And I certainly did not expect Peter Dutton — amid an election campaign, one with citizens heading to the polls on World Press Freedom Day — to come out swinging at the ABC and Guardian Australia, telling his followers to ignore “the hate media”.
I’m not saying Labor is likely to be the great saviour of the free press either.
The ALP has been slow to act on a range of important press freedom issues, including continuing to charge journalism students upwards of $50,000 for the privilege of learning at university how to be a decent watchdog for society.
Labor has increased, slightly, funding for the ABC, and has tried to continue with the Coalition’s plans to force the big tech platforms to pay for news. But that is not enough.
The World Press Freedom Index has been telling us for some time that Australia’s press is in a perilous state. Last year, Australia dropped to 39th out of 190 countries because of what Reporters Without Borders said was a “hyperconcentration of the media combined with growing pressure from the authorities”.
We should know on election day if we’ve fallen even further.
What is happening in America is having a profound impact on journalism (and by extension journalism education) in Australia.
‘Friendly’ influencers
We’ve seen both parties subtly start to sideline the mainstream media by going to “friendly” influencers and podcasters, and avoid the harder questions that come from journalists whose job it is to read and understand the policies being presented.
What Australia really needs — on top of stable and guaranteed funding for independent and reliable public interest journalism, including the ABC and SBS — is a Media Freedom Act.
My colleague Professor Peter Greste has spent years working on the details of such an act, one that would give media in Australia the protection lacking from not having a Bill of Rights safeguarding media and free speech. So far, neither side of government has signed up to publicly support it.
Australia also needs an accompanying Journalism Australia organisation, where ethical and trained journalists committed to the job of watchdog journalism can distinguish themselves from individuals on YouTube and TikTok who may be pushing their own agendas and who aren’t held to the same journalistic code of ethics and standards.
I’m not going to argue that all parts of the Australian news media are working impartially in the best interests of ordinary people. But the good journalists who are need help.
The continuing underfunding of our national broadcasters needs to be resolved. University fees for journalism degrees need to be cut, in recognition of the value of the profession to the fabric of Australian society. We need regulations to force news organisations to disclose when they are using AI to do the job of journalists and broadcasters without human oversight.
And we need more funding for critical news literacy education, not just for school kids but also for adults.
Critical need for public interest journalism
There has never been a more critical need to support public interest journalism. We have all watched in horror as Donald Trump has denied wire services access for minor issues, such as failing to comply with an ungazetted decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And mere days ago, 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens resigned citing encroachments on his journalistic independence due to pressure from the president.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is so concerned about what’s occurring in America that it has issued a travel advisory for journalists travelling to the US, citing risks under Trump administration policies.
Those of us who cover politically sensitive issues that the US administration may view as critical or hostile may be stopped and questioned by border agents. That can extend to cardigan-wearing academics attending conferences.
While we don’t have the latest Australian figures from the annual Reuters survey, a new Pew Research Centre study shows a growing gap between how much Americans say they value press freedom and how free they think the press actually is. Two-thirds of Americans believe press freedom is critical. But only a third believe the media is truly free to do its job.
If the press isn’t free in the US (where it is guaranteed in their constitution), how are we in Australia expected to be able to keep the powerful honest?
Every single day, journalists put their lives on the line for journalism. It’s not always as dramatic as those who are covering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, but those in the media in Australia still front up and do the job across a range of news organisations in some fairly poor conditions.
If you care about democracy at all this election, then please consider wisely who you vote for, and perhaps ask their views on supporting press freedom — which is your right to know.
Alexandra Wake is an associate professor in journalism at RMIT University. She came to the academy after a long career as a journalist and broadcaster. She has worked in Australia, Ireland, the Middle East and across the Asia Pacific. Her research, teaching and practice sits at the nexus of journalism practice, journalism education, equality, diversity and mental health.
New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) has upheld complaints about two 1News reports relating to violence around a football match in Amsterdam between local team Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv.
The authority found an item on “antisemitic violence” surrounding the match, and another on heightened security in Paris the following week, breached the accuracy standard.
In a majority decision, the BSA upheld a complaint from John Minto on behalf of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) about reporting on TVNZ’s 6pm 1News bulletin on 9 November 2024.
This comprised a trailer reporting “antisemitic violence”, an introduction by the presenter with “disturbing” footage of violence against Israeli fans described by Amsterdam’s mayor as “an explosion of antisemitism”, and a pre-recorded BBC item.
TVNZ upheld one aspect of this complaint over mischaracterised footage in the trailer and introduction. This was originally reported as showing Israeli fans being attacked, but later corrected by Reuters and other outlets as showing Israeli fans chasing and attacking a Dutch man.
“The footage contributed to a materially misleading impression created by TVNZ’s framing of the events, with an emphasis on antisemitic violence against Israeli fans without acknowledging the role of the Maccabi fans in the violence – despite that being previously reported elsewhere,” the BSA found.
A majority of the authority found TVNZ did not make reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy.
It considered the background to the events was highly sensitive and more care should have been taken to not overstate or adopt, without question, the antisemitic angle.
The minority considered it was reasonable for TVNZ to rely on Reuters, the BBC and Dutch officials’ description of the violence as “antisemitic”, in a story developing overseas in which not all facts were clear at the time of broadcast.
The authority considered TVNZ should have issued a correction when it became aware of the error with the footage. It therefore found the action taken was insufficient, but considered publication of the BSA’s decision to be an adequate remedy in the circumstances.
Western media’s embarrassing failures on Amsterdam violence. Video: AJ’s The Listening Post
In a separate decision, the authority upheld two complaints about a brief 1News item on 15 November 2024 reporting on heightened security in Paris in the week following the violence.
The item reported: “Thousands of police are on the streets of Paris over fears of antisemitic attacks . . . That’s after 60 people were arrested in Amsterdam last week when supporters of a Tel Aviv football team were pursued and beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters.”
TVNZ upheld both complaints under the accuracy standard on the basis the item “lacked the nuance” of earlier reporting on Amsterdam, by omitting to mention the role of the Maccabi fans in the lead-up to the violence.
The authority agreed with this finding but determined TVNZ took insufficient action to remedy the breach.
“The broadcaster accepted more care should have been taken, but did not appear to have taken any action in response, or made any public acknowledgement of the inaccuracy,” the BSA said.
The authority found the framing and focus careless, noting “the role of both sides in the violence had been extensively reported” by the time of the 15 November broadcast. TVNZ had also aired the mischaracterised footage again, not realising Reuters had issued a correction several days earlier.
As TVNZ was not monitoring the Reuters fact-check site, the correction only came to light when the complaints were being investigated.
Other standards raised in the three complaints were not breached or did not apply, the authority found.
The BSA did not consider an order was warranted over the item on November 15 – deciding publication of the decision was sufficient to publicly acknowledge and correct the breach, censure the broadcaster and give guidance to TVNZ and other broadcasters.
Palestinians do not have the luxury to allow Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small, but important, step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed, writes Dr Ilan Pappé
ANALYSIS:By Ilan Pappé
Responses in the Western world to the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to Palestinian suffering?
Why is the Democratic Party in the US complicit, directly and indirectly, in sustaining the daily inhumanity in Palestine — a complicity so visible that it probably was one reason they lost the election, as the Arab American and progressive vote in key states could, and justifiably so, not forgive the Biden administration for its part in the genocide in the Gaza Strip?
This is a pertinent question, given that we are dealing with a televised genocide that has now been renewed on the ground. It is different from previous periods in which Western indifference and complicity were displayed, either during the Nakba or the long years of occupation since 1967.
During the Nakba and up to 1967, it was not easy to get hold of information, and the oppression after 1967 was mostly incremental, and, as such, was ignored by the Western media and politics, which refused to acknowledge its cumulative effect on the Palestinians.
But these last 18 months are very different. Ignoring the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank can only be described as intentional and not due to ignorance.
Both the Israelis’ actions and the discourse that accompanies them are too visible to be ignored, unless politicians, academics, and journalists choose to do so.
This kind of ignorance is, first and foremost, the result of successful Israeli lobbying that thrived on the fertile ground of an European guilt complex, racism and Islamophobia. In the case of the US, it is also the outcome of many years of an effective and ruthless lobbying machine that very few in academia, media, and, in particular, politics, dare to disobey.
The moral panic phenomenon
This phenomenon is known in recent scholarship as moral panic, very characteristic of the more conscientious sections of Western societies: intellectuals, journalists, and artists.
Moral panic is a situation in which a person is afraid of adhering to his or her own moral convictions because this would demand some courage that might have consequences. We are not always tested in situations that require courage, or at least integrity. When it does happen, it is in situations where morality is not an abstract idea, but a call for action.
This is why so many Germans were silent when Jews were sent to extermination camps, and this is why white Americans stood by when African Americans were lynched or, earlier on, enslaved and abused.
What is the price that leading Western journalists, veteran politicians, tenured professors, or chief executives of well-known companies would have to pay if they were to blame Israel for committing a genocide in the Gaza Strip?
It seems they are worried about two possible outcomes. The first is being condemned as antisemites or Holocaust deniers. Secondly, they fear an honest response would trigger a discussion that would include the complicity of their country, or Europe, or the West in general, in enabling the genocide and all the criminal policies against the Palestinians that preceded it.
This moral panic leads to some astonishing phenomena. In general, it transforms educated, highly articulate and knowledgeable people into total imbeciles when they talk about Palestine.
It disallows the more perceptive and thoughtful members of the security services from examining Israeli demands to include all Palestinian resistance on a terrorist list, and it dehumanises Palestinian victims in the mainstream media.
On ‘Moral Panic’ and the Courage to Speak – Professor Ilan Pappé examines how fear of professional consequences silences Western voices in the face of genocide in Gaza — and what this reveals about power, complicity, and moral responsibility.
— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) April 18, 2025
Lack of compassion
The lack of compassion and basic solidarity with the victims of genocide was exposed by the double standards shown by mainstream media in the West, and, in particular, by the more established newspapers in the US, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
When the editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, lost 56 members of his family — killed by the Israeli genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip — not one of his colleagues in American journalism bothered to talk to him or show any interest in hearing about this atrocity.
On the other hand, a fabricated Israeli allegation of a connection between the Chronicle and a family, in whose block of flats hostages were held, triggered huge interest by these outlets.
This imbalance in humanity and solidarity is just one example of the distortions that accompanies moral panic. I have little doubt that the actions against Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students in the US, or against known activists in Britain and France, as well as the arrest of the editor of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, in Switzerland, are all manifestations of this distorted moral behaviour.
A similar case unfolded just recently in Australia. Mary Kostakidis, a famous Australian journalist and former prime-time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter, has been taken to the federal court over her — one should say quite tame — reporting on the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The very fact that the court has not dismissed this allegation upon its arrival shows you how deeply rooted moral panic is in the Global North.
But there is another side to it. Thankfully, there is a much larger group of people who are not afraid of taking the risks involved in clearly stating their support for the Palestinians, and who do show this solidarity while knowing it may lead to suspension, deportation, or even jail time. They are not easily found among the mainstream academia, media, or politics, but they are the authentic voice of their societies in many parts of the Western world.
The Palestinians do not have the luxury of allowing Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small but important step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed — firstly, to stop the destruction of Palestine and its people, and second, to create the conditions for a decolonised and liberated Palestine in the future.
Dr Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. This article is republished from The Palestine Chronicle, 19 April 2025.
Attorney General Pam Bondi distributed plans inside the Justice Department last week to scrap rules protecting journalists and their sources from surveillance and subpoenas over unflattering coverage and leaks. Bondi’s memo leaked to the press immediately.
“This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people,” reads the memo, citing recent leaks to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Reuters as examples of the kind of reporting that would no longer be tolerated. “I have concluded that it is necessary to rescind [former attorney general] Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.”
Eliminating these rules is the latest signal of a looming threat to reporters, who could face subpoenas and search warrants for daring to publish information that President Donald Trump would prefer kept secret. Journalists who resist legal demands to disclose their sources could face fines or even jail time.
Long before Trump was reelected on promises to punish disfavored reporters and outlets, free press advocates warned that the rescinded Justice Department rules were an inadequate shield. The Biden DOJ last revised the rules in 2022 in light of revelations about the first Trump administration’s spying on journalists to smoke out leakers. Along the way, even as it offered its own leaks to friendly outlets, the first Trump DOJ routinely ignored prior versions of the rules, which are not enforceable in court.
Last year, Senate Democrats had a clear opportunity to make basic protections for journalists a matter of binding federal law, rather than mere policy that could be undone with a vendetta-laced memo. Following years of debate over the proper scope of a federal shield law for reporters, the PRESS Act unanimously passed the House of Representatives and had a bipartisan roster of Senate sponsors, including Republican Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.
Then Democratic leaders blew it.
For months, they let the PRESS Act sit in the Senate Judiciary committee without a hearing, even though that committee’s chair, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., was the bill’s co-sponsor.
After the election, Trump demanded that Republicans kill the bill. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., swore the PRESS Act was a top priority for his last weeks as Senate majority leader. But neither he nor Durbin put any apparent effort into moving the bill forward, either on its own or as part of must-pass legislation like the defense budget. They offered statements of reassurance and support for the press, but no action.
In mid-December, with time running out, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the PRESS Act’s lead sponsor, tried to advance it himself, bringing the bill to the Senate floor on a motion to enact it by unanimous consent. A single Republican, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, blocked it with a grandstanding speech about the evils of leaks and “America-hating and fame-hungry journalists,” as he’d done with prior versions of the PRESS Act.
“Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight.”
Despite the predictable opposition, Senate Democrats had no strategic plan to counter it — other than a speech by Schumer — and the PRESS Act died at the end of the session. Durbin’s office blamed the PRESS Act’s failure on Cotton’s obstruction but did not answer why Durbin allowed the bill to stall in his committee. Durbin recently announced that he is retiring after more than four decades in Congress. Schumer’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.
“Every Democrat who put the PRESS Act on the back burner when they had the opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill codifying journalist-source confidentiality should be ashamed,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in a statement after Bondi’s memo came out.
“Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight.”
Barely three months in, the second Trump DOJ has already launched multiple investigations into reporters’ sources for embarrassing stories.
In March, Bondi’s deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, announced a criminal inquiry over the leak of classified information to the Times about Tren de Aragua that contradicted many of the White House’s basic claims about the Venezuelan gang.
Last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that she had referred two leaks of classified information to DOJ for criminal investigation, including a “recent illegal leak to the Washington Post.” Earlier that day, the Post reported new details about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal app. Gabbard said a third leak referral was “on its way.”
Multiple agencies are forcing federal employees under suspicion of leaking to take polygraph tests, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Hegseth, who is obsessed with finding out who’s leaking details of his own terrible security practices, has also threatened to use lie detectors.
What procedural protections will remain for journalists as Bondi and her deputies prosecute these investigations is still unknown. Her memo was clear that the Biden-era rules were rescinded but light on details as to what might take their place. The memo referred to recent updates in the DOJ’s manual and federal regulations, but updated language has not yet been published and the DOJ did not respond to The Intercept’s request for copies.
Where the prior rules barred subpoenas against reporters except under narrow circumstances, Bondi’s memo emphasized the lack of clear legal protection for journalists against such subpoenas under Supreme Court precedent.
Trump “can and almost certainly will abuse the legal system to investigate and prosecute his critics and the journalists they talk to,” Stern said in his statement.
Such abuses can take many forms, including using subpoenas to obtain a reporter’s phone and email records, which the first Trump DOJ did for at least eight reporters at three national outlets: the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times. The Obama administration tried to force former New York Times reporter James Risen, who later joined The Intercept, to testify about his sources, but eventually dropped the effort.
According to Bondi’s memo, a subpoena for a reporter’s testimony, notes, or correspondence should be “an extraordinary measure to be deployed as a last resort,” narrowly drawn, and subject to “enhanced approval and advance-notice procedures,” which Bondi did not spell out. Any arrests of reporters would be subject to her personal go-ahead, as would requests to interrogate journalists.
“Trump is laying the groundwork to lock up reporters who don’t rat out their sources who expose crimes by his administration,” Wyden, the PRESS Act’s lead Senate sponsor, wrote on Bluesky after the Bondi memo came out. “I have a bipartisan bill that would make these protections ironclad. It passed the House unanimously (twice) and it was never taken up in the Senate.”
New documents have further exposed the UK government’s collusion with the Israeli embassy in the arrest and imprisonment of the ‘Filton 18‘ Palestine Action activists.
Filton 18: government collusion with the Israeli embassy
The UK government shared contact details of counter-terrorism police and prosecutors with the Israeli embassy during an investigation into protests at an arms factory, official documents suggest, raising concerns about foreign interference.
The documents suggest political interference in the ongoing case and policing operations. Throughout, state authorities have repeatedly used counter-terror powers to repress activists taking direct action against the Israeli weapons industry in Britain.
Specifically, a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOI) disclosures show the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) directly facilitating Israeli interference in ongoing cases against activists. In the weeks following the first arrests of Filton 18 activists, the AGO shared contact details for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), and the ‘SO15’ Counter-Terrorism Command overseeing the investigation, with the Israeli embassy.
In August 2024, the first ten activists of the ‘Filton 18’ were imprisoned after a raid on an Elbit Systems weapons plant in Filton, Bristol. There, they had destroyed Israeli quadcopter drones. Police arrested, imprisoned, and detained them under ‘Counter Terror’ powers. During their pre-charge and pre-trial detention, the courts used this to deny their basic rights. Four UN special rapporteurs have condemned the use of counter-terrorism powers in this case.
Attorney General’s Office: emails to deputy Israeli ambassador to the UK
In the weeks after their arrest, correspondence demonstrates the extent of communications the AGO held with the Israeli embassy. Although the contents is almost entirely redacted, the subject heading of one email shows the AGO’s head of international law and national security Nicola Smith sharing information “to Israelis re CPS/SO15 contact details” on 9 September 2024.
The AGO sent the email to Daniela Ekstein, the deputy Israeli ambassador to the UK. It appears to be a follow-up to a meeting that Smith, Ekstein, the embassy’s counsellor of political affairs Yosef Zilberman, and AGO director Douglas Wilson held on 28 August.
Previously, Palestine Action obtained documents showing that Wilson, who the AGO copied into the email, had discussed ongoing cases of Palestine Action activists with the Israeli embassy. He had shared details relating to SO15, the Counter Terrorism Command. In an unprecedented move, the CPS, as the body prosecuting the case, has submitted to the court that the Filton18’s alleged offences have a ‘terrorism-connection’.
Logically, after the AGO facilitated contact, subsequent correspondence would have presumably taken place between the embassy, CPS, and SO15. Just over two months after the email, terrorism police raided an additional ten activists’ homes. They and arrested them under those same powers. Following this, they charged eight of the activists and remanded them to prison.
Filton 18 charges must be dropped amid political interference
Any improper influence by the Israeli embassy would result in a violation of the Crown Prosecution Service’s General Principle 2.1 that:
The independence of the prosecutor is central to the criminal justice system of a democratic society. Prosecutors are independent from persons or agencies that are not part of the prosecution decision-making process. CPS prosecutors are also independent from the police and other investigators. Prosecutors must be free to carry out their professional duties without political interference and must not be affected by improper or undue pressure or influence from any source.
With the possibility of diplomatic involvement in the Crown’s case, Palestine Action has called for the CPS to drop the charges. This evidence is the latest in a series ofdocumentsdetailing apparent interference in Palestine Action cases. These have shown deep collusion between the CPS, Home Office, AGO, senior police officials, and representatives of Elbit Systems and the Israeli embassy.
The correspondence raises questions of embassy interference in all manner of policing operations relating to Palestine in Britain. This is particularly pertinent in the context of the state liberally deploying counter-terror powers against activists, journalists, and academics supportive of Palestinian liberation.
A Palestine Action spokesperson stated:
The Israeli Embassy has attempted to interfere in our cases for years. For the first time, our activists are detained for direct action under counter terror powers, the CPS pursuing ‘terrorism-connected’ charges. As this unprecedented escalation of state repression happens, the Israeli Embassy has secured direct communication with the CPS and the ‘counter-terror’ police responsible. Political interference is forbidden in our legal system, and in the Filton 18 case its resulted in the most draconian laws being wielded against them. In light of the information uncovered, continuing the prosecution against them is a serious miscarriage of justice. They must be released and all compromised prosecutions of activists and journalists must be stopped.
Clare Rogers, mother of Filton 18 Political Prisoner Zoe Rogers, said:
My 21-year-old daughter Zoe has been in prison for 8 months without trial and counting. She took action against Elbit because she couldn’t sit on her hands and do nothing while her government committed war crimes by supplying arms to Israel. It’s sickening to learn that the brutal repression she & the Filton18 are experiencing may have been planned in secret conversations between our government and the Israeli embassy. In a just nation, the Filton18 case would be thrown out as soon as this political interference came to light.
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls, who is visiting New Caledonia this week for the third time in two months, has once again called on all parties to live up to their responsibilities in order to make a new political agreement possible.
Failing that, he said a potential civil war was looming.
“We’ll take our responsibilities, on our part, and we will put on the table a project that touches New Caledonia’s society, economic recovery, including nickel, and the future of the younger generation,” he told a panel of French journalists on Sunday.
He said that he hoped a revised version on a draft document — resulting from his previous visits in the French Pacific territory and new proposals from the French government — there existed a “difficult path” to possibly reconcile radically opposing views expressed so far from the pro-independence parties in New Caledonia and those who want the territory to remain part of France.
The target remains an agreement that would accommodate both “the right and aspiration to self-determination” and “the link with France”.
“If there is no agreement, then economic and political uncertainty can lead to a new disaster, to confrontation and to civil war,” he told reporters.
“That is why I have appealed several times to all political stakeholders, those for and against independence,” he warned.
“Everyone must take a step towards each other. An agreement is indispensable.”
Valls said this week he hoped everyone would “enter a real negotiations phase”.
He said one of the ways to achieve this will be to find “innovative” solutions and “a new way of looking at the future”.
This also included relevant amendments to the French Constitution.
Local parties will not sign any agreement ‘at all costs’ Local parties are not so enthusiastic.
In fact, each camp remains on their guard, in an atmosphere of defiance.
And on both sides, they agree at least on one thing — they will not sign any agreement “at all costs”.
Just like has been the case since talks between Valls and local parties began earlier this year, the two main opposing camps remain adamant on their respective pre-conditions and sometimes demands.
The pro-independence Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), largely dominated by the Union Calédonienne, held a convention at the weekend to decide on whether they would attend this week’s new round of talks with Valls.
They eventually resolved that they would attend, but have not yet decided to call this “negotiations”, only “discussions”.
They said another decision would be made this Thursday, May 1, after they had examined Valls’s new proposals and documents which the French minister is expected to circulate as soon as he hosts the first meeting tomorrow.
FLNKS reaffirms ‘Kanaky Agreement’ demand
During their weekend convention, the FLNKS reaffirmed their demands for a “Kanaky Agreement” to be signed not later than 24 September 2025, to be followed by a five-year transition period.
The official line was to “maintain the trajectory” to full sovereignty, including in terms of schedule.
On the pro-France side, the main pillar of their stance is the fact that three self-determination referendums have been held between 2018 and 2021, even though the third and last consultation was largely boycotted by the pro-independence camp.
All three referendums resulted in votes rejecting full sovereignty.
One of their most outspoken leaders, Les Loyalistes party and Southern Province President Sonia Backès, told a public rally last week that they had refused another date for yet another referendum.
“A new referendum would mean civil war. And we don’t want to fix the date for civil war. So we don’t want to fix the date for a new referendum,” she said.
However, Backès said they “still want to believe in an agreement”.
“We’re part of all discussions on seeking solutions in a constructive and creative spirit.”
Granting more provincial powers
One of their other proposals was to grant more powers to each of the three provinces of New Caledonia, including on tax collection matters.
“We don’t want differences along ethnic lines. We want the provinces to have more powers so that each of them is responsible for their respective society models.”
Under a draft text leaked last week, any new referendum could only be called by at least three-fifths of the Congress and would no longer pose a “binary” question on yes or no to independence, but would consider endorsing a “project” for New Caledonia’s future society.
Another prominent pro-France leader, MP Nicolas Metzdorf, repeated this weekend he and his supporters “remain mobilised to defend New Caledonia within France”.
“We will not budge,” Metzdorf said.
Despite Valls’s warnings, another scenario could be that New Caledonia’s political stakeholders find it more appealing or convenient to agree on no agreement at all, especially as New Caledonia’s crucial provincial elections are in the pipeline and scheduled for no later than November 30.
Concerns about security But during the same interview, Valls repeated that he remained concerned that the situation on the ground remained “serious”.
“We are walking on a tightrope above embers”.
He said top of his concerns were New Caledonia’s economic and financial situation, the tense atmosphere, a resurgence in “racism, hatred” as well as a fast-deteriorating public health services situation or the rise in poverty caused by an increasing number of jobless.
“So yes, all these risks are there, and that is why it is everyone’s responsibility to find an agreement. And I will stay as long as needed and I will put all my energy so that an agreement takes place.
“Not for me, for them.”
Valls also recalled that since the riots broke out in May 2024, almost one year ago, French security and law enforcement agencies are still maintaining about 20 squads of French gendarmes (1500 personnel) in the territory.
This is on top of the normal deployment of 550 gendarmes and 680 police officers.
Valls said this was necessary because “any time, it could flare up again”.
Outgoing French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said in an interview recently that in case of a “new May 13” situation, the pre-positioned forces could ensure law enforcement “for three or four days . . . until reinforcements arrive”.
If fresh violence erupts again, reinforcements could be sent again from mainland France and bring the total number to up to 6000 law enforcement personnel, a number similar to the level deployed in 2024 in the weeks following the riots that killed 14 and caused some 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4.2 billion) in damage.
Carefully chosen words Valls said earlier in April the main pillars of future negotiations were articulated around the themes of:
“democracy and the rule of law”;
a “decolonisation process”;
the right to self-determination;
a “fundamental law” that would seal New Caledonia’s future status;
the powers of New Caledonia’s three provinces; and a future New Caledonia citizenship with the associated definition of who meets the requirements to vote at local elections.
Valls has already travelled to Nouméa twice this year — in February and March.
Since his last visit that ended on April 1, discussions have been maintained in conference mode between local political stakeholders and Valls, and his cabinet, as well as French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s special advisor on New Caledonia, constitutionalist Eric Thiers.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
I was one of these people who thought the British justice system was brilliant, that you could only be found guilty if you’ve committed a crime, and if you’re telling the truth and are innocent then they’ll protect you- how wrong I was!
– Brian Buckle
Brian Buckle: sentenced 33 years for crimes he did not commit
Brian Buckle, 52, from Pembrokeshire, says his life was good. Then one day, out of the blue, he was accused of rape and sexual assault of a child, dating back to the mid 1990s. He spent two years on bail and then, in 2017, a jury at Swansea Crown Court found him guilty of all 16 counts, by a majority of 11 to 1. Buckle was given a 33-year sentence, and told he would serve a minimum of 15. But, he was innocent.
Buckle said:
My life’s really bad now. Getting up in the morning is the worst for me. I dream about prison all the time. I just can’t get it out of my head. But as the day goes on, I get better and better, then I have to start another day. It’s still really hard work. I do struggle with life, and I’m not the same anymore.
Buckle was locked up for more than five years before his name was eventually cleared. He says life behind bars was traumatic, especially in the sex offender’s prison in which he spent most of his sentence. Buckle expressed that:
It turned me into a horrible person. I just hated everybody, and I was so angry. 80% of the time I was in my cell, because I couldn’t deal with people, and didn’t want to speak to them. I just sat there thinking Where’s all this come from? For five and a half years I cried more or less every time I spoke to my wife. I couldn’t see an end to it.
Devastated Buckle’s life financially and emotionally
Luckily for Brian Buckle, his family never doubted his innocence, and devoted all their time, energy, and money into clearing his name. Although there were no legal grounds to challenge the conviction immediately after his trial, the determination and resilience of Elaine, Buckle’s wife of 33 years, changed this.
Elaine found Stephen Vullo KC to represent her husband, and with the help of a private investigator and new forensic evidence, Buckle said that:
the truth kept bubbling to the surface.
By the time of his appeal, in September 2022, there was witness evidence that the real abuser – who had set Buckle up to take the blame for what he had done – was a violent, intimidating man. He was also a sexual offender and paedophile.
Buckle’s conviction was eventually overturned, and a retrial ordered, which took place in May 2023. This time, the jury returned unanimous not guilty verdicts, in less than an hour. Buckle was a free man.
But five and a half years in prison, for a crime he did not commit, has devastated Buckle, financially and emotionally. His well-paid job meant he was ineligible for legal aid, so it was left to his family to find the money to fight his conviction. They spent all their savings and inheritance, took out loans, and Buckle’s father-in-law even sold his house to raise money for the cause, which cost them a total of £500,000.
Since leaving prison, Buckle has also been diagnosed with PTSD, as a direct result of his false accusation and imprisonment and has been unable to work since his release.
Government failing victims of a miscarriage of justice
Brian Buckle said how:
The company where I previously worked has been really good to me and said I could go back there, but my mental health is a problem. There’s no way I could go back to work. I’m all over the place, and I’ve had no support really, since I’ve been out, from the government or anything.
Buckle has sought compensation for his wrongful conviction, but his application has been refused by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).
Until 2014, an individual who was wrongfully convicted, had gone to prison, then had their conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal, and been acquitted on all charges at a retrial, would be paid compensation. But changes to the law now mean victims of a miscarriage of justice must not only be cleared of their charges but also prove their innocence ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ before they can receive a payout. This test is impossible to meet for most people and contradicts the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
In reality, because there’s no oral hearing, and it’s just done on paper and dealt with by someone at the Ministry of Justice, unless you get DNA evidence saying someone else did the crime, they just work on the assumption that you didn’t prove your innocence, even though the jury found you not guilty, or the Court of Appeal quashed your conviction. Watching Brian’s case, I knew the jury would find him not guilty. We didn’t win the trial by a little bit, but by a long, long way. Brian has, in my opinion, more than met the test, in reality, but on a piece of paper sent to the MOJ it’s a different story.
According to Appeal, a charity dedicated to challenging wrongful convictions and promoting a fairer justice system, the MOJ refused 93% – more than 550 – of the compensation applications from wrongfully convicted people, in the eight years between 2016 and 2024.
Vullo said that:
The change, in 2014, was obviously done to save money, although the highest payout in any one year for the old compensation scheme was about £20 million which, for the government, is loose change at the back of a sofa. What the government did not want to happen was for somebody who was clearly guilty, and had got off on a technicality, to then be able to get compensation, and therefore embarrass the government. But I’ve been doing this for 30 years and never seen anyone get off in the Court of Appeal on a technicality.
A petition to demand justice and compensation for Buckle and others
Brian Buckle and Mr Vullo, are asking us to support their petition, demanding justice and compensation for Buckle, which will not only give him a chance to rebuild his life but, once it reaches 100,000 signatures, will also be debated in the House of Commons.
They are also calling for the new law regarding compensation to be reversed back to how it used to be, to not only try and help Buckle, but also others who may find themselves in a similar situation. Vullo, claims the previous compensation scheme was fair and just, and still a matter of discretion. Compensation was not automatic but, although the MOJ could still refuse it, about 86% of people received payment. This law is still used in most of Europe, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Vullo argued therefore argued that:
Yes, there’s going to potentially be the odd person in that group that may be guilty, that has got an appeal quashed and the jury found them not guilty. But our system is set up to protect the innocent. That protection is now gone. To make sure the government doesn’t embarrass itself by giving money to someone who’s guilty, it’s not giving money to anyone.
But if the government is not going to reverse this law, then it must be for the jury to make the decision as to whether someone has proven themselves to be innocent.
Buckle explained that:
When you’re found not guilty, this doesn’t mean the jury finds you innocent, but only that they can’t be sure you’re guilty. As the law stands now, you can’t prove you are innocent. That’s why the challenge we gave the government when we went up to Westminster was to get my jury back and ask them if they found me just not guilty or came to the conclusion that I was innocent. I know my jury found me innocent, because all the evidence proves it wasn’t me, including the complainant saying it wasn’t even me. Otherwise, there’s no way of proving beyond reasonable doubt.
Echoing this, Vullo said that:
Juries need to make this decision, because if there is this impossibly high test, that you have to prove you are innocent beyond reasonable doubt, it is inarguable that the best body to decide whether you are actually innocent has to be the jury. They’ve heard everything to do with the case and seen the demeanour of the people who gave evidence. If they’re going to keep this unfair system, to give it any chance of fairness, you have to make the jury decide, not someone from the MOJ dealing with it on paper. The person that made Brian’s decision hadn’t understood the case and made two or three really serious practical errors in their determination. And yet, there’s no appeal. Their decision is final.
‘Justice must go beyond acquittal’
The Law Commission recently published its consultation on the way criminal appeals are handled in England and Wales, including proposals to make it easier to overturn wrongful convictions. According to its initial findings, the new law regarding compensation is unfair, so the Law Commission has proposed lowering the standard, so although claimants would still need to prove their innocence, the evidence level would be much lower and wouldn’t require it to be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
This would be an improvement: an acknowledgement that the situation is unfair. However, according to Vullo, who will be having further discussions with the Law Commission in the coming weeks, it does not yet go far enough.
Last month, Brian Buckle’s local MP, Ben Lake, also gave his support to the campaign. He led a debate in Parliament on ensuring compensation for victims of miscarriages of justice, and described Buckle’s situation as “a moral and legal failure”.
Lake told the Canary that:
It cannot be fair for our justice system to deny support to those who are forced to endure the trauma of wrongful conviction and imprisonment, and who often suffer irreparable harm to their mental health and reputation.
Most people will understandably – and quite reasonably – assume that victims of miscarriages of justice are compensated, particularly if they have spent time in custody before being pardoned or having their convictions quashed. Unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule for victims of miscarriages of justice across England and Wales. That is why the UK Government must act to ensure that those wrongfully convicted are compensated. Justice must go beyond acquittal – the innocent must be compensated so that they can rebuild their lives.
Buckle is now expecting to attend a meeting with the justice minister in the next few weeks.
Brian Buckle should be entitled to compensation for his wrongful conviction and the five years he spent in prison. Help his petition reach 100,000 signatures, so this issue can be debated in parliament, and the law can be changed. Sign here.
Organisations working in children’s rights and youth justice have joined together to condemn the Labour Party government’s decision to introduce PAVA spray – an incapacitant similar to pepper spray – for use against children.
PAVA spray: Labour Party permitting pepper spray use against children
On Thursday 24 April, justice secretary Shabana Mahmood authorised it for use against children across three Young Offender Institutions (YOIs).
In response, the Alliance for Youth Justice (AYJ) has led a joint statement to call this out. It included signees from 37 organisations and individuals working to represent the views of, or deliver services to children. Together, they set out the significant risks this measure poses to children’s safety and wellbeing.
The government’s decision represents a serious escalation in the use of force that is permitted against children. Far from keeping children and staff safe, normalising the use of violence in this way risks making conditions even worse for those living and working in YOIs. The move is also inconsistent with the government’s ‘Child First’ approach. This commits to seeing children as children first and foremost, and to prioritising their best interests.
When adult male prisons first piloted PAVA spray, the Ministry of Justice’s evaluation showed that violence continued to rise. The use of PAVA undermined trust between prisoners and staff, further affecting safety.
Despite repeated warnings that the introduction of PAVA spray was highly likely to mirror the existing disproportionate use of force against those from racially minoritised backgrounds, the previous government nonetheless proceeded to roll it out across the adult male estate.
Through the Ministry of Justice’s own monitoring and evaluation, we now know that these predictions were correct.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also highlighted that disabled people are likely to be disproportionately impacted by the use of PAVA spray due to pre-existing conditions and vulnerabilities.
‘Locking institutions into cycles of violence’
Despite this evidence from the adult estate, the current government now risks repeating the same mistakes in the children’s estate.
This decision reflects a broader failure to address the longstanding challenges within the children’s custodial estate. Staffing shortfalls, deteriorating conditions, and inadequate support structures have contributed to an unsafe environment for both children and staff. Rather than arming staff with chemical sprays, the government must prioritise safer, trauma-informed environments that meet children’s needs.
Chief Executive of the Alliance for Youth Justice Jess Mullen said:
Years of failure and a lack of direction has led the children’s secure estate to a deeply concerning point.
Young Offender Institutions (YOIs), which the previous government had committed to closing, are the largest and most prison-like establishments that can hold children in custody, with the lowest staff-to-child ratios. They suffer from staffing shortages, and staff who are in place are not always sufficiently trauma-informed or child-centred. Children spend most of their time locked in cells with limited access to education and support.
In such a context, it is no wonder that tensions run high. But the solution to volatile establishments is not to propagate further harm, and the introduction of PAVA spray will only further lock institutions into cycles of violence.
Instead, children need more support, education, and interventions from well-trained, child-centred staff able to de-escalate tension and meet complex needs. The government must outline a clear plan for achieving this, including closing YOIs and the last Secure Training Centre, increasing capacity in more appropriate provision, and ensuring custody is only ever used for children as a last resort. Every day that goes by without doing so places the wellbeing of these children at risk.
The International Court of Justice began hearings today into Israel’s obligations towards the presence and activities of the UN, other international organisations and third states in occupied Palestine.
The case was prompted by Israeli bills outlawing the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) in October 2024, an event that sparked global outrage and calls for unseating Israel from the UN due to accusations that it violated the founding UN charter, particularly the privileges and immunities enjoyed by UN agencies.
The ICJ hearings coincide with Israel’s continued ban on humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip since March 2 — more than 50 days — and the intensification of military attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians since the collapse of ceasefire on March 18.
It will be the third advisory opinion case since 2004 to be heard before the World Court in relation to Israel’s violations of international law.
About 40 states, including Palestine, are presenting evidence before the court between April 28 and May 2. Israel’s main ally, the United States, is due to speak at the Peace Palace on Wednesday, April 30.
The hearings follow the resolution of the UN General Assembly on 29 December 2024 (A/RES/79/232), mainly lobbied for by Norway, requesting the court to give an advisory opinion on the following questions:
“What are the obligations of Israel, as an occupying Power and as a member of the United Nations, in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, including its agencies and bodies, other international organisations and third States, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including to ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population as well as of basic services and humanitarian and development assistance, for the benefit of the Palestinian civilian population, and in support of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination?”
Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the ICJ hearings.
The UNGA’s request invited the court to rule on the above question in relation to a number of legal sources, including: the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, international human rights law, privileges and immunities of international organisations and states under international law, relevant resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, as well as the previous advisory opinions of the court:
the opinion of 9 July 2004 which declared Israel’s separation wall in occupied Palestine illegal; and
the 19 July 2024 advisory opinion, which confirmed the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and Israel’s obligation as an occupying power to uphold the rights of Palestinians.
‘Nowhere and no one is safe’ Swedish lawyer and diplomat Elinor Hammarskjold, who has served as the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and its Legal Counsel since 2025, opened the proceedings.
“Under international law, states are prohibited from acquiring territory by force,” Hammarskjold said in her opening comments.
She explained that Israel was not entitled to sovereignty over the occupied territories, and that the Knesset rules and judgments against UNRWA “constitute an extension of sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories”.
“Measures taken on basis of these laws, and other applicable Israeli law in occupied territories is inconsistent with Israel’s obligations under international law,” she concluded.
She further outlined Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law as an occupying power and obligations under the UN Charter, emphasising that it has a duty to ensure the safety of both the Palestinian people and UN personnel.
Palestine’s ambassador to the UN, Ammar Hijaz accused Israel of using humanitarian aid as “weapons of war”.
He told the court that Israel’s efforts to starve, kill and displace Palestinians and its targeting of the organisations trying to save their lives “are aimed at the forcible transfer and destruction of Palestinian people in the immediate term”.
‘Children will suffer irreparable damage’
In the long term, he said, “they will also ensure that our children will suffer irreparable damage and harm, placing an entire generation at great risk”.
Irish lawyer, Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, who is representing Palestine, outlined Israel’s obligations as a UN member, including its obligations to cooperate with the UN and to protect its staff and property, as well as to ensure the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, and to abide by UN resolutions and court orders.
“Israel’s violations of these obligations are egregious and ongoing,” Ghralaigh told the court.
The hearings are ongoing until Friday.
Sondos Asem reports for the Middle East Eye. Republished under Creative Commons.
I have drafted a Preamble I believe our Founding Fathers should have adopted as the opening statement of the Australian Constitution in 1901. We should vote on it (or a better version) at a Referendum to be held on the same day as Federal Election 2028 so that future Parliaments are required to uphold the …
“The day-to-day chaos of the American political news cycle can make it hard to fully take stock of the seismic shifts that are happening,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF North America.
“But when you step back and look at the whole picture, the pattern of blows to press freedom is quite clear.
“RSF refuses to accept this massive attack on press freedom as the new normal. We will continue to call out these assaults against the press and use every means at our disposal to fight back against them.
“We urge every American who values press freedom to do the same.”
Here is the Trump administration’s war on the press by the numbers: *
427 million – Weekly worldwide audience of the USAGM news outlets silenced by Trump
In an effort to eliminate the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) by cutting grants to outlets funded by the federal agency and placing their reporters on leave, the government has left millions around the world without vital sources of reliable information.
This leaves room for authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China, to spread their propaganda unchecked.
However, RSF recently secured an interim injunction against the administration’s dismantling of the USAGM-funded broadcaster Voice of America,which also reinstates funding to the outlets Radio Free Asia (RFA) and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN).
8,000+ – US government web pages taken down
Webpages from more than a dozen government sites were removed almost immediately after President Trump took office, leaving journalists and the public without critical information on health, crime, and more.
3,500+ – Journalists and media workers at risk of losing their jobs thanks to Trump’s shutdown of the USAGM
Journalists from VOA, the MBN, RFA, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are at risk of losing their jobs as the Trump administration works to shut down the USAGM. Furthermore, at least 84 USAGM journalists based in the US on work visas now face deportation to countries where they risk prosecution and severe harassment.
At least 15 journalists from RFA and eight from VOA originate from repressive states and are at serious risk of being arrested and potentially imprisoned if deported.
180 – Public radio stations at risk of closing if public media funding is eliminated
The Trump administration reportedly plans to ask Congress to cut $1.1 billion in allocated funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). These cuts will hit rural communities and stations in smaller media markets the hardest, where federal funding is most impactful.
74 –Days the Associated Press (AP) has been banned from the White House
On February 11, the White House began barring the Associated Press (AP) news agency from its events because of the news agency’s continued use of the term “Gulf of Mexico,” which President Trump prefers to call the “Gulf of America” — a blatant example of retaliation against the media.
Despite a federal judge ruling the administration must reinstate the news agency’s access on April 9, the White House has continued to limit AP’s access.
64 – Disparaging comments made by Trump against the media on Truth Social since inauguration
In addition to regular, personal attacks against the media in press conferences and public speeches, Trump takes to his social media site nearly every day to insult, threaten, or intimidate journalists and media workers who report about him or his administration critically.
13 –Individuals pardoned by President Trump after being convicted or charged for attacking journalists on January 6, 2021
Trump pardoned over a dozen individuals charged with or convicted of violent crimes against journalists at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.
6 –Federal Communications Commission (FCC) inquiries into media companies
Brendan Carr, co-author of the Project 2025 playbook and chair of the FCC, has wasted no time launching politically motivated investigations, explicit threats against media organisations, and implicit threats against their parent companies. These include inquiries into CBS, ABC parent company Disney, NBC parent company Comcast, public broadcasters NPR and PBS, and California television station KCBS.
4 – Trump’s personal lawsuits against media organisations
While Trump settled a lawsuit with ABC’s parent company Disney, he continues to sue CBS, The Des Moines Register, Gannett, and the Pulitzer Center over coverage he deemed biased.
$1.60 – Average annual amount each American pays for public media
Donald Trump has threatened to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting, framing the move as a cost-cutting measure.
However, public media only costs each American about $1.60 each year, representing a tremendous bargain as it gives Americans access to a wealth of local, national, and lifesaving emergency programming.
The United States was 55th out of 180 nations listed by the RSF World Press Freedom Index in 2024. The new index rankings will be released this week.
* Figures as of the date of publication, 24 April 2025. Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Activists for Palestine paid homage to Pope Francis in Aotearoa New Zealand today for his humility, care for marginalised in the world, and his courageous solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza at a street theatre rally just hours before his funeral in Rome.
He was remembered and thanked for his daily calls of concern to Gaza and his final public blessing last Sunday — the day before he died — calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian enclave.
Several speakers thanked the late Pope for his humanitarian concerns and spiritual leadership at the vigil in Auckland’s “Palestinian Corner” in Te Komititanga Square, beside the Britomart transport hub, as other rallies were held across New Zealand over the weekend.
“Last November, Pope Francis said that what is happening in Gaza was not a war. It was cruelty,” said Catholic deacon Chris Sullivan. “Because Israel is always claiming it is a war. But it isn’t a war, it’s just cruelty.”
During the last 18 months of his life, Pope Francis had a daily ritual — he called Gaza’s only Catholic church to see how people were coping with the “cruel” onslaught.
Deacon Sullivan said the people of the church in Gaza “have been attacked by Israeli rockets, Israeli shells, and Israeli snipers, and a number of people have been killed as a result of that.”
In his Easter message before dying, Pope Francis said: “I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
‘We lost the best man’
Also speaking at today’s rally, Dr Abdallah Gouda said: “We lost the best man. He was talking about Palestine and he was working to stop this genocide.
“Pope Francis, as a Palestinian, as a Palestinians from Gaza, and as a Moslem, thank you Pope Francis. Thank you. And we will never, never forget you.
“As we will always talk about you, the man who called every night to talk to the Palestinians, and he asked, ‘what do you eat’. And he talked to leaders around the world to stop this genocide.”
Pope Francis called Gaza’s Catholic parish every night. Video: AJ+
In Rome, the coffin of Pope Francis made its way through the city from the Vatican after the funeral to reach Santa Maria Maggiore basilica for a private burial ceremony.
It arrived at the basilica after an imposing funeral ceremony at St Peter’s Square.
The Vatican said that more than 250,000 people attended the open-air service that was held under clear blue skies
Dozens of foreign dignitaries, including heads of state, were also in attendance.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re eulogised Pope Francis as a pontiff who knew how to communicate to the “least among us” and urged people to build bridges and not walls.
In Auckland at the “guerrilla theatre” event, several highly publicised examples of recent human rights violations and war crimes in Gaza were recreated in several skits with “actors” taking part from the crowd.
Palestinian Dr Faiez Idais role played the kidnapping of courageous Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya by the Israeli military last December and his detention and torture in captivity since.
Palestinian Dr Faiez Idais (hooded) during his role played for courageous Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya held prisoner by Israeli forces. Image: APR
Khalil was seized by ICE agents from his university apartment without a warrant and abducted to a remote immigration prison in Louisiana but the courts have blocked his deportation in a high profile case.
He is one of at least 300 students who have been captured ICE agents for criticising Israel and its genocide.
A two-year-old child holds a “peace for all children” in Gaza placard at today’s rally. Image: APR
The skits included a condemnation of the US corporation Starbucks, the world’s leading coffee roaster and retailer, with mock blood being kicked over fake bodies on the plaza.
The backlash against the brand has caused heavy losses and 100 outlets in Malaysia have been forced to shut down.
Singers and musicians Hone Fowler, who was also MC, Brenda Liddiard and Mark Laurent — including their dedicated “Make Peace Today” inspired by Jesus’ “Blessed are the peacemakers” — also lifted the spirits of the crowd.
Protesters call for an end to the genocide in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Image: APR
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
Demonstrators against the forced disappearances of immigrants to El Salvador gather to protest on April 24, 2025, in NYC.Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The FBI arrested a sitting judge in a Milwaukee County court in Wisconsin on Friday, claiming that she obstructed immigration enforcement agents from detaining an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan’s arrest is not only the latest escalation in Donald Trump’s fascist deportation program, it also marks the administration’s eagerness to take aim at any and all constraints on its power to act.
“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse,” wrote FBI director Kash Patel in a post on X. Patel added that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since.”
For the Trump administration, due process and an independent judiciary are hurdles to be kicked down.
Dugan faces charges of obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the U.S., as well as a charge of concealing an individual to prevent their discovery and arrest. According to reports, the judge escorted a man sought by ICE and his defense attorney through a non-public jury door.
In Wisconsin, there’s no explicit law dictating that judges must allow immigration enforcement into their courtrooms. Members of the judiciary nationwide have consistently stressed that the presence of ICE agents interferes with legal proceedings, as defendants fearing deportation miss court appearances for fear of ICE detention.
For the Trump administration, however, court appearances are beside the point: Due process and an independent judiciary are hurdles to be kicked down.
In the absence of any meaningful opposition party challenges, activists and organizers are struggling to gain ground in building robust resistance in the face of extraordinary repression. Unions, for their part, are disempowered. That has left courts as one of the few sites of actionable pushback on Trump’s agenda.
That we are left with only the courts is no good thing; the U.S. criminal legal system with its carceral designs has never been suitable terrain for achieving justice. And our current Supreme Court has been a regular aid to the far right and the president’s authoritarian ambitions.
Whatever limitations there are to Trump’s expansive power grabs, however, must be championed. Judges willing to push back on the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal behavior are a lifeline.
Just last week, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a new round of mass deportations of Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act. Judge James Boasberg has also recently found probable cause to hold the government in contempt for defying his orders to halt previous deportations to El Salvador’s prison camp under the act.
ICE on Friday also announced it will restore thousands of students’ previously terminated records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, after dozens of cases were brought by students led by the government to believe that their legal student immigration statuses had been revoked.
The SEVIS case is instructive. Again and again, judges sided with the students. One excoriated the government’s actions as “Kafkaesque.” Dozens of rulings have, at least temporarily, been a breakwater against Trump’s tidal wave of executive orders and his modus operandi of chaos, speed, and relentlessness.
Lawless in the Name of the Law
Questions of how flagrantly the administration will continue to disobey the courts abound — and there aren’t many reasons for optimism.
The targeting of judges for arrest is another clear signal that Trump will continue to attack the independent judiciary by force. The insult added to injury is that he will keep calling it the law.
“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her attorney told reporters on Friday.
She was an apt target for the Trump administration: Dugan, before her current stint on the bench, was the executive director of Catholic Charities in Milwaukee, a group that has done considerable work with poor and vulnerable people.
Dugan is not the first judge to be arrested for allegedly obstructing ICE. During Trump’s first term, federal prosecutors charged Judge Shelley Joseph in Massachusetts with obstruction of justice after she allegedly allowed a defendant to leave the building through a rear door and evade ICE. The federal charges were dropped, but the judge continues to face a judiciary disciplinary process.
There’s reason to fear that Dugan’s arrest will not stand alone in Trump’s second term, in all its authoritarian excess. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a message to other judges who might stand in the way of the administration’s deportation machine: “We are prosecuting you.”
Bondi had posted on X to confirm the judge’s arrest earlier in the day.
“No one is above the law,” she wrote.
For Bondi, like too many others in Trump world, the lawappears to be Trump’s word alone.
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is known and respected internationally for his work as a consumer defense lawyer and for winning major lawsuits against corporate giants such as Volkswagen, Kühne & Nagel, and Deutsche Bank. He was one of the first individuals to recognize that the COVID measures constituted crimes against humanity and decided, along with three other lawyers, to create the Corona Investigative Committee, which aimed to shed light on the actions of governments, public institutions, and the medical community in the context of the so-called “pandemic.”
Thanks to his brilliant investigative work, and after consulting more than 150 scientists and experts in all fields around the world, as well as numerous whistleblowers (from Pfizer, WHO, CDC, UN), he was able to collect an abundance of evidence of what he calls “the biggest crime ever perpetrated against humanity.”
He was ready to take action
However, the German secret services, in cooperation with Göttingen public prosecutor Simon Phillip John and Fuellmich’s accusers, had already decided to construct a case against Fuellmich, aimed at stopping him.
He is accused of having embezzled 700,000 euros, but, in truth, he did not. The imminent threat of seizure of the Corona Investigative Committee’s bank accounts by the German government during the fallout of the COVID pandemic, along with the risk of no longer being able to use the funds raised by private donations to carry out their investigative work, Reiner Fuellmich and Viviane Fischer took steps to protect those funds. They purchased 1 million euros worth of gold (current value: 1.8 million euros), and each took out personal loans (700,000 euros to Reiner Fuellmich, and 100,000 euros to Viviane Fischer). Their loan agreements were documented in written, signed contracts.
When the defense demonstrated the erroneousness of the original accusation which asserted that Fuellmich had no authority to take a personal loan without the other committee member’s consent, the judge had to invent a new allegation in order to justify Fuellmich’s continued imprisonment. The judge thus declared that that the loans were “fake”.
Interestingly, the previous Göttingen lead prosecutor Reinicke, who had been asked by the secret services to open an investigation on Fuellmich, had clearly stated that there were no grounds upon which to investigate him and archived the case in June 2022. Merely two and a half months later, a young, inexperienced prosecutor by the name of Simon Phillip John was transferred from Hanover to Göttingen and given the task of doing the dirty work that Reinicke had previously deemed unjustified.
Judge Carsten Schindler and prosecutor John are, without any shadow of a doubt, following someone else’s instructions. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich has been unlawfully held in pre-trial detention in the German maximum-security prison in Rosdorf for 18 months. This, even though the maximum term for pre-trial detention in Germany is 6 months. This, after his having been lured under false pretenses, subsequently abducted in Mexico, and then deported to Germany – without an international arrest warrant NOR a formal extradition order — where he was then arrested and imprisoned.
The circumstances of his illegal arrest and subsequent mistreatment in prison are very concerning.
From June 2024 until December 2024, Reiner Fuellmich was placed in solitary confinement. The official reason was that he was providing fellow inmates with legal advice. Fuellmich was also subjected to various forms of abuse, in clear violation of his human rights: physical and psychological mistreatment including prolonged solitary confinement, deprived of sunlight, deprived of outdoor physical activity, deprived of sleep, forced to choose between taking a shower or having his one-hour outdoors, and even prohibited from calling his lawyers. Aside from their brief (and monitored) telephone calls on Skype, he has not seen his wife since his arrest.
He is only permitted three hours per month of visits and telephone calls. On top of that, he has been denied adequate medical care, including simple access to vitamins.
Moreover, Reiner was not allowed to visit his dying mother, nor attend her funeral.
Both the inhumane prison conditions and how his trial is being conducted raise serious doubts about the level of respect for fundamental rights in the German judicial system.
From June 10, 2024 to this day, Reiner Fuellmich, after being body-searched, is brought to the court and back to prison in shackles and handcuffs, escorted by armed security officers in armored vehicles, as if he were a serial killer!
He is being denied a fair trial because any motions presented by his defense lawyers are rejected without explanation. As of July 2024, Judge Schindler ordered that the defense motions and arguments, instead of being read aloud to the court, were from then on to be presented in writing only, thus impeding court observers from understanding and properly documenting the proceedings. These same court spectators, as have Fuellmich’s defense lawyers, have been subject to threats.
In addition to not permitting defense witnesses to take the stand, Judge Schindler refuses to allow the person who pocketed the funds to testify in court.
This “kangaroo court” proceeding is now in its final phase. As we write this, the defense lawyers have completed their closing statements, and Fuellmich has begun to make his final, closing statement before the court, which, to silence him, interrupted and admonished him at least 12 times. It is feared that the court may impose upon Fuellmich a time limit for the presentation of his final defense statement, as they did to his defense lawyers, forcing them to shorten their closing statements.
In the course of 51 hearings, what we have witnessed is nothing less than an egregious case of obstruction of justice– a criminal offense in Germany– which confirms the intent of the German secret services as stated in their dossier on Reiner Fuellmich.
One of Fuellmich’s defense lawyers presented this dossier to the court. It specified that Fuellmich was to be stopped “at all costs”; that “it is necessary to prepare a criminal case against Fuellmich, [including the] collaboration of prosecutors and suitable third parties”; and recommending “the recruitment and involvement of trusted persons amongst Fuellmich’s closest circle.”
It was also their stated objective to convict Fuellmich; that “the possibility of [him] obtaining a politically exposed position must be prevented by any means”. This dossier, provided by a whistleblower, demonstrates that Reiner Fuellmich was already under special surveillance as far back as 2021.
That said, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Reiner Fuellmich had to be stopped to prevent him from continuing his precious investigational work exposing the truth regarding the “pandemic” as well as the so-called “vaccines”.
Fuellmich is clearly a political prisoner, punished for speaking the truth. His case demands the attention of international human rights organizations and the indignation of worldwide public opinion.
Pre-trial detention must never be used as an instrument to defer, suppress, or completely substitute the justice system as a legitimized punishment without a sentence.
Justice, free speech, and respect for fundamental human rights are the pillars of a democratic state, not only for but especially for those individuals who raise uncomfortable questions and dare to speak up.
Seba Terribilini
Cynthia Salatino
April 17, 2025
A postscript from Dr. Robert Malone:
Even CHAT-GPT3 writes that the treatment of Dr. Fuellmich is indefensible. It writes:
The treatment of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is not defensible under normal German legal standards. His prolonged solitary confinement, excessive security measures, and extended pre-trial detention are all highly unusual and have prompted widespread concern and condemnation from legal experts, human rights advocates, and international observers2,5,7,10,11,12,14. The available evidence suggests that his case is an outlier and may be politically motivated, rather than a routine application of German justice.
When the CHAT-GPT3 doesn’t back up the German government, an AI summarizer trained on data that supports the administrative state, you know things are bad…
Note that German courts usually opt for a suspended sentence (probation) or a fine for a first-time offender convicted of a standard embezzlement offense (without aggravating factors).
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich has been held in that high-security prison for over 18 months during his trial process. This duration of pre-trial detention is highly unusual in Germany, particularly for non-violent offenses. This is political persecution.
For the last week, Indigenous leaders from around the world have converged in New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFI. It’s the largest global gathering of Indigenous peoples and the Forum provides space for participants to bring their issues to international authorities, often when their own governments have refused to take action. This year’s Forum focuses on how U.N. member states’ have, or have not, protected the rights of Indigenous peoples, and conversations range from the environmental effects of extractive industries, to climate change, and violence against women.
The Forum is an intergenerational space. Young people in attendance often work alongside elders and leaders to come up with solutions and address ongoing challenges. Grist interviewed seven Indigenous youth attending UNPFII this year hailing from Africa, the Pacific, North and South America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Arctic.
Joshua Amponsem, 33, is Asante from Ghana and the founder of Green Africa Youth Organization, a youth-led group in Africa that promotes energy sustainability. He also is the co-director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund which provides funding opportunities to bolster youth participation in climate change solutions.
Since the Trump administration pulled all the funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, Amponsem has seen the people and groups he works with suffer from the loss of financial help.
Courtesy of Joshua Amponsem
It’s already hard to be a young person fighting climate change. Less than one percent of climate grants go to youth-led programs, according to the Youth Climate Justice Fund.
“I think everyone is very much worried,” he said. “That is leading to a lot of anxiety.”
Amponsem specifically mentioned the importance of groups like Africa Youth Pastoralist Initiatives — a coalition of youth who raise animals like sheep or cattle. Pastoralists need support to address climate change because the work of herding sheep and cattle gets more difficult as drought and resource scarcity persist, according to one report.
“No matter what happens we will stand and we will fight, and we will keep pushing for solutions,” he said.
Janell Dymus-Kurei, 32, is Māori from the East Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a fellow with the Commonwealth Fund, a group that promotes better access to healthcare for vulnerable populations.
At this year’s UNPFII, Dymus-Kurei hopes to bring attention to legislation aimed at diminishing Māori treaty rights. While one piece of legislation died this month, she doesn’t think it’s going to stop there.
She hopes to remind people about the attempted legislation that would have given exclusive Maori rights to everyone in New Zealand.
Courtesy of Janell Dymus-Kurei
The issue gained international attention last Fall when politician Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke performed a Haka during parliament, a traditional dance that was often done before battle. The demonstration set off other large-scale Māori protests in the country.
“They are bound by the Treaty of Waitangi,” she said. Countries can address the forum, but New Zealand didn’t make it to the UNPFII.
“You would show up if you thought it was important to show up and defend your actions in one way, shape, or form,” she said.
This year, she’s brought her two young children — TeAio Nitana, which means “peace and divinity” and Te Haumarangai, or “forceful wind”. Dymus-Kurei said it’s important for children to be a part of the forum, especially with so much focus on Indigenous women.
“Parenting is political in every sense of the word,” she said.
Avery Doxtator, 22, is Oneida, Anishinaabe and Dakota and the president of the National Association of Friendship Centres, or NAFC, which promotes cultural awareness and resources for urban Indigenous youth throughout Canada’s territories. She attended this year’s Forum to raise awareness about the rights of Indigenous peoples living in urban spaces.
The NAFC brought 23 delegates from Canada this year representing all of the country’s regions. It’s the biggest group they’ve ever had, but Doxtator said everyone attending was concerned when crossing the border into the United States due to the Trump Administration’s border and immigration restrictions.
Taylar Dawn Stagner
“It’s a safety threat that we face as Indigenous peoples coming into a country that does not necessarily want us here,” she said. “That was our number one concern. Making sure youth are safe being in the city, but also crossing the border because of the color of our skin.”
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, protects Indigenous peoples fundamental rights of self-determination, and these rights extend to those living in cities, perhaps away from their territories.
She said that she just finished her 5th year on the University of Toronto’s Water Polo Team, and will be playing on a professional team in Barcelona next year.
Liudmyla Korotkykh, 26, is Crimean Tatar from Kyiv, one of the Indigenous peoples of Ukraine. She spoke at UNPFII about the effects of the Ukraine war on her Indigenous community. She is a manager and attorney at the Crimean Tatar Resource Center.
The history of the Crimean Tatars are similar to other Indigenous populations. They have survived colonial oppression from both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union — and as a result their language and way of life is constantly under threat. Crimea is a country that was annexed by Russia around a decade ago.
Taylar Dawn Stagner
In 2021, President Zelensky passed legislation to establish better rights for Indigenous peoples, but months later Russia continued its campaign against Ukraine.
Korotkykh said Crimean Tatars have been conscripted to fight for Russia against the Tatars that are now in Ukraine.
“Now we are in the situation where our peoples are divided by a frontline and our peoples are fighting against each other because some of us joined the Russian army and some joined the Ukrainian army,” she said.
Korotkykh said even though many, including the Trump Administration, consider Crimea a part of Russia, hopes that Crimean Tatars won’t be left out of future discussions of their homes.
“This is a homeland of Indigenous peoples. We don’t accept the Russian occupation,” she said. “So, when the [Trump] administration starts to discuss how we can recognize Crimea as a part of Russia, it is not acceptable to us.”
Toni Chiran, 30, is Garo from Bangladesh, and a member of the Bangladesh Indigenous Youth Forum, an organization focused on protecting young Indigenous people. The country has 54 distinct Indigenous peoples, and their constitution does not recognize Indigenous rights.
In January, Chiran was part of a protest in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where he and other Indigenous people were protesting how the state was erasing the word “Indigenous” — or Adivasi in Hindi — from text books. Chiran says the move is a part of an ongoing assault by the state to erase Indigenous peoples from Bangladesh.
Courtesy of Toni Chiran
He said that he sustained injuries to his head and chest during the protest as counter protesters assaulted their group, and 13 protesters sustained injuries. He hopes bringing that incident, and more, to the attention of Forum members will help in the fight for Indigenous rights in Bangladesh.
“There is an extreme level of human rights violations in my country due to the land related conflicts because our government still does not recognize Indigenous peoples,” he said.
The student group Students for Sovereignty were accused of attacking Chiran and his fellow protesters. During a following protest a few days later in support of Chiran and the others injured Bangladesh police used tear gas and batons to disperse the crowd.
“We are still demanding justice on these issues,” he said.
Aviaaija Baadsgaard, 27, is Inuit and a member of the Inuit Circumpolar Council Youth Engagement Program, a group that aims to empower the next generation of leaders in the Arctic. Baadsgaard is originally from Nuunukuu, the capital of Greenland, and this is her first year attending the UNPFII. Just last week she graduated from the University of Copenhagen with her law degree. She originally began studying law to help protect the rights of the Inuit of Greenland..
Recently, Greenland has been a global focal point due to the Trump Administration’s interest in acquiring the land and its resources – including minerals needed for the green transition like lithium and neodymium: both crucial for electric vehicles.
“For me, it’s really important to speak on behalf of the Inuit of Greenland,” Baadsgaard said.
Taylar Dawn Stagner
Greenland is around 80 percent Indigenous, and a vast majority of the population there do not want the Greenland is around 80 percent Indigenous, and a vast majority of the population there do not want the U.S. to wrest control of the country from the Kingdom of Denmark. Many more want to be completely independent.
“I don’t want any administration to mess with our sovereignty,” she said.
Baadsgaard said her first time at the forum has connected her to a broader discussion about global Indigenous rights — a conversation she is excited to join. She wants to learn more about the complex system at the United Nations, so this trip is about getting ready for the future.
Cindy Sisa Andy Aguinda, 30, is Kitchwa from Ecuador in the Amazon. She is in New York to talk about climate change, women’s health and the climate crisis. She spoke on a panel with a group of other Indigenous women about how the patriarchy and colonial violence affect women at a time of growing global unrest. Especially in the Amazon where deforestation is devastating the forests important to the Kitchwa tribe.
She said international funding is how many protect the Amazon Rainforest. As an example, last year the United States agreed to send around 40 million dollars to the country through USAID — but then the Trump administration terminated most of the department in March.
Courtesy of Cindy Sisa Andy Aguinda
“To continue working and caring for our lands, the rainforest, and our people, we need help,” she said through a translator. Even when international funding goes into other countries for the purposes to protect Indigenous land, only around 17 percent ends up in the hands of Indigenous-led initiatives. “In my country, it’s difficult for the authorities to take us into account,” she said.
She said despite that she had hope for the future and hopes to make it to COP30 in Brazil, the international gathering that addresses climate change, though she will probably have to foot the bill herself. She said that Indigenous tribes of the Amazon are the ones fighting everyday to protect their territories, and she said those with this relationship with the forest need to share ancestral knowledge with the world at places like the UNPFII and COP30.
“We can’t stop if we want to live well, if we want our cultural identity to remain alive,” she said.
There was faint hope that efforts to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza would succeed. That hope is now all but gone, offering 2.1 million tormented and starved Palestinians dismal prospects for the days and weeks ahead.
Last Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister once again affirmed he had no intention to end the war. Benjamin Netanyahu wants what he calls “absolute victory” to achieve US President Donald Trump’s so-called vision for Gaza of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
To that end, Israel is weaponising food at a scale not seen before, including immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas. It has not allowed any wheat, medicine boxes, or other vital aid into the Gaza Strip since 2 March.
This engineered starvation has pushed experts to warn that 1.1 million Palestinians face imminent famine.
Many believe this was Israel’s “maximum pressure” plan all along: massive force, starvation, and land grabs. It’s what the Israeli Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, referred to in March when he gave Palestinians in Gaza an ultimatum — surrender or die.
A month after breaking the ceasefire, Israel has converted nearly 70 percent of the tiny territory into no-go or forced displacement zones, including all of Rafah. It has also created a new so-called security corridor, where the illegal settlement of Morag once stood.
Israel is bombing the Palestinians it is starving while actively pushing them into a tiny strip of dunes along the coast.
Israel only interested in temporary ceasefire
This mentality informed the now failed ceasefire talks. Israel was only interested in a temporary ceasefire deal that would keep its troops in Gaza and see the release of half of the living Israeli captives.
In exchange, Israel reportedly offered to allow critically needed food and aid back into Gaza, which it is obliged to do as an occupying power, irrespective of a ceasefire agreement.
Israel also refused to commit to ending the war, just as it did in the Lebanon ceasefire agreement, while also demanding that Hamas disarm and agree to the exile of its prominent members from Gaza.
Disarming is a near-impossible demand in such a context, but this is not motivated by a preserved arsenal that Hamas wants to hold on to. Materially speaking, the armaments Israel wants Hamas to give up are inconsequential, except in how they relate to the group’s continued control over Gaza and its future role in Palestinian politics.
Symbolically, accepting the demand to lay down arms is a sign of surrender few Palestinians would support in a context devoid of a political horizon, or even the prospect of one.
While Israel has declared Hamas as an enemy that must be “annihilated”, the current right-wing government in Israel doesn’t want to deal with any Palestinian party or entity.
The famous “no Hamas-stan and no Fatah-stan” is not just a slogan in Israeli political thinking — it is the policy.
Golden opportunity for mass ethnic cleansing
This government senses a golden opportunity for the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank — and it aims to seize it.
Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya recently said that the movement was done with partial deals. Hamas, he said, was willing to release all Israeli captives in exchange for ending the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the release of an agreed-on number of Palestinian prisoners.
But the truth is, Hamas is running out of options.
Netanyahu does not consider releasing the remaining Israeli captives as a central goal. Hamas has no leverage and barely any allies left standing.
Hezbollah is out of the equation, facing geographic and political isolation, demands for disarmament, and the lethal Israeli targeting of its members.
Armed Iraqi groups have signalled their willingness to hand over weapons to the government in Baghdad in order not to be in the crosshairs of Washington or Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have sustained heavy losses from hundreds of massive US airstrikes. Despite their defiant tone, they cannot change the current dynamics.
Tehran distanced from Houthis
Finally, Iran is engaged in what it describes as positive dialogue with the Trump administration to avert a confrontation. To that end, Tehran has distanced itself from the Houthis and is welcoming the idea of US investment.
The so-called Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction also excludes any role for Hamas. While the mediators are pushing for a political formula that would not decisively erase Hamas from Palestinian politics, some Arab states would prefer such a scenario.
As these agendas and new realities play out, Gaza has been laid to waste. There is no food, no space, no hope. Only despair and growing anger.
This chapter of the genocide shows no sign of letting up, with Israel under no international pressure to cease the bombing and forced starvation of Gaza. Hamas remains defiant but has no significant leverage to wield.
In the absence of any viable Palestinian initiative that can rally international support around a different dialogue altogether about ending the war, intervention can only come from Washington, where the favoured solution is ethnic cleansing.
This is a dead-end road that pushes Palestinians into the abyss of annihilation, whether by death and starvation or political and material erasure through mass displacement.
Nour Odeh is a political analyst, public diplomacy consultant, and an award-winning journalist. She also reports for Al Jazeera. This article was first published by The New Arab and is republished under Creative Commons.
As President Donald Trump guts the federal government, there’s a greater need than ever for nonprofit organizations to step up and fill the void. But there’s a Trump-shaped fundraising problem looming over the nonprofit sector.
Fearful of Trump’s penchant for targeting his perceived political enemies, some nonprofit leaders say the large donors who help subsidize their operations are pulling back. Even though the Trump administration has said it will not move forward with a series of rumored executive actions targeting nonprofits, this retreat by large donors poses a critical problem — especially as the federal government has slashed grants and issued stop-work orders already restricting key services.
“It’s kind of a perfect storm of the federal cuts happening and philanthropy not moving as quickly as one would hope,” said Lynn English, president and co-founder of English Hudson Consulting, a development and consulting firm that works with dozens of nonprofits across the United States, including groups that have been outspoken against Trump. “Anyone who has federal money is cutting expenses, cutting staff, and trying to figure out where they can possibly make up the gap.”
Threats from senior administration officials to foundations and nonprofits’ tax-exempt status have heightened donors’ concerns about giving to causes that might be perceived as opposing Trump and singled out for retribution — like law firms, universities, and news organizations, leaders of nonprofits told The Intercept.
The consequences are being felt at nonprofits that focus on climate, transgender rights, racial justice, and gender equality.
Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made no secret of their animosity toward certain nonprofits and major funders. In his 2021 Senate campaign, Vance argued that major foundations and academic institutions should lose their tax-exempt status. “The Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Harvard University endowment, these are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities so they benefit from preferential tax treatment,” Vance told Tucker Carlson during a 2021 Fox News interview.
More recently, Trump has publicly threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, while implying broader risks to other nonprofit organizations and foundations. “Tax-exempt status, it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege. And it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard,” Trump told reporters last Thursday. Last week, the administration cut billions of dollars in federal funding to the university for research purposes, though its tax-exempt status for now remains unchanged.
At the Thursday news conference, Trump also threatened specific nonprofit organizations, namely Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog organization that has repeatedly sued the Trump administration. “It’s supposed to be a charitable organization,” Trump told reporters. “The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So, we’re looking at that. We’re looking at a lot of things.”
Were a nonprofit to lose its 501(c)(3) status, it would have to pay corporate income tax, and in some cases back taxes. It would also block an organization from receiving most types of federal and foundation grants. Donations to that group would no longer be tax-exempt, making it significantly more difficult to fundraise.
A rumored executive order targeting climate organizations on Earth Day did not materialize. The White House told Politico this week “No such orders are being drafted or considered at this time.”
However, Trump on Thursday urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate alleged unlawful foreign contributions on ActBlue, a fundraising platform widely used by Democratic campaigns. Many nonprofits, including The Intercept, use ActBlue Charities to process donations.
This climate is causing hesitation among large donors, said English. “They’re being much more cautious,” she explained, “and I think it is the threat of either litigation or attacks on their 501(c)(3) status or attacks on their endowment that are causing some real delays in getting money on the ground.”
“If they’re going to be attacking us, I want to show people why.”
Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network, said that organizers focused on climate change have been warned to stay quiet to avoid attacks on their 501(c)(3) status, like those in the rumored executive order. “Some of the advice that I’ve been getting is to be silent on social media,” said Ing.
But he rejects that logic.
“If they’re going to be attacking us, I want to show people why. I don’t want to have to tell them after the fact,” Ing said. “I want to make it clear that this a fight of good and evil. And we’re the good guys.”
While it’s still too early to get a full financial picture of how donors are responding across the nonprofit ecosystem, layoffs at large nonprofit organizations working on left-leaning issues like LGBTQ+ rights provide a clue. In February, Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the U.S., laid off 20 percent of its staff. Another major LGBTQ+ nonprofit, GLSEN, laid off 60 percent of its staff that same month.
English said donors were much more willing to support causes in opposition to Trump in his first term, illustrating how much landscape has shifted in a second term focused in large part on revenge. “They are trying to figure out what position they can take under the administration,” she said. “Under Trump 1.0, the foundations came out very quickly to fund the pushback, and they came out with a lot of money to fund litigation and movement-building organizing. This time around, they are taking more time.”
Part of the problem with hitting so many nonprofits at once with federal funding cuts and freezes is that all of these groups are fighting for the same pool of funding of nongovernmental funding. At least 30 percent of the estimated 1.8 million nonprofits in the U.S. receive federal grant funding. Larger organizations are more reliant on grants, with 55 percent of nonprofits with budgets over $5 million receiving at least one government grant. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the administration had canceled over400 environmental justice grants, totaling $1.7 billion in losses across multiple organizations. In the foreign assistance sector, Trump slashed 90 percent of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts in February, totaling $60 billion, meaning the thousands of contractors relying on this funding now have to fight for the same pot of donor money.
So even if an individual donor isn’t fearful of attacks by the Trump administration and might have more leeway than a corporate donor or a large foundation, demand for their dollars is now at an all-time high.
alicia sanchez gill, executive director of Emergent Fund, which provides rapid-response funding to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ organizations and also co-runs the Action for Transformation Fund along with the Transgender Law Center, said the groups they fund are seeing donors pull back at a critical moment.
“What we’re seeing from the philanthropic ecosystem is that there is not [the] bump that we saw in 2016,” she said. “And in fact, we’re seeing a lot of funder retraction in this moment.”
sanchez gill argues that funders are scared of associating with nonprofits that could be targets. “We are seeing our grantees actually be either denied funding in order to minimize funder risk,” she said. “Or just complete — for lack of a better term — ghosting by funders.”
sanchez gill noted that many of the organizations Emergent Fund and the Action for Transformation Fund work with already struggled to get funding. Less than 1 percent of philanthropic dollars goes toward support trans-led organizations, according to the Equitable Giving Lab.
“Many of the groups that we fund, actually, at Emergent Fund and at the Action for Transformation Fund already are deeply divested from the federal government and from state institutions and from philanthropy itself,” she said. If their organization no longer existed, many of these organizations could go without the “rapid-response” funding they need to survive.
The bitter irony is that this is the exact moment that marginalized communities need these resources the most. “We’ve really seen a surge in applications from groups that are facing state violence and surveillance,” said sanchez gill. Last year, sanchez gill said that her organization received roughly 70 to 100 proposals in a month. Last month, it received roughly 180 proposals, underscoring the increased need in the communities it serves.
“There is no greater risk in this moment than defunding the communities who are doing the most mission-oriented and necessary work right now,” she said.
Federal cuts to nonprofit grant recipients have already had devastating consequences. Trump has frozen billions in federal grants to universities, states, and other nonprofit entities across the country.
Last month, for instance, the Trump administration cut funding to programs that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. Unlike in the criminal legal system, in the U.S., people do not have a right to counsel in immigration court, which means that every year, tens of thousands of children are forced to represent themselves against the government. In 2023, nearly half of all unaccompanied minors represented themselves in immigration court. But federal funding cuts from the Trump administration are threatening even the existing services in place for these children, and philanthropic dollars cannot fill the gap.
A judge has blocked the implementation of these cuts for now, but the impacted nonprofits expect the Trump administration to continue its assault on the program, as well as other immigrant legal services.
“We’re talking about 26,000 children across the country who will lose an attorney.”
Abegail Baguio, development and communications director for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said these cuts would directly impact minors in their legal services program. “We’re talking about 26,000 children across the country who will lose an attorney,” said Baguio.
The threat to the organization runs deeper than just its program for unaccompanied minors. Baguio said that the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights receives roughly 70 percent of funding through federal contracts. Even with an outpouring of new philanthropic support, it won’t be able to make up the loss of federal funds if the Trump administration succeeds in fulling stripping them away. “There’s no way that private philanthropy can fill that gap,” she said.
If the federal coffers fully close, “we’re going to see families separated, families separated. We’re going to see people being deported without having access to due process rights,” said Baguio.
Organizations with federal funding, doing work from cancer research to feeding people, are being forced to lay off up to 40 percent of staff, said English, the nonprofit consultant. Next, she said it will be cuts to services. An analysis from the Urban Institute, after Trump temporarily froze nearly all federal grants nationwide, found that in every state, 60 to 80 percent of nonprofits that receive federal funding could fail to cover their expenses if government funding remained frozen or disappeared.
Despite the risks to funders, donors, and nonprofits, sanchez gill said the worst mistake would be to concede defeat. “Now is really the time to double down on trust-based funding that resists authoritarian control,” she said. “Now is the time to push back. We can’t cede power in advance. We can’t cower in advance, or retreat in advance.”
As President Donald Trump guts the federal government, there’s a greater need than ever for nonprofit organizations to step up and fill the void. But there’s a Trump-shaped fundraising problem looming over the nonprofit sector.
Fearful of Trump’s penchant for targeting his perceived political enemies, some nonprofit leaders say the large donors who help subsidize their operations are pulling back. Even though the Trump administration has said it will not move forward with a series of rumored executive actions targeting nonprofits, this retreat by large donors poses a critical problem — especially as the federal government has slashed grants and issued stop-work orders already restricting key services.
“It’s kind of a perfect storm of the federal cuts happening and philanthropy not moving as quickly as one would hope,” said Lynn English, president and co-founder of English Hudson Consulting, a development and consulting firm that works with dozens of nonprofits across the United States, including groups that have been outspoken against Trump. “Anyone who has federal money is cutting expenses, cutting staff, and trying to figure out where they can possibly make up the gap.”
Threats from senior administration officials to foundations and nonprofits’ tax-exempt status have heightened donors’ concerns about giving to causes that might be perceived as opposing Trump and singled out for retribution — like law firms, universities, and news organizations, leaders of nonprofits told The Intercept.
The consequences are being felt at nonprofits that focus on climate, transgender rights, racial justice, and gender equality.
Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made no secret of their animosity toward certain nonprofits and major funders. In his 2021 Senate campaign, Vance argued that major foundations and academic institutions should lose their tax-exempt status. “The Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Harvard University endowment, these are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities so they benefit from preferential tax treatment,” Vance told Tucker Carlson during a 2021 Fox News interview.
More recently, Trump has publicly threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, while implying broader risks to other nonprofit organizations and foundations. “Tax-exempt status, it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege. And it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard,” Trump told reporters last Thursday. Last week, the administration cut billions of dollars in federal funding to the university for research purposes, though its tax-exempt status for now remains unchanged.
At the Thursday news conference, Trump also threatened specific nonprofit organizations, namely Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog organization that has repeatedly sued the Trump administration. “It’s supposed to be a charitable organization,” Trump told reporters. “The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So, we’re looking at that. We’re looking at a lot of things.”
Were a nonprofit to lose its 501(c)(3) status, it would have to pay corporate income tax, and in some cases back taxes. It would also block an organization from receiving most types of federal and foundation grants. Donations to that group would no longer be tax-exempt, making it significantly more difficult to fundraise.
A rumored executive order targeting climate organizations on Earth Day did not materialize. The White House told Politico this week “No such orders are being drafted or considered at this time.”
However, Trump on Thursday urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate alleged unlawful foreign contributions on ActBlue, a fundraising platform widely used by Democratic campaigns. Many nonprofits, including The Intercept, use ActBlue Charities to process donations.
This climate is causing hesitation among large donors, said English. “They’re being much more cautious,” she explained, “and I think it is the threat of either litigation or attacks on their 501(c)(3) status or attacks on their endowment that are causing some real delays in getting money on the ground.”
“If they’re going to be attacking us, I want to show people why.”
Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network, said that organizers focused on climate change have been warned to stay quiet to avoid attacks on their 501(c)(3) status, like those in the rumored executive order. “Some of the advice that I’ve been getting is to be silent on social media,” said Ing.
But he rejects that logic.
“If they’re going to be attacking us, I want to show people why. I don’t want to have to tell them after the fact,” Ing said. “I want to make it clear that this a fight of good and evil. And we’re the good guys.”
While it’s still too early to get a full financial picture of how donors are responding across the nonprofit ecosystem, layoffs at large nonprofit organizations working on left-leaning issues like LGBTQ+ rights provide a clue. In February, Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the U.S., laid off 20 percent of its staff. Another major LGBTQ+ nonprofit, GLSEN, laid off 60 percent of its staff that same month.
English said donors were much more willing to support causes in opposition to Trump in his first term, illustrating how much landscape has shifted in a second term focused in large part on revenge. “They are trying to figure out what position they can take under the administration,” she said. “Under Trump 1.0, the foundations came out very quickly to fund the pushback, and they came out with a lot of money to fund litigation and movement-building organizing. This time around, they are taking more time.”
Part of the problem with hitting so many nonprofits at once with federal funding cuts and freezes is that all of these groups are fighting for the same pool of funding of nongovernmental funding. At least 30 percent of the estimated 1.8 million nonprofits in the U.S. receive federal grant funding. Larger organizations are more reliant on grants, with 55 percent of nonprofits with budgets over $5 million receiving at least one government grant. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the administration had canceled over400 environmental justice grants, totaling $1.7 billion in losses across multiple organizations. In the foreign assistance sector, Trump slashed 90 percent of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts in February, totaling $60 billion, meaning the thousands of contractors relying on this funding now have to fight for the same pot of donor money.
So even if an individual donor isn’t fearful of attacks by the Trump administration and might have more leeway than a corporate donor or a large foundation, demand for their dollars is now at an all-time high.
alicia sanchez gill, executive director of Emergent Fund, which provides rapid-response funding to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ organizations and also co-runs the Action for Transformation Fund along with the Transgender Law Center, said the groups they fund are seeing donors pull back at a critical moment.
“What we’re seeing from the philanthropic ecosystem is that there is not [the] bump that we saw in 2016,” she said. “And in fact, we’re seeing a lot of funder retraction in this moment.”
sanchez gill argues that funders are scared of associating with nonprofits that could be targets. “We are seeing our grantees actually be either denied funding in order to minimize funder risk,” she said. “Or just complete — for lack of a better term — ghosting by funders.”
sanchez gill noted that many of the organizations Emergent Fund and the Action for Transformation Fund work with already struggled to get funding. Less than 1 percent of philanthropic dollars goes toward support trans-led organizations, according to the Equitable Giving Lab.
“Many of the groups that we fund, actually, at Emergent Fund and at the Action for Transformation Fund already are deeply divested from the federal government and from state institutions and from philanthropy itself,” she said. If their organization no longer existed, many of these organizations could go without the “rapid-response” funding they need to survive.
The bitter irony is that this is the exact moment that marginalized communities need these resources the most. “We’ve really seen a surge in applications from groups that are facing state violence and surveillance,” said sanchez gill. Last year, sanchez gill said that her organization received roughly 70 to 100 proposals in a month. Last month, it received roughly 180 proposals, underscoring the increased need in the communities it serves.
“There is no greater risk in this moment than defunding the communities who are doing the most mission-oriented and necessary work right now,” she said.
Federal cuts to nonprofit grant recipients have already had devastating consequences. Trump has frozen billions in federal grants to universities, states, and other nonprofit entities across the country.
Last month, for instance, the Trump administration cut funding to programs that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. Unlike in the criminal legal system, in the U.S., people do not have a right to counsel in immigration court, which means that every year, tens of thousands of children are forced to represent themselves against the government. In 2023, nearly half of all unaccompanied minors represented themselves in immigration court. But federal funding cuts from the Trump administration are threatening even the existing services in place for these children, and philanthropic dollars cannot fill the gap.
A judge has blocked the implementation of these cuts for now, but the impacted nonprofits expect the Trump administration to continue its assault on the program, as well as other immigrant legal services.
“We’re talking about 26,000 children across the country who will lose an attorney.”
Abegail Baguio, development and communications director for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said these cuts would directly impact minors in their legal services program. “We’re talking about 26,000 children across the country who will lose an attorney,” said Baguio.
The threat to the organization runs deeper than just its program for unaccompanied minors. Baguio said that the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights receives roughly 70 percent of funding through federal contracts. Even with an outpouring of new philanthropic support, it won’t be able to make up the loss of federal funds if the Trump administration succeeds in fulling stripping them away. “There’s no way that private philanthropy can fill that gap,” she said.
If the federal coffers fully close, “we’re going to see families separated, families separated. We’re going to see people being deported without having access to due process rights,” said Baguio.
Organizations with federal funding, doing work from cancer research to feeding people, are being forced to lay off up to 40 percent of staff, said English, the nonprofit consultant. Next, she said it will be cuts to services. An analysis from the Urban Institute, after Trump temporarily froze nearly all federal grants nationwide, found that in every state, 60 to 80 percent of nonprofits that receive federal funding could fail to cover their expenses if government funding remained frozen or disappeared.
Despite the risks to funders, donors, and nonprofits, sanchez gill said the worst mistake would be to concede defeat. “Now is really the time to double down on trust-based funding that resists authoritarian control,” she said. “Now is the time to push back. We can’t cede power in advance. We can’t cower in advance, or retreat in advance.”
Parts of the U.S. are an eco-disaster, a sacrifice zone. Take Newark, NJ. If you travel down a one-mile stretch of Doremus Avenue in Newark you pass a natural gas plant next to a sewage treatment facility next to an animal fat rendering plant next to a series of ominous-looking chemical storage containers behind acres of fencing. Airplanes pass overhead every two minutes, their engines rattling windows, while a putrid smell wafts from the open pools at the sewage treatment plant. Nationally, where are these polluters located? Overwhelmingly in poor communities of color like the Ironbound section of Newark where activists are organizing and fighting back to create a just, vibrant and sustainable community.
This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.
Parts of the U.S. are an eco-disaster, a sacrifice zone. Take Newark, NJ. If you travel down a one-mile stretch of Doremus Avenue in Newark you pass a natural gas plant next to a sewage treatment facility next to an animal fat rendering plant next to a series of ominous-looking chemical storage containers behind acres of fencing. Airplanes pass overhead every two minutes, their engines rattling windows, while a putrid smell wafts from the open pools at the sewage treatment plant. Nationally, where are these polluters located? Overwhelmingly in poor communities of color like the Ironbound section of Newark where activists are organizing and fighting back to create a just, vibrant and sustainable community.
This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.
The Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network today condemned the Fiji government’s failure to stand up for international law and justice over the Israeli war on Gaza in their weekly Black Thursday protest.
“For the past 18 months, we have made repeated requests to our government to do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel,” said the protest group in an open letter.
“We have been calling upon the Fiji government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes.
“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained.
“We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing. Our pleas fell on deaf ears. We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.”
The open letter said:
“Dear fellow Fijians,
“As we gathered tonight in Suva at the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre compound, Israel has maintained an eight-week blockade on food, medicine and aid entering Gaza, while continuing to bomb homes and tent shelters.
“At least 52,000 people in Gaza have been killed since October 2023, which includes more than 18,000 children. The death toll means that one out of every 50 people has been killed in Gaza. We all know that the real number of those killed is far higher.
“Today, at least 13 people were killed in Israeli attacks. Among the dead were three children in a tent near Nuseirat in central Gaza, and a woman and four children in a home in Gaza City.
“Also reportedly killed in a recent attack was local journalist Saeed Abu Hassanein, whose death adds to at least 232 reporters killed by Israel in Gaza in this genocide.
“For the past 18 months, we have made repeated requests to our government to do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel. We have been calling upon the Fiji Government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes.
“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained. We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing. Our pleas fell on deaf ears. We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.
“Instead our leaders met with Israeli Government representatives and declared support for a country accused of the most heinous crimes recognised in international law.
“Fijian leaders and the Fiji Government must not be supporting Israel or planning to set up an Embassy in Israel while Israel continues to bomb refugee tents, kill journalists and medics, and block the delivery of aid to a population under relentless siege.
“No politician in Fiji can claim ignorance of what is happening.
“Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed.
“Many more have been maimed, traumatised and displaced. Hospitals, clinics, refugee camps, schools, universities, residential neighbourhoods, water and food facilities have been destroyed.
“We must loudly name what’s happening in Gaza – a GENOCIDE.
“We should name the crime, underline our government’s complicity in it, and focus our efforts on elevating the voices of Palestinians.
“We know that our actions cannot magically put an end to the GENOCIDE in occupied Palestine, but they can still make a difference. We can add to the global pressure on those who have the power to stop the genocide, which is so needed.
“The way our government is responding to the genocide in Gaza will set a precedent for how they will deal with crises and emergencies in the future — at home and abroad.
“It will determine whether our country will be a force that works to uphold human rights and international law, or one that tramples on them whenever convenient.
“There are already ongoing restrictions against protests in solidarity with Palestine including arbitrary restrictions on marches and the use of Palestine flags.
“We have had to hold gatherings in the premises of the FWCC office as the police have restricted solidarity marches for Palestine since November 2023, under the Public Order (Amendment) Act 2014.
“Today, we must all fight for what is right, and show our government that indifference is not acceptable in the face of genocide, lest we ourselves become complicit.
“History will judge how we respond as Fijians to this moment.
“Our rich cultural heritage and shared values teach us the importance of always standing up for what is right, even when it is not popular or convenient.
“We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people out of a shared belief in humanity, justice, and the inalienable human rights of every individual.”
In Solidarity Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network
Part Two of Solidarity’s Vietnam War series: The folly of imperial war
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
Vietnam is a lesson we should have learnt — but never did — about the immorality, folly and counter-productivity of imperial war. Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine are happening today, in part, because of this cultural amnesia that facilitates repetition.
It’s time to remember the Quiet Mutiny within the US army — and why it helped end the war by undermining military effectiveness, morale, and political support at home.
There were many reasons that the US and its allies were defeated in Vietnam. First and foremost they were beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will.
The Quiet Mutiny that came close to a full-scale insurrection within the US army in the early 1970s was an important part of the explanation as to why America’s vast over-match in resources, firepower and aerial domination was insufficient to the task.
Beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘Our army is approaching collapse’ Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr wrote: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.” — Armed Forces Journal 7 June, 1971.
A paper prepared by the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library — “Veterans, Deserters and Draft Evaders” (1974) — stated, “Hundreds of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans hold other-than-honorable discharges, many because of their anti-war activities.”
Between 1965-73, according to the Ford papers, 495,689 servicemen (and women) on active duty deserted the armed forces! Ponder that.
For good reason, the defiance, insubordination and on many occasions soldier-on-officer violence was something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory.
Something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘The officer said “Keep going!” He kinda got shot.’ At 12 years old in 1972, I took out a subscription to Newsweek. Among the horrors I learnt about at that tender age was the practice of fragging — the deliberate killing of US officers by their own men, often by flicking a grenade — a fragmentation device (hence fragging) — into their tent at night, or simply shooting an officer during a combat mission.
There were hundreds of such incidents.
GI: “The officer said, ‘Keep on going’ but they were getting hit pretty bad so it didn’t happen. He kinda got shot.”
GI: “The grunts don’t always do what the Captain says. He always says “Go there”. He always stays back. We just go and sit down somewhere. We don’t want to hit “Contact”.
GI: “We’ve decided to tell the company commander we won’t go into the bush anymore; at least we’ll go to jail where it’s safe.”
Hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers challenged the official narratives about the war. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US Army — refusing to fight “Soldiers in Revolt: G.I. Resistance During the Vietnam War,” by David Cortright, professor emeritus at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, himself a Vietnam veteran, documents the hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers that challenged the official narratives about the war.
Cortright’s research indicated that by the early 1970s the US Army was close to a full mutiny. It meant that the US, despite having hundreds of thousands of troops in the country, couldn’t confidently put an army into combat.
By the war’s end the US army was largely hunkered down in their bases. Cortright says US military operations became “effectively crippled” as the crisis manifested itself “in drug abuse, political protest, combat refusals, black militancy, and fraggings.”
Cortright cites over 900 fragging incidents between 1969–1971, including over 500 with explosive devices.
“Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” Colonel Heinl said in his 1971 article.
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced because of the calamitous knock-on effect this would have had both at home and within the army in the field.
‘The rebellion is everywhere’ It was heroic journalists like John Pilger who refused to file the reassuring stories editors back in London, New York, Sydney and Auckland wanted. Pilger told uncomfortable truths — there was a rebellion underway. The clean-cut, spit-and-polish boys of the 1960s Green Machine (US army) had morphed into a corps whose 80,000-strong frontline was full of defiant, insubordinate Grunts (infantry) who wore love beads, grew their hair long, smoked pot, and occasionally tossed a hand grenade into an officer’s tent.
John Pilger’s first film “Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny”, aired in 1970. “The war is ending,” Pilger said, “because the largest, wealthiest and most powerful organisation on earth, the American Army, is being challenged from within — by the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members.
“The war is ending because the Grunt is taking no more bullshit.”
That short piece to camera is one of the most incredible moments in documentary history yet it likely won’t be seen during the commemorations of the Fall of Saigon on April 30.
At the time, Granada Television’s chairman was apoplectic that it went to air at all and described Pilger as “a threat to Western civilisation”. So tight is the media control we live under now it is unlikely such a documentary would air at all on a major channel.
“I don’t know why I’m shooting these people” a young grunt tells Pilger about having to fight the Vietnamese in their homeland. Another asks: “I have nothing against these people. Why are we killing them?”
Shooting the messenger Huge effort goes into attacking truth-tellers like Pilger, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but as Phillip Knightley pointed out in his book The First Casualty, Pilger’s work was among the most important revelations to emerge from Vietnam, a war in which a depressingly large percentage of journalists contented themselves with life in Saigon and chanting the official Pentagon narrative.
Thus it ever was.
Pilger was like a fragmentation device dropped into the official narrative, blasting away the euphemisms, the evasions, the endless stream of official lies. He called the end of the war long before the White House and the Pentagon finally gave up the charade; his actions helped save lives; their actions condemned hundreds of thousands to unnecessary death, millions more to misery.
African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers – about a quarter of all frontline fighters. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Race politics, anti-racism, peace activism
Race politics was another important factor. African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers — about a quarter of all frontline fighters. There was a strong feeling among black conscripts that “This is not our war”.
In David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger we see a woman at an antiwar protest in Harlem, New York. “My boy is over there fighting for his rights,” she says, “but he’s not getting them.” Then we hear the chant: “The enemy is whitey! Not the Viet Cong!”
We should recall that at this time the civil rights movement was battling powerful white groups for a place in civil society. The US army had only ended racial segregation in the Korean War and back home in 1968, there were still 16 States that had miscegenation laws banning sexual relations between whites and blacks.
Martin Luther King was assassinated this same year. All this fed into the Quiet Mutiny.
Truth-telling and the lessons of history Vietnam became a dark arena where the most sordid aspects of American imperialism played out: racism, genocidal violence, strategic incoherence, belief in brute force over sound policy.
Sounds similar to Gaza and Yemen, doesn’t it?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Despite calls from women’s groups urging the government to implement policies to address the underrepresentation of women in politics, the introduction of temporary special measures (TSM) to increase women’s political representation in Fiji remains a distant goal.
This week, leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa), Cabinet Minister Aseri Radrodro, and opposition MP Ketal Lal expressed their objection to reserving 30 percent of parliamentary seats for women.
Radrodro, who is also Education Minister, told The Fiji Times that Fijian women were “capable of holding their ground without needing a crutch like TSM to give them a leg up”.
Lal called the special allocation of seats for women in Parliament “tokenistic” and beneficial to “a few selected individuals”, as part of submissions to the Fiji Law Reform Commission and the Electoral Commission of Fiji, which are undertaking a comprehensive review and reform of the Fiji’s electoral framework.
Rabuka said it devalued “the dignity of women at the highest level of national governance.”
“This specific issue makes me wonder at times. As the percentage of women in population is approximately the same as for men, why are women not securing the votes of women? Or more precisely, why aren’t women voting for women?” he said.
Doubled down
The Prime Minister doubled down on his position on the issue when The Fiji Times asked him if it was the right time for Fiji to legislate mandatory seats for women in Parliament as the issue was gaining traction.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “Why aren’t women voting for women?” Image: Fiji Parliament
“There is no need to legislate it. We do not have a compulsory voting legislation, nor do we yet need a quota-based system.
However, Rabuka’s Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Speaker Lenora Qereqeretabua holds a different view.
Qereqeretabua, from the National Federation Party, said in January that Parliament needed to look like the people that it represented.
“Women make up half of the world’s population, and yet we are still fighting to ensure that their voices and experiences are not only heard but valued in the spaces where decisions are made,” she told participants at the Exploring Temporary Special Measures for Inclusive Governance in Fiji forum.
She said Fiji needed more women in positions of power.
“Not because women are empirically better leaders, because leadership is not determined by gender, but because it is essential for democracy that our representatives reflect the communities that they serve.”
Lenora Qereqeretabua on the floor of Parliament . . . “It is essential for democracy that our representatives reflect the communities that they serve.” Image: Fiji Parliament
‘Shameless’ lag
Another member of Rabuka’s coalition government, one of the deputy prime ministers in and a former Sodelpa leader, Viliame Gavoka said in March 2022 that Fiji had “continued to shamelessly lag behind in protecting and promoting women’s rights and their peacebuilding expertise”.
He pledged at the time that if Sodelpa was voted into government, it would “ensure to break barriers and accelerate progress, including setting specific targets and timelines to achieve gender balance in all branches of government and at all levels through temporary special measures such as quotas . . . ”
However, since coming into power in December 2022, Gavoka has not made any advance on his promise, and his party leader Radrodro has made his views known on the issue.
Fiji women’s rights groups say temporary special measures may need to be implemented in the short-term to advance women’s equality. Image: RNZ Pacific/Sally Round
Fijian women’s rights and advocacy groups say that introducing special measures for women is neither discriminatory nor a breach of the 2013 Constitution.
In a joint statement in October last year, six non-government organisations called on the government to enforce provisions for temporary special measures for women in political party representation and ensure that reserved seats are secured for women in all town and city councils and its committees.
“Nationally, it is unacceptable that after three national elections under new electoral laws, there has been a drastic decline in women’s representation from contesting national elections to being elected to parliament,” they said.
“It is clear from our history that cultural, social, economic and political factors have often stood in the way of women’s political empowerment.”
Short-term need They said temporary special measures may need to be implemented in the short-term to advance women’s equality.
“The term ‘temporary special measures’ is used to describe affirmative action policies and strategies to promote equality and empower women.
“If we are to move towards a society where half the population is reflected in all leadership spaces and opportunities, we must be gender responsive in the approaches we take to achieve gender equality.”
The Fijian Parliament currently has only five (out of 55) women in the House — four in government and one in opposition. In the previous parliamentary term (2018-2022), there were 10 women directly elected to Parliament.
According to the Fiji Country Gender Assessment report, 81 percent of Fijians believe that women are underrepresented in the government, and 72 percent of Fijians believe greater representation of women would be beneficial for the country.
However, the report found that time and energy burden of familial, volunteer responsibilities, patriarchal norms, and power relations as key barriers to women’s participation in the workplace and public life.
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) board member Akanisi Nabalarua believes that despite having strong laws and policies on paper, the implementation is lacking.
Lip service
Nabalarua said successive Fijian governments had often paid lip service to gender equality while failing to make intentional and meaningful progress in women’s representation in decision making spaces, reports fijivillage.com.
Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry said Rabuka’s dismissal of the women’s rights groups’ plea was premature.
Chaudhry, a former prime minister who was deposed in a coup in 2000, said Rabuka should have waited for the Law Reform Commission’s report “before deciding so conclusively on the matter”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia has granted a preliminary injunction in Widakuswara v Lake, affirming the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) was unlawfully shuttered by the Trump administration, Acting Director Victor Morales and Special Adviser Kari Lake.
The decision enshrines that USAGM must fulfill its legally required functions and protects the editorial independence of Voice of America (VOA) journalists and other federal media professionals within the agency and newsrooms that receive grants from the agency, such as Radio Free Asia and others with implications for independent media in the Asia-Pacific region.
Journalists, federal workers, and unions celebrate this important step in defending this critical agency, First Amendment rights, resisting unlawful political interference in public broadcasting, and ensuring USAGM workers can continue to fulfill their congressionally mandated function, reports the News Guild-CWA press union.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for the rule of law, for press freedom and journalistic integrity, and for democracy worldwide,” said the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) national president Everett Kelley.
“The Trump administration’s illegal attempt to shutter Voice of America and other outlets under the US Agency for Global Media was a transparent effort to silence the voices of patriotic journalists and professionals who have dedicated their careers to spreading the truth and fighting propaganda from lawless authoritarian regimes.
“This preliminary injunction will allow these employees to get back to work as we continue the fight to preserve their jobs and critical mission.”
President Lee Saunders of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees AFSCME), the largest trade union of public employees in the United States, said: “Today’s ruling is a major win for AFSCME members and Voice of America workers who have dedicated their careers to reporting the truth and spreading freedom to millions across the world.
Judge’s message clear
“The judge’s message is clear — this administration has no right to unilaterally dismantle essential agencies simply because they do not agree with their purpose.
“We celebrate this decision and will continue to work with our partners to ensure that the Voice of America is restored.”
“Journalists hold power to account and that includes the Trump administration,” said NewsGuild-CWA president Jon Schleuss. “This injunction orders the administration to reverse course and restore the Congressionally-mandated news broadcasts of Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and other newsrooms broadcasting to people who hope for freedom in countries where that is denied.”
“We are gratified by today’s ruling. This is another step in the process to restore VOA to full operation.” said government accountability project senior counsel David Seide.
“VOA is more than just an iconic brand with deep roots in American and global history; it is a vital, living force that provides truth and hope to those living under oppressive regimes.” Image: Getty/The Conversation“Today’s ruling marks a significant victory for press freedom and for the dedicated women and men who bring it to life — our clients, the journalists, executives, and staff of Voice of America,” said Andrew G. Celli, Jr., founding partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP and counsel for the plaintiffs.
“VOA is more than just an iconic brand with deep roots in American and global history; it is a vital, living force that provides truth and hope to those living under oppressive regimes.
“We are thrilled that its voice — a voice for the voiceless — will once again be heard loud and clear around the world.
Powerful affirmation of rule of law
“This decision is a powerful affirmation of the rule of law and the vital role that independent journalism plays in our democracy. The court’s action protects independent journalism and federal media professionals at Voice of America as we continue this case, and reaffirms that no administration can silence the truth without accountability,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, co-counsel for the plaintiffs.
“We are proud to be with workers, unions and journalists in resisting political interference against independent journalism and will continue to fight for transparency and our democratic values.”
“Today’s decision is another necessary step in restoring the rule of law and correcting the injustices faced by the workers, reporters, and listeners of Voice of America and US Agency for Global Media,” said former Ambassador Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund.
“By granting this preliminary injunction, the court has reaffirmed the legal protections afforded to these civil servants and halted an attempt to undermine a free and independent press. We are proud to represent this resilient coalition and support the cause of a free and fair press.”
“This decision is a powerful affirmation of the role that independent journalism plays in advancing democracy and countering disinformation. From Voice of America to Radio Free Asia and across the US Agency for Global Media, these networks are essential tools of American soft power — trusted sources of truth in places where it is often scarce,” said Tom Yazdgerdi, president of the American Foreign Service Association.
“By upholding editorial independence, the court has protected the credibility of USAGM journalists and the global mission they serve.”
A critical victory
“We’re very pleased that Judge Lamberth has recognised that the Trump administration acted improperly in shuttering Voice of America,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) USA.
“The USAGM must act immediately to implement this ruling and put over 1300 VOA employees back to work to deliver reliable information to their audience of millions around the world.”
While only the beginning of what may be a long, hard-fought battle, the court’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction marks a critical victory — not just for VOA journalists, but also for federal workers and the unions that represent them.
It affirms that the rule of law still protects those who speak truth to power.
Early in the morning last Monday, a group of third graders huddled in the garden of Mendota Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. Of the dozen students present, a handful were busy filling up buckets of compost, others were readying soil beds for spring planting, while a number carefully watered freshly planted radishes and peas. The students were all busy with their assorted tasks until a gleeful shout rang across the space. Everything ground to a halt when a beaming boy triumphantly raised his gloved hand, displaying a gaggle of worms. The group of riveted eight- and nine-year-olds dropped everything to cluster around him and the writhing mass of invertebrates.
“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil, because they’re healthy and they’re happy and they have sunshine, and they’ve watered them,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a Wisconsin nonprofit community agricultural organization that helps oversee the garden.
Krug stopped by the school that day to join the class, which her team runs together with AmeriCorps. Outdoor programming like this, said Krug, positions students to learn how to grow food — and take care of the planet that bears it.
First established some 25 years ago, in a historically underserved area that has long struggled with access to healthy food, the small but thriving garden is now a mainstay in the Mendota curriculum. The produce grown there is routinely collected and taken to local food pantries. Later this spring, the third grade class plans to plant watermelon and pumpkin seeds. Come summer, the garden will open to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash, and take home what they need.
Farm-to-school work, said Krug, isn’t limited to partnering with farmers to get locally grown foods into school meals, but also includes supporting schools in lower-income neighborhoods with working gardens, and providing students with agricultural and health education they won’t get otherwise. That can take the shape of after-school gardening clubs, field trips to local farms, and cooking classes. “We want kids to understand where their food comes from. We want them to be able to have that experience of growing their own food,” she said. “It’s really, really powerful.”
Back in January, the Rooted team applied for a $100,000 two-year grant through the Department of Agriculture’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program, intended to provide public schools with locally produced fresh vegetables as well as food and agricultural education. Rooted had plans to “use a huge chunk of those funds” to continue supporting school garden activities and food programming at three local schools, including Mendota.
Then, late last month, the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, sent them an email announcing the cancellation of funding for grants through the program. The email, shared with Grist, noted that the cancellation is “in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government and DEI Programs and Preferencing.’”
The loss of the funds is “so upsetting,” said Krug, and the reasoning provided, she continued, is “ridiculous.”
“When they talk about ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” Krug argued, “they don’t mean everybody. Because if they’re saying that they’re canceling this program because it’s ‘radical’ and ‘wasteful’ and ‘DEI,’ then that means that they don’t want non-white kids having access to fruits and vegetables.”
A group of third grade students tend to the garden outside of Mendota Elementary School on April 14, 2025 in Madison, Wisconsin. Erica Krug / Rooted
Scenarios like these are playing out across the nation as the USDA, working with the initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency, continues to cancel funding for multiple food and farm programs. Five USDA programs have had their funding pulled since President Trump’s inauguration, while at least 21 others remain frozen.
Last month, the agency terminated some $1.13 billion slated to be distributed through the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program and Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The move has had a resounding impact on the livelihoods of thousands of people, as charitable organizations have shuttered food donations, regional food hubs cut staff, and small farmers have gone bankrupt. The cancellation of this year’s farm-to-school funding was announced roughly two weeks after the USDA ended the billion-dollar funding stream.
In prior years, Krug said, “we were being asked ‘What are you doing to address equity? To address diversity? How are you making sure your project is for everyone?’ And now we’re going to be penalized for talking about that.”
The team at Rooted is now working overtime to find other funding sources to continue the work, including hosting a fundraising drive and benefit concert next month at their urban farm site. Krug hopes the proceeds will help offset some of the loss. “We’re not ready to say, without this funding, that we’re going to abandon this program, because we believe so strongly in it,” she said.
First established by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed in 2010, the Patrick Leahy Farm to School program was created by the Obama administration to address rising hunger and nutritional needs in public schools. The program has since awarded over $100 million in grants to schools that support millions of students in tribal, rural, and urban communities nationwide.
Nutrition advocates and legislators are calling the USDA’s decision to cancel the farm-to-school funding contradictory to the stated goals of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again commission. Many see it as a sign that the government is dismantling local food systems — hurting people and the planet. The fallout, experts say, will be gradual, but no less devastating.
Advocates are also questioning whether it’s legal.
“This program is authorized. It’s a direction from Congress for USDA to carry it out. So carrying it out is not optional,” said Karen Spangler, policy director of the nonprofit National Farm to School Network, which advocated for the program.
From its inception, the program has had a $5 million baseline allocation every year that the legislation mandates, and lawmakers have the ability to add discretionary funds. A total of $10 million was allocated to it for this fiscal year.
To some policymakers, watching as the USDA revoked the funding came as a shock. A letter penned by federal lawmakers on April 4 urged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to clarify why the administration “abruptly” cancelled the grants. The letter, spearheaded by longtime anti-hunger advocate Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts, and signed by 37 other House Democrats, also asked Rollins to explain the scope of the cancellation and to clarify “the authority” the agency is using to terminate funding, “given that Congress directed USDA to carry out this program.”
Though an April 11 deadline for response was given, McGovern told Grist that, as of the time of this story’s publication, they have not received an answer.
“The Trump Administration is slashing programs that help support our farmers and provide people in communities across the country with better access to local food. It’s pathetic,” said McGovern, who is also a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee. “Termination of these programs has caused tremendous uncertainty for schools, food banks and pantries, farmers, and hardworking families.”
Grist reviewed the official notice shared with grantees and applicants from the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which stated that the agency will not review applications, nor will it award grants this year. The agency did, however, note that it was “making plans for an improved competition funding opportunity.”
In an email, a USDA spokesperson told Grist that, in alignment with Trump’s executive order, the agency had “paused” this year’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program competition, and is now “revising the application” for the next fiscal year.
“Secretary Rollins and the Food and Nutrition Service are committed to creating new and greater opportunities to connect America’s farmers to nutrition assistance programs and Farm to School is a critical component of this work,” the spokesperson added. They also noted that the “updated” application will provide “opportunities to support bold innovations in farm to school that encourage more applicants and better impacts, which reflect the realities of the intent and tremendous progress in farm to school made by states and communities over the past 15 years.”
The USDA did not address Grist’s requests for clarification about the authority the agency is using to withhold the money, and did not clarify when or how it plans to award it.
Sophia Kruszewski, a lawyer and deputy policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, explained that the USDA may technically have the legal authority to cancel this year’s grants through the program. In both the underlying statute and the appropriations text, there is language indicating that the funding for this program is to be “available until expended,” which, in most cases, gives the agency the ability to roll over unobligated funding from year to year.
But Kruszewski isn’t convinced the move is in line with the spirit of the law. “It seems highly doubtful that Congress intended to give the agency carte blanche to simply choose not to spend any of the money directed toward the program,” said Kruszewski, “particularly when the call for proposals has already happened and applicants have spent significant time developing and submitting proposals.”
All the while, Rollins has publicly championed the president’s national nutrition overhaul. Earlier this month, the agriculture secretary joined Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia. The two spoke to students, staff, and onlookers about the importance of advancing nutrition in public schools. The event took place a little more than a week after the cancellation of the farm-to-school funding.
“Secretary Kennedy and I have a unique once-in-a-generation opportunity to better align our vision on nutrition-related programs to ensure we are working together to advance President Trump’s vision to make our kids, our families, and our communities healthy again,” said Secretary Rollins in a press release. “Our farmers, ranchers, and producers dedicate their lives to growing the safest most abundant food supply in the world and we need to make sure our kids and families are consuming the healthiest food we produce. There is a chronic health problem in our country, and American agriculture is at the core of the solution.”
Kennedy, for his part, championed the end of ultra-processed foods in public schools and tightening nutrition program restrictions. During the visit, Rollins underscored how the USDA should be supporting “moving farm-fresh produce, as much as is possible, into the schools.”
Katie Wilson, former Obama administration USDA Deputy Under Secretary of Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, and executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, argues that the event, and the USDA’s bigger MAHA campaign, are nothing more than a “facade” to distract from the agency’s subtler efforts to do the opposite. “Having these little kids around you — it’s a camera opp. So that’s the distraction, while I’m over here slicing and dicing the program, right?” Wilson said. “Just remember this funding was for unprocessed, local, fresh food, and so it’s about as healthy and as wonderful as it can get.”
As for Rollins’ stated goal to bring more local food into schools, Wilson only sees more contradictions. “We’ve been doing that, but you just took the rug completely out from under us,” she said. For larger school districts, planning for budgets, programs, and things like meals runs typically a year out. The loss of the farm-to-school grant and uncertainty about the future of the program means that schools across the country are now scrambling to find money, said Wilson. “Contracts don’t go away just because your funding got cut. Where does that money come from? Do you raise the price of school meals for kids? I mean, what do you do? Do you cut staff?”
For decades, advocates and policymakers have looked to strengthen local food systems as a plausible solution to rising hunger rates. Localized food systems have also been championed as a climate solution.
The climate footprint of transportation in the food supply chain, or the movement of crops, livestock, and machinery, contributes considerably to global agricultural emissions. Long-distance shipping of perishable fruit and vegetables in particular ramps up the amount of CO2 emissions generated. The same goes for emissions-intensive food waste: The longer the supply chain, the larger the proportion of food typically lost or thrown away.
According to Jenique Jones, executive director at global nonprofit WhyHunger, small and regional producers are not only much less of a strain on the planet, but they also address systemic issues caused by the “monopoly” that a handful of national producers have on America’s food supply. Localized food systems allow for small farmers to be paid fair wages, she said, and healthier, better quality food to be made accessible to their communities.
The gutting of grants through this program, along with other recent funding decisions by the USDA, signals to Jones that the administration is intentionally dismantling local food systems — which she believes will bring in big costs. The legislation that underwrote the Leahy program, for one, mandated that the agency prioritize geographic diversity and equitable distribution among tribal, rural, and urban communities. Between 2013 and 2024, roughly one in every 20 farm-to-school projects supported Native communities.
These cuts show the administration’s priority, she said, which is “definitely not local food systems, and more importantly than that, it’s not people.”
Among those that may feel some of the harshest burdens from the loss of farm-to-school funding are communities in lower-income, rural swaths of America. One such place is just outside of Bolivar County, in the heart of the Mississippi River Delta, where Sydney Bush has to travel 20 or so miles just to buy fresh vegetables. The closest grocery store is a 40-minute drive from her house.
Bush works in food justice with the nonprofit Mississippi Farm to School network. Early this year, in partnership with the Cleveland School District, the organization submitted an application for almost $50,000 in a farm-to-school grant. That money would have been used to launch a pilot project to establish procurement plans between regional farmers growing fresh food and the district’s 10 local schools. It would have supported more than 2,800 students.
The cancellation of the funding pot, a crucial lever in achieving truly local food sovereignty and remedying nutrition inequity across America’s resource-strapped rural communities, said Bush “isn’t just about this pilot not happening, it’s about what comes after.” Without it, groups like hers will have to work twice as hard to fill in the gaps. “Food is power,” she said. “There are folks in this country that don’t have the same access to nutrition as everyone else. It’s a systemic problem.”
Now, because of the rescinded grant, that dream of a localized food chain, the culmination of work that started in 2020, appears to be over before it even began.
To learn more, RNZ Pacific spoke with Australian National University academic Dr Thiago Oppermann, who has spent many years in both Bougainville and PNG.
James Marape (second left) and Ishmael Toroama (right) during joint moderations talks in Port Moresby last month. Image: Autonomous Bougainville Government
Don Wiseman: We’ve had five-and-a-half years since the Bougainville referendum, but very suddenly in the last couple of months, it would seem that Bougainville is picking up pace and trying to really make some progress with this march towards independence, as they see it.
Are they overplaying their hand?
Dr Thiago Oppermann: I do not believe that they are overplaying their hand. I think that the impression that is apparent of a sudden flurry of activity, arises partly because for the first two years after the referendum, there was a very slow pace.
One of the shortcomings of the Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA) was that it did not set out a very clear post-referendum path. That part of the process was not as well designed as the parts leading to the referendum, and that left a great deal of uncertainty as to how to structure negotiations, how things should be conducted, and quite substantial differences in the views of the Papua New Guinean government and the ABG (Autonomous Bougainville Government), as to how the referendum result would be processed further.
For instance, how it would it need to be tabled in Parliament, what kind of vote would be required for it, would a negotiation between the parties lead to an agreement that then is presented to the Parliament, and how would that negotiation work? All these areas, they were not prescriptive in the BPA.
That led to a period of a good two years in which there was very slow process and then attempts to get some some movement. I would say that in that period, the views of the Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guineans became quite entrenched in quite different camps, and something I think would have to give eventually.
Why the Bougainvilleans have moved towards this point now, I think that it bears pointing out that there has been a long process that has been unfolding, for more than two years now, of beginning the organic process of developing a Bougainvillean constitutional process with this constitutional development committees across the island doing a lot of work, and that has now borne fruit, is how I would describe it.
It happens at a point where the process has been unblocked by the appointment of Sir Jerry Mataparae, which I think sets a new vigour into the process. It looks now like it’s heading towards some form of outcome. And that being the case, the Bougainvilleans have made their position quite clear.
Sir Jerry Mateparae (middle) with representatives of the PNG and Bougainville governments at the second moderation in April 2025. Image: ABG
DW: Well, Bougainville, in fact, is saying it will be independent by 1st September 2027. How likely do you think that is?
TO: I think there’s a question that comes before that. When Bougainville says that they will be independent by such a date, what we need to first consider is that the process of mediation is still unfolding.
I think that the first thing to consider is, what would that independence look like, and what scope is there within the mediation for finding some compromise that still suits Papua New Guinea. I think that there’s a much greater range of outcomes than people realise within this sort of umbrella of independence, the Bougainvilleans themselves, have moved to a position of understanding independence in much more nuanced terms than previously.
You might imagine that in the aftermath of this fairly brutal and bitter civil conflict, the idea of independence at that time was quite a radical cut towards “full bruk loose” as they say.
But the reality is that for many post colonial and new states since World War Two, there are many different kinds of independence and the degree to which there remains a kind of attachment with or relationship with the so called parent colonial country is variable, I should add.
I do not want to digress too much, but this concept of the parent colonial country is something that I heard quite a lot of when I was studying the referendum itself. Many people would say that the relationship that they had to Papua New Guinea was not one of enmity or of like running away, it was more a question of there being a parent and Bougainville having now grown up to the point where the child, Bougainville, is ready to go off and set up its own house.
Many people thought of it in those terms. Now I think that in concrete terms that can be articulated in many different ways when we think about international law and the status of different sovereign nations around the world.
DW: If we can just look at some of the possibilities in terms of the way in which this independence might be interpreted. My understanding is, for Bougainville it’s vital that they have a degree of sovereignty that will allow them to join organisations like the United Nations, but they’re not necessarily looking to be fully independent of PNG.
TO: Yes, I think that there would be like a process underway in Bougainville for understanding what that would look like.
There are certainly people who would have a view that is still more firmly towards full independence. And there will be others who understand some type of free association arrangements or something that still retains a closer relationship with Papua New Guinea.
I do not think many people have illusions that Bougainville could, for instance, suddenly break loose of the very deep economic connections it has with Papua New Guinea, not only those of government funding, but the commercial connections which are very, very deep. So suddenly making that disappear is not something people believe it’s possible.
But there are many other options that are on the table. I think what Bougainville is doing by having the announcement of the Independence Day is setting for Papua New Guinea saying, like, “here is the terms of the debate that we are prepared to consider”. But within that there is still a great deal of giving and taking.
DW: Now within the parliament in PNG, I think Bougainville has felt for some time that there hasn’t been a great deal of understanding of what Bougainville has been through, or what it is Bougainville is trying to achieve. There’s a very different lineup of MPs to what they were at the turn of the century when the Bougainville Peace Agreement was finalised. So what are they thinking, the MPs from other parts of the country? Are they going to be supportive, or are they just thinking about the impact on their own patch?
TO: I am not entirely sure what the MPs think, and they are a very diverse bunch of people. The sort of concern I think that many have, certainly more senior ones, is that they do not want to be the people in charge when this large chunk of the country secedes.
I think that is something that is important, and we do not want to be patronising the Papua New Guineans, who have a great deal of national pride, and it is not an event of celebration to see what is going on.
For many, it is quite a tragic chain of events. I am not entirely sure what the bulk of MPs believes about this. We have conducted some research, which is non randomised, but it is quite large scale, probing attitudes towards Bougainvillean independence in 2022, around the time of the election.
What we found, which is quite surprising, is that while, of course, Bougainville has the highest support for independence of any place in Papua New Guinea, there are substantial numbers of people outside Bougainville that are sympathetic to Bougainvillean independence or sympathetic towards implementing the referendum.
I think that would be the wording, I would choose, quite large numbers of people. So, as well as, many people who are very much undecided on the issues. From a Papua New Guinean perspective, the views are much more subtle than you might think are the case. By comparison, if you did a survey in Madrid of how many people support Catalan independence, you would not see figures similar to the ones that we find for Papua New Guinea.
DW: Bougainville is due to go to elections later this year. The ABG has stated that it wants this matter sorted, I think, at the time that the election writs are issued sometime in June. Will it be able to do this do you think?
TO: It’s always difficult to predict anything, especially the future. That goes double in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. I think the reality is that the nature of negotiations here and in Bougainville, there’s a great deal of personal connections and toing and froing that will be taking place.
It is very hard to fit that onto a clear timeline. I would describe that as perhaps aspirational, but it would be, it would be good. Whether this is, you know, a question of electoral politics within Bougainville, I think there would be, like, a more or less unanimous view in Bougainville that this needs to move forward as soon as possible. But I don’t know that a timeline is realistic.
The concerns that I would have about this, Don, would be not just about sort of questions of capacity and what happens in the negotiations in Bougainville, but we also need to think about what is happening in Papua New Guinea, and this goes for the entire process.
But here, in this case, PNG has its hands full with many other issues as well. There is a set of like LLG [Local Level Government] elections about to happen, so there are a great deal of things for the government to attend to. I wonder how viable it is to come up with a solution in a short time, but they are certainly capable of surprising everybody.
DW: The Prime Minister, James Marape, has said on a number of occasions that Bougainville is not economically ready or it hasn’t got the security situation under control. And my understanding is that when this was raised at the last meeting, there was quite a lot of giggling going on, because people were comparing what’s happened in Bougainville with what’s happening around the rest of the country, including in Southern Highlands, the province of Mr Marape.
TO: I think you know for me when I think about this, because I have worked with Bougainvilleans for a long time, and have worked with Papua New Guineans for a long time as well. The sense that I have is really one of quite sadness and a great missed opportunity.
Because if we wind the clock back to 1975, Bougainville declared independence, trying to pre-empt [the establishment of] Papua New Guinea. And that set in train a set of events that drastically reformed the Papua New Guinean political Constitution. Many of the sort of characteristic institutions we see now in Papua New Guinea, such as provinces, came about partly because of that.
That crisis, that first independence crisis, the first secession crisis, was resolved through deep changes to Papua New Guinea and to Bougainville, in which the country was able to grow and move forward.
What we see now, though, is this sort of view that Bougainville problems must all be solved in Bougainville, but in fact, many of the problems that are said to be Bougainville problems are Papua New Guinea problems, and that would include issues such as the economic difficulties that Bougainville finds itself in.
I mean, there are many ironies with this kind of criticism that Bougainville is not economically viable. One of them being that when Papua New Guinea became independent, it was largely dependent on Bougainville at that time. So Bougainvilleans are aware of this, and don’t really welcome that kind of idea.
But I think that more deeply there were some really important lessons I believe that could have been learned from the peace process that might have been very useful in other areas of Papua New Guinea, and because Bougainville has been kind of seen as this place apart, virtually as a foreign nation, those lessons have not, unfortunately, filtered back to Papua New Guinea in a way that might have been very helpful for everybody.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.
“Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.”
There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk.
He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.
From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.
Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.
“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”
Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.
The Pope’s Easter Blessing Video: AP
The day before his death, Pope Francis made a brief appearance on Easter Sunday to bless the crowds at St Peter’s Square.
Between a rock and a hard place Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.
His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.
He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.
The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.
Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people — that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.
At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.
Impact on the Catholic Church In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.
He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.
He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.
Pope Francis on respecting and protecting the environment. Image: Tandag Diocese
Love for our common home The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.
Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.
He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.
Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.
Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).
Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.
Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.
With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.
Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.
Cardinals use a centuries-old voting process to elect a new pope, complete with smoke signals to indicate the outcome. And the next papal conclave will be the most diverse in Catholic history.
— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) April 21, 2025
Catholicism in the modern age Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.
He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.
Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has appealed to Foreign Minister Winston Peters askingto New Zealand initiate a call for an internationally enforced “no-fly” zone over Gaza.
PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said in a statement this would be a small but practicable step to “blunt Israel’s continuing genocidal attacks” on Palestinians.
“Gaza is recognised under international law, and by the New Zealand government, as part of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territory,” they said.
“As such, Israel’s intrusion into Gaza airspace is illegal, and is elevated to a war crime when its aircraft attack Palestinian civilians there to further what the International Court of Justice has described as a ‘plausible genocide”.”
Minto and Maher said the United Nations had repeatedly said there were no safe places in Gaza for Palestinian civilians, where even so-called “safe zones” were systematically attacked as Israel “terrorised the population to flee from the territory”.
“Suggestions for a no-fly zone have been made in the past but there has never been a better time for a concerted international effort to enforce such a zone over Gaza,” said Minto.
“In the week leading up to Anzac Day there is no better time for New Zealand to stand up and be counted.
“New Zealanders from past conflicts, including in that very region in 1917 and 1918, have died in vain if today’s politicians refuse to speak out to end the death and destruction in Gaza.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
![To President Trump, the USAGM [Voice of America] has become a promoter of "anti-American ideas" and agendas](https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/VOA-TConv-680wide-300x215.png)
