As Congress approved some $45 billion to expand ICE’s immigration detention capacity, including the jailing of families and children, we look at the case of one family. In May, plainclothes ICE agents detained a 6-year-old boy from Honduras who has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, along with his 9-year old sister and their mother, as they left their immigration court hearing in Los Angeles. In detention, the boy missed a key doctor’s appointment, and the family said his sister cried every night. As pressure grew over their conditions, the family was released on July 2. “The little boy doesn’t want to leave his home. He’s terrified. He sobs, cries and screams when his mother takes him out of the house,” says attorney Elora Mukherjee, who represents the boy and his family and is director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She says the young children are traumatized after their month in ICE detention.

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

The flash flooding in Texas would have been catastrophic at any time of day, but it was especially dangerous because it happened at night. Research shows that more than half of deaths from floods happen after dark, and in the case of flash floods, one study put the number closer to three-quarters. Other hazards are more perilous in the dark, too: Tornadoes that strike between sunset and sunrise are twice as deadly, on average, as those during the day. No one can stop the sun from rising and setting, but experts say there are simple precautions that can save lives when extreme weather strikes at night. As climate change supercharges floods, hurricanes, and fires, it’s becoming even more important to account for the added risks of nocturnal disasters.

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Disaster 101: Your guide to extreme weather preparation, relief, and recovery

Lyndsey Gilpin

Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer at Villanova University, said that at night, it’s not enough to rely on a phone call from a family member or outdoor warning sirens (which Kerr County officials discussed installing, but never did). The safest bet is a NOAA radio, a device that broadcasts official warnings from the nearest National Weather Service office 24/7. One major advantage is that it doesn’t rely on cell service. 

“That’s old school technology, but it’s the thing that will wake you up and get you up at 3 a.m.,” said Walker Ashley, an atmospheric scientist and disaster geographer at Northern Illinois University.

Even with warning, reacting in the middle of the night isn’t easy. When people are shaken awake, they’re often disoriented, requiring additional time to figure out what’s happening before they can jump into action. “Those precious minutes and seconds are critical a lot of times in these situations for getting to safety,” Strader said. 

The darkness itself presents another issue. People tend to look outside for proof that weather warnings match up with their reality, but at night, they often can’t find the confirmation they’re looking for until it’s too late. Some drive their cars into floodwaters, unable to see how deep it is, and get swept away. It’s also harder to evacuate — and try to rescue people — when you can barely see anything. “I invite anybody to just go walk around the woods with a flashlight off, and you find out how difficult it can be,” Ashley said. “Imagine trying to navigate floodwaters or trying to find shelter while you’re in rushing water at night with no flashlight. It’s a nightmare.”

The logic applies to most hazards, but the night problem appears the worst with sudden-onset disasters like tornadoes and earthquakes — and the early-morning flash floods in Texas, where the Guadalupe rose 26 feet in 45 minutes. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, meaning that storms can dump more water more suddenly than they used to. 

“We have essentially, because of climate change, put the atmosphere on steroids,” Strader said. It’s on his to-do list to study whether other disasters, like hurricanes and wildfires, are deadlier at night. 

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After deadly flash floods, a Texas town takes halting, painful steps toward recovery

Naveena Sadasivam

When Hurricane Harvey pummeled Texas with rain for days in 2017, people described waking up to water creeping into their homes; the Texas National Guard navigated rescue boats through neighborhoods in the dark, searching for survivors. In recent years, hurricanes have rapidly intensified before making landfall, fueled by warmer ocean waters. That shrinks the window in which forecasters can warn people a strong storm is coming. To compound the problem, at the end of July, the Pentagon plans to stop sharing the government satellite microwave data that helps forecasters track hurricanes overnight, leaving the country vulnerable to what’s called a “sunrise surprise.”

In the past, nighttime conditions have proved useful for slowing wildfires: Temperatures are cooler and the air has more moisture, reducing the likelihood of fires spreading quickly. But climate change is lessening these beneficial effects. The overall intensity of nighttime fires rose 7 percent worldwide between 2003 and 2020, according to a study in the journal Nature. That means fires are increasingly spreading late at night and early in the morning. It was an ultra-dry January night when the Eaton Fire began tearing through Altadena in Los Angeles County. Some residents were woken up in the predawn hours to smoke already in their homes, strangers pounding on their windows, or sheriff’s deputies and rescue volunteers driving by with loudspeakers.

While daytime tornado deaths have declined over time, nighttime fatalities are on the rise, Strader and Ashley have found in their research. (It’s still unclear as to how climate change affects tornadoes.) They found that tornadoes that touch down at night are statistically more likely to hit someone, simply because there are more potential targets scattered across the landscape. During the day, people are often concentrated in cities and sturdy office buildings versus homes, which may be manufactured and not as structurally resilient to floods or high winds. 

Night adds dimensions of danger to many types of disasters, but the darkness isn’t the only factor at play — and it doesn’t have to be as deadly, Ashley said, stressing the importance of getting a weather radio and making a plan in case the worst happens. “Have multiple ways to get information, and your odds of survival are extremely high, even in the most horrific tornado situation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising reasons floods and other disasters are more deadly at night on Jul 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

Junta airstrikes in northwestern Myanmar killed more than 30 civilians, including an entire family, residents and officials told Radio Free Asia on Thursday.

Despite a junta-declared ceasefire on April 2 following a devastating earthquake in central Myanmar, clashes have continued between military troops and rebel militias that have claimed increasing amounts of territory following the country’s 2021 coup.

On Wednesday evening, airstrikes on northern Sagaing region’s Wuntho township resulted in heavy civilian casualties, said Nay Bone Latt, a spokesperson for exiled National Unity Government, or NUG.

“The latest we know is that, including women and children, 26 people are dead and 23 are injured,” he said of the attack on an intersection in Nan Khan village. The junta had targeted a police checkpoint occupied by soldiers under the NUG’s Ministry of Defense, he said.

Recent rebel victories in Chin state and Sagaing region, hotspots for ethnic armies and militias aligned with the country’s exiled civilian government, may have contributed to retaliation from junta forces. Nan Khan village is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) southwest of Indaw town, which the NUG’s militia captured on Monday.

The NUG has not released any information about soldier casualties from the attack.

The checkpoint is inside the village, resulting in heavy civilian losses, said a resident.

“The plane bombing the People’s Defense Force gate. It’s at an intersection in the village, so it affected the public entirely,” he said, declining to be named for security reasons. “Some are still dying after reaching the hospital. We don’t have any other details yet.”

The junta has not released any information on the attack. Spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun did not respond to calls.

Despite ceasefires declared by the junta and the National Unity Government following the March 28 earthquake, both have launched military attacks and accused the other of breaking temporary peace declarations.

However, only junta airstrikes have caused heavy civilian losses in the wake of the natural disaster, killing six children, 30 women and 34 men, according to information released on Thursday.

To Sagaing’s west, junta airstrikes launched in Chin state’s Tedim and Mindat townships killed 12 people, including a Christian pastor, residents told RFA.

“There was no fighting. Yesterday around 12 at night, they bombed houses in Saizang village with a 500-pound bomb,” said a Tedim resident, declining to be named for fear of reprisals. “The house it hit belonged to a family of six, who died when the house collapsed.”

The victims included a 43 and 40-year-old husband and wife, their 17, 14 and five-year-old sons and a 10-year-old daughter. Another son, aged 10, was hospitalized with severe injuries.

(Chin Revolution News)

To Tedim’s south, airstrikes on rebel-controlled Mindat township’s Phwi village at 9 p.m. killed another six people, residents said.

“Just one plane came shooting twice and then dropped two 500-pound bombs. Among those killed are a Christian pastor, children and the elderly,” said a Mindat resident. “Of the nine people injured, three are critical.”

The dead were identified as an eight-month-old boy, two seven-year-old children, a 68-year-old man, a 72-year-old woman, a 38-year-old disabled man, and a pastor, who was 36 years old.

RFA called Chin state’s junta spokesperson Aung Cho for more information on the attacks, but he did not respond by the time of publication.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Mike Firn and Stephen Wright.

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

Murad, who works as a reporter for Urdu News and runs the independent news site Pakistani24, later appeared  before the Judicial Magistrate Islamabad (West) court, where he was placed in the custody of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for two days under Pakistan’s cybercrime laws for allegedly posting “intimidating content” online, according to a copy of the court order, reviewed by CPJ.

“The shocking overnight raid on the home of seasoned journalist Waheed Murad is part of a disturbing trend of enforced disappearances and detentions of journalists by Pakistan’s security agencies,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must allow Murad to resume reporting without fear of detention, threats, or intimidation.”

Murad’s mother-in-law, Abida Nawaz, said that the unidentified men who abducted the journalist did not say where they were taking him. Before Murad appeared in court, she had filed a petition with the Islamabad High Court seeking his recovery. The petition states that the journalist had raised his voice about the disappearance of exiled journalist Ahmed Noorani’s two brothers in Islamabad.

Noorani’s brothers have been missing since March 18, when individuals identifying themselves as police forcibly entered their family home. In addition, journalist Asif Karim Khehtran disappeared from his home district of Barkhan on March 13, and Farhan Mallick, founder of the independent online media platform Raftar, continues to be held in FIA detention after being detained on March 20 in Karachi.

CPJ’s text messages requesting comment from Information Minister Attaullah Tarar received no response.

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

Listen carefully to the end. It will be historic. Interestingly, if you can not see it embedded here from my homepage (see below). But just click this link to see it on YouTube.

Vice-president JD Vance’s 59 seconds speech about the “fun” in Greenland that he wants to join in marks the beginning of an occupation of Greenland by that US, which Denmark’s governments since 1948 have blindly been submissive to, supported politically and militarily no matter its illegal interventions and wars, CIA worldwide, regime changes, 650 foreign bases, mass killings, genocide, country-destruction, NATO militarism and economic exploitation.

In sum, the most violent and war-addicted country on earth for more than half a century.

He invents a series of “threats” from many other countries against Greenland (and the US…). He scolds Copenhagen for having ignored Greenland’s security for far too long, and he twice elevates Greenland to a world security issue and insists that only the US can make it secure and thereby secure “the entire world.”

For equally long, some of us argued – warned – that the US was not that good – and Russia and China were not that bad. That our world was not a black-and-white world. But that was too much of an intellectual challenge. Over time, facts, analyses, conflict analysis, objective threat analyses based upon decent intelligence as well as national and international law, the UN, diplomacy – not to mention peace-making – were treated as petty issues and thrown overboard.

The Danish foreign policy kakistocracy has finally entered a situation in which they will feel what it means to be blind friends of the Evil Empire and opportunistically never prepare for the obvious: That that empire would ruthlessly pursue only its own interests and humiliate its friends (except Israel) and treat them like dirt. It allegedly gave them “protection”…

Like the rest of Europe, Denmark will now face two Cold Wars for decades ahead – one with Russia and one with the US – and in best Frederiksen-Leyden-Kallas-style, militarise itself to death. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that, like “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The tragedy – which is now also Sweden’s and Finland’s – is that it could all have been avoided.

By independent, free thinking and research, by listening and prudent decision-makers, not servants listening only to His Master’s Voice.

Europe will now be dragged down with the decline and fall of the US/Western world. What? Oh yes, the Trump Regime will not get away with all its crystal-clear extremist imperialism, its megalomania and delusional ways: It will meet increasing worldwide resistance and fall – “one way or the other” as Trump said about getting Greenland.

I fear the price to be paid with Trump in his undoubtedly golden bunker fiddling with the red button when he hears someone say, Mr President, it is all over. It’s all over.

Do you?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Mar. 18, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israel resumed heavy airstrikes across the Gaza Strip after two weeks of systematic Israeli violations of the terms of the ceasefire and the stalling of negotiations over the agreement’s second phase. The Israeli army began bombing numerous targets in the Gaza Strip early on Tuesday past midnight, including civilian homes and tents for the displaced. As of the time of writing, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that over 404 people have been killed in Gaza and 562 were injured in multiple massacres carried out by Israeli forces since the early morning hours. According to the Health Ministry, among the slain are 174 children, 89 women, and 32 seniors.

After nearly two months of relative calm, the airstrikes resumed overnight without prior warning or evacuation orders, with local sources reporting that bombs dropped over Gaza City, northern Gaza, Khan Younis, Rafah, al-Bureij, and several other parts of the Strip.

Familiar scenes of mass killing returned to Gaza as hundreds of families gathered at hospitals throughout the Strip, carrying the remains of their loved ones.

“We were sleeping when suddenly a volcano descended on my children’s heads,” Muhammad al-Sakani, 42, told Mondoweiss in front of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, standing over the bodies of his two slain children. “This is the bank of targets of Netanyahu, Trump, and all the other cowards.” 

“They are not to blame,” he added. “Their only crime is that our enemy is a criminal who assassinates children and women as they sleep.”

The Israeli military announced that it had carried out extensive strikes on Hamas targets in Gaza, adding that it was “prepared to continue attacks against Hamas leaders and infrastructure in Gaza for as long as necessary.” The army said that the attack would expand beyond airstrikes, signaling the likelihood of the return of a ground invasion. After the airstrikes had already begun and claimed hundreds of casualties, the Israeli military spokesperson warned several areas, such as Beit Hanoun and the Khuza’a and Abasan areas in Khan Younis, that they needed to be evacuated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office announced in a statement that the Prime Minister had instructed the army to “take strong action” against Hamas and that Israel would act “with increased military might from now on.” 

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the resumed fighting was due to  “Hamas’s refusal” to release Israeli captives and “its threats to harm” Israeli soldiers and communities near Gaza. Katz added that Israel would not stop fighting until all captives were returned and “all the war’s aims” were achieved.

In an interview with Fox News, White House spokesperson Caroline Leavitt said that “the Trump administration and the White House were consulted by the Israelis on their attacks in Gaza tonight.” 

“President Trump has made it absolutely clear that Hamas, the Houthis, Iran, and all those who seek to spread terror, not only against Israel but also against the United States, will pay a price for their actions,” Leavitt added.

Hamas remains committed to implementing ceasefire

Despite the Israeli aggression, Hamas continues to call on the international community to intervene and put an end to the bombing taking place in Gaza, reaffirming the movement’s commitment to completing the ceasefire deal.

Hamas spokesperson Abdul Latif al-Qanou told Mondoweiss that Israel was “resuming its war of genocide and committing dozens of massacres against our people,” adding that Israel’s “prior coordination with the American administration confirms [U.S.] partnership in the war of extermination against our people.”

Al-Qanou stressed that Netanyahu resumed the war on Gaza to escape his internal crises and impose new negotiating conditions on the Palestinian resistance, referencing Netanyahu’s battle against corruption charges and his attempts to revive his right-wing government coalition. Qanou pointed out that Hamas adhered to all the terms of the ceasefire agreement and remains keen on moving on to its second phase.

“All the mediators are aware of Hamas’s commitment to the terms of the agreement, despite Netanyahu’s procrastination,” Qanou added. “His reversal requires them to reveal this to the world.”

The Israeli raids have killed several Hamas leaders across Gaza, including those holding civilian positions, such as Ayman Abu Teir, director of the nutrition department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, who was assassinated by Israel in his home in Khan Younis along with 13 members of his family. 

Hamas mourned several of its leaders, including Issam al-Da’alis, head of Government Operations in the Gaza Strip, Ahmad al-Hatta, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Major General Mahmoud Abu Watfa, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior, and Major General Bahjat Abu Sultan, Director-General of the Internal Security Service.

Local media sources affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) also revealed that the military spokesperson of the PIJ’s armed wing, the al-Quds Brigades, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Known by his nom de guerre, “Abu Hamza,” the spokesperson’s real name was revealed to be Naji Abu Saif, according to media reports. The PIJ did not officially confirm the news as of the time of writing. 

Systematic Israeli ceasefire violations

Since the signing of the ceasefire agreement on January 17, which stipulated three consecutive 42-day phases under Egyptian, Qatari, and American sponsorship, Hamas has largely adhered to the terms of the first phase, while Israel has systematically violated it by suspending the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and progressively resuming the targeting and killing of civilians in Gaza’s border areas.

Hamas released 33 Israeli captives during the first phase as stipulated in the agreement, but Israel did not comply with its end of the deal, including the delay or prevention of the entry of reconstruction material, tents, and prefabricated mobile homes. More importantly, Israel has consistently attempted to walk back its commitments to engage in talks over the permanent end of the war and the full withdrawal of its forces from Gaza. Israel was supposed to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor along the Egyptian border during the first phase of the ceasefire. It was also supposed to have entered into talks over the second phase of the deal in mid-February, ahead of the end of the first phase. Israel did neither, instead shifting the goalposts for the agreement by insisting that Hamas continue to release more Israeli captives without entering into negotiations over withdrawing or ending the war.

In early March, Israeli officials threatened to completely close the crossings and prevent food, medicine, water, and electricity from reaching Gaza if more Israeli captives weren’t released. It implemented these threats during the past two weeks. Moreover, without announcing the resumption of the war, Israel resumed bombarding various areas throughout Gaza starting in March, resulting in the death of dozens of Palestinian civilians. In the two days before the official resumption of the war, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 15 people across Gaza.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Tareq S. Hajjaj.

Chinese- and Russian-made drones using night vision cameras are giving Myanmar’s military junta an advantage in its war against rebel groups, according to sources on the ground, touching off what one observer termed a “drone arms race” between the two sides.

The new weaponry is upping the ante in Myanmar, where drones were once solely a tool of the armed opposition seeking a cheap way to level the playing field against a far better-equipped military, which seized control of the country in a 2021 coup d’etat.

Since early February, pro-junta channels on the social media platform Telegram have posted video footage of what appears to be military drone bomb attacks on rebel forces in Kachin state’s Bhamo township using either infrared or thermal night vision cameras and causing casualties.

On Feb. 20, British military intelligence publisher Janes International Defense Review cited the footage in a statement which claimed that Myanmar’s military “has begun enhancing its expanding unmanned aerial vehicle capabilities, adapting forward-looking infrared systems for tactical attack drones.”

Officials from two anti-junta groups — the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, and a civilian defense unit based in Bhamo — confirmed to RFA Burmese that the military has deployed such drones in combat to devastating effect.

“The junta is using night vision drones in Bhamo battles,” said KIA spokesperson Colonel Naw Bu. “Our officials in the fighting reported that the drones are very advanced, with night vision cameras.”

Naw Bu said he was unaware of night vision drones being used by the military in other parts of the country.

Infrared imaging uses radiation emitted or reflected by objects to create images, while thermal imaging measures heat emitted by objects to create images based on temperature differences. Both provide users with a way to track objects at night.

It was not immediately clear which technology the drones were fitted with. Thermal cameras are a type of infrared camera, but not all infrared cameras produce thermal images.

Drones from China, Russia

Fighting between the junta and the KIA has been intensifying in Bhamo since early January, according to sources in the region.

A member of an anti-junta civilian defense group in Bhamo told RFA that junta forces had been using night vision drones for “about a month” and called their destructive power “considerable.”

“We have [equipment] that can disrupt radio frequencies, and when we hear a drone flying overhead, we have time to defend against it,” said the fighter, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. “Nonetheless, on some occasions, we continue to face [drone] attacks with highly explosive bombs, despite our preparations.”

The rebel fighter did not disclose details of casualties caused by these drones, and RFA was unable to independently verify confirm the number of people killed or injured in the attacks.

(Myanmar Military)

Some ethnic armed and civil defense groups have claimed that the junta is using drones made in Russia and China — two countries that have backed the military regime since the coup — with a higher reliance on those from China.

Captain Zin Yaw, a former military officer and a member of the Civil Disobedience Movement of public servants who quit their jobs to protest the coup, told RFA that the junta is likely to continue pursuing advanced drones.

“We see that they are actively seeking advanced technology to engage in modern warfare,” he said. “The junta chief [Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing] recently visited Russia, and they may have gained a technological advantage from the trip.”

‘Drone arms race’ underway

Attempts by RFA to contact junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the military’s use of high-tech drones went unanswered by the time of publishing.

But Thein Tun Oo, the executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, composed of former military officers, told RFA that he expects the junta will gain a significant advantage with the advanced technology.

“Armed resistance forces should reassess their strategies because their available resources are no match for those of the nation’s military,” he said. “Over time, their resources will dwindle, while the [junta] continues to expand its capabilities.”

Jonah Blank, a senior political scientist at global policy think tank the RAND Corporation, said the military and rebel forces “are now in a drone arms race,” after rebels deployed drones to challenge the junta’s air superiority and the military responded with more advanced drone technology “to try to regain its edge.”

“But these technological advances tend to become cheaper and more easily available very quickly — the rebels will soon have them too," said Blank, who is also a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore.

He characterized drones as “inherently democratizing technology,” noting that even the most advanced U.S. and Chinese drones “are far less expensive than these powers' manned aircraft.”

“This trend inherently favors an irregular army,” he said.

According to data compiled by RFA, junta air and artillery strikes killed at least 1,769 civilians and injured some 3,720 across the country in 2024.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

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

A Muscovy Duck.

It was a show that forever changed not just the entertainment industry but the world.

As the Sunday afternoon hour approached for the start of the 97^th Academy Awards ceremony, rumors swept down the Red Carpet more quickly than the fires that had ravaged Los Angeles a few months before. That catastrophe’s toxic residue glazed the Californian light in a vintage 1970s hue that conjured a goldener era for American movies.

In every corner of the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard could be heard wildfire whispers: was Buster-Keaton-sad-faced-comic-turned-wartime-President Volodymyr Zelenskyy really in Tinseltown, fresh off his star turn in the White House? It could just be true, since the Ukrainian entertainer-cum-politician had gotten rave reviews and registered record-breaking ratings for Friday’s cross-talk act in the White House with the Vaudevillian bad-cop, bad-cop duo, Vance and Trump.

Faced with plunging popular interest and dogged by charges of irrelevance and ennui, the moribund Oscars needed a jolt. Maybe, just maybe the annual ritual would get one before it was too late.

As hundreds of Patek Philippe and Rolex wristwatches ticked past 4 pm Pacific Time and host Conan O’Brien ambled onto the Dolby Theatre stage for his opening monologue, the assembled glitterati emitted a collective sigh of resignation. Another stinker of epic proportions appeared to be underway.

The red-haired emcee cracked a crooked grin and started into his script: “There probably aren’t many of you out there who’ll think this is a Crimean shame, but I’ve been given the hook …”

That’s when the Miracle of the Movies’ Night began.

Four shotgun-wielding G-men marched in headed by Kevin Costner, who informed O’Brien that “we have the right for you to remain silent.” In a lanky cameo, James Comey handcuffed the ousted host and the FBI agents carted him off into the wings as the Academy orchestra’s brass section launched into a military fanfare.

Out sashayed Sunday’s savior and thus began what would become the Academy’s finest hours. His tuxedo piped in the Ukrainian colors was from Tom Ford and therefore “Built to Last,” as Zelenskyy proclaimed when Meryl Streep asked from the front row who he was wearing.

For the next twelve minutes Vaudeville Voldy wowed Hollywood and the world with a top-hat-and-cane song-and-dance routine that choreographed its way into a rollicking production number unsurpassed in the history of the Oscars:

Are you blue and yellow in the White House

And had enough of all those shits?
Putin on the Ritz …

The swelling strings were pierced by a train whistle. A locomotive with “Trans-Siberian Railway” painted across its black body blasted through the backdrop. Up on the big screen, the onstage camera captured the steamy kiss of the engineer and his brakeman—Woody Harrelson as JD Vance and the Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón. Her racist tweets had scuttled her Oscar changes, but now she was back in the spotlight. There was no quicker way to get there than by kicking the Hillbilly Elegist and MAGA-Manchild in the cojones.

From the bowels of the stage, up came Ed Harris strapped to the train tracks as Putin in a Ritz. The dictator’s stubby fingers wiggled nefariously just beyond the scalloped edge of the greasy cracker as it was run over by the locomotive in a spectacular snack explosion.

Academy Award winner Casey Affleck, also eager to feast on the crumbs of decancellation, waddled out trussed up as an Elon Muskovy Duck, dabbled at the buttery debris and quacked:

Have you seen the well-to-do
Up
and down Park Avenue?

Also in urgent need of a reboot, Alec Baldwin slunk on stage as Don the Drag Queen of Hearts casting off falsetto skeins of de-tuned melody: “You haven’t got the cards,” he crooned as he mounted the cockpit for the threesome’s refrain:

“Pants with stripes and cutaway coat, perfect fits
Putin on the Ritz”

Jane Fonda in Ukrainian army-issue helmet and black war fatigues by Versace drove out in a budget-busting Abrams tank as Voldy soft-shoed in time to the rumble of the mighty treads:

“Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)”

Busby Berkeley drones pirouetted in formation above the stage as the whole ensemble sang and high-kicked, the audience rising as one to join in on:

Move to the rhythm
We can
Move
Move
I want you to move

As if aroused by the massed crescendo, the muzzle of the Abrams’ cannon raised to an erotically suggestive angle, gave a “pop” and shot out a giant blue-and-yellow flag with a peace sign to climax the show-starting show-stopper.

And that was just the beginning.

The evening’s first award, for Best Supporting Actor, went to Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain in which he plays a mad/melancholic stoner (the character smokes weed from Ithaca, New York—that line got some laughs when I saw the film in that very city) on a heritage tour of Poland. Along with his cousin (a role taken by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the movie), he vists a death camp and other sites and goes in search of their recently deceased grandmother’s house. Culkin gave a concise and eloquent acceptance speech, first lambasting Rupert Murdoch’s anti-democratic depredations (Culkin played one of the media baron’s sons in Succession), then voicing support for Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at last year’s ceremony decrying what Glazer had called the “hijack[ing] of the Holocaust by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” In a witty-weird closing flourish, Culkin promised not to force his wife to have any more children.

Later, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan and Timothée Chalamet, nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of the bard in A Complete Unknown, sang “The Times They are A-Changin’” together, joined halfway through by the real Joan Baez and her screen epigone, Monica Barbaro (also nominated for Best Supporting Actress in the Dylan biopic).

Even though snubbed for her work in Callas, Angeline Jolie floated down from above like last year’s Barbie, and Mick Jagger bounced up from the auditorium to join in with the gang on a “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the Ages.

Throughout the seamless show, Voldy continued somehow to charm with silly one-liners like the one that started “Elon goes to Kremlin with chainsaw and asks Vlad, What is your Occupation? …”

Late in the broadcast Adrian Brody was declared Best Actor. He strode to the stage already carrying an Oscar—the one he had received for The Pianist more than two decades ago. In a terse but heartfelt address citing George C. Scott’s refusal of the 1970 Best Actor award for Patton, Brody renounced “the crass hucksterism of declaring one artist better than another.” He took his second statuette from last-year’s winner, Cillian Murphy, then handed both to the nearby Zelenskyy. “Not exactly rare earths,” said Brody, “But maybe good for a few bullets.” Sticking to his running gag of making a spooneristic muddle of his English, Voldy nodded and said, “No, no, I give these boys to VD Jance and Tronald Dump on way back to Kyiv to thank them—to really thank them!—for their terrific show on Friday.”

Next, Jeff Bezos bulldozed his way to center stage and announced that Amazon and all other streaming services, from Netflix on down, would close for business before the end of the year. Bezos instead would be putting 200 billion bucks into restoring America’s downtown movie theatres and providing free screenings in perpetuity, funding independent films, and remodeling (with windows and turf roofs!) all Amazon fulfillment centers and converting them to climate-safe agrarian theatre schools, daycares, and free-for-all hospitals.

In the last of the many shocks and surprises, the Best Picture went to the Croatian short film The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, whose dramatic force and moral power harrow and build across its epic 12 minutes. There is no more compelling and urgent piece of cinema.

After this final award, dispensed after a crisp 100 minutes, the director of this year’s show, Steven Spielberg, took to the stage to announce that, however much the Academy had wanted to make it to 100, this would be the last Award ceremony. The first Sunday in March of 2026—if there turned out to be one—would instead find all of Hollywood Royalty in Kyiv’s National Palace of the Arts for the premiere of the first film in a ten-part series to be made in collaboration with Ridley Scott, called Fighting for Freedom and starring none other than …  Volodymyr Zelenskyy! The Ukrainian shrugged: “Then maybe I keep these two Oscars after all.”

The post Vaudeville Volodymyr’s Big Night appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Yearsley.

Silent Night is a well-known Christmas carol that tells of a peaceful and silent night in Bethlehem, referring to the first Christmas more than 2000 years ago.

It is now 2024, and it was again a silent night in Bethlehem last night, reports Al Jazeera’s Nisa Ibrahim. Not because of peace. But a lack of it.

Israel’s war on Gaza and violence in the occupied West Bank has frightened away visitors who would traditionally visit Bethlehem at this time of year.

• READ MORE: Israeli forces still pound Gaza at Christmas, kill at least two in drone strike on Gaza City Civil Defence HQ
• ‘Christ Is Still in the Rubble’: Bethlehem pastor calls on US to stop funding Gaza genocide
• Christ wasn’t born in a stable so that Palestinians could be born in tents — Eugene Doyle

Her full report is here.

Meanwhile, in Gaza City, hundreds of Christians gathered at a church on Christmas Eve, praying for an end to the war that has devastated much of the Palestinian territory.

Gone were the sparkling lights, the festive decorations and the towering Christmas tree that had graced Gaza City for decades.

The Square of the Unknown Soldier, once alive with the spirit of the season, now lies in ruins, reduced to rubble by relentless Israeli air strikes.

Amid the rubble, the faithful sought solace even as fighting continued to rage across the Strip.

“This Christmas carries the stench of death and destruction,” said George al-Sayegh, who for weeks has sought refuge in the 12th century Greek Orthodox Church of St Porphyrius.

“There is no joy, no festive spirit. We don’t even know who will survive until the next holiday.”

‘Christ still in the rubble’
On Friday, the Palestinian theologian and pastor Reverend Munther Isaac delivered a Christmas sermon at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, in occupied West Bank — the birthplace of Jesus — called “Christ Is Still in the Rubble.” He said in this excerpt from Democracy Now!:

‘“Never again” should mean never again to all peoples. “Never again” has become “yet again” — yet again to supremacy, yet again to racism and yet again to genocide.

‘And sadly, “never again” has become yet again for the weaponisation of the Bible and the silence and complicity of the Western church, yet again for the church siding with power, the church siding with the empire.

‘And so, today, after all this, of total destruction, annihilation — and Gaza is erased, unfortunately — millions have become refugees and homeless, tens of thousands killed.

‘And why is anyone still debating whether this is a genocide or not? I can’t believe it. Yet, even when church leaders simply call for investigating whether this is a genocide, he is called out, and it becomes breaking news.

‘Friends, the evidence is clear. Truth stands plain for all to see. The question is not whether this is a genocide. This is not the debate. The real question is: Why isn’t the world and the church calling it a genocide?

‘It says a lot when you deny and ignore and refrain from using the language of genocide. This says a lot. It actually reveals hypocrisy, for you lectured us for years on international laws and human rights. It reveals your hypocrisy.

‘It says a lot on how you look at us Palestinians. It says a lot about your moral and ethical standards. It says everything about who you are when you turn away from the truth, when you refuse to name oppression for what it is. Or could it be that they’re not calling it a genocide?

‘Could it be that if reality was acknowledged for what it is, that it is a genocide, then that it would be an acknowledgment of your guilt? For this war was a war that so many defended as “just” and “self-defense.” And now you can’t even bring yourself to apologise . . .

‘We said last year Christ is in the rubble. And this year we say Christ is still in the rubble. The rubble is his manger. Jesus finds his place with the marginalised, the tormented, the oppressed and the displaced.

‘We look at the holy family and see them in every displaced and homeless family living in despair. In the Christmas story, even God walks with them and calls them his own.’

Christ is still in the Rubble – Reverend Munther Isaac’s Christms message.   Video: Reverend Isaac

Story of Jesus one of oppression
“Pastor Isaac joined journalist host Chris Hedges on a special episode of The Chris Hedges Report to revisit the story of Christmas and how it relates to Palestine then and now.

He wasted no time in reminding people that despite the usual jolly associations with Christmas, the story of Jesus Christ was one of oppression, one that involved the struggle of refugees, the rule of a tyrant, the witnessing of a massacre and the levying of taxation.

“To us here in Palestine,” Reverend Isaac said the terms linked to the struggle “actually make the story, as we read it in the Gospel, very much a Palestinian story, because we can identify with the characters.”

Journalist Hedges and Reverend Isaac invoked the story of the Good Samaritan to point out the deliberate blindness the world has bestowed upon the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza in the midst of the ongoing genocide.

The conclusion of the [Good Samaritan] story is that there is no us and them, Reverend Isaac told Hedges.

“Everybody is a neighbour. You don’t draw a circle and determine who’s in and who’s out.”

It was clear, Reverend Isaac pointed out, “the Palestinians are outside of the circle. We’ve been saying it — human rights don’t apply on us, not even compassion.”

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

In a video widely circulated on social media, one young man who said he took part said many riders were looking for a way to make some memories with a temporary escape from the pressure and stresses of their lives.

He said the rides were originally conceived as a cheap way to have fun by college kids looking for a summer jaunt on a tight budget, using ubiquitous hired bikes from urban schemes.

“If we could afford to buy motorcycles or cars, there’s no way we would be riding hired bikes,” the man said in a social media video posted as the authorities began a nationwide clampdown on mass riding activities, apparently fearing a possible re-run of the 2022 “white paper” movement that triggered the end of COVID-19 restrictions.

“We’re too poor to go on vacations, to socialize or to go abroad, or to take part in sports activities at a high level,” he said. “We’re so poor that the best we dare to hope for is a bowl of dumpling soup after a midnight bike ride.”

He said young people are expected to show absolute obedience to those in authority, yet have no job opportunities to show for it.

“We’ve done as we were told for more than 20 years now, and we’ll likely have to go on doing as we’re told for the rest of our lives,” the man said. “And yet most of us will likely only make about 3,000 yuan (US$415) a month even after we graduate, and somehow get by on that for a lifetime.”

“I don’t want to grow old without a single thing worth remembering,” he said. “We’re not getting any younger, so that’s why we do stuff like this.”

The night-cycling craze went viral after the first group of young women made the night trip on hired bikes to Kaifeng in June, was widely reported by official media as a boost to the “night-time economy.”

“These youthful adventures embody a vibrant spirit — full of curiosity, determination, and a zest for discovery — that adds new dimensions to the tourism industry,” the People’s Daily online edition gushed in a Nov. 7 article on the craze.

“Far from being just a passing fad, this movement reflects a generation that craves flexible and diverse lifestyles despite their busy schedules,” the article said. “It also highlights the resilience and adaptability of China’s economy, flourishing as it evolves alongside the aspirations of its young people.”

‘They find a way to vent'

But shortly after hundreds of thousands of people turned out on a ride on Nov. 8, including politically sensitive groups like People’s Liberation Army veterans, the authorities clamped down on the gatherings, placing students across northern China under lockdown in their university campuses.

According to a post on the blogging platform Botanwang, students were hauled back to campuses and kept in their classrooms for several hours after the clampdown on the mass bike rides began, and given a movie to watch before being finally allowed to return to their dorms.

Luis Liang, a young graduate who recently graduated from a university in China and has since migrated to Germany, said he could relate to the students' accounts of their bike rides.

“What he said is true,” Liang told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview, in a reference to the young man’s video. “Unless you come from a powerful family ... all you have if you don’t go to college is the prospect of doing work that isn’t fit for human beings to try to earn a living. Even if you do, what can you learn from the suffocating education that you get in a Chinese university?”

“They’re desperate, and they can’t see any way to better themselves, so they find a way to vent,” he said.

He said the majority of young Chinese people aren’t generally thinking about challenging the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

“Freedom is a luxury that they daren’t even think about, so they try to do as they’re told and work hard,” Liang said. “If they could just improve their lives and those of their families just a little bit, they’d be happy, and wouldn’t dream of challenging the government.”

“But in today’s China, they can’t even fulfill those humble goals, so they’ve had enough,” he said.

“This kind of protest can fuel hope and encourage other young people, yet the authorities will suppress it and spend a lot of money on maintaining stability, even if they know that it doesn’t actually pose any kind of threat,” he said.

Wu Renhua, who was present at the student-led pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in the spring and early summer of 1989, said the night rides to Kaifeng didn’t appear to have the same kind of focused agenda that was seen among young people around the country in the late 1980s.

“These cycle rides may not have amounted to a movement this time around, but there’s no guarantee that that won’t happen next time,” Wu said. “The college students of today aren’t like those of 1989, but you can still get demonstrations.”

He said the government is very nervous about any large gathering of people.

“If anything changes China, it’ll be a mass movement caused by something other than politics, or at least it won’t be political at the beginning,” Wu said.

“Everyone’s dissatisfaction with the system has been suppressed for so long that people will start out just connecting with each other via non-political gatherings,” he said.

“But once people start gathering, someone could suddenly start raising political demands.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Yitong Wu and Kit Sung for RFA Cantonese.

The police department in Henan’s Zhengzhou city issued a warning to students on Nov. 9, following a mass “night ride to Kaifeng” by thousands of young people a day earlier, as a social media video about riding to the city in search of dumplings spawned dozens of copycat outings, eventually expanding to a mass cycle ride that some observers said left the authorities rattled, concerned that it could turn into a political protest like the “white paper” movement two years ago, or Halloween in Shanghai.

Video footage of the rides uploaded to social media of the Nov. 8 event showed phalanxes of cyclists riding abreast across several lanes of a highway, flying the Chinese national flag and singing the Chinese national anthem, many of whom were riding bikes from urban sharing schemes.

Police didn’t take action at the time, but they announced a ban on cycles from downtown Zhengzhou on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, reserving main roads for motorized traffic only, according to Jimu News.

Cycle-hire companies Hello, Qingjue and Meituan responded by banning the riding of their bikes between city jurisdictions, saying anyone who defied the ban would have their hired bike locked remotely.

A retired teacher from Zhengzhou who gave only the surname Jia for fear of reprisals said she saw the road from Zhengzhou to Kaifeng “packed” with cyclists on Nov. 8.

“I would say there were more than 200,000 people,” Jia said. “Zhengzhou to Kaifeng Boulevard was so crowded that ... there were no shared bikes left and a lot of people had to walk instead.”

“[The authorities] are very nervous,” she said.

The cycling bans came after the Nov. 8 ride was joined by more than 600 students who traveled down by train from Beijing to take part, and also by military veterans, a group regarded as highly politically sensitive by the government, who carried flags and shouted slogans calling for “freedom,” according to social media reports.

“Eight years in the Rocket Force, night ride to Kaifeng -- charge!” a person shouts in one video clip. “Five years in the Air Force, retired but still got it, night ride to Kaifeng, let’s go!” shouts someone else.

One Douyin user from Shandong posted a video saying the authorities in Henan were now cracking down on “night rides” by students in universities across the province, as well as in the northern provinces of Shanxi and Shaanxi.

“One video I saw showed students from Shandong and Tianjin also took action, with some waving national flags,” the user said.

According to other social media posts, some students who tried to form a mass ride to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were stopped and turned away at a police checkpoint, so they rode the 138 kilometers (86 miles) to the northern port city of Tianjin.

In the eastern city of Nanjing, tens of thousands of college students rode to Chaohu Lake 140 kilometers (87 miles) away or Ma’anshan, 59 kilometers (37 miles) away, while students in Sichuan’s provincial capital Chengdu role to Dujiangyan 70 kilometers (43 miles) away and students from Xi’an rode 28 kilometers (17 miles) by night to Xianyang.

According to Jia, authorities in Zhengzhou also locked down college campuses across the city and wouldn’t let students leave.

“All students were told to return to campus, and then not allowed out again for a certain period of time,” she said. “The universities sent out a lot of internal notices to counselors and other staff, which you can seen online.”

Jimu News reported that students at the Henan Institute of Science and Technology in Zhengzhou were required to get a special pass to leave campus, citing campus officials.

Zhengzhou-based teacher Li Na said she was amazed at the students’ actions.

“Let’s not impute a political stance to this, but at the very least it shows that young people in mainland China are very eager to take part in public life,” Li said. “Secondly, they are very organized.”

“I don’t know how they are communicating with each other given how tight the controls are, and yet it’s gotten so big that students all over the country have responded,” she said.

Li cited local media reports as saying that universities in Shanxi and other places had gone as far as to label the bike rides a “political movement,” and warn students not to take part on pain of having a black mark on their record.

University staff were also working “ideologically” with students to persuade them not to take part, she said.

“This isn’t the first time we have seen the capacity of young people to organize,” Li said. “The first time was the white paper movement, and the second was Halloween.”

Li Meiyao, a psychologist from Shanxi, said the initial bike ride in June was described as a way to alleviate mental health problems by the young woman who posted about it first.

“I rode a bike to Kaifeng to eat dumplings, because I haven’t found any other way to release the depression caused by the three-years of pandemic restrictions,” she paraphrased the original post as saying.

University students endured months of lockdown on campus during the three years of zero-COVID restrictions, which ended in December 2022, and were sent home en masse when they gathered to protest, with the authorities blaming instigation by “hostile foreign forces” for the protests.

A Henan-based commentator who gave only the surname Gong for fear of reprisals said the rides likely started out as a way for young people to let off steam.

“At the outset, this was about having fun, with a few young students going to Kaifeng, but why did they get such an instant response?” Gong said. “Because college students have been isolated and shut off from society for such a long time, and rarely had the opportunity to take part in any public events.”

“It was an important opportunity for them to let off steam, express themselves, and affirm their values in a public setting,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

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Chinese universities send students home en masse after weekend protests

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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.

This is what nightmares are made of – between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, and the result is that the Marshallese people have lost their pristine environment and face health problems. Our environment is threatened here as well. Not only did the indigenous Chumash people lose their sacred land to Vandenberg Air Force Base, but also America’s Heartland presently has around 400 ICBMs stored in underground silos equipped with nuclear warheads that are ready to launch at a hair trigger’s notice. Named “MinuteMen III,” after Revolutionary War soldiers who could reload and shoot a gun in less than a minute, ICBMs not only put Americans at risk of accident, but they put all life on earth in danger.

ICBMs are not viable for national defense. They are a relic of a bygone era having been invented by Nazi Germany, and their presence only escalates the risk of nuclear accidents or conflicts.A single launch could lead to a nuclear exchange that would annihilate cities, contaminate the environment, and cause irreversible harm to our planet’s ecosystem. Once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled. I don’t want a nuclear strike or accident to happen. We can change course now, and our first step is to decommission the ICBM program also because it is a staggering financial burden to maintain.

The U.S. plans to spend over $1.2 trillion on nuclear modernization over the next 30 years, which means new, larger nuclear bombs and new, larger ICBMs called Sentinels that will need to be tested. This massive investment in outdated technology diverts critical funds away from humanitarian needs like healthcare, education, and healing climate change— issues that directly impact our quality of life, and our children’s future.

I teach 4th and 5th graders Creative Writing. I adore children’s imaginations, but when my students were given the assignment to write about something important to them, they wrote lines that broke my heart.  This is a wake-up call for us adults to face the reality we have made for our children.

“Such a shame, a perfectly good planet, trashed.” Claire, age 9.

“What would you think about no nature in the world? No trees, no butterflies, no birds or bunnies at all! Most important of all, no people. There would be no technology, no schools, no history, no entertainment; everything we have worked for would be wasted. What would you think about a beautiful world that basically had nothing? I think I would absolutely hate it.,” Brynn, age 9.

Other than destruction caused by industrial global warming and by war, which the children are all-too aware of, this child does not know what actually could turn nature and civilization to nothing in a matter of minutes; she doesn’t know about “nuclear winter” or how vulnerable we are to a nuclear accident. Most people don’t.

The claim is that nuclear weapons are deterrents, but it is diplomacy that creates alliances and peace. Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.

As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted.  By decommissioning ICBMs, the U.S. could lead the world in reducing the nuclear threat and encourage other nations to do the same. For the sake of our health, environment, and the safety of future generations, it’s time to scrap the ICBM program. We owe it to our children to invest in a future that prioritizes peace and sustainability over destruction.

As it is we the people who possess the right of self-determination, we must confront the material reality of our homeland and face what it will take to protect it.  Do we have the courage to change our country for the better and ensure our futures?  Yes we do, and now is the time to take action.

“Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress,” said Daniel Ellsberg, U.S. military analyst, economist, and author of “The Doomsday Machine.”

May we cancel this nightmare weapons program for once and for all and give our children the security that they deserve.

Tell Congress: Cancel Sentinel Missile Program—More Than 700 Scientists Agree.

Learn more about the dangers of ICBMS and get involved.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Leah Yananton.

The post KPFA News Election Night Special Coverage (10pm-midnight) appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

We take a close look at Donald Trump’s campaign and racist rally at Madison Square Garden with filmmaker Marshall Curry, who attended the rally and also directed the short film A Night at the Garden, about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and notes, “The demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today.”

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

Read Part 1.

The events described in previous articles ─ pro-Israel influence that enabled rapid recognition by the U.S. government of the Israel regime in 1948 and an American murder of 29 Palestinians at the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994 are not isolated relics of the past. They link to events that occur in contemporary times and remain alive as if happening today ─ salient features in the historical narrative that a world ignored and served to claim more victims.

Pro-Israel influence that enabled rapid recognition by the U.S. government of the Israel regime initiated the trend that guaranteed almost continuous support by the U.S. government for Israel’s mounting crimes. Made in America Baruch Goldstein, in his murderous rampage, set the stage for continuous murders of Palestinians and for the made in America bombs that extinguished the life of Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah.

The constant drumming of arranged epithets and twists of reality, where an Israel committed atrocity becomes an Israel sacrifice, continues to manipulate minds. Hezbollah and its deceased leader, Hassan Nasrallah, are not portrayed as fighting to prevent the genocide of the Palestinian people by the terrorist Israeli government; they are labelled as terrorist Hezbollah and terrorist Nasrallah urging genocide of nuclear-armed Israel and as individuals who deserve the ultimate fate.

In his speech to the United Nations (UN), Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, displayed the deranged and manipulative mind that governs Israel’s actions. He said “more resolutions have been passed by the General Assembly against Israel in the last decade than against the rest of the world’s countries,” and accused the UN of being a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” The avalanche of UN resolutions condemning Israel’s genocidal actions prove that Israel is a “house of darkness,” a nation that has no regard for international law, and has leaders who feed upon hating other peoples. In his purposeful upside-down world, Netanyahu attempted to use valid condemnation of Israel’s actions by those who have been trusted to safeguard the world against criminal actions to prove Israel is a “shining light on the hill.”

From Netanyahu,

Hezbollah is the quintessential terror organization in the world today. It has tentacles that span all continents. It has murdered more Americans and more Frenchmen than any group except Bin Laden. It’s murdered the citizens of many countries represented in this room.

Netanyahu alludes to one incident, the 40 year-old 1983 bombings of French and American barracks in Beirut. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 U.S. military personnel. That same morning, another suicide attack killed 58 French soldiers in their barracks. The barracks were components of contingents of U.S. Marines and French forces that arrived in Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping mission. After the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which killed between “1,300 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias,” and French and U.S. naval bombardments of the Shouf hills, Lebanese militants perceived the French and U.S. presences in their land as intruding forces that protected Israel’s invasion. The militants wanted these forces to leave, and, not too long after the bombings, they left. No confirmed information is available of who authorized and carried out the bombings. A formal Hezbollah did not exist at that time.

There is definite information that Israeli air force jet fighter aircraft and navy motor torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, killed 34 and wounded 171 crew members. Many Americans have been arbitrarily murdered by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, about ½ dozen this year.

Heart breaking to learn that Turkish-American woman, Aysenur Eygi, who radiates beauty, was shot and killed while protesting near Nablus. Disturbing to know the U.S. government does not hold Israeli officials responsible. Pulverizing to understand that Israel uses slaughter to send a message ─ come to Israel to help the Palestinians and you will be killed — young, old, man, woman, or child. Her life should not be forgotten, and her image should appear on every protest mechanism.

Apply Netanyahu’s statement to situations that caused U.S. casualties, and we have, “Israel is the quintessential terror organization in the world today. It has tentacles that span all continents. It has murdered more Americans than any group except Bin Laden. It’s murdered the citizens of many countries represented at the UN.”

Reality, truth, and facts are rarely considered by Israel’s puppets. Reading a paper placed before him, US President Joe Biden says the same as his leader.

Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror. His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”

“Hundreds of Americans,” and “thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians?” Some Israeli civilians have been killed in the tit-for-tat hostilities, a minute number compared to Lebanese civilians and UN workers killed by Israel. Ex-president Joseph Biden, please name one American proven to be killed by Hezbollah since it became an official organization in 1985.

The Israeli Prime Minister, who believes that the function of the peoples of the world is to make certain Israeli Jews live and survive well, regardless of the murders of others, recites,

After generations in which our people were slaughtered, remorselessly butchered, and no one raised a finger in our defense, we now have a state. We now have a brave army, an army of incomparable courage, and we are defending ourselves.

An insolent and degrading insult to all those who fought and died in World War II. The United States, Soviet Union, and their allies fought bravely to defeat the Nazi state in World War II. They raised more than their fingers; they sacrificed themselves in defense of all the European peoples. If there was a strategy to liberate anyone from the camps and secure their lives — Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, political opponents of the Nazi regime, and Jews — they would have implemented the strategy.

In war and immediate post-war years, communication and access to news, including firsthand knowledge was limited — no Internet, no 100 channels of television, no electronic mail, no You Tube, no digital cameras, no smart phones, no Facetime, no WhatsApp, and no social media. The ubiquitous, daily, and on site images of the violence we see today were not available to stir the mind to action. Unbelievable, that despite the enormous information that describes the genocide in Gaza, the world remains relatively passive and little effort is being applied to prevent the genocide. Just the opposite is occurring; societies are helping and encouraging it. Mr. Netanyahu, nobody encouraged the Holocaust; Mr. Netanyahu stand up and tell us why you are encouraging the genocide, requesting the Western world to contribute to your gruesome cause, and are ready to extend it to Lebanon?

The unwary world, still unable to confront its malaise, has allowed the Israeli Jews to judge who lives and who dies, slaughtering others with impunity and without redress. Netanyahu has said it with bravado, vowing to destroy anyone in the world who harms an Israeli citizen. Recent events indicate nobody is safe from the Zionist Jews who murder with ease, without remorse, and without facing justice. Give it perspective by citing a few examples.

The goat and sheepherders in the South Hebron Hills live a simple and basic life on semi-desert land, which is barely sufficient to feed their small herds. They don’t ask anything from anybody, don’t harm anybody, and just want to do their daily chores. Settlers from Brooklyn, New York, who never saw a goat or sheep in their life, have suddenly become herders who need room and land for their pet goats. Simple way to get it ─ forcibly evict these simple people and ruin their lives by telling them the land is now a closed “firing zone.” If they protest, well, just shoot them. A video (scroll down) shows a settler arguing with a Palestinian herder on the herder’s land in the village of al-Tawani and arbitrarily shooting him. Israeli soldiers nonchalantly regard the incident and nobody detains the assailant.

Gaza has its daily atrocities. Israeli snipers and soldiers wantonly murder men, women, and especially children. In one episode, Israeli soldiers search a building, going from apartment to apartment. They enter an apartment and order several men to strip and then execute them. No reason and no concern for the killings. Go to “The Night Won’t End,” a film that investigates civilian killings in Gaza. View from 1:00.01 to 1:04.50 and be prepared to witness a horror.

In the West Bank town of Qabatiya, soldiers murder several Palestinians and then commit a gruesome act — treat the lifeless bodies as rubbish and throw them off the roof into the street below.  

The New York Times reports,

According to Wafa (Palestine News Agency), seven Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military during a 10-hour raid into Qabatiya, south of the city of Jenin, on Thursday. Among them, Wafa said, were the three people — believed to be men — captured in the video.

Wafa reported that, after being thrown from the building, the bodies were mutilated on the ground by the claw of an Israeli excavator before being taken away by the military.

In describing the exploding pagers that killed about 10 people and injured several thousand in Lebanon, media, as usual, inserts a description of Hezbollah as the “terror group.” Here we have one of the most horrific terror attacks in recorded history, with innocent civilians suddenly blinded while doing their daily activities and the victims are called the terrorists.

Biggest atrocity

The greatest atrocity has been done to Jewish people. Since its inception, Israel Jews have been used as pawns to oppress and subjugate others and been subjected to constant attacks. Thanks to Netanyahu and his compatriots, the Jews have become the most hated people in the world. Not just animosity or mild disapproval; venomous hatred of not wanting to associate and wishing disappearance. World Jewry may not realize it but this animosity comes from democratic, freedom loving, and liberal persons, people fighting for human rights who now express belief that Zionist Jews are inhuman. Many decent and well-meaning people are following the suggestion by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi.

Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.

Can the world confront its malaise? Activists should keep doing what they are doing and try to overcome the Zionists and their worldwide conspirators who find antidotes by converting protests against their malevolent actions into malevolent protests by the protestors. The latest trickery has the New York Times, Sept. 4, 2024, publish, “Across the United States this spring, Iran also used social media to stoke student-organized protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, with operatives providing financial assistance and posing as students, according to American intelligence assessments.” What nonsense.

Well known that Israeli operatives flood social media with derogatory information on campus protestors and flattering information on their counter protestors, and hundreds of millions of dollars of donations are used to shape college presidents’ and government officials’ decisions. The Iranian agents, if they existed, probably could not buy a government or college official a cup of coffee.

Mentioning the atrocities committed by Israel leads to the question, “What can be done to stop Israel?” Arguments to the eventual demise of the Zionist nightmare are more wish fulfillment than reality.

The Times of Israel (TOI) features an article, “Derelict economy could sink ‘Titanic’ Israel, experts warn,” which relates, “New research paints worrying picture of decades of neglected national priorities leaving the country without the resources to face existential threats.” TOI is perspicacious, Intel has halted expansion of its facilities in Israel, delaying construction of a $25 billion factory for chip production. This pessimism gives optimism to those who believe that a disastrous economy will not be able to support a strong military. After Israel’s military decimates Hezbollah as a fighting force, Israel will no longer need a world class military to protect it from fulfilling its self-guided mission. This mission does not have a high-flying economy as its prominent feature; the Israel economy will always receive assistance from its benefactors — United States, Germany, and Jewish billionaires around the world. The salient feature of the Zionist mission is Irredentism ─ uniting of Jews around the world, physically or morally, in a supposedly united Biblical kingdom of Judah and Israel. That mission is almost completed and only enforcers composed of a small military and a large settler population will be needed to contain the Palestinians on the plantation. The shrinking labor force, due to emigrating Israelis, will be filled by the slave labor of compliant Palestinians.

Another argument for defeating Israel treats collapse of its principal supporter, the United States of America. Accomplishing that internally does not seem plausible. A possible solution to Israel’s maddening of the civilized world lays with leaders of several nations. A world realignment of blocs, those contending American hegemony and those blindly supporting it, is occurring. The U.S. faces economic decline from Chinese competition. If a substantial number of nations are convinced that moving away from the United States and aligning with China is less dangerous than allowing the modern Israelites and their Joshua leader to continue the revival of the Biblical Conquest, slay the inhabitants of the “promised Land,” and lead the world to continuous conflagrations, they could take action and give the U.S. an offer it cannot refuse ─ stop aiding Israel or we start aiding China. Successful rearrangement of the contending blocs requires a three-way endeavor.

• Gravitation to use of the Yuan as international currency will sink the dollar, substantially raise the price of U.S. imports, and cause a national inflation. This will be offset by lowering the cost of U.S. labor for exports and foreign investment.
• Tariffs will have to be imposed by foreign nations to offset the reduced prices and increased competitiveness of U.S. exports
• Nations will have to be assured they are not threatened by loss of U.S. security.

We have a complex subject that needs discussion beyond this article. Wait, there may be a solution on the way. I don’t recommend it but ex-President and future felon, Donald Trump, proposes weakening the dollar, increasing tariffs, and providing less security to other nations.

Will a Trump victory bring about the international realignment that forces the United States to compromise its protection of Israel to guarantee protection of its economy? What a dilemma!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 13 September, at a conclave in Washington, DC, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer indicated that it would be acceptable for Ukraine to fire missiles, provided by the West, into Russian territory. No official decision has been announced as of yet, but it is clear where the conversation among North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member states is headed. After Starmer – whose approval rating with voters sits at 22% – returned to London, his foreign secretary David Lammy told the press that the UK government is in conversation with other allies about lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of UK-provided Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Sir John McColl, a retired senior UK army officer, went further, stating that these missiles would eventually be used against Russia, yet – by themselves – they would not enable Ukraine to prevail. In other words, knowing full well that these missiles will not change the tenor of the war, these men (Biden, Starmer, and McColl) are willing to risk deepening the conflict.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made the use of Western-provided missiles a central theme of his conversations with world leaders, claiming that if his military is allowed to fire the Storm Shadow missiles (from the UK), SCALPs (from France), and ATACMS (from the US), then Ukraine will be able to hit Russian military bases on Russian soil. A greenlight by NATO to use these three missile systems, which have already been supplied to Ukraine by NATO member countries, would be a significant escalation: if Ukraine were to use these missiles to attack Russia, and Russia were to retaliate with an attack on the countries that provided the missiles, it would trigger Article 5 of the NATO charter (1949), drawing all NATO member countries directly into the war. In such a scenario, several nuclear powers (US, UK, France, and Russia) will have their fingers on the nuclear button and could very well take the planet down the path of fiery destruction.

Ion Grigorescu and Arutiun Avakian (Romania/Armenia), The Genius and the Era, 1990/1950s.

In December 2021, Russia and the United States held a series of consultations that, even at that late hour, could have prevented hostilities from breaking out in Ukraine. A summary of those discussions is vital to highlight the key issues underlying the conflict:

1.  7 December 2021. US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a two-hour video conference. The White House readout, which is only a paragraph long, focused on Russian troop movements on the Ukrainian border. The Kremlin summary is a bit longer and introduced a point that the United States has ignored: ‘Vladimir Putin warned against the shifting of responsibility on Russia, since it was NATO that was undertaking dangerous attempts to gain a foothold on Ukrainian territory and building up its military capabilities along the Russian border. It is for this reason that Russia is eager to obtain reliable, legally binding guarantees ruling out the eventuality of NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of offensive weapons systems in the countries neighbouring Russia’.

2. 15 December 2021. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met with US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Karen Donfried in Moscow. The Russian press release published after the meeting said that ‘they had a detailed discussion of security guarantees in the context of the persistent attempts by the US and NATO to change the European military and political situation in their favour’.

Maria Khan (Pakistan), Craving for Love, 2012

3.  17 December 2021. Russia released a draft treaty between itself and the United States as well as a draft agreement with NATO. Both texts made it clear that Russia was seeking firm security guarantees against any destabilisation of the status quo to its west. In these texts, there are explicit and important statements about missiles and nuclear weapons. The draft treaty says that neither the US nor Russia should ‘deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party’ (article 6) and that both sides should ‘refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories’ (article 7). The draft agreement with NATO says that none of the NATO countries should ‘deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties’ (article 5).

4.  23 December 2021. In his annual press conference, Putin once more broadcast Russia’s anxiety about NATO’s eastward movement and about the threats of weapons systems being deployed on Russian borders: ‘We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania, and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see? We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached US borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well. Or, even if it does not join NATO, that military bases and strike systems will be placed on its territory under bilateral agreements’.

5.  30 December 2021. Biden and Putin had a phone call about the deteriorating situation. The Kremlin’s summary is more detailed than the one from the White House, which is why it is more useful. Putin, we are told, ‘stressed that the negotiations needed to produce solid legally binding guarantees ruling out NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of weapons that threaten Russia in the immediate vicinity of its borders’.

On 24 February 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine.

Louay Kayyali (Syria), Then What?, 1965.

Russia has been anxious about its security guarantees ever since the United States began to unilaterally withdraw from the delicate arms control system. The bookends of this dismissal are the US’s 2001 departure from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and 2019 revocation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The disposal of these treaties and the failure to acknowledge Russian pleas for security guarantees – alongside NATO aggressions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya – caused anxieties to grow in Moscow about the possibility that the West could place short-range nuclear missiles in Ukraine or in the Baltic states and be able to strike large Russian cities in the west without any hope of defence. That has been Russia’s main argument with the West. If the West had taken the treaties that Russia proposed in December 2021 seriously, then we might not be in a situation where the Western countries are discussing the use of NATO missiles against Russia.

A new study by the consulting firm Accuracy shows that arms companies in the United States and Europe have benefited enormously from this war, with stock market capitalisation for the main weapons companies having increased by 59.7% since February 2022. The largest gains were made by Honeywell (US), Rheinmetall (Germany), Leonardo (Italy), BAE Systems (UK), Dassault Aviation (France), Thales (France), Konsberg Gruppen (Norway), and Safran (France). The US companies Huntington Ingalls, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman also saw gains, though their percentage increases were lower because their absolute profits were already at obscene levels. While these NATO merchants of death profit enormously, their populations continue to struggle with higher prices due to fuel and food price inflation.

Askhat Akhmedyarov (Kazakhstan), Geopolitical Soldier, 2014.

Perhaps the most cruelly ironic part of this entire debate is that allowing Ukraine to strike Russia would not necessarily result in any military benefit. Firstly, Russian air bases have now moved out of range of the missiles under discussion, and, secondly, Ukrainian supplies of these missiles are low. Adding to the looming threat of nuclear war are two recent statements from the US. In August, the US press reported that the Biden administration had produced a secret memorandum about preparing the US nuclear arsenal to combat China, North Korea, and Russia. This came on the heels of another report, in June, that the US is considering expanding its nuclear forces.

All of this is part of the backdrop of the 79th United Nations General Assembly meeting taking place this month, where member states will discuss a new Global Compact. The draft compact uses the word ‘peace’ over a hundred times, but the real noise we hear is war, war, war.

Tuvshoo (Mongolia), Tears of Joy, 2013.

When I was a teenager in Calcutta, India, I would often zip off to the Gorky Sadan theatre and watch the films of the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, which ruminated about life and the human desire to be better. One of these films, Mirror (1975), about the outrageousness of war, is anchored in the poems of the filmmaker’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky. As tensions rise in Ukraine, the elder Tarkovsky’s poem ‘Saturday, June 21’ (referring to the day before the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany 1941) warns us against mounting threat of war:

There’s one night left to build fortifications.
It’s in my hands, the hope for our salvation.

I’m yearning for the past; then I could warn
Those who were doomed to perish in this war.

A man across the street would hear me cry,
‘Come here, now, and death will pass you by’.

I’d know the hour when the war would strike
Who will survive the camps and who will die.

Who will be heroes honoured by awards,
And who will die shot by the firing squads.

I see the snow in Stalingrad, all strewn
With corpses of the enemy platoons.

Under the air raids, I see Berlin
The Russian infantry is marching in.

I can foretell the enemy’s every plot
More than intelligence of any sort.

And I keep pleading, but no one will hear.
The passersby are breathing in fresh air,

Enjoying summer flowers in June,
All unaware of the coming doom.

Another moment – and my vision disappears.
I don’t know when or how I ended here.

My mind is blank. I’m looking at bright skies,
My window not yet taped by criss-crossed stripes.

Warmly,

Vijay

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

As French Polynesia’s Olympic surfing competition began this weekend, it will be the only event to host athletes in a floating hotel.

The accommodation is provided by the luxury French Polynesia ship Aranui 5 for the duration of the surfing competition being held on the iconic site of Teahupo’o on July 27-30.

What is now the Paris Olympics’ only floating hotel and Olympic village usually carries passengers and freight to outlying Pacific islands.

• READ MORE: Other Paris Olympics 2024 reports

The choice for a floating Olympic village was made because, in this part of Tahiti, there was no adequate facility located close enough to the competition site.

The 28 international competitors and their delegations have arrived and are settled on board the Aranui 5.

Onboard they are being treated to French and Polynesian cuisine, as well as local Polynesian dances every night.

The favourites in the competition are also home-grown — in the female competition, Vahine Fierro, who made history in May to win the Tahiti leg of the World Surfing League’s competition, has been surfing on the Teahupo’o wave since she was 15.

Kauli Vast, in the men’s event, also grew up on the world-renowned site.

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.

In a special broadcast, we feature part of our recent in-depth interview about The Night Won’t End, a new documentary from Al Jazeera English which takes an in-depth look at attacks on civilians by the Israeli military in Gaza and the United States’ role in the war. The film follows three Palestinian families as they recount the horrific experiences they have endured under relentless Israeli assault, including the family of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, the young Palestinian girl who made headlines when it emerged in January that she had been trapped in a car with family members killed by Israeli ground troops, and the Salem family, who first lost dozens of family members in an Israeli airstrike and then additional family members who were executed by Israeli soldiers. We play clips from the documentary and speak to journalists Kavitha Chekuru and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the director and correspondent on The Night Won’t End, respectively. We also discuss the plight of journalists in Gaza and U.S. complicity in Israel’s war. “There’s no question that U.S. weapons have killed civilians in Gaza,” says Kouddous. “This violates both international humanitarian law and domestic law.”

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

The Night Won’t End, a new documentary from Al Jazeera English, takes an in-depth look at attacks on civilians by the Israeli military in Gaza and the United States’ role in the war. The film follows three Palestinian families as they recount the horrific experiences they have endured under relentless Israeli assault, including the family of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, the young Palestinian girl who made headlines when it emerged in January that she had been trapped in a car with family members killed by Israeli ground troops, and the Salem family, who first lost dozens of family members in an Israeli airstrike and then additional family members who were executed by Israeli soldiers. We play clips from the documentary and speak to journalists Kavitha Chekuru and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the director and correspondent on The Night Won’t End, respectively. We also discuss the plight of journalists in Gaza and U.S. complicity in Israel’s war. “There’s no question that U.S. weapons have killed civilians in Gaza,” says Kouddous. “This violates both international humanitarian law and domestic law.”

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

It is the final day of election campaigning in Solomon Islands and there is a palpable sense of anticipation in the country, which is holding national and provincial elections simultaneously for the first time this year.

There is also significant international interest this year in the outcome of the National Election, as it is the first to be held since 2019 when Taiwan cut its decades-long diplomatic ties with the country — leaving Honiara in the lurch as it moved to formally establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

The elections this week were officially scheduled to take place last year but were postponed, somewhat controversially, so that the country could host the Pacific Games.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Excitement in Solomon Islands as election nears

Most of the voters RNZ Pacific has spoken to in Honiara so far seem both excited and determined to exercise their democratic right.

In and around the capital, stages are being erected for final campaign rallies and all manner of vehicles are being decked out for colourful and noisy float parades.

Overnight, down at the main Point Cruz wharf, hundreds of voters were still boarding ferries paid for by election candidates trying to shore up their numbers.

Many of the ships are not actually designed for passengers — they are converted fishing or cargo vessels purchased through Special Shipping Grants given to MPs to help meet transportation needs for their constituents.

Voter ferries
One such vessel is the MV Avaikimaine run by Renbel Shipping for the Rennell and Bellona constituency.

The man in charge of boarding last night, Derek Pongi, said voters for all election candidates were allowed to travel on the vessel.

Pongi said some people had their fares paid for by the candidates they support, while others meet their own travel costs.

He said the vessel had completed four trips carrying 400 or more passengers each time.

“It’s important because people from Rennell and Bellona can go back and participate in these elections and exercise their right to vote for their member of Parliament and the members of the Provincial Assembly,” Pongi said.

But not all vessels have such an open policy — some of the wealthier candidates in larger constituencies either charter or call in favours to get potential voters to the polls.

A couple of jetties over from the Avaikimaine was the bright neon green-coloured Uta Princess II.

Her logistics officer, Tony Laugwaro, explained the vessel was heading to the Baegu Asifola constituency and that most of the people on board were supporters of the incumbent MP John Maneniaru.

Three trips
He said they had made three trips already, but had to be wary of remaining within the campaign expenses’ maximum expenditure limit.

“It’s only around SBD$500,000 (US$58,999) for each candidate to do logistics, so we have to work within that amount for transporting and accommodating voters,” Tony Laugwaro said.

According to Solomon Islands electoral laws, candidates are also only allowed to accept donations of up to SBD$50,000 (US$5900) for campaigning.

As each ship pulls away from the jetty and disappears into the night, another appears like a white ghost out of the darkness and begins the process of loading more passengers.

The official campaign period ends at midnight today, followed immediately by a 24-hour campaign blackout.

Polls open on Wednesday at 7am and close at 4pm. Counting is expected to continue through until the weekend.

Depending on the official results, which will be announced by the Governor-General, lobbying to form the national and provincial governments could last anywhere from a few days to several weeks.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, as he watched his fellow Indigenous advocates hugging one another and celebrating, he thought of how many times their peoples had been denigrated as savages and animals. Here was a new standard enshrining Indigenous rights as human rights. “The world is finally looking at Indigenous peoples as humans,” he thought. 

The vote was a pivotal point for Indigenous advocacy. For decades, people like Borrero had turned to the United Nations to hear their pleas when colonial governments refused to do so. 

Today, nearly two decades after that vote, Borrero senses Indigenous peoples are approaching another critical moment.

World leaders are pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to address climate change. At least 190 countries have committed to conserving 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by 2030. Once again, Native advocates are flying to New York and Geneva to ensure that their voices are heard and their peoples’ rights and territories are respected. But increasingly, Borrero and other advocates have been unnerved by one particular acronym that keeps popping up in multilateral discussions: IPLC, which stands for Indigenous peoples and local communities. 

If you study international conservation, you may have seen it before. It pops up in treaties, in scholarly works, in studies about what lands Indigenous peoples own and what solutions exist to climate change. It’s a phrase that seems to have originated in conservation treaties, but advocates like Borrero are noticing it more often across various international venues. 

It sounds innocuous, but to Borrero it feels insidious. Indigenous people have spent decades fighting for their rights and recognition. To him, lumping them in with the very broad, amorphous term “local communities” threatens to roll back the progress that they have made. 

It’s one thing for state governments to be expected to get the consent of Indigenous peoples before carving out a new protected area. It’s quite another if states can say that they need “IPLC” consent, and can argue that local communities’ support outweighs Indigenous opposition, effectively drowning out the voices of Native peoples and diminishing their rights.

Supporters of linking the two say doing so doesn’t diminish Indigenous rights but Borreco and others who have seen their land stolen and communities decimated are bracing themselves for the worst. 

“You’re really setting up a possibility for one of the biggest land grabs since colonization, since the beginning of colonization,” he said. “That’s what we’re raising the alarm about.”

He’s far from the only one doing so.  Last summer, three United Nations bodies spoke out against the term: the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council; the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, who promotes Indigenous rights and analyzes rights violations; and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Geneva, a subsidiary to the Human Rights Council that conducts studies to help state governments meet the goals of the Indigenous rights declaration. 

“We, the UN mechanisms of Indigenous Peoples, urge all UN entities in their methods of work to refrain from conflating, associating, combining, or equating Indigenous Peoples with non-indigenous entities, such as minorities, vulnerable groups, or ‘local communities,’” they wrote. 

“We further request that all UN Member State parties to treaties related to the environment, biodiversity, and climate cease using the term ‘local communities’ alongside ‘Indigenous Peoples,’ so that the term ‘Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ is no longer used.”

Not everyone agrees. In a meeting of United Nations working groups in Geneva last September, Borrero listened as Daniel Mukubi Kikuni, a representative for a group of African nations, argued that linking Indigenous peoples with local communities in conservation treaties is necessary for achieving biodiversity objectives.

Kikuni is the head of the Office of Biodiversity Conservation in the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He’s one of the main negotiators at the United Nations for the Congo on climate change and conservation issues.

He said in an interview that in Africa, it’s difficult to separate Indigenous peoples from local communities. In his mind, they have the same rights. “To separate them is like to have an elephant without ivory,” he said. “There is no elephant without ivory.” 

He sees this work well in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Congo, where he said Indigenous Mbuti and Efe are mainly hunters while local community members are mainly farmers. The communities rely on each other, trading bushmeat and farm products. It’s this kind of mutual reliance that makes him think the two can’t be separated. 

“At the global level, we have shown that the two are linked and contribute immensely to achieve our goals and targets,” he said. 

But not all local communities have strong connections with the land. In other countries, local communities may be equated with civil society in general, said Borrero. And the potential for tension between the two is what’s causing Indigenous advocates to be concerned. 

Few people know this as well as Andrea Carmen, who has led the International Indian Treaty Council for the last 30 years. The organization was founded 50 years ago at Standing Rock in the wake of numerous protests in the 1970s to raise awareness of Native rights. Frustrated by North American governments and their lack of response to Indigenous issues, thousands gathered in solidarity and decided to take their voices to the international arena. 

Carmen joined the organization in the 1980s, pushing for the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and raising two children and grandchildren in the process of trying to get the declaration approved. She said that in the countless meetings she attended about the writing of that declaration, no one ever suggested that it be called the rights of “Indigenous peoples and local communities.” 

She said the first time she came across the linking of the two was in the 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The conservation treaty, signed by nearly 200 countries (excluding the United States), was a commitment by countries to recognize the importance of conserving biological diversity. In Article 8(J), the treaty acknowledges “the close and traditional dependence of many indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles on biological resources.” 

At the time, the fact that countries were recognizing the value of Indigenous peoples at all was significant. But the wording still raised red flags, said Nicole Schabus, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. 

Schabus said that in international negotiations, single words or even letters — such as the word “people” versus “peoples” — carry major implications. United Nations documents used to refer to Indigenous populations, which she said implied, “‘let’s look at the problem of Indigenous populations being so poor, how can we help?’ not ‘Let’s look at Indigenous peoples and how can they have standing and be empowered?’”

In recent decades, Indigenous advocates like Borreca and Carmen have been lobbying international organizations to use the term “Indigenous peoples.” The term “peoples” suggests that Indigenous groups have a defined identity with the right to self-determination, instead of just being another population or community. 

In 2014, they found success at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, where parties agreed to add the word peoples to future writings, using the term “Indigenous peoples and local communities.” But the countries involved also made clear that they weren’t changing their legal obligations under the 1992 agreement. And still, the linking of Indigenous peoples with local communities rankled Native advocates.

“‘IPLC’ is problematic because it implies Indigenous peoples and local communities, they’re all the same. They’re not,” Schabus said. In international law, Indigenous peoples have different rights and standing from local communities. Local communities may be knowledge holders, but they don’t have the same rights laid out in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They don’t have their own declaration of rights.

“It’s important to keep those terms and concepts separate,” Schabus said. Part of the problem is that there’s a lot of confusion about what “local communities” means. 

There’s ambiguity around both terms, but there’s much more clarity around what makes someone Indigenous, according to  Elissavet Tsioumani, an international legal scholar at the University of Trento in Italy. Indigenous peoples are generally considered to have some connection to pre-colonial cultures and land bases and to have the right to determine their national identity. There’s also a growing body of international law around the rights of Indigenous peoples, such as the right to free, prior and informed consent to projects on their lands.

Local communities don’t explicitly have that same right. At the same time, there’s often conflict between local communities and Indigenous peoples, said Galina Angarova, former executive director of the Indigenous advocacy group Cultural Survival. 

“In many cases around the world, local communities actually represent the mainstream society,” she said, adding their interests may be in direct opposition to Indigenous peoples especially when it comes to resources and territorial claims.  

To Monica Magnusson, an attorney and human rights advocate in Belize, the issue is not theoretical. She’s a member of Laguna, a community of Maya people in southern Belize. 

For years, her community has fought for recognition of their ancestral ties to territories in Belize. They won a major victory in 2015 at the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming their land claims. But she said the Belize government still resists granting the Laguna people rights to their territories. 

Magnusson thinks acronyms like IPLC give state governments an excuse to diffuse Indigenous rights. 

Local communities and Indigenous peoples might have some similarities, she said, and local communities should be free to organize and advocate for their own rights. But any reference to Indigenous peoples should recognize their distinct rights and not conflate them with another group. 

“What’s being created here in these spaces are policies and protocols that will have a direct impact on Indigenous people’s lands and resources,” she said. “For governments like Belize, who already don’t want to acknowledge the rights we have, they’re going to jump at any opportunity to water it down.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline IPLC: The acronym that is keeping Indigenous advocates up at night on Mar 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

Photograph Source: Jeanne Menjoulet – CC BY 2.0

The town hall meeting is the last throbbing reminder of the authentic demos.  People gather; debates held.  Views converge; others diverge.  Speakers are invited to stir the invitees, provoke the grey cells.  Till artificial intelligence banishes such gatherings, and the digital cosmos swallows us whole, cherish these events.

And there was much to cherish about Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic, part of a global movement to publicize the importance of freeing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains in the forbidding confines of Belmarsh Prison in London.  Held on March 9 in Melbourne’s Storey Hall, it was a salutatory minder that the publisher’s plight has become one of immediate concern.  Worn down by judicial process and jailed by a US surrogate power, he faces a vicious political indictment of 17 charges focused on the Espionage Act of 1917 and one on computer intrusion.  A UK High Court appeal on the matter of extradition hangs in the balance.

The thematic nature of such events can be challenging.  One should never be too gloomy – and in Assange’s case, be it in terms of health, torture, injustice and pondered attempts by US intelligence officials to take his life or kidnap him – there is much to be gloomy about.  Bleakness should be allowed, but only in modest, stiff doses.  Try, as far as you can, to inject a note of encouraging humor into proceedings.  Humour unsettles the tyrannically inclined, punctures the ideologue’s confidence.  Then reflect, broadly, on the astonishing legacy on the subject and ask that vital question: Where to now?

The sessions, superbly steered through by Mary Kostakidis (“Try to avoid lengthy preambles to your questions, please”), covered a fanned out universe: the nature of “imperial law” and extra-territorial jurisdiction; the stirring role of WikiLeaks in exposing state atrocities; the regenerative tonic Assange had given to an ungrateful, envious Fourth Estate; the healthy emergence of non-mainstream media; and the tactics necessary to convince politicians that the publisher’s release was urgently warranted.

Two speakers were spear-sharp on both the legacy of Assange and what had to be done to secure his release.  The Greek former finance minister and rabble-rousing economist, Yanis Varoufakis, was encouraging on both scores.  A picture of pugilistic health, Varoufakis pondered “what Julian had taught” him.  People forget, Varoufakis reminded his audience, Assange’s genius as one of the original cypherpunks, able to build a website that has managed to weather hacking storms and stay afloat in treacherous digital waters.  Whistleblowers and leakers could be assured of anonymous contributions to the WikiLeaks website.

He was also impressed by the man’s towering, almost holy integrity.  As much as they disagreed, he recalled, “and as much as I wanted to throttle the man”, he brimmed with intellectual self-worth and value.  On the subject of revealing his sources, quite contrary to the spirit and substance of the US indictment, Assange was scrupulous to a fault.  To betray any would endanger them.

Most movingly, Varoufakis reflected on his own intellectual awakening when reading Assange’s meditations on the internet; how it might, just might, fracture the imperium of information guarded so closely by powerful interests.  Finally, the common citizenry would have at their disposal the means of returning the serve on spying and surveillance.  The digital mirror would enable us to see what they – the state operatives, their goons and their lickspittle adjutants – could see about us.  This was as significant to Varoufakis as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, books he read with some anxiety during the days of Greece’s military junta.

On the nature of power – in this case, the menace posed by the US imperium – Australia had to be break free and embrace non-alignment.  With characteristic flavour, Varoufakis characterised Washington’s exertion of influence over its satellite states as that of a mafia gang: “They manufacture insecurity in order to sell protection.”  It was a brilliant formulation and goes to the centre of that infantile desire of Australian policy makers to endorse AUKUS, a dangerous military compact with the US and the UK that will mortgage the country to the sum of A$368 billion.

Even assuming that this arrangement would remain in place, those in the nation’s capital, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, had to ask the fundamental question on Assange.  “Make it a condition of AUKUS that Assange returns to Australia,” insisted Varoufakis.  “And the powerful will respect you even if you disagree with them.”  To date, the PM had been a sore disappointment and hardly likely to be respected, even by the near comatose US President Joe Biden.

Virility, however, may be returning.  That theme was evidenced in the sharp address from Greg Barns, a seasoned barrister and campaign strategist who has been involved in the WikiLeaks journey since 2012.  While drawing attention to the outrageous assertion of extra-territorial jurisdiction by Washington to target Assange, he saw much promise in the political dawn in Canberra.  A few years ago, he would never have envisaged being in a room where the Australian Greens leader, Adam Bandt, would be seated next to a fossil fuel advocate and Nationals senator, Matthew Cannavan.  “Beside Mr Green sat Mr Coal.”  Their common purpose: Assange’s release and the termination of a state of affairs so unacceptable it is no longer the talk of academic common rooms and specialist fora.

For the audience and budding activists, Barns had sound advice.  Pester local political representatives.  Arrange meetings, preferably in groups, with the local member.  Remind them of the significance of the issue.  “Make it an alliance issue.”  There is nothing more worrying to a backbencher than concerned “traffic” through the electoral office that suggests a shift in voter sentiment.  “I will bet good odds that the treatment of Assange has made it into party room discussions,” declared Barns with certitude.

In closing, Assange’s tireless father, John Shipton, washed his audience with gentle, meditative thoughts.  Much like a calming shaman, he journeyed through some of the day’s themes, prodding with questions.  Was AUKUS a bribe?  A tribute?  A payment for knowledge?  But with optimism, Shipton could feel hope about his son: “Specks of gold” had formed to stir consciousness in the executive.  Those in power were at long last listening.

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

And there was much to cherish about Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic, part of a global movement to publicise the importance of freeing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains in the forbidding confines of Belmarsh Prison in London.  Held on March 9 in Melbourne’s Storey Hall, it was a salutatory minder that the publisher’s plight has become one of immediate concern.  Worn down by judicial process and jailed by a US surrogate power, he faces a vicious political indictment of 17 charges focused on the Espionage Act of 1917 and one on computer intrusion.  A UK High Court appeal on the matter of extradition hangs in the balance.

The thematic nature of such events can be challenging.  One should never be too gloomy – and in Assange’s case, be it in terms of health, torture, injustice and pondered attempts by US intelligence officials to take his life or kidnap him – there is much to be gloomy about.  Bleakness should be allowed, but only in modest, stiff doses.  Try, as far as you can, to inject a note of encouraging humour into proceedings.  Humour unsettles the tyrannically inclined, punctures the ideologue’s confidence.  Then reflect, broadly, on the astonishing legacy on the subject and ask that vital question: Where to now?

The sessions, superbly steered through by Mary Kostakidis (“Try to avoid lengthy preambles to your questions, please”), covered a fanned out universe: the nature of “imperial law” and extra-territorial jurisdiction; the stirring role of WikiLeaks in exposing state atrocities; the regenerative tonic Assange had given to an ungrateful, envious Fourth Estate; the healthy emergence of non-mainstream media; and the tactics necessary to convince politicians that the publisher’s release was urgently warranted.

Two speakers were spear-sharp on both the legacy of Assange and what had to be done to secure his release.  The Greek former finance minister and rabble-rousing economist, Yanis Varoufakis, was encouraging on both scores.  A picture of pugilistic health, Varoufakis pondered “what Julian had taught” him.  People forget, Varoufakis reminded his audience, Assange’s genius as one of the original cypherpunks, able to build a website that has managed to weather hacking storms and stay afloat in treacherous digital waters.  Whistleblowers and leakers could be assured of anonymous contributions to the WikiLeaks website.

He was also impressed by the man’s towering, almost holy integrity.  As much as they disagreed, he recalled, “and as much as I wanted to throttle the man”, he brimmed with intellectual self-worth and value.  On the subject of revealing his sources, quite contrary to the spirit and substance of the US indictment, Assange was scrupulous to a fault.  To betray any would endanger them.

Most movingly, Varoufakis reflected on his own intellectual awakening when reading Assange’s meditations on the internet; how it might, just might, fracture the imperium of information guarded so closely by powerful interests.  Finally, the common citizenry would have at their disposal the means of returning the serve on spying and surveillance.  The digital mirror would enable us to see what they – the state operatives, their goons and their lickspittle adjutants – could see about us.  This was as significant to Varoufakis as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, books he read with some anxiety during the days of Greece’s military junta.

On the nature of power – in this case, the menace posed by the US imperium – Australia had to be break free and embrace non-alignment.  With characteristic flavour, Varoufakis characterised Washington’s exertion of influence over its satellite states as that of a mafia gang: “They manufacture insecurity in order to sell protection.”  It was a brilliant formulation and goes to the centre of that infantile desire of Australian policy makers to endorse AUKUS, a dangerous military compact with the US and the UK that will mortgage the country to the sum of A$368 billion.

Even assuming that this arrangement would remain in place, those in the nation’s capital, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, had to ask the fundamental question on Assange.  “Make it a condition of AUKUS that Assange returns to Australia,” insisted Varoufakis.  “And the powerful will respect you even if you disagree with them.”  To date, the PM had been a sore disappointment and hardly likely to be respected, even by the near comatose US President Joe Biden.

Virility, however, may be returning.  That theme was evidenced in the sharp address from Greg Barns, a seasoned barrister and campaign strategist who has been involved in the WikiLeaks journey since 2012.  While drawing attention to the outrageous assertion of extra-territorial jurisdiction by Washington to target Assange, he saw much promise in the political dawn in Canberra.  A few years ago, he would never have envisaged being in a room where the Australian Greens leader, Adam Bandt, would be seated next to a fossil fuel advocate and Nationals senator, Matthew Cannavan.  “Beside Mr Green sat Mr Coal.”  Their common purpose: Assange’s release and the termination of a state of affairs so unacceptable it is no longer the talk of academic common rooms and specialist fora.

For the audience and budding activists, Barns had sound advice.  Pester local political representatives.  Arrange meetings, preferably in groups, with the local member.  Remind them of the significance of the issue.  “Make it an alliance issue.”  There is nothing more worrying to a backbencher than concerned “traffic” through the electoral office that suggests a shift in voter sentiment.  “I will bet good odds that the treatment of Assange has made it into party room discussions,” declared Barns with certitude.

In closing, Assange’s tireless father, John Shipton, washed his audience with gentle, meditative thoughts.  Much like a calming shaman, he journeyed through some of the day’s themes, prodding with questions.  Was AUKUS a bribe?  A tribute?  A payment for knowledge?  But with optimism, Shipton could feel hope about his son: “Specks of gold” had formed to stir consciousness in the executive.  Those in power were at long last listening.

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

Television New Zealand is proposing to axe its long-running and award-winning current affairs programme Sunday, hosted by veteran broadcaster Miriama Kamo.

It is part of plans to cut dozens of jobs at the public broadcaster.

Staff were learning which programmes will be affected at a series of meetings today.

• READ MORE: TVNZ to cut up to 68 jobs in restructure – ‘dire for democracy’
• Other TVNZ and Newshub reports

TVNZ said a proposal had been presented to Sunday staff which could result in cancellation of the programme.

The show was named Best Current Affairs Programme at the Voyager Media Awards and the New Zealand Television Awards last year.

It first aired in 2002 and has run for more than two decades, showcasing a mix of New Zealand stories and reports from overseas.

One award-winning investigation looked into the 2008 Chinese poisoned milk scandal, and how patients were treated at Porirua Hospital.

Veteran journalists like John Hudson, Janet McIntyre and Ian Sinclair have contributed to the show.

News bulletins may be canned
RNZ understands the 1News Midday and Tonight bulletins may also be canned, and consumer affairs programme Fair Go could to be cut too.

Its understood four out of 10 roles at youth platform Re: News are set to go — head of Re: News, head of content, production manager, and a journalist.

Its understood four out of 10 roles at youth platform Re: News are set to go — head of Re: News, head of content, production manager, and a journalist.

The remaining five staff will have a change in reporting line, reporting to TVNZ digital news and content general manager Veronica Schmidt.

RNZ has been told there will be a shift away from social media in a bid to drive more traffic to the Re: News website. Its documentary series funded by NZ On Air is also set to be canned.

The digital media platform was launched in 2017 as a current affairs platform aimed at audiences under-served by mainstream news.

It produces documentary videos, articles and podcasts particularly relevant to youth, Māori, Pasifika, rainbow communities, and migrant and regional audiences.

The platform won four awards at last year’s Voyager Media Awards, including best news, current affairs or specialist publication; video journalist of the year; best video documentary series; and best original podcast — seasonal/serial.

On average, Re: News receives more than a million video views each month.

Difficult choices
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell said in a statement that difficult choices had to be made to ensure the broadcaster remained sustainable.

It comes just a week after rival Newshub announced it had proposed to axe its entire news operation of 300 staff.

A hui for all news and current affairs staff is due to be held at 1pm, following the individual programme meetings.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, speaking at a press conference in Whangārei, said he was concerned about reports of job cuts and that it was a “pretty tough time if you’re a TVNZ employee”.

Luxon said consumers are consuming news in different ways and advertising and revenue models are changing.

He said it was a pretty tough time for people working in the media but he had travelled the country and many other sectors were doing it tough.

Media companies needed to evolve and innovate in order to adapt, he said.

Fair Go
Fair Go is one of New Zealand’s longest running and most popular television series.

The consumer affairs show, which investigates complaints from viewers, first aired in April 1977 and is just shy of its 47th birthday.

During a 2021 interview with RNZ’s Afternoons programme, original host and creator Brian Edwards said he was inspired by a BBC programme called That’s Life.

“One particular segment was on consumers and I think that was the germ of the idea, that we could do a programme in New Zealand where we could look at protecting people right there in their normal daily lives from rip offs and scams by various people and it it just soared from the beginning. I mean, it was tremendous,” Edwards said.

“I suppose my main function was to grill the villains, and because I’m a really quite unpleasant person, this fit in my my personality very well.”

Well-known presenter Kevin Milne hosted the show for almost three decades, from 1983 to 2010.

“It was beautifully set up, really, and it didn’t require any change as much and still hasn’t, you know, 44 years later,” he told Afternoons during the same interview.

‘Good deal of cynicism’
“I remember that there was a good deal of cynicism in the early days from the newsroom journalists who thought that because there was an element of entertainment on the show that you couldn’t call it real journalism, which was nonsense because it ended up leading the way in terms of investigative journalism.”

The show broke new ground, Milne said.

“It’s hard to believe now that back then, at the time when Brian set up those programmes, most broadcasters never named names. I can remember now hearing news stories which could say a well-known department store in Lambton Quay appeared in court this morning. No mention [of name], and when Fair Go started up, it was decided it would name names.”

Edwards said that was an “absolutely critical” aspect of the show.

“The thing would have been pointless I think, if you couldn’t name names. The thing was to expose the wrong doers if you like . . . what was the point in in doing that if you couldn’t name names?

“And I think we probably, together, our team, won some battles there and being able to do that. It took a while and I think there was a degree of nervousness by the broadcaster and eventually it turned out all right.”

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

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

Photograph Source: Flickr user walnut whippet – CC BY 2.0

Journalist John Pilger, 84, died on December 30, 2023, in London, England.

John Pilger was from Down Under. You could tell from his acerbic worldview, his twang, the hat he wore, and his recreational activity listed on his website: Swimming, sunning, reading and mulling. He was also, like so many of his Down Under mates, a contra. Contra this, contra that, contra the cat in the hat. I don’t believe he ever slipped into cantankerous, like a lot of them do around this place.

Pilger came from a cultural milieu that British writer Howard Jacobson, on an extended tour of the continent in the late ‘80s, once summed up this way:

I gave myself up to continuous discomfort, bad roads, the bullying babble of long-distance Australian bus drivers, the uncertainties of cheap motels, venomous spiders, the monologues of racists, and the difficulty of making sense of a country that was at one and the same time magnanimous and cruel, sophisticated and suspicious, self-righteous and free-spirited.

Indeed, I have resided here more than 25 years, and my take as an American expat is that Oz is what America would have been like had the South won the Civil War. We’d still have slavery. Taylor Swift and her publicist would be picking cotton. And the national anthem would have been “Free Bird” by Rhinehold Skinhead. (And it would be an improvement over that brassy bombast we currently march to.)

Assange and Freedom of Thought

Pilger shared with Julian Assange an anti-Empire modus vivendi, and yet he rarely criticized the Union Jack symbol of Britain’s empire, which takes up so much territory on the Aussie flag. And he lived in England, where he died last December. Instead, like Assange he went after, with his potent journalism, perhaps the greatest of all empire’s — America, which, depending on how you count the matchsticks, has been at almost continuous war somewhere since WW2. Its Military-Industrial-Complex (no myth) stretching its tentacles around the globe by means of neo-liberalism and enforced by neo-conservatism. No real checks or balances. And the public always picks up the tab. Pilger was on top of this.

John Pilger was an early avid supporter of Julian Assange after he was house-arrested, suspected of rape of a lesser degree, unlawful coercion and multiple cases of sexual molestation, according to allegations laid by Swedish officials. Pilger put up the bail for Assange’s release from jail.  When Assange, after clear indications that the Americans were working with the British to have him directly or indirectly extradited (by way of Sweden) to America, Assange sought and received asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012. Pilger lost the bail money he put up for Assange. But he understood the situation and continued to publicly and privately support the independent, even radical publisher of Empire’s Burlesque. Pilger knew what the democratic world would be losing if Assange was taken down by the Empire — the beginning of the destruction of the Bill of Rights in the US that make Americans born free to express and independently think by law, with protections against corporate and military miscreants who look to erode the guarantees.  450,000,000 guns in circulation around America suggests that folks are going Minuteman again and are ‘getting ready for the show’ (as Dylan would say).

John Pilger knew about this erosive power; he keenly understood the hypocrisy and danger of an Empire spreading its ‘way of life’ around the globe, which seemed to include the same guarantees of freedom to everyone (see Bruce Springstein’s great rendition of Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” in East Berlin just before the fall of the wall there.) Freedom is the product. Distribute the product. Get them hooked and keep them that way. Everywhere. (China went, Oh-oh, here come the parlors again, and resisted with face-saving handsomeness.) But at home the Kochs were sucking the light out of the eyes of children, like black holes in the sky (Pink Floyd), beginning with Citizens United.  Citizens??? Assange knows. Pilger knew.

The War on Democracy

In 2007, Pilger put out a new and ‘important’ documentary, The War on Democracy.  As Pilger explains at his site (where his documentaries can be watched for free), “It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.”  It was a good case study film, in my humble O. Last year saw Lefties commemorate the coup that took place in Chile on 9/11 1973.  It was partially orchestrated Henry Kissinger and his hoods (Ellsberg feared for his life, with K calling him “the most dangerous man in America who had to be stopped at any cost”), in collusion with corporations like IT&T, to make Chile pay for its socialist evolution that included the nationalization of copper — so important to telephony and the internet of minds.  What came out of this section of the film that was so amazing was the interview with Duane Clarridge, an American senior operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  Clarridge, in a now oft-repeated segment, lays bare the soul of American foreign policy and its purpose in language so brazen that it shocks on the first viewing.

“We’re not gonna put up with nonsense.” Mind control is next. No doubt, Elon Musk’s Neuralink and its promise of “telepathic” delivery of thoughts is the next fascist bootstep.

The film also weighed in on the regional phenomenon that Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez represented. As with Chile and its wealth distribution, Chavez opted to nationalize oil; essentially, as with Salvador Allende in Chile, signing his own death warrant, as the narcissistic hit men like to put it. (You’ve seen the movie.) As Pilger puts it, the film describes “a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable; they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us.” Venezuela immediately got on the US MIC elites shitlist with the nationalization and saw themselves hit with ‘economic sanctions,’ the softshoe version of declared war. In Orgy of Thieves, Jeffrey St. Clair briefly tackles this bellicosity in his essay, “Venezuela and the Imperial Script.”  He begins by pointing out that ‘Chavez was the best thing to happen to Venezuela’s poor in a very long time.’ He brought health care, education and literacy programs, and school meals to the poor. Writes St. Clair,

[T]he economy grew at close to 12 percent soon after, and with world oil prices near $40 a barrel at the time, the government had extra billions that it put into social programs. So naturally the United States wanted him out, just as the rich in Venezuela did. Chavez was re-elected in 2000 for a six-year term. A US-backed coup against him was badly botched in 2002.

It is not unexplained, or even hostile to the US, to see Venezuela then turn and sell their oil to China, America’s principal global economic rival.  And it’s no surprise to see the US heavily support Ukraine, with weapons and money, in its defense of Russia’s rejection of the plan for Ukraine to join NATO. And Russia has faced ‘economic sanctions’ (and, according to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, an actual act of war by seeing that the newly Nordstrom II pipeline was destroyed underwater by demolitionists), and, not surprisingly, has partnered up with China in resisting the imperial pressure.  The background that Pilger provides in The War Against Democracy is a helpful reminder of the stakes and the games being played by folks who probably inspired the series Black List, starring James Spader.

Palestine: The Other Holocaust

At his blog, Pilger starts a 9/11 2014 article about Palestine — “Breaking the last taboo – Gaza and the threat of world war” — with a strong quote from the ‘visionary’ Edward Said:

There is a taboo on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel. Only when this truth is out can any of us be free.

Said reminds the reader (and witness thereby) that “us” means “I am he as you are he as you are me / And we are all together.” (Lennon). That’s what the United Nations is supposed to represent — a congress of rational minds seeking to avoid war and conflict and to solve pressing global issues, such as nukes, climate change, and the erosion of democracy (Chomsky).  Pilger observed after the 2014 Gaza War:

The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a siege of all of us. The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symptom of much of humanity under siege and a warning that the threat of a new world war is growing by the day.

It didn’t happen then, but it sure seems more inevitable than ever.

But the UN has been a depressing failure — its latest being the withdrawal of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from assistance to Palestinian refugees that includes up to two million people, including perhaps a million children. The US did not veto or intervene in this ‘economic sanction’ move. Perhaps they think its effects will be worth it (Albright). One wonders why ‘economic sanctions’ are not regarded as war crimes, since they are declarations and their known result is the death of innumerable children.

Former South African president Nelson Mandela expressed his support for a two-state solution between Palestians and Israelis. Pilger quotes Mandela, in his 2014 article, expressing the urgency of the cause:  It is “the greatest moral issue of our time.” Mandela suggests a solution should be worked out peacefully, but that if the process is foiled by political intransigence then Palestinians are justified in using violence:

Mandela is not advocating violence, but suggesting like Malcolm X that vital corrective changes to a society’s ethos need to be driven with pressure, by any means necessary, including violence, if the intolerable situation cannot be settled politically. It may be a casus belli.

In a September 2022 piece on propaganda that included reporting on events between Palestinians and Israelis, Pilger remarks on the “hypnotic” numbness that mainstream media places the average reader in, likening the acceptance of government indifference to the spell Germans fell under during the Nazi and captured so startlingly by Leni Riefenstahl’s films. Although Pilger has criticized the craven political inadequacies of the Five Eyes — six if you count Israel — in countering the growing global fascistic turn of events, heaps the most blame on the US. Pilger quotes from Harold Pinter’s attack on American policy delivered during his acceptance speech for Nobel Prize in Literature (2005). Pinter said:

US foreign policy is best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.

Like The Birthday Party which ends with a non-conforming Stan being taken away from his home by thugs who take him off to blow out his fuckin candles.

Australian Aboriginals

Pilger also was a strong chronicler of the violence and neglect meted out to Australian Aboriginals over the years.  Last October, Australian voters held a referendum that would have symbolically allowed Aboriginals to participate in legislative decisions about their affairs.  Australia, which has sat on the committee that advanced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wanted to show what tokenism really meant by allowing Aboriginal elders an opportunity to sit in on mighty whities deciding on their affairs.  For lucky elders, it was a chance to go to the Big Smoke, hotel and meals paid for (including grog), and be honored before the meeting began by having a speaker acknowledge Aboriginal ownership of the land the meeting was taking place on.  But the referendum failed.  The white Aussies had already apologized, for fuck’s sake, and real representation might have been uncomfortably close to pow-wows about reparations.

John Pilger’s documentary Utopia (2013) was his last of several films he released on Aboriginal conditions and politics.  The film is described this way:

This Australian Tale of Two Cities contrasts the material comfort of the majority with the First Australians who die from Dickensian diseases in their 40s and are imprisoned at a rate six times that of blacks in apartheid South Africa. The state of Western Australia, the richest in the nation, has the highest incarceration rate of juveniles in the world – most of them Indigenous.

That’s about the size of it.

Western Australia is where I reside, at the moment.  To me, the most significant symbol of the Divide is represented by the history and use of nearby Rottnest Island.  Settled by the Dutch, the name comes from the fact that when they trekked about the small island they came across teeming hordes of what they thought were feral and crazy-looking but friendly fuckin rats, which turned out to be what they call quokkas, marsupials native to the island. The island was called Wadjemup by the Noongar peoples, which means “place across the water where the spirits are.”

I have come to think of the furry little critters on the island as the embodiment of those Aboriginal spirits. (Maybe I’ve watched Caddyshack (1980) too many times, hepped up on dope mistaking the bong for my saxophone.) The island had been used to imprison and hard-labor wayward ‘blackfellas’ from 1838 to 1931. Military purposes took over from there. Now it’s settled with 300 white people living there year round with all the bells and whistles of mainland civilization — supermarket, post office, coffee shop, bars, hotels, a packie, and a place where you can rent bicycles. Every year, white people have a swim from Cottesloe Beach to Rottnest to mostly piss off the local sharks (who must settle for stragglers, usually Yanks) and demonstrate their grace under fire.

In an April 13 piece for Guardian, Pilger likes to contrast the way Rottnest experience is felt by whites versus Noongar.  He writes,

This is Rottnest Island, whose scabrous wild beauty and isolation evoked, for me, Robben Island in South Africa. Empires are never short of devil’s islands; what makes Rottnest different – indeed, what makes Australia different – is silence and denial on an epic scale.

While whites prepare for a day or perhaps a weekend of “family fun” on the island, kids chasing each to see who can be first to the lighthouse that faces the Indian Ocean, local Aboriginals “are preparing for the pain.”  Pilger goes on:

What was done was the starving, torture, humiliation and murder of the first Australians. Wrenched from their communities in an act of genocide that divided and emasculated the indigenous nations, shackled men and boys as young as eight endured the perilous nine-hour journey in an open longboat. Terrified prisoners were jammed into a windowless “holding cell”, like an oversized kennel. Today, a historical plaque refers to it as “the Boathouse”. The suppression is breathtaking.

Ten years later it is still not necessarily cool to talk openly in white Western Australia about such matters. Some of these people are the kind that would seriously argue as a valid point (were it true) that it was only 5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust (they roll their eyes) not 6.

China Syndrome

One theme that haunted Pilger toward the end of his life was a worry that a war with China would break out.  He voiced his reasons for this concern in his next to last documentary film, The Coming War with China (2016). Again, he points to the US empire as a precipitating agent in any future martial confrontation, Pilger largely arguing that the US doesn’t want the economic competition that the rise of China brings as a great economic producer. (One remembers similar fears of a Japanese rise.) He writes in a May 2023 piece, “There Is A War Coming Shrouded in Propaganda,”

In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Postmodernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean? Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’.

It’s a bit of a rant, with lots of Down Under twang, but spot-on.

This month will probably be the month that Julian Assange is brought in chains to America to undergo the ordeal of a political trial under the Espionage Act of 1917, which he almost certainly will not win — as it is based not on criminal or justice activities but political. It would have been appropriate and potentially ‘woking’ to have had John Pilger in America during the show trial, on camera, scathing the Empire’s agenda and the mainstream media, which has so much to lose, for its lack of fire in the belly.

The reader is invited to check out Pilger’s collection of writings and documentary films (free to view) on his website: johnpilger.com

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

No fighting preceded the attack, locals said. Junta troops began shooting into Minbya township’s Sin Gyi Pyin village late on Tuesday night and the artillery hit two  houses. The explosions burned down nearby houses, said a resident who did not want to be named for security reasons.

“They died due to the heavy artillery. Two young men died on the spot. Another woman died around 12 am. The artillery dropped when they were sleeping,” he said. 

“Two houses hit by the artillery were also burned. There was no fight. It was just shooting for no reason. They have been shooting like this for two nights.”

The attack killed Saw Muda, a woman in her 50s, as well as Mar Mauk Arlarm and Swe Yauk Huson, both in their 20s. The victims are all from Sin Gyi Pyin village.

Locals claimed that the heavy artillery was fired by the junta’s Infantry Battalion-380 based in Minbya, but RFA could not independently confirm this.

The injured villagers have been sent to Minbya Hospital, and families of the deceased are preparing to have their bodies cremated in the village. 

Those hurt in the attack are from three Minbya neighborhoods but the total number of injured people is not yet known. 

RFA called Rakhine’s junta spokesperson Hla Thein for comment on the attacks, but he did not answer the phone.

Fighting in Rakhine state resumed on Monday after a year-long ceasefire. Since then, five civilians have died and 18 have been injured by heavy artillery explosions and rounds of gunfire by junta troops. 

The dead are from Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U, Maungdaw, Rathedaung and Minbya townships. Fighting in other parts of Rakhine state killed two more civilians from Ann township on Tuesday night when junta troops fired into Thea Kan Htaung village. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

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

Happy Halloween! 

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

From winning a single-party majority in 2020, Labour’s vote has virtually halved in 2023 in the Aotearoa New Zealand general election.

Pre-election polls appear to have under-estimated support for National, which on the provisional results last night can form a government with ACT and will not need NZ First, despite those same polls pointing to a three-way split.

While the Greens and Te Pāti Māori both saw big gains, taking crucial electorate seats, it has been at the expense of Labour.

• READ MORE: NZ election 2023: National, ACT poised to form new government
• Other NZ election reports

Special votes are yet to be counted, and Te Pāti Māori winning so many electorate seats will cause an “overhang”, increasing the size of Parliament and requiring a larger majority to govern.

There will also be a byelection in the Port Waikato electorate on November 25, which National is expected to win.

So the picture may change between now and November 3 when the official result is revealed.

But on last night’s count, the left bloc is out of power and the right is back.

Big shift in the Māori electorates
Te Pāti Māori has performed better than expected in the Māori electorates – taking down some titans of the Labour Party and winning four of the seven seats.

The party vote remained at 2.5 perecent — consistent with 2020.

One of the biggest upsets was 21-year-old Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke’s win over Labour stalwart Nanaia Mahuta in the Hauraki-Waikato electorate. Mahuta has represented the electorate since 2008 and has been in Parliament since 1996.

This was a must-win race for Mahuta, the current foreign affairs minister, after she announced she would not be running on the Labour party list.

Labour won all seven Māori seats in 2017 and six in 2020.

Advance voting
In 2017, 1.24 million votes were cast before election day, more than the previous two elections combined.

In 2020, this rose to 1.97 million people – an extremely high early vote figure attributable to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, more than 1.3 million New Zealanders cast advance votes before election day – higher than 2017 but significantly lower than 2020.

The comeback kid
After a dismal showing at the 2020 election, NZ First’s Winston Peters has yet again shown himself to be the comeback kid of New Zealand politics. Peters and his party have provisionally gained nearly 6.5 percent of the vote, giving them eight seats in Parliament.

On the current numbers, the National Party will not need NZ First to help form the government. But the result is still a massive reversal of fortune for Peters, who failed to meet the 5 percent threshold or win an electorate seat in 2020.

The heart of Wellington goes Green
Urban electorates in the capital Wellington have resoundingly shifted left, with wins for the Green Party’s Tamatha Paul in Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter in Rongotai.

Chlöe Swarbrick has retained her seat in Auckland Central.

The Wellington electorates had previously been Labour strongholds. But the decision by outgoing Finance Minister Grant Robertson to compete as a list-only MP opened Wellington Central to Paul, currently a city councillor.

Genter takes the seat from outgoing Labour MP Paul Eagle.

Both Wellington electorates have also seen sizeable chunks of the party vote — 30 percent in Rongotai and almost 36 percent in Wellington Central — go to the Greens.

Debrin Foxcroft, deputy New Zealand editor, The Conversation; Finlay Macdonald, New Zealand editor, The Conversation; Matt Garrow, editorial web developer, The Conversation, and Veronika Meduna, science, health + environment New Zealand editor, The Conversation. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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

A sleeping car on an ÖBB Nightjet train from Zurich to Zagreb. Photo: Matthew Stevenson.

During the two years of the pandemic, I did not return to Sarajevo, although our informal band of brothers in Geneva shipped thousands of books there amid the global gloom.

A New Life for the European Enlightenment

One collection came from Syracuse, New York, where an esteemed professor of European history, Joseph Levine, had devoted his life to collecting books about the European Enlightenment.

After he died, his family found no place to donate the roughly 30,000 volumes, as libraries in the United States and western Europe generally have no interest in acquiring such collections (as we discovered with our friend Gene Schulman’s books). Eastern Europe is another story, although again the barrier was the cost and logistics of shipping.

The Syracuse books eventually went into more than 1,000 boxes and a 40-foot container, which for about five pandemic months drifted its way from the United States to Bosnia.

At the Bosnian border, even though the books were a gift to the national library (and thus the people of Bosnia), they were held up until money could be found to pay a shakedown import tax—an indication that everything in Bosnia comes at a price.

Eventually, the container was backed into the loading dock of the library, where everyone from the directors down to the maintenance staff carried boxes into storage. Now on the top floor of the national and university library there’s a large room devoted to the enlightenment. As Thomas Jefferson (surely a product of the Enlightenment) liked to say: “I cannot live without books.”

Balkan Railways Run Off the Grid

Occasionally to get back to Bosnia, I would check Sarajevo train schedules in my various timetables. I learned that not only was train service from Zagreb to Sarajevo still suspended, but that the Talgo train from Banja Luka was no longer running. Nor did the train connection to Sarajevo from Belgrade, which ended during the Yugoslav wars, survive a brief revival after the fighting ended.

As best I could determine, Bosnia-Herzegovina had become one of the few countries in Europe that no longer had any international train service (the others are North Macedonia and Albania).

It spoke to the larger isolation of the Balkans in pan-European evolution: during the pandemic, train service was cut from Belgrade to Skopje and Thessaloniki (and then on to Athens); from Belgrade to Bucharest; from Belgrade to Sofia; and from Bucharest to Istanbul. And none of these trains are operating today, although I may be the only traveler who misses them.

Nevertheless, when this past winter I wanted to get back to Sarajevo, I was determined to get as close as I could on trains, which meant taking an intercity Swiss train to Zurich and catching at 20:40 an ÖBB Nightjet sleeper to Zagreb.

On my night train from Zurich to Zagreb, I was lucky to have a single compartment of my own, with a sink, a small desk on which to unfold my maps (the German general staff traveled with fewer maps than I cart around), and a closet in which to store my grip.

Occasionally on other night trains, I find a shower at the end of the corridor, and finally, train companies are installing toilets that are neither open to the tracks nor prone to backing up five hours into the journey. But progress is slow.

The Night Train Revival

For those who last spent a night on a European train in the 1970s—squeezed into an upper berth of a six-person couchette that reeked of stale cigarette smoke and beer spilled on the floor—ÖBB is the Austrian national railway company that has tried, almost single-handedly, to revive the lost charms of European night trains.

Into the 1980s, Europe was awash with couchettes—rolling dormitories—that rumbled through the night with stacks of prison berths and a vile toilet at the end of the corridor. No wonder everyone embraced easyJet and Ryanair as a way to get from Barcelona to Milan or Paris to Rome.

With Vienna and Zurich as its hubs, ÖBB Nightjet now has a fleet of sleepers that each night crisscross Europe to places such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Warsaw, and Budapest.

Under its EuroNight brand (the various names are confusing), together with other national rail companies, it markets additional sleepers on secondary routes, say from Hamburg to Basel or Vienna to Krakow.

In all, it means that central Europe especially is well served by a network of night trains that roll (in some fashion) from Stockholm to Rome and from Amsterdam to Bucharest.

All Aboard from Geneva to London?

Best of all, night train companies are responding to passenger demand, especially among travelers who believe that short-haul European budget airlines flooding the biosphere with carbon waste will add up to death for the planet.

Unfortunately, the great sell-off of rolling stock (it started about fifteen years ago) means that there is a shortage of sleeping cars, especially those in which you would like to rest your head.

I live in Geneva, which has the dubious distinction of having no night train service, despite not-so-long-ago having sleepers to Barcelona, Florence, Rome, Venice, and Trieste. Mostly what the city needs is a night train to London, as the local airport sends off some fifteen daily flights to Great Britain.

With luck, the era of budget airlines might now give way to the return of the night train, especially if the costs are moderate and the accommodations are a pleasure.

European Sleeper: The New Wagons-Lits

To supplement the sleeping car inventory shortfall, a new company, European Sleeper (“The Good Night Train…”), has just started up, with nightly service between Brussels, via Amsterdam, to Berlin.

Its hope is to make booking night trains—now somewhat complicated, like the paperwork for a second mortgage—an easy online experience and to build up train sets of sleeping cars that are modern, clean, and efficient to serve, for example, the trade between London and Provence or Paris and Madrid.

In many ways, European Sleeper would love to be the successor to Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which once operated the Orient Express between Paris and Istanbul.

Actually, the historic company still exists—if not its Orient Express except as a luxury cruise train—and it even owns sleeping cars and catering franchises used on national rail lines, but the quality of sleeping cars in Europe has taken a dive in the last fifty years.

Balkanized Railways

The problem for all sleeping car operations in Europe today is that while the European Union is a presence in many industries across the continent, the rail network remains distinctly nationalistic, as if Bismarck (or, god forbid, Mussolini) were running the trains.

To be sure there are celebrated high-speed international trains, such as Eurostar from London to Paris or Amsterdam, but even that operates more as a land-based airline than an international railway company (it scans luggage, obsesses over passports, body searches, jams passengers into dank waiting spaces, and features cramped seating, as though it were easyStar).

Otherwise, many trains stop at their national borders, and few companies have tried to use EU advantages to operate services in other countries, which would permit, say, Deutsche Bahn to run trains from Barcelona to Paris. The result is a Balkanized rail network in Europe, which with the coming of discount airlines decided to kill off its night trains.

Even the thriving sale of Eurail/Interrail passes that allow for seamless train travel across Europe is being thwarted by national rail polices that have developed the most arcane (and frustrating) rules regarding seat reservations, often rendering the passes inoperable on anything except some midnight milk trains. And don’t even think of taking along a bicycle unless it’s a folder.

Melania’s First Catwalk

On my overnight train to Zagreb (which was a great pleasure), I woke up as the train was passing near Lake Bled, a fashionable year-round resort in Slovenia. From my window, I could see neither castles nor azure blue water, but from the surrounding mountains dusted with snow, I took it on faith that the area is one of alpine splendor.

The railway breakfast was a prepackaged croissant, yogurt, and instant coffee, so instead I grazed from my picnic sack as the train crossed the rolling alpine landscape between Ljubljana and Zagreb.

About halfway along that line, the train passed through Sevnica in the Sava Valley, where Melania Trump spent much of her childhood in what was then Yugoslavia.

In her first iteration, she was Melanija Knavs, although as a teen model, she took the German form of her last name, hence Knauss, and at some point dropped the Slavic “j” from her first name.

Flooding the Old Real Estate Developer Market

As Yugoslavia was breaking up and Slovenia was gaining its independence, her family moved to Ljubljana. Then for her modeling work in the mid-1990s, Melania decamped to Milan and eventually New York City, where she managed to flip a short-term visa into permanent residence, if not a glass slipper.

She met her future husband, Donald J. Trump, in 1998, at a fashion show at the Kit Kat Club, where (correct me if I am wrong) older men of means looked over the dealership of the assembled new models.

Seen from the train in the bright morning sun, Sevnica looked both well-tended and prosperous, although I am sure that it felt claustrophobic to a teenager in newly independent Slovenia, as would have her family’s high-rise apartment in a Ljubljana housing project.

For a while, Melania must have felt like Sleeping Beauty, waking up as the princess of Trump Tower. Now, with her Studio 54 prince under indictment for paying off a porn star and stealing government secrets (leaving aside the civil convictions for sexual abuse and financial three-card monte), Melania may wonder if she would have been happier had she stayed closer to home and raised a family at a chalet near Lake Bled.

Next installment: Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia. Earlier pieces in this series can be read here.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

People lay carnations on a memorial for Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash, near the PMC Wagner Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Aug. 24, 2023.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

For two months after Yevgeny Prigozhin led a brief mutiny that threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power, the mercenary boss traveled freely, attending to business in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as if all were forgotten and forgiven.

But on Wednesday, a very suspicious plane crash killed Prigozhin and decapitated his Wagner Group, the mercenary army that marched on Moscow in June under his command. Dmitry Utkin, Prigozhin’s right hand at Wagner, and Valery Chekalov, a close Prigozhin aide, died along with him as they flew from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The other passengers on the plane were also with Wagner.

On the same day, Putin fired Gen. Sergei Surovikin, chief of the Russian Air Force and one of Prigozhin’s closest supporters in the military.

Although Putin’s role in the plane crash is not entirely clear, Wednesday’s events were reminiscent of the “Night of the Long Knives,” Adolf Hitler’s 1934 purge of the SA, a Nazi paramilitary organization also known as the Brownshirts that Hitler feared was becoming too powerful and too difficult to control.

Prigozhin was similar in many ways to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. An early and avid supporter during Putin’s rise to power in St. Petersburg, Prigozhin grew so close to him that he became known as Putin’s “chef.” Röhm, meanwhile, was one of Hitler’s earliest lieutenants and took part in the Nazi’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, a decade before Hitler gained power.

As Putin consolidated his power in Russia, Prigozhin gained wealth and influence, and his Wagner Group became a key component in Putin’s national security apparatus, increasing Russia’s military reach in the Middle East and Africa. Röhm’s SA also became a fearsome force, one that used brutal tactics against Hitler’s political enemies as Hitler rose to power.

After Hitler gained control over Germany, Röhm ascended as well, yet he also became more radicalized, which led him to become increasingly frustrated with Hitler. He began calling for a drastic transformation of German society and its economy, which angered the German industrialists Hitler wanted to appease. Röhm also sought to take control of the German army by merging it with the SA, thus threatening the status of the German officer corps.

Hitler finally moved against Röhm and the SA in June 1934, when the SA’s leaders were together at a hotel in Bavaria. SS troops loyal to Hitler arrested and executed the SA leaders, while Röhm was arrested and later shot in his jail cell.

Prigozhin’s power peaked over the past year and a half during the war in Ukraine, when the Wagner Group took a leading combat role. But eventually, Prigozhin, like Röhm, became radicalized, launching a series of public diatribes against the Russian military’s handling of the war. He soon found himself at odds with the Russian general staff, and that eventually led him to become a very public critic of the entire Putin regime. After months of vituperative criticism, he finally broke into open rebellion in June, when he led his Wagner forces from Ukraine back into Russia. Seizing control of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub that served as the forward headquarters for Russian military operations in Ukraine, Prigozhin and his forces marched north toward the Russian capital, encountering little resistance.

But with Moscow in sight, Prigozhin froze and suddenly reversed himself. He agreed to a deal with Putin, arranged by Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, and turned his troops around, while Putin agreed to drop all charges against him for his mutiny.

If Prigozhin really believed that Putin would live up to that bargain, he was a fool who didn’t understand the history of dictators.

Although to be fair to Putin, he never did take Prigozhin to court.

Hitler never put Röhm on trial either.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

The post The Night the Cops Tried to Break Thelonious Monk appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Signed copies of the new Gaslit Nation graphic novel Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think! can be ordered at the event, and I'll be personally giving away 10 signed copies of the Mr. Jones film poster. Hope you can join me and celebrate this rare Gaslit Nation Night Out! 

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

The optics — a range of views — how it looks from here — not necessarily how it is. Having decided to write about our present perceptions of the United States from over here, these were just some of my notes. Russian leadership is so out of control right now, it is small wonder some of us find ourselves peering across the pond. As I have said before, I spent five good years in the States. Notions of liberty, however theatrical, were draped everywhere. Through hand-coloured platinum prints of Edward Curtis photographs initially, I began a real passion for Native American history. I still have a number of good American friends. What I wanted to know was if we still saw the US as the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave, a Melting Pot, Eagleland, Uncle Sam’s Country, the Great American Experiment, El País de las Oportunidades, La Terra dei Sogni, HaMedina HaTova, Turtle Island? With optics, I had to remind myself, feelings count as much as facts. Besides, where in the world hasn’t changed? Chang Tang in Tibet? Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland? The fact we are made to feel so close to the US means we shudder slightly whenever we feel it smoulder. I’m not talking about the special relationship here. I have already attempted to write about that, and everything grows so out of date so fast, anyway.

From where I am looking — I happen to be in a well-known American coffee franchise in central London writing this paragraph — we know that many political constellations in the US have changed, or been rearranged. Not just towards hardening divisions or sulphurous tribalisms like the ones we now have over here now, but also in terms of a seeming loss of hope. There used to be so much when I lived there. It is no secret to say that many of us here in London would welcome its return. ’My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth,’ said Lincoln a long time ago. So where has it gone? Or has it always been there all along? Now, come think of it, even Madonna is in intensive care.

Here’s a weird question. Should we as Brits be so arrogant as to blame ourselves for some of these changes in the US? There are some over here wacky enough to believe the improbability of our own Brexit result was partially responsible for encouraging Republicans to vote for someone like Donald Trump, thereby setting off the ricochet of disgruntlements not so dissimilar to our own. Some even more madcap observers go so far as to say Brexit also emboldened Putin, playfully citing ‘Comrade Chaos’ — one of the nicknames for former prime minister Johnson — a contributing factor.

So large, in fact, does the United States loom over here, especially among those of us who have taken the trouble to explore its vast and fascinating interior, we are probably expected to behave by the US in a certain way. It would certainly be no surprise if the shadow cast over us has great significance. With all the ‘egesta’ beginning to really hit the fan now inside Russia, I was actually searching online for coverage of its initial moments on some of the more major US TV networks at the time. While the story was still breaking, there was surprisingly little on at first — nothing on Putin, Prigozhin, Shoigu, or Gerasimov. In fact, during those first few potent minutes, I had to trawl the UK, French, and Middle East channels — as well as Telegram — for updates.

We Brits can be just as bad, if not worse, of course. The day after the coup, some UK newspapers led not with Russia but an American story, albeit with a slight UK twist, about Taylor Swift turning down an invitation to talk on a Meghan Markle podcast, Markle being a woman who one malodorous UK columnist — Jeremy Clarkson — wrote viciously should be seen paraded naked through crowing streets. Meanwhile, not so far from Meghan Markle and Hollywood, a lot of Brits were saddened by hikers in California finding human remains in the mountains where UK actor Julian Sands disappeared over five months ago. At the same time, Californian music idol Lana Del Rey — quintessentially American to many young fans over here — turned up 30 minutes late for her set at Glastonbury, meaning her performance was cut short by six songs. Informed punctuality, I was remembering, used to be such a thing when I lived in the States. Has that gone out of the window? Not entirely, if you believed late British foreign correspondent Ann Leslie, who sadly died last week. (I had the pleasure of meeting Ann through novelist Paul Pickering, and was invited to chaperone her as an elderly doyen to a few events.) ‘Young journalists, especially in America, are much more earnest,’ she said. ‘Computers have done something very peculiar to them. They’re all super-efficient and terribly boring.’ To be fair, people on the European mainland have grown poor at things like acknowledging emails or messages. I find South Americans much better at this. Maybe it’s all that intellectual rigour from the likes of Jorge Luis Borges.

Checking for fresh optics to write about, we were told in the end that US intelligence had known beforehand that Prigozhin was poised to take action. It was also said Putin knew a day or two in advance about his former ally plotting rebellion. It was like another of those Stanley Kubrick moments in ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’. Some of us were reassured however when we read that the US was cautioning Ukrainians not to over-poke the Russian bear while the mutiny was ongoing. The US does after all call the shots.

Panning one’s eyes across an online map of the world shows just how simple it all is when they reach North America. Apart from Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Australia, and Brazil, our eyes enjoy few more simple landings than Canada and the United States. I remember one or two Americans taking great pride in their geographical certainty, with its impossibly long, straight edges for borders and state-lines. I would like out too.

If Brexit and its impact did in fact have influence on the US, which remains highly debatable, one separate concern we do have about coming over here in the opposite direction is the vexatious issue of abortion. Even the BBC was recently highlighting Kristan Hawkins saying she wanted to abolish abortion in the US, and has little patience for politicians anywhere who are insufficiently pro-life. We also note former US Vice-President Mike Pence taking a pop at rivals by supporting a 15-week national abortion ban. In fact, few matters concern some Brits more than staving off this issue from crossing these shores — other than guns — to the point where any moderation that may still be lurking in the British psyche is seriously reached for.

Of course, by far our greatest and possibly least innocuous cultural exposure comes through streaming channels. It used to be that our popcorn moments came in the cinema, or as part of a tight schedule on mainstream TV. Just as I watched Masterpiece Theatre on PBS while living in New York, famously introduced by Alastair Cooke, I also used to study dramas such as M*A*S*H as a boy. (New York, we read now, is enduring a weird blizzard of flying bugs.) Despite more recent moments of televisual or tablet genius such as Mad Men or The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, there has been since a possible dreariness in quality. The last American drama I found truly compelling was still Dopesick. That said, at the risk of reporting myself, apart from A Spy Among Friends, the same can probably be said over here.

As for US news more generally, it runs at times like a treadmill of violence. Take the story of Emma Brown, 12, who shot her father, Daniel Brown, 38, in the abdomen, in Poolville, Texas. Emma, as many Americans know, then shot herself in the head, dying two days later in hospital. Why don’t these stories surprise us at all? Are we really so anaesthetised? This is also the time of year in London when the capital is full of American tourists — and it is always a great pleasure to see them — but it is so confusingly difficult to match their genuine geniality with all that violence? The so-called fentanyl genocide is another American horror news story reaching us with increasing spikiness. Tent-lined streets with people overdosing left, right and centre are like a daily fix from across the pond these days. Beautiful San Francisco gets a particular puncturing. We had one adorable friend visit there on business the other week and she didn’t feel comfortable about leaving her hotel, she said.

As for the young over here, one young Londoner I spoke to last week said to me he and his friends whenever they studied the optics coming out of the States right now looked upon it all as ‘a bit of a mess’, as ‘bonkers’. I tried reminding him of the many great things to have come out of the US, but this didn’t really have much traction, to be honest, which is a shame. (‘We share a lot of music,’ he conceded warmly.) He was probably more interested in what was suddenly unravelling over in France.

London author Will Self once wrote: ‘Only America and the Americans have this ability to derange us with their capacity to reflect our own image. Not that they do this intentionally, really, it’s something we do to ourselves. And it follows that what we also do to ourselves is to relentlessly equate America with Americans, and the US government with its electorate — conflations we wouldn’t dream of making in the case of the German or Greek peoples.’

Optics go a long way. I was at an inner city book reading last week in a former car park not so far from where I live. People kicked their way through the litter to get there, only to arrive in this vast concrete paradise of words and glow and beautiful people with one almighty skyline and sky. To be fair, just as the sun began sinking in the West, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) had just formally agreed to readmit the US as a member. This was after Trump had withdrawn the US five years ago, accusing them of anti-Israel bias. Also, the US state department had just criticised the US approach in 2021 to the evacuation from Afghanistan by blaming both President Biden and Trump. Now, to many of us over here, even to those of us drowning not waving, this feels like progress.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

At the nondescript Admiral bar in Dupont Circle, there was no visible sign of the coming attraction, but maybe that was the point. He was marquee enough on his own, at least for a Wednesday night. A milieu of young conservatives, operatives, and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.

I was challenged on entry for failing to register as press but quickly spoke with the event manager of the Washington, D.C., Young Republicans, Isaac Smith, who towered over me broad-shouldered and glistening. “Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone,” he smirked with William F. Buckley flare.

Smith, an EMT by trade, saw carnage a plenty in his day job, and seemed eager for more as night fell and the hour of Santos’s appearance drew near. Following a national political trend, he confirmed, last year he and his cohort had successfully used the bylaws of the Young Republicans to wrest control from the moderate faction which had once governed the youth arm of the party. Their ranks include Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s communications director, Joel Valdez; Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s legislative correspondent, Brian Oakes; and Colorado Rep. Ken Buck’s chief counsel, Isabela Belchior.

Now, they were reveling in the chaotic bounty of their coup over the “Paul Ryan faction,” as one operative put it to me. For Smith and many of those gathered, Santos was the free-base alternative to the low-dose incumbents in the sundowning stages of their withered political careers. If corruption is the currency of Washington, why not celebrate the precision with which its most extravagant excesses cut through the noise, instead of shoving fingers in ears and turning a blind eye? Why not push the madness to its limits?

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., speaks at the Admiral bar in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on April 26, 2023.

Photo: Daniel Boguslaw

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

Israeli police assaulted Palestinians inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on Wednesday evening for the second consecutive night during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, just hours after being widely condemned for an earlier attack.

"Dozens of armed Israeli officers entered the courtyards of the mosque while nearly 20,000 Palestinian worshipers were still performing the Ramadan Taraweeh night prayer," Middle East Eyereported. "Israeli forces fired rubber-coated bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades at worshipers just before the prayer ended to disperse them and clear the mosque... They also chased after people, beating them with batons and wounding some."

Israeli forces injured at least six people during their latest storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. On Thursday morning, Israeli officers prevented Palestinians from entering the mosque for the Fajr prayer while allowing Israeli settlers to enter the compound.

"They want to create a new reality," eyewitness Firas al-Dibbs told Middle East Eye. "They want to empty Al-Aqsa Mosque of Palestinians."

"What happened, especially yesterday, was catastrophic," said al-Dibbs, referring to the preceding overnight raid. "The scale of violence was shocking."

During the first attack of the week, which began late Tuesday night and stretched into Wednesday morning, Israeli police officers injured at least a dozen peaceful worshipers and arrested more than 400.

Of the 450 Palestinian men taken into custody, 397 have been released with a one-week ban from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque, according to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees' Affairs. Forty-seven of the prisoners who live in the occupied West Bank have been transferred to the Ofer military prison and six remain incarcerated in Jerusalem.

Al Jazeerareported Thursday that Israeli police have shut down access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque for Palestinian men under the age of 40. This restriction comes after Israel reportedly reduced the number of people allowed to attend the Taraweeh prayer from 80,000 on Tuesday to 20,000 on Wednesday.

Tuesday night's "barbaric" raid, which eyewitnesses say was far worse in person than what is shown in disturbing video footage, elicited denunciations from around the world, as Common Dreamsreported Wednesday.

Leaders from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority described the attack as criminal and called on people to defend the mosque.

Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Germany, and Canada all issued statements either condemning or expressing concerns about the assault. The United States also expressed concern even as it continues to provide $3.8 billion in annual military support to Israel, an anti-democratic regime that numerous human rights groups have characterized as an apartheid state.

Following its emergency meeting in Cairo on Wednesday, the Arab League issued a statement urging the United Nations Security Council to intervene to halt Israeli violence.

"These crimes escalated dangerously in the past days of Ramadan," the League said, "and led to hundreds of injuries and arrests of worshipers, incursions and deliberate desecration of the sanctity of Al-Aqsa Mosque by extremist Israeli officials and settlers under the protection of the occupation forces."

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is Islam's third-holiest site "where unsolicited visits, prayers, and rituals by non-Muslims are forbidden, according to decadeslong international agreements," Middle East Eye explained. "Israeli groups, in coordination with authorities, have long violated the delicate arrangement and facilitated raids of the site and performed prayers and religious rituals."

Malaysia and neighboring Indonesia—the largest Muslim-majority country in the world—on Wednesday joined the Arab League in demanding an international response. The U.N. Security Council, said Malaysia, should "hold the Israeli regime accountable and responsible for the heinous crimes, and for them to release immediately all Palestinian detainees."

U.N. Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland, for his part, said Wednesday that "this holy period and places of worship should be for safe and peaceful religious reflection." The diplomat implored all parties to "act responsibly and refrain from steps that could escalate tensions."

However, just hours after people across the globe expressed outrage and called for restraint, Israeli forces renewed their attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

As Middle East Eye reported: "The raid on Wednesday started slightly earlier than the previous one on Tuesday, apparently in an attempt by Israeli forces to prevent worshipers from locking themselves inside the Qibli prayer hall. [Tuesday] night, hundreds of Palestinians barricaded themselves inside the Qibli hall—the building with the silver dome—to perform the contemplative prayer of Itikaf and avoid attempts by police to remove them. Itikaf is a non-mandatory religious practice that is common during Ramadan, when worshipers stay inside mosques overnight to pray, reflect, and recite the Quran."

Following Tuesday night's intensification of anti-Palestinian brutality, protests erupted in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and Umm al-Fahm, a Palestinian town in Israel. Demonstrations have since spread to other cities, but Israeli police have violently dispersed them and arrested several people.

Rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israel early Wednesday morning. In response, the Israeli military launched a series of airstrikes on the besieged enclave. More rockets were fired from Gaza on Thursday after Wednesday night's storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Also in the wake of Wednesday night's attack, several rockets were fired into Israel from southern Lebanon on Thursday. The Israeli military responded to its northern neighbor with artillery fire, raising fears of a broader regional conflagration.

The final two weeks of Ramadan coincide with Passover—a weeklong Jewish holiday that started on Wednesday—prompting concerns about further violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and beyond.

The raids on Tuesday and Wednesday "come ahead of planned mass incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli settlers set to start on Thursday and last a week," according to Middle East Eye. "Israeli forces regularly empty the mosque of Palestinians outside the five Muslim prayers, especially overnight and after dawn prayers to ensure a smooth incursion of Israeli settlers that takes place daily around 7:30 am local time. Temple Movement groups, which facilitate the settler incursions and advocate for the destruction of Al-Aqsa, have called for mass stormings throughout the weeklong Passover holiday."

"They have also called for conducting ritual animal slaughter at the site which could trigger anger from Palestinians and Muslims worldwide," the outlet noted. "Palestinian groups have urged mass presence at the site this week to prevent the planned animal slaughter and mass incursions."

Israeli attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in May 2021 preceded a deadly 11-day offensive on the Gaza Strip. Some commentators have argued that Israel is seeking to heighten anti-Arab violence now as a way to blunt internal opposition to the far-right's attempted judicial coup.

"What we see today is a very serious provocation that will definitely lead to an escalation, and maybe this is exactly what the Israeli government wants," Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative told Al Jazeera. "They want to distract attention from their internal division, from the demonstrations that are taking place inside Israel against this government, and they want to drag the whole region into a total explosion."

Speaking with journalists on Wednesday, U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said that the body's secretary-general, António Guterres, had been "shocked and appalled by the images" he had seen from inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

"At a time of the calendar which is holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this should be a time for peace and not violence," said Dujarric. "Places of worship should only be used for peaceful religious observances."

The U.N. Security Council is set to hold a closed-door emergency session on Thursday to discuss recent Israeli assaults on peaceful Palestinian worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lauren Crosby Medlicott.

The problems Fox News had on Election Night 2020 don’t bode well for the election of 2024.

iMediaEthics (5/19/21): In Arizona, “the actual results were much closer than what VoteCast predicted.”

A little before midnight Eastern time on November 3, 2020, the Fox network, which was collaborating with the Associated Press on vote projections, predicted that Biden would win Arizona. The decision desk director at the time later acknowledged it seemed “premature.” Almost two years ago, on iMediaEthics (5/19/21), I outlined the reasons why the call should not have been made, based on Associated Press’s own post mortem assessment. More recently, Nate Cohn of the New York Times (3/13/23) made a similar argument.

On Election Day 2020, Fox also predicted Democrats to win the House, with their majority expanding by “at least five seats.” That was incorrect, also noted in my article. While Democrats retained the majority, they actually lost 13 seats. Cohn does not mention this miscall.

The predictions were based on a new system that Fox and AP had developed in conjunction with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Called  VoteCast by AP, and Fox News Voter Analysis by the network, it was born out of Fox’s frustration with the slow pace of predicting winners in 2016.

At that time, the network was part of a consortium, the National Election Pool (NEP) run by Edison Research, which uses exit polls and related data to project election winners. With its new system, Fox would presumably be able to make quicker decisions.

It did not go well.

Neither quicker nor more accurate

The New York Times‘ Peter Baker (3/4/23) suggests that Fox‘s problem was that its polling was too good.

Yet, earlier this month, Peter Baker of the New York Times (3/4/23) seemed to embrace the notion that the Fox/AP/NORC system is superior to the NEP system used by the other networks.

He alluded to a meeting of Fox executives after the 2020 election, when they were discussing how, in the future, they could avoid calling an election for a Democrat before the other networks. Information about the meeting came from evidence in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.

Baker wrote:

Maybe, the Fox executives mused, they should abandon the sophisticated new election-projecting system in which Fox had invested millions of dollars and revert to the slower, less accurate model.

It seems unlikely the executives would have referred to the NEP as a “less accurate” model. Slower, perhaps; that was the catalyst for developing the new system. But accuracy was not an issue, at least as publicly stated. It seems more a projected characterization by Baker.

In any case, Baker’s own words appeared to embrace VoteCast as a superior system:

Fox reached its call earlier than other networks because of the cutting-edge system that it developed after the 2016 election, a system tested during the 2018 midterm elections with great success—Fox projected that Democrats would capture the House before its competitors.

The only evidence Baker offered for VoteCast as a “cutting-edge” system is that Fox called the 2018 House contest “before its competitors.” In 2020, Fox also called the House contest before the other networks but, as already noted, that call was a rush to judgment that forced the network to eat crow more than a week later. Hardly cutting edge. NEP made no such error.

Baker ignored altogether the lopsided competition between the two systems in the 2022 House elections. Data posted on the Edison website shows that NEP correctly called the winners before AP and VoteCast in 296 congressional districts, while AP beat NEP in just 73 districts.

A dangerous competition

Personally, I’ve long been skeptical about the competition among networks to be first in calling winners. The public has no immediate need to know who the winner will “likely” be. In most cases, a few more hours will see a completed ballot count and the actual winners announced. If the counting extends for several days, so be it.

The real utility of the election night systems is the statistical information that is collected, which allows for a more in-depth understanding of the factors that motivated voters for one candidate or another. Projecting winners on Election Night is at best an added advantage, and at worst—when miscalls are made—a danger to democracy.

Then–Florida Gov. John Ellis “Jeb” Bush and his first cousin, Fox executive John Ellis, together made the decision that Fox would call Florida for their brother/cousin George W. Bush (image: Media Matters, 2/3/15).

That was the case in the 2000 election, when—at 2:16 in the morning after Election Day—Fox was the first to project George W. Bush the winner in Florida. The head of the decision desk was John Ellis, Bush’s cousin. Bush’s brother Jeb, then governor of Florida, was on the phone with Ellis, and urged his cousin to make the call, though the data did not support it. This projection caused the other major networks to follow suit, only to rescind the call hours later. Chaos ensued.

The miscall and resulting confusion caused Roger Ailes, chair and CEO of Fox News Network, later to admit, “In my heart, I do believe that democracy was harmed by my network and others on November 7, 2000.” (See my book How to Steal an Election: The Inside Story of How George Bush’s Brother and Fox Network Miscalled the 2000 Election and Changed the Course of History for further details.)

That kind of chaos could have happened again in 2020. As Cohn argues about the early call:

There’s not much reason to believe that there was a factual basis for a projection in Arizona. It came very close to being wrong. If it had been, it could have been disastrous.

The public’s confidence in elections would have taken another big hit if Mr. Trump had ultimately taken the lead after a call in Mr. Biden’s favor. It would have fueled the Trump campaign’s argument that he could and would eventually overturn the overall result.

Misleading distinctions

AP says of its VoteCast system, “We meet voters where they are”—meaning they don’t meet voters where they vote.

The hype about the VoteCast system begins with the misleading descriptions found on each news media’s website. Each has a slightly different description of the wonders of their new system, but both emphasize the limits of exit polls as its genesis.

AP: In the 2020 general election, less than a third of voters cast a ballot at a neighborhood polling place on Election Day. That’s why we meet voters where they are, surveying them via mail, phone and online to create a comprehensive data set that empowers accurate storytelling…. AP VoteCast is the product of more than a decade of research and years of experiments aimed at moving away from traditional, in-person exit polls to an approach to election research that reflects the modern approach to voting.

Fox: With more voters than ever voting early or by mail, the new method overcomes the limitations of in-person exit polls and captures the views of all Americans.

The descriptions imply the old, unnamed system, the one they used to belong to (NEP), relies solely on “in-person exit polls.” It does not. And the people at Fox and AP know that.

NEP has been much more than an exit poll operation, ever since its incarnation in 2004. I was with the previous media consortium, called Voter News Service (VNS), on Election Nights 1996 and 2000, and even then, the consortium supplemented exit polls with pre-election polls to measure the preferences of early and by-mail voters.

These days, NEP supplements Election Day exit polls with exit polls at early voting locations around the country, plus multi-mode pre-election polls of absentee voters, including interviews conducted by phone and web.

You can see a comparison of the two methodologies as outlined by NEP and AP Votecast. The comparison reveals two major differences:

1. The Fox/AP system relies solely on surveys of voters done before polls close, while NEP uses pre-election polls to measure preferences of absentee voters and exit polls to measure preferences of voters as they have just finished voting.
2. All voter preferences gathered by NEP are based on probability samples, the “gold standard of survey research.” Less than a third of VoteCast respondents are selected using probability methods.

To be fair, given the low response rates of phone surveys, or even of multi-mode surveys (those which include, as NEP does, phone and web), it’s not clear that probability samples continue to be superior to non-probability surveys (Pew, 5/2/16; 538, 8/11/14; 3Streams, 3/18/21).

VoteCast or NEP?

Journalists should welcome the addition of a statistically based Election Day coverage system like VoteCast to compete with NEP. Until 1990, the three major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—each conducted their own exit poll operation, providing somewhat different takes on the electorate. But in 1990, because of prohibitive costs, they formed a consortium (and added CNN), originally called Voter Research and Surveys. The consortium expanded to include Fox and AP, but still there was only one take on the electorate.

Just as it’s useful to have more than one poll on any given race, it’s useful to have more than one election night operation. But there’s nothing to substantiate the idea that this new operation is especially “cutting edge” or superior to the one that already existed.

In fact, VoteCast is not so much cutting edge as duller edge. Its main advantage in avoiding any in-person exit polling and using mostly non-probability samples of voters is lower cost, rather than any increase in quality.

VoteCast cuts costs dramatically by getting rid of the whole exit poll operation, both in early voting states, and especially on Election Day, which (for NEP) includes 734 exit poll stations across the country, along with recruiting and training interviewers and establishing a live call-in reporting process for the results.

Fox and AP are not alone in trying to find cheaper methods of polling voters. There is an industry-wide effort to cut polling costs, because of abysmally low response rates. As Pew (5/2/16) noted several years ago:

For decades the gold standard for public opinion surveys has been the probability poll, where a sample of randomly selected adults is polled and results are used to measure public opinion across an entire population. But the cost of these traditional polls is growing each year, leading many pollsters to turn to online nonprobability surveys, which do not rely on random sampling and instead recruit through ads, pop-up solicitations and other approaches.

By 2020, most election polls had in fact turned to non-probability samples. As one article noted, from September 1 to November 1, 2020, only 23% of the reported election polls on 538 were based on strict probability samples. The rest were based either totally (61%) or partially (16%) on non-probability samples. Pew observed:

The advantages of these online surveys are obvious—they are fast and relatively inexpensive, and the technology for them is pervasive. But are they accurate?

That is the question that faces the industry overall. The advent of VoteCast, which mostly relies on non-probability samples, is yet another effort to develop more cost-effective ways of measuring public opinion. As such, it should provide useful information for other pollsters as the industry morphs away from the very expensive probability standard.

But the key test should not be which system is quicker in projecting winners, though it is naïve to assume the networks won’t continue to compete in this area. Instead, an evaluation of the two systems should rely on how accurate and plausible are the data each system provides about the nature of the electorate, and the factors that influenced the election.

What about Election Night?

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott was worried about “the impact to the brand” of calling Arizona for Joe Biden (New York Times, 3/4/23).

Among the media partners in each system, it appears that only one media organization can’t be trusted to make projections in a timely manner based on the statistical findings. Baker makes clear in his New York Times article (3/4/23) that following the 2020 election, Fox executives’ primary concern about the Arizona call was not that it was right, but that coming before any other network, it infuriated Trump and his aides, and angered their own viewers.

Discussions followed, even by their two main news anchors, who, according to Baker,

suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered.

As Baker points out, that had already happened. When its decision desk decided to call Nevada for Biden on Friday night, November 6, Fox president Jay Wallace refused to air it. By VoteCast’s models, Arizona would have given Biden the electoral votes he needed to be declared president. Wallace didn’t want his network to be the first. He waited until all the other networks had made the call the next day, and then allowed Fox to follow suit.

Once a network has decided it’s more important to tell viewers what they want to hear, rather than what the data provide, it doesn’t matter how good the election night system might be. The calls can’t be trusted.

The post What Fox’s Bad Calls on Election Night 2020 Say About 2024 appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.

As the sun was setting in Buenos Aires this past Saturday, the vibrant Corrientes Avenue that goes through the center of the city was shut down. Corrientes is closely connected to Argentine culture; lined with theaters and bookstores and on this occasion it was dedicated to The Night of the Libraries and honoring 40 years of democracy since the bloody dictatorship. Reading, educating and never forgetting those dark years of the 1970s when the US backed Argentine military killed, or disappeared, over 30,000 people is important to the human core of this country to ensure that history will not repeat itself.

Teachers, authors, intellectuals, academics and young students spoke to crowds in panels covering a wide range of social topics, along with cultural performances. The City of Buenos Aires helped finance the event even with its Macrist Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta of the right-wing Republican Proposal Party (PRO) who has already announced he is running for president in the general election in October; clearly his strategy was to not allow the Peronists currently in power to take the credit for this popular event.

Meanwhile in the US, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has taken a different approach to reading and libraries as he maneuvers to be more reactionary than other Republican candidates in his bid to get the nomination for US President in 2024 by banning books in his state.

In July 2022, DeSantis signed into law House Bill 1467 that requires that all books in Florida schools have to be screened by employees that had an educational media specialist certificate. The full impact of is just now taking affect as many districts hastily pulled all books off their library shelves and classroom until they are arbitrarily reviewed to be appropriate for “student needs” and if they do not meet approval they need to be covered and stored.

In Manatee County some parents are reporting that shelves of the school’s library are empty. Signs in Parrish Community High School bookcases have been covered with signs that read, “Books Are NOT for Student Use!!”

Florida teachers, who rank 48th in how much they get paid, are confused and now run the risk of possible professional ramification if they are not in compliance with the law and could possibly face felony charges for having unapproved books in their classroom.

One such dangerous book that has been covered and shelfed in Duval County is Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter that tells the story of the legendary Afro-Puerto Rican baseball player who won multiple Most Valuable Player awards, and was a strong voice against racism in the major leagues. Clemente died in a plane crash while delivering humanitarian aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua in 1972.

The banning of books legislation is in conjunction with another reactionary Florida law promoted and signed by DeSantis in April 2022 known as the STOP WOKE Act which regulates instruction in schools and workplaces prohibiting discussions on primary issues like LGBTQ struggles, racism, and even Black, Latino or Indigenous history because according to the law it could make other students or workers “uncomfortable” to hear about slavery from a Black point of view for example. The law essentially requires teachers to monitor classroom discussion to prevent them from wandering into exchanging of ideas on a range of topics that are fundamental issues facing US society.

Back on Corrientes Avenue Saturday there were lots of books about socialist Cuba including books dedicated to the life of Fidel and photography books on the Cuban Revolution. I could not help but wonder just what access students in Florida have to any truthful accounts of not just the Cuban Revolution but also about the social gains that have been made there since 1959. Could they find out, for example, that Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US despite the criminal unilateral blockade of the island that has gone on for over 60 years? Could they learn in school about how Cuba sent front line doctors to over 40 countries during Covid?, or the remarkable protection of life that Cuba has during the cycles of hurricanes that hit the island and how miserable in comparison the record in preparation that their state has when those hurricanes move onto their shores.

You don’t have to be an educator to know how fundamental reading a wide range of topics is for students in developing them into being critical thinkers, to be able to arrive at one’s own conclusion through education and to be able to distinguish between truth and fake news, or to question authority about issues of war and peace and why is it that billions get sent to fan the flames of war in Ukraine at the same time as 30 million people get kicked off of food stamps while inflation soars.

This is some kind of slippery slope with frightening consequences as other states are also enacting these extreme steps towards censorship. History teaches us that things change only when people have developed a consciousness and come together into collective movements to forge a new inclusive future that has freedom and respect for everybody as its goal.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Hackwell.

Fiji police have apologised for “miscommunication” that led to an incident before the Reclaim the Night march last night that almost led to it being called off, Fijivillage News reports.

Police Chief Operations Officer Acting Assistant Commissioner Livai Driu apologised, saying they had been following the conditions of the permit issued.

However, he said the issue was sorted and officers had been directed to allow the march to continue and to provide security measures.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji freedom of speech reports

It was earlier reported by Fijivillage News that police had told organisers amid scenes of “high drama” at the Suva Flea Market when the march was about to begin that there should be “no messages about West Papua or other international matters”.

Minister for Home Affairs Pio Tikoduadua has also apologised over the incident and said that it should never have happened.

Tikoduadua last night tweeted an apology for the mix-up. He said that human rights were paramount, and he had been making that clear.

The minister said the government was working with the police to “undo the mentality that has been the norm [under the former FijiFirst government] over the past 16 years”.

He added that the change was slow, “but it will happen”.

While speaking at the end of the march, Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre coordinator Shamima Ali said they almost called off the march because of the incident.

Again, I apologize for the mix up. It should never have happened.

Your Human Rights are paramount and I’ve been making that clear. We are working together with Police to undo the mentality that has been the norm over the past 16 years– it’s slow but it will happen! https://t.co/zsttk3ko7p

— Pio Tikoduadua (@piotikoduaduafj) March 8, 2023

Ali said she called Minister Tikoduadua. He did not answer at first, but called her back later and asked to talk to the officer at the scene.

She also said she believed that Minister for Women Lynda Tabuya had intervened and she thanked her.

“High drama” at the Reclaim the Night march. Video: Fijivillage News

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

We speak with journalist Lynzy Billing, whose investigation for ProPublica details how CIA-backed death squads, known as Zero Units, have yet to be held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians during the U.S. War in Afghanistan. The Afghan units, which were routinely accompanied by U.S. soldiers, became feared throughout rural Afghanistan for their brutal night raids, often descending upon villagers from helicopters and carrying out summary executions before disappearing. Families of victims continue to demand answers, but since the operations were directed by the CIA rather than the military, there is almost no oversight or disclosure when things go wrong. “Many people I spoke to feel that these operations … were counterproductive and actually had turned their families against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and against the U.S.,” says Billing.

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

March 2019 • Rodat District, Nangarhar Province

This story contains graphic descriptions and images of war casualties.

On a December night in 2018, Mahzala was jolted awake by a shuddering wave of noise that rattled her family’s small mud house. A trio of helicopters, so unfamiliar that she had no word for them, rapidly descended, kicking up clouds of dust that shimmered in their blinding lights. Men wearing desert camouflage and black masks flooded into the house, corralling her two sons and forcing them out the door.

Mahzala watched as the gunmen questioned Safiullah, 28, and 20-year-old Sabir, before roughly pinning them against a courtyard wall. Then, ignoring their frantic protests of innocence, the masked men put guns to the back of her sons’ heads. One shot. Two. Then a third. Her youngest, “the quiet, gentle one,” was still alive after the first bullet, Mahzala told me, so they shot him again.

Her story finished, Mahzala stared at me intently as if I could somehow explain the loss of her only family. We were in the dim confines of her home, a sliver of light leaking in from the lone window above her. She rubbed at the corner of her eyes; her forehead creased by a pulsing vein. The voices of her sons used to fill their home, she told me. She had no photos of them. No money. And there was no one who would tell her, a widow in her 50s, why these men dropped out of the sky and killed her family or acknowledge what she insisted was a terrible mistake.

But now there was me. I had ended up in Rodat in the heart of Nangarhar province while researching my own family’s story of loss in this desolate rural region in eastern Afghanistan.

Mahzala’s neighbors had pressed me to meet her; I was a foreigner, I must be able to help. Three months had passed since the raid. The neighbors believed it was the work of the feared Zero Units — squadrons of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers. Two more homes in the area were targeted that night, they said, though no one else was killed. Everyone acknowledged the Taliban had been in the area before; they were everywhere in Nangarhar province. But Mahzala’s sons? They were just farmers, the neighbors told me.

That trip was the first time I’d heard of the secretive units, which I’d soon learn were funded, trained and armed by the CIA to go after targets believed to be a threat to the United States. There was something else: The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the CIA often joined them. It was a “classified” war, I’d later discover, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong.

Back in Kabul, I tried to continue my personal hunt, but Mahzala’s story had changed the trajectory of my journey. Her words and her face, with its deep-set wrinkles that mirrored the unforgiving landscape, lingered in my thoughts. Who were these soldiers? And what were they doing in remote farming villages in Afghanistan executing young men under the cover of night? Did anyone know why they were being killed?

As a journalist, I knew that Afghanistan’s story was most often told by outsiders, by reporters with little cause to explore barren corners like Rodat. Far from the world’s eyes, this story felt like it was being buried in real time. It was clear no one would be coming to question what happened that night or to relieve Mahzala’s torment.

Mahzala’s sons’ lives, it seemed, were being shrugged away, without acknowledgement or investigation, disappearing into the United States’ long war in Afghanistan. I began to focus on a basic question: How many more Mahzalas were there?

As I write this today, America’s war in Afghanistan is already being consigned to history, pushed from the world’s consciousness by humanity’s latest round of inhumanity. But there are lessons to be learned from the West’s failures in Afghanistan. Other reporters, notably at The New York Times, have documented the cover-up of casualties from aerial bombardment and the drone war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. This story is a deep look inside what happened after America embraced the strategy of night raids — quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S. has acknowledged.

As one U.S. Army Ranger ruefully told me after the Taliban’s triumph last year: “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”

May 2019 • Kabul

Although I hadn’t revealed it to Mahzala, I’d come to Afghanistan hoping to answer questions similar to her own.

Like Mahzala, I’m from Afghanistan. People call me “lucky” because I was adopted by a British family running a school across the border in Pakistan. At age 12, I moved with them to Israel and then on to England, where I attended university and later became a journalist. I had a few traces of my Afghan and Pakistani origins: a couple photographs of my biological mother — a Pakistani, young and lovely with hands like my own — a newspaper clipping advertising me, an orphan girl, for adoption and a few other scraps of information. But really, I had nothing.

I’d returned to Afghanistan as an adult, and with plans to also go to Pakistan, to investigate my past: Who were my birth parents? And what had happened to them? I was spurred by a mix of emotions from curiosity to a desire for closure.

Thirty years earlier, when I was 2, my mother, a refugee to Afghanistan, and younger sister were killed in a nighttime raid in the very same district as Mahzala’s sons — long before the Americans arrived. Like her, I also had no answers. A distant relative told me that my Afghan father was likely the intended target of the attack. He would be killed two years later during the increasingly violent civil conflict, but the people who murdered my mother and sister would never be held to account. One war bled into the next, and one family’s story of loss was replaced by another’s.

Trauma, I’ve learned, creates a rippling pool; its ravages spread to unseen edges. After I was adopted, I underwent numerous medical and psychological assessments. One declared that I’d had a “neurological insult” likely from an incident of trauma to the brain. I have no idea when or with what I was hit. The doctors observed that I had an “abnormal gait” that stymied my ability to run and a string of learning disabilities that affected my speech and my ability to interact with others. Doctors suggested that my adoptive father slowly push me on a swing to introduce me to movement. But I’d shut down and go rigid or, with white knuckles gripping the swing, scream.

My adoptive father recalls some friends suggesting that I “had demons and wouldn’t be at rest until they were cast out.”

Even as my physical and psychological ailments faded, questions of my origins taunted me. My personality and interests didn’t match those of my adoptive sisters. I was hardheaded, self-contained and struggled to show affection toward the people I loved. I had difficulty expressing my thoughts and feelings. Friends would ask me why I made things so difficult for myself. I didn’t have an answer.

I was middle of the road in most things in school and struggled to find my place among sisters who excelled academically and athletically. Although I did indeed feel “lucky,” I also felt an overwhelming pressure to make the most of the opportunities I’d been given.

In truth, I never felt British, Afghan or Pakistani. I tried to hire private investigators to find my birth parents. A slick businessman in a dodgy one-room London office above a bakery laughed off my request. A beefy man in hobnail cowboy boots met me at a swanky hotel in Dubai, then said he was reluctant to take on such a small but difficult job. No one was interested in digging around in a country at war.

And so I set out to Jalalabad to do it myself.

I learned from my conversation with Mahzala that the violence that tore apart my family had continued as Afghanistan lurched from civil war to a grinding conflict between the U.S. and the Taliban, al-Qaida and later ISKP (Islamic State Khorasan Province, the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State). As I made calls and sifted through local news reports, my focus shifted from exploring my personal story to something else.

Over the next three and a half years, I did what it appeared that no one else was doing — nor will be able to do again — I tracked what the U.S.-trained and sponsored squads were doing on the ground, concealed from most of the world.

I cataloged hundreds of night raids by one of the four Zero Unit squads, which was known in Afghanistan as 02 unit, eventually identifying at least 452 civilians killed in its raids over four years. I crisscrossed hundreds of miles of Nangarhar interviewing survivors, eyewitnesses, doctors and elders in villages seldom, if ever, visited by reporters. The circumstances of the civilian deaths were rarely clear. But the grieving families I spoke to in these remote communities were united in their rage at the Americans and the U.S.-backed Kabul government.

My pursuit would take me from the palatial Kabul home of the former head of Afghanistan’s spy agency to clandestine meetings with two Zero Unit soldiers who were ambivalent about their role in America’s war. It would lead me back to the United States, where I met an Army Ranger in a diner in a bland middle American city. Over breakfast, he casually described how American analysts calculated “slants” for each operation — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he acknowledged, yet no one seemed to really care.

My reporting showed that even the raids that did end in the capture or killing of known militants frequently also involved civilian casualties. Far too often, I found the Zero Unit soldiers acted on flawed intelligence and mowed down men, women and children, some as young as 2, who had no discernible connection to terrorist groups.

And the U.S. responsibility for the Zero Unit operations is quietly muddied because of a legal carve-out that allows the CIA — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for the operations — to act without the same oversight as the American military.

The CIA declined to answer my questions about the Zero Units on the record. In a statement, CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.”

She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed and, if valid, the CIA and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

My reporting, based on interviews with scores of eyewitnesses and with the Afghan soldiers who carried out the raids, shows that the American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.

May - October 2019 • Nangarhar Province

When I conceived this investigation, I knew if I was going to track the dead, I’d need some help. I met Muhammad Rehman Shirzad, a 34-year-old forensic pathologist from Nangarhar.

As a government employee, Shirzad had access to official records to verify the identities of those killed. But helping me was a risk. Nevertheless, he was keen to join. “We have to share the truth,” he told me. We began building a database of alleged civilian casualties and hit the road.

In the late spring of 2019, the trail led to the basement office of Lutfur Rahman, 28, former university professor who’d found himself unexpectedly chronicling the stories of Zero Unit survivors. He’d taught literature but had also acted as a counselor to young men with no one else to talk to.

“Nangarhar is the most restless province,” Rahman said. “They witness these raids every day.” He handed me a beat-up notebook. Inside were 14 stories of deadly Zero Unit raids that his students had described to him over two years.

We’d just started talking when Rahman got a call from a professor at the University of Nangarhar who said one of his students had missed classes for several days and then returned distracted and distressed, saying there’d been “an incident.”

A few days later, I found Batour, 22, in the university’s science lab, sitting sandwiched between plastic models of dissected human bodies. Slight, disheveled and with wild eyes, he looked lost. I suggested that we move to the privacy of the roof. He didn’t have to talk to me, I said. “It’s OK,” he said, then took a deep breath and cocked his chin, as if bracing for a blow.

They came a week earlier, on April 26. “It was a normal Thursday,” Batour said. He and his brothers prayed at the mosque and then returned to their home in Qelegho in Khogyani district. As Batour spoke, his skinny ankles swayed back and forth, not quite reaching the ground.

Around 9 p.m., he said, the 02 soldiers descended from helicopters and he knew a raid had started. They hit four houses before reaching his home hours later and “blew up the door.”

A soldier with a megaphone announced: “Your house is surrounded. Come out.” Inside, soldiers were asking everyone: “What is your name? What do you do?”

Batour and his father were led out of the house while his two brothers remained inside.

Two soldiers were speaking in English, he said, but there was a man with them translating their words into Pashto. Batour told them he was a student at the university and gave them his university ID. The soldiers checked his name against a list, he said, then ordered him to sit under a tree. As long as the planes are circling above, they told him, do not move.

Batour paused and stared at his hand, flexing his fingers.

“My back was to the house and I don’t know how long I was sitting there,” he said quietly, but that’s when he heard the sound of firing. “It was just like pop-pops, so it was silenced guns.” Batour heard the helicopters take off. “Immediately my father ran to the house screaming, but I couldn’t hear him. I ran after him. My father said: ‘Come on. They are finished.’”

They found his two brothers dead. They’d been shot many times.

That night, 11 people were killed including Batour’s brothers: Sehatullah, 28, a teacher at a secondary school in Khogyani district, left behind a wife and three young sons, and Khalid Hemat, 26, who went to university with Batour, had married just four months earlier.

The following day, Batour heard the local radio station announce that teachers from a government school were killed in the raid by the 02 unit. There was no mention that insurgents had been successfully eliminated.

“While my brothers were alive, I was free to study. But now they are gone; no one is here to support me. My lessons are left half-completed.” He told me he can’t concentrate and has nightmares about the night of the raid, but his family can’t afford to move from the village. “We still don’t know the reason my brothers were slaughtered.”

Batour believes the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He said his brothers had both supported the government and he did, too, vowing never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure. As Batour spoke, something round and black dropped onto the roof by his feet. He briefly cowered, before realizing it was a taped-up black cricket ball that soared up from the ground floor. After a moment he exhaled. It’s as if he’d forgotten to breathe the whole time we were talking.

As Batour told me his story, I heard echoes of the other witnesses I had spoken to about the psychological toll of the raids. As long as most of them could remember, the country had been racked by violence. The hum of drones, the whirr of helicopters and the deafening blasts of suicide bombings and missile strikes had scarred the land and seeped into daily life.

Kurdish-German psychologist Jan Ilhan Kizilhan trains psychologists who specialize in trauma to work with war victims in Iraq and Syria. He told me that in Afghanistan trauma has become an inescapable legacy. “They experience past trauma again and again as if it is immediate,” he said. “The repetition reinforces these experiences many times over, keeping them alive for numerous future generations.”

At the more than 30 raid sites Shirzad and I visited, we were often greeted with surprise, particularly by women, who had seldom been asked about what they’d seen and, if they were victims, sometimes not mentioned. One 60-year-old woman told me that after her three sons and son-in-law were killed in a July 2019 night raid, she simply washed, shrouded and buried them. At the provincial governor’s office, she was told that the 02 conducted the operation and “it was a mistake.”

“Not once did I think I had any other options, that any Afghan official, court or anyone would believe me,” she said.

In Qala Sheikh village in Chaparhar district, more than a dozen people witnessed Zero Unit soldiers shoot five teachers in their homes, leaving behind the blackened shell of one home with two burned bodies inside.

The 02 unit later said it carried out the raid in a statement, announcing that the men were ISKP members — a claim Abdul Rahim, who saw his brother and nephews burning in the fire, denied. “If they were ISIS, why didn’t they arrest them in the city where they teach at government schools?” Rahim said that October. “It’s the obligation of the Afghan government to ask this unit why they are killing civilians.”

Rahim told me that a presidential delegation had traveled to Jalalabad, ostensibly to investigate the raid, but it never came to Qala Sheikh or spoke to witnesses or the doctors who treated his brother’s injuries before he died.

1967 - Present Day

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long used night raids by forces like the 02 to fight insurgencies and since the Vietnam War have defended the tactic, arguing that the raids are less likely to cause civilian casualties than aerial bombing.

But even a cursory review of U.S. military history raises serious questions about the operations, especially in places like Afghanistan, which is defined by deep tribal loyalties and where the high civilian death toll has, time and again, turned people against the United States and the local government it supported.

In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. William Colby, then-CIA executive director and former chief of the Saigon station, conceded to Congress in 1971 that it wasn’t possible to differentiate with certainty between enemy insurgents or people who were neutral or even allies.

Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.

The U.S. used night raids against al-Qaida in Iraq, under Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Military officials said many of the operations killed or captured their targets. But it’s impossible to determine how often the intelligence was wrong, or misguided, and civilians paid the price. As in Afghanistan, complete casualty data has remained either classified, unavailable or untracked.

When McChrystal took over operations in Afghanistan in June 2009, he declared that Afghan officials would now take part in the planning and execution of the raids, but he also accelerated them. As in Iraq, the raids were met with protests, and former President Hamid Karzai repeatedly called for them to be banned.

The raids, along with drone strikes, were part of America’s vast counterterrorism apparatus known as the “kill-capture program.” When Petraeus replaced McChrystal in Afghanistan, he expanded the program and in 2010 released figures to the media claiming spectacular success — thousands of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders captured or killed.

In a subsequent press conference, a U.S. admiral revealed that more than 80% of those captured “terrorists” were released within weeks because there wasn’t supportable evidence that they were insurgents. And the raids seemed counterproductive: as they ramped up, so did the insurgent attacks.

Petraeus and McChrystal declined to answer questions for this story.

Meanwhile, the CIA was separately funding, training and equipping its own series of paramilitary forces in Afghanistan. The Zero Units were officially established around 2008, according to Afghan officials and soldiers, and modeled on U.S. special operations forces like the Navy SEALs. Regionally based and staffed by local soldiers, the units were sometimes accompanied by CIA advisers, transported by American helicopters and aided by armed support aircraft.

Sandwiched between bomb blasts and attacks on government institutions by insurgents, the Zero Units, whose members are estimated to be in the thousands, received scant scrutiny until 2013. Under the Trump administration, CIA Director Mike Pompeo announced that the agency was ramping up its approach in Afghanistan: “The CIA, to be successful, must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentless — you pick the word.”

The following year, in 2018, The New York Times published a report about the 02 unit using brutal tactics to terrorize Afghans. In October 2019, Human Rights Watch documented 14 cases — some amounting to war crimes — involving the 02 unit and other CIA-backed strike forces. In 2020, The Intercept reported on 10 night raids by another Zero Unit, 01, that targeted religious schools.

While the stories described deadly raids, not much was said about why the intelligence guiding them was often flawed. It appeared to be a pattern that went hand in hand with the night raid strategy. I spoke with two self-proclaimed “geeks” who helped build or operate spy technology during the peak years of war. They said failure was predictable, despite the huge advances in technical intelligence. The most cutting-edge equipment in the world, they said, didn’t make up for the deficits in understanding “the enemy” by the Americans processing the intelligence.

Lisa Ling spent 20 years in the military and built technology that was ultimately used to process intelligence that targeted Afghans. “I understand very viscerally how this tech works and how people are using it,” she said. The counterterrorism mission is essentially: “Who am I fighting, and where will I find them,” she said. But the U.S. struggled to differentiate combatants from civilians, she said, because it never understood Afghanistan.

Her thoughts echoed what I’d heard from Afghan intelligence officials. “Every gun-wielding guy in this country is not a Talib because people in rural Afghanistan carry guns,” said Tamim Asey, former deputy minister of defense and Afghan National Security Council director general.

In Afghanistan, Air Force technician Cian Westmoreland built and maintained the communications relays that underpinned America’s drone program. His grandfather’s distant cousin was Gen. William Westmoreland, a key architect of the night raid operations in Vietnam. His father was a technical sergeant and, Cian said, “ordered the missile parts for the initial bombing of Afghanistan.”

It became clear to Westmoreland that civilian casualty reports from the drone strikes sent up the chain of command were inaccurate. “Unless there are operators physically checking body parts on the ground, they have no idea how many civilians were killed,” he said. “And they have no idea how many ‘enemies’ they actually got.”

When he finished his deployment in 2010, Westmoreland says he was handed his evaluation, stating that he’d assisted on 200-plus enemy kills in five months. He ran to the bathroom, he said, and threw up. “How many is the plus? Who is counting? And who knows who was killed?”

A source familiar with the Zero Unit program said it “stayed in close contact with a network of tribal elders,” who alerted program officials when civilians were killed. Any such deaths, the source said, were “unintended.”

At times, Westmoreland said, bystanders paid the price simply because they were near a suspected target’s cellphone.

Speaking with them, it became clear that the language of the intelligence world itself could hide its weaknesses. Ling said that when intelligence officers cite “multiple sources” of intelligence to justify an operation, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have confirmatory information. It could simply mean that they have an overhead image of a house and an informant telling them who’s inside.

October 2019 • Kabul

For six months, I pursued the most elusive perspective on the U.S. night raid strategy — the Zero Unit soldiers themselves; the men killing their own compatriots on U.S. orders.

In October 2019, two men whom I’ll call Baseer and Hadi finally agreed to meet me. Both in their mid-30s, they were friends, fathers and comrades-in-arms. Hardened by violence and the isolation of the Zero Units, they were initially baffled by my interest, not just because they feared discovery. Why would I want to talk to killers? They decided to speak, they said, because of their unease with missions gone awry — and their distrust of the motives of those directing the attacks. I agreed to protect their identities.

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“They are Americans killing Afghans, and we are Afghans killing Afghans,” Baseer told me. “But I know the Americans do not lie awake at night with the guilt I have.”

Clouds of cigarette smoke swirled through shafts of sunlight in the dimly lit backroom of a quiet fish restaurant on the outskirts of Kabul where we finally met. Outside, the day’s first light paled into a gray glare glinting off gridlocked cars waiting to pass through fortified checkpoints into the capital.

Baseer sat cross-legged on the well-worn carpet, balancing a cellphone on each knee and grasping a cup of green tea between his jeweled fingers. His neat mustache caught a bead of sweat as it dripped from his brow. His impeccable grooming was at odds with the mismatched socks peeking from beneath his shalwar kameez.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, and I noticed finger-sized bruises stretching around his neck. Although he caught me looking at the bruises, he made no effort to explain them. He rolled his neck from side to side to loosen kinks and rubbed his hands together. He was eager to talk.

Sitting off to one side, Hadi wore a leather bomber jacket (“like Top Gun”) that dwarfs his wiry frame. It was 80 degrees, but Hadi only removed his beanie briefly, to absently rub a long, silvery scar that stretched across the top of his head. He was wary and toyed nervously with the gold watch that hung from his skinny wrist. His eyes darted to the door at every hint of movement.

According to Baseer, Hadi is the joker of the two. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder reassuringly, grinning at him. “Don’t worry, she’s not American,” he said in Pashto. In an attempt to reassure them, I tell them I am English, not American, and of Afghan and Pakistani descent. Hadi smiled weakly, but it was clear he was unconvinced.

Both soldiers had obtained leave passes under false pretenses to meet me. The relationship between journalist and soldier seemed to offer them a space where they could discuss their actions — even boast about them when marveling at their superior training and autonomy — because I think they knew I wasn’t going to turn them in or use their stories as leverage.

Baseer’s family had left Afghanistan when he was 3, during the same fractious conflict that killed my own family. Eventually, his family settled in a refugee camp in Peshawar in Pakistan. Growing up, he considered both the Americans and the Soviets infidels, but he later came to realize that the Taliban have their own cruelties.

When he returned to Afghanistan at age 16, he lived in yet another refugee camp. “I wanted to be a politician, but there were no jobs.” Baseer eventually became a bodyguard for his father, a police officer, before signing on with the police as well. The poor pay pushed him to join the military and then the 02 unit in late 2016, where he said he was paid about $700 per month in American currency — more than three times what regular soldiers made. He also received eight months of training from Turkish and American soldiers at several locations in Afghanistan. “The 02 had the weapons and power, and I liked the idea of duty related to operations and fighting,” he said.

Hadi transferred to the 02 from the Afghan commandos in 2017. “It was my dream to join ‘the Infamous Zero Unit,’” he said. “I thought I would be part of building and securing a new Afghanistan, and as the Americans say,” Hadi briefly switched to English, with an American twang: “‘blast them out of their holes’ and ‘send them to hell.’ I wanted to get the bad guys.” He paused. “At first, the thrill was intense. But the job wasn’t this clear in the end. You know, I became the bad guy, or maybe I wanted to be the bad guy all along.” He looked away, fingering a frayed edge of the carpet.

Once in the units, the men said, it often seemed like they weren’t fighting Afghanistan’s battle at all. The CIA, with the aid of American soldiers on the ground, they said, ran the show. “They point out the targets and we hit them,” Baseer said, adding that about 80 soldiers go on a raid and “10 Americans, sometimes 12, join every operation.”

“After we return to base, we count how many soldiers were lost,” he said. Many Afghan soldiers have been killed, but not Americans: “They are out of the war.”

December 2019 • Kamal Khel, Logar Province

Over the weeks, Baseer, Hadi and a third Zero Unit soldier, Qadeer, updated me on their raids. They showed me chaotic videos they’d kept on their phones. Baseer had been keeping a diary, and he began sharing extracts with me.

At first, he gave me simple reflections: the time he stole the car keys for a joy ride or when they played volleyball and watched Bollywood movies with the Americans at their base. But over time, he began to share stark excerpts that showed he was keeping a count of those killed. One noted that a dead boy reminded him of his own son.

At an abandoned office one morning, Baseer and Hadi told me about a raid that seemed to haunt them. Hadi took a deep breath. It happened in July 2019 in the remote village of Kamal Khel in Pul-e-Alam district of Logar province, in eastern Afghanistan.

That night, he said, word had come that a handful of suspected Taliban militants were holed up in Kamal Khel. Thunder from a coming storm rumbled in the distance as he, Baseer and their 70-strong battalion scrambled aboard a fleet of camouflaged, heavily armed Toyota Hilux trucks. Tucked in “the cradle” in the middle, protected, were a dozen men he described as American special forces soldiers.

At 2 a.m. they roared out of the pitted concrete walls of Forward Operating Base Shank, a former U.S. stronghold famed for the sheer volume of Taliban rockets that had battered it. En route, their Afghan commander relayed details about the night’s four targets. As the city’s lights faded, the convoy split, driving into the storm to approach the village from opposite directions. Half a mile outside of Kamal Khel, they left the trucks to approach on foot over the rocky terrain and dry riverbeds.

As they grew close, their night vision goggles illuminated in fluorescent green hues a handful of family homes. Moving swiftly, they trained their weapons and laser sights on the houses ahead.

Suddenly, a rocket-propelled grenade shrieked out of the blackness behind them, exploding against one of the trucks. Even under his noise-canceling headset, Baseer said, the blast deafened him. Ears ringing, he and the other soldiers scrambled for cover. As bullets snapped overhead and muzzle flashes erupted from the surrounding darkness, one of the American soldiers gave the order to open fire.

“Smoke ’em,” an American voice ordered over the radio.

Baseer said he flattened himself against the mud wall of a nearby home. To his left, a soldier relayed updates to the base. To his right, Hadi squeezed off shot after shot.

It was 4 a.m. when the echo of gunfire finally subsided. As the first hints of dawn crept over the nearby mountains, the soldiers moved door to door searching for the raid’s targets. The suspected Taliban militants were nowhere to be found. But in a nearby doorway, four bodies lay on the ground — a man, a teenage girl and two children.

Baseer says he crouched by the bodies, his helmet camera capturing the carnage. The children were so covered in blood that it was difficult to guess their ages. The teenager’s body was twisted at an unnatural angle. “Don’t touch them,” Baseer said his commander ordered, calling the soldiers back to the trucks.

Baseer and Hadi looked at me angrily. “The militants were not in the target house,” Baseer said. “They were not even inside the village. They had changed location and started firing on us from behind,” he said. He paused and locked eyes with Hadi.

“I can’t say who killed them, the Americans or us … all of us were shooting,” he said, and there were no Taliban members residing in the compound they targeted. “The intelligence was incorrect. Or the Taliban had better intelligence than us.”

The raid, though it was like so many others, felt like a tipping point. They returned to the base that night with questions and anger. It was the responsibility of their commander to write the after-action report and send it up the chain of command, and they didn’t know if it included the four dead. After the raid, they asked him if anything would be done about those killed, but they said they never got an answer.

Instead, they said, all the soldiers on the raid were required to sign a battle damage assessment, prewritten by their superior, along with a nondisclosure agreement. The assessment, Baseer said, noted no civilian casualties.

“These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” Hadi said, his voice thin and raspy, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”

September 2020 • Kabul

The person I really needed to talk to, prominent Afghan officials said, was Rahmatulah Nabil. The former director of the National Directorate of Security had overseen the units during a critical transition period that began in 2012, when the CIA gave the Afghan intelligence agency nominal control. Although Nabil was no longer at NDS, I’d come to learn his ears, and his hands, are everywhere.

For months, Nabil avoided me, but in September I received a message around 1:30 a.m. telling me to meet him at his Kabul home later that day. I was granted 30 minutes. After navigating a maze of towering, pockmarked blast walls, a taxi dumped me by a nondescript gate in the east of the capital. Nabil was a compromised man, so when I saw six men guarding a gate, I knew I was in the right spot.

I was buzzed through a series of armored doors and guided into a large basement room by two burly bodyguards. The room was adorned with backlit murals of turquoise lakes under snow-capped mountains. Dozens of velvet chairs lined the walls and a few men milled around at the door. Nabil strode in and took a seat in a chair at the end of the room, larger than the others and with gold trim. He crossed his legs, lit a cigarette and asked if he could use my tea saucer as his ashtray. Before I could answer, he reached over and took it.

The conversation started easily enough. The CIA, he said, provided the logistics, intelligence and money in cash, and the Zero Units “conduct” the raids and “deliver” the target, with U.S. special operations forces soldiers joining in. If there was an area where the Americans didn’t have a presence, they had the Zero Units to go there for them, he said. “They needed us and we needed them.” Nabil oversaw the units from 2010 — around two years after their founding — until December 2015, except for a short stint as deputy national security adviser.

In 2014, with local anger growing over the raids, Nabil said, the U.S. and Afghan governments signed a security agreement that all American operations must be approved by the Afghan government, a protocol that was “followed for a while.” The agreement also gave the units more autonomy to conduct raids of their own.

Under such an arrangement, I asked, who’s responsible when the Zero Units get it wrong? The U.S., Nabil said matter-of-factly. “If they provided the intelligence, and the intelligence turns out to be false.”

But he also said that if the system was working, the Afghan government “should take responsibility” because all intelligence is supposed to go through it as well.

He switched the subject to how he professionalized the Zero Units, instituting a code of conduct after “something really horrible happened” and the government asked him what the rules of engagement were. Soldiers, he explained, killed the wrong target, perhaps because of what he called “personal” problems with local people.

“Before me,” he said, “they were basically without any laws. The U.S. was under pressure before because these units were misusing their power.” Nabil said the United States’ plan to staff the units with local Afghans who were “cheaper” and knew the area had backfired. The U.S., he said, failed to understand that tribal ties might cause the Afghan soldiers to provide false intelligence or have conflicted allegiances.

Nabil said he also oversaw the creation of the Afghan National Threat Intelligence Center in 2015. Known as Nasrat, it unified Afghan intelligence used in combat operations with the help of Resolute Support, the NATO-led multinational mission in Afghanistan. “It was because some of these operations went wrong that we put this center together,” he said.

I interrupted this mild boasting to tell him that I’d been tracking all the operations that the 02 unit had recently gotten wrong, killing civilians. He turned to face me. Despite some problems, he said firmly, the majority of the operations were correct.

I told him that I’d seen videos of civilians killed by the 02 unit. Even though he’d left the agency, had he seen those videos?

Nabil paused and the conversation took a startling shift. “Yeah, but the problem is, nobody takes it seriously.” When these accidents increase, you become used to these deaths, he said, “and then you lose the sense of seriousness. Like when you see blood for the first time, you feel something. Tenth time, nothing.”

In 2019, I said, I found more deaths due to incorrect targeting or crossfire than any other year, pulling my crumpled notes from my pocket to show him just how many I had found.

“Yes, I agree,” Nabil interrupted, without looking at my notes, then offered a startling admission: He was aware that the units had been going on operations based on botched intelligence and that the soldiers, the commanders and higher-ups had faced no consequences if civilian deaths resulted. Nabil said he didn’t know how many civilians had been killed. He believed, in the end, that the units were used as tools by both sides, and that their targets were not always legitimate.

“One of the operations went wrong in Bagrami District and I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. … We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban,” he said, trailing off.

October 2020 • Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province

After months of searching, the only night raid I could find that the Afghan government said it investigated was one so audacious that it captured the attention of both the current and former Afghan president. The raid killed four brothers, including one who was a legal adviser to the Afghan Senate and another who was a lawyer.

The night of the September 2019 raid, the family was at their home in Jalalabad, celebrating the recent return of one of the brothers from a religious pilgrimage. Qadir Seddiqi, the eldest brother who worked in the Senate, was in his room sleeping with his 10-day-old son in the crook of his arm. His father was joking with the youngest brother, while the other two drank tea with their mother.

After the raid, the 02 unit posted pictures on the NDS Facebook page of the brothers with weapons laid across their bodies, declaring that four ISKP militants had been killed. But when Shirzad and I visited in October 2020, family members told us that the photos were staged after the fact.

Mohammad Ibrahim, who found his nephews that night, believed the staging was to make them look like they had been killed because they had guns. As he talks, Ibrahim is jittery and keeps his head tilted, preoccupied by a helicopter circling above us in the fading light. Accounts of weapons being planted have emerged in several eyewitness reports about controversial operations led by British and Australian troops.

That night, the Zero Unit soldiers bound the brothers’ hands and wrote their names on pieces of tape they stuck to each man before shooting them, said their cousin Wasiullah. “That was the last time I saw my cousins, with labels on them.”

Wasiullah said a hood was placed over his head and he and eight others were taken to Forward Operating Base Fenty, the home of the 02, to gather biometrics, including facial images, iris scans and fingerprints. They were then left in a cell overnight, he said.

A day later, on President Ashraf Ghani’s orders, an investigative team arrived from Kabul. It was joined by prosecutors, the governor and the NDS director. “We gave them evidence,” Ibrahim said, including a bullet that had gone straight through one of the brother’s feet and into the mattress beneath him. One of the brothers was shot in the head and stabbed; another was “shot in the hands and feet and then twice in his head,” Ibrahim said. “His wedding ceremony was only two weeks away. My heart broke.”

A press release issued by the NDS initially claimed that the 02 soldiers targeted alleged members of the Islamic State. Afghan government officials later backtracked and admitted that the brothers were innocent. The provincial government said in a statement that the 02 had conducted the raid.

After the family protested, Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the director of the NDS at the time, resigned. Ghani tweeted that the raid happened despite “previous assurances and changes in guidelines” for operations and declared that there was “zero tolerance for civilian casualties.” He ordered the attorney general to investigate the incident immediately “and to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Family members said they were assured that an investigation would be carried out into the incident but told me they were never contacted again.

November - February 2021 • Kabul

As my tally of the dead and injured grew, tracking civilian deaths through official American channels was proving nearly impossible. Afghan officials told me they lacked the resources to investigate and reiterated that these were CIA operations. Researchers and experts questioned whether “collateral” deaths could even be tracked, arguing that such a count would be classified.

Michel Paradis, a national security expert at Columbia Law School and a senior attorney with the Department of Defense, said that civilian deaths during U.S.-Afghan operations can fall into a bureaucratic gray area, with no one interested in claiming casualties they don’t have to.

Under the international Law of Armed Conflict, the military must differentiate between civilian and combatant, but in Afghanistan civilians and fighters often live in the same villages. I found that civilian casualties could easily be shifted to categories that allow them to be labeled as legitimate kills. In Afghanistan, there are many reasons one would need to protect themself. If a woman picks up a gun because masked men with weapons have invaded her home in the middle of the night, she could be labeled a combatant, involved in “direct participation in hostilities,” despite any other evidence.

The law specifies that “in case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian,” and it’s up to the military to establish “combatant status.” In reality, I found the families of those targeted in Zero Unit raids had no way to prove otherwise. And it was impossible to find out how, or if, the CIA recorded their deaths. And then there were those whose deaths were written off as “collateral.”

Two lawyers working for years with whistleblowers on Afghanistan war crimes told me they’d experienced similar roadblocks. “There is not any real desire from the Pentagon or the executive branch to track civilian casualties accurately,” said Jesselyn Radack, a national security and human rights attorney who represented Daniel Hale, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst, among others. Hale was convicted for disclosing classified information that nearly 90% of the people killed by U.S airstrikes in Afghanistan were not the intended targets. Radack said Afghans who were killed because of faulty intelligence or botched raids were often classified as if they were caught in legitimate crossfire or were part of a terrorist group.

Radack said she’d seen official accounts from operations in Afghanistan in which children killed by mistake were called “TITS,” or terrorists in training. Or, she said, a child “had the wrong father, so he was adjacent to terrorist activities. The ages of children had been changed to make them appear older than they were. … The pressure to make civilian casualties not civilian casualties is pretty intense.”

By the time the reports get to the congressional oversight committees, she said, they’re “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”

She and others I spoke to said they believe U.S. officials create the impression that the night raid strategy is effective by “sanitizing,” or removing relevant details from, the reports before they are shared with Congress.

A CIA official denied this: “When reports — which can be lengthy — are provided to the Hill, they are not ‘sanitized,’ but simply summarized as is regular practice.”

Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe they’re getting an accurate picture of the CIA’s overseas operations. They added that intelligence committee members who theoretically monitor such operations lack the capacity, and sometimes the willpower, to get information about the programs — or even understand which questions to ask.

A congressional source on the House Foreign Affairs Committee told me that Congress had also abdicated its authority over the CIA’s operations. “It is really clear that we have backed a lot of groups that did pretty horrific things,” he said. “It benefits people up here to not have to actually deal with these sort of things.”

Over the years, the task of publicly counting the dead had fallen to human rights organizations, which have produced a series of strongly worded, but largely ineffectual, reports detailing some incidental deaths, summary executions, torture and disappearances resulting from the Zero Units’ night raids. Even so, more than a dozen human rights groups I spoke to conceded it’s nearly impossible to track such incidents, especially those involving civilians.

The only organization I found that appeared to be consistently attempting to document those killed during raids was the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. It reported on one raid in which NDS special forces supported by international soldiers entered a medical clinic in 2019 and “shot and killed three civilian males, two of whom worked at the clinic and one of whom was accompanying a patient.” The organization said deaths of civilians during the operations in 2019 were at their highest level since 2009. They found that the 02 unit alone killed 80 civilians and injured 17.

In trying to count the civilian dead from 02 raids from June 2017 through July 2021, Shirzad and I used news reports, nongovernmental sources and eyewitness reports. We mapped the raids using geographical coordinates and satellite imagery, then used medical records, birth and death certificates, in-person witness interviews and a forensic database to identify the dead.

At medical facilities, doctors told us they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of them later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.

One coroner in Jalalabad described how, at times, 02 soldiers had brought bodies to the morgue themselves, dismissing the staff and using the facilities before leaving with the dead. These deaths were not allowed to be recorded by him or other staff.

After years of searching, we realized that our resulting tally of at least 452 civilians killed during 107 raids was almost certainly an undercount. In some of these raids, authorities claimed to have killed or captured insurgents, an assertion that is difficult to independently substantiate. There were hundreds of additional operations in which we couldn’t determine if the dead were civilians or militants.

And this count also does not capture another cost of the raids: all of those who were injured, sometimes suffering permanent disabilities. Among those I met was a young man who’d been struck in the cheek by shrapnel. Unable to afford surgery to remove it, the metal shard migrated to his eye, leaving him partially blind.

Shirzad and I were overwhelmed. We kept thinking: If this count was from just one of the four units for just four years, what was the full tally?

April 2021 • Kabul

In the spring of 2021, I squeezed into the backseat of a beat-up Toyota Corolla off the highway between Kabul and Jalalabad to tell Baseer and Hadi that I’d finally tracked down what happened in the raid that they had told me about back in October 2019.

It had taken me a year and a half to find any record corroborating the raid at Kamal Khel despite the four civilians killed. Then I discovered a radio reporter who had gone to the site the following day.

In Kamal Khel, the relatives of the dead met me and described what happened: That July day, a drone had dropped a missile just outside their mosque, killing 13 people, including Nasibullah, 11, and injuring his cousin Sebghatullah, 18, who died in his brother’s arms on the way to the hospital. Such airstrikes often came in tandem with the ground operations.

Later that night — when Baseer and Hadi and the Zero Unit descended on their home — the family was still awake, in shock, and mourning their deaths. Nasibullah’s body was cradled in the arms of his grandfather, Ghulam Rasul.

Chaos ensued in the blaze of explosions and gunfire. Masked soldiers stormed into the house, forcing the men outside to face the courtyard wall until the soldiers had left.

Watch video ➜

Only then did Rasul find his 16-year-old granddaughter, badly injured in the hand and abdomen, lying on the ground by the bodies of Nasibullah and Sebghatullah. She later died. Her uncle had also been shot in the raid and died from his injuries. Rasul’s wife and a grandson were injured.

Rasul, who was forced to drop his dead grandson and flee when the shooting started, said that when he protested the killings, the provincial governor told him, “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation.”

At the end of the meeting, Rasul told me bitterly, “the provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar” as compensation for their loss. But no one ever told the family members why they were targeted or if the Zero Unit had simply got it wrong.

Baseer said it didn’t make a difference who had killed the family, a drone strike or the unit. “They were just children.” He paused, “I don’t know how in any meaningful way I can say I am sorry to that family. How do I even express it? I can’t.”

“I have had the feeling many times, you know, when you feel like you’re trapped in a corner, with no way out ... but I made the choice, I joined the unit, and there’s nothing I can do to undo it now,” he said.

In the three years I’d spent interviewing Baseer and Hadi, I’d come to see them as flawed soldiers who, in their way, were trying to pull some good out of their lot by sharing what they know, even if it meant exposing their role in killing innocents.

Hadi said that Afghans lived in fear. “They get killed by all — if it’s 02, if it’s Taliban, ISIS, criminals and others. It’s the same for them. Everyone kills these civilian Afghans.”

Hadi whispered to himself: “In war, nobody wins. I have caused unforgivable pain on my people. We can’t ignore these deaths. Our minds are damaged, too. So are the Americans’.”

But neither Baseer or Hadi believed that there would be a day of reckoning for the Zero Units. As our conversation ended, they climbed out of the car and disappeared into the night.

September 2021 • The Midwest, America

Early in my reporting, a former U.S. special operations forces member told me that “no one would give a shit” about the killing of Afghan civilians. But it “would be more of a story” if I had American soldiers coming forward. Since then, I’d been searching for an American willing to speak candidly about his time with a Zero Unit.

It shouldn’t be that hard, I reasoned. The CIA had been pointing Army Rangers and other special operations forces at targets in Afghanistan for more than a decade.

My conversations with a Ranger I call Jason, who agreed to talk as long as I withheld identifying details about him, started over the phone after he’d left Afghanistan and finished several months later when I traveled to meet him in the United States just two weeks after the final U.S. planes left Kabul. I confirmed his service with one of the units and corroborated his impressions with other Rangers.

When we first began talking, Jason had recently left a stint with a Zero Unit after six years with two unrelated Afghan special forces units who joined the Rangers on night raids throughout the country. Now he was sitting in a booth in a diner in the heart of the Great Plains watching the Taliban set up their new government more than 7,000 miles away.

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about the Zero Unit operations.

He was stocky and trying to sit tall, perhaps to appear taller than he was, even though he wore flip-flops.

Initially, he was focused, puffing his chest out as he talked. He wanted me to know that he understood Afghanistan. His reasons for joining the fight echoed those of Hadi’s, “to catch the bad guys,” but like his Afghan counterpart, he now wondered if the units’ mission had been squandered. His rage is not over the civilians killed — those, he said, are the cost of war — but for the terrorists left alive.

I asked him to lead me through how the raids worked and how intelligence could go wrong. “That just happens. If you do enough operations, there’s gonna be some times where it’s not the right person. The intelligence isn’t perfect.”

As the conversation went on, he began waffling: They didn’t kill civilians. They never botched operations. They just shot back. OK, they did kill them, but they were just collateral.

I was startled to learn that military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus they prepared from overhead photography and other intelligence. “Ninety percent of the casualties are because you just can’t see them,” Jason said. “We have something we call a slant, which predicts the number of people in the compound. So 3/6/8 is 3 men, 6 women and 8 children. But because the women and children are hidden inside, that slant in reality will end up being 3/14/36, and a lot of times it’s the kids and women who get caught in the crossfire.”

In other cases, he said, civilians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “There’s a time we threw a grenade into a hole where an ISIS guy was,” he said. “But there were a bunch of women and kids and in the crossfire a pregnant woman got shot. She was fine, but obviously the kids’ eardrums exploded and everything like that.”

During his four months with the Zero Units, Jason said, Americans were often present at every stage of the operation. The questioning of suspects at the scene was done by the Afghan soldiers, and the “verification” of terrorists was typically done by the American soldiers through biometrics “or people at the site of the raid saying they are terrorists.”

“While the unit did get some known bad guys,” he said, it was also sent after the wrong people or just low-level Taliban to boost their count.

He initially tells me that every death was accounted for in after-action reports and sent up the chain of command, and that any raid gone wrong was investigated. The reports included “what went well and what went bad and how to fix it,” he said, and were written by senior commanders.

When I told him that his account conflicts with what I discovered, that the injured often died later or in hospitals and that the dead were sometimes misidentified as insurgents, he paused, then conceded that only those at the scene would know if they counted the dead and if they double-checked who they had killed.

“I don’t know how many times we said we killed this one Taliban commander before we actually killed him,” he said. “But the U.S. just claimed they got the right guy.”

March 2022 • Kabul

I was working to put the final touches on my reporting when I began to see alarming reports from Afghanistan. City after city had surrendered to the Taliban. U.S. authorities were scrambling to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans with ties to the American forces from the Kabul airport. The Zero Units had been deployed as a last line of resistance against the Taliban. In the end, they stood arms’ reach from one another securing the airport. Only some Zero Unit members made it out of the country.

Months later, I returned to see what was left of America’s secret war. Government offices were now inhabited by the Taliban, who targeted enemies much as the Zero Units did. The news archives I’d scoured had been deleted and the statistical records burned. The families of some victims had left the homes that bore the Zero Units’ bullet holes. The Afghan government officials who once brushed me off were now texting me to help them leave the country. And those heavily armed, widely feared Zero Unit trucks? They were now being used by the Taliban, who rode around the streets aimlessly with brand-new, American-made M4 rifles on their laps.

Baseer is one of those left behind. Our final meeting was at the fish restaurant where we’d first talked three years earlier. He and others who had served with the 02 were living off the grid. The Americans’ promises that they would never abandon their Afghan allies had proven empty.

After sending me months of desperate texts from different hiding spots, Baseer told me he no longer wants to leave his homeland. He said he realized he fought a messy, failed war for a country that he now believes never cared about Afghanistan. Angry, bitter and disappointed, he wants no part of America.

His feelings are the same reason that the Taliban grew, he said. “The U.S. and our NDS made a lot of enemies,” he said. “Look at me now. I will never support an American war in Afghanistan again.” (After months on the run, Baseer would later be detained by the Taliban. No one has been able to contact Hadi since the Taliban takeover. He is presumed to have been killed.)

After the fall of Kabul, my reporting partner and now friend, Shirzad, was airlifted with, ironically, thousands of Zero Unit soldiers and their families to Fort Dix in New Jersey. He was deeply troubled by the units’ killing of Afghans. But amid the foreignness of America, the soldiers were just Afghans like him, lost and frightened. He sounded almost confused by this realization. In December, he was finally allowed to leave Fort Dix to study for a doctorate at an American university.

I tried to find out what the U.S. was going to do with all the men it had trained to kill with precision. Would it just dump them into America? Or would it find a new use for them?

Only one of the 02 unit commanders picked up my call. He’d just arrived in Sacramento, California, after five months at a U.S. base and 20 days in a hotel in Los Angeles. There is no plan yet for him or his men. They’d been dispersed across the country, “but our skills and abilities are not being utilized and we are jobless.”

As for me, the trauma of compiling a body count had taken a toll. As I processed the grief of family after family and the photographs of blood-soaked bodies, I started waking up with bruises on my arms and legs. “It’s a psychosomatic disorder,” a psychologist friend told me. The splotches had started appearing, I realized, when I started sharing my personal story for the first time. It made me wonder what kind of bruises the Zero Units, and America, had left on Afghanistan.

I was devastated to find out that Mahzala died quietly in her home in December, just days from the anniversary of her sons’ deaths. She never got her answers.

Neither did I. The path to Pakistan to uncover my mother’s roots still taunts me, as do the questions about what happened the night of the attack that killed her. For now, the answers remain buried under so many other tragedies.

In the end, I got closure for my own personal story from the unlikeliest source: Baseer. He was not the one who killed my mother and sister, but he was a perpetrator nonetheless. Seeing his remorse, his torment over the hideous things he’d done to his country and his compatriots for someone else’s agenda loosened something in me.

“It will be good if you leave Afghanistan as soon as possible,” he said, warning of escalating violence. “At first I was thinking: ‘Everyone wants to get a visa to go out. Why do you want to come in?’” As he got up to leave, he turned to me. “I understand it now; I understand you now. You came for your story, not mine.”

July 2022 • Jalalabad

In the summer of 2022, I was in Afghanistan on another story when I was approached by a skinny teenager named Spin Ghar who wanted my help reading a letter from the U.S. military. Six years earlier, he told me, he’d been shot by 02 soldiers next to his home outside their base in Jalalabad. He was 12 when it happened, pulling up his shirt to show me scars from three bullet wounds. He still lives next to the once heavily fortified base, which is now empty, except for a lone Talib on his phone.

After the shooting, he received surgery at two U.S. bases, he said. The 02 soldiers gave his family the commander’s name and number. “They said they would give assistance.”

He showed me the claim form, which had been filled out in English by the Americans at the base. His age had been bumped up to 14.

In 2020, they finally received the letter, written in English. I told him the letter said the U.S. military had rejected his claim: “I understand that you suffered a serious injury in the incident, and sympathize with your situation,” wrote Capt. Andrew R. Dieselman, the U.S. foreign claims commissioner at the Jalalabad air base. “Unfortunately, because our investigation determined U.S. Forces were not involved in the incident, I am unable to compensate you.”

Spin Ghar looked straight ahead in silence and finally seemed to gather some strength, turning to me and saying, “What should I do now?"

Resolute Support, which is named on the letterhead, told me my questions are best directed to the CIA.

As I left Spin Ghar’s home that day, feeling helpless yet again, a woman, his neighbor, rushed toward me, waving a piece of paper. It was a claims card from a U.S. task force. Her sister, she said, “lost her mind” in 2019 after an American drone crashed into their house right next to the base, killing all three of her young children.

She asked me to take the claims card to the Americans. I told her the Americans have left Afghanistan.

She looked at me stunned. She had no idea. “When are they coming back?”

Sources

To understand the Zero Units’ operations and their consequences, as well as the CIA’s role in training, funding and directing them, Lynzy Billing traveled hundreds of miles across Nangarhar province, one of the most volatile regions of Afghanistan. She visited the sites of more than 30 night raids of the 02, one of four known Zero Units. She was joined by a forensic pathologist, who used a variety of government records to help verify the identities of the dead.

She conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and U.S. government officials, Afghan and U.S. defense and security officials and former CIA intelligence officers. She spoke with U.S. congressional oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts and representatives of human rights organizations. To unravel what happened at the sites of raids, she interviewed doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses, family members and village elders. She spoke at length with two active Zero Unit soldiers, an American Ranger who had participated in Zero Unit operations and the former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency.

Billing also reviewed leaked security incident reports from the country’s intelligence agency, police and nongovernmental organizations, and hundreds of local news articles, copies of emails, phone conversations and declassified intelligence files.

Methodology

Counting civilian casualties that resulted from CIA-backed operations during the war in Afghanistan proved to be incredibly challenging. It was chaotic. Raid sites were often remote and in dangerous areas, left inaccessible by the fighting. The victims sometimes died later in hospitals from their wounds or were quickly buried without anyone going back to investigate. No one organization was able to keep complete tallies. We set out to catalog the civilians killed during raids by the 02 unit over a four-year-period: June 2017 to July 2021.

In records and reports, the 02 unit appeared under different names and the raids were at times recorded as “search operations,” but 02 was the only such strike force — identifiable by its tactics, equipment, vehicles and ability to call in U.S. air power — operating in Nangarhar during this time period. In some cases eyewitnesses say the 02 announced themselves to those at the scene.

We obtained a comprehensive list of the 02 unit operations from a reputable international organization, including dates the raids were conducted, their locations and the number of casualties. We then collected additional alleged civilian casualties from lists kept by human rights organizations, as well as from local news and radio reports and government and police files. We sought corroborating records and eyewitness testimony for each raid.

Using satellite imagery and geolocation, we were able to verify the locations of many of those raids, especially those accompanied by airstrikes, by searching for evidence of damaged homes and structures. We mapped these against what we found during site visits, such as blown-open doors, burned homes and walls marked by bullet holes, as well as videos of the raids and their destruction obtained from eyewitnesses.

We traveled to the scenes of more than 30 raids to speak with survivors, eyewitnesses and family members of those killed. To determine who the dead were, we used government statistical department records, IDs and hospital records, which included such details as name, gender, estimated age and tribal affiliation. In some cases, we also found death certificates and coroner reports at the federal forensics department in Kabul.

ProPublica research reporters reviewed the list of hundreds of raids that Billing brought back from her years of reporting, cross-checking her list against the evidence she’d compiled and publicly available descriptions of the events including news accounts and NGO reports. From there we produced a list of raids and civilian casualties that, while certainly an undercount, was supported by the evidence available to us.

During the process of visiting villages to corroborate the unit’s night raids, we were continually told about other raids and other deaths. Almost every witness to a raid seemed to know another witness to another raid. We do not believe by any stretch that this is a full accounting of the 02 raids casualties. It is a tally that will now remain unreported and uninvestigated.

Contributors to this story include: design and development by Anna Donlan, ProPublica; research by Mariam Elba, ProPublica; and fact-checking by Hannah Murphy Winter for ProPublica.

Contributors to the videos include: illustration and animation by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, ProPublica; field production by Lynzy Billing, Muhammad Rehman Shirzad and Kern Hendricks for ProPublica; and music by Milad Yousufi for ProPublica.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Lynzy Billing, video by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons.

The Fiji Elections Office app is back online after a glitch last night forced the suspension of provisional results.

Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem briefed media in the early hours of today saying attempts to restart a failed data transfer had caused the app to glitch out and give a disproportionate amount of votes to some candidates.

Two candidates in particular received a boost of about 28,000 and 14,000 votes respectively.

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“The situation occurred because of the termination of a data transfer. And then when we retried to do it, that’s when things got messy. Of course, with the results that are provisional right now, we are uploading you know with the result management system data directly,” Saneem explained.

Saneem reassured media the problem had now been rectified and promised to email media copies of data releases being uploaded to the app going forward to 7am Fiji time, so that they could verify for themselves the data was accurately reflected in the app.

At 7am provisional results stopped being released and the official count began.

No further provisional results were being released, and official results are expected on Sunday.

Reassurances for political parties?
Responding to a question from RNZ Pacific’s regional correspondent Kelvin Anthony about whether he had any reassurances for political parties that might be concerned about the app malfunctioning, Saneem replied: “Well, none of the political parties are at the results centre.

“So, we believe that they have full confidence in the system.”

Saneem stressed that manual data entry had not stopped while the app was down, and that the counting process was well under way and would continue throughout today.

The Supervisor of Elections also wanted to make it clear that data reloaded onto the app for the restart of the provisional results roll-out was from a different set of polling stations than the one released at 9pm last night, hence the difference in the data sets.

The first results released at last night had shown the People’s Alliance Party in the lead with 2600 votes over Fiji First’s 667 votes.

The new results released at the relaunch of the app around 2.30am Fiji time showed FijiFirst leading with 65,949 votes over the People’s Alliance Party who had 50,348 votes, with 531 of 2071 stations counted.

“It’s not the exact same polling stations that we had initially uploaded. But this is 531 sets of data that has been pulled by the laptop,” Saneem explained.

“We will email all the media, the result management system print out in a PDF format for you to be able to verify that the data that is on the app against the provisional results – by party – that has been printed out by the result management system,” he said.

Fiji uses an open list proportional electoral system with the whole nation voting as a single constituency.

This year nine political parties are contesting 55 seats in the country’s unicameral 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.

The post I Dreamed I Saw Limbaugh Last Night appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Hugh Iglarsh.

A weekly offering of fried fish stands out as a cultural institution in a state known for its beer, football, and cheese. The Wisconsin fish fry— a regional dish consisting of battered and fried fish, generally served with fries or potato pancakes, cabbage or coleslaw, rye bread or a dinner roll, and topped off with a lemon slice —has been a hearty Friday night staple of local bars, village halls, and supper clubs.

This dish is more than just a line on a menu, it’s how people have defined their Friday nights for decades.

Now, fish frys will have to adapt to a changing climate. From the Hatch green chiles in New Mexico to gumbo in Louisiana, climate change is altering regional food traditions across the country. 

Wisconsin lakes are warming and becoming more hospitable to invasive species and extreme weather conditions thanks to a global rise in temperature, challenging the future of this statewide ritual. Commonly fried fish species like perch, lake trout, and whitefish have declined, causing Wisconsin restaurants to look beyond their own lakes for certain fish, or abandon some altogether. 

Two Great Lakes — Michigan and Superior — touch Wisconsin’s shores and have experienced a steady rise in temperature since 1995. Even the deepest depths of the lake system are starting to warm up and the average maximum ice cover on the Great Lakes has dropped over 20 percent in the last 50 years. 

The fish fry is predicated on Wisconsin “geography, religion, and history,” said Terese Allen, an expert on the state’s culinary history and a co-author of Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State.

Cooking fish for large groups predates settlers, with evidence of Indigenous fishing practices dating back thousands of years in the Great Lakes. Allen said when Indigenous communities and colonizers intermingled in a region “surrounded by and intertwined with waterways,” the settlers found preparing fish in mass to be a useful skill. Many immigrants who settled the state were also Catholic and wouldn’t eat meat on Fridays, a factor in the dish’s growth and popularity.

Fish frys boomed during Prohibition, Allen said, as taverns would sell fried fish for cheap to get customers in the door during a time when bars struggled to survive. By the 1960s, in a post-Prohibition era and the end of the Friday meat ban for Catholics, Wisconsinites across the state were hooked.

As a definition for the uninitiated, Allen said a fish fry is simply an “end-of-the-work-week rite, in restaurants plain and simple to fancy, that brings people together to celebrate everyday life. It’s not a holiday, but it is a regular special occasion.”

It used to be that the fish for those occasions came from the state’s shorelines. Unfortunately, years of overharvesting and strained ecosystems led to a rapid decline in fish populations in these lakes. By the turn of the 20th century, a growing interest in commercial fishing across all Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior) led to the near-death of Atlantic salmon, lake trout, and ciscoes, with whitefish on a rapid decline. In 1954, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission was formed to protect and manage fish populations, protect the lakes from overharvesting, manage water quality, and fight another persistent problem — invasive species. 

Two invasive species have caused lasting effects on Wisconsin fish; sea lampreys and zebra mussels. Sea lampreys are a parasitic fish famed for their rows of sharp teeth and funnel-shaped mouths, also known as the vampire fish, and have been called North America’s first invasive species. Sea lamprey nearly decimated all Great Lakes fish life, dropping the average catch weight from 15 million pounds down to a dismal 300,000 by the 1960s, according to the fishery commission. Baby vampire fish are killed using a set of chemicals known as lampricides, but climate change has made it harder to terminate these bloodsuckers. A study found that rising lake temperatures make lamprey larvae more resistant to chemicals meant to kill them.

Yellow perch used to be caught, doused in batter, and fried by the bushel in the Great Lakes region until zebra mussels invaded. Zebra mussels are natives of Russian and Ukrainian freshwater systems and by the 1980s, found their way to Wisconsin’s lakes and bays. Spawning perch and zebra mussels both feed on and fight over phytoplankton and zooplankton. 

This feud has left yellow perch populations in freefall from a few decades ago, with Lake Michigan perch on a continued decline, according to the Wisconsin DNR. Zebra mussels, much like a lamprey, will thrive in a warmer climate, according to a 2020 Hydrobiologia study, especially in northern higher North American latitudes, such as Wisconsin lakes. The infestation of zebra mussels has reached over 250 lakes in Wisconsin and once they set up shop, the invasive species is hard to get rid of.

Besides invasive species, extreme weather events on lakes, such as turbulent windstorms, are already harming Lake Michigan fish. The loss of ice cover has caused lakes to thaw faster and expose still developing fish to the elements. “If you have loss of ice cover, then you’re going to potentially have more wind events that could cause turbulence [and] could potentially bury eggs,” said Abby Lynch, a fish biologist and researcher with the United States Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Center.

Lynch’s research focuses on how climate change is impacting inland fish across the globe. Given the complexity of a given lake’s ecosystem, she said factors such as increased precipitation and periods of drought will also change how fish survive. Lake temperatures, she added, are a major concern when looking at the future of fish populations.

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Climate change has also affected how whitefish, another popular fish fry option, are spawning. Whitefish spawn in the fall, egg in the winter, and hatch in the spring, leaving them vulnerable to seasons experiencing warming temperatures. As these changes to the lake systems happen, one of the most immediate impacts is where certain fish are staying or moving. 

Lynch said anglers, fisheries, and shoreline communities are already seeing that when a lake changes, the species available at a specific location will change with time. Once certain species move out of a lake, the regional identity and industry associated with that fish will be forced to acclimate. 

“Fish might be able to move and their populations may end up in a reasonable place, but there’s still a lot of political and social implications for those shifts that are not simple to deal with,” Lynch said. 

Wisconsin perch reigned supreme at fish fries for decades. As the population shifts, stalwart fishers look for ways to get perch on plates. 

Doug Sackett, a retired firefighter and EMT from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, started farming yellow perch at his Cedar Hill Farm pheasant hunting retreat eight years ago. Halfway between Madison and Milwaukee, his property now has three half-acre 15-foot-deep perch ponds with around 60,000 fish. He said he’s seen how limits on commercially harvested perch and other species harvest has caused restaurants and suppliers to look for other options.

“They’ve been cutting back on how many fish they are able to harvest which puts a big hurt on the Friday night fish fry industry,” Sackett said. 

As taverns look to fill in the gaps left by declining populations, Sackett said he’s seen buyers supplement local freshwater fish for imported zander, a freshwater fish that resembles perch and is found in Finland and other European countries, as well as ocean perch, imported from fisheries in the Pacific Ocean. 

Justin Kohlhagen, operating manager of VFW Memorial Post 9156 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, stays tried and true to local fish as much as he can. The VFW, found just around the corner from a semi-pro baseball field and across the street from a Lutheran cemetery, has hosted a booming Friday night fish fry for the last nine years under his watch. Born and raised in Sheboygan, a city nicknamed the Malibu of the Midwest and known for freshwater recreation, Kohlhagen spent his childhood fishing perch with his family along Lake Michigan shores.

“You used to go off South Pier by the power plant and we could go out perch fishing,” Kohlhagen said. “You can’t do that anymore in Sheboygan, there’s no perch around here.”

Now Kohlhagen sources his perch from Lake Erie, a point of pride for the VFW. “It’s not zander and all that crap,” he said. “It’s actual fish.” 

This commitment to Great Lakes perch has caused prices to rise in recent years, with a perch plate costing $22.50 a plate and Kohlhagen paying over $17 a pound for Great Lakes perch, but he said his Sheboygan customers want and expect fresh fish. Kohlhagen said the VFW operates at the same scale as restaurants or supper clubs and they turn over “tons” of tables each Friday night. “We’re the busiest fish fry in Sheboygan County. I can promise you that,” he said.

At the northern tip of the state, a fish success story has spawned from decades of conservation and management efforts. Lake Superior communities Bayfield, Red Cliff, and the Apostle Islands have seen a growth in fish species commonly used for fish frys. 

“Whitefish populations, right now, in the Apostle Islands region of Lake Superior are doing fantastic,” said Ian Harding, a fish biologist for the Red Cliff Fisheries Department. The agency is operated by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of Wisconsin’s eleven federally recognized Indigenous tribes. 

Harding said whitefish populations declined in Lakes Michigan and Superior in the early 20th century like other species, but since the 1970s-80s fight for treaty and fishing rights, Superior whitefish have boomed with help from Red Cliff and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources conservation methods.

He said Lake Superior also sets itself apart due to the “great luck” of its chemical makeup, which has far less calcium buildup than Lake Michigan, a crucial component to the growth of zebra mussels. This invasive species has been spotted in Superior, but nowhere close to the levels seen in other lakes. In addition to its chemical makeup, Lake Superior has far less shoreline development than Lake Michigan, which is home to larger cities like Green Bay or Milwaukee. The lack of development along Superior has played a role in the health of the lake, and thus its fish, and is something he wants to protect. 

“When projects pop up in the Lake Superior basin, or they want to develop Lake Superior shoreline, use water resources, or anything like that, generally in our position, we’re opposed,” Harding said.

The Red Cliff tribe operates its own fishing company that sells whitefish wholesale to restaurants across the state and beyond due to its booming harvest. Harding said Lake Superior whitefish and ciscoes, or lake herring, are among the most popular catches that make their way to plates in the state. Still, Lake Superior fish populations aren’t without problems. The lake is one of the fastest warming lakes in the world, and slowly but surely, warming waters have created growing toxic algae blooms. 

“We should really take notes and learn from what’s happened to Lake Michigan and Huron so we can take steps so that doesn’t happen here in Lake Superior,” Harding said. “We’re really fortunate to have what we have right now and things generally have been going pretty well, but there’s warning signs out there.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Friday night fish frys define Wisconsin. What happens when climate change adjusts the menu? on Aug 26, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Image Source: Cap Badge of the UK Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) – Public Domain

The investigation by the Panorama programme of the BBC of the SAS unit alleged to have killed 54 detainees in Afghanistan in a six month period was wholly convincing. The death squads, which is what they were, appear to have made only cursory efforts to conceal the arbitrary killings, presumably because they had been covertly approved by senior officers.

A senior officer who worked at UK Special Forces headquarters told the BBC there was “real concern” over the squadron’s reports.

“Too many people were being killed on night raids and the explanations didn’t make sense,” he said. “Once somebody is detained, they shouldn’t end up dead. For it to happen over and over again was causing alarm at HQ. It was clear at the time that something was wrong.”

Internal emails from the time show that officers reacted with disbelief to the reports, describing them as “quite incredible” and referring to the squadron’s “latest massacre”. An operations officer emailed a colleague to say that “for what must be the 10th time in the last two weeks” the squadron had sent a detainee back into a building “and he reappeared with an AK”.

The email reads: “Then when they walked back in to a different A [building] with another B [fighting-age male] to open the curtains, he grabbed a grenade from behind a curtain and threw it at the c/s [SAS assault team]. Fortunately, it didn’t go off… this is the 8th time this has happened… You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!”

As the concerns grew, one of the highest-ranking special forces officers in the country warned in a secret memo that there could be a “deliberate policy” of unlawful killing in operation. Senior leadership became so concerned that a rare formal review was commissioned of the squadron’s tactics. But when a special forces officer was deployed to Afghanistan to interview personnel from the squadron, he appeared to take the SAS version of events at face value.

The BBC understands that the officer did not visit any of the scenes of the raids or interview any witnesses outside the military.

I want to make a further point about the night raids and the execution of prisoners, many of them held on the flimsiest evidence provided by paid informants who were often personal or tribal enemies. By so doing, the SAS delegitimised the Afghan government, foreign intervention, and became the recruiting sergeant for the Taliban.

The Americans had a similar campaign of killing alleged roadside bomb makers in Iraq. But a military survey found that the deaths only served to increase the number of bomb attacks on their forces. On the occasions when a death squad did kill a bomb making kingpin, he was immediately replaced by a more enthusiastic deputy or a vengeful family member and American losses went up.

Regular armies never seem to learn the lesson that a well-led insurgency will always try to lure them into inflicting collective punishment on a community. The French did this in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the British in Northern Ireland – and then again in Helmand.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

Leaked audio of Steve Bannon published earlier this week by Mother Jones confirms that days before the 2020 presidential election, Republican incumbent Donald Trump planned to prematurely declare victory on the night of November 3 regardless of whether it was true.

"What Trump's gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He's gonna declare victory. But that doesn't mean he's a winner," a chuckling Bannon told a group of associates on October 31, 2020. "He's just gonna say he's a winner."

"At 10 or 11 o'clock, Trump's gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, 'I'm the winner. Game over. Suck on that,'" the former White House strategist said later in the conversation.

The infamous press conference where Trump falsely stated, "Frankly, we did win this election," started a little later than Bannon predicted, coming on November 4 around 2:00 am ET—at the behest of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, the House January 6 committee showed last month—but other than that, the outgoing president stuck to the script that Bannon outlined.

Because Republicans were more likely to vote in-person and have their ballots counted quickly while Democratic voters' ballots, disproportionately cast by mail, would take days to tally, Trump was "going to take advantage of" initial public perceptions about who was winning, said Bannon. "That's our strategy. He's gonna declare himself a winner."

After lying on election night that he had already won—rejecting the legitimacy of millions of yet-to-be-tallied absentee votes that he vowed to invalidate through GOP-friendly courts—Trump's early lead in key swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and others was negated as the counting of mail-in ballots shifted the race in Democratic nominee Joe Biden's favor.

But the seeds of the "Big Lie" that culminated in a deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021, and continues to wreak havoc on the republic had been sown. As of this week, 61% of Republican voters still believe that Trump—not President Biden—won in 2020.

While the recording of Bannon's October 31 meeting confirms the premeditated nature of Trump's scheme, the broad outlines of his plan to swiftly declare victory and then characterize a come-from-behind win by Biden as illegitimate were widely recognized—and condemned—weeks earlier.

Late-night show host Jimmy Fallon's October 23 interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) went viral on November 5 when the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election unfolded almost exactly as the Vermont progressive warned it would.

After jumping out to a temporary lead thanks to a higher rate of in-person voting among Republicans, Trump would try to claim an election night victory, Sanders told Fallon eight days before Bannon's conversation. As election officials counted millions of mail-in ballots, more likely to be cast by Democrats, Biden would gain ground and overtake Trump in key battleground states, he continued.

"At which point Trump says: 'See? I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked and we're not going to leave office,'" Sanders said.

As prescient as Sanders was in that clip, he and many others had been working tirelessly, well before late October 2020, to warn Americans that Trump posed an existential threat to U.S. democracy.

Many analysts were especially concerned that the president would provoke post-election chaos by accusing the Democratic Party of rigging the election when the delayed counting of absentee votes eroded his early lead.

In early September of that year, Sanders sounded the alarm about the authoritarian nature of Trump's frequent, baseless attacks on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and preemptive claims that if he were to fall short in his bid for reelection, it could be attributed solely to electoral fraud.

Trump, Sanders warned—correctly, it turned out—was laying the groundwork for a "nightmarish scenario" in which he would bombard the public with "lies and misinformation to sow confusion and chaos in the election process and undermine American democracy."

Fears of an impending coup attempt grew increasingly intense toward the end of that month, when Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, saying that he would "have to see what happens."

According to Mother Jones: "The new recording stands out for the striking candor and detail with which Bannon described a scheme to use lies to subvert democracy. Bannon also predicted that Trump's false declaration of victory would lead to widespread political violence, along with 'crazy' efforts by Trump to stay in office. Bannon and his associates laughed about those scenarios at various points in the recording."

"It's not clear how much influence Bannon, who had previously been Trump's top White House strategist before being ousted, really wielded over Trump at this time," the outlet reported. "But Bannon has suggested that he was a key architect of Trump's efforts to overturn the election results and has reportedly asserted that he convinced Trump to make January 6 a moment of reckoning in that bid."

Trump apparently liked the strategy. Two months ago, he took to his Truth Social platform to encourage far-right U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to "declare victory" in Pennsylvania's Republican primary even though the race between Oz and ex-hedge fund manager David McCormick was too close to call at the time.

Prematurely declaring victory "makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they 'just happened to find,'" Trump said at the time, repeating his thoroughly disproven lie that Biden stole the White House.

Hold Trump Accountable, a campaign of progressive advocacy group Free Speech for People, responded by tweeting: "This is why we keep saying Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy."

The release of the Bannon audio comes as the erstwhile Trump adviser prepares to go to trial on Monday over criminal contempt charges stemming from his refusal to respond to a subpoena last year from the House January 6 panel.

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Testing burden

Shanghai's 26 million people are still being required to take a COVID-19 test several times a week, to be allowed to move around in public, residents said.

"If you need to go out, to leave your residential compound to see the doctor, go to the supermarket, take the bus, etc., you need a negative PCR test result from the last 48 hours," a Jing'an district resident surnamed Dai told RFA.

Authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen announced similar requirements for anyone using public transportation in the city, including taxi or ride-sharing hires.

Beijing-based current affairs commentator Hua Po said the impact of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s zero-COVID policy on the Chinese economy has been huge.

"Beijing is carrying out mass PCR testing for all employees, and there is a lot of money involved," Hua said. "The Beijing municipal government is in a very strong financial position, and it has that money to spend."

"But the situation is very different in other places," he said. "Some local governments are very poor, and the people there are being forced to pay for the tests themselves."

Hua said the policy is more about political performance and official rankings than public health.

"If officials fail to prevent or control COVID-19, they are severely punished, so party and government leaders are implementing these policies while trying to help out local governments and take on double the economic burden," he said.

Abuse of health code app

A resident of the central province of Hubei who gave only the surname Lu said PCR testing is still mandatory in the provincial capital, Wuhan.

"Things can't go on like this ... the economy is really bad and can't take much more of this," Lu told RFA. "Many companies, logistics and supply chains can't carry on."

"Such frequent PCR testing is totally ridiculous ... it would be better not to have any testing at all," he said.

Meanwhile, a resident of the central province of Henan said they are suing the government for using the "health code" COVID-19 app to restrict their movements during protests by depositors unable to withdraw their money from the Agricultural Bank.

Xie Yanling, a resident of Dingzhuang village in Henan's provincial capital Zhengzhou, told Caixin.com that she is suing the authorities for allegedly turning her traffic-light style health code amber despite her having submitted a negative PCR test result, on the day she was due to attend a court hearing relating to the demolition of her home.

"It's inexplicable," a person familiar with the case told RFA. "The code had been green."

"I wish they would carry out the relevant policies in a normal manner, legally, and in the plain light of day," the person said.

Cai Fan, a retired associate professor of law at Wenzhou City University in Zhejiang, said health codes are being used for "stability maintenance" purposes in China.

"This forced demolition involves the vested interests of the village committee and local government," Cai said. "If they turn your health code amber for the hearing, you won't be able to get in."

"Then, after a period of time, the government will level the land, put new buildings there, and you won't be able to do anything about it," Cai said. "It will be a fait accompli."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qiao Long, Hsia Hsiao-hwa and Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.

We spend the hour featuring highlights from the second public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Main witnesses were ex-President Donald Trump’s former inner circle, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, Attorney General William Barr, campaign adviser Jason Miller and his own daughter Ivanka Trump, who all said Trump ignored them on election night in November 2020 when they argued against declaring victory. They described how Trump instead turned to his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who they said was drunk when he urged Trump to claim he’d won and say the election was being stolen.

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

New reporting from The Washington Post on Monday laid out the increasingly dire conditions across Afghanistan amid drought and in the wake of the Taliban takeover and disastrous U.S. withdrawal last year following nearly two decades of war.

"Sometimes all we have is donated stale bread and tea."

"We were poor before the takeover. Now we have nothing," Ahmed Shah Jamshidi told journalist Susannah George, who reports that the 42-year-old Afghan borrows money from shopkeepers to buy potatoes and cooking oil so his wife can make his family a watery stew.

When the family has no food, "the children scream from the hunger at night," Jamshidi explained. "Sometimes all we have is donated stale bread and tea. And when we run out of tea, I just gather grass to boil with the water."

George's accounts from struggling families come as members of the former Afghan government, diaspora groups, and relatives of 9/11 victims call on U.S. President Joe Biden to help end the suffering after freezing $7 billion in the nation's central bank funds.

In a move that The Intercept's Austin Ahlman called "tantamount to mass murder," Biden in February signed an executive order to evenly split the central bank assets held in the Federal Reserve between a trust "for the benefit of the people of Afghanistan" and American families of 9/11 victims who have taken legal action in the U.S. court system.

Various reports from United Nations and humanitarian organizations in recent months have found about 20 million people in Afghanistan, roughly half the population, face acute hunger.

"Unprecedented levels of humanitarian assistance focused on bolstering food security have made a difference. But the food security situation is dire," Richard Trenchard, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Afghanistan, said last month.

"Humanitarian assistance remains desperately important, as do the needs to rebuild shattered agricultural livelihoods and reconnect farmers and rural communities to struggling rural and urban markets across the country," he added. "Unless these happen, there will be no way out of this crisis."

George at the Post spoke with Madina Noori, who traveled over 250 miles to seek help for her daughter, Sahar, in the malnutrition ward at a children's hospital in the capital Kabul:

"She was fine when she was born, but after a few days I began to worry something was wrong," said Noori, who didn't have enough milk to sustain her. "Her skin started turning yellow, and she was very weak."

Sahar's health deteriorated quickly. By the time Noori got her to the hospital, the baby couldn't swallow liquids. Even after a week of treatment, Sahar hadn’t improved. Her hands and feet were gaunt, her skin a pale gray.

"They told us she may need to stay here for weeks, but I don't know if we can stay that long," said Noori, who is quickly running out of money. She and her mother sleep on the hospital floor beside Sahar's bed because they can't afford a place to stay.

The newspaper noted that the U.S. State Department's "refusal to recognize the Taliban also made it impossible for the country's new rulers to access billions of dollars in foreign assets. Parallel moves by the World Bank and the European Union brought Afghanistan's economy crashing down."

Although the U.S. government and others have recently begun to "funnel money through the United Nations and groups that bypass Taliban leadership," the Post continued, "these hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid are a small fraction of the billions that once kept the country afloat."

NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid praised George's reporting and the article's accompanying photographs, taken by Lorenzo Tugnoli.

"This story. And these images—absolutely devastating," Khalid said, thanking the journalist "for keeping an eye on Afghanistan... as so much of the world looks away."

George's coverage came a week after The Intercept's Murtaza Hussain detailed calls for the Biden administration "to take urgent steps to help the Afghan economy," highlighting the impact of the $7 billion seizure and that lawyers are likely to be key beneficiaries of the February order.

Kelly Campbell, co-founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, told Hussain about what she saw while leading a delegation to Afghanistan and her view of Biden's actions.

"There are people waiting in bread lines and very poor children with malnutrition visible in public, but there are also many middle-class people rapidly falling into poverty," she said. "This is being driven in part because there's no longer a functioning banking system and people are unable to access their salaries. It's a problem that humanitarian aid alone is not going to be able to solve."

"The fact of the matter is that these reserves are the Afghan people's money. The idea that they are on the brink of famine and that we would be holding on to their money for any purpose is just wrong," Campbell added. "The Afghan people are not responsible for 9/11, they're victims of 9/11 the same way our families are. To take their money and watch them literally starve—I can't think of anything more sad."

Highlighting Hussain's article last week, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) noted the rising hunger as well as a reported increase in child marriages.

"It's happening all over and in different social economic spheres," said Cornelius Williams, head of child protection for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in April. "What we are seeing is a commodification of girls and child marriages becoming more of a transaction. Children in general are becoming an economic commodity in the household."

According to CEPR, "The U.S. has a moral duty to end its inhumane economic policy and return what rightfully belongs to the people of Afghanistan."

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

The post Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock wasn’t the Worst thing that Happened on Oscar Night appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Ware.