Bogotá, November 12, 2024—Peruvian judicial authorities must stop harassing journalist Gustavo Gorriti and the investigative news website he founded, IDL-Reporteros, and respect the right of reporters to maintain confidential sources, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.
In an October 25 resolution, Peru Supreme Court Judge Juan Carlos Checkley ordered the Attorney General’s office to compel IDL-Reporteros to turn over audio recordings that were part of its 2018 investigation into judicial corruption and to interrogate Gorriti, its editor-in-chief.
“It is appalling that the Peruvian judicial system is being used to prosecute IDL-Reporteros and Gustavo Gorriti for their work investigating issues of public interest,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in São Paulo. “CPJ insists that freedom of expression and the right to maintain confidential sources be respected.”
The resolution came in response to a request from César Hinostroza, a fugitive former Supreme Court judge who fled to Belgium. Hinostroza, whose recorded conversations with government officials formed part of IDL-Reporteros’ 2018 investigation, is under investigation for corruption and influence peddling.
Gorriti told CPJ that the aim of Checkley’s order is to get IDL-Reporteros to reveal the names of its sources from the 2018 investigation. “No matter what happens, we are not going to reveal our confidential sources,” he said via messaging app.
Adriana León, spokesperson for the Lima-based Institute for Press and Society, told CPJ that Peru’s constitution protects the rights of journalists to maintain the secrecy of confidential sources.
There was no response to CPJ’s calls to the Attorney General’s office.
A 1998 IPFA awardee, Gorriti is Peru’s most prominent investigative reporter. In 2009, he founded IDL-Reporteros, the journalism arm of the Legal Defense Institute, an independent organization dedicated to fighting corruption and improving justice in Peru.
Partly as a result of IDL-Reporteros’ scoops, dozens of Peruvian public officials, lawyers, judges, and business people are under investigation for criminal acts. But there has also been a fierce backlash against IDL-Reporteros and Gorriti, who has been targeted by right-wing protesters and government officials.
In July 2018, CPJ reported that police and prosecution officials went to IDL-Reporteros’ office to demand they hand over materials used in stories about government corruption, but left after they were unable to show a warrant.
In March 2024, a public prosecutor in Lima launched a bribery investigation of Gorriti for allegedly promoting the work of two public prosecutors in exchange for scoops about political corruption investigations. Gorriti has called that investigation “absurd.”
France is preparing for the deployment of its flagship Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier in the next four weeks, the French navy has announced, amid reports it may head to Asia-Pacific waters.
The navy said in a press release that the crew of the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle carried out a three-week training session on Oct. 4-25 in the Mediterranean in order to regain operational capability after a recent technical shutdown that lasted nearly four months.
The crew has now embarked on a final four-week logistical and operational preparation at the quayside before the next deployment of the Charles de Gaulle in a “constituted carrier battle group,” the navy said in the release without specifying where the carrier strike group would be heading to.
Before this announcement, however, the Naval News quoted a senior French officer as saying that the months-long deployment would take place in the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and “possibly the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean.”
The carrier strike group could make first, “historic” calls to Japan and the Philippines, the Paris-based publication said.
Apart from the Charles de Gaulle, the strike group may include several other warships, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, a logistics support ship and some support and assistance vessels. The air wing is set to include two E-2C Hawkeye AEW aircraft, 24 Rafale Marine jets and four helicopters.
About 3,000 sailors and naval aviators would take part in several exercises during the deployment, among which a multinational exercise would “focus on the theme of maritime security in the Indonesian straits,” Naval News said.
The Prairial surveillance frigate sailing in the Philippine Sea on Oct. 18, 2024.
China’s reaction
“This deployment is significant because it marks a major expansion of France’s presence in the Indo-Pacific,” said Benjamin Blandin, a network coordinator at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies.
“Since the announcement of France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy in 2019, the French military’s presence in the region has really grown and diversified,” Blandin told Radio Free Asia.
Last week, Taiwan’s ministry of defense said that a French naval vessel sailed through the Taiwan Strait from the south to the north. Notably, the Prairial (F731) – a Floreal-class frigate – was sailing on the west side of the median line closer to China, unlike U.S. and Canadian ships, which normally pass east of the median line closer to Taiwan.
Beijing did not immediately protest against the transit but on Nov. 4, the Communist Party-sanctioned Global Times published an article denouncing the possible deployment of the Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group in the Indo-Pacific.
The Chinese news outlet quoted analysts as saying that the deployment “is an attempt to pander to NATO’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific, which is detrimental to regional peace and stability.”
Zhang Junshe, a Chinese military expert, told the Global Times that despite being the only country outside the U.S. that possesses a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, France’s strength in this area was limited.
Zhang warned that “neither the countries nor the people of the Asia-Pacific region want external forces to build up their military presence in the region to sow discord and intensify regional tensions.”
French comeback
Paris has a long history of involvement in the region and after a period of relative inactivity, it seems it is making a strategic comeback.
France has several arms deals in the Asia-Pacific, with Indonesia, Singapore and most recently, a US$438-million aid project to provide 40 patrol vessels and logistical support to the Philippine Coast Guard.
“The Philippines can be seen as the cornerstone of France’s strategic presence in the region,” said Blandin.
France and the Philippines agreed to enhance cooperation in December 2023 and a French defense attaché office was established in the Philippines in May this year.
Frigate Vendémiaire participated in the Balikatan exercise in April and the destroyer Bretagne made a port call in Manila from May 31 to June 4. The frigate Prairial that recently transited the Taiwan Strait also conducted a goodwill visit to Cebu between Oct. 22-25.
“The French military is in the process of negotiating a visiting forces agreement with the Philippines, which is expected to conclude in the first semester of 2025,” said Blandin. “Paris wants to put its name back on the map.”
Construction on a new hospital in North Korea is struggling to meet deadlines, so authorities told doctors and nurses to put down the stethoscope and pick up the toolbelt, residents in the country told Radio Free Asia.
The country’s leader Kim Jong Un last August ordered construction of the new hospital in an industrial area of Hamju county, in the eastern province of South Hamgyong, but he also said that he wanted it finished by the end of 2024.
Now the authorities are scrambling to get it finished. As with most government projects, the military and residents are being mobilized to provide free labor or donate construction materials.
But now with the clock ticking, the county government is leaning on the medical workers, a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“Since hospital construction began, military hospital and clinic staff have been mobilized to the construction site for more than two hours every evening,” he said. “All hospital staff, except the emergency department and on-duty doctors and nurses, must participate.”
In addition to providing labor, the doctors and nurses must donate money to the project, the resident said.
“A few days ago, an order was given to provide funds for hospital construction,” he said. “The set offering is 100,000 won (US$6) for doctors and 50,000 won ($3) for nurses,” he said.
Even for a doctor, 100,000 won is an enormous sum in North Korea, enough to buy about 12 kilograms (26.4 pounds) of rice at the latest market price published by the Osaka-based Asia Press media outlet that specializes in news about North Korea.
“When the order was delivered, hospital staff complained, saying, ‘How can we pay 50,000 won or 100,000 won at a time when we don’t have enough money to prepare for winter?’“ the resident said. ”Some people say that their blood pressure will explode when they are told what to pay.”
He said the order was relayed by a lower-level party secretary, who explained that the orders came from above, and the intention was to rely on the doctors and hospital staff to donate to their future workplace.
“The hospital staff glared at the secretary,” he added.
Another hospital, in Orang county in nearby North Hamgyong province, is also leaning hard on residents to be completed on time, a resident there told RFA.
“In the early days when construction of local industrial factories began, there was no pressure towards residents, so people thought that the measures initiated by Kim Jong Un himself were clearly different,” he said. “But now, there is so much pressure to pay and do more for the project.”
For the Orang county hospital, workers from local factories are made to work on the hospital, and residents must wake up at dawn or go in on their days off to help out, the resident there said.
“At the end of September, every household in the county, excluding farmers, had to donate 20 cement blocks,” he said. “This is on top of having already donated money twice to provide support for the soldiers who were working on the project,” he added.
As with the Hamju county hospital, military doctors and nurses have been working on the project. The Orang resident said that they finish their healthcare work and then go immediately to the construction site for a few hours.
“Last week, the authorities forced the doctors and nurses who will work at the new hospital to pay cash,” he said. “They said that doctors and nurses who will work at the new hospital should take the lead in supporting hospital construction. Each doctor and nurse gave at least 50,000 won.”
The reaction to the project has not been positive, the Orang resident said.
“It is good to see a modern hospital being built instead of a shabby and outdated military hospital,” he said. “But it is not right to force the burden on residents and medical workers.”
Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Ahn Chang Gyu for RFA Korean.
The result of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election won’t impact the future of the AUKUS or Quad security arrangements that the Biden administration has pushed in the Indo-Pacific, Australia and India’s foreign ministers said in a joint press conference in Canberra.
Speaking hours before polls opened in America, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said they believed Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump would continue with both security arrangements.
“We have an understanding on both sides of politics in the U.S. about the importance of AUKUS,” Wong told reporters. “In terms of the U.S. election, we will work with whomever the American people choose … for president, and also for the Congress of the day.”
“Historically, we’ve had an alliance for many, many years,” she added, “and it is a relationship that is bigger than the events of the day.”
Wong added that Canberra saw the Quad likewise “retaining its importance regardless of the outcome of the election,” given that its four member countries share similar visions for global security.
As is hinted by its name, AUKUS ties together Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, while the Quad is the name given to a forum involving Australia, the United States, India and Japan.
Along with the “trilateral” between the United States, Japan and Seoul, AUKUS and the Quad have been pushed by the Biden administration in its efforts to build a “patchwork” of alliances to counter China’s rising military aspirations, even if U.S. officials deny that’s its explicit aim.
‘Nasty’ Kevin Rudd
Jaishankar, the Indian external affairs minister, said Indian-U.S. ties would likewise be unchanged whoever is in the White House.
“We have actually seen steady progress in our relationship with the U.S. over the last five presidencies, including an earlier Trump presidency,” Jaishankar said. “We are very confident that whatever the verdict, our relationship with the United States will only grow.”
“In terms of the Quad, I remind you that actually the Quad was revived under a Trump presidency in 2017,” he added, noting that the group’s foreign ministers even held a rare in-person meeting during COVID in 2020, when most international meetings were being held virtually.
“That should tell you something about the prospects of it,” he said.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd speaks with participants on the sidelines of the Quad leaders summit in Claymont, Delaware, Sept. 21, 2024.
However, the prospect of a return of a Trump presidency would likely shake up U.S. alliances with its Indo-Pacific partners at least a bit.
Australia’s ambassador in Washington and two-time former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has a testy relationship with the former president, having – prior to his current diplomatic appointment – called him “nuts,” a “traitor to the West’’ and the “most destructive president in history.”
Trump responded by labeling Rudd “nasty” and suggesting he might need to be removed as Australian ambassador if he wins.
“I don’t know much about him. I heard he was a little bit nasty. I hear he’s not the brightest bulb,” Trump told British conservative politician and broadcaster Nigel Farage on GB News in a March interview.
“If he’s at all hostile, he will not be there long,” he said.
But both Wong and Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who served as Rudd’s deputy prime minister in 2013, have said Rudd would not be replaced as ambassador if Trump wins Tuesday’s election.
The former prime minister was doing “an excellent job” as ambassador in Washington, Wong told Australian media earlier this year.
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns.
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Evidence is mounting of clandestine Chinese influence operations in the heart of America.
Just in the last few months, a former aide to the governor of New York state and her husband were arrested for alleged illicit activities promoting the interests of China; a Chinese democracy activist was arrested and accused of spying for China; and a historian was convicted of being an agent for Beijing.
The three separate cases of former Albany functionary Linda Sun, dissident Yuanjun Tang and author Wang Shujun took place in New York alone. And they were not the first cases of alleged Chinese influence operations targeting immigrants from China in the Big Apple.
Those cases came to light as a detailed investigation by the Washington Post revealed that China’s diplomats and pro-Beijing diaspora were behind demonstrations in San Francisco that attacked opponents during President Xi Jinping’s visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit last November.
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, exits Brooklyn Federal Court after she was charged with acting as an unregistered agent of China’s government in New York City, Sept. 3, 2024.
All bear the hallmarks of China’s “united front” influence operations conducted by government ministries, party operatives and local proxies – but in a veiled manner.
“United front work is a unique blend of influence and interference activities, as well as intelligence operations that the CCP uses to shape its political environment,” said the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in a report published last November.
What is the United Front Work Department?
Coordinating this overseas influence and interference work is Beijing’s shadowy United Front Work Department, or UFWD, set up in 1942, even before the Communists took over control of China.
Headed by Shi Taifeng, a Politburo member, it seeks to promote China’s political interests through an extensive network of organizations and individuals around the world, experts say.
It spares no effort trying to push Beijing’s view – and crush dissenting opinions – among people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, ethnic minorities such as Mongolians, Tibetans and Uyghurs as well as among religious groups.
How does the UFWD operate?
The United Front Work Department is engaged in a mixture of activities, from interfering in the Chinese diaspora and suppressing dissidents to gathering intelligence, encouraging investment in China and facilitating the transfer of technology, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, said in a report.
Chinese martial arts teacher Liu Wei practices with students of the Fourah Bay College Secondary School in Freetown during a training session at the Confucius Institute University of Sierra Leone on Oct. 15, 2024.
It uses quasi-official organizations and civil society groups based overseas to blur the line between official and private, giving China plausible deniability in many cases, witnesses told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which advises Congress on China.
It funds Confucius Institutes – Chinese-language study centers on university campuses around the world – many of which have been shut down in the United States. It also funds diplomats’ engagement with foreign elites and its police force’s perpetration of “transnational repression” – clamping down on dissidents or opponents outside China’s borders, the review commission said in a 2023 report based on expert testimony.
United front groups often have innocuous sounding names, like the Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification or the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Many appear to be ordinary overseas Chinese community organizations, and are found in business and even in multinational corporations.
Lurking behind or within them, though, are government or party agencies – very often China’s powerful intelligence, security and secret police agency.
“United front groups are used – very specifically – to hide the Ministry of State Security,” said Peter Mattis, head of the non-profit Jamestown Foundation. “This is why I like to think of the United Front Work Department as the tall grass that is sort of deliberately cultivated to hide snakes,” he told RFA.
What is the history of China‘s ’united front’ work?
Under the Moscow-led Comintern in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party adapted Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s concept of forming a “united front” – forging temporary alliances with friends and lesser enemies in order to defeat greater enemies.
After Mao Zedong’s Communists took power in 1949, united front work focused internally on co-opting Chinese capitalists and intellectuals, who were brought to heel and persecuted in the 1950s under Mao’s vicious ideological campaigns.
People in costumes perform onstage at the 13th Confucius Institute Conference in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China, Dec. 4, 2018.
Xi Zhongxun, the father of current President Xi Jinping, played a key united front work role with top Tibetan Buddhist figures, trying to influence the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.
What role has Xi played?
While China denies meddling in the affairs of foreign nations, experts say that under President Xi, China’s overseas influence activities have become more aggressive and technologically sophisticated.
In 2017, Xi famously repeated Mao’s description of united front work as a “magic weapon” for the party’s success. But two years before that, he established a “leading small group” to coordinate top-level united front work and carried out a major expansion and reorganization of the UFWD.
“We will build a broad united front to forge great unity and solidarity, and we will encourage all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation to dedicate themselves to realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation,” Xi told the 20th Party Congress in 2022.
That congress saw Xi’s top ideological theorist, Wang Huning, who ranks fourth in the Politburo, appointed to lead the national-level united front system, the House Select Committee report said.
Xi has built up the power and capacity of the UFWD, which controls 11 subordinate government agencies, including the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the State Administration for Religious Affairs, according to Australia’s ASPI.
What are some examples of the UFWD’s efforts in the U.S.?
In New York, prosecutors say that Linda Sun and her husband, Christopher Hu, received millions of dollars in cash, event tickets and gourmet salted duck from the UFWD. In exchange, Sun tried to remove references to Taiwan in state communications, and obtained unauthorized letters from the governor’s office to help Chinese officials travel, prosecutors say.
In California during Xi’s visit in November, the Washington Post reported, the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals and directly interacted with aggressive actors who punched and kicked anti-Xi protesters and attacked them with flagpoles and chemical spray. U.S. stopovers by Taiwan leaders have drawn similar protests.
Who are the targets of united front work?
Sun and Hu represent a key demographic in the UFWD’s crosshairs: the Chinese diaspora. The activist Tang had access to the overseas Chinese dissident and pro-democracy community and its network of supporters.
United front pressure and harassment tactics – including threats against family in China – are deployed against diaspora members of China’s persecuted ethnic and religious minorities: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and members of the banned Falun Gong movement.
Supporters await the arrival of Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to Kings Park in Perth, Australia, June 18, 2024.
Citizens of Taiwan have for decades been pressured by united front efforts to support unification with the Communist-controlled mainland.
The recent imposition of draconian national security legislation in Hong Kong has made citizens and exiles who oppose those authoritarian steps in formerly free Chinese territory targets of united front pressure.
These targets are not alone and the list is growing, with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand also grappling with Chinese influence campaigns that smack of united front work.
“There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work: all bureaus of the UFWD and all areas of united front work involve overseas activities,” the report from Australia’s ASPI said.
“This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else,” it said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington told Radio Free Asia that the United Front’s domestic role is to “promote cooperation between the (Communist Party) and people who are not members of it.” Outreach to the diaspora “helps give full play to their role as a bridge linking China with the rest of the world,” the embassy spokesperson’s office said in an e-mailed statement.
“Its work is transparent, above-board and beyond reproach,” it said. “By making an issue out of China’s United Front work, some people are trying to discredit China’s political system and disrupt normal exchange and cooperation between China and the United States.”
Additional reporting by Jane Tang of RFA Investigative. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Paul Eckert for RFA.
On October 31, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), alongside 27 other human rights organizations and experts, called on technology company Sandvine to publicly commit to upholding the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and to provide stronger oversight and transparency of its newly announced human rights processes and policies.
The letter was prompted by Sandvine’s removal on October 21 from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List of companies subject to export controls. The company had been added to the list February 2024 due to its sale of deep packet inspection technology to governments, including Egypt and Belarus, that used it for deploying spyware and “in mass web-monitoring and censorship to block news.” The Commerce Department stated that Sandvine was removed due to changes in its corporate structure and leadership, its ongoing exit from non-democratic countries, establishment of a human rights due diligence process, and other reforms.
CPJ and its partners are calling for Sandvine to provide remedies to those harmed by its previous actions, in addition to other transparency and accountability measures relating to the company’s announced reforms.
“While Sandvine claims it will implement corrective measures to redress the harm caused, it has yet to clarify how it plans to address the impact on Egypt’s 110 million citizens, deprived of access to independent news under an oppressive regime, or on journalists who have risked their safety to inform the public,” Nora Younis, editor-in-chief of the Cairo-basednews website Al-Manassa, told CPJ. “Where is the apology to the Egyptian people?”
Al-Manassa is one of the independent media outlets in Egypt that remains blocked due to Sandvine’s technology, which was sold to Egyptian authorities.
Impunity for the killers of journalists continues unabated at nearly 80% worldwide
New York, October 30, 2024 — Two small nations with outsized levels of impunity—Haiti and Israel—are the world’s top offenders in allowing the murderers of journalists to go unpunished. Globally, impunity remains entrenched, as no one is held to account in almost 80% of the cases where journalists have been directly targeted in retaliation for their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2024 Global Impunity Index.
Haiti, which first appeared on the index in 2023, is challenged by criminal gangs that are overtaking the country and destabilizing already weak institutions, including the judiciary. Its rise to the top of CPJ’s index—which was launched in 2008—follows the unsolved murders of seven journalists within the 10-year period index period for 2024. Israel, ranked second, has landed on the index for the first time following a failure to hold anyone to account in the targeted killing of five journalists in Gaza and Lebanon in a year of relentless war. All of the murdered journalists were reporting on the war and three of the five were wearing press vests at the time they were killed. CPJ is investigating the possible targeted murders of at least 10 additional journalists. Given the challenges of documenting the war, the number may be far higher. Overall, Israel has killed a record number of Palestinian journalists since the war began on October 7, 2023. Deliberately targeting journalists, who are civilians in any conflict, is a war crime.
“Murder is the ultimate weapon to silence journalists,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Once impunity takes hold, it sends a clear message: that killing a journalist is acceptable and that those who continue reporting may face a similar fate.”
Somalia (third), Syria (fourth), and South Sudan (fifth), round out the top five worst offenders of 2024. All three countries have appeared on CPJ’s index for at least a decade. In total, 13 nations are on the index, including democracies and authoritarian regimes, most of them suffering from one or more of the corrosive factors that allow journalists’ killers to evade justice: wars, insurgencies, criminal gangs and local authorities that are unwilling or unable to act and deliver justice.
Source: CPJ data and population data from the World Bank’s 2023 World Development Indicators, viewed in September 2024, was used in calculating each country’s rating. Regions within a nation that are partially controlled or occupied by that nation, such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and Gaza and Israel, are included in that country’s population figures.
*The total for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory includes the murder of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, who was killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces firing from inside Israel.
Over the 10-year period covered in the index, CPJ identified 241 killings where there was clear evidence the murders were directly linked to a person’s work. Less than 4% of those murdered achieved full justice; 19% obtained partial justice, meaning some of their killers were held to account; and the remaining 77% received no justice.
Mexico recorded the highest overall number of unpunished murders of journalists – 21 – during the index period and ranks eighth on the index because of its sizable population. Long one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the media, Mexico reported a rise in deadly violence in 2024 after dropping from record levels in 2022. More than a decade since the establishment of a Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, the program is plagued by fundamental flaws and requires reform in order to provide the protection for which it was designed.
“Impunity in the murder of journalists does not exist in a vacuum, as the index shows. These countries represent places where acute violence against the press is normalized, with journalists perpetually under threat, working under impossible conditions that remain unabated for years,” said Ginsberg. “The lack of accountability creates news deserts that stifle the voices of local people, making it easy for officials to ignore them, and creating fertile ground for corruption and wrongdoing to flourish.”
Asia is the most represented region in the index with Afghanistan (ranked sixth), the Philippines (ninth), Myanmar (10th) and Pakistan (12th), with the Philippines and Pakistan appearing annually since 2008.
Iraq, which has appeared on the index every year since its inception, ended its six-year hiatus in work-related murders following the targeted killing of two women journalists in 2024. Islamic State (IS) militants and Turkish anti-Kurdish forces were behind most of the 11 murders in Iraq during the 2024 index period.
Despite international frameworks intended to tackle impunity, the lack of meaningful improvement in accountability for journalist killings in the past decades indicates more needs to be done to hold perpetrators to account. Together with other organizations, CPJ is advocating for the establishment of an international investigative task force focused on crimes against journalists. A blueprint for a body, initially proposed in 2020 by a panel of legal experts, could deploy resources or advise in situations where local law enforcement may be lacking either capacity or political will to investigate crimes against journalists.
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Note to Editors:
CPJ’s Global Impunity Index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. For the 2024 index, CPJ examined journalist murders that occurred between September 1, 2014, and August 31, 2024, and remain unsolved. Only those nations with five or more unsolved cases are included on the index. CPJ defines murder as the targeted killing of a journalist, whether premeditated or spontaneous, in direct connection to the journalist’s work. The index only tallies murders that have been carried out with complete impunity. It does not include those for which partial justice has been achieved. Population data from the World Bank’s 2023 World Development Indicators, viewed in October 2024, were used in calculating each country’s rating. Regions within a nation that are partially controlled or occupied by that nation, such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and Gaza and Israel, are included in that country’s population figures. The total for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory includes the murder of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, who was killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces firing from inside Israel. See full methodology here.
Read CPJ’s 2023, 2022, and 2021 impunity index reports.
About the Committee to Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.
North Korea has completed preparations to test an ICBM-class missile, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported on Wednesday, citing the South Korean military, with a launch possibly timed to coincide with next week’s U.S. presidential election.
North Korea has also completed “unspecified preparations” at its Punggye-ri nuclear test site, Yonhap reported the military as saying, raising the possibility of a seventh nuclear test compounding global concerns surrounding North Korea’s deployment of troops to help Russia fight its war against Ukraine.
North Korea’s suspected preparations for a missile and nuclear test were outlined to members of South Korea’s parliament in a briefing by the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, Yonhap reported.
“It appears that preparations are nearly complete for an ICBM-class long-range missile, including a space launch vehicle,” members of South Korea’s parliament said, citing the agency.
Preparations for a transporter erector launcher for the missile were complete and it had been deployed, though no missile had been mounted, they said, adding that the DIA said the ICBM test could come before or after the U.S. election on Nov. 5.
North Korea’s last ICBM test was in December when it fired its latest solid-fueled ICBM, the Hwasong-18.
There was no immediate elaboration on the expected nuclear test but South Korea said in September that North Korea may conduct its seventh nuclear test after the U.S. election.
North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests since 2006, all of them underground at the Punggye-ri site. Its last nuclear test was in 2017.
North Korea unveiled details of its uranium enrichment facility for the first time in September, with leader Kim Jong Un calling for increasing the number of centrifuges for uranium enrichment so it can build up its nuclear arsenal for self-defense.
South Korea says the North possesses about 70 kilograms of plutonium and a significant amount of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons.
North Korea classifies itself a nuclear state but it has kept secret the number of nuclear weapons it has or deployed.
Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. I’m L.V. Anderson (or Laura to my colleagues), a senior editor at Grist, and I’m taking over the newsletter today to give you a wide-angle look at how climate change is affecting democracy not just in the U.S., but around the world.
One of the biggest stories of this year’s U.S. presidential election is former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric. Over the past few years, Trump has described his political opponents as “vermin” and made more than 100 threats to prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish them. He’s said he would be a dictator on “day one” of his second term. He’s called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He’s demonized immigrants and promised mass deportation. That’s just a small sample of Trump’s numerous pledges to pursue retaliation and personal grievances without regard for democratic norms.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign appearance on July 31 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.Spencer Platt / Getty Images
In some ways, Trump’s persona and bombast are uniquely American. But he is hardly the only politician around the world to incite violence, scapegoat vulnerable communities, and seek unchecked power in recent years. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are just a few of Trump’s international counterparts. The global rise of these authoritarian populists, also known as strongmen, has coincided with rapidly accelerating climate change and unprecedented hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires. Could climate change actually be contributing to the rise of authoritarianism? That’s the question I address in my latest piece for Grist.
Economists and social scientists have found evidence that global warming can push individuals, and nations, in an authoritarian direction.
There’s never any single factor behind a political trend, but economists and social scientists have found evidence that global warming — which increases people’s physical, social, and economic vulnerability — can push individuals, and nations, in an authoritarian direction. “Climate change is often discussed as a global security risk,” said Immo Fritsche, a social psychology professor at Leipzig University in Germany. As climate change reduces water access and habitable land around the world, the theory goes, intergroup conflict increases. But Fritsche has co-authored a series of studies that demonstrate that reminding people of the dangers of climate change can cause them to more strongly conform to collective norms — and to denigrate outsiders.
His findings point to a different possible explanation for how climate change could contribute to political destabilization. “The idea was to think about another potentially catalyzing process that might also be relevant for such effects, which is a bit more psychological and a bit more subtle.”
You can read about Fritsche’s research, along with other studies that have looked at the ties between climate change and authoritarianism, in my full article here. I hope you find this body of scholarship as interesting as I do.
A referendum on Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover from historic damage caused by Hurricane Maria, which took down the U.S. territory’s power grid in 2017 and created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis there. Trump, who took office that year, withheld about $20 billion in disaster aid and famously tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd as citizens of the island suffered nearby with limited federal aid.
Now, a week before the election, a Trump rally in New York City has thrust the former president’s response to that storm back into the spotlight. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe said in the opening segment of a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. The Trump campaign quickly denounced the racist remark — “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a senior advisor said — but the Harris campaign, which had put out a Puerto Rico policy plan that same day, had already pounced.
Vice President Kamala Harris attends an event in Puerto Rico to highlight the administration’s support of the U.S. territory’s recovery and renewal.Drew Angerer / AFP via Getty Images
“Today I released my plan to help build a brighter future for Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people as president,” Vice President Harris posted on X Sunday night. “Meanwhile, at Donald Trump’s rally, they’re calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” Harris’ proposal, called Building an Opportunity Economy for Puerto Rico, focuses on making the island’s grid greener and more resilient by tapping into federal disaster funding and clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Latin pop stars Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, who have tens of millions of followers between them, shared Harris’ Puerto Rico plan hours after the racist, misogynistic, and vitriolic comments made by the former president and other speakers at the rally, including Hinchcliffe, started making headlines. Puerto Ricans can participate in primary elections, but it does not have votes in the Electoral College, so residents have no say over who becomes president. There are, however, nearly 6 million Puerto Ricans living in the continental U.S. who can vote — and 8 percent of them live in Pennsylvania, the swing state where Harris unveiled her Puerto Rico policy plan on Sunday.
— Zoya Teirstein
What we’re reading
Colorado River punt: The Biden administration, which is leading negotiations between seven western states over water usage on the Colorado River, has decided to delay a decision on water cuts until next year, reports Politico Pro. It will be up to the next president to decide who bears the brunt of future water shortages on the river. Read more
Harris leads on disaster poll: A new survey from the left-aligned polling firm Data for Progress found that voters trust Kamala Harris to respond to a natural disaster more than they trust Donald Trump. The poll, which was conducted just days after Hurricane Milton made landfall, found the vice president leading the former president on the issue by 50 percent to 46 percent. Read more
An Election Day hurricane?: We’re nearing the end of hurricane season, but there’s still enough heat in the tropics to support the formation of a tropical cyclone, and some models even predict that one could emerge next week around Election Day. Counties in Florida have contingency plans to shift polling places around, reports Florida Today, but there’s only so much they can do. Read more
Trump politicized disaster aid: In the last months of his presidency, as Washington state raced to recover from a wildfire outbreak, then-president Donald Trump refused to grant a disaster declaration for the blue state. The state’s Democratic former governor, Jay Inslee, told E&E News that he had to wait until President Joe Biden took office to get money from FEMA. Read more
Ballot box arson: A drop box for mail-in ballots in the city of Vancouver, Washington, was set on fire Monday morning in what appeared to be an act of arson, following similar arson attempts in Portland, Oregon, and Phoenix. The city of Vancouver is part of Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, home to one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the closely divided House of Representatives. Read more
We speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism, who argues that Trump’s use of the hallmarks of “fascism and violence,” including dehumanizing rhetoric, profane and crude discriminatory language and threats to the “enemy within,” echoes the rise of midcentury fascist rulers like Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
New York, October 28, 2024—On October 13, the Taliban banned television operations and the filming and photographing of people in public spaces in northeast Takhar province according to a local journalist who spoke to the Committee to Protect Journalists under the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from the Taliban, and mediareports.
“The Taliban’s latest ban on television and filming and photography in Takhar should trouble anyone who cares about media freedom worldwide” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, in New York. “The citizens of Afghanistan deserve fundamental rights, and the international community must cease its passive observation of the country’s rapid regression.”
The ban was approved by senior officials from the Taliban’s provincial General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), directorates of Information and Culture, and the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as well as the governor’s office of Takhar province.
Takhar is the second province in Afghanistan to institute such a ban. Previously, the Taliban implemented a similar ban in Kandahar province, its unofficial capital and the residence of the group’s leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, according to a Kandahar-based journalist who also spoke to CPJ under the condition of anonymity for fear of Taliban retaliation.
Saif ul Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, confirmed to the Associated Press that media outlets in the provinces of Takhar, Maidan Wardak, and Kandahar had been “advised not to broadcast or display images of anything possessing a soul—meaning humans and animals,” according to the AP. Khyber said the directive is part of the implementation of a recently ratified morality law.
Article 17 of the law details the restrictions on the media, including a ban on publishing or broadcasting images of living people and animals, which the Taliban regards as un-Islamic. Other sections order women to cover their bodies and faces and travel with a male guardian, while men are not allowed to shave their beards. The punishment for breaking the law is up to three days in prison or a penalty “considered appropriate by the public prosecutor.”
On October 14, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, the director of Taliban-controlled Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), informed senior management of Kabul’s national TV station that a phased strategy to implement the new law had already begun. TV stations across Afghanistan’s provinces will be gradually closed and converted to radio stations, with plans to eventually extend the ban to Kabul, where RTA and other major national broadcasters operate, according to two journalists familiar with the meeting and a report by the London-based independent outlet, Afghanistan International.
On October 19, during a visit to Sheikh Zahid University in Khost province, Neda Mohammad Nadim, the Taliban’s Minister of Higher Education, barred the filming of the event, according to the London-based Afghanistan International.
On October 23, the Taliban’s Ministry of Defense launched the broadcast of Radio Sada-e-Khalid, which is managed by the ministry and operates from the 201st Corps of the Taliban army.
The report, which follows an October fact-finding mission to Georgia, highlights the “climate of fear” under which journalists operate following the passage of a Russian-style “foreign agents” law and issues recommendations on key challenges faced by independent media, including physical attacks, intimidation campaigns, and impunity.
Israeli soldiers have just conducted what Gaza’s Civil Defense is calling a “major massacre” in Jabaliya, with more than 150 people killed or injured and dozens of buildings destroyed. It is the latest atrocity amid the military’s weekslong siege of northern Gaza. “It’s getting worse and worse,” says Dr. Mohammed Salha in a call from the Jabaliya refugee camp, where he is acting director of Al-Awda Hospital.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
