Latifa Najjar superimposes hearts over the faces of her children’s online photographs in the classic mother’s move to protect them. But, unfortunately, her children are in a Rafah refugee camp, and it’s the middle of the Israeli-Gaza war. So she’s unknowingly saving me from missing their beautiful faces, if I learn one day they’ve been murdered by bombs or famine. Exterminated by the bad luck of being born in Gaza, a country stripped not only of its housing and masjids (mosques), but food, water, and medical care. A country strip-searched by Israeli soldiers like they strip-search its women—taking their last bit of dignity and leaving nothing left but malnourished bodies and lips to pray with. Latifa lost almost everything—even her snow white, blue-eyed kittens Lia and Leo, for they were left behind in the misery of North Gaza, where they are sure to die.

Latifa’s brother is dead, a cousin too, but the family she created with her husband still lives. Her eldest daughter, Farah, age seventeen, translates Facebook messages between us. Deciphering her mom’s homegrown Arabic into an English she learned a la cart from Sherlock Holmes movies, social media and online classes. Amideast, an American NGO, gave her an award for an essay she wrote about her future: The Remarkable Story of Farah Najjar. Now that future seems impossibly far away.

Things are hard for Latifa’s family, so I take her children to the land of make believe, where they become a family of kings and queens. Why not? Latifa’s been so open with me, a total stranger. She has to tell a man she’s never met about her life and death struggles. Not a thing women usually do in Gaza. It’s a patriarchal culture, and I’m on the wrong side of history. But all that is forgotten as I entertain her children with a bedtime story.

In a faerie tale desert by the sea, I exchange their tattered refugee clothes for luxurious silk garments. I put them on gorgeous thrones set on thick carpets in Bedouin tents instead of dirt floors under blue tarps. The little princes and princesses enjoy endless sweets, playtime and peace. No bombs detonate here, no innocent people scream.

Years from now they will live in solace. They will forget that long ago missiles wiped out family and friends leaving half-living relatives to bury the dead. Tonight I take them to a world where children slay dragons and fear is conquered with toy swords and Aladdin’s wishes. Finally, the moonlight serenades faces as tired eyes fall asleep.

That next day I receive a call from a young woman, Fatima, who’s somewhere that’s not Rafah. Stuck on a rooftop overlooking a fractured city block. In her arms, her two-year-old son. Scattered around her: water, garbage and shame. Gunfire argues in the distance. Every building in the background is reduced to rubble or half burned up in flames. Trapped civilians scream out for help, but no one hears them. Fatima asks for money. I send ten dollars. “Ouch,” she replies, demanding more. A Facebook friend obliges. Then Fatima makes another request. The cycle continues. It will never stop. Scam, or not? Normally, I would have never sent her money—I’m not one for double drowning. But I forgive her because, just above, I witnessed hell on a smartphone screen.

This asking for money is the only control she has over life. She demands our charity, while facing death and being buried by debris. Regardless, she’s nearly alone, with only a few small souls for company, less in weight than they used to be, the lower echelon of refugees. Her only link to sanity is through the same technology that guides the smart bombs which kill whole families. I say goodbye. We will never talk again. She’ll be ravaged by circumstance, and I’ll write about her while sitting here, sickened by what I’ve seen.

Latifa posts videos of her children singing, dancing, pleading. I can feel her heart beating through the interwebs. There’s nothing else to do, but mask the horror with innocence. Long before the war she was a social researcher, a young woman with a college degree helping her people. And here she is, years later, kingdom gone and trapped among the poor.

But, she has plans. Like many Palestinians she’s had enough of the endless strife with Israel, and wants to leave Gaza. Enticed by the internet images of life outside their nation-state prison, she works at getting away by soliciting money for her Go Fund Me. With luck they will not perish in the genocide.

Another woman-lead family messages me. Samah Ouda is far away from food in a place called Nuseirat, a suburb by the sea. The remains of Turkish coffee houses, masjids and cemeteries are all that’s left. The beaches, strewn with chunks of concrete. The streets, peppered with powdered coffee. The call to prayer, absent from the broken minarets after endless centuries. She’s more desperate than Latifa, speaking in shorter sentences, not allowing herself to dream. Her children’s survival, less likely. Her words, terse and to the point. She taught English before the war. Now, she promotes her plight through Tik-Tok and Instagram, to fund her own Go Fund Me.

I focus on Latifa’s family and their future, not wanting to think about those who won’t make it, those whose death will have no meaning. I message her again, but she’s too busy trying to live, to listen. So I find a channel that’s live-streaming a Gaza hospital, where children play on wheelchairs amid the dying.

The next day we talk.

“Alhamdulillah (God help me), I’m desperate,” Latifa says. “We need a truce.”

So I say: “You are brave. You are strong.”

“Thanks a lot.” she replies. “We are happy to know you brother. I pray that we survive.”

Then an anonymous young woman asks me for help. She is alone, stranded in a home housing elderly and children. Like many, she has lost touch with her friends from before the war. I hear it all the time. A fragmented people, living fragmented lives, with fragmented families waiting to die. In this case the young woman is too afraid to go outside, or even look out the window. She has stayed off evil by refusing to see, her terror limited to the sound of bombs, gunfire and drones. But even so, her food is tasteless and nothing smells good. No one hugs her either, so she’s slowly losing the sense of touch as well. A solitary life in a solitary room, but still, that’s a better existence than some.

She is worried about what the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) will do to her if they invade Rafah. She has heard the stories, the tales of sexual assault. At first I avoid the topic, try to steer her mind somewhere else. But there is a very good chance she will be caught and stripped searched as she tries to flee. Likely in front of male Israeli soldiers, rifles pointed in her direction, ready to kill. She will feel humiliated. A young woman who’s never shown, since puberty, an unrelated man an inch of her skin not on her face or hands. The clothing the Israelis say oppresses her will now be used to violate what little she has left.

When I finally tell her about how to stem the anxiety and fear, my words feel like instructions for going to the gallows. Repeat this prayer in times of trouble: ‘I take refuge in the Lord of the people.’ Supposedly, the last line spoken before the Prophet’s (PBUH) death.

I hear about an airstrike striking Nuseirat that kills many women and children. I message Samah and luckily she replies, she is not hurt. We chit-chat for once, and I learn that before the war she was a high school physics teacher.

The next day I receive messages from two new women. Mays Astal and Maryam Hasanat are desperate. They are both eight months pregnant, in land with little medical care if anything goes wrong. One of them has a good chance of surviving, for the other everything has already gone wrong.

Mays, Catholic Relief Services employee, Palestinian Red Crescent Society engineer, found herself with nothing but a tent, her two children named Dialah and Mohammed and a husband. Yet she still spends three hours a day as a humanitarian worker risking death at the hands of the IDF. The perfect American nuclear family, except they live in a war zone, not prosperity.

One day the IDF decided it would be best if they burn down all the buildings in the refugee camp with incendiary munitions, then drive tanks through the tent city to run down the living. Mays and her family bury themselves in the sand, narrowly avoiding being run over. She clings to hope with another Go Fund Me, so she and her family can get out of hell and into Egypt. There she can give birth in peace.

Maryam has a beautiful Facebook profile picture from her wedding. In it her tall, handsome husband smiles as he looks down at her. Like nearly everyone else, they lost everything, and left their home as soon as Israel littered their living area with leaflets exalting doom and destruction for all who remain. Within a few weeks their apartment was bombed, and her brother-in-law was shot to death by the IDF as he drove back to his young wife and child.

A day after she contacted me, she sends me a message: “Today my best friend, Haia, and her baby died.”

“From a bomb?” I ask.

“No, Haia was pregnant, and she had to have a cesarean section.”

“What went wrong?”

“They cut her womb open with no anesthesia, and couldn’t stop the bleeding. Neither mother nor child survived.”

Then I find out why Maryam’s so desperate. She’ll need a c-section as well, because her pelvis is too narrow. That’s why she needs twenty-five thousand dollars to get to Egypt, so she and her baby won’t die in a hospital in Rafah that has no supplies. So she won’t become one of the thousands of women who have lost their lives between the barbed wire and the sea.

The following fundraisers will help bring hope to these families. They are listed in order of appearance in this story.

Latifa’s Go Fund Me Campaign

Samah’s Go Fund Me Campaign

Mays Go Fund Me Campaign

Maryam’s Go Fund Me Campaign

Maryam and husband

Pregnant Maryam and her son

Latifah’s daughter

• Please message the author at moc.liamgnull@erotavlassore if you want to inquire about helping refugees in Gaza.

•• First published in Z

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eros Salvatore.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Aron Thorn about the Texas border standoff for the February 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (7/26/23)

Janine Jackson: Many see a looming constitutional crisis in Texas, where, as the New York Times put it, Gov. Greg Abbott has been “testing the legal limits of what a state can do to enforce immigration law,” with things like installing razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, and physically barring border patrol agents from responding to reports of migrants in distress—in one case, two weeks ago, of a woman and two children who subsequently drowned.

The tone of much corporate news reporting, outside of gleefully racist outlets like Fox, is critical of Texas’ defiance of federal law, but conveys an idea that, yes, there’s a crisis at the border, but this isn’t the way to handle it.

But what if their definition of crisis employs some of the same assumptions and frameworks that drive Abbott’s actions? Precisely how big a leap is it from Biden’s promise that, if he gets a deal for money to Ukraine, he would “shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” to razor wire in the Rio Grande?

Defining a crisis shapes the ideas of appropriate response. So, is there a crisis at the US Southern border, and for whom?

We’re joined now by Aron Thorn. He’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He joins us now by phone from the Rio Grande Valley. Welcome to CounterSpin, Aron Thorn.

Aron Thorn: Thank you.

JJ: I want to ask about US immigration policy broadly, but all eyes are on Texas now for a reason. And from a distance, it just looks wild. As an attorney, as a Texan, what are the legal stakes that you see here? It feels a little bit like uncharted territory, even if it has historical echoes, but how alarmed should we be, legally, about what’s happening right now?

Texas Tribune (3/30/22)

AT: Yeah, I think that is the billion-dollar question for all of us seeing this issue bubble up from the ground, frankly, as a slow boil from a couple of years ago, when Governor Abbott began to establish the Operation Lone Star program, in which he spent billions of Texas taxpayer money to send troops, and put a ton of resources into this state hardening of the US/Mexico border.

We’ve seen an increasing, frankly, level of aggression of the state, towards not only migrants, who are the ones who are caught in the day-to-day violence of being caught up in the razor wire, being met with officers, things like that. But the aggression from the state to the federal government has increased intensely over the last year or so. It is difficult to say that this constitutional crisis, between what a state and the federal government can do, it’s hard to say that that is overblown.

I would say that Texas is absolutely challenging the limits of federalism, to see just how far it can go. And immigration is a perfect vehicle for this kind of test. How far can I push the federal government to act the way that I want the federal government to, on things like immigration, on any other sort of federal issue where the feds are the ones who are responsible under our system? How far can I go?

Immigration is controversial. It’s very sensitive to a lot of folks. A lot of folks do not know a lot about it, and so the images that come out, as you mentioned, they seem chaotic, but this has ramifications for something much beyond immigration.

So when I think of the constitutional crisis, I think about it in this larger sense of, what does this really mean for federalism in this country, right? If the federal government is not able to stand up and assert its dominion over anything—immigration is just the hot topic now—what does that say for the government of our country? And the next time another state doesn’t like what the United States does on, say, environmental regulations, or other things that are cross-border or national, how far can that state take their agenda?

These are questions baked into our political system, they don’t have any solid answers, and Texas is running into that gap to assert that the state, at the end of the day, can assert itself over the federal government when it wants to.

JJ: So it’s important to stay on top of, but for a lot of folks, it’s just kind of a story in the paper. It’s about feds versus states, and it’s kind of about red states and blue states, and I think it’s a little bit abstract—but it’s not abstract or potential or theoretical. There are communities of human beings, as you’ve pointed out, not just at the border, but elsewhere that are being impacted. And I just wonder, how would you maybe have us redefine the scope of impact, so that folks could understand that we’re not talking about a few border communities?

Texan (1/24/24)

AT: Yeah, absolutely. I think one angle of this story that we don’t always see, it’s been heartbreaking to see, for example, the state’s rhetoric of “come and cut it,” be very aggressive, “we have a right to defend ourselves,” etc., etc. The, in my opinion, overblown claims about just how many cartel members are among people, just how many drugs they’re finding on people, for example.

The very vast majority of folks who are showing up to the US/Mexico border are folks who are in need of protection, they’re in need of safety, they’re in need of stability. That is the very vast majority of people.

And so something that does not often show up in these stories that is particularly pertinent right now is, let’s be clear, Texas is fighting for its right to lay concertina wire so that people can get caught in it for hours, and get injured and languish there as punishment for trying to seek safety.

And what they want to do is push people back into Mexico where they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, worse, as punishment for wanting to seek safety. That is what Texas is asserting its right to do. That’s what the Trump administration’s primary goal was on the US/Mexico border. That’s what Greg Abbott’s primary goal is at the US/Mexico border. And we don’t talk about that, as a country, of what that actually looks like every day, what that looks like on the ground.

What we talk about are US communities, we talk about people “taking our jobs,” we talk about the fentanyl that’s coming in—all real issues that are not touched, not controlled, by people who are desperate and are trying to seek safety. So to me, that is one of the biggest holes that I always see in these stories, that we don’t really take: our right to defend our border, but from what?

As a Texan, I don’t think what Texas is doing on the border day-to-day will actually improve the lives of Texans. We are spending billions of dollars of our own tax money for this political ploy that we are improving the lives of Texans, while we are stripping Texans off of Medicaid faster than any other state in the country. Texans are very strapped in an economy where inflation is still an issue, and nothing that we’re doing at our border is going to affect that.

So we don’t talk about where the rubber meets the road for basically anybody in this story. It’s just simply in the political cacophony.

ABC News (12/19/23)

JJ: When you were on ABC News in December, talking about SB4, which you can talk about, the setup talked about a “tidal wave” of people coming over the southern border—let’s be clear, we’re talking about the southern border, right—the strain on US resources being “unprecedented,” and all of these people were crossing the border “illegally.” And that was the intro for you. And in media, generally, migration itself is sort of pre-framed as a problem, as a crisis; but we haven’t always seen it that way, and we don’t have to see it that way, do we? We kind of need a paradigm shift, it seems like here.

AT: I think you’re absolutely right, and one thing that I sometimes will tell people is, take a step back and really think about it. Migration is one of the most constant things in the entirety of human existence. This is one of the most fundamentally human things that someone can do. If you are suffering in one place for whatever reason, X number of reasons, throughout literal human history, you migrate to a place where you will do better.

Aron Thorn: “We will continue down this really ugly road of, how violent are we willing to get with people? That’s the question we’re at in 2024.” (image: ABC News)

Let’s not let the federal government get off the hook. The idea that you can law-enforce your way out of human instinct and human behavior is absurd, and it’s been very present in, obviously, Texas, but the federal government’s policies on the US/Mexico border, for at least 30 years, since at least the early ’90s. This idea that there is such a strain on resources, but yet we have a blank check for enforcement-only policies, that if we are just a little more violent and a little more aggressive towards people trying to come in to get more stability in their lives, then we can prevent something that is a fundamentally human behavior, is absurd.

And we need to have more of a discussion about why we’re sitting here, 30 years later, and we’re at a point where if we lay a hundred more yards of concertina wire, and we cut up a few more women and children, they will stop coming. That is the argument we’re having now, and it’s absurd.

So I absolutely agree that without this paradigm shift of: what are we doing? we will continue down this really ugly road of, how violent are we willing to get with people? That’s the question we’re at in 2024.

JJ: Yeah, I harbor hatred for corporate media for many reasons, but one of them is this PBS NewsHour, real politic for the smart people, that I saw recently, which basically said, calm down, Biden is just “seeking to disarm criticism of his handling of migration at the border as immigration becomes an increasing matter of concern to Americans in the lead up to the presidential election.”

So we’re supposed to just think of it as part of a chess game, and I guess ignore the actual human impact of what these moves are going to be. But I just really resent this media coverage that says, “This is just shadows on the cave wall; it’s really about the election, you don’t really need to worry about it.” I just wonder what you would like to see news media, well, I guess I’m saying do less of, but what could they do more of that would move this issue forward in a humane way?

PBS NewsHour (1/29/24)

AT: Yeah, I mean, hearkening back to the last question about a paradigm shift, I think as somebody who has done this work on the ground for many years, started doing this in the middle of the Trump administration, now has seen this through the Biden administration, something that we often remark to each other on the ground is that so much of the Biden administration’s policies have the exact same effect as what the Trump administration was doing, just in a less visceral way.

And so when that is raised to folks—he’s having the same exact effect on the daily lives of migrants—people who would be outraged and out in the streets to protest against Donald Trump, look at the Biden administration having the exact same effect, saying, “Well, he’s trying his best.”

So the idea that it still boils down to the politics of it all: “I just don’t like this person who’s in office, and so anything that he does, if he breathes wrong, I’m going to criticize him,” but yet somebody who has the same effect… It really brings to bear how many folks in this country, this is a theoretical issue for them. When the rubber meets the road, we don’t have a great track record of being truly empathetic and truly smart on migration. “It’s a political football in the right hands, and so I’m going to just agree with whatever the administration does, and I’m certainly not going to critique him,” is not the way that we really get to actual solutions on immigration in this country.

JJ: Are there any policies that are in the works, or about to be in the works? Is there anything that folks can be pulling for, either in Texas or nationally?

AT: That is also a really complicated answer. But one thing I will say, I always raise for folks to think about the guest worker program in this country, and it’s complicated to say in a soundbite type of answer, because labor has its own issues, right? Labor is very exploited in the United States, and so sometimes I don’t want to have this discussion about bringing migrants here just to be exploited by abusive employers, right? That’s not the answer.

However, it is true that economics is one of the biggest drivers of migration trends over the last couple of centuries that we can see, right? Bad economies in other parts of the world encourage people to migrate to the US, and a bad economy in the US actually encourages people to go home. The numbers are there.

And so that is actually true, that a lot of people are coming to seek stability in their lives, or in the lives of people who are still at home. And yet the United States has done everything in its power to either gum up the works of its guest worker program—slashing visas, making things more difficult for whatever reasons—and we are still sitting here with the reality that a significant slice of people would love to come to the United States, make money and go home.

To me, that seems like a no-brainer that both parties could get behind, of “let’s confront that reality,” and if we do not want to absorb these people into our society, let’s allow people to come in, benefit us, benefit themselves, and then return.

There is a significant slice of people who would like to do that, and we do have a guest worker visa program, but every year we make it more difficult, or we don’t want to expand it. An expanded guest worker program, I think, is a step in the right direction, if we don’t want so many people showing up at the US/Mexico border saying, “OK, I have no other viable options. Let me take the way that I need to to protect myself and my family.”

FAIR.org (1/9/24)

JJ: Ari Paul wrote for FAIR.org recently about how news media—he was writing about the New York Times, but they weren’t alone—make this fake consensus. They had a front-page piece that said, “Biden Faces Pressure on Immigration, and Not Just From Republicans.” And it was the idea that even Democratic mayors and leaders are agreeing: Too many South Americans are trying to get into this land of milk and honey. And what that reporting involves is manipulating statements of local officials who are saying, “We want to welcome immigrants, but we don’t have the resources,” and turning that into, “Nobody wants immigrants in their community.”

And I guess my big beef, among others, with that is that media do us a disservice, confusing people about what we believe and what we are capable of and what we really think. And it just kind of breaks my heart, because it tells people their neighbors think differently than they do. It misleads us about public opinion about the welcoming of immigrants.

And I guess I should have put a question on that, but I can’t think of one, except to say that when communities say, “We need more resources to address this,” that is not the same as them saying, “Migrants out.”

AT: Having worked in immigration now for many years, immigration is such a difficult topic, because underneath the banner of immigration are so many other debates, about US society and culture and race, class, our place in the world, right, foreign policy—the list goes on and on and on. Immigration hits on so many of those realities.

And it hearkens back to, many other different types of groups of folks can tell you about—people of color, for example—having white colleagues who say prejudiced things until they know a person of color, or they say xenophobic things until they know an immigrant.

And I think that this is so deeply challenging because people are stepping to this without having any actual access, easy access, to folks who have gone through this process, and specifically on class, and also on the way that the United States government works, right? I don’t know the exact figure, but DHS’s budget is colossal, and Texas is spending billions of dollars with its own money.

And so everybody’s stepping to this debate of whether this person should “have not broken the law.” But we have gotten to this place by spending all of this money we could use welcoming people, putting welcoming infrastructure in place, we’re using it on enforcement. No wonder we don’t have any money to welcome people into our communities, and that’s frustrating and hurtful to you. And then also you’re stepping with all of these biases, because that’s a real challenge we have in our society.

Yeah, no wonder, it’s very easy to point fingers at that person. It is the culmination of all of these other real societal ills that we grapple with every single day. No other issue hits on so many at the same time.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Aron Thorn; he’s senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program at the Texas Civil Rights Project. Aron Thorn, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AT: Yes, thank you.

The post ‘Texas Is Fighting for Its Right to Lay Concertina Wire’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

In front of the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso, Texas, a few blocks from the border. Photo: Todd Miller.

I am at the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where one year ago I watched groups of people wade through the shallow water to “pedir posada,” the Spanish-language term used for Joseph and Mary asking for refuge in Bethlehem 2,023 years ago. This year, there are no people below me, at least not right now, and the Rio Grande is a greenish, contaminated trickle that will dry up completely just east of El Paso, and then be replenished by the Rio Conchos 200 miles downriver in Presidio, Texas. On the other side of the bridge, you can see that the holiday season is in full gear as the line of people entering the United States coming from Ciudad Juárez extends up to the top of the bridge, exactly above the river. Surrounding the river are the props of the modern-day nativity scene: coiling razor wire, 30-foot walls, Texas Army National Guard troops and their armored jeeps, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped trucks, drone surveillance, camera surveillance, biometric systems. Partially, this is the result of the most money ever put toward federal border and immigration enforcement (as we reported this year, 2023 was $29.8 billion, a record number, which adds to the more than $400 billion since 2003). Partially, this is because Texas’s spending on Operation Lone Star, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott and his right-wing, un-Christian justification machine, which has added up to $4.5 billion over the last two years. And this has been the response of the United States for people “pidiendo posada” for 30 years since Operation Blockade/Hold the Line began a border-building spree that has not ceased: there is no room at the inn.

From the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in December 2022 of people asking for refuge at the border wall. Photo: Todd Miller.

I think of that cold night on the ground in a stable that is depicted in so many places this time of year as I walk past shivering refugees in heavy coats sitting outside against the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso a few blocks from the border. I am reminded of the hundreds upon hundreds of people arriving to the Arizona border, as Melissa reported on earlier this week. I am reminded of the young Guatemalan mother I met myself at the border wall in late November as she tended to her two-month-old under the 30-foot border wall. They had been waiting there for two days. The infant was sick, and the nights were cold. The rest of the group, from the coast of Guatemala, built a fire to keep warm. When were the wise men going to arrive, the kings, the angels? The humanitarians did arrive, as they do, day after day (see Melissa’s reporting on that). I am reminded of being in Bethlehem myself a few years back, visiting the Aida refugee camp of Palestinians, which was surrounded by a tall concrete wall that had an embedded “pill box,” or a tower where snipers could point their assault rifles located mere miles from that stable where Mary gave birth on the cold ground. The Christmas story is playing out all around us, as lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar pointed out for us just yesterday. Where Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus had to flee Bethlehem when King Herod started to wield authoritarian power, the long trek to Egypt fleeing persecution is happening right now, throughout the world, such as in the Darién Gap in Colombia and Panama, as discussed in Melissa’s two interviews with anthropologist Caitlyn Yates—one podcast in December, one in August. Or the equivalent might be in the Mediterranean, as we discussed with Lauren Markham last June after a ship capsized near Greece, killing 600 people, or the countless places across the world where people struggle with a huge enforcement apparatus, which Anna Lekas Miller wrote about in her book Love Across Borders. We have spent the year doing our best to give you insight into what is happening on our borders.

I love this time of year, December, because things start to slow down, the frenetic pace starts to wane. For me, this becomes a more reflective period. Yet this modern Christmas story is anything but reflective. On television sets, commercials remind us of the holiday spirit (and to buy as much as we can), and movies have heartwarming tales of people coming together. Yet hospitality is scoffed at in words and policy, no matter what president, no matter what political party. Melissa has reported time and time again about the dehumanizing rhetoric; earlier this week, she wrote about a Fox News reporter talking about invaders and invasions and “credible fear thresholds.” This discourse abounds, with stories of people “taking advantage of our asylum system,” and claims that the United States can’t absorb any more people. Did Mary and Joseph hear similar soundbites on their journeys?

In these stories, we rarely hear about U.S. foreign policy, both historical and current. Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine’s effect in Latin America: the centuries of upholding dictatorships, training generals, arming militaries—and, lately, creating border guards—and influencing politics, as well as the economic domination, in which corporate power and extractive industries enjoy a borderless world and can travel anywhere and take anything they want (see NAFTA, see CAFTA), from precious resources to cheap labor. Meanwhile, regular people—sometimes the very people displaced by corporate power—face harsher and harsher border regimes that extend throughout the continent. The same thing the Greg Abbotts of the world accuse undocumented people of doing here, corporate power is doing there. Studies have continually shown how a migrant labor force bolsters the U.S. economy in myriad, even critical ways (see, for example, the film A Day without a Mexican), yet border crossers get blamed for the big societal problems as if they had the power to set policy in corporate board rooms and in Washington. In the halls of power, debates stagnate over whether people are refugees or economic migrants—creating more divisions between the people most affected by the entrenched borders.

At the height of her pregnancy, Mary and Joseph walked for days, fleeing a Caesar Augustus’s occupying force—a story that resonates with more than 184 million people on the move today. I am reminded of my dear friend Irene Morales, a nun with the Madres of the Eucaristia, who I worked with two decades ago and who told me day after day—as we traveled through northern Mexico and the U.S. borderlands—that she saw Christ in the faces of people on the move. In the early 2000s, thousands of people were arriving to Altar, Sonora, to cross through the Arizona deserts. The people I talked to and interviewed were mostly from southern Mexico, and in many cases they were migrating because they could no longer make ends meet. From about 2002 to 2005, I talked to hundreds of people, and often it was parents thinking about their children, parents who talked about skipping meals for their children, wanting their children to get an education, or sometimes it was children on the move for a sick parent. So often it was a story of sacrifice at a time in a post-9/11 era characterized by a massive ramp-up on the border, with terrorism and migration blurring into each other at a policy level. “El rostro de Cristo,” Irene told me.

Stanton Street Bridge at sunset with a long line of people crossing from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso as is typical during the holidays. Photo: Todd Miller.

As I stand on the bridge in Juárez, where everything seems basically the same, I know a lot has happened over the last year, and we have covered much of it at The Border Chronicle. I, for one, have been following that contaminated river and have gone into Chihuahua to report on border water struggles for a forthcoming book, and I have shared some photo essays here. Melissa also wrote about Chihuahua earlier this year for The New Yorker, focusing on the epidemic of journalists assassinated in Mexico, which she summarized in The Border Chronicle. I feel so fortunate to work alongside Melissa, who not only wrote (and talked to experts) about the innards of this massive border fortification, whether it be the surge of wall building, deadly vehicle chases, Operation Lone Star, or Florida cops patrolling the border—and the right-wing rhetoric that so often propels it (not to mention the Elon Musk circus)—but also about people in border communities for inspiration and solutions such as border artists, a brilliant sidewalk school, or a doctor who spends his time treating border crossers (Doctor Brian Elmore also penned an op-ed for us). And that’s just a taste. This year, I had the opportunity to go to Yale and debate border enforcement, a humbling and educational experience, to say the least. As I wrote about my losing effort, some of the dynamics we constantly struggle with in this sort of border journalism were clearly revealed.

Much has changed over the last year, but—from what I can tell suspended between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—much has remained the same. The border policy is the same, there is more money in the budgets, there is more money in as-of-yet-unpassed supplemental funding bills, there are more and more contracts for private industry. And now we have an election year. And, as we all know, during an election year, the border is a politician’s sacrificial lamb. So be prepared for a good dose of border theater, and we’ll be here with our coverage, commentary, interviews, and podcasts. The last thing I want to do is stand on that bridge a year from now and watch people wade through the trickling Rio Grande to “pedir posada” at a large gate at an even more fortified border wall in El Paso. That is, however, the likely outcome of 2024, and we will cover all of it. But we will also find the spaces where people are trying to make change, we will listen to the border communities, and we will document the humanitarian efforts. And trust me you, we will be looking in the places where there is generosity toward the stranger.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicle. Subscribe here.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Todd Miller.

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

The U.S. Justice Department is threatening to sue the state of Texas after Republican Governor Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in the Rio Grande in an attempt to block migrants from crossing the river. This comes just after a whistleblower state trooper at the Texas Department of Public Safety recently protested the state’s inhumane policies in a letter to superiors. “What’s happening at the border in Texas right now is criminal,” says Democratic Texas Senator Roland Gutierrez. “There’s state crimes, there’s federal crimes, and there’s international crimes.”

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

Recently, there was a serious revelation that some wire service reports were edited, without attribution, by an individual employee of our national broadcaster, RNZ.

Now, let’s examine the way I composed the above sentence.

I included the word “serious” to signal to readers that this news is of significant importance. The reason is that I believe there is already extensive frustration at media coverage of news — and therefore anything that erodes trust in our major media should be taken seriously.

• READ MORE: Mediawatch: Further fallout as RNZ takes out the ‘Kremlin garbage’
• Other RNZ inquiry reports
• Other Palestine reports

Later in the sentence, I used the word “edited”. Initially, I had used the word “altered” but I made a conscious decision to change it to “edited”. I did this because I thought the word “altered” might suggest a higher type of wrongdoing — one that could be linked to fraud and criminality, such as being paid by a foreign agent to alter documents.

There is no evidence that this was the case at RNZ. The word “edited” suggests the use of some sort of journalistic judgment which, in this particular case, regardless of the factuality or falsehood of the edits, were clearly unethical because they were unauthorised and undeclared.

The reference to “an individual employee” was to ensure that other journalists at RNZ, and the organisation as a whole, were not implicated in the revelation. If I had thought RNZ was systematically biased in its reporting, I probably would have just written that RNZ had been found to be altering wire service news.

So my choice of words to form the first sentence of this column was informed by my personal perspectives, as well as the impression I hoped to create in the minds of those reading it.

The subject of this column isn’t about what happened at RNZ. We will be informed of this, in time, when the result of the ongoing inquiry is made public.

Unbiased reporting?
The question I intend to explore here is if there is such a thing as unbiased reporting.

I went back to university later in life to study journalism because it was important to me to understand how the news was produced. My course placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of objectivity and impartiality as ideal standards of news reporting, without much discussion about the limits of achieving such unrealistic standards.

News is produced by reporters and shaped by editors who cannot help but inject their own perspectives and personal experiences into the final product. Even when reporting live from the scene, journalists often have to form a judgment as to what is newsworthy, and so depending on who is reporting the story, the information we receive may alter.

In general, the idea of “unbiased”, “objective” or “neutral” reporting cannot be entirely divorced from the editorial guides journalists use to determine what information to report, and also what they believe is the truth.

Omitting context or the decision to exclude some key words can, in some instances, produce a misleading report.

For instance, my interest in the Palestinian cause has meant that I notice the journalistic language used in reporting on Palestine. I consider that Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) should always be referred to as “occupied Gaza” and “occupied West Bank” because this is their legal status under international law.

But in many articles about Palestine, the word “occupied” is often dropped even though its use matters because it gives relevant context to reporting of political and military events there.

#Mediawatch: Further #fallout as #RNZ takes out the ‘Kremlin garbage’ #CafePacific #AsiaPacificReport #rnznews #PacificMediaWatch #rnzinquiry #kremlingarbage #RussiaUkraineWar #media #mediacredibility #newsedits @USPWansolwara https://t.co/waIGzEUdwE pic.twitter.com/wfzDEFZjdi

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) June 18, 2023

Impartial presentation
Some journalistic codes refer to “balanced” and “fair” reporting. The idea here is that, where there is controversy, there should be an impartial presentation of all facts as well as all substantial opinions relating to it.

A fair report, it is said, should avoid giving equal footing to truths and mistruths and should provide factual context to any inaccurate or misleading public statement.

In recent years, The New York Times has used a series of articles known as Explainers to, as they describe it, “demystify thorny topics”.

Stuff’s Explained follows a similar format to help deconstruct topics that are complex and challenging to understand.

The notion of bias in news writing has become the most common criticism of the media.

Ultimately, the solution to increasing trust in journalism lies in transparency and disclosure of the standards, judgments and systems used to produce and edit news. It is therefore right that RNZ has announced an external review of its processes for the editing of online stories.

But there should also be a mind shift in our understanding of the notions of unbiased and objective reporting — namely that these notions have always existed and continue to operate within power dynamics that give privilege to certain perspectives.

The best approach, therefore, is to always allow for an element of doubt — and only believe something to be true just so long as our active efforts to disprove it have been unsuccessful.

Donna Miles-Mojab is an Iranian New Zealander interested in justice and human rights issues. She lives in Christchurch and works as a freelance journalist and a columnist for The Press. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

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

RNZ has appointed a group of experts to carry out an investigation over how pro-Russian edits were inserted into international stories online.

An RNZ digital journalist has been placed on leave after it came to light he had changed news agency stories on the war in Ukraine.

RNZ has since been auditing hundreds of stories the journalist edited for its website over a five-year period.

Twenty-one stories from news agency Reuters and one BBC item have so far been found to be inappropriately edited, and have been corrected. Most relate to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but others relate to Israel, Syria and Taiwan.

Media law expert Willy Akel, will chair a three-person panel. The other members are public law expert and former journalist Linda Clark, and former director of editorial standards at the ABC, Alan Sunderland.

RNZ board chairman Dr Jim Mather told RNZ’s Morning Report the board had also agreed on the review’s terms of reference.

“The terms of reference are specific about reviewing the circumstances around the inappropriate editing of wire stories discovered in June 2023 identifying what went wrong and recommending areas for improvement.

Specific handling of Ukraine complaint
“We’re also going to look at the specific handling of the complaint to the broadcasting minister from the Ukrainian community in October 2022 and then it’s going to broaden out to review the overall editorial controls, systems and processes for the editing of online content at RNZ.”

The review would also look at total editorial policy and “most importantly” practice as well, Mather said.

No stone would be left unturned, he said.

“Policy is one thing but ensuring it’s put into practice is another.

“We have specifically and purposefully decided not to limit it in any way shape or form but to allow it to broaden as may be required to ensure we restore public confidence in RNZ.

“We’re prepared as a board to support the panel going where they need to, to give us all confidence that we are ensuring that robust editorial process are being followed.

“I’m making no pre-determinations whatsoever, I’m waiting for the review to be conducted.”

The investigation was expected to take about four weeks to complete.

Dr Mather said he retained confidence in RNZ chief executive and editor-in-chief Paul Thompson.

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.

Three women went into their experiences recruiting and screening potential college hire-ons. The language coming from these people belies the vapidity of our times. Now, well, one woman said, “we have 30 people applying for one job, compared to a few years ago when 300 applied for one job.” I almost puked.

This entire “thing” was all about HR-speak, and the shallowness of their conversation and the Dystopian proposals they lay out are just signs of the shifting baseline disorder times.

They are happy about hybrid work, about kicking down the useless 9 to 5 timeframe for work, and are happy that work can be done at home, 8 am to 8 pm, or later, if need be.

Then, two males came on, and they are the Linked-In creeps, which sponsors these talks. Microsoft, now, owns Linked-In. Linked-In does staffing/hiring now, and alas, many of the universities and colleges are using hiring and staffing services like Linked-In to do the real work of hiring and screening.

One of the fops stated that colleges are way behind the times, technologically, and that getting courses and admin work on line, in hyper-remote ways, is the only way forward. You know, these monsters who believe the bricks and mortar campuses are just dinosaurs.

Yikes, here it is: The Talent Crisis in Higher Education

This is just one of a million types of superficial and back ass wards thinking, or unthinking comments:

Online schools are mushrooming everywhere these days, and it’s not that hard anymore to tell the genuine ones from the diploma mills. A number of online institutions have established strong brand names and reputations for themselves, and even with traditional brick and mortar big guns like MIT jumping on the online education bandwagon, it stands to reason that place-based higher education is losing the importance and prestige it once held.

The death of brick and mortar colleges will likely be long, slow, and painful, but here are ten reasons why we should consider speeding up the process and abolishing them right now:They’re way too expensive for most people.

Yeah, so throw the baby out with the bathwater:

[The German phrase] had its first written occurrence in Thomas Murner’s (1475-1537) versified satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512), which contains as its eighty-first short chapter entitled “Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten” (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-six rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric leitmotif, and there is also the first illustration of the expression as a woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with the bath water […].

Instead of stepping back, reforming, retrofitting, stopping the lunacy of capitalism eating everything, including those babies in the bathwater, we have these creeps, lowly ones, middlings, who have bought into the Fortune Magazine lies of — “we have to just accelerate AI-AR-VR-CGI-Twinning-Robotics since the cat’s out of the bag, and we will just have to deal witht he negative consquences of a Dystopian, anti-human, anti-community world.”

Well, they don’t quite say it that way, but you read my last Substack, so enjoy these liars: You Never Can Pick Your Poison in Capitalism

This is how “THEY” think:

Or, they go to France and talk about their Power with Twitter: Fucking double dose of creepy.

Ahh, it’s just given, like gravity, or the H and O times two in Water. The billionaires are stupid but gods,

Ahh, so this is how the disrupters work, and that Chronicle Zoom Doom just shows how co-opted these HR and Hiring Creeps and the Admin Class are. Well, let’s see. Hmm, face to face, bricks and mortar and using typewriters, no phones and tablets and laptops allowed, I can teach a shit load of great things, outside and in the community with paper and pencil:

This is a foregone conclusion, no? Death of education, death of ethics, death of philosophy, death of families, death of agency, death of freedoms and rights, but we can lie, steal, plagiarize and pollute.

No need to read between the lines with this student’s arrogance and self-importance. He’s lying too, since he pushes the supposed step by step process of ChatGPT (fucking another polluted term in our language) helping him with a paper. Ahh, it is plagiarizing, for sure, and, bam, the arrogance. Not that college teachers do not need huge kicks in the butt, and the liberal arts, well, major lashes to the butt. But that’s not the point here:

Look at any student academic-integrity policy, and you’ll find the same message: Submit work that reflects your own thinking or face discipline. A year ago, this was just about the most common-sense rule on Earth. Today, it’s laughably naïve.

There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own. Once that becomes clear, it follows that massive structural change will be needed if our colleges are going to keep training students to think critically.

The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step. You tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better.

As an example, I told ChatGPT, “I have to write a 6-page close reading of the Iliad. Give me some options for very specific thesis statements.” (Just about every first-year student at my university has to write a paper resembling this one.) Here is one of its suggestions: “The gods in the Iliad are not just capricious beings who interfere in human affairs for their own amusement but also mirror the moral dilemmas and conflicts that the mortals face.” It also listed nine other ideas, any one of which I would have felt comfortable arguing. Already, a major chunk of the thinking had been done for me. As any former student knows, one of the main challenges of writing an essay is just thinking through the subject matter and coming up with a strong, debatable claim. With one snap of the fingers and almost zero brain activity, I suddenly had one. (source)

Ahh, now, Homer, the gods, the entire poem, now how do teachers teach it and shepherd thinkers across all disciplines to look at the work? Oral fucking poems, man, and so, the hard work is getting bricks and mortar colleges to get under the skin of this concept: Homer’s Iliad chronicles the ten year siege of Troy, and Odyssey chronicles one man’s ten year attempt to return home after Troy.

Ahh, war, war mongers, battles, existential battles, what does heroism and tragedy mean in today’s world? What do we miss as modern readers of an oral poem? What sort of elements of modern history tie into Homer’s works? You can’t return home, or can you, and what is home in an atomized, broken, capitalistic, denuding, neutering/spaying society? You get the picture.

So, I was outside with the cable guy. Man in his thirties, and we talked about fiber optics, and I watched him install fiber (thin as a human hair) and splicing it to the current five line telephone line so we can have faster modems and more junk and stuff coming down the pipeline.

He looks like a rugged Val Kilmer, and he is from Albuquerque, having moved out here when he was 20 after his father died of cancer and Hep C, after getting a blood transfusion after a saw accident. “They didn’t screen blood back then, so he got Hep C, and liver damage and liver cancer.”

Dead at 58, and so the mom and young son moved to Yachats, of all places.

The work he does is with both copper and fiber optics. I watched the machine, the splicing, the ins and outs of the process. The machine, splicer, is computerized, fragile to the rain out here. We were talking about what happened fiber optic wise after Puerto Rico’s hurricane that the systems — phone, communication — were devastated and my Val Kilmer said spicers — fiber optics splicers, people — were getting $80 a splice, not an hour. Some of the independent contractors were splicing lines at 300 a day. Imagine that bill, imagine that.

“Look at me, with no college education. I like this job, and, the rain is worth it, and while I miss New Mexico’s food, I am happy with the scenery here.”

Alas, I asked about a son or daughter, and he stated he and his wife have a son, five, diagnosed with Autism, and while he’s getting more verbal in the schema of things and he’s sort of getting a few more social skills/cues, there is a daily trial and tribulation tied to getting the boy into some form to meet the fucker up neural normal world.

[Photos: Puerto Rico before the stupid USA’s Trump brought paper towels.]

In the midst of an active hurricane season, Puerto Rico has suffered yet again. Thanks to Fiona, which crashed into the territory a few days before Ian hit Florida, we were without critical services like electricity, water, hospitals and fuel supplies. Fiona’s destruction was a sharp reminder of the life-threatening effects of Hurricane Maria, which caused $90 billion in damage five years ago. More than 30 people died because of Fiona and as we recover from yet another destructive hurricane, our leaders have ignored the planning and preparedness lessons made clear by Maria.

After Maria, the U.S. federal and Puerto Rico local governments promised an increased level of resilience by strengthening existing infrastructures following the usual central-planning approach and solutions. But Hurricane Fiona has been yet another reminder that our strategy to build resilience in Puerto Rico is wrong, and that the leaders who espouse it are making decisions based on a philosophy that centers on the wrong things. They are rebuilding 20th-century electric grids, and water, sanitation and other infrastructure as they were before Maria hit; this will not work. Private companies cannot be relied on to provide resilient infrastructures. Rethinking how we approach planning and preparedness will make the archipelago a more viable place that benefits Puerto Rican people without straining budgets. (source)

Ahh, the privateers, the merchants of death, the merchants of debt, private companies, and then, what, $80 for each fiber optic splice? This is fucking lunacy.

And, so, colleges are shooting themselves in the foot, hand, neck, head, brain, and this country of unlimited and blank check to the UkroNaziLandians and now for more and more $$$ to the merchants of death CEOs and offensive weapons and gear and etc. and more satellite and softare and computing war gear, we are not getting the homes fixed or built.

Ahh, these pencil necks, these Linked-In do nothings, rad digital and on-line gods, know nothing about the world:

Despite the slowing of immigration inflow to the U.S., the share of foreign-born workers in the US construction labor force has been rising since the housing recovery began. Immigrant workers now account for close to one in four workers, a record high share that was reached for the first time in 2016. The story behind the rising share of immigrants in the construction labor force during the housing recovery is twofold – an unusually slow, delayed and reluctant return of native-born workers and a much faster and robust comeback of immigrant workers. Close to 1.7 million native-born workers left the construction labor force during the housing downturn, and the vast majority on a net basis, over 1 million, had not returned to the industry as of 2018. In sharp contrast, the number of immigrant workers in construction has now returned to the 2006 level.

The share of immigrants is even higher in construction trades, reaching 30%. Concentration of immigrants is particularly high in some of the trades needed to build a home, like carpenters, painters, drywall/ceiling tile installers, brick masons, and construction laborers – trades that require less formal education but consistently register some of the highest labor shortages in the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) surveys and NAHB Remodeling Market Index (RMI).

In some states, reliance on foreign-born labor is even more pronounced. Immigrants comprise close to 40% of the construction workforce in California and Texas. In Florida, New Jersey and New York, close to 37% of the construction labor force is foreign-born and in Nevada, one out of three construction industry workers come from abroad. (source)

Notice the verbiage — jobs that “require less formal education.” What does that mean? Formal education equates to what, college, trade school, apprenticeships?

So, my Val Kilmer cable guy from New Mexico said he started off young thinking he’d be the next YouTube star, and then he tried working on cellular phones, and even the call centers, but he is happy now with Pioneer Cable.

From the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Crawford discussed his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Link.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

— Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

I suppose it all boils down to the masters controlling destinies, and no matter how powerful the urge is to be Matthew and have a motorcycle shop, we are in a Brave New World where the billionaires and the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires and WEF-ers, want control, man, control. Here, from Matthew Ehret’s latest: “Roosevelt vs. Keynes’ New Deal and the Battle of Bretton Woods” Believe it or not, this piece ties into indirectly how we are being shaped by perverse people, whose roots go back. Contrast Keynes and Churchill with FDR.

Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.

-John Maynard Keynes on Galton’s Eugenics, Eugenics Review, 1946

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

– Winston Churchill to the Peel Commission, 1937

There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people fit to serve as masters over their fellow men… We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 1941

They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

– Franklin Roosevelt

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

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kent Paterson.

The severe impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on the North Island, and the five severe weather events experienced by the Thames–Coromandel region in just the first two months of 2023, are merely the latest examples of more frequent erosion-triggering rainfall events over the past decade.

Inevitably with the heavy rain, soil, rocks and woody material (also known as “slash”) from landslides have flowed down onto valleys and flood plains, damaging the environment and risking human safety.

Clear-fell harvesting of pine forests on steep erosion-prone land has been identified as a key source of this phenomenon.

• READ MORE: Things fall apart: why do the ecosystems we depend on collapse?
• Rewilding isn’t about nostalgia – exciting new worlds are possible
• How to get sustainable forestry right
• Other Cyclone Gabrielle reports

So we need to ask why we harvest pine forests on such fragile land, and what needs to change to prevent erosion debris and slash being washed from harvested land.

Pine was a solution
Ironically, most of these pine forests were planted as a solution to soil erosion that had resulted from the clearing of native forests to create hill country pastoral farms.

The clearing of native forests happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the consequences — erosion, flooding and floodplains covered in silt and rocks — only became apparent decades later.

Research has shown that pastoral farming on our most erosion-susceptible soils is not sustainable. The productivity of the land is being degraded by loss of soil and large areas have been buried with sediment eroded from hill country farms upstream.

So the need to reforest large areas of erosion-prone farmland is scientifically well accepted.

Why pine?
But why did we choose radiata pine for our reforestation efforts instead of other tree species?

Even today, it is hard to find affordable and feasible alternatives to radiata pine. Affordable is the key word here.

We are not a rich country and our liking for “Number 8 wire” solutions makes a virtue out of necessity — we don’t have the money to pay for anything fancier.

Radiata pine is a cheap and easy tree to establish and it grows fast and reliably. Planting native or other exotic trees, such as redwoods, is possible, but it costs more and needs more skill and care to grow a good crop.

‘Has to be done’: Forestry industry under fire as McAnulty calls for slash to be investigated https://t.co/7lx5G2t07W

— Newshub Politics (@NewshubPolitics) February 14, 2023

The problem with radiata pine is that if grown as a commercial crop, it is clear-fell harvested after about 28 years.

The clear-felled land is just as erosion-prone as it was before trees were planted — with the added threat of large amounts of logging slash now mixed in with the erosion debris.

It can take six years or more after harvesting before the replanted pine trees cover the ground and once again provide protection to the soil.

Benefits of pine come with a cost
If we take a long-term perspective, research shows that even a radiata pine forest that is clear-felled once every 28 years will still significantly reduce erosion, compared with a pastoral farm on erosion-prone hill country.

This is because the erosion from the clear-felled forest is outweighed by the reduced erosion once the replanted trees cover the land.

However, this is not much comfort to communities in the path of the flood-borne soil and logs from that clear-felled forest. It’s difficult to take a long-term perspective when your backyards and beaches are covered with tonnes of wood and soil.

Slash a byproduct of efficiency
Whatever benefits radiata pine forests bring, we need to transition forest management away from “business as usual” clear-felling on erosion-prone hill country.

This transition is possible, but one important problem is not often discussed. The pine forests are privately owned by a range of people including iwi, partnerships made up of mum-and-dad investors and large international forestry companies.

All these people have created or acquired these forests as an investment.

A typical pine forest investment makes a good financial return, but this assumes normal efficient forestry, including clear-felling large areas with highly-productive mechanised logging gangs.

It has become clear that we need to manage forests differently from this large-scale “efficient” model to reduce the risk of erosion and slash from erosion-prone forests.

Changing how we manage these forests will inevitably reduce the economic return, and forest investors will absorb this reduction.

When a cyclone bears down on the East Coast, it’s not just wind and rain residents brace for. https://t.co/h9TJr3Q2dv

— Stuff Business (@NZStuffBusiness) February 15, 2023

Time for a permanent fix
If we go back to when the pine forests being harvested today were planted, the forests had a social value — not just in reducing erosion but in providing employment in rural areas where few jobs were available.

This social value was recognised by government funding, initially through tree planting by a government department, the NZ Forest Service. With the rise of free market economics in the 1980s, such direct government investment was considered inefficient and wasteful.

The Forest Service was disbanded in 1987 and its forests were sold to forestry companies. However, the government continued to promote tree planting on erosion-prone land with subsidies to private investors.

As these forests grew, they came to be considered purely as business investments and were bought and sold on that basis. When the time came to harvest the trees, the expectation was that these could be clear-fell harvested in the same conventional way as commercial forests growing on land with no erosion risk.

As erosion started occurring on the harvested sites, it became clear why these trees were originally planted as a social investment to protect the land and communities from soil erosion.

Aotearoa New Zealand has achieved control of erosion with a Number 8 wire solution- encouraging private investors to grow commercial pine forests on erosion-prone land. The problem with Number 8 wire solutions is that after a while the wire fails, and you have to find a permanent fix.

Conventional commercial pine forestry was a good temporary solution, but now we need to find a more sustainable way to grow forests on our most erosion-prone lands – and it won’t be as cheap.

Mark Bloomberg, adjunct senior fellow Te Kura Ngahere — New Zealand School of Forestry, University of Canterbury.  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.

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The post Bridges, Buses and Barbed Wire appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kent Paterson.

“Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from ‘imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.’”

OK, he’s a politician — Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting “hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire” along Arizona’s eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?

No matter the wall doesn’t really keep desperate, fleeing migrants out. It keeps out ocelots and jaguars, bighorn sheep and spotted owls. It keeps out, or rather, imperils the life of the western yellow-billed cuckoo. It endangers the survival of 70+ plant and animal species. The wall is a monument to racism, according to Daniel Lombroso, director of “American Scar,” and what it accomplishes is ecocide.

“The crisis at the border is our government.”

The title of the film is not metaphorical. It refers to the fact that mountaintops were blown off to build the wall. The “scar” is the slash blown and bulldozed through mountain ranges in order to build the preposterous and cruel wall. Someday the wall will come down, but its “mark will last forever,” all for the purpose of turning an abstract concept — national territory — into something allegedly “real.”

Hurray for nationalism! Its essence is to divide “us” from “them.” We could not have nations on Planet Earth unless we believed the planet was full of people who are not us and who can thus be dehumanized, not only when we’re waging war but whenever we want. The existence of “them” is at the core of the national psyche — people who do not belong here and whose lives don’t matter. Racial and ethnic differences help maintain the illusion, especially the latter part of it: that their lives don’t matter.

And the reason it’s so crucial to believe this is that the world is far from perfect. People migrate for many reasons, often with utter desperation: their homeland being is ravaged by war, authoritarianism, poverty, starvation, all of which is now intensified by the presence of climate change, especially in the Global South. Indeed, more migrants than ever are attempting to cross the U.S. southern border.

I want to live in a country — in a world — that sees beyond razor wire as the answer, indeed, that embraces understanding and connection as the only way forward. Oh God. We know this. Why is it so politically marginalized?

Consider Humane Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 for the purpose of helping migrants survive the treacherous trek to the border, primarily by establishing water stations in the Sonoran Desert, motivated by “a universal need for kindness.” Their primary mission “is to save desperate people from a horrible death by dehydration and exposure.”

But in doing so they have also taken on the terrible task of finding — and identifying — the bodies of those who do not survive. Many remain unidentified. And of course many victims are never found; they simply vanish under the desert sun.

As we look beyond our fear of “them,” as we look at the world with clarity and directness, it becomes clear that we must address its difficulties with more than kindness. Climate change is consuming the planet! It endangers every last one of us, and all of us — but especially the richest of us (who are, ironically, the ones least affected by climate change right now) — bear responsibility for it. Attention, ex-Gov. Ducey: Climate change does not recognize national borders.

Are there role models out there — role models for humanity’s evolution? Maybe so. Let us cross the ocean and visit the continent of Africa, where climate change is demanding human sanity, both nationally and trans-nationally, to restore diversity in the continent’s ecosystems. Welcome to the Great Green Wall, described as “the first wall designed to bring people together rather than keep them apart.”

The Great Green Wall, envisioned and financed by some 20 international organizations, including the African Union, the World Bank and the U.N., is a “wall” of biodiversity that is nine miles wide and 4,831 miles long, running across the Sahel region of Northern Africa, just south of the Sahara Desert. It runs across 11 countries — Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal — who “have joined to combat land degradation and restore native plant life to the landscape,” according to National Geographic.

The Great Green Wall is a wall of native trees and plants — millions of them — planted by hundreds of thousands of local residents. And the leaders of these 11 countries are working together to deal with land degradation.

National Geographic notes:

“Beyond the project’s strong political foundation, its carefully crafted approach brings environmental benefits both locally and globally. The initiative uses an ‘integrated landscape approach’ that allows each country to address land degradation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity, and forestry within its local context.”

And the benefits are both local and global — a concept apparently not yet understood by leaders in the Global North.

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

"Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from 'imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.'"

The wall is a monument to racism, according to Daniel Lombroso, director of "American Scar," and what it accomplishes is ecocide.

OK, he's a politician—Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting "hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire" along Arizona's eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?

No matter the wall doesn't really keep desperate, fleeing migrants out. It keeps out ocelots and jaguars, bighorn sheep and spotted owls. It keeps out, or rather, imperils the life of the western yellow-billed cuckoo. It endangers the survival of seventy-plus plant and animal species. The wall is a monument to racism, according to Daniel Lombroso, director of "American Scar," and what it accomplishes is ecocide.

"The crisis at the border is our government."

The title of the film is not metaphorical. It refers to the fact that mountaintops were blown off to build the wall. The "scar" is the slash blown and bulldozed through mountain ranges in order to build the preposterous and cruel wall. Someday the wall will come down, but its "mark will last forever," all for the purpose of turning an abstract concept—national territory—into something allegedly "real."

Hurray for nationalism! Its essence is to divide "us" from "them." We could not have nations on Planet Earth unless we believed the planet was full of people who are not us and who can thus be dehumanized, not only when we're waging war but whenever we want. The existence of "them" is at the core of the national psyche—people who do not belong here and whose lives don't matter. Racial and ethnic differences help maintain the illusion, especially the latter part of it: that their lives don't matter.

And the reason it's so crucial to believe this is that the world is far from perfect. People migrate for many reasons, often with utter desperation: their homeland being is ravaged by war, authoritarianism, poverty, starvation, all of which is now intensified by the presence of climate change, especially in the Global South. Indeed, more migrants than ever are attempting to cross the U.S. southern border.

I want to live in a country—in a world—that sees beyond razor wire as the answer, indeed, that embraces understanding and connection as the only way forward. Oh God. We know this. Why is it so politically marginalized?

Consider Humane Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 for the purpose of helping migrants survive the treacherous trek to the border, primarily by establishing water stations in the Sonoran Desert, motivated by "a universal need for kindness." Their primary mission "is to save desperate people from a horrible death by dehydration and exposure."

But in doing so they have also taken on the terrible task of finding—and identifying—the bodies of those who do not survive. Many remain unidentified. And of course many victims are never found; they simply vanish under the desert sun.

As we look beyond our fear of "them," as we look at the world with clarity and directness, it becomes clear that we must address its difficulties with more than kindness. Climate change is consuming the planet! It endangers every last one of us, and all of us—but especially the richest of us (who are, ironically, the ones least affected by climate change right now)—bear responsibility for it. Attention, ex-Gov. Ducey: Climate change does not recognize national borders.

The Great Green Wall is a wall of native trees and plants—millions of them—planted by hundreds of thousands of local residents.

Are there role models out there—role models for humanity's evolution? Maybe so. Let us cross the ocean and visit the continent of Africa, where climate change is demanding human sanity, both nationally and trans-nationally, to restore diversity in the continent's ecosystems. Welcome to the Great Green Wall, described as "the first wall designed to bring people together rather than keep them apart."

The Great Green Wall, envisioned and financed by some twenty international organizations, including the African Union, the World Bank and the U.N., is a "wall" of biodiversity that is nine miles wide and 4,831 miles long, running across the Sahel region of Northern Africa, just south of the Sahara Desert. It runs across eleven countries—Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal—who "have joined to combat land degradation and restore native plant life to the landscape," according to National Geographic.

The Great Green Wall is a wall of native trees and plants—millions of them—planted by hundreds of thousands of local residents. And the leaders of these eleven countries are working together to deal with land degradation.

National Geographic notes: "Beyond the project's strong political foundation, its carefully crafted approach brings environmental benefits both locally and globally. The initiative uses an 'integrated landscape approach' that allows each country to address land degradation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity, and forestry within its local context."

And the benefits are both local and global—a concept apparently not yet understood by leaders in the Global North.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

"Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from 'imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.'"

The wall is a monument to racism, according to Daniel Lombroso, director of "American Scar," and what it accomplishes is ecocide.

OK, he's a politician—Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting "hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire" along Arizona's eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?

No matter the wall doesn't really keep desperate, fleeing migrants out. It keeps out ocelots and jaguars, bighorn sheep and spotted owls. It keeps out, or rather, imperils the life of the western yellow-billed cuckoo. It endangers the survival of seventy-plus plant and animal species. The wall is a monument to racism, according to Daniel Lombroso, director of "American Scar," and what it accomplishes is ecocide.

"The crisis at the border is our government."

The title of the film is not metaphorical. It refers to the fact that mountaintops were blown off to build the wall. The "scar" is the slash blown and bulldozed through mountain ranges in order to build the preposterous and cruel wall. Someday the wall will come down, but its "mark will last forever," all for the purpose of turning an abstract concept—national territory—into something allegedly "real."

Hurray for nationalism! Its essence is to divide "us" from "them." We could not have nations on Planet Earth unless we believed the planet was full of people who are not us and who can thus be dehumanized, not only when we're waging war but whenever we want. The existence of "them" is at the core of the national psyche—people who do not belong here and whose lives don't matter. Racial and ethnic differences help maintain the illusion, especially the latter part of it: that their lives don't matter.

And the reason it's so crucial to believe this is that the world is far from perfect. People migrate for many reasons, often with utter desperation: their homeland being is ravaged by war, authoritarianism, poverty, starvation, all of which is now intensified by the presence of climate change, especially in the Global South. Indeed, more migrants than ever are attempting to cross the U.S. southern border.

I want to live in a country—in a world—that sees beyond razor wire as the answer, indeed, that embraces understanding and connection as the only way forward. Oh God. We know this. Why is it so politically marginalized?

Consider Humane Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 for the purpose of helping migrants survive the treacherous trek to the border, primarily by establishing water stations in the Sonoran Desert, motivated by "a universal need for kindness." Their primary mission "is to save desperate people from a horrible death by dehydration and exposure."

But in doing so they have also taken on the terrible task of finding—and identifying—the bodies of those who do not survive. Many remain unidentified. And of course many victims are never found; they simply vanish under the desert sun.

As we look beyond our fear of "them," as we look at the world with clarity and directness, it becomes clear that we must address its difficulties with more than kindness. Climate change is consuming the planet! It endangers every last one of us, and all of us—but especially the richest of us (who are, ironically, the ones least affected by climate change right now)—bear responsibility for it. Attention, ex-Gov. Ducey: Climate change does not recognize national borders.

The Great Green Wall is a wall of native trees and plants—millions of them—planted by hundreds of thousands of local residents.

Are there role models out there—role models for humanity's evolution? Maybe so. Let us cross the ocean and visit the continent of Africa, where climate change is demanding human sanity, both nationally and trans-nationally, to restore diversity in the continent's ecosystems. Welcome to the Great Green Wall, described as "the first wall designed to bring people together rather than keep them apart."

The Great Green Wall, envisioned and financed by some twenty international organizations, including the African Union, the World Bank and the U.N., is a "wall" of biodiversity that is nine miles wide and 4,831 miles long, running across the Sahel region of Northern Africa, just south of the Sahara Desert. It runs across eleven countries—Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal—who "have joined to combat land degradation and restore native plant life to the landscape," according to National Geographic.

The Great Green Wall is a wall of native trees and plants—millions of them—planted by hundreds of thousands of local residents. And the leaders of these eleven countries are working together to deal with land degradation.

National Geographic notes: "Beyond the project's strong political foundation, its carefully crafted approach brings environmental benefits both locally and globally. The initiative uses an 'integrated landscape approach' that allows each country to address land degradation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity, and forestry within its local context."

And the benefits are both local and global—a concept apparently not yet understood by leaders in the Global North.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert C. Koehler.

Outgoing Republican Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona is spending nearly $100 million in his final weeks in office to erect a makeshift border wall along the state’s southern boundary with Mexico made of shipping containers and razor wire. Ducey has described it as an effort to complete former President Donald Trump’s border wall, but the shipping containers are being placed on federal and tribal lands without permission. Protesters who have tried to block construction warn the wall is destroying precious desert biodiversity and forcing asylum seekers to take even more dangerous routes along the border to seek refuge in the United States. Meanwhile, it is unclear what Democratic Governor-elect Katie Hobbs will do with the container wall once she is sworn in. “It’s quite amazing that there’s simply been no [federal] law enforcement response,” says Myles Traphagen with Wildlands Network, who coordinates the group’s borderlands program. “Why aren’t they mobilizing a federal law enforcement response when this is a blatant disregard of the law?” We also speak with Alejandra Gomez, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA Arizona, who says immigrant communities in Arizona are responding with aid and compassion despite “the fueling of hate against migrants” by Ducey and other Republicans.

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

On Monday, officials with the Delhi police crime branch searched the New Delhi office of The Wire and the residences of editors Siddharth Vardarajan, M.K. Venu, Siddharth Bhatia, and Jahanavi Sen, seized their electronic devices, according to various news reports and Vardarajan, who spoke to CPJ over phone. 

The searches were in relation to a police investigation into The Wire based on a complaint from Amit Malviya, an official with the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, Vardarajan said.

Malviya has accused Vardarajan, Venu, Bhatia, and Sen of cheating, forgery, and defamation in relation to a series of articles, in which The Wire had claimed that Malviya had special privilege to remove any posts from Instagram, according The Hindu. 

Both Malviya and Meta, which owns Instagram, denied the accusation and The Wire later retracted the articles, claiming that it was  misled by one of its reporters, and began a review of the incident, according to Scroll.in. 

“The raids on the homes of The Wire editors is an excessive reaction by the Indian authorities,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Frankfurt, Germany. “The Wire has voluntarily withdrawn its reportage on Meta and Amit Malviya, apologized to its readers, and initiated an internal review. We call on authorities and politicians to cease the harassment.”

During the raid, the police seized phones, laptops and iPads belonging to Vardarajan, Venu, and Bhatia, as well as a junior video editor, the news reports said. The raid at The Wire office lasted for about six hours, and was conducted by 25 officers who refused the outlet’s lawyer entry to the premises and confiscated computers used for video editing and a hard disk containing information such as employee salaries, according to Vardarajan. 

On Sunday, The Wire filed a complaint against its researcher Devesh Kumar with the economic offenses wing of the Delhi police, accusing him of fabricating documents that were used to substantiate the publication’s reporting on Meta and Malviya, according to Indian Express.

Delhi police spokesperson Suman Nalwa and Malviya did not respond to CPJ’s text messages requesting comment. 

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

“Earlier it was just one conversation they [authorities] would tap into,” Venu told CPJ in a phone interview. “They wouldn’t see what you would be doing in your bedroom or bathroom. The scale was stunning.”

The Indian journalists were among scores around the world who learned from the Pegasus Project in July 2021 that they, along with human rights activists, lawyers, and politicians, had been targeted for possible surveillance by Pegasus, the spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group. (The company denies any connection with the Project’s list and says that it only sells its product to vetted governments with the goal of preventing crime or terrorism.) 

The Pegasus Project found that the phones of two founding editors of The Wire – Venu and Siddharth Vardarajan – were confirmed by forensic analysis to have been infected with Pegasus. Four other journalists associated with the outlet – diplomatic editor Devirupa Mitra, and contributors Rohini Singh, Prem Shankar Jha, and Swati Chaturvedi – were listed as potential targets.

The Indian government denies that it has engaged in unauthorized surveillance, but has not commented directly on a January New York Times report that Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to buy Pegasus during a 2017 visit to Israel. The Indian government has not cooperated with an ongoing inquiry by an expert committee appointed by the country’s Supreme Court to investigate illegal use of spyware. In late August, the court revealed that the committee had found malware in five out of the 29 devices it examined, but could not confirm that it was Pegasus.

However, Indian journalists interviewed by CPJ had no doubt that it was the government behind any efforts to spy on them. “This government is obsessed with journalists who are not adhering to their cheerleading,” investigative reporter Chaturvedi told CPJ via messaging app. “My journalism has never been personal against anyone. I don’t understand why it is so personal to this government.” For Chaturvedi, the spying was an invasion of privacy “so heinous that how do you put it in words.” 

Read CPJ’s complete special report: When spyware turns phones into weapons

Overall, the Pegasus Project found that at least 40 journalists were among the 174 Indians named as potential targets of surveillance. With six associated with The Wire, the outlet was the country’s most targeted newsroom. The Wire has long been a thorn in the side of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its reporting on allegations of corruption by party officials, the party’s alleged promotion of sectarian violence, and its alleged use of technology to target government critics online. As a result, various BJP-led state governments, BJP officials, and their affiliates have targeted the website’s journalists with police investigations, defamation suits, online doxxing, and threats.

Indian home ministry and BJP spokespeople have not responded to CPJ’s email and text messages requesting comment. However after the last Supreme Court hearing, party spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia criticized the opposition for “trying to create an atmosphere of fear” in India. “They [Congress party] were trying to spread propaganda that citizens’ privacy has been invaded. The Supreme Court has made it clear that no conclusive evidence has been found to show the presence of Pegasus spyware in the 29 phones scanned,” he said.

As in so many other newsrooms around the world, the Pegasus Project revelations have prompted The Wire to introduce stricter security protocols, including the use of encrypted software, to protect its journalists as well as its sources.

Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta, political editor at The Wire, told CPJ in a phone interview that as part of the new procedures, “we would not talk [about sensitive stories] on the phone.” While working on the Pegasus project, the Wire newsroom was extra careful. “When we were meeting, we kept our phones in a separate room. We were also not using our general [office] computers,” he said.

Venu told CPJ that while regular editorial meetings at The Wire are held via video call, sensitive stories are discussed in person. “We take usual precautions like occasional reboot, keep phones away when we meet anyone. What else can we do?” he asks.

Chaturvedi told CPJ via messaging app that she quickly started using a new phone when she learned from local intelligence sources that she might have been under surveillance. As an investigative journalist, her immediate concern following the Pegasus Project disclosures was to avoid compromising her sources. “In Delhi, everyone I know who is in a position of power no longer talks on normal calls,” she said. “The paranoia is not just us who have been targeted with Pegasus.”

“Since the last five years, any important source I’m trying to talk to as a journalist will not speak to me on a normal regular call,” said Arfa Khanum Sherwani, who anchors a popular political show for The Wire and is known as a critic of Hindu right-wing politics. Sherwani told CPJ that her politician sources were the first ones who moved to communicate with her on encrypted messaging platforms even before the revelations as they “understood that something like this was at play.”

Rohini Singh similarly told CPJ that she doesn’t have any conversations related to her stories over the phone and leaves it behind when she meets people out reporting. “It is not about protecting myself. Ultimately it is going to be my story and my byline would be on it. I’m essentially protecting people who might be giving me information,” she said. 

Journalists also say they are concerned about the safety of their family members.

“After Pegasus, even though my name per se was not part of the whole thing, my friends and family members did not feel safe enough to call me or casually say something about the government. Because they feel that they are also being audiographed and videographed [filmed or recorded],” said Sherwani.

Chaturvedi told CPJ that her family has been “terrified” since the revelations. “Both my parents were in the government service. They can’t believe that this is the same country,” she said.

Venu and Sherwani both expressed concerns about how the atmosphere of fear could affect coverage by less-experienced journalists starting out in their careers. “The simple pleasure of doing journalism got affected. This may lead to self-censorship. When someone gets attacked badly, that journalist can start playing safe,” said Venu.

Said Sherwani: “For someone like me with a more established identity and career, I would be able to get people [to talk to me], but for younger journalists it will be much more difficult to contact politicians and speak to them. Whatever they say has to be on record, so you will see less and less source-based stories.”

Ashirwad agreed. “I’m very critical of this government, which is known. My stand now is I shall not say anything in private which I’m not comfortable saying in public,” he said.  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Kunal Majumder/CPJ India Representative.

Image by Josh Calabrese.

There they were again. The dangling irony of memorial Nikes . . .

I was walking home from my neighbor’s house. They’d just had a piano recital and I was still full of music when I saw the pair of tennis shoes flung over the telephone wire that crosses my street – instantly redefining, at least for me, this moment, this piece of earth and sky. Oh my God. I don’t believe it.

Here?

In front of my house?

Every now and then I see a pair of tennis shoes flung over a telephone wire – that wire stretching through a nearby McDonald’s parking lot, for instance– and every time I do, I think about a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who shoved a bit of reality in my face 20 or so years ago. He did so as a student of mine.

I was a volunteer writing teacher at the time. This was part of my decade-long struggle with the Chicago Public Schools, which my daughter attended. One day, when she was in third grade – this is when the school system begins the farce known as standardized testing, and “education” started to mean teaching to the test – she came home angrily and declared: “Dad, I hate writing!”

Writing had become nothing more than spelling and grammar, plus an opening sentence, yada yada, conclusion. The writer’s actual knowledge and life experiences – the writer’s voice, the writer’s soul – were irrelevant. Writing was not about saying something. All that mattered was conforming to the test format. Students’ words were emptied of meaning. That no longer mattered. In fact, it was a nuisance, since meaning was determined by the writer herself and often went off in its own direction; it couldn’t easily be reduced to a number.

No wonder she hated writing!

I was beside myself with frustration. I believed in the public schools. But their (politically forced) conformity to standardized testing – good numbers meant adequate funding – was just plain wrong. As a writer myself, there was no way – no way! – I could allow my own kid to be robbed of her developing writer’s voice.

This was a long struggle, but the beginning was here at Franklin Elementary School. I wound up having a conversation with the school’s principal, who actually listened to my concerns and got my point. While she had no power to change the system, she suggested, if I was interested, that I could do some teaching at the school. I wasn’t working fulltime at that point and had some free time in my week, so she arranged with one of the teachers for me to work with a small group of kids once a week.

Well, what the heck. It was better than nothing. At that point I had done a little bit of teaching, at the college level – just enough to know how difficult it was. I was anything but confident that I knew what I was doing, but I did have a game plan. Back when I was in college, I’d had a fabulous writing teacher and mentor who helped me shatter my own long-established self-censorship with a process he simply called “free writing.” Step one: Sit down and write without stopping for 10 minutes, 20 minutes or whatever. Let it flow. If you can’t think of anything to say, write “I can’t think of anything to say,” and keep going!

This was the essence of it. Writing starts to become an internal process. Later one’s words can be clarified and reorganized, but first you have to hear yourself and learn to let your truth emerge.

OK, so suddenly there I am, sitting in a circle – yes, definitely a circle, we’re all equals – with a small group of 12-year-olds. We talk for a while, then, yeah, start writing! They go for 10 minutes, then everyone reads his words aloud to the group.

How much difference, if any, did it make in their lives? I have no idea. And my daughter wasn’t part of the group (but eventually, over the years, overcame the “I hate writing” curse and became a poet) – but I know for sure that one participant in that group learned something of value. Me!

I learned that teaching flows in both directions. As a teacher, you can know that you’re accomplishing something if the students start becoming your teachers – which leads me to Jose and the dangling tennis shoes. We’d been talking about gang life, a reality for lots of Chicago public school students. Jose talked about the ritual of tossing someone’s shoes over a wire . . . if he’s shot, if he’s killed.

He wrote:

“One of my friends he got stabbed with a pencil because he was in a gang, but now he isn’t in a gang because he doesn’t want his family to see his shoes dangling from a telephone wire. And he wants to go back and fix all the things he has done wrong and now he never wants to have a relation with a gang member. Now he is in my house to play video games.”

Since then, yeah, every now and them I’d see it . . . grief and shoelaces hovering above the city. Maybe the shoes had been tossed as a joke or a prank, not a memorial, but how could I know? All I know is that the city is not the same anymore – it’s more than bricks and lawns and sidewalks, traffic lights and convenience stores. It’s a mortal being, in quiet pain this very moment, as I walk home.

And it’s speaking to me, in a language I learned from a 12-year-old boy.

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

Such surveys examine a group’s balance sheets to search for irregularities, those reports said, noting that authorities had not disclosed a reason for the action. On the same day, tax authorities also conducted surveys at the offices of the Center for Policy Research think tank and Oxfam India, a charity organization, according to those news reports.

The Digipub News India Foundation, a trade body of Indian digital media organizations, said in a statement that the tax survey was part of an inquiry into alleged violations of regulations concerning foreign financial contributions. That statement condemned the raid on the IPSMF as an “assault on independent journalism.”

IPSMF has provided grants to privately owned online news outlets, including Alt News, Article14, The Caravan, Swarajya, and The Wire, according to those news reports.

Since 2018, tax authorities have also raided news outlets including Newslaundry, The Quint, and Newsclick, as CPJ has documented.

CPJ emailed the Indian Income Tax Department for comment but did not immediately receive any response.

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

A New Zealand aid worker in Kyiv says the ReliefAid group he leads was one of the first to provide food in the suburb of Bucha — northwest of Kyiv — where Russian troops are alleged to have executed 150 civilians.

New Zealand donations in the Ukraine War have so far helped the aid group deliver more than six tonnes of food to survivors, and take medical supplies to hospitals around Kyiv.

ReliefAid executive director Mike Seawright arrived in Kyiv this weekend after driving in from the western side of Ukraine — “down some roads that have seen a lot of intense fighting, burnt out buildings, warehouses completely flattened, family homes destroyed and lots of military hardware burnt out.

• LISTEN TO RNZ SUNDAY MORNING: ‘You can’t do this from a desk in New Zealand’ – ReliefAid executive director Mike Seawright
• Ukraine: Zelenskyy still seeks peace despite expected Russian attacks

“It was an interesting if not somewhat chilling drive.”

He has been in the country for a month after crossing the border on foot.

In Kyiv, “the fighting may have stopped … but the destruction of family homes is still there. People are living in the rubble of what was their normal lives with nothing to their name, faced with cold, harsh conditions, with little or no food. So humanitarian support such as we are providing … is essential.”

But while fighting there may have stopped, missiles were still “raining down” on the city, making it unsafe.

Management on the fly
Seawright said that with many trucks bringing aid into the country — and at least one plane of medical supplies — a lot of organisation was involved.

“It also takes a lot of management on the fly. So we’ve predefined plans … but of course what happens on the day is entirely dependent on checkpoints we can’t control, road conditions on roads that have been severely damaged … and a security situation that is extremely volatile. So this is our number eight wire – managing all of this.”

His team also wants to deliver aid to people in the besieged city of Mariupol.

“We are standing by to get in there as soon as conditions allow. We pride ourselves on being at the forefront of humanitarian action. ReliefAid is a warzone specialist humanitarian aid organisation but I have to say, even we can’t get access to Mariupol at the moment.”

As soon as an access corridor was established, they would be in, Seawright said.

Being on the ground was key to working effectively, he said.

A lot of hard work
“It takes a lot of hard working, a lot of networking, a lot of managing logistics, but I’m proud to say we’ve got an incredible team here in Ukraine allowing us to do that.

“The most important thing you need to do when engaging with a new environment is see what is happening on the ground. We’ve got to know who we are supporting. We have got to make sure we know what their needs are and therefore we need to make sure the support that we receive by generous kiwis in New Zealand and across the world is going to the right place.

“You can’t do this from a desk in New Zealand, you can’t do this by reading a report. You have to get on the ground and see it yourself.”

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.