• Trump’s Big Bill to be signed Friday after marathon vote and marathon speech by Dem leader Hakeem Jeffries;
• Democratic and labor leaders say Big Budget Bill will hurt workers and destroy the middle class;
• SF sues Trump over EPA termination of Environment Climate Justice grants;
• Advocates fear state cannabis tax proposals could unravel and hurt programs for children
• MALDEF planning million dollar lawsuit over US citizen arrested for filming ICE raid

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

One of the Chinese nationals who was freed, Xu Yanjun, had been serving a 20-year sentence. He had worked for China’s Ministry of State Security. One of the Americans in China, John Leung, reportedly an FBI informant, had been held in prison for three years. Two other Americans, Kai Li, also accused of providing information to the F.B.I., and Mark Swidan, a Texas businessman, were freed at the same time. In addition, Ayshem Mamut, the mother of human-rights activist Nury Turkel, and the two other Uyghurs were allowed to leave China. They all traveled on the same plane to the United States.

Holden Triplett, the co-founder of a risk-management consultancy, Trenchcoat Advisors, has served as the head of the FBI office in Beijing and as director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council. Here, he weighs in on the high-stakes game of exchanging spies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: Spy swaps have a long history. What was it like in the past?

Holden Triplett: During the Cold War, there were a lot of spy swaps. It’s kind of a normal way of interacting between two rival powers. But it was always Russia, or the Soviet Union, and the United States. It’s not something that China had typically engaged in in the past.

RFA: Why would China, or any country, be interested in a spy swap?

Holden Triplett: China would be very interested in getting back the individuals who’d worked for them. The longer they’re in prison in the U.S., the more chance they’re going to divulge information about what they’ve done. Also, the Chinese want to be able to say to the people who work for them, ‘Hey, we may put you in dangerous situations. But, don’t worry, if anything happens, we’ll get you back home.’ The down side for the Chinese, of course, is that it’s an implicit acknowledgement of what they’ve been doing. In the past, they’ve denied that they’re [engaged in espionage].

RFA: And for the U.S?

Holden Triplett: The idea is the same; We get our spies back. It’s more of a game, I guess you could say. There’s a bit more protection for spies than for others. They get arrested, but they don’t serve time. And so, spying on each other is made into a regularized affair.

My concern is that the Chinese say, ‘Now that we’ve established this kind of exchange, people for people, now all we need to know to do now is pick up some more Americans and arrest them.’ Then, the Chinese can try and bargain with the U.S. for their release.

We’ve already seen that in Russia with Brittney Griner [an American basketball player who was imprisoned in Russia]. Look at who the Russians got back – Viktor Bout [a Russian arms dealer found guilty of conspiring to kill Americans].

The Russians have wanted him for decades. Nothing against Ms. Griner, but that is a pretty easy decision-making process. They pick up somebody who has star power, and they can get someone they want back. If China’s gotten that message, then Americans should be concerned about going to China. They could become a chip in a larger geopolitical game. There’s a possibility that they could get arrested and end up in a nightmare jail.

RFA: Well, they say you’re not supposed to negotiate with -

Holden Triplett: - with terrorists. Look, I think the U.S. is in a really difficult place. There’s pressure on the U.S. government from the families to get them back.

RFA: Several Uyghurs were also released. What is the significance of that?

Holden Triplett: I would assume the Chinese got something for this. They’re very transactional. They’re not doing something for the good of the relationship between the U.S. and China.

RFA: It didn’t seem as though John Leung, who’d been held in a Chinese prisoner, was an important asset for the FBI. What do you think was behind this?

Holden Triplett: I don’t know what role he played for the FBI, or even if that’s true. But regardless, the message from the bureau is: Don’t worry. Even if you’re doing dangerous work, we will protect you. We will come and get you.

Edited by Jim Snyder.

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

Image by Jakayla Toney

Following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks that resulted in at least 1,163 deaths, rumors began circulating that Israeli women were experiencing horrific mass rape and sexual violence. Months later, a position paper by Physicians for Human Rights Israel and a New York Times investigation convinced many observers that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war. But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred.

The New Yorker, New York Times, Associated Press, and The Nation treat PHRI’s paper as the gold standard for proof of Hamas’ rape and sexual violence. But the paper is shockingly thin. It lacks original reporting and is based on media reports that are dubious at best with no corroboration—no forensic evidence, no survivor testimony, no video evidence.

During a two-hour-long interview that was heated at times, Hadas Ziv, director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), acknowledged numerous problems with the position paper she co-authored, “Sexual and Gender-Based Violence As a Weapon of War During the October 7, 2023 Hamas Attacks.”

Ziv admitted credibility problems with sources and that she did not review all available evidence. She was “unaware” numerous sources had fabricated atrocity stories about Oct. 7. Ziv said, “Yeah, that’s a problem,” about a soldier she quotes whose claim of rape was changed by the government. She quoted volunteers from Zaka, a scandal-plagued organization that collected human remains after Oct. 7, but Ziv did not realize Zaka openly talks of inventing stories. When discussing claims that women’s sexual organs were deliberately mutilated, Ziv conceded, “OK, if there’s alternative explanations you can’t say that.”

While admitting “I did not know all the stories that you speak about that discredit those witnesses,” Ziv also lashed out: “I feel like I’m a rape victim that’s being interrogated.” YES! responded, “Not every interview is a friendly interview.”

Further, the PHRI paper is riddled with errors small and large. Names are misspelled, quotes don’t match links, and an individual is misidentified. Ziv was unaware that the Israeli government alleges it has forensic evidence of rape, which it has not produced publicly. Most egregious, Ziv didn’t realize her paper counted one alleged gang rape as two separate incidents.

The New York Times’ Dec. 28, 2023, story, “Screams Without Words,” has also been treated as proof that Hamas committed widespread sexual violence.

The cornerstone of that report is Gal and Nagi Abdush, a couple killed on Oct. 7. The Times says Israeli police believe Gal Abdush was raped. But the only evidence given is a “grainy video” of Gal’s burned corpse, “lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed.” Gal became known as “the woman in the black dress.” The story blew up in the Times’ face. Surviving family members denied she was raped.

PHRI references the video of Gal Abdush as evidence of possible “sexual abuse.”

The Times mentioned messages that Gal and Nagi, parents of two children, sent to their family during the attack. After Gal was killed, Nagi sent “a final audio message” to his brother Nissim Abdush at 7:44 a.m., “Take care of the kids. I love you,” right before he was killed.

But the Times fails to mention other text and phone messages that make it almost impossible Gal was raped. She messaged at 6:51 a.m. about intense explosions on the border, based on an Instagram comment by Miral Altar, Gal’s sister.

Nine minutes later, at 7:00 a.m., Nagi Abdush called his brother Nissim to say Gal was shot and dying.

Mondoweiss said Nissim told his story to an Israeli TV station. He said Nagi never mentioned Gal was raped, nor did Israeli police indicate to the surviving family that Gal was sexually assaulted. The Times never explains how Gal could be captured, raped, fatally shot, and burned to death in nine minutes while Nagi messaged his family and never mentioned any physical contact with Hamas forces.

YES! spoke with Nissim and Neama Abdush, siblings of Nagi. They said Nagi called twice, first to say Gal had been shot in the heart and had died, and then his farewell call asking them to take care of their children. Neama said, “No, no, no,” when asked whether Nagi said anything about Gal being attacked or raped.

In a follow-up call, Nissim reiterated the police did not give any indication Gal was sexually assaulted, but he refused to offer any more details unless he was paid 60,000 “dollars, shekels.”

Tali Barakha, another sister of Gal, wrote on Instagram, “No one can know if there was rape.”

The Dubious Dozen

PHRI’s paper stated there is “sufficient evidence to require an investigation of crimes against humanity.” The New York Times claimed “attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.”

Yet there are extraordinarily few sources. Twelve individuals account for the vast majority of rape and sexual violence claims in hundreds of articles.

Eight of these sources are in PHRI’s paper and six are in The New York Times report. Investigations by The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Straits Times, BBC, AP, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, The New Yorker, and various CNN segments all rely on a combination of these 12 sources.

All but one of the 12 sources are connected to the Israeli military and police, such as the Home Front Command. Five of the sources are Zaka volunteers who told stories that smack of fabrications. Five other sources claimed they saw corpses that bore signs of rape or sexual violence. Not one of these sources was professionally trained to make such assessments, and nearly all fabricated stories, as described below.

That leaves only two people who claimed they witnessed rape. The government of Israel’s entire case for mass rape is built on two allegations: a source known as “Witness S.,” or Sapir, put forward by the police, and an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) special forces soldier, Raz Cohen. The soldier has changed his story numerous times, making it suspect, while Sapir’s account is so fantastical as to defy belief, as explained below.

Even if all 12 sources are considered entirely credible, their accounts lack photo and forensic evidence and survivor testimony. At best they are unsubstantiated claims.

As for evidence, two reports have thrown cold water all over it. First, Ha’aretz reported on Dec. 24 that Israeli police sent a court order to “general and psychiatric hospitals” to “provide information on the victims of sexual offenses committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7.” It was a tacit admission that police lack survivor testimony. The court order also undercut claims that alleged survivors were not being identified to protect them as unique details would make it simple to identify them.

Second, an even more revealing Ha’aretz report published on Jan. 4, 2024, pointed out that “[t]he police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault or witnesses to acts from the Hamas attack, and are unable to connect the existing evidence with the victims described in it.” Police are so desperate they appealed through the media, without success so far, “to encourage those who have information on the matter to come and testify.”

United Nations experts have provided some evidence. On Jan. 29, a U.N. envoy in Israel investigating sexual violence on Oct. 7 issued a plea through the Israeli president’s office for “victims of alleged sexual assault [to] break your silence.” It was met with silence. Then on Feb. 19, four U.N. experts said they “expressed alarm over credible allegations” that Israel had subjected hundreds of Palestinian women and girls in Gaza to “arbitrary detention,” “degrading treatment,” “multiple forms of sexual assault,” including rape, and “deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing.”

Extrapolating “Evidence” From Hearsay

Much of the coverage of Oct. 7 is reminiscent of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Reporters have tried to glean “truth” from ambiguous photos and jumped to conclusions without considering other possibilities. An undressed corpse does not equal sexual assault. Clothes might be torn off while fleeing, in panic, hiding in brush, or dressing wounds.

The New York Times recounted the death of the Evens family in Kibbutz Be’eri, using texts and photos. Caught in a fire, “they stripped to their underwear.” Soldiers later found “several half-naked bodies lying under a line of trees.” The parents and two teenage boys “had all been shot dead.”

Similarly, metal fragments in a body does not equal sexual violence. A Reuters report on Be’eri, one of the worst-hit communities on Oct. 7, described how grenade blasts in a safe room turned screws from a sofa into shrapnel that punctured the leg of a 13-year-old girl. If she had not lived would that now be a case of Hamas sexual violence?

Asked about the Reuters report, PHRI’s Ziv admitted, “OK, if there’s alternative explanations you can’t say that” it was sexual violence.

Alternative explanations applies to nearly every sexual violence claim in the media.

Head in Hands

Two witnesses, the anonymous source Sapir and Raz Cohen, provide the most dramatic claims of sexual violence in PHRI’s paper, the Times, and other media. Sapir and Cohen attended the Supernova music festival and claimed to see gang rapes taking place 50 to 150 feet away from their hiding spots. The Times places them a few miles apart, meaning Sapir and Cohen were describing different assaults.

In early November Israeli police showed a three-minute video clip with Sapir’s face blurred to reporters, but they refused to take questions and have since “declined” to release the entire interview. Reports on the three-minute clip and shorter excerpts on the web were all that was known of Sapir’s story until The New York Times interviewed her “several times.” The Times says Sapir is “a 26-year-old accountant” who “has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses.”

The Times said Sapir was wounded in her back and feeling faint. She hid near a road covered “in dry grass and lay as still as she could.” She claimed to see a group of “about 100 men” involved in the horrific rape and murder of “at least five women.” The Times said:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.” …

Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Compare this to what is known of the police video. In a 52-second clip of the police video, Sapir claimed a woman standing on her feet was raped by militants and passed around. Sapir said a militant “cuts her breasts. He throws it on the road. They are playing with it.”

Referring to the police video, the BBC added that Sapir claimed a militant killed the woman and continued to rape her. “He … shot her in the head before he finished. He didn’t even pick up his pants; he shoots and ejaculates.”

One journalist who viewed part of the video said Sapir claimed “some terrorists were carrying heads in their hands [beheaded] as trophies, saying there wasn’t a thing [they] didn’t do to the heads,” implying that Hamas fighters were having sex with severed heads.

Sapir’s story and how it changes between the police video and Times report raises many questions. How could she see 100 militants and numerous assaults while lying still, covered? How does one victim of rape become five? Why did one woman who was raped and had her breast cut off in the police video become two women in the Times story?

Given such a slaughter—severed heads, hacked-off parts, blood sprays, and five mutilated corpses—where is the forensic and photo evidence? Why are there no witnesses who can verify any of her accounts, such as sex with severed heads and corpses that sound like they are out of Dante’s Inferno?

The Times published a follow-up defending the Dec. 28 report after it was hammered for poor sourcing and lack of evidence, but it only raised more questions about flimsy reporting.

PHRI’s position paper bungles Sapir’s story as well, citing it as two separate incidents. It is first mentioned in the “Victims” section as “a woman who detailed the group rape and murder of a young woman by assailants dressed in military uniforms.” Then, PHRI cited Sapir’s story again under “Visual Testimonies” as it is a video. Hadas Ziv admitted the mistake to YES!, but no other media outlets have picked up PHRI’s error.

Changing Stories

Raz Cohen, the second eyewitness to claim he saw rape, is a former Israeli officer from “the elite Maglan unit.” Neither the original Times report nor PHRI mentions Cohen is an ex-special forces soldier or that his story has changed numerous times.

Cohen hid in a streambed with friends after fleeing the Supernova festival. According to the Times, he claimed to see a white van pull up about 40 yards away and five men drag a woman across the ground, “young, naked, and screaming.” Cohen said, “They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words. Then one of them raises a knife, and they just slaughtered her.”

Initially, Cohen’s story was different. On Oct. 7, he described hundreds of terrified people fleeing Hamas gunmen across a field as some were shot and fell. Cohen and others hid for six hours in the bush as gunshots whistled above them and a battle between “our army and the terrorists” raged around them.

In the next three days, a shaken Cohen described similar experiences in videos and interviews. He said people were “slaughtered with knives.” The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported in an Oct. 10 story based on an interview with Cohen that, “Hamas militants stabbed a group of women nearby.” But he made no mention of rape or sexual violence.

Then Cohen’s story changed. Later in the day in an Oct. 10 appearance, Cohen said on PBS Newshour, “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed—and after they raped, they—they did that.” In an Oct. 24 interview with the Washington Free Beacon he also claimed a woman was raped and murdered.

It is notable that Cohen’s story is strikingly similar to Sapir’s: multiple gang rapes, killing with knives, sexual assault of corpses. No major media has picked up on the similarities, nor that the number of victims appears to go from several to one.

Since both Sapir and Cohen’s accounts surfaced, a different companion who hid with each one has since come forward. The Times interviewed both, and their accounts don’t back up those of Sapir or Cohen. There are other accounts of rape and sexual violence, but the sources can’t be identified or say they “heard” but did not visually witness rape.

Further undermining Sapir and Cohen are reports on the massacre of 364 people at the festival. CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, and NBC News reconstructed the killing field using photos, videos, social media, and interviews with dozens of festival goers. It was a horrific slaughter, but no one mentioned torture, sexual violence, or rape.

Nor have police substantiated Sapir or Cohen’s stories despite possessing “over 60,000 ‘visual documents’ including videos from GoPro cameras worn by attackers, CCTV footage and images from drones.” YES! reviewed every graphic video and photo it could locate, including in a Telegram channel, Israeli government websites, and a five-part series of, frankly, snuff films. They show militants, brutal killings, and hundreds of corpses, but nothing like the scenes Sapir or Cohen described.

Body Bags and Money Grabs

The dearth of evidence of mass rapes has been attributed to Israeli government claims that religious concerns and chaos prevented the gathering of forensic evidence. But other reports indicate Israel manipulated evidence, forensics, and Zaka testimony that all create the appearance of a campaign of mass rape.

Ha’aretz reported Zaka volunteers sidelined soldiers in collecting evidence after Oct. 7.

[The] IDF decided to forego the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use Zaka, a private organization.

A Nov. 12 Ynet report suggests why Zaka took the lead. An information specialist in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office boasted to Ynet that Zaka testimonies “had a tremendous impact on the reporters” by portraying Hamas as “human-monsters.” That bolstered Israel’s narrative that “Hamas is equal to Isis … deepening the legitimacy of the state to act with great force,” the official said.

On top of serving as war propaganda, stories by Zaka volunteers appear invented. This author described in a recent Intercept investigation how Zaka officials say “we’re using our imagination” when they recount atrocities and “the bodies is telling us the stories that happened to them.” Western media is full of Zaka atrocity claims, nearly all of which are fabrications, dubious, or unsubstantiated.

Even more shocking, Zaka was founded decades ago by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, who allegedly sexually assaulted at least 20 minors over decades before being exposed in 2021. Meshi-Zahav and relatives reportedly used “shadow organizations” to divert millions of dollars from a nearly insolvent Zaka into a “slush fund” to finance “a lavish lifestyle in 5-star hotels and a multi-million dollar villa.”

Ha’aretz reported that during Oct. 7 recovery efforts, a financially troubled Zaka used “the dead as props” for fundraising. In the process, Ha’aretz says, Zaka wrecked forensic evidence that could prove or disprove rape claims.

PHRI’s paper includes testimony from two Zaka volunteers. After being told a few Zaka stories, Hadas Ziv told YES!, “I didn’t know that they are unreliable. … But maybe I’m just trusting people who tell the story as it is and I don’t look into [it].”

Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, NBC, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post also quote Zaka volunteers with no mention of past scandals or present controversies.

A Flood of Disinformation

Remaining sources also have credibility problems. One is an anonymous paramedic with Unit 669, an elite Israeli search-and-rescue outfit. The soldier claims he found a dead girl, “14, 15-years-old teenager,” on the floor of a home in a kibbutz. She was “on her stomach, her pants are pulled down, and she is half-naked. Her legs are spread out, wide open, and there are remains of sperm on her back. Someone executed her right after he brutally, brutally raped her.”

He first spoke on Oct. 25 with Republic World, a right-wing Indian news channel, his back to the camera. Ziv linked to a clip in the PHRI paper from the same interview that Eylon Levy tweeted the same day. A spokesperson for Netanyahu, Levy is a conduit of disinformation.

In the full interview, the paramedic said a teammate “pulled out of the garbage” a 1-year-old baby “multiple times stabbed all over his body.” He also claimed there were “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses [with] the blood of the people that were living in those houses.”

One infant was killed on Oct. 7, 10-month-old Mila Cohen, “who was shot while in the arms of her mother,” who survived.

Needless to say, these stories appear to be fabrications as well. More significantly, the paramedic is typical of other major sources. Their claims are wild, there’s no other witnesses, no independent reporting, no photo or forensic evidence, no information about the deceased.

Further weakening his credibility, the paramedic initially identified Kibbutz Nahal Oz three times as the site of the attack and translated its name as “River of Strength.” In Nahal Oz, at least 60 soldiers were killed and 12 civilians. Five family members were killed in one home, including two sisters, but they were adults, aged 18 and 20.

Perhaps realizing none of the victims in Nahal Oz matched the paramedic’s description, Eylon Levy changed the location to Be’eri in a tweet and trimmed the clip to cut out all references to Nahal Oz.

When talking to The New York Times, AP, The Washington Post, and CNN, the paramedic only referenced Be’eri as the location. The number of victims changed as well, hardly a minor point, from one to two, to half a dozen, and back to one or two.

When asked about how she did her research for the PHRI paper, Ziv said, “I checked every report that was available to me.” The Republic World interview of the paramedic was available to her as she linked to the short clip Levy tweeted out in the PHRI paper.

After listening to a description of the paramedic’s false stories, Ziv said, “No, I didn’t see this one.” YES! asked, “So you didn’t look at all the evidence then?” Ziv responded, “No I didn’t, probably.”

Ziv also said, “Yeah, that’s a problem” about the fact Netanyahu’s office altered the paramedic’s story and that he is an anonymous military source.

Dead Babies

Six of the 12 sources fabricated dead-baby stories, including Shari Mendes. A volunteer military reservist who worked in the Rabbinate Corps at the Shura military morgue in Central Israel for two weeks, Mendes helped “medics with fingerprinting and cleaning female soldiers’ bodies,” according to Reuters.

On Oct. 20, Mendes told The Daily Mail, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.” Senior personnel at Shura, Col. Rabbi Haim Weisberg and retired Brig. Gen. Rabbi Israel Weiss, also claimed they discovered a pregnant mother killed with her fetus.

Ha’aretz says, “This horrific incident … simply didn’t happen.”

PHRI quotes Mendes from a Nov. 9 Times of Israel report. Mendes says, “Yes, we have seen that women have been raped. Children through elderly women have been raped. Forcible entry, to the point that bones were broken.” Mendes has also alleged, “We saw genitals cut off, heads cut off, babies, hands, feet, no reason.” She says, “This is not just something we saw on the internet, we saw these bodies with our own eyes.”

PHRI cites Capt. Maayan, an IDF reservist and dentist at Shura, from the same article. The Times of Israel wrote:

Maayan said on October 31 that she has seen several bodies that had signs consistent with sexual abuse.

“I can tell that I saw a lot of signs of abuse in the [genital region],” Maayan said, using her hand to euphemistically demonstrate. “We saw broken legs, broken pelvises, bloody underwear,” and women who were not dressed below the waist, she said.

The Times of Israel said Mendes is not “legally qualified to determine rape.” Likewise PHRI cautioned that “emergency and medical personnel who provided testimonies” were not “professionally trained to determine whether rape had occurred.”

But PHRI tries to have it both ways. It cites claims of rape and sexual abuse from Shari Mendes, Capt. Maayan, the paramedic, Itzik Itah and Simcha Greiniman of Zaka, and its final source, Rami Shmuel, a music festival organizer.

If these sources can’t determine rape, why include them? PHRI also says “the accounts they provided indicate the perpetration of sexual violence.” What qualifies them to conclude wounds are deliberate signs of sexual violence and not from weapons?

When asked how Mendes could have known broken pelvises were caused by mass rape, Ziv said, “She doesn’t, she doesn’t. She can only say that this is what she saw. She can’t say this is a result of rape.”

So why is Israel seemingly making untrained civilians the face of mass rape claims? At a high-profile U.N. session on Dec. 4, organized with the help of tech mogul Sheryl Sandberg, Mendes, and Greiniman testified and parts of Sapir’s video were shown.

Greiniman, a deputy commander in Zaka, claimed naked women were tied to trees at the Supernova festival, he found a toddler with a knife stuck through its head, and he discovered foreign fighters—they left their IDs in their pockets. Why did Israel choose to present sources with some of the most bizarre and hard-to-believe stories to the world?

Why have doctors, pathologists, or soldiers who recovered remains not offered testimony or documentation of rape, sexual assault, or other atrocities? Israel has produced videos of forensic investigations of Oct. 7 victims. Media were given access to document atrocities at the National Center of Forensic Medicine on Oct. 16.

On Oct. 14, Reuters, Ha’aretz, and Politico joined a media tour of Shura organized by Israeli officials. Reuters reported, “Military forensic teams … found multiple signs of torture, rape and other atrocities.” Rabbi Israel Weiss, who helped oversee the identification of the dead, said “Many bodies showed signs of torture as well as rape.” Capt. Maayan said, “Forensic examination found several cases of rape,” according to Politico.

But, according to Reuters, “The military personnel overseeing the identification process didn’t present any forensic evidence in the form of pictures or medical records.”

Not long after, Zaka volunteers, Shari Mendes, and the Unit 669 paramedic began making a splash in the media. Little has been heard from the forensic experts since.

Tali Shapiro provided research help for this story.

This piece first appeared in Yes!

The post Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Arun Gupta.

Conflict and insufficient social cohesion are the biggest challenges in Fiji, and all and any efforts to mitigate and address this situation are laudable.

The research literature posits that while news media can exacerbate social and political conflicts through their reporting styles and focus, they also have the potential to alleviate tense situations by adopting conducive, conflict resolution methodologies.

The Conflict-Sensitive Reporting Manual for Fijian Journalists includes guidelines to approach and report conflicts in a responsible manner by, among other things, conducting the requisite research, and avoiding unnecessarily inflammatory tones.

• READ MORE: Other conflict-sensitive reporting articles

Dialogue Fiji is the most active civil society in the “social cohesion” space and besides this manual, it published the proceedings of its first symposium on social cohesion in 2017 entitled Ethnic Relations in Fiji: Threats and Opportunities.

The book, which I co-edited with Dialogue Fiji executive director Nilesh Lal, not only highlighted the challenges of social cohesion in Fiji, but also the reservoir of goodwill in our communities, despite everything that we have been through together.

More than 50 years after independence we are still struggling with social cohesion, not the least because it is a complex problem given our context, with no overnight solutions.

The problem requires commitment from every sector of our nation, the news media being no exception.

National media’s contribution
In this regard, conflict-sensitive reporting can be seen as the national media’s contribution to social cohesion and nation-building.

To understand how conflict-sensitive reporting can contribute positively, we first need to look at the media-conflict dynamic, that is, how media conventionally report conflicts.

According to critics, most violent conflicts are “rooted in resource or land disputes, but fought with strong references to ethnic, cultural, and religious identities”.

The news media tend to focus on the manifestations of conflict, such as the tensions, violence, and damage, rather than the root causes, or possible solutions to any disputes. This lopsided approach risks feeding prejudices and fueling misconceptions.

Conflict-sensitive reporting, on the other hand, takes a nuanced approach to the coverage of conflicts, in that it does not regard conflict as run-of-the mill, daily news reporting round, but something that needs extra care and attention.

Conflict-sensitive reporting is an informed and considered approach, based on a commitment to understanding the roots of a conflict and reporting in an in-depth and circumspect manner.

The idea is to not only “do no harm” but report stories with the aim of facilitating solutions to conflict.

Fair and balanced?
It should be pointed that conflict-sensitive reporting is an idea that is not fully accepted in the news media fraternity, which has traditionally espoused reporting the “facts” in a fair and balanced manner. But what is “fair”, “balanced” and “objective” is in itself heavily debated in the news media sector.

As a university journalism programme, we at the University of the South Pacific are open to researching and experimenting with new and innovative concepts like conflict-sensitive reporting.

The framework has been designed for developing countries with multiethnic communities at greater risk of conflict, than societies with greater ethnic homogeneity.

Such countries are highly susceptible to movement towards civil conflict and/or repressive rule. If this sounds familiar, it is because “civil conflict and repressive rule” have been very much part of our existence in Fiji.

Fiji, mired in ethnic tensions and political differences culminating in four coups fits the description of “fragile” or “vulnerable” societies”.

Media have described Fiji’s coups as “short-lived”, “clean-up-campaign” or “coup-to-end all coups.”

This terminology is regrettable because it grossly underestimates the lingering, sustained, pervasive and long-term damage of our coup culture.

Infrastructure deficit
For example, research published by professors Biman Prasad and Paresh Narayan in 2008 indicates a 20-year infrastructure deficit of $3.4 billion partly due to instability.

Likewise, Professor Wadan Narsey in his 2013 article estimates that by 2011, Fiji had lost $1700 million because of the 2006 coup alone.

This included $400 million in government revenue, which could have been used in education, health, infrastructure and public debt repayments.

Because of just a few deaths due to the four coups in Fiji, media often describe these upheavals as “bloodless coups”.

However, in social and economic terms, the coups caused a bloodbath.

The expression “death by a thousand cuts” comes to mind. We do not feel the pain immediately because after the initial shock, there are smaller aftershocks that we feel and absorb over the course of years and decades.

In time, these repeated blows add up to inflict deeper wounds that are more difficult to heal, but we adjust to the pain, normalise it, and learn to live with our situation, especially the poor and disadvantaged, who face the brunt of it.

Low life expectancy
In Fiji these wounds are manifest in the lack of services, dilapidated infrastructure, low life expectancy, lack of opportunities, low employment and high crime, brain drain, and so forth.

Fiji gives meaning to renowned author Paul Collier’s words: “Wars and coups are not tea parties: they are development in reverse”.

Some of the key underlying causes of our lack of progress are the lack of social cohesion and national unity, which equal unrealised potential.

Since the 1980s there has been idle talk of turning Fiji into a Singapore, and more recently, political chatter about Fiji surpassing Australia and New Zealand

In my opinion, this is a pipe dream unless and until we get social cohesion right, learn to resolve our differences without guns, and move together as a united force.

This requires leadership and vision from the government, support and selflessness from citizens and professionalism and responsibility from the news media, with regards to taking it on themselves to understand the national context, and tailor their coverage accordingly 

This is an edited version of Associate Professor Shailendra Bahadur Singh’s launch address for Dialogue Fiji’s Conflict Sensitive Reporting Manual for Fijian Journalists on 8 August 2023 at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. It was also first published in The Fiji Times.

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

Photograph Source: David Lienemann – Public Domain

The proxy war on Russia is the centre piece of Biden’s foreign policy of uniting the world’s ‘democracies’ against ‘autocracies’, particularly China and Russia. He boasts repeatedly of uniting US allies, most in NATO, as never before. Though the real unity is spotty at best, until recently, the rhetoric seemed to work. No longer. At its recent Vilnius Summit, NATO’s disunity bubbled over, though not for the reasons most discussed in the press. The real reasons are rooted in developments that threaten to unravel not only Biden’s strategy, but also NATO.

Discordant strains were amply discussed in the run up to the summit. Members could not decide on any successor for Jens Stoltenberg. While the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea attended the summit for the second year, and while the final communique reiterated NATO’s concerns about ‘the systemic challenges posed by the PRC to Euro-Atlantic security’ and its commitment to ‘boosting … shared awareness, enhancing … resilience and preparedness, and protecting against the PRC’s coercive tactics and efforts to divide the Alliance’, President Macron led (a not inconsiderable) opposition to establishing a permanent NATO presence in the East Asian region with an office in Tokyo. Though Finish membership was approved, President Erdoğan opposed Sweden’s membership until Biden offered him not only F-16s but also an IMF loan from aboard Air Force One.

Most spectacularly, while members once again promised to increase defence expenditure and production, and while the alliance made various commitments to supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, not only did the clamour to induct Ukraine into NATO fail, but NATO proved unwilling even to commit to a timetable for entry. President Zelensky called this ‘absurd’ and the US administration called him ungrateful in return.

Though this serious spat ended in Zelensky’s expressions of gratitude, a sense of foreboding could not be avoided. Atlanticist commentators still worried about the prospect of a disengagement between the US and Europe in case of a Trump victory or disagreements over China. However, even these worries do suspect how close such a disengagement is today or the reason for it: that Biden is about to lose his military wager in Ukraine.  That is bound to end Biden’s project of uniting US allies, the closest thing there has been to a Biden Doctrine.

Always a work-in-progress, NATO unity has got more difficult as US power has declined. In recent decades, its chief glue has been US military power. If it too ceases to bind – as is clear from the string of military failures culminating in the humiliating exit from Afghanistan – then the self-sacrifice Biden has demanded, and some extent received, from the Europeans on Ukraine – is the dime on which the future of US leadership over what remains of its allies and of its chief instrument, NATO, will turn.

The Weak Ties that Bind NATO

Understanding such imminent fundamental change requires a return to fundamentals beneath the appearance of NATO unity.

The much-vaunted Article 5 may state, famously, that ‘an armed attack against one … shall be considered an attack against … all’. However, if you think this obliges all members to rush to the defence of attacked members with all they’ve got, think again. The article specifies further that each ally will ‘will assist … by taking forthwith … such action as it deems necessary [emphasis added]’. So, allied solidarity turns out to be a moveable feast, meaning only what each member country ‘deems necessary’.

On the matter of the US commitment to Europe, which NATO is held to powerfully instantiate, even the early Cold War commitment to defend Western Europe against the big bad Soviet Union, amounted, practically, to schemes that were ‘always far-fetched and recognised as such’.

If you are shocked, consider this: the US ‘aided’ Europe during the two World Wars on a more or less commercial basis, vastly increasing its economic and financial clout at the expense of ‘allies’. Ruinously for them, it  demanded repayment of its war loans after the First World War and, equally ruinously, demanded policy alignment after the Second.

Europe can thank its stars that the critical aid and immense sacrifices of Soviet and Chinese forces ensured victory in the Second World War, and that the alleged threat of an imminent Soviet attack on Western Europe was little more than a figment of the very hysterical US imagination that has kept its military industrial complex is such fine fettle down the decades.

What the US Wants from NATO

Some argue that NATO was primarily directed against the ‘enemy at home’, left and popular forces and NATO certainly sports a disingenuous record of this. However, it leaves out the international dimension.

Long and hard as US leaders wished to dominate a capitalist world, history unfortunately gave them the opportunity to attempt it just when such domination had become impossible: with the rise of Germany, the US itself and Japan, the capitalist world had already become multipolar by the early twentieth century. No single power could dominate it. Worse, the Russian Revolution, soon followed by the Chinese, took vast swaths of the world out of the capitalist world entirely.

Undaunted, the US persisted, using NATO in attempts to dominate Europe. In the apocryphal words of its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, it aimed ‘to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out’ of Europe.

During the Cold War, the US was reasonably successful, though not without considerable European stroppiness: the Europeans demanded gold over dollars throughout the 1960s, eventually forcing the US to break the dollar-gold link in 197; De Gaulle removed France from NATO’s integrated command in 1966; and Brandt engaged in his Ostpolitik of better relations with the Eastern Bloc. Though many think inter-imperialist rivalry died after the Second World War, it seems to live on such European behaviour.

The Cold War ended neither in unipolarity not in any ‘peace dividend’. US economic decline became visible soon thereafter and the US sought to compensate for economic decline with military aggression. In the circumstances, Europe proved increasingly open to creating autonomous security structures which, inevitably, involved improved economic and security relations with Russia.

With its aims unchanged even as its capacities declined, the US had to thwart such European impulses. It succeeded with its military intervention in Yugoslavia, chiefly by demonstrating the effectiveness of its superior air power and this success ensured that henceforth eastward EU expansion would normally be accompanied by NATO expansion. However, this was no stable arrangement.

Why the US can’t get it

No mere ‘realist’ assertion, the European impulse towards autonomy stemmed from historical differences between the continental European and the Anglo-American economies, the one productively rather than financially oriented the other financially and commercially rather than productive orientated. Four decades of neoliberalism found the latter productively emaciated and more reliant on predatory and speculative finance than ever.

These differences had already made NATO unity hard to contrive and US economic decline only made it more so. As it lost economic attractiveness for Europe (while, moreover, China and Russia gained it), as the US relied on military projection only to fail more and more spectacularly, European impulses towards autonomy were re-surfacing, with President Macron calling NATO brain dead at the alliance’s 2019 summit.

This was the context in which Biden wagered on winning the proxy war in Ukraine as a prelude to then waging one on China. Knowing that Europe, already reluctant to go to war with Russia, would be even more reluctant (for sound economic reasons) to join any anti-Chinese venture, Biden sought so resolutely and completely sunder Europe from Russia and bind it to the US through the Ukraine war that it would have no choice but to go along with the US on China later.

However, this enterprise got off to an unpromising start and is now unravelling.

Marshalling unity even against Russia was hard, involving as it did inflicting a great deal of economic pain on Europe. Even with the Biden Administration’s historical luck of having astonishingly compliant leaderships in so many capitals, pre-eminently Berlin, NATO unity over Ukraine conflict has been more a show than a reality, with a minimum of real and maximum of show compliance. Sanctions have generally been confined those that hurt the least, leaving so many western companies still operating in Russia one wonders what the fuss is all about. Weapons supplies have focused on those that are easiest to spare, often obsolete, leaving Ukraine with a ‘Big Zoo of NATO equipment’ that is hard to deploy or repair efficiently.

Why Defeat in Ukraine will Unravel NATO, and Biden

Both prongs of Biden’s strategy – sanctions and military action by proxy – were, it is now clear, delusional. The first, famously expecting to reduce the rubble to rouble and to push the Russian economy ‘back to the stone age’, had become a manifest failure by the end of 2022 if not earlier. As for the second, despite the billions in military assistance, despite exhausting Western weapons stockpiles, despite discovering the quantitative and qualitative limits to Western weapons production capacities despite astronomically expensive military industrial complexes, despite ever more deadly weapons now including cluster bombs, despite reliance on neo-Nazi battalions, despite US and Ukrainian willingness to incur macabre levels of Ukrainian and mercenary casualties, it has been clear for some time that Ukraine is losing and has no prospect of winning.

President Biden acknowledged this in his turnaround on offering Ukraine membership of NATO or even giving it a timetable for the same and his new-found insistence that not only should things not be made easy for Ukraine to join, not only should Ukraine demonstrate progress on requisite reforms, but it should conclude a peace treaty with Russia before it can join NATO, a point repeated more than one by Jens Stoltenberg at Vilnius.

This is the Biden administration’s off-ramp from the Ukraine conflict, one he also needs thanks to the unpopularity of war at home amid an election campaign about to do into full swing.

In the face of this military defeat, patching up no other differences in NATO will matter. The US has only military might to offer allies. So, Biden’s impending military failure in Ukraine is likely to prove the effective undoing of NATO. If the US cannot ensure military victory, its utility to Europe can only be limited.  And if Biden’s has failed in this intermediate Russian stage, it can hardly go onto its final, Chinese one.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Radhika Desai.

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

On an evening in late June, Alex Jimenez, Tucson Water’s artist-in-residence, hosted an outdoor art installation designed to “call the rain through sound.”

The Santa Cruz Sound Experience, held underneath one of the bridges that crosses the dry Santa Cruz River, featured a three-hour sensory compilation of the region’s seasonal summer rains. Toward the end of the event, the skies answered the call, and attendees celebrated as raindrops fell.

The monsoon season has come to the Southwest again. But this season is different from past monsoons: It’s the first since scientists demonstrated that North America’s monsoon — which drenches Sonora, northern Sinaloa and northeastern Chihuahua in Mexico, and the southern fringe of Arizona and New Mexico — differs from seasonal rains in the rest of the world. And, unfortunately for Southwesterners — who welcome the precipitation and need a break from the summer heat — the phenomenon is likely to weaken as the climate warms.

Monsoons, which exist on every continent except Antarctica, are continental-scale wind patterns that transport water vapor and cause seasonal rains. In general, they occur when intense sunlight during summer causes the land to heat up. Warm air rises and draws in water vapor from the ocean, creating a “thermal contrast between the land and the nearby ocean, and an air circulation between the two,” William Boos, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, explained.

Scientists and lay observers alike have long thought that the North American monsoon was also caused by this “thermal forcing,” with cooler water vapor being pulled in from the Pacific off the west coast of Mexico. To Boos, however, something about North America’s monsoon, which is smaller and more oddly shaped than its peers, was “always a little peculiar.”

In 2021, Boos and Salvatore Pascale, who researches climate dynamics at the University of Bologna in Italy, published an article in the journal Nature that showed that the Southwest’s summer storms were not caused by the typical thermal forcing. Rather, they were caused by something that scientists call “mechanical forcing,” which has to do with terrain. When the mid-latitude jet stream — the band of eastward winds that circle the entire planet — collides with the Rocky Mountains, the range deflects the winds southward, to Mexico. As the winds move east, they push over Mexico’s Sierra Madre, after collecting water vapor from the tropics of the eastern Pacific and Mexico. Then, when the jet stream lifts, forcing moisture-laden air up over mountainous terrain, the vapor condenses into “orographic rain” that falls on the western side of the mountains, creating the monsoon.

“The orographic effect is critically important, especially in terms of what’s going to happen with climate change,” said scientist Agustin Robles of the Technological Institute of Sonora’s Laboratory of Environmental Modeling and Sustainability. “We’ll see the bulk of the changes there.”

There’s a simple reason why scientists hadn’t already figured out geology’s role in creating the monsoon: The technology to do so didn’t exist. Whereas the Tibetan Plateau is so large that it could be modeled for its effect on climate starting in the 1980s, the Sierra Madre was too small and too fine for computers to render accurately until recently. Boos and Pascale used a cutting-edge supercomputer to compare a model of the region’s topography with a version in which they set all the landscape’s elevations to zero. Since that version in effect flattened Mexico, they called it “FlatMex.” In FlatMex, the monsoon all but disappeared, leading to their conclusion that the North American Monsoon is created by wind going over the Sierra Madre.

The recent research built on previous studies of the North American monsoon. A few years ago, Pascale, Boos and six other collaborators published a study that challenged the idea that climate change will increase precipitation across North America.

“There’s a classic idea that as the air gets warmer, it can hold more water vapor, so it will deliver more water to the continent,” said Boos. While that may be true for other monsoons — including the southeast Asian monsoon, which has already become wetter — it’s different in regions like the Southwest, where most of the rainfall comes from thunderstorms and the cumulus clouds associated with them.

Thunderstorms are caused by a difference in the temperature and humidity of the air near ground level and the air higher up in the atmosphere. Once the difference between the two air temperatures reaches a certain level, they turn over, switching places. The hotter, less dense air rises and the colder, denser air sinks, because of gravity. But as the upper levels of the atmosphere warm, there is less of a difference between the two temperatures — and that means fewer thunderstorms and a weaker monsoon.

Communities in the Southwest, which is already facing increasing aridity and extreme heat, will need to improve both air quality and the infrastructure that ensures their access to water, and they’ll also have to find ways to cope with more days at high temperatures. Unfortunately, there “aren’t a lot of options” to address the declining summer rainfall, said Dan McGregor, natural resources services manager for Bernalillo County, New Mexico. His agency mainly encourages water users to conserve water, maintain their wells and to harvest rainwater.

In the Southwest, these effects will disproportionately affect those who rely directly on the rains. Sheryl Joy, Acting Seed Bank Manager at the organization Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, said that for Indigenous communities in Arizona who have developed agricultural systems organized around the summer rains, “continued declines in monsoon rainfall could have devastating effects” on the communities who continue to use these practices.

In Sonora, Mexico, where most of the monsoon’s precipitation falls, there is less infrastructure in place to address water shortages than there is in the U.S. Southwest. “Unlike Arizona or California, which have long-term planning and responses such as the Tier 1 shortage announcements, here our institutions have not anticipated the effects of the weaker monsoon,” said Robles. “They tend to blame drought, when it’s really a modification of the monsoon over the last 30 or 40 years.”

Jonah Ivy of Tucson’s Watershed Management Group focuses on helping residents use the water that falls, rather than waste it as runoff. “What does a weaker monsoon matter if right now we’re pushing all the water off our landscapes?” he said. “Even with a weaker monsoon, we still live in the wettest desert in the world. We still live in abundance.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists unravel the origins of the Southwest’s monsoon on Aug 16, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Caroline Tracey.