We can only speculate why the Constitution’s Framers omitted a national recall in their lengthy deliberations in drafting the rules governing this young nation. They seem to have counted on a provision that a House impeachment and a Senate trial could oust a president. Somehow, they could not conceive of an autocratic or impaired president failing to uphold the Constitution, ruling a cowardly Congress, ignoring the courts, and crowning himself as the nation’s first lifetime dictator.

For starters, they obviously did not want a parliament or royalty to rule, nor voting by women, the property-less, and Native Americans. After all, how could the uneducated read or understand such ballot issues as budgets, taxes, war, corruption, property lines, gerrymandering, and the like? Besides, political leaders and officeholders recognized that voters might oust Senate and House members, Supreme Court judges.

Also, logistics of conducting a nationwide referendum or initiative was a factor, much less paying millions for it. Interestingly, it certainly hasn’t been a problem in electing a president in our 250-year history.

It also took a century before people recognized that state legislators failed to pass laws desperately needed. As an election expert on Ballotpedia’s website explained the origin of such oversight:

By the late 19th century, many citizens wanted to increase their check on representative government. Members of the populist and progressive movements were dissatisfied with the government; they felt that wealthy special interest groups controlled the government and that citizens had no power to break this control. A comprehensive platform of political reforms was proposed that included women’s suffrage, secret ballots, direct election of [legislative] senators, recall elections and primary elections.

The theory of the referendum process was that the individual was capable of enhancing the representative government. The populists—who believed citizens should rule the elected and not allow the elected to rule the people—and the progressives took advantage of methods that were already in place for amending state constitutions, and they began pushing state legislators to add an amendment that would allow for an initiative and popular referendum process.

Thus, the recall referendum/initiative system was born in those 19 states—but not for a president and other federal officials.

Soon, recalls took out mayors, judges, and two governors (North Dakota in 1921, California in 2003) and nearly California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. He won by 69.1 percent of the vote, having raised $70 million for media promotion. And he also campaigned around the state to “meet-and-greet” voters. The estimated cost to California taxpayers: $215 million. Last year, Newsom faced yet another recall by opponents who then failed to get the required 1,311,963 petition signatures in time to make the state ballot.

A presidential recall referendum would require a Constitutional Amendment by passage from Congress and state legislators—and approval by 38 states with a seven-year deadline to gather signatures. So prospects for expelling Trump do seem bleak. But all the 27 Amendments once had the same challenges and met them despite geographic distances and lacking today’s electronic communication systems.

But the majority of states passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) within the first year. Trump has three and a half years left to continue wreaking havoc on the American public and exchanging democracy for a dictatorship. If his first six months is any indication of peoples’ reaction to his rule, it brought at least five million angry protesters to the streets in a “No Kings” demonstrations against him a day before his 79th birthday. So consider what his continuing violations of the Constitution and democracy will do to destroy both during this term.

However, a new factor about election numbers can now foretell favorable outcomes if a recall movement gets started:

If the political marker of 3.5 percent of a nation’s voters opposes a dictator, the regime will fold, according to extensive long-term quantitative research noted recently by Harvard University professor Erica Chenoweth . America’s electorate was 154,000,000 in 2024, so 3.5 percent means it would take only 5.4 million voters to win a Constitutional Amendment referendum for recalling Trump.

Another factor is that far more millions would be voting in a Trump recall election than in 2024. For example, those five million No Kings protesters have family and friends who vote. So do those who couldn’t or wouldn’t participate. Then, add Trump’s social and healthcare victims affected by his “Big, Beautiful” budget-cutting bill he just signed into law. Like the 71, 258, 215 currently enrolled in Medicaid who will lose its benefits. Not to mention recipients’ families and friends. The 41 million on Trump’s chopping block for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) certainly would vote for a recall Amendment. So would the 73.9 million receiving Social Security benefits he is threatening. Include, too, the tens of thousands of federal employees (plus family/friends) who have just been fired/laid off by Trump’s hatchet man Elon Musk.

Multiply the total by 3.5 percent.

Republicans in Congress who voted for that bill because of Trumpian and donor threats can count that percentage. If they can’t or won’t, furious and outspoken constituents in town halls or at campaign rallies will awaken them in the months before the 2026 mid-term elections. So will public confrontations of state legislators.

In such a hostile constituent climate, it would seem to be fairly easy for them to ignore heavy pressure by Trump and donors to pass a recall Amendment. He will, of course, veto it, but Congress can override the veto with a two-thirds affirmative vote in both houses (House: 290; Senate: 67). Apply that 3.5 percent to those totals.

Another supportive factor for a recall Amendment is the historical precedent of success by people finally ridding their countries from years of repressive and rapacious rulers. The French did it with revolution and guillotine, beginning in 1789. Our revolution began brewing in 1775 and took eight years of war to free us from Britain’s mad King George III. Both bloody uprisings were inspired and patterned by the achievement of democracy and people’s rights, first won 800 years ago in England. That’s when its barons forced King John to apply the royal seal approving Magna Carta (the Great Charter) June 15, 1215 on Runnymede meadows.

That monumentally important document ended immunity for imperious, narcissistic kings under the centuries-old “Divine Right” policy, starting with the feckless King John’s tyrannical reign (1166-1216). Most of its 63 clauses set out the rights of subjects and kings, established British law, and influenced the authors of both the U.S. Constitution and France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

John was a pampered, favored youngest son of Henry II and one of four brothers. He inherited a fortune, vast taxable properties in England and whole sections of France. With a lascivious nature, he married twice and had numerous mistresses despite often being away with the army to fight the French from stealing his holdings. His early struggle to seize the throne revealed deviousness, murderous ambition, insecurity, paranoia, physical cowardice—and greed. As a king, he jailed opponents, bullied absolute loyalty from his officials and the army, stole lands from the nobility. Worst of all, he never ceased extorting excessive taxes from the elite, commoners, and the English church.

Sound like a president we know?

The bad years began for King John in 1209. He was briefly excommunicated for opposing Pope Innocent III’s choice of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury. He suspected the candidate’s involvement with the growing unrest of barons and the people. After an attempted assassination in 1212 in the 14th year of his reign of terror, John went after the barons he suspected of the deed. But they had banded together, began drafting Magna Carta (chiefly protecting themselves from future kings), and raised an army against him for a civil war.

Only fear of certain defeat by the barons and a near-empty treasury could have brought a humbled King John to use negotiation to escape Magna Carta’s clauses. He had no intention of obeying them—especially the security clause (61) permitting 25 barons to seize his property and “distrain” him if he disobeyed the charter. He even got the Pope to annul the document a month later. The war ended with John’s death from dysentery the following year. By 1225, Magna Carta was in force.

This extraordinary historical event could now be repeated almost exactly 810 years later, lacking only the same solution: a final uprising of the high and low classes to strip Trump of his office and fortunes by a recall Amendment. It’s not so wild a dream at all.

We don’t have the vast organizational obstacles of the 13th century that took 17 years to put Magna Carta in place. But we do have the same furious energy and zeal of King John’s outraged public to oust a dictator and save the Constitution and democracy.

Consider that some 500 national organizations exist—MoveOn, Indivisable, and SEIU to Win Without War, Greenpeace, Patriotic Millionaires, and ACLU—to set up a nationwide alliance for such a cause.

The speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of the recent No Kings protest against Trump’s dictatorial regime shows what’s possible when a coalition is galvanized for a great historical cause. Its organizers in the 50-50-1 group (“50 states, 50 protests, one movement”), American Opposition, and Indivisible linked 193 powerful progressive “partners” driven by a singleness of purpose: to depose Trump and his regime.

So why not a repeat of this astonishing logistical success for a national recall referendum? Millions of volunteers would be more than willing to knock on doors, do teach-ins and phone-banking, lead rallies and marches, design signs and flyers, write articles, stuff envelopes, send emails and other electronic “reach-outs,”—and contribute funds large and small for expenses.

Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people will only get worse if we do nothing in the next few weeks. Let’s get to it!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court has ruled that Parliament must be recalled on April 8 to debate a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister James Marape.

In a decision handed down yesterday, the court found that actions taken by the Parliament’s Private Business Committee and Deputy Speaker, Koni Iguan, in November 2024 were unconstitutional and in breach of the principle of parliamentary democracy.

The ruling stems from an incident on 27 November 2024, when a notice of motion for a vote of no confidence was submitted to Iguan and found compliant with constitutional requirements under Section 145.

• READ MORE: Other PNG no confidence vote reports

However, the motion was rejected by invoking Section 165 of the Standing Orders, which disallows motions deemed identical in substance to those resolved within the previous 12 months.

This restriction came into play just over two months after an earlier motion of no confidence had been defeated on 12 September.

Iguan disallowed the motion and prevented it from being tabled in Parliament, triggering legal action from Chuave MP and deputy opposition leader James Nomane.

The court emphasised that parliamentary democracy relies on the executive’s accountability to the people through such mechanisms as motions of no confidence.

Overstepped mandate
The court also found that the Private Business Committee had overstepped its mandate, taking actions that should have been handled by the Speaker or Parliament as a whole.

Marape has responded to the decision, saying his government will respect the rule of law and comply with the court’s directives.

“We are a government that respects the courts. The Supreme Court reads and interprets the Constitution better than all of us, and we will honour its ruling,” he said.

Marape commands the support of more than two-thirds of the MPs in the house which enabled him to pass several major consitutional amendments last month, including declaring Papua New Guinea a Christian nation.

He acknowledged the Supreme Court’s clarification of critical constitutional provisions which pertain to the right of MPs to introduce motions and participate in the democratic processes of government.

“The court found that there was a vacuum in the law and has provided direction,” he said.

“As the executive arm of government, we will not stand in the way. Parliament will sit as ordered by the court.”

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.

Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court has ruled that Parliament must be recalled on April 8 to debate a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister James Marape.

In a decision handed down yesterday, the court found that actions taken by the Parliament’s Private Business Committee and Deputy Speaker, Koni Iguan, in November 2024 were unconstitutional and in breach of the principle of parliamentary democracy.

The ruling stems from an incident on 27 November 2024, when a notice of motion for a vote of no confidence was submitted to Iguan and found compliant with constitutional requirements under Section 145.

• READ MORE: Other PNG no confidence vote reports

However, the motion was rejected by invoking Section 165 of the Standing Orders, which disallows motions deemed identical in substance to those resolved within the previous 12 months.

This restriction came into play just over two months after an earlier motion of no confidence had been defeated on 12 September.

Iguan disallowed the motion and prevented it from being tabled in Parliament, triggering legal action from Chuave MP and deputy opposition leader James Nomane.

The court emphasised that parliamentary democracy relies on the executive’s accountability to the people through such mechanisms as motions of no confidence.

Overstepped mandate
The court also found that the Private Business Committee had overstepped its mandate, taking actions that should have been handled by the Speaker or Parliament as a whole.

Marape has responded to the decision, saying his government will respect the rule of law and comply with the court’s directives.

“We are a government that respects the courts. The Supreme Court reads and interprets the Constitution better than all of us, and we will honour its ruling,” he said.

Marape commands the support of more than two-thirds of the MPs in the house which enabled him to pass several major consitutional amendments last month, including declaring Papua New Guinea a Christian nation.

He acknowledged the Supreme Court’s clarification of critical constitutional provisions which pertain to the right of MPs to introduce motions and participate in the democratic processes of government.

“The court found that there was a vacuum in the law and has provided direction,” he said.

“As the executive arm of government, we will not stand in the way. Parliament will sit as ordered by the court.”

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.

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For users of breathing machines made by Philips Respironics, recent years have been a nightmare in multiple acts. First came complaints of illnesses and injuries caused by the devices. Then came reports of deaths. Then came a large-scale recall that itself was beset by problems.

Now ProPublica has learned of another episode. As Philips struggled to execute its recall in 2022, it turned to its biggest distributor, a company called Lincare, to help ensure that replacement equipment would reach the patients who needed it most. But instead of sending those machines to vulnerable longtime users — what Philips expected — Lincare diverted thousands of machines to new customers, which resulted in greater profits. Some patients did not receive replacement breathing machines for as long as two years. Meanwhile, complaints to the FDA reporting deaths (561) and illnesses, injuries or malfunctions (116,000) associated with the recalled devices continued to climb.

Philips’ problems first surfaced publicly in June 2021, when the company warned that the noise-deadening foam lining its equipment, mostly CPAP machines, could break apart, sending potentially toxic particles and fumes into users’ throats and lungs. (Millions of people use such “continuous positive airway pressure” devices to treat sleep apnea, a condition that causes breathing to stop and start repeatedly during the night.)

Philips announced a recall. The company vowed to stop selling to new customers and dedicate its manufacturing capacity to replacing the recalled devices with safe, redesigned CPAP machines “as expeditiously as possible.” (The Philips recall, and the tangled history that led up to it, were the subject of a series of investigations by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)

But the recall was marred by problems, and by the spring of 2022, many patients hadn’t received replacement devices. Some were informed by Philips that they might have to wait another year, meaning the company would fail to fulfill its plan to swap out all the recalled equipment by the end of 2022. That left even a patient who’d had a double lung transplant waiting for months on end.

Under pressure from the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical-device safety, Philips agreed to pursue a “prioritization approach,” providing new equipment first to the “most vulnerable” patients — those who depend on the breathing equipment the most. Philips pledged that all the safe devices it produced would go as quickly as possible to the sickest patients, according to a March 10, 2022, FDA notification order.

Lincare is America’s biggest distributor of breathing equipment. It buys tens of thousands of CPAP machines from Philips and other manufacturers every year, then collects up to 13 months of rental payments for providing them to patients, with Medicare and other insurers picking up most of the tab. Lincare also sells lucrative replacement supplies, such as masks, filters and hoses. The company has a lengthy history of misbehavior, including repeated instances of overcharging Medicare and elderly patients — Lincare has been placed on Medicare’s equivalent of probation four times in the past quarter-century — according to a recent investigation by ProPublica.

Lincare and most other distributors had refused to actively help Philips with the recall, according to four sources familiar with the recall. They complained that Philips wasn’t offering enough money to do the work of picking up old equipment and replacing it. Meanwhile, Philips’ CPAP woes had cut into Lincare’s profits, since there was a dearth of new machines to make money off while the recall was underway.

But a top Lincare executive found a way to exploit the recall to the company’s benefit. In late March 2022, Lincare’s chief operating officer, Greg McCarthy, unveiled a plan to his deputies that would ease the financial hit, according to Sam Markovic, then one of the company’s four regional vice presidents. McCarthy told them, in their regular Friday conference call, that he’d arranged for Philips to give Lincare 20,000 CPAP machines for free.

Philips had assured the FDA that it would direct that all of the new machines be sent to replace recalled devices, prioritizing customers who needed them the most. But that’s not what Lincare planned to do with its supply. Instead, according to Markovic, McCarthy told his deputies that Lincare would provide the devices to new customers. The company would make more money that way. Lincare could add more patients even as existing customers kept paying for supplies for their recalled machines. McCarthy ended the conference call, Markovic said, with his frequent admonition: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying!”

In a private conversation that was tape recorded, McCarthy later described how he had obtained the machines, according to Spence Hodges, then Philips’ top sales executive on the Lincare account, who was given a copy of the recording. In that conversation, McCarthy said he had let Philips believe that Lincare would use the machines to replace recalled devices that it owned and were needed for existing patients in long-term care facilities, such as assisted living and nursing homes.

This article is based on accounts from Markovic, other former Lincare employees and Hodges. Lincare, which has a history of litigation with its former executives, fired Markovic in 2022 and sued him for obtaining more than $100,000 in reimbursements for allegedly improper expenses; earlier this year, a judge issued a summary judgment in Lincare’s favor. Markovic disputes the allegations.

Philips declined to comment on Lincare’s role in the recall. But in a written statement, Philips confirmed that the new CPAP devices it provided were supposed to be used to replace recalled machines: “All of the decisions Philips Respironics has taken to allocate new and remediated devices in the United States are based solely on prioritizing patient needs. Our position has always been, and remains, that all devices manufactured to address the recall in the United States are intended for affected patients only.”

An FDA spokesperson declined to make officials available for interviews or comment on Lincare’s actions, but wrote, “Protecting impacted patients and ensuring they receive relief has been a high priority for the FDA throughout this recall.”

Lincare also declined to make executives available for comment. In response to a summary of this article’s findings, provided separately to a spokesperson and to COO McCarthy, the spokesperson emailed a two-sentence response: “We appreciate your questions. We take this matter seriously and are looking into it.” McCarthy did not provide any comment.

In early April 2022, shortly after their meeting with McCarthy, Lincare vice presidents began contacting local center managers around the country who would be receiving shipments of the otherwise scarce Philips CPAP machines, to pass on the COO’s orders that they be used for new patients. Markovic said he personally notified five managers in four states.

Several were surprised to learn that Lincare would have devices for new customers (or “setups,” in industry parlance). The new machines allowed one local center to exceed its monthly quota for new CPAP sales despite the recall, according to a former manager who requested anonymity. “I set up over a hundred in that time,” the former manager told ProPublica. “I just remember every time before I thought I had to cancel setups, there would be another two pallets of them [arriving]. It was just perfect timing.”

By June 2022, Hodges, Philips’ account executive for Lincare, had learned about Lincare’s plans. Hodges promptly reported what he had heard to Philips management, he told ProPublica. A few weeks later, he received the recording of McCarthy discussing how he’d misled Philips, he said, and turned that over to his bosses too. “All I know is that information was brought back to me,” he said, “and I went through the appropriate channels at Philips. I turned over everything and let them decide what to do with it.” It’s unclear what, if any, actions Philips took in response to that information.

Hodges, who left Philips in 2023 after 15 years at the company, said he was upset at the time. “People were having to wait,” he said. “To my mind, these devices were meant to be used by patients that needed their devices replaced, and I felt strongly that’s what they should be used for. Philips was doing their best to remediate as fast as they could.”

It’s not clear exactly how much longer some patients had to wait for new equipment because of Lincare’s diversion. It was only in October 2023 that Philips said it had fulfilled “over 99%” of requests made by patients who registered for the recall. (Those patients received new equipment or, in some instances, a payment.) That means that some users may have waited as long as two years for replacement equipment.

As ProPublica previously reported, Philips waited years to act on health complaints and internal concerns before issuing its recall, which involved both CPAP machines and ventilators, in June 2021. Since then, the company has faced an ongoing federal criminal investigation and more than 700 lawsuits. Since December 2023, Philips, without admitting fault, has agreed to $1.7 billion in settlements and a federal consent decree that indefinitely bars any new respiratory device sales in the U.S. and provides health monitoring and payments for affected customers.

Philips has long cultivated a cozy relationship with Lincare. Philips’ efforts to boost sales to Lincare and other distributors have led to three civil suits by the federal government claiming Philips gave the distributors kickbacks. In 2016, Philips agreed to pay $34.8 million to resolve claims that it illegally provided free call-center services in exchange for companies’ purchase of Philips CPAP masks. In 2022, it agreed to pay $24 million to resolve claims that it provided physician prescribing data to Lincare and other companies in exchange for equipment orders, and to pay $1.3 million for allegedly arranging interest-free loans for equipment purchases. (Philips denied wrongdoing in each of the cases.)

These days, Lincare and Philips are squaring off in court — with Lincare as the plaintiff. The company sued Philips in February in state court in Pennsylvania, where Philips manufactures its devices. Lincare is seeking payment for “many millions of dollars” in costs and losses that Lincare blamed on the recall, citing an indemnification provision in its contract with Philips. Philips has not filed a response to the lawsuit. In a public filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, however, Philips said it is “engaging with certain of its business partners on the level of compensation they alleged to be entitled to” from the recall.

Tom Wilson, administrator of the 7,700-member CPAP Recall Support Group on Facebook, called Lincare’s actions in the recall “terrible.” In mid-2022, he said, many patients were still waiting for new, safe machines. Those with severe cases of apnea, unable to simply stop using their recalled devices, were especially frightened and desperate to get replacements. “You’ve got something that’s on your face eight hours a night, and you don’t know how safe or unsafe this equipment is.”

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Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Peter Elkind.

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Philips Respironics must hire an independent safety monitor, undergo regular facility inspections for five years and pay part of its revenue to the federal government under the terms of an agreement with prosecutors filed in federal court in Pennsylvania, capping one of the most catastrophic medical device recalls in decades.

The company will also face a review of its testing on the millions of replacement machines that it sent to customers after the old ones were recalled in 2021.

The consent decree with the Justice Department, filed in federal court last week, comes nearly three years after Philips acknowledged that an industrial foam fitted inside its widely used sleep apnea machines and ventilators to reduce noise could degrade and release toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients.

A ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation last year found the medical device giant had withheld thousands of complaints about the foam for more than a decade before warning its customers — including medically vulnerable patients such as infants and the elderly — about the dangers.

The news organizations also revealed that a new, silicone-based foam that the company used in the replacement machines was also found to emit dangerous chemicals, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.

Though Philips maintained that the new foam was safe, scientists involved in the testing raised alarms, and the Food and Drug Administration said more tests were needed before determining if the devices pose risks to patients.

The consent decree requires Philips to carry out additional tests on the silicone foam if the independent safety monitor brought on by the company determines that prior testing was inadequate.

The agreement also prohibits Philips from selling all sleep apnea devices and other respiratory machines in the United States. In January, Philips disclosed that it would no longer distribute the machines in the country as part of the negotiations with the Justice Department — a major shift for a company that long dominated the industry.

Philips, which manufactures the devices at two plants outside Pittsburgh, is still able to export devices to other countries under the terms of the agreement. The company can also sell a select group of machines deemed “medically necessary” by the FDA inside the United States, including some ventilators, but must turn over up to 25% of the revenue to the government.

The payments “are an equitable remedy and not punitive,” according to the agreement.

In the consent decree, the Justice Department argued that the company had violated federal law by selling “adulterated” machines that did not comply with manufacturing requirements. The agreement was signed by Roy Jakobs, chief executive officer of Philips’ parent company, Royal Philips, headquartered in Amsterdam. The company did not admit fault.

If Philips fails to abide by the agreement, the company could be forced to pay up to $20 million a year.

Philips did not respond to questions about the consent decree, which still has to be approved by a judge.

The company has previously said that tests on the original foam caused no “appreciable harm” to patients. And in an online video about the settlement, Chief Patient Safety and Quality Officer Steve C de Baca said the silicone-based foam in the replacement machines was also safe.

Philips has “not identified any safety issues” with the replacement machines, he said, and “their use is not impacted” by the consent decree.

On an informational page for customers, Philips said the settlement with U.S. authorities will help it “restore the business.” The company also said it has launched multiple safety reforms.

The FDA said it would not comment until the settlement has been approved by the court. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Patient safety advocates say it will take years to assess the impact of the devices on patient health. At the time of the recall, both Philips and the FDA described potential health risks including respiratory tract illnesses, headaches, nausea, and toxic and carcinogenic effects.

The FDA has said it received 561 reports of deaths reportedly associated with the degrading foam since 2021. The Post-Gazette and ProPublica previously identified reports that described nearly 2,000 cases of cancer, 600 liver and kidney illnesses, and 17,000 respiratory ailments.

Though the company says the foam in the recalled devices does not lead to long-term harm, the material has repeatedly tested positive for genotoxicity, the ability of a chemical to cause cells to mutate, a process that can lead to cancer.

Michael Twery, former director of sleep disorders research at the National Institutes of Health, said it could be difficult for Philips to earn back the trust of its customers.

“If a manufacturer misleads [the] FDA, how do they reestablish integrity?” he said.

Do You Work For the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants To Hear From You.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Michael Korsh and Evan Robinson-Johnson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

While accounts of abuse and sexual assault by police officers and prison guards have emerged in recent years among former protesters and activists, not many have been confirmed or even fully investigated.

But on Jan. 19, a Correctional Services officer and five young inmates at the Pik Uk Correctional Institution were remanded in custody on charges of causing "serious bodily harm" to an 18-year-old inmate, including causing rectal perforations with a wooden implement, online court news service The Witness reported.

The victim required surgery and a stoma bag as a consequence of the attack, the report said.

The case prompted another young activist who had been detained in the same juvenile facility under the 2020 National Security Law to speak about another unreported incident there.

Wong Yat Chin, of the activist group Student Politicism, took to Facebook to talk about a rape and abuse and anal assault with a toothbrush perpetrated on a 15-year-old boy in Pik Uk, which houses young male inmates up to the age of 21.

"The 15-year-old boy was under duress and didn't dare to tell his family about the anal rape," Wong wrote. "It wasn't until he was hospitalized for persistent bleeding that Correctional Services officers called the police."

"A few months later, the police gave up the prosecution, saying there was insufficient evidence," wrote Wong, who was serving a three-year jail term in Pik Uk at the time.

The Correctional Services Department then issued a statement accusing Wong of "slander." But the Ming Pao newspaper later reported that a case sounding much like the one he described was reported to police on Jan. 30, 2022.

According to Wong, prison guards don't always carry out assaults themselves, but allow certain inmates known as "B Boys" special privileges to "discipline" fellow inmates.

He also described bullying and physical assaults he and his fellow inmates suffered at the hands of guards and other inmates acting under duress.

Youth prison population growing

Since the pro-democracy movement of 2014, the authorities have prosecuted large numbers of young people for taking part in "illegal" public gatherings, "rioting" and other protest-related charges, as well as more serious offenses like "terrorism" and "subversion" for peaceful activism under the 2020 National Security law.

According to the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department, the number of people in custody under the age of 21 rose from 4% to 6% of the total population, with a total juvenile prison population of around 450 as of the end of 2022.

A former Pik Uk inmate who gave only the pseudonym Cheung Tz Hin for fear of reprisals told RFA and The Reporter that he recalls an incident in which guards had a group of seven cellmates squat down in a stairwell that wasn't covered by surveillance cameras after they sang the banned protest anthem "Glory to Hong Kong" in their cell the night before.

To their shock, Cheung and the others were slapped around by the guard.

"At first I thought he would stop short," he said. "I never expected he would actually hit us."

From time to time after that, guards would also shove Cheung and another cellmate around at random times, elbowing them and hitting them on the palms or the soles of the feet with a metal ruler, Cheung recalled.

Prison rules bar singing by inmates, but Cheung said exceptions were made for inmates who sang songs with no political content, for their own entertainment.

"It felt like the correctional officers were really selective, and targeted us in particular," he said.

Beaten within earshot

He said guards and their proxies used to take their victims to the stairwell behind the daily activities room, where the sounds of them being beaten would drift through for the other young inmates to hear.

One inmate would walk around on crutches after these assaults, he said.

"We could see a little [of what was going on] through a gap, but mostly we could just hear the sound of hitting, which was very regular," Cheung said. "We would see him walking around on crutches because the soles of both feet had been beaten."

The attacks were to have tragic consequences. After four nights of this treatment, Cheung heard the guards gossiping about the boy's suicide attempt by drinking detergent.

He fell to the ground foaming at the mouth, and had to be sent to an external hospital for gastric lavage, Cheung heard them saying. He was later transferred to a forensic psychiatric facility at Castle Peak Hospital, but never returned.

"Usually, he would have come back to Pik Uk 14 days later,” Cheung said, “but I never saw him again, and I heard from the staff that he never came back from Castle Peak Hospital."

Hong Kong independence activist Tony Chung, who has served a 21-month jail term for "secession" under the 2020 National Security Law, spent some time after his release campaigning for the rights of other prisoners in Hong Kong.

He told RFA Mandarin and The Report that he once tried to help a teenage inmate "forced to have oral sex to the point of ejaculation" by another inmate at Pik Uk to file a complaint.

But he was never allowed to meet with the youth alone, only with another inmate who he suspected was actually the perpetrator of the alleged assault.

"The older inmate who was rumored to be the perpetrator asked him in a provocative tone of voice: 'Has someone been treating you badly? Tell me!' and the boy whispered 'No," and changed the subject, and that was that," Chung said.

More abusive than adult prisons

Chung, who is now seeking asylum in the United Kingdom and is once more wanted by the authorities, said juvenile institutions lend themselves far more readily to abuse than adult prisons for a number of reasons.

For example, guards and fellow inmates rarely show newcomers how to do their chores properly, offering ample opportunity for physical reprisals when they're not up to standard, he said.

"If you keep doing it wrong, they just beat you up," he said. "If you do it wrong again, they will gradually increase the level of violence if they find that you can't fight back."

And according to Cheung Tz Hin, guards in adult prisons are a little more concerned about angering the wrong people in a city where criminal gangs, or triads, might target off-duty officers who have mistreated one of their own.

In the facilities for younger inmates, Chung said that any attempt to complain or investigate is met with stonewalling by prison guards, who cow prisoners into keeping quiet in the event of any inquiries.

Public data from the Correctional Services Department shows a total of 579 complaints filed by persons in custody over the past five years, with only 12 substantiated or partially substantiated following investigation.

Much of the reason for this is that guards and their favored inmates are well aware of the best blind spots in which to carry out their attacks, which are seldom picked up by surveillance cameras.

No one will speak up

In Hong Kong, one of the duties of the Justices of the Peace appointed by the Chief Executive and Chief Secretary is to “ensure that persons in custody are not be treated unfairly or exploited."

Justices of the Peace inspect the city's four juvenile detention facilities and halfway houses every two weeks or at least once a month, and would be an ideal channel through which to raise a complaint.

But nobody would dare to speak to them publicly in front of fellow inmates and guards, according to Chung and Cheung.

There was a flurry of public concern about prisoner abuse in Hong Kong when dozens of high-profile pro-democracy activists and opposition lawmakers were released from their sentences in the wake of the 2014 Occupy Central movement and the 2016 "Fishball Revolution" in Mong Kok. 

But the 2020 National Security Law forced many civic groups and prisoner charities to disband out of fear of further prosecution.

Chung said anyone advocating for prisoners in Hong Kong now faces the additional risk of prosecution under the new Safeguarding National Security Law, which took effect on March 23, as well as the 2020 National Security Law.

"I'm no longer in Hong Kong, so I don't have to worry about being accused of inciting people to hate the government," Chung said. "But others are still in Hong Kong, so I'm a bit worried about them."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsieh Fu-yee for RFA Mandarin/The Reporter.

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In the winter of 2021, with its stock price plunging, lawsuits mounting and popular breathing machines pulled from the shelves, Philips Respironics made a surprise public announcement.

The company said the sleep apnea devices it had recalled only months earlier had undergone new safety tests and did not appear to pose a health threat to themillions of patients who relied on them to breathe.

It was a remarkable reversal for the global manufacturer, which had drawn headlines after admitting that an industrial foam placed inside the devices could break apart in heat and humidity and send potentially toxic and carcinogenic particles and fumes into the masks worn by users.

The new results, Philips said, found the machines were not expected to “result in long-term health consequences.”

But a series of emails obtained by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette show the Food and Drug Administration quickly rejected those safety claims, telling Philips that the new tests failed to account for the impact on patients who had used the devices for years. The FDA also said it still considered the machines a significant health threat that could inflict severe injury or even death.

“These tests are preliminary,” the agency told Philips. “Definitive conclusions cannot yet be drawn in support of reduction in hazards.”

The FDA did not publicize its assessment, even though patients across the country were at risk and an untold number continued using their recalled machines while they waited on Philips to send replacements.

At the time, the FDA made only one public reference to the dispute — on the fourth page of a 14-page letter to Philips in May 2022. To see it, customers would have had to find it on the agency’s website and then wade through scientific language about “cytotoxicity failure,” “novel continuous sampling” and other complex concepts.

Philips went on to publicize more test results, all playing down the potential health dangers. To this day, the FDA has said little about its ongoing disagreement with the company over whether the machines were safe.

The emails over the course of 2022 were obtained by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette through a public records lawsuit filed by the news organizations against the FDA. Taken together, the exchanges reveal a startling lack of transparency by both Philips and the government while patients and their doctors struggled to make sense of one of the largest and most tumultuous medical device recalls in years.

“The bottom line is that lives were at risk,” said Dr. Bob Lowe, a former emergency room physician and public health advocate in Oregon who used one of the recalled machines. “People have a right to know and providers have a right, or really an obligation, to be fully informed. As a physician, if I don’t know what the dangers are, then I can’t protect my patients.”

In the emails to Philips, the FDA described a litany of concerns, notably that the company’s analysis did not consider the “real world” use of the devices, which send air directly into the noses, mouths and lungs of patients for hours at a time.

Philips had brought on independent testing labs to assess whether the chemicals and particles released into the masks of patients reached dangerous levels, but the government in its emails said the testing program was “limited in its utility and does not fully assess or account for all risks.”

“FDA has not accepted the data or Philips Respironics’ conclusions,” Denise Hampton, with the FDA’s Office of Health Technology, wrote to the company in one of the emails.

It wasn’t until October 2023 — nearly two years after Philips started promoting the favorable test results — that the FDA released a public statement about its concerns, saying that testing and analysis were not “adequate” and that Philips had agreed to conduct additional studies.

Richard Callender, a former mayor in Pennsylvania who used his sleep apnea machine for six months after the recall, said patients should have been given details far earlier.

“We deserve that. If they had concerns they should have at least informed the public,” he said. “Don’t let everybody walk around saying, ‘Hey, I’m OK because [Philips] told me they think it’s all right.’”

The FDA defended its handling of the matter, saying it released the statement in October after completing an analysis of the company’s test results. “Any health determination made by the FDA is science-driven and based on thorough analysis of the information presented to the agency,” it said.

The agency said it “has been clear” about the government’s concerns with the foam in public alerts and other communications and has maintained its position about the potential health risks.

Lowe, however, said the FDA waited far too long to publicly challenge Philips as the company repeatedly told patients that the devices were safe.

“It’s not full disclosure,” he said.

Philips did not respond to specific questions from ProPublica and the Post-Gazette, but it has previously said that the tests found the foam caused no “appreciable harm” to patients and that the company would continue to carry out additional tests.

In its emails to the FDA, Philips said that the favorable findings were based on the “worst-case chemical release” and that testing had found particles from the foam did not exceed safety levels.

While Philips continues to defend the safety of the devices, the company late last month announced it would not sell any new sleep apnea machines and other respiratory devices in the United States under an agreement with the federal government.

Days later, the FDA said it had received 561 reports of deaths associated with the machines since 2021.

From the outset of the recall, there was little debate that Philips had a serious problem: Noise-reducing foam that the company had fitted inside the devices years earlier was crumbling.

Both Philips and the FDA at the time described potential health risks for patients exposed to the material, including respiratory tract illnesses, headaches, nausea, and toxic and carcinogenic effects.

Philips, however, began to walk back its warnings in December 2021, six months after the recall began. And by the following year, the company made multiple announcements about the new test results.

In email exchanges, the FDA challenged the “significant limitations” of the company’s testing program as well as efforts to change an earlier evaluation of the health risks conducted by about a dozen company officials. The 2021 internal assessment was damning, describing the deteriorating foam and dangerous chemicals and declaring the risk to patients who used the machines “unacceptable.”

Months later, Philips turned in a modified evaluation to the FDA, lowering the threat level from “crucial” to “marginal.”

Inside Philips, scientists and others were also alarmed, criticizing the company for minimizing the health risks without carrying out comprehensive testing to determine whether the machines could inflict serious harm, according to interviews and internal communications obtained by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette.

The dispute reached the company’s highest levels. Medical director Hisham Elzayat broke ranks and refused to sign the evaluation that downgraded the risk level, according to court testimony and the internal communications.

“I haven’t seen or heard anything that makes me decide acceptable risk,” he wrote at the time.

In another message, he noted about the evaluation, “There is nothing I can do about it.”

He also wrote, “If only all this effort is steered towards fixing the problem instead of hiding it.”

Elzayat, a cardiothoracic surgeon who still works for Philips and whose differences with the company were described in a federal court hearing in October, declined to comment.

According to the court testimony, after Elzayat refused to endorse the new evaluation, he was removed from the team inside Philips that was handling the crisis and stripped of his access to data about the foam.

Another company supervisor also raised concerns, complaining about the company’s push to change the evaluation, internal communications show.

“They desperately want to make changes,” the supervisor wrote. “I am trying to limit what they are doing.”

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette are withholding the supervisor’s name because of fear of reprisals.

Another official at Philips cited similar concerns, writing about the actions by a company manager to ensure that a testing lab reported favorable results. “You wouldn’t believe the magic he worked to ensure that compound was labeled a non-risk,” the official wrote.

The debate was captured in internal communications, some of which have been turned over to the Department of Justice. The DOJ has been carrying out a criminal investigation, according to sources familiar with the probe and a document reviewed by the news organizations.

Philips, which has said it is cooperating with authorities, declined to answer questions about Elzayat’s role in the controversial evaluation of the foam.

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette have reported that the company held back more than 3,700 complaints about the foam degradation from customers and the government before announcing the recall. The news organizations recently obtained more records from the FDA that identified an additional 1,100 complaints that Philips did not turn over to the government before the recall.

Federal law requires medical device makers to submit reports about malfunctions, patient injuries and deaths to the FDA within 30 days. Philips has said the company reviewed the complaints on a case-by-case basis and gave them to the FDA after the recall out of an “abundance of caution.”

The private debate about whether the machines were safe played out as hundreds of thousands of people were left to decide whether to continue using their recalled devices while waiting for a replacement from Philips. Many reached out to members of Congress, who forwarded a series of complaints to the FDA, records show.

“Having to choose whether to continue using a life-saving device and risk further health complications or to stop using them altogether and risk death is an unthinkable decision to make,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., wrote to the agency in 2022. “It is imperative that patients and healthcare providers have the best guidance.”

The back-and-forth between federal regulators and Philips also unfolded as longtime users of the devices and their relatives stepped forward to report illnesses, including throat, lung, esophageal and nasal cancers. Some described deaths of wives, husbands and other family members.

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette previously identified reports that described nearly 2,000 cases of cancer, 600 liver and kidney illnesses, and 17,000 respiratory ailments.

Medical experts interviewed by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette say that it may take years to determine the health consequences but that early findings are worrisome. The devices tested positive numerous times for genotoxicity, the ability of a chemical to cause cells to mutate, a process that can lead to cancer, company records show.

The biggest challenge, they said, is conducting more comprehensive testing, including an epidemiological analysis that tracks the health of people who used the machines over years.

“You would want more than lab tests to really confirm that these devices are safe,” said Kushal Kadakia, a public health researcher at Harvard Medical School who has written about the recall. “You’d want data from patients over multiple years.”

Mike Wereschagin of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed reporting.

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

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Reeling from one of the most catastrophic recalls in decades, Philips Respironics said it will stop selling sleep apnea machines and other respiratory devices in the United States under a settlement with the federal government that will all but end the company’s reign as one of the top makers of breathing machines in the country.

The agreement, announced by Philips early Monday, comes more than two years after the company pulled millions of its popular breathing devices off the shelves after admitting that an industrial foam fitted in the machines to reduce noise could break apart and release potentially toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients.

It could be years before Philips can resume sales of the devices, made in two factories outside Pittsburgh. The company said all the conditions of the multiyear consent decree — negotiated in the wake of the recall with the Department of Justice on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration — must be met first.

The move by a company that aggressively promoted its machines in ad campaigns and health conferences — in one case with the help of an Elvis impersonator — follows relentless criticism about the safety of the machines.

A ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found the company held back thousands of complaints about the crumbling foam for more than a decade before warning customers about the dangers. Those using the machines included some of the most fragile people in the country, including infants, the elderly, veterans and patients with chronic conditions.

“It’s about time,” said Richard Callender, a former mayor in Pennsylvania who spent years using one of the recalled machines. “How many people have to suffer and get sick and die?”

Philips said the agreement includes other requirements the company must meet before it can start selling the machines again, including the marquee DreamStation 2, a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, device heralded by Philips when it was unveiled in 2021 for the treatment of sleep apnea. The settlement, which is still being finalized, has to be approved by a court and has not yet been released by the government.

The FDA declined to comment until the agreement is final. The DOJ could not be immediately reached for comment.

It remains unclear how the halt in sales will impact patients and doctors. The company’s U.S. market share for sleep apnea devices in 2020 was about 37% — behind only one competitor, medical device maker ResMed, according to an analysis by iData Research. Philips has dominated the market in ventilator sales, the data shows.

One global market report on Monday referred to the agreement as “very punitive” and noted, “It will be very difficult for Philips to recover its U.S Respironics market position.”

After the announcement, the company’s stock prices plunged by 7% in early trading.

Philips did not address the safety of the recalled devices in its announcement, but the company has previously said that new testing shows the foam causes no “appreciable harm” to patients. The FDA has challenged those claims, saying the company’s tests are not “adequate.”

The settlement comes just weeks after federal lawmakers called for an immediate criminal probe of Philips by the DOJ, and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said it will launch an inquiry of the FDA’s oversight of medical device recalls for the first time in years.

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette identified thousands of reported cases of cancer, respiratory illnesses and liver and kidney conditions among users of the recalled machines, as well as more than 370 reports of deaths.

The news organizations found that scientists inside Philips repeatedly raised concerns about the foam and that the company’s own testing called into question its safety claims.

The news organizations also reported that a new and different foam used in the DreamStation 2 and millions of other replacement machines sent out by Philips in the wake of the recall was found to emit dangerous chemicals as well, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. The company has said the new foam is safe, but scientists involved in the testing have again raised alarms and the FDA has said additional safety tests are still needed.

In its announcement, the company said it would provide ongoing service and parts for machines already in the hands of doctors and patients and continue selling its devices outside the United States subject to requirements in the agreement.

“Resolving the consequences of the Respironics recall for our patients and customers is a key focus area and I acknowledge and apologize for the distress and concern caused,” said Roy Jakobs, CEO of parent company Royal Philips. “We are fully committed to complying with the consent decree, which is an important step and provides a clear path forward.”

The announcement was the latest in a series of developments at Philips since the recall prompted a global health emergency that sent millions of patients scrambling to find replacement machines and assess the risk of long term exposure.

Philips has discontinued some of the recalled devices, including ventilators and, just last week, the widely promoted DreamStation Go, a portable CPAP.

In an online update and email to U.S. customers, Philips said the decision to pull the devices off the market in the United States was a “strategic” choice that “streamlined” its portfolio. The email reignited anger and frustration among patients and doctors.

“They used to be one of the most respected industry leaders,” said Dr. Radhika Breaden, a sleep medicine specialist in Oregon. “They have lost the trust of many of our sleep patients and many professionals in the sleep field.”

Michael Korsh of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Michael D. Sallah, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In 2021, Philips Respironics recalled its DreamStation breathing machines, along with other sleep apnea devices and ventilators, leaving millions of customers worldwide waiting for replacements. Foam inside the machines could crumble in heat and humidity, sending potentially carcinogenic materials into the lungs of patients.

I spent eight months making a film about this, following sleep apnea patients through airports to doctor appointments. I recorded their home lives, their bedtime routines. I tried to capture the claustrophobic details of the mask that fits tightly over the nose and mouth.

In February 2023, when I first began having conversations with the reporting team investigating the recall about making a film about sleep apnea, I wondered how I would visualize sleep. I could use interviews to spell out the intricacies of what went wrong, but how would I bring the reality of restricted breath to the screen? And why would someone who doesn’t have sleep apnea choose to watch this?

I got part of that answer from one of the film’s participants, Dr. Carol Stark, who said: “Sleep isn’t a luxury. It isn’t optional.”

What these patients need help doing — breathing while sleeping — is something that I took for granted before making this film. As I learned more about the patients who relied on the DreamStation machine and other Philips devices, the heart of the film surfaced at a crossroad between two impossible decisions: continue using something that could be harmful or stop using it and risk heart attacks, strokes or even death.

An investigation by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that the company received thousands of warnings over the span of 11 years but withheld them from the government and the public. In statements, the industry giant said that it acted as soon as it learned of the “potential significance” of the problem and that the machines are unlikely to cause harm.

I have been making documentaries and photo essays for over a decade, and a guiding principle is that if you’re able to capture a person’s day to day, no matter how unrelated it is to the issue, viewers might see them as people not so different from themselves. So I chose to introduce the patients with their histories and hobbies; I reused footage from a professional drummer’s archival videos and captured a couple lap swimming in their 70s. It was important to me to frame the participants as people first — not defined by their health condition. We don’t need to have sleep apnea to connect with them.

How many of us have experienced something unjust done to us but we had to pick up the shards ourselves? “You can do everything right and the people who should be taking care of things are not,” Carol’s husband, Dr. Allen Stark, who also has sleep apnea, said.

Mark Edwards, another patient, demonstrated profound acceptance in order to move through this recall. At times, he heatedly talked about the company, still angry at how its actions have impacted thousands of people; other times, he expressed his belief that the more he suffers the closer he gets to God. “I have one foot in the next life and one foot in this life,” he said, heaving after only minutes of walking.

The film follows these three patients and a sleep medicine specialist, Dr. Radhika Breaden, who described the chaos of the first few days of the recall. Thousands of her patients angrily called with questions that could not yet be answered. “We don’t know what to do,” she said, as bewildered as them. I tried to capture these moments with 14 drone shots that populate the screen in just eight seconds. These rapid clips, both rural and urban landscapes to represent the locations of people affected worldwide, were intended to make the viewer feel the tension and desperation of the moment.

It was crucial to show the disintegration of the foam inside the machine, so I researched YouTube for archival videos from other users. The most disturbing one reveals a once-intact block of foam dissolved into loose, messy particles. To visualize metaphors of these particles, I filmed water droplets spewing out of a sprinkler and details of puddles lit by street lamps.

The most moving sequence to me is of Carol and Allen Stark picnicking and hiking with their grandchildren because it’s tenderly paired with Carol describing her fear: no longer being alive with her grandchildren. It’s a real possibility that tomorrow she could learn that she has a health complication. After all, many other people who used these machines died, developed cancer or came down with respiratory complications that they or their loved ones believe were related to the use of these machines. The Starks are treating their sleep apnea to be able to live, and it was important to show how they want to live.

But my initial challenge — how do you visualize sleep? — still remained. We all sleep. We all breathe. So I looked for metaphors in our world that are universal. Fog representative of breath. Sunset preceding the nighttime rest. A reflection of pillows on a bed. Vistas of waves, mountains and a coastline when Breaden describes REM sleep as “the most stunning, beautiful thing in the world.”

I hope you watch this film because it’s a story for everyone who sleeps.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Liz Moughon.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In 2021, Philips Respironics recalled its DreamStation breathing machines, along with other sleep apnea devices and ventilators, leaving millions of customers worldwide waiting for replacements. Foam inside the machines could crumble in heat and humidity, sending potentially carcinogenic materials into the lungs of patients.

I spent eight months making a film about this, following sleep apnea patients through airports to doctor appointments. I recorded their home lives, their bedtime routines. I tried to capture the claustrophobic details of the mask that fits tightly over the nose and mouth.

In February 2023, when I first began having conversations with the reporting team investigating the recall about making a film about sleep apnea, I wondered how I would visualize sleep. I could use interviews to spell out the intricacies of what went wrong, but how would I bring the reality of restricted breath to the screen? And why would someone who doesn’t have sleep apnea choose to watch this?

I got part of that answer from one of the film’s participants, Dr. Carol Stark, who said: “Sleep isn’t a luxury. It isn’t optional.”

What these patients need help doing — breathing while sleeping — is something that I took for granted before making this film. As I learned more about the patients who relied on the DreamStation machine and other Philips devices, the heart of the film surfaced at a crossroad between two impossible decisions: continue using something that could be harmful or stop using it and risk heart attacks, strokes or even death.

An investigation by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that the company received thousands of warnings over the span of 11 years but withheld them from the government and the public. In statements, the industry giant said that it acted as soon as it learned of the “potential significance” of the problem and that the machines are unlikely to cause harm.

I have been making documentaries and photo essays for over a decade, and a guiding principle is that if you’re able to capture a person’s day to day, no matter how unrelated it is to the issue, viewers might see them as people not so different from themselves. So I chose to introduce the patients with their histories and hobbies; I reused footage from a professional drummer’s archival videos and captured a couple lap swimming in their 70s. It was important to me to frame the participants as people first — not defined by their health condition. We don’t need to have sleep apnea to connect with them.

How many of us have experienced something unjust done to us but we had to pick up the shards ourselves? “You can do everything right and the people who should be taking care of things are not,” Carol’s husband, Dr. Allen Stark, who also has sleep apnea, said.

Mark Edwards, another patient, demonstrated profound acceptance in order to move through this recall. At times, he heatedly talked about the company, still angry at how its actions have impacted thousands of people; other times, he expressed his belief that the more he suffers the closer he gets to God. “I have one foot in the next life and one foot in this life,” he said, heaving after only minutes of walking.

The film follows these three patients and a sleep medicine specialist, Dr. Radhika Breaden, who described the chaos of the first few days of the recall. Thousands of her patients angrily called with questions that could not yet be answered. “We don’t know what to do,” she said, as bewildered as them. I tried to capture these moments with 14 drone shots that populate the screen in just eight seconds. These rapid clips, both rural and urban landscapes to represent the locations of people affected worldwide, were intended to make the viewer feel the tension and desperation of the moment.

It was crucial to show the disintegration of the foam inside the machine, so I researched YouTube for archival videos from other users. The most disturbing one reveals a once-intact block of foam dissolved into loose, messy particles. To visualize metaphors of these particles, I filmed water droplets spewing out of a sprinkler and details of puddles lit by street lamps.

The most moving sequence to me is of Carol and Allen Stark picnicking and hiking with their grandchildren because it’s tenderly paired with Carol describing her fear: no longer being alive with her grandchildren. It’s a real possibility that tomorrow she could learn that she has a health complication. After all, many other people who used these machines died, developed cancer or came down with respiratory complications that they or their loved ones believe were related to the use of these machines. The Starks are treating their sleep apnea to be able to live, and it was important to show how they want to live.

But my initial challenge — how do you visualize sleep? — still remained. We all sleep. We all breathe. So I looked for metaphors in our world that are universal. Fog representative of breath. Sunset preceding the nighttime rest. A reflection of pillows on a bed. Vistas of waves, mountains and a coastline when Breaden describes REM sleep as “the most stunning, beautiful thing in the world.”

I hope you watch this film because it’s a story for everyone who sleeps.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Liz Moughon.

We speak with two physicians who knew Dr. Hammam Alloh, a Palestinian nephrologist at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital who was killed Saturday in an Israeli airstrike. They recall him as a “committed physician, wonderful father” and “beacon of light.” He had refused to heed Israeli directives to evacuate in order to continue providing care to his patients. “He spent a decade learning how to serve his people,” says Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan with Doctors Without Borders. “He wanted his children to be able to see a day when they had a free, just, durable, free life in Palestine, without occupation,” says Dr. Ben Thomson, a fellow nephrologist who worked with Dr. Alloh.

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

The incipient campaign to unseat a reformist district attorney in California just became official: A new political committee was launched to recall Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, according to public registrations. The recall committee launched just seven months after Price, whose jurisdiction includes Oakland and other East Bay communities, took office.

Price is one of more than a dozen reform-minded prosecutors who have faced recalls or attempts to restrict their discretion in recent years — part of a backlash to criminal punishment reforms and fearmongering over crime by police and their political allies.

“They were threatening to recall her when she was running for the seat,” said Cat Brooks, co-founder and executive director of the Anti-Police Terror Project, which endorsed Price last year. “Unfortunately in the Bay Area and in other places in the country, this is the new political tactic,” she said. Brooks added that the campaigns follow a pattern: first, character assassination and right-wing attacks, and then a recall.

Price’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The committee registration lists the phone number for Reed & Davidson LLP, a law office based in Los Angeles that serves as a treasurer for political committees. The law office did not respond to a request for comment.

Price, a civil rights attorney, was elected in 2022 on a reform platform that focused on rehabilitation and addressing police misconduct and corruption within the office. She promised to end use of the death penalty, stop charging kids under 18 as adults, establish a conviction integrity unit, and expand services for victims of gun violence.

In a story that has become familiar to prosecutors across the country who campaigned on reforming the criminal justice system, Price’s opponents began to attack her proposed policies before she took office in January. An online petition for her recall started circulating in February.

The Oakland Police Officers’ Association has blamed her office for worsening crime. And her handling of two high-profile cases of children killed fueled intense internal and public criticism.

Two prosecutors resigned from Price’s office in recent months after she decided not to lengthen sentences for defendants in two cases where children were shot and killed, one by a stray bullet. At least two dozen other prosecutors and investigators have left the office since Price was elected. Several of the departed staffers went to work for San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins — who is widely seen as being close to police and was herself appointed last year after campaigning to successfully recall a reformist prosecutor.

Price’s critics point to the departures as evidence of her failures, but turnover is typical when a new prosecutor takes office. Brooks said, “The hype-up that this is because Pamela is somehow so problematic and that’s why there’s turnover is absolutely ludicrous.”

California has seen several recall campaigns in recent years after reform prosecutors won office from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled, and Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón survived a second recall attempt. The attacks on reform-minded prosecutors play up individual cases to highlight what critics say is incompetence in the offices of prosecutors like Price, Boudin, and Gascón.

The visceral criticisms of Price have taken hold just seven months into her first term in office and made it difficult for observers to distinguish impartial criticism from backlash to the reform movement writ large. In the cases of both Price and Boudin, proponents of tough-on-crime policies have drawn a link between criminal justice reform and crimes against Asian Americans.

“All of this was happening under [Nancy] O’Malley,” Brooks said, referring to the previous Alameda County district attorney. Part of the backlash to the criminal justice reform movement is a law-and-order drum beat that capitalizes on and manipulates people’s fear and pain, Brooks said. “It’s a bunch of false flags,” she added. “Unfortunately, that is a tactic we know that the right uses to prevent solidarity.” 

Since the reform prosecutor movement took off in the mid-2010s, more than 30 bills in at least 17 states have tried to strip power from prosecutors whose policies address efforts to reform the criminal justice system. State lawmakers, often in rural areas, have sought to limit the power of prosecutors elected on reform platforms in far-away cities.

The lines betweensubstantive criticism of elected prosecutors and efforts to undermine their authority have become blurred.

While prosecutors across the political spectrum should be accountable to their constituents, criticism of prosecutors like Price and her peers has been amplified within a larger project to oppose popular criminal justice reform, said Anne Irwin, founder and director of the pro-reform group Smart Justice. “The nascent recall effort in Alameda County is absolutely reflective of a national Republican playbook,” Irwin said.

“The nascent recall effort in Alameda County is absolutely reflective of a national Republican playbook.”

There are parallels to St. Louis, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, where lawmakers impeached Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner last year, she added. Ideological differences typically drive resignations under tough-on-crime and reform prosecutors alike, but the media did not cover staff departures or internal office drama until reform-minded candidates started winning office.

“What’s remarkable is that there has been almost no coverage of how an elected prosecutor runs their office until progressive prosecutors were elected,” Irwin said. “Then all of a sudden, there is intense scrutiny, much of it drummed up by the folks who are backing a recall, to make a case that the progressive prosecutor is a bad manager. But can any of us look back in history and point out whether or not any other tough-on-crime prosecutors in the ’80s or ’90s were good managers?”

Voters in Alameda County watched Boudin’s recall play out. More than a year later, they saw that the recall didn’t make San Francisco a cleaner or safer place, Irwin said. Unlike San Francisco, Alameda County has less money and more people directly impacted by mass incarceration. Those factors could make a recall effort in Alameda County more of an uphill battle.

“The entire Bay Area, including Alameda County, is realizing that the recall of Chesa Boudin was a false promise,” she said. “That will impact how Alameda County voters approach a recall effort against DA Price. There will be a lot more skepticism about a recall of the district attorney being the panacea.” 

Price’s 2022 election was in part response to a push among Oakland residents for reforms to the criminal justice system they said were long overdue. Price beat a more moderate candidate and became the first Black prosecutor with support among communities most impacted by crime. She declined corporate PAC money and raised more than $1 million for her campaign.

Price’s predecessor and 2018 opponent, Nancy O’Malley, had beenaccused of misconduct and workedagainst some criminal justice reform efforts. Police unions heavily backed O’Malley’s 2018 reelection campaign against Price. She retired in 2021.

As Price implemented the reforms she ran on, pushback was swift. One prosecutor resigned over Price’s reluctance to enhance sentencing in the stray bullet case and said Price’s office had mistreated victims in Asian American Pacific Islander communities. Another said she had neglected victims of violent crime.

Families of victims have also issued criticisms of Price, saying her office hasn’t implemented strict-enough sentences. Outlets including the New York Post and the Berkeley Scanner, a conservative independent outlet, have amplified criticism of Price’s office and publicized resignation letters from prosecutors who left her office.

The resignations fueled more public criticism that linked Price’s policies to crime in Oakland, which reached 100 homicides for the first time in a decade in the years before she was elected. Within her first six months in office, conservative media began to attack Price’s approach to reform. A recent headline in the national conservative outlet Washington Examiner blared: “Soros-backed prosecutor continues to go easy on murderers.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

"The worst thing was that the day they arrested several high-level executives was actually my birthday, so I have felt very sad on my birthday these past couple of years," he said. 

"I feel very bad that they have been sitting in jail for the past two years," he said.

The Apple Daily, founded by pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai, was raided by national security police on June 17, 2021, becoming one of the biggest casualties of draconian national security law imposed by the ruling Communist Party in a bid to suppress the 2019 protest movement.

Five days later, as the paper shut down for good, a group of editors and reporters gathered outside the headquarters of Lai's Next Digital media empire, bowing to their readers to show gratitude for their support over the years. 

"We are the Apple Daily editorial team, including reporters, and we have something to say to the people of Hong Kong – thank you," one said. 

The last edition of the paper sold a record-breaking 1 million copies, with people lining up on the street from the early hours to get their piece of Hong Kong history, making a bittersweet end to 26 years of the paper’s sensationalist, hard-hitting style and its cheery apple logo.

Two years later, the doors of Next Digital's former headquarters are boarded up, and the company's name has been erased from the bus stop outside. 

Leaving Hong Kong, journalism

Radio Free Asia caught up with four of its former journalists in recent weeks, marking the second anniversary of the raid. 

Not many former Apple Daily staffers – who once numbered around 600 – are still in journalism, while an estimated 1 in 10, have left Hong Kong for a new life overseas. 

Meanwhile, at least 15 other media outlets have since also shut down, either because they were also being investigated by the national security police, or as a pre-emptive decision. 

Of the former journalists who spoke to RFA Cantonese, some have changed careers, others have emigrated, and some have gone back to school. 

And some diehards have clung to their profession because they believe very strongly in the idea of a free press for Hong Kongers – wherever they are in the world.

Three former staff members, who gave only the pseudonyms Ah Y, Ah A, and Jimuk for fear of political reprisals against themselves or their loved ones, spoke to Radio Free Asia about their current plans and their memories of the crackdown, which proved so fateful not just for the Apple Daily, but for Hong Kong. 

A fourth – Taiwan-based Photon News website founder Leung Ka Lai – agreed to speak on the record.

More than a job

All are still struggling in their own way to come to terms with the loss of their paper, which was so much more than a job, and which has become a symbol of the crackdown on dissent and peaceful political opposition in Hong Kong since the protest movement tried to take issue with the erosion of the city's promised freedoms.

"I worked for the Apple Daily for more than 20 years – that place took all of my blood, sweat and tears. Anyone who says they don't miss the place is lying," Ah Y said. 

For Ah A, it's the openness of the interactions with colleagues he misses the most. 

"That open atmosphere made me very happy to go to work,” he said. “I miss that rapport with my colleagues, and I miss the feeling of everyone working together."

Jimuk said he still treasures every moment he spent working there.  

"I haven't forgotten anything about the paper over the last two years because I invested so much in it, both mentally and emotionally, and did some good work there," they said. 

For Ah Y, who now lives in the United Kingdom, there seems to be little point in staying in the industry at all. "These days being a journalist seems pretty pointless," he said, adding that he hadn't planned on leaving the profession, and isn't sure what to do now.   

"It's not easy to just change careers after 20 years in journalism," he said. "I've spent more than half of my working life doing this job, and I always thought I would keep doing it until I retired." 

Ah Y now does manual labor in Britain.

 "Being a journalist has lost its meaning in this day and age," he said. "It would feel like going through the motions, like a zombie. And there isn't much of a future in it for young people." 

Keeping the spirit alive

Jimuk is carrying out academic research into the Apple Daily in Taiwan, and teaching students from Taiwan and the rest of the world about the demise of press freedom in Hong Kong and about the 2019 protest movement. 

He feels that he's still working as a communicator, only in a different venue and profession. 

"I often think about how to keep the spirit of the Apple Daily alive," he said. "Also about how we can help preserve its history. My aim over the next few years is to create an academic archive detailing more than two decades of Apple Daily history.”

Ah Y has also written about Hong Kong for some Taiwanese news organizations, something he has been grateful for because he feels as if he is helping Hong Kong from overseas. 

Ah A decided to brave the chilly political climate and stay in Hong Kong, but hasn't managed to find another reporting job, as his resume is now tainted by his association with his former paper.

Instead, he has worked in sales, data analysis and as an Uber driver since the paper's demise. 

He said media organizations in Hong Kong now appear reluctant to hire him.  

"Journalists I have worked with from other media organizations have invited me to interview, and I went to more than one that was on the point of hiring me, but then didn't get approval from the highest level," he said. 

"Each time it was because I was one of the last journalists to leave the Apple Daily," he said. 

Excluded

It seems that being a former Apple Daily journalist is now something akin to the Black Five Categories of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 in mainland China – a recipe for vilification and exclusion, according to its former staffers.

Some former journalists at the paper have even been turned down for teaching positions in universities.  

"It's a shame, because I would never have done this job for so long if I didn't really love it," said Ah A, who was a journalist for 16 years. "But the industry is changing so rapidly that I probably wouldn't be able to bear it. I'm getting a bit long in the tooth for that."  

"I prefer the challenge of trying a different career altogether," he said. 

As the ruling Communist Party tightened its grip on Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, it "gutted" press freedom in the city, according to journalists and overseas rights groups. 

Since the national security law took effect on July 1, 2020, Hong Kong has plummeted from 18th to 140th in Reporters Without Borders' annual press freedom index. 

Last hurrah

The 2019 protest movement, which was covered round-the-clock by a dedicated press corps who braved constant street battles between protesters and riot police, may have been its last hurrah. 

With daily drone footage, live-tweeting, live streams, running commentary, political debate and in-depth interviews with participants, Hong Kong's journalists offered a depth and intensity of coverage that hasn't been seen in the city since. 

That year, they really fulfilled their role as the fourth estate that holds governments to account and speaks truth to power.

But by the following year, the National Security Law had put an end to the activities of its once-intrepid press corps, barring the depiction of any scenes or slogans seen as “glorifying” the protesters or their aims.

Jimmy Lai, who was initially arrested and released on bail at the time of the national security raid, was taken back into custody, where he remains awaiting trial on national security charges. 

He was also convicted of "fraud" in connection with the alleged misuse of Next Digital premises under the terms of its lease agreement. 

Meanwhile, six former Apple Daily executives have pleaded guilty to "conspiring and colluding with foreign powers" under the national security law. 

Other casualties

Six months after the raid on the Apple Daily, the pro-democracy Stand News website was also forced to close, with two of its senior editors prosecuted. A month later, Citizen News followed suit, saying it needed to shut down to keep its journalists safe. 

"Four years on, the transformation has been shocking," Leung Ka Lai said. "Nobody thought this could happen, not even people with more than a decade of experience in Hong Kong media organizations." 

"I used to think it would be something like the frog in the gradually heating pan of water, but actually, things changed overnight," she said. 

Leung, who worked for 16 years as a journalist in Hong Kong, the last three of them at the Apple Daily, tried to stay on after the paper closed, working as a citizen journalist covering protests and political opposition. 

But she has since moved to the democratic island of Taiwan, where she founded Photon News, a service for Hong Kong readers anywhere in the world. 

‘Be water’

Leaving felt like the Bruce Lee maxim used by the 2019 protesters to denote a fluid approach to political opposition, "Be Water."  

"I chose to leave because it turns out that there is some space to do my work here, enough freedom of expression," she said.   

"Resistance takes many forms, and refusing to put up banners can be a form of resistance, if that's what the regime wants you to do," Leung said. "I don't want to put up protest banners -- I'm a journalist." 

Yet Leung has found that self-censorship has dogged her shoestring news operation even in Taiwan, as people are reluctant to speak to the press due to risks under the national security law. There is also the need to protect her own employees. 

“We are now overseas, in a place that isn't threatened by Hong Kong's National Security Law, but still have to consider the safety of anonymous colleagues, and sometimes there are decisions to be made about which stories to run, and how they should be written," Leung said. 

While some former colleagues have carried on reporting via social media, there are concerns about how effective an option this can be in the longer term.

"There are lot of like-minded colleagues in Hong Kong who have started their own news platforms, and there seems to be some room for them to do that," Leung said, adding that while 12 media organizations have folded, 15 new services -- albeit smaller and less well-funded -- have sprung up to take their place. 

"But Hong Kongers are pretty picky, and won't just accept anything you feed them," she said, adding that the prospects for what little press freedom remains are looking grim, with the government planning further national security legislation.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Edward Li for RFA Cantonese.

Australia sent 50,190 troops to fight in the conflict, which ended in 1975 when communist North Vietnam sacked the capital Saigon in the U.S.-backed South. 

The commemorative Australian $2 coin marks the 50th anniversary of the end of Canberra’s involvement in the war in April 1973. 

One side of the coin features a memorial portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, while the reverse side shows a UH-1 helicopter, colloquially called the “Huey,” encircled by medal ribbons awarded to Australian veterans, two of which incorporate the colors of South Vietnam’s flag.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally requested that Australia stop circulating the coin, and take steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.

“We are regretful and strongly protest against the Royal Australian Mint and Australia Post’s releases of items with the image of the yellow flag of a regime that no longer exists,” Pham Thu Hang, the ministry’s deputy spokeswoman said in a report published in The World & Vietnam Newspaper. 

“This is not in line with the tendency of fine developments of the Vietnam – Australia Strategic Partnership.”

RFA’s Vietnamese Service attempted to contact Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as well as the Australian Embassy in Hanoi, but have not yet received a response.

The mint made two versions of the coin: 80,000 pieces of the gold-colored version, which sold for AU$15 (U.S.$10) each, and only 5,000 of the much rarer silver-colored version, which sold for AU$80 (U.S.$54). 

As they were the first Australian $2 coin to have a design in full color and had a limited issue, the coins completely sold out upon release. According to a Daily Mail report, the silver version is being traded for more than AU$1,200 (U.S.$805) and the gold for AU$80 on e-commerce sites.

The Vietnamese government often takes action against international displays of the South Vietnamese flag. 

In January 2022, when the Vietnamese national soccer team traveled to Australia for a match, Vietnam Television postponed the broadcast because many fans brought red-striped yellow flags to the stadium.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

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

An Anzac memorial service was held above the site in the South China Sea where a Japanese freighter — which had been carrying more than a 1000 prisoners — was sunk by an American submarine in 1942.

The Montevideo Maru, carrying soldiers and civilians captured when Japan invaded Rabaul in Papua New Guinea in January 1942, was torpedoed by the USS Sturgeon off the coast of the Philippines in July 1942.

A total of 979 people died, almost all Australian, but there were a number of other nationalities, including three New Zealanders.

The wreck was located last week by the research vessel Fugro Equator and the Silentworld Foundation, using an autonomous underwater vehicle.

One of those on board the Fugro Equator is Andrea Williams, the chair of the Rabaul and Montevideo Maru Society, who said the site, at more than 4000m deep, will remain untouched and be treated as a sacred place.

She said the crew on the Fugro held a service on Anzac Day over the site of the wreck.

“That was a tremendously moving experience as you can imagine,” she said.

“You know, being out on the Fugro Equator, and you have had the vast deep blue ocean just spread all around you, and just think about all the lives that were lost. So having a service over the site was tremendously special and very, very moving.”

Williams, who lost an uncle and her grandfather on the ship, helped form the Rabaul and Montevideo Society in 2009, after the sinking had been largely ignored by the Australian government and media.

She said ahead of each Anzac Day she would write to media outlets asking them to cover the sinking, which remains the worst maritime disaster in Australian history.

But Williams said more and more people linked to the society found the gatherings were “really comforting for the families because they could talk about it to other people who understand their generational grief really, I think”.

“And you find in the early days you have more of the siblings of those who had died on the Montevideo Maru, and also more of the children.”

She said with the greater recognition it was rewarding to know that the men lost on the Montevideo Maru were not forgotten.

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.

Electric automaker Tesla on Thursday announced it is recalling more than 362,000 vehicles due to their full self-driving software's potential crash risk, adding to the woes of billionaire CEO Elon Musk, whose recently acquired Twitter is beset by operational and financial troubles.

The recall announement came after the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Thursday that Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD Beta) software allows a vehicle to "exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash."

NHTSA said 362,758 Tesla vehicles could potentially be at risk, including "certain 2016-2023 Model S, Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles" equipped with FSD Beta.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said on Twitter that "this recall is long overdue."

"We have been sounding the alarm on the critical flaws in Tesla's software and its misleading advertising for years," he added.

\u201cThe bird is not the only sick company. https://t.co/IP8MfeChZ6\u201d

— John B Gilman (@John B Gilman) 1676581469

According to The Washington Post:

Officials said the software—part of Tesla's driver-assistance package—is being recalled because of the vehicles' failure to stop at intersections or exercise proper caution at yellow signals, come to a complete stop at stop signs, as well as adhere to posted speed limits. The company says it will send a remote update to remedy the problem, as it has done with past recalls.

It is the widest recall yet for the software, which has garnered widespread attention for Tesla's promises to leverage it to make vehicles autonomous.

Last month, Musk assured investors that the software behind its self-driving technology was safe and ready to roll out.

"We would not have released the FSD Beta if the safety statistics were not excellent," he said.

According to NHTSA data, 11 people were killed in U.S. crashes involving vehicles that were using automated driving systems during a four-month period of 2022. Ten of the deaths involved Tesla vehicles, although it is unclear whether the technology or drivers were at fault.

The recall announcement came a day after Tesla fired dozens of employees at its Buffalo, New York factory after workers notified Musk of their intent to unionize.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

His son, Joshua Nascimento joined his mother, Assíria Lemos, in conversation with Monica Grayley, head of our Portuguese service, to talk about the legacy of the footballing great and three-time World Cup winner, who died in hospital in Sao Paulo, on Thursday.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Monica Grayley.

San Francisco voted on June 7 to recall its district attorney, Chesa Boudin, a reformer who had challenged the traditional “lock ’em up” policies of big-city prosecutors. The margin was initially reported as a lopsided  61%–39% landslide, in what major news media across the country reported as a blow to progressive Democrats.

As New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller, in an article published the day after the election (6/8/22), put it, under a headline declaring “Voters in San Francisco Topple the City’s Progressive District Attorney, Chesa Boudin”:

Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday put an end to one of the country’s most pioneering experiments in criminal justice reform, ousting a district attorney who eliminated cash bail, vowed to hold police accountable and worked to reduce the number of people sent to prison.

Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney, was removed after two and a half years in office, according to the Associated Press, in a vote that is set to reverberate through Democratic politics nationwide as the party fine-tunes its messaging on crime before midterm elections that threaten to strip Democratic control over Congress.

‘Decisively to the right’

Yahoo (6/8/22): “Statistics failed to persuade voters who routinely had to step over the broken glass of car windows, human excrement and drug paraphernalia.”

The Times wasn’t alone in portraying San Francisco’s successful DA recall as a watershed moment for the United States, with progressive voters allegedly turning against police and prosecutor reforms in favor of “tough on crime” policies.

Yahoo News White House correspondent Alexander Nazaryan (6/8/22) termed the recall a “decisive” defeat, predicting that it was “sure to reverberate nationwide.” Nazaryan wrote that the recall election result represented

a reprise of February’s successful effort by San Franciscans to recall three school board members who were seen as engaging in progressive cultural issues while doing little to open schools that had been closed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Citing that earlier recall, as well as the latest LA Democratic mayoral primary that sent billionaire realtor Rick Caruso, a former Republican, into a runoff against progressive Rep. Karen Bass, he wrote,  “In both cases, Left Coast voters moved decisively to the right.” He then quoted (without naming him) Democratic strategist Garry South, who has also represented the real estate and telecom industries: “People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood. It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”

Wait a minute, though. District attorneys aren’t responsible for dealing with homelessness, nor do they have anything to do with gasoline prices!  Does this even qualify as political analysis?

Jumping the gun

Yahoo News columnist Rick Newman (6/8/22) said ex-Republican billionaire Rick Caruso’s “suprisingly strong showing” in the LA mayoral primary was an “ominous” sign for Democrats. Caruso actually came in second to progressive Karen Bass by a slightly larger margin than predicted by polling.

Like many news organizations ready to find meaning in Boudin’s recall, the New York Times and Yahoo News were so excited by the result they jumped the gun in saying that he had suffered a rout. Once all the absentee and mail-in ballots were counted a few days later, Boudin had actually lost not by a 22-point margin but by a less overwhelming 10 percentage points—a 55%–45% vote.

Since Boudin only won election in 2019 in a 50.8%–49.2% runoff, he hadn’t actually lost that much support over his almost three years in office.

Yahoo‘s Nazaryan was also caught flat-footed by reaching his “progressives are getting whupped” conclusion too early in the LA mayoral primary vote count. His report had ex-Republican Caruso leading Bass by 5 percentage points on the evening of the voting, but by Friday, when nearly all the mail-in votes had been tallied, the LA Times (6/17/22) was reporting that lead had flipped, the election had flipped, with Bass, running on a police-reform platform, enjoying a definitive lead of 6 percentage points. (Bass, whose final lead was 7 points,  will face Caruso in a November runoff.) Other progressives running for LA’s city council also did well as mail-in ballots poured in following primary day.

Massive financing

The really dramatic margin in the Boudin recall was in the money shoveled into the “Yes” vote. Neither the New York Times nor Yahoo—nor, indeed, most news reports on the Boudin recall—even mentioned the massive financing behind the recall effort.

They should have. Since money and media are so important—and so corrupting—in US elections, it’s important for the public to know who’s behind such campaigns.

The San Francisco Chronicle did a creditable job of covering the recall campaign, endorsed Boudin in an editorial (4/23/22) and reported less apocalyptically on the results than leading national news media. The hometown paper (6/7/22) reported that recall supporters—primarily wealthy donors from real estate and venture capitalist companies, as well as wealthy doctors and lawyers—raised and spent a stunning $7.2 million to oust Boudin. It also noted that the bundler who donated a whopping $4.7 million of that total showed an average contribution of $80,000. Boudin’s campaign to defeat the recall raised only $3.3 million, most of that reportedly coming from small donors.

Remarkably, most news articles, including the Times and Yahoo News, ignored the fact that on the same Election Day, two neighboring California counties—Alameda and Contra Costa—either elected or re-elected progressive reform DAs, while a progressive candidate won the Democratic nomination for state attorney general (KQED, 6/7/22). Altogether, the day hardly constituted a wave of anti–justice reform voting (CounterSpin, 6/17/22).

Contradictory evidence

Perhaps national news organizations felt that it was okay to focus on the Boudin recall because of his celebrity/notoriety—based on being the child Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two Weather Underground members who were convicted of murder for participating in a lethally botched Brinks robbery in 1981. Chesa Boudin, born in 1980, was raised by two Weather Underground founders, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

But even if that could justify their focus, publications should have provided some contradictory evidence to their shaky theory of progressives losing their passion for criminal justice reform. One major counterexample is the big re-election win in 2021 by Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner, a former public defender and defense attorney, and perhaps an even more radical reformer than Boudin.

Philadelphia Inquirer (5/20/21): A National Academy of the Sciences panel “found that a so-called tough-on-crime approach doesn’t significantly lower gun violence rates.”

While Pennsylvania doesn’t have recall votes, Krasner was challenged both in the spring Democratic primary and in the November general election by former assistant DAs he had fired in a big clean-out of hard-line prosecutors hired by his predecessors. According to Ballotpedia (which gives final results), he trounced his primary opponent, former Assistant DA Carlos Vega, winning  by a 65/35% margin. Vega was heavily funded by big donors, with Philadelphia’s traditionally powerful police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, his biggest donor,

Krasner then went on last November to defeat Republican candidate and former Assistant DA Chuck Peruto, also a big recipient of FOP money and support, winning by 69/31%. That’s not that much lower than his 75% blowout win in his first election to DA, and surely doesn’t suggest that Democratic voters and independents are souring on progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia.

Even the Philadelphia Inquirer (5/20/21), which had been hard on Krasner through his first term and this past election season, had to admit after his re-election that there was little reason to believe that he was responsible for the rise in gun violence:

Philadelphia’s rise in shootings and homicides began in 2015, three years before Krasner took office. And while gun violence has indeed skyrocketed during the pandemic, that’s happened across the country and Philadelphia’s increase hasn’t been worse than other cities.

As the Inquirer article  put it, “One reason the anti-Krasner argument didn’t stick may be that there’s little evidence to back it up.”

‘Bogus backlash’

Radley Balko (Washington Post, 6/14/21): “Violent crime in [San Francisco] was down in 2020. Overall crime was down 25 percent from 2019.”

Ultimately, the case against Boudin rests on two assumptions: that crime in the city has exploded and that Boudin isn’t charging people at the rate his predecessors did. And neither of those assumptions is true. There’s also little evidence that progressive policies such as ending cash bail or refusing to charge low-level offenses have anything to do with the spike in violence nationwide. The 2020 figures are expected to show a homicide surge coast to coast, in rural areas and urban areas, in jurisdictions with both reform-minded radicals and law-and-order stalwarts in the DA’s chair.

Balko’s data were readily available. Why don’t editors make political reporters do their research?

The post Turning a San Francisco Recall Into Rout for Police Reform appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

Vincent Chin (1955-1982)

This week on CounterSpin: The New York Times didn’t address the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin until 1983, in response to ongoing protest centered in Detroit’s Asian-American community, about the killing and the lack of justice—at which point the paper ran a story with a lead claiming that when “two men were quickly charged and prosecuted…the incident faded from many memories.” One, the process was hardly that tidy. And two, whose memories, exactly?

It’s 40 years since Vincent Chin’s murder, with a depressingly resonant context of anti-Asian hatred and scapegoating, that corporate media, with their thinly veiled drumbeating for “war” with China—over trade or Covid or presence in Africa—do little to dissuade. We’ll talk with activist and author Helen Zia, about the ongoing effort to remember Chin’s murder by rededicating to the work of resisting, not just anti-Chinese or anti-Asian ideas and actions, but also those separating us each from one another in the fight against those who, let’s face it, hate all of us.

Chesa Boudin (cc photo: Lynn Friedman)

Also on the show: We’re told not to “overanalyze”—which seems to mean to analyze at all—the language of reporting, and not to think about what’s  behind the scenes; it’s official news from a neutral nowhere.  But if the New York Times, for example, has enough intentionality to delete, without acknowledgement, declarative claims about “rising crime” in an article about how concerns about that are moving people to vote out reformist officials like San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, can we not imagine that they are likewise intentional about what they leave in? We’ll talk about coverage of that recall, of which elite media are making much conventional wisdom hay, with Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System.

The post Helen Zia on Vincent Chin Murder, Alec Karakatsanis on Chesa Boudin Recall appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted by voters Tuesday in a special recall election, after facing well-funded tough-on-crime attacks by the real estate industry. “He made enemies with very, very deep pockets,” says Lara Bazelon, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and chair of Boudin’s Innocence Commission, who describes the primary challenge as a “perfect storm” to take down Boudin. Bazelon also discusses the mayoral race in Los Angeles, where billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Congressmember Karen Bass will head to a runoff in November after placing first and second in Tuesday’s primary. She says the two candidates will be competing for the Latinx voting bloc, which could ultimately determine the outcome of the election.

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

We speak to San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was elected in 2019 after promising to end cash bail, curb mass incarceration and address police misconduct. He now faces a recall campaign, with opponents blaming rising crime rates on his policies, even though sources like the San Francisco Chronicle report that crime rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Boudin says the recall campaign is spearheaded by wealthy donors, the real estate industry and Republicans who desire a conservative DA who will not hold police and other powerful actors accountable. Opponents who attack Boudin’s social justice reform without any of their own proposals “are a scourge to democracy,” says Boudin. “We don’t need to jail our way out of poverty or other social programs.”

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

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Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.

One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

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It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)

Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.

Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.

In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”

Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv. One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”

Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”

Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.

In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year, Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.

With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.

“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.

According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)

A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”

According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.

The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”

Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.

After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.

Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.

With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.

By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.

Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.

Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.

Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.

Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:

These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.

In December 2019, as an impeachment inquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.

Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”

In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:

Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump

Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI

Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch

Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal

• US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities
• Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report
• Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ilya Marritz.

The post Tech Elite Threatened by Progressive San Francisco DA, Push for His Recall appeared first on Project Censored.

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

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