I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem.
The United States has an impeachment problem. Impeachment was put into a Constitution that made no mention of, allowance for, or plans to survive the existence of political parties. Presidents are now generally not impeached for any abuse or outrage unless there is one party that doesn’t itself engage in that same abuse or outrage and that party is in the majority in the House. The use of a sex scandal for the impeachment of Bill Clinton was part of the process of destroying the impeachment power, but we’re now probably past sex scandals, for better or worse. We’re reduced to obscure or even fictional offenses, or physical attacks on Congress Members. And even those can be impeachable only when the non-presidential party has a House majority. And even then, the same party would have to have a two-thirds majority in the Senate to get a conviction, since a president’s party’s members will do virtually anything a president commands.
This impeachment problem, unless it is solved, effectively means that a popular nonviolent movement to oust a lawless dictator from the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue must turn out the entire government and start over. The reason the proper course is not the one everyone has been conditioned to mindlessly follow, namely waiting for a distant election, is the same reason impeachment was put into the Constitution: some abuses and outrages should never be tolerated. They do too much massive damage, and they set precedents that are very hard to undo. When Bush-Cheney and then Obama were allowed to finish out and not be removed, warmaking became more acceptable than ever, as did warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, murder by missile, etc. Criminal thuggery became firmly a policy choice, not an impeachable or prosecutable offense — unless of course you’re not the president. The top impeachable offenses by Bush are in this list of 35. Partway into the Obama presidency, I documented his continuation of 27 of those 35.
The Trump-Biden-Trump era has iced the cake of acceptable and legalistic monstrosities. In 2019, RootsAction put together a list of 25 articles of impeachment for Trump:
One could go on piling up the articles of impeachment or documenting their continuation and expansion. But what’s missing is not the documentation. Here’s a guy who incited violence at his campaign events prior to his first stint on the throne. RootsAction proposed his impeachment for open financial corruption on his first inauguration day. The case was beyond solid, and has been built up ever since. Every weapons shipment for genocide by Biden, Trump, or a harmoniously bipartisan Congress violates numerous U.S. laws. The corruption is gradiose, fantastic, megalithic. The wars, the lies, the kidnappings by masked thugs, the environmental destruction, the promotion of bigotry and hatred — it’s a festival of flagrantly overly justified grounds for removal from office. But what’s missing is the will to make removal happen. On June 24, a huge, happy, bipartisan majority voted not to impeach Trump for making himself a king, just 10 days after huge demonstrations all across the country denouncing Trump for having made himself a king.
I’m afraid of what will happen instead of impeachment. President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is nobility in that idea. But there is no such thing as making nonviolent revolution impossible. And the powers of nonviolent action are virtually unknown in U.S. culture. Mildly objecting to mass murdering foreign people is a lot for us. The notion that we might actually learn from the successes of foreign people could be asking too much. And so the vast panoply of options between demanding impeachment and hitting Capitol Police officers with flag poles may be lost on too many of us. It may be lost on us beyond our ability to recognize the absurd insufficiency of choosing between two disastrous candidates every four years. We may realize what a scam this so-called democracy is, but not realize our latent power to take it over without counterproductive violence. That does not bode well.
In an unprecedented legal move in Aotearoa New Zealand, a national Palestine solidarity advocacy group has filed a referral against the prime minister, three other ministers in the coalition government and two business leaders, alleging complicity with Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has 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”.
The PSNA movement has led 90 consecutive weeks of protest at multiple locations across New Zealand in the country’s biggest humn rights campaign since the war began in October 2023.
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.”
The six people named in the referral documentation are Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, Minister for Defence and Space Judith Collins, Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour, and businessmen Rocket Lab chief executive Sir Peter Beck and Rakon Limited chief executive Dr Sinan Altug.
Spy satellites
According to PSNA, Rocket Lab launches spy satellites from Māhia, which PSNA claims Israel uses go target civilians in Gaza, while Rakon exports military-grade crystal oscillators to the US “to be put in missiles which Israel can deploy in Gaza and elsewhere”.
“This is a grave step which we have not taken lightly,” Minto and Nazzal said.
PSNA co-chair John Minto … “This is a grave step which we have not taken lightly.” Image: PMC
“The government’s ongoing and meaningful support for Israel, despite its horrendous war crimes, is not only egregious to most New Zealanders, but is also criminal conduct under international law.”
The PSNA referral follows an open letter by one of the country’s largest environmental organisations two days ago that called on the government to impose sanctions on Israel amid mounting criticism in New Zealand over war crimes allegations against the state over its 20-month war.
Greenpeace’s sanctions open letter to NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Image: Greenpeace screeshot APR
Greenpeace Aotearoa’s executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party co-leader, said in an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Luxon and Foreign Minister Peters that he was expressing grave concerns about the “ongoing genocide in Gaza being carried out by Israeli forces, and the ongoing failure of the New Zealand government to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel.”
Norman cited a statement by the UN Human Rights Office last week that “at least 410 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to fetch from controversial new aid hubs in Gaza”.
The office said this was “a likely war crime”.
‘Killing field’
He also cited Ha’aretz, a respected Israeli newspaper, quoting an Israeli soldier describing the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHC) aid hubs as a “killing field”.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “This has brought shame on the whole country.” Image: APR
In March last year, Sydney law firm Birchgrove Legal referred a case to ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan consisting of 92 pages of documented evidence, alleging that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and several other high level local politicians were complicit in the Gaza genocide.
‘Letter of demand’
The New Zealand referral to the ICC followed a “letter of demand” issued to the government last year actions that a “reasonable government” would take to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, and the actions a government should take to avoid criminal complicity with Israel.
The ICC referral document from PSNA against the New Zealand coalition government individuals. Image: PSNA screenshot APR
“For 20 months these political and business leaders have supported Israel to commit crimes which have shocked the human conscience,” Minto and Nazzal said.
“This has brought shame on the whole country.”
It is understood that this is the first time that New Zealand political or business leaders have been referred to the ICC for investigation.
There were no immediate responses. However, a growing number of such cases are being filed around the world.
In July 2024, the UN’s highest global court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza and East Jerusalem, was illegal.
It called on Israel to halt all settlements and withdraw settlers from the territory. The court is also investigating Israel over a case brought by South Africa alleging genocide.
The Catholic Church has strongly warned against Papua New Guinea’s political rhetoric and push to declare the nation a Christian country, saying such a move threatens constitutional freedoms and risks dangerous implications for the country’s future.
Speaking before the Permanent Parliamentary Committee on Communication on Tuesday at Rapopo during the ongoing Regional Parliamentary Inquiry into the Standard and Integrity of Journalism in Papua New Guinea, Archbishop Rochus Tatamai of the Rabaul Archdiocese delivered a firm but thoughtful reflection on the issue, voicing the Catholic Church’s opposition to the notion of a legally enshrined Christian nation.
“When talking about freedom of media and PNG, a Christian country, we must be clear,” said Archbishop Tatamai. “The claim that PNG is a Christian country is not supported by law.
“The Catholic Church disagrees with this. It conflicts with our Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.”
The archbishop’s remarks were part of a broader presentation on the influence of evolving technology on church authority, but he took the opportunity to confront what he called one of the major topics in PNG today.
He raised concerns about the legal, social, and theological implications of attempting to legislate Christianity into state law, stating that politicians were not theologians and risked entering spiritual territory without the understanding to handle it responsibly.
“If we declare PNG a Christian nation,” he asked, “whose version of Christianity are we referring to? We’re not all the same.”
Legal obligation
He warned of a future where attending church could become a legal obligation, not a matter of faith.
“If PNG is supposedly a Christian nation, police could walk into your village and tell you: it’s not just a sin to skip church on Sunday, it’s illegal and get you arrested.’ That’s how dangerous this path could be.”
Archbishop Tatamai also referenced the Chief Justice, who had recently stated that if PNG were truly a Christian nation, then principles like honesty would become enforceable laws: “You should not steal. And if you do, you’re not only sinning you’re breaking the law.”
But the archbishop warned that such a conflation of morality and legality opens up deep conflicts.
“History has shown us the dangers of blurring the line between church and state. Blood has been spilled over this in other parts of the world. Are we ready for that?”
He stressed that the founding fathers of PNG had been wise to embed freedom of religion and conscience into the Constitution, ensuring that the state remained neutral in matters of faith.
“Now, we risk undoing their vision by imposing a national religion,” he said.
Challenged Parliament
The archbishop also challenged Parliament and national leaders to think beyond symbolism.
“Yes, Parliament can pass declarations. Yes, politicians can make the numbers. But have they truly thought through the implications and applications of these decisions?”
He concluded his presentation with a sharp warning against hypocrisy and selective morality under a Christian state:
“You cannot use Christianity as a legal framework and continue with corruption. You cannot justify wrongdoing and expect forgiveness simply because now, in a confessional state, sin becomes crime and crime must have consequences.”
Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.
In July 1985, Australia’s Pacific territory of Norfolk Island (pop. 2188) became the centre of a real life international spy thriller.
Four French agents sailed there on board the Ouvéa, a yacht from Kanaky New Caledonia, after bombing the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.
The Rainbow Warrior was the flagship for a protest flotilla due to travel to Moruroa atoll to challenge French nuclear tests.
Australian police took them into custody on behalf of their New Zealand counterparts but then, bafflingly, allowed them to sail away, never to face justice.
On the 40th anniversary of the bombing (10 July 2025), award-winning journalist Richard Baker goes on an adventure from Paris to the Pacific to get the real story – and ultimately uncover the role that Australia played in the global headline-making affair.
The programme includes an interview with Pacific journalist David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. David’s article about this episode is published at Declassified Australia here.
Earlier this week, California lawmakers passed among the most sweeping reforms to the state’s environmental regulations in more than half a century. The measures were primarily intended to boost housing construction and urban density in the Golden State, which faces among the most severe housing shortages in the U.S.
Though the move was celebrated by Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed the bills into law, it has exposed tensions between the progressive priorities that motivate Democratic lawmakers. Housing affordability advocates have clashed with those promoting environmental justice, with the former boosting the bills and the latter remaining wary. More broadly, the move exposes divisions between those who want more tools to mitigate climate change and environmentalists who would rather maintain strict limits on what can be built and how.
The reforms target the California Environmental Quality Act, which then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed more than 50 years ago. Known as CEQA, the legislation requires public agencies and decision-makers to evaluate the environmental impact of any project requiring government approval, publicize any effects and mitigate them if feasible.
Supporters say the law has prevented or altered scores of projects that would have been detrimental to the environment or Californians’ quality of life. But CEQA has also become the basis for a regular stream of formal complaints and lawsuits that pile substantial costs and delays onto projects that are ultimately found to have minimal harmful effects — sometimes killing them entirely. In one infamous instance, opponents of student housing near the University of California Berkeley argued that the associated noise would constitute environmental pollution under CEQA, which led to a three-year legal battle that the university only won after it went to the state supreme court. Examples like this have led CEQA, which was once a national symbol of environmental protection, to become vilified as a cause of the state’s chronic housing shortage.
After this week’s reforms, most urban housing projects will now be exempt from the CEQA process. The new legislation also excepts many zoning changes from CEQA, as well as certain nonresidential projects including health clinics, childcare centers and advanced manufacturing facilities, like semiconductor and nanotech plants, if they are sited in areas already zoned for industrial uses. (A related bill also freezes most updates to building efficiency and clean energy standards until 2031, angering climate advocates who otherwise support the push for denser housing.) Governor Newsom used a budgetary process to push long-debated changes into law, with strong bipartisan support.
Some activists welcomed the changes, saying they will lead to denser “infill” housing on vacant or underutilized urban land, slower growth in rents and home prices, and shorter commutes — with the welcome byproduct of fewer planet-warming emissions.
“For those that view climate change as one of the key issues of our time, infill housing is a critical solution,” read one op-ed supporting the measures. Other environmentalists, however, lambasted the changes as environmentally destructive giveaways to developers. After Newsom signed the legislation, the Sierra Club California put out a statement calling the changes “half-baked” measures that “will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California.”
At a time when President Donald Trump’s assaults on climate policy and environmental protections have galvanized opposition from the left, what unfolded in California serves as a reminder that, even among Democrats, a divide remains on the extent to which regulation can help — or hurt — the planet. It’s the type of pickle that liberals across the country may increasingly face on issues ranging from zoning to permitting reform for renewable energy projects, which can face costly delays when they encounter procedural hurdles like CEQA. (Indeed, in California, CEQA has been an impediment to not just affordable housing but also solar farms and high-speed rail.)
“How do we make sure the regulations we pass to save the planet don’t harm the planet?” asked Matt Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, a housing advocacy organization and proponent of the CEQA reforms. Transportation accounts for the largest portion of California’s carbon footprint, and Lewis argues that denser housing will be key to keeping people closer to their jobs. But, he said, people with a “not in my backyard” attitude have abused CEQA to slow down those beneficial projects. (His organization’s name is a play on this so-called NIMBY disposition, with YIMBY standing for “yes in my backyard.”)
“One of the leading causes of climate pollution is the way we permit or do not permit housing to be built in urban areas,” Lewis said, adding that more urban development could reduce pressure to build on unused land in more sensitive areas. He pointed to other legal backstops, like state clean water and air laws, that can accomplish the environmental protection goals often cited by supporters of the CEQA process. “CEQA isn’t actually the most powerful law to make sure that manufacturing facilities and other industrial facilities protect the environment,” he said.
In short, Lewis believes that any downsides of the new reforms pale in comparison to their benefits for both people and the planet. “Did we fix it perfectly this time? I’m willing to admit, no,” he said, adding that any shortcomings that environmentalists are concerned about could be repaired in future legislative sessions.
But many environmentalists contend that the downsides in the new legislation are too large.
“We put one foot forward but we take another step back,” said Miguel Miguel, director of Sierra Club California, noting his opposition to the nonresidential exemptions. He said that CEQA often acts as a first line of defense that allows community input on development projects. Without it, he argues, community voices will be marginalized. Miguel speaks from personal experience: CEQA helped save the mobile home park where he grew up from being replaced by more expensive apartments.
Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and consultant who followed the legislation, said that the scope of the reforms expanded from simple support for urban housing development to become “a potpourri of industry and developer desires.” She added that CEQA requires biological surveys that can be the first step to invoking other environmental protections.
“If you never look, you will never know if there are endangered species there,” she said. “We’ve decided to take a head in the sand approach.”
This impasse between environmentalists and housing-focused advocates like Lewis is now decades-old and among the reasons that CEQA reforms — or rollbacks, depending on who you ask — have taken so long to come about. As the fight has drawn out, skepticism has become entrenched.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” California YIMBY’s Lewis said of his optimism that the latest changes can thread the needle between the state’s housing needs and environmental priorities. But, he added, he’d rather defer to elected lawmakers than environmentalists, who have long opposed his housing advocacy. “The environmental movement in California has been fundamentally dishonest about housing,” he charged.
The Sierra Club’s Miguel, for his part, hopes for more cooperation between the competing parties, lest the disagreements poison future legislative efforts. At the end of the day, all parties involved share the same broad goals, if with different levels of emphasis.
“We have to do everything and anything all at once,” he said, referring to climate and environmental policy. “That is fine art.”
A Tongan cybersecurity expert says the country’s health data hack is a “wake-up call” for the whole region.
Siosaia Vaipuna, a former director of Tonga’s cybersecurity agency, spoke to RNZ Pacific in the wake of the June 15 cyberattack on the country’s Health Ministry.
Vaipuna said Tonga and other Pacific nations were vulnerable to data breaches due to the lack of awareness and cybersecurity systems in the region.
“There’s increasing digital connectivity in the region, and we’re sort of . . . the newcomers to the internet,” he said.
“I think the connectivity is moving faster than the online safety awareness activity [and] that makes not just Tonga, but the Pacific more vulnerable and targeted.”
Since the data breach, the Tongan government has said “a small amount” of information from the attack was published online. This included confidential information, it said in a statement.
Reporting on the attack has also attributed the breach to the group Inc Ransomware.
Vaipuna said the group was well-known and had previously focused on targeting organisations in Europe and the US.
New Zealand attack
However, earlier this month, it targeted the Waiwhetū health organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. That attack reportedly included the theft of patient consent forms and education and training data.
“This type of criminal group usually employs a double-extortion tactic,” Vaipuna said.
It could encrypt data and then demand money to decrypt, he said.
“The other ransom is where they are demanding payment so that they don’t release the information that they hold to the public or sell it on to other cybercriminals.”
In the current Tonga cyberattack, media reports say that Inc Ransomware wanted a ransom of US$1 million for the information it accessed. The Tongan government has said it has not paid anything.
Vaipuna said more needed to be done to raise awareness in the region around cybersecurity and online safety systems, particularly among government departments.
“I think this is a wake-up call. The cyberattacks are not just happening in movies or on the news or somewhere else, they are actually happening right on our doorstep and impacting on our people.
Extra vigilance warning
“And the right attention and resources should rightfully be allocated to the organisations and to teams that are tasked with dealing with cybersecurity matters.”
The Tongan government has also warned people to be extra vigilant when online.
It said more information accessed in the cyberattack may be published online, and that may include patient information and medical records.
“Our biggest concern is for vulnerable groups of people who are most acutely impacted by information breaches of this kind,” the government said.
It said that it would contact these people directly.
The country’s ongoing response was also being aided by experts from Australia’s special cyberattack team.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When advocates and defenders of a nuclear-free Pacific condemned the AUKUS military pact two years ago and warned New Zealand that the agreement would make the world “more dangerous”, a key speaker was Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua.
He was among leading participants at a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement teachers’ wānanga, which launched a petition against the pact with one of the “elders” among the activists, Hilda Halkyard-Harawira (Te Moana Nui a Kiwa), symbolically adding the first signature.
Speaking about the petition declaration in a ceremony on the steps of the Auckland Museum marking the 10 July 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua explained that the AUKUS agreement was a military pact between Australia-UK-US that was centred on Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear propelled submarines.
Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua and the NFIP petition has been featured in a new video report by Nik Naidu as part of a “Legends of NFIP” series by Talanoa TV of the Whanau Community Centre and Hub.
In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.
They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.
As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”
Gaza crisis and Iran tensions. Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea
Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.
Martyn Bradbury talks to Dr Paul Buchanan (left) and Selwyn Manning on the Iran crisis and the future. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Political Panel:
Māori Party president John Tamihere,
NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson
NZCTU economist Craig Renney
Topics:
– The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp
– New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy?
– Cost of living crisis and the failing economy
The Supreme Court often releases one or two big, splashy environmental decisions each term. Last year it was overruling a decades-old legal precedent called the “Chevron deference,” which allowed courts to defer to the expertise of a federal agency when interpreting ambiguous statutes. The year before that, Sackett v. EPA limited the definition of bodies of water that are protected under the federal Clean Water Act.
This year’s term, which began in October and ended last week, was a bit different. The justices issued a number of decisions related to climate and the environment, but none of them was a “blockbuster,” according to University of Vermont Law and Graduate School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau.
Arguably, the decisions that will have the greatest potential consequences for climate and environmental policy came from cases that weren’t explicitly about the planet at all.
Rather, they were decisions that legitimized the executive branch’s actions to fire personnel and block funding already appropriated by Congress. These actions may have far-reaching effects on federal agencies that work on climate and environmental issues, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and the Department of Agriculture, which have already been affected by layoffs and funding cuts, as well as early retirement offers intended to get longtime staffers to voluntarily leave their posts.
“What’s being done is irredeemable,” Parenteau added. “The brain drain, the firing of people, the defunding — those are causing really, really long-term damage to the institutional capabilities of the federal government to implement and enforce environmental law.”
Three of the court’s decisions help illustrate what has happened.
Two of them — Trump v. Wilcox and Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees — which came earlier in the session, have made it possible for decisions by President Donald Trump to move forward while they are being litigated in lower courts, reversing orders from federal judges that had temporarily paused them. These decisions have effectively allowed firings without cause at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, and have stopped six federal agencies from bringing back probationary employees that the Trump administration had fired.
Then last week, on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision in Trump v. CASA that limits the power of the country’s more than 1,000 district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential orders. Those judges’ injunctions are now supposed to target only the plaintiffs in a given case.
“Trump is the big winner in this decision,” Parenteau said.
One of the the decision’s most immediate consequences is that it will allow Trump’s unconstitutional limits to birthright citizenship to go into effect in July. In theory, it also means that Trump could issue an executive order illegally rolling back some environmental policy, and district courts would have less power to stop it while a legal challenge makes its way through the courts. District court judges can still issue nationwide injunctions against rules from federal agencies, and they can issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders that are challenged by a large number of plaintiffs, as in a class action lawsuit. Circuit court judges’ injunction powers remain unchanged.
In Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring fossil fuel-fired power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA Law, said the court’s decisions affecting funding and personnel have “giant implications.” They raise “huge questions about the balance between the executive branch and Congress, and the executive branch’s ability and authority to simply ignore what Congress has appropriated.”
Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said this term’s Supreme Court decisions have been “enabling” the Trump administration in its attempts to shrink the size of the government and eliminate institutional expertise. “It’s hard to quantify, but it’s impossible to deny.”
Although the justices didn’t release any landmark environmental decisions this term, the court took up multiple “unusual cases” that showed its continued interest in environmental statutes and administrative actions, according to Datla. For example, in Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, and in Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. EPA it decided to allow oil company plaintiffs to sue the EPA for having allowed California to set its own stricter auto emissions standards than the federal government’s.
The Ohio case was “just a regular decision,” Datla said — ”getting deep into the weeds of the record and ultimately disagreeing with what a lower court had done, which is not usually how the Supreme Court spends its time.” Neither case changed existing law or resulted in a big-picture pronouncement about how to apply or interpret the law. And the Diamond case may become irrelevant anyway, since the Senate recently voted — controversially — to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke California’s auto emissions waiver.
Other notable decisions from the Supreme Court’s term included Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which limited the scope of environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The court essentially said that such reviews don’t have to look at upstream consequences of a given project — such as oil drilling and refining, for projects like railroads that are only directly associated with transporting these fuels — and that courts should defer to federal agencies when deciding what to include in environmental impact statements.
City and County of San Francisco v. EPA found that some of the EPA’s pollution permits under the Clean Water Act are unenforceable unless the EPA writes out specific steps that water management agencies should take to comply with them. But Datla said this was a “quite narrow case” whose national implications are unclear.
The justices have not yet added any explicitly climate- and environment-related cases to their docket for its next session. But Parenteau, the emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said he’s nervous that the court will take up a challenge to Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. That decision from 2000 said residents of South Carolina had legal standing to sue an industrial polluter, even without proving they had been harmed in a particular way. They just had to show that the pollution had impacted the “aesthetic and recreational values” of the river they liked to swim in. Overturning the case could make it more difficult for environmental advocates to file similar lawsuits. “The Laidlaw case has me very worried,” Parenteau said.
For Carlson, the UCLA Law professor, a longer-term worry is that the court’s conservative supermajority will eventually overturn the “endangerment finding,” a precedent set in 2009 saying that carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated by the EPA. “It’s going to get challenged, and it will get challenged up to the Supreme Court,” Carlson said.
Overall, the outlook isn’t good. The executive branch and the Supreme Court “are exhibiting extraordinary hostility to actions on climate change at a time when the planet is burning,” she said. “It’s a pretty depressing story overall.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Dozens of immigrants are detained by ICE agents inside the Federal Plaza courthouse in New York City on June 26, 2025, following their legal proceedings. Photo: Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
There’s nothing subtle about the Gestapo-style tactics of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Armed gangs of officers, often masked and anonymous, are openly engaged in a white nationalist mission to kidnap many thousands of people — stalking court houses, farms, construction sites, and retail stores, and ripping apart the fabric of communities nationwide.
The Trump administration wants America paying attention to this sickening spectacle of mass deportations: broadcasting ICE raids featuring television personality Dr. Phil; meme-postingchained men sent to a gulag in El Salvador; and sharing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s various “ICE Barbie” photo ops.
What the Trump administration doesn’t want, however, is for anyone to hold ICE agents accountable. Attempts by the public to keep tabs on ICE are provoking predictable and pathetic responses from the government.
The latest cause of outrage is ICEBlock, an app that lets users share local ICE sightings. On Monday, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons condemned the app and called CNN “reckless and irresponsible” for broadcasting a brief interview with its developer.
“Advertising an app that basically paints a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs is sickening,” said Lyons. “My officers and agents are already facing a 500% increase in assaults, and going on live television to announce an app that lets anyone zero in on their locations is like inviting violence against them with a national megaphone.”
CNN did not, of course, advertise the app. The network interviewed its developer, Joshua Aaron, because it is newsworthy that 20,000 users, many based in Los Angeles, are looking for ways to share information and keep people safe. Public ICE sightings are just that: public. ICEBlock is just one example of a larger story of autonomous, community efforts nationwide to share such information, be it in large Signal threads or social media alerts. Sharing this information is protected speech and a public service.
The Trump administration has shown its readiness to take extreme measures against efforts to share information about ICE’s troops. In early May, federal agents stormed a home in Irvine, California, in a massive, military-style raid based on suspicions that the residents’ son may have been involved with the placement of posters around Los Angeles that shared information about ICE officers.
ICE watch groups and rapid-response networks have proliferated as a necessary response to Trump’s supercharged deportation agenda. Such efforts are not new but sit in the honorable tradition of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s to protect and shelter refugees, as well as local Copwatch networks, which have existed for over three decades as community efforts against law enforcement violence and impunity.
The agency’s response is itself in line with a storied tradition in U.S. law enforcement and broader efforts to shore up a white supremacist order. Namely, painting the oppressor as the victim and the real victim as the dangerous threat. In his statement about CNN’s ICEBlock segment, Lyons regurgitated the all-too-typical law enforcement claim that “the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day” are endangered when their total impunity is threatened.
The “500% increase in assaults” against ICE officers that Lyons cited has been a statistic repeated ad nauseam by Trump administration officials as grounds for agents covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves as they grab people from the street or tear them from the arms of their neighbors and loved ones. The number remains completely unverified.
Keep in mind, too, that “assault” in this context is a term practically evacuated of meaning. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said that New York City Comptroller Brad Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer” when he was detained by masked federal agents while accompanying a person out of immigration court in June. The Justice Department charged New Jersey Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver with “assaulting” an ICE officer when the member of Congress attempted to conduct an oversight visit at an ICE detention facility. Both incidents were filmed, and claims that federal officers were assaulted by either politician are nonsense.
Trump administration officials have touted footage on social media purporting to show assaults against ICE officers. What these videos overwhelmingly show are unarmed civilians swarmed by militarized forces. During a workplace raid in Santa Ana, California, for example, three federal agents brutally tackled a man, pinned him to the floor, and repeatedly punched his head and neck in a now viral video. The Department of Homeland Security later posted a video on X of the man holding a weed wacker tool in the air while attempting to move away from a heavily armed, masked agent who was spraying some sort of pepper spray in his direction. “He ASSAULTED federal law enforcement with a WEED WHACKER [sic],” DHS wrote above the video, which showed nothing of the sort.
The abject performance of victimhood is absurd, but it’s also the foundation of our entire border regime and criminal legal system, which rest on treating poor Black and brown people as a constant threat. Calls for accountability have long been met with patently melodramatic and false claims of danger to law enforcement officials in defense of racist policing. Police departments and unions have for decades employed the strategy of “blue flu” strikes to protest even minor calls for reform. Hundreds of police officers in New York famously turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio during a fellow officer’s funeral in 2014, because the mayor had dared to acknowledge he understood the reasons to protest racist police killings. Such is the entrenched culture of expected impunity.
The danger of American immigration policy is faced by immigrants.
Being a well-armed officer carrying out state violence is, however, not even in the top 10 most dangerous professions; roofers, loggers, and garbage collectors all have higher rates of fatal injury than regular police officers. Working as an ICE officer is even less dangerous than being an ordinary cop. Yet the entire mass deportations project relies on the lie that poor immigrants of color are a social danger — a myth bolstered by years of bipartisan policies around “criminal” migrants and anti-immigration discourse. Despite the fact that 65 percent of the 60,000-plus ICE arrests during Trump’s second term have been of immigrants with no criminal convictions, Trump’s servants like Lyons are nonetheless framing ICE targets as “dangerous criminal aliens.”
The danger of American immigration policy is faced by immigrants. As many as 80,000 people have reportedly died trying to cross into the U.S. through the Southern border in the last decade — each a victim of migration deterrence policies. Thirteen people have died in ICE custody in 2025 alone. A 75-year-old Cuban national died in an ICE detention center just last week; he had lived 60 years of his life in the U.S. When asked by a reporter on Monday about the latest death on his watch, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan shrugged. “I’m unaware of that,” he said. “I mean people die in ICE custody, people die in county jail, people die in state prisons.”
It takes the blind conviction of white nationalism, or the no-less-evil pretenses of a cynical propagandist, to claim that it is federal agents, rather than the immigrants they hunt, who are at risk.
So what’s the real reason for the masks? ICE agents, of course, have reasons they’d prefer not to be located or identified. They have no desire to face protesters who mobilize in response to reports of their presence. They wear masks to avoid being held personally responsible for carrying out the regime’s desired acts of cruelty.
Keep in mind that the mask isn’t the core problem but a tool that worsens it. Were ICE agents carrying out the project of whitening America with bare faces and name badges, their activities would be just as fascist. Racist policing and border rule did not begin this year and has never been reliant on law enforcement agents acting in secret.
But ICE’s new tendency to act in anonymous uniformity, without even the possibility for personal responsibility or individual consequences, no doubt helps when carrying out orders that require the extreme dehumanization of others.
If we stick to the liberal parlance of transparency and accountability, there should be nothing radical about public oversight and information-sharing, or protest against unpopular state actions. There should also be nothing radical about protecting vulnerable neighbors from fascist round-ups, either.
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.
I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.
It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.
“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.
Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.
The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.
Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.
Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.
Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”
On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”
Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.
Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.
“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.
“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”
He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.
“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.
Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”
The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.
“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.
“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”
The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.
As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”
Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.
“It’s a killing field” says a headline in the Ha’aretz newspaper. Image: Ha’aretz screenshot APR
“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.
Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.
There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.
The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.
On 30 June, the UK High Court ruled that the government’s decision to continue exporting F-35 fighter jet components to Israel is lawful, despite Labour acknowledging that these parts could potentially be used in violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) in Gaza. This decision has sparked significant criticism from human rights organisations and legal experts who argue that it undermines the UK’s commitment to upholding international law and human rights.
F-35 exports are legal, says High Court
The case was brought forward by the Global Legal Action Network and the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, with support from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam.
They contended that the UK’s continued supply of F-35 components, which are part of a global spares pool accessible by Israel, makes the UK complicit in potential IHL violations committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
UK industry makes 15% of every F-35, with the value of UK components in Israel’s F-35s estimated by CAAT to be well over £500m. This is by far the most significant part of the UK arms trade with Israel. At least 75 UK companies are involved in manufacturing components. For example, BAE Systems makes every rear fuselage for the F-35 and also makes its active interceptor system. Leonardo makes its targeting lasers and L3 Harris makes the weapons release cables.
Israel is using its 45 F-35s intensively to bomb the Palestinian people in Gaza, including using horrifically destructive 2,000lb bombs. By March this year, Israel had carried out 15,000 flight hours with the F-35 since the start of the war, using the planes in “beast mode”, with extra munitions attached to the wings.
A “cowardly ruling”
In their 72-page ruling, Lord Justice Males and Mrs. Justice Steyn stated that such matters are political and best left to the executive branch and Parliament, not the courts. They emphasised that the issue at hand was whether it is appropriate for the court to mandate the UK’s withdrawal from a multilateral defense collaboration, which ministers consider vital to national and international security, due to the possibility that UK-manufactured components might be used in serious IHL violations.
Critics argue that this ruling effectively allows the UK government to prioritise political and economic interests over its legal and moral obligations to prevent complicity in potential war crimes.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT’s) Media Coordinator Emily Apple said:
This is a cowardly ruling that absolves any responsibility from the court to rule on the UK government’s compliance with international law. International law exists to keep all of us safe. It should be the founding principle of our arms export criteria, not one the government can pick and choose when to implement.
Successive governments have claimed that our arms export licensing criteria are the most robust in the world. This claim is now in tatters.
This court ruling vindicates Palestine Action. Palestine Action are not terrorists – they have the courage our courts clearly lack. It shows the only option open to us is to take direct action against the arms trade, to stop the genocide profiteers in their tracks. We cannot rely on our institutions to uphold international law, we can only rely on ourselves and the power we have to create change.
When our government and our courts fail us, it is down to us, ordinary citizens, to take action. We cannot wait for the history books to vindicate us. We cannot wait for Israel to obliterate Gaza and the West Bank. We cannot wait and watch while Israel kills more Palestinian children with 2000lb bombs dropped by F-35s. We will not stand by and we will not stay silent while the government prioritises its relationship with a genocidal state and arms dealers’ profits over Palestinian lives.
A biased assessment
Furthermore, the government’s limited investigation into potential IHL breaches by Israeli forces raises concerns about the thoroughness and impartiality of its assessments.
Despite reports of at least 56,000 Palestinian deaths, the government identified only one case—the April 2024 World Central Kitchen strike—as a possible IHL violation. This narrow focus fails to account for the broader pattern of civilian casualties and destruction in Gaza.
theguardian.com
The ruling also highlights the UK’s significant role in the F-35 program, with British manufacturers supplying approximately 15% of the aircraft’s components. This involvement not only ties the UK economically to the program but also raises questions about the influence of defense industry interests on government policy decisions.
The government is committing war crimes with its F-35 exports
Human rights organisations and legal experts have expressed deep concern over the implications of this ruling. The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said:
We are disappointed by the High Court’s refusal to grant permission for judicial review, but recognise the significant steps made in the course of this case so far. The Court accepted the government’s own finding that Israel is not committed to compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL). The Court accepted that there is a clear risk that UK-manufactured F-35 components may be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of IHL in Gaza. These findings are profoundly serious, and without Al-Haq’s claim the government may well have continued to deny these facts.
Yet despite those acknowledgements, the Court held that the legality of the UK’s decision to continue F-35 exports is not a matter that the courts can properly decide. We believe that the Court was wrong in law to conclude that the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Arms Trade Treaty, or customary international law are non-justiciable. The government must be held to account – in the Courts and in the court of public opinion – on these well-evidenced risks of atrocity crimes.
ICJP commends the efforts of Al-Haq, the Global Legal Action Network, interveners in this case, and those who provided their eyewitness testimony. Without them, the troubling reality may not have been exposed: that the UK government can acknowledge the risk of war crimes, admit the likely involvement of British-supplied weapons, and still continue exports to the perpetrators – shielded from judicial scrutiny.
ICJP remains committed to pursuing all available legal avenues to end the UK’s complicity in serious violations of international law. We have worked to support this case for over 18 months and will continue to do so should an appeal be launched.
In light of this decision, there is a growing call for greater transparency and accountability in the UK’s arms export policies. Critics urge the government to reassess its commitments and ensure that its actions align with its legal and moral obligations to prevent complicity in serious violations of international humanitarian law.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights in Fiji (NGOCHR) has called on Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka as the new chair of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) to “uphold justice, stability and security” for Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua.
In a statement today after last week’s MSG leaders’ summit in Suva, the coalition also warned over Indonesia’s “chequebook diplomacy” as an obstacle for the self-determination aspirations of Melanesian peoples not yet independent.
Indonesia is a controversial associate member of the MSG in what is widely seen in the region as a “complication” for the regional Melanesian body.
The statement said that with Rabuka’s “extensive experience as a seasoned statesman in the Pacific, we hope that this second chapter will chart a different course, one rooted in genuine commitment to uphold justice, stability and security for all our Melanesian brothers and sisters in Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua”.
The coalition said the summit’s theme, “A peaceful and prosperous Melanesia”, served as a reminder that even after several decades of regional bilaterals, “our Melanesian leaders have made little to no progress in fulfilling its purpose in the region — to support the independence and sovereignty of all Melanesians”.
“Fiji, as incoming chair, inherits the unfinished work of the MSG. As rightly stated by the late great Father Walter Lini, ‘We will not be free until all of Melanesia is free”, the statement said.
“The challenges for Fiji’s chair to meet the goals of the MSG are complex and made more complicated by the inclusion of Indonesia as an associate member in 2015.
‘Indonesia active repression’
“Indonesia plays an active role in the ongoing repression of West Papuans in their desire for independence. Their associate member status provides a particular obstacle for Fiji as chair in furthering the self-determination goals of the MSG.”
Complicating matters further was the asymmetry in the relationship between Indonesia and the rest of the MSG members, the statement said.
“As a donor government and emerging economic power, Indonesia’s ‘chequebook and cultural diplomacy’ continues to wield significant influence across the region.
“Its status as an associate member of the MSG raises serious concerns about whether it is appropriate, as this pathway risks further marginalising the voices of our West Papuan sisters and brothers.”
This defeated the “whole purpose of the MSG: ‘Excelling together towards a progressive and prosperous Melanesia’.”
The coalition acknowledged Rabuka’s longstanding commitment to the people of Kanaky New Caledonia. A relationship and shared journey that had been forged since 1989.
‘Stark reminder’
The pro-independence riots of May 2024 served as a “stark reminder that much work remains to be done to realise the full aspirations of the Kanak people”.
As the Pacific awaited a “hopeful and favourable outcome” from the Troika Plus mission to Kanaky New Caledonia, the coalition said that it trusted Rabuka to “carry forward the voices, struggles, dreams and enduring aspirations of the people of Kanaky New Caledonia”.
The statement called on Rabuka as the new chair of MSG to:
Ensure the core founding values, and mission of the MSG are upheld;
Re-evaluate Indonesia’s appropriateness as an associate member of the MSG; and
Elevate discussions on West Papua and Kanaky New Caledonia at the MSG level and through discussions at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders.
The Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights (NGOCHR) represents the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (chair), Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, femLINKpacific, Social Empowerment and Education Program, and Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji. Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is an observer.
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.
Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.
Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.
The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.
Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.
“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”
‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”
She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.
“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.
“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.
“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . publication July 2025. Image: Little Island Press
In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.
Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.
“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”
Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.
The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.
His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.
Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.
Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary day, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
Michelle Taylor sat at the defense table during her sentencing hearing in St. Augustine, Florida, listening to a trio of forensic chemists lay out the scientific evidence to prove what she’d sworn for years: She had not set the fire that burned down her house and killed her own son.
It was the last Friday in May, and the St. Johns County courthouse was mostly empty.
The expert witnesses each testified via Zoom, their faces appearing on a pair of large monitors inside the wood-paneled courtroom. None of the experts knew Taylor personally. But they knew chemistry. And each made clear that the case against Taylor had been based on junk science: faulty analysis by a state lab worker who detected gasoline in fire debris samples where there was none.
The testimony was vindicating for Taylor. But it also came too late to prevent what she insisted was a wrongful conviction. More than six years after the fire, she had reluctantly accepted a plea deal at the urging of her defense attorney. It allowed her to maintain her innocence — and avoid a mandatory life sentence had she gone to trial and lost. But it had not cleared her name. Now Taylor hoped the hearing might.
Taylor’s home caught fire on the night of October 23, 2018. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window. But her 11-year-old son David went back for the family dog and died. Investigators became immediately suspicious of Taylor after a dog trained to detect accelerants alerted in several spots throughout the home. At the state fire marshal lab outside Tallahassee, fire debris analyst Dee Ann Turner examined samples collected from the scene and repeatedly found gasoline, a telltale sign of arson.
But Turner was disastrously wrong, the witnesses said. According to the experts, she had misidentified gasoline in 12 different samples taken from Taylor’s home. The samples were “very clearly not gasoline,” testified John Lentini, a renowned fire scientist who first reviewed the data and submitted his findings in a defense report in January 2024. Turner’s erroneous analysis had gone undetected for so long because investigators had little reason to suspect such sweeping mistakes — “nor did they have the expertise to question it,” he testified.
The faulty forensics became the basis for the entire case against Taylor, Lentini said. “Every time another possibility was considered, the [lead investigator] said, ‘Yeah but we’ve got gasoline here.’”
Prosecutors had long known that their forensic evidence was fatally flawed. Lentini’s report had been reviewed by a pair of chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who agreed that the data did not show gasoline. Yet Seventh Judicial Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza had refused to drop the charges against Taylor, instead seizing on financial improprieties in her bank records as proof that she committed arson for profit. Taylor and her husband were behind in their mortgage at the time of the fire. Despite having money to pay for it, there was evidence that Taylor had defrauded area churches to cover the payments instead.
Such circumstantial evidence did not prove anything on its own. But Taylor’s attorney, John Rockwell, worried it may be enough for a jury to convict his client anyway. He worked out a plea deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop the arson charge if Taylor pleaded no contest to manslaughter. Rockwell, a former prosecutor, began to prepare for the sentencing hearing the way he would for a criminal trial. If he could prove that the scientific evidence did not hold up, he could convince the judge to impose the lowest possible sentence.
The stakes remained high. Under the plea deal, Seventh Judicial Circuit Judge Lee Smith could still sentence her to as many as 13 years in prison. And while the scientific evidence was certainly on Taylor’s side, there was no guarantee Smith would be moved by it. At the start of the hearing, Lee asked Taylor: “And you still want to proceed today with the sentencing knowing the possible range of possible sentences that you’re facing?”
“Yes, sir,” Taylor said.
No Gray Area
I first wrote about Taylor in March, delving into the fire investigation in her case as well as the Florida lab, which had a record of faulty fire debris analysis. At that time, Taylor was scheduled to go to trial over the summer — and prosecutors had asked the judge to limit what Lentini would be allowed to say to the jury about the lab, arguing that its history was irrelevant.
Lentini had been raising alarm over the lab for years. The lab’s flawed gasoline findings had led numerous people to be wrongly accused of arson — including in a death penalty case. In 2016, he filed an ethics complaint against the lab, which led to an audit by a team of independent experts. The results were abysmal: Of 26 cases they selected for reanalysis, lab analysts had wrongly reported gasoline in 14 of them. The lab temporarily lost its professional accreditation but regained it after agreeing to a remedial plan, which included a self-review of work dating back to 2009. But the review was never completed, leaving some 8,000 cases unexamined.
“There is no gasoline in these samples.”
At the heart of the problem, Lentini argued, was that state lab analysts were not following the professional standards for fire debris analysis that had been in place for decades. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed in the 1990s by the American Society for Testing and Materials. A standard known as ASTM E1618 laid out specific parameters for identifying gasoline. The auditors had previously found that lab analysts were not following the standard, instead using an “unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community.” Although the lab claimed to abide by ASTM E1618, Turner’s work showed that, in Taylor’s case, this was not true.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Florida Division of Criminal Investigations’ Bureau of Forensic Services said: “BFS adheres to industry standards, including ASTM E1618, to detect trace levels of ignitable liquids and ensure reliable, science-based conclusions. Moreover, the lab maintains a culture of continuous improvement, regularly evaluating its procedures, investing in advanced training, and participating in proficiency testing to uphold the highest integrity of its work.”
The evidence taken from Taylor’s home in the fall of 2018 had gone through a common procedure for testing fire debris. Samples were collected in metal cans, which were brought to the lab and heated in an oven. The resulting vapors were captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can, which were then rinsed with a solvent, producing a solution to be injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The GCMS, as it is commonly known, produced a chromatogram: an electronic signature made of up peaks and valleys.
This process is straightforward until it comes to interpreting the data. The peaks on a chromatogram that indicate gasoline can easily be mistaken for peaks indicating other petroleum-based products. For this reason, ASTM E1618 dictates that lab analysts start their examination by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios in order to be labeled positive for gasoline.
According to Reta Newman, a veteran chemist and one of the independent auditors who uncovered problems at the state lab in 2016, the samples in Taylor’s case had not passed this first step. Testifying at the sentencing hearing that afternoon, she agreed with Lentini’s blunt assessment. “There is no gasoline in these samples,” she testified.
“There is no gasoline in these samples.”
Newman, the director of the Pinellas County Forensic Lab, gave a quick chemistry lesson. “Gasoline is a blended product,” she explained, full of components that are added to improve performance in internal combustion engines. These include a class of hydrocarbons known as aromatic compounds, which are ubiquitous in petroleum-based products, including materials used to furnish modern homes. Newman motioned toward the green courtroom carpet as an example. When such synthetic materials burn in a fire, they “unfortunately break down into aromatic products — the same compounds that we see in gasoline.”
On a chromatogram from a gasoline sample, aromatic compounds form a specific pattern that can be hard to differentiate from those produced by aromatics in burned synthetic materials. “Fortunately for us,” Newman said, there is another kind of hydrocarbon that analysts use to identify gasoline in a fire debris sample. “I apologize for being so nerdy. But isoalkanes are also added to gasoline,” she said. And unlike aromatics, isoalkanes generally do not turn up in burned synthetic material.
Turner had correctly identified aromatic compounds in the fire debris taken from Taylor’s home, Newman said, although the peak patterns “were much more consistent” with the burning of synthetic material rather than gasoline. But the data showed an absence of isoalkanes. Under ASTM E1618, this should have been disqualifying. Yet Turner had reported the samples positive.
Rockwell, Taylor’s attorney, asked whether this was a plain fact or a subjective opinion. “If two different scientists look at this, is it very easy to tell that this is either gasoline or not gasoline?” he asked. Newman acknowledged that many cases present samples where there are gray areas. But not here. “There is no gray area.”
A metal can used to collect fire debris samples from the Taylor home in 2018. The samples were tested at the Bureau of Forensic Services lab in Havana, Fla.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The third and last expert witness for the defense was Laurel Mason, a veteran chemist and director of a Georgia lab called Analytical Forensic Associates. Unlike Lentini or Newman, who had only reviewed Turner’s reports and chromatographic data, Mason had actually reexamined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris from Taylor’s home. She found no proof of gasoline or any other ignitable liquid.
There was a haunting irony to Mason’s testimony. She had actually first encountered Taylor’s case in 2018, when one of her lab analysts had examined fire debris samples taken from the home on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company. That analyst found no evidence of an ignitable liquid. The insurance investigator concluded that the cause of the fire was undetermined — and Taylor’s insurance company paid the claim in full. Had Mason been the analyst first assigned to examine the evidence on behalf of the state rather than the insurance company, Taylor would almost certainly have never been arrested for arson.
Mason had found a number of things alarming about Turner’s work. There was the analysis itself, which was clearly flawed. But she was also concerned about the lab’s handling of evidence. Rockwell had asked for permission to retest the carbon strips after discovering that the fire debris samples themselves had been destroyed by the lab. But the lab resisted providing the strips, offering instead to cut them in two and allow the defense to test one half of each. Posting on a listserv for fire debris analysts in late January, Turner had solicited recommendations for any scientific literature that might support this plan. She was not successful, perhaps because, according to Mason, altering the carbon strips went against best practices for preserving evidence.
Rockwell asked Mason about a strange turn of events that followed her examination of the carbon strips. Shortly after Mason submitted her defense report in February 2025, Turner herself issued an amended report on behalf of the state lab, suddenly altering four of her original findings without explanation. Of the samples she had originally determined to be positive for gasoline, four were now negative. “The curious thing to me was the documentation,” Mason testified. On the data sheet accompanying the report, where Turner had crossed out four of the original findings, she had written her initials, along with the date: February 26, 2025. Yet the report itself was dated January 2025.
To Rockwell, it seemed clear that the amended report had been deliberately backdated to make it appear as if it had preceded Mason’s report — a stealth correction designed to circumvent any accountability for the lab’s mistakes.
The lab did not respond to specific questions about the backdated report, but said in a statement its “technicians are extensively trained and conduct rigorous reviews of their findings, often re-examining evidence in preparation for depositions or expert testimony.”
Whatever the truth of the timing, it was clearly unusual for an expert to go back and change their conclusions six and a half years later. “I have never seen that before,” Mason said.
“I Hope This Can Be Corrected”
In a teal blouse and freshly colored hair, 41-year-old Taylor listened to the expert testimony without expression. She’d lost weight since her last court date, the effect of stress, according to her most vocal advocate Megan Wallace, who Taylor had met at the county jail, and who wept in the back of the courtroom for much of the hearing.
Taylor’s arrest had made her a villain in the press. Yet almost no local media had shown up at the hearing. Though a TV reporter sat in the jury box alongside a cameraman, her subsequent report would make no mention of the flawed forensics at the center of the case.
Taylor’s husband Dennis and their daughter Bailey sat in the front of the gallery. The fire and its aftermath had torn their family apart. Dennis’s mother Lillian had blamed Taylor for David’s death, telling a police detective in an interview that she believed her daughter-in-law had set the fire for insurance money. But she had since disavowed her statements. In an email to the judge, she wrote, “I strongly disagree and contradict anything I said,” adding that she was “heavily medicated” at the time. “I hope this can be corrected and we can have a satisfactory outcome and closure to all parties involved.”
Other family members had written character letters on Taylor’s behalf, along with friends, neighbors, and co-workers who described Taylor as generous, hardworking, and completely committed to her children. David’s football coach described Taylor as “the most supportive and involved parent,” sharing an anecdote about David I had previously heard in my interviews. “I vividly remember moments in the middle of games when he’d run over to give her a kiss, not caring if his teammates saw,” he wrote. “Their bond was pure and inspiring.”
Several of the letters begged the judge to let Taylor go free. Although her supporters understood the plea deal in theory, they could not comprehend why she should serve any more time behind bars for a crime she did not commit.
Representing the state was Assistant State Attorney Sarah Thomas, who flatly rejected the notion that Taylor was innocent, telling the judge at the start of the hearing that prosecutors had agreed to the plea deal because they did not believe she had meant to kill her son. Thomas called a series of witnesses whose brief testimony seemed mainly aimed at casting Taylor in a suspicious light, from a uniformed sheriff’s deputy who said that Taylor had told Bailey not to speak to investigators at the hospital on the night of the fire, to a fraud expert who described the scam Taylor appeared to have been running against local churches — including, it turned out, his own.
With no witness to discredit the scientific testimony of the defense experts, Thomas instead sought to reframe the problem. It wasn’t that the lab had reported gasoline where there was none, she suggested. Rather, the necessary components in the contested samples were simply too low to fulfill the “threshold” necessary to report it as gasoline. This was highly misleading; as the experts had testified, the fire debris samples were actually missing the necessary components to be accurately classified as gasoline. And the whole purpose of a standard is to ensure accurate interpretation of forensic evidence. If the indicators were too low to report gasoline, a sample had to be classified as negative.
Nevertheless, Thomas cast this as a mere technicality. She called the former K-9 handler whose accelerant detection dog had alerted at the site of the fire — and who explained that just because a dog’s alerts are not always confirmed by a lab analyst, it does not mean that there is nothing there. “The lab has a level that they have to meet,” he said. “The experts will tell you that what the dog is picking up is below what they can call by their standards. It is gasoline. Everyone at the lab people kept telling us, ‘It is gasoline but it does not meet our level to be able to call it that for court.’”
Thousands of Samples
The last person to testify for the state was Dee Ann Turner herself. Her name had been visible on the TV monitors since the start of the hearing, suggesting that she’d heard the defense experts’ critiques of her work and would be well-positioned to respond. But this was not the case. “I’ve been sitting waiting to be let in,” she chuckled.
Turner had worked at the lab for a decade. She was hired in 2015, the year before the lab temporarily lost its accreditation. As the state’s sole scientific expert, she was the only witness who could conceivably rehabilitate the state’s case against Taylor. Instead, her testimony was unpersuasive and off-putting. She was awkward and halting, fumbling basic questions and laughing at uncomfortable moments. When Thomas asked when she submitted her amended lab report — a critical chance to clear up any suspicions that it had been purposefully backdated as Rockwell claimed — Turner shuffled clumsily through her paperwork for more than two minutes. She finally answered that she submitted the report in January 2025, explaining that her notes were dated February 2025 because she’d forgotten to date and initial them.
Thomas asked Turner why she had gone back to revise her 2018 findings to begin with. “After reading Mr. Lentini’s deposition I went back and looked at the data,” Turner replied. “I decided, you know, this data really isn’t sufficient for a positive call.”
The answer seemed to catch the prosecutor off guard. Thomas had cast Lentini as hopelessly biased — a man with a “vendetta” against the state lab. Now her own expert was saying that Lentini’s opinion had prompted her to reexamine her own work. In her closing argument, Thomas would go on to insist that, in fact, Turner had changed her findings on the basis of the other experts, who were more worthy of respect — never mind what Turner herself said on the stand.
On cross-examination, Rockwell probed further into the question of what had prompted Turner to revisit her analysis from 2018. Did anything change about her approach to fire debris analysis between 2018 and 2025? Turner said that the lab’s reporting requirements had become stricter after its accreditation was temporarily suspended. “We’re being more conservative in our calls,” she said. But Rockwell pointed out that the accreditation had been suspended and restored in 2016. Turner’s analysis in the case had taken place two years later. Turner was forced to concede that, in fact, nothing had changed.
Rockwell asked Turner if she was aware of Laurel Mason’s retesting of the carbon strips. Did it surprise her that Mason found no proof of an ignitable liquid in the fire debris samples? Yes, “I’m actually quite surprised,” Turner said. Would it surprise her to know that Reta Newman, “one of the preeminent authorities in the fire debris chemistry field also has the same opinion as Mr. Lentini and Ms. Mason?” Yes, Turner said. “I’m surprised by that as well.”
Rockwell pointed out that, in a total of 22 samples she’d examined in the case, Turner had reversed her determinations in four. This came out to 18 percent. Wasn’t this an unacceptable error rate for an expert like her? Turner hesitated. “It’s not wrong,” she said. “I still think that there’s gasoline in those samples that I changed. It’s just — the data’s just not sufficient for me to report it.”
Rockwell asked the question again, over the objection of the state. When her lab analysis is used by investigators “to arrest somebody for first-degree murder and arson, when that can change the course of someone’s life forever, do you think that’s an appropriate standard of error?” he asked.
“No,” Turner finally said.
Still, she objected to the characterization of her work. “This is one case,” she said. Over the course of her career, “I’ve analyzed thousands of samples.”
A view of the living room in the back of the Taylor home, believed to be the area where the fire started on Oct. 23, 2018.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The Most Important Evidence
The last round of testimony came from Taylor’s family. Her mother tried to read a letter to the court but left the stand after becoming too emotional, leaving Rockwell’s co-counsel to read it instead. Bailey and her father, Dennis, both spoke briefly, holding their emotions at bay. But the trauma of the fire and its aftermath was written on their faces.
When Taylor stood to address the court, her words quickly gave way to anguished sobs. She talked about her three children, one of whom had died in a tragic accident just a few years before David. In the months leading to the fire, she said, her grandmother had died of cancer, which had led to Taylor’s financial problems. “When she didn’t have the money, I used my money,” she said. “I would’ve gave her every last dime I had to save her life.” Above all, she wanted the judge to know that she did everything she could to save David from the fire. “I lived for my son.”
Before delivering his closing argument, Rockwell flagged one last piece of evidence for the judge: a polygraph test given to Taylor in early May. Taylor had been asked three variations of a single question: Did she set a fire in her home in October 2018? Taylor had passed every time.
Polygraphs have long been known to be unreliable and thus inadmissible in criminal trials. Although the rules of evidence governing the sentencing hearing were different, Thomas was suddenly concerned about junk science, objecting to the polygraph, and arguing that the judge had to find “some reliability of the evidence” before it could be introduced. But Smith said that the polygraph results had been included in the binder he’d received prior to the hearing. She had not objected then. Besides, he said, “I’ve already reviewed it.”
In his closing, Rockwell called the case “the most difficult case I think I’ve ever worked on in my career.” He decried Turner’s laughter and “cavalier attitude” upon being confronted with her errors. Thomas countered that Turner’s laughter had been due to nerves, blaming Rockwell for pummeling her with the same question over and over again. She reiterated that Lentini was too biased to be believed. But when Smith asked Thomas whether she had any response to the other experts — or to the ATF chemists who had agreed with Lentini more than a year earlier — the prosecutor had little to say.
Smith was quiet for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “The most important piece of evidence, I think, in any arson case is the science,” the judge said. He was not an expert himself, he added, and declined to say which side was correct. But he was going to impose the lowest sentence: three years in prison, with credit for time served.
Taylor was taken into custody moments later. She embraced her lawyers, thanking Rockwell profusely, then hastily took off her watch to give to her family with the rest of her belongings before being handcuffed. Her mother asked a sheriff’s deputy permission to give her a hug but was denied.
On June 11, Taylor was transferred to the Florida Women’s Reception Center in Ocala. In an email this week, she said she would discuss her case after she gets out of prison, which should be in a matter of weeks given the nearly three years she spent in jail. She is scheduled for release in August.
Michelle Taylor sat at the defense table during her sentencing hearing in St. Augustine, Florida, listening to a trio of forensic chemists lay out the scientific evidence to prove what she’d sworn for years: She had not set the fire that burned down her house and killed her own son.
It was the last Friday in May, and the St. Johns County courthouse was mostly empty.
The expert witnesses each testified via Zoom, their faces appearing on a pair of large monitors inside the wood-paneled courtroom. None of the experts knew Taylor personally. But they knew chemistry. And each made clear that the case against Taylor had been based on junk science: faulty analysis by a state lab worker who detected gasoline in fire debris samples where there was none.
The testimony was vindicating for Taylor. But it also came too late to prevent what she insisted was a wrongful conviction. More than six years after the fire, she had reluctantly accepted a plea deal at the urging of her defense attorney. It allowed her to maintain her innocence — and avoid a mandatory life sentence had she gone to trial and lost. But it had not cleared her name. Now Taylor hoped the hearing might.
Taylor’s home caught fire on the night of October 23, 2018. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window. But her 11-year-old son David went back for the family dog and died. Investigators became immediately suspicious of Taylor after a dog trained to detect accelerants alerted in several spots throughout the home. At the state fire marshal lab outside Tallahassee, fire debris analyst Dee Ann Turner examined samples collected from the scene and repeatedly found gasoline, a telltale sign of arson.
But Turner was disastrously wrong, the witnesses said. According to the experts, she had misidentified gasoline in 12 different samples taken from Taylor’s home. The samples were “very clearly not gasoline,” testified John Lentini, a renowned fire scientist who first reviewed the data and submitted his findings in a defense report in January 2024. Turner’s erroneous analysis had gone undetected for so long because investigators had little reason to suspect such sweeping mistakes — “nor did they have the expertise to question it,” he testified.
The faulty forensics became the basis for the entire case against Taylor, Lentini said. “Every time another possibility was considered, the [lead investigator] said, ‘Yeah but we’ve got gasoline here.’”
Prosecutors had long known that their forensic evidence was fatally flawed. Lentini’s report had been reviewed by a pair of chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who agreed that the data did not show gasoline. Yet Seventh Judicial Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza had refused to drop the charges against Taylor, instead seizing on financial improprieties in her bank records as proof that she committed arson for profit. Taylor and her husband were behind in their mortgage at the time of the fire. Despite having money to pay for it, there was evidence that Taylor had defrauded area churches to cover the payments instead.
Such circumstantial evidence did not prove anything on its own. But Taylor’s attorney, John Rockwell, worried it may be enough for a jury to convict his client anyway. He worked out a plea deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop the arson charge if Taylor pleaded no contest to manslaughter. Rockwell, a former prosecutor, began to prepare for the sentencing hearing the way he would for a criminal trial. If he could prove that the scientific evidence did not hold up, he could convince the judge to impose the lowest possible sentence.
The stakes remained high. Under the plea deal, Seventh Judicial Circuit Judge Lee Smith could still sentence her to as many as 13 years in prison. And while the scientific evidence was certainly on Taylor’s side, there was no guarantee Smith would be moved by it. At the start of the hearing, Lee asked Taylor: “And you still want to proceed today with the sentencing knowing the possible range of possible sentences that you’re facing?”
“Yes, sir,” Taylor said.
No Gray Area
I first wrote about Taylor in March, delving into the fire investigation in her case as well as the Florida lab, which had a record of faulty fire debris analysis. At that time, Taylor was scheduled to go to trial over the summer — and prosecutors had asked the judge to limit what Lentini would be allowed to say to the jury about the lab, arguing that its history was irrelevant.
Lentini had been raising alarm over the lab for years. The lab’s flawed gasoline findings had led numerous people to be wrongly accused of arson — including in a death penalty case. In 2016, he filed an ethics complaint against the lab, which led to an audit by a team of independent experts. The results were abysmal: Of 26 cases they selected for reanalysis, lab analysts had wrongly reported gasoline in 14 of them. The lab temporarily lost its professional accreditation but regained it after agreeing to a remedial plan, which included a self-review of work dating back to 2009. But the review was never completed, leaving some 8,000 cases unexamined.
“There is no gasoline in these samples.”
At the heart of the problem, Lentini argued, was that state lab analysts were not following the professional standards for fire debris analysis that had been in place for decades. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed in the 1990s by the American Society for Testing and Materials. A standard known as ASTM E1618 laid out specific parameters for identifying gasoline. The auditors had previously found that lab analysts were not following the standard, instead using an “unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community.” Although the lab claimed to abide by ASTM E1618, Turner’s work showed that, in Taylor’s case, this was not true.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Florida Division of Criminal Investigations’ Bureau of Forensic Services said: “BFS adheres to industry standards, including ASTM E1618, to detect trace levels of ignitable liquids and ensure reliable, science-based conclusions. Moreover, the lab maintains a culture of continuous improvement, regularly evaluating its procedures, investing in advanced training, and participating in proficiency testing to uphold the highest integrity of its work.”
The evidence taken from Taylor’s home in the fall of 2018 had gone through a common procedure for testing fire debris. Samples were collected in metal cans, which were brought to the lab and heated in an oven. The resulting vapors were captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can, which were then rinsed with a solvent, producing a solution to be injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The GCMS, as it is commonly known, produced a chromatogram: an electronic signature made of up peaks and valleys.
This process is straightforward until it comes to interpreting the data. The peaks on a chromatogram that indicate gasoline can easily be mistaken for peaks indicating other petroleum-based products. For this reason, ASTM E1618 dictates that lab analysts start their examination by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios in order to be labeled positive for gasoline.
According to Reta Newman, a veteran chemist and one of the independent auditors who uncovered problems at the state lab in 2016, the samples in Taylor’s case had not passed this first step. Testifying at the sentencing hearing that afternoon, she agreed with Lentini’s blunt assessment. “There is no gasoline in these samples,” she testified.
“There is no gasoline in these samples.”
Newman, the director of the Pinellas County Forensic Lab, gave a quick chemistry lesson. “Gasoline is a blended product,” she explained, full of components that are added to improve performance in internal combustion engines. These include a class of hydrocarbons known as aromatic compounds, which are ubiquitous in petroleum-based products, including materials used to furnish modern homes. Newman motioned toward the green courtroom carpet as an example. When such synthetic materials burn in a fire, they “unfortunately break down into aromatic products — the same compounds that we see in gasoline.”
On a chromatogram from a gasoline sample, aromatic compounds form a specific pattern that can be hard to differentiate from those produced by aromatics in burned synthetic materials. “Fortunately for us,” Newman said, there is another kind of hydrocarbon that analysts use to identify gasoline in a fire debris sample. “I apologize for being so nerdy. But isoalkanes are also added to gasoline,” she said. And unlike aromatics, isoalkanes generally do not turn up in burned synthetic material.
Turner had correctly identified aromatic compounds in the fire debris taken from Taylor’s home, Newman said, although the peak patterns “were much more consistent” with the burning of synthetic material rather than gasoline. But the data showed an absence of isoalkanes. Under ASTM E1618, this should have been disqualifying. Yet Turner had reported the samples positive.
Rockwell, Taylor’s attorney, asked whether this was a plain fact or a subjective opinion. “If two different scientists look at this, is it very easy to tell that this is either gasoline or not gasoline?” he asked. Newman acknowledged that many cases present samples where there are gray areas. But not here. “There is no gray area.”
A metal can used to collect fire debris samples from the Taylor home in 2018. The samples were tested at the Bureau of Forensic Services lab in Havana, Fla.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The third and last expert witness for the defense was Laurel Mason, a veteran chemist and director of a Georgia lab called Analytical Forensic Associates. Unlike Lentini or Newman, who had only reviewed Turner’s reports and chromatographic data, Mason had actually reexamined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris from Taylor’s home. She found no proof of gasoline or any other ignitable liquid.
There was a haunting irony to Mason’s testimony. She had actually first encountered Taylor’s case in 2018, when one of her lab analysts had examined fire debris samples taken from the home on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company. That analyst found no evidence of an ignitable liquid. The insurance investigator concluded that the cause of the fire was undetermined — and Taylor’s insurance company paid the claim in full. Had Mason been the analyst first assigned to examine the evidence on behalf of the state rather than the insurance company, Taylor would almost certainly have never been arrested for arson.
Mason had found a number of things alarming about Turner’s work. There was the analysis itself, which was clearly flawed. But she was also concerned about the lab’s handling of evidence. Rockwell had asked for permission to retest the carbon strips after discovering that the fire debris samples themselves had been destroyed by the lab. But the lab resisted providing the strips, offering instead to cut them in two and allow the defense to test one half of each. Posting on a listserv for fire debris analysts in late January, Turner had solicited recommendations for any scientific literature that might support this plan. She was not successful, perhaps because, according to Mason, altering the carbon strips went against best practices for preserving evidence.
Rockwell asked Mason about a strange turn of events that followed her examination of the carbon strips. Shortly after Mason submitted her defense report in February 2025, Turner herself issued an amended report on behalf of the state lab, suddenly altering four of her original findings without explanation. Of the samples she had originally determined to be positive for gasoline, four were now negative. “The curious thing to me was the documentation,” Mason testified. On the data sheet accompanying the report, where Turner had crossed out four of the original findings, she had written her initials, along with the date: February 26, 2025. Yet the report itself was dated January 2025.
To Rockwell, it seemed clear that the amended report had been deliberately backdated to make it appear as if it had preceded Mason’s report — a stealth correction designed to circumvent any accountability for the lab’s mistakes.
The lab did not respond to specific questions about the backdated report, but said in a statement its “technicians are extensively trained and conduct rigorous reviews of their findings, often re-examining evidence in preparation for depositions or expert testimony.”
Whatever the truth of the timing, it was clearly unusual for an expert to go back and change their conclusions six and a half years later. “I have never seen that before,” Mason said.
“I Hope This Can Be Corrected”
In a teal blouse and freshly colored hair, 41-year-old Taylor listened to the expert testimony without expression. She’d lost weight since her last court date, the effect of stress, according to her most vocal advocate Megan Wallace, who Taylor had met at the county jail, and who wept in the back of the courtroom for much of the hearing.
Taylor’s arrest had made her a villain in the press. Yet almost no local media had shown up at the hearing. Though a TV reporter sat in the jury box alongside a cameraman, her subsequent report would make no mention of the flawed forensics at the center of the case.
Taylor’s husband Dennis and their daughter Bailey sat in the front of the gallery. The fire and its aftermath had torn their family apart. Dennis’s mother Lillian had blamed Taylor for David’s death, telling a police detective in an interview that she believed her daughter-in-law had set the fire for insurance money. But she had since disavowed her statements. In an email to the judge, she wrote, “I strongly disagree and contradict anything I said,” adding that she was “heavily medicated” at the time. “I hope this can be corrected and we can have a satisfactory outcome and closure to all parties involved.”
Other family members had written character letters on Taylor’s behalf, along with friends, neighbors, and co-workers who described Taylor as generous, hardworking, and completely committed to her children. David’s football coach described Taylor as “the most supportive and involved parent,” sharing an anecdote about David I had previously heard in my interviews. “I vividly remember moments in the middle of games when he’d run over to give her a kiss, not caring if his teammates saw,” he wrote. “Their bond was pure and inspiring.”
Several of the letters begged the judge to let Taylor go free. Although her supporters understood the plea deal in theory, they could not comprehend why she should serve any more time behind bars for a crime she did not commit.
Representing the state was Assistant State Attorney Sarah Thomas, who flatly rejected the notion that Taylor was innocent, telling the judge at the start of the hearing that prosecutors had agreed to the plea deal because they did not believe she had meant to kill her son. Thomas called a series of witnesses whose brief testimony seemed mainly aimed at casting Taylor in a suspicious light, from a uniformed sheriff’s deputy who said that Taylor had told Bailey not to speak to investigators at the hospital on the night of the fire, to a fraud expert who described the scam Taylor appeared to have been running against local churches — including, it turned out, his own.
With no witness to discredit the scientific testimony of the defense experts, Thomas instead sought to reframe the problem. It wasn’t that the lab had reported gasoline where there was none, she suggested. Rather, the necessary components in the contested samples were simply too low to fulfill the “threshold” necessary to report it as gasoline. This was highly misleading; as the experts had testified, the fire debris samples were actually missing the necessary components to be accurately classified as gasoline. And the whole purpose of a standard is to ensure accurate interpretation of forensic evidence. If the indicators were too low to report gasoline, a sample had to be classified as negative.
Nevertheless, Thomas cast this as a mere technicality. She called the former K-9 handler whose accelerant detection dog had alerted at the site of the fire — and who explained that just because a dog’s alerts are not always confirmed by a lab analyst, it does not mean that there is nothing there. “The lab has a level that they have to meet,” he said. “The experts will tell you that what the dog is picking up is below what they can call by their standards. It is gasoline. Everyone at the lab people kept telling us, ‘It is gasoline but it does not meet our level to be able to call it that for court.’”
Thousands of Samples
The last person to testify for the state was Dee Ann Turner herself. Her name had been visible on the TV monitors since the start of the hearing, suggesting that she’d heard the defense experts’ critiques of her work and would be well-positioned to respond. But this was not the case. “I’ve been sitting waiting to be let in,” she chuckled.
Turner had worked at the lab for a decade. She was hired in 2015, the year before the lab temporarily lost its accreditation. As the state’s sole scientific expert, she was the only witness who could conceivably rehabilitate the state’s case against Taylor. Instead, her testimony was unpersuasive and off-putting. She was awkward and halting, fumbling basic questions and laughing at uncomfortable moments. When Thomas asked when she submitted her amended lab report — a critical chance to clear up any suspicions that it had been purposefully backdated as Rockwell claimed — Turner shuffled clumsily through her paperwork for more than two minutes. She finally answered that she submitted the report in January 2025, explaining that her notes were dated February 2025 because she’d forgotten to date and initial them.
Thomas asked Turner why she had gone back to revise her 2018 findings to begin with. “After reading Mr. Lentini’s deposition I went back and looked at the data,” Turner replied. “I decided, you know, this data really isn’t sufficient for a positive call.”
The answer seemed to catch the prosecutor off guard. Thomas had cast Lentini as hopelessly biased — a man with a “vendetta” against the state lab. Now her own expert was saying that Lentini’s opinion had prompted her to reexamine her own work. In her closing argument, Thomas would go on to insist that, in fact, Turner had changed her findings on the basis of the other experts, who were more worthy of respect — never mind what Turner herself said on the stand.
On cross-examination, Rockwell probed further into the question of what had prompted Turner to revisit her analysis from 2018. Did anything change about her approach to fire debris analysis between 2018 and 2025? Turner said that the lab’s reporting requirements had become stricter after its accreditation was temporarily suspended. “We’re being more conservative in our calls,” she said. But Rockwell pointed out that the accreditation had been suspended and restored in 2016. Turner’s analysis in the case had taken place two years later. Turner was forced to concede that, in fact, nothing had changed.
Rockwell asked Turner if she was aware of Laurel Mason’s retesting of the carbon strips. Did it surprise her that Mason found no proof of an ignitable liquid in the fire debris samples? Yes, “I’m actually quite surprised,” Turner said. Would it surprise her to know that Reta Newman, “one of the preeminent authorities in the fire debris chemistry field also has the same opinion as Mr. Lentini and Ms. Mason?” Yes, Turner said. “I’m surprised by that as well.”
Rockwell pointed out that, in a total of 22 samples she’d examined in the case, Turner had reversed her determinations in four. This came out to 18 percent. Wasn’t this an unacceptable error rate for an expert like her? Turner hesitated. “It’s not wrong,” she said. “I still think that there’s gasoline in those samples that I changed. It’s just — the data’s just not sufficient for me to report it.”
Rockwell asked the question again, over the objection of the state. When her lab analysis is used by investigators “to arrest somebody for first-degree murder and arson, when that can change the course of someone’s life forever, do you think that’s an appropriate standard of error?” he asked.
“No,” Turner finally said.
Still, she objected to the characterization of her work. “This is one case,” she said. Over the course of her career, “I’ve analyzed thousands of samples.”
A view of the living room in the back of the Taylor home, believed to be the area where the fire started on Oct. 23, 2018.Photo: Florida Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations
The Most Important Evidence
The last round of testimony came from Taylor’s family. Her mother tried to read a letter to the court but left the stand after becoming too emotional, leaving Rockwell’s co-counsel to read it instead. Bailey and her father, Dennis, both spoke briefly, holding their emotions at bay. But the trauma of the fire and its aftermath was written on their faces.
When Taylor stood to address the court, her words quickly gave way to anguished sobs. She talked about her three children, one of whom had died in a tragic accident just a few years before David. In the months leading to the fire, she said, her grandmother had died of cancer, which had led to Taylor’s financial problems. “When she didn’t have the money, I used my money,” she said. “I would’ve gave her every last dime I had to save her life.” Above all, she wanted the judge to know that she did everything she could to save David from the fire. “I lived for my son.”
Before delivering his closing argument, Rockwell flagged one last piece of evidence for the judge: a polygraph test given to Taylor in early May. Taylor had been asked three variations of a single question: Did she set a fire in her home in October 2018? Taylor had passed every time.
Polygraphs have long been known to be unreliable and thus inadmissible in criminal trials. Although the rules of evidence governing the sentencing hearing were different, Thomas was suddenly concerned about junk science, objecting to the polygraph, and arguing that the judge had to find “some reliability of the evidence” before it could be introduced. But Smith said that the polygraph results had been included in the binder he’d received prior to the hearing. She had not objected then. Besides, he said, “I’ve already reviewed it.”
In his closing, Rockwell called the case “the most difficult case I think I’ve ever worked on in my career.” He decried Turner’s laughter and “cavalier attitude” upon being confronted with her errors. Thomas countered that Turner’s laughter had been due to nerves, blaming Rockwell for pummeling her with the same question over and over again. She reiterated that Lentini was too biased to be believed. But when Smith asked Thomas whether she had any response to the other experts — or to the ATF chemists who had agreed with Lentini more than a year earlier — the prosecutor had little to say.
Smith was quiet for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “The most important piece of evidence, I think, in any arson case is the science,” the judge said. He was not an expert himself, he added, and declined to say which side was correct. But he was going to impose the lowest sentence: three years in prison, with credit for time served.
Taylor was taken into custody moments later. She embraced her lawyers, thanking Rockwell profusely, then hastily took off her watch to give to her family with the rest of her belongings before being handcuffed. Her mother asked a sheriff’s deputy permission to give her a hug but was denied.
On June 11, Taylor was transferred to the Florida Women’s Reception Center in Ocala. In an email this week, she said she would discuss her case after she gets out of prison, which should be in a matter of weeks given the nearly three years she spent in jail. She is scheduled for release in August.
Advocacy groups in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) disrupted the US Department of Defense’s public meeting this week, which tackled proposed military training plans on Tinian, voicing strong opposition to further militarisation in the Marianas.
Members of the Marianas for Palestine, Prutehi Guahan and Commonwealth670 burst into the public hearing at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Garapan, chanting, “No build-up! No war!” and “Free, free, Palestine!”
As the chanting echoed throughout the venue on Wednesday, the DOD continued the proceedings to gather public input on its CNMI Joint Military Training proposal.
The US plan includes live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure, and a biosecurity facility. Officials said feedback from Tinian, Saipan and Rota communities would help shape the final environmental impact statement.
Salam Castro Younis, of Chamorro-Palestinian descent, linked the military expansion to global conflicts in Gaza and Iran.
“More militarisation isn’t the answer,” Younis said. “We don’t need to lose more land. Diplomacy and peace are the way forward – not more bombs.”
Saipan-born Chamorro activist Anufat Pangelinan echoed Younis’s sentiment, citing research connecting climate change and environmental degradation to global militarisation.
‘No part of a war’
“We don’t want to be part of a war we don’t support,” he said. “The Marianas shouldn’t be a tip of the spear – we should be a bridge for peace.”
The groups argue that CJMT could make Tinian a target, increasing regional hostility.
“We want to sustain ourselves without the looming threat of war,” Pangelinan added.
In response to public concerns from the 2015 draft EIS, the DOD scaled back its plans, reducing live-fire ranges from 14 to 2 and eliminating artillery, rocket and mortar exercises.
Mark Hashimoto, executive director of the US Marine Corps Forces Pacific, emphasised the importance of community input.
“The proposal includes live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure and a biosecurity facility,” he said.
Hashimoto noted that military lease lands on Tinian could support quarterly exercises involving up to 1000 personnel.
Economic impact concerns
Tinian residents expressed concerns about economic impacts, job opportunities, noise, environmental effects and further strain on local infrastructure.
The DOD is expected to issue a Record of Decision by spring 2026, balancing public feedback with national security and environmental considerations.
In a joint statement earlier this week, the activist groups said the people of Guam and the CNMI were “burdened by processes not meant to serve their home’s interests”.
The groups were referring to public input requirements for military plans involving the use of Guam and CNMI lands and waters for war training and testing.
“As colonies of the United States, the Mariana Islands continue to be forced into conflicts not of our people’s making,” the statement read.
“ After decades of displacement and political disenfranchisement, our communities are now in subservient positions that force an obligation to extend our lands, airspace, and waters for use in America’s never-ending cycle of war.”
They also lamented the “intense environmental degradation” and “growing housing and food insecurity” resulting from military expansion.
“Like other Pacific Islanders, we are also overrepresented disproportionately in the military and in combat,” they said.
“Meanwhile, prices on imported food, fuel, and essential goods will continue to rise with inflation and war.”
That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.
There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.
But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?
In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.
Victimhood serving narrative
Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.
And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.
Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.
Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.
Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.
Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.
Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.
Bias over Palestinian deaths
A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.
Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.
The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.
Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.
Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.
It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.
And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.
Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’
But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.
This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.
Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.
But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.
After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment
The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.
They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.
Low social justice spending
At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.
And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.
Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.
They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.
The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.
The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.
‘Don’t drop bombs’
And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.
Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.
But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.
Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.
Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.
Since President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, Republicans in Congress have been desperate to gut federal judges’ power to block his administration’s unlawful executive orders, policies, and threats. On Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority gave them what they wanted, further weakening the judiciary as an effective check on a White House that was already ignoring court orders with impunity.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent she read from the bench, calling the ruling “an attack on our system of law.”
The case stems from the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via an executive order issued hours after Trump was sworn in. Three different district court judges quickly blocked the executive order as unconstitutional under both the text of the Constitution and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent.
Friday’s decision did not address the merits of the executive order, but instead how the judges went about ensuring the core constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative wing drastically limited courts’ authority to issue injunctions even in the face of galling illegality affecting millions of people.
The three judges had issued a “universal” injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order, which meant the Trump administration could not enforce it anywhere in the country. A more limited injunction would have protected just the rights of the specific plaintiffs who sued — leaving the Trump regime free to target anyone who hadn’t gone to court themselves.
But from today forward, district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, which conservatives gleefully sought and obtained during the Biden administration to block student loan forgiveness and other policies.
“Curiously, this same Supreme Court never thought to say all the injunctions it upheld and stays it granted against Biden administration actions were outside its power,” observed Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley on social media. “But now apparently they are.”
Instead, federal courts may only use injunctions to block presidents and their administrations from violating the rights of the specific parties that filed suit. In effect, judges will have no ability to offer immediate relief to however many people outside the courtroom are suffering from illegal actions of the executive branch. The ruling is certain to spur more class-action lawsuits against the federal government, which are still allowed but carry significant procedural hurdles and additional costs.
“Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent. Eliminating universal injunctions “requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness,” Jackson wrote.
“This decision is devastating for U.S. families who are not protected by the limited injunction the Supreme Court left in place,” said Monica, a pregnant mother, asylum-seeker, and named plaintiff challenging the birthright citizenship executive order, in an emailed statement. “Hundreds of thousands of other U.S.-born children are in danger of not receiving U.S. citizenship. I know that every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U.S. citizenship — that is why I filed this lawsuit to not only protect my child’s rights, but the constitutional rights of all U.S.-born children of immigrants.”
The conservative supermajority framed the ruling as grounded in history and ancient principles about the limits of judicial authority. Jackson called this “legalese” a “smokescreen” that “obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”
The court’s three liberal dissenters — Justices Elena Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor — framed the decision in catastrophic terms.
“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,” wrote Jackson. “But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”
Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, wrote that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court failed to recognize that the “current administration is a unique threat to the rule of law,” and that it was disastrous to remove such “a useful tool for the judiciary to constrain the president at this particular moment.”
“It empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law.”
“It’s such a threat because it empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law,” Dorf wrote.
The plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration. In one of the cases, the plaintiffs quickly filed a motion in Maryland district court to certify their lawsuit as a class action.
“Even without a universal injunction, we will continue to litigate this case to ensure that every child born in the United States receives the citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment promises them, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” said William Powell, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, in an emailed statement. “The Executive Order is unconstitutional, and nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision today calls that ultimate conclusion into question.”
Since President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, Republicans in Congress have been desperate to gut federal judges’ power to block his administration’s unlawful executive orders, policies, and threats. On Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority gave them what they wanted, further weakening the judiciary as an effective check on a White House that was already ignoring court orders with impunity.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent she read from the bench, calling the ruling “an attack on our system of law.”
The case stems from the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via an executive order issued hours after Trump was sworn in. Three different district court judges quickly blocked the executive order as unconstitutional under both the text of the Constitution and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent.
Friday’s decision did not address the merits of the executive order, but instead how the judges went about ensuring the core constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative wing drastically limited courts’ authority to issue injunctions even in the face of galling illegality affecting millions of people.
The three judges had issued a “universal” injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order, which meant the Trump administration could not enforce it anywhere in the country. A more limited injunction would have protected just the rights of the specific plaintiffs who sued — leaving the Trump regime free to target anyone who hadn’t gone to court themselves.
But from today forward, district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, which conservatives gleefully sought and obtained during the Biden administration to block student loan forgiveness and other policies.
“Curiously, this same Supreme Court never thought to say all the injunctions it upheld and stays it granted against Biden administration actions were outside its power,” observed Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley on social media. “But now apparently they are.”
Instead, federal courts may only use injunctions to block presidents and their administrations from violating the rights of the specific parties that filed suit. In effect, judges will have no ability to offer immediate relief to however many people outside the courtroom are suffering from illegal actions of the executive branch. The ruling is certain to spur more class-action lawsuits against the federal government, which are still allowed but carry significant procedural hurdles and additional costs.
“Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent. Eliminating universal injunctions “requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness,” Jackson wrote.
“This decision is devastating for U.S. families who are not protected by the limited injunction the Supreme Court left in place,” said Monica, a pregnant mother, asylum-seeker, and named plaintiff challenging the birthright citizenship executive order, in an emailed statement. “Hundreds of thousands of other U.S.-born children are in danger of not receiving U.S. citizenship. I know that every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U.S. citizenship — that is why I filed this lawsuit to not only protect my child’s rights, but the constitutional rights of all U.S.-born children of immigrants.”
The conservative supermajority framed the ruling as grounded in history and ancient principles about the limits of judicial authority. Jackson called this “legalese” a “smokescreen” that “obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”
The court’s three liberal dissenters — Justices Elena Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor — framed the decision in catastrophic terms.
“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,” wrote Jackson. “But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”
Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, wrote that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court failed to recognize that the “current administration is a unique threat to the rule of law,” and that it was disastrous to remove such “a useful tool for the judiciary to constrain the president at this particular moment.”
“It empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law.”
“It’s such a threat because it empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law,” Dorf wrote.
The plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration. In one of the cases, the plaintiffs quickly filed a motion in Maryland district court to certify their lawsuit as a class action.
“Even without a universal injunction, we will continue to litigate this case to ensure that every child born in the United States receives the citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment promises them, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” said William Powell, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, in an emailed statement. “The Executive Order is unconstitutional, and nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision today calls that ultimate conclusion into question.”
Australian-Lebanese journalist and commentator Antoinette Lattouf’s unfair dismissal case win against the public broadcaster ABC in the Federal Court on Wednesday is a victory for all those who seek to tell the truth.
It is a breath of fresh air, after almost two years of lies and uncritical reporting about Israel’s genocide from the ABC and commercial media companies.
Lattouf was unfairly sacked in December 2023 for posting on her social media a Human Rights Watch report that detailed Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Justice Darryl Rangiah found that Lattouf had been sacked for her political opinions, given no opportunity to respond to misconduct allegations and that the ABC breached its Enterprise Agreement and section 772 of the Fair Work Act.
The Federal Court also found that ABC executives — then-chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor, editor-in-chief David Anderson and board chair Ita Buttrose — had sacked Lattouf in response to a pro-Israel lobby pressure campaign.
The coordinated email campaign from Zionist groups accused Lattouf of being “antisemitic” for condemning Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The judge awarded Lattouf A$70,000 in damages, based on findings that her sacking caused “great distress”, and more than $1 million in legal fees.
‘No Lebanese’ claim
Lattouf had alleged that her race or ethnicity had played a part in her sacking, which the ABC had initially responded to by claiming there was no such thing as a “Lebanese, Arab or Middle Eastern Race”, before backtracking.
The court found that this did not play a part in the decision to sack Lattouf.
The ABC’s own reporting of the ruling said “the ABC has damaged its reputation, and public perceptions around its ideals, integrity and independence”.
Outside the court, Lattouf said: “It is now June 2025 and Palestinian children are still being starved. We see their images every day, emaciated, skeletal, scavenging through the rubble for scraps.
“This unspeakable suffering is not accidental, it is engineered. Deliberately starving and killing children is a war crime.
“Today, the court has found that punishing someone for sharing facts about these war crimes is also illegal. I was punished for my political opinion.”
Palestine solidarity groups and democratic rights supporters have celebrated Lattouf’s victory.
An ‘eternal shame’
Palestine Action Group Sydney said: “It is to the eternal shame of our national broadcaster that it sacked a journalist because she opposed the genocide in Gaza.
“There should be a full inquiry into the systematic pro-Israel bias at the ABC, which for 21 months has acted as a propaganda wing of the Israeli military.”
Racial justice organisation Democracy in Colour said the ruling “exposes the systematic silencing taking place in Australian media institutions in regards to Palestine”.
Democracy in Colour chairperson Jamal Hakim said Lattouf was punished for “speaking truth to power”.
“When the ABC capitulated to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby . . . they didn’t just betray Antoinette — they betrayed their own editorial standards and the Australian public who deserve to know the truth about Israel’s human rights abuses.”
Noura Mansour, national director for Democracy in Colour, said the ABC had been “consistently shutting down valid criticism of the state of Israel” and suppressing the voices of people of colour and Palestinians. She said the national broadcaster had “worked to manufacture consent for the Israeli-US backed genocide”.
Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance chief executive Erin Madeley said: “Instead of defending its journalists, ABC management chose to appease powerful voices . . . they failed in their duty to push back against outside interference, racism and bullying.”
Win for ‘journalistic integrity’
Australian Greens leader Larissa Waters said the ruling was a win for “journalistic integrity and freedom of speech” and that “no one should be punished for speaking out about Gaza”.
Green Left editor Pip Hinman said the ruling was an “important victory for those who stand on the side of truth and justice”.
“It is more important than ever in an increasingly polarised world that journalists speak up and report the truth without fear of reprisal from the rich and powerful.
“Traditional and new media have the reach to shape public opinion. They have had a clear pro-Israel bias, despite international human rights agencies providing horrific data on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people around Australia continue to call for an end to the genocide in Gaza in protests every week. But the ABC and corporate media have largely ignored this movement of people from all walks of life. Disturbingly, the corporate media has gone along with some political leaders who claim this anti-war movement is antisemitic.
“As thousands continue to march every week for an end to the genocide in Gaza, the ABC and corporate media organisations have continued to push the lie that the Palestine solidarity movement, and indeed any criticism of Israel, is antisemitic.
“Green Left also hails those courageous mostly young journalists in Gaza, some 200 of whom have been killed by Israel since October 2023.
“Their livestreaming of Israel’s genocide cut through corporate media and political leaders’ lies and today makes it even harder for them to whitewash Israel’s crimes and Western complicity.
“Green Left congratulates Lattouf on her victory. We are proud to stand with the movement for justice and peace in Palestine, which played a part in her victory against the ABC management’s bias.”
The Supreme Court moved to limit access to health care for over 1.3 million South Carolinians on Thursday by allowing the state to block Medicaid recipients from getting care at Planned Parenthood. The tight restriction on reproductive rights will likely pave the way for similar bans in other states, as ongoing attacks on abortion providers further impinge on access to maternal, gynecological, and other basic forms of health care.
In a 6-3 decision, the court determined that Planned Parenthood clinics and patients in South Carolina may not sue the state for denying Medicaid funding to the reproductive care provider. The ruling overturns repeated lower court decisions that affirmed Medicaid recipients’ rights to visit a provider of their choosing that accepts the program. It comes against the backdrop of looming federal cuts to Medicaid, which would further restrict health care access for millions of low-income Americans.
In South Carolina, abortion is already subjected to a near-total ban. State law prohibits abortion after six weeks with limited exceptions — which is often before someone would be aware that they’re pregnant. Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has been direct about wanting to target Planned Parenthood because the network of clinics is known as an abortion provider.
“South Carolina has made it clear that we value the right to life,” McMaster said in a February statement. “Therefore, taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize abortion providers who are in direct opposition to their beliefs.”
The idea that Medicaid is subsidizing abortion care in South Carolina is incredibly misleading, said Susanna Birdsong, general counsel and vice president of compliance at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.
“Medicaid does not cover abortion except in very narrow circumstances of rape, incest in life of the pregnant person,” Birdsong said. “That’s been a federal rule since the 1970s.”
Planned Parenthood provides care for a host of other sexual and reproductive wellness concerns — meaning that low-income South Carolinians will lose access to “health care that has nothing to do with abortion,” Birdsong said. She pointed to things like testing for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screening, and birth control.
In its ruling, the court made clear that it was aware of the other services Planned Parenthood provides.
“Planned Parenthood South Atlantic operates two clinics in South Carolina, offering a wide range of services to Medicaid and non-Medicaid patients,” reads a summary of the decision. “It also performs abortions.”
The court noted that Planned Parenthood and a patient sued under the any-qualified-provider provision, which allows Medicaid patients to seek care from a provider of their choosing, but the majority determined they did not necessarily have an “enforceable” right to do so.
Experts expect that this decision will open the floodgates for other states to pass similar bans, limiting access to the largest provider of reproductive and sexual health care in the United States for millions of lower-income Americans.
“Other states certainly have tried it before,” said Dr. Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and president of the nonprofit Physicians for Reproductive Health. “Much in the same way that abortion bans really swept this country, I think we’re going to see similar effects.”
The decision to limit where Medicaid patients can access care disproportionately affects women of color, said Perritt. As of 2023, the majority of people enrolled in Medicaid in South Carolina were nonwhite, and roughly 39 percent of Medicaid enrollees were Black, according to health policy research nonprofit KFF.
Even before the decision, access to health care — particularly reproductive and sexual health care — in South Carolina was a challenge for lower-income residents. Roughly 41 of the state’s 46 counties are considered federally designated “Health Professional Shortage Areas,” and Medicaid recipients are disproportionately likely to live in communities with provider shortages.
“We’re talking about communities that are already marginalized from care, communities that already have disproportionately poor reproductive and sexual health outcomes,” said Perritt, who predicted the decision would have “significant negative health consequences.”
Aside from having one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, South Carolina is one of only 10 states not to expand Medicaid coverage since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. South Carolina also has the eighth-highest maternal mortality rate in the country, hovering around 47.2 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births, and some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections in the nation.
“It’s really a state that should be investing more in its public health infrastructure and making sure that people who live in the state have access to the care that they need,” said Birdsong.
Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights for State Innovation Exchange, said, like the state’s abortion ban, lower-income people in South Carolina will bear the brunt of the burden of this decision.
“It targets people who are already limited on resources to say, “You know what? On top of that, you actually don’t get to have a decision on the care that you get and the provider you get it from,” she said.
At the same time, the Trump administration and Congress are seeking to further restrict health coverage for low-income Americans. A Congressional Budget Office report found that the House of Representatives’ version of the “Big, Beautiful, Bill” would leave 16 million Americans without health insurance and kick 7.8 million people off of Medicaid. Senate Republicans are considering their own set of Medicaid cuts, though they’ve been snarled by political opposition.
“This is a clear and obvious attack on people with low income, people who rely on Planned Parenthood clinics to get life-saving health services,” said Perritt. She described the decision as part of the government’s broader efforts “to eliminate access to comprehensive health care for folks, really across the country. This has to also be understood as an attack that reaches far beyond the borders of South Carolina.”
The Supreme Court moved to limit access to health care for over 1.3 million South Carolinians on Thursday by allowing the state to block Medicaid recipients from getting care at Planned Parenthood. The tight restriction on reproductive rights will likely pave the way for similar bans in other states, as ongoing attacks on abortion providers further impinge on access to maternal, gynecological, and other basic forms of health care.
In a 6-3 decision, the court determined that Planned Parenthood clinics and patients in South Carolina may not sue the state for denying Medicaid funding to the reproductive care provider. The ruling overturns repeated lower court decisions that affirmed Medicaid recipients’ rights to visit a provider of their choosing that accepts the program. It comes against the backdrop of looming federal cuts to Medicaid, which would further restrict health care access for millions of low-income Americans.
In South Carolina, abortion is already subjected to a near-total ban. State law prohibits abortion after six weeks with limited exceptions — which is often before someone would be aware that they’re pregnant. Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has been direct about wanting to target Planned Parenthood because the network of clinics is known as an abortion provider.
“South Carolina has made it clear that we value the right to life,” McMaster said in a February statement. “Therefore, taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize abortion providers who are in direct opposition to their beliefs.”
The idea that Medicaid is subsidizing abortion care in South Carolina is incredibly misleading, said Susanna Birdsong, general counsel and vice president of compliance at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.
“Medicaid does not cover abortion except in very narrow circumstances of rape, incest in life of the pregnant person,” Birdsong said. “That’s been a federal rule since the 1970s.”
Planned Parenthood provides care for a host of other sexual and reproductive wellness concerns — meaning that low-income South Carolinians will lose access to “health care that has nothing to do with abortion,” Birdsong said. She pointed to things like testing for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screening, and birth control.
In its ruling, the court made clear that it was aware of the other services Planned Parenthood provides.
“Planned Parenthood South Atlantic operates two clinics in South Carolina, offering a wide range of services to Medicaid and non-Medicaid patients,” reads a summary of the decision. “It also performs abortions.”
The court noted that Planned Parenthood and a patient sued under the any-qualified-provider provision, which allows Medicaid patients to seek care from a provider of their choosing, but the majority determined they did not necessarily have an “enforceable” right to do so.
Experts expect that this decision will open the floodgates for other states to pass similar bans, limiting access to the largest provider of reproductive and sexual health care in the United States for millions of lower-income Americans.
“Other states certainly have tried it before,” said Dr. Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and president of the nonprofit Physicians for Reproductive Health. “Much in the same way that abortion bans really swept this country, I think we’re going to see similar effects.”
The decision to limit where Medicaid patients can access care disproportionately affects women of color, said Perritt. As of 2023, the majority of people enrolled in Medicaid in South Carolina were nonwhite, and roughly 39 percent of Medicaid enrollees were Black, according to health policy research nonprofit KFF.
Even before the decision, access to health care — particularly reproductive and sexual health care — in South Carolina was a challenge for lower-income residents. Roughly 41 of the state’s 46 counties are considered federally designated “Health Professional Shortage Areas,” and Medicaid recipients are disproportionately likely to live in communities with provider shortages.
“We’re talking about communities that are already marginalized from care, communities that already have disproportionately poor reproductive and sexual health outcomes,” said Perritt, who predicted the decision would have “significant negative health consequences.”
Aside from having one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, South Carolina is one of only 10 states not to expand Medicaid coverage since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. South Carolina also has the eighth-highest maternal mortality rate in the country, hovering around 47.2 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births, and some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections in the nation.
“It’s really a state that should be investing more in its public health infrastructure and making sure that people who live in the state have access to the care that they need,” said Birdsong.
Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights for State Innovation Exchange, said, like the state’s abortion ban, lower-income people in South Carolina will bear the brunt of the burden of this decision.
“It targets people who are already limited on resources to say, “You know what? On top of that, you actually don’t get to have a decision on the care that you get and the provider you get it from,” she said.
At the same time, the Trump administration and Congress are seeking to further restrict health coverage for low-income Americans. A Congressional Budget Office report found that the House of Representatives’ version of the “Big, Beautiful, Bill” would leave 16 million Americans without health insurance and kick 7.8 million people off of Medicaid. Senate Republicans are considering their own set of Medicaid cuts, though they’ve been snarled by political opposition.
“This is a clear and obvious attack on people with low income, people who rely on Planned Parenthood clinics to get life-saving health services,” said Perritt. She described the decision as part of the government’s broader efforts “to eliminate access to comprehensive health care for folks, really across the country. This has to also be understood as an attack that reaches far beyond the borders of South Carolina.”
The former head of Human Rights Watch — and son of a Holocaust survivor — says Israel’s military campaign in Gaza will likely meet the legal definition of genocide, citing large-scale killings, the targeting of civilians, and the words of senior Israeli officials.
Speaking on 30′ with Guyon Espiner, Ken Roth agreed Hamas committed “blatant war crimes” in its attack on Israel on October 7 last year, which included the abduction and murder of civilians.
But he said it was a “basic rule” that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other.
There was indisputable evidence Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza and might also be pursuing tactics that fit the international legal standard for genocide, Roth said.
30′ with Guyon Espiner Kenneth Roth Video: RNZ
“The acts are there — mass killing, destruction of life-sustaining conditions. And there are statements from senior officials that point clearly to intent,” Roth said.
He cited comments immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas from Israel’s former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who referred to Gazans as “human animals”.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also said “an entire nation” was responsible for the attack and the notion of “unaware, uninvolved civilians is not true,” referring to the Palestinean people. Herzog subsequently said his words were taken out of context during a case at the International Court of Justice.
The accusation of genocide is hotly contested. Israel says it is fighting a war of self-defence against Hamas after it killed 1200 people, mostly civilians. It claims it adheres to international law and does its best to protect civilians.
It blames Hamas for embedding itself in civilian areas.
But Roth believes a ruling may ultimately come from the International Court of Justice, especially if a forthcoming judgment on Myanmar sets a precedent.
“It’s very similar to what Myanmar did with the Rohingya,” he said. “Kill about 30,000 to send 730,000 fleeing. It’s not just about mass death. It’s about creating conditions where life becomes impossible.”
‘Apartheid’ alleged in Israel’s West Bank Roth has been described as the ‘Godfather of Human Rights’, and is credited with vastly expanding the influence of the Human Rights Watch group during a 29-year tenure in charge of the organisation.
In the full interview with Guyon Espiner, Roth defended the group’s 2021 report that accused Israel of enforcing a system of apartheid in the occupied West Bank.
“This was not a historical analogy,” he said, implying it was a mistake to compare it with South Africa’s former apartheid regime.
“It was a legal analysis. We used the UN Convention against Apartheid and the Rome Statute, and laid out over 200 pages of evidence.”
Kenneth Roth appears via remote link in studio for an interview on season 3 of 30′ with Guyon Espiner. Image: RNZ
He said the Israeli government was unable to offer a factual rebuttal.
“They called us biased, antisemitic — the usual. But they didn’t contest the facts.”
The ‘cheapening’ of antisemitism charges Roth, who is Jewish and the son of a Holocaust refugee, said it was disturbing to be accused of antisemitism for criticising a government.
“There is a real rise in antisemitism around the world. But when the term is used to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel, it cheapens the concept, and that ultimately harms Jews everywhere.”
Roth said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long opposed a two-state solution and was now pursuing a status quo that amounted to permanent subjugation of Palestinians, a situation human rights groups say is illegal.
“The only acceptable outcome is two states, living side by side. Anything else is apartheid, or worse,” Roth said.
While the international legal process around charges of genocide may take years, Roth is convinced the current actions in Gaza will not be forgotten.
“This is not just about war,” he said. “It’s about the deliberate use of starvation, displacement and mass killing to achieve political goals. And the law is very clear — that’s a crime.”
Roth’s criticism of Israel saw him initially denied a fellowship at Harvard University in 2023. The decision was widely seen as politically motivated, and was later reversed after public and academic backlash.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A West Papuan independence movement leader has warned the Melanesian Spearhead Group after its 23rd leaders summit in Suva, Fiji, to not give in to a “neocolonial trade in betrayal and abandonment” over West Papua.
While endorsing and acknowledging the “unconditional support” of Melanesian people to the West Papuan cause for decolonisation, OPM chair and commander Jeffrey P Bomanak
spoke against “surrendering” to Indonesia which was carrying out a policy of “bank cheque diplomacy” in a bid to destroy solidarity.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka took over the chairmanship of the MSG this week from his Vanuatu counterpart Jotham Napat and vowed to build on the hard work and success that had been laid before it.
He said he would not take the responsibility of chairmanship lightly, especially as they were confronted with an increasingly fragmented global landscape that demanded more from them.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape called on MSG member states to put West Papua and Kanaky New Caledonia back on the agenda for full MSG membership.
Marape said that while high-level dialogue with Indonesia over West Papua and France about New Caledonia must continue, it was culturally “un-Melanesian” not to give them a seat at the table.
West Papua currently holds observer status in the MSG, which includes Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji — and Indonesia as an associate member.
PNG ‘subtle shift’
PNG recognises the West Papuan region as five provinces of Indonesia, making Marape’s remarks in Suva a “subtle shift that may unsettle Jakarta”, reports Gorethy Kenneth in the PNG Post-Courier.
West Papuans have waged a long-standing Melanesian struggle for independence from Indonesia since 1969.
The MSG resolved to send separate letters of concern to the French and Indonesian presidents.
The OPM letter warning the MSG. Image: Screenshot APR
In a statement, Bomanak thanked the Melanesians of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) of Kanaky New Caledonia for “unconditionally support[ing] your West Papuan brothers and sisters, subjected to dispossession, enslavement, genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and ethnic cleansing, [as] the noblest of acts.”
“We will never forget these Melanesian brothers and sisters who remain faithfully loyal to our cultural identity no matter how many decades is our war of liberation and no matter how many bags of gold and silver Indonesia offers for the betrayal of ancestral kinship.
“When the late [Vanuatu Prime Minister] Father Walter Lini declared, ‘Melanesia is not free unless West Papua is free,”’ he was setting the benchmark for leadership and loyalty across the entire group of Melanesian nations.
“Father Lini was not talking about a timeframe of five months, or five years, or five decades.
“Father Lini was talking about an illegal invasion and military occupation of West Papua by a barbaric nation wanting West Papua’s gold and forests and willing to exterminate all of us for this wealth.
‘Noble declaration’
“That this noble declaration of kinship and loyalty now has a commercial value that can be bought and sold like a commodity by those without Father Lini’s courage and leadership, and betrayed for cheap materialism, is an act of historic infamy that will be recorded by Melanesian historians and taught in all our nations’ universities long after West Papua is liberated.”
OPM leader Jeffrey Bomanak . . . his letter warns against surrendering to Indonesian control. Image: OPM
Bomanak was condemning the decision of the MSG to regard the “West Papua problem” as an internal issue for Indonesia.
“The illegal occupation of West Papua and the genocide of West Papuans is not an internal issue to be solved by the barbaric occupier.
“Indonesia’s position as an associate member of MSG is a form of colonial corruption of the Melanesian people.
“We will continue to fight without MSG because the struggle for independence and sovereignty is our fundamental right of the Papuan people’s granted by God.
“Every member of MSG can recommend to the United Nations that West Papua deserves the same right of liberation and nation-state sovereignty that was achieved without compromise by Timor-Leste — the other nation illegally invaded by Indonesia and also subjected to genocide.”
Bomanak said the MSG’s remarks stood in stark contrast to Father Lini’s solidarity with West Papua and were “tantamount to sharing in the destruction of West Papua”.
‘Blood money’
It was also collaborating in the “extermination of West Papuans for economic benefit, for Batik Largesse. Blood money!”
The Papua ‘problem’ was not a human rights problem but a problem of the Papuan people’s political right for independence and sovereignty based on international law and the right to self-determination.
It was an international problem that had not been resolved.
“In fact, to say it is simply a ‘problem’ ignores the fate of the genocide of 500,000 victims.”
Bomanak said MSG leaders should make clear recommendations to the Indonesian government to resolve the “Papua problem” at the international level based on UN procedures and involving the demilitarisation of West Papua with all Indonesian defence and security forces “leaving the land they invaded and unlawfully occupied.”
Indonesia’s position as an associate member in the MSG was a systematic new colonialisation by Indonesia in the home of the Melanesian people.
Indonesia well understood the weaknesses of each Melanesian leader and “carries out bank cheque diplomacy accordingly to destroy the solidarity so profoundly declared by the late Father Walter Lini.”
“No surrender!”
MSG leaders in Suva . . . Jeremy Manele (Solomon Islands, from left), James Marape (PNG), Sitiveni Rabuka (Fiji), Jotham Napat (Vanuatu), and Roch Wamytan (FLNKS spokesperson). Image: PNG Post-Courier
Amid uncertainty in the Middle East, one thing remains clear — most Pacific governments continue to align themselves with Israel.
Dr Steven Ratuva, distinguished professor of Pacific Studies at Canterbury University, told RNZ that island leaders are likely to try and keep their distance, but only officially speaking.
“They’d probably feel safer that way, rather than publicly taking sides. But I think quite a few of them would probably be siding with Israel.”
With Iran and Israel waging a 12-day war earlier this month, Dr Ratuva said that was translating into deeper divisions along religious and political lines in Pacific nations.
“People may not want to admit it, but it’s manifesting itself in different ways.”
Pacific support for Israel runs deep
The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on 13 June calling for “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in the war in Gaza”, passing with 142 votes, or a 73 percent majority.
Among the 12 nations that voted against the resolution, alongside Israel and the United States, were Fiji, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.
The flags of Iran – a strong supporter of Palestine, along with a 73 percent support for a ceasefire at the United Nations – and Israel, backed by the United States. Image: 123rf/RNZ Pacific
Pacific support for Israel runs deep The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on June 13 calling for “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in the war in Gaza”, passing with 142 votes, or a 73 percent majority.
Among the 12 nations that voted against the resolution, alongside Israel and the United States, were Fiji, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.
Among the regional community, only Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands voted for the resolution, while others abstained or were absent.
Last week, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, in an interview with The Australian, defended Israel’s actions in Iran as an “act of survival”.
“They cannot survive if there is a big threat capability within range of Israel. Whatever [Israel] are doing now can be seen as preemptive, knocking it out before it’s fired on you.”
In February, Fiji also committed to an embassy in Jerusalem — a recognition of Israel’s claimed right to call the city their capital — mirroring Papua New Guinea in 2023.
Dr Ratuva said that deep, longstanding, religious and political ties with the West are what formed the region’s ties with Israel.
“Most of the Pacific Island states have been aligned with the US since the Cold War and beyond, so the Western sphere of influence is seen as, for many of them, the place to be.”
He noted the rise in Christian evangelism, which is aligned with Zionism and the global push for a Jewish homeland, in pockets throughout the Pacific, particularly in Fiji.
“Small religious organisations which have links with or model selves along the lines of the United States evangelical movement, which has been supportive of Trump, tend to militate towards supporting Israel for religious reasons,” Dr Ratuva said.
“And of course, religion and politics, when you mix them together, become very powerful in terms of one’s positioning [in the world].”
An anti-war protest at Parliament over Israel-Iran conflict. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Politics or religion? In Fijian society, Dr Ratuva said that the war in Gaza has stoked tensions between the Christian majority and the Muslim minority.
According to the CIA World Factbook, roughly 64.5 percent of Fijians are Christian, compared to a Muslim population of 6.3 percent.
“It’s coming out very clearly, in terms of the way in which those belonging to the fundamentalist political orientation tend to make statements which are against non-Christians” Dr Ratuva said.
“People begin to take sides . . . that in some ways deepens the religious divide, particularly in Fiji which is multiethnic and multireligious, and where the Islamic community is relatively significant.”
A statement from the Melanesian Spearhead Group Secretariat, released on Wednesday, said that the Pacific wished to be an “ocean of peace”.
“Leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to the “Friends to All, Enemy to None” foreign policy to guide the MSG members’ relationship with countries and development partners.”
It bookends a summit that brought together leaders from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and other Melanesian nations, where the Middle East was discussed, according to local media.
But the Pacific region had been used in a deceptive strategy as the US prepared for the strikes on Iran. On this issue, Melanesian leaders did not respond to requests for comment.
The BBC reported on Monday that B-2 planes flew to Guam from Missouri as a decoy to distract from top-secret flights headed over the Atlantic to Iran.
This sparked outrage from civil society leaders throughout the region, including the head of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan.
“This use of Pacific airspace and territory for military strikes violates the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga, our region’s declaration for being a nuclear, free peace committed zone,” he said.
“Our region has a memory of nuclear testing, occupation and trauma . . . we don’t forget that when we talk about these issues.”
Reverend Bhagwan told RNZ that there was no popular support in the Pacific for Israel’s most recent actions.
“This is because we have international law . . . this includes, of course, the US strikes on Iran and perhaps, also, Israel’s actions in Gaza.”
“It is not about religion, it is about people.”
Reverend Bhagwan, whose organisation represents 27 member churches across 17 Pacific nations, refused to say whether he believed there was a link between Christian fundamentalism and Pacific support for Israel.
“We can say that there is a religious contingency within the Pacific that does support Israel . . . it does not necessarily mean it’s the majority view, but it is one that is seriously considered by those in power.
“It depends on how those [politicians] consider that support they get from those particular aspects of the community.”
Pacific Islanders in the region For some, the religious commitment runs so deep that they venture to Israel in a kind of pilgrimage.
Dr Ratuva told RNZ that there was a significant population of islanders in the region, many of whom may now be trapped before a ceasefire is finalised.
“There was a time when the Gaza situation began to unfold, when a number of people from Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were there for pilgrimage purposes.”
“At that time there were significant numbers, and Fiji was able to fly over there to evauate them. So this time, I’m not sure whether that might happen.”
Reverend Bhagwan said that the religious ties ran deep.
“They go to Jerusalem, to Bethlehem, to the Mount of Olives, to the Golan Heights, where the transfiguration took place. Fiji also is stationed in the Golan Heights as peacekeepers,” he said.
“So there is a correlation, particularly for Pacific or for Fijian communities, on that relationship as peacekeepers in that region.”
Police in Papua New Guinea say the country’s overrun courts and prisons are behind mass breakouts from police custody.
Chief Superintendent Clement Dala made the comment after 13 detainees escaped on Tuesday in Simbu Province, including eight who were facing murder charges.
Dala said an auxiliary policeman who had the keys to a holding cell at Kundiawa Police Station is also on the run.
Police are investigating a claim by local media that he is the partner of a female escapee who was facing trial for murder.
Six police officers on duty at the time have been suspended for 21 days while investigations continue.
“The auxiliary officer is not a recognised police officer and should not have had the key, but it appears he was helping the sole police officer on cell duties,” said Dala, who is the acting assistant commissioner for three Highlands provinces.
Dala said it appeared the auxiliary officer wandered off for a meal and left the cell door open at the entrance to the police station.
“He may have played a role in assisting the escapees, but we are still trying to find out exactly what happened.”
‘Probably hiding somewhere’
“If we find it was deliberate then he will definitely be arrested. He is probably hiding somewhere nearby and we’ll get to him as soon as we can,” he said.
As of yesterday, none of the escapees had been caught. Police are relying on community leaders to encourage them to surrender.
But this could take a month or longer and police fear some could reoffend.
He said the police have previously been told not to use auxiliary officers in any official capacity as they were community liaison officers.
“This is a symptom of our severe staff shortages, but I have reissued an instruction banning them from frontline duties,” he said.
Dala said PNG’s courts and prisons were completely overrun, and this was the main reason detainees in police custody escape.
Up to 200 people on remand
He said on any given day there could be up to 200 people on remand in police cells under his command and many brought in weapons and drugs.
“We have different cells for different remandees, but if we are overcrowded we have to keep prisoners in the main corridor, especially those who have committed minor crimes,” he said.
Dala said some remand prisoners were being kept in police holding cells for more than a month.
He said the police had faced a lack of political will to deal with severe staff shortages, a lack of training across the force and outdated infrastructure.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
BEARING WITNESS:By Cole Martin in occupied Bethlehem
Kia ora koutou,
I’m a Kiwi journo in occupied Bethlehem, here’s a brief summary of today’s events across the Palestinian and Israeli territories from on the ground.
At least 79 killed and 391 injured by Israeli forces in Gaza over the last 24 hours, including 33 killed and 267 injured while seeking aid at the US-Israel “humanitarian” centres.
*
Three killed and 7 injured by settler pogrom on the town of Kafr Malik, northeast of Ramallah; setting fire to houses and cars, and protected by soldiers. Israeli forces shot and killed 15-year-old Rayan Houshia west of Jenin as they retreated from resistance fighters, after using a civilian home as military barracks; also invading several towns across the West Bank, firing teargas into al-Fawar refugee camp south of Hebron, sound-bombs near the Jenin Grand Mosque in the north, and arresting several Palestinians.
Al Quds/Jerusalem’s old city faced low visitor numbers even after restrictions were lifted by the Israeli occupation. Jerusalem Governate reported 623 homes and facilities demolished by Israel since October 2023.
*
Palestinian political prisoner Amar Yasser Al-Amour was released after 2.5 years without charge or trial in Israeli prisons. Thousands remain detained illegally in this way. Another freed prisoner Fares Bassam Hanani mourned his mother who passed away while he was imprisoned. Mohammad al-Ghushi, also freed, was taken to hospital to have his kidney removed due to torture and medical neglect he faced in Israeli prisons.
*
The unexpected ceasefire between Israel, America, and Iran appears to be holding for now. Iranian officials say the US “torpedoed diplomacy” and have passed a bill to halt cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the Trump administration could resume deporting immigrants to countries other than their own without any chance to object on the grounds that they might be tortured. This may clear a legal path for the government to send men held at a U.S military base in Djibouti to the war-ravaged nation of South Sudan where they face an uncertain future, including the possibility of indefinite detention. Three justices, in a dissent, said the ruling exposes “thousands to the risk of torture or death.”
That may be a best-case scenario.
An Intercept investigation finds that the Trump administration has been hard at work trying to expand its global gulag for expelled immigrants, exploring deals with a quarter of the world’s nations to accept so-called third-country nationals — deported persons who are not their citizens.
To create this archipelago of injustice, the U.S. government is employing strong-arm tactics with dozens of smaller, weaker, and economically dependent nations. The deals are being conducted in secret, and neither the State Department nor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will discuss them. With the green light from the Supreme Court, thousands of immigrants are in danger of being disappeared into this network of deportee dumping grounds.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves thousands of people vulnerable to deportation to third countries where they face torture or death, even if the deportations are clearly unlawful,” said Leila Kang, a staff attorney at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a group that represents immigrants who filed suit.
The Supreme Court gave no explanations for its decision, which paused enforcement of a federal judge’s ruling that immigrants facing deportation must be given an opportunity to show that they may be tortured at their destination. Later Monday, a district judge in Massachusetts ruled that the order didn’t apply to the deportees in Djibouti. The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to allow it to immediately expel the men to South Sudan, claiming that U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy was acting in “defiance” of the Supreme Court’s order.
The majority on the Supreme Court did not publish any explanation for their Monday ruling. In a 19-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the majority had disregarded a federal law that requires due process.
“Congress expressly provided noncitizens with the right not to be removed to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that the majority had endorsed a policy of lawlessness. “The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard.” She pointed to the cases of 13 immigrants who “narrowly escaped being the target of extraordinary violence in Libya”; another who “spent months in hiding in Guatemala,” and the men who “face release in South Sudan, which the State Department says is in the midst of ‘armed conflict’ between ‘ethnic groups.’”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for ICE’s parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, called the ruling “a victory for the safety and security of the American people.”
Lawyers representing the immigrants at risk of being sent to countries — or even continents — that they have never visited in their lives disagree. “The ramifications of the Supreme Court’s order will be horrifying; it strips away critical due process protections that have been protecting our class members from torture and death,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance.
Realmuto is representing some of the men whom the government attempted to expel to South Sudan, a nation that may, again, be teetering on the brink of civil war. Their rendition flight to South Sudan was diverted to Djibouti, when Murphy, the U.S. district judge, intervened in the case. The eight men — all previously convicted of violent crimes — have been detained on a U.S military base, Camp Lemonnier, ever since.
A top ICE official earlier this month detailed the appalling and unsafe conditions — including illnesses brought on by the environment — that deportees and the government officials guarding them face at Camp Lemonnier in a sworn legal declaration.
A recent memo by Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that the Trump administration threatened dozens of nations with a travel ban while dangling third-country deportation deals to avoid the restrictions. An investigation by The Intercept finds that, with this new gambit, the U.S. has reportedly pursued deals with at least 53 countries, including many that are beset by conflict or terrorist violence or that the State Department has excoriated for human rights abuses.
The State Department refused to provide a list of countries with which the U.S. has made agreements to accept deportees from third countries, citing the sensitivity of diplomatic communications.
“The sheer number of countries is absolutely unprecedented, as is including so many countries with problematic human rights records,” Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, told The Intercept. “The transactional deals the Trump administration is offering up turn migrants and refugees into pawns whose rights are of no concern. This just shows what is evident from other Trump administration policies: It does not believe the migrants have any rights.”
The nations targeted by the Trump administration recently expanded as a result of a memo, signed by Rubio, which was sent on June 14 to U.S. diplomats who work in 36 countries whose citizens may soon be restricted from entry into the United States. The cable, first reported by The Washington Post, castigated countries for failing to meet various criteria — from having “no competent or cooperative central government authority to produce reliable identity documents or other civil documents” to being state sponsors of terrorism. Rubio stated, however, that concerns with such nations could be “mitigated” if that country is willing to accept deportees from other countries.
The State Department did not comment on the memo or the impetus behind it, but provided a disingenuous statement that framed the U.S. efforts to forge third-country deportation deals in hypothetical terms. “In some cases, we might work with other countries to facilitate the removal of individuals, via third countries, who have no legal basis to remain in the United States,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept by email.
Many observers — and a minority of Supreme Court justices — noted that the push to send immigrants to far-flung detention facilities appears to be as bizarre as it is cruel.
“Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.
Anwen Hughes, the senior director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, noted that there were Mexican nationals held in south Texas set to be deported to both Libya and South Sudan. “The Mexican border is right there. I’ve been doing immigration detention work for a very long time. I’ve never in my life seen Mexico refuse to take back one of its nationals, ever,” she told The Intercept. “The U.S. appears to be looking for really implausible destinations to send people. It’s not just punitive, it’s deliberately terrifying and honestly perverse.”
“Pressuring nations that are in a vulnerable situation vis-à-vis U. S. power and diplomacy to take nationals of countries they have nothing to do with is worrisome because it obviously sets the stage for some very serious abuses,” said Hughes.
The Trump administration is paying President Nayib Bukele’s government in El Salvador $6 million to imprison the Venezuelan nationals. A May federal court filing by Rubio referred to deportation negotiations between the Trump administration and both Libya and South Sudan.
Schacher said the Trump administration’s policies highlight its “disdain for immigrants,” and the premium in places on expelling them. “If it has to allow for some immigration from Africa, it will only allow it in exchange for deportation,” she noted. “It truly sees immigration as in the interest of sending countries and not in the interests of the U.S.— so it will demand an exchange.”
Due to the secret nature of agreements, it’s unclear what fate awaits people deported to these nations. The question of whether they would be deported again to their nation of origin, or another unrelated nation, where they face the possibility of persecution or abuse; be allowed to remain in the third country and under what circumstances; or be held in detention or prison, as in El Salvador, remains unknown.
Schacher noted that while almost all African countries and nations in the Americas are parties to the U.N. Refugee Convention, countries like Kosovo, Moldova, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Uzbekistan are not. If they were to expel immigrants they received as part of a deal with the Trump administration, they would have no obligation under international law to screen deportees to ensure they are not sent to a country where they face threats to their life or freedom.
Earlier this month, the U.S. struck a deal with Kosovo, Europe’s youngest country, to accept 50 deportees from other countries. The landlocked Balkan nation said the expelled immigrants would be “temporarily relocated” to Kosovo, while officials facilitate “their safe return to their home country.”
“I truly worry these places will become way stations or bridges for deportation from the U.S. to home countries,” Schacher told The Intercept. “Bhutan, not a signatory, has already accepted Nepalese from the U.S. and basically dumped them at the Indian border.”
“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach,” wrote Sotomayor, detailing the efforts of the government to dump deportees in far-flung and unsafe locales. “It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel. An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya.”
As an attorney, Bill Essayli represented two January 6 defendants, arguing that men accused of crimes outside the U.S. Capitol were merely expressing their First Amendment rights. Now that he’s representing the Trump administration as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he has a very different perspective on some of the protesters opposing mass deportation.
“They are injuring our officers. It is out of control, and since the state of California, the governor, can’t control his state, then yes, the federal government is going to step in. The National Guard is on its way, and we will have peace and order in Los Angeles,” said Essayli, who is serving as Donald Trump’s interim U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.
Elected in 2022 as a Republican state assembly member representing California’s Inland Empire, the junior legislator rose quickly to a prized Justice Department post. Despite passing little legislation in his two terms in Sacramento, Essayli elevated his profile in the MAGA world by introducing bills seemingly designed to grab the attention of the far-right media world — and defending these extreme proposals loudly on Fox News.
Now he represents Trump administration’s interests in federal court in Los Angeles, where Essayli has hit demonstrators who took to the streets to protest Trump’s deportation campaign with conspiracy charges that carry stiff sentences, while claiming that he supports the right to peaceful protest.
Trump has yet to formally nominate anyone to serve as the U.S. attorney on a permanent basis. If he does tap Essayli, whose temporary appointment expires at the end of July, activists in California are calling on the state’s two U.S. senators to block his confirmation using an obscure privilege known as the “blue slip” process.
“This tradition was made for exactly these kinds of things, where an attorney is just not acceptable as an appointee. He’s not there for justice but for partisan purposes,” said Jacob Daruvala, the director of the Stop Essayli campaign and a former constituent involved in LGBTQ+ advocacy.
Essayli did not respond to a request for comment sent through his office.
Steep Charges
Essayli was sworn in as the interim U.S. attorney in Los Angeles on April 2, following his appointment by Attorney General Pam Bondi under a federal statute that allows him to stay in the post for 120 days.
He brought to the post more experience than some of the administration’s other interim appointments — such as Ed Martin in Washington, D.C. — having previously participated in the office’s prosecutions of the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting attack as an assistant U.S. attorney.
Since his appointment, however, Essayli has quickly alienated career prosecutors, protesters in Los Angeles, and top politicians across the state.
One of his first moves was to sign his name to a rare post-trial plea deal for a sheriff’s deputy who had already been convicted of excessive force for pepper-spraying a woman outside a supermarket. Soon thereafter, several federal prosecutors withdrew from the case and resigned from the office, according to the Los Angeles Times.
As the demonstrations over ICE raids in Los Angeles heated up over the past month, Essayli was out front on local media defending the administration’s aggressive response.
At one press conference, Essayli said the administration had “no choice” but to send in the National Guard.
“Our agents and our law enforcements were overwhelmed,” he said.
He also made charging decisions that riled up elected officials and grassroots protesters alike. His office slapped union leader David Huerta, the state SEIU chief, with charges that carry a six-year maximum for confronting federal agents at a worksite raid on June 6.
The charges against Huerta galvanized state Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, who was briefly detained after attempting to question Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at a June 12 press conference. Essayli was present as Secret Service agents ejected and handcuffed Padilla, who was released without being arrested. In an interview this week, Essayli accused Padilla of perpetrating a “stunt” and blamed him for the incident.
“He’s a very large person,” Essayli told Fox 11. “He’s very tall, he’s got a big demeanor. And he started charging, pushing his way through the security, shouting. We didn’t know he was here. We didn’t know who he was at the time. And then he started shouting, and then he was dragged out.”
Federal prosecutors have cast their eye well beyond powerbrokers such as Huerta. Another high-profile charge came against a member of a community organizing group called Centro CSO who was allegedly spotted on news cameras handing out face shields to demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles.
The man, Alejandro Orellana, faces charges of conspiracy to commit civil disorders and aiding and abetting civil disorders that carry up to five years in prison. As Fox News and other outlets whipped up an online frenzy about the face shield distribution — seeing it as evidence of a well-funded conspiracy behind the immigration protests — FBI agents zeroed in on Orellana and raided his house.
In a statement, a group supporting Orellana said he was guilty only of “providing aid to the community being tear-gassed.” Essayli defended the charges in the same interview with Fox 11.
“He wasn’t handing them out at the beach. He was there in downtown Los Angeles, and he’s handing them out to people who are dressed and behaving similarly to the people who have been committing riots. These are people hiding their faces, wearing black from top to bottom,” Essayli said. “Why would a peaceful protester need a face shield?”
Seeking to diminish the popular outrage over ICE raids, national Republicans have floated claims that various groups are the hidden hand funding the protests. Essayli sounded a similar note in his interview, promising that prosecutors would go after protest funders.
“We’ll get to the bottom of that,” he said.
Essayli said last week that he has already brought about 20 charges.
Defending J6
In a prior life as an attorney in private practice, Essayli espoused radically different views about the protesters who gathered around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
For a time he represented Alan Hostetter, a former police chief who came to the Capitolwith a hatchet in his backpack and joined protesters who pushed through a line of police officers defending the building.
Essayli criticized prosecutors after Hostetter was charged, noting that the indictment did not directly accuse him of violence.
“He was there to support the objection to the election, which members of Congress did do. I am concerned because we are getting to a dangerous place where we’re trying to criminalize political differences,” Essayli said.
Hostetter would go on to represent himself at trial. He was convicted and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.
Essayli made similar arguments in defense of Brandon Straka, a social media influencer charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct in connection with the Capitol riot.
“Defendant and others present on January 6 were engaged in a protest to express their dissatisfaction with the manner in which the 2020 presidential election was conducted and certified,” he wrote in one legal brief. “Doing so in a peaceful manner was well within their First Amendment rights.”
Prosecutors never accused Straka of entering the Capitol, but they said he helped whip up the crowd with statements on social media and in person. In a sentencing memo, Essayli accused federal prosecutors of trying to load far too much responsibility for the breach of the Capitol onto his client’s shoulders.
“There was no conspiracy. This was a demonstration that unfortunately spiraled out of control,” Essayli said.
Straka and Hostetter would go on to receive pardons from Trump.
Targeting Trans Rights
Essayli served only two and a half years in the California State Assembly, where he represented Corona and other suburbs east of Los Angeles and became the body’s first Muslim member.
During his time in the state capitol, Essayli raised his public profile despite little legislative success.
He recorded one of the highest rates in the Legislature for missed votes. Explaining his own meager track record of legislation, Essayli said he used his bills to “communicate issues” and spark debate.
His style, as much as his conservative beliefs, rankled colleagues across the aisle. He once called some Democrats in the state Legislature “pedophile protectors” for blocking his bill to end sanctuary state protections for people convicted of sex crimes against minors.
“If he can use it for political theater, he is going to do it, no matter who it hurts.”
In the Assembly, Essayli also pursed a forced outing bill for transgender students that had little chance of passing. When it went nowhere, he went on a tour of southern California school districts urging them to impose similar policies requiring staffers to inform parents if their children use names or pronouns that differ from their sex assigned at birth.
It was during the debate over that bill that Essayli and another lawmaker, Democratic Assembly Member Corey Jackson, got into a verbal confrontation that resulted in another lawmaker physically preventing Jackson from moving toward Essayli, the Sacramento Bee reported.
In an interview last week, Jackson said he had heard from some of Essayli’s Republican colleagues that they were glad to have him gone.
“At the end of the day, this guy is an ideologue, and all of his decisions are based upon ideology,” Jackson said. “It’s based upon key MAGA principles. It is that that guides his actions, not the law.”
“If he can use it for political theater, he is going to do it, no matter who it hurts,” Jackson added.
Lacking in power in the Democrat-controlled Assembly, Essayli turned to Fox News, where he became a frequent late-night guest. Weeks after Trump’s election to a second term, he appeared in the 11 p.m. slot denouncing Democratic jurisdictions that were promising not to cooperate with mass deportations.
Rare Power for Senate Democrats
Under Senate tradition, members of the home-state delegation are given an effective veto over U.S. attorney nominees via the “blue slip” process. That means Essayli’s chance of winning the nomination could rest on convincing Padilla and his fellow Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, according to University of Richmond law school professor Carl Tobias, an expert on the confirmation process.
“If either senator says no from California, it’s over for this nominee. That may be the hardest obstacle,” Tobias said. “That’s what the White House has to work with: Padilla.”
Padilla, Schiff, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
“I think Donald Trump was trying to choose the most anti-California person he could, and that was Bill Essayli.”
LGBTQ+ activists have been among those urging Padilla and Schiff to block Essayli if Trump formally nominates him for the job on a permanent basis.
Daruvala, the Inland Empire resident mounting the Stop Essayli campaign, said he was motivated by Essayli’s position on trans kids’ rights. He believes Essayli received the interim appointment essentially to anger state Democrats.
“I think Donald Trump was trying to choose the most anti-California person he could, and that was Bill Essayli,” he said.
Even if Essayli never receives Senate confirmation, however, he could find himself rewarded by Trump. Martin, the short-lived U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., received an appointment as the Justice Department’s top pardon attorney after receiving pushback in the U.S. Senate.
