The way the world is going, she and her children might be the precursor of the dwelling habits of the future generations, those who manage to survive the coming nuclear war between the rising bloc of rising nations and decaying bloc of decaying nations, the war between the BRICS and the Pricks.

The BRICS ─ Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and five new members — have no “biggest BRIC,” each Bric nation relishes its independence and the group is cemented by their distaste for the offensive Pricks. Fortunately, for the BRICS, their entourage contains China, the new superpower that encourages cooperation rather than domination and has initiated a “Belt and Road” that facilitates free trade throughout the world.

The Pricks — United States, Great Britain, and the European Union — have the United States as their power Prick, which is led by their president, the biggest Prick. In slavish obedience to genocide Israel, the U.S. identifies itself as the Super Prick. This bloc has recently featured severe discord, lack of cooperation, and inauguration of high tariffs that impede global trade. Domination is its focus. with cooperation a temporary means to enable domination.

For one simple reason, the Pricks are finding it difficult to control and use the BRICS for their personal gain ─ the BRICS have economic dominance.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
GDP PPP, Int$: 2025

Coming into 2025, the BRICS have a greater share of the economic pie, six times the population digesting the pie, and are growing in principal categories — GDP/PPP, population, and adherents at a faster rate.

The Pricks devalue the Brics by claiming they are a loose and uncoordinated confederation, unable to agree on vital issues. Brazil is accused of harassing former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro and may be subjected to sanctions; Russia is led by an irresponsible tyrant and is heavily sanctioned; India gets a pass despite the heavy-handed tactics toward its Muslim community; China is led by a despotic dictator, and South Africa is guilty of genocide toward its white population.

The Pricks pose themselves as a model of decency and decorum. They have ballot boxes and freedom of speech, which enables their citizens to elect the biggest pricks and then freely criticize their selections by vocal erections. In the U.S. the next presidential election process — fund raising, organization, public relations, the “eye on the prize”— starts shortly after a new president takes office. Winning candidates in elections expend more time and energy in gaining victory and preparing for their next victory than performing their duties during their term in office.

The economic, social, and political advancements of their principal superpowers, China for the BRICS and the United States for the Pricks, determine the success of the BRICS and the Pricks. A brief examination of each nation’s potential to rise in the firmament or descend into chaos tells the story.

The Trump administration shows the hidden failures of the United States pluralistic democracy. The past has no continuity; just the opposite, many of the legislations from previous administrations are discarded. and the country, rather than advancing to a progressed new, returns to a rejected old. One example from Understanding AI:

…. Sen. Hawley asked Donald Trump to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, an $11 billion transmission line that is supposed to carry electricity from Kansas wind farms to homes in Illinois and Indiana. The proposed line would pass through Hawley’s state of Missouri, annoying farmers whose land would be taken by eminent domain.

According to the New York Times, Hawley “explained his concerns to the president, who has repeatedly expressed his distaste for wind power, saying he would not permit any new wind projects during his administration.” Trump then called Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who agreed to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the project, throwing its viability into question.

Impulse overrides soul searching, allegiance to leader is more important than professional education and experience; rash and subjective action replaces careful thought. The America of 2025, with its decaying infrastructure, troubled inner cities, dependence on fossil fuels, continuous problems of crime, drug addiction, health care, and immigration, closely resembles the America of 2010. One big difference ─ adversity and polarization of the population has increased, Americans are at the breaking point with one another. The country, which is rich in resources, has extensive farmland, enjoys suitable and varied climates, and contains an educated and diligent population, is not well managed; it is mismanaged.

The Xi JInping administration shows the hidden success of China’s people’s democracy. The past has continuity; legislations and plans from previous administrations are massaged and enhanced, and the country, rather than remaining stagnant, advances to a new level. Soul searching from millions of cadres provides suggestions for millions of improvements. All leaders have professional education and experience; careful thought displaces rash and subjective action.

The China of 2025, with its continually increasing infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, superhighways, high speed trains, and airline routes that link every remote place in China with central cores, with modern building complexes that replace the shanty towns and provide agreeable living space for an aging population and marginalized rural farmers, with its expanded megacities that are considered technology and planning marvels, and with a unified and obedient population ─ no adversity or polarization here ─ has only a fleeting resemblance to the China of 2010.

Dubbed an engineering marvel, the highly anticipated Raffles City Chongqing project is nearly complete. CapitaLand Group

Sheltering their deficiencies, the Western democracies shift the critical analysis to public relations stunts that highlight the supposed and exaggerated deficiencies of the Chinese system. The Westerners make no effort to learn and understand the workings of China’s political, social, and economic systems. Fabrications are added to the limited “don’t care to know” and conveyed to the public as authorized knowledge. One example is the “debt trap” verbiage, applied to Chinese lending, which began during Sri Lanka’s first debt crisis and has stuck around as an effective means to vilify the PRC.

We have the falsehood. Washington Post (WAPO), “This China has a hand in Sri Lanka’s economic calamity,” analysis by Ishaan Tharoor, July 20, 2022:

One of the major players in Sri Lanka’s calamity is China. Beijing is Sri Lanka’s lone biggest creditor, accounting for some 10 percent of the country’s foreign debt. Between 2000 and 2020, it extended close to $12 billion in loans to the Sri Lankan government, largely for a slate of major infrastructure projects that turned into white elephants — including a costly port facility in the Rajapaksas’ hometown of Hambantota, which was effectively ceded to Chinese control half a decade ago after Sri Lankan authorities recognized they could no longer pay off the loans.

Examination of the Sri Lanka debt crisis exposes the mendacity and viciousness of the WAPO report. Almost every sentence is spurious; China does not engage in “debt trap diplomacy” and has been one lender who makes financial sacrifices that rescues nations from debilitating borrowing.

We have the truth. The Atlantic, “The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth,” by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire, February 6, 2021, had already contradicted WAPO statements.

Steep payments on international sovereign bonds, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the country’s external debt, put Sirisena’s government in dire fiscal straits almost immediately. When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.

There was also never a default. Colombo arranged a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and decided to raise much-needed dollars by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company—just as the Canadians had recommended. There was not an open tender, and the only two bids came from China Merchants and China Harbor. Sri Lanka chose China Merchants, making it the majority shareholder with a 99-year lease, and used the $1.12 billion cash infusion to bolster its foreign reserves, not to pay off China Eximbank. The China impressed on our minds is not the China that exists.

The United States moves on fumes, on the energies of its past without renewable energies for an improved future. China moves on constantly reinforced energy, all engines operating at top speed, each day becoming a new future. The Pricks know they will not be able to compete economically with the BRICS. They have a choice of consolidating and working together and maintaining reduced economies, cooperating with the Brics in mutual agreements, or, by the usual United States method, resolving the situation by military action.

The threat of military force alarms and subdues the BRICS. They may be compelled to yield much in order to save all. China, guided by its Mandate of Heaven, “a political and religious doctrine that justifies the rule of an emperor based on virtue and ability to govern,” and which it has extended to relations between all nations, might do what it did in the fifteenth century. At that time, China was, by far, the leading commercial power in the world, and huge Chinese fleets sailed the world for markets for its surplus products. After meeting the imperial powers of France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands and observing their nefarious methods in subduing the Africa and Indian peoples, stripping them of resources, and forcing upon them the products manufactured from the resources, China scuttled its fleet and went into solitary confinement.

The reason for Xi Jinping’s self-sufficiency drive is clear. Save the world from nuclear conflagration and let the rest of the world rot. Pricks always lose and always think they have won.

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

New Zealand is lagging behind the rest of the world through its failure to recognise Palestinian statehood, says Former Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Canada yesterday became the latest country to announce it would formally recognise the state of Palestine when world leaders met at the UN General Assembly in September.

It follows recent similar commitments from the France and the United Kingdom.

• READ MORE: What would New Zealand recognising Palestinian statehood mean?
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon suggested the discussion was a distraction and said the immediate focus should be on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But, speaking to RNZ Midday Report, Clark said New Zealand needed to come on board.

“We are watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza. We’re watching starvation. We’re watching famine conditions for many. Many are using the word genocide,” she said.

“If New Zealand can’t act in these circumstances, when can it act?”

Elders call for recognition
“The Elders, a group of world leaders of which Clark is a part, last month issued a call for countries to recognise the state of Palestine, calling it the “beginning, not the end of a political pathway towards lasting peace”.

Clark said the government seemed to be trying avoid the ire of the United States by waiting until the peace process was well underway or nearing its end.

“That is no longer tenable,” she said.

“New Zealand really is lagging behind.”

Even before the recent commitments from France, Canada and the UK, 147 of the UN’s 193 member states had recognised the Palestinian state.

Clark said the hope was that the series of recognitions from major Western states would first shift the US position and then Israel’s.

“When the US moves, Israel eventually jumps because it owes so much to the United States for the support, financial, military and otherwise,” she said.

“At some point, Israel has to smell the coffee.”

Surprised over Peters
Clark said she was “a little surprised” that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had not been more forward-leaning given he historically had strongly advocated New Zealand’s even-handed position.

On Wednesday, New Zealand signed a joint statement with 14 other countries expressing a willingness to recognise the State of Palestine as a necessary step towards a two-state solution.

However, later speaking in Parliament, Peters said that was conditional on first seeing progress from Palestine, including representative governance, commitment to non-violence, and security guarantees for Israel.

“If we are to recognise the state of Palestine, New Zealand wants to know that what we are recognising is a legitimate, representative, viable, political entity,” Peters told MPs.

Peters also agreed with a contribution from ACT’s Simon Court that recognising the state of Palestine could be viewed as “a reward [to Hamas] for acts of terrorism” if it was done before Hamas had returned hostages or laid down arms.

Luxon earlier told RNZ New Zealand had long supported the eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, but that the immediate focus should be on getting aid into Gaza rather than “fragmenting and talking about all sorts of other things that are distractions”.

“We need to put the pressure on Israel to get humanitarian assistance unfettered, at scale, at volume, into Gaza,” he told RNZ.

“You can talk about a whole bunch of other things, but for right now, the world needs to focus.”

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

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

In the land of the Condor, near the base of the tallest mountain in the Western hemisphere, an Incan community lived. The people hunted, along the sheer hillsides, they farmed, they collected water from the river gushing from snowmelt. They had children, built families, and passed on traditions to generations of descendants.

The land was cold, inhospitable, but their village grew and their community thrived at the far Southern reaches of the vast Incan empire, in present-day Argentina. Today, centuries have passed, the people are gone, but the stones and dirt that made their homes remain. The stories and language of their ancestors have been lost to time. But their spirits remain. And the ruins remember.

This is episode 60 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

A note from Stories of Resistance host Michael Fox: 

If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

You can check out pictures of these Incan ruins in Argentina’s Andes Mountains, on Michael’s Patreon account

Please consider supporting this podcast and Michael Fox’s reporting at patreon.com/mfox. There you can also see exclusive pictures, video, and interviews. 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

While previous efforts to finalize a global treaty on plastic pollution have stalled, a majority of ambitious countries continue to push for progress, with only a small minority hindering momentum. As a result, the question of whether a strong and effective treaty can be achieved through formal consensus alone is up for debate, and it is expected that alternative pathways to deliver a meaningful outcome will be part of the upcoming negotiations.

“The speed at which the treaty went from conception to near completion is exactly what the planet needed, but it was never going to be without challenges,” said Erin Simon, Vice President and Head of Plastic Waste & Business, World Wildlife Fund. “As we approach the final stretch, negotiators must remember why we’re here. Our planet is overwhelmed by plastic waste, and it’s impacting everyone and everything that calls this planet home. At the start of these negotiations, the global community collectively agreed enough was enough, now is the moment to come together to deliver a path forward.”

At this point, the negotiations are well into overtime and every day that goes by, another 30,000 tonnes of plastic pours into our oceans. Failure to conclude a strong treaty at INC- 5.2 will only make the job of addressing this crisis more difficult, costly and dangerous for people all around the world. While the cost of not acting is grave, the potential benefits of meaningful action are plentiful. In the US and around the world a strong global plastic treaty could help create jobs, boost economic competitiveness, lower taxpayer costs, curb pollution and improve human and environmental health outcomes.

The global community must leave Geneva with a treaty built on specific binding rules supported by the majority of countries to be able to effectively tackle global plastic pollution. This means a treaty which includes global bans on the most harmful plastic products and chemicals; global product design requirements to enable a non-toxic circular economy; financial and technical support for developing countries to ensure effective implementation and mechanisms to strengthen and adapt the treaty over time.

“The path forward won’t be easy but it’s time to prioritize the key points where we can align globally and deliver a treaty that will protect the health of people and our planet well into the future,” added Simon.

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

ANALYSIS: By Shadee ElMasry

In our world today, one would be hard-pressed to find a reputable, well-known scholar or group of scholars who support Israel. Of course, the keywords here are “well-known” and “reputable”, after a “misguided” delegation of European Imams travelled to Israel to placate the Israeli occupation and sponsor the genocide of the Palestinian people.

It is increasingly common to find these figures, Muslim apologists for Israel, who have breached the Islamic tenet of standing against injustice, laundering their authority to provide cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity against their brothers and sisters in Palestine and across the wider Arab world.

We live in a world of shameless opportunism, where the poisoned fruit of “normalising” relations with the Israeli occupation is weighed against moral conviction and our duty to stand with the afflicted Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Israel kills 53 Palestinians in Gaza despite ‘pauses’ in fighting
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

A few weeks ago, this tradeoff played out across our screens.

The delegation’s visit, which included 15 European Imams, was led by the controversial Hassen Chalghoumi (known for supporting Nicolas Sarkozy’s burqa ban) and involved meetings with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who has been accused of inciting genocide.

Clearly, their consciences weren’t troubled by the catastrophic famine now gripping Gaza, a “hell on earth” where women and children are killed for scrambling to get flour, and men are killed without rhyme or reason.

I, like many companions across mosques and online feeds, was dumbfounded by the delegation’s complicity. This visit happened at a time when we as Muslims, and the global community, must rally around the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights: to exist, to return home, and to live free from occupation, especially as they face an existential threat.

Delegation swiftly denounced
The delegation was swiftly denounced. Al-Azhar University stressed that they “do not represent Islam and Muslims.” Worshippers walked out of UK mosques. A Dutch Imam was suspended.

But this isn’t just about them. We need to ask how this happened and ensure it does not repeat with us. As one scholar said, if an Imam sees the community fall into usury, then gives his Friday sermon on adultery, the Imam has betrayed his congregation.

The same is the case with Muslim apologists for Israel.

To understand their motives, we must examine three theological “traps” these figures use to justify their support for Israel, or at least the very least, their silence over Palestine. The first of which is the “Greater Good Trap”.

They claim that “speaking up against Israel will result in more harm than good”. But only the Prophet Muhammad’s silence constitutes tacit approval. Their reasoning doesn’t hold up.

A weak-willed person will always accept this reasoning because it allows them to have their proverbial cake and eat it: they gain spiritual cover for remaining silent. As we’ve seen, the scholar will say: “Yes, I can speak, but then our school will get shut down, or we’ll lose funding. For the sake of the greater good, I must remain silent.”

Israel, I’m sure, is delighted by this self-censorship. But we should also ask how it is that so many non-scholars, non-Muslims, and non-Arabs are speaking the truth about the Gaza genocide, while Islamic scholars remain silent.

It raises eyebrows, at the very least.

‘Pure theology’ trap
The second trap is the “Pure Theology” trap. Here, the scholar says: “Sound belief is the most important thing. How can we support the Palestinians when they resort to armed conflict? Their theology is flawed. I prioritise the truth, what’s wrong with that?”

But what they overlook is that falsehood has degrees. It is foolish to denounce one error while ignoring a greater one.

To attack a people’s doctrinal shortcomings while staying silent on their oppression is not principled; it is a failure to understand the fiqh of priorities.

This trap lies in misplacing truths: loudly condemning the religious mistakes of Israel’s victims while conveniently forgetting the far graver injustice of Israel itself and the violent context that brought it into being.

The final, and most sophisticated, trap that Muslim apologists for Israel use is metaphysical: they attempt to misdirect Muslims to a higher order of spiritual thought about the Divine will.

They ask what sounds like a noble question: “Why is Allah doing this to us? It must be because of our sins. Israel is merely a tool God is using to punish us or purify us.”

But the catch here is that the spiritual angle often (but not always) becomes a cover for pacifism. These figures that travelled to Israel, for instance, actively promote inaction. They showed no emotion, no voice, when witnessing the oppression of their own; only when it came to their sponsors did they find something to say.

Suffer in silence
The idea here is to suffer in silence, to clothe disengagement in the language of spiritual endurance.

In the end, this is precisely what Israel and its supporters want: to keep the spotlight off themselves. Any diversion, theological or otherwise, is welcome. As we know, the oppressor laughs at those who fixate on what is bad while ignoring what is worse. And that is the danger behind all three traps.

Yet despite these efforts, something far more powerful holds. The drive within the hearts and minds of Muslims to carry the burden of the Palestinian people, to speak their truth and fight for their freedom has not been extinguished.

It is sustained by faith, shared memory, and the belief that justice is not a slogan but a sacred duty. We ask Allah for continued guidance and protection, and the strength to continue this noble and just cause. Ameen.

Dr Shadee Elmasry has taught at several universities in the United States. Currently, he serves as scholar in residence at the New Brunswick Islamic Center in New Jersey. He is also the founder and head of Safina Society, an institution dedicated to the cause of traditional Islamic education in the West. This article was first published by The New Arab.

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

The post Big Tech Data Centers Deplete Water From Scarce Sources Around the World appeared first on Project Censored.

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

As estimated from data published by a succession of expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet, 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with  a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths that is under-reported 10 fold by Western Mainstream media. In impoverished countries  about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation are those of under-5 year old infants (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country). It is estimated that the 680,000 dead Gazans (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million) included  380,000 under-5 year old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men (Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025 ).

Now the surviving Gazans are suffering man-made famine and mass starvation while the world looks on. This crime has been perpetrated many times in history, notably in the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust  (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death in 1942-1945 for strategic reasons in Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Odisha by the British under fervent Zionist Winston Churchill with food-denying Australian complicity) (for details of this and some 70 other genocide and holocaust atrocities see Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial & the crisis in biological sustainability”).

The World’s major powers must (a) order Apartheid Israel to immediately leave  the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International  Court of Justice), (b) immediately provide life-sustaining  food and medical services to Gaza  (as demanded of any Occupier for its Occupied Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”  by Articles 55 and 56 of the  Fourth Geneva Convention), and (c) immediately impose rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters, notably the US and neo-Nazi Germany, until reparations and war crimes trials are delivered.

28 countries (all European except for Japan) have  issued a statement demanding aid to Gaza, an immediate end to the killing and condemning the Zionist Israeli-imposed killing, deprivation, starving and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Palestine. Words are cheap but something is better than nothing. Of these 28 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) only 9 actually recognize the State of Palestine (Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, and Spain). France will recognize Palestine at the September UN General Assembly.

Notably absent from this list of 28 concerned countries were the Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, neo-Nazi Germany and the perpetrator, nuclear terrorist and genocidally racist Apartheid Israel itself. The US has supplied most of Israel’s weaponry, supplied the bombs and bullets that have killed 28% of Gaza’s pre-war population, and vetoed any action  by the UN Security Council. Neo-Nazi Germany has supplied 30% of Israel’s weapons imports and like the US, the UK and Australia has a rotten record of  persecuting humanitarians  demanding  human rights  for Palestinians.

Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways but has merely applied sanctions against 2 far-right Israeli extremist politicians – something is better than nothing.  The Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, UK, German and Australian Governments assiduously refrained from criticizing Apartheid Israel for the nearly 2 years of the Gaza Massacre and actively sought to hide  the horrors of the Gaza Genocide by hysterical and false  campaigns alleging “antisemitism” by anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians demanding equal and full human rights for the sorely oppressed Palestinians.

Australians are repeatedly told by Zionists and the fervently pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government and Coalition Opposition that there has been  an asserted increase in “antisemitism”  in Australia. A Jewish Zionist “Antisemitism Envoy” and a Christian  Egyptian Australian “Islamophobia Envoy” were appointed to inform the government. Antisemitism  occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism and anti-Arab anti-Semitism  (including Islamophobia) but these 3 key terms (and indeed about 80 related terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “[Antisemitism] Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism” sent to the Australian Government.

I individually addressed the following Letter to major Mainstream Australian media under the Subject heading “Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews” and copied it to all Federal and Victorian State MPs (however, it was not published and the Silence has been Deafening in Australia):

Dear Editor,

For 3 decades I have been researching “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” of subjugated peoples in the global South due to European-imposed war and hegemony, with the findings reported in a thousand  huge and exhaustively referenced articles and 9 huge books (this including massively updating editions). However Google the phrase “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” and you will find that the West simply doesn’t want to know, even though UN demographic data show that 1,500 million people have died avoidably from deprivation since 1950, 70% of them under-5 infants.

Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicate that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with  a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths. In Australia (as well as the US and UK) this carnage has been under-counted by a factor of 10 and deliberately masked by a massive “antisemitism hysteria” campaign that now threatens a McCarthyist curb on free speech in Australia. Also ignored by Mainstream Australian media and politicians are 30 ways Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews (anti-Zionist Jews) is entrenched in Zionist-perverted Australia (cc Mps).

Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

Dr. Nick Maynard, a surgeon who has just returned from volunteering in Gaza for the past month, describes a pattern reminiscent of “target practice” visible in the injuries medical staff are treating in Gaza. As evidence grows of deliberate massacres of Palestinians seeking aid at the U.S.- and Israeli-backed aid sites, Maynard says the pattern of injuries suggests that Israeli military forces and other security contractors staffing the sites are “playing some sort of game” in their targeting of civilians, shooting at the head one day, “the abdomen tomorrow, the testicles the day after that.” Because of Israel’s blockade on food and medicine outside of the sparse supplies available at these dangerous aid sites, Maynard continues, normally survivable injuries have become fatal. “Because they’re so malnourished, their tissues don’t heal. Their immune systems are suppressed. … They often end up breaking down, causing terrible infections inside the body, and frequently these patients die.”

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

In a landmark decision, the International Court of Justice found that polluting countries are now legally obligated to address global warming. In a unanimous ruling by a panel of 15 judges, the court said high-emitting countries do have legal obligations under international law to address the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change. The case was brought forward by the island nation Vanuatu, which has faced the brunt of the climate crisis with extreme weather events and rising sea levels. “Countries in the Pacific, communities in the Pacific, are suffering from something which they did not cause,” says Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister for climate change. “It’s been caused by private actors that are being regulated by states in the West.” Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, which supported Vanuatu in its case, agrees. He says, “What we really need is to end an era of impunity and just actually rely on existing legal principles to hold polluters accountable, whether they are corporate or governmental.”

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

• World Court rules countries that don’t act on climate crisis may be liable for violating human rights law;
• UN Security Council debates Gaza crisis amid questions over role of UN, humanitarian law;
• Civil disobedience at Wells Fargo offices in SF, NYC protest bank dropping DEI, climate goals;
• California AG asks judge to put LA juvenile detention facilities into receivership over poor conditions, abuse of power;
• Florida AG investigating restaurant that held LGBTQ pride event;
• UN says food deprivation, shattered health system leading to catastrophic birth outcomes for pregnant women and newborns

The post World Court rules countries failing to act on climate may be violating human rights law; UN Security council debates Gaza war, humanitarian crisis – July 23, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

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

Leonardo da Vinci’s extensive studies of human anatomy were hundreds of years ahead of their time. (Image by Wikimedia Commons, Leonardo da Vinci.)

At the third assembly of the World Humanist Forum on July 19, Antonio Carvallo proposed the creation of a new working table on the theme of Personal Development. During his presentation, a spark caught my attention. He remarked that, for over 5,000 years, humanity has devoted nearly all its energy to understanding and developing the external world, while neglecting its own internal development as human beings.

Here we are today, with astonishing technological, scientific, intellectual, and social capacities. We can split atoms, map genomes, and communicate instantly across the planet. Yet, in comparison, our understanding of how we function internally as human beings remains painfully limited. Human beings are still too often treated as tools, valued mainly for their capacity to produce and consume.

Ask a teenager what they plan to do with their life, and the question is typically understood to mean: What job will you have? Life becomes synonymous with work. You study in order to work, you work most of your life, and eventually retire—often exhausted and disillusioned. Fulfillment is closely tied to career success, even in a dysfunctional society or a toxic workplace.
Meanwhile, mental health statistics in Western society point to a deep and growing crisis:

• • In 2022, around 59.3 million U.S. adults (≈23.1%) experienced some form of mental illness.
  • In 2022, 15.4 million adults (6%) experienced serious mental illness.
  • In 2022, the CDC reported 49,449 suicide deaths in the United States—about a 3% increase from 48,183 in 2021, marking a record high.

Is this not a dramatic expression of unresolved internal conflict?

Why has internal development been so undervalued? It almost seems like there’s a global conspiracy against it. Most religions begin with an internal experience, but over time, they become increasingly outward-facing — placing God in the sky, focusing on external rituals, and obsessing over food or rules. Political ideologies like Marxism often fail to explore the role of violence, fear, and meaning in how we organize ourselves. Even in the modern “self-help” industry, personal growth is often framed as a way to “optimize performance” within the same dehumanizing structures that cause suffering.

Ask someone, “How do you deal with fear?” Most will struggle to answer. People have no internal tools or language to face and transform their fear. Fear becomes a tool used by the system to control everyday life: we fear being fired, not having enough money, not being loved, being “too much” or “not enough.”

Why are so many people exhausted? What do we actually know about our internal energy — how to cultivate it, renew it, and direct it? These are fundamental questions central to our survival and evolution, and yet society rarely addresses them.

Let’s be clear: we are not proposing personal development so that people can function better in this dehumanized system. True personal development is about changing the focus of our lives entirely. Nothing meaningful can be transformed in the world until we internalize our knowledge of what it means to be human, recognize that life has meaning beyond labor and consumption, and free ourselves from the illusion of fear.

Peace is not the absence of war. It is an internal state of being.

Imagine what it would mean for 8 billion people to embark on a path of self-understanding, learning to overcome pain and suffering, seeing money not as an end in itself but as a tool to humanize the Earth. Imagine if self-knowledge were approached with the same discipline, care, and passion as a musician practices an instrument.

Education must evolve. It must be rooted in the development of the whole human being. Reconciling with oneself should be the first step. The world we long for must first take root within ourselves—only then can we co-create it with others.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Andersson.

 Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China narratives that liken Chinese trade relations to Western imperial conduct, as in Sri Lanka and the Congo. Others have written of Chinese investments in the Occupied West Bank, and even criticize China for lack of aid to Cuba – clearly not issues the Western powers have problems with. 

 The US empire has at least 750 military bases in 80 countries. China has just one, in Djibouti – part of a UN mission against piracy. The US has continued wars against other countries on a non-stop basis, while China has invaded no country nor started any wars in close to half a century. The US instigated over 25 coups and coup attempts in Latin America just between 2000 and 2020. China has sponsored no coup attempts on any government. The US imposes blockades and “sanctions” warfare on at least 39 nations. China imposes no sanctions on anyone. The US regularly launches drone attacks on the people of other countries. China has launched no drone attacks on anyone. China is no imperial superpower, but a peaceful one. 

China is the outstanding example of a Third World country developing into a superpower despite the West’s centuries-long efforts to torpedo its progress. China engages in “win-win” economic relations with other nations. Its loans and investment are carried out based on equality, consensus and joint benefit, unlike the predatory behavior of the IMF and Western lending institutions. China is helping other countries of the Global South break out of the underdevelopment that colonialism and imperialism have imposed on their countries for 500 years.

Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role

 At present, over 150 countries have chosen to participate in China’s economic program called the Belt and Road Initiative. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega explained why:

The People’s Republic of China has brought progress, benefits, development to peoples who were colonized, and later became independent, but who were then subjugated under the boot of the interests of the powers that had colonized them, leaving those peoples in poverty, with people in misery, people going hungry, people in illiteracy, with infant mortality, in Africa, in Asia. And the People’s Republic of China has been developing a policy bringing benefits to developing countries, without setting any conditions… The powers that have been colonialists and neocolonialists, like the US, like Europe… have not stopped being colonialists. They still are neocolonialists. They have not stopped being criminals. They still are criminals. They still are killers. 

China’s role in helping other countries to develop has been noted by several anti-imperialist leaders. Fidel Castro rejected the notion that China was an imperial power. “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy… The role that China has been playing in the United Nations, including the Security Council, is an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability.” Of the Chinese leader he said, “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”

Present Cuban President Diaz-Canel also had high praise for Xi Jinping.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez likewise said, “one of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese Revolution.” Chavez considered that an alliance with China constituted a bulwark against imperialism — a “Great Wall against American hegemonism… China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.” 

 Bolivian President Arce said: “We have built bridges of trust between the two countries and maintain a very positive bilateral relationship.” Evo Morales, the former president, said Bolivia and China “maintain a relationship characterized by wide-ranging and diverse cooperation and reciprocity.” China “works in a joined-up way with other countries and benefits the peoples of the world; the opposite to what was imposed on us for decades by the US, where predatory, individualistic and competitive capitalism looted our people’s resources for the benefit of transnational corporations.” “China develops, and helps, invests, without any conditions, just to support our development. China is always ready to cooperate unconditionally.”

 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro declared, “Between China and Venezuela there is a model relationship, a model of what should be the relationship between a superpower like China, the great superpower of the 21st century, and an emerging, heroic, revolutionary and socialist country like Venezuela… China has inaugurated a new era of the emergence of non-colonialist, non-imperialist, non-hegemonic superpowers.”

 Former Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa spoke highly of Chinese aid to the Citizens Revolution. China’s assistance is “an example for Latin America and for the rest of the world.”

 Burkina Faso revolutionary President Ibrahim Traoré said Chinese aid was a “testament to a mutually beneficial partnership.”

 Even President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia recently said at the ASEAN summit, “China has consistently defended the interests of developing countries. They consistently oppose oppression, oppose imperialism, oppose colonialism, oppose apartheid, The People’s Republic of China defends liberation struggles in countries that are still oppressed by imperialism and colonialism.” 

 Recent Western Left anti-China Stories

Yet, despite the testimonies of these anti-imperialist Third World leaders, some progressives still highlight West’s anti-China narratives, such as in Sri Lanka and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Sri Lanka

The China debt-trap myth arose from Sri Lanka’s port Hambantota, that China lent money to the country to build the port, knowing Sri Lanka could not make it viable. This led Sri Lanka to default on the loans, and Beijing demanded the port as collateral. Chatham House and The Atlantic, both organs of the ruling elite, debunked this. First, the Hambantota Port project was not proposed by China, but by Sri Lanka. Second, Sri Lanka’s debt crisis resulted not from Chinese lending, but from Western loans. Third, there was no debt-for-asset swap. Rather, China leased the port for $1.1 billion, money Sri Lanka then used to pay down debts to the West. Chatham House concludes, “Sri Lanka’s debt trap was thus primarily created as a result of domestic policy decisions and was facilitated by Western lending and monetary policy, and not by the policies of the Chinese government.”

 China in Africa

Liberia’s former minister of public works, W Gyude Moore noted that under European colonialism “there has never been a continental-scale infrastructure building program for Africa’s railways, roads, ports, water filtration plants and power stations…China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries.”

 At the most recent Forum on China–Africa Cooperation in 2024, 53 of the 54 African countries chose to attend. China pledged $50 billion over the next three years on top of the $40 billion already invested.

 Dee Knight took up the issue of China’s exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo propagandized in the book Cobalt Red. He drew on Isabelle Minnon’s report, “Industrial Turn-Around in Congo?” She wrote, “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization.” The West had bled Congo dry through debts that prevented its development. China brought large-scale investment on a new basis, combining financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities.

 Minion stated the result: “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” This “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies,” which just plundered the Congo. Furthermore, China cancelled $28 million in interest-free loans, and gave $17 million in support to the DRC.

 During the Covid pandemic, China announced that it also forgave 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations.  This is in addition to China’s cancellation of more than $3.4 billion in debt and restructured $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019.

 Chinese investments in Israel

Chinese trades with Israel, as with all other countries, to establish mutually beneficial economic relations, to counter the US goal of turning countries against China. China’s trade with Israel is qualitatively different from that of the US, Britain, France, Germany and others since China does not export weaponry to Israel used to slaughter Palestinians and peoples in surrounding countries. 

Some have written of Chinese business involvement in the occupied West Bank. The report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese (which brought US sanctions on her) substantiates one such instance. China’s role contradicts its vote in favor of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution calling for no trade or investments with Israeli operations in the occupied territories. 

 Yet China worked hard to unite the divided Palestinian resistance with the recent Beijing Declaration. China has continually denounced the US and Israel in Gaza, upholds the Palestinian right to resist occupation, and has never condemned the October 7, 2023 Hamas breakout attack. China is also a participant in the present The Hague Group calling for “concrete measures” against Israel.

 China and Cuba

Some Western leftists have criticized China for lack of support for Cuba, suffering under a now worsening US blockade. However, China is working to build 55 solar installation complexes there this year, covering Cuba’s daytime shortfall, and another 37 by 2028, for a total of 2,000 megawatts. This aid would meet nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s present-day demand. China has long been a partner of Cuba in terms of trade and investment, participating in the Mariel Special Development Zone, and in projects in the production of medicines, biotechnology and agriculture.

 China, A Superpower that Supports Third World Development

It is a contradiction that many on the Western left are not supportive of China, given that the US rulers have long called China the primacy threat to imperialist domination. 

Recognizing the US’s continued economic and military power, if not superiority, China seeks to avoid a major destructive direct confrontation. China counters the US and Western isolation strategy by fostering a world based on cooperation with all countries, even with the US and its close allies. It focuses on obtaining essential resources for its industry and for economic self-sufficiency to fortify itself in self-defense against the US strategy to isolate it economically and politically, and on meeting countries’ desire for its cheaper goods and investments. As the Third World leaders above say, most of China’s foreign loans are not capitalist investments, but government funds that have been used to free countries from the grip of imperialism.

 That has made it impossible for the West to isolate China. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, Chinese investments in schools, roads, railroads, and other needed infrastructure are generally seen as a welcome change from the neglect and underdevelopment imposed by the imperial First World.  

 Consequently, every year China becomes more and more a world power in relation to the imperialist countries.

 China’s significance for the world lies in being a singular example of a Third World country developing despite the West’s goal to thwart its rise. This is a model for other Third World countries that seek to assert their independence of the West and make their own path.

 In this process, China, which just 75 years ago, had an illiteracy rate of 80%, has just ended poverty for 800 million people, which no capitalist group of countries ever accomplished. China has achieved the fastest growth in living standards of any country in the world. It achieved this without invading, massacring, colonizing and looting other countries, but peacefully, without threatening any other people, and in cooperation with them.

 As Daniel Ortega said:

The self-same ideologues of imperialism state that what worries them is that they see the People’s Republic of China bringing benefits to these Peoples and they feel that there they are losing the power to keep these peoples enslaved…They are upset, outraged, because the People’s Republic of China is making available billions in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. These are investments for the development of our peoples. They see that as bad for themselves, but why can’t they do the same? Why have they never brought investment with the same conditions that the People’s Republic of China is making available?

The West, with the US at its head, seeks to maintain so-called “Western civilization,” the rule of the white colonizer over the rest of the world. It regards China and Russia as the two major threats to its continued domination and seeks to disable both. China and Russia are drawn into a struggle, where their continued growth, if not existence, is at stake. The more they can neutralize the West’s goal, the more this is a victory for all the oppressed people of the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

 Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China narratives that liken Chinese trade relations to Western imperial conduct, as in Sri Lanka and the Congo. Others have written of Chinese investments in the Occupied West Bank, and even criticize China for lack of aid to Cuba – clearly not issues the Western powers have problems with. 

 The US empire has at least 750 military bases in 80 countries. China has just one, in Djibouti – part of a UN mission against piracy. The US has continued wars against other countries on a non-stop basis, while China has invaded no country nor started any wars in close to half a century. The US instigated over 25 coups and coup attempts in Latin America just between 2000 and 2020. China has sponsored no coup attempts on any government. The US imposes blockades and “sanctions” warfare on at least 39 nations. China imposes no sanctions on anyone. The US regularly launches drone attacks on the people of other countries. China has launched no drone attacks on anyone. China is no imperial superpower, but a peaceful one. 

China is the outstanding example of a Third World country developing into a superpower despite the West’s centuries-long efforts to torpedo its progress. China engages in “win-win” economic relations with other nations. Its loans and investment are carried out based on equality, consensus and joint benefit, unlike the predatory behavior of the IMF and Western lending institutions. China is helping other countries of the Global South break out of the underdevelopment that colonialism and imperialism have imposed on their countries for 500 years.

Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role

 At present, over 150 countries have chosen to participate in China’s economic program called the Belt and Road Initiative. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega explained why:

The People’s Republic of China has brought progress, benefits, development to peoples who were colonized, and later became independent, but who were then subjugated under the boot of the interests of the powers that had colonized them, leaving those peoples in poverty, with people in misery, people going hungry, people in illiteracy, with infant mortality, in Africa, in Asia. And the People’s Republic of China has been developing a policy bringing benefits to developing countries, without setting any conditions… The powers that have been colonialists and neocolonialists, like the US, like Europe… have not stopped being colonialists. They still are neocolonialists. They have not stopped being criminals. They still are criminals. They still are killers. 

China’s role in helping other countries to develop has been noted by several anti-imperialist leaders. Fidel Castro rejected the notion that China was an imperial power. “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy… The role that China has been playing in the United Nations, including the Security Council, is an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability.” Of the Chinese leader he said, “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”

Present Cuban President Diaz-Canel also had high praise for Xi Jinping.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez likewise said, “one of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese Revolution.” Chavez considered that an alliance with China constituted a bulwark against imperialism — a “Great Wall against American hegemonism… China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.” 

 Bolivian President Arce said: “We have built bridges of trust between the two countries and maintain a very positive bilateral relationship.” Evo Morales, the former president, said Bolivia and China “maintain a relationship characterized by wide-ranging and diverse cooperation and reciprocity.” China “works in a joined-up way with other countries and benefits the peoples of the world; the opposite to what was imposed on us for decades by the US, where predatory, individualistic and competitive capitalism looted our people’s resources for the benefit of transnational corporations.” “China develops, and helps, invests, without any conditions, just to support our development. China is always ready to cooperate unconditionally.”

 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro declared, “Between China and Venezuela there is a model relationship, a model of what should be the relationship between a superpower like China, the great superpower of the 21st century, and an emerging, heroic, revolutionary and socialist country like Venezuela… China has inaugurated a new era of the emergence of non-colonialist, non-imperialist, non-hegemonic superpowers.”

 Former Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa spoke highly of Chinese aid to the Citizens Revolution. China’s assistance is “an example for Latin America and for the rest of the world.”

 Burkina Faso revolutionary President Ibrahim Traoré said Chinese aid was a “testament to a mutually beneficial partnership.”

 Even President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia recently said at the ASEAN summit, “China has consistently defended the interests of developing countries. They consistently oppose oppression, oppose imperialism, oppose colonialism, oppose apartheid, The People’s Republic of China defends liberation struggles in countries that are still oppressed by imperialism and colonialism.” 

 Recent Western Left anti-China Stories

Yet, despite the testimonies of these anti-imperialist Third World leaders, some progressives still highlight West’s anti-China narratives, such as in Sri Lanka and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Sri Lanka

The China debt-trap myth arose from Sri Lanka’s port Hambantota, that China lent money to the country to build the port, knowing Sri Lanka could not make it viable. This led Sri Lanka to default on the loans, and Beijing demanded the port as collateral. Chatham House and The Atlantic, both organs of the ruling elite, debunked this. First, the Hambantota Port project was not proposed by China, but by Sri Lanka. Second, Sri Lanka’s debt crisis resulted not from Chinese lending, but from Western loans. Third, there was no debt-for-asset swap. Rather, China leased the port for $1.1 billion, money Sri Lanka then used to pay down debts to the West. Chatham House concludes, “Sri Lanka’s debt trap was thus primarily created as a result of domestic policy decisions and was facilitated by Western lending and monetary policy, and not by the policies of the Chinese government.”

 China in Africa

Liberia’s former minister of public works, W Gyude Moore noted that under European colonialism “there has never been a continental-scale infrastructure building program for Africa’s railways, roads, ports, water filtration plants and power stations…China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries.”

 At the most recent Forum on China–Africa Cooperation in 2024, 53 of the 54 African countries chose to attend. China pledged $50 billion over the next three years on top of the $40 billion already invested.

 Dee Knight took up the issue of China’s exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo propagandized in the book Cobalt Red. He drew on Isabelle Minnon’s report, “Industrial Turn-Around in Congo?” She wrote, “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization.” The West had bled Congo dry through debts that prevented its development. China brought large-scale investment on a new basis, combining financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities.

 Minion stated the result: “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” This “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies,” which just plundered the Congo. Furthermore, China cancelled $28 million in interest-free loans, and gave $17 million in support to the DRC.

 During the Covid pandemic, China announced that it also forgave 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations.  This is in addition to China’s cancellation of more than $3.4 billion in debt and restructured $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019.

 Chinese investments in Israel

Chinese trades with Israel, as with all other countries, to establish mutually beneficial economic relations, to counter the US goal of turning countries against China. China’s trade with Israel is qualitatively different from that of the US, Britain, France, Germany and others since China does not export weaponry to Israel used to slaughter Palestinians and peoples in surrounding countries. 

Some have written of Chinese business involvement in the occupied West Bank. The report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese (which brought US sanctions on her) substantiates one such instance. China’s role contradicts its vote in favor of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution calling for no trade or investments with Israeli operations in the occupied territories. 

 Yet China worked hard to unite the divided Palestinian resistance with the recent Beijing Declaration. China has continually denounced the US and Israel in Gaza, upholds the Palestinian right to resist occupation, and has never condemned the October 7, 2023 Hamas breakout attack. China is also a participant in the present The Hague Group calling for “concrete measures” against Israel.

 China and Cuba

Some Western leftists have criticized China for lack of support for Cuba, suffering under a now worsening US blockade. However, China is working to build 55 solar installation complexes there this year, covering Cuba’s daytime shortfall, and another 37 by 2028, for a total of 2,000 megawatts. This aid would meet nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s present-day demand. China has long been a partner of Cuba in terms of trade and investment, participating in the Mariel Special Development Zone, and in projects in the production of medicines, biotechnology and agriculture.

 China, A Superpower that Supports Third World Development

It is a contradiction that many on the Western left are not supportive of China, given that the US rulers have long called China the primacy threat to imperialist domination. 

Recognizing the US’s continued economic and military power, if not superiority, China seeks to avoid a major destructive direct confrontation. China counters the US and Western isolation strategy by fostering a world based on cooperation with all countries, even with the US and its close allies. It focuses on obtaining essential resources for its industry and for economic self-sufficiency to fortify itself in self-defense against the US strategy to isolate it economically and politically, and on meeting countries’ desire for its cheaper goods and investments. As the Third World leaders above say, most of China’s foreign loans are not capitalist investments, but government funds that have been used to free countries from the grip of imperialism.

 That has made it impossible for the West to isolate China. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, Chinese investments in schools, roads, railroads, and other needed infrastructure are generally seen as a welcome change from the neglect and underdevelopment imposed by the imperial First World.  

 Consequently, every year China becomes more and more a world power in relation to the imperialist countries.

 China’s significance for the world lies in being a singular example of a Third World country developing despite the West’s goal to thwart its rise. This is a model for other Third World countries that seek to assert their independence of the West and make their own path.

 In this process, China, which just 75 years ago, had an illiteracy rate of 80%, has just ended poverty for 800 million people, which no capitalist group of countries ever accomplished. China has achieved the fastest growth in living standards of any country in the world. It achieved this without invading, massacring, colonizing and looting other countries, but peacefully, without threatening any other people, and in cooperation with them.

 As Daniel Ortega said:

The self-same ideologues of imperialism state that what worries them is that they see the People’s Republic of China bringing benefits to these Peoples and they feel that there they are losing the power to keep these peoples enslaved…They are upset, outraged, because the People’s Republic of China is making available billions in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. These are investments for the development of our peoples. They see that as bad for themselves, but why can’t they do the same? Why have they never brought investment with the same conditions that the People’s Republic of China is making available?

The West, with the US at its head, seeks to maintain so-called “Western civilization,” the rule of the white colonizer over the rest of the world. It regards China and Russia as the two major threats to its continued domination and seeks to disable both. China and Russia are drawn into a struggle, where their continued growth, if not existence, is at stake. The more they can neutralize the West’s goal, the more this is a victory for all the oppressed people of the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

Israel launched airstrikes that destroyed part of the Syrian Defense Ministry and a facility near the presidential palace in Damascus on Wednesday, killing three people. This comes weeks after Israel launched unprovoked strikes on Iran, which led to a brief war that killed over 900 Iranians and 29 people in Israel. Adam Shatz, U.S. editor at the London Review of Books, says Israel’s motivation in the Middle East is to “settle accounts with any force in the region that might challenge its domination.” He also notes violent language around foreign policy has become “banal” in many Western countries. “It’s not simply Trump and the far right who speak blithely about overthrowing foreign governments, about bombing other foreign populations. It’s people who have a reputation … for being liberals and moderates,” says Shatz.

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

After getting a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, Jaz Brisack became a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helped organize the first unionized Starbucks in the US in December of 2021. In their new book, Get on the Job and Organize, Brisack details the hardwon lessons they and their coworkers have learned from building one of the most significant and paradigm-shifting worker organizing campaigns in modern history. In this extended episode of Working People, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian speaks with Brisack about their book, the facts and fictions characterizing today’s “new labor movement,” and why union organizing is essential for saving democracy and the world.

Guests:

• Jaz Brisack is a union organizer and cofounder of the Inside Organizer School, which trains workers to unionize. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Jaz got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States in December of 2021. As the organizing director for Workers United Upstate New York & Vermont, they also worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to Tesla.

Additional links/info:

• Jaz Brisack, One Signal Publishers, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
• Jaz Brisack, Teen Vogue, “Starbucks Workers United grew out of Jaz Brisack’s undercover organizing. Here’s how”
• Starbucks Workers United website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Inside Organizer School website

Featured Music:

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Credits:

• Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

“This incident once again underscores the serious lack of transparency and accountability in how the Indian government issues and enforces orders for the removal of social media content and the blocking of accounts,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “Any action affecting journalists or news organizations must be based on clear legal grounds, be subject to independent judicial oversight, and not infringe on press freedom. India still lacks a credible mechanism to review or challenge these opaque and arbitrary orders.”

On July 5, two of Reuters’ handles, @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, were blocked, with X saying the accounts were obstructed “due to legal demands.” Several reports also suggest that accounts of Turkish broadcaster TRT World and the Chinese state media outlet Global Times were censored. The accounts were restored the next day. A government official speaking on condition of anonymity told CPJ that the authorities had not issued any orders to block the accounts and that they were engaging with X to get them restored. 

However, in a July 8 post, X countered the Indian claim and said that on July 3, the Indian authorities had ordered the platform to block 2,355 accounts. X also expressed concerns about “ongoing press censorship in India due to these blocking orders.” X has already sued the Indian government over a new official portal that it says grants “countless” government officials expanded powers to issue takedown orders.

The Indian government denied issuing any recent blocking order against Reuters and others and said the accounts were unintentionally restricted due to a previously issued directive that was part of broader digital enforcement measuresimplemented in the wake of heightened national security concerns. 

Authorities said they’d asked X to restore access immediately and blamed a 21-hour delay on the platform for the continued impediment.

In May 2025, X expressed concern about the Indian government’s demand to block over 8,000 accounts, and asked for such executive orders to made public.

X and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not reply to CPJ’s emails seeking comment. 

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

After PIB’s release, several media outlets, including Times of India, Moneycontrol, The Hindu, Mint, Deccan Herald, Indian Express and Republic published reports that India ranked fourth in terms of income equality, with some directly attributing it to the World Bank. Among them, The Hindu and Deccan Herald had PTI copies while Mint had an ANI copy. Largely, they all parroted the PIB release.

Also Read | Op Sindoor: As Indian media made false, outrageous claims, PIB looked the other way

Why PIB’s Claim Is Misleading

Comparing India’s Gini score (25.2) with the United Kingdom (32.4), the United States (41.8) and China (35.7), PIB said that India’s income equality outshone major economies.

The World Bank defines the Gini as an index that measures the “extent to which the distribution of income or consumption among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution”. A Gini score or coefficient is expressed as a percentage. The number 0 denotes a perfectly equal society (where everyone has the same level of income or consumption), while a score of 100 denotes extreme inequality (where some have nothing and the rest have all).

Also Read | India is not the fourth-largest or a $4-trillion economy yet; NITI Aayog CEO’s claim citing IMF data misleading

However, the PIB seems to have cherry picked some information from the World Bank report and misrepresented it.

Here’s what the World Bank’s April 2025 Poverty & Equity Brief for India says:

“…India’s consumption-based Gini index improved from 28.8 in 2011-12 to 25.5 in 2022-23, though inequality may be underestimated due to data limitations. In contrast, the World Inequality Database shows income inequality rising from a Gini of 52 in 2004 to 62 in 2023. Wage disparity remains high, with the median earnings of the top 10 percent being 13 times higher than the bottom 10 percent in 2023-24…”

So, there are two Ginis—one based on consumption and the other on income. Clearly, the World Bank says that India has improved in one and done worse in the other.

But PIB has compared the consumption-based Gini score of India (where India fares slightly better in 2022-23 than 2011-12) with the income-based Gini scores of UK, US, Slovenia and Slovak Republic (where India is worse off now than before).

The World Bank itself warns against comparing Gini coefficients of different countries for this very reason, because the underlying data used in surveys for these calculations varies. Note that the World Bank does not collect data itself; it measures inequality based on household survey data provided by governments. From the World Bank glossary:

“Because the underlying household surveys differ in methods and types of welfare measures collected, data are not strictly comparable across countries or even across years within a country.”

The reason such a comparison is problematic follows:

“… Surveys can differ in many respects, including whether they use income or consumption expenditure as the living standard indicator. The distribution of income is typically more unequal than the distribution of consumption.”

So, in comparing India’s consumption inequality with more developed countries’ income inequality, we are essentially comparing two different units. And inequality based on consumption data will, by default, appear more equal.

Let’s understand why this is so.

Inequality Based on Consumption vs Income

Most developed, wealthy or high-income countries use income-based household surveys because their economies are formalised and tracking incomes is not a challenge. Developing, middle and lower-income groups use consumption-based household surveys owing to challenges with collecting data on incomes (some reasons could be a sizeable proportion of the labour force being deployed in informal sectors, more cash transactions, less access to banking, etc).

But when we track inequality based on the two different surveys, the results are different. Countries that use income-based surveys appear to be more unequal. There are three main reasons for this:

First, income-based surveys include all means through which one earns (such as salary, capital gains, additional earnings) whereas consumption-based surveys take account only of households’ expenditure. To put it another way, one measures a household’s potential purchasing power while the other only measures how much is actually used or spent. While those with higher incomes may consume more, they also have a greater propensity to save. So, just looking at households’ consumption data cannot give us a clear picture of their potential purchasing power.

Let’s take an oversimplified example. A poor household spends around Rs 15,000 a month or 75% of its income, while a wealthy household spends Rs 50,000, which is 10% of its monthly income. At a glance, just based on their expenditure or consumption, it is hard to gauge the level of inequality between the two, even when there is a significant difference in their spending. But if we conflate their monthly incomes—Rs 20,000 and Rs 5 lakh, respectively—the level of inequality is stark.

Two, according to a 2024 paper on the Gini coefficient titled “The World Bank’s New Inequality Indicator: The Number of Countries with High Inequality” (Haddad et al.) households’ incomes can sometimes be extremely low or even negative, due to unemployment, loss in business, or other temporary shocks but they would still need to maintain a basic level of consumption for sustenance. This keeps consumption levels from falling sharply. 

Three, wealthier households have a greater propensity to save. As incomes grow, the proportion of what is spent on essentials diminishes and the proportion devoted to savings rises. For instance, a household might receive a large one-time income from investments but won’t necessarily spend all of it right away. Instead, they may save most of it for future needs or emergencies.

Because of these differences, income and consumption inequality are not directly comparable—income can fluctuate sharply, while consumption tends to be smoother since everyone depends on at least a minimum level of subsistence.

What PIB Got Wrong

The Press Information Bureau took the 25.5 figure, which is the consumption-based Gini and compared it with the income-based Gini of the United States of America and the United Kingdom. It also claimed that India stands fourth globally in income equality, after the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Belarus.

As established earlier, income inequality is typically higher than consumption inequality. This means that when the Gini for a country is calculated using income data, it will appear more unequal and thus have a higher score than when it is calculated using consumption data.

• For example, the United Kingdom’s score on the Gini index (calculated in 2021) is 32.40, which makes it seemingly more unequal than India’s consumption-based Gini index score of 25.5. The footnote in the World Bank data clearly states that the UK’s Gini score is based on income data.

• Similarly, the United States of America’s latest score on the Gini index (calculated in 2023) is 41.80, which is higher (and hence more unequal) than India’s consumption-based Gini index score of 25.5. US’s Gini coefficient is also based on income data.

Like we mentioned before, this is similar to comparing absolute numbers of different units. For instance, it’s like saying 100 grams is more than 50 ounces. What is comparable, however, is India’s income-based Gini, which is 62, much higher than those of the UK and the USA.

• Similarly, the Slovak Republic, in 2022, had an income-based Gini of 24.10. When compared with India’s income-based Gini of 62, the Slovak Republic is far ahead in terms of equality.

• Slovenia, as of 2022, had an income-based Gini of 24.30. Again, income equality there is far less than in India, with a Gini of 62.

• As of 2020, Belarus had a consumption-based Gini Index of 24.40. This is comparable to India’s consumption-based Gini of 25.5. Belarus fares better than India.

• China’s Gini Index of 35.70 is comparable to that of India’s 25.5, since China also has a consumption-based Gini.

We’ve ranked the countries mentioned in the PIB press release below, distinguishing their most recent available consumption-based and income-based scores on the Gini index.

To put things in perspective, India’s income inequality has actually risen from 2004 to 2023. The World Bank brief clearly says this. Even the improvement in consumption inequality is very marginal—from 28.8 in 2011-12 to 25.5 in 2022-23. This is hardly celebratory; it rather shows that India’s consumption is facing strain.

Economist Surbhi Kesar, who was the first to point out PIB’s misrepresentation of World Bank data on X, writes that we might even be underestimating India’s consumption inequality due to data limitations. The 2022–23 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey introduced several changes in methodology compared to the earlier 2011–12 survey, making direct comparisons on poverty reduction unreliable.

Also, the Gini index is one inequality indicator, just like income and consumption are a few metrics to measure inequality. Like economist Santosh Mehrotra points out in The Wire, inequality manifests in various ways such as social inequality (owing to caste, ethnicity, class, etc) and wealth-based inequality (when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few over the years and then passed down as inheritence), which are often beyond the scope of the Gini index but crucial for developing economies like India to take into account.

Importantly, these surveys and numbers do not highlight enough just how stark inequality is in India, in terms of wealth concentration. These issues have been widely flagged by economists and statisticians on several occasions.

(With inputs from Diti Pujara)

The post PIB’s claim that India is fourth most equal country citing World Bank data is misleading appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

The fragrances named “Trump Victory 45-47” — referring to his capturing the 45th and 47th presidencies — are available as cologne for men and perfume for women, and are bargain priced at only $249 for the limited edition 3.3 fl oz numbered collectors version. You can get them at the dedicated website. Hurry! They won’t last.

I recognize that there are some nasty people out there, cynics who would want to portray Trump as being a crude, obnoxious opportunist, using his prominence as the world-renowned leader of the most powerful and wealthiest country in human history, to suck money out of the wallets of Trump loyalists and other gullible chumps. This would obviously be a grotesque and insulting abuse of power.

But hey, let’s cut the man some slack.

What’s his motto? It’s not MTRGA: ‘Make Trump Resorts Great Again’. It’s MAGA! ‘Make America Great Again!’ That says it all! That tells us where his loyalties really lie.

Trump is not getting any younger. He probably hasn’t — especially considering his diet — got that many years left on this Earth. Yet he’s dedicating this final chapter in his life to service to our nation. His devotion to the United States of America limitless and beyond dispute.

Look at the reality. He’s been a super-entrepreneur all his life, wheeling, dealing, perfecting the art of the deal. He could right now be in the private sector bankrupting companies. Instead, he is selflessly committed his life to the public sector, bankrupting the country.

No, you negative nitpickers, ‘Trump Fragrances’ is not some scam. Trump Fragrances is our deeply patriotic, courageous, noble president’s bold and history-changing attack on the stench that now exhales from our bilious economy, the noxious cloud hovering over our whole putrid and stagnating society, the effluvium exuded by the political milieu of Washington DC.

And what a stinky mess our governing institutions, including the Executive Branch, have become! The swamp creatures roaming the halls of power are exclusively beholden to the ruling elite — the extreme ultra wealthy — pathologically beguiled by American exceptionalism, addicted to war, paranoid, xenophobic, ill-informed, myopic, misinformed, insular, delusional, deaf, dumb, and blind. And that’s on a good day!

But there is hope!

Trump Fragrances will displace the putrefying off-gassing of our dying democracy, the foul stench of corruption and treachery, the malodor of malfeasance and incompetence, the rank miasma of hypocrisy and betrayal, and doggedly overpower the fetid reek of failure with the SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS … of winning and winning and winning again and again.

Yes, good people, with Trump Fragrances, we are witnessing a revolution in the making!

Call it the New World Odor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of the new book Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of AI companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment. “This is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms,” says Hao, in an extended interview.

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

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel — including a full arms embargo — and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”, reports Al Jazeera.

Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.

“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”

• READ MORE: Israel kills more than 300 in Gaza in 48 hours as focus intensifies on GHF
• Palestine solidarity group lawyers refer NZ prime minister Luxon, 3 ministers to ICC over Gaza
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war — now in its 22nd month — began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.

Al Jazeera’s Federica Marsi reports that Albanese’s latest document names 48 corporate actors, including United States tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. — Google’s parent company — and Amazon.

“[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely,” the report said.

“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation — they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.

In an expert opinion last year, Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.

“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.

Francesca Albanese v Israel’s lobby.     Video: Al Jazeera

Military procurements
Israel’s procurement of F-35 fighter jets is part of the world’s largest arms procurement programme, relying on at least 1600 companies across eight nations. It is led by US-based Lockheed Martin, but F-35 components are constructed globally.

Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A is listed as a main contributor in the military sector, while Japan’s FANUC Corporation provides robotic machinery for weapons production lines.

The tech sector, meanwhile, has enabled the collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, “supporting Israel’s discriminatory permit regime”, the report said.

Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon grant Israel “virtually government-wide access to their cloud and AI technologies”, enhancing its data processing and surveillance capacities.

The US tech company IBM has also been responsible for training military and intelligence personnel, as well as managing the central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) that stores the biometric data of Palestinians, the report said.

It found US software platform Palantir Technologies expanded its support to the Israeli military since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023.

The report said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the company provided automatic predictive policing technology used for automated decision-making in the battlefield, to process data and generate lists of targets including through artificial intelligence systems like “Lavender”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?”

The report named the US’s Drummond Company and Switzerland’s Glencore as the primary suppliers of coal for electricity to Israel, originating primarily from Colombia.

In the agriculture sector, Chinese Bright Dairy & Food is a majority owner of Tnuva, Israel’s largest food conglomerate, which benefits from land seized from Palestinians in Israel’s illegal outposts.

Netafim, a company providing drip irrigation technology that is 80-percent owned by Mexico’s Orbia Advance Corporation, provides infrastructure to exploit water resources in the occupied West Bank.

Treasury bonds have also played a critical role in funding the ongoing war on Gaza, according to the report, with some of the world’s largest banks, including France’s BNP Paribas and the UK’s Barclays, listed as having stepped in to allow Israel to contain the interest rate premium despite a credit downgrade.

Which are the main investors behind these companies?
The report identified US multinational investment companies BlackRock and Vanguard as the main investors behind several listed companies.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is listed as the second largest institutional investor in Palantir (8.6 percent), Microsoft (7.8 percent), Amazon (6.6 percent), Alphabet (6.6 percent) and IBM (8.6 per cent), and the third largest in Lockheed Martin (7.2 percent) and Caterpillar (7.5 percent).

Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, is the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar (9.8 percent), Chevron (8.9 percent) and Palantir (9.1 percent), and the second largest in Lockheed Martin (9.2 percent) and Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (2 percent).

New Zealand referrals to the International Criminal Court
Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa yesterday released a report saying that it was referring two New Zealand businessmen along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, to the International Criminal Court for investigation over alleged policies relating to Gaza.

The PSNA accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.

In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.

“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”

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

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel — including a full arms embargo — and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”, reports Al Jazeera.

Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.

“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”

• READ MORE: Israel kills more than 300 in Gaza in 48 hours as focus intensifies on GHF
• Palestine solidarity group lawyers refer NZ prime minister Luxon, 3 ministers to ICC over Gaza
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war — now in its 22nd month — began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.

Al Jazeera’s Federica Marsi reports that Albanese’s latest document names 48 corporate actors, including United States tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. — Google’s parent company — and Amazon.

“[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely,” the report said.

“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation — they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.

In an expert opinion last year, Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.

“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.

Francesca Albanese v Israel’s lobby.     Video: Al Jazeera

Military procurements
Israel’s procurement of F-35 fighter jets is part of the world’s largest arms procurement programme, relying on at least 1600 companies across eight nations. It is led by US-based Lockheed Martin, but F-35 components are constructed globally.

Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A is listed as a main contributor in the military sector, while Japan’s FANUC Corporation provides robotic machinery for weapons production lines.

The tech sector, meanwhile, has enabled the collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, “supporting Israel’s discriminatory permit regime”, the report said.

Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon grant Israel “virtually government-wide access to their cloud and AI technologies”, enhancing its data processing and surveillance capacities.

The US tech company IBM has also been responsible for training military and intelligence personnel, as well as managing the central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) that stores the biometric data of Palestinians, the report said.

It found US software platform Palantir Technologies expanded its support to the Israeli military since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023.

The report said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the company provided automatic predictive policing technology used for automated decision-making in the battlefield, to process data and generate lists of targets including through artificial intelligence systems like “Lavender”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?”

The report named the US’s Drummond Company and Switzerland’s Glencore as the primary suppliers of coal for electricity to Israel, originating primarily from Colombia.

In the agriculture sector, Chinese Bright Dairy & Food is a majority owner of Tnuva, Israel’s largest food conglomerate, which benefits from land seized from Palestinians in Israel’s illegal outposts.

Netafim, a company providing drip irrigation technology that is 80-percent owned by Mexico’s Orbia Advance Corporation, provides infrastructure to exploit water resources in the occupied West Bank.

Treasury bonds have also played a critical role in funding the ongoing war on Gaza, according to the report, with some of the world’s largest banks, including France’s BNP Paribas and the UK’s Barclays, listed as having stepped in to allow Israel to contain the interest rate premium despite a credit downgrade.

Which are the main investors behind these companies?
The report identified US multinational investment companies BlackRock and Vanguard as the main investors behind several listed companies.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is listed as the second largest institutional investor in Palantir (8.6 percent), Microsoft (7.8 percent), Amazon (6.6 percent), Alphabet (6.6 percent) and IBM (8.6 per cent), and the third largest in Lockheed Martin (7.2 percent) and Caterpillar (7.5 percent).

Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, is the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar (9.8 percent), Chevron (8.9 percent) and Palantir (9.1 percent), and the second largest in Lockheed Martin (9.2 percent) and Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (2 percent).

New Zealand referrals to the International Criminal Court
Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa yesterday released a report saying that it was referring two New Zealand businessmen along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, to the International Criminal Court for investigation over alleged policies relating to Gaza.

The PSNA accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.

In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.

“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”

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

On Friday, June 13, after Israeli airstrikes struck Iran, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of missiles at Israel, hitting targets in Tel Aviv. Palestinians watched Iran’s bombs fall on Israel from across the militarized border separating the Gaza Strip from Israel. The Real News Network spoke with Palestinians on the ground in Gaza, who continue to endure genocidal violence and forced starvation at the hands of Israel, about their reactions to Iran’s airstrikes.

Credits:
Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographers: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt, Ruwaida Amer and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

Through the looking glass.

Mike Ferner, of Veterans For Peace, threw blood at the US mission to the UN today: “Here, United States, have some blood! You like shedding it all over the world so much? There you go! How about some blood? A small amount of the blood — the blood money — that corporations make taking us to war all the time. No. More. Killing. Please. Stop it.”

He and 28 others were reportedly arrested today. He had been participated in #FastForGaza

Most arrests took place at the Israeli mission to the UN where a mass action was. Joy Metzler, co-founder of Servicemembers For Ceasefire, was among those arrested there. She’s been doing #FastForGaza outside the US mission to the UN for the last 40 days. They limited themselves to “250 calories per day, considered medically to be a starvation diet and the amount reported early this year as the average available” to Palestinians in Gaza. Joy left the Air Force and became a conscientious objector, citing US aggression in the Middle East and the continued ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine and the ongoing mass massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

One of the last times I saw Mike he was railing about “fuckers” killing “fucking babies”.

Mike is a former Navy corpsman and author of Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq. Mike participated in the 40-day #FastForGaza until he had to be taken to the ER a few weeks ago. I repeatedly asked the UN about the fasters and if UNSG António Guterres would meet with them, but he never did: 35 Days of Fasting: UN Secretary General Won’t Meet With Gaza Hunger Strikers…

While I was in NYC recently, I repeatedly questioned the UN Secretary General’s spokespersons about Gaza and if he would meet with the Veterans and Allies who are on day 35 of a 40 day fast in front of the UN — it ends Monday — as well as other issues: Read full story.

In contrast to the lack of coverage of the Fast For Gaza, in 1965, Roger Allen LaPorte immolated himself outside the UN over war, resulting a front page New York Times piece (self-immolators against the Iraq invasion were largely ignored): Holocaust, Immolation, Sacrifice and “An Extreme Act of Protest”.

[Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., a year ago today. A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of The Capitol Hill Citizen — which is only available in print. Read full story.

• Thanks to folks who took videos and Kelley Lane for editing.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sam Husseini.

In high school, our history teacher asked us to write a story about a particular moment in history. He asked us to write one page. I went home that night, and I wrote 12 pages. I thought that was normal. The next day [my teacher] went around, making sure that everyone did their one page. When he saw that I had written a ton, he looked at me like, What? What is wrong with you? Why did you do this? But I think in that moment, seeing his reaction, for some reason made it click for me. This was something that I did because I enjoyed it, not because it was expected of me. I was always a big reader. I knew that I loved literature, but I didn’t know that this was something that I could do.

What does it mean to be a queer son of immigrants AND an artist? Was there any hesitation from your family about your pursuit of an artistic life?

My parents were never discouraging. They were always like, “Do what will make you happy in life.” But I don’t know that they’ve always understood what this artistic life really means and what it entails. I think now they’re starting to sort of wrap their minds around it. They came to my book launch in New York. I was on the local news in the Bronx, on a small channel. When my mom saw that, when my grandparents saw that, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re a serious person. You’re on the news.” It’s been less about them being discouraging and more about working with them to understand what this artistic life entails, what it means, what it doesn’t mean.

Just because I have a fancy fellowship here or there, just because I published a book, they think I’m rich. “You’re a writer and you’re traveling and you’re on a book tour, so you have all this money,” and I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand….”

That tension between money and art always comes up when I’m talking to my family about what I do. Part of what helped them feel okay with me being an artist is that I always had a full time job in my 20s. I lived on my own. I moved out of my mom’s house after coming back from college. I’ve always sort of taken care of myself financially as an adult. Because they see that, they’re like, “Oh, well, we don’t care what you do, as long as you can pay for your own rent and take care of yourself.”

I would love to hear a bit about your previous work as a community organizer. So much of your writing is about community and place. And I know you yourself are very rooted in the Bronx where you grew up. How has community organizing informed your writing? Why is it important for artists to do this line of work?

I started doing community organizing in college. I went to college around the time of Trayvon Martin’s death, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. I was organizing in college around racial justice. When I graduated, I went back home to the Bronx, and I started getting involved in efforts around responding and resisting gentrification. The first moment where I realized that art and writing has a place in community organizing was during a city council hearing with people in power. It was about the rezoning of Jerome Avenue which would change the landscape of one of the longest streets in the Bronx. During that hearing, I went up there and I read a poem. I hadn’t planned to read that poem. I just decided at the last minute to do it and I saw how much that shifted the room. I wasn’t saying anything that other people weren’t saying. [The poem] encapsulated the feeling, the frustration, the anger and the pride in being someone from the Bronx. It really moved people.

And so from then on, I spent a lot of time trying to bridge the gap between writing and community building, specifically trying to bring artists and writers to spaces where folks were already doing community organizing work. I will say it’s something that I struggle with. I wrote an essay recently about the tension that I find between community organizing and writing. I think that it is important for artists to be involved and engage with their community, to make their local community the best that it can possibly be for its residents. And I also find it a little troubling the way we talk about art and activism these days. It feels to me like we often judge a piece of writing’s value only on its political utility. What issues does it explore? What “communities” is it representing? And I think that is an important part of the conversation, but it cannot be the only way that we judge the value of a piece of art.

Isn’t all art political? Does art have to be political to be good?

I just had a three hour conversation with a friend about this yesterday, and he said the exact same thing. He was like “All art is political. Everything is political. You can’t escape it.” And I said, sure, that’s fine, but I want you to know that when I am sitting down to write a story that is not top of my mind. I am not trying to explore or expand or tease out my politics on the page. I am asking myself questions about people and their feelings and their hearts and their minds and the things that draw them together in community or in relationships, and sure that can be political or be interpreted through a political lens. The reader and the critic can do whatever they want with the work, but I am not thinking about these things first and foremost.

As immigrant writers, as queer writers, as writers of color, there is this question of what are you trying to say about your marginalized group? And sometimes I’m not trying to say anything about any group.

**You don’t want your work to be contrived. You don’t want to try to fit into some sort of immigrant queer writer box, in order to be appreciated as an artist. **

You are a recipient of the prestigious Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellowship in Las Vegas. What have you learned about yourself as a person and an artist during your time in Sin City?

First I will say that it has been an incredible honor to be a Shearing Fellow. I have written more than I have written ever in my life in the last nine months. I always wanted to know what kind of person, what kind of writer, what kind of artist I would be if I had the privilege and time to just be a full-time artist and dedicate all my energy and time to being an artist. It’s just been pretty incredible to find that out on a very practical level. What time do I write? How do I like writing? How do I revise? Can I make time for reading while I’m writing? There are different questions [to ask] when you have a full time job, as I did for 10 years before I got this fellowship.

I forget who said this. I’m sure many writers have said this: it’s best to write about home when you are away from home, in a place very different from where you grew up.

Yes. I 100 percent agree with that. I think often our job as writers is to mystify and demystify what is familiar to us. When you’re in the place, it’s really hard to see the things that you’re not seeing. And so it has been really helpful. I have been writing about the Bronx and other projects. I’ve been writing about communities in the Bronx that are not Dominican. I spend so much time in Loca and in other projects writing about what I know, what I call a Dominican village, but it’s been such a revelation to write about all these different corners of the Bronx. For example, there’s a huge Irish population in the Bronx that I have been researching and reading about and writing about in my work. It’s been nice to have that space away from home, in order to see it better, or to see it from a different perspective.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Yes, and [makes the heart] ask more complicated questions.

Your debut novel Loca came out in February 2025. The act of writing/creating is so contrary to the publicity machine of a book tour. What have been the most surprising aspects of promoting your book?

I spent so much time working on this novel, understanding it from beginning to end, backwards and forward, but it’s a totally different learning experience when you have to talk about it with other people. It is also incredibly challenging to see your work as an object that you have to sell to other people. You have to anchor your work in the theme and keywords. I have to talk about the fact that this is a queer transnational novel. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was writing the work. I was just asking myself questions about these people on the page. And so it’s incredibly challenging. And the biggest thing that I have learned is that for things to move along, you have to remain in the driver’s seat of the promotional experience as the writer, which is really hard. So if I had to give a piece of advice to a writer that is about to go do this, or will do this one day, it is to get a ton of writing done before your book comes out. Because for a little while there will be no space and time for creativity or spiritual connection to one’s work in traditional ways.

Let’s pivot to Sex and the City for a minute. You have written about your love for this show and spoken about it on book tour. I know it’s a comfort show but also deeply problematic lacking LGBTQ+ representation amongst many other pitfalls, despite all that, why is this show important to you?

The show was important to me because growing up as a queer person, I wanted to have the life that these women had; going out, dancing with friends, meeting random lovers, buying nice clothes, having artistic lives and professional lives. As a young queer person, I projected a lot of my dreams and hopes for adulthood on these white women who were not me but who I was able to connect to just on the basis of emotions. So much has changed in the culture regarding representation, and I really value seeing people who look or sound like me or whose experiences are more aligned with mine on screen or in a book. But I also really value that watching shows like Sex and the City or Buffy the Vampire Slayer attuned me to connecting to people across differences. I don’t begrudge having grown up that way. And sure, it would have been nice to see more people like me on TV or in books or whatever, but I also think that is what has made me a writer. Even when I’m writing about people who are “like me” on the page, I still feel that I’m writing across differences. It just makes me a rigorous thinker and a rigorous writer.

I think it’s such an easy cop out to be like, “That’s not for me because they’re not like me.” The whole point of why we open up a book or watch a television show or movie is to learn about other people.

It’s so true. I was just having a conversation with a young writer recently. He was like, “I don’t read these white people in the canon.” And I was like, you know, I understand the sentiment and also white people write things that slap. I would not be the writer that I am or the thinker that I am without having read Virginia Woolf for example. I follow James Baldwin’s philosophy. He used to say something like, “I’m an artist. I’m a human being. And so all of the art is available to me.” I get to read about the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and connect with those folks, as well as Virginia Woolf or Forester.

What inspires you?

The thing that inspires me the most is [the Bronx.] I’m really interested in the ways in which people share space, even when they don’t want to share space, and the kinds of beautiful things and conflicts that come out of living in an apartment building or living on a block with other people.

When I want to connect to a source bigger than myself, I go to nature. I go to the park. I go on a hike. It’s the same feeling that people get when they go to church. And so I need to do that in order to connect. Reading is a huge source of inspiration. Seeing the way that other writers do language on the page usually pushes me to think differently about what I’m trying to do on the page.

There are some writers that don’t want to get “tainted” by other people’s work. They don’t read.

I used to be one of those people when I was in my early 20s, trying to be a serious writer. I was like, “I don’t want to be influenced by anyone. I want to be my own person and my own thinker.” I appreciate that young version of me and his drive. But I also think it’s quite alright to live and write and exist within a tradition.

I would love to talk a bit about endurance. Writing a novel takes stamina and discipline. How do you convince yourself to get up every day and write; “butt in a chair” as the writer Anne Lamott likes to say?

The thing that propels me to sit down and write every day is just the fact that I’m going to die. When I tell people this, they sort of look at me like, are you okay? I’m not depressed. I’m not walking around with this huge weight of existential dread. I just read this quote by Didion, where she says, “Everyday is all there is.” I am so aware that every day is all that we have and that I am not promised tomorrow. And so while I am here, I have work to do. There are things that I would like to accomplish. There are sentences and stories that I would like to get on the page before it’s my time. Sometimes that pressure can be a lot and I need to be easy on myself and allow myself to rest and recuperate. There’s this American idea that we are endless and that we are going to remain young forever and that we’ll just keep going but I am very aware of my own mortality, and it informs my everyday life.

When I read Claude McKay, I’m able to visit Harlem in the 1920s. Or when I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I’m able to be in London in the 1910s and 1920s. My dream is that in 100 years (if we have a literary society, if people are still reading books) that people will be able to see how some people lived in the Bronx 100 years ago.

This goes back to your origin story. How you wrote all those pages for your history class. You’re contributing to the history of time. What advice do you have for other writers who can’t seem to stick to a writing routine?

My primary piece of advice is that it’s really important to not romanticize the writing process. Writing can be very magical and it can be very spiritually fulfilling, but when I am creating my writing routine, I am grounded in the fact that this is my work in the world. And just as I used to show up from nine to five for my organizing jobs, how I used to show up after work hours for a community meeting, I need to treat my writing work as practically as possible, so that I can build a writing life. That means that you have to get really practical figuring out, what times do I write best? How long can I write? That was a really important question for me. When I was figuring out my process. It was really important for me to figure out that the first hour is usually horrible, the second hour is okay, and then if I’m able to make it a third hour, which I’m not always able to make a third hour, but if I’m able to make a third and fourth hour, that’s when the good stuff really happens. And then after that, it just goes to shit again. But that was really important for me to figure out, and you can only figure that out by experimenting, trying new things and getting very, very practical about your writing process.

Why is it important to get serious about your art?

The world could care less if I write or not. The world will not be moved if I don’t write another book. It’s fine, but I am here in the world to write. If it is my calling in life, which I believe it is, the thing that gives my life the most meaning, then I have to say no to distractions. We are living in a time where one of the most important commodities is our attention, and people are making a lot of money out of grabbing our attention. Not only social media companies, but also our government throws a slew of things at us every single day to keep us distracted from the things that we are meant to pay attention to.

How can we avoid distractions in a world that profits off our time?

On a very practical level, turning off your phone is really helpful. I know that we like to be available to people all the time, and we like to be connected all the time, but we don’t have to be. Sometimes, turning off my phone for like, two or three hours and putting it somewhere is the best thing that I can do for my mind. I was talking to some students last year, and they were telling me, “We have a hard time getting off social media, even though we know that it’s really bad for us, it makes us really anxious, because we want to keep up with the news. We want to keep up with what’s going on. It feels like the ethical thing to do, to be connected all the time.” I hope that individually and collectively, we are able to one day divorce what we believe is our ethical responsibility to the community from being online or reading the news, especially national news, every single day.

We’re not meant to consume this much information.

It’s paralyzing. I asked my students, what would your life look like if, instead of being on social media and reading the news every day and engaging with that all the time, what if you turned off your phone a couple days a week and used that time to volunteer somewhere locally? How would your relationship to yourself and your relationship to this responsibility that you have for collective engagement be different at the speed of a human life? This is always what I go back to. I am interested in living at the speed of a single human life, and anything that demands that I move at the speed of an influencer, at the speed of being everywhere all the time, that’s just not for me. I can’t do it.

Back in the day when novels first came out, people thought that they were addicting and distracting.

The difference between a book and a phone is that you engage with a book, but the book does not change. You change. You can come back to a book 100 times and read it differently and feel differently about it 100 times, but the book is not modifying itself to capture your attention, versus the phone. Technology is constantly being upgraded and changed to capture your attention, manipulate your taste and manipulate the way that you think, how you think, and how much time you spend on these things. It’s just a different beast.

Technology is also homogenizing. It makes us all these stereotypical, algorithmic versions of whoever we’re supposed to be.

It’s boring. I feel like there’s more group think now than people are willing to accept. Everybody wants to think that they are thinking bigger and better than the next person. But if you’re on these platforms, and most of us are, you’re probably getting your information from the algorithm and falling into these niches and thinking the way that other people are thinking.

I do believe that my single job as a writer is to make up my own mind about things. And so that means that it is my responsibility to try to disengage with the group and encourage others to do so by reading about characters that they may not have encountered in their daily lives.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Rozuva.

Ellis, bubbly and blonde and smiling behind an enormous pair of shades, is overjoyed to be back on the water after an uncertain winter. It has been nine months since Hurricane Helene ravaged central Appalachia, crumbling highways and roads, leveling forests, and reshaping rivers.

The Pigeon runs through Western North Carolina into the eastern end of Tennessee, roughly parallel to Interstate 40. When the river flooded after Helene, it took huge bites out of the highway, closing it for months and isolating small communities. Debris tumbled into the river, and the crews scrambling to make repairs have replaced sections of riverbank with concrete. Their efforts have been complicated by ongoing flooding and mudslide, creating new scars alongside the old.  

 “The whole thing basically changed,” Ellis said. “It moved major boulders and mountains.”

Ellis possesses an infectiously sunny outlook, even though things have been hard. She lost her home and most of her belongings to Helene and lives in a camper parked in the lot at work. She shares her uncertainty with many thousands of people, especially those who are paid to lead visitors into the beautiful places that make the Great Smoky Mountains so popular. 

As many as 149,000 people in North Carolina alone draw a paycheck related in some way to outdoor recreation, and by one count the seven rivers of the southern Blue Ridge help sustain 68,000 jobs. The Pigeon River provides about $6 million in revenue annually to the rural counties along its banks, and some seven million people visit the French Broad, which flows through Asheville, each year. Rafting is second only to property taxes in the amount of money it brings to Cocke County, Tennessee.

Helene’s disruption of the rafting industry underscores how climate change — and the extreme weather it brings — threatens tourism-dependent economies. A dozen outfitters on the Pigeon, French Broad, and other rivers shut down after the storm and haven’t reopened. Many guides moved on. Those who remain grapple with what Helene wrought, trying to work during a season that, while active, remains well short of its usual vigor.

Those crammed into Ellis’ boat shouted joyfully over the din of roaring rapids, and when the water calmed, guides playfully pushed each other in. Yet everyone was keenly aware of what’s been lost. The patterns of the most popular rapids have shifted. Some vanished, others grew bigger and wilder. In some ways, the Pigeon is a different river. “Stuff will come back eventually but, you know … it’ll probably be a bit,” Ellis said as the boat approached a construction zone.

The bustling work on shore highlighted the dissonance of life on the Pigeon. To the left, the riverbank met a dense and dark mountain forest. To the right, it rose sharply into concrete and gravel shoring up the storm-damaged highway. The sound of singing birds and running water mingled with the rumble of heavy equipment and traffic on Interstate 40. As Ellis’s raft passed the site, she waved. A man in a bulldozer honked a friendly response.

Hurricane Helene made a mess of the Pigeon. Much of the debris the storm knocked loose and the flood carried away choked the waterway, which meanders 70 miles through Pisgah National Forest and drains a watershed of some 700 square miles. Downed trees, vast tangles of brush, even the remains of buildings that once stood along its banks clogged it for months. Although an intrepid rafter or kayaker could run its full length, some of the most popular spots for putting in remain inaccessible.

Other rivers that course through the Smokies saw similar devastation, and uneven recoveries. Some are running clear and strong enough to host rafters, others lag behind. “It’s a story of haves and have nots,” said Kevin Colbourn, executive director of American Whitewater and a river enthusiast himself.

The Pigeon is among those that are open for business but marred by quarrying, riverbank stabilization, and construction. Others, like the French Broad, are ready to ride but businesses along their shores have been washed out. The Nolichucky, which runs 115 miles through North Carolina into Tennessee, is, to Colbourn’s mind, the most tragic. Rafting season is on hold as CSX Transportation rebuilds its rail line through the gorge. A lot of people aren’t happy about that. Guides have watched, aghast, as the company dug rock from the riverbed to shore up the tracks. “‘The river will be there,’ is what people say,” Colbourn said. “What the storm taught us is that’s not always true.”

When the flood swept dozens of businesses away, many guides were left without a reason to return. Others have been hindered by the lugubrious pace of recovery and reconstruction. With nothing else to do, Trey Moore, a kayak instructor and guide in Erwin, Tennessee, turned to activism to get the Nolichucky open again. The river has long kept towns like his alive even as other industries moved on by attracting a steady stream of people who fall in love with the area and settle there to raise families. “We’re a small, tight-knit community,” he said of those who work the rivers.

Moore, a guide for more than 20 years, said many feel a responsibility to their neighbors. During and after the storm, many used their swiftwater rescue skills, and knowledge of the rivers’ contours, to pull people from raging waters. Some hiked for miles up broken roads bringing supplies to isolated elders. Others administered first aid and guided helicopters and first responders to those needing help. They saved lives.

That overwhelming feeling of purpose has since given way to worry. Guiding people down a river is by most accounts incredibly fun for people who love it, but it can also be an unstable way to earn a living. It’s a dangerous seasonal gig, it doesn’t pay all that well, and it rarely comes with benefits. Many who do it live in communal housing or mobile homes. So when the jobs vanished, a lot of them left. “We’ve lost so many guides to so many other rivers,” Moore said. “The guides that are sticking around are struggling.”

Moore is outraged by how CSX is handling reconstruction of the railroad and feels agencies like the U.S. Forest Service have backburnered people like him. As someone who loves the river, and as chairman of the Nolichucky River Outdoor Association, he feels a responsibility to help restore the paddling community to glory. In the meantime, a lot of guides are working on debris removal crews clearing the rivers and surrounding areas. Leslie Beninato is among them. She worked as a guide and owned a small boat rental business before Helene. “Both places do not exist anymore,” she said. “It was just, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do now?’” 

These days she leads crews picking trash off the banks of the French Broad. The only requirement is that anyone joining her must have lost their job to Helene. Most worked in rafting or other river-related industries. Some of them have cleared away remnants of their own workplaces.

Beninato is in her late thirties, and has lived in the mountains of western North Carolina since graduating from Appalachian State University 20 years ago. Unlike some of the younger, greener guides, she’s settled enough to feel stubborn about staying. “To look at the positives of it, how our community came together, that’s one of the reasons why I love the Appalachian mountains,” she said. “I’ve chosen to make these mountains my home because they mean so much to me and they really captured my heart.”

She spoke while paddling across the river, wearing gloves, waders, and a sun hat. Her small canoe carried a pile of trash bags and some trash grabbers; the sun was hot, and mounds of silt covered the tangled riverbanks where trees and businesses once stood. “Just a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, but then everyone else was in that same boat,” she said, jumping out of hers into waist-deep water. 

A few months after the storm, she started exploring the river and grabbing trash, keeping Excel spreadsheets detailing what she found and where, and what more needed to be removed. That work turned into the crew, and the possibility of something more permanent as destructive storms continue to wreak havoc on the mountains. Things are OK for now, she said, yanking a few pieces of twisted metal out of the brush. Besides, she’s used to improvising. All guides are. “That’s what you have to do in outdoor scenarios,” she said. “You have to think, ‘All right, well here’s plan A, how we think and we want things to go. Here’s plan B, if it doesn’t really go this way, then, oh crap, here’s plan C, if plan A and B just got thrown out the window.’”

Earlier this month, just as rafting season was getting in swing, the Pigeon’s wounds reopened. Four inches of rain doused western North Carolina, causing a rockslide on Interstate 40 and washing construction equipment into the river. All but the lowest reaches of the waterway is closed to rafting, and several put-in spots washed out.

Even before the water started to recede, raft guides once again piled into their boats to rescue neighbors, then set to work mucking out damaged houses and businesses. It was another blow to an industry, and a community, that is, in the words of one young guide, “getting some PTSD from the flood in September.”

As best as Heather Ellis can tell, no more than half the rafting companies in the Cocke County area have managed to reopen since Helene,, and some may not come back at all. She feels like one of the lucky ones, even if she is living in a camper until her new home is built.

After that May day on the Pigeon, she and two guide friends relaxed in front of her RV, watching the next group of lifejacket-clad tourists prepare to set out. Ellis started working here eight years ago, when she was 20, long enough that it started feeling like home. She recalled the moment her boyfriend called her to say Helene had taken their house. “It was heartbreaking,” she said.

In the months since, Ellis has found solace in growing more connected to the community, helping people rebuild, and getting to know the Pigeon River in its new form — exciting and frightening in equal measure. For Ellis and other guides, the only constant is the way these rivers change. 

“It kind of made me feel like a rookie again, cause I had to read water,” Ellis said. “That’s what we say when we’re just kind of seeing where the path needs to be, how we’re going to navigate down the river.”

Gerard Albert III contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A year after Helene, river guides in Appalachia are navigating a new world on Jun 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Ellis, bubbly and blonde and smiling behind an enormous pair of shades, is overjoyed to be back on the water after an uncertain winter. It has been nine months since Hurricane Helene ravaged central Appalachia, crumbling highways and roads, leveling forests, and reshaping rivers.

The Pigeon runs through Western North Carolina into the eastern end of Tennessee, roughly parallel to Interstate 40. When the river flooded after Helene, it took huge bites out of the highway, closing it for months and isolating small communities. Debris tumbled into the river, and the crews scrambling to make repairs have replaced sections of riverbank with concrete. Their efforts have been complicated by ongoing flooding and mudslide, creating new scars alongside the old.  

 “The whole thing basically changed,” Ellis said. “It moved major boulders and mountains.”

Ellis possesses an infectiously sunny outlook, even though things have been hard. She lost her home and most of her belongings to Helene and lives in a camper parked in the lot at work. She shares her uncertainty with many thousands of people, especially those who are paid to lead visitors into the beautiful places that make the Great Smoky Mountains so popular. 

As many as 149,000 people in North Carolina alone draw a paycheck related in some way to outdoor recreation, and by one count the seven rivers of the southern Blue Ridge help sustain 68,000 jobs. The Pigeon River provides about $6 million in revenue annually to the rural counties along its banks, and some seven million people visit the French Broad, which flows through Asheville, each year. Rafting is second only to property taxes in the amount of money it brings to Cocke County, Tennessee.

Helene’s disruption of the rafting industry underscores how climate change — and the extreme weather it brings — threatens tourism-dependent economies. A dozen outfitters on the Pigeon, French Broad, and other rivers shut down after the storm and haven’t reopened. Many guides moved on. Those who remain grapple with what Helene wrought, trying to work during a season that, while active, remains well short of its usual vigor.

Those crammed into Ellis’ boat shouted joyfully over the din of roaring rapids, and when the water calmed, guides playfully pushed each other in. Yet everyone was keenly aware of what’s been lost. The patterns of the most popular rapids have shifted. Some vanished, others grew bigger and wilder. In some ways, the Pigeon is a different river. “Stuff will come back eventually but, you know … it’ll probably be a bit,” Ellis said as the boat approached a construction zone.

The bustling work on shore highlighted the dissonance of life on the Pigeon. To the left, the riverbank met a dense and dark mountain forest. To the right, it rose sharply into concrete and gravel shoring up the storm-damaged highway. The sound of singing birds and running water mingled with the rumble of heavy equipment and traffic on Interstate 40. As Ellis’s raft passed the site, she waved. A man in a bulldozer honked a friendly response.

Hurricane Helene made a mess of the Pigeon. Much of the debris the storm knocked loose and the flood carried away choked the waterway, which meanders 70 miles through Pisgah National Forest and drains a watershed of some 700 square miles. Downed trees, vast tangles of brush, even the remains of buildings that once stood along its banks clogged it for months. Although an intrepid rafter or kayaker could run its full length, some of the most popular spots for putting in remain inaccessible.

Other rivers that course through the Smokies saw similar devastation, and uneven recoveries. Some are running clear and strong enough to host rafters, others lag behind. “It’s a story of haves and have nots,” said Kevin Colbourn, executive director of American Whitewater and a river enthusiast himself.

The Pigeon is among those that are open for business but marred by quarrying, riverbank stabilization, and construction. Others, like the French Broad, are ready to ride but businesses along their shores have been washed out. The Nolichucky, which runs 115 miles through North Carolina into Tennessee, is, to Colbourn’s mind, the most tragic. Rafting season is on hold as CSX Transportation rebuilds its rail line through the gorge. A lot of people aren’t happy about that. Guides have watched, aghast, as the company dug rock from the riverbed to shore up the tracks. “‘The river will be there,’ is what people say,” Colbourn said. “What the storm taught us is that’s not always true.”

When the flood swept dozens of businesses away, many guides were left without a reason to return. Others have been hindered by the lugubrious pace of recovery and reconstruction. With nothing else to do, Trey Moore, a kayak instructor and guide in Erwin, Tennessee, turned to activism to get the Nolichucky open again. The river has long kept towns like his alive even as other industries moved on by attracting a steady stream of people who fall in love with the area and settle there to raise families. “We’re a small, tight-knit community,” he said of those who work the rivers.

Moore, a guide for more than 20 years, said many feel a responsibility to their neighbors. During and after the storm, many used their swiftwater rescue skills, and knowledge of the rivers’ contours, to pull people from raging waters. Some hiked for miles up broken roads bringing supplies to isolated elders. Others administered first aid and guided helicopters and first responders to those needing help. They saved lives.

That overwhelming feeling of purpose has since given way to worry. Guiding people down a river is by most accounts incredibly fun for people who love it, but it can also be an unstable way to earn a living. It’s a dangerous seasonal gig, it doesn’t pay all that well, and it rarely comes with benefits. Many who do it live in communal housing or mobile homes. So when the jobs vanished, a lot of them left. “We’ve lost so many guides to so many other rivers,” Moore said. “The guides that are sticking around are struggling.”

Moore is outraged by how CSX is handling reconstruction of the railroad and feels agencies like the U.S. Forest Service have backburnered people like him. As someone who loves the river, and as chairman of the Nolichucky River Outdoor Association, he feels a responsibility to help restore the paddling community to glory. In the meantime, a lot of guides are working on debris removal crews clearing the rivers and surrounding areas. Leslie Beninato is among them. She worked as a guide and owned a small boat rental business before Helene. “Both places do not exist anymore,” she said. “It was just, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do now?’” 

These days she leads crews picking trash off the banks of the French Broad. The only requirement is that anyone joining her must have lost their job to Helene. Most worked in rafting or other river-related industries. Some of them have cleared away remnants of their own workplaces.

Beninato is in her late thirties, and has lived in the mountains of western North Carolina since graduating from Appalachian State University 20 years ago. Unlike some of the younger, greener guides, she’s settled enough to feel stubborn about staying. “To look at the positives of it, how our community came together, that’s one of the reasons why I love the Appalachian mountains,” she said. “I’ve chosen to make these mountains my home because they mean so much to me and they really captured my heart.”

She spoke while paddling across the river, wearing gloves, waders, and a sun hat. Her small canoe carried a pile of trash bags and some trash grabbers; the sun was hot, and mounds of silt covered the tangled riverbanks where trees and businesses once stood. “Just a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, but then everyone else was in that same boat,” she said, jumping out of hers into waist-deep water. 

A few months after the storm, she started exploring the river and grabbing trash, keeping Excel spreadsheets detailing what she found and where, and what more needed to be removed. That work turned into the crew, and the possibility of something more permanent as destructive storms continue to wreak havoc on the mountains. Things are OK for now, she said, yanking a few pieces of twisted metal out of the brush. Besides, she’s used to improvising. All guides are. “That’s what you have to do in outdoor scenarios,” she said. “You have to think, ‘All right, well here’s plan A, how we think and we want things to go. Here’s plan B, if it doesn’t really go this way, then, oh crap, here’s plan C, if plan A and B just got thrown out the window.’”

Earlier this month, just as rafting season was getting in swing, the Pigeon’s wounds reopened. Four inches of rain doused western North Carolina, causing a rockslide on Interstate 40 and washing construction equipment into the river. All but the lowest reaches of the waterway is closed to rafting, and several put-in spots washed out.

Even before the water started to recede, raft guides once again piled into their boats to rescue neighbors, then set to work mucking out damaged houses and businesses. It was another blow to an industry, and a community, that is, in the words of one young guide, “getting some PTSD from the flood in September.”

As best as Heather Ellis can tell, no more than half the rafting companies in the Cocke County area have managed to reopen since Helene,, and some may not come back at all. She feels like one of the lucky ones, even if she is living in a camper until her new home is built.

After that May day on the Pigeon, she and two guide friends relaxed in front of her RV, watching the next group of lifejacket-clad tourists prepare to set out. Ellis started working here eight years ago, when she was 20, long enough that it started feeling like home. She recalled the moment her boyfriend called her to say Helene had taken their house. “It was heartbreaking,” she said.

In the months since, Ellis has found solace in growing more connected to the community, helping people rebuild, and getting to know the Pigeon River in its new form — exciting and frightening in equal measure. For Ellis and other guides, the only constant is the way these rivers change. 

“It kind of made me feel like a rookie again, cause I had to read water,” Ellis said. “That’s what we say when we’re just kind of seeing where the path needs to be, how we’re going to navigate down the river.”

Gerard Albert III contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A year after Helene, river guides in Appalachia are navigating a new world on Jun 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

That idea defies conventional political wisdom, which typically holds that people hate taxes. It emerged in a survey of 40,680 people in 20 nations that found strong support for a carbon tax that would transfer wealth from the worst polluters to people in developing nations. Most of them support such policies even if it takes money out of their own pocket. 

Adrian Fabre, lead author of the study published in Nature, wasn’t surprised by the results. He studies public attitudes toward climate policy at the International Center for Research on Environment and Development in Paris, and said this is the latest in a long line of studies showing that climate-related economic policies enjoy greater support, on the whole, than people assume.

This study asked people how they’d feel about a global carbon tax: The larger an individual’s contribution to climate change, the more they’d pay. In exchange, everyone in the world would receive about $30 per month. “People with a carbon footprint larger than the world average would financially lose, and those with a carbon footprint lower than the world average would win,” Fabre said.

The survey included 12 high-income countries and eight “middle-income” countries like Mexico, India, and Ukraine. The researchers surveyed at least 1,465 people in each nation over several weeks in May 2024. Japan showed the highest support, with 94 percent of respondents backing the idea of linking policies that combat inequality and climate change. 

That said, the policy was least popular in the United States, where the average person is responsible for about 18 tons of CO2 a year. About half of Americans surveyed supported the tax. (Three in 4 Biden voters favored the idea. Among Trump voters, just 26 percent did. In contrast, support ran as high as 75 percent across the European Union, where per-capita emissions are 10 tons. “We found that people in high-income countries are willing to let go of some purchasing power, if they can be sure that it solves climate change and global poverty,” Fabre said. Americans would end up foregoing about $85 a month, according to the study. 

That’s not to say such policies would remain popular once enacted. Canada learned this lesson with its tax-and-dividend scheme, which levied a tax on fossil fuels and returned nearly all of that money to households — most of which ended up receiving more money in dividends than they lost to the tax. People supported the plan when the government adopted it in 2019. But support slid as fuel prices rose, and the government scrapped it earlier this year amid pressure from voters and the fossil fuel industry.

“What matters ultimately is not the actual objective benefits that people receive,” said Matto Mildenberger, “but the perceived benefits that they think they are receiving.” 

Mildenberger studies the political drivers of policy inaction at the University of California Santa Barbara. In Canada’s case, the higher prices people paid at the gas pump weighed more heavily in their mind than the rebate they received later — especially when opponents of such a tax told them they were losing money. “One of the most critical factors in my mind that generates friction for these policies is interest group mobilization against them,” Mildenberger said.

Regardless of whether carbon pricing is the answer to the world’s climate woes, the fact that people are more supportive of climate policies that also fight poverty is telling, he said. 

“Inequality-reducing policies are a political winner, and integrating economic policy with climate policy will make climate policies more popular,” he said. “The public rewards policies that are like chewing gum and walking at the same time.” The question now is whether governments are listening. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A majority of people around the world support a carbon tax — even if they’re paying it on Jun 20, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sophie Hurwitz.

How can it be? How can an obvious genocide, perpetrated by a small country, be allowed to occur?

How can a small and newly developed nation, with a slight population and few resources, artificially stitched together with foreign people from unrelated parts of the world, pulverize a large and millennium developed nation with a huge population, abundant resources, and naturally situated with native people in one unique area?

Candide searched the world and concluded, “This is the best of all possible worlds.”

Thomas More wrote of escape to Utopia, a vision that captivated many who tried to turn the vision into a practicality and always failed.

Literature, theater, and film have explored the savagery that allows violence. A simple 1961 Japanese film, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, attempts to explain it ─ in a cruel world, we are not masters of our fate, nobody will help, and we often must accept it.

In this quiet masterpiece, a bar girl in the Tokyo Ginza district, politely serves the customers and politely refuses to compromise her moral standing. She searches for ways to escape from ascending the stairs to the bar each evening and cannot find help from anyone. Battered and bruised by betrayal, even from a mother and brother who take advantage of her, she remains resolute and struggles to find a rewarding life. After succumbing to a married man, whom she loved and who will be leaving Tokyo, and after receiving a false proposal of marriage, she returns to the bar, ascends the stairs with a firm step, and enters the bar with a smile and pronouncement, “I’m here.”

The world begs for a means to counter the oppressors and killers who have no regard for the lives of others, who lie, cheat, gain control, and use that control to elevate themselves and subdue others. A few inhabitants of the seven plus billions of the world community have spoken with their own violence.

Individual attacks on those allied with the Zionists are a clue to the feelings of ordinary people, driven to a paralyzing anguish by the continued murders of innocents from Israeli Jews and their worldwide supporters. People, who have no stairs left to climb and no lives left to live, reach out in punishing manners. There are several million who have been directly affected and been driven to madness, and several hundreds of millions who cannot comprehend the failure to prevent the genocide and have lost faith in the inhuman race. Animosity to Zionist Israel and its supporters has reached an inflection point and grows exponentially each day.

Israel’s genocidal tactics are not the sole feature that has alienated humanity from Israel and its supporting Jewish people, from all those who are identified with the genocide. There is a sense of betrayal, that Israel and the Jewish people are not constant victims who have consistently battled a hostile world composed of anti-Semites and fiendish supremacists.

People have learned that the celluloid shaped Exodus was an old and discarded tub, into which displaced Jews were unknowingly shoved and taken to a Promised Land. Many arrivals could not leave without paying the bill for the voyage and the assistance given to them. The fearless Kibbutz settler, originally a dedicated and hard-working pioneer, kept alive by public relations, became less significant after World War I. In 1920, after the Zionist population had grown to 60,000 in a Palestine composed of 585,000 Arabs, a reporter noted that earlier settlers felt uncomfortable with the later immigrants. From Zionist Aspirations in Palestine, Anstruther Mackay, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1920.

It may not be generally known, but a goodly number of the Jewish dwellers in the land are not anxious to see a large immigration into the country. This is partly due to the fear that the result of such immigration would be an overcrowding of the industrial and agricultural market; but a number of the more respectable older settlers have been disgusted by the recent arrivals in Palestine of their coreligionists, unhappy individuals from Russia and Romania brought in under the auspices of the Zionist Commission from the cities of Southeastern Europe, and neither able nor willing to work at agriculture or fruit-farming.

The so-called miracle progress of Israel would not have occurred without the financial and military support from Germany and the United States, support programs that used the financial accounts of the German and American peoples. The “progress” is not unique; many nations after World War II, without outside support, have leaped far ahead of Israel. The “blooming of the desert” is nothing more than using standard irrigation techniques and wasting precious water to satisfy public relations. Technological advancements are due to Russian and American engineers who brought their knowledge, experience, and resources to a country that needed modernization.

Hidden from public scrutiny is that Israel, together with the United States, has always had close to the highest poverty rate in OECD nations. Only Costa Rica has a higher poverty rate.

Hidden from public scrutiny are the continuous atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers against innocent populations in Israel, West Bank, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, which can be found in A history stained with innocent blood at Ahram Online. One function of the Israeli army in the West Bank ─ protect the settlers from retribution as they daily murder Palestinians.

The most disquieting revelation is that anti-Semitism is not a careless invective against Jews but an originated word that serves to turn legitimate arguments against Jewish practices into elements of hate. “Kill the Arabs,” expressed by many Israelis, is perceived as anxious rhetoric. Arguing against genocidal maniacs is termed anti-Semitic. In the Molotov cocktail throwing incident in Boulder, Colorado, Americans, who never highlighted the captivity of Americans in foreign nations, highlighted the captivity of foreign people who betrayed humanity by joining the genocidal nation of Israel. Stefanie Clarke, co‑executive director of Stop Antisemitism Colorado disguised the truth behind the happenings, and used the hostility to Zionist Jews to further Zionist interests. Ms. Clarke said, “The reason things like this are happening is because we have allowed this climate of hate to fester. And today it boiled over and this doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is part of a deeply disturbing trend of hate that has been normalized and allowed to spread.”

The attack in Boulder, Colorado came from a person driven into mental anguish by observing people lacking sympathy for the desperate Palestinians registering concern with those who contributed to the genocide. The mental anguish boiled over and arrived from a need to confront the disturbing expressions of hatred exhibited by Israel’s Zionist Jews for others. This hatred has been normalized, and those unnerved by the genocide are striking out at those who contribute to the genocide.

Reconciliation, compromise, and mutual consideration have failed. The deadly is all that is left. And with it, the realization that reconciliation, compromise, and mutual consideration never existed for the Zionists and has been made impossible by them. From the day of its recognition, Israel has been a criminal state. Too little, and maybe too late, the world realizes a misrepresentation of what is called the Middle East conflict. The misrepresentation has led to a fallacious approach for rectification, and an obstacle for obtaining peace with justice. Criminal gangs, once they achieve superiority in firepower, make no compromises. They don’t divide or share their stolen largesse with the original owners.

One word summarizes the taking of another person’s property, livelihood, and dignity – theft! In this case, we have a specific type of theft, Raubwirtschaft, German for “plunder economy.” In Raubwirtschaft, the state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. States that engage in Raubwirtschaft are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people.

Israel has gone further than Raubwirtschaft, using it as a springboard for transnational corruption and having its citizens extend the illicit activities to global networks of money laundering, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and general crime.

A Broad Brush of Israeli Involvement in Transnational Corruption in the 21st Century Blacklisted 16 years ago, Israel has gained entry to the Financial Action Task Force, yet new immigrants can bring in unreported income for 10 years and vast scams go unprosecuted. Complaints from law enforcement in France and the United States that Israel is not cooperating sufficiently on international financial crimes continue unheeded.

Ariel Marom, a Belorussian-born former banker who lives in Israel and frequently travels throughout Russia and Eastern Europe for work, told The Times of Israel he believes that hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty money from the former Soviet Union is being smuggled into Israel, including by new immigrants. There are certain branches of large Israeli banks, he said, that have developed a reputation among newcomers for looking the other way. “A small percentage of this money is used to corrupt Israeli politicians,” he charged. “Russians – and this is no secret – fund the campaigns of a number of politicians, not just one party.”

Two Israelis shot dead in Mexico City were involved in money laundering and had links to local mafia.

Fourteen Israelis are suspected by Colombian authorities of running a child sex trafficking ring, which marketed tour packages from Israel to the Latin American country aimed at businessmen and recently discharged soldiers.

New report sheds light on disturbing human trafficking phenomenon in Israel.
The Justice Ministry published a report Thursday morning revealing alarming data about human trafficking in Israel over the past five years.

In its annual report for 2012, the International Narcotics Control Board lists Brazil and Israel among the “countries that are major manufacturers, exporters, importers, and users of narcotic drugs.”

Drugs trafficking arrest leads police to Israeli underworld.

Oded Tuito was alleged to be a global pill-pusher, whose Israeli mafia group was the biggest operator in a booming international trade in the lucrative “hug drug.” The profits were ploughed into Israeli real estate, being sent there from the US or Barcelona,” a police spokesman said. Police forces in various parts of the world said Mr. Tuito’s arrest confirmed the alleged growing global influence of Israel’s loose-knit, but expanding, crime organisations.

Israel is at the center of international trade in the drug ecstasy, according to a document published last week by the U.S. State Department. A seriously embarrassing record for a nation that was created to be “a light among all nations,” and claims to represent world Jewry.

The most deceptive propaganda mechanism in history — AIPAC, ADL, CAMERA, and a multitude of acronym named Israel support organizations in western nations — extend Israel’s reach and influence western governments and peoples.

Global influencers perpetuate the myth of Israel as a responsible and peace seeking Jewish state.

In France, Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) gathers an assortment of groups dedicated to Israel. Examples of their thrust and how they operate.

French Jewish group CRIF was fined for defaming pro-Palestinian charity, April 8, 2014.

(JTA) – France’s largest Jewish organization defamed a pro-Palestinian charity by accusing it of financing Hamas, a French court ruled. CRIF staff were ordered to pay the equivalent of $4,140 to the Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians, or CBSP – a group that CRIF researcher Marc Knobel in 2010 wrote “collects funds for Hamas.”

Former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar (why him?) leads The Friends of Israel Initiative (FII), which defines its thrust as “countering the growing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders.” A July 2014 working paper, Understanding the Issue of Israeli Settlements and Borders claims that

…settlements have become an exaggerated issue in the diplomatic discourse over Israel. Settlement activity, like the construction of homes and schools, does not constitute a violation of Israel’s signed agreements with the Palestinians. Indeed, as was pointed out, the Oslo Agreements were signed without a settlement freeze. Those agreements allowed Israel to build in the areas under its jurisdiction as these allowed the Palestinians to build in the areas under their jurisdiction. The assertion that settlement activity is a violation of international law is not universally accepted, though it is frequently stated in UN debates and in the declarations of the European Union.

A July 2017 FII event featured this statement:

As goes Israel – so goes the United States of America and so goes Western civilization. And so many of our adversaries and enemies know that. That’s what we’re facing all across the Middle East and, truthfully, all across the world.

United Kingdom has almost as many pro-Israel organizations as there are Israelis. Three of them are:

(1) Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a parliamentary group affiliated with the Labor Party, which promotes support for a strong bilateral relationship between Britain and Israel. They “run and promote campaigns to help create a lasting peace in the Middle East with Israel safe, secure and recognised within its borders; living alongside a democratic, independent Palestinian state.”

(2) Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), a parliamentary group affiliated with the Conservative Party and dedicated to strengthening business, cultural and political ties between the United Kingdom and Israel. CFI has given £377,994 to the Conservative party since 2004, mostly in the form of fully-funded trips to Israel for MPs, according to the Electoral Commission website. Directors of CFI have also given money directly to the Tory party.

(3) Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), which “seeks to present Israel’s case to journalists.” Their “Strategic Assessments provide expert analysis of the ever changing challenges to Israeli security. From sub-state actors and foreign states to domestic concerns, the strategic threats to Israel and the Middle East are explored in depth.”

Russia, yes Russia, has formation of a new lobby. From Jerusalem Post, Pro-Israel caucus forming in Russian parliament, By Gil Hoffman, 05/25/2013

A select group of Russian parliament members will soon be urging their colleagues to say “da” to Israel after a delegation of Israelis took steps to initiate the formation of a pro-Israel caucus in the Duma in meetings last week in Moscow.

An abundant number of pro-Israel lobbies, too numerous to describe, operate at all levels in the United States — political, social, media, economic, educational, “think tanks,” fund-raising, recruiting, and institutional. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli supporters intrude, infiltrate, and mold the minds of everyday Americans. One description can be found at The Israel Lobbies: A Survey of the Pro-Israel Community in the United States, Dov Waxman, June 2010.

Digest all of this. Why the existence of this plethora of helpful groups for one small country that has a strong military and is economically well-off? Do any equivalent assemblies of forces that promote a specific nation exist in the world?

Overlooking all of this is Mossad.

Mossad, an illegal intelligence gathering and terrorist organization, operates within a multitude of counties, gathers information on military, social, political, and economic activities, assassinates adversaries, terrorizes populations and assures the criminal activities continue unimpeded.

A paralyzed world asks how can it happen.

The answers to why a small nation can commit genocide, develop a superior military, and brutally attack a larger and more resourceful nation have been provided.

Israel is a criminal nation and not brought to justice for its criminal actions.

Raubwirtschaft, its state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. Raubwirtschaft states are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people. The U.S. and other nations assist and enable the Raubwirtschaft.

Criminal gangs, once they achieve superiority in firepower, make no compromises.

Israel would not have achieved superiority in firepower without the financial and military support from Germany and the United States, programs that used the financial accounts of the German and American peoples.

Israel has gone further than Raubwirtschaft, using it as a springboard for transnational corruption — extending illicit activities to global networks of money laundering, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and general crime. Local authorities take action but do not engage the central source in Tel Aviv.
Global influencers perpetuate the myth of Israel as a responsible and peace seeking Jewish state. No attempt is made to register these organizations as lobbies for a foreign government or investigate the legality of their operations.

Mossad, an illegal intelligence gathering and terrorist organization, operates within a multitude of counties and assures the criminal activities continue unimpeded. The U.S. refuses to include Mossad in its war on terrorism and permits the intelligence gathering and terrorism on its soil and in other lands.

Is it ignorance, is it bribery, is it graft, is it betrayal, is it lack of concern? It is all of that.

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

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

Cambodia threatened Monday to ban imports of Thai fruit and vegetables within 24 hours as a border dispute deepened after bilateral talks at the weekend failed to breach the impasse between the Southeast Asian neighbors.

On Sunday, Cambodia formally requested the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, resolve claims over four areas of the disputed 800-kilometer (500-mile) Thai-Cambodia border. Thailand reiterated Monday that it rejects the compulsory jurisdiction of the court.

The developments pointed to prolonged tensions over a territorial spat that stirs nationalist passions on both sides. Thai forces shot dead a Cambodian soldier on May 28 after they said Cambodian forces dug a trench on the Thai side of the border.

(Heng Sinith/AP)

The two governments held talks in Phnom Penh on Saturday and Sunday under the aegis of a Joint Border Commission. Another round of talks was set for September.

The Thai Foreign Ministry said Monday that it “expressed deep disappointment regarding Cambodia’s continued refusal to address bilateral disputes” over the four border areas that Cambodia wants the ICJ to rule on.

Thailand, which hosts hundreds of thousands of Cambodian migrant laborers, has irked Cambodia by imposing restrictions on opening hours at border crossings since last month’s border clash. Cambodia has responded by closing one crossing point, cutting Thai internet services and stopping broadcasts of Thai movies and TV.

In parliament on Monday, former prime minister Hun Sen upped the ante, saying the Thai military has 24 hours to reopen the border from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. or Cambodia would close all crossing points from Tuesday to prevent Thailand from exporting vegetables and fruits.

Hun Sen, who is Senate president, said that the current border conflict will not be easily resolved. He called on Cambodian students and workers to return from Thailand.

Prime Minister Hun Manet ordered Cambodian authorities to facilitate the return of workers to Cambodia and help transport them to their hometowns.

The border dispute has historical roots and the two sides differ over which maps to use in demarcating territory. The last time there was a serious and bloody flare-up in tensions was between 2008 and 2011, over a disputed 11th century temple at Preah Vihear. The ICJ has granted sovereignty over the temple to Cambodia.

Cambodia is now calling for The Hague-based court to rule on the demarcation of the border at four other spots: three ancient Khmer temples - Ta Moan Thom, Ta Moan Toch and Ta Krabei - and at an area near to where the May 28 shootout happened where the borders of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos meet.

Thailand reiterated Monday that it doesn’t want the court to intervene.

“Thailand is of the view that recourse to a third party may not always be conducive to the preservation of amicable relations among States, particularly in sensitive matters involving complex historical, territorial, or political dimensions,” it said in response to Cambodia’s ICJ filing.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

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

Fighting between Israel and Iran has entered a fourth day, after Israel launched a sweeping, unprovoked attack. Iran’s Health Ministry reports a total of 224 people have been killed, with 1,277 people hospitalized, by Israeli attacks. Iran has responded by launching a wave of missile attacks on Tel Aviv, Haifa and other Israeli cities, killing at least 24 people and injuring more than 500.

We speak with Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, who says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “basically bombed away President Trump’s only possibility for a diplomatic win early on in his second term.” Vaez also argues President Trump is the only world leader with the ability to “stop this cycle of escalation from expanding into a much more disastrous regional conflagration.”

Iranian-born Israeli political activist Orly Noy says Netanyau launched strikes on Iran to salvage his dwindling political popularity. The Israeli people are very susceptible to believing “the imaginary threats that Netanyahu uses,” says Noy.

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

“We have some heavy mapping to do today!” Francis announced, breaking into a toothy smile, her dark hair pulled back neatly into a bun. 

Most of St. Lucia, which sits at the southern end of an archipelago stretching from Trinidad and Tobago to the Bahamas, is poorly mapped. Aside from strips of sandy white beaches that hug the coastline, the island is draped with dense rainforest. A few green signs hang limp and faded from utility poles like an afterthought, identifying streets named during more than a century of dueling British and French colonial rule. One major road, Micoud Highway, runs like a vein from north to south, carting tourists from the airport to beachfront resorts. Little of this is accurately represented on Google Maps. Almost nobody uses, or has, a conventional address. Locals orient one another with landmarks: the red house on the hill, the cottage next to the church, the park across from Care Growell School.

Our van wound off Micoud Highway into an empty lot beneath the shade of a banana tree. A dog panted, belly up, under the hot November sun. The group had been recruited by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, a nonprofit that uses an open-source data platform called OpenStreetMap to create a map of the world that resembles Google’s with one key exception: Anyone can edit it, making it a sort of Wikipedia for cartographers.

The organization has an ambitious goal: Map the world’s unmapped places to help relief workers reach people when the next hurricane, fire, or other crisis strikes. Since its founding in 2010, some 340,000 volunteers around the world have been remotely editing OpenStreetMap to better represent the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and other regions prone to natural disasters or humanitarian emergencies. In that time, they have mapped more than 2.1 million miles of roads and 156 million buildings. They use aerial imagery captured by drones, aircraft, or satellites to help trace unmarked roads, waterways, buildings, and critical infrastructure. Once this digital chart is more clearly defined, field-mapping expeditions like the one we were taking add the names of every road, house, church, or business represented by gray silhouettes on their paper maps. The effort fine-tunes the places that bigger players like Google Maps get wrong — or don’t get at all.

As we filed out of the bus, Christopher Williams, a consultant for the World Bank, stood waiting for us in a tangerine-colored polo, jeans, and gym shoes. He looked ready to trek through the Amazon, handing out bottles of water and clutching a stack of clipboards as everyone crowded around him. Each held a map, created with satellite images gleaned from Microsoft Bing, of the area we were about to walk. “OK, everyone,” Williams announced. He squinted at the document from behind square-framed glasses. “We just want to get a baseline of what is out there. What is the street layout, where are the houses, what are the types of businesses, what are their names? That’s pretty much it. Just map out what is there.” 

Gros Islet village is a largely residential community. It sits at the northwestern tip of St. Lucia, hugged by dense forests to the east and the Caribbean to the west. There is little to protect from storms that race across the ocean. The last time the government counted, in 2020, 981 people lived there. Fewer live there today. Those who can afford to move to areas with better infrastructure. 

“Where do we start?” Alaine Weeks asked as she examined her map, clutching a pen with 3-inch pink acrylic nails. Weeks, like the other women, were volunteers from the Youth Emergency Action Committee, which teaches young locals how to be first responders. The group has been at the forefront of these island expeditions, believing, as Francis explained to me, that its mission was to “do a good deed while having fun.”

“We’ll begin at the farthest point on the grid,” Williams told her, tracing his thumb over the perimeter of the map, where the sea met land. He divided the women into groups of three; each was assigned a section of the village. Soon, everyone splintered off in different directions. The charts they were supposed to complete covered about half a square mile of the village and a fraction of Gros Islet district, which is a little larger than Manhattan in New York City. Eventually, they hope to account for every foot of St. Lucia, which covers 238 square miles and includes more than a dozen peaks and ridges, broad valleys, and lush rainforest. 

They are running out of time. Rising sea levels, dangerously high temperatures, and coastal erosion threaten the very existence of St. Lucia and other Caribbean islands, which are warming rapidly and experiencing sea level rise at rates as much as 67 percent faster than the global average, leading to more extreme weather. The climate crisis will only deepen, but maybe, with a more complete picture of the country’s geography, its most adverse outcomes can still be mitigated.

The central challenge in drawing an accurate map of the world has plagued cartographers for centuries: The world is spherical and paper is flat. They’ve tried and failed to get around this problem since the second century, when Ptolemy drew the first intelligible representation of the world in Geographia. His handiwork showed a lattice of blue oceans and bulges of undefined land, with more than half the world as we now know it missing. Its lines of latitude and longitude gestured toward a working scale of the planet — an attempt to think of Earth’s magnitude beyond what the eye could see. It would take many centuries before the full expanse of terra incognita came to light. As navigators sailed ever farther from shore and, later, airplanes took to the sky, once unknown features came into view. The Space Age widened the lens further as satellites allowed humanity to view Earth from the heavens. Still, the puzzle that stymied cartographers for millennia remained, raising the question of whether it would ever be possible to create a map so accurate as to represent reality itself. 

Google was among the first to get around this. In 2001, a software startup called Keyhole developed an innovative approach to mapping. The California company combined a bunch of satellite and aerial images purchased from commercial suppliers, then chopped them up to create tiles a user could zoom in on. Rudimentary data from the two largest digital map providers at the time, TeleAtlas and NavTeq, helped with roads and addresses. The result was a truly interactive digital tool that allowed users to zoom, pan, and drag a 3D simulation of the world. Yet early iterations were flawed. The geospatial data they started with was not always of the best quality, and although Keyhole could provide a realistic sense of the Earth’s scale, users couldn’t always discern what they were zooming in on. “We had a very spotty Earth,” Brian McClendon, who co-founded Keyhole and was a Google vice president until 2015, told me. 

Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 and used the company’s satellite imagery to help create a nascent version of Google Earth — whose core technology was integrated into what would become Google Maps. The acquisition led to a bigger budget, and the new Google team purchased higher-quality aerial imagery to get around the coverage problem. The following year, Google Maps used the technology to launch its first digital, interactive map, with the goal of helping “People get from Point A to Point B.” Within a few years, Google was flying planes over as much of the world as possible — excluding places like North Korea or China that didn’t allow them in their airspace — to create a live digital image of the world we live in. 

This fundamentally changed the concept of mapping. “People had never seen satellite imagery before.” McClendon told me. “The most important thing that people got out of this was they could see their house, they could see how their space fit into the world. They could go to Iraq and see how the Iraqis were living.” The map data, however, was a disaster. While the app marked the first time anyone could see the entire planet, then zoom in on a particular city or town, the data that makes such a thing useful — the names of streets and roads and towns and buildings — was sparse and inaccurate. Entire towns were misidentified or even unidentified. Roads disappeared into an abyss. Earth could be seen from above, but not always from the ground up.

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One day in 2004, McClendon recalled how Google executives Marissa Mayer, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page were driving around Stanford University when Page took out a camcorder and started recording. “Why can’t we do this?” Page asked them. Three years later, Google bolted a panoramic camera to the hood of a van and sent it to five cities, capturing spherical images every 30 feet or so. It worked, but it was slow and expensive. That led to “ball and stick” cameras mounted on hundreds of cars. Google dispatched some 100 drivers to cover every possible inch of the country. Entire towns that hadn’t been mapped began to appear on a scale that made it seem almost as if users were standing inside the map itself. Google named the feature Street View and today has covered over 10 million miles of roads.

The problem with trying to create a life-size digital version of the world is that the world is not static. “Mapping everywhere all the time in 3D, even today, is impossible,” McClendon said. “You have to make choices about what data to get and where to fly.” Google’s choices mostly came down to two priorities: population density and revenue. It focused resources where it enjoyed the easiest access: North America and much of Western Europe. Photographing streets in places like China or North Korea was impossible. It didn’t focus on countries like South Sudan or Cambodia because there was little profit to be made there. Until it started using AI and machine learning, the company relied on contractors to do much of the grunt work — just covering North America was a task that, in its first iteration, took 18 months. Today, the map is updated every second — more than 100 million updates made each day.

One of Google’s competitors, OpenStreetMap, took a different approach. The company, founded six months before Google Maps and launched by a physics student in London named Steve Coast, started with a simple question: What if a map were free and open to all? And what if it could be a collaborative effort involving people all over the world? When OpenStreetMap launched in 2005, it enjoyed immediate popularity in Western countries with access to the technology required to fill in the map. 
Yet even as the modern, digitized representation of the world began coming together quickly, a fundamental cartographical inequity emerged. Street View provided excellent data in big cities and tourist destinations. OpenStreetMap was beloved by adventurers and hikers in Europe. But no one offered much data from developing nations or corners of the world that remained off the grid. But it was precisely in those kinds of places that the threat of disaster — intensified by  climate change— was most severe. Who would map the spaces that remained terra incognita? And how?

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake ravaged Haiti, creating one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes to date. Rescue teams were ill-prepared. Maps of the country were imprecise, and with so many major landmarks destroyed, first responders had trouble orienting themselves even as aftershocks hit. By some estimates, a quarter of a million people died and at least four times that many were left homeless. Many of those displaced crowded into unsanitary, makeshift camps that led to a cholera epidemic, creating a crisis within the crisis. 

That same day, Mikel Maron, a freelance software engineer who’d been involved with OpenStreetMap, or OSM, from its start, helped assemble a team. In the five years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, he’d seen the humanitarian potential of OSM’s method — a way, as he put it to me, “to make a map that could be as dynamic as disasters are.” A friend who volunteered in New Orleans following the inundation noticed that the Red Cross was sending workers on a route where a bridge had been destroyed because it still existed on Google Maps, which was slow to incorporate updates. “At the time it was a really crazy idea to suggest that we use OpenStreetMap for disaster,” Maron told me. “OSM was a hacker project. We were still trying to figure out how to make it work — it wasn’t something you’d want to rely on in an emergency.” 

But by the time the earthquake struck Haiti, the technology had become much more user-friendly. Word spread quickly and within two weeks some 600 volunteers around the world were contributing to a map that grew intricately detailed, like a spider spooling out its web. The challenge shifted to getting it into the hands of aid workers. 

Ivan Gayton was in Port-au-Prince working for Doctors Without Borders when the cholera epidemic erupted. Gayton was overwhelmed. Clinics were flooded with desperate Haitians, their numbers multiplying faster than he could count. He’d never seen an epidemic of this scale before. His priority was to figure out how to stop the transmission. To do that, he needed to locate the source of the outbreak. It was standard to ask people who came into the clinic where they’d just come from, but he quickly realized that they lacked the tools and data to make use of any of the answers. When Gayton tried to pinpoint their responses on Google Maps, he drew a blank. Villages were improperly labeled, and aside from a few major highways, entire districts were a giant lacuna of pale yellow.

Then one day, a software engineer from Google brought a hard drive full of data generated by the nascent Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and introduced the mapping system to Gayton. “The trick to OSM was that it was wide open,” Gayton told me. “I could take the data and do what I wanted with it to get what I needed. That was demonstrably, evidence-based life saving.” 

The tool also was surprisingly accurate after months of contributions. It provided proper names of many villages, districts, makeshift shelters, and hospitals. Like the British physician John Snow who, in 1854, used addresses of cholera victims and a map of London to trace the outbreak to a single contaminated pump, Gayton used a similar method to pinpoint clusters of cases. To his great surprise, it worked, and his team identified several transmission hot spots, including in a neighborhood called Mariani, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. “To this day I maintain that if we’d had a proper map of Haiti from the start,” Gayton said, “we could’ve stopped cholera dead.”

Not long after HOT’s official launch in 2010, some of the worst natural disasters of the century struck. Earthquakes throughout Asia and the Middle East. A typhoon in the Philippines. Major flooding, then major drought, in India. Wildfires in the Amazon. Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean. HOT’s small team found themselves inundated with requests from aid workers who needed better maps of the disaster zones. “We were basically running on a crisis-by-crisis model,” Kate Chapman, one of the startup’s co-founders, told me.

In its early days, HOT had just three full-time employees and about 20 contractors working in Indonesia. By 2015, the small organization had grown to around 11,000 online volunteers. Yet with so many crises hitting, it was difficult to measure their progress — or predict where the next emergency would strike. HOT’s team started collaborating with humanitarian organizations to find a way to work together when a disaster hit. “The question became, Could you map ahead of time?” Chapman explained. “Then that question became, What if we mapped ahead of time?” 

Their projects grew more targeted, focusing not just on vulnerable and unmapped places, but on the specific issues facing communities in those places. In Tanzania in 2017, for example, HOT supported a local mapping group, Crowd2Map, to help young girls escape mandatory genital mutilation ceremonies. Its network of online cartographers identified buildings, roads, and villages in the Serengeti district where the illegal ceremonies often occurred. Over 277,000 buildings in the district were added to the map. According to The Guardian, the new map helped a legal aid worker locate a 16-year-old girl who was being held against her will in her home days before she was to be circumcised. 

But there were too many places in the world that were on the brink of extreme poverty, civil war, and migration crises, as well as prone to climate disasters. HOT’s team realized that while it could start remote mapping projects anywhere, completing them required being on the ground. They would have to narrow their focus. But that, too, proved impossible. There were too many places that were poorly charted — 94 countries, the organization estimated in 2019, and roughly a billion people. The only way to change that was if people in those countries showed a desire to do the work. HOT decided to open four regional hubs – informal offices in Kenya, the Philippines, Senegal, and Uruguay. One of its earliest priorities was getting a project up and running in the Caribbean — a region the United Nations’ secretary general called “ground zero for climate change.”

The sun had climbed high and grown unwaveringly intense as the women set off on their expedition of Gros Islet. From where I stood, studying Google Maps on my phone, I realized we were entering what felt like a modern version of terra incognita. Satellite imagery captured the basic contours of the village with all its streets and silhouettes of buildings, but few businesses or roads were labeled accurately. Alleyways and roads were missing. Buildings that lay in ruins still stood according to Google Maps.  

I followed my mapping group toward an empty road. A few chickens broke into a trot in front of us. I was already disoriented: Without street names or addresses, it was difficult to find our place on the map. We reached an intersection where a grand stucco church with gilded windows stood before us. A few women in the group already knew it as St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church, which they used as a landmark to orient us on the map. Then, Weeks spotted a green street sign, likely leftover from a century of British and French colonial rule, its white lettering all but faded by the sun. It wasn’t until we were a few feet away that we could make out the faint word “Marina.” Weeks pinpointed the narrow lane on the map on her clipboard and labeled it. We took a left, down a street named Church, toward the shoreline. 

Weeks was 24 when she discovered HOT’s cartography through a charity at her church. In 2021, she joined a field-mapping trip in St. Lucia’s southernmost city, Vieux Fort. With a small group, Weeks went door-to-door to record houses, street names, and businesses. Afterward, everyone went to a school computer lab to add their findings to OpenStreetMap. When Weeks pulled up the map of St. Lucia, she was stunned. She’d used Google Maps before, mostly to check traffic patterns, but had never seen her island from above. She spent hours correcting mistakes. Weeks was hooked. “It’s so addictive!” she told me as we stood at an abandoned bar near the water, surveying where we were. In the past two weeks alone, she’d made 5,584 edits, clicking away online, filling in the contours of buildings as seen from above.

We rounded another corner, passing a row of single-story wood homes, each no larger than a few hundred square feet. The stillness of the village felt deafening. We passed many abandoned houses and empty lots, which the women labeled “R” for ruins on their maps. But many places were still very alive, painted bubble-gum pink and lime green, azure blue and canary yellow. On the side of one bar, someone had painted a mural of a man gazing through binoculars with the words “Stay curious.” Near the shore, Weeks stopped in the middle of the road, furrowing her brow at her clipboard as she tried to position herself. A woman in a fitted, tan beach dress picking at a box of plantains and salted fish looked up at her. “Are you lost?” she asked.

Weeks nodded. “We are just mapping out the village. Is this a bar?” she asked, pointing at a two-story building with shuttered windows and a sign that read “Whispering Lionz.” The woman clapped her hands together excitedly. “It’s my new bar!” she replied. “We’re opening in two weeks.” Weeks noted the name on her map, while the woman helped identify the rest of the bars lining the street. She’d never used a map to orient herself in the neighborhood before. 

All was still and quiet, the Caribbean Sea gently lapping the shore of Rodney Bay, the November sun burning intensely down, casting shadows onto the road in front of us. Stray dogs napped in the underbrush of leafy banana trees. It hardly seemed like the sort of place where a perilous, life-threatening storm could strike with little warning. But that was exactly the point of the mapping project: being prepared for the inevitable disasters long before they hit. The ability to identify who lived where could help apportion resources to poorer areas like Gros Islet. In times of acute crisis, the goal was for rescue teams to use the map to find people.

Like many residents of many island nations, St. Lucians live on the front lines of climate change. They are surrounded by turquoise waters that are slowly rising. Dense rainforest is prone to wildfires. Warming seas feed devastating hurricanes. Acidification threatens the marine habitat. Despite having some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in the world, small island nations are paying the highest price for the warming planet. “The problem is the governments of the developed countries, they still believe that there’s time or that this is not as serious as we make it out to be,” said Dr. James Fletcher, St. Lucia’s former minister of public service, sustainable development, energy, science, and technology. “I don’t think they appreciate just how much of a life-or-death threat it is for us. I think this whole question of mapping is a very important one: How do we use empirical data to determine which are the most vulnerable communities?”

In 2013, an unexpected storm struck St. Lucia on Christmas Eve — a time typically in the dry season. The “Christmas trough,” as locals now call it, shredded roads, destroyed houses, and flooded low-lying areas. Rescue workers found it nearly impossible to know where to go, or how to find people. Five people died. The disaster made the government and first responders realize that their Achilles heel lay in not being able to locate communities that were off the grid. “A lot of the communities might have an official route to reach them, and then when you go, it might be covered or doesn’t exist,” Marcia Haywood, the regional coordinator of Caritas Antilles, a  nongovernmental organization  focused on poverty and disaster relief, told me. “I want to see a map of St. Lucia that is a living, breathing document.”

After a few hours of exploration, my team reached an impasse: a busy highway leading into a dense forest. Weeks knew about a croissant stand at the corner — a business that didn’t appear on Google Maps but that she swore existed. We climbed a dusty hill and, sure enough, found a little wood lean-to with a red, white, and blue sign reading “Bonne Café Authentic French Bistro.” It was shuttered. None of the women knew how long it had been out of business or whether to include it on their maps. Williams decided it was time to turn around. Our team had covered about 0.05 square miles and labeled 15 businesses. “That’s a lot!” Williams told them encouragingly. The women seemed more dubious. We began making our way back to the van, where Proann Francis doled out fish sandwiches and brownies in white Styrofoam containers. Standing by the bus, I noticed a small sign reading “Centre for Adolescent Renewal and Education: the C.A.R.E. Grow Well School,” which Google had told me was in India. I logged onto OpenStreetMap on my phone to update the map. Someone had beaten me to it.

It is not until you get into the business of trying to map far-flung, disaster-prone areas that the question of what a map is becomes muddled. As HOT began expanding its mission in different parts of the world, from Zimbabwe to Dominica to Syria, the nuances of each place made creating a universal map ever more difficult. Roads, borders, buildings, and village names have a different meaning depending on whom you talked to. Once, during a project in an informal neighborhood in Dar es Salaam, a city on the Tanzanian coast that experiences regular flooding, HOT’s team was collecting data on historical inundations. They noticed that the information varied wildly, with households next door to each other reporting large variations in flood height. The next day, rather than asking people to estimate the water’s depth, they asked people to indicate where on their bodies the water had reached: their ankles, feet, knees, or hips. The findings were much more consistent. “From a traditional cartographic angle, you think that’s not good data,” Rebecca Firth, HOT’s executive director, told me. “But that’s the language people talk in. And that is actually extremely important data.”

For many people in developing countries whose villages or neighborhoods are poorly mapped, the very idea of a Western, Cartesian map can be antithetical to how they navigate the world. “When you take data out there in the world and reduce it to a line on a map, you are making an inherent argument about that place,” Robert Soden, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder of HOT, told me. “And it tends to be people who are more powerful who make these datasets.” The OpenStreetMap model, in theory, is intended to hand that power to anyone who wants it.

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Just as Wikipedia relies on the honesty of its community to keep its pages up to date, HOT is at the mercy of its 339,000 or so volunteers. It is easy to make mistakes while editing OpenStreetMap. Although the software relies on a seasoned “editor” to “approve” edits before they are published, the sheer number of revisions outweighs the expertise. An even greater challenge lies in the fact that users’ intentions are sometimes nefarious. As Sam Colchester, who leads disaster response for HOT, explained to me, “online vandalism” is a challenge. Malicious users might mislabel or even eliminate things. “It often happens in conflict areas,” Colchester told me. “Russians were deleting data in Ukraine, or renaming all the streets in western Ukraine to Russian names.” While HOT’s volunteers keep watch for such things, he said, they are often difficult to catch quickly.

The best way to ensure a map’s accuracy is to chart the place in person. But HOT’s limited resources make it impossible to launch expeditions in the 94 counties it has identified as most needing to be chronicled. Building the community needed to keep that document current is even harder. Sodden discovered that as he visited Haiti several times in 2010 and 2011, training locals on how to do just that. Eventually, the funding fell through, and it became difficult to keep the project going. “I don’t think we were successful in creating any sort of long-term map in Haiti,” he told me. “I think it’s safe to say we didn’t build a robust and self-sustaining community of mappers there.”

In the week I spent in St. Lucia, I found myself wondering what it would take to keep any map alive. How could HOT build a self-sustaining community of mappers to continuously update the ever-changing world we live in? No one who participated in the effort to document Gros Islet had returned to finish the project. Other, more pressing projects lay ahead, like Bexon, which sits between two rivers, in a basin in the middle of the island, just barely above sea level. When heavy rains come, the highway floods and the residents are cut off like a severed artery.

One day, HOT’s regional coordinator, Louise Mathurin-Serieux, picked me up in her SUV to take me to Bexon. She wanted to survey the work of a field-mapping trip taken a year ago. It had proven more challenging than Gros Islet: The small community of a few hundred people lay off a major highway that had seen frequent fatal accidents, and the rainforests teemed with venomous snakes. Houses sat in clusters and it could take 10 minutes to walk from one neighborhood to the next.

“This is the flood zone,” Mathurin-Serieux explained to me ominously, parking at the side of the road just after we crossed a yellow bridge spanning a trickle of water. When the rain is heavy, flash floods wash over the bridge, effectively cutting off everyone in Bexon. “Water!” Francis, who’d joined our trip along with Weeks, chimed in. “Water is our biggest problem!” 

We stood before a handful of dilapidated houses built on stilts. Water coursing over the land during a flood last year had left its mark on many of them. One had been destroyed and lay in a pile of kindling. The government tried to get people to move to higher ground, but few wanted to budge. “A hurricane is like childbirth,” Francis explained. “You forget how bad the pain gets.”

As I walked around the houses, I met an older woman named Olive, who sat watching us curiously from her front porch. She’d grown up in the same house; it was passed down to her from her grandparents. Leaving was out of the question. But she was getting increasingly worried about the changing weather. She kept a card near her front door that the government had provided that reads “Flood Warning Messages.” It was part of a system devised for locals, color-coded to rate the severity of an incoming storm. Red indicated serious flooding, orange meant inundation was expected anytime, yellow meant it is possible, be prepared. When a storm was coming, residents were instructed to run down the road to compare their cards to a sign that would indicate the severity of an incoming storm. The card was, for her, a personal map to navigate future storms. 

A life-threatening storm was hard to imagine as we stood surveying Bexon, under the bright sun, with not a cloud in the sky. But that was part of the irony of HOT’s work: The success of the projects would only truly be put to the test when a major disaster hit. Since its founding 15 years ago, HOT’s small troupe of online volunteers has mapped more than 2.1 million miles of roads and 156 million buildings. Despite that progress, it is hard not to feel like their mission is a game of whack-a-mole with impending crises. Nobody had seen the Gaza invasion coming, for example, or the outbreak of an impending civil war in Haiti. More often than not, the crises were coming faster than the mappers could complete their work. Mathurin-Serieux was not deterred by this. “When it comes to mapping, we are still in our infancy,” she told me as we climbed back into her vehicle. “But if we don’t have a thriving community, then we have an outdated map in five years.”

As our car left Bexon, ascending the large hill out of town — one that was prone to landslides that would further entrench the village during heavy rain –—Weeks pointed out two new houses that had gone up since the last flood. She pulled out her phone to add the structures to OpenStreetMap. In the stillness of the calm sun, it was hard to feel the gravity of adding two small wooden lean-to residences to the map of St. Lucia. But tomorrow, those could be two lives saved.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can a crowdsourced map of the world help save millions of people from climate disaster? on Jun 11, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddy Crowell.

Recent reports say that US AID is considering giving $500 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an “aid” initiative launched at Israel’s request. At first glance, that might sound like a generous effort to help desperate Palestinians in Gaza. But peel back even one layer, and you’ll find a deadly political scheme masquerading as humanitarian relief.

This is not about helping hungry people. It’s about controlling them, displacing them, and starving them into submission.

Let’s start with some basics. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not a humanitarian organization. It’s a U.S.- and Israeli-backed scheme run by people with no track record in neutral aid work. Its first director Jake Wood, resigned on May 25, saying the organization failed to uphold humanitarian principles. Then the Boston Consulting Group, which had secretly helped design GHF’s aid operations, pulled out and apologized to staff who were furious about the firm’s complicity in a system that enabled forced displacement and sidelined trusted UN agencies.

GHF’s brand new director is Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical PR executive best known for helping Donald Trump recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and push the U.S. embassy move there—a move that only fanned the flames of conflict.

GHF’s entire premise is rooted in deception. It was launched with Israeli government oversight, without transparency, without independence, and—critically—without the participation of the United Nations or any respected humanitarian agencies. In fact, the UN has refused to have anything to do with it. So have groups like Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme, whose leaders have warned in no uncertain terms that GHF’s model militarizes aid, violates humanitarian norms, and places Palestinian lives at even greater risk.

GHF has never been about delivering aid. It’s about using the illusion of aid to control the population of Gaza—and to give cover to war crimes.

People in Gaza are starving because Israel wants them to. There are thousands of aid trucks, many loaded with supplies from the United Nations, that—for months—have been blocked from entering Gaza. They contain food, water, medicine, shelter materials—the lifeblood of a besieged civilian population. But instead of letting them through, the U.S. and Israel are pushing their own version of aid: a privatized, militarized operation. Armed U.S. contractors working with the GHF are reportedly earning up to $1,100 per day, along with a $10,000 signing bonus.

The GHF plan is to make aid available only in the south, forcibly displacing people from the north—driving them toward the Egyptian border, where many fear a permanent expulsion is being engineered.

From the very start of GHF’s operations, with the opening of two distribution sites in southern Gaza on May 26, the chaos turned deadly, with Israeli military shooting at hungry people seeking food. In its short time of operation, nearly 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded. These are not tragic accidents—they are predictable outcomes of militarizing aid.

Let’s also address the fear-mongering claim that when the UN was in charge of aid delivery, food was being stolen by Hamas. There is no credible evidence of this and Cindy McCain, head of the World Food Programme, has publicly refuted this allegation, saying that trucks have been looted by hungry, desperate people.

The real threat to aid integrity isn’t Hamas—it’s the blockade itself, which has created an artificial scarcity and fueled black markets, desperation, and chaos..

To truly help the people of Gaza, here’s what needs to happen:

• Shut down GHF and reject all militarized aid schemes.

• Restore full U.S. funding to UNRWA and the World Food Programme—trusted, experienced agencies that know how to do this work.

• Demand that Israel end the blockade. Let aid trucks in—UN trucks, Red Cross trucks, WFP trucks. Flood the strip with food, medicines, tents.

• Demand an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing and create space for meaningful relief and political solutions.

The starvation in Gaza is not a logistical failure. It is Israel’s political choice. And GHF is not a lifeline. It is a lie. It is complicity. It is diabolical. And U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to fund it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

More than 150 press freedom advocacy groups and international newsrooms have joined Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in issuing a public appeal demanding that Israel grant foreign journalists immediate, independent and unrestricted access to the Gaza Strip.

The organisations are also calling for the full protection of Palestinian journalists, nearly 200 — the Gaza Media Office says more than 230 — of whom have been killed by the Israeli military over the past 20 months.

For more than 20 months, Israeli authorities have barred foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, says RSF in a media release.

• READ MORE:  Israel’s war on Gaza deadliest conflict ever for journalists, says report
• ‘Ban on truth’: UNRWA condemns Israel for barring journalists from entering Gaza
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

During the same period, the Israeli army killed nearly 200 Palestinian journalists in the blockaded territory, including at least 45 slain for their work.

Palestinian journalists who continue reporting — the only witnesses on the ground — are facing unbearable conditions, including forced displacement, famine, and constant threats to their lives.

This collective appeal, launched by RSF and CPJ, brings together prominent news outlets from every continent demanding the right to send correspondents into Gaza to report alongside Palestinian journalists.

The signatories include Asia Pacific Report from Aotearoa New Zealand.

“The media blockade imposed on Gaza, combined with the massacre of nearly 200 journalists by the Israeli army, is enabling the total destruction and erasure of the blockaded territory,” said RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin.

“Israeli authorities are banning foreign journalists from entering and ruthlessly asserting their control over information.

“This is a methodical attempt to silence the facts, suppress the truth, and isolate the Palestinian press and population.

“We call on governments, international institutions and heads of state to end their complicit silence, enforce the immediate opening of Gaza to foreign media, and uphold a principle that is frequently trampled — under international humanitarian law, killing a journalist is a war crime.

“This principle has been violated far too often and must now be enforced.”

The media blockade on Gaza persists despite repeated calls from RSF to guarantee foreign journalists independent access to the Strip, and legal actions such as the Foreign Press Association’s (FPA) petition to the Israeli Supreme Court.

Palestinian journalists, meanwhile, are trapped, displaced, starved, defamed and targeted due to their work.

Those who have survived this unprecedented massacre of journalists now find themselves without shelter, equipment, medical care or even food, according to a CPJ report. They face the risk of being killed at any moment.

To end the enduring impunity that allows these crimes to continue, RSF has repeatedly referred cases to the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging it to investigate alleged war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza by the Israeli army.

RSF also provides aid to Palestinian journalists on the ground — particularly in Gaza — through partnerships with local organisations such as ARIJ (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism).

This partnership provides Palestinian journalists with psychological and professional support, ensuring the continued publication of high-quality reporting despite the blockade and the risks.

Through this cooperation, RSF reaffirms its commitment to defending independent, rigorous journalism — even under the most extreme conditions.

• See the full media signatory list at RSF
• Under the latest rankings by the RSF 2025 World Press Freedom Index, Israel is 112th and Palestine 168th out of 180 countries surveyed.

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

Having grown up in the Southeast, I’ve always loved a good summer thunderstorm. Sure, thunder can be loud and sometimes scary, but I associate storms with a feeling of coziness. We would seek shelter in the safety of our home, me and my brother hoping the power would go out (it often did) so we’d have an excuse to light candles and eat ice cream before it melted.

Fireworks, on the other hand, I have come to loathe. Now, living in a city, each 4th of July I feel hostage to the relentless booms and the trail of smoke they leave behind.

“Noise” is generally defined as any unwanted sound, or sound that interferes with our ability to hear other things — and it is a form of pollution associated with myriad health impacts. I’m sure many of you will relate to the feeling of annoyance, stress, even anger that can arise from being subjected to nuisance noise. But noise is also often deeply connected to other environmental ills, not always as obviously as smoky fireworks. Many things that cause loud, obnoxious noise also cause harmful air pollution: planes, trucks, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, construction, demolition. A world built on fossil fuels is noisy. Some advocates are fighting back — championing not only our right to live in clean communities, but also in peaceful ones.

“It’s really unbelievable, how much noise impacts so many people,” said Mary Tatigian, who founded a group called Quiet Florida to advocate against noise pollution in 2021, when street and air traffic noise in her community skyrocketed. A registered nurse for 30 years, she began to learn more about the health impacts of the chronic noise she was confronted with.

“Not only does it cause hearing problems, it’s a cardiovascular issue,” she said. “Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure rises. It’s almost like a fight-or-flight system.” Noise exposure can disrupt sleep and increase levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the body. It may also bring psychological impacts, like increased anxiety and irritability. “We use the term ‘learned helplessness,’ where you just feel you’re subjected to this noise, all the time, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Tatigian.

Tatigian has lived in the small city of Naples, Florida, for around 40 years, and the same house for the past 25. “Four years ago, it was like the floodgates opened,” she said. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the local population ballooned. Cars with modified exhaust became more common on the roads, and air traffic to and from the Naples Airport — primarily from charter jets — went nuts. “I happened to be in a flight path. I had no idea I was in a flight path,” she said.

She got a noise meter on her deck, and found that the low-flying planes overhead ranged from 60 to 85 decibels — 85 decibels is the threshold at which regular sound exposure can begin to cause hearing loss, according to the National Institutes of Health. Tatigian estimates that she hears as many as 60 to 70 planes in a day.

In the 1970s, when many environmental hazards were coming into focus and the country was passing legislation to address them, noise was considered among those issues. The Noise Control Act of 1972 established a national mandate to “promote an environment for all Americans free from noise that jeopardizes their health and welfare,” as well as funding research and education around noise. But the EPA stopped funding the program in the ’80s under the Reagan administration, instead shifting responsibility to state and local governments.

“Our knowledge and actions around noise basically stalled,” said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of a nonprofit called Quiet Communities, which Tatigian is also involved with. Since then, efforts to manage noise in different states and localities have been spotty, Banks said, and regulations that do exist, like laws banning modified exhaust on vehicles, are seldom enforced. Quiet Communities brought a lawsuit against the EPA in 2023 to try and compel the agency to uphold the 1972 noise law, which is still on the books. “The EPA has mandatory responsibilities defined under that law that are not being carried out,” Banks said.

The case has yet to be heard, and she isn’t certain what the outcome will be. But Quiet Communities is also working to create more grassroots momentum for solutions that offer an array of benefits — quiet among them. “We certainly do work on noise as a problem, but we also want to promote quiet as a valuable natural resource, and one that frankly is endangered,” said Banks.

The group has collaborated with a sustainable landscaping certification group called American Green Zone Alliance to help municipalities, parks, and universities transition to electric lawncare equipment, for instance. A growing number of towns and cities have passed ordinances banning gas-powered leaf blowers, a notorious source of both air pollution and nuisance noise — but Banks is also somewhat leery of this approach, which can have an outsize impact on small businesses and has led to pushback from lawncare professionals.

“Trying to regulate in this area can bring landscapers and the public and municipalities into conflict,” she said. “That’s something that really has to be done in a thoughtful and careful way that engages all stakeholders.”

Erica Walker, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health and the founder of a research organization called Community Noise Lab, studies how noise pollution intersects with other systemic issues. “Usually noise is not happening in isolation. It’s just a physical stimulus to represent urban imbalance or community imbalance,” said Walker. “If we’re saying noise creates negative cardiovascular health outcomes, it’s not just noise. It’s socioeconomics, it’s air pollution, it’s water quality, it’s visual quality.”

Having studied noise and other forms of pollution for over a decade, she said she can tell a lot about a community and its stressors by the way it sounds. A nearby highway, for instance, has a distinct sound pattern — if she hears that, she knows what the air will smell like (exhaust), and what the night sky will look like (lit up by billboards).

It’s well documented that low-income communities of color are more likely to be situated near environmental hazards. And, like a highway, those hazards often come with noise pollution as well. In a 2017 paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that poorer communities with a high percentage of nonwhite residents were more likely to face higher noise exposures. The differences became more stark the more racially segregated communities were.

But Walker has also studied how socioeconomic factors feed into people’s perceptions of noisiness. In 2015 and 2016, she helped run a survey in Boston that focused on experience rather than objective measures of loudness. The results showed that simply having a higher percentage of nonwhite residents in an area made people perceive their neighborhood as louder, as did other factors like proximity to a housing project. The majority of the survey respondents were white.

“I’m a Black person, right? There’s a stereotype that we’re loud — everyone has that stereotype,” Walker said. “It was just really interesting to see, statistically, some of these stereotypes that we don’t really think about until we encounter them coming up in the data.”

In contrast with other forms of pollution, perception in fact has a lot to do with how we experience noise and how that may impact our well-being. It gets back to that definition of noise — “unwanted” sound.

“As a community noise researcher, I am steadfastly anti-quiet. I don’t believe in quiet,” said Walker. Absolute quiet, in many instances, is an unattainable and even undesirable goal. (Like my positive experience with thunderclaps — a loud sound, but one I don’t experience as “noise.”) And enforcing quiet may cause harm to groups of people who want certain types of sound, Walker said. For example, fights over noise have erupted in gentrifying communities where traditions like playing music come into conflict with new residents’ expectations. In the pursuit of quiet, “we have castigated people,” Walker said. “We have ignored cultural elements of noise. We have shut practices down that are part of the acoustical culture of a community, because we thought it was too loud.”

She’s anti-quiet, but pro-peace — an alternative where everyone in a community is able to negotiate around sound that they want and sound they can live with.

That compromise can be difficult in practice. Mary Tatigian said she has received quite a lot of negative feedback since she began advocating with Quiet Florida, “from people who like to modify their exhaust, or have loud cars, or to fly their jets all over.” A couple of years ago, after her work was featured on TV, she said she was inundated with vulgar comments — “and I’m not a prude, by far,” she added. Some of it was even threatening.

People may be quick to defend their right to make as much noise as they want. But in Tatigian’s view, communities also have a right to be able to access peace and quiet. “At the very least, a person should have that inside their home,” she said.

In the near term, two measures that Tatigian is advocating for in her Florida community are more dispersed flight paths to the regional airport, so that one community doesn’t have to bear the brunt of the air traffic pollution burden, and a noise camera system that could help enforce laws about excessively loud cars — similar to cameras that catch cars speeding through red lights.

But her long-term vision of a healthy, peaceful community would involve cleaner technologies, she said — like more electric vehicles, which are known for being quiet since their engines don’t require combustion to run. She also envisions more public transit as a part of the solution, as well as a better rail system that could help displace short-distance, regional flights. “You have to think outside the box,” she said.

For Walker, the vision of what a healthy community looks like is entirely dependent on the culture, context, and priorities of a place. “I think a thriving community could be loud,” she said. “A thriving community is not necessarily quiet, but it’s in a rhythm.” There’s a predictability, and a sense of security, she said. Whatever sound there may be — from music, from children playing, from the vibrations of nature — is not unwanted.

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more about the history of the Noise Control Act of 1972, and our current understanding of noise pollution (Undark)
• Read: about the latest type of infrastructure plaguing communities with noise pollution: cryptocurrency mining centers (The Week)
• Read: about efforts to silence go-go music in D.C.’s gentrifying neighborhoods — and the countermovement to preserve it (The Georgetown Voice)
• Read: about how climate change is impacting the soundscape of the natural world, from birdsong to frog croaks (Grist)

A parting shot

It’s not just human health that’s impacted by excessive noise. Wildlife can be harmed by it as well, notably creatures like bats and whales that use echolocation to navigate their environments. Some developers and land managers have taken steps to mitigate the effects of human-caused noise on wildlife. This photo shows water buffalo passing under a railway, equipped with noise deflectors, in Nairobi National Park in Kenya.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Mia Torres / Grist

Parting shot: Dong Jianghui / Xinhua via Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A world built on fossil fuels is loud. Here’s how advocates are defending peace and quiet. on Jun 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.

A leader in an Indigenous rights group, Vasquez said such efforts were long supported by financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which spent billions of dollars starting in the 1980s to help farmers in Peru shift from growing coca for cocaine production to legal crops such as coffee and cacao for chocolate. The agency funded economic and agricultural training and technology, and helped farmers gain access to international markets.

But the Trump administration’s recent sweeping cuts to the agency have thrown that tradition of U.S. assistance into doubt, and Indigenous people in the Amazon worry that without American support there will be a resurgence of the cocaine market, increased threats to their land and potentially violent challenges to their human rights.

“We don’t have the U.S. government with us anymore. So it can get really dangerous,” said Vásquez, who belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo people and is vice president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest. “We think the situation is going to get worse.”

Several Indigenous human rights defenders have been killed trying to protect their land, Vasquez said, and in some of those cases U.S. foreign aid provided money to help prosecute the slayings. “We really needed those resources,” he said.

Sweeping cuts began in January

When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began dismantling USAID shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term, it all but eliminated U.S. foreign aid spending, including decades of support to Indigenous peoples around the world.

USAID’s work with Indigenous peoples sought to address a variety of global issues affecting the U.S., according to former employees. Its economic development efforts created jobs in South America, easing the need for people to work in illicit drug markets and reducing the likelihood they would migrate to America seeking jobs and safety. And its support for the rights of Indigenous peoples to steward their own land offered opportunities to mitigate climate change.

That included Vásquez’s organization, which was about to receive a four-year, $2.5 million grant to continue fighting illicit activity that affects Indigenous people in the region. Vásquez said that grant was rescinded by the new administration.

In January, DOGE launched a sweeping effort empowered by Trump to fire government workers and cut trillions in government spending. USAID, which managed about $35 billion in appropriations in fiscal year 2024, was one of his prime targets. Critics say the aid programs are wasteful and promote a liberal agenda. Trump, Musk, and Republicans in Congress have accused the agency of advancing liberal social programs.

Read Next

Want climate solutions in Indigenous territories? Better get consent.

Maria Parazo Rose

“Foreign assistance done right can advance our national interests, protect our borders, and strengthen our partnerships with key allies,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement released in March. “Unfortunately, USAID strayed from its original mission long ago.  As a result, the gains were too few and the costs were too high.”

Musk last week announced his departure from the Trump administration, marking the end of a turbulent chapter that included thousands of layoffs and reams of litigation.

Former USAID employees said political pressure from the U.S. often kept foreign governments from violating some Indigenous rights. 

In the three months since thousands of foreign aid workers were fired and aid contracts canceled, the Peruvian government has moved quickly to strip Indigenous people of their land rights and to tighten controls on international organizations that document human rights abuses. It’s now a serious offense for a nonprofit to provide assistance to anyone working to bring lawsuits against the government.

The National Commission for Development and a Drug-free Lifestyle, the country’s agency that combats drug trafficking, did not respond to a request for comment.

“The impact was really, really strong, and we felt it really quickly when the Trump administration changed its stance about USAID,” Vásquez said.

The U.S. spends less than 1 percent of its budget on foreign assistance. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide in the Senate who works for Democratic Vermont Senator Peter Welch, called DOGE’s cuts to USAID a “mindless” setback to years of work.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

Agency reached Indigenous communities worldwide

USAID’s work reached Indigenous communities around the world. It sought to mitigate the effects of human rights abuses in South America, created programs in Africa to enable Indigenous people to manage their own communities, and led the global U.S. effort to fight hunger.

One of the most recent additions to USAID’s work was incorporating international concepts of Indigenous rights into policy.

Rieser, for instance, was responsible for crafting legislation that created an adviser within USAID to protect the rights and address the needs of Indigenous peoples. The adviser advocated for Indigenous rights in foreign assistance programs, including actions by the World Bank.

“That provided Indigenous people everywhere with a way to be heard here in Washington,” Rieser said. “That has now been silenced.”

That adviser position remains unfilled.

Vy Lam, USAID’s adviser on Indigenous peoples, who said he was fired in March as part of the DOGE downsizing, said the idea of Indigenous rights, and the mandate to recognize them in foreign operations, was new to USAID. But it was gaining momentum under President Joe Biden’s administration.

He said concepts such as free, prior, and informed consent — the right of Indigenous people to give or withhold approval for any action that would affect their lands or rights — were slowly being implemented in American foreign policy.

One of the ways that happened, Lam said, came in the form of U.S. political pressure on foreign governments or private industry to negotiate mutually beneficial agreements between Indigenous peoples and their governments.

For instance, if an American company wanted to build a hotel in an area that could affect an Indigenous community, the U.S. could push for the deal to require Indigenous approval, or at least consultation.

“We had that convening power, and that is the thing that I grieve the most,” Lam said.

U.S. foreign aid workers were also able to facilitate the reporting of some human rights violations, such as when a human rights or an environmental defender is jailed without charges, or Indigenous peoples are forced off their land for the establishment of a protected area.

Money supported attendance at international meetings

In some cases, USAID supported travel to the United Nations, where Indigenous leaders and advocates could receive training to navigate international bodies and document abuses.

Last year under the Biden administration, USAID awarded a five-year grant to support Indigenous LGBTQIA people to the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Indigenous People, an agency that offers financial support to Indigenous peoples to participate in the U.N.

Read Next

How the Trump administration is putting hundreds of sacred sites at risk

Maria Parazo Rose

At $350,000 per year, it was the largest grant from any member state in the U.N., fund secretary Morse Flores said. The money would have supported attendance at international bodies to report human rights abuses and testify on areas of foreign policy and development that negatively impact their lives and communities.

In February, the fund received notice that the grant would be terminated. The State Department does not plan to fulfill its pledge to fund the remaining four years of the grant to help Indigenous peoples travel to the U.N. and other world bodies.

In most cases, people receiving assistance to attend major meetings “are actual victims of human rights violations,” Flores said. “For someone who’s unable to come and speak up, I mean, it’s really just an injustice.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cuts to USAID severed longstanding American support for Indigenous peoples around the world on Jun 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Graham Lee Brewer, The Associated Press.

A leader in an Indigenous rights group, Vasquez said such efforts were long supported by financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which spent billions of dollars starting in the 1980s to help farmers in Peru shift from growing coca for cocaine production to legal crops such as coffee and cacao for chocolate. The agency funded economic and agricultural training and technology, and helped farmers gain access to international markets.

But the Trump administration’s recent sweeping cuts to the agency have thrown that tradition of U.S. assistance into doubt, and Indigenous people in the Amazon worry that without American support there will be a resurgence of the cocaine market, increased threats to their land and potentially violent challenges to their human rights.

“We don’t have the U.S. government with us anymore. So it can get really dangerous,” said Vásquez, who belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo people and is vice president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest. “We think the situation is going to get worse.”

Several Indigenous human rights defenders have been killed trying to protect their land, Vasquez said, and in some of those cases U.S. foreign aid provided money to help prosecute the slayings. “We really needed those resources,” he said.

Sweeping cuts began in January

When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began dismantling USAID shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term, it all but eliminated U.S. foreign aid spending, including decades of support to Indigenous peoples around the world.

USAID’s work with Indigenous peoples sought to address a variety of global issues affecting the U.S., according to former employees. Its economic development efforts created jobs in South America, easing the need for people to work in illicit drug markets and reducing the likelihood they would migrate to America seeking jobs and safety. And its support for the rights of Indigenous peoples to steward their own land offered opportunities to mitigate climate change.

That included Vásquez’s organization, which was about to receive a four-year, $2.5 million grant to continue fighting illicit activity that affects Indigenous people in the region. Vásquez said that grant was rescinded by the new administration.

In January, DOGE launched a sweeping effort empowered by Trump to fire government workers and cut trillions in government spending. USAID, which managed about $35 billion in appropriations in fiscal year 2024, was one of his prime targets. Critics say the aid programs are wasteful and promote a liberal agenda. Trump, Musk, and Republicans in Congress have accused the agency of advancing liberal social programs.

Read Next

Want climate solutions in Indigenous territories? Better get consent.

Maria Parazo Rose

“Foreign assistance done right can advance our national interests, protect our borders, and strengthen our partnerships with key allies,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement released in March. “Unfortunately, USAID strayed from its original mission long ago.  As a result, the gains were too few and the costs were too high.”

Musk last week announced his departure from the Trump administration, marking the end of a turbulent chapter that included thousands of layoffs and reams of litigation.

Former USAID employees said political pressure from the U.S. often kept foreign governments from violating some Indigenous rights. 

In the three months since thousands of foreign aid workers were fired and aid contracts canceled, the Peruvian government has moved quickly to strip Indigenous people of their land rights and to tighten controls on international organizations that document human rights abuses. It’s now a serious offense for a nonprofit to provide assistance to anyone working to bring lawsuits against the government.

The National Commission for Development and a Drug-free Lifestyle, the country’s agency that combats drug trafficking, did not respond to a request for comment.

“The impact was really, really strong, and we felt it really quickly when the Trump administration changed its stance about USAID,” Vásquez said.

The U.S. spends less than 1 percent of its budget on foreign assistance. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide in the Senate who works for Democratic Vermont Senator Peter Welch, called DOGE’s cuts to USAID a “mindless” setback to years of work.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

Agency reached Indigenous communities worldwide

USAID’s work reached Indigenous communities around the world. It sought to mitigate the effects of human rights abuses in South America, created programs in Africa to enable Indigenous people to manage their own communities, and led the global U.S. effort to fight hunger.

One of the most recent additions to USAID’s work was incorporating international concepts of Indigenous rights into policy.

Rieser, for instance, was responsible for crafting legislation that created an adviser within USAID to protect the rights and address the needs of Indigenous peoples. The adviser advocated for Indigenous rights in foreign assistance programs, including actions by the World Bank.

“That provided Indigenous people everywhere with a way to be heard here in Washington,” Rieser said. “That has now been silenced.”

That adviser position remains unfilled.

Vy Lam, USAID’s adviser on Indigenous peoples, who said he was fired in March as part of the DOGE downsizing, said the idea of Indigenous rights, and the mandate to recognize them in foreign operations, was new to USAID. But it was gaining momentum under President Joe Biden’s administration.

He said concepts such as free, prior, and informed consent — the right of Indigenous people to give or withhold approval for any action that would affect their lands or rights — were slowly being implemented in American foreign policy.

One of the ways that happened, Lam said, came in the form of U.S. political pressure on foreign governments or private industry to negotiate mutually beneficial agreements between Indigenous peoples and their governments.

For instance, if an American company wanted to build a hotel in an area that could affect an Indigenous community, the U.S. could push for the deal to require Indigenous approval, or at least consultation.

“We had that convening power, and that is the thing that I grieve the most,” Lam said.

U.S. foreign aid workers were also able to facilitate the reporting of some human rights violations, such as when a human rights or an environmental defender is jailed without charges, or Indigenous peoples are forced off their land for the establishment of a protected area.

Money supported attendance at international meetings

In some cases, USAID supported travel to the United Nations, where Indigenous leaders and advocates could receive training to navigate international bodies and document abuses.

Last year under the Biden administration, USAID awarded a five-year grant to support Indigenous LGBTQIA people to the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Indigenous People, an agency that offers financial support to Indigenous peoples to participate in the U.N.

Read Next

How the Trump administration is putting hundreds of sacred sites at risk

Maria Parazo Rose

At $350,000 per year, it was the largest grant from any member state in the U.N., fund secretary Morse Flores said. The money would have supported attendance at international bodies to report human rights abuses and testify on areas of foreign policy and development that negatively impact their lives and communities.

In February, the fund received notice that the grant would be terminated. The State Department does not plan to fulfill its pledge to fund the remaining four years of the grant to help Indigenous peoples travel to the U.N. and other world bodies.

In most cases, people receiving assistance to attend major meetings “are actual victims of human rights violations,” Flores said. “For someone who’s unable to come and speak up, I mean, it’s really just an injustice.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cuts to USAID severed longstanding American support for Indigenous peoples around the world on Jun 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Graham Lee Brewer, The Associated Press.

The new book Empire of AI by longtime technology reporter Karen Hao unveils the accruing political and economic power of AI companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment. “This is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms,” says Hao.

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

We’re living in a time of weaponized exhaustion. Democracy is being undermined, basic human rights are under attack, and billionaires are playing dictator, gleefully sentencing millions to death by slashing desperately needed aid. But history shows us again and again: when the forces of destruction rise, ordinary people must rise higher.

Dr. King built a movement in the face of death threats, betrayals, and overwhelming pressure to give up. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott to victory. Our Patreon community came together to discuss his powerful instructional memoir, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. We’re called to lead our own. Whether you’re boycotting companies that cave to fascism or marching on June 14 at the No Kings March, every action matters. Join a community, find your people, and check out the Gaslit Nation Action Guide at GaslitNationPod.com.

The arc of justice won’t bend itself. Our job is to build, baby, build. Build movements. Build communities. Build a world where everyone’s light can shine.

So what’s your blueprint? The world needs your light. 

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Sensitivity warning: The full conversation on Patreon includes themes related to religion and spirituality, including references to church, faith, and astrology. These topics may be sensitive or triggering for some members based on personal beliefs, experiences, or cultural backgrounds. Engage with care and take the space you need. Thank you!

Show Notes:

Full discussion of Stride Toward Freedom from Gaslit Nation's salon available on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/build-baby-build-130278922?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "What Is Your Life's Blueprint?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmtOGXreTOU&t=10s

No King’s March June 14 2025: https://indivisible.org/statements/indivisible-and-partners-announce-no-kings-nationwide-day-defiance-flag-day-during

Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html

Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/elon-musk-doge-usaid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

In addition to Musk, multiple top DOGE officials leaving Trump administration: Sources https://abcnews.go.com/US/addition-musk-multiple-top-doge-officials-leaving-trump/story?id=122321780

As Trumps Monetize Presidency, Profits Outstrip Protests: The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback and official investigations. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-money-plane-crypto.html

Women account for 28% of lawmakers in the 119th Congress – unchanged from the last Congress https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-account-for-28-of-lawmakers-in-the-119th-congress-unchanged-from-the-last-congress/

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gay-revolution-the-story-of-the-struggle-lillian-faderman/16646200?ean=9781451694123&next=t

Musk's SpaceX town in Texas warns residents they may lose right to 'continue using' their property https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/05/29/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-texas.html

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

We’re living in a time of weaponized exhaustion. Democracy is being undermined, basic human rights are under attack, and billionaires are playing dictator, gleefully sentencing millions to death by slashing desperately needed aid. But history shows us again and again: when the forces of destruction rise, ordinary people must rise higher.

Dr. King built a movement in the face of death threats, betrayals, and overwhelming pressure to give up. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott to victory. Our Patreon community came together to discuss his powerful instructional memoir, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. We’re called to lead our own. Whether you’re boycotting companies that cave to fascism or marching on June 14 at the No Kings March, every action matters. Join a community, find your people, and check out the Gaslit Nation Action Guide at GaslitNationPod.com.

The arc of justice won’t bend itself. Our job is to build, baby, build. Build movements. Build communities. Build a world where everyone’s light can shine.

So what’s your blueprint? The world needs your light. 

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Sensitivity warning: The full conversation on Patreon includes themes related to religion and spirituality, including references to church, faith, and astrology. These topics may be sensitive or triggering for some members based on personal beliefs, experiences, or cultural backgrounds. Engage with care and take the space you need. Thank you!

Show Notes:

Full discussion of Stride Toward Freedom from Gaslit Nation's salon available on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/build-baby-build-130278922?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "What Is Your Life's Blueprint?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmtOGXreTOU&t=10s

No King’s March June 14 2025: https://indivisible.org/statements/indivisible-and-partners-announce-no-kings-nationwide-day-defiance-flag-day-during

Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html

Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/elon-musk-doge-usaid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

In addition to Musk, multiple top DOGE officials leaving Trump administration: Sources https://abcnews.go.com/US/addition-musk-multiple-top-doge-officials-leaving-trump/story?id=122321780

As Trumps Monetize Presidency, Profits Outstrip Protests: The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback and official investigations. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-money-plane-crypto.html

Women account for 28% of lawmakers in the 119th Congress – unchanged from the last Congress https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-account-for-28-of-lawmakers-in-the-119th-congress-unchanged-from-the-last-congress/

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gay-revolution-the-story-of-the-struggle-lillian-faderman/16646200?ean=9781451694123&next=t

Musk's SpaceX town in Texas warns residents they may lose right to 'continue using' their property https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/05/29/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-texas.html

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

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Andersson.

The fasters are demanding:

1) Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority, and

2) No more U.S. weapons to Israel.

Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are present from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Many others are fasting around the U.S. and beyond for as many days as they can. The fast is organized by Veterans For Peace along with over 40 co-sponsoring organizations.

Remarkably, over 600 people have registered to join the fast. Friends of Sabeel, NA, is maintaining the list of fasters.

Who will stop the genocide in Palestine, if not us? That is the question that the fasters and many others are asking. The U.S. government is shamelessly complicit in Israel’s genocide, and to a lesser extent, the same is true for the European governments.  The silence and inaction of most Middle Eastern countries is resounding. Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, the only countries to come to Palestine’s aid, have been bombed by Israel and the U.S., with the threat of more to come. Syria, another country that stood with Palestine, has been “regime changed” and handed over to former al-Qaeda/ISIS extremists.

On the positive side, some governments are making their voices heard. South Africa and Nicaragua have taken Israel and Germany, respectively, to the International Court of Justice – Israel for its genocide, and Germany for providing weapons to Israel.  And millions of regular people around the globe have protested loudly and continue to do so.

Here in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has provided crucial leadership, pushing back against the phony charges of “anti-semitism” that are thrown at the student protesters whose courageous resistance has spoken for so many.  University administrators have been all too quick to crack down on the students, violating their right to freedom of speech, but even these universities have come under attack from the repressive, anti-democratic Trump administration.

Peace-loving people are frustrated and angry. Some are worried they will be detained or deported. And many of us are suffering from Moral Injury, concerned about our own complicity. How are we supposed to act as we watch U.S. bombs obliterate Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, churches, and universities?  What are we supposed to do when we see Palestinian children being starved to death, systematically and live-streamed?

Because our movement is nonviolent, we do not want to follow the example of the young man who shot and killed two employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. However, we understand his frustration and the driving force behind his forceful action. We take courage from the supreme sacrifice of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy, asking, “What would you do?”

Student protesters at several universities around the country have initiated “hunger strikes,” a protest tactic often considered a last resort. Now they have been joined by military veterans.

“Watching hundreds of people maimed, burned, and killed every day just tears at my insides,” said Mike Ferner, former Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and one of the fasters.  “Too much like when I nursed hundreds of wounded from our war in Vietnam,” said the former Navy corpsman. “This madness will only stop when enough Americans demand it stops.”

Rev. Addie Domske, National Field Organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), said, “This month I celebrated my third Mother’s Day with a renewed commitment to parent my kid toward a free Palestine. As a mother, I am responsible for feeding my child. I also believe, as a mother, I must be responsive when other children are starving.

Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, also in NY for the fast, said, “Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, at age 81, recently fasted for forty days, saying ‘As the children of Gaza are hungry and injured with bombs by official Israeli policy, I have decided that I, too, must go hungry with them, as I in good conscience can do no other.’ Now, Israel intensifies its efforts to eradicate Gaza through bombing, forcible displacement, and siege. We must follow Mairead’s lead, hungering acutely for an end to all weapon shipments to Israel. We must ask, ‘who are the criminals?’ as war crimes multiply and political leaders fail to stop them.”

Another faster is Joy Metzler: 23, Cocoa, FL., a 2023 graduate of the Air Force Academy who became a Conscientious Objector and left the Air Force, citing US aggression in the Middle East and the continued ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine. Joy is now a member of Veterans For Peace and a co-founder of Servicemembers For Ceasefire.

“I am watching as our government unconditionally supports the very violations of international law that the Air Force trained me to recognize,” said Joy Metzler. “I was trained to uphold the values of justice, and that is why I am speaking out and condemning our government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

I spoke with VFP leader Mike Ferner on Day 7 of his Fast. The NYPD had just told him and the other fasters that they could no longer sit down in front of the US Mission to the UN on the little stools they had brought. But Mike Ferner was not complaining. He said:

“We go home every night to a safe bed, and we can drink clean water. We are not watching our children starve to death before us. Our sacrifice is a small one. We are taking a stand for humanity, and we encourage others to do what they can.  Demand full humanitarian relief in Gaza under UN authority, and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. This is how we can stop the genocide.”

More information about how you can participate or support the fasters is available at
Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza.

To arrange interviews with the fasters, contact Mike Ferner at 314-940-2316.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gerry Condon.

Once temples of learning where new generations of students sought to advance their futures, Gaza’s universities have all been destroyed by Israel’s genocidal annihilation of the Gaza Strip, and many students and faculty have been killed. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN speaks with displaced Palestinian students and parents about the systematic destruction of life and all institutions of learning in Gaza, and about their reactions to Palestine solidarity protests on campuses in the West and around the world.

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

CHANTINGS: 

Free free Palestine! 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

I saw the protests at Columbia University. There were protests in solidarity with Gaza. The police arrested more than 100 students. They were in solidarity with the students of Gaza. They arrested many teachers and students. There was also a university in Atlanta where the head of the philosophy department was arrested. The police used tear gas and rubber bullets to suppress these protests and demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza. 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

Of course, when we see all this, we feel a sense of pride and gratitude. We want to thank them for standing with us. We thank the free people of the world—professors and students—for standing with us. Who stood with the students of Gaza, despite the repression, despite the arrests they stood with us, and this has helped us a lot. 

I am Haya Adil Agha, 21 years old, a fourth-year student at the Islamic University in Gaza. The Department of Science and Technology, specializing in smart technologies. The technology club was like a second home to us. There was a club president, we had club members, My classmates and I used to spend most of our time at the university. We had different groups and organized events. We would come up with innovations and new ideas for students. I used to spend most of my time at university with friends. We would discuss projects, questions and assignments and study together. If the professors were available you could go and ask them questions. So I used to spend all my time at University and they were the best years of my life —the last two years before the war. Exactly three days before the war—two weeks into the first semester. My professor requested that I present on a subject. So I prepared a PowerPoint presentation and handed out a summary to the students. I got up and began presenting. I had no idea that this would be my last presentation at university. Three days later, the war began. It destroyed our dreams, destroyed our future, destroyed our aspirations. All our memories now have no meaning. The place is gone and nothing is left. 

UM MOHAMED AWADH: 

Our dreams and everything else we ever wanted was destroyed with our homes. Even our dreams were destroyed. Everything in our life was destroyed. It used to be a really good area. It used to be a place for the youth to study and pursue their dreams. Look at the extent of the destruction. I mean it’s just rubble. Even learning has been banned here. We’ve started to dream about the simplest of things. Just to eat. The dreams of our children have become as basic as filling a bottle of water. They dream of reaching a soup kitchen. These are simple things. They have been robbed of their right to education. Their right to healthcare. They have been robbed of a lot.

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

I lost contact with some of my friends because they were killed at the beginning of the war. Of course, this impacts me because every day, you hear that a classmate was killed, that a professor at your university was killed. This has a profound impact on us as students. Many professors were killed, too. I can’t list them all. And I lost contact with many others because it was the university that used to bring us together. The war has driven us apart, so I couldn’t stay in touch with them. We were constantly displaced, moving from place to place. There was no internet and no electricity. I was forced to take my laptop outside to charge it. This was a big risk because, as an IT student, my most important tool is my laptop. As well as this, there was no internet. I had to travel far to get to the closest spot with internet. to be able to download lectures and slides to be able to study. I came back to the university after seeing it from afar. I had planned to visit briefly and then leave. When I saw it, I got depressed. I had seen it in pictures, but I wasn’t expecting this level of destruction. When I first arrived, I was so upset and angry. Everywhere I looked, I remembered things: This is the building where I used to sit; this is the corner where my friends and I used to hang. This is the building where a certain professor used to be. We would always go to ask him questions, and he would respond. All of the memories came back—so it affected me really deeply. My university—the place where I used to dream, where I spent two years of my life, the best two years of my life—was gone. I had been counting down the years until graduation. And just like that, it disappeared in the blink of an eye. In one day, the university was gone without a trace. 

HANI ABDURAHIM MOHAMED AWADH: 

The suffering in our lives—lack of water, food, and drink—is unbearable. You can see, the children, they have been robbed of everything. In the whole of the Gaza strip, from one end to the other, there is no safe place. Here used to be students and a university, all the people of Gaza used to study here. Now: it’s become ruins. All of it is just ruins. There’s nothing to be happy about. No reason to be happy. 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

People have been forced to burn books. Firstly, there’s no gas—the occupation has stopped gas from entering Gaza. But people still have to fulfill their daily needs. There’s no gas, but people still need to cook and heat water. And on top of that, people have lost their source of income. So people can’t afford to buy wood or paper. so in the end they have been forced to burn the university library books. Of course they have been forced to do this. You have to understand people’s circumstances. 

ALAA FARES AL BIS: 

I have been displaced about 18 times. We left under fire, under air strikes. I mean, we couldn’t take anything with us—we left running for our lives. With ourselves and our children. There’s no food, no drink, no water, no proper sleep, no proper shelter. We are living amidst rubble. We ask the whole world to have mercy on us and to bring a ceasefire in Gaza. 

CHANTINGS:

Free free Palestine!

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt, Ruwaida Amer and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

Eighty years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War, the threat of nuclear fallout remains.

Last Monday, the UN Human Rights Council issued a formal communication to the Japanese government regarding serious concerns raised by Pacific communities about the dumping of 1.3 million metric tonnes of treated Fukushima nuclear wastewater into the ocean over 30 years.

The council warned that the release could pose major environmental and human rights risks.

• WATCH: Te Aniwaniwa Paterson’s video report

Te Ao Māori News spoke with Mari Inoue, a NYC-based lawyer originally from Japan and co-founder of the volunteer-led group The Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World.

Recently, at the UN, they called for global awareness, not only about atomic bomb victims but also of the Fukushima wastewater release, and nuclear energy’s links to environmental destruction and human rights abuses.

Formed a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the group takes its name from the original Manhattan Project — the secret Second World War  US military programme that raced to develop the first atomic bomb before Nazi Germany.

A pivotal moment in that project was the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico — the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. One month later, nuclear weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people.

Seeking recognition and justice
Although 80 years have passed, victims of these events continue to seek recognition and justice. The disarmament group hopes for stronger global unity around the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and more support for victims of nuclear exposure.

The anti-nuclear activists supported the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Their advocacy took place during the third and final preparatory committee for the 2026 NPT review conference, where a consensus report with recommendations from past sessions will be presented.

Inoue’s group called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to declare Japan’s dumping policy unsafe, and believes Japan and its G7 and EU allies should be condemned for supporting it.

Nuclear energy for the green transition?
Amid calls to move away from fossil fuels, some argue that nuclear power could supply the zero-emission energy needed to combat climate change.

Inoue rejects this, saying that despite not emitting greenhouse gases like fossil fuels, nuclear energy still harms the environment.

She said there was environmental harm at all processes in the nuclear supply chain.

Beginning with uranium mining, predominantly contaminating indigenous lands and water sources, with studies showing those communities face increased cancer rates, sickness, and infant mortality. And other studies have shown increased health issues for residents near nuclear reactors.

“Nuclear energy is not peaceful and it‘s not a solution to the climate crisis,” Inoue stressed. “Nuclear energy cannot function without exploiting peoples, their lands, and their resources.”

She also pointed out thermal pollution, where water heated during the nuclear plant cooling process is discharged into waterways, contributing to rising ocean temperatures.

Inoue added, “During the regular operation, [nuclear power plants] release radioactive isotopes into the environment — for example tritium.”

She referenced nuclear expert Dr Arjun Makhijani, who has studied the dangers of tritium in how it crosses the placenta, impacting embryos and foetuses with risks of birth defects, miscarriages, and other problems.

Increased tensions and world forum uniting global voices
When asked about the AUKUS security pact, Inoue expressed concern that it would worsen tensions in the Pacific. She criticised the use of a loophole that allowed nuclear-powered submarines in a nuclear-weapon-free zone, even though the nuclear fuel could still be repurposed for weapons.

In October, Inoue will co-organise the World Nuclear Victims Forum in Hiroshima, with 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nihon Hidankyo as one of the promoting organisations.

The forum will feature people from Indigenous communities impacted by nuclear testing in the US and the Marshall Islands, uranium mining in Africa, and fisheries affected by nuclear pollution.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

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

Eighty years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War, the threat of nuclear fallout remains.

Last Monday, the UN Human Rights Council issued a formal communication to the Japanese government regarding serious concerns raised by Pacific communities about the dumping of 1.3 million metric tonnes of treated Fukushima nuclear wastewater into the ocean over 30 years.

The council warned that the release could pose major environmental and human rights risks.

• WATCH: Te Aniwaniwa Paterson’s video report

Te Ao Māori News spoke with Mari Inoue, a NYC-based lawyer originally from Japan and co-founder of the volunteer-led group The Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World.

Recently, at the UN, they called for global awareness, not only about atomic bomb victims but also of the Fukushima wastewater release, and nuclear energy’s links to environmental destruction and human rights abuses.

Formed a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the group takes its name from the original Manhattan Project — the secret Second World War  US military programme that raced to develop the first atomic bomb before Nazi Germany.

A pivotal moment in that project was the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico — the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. One month later, nuclear weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people.

Seeking recognition and justice
Although 80 years have passed, victims of these events continue to seek recognition and justice. The disarmament group hopes for stronger global unity around the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and more support for victims of nuclear exposure.

The anti-nuclear activists supported the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Their advocacy took place during the third and final preparatory committee for the 2026 NPT review conference, where a consensus report with recommendations from past sessions will be presented.

Inoue’s group called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to declare Japan’s dumping policy unsafe, and believes Japan and its G7 and EU allies should be condemned for supporting it.

Nuclear energy for the green transition?
Amid calls to move away from fossil fuels, some argue that nuclear power could supply the zero-emission energy needed to combat climate change.

Inoue rejects this, saying that despite not emitting greenhouse gases like fossil fuels, nuclear energy still harms the environment.

She said there was environmental harm at all processes in the nuclear supply chain.

Beginning with uranium mining, predominantly contaminating indigenous lands and water sources, with studies showing those communities face increased cancer rates, sickness, and infant mortality. And other studies have shown increased health issues for residents near nuclear reactors.

“Nuclear energy is not peaceful and it‘s not a solution to the climate crisis,” Inoue stressed. “Nuclear energy cannot function without exploiting peoples, their lands, and their resources.”

She also pointed out thermal pollution, where water heated during the nuclear plant cooling process is discharged into waterways, contributing to rising ocean temperatures.

Inoue added, “During the regular operation, [nuclear power plants] release radioactive isotopes into the environment — for example tritium.”

She referenced nuclear expert Dr Arjun Makhijani, who has studied the dangers of tritium in how it crosses the placenta, impacting embryos and foetuses with risks of birth defects, miscarriages, and other problems.

Increased tensions and world forum uniting global voices
When asked about the AUKUS security pact, Inoue expressed concern that it would worsen tensions in the Pacific. She criticised the use of a loophole that allowed nuclear-powered submarines in a nuclear-weapon-free zone, even though the nuclear fuel could still be repurposed for weapons.

In October, Inoue will co-organise the World Nuclear Victims Forum in Hiroshima, with 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nihon Hidankyo as one of the promoting organisations.

The forum will feature people from Indigenous communities impacted by nuclear testing in the US and the Marshall Islands, uranium mining in Africa, and fisheries affected by nuclear pollution.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

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

Eighty years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War, the threat of nuclear fallout remains.

Last Monday, the UN Human Rights Council issued a formal communication to the Japanese government regarding serious concerns raised by Pacific communities about the dumping of 1.3 million metric tonnes of treated Fukushima nuclear wastewater into the ocean over 30 years.

The council warned that the release could pose major environmental and human rights risks.

• WATCH: Te Aniwaniwa Paterson’s video report

Te Ao Māori News spoke with Mari Inoue, a NYC-based lawyer originally from Japan and co-founder of the volunteer-led group The Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World.

Recently, at the UN, they called for global awareness, not only about atomic bomb victims but also of the Fukushima wastewater release, and nuclear energy’s links to environmental destruction and human rights abuses.

Formed a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the group takes its name from the original Manhattan Project — the secret Second World War  US military programme that raced to develop the first atomic bomb before Nazi Germany.

A pivotal moment in that project was the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico — the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. One month later, nuclear weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people.

Seeking recognition and justice
Although 80 years have passed, victims of these events continue to seek recognition and justice. The disarmament group hopes for stronger global unity around the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and more support for victims of nuclear exposure.

The anti-nuclear activists supported the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Their advocacy took place during the third and final preparatory committee for the 2026 NPT review conference, where a consensus report with recommendations from past sessions will be presented.

Inoue’s group called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to declare Japan’s dumping policy unsafe, and believes Japan and its G7 and EU allies should be condemned for supporting it.

Nuclear energy for the green transition?
Amid calls to move away from fossil fuels, some argue that nuclear power could supply the zero-emission energy needed to combat climate change.

Inoue rejects this, saying that despite not emitting greenhouse gases like fossil fuels, nuclear energy still harms the environment.

She said there was environmental harm at all processes in the nuclear supply chain.

Beginning with uranium mining, predominantly contaminating indigenous lands and water sources, with studies showing those communities face increased cancer rates, sickness, and infant mortality. And other studies have shown increased health issues for residents near nuclear reactors.

“Nuclear energy is not peaceful and it‘s not a solution to the climate crisis,” Inoue stressed. “Nuclear energy cannot function without exploiting peoples, their lands, and their resources.”

She also pointed out thermal pollution, where water heated during the nuclear plant cooling process is discharged into waterways, contributing to rising ocean temperatures.

Inoue added, “During the regular operation, [nuclear power plants] release radioactive isotopes into the environment — for example tritium.”

She referenced nuclear expert Dr Arjun Makhijani, who has studied the dangers of tritium in how it crosses the placenta, impacting embryos and foetuses with risks of birth defects, miscarriages, and other problems.

Increased tensions and world forum uniting global voices
When asked about the AUKUS security pact, Inoue expressed concern that it would worsen tensions in the Pacific. She criticised the use of a loophole that allowed nuclear-powered submarines in a nuclear-weapon-free zone, even though the nuclear fuel could still be repurposed for weapons.

In October, Inoue will co-organise the World Nuclear Victims Forum in Hiroshima, with 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nihon Hidankyo as one of the promoting organisations.

The forum will feature people from Indigenous communities impacted by nuclear testing in the US and the Marshall Islands, uranium mining in Africa, and fisheries affected by nuclear pollution.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

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

Alice Rothchild’s path to becoming an anti-Zionist Jew took many years, many hard conversations, and required a lot of critical self-reflection. But she is part of a growing, powerful chorus of Jewish voices around the world speaking out against Israel’s Occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and she is urging others to join that chorus. “The time is long overdue for liberal Zionists to find the courage to take a long hard look at their uncritical support for the actions of the Israeli state as it becomes increasingly indefensible and destabilizing, a pariah state that has lost its claim to be a so-called democracy (however flawed) that is endangering Jews in the country and abroad as well as Palestinians everywhere,” Rothchild writes in Common Dreams. In the latest installment of The Marc Steiner Show’s ongoing series “Not in Our Name,” Marc speaks with Rothchild about her path to anti-Zionism, the endgame of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and the need to liberate Jewish identity from Zionist state of Israel.

Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker with an interest in human rights and social justice. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years and served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of numerous books, including: Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience; Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine; Old Enough to Know, a 2024 Arab American Book Award winner; and Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician. Rothchild is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council and a mentor-liaison for We Are Not Numbers.

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And today we’re going to talk with Dr. Alice Rothchild. She’s a physician and author of filmmaker, an activist for the rights of Palestinians. She was an OB GYN for almost 40 years and served as assistant professor of Obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She directed this incredibly amazing documentary called Voices Across the Divide. It’s about the struggles in Israel Palestine, and her books include a young adult novel finding Melody Sullivan, old enough to know broken promises, broken dreams, stories of Jewish and Palestinian trauma and resilience on the brink about her experiences in Gaza and the West Bank, and most recently inspired and outraged the making of a feminist physician. And Alice, welcome. It’s good to have you with us here on the Marc Steiner Show and our name. It’s really great to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Alice Rothchild:

Well, Marc, it’s really great to be here.

Marc Steiner:

So let’s take a step backwards a bit. I’m always fascinated by the journey people take, growing up Jewish and then having this, it’s not to say a moment, but having a series of things happen that shift feeling inside. I can remember in the late sixties trying to volunteer for the Israeli army in 67 and then meeting Palestinians and left winged Israelis and things began to shift, I mean, dramatically shift and it was hard and painful. But tell us about your own story there.

Alice Rothchild:

Okay, so I am a second generation from Eastern European Jews that came over and lived in Brooklyn and worked in sweatshops in that whole era. So I grew up in a small New England town called Sharon, Massachusetts. My family went to a conservative temple. My parents were not orthodox like their parents, but moving outside of that, but not far enough for me. So I went to Hebrew school three days a week. I had a bat mitzvah. I went to Israel with my family when I was 14. It was like this magical trip. I have my diary, so I actually know how I felt

And I had, despite the fact that I had very liberal parents who were supporting the civil rights movement and all that kind of stuff, we actually had very racist attitudes towards Arabs. And I had no idea that we were racist towards Arabs. And so I was going along on that journey. And then I’m also a child of the sixties. So in college I got to be acquainted with political movements and fighting the Vietnam War, and then went to medical school and got more radicalized when I hit up against all the sexism and racism in the healthcare system. And so I was moving left, but I didn’t have the energy and insight to know what to do with my love of Israel. I was a big fan of Israeli dancing, that kind of thing. And so this continued, and then I was an obstetrician gynecologist, so I was a little busy and I had two children and all that was going on. And then in 1997 as a member of what was then called Workman’s Circle, that’s now called Workers Circle, which was a secular Jewish group. It was national, a hundred years old, was originally for immigrants, founded by people from the bun. Complicated but interesting. And we had created a school there for our kids so they would have a sense of Jewish identity but not have God and religion. So it was a complicated thing we were doing. And so we did these secular holidays. So after the Yom Kipper holiday, we were sitting by Jamaica Pond throwing in bread for the ducks and to get rid of whatever we were getting rid of. And we realized we needed to have a political focus for the year, and it was going to be the Israel 50th anniversary, and there was going to be a massive celebration in Boston with Israeli bands and face painting and fireworks. And we thought, well, we have, we’ll submit a suggestion to the Jewish Community Relations Council about having a peace forum, and they’ll say no, and then we’ll have a protest. And that was the total extent of our knowledge. So we put together this thing, and much to their credit, they said yes. But then we were stuck because we didn’t know anything. So we immediately went into high gear and started inviting Palestinians from the Boston area as well as lefty Israelis to come and just talk with us. And we had a very rapid education. And as I learned more and more, all the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. I knew about colonialism and imperialism, I knew those concepts, but I had never applied it to Israel. So we actually pulled this off. 200 people came, Barney Frank was the speaker. I mean, it was just an amazing empowering experience. We had a children’s section with kids doing the flags for both

Countries, and we were so excited. We thought we need to have a grassroots organization to learn more and to teach our community. So we did that and we started having events and with the public library and an adult education and that kind of stuff. And within a couple of years, we were totally blacklisted. And so we were kind of frustrated and we thought, well, a bunch of us are doctors. Maybe we could approach this through health and human rights. So we started organizing health and human rights delegations to the region, first one mine in 2003. And so I went almost annually until Covid originally. There were about 15 years of doing this delegation. I went on a whole bunch of other delegations. My commitment, my understanding, my experience really deepened. I’ve been to Gaza four times. I was in Gaza in August of 2023. So siege, occupation, racism, Islamophobia are not theoretical concepts for me. And as we went through this journey, we really started struggling with the whole question of Zionism because we started out as nice two-state people, which was a very radical idea at the time

Marc Steiner:

It was.

Alice Rothchild:

And then I gradually began to understand that Zionism as a political ideology is actually based in British colonialism and imperialism concepts. And also that Zionism, the privileging of Jews over other folks in historic Palestine requires harm to Palestinians. And I’m into mutual liberation. And so Jewish supremacy didn’t kind of fit with that ideology. So really, I gradually became an anti Zionist. I began to understand the power of the boycott, divestment, sanction movement. All those things fell into place and it’s become an increasing commitment for me. And so I’ve always, my mother was a writer, and I always would never be a writer. So of course, I wrote a book in two, let’s see, was it 2013, broken Promises, broken Dreams, which really gave me a taste of the power of writing about my experiences. And I figured out that a lot of people couldn’t handle politics, but they could handle, I went here and I talked to this person, and guess what? I learned sort of the personal. And that was a way to get under people’s defenses. So that led to more books and a documentary film and a greater commitment to working on these issues.

Marc Steiner:

One of the things I’ve wrestled with a lot, and I’ve talked to some other people about this as well, is how the oppress can become the oppressor,

Alice Rothchild:

Right? It’s painful.

Marc Steiner:

It is painful. I mean, you grow up knowing that there’s a whole body of people who do not like you and hate you because you’re a Jew. And I experienced that a lot when I was young. But then what we in turn have done to the Palestinians, and I always use the word we because I can’t separate myself from it.

Alice Rothchild:

These are our people, right?

Marc Steiner:

Right. It’s my cousins, he’s my family. They’re there, em Jerusalem, they’re there. So the question, I mean, when you wrestle with this, and I know you’ve been wrestling with this a lot over your life, is how does that happen? How do we as a people who were oppressed, who identified, but where 70% of all the white civil rights workers in the Southwest were Jews that we’ve been fighting for human rights across the globe and against our own oppression. How do the oppress become the oppressor?

Alice Rothchild:

That’s like one of the core questions. So I think that first of all, Jews as a sort of community have psychopathology that we have not seriously dealt with around the issue of trauma and the Nazi Holocaust. And what happened was that this traumatic experience in our community after years of antisemitism has became kind of almost a religion. It became, “We are the supreme victims of the world, and our victimization gives us the right to do anything in order to survive.” And you see that happening, particularly in Israel where originally the Holocaust survivors were looked down upon. They were the weak need survivors. Who knows what they did, who knows how they cooperated, all sorts of horrific things. They did not do well in Israel, and they were not well funded and taken care of. So Israel was very into creating the new Jew, the muscular bronze tanned fighter, Jew and Holocaust survivors didn’t fit with that. But then it became useful to the Israeli propaganda machine to embrace the Holocaust as the reason why we can do whatever we want to do. And I think that’s what we’re seeing now, and it’s a real abuse of Holocaust memory. And people have written endless books and papers on this, but

I think it is a pathology in us as a community and something that until we work it out, we’re going to keep doing horrific things to people. And it’s almost like the abusive parent abuses the child. I mean, it’s all that kind of stuff, but it’s also sort of an othering. So everybody else is out to get us. Everybody else is demonizing us, and we are not responsible for what we’re doing to provoke that. And that’s a huge problem within the Jewish community. And more mainstream Jews don’t want to hear that because I grew up, the Jews are the good people. We are the people we’re chosen. My mother didn’t think we were religiously chosen, but we’re chosen to make the world a better place. So if you buy that and then we go do something, it really is not making the world a better place. It’s very hard to square that. And so that’s the struggle that’s going on. I think in one of the many struggles going on in the Jewish community, both in Israel and here and all over the world,

Marc Steiner:

I’ve been really shocked and happy to see the number of Jews who coming out to say no to what’s happening in Gaza. The demonstration has been huge and mostly Jewish. It’s been here in the city in New York, Baltimore, around, there’s a shift taking place. This internal battle is taking place. Increasingly, this means that Israel becomes a pariah over what’s happening in Gaza.

Alice Rothchild:

The other thing I’ve seen over the decades is that originally when I started doing this work, there were very few Palestinians out in the open,

And I think particularly Palestinians in the United States were mostly people who came here. They were anxious about being accepted in the United States. They were worried about being targeted or deported, and they kept their heads down. Their kids and their grandchildren aren’t doing that. They are out there on the front lines. And so what a lot of young Jews are doing is standing in solidarity with Palestinians and understanding that this is actually a Palestinian led liberation movement, and we need to embrace it as a liberation movement also for ourselves because we’re all trapped in the ways of our parents and our grandparents

Marc Steiner:

As we see all this unfolding around us. One of the things you wrote about I found really interesting that’s not getting a lot of press, is the number of people who wrote about, who have stopped serving in the Israeli army who refuse to go to Gaza. I’ve talked a bit about that because I really think it’s not covered in the times. It’s not covered in major papers. Nobody’s really talking about a hundred thousand Israel Jews saying, no, we’re not going.

Alice Rothchild:

So I mean, this is an interesting development. I think we need to understand. I mean, there are obviously Israeli Jews who are aware of the genocide and Gaza and are horrified. Most Israeli Jews who are against the war, are against the war because they want the hostages back and they want their soldiers to stop dying. Israeli Jews tend not to be that sympathetic to the fact that they’re committing genocide. That’s not what the headlines are about. The headlines are about we want our hostages back. And that’s fine. I mean, if we could stop the war, that would be great, and if enough refusers refuse, that will be more pressure on the government. But I don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that after decades and decades of incredible assaults and occupation and harm to Palestinians, that Israeli Jews of a progressive nature are suddenly waking up to this, they’re much more aware of their own pain, which is losing their sons and not having their hostages back.

Marc Steiner:

So your perspective and your analysis is that the majority of these Israeli Jews are saying, no, I’m not serving. They’re more concerned about the hostages coming back home Absolutely. Than they are about taking Palestinian lives or

Alice Rothchild:

Absolutely. And it’s also, it’s not good for the Israeli economy to have all these young men in combat. They’re pulled from their jobs and their tech and industries are also leaving like tech industries are leaving. So I think that there’s a lot of economic things going on as well that Israelis object to. But I don’t delude myself into thinking that there’s sudden awareness and consciousness of the horrible harms to Palestinians. That’s not part of the deal as far as I can

Marc Steiner:

Tell. I think what you’re describing is really important because when people hear people refusing to serve, it’s like for me, it was like going back to Vietnam going, no, I’m not going. I’m not going. Yeah,

Alice Rothchild:

It’s not a Vietnam situation.

Marc Steiner:

So this is a very different kind of dynamic, but a dynamic that could lead to things.

Alice Rothchild:

And I mean, Netanyahu and his right wing henchmen are a segment of the population that doesn’t represent the secular liberal Tel Aviv Jews who don’t espouse his right wing politics. So there’s a huge crisis going on in Israel right now politically.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m really curious to see your thoughts and analysis about where this takes us. I mean, we have this right wing government here in the United States. Trump a little madman at the helm who doesn’t really care about Jews that much, but loves the idea of Israel doing what it’s doing.

Alice Rothchild:

If Trump really cared about Jews, he wouldn’t have forgiven all the crazies who attacked at the time of the election. Those people are fanatical. He wouldn’t get rid of gun control. I mean, he’s unleashing all these forces that are intensely antisemitic. So it’s not that he doesn’t care much about Jews, he does not care about Jews. He cares about Trump. Just to clarify that,

Marc Steiner:

An important clarification.

Alice Rothchild:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

In that and what we face here and the right wing government in Israel, I worry about several things. A, I worry about the future of the Palestinian people, what’s going to happen to them? We’re slaughtering people all through Gaza. I’m in touch with people in the West Bank more than I am in Gaza who are telling me these horrendous stories that are taking place. You have it also unleashes and antisemitic fervor that’s always bubbling below the surface. Not that antisemitism is our fault, but this is unleashing it. And the right is in control in many sectors of this country and across the globe. And I’m not a negative person by nature, but I’m looking at this and going, okay, so where do you think this takes us? Where does your organizing have to take place to turn this around?

Alice Rothchild:

So first of all, I don’t know where this takes us, but I am completely terrified early on in this war, I would say the goal of the Israeli government is to depopulate Gaza. And everybody go, oh, that’s too extreme. But the way it looks to me right now is that their goal is to completely devastate the Gaza Strip to push everybody south to starve people to death if they don’t kill them with bombs. And then at some point to open the gates and to have voluntary migration. And I think that’s the plan. And then the settlers will move in and they’ll clear everything up and they’ll get billions of dollars from US Jewish organizations. And it will continue the dispossession expulsion of Palestinians, which started way before 48. And then I think they’re going to do it in the West Bank. I mean, we talk about the gasification of the West Bank.

They’re bombing refugee camps. They’re displacing people. They’re killing people. I mean, they bombed hospitals. This is not new. This is like a continuation. And I really also am not shocked by this because if you look at the underlying goals of Zionism and Jewish supremacy, it is to get rid of the Palestinians as much as possible and to take as much land as possible. So in some ways, as horrible as this is, we are just having the fruition of all the dreams from founding the state and creating a state for Jews only. So I am completely terrified that that’s the direction we’re going in. And the United States in all of its mishegas is going to support this. I think that the Trump type people don’t like Jews, but they like strong governments. They like dictators and things like that. They hate Iran. They are Islamophobic. So here’s this little country that is doing the job for them.

And so it fits with this MAGA universe and the kind of things that they espouse. And it’s sort of ironic to me that it’s all being done in the name of protecting the Jews. It’s like, oh my God, because this is going to be really dangerous. And when it’s all done, said and done, people are going to blame the Jews. And we have seen this before. And so this is dangerous for Palestinians, and then it’s going to be dangerous for Jews, and it’s just a terrible, terrible idea. So in terms of trying to organize, I think I take a lot of hope from the organizing the Jewish Voice for Peace is doing, because it is the most rapidly growing Jewish organization in the country. It is anti-Zionist. It is pro boycott, divestment, sanction. It is big tent. Everybody’s invited. You don’t have to be a particular kind of person.

And they’re really being very thoughtful about the kinds of messaging that they give. And there’s a lot more visibility from Palestinians, which is really, really important because one of the things that helps people be less terrified and racist and all the things that people are is to meet a Palestinian and find out, oh, they’re human. How do you like that? They value education. They want to be doctors. Their children are growing up and are nice people. But that’s on the one-to-one basis really, really important. And then I think the other thing is that a lot of the catastrophes that have happened in the past were before social media. And because we have social media now for all of its bad things, it provides us with an unfiltered opportunity to hear the voices from the region. And that makes a real big difference because much of what Israeli military did for decades was just completely hidden unless you were looking for it from the public. And now it’s not hidden anymore. I work with, we Are Not Numbers, and we’re publishing two stories a day from young writers who are in Gaza writing about their experiences. So

It’s on social media, it’s on a website, it’s all out there. You just have to read it, which is very

Marc Steiner:

Different. What was the name of the group? Just

Alice Rothchild:

We Are Not Numbers.

Marc Steiner:

We Are Not Numbers.

Alice Rothchild:

You know that group?

Marc Steiner:

Yes, yes, yes. I didn’t hear. Yeah.

Alice Rothchild:

So I’m the mentor Liaison. So I’m the person who gets the writer’s essay after, goes through some stuff, and then finds a published English speaking writer and matches them, and then they work together on the essay. So there’s so much out there that wasn’t out there 20 years ago.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, that’s really critically important. I feel like in some ways, historically we’re at this very strange moment, but when I saw the picture of the Israeli soldier holding the a Palestinian kid who had a cast in his arm and the fear in the little boy’s eyes, and then I thought about that famous picture from the Warsaw ghetto of the Nazi and this little 12-year-old boy and the terror in his eyes.

Alice Rothchild:

It’s not subtle.

Marc Steiner:

It’s not, and it’s not subtle at all. And you look at that, and I think about in some ways, when I look at JVP, the struggle inside the Jewish world now, I think of the struggle in the early part of the 20th century between the Zionists and the Bunes between the revolutionary Jews who were Bunes and the Zionists, many whom were willing to sell out their own people to get what they wanted, right?

Alice Rothchild:

And there were the Buber Zionists who wanted to buy national state. I mean, Zionism was highly controversial basically until the 67 War when it was propagandized that this was an existential struggle. And so Jews just got in line, and I had this famous conversation that a friend of mine was having with one of the Jewish in Boston, one of the Jewish leaders, and she was saying, why do you have to be a Zionist to be a Jew? And he said, you don’t understand Israel is the religion. And I think that that’s really the turning point in 67 is when that became the test and you had to be a Zionist to be a good Jew. And that’s when more reformed Jews got on the wagon. It just was a major turning point.

Marc Steiner:

I think that’s true. I think that I’m curious as to your analysis about the shift you’re seeing inside the Jewish.

Alice Rothchild:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what we’re seeing now in the United States at least, is that Jews are traditionally progressive people. They raise their children to think about civil rights and equality and blah, blah, blah. And then the kids look at what’s going on in Israel and they go, I can’t buy that. So I think this generation is really questioning the things that their parents and grandparents just accepted as the Bible, basically. And the younger generations don’t have Holocaust memory, don’t have the upswing of the 67 War and blah, blah, blah. So it’s like a fresh batch, and they’re really having trouble standing with Israel. I mean, they’re certainly ones that do. But as a group, it’s a whole different ballgame. And the majority of people in the United States support an arms embargo against Israel. That’s like revolutionary. I mean, it hasn’t penetrated to the people who sell the arms, but that’s a major, major shift.

Marc Steiner:

So in all the years that I’m trying to figure out for myself as well, talking to other people in our generation where the hope lives

That this ends, and how you organize the story and where you take it, when I see the kind of growth inside the Jewish world of alternative synagogues, it’s see the growth, even though I’m not a religious person when I see that, look at that, or when you watch what JVP is going and the eruption saying, no, not in our name taking over. And then you see this right wing surge as well. I mean, we are on this, it seems to be a political precipice at the moment, and it takes voices organizing to really shift it. And I was just curious in your own work, I mean, we’ve written these books, a physician, an activist, where you see the optimism, where you see the fight going at this moment.

Alice Rothchild:

So first of all, it is very hard for me to remain optimistic, but I’m really trying. I’m not a naturally optimistic person. I always say I’m pessimistically optimistic.

Marc Steiner:

I understand.

Alice Rothchild:

And I also feel like particularly having become a part of the feminist movement, you take two steps forward, one step back, then you get knocked on the head, then you get up again. So I’m not like starry-eyed about this. I am incredibly impressed right now with the assault on universities and the pushback from university students and their professors. This very much reminds me of the Vietnam War

Because there is this massive assault, both not only on Palestine, but on DEI and all the things that you know, and more and more universities, their students are getting out in those encampments. They’re putting up their protests, they’re organizing in their communities, they’re doing alternative conferences, they’re doing fasting for Gaza. I mean, there’s all sorts of things that young people are doing. And that for me is the most hopeful place. It is also the most dangerous place because the pushback against them is very powerful, very well funded. I mean, we should know who all the donors universities are who are pulling all these strings. And the right wing has been planning for this for decades. And if the right wing wins, they’re going to destroy universities as we know it, and they’re going to destroy a generation of young people, researchers, thinkers, professors, educated people, and that will be catastrophic. So my hope is with the younger generation and what they’re doing now, but also I see a tremendous amount of support from older people as well. And also that it’s intersectional, which is a new thing. When we started, we were like, will anyone actually be interested in this besides Jews and Palestinians? How could

Will anyone come to our meetings? And now people understand this is much more than the actual topic. This is about the remnants of colonialism. This is about fighting racism. This is about police brutality, this is about the military industrial complex, all the big things that run the universe. This is what this is about, and this is the test case. And I think we have to be clear on that and clear on how big the struggle is because the opposition is very, very well organized and has been planning this for decades.

Marc Steiner:

Well, I think the work you’ve been doing, the books you’ve written and your film, which we’ll be linking to so people can actually watch it, which your film is amazing.

Alice Rothchild:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

We can spend an hour just talking about the film itself, which we may do, because I think it’s a powerful piece, and I want to thank you for your work and not stopping the fight and the struggle both in terms of Palestinian rights and for a better society here. And I really appreciate taking the time out. It’s been really a great conversation.

Alice Rothchild:

Well, it’s been a pleasure, mark. Thank you so much.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, I want to thank Dr. Alice Rothchild for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program and our audio editor, Alina Nelich, producer Rosette, for making it all happen behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me ats@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you to Dr. Alice Rothchild for joining us today and for the incredible work she does. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

We asked people in Gaza what their thoughts were on US President Donald Trump’s stated plans to “take over the Gaza Strip” and displace the Palestinian population there. This is what they told us…

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

Ahed Hisham Raffat Arif: 

Who is Trump? Who is this? Where did he appear from? This is a crazy, harmful person. We will not leave Gaza, even if it were the last moment of our lives. 

Donald Trump [CLIP]: 

The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a proper job with it. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, clear the rubble, and remove the destroyed buildings. We’ll level the area and initiate economic development that will provide unlimited jobs and housing for the people of the region.

Ibrahim Al Fayadh: 

Trump’s evacuation plans are nonsense. We will stay until the end. We are losing people daily, yet still we say: “Don’t despair, God is with us” and “be strong and it will end,” and we say to Trump: your words are empty, we in Gaza are steadfast and remain until the end. 

Abu Tha’ir: 

This plan is new and old. In 1948 they were working on the expulsion of all Palestine from the Gaza Strip and from Jaffa… and everyone knows this. But of course, they weren’t able to empty Gaza City entirely, or erase or remove Palestine. No one would accept this, because it is rejected by the whole world and by the people of Palestine in particular: we refuse it completely. When you pull out a tree by its roots, you kill it. You won’t benefit from it in the future. For a human, who is forced to leave his land, he is being sentenced to death. 

Mohamed El Kurdi: 

This is the land of our ancestors. We will remain as long as the thyme and olive trees grow, by the grace of God. 

Abu Tha’ir: 

To be present on the land in Palestine—this is your land—you are rooted here. It’s hard to leave it. Even under threat of death, with force. It’s hard. 

Mohamed El Kurdi: 

We reject any plan, whether it’s from Trump or Biden—many have tried! God willing, they will fail. They attempted plans with their generals and to evacuate areas, but they have all failed. 

Jamal Eid Qater:

We will not leave, because this land is ours. No one can buy or sell us. We are the people of this land. We will not allow anyone to buy or sell us. We won’t leave. Pharaoh himself could come—we won’t leave. 

Mohamed El Kurdi: 

What was destroyed will be rebuilt. We will rebuild it better, God willing. Abu Tha’ir: 

Some left to go to the South but others stayed under fire and death. This shows how strongly people cling to their land. To die and be buried in it is better than to be forced out. The whole world has heard and seen this reality. 

Ahed Hisham Raffat Arif: 

To us, Gaza is the best country—and the best city—in the world. Despite all the destruction and the blockade, look at Gaza. Gaza is my whole life. I will rebuild my home, my family, and every stone in Gaza. I will rebuild it. 

Ibrahim Al Fayadh: 

Gaza is my life. My blood. My veins, my breath, my soul. My eyes, my vision. Honourable Gaza. 

Abu Tha’ir: 

Gaza is the soul, the blood, the body, the breath. Without Gaza there is nothing. Mohamed El Kurdi: 

Gaza is the heart, is the soul. It’s the veins filled with blood. 

Jamal Eid Qater: 

Gaza means everything to me. It’s my mother, my father. She is the loving mother to us. Yes. We won’t leave her.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ruwaida Amer, Leo Erhadt, Belal Awad and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

In Danish here for Danish readers.

The development – or decline – of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken as a quality newspaper in the field of foreign policy pains me. Allow me a personal, somewhat nostalgic introduction. I wrote frequently for Politiken from 1971 to 1994. As a 20-year-old sociology student, I was naturally proud to be published in what was then a prestigious, liberal media outlet, which was initially shaped by Hørup’s anti-militarism and cultural radicalism.

In Denmark, there was a – albeit quite traditional but serious and multifaceted – discussion about the state of the world. There was actually quite a lot of room for different opinions, and it was natural that many opinions were expressed and met in the Danish media – creating the social debate that is essential for security, peace and democracy. There were debates on security policy around the country – in folk high schools, assembly halls, upper secondary schools and trade unions.

How I miss that Denmark, which is dead and gone today.

Back then, no one would dream of excluding/cancelling discussions about peace – nor did anyone suggest that Denmark should contribute to the militarisation of the world or participate in wars abroad – no, Denmark should first and foremost be able to defend itself against an attack or if, God forbid, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty should come into force. Denmark was called a ‘footnote nation;’ the principles were upheld that NATO membership was compatible with the country never accepting nuclear weapons, foreign bases, pre-positioning of equipment, weapons and ammunition on its soil, and that Denmark should not participate in NATO’s nuclear planning group.

Those were the days. There were politicians who could both read books and write books – readable ones at that.

And back then, long ago, Politiken was, in my view, the leading newspaper (along with Information, which, however, had less general influence) for common sense, diversity, broad social debate and room for both pro- and anti-military perspectives.

And peace – and futurology, including global perspectives, Club of Rome reports, which I reviewed, etc.

OK, things change over 50 years, of course. But Politiken’s current position on foreign and security policy is not a law of nature. Over time, the owners and editorial managers of the daily newspaper could have chosen to preserve at least some of the soul of what Politiken used to be.

But where does Politiken – which still confidently calls itself ‘the organ of the highest enlightenment since 1884’ – stand today?

For me, with the above background to compare (there are advantages to getting older…), it stands as one of the highest organs of propaganda about other countries and their – Western-determined – role as threats to the fine, pure, innocent Western world. Whether intentional or not, Politiken legitimises and promotes militarism infinitely more strongly than anti-militarism and peace.

Today, it can rightly be called PolitPravda.

My younger readers should know that Pravda was the organ of the Soviet Communist Party; Pravda means ‘the truth’ – and that wasn’t exactly what Pravda contained.

In the areas of foreign and security policy, today’s Politiken runs on what I call FOSI – Fake+Omission+Source Ignorance. The newspaper’s management clearly sees its role as blindly loyal support for the militarism of the American empire – NATO, interventions, bombings, regime change, hatred of Russia – although not necessarily for Trump’s policies or the grabbing of Greenland.

FOSI has been and continues to be practised in the coverage of Syria, Israel, Russia, Ukraine… Palestine. And China, which I discuss further down.

*****

I have just listened to the fifth episode of Politiken’s populist podcast series: Putin – The World’s Most Dangerous Man? The episode is alternately titled The Grand Plan and How He Is Creating a Generation of Ardent Nationalists. Listen here.

It is incomprehensibly trivialising, intellectually lazy and unprofessional, with a few facts and guesswork about, for example, Putin’s daily routines, spiced with the journalist’s personal opinions and ‘assessments,’ interrupted now and then by exclusively US-Western media Russophobic expert quotes, which are concocted into breakneck interpretations of the banal central thesis that Putin is power-mad with his Grand Plan for the re-establishment of the old Soviet empire.

No, dear reader, this is not political satire on Politiken’s humour page, ATS, or elsewhere. These are grown adults conveying this message without any form of analysis or arguments for or against the thesis, based solely on Western mainstream sources. It is blatant Russophobia, entirely in line with the relentless opinion-shaping efforts of the government, the military’ intelligence’ agency, FET, and other media outlets. It is opinion journalism of the worst kind and of no use whatsoever to anyone seeking qualified knowledge.

There are no theories or concepts, and therefore no rigour. It is tabloid drivel at the lowest level of information and limited in its understanding, in that Russia and Putin are not seen as part of the international system or as a partner in a very complex conflict with the cultural West, which all Soviet/Russian leaders since Gorbaechev, also Putin, has stated clearly that they feel their country belongs to. In this presentation, Russia is an isolated entity – only action and never reaction. It is about a Russia that is only itself and in no way navigates the challenges posed by, for example, NATO. At Politiken, Russia is a pariah that can be talked about – and disparaged – however one pleases.

This is the result of 110% groupthink, and there is only one possible attitude towards ourselves and towards Russia (and China). From my own experience, I know that it is impossible to get a response from today’s journalists if you point out that their portrayals are, for example, factually incorrect, biased and lacking in basic knowledge and fairness. Or if the top management has chosen a very specific systematic approach to reporting.

How many times have you seen that this or that country is engaging in dis/misinformation – and that we must protect ourselves against this sedition? We are to understand that it is only the others who do this; we in the West do not engage in such mis/dis behaviour. It is only Russia that threatens us – we cannot in any way be perceived as threatening in the eyes of Russia or China. We have good intentions, but they do not.

Coincidentally, this awful story about the CIA’s activities in China came out at the same time as Politiken’s series. You will not find that story in Politiken.

Thus, nothing is too low, simple or stupidly propagandistic. It would be demeaning to children to describe it as ‘sandbox level.’

This fifth podcast about the world’s most dangerous man is completely uninteresting if you want to know anything about Russia, Putin and international politics – including the invasion/war in Ukraine, which, in NATO agitprop style, is of course and quite foolishly called ‘full-scale,’ which is about the only thing (along with ‘unprovoked’) it cannot be described as. It is simply factual nonsense and should not have made it through quality control. When it does, it is because it is NATO speak, and therefore, there is no professional or ethical problem.

I wonder how far they can go – and how long it will take – before loyal readers of the highest organ of propaganda realise that they are being deceived? When will the Pravda Moment hit Politiken’s readers?

And if it is not deliberate deception, then it is simple ignorance and professional incompetence. A third – entirely hypothetical, of course – possibility is that senior editors at Politiken a little too often have lunch with people from the American embassy and say ‘No, thank you’ if they receive invitations from embassies that do not represent NATO and the EU.

*****

In keeping with the West’s incredible, rapid intellectual decline and impending fall, coupled with its support for armament and militarism, Politiken has also descended into pure propaganda when it comes to China. In an ‘analysis’ a few days ago, it claimed that China is hunting down critics all over the world. Read it here.

In another, the theme is that China has infiltrated the UN and distorts and lies about everything related to human rights. Read it here. These are pure smear articles by journalist John Hansen and the newspaper’s Asia correspondent Sebastian Stryhn Kjeldtoft – who is based in Taipei, Taiwan, and not in mainland China.

China has infiltrated the UN with an army of fake NGOs. Meet the gongos

This is yet another example of how the media sees it as its primary task to write only negatively about China. You hardly ever see anything positive about China and its impressive development over the past 40 years. The classic themes are Tibet, Hong Kong, the ‘genocide’ and ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is a dictator – and the system is a dictatorship because it is not a democracy in the Western sense – Chinese researchers, students and agents have stolen everything in the West, China’s military build-up is a threat to the Western world – and then, of course, Taiwan, which, according to Western media, is an independent state (or should be), but is constantly threatened by an invasion launched by Beijing.

On the other hand, you never hear about what the US and the rest of the West are doing vis-à-vis China – and it is not small stuff and is not done on small budgets. TFF and my staff have mapped out this entire media-based Cold War initiated by the West. Read the full report with extensive, concrete documentation here.

Both articles are based on material from an organisation that Politiken neither describes nor provides its readers with a link to, namely ‘the journalistic network ICIJ’ – as if readers already knew what ICIJ stands for, much like NATO or the EU. ICIJ’s website can be found here.

I visited this website on 6 May 2025 and found that of the 13 top articles, 11 are about China – and only about how terrible China is. Several focus on the well-worn story of how China persecutes all Uyghurs. In Politiken, the issue of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is presented by quoting Zumretay Arkin, vice-president of the World Uyghur Congress, ‘who is fighting for democracy and independence for the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in the Xinjiang region of western China.’ (My italics).

However, the whole thing is a little more complicated. A very small minority of Uyghurs want an independent East Turkestan and have been trying to achieve this goal for a couple of decades by carrying out around 1,200 terrorist attacks in and outside Xinjiang. The United States and US-backed terrorist movements support them, and the East Turkestan government-in-exile has been based in Washington for 20 years!

Many have been arrested and sentenced to prison or re-education camps in China – and it is certainly no fun to be there. But it is also no fun for China that the United States supports violent separatist movements in its largest province – and that some of these Uighur terrorists have been trained by al-Nusra and have been fighting in Syria for years with the aim of returning to Xinjiang and ‘liberating’ it – a province considerably larger than France and with extensive natural resources, through which China’s new Silk Road project, BRI, involving 140 countries runs.

But in Western media and political propaganda, the terrorist element of this is never mentioned; it is simply that China persecutes Muslims in general and Uighurs in particular. Because remember: this was said by Trump’s then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – a habitual liar and former CIA chief who has himself said that he is proud to have trained CIA agents to ‘lie, cheat and steal.’ On his last day at work, he left a ‘statement’ saying that what was happening in Xinjiang was genocide. Full stop. To date, the State Department has never backed this up with any form of documentation. But TFF has documented how this outright lie has come about, how it is part of the US media’s Cold War against China, and here you can read a report from Xinjiang, which I co-authored.

People who have no idea what social analysis or journalism is – but have a political agenda – have since promoted the lie, the fake and omission. Whether they know what they are doing or are simply ignorant, I will leave unsaid – but neither is particularly honourable. And the very same media and politicians are simultaneously concealing the actual Israeli/Zionist genocide and ensuring that it is not stopped. The US and its media allies are – once again – at the centre of moral decay.

Back to the ICIJ website. The ICIJ’s ‘Our team’ consists of 42 journalists; no less than 25 of them are listed as ‘United States,’ and it is indeed in Washington that the organisation has its headquarters. The chairwoman of the board, Rhona Murphy, has worked with a number of leading conservative American media outlets.

And who finances the ICIJ – which Politiken’s source-uncritical China smear campaign chooses not to reveal to its readers in the two articles? Well, as I thought – yes, I have a nasty mind: A long list of government organisations, foundations and funds in NATO countries, in the West in general – none outside. See the list here.

Three stand out: the EU, the US State Department and the usual suspect, NED – The National Endowment for Democracy, which is indisputably well known as a front organisation for the CIA. There is hardly a US regime change where NED has not pumped money into NGOs to carry out colour revolutions, etc. The organisation was created by Ronald Reagan, and a former NED director has stated that most people would not want to accept money directly from the CIA and that NED appears less controversial as an NGO.

As I write this article, Politiken publishes another smear article on 6 May and an editorial by Marcus Rubin – a law graduate, former US correspondent for Politiken and now feature editor and member of the editorial board – with the cultured, journalistically objective headline: “China’s oppression is both lawless and boundless. It makes for frightening reading about an extremely powerful dictatorial regime.”

A taste:

It makes for frightening reading about an extremely powerful dictatorial regime whose power is spreading both in Asia and throughout the rest of the world, and which will stop at nothing. The goal of the campaign of repression is to stifle any criticism of the regime in Beijing by persecuting, subjugating and destroying its critics – wherever they may be. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) acknowledges the problems and assesses that China is also ‘attempting to exercise control over Chinese people in Denmark to a large extent.

Not a single fact, not a single example, not a single piece of evidence. No documentation. It is as if Rubin asked an AI machine to ‘Write some shit about China.’

The third article in the “highest level of information” about China appeared on 28 April with this sober headline: “Eric compares his former workplace to the Gestapo.” And the introduction reads:

Chinese people who criticise the Communist Party are hunted down all over the world. Now one of the regime’s former manhunters, the spy “Eric”, tells his story in Politiken. For 15 years, he helped spy on and plan the kidnappings of dissidents, even though he secretly hated the Communists. Now Eric himself has become a victim.

Like the other articles, the story is accompanied by a tasteful illustration of this type and begins:

We meet “Eric” at dusk in an anonymous car in a secret location in Australia. He fumbles with the video camera, nervous that some detail in the background might reveal his location. He knows better than most what China’s hackers are capable of. Eric is convinced that his life is in danger. That is why Politiken does not publish his real name…