel on 7 October 2023, that permitted the Israeli killing of Israeli civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them from being taken captive by Hamas. See our media alert about this from February 2025.

2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, which underlies Israel’s murderous ‘mowing the lawn’ Gaza strategy over the past two decades: repeated devastating assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza to weaken their resistance to the brutal and illegal Israeli occupation, and to make it easier to ethnically cleanse them.

3. The BBC has not reported the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October. In particular, the BBC buried Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to ‘Amalek’ – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth.

4. By contrast, as reported in the CfMM study, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air.

5. The BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

6. Finally, Oborne observed that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University, has never been invited to appear on the BBC.

Cook noted:

‘Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. […] His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide.’

Cook added:

‘He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.’

The BBC Is Being led by A ‘PR Person’

When the BBC dropped the powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack’, it compounded its complicity in Israel’s genocide. The Corporation’s earlier withdrawal of ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, had already epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby (see our media alert here).

‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack’ details how Israel has systematically targeted hospitals, health care centres, medics themselves, and even their families. Doctors told the filmmakers of how they had been detained, beaten, and tortured by the Israelis, as confirmed by an anonymous Israeli whistleblower. The nonsensical reason given by the BBC for cancelling the film, which it had itself commissioned from Basement Films, was the risk that broadcasting it would create ‘a perception of partiality’. Reporting the truth about Israel’s crimes would be ‘partial’? Such inversion of reality has become standard for the national broadcaster.

The film was instead shown by Channel 4 on 2 July. After watching it, Gary Lineker, who had essentially been pushed out of the BBC for his honesty on Gaza and other issues, said that, ‘The BBC should hang its head in shame.’

Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former Greek finance minister, said:

‘I can’t see how the BBC will ever recover from its headlong leap into this ethical void, all in the name of not upsetting the perpetrators of the most horrific genocide since the end of the 2nd World War.’

Ben de Pear, the documentary’s executive producer for Basement Films and a former Channel 4 News editor, accused the BBC of trying to gag him and others over its decision not to show the documentary. In a statement that he posted to LinkedIn, de Pear said the film had passed through many ‘BBC compliance hoops’ and that the BBC were now attempting to stop him talking about the film’s ‘painful journey’ to the screen:

‘I rejected and refused to sign the double gagging clause the BBC bosses tried multiple times to get me to sign. Not only could we have been sued for saying the BBC refused to air the film (palpably and provably true) but also if any other company had said it, the BBC could sue us.

‘Not only could we not tell the truth that was already stated, but neither could others. Reader, I didn’t sign it.’

At a conference in Sheffield, de Pear criticised Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, over the BBC’s decision to drop the film:

‘All the decisions about our film were not taken by journalists, they were taken by Tim Davie. He is just a PR person. Tim Davie is taking editorial decisions which, frankly, he is not capable of making.’

De Pear added:

‘The BBC’s primary purpose is TV news and current affairs, and if it’s failing on that it doesn’t matter what drama it makes or sports it covers. It is failing as an institution. And if it’s failing on that then it needs new management.’

Of course, as Media Lens has long argued and demonstrated with copious examples since our inception in 2001, the BBC isn’t ‘failing’. It is doing precisely what it was set up to do: namely, act as a mouthpiece for establishment power and as an enabler of state crimes.

The post Burying Genocide – The BBC, Gaza And The Role Of The UK first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Burying Genocide – The BBC, Gaza And The Role Of The UK

Media Lens — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:30:47 +0000

Iain Overton, the Executive Director of AOAV, noted that:

‘This is not the only instance where UK ISR flights have coincided with major Israeli military assaults. In the two weeks leading up to Israel’s attack on Rafah on 12 February 2024, which killed at least 67 Palestinians, the RAF flew 15 ISR missions over Gaza. Flights continued even during the so-called “limited ceasefire” in early 2025, with six flights recorded in February alone.’

He added:

‘With no parliamentary oversight or public scrutiny, it remains unclear how much British intelligence gathered from these flights has been shared with Israel.’

In an article jointly published by Declassified UK and The National newspaper in Scotland, Des Freedman, Professor of Media & Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, wrote:

‘thanks to dogged work by campaigners, independent journalists and pro-Palestine MPs, we know both that the flights are continuing to operate (as they did even throughout the ceasefire) and that spikes in the number of flights have coincided with especially deadly Israeli attacks on Gaza.

‘The lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream media is perhaps not surprising but it is deeply troubling.’

He added:

‘It’s hard to reconcile this silence with the energy with which mainstream media have investigated Russian spy planes flying over Ukraine and other military manoeuvres related to Putin’s invasion.’

On 7 July, we challenged Jonathan Beale, the BBC’s defence correspondent, via X, linking to Freedman’s article:

‘Hello @bealejonathan,

‘As @BBCNews defence correspondent, why are you covering up British spy flights for Israel?’

Beale was clearly irked and posted this reply:

‘Why are you claiming “cover-up” – without a shred of evidence of what’s supposed to have been covered up? I’m curious as to how a media lecturer at Goldsmiths seems to have knowledge of “intelligence” that no other journalist has seen?’

A few minutes later, having now been alerted to the Declassified UK article, he confronted Freedman:

‘Please tell us Des as to how we can get the classified intelligence only you seem to know about. Why teach media studies when you can clearly scoop us all?’

Freedman responded reasonably:

‘As you know Jonathan, I don’t have access to classified files but to open news databases. Is any of the story incorrect? Instead of a snippy response, surely it would be better to use your contacts to investigate a story that’s in the public interest?’

As Declassified UK said in a follow-up post on X:

‘In a bizarre admission he [Beale] suggests that open source information on military flights is “classified”, raising the question – how do BBC journalists investigate the British military?’

The answer, of course, is that BBC journalists, along with other state stenographers, have learned not to investigate too deeply if they are to retain their privileged position.

When Declassified UK challenged Richard Burgess, the BBC’s director of news content, he gave this response befitting a senior news apparatchik:

‘I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel.’

Why did Burgess say, ‘in Israel’? Did he just erase Palestine? Is he actually unaware that Gaza is an occupied Palestinian territory?

‘We have also repeatedly asked for the truth regarding the role of British military bases in Cyprus, concerning the transfer of arms and the supply of military intelligence.

‘When the Prime Minister visited RAF Akrotiri in December 2024, he was filmed telling troops: “The whole world and everyone back at home is relying on you.” He added: “Quite a bit of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time. We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing.” What does the government have to hide?’

Corbyn continued:

‘Over the past 18 months, our questions have been met with evasion, obstruction and silence, leaving the public in the dark over the ways in which the responsibilities of government have been discharged. Transparency and accountability are cornerstones of democracy. The British public deserves to know the full scale of Britain’s complicity in crimes against humanity.’

‘Britain’s national media are doing a wonderful job covering up the extent of British support for Israel during a genocide. It’s their most impressive performance since destroying the prospects of a decent government under Jeremy Corbyn in 2015-19.’

A Devastating Indictment Of BBC ‘Impartiality’

CfMM’s key findings were:

Palestinian deaths treated as less newsworthy: Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanizing victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs 201 Israelis).
Systematic language bias favouring Israelis: BBC used emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims, applied ‘massacre’ 18 times more to Israeli casualties, and used ‘murder’ 220 times for Israelis versus once for Palestinians.
Suppression of genocide allegations: BBC presenters shut down genocide claims in over 100 documented instances whilst making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements, including Netanyahu’s biblical Amalek reference (see below).
Muffling Palestinian voices: The BBC interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (1,085 v 2,350) on television and radio, while BBC presenters shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian perspective (2,340 v 217).

4. By contrast, as reported in the CfMM study, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air.

5. The BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

6. Finally, Oborne observed that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University, has never been invited to appear on the BBC.

Cook noted:

‘Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. […] His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide.’

Cook added:

‘He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.’

The BBC Is Being led by A ‘PR Person’

Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former Greek finance minister, said:

‘I can’t see how the BBC will ever recover from its headlong leap into this ethical void, all in the name of not upsetting the perpetrators of the most horrific genocide since the end of the 2nd World War.’

‘I rejected and refused to sign the double gagging clause the BBC bosses tried multiple times to get me to sign. Not only could we have been sued for saying the BBC refused to air the film (palpably and provably true) but also if any other company had said it, the BBC could sue us.

‘Not only could we not tell the truth that was already stated, but neither could others. Reader, I didn’t sign it.’

At a conference in Sheffield, de Pear criticised Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, over the BBC’s decision to drop the film:

‘All the decisions about our film were not taken by journalists, they were taken by Tim Davie. He is just a PR person. Tim Davie is taking editorial decisions which, frankly, he is not capable of making.’

De Pear added:

‘The BBC’s primary purpose is TV news and current affairs, and if it’s failing on that it doesn’t matter what drama it makes or sports it covers. It is failing as an institution. And if it’s failing on that then it needs new management.’

The post Burying Genocide – The BBC, Gaza And The Role Of The UK first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

L.A. organizers mark 30 days of resisting ICE

Democracy Now! — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 13:40:16 +0000

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

Why I’m running for leadership of Canada’s NDP

Yves Engler — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I’m running to lead the New Democratic Party. Canada needs a mainstream voice willing to challenge capitalism and imperialism while promoting decolonization, degrowth, and economic democracy.

Initially, my reaction to the NDP Socialist Caucus’ request to run was to reject it. But there are two crucial issues before us that I am particularly well placed to challenge: Canadian complicity in Israel’s holocaust in Gaza and the unprecedented growth in military spending.

Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are revolted by this country enabling Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza. They can trust that I’ll stand up to the genocide lobby. As student union vice-president, I was expelled from Concordia University in the aftermath of the 2002 protest against Benjamin Netanyahu, and fifteen years ago, I wrote Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid. I understand the scope of Canada’s complicity. I will push to jail anyone in this country who has participated in war crimes in Gaza, and to investigate institutions “inducing” young Canadians to join the Israeli military. I’ll seek to outlaw government-subsidized donations to Israel, de-list the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, and end Canada’s assistance to a security force overseeing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

We need to politicize the popular uprising against Israel’s holocaust by “Canadianizing” it. But we also need to move those politicized by Gaza towards broader critiques of Canadian foreign policy, militarism, and the unequal, ecologically damaging status quo. The left has not done well in turning the Palestine mobilizations into a broader systemic challenge. Might an insurgent NDP candidacy assist?

Anyone appalled by the Liberals’ and Conservatives’ support for the holocaust in Gaza should be terrified by the prospect of giving these monsters greater means to wage violence.

But that is exactly what is taking place. Prime Minister Mark Carney has committed to the largest military expansion in seventy years. In Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Michael Wernick explained, “It’s a mistake to think of this as a short-term issue. It’s going to bedevil finance ministers for the next six or seven budgets and probably be relevant to the next two federal election campaigns.” To pay for Carney’s massive military boost, the former head of Canada’s public service is calling for a new 2-per-cent “defense and security tax” in addition to the GST.

Wernick’s proposal should spur a backlash. So should the slashing of the civil service and social programs to pay for more war spending. Even before the massive military boost, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has concluded that Carney’s campaign promises would likely lead to the “worst cuts to the public service in modern history.”

While it’s bad enough that Mark Carney’s war spending plan will lead to major cuts in social programs and bolster an authoritarian, racist, and patriarchal institution, more soldiers and weapons will also lead to more international killing and subjugation campaigns. It’s beyond reckless to strengthen the killing hand of politicians who’ve enabled Israel’s holocaust.

However, the current NDP leadership is unable to say as much or even seriously push back on boosting military spending, as they’ve promoted the institution, US foreign policy, and the belligerent NATO alliance. Establishment leadership candidate Heather McPherson is part of the NATO Parliamentary Association, and she called for Canada to promote Ukraine’s membership in the alliance (even former Prime Minister Jean Chretien recognizes that NATO expansion contributed to provoking Russia’s illegal invasion). As I detail in Stand on Guard for Whom: A People’s History of the Canadian Military, we should withdraw from NATO, lessen US military ties, and cut military spending.

Although my knowledge and credentials in other areas of public policy may not be as strong, over the past 25 years, I’ve assisted environmental, indigenous, feminist, and other social movements.

As part of protecting political speech, I’ll push to end state surveillance of activists, weaken the intelligence agencies, and abolish Canada’s terrorism list. As part of promoting Land Back, I’ll seek to expand Indigenous jurisdiction. As part of significantly reducing Canada’s ecological footprint, I’ll push to immediately phase out Alberta’s tar sands.

Capitalism’s need for endless consumption and profit maximization is imperiling humanity’s long-term survival. We must build an alternative that rejects its war on the earth, human psyche, and democracy.

In Economic Democracy: The Working Class Alternative to Capitalism, my late uncle, Al Engler, proposed an egalitarian, democratic vision for replacing a capitalist economic system based on one dollar, one vote with an economic democracy based on one person, one vote. When I worked for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (now Unifor), I successfully promoted measures that led to economic democracy. I crafted a widely circulated call to set up a publicly owned national telecommunications company, promoted an eco-socialist vision for a union representing tar sands workers, and published mainstream commentary questioning why we have democracy in the political arena but not in the workplace.

The aim of running is to win the party leadership, but that’s obviously a long shot. The more realistic objective is to drive the debate away from the mushy middle. To do so will require the support of many volunteers and registering a few thousand new members to ensure the other candidates know the campaign is serious. To win, we’d need to persuade 25,000 individuals to purchase NDP memberships and convince a significant portion of current members to support bold change. This is a steep hill to climb, but half of Canadians believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and many tens of thousands are appalled by Canada’s complicity.

Two months ago, I spoke before 20,000 at an anti-genocide demonstration in Ottawa, and six weeks into Israel’s holocaust at a march in Montreal of 50,000.

As Sean Orr’s victory for Vancouver city council and Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York Democratic primary attest, there’s an appetite for change out there. Let’s see what happens.

The post Why I’m running for leadership of Canada’s NDP first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Mark Carney’s Quiet Capitulations to Trump

Owen Schalk — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 22:33:43 +0000

Canada’s new prime minister talks like a critic but acts like a sycophant.

This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Owen Schalk.

A Zionist Gaza is a Sick Vision Unworthy of any Country with Integrity

Karin Brothers — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 19:55:36 +0000

Dear Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada:

Prime Minister Carney’s statement that the solution to Mideast peace was a “Zionist Gaza” made me ill. It demonstrated his support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and showed total contempt for international law.

Canada’s official foreign policy supports international law and Canada
is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The ICJ has repeatedly called Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and the UN GA even demanded last year that Israel vacate the Palestinian territories by this year. A Zionist Gaza means either the outright Israeli theft of the Palestinian territory or continued illegal occupation: probably the Israeli imposition of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority, which virtually no Palestinian respects.

That our government would support Israel’s control over Gaza as a result of this genocide makes me ashamed of our country.

What value does an independent Canada have if it has no integrity and
displays no respectable sovereignty? We understand that Canada must
tread carefully to avoid giving the US excuses to invade, but we would
like to see some signs of integrity in our government. Something that
makes us care about preserving our independence (such as it is).

The post A Zionist Gaza is a Sick Vision Unworthy of any Country with Integrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Karin Brothers.

A Zionist Gaza is a Sick Vision Unworthy of any Country with Integrity

Karin Brothers — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 19:55:36 +0000

Dear Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada:

That our government would support Israel’s control over Gaza as a result of this genocide makes me ashamed of our country.

The post A Zionist Gaza is a Sick Vision Unworthy of any Country with Integrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Karin Brothers.

A Zionist Gaza is a Sick Vision Unworthy of any Country with Integrity

Karin Brothers — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 19:55:36 +0000

Dear Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada:

That our government would support Israel’s control over Gaza as a result of this genocide makes me ashamed of our country.

The post A Zionist Gaza is a Sick Vision Unworthy of any Country with Integrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Karin Brothers.

Faramarz Farbod in Conversation with Yves Engler on Canada, the US, and Imperialism

Faramarz Farbod — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:21:38 +0000

Faramarz Farbod speaks with Yves Engler, a Canadian activist and author of 13 books, including most recently Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy and Stand on Guard for Whom? (A People’s History of Canadian Military). The conversation explores Canada’s role in the world, its relationship with US capitalism and imperialism, Canada’s policies toward Iran and Cuba, misperceptions of Canada in the US, and the concept of Canadianism.

The post Faramarz Farbod in Conversation with Yves Engler on Canada, the US, and Imperialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

NATO’s Promise of War

Binoy Kampmark — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 01:28:35 +0000

he confidence trickster was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO. President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily on defence, inflating the margins of sense and sensibility against marginal threats. Never mind the strain placed on the national budget over such absurd priorities as welfare, health or education.

The marvellous irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump’s perceived unreliability and capriciousness when it comes to European affairs. Would he, for instance, treat obligations of collective defence outlined in Article 5 of the organisation’s governing treaty with utmost seriousness? Since Washington cannot be relied upon to hold the fort against the satanic savages from the East, various European countries have been encouraging a spike in defence spending to fight the sprites and hobgoblins troubling their consciences at night.

The European Union, for instance, has put in place initiatives that will make getting more weaponry and investing in the military industrial complex easier than ever, raising the threshold of defence expenditure across all member countries to 3.5% of GDP by the end of the decade. And then there is the Ukraine conflict, a war Brussels cannot bear to see end on terms that might be remotely favourable to Russia.

The promised pecuniary spray made at the NATO summit was seen by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte as utterly natural if not eminently sensible. Not much else was. It was Rutte who remarked with infantile fawning that “Sometimes Daddy has to use tough language” when it came to sorting out the murderous bickering between Israel and Iran. Daddy Trump approved. “He likes me, I think he likes me,” the US president crowed with glowing satisfaction.

Rutte’s behaviour has been viewed with suspicion, as well it should. Under his direction, NATO headquarters have made a point of diminishing any focus on climate change and its Women, Peace, and Security agenda. He has failed to make much of Trump’s mania for the annexation of Greenland, or the President’s gladiatorial abuse of certain leaders when visiting the White House – Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa come to mind. “He is not paid to implement MAGA policy,” grumbled a European NATO diplomat to Euroactive.

In his doorstep statement of June 25, Rutte made his wish known that the NATO collective possess both the money and capabilities to cope, not just with Russia “but also the massive build-up of military in China, and the fact that North Korea, China and Iran, are supporting the war effort in Ukraine”. Lashings of butter were also added to the Trump ego when responding to questions. “Would you really think that the seven or eight countries not at 2% [of GDP expenditure on defence] at the beginning of this year would have reached the 2% if Trump would not have been elected President of the United States?” It was only appropriate, given the contributions of the US (“over 50% of the total NATO economy”), that things had to change for the Europeans and Canadians.

The centrepiece of the Hague Summit Declaration is a promise that 5% of member countries’ gross GDP will go to “core defence requirements as well as defence and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations”. Traditional bogeyman Russia is the predictable antagonist, posing a “long-term threat […] to Euro-Atlantic security”, but so was “the persistent threat of terrorism”. The target is optimistic, given NATO’s own recent estimates that nine members spend less than the current target of 2% of GDP.

What is misleading in the declaration is the accounting process: the 3.5% of annual GDP that will be spent “on the agreed definition of NATO defence expenditure by 2035 to resource core defence requirements, and to meet NATO Capability Targets” is one component. The other 1.5%, a figure based on a creative management of accounts, is intended to “protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.”

Another misleading element in the declaration is the claimed unanimity of member states. The Baltic countries and Poland are forever engaged in increasing their defence budgets in anticipation of a Russian attack, but the same cannot be said of other countries less disposed to the issue. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, for instance, declared on the eve of the summit that his country had “better things to spend money on”. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also called the 5% target “incompatible with our world view”, preferring to focus on a policy of prudent procurement.

Rutte seemed to revel in his role as wallah and jesting sycophant, making sure Trump was not only placated but massaged into a state of satisfaction. It was a sight all the stranger for the fact that Trump’s view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a warm one. Unfortunately for the secretary general, his role will be forever etched in the context of European history as an aspiring warmonger, one valued at 5% of the GDP of any of the NATO member states. Hardly a flattering epitaph.

The post NATO’s Promise of War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

NATO’s 5% Pledge: An Obscene Betrayal of Global Needs

Medea Benjamin — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 15:17:15 +0000

No to NATO protest at The Hague, June 22, 2025. Photo credit: Xinhua News

At this week’s NATO summit in The Hague, leaders announced an alarming new goal: push military spending to 5% of nations’ GDP by 2035. Framed as a response to rising global threats, particularly from Russia and terrorism, the declaration was hailed as a historic step. But in truth, it represents a major step backward—away from addressing the urgent needs of people and the planet, and toward an arms race that will impoverish societies while enriching weapons contractors.

This outrageous 5% spending target didn’t come out of nowhere—it’s the direct result of years of bullying by Donald Trump. During his first term, Trump repeatedly berated NATO members for not spending enough on their militaries, pressuring them to meet a 2% GDP threshold that was already controversial and so excessive that nine NATO countries still fall below that “target”.

Now, with Trump back in the White House, NATO leaders are falling in line, setting a staggering 5% target that even the United States—already spending over $1 trillion a year on its military—doesn’t reach. This is not defense; it’s extortion on a global scale, pushed by a president who views diplomacy as a shakedown and war as good business.

Countries across Europe and North America are already slashing public services, yet they are now expected to divert even more taxpayer money into war preparations. Currently, no NATO country spends more on the military than on health or education. But if they all meet the new 5% military spending goal, 21 of them would spend more on weapons than on schools.

Spain was one of the few to reject this escalation, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez making clear that his government would not sacrifice pensions and social programs to meet a militarized spending target. Other governments, including those of Belgium and Slovakia, quietly pushed back as well.

Still, NATO leaders pressed on, cheered by Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who fawned over Donald Trump’s demand that Europe boost defense spending. Rutte even referred to Trump as “Daddy,” a comment that—while dismissed as a joke—spoke volumes about NATO’s subservience to U.S. militarism. Under Trump’s influence, the alliance is shedding even the pretense of being a defensive pact, embracing instead the language and logic of perpetual war.

Just before NATO leaders were gathering at the Hague, protesters took to the streets under the banner “No to NATO.” And back in their home countries, civic groups are demanding a redirection of resources toward climate justice, healthcare, and peace. Polls show that majorities in the U.S. oppose increased military spending, but NATO is not accountable to the people. It’s accountable to political elites, arms manufacturers, and a Cold War logic that sees every global development through the lens of threat and domination.

NATO’s expansion, both in terms of war spending and size (it has grown from 12 founding members to 32 countries today), has not brought peace. On the contrary. The alliance’s promise that Ukraine would one day join its ranks was one of the triggers for Russia’s brutal war, and instead of de-escalating, the alliance has doubled down with weapons, not diplomacy. In Gaza, Israel continues its U.S.-backed war with impunity, while NATO nations send more arms and offer no serious push for peace. Now the alliance wants to drain public coffers to sustain these wars indefinitely. NATO is also surrounding its adversaries, particularly Russia, with ever more bases and troops.

All of this demands a radical rethink. As the world burns—literally—NATO is stocking up on kindling. When healthcare systems are crumbling, schools are underfunded, and blazing temperatures are making large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, the idea that governments should commit billions more to weapons and war is obscene. Real security doesn’t come from tanks and missiles—it comes from strong communities, global cooperation, and urgent action on our shared crises.

We need to flip the script. That means cutting military budgets, withdrawing from endless wars, and beginning a serious conversation about dismantling NATO. The alliance, born of the Cold War, is now a stumbling block to global peace and an active participant in war-making. Its latest summit only reinforces that reality.

This is not just about NATO’s budget—it’s about our future. Every euro or dollar spent on weapons is one not spent on confronting the climate crisis, lifting people out of poverty, or building a peaceful world. For the future of our planet, we must reject NATO and the war economy.

The post NATO’s 5% Pledge: An Obscene Betrayal of Global Needs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

Former New Zealand PM Helen Clark blames Cook Islands for crisis

APR editor — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:02:52 +0000

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific presenter/producer

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark believes the Cook Islands, a realm of New Zealand, caused a crisis for itself by not consulting Wellington before signing a deal with China.

The New Zealand government has paused more than $18 million in development assistance to the Cook Islands after the latter failed to provide satisfactory answers to Aotearoa’s questions about its partnership agreement with Beijing.

The Cook Islands is in free association with New Zealand and governs its own affairs. But New Zealand provides assistance with foreign affairs (upon request), disaster relief, and defence.

Helen Clark (middle) . . . Cook Islands caused a crisis for itself by not consulting Wellington before signing a deal with China. Image: RNZ Pacific montage

The 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration signed between the two nations requires them to consult each other on defence and security, which Foreign Minister Winston Peters said had not been honoured.

Peters and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown both have a difference of opinion on the level of consultation required between the two nations on such matters.

“There is no way that the 2001 declaration envisaged that Cook Islands would enter into a strategic partnership with a great power behind New Zealand’s back,” Clark told RNZ Pacific on Thursday.

Clark was a signatory of the 2001 agreement with the Cook Islands as New Zealand prime minister at the time.

“It is the Cook Islands government’s actions which have created this crisis,” she said.

Urgent need for dialogue
“The urgent need now is for face-to-face dialogue at a high level to mend the NZ-CI relationship.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has downplayed the pause in funding to the Cook Islands during his second day of his trip to China.

Brown told Parliament on Thursday (Wednesday, Cook Islands time) that his government knew the funding cut was coming.

He also suggested a double standard, pointing out that New Zealand had also entered deals with China that the Cook Islands was not “privy to or being consulted on”.

Prime Minister Mark Brown and China’s Ambassador to the Pacific Qian Bo last year. Image: RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis

A Pacific law expert says that, while New Zealand has every right to withhold its aid to the Cook Islands, the way it is going about it will not endear it to Pacific nations.

Auckland University of Technology senior law lecturer and a former Pacific Islands Forum advisor Sione Tekiteki told RNZ Pacific that for Aotearoa to keep highlighting that it is “a Pacific country and yet posture like the United States gives mixed messages”.

“Obviously, Pacific nations in true Pacific fashion will not say much, but they are indeed thinking it,” Tekiteki said.

Misunderstanding of agreement
Since day dot there has been a misunderstanding on what the 2001 agreement legally required New Zealand and Cook Islands to consult on, and the word consultation has become somewhat of a sticking point.

The latest statement from the Cook Islands government confirms it is still a discrepancy both sides want to hash out.

“There has been a breakdown and difference in the interpretation of the consultation requirements committed to by the two governments in the 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration,” the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Immigration (MFAI) said.

“An issue that the Cook Islands is determined to address as a matter of urgency”.

Tekiteki said that, unlike a treaty, the 2001 declaration was not “legally binding” per se but serves more to express the intentions, principles and commitments of the parties to work together in “recognition of the close traditional, cultural and social ties that have existed between the two countries for many hundreds of years”.

He said the declaration made it explicitly clear that Cook Islands had full conduct of its foreign affairs, capacity to enter treaties and international agreements in its own right and full competence of its defence and security.

However, he added that there was a commitment of the parties to “consult regularly”.

This, for Clark, the New Zealand leader who signed the all-important agreement more than two decades ago, is where Brown misstepped.

Clark previously labelled the Cook Islands-China deal “clandestine” which has “damaged” its relationship with New Zealand.

RNZ Pacific contacted the Cook Islands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment but was advised by the MFAI secretary that they are not currently accommodating interviews.

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.

Mark Brown: Cook Islands ‘not consulted’ on NZ-China agreements

APR editor — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 01:45:38 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown has suggested a double standard, saying he was “not privy to or consulted on” agreements New Zealand may enter into with China.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters has paused $18.2 million in development assistance to the Cook Islands due to a lack of consultation regarding a partnership agreement and other deals signed with Beijing earlier this year.

The pause includes $10 million in core sector support, which Brown told parliament this week represents four percent of the country’s budget.

“[This] has been a consistent component of the Cook Islands budget as part of New Zealand’s contribution, and it is targeted, and has always been targeted, towards the sectors of health, education, and tourism.”

Brown said he was surprised by the timing of the announcement.

“Especially Mr Speaker in light of the fact our officials have been in discussions with New Zealand officials to address the areas of concern that they have over our engagements in the agreements that we signed with China.”

Peters said the Cook Islands government was informed of the funding pause on June 4. He also said it had nothing to do with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon being in China.

Ensured good outcomes
Brown said he was sure Luxon could ensure good outcomes for the people of the realm of New Zealand on the back of the Cook Islands state visit and “the goodwill that we’ve generated with the People’s Republic of China”.

“I have full trust that Prime Minister Luxon has entered into agreements with China that will pose no security threats to the people of the Cook Islands,” he said.

“Of course, not being privy to or not being consulted on any agreements that New Zealand may enter into with China.”

The Cook Islands is in free association with New Zealand and governs its own affairs. But New Zealand provides assistance with foreign affairs (upon request), disaster relief, and defence.

The 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration signed between the two nations requires them to consult each other on defence and security, which Winston Peters said had not been lived up to.

In a statement on Thursday, the Cook Islands Foreign Affairs and Immigration Ministry said there was a breakdown in the interpretation of the 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration.

The spokesperson said repairing the relationship requires dialogue where both countries are prepared to consider each other’s concerns.

‘Beg forgiveness’
Former Cook Islands deputy prime minister and prominent lawyer Norman George said Brown “should go on his knees and beg for forgiveness because you can’t rely on China”.

“[The aid pause] is absolutely a fair thing to do because our Prime Minister betrayed New Zealand and let the government and people of New Zealand down.”

But not everyone agrees. Rarotongan artist Tim Buchanan said Peters is being a bully.

“It’s like he’s taken a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook using money to coerce his friends,” Buchanan said.

“What is it exactly do you want from us Winston? What do you expect us to be doing to appease you?”

Buchanan said it had been a long road for the Cook Islands to get where it was now, and it seemed New Zealand wanted to knock the country back down.

Brown did not provide an interview to RNZ Pacific on Thursday but is expected to give an update in Parliament.

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.

Why New Zealand has paused funding to the Cook Islands over China deal

APR editor — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:32:03 +0000

BACKGROUNDER: By Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific bulletin editor/presenter;
Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific; and Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

New Zealand has paused $18.2 million in development assistance funding to the Cook Islands after its government signed partnership agreements with China earlier this year.

This move is causing consternation in the realm country, with one local political leader calling it “a significant escalation” between Avarua and Wellington.

A spokesperson for Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the Cook Islands did not consult with Aotearoa over the China deals and failed to ensure shared interests were not put at risk.

READ MORE: Other Cook Islands and China reports

On Thursday (Wednesday local time), Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown told Parliament that his government knew the funding cut was coming.

“We have been aware that this core sector support would not be forthcoming in this budget because this had not been signed off by the New Zealand government in previous months, so it has not been included in the budget that we are debating this week,” he said.

How the diplomatic stoush started
A diplomatic row first kicked off in February between the two nations.

Prime Minister Brown went on an official visit to China, where he signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” agreement.

The agreements focus in areas of economy, infrastructure and maritime cooperation and seabed mineral development, among others. They do not include security or defence.

However, to New Zealand’s annoyance, Brown did not discuss the details with it first.

Prior to signing, Brown said he was aware of the strong interest in the outcomes of his visit to China.

Afterwards, a spokesperson for Peters released a statement saying New Zealand would consider the agreements closely, in light of the countries’ mutual constitutional responsibilities.

The Cook Islands-New Zealand relationship
Cook Islands is in free association with New Zealand. The country governs its own affairs, but New Zealand provides assistance with foreign affairs (upon request), disaster relief and defence.

Cook Islanders also hold New Zealand passports entitling them to live and work there.

In 2001, New Zealand and the Cook Islands signed a joint centenary declaration, which required the two to “consult regularly on defence and security issues”.

The Cook Islands did not think it needed to consult with New Zealand on the China agreement.

Peters said there is an expectation that the government of the Cook Islands would not pursue policies that were “significantly at variance with New Zealand’s interests”.

Later in February, the Cooks confirmed it had struck a five-year agreement with China to cooperate in exploring and researching seabed mineral riches.

A spokesperson for Peters said at the time said the New Zealand government noted the mining agreements and would analyse them.

How New Zealand reacted
On Thursday morning, Peters said the Cook Islands had not lived up to the 2001 declaration.

Peters said the Cook Islands had failed to give satisfactory answers to New Zealand’s questions about the arrangement.

“We have made it very clear in our response to statements that were being made — which we do not think laid out the facts and truth behind this matter — of what New Zealand’s position is,” he said.

“We’ve got responsibilities ourselves here. And we wanted to make sure that we didn’t put a step wrong in our commitment and our special arrangement which goes back decades.”

Officials would be working through what the Cook Islands had to do so New Zealand was satisfied the funding could resume.

He said New Zealand’s message was conveyed to the Cook Islands government “in its finality” on June 4.

“When we made this decision, we said to them our senior officials need to work on clearing up this misunderstanding and confusion about our arrangements and about our relationship.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is in China this week.

Asked about the timing of Luxon’s visit to China, and what he thought the response from China might be, Peters said the decision to pause the funding was not connected to China.

He said he had raised the matter with his China counterpart Wang Yi, when he last visited China in February, and Wang understood New Zealand’s relationship with the Cook Islands.

Concerns in the Cook Islands
Over the past three years, New Zealand has provided nearly $194.6 million (about US$117m) to the Cook Islands through the development programme.

Cook Islands opposition leader Tina Browne said she was deeply concerned about the pause.

Browne said she was informed of the funding pause on Wednesday night, and she was worried about the indication from Peters that it might affect future funding.

She issued a “please explain” request to Mark Brown:

“The prime minister has been leading the country to think that everything with New Zealand has been repaired, hunky dory, etcetera — trust is still there,” she said.

“Wham-bam, we get this in the Cook Islands News this morning. What does that tell you?”

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown (left) and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters in Rarotonga in February last year. Image: RNZ Pacific/Eleisha Foon

Will NZ’s action ‘be a very good news story’ for Beijing?
Massey University’s defence and security expert Dr Anna Powles told RNZ Pacific that aid should not be on the table in debate between New Zealand and the Cook Islands.

“That spirit of the [2001] declaration is really in question here,” she said.

“The negotiation between the two countries needs to take aid as a bargaining chip off the table for it to be able to continue — for it to be successful.”

Dr Powles said New Zealand’s moves might help China strengthen its hand in the Pacific.

She said China could contrast its position on using aid as a bargaining chip.

“By Beijing being able to tell its partners in the region, ‘we would never do that, and certainly we would never seek to leverage our relationships in this way’. This could be a very good news story for China, and it certainly puts New Zealand in a weaker position, as a consequence.”

However, a prominent Cook Islands lawyer said it was fair that New Zealand was pressing pause.

Norman George said Brown should implore New Zealand for forgiveness.

“It is absolutely a fair thing to do because our prime minister betrayed New Zealand and let the government and people of New Zealand down.”

Brown has not responded to multiple attempts by RNZ Pacific for comment.

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.

Progress and frustration mark the UN’s third Ocean Conference

Joseph Winters — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:21:07 +0000

Delegates from around the world convened in Nice, France, last week to discuss a range of ocean priorities, including the implementation of a recently finalized “high seas treaty” to protect the two-thirds of the oceans that lie outside countries’ control.

It was the third United Nations Ocean Conference, a high-level forum meant to advance the U.N.’s sustainable development goal to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans.” This year’s co-hosts, France and Costa Rica, urged other countries to step up marine conservation efforts in light of overlapping ocean crises, from plastic pollution and ocean acidification to rising sea levels that are jeopardizing small island nations. António Guterres, the U.N.’s secretary-general, said in his opening remarks that oceans are “the ultimate shared resource” and that they should foster multilateral cooperation.

Whether the conference was a success depends on whom you ask. The most prominent outcome of the meeting was a flurry of voluntary and rhetorical commitments made by countries to conserve marine resources. Some of these, like France’s pledge to limit a destructive kind of fishing called bottom trawling, were criticized as insufficient. France had also promoted the conference as a sort of deadline for reaching 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty — a threshold needed for it to enter into force — but this didn’t happen, leading to disappointment among ocean advocates

On the other hand, experts said there were real signs of progress. Germany and the European Union pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward marine conservation, for example, and 11 governments signed a new pledge to safeguard coral reefs. Nearly 20 countries ratified the high seas treaty over just a few days, bringing the total up to 50.

Angelique Pouponneau, the lead ocean negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc of 39 countries, said in a statement that the conference had been “a moment of both progress and reflection.” Former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, who also served as special envoy on climate under the Biden administration, noted “critical momentum to safeguard our planet.”

The biggest focus of the U.N. Ocean Conference was the high seas treaty, also known as the agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions. Adopted by U.N. member states in 2023 after more than 20 years of negotiations, the treaty aims to solve a longstanding problem in marine protection: how to safeguard parts of the ocean that lie outside countries’ “exclusive economic zones,” swaths of water that stretch about 200 nautical miles beyond their coastlines. As of now, countries can unilaterally create marine protected areas within their economic zones. They usually restrict resource extraction and industrial fishing in these areas, often with exceptions for small-scale fishers. Many countries have established such zones, but they need the high seas treaty to create a legal framework for doing the same thing in more distant waters.

Protestors march on the Promenade des Anglais ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France. Valery Hache / AFP via Getty Images

France had made it a priority to reach 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty either before or during the third Ocean Conference; doing so would kick off a 120-day countdown for the agreement to enter into force. Not enough countries signed on, though the conference did seem to accelerate the ratification process: At a special event on the conference’s first day, 18 countries announced their ratification, including several small coastal states like Ivory Coast and Vanuatu, bringing the total to 50 (including the European Union, which has ratified it as a bloc). Each country has its own laws and processes for ratifying treaties; upon ratification, it formally lets the U.N. know and agrees to be bound by the terms of the relevant treaty.

France’s special envoy to the talks, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, wrote on LinkedIn that he expects the remaining ratifications by the next U.N. General Assembly meeting this September. That would still be pretty fast, compared to other multilateral environmental agreements. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example — the world’s main legal framework for regulating maritime activities like shipping and fishing, and for establishing countries’ exclusive economic zones —— took eight years to reach 60 ratifications. Only a few agreements, like the Paris Agreement to address global warming, were ratified faster.

Rebecca Hubbard, director of a coalition of environmental nonprofits advocating for the high seas treaty called High Seas Alliance, said in a statement that the world was “within striking distance” of the 60th ratification. “The treaty’s entry into force could be triggered in a matter of weeks,” she said.

Several experts Grist spoke with said marine protected areas are essential for advancing the U.N. target to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water by 2030. Robert Blasiak, an associate professor of sustainable ocean stewardship at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Center, estimated that without a high seas treaty, countries would have to designate some 90 percent of their waters as marine protected areas — an unlikely scenario. French Polynesia, however, made a splash at the Ocean Conference by declaring the entirety of its exclusive economic zone — all 1.9 million square miles of it — a marine protected area, making it the largest in the world.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, speaking on French TV channel France 2 about the need for marine conservation. Sebastien Bozon / AFP via Getty Images

Other declarations and pledges from the U.N. Ocean Conference linked oceans to climate change, plastic pollution, economic inequality, and the erosion of public trust in science. During daily plenaries, many delegates delivered statements about a healthy ocean’s role in mitigating global warming — it absorbs 90 percent of the excess heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels — and some called for nations to “emphasize the essential role of ocean-based solutions”

in their climate targets under the Paris Agreement, for example by protecting ocean ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs. Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho, the princess of Tonga, called for whales to be recognized as legal persons — part of a broader movement to establish inherent rights for natural entities.

Leaders from many countries also reiterated calls for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, including French president Emmanuel Macron, who called it “madness” to proceed with mineral extraction from the largely unexplored seafloor. Separately, nearly 100 national representatives released a statement reaffirming their commitment to crafting an “ambitious” U.N. plastics treaty during negotiations that are set to resume this August. And a letter signed by more than 100 scientists, Indigenous leaders, and environmental advocates called for the adoption of an “ocean protection principle” that prioritizes conservation over the “irresponsible and unrestrained pursuit of profit.”

One pledge that was not well received was French president Emmanuel Macron’s promise to “limit” bottom trawling, a type of commercial fishing that involves dragging a heavy net across the bottom of the ocean, kicking up debris and releasing carbon dioxide in the process. Environmental groups lambasted the plan for applying to only 4 percent of French waters — mostly in places where bottom trawling does not occur, according to the international nonprofit Oceana. “These announcements are more symbolic than impactful,” the group’s campaign director, Nicolas Fournier, said in a statement.

Other groups said the conference hadn’t placed enough emphasis on issues such as offshore oil and gas extraction and the rights of fishers. They noted with caution the nonbinding nature of many countries’ pledges and urged world leaders to “turn promises into action.”

“Ultimately, this summit produced a mere drop in the bucket of what we desperately need to protect the ocean — the lungs of our planet,” Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and National Geographic explorer, said in a statement.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Progress and frustration mark the UN’s third Ocean Conference on Jun 16, 2025.

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

There are Only Jewish-Inspired Warsaw Ghetto Pogroms for Palestinians

Paul Haeder — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 14:30:53 +0000

Note: In polite company or in public arenas or in schools and conferences, what have you, what is it to be anti-semitic according to the Israel Occupation Forces legions of facilitators like the ADL, AIPAC, and a list of tens of thousands of Jewish controlled non-profits and foundations?

Pro-Israeli circles often try to invent an anti-Semitic element behind every legitimate criticism of Israel.

But this is a cheap and increasingly exposed exploitation and manipulation of true anti-Semitism a morbid form of racism that ought to be denounced.

However the behaviors of the shipyard dogs of Zionism would have us believe that true anti-Semites are no longer those who hate Jews for being Jewish but rather those Zionist fanatics criticize for criticizing Israel for being criminal murderous and evil.

Well we are supposed to be living in a moral universe where no people should have more rights than the rest of mankind.

Proceeding from this timeless basic logic if criticizing Israel including questioning the moral legitimacy of Israel’s very existence amounts to anti-Semitism then humanity has a moral obligation to be anti-Semitic.

Opponents of Israel it must be proclaimed loudly don’t hate Israel because Israel is Jewish; they hate Israel because Israel happens to be a gigantic crime against humanity a virulent practitioner of ethnic cleansing and apartheid which is committed to the national destruction of another people the Palestinian people.

Yes anti-Judaism is wrong and should be rejected. However if Judaism especially Jewishness can not maintain a decent and peaceful existence outside the realm of racism apartheid and genocidal supremacy then people will have second thoughts about Judaism. — effing 2012 Op-Ed, The absurdity of equating opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism

No lover of ANY POTUS, especially Truman, but, that broken white psychosis can get it right once in a blue moon:

In 1948 President Harry Truman was infuriated by Jewish terrorism which was nothing in comparison to Israel’s terror these days angrily wrote in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt: “I fear very much that the Jews are being like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.” (Eleanor and Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman Eleanor Roosevelt, [Scribner/Drew, 2002] p.187.)

No fan of Stanley, as he calls the American University the most Jewish of institutions; however,

Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor who recently decided to leave Yale to go teach in Canada, recently explained on PBS’ Amanpour & Company why he thinks the Trump administration’s efforts are actually boosting antisemitic tropes:

This is reinforcing antisemitic tropes all across the political spectrum. … What are the most toxic antisemitic tropes? Well, “Jews control the institutions.” This is absolutely reinforcing this. Any young American is going to think: Remember what happened when they took down the world’s greatest university system on behalf of Jewish safety? And this will go down in history books — the history of this era will say that Jewish people were the sledgehammer for fascism. So if we don’t speak out, if we American Jews do not speak out against this, this will be a grim chapter in our history as Americans. It’s the first time in my life as an American that I have been fearful of our status as equal Americans — not because of the protests on campus, which, as I said, had a lot of Jewish students in them. But because we are suddenly at the center of U.S. politics. It’s never good to be in the crosshairs for us. And we are being used to destroy democracy.

So, this following little doozy would be put on the targets for IOF and others loving the Jewish Raping Murdering Starving Displacing Poisoning Polluting Occupied State of “Israel”/Palestine.

Over an effing billion of these Goy-ionists?

Days later, India launched Operation Sindoor, a wave of air strikes, describing them as “non-escalatory” in nature. Yes, that is the face of Judaism in that part of the world, where Benzion Mileikowsky works wonders on the Jewish Population where 84 percent plus want all Palestinians wiped from lower Greater Israel.

Many of the drones used in the operation were Israeli-made.

Among the systems deployed was the Harop, a “suicide drone” developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Designed to hover above a target area before diving for impact, the Harop carries a 10-kilogram warhead and can remain airborne for nearly six hours.

Since acquiring the Harop, India has increasingly relied on it.

Oshrit Birvadker, a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told The Times of Israel that India’s use of Harop drones reflects “Israel’s growing footprint in Indian defense.”

That’s fourth globally in arms sales, Jewish State of Murdering Maiming Raping Starving Poisoning Polluting Displacing Israel (sic).

Marching to get into the Katz’s and Benzion Mileikowsky’s heads? For fuck’s sake!

Chris Hedges: This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

Some bulwarks across international community would stop this. Fuck, it is a Jewish project across all DNA-lines.

Given Britain’s continued support for Israel, from refusing to implement a full arms embargo to continuing to send RAF spy flights over Gaza from the British base at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, Ahmed questions whether efforts have indeed been enough.

Israeli drones sprayed the Madleen with a white substance and an Israeli boat rammed the aid vessel before commandos boarded it, all because it contained things like baby food, medicine and prosthetics. Israel must defend itself from those things, apparently.

Is this a certain brand of Jewish Inspired, Supported, Financed death and murder cult? Is the question antisemitic?

Dirty dirty Sweden:

The Temporary Protection Directive (2001/55/EC) (commonly referred to as collective temporary protection) was activated in March 2022, granting Ukrainians seeking refuge temporary protection in EU countries, including Sweden. This directive provides residence permits, access to work, education, and limited social benefits without requiring individuals to go through the standard asylum process.

However, the practicalities of the Directive’s use differed significantly between countries. Sweden, despite its, until recent, reputation of being relatively liberal in its migration policies, has at times, lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbors in supporting Ukrainian displaced people. To illustrate this, it is useful to compare the Swedish approach to that of other Nordic states, as well as Poland.

Bizarrely, Israel’s act of piracy was described by the BBC as “diverting” the Madleen. In what universe was this a diversion? When you capture people in international waters who have committed no crime, you have not diverted them, you have kidnapped them. The crew of the Madleen are hostages, and not only that, Israel is already bragging about how it plans to abuse them.

The crew of 12, who the media describe as “activists”, comprised of journalists, politicians, and a doctor. They are to be taken to the port of Ashdod where they will be psychologically tortured by the IDF/IOF.

Israel Katz says he has given the order to make the crew watch footage of October 7th to show them “exactly who the terrorist organization they came to support and for whom they work is”. Presumably, they will only watch the killings carried out by Hamas and not the enactment of the Hannibal Directive killing hundreds of Jews by Jews.

Pointing out the non-Jews and Jews involved, is that antisemitic?

Remember this Jewish guy?

1992 document published by the US Department of Defense, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine (because it was co-written by Paul Wolfowitz, who then served as US undersecretary of defense for policy, before later returning as Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush).

The Pentagon’s Wolfowitz Doctrine stated (emphasis added):

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

The Trump administration’s foreign policy is still consistent with much of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Although Trump has de-prioritized Western Europe and the territory of the former USSR, he has dedicated significant resources to US military operations in East Asia and Southwest Asia (also known as the Middle East).

Yep, even CIA-drenched Wikipedia advances Ratner’s Judaism:

Ely Ratner, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs in Biden’s Pentagon, wrote approvingly on X/Twitter, “Rhetoric aside, on actual defense policy Secretary Hegseth’s speech was near total continuity with the previous administration”.

“That’s good, but we’ll need heightened urgency, attention, and resources to address the China challenge”, Ratner added.

This fellow for years advanced his Jewishness for sure Zyklon or Final Solution Blinken:

Biden’s neoconservative Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also maintained a hardline anti-China position.

In a speech in 2022, Blinken announced what was essentially a containment policy targeting China.

“We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing”, he said.

Blinken added, “The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before”.

Tucker Carlson has posted an extraordinary article on X that could potentially stop a war with Iran. As everyone knows, Carlson’s political views are admired by President Donald Trump who sees the former Fox commentator as a blunt, but fair-minded analyst who sees the world in similar terms as himself. And while there’s no evidence that the two men communicate regularly, a number of pundits believe that Carlson has influenced Trump’s thinking, particularly on matters related to foreign policy. That said, it is entirely possible that Trump will read Carlson’s June 4 post on Iran, and see that—once again—influential neocons are making every effort to drag the US into another bloody conflict in the Middle East to achieve Israel’s ambition of becoming the preeminent power in the region. Here’s Carlson:

Mark Levin was at the White House today, lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it. We need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, he and like-minded ideologues in Washington are now arguing. They’re just weeks away.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same people have been making the same claim since at least the 1990s. It’s a lie. In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb or has plans to. None. Anyone who claims otherwise is ignorant or dishonest. If the US government knew Iran was weeks from possessing a nuclear weapon, we’d be at war already.

Iran knows this, which is why they aren’t building one. Iran also knows it’s unwise to give up its weapons program entirely. Muammar Gaddafi tried that and wound up sodomized with a bayonet. As soon as Gaddafi disarmed, NATO killed him. Iran’s leaders saw that happen. They learned the obvious lesson.

So why is Mark Levin once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction? To distract you from the real goal, which is regime change — young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government. Virtually no one will say this out loud. America’s record of overthrowing foreign leaders is so embarrassingly counterproductive that regime change has become a synonym for disaster. Officially, no one supports it. So instead of telling the truth about their motives, they manufacture hysteria: “A country like Iran can never have the bomb! They’ll nuke Los Angeles! We have to act now!” Tucker Carlson (tuckercarlsonliveshowpodcast)

*****

Back to the death spiral of the Jewish Controlled Palestine:

In his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad writes:

Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

You can see his interview with El Akkad here.

You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

The post There are Only Jewish-Inspired Warsaw Ghetto Pogroms for Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Nation-Building Requires Taking up the Aim of Satisfying the Collective Interests of Society

Pauline Easton — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:35:09 +0000

It is noteworthy that those in the U.S. fighting for their rights against the oligarchs have as one of their slogans “No Kings” and here Carney is going in the opposite direction. It is another indication of the anti-people, anti-democratic aims of this government.

No matter what variant the ruling circles give of nation-building, of significance is that nation-building is not possible today without first settling the issue of where sovereignty is vested: in narrow private interests or in the people? And, along with this, who is “the people”? If “the people” is the ruling class, as those with positions of power and privilege claim, then that settles that — we have the status quo which is in crisis.

The goings on of the new government show by whom and how decisions are to be made and the kind of nation-building the ruling circles are promoting. Carney’s meetings with cabinet and the Liberal caucus, his Mandate Letter to his ministers and the Throne Speech all repeat a narrative for what is emerging from the Privy Council, from backroom deals with the Trump administration, from the initial stages of this five-week Parliamentary session, his tedious news conferences and talk show performances, and, most recently, the love-fest between the premiers in Saskatoon.

Carney’s own liberal arrogance gave us a taste of it when, following the meeting with premiers on March 21, he answered reporters with statements such as: “Look, I could explain to you later but trust me, I’m right,” and “We have discussed these matters among ourselves and we are very serious, not like Poilievre” who, he said, reduces everything to “a slogan” and “Things are much more complicated than that.” Apparently so complicated that he cannot lay it out to the polity.

According to Carney, the state determines society, rather than the ensemble of human relations revealing that which exists. Whatever is in his head, whatever the narrative given, is what exists. A good example of this is found in the Mandate Letter he provided his ministers on May 21. Under the subhead General Challenge, the Mandate Letter says: “At home, our longstanding weak productivity is straining government finances, making life less affordable for Canadian families, and threatening to undermine the sustainability of vital social programs on which Canadians rely.”

Sorting out the problem of weak productivity by making Canada’s economy the strongest in the G7 is one of the aims Carney has set for Canada.

Carney ignores the fact that modern production technique has gone beyond the capacity of today’s financiers, managers and owners of capital to handle. Productivity inevitably puts downward pressure on profits as more past work-time in machinery and material is used in relation to present work-time. You cannot squeeze capitalist profit out of a machine when every competitor has the same machine. Profit comes from active workers’ work-time.

Rather than facing up to the objective situation and finding real solutions and a new direction for the modern socialized economy that can use productivity for the benefit of the people and society, today’s financial gurus, managers and owners of capital are stuck in the old ways of doing things. They deny that the current problems with the economy are the consequence of doing just that since the mid-80s when this current neo-liberal anti-social offensive was first launched by the neo-Conservatives Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and, in Canada, Brian Mulroney. What is occurring today is the result of the recurring crises that approach generated, revealing that the necessity for change is even more urgent today than ever before.

Whatever Carney and his cronies do today promises more of the same as has been done in the past. Forty years ago free trade with the United States and then Mexico was presented as the panacea for every economic woe affecting the monopoly capitalist class in power. It led to nation-wrecking including the smashing of unions, increased state attacks on workers fighting for their rights, criminalization of Canadian citizens and residents from all walks of life expressing their right to conscience and of Indigenous Peoples fighting for their right to be and not permitting the Anglo-colonial state to determine who they are, increased war preparations, support for neo-Nazis in Ukraine, genocide against the Palestinians and much more.

As has taken place for the past 40 years, out of frustration, the Carney government and its provincial counterparts have already made it clear that they will step up their demands for concessions from the working class, stealing, gambling, pillaging the public purse, and engaging in predatory wars.

Despite all the talk about national unity and fast-tracking nation-building projects, the ruling class is incapable of nation-building. It is up to the working class to stop the bourgeoisie from squandering the national resources, the independence of the country and its well-being. Under the banner of using the resources of the country to benefit the collective interests of the people, the working class can mobilize and rally the people to oppose what the bourgeoisie is talking about – that everybody should create an environment for the success of businesses in the global market. It also arouses the people to take into their own hands what belongs to them and to create a society which will favour them.

The program the working class takes up must be set by taking up the needs of society at this particular time. The working class rejects narratives in somebody’s head and the ridiculous idea that gods come out of the machinery as in a theatre to rescue the people from the calamities in which their society is mired. Far from needing the likes of gods like Mark Carney, Canadian society needs an aim. The Canadian people need an aim which can be easily understood and appreciated by everyone. This aim can only be the aim of nation-building.

The main content of this project is that the working class must constitute the nation. In other words, the aim of the working class must become the aim of the nation, just as the bourgeoisie in its ascendancy put its aim, the aim of defending individual interest, private property, as the aim of the nation and even subordinated the nation to this aim. This aim is now long-since exhausted. Oligopolies operate as cartels and coalitions on a supranational basis. They have usurped the powers of the nation-states established to end the English Civil War and the foreign wars in which England and France and countries of Old Europe were mired for 100 years. Societies established to defend private property and recognize rights of the propertied classes on that basis cannot live to see another day because the properties classes themselves seize the land, resources and sovereignty of entire countries by unleashing wars of destruction on any country which refuses to submit to their predatory demands. The banks established to store the gold of sovereign nations now steal their gold to further narrow private interests. Where is the rule of law which defends property today? It no longer exists. Just as the narrow private interests have usurped the powers of the state within individual countries, so too, the International Rule of Law established by the United Nations in the name of “We the Peoples” of the United Nations has shown itself incapable of defending any peoples fighting for their right to be.

The time has now come for the working class to constitute the nation, establishing its own aim as the aim of the nation. In other words, the working class itself must take up the question of nation-building. It must lead the broad masses of the people to take up this aim as well. It is not possible for the working class to channel all its resources at this time without taking up the aim of satisfying the collective interests of society. This is what nation-building is all about.

Carney’s nation-building is a fraud. In Canada, nation-building can mean only one thing: that the working class must provide society with a modern constitution, with a modern political mechanism, with a change in the direction of the economy and with independence.

Let the battle for the working class to constitute the nation, in its own image, start in earnest. Without this battle, grave dangers lie ahead.

First published at TML in the News.

The post Nation-Building Requires Taking up the Aim of Satisfying the Collective Interests of Society first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pauline Easton.

The Killing of Israeli Embassy Staffers

Binoy Kampmark — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:54:41 +0000

Here was another chance – at least as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it – of threading one set of events with another. It’s all part of the Israeli security state’s playbook: any killing of Jews or its citizens, wherever they might be, will have a causal link to rabid, drooling antisemitism. To protest ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, dispossession, starvation as a tool of war, and the conscious infliction of humanitarian catastrophe on a population is equivalent to believing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These accusations and charges are seen as blood libels on the Jewish people, rather than rebukes and condemnation of the Israeli State and its policies.

The killing of Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum located in downtown Washington, D.C. was such a chance. According to Yechiel Leitner, the Israeli ambassador to the US, the couple were to be engaged.

The suspect gunman, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested at the scene and taken away shouting: “Free Palestine!” In court documents submitted by the FBI, the suspect, in handing himself to the officers, stated his rationale for the shootings: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.” He also professed admiration for US Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in February 2024 declaring that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Rodriguez has been charged by the US attorney’s office in Washington with two counts of first-degree murder.

A grave, reflective response might have been in order. But the Netanyahu government has always been on the hunt for the political justification, and the political expedient. Given Netanyahu’s own political travails, be they corruption charges and his own unpopularity, this quest has become habitual. So it came to pass that Milgrim and Lischinsky could become a convenient platform to attack countries allied to Israel yet taking issue with the levelling and starving of Gaza.

The mood was set during a press conference given by Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on May 21. The slaying of Milgrim and Lischinsky was “the direct result of toxic antisemitic incitement against Israel and Jews around the world that has been going on since the October 7 massacre.” Israel’s missions and representatives across the globe had become “targets of antisemitic terrorism that has crossed all red lines.”

In suggesting “a direct line connecting antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement to this murder”, Sa’ar accused “leaders and officials of many countries and international organizations, especially from Europe”, for being central instigators. They had resorted to “modern blood libels” in accusing Israel of “genocide, crimes against humanity and murdering babies”.

While not expressly mentioning them, the Foreign Minister was clearly referring to France, Britain and Canada and their joint statement of May 19 warning about the murderous implications of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The statement affirmed the trio’s opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was condemned as wholly inadequate, while denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip was “unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law.” The three countries further condemned “the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”

The statement went on to warn that, were Israel not to cease pursuing such “egregious actions”, cease the ongoing military operation, and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid, “we will take further concrete actions in response.”

On May 20, in his address to the House of Commons, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy noted the “abominable” situation of threatened “starvation hanging over hundreds of thousands of civilians.” He grimly noted the words of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had spoken of “cleansing Gaza” and “destroying what’s left”, with the intention of relocating Palestinians to third countries. Such measures, for Lammy, were “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counter-productive.”

In light of such developments, negotiations with Israel over a new free trade agreement were to be suspended. A further three individuals and four entities involved in Israel’s illegal settler program in the West Bank were also to be sanctioned.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry was dismissive of the British position, calling the sanctions “regrettable”. “If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy – that is its own prerogative.”

It was Netanyahu, however, who pulled out all the stops. In a video address, he noted the words uttered by Rodriquez as he was taken away: “Free Palestine.” Finding such a statement obscene, he recalled that it was “the same chant we heard on October 7 [2023]”, when “thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza”, proceeding to behead men, rape women and burn babies. To take “Free Palestine” as a serious proposition was “today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler.’” It was a “simple truth” that had evaded “the leaders of France, Britain, Canada and others.” In their proposals for establishing a Palestinian state, they were rewarding “these murderers with the ultimate price.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney were roundly condemned for being on “the wrong side of justice”, “humanity” and “history”. They had been praised by “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”. The PM’s objective was simple: avoiding the establishment of any Palestinian state, as it was bound to be vulnerable to seizure by “radicals”. It was axiomatic that such an entity would wish for the destruction of the Jewish state. The picture becomes complete: Israel’s operations, totally justified on national security grounds; critics, abominated as hateful antisemites; the Palestinians, radicals current or in embryo needing to be rubbed out.

No one doubts that the reserves of antisemitism run deep, clouded by miasmic, millennial hatreds. Few can also doubt that a dislike of policies driven by ethno-religious fanaticism contemptuous of human rights is a valid ground of protest. That this should end up in killings of individuals attending an event about humanitarian aid that would have otherwise appalled Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, et al., is another, disturbing irony. Fanaticism diminishes the horizon, leaving human beings bare, and hollow, and naked. And that baring is currently underway with remorseless intensity in Gaza.

The post The Killing of Israeli Embassy Staffers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Ignore Starmer’s Theatrics. Gaza’s Trail of Blood Leads Straight to His Door

Jonathan Cook — Fri, 23 May 2025 14:50:51 +0000

Western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their ‘criticisms’ of the genocide – just as they earlier coordinated on their support for the slaughter

After 19 months of being presented with dissembling accounts of Gaza from their governments, western publics are now being served up a different – but equally deceitful – narrative.

With the finishing line in sight for Israel’s programme of genocidal ethnic cleansing, the West’s Gaza script is being hastily rewritten. But make no mistake: it is the same web of self-serving lies.

As if under the direction of a hidden conductor, Britain, France and Canada – key US allies – erupted this week into a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

They called Israel’s plans to level the last fragments of Gaza still standing “disproportionate”, while Israel’s intensification of its months-long starvation of more than two million Palestinian civilians was “intolerable”.

The change of tone was preceded, as I noted in these pages last week, by new, harsher language against Israel from the western press corps.

The establishment media’s narrative had to shift first, so that the sudden outpouring of moral and political concern at Gaza’s suffering from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – after more than a year and a half of indifference – did not appear too abrupt, or too strange.

They are acting as if some corner has been turned in Israel’s genocide. But genocides don’t have corners. They just progress relentlessly until stopped.

The media and politicians are carefully managing any cognitive dissonance for their publics.

But the deeper reality is that western capitals are still coordinating with Israel and the US on their “criticisms” of Israel’s genocide in Gaza – just as they earlier coordinated their support for it.

As much was conceded by a senior Israeli official to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Referring to the sudden change of tone, he said: “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels, and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The handwringing is just another bit of stagecraft, little different from the earlier mix of silence and talk about Israel’s “right to defend itself”. And it is to the same purpose: to buy Israel time to “finish the job” – that is, to complete its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The West is still promoting phoney “debates”, entirely confected by Israel, about whether Hamas is stealing aid, what constitutes sufficient aid, and how that aid should be delivered.

It is all meant as noise, to distract us from the only pertinent issue: that Israel is committing genocide by slaughtering and starving Gaza’s population, as the West has aided and abetted that genocide.

PR exercise

With stocks of food completely exhausted by Israel’s blockade, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday that some 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours without immediate aid reaching them.

The longer-term prognosis is bleaker still.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to let in a trickle of aid, releasing five trucks, some containing baby formula, from the thousands of vehicles Israel has held up at entry points for nearly three months. That was less than one percent of the number of trucks experts say must enter daily just to keep deadly starvation at bay.

On Tuesday, as the clamour grew, the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza reportedly climbed to nearly 100 – or less than a fifth of the bare minimum. None of the aid was reported to have reached the enclave’s population by the time of writing.

Netanyahu was clear to the Israeli public – most of whom appear enthusiastic for the engineered starvation to continue – that he was not doing this out of any humanitarian impulse.

This was purely a public relations exercise to hold western capitals in check, he said. The goal was to ease the demands on these leaders from their own publics to penalise Israel and stop the continuing slaughter of Gaza’s population.

Or as Netanyahu put it: “Our best friends worldwide, the most pro-Israel senators [in the US] … they tell us they’re providing all the aid, weapons, support and protection in the UN Security Council, but they can’t support images of mass hunger.”

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was even clearer: “On our way to destroying Hamas, we are destroying everything that’s left of the [Gaza] Strip.” He also spoke of “cleansing” the enclave.

‘Back to the Stone Age’

Western publics have been watching this destruction unfold for the past 19 months – or at least they’ve seen partial snapshots, when the West’s establishment media has bothered to report on the slaughter.

Israel has systematically eradicated everything necessary for the survival of Gaza’s people: their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries, water systems and community kitchens.

Israel has finally implemented what it had been threatening for 20 years to do to the Palestinian people if they refused to be ethnically cleansed from their homeland. It has sent them “back to the Stone Age”.

A survey of the world’s leading genocide scholars published last week by the Dutch newspaper NRC found that all conclusively agreed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Most think the genocide has reached its final stages.

This week, Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s main centrist party and a former deputy head of the Israeli military, expressed the same sentiments in more graphic form. He accused the government of “killing babies as a hobby”. Predictably, Netanyahu accused Golan of “antisemitism”.

The joint statement from Starmer, Macron and Carney was far tamer, of course – and was greeted by Netanyahu with a relatively muted response that the three leaders were giving Hamas a “huge prize”.

Their statement noted: “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.” Presumably, until now, they have viewed the hellscape endured by Gaza’s Palestinians for a year and a half as “tolerable”.

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary who in the midst of the genocide was happy to be photographed shaking hands with Netanyahu, opined in parliament this week that Gaza was facing a “dark new phase”.

That’s a convenient interpretation for him. In truth, it’s been midnight in Gaza for a very long time.

A senior European diplomatic source involved in the discussions between the three leaders told the BBC that their new tone reflected a “real sense of growing political anger at the humanitarian situation, of a line being crossed, and of this Israeli government appearing to act with impunity”.

This should serve as a reminder that until now, western capitals were fine with all the other lines crossed by Israel, including its destruction of most of Gaza’s homes; its eradication of Gaza’s hospitals and other essential humanitarian infrastructure; its herding of Palestinian civilians into “safe” zones, only to bomb them there; its slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of children; and its active starvation of a population of more than two million.

Played for fools

The three western leaders are now threatening to take “further concrete actions” against Israel, including what they term “targeted sanctions”.

If that sounds positive, think again. The European Union and Britain have dithered for decades about whether and how to label goods imported from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The existence of these ever-expanding settlements, built on stolen Palestinian territory and blocking the creation of a Palestinian state, is a war crime; no country should be aiding them.

In 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that it must be made clear to European consumers which products come from Israel and which from the settlements.

In all that time, European officials never considered a ban on products from the settlements, let alone “targeted sanctions” on Israel, even though the illegality of the settlements is unambiguous. In fact, officials have readily smeared those calling for boycotts and sanctions against Israel as “Jew haters” and “antisemites”.

The truth is that western leaders and establishment media are playing us for fools once again, just as they have been for the past 19 months.

“Further concrete actions” suggest that there are already concrete actions imposed on Israel. That’s the same Israel that recently finished second in the Eurovision Song Contest. Protesters who call for Israel to be excluded from the competition – as Russia has been for invading Ukraine – are smeared and denounced.

When western leaders can’t even impose a meaningful symbolic penalty on Israel, why should we believe they are capable of taking substantive action against it?

No will for action

On Tuesday, it became clearer what the UK meant by “concrete actions”. The Israeli ambassador was called in for what we were told was a dressing down. She must be quaking.

And Britain suspended – that is, delayed – negotiations on a new free trade agreement, a proposed expansion of Britain’s already extensive trading ties with Israel. Those talks can doubtless wait a few months.

Meanwhile, 17 European Union members out of 27 voted to review the legal basis of the EU–Israel Association Agreement – providing Israel with special trading status – though a very unlikely consensus would be needed to actually revoke it.

Such a review to see if Israel is showing “respect for human rights and democratic principles” is simple time-wasting. Investigations last year showed it was committing widespread atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Speaking to the British parliament, Lammy said: “The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”

There are plenty of far more serious “concrete actions” that Britain and other western capitals could take, and could have taken many months ago.

A flavour was provided by Britain and the EU on Tuesday when they announced sweeping additional sanctions on Russia – not for committing a genocide, but for hesitating over a ceasefire with Ukraine.

Ultimately, the West wants to punish Moscow for refusing to return the territories in Ukraine that it occupies – something western powers have never meaningfully required of Israel, even though Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories for decades.

The new sanctions on Russia target entities supporting its military efforts and energy exports – on top of existing severe economic sanctions and an oil embargo. Nothing even vaguely comparable is being proposed for Israel.

The UK and Europe could have stopped providing Israel with the weapons to butcher Palestinian children in Gaza. Back in September, Starmer promised to cut arms sales to Israel by around eight percent – but his government actually sent more weapons to arm Israel’s genocide in the three months that followed than the Tories did in the entire period between 2020 and 2023.

Britain could also stop transporting other countries’ weapons and carrying out surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. Flight tracking information showed that on one night this week, the UK sent a military transport plane, which can carry weapons and soldiers, from a Royal Air Force base on Cyprus to Tel Aviv, and then dispatched a spy plane over Gaza to collect intelligence to assist Israel in its slaughter.

Britain could, of course, take the “concrete action” of recognising the state of Palestine, as Ireland and Spain have already done – and it could do so at a moment’s notice.

The UK could impose sanctions on Israeli government ministers. It could declare its readiness to enforce Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, in line with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, if he visits Britain. And it could deny Israel access to sporting events, turning it into a pariah state, as was done to Russia.

It could announce that any Britons returning from military service in Gaza risk arrest and prosecution for war crimes.

And of course, the UK could impose sweeping economic sanctions on Israel, again as was done to Russia.

All of these “concrete actions”, and more, could be easily implemented. The truth is there is no political will to do it. There is simply a desire for better public relations, for putting a better gloss on Britain’s complicity in a genocide that can no longer be hidden.

Wolf exposed

The problem for the West is that Israel now stands stripped of the lamb’s clothing in which it has been adorned by western capitals for decades.

Israel is all too evidently a predatory wolf. Its brutal, colonial behaviours towards the Palestinian people are fully on show. There is no hiding place.

This is why Netanyahu and western leaders are now engaged in an increasingly difficult tango. The colonial, apartheid, genocidal project of Israel – the West’s militarised client-bully in the oil-rich Middle East – needs to be protected.

Until now, that had involved western leaders like Starmer deflecting criticism of Israel’s crimes, as well as British complicity. It involved endlessly and mindlessly reciting Israel’s “right to defend itself”, and the need to “eliminate Hamas”.

But the endgame of Israel’s genocide involves starving two million people to death – or forcing them out of Gaza, whichever comes first. Neither is compatible with the goals western politicians have been selling us.

So the new narrative must accentuate Netanyahu’s personal responsibility for the carnage – as though the genocide is not the logical endpoint of everything Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for many decades.

Most Israelis are on board, too, with the genocide. The only meaningful voices of dissent are from the families of the Israeli hostages – and then chiefly because of the danger posed to their loved ones by Israel’s assault.

The aim of Starmer, Macron and Carney is to craft a new narrative, in which they claim to have only belatedly realised that Netanyahu has “gone too far” and that he needs to be reined in. They can then gradually up the noise against the Israeli prime minister, lobby Israel to change tack, and, when it resists or demurs, be seen to press Washington for “concrete action”.

The new narrative, unlike the worn-thin old one, can be spun out for yet more weeks or months – which may be just long enough to get the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza either over the finish line, or near enough as to make no difference.

That is the hope – yes, hope – in western capitals.

Blood on their hands

Starmer, Macron and Carney’s new make-believe narrative has several advantages. It washes Gaza’s blood from their hands. They were deceived. They were too charitable. Vital domestic struggles against antisemitism distracted them.

It lays the blame squarely at the feet of one man: Netanyahu.

Without him, a violent, highly militarised, apartheid state of Israel can continue as before, as though the genocide was an unfortunate misstep in Israel’s otherwise unblemished record.

New supposed “terror” threats – from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran – can be hyped to draw us back into cheerleading narratives about a plucky western outpost of civilisation defending us from barbarians in the East.

The new narrative does not even require that Netanyahu face justice.

As news emerges of the true extent of the atrocities and death toll, a faux-remorseful Netanyahu can placate the West with revived talk of a two-state solution – a solution whose realisation has been avoided for decades and can continue to be avoided for decades more.

We will be subjected to yet more years of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” finally being about to turn a corner.

Even were a chastened Netanyahu forced to step down, he would pass the baton to one of the other Jewish supremacist, genocidal monsters waiting in the wings.

After Gaza’s destruction, the crushing of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem will simply have to return to an earlier, slower pace – one that has allowed it to be kept off the western public’s radar for 58 years.

Will it really work out like this? Only in the imaginations of western elites. In truth, burying nearly two years of a genocide all too visible to large swaths of western publics will be a far trickier task.

Too many people in Europe and the US have had their eyes opened over the past 19 months. They cannot unsee what has been live-streamed to them, or ignore what it says about their own political and media classes.

Starmer and co will continue vigorously distancing themselves from the genocide in Gaza, but there will be no escape. Whatever they say or do, the trail of blood leads straight back to their door.

First published at the Middle East Eye.

The post Ignore Starmer’s Theatrics. Gaza’s Trail of Blood Leads Straight to His Door first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

The Nakba Never Ended

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East — Mon, 19 May 2025 14:45:17 +0000

May 15 marked 77 years since the Nakba, which refers to the expulsion, destruction, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians associated with the creation of Israel in 1948. While we advocate for the colonization of Palestine to be recognized by our leaders and institutions in Canada as an injustice, we are also witnessing the Nakba continue — and even accelerate — in Israel’s genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank.

In Canada, even acknowledging the existence of the 1948 Nakba continues to be rejected. Nakba denial is a form of genocide denial and a mechanism for denying the Palestinian right of return. It is also a key element of anti-Palestinian racism, something that is consistently perpetuated by the Canadian media. In 2023, the Canadian government even boycotted the first ever event held by the United Nations to commemorate the Nakba, sending a message to Palestinians that their ongoing suffering is uniquely undeserving of recognition.

What makes Nakba denial especially absurd in 2025 is that Israel is currently causing a greater scale of dispossession in Gaza than in 1948, with at least 1.9 million Palestinians forcibly displaced from their homes. This cruelty is not an accident, but by design, as one step in a deliberate plan by Israel to permanently expel Palestinians from Gaza.

When Donald Trump announced his plan for the United States to take over Gaza and permanently expel the population, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu praised it — and told lawmakers that forcing Palestinians out of Gaza was the “inevitable outcome” of his military strategy. They are blocking aid from entering Gaza, deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war — a practice strictly prohibited under international law and codified as a war crime — with the genocidal intent of ensuring that Palestinians die, if not by bomb, then by hunger. This is a way of coercing those who survive to leave Palestine.

In a chilling message to world leaders, UN experts recently warned that we are at a “moral crossroads” in Gaza, and that states “must act now to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Similarly, this week the UN Relief Chief challenged states: “what more evidence do you need? Will you act now – decisively – to prevent genocide in Gaza and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”

How will Canada respond to this call? Prime Minister Carney has said that “President Trump’s proposed forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza is deeply disturbing,” but he has taken no concrete steps to address it. No sanctions, no pressure, nothing that could ever hope to stop the genocide that is being openly plotted by US and Israeli leaders.

Last year, CJPME submitted policy recommendations outlining how Canada can acknowledge and rectify the historical tragedy of the Nakba. Some of our recommendations included:

Canada must officially recognize the Nakba and our role in the partition of the Mandate of Palestine.
Canada must recognize Nakba denial as a form of anti-Palestinian racism and as having a direct impact on Canadians’ right to free speech and academic freedom.
The Nakba is ongoing and Canada must play a role in halting it and reversing its consequences. To halt it, Canada must pressure Israel to change course by implementing boycotts, divestments, and sanctions.
Canada must insist upon the right to return, restitution, and compensation for Palestine refugees, consistent with UNGA Resolution 194 and general principles of international human rights law and refugee law, and acknowledge that these rights are distinct, they are not mutually exclusive and must not be pitted against one another.
Canada must play a role in demanding accountability and reparations for the Nakba (past and ongoing) by calling on the international community to set up an International Criminal Tribunal for Palestine, and by providing support to the International Criminal Court’s open investigation into war crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Acknowledging the Nakba is not just about the past, it is about the present and the future — and addressing Canada’s complicity in an ongoing genocide. As Israel advances the Nakba in Gaza while annexing the West Bank, what will Canada’s legacy be?

The post The Nakba Never Ended first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

Why the Wall of Silence on the Genocide of Gazans is Finally Starting to Crack

Jonathan Cook — Sat, 17 May 2025 12:56:15 +0000

As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.

Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.

Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.

The British establishment’s financial daily, the Financial Times, was first to break ranks last week to condemn “the West’s shameful silence” in the face of Israel’s murderous assault on the tiny enclave.

In an editorial – effectively the paper’s voice – the FT accused the United States and Europe of being increasingly “complicit” as Israel made Gaza “uninhabitable”, an allusion to genocide, and noted that the goal was to “drive Palestinians from their land”, an allusion to ethnic cleansing.

Of course, both of these grave crimes by Israel have been evidently true not only since Hamas’ violent, single-day breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023, but for decades.

So parlous is the state of western reporting, from a media no less complicit than the governments berated by the FT, that we need to seize on any small signs of progress.

Next, the Economist chimed in, warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers were driven by a “dream of emptying Gaza and rebuilding Jewish settlements there”.

At the weekend, the Independent decided the “deafening silence on Gaza” had to end. It was “time for the world to wake up to what is happening and to demand an end to the suffering of the Palestinians trapped in the enclave.”

Actually much of the world woke up many, many months ago. It has been the western press corps and western politicians slumbering through the past 19 months of genocide.

Then on Monday, the supposedly liberal Guardian voiced in its own editorial a fear that Israel is committing “genocide”, though it only dared do so by framing the accusation as a question.

It wrote of Israel: “Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”

The paper could more properly have asked a different question: Why have Israel’s western allies – as well as media like the Guardian and FT – waited 19 months to speak up against the horror?

And, predictably bringing up the rear, was the BBC. On Wednesday, the BBC Radio’s PM programme chose to give top billing to testimony from Tom Fletcher, the United Nation’s humanitarian affairs chief, to the Security Council. Presenter Evan Davis said the BBC had decided to “do something a little unusual”.

Unusual indeed. It played Fletcher’s speech in full – all 12 and a half minutes of it. That included Fletcher’s comment: “For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now? Will you act – decisively – to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?”

We had gone in less than a week from the word “genocide” being taboo in relation to Gaza to it becoming almost mainstream.

Growing cracks

Cracks are evident in the British parliament too. Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP and life-long Israel supporter, stood up from the back benches to admit he had been wrong about Israel, and condemned it “for what it is doing to the Palestinian people”.

He was one of more than a dozen Tory MPs and peers in the House of Lords, all formerly staunch defenders of Israel, who urged British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to immediately recognise a Palestinian state.

Their move followed an open letter published by 36 members of the Board of Deputies, a 300-member body that claims to represent British Jews, dissenting from its continuing support for the slaughter. The letter warned: “Israel’s soul is being ripped out.”

Pritchard told fellow MPs it was time to “stand up for humanity, for us being on the right side of history, for having the moral courage to lead.”

Sadly, there is no sign of that yet. Research published last week, based on Israeli tax authority data, showed Starmer’s government has been lying even about the highly limited restrictions on arms sales to Israel it claimed to have imposed last year.

Despite an ostensible ban on shipments of weapons that could be used in Gaza, Britain has covertly exported more than 8,500 separate munitions to Israel since the ban.

This week more details emerged. According to figures published by The National, the current government exported more weapons to Israel in the final three months of last year, after the ban came into effect, than the previous Conservative government did through the whole of 2020 to 2023.

So shameful is the UK’s support for Israel in the midst of what the International Court of Justice – the World Court – has described as a “plausible genocide” that Starmer’s government needs to pretend it is doing something, even as it actually continues to arm that genocide.

More than 40 MPs wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy last week calling for him to respond to allegations that he had misled the public and parliament. “The public deserves to know the full scale of the UK’s complicity in crimes against humanity,” they wrote.

There are growing rumblings elsewhere. This week France’s President Emmanuel Macron called Israel’s complete blockade on aid into Gaza “shameful and unacceptable”. He added: “My job is to do everything I can to make it stop.”

“Everything” seemed to amount to nothing more than mooting possible economic sanctions.

Still, the rhetorical shift was striking. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, similarly denounced the blockade, calling it “unjustifiable”. She added: “I have always recalled the urgency of finding a way to end the hostilities and respect international law and international humanitarian law.”

“International law”? Where has that been for the past 19 months?

There was a similar change of priorities across the Atlantic. Democratic Senator Chris van Hollen, for example, recently dared to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “ethnic cleansing”.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, a bellwether of the Beltway consensus, gave Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, an unusually tough grilling. Amanpour all but accused her of lying about Israel starving children.

Meanwhile, Josep Borrell, the recently departed head of European Union foreign policy, broke another taboo last week by directly accusing Israel of preparing a genocide in Gaza.

“Seldom have I heard the leader of a state so clearly outline a plan that fits the legal definition of genocide,” he said, adding: “We’re facing the largest ethnic cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War.”

Borrell, of course, has no influence over EU policy at this point.

A death camp

This is all painfully slow progress, but it does suggest that a tipping point may be near.

If so, there are several reasons. One – the most evident in the mix – is US President Donald Trump.

It was easier for the Guardian, the FT and old-school Tory MPs to watch the extermination of Gaza’s Palestinians in silence when it was kindly Uncle Joe Biden and the US military industrial complex behind it.

Unlike his predecessor, Trump too often forgets the bit where he is supposed to put a gloss on Israeli crimes, or distance the US from them, even as Washington ships the weapons to carry out those crimes.

But also, there are plenty of indications that Trump – with his constant craving to be seen as the top dog – is increasingly annoyed at being publicly outfoxed by Netanyahu.

This week, as Trump headed to the Middle East, his administration secured the release of Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, the last living US citizen in captivity in Gaza, by bypassing Israel and negotiating directly with Hamas.

In his comments on the release, Trump insisted it was time to “put an end to this very brutal war” – a remark he had very obviously not coordinated with Netanyahu.

Notably, Israel is not on Trump’s Middle East schedule.

Right now seems a relatively safe moment to adopt a more critical stance towards Israel, as presumably the FT and Guardian appreciate.

Then there is the fact that Israel’s genocide is reaching its endpoint. No food, water or medicines have entered Gaza for more than two months. Everyone is malnourished. It is unclear, given Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system, how many have already died from hunger.

But the pictures of skin-and-bones children emerging from Gaza are uncomfortably reminiscent of 80-year-old images of skeletal Jewish children imprisoned in Nazi camps.

It is a reminder that Gaza – strictly blockaded by Israel for 16 years before Hamas’ 7 October 2023 breakout – has been transformed over the past 19 months from a concentration camp into a death camp.

Parts of the media and political class know mass death in Gaza cannot be obscured for much longer, not even after Israel has barred foreign journalists from the enclave and murdered most of the Palestinian journalists trying to record the genocide.

Cynical political and media actors are trying to get in their excuses before it is too late to show remorse.

The ‘Gaza war’ myth

And finally there is the fact that Israel has declared its readiness to take hands-on responsibility for the extermination in Gaza by, in its words, “capturing” the tiny territory.

The long-anticipated “day after” looks like it is about to arrive.

For 20 years, Israel and western capitals have conspired in the lie that Gaza’s occupation ended in 2005, when Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, pulled out a few thousand Jewish settlers and withdrew Israeli soldiers to a highly fortified perimeter encaging the enclave.

In a ruling last year, the World Court gave this claim short shrift, emphasising that Gaza, as well as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, had never stopped being under Israeli occupation, and that the occupation must end immediately.

The truth is that, even before the 2023 Hamas attacks, Israel had been besieging Gaza by land, sea and air for many, many years. Nothing – people or trade – went in or out without the Israeli military’s say-so.

Israeli officials instituted a secret policy of putting the population there on a strict “diet” – a war crime then as now – one that ensured most of Gaza’s young became progressively more malnourished.

Drones whined constantly overhead, as they do now, watching the population from the skies 24 hours a day and occasionally raining down death. Fishermen were shot and their boats sunk for trying to fish their own waters. Farmers’ crops were destroyed by herbicides sprayed from Israeli planes.

And when the mood took it, Israel sent in fighter jets to bomb the enclave or sent soldiers in on military operations, killing hundreds of civilians at a time.

When Palestinians in Gaza went out week after week to stage protests close to the perimeter fence of their concentration camp, Israeli snipers shot them, killing some 200 and crippling many thousands more.

Yet, despite all this, Israel and western capitals insisted on the story that Hamas “ruled” Gaza, and that it alone was responsible for what went on there.

That fiction was very important to the western powers. It allowed Israel to evade accountability for the crimes against humanity committed in Gaza over the past two decades – and it allowed the West to avoid complicity charges for arming the criminals.

Instead, the political and media class perpetuated the myth that Israel was engaged in a “conflict” with Hamas – as well as intermittent “wars” in Gaza – even as Israel’s own military termed its operations to destroy whole neighbourhoods and kill their residents “mowing the lawn”.

Israel, of course, viewed Gaza as its lawn to mow. And that is precisely because it never stopped occupying the enclave.

Even today western media outlets collude in the fiction that Gaza is free from Israeli occupation by casting the slaughter there – and the starvation of the population – as a “war”.

Loss of cover story

But the “day after” – signalled by Israel’s promised “capture” and “reoccupation” of Gaza – brings a conundrum for Israel and its western sponsors.

Till now Israel’s every atrocity has been justified by Hamas’ violent breakout on 7 October 2023.

Israel and its supporters have insisted that Hamas must return the Israelis it took captive before there can be some undefined “peace”. At the same time, Israel has also maintained that Gaza must be destroyed at all costs to root out Hamas and eliminate it.

These two goals never looked consistent – not least because the more Palestinian civilians Israel killed “rooting out” Hamas, the more young men Hamas recruited seeking vengeance.

The constant stream of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli leaders made clear that they believed there were no civilians in Gaza – no “uninvolved” – and that the enclave should be levelled and the population treated like “human animals”, punished with “no food, water or fuel”.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reiterated that approach last week, vowing that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and that its people would be ethnically cleansed – or, as he put it, forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”.

Israeli officials have echoed him, threatening to “flatten” Gaza if the hostages are not released. But in truth, the captives held by Hamas are just a convenient pretext.

Smotrich was more honest in observing that the hostages’ release was “not the most important thing”. His view is apparently shared by the Israeli military, which has reportedly put that aim last in a list of six “war” objectives.

More important to the military are “operational control” of Gaza, “demilitarization of the territory” and “concentration and movement of the population”.

With Israel about to be indisputably, visibly in direct charge of Gaza again – with the cover stories stripped away of a “war”, of the need to eliminate of Hamas, of civilian casualties as “collateral damage” – Israel’s responsibility for the genocide will be incontestable too, as will the West’s active collusion.

That was why more than 250 former officials with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency – including three of its former heads – signed a letter this week decrying Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in early March and its return to “war”.

The letter called Israel’s official objectives “unattainable”.

Similarly, the Israeli media reports large numbers of Israel’s military reservists are no longer showing up when called for a return to duty in Gaza.

Ethnic cleansing

Israel’s western patrons must now grapple with Israel’s “plan” for the ruined territory. Its outline has been coming more sharply into focus in recent days.

In January Israel formally outlawed the United Nations refugee agency UNRWA that feeds and cares for the large proportion of the Palestinian population driven off their historic lands by Israel in earlier phases of its decades-long colonisation of historic Palestine.

Gaza is packed with such refugees – the outcome of Israel’s biggest ethnic cleansing programme in 1948, at its creation as a “Jewish state”.

Removing UNRWA had been a long-held ambition, a move by Israel designed to help rid it of the yoke of aid agencies that have been caring for Palestinians – and thereby helping them to resist Israel’s efforts at ethnic cleansing – as well as monitoring Israel’s adherence, or rather lack of it, to international law.

For the ethnic cleansing and genocide programmes in Gaza to be completed, Israel has needed to produce an alternative system to UNRWA’s.

Last week, it approved a scheme in which it intends to use private contractors, not the UN, to deliver small quantities of food and water to Palestinians. Israel will allow in 60 trucks a day – barely a tenth of the absolute minimum required, according to the UN.

There are several catches. To stand any hope of qualifying for this very limited aid, Palestinians will need to collect it from military distribution points located in a small area at the southern tip of the Gaza strip.

In other words, some two million Palestinians will have to crowd into a location that has no chance of accommodating them all, and even then will have only a tenth of the aid they need.

They will have to relocate too without any guarantee from Israel that it won’t continue bombing the “humanitarian zones” they have been herded into.

These military distribution zones just so happen to be right next to Gaza’s sole, short border with Egypt – exactly where Israel has been seeking to drive the Palestinians over the past 19 months in the hope of forcing Egypt to open the border so the people of Gaza can be ethnically cleansed into Sinai.

Under Israel’s scheme, Palestinians will be screened in these military hubs using biometric data before they stand any hope of receiving minimum calorie-controlled handouts of food.

Once inside the hubs, they can be arrested and shipped off to one of Israel’s torture camps.

Just last week Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published testimony from an Israeli soldier turned whistleblower – confirming accounts from doctors and other guards – that torture and abuse are rife against Palestinians, including civilians, at Sde Teiman, the most notorious of the camps.

War on aid

Last Friday, shortly after Israel announced its “aid” plan, it fired a missile into an UNRWA centre in Jabaliya camp, destroying its food distribution centre and warehouse.

Then on Saturday, Israel bombed tents used for preparing food in Khan Younis and Gaza City. It has been targeting charity kitchens and bakeries to close them down, in an echo of its campaign of destruction against Gaza’s hospitals and health system.

In recent days, a third of UN-supported community kitchens – the population’s last life line – have closed because their stores of food are depleted, as is their access to fuel.

According to the UN agency OCHA, that number is rising “by the day”, leading to “widespread” hunger.

The UN reported this week that nearly half a million people in Gaza – a fifth of the population – faced “catastrophic hunger”.

Predictably, Israel and its ghoulish apologists are making light of this sea of immense suffering. Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, argued that critics were unfairly condemning Israel for starving Gaza’s population, and ignoring the health benefits of reducing “obesity” among Palestinians.

In a joint statement last week, 15 UN agencies and more than 200 charities and humanitarian groups denounced Israel’s “aid” plan. The UN children’s fund UNICEF warned that Israel was forcing Palestinians to choose between “displacement and death”.

But worse, Israel is setting up its stall once again to turn reality on its head.

Those Palestinians who refuse to cooperate with its “aid” plan will be blamed for their own starvation. And international agencies who refuse to go along with Israeli criminality will be smeared both as “antisemitic” and as responsible for the mounting toll of starvation on Gaza’s population.

There is a way to stop these crimes degenerating further. But it will require western politicians and journalists to find far more courage than they have dared muster so far. It will need more than rhetorical flourishes. It will need more than public handwringing.

Are they capable of more? Don’t hold your breath.

Middle East Eye

The post Why the Wall of Silence on the Genocide of Gazans is Finally Starting to Crack first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

Israel’s “Crime of Apartheid”: New Report by U.S. Professors as Palestinians Mark Nakba Day

Democracy Now! — Thu, 15 May 2025 15:09:20 +0000

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

Israel’s “Crime of Apartheid”: New Report by U.S. Professors as Palestinians Mark Nakba Day

Democracy Now! — Thu, 15 May 2025 12:34:07 +0000

A major new report by U.S. academics analyzes Israel’s occupation of Palestine under the legal framework of the crime of apartheid. The report was intentionally released on Nakba Day — the day that marks the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes during Israel’s violent founding in 1948. Citing dozens of experts, human rights organizations and judicial decisions, it concludes that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “meets the legal threshold of apartheid.” Researchers found that Israel imposes “policies that are designed to ensure the perpetual racial subordination of the Palestinian people,” says Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor at Cornell Law School who helped author the report.

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

Are Albertans Striving to Leaving Canada?

Aaron Denley — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:13:49 +0000

The idea to separate from Canada appeared with the Social Credit Party of Alberta in 1930s, but it failed to win widespread support there and then. Separatist sentiment in the province strengthened only in 1980s, after the Canadian government introduced the National Energy Program trying to tighten federal control over the sector. Being the largest producer of crude oil in the country, Alberta suffered great losses, leaving a huge number of locals unemployed.

The election victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing of Alberta’s separation question. “For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta’s free economy – and in effect – against the future and livelihoods of our people,” wrote the province’s Premier Danielle Smith. The implementation of the No new pipelines law Bill C-69 as well as the oil tanker ban, increase of taxes on carbon emissions and imposing restrictions on oil and gas industry are just several examples of the liberal governments’ actions that cost Alberta billions of dollars.

It should be emphasized that the province contributes great sums of money to the federal budget of Canada, some hundreds of billions of dollars more, then other parts of the country. Despite this fact, the money is not allocated between provinces in proportion to their contribution. Thus, the Albertans give several times more, than they get.

It’s no surprise that, according to the data reported for May, 2025, the idea of independent Alberta is supported by approximately 36% of the locals. Their desire to leave Canada is quite reasonable as independence will open up new horizons to the current Canadian province and will help to avoid the limits set by Ottawa. Among other advantages Alberta will gain an opportunity to export its natural resources not only to the USA but also to other countries, all money it earns will stay within Alberta that will substantively increase the living standards of the population.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is ready to hold a referendum on provincial separation already in 2026 if citizens gather the required signatures on a petition. Taking into account that Ottawa demonstrates no intention to change its policy towards Alberta as well as to meet the demands voiced by the province’s Premier, there is no doubt the task will be implemented within a short period of time. By the way, it’s important to stress that the Albertans are not the first who started to talk about separation in Canada. The experience of Quebec, that tried to gain independence twice, should help the Albertans to achieve their goal.

The post Are Albertans Striving to Leaving Canada? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Denley.

Are Albertans Striving to Leaving Canada?

Aaron Denley — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:13:49 +0000

The post Are Albertans Striving to Leaving Canada? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Denley.

The New Face of Globalist Tyranny?

Allen Forrest — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:20:42 +0000

Klaus Scwab is gone and so is WEF alumnus Justin Trudeau. But in comes Mark Carney whose curriculum vitae is displayed on the WEF website as a WEF agenda contributor.

The post The New Face of Globalist Tyranny? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Myanmar junta pardons prisoners to mark Burmese New Year

Radio Free Asia — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:37:40 +0000

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

A coffin to mark Pol Pot’s memory, 50 years after the Cambodian capital fell

Radio Free Asia — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 21:08:06 +0000

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

Myanmar quake victims mark new year camped amidst ruins

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 03:30:16 +0000

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

Journalists in Turkey arrested, beaten, deported amid government crackdown on opposition

CPJ Staff — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 17:21:44 +0000

Istanbul, April 2, 2025—In the weeks since the March 19 detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a potential challenger to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the next presidential race, along with other members of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), civil unrest has erupted in western Turkey.

The government, controlled by Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), launched a crackdown against CHP-controlled Istanbul municipalities, including two district municipality mayors and dozens of other politicians and municipality personnel, citing accusations of corruption. But authorities have since arrested thousands of protesters and have moved aggressively to tamp down media coverage of the demonstrations.

Authorities have raided the homes of at least nine journalists, detaining them along with at least four other journalists arrested while covering the protests, while hurting numerous others. Media regulators have also imposed suspensions and fines on pro-opposition broadcasters and threatened to cancel the licenses of TV channels covering the protests.

While many of the journalists arrested in the initial sweep have been released, press freedom advocates are concerned that authorities are deliberately targeting them to suppress coverage, as the government has done during times of civil unrest or protests in recent decades.

Since March 19, CPJ has documented the following press freedom violations:

Detentions

On March 19, police detained freelance reporter and TV commentator İsmail Saymaz at his house in Istanbul. Saymaz, who has worked for pro-opposition outlets such as Halk TV and Sözcü, was put under house arrest pending investigation on March 21 for “assisting an attempt to overthrow the government” based on his interviews from years ago.
On March 23, police detained Zişan Gür, a reporter for the leftist news website Sendika, from the field in Istanbul. He was released on March 27.
On March 24, police detained five photojournalists who had covered the protests during raids on their homes in Istanbul: Yasin Akgül of Agence France-Presse (AFP), Ali Onur Tosun of NOW Haber, as well as freelancers Bülent Kılıç, Zeynep Kuray, and Hayri Tunç. An Istanbul court arrested the five for “violating the law on gatherings and demonstrations” on March 25, but they were released the following day. Prosecutors had argued that they were actually protesters, citing select police camera shots of them as evidence.
On March 24, police detained freelance photojournalist Murat Kocabaş at his house in in the western city of Izmir. He was released on March 27.
On March 25, police detained freelancer Yağız Barut as he was covering the protests in Izmir. He was released on March 27.
On March 27, authorities arrested Kaj Joakim Medin, a Swedish reporter for newspaper Dagens ETC who was traveling to Istanbul to follow the protests, upon his arrival at the Istanbul airport. He was accused of insulting Erdoğan and of being a member of a terrorist organization, in relation to a 2023 investigation.
On March 28, police detained Nisa Sude Demirel, a reporter with the leftist daily Evrensel, and Elif Bayburt, a reporter with leftist outlet ETHA, at their houses for covering the Istanbul protests. They were both released the following day.

Turkey has a history of imprisoning journalists, having been ranked among the top 10 worst jailers of journalists from 2012 to 2023, and the recent drop in number of journalists behind bars may be misleading as an indicator on its own.

Deportation

On March 27, Istanbul police detained BBC correspondent Mark Lowen and deported him on a flight to London for covering the protests.

Injuries

From March 21 to 23, at least 14 journalists were injured after being beaten or shot with rubber bullets by Istanbul police, while one reporter was assaulted by the protesters, according to the local media freedom group MLSA. Police also damaged journalists’ equipment.

Censorship

Ebubekir Şahin, the government-appointed chair of the media regulator RTÜK, has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of Turkish TV channels covering the protests and opposition rallies.
On March 27, RTÜK imposed heavy penalties on multiple pro-opposition TV channels, though the sanctions didn’t immediately go into effect since they can be challenged in court. Sözcü TV would have to stop broadcasting for 10 days if its appeal is rejected.

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

Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate

Binoy Kampmark — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:33:29 +0000

There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.

Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.

The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.

As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”

As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.

Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”

Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”

Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.

The post Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

NATO: More Militarism, No Defence against US Expansionists

Yves Engler — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:59:28 +0000

If you believe Donald Trump might invade, you should be calling for Canada to withdraw from NATO. The alliance won’t defend Canada, has enabled US interference, and gobbles up resources.

During a recent meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, US President Donald Trump questioned the border and Canadian sovereignty. He said, “if you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. … somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago, and (it) makes no sense.” Trump also repeatedly said Canada should be a US state, noting “to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state.”

Sitting next to the US president, Rutte stayed silent. A bit later Trump suggested Rutte might assist him in taking part of NATO member Denmark, noting “I’m sitting with a man who could be very instrumental. You know Mark, we need that for international security.” Rutte replied, “when it comes to Greenland yes or not joining the U.S. I would leave that outside for me this discussion because I don’t want to drag NATO in that.”

Rutte doesn’t seem to want to commit even rhetorically to defending alliance members’ sovereignty. Even if Rutte had interrupted Trump and told the US president his comments were inappropriate, the idea that NATO would defend Canada from a US invasion is ridiculous. Latvia and Estonia will not send troops to repel a US invasion. Nor will France or the UK.

Will Canada send troops to defend Greenland if Trump takes it from NATO member Denmark? Does anyone think that would that be a good idea?

Article 5 of the NATO Charter is not clear on what collective defence entails. It says an attack against one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” But it doesn’t stipulate what the response should be, noting only that each member state must take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.” Article 5 has only ever been invoked after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US.

In the past NATO has undercut Canadian sovereignty. Unbeknownst to most Canadians, NATO was employed by Washington to topple a government in Ottawa. When Prime Minister John Diefenbaker didn’t provide unconditional support during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, US President John F. Kennedy used NATO as part of a multifaceted effort to precipitate the downfall of his minority Conservative government. On January 3, 1963, the outgoing commander of NATO, US General Lauris Norstad, came to Ottawa on an unplanned visit in which he claimed Canada would not be fulfilling her commitments to the alliance if the country did not acquire nuclear warheads. It was part of a series of moves by the Kennedy administration to weaken Diefenbaker, which led to the fall of his government. During the subsequent election campaign, Kennedy’s top pollster, Lou Harris, helped longtime external affairs official Lester Pearson defeat Diefenbaker.

NATO continues to undercut Canadian sovereignty. It’s used to justify purchasing expensive offensive kit (think F-35s and surface combatant warships) that are a drag on resources. The alliance also undermines Canadian defence since it promotes a forward military posture. In recent years, Canada has participated in NATO maritime operations in the Baltic and Black seas. In 2018, Canada took charge of NATO Mission Iraq. About 200 Canadian troops were deployed there.

For the past eight years Canada has led a NATO battlegroup in Latvia. About 700 Canadian soldiers are stationed on Russia’s border. There are also Canadian troops elsewhere in Eastern Europe as part of NATO aligned deployments.

NATO has entangled Canada in, what former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson labelled, a “proxy war” that has devastated Ukraine. Ottawa has donated over $4 billion in military assistance and $6 billion in other types of assistance in a bid to continue the fight until the last Ukrainian. While Russian violence is condemnable, NATO provoked the war through its interventionist, antidemocratic, moves.

When NATO promoted Ukraine’s accession to the alliance in 2008, most Ukrainians opposed joining. Subsequently, NATO countries supported the ouster of elected President Viktor Yanukovych who passed legislation codifying Ukrainian neutrality. As John Mearsheimer warned in 2015, NATO was “leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

Pro-NATO commentators generally ignore the alliance’s provocations. They oppose Donald Trump’s — who often says the quiet part out loud — bid to end the conflict in Ukraine. Simultaneously they’ve been upended by Trump’s crass attacks on Canada and have suddenly become wary of US power. While they’ve begun criticizing Canada’s military dependence on the US, they continue to support militarism and imperialism.

In a sign of the crisis faced by militarists, the opinion section of last Saturday’s Globe and Mail published a long article headlined “WANTED: NEW ALLIES: Successive Canadian governments have leveraged our close relationship with Washington to get the most out of our low defence spending. This long-standing approach cannot continue.” Next to it, the paper published Thomas Homer Dixon’s “If you want peace, prepare for war” and a column by a Royal Military College professor headlined “Canada needs to develop its own nuclear program”.

The militarists/imperialists can’t see an option outside of militarism and global hierarchy. Their calls to establish a NATO without the US is an excuse for more militarism and prolonging the conflict in Ukraine. It would do little to protect Canada.

While there may be an argument for developing a guerrilla type defence structure, membership in NATO undercuts this country’s moral standing. Canada’s best defence against an invasion is making sure hundreds of millions of people in the US and elsewhere know this country is not their enemy.

Image credit: GHY International

The post NATO: More Militarism, No Defence against US Expansionists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing of Lies about CODEPINK: Women for Peace

Ann Wright — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:29:05 +0000

Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.

During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.

As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.” Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.

Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK, and it is not funded by Communist China.” I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.

After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie, “The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.”

Senator Cotton does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

Senator Cotton does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a US Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family. In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.

CODEPINK members have been challenging in the US Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a US Senator in 2014. We have been in the US Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested the war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.

After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a complaint to this office staff.

We are also submitting a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.

The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing of telling lies about individuals and organizations that challenge U.S. government politics, particularly its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza must be called out and pushed back against.

And we must push back against US Senators who actually receive funding from front groups for other countries. Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the genocidal policies of the State of Israel.

The post Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing of Lies about CODEPINK: Women for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ann Wright.

Singh Embarrassingly Trails Carney on Questioning F-35 deal

Yves Engler — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:05:56 +0000

The NDP’s belated call to scrap the F-35 contract is a damning comment on Jagmeet Singh’s leadership. This cautious response to a rapidly shifting political terrain also includes an outrageous sop to the military industrial complex.

On February 25 I asked the NDP leader if he’d reconsider paying tens of billions of dollars to a US arms giant for offensive fighter jets as part of his stated desire to take a hardline in response to Donald Trump’s threats. Singh spent over a minute responding to my question but refused to answer. While seeking to portray himself as the ‘get tough on Trump’ candidate, Singh was unwilling to even say the party could reconsider paying huge sums to Lockheed Martin for 88 F-35s. To make his cautiousness even more absurd, the NDP has effectively opposed the F-35 contract, which is to cost $19 billion upfront and $70 billion over the life cycle.

The answer wasn’t simply off the cuff. I arrived half an hour early and had a conversation with Singh’s assistant in which I told her the two questions I hoped to ask.

Two weeks later I asked Yves Francois Blanchet basically the same question I had asked Singh. Last Tuesday the Bloc Québécois leader said he was open to canceling the F-35 contract in response to Trump’s belligerence. Blanchet expressed concern about a “switch off controlled in the US” for Canada’s expensive fighter jets.

In a sign that the issue was ripe, my Blanchet clip was viewed by over 200,000 times on social media, which is a surprisingly large number for an exchange in French.

To be fair to Singh, days before my question to Blanchet Postmedia reporter David Pugliese published a story discussing the US having an effective “kill switch” over the warplanes. Additionally, Michael Byers published a column in the Globe and Mail detailing some nationalist reasons to oppose the F-35 deal.

Also on Tuesday, thousands began responding to a Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, Just Peace Advocates and World Beyond War email campaign to Mark Carney and the leaders of the other political parties. It called for the F-35 contract to be scrapped and to “Stop Canada’s plan to spend billions on U.S.-made & controlled weapons of war.”

On Thursday former Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy added his voice to a rapidly growing number of Canadians speaking out on the F-35. That day Portugal also announced it was abandoning a plan to purchase the F-35s. The government cited concerns about US reliability and control over the planes’ logistics and parts.

Amidst the mounting pressure, defence minister Bill Blair told CBC on Friday that Carney asked him to reconsider the F-35 deal. The news made international headlines and has hit Lockheed Martin’s stock.

In effect, Canada’s new investment banker prime minister outflanked the leader of a social democratic party polling under 15%. In a widely circulated YouTube interview Saturday morning Brent Patterson and I discussed the NDP brass’ caution amidst a rapidly changing political terrain.

On Sunday the NDP released a sloppily put together statement (they rewrote the headline after publishing) saying the government should cancel the F-35 deal and its contract for 16 Boeing P-8A Poseidon Multi-Mission Aircraft. It notes “At a time when Donald Trump has threatened not just workers and jobs, but Canada’s very sovereignty, it’s a matter of national security that our defence technology not be controlled by the United States. That’s why we’ll cancel the F-35 contract, and build the fighter jets Canada needs in Canada, using Canadian workers.”

Simultaneously, NDP defence critic Lindsay Mathyssen released a statement on the F-35. It noted, “We cannot allow President Trump to control the production, maintenance, and software of our military equipment. At a time when the United States is not respecting our territorial sovereignty, we cannot risk him being able to control our military equipment … Cancelling these projects would have an immediate impact on President Trump’s economy and send our clearest message yet that Canada will not stand for his disrespect.”

Mathyssen has largely ignored the issue even though 1,400 emailed her in 2022 calling on the party to question the “Liberal’s fighter jet plans” in a statement headlined “NDP must oppose F-35 purchase”. Previous to that the NDP largely ignored the widely mediatized 2021 No New Fighter Jets for Canada statement signed by Neil Young, Stephen Lewis, Teagan and Sarah, David Suzuki and many other notable Canadian and international figures.

While it’s good the NDP has decided to criticize the F-35, their Sunday statement also calls for Canada to spend 2% of GDP on its military by 2032. That would boost outlays on the war machine by some $20 billion per year (with annual rises matching GDP growth).

This is an odious shift in NDP policy. In July Singh repeated to me that the NDP considered NATO’s 2% of GDP target “arbitrary”. Their shift reflects the party’s subservience to an alliance NDP members previously voted to withdraw from as well as to the president seeking to annex Canada.

The NDP statement even responds to the contradiction, noting that “We don’t do this [call to increase military spending] to placate Donald Trump.” But that is precisely who has spurred the renewed push to boost military spending. Trump’s criticism is what led the Liberal leadership candidates to seek to outdo each other in declaring the speed at which they would hit the 2% of GDP target.

While it may be difficult to have principles in electoral politics, the opportunism shaping NDP military policy is beyond embarrassing.

The post Singh Embarrassingly Trails Carney on Questioning F-35 deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Photo of the Week: Protests and rallies mark Tibetan uprising anniversary

Paul Nelson for RFA — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 13:08:10 +0000

Tibetans around the world marked the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule with protests last week. With faces painted in the colors of the Tibetan national flag, Tibetans and their supporters rallied in many places, including Sydney, Taipei, London, New York, Washington and Toronto.

The Photo of the Week showcases a compelling image from the past seven days.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Paul Nelson for RFA.

BBC Credibility Nosedives Even Further

Media Lens — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:04:42 +0000

The BBC’s withdrawal of the powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, epitomises how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby.

The corporation’s longstanding systematic protection of Israel, considered an ‘apartheid regime’ by major human rights organisations, has been particularly glaring since the country launched its genocidal attacks on Gaza in October 2023. We have all seen the repetition and amplification of the Israeli narrative above the Palestinian perspective, omission of ‘Israel’ from headlines about its latest war crimes committed in Gaza, and even the dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists.

The documentary focused on the experiences of several children trying to survive in Gaza under brutal attack by Israeli forces armed to the hilt with weaponry and intelligence from the US, the UK and other western nations. It transpired that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas.

Mr al-Yazuri previously worked for the United Arab Emirates’ education ministry and studied at British universities, obtaining a PhD in chemistry from the University of Huddersfield. Middle East Eye (MEE), an independently-funded online news organisation covering stories from the Middle East and North Africa, described him as ‘a technocrat with a scientific rather than political background’, pointing out that ministers, bureaucrats and civil servants in Gaza are appointed by Hamas.

Indeed, as MEE explained:

‘Many Palestinians in Gaza have family or other connections to Hamas, which runs the government. This means that anyone working in an official capacity must also work with Hamas.’

A campaign was launched by pro-Israel voices, including Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, to pressure the BBC to drop the documentary from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February.

Despite a countercampaign by over 1,000 media and film professionals objecting to the ‘racist’ and ‘dehumanising’ targeting of the documentary by supporters of Israel, the BBC quickly caved in, apologising for ‘mistakes’ that they deemed ‘significant and damaging’. Notably, however, the BBC did not point to any errors or inaccuracies in the actual editorial content of the programme.

The broadcaster attempted to divert some of the blame onto the independent company, Hoyo Films, who had made the documentary, saying that the BBC had not been told by the filmmakers that Abdullah al-Yazuri’s father was a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas government.

Hoyo Films told the BBC it paid the boy’s mother ‘a limited sum of money for the narration’ via his sister’s bank account. A BBC spokesperson said:

‘While Hoyo Films have assured us that no payments were made to members of Hamas or its affiliates, either directly, in kind, or as a gift, the BBC is seeking additional assurance around the budget of the programme and will undertake a full audit of expenditure.’

Addressing MPs from the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 3 March, Samir Shah, the BBC’s chairman, said that:

‘This is a really, really bad moment. What has been revealed is a dagger to the heart of the BBC’s claim to be impartial and to be trustworthy, which is why I and the board are determined to ask the questions.’

Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, told the MPs that after ‘failures in transparency’ he simply ‘lost trust’ in the production of the film and personally ordered it to be withdrawn:

‘It was a very difficult decision. What I did – and it was a very tough decision – was to say, at the moment, looking people in the eye, can we trust this film in terms of how it was made, the information we’ve got? And that’s where we made the decision. It’s a simple decision in that regard.’

In short, one child’s family connection with an official in the civilian administration of Gaza is supposedly reason enough to remove a vital documentary humanising Palestinians. This is an important film which redressed, to a marginal extent, the overwhelming pro-Israel bias displayed by the BBC over the past 18 months.

Meanwhile, the broadcaster repeatedly and prominently platforms the leaders and spokespeople of a state committing genocide and apartheid. Is it any wonder the public reputation of BBC News has likely nosedived yet further since 7 October, 2023?

As Mark Seddon, director of the Centre for UN Studies at the University of Buckingham and a former speechwriter for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, observed via X:

‘Tim Davie should perhaps get the BBC to do some sampling. He may discover that there is a significant body of public opinion that has [been], and is, losing faith in BBC news gathering which is increasingly parochial & transparently failing when it comes to Israel/Palestine.’

Although Davie insisted on the need for BBC ‘transparency’, he was not at all transparent when asked by Rupa Huq MP to name specific groups or individuals who had demanded the BBC withdraw the film. He declined to do so. One of those is, as mentioned, the Israeli ambassador to the UK who constantly repeats ludicrous propaganda such as ‘our only target is Hamas facilities’, and who has denied that there is any humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Spineless BBC

As Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, noted:

‘By pulling [the] Gaza film, BBC shows it cannot stand up to Israel.’

By contrast, he pointed out that in 2003, the BBC aired a documentary on Israel’s nuclear programme, titled Israel’s Secret Weapon:

‘Israeli leaders hit the roof and banned its officials from appearing on the BBC.

‘The documentary was spot on. Israel was embarrassed at having its nuclear arsenal exposed when Iraq was being invaded for a non-existent stash of weapons of mass destruction.’

Doyle added:

‘The BBC did not cave in, and Israel lifted its boycott.

‘Twenty-five years later, the BBC has lost any semblance of a spine on Israel.’

British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford, said that the pulling of the film was ‘only the latest example of the public broadcaster’s regular capitulation to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby’. He continued:

‘The BBC has good reporters on Israel-Palestine, but its bosses are hopelessly compromised by their pronounced and persistent bias in favour of Israel.

‘The reason for this bias is not lack of knowledge but cowardice, the fear of antagonising Israel and Israel’s friends in high places in Britain.’

Richard Sanders, an award-winning producer who has made over fifty films in history, news and current affairs, including Al-Jazeera’s ‘October 7’ documentary, said:

‘Had the situation been reversed and an Israeli boy revealed to be the child of a junior minister in Netanyahu’s government the BBC might have felt obliged to issue one of its “corrections and clarifications” but it’s highly unlikely the film would have been withdrawn and the – extremely vulnerable – production team humiliated in such a public manner.’

Sangita Myska, dropped by radio broadcaster LBC in April 2024 after robustly challenging an Israeli spokesman live on air, wrote on X:

‘I was a BBC journalist for years. However well-intentioned the Gaza doco-makers were, they did not meet editorial standards of transparency BUT does that make a material difference to the overall accuracy of the film? Given the weight of supporting evidence: Probably not.’

She added:

‘I’m reliably informed that morale amongst some brilliant, committed, journalists is in free-fall over this.’

Sanders followed up with:

‘As another old hand who has spent more hours in sweaty edit suites with lawyers and commissioning editors than I care to remember I broadly agree with @SangitaMyska’s comments.

‘But I’d stress that a media environment where the victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid are subjected constantly to the most intense scrutiny, while their tormentors and those who support them are all too often allowed a free pass is a distorted and frankly racist one.’

He added:

‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone remains by far the best thing the BBC has produced on Gaza and bore no evidence at all of any Hamas involvement in its editorial content.

‘It is deeply concerning that it is now being used as a stick to beat the BBC which must not allow itself to become even more cowed.’

In October 2024, the BBC had broadcast a documentary called, ‘Surviving October 7^th: We Will Dance Again’. The BBC’s description said:

‘A harrowing glimpse into the brutal assault on partygoers at the Nova Music Festival – one of the sites in Israel attacked by Hamas on 7 October 2023.’

As one user on X pointed out last week:

‘BBC made a documentary “We Will Dance Again”

‘Was there anyone in that documentary that was IDF or related to IDF?

‘Were there any serving soldiers or illegal settlers in the documentary.

‘Were any of their children in it?

‘As a @BBC licence payer, I demand an inquiry.’

Of course, the ‘demand’ for an inquiry was intended ironically and there was no response from the BBC. But the point was clearly made.

The Truth Exists

As mentioned in several of our previous alerts on Israel and Palestine, there is tremendous pressure on journalists working at BBC News to toe the Israeli line. Notably, since 7 October, use of the word ‘genocide’ has essentially been banned. Any time an interviewee mentions the word in a live setting, the BBC presenter intervenes to shut down the discussion. As one anonymous former BBC journalist said:

‘People [at the BBC] were terrified of using the word “genocide” in coverage. They still are. You will very rarely see it in any BBC coverage. And if an interviewee says the word “genocide”, the presenter will almost always panic.’

And whenever Israeli war crimes or breaches of international law are raised by a guest on a BBC television or radio programme, the BBC journalist will promptly add words to the effect that, ‘Israel denies that’ or ‘Israeli disputes that’. Such BBC repetition of one side’s viewpoint is rarely, if ever, seen when reporting or discussing Russia’s actions in Ukraine, for example, or more generally when addressing Moscow’s role in global affairs.

Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist, wrote recently about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.

Media Lens readers may recall the late Professor Greg Philo, head of the Glasgow Media Group, relating how he was once told by senior BBC editors that they ‘wait in fear’ for a phone call from the Israeli embassy in London whenever a news item appears on Israel or Palestine.

Patel continued:

‘Impartiality has failed if its key method is to constantly balance “both sides” of a story as equally true. A news outlet that refuses to come to conclusions becomes a vehicle in informational warfare, where bad faith actors flood social media with unfounded claims, creating a post-truth “fog”. Only robust evidence-based conclusions can cut through this.’

She described her horror at seeing images for the first time of a Palestinian man crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer, adding:

‘To see such overwhelming evidence every day and then hear 50/50 debates on Israel’s conduct – this is what created the biggest rift between my commitment to truth and the role I had to play as a BBC journalist. We have passed the point at which Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are debatable. There’s more than enough evidence – from Palestinians on the ground, aid organisations; legal bodies – to come to coverage-shaping conclusions around what Israel has done.’

As she rightly noted, ‘truth exists’ based on reasonable, verifiable evidence:

‘In a world where claims are constantly competing, a journalist’s job is back-breaking: it is to investigate and come to conclusions, rather than setting up constant debates – no matter who this angers and no matter how much work it takes.’

A perfect example is the fake ‘debate’ over the reality of human-induced climate change. Until very recently, the BBC created a spurious ‘balance’, where none exists, hosting exchanges between highly-credentialed climate scientists and climate ‘sceptics’ often linked to fossil fuel interests.

Patel observed:

‘In 2018, the BBC issued long overdue editorial guidance to its staff, stating: “Climate change IS happening.” There was a sigh of relief from climate scientists, after years spent warning the organisation its debates were harmful. Coverage would now be rooted in this evidence-based conclusion.’

She summed up:

‘When will the BBC conclude that Israel IS violating international law, and shape its coverage around that truth? As the old saying goes, the journalist’s job isn’t to report that it may or may not be raining. It’s to look outside and tell the public if it is. And let me tell you: there’s a storm.’

The withdrawal of the Gaza documentary has been followed by ‘torrents of online harassment and abuse targeting 13-year-old Abdullah and his family’, according to MEE. Abdullah said:

‘I’ve been working for over nine months on this documentary for it to just get wiped and deleted… it was very sad to me.’

Abdullah told MEE that the whole affair has caused him serious ‘mental pressure’ and made him fear for his safety.

A BBC spokesperson claimed:

‘The BBC takes its duty of care responsibilities very seriously, particularly when working with children, and has frameworks in place to support these obligations.’

Richard Sanders pointed out that ‘more than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israelis in Gaza’. He said that it was dangerous that:

‘the team that made this [film] are effectively being smeared as Hamas accomplices. And at the heart of the story we have a vulnerable child.’

In an interview with the Sunday National newspaper in Scotland, Patel said:

‘He [Tim Davie] was talking about distrusting the entire film on the basis of this connection that the child narrator has.

‘One of the things that occurred to me is the fact that the BBC over the past 15 or 16 months has on two different occasions willingly chosen to embed with the Israeli military and to be openly subject to its censor. That was Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza quite early on and there was a Lebanese town as well, where a BBC correspondent followed the Israeli military into the town.

‘There is a lot of concern around potential influence over this documentary but there was very little public concern over our public broadcaster embedding with the Israeli military.’

In a message he addressed to the BBC, Abdullah said:

‘I did not agree to the risk of me being targeted in any way before the documentary was broadcasted on the BBC. So [if] anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.’

Artists for Palestine UK, who organised the letter mentioned earlier with over 1,000 signatories demanding reinstatement of the film, warned that:

‘Tim Davie and Samir Shah are throwing Palestinian children under the bus.

‘BBC bosses must explain how they plan to safeguard the children who participated in the film. Their lives are in danger as Israel cuts off aid and threatens to collapse the ceasefire in Gaza. How will Britain’s public broadcaster ensure it isn’t putting a target on innocent kids’ backs?’

Abdullah finished by telling MEE that he is grateful to ‘all of those in the United Kingdom who had supported me, supported the documentary and had protested for the documentary to be put back on the BBC. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart, and continue your efforts that hopefully can and will return the movie back up on BBC. I hope that Gaza sees light again, that children of Gaza have a bright future again and everybody… sees a better future and a better tomorrow.’

He concluded by saying: ‘My wish is to study journalism [in] the United Kingdom.’

If Abdullah achieves his dream, it seems unlikely he will pursue a career in journalism with the BBC.

Note. At the time of writing, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone’, can be viewed here on Rumble.

The post BBC Credibility Nosedives Even Further first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

He Was Convicted Based on Allegedly Fabricated Bite Mark Analysis. Louisiana Wants to Execute Him Anyway.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination.

Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing.

Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die.

There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan.

Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18.

Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry.

And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.

“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.”

Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death.

This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine.

—Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project

Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks.

In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors.

As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled.

“It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand.

Dr. Lowell Levine, a defense expert, testified in a September hearing as part of Jimmie Chris Duncan’s post-conviction appeal over the death of his girlfriend’s daughter. He is quoted in a brief summarizing Duncan’s case following his appeal hearing. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries.

In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job.

West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home.

In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.”

Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him.

“This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team.

He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder.

The Original Charge: Negligent Homicide

On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.”

The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …”

At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said.

On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise.

“I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.”

Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective.

He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl.

“Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective.

Duncan and his girlfriend, Allison Oliveaux, were living in this home at the time of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux’s death. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings.

The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana.

That charge would only stick for a few hours.

Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival.

The Pathologist and the Dentist

At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said.

Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.

On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.

Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls.

Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.”

West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”

In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death.

The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings.

West has said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.

At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t.

By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.”

The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.”

Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning.

West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him.

When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project.

Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub.

First image: Duncan, center, with his family and friends during a visit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Second image: Duncan’s parents, Sharon and Bennie. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter.

A Broader Pattern of Misconduct

A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them.

Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police.

Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names.

Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.

In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time.

West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney.

A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human.

Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.

Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases.

When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that.

—Michael West

West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method.

Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison.

“When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.”

When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.”

In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks.

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.”

Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.

Prosecutors Suppressed Evidence

All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars.

During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct.

Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial.

According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.”

What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.”

Michael Cruse, a former cellmate of Duncan’s in 1993, wrote a letter to prosecutors offering to testify about an alleged confession Duncan made. Duncan’s defense team claims Cruse did so in exchange for leniency. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.”

The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense.

Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.

In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed.

He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense.

Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said.

Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls.

Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault.

“There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams.

Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures.

When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died.

None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded.

In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show.

Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team.

Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.”

One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Richard A. Webster, Verite News.

Tibetans mark 1959 revolt with rallies in Europe, North America and India

RFA Tibetan — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 20:46:17 +0000

Tibetans around the world on Monday marked the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule with protests in cities across Europe, North America and India as thousands marched for an end to Chinese oppression.

With faces painted in the blue and red of the Tibetan national flag –- and shouting slogans in a slew of different languages -– Tibetans and their supporters rallied in Sydney, Taipei, London, New York, Washington and Toronto, among others.

Some of the protests took place outside Chinese embassies. In New Delhi, police clashed with dozens of Tibetan protesters as some demonstrators tried to enter the Chinese Embassy.

On March 10th, thousands of Tibetans commemorated the 66th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising, with hundreds joining peaceful demonstrations worldwide

Supporters carried banners that read “World Leaders, Stand up for Tibet,” “CCP, Stop Torturing Tibetans” and “Missing Home Since 1959.”

The Tibetan national flag –- which is banned inside Tibet -– was widely seen.

Demonstrations for the 66th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising were also held in Ladakh in north India, Guwahati in northeast India and Mysore in south India.

Tibetans protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington, March 10, 2025.

(RFA Tibetan)

China invaded and forcibly annexed Tibet in 1950. The revolt nine years later was sparked in part by fears that the Chinese would arrest Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled from Lhasa to India several weeks later.

Thousands of Tibetans died in the 1959 uprising amid a subsequent crackdown by China. Since then, Tibetans have used March 10 to honor their courage, press China to stop its repression of Tibetans and voice their hope for a homeland where they can live freely.

The date remains a politically sensitive one for Chinese authorities in Tibet, who routinely tighten surveillance and security measures in Tibetan areas of China to block protests ahead of the anniversary.

‘Freedom from Chinese forces’

The Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA, led an official event in Dharamsala, India, where the Tibetan government-in-exile is located.

“As we commemorate the Tibetan National Uprising Day, we honor our brave martyrs, and express solidarity with our brothers and sisters inside Tibet who continue to languish under the oppressive Chinese government,” CTA President Sikyong Penpa Tsering said at the event, which was attended by former Slovakian President Andrej Kiska and Estonian parliamentarian Juku-Kalle Raid.

Tibetans protested in 1959 out of a “sense of real desperation,” the Dalai Lama said from his residence in Dharamsala.

“There was no other way but to escape,” he said. “My heart was a little heavy. After I crossed a river, a local villager guiding my horse told me to take one last look at Lhasa as I won’t be able to see Lhasa beyond this point.

At his residence in Dharamsala, North India, March 10, 2025, the Dalai Lama marks the March 10 Uprising of 1959.

(OHHDL)

“So I turned and made my horse face Lhasa and said my prayers,” he said. “As I made my way southward, crossing the river and up through the passes, I felt a sense of happiness and freedom from Chinese forces.”

Since then, despite Chinese efforts to “wipe Tibet from the face of the earth,” Tibet has endured, he said.

Tight security in Lhasa

In Europe, over 3,000 Tibetans and supporters from across various European countries gathered at The Hague in the Netherlands to participate in a rally that is organized every two years in a major city in Europe under the campaign, “Europe, Stand with Tibet.”

Speaking at the rally were Dutch members of parliament, actor Richard Gere and former NBA player, Enes Kanter Freedom.

“Tibetans inside Tibet are still experiencing a lot of problems under Chinese rule,” Kanter told Radio Free Asia. “So being a supporter of human rights and peace in the world, I fully support the Tibetan people and movement.”

In Taipei, more than 500 people –- mostly Taiwanese and about 40 Tibetans –- gathered on Sunday. Representatives from Taiwan’s Human Rights Commission urged the Taiwanese people to stand with Tibetans to hold China accountable for human rights violations in Tibet.

The Tibetan national flag was hoisted in various parts of the United States, including Berkeley and Richmond in California, Burlington in Vermont and East Rutherford in New Jersey. In Germany, more than 400 cities, districts and municipalities raised the Tibetan flag to recognize the ongoing oppression in Tibet.

Inside Tibet, Chinese authorities have deployed police and military throughout Lhasa’s streets and religious sites, including the Jokhang Temple and Sera Monastery, since the beginning of March, two sources in the region told RFA.

The sources added that police are conducting patrols even at 3 a.m. in predominantly Tibetan neighborhoods, while travelers from other Tibetan regions attempting to enter Lhasa are being turned away for even minor documentation issues.

Edited by Tenzin Pema and Matt Reed.

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

Thousands of Tibetans mark 66th uprising anniversary with global protests | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 19:44:17 +0000

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

Where Hollywood — and the Oscars — still miss the mark on climate representation

Claire Elise Thompson — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:50:12 +0000

The vision

“I need help making meaning of all this. And stories have always been how humans make sense of our world.”

— Anna Jane Joyner, founder and CEO of Good Energy

The spotlight

If you watched the Oscars this weekend, you might have been paying attention to the dazzling red carpet looks (so much silver!), or maybe host Conan O’Brien’s best jokes (poking fun at the nominees, himself, and of course Jeff Bezos), or that Wicked medley (chills). But did you clock how many of the nominated movies featured climate change?

Anna Jane Joyner did. Her nonprofit story consultancy, Good Energy, is dedicated to bringing more climate themes and plotlines into mainstream movies and TV. When she and her team analyzed this year’s Oscar nominees, they were hoping to see them pass a specific test: If the movie takes place on Earth, in the present day or relatively close, does climate change exist in that movie? And does at least one character know about it?

The results were a tad disappointing. One only Oscar-nominated film passed this “Climate Reality Check”: The Wild Robot, an animated movie about a helper robot that learns how to communicate with animals after getting marooned on a remote island in the not-too-distant future (though distant enough that the Golden Gate Bridge is mostly underwater, as we see in one subtle but striking scene). Last year, three movies made the cut: Barbie, Nyad, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.

Watch a trailer for The Wild Robot. Universal Pictures / YouTube

But in many ways, this year has been a breakout one for climate cinema, both in and outside of the Academy Awards. Sci-fi blockbusters Dune: Part Two (which was nominated for best picture, and won for sound and visual effects) and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (which was also nominated for best visual effects) both took on climate themes in more metaphorical ways. And a variety of uniquely creative indie films tackled climate themes this year as well, like Flow, a dialogue-less fantasy movie from Latvia in which a cat and other animals must survive a biblical flood, which took home the award for best animated feature.

Although it didn’t garner any Oscar nominations, the highly popular Twisters played with both science fiction and real science in its depiction of climate change and extreme weather. And the icy, apocalyptic musical The End provided another example of creative approaches to tackling both the future of climate change and its root causes.

Any climate story is progress, says Joyner. But there’s a reason she puts extra focus on films that tackle our current realities: Keeping climate relegated to sci-fi and fantasy misses something important about what the movies can and should do when it comes to reflecting and helping us make sense of the human experience in the era of climate change.

“We’re all living in the climate crisis. Everyone on Earth is affected by it in some way at this point,” said Ali Weinstein, a TV writer, consultant, and activist, and one of the co-founders of the annual Hollywood Climate Summit. “That’s what we’re living — and our storytelling is supposed to reflect how we’re existing in the world.”

That’s part of the ethos behind Good Energy’s reality-check test, and the work of consultants like Weinstein who strive to bring climate awareness into more writers’ rooms. That work involves educating writers and creatives about the climate crisis and its many intersections with other facets of our lived experiences, Weinstein said, so that they have more opportunities to organically incorporate it into characters’ experiences — not only exploring it in allegories.

“It often is easier to address any social justice issue, not just climate, when you make it more abstract,” she said. That may be one reason why climate has more commonly been handled metaphorically, in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy.

“That was historically where it showed up the most,” Joyner said. Themes of ecological collapse and the perils of overextraction have been explored in many sci-fi and fantasy stories, often containing morals about how we must learn to live more sustainably, lest our future be barren and desolate. Think of The Lorax, for example — but also classics like the 1973 thriller Soylent Green, which contends with the future of food on an overpopulated planet, or the childhood favorite FernGully: The Last Rainforest, about a fairy-filled forest threatened by a logging company and a pollution demon. Joyner also pointed to some more recent high-profile examples that have been discussed as climate parables, like Avatar, which is premised on the attempted colonization and mining of the planet Pandora, and Game of Thrones, where society is threatened by the coming of a magically destructive winter.

Watch a trailer for Flow. Rotten Tomatoes Indie / YouTube

“We just felt it was really, really important that it not only showed up in fantasy, as a kind of metaphor that a lot of people didn’t actually understand or see … but it also showed up in stories about our real lives,” she said. People might find meaning and inspiration in fantasy, sci-fi, or historical stories, and these genres have often been seen as a more palatable, or even approachable, way to deal with tough or controversial themes — a way to sneak them in without the baggage of their current-day context. But representations in realism are needed to tell the full story. And, increasingly, stories that take place in the real world and don’t recognize climate change are creating something of a fantasy.

Relating to the characters we see in media can help us process our own experiences, decrease feelings of isolation, and increase agency. “It is a climate solution to see yourself on screen in a way that makes you feel seen and validated,” Joyner said.

The Climate Reality Check took inspiration from a similar thought experiment, called the Bechdel Test. Devised in the ’80s as a way to measure (and call attention to a lack of) female representation in film, the test asks simply: Are there at least two women in this movie? And do they, at some point, have a conversation about something other than a man?

Often critiqued as a comically low bar, the Bechdel Test in fact started as a joke in a comic strip by cartoonist Alison Bechdel. It made a punchline out of the fact that so many popular movies failed to represent the lives of women and treat them as complete characters. As Joyner and Weinstein noted, the same can be said of movies’ failure to reflect a phenomenon that is increasingly part of everyday life. The Climate Reality Check is a simple way for viewers to track that in what they’re watching.

But the test is also intended to be generative, Joyner said — it’s an invitation to writers, showrunners, and other creatives to think about bringing climate realities into their stories, in the interest of being relatable to viewers.

Of course, the stories we see on screen also help us relate to others — and boosting the presence of climate change in popular media is a part of raising awareness and motivating more people to take action. Research has actually shown that watching movies can increase empathy, something long believed but only recently tested. And representation in popular media has helped bring greater visibility to marginalized communities and issues in the past — many credit film and TV portrayals of queer characters with the real-world growth in acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, and subsequent policy changes like the legalization of same-sex marriage.

People do tend to create stories that stem from their own lived experiences — one reason why many advocates believe that true, authentic representation starts with more diversity among storytellers. And when it comes to direct experiences with the climate crisis, all of Hollywood just experienced a major wake-up call in the form of the devastating L.A. wildfires.

“The profile of a Hollywood television writer is not someone who is on the front lines of the climate crisis, traditionally,” said Allison Begalman, another co-founder of the Hollywood Climate Summit, and also of YEA! Impact, a social impact marketing consultancy. “I think, now that a lot of people in Los Angeles have experienced this wildfire, they’re seeing things a bit differently, and I believe that it will lead to an opening of understanding for a lot of people.”

Weinstein predicts, for instance, that we might see an influx of escape thrillers centering around catastrophic fires. “But I would really encourage people to look past the disaster narrative,” she said. Dwelling too much on the disaster itself, and the apocalypse of it all, can create a sense of apathy. “If we feel like the world has already ended, why would we fight for it?”

What she hopes to see instead are stories about what can grow from the ashes of a tragedy like the L.A. fires — communities banding together to help one another.

While the team is still in the early stages of setting the programming lineup for this year’s Hollywood Climate Summit, planned for early June, the impact of the fires will certainly play a role in shaping the agenda. Begalman said one thing they will likely emphasize is community preparedness and resilience, both within storytelling and for attendees themselves.

Joyner also echoed the need to highlight stories of contending with the impacts of climate change. She splits her time between Los Angeles and a family home on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, two places facing different forms of climate extremes. But she grew up in western North Carolina, which was thought to be something of a climate haven — before it was hit by Hurricane Helene, one of the worst disasters in recent history.

“I never expected that to happen in Asheville,” Joyner said. In the aftermath of the storm, she wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about what it felt like trying to process the tragedy:

I have no emotional framework for this, no story to help me. Right now, what I desperately need are authentic stories that help us figure out how to be human in this changing world, to face this overwhelming crisis with bravery. Stories that help us navigate our very understandable fear, anxiety, grief, despair, uncertainty, and anger in a way that allows us to feel seen. Stories that make us laugh — not in ignoring our reality, but in the midst of it — and stories that remind us there’s still so much beauty here to fight for. That capture how, in the living nightmare of climate disasters, people demonstrate extraordinary kindness and creativity, as they’re doing in Asheville and Black Mountain at this very moment.

The only silver lining of tragedies like Helene and the L.A. fires, she said, was watching how communities came together to help each other. And that’s something that people were also able to watch in some of this year’s Oscar nominees — those that passed the reality-check test, and those that didn’t. In both Flow and the film it edged out for best animated feature, The Wild Robot, groups navigate the arrival of disasters by learning to cooperate and unite as a community. “It was all about people coming together — or in this case, animals and robots coming together, overcoming their differences, overcoming their fears, working in community to build resilience, to help each other,” Joyner said. A powerful message for climate movies, and children’s movies at that.

“I’m really glad that those stories are becoming more prevalent, because I think we really, really need them as impacts get worse,” Joyner said. “We have to learn how to work together and find courage.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

Read: more about the shadow of the L.A. fires on this year’s Oscars, and how the academy can do more to acknowledge our climate crisis (Atmos)
Read: an opinion piece by the co-founders of the Hollywood Climate Summit, exploring “how Hollywood can make climate stories sexy” (The Hollywood Reporter)
Read: a review of Flow, the Oscar winner for best animated feature, which doesn’t mention climate explicitly but “might be the best climate movie of the year” (Grist)
Read: Anna Jane Joyner’s op-ed describing her feelings of shock and loss after Hurricane Helene, and why she and others need stories to make meaning out of climate-wrought tragedies like these (L.A. Times)

A parting shot

A life-size replica of Roz (aka Rozzum 7134), the titular character in The Wild Robot, at a headline gala at the BFI London Film Festival in October. Although an animated movie starring a humanoid robot isn’t exactly realism, it passed Good Energy’s reality check because it is clearly set on Earth, in a somewhat near future where climate change is evident. As the report notes: “Climate impacts and situations — from sea level rise to hints that humans have isolated themselves in climate-safe, domed cities — are subtly woven into the fabric of the storyworld.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Where Hollywood — and the Oscars — still miss the mark on climate representation on Mar 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.

Extended Interview: Mark Graham on Internet Archive’s Work Preserving the Web as Gov’t Sites Go Dark

Democracy Now! — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Extended interview with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. He is also part of the End of Term Archive for federal websites.

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

Cook Islands government to seek update on China’s naval exercises

APR editor — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 21:53:35 +0000

By Talaia Mika of the Cook Islands News

As concerns continue to emerge over China’s “unusual” naval exercises in the Tasman Sea, raising eyebrows from New Zealand and Australia, the Cook Islands government was questioned for an update in Parliament.

This follows the newly established bilateral relations between the Cook Islands and China through a five-year agreement and Prime Minister Mark Brown’s accusations of the New Zealand media and experts looking down on the Cook Islands.

A Chinese Navy convoy held two live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand on Friday and Saturday, prompting passenger planes to change course mid-flight and pressuring officials in both countries.

Akaoa MP Robert Heather queried the Prime Minister whether the government had spoken to Chinese embassy officials in New Zealand for a response in this breach of Australian waters?

“One thing I do know is that just in the recent weeks, New Zealand navy was part of an exercise with the Australians and Americans conducting naval exercises in the South China Sea and perhaps that’s why China decided to exercise naval exercises in the international waters off the coast of Australia,” he said.

“And I also know that in the last two weeks, the government of Australia and China signed a security treaty between the two countries.

“However in due course, we may be informed more about these naval exercises that these countries conduct in international waters off each other’s coasts.”

According to Brown, he had not been briefed by any government whether it’s New Zealand, Australia, or China about these developments.

Asking for an update
He added that while the Minister of Foreign Affairs Elikana was currently in the Solomon Islands attending a forum on fisheries together with other ministers of the Pacific Region, he would ask him about whether he could make any inquiries to find out whether the government could be updated or briefed on this issue.

Meanwhile, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said after a meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing, that lack of sufficient warning from China about the live-fire exercises was a “failure” in the New Zealand-China relationship.

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defence, Wu Qian explained that China’s actions were entirely in accordance with international law and established practices and would not impact on aviation safety.

He added that the live-fire training was conducted with repeated safety notices that had been issued in advance.

Republished with permission from the Cook Islands News.

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

Cook Islanders march in Avarua against Mark Brown government

APR editor — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 22:21:49 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist, in Avarua, Rarotonga

More than 400 people have taken to the streets to protest against Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s recent decisions, which have led to a diplomatic spat with New Zealand.

The protest, led by Opposition MP and Cook Islands United Party leader Teariki Heather, has taken place outside the Cook Islands Parliament in Avarua — a day after Brown returned from China.

Protesters have come out with placards, stating: “Stay connected with New Zealand.”

The protest in Avarua today. Video: RNZ

Some government ministers have been standing outside Parliament, including Foreign Minister Tingika Elikana.

Heather said he was present at the rally to how how much Cook Islanders cared about the relationship with New Zealand and valued the New Zealand passport.

He has apologised to the New Zealand government on behalf of the Cook Islands government.

Leader of the opposition and Democratic Party leader Tina Browne said she wanted the local passport to be off the table “forever and ever”.

“We have no problem with our government going and seeking assistance,” she said.

“We do have a problem when it is risking our sovereignty, risking our relationship with New Zealand.”

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.

‘No areas of concern’, says Cook Islands PM on NZ’s China deal fears

APR editor — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:55:52 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist in Avarua, Rarotonga

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown hopes to have “an opportunity to talk” with the New Zealand government to “heal some of the rift”.

Brown returned to Avarua on Sunday afternoon (Cook Islands Time) following his week-long state visit to China, where he signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” to boost its relationship with Beijing.

Prior to signing the deal, he said that there was “no need for New Zealand to sit in the room with us” after the New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister raised concerns about the agreement.

Responding to reporters for the first time since signing the China deal, he said: “I haven’t met the New Zealand government as yet but I’m hoping that in the coming weeks we will have an opportunity to talk with them.

“Because they will be able to share in this document that we’ve signed and for themselves see where there are areas that they have concerns with.

“But I’m confident that there will be no areas of concern. And this is something that will benefit Cook Islanders and the Cook Islands people.”

He said the agreement with Beijing would be made public “very shortly”.

“I’m sure once the New Zealand government has a look at it there will be nothing for them to be concerned about.”

Not concerned over consequences
Brown said he was not concerned by any consequences the New Zealand government may impose.

The Cook Islands leader is returning to a motion of no confidence filed against his government and protests against his leadership.

“I’m confident that my statements in Parliament, and my returning comments that I will make to our people, will overcome some of the concerns that have been raised and the speculation that has been rife, particularly throughout the New Zealand media, about the purpose of this trip to China and the contents of our action plan that we’ve signed with China.”

1News Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver was at the airport but was not allowed into the room where the press conference was held.

The New Zealand government wanted to see the agreement prior to Brown going to China, which did not happen.

A spokesperson for New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters said Brown had a requirement to share the contents of the agreement and anything else he signed under the 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration.

‘Healing some of the rift’
Brown said the difference in opinion provides an opportunity for the two governments to get together and “heal some of the rift”.

“We maintain that our relationship with New Zealand remains strong and we remain open to having conversations with the New Zealand government on issues of concern.

“They’ve raised their concerns around security in the Pacific. We’ve raised our concerns around our priorities, which is economic development for our people.”

Brown has previously said New Zealand did not consult the Cook Islands on its comprehensive strategic partnership with China in 2014, which they should have done if the Cook Islands had a requirement to do so.

He hoped people would read New Zealand’s deal along with his and show him “where the differences are that causes concern”.

Meanwhile, the leader of Cook Islands United Party, Teariki Heather, said Cook Islanders were sitting nervously with a question mark waiting for the agreement to be made public.

Cook Islands United Party leader Teariki Heather stands by one of his trucks he is preparing to take on the planned protest. Image: Caleb Fotheringham/RNZ Pacific

“That’s the problem we have now, we haven’t been disclosed or told of anything about what has been signed,” he said.

“Yes we hear about the marine seabed minerals exploration, talk about infrastructure, exchange of students and all that, but we haven’t seen what’s been signed.”

However, Heather said he was not worried about what was signed but more about the damage that it could have created with New Zealand.

Heather is responsible for filing the motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister and his cabinet.

The opposition only makes up eight seats of 24 in the Cook Islands Parliament and the motion is about showing support to New Zealand, not about toppling the government.

“It’s not about the numbers for this one, but purposely to show New Zealand, this is how far we will go if the vote of no confidence is not sort of accepted by both of the majority members, at least we’ve given the support of New Zealand.”

Heather has also been the leader for a planned planned today local time (Tuesday NZ).

“Protesters will be bringing their New Zealand passports as a badge of support for Aotearoa,” he said.

“Our relationship [with New Zealand] — we want to keep that.”

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.

‘Clandestine’ Cook Islands-China deal ‘damaged’ NZ relationship, says Clark

APR editor — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 01:09:22 +0000

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific presenter/Bulletin editor

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark maintains that Cook Islands, a realm of New Zealand, should have consulted Wellington before signing a “partnership” deal with China.

“[Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown] seems to have signed behind the backs of his own people as well as of New Zealand,” Clark told RNZ Pacific.

Brown said the deal with China complements, not replaces, the relationship with New Zealand.

The contents of the deal have not yet been made public.

“The Cook Islands public need to see the agreement — does it open the way to Chinese entry to deep sea mining in pristine Cook Islands waters with huge potential for environmental damage?” Clark asked.

“Does it open the way to unsustainable borrowing? What are the governance safeguards? Why has the prime minister damaged the relationship with New Zealand by acting in this clandestine way?”

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Clark went into detail about the declaration she signed with Cook Islands Prime Minister Terepai Maoate in 2001.

“There is no doubt in my mind that under the terms of the Joint Centenary Declaration of 2001 that Cook Islands should have been upfront with New Zealand on the agreement it was considering signing with China,” Clark said.

“Cook Islands has opted in the past for a status which is not independent of New Zealand, as signified by its people carrying New Zealand passports. Cook Islands is free to change that status, but has not.”

Sione Tekiteki in Tonga for PIFLM 2024 . . . his last leader’s meeting in his capacity as Director of Governance and Engagement. IMage: RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis

Missing the mark
A Pacific law expert said there was a clear misunderstanding on what the 2001 agreement legally required New Zealand and Cook Islands to consult on.

Brown has argued that New Zealand does not need to be consulted with to the level they want, something Foreign Minister Winston Peters disagrees with.

AUT senior law lecturer and former Pacific Islands Forum policy advisor Sione Tekiteki told RNZ Pacific the word “consultation” had become somewhat of a sticking point:

“From a legal perspective, there’s an ambiguity of what the word consultation means. Does it mean you have to share the agreement before it’s signed, or does it mean that you broadly just consult with New Zealand regarding what are some of the things that, broadly speaking, are some of the things that are in the agreement?

“That’s one avenue where there’s a bit of misunderstanding and an interpretation issue that’s different between Cook Islands as well as New Zealand.”

Unlike a treaty, the 2001 declaration is not “legally binding” per se but serves more to express the intentions, principles and commitments of the parties to work together in “recognition of the close traditional, cultural and social ties that have existed between the two countries for many hundreds of years”, he added.

Tekiteki said that the declaration made it explicitly clear that Cook Islands had full conduct of its foreign affairs, capacity to enter treaties and international agreements in its own right and full competence of its defence and security.

There was, however, a commitment of the parties to “consult regularly”, he said.

For Clark, the one who signed the all-important agreement all those years ago, this is where Brown had misstepped.

Pacific nations played off against each other
Tekiteki said it was not just the Joint Centenary Declaration causing contention. The “China threat” narrative and the “intensifying geopolitics” playing out in the Pacific was another intergrated issue.

An analysis in mid-2024 found that there were more than 60 security, defence and policing agreements and initiatives with the 10 largest Pacific countries.

Australia was the dominant partner, followed by New Zealand, the US and China.

A host of other agreements and “big money” announcements have followed, including the regional Pacific Policing Initiative and Australia’s arrangements with Nauru and PNG.

“It would be advantageous if Pacific nations were able to engage on security related matters as a bloc rather than at the bilateral level,” Tekiteki said.

“Not only will this give them greater political agency and leverage, but it would allow them to better coordinate and integrate support as well as avoid duplications. Entering these arrangements at the bilateral level opens Pacific nations to being played off against each other.

“This is the most worrying aspect of what I am currently seeing.

“This matter has greater implications for Cook Islands and New Zealand diplomatic relations moving forward.”

Mark Brown talking to China’s Ambassador to the Pacific, Qian Bo, who told the media an affirming reference to Taiwan in the PIF 2024 communique “must be corrected”. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis

Protecting Pacific sovereignty
The word sovereignty is thrown around a lot. In this instance Tekiteki does not think “there is any dispute that Cook Islands maintains sovereignty to enter international arrangements and to conduct its affairs as it determines”.

But he did point out the difference between “sovereignty — the rhetoric” that we hear all the time, and “real sovereignty”.

“For example, sovereignty is commonly used as a rebuttal to other countries to mind their own business and not to meddle in the affairs of another country.

“At the regional level is tied to the projection of collective Pacific agency, and the ‘Blue Pacific’ narrative.

“However, real sovereignty is more nuanced. In the context of New Zealand and Cook Islands, both countries retain their sovereignty, but they have both made commitments to “consult” and “cooperate”.

Now, they can always decide to break that, but that in itself would have implications on their respective sovereignty moving forward.

“In an era of intensifying geopolitics, militarisation, and power posturing — this becomes very concerning for vulnerable but large Ocean Pacific nations without the defence capabilities to protect their sovereignty.”

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.

China deal ‘complements, not replaces’ NZ relationship, says Cook Islands PM

APR editor — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:17:11 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown says the deal with China “complements, not replaces” the relationship with New Zealand after signing it yesterday.

Brown said “The Action Plan for Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP) 2025-2030” provides a structured framework for engagement between the Cook Islands and China.

“Our relationship and engagement with China complements, not replaces, our long-standing relationships with New Zealand and our various other bilateral, regional and multilateral partners — in the same way that China, New Zealand and all other states cultivate relations with a wide range of partners,” Brown said in a statement.

The statement said the agreement would be made available “in the coming days” on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration online platforms.

Brown said his government continued to make strategic decisions in the best long-term interests of the country.

He said China had been “steadfast in its support” for the past 28 years.

“It has been respectful of Cook Islands sovereignty and supportive of our sustained and concerted efforts to secure economic resilience for our people amidst our various vulnerabilities and the many global challenges of our time including climate change and access to development finance.”

Priority areas
The statement said priority areas of the agreement include trade and investment, tourism, ocean science, aquaculture, agriculture, infrastructure including transport, climate resilience, disaster preparedness, creative industries, technology and innovation, education and scholarships, and people-to-people exchanges.

At the signing was China’s Premier Li Qiang and the minister of Natural Resources Guan Zhi’ou.

On the Cook Islands side, was Prime Minister Mark Brown and Associate Minister of Foreign Affairs and Immigration Tukaka Ama.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for New Zealand Minister for Foreign Affairs Winston Peters released a statement earlier on Saturday, saying New Zealand would consider the agreements closely, in light of New Zealand and the Cook Islands’ mutual constitutional responsibilities.

“We know that the content of these agreements will be of keen interest to the people of the Cook Islands,” the statement said.

“We note that Prime Minister Mark Brown has publicly committed to publishing the text of the agreements that he agrees in China.

“We are unable to respond until Prime Minister Brown releases them upon his return to the Cook Islands.”

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.

China confirms ‘in-depth exchange’ with Cook Islands as New Zealand faces criticism for bullying

APR editor — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 22:47:28 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist in Avarua, Rarotonga

China has confirmed details of its meeting with Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown for the first time, saying Beijing “stands ready to have an in-depth exchange” with the island nation.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters during his regular press conference that Brown’s itinerary, from February 10-16, would include attending the closing ceremony of the Asian Winter Games in Harbin as well as meeting with Premier of the State Council Li Qiang.

Guo also confirmed that Brown and his delegation had visited Shanghai and Shandong as part of the state visit.

“The Cook Islands is China’s cooperation partner in the South Pacific,” he said.

“Since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the two countries have respected each other, treated each other as equals, and sought common development.”

Guo told reporters that the relationship between the two countries was elevated to comprehensive strategic partnership in 2018.

“Our friendly cooperation is rooted in profound public support and delivers tangibly to the two peoples.

‘New progress in bilateral relations’
“Through Prime Minister Brown’s visit, China stands ready to have an in-depth exchange of views with the Cook Islands on our relations and work for new progress in bilateral relations.”

Brown said on Wednesday that he was aware of the strong interest in the outcomes of his visit, which has created significant debate on the relationship with Cook Islands and New Zealand.

He has said that the “comprehensive strategic partnership” deal with China is expected to be signed today, and does not include a security component.

Cook Islanders are divided over Brown’s decision to keep Aotearoa in the dark about the contents of the agreement it intends to sign with Beijing.

While on one hand, the New Zealand government has been urged not to overreact, on the other the Cook Islands opposition want Brown and his government out.

Locals in Rarotonga have accused New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters of being a “bully”, while others are planning to protest against Brown’s leadership.

A local resident, Tim Buchanan, said Peters has “been a bit bullying”.

He said Peters had overacted and the whole issue had been “majorly” blown out of proportion.

‘It doesn’t involve security’
“It does not involve our national security, it does not involve borrowing a shit load of money, so what is your concern about?

“Why do we need to consult him? We have been a sovereign nation for 60 years, and all of a sudden he’s up in arms and wanted to know everything that we’re doing”

Brown previously told RNZ Pacific that he had assured Wellington “over and over” that there “will be no impact on our relationship and there certainly will be no surprises”.

However, New Zealand said it should have seen the text prior to Brown leaving for China.

Cook Islands opposition MP and leader of the Cook Islands United Party Teariki Heather . . . he has filed a vote filed a vote of no confidence motion against Prime Minister Mark Brown. Image: Caleb Fotheringham/RNZ Pacific

Vote of no confidence
Cook Islands opposition MP Teariki Heather said he did not want anything to change with New Zealand.

“The response from the government and Winston Peters and the Prime Minister of New Zealand, that’s really what concerns us, because they are furious,” said Heather, who is the leader of Cook Islands United Party.

Heather has filed a no confidence motion against the Prime Minister and has been the main organiser for a protest against Brown’s leadership that will take place on Monday morning local time.

He is expecting about 1000 people to turn up, about one in every 15 people who reside in the country.

Opposition leader Tina Browne is backing the motion and will be at the protest which is also about the Prime Minister’s push for a local passport, which he has since dropped.

With only eight opposition members in the 24-seat parliament, Browne said the motion of no confidence is not about the numbers.

“It is about what are we the politicians, the members of Parliament, going to do about the two issues and for us, the best way to demonstrate our disapproval is to vote against it in Parliament, whether the members of Parliament join us or not that’s entirely up to them.”

The 2001 document argument
Browne said that after reading the constitution and the 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration, she agreed with Peters that the Cook Islands should have first consulted New Zealand on the China deal.

“Our prime minister has stated that the agreement does not affect anything that he is obligated to consult with New Zealand. I’m very suspicious of that because if there is nothing offensive, why the secrecy then?

“I would have thought, irrespective, putting aside everything, that our 60 year relationship with New Zealand, who’s been our main partner warrants us to keep that line open for consultation and that’s even if it wasn’t in [the Joint Centenary Declaration].”

Other locals have been concerned by the lack of transparency from their government to the Cook Islands people.

But Cook Islands’ Foreign Minister Tingika Elikana said that is not how these deals were done.

“I think the people have to understand that in regards to agreements of this nature, there’s a lot of negotiations until the final day when it is signed and the Prime Minister is very open that the agreements will be made available publicly and then people can look at it.”

Cook Islands Foreign Minister Tingika Elikana . . . Image: Caleb Fotheringham/RNZ Pacific

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the government would wait to see what was in the agreement before deciding if any punishment should be imposed.

With the waiting, Elikana said he was concerned.

“We are worried but we want to see what will be their response and we’ve always reiterated that our relationship is important to us and our citizenship is really important to us, and we will try our best to remain and retain that,” Elikana said.

He did not speculate about the vote of no confidence motion.

“I think we just leave it to the day but I’m very confident in our team and very confident in our Prime Minister.”

‘Cook Islands does a lot for New Zealand’
Cultural leader and carver Mike Tavioni said he did not know why everyone was so afraid of the Asian superpower.

“I do not know why there is an issue with the Cook Islands and New Zealand, as long as Mark [Brown] does not commit this country to a deal with China with strings attached to it,” he said.

Tavioni said the Cook Islands does a lot for New Zealand also, with about 80,000 Cook Islanders living in New Zealand and contributing to it’s economy.

“The thing about consulting, asking for permission, it does not go down well because our relationship with Aotearoa should be taken into consideration.”

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.

Will New Zealand invade the Cook Islands to stop China? Seriously

APR editor — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:56:08 +0000

The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.

“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.

“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR

‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.

“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.

“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”

This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.

The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.

Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.

The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.

Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:

“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”

All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.

New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:

“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”

A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.

New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.

Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.

“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”

Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.

Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.

Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.

It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.

Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:

“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.

I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.

We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.

In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.

To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.

Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.

Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.

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

Cook Islands opposition files no-confidence motion against PM

APR editor — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 23:18:48 +0000

By Melina Etches of the Cook Islands News

A motion of no confidence has been filed against the Prime Minister and his Cabinet following the recent fiasco involving the now-abandoned Cook Islands passport proposal and the comprehensive strategic partnership the country will sign with China this week.

Cook Islands United Party leader Teariki Heather said Prime Minister Mark Brown should apologise to the people and “graciously” step down, or else he would move a no-confidence vote against him in Parliament.

Clerk of Parliament Tangata Vainerere today confirmed that a motion of no confidence has been filed, and he had placed the notice with the MPs.

Parliament will convene for the first time this year next Monday, February 17, to consider various bills and papers, including the presentation of the supplementary budget.

Heather, an Opposition MP, is concerned with Brown’s lack of consultation regarding the passport issue, which the Prime Minister later confirmed was “off the table”, and the China agreement with New Zealand.

New Zealand has raised concerns that it was not properly consulted, as required under their special constitutional arrangement.

However, PM Brown said he had advised them and did not believe the Cook Islands was required to provide the level of detail New Zealand was requesting.

‘Handled the situation badly’
“He [Brown] has handled the situation badly. He has to step down graciously but if he doesn’t, I’m putting in a no confidence vote in Parliament — that’s the bottom line,” Heather told the Cook Islands News.

“I will move that motion and if there’s no support at least I’ve done it, I’ve seen it through.”

Heather also said that he believed the Prime Minister should apologise to the people of the Cook Islands.

“A simple apology, he made a mistake, that’s it.”

Cook Islands News asked the Leader of the Opposition Tina Browne for comment on Heather’s no confidence motion.

Browne on Sunday told PMN that residents were angry, and there was mounting pressure and strong feeling that the PM Brown “should go” (step down).

Backed by cabinet ministers
The Prime Minister has the confidence of his Cabinet Ministers, who are backing their leader and the China agreement, according to Foreign Affairs Minister Tingika Elikana.

Brown is in China on a state visit with his delegation. Yesterday marked the third day of the visit, during which he will oversee the signing of a Joint Action Plan for Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP) with China.

He is also expected to meet with Chinese Premier Li Qiang and President Xi Jinping.

The content of the agreement and its signing date remain unknown.

“At this stage, discussions regarding the agreement are still ongoing, and it would be premature to confirm a signing date at this time. However, once there are any formal developments, we will ensure updates are shared through an official MFAI media release,” a spokesperson for the Cook Islands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration told Cook Islands News.

Public protest march
A public protest march will convene at Parliament House on Monday to challenge the government’s direction for the people of the Cook Islands.

Heather is spearheading the “peaceful” protest march, rallying citizens against PM Brown’s controversial proposal to introduce a Cook Islands passport.

More than 100 people attended Heather’s public meeting last Monday evening at the Aroa Nui Hall to voice their concerns about government’s actions disregarding the voices of the people.

“Do we just sit around no. Te inrinaki nei au e te marama nei kotou te iti tangata,” Heather said.

“We have to do this for the sake of our country. This is not a political protest, it’s people of the Cook Islands uniting to protest, if you understand the consequences, you will understand the reason why.”

Although Brown has since ditched the proposal after New Zealand warned it would require holders to renounce their New Zealand one, “the damage is done”.

This has sparked heated debates about national identity, sovereignty and the implications for the Cook Islands relationship with New Zealand.

Concerns of citizens
Heather has taken onboard the concerns of citizens and argued that such a move could undermine the historical ties and shared citizenship that have long defined the relationship between the Cook Islands and New Zealand.

He has no confidence in Brown’s statement that the proposed Cook Islands identity passport is “off the table”.

“I think it is off the table for now . . . but for how long?” Heather questioned.

“Then there’s the impact of what he has done with our relationship with New Zealand so we are very much concerned about that.

“We are making a statement. The march is actually to show the government of New Zealand that we the people of the Cook Islands don’t agree with the Prime Minister on that.

“We want New Zealand to see that the people of the Cook Islands – that we love to keep our passport, that we care about our relationship as well.”

Heather said they are also concerned about New Zealand’s reaction to the Cook Islands proposed agreement with China.

‘Peaceful’ protesters welcomed
He welcomes members of the community to join the “peaceful” protest.

On Monday morning, drummers will be located on both sides of Parliament House on the main road.

At 10.45am, the proceedings will start when people start moving towards Parliament. Heather wants all protesters to bring along their New Zealand passports.

Heather would like to remind people not to use dirty language at the protest — “auraka e autara viiviii, don’t bring your dirty laundry . . . ”

First published by the Cook Islands News and republished with permission.

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

China: Cook Islands’ relationship with Beijing ‘should not be restrained’

APR editor — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:17:41 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

China and the Cook Islands’ relationship “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”, says Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun, as opposition leaders in Rarotonga express a loss of confidence in Prime Minister Mark Brown.

In response to questions from the Associated Press about New Zealand government’s concerns regarding Brown’s visit to Beijing this week, Guo said Cook Islands was an important partner of China in the South Pacific.

“Since establishing diplomatic relations in 1997, our two countries have respected each other, treated each other as equals, and sought common development, achieving fruitful outcomes in exchanges and cooperation in various areas,” he said.

“China stands ready to work with the Cook Islands for new progress in bilateral relations.”

Guo said China viewed both New Zealand and the Cook Islands as important cooperation partners.

“China stands ready to grow ties and carry out cooperation with Pacific Island countries, including the Cook Islands,” he said.

“The relationship between China and the Cook Islands does not target any third party, and should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party.”

Information ‘in due course’
Guo added that Beijing would release information about the visit and the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement “in due course”.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun . . . “China stands ready to grow ties and carry out cooperation with Pacific Island countries.” Image: China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs/RNZ

However, Cook Islanders, as well as the New Zealand government, have been left frustrated with the lack of clarity over what is in the deal which is expected to be penned this week.

United Party leader Teariki Heather is planning a protest on February 17 against Brown’s leadership.

He previously told RNZ that it seemed like Brown was “dictating to the people of the Cook Islands, that I’m the leader of this country and I do whatever I like”.

Another opposition MP with the Democratic Party, Tina Browne, is planning to attend the protest.

She said Brown “doesn’t understand the word transparent”.

“He is saying once we sign up we’ll provide copies [of the deal],” Browne said.

“Well, what’s the point? The agreement has been signed by the government so what’s the point in providing copies.

“If there is anything in the agreement that people do not agree with, what do we do then?”

Repeated attempts by Peters
New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs office said Winston Peters had made repeated attempts for the government of the Cook Islands to share the details of the proposed agreement, which they had not done.

Peters’ spokesperson, like Browne, said consultation was only meaningful if it happened before an agreement was reached, not after.

“We therefore view the Cook Islands as having failed to properly consult New Zealand with respect to any agreements it plans to sign this coming week in China,” the spokesperson said.

Prime Minister Brown told RNZ Pacific that he did not think New Zealand needed to see the level of detail they are after, despite being a constitutional partner.

Ocean Ancestors, an ocean advocacy group, said Brown’s decision had taken people by surprise, despite the Cook Islands having had a long-term relationship with the Asia superpower.

“We are in the dark about what could be signed and so for us our concerns are that we are committing ourselves to something that could be very long term and it’s an agreement that we haven’t had consensus over,” the organisation’s spokesperson Louisa Castledine said.

The details that Brown has shared are that he would be seeking areas of cooperation, including help with a new inter-island vessel to replace the existing ageing ship and for controversial deep-sea mining research.

Castledine hopes that no promises have been made to China regarding seabed minerals.

“As far as we are concerned, we have not completed our research phase and we are still yet to make an informed decision about how we progress [on deep-sea mining],” she said.

“I would like to think that deep-sea mining is not a point of discussion, even though I am not delusional to the idea that it would be very attractive to any agreement.”

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.

Cook Islands crisis: Haka with the taniwha or dance with the dragon?

APR editor — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 01:03:46 +0000

The Cook Islands finds itself in a precarious dance — one between the promises of foreign investments and the integrity of our own sovereignty. As the country sways between partners China and Aotearoa New Zealand, the Cook Islands News asks: “Do we continue to haka with the Taniwha, our constitutional partner, or do we dance with the dragon?”

EDITORIAL: By Thomas Tarurongo Wynne, Cook Islands News

Our relationship with China, forged through over two decades of diplomatic agreements, infrastructure projects and economic cooperation, demands further scrutiny. Do we continue to embrace the dragon with open arms, or do we stand wary?

And what of the Taniwha, a relationship now bruised by the ego of the few but standing the test of time?

If our relationship with China were a building, it would be crumbling like the very structures they have built for us. The Cook Islands Police Headquarters (2005) was meant to stand as a testament to our growing diplomatic and financial ties, but its foundations — both literal and metaphorical — have been called into question as its structure deteriorated.

COOK ISLANDS NEWS

Then, in 2009, the Cook Islands Courthouse followed, plagued by maintenance issues almost immediately after its completion. Our National Stadium, also built in 2009 for the Pacific Mini Games, was heralded as a great achievement, yet signs of premature wear and tear began surfacing far earlier than expected.

Still, we continue this dance, entranced by the allure of foreign investment and large-scale projects, even as history and our fellow Pacific partners across the moana warn us of the risks.

These structures, now symbols of our fragile dependence, stand as a metaphor for our relationship with the dragon: built with promises of strength, only to falter under closer scrutiny. And yet, we keep returning to the dance floor. These projects, rather than standing as enduring monuments to our relationship with China, serve as cautionary tales.

And then came Te Mato Vai.

What began as a bold and necessary vision to modernise Rarotonga’s water infrastructure became a slow and painful lesson in accountability. The involvement of China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) saw the project mired in substandard work, legal disputes and cost overruns.

By the time McConnell Dowell, a New Zealand firm, was brought in to fix the defects, the damage — financial and reputational — was done.

Prime Minister Mark Brown, both as Finance Minister and now as leader, has walked an interesting line between criticism and praise.

In 2017, he voiced concerns about the poor workmanship and assured the nation that the government would seek accountability, stating, “We are deeply concerned about the quality of work delivered by CCECC. Our people deserve better, and we will pursue all avenues to ensure accountability.”

In 2022, he acknowledged the cost overruns but framed them as necessary lessons in securing a reliable water supply. And yet, most recently, during the December 2024 visit of China’s Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu, he declared Te Mato Vai a “commitment to a stronger, healthier, and more resilient nation. Together, we’ve delivered a project that not only meets the needs of today but safeguards the future of Rarotonga’s water supply.”

The Cook Islands’ relationship with New Zealand has long been one of deep familial, historical and political ties — a dance with the taniwha, if you will. As a nation with free association status, we have relied on New Zealand for economic support, governance frameworks and our shared citizenship ties.

And they have relied on our labour and expertise, which adds over a billion dollars to their economy each year. We have well-earned our discussion around citizenship and statehood, but that must come from the ground up, not from the top down.

China has signed similar agreements across the Pacific, most notably with the Solomon Islands, weaving itself into the region’s economic and political fabric. Yet, while these partnerships promise opportunity, they also raise concerns about sovereignty, dependency and the price of such alignments, as well as the geopolitical and strategic footprint of the dragon.

But as we reflect on the shortcomings of these partnerships, the question remains: Do we continue to place our trust in foreign powers, or do we reinvest in our own community and governance systems?

At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves: How do we sign bold agreements on the world stage without consultation, while struggling to resolve fundamental issues at home?

Healthcare, education, the rise in crime, mental health, disability, poverty — the list goes on and on, while our leaders are wined and dined on state visits around the globe.

Dance with the dragon, if you so choose, but save the last dance for the voting public in 2026. In 2026, the voters will decide who leads this dance and who gets left behind.

Republished from the Cook Islands News with permission.

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

Mark Brown on China deal: ‘No need for NZ to sit in the room with us’

APR editor — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 22:59:22 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown says New Zealand is asking for too much oversight over its deal with China, which is expected to be penned in Beijing next week.

Brown told RNZ Pacific the Cook Islands-New Zealand relationship was reciprocal.

“They certainly did not consult with us when they signed their comprehensive partnership agreement [with China] and we would not expect them to consult with us,” he said.

READ MORE: Other Pacific and China reports

“There is no need for New Zealand to sit in the room with us while we are going through our comprehensive agreement with China.

“We have advised them on the matter, but as far as being consulted and to the level of detail that they were requiring, I think that’s not a requirement.”

Brown is going to China from February 10-14 to sign the “Joint Action Plan for a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership”.

The Cook Islands operates in free association with New Zealand. It means the island nation conducts its own affairs, but Aotearoa needs to assist when it comes to foreign affairs, disasters, and defence.

NZ seeks more consultation
New Zealand is asking for more consultation over what is in the China deal.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters said neither New Zealand nor the Cook Island people knew what was in the agreement.

“The reality is we’ve been not told [sic] what the nature of the arrangements that they seek in Beijing might be,” he told RNZ Morning Report on Friday.

In 2023, China and Solomon Islands signed a deal on police cooperation as part of an upgrade of their relations to a “comprehensive strategic partnership”.

Brown said he had assured New Zealand “over and over” that there would be no impact on the countries’ relationship and “no surprises”, especially on security aspects.

“But the contents of this agreement is something that our team are working on with our Chinese counterparts, and it is something that we will announce and provide once it is signed off.”

He said it was similar to an agreement New Zealand had signed with China in 2014.

Deep sea mining research
Brown said the agreement was looking for areas of cooperation, with deep sea mining research being one area.

However, he said the immediate area that the Cook Islands wanted help with was a new interisland vessel to replace the existing ageing ship.

Brown has backed down from his controversial passport proposal after facing pressure from New Zealand.

He said the country “would essentially punish any Cook Islander that would seek a Cook Islands passport” by passing new legislation that would not allow them to also hold a New Zealand passport.

“To me that is a something that we cannot engage in for the security of our Cook Islands people.

“Whether that is seen as overstepping or not, that is a position that New Zealand has taken.”

A spokesperson for Peters said the two nations did “not see eye to eye” on a number of issues.

Relationship ‘very good’
However, Brown said he always felt the relationship was very good.

“We can agree to disagree in certain areas and as mature nation states do, they do have points of disagreement, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has in any way broken down.”

On Christmas Day, a Cook Islands-flagged vessel carrying Russian oil was seized by Finnish authorities. It is suspected to be part of Russia’s shadow fleet and cutting underwater power cables in the Baltic Sea near Finland.

Peters’ spokesperson said the Cook Islands shipping registry was an area of disagreement between the two countries.

Brown said the government was working with Maritime Cook Islands and were committed with aligning with international sanctions against Russia.

When asked how he could be aligned with sanctions when the Cook Islands flagged the tanker Eagle S, Brown said it was still under investigation.

“We will wait for the outcomes of that investigation, and if it means the amendments and changes, which I expect it will, to how the ship’s registry operates then we will certainly look to make those amendments and those changes.”

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.

Uyghurs in Istanbul, Washington DC mark anniversary of 1997 Ghulja Massacre | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 06:33:46 +0000

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

Cambodian activists mark anniversary of union leader’s murder | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:57:21 +0000

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

Cambodian activists mark anniversary of union leader’s murder | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:24:58 +0000

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

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the world’s fact-checkers – nine years later

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 03:37:30 +0000

Dear Mr Zuckerberg,

Nine years ago, we wrote to you about the real-world harms caused by false information on Facebook. In response, Meta created a fact-checking programme that helped protect millions of users from hoaxes and conspiracy theories. This week, you announced you’re ending that programme in the United States because of concerns about “too much censorship” — a decision that threatens to undo nearly a decade of progress in promoting accurate information online.

The programme that launched in 2016 was a strong step forward in encouraging factual accuracy online. It helped people have a positive experience on Facebook, Instagram and Threads by reducing the spread of false and misleading information in their feeds.

We believe — and data shows — most people on social media are looking for reliable information to make decisions about their lives and to have good interactions with friends and family. Informing users about false information in order to slow its spread, without censoring, was the goal.

Fact-checkers strongly support freedom of expression, and we’ve said that repeatedly and formally in last year’s Sarajevo statement. The freedom to say why something is not true is also free speech.

But you say the programme has become “a tool to censor,” and that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.” This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record.

Meta required all fact-checking partners to meet strict nonpartisanship standards through verification by the International Fact-Checking Network. This meant no affiliations with political parties or candidates, no policy advocacy, and an unwavering commitment to objectivity and transparency.

Each news organisation undergoes rigorous annual verification, including independent assessment and peer review. Far from questioning these standards, Meta has consistently praised their rigour and effectiveness. Just a year ago, Meta extended the programme to Threads.

Fact-checkers blamed and harassed
Your comments suggest fact-checkers were responsible for censorship, even though Meta never gave fact-checkers the ability or the authority to remove content or accounts. People online have often blamed and harassed fact-checkers for Meta’s actions. Your recent comments will no doubt fuel those perceptions.

But the reality is that Meta staff decided on how content found to be false by fact-checkers should be downranked or labeled. Several fact-checkers over the years have suggested to Meta how it could improve this labeling to be less intrusive and avoid even the appearance of censorship, but Meta never acted on those suggestions.

Additionally, Meta exempted politicians and political candidates from fact-checking as a precautionary measure, even when they spread known falsehoods. Fact-checkers, meanwhile, said that politicians should be fact-checked like anyone else.

Over the years, Meta provided only limited information on the programme’s results, even though fact-checkers and independent researchers asked again and again for more data. But from what we could tell, the programme was effective. Research indicated fact-check labels reduced belief in and sharing of false information. And in your own testimony to Congress, you boasted about Meta’s “industry-leading fact-checking programme.”

You said that you plan to start a Community Notes programme similar to that of X. We do not believe that this type of programme will result in a positive user experience, as X has demonstrated.

Research shows that many Community Notes never get displayed, because they depend on widespread political consensus rather than on standards and evidence for accuracy. Even so, there is no reason Community Notes couldn’t co-exist with the third-party fact-checking programme; they are not mutually exclusive.

A Community Notes model that works in collaboration with professional fact-checking would have strong potential as a new model for promoting accurate information. The need for this is great: If people believe social media platforms are full of scams and hoaxes, they won’t want to spend time there or do business on them.

Political context in US
That brings us to the political context in the United States. Your announcement’s timing came after President-elect Donald Trump’s election certification and as part of a broader response from the tech industry to the incoming administration. Mr Trump himself said your announcement was “probably” in response to threats he’s made against you.

Some of the journalists that are part of our fact-checking community have experienced similar threats from governments in the countries where they work, so we understand how hard it is to resist this pressure.

The plan to end the fact-checking programme in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programmes in more than 100 countries that are all highly diverse, at different stages of democracy and development. Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the programme worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places.

This moment underlines the need for more funding for public service journalism. Fact-checking is essential to maintaining shared realities and evidence-based discussion, both in the United States and globally. The philanthropic sector has an opportunity to increase its investment in journalism at a critical time.

Most importantly, we believe the decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme is a step backward for those who want to see an internet that prioritises accurate and trustworthy information. We hope that somehow we can make up this ground in the years to come.

We remain ready to work again with Meta, or any other technology platform that is interested in engaging fact-checking as a tool to give people the information they need to make informed decisions about their daily lives.

Access to truth fuels freedom of speech, empowering communities to align their choices with their values. As journalists, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the freedom of the press, ensuring that the pursuit of truth endures as a cornerstone of democracy.

Respectfully,

15min – Lithuania

AAP FactCheck – Australia

AFP – France

AkhbarMeter Media Observatory – Egypt

Animal Político-El Sabueso – México

Annie Lab – Hong Kong SAR

Aos Fatos – Brazil

Beam Reports – Sudan

Check Your Fact – United States of America

Chequeado – Argentina

Civilnet.am – Armenia

Colombiacheck – Colombia

Congo Check : Congo, Congo DR, Central African Rep

Doğruluk Payı – Türkiye

Dubawa – Nigeria

Ecuador Chequea – Ecuador

Ellinika Hoaxes – Greece

Estadão Verifica – Brazil

Fact-Check Cyprus – Cyprus

FactCheck.org – United States of America

FactCheckNI – Northern Ireland

Factcheck.Vlaanderen – Belgium

Factchequeado – United States of America

FactReview – Greece

Factnameh – Iran

Faktisk.no – Norway

Faktograf – Croatia

Fatabyyano – Jordan

Full Fact – United Kingdom

Greece Fact Check – Greece

Gwara Media – Ukraine

Internews Kosova KALLXO – Kosovo

Istinomer – Serbia

Källkritikbyrån – Sweden

La Silla Vacía – Colombia

Lead Stories – United States of America

Les Surligneurs – France

Lupa – Brazil

Mafindo – Indonesia

Mala Espina – Chile

MediaWise – United States of America

Myth Detector – Georgia

Newtral – Spain

Observador – Portugal

Open – Italy

Pagella Politica / Facta news – Italy

Polígrafo – Portugal

PolitiFact – United States

Pravda – Poland

PressOne.PH – Philippines

RMIT Lookout – Australia

Snopes – United States of America

Taiwan FactCheck Center – Taiwan

Tech4Peace – Iraq

The Journal FactCheck – Ireland

The Logical Indian – India

VERA Files – Philippines

Verify – Syria

Editor: Fact-checking organisations continue to sign this letter, and the list is being updated as they do. No New Zealand fact-checking service has been added to the list so far.

The separate cartoon is by New Zealand Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson and is republished with permission.

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

Myanmar releases thousands of prisoners to mark Independence Day

Radio Free Asia — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 01:25:49 +0000

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

Cook Islands ‘not qualified’ for UN membership, says prime minister

APR editor — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 20:02:24 +0000

By Talaia Mika of the Cook Islands News

The Cook Islands will not pursue membership in the United Nations and the Commonwealth due to its inability to meet the criteria for UN membership and existing relationship with New Zealand, which fulfils Commonwealth membership requirements.

Prime Minister Mark Brown has clarified that the Cook Islands is not qualified for UN membership, a long-standing government proposal that has remained uncertain.

In an exclusive interview with Cook Islands News, Brown was asked to provide an update on the government’s plans for a UN membership.

READ MORE: Other Cook Islands reports

“That’s old news now, I mean we’ve been around the block with that a few years, and a few times,” Brown said.

“So that’s again another one, we haven’t pursued that. There are a number of criteria that the UN requires for membership and according to them, we don’t meet those requirements.”

Cook Islands has maintained diplomatic ties with the UN since the 1990s. It is not currently a member of the UN.

Earlier this year, the Cook Islands government applied for membership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a first step on the road to becoming a member of the UN.

Cook Islands Minister for Foreign Affairs Tingika Elikana then told RNZ that the decision to become a UN member would ultimately need to be decided by the general population of the Cook Islands through a referendum.

The Cook Islands is part of the realm of New Zealand, which makes Cook Islanders also New Zealand citizens. If the Cook Islands joins the United Nations as a separate member to NZ, it would potentially forfeit its citizenship rights under the current treaty which binds the nations.

Cook Islands Foreign Affairs Minister Tingika Elikana . . . “I think a referendum would need to be run and then we will enter into discussions with New Zealand.” Image: Johnny Blades/VNP

“I don’t think short-term elected politicians should decide on that. I think a referendum would need to be run and then we will enter into discussions with New Zealand,” Elikana then said.

When asked about the possibility of joining the Commonwealth, an international association of 56 member states, primarily comprised of former British territories, Brown said the government would not be making another effort to try and become a member.

“We did enquire a number of years ago about it, but the understanding was because we’re part of the realm of New Zealand, that is considered our membership in the Commonwealth, even though we don’t have any place at the table, and we don’t speak at the Commonwealth,” Brown explained.

“So, they consider that our realm relationship is where we are in terms of Commonwealth membership.”

Cook Islands News understands the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration has written to the Commonwealth Secretariat about the country’s membership.

Brown confirmed that a letter had already been submitted to the Commonwealth for that purpose, but he was uncertain whether a response had been received.

“But from what I understand, that is the response that we’ve had from officials at the Commonwealth, is that they consider us through New Zealand as part of the realm of New Zealand as already being covered in the Commonwealth, even though we don’t have a seat or a voice there.”

When asked if this would be considered the government’s final attempt to gain Commonwealth membership, the Prime Minister responded “yes”.

“I think so, I mean I’ve got to weigh it up as well with what benefit we get from being part of the CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting),” he said.

Brown added that there were areas where the Cook Islands did receive support from the likes of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

“We have had support from the likes of the Commonwealth Secretariat in the past with things like technical assistance that they provided for us in the early stages of our development of our Seabed Minerals Authority office.”

Republished with permission from the Cook islands News.

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

Cook Islands govt fends off cyberattacks, passes bill to strengthen financial transparency

APR editor — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:06:19 +0000

Significant attempts were made from overseas to hack into the government’s central network a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Mark Brown has revealed.

However, the Prime Minister said that the government’s robust firewall security systems were able to fend off these attempts.

Brown revealed this while speaking in support of the Financial Transactions Reporting Amendment Bill 2024, which was passed in Parliament last week.

READ MORE: Other cyber attack reports

The hacking attempts from overseas had, however, affected a couple of local companies in the hospitality industry in which their systems were compromised, he said.

“We were able to provide support to reduce any damage caused by these cyber security threats,” Brown said.

The Financial Transactions Reporting Amendment Bill’s primary purpose is to implement the recommended actions put forth by the Global Forum on Transparency and the Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.

This Forum conducts peer reviews and assessments across over 130 jurisdictions in which Cook Islands is a member of. The aim of these reviews is to evaluate the country’s ability to cooperate effectively with established standards, Brown explained.

‘Increasing collaboration’
“The financial transactions reporting requirements that our country have signed up to is an example of the increasing collaboration among international jurisdictions to share information. Additionally, the need to protect the integrity of our financial centres and enhance our cybersecurity measures will only intensify as the world increasingly moves toward digital currencies.

“Our initial peer reviews took place in 2017, and the Cook Islands received a very positive rating for its capacity to exchange information.

“In light of the subsequent growth and improvements in both the quality and quantity of information exchanges, as well as enhancements to the standards themselves, a second round of assessment was initiated just last year. This latest round includes a legal framework assessment and peer reviews that also cover technical, operational, and information security aspects.”

Brown said that during this process several gaps in the legal framework were identified, and the Global Forum provided recommendations aimed at helping the country maintain a positive rating.

He said Cook Islands is required to address these recommendations by implementing the necessary legislative amendments by the 31st of this month in order to qualify for another round of onsite assessments and reviews in 2025.

The Prime Minister said the security of information is very important, and the security of tax information, in particular, is of significant importance to the Global Forum.

He added that some of the areas identified for improvement extend beyond legislative requirements.

Security codes
“For example, all doors in the RMD (Revenue Management Division) office that hold tax information must have security codes. The staff that work there must have proper identification cards with ID cards to swipe and allow access to these rooms,” Brown said.

“It is a big change from how our public service has operated for many years and maybe we do not see the actual need for this level of security. However, the Global Forum has its standards to maintain and we are obligated to maintain those standards, so we must follow suit.

“Not only that but now there’s also a requirement for proper due diligence to be conducted on employees or people who will work inside these departments. It is these sorts of requirements that compels us in our government agencies, many of them now to change the way we do things and to be mindful of increased security measures that are being imposed on our country. ”

Justice Minister Vaine “Mac” Mokoroa, who presented the Bill to Parliament, said: “The key concern here is to ensure that the Cook Islands continues to be a leader in the trust industry . . . our International Trust Act has been at the forefront of the Cook Islands Offshore Financial Services Industry since its enactment 40 years ago, establishing the Cook Islands as a leader in wealth protection and preservation.”

“At that time, these laws were seen as innovative and ground-breaking, and their success is evident in the growth and development of the sector, as well as in the number of jurisdictions that have copied them, either in whole or in part.”

Mokoroa said that the Cook Islands Trust Companies Association, which comprises seven Trustee Companies licensed under the Trustee Companies Act, along with the Financial Supervisory Commission, conducted a thorough review of the International Trust Act and recommended necessary changes. These changes were reflected in the Financial Transactions Reporting Amendment Bill.

Republished from the Cook Islands News with permission.

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

Activists mark International Human Rights Day around the globe | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:57:50 +0000

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

Activists mark International Human Rights Day around the globe | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:34:39 +0000

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

Overseas activists mark Urumqi fire, ‘white paper’ protest anniversary

Jasmine Man for RFA Mandarin — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 19:47:29 +0000

Dozens of overseas activists gathered to light candles in London over the weekend to mark the second anniversary of a fatal lockdown apartment fire in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi that sparked nationwide protests.

At least 30 activists from China and Hong Kong converged on St Mary-At-Hill church in Billingsgate to mark the anniversary of the Nov. 24, 2022, fire, which left at least 10 people dead, all of them Uyghurs.

According to media reports, the death toll was likely higher because the COVID-19 lockdown prevented fire and rescue teams from reaching the building in time.

Firefighters spray water on a fire at a residential building in Urumqi in China's Xinjiang region, Nov. 24, 2022.

The fire prompted a spontaneous protest and commemoration by mostly young people at Urumqi Road in Shanghai, many of whom held up blank sheets of paper to symbolize their desire to protest -- and their awareness of Chinese censors who are quick to clamp down on any slogans or protests critical of the government.

The sheets of paper sent the message that people were upset, but that authorities gave them no voice.

Protests spread to other cities across China as the fire became a catalyst for a wider outpouring of public anger at the loss of freedom and the damage done by pandemic lockdowns to the economy.

At that time, many social media accounts showed footage of people in cities holding up white sheets of A4-sized printer paper, with some of them even chanting for the removal of President Xi Jinping.

People gather for a vigil and hold white sheets of paper in protest, in Beijing, over coronavirus disease restrictions, during a commemoration of the victims of a fire in Urumqi, China, Nov. 27, 2022. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)

In the wake of the demonstrations, which came to be known as the “white paper protests” and which subsided after a few days, the ruling Chinese Communist Party moved quickly to end the three-year zero-COVID restrictions.

But many demonstrators were still targeted in a subsequent crackdown on dissent.

‘Human awakening’

Singing and lighting candles for the victims, participants in Saturday’s event, organized by the overseas pro-democracy group China Deviants, also displayed a replica sign that read “Urumqi Road.”

They also read out anonymous messages of support from Chinese nationals who were unable to attend in person for fear of political reprisals.

One year later, Uyghurs demand accountability for deadly Urumqi fire

Angered by lockdowns, protests spread in China amid calls for Xi’s ouster

“Human awakening requires knowledge and information before it can form a personality capable of independent thought and action,” one message said. “Right now, the conditions for that don’t exist in mainland China.”

“Even if people are awakened, they still have no choice but to grow old in silence, lonely and desperate,” the message said. “Bless you, all of young people, for carrying on the struggle with such passion.”

A speaker addresses the gathering at St Mary-At-Hill church in Billingsgate, London, marking the second anniversary of the fatal lockdown fire in Urumqi in China’s Xinjiang region, Nov. 23, 2024.

A young man who gave only the pseudonym Youhan for fear of reprisals said he was “stunned” by the “white paper” protests when they broke out.

“I saw people in China daring to stand up, and shouting slogans that nobody had shouted since 1989,” Youhan said, in a reference to the weeks-long pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square and in other Chinese cities, that ended with the June 4 Tiananmen massacre.

“I came here today to commemorate my compatriots who died due to pandemic lockdowns,” he said. “Judging from recent developments, the kind of struggle we saw two years ago could break out again soon, because China’s economy hasn’t shown any sign of economic recovery [since restrictions were lifted].”

Similar vigils were held in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo, the organizers told RFA Mandarin.

Imprisoned Hong Kong activists remembered

Some activists in London also displayed information about the recent sentences of up to 10 years handed down to democracy activists and politicians in Hong Kong, who were jailed for “subversion” under the 2020 National Security Law for organizing a democratic primary election.

A woman holds a blank sheet of paper as demonstrators protest the deaths caused by an apartment complex fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, at the Langson Library on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, in Irvine, California, on November 29, 2022. (AFP Photo/ Frederic J. Brown)

A recently-arrived Hong Konger who gave only the nickname Wai for fear of reprisals said many activists in Hong Kong and China share the same beliefs.

“It was the anti-extradition protesters in Hong Kong who passed on the will to protest to young people in mainland China, who then took part in the white paper movement,” Wai said. “It was the desire to stand up and oppose injustice.”

“The saddest and most infuriating thing about the Urumqi fire was that the authorities actually locked people in their homes and didn’t let them out due to pandemic restrictions, and even locked the fire escapes, which is tantamount to murder,” Wai said.

Dozens of young Chinese -- many of them women -- were quietly detained across the country for taking part in November’s “white paper” protests.

A police officer asks a woman to leave as she holds white sheets of paper during a commemoration of the victims of a fire in Urumqi, in Hong Kong Kong, China November 28, 2022. (REUTERS/Tyrone Siu)

Sources familiar with the crackdown in Beijing said at least 40 people are missing and believed detained following a protest at the city’s Liangmahe district on the night of Nov. 27.

A former “white paper” movement protester who gave only the pseudonym Dan Mu for fear of reprisals told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview that she had attended the Liangmahe protest after witnessing an online deluge of public anger, sadness and mourning in the wake of the Urumqi fire.

“I didn’t forward a single message to my friends, nor did I write anything,” she said. “What I was thinking at the time was, what’s the point? If you have the guts, you should take to the streets.”

“Just then, the people of Shanghai took to the streets, and Beijing was the following day,” Dan said.

“We walked to the south bank of Liangmahe [river], where a lot of people were shouting slogans, like ‘freedom not lockdowns!’,” she said.

“I was very scared when I left the house,” she said. “I didn’t know if I would make it back OK, but I still wanted to go.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jasmine Man for RFA Mandarin.

US lawmakers mark East Turkestan National Day with Uyghur community

RFA Uyghur — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 20:24:35 +0000

Updated Nov. 15, 2024, 6:50 p.m.

Read RFA coverage of this topic in Uyghur.

U.S. lawmakers gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington this week to mark “East Turkestan National Day,” the anniversary of two short-lived independent Uyghur states, pledging their support for Uyghurs facing persecution in northwestern China.

Nov. 12 marks the founding of the two republics called East Turkestan in 1933 and in 1944 in what is now known as China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The United States and parliaments of other Western countries have declared that China has committed genocide or crimes against humanity in Xinjiang based on credible evidence of mass detentions in camps, forced sterilizations of Uyghur woman and other severe rights abuses.

Wednesday’s event was attended by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congressman Tom Suozzi, Uyghur studies scholars, and officials from the Uyghur American Association, or UAA.

The commemoration began with the national anthems of the U.S. and East Turkestan, followed by remarks from UAA President Elfidar Iltebir and a short film about the two independent republics.

Statements of congratulations were delivered by Congressional-Executive Committee on China chairs Rep. Chris Smith and Senator Jeff Merkley. CECC Commissioner Senator Marc Rubio, who was recently tapped by President-Elect Donald Trump to lead the State Department, issued a statement marking the anniversary, which was read at the event by an aide.

British foreign secretary under fire for failing to raise Uyghur genocide in China

Turghunjan Alawudun elected head of World Uyghur Congress

After the film, Pelosi described Uyghur culture and governance as “treasure[s] to be preserved, continued and strengthened.”

She also reaffirmed what she called “strongly bipartisan” support for the Uyghurs in both houses.

“In China, millions of Uyghurs and other Muslims have endured outrageous barbaric abuses,” she said. “We want to make sure that those in prison ... are not forgotten.”

“I always say if we don’t speak out for human rights in China … We lose all moral authority to speak out for human rights in any other place in the world,” she added.

Call for stronger measures

Congressman Suozzi acknowledged the work and sacrifices that the diaspora has put into highlighting the persecution Uyghurs face in China, pointing out that their activism subjects them to “transnational repression in the process.”

He vowed to continue working with the community to help bring relief to their friends and family members back in Xinjiang.

Rep. Tom Suozzi speaks at a commemoration of East Turkestan National Day on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2024.

In a message delivered to attendees by a representative, Rubio emphasized the genocide Uyghurs are facing and the need for stronger, more practical measures against it.

“We need to take further actions to impose economic and reputational costs on the CCP,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

“Countries around the world also need to do more to stop the goods produced with [Uyghur] forced labor from entering their countries, press the CCP to release innocent members, intellectuals, religious scholars and cultural icons who are still in prison, and to stop the CCP from subjecting Uyghur women to horrific crimes, including forced abortion, sterilization, sexual violence and separation from their children,” he said.

A statement by CECC Co-chair Christopher Smith said that he expected Rubio, if confirmed as secretary of state, would further elevate the Uyghur issue as part of U.S. policy.

“We do have our work cut out for us,” he said. “But I believe that together with your leadership here, we can prevail.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, the other CECC co-chair, noted in a statement that while some steps have been taken regarding the Chinese government’s Uyghur genocide, China hasn’t changed its ways, and the incoming Trump administration needs to take stronger measures.

20th century states

The first East Turkestan Republic was founded by Turkic - mostly Uyghur - intellectuals on Nov. 12 in 1933 as the only independent republic of Turkic people outside of the Republic of Turkey, formed a decade earlier at the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The budding nation was formed around the capital of Kashgar city - a key node in the ancient Silk Road trade route between China and the West - and had its own flag, constitution, passport, and complete state administration system.

Hui Muslim warlords nominally allied with the Kuomintang-led nationalist government in Nanjing sacked Kashgar in 1934, leading to the dissolution of the republic on April 16 that year, a mere six months after its founding.

Demonstrators display the flag of East Turkestan during a protest in Istanbul, Turkey, July 10, 2009.

The first republic served as an example for the second, lengthier republic founded in 1944, following the Ili Rebellion in Xinjiang.

The second East Turkestan Republic, which lasted until 1949, was more fully formed and boasted its own standing army with modern weaponry, multilingual media outlets, currency and postal system.

The state was initially backed by the Soviet Union, but funding ceased as a result of Moscow’s wartime alliance with the Chinese nationalists' Republic of China.

It was dissolved when communist forces prompted nationalist troops to retreat from mainland China to the island of Taiwan and Mao Zedong formally declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, 1949.

While the two republics were brief, they demonstrated the Uyghur community’s capacity to manage an independent state based on democratic principles, Uyghur activists say.

Gratitude for US support

Speaking after the lawmakers on Wednesday, George Washington University Professors Sean Roberts and Eric Schlussel elaborated on the Uyghur experience of nation-building.

Roberts noted that the Uyghurs are not just a minority demanding equal rights in China, but rather a community aspiring for national self-determination.

Schluessel lamented that both Uyghur republics fell victim to power politics between China and the Soviet Union.

He said that the 91st and 80th anniversaries of the republics are a time to reflect on “the ongoing experiments that are [part of] the struggle for Uyghur political rights.”

“I look forward to witnessing the next experiment, whatever form it takes and wherever it may be,” he added.

Musicians perform at a commemoration of East Turkestan National Day on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2024.

At the end of the event, UAA President Iltebir expressed gratitude for the “tremendous support” that the U.S. government has provided to the Uyghur community.

“East Turkestan Republic Day holds great significance for us,” he said. “This event is incredibly meaningful because it demonstrates that the U.S. government continues to have our backs.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that the second East Turkestan Republic lasted until 1946.

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

Kamala is the In-Girl

B.R. Gowani — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:14:06 +0000

IMAGE/Monthly Review

The criteria for winning a presidential debate is very simple: the candidate who fumbles less, makes less mistakes, avoids too many verbal gaffes, etc., who is able to present a rosy picture for the future, and, who believes in people’s “ambition, the aspirations, [and] the dreams,” is the winner — provided all bullshitting is done with a serious face.

However, it’s entirely a different matter whether that person has any genuine solutions to the problems majority of the people face.

Exactly eight years ago, first time in US history of 240 years, a woman had a chance to reach the highest office — Hillary Clinton won popular votes by almost 3 million votes, but that rare opportunity was snatched away by the Electoral College. The victory went to Donald Trump, a slowly evolving fascist. It is to be remembered that Clinton was not that woman progressives have been waiting for.

This time, another woman, Kamala Harris, is in the race for presidency. Her opponent is none other than Trump. Harris was not in the competition but got her opportunity when the Democratic establishment realized, after the Biden/Trump debate, that the horse they have been trying to steady for three and a half years cannot any more stand on its own, and could give up any moment.

Thus, Joe Biden was pushed aside with a tribute that he left the race for a second term out of patriotic duty. Everyone knows that almost no one gives up power, whether s/he is an authoritarian or a “democrat,” without a rough push.

Kamala is the in-girl

Kamala is the in-girl — so many love and support her, not only most of the Democrats but also some prominent Republicans! Within 36 hours of Biden’s decision not to run, and his nominating of Harris as his successor, Harris campaign raised $100 million that jumped to $310 in less than two weeks, with new donors contributing two-thirds of the amount. By September 6, the number had nearly doubled to $615 million. Andrew Byrnes, a tech policy strategist and Harris fundraiser, said the amount he raised for Kamala in one week was double the amount he raised for Biden in a whole year.

In two months, the amount rose to $1 billion. No other presidential candidate has accumulated such a huge amount in such a short period!

Trump is no match for Harris in fundraising despite the fact that his campaign received $100 million from Miriam Adelson who likes Trump so much that she said “Book of Trump”¹ should be added to the Bible, i.e. the Old Testament. Trump allied PAC also got $150 million from Timothy Mellon. Trump’s equally nasty buddy Elon Musk has contributed $76 million.

Trump is the best thing that has happened to the Democratic Party. Most Democrats never tire of ridiculing him. This enables them and the Democrat-leaning news media to keep their supporters busy in Trump’s antics and eccentricities and thus saves the party from answering hard questions.

MSNBC is also known as MSDNC or Democratic National Committee mouthpiece. MSNBC is a cheerleader for the Democrats. Biden and Harris regularly watch MSNBC’s Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “A Jacobin analysis of six months of its Gaza coverage reveals an unflagging role cheering on Israel’s genocide.”

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire, is backing Kamala because he wants to get rid of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Billionaire Mark Cuban endorsed Harris too for the same reason: dump Khan.

Sheryl Sandberg is “thrilled to support” Kamala,² because

She is an accomplished leader, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country forward.

Ron Conway, a billionaire, has asked tech community to join hands to salvage “our democracy” by getting behind Kamala, whom he has known “for decades” to prevent Trump’s reentry into White House. Conway says she is an “advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met.”

Melinda French Gates ($13 million), Reed Hastings (Netflix), George Soros and Alex Soros, Vinod Khosla, Jeffrey Katzenberg (former president of Walt Disney Studios), Bill Gates ($50 million), and other billionaires numbering 81 (or more) have joined the Kamala bandwagon, whereas, Trump has 52 billionaires with him.

Billionaires’ bribes count. Harris, who was with Biden’s plan of raising capital gains tax from 23.8% to 44.6%, opted for 33%, instead.

More than 90 business leaders, including over a dozen billionaires, wrote and signed an endorsement letter to Harris.

“Her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy. … [She] ensure[s] American businesses can compete and win in the global market. … she will strive to give every American the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”

These billionaire and multimillionaire business people have nothing to do with democracy. The main thrust of the letter is US “businesses can compete and win in the global market,” under Harris, that is, the US government either diplomatically or through military force opens up foreign markets for them like US Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open up for business in 1853. The other fallacy is that Kamala will try to provide people with “the opportunity to pursue the American dream.”

A few corporations are controlling most businesses in US. People are free to dream but whose dreams get realized is decided by the people in power.

Many US presidents, have warned about the increasing corporate power and its harmful effect on country. Thomas Jefferson had hoped in 1816 to “crush” the corporate power which was challenging government and defying laws. Instead the corporations crushed the government power and as journalist and novelist Theodore Dreiser puts it, “the corporations are the government.” (China is a capitalist country but the government controls the capitalists; this is anathema to the US; it wants China to go the US way.)

Women are elated with Harris entering the race for two main reasons: one is that someone from their gender has a chance to win and the other is Harris’ support for abortion. Sadly, most of these women have no Palestinian and Lebanese women and children on their mind.

Porn actors, some of them, are spending over $100,000 in seven swing states in support of Harris because they fear Trump presidency and Project 2025 will ban the porn industry. Harris should thank them but should ask them to stop violence and degradation of women in many of their videos.

Jeff Bridges extended his support to Kamala who is “just so certainly our girl.” He proudly proclaimed: “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris.” Bridges was a part of White Dudes for Harris Zoom call; over 180,000 joined in and raised about $4 million for her campaign. The invitation to join in was based on: “Are you a white guy who believes in science, human rights, and democracy?”

There have been several similar events: such as Latinas for Harris; White Women: Answer the Call; the Black Women Zoom; Caribbean-Americans for Harris; South Asian Women for Harris; Disabled Voters for Harris; Black Men for Harris; Win With Black Women; and South Asian Men for Harris.

Salman Rushdie, an author, joined the South Asian Men for Harris virtual meet and declared he’s in for Harris “1,000 per cent.”³ One could understand Rushdie’s worry as a writer because if Trump wins and turns dictator, of which there are great chances, then he and his ministers, like Elon Musk, won’t tolerate any kind of criticism. The Kamala government would let them write in small publications and press which have limited reach and do not disturb or threaten the ruling class and the system.

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is for Kamala too because “She is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

Billionaire Swift resides in her own bubble and is unaware that, until now the US has been led by calm leaders, but most people have achieved nothing but decline.

In 1982, when the Forbes 400 list was initiated, one could join the list with $100 million ($300 million in today’s money). There were only 13 billionaires then. Today, you need eleven times that amount or $3.3 billion to be one of 400 wealthy in US. So, 400 billionaires made it to the list but 415 individuals couldn’t make it, including Oprah Winfrey who has $3 billion, less than the required $3.3 billion.

What about the rest of the people? A whopping 37% of people in US have less than $400 in savings!

Singer-songwriter Beyonce joined Kamala at a rally in Houston to extend her support. Many celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis, George Clooney,⁴ and Sarah Jessica Parker (who is voting for Kamala for 31 things, including “For our military, past and currently serving” but not for peace or ceasefire in Gaza).

Dick Cheney, the Vice President in George W. Bush regime and one of the major architects of the Iraq War, a Republican, has also announced that he’ll vote for Kamala Harris.

“[There had] never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump”

“He [Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.” “He can never be trusted with power again.”

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution.” “That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”

Liz Cheney, a Republican and Dick Cheney’s daughter, supports Harris too, and joined her campaign events thrice in early October. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , the progressive supporters and Democrats like Harris, are campaigning for her but have not been invited to appear with Harris, as yet.

Liz Cheney criticized Trump: “He is petty, he is vindictive, and he is cruel.” If she had not mentioned Trump’s name, one would have assumed she was talking about her dad Dick Cheney who is not any better, in any respect, but is worst than Trump –until now. Liz Cheney also added: “Violence does not and must never determine who rules us. Voters do.”

Trump called Dick Cheney (whose approval rating, when he left office, was mere 13%) a “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars,” and blasted both father- daughter duo on his TruthSocial account.

“… Her father, Dick, was a leader of our ridiculous journey into the Middle East, where Trillions of Dollars were spent, millions of people were killed – and for what? NOTHING! Well, today, these two fools, because the Republican Party no longer wants them, endorsed the most Liberal Senator in U.S. Senate, further Left than even Pocahontas or Crazy Bernie Sanders – Lyin’ Kamala Harris. What a pathetic couple that is, both suffering gravely from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Good Luck to them both!!!”

Trump is correct about Dick Cheney. He was George H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary when US went to war against Iraq and destroyed that country. Dick Cheney was Vice President of Bush Jr., when US devastated Afghanistan in 2001, and again went to war against Iraq, in 2003.

Trump lies a great deal but then every now and then he also shows a mirror of the US empire, and its imperialist crimes. Trump once told Bill O’Reilly, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think — our country’s so innocent?” Or just recently he said: Trillions of Dollars were spent, millions of people were killed. Now this kind of talk can’t be conducive to people running the empire because they suffer from spectrophobia.

238 staffers from four previous Republican governments and many more, including John Negroponte, one of the criminal minds of US imperialism, endorsed Kamala. Barbara Pierce Bush (daughter of former Republican president George W. Bush) is supporting Kamala with the hope the US moves “forward and protect women’s rights.”

Why so many wealthy and powerful people have gotten behind Kamala? The reasons, as we have seen vary, but the most important one is that Kamala will maintain the statue quo. She’s not going to make any drastic changes, but just the cosmetic type.

On the other hand, many rich, and not very rich, in the ruling class are scared of Trump’s unpredictable nature. The wealthy class may benefit much more under Trump than under Harris. In 2017, Trump lowered the corporate tax rate from (Obama government’s) 35% to 21% and corporations benefited a lot. (Biden raised it to 28% and not the 35% it used to be during his vice presidency.)

Trump may concentrate on domestic issues rather than waging foreign wars; but, then if something triggers him, or he is incited by his aides, or perceives a threat from foreign leader(s), then he may go unhinged.

Biden praised Liz Cheney’s “courage” to appear with Harris. “I admire her. Her dad and I worked together a long, long time.” Biden, like Cheneys, loves violence and war. Republicans and Democrats working together can screw the people within and without the US. It becomes so much easier to wage a war against “foreign enemy” when both parties are working together.

Trump will probably do within the US, what the US has been doing to the world for several decades. He will unleash the army on his opponents and critics. Here is Trump:

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within, Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”⁵

Irony

In 2021, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance had portrayed Vice President Kamala Harris and other women Democrats as, “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives.”

During the presidential debate in September 2024, Trump falsely charged Haitians residing in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs … the cats … the pets of the people that live there.”

On October 31, Trump said “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”

On October 27, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist fun of Latino people by saying “These Latinos, they love making babies,” he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” and repeated the lie about Haitians eating pets.

Donald Trump and his team, it seems, is striving to lose the election. Despite that, the polls show a tight race between Trump and Harris.

On Harris’ side, she is careful but had to distance herself from Biden telling Latinos “The only garbage I see floating out there is his [Trump] supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” Harris has yet to comment on former president Bill Clinton‘s “racist Michigan speech” as Sanjana Karanth puts it. Bill Clinton said:

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died — I get that, but…” “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians, if you want to defend yourself.”

Harris is very popular, was able to amass great amount of money, got lot of support but somehow the polls — which may be wrong , as often happens — are not favoring her. Who knows, as investigative reporter Dave Lindorff points out, Harris could win if she gets “secret women’s vote” in rural Pennsylvania similar to what happened in Kansas in 2022 regarding the banning of abortion referendum. Julia Roberts encouraged women to exercise their right to choose, within the privacy of the election booth:

This is an election where voters will decide between possible drastic changes that result in fascism, versus, maintaining the unjust pro-war inegalitarian status quo.

However, those who are fed up with the two main lesser and greater evils, there are two other candidates to choose from who are anti-war and pro-common people: Jill Stein of Green Party and Claudia De la Cruz of Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).⁶

ENDNOTES:

The post Kamala is the In-Girl first appeared on Dissident Voice.

1 Miriam Adelson wrote in her paper Israel Hayom: “Would it be too much to pray for a day when the Bible gets a ‘Book of Trump,’ much like it has a ‘Book of Esther’ celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from ancient Persia? “Until that is decided, let us, at least, sit back and marvel at this time of miracles for Israel, for the United States, and for the whole world.”

2 In June 2024, Kamala Harris joined by Sandberg screened Sandberg’s documentary Screams Before Silence at the White House. The film was about alleged rapes by Hamas members — a long debunked theory. See Briahna Joy Gray’s detailed expose about the entire issue.

3 Once accepted by US mainstream, which Rushdie has been, he toned down or ignored the crimes of the US, and its ally, Israel. There was a time when Rushdie was for the Palestinian cause; he interviewed Professor Edward Said, the most prominent Palestinian in the Western world then. Last year, Rushdie repeated the Western line of argument labeling Hamas “as a “terrorist organization.” One should have asked Rushdie as to how the occupied people should fight their occupiers.

4 In March 2012, George Clooney was arrested in Washington DC while protesting in front of Sudan’s embassy for violence in South Sudan. He then boasted: “We are the antigenocide paparazzi.” But nowadays Clooney is careful what he says: “I’m very careful not to use words like genocide, occupation, colonialism, open-air prisons — despite believing they do accurately describe what’s happening in Gaza. Those put a target on your back. I also don’t use the word unprovoked. A lot of people say October 7 was “unprovoked.” Well, it’s a massive chicken-and-egg situation, this back-and-forth. Also, I didn’t know the word cease-fire would be such a problem! I would hope we don’t want wars!”

5 See “Making America Great, Again? Racism, Poverty, Violence…“

6 See also “A Moral Imperative for the 2024 US Elections.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

Election 2024 Lies: Money Media Misses the Mark | Meet the BIPOC Press

Laura Flanders & Friends — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:55:32 +0000

This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.

China, North Korea mark 75th anniversary of ties in muted tone

By Taejun Kang for RFA — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:44:16 +0000

Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have marked the 75th anniversary of their countries’ relations but the messages they exchanged were less effusive and shorter than in the past, hinting at cooler ties.

Xi’s message to Kim this year, published by China’s Xinhua News Agency, was 309 characters long, compared with 435 characters in 2019, for the 70th anniversary.

Similarly, Kim’s message to Xi, published by the Korean Central News Agency, was 497 characters this year, down from 809 characters in 2019.

But it wasn't just the length of the messages that was different.

Xi told Kim that relations between their countries had “stood the changes of the times and the trials of an ever-changing international situation and become a precious asset common to the two countries and the two peoples.”

Xi added that China was ready to further develop relations “through strengthened strategic communications and coordination, and deepened friendly exchange and cooperation.”

But Xi did not use the phrases he used in the 70th anniversary celebration, such as “the traditional friendship between China and the DPRK has grown stronger over time and gone deep into the hearts of the people.”

DPRK stands for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Kim referred to Xi in 2019 as his “esteemed” comrade but he dropped that salutation this year.

“Our Party and the government of the Republic will steadily strive to consolidate and develop the friendly and cooperative relations between the DPRK and China as required by the new era,” Kim said.

This year, the messages between Xi and Kim were published on page four of North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun daily. In 2019, they were splashed across the newspaper’s front page.

North Korea bans more TV and movies. Surprise! They’re Chinese

North Korea orders return of workers in China stranded by pandemic

Since North Korea and China established diplomatic ties on Oct. 6, 1949, their relationship has often been described as being “as close as lips and teeth.”

However, there have been signals that China, by far North Korea’s largest trading partner, has become more distant towards its northeastern neighbor.

In September, Xi, in his first message to Kim in eight months, marking the anniversary of North Korea’s founding, was also less effusive in tone on the friendship between the countries than he had been the previous year.

South Korea’s main security agency has raised the possibility of cooler ties between China and North Korea while media has reported that China is hesitant to form a three-way, anti-West alliance with North Korea and Russia.

North Korea and Russia have moved significantly closer amid widespread suspicion that North Korea has supplied conventional weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine in return for military and economic assistance.

This year, North Korea and Russia the two countries signed a strategic treaty that includes mutual defense elements.

China Beijing appears to prioritize a stable regional security environment to address its economic challenges and maintain relationships with Europe and its Asian neighbors.

China’s foreign ministry has dismissed any suggestions that relations with North Korea have cooled.

While North Korea largely sealed itself off during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year it has been building up its diplomatic ties, apart from those with Russia.

A top Vietnamese defense official visited Pyongyang last month and in August, North Korea took steps to patch up ties with old ally Cuba.

In April, a North Korean delegation visited Iran.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

California Court Decision Misses the Mark on the Threat of Political Deepfakes

Newswire Editor — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 21:18:03 +0000

A federal district court in California has issued a preliminary injunction against a California state law, supported by Public Citizen, that aimed to curb deceptive AI-generated deepfakes that could influence the outcome of elections.

The court said that the law doesn’t take an adequately narrow approach to restricting such content, thereby infringing on First Amendment-protected speech or compelling unduly burdensome speech to avoid liability.

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement:

“The court’s decision misses the fundamental problem with deepfakes, which is not simply that they make false claims but that they show candidates saying or doing things that the candidates did not say or do. The court suggests that a targeted candidate can just respond with counter speech – but that is not true, where the candidate has to ask the public not believe their eyes and ears. For this unprecedented kind of fraudulent deception, disclosure *is* the least speech-restrictive solution that can advance the government’s compelling interest in preserving election integrity.

“There are particular features of the California law – such as the requirement to label satire and font size required for disclosures – that appeared to color the court’s decision. And the court recognized that labeling requirements, if narrowly tailored, could pass constitutional muster. This decision therefore should not become an excuse for inaction against the threat of deepfakes.

“There’s nothing about the First Amendment that ties our hands in addressing fraud and a here-and-now threat to democracy.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Who Is NATO’s New Secretary-General Mark Rutte?

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:23:18 +0000

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

Mark Robinson: Anti-Abortion, Anti-LGBTQ & "Black Nazi" Candidate Runs for North Carolina Governor

Laura Flanders & Friends — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 16:41:05 +0000

This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.

Hong Kongers march in London to mark subway station police attacks

By Jasmine Man and Liu Fei for RFA Mandarin — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 17:29:26 +0000

Read RFA coverage of this story in Mandarin from London and Canada

Hundreds of Hong Kongers gathered in London over the weekend to mark the fifth anniversary of 2019 attacks by riot police on unarmed train passengers with baton's and tear gas in Prince Edward subway station.

Around 500 people gathered in London's Trafalgar Square on Saturday, raising the colonial-era flag of British Hong Kong and singing the banned protest anthem "Glory to Hong Kong," before lowering the flag to half-mast to mourn those who died during the months-long protests against Hong Kong's vanishing autonomy under Chinese rule.

The protesters then marched to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, shouting "Hong Kong is not China!" and "One Hong Kong, one nation!" and handing out information leaflets about the attacks to passers-by.

Police were present at the march, and while the demonstration drew stares from some people around Chinese-owned businesses as the march passed through Chinatown, there was no physical or verbal altercation.

Details of the attacks by riot police at the height of the 2019 protest movement remain shrouded in secrecy. Journalists and activists are having difficulty piecing together a coherent picture of what exactly happened in the station as much of the evidence remains in the hands of the authorities.

While police and government officials have hit out at 'malicious rumors' that someone died, the selective release of stills from surveillance footage from cameras inside the station has done little to assuage public mistrust in the official narrative.

Call for investigation

A woman who gave only the surname Wong for fear of reprisals said she has been living in the U.K. for three years now, and has attended every rally marking the Aug. 31, 2019, attacks.

Wong said the attacks were one of the most iconic events in the entire anti-extradition movement, adding that she "can't accept" that the Hong Kong police charged into a subway station and "indiscriminately attacked" people.

She said the government has yet to fully investigate the incident, and called for the truth about what happened in the subway station to be made public.

Passers-by view an art exhibit about the 2019 Hong Kong protests in Vancouver, Aug. 31, 2024. (RFA/Liu Fei)

The parents of a 6-year-old marcher told RFA Mandarin that they had "mixed feelings" about being allowed to hold peaceful demonstrations in the United Kingdom after moving to the country in June.

They said they felt an obligation to tell people in Britain about how their freedoms were built on the sacrifices of others, and that Hong Kongers had been forced to emigrate to the U.K. by the ongoing political crackdown in their home city.

In Canada, around 40 protesters gathered outside the Chinese Consulate in Calgary, burning photos of Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee and security chief Chris Tang, who was chief of police at the time of the protest movement, when rights groups hit out at the use of "excessive force" by the authorities.

39 minutes

Public anger against the police treatment of protesters began with the intense tear-gassing of unarmed crowds who had no escape route at the start of the anti-extradition protests.

It gained momentum when officers took 39 minutes to respond to hundreds of emergency calls when unidentified mobsters in white T-shirts attacked passengers and passers-by at Yuen Long MTR on July 21, 2019.

And it took on a much darker turn following the bloody attacks on train passengers, after which the MTR refused to release video footage from trains and platforms despite persistent rumors that at least one person died in the attacks.

Photos of Lee's second-in-command Eric Chan and Secretary for Justice Paul Lam were also burned.

Protest organizer Paul Cheng, who organized the protest, called them Hong Kong's "Gang of Four," and called on the Canadian government to sanction them.

"They helped the Communist Party destroy Hong Kong and kill Hong Kong," Cheng told RFA Mandarin at the protest. "They are the Communist Party's running dogs. The Communist Party is the culprit in the killing of Hong Kong, and they are its accomplices."

Cheng, who emigrated to Canada more than 40 years ago, says he remembers the freedoms once enjoyed by the city's 7 million residents, adding that things are very different now.

First sedition conviction

Last Thursday, a Hong Kong court found two editors of the now-defunct Stand News guilty of conspiring to publish seditious material, marking the first sedition conviction against any journalist since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997.

The publication’s former editor-in-chief, Chung Pui-kuen, and former acting editor-in-chief, Patrick Lam, could face a maximum prison term of two years under colonial-era sedition laws.

A former Hong Kong journalist who gave only the nickname Stephen for fear of reprisals said he used to work as a journalist in the city, and was particularly saddened by those convictions.

"All Hong Kong media have the same tone now," he said. "There's no opposing voices, just a unified message."

Meanwhile, Vancouver-based activist Christine described physical and mental "torment" after leaving the city she once called home.

"I can't let it go, to be honest," she said. "It's not easy. But fortunately, there is a group of us with the same aspirations, so we can use that discomfort as motivation."

"So we come out on days that need to be commemorated, which is better than pretending I've forgotten about it," she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jasmine Man and Liu Fei for RFA Mandarin.

Rohingya refugees brave heavy monsoon rains to mark seven years of exodus | Radio Free Asia (RFA)

Radio Free Asia — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 13:41:12 +0000

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

‘We Are A Free People’: Ukrainian Soldiers Mark Independence Day

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 07:40:28 +0000

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

Brown’s ‘backflip’ over Japanese nuclear wastewater dump poses challenge for Forum

APR editor — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 19:09:22 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Brittany Nawaqatabu in Suva

Regional leaders will gather later this month in Tonga for the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Tonga and high on the agenda will be Japan’s dumping of
treated nuclear wastewater in the Pacific Ocean.

A week ago on the 6 August 2024, the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima in 1945 and the 39th anniversary of the Treaty of Rarotonga opening for signatures in 1985 were marked.

As the world and region remembered the horrors of nuclear weapons and stand in solidarity, there is still work to be done.

READ MORE: Other nuclear wastewater in Pacific reports

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown has stated that Japan’s discharge of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean does not breach the Rarotonga Treaty which established a Nuclear-Free Zone in the South Pacific.

Civil society groups have been calling for Japan to stop the dumping in the Pacific Ocean, but Brown, who is also the chair of the Pacific Islands Forum and represents a country
associated by name with the Rarotonga Treaty, has backtracked on both the efforts of PIFS and his own previous calls against it.

Brown stated during the recent 10th Pacific Alliance Leaders Meeting (PALM10) meeting in
Tokyo that Pacific Island Leaders stressed the importance of transparency and scientific evidence to ensure that Japan’s actions did not harm the environment or public health.

But he also defended Japan, saying that the wastewater, treated using the Advanced Liquid
Processing System (ALPS) to remove most radioactive materials except tritium, met the
standard set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Harmful isotopes removed
“No, the water has been treated to remove harmful isotopes, so it’s well within the standard guidelines as outlined by the global authority on nuclear matters, the IAEA,” Brown said in an Islands Business article.

“Japan is complying with these guidelines in its discharge of wastewater into the ocean.”

The Cook Islands has consistently benefited from Japanese development grants. In 2021, Japan funded through the Asian Development Bank $2 million grant from the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction, financed by the Government of Japan.

Together with $500,000 of in-kind contribution from the government of the Cook Islands, the grant funded the Supporting Safe Recovery of Travel and Tourism Project.

Just this year Japan provided grants for the Puaikura Volunteer Fire Brigade Association totaling US$132,680 and a further US$53,925 for Aitutaki’s Vaitau School.

Long-term consequences
In 2023, Prime Minister Brown said it placed a special obligation on Pacific Island States because of ’the long-term consequences for Pacific peoples’ health, environment and human rights.

Pacific states, he said, had a legal obligation “to prevent the dumping of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter by anyone” and “to not . . . assist or encourage the dumping by anyone of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter at sea anywhere within the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone.

“Our people do not have anything to gain from Japan’s plan but have much at risk for
generations to come.”

The Pacific Islands Forum went on further to state then that the issue was an “issue of significant transboundary and intergenerational harm”.

The Rarotonga Treaty, a Cold War-era agreement, prohibits nuclear weapons testing and
deployment in the region, but it does not specifically address the discharge of the treated
nuclear wastewater.

Pacific civil society organisations continue to condemn Japan’s dumping of nuclear-treated
wastewater. Of its planned 1.3 million tonnes of nuclear-treated wastewater, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has conducted seven sets of dumping into the Pacific Ocean and was due to commence the eighth between August 7-25.

Regardless of the recommendations provided by the Pacific Island Forum’s special panel of
experts and civil society calls to stop Japan and for PIF Leaders to suspend Japan’s dialogue
partner status, the PIF Chair Mark Brown has ignored concerns by stating his support for
Japan’s nuclear wastewater dumping plans.

Contradiction of treaty
This decision is being viewed by the international community as a contradiction of the Treaty of Rarotonga that symbolises a genuine collaborative endeavour from the Pacific region, born out of 10 years of dedication from Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, the Cook Islands, and various other nations, all working together to establish a nuclear-free zone in the South Pacific. Treaty Ratification

Bedi Racule, a nuclear justice advocate said the Treaty of Rarotonga preamble had one of the most powerful statements in any treaty ever. It is the member states’ promise for a nuclear free Pacific.

“The spirit of the Treaty is to protect the abundance and the beauty of the islands for future
generations,” Racule said.

She continued to state that it was vital to ensure that the technical aspects of the Treaty and the text from the preamble is visualised.

“We need to consistently look at this Treaty because of the ongoing nuclear threats that are
happening”.

Racule said the Treaty did not address the modern issues being faced like nuclear waste dumping, and stressed that there was a dire need to increase the solidarity and the
universalisation of the Treaty.

“There is quite a large portion of the Pacific that is not signed onto the Treaty. There’s still work within the Treaty that needs to be ratified.

“It’s almost like a check mark that’s there but it’s not being attended to.”

The Pacific islands Forum meets on August 26-30.

Brittany Nawaqatabu is assistant media and communications officer of the Suva-based Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG).

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

Brown, Rabuka and Manele to lead Pacific mission to New Caledonia

APR editor — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 23:30:34 +0000

By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist in Suva

The high-level Pacific mission to New Caledonia will be a three person-led delegation and it is still expected to happen prior to the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders (PIF) Meeting in Tonga on August 26, says PIF chair Mark Brown.

Brown, who is also the Cook Islands Prime Minister, made the comment at the PIF Foreign Ministers Meeting on Friday following French President Emmanuel Macron approving the mission.

“It’s important that everyone can assess the situation together with [France],” the French Ambassador to the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, told RNZ Pacific on Friday.

Brown said Tonga’s Prime Minister, Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni, may not be on the trip “because of pending obligations in preparation for the leaders meeting”.

“In which case the incoming troika member, Prime Minister of Solomon Islands [Jeremiah Menele], would be the next person,” he said.

“It will be a three-person delegation that will be leading the delegation to New Caledonia and the expectation is it will be done before the leaders meeting at the end of this month.”

Brown and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka will both be on the mission.

‘Sensitive political dimensions’
“The Forum is very mindful of the nature of the relationship that New Caledonia as a member of the Forum has, but also France’s relationship with New Caledonia currently as a territory of France.

“There are some sensitive political dimensions that must be taken into account, but we feel that our sentiments as a Forum, firstly, is to try and reduce the incidents of violence that has taken place over the last few months and also to call for dialogue as the way forward.”

He said the decision around timing of the trip is up to the troika members — current chair, previous chair and incoming chair.

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters prior to the announcement from France, said it was still to be worked out what role New Zealand would play on the New Caledonia mission.

“We are seriously concerned to ensure that the long-term outcome is a peaceful solution but also where the economics of New Caledonia is sustained, that’s important,” he said.

Peters said he expected that over time there would be more than one delegation sent to New Caledonia.

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.

Laos, Thailand mark first direct passenger train between Bangkok, Vientiane

By RFA Lao — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 15:29:06 +0000

The first direct passenger train between Bangkok and Vientiane arrived earlier this month.

Previously, passengers could ride from Bangkok to the Thai city of Nong Kai on the border with Laos. But now they can travel straight into Vientiane – and also have the option of transferring to the high-speed rail line that travels north to Kunming in southwest China.

The first State Railway of Thailand train began servicing the route on July 19. A return train on July 20 left Vientiane at about 6:25 p.m. and arrived in Bangkok at about 7:35 a.m. the next day.

Prices ranged from between 158,000 kip (US$7) to 530 million (US$24) kip. It was so popular that officials added an additional carriage after passengers bought most of the available tickets.

“I always commuted by train when I was studying,” one Lao passenger told Radio Free Asia. “I wanted my kids to take this train, so they could experience it.”

Eventually, passengers could travel from Bangkok and Vientiane on a high-speed rail line.

Earlier this year, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Thailand’s prime minister that he hopes to speed up construction of a high-speed rail line in Thailand that would connect with Laos’ high speed line, which China built in 2021 as part of its Belt & Road Initiative.

China has said that it plans to construct and connect a 3,000-kms (1,864-miles) pan-Asian railway network, in which Chinese rail lines would extend all the way to the tip of the Malay Peninsula, linking Beijing to Singapore.

Edited by Matt Reed.

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

Laos, Thailand mark first direct passenger train between Bangkok, Vientiane

By RFA Lao — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 14:43:53 +0000

The first direct passenger train between Bangkok and Vientiane arrived earlier this month.

The first State Railway of Thailand train began servicing the route on July 19. A return train on July 20 left Vientiane at about 6:25 p.m. and arrived in Bangkok at about 7:35 a.m. the next day.

Prices ranged from between 158,000 kip (US$7) to 530 million (US$24) kip. It was so popular that officials added an additional carriage after passengers bought most of the available tickets.

“I always commuted by train when I was studying,” one Lao passenger told Radio Free Asia. “I wanted my kids to take this train, so they could experience it.”

Eventually, passengers could travel from Bangkok and Vientiane on a high-speed rail line.

Edited by Matt Reed.

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

PIF hopes to send delegation to New Caledonia, says Forum chair

APR editor — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 09:01:33 +0000

By Pita Ligaiula in Tokyo

The Pacific Islands Forum hopes to send a high-level delegation to Kanaky New Caledonia to investigate the current political crisis in the French territory before the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting in Tonga in August.

According to Pacnews, Forum Chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown confirmed this during an interview with journalists in Tokyo after the conclusion of the PALM10 meeting.

He said while it was a work in progress, there had been a request from the territorial government of New Caledonia for a high-level Pacific delegation.

READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Brown said the next step was to write a letter which would then need support from France.

“We will now go through the process of how we will put this into practice. Of course, it will require the support of the Government of France for the mission to proceed,” Brown said.

The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) has voiced strong objections to France’s handling of the political situation in Kanaky/New Caledonia.

Brown said the Forum shared similar concerns.

“We do have similar concerns. The third referendum was boycotted by the Kanak population because of the impacts of covid-19 and the respect for the mourning period. Therefore, the outcome of that referendum is not valuable,” he said.

The adviser to New Caledonia’s President Charles Wea, who is in Japan for talks on the sidelines of the PALM10 meeting, told RNZ Pacific the high level group would be made up of the leaders of Fiji, Cook Islands, Tonga and Solomon Islands.

New Caledonia government adviser Charles Wea . . . mission to New Caledonia would be made up of the leaders of Fiji, Cook Islands, Tonga and Solomon Islands. Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony

Fiji’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sitiveni Rabuka announced he would lead the Forum’s fact-finding mission in New Caledonia.

“I have also been asked by many Pacific leaders to lead a group to conduct a fact-finding mission in Nouméa to understand the problems they are facing,” he said during a talanoa session with the Fijian diaspora in Tokyo.

Fiji Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . leading a “fact-finding mission in Nouméa to understand the problems they are facing”. Image: RNZ/Giles Dexter

“Additionally, I will accompany Prime Minister James Marape to visit the President of Indonesia to discuss further actions regarding the people of West Papua.”

New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister Winston said on Friday that the Pacific Islands Forum could serve as a “constructive force” to find a “path forward” in New Caledonia.

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

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

New Caledonia violence ‘unfortunate’ but ‘not surprising’, says Pacific Forum chief

APR editor — Wed, 15 May 2024 06:57:02 +0000

RNZ Pacific

Outgoing Secretary-General Henry Puna of the Pacific Islands Forum is “not surprised” with the violent unrest in New Caledonia which has shut down the French Pacific territory.

New Caledonia has come to a virtual stop after three days of civil unrest, resulting in burning, shooting and looting, as leaders call for calm.

French police reinforcements have arrived in Nouméa, with reports of dozens of arrests being made.

New Caledonia’s territorial President, pro-independence leader Louis Mapou, has condemned violent actions, saying “anger cannot justify harming or destroying public property, production tools, all of which this country has taken decades to build”.

Secretary-General Puna told journalists in his final news conference as the region’s top diplomat from Rarotonga that “to see the collapse [and], protesting is very unfortunate” — but it was predictable.

He said the issue “has been boiling” since the 2021 independence referendum in the French territory, the third and final vote under the Nouméa Accord, which was boycotted by the pro-indigenous Kanak population.

He said he was there in December 2021 to monitor the independence referendum when it was taken and “it was unfortunate that it was allowed to go ahead during that time”.

‘In middle of covid pandemic’
“We were in the middle of the covid pandemic and the Kanak custom is that when somebody passes, they mourn for one year. So they weren’t allowed that freedom.

“As a result, they didn’t want to take part in the referendum because they couldn’t go against their tradition and go campaigning or do other work. That’s disrespectful for the custom.”

Puna said the Nouméa Accord — all the processes, and the steps leading to that referendum, had been set and agreed to by all parties and if that had been followed right through, the referendum would not have been held then but in September 2022.

“To see the collapse and protesting is very unfortunate because it does raise some issues that need to be resolved. But I think it can be resolved in the wisdom of our leaders at this time.

“That’s something that we really need to talk about openly and honestly. What the causes of the problem are, and what the solutions could be.

Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna . . . the New Caledonia unrest is “unfortunate”. Image: PIF Secretariat

‘Recognise greater autonomy’ – Mark Brown
The outgoing chair of the Forum and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown said greater autonomy for the indigenous Kanak population was needed.

Brown said Pacific peoples valued sovereignty and the protests were in response to that.

He said many forum members were former colonies.

“If there’s one thing that specific countries value, it is the sovereignty and independence. To be able to have control over the destiny of your own country,” he said.

New Caledonia, French Polynesia were new entrants into the Forum and this was in recognition of their calls they had made for greater autonomy coming from their people.

“My initial view of the unrest that’s occurring in Caledonia, it is a call to recognise greater autonomy and greater independence from the people on those islands,” he said.

“As a member of the Forum now, we will be able to provide support assistance to these member countries as to the best way forward without trying to avoid any escalation of conflict.”

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.

Frontman and composer Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo) on finding inspiration in scraps

Lior Phillips — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0000

You seem like someone who is very intentional about your art. Were you a part of every bit of the process for your new book, down to the materials and overall design?

I make books, but I only make them one at a time. I use this online company called Blurb. I put together books of different sizes with artwork that I do, and I make one for me or I make two and then I give one to somebody that wants one. And I’ve done that for years when I get stuck or just need a break when I’m writing music. Anyhow, John came to the building and saw the book that I was working on and goes, “Oh, I want to put that out.” And I go, “No, you don’t. I just make them for me with Blurb.”

I mean, I think Blurb’s genius. They’re allowing people that normally would never put out a book, like grandmas and grandpas, to put together books. My kids put out their books at Valentine’s Day a few years ago when they were just in junior high. They made one for our family. I think those books are going to be worth a lot of money someday. People will say, “Oh, this was a whole other way to think about books.” Books are like an endangered species, books as we know them, because the internet and cell phones and things have eliminated a lot of that stuff. And a lot of that’s good. There’s a lot of good in that because you only have so much paper.

The barrier to entry has changed much the way it has for music. Though I suppose when it comes to a book, the audience and ability to quickly make an impact for a book is much more difficult, and you essentially need to be your own PR.

There are a lot of impediments to bring out a book!

But I like what you’re saying in that there shouldn’t be. That’s why I love zines and alt weeklies, which just keep disappearing. Just like with vinyl, people still want that physicality.

Yes. I don’t want the physical piece of every single piece of music I’ve ever heard. I don’t want to have that much stuff, nor does anybody. Maybe a few people need that, and go for it. They should be allowed to do it. I think curations are great and they’re good to acknowledge, but I don’t think everybody needs everything. This guy saw my book I was just going to make for myself, and he said, “Let me put it out.” And I go, “You might lose money doing this.” He goes, “No, we’ll be careful about it and we won’t make that many.” Which is true, we didn’t. I think we made 1,500 copies.

It’s so incredible that when you feel like a break from creating, you just create another type of art. You don’t stop yourself from creating. How do you keep that energy?

I was either fortunate enough or unfortunate enough that I was seven years old when they discovered I was blind, and I walked to school for two years not being able to see further than six inches from my face. There was just enough of a blur of color and blobs that I would know that I was getting close to a street corner and I’d feel it when you stepped down and I made it across and didn’t get flattened by a car.

The day that I got a pair of glasses, it was extreme myopia. It was like everything came into focus for the first time in my life. I didn’t have that when I was a baby, where your eyes slowly start to focus and everything. I just had it, bang, and it just happened at once and it was a joyous moment for me. The downside is that the glasses in those days, the prescription was so extreme, they looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles. I saw everything… You know when you look in an orb, like a Christmas ornament or a doorknob or something and everything was… What do they call that…

Like a fisheye?

Yes, like a fisheye lens. So it meant there were a lot of things I couldn’t be part of, like sports. But the joy of getting to see things… I spent seven years where I would lay close to stuff. I’d be on the lawn and I could see little bugs. If they were this close to me, I could watch ants climb on leaves of grass. They’d crawl on me and I could see things if they were this close. I think that handicap of not having vision made my mind always look at things and try to create a shape. If somebody knocked on the door and I was in the living room, I could look over at the direction where I knew a door was, but it wasn’t until they came in and I heard their voice that I would run up to them and I’d be like this close. I’d go, “Grandma!” And grandma would go, “Okay, you’re a freak.” But my mind would make things.

I think that’s why I never really liked LSD. Somebody dropped on me a couple times. I never took it on purpose. Two different people thought they were helping me out. I think my mind already kind of created the visions people saw. Just in my dreams and just getting up and looking for my glasses in the morning, I would see things, my mind would create things. So it was too intense for me.

A lot of things that inspire me are just scraps of information. My mom and dad, we’d go downtown at Christmas time in Akron, Ohio, and we’d walk along, there’d be a homeless person speaking, and I’d want to stop and listen to them. “Wow, they know something that we all need to know.” They’ve altered their life. He’s doing something else and he’s trying to warn people. I knew that there were things that were out there that people couldn’t see. And I thought, “Well, maybe they were right in front of you and you didn’t see them.” I thought maybe there’s things you hear and you don’t even know it. So that’s the kind of stuff that intrigued me.

I decided that I was going to keep track of that kind of stuff. So at a very early age, I started making cards. It started off with postcards and blank paper, and then I started prepping the cards. This book that we’re talking about here is atypical in the sense that it’s a collection of 500 images that started with an eye that was made out of plaster that I found in downtown LA, somewhere between ‘77 and ‘79. When I came out to California, Mexican botanicas had me interested and mesmerized because I felt like they were supplying a part of the world that science wasn’t supplying, society wasn’t supplying. They were in an area that I was really interested in, which was where faith and science start mixing together. I thought they represented important parts of what it means to be a human. So anyhow, I collected this eye and you put it over your doorway to ward off evil spirits and to ward off bad energy from people that were maybe thinking bad thoughts about you, evildoers that had it in for you for some reason.

But it’s so symbolic for you as well, having started out without your vision.

Ironically, I lost vision in one of my eyes about four years ago at the very beginning of COVID. I went into an ICU back before that. They didn’t have any medicine yet to treat people, they were panicking. They just put everybody on ventilators. So I think going on a ventilator, it either popped my eye or somebody hit me when they were sending me in this chaotic situation. But the first couple days I was in ICU, I lost vision in one of my eyes. And they were saying, “Well, maybe it’s the COVID,” which we now know had nothing to do with it other than it was my reason for being at ICU. But it’s kind of interesting in a way because I have, in this eye now, a permanent version of what I had for the first 69 years of my life, which was taking off my glasses and everything being blurred. Now glasses can’t correct it. If I close this eye, I have this blurred eye that has about as much vision, or even maybe a little less, than what I had for the first seven years of my childhood.

They say when you take a sense away, everything else picks up.

Here’s my feeling about being a cyclops: it has some irritating problems with it. I’m sure my left eye was my subordinate. Now it’s got to step up to the plate and do everything.

We’re so sorry, left eye.

So my left eye at the end of the day is like, “I’m tired.” It really wants me to give it a rest earlier than normal. I don’t feel like 18 hour days are that great for me and I need a little bit more time. But on the other hand, I think stereo is overrated. I spent 69 years with stereo vision, and now I’ve been a cyclops for four years. I’ll trip on a stairway or something. I have to be more careful than I used to. A little intentional. I have a daughter that lost her vision in one eye when she was one or two. Her eyes were over-inflating with fluid. She had glaucoma. And it was cute because when I came back from the hospital, she was watching me kind of shaky and pouring coffee on the table. And she goes, “Dad, let me show you something,” and she showed me how you touch the coffee cup with your little finger before you pour, then you don’t pour it on the table. We’ve bonded over that. My family, two of us out of four are cyclops. But for the most part, yeah, it just gives you something else to add to the way you think about your art you’re doing.

Did you have any habits or processes that have had to change as your life has changed?

I don’t write music every day. I write music five days a week approximately. But visual art I do every single day of my life. If something happens where I go to bed and I forgot to work on one of these cards, and I go, “Oh, I only have this little piece here and this here,” I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll finish it because I have that obsession that I need to keep that journal. It’s like a journal for me, doing artwork on cards. I really liked the book because it’s much more focused. These cards are things I heard during the day, or I get a thought in my head and I don’t want to lose it.

You leave space for it, which is so nice, but don’t then obsess over finality. Your note with the book said that you were open to people cutting pages up and being able to collage with it. People are so precious about their art and you seem to have the opposite approach here.

My art is very personal, but I understand that people are going to open this book up and they’re going to read the line over top of this eyebrow that says “filthy esophagus,” and then right below it says “lift your leg.” And they’re going to go, “How do those…” It’s not going to mean anything to them. Moving on to the next word in the title beatnik, I think of it as beat poetry and stream of consciousness. I’m fascinated with artists. The beatniks to me were the first generation post-atomic bomb that we’re saying, “You know what? Humans might not be good for this planet.” And they were critical of humans. I identify with that because I have feelings similar to them, I’m sure. So with the text in this, you skip a couple pages and then you find something else that it relates to from another day and from another situation. And I could see building poems from it, and I have done it… I’ve built lyrics out of these phrases. I mean, in this book even there’s a QR code, and if you click on it, you can hear a song that I wrote that uses lyrics made from this book.

I remember listening to you on a podcast where you talked about breaking your sister and brother’s records.

Oh yeah, yeah. Now that you’re saying that… Yeah, when I was a kid, I was kind of a jerk, and my sister bought records that I didn’t respect. At the time I didn’t care. I liked the Bee Gees’ first singles, when they had 45s when I was 12. But when I got to be 15, I was not into them anymore. My sister had this album and we didn’t treat our records well at our house because there were kids ranging from me at 15 down to five years old. So there were all these ages and everybody used the record player, and they weren’t precious with whether they went back into the sleeve, where they were put. And we were terrible with handling stuff. Because of it, a lot of records got destroyed, broken, bent, scratched. I was playing one of my sister’s records with a Bee Gees song on it when I was 14 or 15, and I just heard, “There’s a time, there’s a time, there’s a time.” And I remember, I was like, “Wow, I like that. It’s a tempo.” And it used real music, but it was a deconstruction of something that to me was not that interesting a song until I heard just a second and a half of it repeating. I didn’t have the technology back in those days to record that, because if I would’ve, I would’ve written music over top of that. And I did kind of jam with records that I scratched and broke. But it was the same thing where I had a partial phrase that I felt was stronger than where it originated from.

You were creating your own mosaic. Devo was similarly revolutionary because you were creating sounds and songs in a way that nobody else was.

We were trying for that.

You were in a different world. And I love that you’ve brought that into the art that you do and the scoring that you do. It makes sense that you hear things that other people don’t hear.

I thought it was related to vision problems, and now I have hearing problems, so I hear things that aren’t real. I did this book partly because of somebody who had seen me, for 20-some years every day, draw on these cards, and they knew I had a storage container that had 700 volumes of these–volumes that had 100 cards each in them. So they knew I had 70,000 of these cards in a storage container that I thought were only ever opened by me. Nobody else was interested in it. I would just go in and look at it myself. But I started this book because I thought this person said to me, “Well, those cards, that’s not art.” It was only after I’d been working on it for six months or something that I told them what they’d said to me and they go, “I would never say that.” I had heard it wrong.

Seeing how open and available you can make yourself for your own art, it seems like you have a proper process. You make time for your music. You make time for your art every day. It’s become a discipline for you.

It took a while. Being an artist, there’s also the other side of it. We’re in a capitalistic society where you still have to pay your rent even if you’re an artist. And if you’re making music all day, you still have to eat food, and you still have to make it from one part of town to another somehow, and it takes money. I was lucky enough that I found a way to have a day job that I really like, and it allows me to do the things that I want to do as an artist. I can’t do that full time. If I stopped doing music for films and TV shows and for video games… I’ve heard other people say, “Well, I don’t know if writing music for a film is art or not.” And a lot of films it’s not, I’m sure. A lot of them, it’s just a craft. But it’s like you do films with artists. I did all the early films for Wes Anderson, for instance. For those and other projects I’ve worked on, I’ve just felt like, “Yeah, we are making art.” And at the end of the day, if they don’t make money, then they don’t hire you again.

You also have a specific way of working. They’re not just hiring anyone. You have an iconic style and decades of experience, but you’re still coming with such a fresh perspective, which I think is not usual.

Yeah, it’s not always. There are a lot of really talented composers out there. I sometimes hear things even on just a crappy TV show or something, not even a good show, but I’m listening to the music and I go, “Oh, I like whoever that was, what they did.” And quite often it drives you crazy because you watch a movie and something’s bothering me, and I’m like, “Oh, you know what it is? I know what they temped that movie with.” They temped it with something out of a Danny Elfman or a Hans Zimmer movie, and then they made the composer kind of do a dumbed down version, trying to copy it. So they did the B version of it. So it’s not as good as the thing that they were trying to copy.

You’re like a craftsman. It’s adding something and you’re supporting somebody else’s ideas, and sometimes people come to you and they need you to help them see their movie, and sometimes they don’t know what they’re doing and they give you bad advice. And luckily in music, it’s so abstract an art form. You come in and they can ask for something and you can leave the meeting going, “They don’t know what they need to make this great.” And then you forget what they say, you write it, and then when you bring it back, you go, “Well, I listened to what you said and here’s what you get.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s what I asked for? Oh, okay.”

Are you making music for yourself, then, in a sense?

Not every day, but almost every day. What I used to do for 30 years, I would come into this building and I would come in at 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning, and I would just write music for myself until everybody showed up at 9:30. And I have hundreds of pieces of music that are all different genres. Like the song in this book, it’s a square dance. But I’ll tell you, everybody has collections. They have things they collect. Some people collect thimbles, some people collect toothpicks. I know somebody who collects toothpicks, and they’re really into the ones that look like they’ve got a little bit of the bark on the outside. Or they like them if they’re die-cut out of something. There are some good ones in the US but there’s more interesting toothpicks in Asia, for instance, than there are in the US. I collect vinyl. You might collect songs that meant a lot to you when you were a kid, but I have a vinyl collection that’s about 2,000 discs, and it’s all 45s of square dance music. Why would you collect that? Because there’s such bad karma attached to square dance music anyhow.

What I like about it was that on one side, you got a caller going, “Well, swing your partner round and round, grab your boots and throw them in the air.” And people would go to their friend’s house or they’d go to their church and they’d play the record with the song on it, and they’d all do the dance. The other side of the record, on almost every square dance record, they were designed so… Square dances not only have the people that do the dance with their checkerboard dresses and their little bolo ties, all that horrible stuff, there’s also a guy that’s the caller, like a DJ, a guy or a girl that tells you what to do. They have a lot to do with making up what the dance is, and depending upon who’s in the dance, you can say one thing on one side of the record, but on the other side you can kind of pull it back a little so that your people in Chattanooga, Tennessee, can all do that dance. But because it’s got no lyrics, I took phrases out of this book, for instance, and I’ve done this with square dance music for nine or 10 years now, and I make up a beatnik poem. And then I play this record that was recorded in the ’60s and add synth over top of it, and I may edit it to open a space up where I could go totally electronic or something and come back into it.

About seven or eight years ago I did a tour of a retrospective of my visual art and some of the audio art mixed in that was all non-Devo, and it wasn’t about other people’s movies or any of that stuff. It toured museums around the US, and when we got to Cincinnati, the people at the museum found square dancers that were 90 years old and they had those outfits I was telling you about. At the premier for the show, they had these 90-year-old people and the guy doing the calls and they were dancing to my beatnik square dancing.

That must have been incredible to see.

Yeah, there’s the doctors and dentists that normally show up at a museum, but then there’s also Devo fans in Devo shirts going, “What the fuck is this?” I enjoyed it so much.

Mark Mothersbaugh recommends:

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Birdy Magazine: I like their funky style

Stupido-Shop Record Store, Helsinki, Finland

Footwear: 810s HOSP/Black (Moonstar)

Ambient Machine by Yuri Suzuki

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lior Phillips.

"Killing People Around the Clock": Palestinians Mark Six Months of War on Gaza

Democracy Now! — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 14:36:23 +0000

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

Novelist Mark Cecil on having faith in creative abundance

Denise S. Robbins — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

After a long career as a journalist, you left your job to write a novel about Paul Bunyan. Why Paul Bunyan for your first novel?

Actually, this was not the first novel that I wrote. It’s just the first novel that I’m getting published. I’ve always been interested in big mythic figures. I wrote novels about Joan of Arc, George Armstrong Custer and Crazy Horse, and also tried my hand at modern retellings of Greek tragedies like Euripides’s Medea and Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. This Paul Bunyan book ended up working because it was the right genre, the right time in my life, the right story. So many things have to click for an artist to break through. There’s an old saying that you want to try to write the book that only you could write, that no other person on earth could have written. With my other unpublished books, I got feedback that they were strong efforts, but perhaps someone else could have written them. But the Paul Bunyan book is so unique that there really isn’t anybody on earth who could have done it. It’s just such a deep reflection of who I truly am.

Dare I ask, how many other books did you write?

You may dare ask. Dare I answer? Oh, my God. I would say at least six. But I write really fast. I averaged a year or two per book, while I had a full-time job.

How do you feel about the six books that may never see the light of day?

I feel good about it, honestly. I think it was all part of a necessary learning process. You learn what works. You learn what doesn’t work. You learn what people respond to. There’s just no better way of figuring out your craft than continuing, continuing, continuing. If I had one piece of advice, it’s don’t be precious. Be courageously open to the idea that you have written something that might not work. But also have faith in creative abundance—that you will have another good idea in the future. Through it all, I always had hope that one day it would truly work. I felt myself getting closer with every effort. And now, my debut novel is built on that solid experiential foundation and knowledge about my own particular strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

What would you say to the new writer who might be terrified that they have to write seven books to get published? Is there another way?

There is definitely another way. I’m an outlier. I talk to a lot of writers on my podcast so I know their track records, and I would say probably 98 percent of published authors write fewer books than me before publication. Maybe 10 or 20 percent of people are publishing the first book that they write. Fifty percent are publishing the second or third book that they write. Seven is a lot. But I have a high artistic metabolism. I just like cycling through projects.

It’s important to mention, though, that I do truly love writing. It’s literally my favorite thing to do in the world. If I had to pay to write, I would. I would probably pay $50 an hour just to be able to write every day. A lot of people talk about writing like they talk about going to the gym, like it’s painful. But I like it. And so that makes it easier to write a lot of books.

Where does that energy come from? Do you ever have a bad day?

While the writing is usually fun, I do have bad days in revision. When I see that my work doesn’t connect to the story, or doesn’t emotionally land, or feels derivative, that can be discouraging. But the writing itself is quite therapeutic. Like draining pressure from my soul.

Back to the first question: Why Paul Bunyan for this book?

For one, I love myths. And Bunyan And Henry is based on my favorite classic story: The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a 4000-year-old tale from ancient Mesopotamia about the adventures of the king, Gilgamesh, and his friend Enkidu.

I’m also influenced by other great classics of myth and fantasy, but the thing is, so much high fantasy is about war. The Lord of the Rings, which casts the biggest shadow across the fantasy landscape to this day, was written by a person who was in World War I. No matter what Tolkien says, every page of that book just screams out, to me anyway, that Tolkien was working through his experiences and thoughts about war. But we don’t have a huge war in this generation, and the Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t a war book, so to me, it resonates more. Gilgamesh is a book about two buddies, their friendship, and the adventures they go on together. It’s about love, a quest for eternal life, temptation, and loyalty. It’s about all these things which I think are so much more relevant to somebody in this day and age.

Paul Bunyan is your modern-day Gilgamesh?

Yes, big time. The American Gilgamesh.

So it’s not really based on the folk tale of Paul Bunyan, but of Gilgamesh transposed onto the Paul Bunyan that you created.

The Paul Bunyan myth is actually pretty thin. It’s really a children’s story. Paul Bunyan began as a folklore figure among lumberjacks. But then he got adopted by commerce. It’s called “fake lore”: advertisers were making up stories about Paul Bunyan to sell griddles or refrigerators. Then he became this Disney figure who’s a hundred feet tall and eats a thousand flapjacks for breakfast. I’m not interested in that. By contrast, John Henry, who is Bunyan’s companion in my novel, is maybe the closest thing this country has to a true mythic hero. The basic contours of John Henry’s story are that he knew when he was a child that he would die with a hammer in his hand. And then he grew up,and did just that, heroically defeating a steam hammer, then dying of exhaustion. I think it’s a story worthy of Sophocles, this struggle with a doomed fate.

Your book talks a lot about the “Twisty Path” on which these characters have to embark. How much of that was inspired by your previous career as a journalist? Did you feel like you had to take a “Twisty Path” to get to where you are?

You guessed it. That’s, in many ways, exactly what this book is about. Part of the power of the fantasy genre is that it’s a disguised emotional autobiography. I quit my job when I was 40 years old to write fiction full time. I had four children and my wife was working, and we were able to make ends meet. That was a major life decision, to leave a steady job and chase a dream. But it was something I just had to do. And it very much mirrors Paul Bunyan trying to follow his own path in the book to his “beautiful destiny.” But the path to our dream is never a straight path. It can be humiliating, discouraging, and terrifying, just as it’s exhilarating. And you never quite know if you’ll get there. That may sound hokey, but hey, I lived it.

How did you maintain a creative practice while you were working full time?

I’m an early bird. I’d work from six till eight or nine, then go to my regular job.

Your kids didn’t need you in the morning?

My wife and I have a system. She’s a night person and I’m a morning person. After 5pm, nothing good is going to come out of my brain. She was able to take care of the kids completely in the morning, and then in the afternoons and the evenings, that’s when I would take over.

Do you feel your time as a reporter helped you write fiction or gather story ideas?

Yes. I was reporting about Wall Street and finance. The character “El Boffo” in my book is a grandiose raging capitalist and is influenced by the kinds of people I met on the job. The character is over the top, for sure. But he also feels real to me. In my book, El Boffo has compiled a bestselling collection of aphorisms called “Awaken The Capitalist Within,” and to be honest, I’m often nearly won over by his point of view. Like all good antagonists, El Boffo has a point.

Meanwhile, I don’t think reporting helped me become a better novelist per se. If you want to write a novel, you just have to write novels. I think you have to practice the exact thing you want to be good at.

And did being a parent help as well?

In a lot of ways, this book was written with my kids in mind. I felt like I was trying to pass on something about what I think is a life well led (at least as far as I can tell here in my 40s). There are a lot of books out there that are about people making bad choices, people making weak choices, people succumbing to their worst instincts. It’s worth making art about that kind of stuff, for sure. But at the particular place I am in my life, and especially since this began as a bedtime story for them, I wanted to show them characters making strong, courageous choices.

The other thing I’ll say on a practical level is that I performed this story over the course of about four to six weeks for my kids, on a nightly basis with nightly installments. Each chapter is a kind of bedtime story in its own right. That means that you can’t take any chapter off. You can’t have a chapter that’s a palate cleanser, or an interstitial, or just one paragraph. Every chapter is six to nine pages or so. It takes five to ten minutes to read it out loud. Every night, the kids would want something that has a little action in it, a little drama that escalates, and a resolution that leads you into the next story. There’s a lot of cliffhangers for that reason, to get them excited about the next night. To me, that was my own personal MFA. I had to work out my material in a way that would keep the eyes of my four children on me and keep them entertained.

Did you perform for all four children at once?

Oh, yeah.

With no chaos?

They’re pretty good. My oldest son was always tired, so he usually fell asleep. But my three younger ones, look, they weren’t always pleased. They would occasionally give me feedback. My daughter once gave me this brilliant piece of feedback. I told the story one night, and it didn’t go well, and she was very sweet. She was maybe seven years old. She saw that I was struggling, so she came up to me and gave me a hug. I asked her, “What did I do wrong?” And she said, “Dad, every night in the story, someone either has to be fighting or falling in love.” Pretty great advice.

Do they ever yell at you to keep going if there was a cliffhanger?

Oh, yes. One hundred percent yes.

Do you feel like this story was intended to teach a moral lesson to children? And how do you approach morality in fiction? Do you think literary fiction tends to shy away from having “a message?” If so, should it?

I think that there is nothing “literary,” per se, about darkness. I don’t think darkness in the human spirit, darkness in tone, or darkness in subject matter are inherently sophisticated. Nor do I think optimism, good choices, courageous choices, or moral people, are inherently unsophisticated. What’s artistic is all in the execution, not the subject matter, in my opinion.

I love dark books and I’ve written dark books. But in Bunyan and Henry, I just wanted to write characters who are making the strong choice and succeeding. Am I trying to say that all human nature is rosy or that good always triumphs over evil? I’m not trying to say that, even if that is what happens in this particular book. I wanted to create the feeling like being shot out of a canon, a book of triumph and good at last prevailing after so much evil. I don’t think that’s preachy. It’s just the kind of story this is—an adult fairy tale with a big heart. To me, it’s part of a tradition that includes Star Wars, Lord of The Rings, The Alchemist, and even more recently, Remarkably Bright Creatures.

What’s the most memorable children’s book you’ve read?

I actually don’t read children’s books! It was always more interesting to me to just make something up myself.

Mark Cecil recommends:

Endings: The Good, The Bad and the Insanely Great. This is a film about how to craft stories that will have audiences absolutely losing their minds and screaming with joy, by two time Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Arndt (who wrote Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine). Entertaining in its own right, it’s also some of the best writing advice to be found anywhere.

The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature of Mass Movements. An astonishing work of sociology, and one of the best books I’ve ever read. It explains the psychology around why human beings surrender their identities, beliefs, rationality, and even their lives to mass movements both good (Christianity) and bad (Nazi-ism). A slim gem of the book for the armchair psychologist.

Storytelling teacher K.M. Weiland. Weiland’s site, Helping Writers Become Authors, is one of the best around for helping storytellers hone, analyze and develop their stories. She also has a podcast, filled with wise, gentle, encouraging advice. She’s especially strong on giving advice around fantasy and myth.

The opening sequence of The Revenant on a big screen TV. Every Christmas, I go down to the basement of my in-laws, where they have a giant TV, and I watch The Revenant. I love the entire film for the beautiful nature scenes, and would submit it may be the most rapturously stunning Hollywood film ever made about the landscape of the American west. The movie is long, so if you want to get the gist, I’d just recommend the opening 25 minutes.

The folk song “Time Has Told Me” by Nick Drake. Nick Drake meant a lot to me at a very certain part of my life, when I was a heartbroken 19 year old. I recently stumbled back across his work, and it took me back to those wildly uncertain, vulnerable and romantic years. Time Has Told Me is his melancholic masterpiece.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Denise S. Robbins.

Reimagining “Nationalism” and “Democracy” with “the View from the Shore”

Steven Schwartzberg — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 20:57:54 +0000

Having no Native American ancestry, I nevertheless want to express a deep admiration for the intense beauty of the spiritual foundations of what Steve Newcomb (Shawnee-Lenape) suggests we refer to as “the view from the shore”—the perspectives of peoples enjoying a genuinely free and independent existence before what Tink Tinker (wazhazhe/Osage) has called “the eurochristians” invaded bringing with them a foreign system of domination that has since been maintained by their heirs and successors.

If we take this “view from the shore” seriously, it calls into question all of the crumbling dominant narratives of our world today—especially narratives based in “nationalism” or in “democracy and human rights” as paths to a more just and peaceful world—and offers a possible way out of what Iain McGilchrist has called “The Unmaking of the World.” We may, perhaps, reimagine global history to see the world as voluntarily entering or reentering into millennia of Indigenous history and culture rather than continually absorbing the peoples of the Native Nations with horrific force and violence into a “Western,” or a “modern,” or even a “democratic” culture that is steadily attacking the spiritual foundations for a shared life on this planet.

The steady attack that is conveyed in these still widely cherished narratives—the steady attack on Indigenous wisdom and spiritual truth that the false universalism of these narratives entails—draws its strength from a covert religious bigotry and a doubling down on moral depravity that has become traditional over the past six centuries; an ongoing whirlpool of lowering moral standards.

Originating in fifteenth century papal bulls attempting to justify what would become chattel slavery, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the invasion and conquest of the “New World,” the first doubling down came—as we will see—in response to the criticisms of grotesque Spanish misconduct articulated by Bartolomé de Las Casas and his allies beginning early in the sixteenth century. In this dynamic, first Spain, and then the other eurochristian powers (including, as of the 1830s, the United States), ultimately embraced the arguments—not of Las Casas—but of Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and his allies and their successors as to the alleged virtue of their “Christian” nations and the alleged inferiority of the peoples of the Native Nations—the “heathens.” This contrast between “Christians” and “heathens” is at the origins of both eurochristian nationalism and modern racism and has been ever since 1452 when Pope Nicholas V authorized Portugal’s Alfonso V to enslave in perpetuity “Saracens,” “Pagans,” and “other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.”

The difference between “Christian” dominators and the “heathen” dominated remains the foundation of what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law” to this day. This is a body of “law” that is not made by the Native Nations but rather imposed upon them. As a unanimous Supreme Court put it, in 1823, in Johnson v. McIntosh, the mere presence of representatives of a “Christian people” on this side of the Atlantic “necessarily diminished” the sovereignty of the “heathens”—the Native peoples—and gave an “ultimate dominion” to the discoverers whereby they claimed a “title” to the land and a “right” to dominate the Native inhabitants—a “degree of sovereignty” over them—to be in their government.

This pernicious doctrine of Christian discovery has been inscribed in more secular language into what now passes for international law where “Indigenous peoples” (read: “heathens”) are defined as peoples under the domination of nation-states (read: “eurochristian dominators”). The covert religious bigotry this involves—and the ongoing and deliberate doubling down on immorality—is part of what Denise Ferreira da Silva has called our “global political architecture.”

The secular religion of nationalism—in many ways the infrastructure of this global architecture—has greatly reinforced the claims made by those who exercise, or seek to exercise, domination in our world. Having experienced domination at the hands of eurochristian nationalists, much of the world has adopted and adapted a version of nationalism in an attempt at self-defense. Nationalist doctrine holds (mistakenly), as Elie Kedourie argued more than sixty years ago, that humanity is divided by nature into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate form of government is national self-determination (in the sense of a nation having a state of its “own”). In short, this doctrine holds that “nations” are “rightful sovereigns” under no superior moral or legal authority whose states can pretty much dominate “things” at will (such as—according to the United States Supreme Court to this day—“Indigenous peoples”). This assertion that the Supreme Court claims that the United States has a “right” to treat the Native Nations as things—as subjects completely under its “plenary power”—is evident in such horrific American misconduct as that involved in forcing the Native Nations onto the Trail of Tears and is powerfully demonstrated in my most recent book, Arguments Over Genocide, in Peter d’Errico’s Federal Anti Indian Law, in Steve Newcomb’s classic, Pagans in the Promised Land, and in the more philosophical exploration of the historical record, Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty, by Lee Hester (Choctaw).

All nations, from a perspective informed by Indigenous ideas, are constituted by the collective self-consciousness of peoples with a capacity to recognize all living beings as our kith and kin; peoples who are obliged to act in accordance with that recognition in trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual ways towards all life. All peoples sense the presencing of the whole and the relationships it contains in contrast with the re-presentations of reality that are perceived and generated by states—the maps rather than the terrain—that are part of the efforts of all systems of domination to control and manipulate.

As George Manuel (Secwepemc), chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (known today as the Assembly of First Nations), has written:

Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.” As the Basic Call to Consciousness—emerging from the Haudenosaunee in 1977—puts it: “The way of life known as ‘Western Civilization’ is on a death path…. The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing…. The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support life—the air, the waters, the trees—all the things that support the sacred Web of Life.

The greatest political divide in our world today is the divide between those who believe that benevolent authority (however variously defined) is necessary to the establishment, maintenance, and improvement of any worthwhile community, and its conduct of relations with any and all other communities, and those who think that at the most inclusive level the beloved community already exists (that it is constituted by the spiritual fact that all living beings are our kith and kin) and that our responsibility is to maintain balance and harmony with and within this beloved community without domination. Those on the pro-“benevolent authority” side of this divide tend to seek security through control and manipulation. Those on the other side understand that the whole cannot be dominated and that harmony and balance with and within it must be sought instead. Such balance and harmony is not a human creation, still less an expression of some “political will.” On the contrary, it is a gift of creation, and especially of our grandmother Earth, and we are all obliged to respect this gift.

There is a grain of truth in the narrative that presents “democracy and human rights” as emerging in the United States and then spreading—as the “best” form of government—towards global hegemony in subsequent centuries against the resistance of monarchical and dictatorial powers including, in the twentieth century, both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. That grain of truth is rooted in the soil of the “New World” and the cultures and polities that this land has sustained for millennia. Embracing the original free and independent existence of the peoples of the Native Nations, these cultures and polities do in fact include forms of government from which the “modern” world has learned much of what little it knows of genuine democracy. It is as an attempt at genuine democracy—a failed attempt at voluntarily entering Indigenous culture and history—that the narrative of “democracy and human rights” should be seen and understood.

Brother Gabriel Sagard’s early seventeenth century account of the Wendat, a work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, is one of many that David Graeber and David Wengrow review in The Dawn of Everything. According to Sagard: “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.” The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi in 1642: “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.” Writing of the Wendat in 1648, Father Lallemant noted that “They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.”

As Graeber and Wengrow note, when it comes “to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty—or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology—indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.” Sixteenth and seventeenth century glimpses of this more genuine democracy became a major tributary flowing into the Enlightenment. Their significance is only beginning to be recovered by contemporary scholarship. And the depth of the failure of the Enlightenment and its successors to become rooted in Indigenous spiritual truth rather than in intellectual abstractions is still to be fully recognized.

It is only as Native scholars have addressed the spiritual foundations of their own societies—as, for example, in God is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) and Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization by Mark Freeland (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe Chippewa)—that they have begun to become more accessible to academic audiences. The works of some rare outsiders, such as Marshall Sahlin’s recent The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, are also helpful. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows something of how “modern” culture enforces divisions within each of us, and among all of us, depriving our world of the qualities we most want to experience—connection, peace, grace, simplicity, clarity, and the like—all of which arise from a sense of wholeness.

It is past time to put an end to the false universalism, perhaps most persuasively expressed by G. K. Chesterton, that links democracy to Christian thought and that claims that “There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.” While that claim is obviously mistaken as it completely ignores the Indigenous foundations of a deeper and more genuine democracy and its influence, Chesterton was correct to warn that without an adequate spiritual foundation there was a great danger to democracy—including to the American democratic experiment—that it would “become wildly and wickedly undemocratic.” Chesterton was not looking back—as he easily could have been—to slavery, the Trail of Tears, and the invasion of the West, but rather looking ahead toward the future and, in particular, the danger to American society that “Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least of patronage.”

The sharp and difficult point that must be grasped here—wounding to the egos of prideful people and prideful nations as it will be—is that, under adherence to even a tacit and allegedly democratic system of domination, the terms “human” and “Christian”—and even “democratic”—can acquire horrific meanings and their advocates become filled with enslaving and even genocidal intent toward those deemed “outside” these categories and seen as “justly” subordinated to those within them. The truth is that the Native peoples have proved better able to realize a human flourishing—in terms of the moral standards that are allegedly held by the societies of Christendom and its secular successors—than have these same societies. The Native peoples have proven that they are capable of being more virtuous—more charitable, more equalitarian, more free, and more attuned to the needs of the land and of all living beings. Much as some contemporary eurochristian attitudes may be closer to those of the Indigenous world than to those of Christendom, the spiritual foundations of our societies seem as far away as ever.

There was, to be sure, a spiritual foundation to the work of the philosophers of the American Revolution and the framers of the Constitution. Perhaps the single most important architect of this work was the Pennsylvanian jurist James Wilson. In a famous political pamphlet in 1774, Wilson declared that “All men are, by nature, equal and free” that “no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent” and that “all lawful government is founded upon the consent of those who are subject to it.” Wilson recognized that the Native Nations had never consented to be governed by the United States and that the United States therefore had, as he put it in 1776, “no right over the Indians, whether within or without the real or pretended limits of any Colony.”

Wilson’s respect and love was not confined to white male property owners. His hope was for an American society in which: “All will receive from each, and each will receive from all, mutual support and assistance: mutually supported and assisted, all may be carried to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown; perhaps, hitherto not believed.” And he carried this hope into the international sphere:

It may, perhaps, be uncommon, but it is certainly just, to say that nations ought to love one another. The offices of humanity ought to flow from this pure source. When this happily is the case, then the principles of affection and friendship prevail among states as among individuals: then nations will mutually support and assist each other with zeal and ardour; lasting peace will be the result of unshaken confidence; and kind and generous principles, of a nature far opposite to mean jealousy, crooked policy, or cold prudence, will govern and prosper the affairs of men.

Wilson believed that the American people had claimed such powers as they asserted a right to exercise under the law of nations—an expression of natural law—while recognizing the equal right of all other nations, including the Native Nations, to do likewise. This is what the sovereignty of “we the people” meant to Wilson: that we were answerable to the international moral and legal order under which we claimed our rights—and ultimately answerable to God—for our conduct. He made this perfectly clear in his law lectures in 1790-1791 at the College of Philadelphia. The first of these lectures was attended by the entire House of Representatives and the entire Senate of the United States—and by the entire Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate—as well as by the President and Martha Washington, and by the Vice President and Abigail Adams, and they are a marvel to read. These lectures provide an authoritative context in which to understand the intentions of the framers of the Constitution in terms of the revolutionary American jurisprudence that helps inform it and which has in the past enabled reform movements to appeal to the Constitution as if it were a “promissory note.”

[When] I say that, in free states, the law of nations is the law of the people; I mean that, as the law of nature, in other words, as the will of nature’s God, it is indispensably binding upon the people, in whom the sovereign power resides; and who are, consequently, under the most sacred obligations to exercise that power, or to delegate it to such as will exercise it, in a manner agreeable to those rules and maxims, which the law of nature prescribes to every state, for the happiness of each, and for the happiness of all. How vast—how important—how interesting are these truths! They announce to a free people how exalted their rights; but at the same time, they announce to a free people how solemn their duties are.

The spiritual truths Wilson articulated and relied upon were inadequate to establish, maintain, and improve a genuine democracy. In the first place, adherence to these truths was not universal even among the more radical American revolutionaries. Such adherence as there was, moreover, was vitiated by the common practices of tolerating and even maintaining active legal support for slavery and was profoundly eroded by the genocidal conduct towards the Native Nations that the Supreme Court sanctioned beginning in the 1830s with the Trail of Tears. From such beginnings as the elimination of religious tests for office, the rise of abolitionism, the movement for women’s suffrage, and the emergence of the trade union movement, there have been powerful reformist endeavors that sought to strengthen adherence to spiritual truth, but they have rarely had the ascendancy for any great length of time. From the practices associated with extractive industries and industrial modernity to the development of those associated with financial capitalism and neoliberalism the corrosion of adherence to spiritual truth has been more of the norm.

At a deeper level, the spiritual truths Wilson sought to advance were inadequate because his strategy involved combining a potentially impressive approach—one that involved cultivating what he called “the power of moral abstraction”—with a deliberate effort to build a democracy with the power of the state.

The power of moral abstraction was as necessary to the progress of exalted virtue, Wilson maintained, as the power of intellectual abstraction was to the progress of extensive knowledge. By this power, the commonwealth of a state, the empire of the United States, the civilized and commercial part of the world, and the inhabitants of the whole earth become the objects of the warmest spirit of benevolence. By this power, even a minute, unknown and distant group of individuals may become a complex object that will warm and dilate the soul. By this power, people otherwise invisible are rendered conspicuous and become known to the heart as well as to the understanding.

This enlarged and elevated virtue ought to be cultivated by nations with peculiar assiduity and ardour. The sphere of exertion, to which an individual is confined, is frequently narrow, however enlarged his disposition may be. But the sphere, to the extent of which a state may exert herself, is often comparatively boundless. By exhibiting a glorious example in her constitution, in her laws, in the administration of her constitution and laws, she may diffuse reformation, she may diffuse instruction, she may diffuse happiness over this whole terrestrial globe.

That this whole terrestrial globe was in need of the “happiness” the Constitution of the United States could provide is a position that can be challenged, particularly by the Native Nations of Turtle Island (this continent) and by the enslaved people coercively held inside the new American states and outside of the equal rights and equal belonging of the supposedly truly human. For them, and for their heirs, the expansionism underlying Wilson’s vision of diffusing happiness—the politics of domination with which this effort was (and is) inextricably bound up—meant that not joy but a challenge to their very existence and relationship to reality was part of even the best intentioned version of the aspirations informing the invader state’s constitution in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Wilson sought to strengthen a political will to “progress” that would suffuse both American society and “its” state. The peoples of the Native Nations sought to maintain balance and harmony with ancestors and descendants.

Wilson could speak of maintaining a warm spirit of benevolence toward all the inhabitants of the earth, but this was still a far cry from respect and love for all living beings, including the Earth herself. That the heart should inform the understanding was a possible place of common ground. With that truth as a shared foundation, what might have been built by working together—or what might be done along such lines even today—remains an open question, particularly if there would be a willingness on the eurochristian side to act with trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual conduct and to leave aside any attempt at continued domination.

The relevant question is whether the “modern” world can, first, overcome its prejudices about the peoples of the Native Nations and their ways and accomplishments—whether it can overcome its absurd “evolutionary” social theories and its simplistic and wrongheaded conceptions of “human nature” (theories and concepts designed to blunt what Graeber and Wengrow call an “Indigenous Critique” of Western culture)—second, whether we can relinquish our efforts at domination, and, third, whether we can voluntarily enter or reenter into millennia of Indigenous history and culture.

Here it may be helpful to make explicit an alternative global political architecture that I think is implicit in “the view from the shore,” a perspective that encourages respect and love for “all our relations” (if not necessarily a liking for each and every one of them) without a pursuit of domination.

It is easy, in the “Western” or “modern” or even “democratic” world, to think of national collective self-consciousness as tending towards an identification with the state, with what might be termed the nation’s ego. This may be considered, from a global perspective, as a form of insanity; a cause of fearful, selfish, and violent behavior on a massive scale. Such nations, from this perspective, are schizophrenic: caught between identifying with their egos in ways that in the extreme are solipsistic and profoundly antisocial and identifying with the peoples they embrace in ways that can open to respect and love for all living beings without a search for domination over any of them.

At the level of national collective self-consciousness, those nations that claim to be devoted to “democracy and human rights”—to say nothing of the outright dictatorships—are more or less dimly aware of the systems of domination that “their” states maintain. They tend to accept, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, the claims to legitimacy that “their” politicians proffer (both for their own rule and for their efforts to rule over other peoples). The challenge is how to help these nations to develop a form of social self-understanding that separates their collective selves from their states and brings clarity to their minds—that deepens their connections with their genuine peoplehood—and thus helps them bring their nations into what JoDe Goudy (Yakama Nation), the founder of www.redthought.org, has called “right and respectful relations.”

A people, in contrast with a state, is a matrix of affinity for all of the members of that people who recognize themselves as fellow nationals, their nationality being understood in relation to such things as territoriality, language, consanguinity, shared history, shared stories, and the like. A people is a form of social self-awareness—a body. A nation, in contrast, is a collective self-consciousness capable of validating the referents of a people’s identity—a mind. A state is a system of domination that involves a claim to a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence within a particular territorial jurisdiction—an ego.

One can distinguish among peoples, nations, and states in such a way that everyone should be able to see all peoples as potential allies, to perceive nations whose collective self-consciousness is more attuned to their full peoplehood as likely friends, to perceive nations whose collective self-consciousness confuses their selves with “their” states as misguided and as likely dangerous, and to see states as unhelpful—as systems of domination that the world would be better off without or, at the very least, would be better off having regulated by the concern for the whole of every people. Such concern for the whole is part of the spiritual foundation of the international laws and usages that were so much a part of life on Turtle Island before the eurochristians invaded, so much a part of the relatively full peoplehood of these nations. And these international laws contributed to the maintenance of a relative harmony and balance that it is illuminating to contrast with the “order” to which the best of the international laws rooted in Christianity contributed.

Underneath modern conceptions of both “nationalism” and “democracy and human rights” are ideas of the global common good in which the rights of every nation and every national are to be secured under the law of nations understood as an expression of natural law. And secured under that law—as if such were possible—by benevolent political authority. When Bartolomé de las Casas condemned Spanish colonialism and imperialism in the so-called “New World” in the sixteenth century this was the language in which he did so:

The king of France does not pronounce sentence in Spain nor does the king of Spain dictate laws for France, nor does the Emperor himself, in his travels, use his imperial authority outside the borders of his empire. [In all of these cases] there is a lack of that power and jurisdiction which in his indescribable wisdom the author of nature has prescribed within certain limits for each nation and prince so as to safeguard and preserve the common good of each. For this reason jurisdiction is said to be implanted in a locality or territory, or in the bones of the persons of each community or state, so that it cannot be separated from them any more than food can be separated from the preservation of life.

At the heart of Charles V’s empire—and at the risk of charges of lèse majesté and heresy (and he was reported to the Inquisition)—Las Casas publicly and persuasively appealed to this global common good arguing that “war against the Indians, which we call in Spanish, conquistas, is evil and essentially anti-Christian…. war against the Indians is unlawful.”

“The Natives (of America),” Las Casas insisted, “having their own lawful kings and princes, and a right to make laws for the good government of their respective dominions, could not be expelled out of them, or deprived of what they possess, without doing violence to the laws of God, as well as the laws of nations.”

When God divided kingdom from kingdom and people from people—when he gave the nations their inheritance—it was, Las Casas maintained, for the common good of each. The office of ruler had been established especially that its holder might be diligently concerned with the public good: “For whatever right a king has, he has by the consent of his people. If a king should die without heirs, the right of choosing a new king belongs to the people…. injustice is committed by depriving a community or people of its right of choice without any lawful cause.”

Those apologists for Spain’s grotesque misconduct who claimed to find a sanction for violence in the gospels (specifically in Luke 14:16-23) were articulating an opinion that Las Casas maintained was “completely foreign to all reason and Christian teaching.” According to this passage, Jesus spoke of a man who gave a great supper and invited many, but found that those originally invited made excuses and did not come. He then ordered his servant to invite the poor and the lame, the blind and the maimed, from the streets and lanes of the city. When this had been done, and there was still space for more, the master ordered his servant to go out to the highways and hedges and “compel them to come in.” That passage had traditionally been interpreted as involving spiritual persuasion, not violence, Las Casas insisted: the use of violence was tyrannical and in direct opposition to the instructions of Christ to his disciples and to the example they established.

Consider, in contrast, the words of Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, the court historian in mid-sixteenth century Spain and Las Casas’ great rival in the debate within Spain over Spanish colonialism. Sepúlveda described the Indians of the New World harshly. There are early expressions of both eurochristian nationalism and modern racism in his opposition to Las Casas’ critique. Speaking of the Native peoples, Sepúlveda declared: “In prudence, talent, virtue, and humanity they are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as the wild and cruel to the most meek, as the prodigiously intemperate to the continent and temperate, that I have almost said, as monkeys to men.”

The idea that Las Casas knew better was beyond Sepúlveda’s imagination and would have seemed to him an affront to the dignity of the crown and of Spain: “Shall we doubt that those peoples, so uncivilized, so barbarous, so wicked, contaminated with so many evils and wicked religious practices, have been justly subjugated by an excellent, pious, and most just King, such as was Ferdinand and the Emperor Charles is now, and by a most civilized nation that is outstanding in every kind of virtue?” To the claim that wars of conquest were impeding the progress of Christianity because the Indians came to hate those who did them harm, Sepúlveda replied, “the madman also hates the doctor who cures him, and the unruly boy hates the teacher who punishes him, but this fact does not negate the usefulness of one nor the other, nor should it be abandoned.”

The ongoing process of seeking to “teach” or “cure” the Native peoples with the force and violence that Sepúlveda and the papal bulls championed was, as Steve Newcomb has noted—and, to a considerable extent, still is—a process of seeking to strip them of their original free and independent existence, to deny them their national rights, to steal their lands, to force them to work, and to force baptism and “cultural conversion” upon them under conditions of torment and misery beneath the incessant and cruel demands of states claiming to be sovereign over them.

While the law of nations that Las Casas was appealing to had less tangibility for the eurochristians and much less political efficacy than the international laws and usages of Turtle Island had for the peoples of the Native Nations, and while the international laws Las Casas championed expressed a false universalism grounded in the inadequate conceptions of a Christianity as yet unfamiliar with Indigenous wisdom and spiritual truth, it was still far preferable to the arrogant, ignorant, hate-filled, and dominationist prejudices that animated Sepúlveda and that continue to animate his heirs and successors including the members of the United States Supreme Court.

The American Constitution sanctioned slavery. It did not sanction genocide. That was the handiwork of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall and his allies. That handiwork was accomplished, in the first place, by their claim that the treaty-guaranteed dominion of the Cherokee Nation, Choctaw Nation, Muscogee Nation, Chickasaw Nation (and many others) was a mere right of “occupancy,” as a unanimous Supreme Court put it in 1823, in Johnson v. McIntosh. When this pernicious nonsense was criticized, the Supreme Court doubled down on that wrongly decided opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, in 1831, by deciding—again wrongly—that no Native Nation has a right to bring an action in the courts of the United States in defense of their treaty rights because they are (allegedly) “domestic” and “dependent.”

In fact, the Cherokee Nation had a perfect right to bring an action in the Supreme Court to enforce the treaty obligations of the United States because their case arose under a treaty and a state of the union was a party to the case, regardless of whether the Cherokee Nation was considered as an independent “foreign state” or not.

While the advocates of “self-restraint”—the advocates of respecting the equal rights of others under the same international moral and legal order in which one claimed one’s own rights—have rarely had the ascendancy over the past six centuries, they exercised a decisive influence on the Constitution’s Treaty Supremacy Clause. It was that clause that James Wilson, clarifying the intentions of the framers, would proudly champion in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention: “This clause, sir, will show the world that we make the faith of treaties a constitutional part of the character of the United States; that we secure its performance no longer nominally, for the judges of the United States will be enabled to carry it into effect, let the legislatures of the different states do what they may.”

Without even attempting to address the reality of the Constitution’s text and of the framers’ intentions, John Marshall and his allies betrayed the Constitution and sanctioned the genocide of the 1830s and those that followed: “If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.”

These two Supreme Court decisions—Johnson and Cherokee Nation—are the equivalent, for the Native Nations, of a combination of Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson. There can be no fundamental movement toward justice for the Native Nations until these anti-constitutional precedents are overturned. Nor can there be much movement towards getting in touch with the true peoplehood of the American people—and away from the insanity of identifying with a state that has committed genocide and that continues to defend the “federal Indian law” that allowed it—without recognizing the anti-constitutional character of what should properly be called federal anti-Indian law.

Here it should be stressed that while there was a spiritual foundation to the self-restraint that both Bartolomé de Las Casas and James Wilson advocated with regard to the Native Nations, and while both men articulated a genuine respect for some of these nations’ national rights, there was still a spiritual failure to recognize that the only lawful basis for any eurochristian presence in the “New World” was in accord with the wishes of these nations and in accord with the wishes of the land and the international laws and usages the land sustains. The eurochristian imperialists had no right to bring any domination system with them to the free soil of Turtle Island, still less to impose one by horrific force and violence on the peoples of the Native Nations.

If we—the heirs and successors of these imperialists—are to free ourselves from the ongoing legacies of their grotesque misconduct (rather than simply continuing to double down upon such misconduct with sanitized and “secular” justifications for our ultimately religious bigotry and domination) we will have to reimagine both “nationalism” and “democracy” in ways that strip these doctrines of their dominationist elements. We will have to fashion, instead, doctrines that genuinely rely upon peoples who recognize all living beings as our kith and kin and act, accordingly, with trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual conduct toward all life. More than this, we will have to recognize the inadequacy of even the best doctrines and seek to learn, instead, from the peoples of the Native Nations as they continue a deep process of healing and of the recovery of their original free and independent existence. If we are all to enter or reenter into millennia of Indigenous history and culture—if we are to enjoy genuine democracy—it will have to be not only by mutual consent among our true selves, who are always already connected (all being “of creation”), but by mutual respect and love in our conduct.

John Collier, who served as the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945, in a popular book titled Indians of the Americas, sought to share something of what he felt the world can learn from the spirituality of the Native Nations:

They had what the world has lost. They have it now. What the world has lost, the world must have again, lest it die. Not many years are left to have or have not, to recapture the lost ingredient…. It is the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality, joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion for the earth and its web of life. This indivisible reverence and passion is what the American Indians almost universally had; and representative groups of them have it still. They had and have this power for living which our modern world has lost—as world-view and self-view, as tradition and institution, as practical philosophy … and as an art supreme among all the arts…. If our modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted … which is the prospect now. True democracy, founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world, would become the realized heaven on earth. And living peace—not just an interlude between wars—would be born and would last through ages.

The post Reimagining “Nationalism” and “Democracy” with “the View from the Shore” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Steven Schwartzberg.

Mark Drakeford: Wales should have taken ‘more stringent action’ in pandemic

Ruby Lott-Lavigna — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:52:52 +0000

The outgoing first minister said with hindsight there are ‘many things’ he would have done differently

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ruby Lott-Lavigna.

Gen. Mark Milley’s Second Act: Multimillionaire

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 21:13:11 +0000

Since retiring from the military last year, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit. From military pay of $204,000 a year, Milley is sure to skyrocket to compensation in the millions, especially because he is represented by the same high-powered speakers’ agency as Hillary Clinton, who faced criticism in 2016 for her paid speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Called “cashing in” by military officers, transitioning from capped government salaries to defense industry, private consulting for global risk management, or work with venture capital brings in lavish paydays. For retired generals, the invasion is swift. The recently retired chief of space operations for the Space Force, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, for example, has joined the board of directors for aerospace companies Impulse Space and Axiom Space, as well as becoming senior managing director for investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. Gen. James C. McConville, who served as chief of staff of the Army before retiring last year, has joined the board of directors of drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy and aerospace investment firm AE Industrial Partners, as an operating partner.

Milley’s speaker’s agency, Harry Walker Agency is touting the retired general, who crossed swords with former President Donald Trump and continues to be a polarizing figure, for his insights on leadership and international conflicts. “His perspective is invaluable for audiences looking to understand the impact of current conflicts and managing risks on boards of directors and leadership teams who are responsible for making strategic decisions and identifying vulnerabilities,” the website says.

According to the speaker’s agency, Milley recently participated in a Q&A at a gathering of 160 CEOs organized by investment bank Moelis & Company, where he provided his “insider’s perspective on world affairs.”

The engagement has not been previously reported.

“He was terrific — we loved him!” said Moelis & Company, a global investment bank, in a review featured on the agency website. “It was fantastic!”

According to the agency website, Milley “provided crucial perspective to business leaders,” but provided little more detail.

On March 4, Milley also spoke at the American Council on Education’s 2024 Presidents and Chancellors Summit at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to an event page. A portrait of Milley appears on the list of major speakers and links to his Harry Walker Agency page.

His speech at the summit was sponsored by Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting and accounting firms, an event page notes. The page describes his speech as exploring “the convergence of democracy, higher education, and moral leadership during times of crisis”; as well as “emphasizing the responsibilities of leaders to uphold democratic principles and inspire resilience in challenging times.”

“The Summit was exclusively for presidents and chancellors, and there is no transcript,” Jonathan Riskind, vice president of public affairs and strategic communications for the American Council on Education, told The Intercept in response to a query.

Asked for transcripts of this and other speaking engagements, and for Milley’s compensation, Moelis & Company, the Harry Walker Agency, and Milley himself did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaker’s fees for former top officials like Milley are often substantial. During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Clinton came under fire for receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs alone in one year. Along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the couple raked in over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House.

Milley has emerged as an ardent critic of Trump — unusual for high-ranking military officers who typically eschew politics. In his final speech as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, in a swipe at Trump, Milley said that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

Trump replied with a statement on his social media platform Truth Social: “Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week.”

Clinton’s speeches reportedly earned her around $200,000 a pop — about the same as Milley’s annual salary when he was in uniform.

Join The Conversation

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

‘Our Voices Matter’: Protesters Mark International Women’s Day With Demands For Action

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 20:59:24 +0000

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

‘Violence Must Stop’: Thousands Rally In Pakistan To Mark Women’s Day

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 20:03:58 +0000

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

‘Violence Must Stop’: Thousands Rally In Pakistan To Mark Women’s Day

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 17:10:45 +0000

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

Hungary Blocks Common EU Statement To Mark Second Anniversary Of Ukraine Invasion — Sources

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:41:39 +0000

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine "prevails" in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having "significantly changed" its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.

Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it's also "in our own security interests."

"We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies," Stoltenberg said.

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.

"I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day," he added.

Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia's unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.

In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.

The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances -- authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family -- adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin's authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.

"I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn't win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails," Stoltenberg said.

Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, "to ensure that Russia doesn't make further gains."

"We don't believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation," he said.

"But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production."

Ukraine's allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.

"Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine," Stoltenberg said in the interview.

On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine's allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.

"So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s," he said. "The sooner the better."

Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.

It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.

Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.

Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party's presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.

Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies -- something that neither China nor Russia has.

The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.

But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.

At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.

"If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it's actually 2 percent today," he said. "That's good, but it's not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum."

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

The Climate Election: Mark Hertsgaard on Why 2024 Must Focus More on Climate Crisis

Democracy Now! — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 13:52:30 +0000

We speak with The Nation's environment correspondent Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, about how journalists under attack by climate deniers must not let fear of retaliation stop them from covering the subject, especially during an election year. “It's not our job as journalists to censor ourselves because one party or one candidate decides that they’re going to deny climate science. We owe it to the public to report that to the public without fear or favor,” he says. Hertsgaard also discusses the role of climate policy in the 2024 election and the fifth anniversary of progressive lawmakers’ first attempt to pass a Green New Deal.

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

Apologies like this one from Mark Zuckerberg are not enough

Amnesty International — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 16:28:49 +0000

This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.

Muslims, Jews Gather In Bosnia To Mark Holocaust, 1995 Genocide

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 16:45:08 +0000

KYIV -- Ukrainian officials on January 27 said Russia had intensified attacks in the past 24 hours, with a commander saying the sides had battled through "50 combat clashes" in the past day near Ukraine's Tavria region.

Meanwhile, Kyiv and Moscow continued to dispute the circumstances surrounding the January 24 crash of a Russian military transport plane that the Kremlin claimed was carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Kyiv said it has no proof POWs were aboard and has not confirmed its forces shot down the plane.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

General Oleksandr Tarnavskiy, the Ukrainian commander in the Tavria zone in the Zaporizhzhya region, said Russian forces had "significantly increased" the number of offensive and assault operations over the past two days.

"For the second day in a row, the enemy has conducted 50 combat clashes daily,” he wrote on Telegram.

"Also, the enemy has carried out 100 air strikes in the operational zone of the Tavria Joint Task Force within seven days," he said, adding that 230 Russian-launched drones had been "neutralized or destroyed" over the past day in the area.

Battlefield claims on either side cannot immediately be confirmed.

Earlier, the Ukrainian military said 98 combat clashes took place between Ukrainian troops and the invading Russian army over the past 24 hours.

"There are dead and wounded among the civilian populations," the Ukrianian military's General Staff said in its daily update, but did not provide further details about the casualties.

According to the General Staff, Russian forces launched eight missile and four air strikes, and carried out 78 attacks from rocket-salvo systems on Ukrainian troop positions and populated areas. Iranian-made Shahed drones and Iskander ballistic missiles were used in the attacks, it said.

A number of "high-rise residential buildings, schools, kindergartens, a shopping center, and other civilian infrastructure were destroyed or damaged" in the latest Russian strikes, the bulletin said.

"More than 120 settlements came under artillery fire in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolayiv regions," according to the daily update.

The General Staff also reported that Ukrainian defenders repelled dozens of Russian assaults in eight directions, including Avdiyivka, Bakhmut, Maryinka, and Kupyansk in the eastern Donetsk region.

Meanwhile, Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, said it remained unclear what happened in the crash of the Russian Il-76 that the Kremlin claimed was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were killed along with nine crew members.

The Kremlin said the military transport plane was shot down by a Ukrainian missile despite the fact that Russian forces had alerted Kyiv to the flight’s path.

Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told RFE/RL that it had not received either a written or verbal request to secure the airspace where the plane went down.

The situation with the crash of the aircraft "is not yet fully understood,” Budanov said.

"It is necessary to determine what happened – unfortunately, neither side can fully answer that yet."

Russia "of course, has taken the position of blaming Ukraine for everything, despite the fact that there are a number of facts that are inconsistent with such a position," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted Ukraine shot down the plane and said an investigation was being carried out, with a report to be made in the upcoming days.

In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the creation of a second body to assist businesses in the war-torn country.

Speaking in his nightly video address late on January 26, Zelenskiy said the All-Ukraine Economic Platform would help businesses overcome the challenges posed by Russia's nearly two-year-old invasion.

On January 23, Zelenskiy announced the formation of a Council for the Support of Entrepreneurship, which he said sought to strengthen the country's economy and clarify issues related to law enforcement agencies. Decrees creating both bodies were published on January 26.

Ukraine's economy has collapsed in many sectors since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Kyiv heavily relies on international aid from its Western partnes.

The Voice of America reported that the United States vowed to promote at the international level a peace formula put forward by Zelenskiy.

VOA quoted White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby as saying that Washington "is committed to the policy of supporting initiatives emanating from the leadership of Ukraine."

Zelenskiy last year presented his 10-point peace formula that includes the withdrawal of Russian forces and the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, among other things.

With reporting by Reuters and dpa

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

Bosnian Serbs Mark ‘National Day,’ Despite Warnings From Sarajevo And The West

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 08:54:10 +0000

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

Bosnian Serbs Mark Unconstitutional ‘National Day’ As U.S. Urges Investigation

News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 07:39:18 +0000

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he was immediately placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell after finishing a quarantine term at the so-called Polar Wolf prison in Russia's Arctic region where he was transferred last month.

In a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny said on January 9 a prison guard ruled that "convict Navalny refused to introduce himself according to format, did not respond to the educational work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself" and therefore must spend seven days in solitary confinement.

Navalny added that unlike in a regular cell, where inmates are allowed to have a walk outside of the cell in the afternoon when it is a bit warmer outside, in the punitive cell, such walks are at 6:30 a.m. in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder.

"I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is," Navalny said in an irony-laced series of eight posts, adding that the cell-like sites for walks are "11 steps from the wall and 3 steps to the wall" with an open sky covered with metal bars above.

"It's never been colder here than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers," Navalny joked, comparing himself with the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant film, who saved himself from freezing in the cold by crawling inside the carcass of a dead horse.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant [here], especially at 6:30 in the morning? So, I will continue to freeze," Navalny concludes in his sarcastic string of messages.

Navalny was transported in December to the notorious and remote prison, formally known as IK-3, but widely referred to as Polar Wolf.

Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, the prison holds about 1,050 of Russia's most incorrigible prisoners.

Human rights activists say the prison holds serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more.

In some cases, like Navalny's, the government sends convicts who are widely considered to be political prisoners there as well. Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant, spent about two years at IK-3 in the mid-2000s.

The prison was founded in 1961 at a former camp of dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag network. The settlement of Kharp, with about 5,000 people, mostly provides housing and services for prison workers and administrators.

Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on extremism charges, on top of previous sentences for fraud. He says the charges are politically motivated, and human rights organizations recognized him as a political prisoner.

He has posed one of the most-serious threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently announced he is running for reelection in March. Putin is expected to easily win the election amid the continued sidelining of opponents and a clampdown on opposition and civil society that intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Navalny survived a poisoning with Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020 that he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny's poisoning.

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

Diehard Chairman Mao fans to mark his birthday with ‘red songs’

By Song Danyang for RFA Mandarin — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 15:40:02 +0000

Changzhou Revolutionary Song Troupe leader Dai Cheng has been to the birthplace of Mao Zedong in Hunan province "countless times."

The museum at Shaoshan is traditionally a focal point for celebrations of Mao's birthday on Dec. 26, and Dai often takes his choir there to fill the air with rousing revolutionary songs, sometimes holding an all-night vigil for his political hero.

"Six or seven years ago, for three consecutive years, we stayed up from Dec. 25 to sunrise on the 26th, ringing in the New Year with a vigil for Chairman Mao," Dai told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview.

"The festive atmosphere in Shaoshan is indescribable," he said. "Even in the middle of the night, there's a constant flow of people. It's incredibly moving."

Fireworks mark Mao Zedong’s birthday in Shaoshan, China, Dec. 26, 2008. (Reuters)

As China marks the 130th anniversary of Mao's birth, the late Chairman is enjoying a political resurgence alongside the cult of personality surrounding incumbent Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

Revered by many as a demigod when he was still alive, Mao's political reputation waned considerably during the economic reform era of his successor, Deng Xiaoping.

Yet the revolutionary praise culture of the early decades of the People's Republic of China has lived on in the popular imagination long after the Great Helmsman's death, embraced above all by China's legions of Mao fans.

"Various factors contribute to Mao fandom," U.S.-based political commentator Hu Ping said. "Some are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, the proliferation of capitalism, wealth disparity and the unchecked power of the elite.

"They view the Mao era through a nostalgic lens and use Mao's image to critique the present," he said.

A loyal follower

Asked if he identified as a "Mao fan," Dai was dismissive, saying: "I'm aware of its meaning, but I can't be bothered with it. All I know is that I'm a soldier of Chairman Mao – a loyal follower of communism."

Dai doesn't believe that the Mao era – which spanned the political violence of the land reforms and Anti-Rightist Campaigns to the mass starvation that followed the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four – should be dismissed simply as a time when everyone was as poor as the next person.

"Its most essential characteristic was fairness, which ensured security for all," he said, blaming the problems China faces today on its divergence from the "true path" of Maoist ideology.

A woman salutes as people celebrate the birthday of Mao Zedong's in Shaoshan, China, Dec. 25, 2016. (Reuters)

There are reasons why Dai is such a true believer – his poverty-stricken background, for one.

"From a young age, my mother would tell me that my father, at the age of eight or nine, used to herd cattle barefoot in the snow for the landlords," he said.

"I was born into a poor family. My father joined the revolution at the age of 19," he said. "We inherited communism; we were taught to emulate [model worker] Lei Feng and do good deeds. Communist education and ideology laid the foundation for our thinking.”

Dai became an active Red Guard at the age of 13, although he ended up in an anti-Mao faction without realizing who they were. He later switched sides to a Maoist faction, but still feels guilty to this day.

Mao’s reputational hit

According to Hu Ping, most ordinary Chinese people thought the same way back then, unquestioningly obeying Mao and striving to be his "good soldiers."

But once Deng Xiaoping launched his program of economic reforms in 1979, people started to criticize the cult of personality around their late leader amid a newfound atmosphere of political liberalism, he said.

"In the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party passed resolutions on historical issues dating back to the founding of the People's Republic of China," Hu said. "Back then, most intellectuals, ordinary people and even high-ranking Communist Party members held a negative view of Mao Zedong and called for a more thorough denunciation.

"It was only Deng Xiaoping who gave a more positive evaluation, taking into account the political situation at the time," he said. "A lot of people believed this was temporary and that a more negative assessment would follow."

Seventy elder party members from Bejing arrive to commemorate Mao Zedong’s birthday in Shaoshan, China, Dec. 25, 2014. (Getty Images)

In the 1970s, Dai Cheng worked in a factory, involved in propaganda activities related to revolutionary arts and literature. In 1980, he was transferred from the factory to the local Machinery Industry Bureau, and in 1984, he joined the Changzhou Municipal Urban Management Team.

It was during the 1980s that things started to go wrong, according to Dai.

"The party began to deviate from its original mission, and it started to distance itself from the people," he said. "The communist education and faith we grew up with began to be abandoned ... and the concerns of ordinary people were increasingly disregarded."

Around that time, Mao's former residence in Shaoshan was seeing a big decline in visitors, while any public admiration for Mao focused on his political skills and his literary and calligraphic talents. His image simultaneously gained an iconic status as a protective talisman or a symbol of good luck.

"At that time, the reverence for Mao Zedong was fundamentally different from the way it was during the Cultural Revolution," Hu said. "He was seen as a kind of mythical figure, an extraordinary figure who faced numerous risks in his lifetime, yet managed to live to a ripe old age.

"So, people believed he could bless them and keep them safe. They elevated Mao to a quasi-divine status," he said.

Elevated once more

The critical atmosphere – which had come along with the more liberal political atmosphere of the 1980s – tailed off after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and the ideological crackdown that followed, Hu said.

"The Tiananmen massacre wasn't only aimed at the protesters in the square; it was a crackdown on anyone supporting ideological liberation, liberalization and democratization in the 1980s," Hu said. "Criticism of Mao Zedong was part of that liberalization ... so when it was suppressed, it was only natural that criticism and negation of Mao's legacy were suppressed too.

"The ideological climate underwent a total transformation," Hu said.

A man prays in front of a bronze statue of Mao Zedong in Shaoshan, China, Dec. 24, 2013. (Wang Zhao/AFP)

Since then, the pendulum has swung back again, and Mao's image has been used by those in power to further their own political agendas.

In 2008, the singing of "red" revolutionary songs by hobby groups was picked up and encouraged by Chongqing Municipal Party Secretary Bo Xilai, whose jailing for corruption came as a top official reported a foiled coup plot.

Mao's political afterlife has also been extended by Xi Jinping, who regularly makes pilgrimages to revolutionary sites in a bid to sell his own ideology as a return to a simpler time, when there was less of a gap between rich and poor, and less official corruption – or so the myth about Mao goes.

Yet while Xi has been accused of trying to become the next Mao, the government also fears Mao and his devotees, concerned that the Chairman's mythologized image could provide a focal point for serious opposition to the status quo.

In recent years, it has cracked down on Maoist websites and on young leftists who campaign for workers rights.

"People like [labor activist] Yue Xin at Peking University supported workers' rights, putting them into the category of Maoists," Hu said. "This faction has been consistently suppressed by the authorities.

"While the authorities have elevated Mao's status again, they are also extremely wary of individuals who use Mao to criticize the current regime," he said. "There is an internal understanding that the authorities staunchly suppress anyone who uses Mao Zedong's image to oppose the contemporary Communist Party."

Singing as activism

When Dai spoke to Radio Free Asia, he was busy rehearsing his choir for a performance marking Mao's 130th anniversary.

The choir isn't just a bit of fun, either. All of its members are staunch followers of Mao who mean every word of revolutionary songs, like "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman" and "The Sun Is Reddest When Chairman Mao Is Closest."

It offers its members a vision of a simpler life in which everyone is provided for.

"Chairman Mao's Communist Party provided workers with secure jobs, but later, these were taken away." Dai said. "Today, young people don't want to get married. Why? Because they can't afford a home. Isn't this a threat to their livelihood? If they can't afford a home, how can our nation develop? Nowadays, food safety is a big issue, and there is disease everywhere, yet people can't afford medical treatment."

Dai started the troupe during the "red song" craze of 1993 sparked by Mao's centenary, in a bid to push back against the tide of pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan and other examples of bourgeois culture.

People bow to a statue of China's former leader Mao Zedong in Shaoshan, Dec. 24, 2013. (Wang Zhao/AFP)

For Dai, the singing of "red songs" is a form of political activism.

"We suddenly realized that singing was a form of struggle, a means of expression, and an ideology," he said. "It was an effective and legitimate way to carry out this struggle."

There is also a strong sense of community, and Dai has extended financial help to at least one member going through hard times.

"Mao fans are definitely people with strong moral values," choir member Huang Yi said. "They are trustworthy, at the very least, they have aspirations, and they want fairness and justice."

Dai has invested everything in his choir, ever since selling his home to finance taking part in a choral competition in 2002 in Beijing, footing the bill for some 100 members over a 10-day period.

His passion for "red songs" has left him more than 2.4 million yuan ($336,000) in debt, with 400,000 yuan still outstanding, and has at times seen him estranged from his wife, sleeping in his car and missing his mother's funeral.

Targeted by police for starting a Mao Zedong study group yet still unbowed, Dai wants to take the choir global.

"Give me a billion, and I'll take red songs global," he said. "I'll sing them all over the world."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Jim Snyder.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Song Danyang for RFA Mandarin.

Mark Drakeford failed Covid bereaved families. My dad deserved better

Anna-Louise Marsh-Rees — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 10:42:37 +0000

The Welsh first minister’s refusal to set up a Covid inquiry for Wales is a disgrace. His successor must commit to one

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Anna-Louise Marsh-Rees.

Uyghurs mark 2 years since ‘genocide’ finding

By Alex Willemyns for RFA — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 02:33:00 +0000

Uyghur activists and U.S. lawmakers on Monday marked two years since an independent tribunal in London handed down a decision that China’s government was committing genocide against Uyghurs.

The Uyghur Tribunal on Dec. 9, 2021, declared that it was “satisfied” that Beijing had pursued a “deliberate, systematic and concerted policy with the object of so-called 'optimizing' the population” of Uyghurs in the far-western Xinjiang province in order to reduce birth rates.

It implicated Chinese President Xi Jinping in the policies, which it said were also intended to erase Uyghur culture and assimilate the mostly Muslim ethnic minority through internment and forced relocation.

At the commemoration, which was held in the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Caucus Room of the House of Representatives, the Uyghur activists spoke of the dual need to recognize the severity of what is occuring in Xinjiang but also to pursue tangible actions to stop it continuing.

Omer Kanat, executive chairman of the World Uyghur Congress and director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project speaks on Capitol Hill, Dec. 11, 2023, in Washington. (Bahram Sintash/RFA)

“By holding this event, we want to highlight the importance of commemorating the victims of the Uyghur genocide and honor the survivors,” said Omer Kanat, executive chairman of the World Uyghur Congress and director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

“But we must act without delay on real action, for accountability, deterrence and a practical humanitarian response,” he said.

Call for action

Rep. Young Kim, a Republican from California, said she had family members who defected from North to South Korea and so understood the pain of many of the Uyghurs in attendance worried about family in Xinjiang who “face genocide in modern-day concentration camps.”

Kim said recognizing the genocide was only the start of the responsibilities of people in free countries, and said Congress had to act through bills like the Uyghur Policy Act, which has failed to pass in past congressional session but now has dozens of co-sponsors.

Among other things, she said, the bill would introduce a Uyghur language program at the Foreign Service Institute, which teaches American diplomats, so that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and each American Consulate in China would have available Uyghur speakers.

Others said action was not the sole responsibility of government.

Kelley Currie, a former Trump administration official, speaks on Capitol Hill, Dec. 11, 2023, in Washington. (Bahram Sintash/RFA)

Kelley Currie, who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, said she was dismayed by the hurried “white washing” of Beijing by American business in recent months.

On its final day in power, the Trump administration, too, declared that China is committing a “genocide” against Uyghurs. President Joe Biden’s decision to carry on that assessment contributed to strained relations between Beijing and Washington over the past three years.

But the recent thaw in ties had made for a strange spectacle, she said.

Business as usual

America’s CEOs “filled the room in San Francisco last month, giving Xi Jinping standing ovations” after a speech he delivered at a high-profile dinner, Currie said, describing their appeals for increased American engagement with a “genocidal regime” as “morally bankrupt.”

The worst culprit, she said, was the financial services industry, “who were the first ones to race back to China” and “grovel” with Chinese officials in order to protect their assets after the recent thaw in ties.

That stood in stark contrast with the finding that genocide of Uyghurs is taking place at the hands of China’s government, Currie noted.

“It’s time for all of us to demand an end to business as usual,” she said. “It’s time that our actions become commensurate with our words.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

US activists mark year since White Paper protests

By Alex Willemyns for RFA — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 02:11:19 +0000

Uyghur, Tibetan, Chinese and Hong Konger activists gathered in frigid temperatures outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday evening to mark a year since China’s “White Paper” protests that briefly threatened to grow into a movement for a change of government.

The protests began in response to a Nov. 22, 2022, fire in Urumqi, the capital of the far-west Xinjiang region, which officially killed 10 people, but residents alleged that it caused 44 deaths. Many blame the country’s harsh zero-COVID lockdown measures.

Wielding blank sheets of paper, protesters across China initially protested the censorship of the fire and restrictions on free speech, but the movement later broadened to include chants of “Xi Jinping, step down!” Dozens were arrested in the weeks afterwards.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party delivers remarks during a gathering commemorating the one-year anniversary of the White Paper pro-freedom movement in China alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023 outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA)

Speaking outside the Capitol on Wednesday, Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said Beijing’s reaction to the blank pieces of paper was akin to an old joke from the Soviet Union.

“A protester was passing out flyers in Red Square, and the KGB showed up and immediately arrested him,” Gallagher said. “When they looked at the flyers, they saw they were just blank sheets of paper.”

“The protesters said to the KGB, ‘How can you arrest me for passing out blank sheets of paper?’’’ he added. “The KGB replied, ‘You think we don’t know what you were talking about?’”

A ‘dissident manifesto’

But Gallagher said it was clear to all what the paper represented.

“No one in China, no one watching from abroad, was at all confused,” he noted, calling the signs clarion calls against censorship and for freedom of expression in China. It was “as if a dissident manifesto had been published on the front page of the People's Daily,” he said.

A Chinese overseas student who gave her name only as Leslie and wore a face-mask and tight-fitting hat to protect her identity, told the vigil that the White Paper protesters had shocked her because they led many of her friends to come out of the woodwork in support.

“I was surprised that my seemingly apolitical Chinese colleagues turned out to be super pro-democratic,” Leslie said, noting that the outpouring had clearly shocked the Chinese authorities.

A Chinese overseas student who gave her name only as “Leslie,” and dressed in a face-mask and tight-fitting hat to protect her identity, speaks during a gathering commemorating the one-year anniversary of the White Paper pro-freedom movement in China alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023 outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA)

But, she said, the many arrests in the months afterwards as authorities tracked down the blank-sheet bearers had again instilled fear in many people. Maybe a future generation of Chinese people will feel safe to speak “without wearing a hat and a mask, like I am doing,” she said.

Dumbfounded

Other activists at the evening event reminisced about their shock at last year’s outpouring of public angst against Chinese authorities.

Anna Kwok, executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, said she was surprised, as a Hong Konger, when mainland Chinese people had the courage to openly protest against COVID-19 lockdown policies. She said where the protests went next was unbelievable.

Hong Kong democracy activist Anna Kwok delivers a speech during a gathering commemorating the one-year anniversary of the White Paper pro-freedom movement in China alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023 outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA)

“When it later emerged to protest against the core, fundamental reason of a failed government, a dictator and an authoritarian, I was dumbfounded,” Kwok said, explaining some of her former mainland critics sent her apologies for attacking Hong Kong’s own protests.

“This is something I could never have imagined four years ago during [Hong Kong’s] 2019 pro-democracy protests,” she added.

Chinese former student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and human rights activist Zhou Fengsuo delivers a speech during a gathering commemorating the one-year anniversary of the White Paper pro-freedom movement in China alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023 outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA)

Zhou Fengsuo, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, told those gathered he believed the White Paper protests represented a change in consciousness brought about by pandemic lockdowns.

“We are here because more than 10 Uyghur people were burned to death in their own homes,” he said. “We are here because in Shanghai, the most prosperous city in the world, the middle-class for the first time realized they have no freedom – if they're hungry, they cannot cry out.”

“For the first time in history after 1989,” Zhou added, “the Chinese people who benefited from the economic development realized that their life, their property, means nothing if there's no freedom.”

Edited by Elaine Chan and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

“The time is now; to unite as a human race. Together we can change the world”- Mark Johnson (PFC)

Playing For Change — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:15:37 +0000

This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.

Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei

CounterSpin — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 15:46:21 +0000

CounterSpin231124.mp3

Washington Post (11/19/23)

This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.”

But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw.

We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy.

CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests.

CounterSpin231124Banter.mp3

The post Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Small victories and major frustrations mark latest round of plastics treaty negotiations

Joseph Winters — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 23:24:40 +0000

In March 2022, the world pledged to negotiate a treaty addressing the “full life cycle” of plastics. Twenty months later, countries still can’t agree on what that means.

A third round of talks over the global plastics treaty ended in frustration this weekend, as so-called “low-ambition” countries hindered progress by litigating the definition of basic terms like “plastics” and “life cycle.” Observers noted some signs of progress — like growing support for measures to address harmful chemicals that are commonly added to plastics. However, negotiators now have no formal work plan for the five months leading up to the next round of discussions and are significantly behind schedule, according to several advocacy groups that Grist spoke with.

“These negotiations have so far failed to deliver on their promise … to advance a strong, binding plastics treaty that the world desperately needs,” said Ana Rocha, global plastics policy director for the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, in a statement. Another nonprofit, the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a press release that without a “rapid course correction,” the treaty would “succumb to inertia and eventual disaster.”

Last week’s talks were part of a process that’s been ongoing since March 2022, when countries agreed to craft a treaty to “end plastic pollution” by addressing its entire life cycle. The first two rounds of discussions — conducted by an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, or INC, composed of representatives from each country — were dominated by broad and often procedural conversations, with lots of stalling from oil-producing countries.

This latest session, held at the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, was the first time delegates had a so-called “zero draft” to spar over: basically, a laundry list of potential definitions, objectives, and other considerations for the final agreement, which countries agreed to have ready by the end of next year. Hopes were high that delegates would read through the draft together, make some recommendations, and give the secretariat a mandate to prepare an official first draft by the beginning of the fourth — and penultimate — negotiating committee session in April.

That’s not what happened.

From the outset, a small group of oil-exporting countries including Russia and Saudi Arabia argued that the zero draft did not reflect all countries’ perspectives and therefore could not serve as the basis for negotiations. To assuage these concerns, the secretariat allowed countries to submit some 500 additional proposals, causing the draft to more than triple in length from its original 31 pages. This process was meant to build trust among negotiators — now, there would be no absolutely no way for countries to say their voice hadn’t been heard.

Delegates meet in plenary on the final day of the third INC session in Nairobi, Kenya. Tony Karumba / AFP via Getty Images

Bjorn Beeler, general manager and international coordinator for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, said this was a positive outcome: “More countries own more of the text,” he said, and discussions around different submissions helped further negotiators’ understanding of complex issues. Representatives from the International Alliance of Waste Pickers — a group representing the more than 20 million informal workers who collect and sell recyclable trash, mostly in the developing world — were also able to use this process to suggest more language about a “just transition” for these workers.

Some observers, however, said many of the new submissions to the zero draft were unproductive.

“‘Repetitive’ is a light way to say it,” Rocha told Grist. “Ninety percent of them were watering down the content” of the text.

Rocha said the flood of submissions forestalled more important discussions on the treaty’s substance. Rather than moving onto a new draft, the secretariat is now planning to present an updated version of the zero draft ahead of the INC’s fourth meeting.

Adding to the disorder, member states on Sunday ran out of time to reach an agreement on “intersessional work” — the important discussions that happen between negotiating sessions. Because there are only two week-long INC meetings remaining before a final draft is due at the end of next year, this intersessional work is considered critical for progress on issues like what to do about hazardous chemicals and microplastics, and how to finance the treaty.

Jacob Kean-Hammerson, an ocean campaigner for the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, said discussions among negotiators will still happen, but they will now be on a strictly informal, voluntary basis. “It’s not a good outcome,” he said, but it wasn’t an accident: “What we saw is just a few countries holding the process to ransom, and not wanting anything out of this treaty.”

Perhaps the biggest sticking point was over the scope of the agreement — whether it should limit plastic production or focus mostly on cleaning up the oceans and preventing litter. Even though countries already agreed at the beginning of the treaty process to address plastics’ “full life cycle” — a term that traditionally refers to everything from production to disposal — oil-producing countries have repeatedly argued for a narrower interpretation of that mandate. This time, members of a loosely defined “group of like-minded countries” — which includes Bahrain, China, Cuba, Iran, and Saudi Arabia — said the plastics life cycle should only begin when a product is disposed of.

Activists call for plastic reduction outside the third INC session in Nairobi, Kenya. Luis Tato / AFP via Getty Images

“It makes no logical sense,” Beeler said. To him, it looks like a desperate scramble from oil-producing countries to undo the mandate they already agreed to in March 2022, in response to proposals that are more ambitious than they may have expected. “I don’t think Saudi Arabia or Russia would have ever imagined 18 months ago that we’d actually be looking at controls on polymers.”

Some environmental advocates have also resisted the phrase “life cycle,” but for different reasons: They say it implies a circular life cycle for plastics, in which products can be turned back into new items in an infinite loop. In reality, only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled globally, and most products can only be recycled a few times before they have to be discarded.

Still, “life cycle” is in the original treaty resolution — and experts told Grist it would be very difficult to remove it.

A majority of countries have expressed support for some sort of mechanism to address plastic production. But the structure of the INC meetings has given outsize power to countries who refuse to negotiate in good faith. At present, all decision-making has to happen by consensus rather than a majority vote, making obstructionism relatively straightforward. Some observers described oil-producing countries’ delegates as “intransigent.”

With just two more meetings and a little over a year left before a final draft of the treaty is due, some observers wondered whether more time will be needed. It’s unclear what kind of progress the so-called “high-ambition coalition” of countries will be able to make at future INC meetings without more cooperation from the oil-producing nations — especially on the critical issue of plastic production, which is expected to nearly triple by 2060, outpacing the capacity for waste collection services and recycling to keep up.

“Major plastic producers just don’t see a connection between plastic production and plastic pollution,” Beeler told Grist.

Beeler resisted some of the most pessimistic assessments of the INC meeting. Progress is going slower than many activists had hoped for, he said, but the plastics conversation in general has ramped up very fast and most countries still need time to develop their national positions.

To get resistant countries to engage at the next INC, he suggested that it might be helpful to steer the conversation toward reduced growth of the plastics sector. “It’s very hard to say you have to cap production,” Beeler said, especially to countries like Russia that are geopolitically isolated and dependent on fossil fuels. “We have to have a serious discussion about how we deescalate the rapid growth of plastic production.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Small victories and major frustrations mark latest round of plastics treaty negotiations on Nov 20, 2023.

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

Argentina Election: “No one so extremist on economic issues has been elected president of a South American country,” Says CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot

Newswire Editor — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 22:21:35 +0000

The possible election of the extreme-right candidate Javier Milei in Argentina’s election on Sunday poses an unprecedented threat to the people and country, says economist Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“No one so extremist on economic issues has been elected president of a South American country,” he said.

Milei is on the record saying that he would abolish the Central Bank, a move that would radically go against the consensus of PhD economists worldwide, and that alone could cause economic havoc.

“His extremist views and values go far beyond macroeconomic policy — he hardly acknowledges any legitimate role for government in some of the most important policies that most people have come to see as necessary for a democratic, humane, and stable society,” said Weisbrot.

In an interview last month, Milei stated, “Every time the state intervenes, it’s a violent action that harms the right to private property and in the end, limits our freedom.”

According to Milei, this applies to trying to “fix the problem of hunger” or “fix the problem of poverty,” or employment.

Milei defines socialism to include almost any government action other than military or police functions: “Argentina is a country that has embraced socialist ideas for the last 100 years,” he said.

“Social justice,” not just “socialism,” is “abhorrent” to Milei … “what is social justice, truly?,” Milei asks. “It’s stealing the fruits of one person’s labor and giving it to someone else. So it means two things. First, it’s stealing. The problem with that is that one of the Ten Commandments is ‘thou shalt not steal.’ To support social justice is to support stealing. So one problem is that it violates the Ten Commandments.”

As for climate change, Milei has said, “It’s another one of the lies of socialism.” He’s also said, “There is a cycle of temperatures … a cyclical behavior … and therefore all the policies that blame humans for climate change are false.”

According to Milei, abortion, which was only made legal in Argentina in 2021, is murder: “As a matter of mathematics, life is a continuum with two quantum leaps, birth and death. Any interruption in the interim is murder.”

According to polling data, many Argentines support Milei in the hope that he will fix the economy and bring down high inflation. But historically, it has been his opponents who have followed a progressive agenda that has boosted the economy, after right-wing governments have gotten macroeconomic policies seriously wrong. This has been true over the past 20 years, as can be seen in multiple data series.

For example, Argentines suffered through a depression from 1998 to 2002, comparable to the US Great Depression, under a neoliberal program. More than 65 percent of the population fell below the poverty line, in a country that previously had one of the highest incomes in the region.

As Weisbrot has noted previously, in the 12 years that followed, there was a decline of 71 percent in poverty, and an 81 percent decline in extreme poverty, according to independent estimates. The government instituted one of the biggest conditional cash transfer programs for the poor in Latin America. According to the International Monetary Fund, GDP per capita grew by 42 percent, almost three times the rate of Mexico. Unemployment fell by more than half, and income inequality also fell considerably. There were large increases in living standards for a vast majority of Argentines, by any reasonable comparison.

This was under administrations headed by the Kirchners (Néstor and then Cristina Fernández), whom Milei refers to as “socialist” or “communist,” but are more commonly defined as part of the broad-based Peronist political movement.

The right-wing government of President Mauricio Macri took office in 2015 and did not do well at all, doubling the country’s foreign public debt as a percent of GDP (to 69 percent), including taking out the largest loan ever from the IMF, in 2018. By following the policies specified in the loan agreement, the government pushed the economy into recession. The IMF then doubled down on tightening fiscal and monetary policy, and the economy shrank further. Poverty increased by 50 percent. Inflation rose to 54 percent for 2019.

The Peronists were reelected in December 2019, oversaw a COVID recession in 2020, and then a sharp rebound in 2021, but have run into trouble since the second half of 2022. Annual inflation surpassed 140 percent in October.

“Much of the current crisis in Argentina is a result of what happened during the Macri administration, including unsustainable borrowing combined with large-scale capital flight, as well as an inflation-depreciation spiral that takes on a momentum of its own,” said Weisbrot. “But a crazed, economically suicidal approach would only make things worse — and as Argentina has experienced, things can get a lot worse.

“Milei displays a callous disregard for most people’s living standards, values, and well-being, as well as a commitment to widely discredited economic policies, that is unprecedented.”

A Milei presidency may also pose a threat to human rights in Argentina. He, and more strongly his vice presidential candidate, Victoria Villarruel, have made statements indicating sympathy with the violent military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

DOE’s Methane Monitoring Framework Misses the Mark on Climate Goals

Newswire Editor — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 02:03:13 +0000

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced an international working group to develop a framework for the measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) of methane, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gas emissions from gas. They claim this effort will reduce global emissions. But the U.S. Department of Energy-led framework will not require producers to make or keep pledges to reduce their overall production of oil and gas and, as a result, will be weaponized by the fossil fuel industry to justify increased production.

As currently envisioned, this voluntary framework would rely on unreliable, easily manipulated, opaque technologies that have not shown they can be trusted to adequately measure the emissions from oil and gas operations. As countries move toward setting standards for methane emissions on imported oil and gas – as the European Union reached a deal to do on Wednesday – it is all the more important that oil and gas companies’ claims can be rigorously, independently and transparently verified.

The U.S. Department of Energy acknowledges that the frameworks will support gas sellers to “compete on the basis of a lower greenhouse gas profile.” They write:

“There is currently no broad agreement for how companies can credibly account for and verify claims regarding greenhouse emissions associated with their natural gas in the marketplace. This limits buyers’ ability to require producers to reduce emissions and sellers’ ability to compete on the basis of a lower greenhouse gas profile.”

At the same time, the United Arab Emirates-held Presidency of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) is working on a “Global Decarbonization Alliance” that would see oil and gas producers commit to eliminate operational methane emissions while refusing to commit to reductions in the vast majority (80-90%) of their emissions, which result when the fossil fuels they produce and sell are burned (called ‘scope 3’ emissions).

The U.S. and other Planet Wreckers persist in operating as though emissions reductions are sufficient to meet climate targets while approving new projects that continue to expand overall production, on track to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C. IReducing oil and gas operational emissions without sharp reductions in overall fossil fuel production will fail to achieve the cuts in methane emissions necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. As a report from the International Energy Agency and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition released October 11 made clear, policies focused on reducing oil and gas emissions – without reducing production overall – are dangerous distractions and ineffective climate policy.

According to the IEA’s projections, either current policies or existing pledges, which both permit substantial use of fossil fuels for decades to come, will result in warming well above 1.5°C, even with best-case scenario methane emissions reductions. The NZE Scenario, which calls for an approximately 80% reduction in gas production by 2050, is the only IEA pathway that avoids significant overshoot of temperature targets.

As we head into COP28, we encourage all countries – particularly the United States and other major producers – to revise their climate commitments to include metrics to guarantee a decline in fossil fuel production in line with or more ambitious than what the IEA shows is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

We cannot afford to throw resources and financing behind infrastructure based on the presumption fossil fuels will remain a significant source of energy.

Lorne Stockman, Research Director at Oil Change International said:
“Oil Change International research shows that over half of the fossil fuels in currently active fields and mines must stay in the ground to limit global temperature rise to internationally agreed upon limits. Oil & gas companies knowingly block, delay, and undermine efforts to address their impact on the planet, and continually use their profits to invest in new fossil fuel extraction over renewables. Reducing methane emissions is important. But what companies need to understand is that what really matters is phasing out fossil fuels. In other words, they need to clean up their mess on their way out the door.”

Gabrielle Levy, Associate Director of Methane Communications at Climate Nexus said:
“It’s important to require companies to clean up operations and reduce methane pollution as much and as quickly as possible in order to protect the health and safety of communities. Still, we can’t lose sight of the larger reality: Cutting emissions simply isn’t enough. We must eliminate most oil and gas production in the next 25 years. Instead, the U.S. and other countries are trying to kick open the door for even more greenwashed, dirty fossil fuels.”

Romain Ioualalen, Global Policy Campaign Manager at Oil Change International said:
“Focusing on methane is a smokescreen the oil and gas industry is using to conceal that they’re actively working against global climate action. The Global Decarbonization Alliance, a new voluntary initiative spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates COP28 presidency, is full of misleading promises that ignore the vast majority of the climate pollution caused by fossil fuel companies. The COP28 presidency must not be under the illusion that vague and voluntary company commitments to address upstream methane emissions, or a framework to measure methane emissions like that proposed by the United States, are substitutes for phasing out all fossil fuels. While cutting methane is an important step, the science says we must stop new exploration and extraction projects immediately. That is what COP28 must deliver.”

Lauren Pagel, Policy Director at Earthworks said:
"The Department of Energy's MMRV approach risks falsely branding gas as green or clean and prolonging its life. That is exactly what the IEA and the UN are warning us about. Any attempt to use reporting, verification or measurement to greenwash fossil fuels has the potential to put us over the edge of a climate catastrophe. We want to see efforts that guarantee a clean up and phase out. That's what science tells us we must do."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Medieval Times Workers Mark 9 Months on Strike with a "Rally Round the Castle"

The Real News Network — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:29:04 +0000

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

The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – November 7, 2023 Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on.

KPFA — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 18:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on.
Supreme Court appears set to uphold ban on domestic abusers owning guns.
Elections take place around the country, governors races and abortion rights are on the ballot in some states.
House votes to go ahead with formal censure vote of Democrat Rashida Tlaib for controversial Israel statements.
Special counsel in Hunter Biden investigation meets in private with Congressional investigators.
We Work to close dozens of offices amid financial trouble.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – November 7, 2023 Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Israel’s Lies and Deception

Stuart Littlewood — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 18:29:09 +0000

We are won over by “words that work” from an Israeli training manual.

Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.

It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.

Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 75 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.

And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.

I wrote this 10 years ago, and nothing has changed, only got worse.

Israel’s book of lies

The great mystery is why Western politicians and media outlets, after 75 years of Israel’s existence, are still so ignorant about what’s been happening and the countless crimes committed in pursuit of Zionist ambitions.

Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of hasbara – the sugarcoating techniques and downright lying to persuade the gullible to swallow their poison.

Notice how everything Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labelled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.

The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which says it is “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It was written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.

TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West. And because God gave them the keys to the Holy Land, their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.

I suspect Messrs Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly, Keir Starmer and the rest of Israel’s stooges in Westminster carry this training manual in their pocket, which accounts for the claptrap they constantly spout and their inexplicable infatuation with the rogue state.

The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivelers use to try to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and its contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.

They tell us, for example, how many rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel but never how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited kind) Israel’s US-taxpayer-funded F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats pour into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza.

And they are careful not to mention, for example, that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British Mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In July 1948 Israeli terrorists seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

Out of a population of 19,000, only 1,052 were allowed to stay. Others who survived the killing spree were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way. Israel has no right to Lydda at all – they stole it in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages.

“Captain of Spin” returns

I’m horrified to see Mark Regev making a comeback to our screens and being interviewed by British media. Regev (real name Freiberg) is an ace propagandist, master of disinformation, whitewasher extraordinaire and personal adviser and spokesman for the apartheid regime’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

While he was ambassador to the UK one of his senior political officers, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Sir Alan Duncan at the Foreign Office. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, regrettably, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government afterwards.

It should have resulted in Regev being kicked out, but he wasn’t.

Regev is quoted several times in the Global Language Dictionary in its attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and to make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink all us simple-minded Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.

Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “Words that work” – that is to say, carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. A statement at the very beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Here’s an example:

Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process.

Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.

Actually, Israel made no sacrifices at all – Gaza wasn’t theirs to keep and staying was unsustainable. Although they removed their settlers and troops, they continued to occupy Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters and control all entrances and exits, thus keeping the population bottled up and provoking acts of resistance that give Israel a bogus excuse to turn Gaza into a prison.

International law regards Israel as still the occupier.

The manual also serves as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks recruited to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet. It uses some of Regev’s words to provide disinformation essential to the hasbara programme. We’re told, for example, that the most effective way to build support for Israel is to talk about “working toward a lasting peace” that “respects the rights of everyone in the region”.

Here are a few more:

We welcome and we support international efforts to help the Palestinians. So, once again, the Palestinian people are not our enemy. On the contrary, we want peace with the Palestinians.

We’re interested in a historical reconciliation. Enough violence. Enough war. And we support international efforts to help the Palestinians both on the humanitarian level and to build a more successful democratic society. That’s in everyone’s interest.

The central lie, of course, is that Israel wants peace. It doesn’t. It never has. Peace simply does not suit Israel’s purpose, which is endless expansion and control. That is why Israel has never declared its borders, maintains its brutal military occupation and continues its programme of illegal squats, or so-called “settlements”, deep inside Palestinian territory, intending to create sufficient “facts on the ground” to ensure permanent occupation and annexation.

Q: Why did Israel use disproportionate force in Gaza?

A: The devastation in Gaza is heartbreaking. So much suffering that was so unnecessary. And none of it had to happen.

Israel left Gaza – uprooting 9,000 Israeli families, and turned it over, peacefully, to the Palestinians. They had every opportunity to succeed: support from the international community, financial aid from across the globe, and the aspirations of the people.

Israel gave up Gaza with every hope that this was the first step towards peace with the Palestinians, and all they got was rockets in return. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands of rockets. Not monthly. Not weekly. Literally daily. Even since the fighting in Gaza stopped, more than 160 rockets been fired from Gaza towards Israel since Israel stopped fighting.

What would you have done – or wanted your government to do – if you and your family were under rocket attack every day? When will the terrorists in Gaza stop shooting rockets at Israeli civilians?

You and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to live on land we’d stolen from the Palestinians at gunpoint.

It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community that

If Hamas reforms itself…

If Hamas recognises my country’s right to live in freedom…

If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…

If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

Iran must be demonised too, so Regev’s twisted wisdom is used again:

Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason.

Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles…. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.

But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? And why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

As for “wiping Israel off the map”, accurate translations of that remark by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (The Guardian), or “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history” (Middle East Media Research Institute). Ahmadinejad was actually repeating a statement once made by Ayatollah Khomeini.

And one more:

When asked a direct question, you don’t have to answer it directly. You are in control of what you say and how you say it. Remember, your goal in doing interviews is not only to answer questions—it is to bring persuadable members of the audience to Israel’s side in the conflict. Start by acknowledging their question and agreeing that both sides – Israelis and Palestinians – deserve a better future. Remind your audience that Israel wants peace. Then focus on shared values. Once you have done this you will have built enough support for you to say what Israel really wants: for the Palestinians to end the violence and the culture of hate so that fences and checkpoints are no longer needed and both sides can live in peace. And for Iran for Iran-backed terrorists in Gaza to stop shooting rockets into Israel so that both sides can have a better future.

A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!

Why is all this elaborate lying and misquoting necessary? It’s the good old Mossad motto “By deception we shall do war”, ingrained in the Israeli mindset.

And I’m even more horrified to have just seen Trevor Phillips giving Tzipi Livni a platform. This vile woman, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians during the blitzkrieg known as Operation Cast Lead. Showing no remorse, and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of it. Speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Yes, There is an Israel Lobby, as any Decent Journalist Knows

Yves Engler — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:18:01 +0000

Is the idea of a “highly organized Israel lobby” antisemitic? An apartheid-promoting Globe and Mail columnist claims as much.

In attacking the Canadian Union of Public Employees for standing in solidarity with Palestinians Robyn Urback tweeted, “Points for alleging a Jewish conspiracy, but if CUPE really wanted to go full antisemitic trope, they should have mentioned something about poisoning the wells.” Below her message Urback quote tweeted a colleague stating, “CUPE Ontario says it’s targeted by ‘trolls’ – ‘a highly organized pro-Israel lobby,’ which targeted [Union president] Fred Hahn and CUPE 3906 for ‘recognition of Palestinians’ rights under international law to resist occupation through armed struggle.’”

But Urback knows full well there are many organizations backed by substantial wealth promoting Israel. This is not a trope. This is reality that is easily fact checked and should have been by any honest journalist.

In a sign of her dishonesty, Urback previously wrote about a lobby sponsored trip to Israel she participated in. Urback went on BirthRight, a program that pays for young Jews to go Israel to become “intellectual ambassadors” for the country.

The preeminent force in the “highly organized Israel lobby” is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. CIJA has over 40 staff and a $10 million budget. In addition, B’nai B’rith has a handful of offices across the country. For its part, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Canada’s budget is $7-10 million annually. These groups work closely with StandWithUs Canada, CAMERA, Allied Voices for Israel, Israel on Campus, Honest Reporting Canada and other Israeli nationalist political organizations. Additionally, more than 200 registered Canadian charities assist projects in Israel and engage in at least some pro-Israel campaigning domestically. There are also numerous Jewish private schools, summer camps and community centres that actively promote Israel.

All these groups are backed by substantial wealth. Patron of CIJA, the Jewish federations of Toronto, Montréal, Winnipeg, Windsor, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, London, Ottawa, Vancouver and Atlantic Canada raise $200 million annually and have over $1 billion in assets.

A large amount of private wealth strengthens Israel lobby groups’ influence. Since 2013 the chief fundraiser for the Trudeau Liberals has been Stephen Bronfman, scion of an arch Israeli nationalist family. Bronfman has millions invested in Israeli technology companies and over the years the Bronfman clan has secured arms for Israeli forces and supported its military in other ways. Bronfman openly linked his fundraising for Trudeau to Israel. In 2013 the Globe and Mail reported:

Justin Trudeau is banking on multimillionaire Stephen Bronfman to turn around the Liberal Party’s financial fortunes in order to take on the formidable Conservative fundraising machine…. Mr. Bronfman helped raise $2-million for Mr. Trudeau’s leadership campaign. Mr. Bronfman is hoping to win back the Jewish community, whose fundraising dollars have been going more and more to the Tories because of the party’s pro-Israel stand. ‘We’ll work hard on that,’ said Mr. Bronfman, adding that ‘Stephen Harper has never been to Israel and I took Justin there five years ago and he was referring at the end of the trip to Israel as ‘we.’ So I thought that was pretty good.’

Other notable Canadian moguls have long histories of ensuring ties between Israel and Canada. Worth more than $3 billion prior to his death, David Azrieli was among the richest Canadians. In his youth he served in the paramilitary Haganah group during the 1948 war. His unit was responsible for the Battle of Jerusalem, including forcibly displacing 10,000 Palestinians. Azrieli was also a real estate developer in Israel and in 2011 he made a controversial donation to Im Tirtzu, a hardline Israeli-nationalist organization (deemed a “fascist” group by an Israeli court).

Worth $1.6 billion, Gerald Schwartz and his wife Heather Reisman created the Heseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides millions of dollars annually for non-Israelis who fight in the IDF.

In recent years Canadian-Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams has plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into various sports and cultural initiatives to rebrand Israel.

Other Canadian billionaires Larry Tanenbaum, Mark Scheinberg, David Cheriton, Mitch Garber, Daryl Katz, Seymour Schulich, as well as the Zekelman, Reichmann and Sherman families, all back Israel. Again, none of this a conspiracy theory or antisemitic trope. It is simple reality and easily fact-checked if one is interested.

It is good, not bad, that a union leader mentions powerful lobbyists influencing Canadian politicians to take certain policy positions. Democracy requires shining a light on such lobbying. Is Urback against this very common practice of good journalists?

Canadians politicians express unmatched fidelity to a state all leading human rights groups say is committing the crime of apartheid. Trudeau’s government organized a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, sued to block proper labels on wines from illegal settlements and announced that should Canada win a seat on the United Nations Security Council it would act as an “asset for Israel” on the council. In recent days Canadian politicians have fallen over themselves to express support for Israel as that country obliterates Gaza, kills dozens in the West Bank and bombs Lebanon, Egypt and Syria.

There’s nothing conspiratorial or untoward about citing the role of a “highly organized Israel lobby”. In fact, there would be nothing conspiratorial or untoward to describe it as a “highly organized Jewish Israel lobby”. A slew of self-described Jewish organizations are deeply involved in anti-Palestinian campaigning and no other lobby focused on a country/ethnicity/religion is near as well-resourced or organized as the above mentioned Canadian Jewish groups.

That’s not to say there aren’t other political and cultural forces shaping Canadian backing for Israel. Zionism began in Canada in the latter half of the 1800s as a Christian movement and there’s still Christian Zionist forces. At the turn of the 20th century Canada became staunchly pro-Zionist due to its close ties to the British empire and Washington’s perspective has significant influence today. There’s also a European ‘settler solidarity’ element to Canadian Zionism and Israel advocates wield a unique and powerful stick: The ability to play victim and smear those advocating for justice as racist.

Robyn Urback knows full well there’s a “highly organized Israel lobby”. Her claim that CUPE is anti-Jewish to mention this is ridiculous. It is also bad journalism and most likely a projection of her (perhaps unintentional) anti-Palestinian racism.

See related article “Defining Racism.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Ten Years on: Uncontacted Tribe in Danger as Land Protection Stalls

Survival International — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:00:15 +0000

The last of the Kawahiva are forced to live on the run from armed loggers and powerful ranchers. Still from unique footage taken by government agents during a chance encounter. © FUNAI

Ten years after Brazilian authorities released extraordinary footage showing the existence of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, their lands have still not been fully protected – and loggers and land-grabbers surround them.

In 2013 Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI released video that they had filmed during a chance encounter with the Kawahiva people of Mato Grosso state, deep in the Amazon.

Award-winning actor Mark Rylance recording the narration for The Last of the Kawahiva. © Survival 2015

Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance later narrated a film about their plight, “The Last of the Kawahiva,” for Survival International.

A global campaign by Survival International, alongside Indigenous people, pressured the authorities to act, and in 2018 cattle ranchers and loggers who had occupied the Kawahiva territory were evicted.

But since then the land protection process has stalled – loggers and landgrabbers are surrounding their territory, and an illegal road has been built just 2km away.

A FUNAI team at a protection post nearby have been working to keep the loggers and ranchers out, despite the dangers – their post has been attacked several times.

Massacres and disease have already killed many Kawahiva – the only chance of survival for those who remain is if their territory is finally demarcated (legally recognized and marked out).

The government has already been given two deadlines to finish demarcating the Kawahiva territory: in 2013 – the year the video was first released – a Brazilian court ordered the demarcation to be carried out. Ten years on, this still has not happened, and in August of this year, Brazil’s Supreme Court gave FUNAI 60 days to finalize a plan for the definitive demarcation of the territory.

Eliane Xunakalo of Indigenous organization FEPOIMT (Federation of Indigenous peoples and organizations of Mato Grosso) said today: “It’s vital to finish the demarcation for our uncontacted relatives. The “Kawahiva do Rio Pardo” territory is coveted by outsiders, and it’s also extremely dangerous for the FUNAI employees who work on the protection post there. We will only be able to guarantee the survival of our uncontacted relatives if the territory is demarcated.

“It’s up to us to protect our relatives, to protect their way of life, because they are the resistance and resilience in the midst of all these threats and challenges that exist here in Mato Grosso,” she added.

This is one of the most crucial cases concerning uncontacted tribes anywhere in Brazil. The Kawahiva are survivors of countless genocidal attacks which have wiped out many of them; the land demarcation process has ground to a halt; and loggers and landgrabbers see the territory as open for business. We know that they have been active inside the Kawahiva’s forest, and any encounter between the Kawahiva and these outsiders, who are usually armed, could be deadly. The authorities must act now to finish the job, and legally protect the Kawahiva territory once and for all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Prevention of Dangers – Mark of a Compassionate Society

Ralph Nader — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 05:49:39 +0000

Image by Sunguk Kim.

If only canes, walkers, railings and banisters were sentient, what would their message be to humans on Earth? “Prevention is the Priority, Dummies,” they would exclaim. “Look at how many trips and falls we prevent for our users compared to the enormous costs in pain, suffering, family disarray and economic expenses that would occur were it not for our reliable presence day after day. We get no respect!”

For the most part, prevention of waste, injury, disease, casualties, wars, toxic chemicals and corporate crimes such as massive over-billing are just not profitable for mindless CEOs. However, selling goods and services that flow from the tragedies, disasters and injustices not prevented produces profits and jobs.

Taking care of broken hips, busted knees, sprained ankles, head trauma and more is a big business and attracts skilled workers to perform these treatments. A capitalist economy blocks obvious public safety standards by governmental agencies and puts profits before people’s safety and health.

Piles of studies and real-world experiences of people attest to the grisly consequences when prevention is blocked due to greed. Republicans starving the small IRS budget that pays for investigations of complex tax escapes or tax evasions blocks the collection of hundreds of billions of dollars annually from big corporations and the super-rich.

Food companies promoting empty calories to children and adults alike block the known capacity of nutritious diets to prevent heart diseases, diabetes, obesity and other harms to health.

Universal childcare, the child tax credit, paid family leave and an adequate minimum wage all reduce the ravages of family poverty. A Washington Post editorial recently asserted that Republicans blocking the child tax credit extension in January 2022 more than doubled child poverty in our country after it had already been halved in 2021, negatively impacting millions of children with “poorer health, lower educational attainment and fewer job opportunities than their peers.” Think of those immense costs to them and society.

When you think about prevention, you realize these objectives are what many consumer citizen, labor and public health groups are all about.

Simple preventive safety devices such as seatbelts, padded dashboards, head restraints, side and rollover protections, improved tires, brakes and stability have saved millions of lives and even more injuries around the world in motor vehicle collisions.

Educating the public and regulating the homicidal tobacco companies have reduced daily tobacco use from nearly 50% of adults in 1964 to under 14% today. With all the non-smoking bans in public buildings, this helps non-smokers too.

Getting lead out of gasoline and paint in the Seventies reduced the lethal exposure of that menacing toxin, especially to brain-damaged toddlers and children living in run-down tenements with lead paint peeling off apartment walls.

The curse of avoidable famines, especially taking the lives of infants, could be prevented by widely distributed nutrition packages flown into danger zones. Former Senator George McGovern’s last book described the immense savings in life and health by assuring every poor child in the world a free lunch. (See, “What It Means to Be a Democrat” by George McGovern, 2011).

Tested vaccines, without serious side-effects, such as the smallpox vaccines, have saved millions of lives for relatively tiny amounts of prevention money. So have investments in public sanitation.

Prevention – anticipating conflicts and waging peace – pays huge dividends given the devastating costs of wars in terms of lives lost and economic waste. Yet, the arms merchants, the egos and machismo of tyrants and those who build and expand military empires stifle and undermine impoverished peace movements driven by morals, ethics and respect for the rule of law.

The list can go on and on, as the work of Harvard School of Public Health Professor David Hemenway has demonstrated during his long, scholarly career focusing on injury prevention. (See, Harvard Injury Control Research Center).

To make prevention a national priority and a measure of judging candidates for elective office, it is good to start with Congress where in the 60s and 70s important consumer, environmental and worker safety laws were passed, animated by the public’s desire to prevent injuries and diseases.

“Prevention impact statements” should be added to all relevant legislation, including appropriations bills. Establishing a Department of Peace and Academies for Teaching Peace Advocacy should be an essential part of this process. The Defense Department and the military Academies would be more efficient and less militaristic if countervailing peace agencies and educational institutions existed.

Former Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced a bill to establish a Department of Peace. Congressional militarists and those who lobby for weapons of mass destruction made sure it went nowhere. However, senior legislator Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) is interested in pushing such legislation. (Contact him at 202-225-6101.)

In matters large and small, send your ideas for Prevention to your Senators and Representatives and to your state legislators, with copies to us at info@csrl.org.

The post Prevention of Dangers – Mark of a Compassionate Society appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

PNG suspended defence chief claims ‘political interference’ in court

APR editor — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 02:43:45 +0000

By Jacob Pok in Port Moresby

Concerns over alleged political interference in the command and control of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force are among the grounds that will be pursued by the suspended Chief of Defence, Major-General Mark Goina, if the court grants him leave to appeal.

Goina seeks leave to review the decision of the National Executive Council (NEC) that suspended him from his substantive role as the major-general of the PNGDF on August 17, 2023, and appointed Commodore Philip Polewara as acting commander of the PNGDF.

While pursuing his application for leave to review at the Waigani National Court yesterday, General Goina, through his lawyer David Dusal, when giving the background of the matter, submitted that the Minister for Defence Win Bakri Daki, who is the third defendant in the proceeding, had been allegedly interfering with the command, control and operation of the PNGDF.

READ MORE: Other PNG Defence Force reports

It was submitted that Goina became gravely concerned in recent times of the minister’s insistence and instructions to the general as the commander of the PNGDF to appoint and discharge certain officers within the PNGDF, which raised significant concerns of
political interference into the functions of the military.

It was submitted that such authority was vested in the Commander of the Defence Force and not, the minister, nor was the commander subject to directions from a civilian.

In his affidavit, General Goina indicated that the minister had to sponsor the NEC submission for him to be suspended without him being informed on the reasons for his suspension.

Presiding judge Justice Oagile Dingake had to direct Goina’s lawyer to first make submissions on leave to review and not on the substantive merits of the case until leave was decided.

Leave requirements met
General Goina’s lawyer Dusal then submitted that leave should be granted since Goina had met all the requirements of leave.

It was submitted that Goina, as the plaintiff, had standing as a person directly affected by the decision of the NEC on August 16, 2023, and the subsequent gazettal by the Governor-General on August 17, 2023, giving effect to the NEC decision.

It was also submitted that General Goina had arguable grounds on the basis that there was an error of law relating to his suspension since it was made without consultation with the Public Services Commission under s.59 of the Constitution and that he was not given the right to be heard.

It was further submitted that there was also no delay in the filing of the leave application.

The state through lawyer Alice Kimbu opposed the application for leave and argued that Goina’s suspension was still active and the proceeding would pre-empt or interfere with a pending inquiry into the death of two soldiers during a military training.

Kimbu further argued that although she had no issue with the plaintiff’s standing or the delay in filing of the application, leave should not be granted and must be refused on the basis that the proceeding would be destructive to the inquiry.

Justice Dingake noted that although General Goina may have met all requirements for leave, it had reached the third month of Goina’s three-month suspension period and there would be “no utility” in pursuing the matter further.

Suspension coming to end
“Suspension is almost coming to an end, what’s the utility?” he asked.

“Just when it is coming to an end, you’re coming to the court.

“Am I entitled to take into account that the suspension is coming to an end?

“What happens if I reserved my decision for six months?” Justice Dingake asked.

Lawyer Dusal in response submitted that as indicated in the suspension instrument, it was indicated that General Goina be suspended for three-months or, pending the final outcome of the inquiry.

He submitted that the inquiry would take six to 12 months and the status of General Goina’s suspension would depend on the final outcome.

Kimbu for the state argued that the grant of leave was discretionary and as per the circumstance, the court should not grant leave.

Justice Dingake reserved his ruling to a date to be advised.

Jacob Pokis a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

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

Prevention of Dangers: Mark of a Compassionate Society

Ralph Nader — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 15:09:31 +0000

Food companies promoting empty calories to children and adults alike block the known capacity of nutritious diets to prevent heart diseases, diabetes, obesity and other harms to health.

When you think about prevention, you realize these objectives are what many consumer citizen, labor and public health groups are all about.

Tested vaccines, without serious side-effects, such as the smallpox vaccines, have saved millions of lives for relatively tiny amounts of prevention money. So have investments in public sanitation.

In matters large and small, send your ideas for Prevention to your Senators and Representatives and to your state legislators, with copies to us at gro.lrscnull@ofni.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Edred Whittingham talks with Mark Longhurst & Pip Thompson | GB News | 5 Oct 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 10:26:13 +0000

This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

Prevention of Dangers – Mark of a Compassionate Society

eweisbaum — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 17:41:14 +0000

By Ralph Nader October 6, 2023 If only canes, walkers, railings and bannisters were sentient, what would their message be to humans on Earth? “Prevention is the Priority – Dummies,” they would exclaim – “look at how many trips and falls we prevent for our users compared to the enormous costs in pain, suffering, family…

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

NZ govt ‘welcomes’ US diplomatic relations with Cook Islands, Niue

APR editor — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 21:28:12 +0000

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

The New Zealand government has given its full blessing to Cook Islands and Niue establishing diplomatic relations with the United States.

At the US-Pacific summit on Monday (Washington time), President Joe Biden said he recognised the two island nations as sovereign and independent states, an announcement which the US Embassy in Aotearoa has labelled as “historic”.

Both countries are self-governing in ‘free association’ with New Zealand.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins acknowledged that and responded to questions around what the US’s move means for both countries’ relationship with Aotearoa.

“That’s the way that the American system works,” Hipkins said.

“So in order to recognise those specific countries, the wording that they use is they recognise their sovereignty but actually they also recognise, through diplomatic channels, the unique constitutional relationship that those countries have with New Zealand as well.”

The establishment of diplomatic relations does not change the constitutional relationship Aotearoa New Zealand has with either the Cook Islands or Niue, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said.

“Aotearoa New Zealand welcomes the establishment of diplomatic relations between US, Cook Islands and Niue,” the MFAT spokesperson said.

Diplomatic relations
“The Cook Islands has diplomatic relations with 61 countries, and Niue has diplomatic relations with 21 countries.

US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a joint statement signing ceremony with Niue Premier Dalton Tagelagi at the Department of State. Image: Screenshot/US Department of State/RNZ Pacific

“[The NZ government] expects that the establishment of diplomatic relations[with the US] will better enable close engagement.”

In his speech, Biden said building a better world started with stronger partnerships.

“And that’s why the United States is formally establishing relations with the Cook Island’s . . . and Niue,” Biden said.

Pacific Islands Forum chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown has hailed the move as a milestone that marks an “era of change”.

He said Niue and the Cook Islands were “celebrating”.

“These milestones celebrate era’s of change and demonstrate that with unshakable resolve and leadership, remarkable achievements are possible,” Brown said.

Brown thanked the US President for his elevated level of engagement with the Pacific over the last year.

Development funding
Massey University’s defence and security analyst Dr Anna Powles said formalising diplomatic ties was “very much about ensuring that Cook Islands and Niue are able to receive development assistance funding”.

“There’s obviously also a strategic benefit from the United States perspective to have diplomatic presence, or at least diplomatic reach, into both of those countries.”

On top of the diplomatic ties talk, Biden also announced climate assistance at the summit.

He told Pacific leaders more than US$20 million is being injected into climate assistance.

The announcement for climate support and affirming the US’s commitment to climate action comes just days days after he was slammed by Pacific youth climate activist Suluafi Brianna Freuan following the UN Climate Ambition Summit.

Suluafi said not all nations were being ambitious enough when it came to climate ambition.

“What are the commitments that they will make to financing those most vulnerable to climate change, including those in their, their very ocean, their neighbours in the Pacific,” Suluafi said.

“[Countries] really need to talk about how they will phase out fossil fuels.”

But President Biden wanted to be clear that the Pacific’s stance on the climate crisis was the US’s position too.

‘I hear you’ – Biden on climate crisis
“I want you to know I hear you, the people in the United States and around the world hear you,” Biden said.

“We hear your warnings of a rising sea that they pose an existential threat to your nations. We hear your calls for reassurance that you never, never, never will lose your statehood, or membership of the UN as a result of the climate crisis.”

The President also announced the doubling of US-Pacific exchange student spots.

He committed to a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific region.

Biden also plans on investing US$5 million into co-funding a fisheries and ocean science vessel.

It is expected to be used to manage the region’s tuna resources and for ocean science research.

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.

U.S. & Iran Complete Prisoner Swap; Iranian Protesters Mark One Year Since Death of Mahsa Amini

Democracy Now! — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 14:14:39 +0000

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

U.S. & Iran Complete Prisoner Swap; Iranian Protesters Mark One Year Since Death of Mahsa Amini

Democracy Now! — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 12:13:48 +0000

As the Biden administration and Tehran carry out a prisoner swap that also includes the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue, we look at the state of U.S.-Iran relations with journalist Negar Mortazavi, host of The Iran Podcast. The deal represents a major diplomatic breakthrough between the two countries since the end of the Iran nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew in 2018. The prisoner swap came just after the anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody last year, which set off nationwide protests against the Iranian government. “What we saw over the past year after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini was nothing short of a mass movement and also, essentially, a cultural revolution,” says Mortazavi, who notes the protests have led to a loosening of social restrictions despite the government crackdown. “I don’t think the government can push it back to where it was before the killing of Mahsa Amini.”

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

International Rallies Mark The Death That Shook Iran

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 15:46:26 +0000

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

As Mark Meadows Pushes for Federal Trial, Activists Say Attack on Voting Rights at Heart of Georgia Case

Democracy Now! — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 12:13:32 +0000

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

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

Countdown starts as Japan poised to release first batch of treated nuclear wastewater

APR editor — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 06:00:10 +0000

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

A Japanese government spokesperson says it is “not wilfully trying to divide the Pacific” over the Fukushima treated nuclear wastewater release.

Japan is set to start discharging more than one million tonnes of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean tomorrow (local time).

This comes 12 years after a tsunami slammed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resulting in what has been labelled as the largest civil nuclear energy disaster since Chernobyl.

Palau, Papua New Guinea, Cook Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia have publicly backed the plan or at least placed their faith in Japan’s word that it will be safe.

The release is forecast to take 30 to 40 years to complete.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi (left) delivers a report on Japan’s ALPS-treated wastewater plans to the Pacific Islands Forum chair, Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown, in Rarotonga. Image: IAEA/RNZ Pacific

Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is the most recent Pacific leader to speak out in defence of Japan.

He said he is satisfied their plan is safe after reading the UN nuclear agency’s report.

Rabuka’s voice is important because he is in the Pacific Islands Forum leadership team — known as the Troika — as the past chair of the Forum. The other two are current chair Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown and future chair, the Tongan Prime Minister Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni.

Since making that statement Rabuka has apologised for speaking ahead of the recent Troika meeting, but he has not backtracked on his view.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “Comparisons between the nuclear legacy in the Pacific and Japan’s nuclear wastewater release is fear-mongering.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone

‘Discharged’ into Japan’s own backyard
Rabuka has taken to social media in response to criticism of his statement of support.

“Comparisons between the nuclear legacy in the Pacific and Japan’s nuclear wastewater release is fear-mongering,” he wrote.

He also said the wastewater was not being dumped but discharged into Japan’s “own backyard”, over 7000km from Fiji.

1/3 One of my critics at the weekend appeared to be somehow connecting the wastewater discharge with the cataclysmic power of the nuclear bombs dropped in the Pacific as part of weapons testing.

— Sitiveni Rabuka (@slrabuka) August 22, 2023

That in itself has been the centre of debate with nuclear activists continuing to call it a dump.

One nuclear expert appointed by the Pacific Islands Forum said there was an argument that it was a dump over a release.

Pacific leaders meet with IAEA in July 2023 following release of the agency’s comprehensive report on Japan’s plans. Image: IAEA/RNZ Pacific

But the International Atomic Energy Agency has gone to great lengths — even travelling to New Zealand and Rarotonga — to explain why this is not a dump.

Director-General Rafael Grossi told RNZ Pacific earlier this year that he condemned dumping which he said had happened in the past and was not the case for Japan’s plan.

Against and on the fence
Vanuatu’s Foreign Minister has drafted a declaration urging Japan to stop the discharge.

He wants the leaders of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) meeting in Port Vila today to support the declaration.

Tuvalu has also spoken out, expressing opposition to Rabuka’s stance.

Tuvalu’s Minister for Finance, Seve Paeniu told FBC News that if Japan was genuinely confident, why did it not consider disposing of it within its own lakes and waters.

TEPCO assures the Pacific
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) spokesperson Junichi Matsumoto told the first media briefing today that his team was “moving quickly” to prepare the release which would depend on the conditions.

“The final decision will be made on the morning of the [August] 24 based on the climate conditions or weather conditions,” he said.

“A very small amount will be carefully discharged using a two-step process.”

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) spokesperson Junichi Matsumoto briefs media online today. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis

RNZ asked TEPCO about the nuclear legacy in the Pacific.

“To the members of the PIF, we have been providing explanations on the discharge into the sea,” Matsumoto said.

“So we would like to continue to provide the explanation on our initiative.

“And in terms of assurance, it may be a bit different in terms of nuance, but the result of sea area monitoring will be communicated.

Matsumoto said anyone wishing to could check the results of the sea area monitoring on the TEPCO website.

When questioned about when Pacific nations would see the effects of the release, he said that according to dispersion models particles would arrive on the shores of Papua New Guinea and Fiji in “a few years’ time or a few decades”.

“It will be impossible to distinguish that [discharged] tritium [in the Pacific Ocean] from that already existing in nature,” Matsumoto said.

A Japan government spokesperson said Tokyo was not wilfully trying to divide the Pacific and no compensation would be given to Pacific nations for potential reputational damage.

“The Japanese government has been taking opportunities at international conferences and at bilateral meetings to thoroughly and meticulously explain and disseminate information to the world through its website, as well as through social network media including X [formerly Twitter],” the spokesperson said.

The Cook Islands Prime Minister and incoming Forum chair Mark Brown in Japan with PIF Secretary-General Henry Puna to meet Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Image: PIF/RNZ Pacific

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.

Rabuka, PIF ‘undermine credibility’ of Pacific experts over Japan’s nuclear waste dumping plan

Wansolwara — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:39:41 +0000

By Aralai Vosayaco in Suva

The Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is disappointed with the Fiji government and Pacific Islands Forum’s endorsement of the Japanese government’s plans to dump 1.3 million tonnes of nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean at the end of this month.

Nuclear justice campaigner Epeli Lesuma of PANG said this was a “blatant disregard” of the expert opinion of a panel of scientists commissioned by the Forum.

“It’s disappointing because Pacific leaders appointed this panel of experts so ideally our trust should be with them and the recommendations they have provided to us,” Lesuma said.

“These are not just random scientists. These are esteemed and respected professionals engaged to provide us with this advice.”

Last week, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said he was satisfied with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report that stated Japan’s plans to release treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean had met relevant international standards.

“I have made it my business as a Pacific Island leader to carefully study the information and data on the matter…I am satisfied that Japan has demonstrated commitment to satisfy the wishes of the Pacific Island states, as conveyed to Japan by the Pacific Island Forum chair,” Rabuka said in a video on the Fiji government’s official Facebook page.

“I am satisfied that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report is reassuring enough to dispel any fears of any untoward degradation of the ocean environment that would adversely affect lives and ecosystems in our precious blue Pacific,” he said.

‘Convinced’ of IAEA’s seriousness
“I am convinced of the seriousness of the IAEA to continuously monitor this process in Japan.”

The controversial plan by Japan continues to spark anger and concern across many communities, environmental activists, non-government and civil society organisations.

Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s statement. Video: Fiji govt

Sharing Rabuka’s sentiments was the PIF chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown, who said the IAEA was the world’s foremost authority on nuclear safety.

“We have received the comments, and the report from our scientific panel and the IAEA and [we are] taking a measured response.

“I’d have to say that as the IAEA is responsible for assessment and for anything to do with the safety of reactors around the world, their findings and credibility need to be upheld.”

Nuclear justice campaigner Epeli Lesuma expresses disappointment over Fiji PM Rabuka’s endorsement of Japan’s controversial plan to release 1.3 million tonnes of nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean at the end of this month. Image: Aralai Vosayaco/Wansolwara

For Lesuma and other concerned members of Pacific communities, the fight was more than just the Pacific being used as a dumping ground.

He maintains that the two Pacific Island leaders’ support for the IAEA report discredited the PIF-commissioned panel’s decision and credibility.

“They are contradicting themselves because they have appointed this group of experts to advise them. Yet they do not believe their recommendations.

‘Now we are backtracking’
“It’s disappointing that this panel was appointed during Fiji’s term as Forum chair. Here we were as head of this regional body but now we are backtracking and saying we don’t believe you.”

Lesuma said civil society groups would continue to back the opinions and recommendations of PIF’s independent panel of scientific experts.

“Their opinions were formulated by science and with the Pacific people and the care of the ocean at its centre,” he said.

PIF’s independent panel of experts remains adamant that there is insufficient data to deem the discharge of nuclear waste safe for release into the Pacific Ocean.

In a June statement this year, PIF General Secretary Henry Puna said the Forum remained committed to addressing strong concerns for the significance of the potential threat of nuclear contamination to the health and security of the Blue Pacific, its people, and prospects.

“Even before Japan announced its decision in April 2021, Pacific states, meeting for the first time in December 2020 as States Parties to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty (Treaty of Rarotonga), recalled concerns about the environmental impact of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor accident in 2011 and urged Japan to take all steps necessary to address any potential harm to the Pacific,” he said.

“They ‘called on states to take all appropriate measures within their territory, jurisdiction or control to prevent significant transboundary harm to the territory of another state, as required under international law’.

International legal rules
“These important statements stem from key international legal rules and principles, including the unique obligation placed by the Rarotonga Treaty on Pacific states to ‘Prevent Dumping’ (Article 7), in view of our nuclear testing legacy and its permanent impacts on our peoples’ health, environment and human rights.”

Puna said Pacific states therefore had a legal obligation “to prevent the dumping of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter by anyone” and “not to take any action to assist or encourage the dumping by anyone of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter at sea anywhere within the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone”.

Specific concerns by the Forum on nuclear contamination issues were not new, Puna added, and that for many years, the Forum had to deal with attempts by other states to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific.

“Leaders have urged Japan and other shipping states to store or dump their nuclear waste in their home countries rather than storing or dumping them in the Pacific.

“In 1985, the Forum welcomed the Japan PM’s statement that ‘Japan had no intention of dumping radioactive waste in the Pacific Ocean in disregard of the concern expressed by the communities of the region’.”

Against this regional context, he said the Forum’s engagement on the present unprecedented issue signify that for the Blue Pacific, this was not merely a nuclear safety issue.

“It is rather a nuclear legacy issue, an ocean, fisheries, environment, biodiversity, climate change, and health issue with the future of our children and future generations at stake.

Pacific people ‘have nothing to gain’
“Our people do not have anything to gain from Japan’s plan but have much at risk for generations to come,” Puna had said.

The Pacific Ocean contains the greatest biomass of organisms of ecological, economic, and cultural value, including 70 percent of the world’s fisheries. It is the largest continuous body of water on the planet.

The health of all the world’s ocean ecosystems is in documented decline due to a variety of stressors, including climate change, over-exploitation of resources, and pollution, a Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) report highlighted.

The PINA news report cited a paper by the US National Association of Marine Laboratories (NAML), an organisation of more than 100 member laboratories, that stated the proposed release of the contaminated water was a transboundary and transgenerational issue of concern for the health of marine ecosystems and those whose lives and livelihoods depend on them.

Japan aims to gradually release 1.3 million tonnes of treated nuclear wastewater from the defunct Fukushima power plant over a period of 30-40 years.

Aralai Vosayaco is a final-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific. She is also the 2023 news editor (national) of Wansolwara, USP Journalism’s student training newspaper and online publication. Asia Pacific Report and Wansolwara collaborate.

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

The Mark of the Beast as a Technologically Facilitated Polymorphous and Panopticonic Concept

Stephen Martin — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 04:45:02 +0000

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. – 1 Corinthians. NKJV It is unbelievable how much you don’t More

The post The Mark of the Beast as a Technologically Facilitated Polymorphous and Panopticonic Concept appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen Martin.

Burmese mark anniversary of 8888 uprising with protests against military junta

By RFA Burmese — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 20:34:00 +0000

Civilians across Myanmar on Tuesday commemorated the 35th anniversary of a significant uprising as they held protests against the ruling military junta dictatorship amid heightened security measures imposed by the regime, activists said.

They gathered in Yangon, Sagaing, Mandalay, and Tanintharyi regions holding red umbrellas, putting up posters with anti-regime slogans, and burning mock-ups of the newly issued 20,000-kyat note to mark the anniversary of “8888.”

The number signifies the wave of popular protests that began in Yangon on Aug. 8, 1988, and was met with a violent crackdown by a previous military junta that resulted in numerous casualties.

An activist who led a peaceful umbrella protest by Yangon People’s Strike in the commercial hub said the umbrellas displayed slogans such as “8888 never ends. We will keep fighting with the people” or “8th August 88.”

The military junta increased security by posting authorities dressed in civilian clothes to crowded places like bus stops or markets to arrest protesters.

The protests occurred amid ongoing political instability and armed conflict across Myanmar between anti-regime resistance forces and the current military junta that seized power from the elected government in a February 2021 coup.

A pro-democracy activist from Yangon People's Strike commemorates the 35th anniversary of the 8888 uprising in Myanmar, Aug. 8, 2023. Credit: Yangon People's Strike/Facebook

Min Lwin Oo, leading member of the Dawei District Democracy Movement Strike Committee in Tanintharyi region, said his group staged a protest on the outskirts of the town of Launglon to avoid the tight security, including a navy vessel patrolling in a nearby river.

In Mandalay, a member of the city’s boycott forces, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said residents released balloons attached to banners to commemorate the 8888 uprising.

“We have released a statement vowing to keep fighting for revolution and a video depicting the history [of 8888],” he said.

“We also want to remind [people] that we are still not free from military dictatorship, although the 8888 revolution has turned into the 2021 Spring Revolution,” he said, referring to the nationwide wave of popular resistance to the Myanmar military following the 2021 coup.

Members of the Burmese diaspora also staged protests in various forms to commemorate the uprising’s anniversary.

‘All of these shall end’

In 1988, under the rule of strongman General Ne Win, an anti-dictatorship movement boiled into a nationwide uprising following the regime’s announcement banning 25-, 35- and 75-kyat bills from circulation and later the killing of a university student by police.

The nationwide uprising, which peaked on Aug. 8 of that year, became a historic milestone that united Myanmar’s various ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, and other communities against the ruling junta.

Nan Linn, a member of the University Students’ Unions Alumni Forces, said the Spring Revolution would end the string of successive military regimes that have suppressed popular uprisings and prevented Myanmar’s development, keeping it isolated and impoverished.

“We are now very determined that all of these shall end with the Spring Revolution,” he said. “This time, in this revolution, they shall be punished for everything they have done to the people and the country.”

The military junta has escalated the arrest, killing and sentencing of anti-regime activists.

Users of pro-military Telegram channels have posted threats against those who share any comments, photos or videos of the anniversary protests, saying they will be arrested and prosecuted under Myanmar’s Counter-terrorism Law.

Junta forces have arrested more than 24,200 civilians and activists across the country since the 2021 coup, according to a tally by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a Thailand-based rights group.

Burmese farmers in in Khin-U township, Sagaing region, commemorate the 35th anniversary of the 8888 uprising in Myanmar, Aug. 8, 2023. Credit: Ko Lu Chaw

The protests came the same day as the public release of an annual report by the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, citing strong evidence that the military and its affiliate militias “are committing increasingly frequent and brazen war crimes.”

Among the war crimes are indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks on civilians from aerial bombings, a rise in the number of mass executions of civilians and detained combatants, and the large-scale intentional burnings of civilian homes and buildings, the report said.

“Our evidence points to a dramatic increase in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the country, with widespread and systematic attacks against civilians, and we are building case files that can be used by courts to hold individual perpetrators responsible,” mechanism head Nicholas Koumjian said in a statement issued Tuesday.

The mechanism was set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council in September 2018 to collect and analyze evidence of serious international crimes and violations of international law committed in the country since 2011.

Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

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

Why We Do This Crap: a Review of Mark Paul’s The Ends of Freedom

Dean Baker — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 05:31:56 +0000

Mark Paul has done a useful public service in etching out the goals of progressive economic policy. Many of us get bogged down in debate over things like whether the Average Hourly Earnings series is more accurate than the Employment Cost Index, or whether Section 230 protection is giving Facebook, Twitter and other Internet giants More

The post Why We Do This Crap: a Review of Mark Paul’s The Ends of Freedom appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

[Stephen Kinzer] Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain & American Empire

info@alternativeradio.org — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 21:00:44 +0000

Why has the United States intervened so often in foreign lands? What are its origins? Having expanded its borders largely through its destruction of Indigenous peoples the U.S. went on to project its power globally. Today, its empire of bases rings the Earth. According to Monthly Review the U.S. “has at least eight hundred military bases located in eighty-five countries.” Historically, military interventions and invasions have been a bi-partisan affair. Republicans and Democrats will only question tactics. It wasn’t always that way. There was a period in U.S. history when there was a fierce debate about Washington’s use of force around the world. It centered on two factions, one led by Theodore Roosevelt and the other by none other than Mark Twain. The themes and debates of the past resonate today. The names change but policy is fairly constant.

This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.

Old nightmares and new dreams mark the year since Kentucky’s devastating flood

Katie Myers — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 10:45:00 +0000

The dream that haunts Christine White is always the same, and though it comes less frequently, it isn’t any less terrifying.

The black water comes rushing at the witching hour, barrelling toward her front door in Lost Creek, Kentucky. She’s outside, getting her grandson’s toys out of the yard. It hits her in the neck and knocks her off her feet before racing down a street that has become a vengeful river. She and her husband run to a hillside and scramble upward, grabbing hold of tree roots and branches. She finds her neighbors huddled at the top of the hill. As dawn comes, everything is unrecognizable, the land shifted, houses torn from foundations. They begin to walk through the trees, over the strip mine, out of the forest, in their pajamas and underwear with whatever they were able to carry when they fled.

Then she wakes up.

That night used to replay every time White went to sleep. She started taking antidepressants six months ago, something she felt ashamed of at first but doesn’t anymore. They’ve helped a little, but the dream still haunts her, lightning-seared and vivid.

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It’s been one year since catastrophic floods devastated eastern Kentucky, taking White’s home and 9,000 or so others with it. Her current abode — a camper on a cousin’s land — has become, if not home, no longer strange. But it’s the closest thing to home she’ll get till her new house, in another county, is finished. Lost Creek, though, is all but gone forever. What houses remain are empty husks. Some are nothing more than foundations overgrown with grass.

White is never going back. “All the land is gone,” she said.

Christine White poses for a photo in Eastern Kentucky, one year after floods destroyed her home. Grist / Katie Myers

In the early hours of July 28, 2022, creeks and rivers across 13 counties in eastern Kentucky overran their banks, filled by a month’s worth of rain that fell in a matter of days The water crested 14 feet above flood stage in some places, shattering records. All told, 44 people died and some 22,000 people saw their homes damaged —staggering figures in a region where some counties have fewer than 20,000 residents. Officially, the inundation destroyed nearly 600 homes and severely damaged 6,000 more. A lot of folks say that tally is low, based on the number of residents who sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As of March about 8,000 applications for housing assistance had been approved. That’s half the number the agency received.

The need for help, specifically housing assistance, was, and remains, acute. Most people here live on less than $30,000 a year, and at the time of the disaster, no more than 5 percent had flood insurance. Multitudes of nonprofits, church and community organizations, businesses, and government agencies have spent months pitching in as best they can. Yet there is a feeling among the survivors that no one’s at the rudder, and it’s everyone for themselves.

Brett Marsh

President Biden issued a federal disaster declaration the day after the flood, and his administration has disbursed nearly $300 million in aid so far. The state pitched in, too, housing 360 families in trailers parked alongside those from FEMA. Many of those have moved on to more permanent housing, but up to 1,800 are still awaiting a solution.

Some in the floodplains are taking buyouts — selling their homes to the federal government, which will essentially make the land a permanent greenspace. It’s a form of managed retreat, a ceding of the terrain to a changing climate. Some local officials openly worry that the approach doesn’t solve the biggest problem everyone faces: figuring out where on Earth people are going to live now. Eastern Kentucky was grappling with a critical shortage of housing even before the flood, and much of the land available for construction lies in flood-prone river bottoms. That has people looking toward the mountaintops leveled by strip mining.

A vacant building in Whitesbury, Kentucky, one year after floods devastated the Eastern part of the state. Grist / Katie Myers

Kate Clemons, who runs a nonprofit meal service called Roscoe’s Daughter, sees this crisis every day. As the water receded, she started serving hot meals in the town of Hindman a few nights each week, on her own dime. She figured it would be a months’ work. She’s still feeding as many as 700 hungry people every week. Recently, an apartment building in Hazard burned down, displacing nearly 40 people. Some of them were flood survivors. They’ve joined the others she’s taken to helping find homes.

“There’s no housing available for them,” she said.

Clemons often brings food to Sasha Gibson, who after the flood moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. At first, she felt optimistic. “I was hoping that this would open up a new door to something better,” she said, after asking her children to go to the other trailer so she could sit for the interview in her cramped quarters. “Like this is supposed to be a new chapter in our lives.”

But the park, built on what was once a strip mine, became purgatory instead.

Sasha Gibson, left, moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. Parker Hobson

Gibson, who lived on family land before the rains came, wants to leave. It’s just that the way out isn’t apparent yet. Many rentals won’t take so big a family. It doesn’t help that many of their identity documents were lost to the flood, making the search that much harder. She got some help from FEMA, but said the money went too quickly.

A caseworker helps navigate a labyrinth of agencies designed to help Kentucky flood victims, and they’ve put in applications at a grab bag of charities building housing. One has told Gibson her case looks promising, but she’s still waiting to hear a final word. Other applications are so long and such a crapshoot — one ran 40 pages, for a loan she’d struggle to pay back — that she’s too tired to put them together.

“It’s a big what-if game,” she said. “They’re not reaching out to you. You’re expected to call them.”

Meanwhile, ATV riders sometimes ride through to the park, kicking up dust and leaving a mess in the restrooms. Gibson tries not to resent them. It’s not their fault she’s stuck.

“While it’s great and, like, they’re having a good time, it’s not a great time for us because we feel like we’re stuck here and we’re, like, an inconvenience and we’re in the way,” she said. “We don’t want to bother anybody.”

As extreme weather intensifies due to climate change, stories like Gibson’s will play out in more and more communities. Though eastern Kentucky hadn’t flooded like this since 1957, parts of the state could face 100-year floods every 25 years or so. About half of all homes in the region hit hardest by last year’s floods — Knott, Letcher, Perry, and Breathitt counties — are at risk for extreme flooding.

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Kentucky floodwaters are rising again and activists blame strip mines

Brett Marsh

Some residents worry that the legacies of surface mining – lost topsoil and tree cover, a ruined water table, and waste retention dams like the one that may have failed near Lost Creek, drowning it – will make communities more vulnerable to floods, compounding the effects of generational poverty and aging rural infrastructure. Housing needs to be built, and some say it needs to go up on the only high, flat land available — that is, the very same strip mines that contributed mightily to this whole problem in the first place.

High ground, especially former strip mines, in the region tends to be off limits. A study completed in the 1970s showed that most of what is available belongs to land companies, coal companies, and other private interests. About 1.5 million acres is believed to have been mined. Many of those sites are too remote to be of much use for housing, though, and those that are closer to town typically have seen commercial development. As the flood recovery has dragged on, though, some of these entities have decided to donate some of what they hold so that there might be more residential construction. Other parcels have been donated by landowning families with cozy relationships to the coal industry, though that hasn’t always gone smoothly.

Chris Doll is vice president of the Housing Development Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to building single-family homes for low-income families. It was beating the drum of eastern Kentucky’s crisis long before the flood. The situation is even more dire now. Without an influx of new construction, he argues, the local economy will spiral even further.

On an overcast and gentle day in June, Doll walked around a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County called Chestnut Ridge. It sits near a four-lane highway and close to other communities, with ready access to water lines. The Alliance is working with other nonprofits to build around 50 houses here, along with, it hopes, 50 to 150 more on each of two similar sites in neighboring counties. A $13 million state flood relief fund has committed $1 million to the projects.

Chris Doll stands in a field in Eastern Kentucky. Grist / Katie Myers

The road leading to what could, in just a few years, be a bustling neighborhood opened up into a bafflingly flat landscape, almost like a wooded savanna. It was wide open to the sunshine, unlike the deep hollers and coves that characterize this part of eastern Kentucky. To an untrained eye, it appeared to be a healthy ecosystem. Look closer, though, and one sees the mix of vegetation coal companies use to restore the land: invasive autumn olive, scrubby pine trees, and tall grasses, planted mostly for erosion control.

Still, it’s ideal land for housing, and most folks around here won’t mind the landscaping. Doll said the number of people who need help is overwhelming, and his team can’t help everybody. But they hope to build as many houses as they can.

“There are so many people that have so many needs that I am of the mindset that I will help the person in front of me,” Doll said. “And now we can turn them into homeowners. If that’s what they want.”

On a hillside overlooking another mine site, Doll and I walked up to the ridge to see if we could get a better view of the terrain. It is covered in a thicket of brush, too dense to see beyond. The path wound toward a small clearing, where worn headstones and stone angels sit undisturbed. Family cemeteries are protected from strip mining, and this one was clearly still cared for; the bouquets at the angels’ feet were fresh. The lifecycle of coal had come and made its mark and gone.

Chestnut ridge is a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County, Kentucky. Grist / Katie Myers

“You can see where they cut out,” Doll said. “They just entirely destroyed that mountain. It’s such a wild thing to think that strip mine land is going to be part of the solution.”

Doll thinks of it as a post-apocalyptic landscape, or maybe mid-apocalyptic, ripe for renewal, but still carrying the weight of its past. The land was gifted by people whose money was made from coal, after all.

“And, you know, it’s great that they’re giving land back,” he said. “I would prefer if it was still mountains, but if it was mountains, we couldn’t build houses on it. So yeah, it’s ridiculously complex.” He shrugged. “Bigger heads than mine.”

He squelched across the mud and back to the car. In the summer heat, two turkeys retreated into the shade of a scrubby pine grove, their tracks etched in the mud alongside hoofprints, probably from deer and elk. The place was alive, if not exactly the way it was before.

The former strip mine developments are financed in part by the Team Kentucky flood relief fund created by the governor’s office. Beyond the four projects already in motion, eastern Kentucky housing nonprofits like the Housing Development Alliance are working with landowners, local officials and the governor to secure more land in hopes of building hundreds more homes.

“Working together – and living for one another – we’ve weathered this devastating storm,” Governor Andy Beshear said last week during a press conference outlining progress made since the flood. “Now, a year later, we see the promise of a brighter future, one with safer homes and communities as well as new investments and opportunities.”

Anya Slepyan & Claire Carlson

That said, nothing is fully promised just yet, and the process could take years. The homes will be owner-occupied and residents will carry a mortgage, but housing advocates hope to lower as many barriers to ownership as possible and help families with grants and loans. Applications for the developments are expected to open within a couple of months. The plans, thus far, call for an “Appalachian look and feel” that combines an old-style coal camp town and a suburban subdivision to create single-family homes clustered in wooded hollers. Though some might argue that density should be the priority, local housing nonprofits want developments that feel like home to people used to having a bit of land for themselves.

The Housing Development Alliance has built houses on mined land before, and some of them are among those given to 12 flood survivors thus far. Alongside other entities, it has also spent the year mucking, gutting, and repairing salvageable homes, often upgrading them with flood-safe building protocols. Even that comparatively small number was made possible through support from a hodgepodge of local and regional nonprofits, and the labor of the Alliance’s carpenters has been supplanted with volunteer help.

Though the Knott County Sportsplex, a recreation center built on the mineland next to Chestnut Ridge, appears to be sinking and cracking a bit, Doll said houses are too light to cause that kind of trouble. Nonetheless, geotechnical engineers from the University of Kentucky, he said, are studying the land to make sure there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. The plan is for the neighborhoods to be mapped out onto the landscape with roads and sewer lines and streetlights, all of which require the involvement of myriad county departments and private companies; then the Alliance and its partners will come in and do what they do best, ideally as further disaster funding comes down the line.

Still, all involved say that there’s no way they can build enough houses to fill the need.

A flood-damaged building sits vacant in Lost Creek, Kentucky. Grist / Katie Myers

More federal funding will arrive soon through the U.S. Housing and Urban Development disaster relief block grant program. It allocated $300 million to the region, and organizations like the Kentucky River Area Development District are gathering the information needed to prove to the feds the scale of the region’s need. Some housing advocates are critical of this process, though.

Noah Patton, a senior policy analyst with the Low-Income Housing Coalition, said HUD grants are too unpredictable to forge long-term plans. “One reason it’s exceptionally complicated is because it is not permanently authorized,” he said. A president can declare a disaster and direct the agency to release funds, but Congress must approve the disbursement. Although it all went smoothly in Kentucky’s case, the unpredictability means there are no standing rules on how to allocate and spend funding.

“Oftentimes, you’re kind of starting from scratch every time there’s a disaster,” Patton said.

Local development districts, such as the Kentucky River Area Development District, are holding meetings around the affected counties, urging people to fill out surveys so it can collect the data needed to apply for funding from the federal program. And HUD is overhauling its efforts to address criticism of unequal distribution of funds. Still, the people who might benefit from these block grants may not see the homes they’ll underwrite go up for a few more years, Patton said.

Zoya Teirstein

On the state level, housing advocates have been pushing the legislature for more money to flow toward permanent housing. Many also say the combined state, FEMA and HUD assistance isn’t nearly enough. One analysis by Eric Dixon of the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank, pegged the cost of a complete recovery at around $453 million for a “rebuild where we were” approach and more than $957 million to incorporate climate-resilient building techniques and, where necessary, move people to higher ground.

Sasha Gibson has heard rumors of the new developments. She’s somewhat interested insofar as they can get her out of limbo. Until she sees these houses going up, though, they’ll be just another vague promise in a year of vague promises that have gotten her nowhere but a dusty ATV park. It’s been, to put it bluntly, a terrible year, and the moments where the family’s had hope have only made the letdowns feel worse.

“I have no hope to rely on other people,” she said. “I don’t want to give somebody else that much power over me. Because then you’ll just wind up disappointed and sad. And it’s even sadder when you have all of these little eyes looking at you.”

As Gibson waits, others long ago decided to remain where they were and rebuild either because they could or because there wasn’t another choice.

Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, has spent the past year in what amounts to a tool shed. It’s cramped and doesn’t even have a sink, but the land under it belongs to him, not a landlord or bank. It’s a piece of the world that he owns, and because a monthly disability check is his only income, he doesn’t have much else and probably couldn’t afford a mortgage or rent. Asked if he’d consider moving, he scoffed.

“You put yourself in my shoes,” he said.

Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, says he won’t consider leaving. Grist / Katie Myers

He can’t believe FEMA would offer to buy someone’s land, or that anyone would take the government up on the offer. “I mean, my God, why in the hell you wanna buy the property and then tell them they can’t live on it?” he said. “What kind of fool would sell their property? Why would you want to sell something and then go rent something?”

James Hall, who also lives in Neon, lost everything but is staying put, in part because he doesn’t think it’ll happen again. The words “thousand-year flood” must mean something, he said. But that didn’t keep him from putting his new trailer a foot and a half higher just in case. He might bump that up to 3 feet when he has a minute. Through it all, he’s kept his dry sense of humor. “If the flood comes again,” he said, “I’m gonna get me a houseboat.”

That kind of outlook buoys Ricky Burke, the town’s mayor. He said the community’s used to flooding – the city sits in a floodplain at the intersection of the Wrights Fork and Yonta Fork creeks – but last year’s was by far the worst. Water and mud plowed through town with enough force to shatter windows. People went without water and electricity for months in some places. A few buildings, like the burger drive-in on the corner at the edge of town, have been repaired, but others remain gaunt and empty.

Still, Burke, a diesel mechanic who was elected in November, is confident the town will pick itself up. He’s heard talk that Neon might need to move some of its buildings, that a return to form simply isn’t viable. He’s dismissive of such a notion. What Neon needs, he believes, is a big party, and he’s planning to celebrate the community’s resilience with flowers, music, and a gathering on the anniversary of the flood.

“These people in Neon ain’t going nowhere,” he said.

A sign hangs above Neon’s main street. Grist / Katie Myers

Some folks, through persistence, hard work, and a bit of luck, have moved into new homes.

Linda and Danny Smith got theirs from Christian Aid Ministries, a Mennonite disaster relief group, though construction started a couple months later than planned because it ended up taking awhile to figure out exactly where the floodplain was. It was built on their land at the end of a Knott County road called, whimsically, Star Wars Way. According to the Smiths, the group, which was from out of state, nearly ran out of time before having to return home and only just finished the job before leaving. They left so quickly that Danny Smith said he still needed to paint the doors. He isn’t complaining, though. Other homes were left half-done, their new owners left searching high and low for someone to finish the job.

Although grateful for the help that put a roof over his head, Smith got a little tired of dealing with all the people who came to heal his body, his spirit, and his mind even as he completed mounds of paperwork and made calls to anyone he thought might help. “One guy, he kept insisting that I needed to go talk to someone,” he recalled. “And I said ‘who?’”

Linda and Danny Smith stand in the kitchen of their new home. Parker Hobson

The man suggested that Danny talk to a therapist. He laughed at the recollection. It was a laugh heard often around here, the sound of a tired survivor who’s already assessed their own hierarchy of needs many times over. “I said, ‘You know, I don’t need nothing done with my mind. I need a home.”

Despite the frustration, the Smiths are piecing their lives back together, a little bit higher up off the ground than they were before. Christine White is praying for a similar outcome, and thinks she can finally see it on the horizon. The occasional nightmare aside, she’s felt pretty good these days.

FEMA gave her $1,900 awhile back to demolish her house and closed her case, leaving her high and dry. She called housing organization after housing organization until CORE, a national nonprofit that assists underserved communities, agreed to build a small home on a piece of land she owns in Floyd County. Construction began earlier this month. White, who spends her time volunteering at a local food bank, calls it a miracle. “You just gotta go where the Lord leads you,” she says. But it’s not built yet, so she’s trying not to count her chickens.

Parker Hobson contributed to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Old nightmares and new dreams mark the year since Kentucky’s devastating flood on Jul 27, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Arrested – or beaten – for wearing flowers to mark Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday

By RFA Burmese — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 01:59:00 +0000

Across Myanmar, more than 130 people were arrested – and others were beaten – on Monday for wearing flowers, residents told Radio Free Asia.

The display of solidarity with jailed leader Aung San Suu Kyi – who often wore flowers in her hair – on her 78th birthday was organized by activists as a protest against the junta, which overthrew Suu Kyi and her democratically elected government in February 2021.

And the military clearly saw the “flower demonstration campaign” as a sign of rebellion, arresting dozens who participated.

The subdued protest is the latest creative show of defiance engineered by opponents of the regime. Over the past two-plus years, activists have organized a “silence strike,” a “doll campaign” and “women’s sarang campaign.”

Suu Kyi had been the face of Myanmar’s democracy movement and lived under house arrest imposed by previous military rulers for 15 of 21 years between 1989 and 2010.

Although her global reputation has been tarnished by her defense of the Myanmar military’s rape, murder and possible genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017, at home she is still widely admired as “the Lady.”

In the National League for Democracy-led government, she held the title state counselor and was the de facto leader of the government. After the 2021 coup, she was arrested by the junta and sentenced to 33 years in prison on corruption and other charges.

Quiet defiance

The arrests happened in various locations around the country.

They started mid-morning on Monday, a resident of Mawlamyinegyun township in the southeastern Ayeyarwady region told RFA’s Burmese Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“At around 10 o’clock, they started abducting people and arrested about 80,” he said. “There is a market on that main street. The people in the shops, including people who offered flowers to Buddha images, were arrested. At about 8 o’clock in the evening, all were released on bail.”

Residents in Sagaing’s Khin-U township hold a prayer service and mark jailed Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s 78th birthday on Monday, June 19, 2023. Credit: Ko Lu Chaw

He said some of the people were arrested for writing and sharing posts on social media about the flowers.

RFA attempted to interview some of the people after they were released on bail, but they declined to talk due to security concerns.

Roses in their hair

In the northern Sagaing region, nearly 20 women with roses in their hair were arrested in the town of Kale, a town resident said.

“Women wearing jasmine and star flowers were released. They [soldiers] mainly targeted the ones who were wearing roses,” a resident of Kale said on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, 29 people – mostly women – were arrested in Yangon, the country’s biggest city, including 15 women from Kamaryut township.

In the central city of Mandalay, a resident who did not want to be named due to security reasons, told RFA that some women wearing flowers were beaten up by soldiers on the street Monday.

One woman wearing flowers who was riding a motorcycle with her husband and child was pulled over by police in front of a bank on 26th Street and beaten by them in front of her family, one Mandalay resident said.

“She was reeling in pain,” the resident said. “There were soldiers, not traffic police.”

Also among those arrested in Mandalay for wearing flowers were two family members of political prisoners and a former political prisoner who returned from a local prison after delivering packages to inmates.

The two facing charges are Thura Maung Maung, a former political prisoner who was released under amnesty on Jan. 4, 2023, and Sanda Myint, who sent a package to her husband, a political prisoner serving a 12-year jail term.

The soldiers’ actions are meant to instill fear, said Zu Padonmar, an official of the Myanmar Women’s Union.

“From a human rights point of view, it is a restriction of the freedom of expression in different ways,” she said. “Another thing is that it is a violation of an individual’s freedom – another example of oppression.”

The junta has not made any statements on these issues and RFA’s calls to junta spokespersons for the Ayeyarwady, Mandalay and Sagaing regions went unanswered.

RFA attempted to contact the junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on Tuesday, but he did not answer phone calls.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.