Today marks the 60th anniversary of the creation of Medicare and Medicaid — and nearly one month since President Trump’s federal budget slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid to extend tax cuts for the rich. The cuts could lead to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year. “Medicaid has been a lifeline. And without it, people will die,” says Ai-jen Poo, co-founder of Caring Across Generations and the Domestic Workers Alliance, which helped organize a 60-hour vigil last week ahead of the anniversary as part of a broader campaign to fight back against Trump’s cuts. She highlights the role of immigrants, who make up a third of the caregiving sector, and says Trump’s crackdown on immigration hastens the dwindling of care available to the aging and elderly. “We should be adding a trillion dollars in investments in healthcare in this country and in caregiving services in this country,” says Poo. “We need to strengthen these systems and programs for the 22nd century, not gut them.”

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

The independent news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call are reporting that Israel is increasingly using grenade-firing drones to enforce evacuation orders. Israeli soldiers have admitted that they deliberately target civilians and likened their use of the weapons to a “video game.” Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport explains how soldiers are instructed to initiate strikes on all residents, not just belligerent targets. “Once a commander defines an imaginary red line that no one is allowed to cross, anyone who does is marked for death,” says Rapoport.

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

We speak to Loris Taylor, president of Native Public Media, about the Trump administration’s drastic defunding of public media and its impact on tribal nations. Fifty-nine tribal radio stations and one tribal television station that depend on federal funding will be among the first to face possible closure, putting some of the essential services that public broadcasting provides, including warning systems for missing Indigenous women and girls, at risk. Taylor shares how Native-led public media helps preserve Indigenous languages and helped keep communities informed during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. She fears that without these same resources and “with the climate crisis increasing, [we] are going to be operating on the margins of information and are not going to have real lifesaving information available to our citizens when they need it most.”

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

Leave their forest within 30 days, the official notice said, or risk charges against anyone who remained.

The letter was dated six days earlier. The clock had already started ticking. 

The notice contended the Rumah Jeffrey people were violating the law by living within a “protected forest.” They had less than a month to demolish all their crops, tear down their longhouse and remove all of their belongings, and get out.

But although the eviction notice cited the land as a “protected” area, Nang knew there was more to the story. Five months earlier, Nang had received a visit from an official from a company called Zedtee Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of a logging company called Shin Yang Group. According to Nang, a company official told him they needed some of their forest for timber. Sarawak wood is often imported into countries like the United States, Japan and South Korea where it is sold as furniture, flooring, and wood pellets that are burned for fuel.

Nang said he never reached an agreement with Zedtee regarding the forest or any potential relocation or payment. Instead, for nearly three years, his people have been at a standoff with authorities, as they resist the eviction levied without their consent or compensation.

That’s according to a new investigation published last week by Human Rights Watch that concludes the Rumah Jeffrey community is being wrongly evicted, in violation of Malaysia’s laws, as well as in violation of their international rights as Indigenous peoples to consent to extractive projects on their land. 

Various studies have shown that deforestation is a leading contributor to climate change, leading to less rainfall, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and warmer temperatures. Research also indicates that protecting Indigenous land rights helps both save forests and protect biodiversity. But despite global pledges to stop deforestation, the problem continues to worsen. 

Luciana Téllez Chávez, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the Rumah Jeffrey’s experience reflects a broader problem of Indigenous rights being disregarded in the region. There are relatively few legal protections for Indigenous peoples in Sarawak compared with other state governments, but her investigation found that even the few legal protections, such as requirements for companies to get certified, are not being met. 

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“There is a sense that a lot of the deforestation that happens in Sarawak is legal just because the law is so permissive of this type of activity,” she said. “What we’re trying to show is that even the modest protections that exist for Indigenous lands are not respected and this is one example of that.”

Indigenous peoples who want to stay on their land must prove their presence through a specific colonial-era aerial land survey, Chávez said. But the survey itself is classified. 

“That’s just absurd,” she said. “It’s just incredibly difficult for communities to advocate for their rights because all this critical environmental information is secret.” 

Chávez said Human Rights Watch worked with university researchers to access the survey data and prove that even by that arbitrary criterion, the Rumah Jeffrey have valid land claims.

Neither Zedtee nor the Shin Yang Group responded to messages seeking comment. The Sarawak Forest Department did not respond either to inquiries, but said in a letter to Human Rights Watch that it is committed to best practices in forest management. 

“The Sarawak Government remains committed to Sustainable Forest Management through its forest management certification policy and best forest management practices,” the agency said. “This commitment applies to both natural and planted forests, ensuring adherence to strict standards and best practices.”

Despite not receiving consent from the Rumah Jeffrey people, Zedtee proceeded with removing trees from the forest, Human Rights Watch found. A study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the organization Global Forest Watch estimated that the subsequent logging removed nearly eight hectares of forest, or the size of nearly 20 American football fields.

Nicholas Mujah is the general secretary of the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association, a community group representing Indigenous Iban communities like the Rumah Jeffrey in Sarawak. Mujah said there are hundreds of court cases dealing with land disputes in Sarawak because evictions to make way for deforestation are growing more common. 

“This type of modus operandi is very, very rampant in Sarawak,” he said. 

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So far, the Rumah Jeffrey community is resisting eviction. The village of about 60 people relies on the forest and nearby river for fishing, hunting, gathering, and growing food. Moving away would force them to leave two cemeteries where their ancestors and loved ones are buried, as well as a waterfall that they consider sacred. 

“The land is very, very significant to the livelihood of the Iban people in Sarawak,” said Mujah.

Human Rights Watch investigators found that the Rumah Jeffrey people did not have an opportunity to provide input in the eviction process, nor do they have an avenue to overturn it.

Mujah hopes the international community helps provide some hope. At the end of this year, the European Union is putting into effect new regulations that will allow companies to be fined for deforestation on their product supply lines that occurred after 2020, whether or not it was technically legal. The law, Chávez says, is a “game-changer,” and could put pressure on the state of Sarawak and the Malaysian government more broadly to better respect Indigenous rights in order to protect a lucrative export industry.

Ideally, Chávez wants the Sarawak government to revoke its eviction notice. Human Rights Watch also called upon countries like the U.S. and Japan to enforce existing laws against importing wood that was felled through illegal deforestation or human rights violations. Finally, Chávez hopes Sarawak adopts stricter legal standards to protect communities like the Rumah Jeffrey.

“The Sarawak legal system is incredibly discriminatory against Indigenous peoples,” she said.”The local laws are not on par with the international standards with the rights of Indigenous peoples and they truly facilitate the appropriation of Indigenous land.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Deforestation and illegal evictions threaten Malaysia’s Indigenous peoples on May 12, 2025.

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

Wikipedia editor Molly White told the Washington Post (4/25/25) that the Trump administration was “weaponizing laws to try to silence high-quality independent information.”

The Trump administration is very upset with Wikipedia, the collaboratively edited online encyclopedia. Ed Martin, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter (4/24/25) to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent nonprofit, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”

The letter said:

Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.

The letter threatened the foundation’s tax-exempt status, demanding “detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors,” the Washington Post (4/25/25) reported.

Wikipedia has been attacked before by countries with censorious reputations. Russia threatened to block Wikipedia “because of its entry on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reported Euractiv (3/4/22), and the site has been blocked in China (BBC, 5/14/19). Turkey lifted a three-year ban on Wikipedia in 2020 (Deutsche Welle, 1/16/20).

Martin’s letter indicates that the Trump administration is inclined to join the club.

‘Notice a theme?’

Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post (6/25/24) that Wikipedia displayed “bias” because its article about her used to quote her tweet (6/30/14) about Hamas: “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”

Right-wing media in the US have been complaining about Wikipedia for a while, displaying the victim mentality that fuels the conservative drive to punish media out of favor with the MAGA movement. Here are a few headlines from Pirate Wires, a right-wing news site that covers technology and culture:

• “How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel/Palestine Narrative” (10/24/24)
• “How Soros-Backed Operatives Took Over Key Roles at Wikipedia” (1/6/25)
• “Wikipedia Editors Officially Deem Trump a Fascist” (10/29/24)

“More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” reported the New York Post (3/18/25), citing the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. “Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors,” Post writer Bethany Mandel (6/25/24) alleged, citing research by the right-wing Manhattan Institute.

Under the headline “Big Tech Must Block Wikipedia Until It Stops Censoring and Pushing Disinformation,” the Post (2/5/25) editorialized that the site “maintains a blacklist compendium of sources that page writers and editors are allowed to cite—and …which will get you in trouble.” The latter category, the Post claims, includes “Daily Caller, the Federalist, the Washington Free Beacon, Fox News and even the Post. Notice a theme?”

(Wikipedia’s list of “perennial sources,” which are color-coded by reliability, marks numerous left-wing as well as right-wing sources as “generally unreliable” or “deprecated”; the fact that the Post implies only right-wing sources are listed is an indication that its reputation as “generally unreliable for factual reporting” is well-deserved.)

‘Stop donating to Wokepedia’

Early Wikipedia staffer Larry Sanger told Fox News (3/7/25) he wants the government to investigate government influence on Wikipedia.

This hostility is amplified by one of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, who accused the site of having a left-wing bias on Fox News (7/16/21, 7/22/21), although he has reportedly not been involved with the site since leaving in 2002 (Washington Times, 7/16/21). He even requested Elon Musk and the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to investigate possible government influence at Wikipedia (Fox News, 3/7/25). It’s an Orwellian situation, asking the government to use its muscle against the site on the grounds that it might have previously been influenced by the government.

Musk, the mega-billionaire who bought Twitter, rebranded it as X and lurched it to the right (Guardian, 1/15/24; NBC News, 10/31/24), also has his problems with Wikipedia. Before he took on a co-presidential role in the Trump White House, Musk  (X, 12/24/24) posted, “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation is also gunning for Wikipedia. The think tank developed Project 2025, the conservative policy document guiding the Trump administration (Atlantic, 4/24/25) that has also called for tighter government control of broadcast media. Unsurprisingly, it “plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic,” the Forward (1/7/25) reported. The paper speculated that the group was targeting “a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.”

For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is of plenty evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction (American Prospect, 5/1/08; Guardian, 8/18/10; Bloomberg, 3/7/25).

Capturing online media

AI’s heavy reliance on Wikipedia for training data (Verge, 4/17/25) means Wikipedia‘s point of view will largely shape the answers we get from AI.

One might ask, “Who cares if Wikipedia is biased?” Lots of media are biased in one direction or another. And the notion that any nonprofit organization’s political leaning requires its status be investigated is ludicrous, considering that three of the organizations hyping Wikipedia’s alleged wrongdoing—the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and the ADL—have the same tax-exempt status. It’s hard to imagine the New York Post accepting a Democratic administration pressuring these groups to change their right-wing positions.

Wikipedia remains popular, with some 4 billion visits a month worldwide. In addition to its lengthy entries, it’s a repository of outside citations that are important for researchers on a wide range of subjects. AI models heavily rely on Wikipedia articles for training—so much so that Wikimedia offers developers a special dataset to help keep the regular site from being overwhelmed by bots (Verge, 4/17/25).

Wikipedia is being targeted by an administration that clearly wants to bring all of Big Tech and major online media under its ideological watch. So far, the right has made progress in capturing the giants in Big Tech and social media. Musk turned the site formerly known as Twitter into a right-wing noise machine (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Rolling Stone, 1/24/24; PBS, 8/13/24; Guardian, 1/4/25).

“In recent months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a series of specific moves to signal that Meta may embrace a more conservative administration,” reported NBC News (1/8/25). Google donated $1 million to this year’s inauguration fund (CNBC, 1/9/25). Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has grown closer to Trump (Axios, 2/27/25; FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

At the same time, the administration is disappearing international students who voice disagreement with US policy (FAIR.org, 3/19/25, 3/28/25), seeking to defund public broadcasting (FAIR.org, 4/25/25), attacking academic freedom (Guardian, 4/27/25) and weaponizing the Federal Communications Commission (FAIR.org, 2/26/25).

So it is fitting that this administration also wants to pressure Wikipedia into moving rightward. What differentiates an authoritarian regime from other right-wing administrations is that it doesn’t just establish extreme policies, but it seeks to eradicate any space where free thought and discussion can take place. The Trump administration’s actions against media and academia show he’s not just right-wing, but an authoritarian in a classic sense.

The efficacy of Martin’s letter remains to be seen, but this is an attack on Wikipedia’s editorial independence. It will undoubtedly cause other websites and media outlets with nonprofit status to wonder if their content will be the next in the government’s crosshairs.

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

Both cases involve a key provision of the Clean Air Act, which has long required companies challenging actions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do so in the D.C. Circuit, if those actions have a “nationwide scope.” When the Clean Air Act was codified into law over half a century ago, Congress was intentional and clear in designating the D.C. Circuit as a neutral venue for litigating EPA actions that could impact multiple states. Now, Republican-led states and the oil and gas industry are trying to roll back this decades-old provision of the Clean Air Act so they can more easily shop their challenges to EPA actions in industry-aligned courts, like the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We all know that corporate special interests have been hand-picking judges to hear their cases to guarantee more favorable outcomes. The cases before the Supreme Court today would turbocharge this judge shopping at everyday Americans’ expense,” said Accountable.US President Caroline Ciccone. “These cases are yet another assault on foundational laws protecting the environment and public health, being brought forward to line the pockets of Big Oil & Gas. At a time when confidence in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low because of Justices’ ethical lapses, siding with special interests to weaken the integrity of the judicial system would only fracture Americans’ trust further.”

The cases being heard today are part of a larger strategy to greenlight judge shopping in the Fifth Circuit and other circuits dominated by conservative judges. For example, an Accountable.US analysis released last year revealed that the industry-aligned U.S. Chamber of Commerce was taking judge shopping to new extremes, and that since 2017 roughly 63% of the Chamber’s lawsuits challenging federal regulations were filed in district courts under the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction. While the Federal Judicial Conference has adopted a new policy addressing the problem of judge-shopping and its effect in undermining public confidence in the courts, certain federal courts within the Fifth Circuit, like the Northern District of Texas, pointedly refused to implement the policy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysis published on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Andy Kroll.

“Despite President Trump’s promise not to touch Social Security, Elon Musk has gained access to the system that cuts your grandmother’s Social Security check and is wreaking havoc. Musk’s baseless claims of massive fraud are a poorly disguised pretext to cut benefits for seniors to pay for his giant tax cut.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

On his first day back in the White House, Donald Trump moved to roll back protections for transgender people. In his inaugural address, Trump declared the U.S. government’s policy is “there are only two genders: male and female.” Chase Strangio, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, describes Trump’s executive orders aimed at pushing “a slew of policies that just seek to both eradicate trans people from civic and public life and also push trans people out of federal government.” “Trans people are bracing themselves for a lot of negative outcomes here, not just symbolic, but really material ones,” says Strangio. “I know the community is scared. I know people are confused. And in this chaos, we just have to come together and build all the forms of resistance we know how to.”

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

“The threats of legal action by Singapore ministers against media outlets, as well as the government’s recent order to ‘correct’ reporting, severely undermine press freedom in the country,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “Singapore authorities must cease using the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act to muzzle and discredit journalists.”

Tan and Shanmugam said in December 15 Facebook posts that they would pursue legal action against Bloomberg over a December 11 article alleging lack of transparency surrounding the purchase of multimillion dollar houses in Singapore. The ministers stated that they intend to take “similar action against others who have published libelous statements about those transactions.”

On December 23, the Singapore government ordered Bloomberg and three other media outlets, which also published the allegations, to issue public “corrections” under its “fake news” law, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act.

The outlets include news websites:

• The Edge Singapore, which republished Bloomberg’s article.
• The Independent Singapore, which cited Bloomberg’s reporting in a December 12 article 
• The Online Citizen, which cited Bloomberg’s reporting in a December 12 article

The Edge Singapore and The Independent Singapore removed their respective posts. The four media outlets complied with issuing corrections, but Bloomberg and The Online Citizen, whose articles remained accessible as of January 10, additionally said that they stood by their reporting.

CPJ has condemned the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act’s provision of broad and arbitrary powers for government ministers to demand corrections from media outlets and remove online content. 

Tan and Shanmugam’s offices did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emails requesting comment.

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

But the claim is false. The voiceover in Chinese does not match what Newsom actually said in the video. The governor never made such a remark. His office dismissed the claim. U.S. states cannot “withhold” federal income taxes because they neither collect nor pay them.

The video was shared on X on Nov. 11, 2024.

The 59-second video shows what appears to be a media interview of Newsom. The voiceover in Chinese can be heard throughout the clip.

“The governor announced he would withhold more than US$250 billion in federal taxes as leverage in future negotiations with the Trump administration,” said the Chinese voiceover.

“This would be a major step towards California’s independence,” the post reads.

The claim began to circulate online after former President Donald Trump secured a second, non-consecutive term by defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5.

There has been collective dismay at Trump’s victory in California, a stronghold of progressive values and a Democratic Party bastion, with some groups even suggesting that California leaves the United States and becomes a separate nation.

The same claim was also shared on Weibo here and here.

But the claim is false.

A reverse image search found the video published on Newsom’s official X account on Nov. 10. It was his first on-camera interview following the U.S. presidential election.

A review of the video found no mention of withholding federal income taxes.

The interview was about a request for the California state legislature to convene a special session to implement state policies protecting “reproductive freedoms” including women’s right to abortion as soon as possible.

Newsom’s office told AFCL the claims were “absolutely false” and referenced a statement the governor made on Nov. 6 in response to election results as a clear signal of the governor’s intent.

“California will seek to work with the incoming president — but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law” the governor said in the statement.

State vs federal taxes

There are two types of annual income taxation in the U.S – state and federal taxes.

The former are collected by each state’s government and the latter by the federal government.

States cannot “withhold” federal income taxes because they neither collect nor pay them. The federal government collects them by levying payrolls directly from individuals and corporations.

Tax filing season in the U.S. typically begins with people receiving a statement of their past year’s wages along with W-2 tax forms from their employers which they use to report their income, file refunds, or pay back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. Federal, state, and local income is reported separately during this process.

Article VIII of the U.S. Constitution regulates the federal government’s ability to tax states, while the 16th Amendment clarified that Congress can directly tax citizens of any state on their income.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers' understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook , Instagram and X .

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

On October 26, protesters blocking a highway nearthe central Bolivian town of Melga threatened to hang Guzmán and briefly confiscated his crew’s TV camera. One of the protesters then tied a noose around Guzmán’s neck and tightened it, according to the Bolivian National Press Association (ANP) and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

 “The right to protest cannot be turned into aggression against other civilians, including journalists,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in São Paulo. “CPJ hopes that the Bolivian authorities will identify and bring to justice those responsible for the attack on Jurgen Guzmán.”

Guzmán told CPJ that the attackers held the rope around his neck for at least 10 seconds, adding, “I put my hand under the twine to avoid being asphyxiated.”

Guzmán said the protesters then released him, returned the camera, and allowed his three-person crew to leave the area. 

The incident was one of several violent attacks against journalists covering anti-government protests and highway blockages, which began last month after authorities issued an arrest warrant for former President Evo Morales on charges of human trafficking and statutory rape. Many Morales supporters view mainstream journalists as allies of President Luis Arce, a fierce critic of Morales, Guzmán told CPJ.

On October 25, Red UNO TV reporter Romer Castedo and camera operator Ricardo Pedraza were assaulted and had equipment stolen. On October 29, Unitel journalist Josué Chubé was attacked by Morales supporters and detained for almost five hours. On November 1, a dynamite explosion during a protest knocked over Spanish news agency EFE photographer Jorge Ábrego, who also suffered a heart attack. He was treated at a hospital and released on November 5.

CPJ called and left messages with the Bolivia Attorney General’s office to inquire about investigations into recent attacks on journalists, but there was no answer.

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

The post Titans of Capital Threaten Humanity appeared first on Project Censored.

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

In a September 4 letter, Kyrgyzstan’s culture and information ministry threatened to block access to Novye Litsa in 24 hours unless it deleted an August 30 article connecting a Russian political strategist linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the deceased leader of the Russian mercenary company Wagner, to Japarov’s 2021 election campaign. The outlet complied with the order but defended the accuracy of the article.

The ministry also demanded that the Kyrgyz Service of the U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, known locally as Radio Azattyk, remove a radio report covering the Novye Litsa story or face a similar block.

“By issuing threats against Radio Azattyk and Novye Litsa over reports looking into President Sadyr Japarov’s alleged political strategists, Kyrgyz authorities have once again demonstrated that the ‘false information’ law is used for shielding the reputations of top state officials, not for countering disinformation,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Defamation allegations should be weighed against evidence— not the opaque whims of officials sitting in the halls of power. The false information law must be repealed.” 

The ministry cited a 2021 law, which allows it to block websites it deems to contain “false information.”  

In 2022, authorities blocked Radio Azattyk’s websites and in 2023 ordered the outlet to close, only reversing their decisions after the outlet had deleted a video about border clashes. This year, prosecutors shuttered andliquidated Kloop, a local partner of the global Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, after blocking its website which featured a series of corruption investigations.

Presidential press secretary Akmat Alagozov said on Facebook that if Radio Azattyk’s reporting was found to “deliberately slander” Kyrgyzstan’s leadership, “the question of whether we need such an outlet may be put on the agenda.”

Since Japarov became president in 2021, Kyrgyz authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown on independent reporting in a country previously seen as a regional beacon for the free press. 

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

“We were trying to spin up solutions…everything to continue to write news,” Pavel Manylov, the site’s lead software engineer, told CPJ. “Our colleagues said the website was giving an error message and the content management system was not working properly. It was because of the enormous traffic, something new for us.”

The scale wasn’t the only notable thing about the attack. In their cyber assault, the attackers deployed a suite of online tools increasingly used to target media sites around the world, while keeping the perpetrators’ identities secret.

To source and direct online traffic en masse, attackers often use a combination of these tools, including:

• Proxy providers offering access to IP addresses, which are unique numbers assigned to internet-connected devices;

• Other marketplaces where IP addresses are leased or re-sold; and,

• Data centers that host and route online traffic.

Experts told CPJ that such tools, offered openly by for-profit companies, can make cyberattacks particularly difficult to defend against. Their use appears to be part of an emerging censorship strategy that poses a serious transnational threat to press freedom and access to information. 

“[Outlets] that try to do some hard-hitting independent journalism, but may not have the resources to defend themselves, are at great risk of being blotted out by a DDoS,” Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at the global network monitoring company Kentik, told CPJ.

Proxy service attacks: ‘You really need to think fast’

Amy Brouillette, advocacy director at the International Press Institute (IPI), a global press freedom group based in Vienna, told CPJ that she initially thought the group’s website was broken when a DDoS attack knocked it offline for three days in early September 2023. The timing was eerie: the group had recently published a report about similar cyberattacks targeting over 40 Hungarian news sites. 

The attacker targeting IPI used the services of proxy providers, which aren’t by definition malicious; their services are used for online research, security, and privacy protection. But they have also been abused. In March, French telecom company Orange warned that proxy providers are part of a “financially motivated cybercrime ecosystem.” 

“You really need to think fast,” KontraBit Development’s Žarko Jović, who IPI hired to defend its site, told CPJ. He described watching the attackers intensify their assault in response to his efforts to identify and block the malicious traffic: “When the attackers see that you are comfortable with protecting yourself…they start using proxy networks.”

Qurium, a Sweden-based non-profit that hosts websites of independent media and human rights groups, found that the attack on IPI, as well as several Hungarian news sites, “weaponized” services of a proxy provider called White Proxies, also known as White Solutions. 

In the Meduza attack, Qurium also identified the use of at least two proxy providers: Vietnam-based MIN Proxy and Hong Kong-based RapidSeedBox. 

Qurium does not host IPI or Meduza, but collaborated with them to investigate the attacks. 

CPJ emailed White Proxies questions about the use of its services in DDoS attacks, but received no response. 

“[W]e immediately notified the client who was using our IP ranges…[and] worked with them mutually to immediately block the actual client who rented the IPs from which the attacks came,” RapidSeedBox product manager Yuri Meshalkin told CPJ by email, explaining the company’s reaction upon learning of the attack on Meduza, but declined to disclose any client information.  “We have both automated and manual systems in place to monitor illicit activity, including DDoS attacks,” Meshalkin said, adding, “We do not intend to work with clients who abuse our IPs in attacks.”

CPJ sent emails to addresses listed on MIN Proxy’s websites but received error messages in reply. Questions sent via messaging app to a number listed on a Facebook page for the company were not answered directly; instead, the respondent accused CPJ of “planning to scam” them. 

Other media sites have been similarly targeted: In October 2023, attackers used services of two proxy providers – U.S.-based RayoByte and FineProxy, founded in Russia – to flood Philippines news site Rappler, which is headed by Nobel laureate and CPJ board member Maria Ressa. CPJ previously reported that RayoByte’s services were used in DDoS attacks on at least six other media sites around the world.

RayoByte and its parent company Sprious confirmed receipt of CPJ’s emailed questions about the attack on Rappler, but did not respond further. In previous responses to questions about its services’ use in earlier DDoS attacks, RayoByte told CPJ it had “removed the abusive user” and opposed online harassment, including cyberattacks. FineProxy did not respond to CPJ’s emailed questions about its services being implicated in attacks on Rappler and websites reporting on Azerbaijan.

Qurium said both companies responded to abuse reports by ​blacklisting the victimized websites, and “refusing to help identifying the customer behind the DDoS.”

“Proxy services are known for being vectors of DDoS attacks,” Madory told CPJ. “If you can large-scale anonymize many, many internet connections, there’s a lot of bad things you can do.”

Why it’s hard to fight proxy-enabled DDoS attacks

Experts told CPJ that standard strategies for defending against DDoS attacks involve analyzing incoming traffic to see which IPs are overwhelming the site, where they are coming from, and determining how to block them most efficiently without blocking legitimate site visitors. 

“There’s a little bit of a science to that, rapidly figuring out that you’re getting overwhelmed with a particular type of traffic,” Madory said. “You may be able to define it by its source.” 

That’s what Manylov did in response to the April attack on Meduza. “It’s cat and mouse,” he told CPJ, recalling how he briefly blocked all IPs from China, Japan, Brazil, and the U.S. at certain points during the attack. But this sorting process was made more difficult because the attackers used “residential proxies,” which give the appearance of standard traffic from real visitors.

“They’re addresses of real people or connected to real people,” Manylov said. “I wouldn’t say that residential proxies by themselves are a bad thing, but this kind of usage is, well, it’s obviously not good…they’re more threatening than the basic DDoS.”

Orange, the French telecom company, said that residential proxies are “an integral part of many malicious operations,” including DDoS. Microsoft has similarly identified them as a problem, noting in January that a “Russian-state sponsored actor” targeting its systems sought to hide using “residential proxy networks, routing their traffic through a vast number of IP addresses that are also used by legitimate users.” Residential proxies also played a role in cybercrime activities disrupted by an international law enforcement operation led by the U.S. Justice Department in late May.

Proxy providers often offer customers access to residential proxies that can be exchanged quickly for new ones, which creates variation in the traffic and reduces the likelihood they will be flagged and blocked. This “rotating” option can make defending websites from DDoS attacks even more complicated.

“The bad actor can go and get a whole bunch of new IP addresses to use to attack you,” Madory said of access to rotating proxies. “If you had profiled [the attack] based on the source IP address before, that information is of no use in the next attack.”

Malicious IPs can be more difficult to identify and block when they change locations every few months, as was the case with traffic used in attacks against various outlets in August and September, Qurium technical director Tord Lundström told CPJ. Defending websites from traffic that has moved in this way is more arduous because the IPs’ defining characteristics, like geolocation data, can vary widely and may not have been kept up to date, he said.

“You see [an] incredible amount of IP addresses on the website and it’s really hard for you to find something common to all of those addresses and to block them,” Jović said of his experience defending IPI. “That’s really the point when you cannot protect yourself with the usual tools.”

Low cost, bulk IP addresses make DDoS more dangerous

Qurium’s analysis of the attacks on Meduza and IPI highlighted an additional concern: the malicious traffic included IPs from the massively expanded set of cheaply available addresses known as IP version 6 (IPv6). This set of IPs became the latest standard for the internet in 2017 to service the world’s growing number of internet-connected devices, as the older set of addresses known as IP version 4 (IPv4) are nearly fully assigned to devices. 

“IPv6 has a much bigger pool…and they’re much cheaper…they are less traceable than IPv4,” Jović said. “It is good for the regular people, but it is also good for the attackers.”

Manylov described IPv6 as “the future of the internet” because it will allow an exponentially greater number of internet addresses, but said that renting millions of IPv6 addresses would “cost you basically nothing” and can make it particularly difficult to block DDoS attacks without blocking real news readers. “It’s very threatening for the small media…[that] have zero tech and IT [people],” he added.

One cybersecurity expert noted to CPJ that DDoS attacks, made harder to defend against by the increased use of IPv6, could pose additional problems for online media trying to monetize journalism. As news outlets work to block potentially malicious traffic, they may prevent actual readers from coming to their sites, hindering their ability to make money from viewership and ads.

Attacks can give clues to who is responsible

Neither the staff of the targeted websites, nor the people defending them, have been able to confirm who is responsible for the attacks. But by analyzing the traffic, clues emerge.

As Jović defended IPI, he recognized what appeared to be a message from the attacker: “HanoHatesU.” The phrase was embedded in many of the URLs used as requests to visit the site and ironically allowed him to successfully identify and filter the malicious traffic. It was the same cryptic message seen in attacks on some of the Hungarian sites earlier that year, suggesting a link between the incidents.

Lundström has also detected patterns. Proxy providers often source and route IP addresses via other companies and Qurium reported that services from some of the same companies, including data centers operated by UK-based A1 Network Exchange, were used in the attacks against Meduza, IPI, and Hungarian media. 

CPJ emailed Shakib Khan, A1 Network Exchange’s director, at addresses publicly listed for the firm and its parent company, HostCram, which Khan heads and is registered in the U.S., but received no response.

The attack on IPI similarly used services of several companies, including five specialized in IP address leasing and re-selling. Addresses leased from one of those companies – U.K.-based IPXO – appeared in DDoS attacks in August 2023 targeting media sites covering news in Somalia, Turkmenistan, and Kosovo. Lundström also noticed that IPs used to attack IPI were used the same day, September 8, 2023, in a DDoS attack against the Philippines-based Bulatlat news site.

IPXO did not respond to CPJ’s questions about the use of IPs sourced via its leasing service to attack IPI, but told Qurium that it would “inform their client so they can suspend the attacker.” Following CPJ’s reporting on the August attacks, IPXO said in an email that it expected lessees of its IP address to “take appropriate action to cease and prevent any abusive or unlawful activities” and may take further action depending on a lessee’s conduct. “We neither possess the resources, means, nor the authority to proactively monitor and prevent unlawful activities by IP address lessees or their customers,” IPXO said, adding it did evaluate lessees’ history for “likelihood of abuse.”

Lundström believes that companies should not protect the identities of their clients that use their services to launch such attacks. So far, none have cooperated in this way and some even hide using U.S.-based shell companies.

Though they don’t have confirming evidence, staff at Meduza believe the Russian government ordered the large-scale attack on their site. It came just days before Russian authorities initiated legal proceedings against Meduza’s head, Galina Timchenko, and two other reporters for the outlet. Cyberattacks often happen alongside other assaults on journalists’ freedom and safety. 

Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, also known as Roskomnadzor, did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment about the attacks on Meduza.

“The mission of journalism is to inform people and there are many forces that want to stop that,” Madory said. “They either want to threaten a journalist, or if they can just take a source of journalism offline. That works too.”

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

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

In a vast stretch of Central Washington’s high desert, the farms and small towns of Grant County sit on nothing short of a gold mine.

Grant County’s utility district owns two public dams on the colossal Columbia River that are capable of powering more than 1.5 million homes. For decades, this sparsely populated county had enough clean hydroelectricity to meet its own power needs and sell the excess at a low cost across the Northwest.

Then wealthy companies, catering to the insatiable demands of our digital world, arrived in the county. Attracted by the cheap electricity, they built power-guzzling data centers — the warehouses filled with computer servers that back the modern internet. Local officials welcomed the industry’s economic potential.

But with demand soaring and the power from dams finite, Grant County has been forced to look to other sources of energy. The problem is so acute that the county is headed for a daunting choice in the next six years: violate a state green energy law limiting the use of fossil fuels or risk rolling blackouts in homes, factories and hospitals.

At least three utilities in other Washington counties are similarly contending with the voracious demands of data centers.

State lawmakers set the stage for this reckoning. In 2019, the Legislature passed a measure to make Washington’s utilities carbon-neutral by 2030. At the same time, in the name of bringing jobs to rural areas, lawmakers encouraged the explosive growth of the data center industry through a massive tax break.

Remarkably, Washington in recent years has gotten a smaller share of its electricity from renewable sources than it did two decades ago, according to the most recent state data. That’s despite the fact the state produces a quarter of the nation’s hydropower.

“Our existing hydro system is pretty much tapped out,” said Randall Hardy, an energy consultant and former administrator of Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that owns Washington’s largest dam. “So you’ve got a dilemma of how you’ll meet this additional load from data centers with clean resources or, frankly, with any resources.”

Artificial intelligence, which requires extraordinary computing power, is accelerating the need to build data centers across the world, and experts say the industry’s global energy consumption as of just two years ago could double by 2026. Data centers also are relied upon every day by businesses and people for internet searches, storing photos on the cloud and streaming videos.

Some states and counties with large data center markets have tried to craft policies to mitigate the impact.

For example, Virginia, home to the nation’s largest market for data centers, has contemplated making them improve energy efficiency and use more green power to qualify for tax breaks. Lawmakers recently ordered an assessment of the industry’s impact on power supply.

Georgia lawmakers went further, passing a bill — ultimately vetoed by the governor — to suspend its tax breaks for data centers while officials completed a study on power impacts.

Meanwhile, Washington undermined an effort to study data centers’ power usage. In 2022, Gov. Jay Inslee, one of the nation’s biggest champions of green energy, vetoed a plan — tucked into legislation that expanded the tax break — to understand how much power data centers consume.

His office defended the veto, saying a study would be duplicative of work underway. Although regional power planners have produced wide-ranging forecasts about data centers’ power use, no one has tracked their rapidly growing energy demands in Washington specifically or the impact of the state’s tax break on its power grid, The Seattle Times and ProPublica found.

In a statement, Inslee’s office said the industry is not driving power problems statewide. When asked whether the state should study data center power usage, given its growth, Anna Lising, Inslee’s top energy policy adviser, said there’s no need. “I’m not concerned because we haven’t had resource adequacy issues or service issues as a result of it,” Lising said.

Inslee’s office said he is aware of the need to bring more renewable energy online, and the state is working on it. The statement said Inslee supports the state tax break but would be “open to considering changes.” He declined to be interviewed.

As temperatures rise and Washington phases out fossil fuels, the need for more clean energy to meet everyone’s power demands becomes increasingly critical.

“You get into this question of equity,” said Kevin Schneider, a senior research fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research facility. “Should people be sitting in overheating houses in order to supply the servers for AI?”

This very dynamic has placed counties like Grant, despite their abundance of clean energy, in the difficult position of finding enough electricity to feed this power-hungry industry. Conversations about potentially costly growth have created rifts between generational farmers and the county’s ever-expanding tech sector, which also has many local supporters.

State Rep. Alex Ybarra, a Republican lawmaker whose district includes most of Grant County, said he believes it’s necessary for the data center industry to continue to grow and considers the state’s climate deadlines unrealistic.

“Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Ybarra said about phasing out fossil fuels on the state’s timeline. “If you want to get rid of natural gas, replace it with something before you change it all out. Because if not, we’ll be stuck.”

Hyperscale data centers, like the ones in Washington’s Grant County, are massive complexes that cover a minimum of 10,000 square feet and store more than 5,000 servers.

Before the 1930s, most of Grant County had no electricity.

Private utilities refused to serve rural areas like Grant County, tucked between the rugged Cascades and the sun-baked foothills of the Palouse. Frustrated locals banded together to create their own public utility amid a national push for rural electrification often called “Power to the People.”

By the 1950s, the public utility used a federal loan and long-term contracts with utilities west of the Cascades to build one, then two, locally owned hydropower dams. Cheap hydro and the expansion of power lines allowed farmers to install electric irrigation pumps and transform the county from an expanse of desert brush and cheatgrass into one of the nation’s leading potato producers.

Cheap electricity — among the lowest rates in the country — also drew the burgeoning internet industry to the area.

Microsoft and Yahoo in 2006 were among the first to break ground in Central Washington. In 2010, Washington lawmakers, hoping to spur economic growth east of the Cascades, began giving data centers a sales tax break on computer equipment, typically replaced every three to five years, and on their installation. For some companies, that amounted to millions of dollars in savings over time.

Washington eventually became home to at least 87 data centers, according to the industry tracking website Baxtel as of July. Washington is among the top 10 largest data center markets by state, according to Baxtel.

In Grant County, data centers grew to consume more power than any other category of ratepayer, including other industrial customers, residents, farm irrigation, local food processors and commercial businesses, according to utility officials. Data centers in 2022 accounted for nearly 40% of total demand, or about as much as 190,000 U.S. households, according to utility and state data.

The increased demand made relying on the county’s traditional source of electricity, the dams, risky, Grant County utility officials said.

So the local utility launched a new arrangement. It signed contracts with big companies that trade in energy, including Shell and Morgan Stanley, agreeing to exchange most of its hydropower for a steady supply of electricity generated by other, “unspecified” sources of energy. Unspecified power comes from the open energy market, where utilities buy available electricity from a mix of fuels. The sources are usually carbon-emitting fuels like natural gas, according to experts.

While the county as a whole grew far more reliant on unspecified power sources, some data centers in Grant County, including Microsoft’s, secured specialized contracts with the county’s utility for guaranteed access to hydroelectricity, enabling them to bank the renewable energy toward their own climate goals.

Right now, Grant County can produce or import enough power to meet its needs. But the county is experiencing an “energy crunch,” according to internal utility documents. By 2025, swapping out hydro for other sources of power will no longer be enough, according to utility officials and documents. The county will be forced to pay out of pocket for contracts with other power suppliers, build its own new sources of generation or consistently buy power on the open market. That’s risky when demand is high and utilities across the West are searching for energy.

Utility officials have been reluctant to blame the dilemma exclusively on the data center industry, which county leaders would like to keep growing in hopes of more jobs and property tax revenue.

But an analysis of electricity data by The Times and ProPublica shows the county’s growth in power demand from 2007 to 2022 roughly equaled the demand now attributable to data centers.

Grant County surveyed residents about the energy crunch last year, hoping to gauge how familiar they were with the county’s need to quickly secure power. The survey produced some shocked responses from ratepayers who said they hadn’t realized how quickly demand was climbing, according to utility documents.

“2025 seems pretty darn soon — that we’d be there that quickly. I knew we were growing and had increased demand for power, I just had no idea it would be that soon,” one customer replied during survey interviews.

It will only get harder by 2030, when Washington’s climate laws require utilities to drastically curtail the amount of fuel coming from unspecified sources.

Ty Ehrman, a senior manager at Grant County Public Utility District, worries it will be impossible to generate enough clean electricity fast enough to meet state mandates.

“You’ve really got to kind of start to wonder if we’re going to end up in a place where we end up with rolling blackouts or unintended outages because we haven’t had the full generation capacity to meet it from the green side,” Ehrman said.

Data centers in neighboring Douglas County, which include cryptomining facilities, used about 39% of the county’s electricity in 2022, according to utility and state data obtained by The Times and ProPublica.

In Seattle, which has several data centers that are much smaller than Grant County’s giant warehouses, the industry used at least 10% of the city’s power in 2022 — enough electricity for roughly 90,000 homes. The amount of power used by data centers grew fivefold since 2016, the earliest year of available data from Seattle City Light, the municipal utility.

The energy predicament that places like Grant County are facing was far from the spotlight one sunny afternoon in May 2019, when Inslee stood in a Seattle park to sign legislation cementing Washington’s top spot among climate-conscious states.

Inslee, who co-authored a book in 2007 calling for bold action against climate change and ran for president on climate issues, declared Washington would lead the nation by eliminating carbon-emitting energy sources.

“We aren’t done,” Inslee said. “Our success this year is just a harbinger of successes to come. But we’re ready. We can do this.”

The Clean Energy Transformation Act calls for Washington’s utilities to become greenhouse gas “neutral” by 2030 and to have 100% renewable or noncarbon-emitting power by 2045.

Washington was poised to struggle with this target because of the nature of renewable energy. Hydropower is a finite resource without building new dams — a hard sell because of the impact on endangered salmon. With current technologies, the availability of solar and wind power depends on weather conditions.

The state has added miles and miles of wind turbines and solar farms to its grid in recent years, making up about 9% of its fuel mix in 2022, and is mandating more energy-efficient buildings in the name of power conservation.

But those efforts compete against growing demand not just from data centers but also from the ongoing transition away from gas-powered vehicles, appliances and industries. Decisions like Grant County’s to exchange dam-generated power for unspecified sources have also reduced the amount of hydro in the state’s energy mix.

The net result: The share of hydropower in Washington’s electricity supply fell from an annual average of two-thirds in the early 2000s to just 55% in the five years leading up to 2022, the latest year with data. The share for all renewables fell from 67% to 61%.

Meanwhile, Washington’s reliance on natural gas and unspecified fuels has increased, accounting for about a quarter of the state’s electricity on average from 2018 through 2022.

The dependence on unspecified fuel became the most pronounced in two Central Washington counties with major data center markets, state data shows. In Grant County, because it sold hydro in exchange for energy from other fuels, more than 80% of electricity came from unspecified sources in 2022.

Douglas County also has experienced rapid growth in data centers, and it had a dramatic drop in its percentage of hydropower.

Microsoft, which built data centers in both counties partly because of hydropower, also understands the limits of this energy source and is “not going to push something until a break,” said Noelle Walsh, who leads the team responsible for the company’s data center operations.

The company has committed to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2030 and recently expanded data center operations in Arizona partly due to constraints on the availability of renewable energy in Washington, Walsh said.

The possibility that data centers would make it harder to phase out fossil fuels rarely came up when lawmakers created and then expanded the tax break that encouraged data center development since 2010.

Reuven Carlyle, a former lawmaker who spearheaded Washington’s clean energy law, said, in hindsight, the cumulative impact has become clear. “The aggregation of demand today — now that is a serious concern,” he said.

The concern finally came onto the Legislature’s radar in 2022, when lawmakers took up the latest proposed expansion of the tax break. They voted to authorize up to $400,000 to study data center power usage in Washington.

“We wanted answers about this industry that we were about to unleash successfully in our state again,” said Rep. April Berg, D-Mill Creek, who sponsored the legislation. She and other lawmakers had heard “anecdotally” about data center power usage but wanted more details, she said. “A study could have come back and said, ‘Here are all the potential issues.’”

Inslee, the leading champion of clean energy goals, stood in the way of doing so in Washington. He vetoed the provision calling for an energy study — one of just 18 full or partial vetoes out of more than 300 bills that crossed his desk that year.

Inslee’s office justified it by saying the Northwest Power and Conservation Council was already doing the work that was needed.

The council does release regional power use forecasts, including for the data center industry based on limited publicly available information and utility trends.

But the provision that Inslee vetoed was intended to provide answers that the council has not, its sponsors said: information specific to Washington’s data center industry and how the state’s tax incentives impact the power grid. The bill also included language designed to ensure the research wasn’t duplicative of the council’s work.

The council’s forecasts for data centers this year were wide-ranging, where lawmakers had hoped for more precise data to inform future policy decisions.

Sen. Matt Boehnke, who co-wrote the study provision, said he was shocked and frustrated by Inslee’s veto of a provision approved with bipartisan support. Lawmakers had been in touch with the governor’s office while writing the bill, he said.

“Why veto it last-minute? Why not work with us to amend it?” said Boehnke, a Richland Republican.

When asked about the impact of data centers on the ability of utilities to meet Washington’s clean energy mandate, Inslee’s office said that the increased use of unspecified power is driven by Grant and Douglas counties. Both have large data center markets.

Inslee’s office said in its statement that Grant County’s choice to swap hydro for energy from unspecified fuel sources was “a business decision” by the utility and that it is still responsible for complying with the state’s green energy law.

Asked to comment on the governor’s office’s position, officials in Grant County said they made choices they felt were necessary to keep the lights on.

While Washington lawmakers didn’t get the study of state power use they authorized, the numbers for the region as a whole are eye-popping.

The power and conservation council predicted this month that by 2029, data centers in the Northwest could grow to use more electricity than the average annual consumption of Puget Sound Energy, the region’s largest utility with more than 1.2 million residential, commercial and industrial customers.

That’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. On the high end, the council estimated that power-guzzling data centers could push the grid past its limits in just five years.

“The power demand from data centers,” said Hardy, the former Bonneville Power Administration official, “combined with other growing demands, and with that transition from fossil fuels to renewables, will inevitably lead to big rate increases.”

In Grant County, the rise of data centers has created a sense of unease for some residents.

In October, rumors about major rate hikes targeting Grant County’s data centers started to spread after utility Commissioner Nelson Cox said he supported doubling their rates. The utility wasn’t considering such a proposal — the comment was meant to “shock and awe” and spark conversation, Cox later said — but data center lobbyists and executives rallied.

“If we are to have any chance of stopping this, WE NEED TO PACK THE COMMISSION ROOM ON TUESDAY 10/24,” read an email from Ryan Beebout, a vice president at Sabey, a Seattle-based company that owns data centers across the state. The email, obtained by The Times and ProPublica through a public records request to the utility, went out to a coalition of Central Washington data centers that included executives at Microsoft and Yahoo. Beebout and Sabey did not respond to requests for comment.

Representatives from data center companies filled the commission chambers for the October meeting and pushed back against rate hikes for industrial customers.

Cox cut in. The timing of this entire discussion wasn’t right, the utility commissioner said, noting that it was the middle of harvest season, when farmers couldn’t take time to show up. He encouraged representatives from agriculture and tech to attend a November meeting.

Come November, the commission chambers of the Grant County Public Utility District were as crowded as longtime employees had ever seen them. Half the room wore dirt-covered work boots and flannel shirts; the other half wore loafers and pressed button-downs.

Grant County needed to raise power rates, commissioners said. How the utility would implement the increases turned into a debate over identity, pitting farmers against tech workers. The leading proposals that were on the table would hit farmers harder than data centers.

Murray Van Dyke, a hay and alfalfa farmer in his 70s, stood up and asked to speak. The need to build costly new infrastructure, a key factor behind talk of rate hikes, was driven by “one area of our town that uses a lot of power,” Van Dyke said, a reference to data centers.

Van Dyke and other farmers shared concerns about being asked to bear the costs. “We’re just trying to be fair,” he later told The Times and ProPublica.

As local utilities like the one in Grant County grapple with the impact data centers are having on the electrical grid, one influential Washington lawmaker is rethinking whether the state should promote the industry’s growth through tax breaks.

Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, the majority floor leader, voted in favor of the data center tax break in 2022. But given the state’s goals for electrification and moving away from carbon, he said he doesn’t find the industry’s economic development promises as compelling as he once did.

“It doesn’t any longer seem like it’s a great idea to put a bunch of super energy-hungry data centers in the middle of the state using a lot of our clean electricity,” Pedersen said.

The Washington Department of Commerce collects from public and private utilities annual data tracking the fuel used to deliver electricity to their customers. The data — available for 2000 through 2022 — breaks down a utility’s fuel mix into categories that include hydropower, natural gas and nuclear energy.

Some electricity falls into the category unspecified, used for power purchased from an open market across the region. The power is untraceable as it is made up of a mix of available fuels. Experts say that most of that fuel is typically natural gas.

Before 2018, Washington officials used an industry formula to break down how much unspecified fuel came from each of the named categories of fuel sources. The state abandoned the effort because the formula wasn’t necessarily an accurate way to attribute fuel sources, said Glenn Blackmon, Washington’s energy policy manager.

Coincidentally, local data from Grant County shows 2018 was also a year when its use of unspecified power jumped after signing additional contracts to sell most of its hydro supply. The numbers indicate that the growth statewide that year was not merely attributable to Washington’s change in accounting methods. Increases in unspecified power use by Chelan and Douglas counties came well after the accounting change.

Because water levels fluctuate from year to year, the amount of hydropower generated in Washington varies. Blackmon said it’s best to compare 2016 and 2022, the recent period when water levels were most stable. The share of hydropower in the state’s electricity mix dropped 10 percentage points. The overall share of renewables also declined.

Without statewide figures on data center power usage, The Times and ProPublica attempted to track trends by collecting data from a handful of public utilities with large data center markets, including Grant County’s. Many utilities do not track data centers, and such data is not available from private utilities.

Seattle City Light, the municipal utility, doesn’t track all data centers but formulated its best estimate of their energy use at our request.

Eli Sanders contributed research while a student with the Technology, Law, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Tan Estrada said on Facebook that he was in a park in the central Cuban city of Camagüey on July 5 when a police officer briefly detained him and warned him that he risked imprisonment if he went to public places on July 11 or published anything to commemorate the demonstrations, the biggest seen in Cuba in decades.

“We are concerned that Cuban authorities’ detention of journalist José Luis Tan Estrada and threats to prevent him reporting on the anniversary of the 2021 protests is a worrying sign that the media may be stopped from covering events on July 11,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “It is vital that journalists across Cuba be allowed to report freely on matters of public importance, including demonstrations against the government.”

Following the 2021 protests over a lack of food and electricity and restrictions on rights, more than 1,400 people were detained and hundreds were prosecuted.

In April 2024, Tan Estrada, a former journalism professor, was arrested in the capital Havana, detained for a week and fined for 4,000 pesos (US$12) for alleged “criminal intent” to disrupt May 1 Worker’s Day celebrations.

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

According to multiple press reports citing a leaked draft of the broadcast bill, electronic and television broadcasts of “exclusive investigative journalism” would be restricted under the proposed changes, which are currently tabled for debate in the House of Representatives.

The bill, which also includes prohibitions on broadcasting LGBTQ content, does not provide details on how the proposed ban on investigative reporting would be implemented, Reuters reported, citing the leaked draft. Lawmakers who sit on Commission 1, the House committee overseeing the bill, have said the revisions are initial and still subject to change, the Reuters report said.

“Indonesian lawmakers should immediately scrap their wrongheaded amendments to the broadcasting law,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Indonesia’s democracy works precisely because journalists can investigate and report freely on their findings. Any changes to the broadcasting law should protect, not imperil, press freedoms.”   

Changes to the 2002 Broadcast Law were first deliberated by legislators in 2020, on the grounds that the law required updating, Reuters reported. If the proposed revisions are passed, they would apply to all content broadcast in the country, including via online streaming platforms, the Reuters report said.

The revised law could be passed as early as September, according to news reports. A discussion of the bill scheduled for Wednesday in the House of Representatives was postponed at the request of the Gerindra Party, a Tempo report said.

Indonesia’s democracy faces new challenges as it transitions from the outgoing President Joko Widodo to president-elect Prabowo Subianto, an ex-soldier linked to rights abuses, including the disappearances of activists in the late 1990s. Prabowo has variously denied and acknowledged the unresolved accusations.

Critics of the proposed amendments quoted in a South China Morning Post report suggested that both Widodo and Prabowo have incentives to curb the media’s ability to investigate their past actions.

Indonesia’s House of Representatives and Executive Office of the President did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

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

On May 3, 2024, three armed soldiers with the DRC military arrived at Katoto’s home, in the Mambasa territory of the DRC’s northeast Ituri province, and told his family that they would kill the journalist for his criticism of insecurity in the territory’s Babila Babombi locality, according to a member of the journalist’s family—who was present at the time, and spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal—as well as a report on the Bunia Actualité news site. Unable to locate Katoto, the soldiers warned his family members that they would take revenge on the journalist for his comments. 

Katoto told CPJ that he had already gone into hiding for fear of reprisals on May 3, the first day the armed men visited his home.

The next day, on May 4, another armed soldier arrived at Katoto’s home and threatened the journalist’s family for not disclosing his whereabouts, according to the family member and a report by the Network of Investigative Journalists in the DRC (REJI-RDC). In the evening of May 12, the family member said another soldier arrived at Katoto’s home and warned that the journalist would be inevitably found and killed.

“The repeated death threats against journalist Parfait Katoto by members of the DRC military are alarming, and those responsible should be investigated and held to account,” said Angela Quintal, Head of CPJ’s Africa Program, from Accra, Ghana. “The DRC’s military should be focused on ensuring the safety of the press, not threatening to kill journalists who broadcast critical voices.”

The privately owned RCAB broadcasts a weekly program called “CDRH speaks to you,” during which local human rights activists discuss local security issues, according to Katoto. During an April 24 broadcast, activists denounced the army and police for allegedly contributing to insecurity in the Babila Babombi locality by harassing the local population. Rebel armed groups also operate in the area.

Katoto told CPJ that he informed the local commander of the Congolese national police, known only as “Bukasa,” and local military colonel Jules Muke of the soldiers’ appearances at his home and their threats, but neither have followed up or offered any assistance.

Katoto told CPJ that he was verbally threatened with death at least four times in March 2024 during run-ins with Muke, who told Katoto that he did not appreciate the comments made by human rights activists on RCAB.

On May 29, 2021, an armed man entered Katoto’s home through an open door and forced him to lie on the ground and empty his pockets. He also threatened to kill him, according to CPJ report.

CPJ’s calls to Muke went unanswered, and Bukasa’s phone was switched off. 

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

After Sunday’s local elections, Turkey’s highest election authority, the Supreme Election Council (YSK), rescinded the victory of a pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) mayoral candidate on Tuesday, in the eastern metropolitan city of Van, on grounds that he was not eligible to run. YSK then certified election results in favor of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which received the second-most votes.

The decision, as well as claims of voter fraud at polling stations in the mostly Kurdish-populated regions of eastern and southeastern Turkey, led to days of social unrest in multiple cities with Van being the foremost epicenter. Another major site of protests and clashes occurred in the southeastern city of Hakkari, where the results of 60 ballots were contested by AKP and six contested by DEM.

Police intervened in the protests with arrests, tear gas,  rubber bullets and water cannons, targeting several field reporters, some of whom were taken into custody. Multiple journalists also reported receiving threats and insults online and offline. 

“Field reporters are among the most vulnerable journalists in Turkey. Security forces, and even civilians, exploit the country’s institutionalized impunity to pressure journalists into not doing their jobs. Their hostility extends to not taking threats against journalists – whether online or face to face — seriously,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should, protect all journalists who believe their security is compromised, remove the issued foreign travel bans, investigate the claims of excessive force, and end the constant violent actions against field reporters.”

All of the field reporters in Van who spoke to CPJ said they were tear-gassed on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Protests ended and turned into celebrations by Wednesday evening in Van after the DEM candidate’s win was recognized by authorities. 

CPJ documented these actions against journalists in post-election unrest:

• Police in the Esenyurt District of Istanbul took four journalists into custody Wednesday while they were following a protest march in solidarity with the DEM Party’s troubles in Van: Ferhat Sezgin with the pro-Kurdish news outlet Mezopotamya Agency, Sema Korkmaz with the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Yeni Yaşam, Müzeyyen Yüce with the critical news website Artı Gerçek, and Dilan Şimşek from the pro-Alevi PİRHA news agency. Police beat the journalists and broke Sezgin’s nose, and smashed his camera, according to reports. The journalists were brought to an Istanbul courthouse for processing on Friday, according to reports. Prosecutors transferred Sezgin and Korkmaz to a court on duty, asking for their arrests pending investigation while Yüce and Şimşek were released. All four were later released, Sezgin and Korkmaz, under a foreign travel ban.
• Freelance journalist Medine Mamedoğlu, from the southeastern Province of Hakkari, posted on X that she received death threats in connection with her reporting on the protests in Van. Separately, Mamedoğlu was briefly taken into police custody in Hakkari on Wednesday while she was following a protest march. CPJ spoke to the journalist by phone Thursday, and she said her lawyer will file criminal complaints regarding the death threats alongside complaints against the police officers who took her into custody in Hakkari. Mamedoğlu told CPJ that the officers tried to take her two cameras and beat her when she resisted. “They punched me in the mouth, hit me in the back, pulled my hair and throttled me,” she said. One of her two cameras was broken and another suffered a damaged lens, according to the journalist. 
• Freelance journalist Oktay Candemir said in a post on Wednesday that police officers in Van forcibly deleted images on his phone, threatened to get him off the street and insulted him. Candemir told CPJ via messaging app on Wednesday that the officers also punched him in the face. The journalist said he will file a criminal complaint about the incident. 
• Freelance journalist Ruşen Takva was subjected to water cannons from a police tank as he was livestreaming from the streets of Van on Tuesday. The journalist also said, in a post on X on Tuesday, that he was receiving threats and insults on social media over his reporting. Takva talked to CPJ via messaging app on Wednesday and said he will file complaints about the insults and the threats via his lawyer.
• Kadir Cesur, Van reporter for critical news site Gazete Duvar, told CPJ via messaging app on Thursday that he was deliberately shot at with rubber bullets by the police on two separate occasions on Tuesday and Wednesday. “Police were shooting at the protesters with rubber bullets. We were separate from them as a group of journalists. One of the officers suddenly turned and opened fire on us,” said Cesur about the Tuesday incident, when he was shot in his left kneecap. Police also fired at journalists in another location in Van on Wednesday and hit Cesur once more on the left leg. He told CPJ that he hasn’t filed a complaint, and he doesn’t intend to.
• Umut Taştan, a reporter for the critical outlet KRT, reported being hit by the police with rubber bullets in Van on Wednesday. CPJ couldn’t reach Taştan for comment.
• Rabia Önver, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish news website JİNNEWS in Hakkari, was hit by a rubber bullet in the foot as she followed police taking protesters in custody on Wednesday. Önver spoke to CPJ via messaging app and said she was not hurt and won’t be filling a complaint. 
• Muhammed Şakir, a camera operator for the Iraq-based Kurdish outlet Rudaw, was hit on the leg with a gas bomb canister as he reported on the events in Van on Wednesday, his employer shared in a post on X. CPJ couldn’t reach Şakir for comment.
• Ece Üner, a presenter for the critical outlet Sözcü TV, on Wednesday said she received a death threat on X for commenting on the situation in Van. CPJ couldn’t reach Üner for comment.
• Ne Haber Ajansı, a local outlet from the southeastern city of Siirt, reported on Tuesday that their reporters were injured by police and hospitalized while covering protests in their city. CPJ spoke to reporter Yusuf Eren via messaging app on Thursday. Eren was hit in the foot by a tear gas canister, and Bünyamin Aybek, another reporter for the outlet, needed medical help after being exposed to tear gas, he said. 

Meanwhile, multiple news outlets reporting on claims of voting fraud on Sunday were blocked from publishing those stories online in Turkey by court order, local anti-censorship group Free Web Turkey reported.

CPJ emailed the Turkish Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, and the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office for comment but did not immediately receive any replies.

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

On March 12, armed men dressed in red and white shirts with Clarkhills Properties Corporation verbally barred Manabat and Quejada from entering an area under land dispute in Anunas village, Angeles City, in the northwest Pampanga province, according to multiple news reports.

The men later grabbed Manabat and Quejada’s belongings and threatened to shoot the journalists when they saw them filming a dispute between local residents and Clarkhills’ armed demolition team, according to reports.

Several demolitions have occurred in the disputed 73-hectare area, sparking violent encounters, Rappler reported. Manabat left the site and took refuge in a nearby house after the men made the shooting threat, according to a Rappler report.

Quejada was accosted, questioned, and held at gunpoint by the men before also taking refuge in a nearby home, according to news reports and a statement on the incident released by Angeles City Mayor Carmelo Lazatin Jr. Additionally, she was temporarily reported missing, reports said.

“Filipino authorities should leave no stone unturned in identifying and prosecuting those responsible for the harassment and shooting threat made against reporters Joann Manabat and Rowena Quejada,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s Senior Southeast Asia Representative. “This type of unchecked thuggery is precisely what makes the Philippines such a perilous place to be a reporter. It should stop under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s democratic rule.”

Several people suffered gunshot wounds in Tuesday’s melee and were taken to the local Rafael Lazatin Memorial Medical Center for treatment, news reports said. Both reporters safely left the area after the violence subsided, the reports said.

The Angeles City Police Department and Clarkhills Properties did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

The local Commission on Human Rights indicated it would conduct a probe into the threats against Manabat and Quejada, news reports said.

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

Nearly 170 of 330 townships are at risk of landmines — a figure that has increased by 68 townships since 2020, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, whose  monitoring wing tracks progress in eliminating landmines, cluster munitions and other explosive remnants of war.

The group issued the Burmese version of its latest 34-page Landmine & Cluster Munition Monitor report on Dec. 28. It did not include the total number of landmine incidents or victims for 2023, but recounted individual incidents covered in media reports.

In 2022, there were 384 deaths and 124 injuries caused by landmines in Myanmar, according to the monitoring group.  

Myanmar is not a member of the Ottawa Convention, also referred to as the Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines. Neither is the United States, China, Russia, India or Pakistan.

Both the ruling junta’s armed forces and non-state armed groups have produced and used antipersonnel mines, including improvised blast and fragmentation mines that are victim-activated, said the report’s 28-page English-language version.  

“Myanmar’s Armed Forces have repeatedly used antipersonnel mines since seizing power in a coup in February 2021,” the report said. “This use represents a significant increase in use in previous years, including use around infrastructure such as mobile phone towers, extractive enterprises, and energy pipelines.”

From 2018 to 2021, the Myanmar military was the only armed forces in the world to use anti-personnel landmines, though Russia joined the list in 2022, said Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, a researcher for the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, said at a press conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on Dec. 28.

“Myanmar is the only country in the world that uses deadly landmines from its military,” he said.  

Among the mines seized by resistance armed groups were various types produced by the state-owned weapons production facility known as KaPaSa, or Defense Products Industries of Myanmar, the report said.

Some individual cases

The report cited numerous instances where landmine explosions killed or maimed civilian adults and children in 2023.

At the beginning of March, a man was seriously injured after stepping on a landmine in the May mountains, where a Myanmar Army contingent is stationed near Cedipyin village in Rathedaung township of Rakhine state. 

On Dec. 26, Lwang Kham, 12, was injured when a landmine exploded near Ma Ding village in Waingmaw township in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, near where the junta’s 58th Light Infantry Battalion is stationed, a resident who did not want to be named for security reasons, told RFA.

“In the afternoon, while he was looking after the cattle, the cattle stepped on a landmine and [the explosion] hit him near Ka War Hka creek,” the villager said, adding that many pieces of shrapnel hit his legs and his left eye.

The injured boy was taken to Myitkyina Hospital for surgery and medical treatment, he said.

In western Myanmar’s Chin state, residents are afraid to go to their hillside farms for fear of setting off an explosion, said Salai Vang Sweesan, assistant director of the Institute of Chin Affairs.

“In Chin, every village depends on the hillside farms to make a living. Since landmines are being planted along the roads [to the hillside farms], even if people want to go to the farms, it’s risky.”

Shan state

Northern Shan state, where fighting between junta troops and an alliance of ethnic armies is intense, has seen an increase in civilian casualties from landmines.

At least five civilians were injured and lost their limbs due to mine explosions in the towns of Kutkai, Lashio and Kyaukme towns amid fighting in December 2023 between junta forces and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, or TNLA, local residents said.

On Dec. 6, a man from Nam Kyan village in Lashio township lost one of his legs and his other limbs were damaged when he stepped on a mine while looking for honey in the forest, residents said.

Two days later, a 63-year-old man from Nam Hu Twang village in Kyaukme township lost one of his legs when he stepped on a mine while cutting bamboo, according to people living in the community.

Residents used to gather firewood in the forest or work in cornfields before the fighting escalated, but now they have stopped and it has affected their abilities to provide for themselves, she said. Now they often hear blasts when dogs and cattle step on the mines.

“Villagers know that the mines are there,” she said. “That’s why we don’t go to the forest at all.” 

RFA could not reach junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the landmines.

Last August, the Cluster Munition Coalition condemned the new use of cluster munitions by the junta’s armed forces and demanded an immediate end to the use of this prohibited weapon.

At the time, a report by the organization’s monitoring wing indicated that junta forces had used what appeared to be domestically produced cluster bombs in attacks in several parts of the country since 2021.

“Myanmar’s production and use of cluster bombs is gravely concerning as these indiscriminate weapons primarily kill and injure civilians, Moser-Puangsuwan said in a statement. “There can be no justification for using them. All governments should condemn this use of an internationally-banned weapon.”

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

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

More school uniforms are necessary because authorities are pushing development of STEM education nationwide, and new schools to train new teachers are opening in each province. Students attending the new schools must wear uniforms that match their peers, and there simply are not enough to go around.

One such factory was completed in October in the northeastern port city of Chongjin.

“It is true that  the construction of a school uniform factory is a measure for students, but some residents are anxious,” a resident of Chongjin’s surrounding North Hamgyong province told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

“There are many people in Chongjin who make money by making various clothes using Chinese fabric,” she said. "They hire several women to process clothes. It’s like running a small factory.”

North Korea had state-run clothing factories that produce school uniforms in the past, but following the 1994-1998 famine and economic collapse, many of these factories lacked the raw materials and labor necessary to make the uniforms. 

Since that era, rapid inflation meant that most families could not survive on the salary provided by government-assigned jobs, so many North Korean families had to start businesses trading goods and services in the local marketplace. These days, most families make their livelihood this way.

With school uniforms no longer being pumped out in factories, entrepreneurial residents took it upon themselves to fill the void in the market.

But now the government’s new factories threaten to kill their market share.

Anxious outlook

It isn’t only the small business owners that are worried about the new factories. Their workers are also afraid.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, imported fabrics and zippers from China were hard to come by, and the uniform makers had to temporarily shut down their operations.

“Women who used to work steadily [making uniforms] have been unable to make money because their work has stopped for the past three years when the border was blocked,” the resident said. “They are afraid of the completion of the school uniform factory.” 

The new factories will make more than only uniforms. So people making other kinds of cloth goods are also worried, the resident said.

“Last year, the Chongjin Bag Factory was also opened,” she said. “Many people will lose their livelihood due to the school uniform factory and the bag factory.”

In addition to the Chongjin uniform factory, another school uniform factory was recently completed in the city of Rason, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) away.

“They were built by the province itself without central support,” a resident there told RFA. “Clothes processing equipment, such as cutting machines, sewing machines, and ironing machines, were brought in from China by the provincial trade bureau.”

He said that the province rushed to open these factories and they are not yet completely finished. 

“This is because the completion is delayed compared to other provinces,” he said. “Everything is a regional competition.”

Clothing produced by the state-run factories is generally lower quality, so residents may still want to buy their uniforms from the private makers, the he said.

In April, at the start of the school year, students were given factory-made uniforms said to be gifts from the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, the second resident said.

“[They] looked good, but the quality was pathetic,” he said. "Although there are school uniforms given by the government, there are many parents whose children are begging them to buy the nicer school uniforms sold at the market,” the source pointed out.

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahn Chang Gyu for RFA Korean.

On Saturday, she’s seated on a couch in the middle of a bustling corridor listening intently to KM Reyes, a community organizer and conservation lobbyist based in the Philippines. With a notepad balanced on her lap, Mallory wants to hear what the U.S. can do to help grassroots advocates like Reyes. “I’m big on details,” she tells her.

“It’s ensuring that we get actual finance on the ground,” Reyes responds. “Because we’re nowhere near the target $20 billion by 2025 in order to fulfill the framework,” she adds, referring to a global biodiversity agreement signed last year.

Finance is an overarching concern at COP28, as the conference is abbreviated, and its predecessor gatherings. Global climate and environment agreements recognize that the planet is careening toward disaster largely as a result of carbon pollution by countries that industrialized relatively early in their histories — like the United States — as opposed to those whose economies began developing more recently, like the Philippines.

As a result, developed countries’ commitments to provide financial support to developing countries are at the crux of climate agreements. As the world’s largest historical polluter, the U.S. is expected to provide its fair share to support climate efforts, but it has failed to deliver in recent years. For instance, only $2 billion of the $3 billion that the U.S. pledged to a climate fund in 2014 has been delivered. Nevertheless, a few days prior to Mallory’s arrival in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged another $3 billion to the same fund.

But looming over these promises are questions about a divided Congress’ ability to execute U.S. funding commitments, as well as the very real possibility that former president Donald Trump will defeat Biden in an election next year, throwing U.S. climate policy into disarray. After all, one of Trump’s signature policies was withdrawing the U.S. from the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming.

That tension was evident during COP28. On the very first day, negotiators made the unprecedented decision to adopt a so-called loss-and-damage fund to provide funding to developing countries facing the disastrous effects of warming that has already taken place. While the United Arab Emirates and Germany pledged $100 million each, the U.S. was roundly criticized for committing only $17.5 million, an amount climate justice advocates described as “paltry” and “shameful.” 

Without mentioning U.S. responsibility explicitly, Reyes emphasized the need for developing countries to receive funding. Just $50,000 could go a long way to protecting 100,000 acres of carbon-dense forests in the Philippines, she told Mallory. “It’s a drop in the bucket for global commitments, but it’s going to be completely transformational,” she said. 

Mallory nodded along, scribbling notes. Later on, Mallory told me that “everyone appreciates that none of this is going to happen unless we figure out mechanisms to finance.”  

Mallory is one of several high-ranking U.S. officials attending COP28 to tout the Biden administration’s accomplishments, and she’s in Dubai for three days “lifting up the work we’re doing that is supporting the president’s agenda on climate change,” she said. Grist spent half a day with Mallory as she led panels on the administration’s climate initiatives, spoke to the press, and recorded a video with a young ocean-justice activist.

Mallory promoted two major U.S. initiatives on Saturday. That morning, she announced that the U.S. would join an international partnership promoting nature-based climate solutions, like tree planting and mangrove protection. (Healthy ecosystems can remove carbon from the atmosphere, and they can also function as natural infrastructure that protects landscapes from climate-driven impacts like flooding.) Later, she moderated an event about a Biden administration conservation initiative called America the Beautiful, through which the president outlined ways to conserve 30 percent of the country’s land and water by 2030. (The commitment is in line with the so-called 30 by 30 goal codified in an international pact signed by many other countries, but the U.S. Congress has never ratified that convention.)

But while Mallory was touting the president’s initiatives, a group of Republican lawmakers were meeting with world leaders and emphasizing their country’s position as one of the world’s top fossil fuel producers. Earlier in the week, Republicans fired off statements condemning Vice President Harris’ commitment to provide $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, the largest international fund to support climate projects in developing countries. 

“I am appalled that the Biden administration will pledge billions more of taxpayer dollars, money that Congress has not even provided, to yet another bloated, mismanaged, and ineffective slush fund that will do nothing to change the temperature of the planet,” said Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida and chair of an appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations, which has jurisdiction over international climate spending.

Meanwhile, at the media center, reporters found postcards with the acronym IRA, a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark 2022 U.S. law that is expected to cut the country’s carbon emissions by roughly 45 percent, putting Paris Agreement targets within reach. The postcard rebranded the IRA as “Irresponsible Reckless Alarming” and included a QR code that linked to a report by Republican lawmakers titled “IRA Will Make the United States Poorer and China Richer.”

“It’s so hard when you’re depending on Congress actually coming around to support exactly what you’re doing,” Mallory said. “What I personally hope is that when people see the efforts to deliver on the commitments that we’re making on dollars combined with the other acts we’re also doing, that you look at those as a package.”

Coons chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations. His comments refer to $1.5 billion in climate finance that Congress appropriated last year, which led to the U.S. contributing an additional $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund earlier this year. The contribution came after years of U.S. disengagement from the Paris Agreement and international climate finance during the Trump administration, and it underscored the domestic challenges U.S. administrations face in fulfilling climate commitments. 

Such complexities are little comfort to those in developing countries.

“I just don’t care,” said Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy with the international environmental group Climate Action Network. “For decades, the United States has masked its lack of genuine political commitment behind the veil of complex domestic politics.”

The U.S. government should have worked to inform its citizens of the country’s historical responsibility in causing and exacerbating the climate crisis, he said: “This negligence towards its international duties exacerbates the plight of vulnerable communities and developing countries, who bear the brunt of a crisis they did little to create.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At COP28, Trump and GOP threaten Biden’s climate promises on Dec 12, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

In December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, presented with great fanfare the so-called “Green Deal.” The package consisted of new laws and directives, goals, and multi-billion-euro funding opportunities designed to transform the continent into a sustainability powerhouse and a model for the rest of the world. The initiative aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels, and to net zero by 2050. Additional goals were added, like making farming more sustainable, rewilding large swaths of Europe’s natural areas, and halving pesticide use in agriculture, among others.

But four years later, progress on green policies in Europe is stalling or, worse, going backward. Instead of moving ahead with bold actions to fight climate change and biodiversity loss, many efforts are currently under attack, have been watered down, or are even being reversed in individual member states and at the EU level. Rattled by Russia’s war against Ukraine and global instability, EU countries are scrambling to secure alternative sources for fossil fuels instead of accelerating renewable energy use, and they are wary of imposing new emissions-reduction rules on the auto industry. Faced with a string of electoral victories of right-wing populist parties in Italy, Finland, Sweden, and Hungary — often with strong support from farming communities — issues like protecting biodiversity have moved from a hard-won central position to the fringe. Europe’s role as a green frontrunner has been fundamentally called into question as it faces strong political forces in many capitals.

Germany, the EU’s most populous state and its largest economy, exemplifies the recent shift. When Steffi Lemke, the German cabinet minister in charge of the environment, spoke at the country’s most prestigious environmental awards ceremony in late October, she laid out the issue bluntly. “As ecologists and environmentalists, we underestimated how great the resistance would be when we started to bring the goals of the Paris climate agreement and the Montreal biodiversity agreement to life,” the Green Party member said. “But now we face the wall of those who want to prevent this and who don’t want to move forward.”

Only a few days later, Christian Lindner, the leader of the neoliberal Free Democratic Party, which shares power with the left-leaning Greens and the center-left Social Democratic Party in Germany’s coalition government, proved Lemke’s point. Citing energy insecurity due to the Ukraine war, Lindner, who is also Germany’s finance minister, withdrew his party’s support for a crucial agreement between the governing parties to phase out the nation’s coal-burning power plants by 2030. “Until it is clear that energy is available and affordable, we should end dreams of phasing out coal-fired power” by that year, he said. The goal of the phaseout was to create additional pressure for utilities to expand wind and solar farms as fast a possible. Without the 2030 deadline, that pressure is much reduced.

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Earlier in the year, the Free Democrats weakened the Greens’ most important piece of legislation, which aimed to replace heating systems that run on oil and gas with heat pumps and renewable energy sources. In addition, the Free Democrats, who are responsible for the government’s transport policy, have blocked all attempts to reduce car traffic or impose a national speed limit on autobahns. The country’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, from the Social Democratic Party, has largely given the Free Democrats a free hand in their anti-environment course.

Scholz fears that ever-stricter rules on heating and car use will further increase support for hard-right parties, who promise to abandon environment targets altogether. Populist sentiments have run high in Germany since the summer, when the influential Bild tabloid — which is co-owned by KKR, one of the largest investment firms serving the U.S. fossil fuel industry — launched a months-long campaign against an alleged “Heiz-Hammer,” or heating hammer, that was seen as forcing sudden changes upon ordinary people. Neoliberals and conservatives “have made the Greens public enemy No. 1,” Sudha David-Wilp, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund, a research institute, told the New York Times. Conservative state governors, who only a few years ago hugged trees in election campaigns and promised to save dwindling insect populations, are now ridiculing or fiercely attacking environment policies, warning of a looming “Verbotstaat,” a term for government overreach.

Brigitte Knopf, deputy chair of the scientific body in charge of monitoring Germany’s progress toward its climate goals, is deeply concerned. The nation has committed to shrinking its CO2 emissions to 65 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Yet the decrease is not fully supported by concrete measures. In order to comply with its year-to-year goals, Germany would need to prevent cumulative emissions of about 1 billion tons of CO2 until 2030. But “even after the government passed its most important CO₂ reduction package this summer, there is [an emissions] gap of 200 million tons” — a 20 percent shortfall — mainly in the areas of heating and transport, she warned.

Knopf, a physicist who also serves as secretary general of the Berlin-based think tank Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, is worried that the German government will set a bad example in the EU and neglect its obligations under the Paris climate accord. “We urgently need a signal to Europe that Germany will take further steps,” she said. “But right now, the climate gap is simply accepted.”

Since the EU’s Green Deal was launched in 2019, some progress has been made across the 27 nations. Greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 31 percent compared to 1990, according to new data from the European Environment Agency. The EU has created a powerful emissions trading system that puts a price on CO₂ and reduces available allowances year by year. By 2028, this system is planned to include 75 percent of all energy-related emissions.

But there’s still a long way to go. CO₂ emissions have to decrease sharply, mainly in areas like heavy manufacturing and steelmaking, which are difficult to decarbonize, and emissions from vehicles with combustion engines, which means cutting into people’s routines. At 23 percent, the share of renewable energy is far below the 2030 target of 42.5 percent.

Meanwhile, biodiversity in Europe continues to dwindle. Populations of formerly common birds inhabiting farmland have shrunk by more than one-third since 1990. Protected areas of land and sea cover far less than the 30 percent target, and a new study has just revealed that nearly one-fifth of all European plant and animal species are threatened by regional extinction, a much higher share than recent Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services assumptions. Last week, a tentative agreement was reached in Brussels on what’s been called the “world’s first nature restoration law,” which aims to put in place measures to restore 20 percent of the EU’s terrestrial and marine ecosystems to good condition by 2030, and to restore all degraded ecosystems by 2050. But it came with so many caveats and concessions that environmental organizations were not in a mood to celebrate.

In many smaller EU countries, environmental progress has spawned a full-blown backlash. In Slovakia, the newly elected populist prime minister, Robert Fico, wanted to appoint an infamous climate-change denialist and anti-environment provocateur as environment minister, mimicking Hungary. Slovakia’s president, who is not part of the government, took the unusual step of rejecting the candidate for failing to support the scientific consensus on climate change. Fico, whose government includes left- and right-wing populist parties, then brought in a substitute who presents as more moderate but has a history of weakening laws to protect Slovakia’s nature, according to environmentalists who cite his opposition to stricter protection for the country’s national parks.

After right-wing populists led by Giorgia Meloni came to power in Italy in fall 2022, they swiftly retracted environmental commitments made by the previous government. “No one in this government really cares about climate change,” says Giuliana Biagioli, an economic and environmental historian who is president of Leonardo-IRTA, a sustainability research institute associated with the University of Pisa. Funds originally destined for the transition to a greener economy have been redirected “to make Italy a gas hub” in response to supply problems from Russia, Biagioli says. In her assessment, “the urgent need to find other ways to energy provisioning has pushed commitments to decarbonization into the background.” She thinks it will be almost impossible for Italy to help the EU reach its emissions goals.

Similar developments are underway in the continent’s far North. Scandinavia’s reputation as a champion of green progress took a big hit after coalitions that include right-wing populist parties were recently elected. The new government in Stockholm cut funding for climate measures and reduced taxes on petrol in one of its first acts. Mattias Goldmann from Sweden’s 2030-secretariat, a watchdog NGO, called the cuts a “gasoline-soaked budget fuse.”

In Finland, the newly elected right-wing government cut taxes meant to further reduce CO₂ emissions, stopped projects that would have improved the capacity of Finland’s extensive bogs to sequester carbon, and has failed to take steps to protect old-growth forests from logging for energy production, says Liisa Rohweder, CEO of WWF Finland.

The backlash in many EU countries mirrors developments in the U.K., where the conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reversing climate-friendly policies and planning to “max out” oil production.

Frans Timmermans, who acted as vice president of the EU commission until August and is considered the architect of the bloc’s Green Deal, now sounds the alarm that Europe could fall behind on its goals. Timmermans left his Brussels post to run for prime minister of the Netherlands in elections scheduled for November 22. He is now pursuing a “Dutch Green Deal” to save his legacy, at least in his home country. “The rest of the world doesn’t stand still” in the green economic transition, he warned at a recent campaign event, citing the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act, which focuses on green technologies and infrastructure, and China’s “renewable energy revolution.”

Environmentalists also worry about Poland, even though the right-wing populist, anti-environment coalition recently lost its majority. Green campaigners fear that the new coalition, which has yet to form, will not live up to its pledges to increase renewable energy and protect old-growth forests in the Carpathian Mountains. Says Marek Józefiak, of Greenpeace Poland, “What worries us is that for now, environmental issues are not listed among their priorities.”

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Nor do they seem to be priorities in Brussels anymore. EU commission president von der Leyen finds herself in a balancing act between implementing the Green Deal and rallying support from her conservative European People’s Party (EPP) for a second term starting in 2024. While von der Leyen has stayed personally committed to climate and biodiversity action, the EPP has recently become increasingly fierce in its resistance to new environmental measures. It has even employed disinformation strategies, claiming in social media posts that rewilding wetlands will lead to the abandonment of whole villages.

Emboldened by electoral victories in member states, the EPP successfully weakened the “Nature Restoration Law” in negotiations, softened goals on wetlands restoration, and limited the law’s scope. When key players carved out a final agreement earlier this month, upon which the European Parliament will vote in February, they gave up on obliging member states to reach ambitious nature restoration goals by certain dates, settling instead on prescribing lofty “efforts.”

“It is clearly noticeable that countries are vacating positions that they helped to decide on just two years ago,” says Jutta Paulus, a member of parliament from the Green Party who has been involved in several high-level negotiations. “In some areas we still see progress, but in many others, we are regressing.”

Back in 2019, Greens performed very well in European elections, which raised the profile of environmental topics. Paulus now shares the fears of many NGOs and scientists across Europe that climate and biodiversity policies are increasingly being pushed to the sidelines: “Many parties are currently afraid to talk about the environment at all, because the argument immediately comes up that we have completely different crises now, as in Ukraine and the Middle East, and we have to stop with the [so-called] ‘flowery stuff.’”

But Greenpeace Poland’s Marek Józefiak pushes back on this view of environmentalists’ concerns: “We want what our lives depend on” — a healthy planet — “to be taken seriously and urgently.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Shifting political winds threaten progress on Europe’s green goals on Dec 10, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Christian Schwägerl, Yale E360.

• "[T]ens of thousands" of baseless searches "related to civil unrest" in a one-year period
  • including 141 racial justice protestors and thousands of January 6 suspects.
• Searches for individuals an NSA analyst had met on an online dating site, and a prospective tenant."
• Searches for a state court judge who reported civil rights violations to the FBI.
• Searches for places of worship that were intentionally hidden from oversight.
• Searches for a member of HPSCI and a US Senator.
• A "batch" search for 19,000 Congressional donors.
• "Batch" searches that included current and former federal government officials, journalists, and political commentators.
• Searches for people who came to the FBI to perform repairs.
• Searches for victims who came to the FBI to report crimes.
• Searches for business, religious, and community leaders who applied to participate in the FBI's "Citizens Academy."
• Searches for college students participating in a "Collegiate Academy."
• Searches for family members and colleagues.
• Searches for police officer candidates.
• Searches for an individual employed by a defense attorney.
• Searches for a wrongly accused American academic.
• Searches based on a witness's report that two men "of Middle Eastern descent" were loading cleaning supplies into a truck.
• Searches for a local political party.
• "Batch" searches for 1600 Americans "who had flown through an airport during a particular date range and were either traveling to or returning from a foreign country"
• 2,000 searches for "the names and dates of birth of individuals who were registered competitors in an athletic event."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Conflict of interest has been a concern for this year’s COP since Sultan Al-Jaber, president of United Arab Emirates' national oil company, was announced as the presidency. Days before delegates arrived in Dubai, leaked documents revealed that the UAE planned to use its role as host to secure deals and gas deals. In recent days, a recording surfaced of the COP Presidency claiming that there is “no science” behind phasing out fossil fuels and that the “role of fossil fuels” must be included in the COP28 decision. In addition to lobbyists, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods himself has been on the ground in Dubai attending negotiations for the first time. Woods is pushing for leaders to focus on emissions, not fossil fuels.

Among the flurry of announcements in the early days of COP28, is the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter. Led by the president of this year’s talks, the charter is a voluntary climate action initiative by oil and gas corporations. The charter largely restates existing emissions reduction pledges already made by investor-owned fossil fuel corporations while bringing national oil companies under its umbrella.

The science is clear that a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels is urgently needed in order to curb climate change and other harmful health impacts of fossil fuels. Scientists across a range of disciplines agree, as evidenced by a letter sent by 650 scientists to President Biden ahead of COP28. Among other asks, the letter urges him to agree to a fast and fair phaseout of all fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) and to protect international climate negotiations from fossil fuel industry interference, disinformation, and greenwashing.

Below is a statement by Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“It’s extremely alarming to witness the pervasive influence of fossil fuel industry interests at COP28. Fossil fuel lobbyists and leaders are actively deploying deceptive tactics to mislead the public and policymakers, sow doubt about climate science, and obstruct critical climate action. Their agenda is crystal clear: safeguarding their profits at the expense of a livable future for all of us. The urgency of phasing out fossil fuels demands a unified, unwavering commitment from global leaders, unencumbered by the fossil fuel industry’s self-serving agenda.

“The COP28 Presidency-led Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter is a lot of fanfare around the restatement of woefully insufficient emissions reductions pledges already made by many of the signatory corporations. Less than a week into negotiations, we have serious concerns about fossil fuel industry influence—both public deception and behind-the- scenes manipulation—and the risk it poses to securing the scientifically-necessary agreement for a fast, fair, and funded phase out of fossil fuels at COP28. We need world leaders to step up and make commitments that align with the urgency and scale of the crisis and prioritize dramatic emission cuts, not recycled voluntary corporate promises.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Last November, radioactive tritium from the 52-year-old General Electric reactor was found in an on-site groundwater “monitoring” well. Xcel, formerly Northern States Power, waited until mid-March to report the month-long 400,000-gallon leak, but inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) winked at the four-month delay, saying reporting wasn’t required by law. Xcel publicly claimed to have plugged the leak.

The concentration of tritium was “about 5 million picocuries per-liter” in the groundwater, according to Xcel.   This is 250 times the amount of tritium contamination legally permitted in drinking water (20,000 picocuries per liter). After saying the leak was fixed, Xcel reported that another several hundred gallons of tritium-tainted water had spilled from an overflow tank used to collect some of the initially poisoned groundwater.

The Monticello reactor is a GE Mark I design identical to the three Fukushima units that melted down and partially exploded in Japan in 2011. There are 23 other reactors just like them still operating in the United States. Monticello’s reactor’s old and mostly uninspected pipes are worn out and corroded — a chronic, nationwide problem across the country which is reason enough to retire the whole fleet. The Minneapolis StarTribune reported June 17, 2023 that, “Tritium leaks unfortunately have been relatively common in the nuclear industry, and the Monticello spill was among the nation’s 10 largest.”

“Radioactive tritium leaks found at 48 U.S. nuke sites,” blared the headline in an lengthy Associated Press investigative series (“Aging Nukes” by Jeff Donn), originally published in June 2011.  “You got pipes that have been buried underground for 30 or 40 years, and they’ve never been inspected, and the NRC is looking the other way,” engineer Paul Blanch told the AP. Blanch, who had worked for the industry and later became a whistleblower, added, “They could have corrosion all over the place.”

NRC public affairs officer Prema Chandrathil replied August 10 to some questions I posed, writing, “The now-stopped leak was from a pipe that ran between two buildings on site where the water had already been processed, filtered, and demineralized.” Asked if there were other radioactive materials in the wastewater, Chandrathil wrote, “When the leak was going on there were low levels of xenon and iodine detected near the leak. They decay away and become non-radioactive quickly due to their short half-life. Therefore, tritium is the only type of radioactive material currently present in the groundwater.”

The reply raised more questions than it answered. Iodine-125 has a 60-day half-life, and, because it takes ten half-lives to “decay away,” its gamma radiation spews for 600 days. Iodine-129 has a half-life of 16 million years. If the NRC official meant Iodine-131 — Chandrathil didn’t specify — that isotope decays for 80 days. Nor does Xenon-137 just “decay away” as the NRC public affairs officer said. It decays to Cesium-137 which takes 300 years to “decay away.” Again Chandrathil didn’t report which isotope of Xenon was leaking, Xe-133, Xe-137, or some other.

The Minn. Department of Health web site report on the radioactive leaks says: “A conservative assumption in radiation protection is that any radiation exposure could result in an increase in cancer occurrences in the population, with the risk increasing as exposure increases.” However Xcel has said there is “no” health risk to the public as the affected groundwater contains “very low levels” of tritium.

This reassurance is untrue. Even “very low levels” of radiation exposure create a risk as the state health department noted. Radiobiologists all agree that no one can speak of a “safe” radiation dose level. Every federal agency that regulates industrial releases and medical uses of ionizing radiation warns that exposure to radiation, no matter how small, increases one’s risk of cancer and other illnesses. For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says, “There is no firm basis for setting a ‘safe’ level of exposure above background ….”[1] “Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (or can increase the risk of cancer). ….no radiation exposure is completely risk free.[2]  “[T]here is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk. … Radiation is a carcinogen.[3]

Tritium emits beta radiation in the form of fast-moving particles. The U.S. EPA and other authorities say beta particles are “more penetrating than alpha particles,” and “are capable of penetrating the skin and causing radiation damage.” In her book No Immediate Danger, Dr. Rosalie Bertell says that if beta particles are inhaled or ingested they can inflict biological damage more severe than an external exposure, because the beta particles can penetrate cell membranes.

Xcel attempts to protect Mississippi

In a practical admission that it has lost control of the plume of radioactive groundwater moving toward the Mississippi, Xcel announced August 17, 2023 that it would build an “underground metal barrier” between the leaking facility and the great river. Xcel said the steel wall — 40-feet deep and 600 feet long — would take four to eight weeks to install “along the edge of the plant’s boundary with the river,” and that it is intended to keep contaminated groundwater from reaching the Mississippi River. Yet it is axiomatic that water moving underground can be deeper than 40 feet.

One grim irony of Xcel’s “groundwater wall” is that at Japan’s Fukushima — where three identical GE reactors were destroyed by damage from the shattering 3/11/11 earthquake and follow-on simultaneous meltdowns — the owners also tried to stem the flow of groundwater. Tokyo Electric Power Co. built a deep “ice wall,” to keep groundwater from gushing through cracks in reactor foundations, but the $250 million effort has failed.

Originally licensed in 1971 to operate for 40 years, Monticello was designed to close in 2010. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued Xcel an extension in 2006, allowing it to produce rad waste until 2030. In 2011, the Japanese catastrophe of three simultaneous meltdowns of Monticello-like GE Mark I reactors proved how reliable the design is. Now the risk-takers at Xcel have applied for a second operating extension, and the owners of this leaker want to drive it for 80 years — until 2050 — twice the distance it was designed to run. Boom!

The post Radioactive Leaks from Monticello Reactor in Minnesota Threaten the Mississippi appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

The last report, which the Trump administration tried to bury when it came out in 2018, was the most dire since the first assessment was published in 2000. Until now.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released on Tuesday by the Biden administration, is unique for its focus on the present. Like previous versions, it looks at how rising temperatures will change the United States in decades to come, but it also makes clear that the rising seas, major hurricanes, and other disastrous consequences of climate change predicted in prior reports have begun to arrive. The effects are felt in every region. In the 1980s, the country saw a billion-dollar disaster every four months on average. Now, there’s one billion-dollar disaster every three weeks, according to the assessment. All of the many extreme weather events that hit the U.S., from the tiniest flood to the biggest hurricane, cost around $150 billion every year — and that’s likely a huge underestimate. 

“Climate change is here,” said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Biden administration during a briefing on the report. “Whether it’s wildfires or floods or drought, whether it’s extreme heat or storms, we know that climate change has made its way into our lives and it’s unfolding as predicted.”  

The report outlines steps every level of government can take to combat the climate crisis. And it takes stock of progress that has been made over the past four years. There’s good news on that front: President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have managed to pass historic climate measures that are expected to reduce the country’s carbon footprint between 32 and 51 percent by 2035, putting the U.S. closer to meeting its emissions targets under the global climate treaty known as the Paris Agreement. A number of cities and states have passed climate policies that can serve as a blueprint for what actions the rest of the country, and indeed the world at large, needs to take in the coming years. California’s clean car program and the Northeast’s regional carbon cap-and-trade program are two examples. 

Despite this progress, climate impacts — oppressive heat domes in the Southeast that linger for weeks on end, record-breaking drought in the Southwest, bigger and more damaging hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, wildfires of unusual duration and intensity along the West Coast — are accelerating. That’s the nature of human-caused climate change: The consequences of a century and a half of burning fossil fuels are arriving now. Even if we stopped burning oil and gas tomorrow, some degree of planetary warming is baked in. 

This reality, the report says, leaves the country no choice but to adapt, and quickly. “We need to be moving much faster,” the Biden administration said. “We need more transformative adaptation actions to keep pace with climate change.” 

The Grist staff, located all over the country, reviewed the assessment to provide you with the most important takeaways for your region. Here they are. 

Alaska

One of the joys of living in Alaska is being able to walk through thick brush without fearing that a tiny, eight-legged critter could latch onto you at any moment and give you a debilitating illness like Lyme disease (though, sure, grizzly bears are a worry). According to the assessment, that’s about to change: The western black-legged tick is creeping north, and it’s poised to establish a new home in the country’s largest state.

As Alaska warms two or three times faster than the rest of the world, it’s making life harder for many of the 730,000 people who live there, particularly Indigenous and rural residents who rely on hunting and fishing for food. Crabs are sweltering in the Bering Sea. Salmon are disappearing, leaving fish racks and freezers empty in Yup’ik and Athabascan villages along the Yukon River. Melting sea ice, extreme ocean warming, and toxic algae blooms are unraveling food webs, killing seabirds and marine mammals. It’s not pretty. 

And it’s not all happening at sea. The ground beneath Alaskans’ feet is collapsing. Eighty percent of the state sits on permafrost, much of which is thawing. In Denali National Park, a melting underground glacier triggered a landslide in 2021 that forced the park’s main road to close for a few years. Add freak storms, flooding, and erosion to the mix, and Alaska Native communities face nearly $5 billion in infrastructure damage over the next 50 years, the report says.

There are a few bright spots. Higher elevations could see more snow, not less, and Alaska’s growing season is getting longer — a boon for a fledgling agricultural industry. Still, if you migrate north to start a farm, don’t think you’ll have found a refuge from wildfires, even in the Arctic. Just Google “zombie fires.”

– Max Graham

Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Islands

Hawaiʻi, Guam, American Sāmoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands

Every month on the sixth day after a new moon, generations of Palauans have ventured out under the hot late-afternoon sun to toss their nets into seagrass meadows to capture rabbit fish. 

In 2021, the low tide didn’t come. Neither did the fish. The Indigenous fishers in Palau were left waiting, wondering if the higher tide would ever ebb.

It’s not yet clear whether climate change is to blame. But what is clear from the climate assessment is that rising sea levels, worsening storms, and other climate-related effects will transform the lives of nearly 1.9 million people who live in the states, nations, and territories that make up the U.S.-affiliated Pacific islands, many of them Indigenous peoples who have contributed little to climate change yet are bearing the worst of its impacts. 

Low-lying atolls in the Marshall Islands are already disappearing. The islands that remain risk losing their drinking water as saltwater intrudes on thin freshwater aquifers. In American Samoa, tuna canneries could see as much as a 40 percent drop in their catch by 2050 compared with the 2000s, according to the report, if carbon emissions don’t fall fast enough. 

In Hawaiʻi, a 3.2-foot rise in sea level could displace 20,000 people and cost $19 billion. That same scenario would affect 58 percent of the built environment on the island of Guam.

Maui residents still reeling from the horror of August’s wildfires can expect more drought on the leeward coast that could provide tinder for more flames. Already, fires burn a greater proportion of land area in U.S.-affiliated Pacific islands than on the continental U.S. 

Health care, already a longstanding challenge in the islands, is expected to get worse, as temperatures rise and mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika proliferate. One study found 82 percent of heat deaths in Honolulu can already be attributed to climate change.

 — Anita Hofschneider

Midwest

Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin

If you’ve ever driven through Iowa, Illinois, or Indiana, you won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces almost a third of the world’s corn and soybeans. In fact, there are so many crops getting irrigated, water is evaporating off them and cooling summer days in parts of the Midwest, like central Wisconsin, countering some of the warming from climate change. But rapid swings between flooding and drought, along with the spread of corn earworms, Japanese beetles, and other pests, are hurting these staple crops and the farmers who grow them. Climate change, the report says, has also led to smaller harvests of wild rice, a staple that’s central to the identity of the Indigenous Anishinaabe. 

The region is getting more rain, and that’s promising for wheat production, but bad news for aging dams, roads, bridges, and wastewater facilities, which are already getting overwhelmed by water. The amount of precipitation during the 1 percent of rainiest days in the Midwest has increased by 45 percent since 1958, the report says.

The Great Lakes, the crown jewel of the Midwest, are among the fastest-warming lakes in the world, with climate change stressing out an ecosystem already plagued by toxic algae and invasive species and also reducing populations of walleye and trout. Warmer winters mean there’s less ice atop lakes and ponds, threatening traditions like ice fishing from Minnesota to Michigan.

Those less-harsh winters are also expanding the ranges of disease-carrying ticks and mosquitoes. Lyme disease has exploded in the Midwest to the point that it’s now endemic, and by 2050, the Ohio Valley may see more than 200 cases of West Nile virus every year. Another once-rare phenomenon that’ll become more common: wildfire smoke. Midwesterners got a preview this summer when smoke poured in from the fires in Canada, inundating Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio with “very unhealthy” air.

— Kate Yoder

Northeast

Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, D.C., West Virginia

When it comes to climate-fueled flooding, the 67 million residents of the U.S. Northeast are especially at risk, and the region’s aging stormwater and sewage infrastructure only makes matters worse. This summer, historic flooding in New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts killed multiple people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, a preview of flooding-related dangers to come. Extreme precipitation events have increased 60 percent across the entire region, which the report says could be due to a combination of more tropical storms and a warmer, wetter atmosphere. No other region in the U.S. has seen such a marked increase in rainfall. 

But climate impacts within the Northeast extend far beyond flooding. Days when real-feel temperatures are over 100 degrees Fahrenheit will triple by 2050 under an intermediate warming scenario, the report said, and communities that lack access to reliable and affordable air conditioning will see their health and general well-being decline as a result. 

The report also warns that states along the coast will have to confront the effects of warming water on marine species, fish stocks, and tourism — if they aren’t doing so already. In the Gulf of Maine, for example, lobster, oysters, and other shellfish are expected to decline. Animals that can migrate, such as right whales, will abandon the gulf for cooler waters north of the state. Sea bass, some types of squid, and other temperate marine species, on the other hand, will flourish. Warming winter nights are allowing damaging forest pests, such as the emerald ash borer and the woolly adelgid, to extend their ranges into colder latitudes and plague new ecosystems. 

Rising seas along the coastline will push homes and infrastructure inland, raising the controversial question of who gets to leave and who can stay. Already, home buyout programs and multibillion-dollar flood protection initiatives are underway in New Jersey and New York.

— Zoya Teirstein

Northern Great Plains

Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming

In parts of the country like southwestern Nebraska, it’s not uncommon for baseball-sized hail to fall from the sky during thunderstorms in the summer months. Unfortunately for people in the northern Great Plains, it’s likely to get worse: The region will experience the largest increase in hail risk, according to the report, along with more storms. By 2071, days with hail of two inches in diameter or more could increase threefold and cover almost nine times more ground. Hail that size can smash windows, dent cars, and cause severe injuries.

The report highlights a shift in the region’s water, so vital for the landlocked landscape spanning Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Decreasing snowpack could cut short winter tourism seasons and reduce available surface water, putting more stress on limited groundwater. At the same time, more flooding and extreme weather could hit communities with the fewest resources to respond. Two storms in 2018 destroyed nearly 600 homes on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, with half not repaired a year later.

Hotter temperatures have already limited harvests of traditional foods and medicine used by many indigenous nations. That includes wild turnips and chokecherries, culturally significant plants for the Lakota people. Rising temperatures have also dried the soil, raising wildfire risks. In the Great Plains grasslands, the number of wildfires has already more than doubled since 1985. Forest fires in Montana and Wyoming have shot up almost ninefold since the 1970s. All these trends are likely to get worse.

But these problems might not be enough to scare off newcomers trying to get away from droughts and wildfires elsewhere in the country. The report suggests that fewer cold snaps and a longer growing season in the Great Plains could lure people migrating from other regions in search of a new place to live.

— Akielly Hu

Northwest

Idaho, Oregon, Washington

Climate change might be putting an end to “Juneuary,” the term for the Northwest’s chilly early summers. Take the infamous “heat dome” that smothered Washington and Oregon in late June 2021. The searing heat melted electrical equipment in Portland, buckled roads outside Seattle, and led to nearly a thousand deaths in the two states (and British Columbia). Without climate change, a heat wave that intense would’ve been “virtually impossible,” according to one study cited. 

The report says the Northwest can expect hotter heat waves — and more deaths. Heat and wildfire smoke in the region have already led to thousands of deaths since 2018, when the last National Climate Assessment was published. Extreme heat is worse in formerly redlined neighborhoods like the Albina neighborhood in Portland, where temperatures can reach 13 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the rest of the city. 

Most of the region’s drinking water has come from melting snow, stored in mountain ranges like the Cascades that run through Washington and Oregon, or the Sawtooth range in Idaho. But warmer winters are turning more snowstorms into rainstorms, leading to destructive floods in the winter and dry rivers in the summer. Glaciers are melting, even atop iconic Mount Rainier.

On the coast, rising waters pose problems. The town of Taholah on the Quinault Reservation along Washington’s northwest coast could see the ocean climb as much as 1.2 feet by 2050. The Quinault Indian Nation recently started to move many of its homes and government buildings farther inland. The report warns that the cost and complexity of managed retreat might make it difficult for other coastal communities.

Diminishing streams could be troublesome for numerous hydroelectric dams. Local and state governments might need to find new sources of energy to power the region’s electric cars and brand-new air conditioners — without relying on the fossil fuels that got us into this mess. 

—Jesse Nichols

Southeast

Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia

The sunny and fast-growing Southeast is on a collision course with climate change. Its cities have gobbled up more than 1.3 million acres of exceptionally biodiverse land since 1985, and more than a million people have moved to Florida alone since 2018. These newcomers are sitting ducks for worsening disasters, especially floods. The Southeast has seen almost two dozen hurricanes make landfall since 2018, and these monster storms are ballooning to full strength much faster as they cross a hotter Gulf of Mexico. The slow creep of sea-level rise has also led to more frequent tidal flooding in coastal cities like Miami. That’s bad news for the millions of people who have bought waterfront homes over the past few decades. 

To say the region is ill-prepared for this era of climate disaster would be an understatement. Many Southeastern cities are plagued with flimsy manufactured housing, antiquated drainage systems, and decades-old power grids. Heat stroke will become a bigger danger for outdoor workers, and more blackouts will knock out life-saving AC units in big cities. Louisiana saw more than 20 such events between 2011 and 2021. Warmer spring temperatures will also increase pollen counts in cities like Atlanta, worsening air quality. All these impacts will be more dangerous for the region’s Black residents, who live in hotter and more flood-prone places than their neighbors. 

The region’s declining rural areas also face existential threats, as industries find themselves unprepared for a warmer world. Farmers of cash crops such as citrus and soybeans, for instance, are fighting a four-front war against drought, flooding, heat, and wildfires, which all reduce annual yields. Extreme weather will continue sapping these moribund economies, leading to more out-migration and urban growth.

— Jake Bittle

Southern Great Plains

Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas

The southern Great Plains encompasses a stunning variety of terrain, from the windy plains of Kansas to the swamps of East Texas. In some parts of the region, annual precipitation is as low as 10 inches, and in other parts it’s as high as 50 inches. Accordingly, the impact of climate change looks very different depending on where you are. In the high plains of Oklahoma, drought has drained rivers and aquifers for rural communities, but residents of large Texas cities like Houston and Dallas have to worry about floods overwhelming asphalt streets and clogged storm drains.

Kansas and Oklahoma don’t face the risk of the billion-dollar disasters that plague Texas, but the report finds that earlier springs in those two landlocked states have “reduced plant growth and diminished productivity” for all-important wheat and sorghum crops. Lyme disease-bearing ticks have started to appear even in the depths of winter, when they’re supposed to be hibernating.

Energy is the backbone of the region’s economy, especially in Texas. This massive industry has helped accelerate climate change, and it’s also vulnerable to climate shifts: Hurricanes and increasingly large rain storms could knock out plants and refineries on the Gulf Coast. Agriculture and livestock, the other main industries, are also vulnerable to droughts: Dry spells in Kansas and Oklahoma have “increased labor demands for feeding, forcing producers to sell genetically valuable animals,” the report notes. These shifts could cost billions of dollars to the region’s economy.

The report also highlights threats to another mainstay of life in the South: football. Extreme heat and flooding could endanger athletes and force schools to postpone games. This already happened in 2021, when Hurricane Ida forced the Tulane University football team to play a game at the University of Oklahoma instead of at home in New Orleans.

— Jake Bittle

Southwest

Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah

A succession of droughts, fires, and heat waves has thrown the Southwest’s economy into turmoil over the past decade, upending housing markets and stalwart industries like agriculture.

The most visible disaster in the region is wildfire. The already hot and dry Southwest is getting hotter and drier, which makes it easy for big fires to rage for weeks and even months, destroying thousands of homes. It also means that “fire season” now lasts roughly all year, as 2021’s Marshall Fire in Colorado demonstrated. The cost of putting out wildfires in California exceeded $2 billion that year, according to the report. As a result of all this damage, insurance costs are skyrocketing for everyone, even city dwellers who aren’t directly threatened by blazes.

On California’s coast, rising seas have eaten away at bluffs, causing stretches of road to collapse into the water. The authors of the report write that a rash of marine heat waves in the Pacific between 2013 and 2020 caused massive die-offs in the state’s salmon fishery and beached starving sea lions. Under the worst warming scenarios, the Pacific sardine fishery could migrate as much as 500 miles north.

In the desert, farms, ranches, and cities have drained reservoirs on big waterways like the Colorado River. Rural residents in California and Arizona are seeing their wells go dry during increasingly severe droughts, thanks in large part to thirsty nut and dairy farms that have sucked up groundwater. And drought has been even more challenging for the many Native American tribes. The Navajo Nation, for instance, lacks legal access to the Colorado River, so most residents haul their water by truck. Building new water infrastructure is more than 70 times as expensive on the reservation as it would be in the average U.S. town, according to the report

— Jake Bittle

U.S. Caribbean

Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands

The climate impacts facing Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands don’t differ wildly from those of the continental states: Storms will strengthen, coastlines will shrink, temperatures will rise, and rainfall will diminish. 

What’s distinct about how the U.S. Caribbean territories will experience these hazards (apart from the islands’ location in a hurricane-prone ocean) are the economic and social conditions that have already made the region’s disasters more deadly — conditions that can be traced to the territories’ history as de facto U.S. colonies. More than 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3 million residents live below the poverty level, as do almost 20 percent of the 87,000 people living in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

After Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, mortality rates were higher for the elderly and those with the lowest household incomes. Studies found that nearly 3,000 excess deaths occurred after the storm because people lacked access to basic services.

That resource imbalance also shows itself in the dearth of necessary data available to assess current and future climate impacts in the region, especially in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The report is full of footnotes conceding that data was unavailable for the Caribbean territories.

Without improved social and economic resilience, U.S. Caribbean residents will continue to be uniquely vulnerable to storms, floods, and heat. 

“We may be facing more extreme hurricanes, but if we have the capacity, the quality of life, the social conditions to be prepared, it wouldn’t be that catastrophic,” said Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, lead chapter author and associate professor of environmental health at the University of Puerto Rico. “If we keep having a huge amount of people living under the poverty level, with preexisting conditions, exposed to flood areas, we will face another María.”

— Gabriela Aoun Angueira

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How does climate change threaten where you live? A region-by-region guide. on Nov 14, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.

In response, Food & Water Watch Policy Director Jim Walsh released the following statement:

“Record exports of fossil fuels are a direct result of Biden administration policies that are expanding fracking, pipelines and LNG export facilities, all of which threaten to lock the world into more climate warming emissions from fossil fuels. These policies are bad news for our climate and public health, but will also continue to push up energy prices for U.S. consumers, and will slow the transition to more affordable, clean renewable energy options.

“The US is hitting this record with just under 14 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of LNG export capacity. That number could expand greatly in the coming years; the United States is on the road to almost doubling this – and that total does not even include the nearly 19 bcfd of export capacity already approved, but not yet under construction.

“President Biden has a chance to reverse this dangerous trend. He can match his climate rhetoric with real climate action by determining that the proposed Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) project in Louisiana, which would be the country’s largest export facility for fossil gas, is not in the public interest. It is time for the White House to put the public interest and our climate future ahead of fossil fuel industry profits.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The fine-grained analysis spans more than 70,000 census tracts, which roughly resemble neighborhoods, mapping out environmental risks alongside factors that make it harder for people to deal with hazards. Clicking on a report for a census tract yields details on heat, wildfire smoke, and drought, in addition to what drives vulnerability to extreme weather, such as income levels and access to health care and transportation.

The “Climate Vulnerability Index” tool is intended to help communities secure funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law President Joe Biden signed last summer. An executive order from Biden’s early months in office promised that “disadvantaged communities” would receive at least 40 percent of the federal investments in climate and clean energy programs. As a result of the infrastructure law signed in 2021, more than $1 billion has gone toward replacing lead pipes and, more than $2 billion has been spent on updating the electric grid to be more reliable.

“The Biden Administration has made a historic level of funding available to build toward climate justice and equity, but the right investments need to flow to the right places for the biggest impact,” Grace Tee Lewis, a health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.

According to the data, all 10 of the country’s most vulnerable counties are in the South, many along the Gulf Coast, where there are high rates of poverty and health problems. Half are in Louisiana, which faces dangers from flooding, hurricanes, and industrial pollution. St. John the Baptist Parish, just up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, ranks as the most vulnerable county, a result of costly floods, poor child and maternal health, a list of toxic air pollutants, and the highest rate of disaster-related deaths in Louisiana. “We know that our community is not prepared at all for emergencies, the federal government is not prepared, the local parish is not prepared,” Jo Banner, a community activist in St. John the Baptist, told Capital B News.

Even among cities where climate risk is comparatively low, like Seattle, the data shows a sharp divide. North Seattle is relatively insulated from environmental dangers, whereas South Seattle — home to a more racially diverse population, the result of a history of housing covenants that excluded people on the basis of race or ethnicity — suffers from air pollution, flood risk, and poorer infrastructure.

Similar maps of local climate impacts have been released before, including by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, but the new tool is considered the most comprehensive assessment to date. While it includes Alaska and Hawaii, it doesn’t cover U.S. territories like Puerto Rico or Guam. The map is available here, and tutorials on how to use the tool, for general interest or for community advocates, are here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How does climate change threaten your neighborhood? A new map has the details. on Oct 2, 2023.

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

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr speaks during a news conference to discuss the recent indictment of 61 defendants in Fulton County on Sept. 5, 2023.

The disturbing indictment of 61 people who protested the Georgia police training facility commonly referred to as “Cop City” lays bare everything that is wrong with RICO laws and the prosecutors who abuse them. Even the author of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, on which the Georgia law is based, agrees that it’s meant to fight organized crime, not stifle dissent.

The implications of the indictment for press freedom may seem like an afterthought considering everything else that is terrible about it. Its working theory is essentially that whenever some members of a protest movement commit crimes, everyone involved in the movement is responsible for the “conspiracy,” no matter how tenuous their connection to the alleged offense. It seeks to criminalize a centuries-old political theory — anarchism — and to frame the activism following George Floyd’s murder as a plot by domestic terrorists (the indictment says the quiet part out loud by listing the date Floyd was killed as the start of the “conspiracy”). Perhaps most importantly, it has upended the lives of all those baselessly indicted.

That said, the threat to press freedom is real and shouldn’t be ignored. Any source considering talking to a journalist about a protest or controversial cause couldn’t be blamed for thinking twice after reading the indictment.

“Defend the Atlanta Forest uses websites, social media, and statements to traditional media to sow disinformation and propaganda to promote its extremist political agenda, legitimize its behavior, and recruit new members,” prosecutors allege. “[I]n an effort to de-legitimize the facts as relayed by law enforcement … members of Defend the Atlanta Forest often contact news media and flood social media with claims that their unlawful actions are protected by the First Amendment.” 

The indictment also alleges that Defend the Atlanta Forest has “worked with external entities to produce videos and podcast interviews” where they discuss “anti-authority movements”; that the group holds “media-attended press conferences to control the story and promote their own narrative”; and that it posts “press releases, misleading information, propaganda, and disinformation” on its website.

The message is clear: Try to spread opinions cops don’t like through the media, and you might find your name listed after “State v.”

Incidentally, it was cops, not protesters, who broke the law in trying to control the media narrative about Cop City. Here’s video of an officer threatening to arrest a journalist and seize his footage unless he agrees to give police favorable coverage. And when a journalist tried to cover the protests firsthand, they stole his notes. At another protest two days after the indictment, police shot down and seized a documentary crew’s drone as it filmed the events. But, according to the indictment, seeking to influence media coverage is a “traditional activity of anarchist organizations.”

The indictment’s framing of “zines” containing “anarchist ideas” as evidence of some sinister plot is just as dangerous as its effort to criminalize talking to journalists. The indictment might leave the impression that the zines contain nothing but catnip for wannabe radicals. In reality, many of them are academic — or even journalistic — in tone. They discuss everything from public records revealing Cop City contractors’ political contributions to research by environmental organizations on the projects’ impact on carbon sequestration rates. One, called “A Brief History of the Atlanta City Prison Farm,” contains 164 footnotes. Sure, the zines include ideas some may find disagreeable. But citing them as proof of a conspiracy is an affront to the First Amendment. 

And the indictment’s assaults on publishers don’t stop there: It also finds criminality in, for example, taking photos and videos of officers to “spread the message of Defend the Atlanta Forest,” posting photos of the Atlanta Police Foundation project manager, and posting links to news stories about the protests.

Federal appellate courts with jurisdiction over Georgia have joined courts everywhere else in declaring filming and photographing police in public to be protected First Amendment activity. But the indictment nonetheless lumps actions like these into the “conspiracy,” often through the laughably convoluted allegation that they were intended to “cause and induce the construction officials to withhold records, documents, and testimony in official proceedings.”

The indictment also threatens the press by attacking basic digital security practices journalists and activists both routinely use to avoid illegal surveillance. Ironically, the same prosecutors trying to criminalize taking pictures and talking to journalists can’t think of any reason why protesters might have wanted to avoid prying government eyes, or prepare for potential run-ins with cops, unless they were committing actual crimes.

Prosecutors also allege that protesters’ intent to break the law is evidenced by their “memorizing or writing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s phone number on their body in case of arrest.” As we wrote in April, journalists, like protesters, write legal aid numbers on their persons “not because journalists intend to commit crimes [but] because police have an unfortunate habit of arresting journalists for doing their jobs.”

They also cite protesters’ use of “online security measures which disguise a user’s true identity, such as the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN)” and their use of “end-to-end encrypted messaging app[s] Signal or Telegram” to “prevent[] law enforcement from viewing their communication.”

Technologies like VPN and encryption aren’t criminal; press freedom organizations recommend them to journalists worldwide. Last month’s unlawful police raid of a newsroom in Marion, Kansas, provides a clear illustration of why journalists should use encryption. Same goes for other noncriminals whose communications might interest law enforcement. Earlier this year, we learned that police in North Carolina cited a journalist’s anarchist beliefs as a pretext to illegally search their phone (which, fortunately, was encrypted).

If certain Cop City protesters committed real crimes, then prosecutors can bring charges against those protesters, individually, that are proportionate to their alleged infractions. Instead they’re trying to elevate relatively small-time offenses, like property damage and allegedly improper petty reimbursements, into racketeering — and throwing the First and Fourth Amendments to the wind in the process. Prosecutors are sworn to uphold the Constitution; drawing criminal inferences from things like talking to journalists to avoiding illegal surveillance is offensive.

Scholars and activists have criticized RICO laws, and particularly their use against First Amendment activity, for decades. This unconstitutional indictment should finally force lawmakers to do something about the problem.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Seth Stern.

On February 6, the trio, a boat captain, and the captain’s wife left La Pedrera, Colombia, to travel along the Caquetá River to the mouth of the Puruê River in Brazil. They were spending the night at a mining dredge when a military police boat also arrived to stay the night at the dredge. Military police officials said that mining at the river is illegal, according to Ebus, who communicated with CPJ via video, email, and text messages. Ebus said that police were looking for a suspect who allegedly fatally shot the operator of a different dredge and stole half a kilo (about one pound) of gold. 

“I felt that we could run into trouble identifying ourselves as journalists, because I sensed something strange was going on while the military police stayed overnight on an illegal mining dredge, so I told them that I was an anthropologist (which I am) and that we were in transit,” Ebus said.

Ebus, Amazon Underworld’s lead journalist and research coordinator, is an award-winning investigative journalist who has been living in Bogotá, Colombia, for 10 years. Cardona and Rufino are freelancers who worked on the Amazon Underworld project.

On February 7, the journalists continued along the river interviewing miners, who told them that military police receive payments of 30 grams (one ounce) of gold per month from each dredge to protect them against dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Brazil launched a military operation to remove the guerrillas in 2021, but an April 2023 clash between FARC dissidents and unknown gunmen that left several guerrillas dead indicates they remain a presence in the area.

On February 8, a policeman wearing a balaclava and wielding an automatic weapon and another policeman who appeared to be his superior approached the journalists while they prepared breakfast at the riverbank where they were moored. The pair aggressively asked Ebus if they were from a television station because the journalists had taken photos and filmed video.

According to Ebus, the policeman who seemed to be in charge insinuated that nobody would know if Ebus was hurt or killed.

The journalists complied when the policeman with the balaclava ordered them to erase the content of two memory cards. The police confiscated three other memory cards and two adapters from the journalists. After the police left, the journalists decided to abort the trip. 

Ebus said they then followed the group’s security protocol, alerting colleagues monitoring their trip through a device that tracked their location and requesting they contact Japurá police and other authorities, such as the Ministry of Justice and Public Security and the Dutch and Colombian embassies in Brazil.

Three hours later, Ebus said the same military police riding in a boat stopped the journalists’ boat in the middle of the river to return the memory cards and adapters. The policemen warned them of the risk of pirates and said that the alleged killer was still at large. Ebus told police they were returning to Colombia.

Also on February 8, military police in Amazonas state sent a text message—a statement explaining their interactions with the journalists that Ebus said contained falsehoods—to the Brazilian editor of the Amazon Underworld project. The editor filed an online complaint about the incident. CPJ sent text and email messages to the military police press officer but did not immediately receive a response.

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

“Following their recent application to shutter the outlet and now their threat to block its website, Kyrgyz authorities’ appetite for retaliation against Kloop for its uncompromising anti-corruption reporting appears to know no bounds,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities in Kyrgyzstan must cease all efforts to silence Kloop and repeal the false information law, which has once again proven its only purpose is to shield officials from  criticism.”

On Thursday, September 7, Kloop received a letter from Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Culture, Information, Sport and Youth Policy warning that if the outlet didn’t remove a September 1 article within 48 hours its website would be blocked under the country’s false information law. The letter did not specify which information was false and followed a complaint against the outlet by the State Committee for National Security.

The article cited a jailed opposition politician’s allegations of ill-treatment—which he had posted on his personal Facebook page and was widely reported by Kyrgyz media—and included a rebuttal of the politician’s claims by the country’s penitentiary service.

Kloop does not intend to remove the report, the outlet’s co-founder Bektour Iskender told CPJ by phone, and the outlet has filed a complaint with the ministry. Iskender said Kloop has been expecting such a step from authorities and set up a mirror website in February.

On August 22, authorities applied to shutter Kloop after the outlet published an investigation alleging the involvement of relatives of Kyrgyzstan’s president and the head of the State Committee for National Security in the construction of a Barcelona soccer academy in Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyz authorities previously blocked Radio Azattyk, the local service of U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, for nine months from October 2022, and restored their access following the removal of a report from the outlet’s websites.

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

Humanity created its current dire trajectory. It is now time to change course with a binding global treaty designed to empower individuals, institutions, and policymakers, and through this shared effort, reduce the existential threats to civilization. The Earth Systems Treaty is potentially a major step forward, a step towards a healthy future for all.

—  Paul R. Ehrlich, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University

Two issues are key to the way forward: (1) focusing on the Mega Risks to take coordinated constructive measures, or (2) ignore Mega Risks as if they’re harmless science fiction, a fantasy world not to be concerned about; it’ll go away. There are no other options. Now is the time when people must decide which option to take. The Earth System has never been more vulnerable. For the first time, the direct impact of global warming and vulnerability of degraded ecosystems have become nightly TV news, almost every night!

Studies have shown that climate change puts most people into one of two camps: (1) believing in the science or (2) casting it off as essentially science fiction, ignoring the issue. But beware, grasshopper, reality often follows in the footsteps of science fiction. In that regard, this article will take a step forward, or maybe a step backwards, depending upon perspective, into the world of the Twilight Zone, created by Rod Sterling in the 1960s for an interesting retrospective on science fiction foretelling the future.

The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) was an American science fiction TV series about people experiencing strange problems, for example: “The Midnight Sun”, Episode 75, November 1961:

At twenty minutes to midnight, it is 110 °F (43 °C) and sunny as high noon. Norma and Mrs. Bronson try to support each other as they watch life as they know it erode around them. The streets are deserted, water usage is limited to an hour a day, and their electricity is gradually being turned off. Food and water are scarce, and the sea has dried up. A radio presenter announces that the police have been moved out of the city and that citizens must defend themselves against looters, then angrily goes off script before being forcibly taken off the air.

Science fiction has a way of becoming reality. For example, some say that “Space Station V” of 2001: A Space Odyssey was inspiration for the International Space Station (ISS).

And 40 years before the introduction of the iPad, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole crew members of Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey held “newspads” in their hands that Samsung would later claim as the original tablet featured in the film 40 years before arrival of the first iPad in 2010. Eventually, Samsung lost its claim in a lawsuit against Apple.

In the 1990 film Total Recall, Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) jumps into a driverless car to escape pursuit by bad guys. The car is driven by an onboard satellite navigation system, which is at the forefront of driverless vehicles today.

And most amazing of all, Star Trek’s “beam me up, Scotty” via dematerialism and conversion back to rematerialization is now a reality but not with humans. Quantum entanglement allows for teleporting balls of energy known as photons with two entangled particles far away from each other remaining connected with actions performed by one affecting the other. This happens faster than the speed of light. It’s true! Einstein referred to quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.”

Today’s Earth System Mega Risks are real even though seemingly science fiction because of the near impossibility of mentally accepting the most-difficult-of-all-consequences; i.e., loss of inhabitable land because of a rapidly changing climate system. Indeed, who can accept the reality of a deadening planet right under their feet; for example, massive drought caused by global warming has put 75% of Spain’s surface area at risk of desertification. As such, the devastation of mega risks requires a universal treaty to confront reality and to do something positive.

This article is an abbreviated version of the Mega Risks, as identified by the Council. The full list resembles science fiction simply because it does not seem real to people. Nobody wants to believe the worst can happen. But truth is stranger than fiction. The threats posed by mega risks are real and active and advanced; e.g., major commercial waterways throughout the world like the Rhine and Danube and Loir have been threatened because of severe drought, which is far-reaching, for example, the Panama Canal was forced to reduce shipping traffic (August 2023) because or severe drought conditions and experienced huge traffic jams with dozens of ships backed up at both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  World drought hits world shipping!

Of additional ‘remarkable’ interest, one of the items found in the list of Mega Risks is Mass Delusion. After all, it’s a hollow world without regard for reality: “The inability of people to understand the deadly threats that now confront us all is the greatest barrier to global action for a safe human future. Disinformation, lies, and false beliefs pose an existential risk to our survival.” (The Mega Risks by The Council for the Human Future, Prof. John Hewson – Chair, Prof. Bob Douglas, Prof. Robyn Alders, Julian Cribb.)

In large measure, Mega Risks revolve around the human footprint, which has grown so large that it now consumes 1.75 earths. Yes, humans are using the equivalent resources of more than one planet to survive. The human ecological footprint crossed the line into biocapacity deficit way back in the late 1970s. The planet no longer regenerates fast enough to carry the necessary ecological assets to support human life because of unsustainable excessive demand plus ecosystem abuse, misuse, and degradation. In other words, the planet is running on reserves built up over millennia and will one day be running on fumes… to be followed by the threat of mass extinction. It’s indisputable that Earth’s resources are finite especially as biocapacity regeneration is overwhelmed by human demand in concert with reckless misuse and disregard for ecosystems.

For example, the oceans are a dumping ground for plastics and chemicals and toxic radioactivity and have been nearly drained of life: According to the Marine Stewardship Council, depletion of fish stocks is the most urgent threat to the world’s oceans. Ninety-three percent (93%) of the world’s major marine fish stocks are classified as fully exploited, overexploited, or significantly depleted. “Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is a pervasive, far-reaching security threat.” (Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing, United States Coast Guard, 2022.)

It’s obvious that sustainable fishing plus putting a stop to using the ocean as an open sewer, especially dumping radioactive toxicity (Japan’s Fukushima*), as well as ecological sustainable farming, as well as sustainable use of all natural resources is the only way forward, but it does not have strong enough sponsorship, in fact, quite the opposite! There is no sponsorship that’s powerful enough to make a positive impact that’s meaningful for nature and its ecosystems, not enough to save the planet from proactive mega risks. There are many NGOs that support nature, like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, nevertheless, widespread collapsing ecosystems still tell a sorrowful tale.

*Why should anybody anywhere in the world be permitted to discharge large quantities of contaminated toxic water that’s been filtered for ‘most radioactive particles’ directly from a broken-down nuclear power plant into the ocean under any circumstances?

It’s never been more important to address the issue of global warming, especially in consideration of the repercussions, for example, Electricite de France SA threatened (August 21^st) to reduce nuclear output (70% French electricity) as a heat wave affecting a large part of the country warmed rivers used for cooling its reactors. Ergo, connecting the dots: too much heat diminishes nuclear power capability which threatens home and business air conditioning needed to escape the same heat that cripples the nuclear power plants, a vicious circle. Global warming is nuclear power’s nemesis (beware of the nuclear energy trap).

The Council for the Human Future is aware of the risks and intends to create enough awareness in the world to help maintain a functioning Earth System. The Council does not pretend to have all the answers but does know it is important to create an awareness and a vehicle to expand knowledge of what can be done. As things stand, there is no formal worldwide organization other than The Council for the Human Future exclusively dedicated to itemizing the full panoply of mega risks to the planet with a mission of organizing humanity under one umbrella to do something constructive.

Yes, at first blush, it seems pretentious that a handful of people can save the planet, but as Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Please sign the petition to Save a Habitable Earth for our Children. It’s never been more important. People are signing up every hour.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

The post Mega Risks Threaten Earth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Hassane, also known as Soufiane Hassane, said he suspected the men targeted him because his media outlet had supported President Mohamed Bazoum, who was ousted in a coup on July 26. Bazoum’s 2021 election marked Niger’s first peaceful, democratic transition since independence from France in 1960. 

Hassane told CPJ that the masked men stopped him while he was walking near his home, identified him by name, gave his exact address, and threatened to raid his house “very soon” and kidnap him, adding that he “won’t know what happens next.” 

Hassane said he suspected that the men were wandering around the neighborhood after military authorities banned a demonstration in support of the coup.

Hassane told CPJ on August 7 that he had gone into hiding and suspended his outlet’s print operations over safety fears, but he was still covering current events on the magazine’s Facebook page.

On July 28, the Press House issued a press release raising concerns “about attempts to undermine press freedom and the safety of journalists,” but did not identify any journalists by name.

Hache Bonzougou, a spokesperson for the new military regime, told CPJ via messaging app that the context in which the media was operating was “normal” and that there was “in principle” no pressure on their freedom to report.

CPJ condemned Niger’s suspension on August 3 of broadcasts by Radio France Internationale and France 24, following anti-French protests and an attack on the French Embassy in Niamey by supporters of the junta.

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

Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days.  I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.

I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded two miles down in the ocean’s cellar while trying to give its passengers a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship nicknamed “the Millionaire’s Special.”  The ship that no one could sink except an ice cube in the drink that swallowed it.

Cellar dreams are well-known as the place where we as individuals and societies can face the flickering shadows that we refuse to face in conscious life.  Carl Jung called it “the shadow.”  Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously surface and erupt, not only leading to personal self-destruction but that of whole societies.  History is replete with examples.  My dream’s mysterious stranger had lit my way through some dark thoughts and opened the door to a possible escape.  He got me thinking about what all of us tend to want to deny or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.

The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology together with naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called “living inner religiousness” but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths.  Such myths tell the stories of things that never happened but always are.  Appropriating the ancient names without irony – such as naming a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan – unveils the hubristic ignorance of people who have never descended to the underworld to learn its lessons.  Relinquishing  their sense of god-like power doesn’t occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.

They will never name some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the fact that they have exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop down to destroy them.

Nietzsche termed the result nihilism.  Once people have killed God, machines are a handy replacement in societies that worship the illusion of technique and are scared to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.

The latter is not a matter fit to print since it must remain in the dark basement of the public’s consciousness.  If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed.  Because power, money, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around publicizing their marvels in spectacular fashion, and when “accidents” occur, they never point out the myth of the machines, or what Lewis Mumford called “The Pentagon of Power.”  Tragedies occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of technology.

But if these media would take us down to see the truth beneath the oceans’ surfaces, we would see not false monsters such as the Titanic or Moby Dick or cartoon fictions such as Disney’s Monstro the whale, but the handiwork of thousands of mad Captain Ahabs who have attached the technologues “greatest” invention – nuclear weapons – to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.

Trident submarines. First strike submarines, such as the USS Ohio.

These Trident subs live and breathe in the cellars of our minds where few dare descend.  They are controlled by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with polished faces in well-appointed offices with coffee machines and tasty snacks.  Madmen.  They hum through the deep waters ready to strike and destroy the world.  Few hear them, almost none see them, most prefer not to know of them.

But wait, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, wealthy voyeurs intent on getting a glance into the sepulchre of those long dead, while six hundred or so desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born.  These are the priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that entertains and distracts while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.

The United States alone has fourteen such submarines armed with Trident missiles constantly prowling the ocean depths, while the British have four.  Named for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (“We deliver innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges”), can destroy the world in a flash. Destroy it many times over. A final solution.

While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some protection from their use and has declared their right of first use, it has consistently pushed toward a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.  Today – 2023 June – we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never before.

A single Trident submarine has 20 Trident missiles, each carrying 12 independently targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb.  Fourteen submarines times 240 equals 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas.  Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.

James W. Douglass, the author of the renown JFK and the Unspeakable and a longtime activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it this way in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident missile designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspirational force for the campaign against the Tridents and nuclear weapons:

Question: “What did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war crimes that had such a deep impact on Robert Aldridge?”

Douglass: “They said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg principles. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the foundations of international law, are violated by both by electronic warfare – which is why we poured blood on the files for electronic warfare [at the base] – and also by the Trident missile system, which is what Robert Aldridge was building.”

Robert Aldridge saw his shadow side.  He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He refused to turn away.  He became an inspiration for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others.  He was a man in and of the system, who saw the truth of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia.  It is possible.

If those missiles are ever launched from the monsters that carry them through the hidden recesses of the world’s oceans, there will never be another Nuremberg Trial to judge the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.

We will have failed to shed light on our darkest shadows.

Writing in another context that pertains to today’s high-flying nuclear madmen whose mythic Greek forbear Icarus would not listen, the poet W. H. Auden put it this way in Musée des Beaux Arts:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

We turn away at our peril.

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

Legal proceedings are expected to take place if the temporary ban on the songs of Jason Suisui — known as Jayrex — is not lifted, warns his lawyer Philip Tabuchi.

“In the event this temporary ban is not uplifted [sic], our client will have no choice but to take the next most appropriate step, including commencing legal proceedings,” said senior associate Tabuchi of Young and Williams Lawyers in response to questions raised by the PNG Post-Courier in an email.

The National Censorship Office took a firm step against gender-based violence by placing a temporary ban on all songs by the popular Pacific reggae artist Jason Suisui from New Ireland following complaints of assault and ongoing emotional abuse by his partner of four years and her family.

• READ MORE: PNG’s censorship office bans Jayrex songs over partner abuse allegations

The singer had been earlier charged with causing grievous bodily harm, emotional distress and mental abuse through numerous phone calls, text message and in the lyrics of his songs.

Relatives close to the woman told the Post-Courier that she was in a fragile state and was often suicidal.

“Just like his legion of fans throughout the country, and other local artists, Jayrex was shocked to learn that the Office of Censorship had placed what they described as a temporary ban on his very passion – his music,” said his lawyer.

Following communication with the Office of Censorship on this undated temporary ban, senior associate Tabuchi said it was intended that logic and common sense would now prevail, and the temporary ban would be lifted.

“Jayrex is appreciative of the massive support he has received from all the fans throughout the country, including from other artists,” Tabuchi said.

“Thank you for all of your kind words and support,” Jayrex said through the lawyer.

“I am confident we will get through this. Bai yumi stap yet! Yumi sanap strong wantem! (We’ll stop this! We’ll stand up really strong!).”

Phoebe Gwangilo is a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.

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

Pesticides can easily drift onto farmworkers—and the schools and neighborhoods near fields. Current pesticide regulations aren’t consistently enforced, and vulnerable workers aren’t always able to seek help when there are violations. 

Exposures may continue around the clock, especially on farms where workers and their families live, says Olivia Guarna, lead author of a recent report, “Exposed and at Risk: Opportunities to Strengthen Enforcement of Pesticide Regulations for Farmworker Safety,” by the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, in partnership with the nonprofit advocacy group Farmworker Justice. This is one of a series of reports addressing needed policy reforms and federal oversight of programs impacting farmworkers. 

Alongside faculty and staff in the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, Guarna, a honors summer intern with a background in environmental issues, spent 10 weeks interviewing attorneys, officials, administrators, legal advisors, and farmworker advocates, researching how pesticide use is regulated and enforced in Washington, California, Illinois, and Florida. What Guarna didn’t expect was just how complicated the regulatory scheme is. The federal Environmental Protection Agency technically has oversight over pesticide use, yet in practice receives little data from states, whose enforcement is spotty at best. “There are a lot more protections on paper than I think are actually being implemented to protect farmworkers,” she says.

One of the biggest issues, according to Laurie Beyranevand, Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and one of the authors of the report, is that unlike other environmental laws administered by the EPA, the agency doesn’t adequately gather data from the states, making enforcement of existing standards more difficult. 

In Florida, the report found, inspections are virtually never a surprise. “Farmworkers report that when inspectors come to the farms, growers know they are coming, and they get to prepare,” says Mayra Reiter, project director of occupational safety and health for Farmworker Justice. “Inspectors don’t get to see what goes on day-to-day in those workplaces.”

Washington is considered one of the more progressive states in terms of farmworker protections. Yet between 2015 and 2019, Guarna discovered the average violation rate there was 418%, meaning that multiple violations were found on every inspection performed. 

In California, when violations are found, fines are often not levied, the report concluded. Even when penalties are issued, they’re often for amounts like $250 — token fines that growers consider to be part of the cost of doing business. Only a single case reported in California between 2019 and 2021 involved a grower being fined the more significant sum of $12,000.

Still, California is one of the few states that makes information readily available to the public about what chemicals are being applied where. Elsewhere, it’s virtually unknown. Washington, Florida, and Illinois do not require pesticide use reporting at all. 

“You have the farmworkers being directly exposed, and there’s so little transparency on what’s in our food,” Guarna says. “It’s not just farmworkers who are affected — drift is a big problem when it’s close to schools and neighborhoods. There’s just so little we know. A lot of the health effects happen years down the road.

In some instances, toxic exposure has become quickly and tragically evident when babies are born with birth defects. Within a span of seven weeks in 2004 and 2005, for example, three pregnant farmworkers who worked for the same tomato grower, Ag-Mart, in North Carolina and Florida, gave birth to babies with serious birth defects, like being born without arms or legs. Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services issued two complaints against Ag-Mart in 2005, alleging 88 separate violations of pesticide use laws altogether. Ultimately, 75 of those violations were dismissed. Ag-Mart was fined a total of $11,400.

Yet thousands of poisonings continue to happen each year, Farmworker Justice says. In August 2019, for example, a field of farmworkers in central Illinois was sprayed with pesticides when the plane of a neighboring pesticide applicator flew directly overhead, the report noted. Several workers turned up at local emergency rooms with symptoms of chemical exposure. 

Despite these incidents, Illinois does not mandate that medical providers report suspected cases of exposure. Only because a medical provider at the hospital personally knew someone in the local public health department—who in turn contacted connections at the Illinois Migrant Council and Legal Aid Chicago—did the exposure result in legal action.

Workers often live on the farms where they work, exposing them to chemicals virtually round-the-clock, Reiter adds. “We know from farmworker testimonies that when they return to their homes, they can smell the pesticides, and it lingers for days after they return,” she says.

Vulnerable legal status can make it difficult for farmworkers to report exposures. Millions of farmworkers hail from Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in Central America, according to Farmworker Justice, although significant numbers also come from countries like Jamaica and South Africa. An estimated half of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. 

Millions of others come on H2-A guest-worker visas that allow them to come to the country for seasonal jobs of up to 10 months. These temporary visas are tied to specific employers, so workers fear being deported or otherwise retaliated against if they raise complaints about safety violations.

“Because [workers] are looked at as expendable, they’re regularly exposed to neurotoxic pesticides that can be carried into their home settings,” says agricultural policy expert Robert Martin, who recently retired from John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. “They’re largely immigrants, and they don’t have a lot of legal protections. The advocates they do have, like Farmworker Justice, are terrific, but they’re really taken advantage of by the system because of their legal status.”

Inherent conflicts of interest also present legal loopholes. The state agencies charged with enforcing federal and state pesticide safety laws, like state Departments of Agriculture, are often the same agencies that promote the economic interests of the ag industry. And farmworkers know it. “That sort of cultural conflict is a big issue,” Guarna says. “Farmworkers have become deeply skeptical of departments of agriculture, and skeptical that they have farmworkers’ interests at heart. They fear their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears.”

While the EPA is legally required to maintain oversight over state agencies, in practice, they only require states to report about federally funded work—and the vast majority of state programs are funded by state budgets. Mandatory and universal standards for inspections and responses to violations would help tremendously, the report concludes. “One of our recommendations is that there should be whole-of-program reporting where states, tribes, and territories have to report all their activities,” Guarna says. “There are some very discrete fixes that can be made that would have a huge impact, so I am hopeful about that.”

Among the report’s 17 policy recommendations is to ensure that enforcement of pesticide safety gets delegated to an agency that is specifically tasked with protecting the health of workers. This could include transferring enforcement to state departments of labor or health, or even creating a new authority specifically dedicated to pesticide regulation.

“Exposed and At Risk” follows a previous report from the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems that focused on the two major threats facing farmworkers—heat stress and pesticide exposure. It focused on opportunities for states to take action to better protect farmworkers, and was written in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. That collaboration also led to a third report, called “Essential and in Crisis: A Review of the Public Health Threats Facing Farmworkers in the U.S.,” which recently explored the public health and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture. Martin, who co-authored these findings, explains that the concentrated power and wealth of large agribusiness companies has consequences for both worker safety and the environment. 

Following corporate consolidation since the 1980s, “there are fewer meat, seed, pesticide companies, and their combined economic power really keeps the status quo in place,” Martin says. ”There are some pretty direct public health threats of these operations.”

As “Exposed and at Risk,” notes, the regulatory system should be structured in a way that works to protect farmworkers. But currently, federal regulators lack sufficient data to even identify the tremendous gaps in enforcement. Requiring states to develop comprehensive reporting systems would be a small step toward protecting the foundation of American agriculture.

Vermont Law and Graduate School, a private, independent institution, is home to a Law School that offers both residential and online hybrid JD programs and a Graduate School that offers master’s degrees and certificates in multiple disciplines, including programs offered by the School for the Environment, the Center for Justice Reform, and other graduate-level programs emphasizing the intersection of environmental justice, social justice and public policy. Both the Law and Graduate Schools strongly feature experiential clinical and field work learning. For more information, visit vermontlaw.edu, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The legal loopholes that threaten farmworkers’ health and safety on Jun 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist Creative.

On the morning of April 30, Togolese soldiers arrested Samboe, the founder and owner of the privately owned Laabali news website, as he was reporting on the aftermath of a jihadist attack in Togo’s northern Waldjouaque village, according to the journalist and Robert Douti, Laabali’s editorial director, who both spoke to CPJ by phone.

Samboe told CPJ that the soldiers took him to their nearby base, where they questioned him about why he was in the area, seized his two phones and computer, and deleted audio and video recordings he had taken that day. They then transferred him to the custody of the local gendarmerie office in the northern city of Dapaong. The gendarmerie held him until May 2 and released him only after he signed a document agreeing not to return to the area without first “informing” the authorities.

“Journalists should be free to work without fear of arrest, harassment, or undue requirements that they inform authorities of their movements,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Togolese journalist Edouard Kamboissoa Samboe should be allowed to work without restriction, and authorities should refrain from harassing members of the press and seizing their devices.”

Samboe said the soldiers were angry because he tweeted about his detention before being transferred to the gendarmerie.  “Get him out, we’ll settle the accounts…We’re going to put him down,” Samboe recalled the soldiers saying, adding that they said, “We spared you and you are ungrateful.”

Samboe said the gendarmerie released him without charge after he signed the agreement and gendarmerie officers returned his phones and computer the following day. He described his detention as an attempt to “isolate” and “traumatize” him.

While in custody of the gendarmerie, Samboe said he was questioned about his work, including if he had ever interviewed jihadists or worked for France-based media outlets like TV5 Monde or Le Monde. Authorities in Burkina Faso, which shares a border with northern Togo, have suspended French broadcasters France 24 and Radio France Internationale over their coverage of the conflict with jihadists in the country, and in April expelled French reporters Agnès Faivre and Sophie Douce.

Samboe said both the soldiers and gendarmerie made him give up the password to one of his phones, which was locked. The gendarmerie also made him give them the password to his Telegram account, he added.

“It is possible that they read my messages,” he told CPJ, adding that he believed authorities had accessed his Facebook account as well because he was logged in on his computer when they took it, but was logged out after it was returned.

Samboe said he was worried that his devices were no longer safe to use, citing concerns over the threat of Pegasus spyware, which has been deployed against Togolese civil society members and may have been used to target Togolese journalists. In July 2022, Togo communication minister Akodah Ayewouadan told CPJ that the government had no connection with the Pegasus vendor NSO Group and “has not used that spyware,” but did not respond to subsequent written questions.

Togolese Minister of Security and Civil Protection Yank Damehame and a gendarmerie officer at the Dapaong office, who identified himself only as Rachid, both agreed to respond to queries via messaging app. CPJ sent questions to both for comment but did not receive any responses by the time of publication.

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

The legislation—condemned by civil rights advocates as the Criminalizing Gender-Affirming Care Bill—passed the state Senate in a 26-13 vote and the House by a margin of 83-28. It now heads to the desk of far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis. The presumptive candidate for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination has previously voiced support for the measure and is expected to sign it into law, upon which it would take immediate effect.

"S.B. 254 is extraordinarily dangerous and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation."

Seven Florida parents who are currently challenging state boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine rules prohibiting gender-affirming care for their children and other trans youth plan to ask a federal court to block provisions in S.B. 254 that would codify the existing boards' bans and create additional barriers for families with trans children.

They are represented by Southern Legal Counsel, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The groups issued a joint statement denouncing Florida for "doubl[ing] down on denying science, intruding on family privacy and parental decision-making, and trampling on the rights and well-being of transgender adolescents."

"The bill passed by the Legislature today interferes even further with families, deliberately provoking conflict by inviting challenges to established custody orders. This exacerbates the state of emergency for parents who are already being forced to watch their kids suffer rather than get them the effective healthcare they need and that will allow them to thrive," says the statement. "We will take swift action to ask the federal court to block the ban on access to essential healthcare in S.B. 254, as well as the boards of medicine bans, to stop further harm to transgender youth and their families while the plaintiffs' case continues."

Similar bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth have been blocked by federal judges in Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Under S.B. 254, the state could take custody of a child who "has been subjected to or is threatened with being subjected to" gender-affirming care such as hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers.

As The New Republicreported:

Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as "sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures" and qualifies this care as a form of "physical harm."

Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.

[...]

Minors who have already begun transitioning will be allowed to continue to do so, but they are no longer allowed to receive care via telehealth, including for prescriptions. Their doctors have to tell them about the "risks" of gender-affirming care, and patients will have to sign an informed consent form, which the ACLU has pointed out often contains misinformation. Doctors who violate any of these new rules could be charged with a felony.

Equality Florida, the state's largest LGBTQ+ rights group, noted that "while much of the bill proponents' rhetoric focused on transgender youth, multiple bill provisions impact consenting transgender adults."

As the organization explained, "The bill bans government entities from offering them gender-affirming healthcare insurance, restricts their ability to access telehealth for care in the way nearly all other healthcare can be delivered, and denies their ability to receive care from highly trained nurses that provide a large portion of the gender-affirming care in the state." Anyone who violates these provisions could face misdemeanor charges.

As repressive as S.B. 254 is, opponents successfully narrowed the bill from the "much more extreme" House companion filed by state Rep. Randy Fine (R-33), the group pointed out. "Provisions previously approved by the House majority would have banned private health insurance providers from covering care for transgender adults and barred transgender Floridians from updating the gender on their birth certificates. The bill as passed also allows certain transgender youth already receiving gender-affirming treatments to continue doing so, whereas the House provisions would have terminated all care by the end of the year."

Equality Florida public policy director Jon Harris Maurer said that S.B. 254 "painfully shows Gov. DeSantis' 'Florida freedom' farce."

"It's an assault on medical freedom and the freedom to parent," Maurer lamented. "After weaponizing the state's Medicaid agency and Board of Medicine against the transgender community, the governor's surrogates have now rammed through legislation to override parental decision-making, jail Florida doctors following best practices, and force adults to jump through government hoops to access their daily medication. This crusade is about political aspirations, but it has real-world consequences for Florida families."

Maurer's critical assessment was echoed by Cathryn Oakley, HRC's state legislative director and senior counsel.

"S.B. 254 is extraordinarily dangerous and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation," said Oakley. "This bill doesn't even pretend to be responsible public policy—instead, it attacks the ability of people of all ages to access medically necessary healthcare simply because those people are transgender; it prevents parents from being able to access best-practice, potentially lifesaving healthcare supported by the entire American medical establishment on behalf of their children; it prevents healthcare providers from delivering best-practice medical care; and it even threatens to overturn out-of-state custody determinations."

"This bill doesn't even pretend to be responsible public policy—instead, it attacks the ability of people of all ages to access medically necessary healthcare."

Oakley warned that "if Gov. DeSantis signs this bill, he will be disrespecting the United States Constitution as well as the rule of law, not to mention transgender Floridians, their families, and their medical care providers."

"Many families are making plans to leave the state to protect their children and get them the care they need to stay alive," she added. "The Human Rights Campaign is committed to doing everything in our power to fight back against these discriminatory bills and give LGBTQ+ children the futures they deserve."

S.B. 254, The New Republic observed, is "one of the cruelest" anti-trans bills yet passed in the country. "State Republicans have openly admitted they 'hate' LGBTQ people and are comfortable with 'erasing' the community from existence."

Equality Florida urged people to call DeSantis' office at 850-717-9337 to assert that "hate has no place" in the state.

As the organization noted, "S.B. 254's passage comes amidst an unprecedented barrage of anti-LGBTQ, anti-freedom bills in the final week of the 2023 legislative session," all of which DeSantis is expected to sign into law. It elaborated:

On Tuesday, the Legislature passed S.B. 1580, known as the License to Discriminate in Healthcare bill, which creates a broad license for healthcare providers and insurance companies to refuse services based on a "religious, moral, or ethical belief." Despite fears from LGBTQ advocates that this could open the door for discrimination in healthcare services, the bill passed on a party-line vote.

On Wednesday, three bills on the Slate of Hate were sent to the governor. H.B. 1069, the Don't Say LGBTQ Expansion Bill... extends last year's censorship of classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity now up to eighth grade and overrides a parent's right to ensure that school personnel address their transgender child with the correct title and pronouns. The bill also dramatically accelerates book-banning efforts in Florida, allowing any person in a county to automatically remove a book from school shelves pending a lengthy review on the grounds of certain objections. The Legislature then passed H.B. 1521, the Anti-Transgender Bathroom Ban, that imposes new restrictions mandating that bathroom use be separated by sex assigned at birth in schools, universities, public stadiums, regional convention centers, airports, and all government buildings. And finally, H.B. 999, which included language banning public funding for LGBTQ-inclusive diversity and inclusion programs in our state colleges and universities.

Florida's hateful offensive is part of a broader nationwide attack carried out by Republican lawmakers and officials. The GOP claims to be "protecting children," but in reality, it is criminalizing LGBTQ+ people of all ages, putting them at increased risk of violence and self-harm.

HRC said it is opposing more than 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in statehouses across the country so far in 2023. According to the group, "More than 220 of those bills would specifically restrict the rights of transgender people, the highest number of bills targeting transgender people in a single year to date."

HRC is currently tracking:

• More than 125 bills that would prevent transgender youth from being able to access age-appropriate, medically necessary, best-practice healthcare; this year, 13 have already become law in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Montana;
• More than 30 bathroom ban bills; and
• More than 100 curriculum censorship bills and 45 anti-drag performance bills.

"In a coordinated push led by national anti-LGBTQ+ groups, which deployed vintage discriminatory tropes, politicians in statehouses across the country introduced 315 discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2022," HRC noted. "Despite this, fewer than 10% of these efforts [29] succeeded. The majority of the discriminatory bills—149 bills—targeted the transgender and nonbinary community, with the majority targeting children... By the end of the 2022 legislative session, a record 17 bills attacking transgender and nonbinary children passed into law."

"Support for LGBTQ+ rights is on the rise in Florida and nationwide," the group pointed out, citing recent survey data showing that 80% of Florida residents back anti-discrimination protections and 66% oppose refusal of service on religious groups. According to the same poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, roughly 80% of U.S. adults favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations, up from 71% in 2015.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Around 9 a.m. on Friday, April 14, three Congolese National Intelligence Agency (ANR) agents arrested Bakuka, a reporter with the privately owned broadcaster Radio Mushauri, at his home in Kindu, the capital of DRC’s eastern Maniema province, according to a tweet by Kindu-based journalist Grace Mbambi and another local journalist who spoke to CPJ by phone and messaging app on the condition of anonymity, citing security concerns. 

An ANR representative told that local journalist that Bakuka was accused of “spreading false rumors” in an article he wrote and shared in a WhatsApp group discussing security issues in Kindu. Reached by phone, the ANR director in Maniema province declined to provide his name or comment on Bakuka’s arrest.

Separately, on Monday, April 10, a prosecutor in the capital, Kinshasa, summoned and detained Kayiba, a reporter with the privately owned broadcaster Kin Actu TV and privately owned news website Reportage.cd, in connection to two tweets, according to a report by privately owned news website Actungolo and Kayiba’s lawyer, who spoke to CPJ by phone and messaging app on the condition of anonymity, citing security concerns. 

“DRC authorities should immediately release and drop all investigations into the work of journalists Gustave Bakuka and Diègo Kayiba,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, from New York. “Too often journalists in the DRC are faced with legal harassment and the prospect of arrest for simply doing their jobs.”

Kayiba’s tweets, which CPJ reviewed before they were removed, were posted in March and alleged that Jules Alingete Key, head of the country’s General Inspectorate of Finance, had not been transparent with his personal spending and betrayed DRC President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi with his personal presidential ambitions.

In an April 4 statement shared with local media, the General Inspectorate of Finance said Alingete had not filed a complaint against Kayiba. CPJ’s calls to the prosecutor rang unanswered. 

On April 13, Kayiba’s lawyer filed a request for the journalist’s provisional release, he said, adding that if rejected, the journalist risks being transferred from detention in the prosecutor’s office to prison.

Separately, on April 9, Jean-Calvin Mingashanga, the elected representative for the central city of Tshikapa, sent an audio message to Kabongo, a reporter with the privately owned Netic-news.net, and threatened him with arrest for publishing a “baseless article,” according to a report by his outlet and Kabongo, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. 

The April 7 article critiqued Mingashanga’s relationship with the minister of finance and his constituents.

Mingashanga told CPJ by phone that he remains outraged by Kabongo’s article, which discredited his reputation. He said he intends to “punish” the journalist and force him not to publish similar reports.

On March 27, ANR agents in Kindu arrested journalist John Ngongo Lomango over his reporting on security issues. Authorities released Ngongo unconditionally on March 29 but kept his phone with the intention of searching it, the journalist told CPJ. 

Authorities have jailed journalist Patrick Lola in the central prison of Mbandaka since January 2022.

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

Normally, dense water flows toward the ocean floor and helps transport heat and and vital nutrients through the planet's oceans. The circulation helps support marine ecosystems and the stability of ice shelves.

With carbon emissions continuing to rise despite clear warnings from energy and climate experts about the urgent need to draw down emissions, the deep ocean current is projected to slow by 40% by 2050, according to the study, which was published in Nature.

The current slowdown would "profoundly alter the ocean overturning of heat, fresh water, oxygen, carbon, and nutrients, with impacts felt throughout the global ocean for centuries to come," according to the study.

The researchers, who study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Australian National University, and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), examined models and simulations over two years to determine how fast the deep ocean current more than 13,000 feet below the surface is expected to slow down as fresh water rapidly enters the ocean.

Circulation deep in the ocean could weaken twice as fast as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which carries warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic Ocean. The collapse of the AMOC has previously been identified as "one of the planet's main potential tipping points," as Common Dreams reported in 2021, but the Antarctic overturning circulation has been less studied until now.

The deep ocean current allows nutrients to rise from the bottom of the ocean, supporting about three-quarters of phytoplankton production and forming the basis of the global food chain.

"If we slow the sinking near Antarctica, we slow down the whole circulation and so we also reduce the amount of nutrients that get returned from the deep ocean back up to the surface," Stephen Rintoul, a fellow at CSIRO and co-author of the study, told Al Jazeera.

The ocean would also be left with a limited ability to absorb carbon dioxide due to the stratification of its upper layers, and warm water could increasingly intrude on the western Antarctic ice shelf, creating a feedback loop and even more melting of glaciers.

The study is "actually kind of conservative" in that it doesn't go into detail regarding that "disaster [scenario]," Alan Mix, a co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report who was not involved in Wednesday's study, toldAl Jazeera.

Matthew England, another co-author of the study, toldThe Guardian that deep ocean circulations have "have taken more than 1,000 years or so to change, but this is happening over just a few decades."

"It's way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down," England added. "We are talking about the possible long-term extinction of an iconic water mass."

The study is the latest sign that action to reduce planet-heating fossil fuel emissions is happening far too slowly, said climate scientist Bill McGuire.

"It seems almost certain that continuing on a high greenhouse gas emission pathway will lead to even more profound effects on the ocean and the climate system," John Church, an emeritus professor at University of New South Wales in Australia, told Al Jazeera. "The world urgently needs to drastically reduce our emissions to get off the high-emission pathway we are currently following."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

The rapidly approaching end of pandemic-related Medicaid coverage protections and growing GOP attacks on the program at the state and federal levels have left millions of vulnerable people worried about being thrown off their insurance—and potentially losing access to lifesaving care.

Beginning on the first day of April, states will be allowed to resume Medicaid eligibility screenings and disenrollments that have largely been paused during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure coverage stability.

As part of a government funding package passed in December, Democrats and Republicans in Congress agreed to begin unwinding so-called "continuous coverage" requirements for Medicaid recipients in April—though some provisions were included to help children maintain health coverage.

Estimates from outside analysts and the Biden administration indicate that the unwinding of coverage protections enacted in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic could throw upwards of 14 million people off Medicaid over the course of 12 months, which is how long states have to resume eligibility screenings.

Some Republican governors, such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, are working to accelerate the screening process with the goal of booting as many people from the program as possible. The results could be disastrous: more than a third of Arkansas residents are on Medicaid.

Experts have warned that even people who are still qualified for the program could be kicked off in the coming weeks given the confusion and administrative barriers associated with income verifications and other eligibility tests that states typically require on an annual basis.

Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project and a Medicaid recipient based in California, described the stress of the program's redetermination process in a column for Teen Vogue earlier this week.

Even though I've been through this process seemingly countless times, when that thick packet from the county comes in the mail, it still creates a pit of dread in my stomach. One small error can be disastrous, resulting in what's called 'churn,' the gap in coverage that can lead to delays in care while people re-enroll—or people can fall through the cracks altogether. Administrative and procedural barriers can also lead to someone being disenrolled, with low-income people and people of color disproportionately at higher risk due to structural inequities.

It is a lot of work to be poor and disabled. In a country where healthcare is not a right, the Medicaid redeterminations reinforce the precarious state of marginalized communities in relationship to the state. When I go through this process, I am angered as I think of all the people who need assistance trying to understand the form, collecting information, and physically completing it on time. The administrative burden, access barriers, and emotional toll it takes to jump through these hoops for survival is cruel and counterproductive.

"Medicaid expansion saves lives," Wong added. "But perhaps we should question whether we are considered human in the eyes of the GOP. If we don't fight back, the 'great unwinding' could become the great unraveling of the safety net as we know it."

In recent years, disability rights advocates and others have fought tirelessly—and often successfully—against Republican attacks on Medicaid, including efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and impose punitive work requirements.

But GOP lawmakers have signaled that they intend to continue targeting the popular program in the coming months, using the need to raise the debt ceiling as leverage to pursue steep spending cuts. Democrats, the minority in the House but retaining a narrow majority in the Senate, have vowed to oppose any proposal to diminish Medicaid.

"We're going to resist them completely," Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) said earlier this month.

The Washington Post reported last month that congressional Republicans have been taking advice from right-wing ideologue Russ Vought, who served as budget director under the Trump administration.

One of the ideas Vought has privately pitched to GOP lawmakers is $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid.

According to Politico, some Republicans "want to revive a 2017 plan to phase out the enhanced federal match for Medicaid and cap spending for the program—an approach the Congressional Budget Office estimated would save $880 billion over 10 years and increase the number of uninsured people by 21 million."

"Many other Republicans are also pushing for Medicaid work requirements," the outlet added, "though the one state that implemented them saw thousands of people who should have qualified lose coverage."

As congressional Republicans and GOP-led states attempt to weaken the critical healthcare program, North Carolina lawmakers on Thursday granted final approval to legislation that would expand Medicaid, a step that could provide coverage to 600,000 residents.

The move, which brought to an end more than a decade of obstruction by state Republicans, came on the 13th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.

"This is a victory for North Carolinians and a victory for the 600,000 individuals and their families who will now have access to lifesaving care," Brad Woodhouse, executive director of the advocacy group Protect Our Care, said in a statement. "Even as Republicans in Washington try to gut the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, this bipartisan action shows what can happen in the states after years of gridlock because the people demanded it."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

In addition to causing an estimated $2.5 billion in damage to agriculture crops, livestock, pastures, and forests each year, National Geographic reported, feral swine also carry diseases that “could potentially spread to people,” including leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, brucellosis, swine influenza, salmonella, hepatitis, and pathogenic E. coli. These pathogens can have serious impacts on human health. Leptospirosis, for example, can cause kidney damage, meningitis, liver failure, respiratory distress, and death if left untreated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Feral swine can also be sources of new diseases. Vienna Brown, a USDA staff biologist with the agency’s National Feral Swine Damage Management Program says, “Swine, in general, are considered a mixing vessel species because they are susceptible to human viruses, like influenza viruses. And when those get into swine, they could create a novel influenza virus.”

In February 2023, the Guardian reported that feral hogs from Canada, which are adapted to colder conditions, are “poised to infiltrate” the northern United States. These “super pigs” are the result of  cross-breeding domestic pigs and wild boars. “Wild pigs are easily the worst invasive large mammal on the planet,” Ryan Brook, who leads a wild pig research project at the University of Saskatchewan, told the Guardian.

The feral swine problem has received some corporate news coverage including reports by the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. An April 2022 Los Angeles Times article focused mainly on feral swine in California and only addressed some of the issues raised in the National Geographic report. Newsweek highlighted a social media post of someone’s lawn being torn up by feral pigs, after the post went viral, but the magazine’s coverage failed to add detail about the greater harm feral hogs can cause.

Sources:

Jason Bittel, “Hogs Are Running Wild in the U.S. And Spreading Disease,” National Geographic, February 1, 2023.

Adam Gabbatt, “‘Incredibly Intelligent, Highly Elusive’: US Faces New Threat From Canadian ‘Super Pig,’” The Guardian, February 20, 2023.

Student Researcher: Brandon Szabo (North Central College)

Faculty Evaluator: Steve Macek (North Central College)

The post Feral Hogs Threaten Agriculture and Human Health appeared first on Project Censored.

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

The makers of Fruity Pebbles, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, and other popular cereal brands are bitterly lobbying against a new Food and Drug Administration proposal that would prevent them from labeling their products as “healthy.”

The proposed FDA rule mandates that foods labeled as healthy must contain a major food group — such as dairy, fruits, or whole grains — and must fit certain limits on saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars.

The rule limits cereals, for example, to no more than 2.5 grams of sugar per serving in order to be labeled as healthy — a restriction food manufacturers claim would exclude over 95 percent of ready-to-eat cereals on the market.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Lee Fang.

Federal agencies are failing to meet their own major milestones for taking actions to protect communities from the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, roughly a year after the White House promised “accelerated efforts” to tackle the harmful chemicals.

President Joe Biden made addressing PFAS to “secure environmental justice

” a top election campaign pledge. However, the Environmental Working Group’s recently updated “Federal PFAS Report Card” – which tracks the status of the Biden administration’s PFAS pledges – reflects an alarming number of missed or delayed milestones on key actions that could help to protect Americans from PFAS.

Following the White House release of a government-wide plan

for PFAS in October 2021, over one-third of the scheduled actions are overdue. More concerning, EWG found the backlog of overdue actions more than doubled after agencies missed key milestones that were pledged in the last quarter of 2022.

Some of the most important actions in the Biden administration’s plan are incomplete or have been pushed to later dates. These measures include Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on PFAS released into waterways, standards to protect drinking water from PFAS, and monitoring to assess PFAS in air emissions.

The failure to propose standards to protect drinking water tops the EPA’s list of unfinished business. The proposal was due in fall 2022 but has not been released. EWG estimates more than 200 million Americans are drinking PFAS-contaminated water.

The EPA also announced on January 20, 2023, that it would delay setting limits on industrial discharges of PFAS into waterways, known as Effluent Limitation Guidelines. The delay means PFAS pollution of water could remain unchecked for years.

Other agencies also missed important deadlines. The Department of Defense failed to submit a Congressionally-mandated schedule and cost estimates for the cleanup of over 400 installations known to have PFAS-tainted ground water.

The Federal Aviation Administration still has not allowed airports to end their use of PFAS-containing firefighting foam – well over one year past a deadline set by Congress.

“The deadlines are slipping. Without more urgency, it will be years before communities are safe from PFAS, discharges into water are controlled, and contamination is cleaned up,” said John Reeder, EWG’s vice president for federal affairs.

“Communities have waited decades for action. The administration needs to renew and re-energize its commitment to tackle PFAS,” said Reeder.

PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they are among the most persistent toxic compounds in existence, contaminating everything from drinking water to food, food packaging and personal care products. They never break down in the environment.

PFAS are toxic at very low levels and have been linked to serious health problems, including increased risk of cancer and harm to the reproductive and immune systems.

“Every day of delay in controlling PFAS and holding corporate polluters accountable prolongs unnecessary risks to communities,” said La’Meshia Whittington, with Green Majority, a political advocacy organization for environmental justice, climate justice, and pro-democracy reform. “The Biden plan for PFAS was heralded as a turning point, but delays threaten to derail the president’s environmental justice promises,” she said.

PFAS pose a particular threat to communities that are low-income or face historically disproportionate exposure to pollution, cumulative adverse health effects, and potentially insurmountable costs of water treatment or remediation. Research suggests communities with a majority of people of color may be especially affected by PFAS.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

A month after the two largest pharmacy chains in the United States announced their efforts to become certified to dispense abortion pills by mail, in accordance with a new Food and Drug Administration rule, the Republican attorneys general of 20 states on Wednesday warned the companies that providing the medications by mail in their states could result in legal action against them.

In a letter co-signed by 19 attorneys general from states that have banned or attempted to ban abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri wrote to officials at Walgreens and CVS and suggested that they could face litigation if they follow new regulatory guidelines introduced by the FDA in early January.

The agency announced last month that retail drugstores can dispense mifepristone and misoprostol—drugs used for medication abortions, which accounted for 51% of abortions in 2020 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rule reversed strict regulations that for decades required patients to obtain mifepristone only at health clinics, which medical experts have long said were unnecessarily limited people's access to the pills and were rooted in politics rather than science.

"The prohibition and difficulty in accessing abortion pills has no medical basis, just a political one."

Both pharmacies said soon after the rule was changed that they were beginning the process of becoming certified to send abortion pills to patients who have a prescription for them from a healthcare provider, in states where abortion care is legal.

The attorneys general who signed Bailey's letter on Wednesday claimed the companies will be in violation "not only of federal law, but also of the laws of the various states" if they follow the FDA guidance.

Two states—Indiana and Texas—have imposed bans on medication abortions starting at a certain point in pregnancy, while 18 states require patients to be in the physical presence of a prescribing clinician to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol—restrictions that run afoul of the new federal regulations.

A manufacturer of mifepristone filed a lawsuit late last month to overturn West Virginia's abortion ban, arguing that the FDA's approval of the drug preempts the state's law.

The Biden administration also issued a legal opinion last month saying the U.S. Postal Service can mail abortion pills to states with abortion bans or severe restrictions, if the sender does not intend to break the law.

Of the 20 states whose attorneys general signed the letter sent Wednesday to CVS and Walgreens, 10—Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Utah— still permit abortion care. Several of the states have attempted to ban the procedure but the proposals have been blocked.

Despite this, the attorneys general suggested that sending abortion pills to patients in their states will violate their laws.

"These state laws reflect not only our commitment to protecting the lives and dignity of children, but also of women," wrote Bailey. "We emphasize that it is our responsibility as state attorneys general to uphold the law and protect the health, safety, and well-being of women and unborn children in our states."

The right-wing attorneys general "are in the wrong here," said women's rights group UltraViolet.

The letter comes just over a week after South Dakota's Republican governor, Kristi Noem, joined state Attorney General Marty Jackley in threatening the state's pharmacists with felony charges if they distribute abortion pills.

If the pharmacies cave to the demands of the Republicans, said author and advocate Jessica Valenti, people in the 20 states in question "will no longer have access to one of the most common forms of miscarriage treatment."

"If abortion medication isn't available—if pharmacies literally don't carry it, or only have limited quantities available—we will see unprecedented suffering," she said.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

South Dakota's Republican governor and attorney general on Tuesday issued a threatening letter directed at the state's pharmacists in response to a recent move by the Biden administration to ease restrictions on dispensing abortion pills amid the GOP's nationwide assault on reproductive freedom.

Gov. Kristi Noem and AG Marty Jackley's letter begins by noting that after Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reversed Roe v. Wade last year, abortion became illegal in South Dakota except to save the life of the pregnant person. It's one of 14 states where abortions are now largely unavailable.

The letter states that "in South Dakota, any person who administers, prescribes, or procures for any pregnant female any medicine or drug with the intent to induce an abortion is guilty of a felony."

In a policy change long advocated by medical experts and rights campaigners, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this month formalized a regulatory change to allow retail pharmacies in the U.S. to dispense mifepristone, one of two drugs often taken in tandem for a medication abortion.

Referencing that development, the letter says that "under South Dakota law, pharmacies, including chain drug stores, are prohibited from procuring and dispensing abortion-inducing drugs with the intent to induce an abortion, and are subject to felony prosecution under South Dakota law, despite the recent FDA ruling."

As The Associated Pressreported Tuesday:

The [FDA's] change could expand access at online pharmacies. People can get a prescription via telehealth consultation with a health professional and then receive the pills through the mail, where permitted by law.

Still, in states like South Dakota, the rule change's impact has been blunted by laws limiting abortion broadly and the pills specifically. Legal experts foresee years of court battles over access to the pills as abortion rights proponents bring test cases to challenge state restrictions.

Amanda Bacon, the director of the South Dakota Pharmacists Association, said in an email that she was not aware of any South Dakota pharmacies with plans to participate in the federal program to dispense abortion pills.

The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, which tracks policies across the country, labels all six states that border South Dakota as restrictive of abortion access to various degrees—and South Dakota is among the dozen "most restrictive" states in the nation.

Since the Dobbs decision, states with pro-choice policies—especially those like Illinois, which is surrounded by states with abortion restrictions—have seen an influx of "healthcare refugees."

While the FDA's recent move was widely seen as a step toward alleviating some of the strain on clinics trying to serve a growing number of patients fleeing states with forced-birth policies, an ongoing legal battle over the agency's initial approval of mifepristone in 2000 could jeopardize access to the drug nationwide.

Anti-choice physicians last month asked Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—appointed by former President Donald Trump to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas—to throw out the FDA's 2000 decision. The judge, who was previously the deputy general counsel at a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, could issue a ruling as soon as February 10.

If the Christian alliance that launched the attack on the FDA approval "wins in federal district court, the Biden administration would appeal to the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, a conservative court with 12 of its 16 active judges appointed by Republicans," CNBCpointed out Tuesday. "From there, the case could end up at the Supreme Court."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

At about 11 a.m., journalists were interviewing some of the delegates before the congress when a group of MDC supporters assaulted a party member who had allegedly criticized the event, according to the MISA statement and Chengeto Chidi, a reporter with the local outlet Heart and Soul TV, who was at the scene.

When journalists from Heart and Soul, the Open Parly ZW news website, and the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster VOA Studio 7 attempted to record the incident, MDC security staff and party activists threatened them, VOA Studio 7 journalist Mlondolozi Ndlovu told CPJ.

Party members in charge of running security for the event told the journalists to stop filming, and threatened to beat them and seize their equipment, Ndlovu told CPJ.

“They said to us, ‘We thought you are with us. Stop taking pictures, go back inside the venue, otherwise we will beat you up,’” Ndlovu said.

One security officer accused the journalists of inciting the scuffle, and another threatened to confiscate Chidi’s phone, he told CPJ.

Heart and Soul reporter Ruvimbo Nyikadzino told CPJ that security staff also obstructed journalists from interviewing delegates who were entering the congress venue.

Heart and Soul News Editor Blessed Mhlanga went to help the journalists before MDC spokesperson Witness Dube arrived at the scene and cautioned party supporters against threatening members of the press, Mhlanga and Ndlovu told CPJ. Mhlanga said the journalists continued covering the event after Dube’s intervention

Dube told CPJ via messaging app that his party believed in media freedom “to the letter and spirit,” and said the MDC would always facilitate safe coverage of its events.

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

One of the men held him at gunpoint, threatening to kill him, while the other tried to break into his car, according to Mujeeb, who spoke with CPJ by phone, the Urdupoint news website, and the Digital Media Alliance of Pakistan, a local digital media industry group.  

Mujeeb said he fought back, taking away the pistol from the man holding him at gunpoint after he opened fire and hit the seat of Mujeeb’s car. Mujeeb handed the gun over to the police while filing a report on the incident.

Mujeeb founded the IMN three years ago, focusing on current issues in Gilgit-Baltistan, a part of the Kashmir region that borders Afghanistan and China. IMN has over 250,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 2,300 followers on YouTube.

He believes the attack may have been a failed abduction attempt and says the Gilgit-Baltistan government has not launched any investigation to find the attackers – possibly, he says, because  IMN’s Editor-in-Chief Shabbir Mir wrote an April 2022 report for The Express Tribune, one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, alleging that Gilgit-Baltitstan’s chief minister held a fake law degree.

CPJ emails to the office of the chief minister and the Gilgit-Baltitstan government’s secretariat did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Serhiy Guz.

The City TV report, which aired on August 7, featured local youth who wanted Elizabeth Goma, a Kasama district commissioner, to leave her position.

Around 9 p.m. on August 7, after the report aired, Goma called Chanda and said the journalist’s report had started “a war” that he “would not end” and accused Chanda of having disseminated “falsehoods,” according to a recording of the call. Chanda responded by reminding Goma that he contacted her for comment before the story aired, but Goma repeated that the journalist had started “a war.” Goma added that she considered Chanda a “son” and said the journalist had been “unfair,” before the line disconnected.

Separately, around 10 a.m. on August 8, Paul Mulenga, chairperson of a UPND youth league in Northern Province, where Kasama is the provincial capital, phoned Chanda in relation to the same broadcast and, in the local Bemba language, said “life is short” and that he would send political operatives to “sort out” the journalist, according to a recording of that call. Mulenga asked Chanda why City TV broadcast the story without notifying him and told the journalist not to report anything about the UPND. Then two other party officials also on the call—Moses Kanyanta, deputy provincial youth chairman, and Doreen Namuchenje, provincial women’s chairperson—repeated the threats.

Chanda told CPJ in a recent interview via messaging app that he has continued to work as a journalist but remained concerned that the UPND would send agents to harm him.

CPJ’s repeated calls to Goma, Mulenga, Namuchenje, and Kanyanta rang unanswered.

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

As Banned Books Week began Monday in the United States, a leading advocacy group published an updated report warning of a surge in right-wing efforts to censor and ban titles—many of them related to the struggles of marginalized peoples—in American schools. 

"More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature. 'More' is the operative word for this report on school book bans," begins the update to PEN America's Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students' First Amendment Rights, which was published in April and covered the first nine months of the 2021-22 scholastic year.

"This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship," PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel told The New York Times, adding that the effort "is ideologically motivated and politically expedient, and it needs to be understood as such in order to be confronted and addressed properly."

The revised report—which shares the Banned in the USA title with the first music album to ever carry a parental advisory sticker—notes that PEN America's Index of School Book Bans now lists at least 2,532 instances of 1,648 titles being banned. That's up from 1,586 banning incidents involving 1,145 books reported in the April publication.

The bans occurred in 138 school districts across 32 states. In 96% of cases, bans were enacted without following the best practice guidelines for challenging controversial titles outlined by the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship.

More than 40% of the banned books in the report deal with LGBTQ+ themes, while 21% "directly address issues of race and racism," 22% "contain sexual content," and 10% are "related to rights and activism," according to PEN America.

PEN America identified at least 50 national, state, and local groups pushing to ban or restrict books in U.S. schools.

The largest of these groups, the right-wing Moms for Liberty, has over 200 local chapters and has gained notoriety for its anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy, for vehemently opposing Covid-19 mask mandates in schools, and for spreading the baseless claim that one local school district was placing litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identify as cats.

Another right-wing group named in the report, MassResistance, is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that claims the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was "clearly a setup" and that there is a "Black Lives Matter and LGBT assault" on American schools.

The group also called parents who opposed its book-banning efforts "groomers," a slur conflating the LGBTQ+ community with pedophilia.

"Book challenges impede free expression rights, which must be the bedrock of public schools in an open, inclusive, and democratic society," PEN America said in the updated report. "These bans pose a dangerous precedent to those in and out of schools, intersecting with other movements to block or curtail the advances in civil rights for historically marginalized people."

"Against the backdrop of other efforts to roll back civil liberties and erode democratic norms," the group added, "the dynamics surrounding school book bans are a canary in the coal mine for the future of American democracy, public education, and free expression. We should heed this warning."

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

Bustillos, a veteran reporter based in Tehuacán in the central Mexican state of Puebla, currently works for privately owned news sites Domingo7 Tehuacán and Grupo Entiempo Comunicaciones, which post their coverage on Facebook. Bustillos told CPJ by phone on Wednesday, September 14, that two unidentified gunmen threatened him over his reporting the previous day. Bustillos said that the men approached him on a motorcycle around 4:30 p.m. while he walked on a street near the center of Tehuacán, a town about 150 miles southeast of Mexico City.

“One of them embraced me and showed me a pistol,” Bustillos said. “He said I should stop reporting. He took out the magazine of the gun, showed me the bullets and said that if I didn’t do as he said, that those would be for me.”

The other man waited on the motorcycle, Bustillos said, adding that he was not physically harmed during the incident. Bustillos said the men did not refer to specific coverage, and believes they may be affiliated with Las Burras, a local criminal gang linked to several violent incidents in the area in recent months, according to news reports.

“The brazen threat against Rodrigo Bustillos is more shocking evidence that reporters are targeted everywhere in a country that is experiencing a horrifically deadly year for the press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately guarantee Bustillos’ safety, determine the identity of his attackers, and bring them to justice.”

Bustillos said he covers a wide range of topics, including crime and safety. Most news articles and videos uploaded to the websites do not carry a byline, according to Bustillos, in some cases out of concern for the safety of the reporters.

On Sunday, September 11, Bustillos covered the discovery of a clandestine burial site in Tehuacán. According to his reports, which cited anonymous local law enforcement sources, the grave may have been used by Las Burras to dispose of victims. In another Domingo7 report by Bustillos on Wednesday, September 14, an alleged leader of the Las Burras gang was arrested in the wake of the discovery.

In recent weeks, there have been several shootings and executions that killed at least six people and that local law enforcement attributed to criminal gangs in Tehuacán, Bustillos said. One victim was a policeman fatally shot on September 5, according to a Primera Línea report.

Bustillos said he believes the threat may have been directly related to his coverage of the the gravesite and the gang leader’s arrest. He is still considering whether he will report the threat to authorities. “Reporting to local authorities here can frankly be risky, because there’s a lot of corruption. I’m not sure if I can trust them,” Bustillos said.

On Thursday, September 15, CPJ made several calls to the Tehuacán municipal government for comment, but the calls were not answered. (September 15 is a national holiday in Mexico.) CPJ made several attempts to reach the editors of Domingo7 and Grupo Entiempo via phone, but the calls were not answered.

CPJ helped the journalist contact the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which operates protection programs sanctioned by the federal government in Mexico City. On Wednesday, September 14, both Bustillos and a group official, who asked not to be named, confirmed via WhatsApp that the journalist is in the process of being enrolled in a protection program.

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. A record 13 journalists were killed in the country this year so far, according to CPJ research. At least three of the reporters were killed in direct relation to their work. CPJ is investigating another 10 killings to determine the motive.

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

In separate incidents on September 6 and 7, armed men dressed in Congolese military uniforms forced their way into the houses of Katoto, director of privately owned community radio station Amkeni Biakato in the country’s eastern Ituri province, and Luhavo, a reporter with privately owned radio stations The Voice of Ituri and Mont Bleu, which are also in the Ituri province, and privately owned news website Monde 24 based in Kinshasa, the capital, according to the two journalists and Christine Abedito, Ituri chapter president of the National Press Union of the Congo known as the UNPC, who all spoke with CPJ by phone and messaging app. The armed men threatened the journalists with death, beat them, and confiscated their work equipment, according to those same sources.

“Congolese authorities should urgently investigate the separate attacks on journalists Parfait Katoto and Picard Luhavo by armed men who appeared to be members of the military and hold those responsible to account,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “Journalists working in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo face enough dangers without worrying that soldiers from their own government may break down their doors and threaten to kill them.”

Ituri and North Kivu have been under military control since May 2021, when Congolese President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi declared a “state of siege” in the two provinces, which placed those areas under military control, according to media reports.

Luhavo and Katoto said the attacks caused body-wide pain and they’d sought treatment at local health centers.

Katoto told CPJ that around 8 p.m. on September 6, two men carrying guns entered the compound where he lives in the city of Biakato while he was watching a football match with a neighbor and accused him of disseminating false information about suspected members of the Maï-Maï rebel group killing government soldiers during an attack on September 5, which another local radio station had reported.

Katoto says he told the intruders that he had not reported on the incident, but they threw him to the ground, stomped on him, and punched him. They also seized his two phones and 12,000 Congolese francs (about US$6). The men said they’d return to kill him if he distributed information deemed favorable to the Maï-Maï.

Katoto said he reported the incident to Selemani Salambongo Mbida, the city chief of Biakato, and that his lawyer had begun to prepare a complaint to be filed to the military’s judicial authority.

CPJ’s calls to Selemani rang without answer.

Separately, Katoto faced similar threats in May 2021, when armed men robbed and threatened to kill him in his home, accusing him of denigrating the Congolese military by broadcasting allegations that soldiers had looted properties in Ituri province.

Around 1 a.m. on September 7, in the Ituri provincial capital of Bunia, three armed men who wore military uniforms forced their way into Luhavo’s home, broke down his bedroom door, and demanded his laptop and external hard drive.

Luhavo told CPJ over the phone that when he told the gunmen his computer and hard drive were at his office, they “grabbed me by my clothes and beat me up badly.” Before leaving, the men took his phone. “One of them made it clear to me that they would come back again to get what they need” or kill him, Luhavo said.

Luhavo’s home was again broken into during the night of Monday, September 12. Neighbors told Luhavo they saw two armed men in military uniforms enter his house. Luhavo had not slept at his home since the attack, but said he found it ransacked when he returned the next day. Nothing was taken.

Abedito told CPJ that she took Luhavo to the police to report the incident and contacted a lawyer, who filed a complaint to police on Luhavo’s behalf on September 8.

Ituri Congolese military spokesperson Lieutenant Jules Ngongo told CPJ via messaging app that he was unaware of the attacks on Katoto and Luhavo and promised to contact them. Ngongo did not answer CPJ’s follow-up calls on Wednesday, September 14, and Friday, September 16.

The police officer investigating Luhavo’s case, who asked to be identified as Martinique, told CPJ by phone that police are investigating the incidents.

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

The post How Drought and Growth Threaten the Waters of the Northern Rockies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Bader.

Mohammed Jubair, who is among those leaders, says the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army has threatened him for his work as head of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH). His group advocates for the repatriation of the refugees to their home villages and townships in Rakhine state, which lies across the border from Cox’s Bazar district.

“ARSA asked me to stop my work, otherwise they would kill me,” Jubair told BenarNews.

ARSA, formerly known as Al-Yaaqin, is the Rohingya insurgent group that launched coordinated deadly attacks on Burmese government military and police outposts in Rakhine that provoked the crackdown, which began on Aug. 25, 2017, and forced close to three-quarters of a million people to seek shelter in Bangladesh.

The United Nations and United States have since labeled the mass killings, burnings and rape allegedly committed by government forces and militiamen at Rohingya villages as a genocide.

Jubair took over as head of the ARSPH after the September 2021 assassination of Muhib Ullah, the society’s previous director, who had drawn international attention to the refugees’ plight and visited the White House in Washington.

For years since the 2017 exodus into Cox’s Bazar, Bangladeshi government officials denied that ARSA had a foothold or presence in the sprawling camps, which house about 1 million refugees near the frontier with Myanmar. But that changed with Muhib Ullah’s killing by a group of gunmen and other attacks that followed. 

In a report issued in June, Bangladesh police alleged that ARSA leader Ataullah Abu Ahmmar Jununi had ordered Ullah assassinated because he was more popular.

Jubair blamed ARSA for killing Rohingya leaders who call for refugees to repatriate to Rakhine state. He said that while ARSA claimed that its members were working to “defend and protect” Rohingya against state repression in Myanmar, they wouldn’t flinch in attacking refugees.

“ARSA never tolerates any Rohingya who are not part of their group,” he said. “They want to ensure their domination everywhere.”

Since the government confirmed ARSA’s existence in the camps following Ullah’s killing, thousands of Rohingya leaders and volunteers have joined police on nightly patrols.

Still, violence goes on. Six Rohingya were killed at their madrassa at the Balukhali camp less than a month after Muhib Ullah’s murder and volunteers with safety patrols say ARSA targets them for sharing information about crime in the camps.

Security volunteer Mohammad Harun said ARSA wanted to make the madrassa a base camp, but madrassa chief Maulana Akiz did not agree and, as a result, was among the six killed.

“No one is safe from ARSA. In the camps where ARSA members stay, people are afraid to go out even during the day,” Harun told BenarNews.

Since the unprecedented exodus into southeastern Bangladesh, not a single Rohingya refugee has been repatriated, and the prospect of Rohingya going home to Rakhine is further complicated by post-coup violence in what is now junta-ruled Myanmar.

Now, five years on, Rohingya say they feel trapped because they have little freedom of movement in the camps and are largely barred from leaving their camps’ confines. About 27,400 others were transferred to Bhashan Char, an island in the Bay of Bengal where the Bangladesh government built housing for about 100,000 of the refugees. Those on the island have complained about being unable to leave to visit family members in the mainland camps.

Noting the five-year anniversary, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar called on the “international community to redouble its efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and deliver justice to the Rohingya inside and outside Myanmar.

“It is long past time for the entirety of the international community to call these attacks what they are – genocide. The Myanmar military has yet to be held to account for this ultimate crime,” Tom Andrews said in a news release issued on Wednesday, the eve of the anniversary.

“It is critical that, once and for all, the international community hold the Myanmar military accountable for its atrocities,” Andrews said.

Police have said at least 121 Rohingya have been killed in the last five years at different camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, while 414 ARSA members have been arrested since Ullah’s killing.

Mohammad Kamran Hossain, additional superintendent of the 8th Armed Police Battalion, did not release details about ARSA’s presence in the camps.

“We are conducting drives to prevent crimes inside the Rohingya camps and root out the criminal groups including so-called ARSA,” he told BenarNews.

Hossain said about 11,000 Rohingya volunteers join police in patrolling the camps each night, adding that many of the volunteers are being victimized because of their efforts to alert police to ARSA activities.

Still, the patrols are having a positive effect in the camps.

“The activities of the criminals are being hindered due to the active role of the Majhi [Rohingya leader] and volunteers in the camp. That is why rebel groups are angry and attack them,” Hossain said, adding no one involved in crimes against Rohingya would be exempt from prosecution.

BenarNews was unable to contact ARSA leaders for a comment in response to the allegations.

‘In fear’ at every moment

Human rights activists described the Rohingya leaders as educated people working for repatriation and against illegal drug dealings and other criminal activities.

“Many educated Rohingya leaders were already being killed by terrorists. Especially after the killing of Muhib Ullah, many English-speaking Rohingya leaders have become silent while few are active because of risks to their lives,” Khin Mong, founder of the Rohingya Youth Association and a resident of the Unchiprang camp in Cox’s Bazar, told BenarNews.

Khin said he uses a pseudonym because of security concerns. While Ullah’s killing shocked the world, ARSA had already killed other pro-repatriation leaders because the rebels sought to establish their leadership in the camps, Khin said.

“All of us who are working in favor of repatriation and against various crimes in the camps, including drug and human trafficking, are in fear of losing our lives every moment,” Khin said.

Khin said pro-repatriation Rohingya leaders who were killed included Maulana Abdullah of the Jamtoli camp and Arif Ullah of the Balukhali camp in 2018; Mulovi Hasim in the Kutupalong camp and Abdul Matlab in the Leda camp in 2019; and Shawkat Ali in Kutupalong’s Lambasia camp in May 2021.

He said the victims’ families blamed ARSA for the killings.

Meanwhile, the executive director of Ain-O-Salish Kendra, the nation’s leading human rights organization, questioned law enforcers’ efforts to protect Rohingya.

“The level of risk for potential Rohingya leaders is increasing because the position of criminals is constantly strong in the camp area,” Nur Khan Liton told BenarNews.

He noted that the closure of the ARSPH office and restrictions on the organization’s leaders after Ullah’s killing had added to the dangers faced by Rohingya.

ARSPH leader Jubair wrote to the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) last month, informing it about the risks that he and his family face, according to a copy of the letter obtained by BenarNews.

Along with Jubair, 17 Christian Rohingya families who have been in transit camps since January 2020 because of a reported ARSA attack sent a letter to UNHCR requesting protection.

“Authorities later rebuilt our houses, but we are still living here in a transit camp due to fear of ARSA,” Saiful Islam Peter, one of 76 Christian Rohingya, told BenarNews.

Regina de la Portilla, a spokeswoman for UNHCR in Cox’s Bazar, told BenarNews that it was providing support to Rohingya Christians, just as it supports all of the refugees in the camps.

“The Government of Bangladesh is responsible for ensuring safety and security for the Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshis living nearby, and so it is per their guidelines that refugees may move between and outside the camps,” she said.

Observers noted that teachers, including Jubair, are facing their own threats from ARSA.

Rahmat Ullah, a teacher not related to Muhib Ullah who lives with his family at the Balukhali camp, was forced to leave Rakhine state because of his profession. Security volunteer Mohammad Harun said Rahmat Ullah was facing death and kidnapping threats here as well.

Asif Munir, an immigration and refugee affairs analyst, said the government must take some responsibility for the killings of Rohingya and other criminal activity in the camps.

“The authorities should be careful in this regard as the volunteers and organizers are now known enemies to rebel groups,” Munir told BenarNews.

Munir, who used to work as an official with the International Organization for Migration, said he was aware that many Rohingya youths hide from their camp homes at night because armed groups including ARSA can pressure or threaten them to join.

A criminology and police science professor, meanwhile, expressed concern about a lack of coordination among security enforcers at the camps.

“The traditional policing will not work at Rohingya camps. The police should discuss with the people who are at risk or vulnerable,” Md. Omar Faruk told BenarNews.

“There is a kind of conflict between the privileged and disadvantaged Rohingya in the camps. Many Rohingya feel they are better off here than in Rakhine, while educated Rohingya with better status think they will be better off if they go back,” said Faruk of the Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sharif Khiam and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

At the same time, the U.S. and South Korea began their biggest combined military exercise in four years on Monday as tensions remain high in the region after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. 

Exercise Pitch Black, which has been held every two years since 1981 but was paused for four years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, has come back with more participating countries than ever.

Three first-timers, Germany, Japan and South Korea, are among the 17 nations taking part.  They have sent 100 aircraft and 2,500 personnel to take part in drills that are taking place from Aug. 19 until Sept. 8.

Exercise Pitch Black aims to "enhance regional security through multinational interoperability and understanding," according to a statement from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF).

The exercise will include day and night flying and “features a range of realistic, simulated threats which can be found in a modern battle-space environment,” the RAAF said, noting that Exercise Pitch Black demonstrates “the high value we place on regional security and fostering closer ties throughout the Indo-Pacific region.”

Beijing has repeatedly criticized U.S.-led security initiatives and activities in the Indo-Pacific, calling them attempts by the West to forge “an Asian version of NATO.”

‘Response from Europe’

Chinese state media said Exercise Pitch Black is designed “to pull more countries into an anti-China united frontline and show the unity of the West to pressure China over the Taiwan question.”

The exercise “may add oil to the flames as the Asia-Pacific region is experiencing instability with the U.S.' rampant provocations in the region,” said the hawkish Chinese tabloid Global Times.

“I think the Chinese are seeking to use it to try to pressure a new Australian government to distance themselves from the U.S.,” said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think tank.

“They will fail in these efforts,” Davis said.

Chinese analysts were quoted in state-run media as saying that exercises such as Pitch Black, with participants coming from all corners of the world, may “give an illusion that many countries have been rallied to counter a certain country” – China.

Germany deployed six Eurofighter Typhoons and support aircraft to the exercise.

German Air Force chief Ingo Gerhartz denied that Berlin’s participation in the exercise was “sending any threatening message towards China.”

Gerhartz told reporters last week that the German aircraft would use civilian air traffic routes and that no passage of the Taiwan Strait was planned, according to Reuters.

"We will fly at an altitude of more than 10 kilometers [6 miles] and barely touch the South China Sea, and we will move on international routes." 

Yet the presence of German Eurofighters indicates that E.U. states “recognize the challenge that China poses to the international system,” said ASPI’s Davis.

“There is a greater response from Europe and not just focused on European security issues,” he added.

“The worst signal would be to cancel exercises under Chinese pressure that would reinforce Beijing's perspective that the U.S. lacks resolve and only encourage them to be more aggressive vis a vis Taiwan and the South China Sea,” the analyst told RFA.

Exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield

Meanwhile agencies reported that the annual U.S.-South Korea military drills Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) started on Monday.

This year’s drills are reportedly the largest in four years and will continue for ten days, involving tens of thousands of troops from the two nations’ armies, navies, and air forces.

In the last few years, the UFS has been virtual because of COVID and also to make room for diplomatic negotiations with North Korea.  

With the drills taking place in South Korea again, North Korea has “denounced the exercise as a dress rehearsal for northward invasion,” Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.

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

Two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives this week threatened to subpoena FTI Consulting if it continues refusing to comply with a request for information about the firm's work for fossil fuel interests.

"FTI may be the first communications agency to be subpoenaed in an investigation such as this one, but they will not be the last."

Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Katie Porter (D-Calif.), head of the panel's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, made the threat in a Wednesday letter to Steven H. Gunby, the firm's president and CEO.

Grijalva and Porter previously sent requests for materials to Gunby and the leaders of four other public relations firms—Blue Advertising, DDC Advocacy, Singer Associates, and Story Partners—plus the American Petroleum Institute, a fossil fuel industry trade group, on June 12.

"In the subsequent weeks, our staff has had multiple conversations with FTI's representation in a good-faith effort to accommodate any reasonable concerns FTI might have regarding this request," the new letter explains. "FTI has not wavered in its blanket refusal to provide even the most basic information about its clients or descriptions of the grounds for its refusal beyond the vaguest assertions of confidentiality and privileges."

"FTI has provided no indication that this obstruction of congressional oversight will come to an end voluntarily," the document adds. "Unless FTI Consulting produces all responsive documents by 5:00 pm on August 24, 2022, the committee will be forced to consider all of its options for obtaining this information, including, but not limited to, authorizing and issuing a subpoena."

In a statement to The Hill, an FTI spokesperson said that "our company takes the subcommittee's request very seriously. We continue to be in regular contact with subcommittee staff as we progress our efforts to be responsive to the chair's request in a manner consistent with our legal obligations to preserve our clients' confidentiality and privileges."

Meanwhile, Duncan Meisel, the executive director of Clean Creatives—a campaign that works to expose the link between climate misinformation and advertising and PR agencies—welcomed the Democrats' latest move.

"FTI Consulting is responsible for some of the most misleading fossil fuel campaigns in operation today," Meisel said. "FTI's refusal to cooperate with this congressional inquiry shows that they have something to hide, which will reveal the dangerous ways agencies like theirs have promoted fossil fuel greenwash and misinformation."

"The public deserves to know the ways in which agencies have polluted the debate about climate change," he added, "and FTI's resistance to participate in this discussion will do damage to their reputation, and the reputation of the communications industry they are a part of."

According to Meisel, "FTI may be the first communications agency to be subpoenaed in an investigation such as this one, but they will not be the last—unless the PR and ad industry cleans up its act, and stops working for the fossil fuel industry."

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

Two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives this week threatened to subpoena FTI Consulting if it continues refusing to comply with a request for information about the firm's work for fossil fuel interests.

"FTI may be the first communications agency to be subpoenaed in an investigation such as this one, but they will not be the last."

Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Katie Porter (D-Calif.), head of the panel's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, made the threat in a Wednesday letter to Steven H. Gunby, the firm's president and CEO.

Grijalva and Porter previously sent requests for materials to Gunby and the leaders of four other public relations firms—Blue Advertising, DDC Advocacy, Singer Associates, and Story Partners—plus the American Petroleum Institute, a fossil fuel industry trade group, on June 12.

"In the subsequent weeks, our staff has had multiple conversations with FTI's representation in a good-faith effort to accommodate any reasonable concerns FTI might have regarding this request," the new letter explains. "FTI has not wavered in its blanket refusal to provide even the most basic information about its clients or descriptions of the grounds for its refusal beyond the vaguest assertions of confidentiality and privileges."

"FTI has provided no indication that this obstruction of congressional oversight will come to an end voluntarily," the document adds. "Unless FTI Consulting produces all responsive documents by 5:00 pm on August 24, 2022, the committee will be forced to consider all of its options for obtaining this information, including, but not limited to, authorizing and issuing a subpoena."

In a statement to The Hill, an FTI spokesperson said that "our company takes the subcommittee's request very seriously. We continue to be in regular contact with subcommittee staff as we progress our efforts to be responsive to the chair's request in a manner consistent with our legal obligations to preserve our clients' confidentiality and privileges."

Meanwhile, Duncan Meisel, the executive director of Clean Creatives—a campaign that works to expose the link between climate misinformation and advertising and PR agencies—welcomed the Democrats' latest move.

"FTI Consulting is responsible for some of the most misleading fossil fuel campaigns in operation today," Meisel said. "FTI's refusal to cooperate with this congressional inquiry shows that they have something to hide, which will reveal the dangerous ways agencies like theirs have promoted fossil fuel greenwash and misinformation."

"The public deserves to know the ways in which agencies have polluted the debate about climate change," he added, "and FTI's resistance to participate in this discussion will do damage to their reputation, and the reputation of the communications industry they are a part of."

According to Meisel, "FTI may be the first communications agency to be subpoenaed in an investigation such as this one, but they will not be the last—unless the PR and ad industry cleans up its act, and stops working for the fossil fuel industry."

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

Two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives this week threatened to subpoena FTI Consulting if it continues refusing to comply with a request for information about the firm's work for fossil fuel interests.

"FTI may be the first communications agency to be subpoenaed in an investigation such as this one, but they will not be the last."

Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Katie Porter (D-Calif.), head of the panel's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, made the threat in a Wednesday letter to Steven H. Gunby, the firm's president and CEO.

Grijalva and Porter previously sent requests for materials to Gunby and the leaders of four other public relations firms—Blue Advertising, DDC Advocacy, Singer Associates, and Story Partners—plus the American Petroleum Institute, a fossil fuel industry trade group, on June 12.

"In the subsequent weeks, our staff has had multiple conversations with FTI's representation in a good-faith effort to accommodate any reasonable concerns FTI might have regarding this request," the new letter explains. "FTI has not wavered in its blanket refusal to provide even the most basic information about its clients or descriptions of the grounds for its refusal beyond the vaguest assertions of confidentiality and privileges."

"FTI has provided no indication that this obstruction of congressional oversight will come to an end voluntarily," the document adds. "Unless FTI Consulting produces all responsive documents by 5:00 pm on August 24, 2022, the committee will be forced to consider all of its options for obtaining this information, including, but not limited to, authorizing and issuing a subpoena."

In a statement to The Hill, an FTI spokesperson said that "our company takes the subcommittee's request very seriously. We continue to be in regular contact with subcommittee staff as we progress our efforts to be responsive to the chair's request in a manner consistent with our legal obligations to preserve our clients' confidentiality and privileges."

Meanwhile, Duncan Meisel, the executive director of Clean Creatives—a campaign that works to expose the link between climate misinformation and advertising and PR agencies—welcomed the Democrats' latest move.

"FTI Consulting is responsible for some of the most misleading fossil fuel campaigns in operation today," Meisel said. "FTI's refusal to cooperate with this congressional inquiry shows that they have something to hide, which will reveal the dangerous ways agencies like theirs have promoted fossil fuel greenwash and misinformation."

"The public deserves to know the ways in which agencies have polluted the debate about climate change," he added, "and FTI's resistance to participate in this discussion will do damage to their reputation, and the reputation of the communications industry they are a part of."

According to Meisel, "FTI may be the first communications agency to be subpoenaed in an investigation such as this one, but they will not be the last—unless the PR and ad industry cleans up its act, and stops working for the fossil fuel industry."

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

On Monday, August 15, two armed Taliban members beat Raufi, an anchor and reporter with Afghanistan’s independent Ariana News TV station, while he was recording the aftermath of an explosion in front of Ariana’s headquarters in the Bayat Media Center in the capital of Kabul, according to media reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

The men confiscated the mobile phone Raufi was using to film the incident and one of the men slapped him in the face, causing his mouth to bleed. Raufi told CPJ that he had identified himself as a journalist and shown his press ID card when one of the men beat him for several minutes with a rifle, on his head, shoulder, back, and legs.

The beating continued until a Taliban commander in the area to investigate the explosion ordered the men to take Raufi to a hospital for medical treatment. Raufi said the beating has left him with two scars on his head, an injured right shoulder, limited mobility in his right hand, and injuries to his back and knee that have made him barely able to walk.

“The brutal attack on Afghan journalist Saboor Raufi, and the threats against him for talking about the attack, highlight the dangers faced by Afghan journalists in the year since the Taliban took back control of the country,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “Taliban leaders must investigate this attack, hold its perpetrators responsible, and keep its promise to respect press freedom.”

Raufi told CPJ that on the night of the beating, after he had responded to other journalists’ questions about the incident, he received a call from an unknown number. The caller warned him that he and his family’s lives would be in danger if he didn’t stop talking to the media about the beating and accused him of being a “disrespectful Pashtun who propagates against the Pashtun government.” Rafui replied that he is a journalist and had reported the Taliban aggression against him in that capacity.

Raufi, who has worked for 13 years as a presenter, news anchor, and reporter for Ariana News and Ariana Television Network, says he fears for his life and hasn’t been able to return to his job.

CPJ contacted Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response. 

CPJ’s reporting on Afghanistan’s media crisis has documented the pressure placed on journalists and news outlets like Ariana since the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

Mandeep Dhaliwal is the director of HIV and health at the UN Development Programme (UNDP). She spoke to Conor Lennon from UN News ahead of the 2022 International AIDS Conference.

She warned that the UN, and other organizations, are losing ground in the fight against the disease.

This content originally appeared on UN News and was authored by United Nations.

The shipadi is a species of parasitic Cordyceps fungi whose spores infect caterpillars, causing them to crawl upwards before killing them. After the caterpillar dies, the fruit of the fungus grows out of its head in a bid to further spread its spores.

While shipadi grow mainly in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, where they are known as “yartsa gunbu,” the Myanmar variant is found only on the ground, trees, and glaciers of northern Kachin state’s remote Puta-O region, near Myanmar’s borders with India and China.

The ethnic Rawan who inhabit the region hunt for the fungus they call “Poe Say Nwe Pin” in May and June each year, when the weather warms and the ice has thawed. The highly-coveted golden-colored shipadi is mostly found on the glaciers of Phonrin Razi, Phangram Razi, and Madwe, and can appear as infrequently as once every four years.

Aung Than, a local trader, told RFA Burmese that prior to the pandemic, merchants exported the majority of their shipadi to China, where they could expect healthy profits due to their use in traditional Chinese medicine as a treatment for kidney disease. However, China closed its borders soon after the coronavirus began to spread globally in early 2020, forcing shipadi traders to find a new market for their product.

“In the past, when border crossing was easy, they bought shipadi from us,” he said.

“But we cannot go there anymore and they can't come to us either. It’s been more than two years now since I lost the market in China.”

Aung Than said that since the pandemic, domestic demand had grown for shipadi, but traders could no longer expect to earn the profits they once had.

Other Rawan shipadi traders in Kachin state told RFA that the market had been further impacted by fighting between junta troops and ethnic Kachin rebels since the military seized control of Myanmar in a coup on Feb. 1, 2021.

Daw Hla, the owner of an herbal store in Puta-O, said she regularly sold to customers from Myanmar’s big cities, including Yangon and Mandalay, prior to the coup. But an increase in clashes between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the military since the takeover had made it more dangerous to hunt shipadi and ship it out of the region, she said.

“I used to send them to Yangon, Naypyidaw and other cities, as well as all over Kachin state. I’d send them as soon as I got the orders,” she said.

“The transportation was OK and sales were good in the past. But this year, I don’t have much [shipadi] to sell. There’s little product to be had this year – it’s getting very rare.”

Sources told RFA that the KIA had recently seized a military camp in Puta-O’s Tsum Pi Yang village, and that fighting along the main road from Puta-O to the Kachin state capital Myitkyina had become particularly fierce since the anniversary of the coup, making it extremely dangerous to travel in the area.

Residents of Puta-O township form groups of five or six each year to climb the mountains and search for shipadi, and can spend months away from home during the hunt.

One resident named Lan Wan Ransan told RFA that hunting shipadi has always been risky, particularly during the rainy season when flash floods are common. Other times, he said, the snow and ice may not have thawed enough, making the trek into the mountains deadly and the search for shipadi nearly impossible.

“There are many difficulties along the way,” he said.

Normally, a single shipadi could fetch 2,000-3,000 kyats (U.S. $1-1.50), Lan Wan Ransan said, but the price has doubled this year, due to the added danger of the conflict. Most hunters will only find around 50 shipadis this year, he added, calling it a significant decrease from years past.

In addition to shipadi, the Rawan also gather herbs in the mountains of Puta-O that are rarely found elsewhere, including the roots of the Khamtauk, Machit, Taushau, and Kyauk Letwar plants, as well as ice ginseng. However, none are as highly-prized as the caterpillar fungus from the glaciers of northern Kachin state, they say.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

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

Barely a month ago we lived in a world where all Americans had the right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy. For much of the country, that’s now history.

Just weeks ago, states could implement at least some common-sense limits on carrying guns. Public school employees couldn’t impose their religious practices on students. And the EPA could hold back our climate disaster by regulating planet-heating carbon emissions from coal plants.

The danger from the Republican judges is only growing.

Thanks to an appalling power grab by the Supreme Court’s conservatives, all that’s been demolished too. And they’ve hinted that the right to take contraception, marry someone regardless of your sexual orientation, and even to choose your own elected representatives could be next.

How did we get to this place? Because Republicans spent decades cheating their way to a right-wing Supreme Court majority that enacts an extremist agenda, rather than interpreting the law.

When the very close presidential election in 2000 turned on Florida, five GOP justices halted the vote count, stealing the election for the man most voters rejected, George W. Bush. In return, Bush appointed right-wing judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

In 2016, the Republican Senate defied the Constitution by refusing to let President Obama fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Instead, they let another voter-rejected president, Donald Trump, install right-winger Neil Gorsuch. Finally, even as voting was underway in the 2020 election, Republicans rush-approved Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment.

So we now have a hard-right Supreme Court drunk on its own power.

We need a fair balance—and we don’t have decades to set things right. We need to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices right now, so we have judges who believe in privacy, who allow our government to protect our children from gun massacres, and who allow common sense steps to protect our future from climate change.

Republican politicians will say that changing the number of justices represents “politicizing” the Court. But it is the Republican-appointed justices who have entered politics, unleashing gun lovers to run wild, vetoing climate change regulations, canceling abortion rights, and threatening other personal freedoms.

The danger from the Republican judges is only growing.

The best way to curtail the power of our own black-robed fundamentalists is to increase the size of the Supreme Court.

Their latest project is destroying the power of regulatory agencies. We will be left with a government that cannot protect babies from dangerous cribs and hazardous toys, cannot prohibit unsafe drugs and contaminated food, cannot protect workers from dangerous workplaces, and cannot limit climate-ravaging carbon emissions.

If we allow this to continue, our political system will look a good deal more like Iran’s theocracy. Like the United States, Iran has elections. But reactionary, fundamentalist religious leaders there set election rules, decide who can run, and often override the decisions of the elected government.

The Supreme Court’s six conservative justices seem dead-set on playing this role here in our system. So the best way to curtail the power of our own black-robed fundamentalists is to increase the size of the Supreme Court.

Under the Constitution, it is for Congress to decide how many justices there will be. Over the years Congress has changed the number six times. It’s time to change them again.

For much of American history, there’s been one justice for each judicial circuit. Today we have 13 circuits, so we should have 13 justices. We cannot simply accept the unfairness of the Republican judicial takeover. We can and must act to restore balance to protect our rights, our lives, and our planet.

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

On the evening of June 29, two police officers in Foya district, in northern Lofa county, threatened to shoot Kollie, a reporter with state-owned Liberia Broadcasting System, and Korzawu, a reporter and video editor for the privately owned Fortune TV Liberia online broadcaster and news website, according to the journalists, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and a statement by the local Press Union of Liberia. 

Police stopped the journalists, who were reporting on the results of June 28 senatorial elections, while Kollie and Korzawu were on their way to cover a confrontation between supporters of the rival Unity Party and Coalition for Democratic Change political parties, they said.

The officers demanded to know where the journalists were going, and then pulled out their guns and threatened to shoot them if they did not return to their hotel, Kollie and Korzawu told CPJ. One officer then slapped Kollie in the face so hard that the journalist lost his balance, and punched him twice in the neck, according to those sources.

“Authorities in Liberia must investigate police officers’ threatening of journalists Emmanuel Kollie and Amas P. Korzawu and their assault of Kollie, identify those responsible, and hold them accountable,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in Durban, South Africa. “Liberian security forces are too often involved in attacks on members of the press, and the lack of accountability is alarming.” 

The journalists returned to their hotel after the incident, saying they feared for their lives. Kollie and Korzawu told CPJ they decided not to file a police complaint because they did not know the officers’ names, as they were wearing jackets that covered their name tags.

Kollie told CPJ on July 6 that he was taking pain medication for his neck.

CPJ’s call and text messes to Liberia police spokesperson Moses Carter went unanswered.

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

On June 3, the Kirovsky District Court in the central city of Yekaterinburg fined the independent Vecherniye Vedomosti newspaper 150,000 rubles (US$2,415) for “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces” in its reporting on Telegram, according to the outlet, media reports, and Vecherniye Vedomosti director Guzela Aitkulova, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Separately, on June 5, the Svetlogorsk City Court in the western Kaliningrad region ruled that a list of soldiers killed in Ukraine, published by the privately-owned Pskov-based news website 60.ru, constituted “classified information,” leading the website to take the list down to avoid facing criminal charges, according to multiple media reports. 60.ru’s list had been compiled from information openly published by official sources, according to those reports.

“Russian authorities, after criminalizing the publication of so-called false information about the war in Ukraine, prosecuting journalists, and blocking dozens of news websites, are continuing their effort to silence outlets that report on military casualties and anti-war protests in Russia,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must overturn the fine imposed on Vecherniye Vedomosti, allow 60.ru to publish freely, and allow journalists to do their jobs.”

The fine of Vecherniye Vedomosti, issued to the newspaper’s parent company Technotorg, stemmed from a March 18 Telegram post by the outlet covering the detention of an artist who allegedly distributed anti-war stickers in the streets of Yekaterinburg, according to Aitkulova and the news reports on that case.

Vecherniye Vedomosti’s Telegram post featured a blurred picture of those stickers, Aitkulova told CPJ, saying there were “no words about the Russian army” in the post.

On June 6, authorities also informed Aitkulova that they were investigating another 54 Telegram posts by the outlet that also allegedly discredited the armed forces, she said. 

“We are outraged that we are, in fact, being punished precisely for our journalistic activities,” Aitkulova told CPJ. “It all looks like revenge for our independent position. And an attempt to destroy us without blocking us – by crushing us financially.”

She said Technotorg intended to appeal the June 3 ruling, and that no hearings concerning the other posts had been scheduled. CPJ emailed the Kirovsky District Court for comment, but did not receive any response.

In its ruling against 60.ru, sparked by a complaint filed by a military prosecutor, the Svetlogorsk City Court said that listing the names of Svetlogorsk residents who died as soldiers in Ukraine constituted the unlawful publishing of classified information, which could be punished by up to seven years in a penal colony, according to the Russian criminal code and media reports.

The state media regulator Roskomnadzor is also authorized by law to block outlets found to have shared such information.

After the court’s decision, a number of online publications associated with the Shkulev Media Holding media network, including 60.ru and 74.ru, removed webpages in memory of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine citing “the safety of journalists,” according to the nongovernmental group Roskomsvoboda.

When CPJ emailed the Svetlogorsk City Court, a representative sent a press release published on June 8 which stated that an unnamed website published “information revealing losses of personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation during a special operation, names, and personal details of those killed.”

CPJ emailed 60.ru and 74.ru for comment, but did not receive any response.

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

On June 1, Damad, host of the program “Al-Mohayed” on the public TV broadcaster Iraqia, aired an interview with al-Taei, a freelance writer, in which al-Taei criticized Iraq’s judicial system and the leadership of Iran.

On June 2, the Karkh Courthouse in Baghdad issued a warrant for al-Taei’s arrest over his comments, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview. Al-Taei, who lives in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil, told CPJ on Tuesday, June 7, that he remained free and believed that local authorities would not comply with the arrest order.

In a statement on Tuesday, Iraqi authorities said unnamed journalists could face charges under Articles 226 and 229 of the penal code, which criminalize insulting the courts. If charged and convicted under Article 226, the journalists could face a fine and prison terms of up to seven years; Article 229 imposes a fine and prison terms of up to three years.

“Iraqi authorities must cease their harassment of journalists Sarmad al-Taei and Saadoun Damad at once. Journalists should not face arrest and potential criminal charges over their political commentary,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour, in Washington, D.C. “Instead of threatening journalists with detention, Iraqi authorities should work to protect members of the press from threats and intimidation.”

Al-Taei is the former editor-in-chief of the Al-Alam newspaper, and now contributes to the website Al-Monitor and other media outlets, he said, adding that, “I criticize a lot, especially the [Iranian] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Iraqia took “Al-Mohayed” off the air shortly after al-Taei made those comments, according to al-Taei and an employee of the broadcaster who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of prosecution. The show has been suspended, according to news reports and the employee who spoke to CPJ.

The Iraqi Media Network coalition of broadcasters, which includes Iraqia, aired a statement later that day saying it “regrets the offense” made by a guest on one of its shows.

After the program aired, armed crowds surrounded Iraqia’s office in Baghdad, and many pro-Iranian Twitter users called for al-Taei and Damad to be “punished” and arrested, according to news reports and tweets reviewed by CPJ.

On June 2, the Iraqi Judicial Association, a professional group of judges, issued a statement accusing unnamed journalists of being part of a “systematic, planned, and continuous campaign to target the Iraqi judiciary,” and the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court said in a statement that there was “an agenda against the judiciary system.”

The Iraqi Communications and Media Commission, which oversees media outlets in the country, also issued a statement decrying “unprofessional offenses against Iraqi national symbols.”

Al-Taei said that he and Damad had been targeted in “a smear campaign” by people affiliated with Iranian militias, which had resulted in the suspensions of his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Twitter’s press office replied to an email from CPJ saying that al-Taei’s account had been suspended “by mistake,” but the account remained suspended at the time of publication. Facebook did not reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.

CPJ emailed the Supreme Judicial Council in Iraq, the Iraqi Media Network, and the Communications and Media Commission for comment, but did not receive any replies.

CPJ called the Karkh Courthouse in Baghdad for comment, but the call did not connect; CPJ also emailed the court, but received an error message that the email could not be received.

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

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Sam Fowles.

Around 6:30 p.m. on May 28, a group of about 15 people gathered in front of the building where Castor lives with his family in the city of São Paulo, attempted to enter the building, and threatened to “break everything” in his apartment, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Castor told CPJ that, earlier that afternoon, he had filmed three municipal guards hitting a woman and spraying her with what appeared to be pepper spray during a security operation targeting drug users on Helvetia street in downtown São Paulo. He shared the video on Instagram and Twitter, and it was broadcast later that day by TV Globo and embedded by other media outlets.

Local residents who supported the police action and angry with Castor for documenting and exposing the police abuse sent threatening messages via neighborhood WhatsApp groups and gathered outside his residence to confront him, according to news reports and the journalist, who added that threatening messages were also posted on Telegram neighborhood groups.

“Authorities in São Paulo must promptly and thoroughly investigate the alarming escalation of threats and harassment against photojournalist Caio Castor and immediately adopt all necessary measures to ensure his and his family’s safety,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Journalists play a vital role in documenting and exposing alleged police brutality and human rights violations, and they must be able to do so without risking reprisal by security forces or anyone else.” 

Castor told CPJ that the group was buzzing the intercom and when he picked up, one man yelled, “You bastard, we’ll get up there! We’ll break into your apartment! We’ll break everything.” A friend of Castor called the São Paulo state civil police, he said, and the group dispersed when a patrol car arrived shortly after 7 p.m.

Since May 11, São Paulo city municipal guard and São Paulo state police forces have been conducting frequent operations targeting hundreds of drug users in the area known as “crackland” in downtown São Paulo, forcing the groups to displace and relocate to other areas, according to news reports.

Castor said that during the hours after he posted the video on Instagram at around 2 p.m., members of WhatsApp and Telegram neighborhood resident groups started to post intimidating and threatening messages. Members of the groups also shared his name and address.

According to screenshots CPJ reviewed,messages included threats such as, “[I] want to beat up that guy,” “I hope this person is the next victim.” They also called him an “idiot” and “defender of criminals who film the part that interest him to harm those who are working,” and accused him of “working for organized crime.”

At least two people messaged him on Instagram warning him about the Telegram group members, according to screenshots CPJ reviewed. One member said they “want the death of the drug users and anyone who helps them, including you. They know you live on Helvetia street, they are really angry.”

“In a few hours, the angry speeches in the groups escalated to a physical presence in my building,” Castor told CPJ. “We turned off the lights. They were ringing the intercom repeatedly. At some point, I answered. When one of them yelled they were going to come up and break everything, it was a shock. I thought, we’re screwed.”

Castor filed a police report, which CPJ reviewed, the night of May 28.

Castor told CPJ he and his family left the apartment on the morning of May 29 and haven’t returned since then, fearing for their safety.

Castor told CPJ that, following the May 11 policing operations, a group of drug users had settled on Helvetia street, where he lives, and that local residents formed groups on WhatsApp and Telegram to discuss how to respond to the situation. According to Castor and to screenshots CPJ reviewed, several residents expressed support for the police’s brutal repression of drug users and homeless people. “I thought this was too little,” said one person in the group, referring to the incident Castor filmed.

The press office of the São Paulo State Public Security Secretary said in an email that the journalist “was briefed about the six month deadline to present criminal charges against the perpetrators,” but did not answer CPJ’s questions about the investigation of the incident nor about measures to protect Castor and his family.

The São Paulo city communications secretary said in an email that the Municipal Secretary for Urban Security has “placed on leave the agents filmed [hitting and using pepper spray] and opened internal investigations into the facts.”

Castor has worked as a freelance photojournalist, reporter, and video editor for 10 years, covering human rights, policing, and environmental issues for several national and international outlets including El País, A Pública, BBC Brasil, The Intercept Brasil, and Repórter Brasil.

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

The President of the Federated States of Micronesia says he has serious concerns about the details of two leaked Chinese government documents to be tabled at a meeting next week.

President David Panuelo warns the sovereignty of the Pacific Island countries is at stake, and that the outcome of one of the documents could result in a cold war or even a world war.

Panuelo has written to 18 Pacific leaders — including New Zealand, Australia, and the Secretary-General of the Pacific Islands Forum — specifically about the China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision.

• READ MORE: President David Panuelo’s letter to Pacific leaders
• Read the Chinese action plan
• Blinken lays out US strategy to counter China as rivalry grows
• Pacific media freedom threatened on by China

The other document is a five-year plan to implement the outcomes into action.

In his letter he said the Common Development Vision and Monday’s meeting was a “smokescreen” for a larger agenda, and further warned that China was looking to exert more control over Pacific nations’ sovereignty and that this document threatened to bring at the very least a new Cold War era but in the worst-case scenario, a world war.

He has urged leaders in the region to look at it carefully before making any decisions.

In particular, Panuelo noted that the Vision sought to “fundamentally alter what used to be bilateral relations with China into multilateral issues”.

Ensuring ‘Chinese control’
The Vision he added sought to “… ensure Chinese control of ‘traditional and non-traditional security” of our islands, including through law enforcement training, supplying, and joint enforcement efforts, which can be used for the protection of Chinese assets and citizens.

It suggests “cooperation on network and governance” and “cybersecurity” and “equal emphasis on development and security”, and that there shall be “economic development and protection of national security and public interests”.

“The Common Development Vision seeks to ensure Chinese influence in government through ‘collaborative’ policy planning and political exchanges, including diplomatic training, in addition to an increase in Chinese media relationships in the Pacific …,” he said.

“The Common Development Vision seeks Chinese control and ownership of our communications infrastructure, as well as customs and quarantine infrastructure …. for the purpose of biodata collection and mass surveillance of those residing in, entering, and leaving our islands, ostensibly to occur in part through cybersecurity partnership.”

The Vision he said “… seeks Chinese control of our collective fisheries and extractive resource sectors, including free trade agreements, marine spatial planning, deep-sea mining, and extensive public and private sector loan-taking through the Belt and Road Initiative via the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.”

Panuelo said the proposed China-Pacific leaders meeting on Monday in Fiji was intended to “shift those of us with diplomatic relations with China very closely into Beijing’s orbit, intrinsically tying the whole of our countries and societies to them.

“The practical impacts, however, of Chinese control over our communications infrastructure, our ocean territory and the resources within them, and our security space, aside from impacts on our sovereignty is that it increases the chances of China getting into conflict with Australia, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand, on the day when Beijing decides to invade Taiwan.

China’s goal – ‘take Taiwan’
“To be clear, that’s China’s goal: to take Taiwan. Peacefully, if possible; through war, if necessary.”

Panuelo said the FSM would attend Monday’s meeting and would reject both documents “on the premise that we believe the proposed agreement needlessly heightens geopolitical tensions, and that the agreement threatens regional stability and security, including both my country’s Great Friendship with China and my country’s Enduring Partnership with the United States.”

He said the Vision and meeting were a “smokescreen for a larger agenda”.

“Despite our ceaseless and accurate howls that Climate Change represents the single-most existential security threat to our islands, the Common Development Vision threatens to bring a new Cold war era at best, and a World War at worst.”

He said the only way to maintain the relationship with Beijing was to focus exclusively on economic and technical cooperation.

Panuelo hoped that by alerting his Pacific colleagues of developments that “… we can collectively take the steps necessary to prevent any intensified conflict, and possible breakout of war, from ever happening in the first place”.

“I believe that Australia needs to take climate change more seriously and urgently. I believe that the United States should have a diplomatic presence in all sovereign Pacific Islands Countries, and step-up its assistance to all islands, to include its own states and territories in the Pacific.”

Not a justification
Panuelo summed up: “However, it is my view that the shortcomings of our allies are not a justification for condemning the leaders who succeed us in having to accept a war that we failed to recognise was coming and failed to prevent from occurring.

“We can only reassert the rightful focus on climate change as our region’s most existential threat by taking every single possible action to promote peace and harmony across our Blue Pacific Continent.”

Panuelo said his cabinet has suggested the FSM resist the objectives of the documents and the nation maintain its own bilateral agenda for development and engagement with China.

He also said the documents would open up Pacific countries to having phone calls and emails intercepted and overheard.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi is currently visiting several Pacific countries.

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.

Over the past 50 years, countries have signed thousands of treaties that protect foreign investors from government actions. These treaties are like contracts between national governments, meant to entice investors to bring in projects with the promise of local jobs and access to new technologies.

But now, as countries try to phase out fossil fuels to slow climate change, these agreements could leave the public facing overwhelming legal and financial risks.

The treaties allow investors to sue governments for compensation in a process called investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. In short, investors could use ISDS clauses to demand compensation in response to government actions to limit fossil fuels, such as canceling pipelines and denying drilling permits. For example, TC Energy, a Canadian company, is currently seeking more than US$15 billion over U.S. President Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

In a study published May 5, 2022, in the journal Science, we estimate that countries would face up to $340 billion in legal and financial risks for canceling fossil fuel projects that are subject to treaties with ISDS clauses.

That’s more than countries worldwide put into climate adaptation and mitigation measures combined in fiscal year 2019, and it doesn’t include the risks of phasing out coal investments or canceling fossil fuel infrastructure projects, like pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals. It means that money countries might otherwise spend to build a low-carbon future could instead go to the very industries that have knowingly been fueling climate change, severely jeopardizing countries’ capacity to propel the green energy transition forward.

Massive potential payouts

Of the world’s 55,206 upstream oil and gas projects that are in the early stages of development, we identified 10,506 projects – 19% of the total – that were protected by 334 treaties providing access to ISDS.

That number could be much higher. We could only identify the headquarters of project owners, not the overall corporate structures of the investments, due to limited data. We also know that law firms are advising clients in the industry to structure investments to ensure access to ISDS, through processes such as using subsidiaries in countries with treaty protections.

Depending upon future oil and gas prices, we found that the total net present value of those projects is expected to reach $60 billion to $234 billion. If countries cancel these protected projects, foreign investors could sue for financial compensation in line with these valuations.

Doing so would put several low- and middle-income countries at severe risk. Mozambique, Guyana and Venezuela could each face over $20 billion in potential losses from ISDS claims.

If countries also cancel oil and gas projects that are further along in development but are not yet producing, they face more risk. We found that 12% of those projects worldwide are protected by investment treaties, and their investors could sue for $32 billion to $106 billion.

Canceling approved projects could prove exceptionally risky for countries like Kazakhstan, which could lose $6 billion to $18 billion, and Indonesia, with $3 billion to $4 billion at risk.

Canceling coal investments or fossil fuel infrastructure projects, like pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals, could lead to even more claims.

Countries already feel regulatory chill

There have been at least 231 ISDS cases involving fossil fuels so far. Just the threat of massive payouts to investors could cause many countries to delay climate mitigation policies, causing a so-called “regulatory chill.”

Both Denmark and New Zealand, for example, seem to have designed their fossil fuel phaseout plans specifically to minimize their exposure to ISDS. Some climate policy experts have suggested that Denmark may have chosen 2050 as the end date for oil and gas extraction to avoid disputes with existing exploration license holders.

New Zealand banned all new offshore oil exploration in 2018 but did not cancel any existing contracts. The climate minister acknowledged that a more aggressive plan “would have run afoul of investor-state settlements.” France revised a draft law banning fossil fuel extraction by 2040 and allowing the renewal of oil exploitation permits after the Canadian company Vermilion threatened to launch an ISDS case.

Securing the green energy transition

While these findings are alarming, countries have options to avoid onerous legal and financial risks.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is currently discussing proposals on the future of investment treaties.

A straightforward approach would be for countries to terminate or withdraw from these treaties. Some officials have expressed concern about unforeseen impacts of unilaterally terminating investment treaties, but other countries have already done so, with few or no real economic consequences.

For more complex trade agreements, countries can negotiate to remove ISDS provisions, as the United States and Canada did when they replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Additional challenges stem from “sunset clauses” that bind countries for a decade or more after they have withdrawn from some treaties. Such is the case for Italy, which withdrew from the Energy Charter Treaty in 2016. It is currently stuck in an ongoing ISDS case initiated by the U.K. company Rockhopper over a ban on coastal oil drilling.

The Energy Charter Treaty, a special investment agreement covering the energy sector, emerged as the greatest single contributor to global ISDS risks in our dataset. Many European countries are currently considering whether to leave the treaty and how to avoid the same fate as Italy. If all country parties to a treaty can agree together to withdraw, they could collectively sidestep the sunset clause through mutual agreement.

The global transition

Combating climate change is not cheap. Actions by governments and the private sector are both needed to slow global warming and keep it from fueling increasingly devastating disasters.

In the end, the question is who will pay – and be paid – in the global energy transition. We believe that, at the very least, it would be counterproductive to divert critical public finance from essential mitigation and adaptation efforts to the pockets of fossil fuel industry investors whose products caused the problem in the first place.

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]

Rachel Thrasher, Law Lecturer and Researcher at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, Boston University; Blake Alexander Simmons, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, Colorado State University, and Kyla Tienhaara, Canada Research Chair in Economy and Environment, Queen's University, Ontario

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Rachel Thrasher, Blake Alexander Simmons, Kyla Tienhaara.

Plans to establish “food estates” were announced by the Indonesian government at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic because, it said, it wanted to ensure Indonesia’s food security.

But as AwasMIFEE! and TAPOL show in their new report released today, Pandemic Power Grabs: Who benefits from Food Estates in West Papua?, these plans would seem to benefit agro-industrial conglomerates and oligarchs with close connections to figures in the government.

Based on previous and current plans, food estates could lead to ecological ruin and further sideline the indigenous population in West Papua, says the report.

• READ MORE: Executive summary
• The full report
• Indonesia’s food estate programme eyes new plantations in forest frontiers

The report details planned food estates and the involvement of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.

A second linked report will examine in more detail the involvement of the Ministry of Defence and the military in food estates.

Pandemic Power Grabs argues that the strong support for corporate plantation agriculture by the government in southern Papua and in other areas of Indonesia has the potential to increase corruption.

The Minister of Environment and Forestry has also seemingly backed off commitments to stop deforestation in Indonesia made at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021.

Long-term impacts of Merauke failure
In the same week that the Indonesian government banned palm oil exports in the face of a global shortage of cooking oils, the report shows that while plans in southern Papua from 2007 for a Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) failed, MIFEE had serious long-term impacts.

As the report states, MIFEE became a “major enabling factor behind the growth of oil palm plantations in the area which have severely impacted [on] West Papuan communities socially, economically and ecologically.”

The report includes:

• A chronology of past top-down agricultural development plans in West Papua
• How plans for food estates could potentially lead to the flourishing of corruption
• How this potential corruption is being facilitated by new legislation which gives new powers to the central government to grab land for food estates, also circumventing environmental safeguards
• That the growth of the plantation industry in West Papua over the last decade has highlighted many of the potential negative consequences indigenous people are likely to suffer under the current plans
• That it is not only indigenous communities’ livelihoods that are threatened by food estates but also their culture.

‘Enduring land grabs’
TAPOL chairperson Steve Alston commented: “Communities in southern Papua province have for more than 15 years had to endure land grabs and clearances for massive plantations.

“We have supported local NGOs to campaign for indigenous peoples’ rights and AwasMIFEE! has publicised and tirelessly reported on the situation.

“But despite it being within its power to review and halt food estates, the Indonesian government has failed to listen to local communities. They have been promised jobs on plantations but then sidelined as transmigrants from other parts of Indonesia have replaced them.

“The food security reasoning for food estates is actually very thin, what we’re seeing instead is cultivation of cash crops for exports, with the government taking a role to support this goal.

“In a time of global crisis for food production, we urge the government to act now to halt plans for food estates which dispossess Papuans of their land, lead to deforestation and will eventually ruin the land of Papua.”

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

The post Unclear Federal Law Allows Logging, Farming and Mining to Threaten America’s Biodiverse Ecosystems appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Davis.

A damaged and torn official campaign poster of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, and a tagged official campaign poster of French President Emmanuel Macron, of La République En Marche, are displayed on billboards next to a polling station on April 2, 2022, in Paris.

Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

“I think that if Le Pen won, our national security would be put at stake.”

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The opportunity to break off a key member of the European alliance against Russia would be a tremendous strategic win for Putin.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

Latest DEATH THREAT letter to all non Muslims who don’t follow ALLAH.

Is this TRUTH or PROPAGANDA? क़ौमी नफ़रत का सत्य या झूठी कहानी?

Dear Comrades, now who is provoking them? Should we tell this TRUTH or cover it up like Kashmir Genocide of Hindus? pic.twitter.com/drNpTgPwiN

— Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri (@vivekagnihotri) April 13, 2022

Newsroom Post published an article based on Agnihotri’s tweet. “Vivek Agnihotri has brought to light a venomous letter,” wrote the outlet. (Archive link)

‘Pandits, leave Kashmir or get killed’: Vivek Agnihotri shares terror group’s ‘letter to kafirs’
| #KashmiriPandits |https://t.co/yaihli8arR

— Newsroom Post (@NewsroomPostCom) April 13, 2022

Similar reports were published by Amar Ujala and Lokmat News.

News18’s Amish Devgn anchored a show on Agnihotri’s tweet as “breaking news” and yelled to his audience – “Lashkar-e-Islam gives big threat”.

#BreakingNews
लश्कर-ए-इस्लाम ने कश्मीरी पंडितों को दी धमकी, कहा- “कश्मीर छोड़ें या धर्म बदलें”#AarPaar #Hindu #Secularism #SecularPolitics @AMISHDEVGAN pic.twitter.com/vNJCw8Ga8t

— News18 India (@News18India) April 13, 2022

Pro-BJP propaganda outlet OpIndia, while reporting on the killing of civilian Satish Kumar Singh in Kulgam, also claimed that the letter was issued by Lashkar-e-Islam.

Fact-check

Alt News found that one Vijay Raina tweeted the same letter a few hours before Vivek Agnihotri. Raina claimed that the letter was found in Veervan Pandit Colony in Baramulla and that it was “sent by post”.

Veervan Pandit Colony #Baramulla received threatening letter through post saying “Raliv, Galiv or Tchaliv” pic.twitter.com/6umZrxSoux

— Vijay Raina (@RealVijayRaina) April 13, 2022

This is the earliest tweet carrying the letter that Alt News could find. We spoke with Vijay Raina, who is a sarpanch of Kulgam. “I am in touch with Kashmiri Pandit settlements living in Kashmir under PM package jobs. I received the letter from a resident of Veervan colony in Baramulla district,” he said, adding that as per his knowledge, the letter was delivered by a postman.

Times Now reported on the letter that surfaced in Veervan colony. The outlet wrote, “Around 150-200 families of Kashmiri Hindus live in Baramulla, Veervan, who have secured government jobs in the Pradhan Mantri Rozgar Yojana under the rehabilitation scheme in the region.”

The report further said, “The threatening letter was delivered via post to the security detail of the colony on Tuesday evening” and added, “however, it doesn’t seem to be real, according to the police, given the fact that the said terrorist organisation’s existence is uncertain. The police assured that robust precautions and security measures have been put in place nonetheless.”

There are also certain red flags in the letter that raise doubts about its authenticity.

1. The letter is unsigned

The letter merely says “commander” at the end, without the name and signature of Lashkar-e-Islam’s commander.

2. Lashkar-e-Islam is misspelt

The word “Lashkar” is misspelt as “Lashker” in the letter. It is unimaginable that the outfit would misspell its own name on official letterhead. Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Islam on June 30, 2008, and a government document that lists proscribed organisations gives the correct spelling – “Lashkar”. It is noteworthy that the outfit’s name transliterated in English is also written as “Lashkar-e-Islami”. This is the spelling given in the document below prepared by the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) of Pakistan. However, both “Islam” and “Islami” are used even on Pakistani government websites. This is not the case with “Lashker”. Readers are requested to check for themselves by searching “lashker” site:gov.pk on Google.

3. The logo on the top left corner of the letter is of Jamaat-e-Dawa Pakistan

On the left of the letterhead is a logo that belongs to a different terror group – Jamaat-e-Dawa (JuD). This outfit was banned by the United Nations in 2008 which recognised it as an alias of the proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group.

A simple reverse-image search (by cropping the logo from the viral letter) throws results revealing that the logo belongs to JuD. Furthermore, the Urdu text below the two swords in the circle (marked in black) itself reads “Jamaat-ud-Dawa Pakistan”.

We spoke with Pakistani journalist Zarrar Khuhro to corroborate Lashkar-e-Islam’s symbol. Khuhro shared with us a genuine letter issued by the outfit where its flag is spotted in the top right corner. It doesn’t match the symbol in the viral letter. Furthermore, this letter is in Urdu, it is signed and has a completely different letterhead that says “Lashkar-e-Islam”, not JuD.

The photo below, credited to AFP, shows a picture of the flag of Lashkar-e-Islam which is the same as the one on the letter shared by Khuhro.

In both the flags (the one in the letter shared by Khuhro and the one in the AFP image), the Urdu text in the middle says “Lashkar-e-Islam”.

4. A letter with identical letterhead was circulating in 2016

A similar letter claimed to have been issued by Lashkar-e-Islam in 2016 was published by DNA. This letter too showed the terror outfit threatening Kashmiri Pandits to leave Kashmir or face death. It also carries the logo of JuD on the left and misspells “Lashkar” as “Lashker”.

However, the main red flag in the 2016 letter is the incomplete greeting. It says, “Aa Salam Aalai Kum – wa Barkat e Ho” and omits the phrase “Wa Rahmat Ullahi” in between. The line should either have only been “As Salamu Alaikum” (peace be upon you) or the complete phrase “As Salamu Alaikum Wa Rahmat Ullahi Wa Barkatuh” (peace be upon you and mercy of Allah and blessings).

On August 7, 2016, Hindustan Times reported that the letter surfaced near the transit accommodation for government employees in South Kashmir. While the police confirmed the presence of the poster, Pulwama SP Rayees Mohammed Bhat said, “We believe it is a work of miscreants who want to create fear among the minority community.”

5. The letter has factual inaccuracies 

There is a portion in the letter that says, “We have started what was left unattended in 1990. We started this again with the killing of Kafir Nischal Jewellers and Kafir Bindaroo.”

Satpal Nischal, 70, was killed in January last year by militants in Srinagar “apparently for having obtained a certificate under the new domicile law, that allows people who have lived in Jammu and Kashmir for more than 15 years rights to purchase immovable property”. The Resistance Front (TRF) had taken responsibility for the attack. Nischal hailed from Gurdaspur, Punjab.

Pharmacy owner Makhan Lal Bindroo, 68, was killed in a series of attacks on minorities in J&K in October 2021. While the police did not identify any specific terror group, TRF had claimed responsibility for shooting Bindroo point-blank, reported India Today. Bindroo was a Kashmiri Pandit.

There are no reports that say Lashkar-e-Islam had claimed responsibility for either of the attacks mentioned in the letter.

The viral letter, therefore, appears to be dubious and not a genuine handiwork of Lashkar-e-Islam as claimed on social media.

The post Dubious letter claimed to be issued by Lashkar-e-Islam to threaten Kashmiri Pandits viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Mohammed Zubair.

This week, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security released its much anticipated report on national security threats affecting the higher education and research sector.

The 171-page report found the sector is a target for foreign powers using “the full set of tools” against Australia, which can undermine our sovereignty and threaten academic freedom.

It made 27 recommendations to “harden the operating environment to deny adversaries the ability to engage in the national security risks in the sector”.

• READ MORE: Kylie Moore-Gilbert is one of hundreds of victims of state attacks on academic freedom
• Academic freedom is paramount for universities. They can do more to protect it from China’s interference
• New foreign interference laws will compound risks to whistleblowers and journalists

The committee’s recommendations, when correctly implemented, will go a long way towards combating the threat of espionage and foreign interference. But they are not enough to protect academic freedom.

This is because the laws that make espionage and foreign interference a crime could capture legitimate research endeavours.

National security risks to higher education and research
The joint committee found there are several national security threats to the higher education and research sector. Most significant are foreign interference against students and staff, espionage and data theft.

This includes theft via talent recruitment programmes where Australian academics working on sensitive technologies are recruited to work at foreign institutions.

These threats have been occurring through cyber attacks and human means, including actors working in Australia covertly on behalf of a foreign government.

Foreign adversaries may target information on research that can be commercialised or used for national gain purposes.

The kind of information targeted is not limited to military or defence, but includes valuable technologies or information in any domain such as as agriculture, medicine, energy and manufacturing.

What did the committee recommend?
The committee stated that “awareness, acknowledgement and genuine proactive measures” are the next steps academic institutions must take to degrade the corrosive effects of these national security risks.

Of its 27 recommendations, the committee made four “headline” recommendations. These include:

1. A university-wide campaign of active transparency about the national security risks (overseen by the University Foreign Interference Taskforce)
2. adherence to the taskforce guidelines by universities. These include having frameworks for managing national security risks and implementing a cybersecurity strategy
3. introducing training on national security issues for staff and students
4. guidance for universities on how to implement penalties for foreign interference activities on campus.

New & long-awaited parliamentary report (PJCIS) on foreign interference at Australian universities. It makes strong recommendations to unis & government on ways to counter state-backed harassment & intimidation & protect students & staff. https://t.co/7I8mI52gb9 pic.twitter.com/uTlMWzDCkv

— Elaine Pearson (@PearsonElaine) March 29, 2022

Other recommendations include creation of a mechanism to allow students to anonymously report instances of foreign interference on campus and diversification of the international student population.

What about academic freedom?
Espionage makes it a crime to deal with information on behalf of, or to communicate to, a foreign principal (such as a foreign government or a person acting on their behalf). The person may also need to intend to prejudice, or be reckless in prejudicing, Australia’s national security.

In the context of the espionage and foreign interference offences, “national security” means defence of Australia.

It also means Australia’s international relations with other countries. “Prejudice” means something more than mere embarrassment.

So, an academic might intend to prejudice Australia’s national security where they engage in a research project that results in criticism of Australian military or intelligence policies or practices; or catalogues Australian government misconduct in its dealings with other countries.

Because “foreign principals” are part of the larger global audience, publication of these research results could be an espionage offence.

The academic may even have committed an offence when teaching students about this research in class (because Australia has a large proportion of international students, some of whom may be acting on behalf of foreign actors), communicating with colleagues working overseas (because foreign public universities could be “foreign principals”), or simply engaging in preliminary research (because it is an offence to do things to prepare for espionage).

Foreign interference makes it a crime to engage in covert or deceptive conduct on behalf of a foreign principal where the person intends to (or is reckless as to whether they will) influence a political or governmental process, or prejudice Australia’s national security.

The covert or deceptive nature of the conduct could be in relation to any part of the person’s conduct.

So, an academic working for a foreign public university (a “foreign principal”, even if the country is one of our allies) may inadvertently commit the crime of foreign interference where they run a research project that involves anonymous survey responses to collect information to advocate for Australian electoral law reform.

The anonymous nature of the survey may be sufficient for the academic’s conduct to be “covert”.

Because it is a crime to prepare for foreign interference, the academic may also have committed an offence by simply taking any steps towards publication of the research results (including preliminary research or writing a first draft).

The kind of research criminalised by the espionage and foreign interference offences may be important public interest research. It may also produce knowledge and ideas that are necessary for the exchange of information which underpins our liberal democracy.

Criminalising this conduct risks undermining academic freedom and eroding core democratic principles.

So, how can we protect academic freedom?
In addition to implementing the recommendations in the report, we must reform our national security crimes to protect academic freedom in Australia. While the committee acknowledged the adequacy of these crimes to mitigate the national security threats against the research sector, it did not consider the overreach of these laws.

Legitimate research endeavours could be better protected if a “national interest” defence to a charge of espionage or foreign interference were introduced. This would be similar to “public interest” defences and protect conduct done in the national interest.

“National interest” should be flexible enough so various liberal democratic values — including academic freedom, press freedom, government accountability, and protection of human rights — can be considered alongside national security.

In the absence of a federal bill of rights, such a defence would go a long way towards ensuring legitimate research is protected and academic freedom in Australia is upheld.

Sarah Kendall is a PhD candidate in law, The University of Queensland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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

The post Biden’s Sanctions on Afghanistan Threaten to Kill More People Than Two Decades of War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mark Weisbrot.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Yuk-yue, Liu Aoran and Raymond Chung.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Yuk-yue, Liu Aoran and Raymond Chung.

At about 10 a.m. on Tuesday, February 22, officers with the country’s National Security Service intelligence agency arrested eight journalists on the grounds of the parliament in Juba, the capital, according to news reports, CPJ interviews with several of those journalists, and Patrick Oyet, president of the Union of Journalists of South Sudan, a local trade group, who spoke to CPJ over the phone.

The reporters were covering a press conference that included members of opposition parties when a group of NSS officers halted the briefing on the grounds that it was illegal, seized the journalists’ recording devices, and took them to the parliament’s security office, according to those sources.

The detained journalists included reporters for the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Voice of America, The City Review newspaper, Radio Bakhita, Eye Radio, The Insider South Sudan news website, No. 1 Citizen newspaper, and Radio Miraya, according to Oyet and the journalists who spoke with CPJ, who said they were held for about three hours and then released without charge.

“Authorities in South Sudan should focus on ensuring that journalists can effectively cover their nation’s politics, instead of detaining them for doing their jobs,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Security forces’ harassment and threats toward journalists who sought to cover an event at the country’s legislature show how far authorities are willing to go to control the public discourse.”

Voice of America reporter Winnie Cirino told CPJ that the NSS officers detained her and the other journalists minutes after the press conference began. The Insider South Sudan managing editor David Mono Danga, who also works as a reporter for Voice of America, told CPJ that he believed they were detained because they were covering an event held by opposition politicians.

The press conference sought to address the intimidation of journalists and opposition lawmakers, as well as alleged government mismanagement, according to a press release by the members of parliament who held the conference, which CPJ reviewed.

The NSS officers “decided to put the whole thing on us, the journalists,” The City Review reporter Keji Janefer told CPJ. “They insisted it was our fault.”

At the parliament’s security office, NSS officers attempted to question each journalist individually, but the reporters refused and said they should remain as a group; the officers then accused them of violating the rules concerning coverage of the legislature, The City Review reporter Sheila Ponnie told CPJ.

After about an hour, the officers took the journalists by bus to an NSS office on Bilpam Road, also in Juba, Ponnie said.

Cirino told CPJ that agents held the journalists in a group at that office, seized their phones, and then locked them in a room inside the building, where an officer lectured them on how they should conduct their work.

After an hour, the NSS officers released the journalists without charge and returned their recorders and phones, but told them to delete any recordings of the press conference and threatened that, if the journalists’ outlets published stories covering the conference, the officers would hold them personally responsible, Cirino and Ponnie said.

“That was a serious threat to our lives,” Danga said. “That is a threat to my life and my family.”

Keji said it was “very bad when security personnel start marking you, given the environment we are operating in.”

South Sudan ranked fourth on CPJ’s 2021 Impunity Index, which calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of a country’s population.

Cirino, Danga, and Keji added that they were concerned about the security of information on their phones, as NSS officers had taken them out of their sight during their detention. CPJ has documented how digital forensics technology can be used to extract contacts and other information from journalists’ devices.

Cirino told CPJ that, while they were at the parliament security office, the reporters communicated with Oyet and other journalists, who raised public awareness about the detentions on social media. Cirino and Keji said she believed that awareness and Oyet’s intervention at the Bilpam Road office helped secure their release without charge.

Separately, Ponnie told CPJ that NSS officers at the parliament stopped her while she was working last week, ordered her to hand over her phone and, after she refused, forced her to delete recordings she had made.

When CPJ called NSS Internal Security Bureau Director of Public Relations David John Kumuri for comment, he said he would call back after 30 minutes, but failed to do so. CPJ repeatedly called him back but he did not answer.

Parliamentary spokesperson John Agany Deng told CPJ in a phone interview that the February 22 press conference was “basically illegal” and denied that the journalists had been “arrested,” before the call quality became too poor to understand him; he did not answer subsequent calls from CPJ.

In broadcast media interviews this week, he defended NSS officers’ actions and alleged that the press conference was illegal and proper media procedures were not followed.

CPJ also called Elijah Alier, the managing director of South Sudan’s media authority, and Sapana Abuyi, the authority’s director-general for information and media compliance, but the calls did not go through.

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