Four Just Stop Oil supportershave been found guilty of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance, with a fifth person being acquitted by a jury at Manchester Crown Court.
Daniel Knorr (23), Margaret Reid (54), Indigo Rumbelow (30) and Ella Ward (22) received a majority guilty verdict. They were arrested in the early hours of 5 August 2024 as they left a BnB in Gatley Close to head to Manchester Airport. Noah Crane (19), who was arrested later on 5 August at his home in Birmingham, was acquitted.
All five were charged with conspiracy and held in prison on remand until 4 February when bail was granted on the second day of the trial.
Sentencing has been adjourned until 23 May for pre-sentencing reports and bail has not been granted.
Just Stop Oil: another four guilty
In the 15-day trial before Judge MacAdam, four defendants freely admitted planning to access the airport via the perimeter fence and then if possible three would glue on to the taxiway. They made the case that they were seeking to prevent harm and inform the public of the huge risks now unfolding due to the collapsing climate. That this is no longer a problem for future generations, but our problem happening now.
Noah Crane, the fifth defendant, chose not to enter the witness box, although each of his co-defendants gave evidence that he was not involved in the planning of the action and they had told him nothing. His only link to the action was, when requested, to purchase four phones, unaware of what they would be used for.
All defendants had the legal defences of necessity and reasonable excuse withdrawn by Judge MacAdam. Ella Ward additionally had self defence withdrawn on the basis that there was ‘no immediate threat.’ They were left only with the defence of denying the indictment. This meant no expert scientific evidence was heard by the jury.
A judge’s admission
The prosecution presented evidence of an imaginary scenario in which flights were disrupted and the police Protest Removal team took two hours to arrive before removing any Just Stop Oil supporters ‘glued on’.
Prosecution witness PC Ben Rigby, the officer in charge of Manchester’s protest response, testified that if the defendants had accessed the airport, the police would not use ‘blue lights’ when responding, and would go through the full security clearance to get ‘airside’. While the Head of Airport Security, Mr Tim Cook indicated that there could be ‘flexibility’ around security clearance for the responding police security team, but neither confirmed or denied vulnerabilities in the CCTV coverage of the airport perimeter.
Judge MacAdam, during legal hearings at the start of the trial, informed the defendants that due to the workload of his position he did not read a great deal about climate science and was therefore neutral.
If you knew a disaster was going to happen…
The following statement was issued on behalf of the defendants after the verdict
We thank the jury for their service and accept their decision. The acquittal of Noah Crane calls into question the six months he was forced to serve on remand at the age of 18. Physics doesn’t care if we were acquitted or not – all that matters now is how hot our world gets and how quickly. The unfolding horror of climate collapse is the future that awaits us, our children and our children’s children.
During the trial Judge MacAdam said “if you knew a disaster was going to happen you would take steps to warn people” – we took those steps and have been found guilty, the bigger crime would have been not to act. The government is not taking the steps needed to protect us, to avoid total ruin. We call on them to act, to address the real security threat and do what is necessary to defend our future.
Daniel Knorr issued a statement saying:
In the second week of trial Judge MacAdam sought clarification from me, asking “If you knew a disaster was going to happen you would take steps to warn people wouldn’t you?
Wasn’t that exactly what I was trying to do? The British legal system knows the stark reality we face and seemingly understands the commonsense response to such reality. Yet again and again it is those seeking to stop the harm who end up in the dock and those profiting from destruction who are protected.
Just Stop Oil: courts are ‘out of step’
A Just Stop Oil spokesperson said:
Yet again our courts have demonstrated that they are out of step with what is happening in the real world. A world of increased heating, panicking scientists and oblivious politicians. We risk ruin and judges and legal experts discuss the finer points of necessity and reasonableness. None of this is reasonable. All those who took part in the prosecution of Just Stop Oil supporters deserve our sympathy, the guilt that they experience due to the collapse of our living world will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Indigo Rumbelow and Margaret Reid represented themselves. Ella Ward sacked her barrister during the second week of the three week trial. Noah Crane and Daniel Knorr had legal representation.
Just Stop Oil supporters are on the right side of history and non-violent civil resistance works. Just Stop Oil will once again be stepping into action this April to demand that governments commit to an international treaty to phase out the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030.
You can help make this happen by coming to a talk and signing up for action at juststopoil.org
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls’ first two days in New Caledonia have been marred by several clashes with local pro-France, anti-independence movements, who feared he would side with their pro-independence opponents.
However, he remained confident that all stakeholders would eventually come and sit together at the table for negotiations.
Valls arrived in the French Pacific territory on Saturday with a necessary resumption of crucial political talks regarding New Caledonia’s political future high on his agenda, nine months after the deadly May 2024 civil unrest.
His visit comes as tensions have risen in the past few days against a backdrop of verbal escalations and rhetoric, the pro-France camp opposing independence stressing that three referendums had resulted in three rejections of independence in 2018, 2020, and 2021.
But the third referendum in December 2021 was boycotted by a large part of the pro-independence, mainly Kanak community, and they have since disputed the validity of its result (even though it was deemed valid in court rulings).
On Saturday, the first day of his visit to the Greater Nouméa city of Mont-Dore, during a ceremony paying homage to a French gendarme who was killed at the height of the riots last year, Valls and one of the main pro-France leaders, French MP Nicolas Metzdorf, had a heated and public argument.
‘First Nation’ controversy Metzdorf, who was flanked by Sonia Backès, another major pro-France local leader, said Valls had “insulted” the pro-France camp because he had mentioned the indigenous Kanak people as being the “first people” in New Caledonia — equivalent to the notion of “First Nation” people.
Hours before, Valls had just met New Caledonia’s Custom Senate (a traditional gathering of Kanak chiefs) and told them that “nothing can happen in New Caledonia without a profound respect towards [for] the Melanesian people, the Kanak people, and the first people”.
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls (second from left) meets pro-France supporters as he arrives in New Caledonia on Saturday as French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc looks on. Image: NC la 1ère
Metzdorf told Valls in an exchange that was filmed on the road and later aired on public broadcaster NC la 1ère: “When you say there are first people, you don’t respect us! Your statements are insulting.”
“If there are first peoples, it means there are second peoples and that some are more important than others.”
To which Valls replied: “When you are toying with these kinds of concepts, you are making a mistake.”
Manuel Valls en Nouvelle-Calédonie : échange tendu entre le ministre des Outre-mer et des personnalités non-indépendantistes
Nicolas Metzdorf et Sonia Backès lui reprochent certaines prises de position depuis la reprise des discussions
Every word counts The 1998 Nouméa Accord’s preamble is largely devoted to the recognition of New Caledonia’s indigenous community (autochtone/indigenous).
On several occasions, Valls faced large groups of pro-France supporters with French tricolour flags and banners (some in the Spanish language, a reference to Valls’s Spanish double heritage), asking him to “respect their democratic (referendum) choice”.
Some were also chanting slogans in Spanish (“No pasaran”), or with a Spanish accent.
“I’m asking for just one thing: for respect towards citizens and those representing the government,” an irate Valls told the crowd.
Questions have since been raised from local organisations and members of the general public as to why and how an estimated 500 pro-France supporters had been allowed to gather while the French High Commissioner still maintains a ban on all public gatherings and demonstrations in Nouméa and its greater area.
“We voted three times no. No means no,” some supporters told the visiting minister, asking him not to “let them down”.
“You shouldn’t believe what you’ve been told. Why wouldn’t you remain French?”, Valls told protesters.
“I think the minister must state very clearly that he respects those three referendums and then we’ll find a solution on that basis,” said Backès.
However, both Metzdorf and Backès reaffirmed that they would take part in “negotiations” scheduled to take place this week.
“We are ready to make compromises”, said Backès.
Valls carried on schedule
Minister Valls travelled to Northern parts and outer islands of New Caledonia to pay homage to the victims during previous insurrections in New Caledonia, including French gendarmes and Kanak militants who died on Ouvéa Island (Loyalty group) in the cave massacre in 1988.
During those trips, he also repeatedly advocated for rebuilding New Caledonia and for every stakeholder to “reconcile memories” and sit at the negotiation table “without hatred”.
Valls believes ‘everyone will be at the table’ In an interview with local public broadcaster NC la 1ère yesterday, the French minister said he was confident “everyone will be at the table”.
The first plenary meeting is to be held this afternoon.
It will be devoted to agreeing on a “method”.
“I believe everyone will be there,” he said.
“All groups, political, economic, social, all New Caledonians, I’m convinced, are a majority who wish to keep a strong link within France,” he said.
He also reiterated that following New Caledonia’s Matignon (1988) and Nouméa (1998) peace accords, the French Pacific territory’s envisaged future was to follow a path to “full sovereignty”.
“The Nouméa Accord is the foundation. Undeniably, there have been three referendums. And then there was May 13.
“There is a before and and after [the riots]. My responsibility is to find a way. We have the opportunity of these negotiations, let’s be careful of the words we use,” he said, asking every stakeholder for “restraint”.
“I’ve also seen some pro-independence leaders say that [their] people’s sacrifice and death were necessary to access independence. And this, also, is not on.”
Valls also said the highly sensitive issue of “unfreezing” New Caledonia’s special voters’ roll for local elections (a reform attempt that triggered the May 2024 riots) was “possible”, but it will be part of a wider, comprehensive agreement on the French Pacific entity’s political future.
A mix of ‘fear and hatred’ Apart from the planned political negotiations, Valls also intends to devote significant time to New Caledonia’s dire economic situation, in post-riot circumstances that have not only caused 14 dead, but also several hundred job losses and total damage estimated at some 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4 billion).
A first, much-expected economic announcement also came yesterday: Valls said the State-funded unemployment benefits (which were supposed to cease in the coming days) woud now be extended until June 30.
For the hundreds of businesses which were destroyed last year, he said a return to confidence was essential and a prerequisite to any political deal . . . And vice-versa.
“If there’s no political agreement, there won’t be any economic investment.
“This may cause the return of fresh unrest, a form of civil war. I have heard those words coming back, just like I’ve heard the words racism, hatred . . . I can feel hope and at the same time a fear of violence.
“I feel all the ferments of a confrontation,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Marape also called for the nation to rise in consciousness to preserve the values and achievements of their fathers and mothers who fought for independence 50 years ago.
“We want to give a special recognition to the fathers and mothers of our country, a generation and people of our country to be proud to be here today,” he said.
He expressed his pain at seeing the continued cycle of abuse and disrespect towards women and children in the country.
Marape’s message was clear: violence and abuse towards women and children would not be tolerated, and the nation must come together to ensure the safety and well-being of all its citizens.
‘Don’t do it to our sisters’
“These are not two things that we want to take on. For every young boy out there, if you have an issue in society, I don’t mind you taking it upon me. But please don’t do it to the girls in the neighbourhood,” he said.
“Don’t do it to our sisters in the neighbourhood. Don’t do it to our mothers and aunties in the neighbourhood.
“In a time when our nation is facing a 50th anniversary, I call for our nation to rise in a consciousness to preserve what our fathers and mothers did 50 years ago.
“Lawlessness, disrespect for each other, especially women and children amongst us. This is something that I speak at great lengths and speak from the depth of my heart.
“It pains me to see girls, women, and children continue to face a vicious cycle of abuse and total abhorrence, abuse of children, rape,” he said.
“I just thought these are important activities coming up. I want to conclude by asking our country through the media.
“We are in another state of our 50th anniversary year.
‘Let us take responsibility’
“We have many challenges in our country. But all of us, we take responsibility of our country. As government, we are trying our absolute best.
“Citizens, public servants, private sector, all of us have responsibility to our country. Unless you have another country to go and live in, if property is your country in the first instance, I call out to all citizens, take responsibility in your corner of property.
“Privacy alone cannot be able to do everything that you expect it to do.
“I’m not omnipotent. I’m not omniscient. I’m not omnipresent.
“I’m but only one person coordinating at the top level. Call for every citizen of our country.
“As we face our 49th year and as we welcome our 50th of September 16,) we call this on every one of us.”
Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.
After leaving the National Prayer Breakfast at the Capitol earlier this month, President Donald Trump and his entourage slipped into the imposing ballroom at the Washington Hilton, where the real show was about to begin.
At the “unofficial” event on February 6, organized by the powerful and insular evangelical group known as “the Family,” Trump took a victory lap before the crowd of largely white evangelicals. These were the voters that had thrust him into power and they were eager to celebrate the rash of executive orders reversing decades-old civil rights advances.
“I don’t know if you’ve been watching but we got rid of woke over the last two weeks. Woke is gone-zo,” Trump said, to applause. “We’re a merit-based society now.”
With an assist from Elon Musk and his DOGE squad, Trump has made the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion a centerpiece of his new administration. For all the crowing about his early success — much of it greatly overinflated — Trump has simply flipped the script: Instead of creating a level playing field, he launched DEI for white Christians.
“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims.”
Trump’s bid to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement while using its own language is part and parcel of the Christian right’s playbook, according to Christine Reyna, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies extremism.
“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims and portray their movement as a civil rights movement,” Reyna said. “And they’ve completely co-opted the strategies of the Black civil rights movement.”
At the prayer event that morning, Trump announced the latest gift to his right-wing evangelical supporters: a task force on “anti-Christian bias,” helmed by his new Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“[T]he task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide,” he said.
Trump’s war on “woke” is a realization of decades of political organizing that has always had civil rights in its crosshairs. Despite rhetoric about religious liberty, backsliding on civil rights and the far-right push to usher in a Christian theocracy are inextricably linked — and they always have been, according to Brad Onishi, a professor of religion at the University of San Francisco.
“There has been a war on the representation of rights of people they think don’t deserve them or at least don’t deserve to be at an equal seat of the American roundtable,” said Onishi, himself a former evangelical Christian. “It’s something that’s 60 years in the making.”
A Longtime Target
While discussions of the Christian right often focus on the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wadedecision as its origin story, the issue that truly launched the movement was integration.
In 1976, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist college that banned interracial marriage on “religious grounds” and, until 1971, excluded Black applicants entirely.
The case, which eventually made its way to the Supreme Court along with similar efforts to desegregate religious institutions catalyzed white Christian outrage. Groups like the Moral Majority sprung up in defense of segregation, capitalizing on white evangelicals’ feelings of grievance.
Although later, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell Sr. would argue that Roe had been his breaking point, scholars have noted that the emergence of these efforts, including Falwell’s, began before Roe and only incorporated anti-abortion stances into their platforms in the late 1970s.
Like Trump, these organizations combined a promise of the restoration of Christianity to dominance in American political life with a staunch opposition to integration and other socially liberal trends in American life.
“The great white Christian flight from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party occurred primarily because the Democratic Party became the party defending the civil rights of Black Americans in this country,” said Robert P. Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.”
Now, said Jones, “the two political parties have essentially sorted themselves along ethno-religious lines.”
From Grievance to Policy
Over the last month, Trump has moved swiftly to turn white evangelicals’ grievances into policy.
In a series of executive orders, the president undid decades worth of civil rights protections for marginalized communities brick-by-brick. He froze the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, eliminated all DEI roles in the federal government, and dismantled equal opportunity executive orders barring racial discrimination in employment.
On the flip side, he formed the Anti-Christian Bias Task Force — announced with fanfare at “the Family’s” prayer breakfast — and re-instituted the White House Faith Office, a bureau led by televangelist Paula White that consults religious leaders on policy.
“What’s especially powerful about this tactic is that civil rights laws already exist.”
Reyna, the DePaul professor, said that there’s a legal benefit to couching the far right’s movement in the terms of civil rights.
“What’s especially powerful about this tactic is that civil rights laws already exist. They already are fundamental to our legal system,” said Reyna. “So if they could find a way to leverage those existing laws in order to protect whiteness in America, they’re going to be more likely to be successful.”
Trump is by all accounts not a pious believer. He can, however, leverage evangelical grievances for support at the ballot box — and perhaps beyond.
“We essentially have kind of a MAGA-controlled Republican Party, that is, both in terms of its ideas and its demography, a white Christian Nationalist Party,” said Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute. “The end game is the installation of an authoritarian regime that’s about power and money and an oligarchy — and the ultimate end of that is the end of American democracy as we know it.”
The BBC has removed its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from iPlayer after it was revealed that its teenage narrator is the son of a Hamas official.
The broadcaster stated that it was conducting “further due diligence” following mounting scrutiny.
The film, which aired on BBC Two last Monday, follows 13-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri as he describes life in Gaza.
However, it later emerged that his father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, serves as the Hamas Deputy Minister of Agriculture in Gaza.
In a statement yesterday, the BBC defended the documentary’s value but acknowledged concerns.
“There have been continuing questions raised about the programme, and in light of these, we are conducting further due diligence with the production company,” the statement said.
The revelation sparked a backlash from figures including Friday Night Dinner actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, literary agent Neil Blair, and former BBC One boss Danny Cohen, who called it “a shocking failure by the BBC and a major crisis for its reputation”.
On Thursday, the BBC admitted that it had not disclosed the family connection but insisted it followed compliance procedures. It has since added a disclaimer acknowledging Abdullah’s ties to Hamas.
UK’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said that she would discuss the issue with the BBC, particularly regarding its vetting process.
However, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians urged the broadcaster to “stand firm against attempts to prevent firsthand accounts of life in Gaza from reaching audiences”.
Others also defended the importance of the documentary made last year before the sheer scale of devastation by the Israeli military forces was exposed — and many months before the ceasefire came into force on January 19.
‘This documentary humanised Palestinian children’ Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), criticised the BBC’s decision.
“It’s very regrettable that this documentary has been pulled following pressure from anti-Palestinian activists who have largely shown no sympathy for persons in Gaza suffering from massive bombardment, starvation, and disease,” Middle East Eye quoted him as saying.
Doyle also praised the film’s impact, saying, “This documentary humanised Palestinian children in Gaza and gave valuable insights into life in this horrific war zone.”
Journalist Richard Sanders, who has produced multiple documentaries on Gaza, called the controversy a “huge test” for the BBC and condemned its response as a “cowardly decision”.
Earlier this week, 45 Jewish journalists and media figures, including former BBC governor Ruth Deech, urged the broadcaster to pull the film, calling Ayman Al-Yazouri a “terrorist leader”.
The controversy underscores wider tensions over media coverage of the Israel-Gaza war, with critics accusing the BBC of a vetting failure, while others argue the documentary sheds crucial light on Palestinian children’s suffering.
Another teenager who appears in the Gaza documentary . . . she has o global online following for her social media videos on cooking and life amid the genocide. Image: BBC screenshot APR
Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” spent the first month of the second Trump presidency ransacking federal agencies — and racking up more than a dozen lawsuits challenging its structure, operations, and power.
In response, both Musk and President Donald Trump attacked judges that dare to apply legal scrutiny to DOGE and flirted with defying court orders altogether.
Simply disregarding the courts, however, would create terrible consequences for the country — according to past remarks from DOGE’s lawyer, James Burnham, who reportedly is serving as the team’s general counsel.
“If you destroy the rule of law, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Burnham said during an October panel of the Federalist Society in Washington. “And things are not going to work for anybody, including the people who are sponsoring the attacks.”
“If you destroy the rule of law, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
During the panel, Burnham — who worked for the first Trump administration and did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about his current role — blasted President Joe Biden for criticizing Supreme Court rulings and liberal critics for poking around the justices’ finances and social networks.
He fretted that imposing term limits for the Supreme Court could lead to the worst-case scenario.
“It’s just going to be a race to the bottom and the ultimate consequence is going to be that the political branches do not listen to the Court anymore,” he said.
“It is not hard to imagine a president who tells the Court he does not care about their opinion, which by the way is how it works in most countries,” Burnham said, musing about what a “President DeSantis or someone like that” might do in that hypothetical scenario.
Burnham dismissed the suggestion that Trump himself might jeopardize the balance of power in the American constitutional system. He even chuckled when the panel moderator predicted that, once elected, Trump “absolutely will shamelessly attack judges who defy him.”
By Burnham’s assessment, liberals’ efforts were “a thousand times more dangerous than anything that Trump has ever done vis-à-vis the court system, and I think ever would do.”
DOGE and Crony Show
Burnham has plenty of experience boosting Trump’s agenda and defending his unconstitutional tactics.
During the first Trump administration, Burnham left Jones Day, a conservative-leaning heavyweight law firm, to join the White House counsel’s office, where he worked on the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. He then moved to the Justice Department, where he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Division and was briefly floated as a potential judicial nominee himself.
While at the Justice Department, Burnham tried his best to justify the White House’s decision to suspend CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass in retaliation for challenging Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants. A judge ruled the White House’s move likely violated the First Amendment, and Acosta’s pass was reinstated.
During his stint at Justice, Burnham got the chance to defend Trump’s first stab at misappropriating funds and subverting Congress’s power over federal spending — namely his attempt to divert billions of dollars to the border wall that Congress had allocated for other purposes. A federal appellate court ultimately ruled the move was illegal, and the Biden administration dropped Trump’s plan before it could be considered by the Supreme Court.
Burnham also defended Trump’s tactic of bypassing the Senate’s role in vetting and confirming high-ranking executive branch officials. A district court ruled that Trump could not circumvent the Constitution by simply installing his preferred head for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who faced Senate opposition, in an “acting” role.
In 2023, Burnham left Jones Day to found his own boutique firm, along with an investment fund that finances lawsuits serving a “conservative mission.”
The following year, Burnham started appearing as a regular host for one of the Federalist Society’s podcasts. In wide-ranging discussions of social media power, Musk came up somewhat frequently, and Burnham expressed admiration for the “crazy guy from South Africa” without hinting that they might soon work together.
In one episode, recorded at some point after the November presidential election and published online in late January, Burnham even touched briefly on DOGE, but did not discuss his involvement, if any, up to that point. (The Federalist Society did not respond to an inquiry about when this episode was recorded.)
“You’ve now got the DOGE, the Department on Governmental Efficiency, run by a couple of very successful tech entrepreneurs,” he said with a smirk, offering DOGE as an example of “tech rebels” supporting Trump.
DOGE Days
In mid-January, after the New York Times first reported his advisory role with DOGE, Burnham withdrew from representing clients in two federal cases, telling one court in a filing that it was “due to his departure from private practice.”
So far, Burnham has not appeared in any of the proliferating lawsuits regarding DOGE — some of which sparked the remarks from Trump and Musk questioning the role of the courts. Earlier this month, when a federal judge blocked DOGE from accessing a sensitive database in the Treasury Department, Musk attacked him on X as a “corrupt judge” and called for his impeachment. Musk also reposted a tweet that mused about defying the ruling.
“Maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation,” Trump said at a press conference with Musk in the Oval Office the next week. The White House press secretary called injunctions against DOGE and the Trump administration’s executive orders “an abuse of the rule of law and an attempt to thwart the will of the people.”
On Monday, a Republican member of Congress filed articles of impeachment against the federal judge in the Treasury database case, and Musk cheered another Republican who promised to file additional impeachment articles.
As DOGE’s general counsel, Burnham would appear to have a responsibility to advise DOGE how to operate within the law. As he counsels Musk, his DOGE crew, and anyone else considering flouting judicial orders in pursuit of power, Burnham might consider his own charge to fellow conservatives before the election.
Asked at the October Federalist Society panel what role attorneys should play in protecting the Supreme Court and the integrity of the judiciary, Burnham was unequivocal.
“The people in this room have an obligation to speak out,” he said, “and do as much as possible to defend the institution. Because it can’t defend itself.”
Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s announcement this week that the island nation will open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem has been labelled “an act of aggression” by Palestine.
On Tuesday, the Fiji government revealed that Cabinet had decided to locate its consulate in Jerusalem, which remains at the centre of the Palestine-Israel decades-long conflict.
According to an overwhelming United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES‑10/19 on 21 December 2017 (128-9), Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as capital of Israel is “null and void”.
Previous UN Security Council resolutions demarcated Jerusalem as the capital of the future state of Palestine.
The Fijian government said in a statement: “Necessary risk assessments will be undertaken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defence, in consultation with relevant agencies, prior to and during the establishment process.”
Fiji and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1970 and have partnerships in security and peacekeeping, agriculture, and climate change.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Rabuka said he “received a phone call from my friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressing his gratitude for Fiji’s decision to open a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem.”
“Even though very brief, we reaffirmed our commitment to strengthening Fiji-Israel ties,” he said.
I commend the Republic of Fiji’s government for its historic decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. Thank you, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka @slrabuka, friend of Israel. Thank you Fiji! pic.twitter.com/IxCkjPnhQ6
‘Violating international law’
“With this decision, Fiji becomes the seventh country to violate international law and UN resolutions regarding the city’s legal and political status and the rights of the Palestinian people,” it said in a statement.
The seven countries include Papua New Guinea.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemns the decision of PM @slrabuka to relocate Fiji’s embassy to occupied #Jerusalem.
This move blatantly violates international law and UN resolutions, and places #Fiji on the wrong side of history. https://t.co/5x1bCECNXO
— Palestine Australia, Aotearoa NZ and Pacific (@PalestineAusNZ) February 19, 2025
“This decision is an act of aggression against the Palestinian people and their rights.
“It places Fiji on the wrong side of history, harms the chances of achieving peace based on the two-state solution, and represents unacceptable support for the occupation and its crimes.”
The statement added that Fiji’s move “blatantly defies UN resolutions at a time when the occupying power is escalating its attacks against Palestinians across all of the Palestinian Territory, attempting to displace them from their homeland.”
The ministry said that it would continue to take political, diplomatic, and legal action against countries that opened or moved their embassies to Jerusalem.
“It will work to hold them accountable for their unjustified actions against the Palestinian people and their rights.”
In September 2024, Fiji was one of seven Pacific Island nations that voted against a United Nations resolution to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Palestine has strongly condemned Fiji’s decision to open a Fiji embassy in Jerusalem, calling it a violation of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry and the Hamas resistance group that governs the besieged enclave of Gaza issued separate statements, urging the Fiji government to reverse its decision.
According to the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, the Fijian decision is “an act of aggression against the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights”.
The Palestinian group Hamas said in a statement that the decision was “a blatant assault on the rights of our Palestinian people to their land and a clear violation of international law and UN resolutions, which recognise Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory”.
Fiji will become the seventh country to have an embassy in Jerusalem after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, and Paraguay.
The corporate media has so far stayed silent over allegations that a famous journalist at the Daily Mail sexually assaulted two young men, and sexually harassed another. Thankfully, Good Law Project is on the case – and trying to support one of the young men in question.
For many months, Good Law Project has been working to help a young man who has been denied justice after he was sexually assaulted by a star journalist at the Daily Mail.
The young man, who works for the publisher of the Mail, and who we shall call X, was groped by the journalist, whom we are naming only as J.
It noted that the Daily Mail Group reportedly investigated X’s claims – and promptly dismissed them, without even interviewing him. As Good Law Project noted, the company can get away with this because X does not have the financial ability to take a huge corporate giant on. Moreover, it noted that, to the Daily Mail, “it feels more important to protect “the talent” than to protect the junior colleagues they prey upon”.
However, X is seemingly not the first survivor of J’s alleged sexual abuse. As Good Law Project wrote:
The Daily Mail Group has previously received a complaint of sexual assault by J from at least one other young man. It knows he has sent unwanted sexual messages to at least one other young man. These are not the only victims of J to whom Good Law Project has spoken. And reports of J’s sexual misconduct have been circulating for well over a decade: it is an open secret.
So far, not one corporate media outlet has reported the story. This is probably not unsurprising, given the privately-owned press in the UK stick together to protect their own interests. Unless, of course, it concerns an outlet like the BBC or ITV – and then the tabloids are all over the story. As Good Law Project noted:
You might also remember the BBC being hammered in a front page of 2 December 2024 that said: “BBC was warned 4 times about [Gregg] Wallace” in, yes, the Daily Mail.
Good Law Project and X need your support
So, what of X’s case?
Well, Good Law Project has gathered him together a legal team. It noted that it has “helped X start proceedings against both the Daily Mail and J himself in the Employment Tribunal for disability discrimination, whistleblowing and victimisation”.
However, Good Law Project cannot do this without your support.
It said:
We plan to publish his ‘Grounds of Claim’ and the names of X and J just as soon as we can. But meanwhile we need your help – taking on the might of the Mail is going to be very expensive.
Please, if you’d like to see them held to account, we need your help.
You can donate to Good Law Project’s crowdfunder here.
High Court judge Thomas Leech who approved the Thames Water £3bn bailout was previously a partner at a law firm where – yes, you guessed it – Thames Water was one of its clients. However, while there is no indication that Leech had any involvement in Thames, what the story does show is the two degrees of separation that exist between the justice system and the corporate world.
Thames Water: leeching off the public
As the Canary has been documenting, Thames Water has become one of the most notorious companies in the UK. Firstly, recent data reveals that over half of its 351 sewage treatment plants lack the capacity to adequately process incoming wastewater, leading to the discharge of untreated effluent into rivers. Specifically, 181 plants are failing to meet required treatment volumes, with some operating at only a third of their necessary capacity.
Then, Thames Water’s management has come under criticism for its handling of environmental and financial issues. The company has been fined £18 million by Ofwat for breaching dividend rules, having paid out dividends totaling £195.5 million during periods of underperformance. That is, while we were suffering from leaks and rocketing bills, Thames Water was giving its shareholders money AND paying bosses bonuses.
However, most significantly the company is grappling with a substantial debt burden, currently standing at £18 billion. It was this that Thames Water went to the High Court for. As the Canary’s Hannah Sharland previously wrote:
On Tuesday 18 February, the mainstream media was awash with the news that the High Court has greenlit a £3bn bailout for the debt-ridden sewage company.
Splashed across the coverage, they invariably referred to it as a “rescue loan” or “lifeline” for the company. In reality however, it’s an obscene handout to a corporation with coffers aplenty to pay stonking fat cat bonuses, but never quite enough to mop up after its own mess.
There was widespread outrage over the decision. People were calling for Thames Water to be nationalised; they were saying that the £3bn was just delaying the company’s inevitable collapse, and of course there’s also the issue of it wanting to increase people’s bills by 59%.
Judge Leech: it’s all so predictable
People were also shocked that the judge in the case, Thomas Leech, granted the Thames Water bailout in the first place. However, a tweet from Damian in Brighton might go some way to explaining why:
Justice Leech carried out legal work for @thameswater, so should have recused himself from ruling on whether the company should be nationalised. He ruled that it is better for the company to be privately owned rather than nationalised when that is not true. He is a liar. pic.twitter.com/y6u5iTOfOl
So, the Canary dug into whether or not Leech has any links to Thames Water. And indeed he does – albeit indirectly.
Leech was a partner at law firm Herbert Smith Freehills from 2014 to 2021. During that time, the firm advised a consortium of companies in its bid to provide infrastructure for the Thames Tideway Tunnel. This, of course, was being paid for by Thames Water customers through their bills.
However, Herbert Smith Freehills was also listed by Thames Water in 2018 as being on:
a new legal panel of five specialist law firms… the panel will compete for major projects, which sit outside of the Managed Legal Services arrangement.
So, Thames Water essentially gave Leech’s previous law firm the chance to bid for work.
Before Leech joined Herbert Smith Freehills, the firm did directly represent Thames Water in a legal case.
Thames Water: a capitalist mindset
So, while Leech and his firm were not exactly in bed with Thames Water. there is a link. Moreover, Herbert Smith Freehills had a significant role in the privatised water industry in the UK. It is this which is the problem.
The Judge concluded, that while he “might have been tempted” to refuse to sanction the restructuring plan given the costs of the interim finance and fees, ultimately after “taking into account the public interest” he would nevertheless sanction the restructuring plan [anyway].
That is, Leech recognised the public anger and also potential consequences of Thames Water’s bailout. However, he chose to err on the side of a ‘corporate-first’ mindset, anyway. Leech notably shifted the blame onto government for making this possible via “public policy”.
Moreover, on Wednesday 19 February Leech then refused a application by so-called Class B creditors – smaller shareholders, to you and me. It was for them to be able to vote on Thames Water’s restructuring plan. This once again shows his preference for corporate power.
It is this mindset which is at fault. It is one bred at corporate firms like Herbert Smith Freehill. It’s then passed onto their barristers like Leech. This mindset then seeps into the judiciary.
Consequently, there is now little separation between the UK courts and the business world. Ultimately, it will always be those that inhabit the latter that win. Like Thames Water just has.
On Tuesday afternoon, the official White House X account posted a video showing men in Seattle shackled by the wrists and ankles about to be boarded onto a plane for deportation.
The 40-second clip’s soundtrack is sparse, with no dialog or music — just the sounds of the plane engine and the jangle of handcuffs and chains first laid out by an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then attached to the immigrants, whose faces are not filmed.
The White House gave the video a macabre caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the pleasurable tingling some people experience in response to certain stimuli, often sound. There are millions of social media videos dedicated to the genre.
For the Trump administration, that pleasure is derived from the sounds of human bondage and racist exclusion.
To me, the sound was a clarion call: the thundering of a fascist machine that demands people of conscience stand up to gum up its works, that the clink of those chains should be silenced with blockages and blockades.
What we need now is not to follow Democratic Party officials — who have long since advocated harsher border rule and shown a willingness to serve Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Instead, we have to to follow the lead of grassroots and front-line immigrant organizers who have been doing the work of opposing far-right nationalism long before this moment of renewed Trumpian reaction.
A Fascist Troll Is Still Fascism
When the White House’s video posted, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, offered his own comment: “Haha wow,” alongside two emojis: a troll and a medal.
The White House account was of course trolling — it reposted Musk’s comment too — and provoking outraged responses like this are part of their goal. There’s no contradiction, though, in an act being trollish and unambiguously serious in its fascist intent and effect.
This is the puerile style of Trumpian fascism: a snickering lexicon of resentment shaped by online far-right culture wars, applied to the violent operations of racist law and border enforcement. The post doesn’t work as a “troll” if it doesn’t produce outrage, sure, but it also doesn’t work as a troll if it doesn’t produce pleasure for Trump’s base — pleasure at fascist domination.
There’s nothing particularly new about the concoction of fascist violence and irony either. The ghost-sheet costumes and ridiculous titles chosen by the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan were to hide members’ identities, but were also purposely absurd in an effort to distract from their violent intentions.
There was, of course, no costume that could disguise the Klan’s terrors, just as no meme-culture references can distract from Trump and Musk’s white supremacist extremism.
The White House’s post makes no attempt, even, to suggest that the anonymous men in chains have committed some sort of heinous acts. All we learn of them is that they fall into the vast category of state-determined “illegal aliens” and are therefore deserving of banishment and humiliation.
The shackles themselves — the video’s audio and visual focus — recall the most shameful episodes of this country’s unbroken history of racist oppression, from slave auctions to chain gangs.
The Ineffective Opposition
Centrist liberals may be horrified by the cruelty on display, but it was an Obama-era move to expand mass deportations under the rubric of removing only “criminals” — a category devoid of moral sense in a country that routinely criminalizes homelessness, poverty, and Blackness, but enables rape, extreme exploitation, and genocide.
The Biden administration and the Harris campaign bear great responsibility, too, for further normalizing the right-wing anti-immigrant agenda.
These Democratic leaders who are helping Trump carry out his nationalist program might want to reflect on the White House “ASMR” post — this is what they are aiding. They might consider, too, that this short clip captures just a slither of the far-reaching cruelty of the deportation machine — from the extremities of the extraordinary rendition of migrants on Guantánamo Bay, to the quotidian terror faced by millions of people who fear separation from their loved ones and lives.
They are, however, unlikely to do so. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, for instance, told a press conference last month that she welcomed ICE going after “people who committed crimes, serious offenders, and those are exactly the people we want removed from the state of New York.” And dozens of Democrats helped pass the Laken Riley Act, which allows for the indefinite ICE detention of undocumented immigrants charged, but not even convicted, of crimes including petty theft.
“I want to be clear, there has always been ICE raids in the state of New York, even in the past, and this is not a new dynamic,” Hochul said. And while ICE was only founded in 2003, it’s true that a decadeslong bipartisan consensus has permitted attacks on immigrants to be the norm, paving the way for Trump’s nationalist excesses.
It is hoping too much to imagine a significant enough number of Democrats will reckon with their own complicity in creating the conditions for this moment. Displays of unambiguous fascist feeling from the White House, however, should at least give pause to those who have expressed willingness to further aid this authoritarian project.
What Needs to Be Done
Since I hold little hope for a robust antifascist response from Democratic leaders, the need for grassroots responses is clear. In cities and neighborhoods around the country, rapid-response networks to respond to ICE raids are proliferating, as are “know your rights” trainings. These are the crucial antidote, if not to the whole machinery, at least to minimizing its ill effects as much as possible.
The blockages and blockades of ICE’s heavy-handed actions need to grow. We need to support the churches and other local institutions that have committed to their role as sanctuary spaces; we need to refuse ICE’s unwarranted entry into our workplaces, schools, and residences; we need worker and union organizing that upholds the legacy of working-class, pro-immigrant resistance; and we need targeted direct action protest.
There are clear examples to follow: When Never Again Action and the Cosecha Movement briefly shut down ICE headquarters in Washington during Trump’s first term; when protesters swarmed New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2017 against the Muslim ban, and cab drivers refused to drop passengers there; when the immigrant rebels of thegilets noirsoccupied a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, in direct resistance to Air France’s role as “the official deporter of the French state.”
It all takes courage — in some cases, more courage and even risk than others. There are examples, if not in what to do, in the kind of fortitude it takes to get in the way of fascism. Take Willem Van Spronsen, a 69-year-old activist who in 2019 was shot dead by police when he attempted to incinerate a fleet of empty ICE vehicles outside a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. “I have an unshakable abhorrence for injustice,” he wrote in a short manifesto. “That is what brings me here.”
Van Spronsen’s solitary, self-sacrificial course of action is not what I’m advocating for here. We need collective direct action, pushing in many directions, against the gears of the necro-political deportation machine, to render individual extreme action unnecessary. It is Van Spronsen’s antifascist commitment that we should carry forward.
We must remember that it is Trump, Musk, and their Republican allies who delight in human suffering; Van Spronsen could not abide it. We need to all find our own ways, together, to demonstrate our unshakeable abhorrence for injustice.
Three Just Stop Oil supporters who participated in a slow march at Vauxhall in 2023 to demand an end to new fossil fuels have been found guilty of breaching police conditions imposed on their march.
It was judged that she had acted outside her powers, had overreached in defining “serious disruption” as merely “more than minor” and that it had been wrong to consult only with law enforcement agencies about the repercussions of the change.
The trio appeared before Judge Balmain accused of a breach of Section 12 of the Public Order Act 1986 Regulations 2023 as they were said to have caused ‘more than minor disruption’. They were found guilty and each given a conditional discharge of 12 months and £333 costs.
William Ward, 67, a retired engineer from Surrey said:
One day, very soon people will look back and say that the law got it wrong; why did they waste time prosecuting peaceful people for taking action to prevent billions of deaths and enormous suffering? Time is short and the government needs to come clean and admit to the public how bad our situation is. They need to get on with the job of cutting oil and gas demand through common sense, cost effective measures like insulating our homes, building more renewables and investing in public transport.
I hold my head up high that I did the right thing for my three grandchildren and the millions of vulnerable people already suffering from the consequences of unchecked fossil fuel burning throughout the world.
Worrying about people walking while the planet burns
In the 20 months since they took action, global heating has continued to accelerate and the world shows no signs of reducing fossil fuel burning.
Just last month, 2024 was confirmed as the warmest year on record and the first to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the annual global average temperature. Last week, January 2025 was confirmed as the hottest January on record at 1.75C above the pre-industrial level, according to European space agency Copernicus.
In 2024 Just Stop Oil successfully won its original demand of ‘no new oil and gas’. Now the courts agree that new oil and gas is unlawful. Just Stop Oil supporters are on the right side of history and non-violent civil resistance works.
Just Stop Oil will once again be stepping into action this April to demand that governments commit to an international treaty to phase out the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. You can help make this happen by coming to a talk and signing up for action at juststopoil.org
The September 2024 extra-legal murder of Dr. Shahnawaz Kumbhar exposed the lethal combination of blasphemy charges with improper policing practises in Pakistan. The incident reveals both human rights challenges that blasphemy accusation victims face and questions the proper role of law enforcement agencies regarding justice and human rights protection.
Background of Dr. Shahnawaz Kumbhar
The district of Umerkot in Sindh now associates its entire symbol with Dr. Shahnawaz Kambhar who suffered brutal murder despite being a resident. Religious fanatics murdered a doctor who remained innocent to his killers. Dr. Shahnawaz Kambhar distinguished himself as a community healthcare worker who received credit for his social activities and charitable activities in the field. His mission included organising free medical programs throughout Umerkot alongside neighbouring rural communities that offered free medical care to all patients. Through his lifetime he devoted himself to enhancing his impoverished residential belt despite the fact that he could have amassed considerable wealth in Karachi like numerous medical professionals do. Through his ongoing healthcare mission he placed greater emphasis on achieving better public health results in his local area.
The Blasphemy Allegation and Subsequent Dismissal
Dr. Kumbhar encountered the ordeal after a local mosque cleric claimed to discover blasphemous content on his social media account. His swift removal from medical service at the civil hospital in Umerkot happened after the accusation was made. When a person in Pakistan faces blasphemy accusations their situation turns into a dangerous sequence that causes harsh legal consequences while society reacts with violent crowds and possible unlawful acts against the accused. The announcement of such allegations against someone becomes an immediate vehicle for both reputation destruction and personal security risks.
Extrajudicial Killing and Fabricated Encounter
Dr. Kumbhar received arrest after the complaint against him. Officials showed him a fair trial but ultimately murdered him during a fake police confrontation. The first police statements stated Dr. Kumbhar died during a gunbattle but investigations showed he stayed under police detention throughout and officials deliberately created the encounter to legitimise his killing. The discovery shows an alarming trend where security forces perform unauthorised killings in highly sensitive cases regarding blasphemy incidents.
Investigations and Legal Proceedings
A complete investigation by the Sindh Human Rights Commission (SHRC) exposed both legal violations and administrative failures following the incident. An extensive investigation started by the Chief Minister of Sindh caused him to suspend multiple high-ranked police officers involved in the case. The legal authorities filed 45 individuals to court with murder and terrorism charges and violations of the Torture and Custodial Death Prevention Act 2022 against Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Javed Jiskani and Superintendent of Police (SSP) Asad Chaudhry. The non-bailable arrest warrants did not prevent multiple accused officers from evading arrest which demonstrated existing legal system failures to enforce responsibility upon influential officials.
Exhumation and Forensic Findings
The authorities obtained Dr. Kumbhar’s body for thorough autopsy procedures after exhuming him to find out what had happened. The forensic examination proved beyond doubt that Dr. Kumbhar had suffered from torture which the first autopsy report had completely failed to detect. The contradictory findings of the autopsy led authorities to arrest Dr. Muntazar Leghari who conducted the first autopsy thus leading to his charges for doctoring medical evidence to hide misconduct. This case element shows how medical and legal systems allow collusive actions between professionals that cause justice to be delayed while maintaining conditions of absolute freedom from prosecution.
Role of Social Media and Mob Violence
Per the SHRC report social media played an important part in worsening the situation. Social media users spread inflammatory content along with false information which triggered widespread public anger leading to violent mob activities. The death of Dr. Kumbhar triggered an enraged mob to seize his body afterwards leading them to use fire to defile it and they tried to bury it without proper funeral rituals as police made insufficient attempts at intervention. The instant consequences of improper social media usage emerged in public perception while demonstrating how dangerous such behaviour can be in delicate situations.
Wider Implications and Call for Reform
The medical professional’s case corresponds to a fundamental issue in the way Pakistan manages blasphemy charges. Multiple incidents registered by the Centre for Justice indicate how accusations of blasphemy have resulted in mistrials of justice that often end with extralegal killings. The established patterns demonstrate that it is essential to create thorough legal reforms that defend the basic rights of citizens and stop blasphemy law misuse.
Conclusion
The unlawful death of Dr. Shahnawaz Kumbhar provides evidence about the dangers facing people accused of blasphemy in Pakistan. Both current legal codes and law enforcement practices need to be evaluated immediately in order to make significant adjustments that will protect individual rights and uphold the rule of law.The absence of reform measures will allow violent and unjust practises to continue which will simultaneously endanger the rule of law and damage state institution credibility.
Up first on the program, associate editor and producer of the weekly livestream at Electronic Intifada, Tamara Nassar discusses the Gaza-like situation unfolding in the West Bank, violence that has been escalating since the start of, and indeed before, the genocide. Tamara outlines the myriad ways in which the occupation oppresses, dehumanizes and murders Palestinians including tricks the Israelis inherited from the British colonial government, and the twisted use of the Palestinian Authority to support Israeli aims behind a Palestinian name. Next, Eleanor Goldfield sits down with journalist and founder of Payday Report, Mike Elk, to talk about corporate media’s failure to cover Day Without Immigrant strike events that happened in more than a hundred cities across 40 states, and how this also speaks to the presence of news deserts and an anemic alternative independent press. Mike also speaks about the need for a multicultural media system, and how unions can protect against raids and other violence aimed at immigrants.
Two Palestinian resistance groups have condemned “the brutal assault” on prisoners at Ofer Prison, saying it was “barbaric criminal behaviour that reflects the fascist and terrorist nature of” Israel.
In the joint statement, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) called the attack a “miserable attempt” by Israel “to restore its shattered prestige”, reports Al Jazeera.
They called on the world to expose “these inhuman crimes against the prisoners”, which “blatantly violate all international conventions and norms”.
The statement called on the international community to intervene to protect the “prisoners, stop criminal violations against them, document them and work to hold the criminal occupation leaders accountable”.
The statement came after Palestinian authorities said Israeli forces had raided a section of Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, and assaulted detainees.
“Prisoners were beaten and sprayed with gas,” the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office said.
Persistent serious allegations of torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners — many who have not been charged or are held on administrative detention — and beatings right up until the release of detainees under the ceasefire have been made over all six exchange events so far.
Medical director severely tortured
Last week, lawyers representing Kamal Adwan Hospital’s medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya met him for the first time since he was detained by Israeli forces in north Gaza last December 27.
He told them he was severely tortured with electric shocks and was being denied needed medication.
Lawyer spells out torture allegations over Israeli detention of doctor. Video: Al Jazeera
Samir Al-Mana’ama, a lawyer with the Al Mazan Center for Human Rights, described his brutal torture in a failed attempt to “extract a confession” from him in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Al-Mana’ama said Dr Abu Safiya suffered from “an enlarged heart muscle and from high blood pressure” and was beaten up and refused treatment for the heart condition.
Transferred to Ofter Prison on January 9, he was held in solitary confinement for 25 days and interrogated nonstop by the Israeli army, Israeli intelligence and police, the lawyer added.
There was “no legal justification” for Abu Safia’s arrest and no evidence against him, the lawyer said.
Since the interview, Israeli authorities said he was being held under an “unlawful combatant” law — despite his status as a civilian doctor — stripping him of any rights as a detainee.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in Jordan, said the doctor was one of hundreds of medical workers taken from Gaza by Israeli forces to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp and other Israeli military prisons.
Two independent Jewish Voices groups in Aotearoa New Zealand have written an open letter to the government condemning the Zionist “colonisation” project leading to genocide and criticising the role of the NZ Jewish Council for its “unelected” and “uncritical support” for Israel.
The groups, Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation, have also criticised a scheduled meeting this week between Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and other ministers and the NZJC.
“The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa,” the open letter said.
“We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.”
The alternative voices also appealed to be consulted along with representatives of the Muslim and Palestinian communities “who have lost the most to racism in recent years”.
“Hear us out before you act,” the open letter said.
We are Jewish New Zealanders, members of Alternative Jewish Voices and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation. We understand that your office has scheduled a meeting this week with the NZ Jewish Council (NZJC) and additional ministers. We object in the strongest terms. The NZJC is unelected coterie, forever uncritically aligned with Israel. That is not the Jewish community.
We have documented in depth that the NZJC is not representative. They are not elected. Their constitution outlines a regional structure for indirect democracy, but much of that structure does not seem to exist.
They are not accountable to the community. Their president has broadcast her intention to “disempower as much as possible” Jews like Alternative Jewish Voices (AJV) members who “raise their voices”.
Several of us attended the Wellington Regional Jewish Council’s last community meeting, in 2021. The meeting roundly disavowed the Jewish Council’s tone and their relentless focus on Israel.
Indeed, the NZJC’s constitution does not even mention Israel or Zionism. The Wellington Regional Jewish Council dissolved itself after that meeting, acknowledging that they have no community mandate. They haven’t been heard from since. So much for regional representation.
They interpret objections to Israel’s occupation as a security threat to the New Zealand Jewish community, and they share their views of individual Palestinian, Muslim and other New Zealanders with a regime accused of genocide against Palestinians. This creates particular risk for Palestinian New Zealanders, should they ever travel to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories to visit family and whānau.
Let us say this clearly: there is nothing essentially Jewish about Zionism. Zionism is a project of colonisation, erasure, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — finally, of genocide. Institutions that wrap their nationalism in our Jewishness are shielding the brutality that we witness daily.
In this country, the NZJC has been a leading voice in the campaign to confuse Jewish with Zionist, enabling decades of oppression in our names.
The NZJC does not serve, represent or account to the Jewish community. How many Jewish New Zealanders would choose a representative who, like NZJC president Juliet Moses, retweets defences of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute?
A Juliet Moses retweeting of the defence of a “Nazi salute” by US billionaire Elon Musk who is unelected head of the controversial US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Image: Screenshot Alternative Voices
The NZJC is an extremist voice. Their politics are harmful, and their actions jeopardise the good standing of Jews in Aotearoa. We protest in the strongest terms that Israel’s advocates are being given Prime Ministerial access.
It’s not hard to guess what the NZJC will be asking for: some special “antisemitism regime” that uses our Jewish identity to shield Israel from the directives of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). They will be asking to divorce the Jewish community from our shared mahi of antiracism and our human rights framework. They will be seeking some exceptional status, suppressing principled protest for Palestinian rights and the criminal accountability of Israeli leaders.
That conversation should not take place without representation from the Muslim and Palestinian communities. They are the New Zealanders whose voices are being silenced, and frankly they are the communities who have lost the most to racism in recent years.
Prime Minister, any meeting with the NZJC ought to be recorded in the ministerial diaries as a session with Israel’s ambassadors. And damn it, they will be doing it in our name. We are also the New Zealand Jewish community, and we are so tired of being used this way.
We would like to join your meeting with the NZJC, bringing Jewish diversity into the room. If you will not open this meeting to the real breadth of the Jewish community, then we wish to schedule a second meeting which includes Muslim and Palestinian representation.
We work closely with the Muslim and Palestinian communities in Aotearoa, modelling the change that we would like to see in the Middle East.
Attorney General Pam Bondi issued last week several memos to all Department of Justice employees including one with the subject: “Reviving the Federal Death Penalty and Lifting the Moratorium on Federal Executions.” It detailed exactly how her agency will put into practice an executive order to restart federal executions that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.
The memo denounced the pause on federal executions under former President Joe Biden and claimed DOJ officials had neglected their jobs by upholding a moratorium on federal executions in place since 2021, which halted a killing spree launched by Trump in his first term. “The Department’s political leadership disregarded these important responsibilities and supplanted the will of the people with their own personal beliefs,” the memo read.
While there is no evidence that the death penalty achieves its purported goal to deter crime, the Trump administration wants the federal government to direct substantial resources and dollars to carrying out more executions, more quickly. Through its executive actions and policy memos, the administration is also stating something that criminal justice and human rights advocates have long said: that conditions in many federal detention facilities are inhumane, and Trump wants to keep them that way.
In the January 20 executive order, Trump directed his attorney general to evaluate the conditions of confinement for the 37 people commuted from federal death row at the end of Biden’s term and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
The message is a direction to the federal government to use conditions of confinement as additional punishment — which is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, according to Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor of law at Yale University and a former federal public defender.
On top of that, it suggests that inhumane conditions in federal detention are the administration’s goal.
“The one thing that was clear from the order was that it sounded like the administration was going to try to influence placement of people, and try to do so under conditions that they called ‘monstrous’ in their order,” Gohara told The Intercept. Gohara spent over a decade representing clients sentenced to death in post-conviction litigation.
“Certainly, if I were leading the [Bureau of Prisons] or if I were working in the BOP, I wouldn’t want to suggest that there are any monstrous conditions in my facilities,” she said.
“That suggests that they’re actually encouraging the Bureau of Prisons to maintain monstrous conditions, or that they think they’re already monstrous conditions in the BOP somewhere, and that somebody could be put there. Which again, seems like a very odd thing for the executive to be saying about one of his agencies.”
The administration’s use of language describing federal detention as “monstrous” is on par with how Trump has spoken on criminal justice from the start, said death row attorney Dale Baich. He previously led the unit of the Arizona Federal Defender’s Office that represents people sentenced to death in post-conviction proceedings.
“I was really taken aback by the number of adjectives in the order,” Baich said. “But, you know, that’s how he campaigned, that’s how Project 2025 was drafted. We really shouldn’t be surprised.”
Incarcerated people and advocates for reform have long argued that conditions of incarceration across the board — from federal prisons to local jails — are inhumane and that the government has not done enough to address them. Even prior to the latest order, there are plenty of examples of detention facilities that have not taken corrective measures even under court order.
Welcoming and embracing inhumane conditions in prisons as federal policy will make challenging those conditions even more difficult, Baich said. “It’s hard enough to challenge conditions of confinement when departments of corrections or the Bureau of Prisons is saying that it’s not unconstitutional,” he said.
“So I just think it’s going to be a real heavy lift going forward to challenge those conditions,” Baich said.
But challenges, he said, must continue. “What is important is to continue to pursue unconstitutional conditions of confinement and hold the government accountable.”
Bondi’s memo last week also directs Bureau of Prisons employees to work with states that allow executions to ensure they have “sufficient supplies and resources to impose the death penalty” — including lethal injection drugs — and helping to transfer federal detainees “to the appropriate authorities to carry out those sentences.”
The order also directs the U.S. attorney general to look for opportunities to bring state capital charges against those with commuted federal death sentences and make relevant recommendations to state and local authorities, effectively finding another way to execute them. At its worst, that could look like the Department of Justice finding a way to federalize crimes in states without the death penalty — in other words, making a new constituency of suspects eligible for federal execution, Baich said.
States that don’t have the death penalty or only rarely use it are already bracing for how, if at all, Trump’s order might affect them. On Wednesday, Trump said judicial efforts to push back on his orders amounted to a “weaponization” of the courts.
Since Trump won the presidential election, at least one Democratic governor has already taken steps to downplay the state’s history of botched executions. In late November, Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs fired an independent commissioner before they were set to publish a report on their investigation into the state’s history of botched lethal injections. A draft of the report, which was never published, concluded that death by firing squad, barred in Arizona, was the only form of execution more quick and less painful than lethal injection. Arizona’s next execution, the first in two years, is scheduled for March 19.
Capital trials are expensive and resource-intensive, and it’s an open question whether the Trump administration would provide grants or additional support to rural counties that historically don’t have the capacity to carry out capital trials or executions. In a worst-case scenario, the administration could find a way to offer money to rural counties that often can’t afford to prosecute death penalty cases.
Trump’s Justice Department has already authorized the movement of one person to ensure their execution. On Wednesday, Bondi approved Oklahoma’s request to transfer George Hanson to the state from Louisiana for execution. Hanson was previously scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma in 2022, but Biden’s DOJ denied Oklahoma’s request to transfer him from Louisiana, where he is serving a life sentence for an unrelated conviction.
Baich called the move an “example of this newly found cooperation between DOJ and the states.”
“Mr. Hanson was never going to get out of prison,” Baich said. “Deliberate decisions by government officials have deprived Mr. Hanson of the guarantees of due process. This trampling of constitutional protections and the rush to execute are consistent with what we saw at the end of the first Trump administration where thirteen people were executed.”
“The death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources.”
The Trump administration’s focus on accelerating federal executions takes away resources from the goals it claims to prioritize, Gohara said during a briefing on the order last month. Those stated goals include things like helping victims and curbing crime — at a time of historically low national rates.
“We now understand that the death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources that actually could be used to help keep people free from crime and violence,” Gohara said. “If you’re spending money on expensive capital trials, you’re not spending money on doing things like using rape kits to clear old cases or to try to solve cold crimes.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi issued last week several memos to all Department of Justice employees including one with the subject: “Reviving the Federal Death Penalty and Lifting the Moratorium on Federal Executions.” It detailed exactly how her agency will put into practice an executive order to restart federal executions that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.
The memo denounced the pause on federal executions under former President Joe Biden and claimed DOJ officials had neglected their jobs by upholding a moratorium on federal executions in place since 2021, which halted a killing spree launched by Trump in his first term. “The Department’s political leadership disregarded these important responsibilities and supplanted the will of the people with their own personal beliefs,” the memo read.
While there is no evidence that the death penalty achieves its purported goal to deter crime, the Trump administration wants the federal government to direct substantial resources and dollars to carrying out more executions, more quickly. Through its executive actions and policy memos, the administration is also stating something that criminal justice and human rights advocates have long said: that conditions in many federal detention facilities are inhumane, and Trump wants to keep them that way.
In the January 20 executive order, Trump directed his attorney general to evaluate the conditions of confinement for the 37 people commuted from federal death row at the end of Biden’s term and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
The message is a direction to the federal government to use conditions of confinement as additional punishment — which is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, according to Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor of law at Yale University and a former federal public defender.
On top of that, it suggests that inhumane conditions in federal detention are the administration’s goal.
“The one thing that was clear from the order was that it sounded like the administration was going to try to influence placement of people, and try to do so under conditions that they called ‘monstrous’ in their order,” Gohara told The Intercept. Gohara spent over a decade representing clients sentenced to death in post-conviction litigation.
“Certainly, if I were leading the [Bureau of Prisons] or if I were working in the BOP, I wouldn’t want to suggest that there are any monstrous conditions in my facilities,” she said.
“That suggests that they’re actually encouraging the Bureau of Prisons to maintain monstrous conditions, or that they think they’re already monstrous conditions in the BOP somewhere, and that somebody could be put there. Which again, seems like a very odd thing for the executive to be saying about one of his agencies.”
The administration’s use of language describing federal detention as “monstrous” is on par with how Trump has spoken on criminal justice from the start, said death row attorney Dale Baich. He previously led the unit of the Arizona Federal Defender’s Office that represents people sentenced to death in post-conviction proceedings.
“I was really taken aback by the number of adjectives in the order,” Baich said. “But, you know, that’s how he campaigned, that’s how Project 2025 was drafted. We really shouldn’t be surprised.”
Incarcerated people and advocates for reform have long argued that conditions of incarceration across the board — from federal prisons to local jails — are inhumane and that the government has not done enough to address them. Even prior to the latest order, there are plenty of examples of detention facilities that have not taken corrective measures even under court order.
Welcoming and embracing inhumane conditions in prisons as federal policy will make challenging those conditions even more difficult, Baich said. “It’s hard enough to challenge conditions of confinement when departments of corrections or the Bureau of Prisons is saying that it’s not unconstitutional,” he said.
“So I just think it’s going to be a real heavy lift going forward to challenge those conditions,” Baich said.
But challenges, he said, must continue. “What is important is to continue to pursue unconstitutional conditions of confinement and hold the government accountable.”
Bondi’s memo last week also directs Bureau of Prisons employees to work with states that allow executions to ensure they have “sufficient supplies and resources to impose the death penalty” — including lethal injection drugs — and helping to transfer federal detainees “to the appropriate authorities to carry out those sentences.”
The order also directs the U.S. attorney general to look for opportunities to bring state capital charges against those with commuted federal death sentences and make relevant recommendations to state and local authorities, effectively finding another way to execute them. At its worst, that could look like the Department of Justice finding a way to federalize crimes in states without the death penalty — in other words, making a new constituency of suspects eligible for federal execution, Baich said.
States that don’t have the death penalty or only rarely use it are already bracing for how, if at all, Trump’s order might affect them. On Wednesday, Trump said judicial efforts to push back on his orders amounted to a “weaponization” of the courts.
Since Trump won the presidential election, at least one Democratic governor has already taken steps to downplay the state’s history of botched executions. In late November, Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs fired an independent commissioner before they were set to publish a report on their investigation into the state’s history of botched lethal injections. A draft of the report, which was never published, concluded that death by firing squad, barred in Arizona, was the only form of execution more quick and less painful than lethal injection. Arizona’s next execution, the first in two years, is scheduled for March 19.
Capital trials are expensive and resource-intensive, and it’s an open question whether the Trump administration would provide grants or additional support to rural counties that historically don’t have the capacity to carry out capital trials or executions. In a worst-case scenario, the administration could find a way to offer money to rural counties that often can’t afford to prosecute death penalty cases.
Trump’s Justice Department has already authorized the movement of one person to ensure their execution. On Wednesday, Bondi approved Oklahoma’s request to transfer George Hanson to the state from Louisiana for execution. Hanson was previously scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma in 2022, but Biden’s DOJ denied Oklahoma’s request to transfer him from Louisiana, where he is serving a life sentence for an unrelated conviction.
Baich called the move an “example of this newly found cooperation between DOJ and the states.”
“Mr. Hanson was never going to get out of prison,” Baich said. “Deliberate decisions by government officials have deprived Mr. Hanson of the guarantees of due process. This trampling of constitutional protections and the rush to execute are consistent with what we saw at the end of the first Trump administration where thirteen people were executed.”
“The death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources.”
The Trump administration’s focus on accelerating federal executions takes away resources from the goals it claims to prioritize, Gohara said during a briefing on the order last month. Those stated goals include things like helping victims and curbing crime — at a time of historically low national rates.
“We now understand that the death penalty does nothing to promote public safety, and, in fact, detracts from public safety resources that actually could be used to help keep people free from crime and violence,” Gohara said. “If you’re spending money on expensive capital trials, you’re not spending money on doing things like using rape kits to clear old cases or to try to solve cold crimes.”
Analysts and commentators have described how images of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees and prisoners have “dehumanised” them and revealed their “horrible” treatment.
Three Israeli captives were released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad yesterday in exchange for 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails as part of the ceasefire in Gaza.
The captives released were identified as US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, Russian-Israeli Alexandre Sasha Troufanov and Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn.
Of the Palestinians released, 333 had been arrested in Gaza and held without charge. They were sent back to the besieged enclave and greeted by remarkable emotional scenes of large crowds.
They disembarked from the buses that had taken them to the European Hospital in Khan Younis.
They made the Victory sign as they left the buses and were greeted by their loved ones.
Ten were released in the occupied West Bank — and half of them were taken to hospital after being treated badly in captivity, one in occupied East Jerusalem and 25 were either being deported to Gaza or Egypt.
The Israel Prison Service published images showing Palestinian prisoners who were being released were forced to wear shirts with the Star of David and slogans that read, “We do not forget, and we do not forgive”.
‘Stunning’ photos of ill-treatment
Dr Mohamad Elmasry, professor in the media studies programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, called the photographs “stunning”.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, he said this was “another method” under which Israel intended to “dehumanise” Palestinians.
Elmasry noted that 333 of the Palestinians being released today were arrested without any charge.
“These are people who by Israel’s own admission have not committed a crime,” he said.
“And this is the case with thousands of Palestinians who are in jail right now [under] administrative detention,” he said, adding it was well-documented that many of the Palestinian prisoners were “treated horribly” inside Israeli prisons.
Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Nour Odeh said that half of the Palestinian prisoners released to the West Bank were taken to hospital.
“We have seen that time and time again whether it is in the occupied West Bank or in Gaza,” she said.
“Palestinians released from Israeli captivity are in very bad shape. They speak of malnutrition, of going hungry; for the past 15 months of being deprived of even hygiene products.”
RAMALLAH: Palestinian prisoners have been released from Israeli jails.
At least 4 have been taken straight to the hospital due to poor health because of conditions in Israeli prisons.
‘Beatings, threatened with assassination’
They were only being allowed to shower every 10 days for a minute as per the command of the former Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“They talk about beatings, mistreatment even in those last hours of their release . . . they were told not to speak to the media, not to celebrate in any way their release,” she said.
“They were threatened with assassination even if they resume any activity. That’s why a lot of those who were released today in Ramallah apologised for not speaking to the media.
“They spoke openly about being monitored, about not being allowed to speak.
“Their health is clearly ailing because of those months of mistreatment.”
‘Bittersweet happiness’
In Ramallah, a Palestinian mother, Mariam Oweiss, spoken of her “bittersweet happiness” after the release of her sons from Israeli prison.
The two brothers had been sentenced to life terms. But one was released to the occupied West Bank while the other was being deported.
“I was hoping they would both be released home,” Oweiss said. But she added, “At least they will both be out of prison shackles.”
She said it would be easier for her as a mother if both had come home, but that it would be easier for the son being deported.
“Anywhere but prison,” she said.
Three Israeli captives held by the Palestinian resistance groups were freed yesterday . . . exchanged for 369 Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the sixth handover of the ceasefire. Image: AJ screenshot APR
When President Donald Trump issued an executive order threatening to deport international students involved in pro-Palestine protests, advocates expressed immediateconcern that the move would target demonstrators — particularly Muslim and Arab students — for engaging in activity protected by the First Amendment.
Some members of the Columbia University community, however, leapt at the chance to get young people they claim are “supporters of Hamas” detained and deported. Several people on a large WhatsApp group, Columbia Alumni for Israel — which counts over 1,000 members, including parents, at least one current student, and Columbia professors — welcomed Trump’s plan.
Deporting Gaza protesters was already a topic of conversation in the Columbia Alumni for Israel group before Trump’s order came down. On the president’s first day in office, group members shared flyers advertising a pro-Palestine January 21 walkout to push the school to drop disciplinary actions against anti-war protesters.
“Identifying the Columbia student-Hamas-sympathizers who show up is key to deporting those with student visas,” former Columbia’s Teachers College assistant professor Lynne Bursky-Tammam said in the chat, according to screenshots from the WhatsApp group obtained by The Intercept.
“Arresting them for hate crimes is not enough. We have to get rid of them.”
Victor Muslin, another alumnus and pro-Israel activist, responded: “If there are photos of someone who needs to be identified (even with a partially obscured face) I have access to tech that may be able to help. DM me.”
Within a few days another member posted a link to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line and wrote, “Let’s get to work.”
In late January, a group member shared an article about students who spray-painted a building and put cement in a sewage line to protest the anniversary of Israel’s killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab. Bursky-Tammam responded to the article and questioned who was funding the protesters, adding, “Arresting them for hate crimes is not enough. We have to get rid of them.” (Bursky-Tammam declined to comment.)
The activities of the chat group, which formed in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, come amid a wider campaign to crack down on dissent over Israel’s war on Gaza. The school has disciplined and suspended protesters — helping to create an environment that has fomented attacks using the courts, among other tactics. Members of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group, whose identities were confirmed by The Intercept using their phone numbers, were of a piece with these efforts, discussing how to report people to law enforcement, including the FBI.
With Trump taking the Oval Office, right-wing pro-Israel activists have focused their energy on using his draconian immigration policies to deal with Israel’s critics, including efforts to paint international student protesters as terrorists to have their visas revoked.
“It’s very disturbing that the alumni and parents are doing this,” said Abed Ayoub, executive director of the civil rights group the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “Really, it’s an across-the-board attempt to silence and take away the First Amendment right of people simply because they don’t agree with them. It’s a very dangerous precedent.”
Critics of the school’s policies toward protesters say Columbia administrators have done little to intervene with attacks on students and faculty. On Thursday, two Columbia professors wrote anop-ed demanding that the school to condemn calls to deport its students.
“The Palestine exception to the First Amendment, to our right to free speech, has been something that’s been ongoing for so many years,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at the civil liberties group Palestine Legal, which filed a complaint about anti-Palestinian discrimination at Columbia that led to a federal investigation.
“This targeting of the students did not begin once Trump was inaugurated. This began last year.”
The success of offensives against pro-Palestine students and faculty on campuses across the country today stands as a testament to how far administrators have let pro-Israel advocates take their attacks, Ayoub said. And those efforts started before Trump took office.
“These universities have been laying the groundwork for whatever Trump wants to do. This targeting of the students did not begin once Trump was inaugurated. This began last year,” he said. “It began when they started targeting the students, putting them in disciplinary process, disciplinary proceedings, calling law enforcement and police to college campuses and putting the students in harm’s way.”
“We Have a List”
As campus protests grew in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza, the “Columbia Alumni for Israel” WhatsApp group kicked into overdrive. It soon became a hub for efforts to identify student and faculty protesters, claim they have links to Hamas, and discuss reporting them to the school or law enforcement agencies for alleged antisemitic activity — which, for the pro-Israel activists, includes anti-Zionist speech.
Screenshots from the group show its members frequently singling out Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim student activists, including some who have already faced disciplinary action. Faculty and other students, including Jewish student leaders, also land in the group’s crosshairs. Several messages show chat members discussing how to make reports to law enforcement, including contacting New York police and the FBI.
Several of the students named in the WhatsApp group have also been targeted by name by groups like Canary Mission, which publishes profiles of students involved in anti-Zionist activism, or in social media posts by the group “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U,” which at least one chat member is involved in. One student mentioned in the chat was also named in a Twitter post from the Zionist group Betar, which last month sent a list of students it wants deported to the White House and federal agencies including ICE. (Students and faculty targeted in the screenshots from the chat declined to comment. The Intercept is withholding their names to protect them from any possible harassment.)
How Columbia has responded to the group’s activities, if at all, is unclear. Several group members have referenced meetings or correspondence with school administrators, including Columbia’s interim president, trustees, donors, and executive vice presidents.
“There are reasons why some of these efforts are not public,” wrote Heather Krasna, an associate dean of career services at Columbia, referencing meetings with top Columbia administrators. “For example, if certain efforts were publicized, specific individuals would possible [sic] be fired.” Krasna, whose handle on the WhatsApp group was simply the letter “H,” raised the possibility that their “efforts would backfire by giving pro-Hamas faculty political weapons by claiming external forces are trying to influence the university or squash free speech; a lot is happening that is confidential for these and other reasons.” (Krasna declined to respond to questions.)
Beyond pushing the school to target individual students and faculty — including calls to remove two deans — members of the WhatsApp group have also strategized how to best build cases to paint student protesters as “supporters of Hamas.”
Trump vowed to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses” in a January 30 White House fact sheet published alongside his executive order. Like Trump, the WhatsApp group members regularly refer to opposition to the war on Gaza as sympathy or support for Hamas.
At one point, a group member pointed to an issue with only targeting foreign students: “And then there’s the problem that most of the students protesting are US citizens and cannot be deported.”
Bursky-Tammam, the former Columbia professor, also addressed how pro-Palestine U.S. citizens could be targeted. “If anyone can trace any of their funding to terror organizations, not a simple task, they can be arrested on grounds of providing ‘material support’ for terror organizations,” she wrote, referring to the Hind Rajab protest. “That is the key to getting these U.S. citizen supporters of Hamas, etc. arrested.”
Even before Trump’s executive order, Muslin, the Columbia alumnus, sent a message asking how to identify whether foreign students were on visas, and therefore eligible for removal.
“How does anyone know whether any given troublemaker is in fact a foreigner or on a visa (or not on a visa, given that Biden opened the border)?” Muslin also wrote, echoing a false right-wing claim about former President Joe Biden’s immigration policy.
A demonstrator waves a flag on the Columbia University campus at a Palestine solidarity protest encampment in NYC on April 29, 2024.Photo: Ted Shaffrey/AP
Muslin, a technology executive, has been vocal in pushing colleges to treat criticism of Israel’s actions as examples of antisemitism. He founded CU-Monitor, an online platform that tracks anti-Zionism on campus. He also helps maintain the digital archive for the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U, which gathers reports of alleged antisemitic incidents. When one chat participant asked whether any members had connections to Canary Misson, another user replied, “Victor is an honorary bird.” (Muslin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Last October, WhatsApp group administrator and Aliya Capital CEO Ari Shrage asked the group for help to “identify students who were protesting” and leaders of groups affiliated with the coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Shrage, who co-founded the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, wrote, “We have a list and need people to do some research.” Last month, he praised Trump’s executive order targeting campus protesters.
Among Jewish students targeted by the pro-Israel activists, particular ire was reserved for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group whose Columbia chapter was already banned from campus. In one screenshot, a group member referred to members of JVP as “kapos,” a slur referencing Jewish prisoners forced to work as guards in Nazi concentration camps. At one point, following an opinion piece in the school paper by JVP members, Muslin asked for information about students involved in the group.
“We need to hold all members accountable for their membership in this despicable organization. Are club membership lists secret?”
“Does anyone have a list of JVP members, especially group leaders or a way to get it,” Muslin wrote.
Another member responded: “My daughter will send me a list shortly,”
After the names were sent, Muslin was unsatisfied.
“Thank you. But we need more than theee [sic] random names of potentially low ranked members,” he wrote. “We need to hold leaders responsible for this antisemitic op-ed in the Spec. And we need to hold all members accountable for their membership in this despicable organization. Are club membership lists secret? How does one obtain a list of members in the official Columbia student club?”
Friends in High Places
Discussions in the group, which includes several people with teaching positions at Columbia, have also focused on efforts to communicate with school administrators and donors about the Columbia’s handling of campus speech.
In a discussion in late 2023 about how to get donors like the billionaire football team owner Robert Kraft to influence the school’s actions, Shrage wrote: “Robert is well aware of the situation.” Kraft announced last April that he would withdraw financial support from Columbia over its handling of the protests. Another group member shared a screenshot of Kraft’s contact card and said his friend knew Kraft personally and that he would reach out and report back with any information.
Gil Zussman, the chair of Columbia’s department of electrical engineering, along with Columbia Business School professors Ran Kivetz and Shai Davidai, are members of the WhatsApp group. Davidai became famous for his tirades against Gaza protestsand has been accused by numerous students of online harassment. At one point, Kivetz shared a petition urging the removal of a dean over public comments at the school’s convocation last year. (Davidai, who was suspended from the Columbia campus after he posted videos of his confrontations with university staff online, declined to be interviewed without a video call. Kivetz did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)
Zussman is a member of the school’s antisemitism task force, which was formed in November 2023 amid the protests. The task force, stacked with vocal supporters of Israel, has pushedthe university to include expressions of anti-Zionism under its definition of antisemitism. Zussman regularly participates in the WhatsApp group by posting news stories, sharing his social media posts, and asking people to save protest material for an archive at the school. (Zussman did not respond to a request for comment.)
In July, Columbia alumnus Ilya Koffman told the group he had scheduled a meeting the following week with the university’s endowment arm on behalf of his private equity firm. “My initial instinct was to politely tell them we don’t want their money and explain why,” Koffman wrote, but he realized “it may be more effective to take the meeting and challenge them on what’s going on at Columbia and what, if anything, the investment arm of the endowment can and should do about it.” Koffman asked the group for any suggested questions or points. (Koffman declined to comment.)
Last April, more than 1,600 people including high-profile Columbia alumni and donors signed an open letter calling on President Minouche Shafik to clear encampments and discipline student protesters. Shafik stepped down last August amid pressure over her handling of the protests. Shrage, one of the WhatsApp group admins, wrote to the group on May 1 that he had co-authored the letter with Lisa Carnoy, a Columbia trustee emerita and current member of one of the board of visitors of the school’s Center for American Studies. (Carnoy did not respond to a request for comment.)
The alumni and donors wrote the letter “to keep pressure on the university,” Shrage said in the WhatsApp group. “Lisa hired Minouche and was former co- chair of the board,” he added, referring to Carnoy and Shafik. In another message to the group in November, Shrage wrote that Columbia alumnus David Friedman, a Trump adviser and former ambassador to Israel, was one of the first 22 people to sign the letter.
When the group member wrote in February about efforts to influence Columbia’s handling of campus speech “that are not public information” including “meetings with the Interim President,” Shrage replied and added that some of those efforts would not go public.
“A lot has already been done,” he wrote. “Multiple lawsuit, [sic] congressional hearings, meetings with influential (now former) donors, meetings and calls with people in DC, dozens and dozens of newspaper articles, an entire database of information that has been used by Congress and lawyers.”
Shrage added, “much much more that is not public information that likely will never become public info. We are all frustrated but much has been done and working together makes us all stronger.” Shrage declined to speak to The Intercept on the record.
Normalizing the Crackdown
In the past, Columbia opposed moves by the federal government that impacted foreign students. The school took part in litigation against ICE restrictions affecting international students in 2020 and issued a statement denouncing Trump’s order barring immigrants from several Muslim countries in 2017.
Lee Bollinger, the president of the university at the time, wrote that while it was important for the school to avoid political or ideological stances, it had a responsibility to step forward “when policies and state action conflict with its fundamental values, and especially when they bespeak purposes and a mentality that are at odds with our basic mission.”
For the WhatsApp group members who seek deportations and terrorism charges, the school’s actions against pro-Palestine students are regularly described as grossly insufficient. Palestine Legal’s Ahamed said, however, that the actions of groups like Columbia Alumni for Israel are aided by the school’s own crackdown on pro-Palestine protests.
“All of these things that the university has been doing has been normalizing the fact that it is wrong to say something about Palestine, it is against our policies to protest for Palestine,” she said. “That is the kind of message that the university has been sending. So it’s not that surprising then that you see these sorts of WhatsApp groups. And people feel comfortable being a part of a group like that.”
This announcement came as the Coalition Cabinet prepared to discuss the matter in Suva next week, reports Fiji One News.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka made these remarks during a bilateral meeting with Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Sa’ar Gideon Moshe on the sidelines of the 61st session of the Munich Security Conference, which opened yesterday in Germany.
The discussions between the two leaders focused on deepening the partnership in various areas of mutual interest, including agriculture, security and peacekeeping, and climate action initiatives.
Prime Minister Rabuka expressed gratitude to the Israeli government for their continued support over the years.
Fiji and Israel have maintained diplomatic relations since 1970, and their cooperation has spanned areas such as security, peacekeeping, and climate change.
In recent years, Israeli technology has played a crucial role in Fiji’s efforts to combat climate change.
Invitation to Rabuka to visit Israel
During the meeting, Minister Moshe extended an invitation to Prime Minister Rabuka to visit Israel as part of ongoing efforts to strengthen diplomatic ties.
The Israeli government also expressed readiness to assist Fiji in its plans to establish an embassy in Jerusalem.
Additionally, in response to a request from Prime Minister Rabuka, Minister Moshe offered support for providing patrol boats to enhance Fiji’s fight against illicit drugs.
The last time Israel provided patrol boats to Fiji was in 1987, when four Dabur-class boats were supplied to the Fiji Navy.
Both leaders acknowledged significant opportunities for collaboration and expressed optimism about further strengthening bilateral relations in the future.
Fiji defies UN, global condemnation of Israel
Asia Pacific Report comments: Fiji has been consistently the leading Pacific country supporting Israel, in defiance of United Nations resolutions and global condemnation of Tel Aviv in the 15-month war on Gaza that has killed at least 47,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children.
The issue is no longer a hypothetical one. US President Donald Trump will not explicitly suggest death camps, but he has already consented to Israel’s continuing a war that is not a war but rather a barbaric assault on a desolate stretch of land. From there, the road to annihilation is short, and Israel will not bat an eye. Trump approved it.
COMMENTARY:By Gideon Levy
And what if US President Donald Trump suggested setting up death camps for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip? What would happen then?
Israel would respond exactly as it did to his transfer ideas, with ecstasy on the right and indifference in the centrist camp.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid would announce that he would go to Washington to present a “complementary plan”, like he offered to do with regard to the transfer plan.
Benny Gantz would say that the plan shows “creative thinking, is original and interesting.” Bezalel Smotrich, with his messianic frame of mind, would say, “God has done wonders for us and we rejoice.” Benjamin Netanyahu would rise in public opinion polls.
The issue is no longer a hypothetical one. Trump will not explicitly suggest death camps, but he has already consented to Israel’s continuing a war that is not a war but rather a barbaric assault on a desolate stretch of land. From there, the road to annihilation is short, and Israel will not bat an eye. Trump approved it.
After all, no one In Israel rose up to tell the president of the United States “thank you for your ideas, but Israel will never support the expulsion of the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians.”
Hence, why be confident that if Trump suggested annihilating anyone refusing to evacuate Gaza, Israel would not cooperate with him? Just as Trump exposed the transfer sentiment beating in the heart of almost every Israeli, aimed at solving the problem “once and for all,” he may yet expose a darker element, the sentiment of “it’s us or them.”
A whitewasher of crimes
It’s no coincidence that a shady character like Trump has become a guide for Israel. He is exactly what we wanted and dreamed about: a whitewasher of crimes. He may well turn out to be the American president who caused the most damage ever inflicted on Israel.
There were presidents who were tight-fisted with aid, others who were sour on Israel, who even threatened it. There has never been a president who has set out to destroy the last vestiges of Israel’s morality.
From here on, anything Trump approves will become Israel’s gold standard.
Trump is now pushing Israel into resuming its attacks on the Gaza Strip, setting impossible terms for Hamas: All the hostages must be returned before Saturday noon, not a minute later, like the mafia does. And if only three hostages are returned, as was agreed upon? The gates of hell will open.
They won’t open only in Gaza, which has already been transformed into hell. They will open in Israel too. Israel will lose its last restraints. Trump gave his permission.
But Trump will be gone one day. He may lose interest before that, and Israel will be left with the damage he wrought, damage inflicted by a criminal, leper state.
No public diplomacy or friends will be able to save it if it follows the path of its new ethical oracle. No accusations of antisemitism will silence the world’s shock if Israel embarks on another round of combat in the enclave.
A new campaign must begin
One cannot overstate the intensity of the damage. The renewal of attacks on Gaza, with the permission and under the authority of the American administration, must be blocked in Israel. Along with the desperate campaign for returning the hostages, a new campaign must begin, against Trump and his outlandish ideas.
However, not only is there no one who can lead such a campaign, there is also no one who could initiate it. The only battles being waged here now, for the hostages and for the removal of Netanyahu, are important, but they cannot remain the only ones.
The resumption of the “war” is the greatest disaster now facing us, heralding genocide, with no more argument about definitions.
After all, what would a “war” look like now, other than an assault on tens of thousands of refugees who have nothing left? What will the halting of humanitarian aid, fuel and medicine and water mean if not genocide?
We may discover that the first 16 months of the war were only a starter, the first 50,000 deaths only a prelude.
Ask almost any Israeli and he will say that Trump is a friend of Israel, but Trump is actually Israel’s most dangerous enemy now. Hamas and Hezbollah will never destroy it like he will.
Gideon Levy is a Ha’aretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. He joined Ha’aretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He is the author of the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 25 years, as well as the writer of political editorials for the newspaper. Levy visited New Zealand in 2017.
In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.
COMMENTARY:By Bernard Keane
Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.
The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.
Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.
To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.
Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.
That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.
The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.
Abandoned due process The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.
The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.
The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.
The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.
No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.
Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.
Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.
Opinion | Australian democracy and the rule of law is being damaged by the media’s willingness to abandon due process and attack those who criticise Israel, writes @bernardkeane.
Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.
Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.
No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.
The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.
Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.
Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.
Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked from her job at ABC because she shared an Instagram post from @hrw in which the NGS accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. She is now taking the broadcaster to court. pic.twitter.com/jRmQW2AAl3
Damaging the fabric of democracy
This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.
The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.
Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.
The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.
Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.
A Just Stop Oil supporter who sprayed King’s College Cambridge with orange paint in 2023 to demand an end to new fossil fuels was found guilty at Peterborough Magistrates Court on Thursday 13 February.
Today they appeared before a magistrate accused of criminal damage under £5,000 for their action on 12 October 2023. The cost of the damage caused by the action was put at £2,430.
In their defence Chiara said:
I have never tried to avoid accountability for my actions. I accept all consequences that come with that. In particular, I have a high respect for the rule of law and I’ve taken action from a place of conscientious objection. I do absolutely hold true that none of us should be above the law, whether it’s students, government officials or fossil fuel executives. Fundamentally it is a deep respect for the law which has led me to take action.
Pronouncing a guilty verdict the judge said:
You’ve raised a number of things in your defence, in particular Articles 9 and 10. And I don’t think anyone will criticise the thoughts and beliefs you have. Article 10 doesn’t come without responsibilities.
The case law suggests there can be a defence of necessity – you raised the issues of the great fire of London – but of course the reasons those persons pulled down the houses was to save people from immediate danger because the fire would otherwise have spread. The case law I’m concerned with is the immediacy of the threat that may well be faced isn’t so immediate that it gives you a defence of lawful excuse.
Chiara was found guilty and given a 12-month conditional discharge and fined £3,080.
Righteous actions – given the overwhelming evidence
Speaking after the verdict Chiara said:
I have a responsibility to my generation to make it clear that burning oil means mass starvation. I refuse to lie to my students and pretend that this is OK. I do not consent to plans that will result in 3C of warming and mass death within a few decades.
Arrests, fines and prison don’t change this reality. When fossil fuel firms have bought our government, when politicians are prioritising corporate profits and the wealth of billionaires over the wellbeing of ordinary people, it’s time to put our bodies on the line and reclaim Parliament from the corporate interests that dominate it.
In the 16 months since Chiara took action, global heating has continued to accelerate and the world shows no signs of reducing fossil fuel burning.
Just last month, 2024 was confirmed as the warmest year on record and the first to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the annual global average temperature. Last week, January 2025 was confirmed as the hottest January on record at 1.75C above the pre-industrial level, according to European space agency Copernicus.
Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, said the January data was “both astonishing and frankly terrifying”, adding:
On the basis of the Valencia floods and apocalyptic Los Angeles wildfires, I don’t think there can be any doubt that dangerous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown has arrived. Yet emissions continue to rise.
Back in November, the Global Carbon Project published its projection for 2024 fossil fuel use showing a rise of 0.8% over 2023. This would be almost 8% higher in 2024 than in 2015, the year the Paris climate agreement was signed.
The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.
In 2024 Just Stop Oil successfully won its original demand of ‘no new oil and gas’. Now the courts agree that new oil and gas is unlawful. Just Stop Oil supporters are on the right side of history and non-violent civil resistance works.
Just Stop Oil will once again be stepping into action this April to demand that governments commit to an international treaty to phase out the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. You can help make this happen by coming to a talk and signing up for action at juststopoil.org
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.
It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.
The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.
“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.
“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR
‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.
“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.
“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”
This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.
The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.
Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.
The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.
Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:
“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”
All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:
“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”
A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.
New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.
Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.
“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”
Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.
Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.
Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.
It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.
Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:
“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.
I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.
We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.
In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.
Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.
Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
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.
Papua New Guinea’s civic space has been rated as “obstructed” by the Civicus Monitor and the country has been criticised for pushing forward with a controversial media law in spite of strong opposition.
Among concerns previously documented by the civil rights watchdog are harassment and threats against human rights defenders, particularly those working on land and environmental rights, use of the cybercrime law to criminalise online expression, intimidation and restrictions against journalists, and excessive force during protests.
In recent months, the authorities have used the cybercrime law to target a human rights defender for raising questions online on forest enforcement, while a journalist and gender-based violence survivor is also facing charges under the law, said the Civicus Monitor in its latest report.
The court halted a logging company’s lawsuit against a civil society group while the government is pushing forward with the controversial National Media Development law.
Human rights defender charged under cybercrime law
On 9 December 2024, human rights defender and ACT NOW! campaign manager Eddie Tanago was arrested and charged by police under section 21(2) of the Cybercrime Act 2016 for allegedly publishing defamatory remarks on social media about the managing director of the PNG Forest Authority.
Tanago was taken to the Boroko Police Station Holding cell and released on bail the same afternoon. If convicted he could face a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment.
ACT NOW is a prominent human rights organisation seeking to halt illegal logging and related human rights violations in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
According to reports, ACT NOW had reshared a Facebook post from a radio station advertising an interview with PNG Forest Authority (PNGFA) staff members, which included a photo of the managing director.
The repost included a comment raising questions about PNGFA forest enforcement.
Following Tanago’s arrest, ACT NOW said: “it believes that the arrest and charging of Tanago is a massive overreach and is a blatant and unwarranted attempt to intimidate and silence public debate on a critical issue of national and international importance.”
It added that “there was nothing defamatory in the social media post it shared and there is nothing remotely criminal in republishing a poster which includes the image of a public figure which can be found all over the internet.”
On 24 January 2025, when Tanago appeared at the Waigani Committal Court, he was instead charged under section 15, subparagraph (b) of the Cybercrime Act for “identity theft”. The next hearing has been scheduled for February 25.
The 2016 Cybercrime Act has been used to silence criticism and creates a chilling effect, said Civicus Monitor.
The law has been criticised by the opposition, journalists and activists for its impact on freedom of expression and political discourse.
JOURNO ARRAIGNED ON CYBER HARASSMENT
Journalist Hennah Joku appeared before Magistrate Paul Nii at the Waigani Committal Court on charges of cyber defamation following a Facebook post made on 4th September 2024.
Read more:https://t.co/LEIDEcTZv6#EMTVNews#EMTVOnlinepic.twitter.com/zHqm353Cst
Journalist and gender activist charged with defamation Journalist and gender activist Hennah Joku was detained and charged under the Cybercrime Act on 23 November 2024, following defamation complaints filed by her former partner Robert Agen.
Joku was charged with two counts of breaching the Cybercrimes Act 2016 and detained in Boroko Prison. She was freed on the same day after bail was posted.
Joku, a survivor of a 2018 assault by Agen, had documented and shared her six-year journey through the PNG justice system, which had resulted in his conviction and jailing in 2023.
On 2 September 2024, the PNG Supreme Court overturned two of three criminal convictions, and Agen was released from prison.
Section 21(2) of the Cybercrimes Act 2016, which has an electronic defamation clause, carries a maximum penalty of up to 25 years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to one million kina (NZ$442,000).
The Pacific Freedom Forum (PFF) expressed “grave concerns” over the charges, saying: “We encourage the government and judiciary to review the use of defamation legislation to silence and gag the universal right to freedom of speech.
“Citizens must be informed. They must be protected.”
Court stays logging company lawsuit against civil society group In January 2025, an injunction issued against community advocacy group ACT NOW! to prevent publication of reports on illegal logging has been stayed by the National Court.
In July 2024, two Malaysian owned logging companies obtained an order from the District Court in Vanimo preventing ACT NOW! from issuing publications about their activities and from contacting their clients and service providers.
That order has now been effectively lifted after the National Court agreed to stay the whole District court proceedings while it considers an application from ACT NOW! to have the case permanently stayed and transferred to the National Court.
ACT NOW! said the action by Global Elite Limited and Wewak Agriculture Development Limited, which are part of the Giant Kingdom group, is an example of Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP).
“SLAPPs are illegitimate and abusive lawsuits designed to intimidate, harass and silence legitimate criticism and close down public scrutiny of the logging industry,” said Civicus Monitor.
SLAPP lawsuits have been outlawed in many countries and lawyers involved in supporting them can be sanctioned, but those protections do not yet exist in PNG.
The District Court action is not the first time the Malaysian-owned Giant Kingdom group has tried to use the legal system in an attempt to silence ACT NOW!
In March 2024, the court rejected a similar SLAPP style application by the Global Elite for an injunction against ACT NOW! As a result, the company discontinued its legal action and the court ordered it to pay ACT NOW!’s legal costs.
Government pushes forward with controversial media legislation The government is reportedly ready to pass legislation to regulate its media, which journalism advocates have said could have serious implications for democracy and freedom of speech in the country.
National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) of PNG reported in January 2025 that the policy has received the “green light” from cabinet to be presented in Parliament.
The state broadcaster reported that Communications Minister Timothy Masiu said: “This policy will address the ongoing concerns about sensationalism, ethical standards, and the portrayal of violence in the media.”
In July 2024, it was reported that the proposed media policy was now in its fifth draft but it is unclear if this version has been updated.
As previously documented, journalists have raised concerns that the media development policy could lead to more government control over the country’s relatively free media.
The bill includes sections that give the government the “power to investigate complaints against media outlets, issue guidelines for ethical reporting, and enforce sanctions or penalties for violations of professional standards”.
There are also concerns that the law will punish journalists who create content that is against the country’s development objectives.
China went from one of the poorest countries in the world to global economic powerhouse in a mere four decades. Currently featured in the news is DeepSeek, the free, open source A.I. built by innovative Chinese entrepreneurs which just pricked the massive U.S. A.I. bubble.
Even more impressive, however, is the infrastructure China has built, including 26,000 miles of high speed rail, the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world, 100,000 miles of expressway, the world’s first commercial magnetic levitation train, the world’s largest urban metro network, seven of the world’s 10 busiest ports, and solar and wind power generation accounting for over 35% of global renewable energy capacity. Topping the list is the Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure development program involving 140 countries, through which China has invested in ports, railways, highways and energy projects worldwide.
All that takes money. Where did it come from? Numerous funding sources are named in mainstream references, but the one explored here is a rarely mentioned form of quantitative easing — the central bank just “prints the money.” (That’s the term often used, though printing presses aren’t necessarily involved.)
From 1996 to 2024, the Chinese national money supply increased by a factor of more than 53 or 5300% — from 5.84 billion to 314 billion Chinese yuan (CNY) [see charts below]. How did that happen? Exporters brought the foreign currencies (largely U.S. dollars) they received for their goods to their local banks and traded them for the CNY needed to pay their workers and suppliers. The central bank —the Public Bank of China or PBOC — printed CNY and traded them for the foreign currencies, then kept the foreign currencies as reserves, effectively doubling the national export revenue.
One major task of the Chinese central bank, the PBOC, is to absorb the large inflows of foreign capital from China’s trade surplus. The PBOC purchases foreign currency from exporters and issues that currency in local yuan. The PBOC is free to publish any amount of local currency and have it exchanged for forex. … The PBOC can print yuan as needed …. [Emphasis added.]
Interestingly, that huge 5300% explosion in local CNY did not trigger runaway inflation. In fact China’s consumer inflation rate, which was as high as 24% in 1994, leveled out after that and averaged 2.5% per year from 1996 to 2023.
How was that achieved? As in the U.S., the central bank engages in “open market operations” (selling federal securities into the open market, withdrawing excess cash). It also imposes price controls on certain essential commodities. According to a report by Nasdaq, China has implemented price controls on iron ore, copper, corn, grain, meat, eggs and vegetables as part of its 14th five-year plan (2021-2025), to ensure food security for the population. Particularly important in maintaining price stability, however, is that the money has gone into manufacturing, production and infrastructure. GDP (supply) has gone up with demand (money), keeping prices stable. [See charts below.]
The U.S., too, has serious funding problems today, and we have engaged in quantitative easing (QE) before. Could our central bank also issue the dollars we need without triggering the dreaded scourge of hyperinflation? This article will argue that we can. But first some Chinese economic history.
From Rags to Riches in Four Decades
China’s rise from poverty began in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping introduced market-oriented reforms. Farmers were allowed to sell their surplus produce in the market, doors were opened to foreign investors and private businesses and foreign companies were encouraged to grow. By the 1990s, China had become a major exporter of low-cost manufactured goods. Key factors included cheap labor, infrastructure development and World Trade Organization membership in 2001.
Chinese labor is cheaper than in the U.S. largely because the government funds or subsidizes social needs, reducing the operational costs of Chinese companies and improving workforce productivity. The government invests heavily in public transportation infrastructure, including metros, buses and high-speed rail, making them affordable for workers and reducing the costs of getting manufacturers’ products to market.
The government funds education and vocational training programs, ensuring a steady supply of skilled workers, with government-funded technical schools and universities producing millions of graduates annually. Affordable housing programs are provided for workers, particularly in urban areas.
China’s public health care system, while not free, is heavily subsidized by the government. And a public pension system reduces the need for companies to offer private retirement plans. The Chinese government also provides direct subsidies and incentives to key industries, such as technology, renewable energy and manufacturing.
After it joined the WTO, China’s exports grew rapidly, generating large trade surpluses and an influx of foreign currency, allowing the country to accumulate massive foreign exchange reserves. In 2010, China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest exporter. In the following decade, it shifted its focus to high-tech industries, and in 2013 the Belt and Road Initiative was launched. The government directed funds through state-owned banks and enterprises, with an emphasis on infrastructure and industrial development.
Funding Exponential Growth
In the early stages of reform, foreign investment was a key source of capital. Export earnings then generated significant foreign exchange reserves. China’s high savings rate provided a pool of liquidity for investment, and domestic consumption grew. Decentralizing the banking system was also key. According to a lecture by U.K. Prof. Richard Werner:
Deng Xiaoping started with one mono bank. He realized quickly, scrap that; we’re going to have a lot of banks. He created small banks, community banks, savings banks, credit unions, regional banks, provincial banks. Now China has 4,500 banks. That’s the secret to success. That’s what we have to aim for. Then we can have prosperity for the whole world. Developing countries don’t need foreign money. They just need community banks supporting [local business] to have the money to get the latest technology.
China managed to avoid the worst impacts of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. It did not devalue its currency; it maintained strict control over capital flows and the PBOC acted as a lender of last resort, providing liquidity to state-controlled banks when needed.
In the 1990s, however, its four major state banks did suffer massive losses, with non-performing loans totaling more than 20% of their assets. Technically, the banks were bankrupt, but the government did not let them go bust. The non-performing loans were moved on to the balance sheets of four major asset management companies (“bad banks”), and the PBOC injected new capital into the “good banks.”
In a January 2024 article titled “The Chinese Economy Is Due a Round of Quantitative Easing,” Prof. Li Wei, Director of the China Economy and Sustainable Development Center, wrote of this policy, “The central bank directly intervened in the economy by creating money. Seen this way, unconventional financing is nothing less than Chinese-style quantitative easing.”
In an August 2024 article titled “China’s 100-billion-yuan Question: Does Rare Government Bond Purchase Alter Policy Course?,” Sylvia Ma wrote of China’s forays into QE:
Purchasing government bonds in the secondary market is allowed under Chinese law, but the central bank is forbidden to subscribe to bonds directly issued by the finance ministry. [Note that this is also true of the U.S. Fed.] Such purchases from traders were tried on a small scale 20 years ago.
However, the monetary authority resorted more to printing money equivalent to soaring foreign exchange reserves from 2001, as the country saw a robust increase in trade surplus following its accession to the World Trade Organization. [Emphasis added.]
This is the covert policy of printing CNY and trading this national currency for the foreign currencies (mostly U.S. dollars) received from exporters.
What does the PBOC do with the dollars? It holds a significant portion as foreign exchange reserves, to stabilize the CNY and manage currency fluctuations; it invests in U.S. Treasury bonds and other dollar-denominated assets to earn a return; and it uses U.S. dollars to facilitate international trade deals, many of which are conducted in dollars.
The PBOC also periodically injects capital into the three “policy banks” through which the federal government implements its five-year plans. These are China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Agricultural Development Bank of China, which provide loans and financing for domestic infrastructure and services as well as for the Belt and Road Initiative. A January 2024 Bloomberg article titled “China Injects $50 Billion Into Policy Banks in Financing Push” notes that the policy banks “are driven by government priorities more than profits,” and that some economists have called the PBOC funding injections “helicopter money” or “Chinese-style quantitative easing.”
Prof. Li argues that with the current insolvency of major real estate developers and the rise in local government debt, China should engage in this overt form of QE today. Othercommentators agree, and the government appears to be moving in that direction. Prof. Li writes:
As long as it does not trigger inflation, quantitative easing can quickly and without limit generate sufficient liquidity to resolve debt issues and pump confidence into the market.…
Quantitative easing should be the core of China’s macroeconomic policy, with more than 80% of funds coming from QE…
As the central bank is the only institution in China with the power to create money, it has the ability to create a stable environment for economic growth. [Emphasis added.]
Eighty-percent funding just from money-printing sounds pretty radical, but China’s macroeconomic policy is determined by five-year plans designed to serve the public and the economy, and the policy banks funding the plans are publicly-owned. That means profits are returned to the public purse, avoiding the sort of private financialization and speculative exploitation resulting when the U.S. Fed engaged in QE to bail out the banks after the 2007-08 banking crisis.
The U.S. Too Could Use Another Round of QE — and Some Public Policy Banks
There is no law against governments or their central banks just printing the national currency without borrowing it first. The U.S. Federal Reserve has done it, Abraham Lincoln’s Treasury did it, and it is probably the only way out of our current federal debt crisis. As Prof. Li observes, we can do it “without limit” so long as it does not trigger inflation.
Financial commentator Alex Krainer observes that the total U.S. debt, public and private, comes to more than $101 trillion (citing the St. Louis Fed’s graph titled “All Sectors; Debt Securities and Loans”). But the monetary base — the reserves available to pay that debt — is only $5.6 trillion. That means the debt is 18 times the monetary base. The U.S. economy holds far fewer dollars than we need for economic stability.
The dollar shortfall can be filled debt- and interest-free by the U.S. Treasury, just by printing dollars as Lincoln’s Treasury did (or by issuing them digitally). It can also be done by the Fed, which “monetizes” federal securities by buying them with reserves it issues on its books, then returns the interest to the Treasury and after deducting its costs. If the newly-issued dollars are used for productive purposes, supply will go up with demand, and prices should remain stable.
Note that even social services, which don’t directly produce revenue, can be considered “productive” in that they support the “human capital” necessary for production. Workers need to be healthy and well educated in order to build competitively and well, and the government needs to supplement the social costs borne by companies if they are to compete with China’s subsidized businesses.
Parameters would obviously need to be imposed to circumscribe Congress’s ability to spend “without limit,” backed by a compliant Treasury or Fed. An immediate need is for full transparency in budgeted expenditures. The Pentagon, for example, spends nearly $1 trillion of our taxpayer money annually and has never passed a clean audit, as required by law.
We Sorely Need an Infrastructure Bank
The U.S. is one of the few developed countries without an infrastructure bank. Ironically, it was Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, who developed the model. Winning freedom from Great Britain left the young country with what appeared to be an unpayable debt. Hamilton traded the debt and a percentage of gold for non-voting shares in the First U.S. Bank, paying a 6% dividend. This capital was then leveraged many times over into credit to be used specifically for infrastructure and development. Based on the same model, the Second U.S. Bank funded the vibrant economic activity of the first decades of the United States.
In the 1930s, Roosevelt’s government pulled the country out of the Great Depression by repurposing a federal agency called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) into a lending machine for development on the Hamiltonian model. Formed under the Hoover administration, the RFC was not actually an infrastructure bank but it acted like one. Like China Development Bank, it obtained its liquidity by issuing bonds.
The primary purchaser of RFC bonds was the federal government, driving up the federal debt; but the debt to GDP ratio evened out over the next four decades, due to the dramatic increase in productivity generated by the RFC’s funding of the New Deal and World War II. That was also true of the federal debt after the American Revolution and the Civil War.
A pending bill for an infrastructure bank on the Hamiltonian model is HR 4052, The National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023, which ended 2024 with 48 sponsors and was endorsed by dozens of legislatures, local councils, and organizations. Like the First and Second U.S. Banks, it is intended to be a depository bank capitalized with existing federal securities held by the private sector, for which the bank will pay an additional 2% over the interest paid by the government. The bank will then leverage this capital into roughly 10 times its value in loans, as all depository banks are entitled to do. The bill proposes to fund $5 trillion in infrastructure capitalized over a 10-year period with $500 billion in federal securities exchanged for preferred (non-voting) stock in the bank. Like the RFC, the bank will be a source of off-budget financing, adding no new costs to the federal budget. (For more information, see https://www.nibcoalition.com/.)
Growing Our Way Out of Debt
Rather than trying to kneecap our competitors with sanctions and tariffs, we can grow our way to prosperity by turning on the engines of production. Far more can be achieved through cooperation than through economic warfare. DeepSeek set the tone with its free, open source model. Rather than a heavily guarded secret, its source code is freely available to be shared and built upon by entrepreneurs around the world.
We can pull off our own economic miracle, funded with newly issued dollars backed by the full faith and credit of the government and the people. Contrary to popular belief, “full faith and credit” is valuable collateral, something even Bitcoin and gold do not have. It means the currency will be accepted everywhere – not just at the bank or the coin dealer’s but at the grocer’s and the gas station. If the government directs newly created dollars into new goods and services, supply will grow along with demand and the currency should retain its value. The government can print, pay for workers and materials, and produce its way into an economic renaissance.
On an earnings call Tuesday, the head of a huge private prison company celebrated the Laken Riley Act and Donald Trump’s anti-immigration executive orders.
The new law and Trump’s policies are expected to lead to flood of detention and deportation, with the private prison firm predicting that the government could ultimately need up to 200,000 new beds to hold immigration detainees.
CoreCivic is so excited by its daily calls with the Trump administration that it is spending at least $40 million to renovate facilities even before inking new contracts, CEO Damon Hininger said on the call for investors.
“I have worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company,” Hininger said, adding that he expects “perhaps the most significant growth in our company’s history over the next several years.”
With $2 billion in revenue, CoreCivic is a publicly traded company that dominates the private prison market along with another company, the GEO Group, which will not report its fourth-quarter earnings until later this month.
CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger answers questions from legislators in Topeka, Kan., on Dec. 20, 2017.Photo: John Hanna/AP
The law drew unanimous support from Republicans and a cohort of swing-district Democrats in Congress.
Critics warned that it would swell the numbers of people locked up in immigration facilities that are frequently criticized for substandard conditions, and rip apart families, with little benefit to public safety.
So far, the Trump administration’s immigration arrests have yet to swell the detention population, officials said. The tone of CoreCivic’s call with investors was buoyant, however, with a parade of corporate officials predicting that the second Trump era would yield a financial bonanza.
Hininger said the company has been in contact with the transition team on “a daily basis” since Trump’s victory in November and has already put a proposal to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold an extra 28,000 people.
The total number of beds that the government could need to hold more immigrants could include 100,000 beds for more aggressive enforcement in general, and 50,000 to 100,000 additional beds in connection with the Laken Riley Act.
Private prison companies’ stock prices soared on Trump’s victory but have slid since then as Trump talks up alternatives abroad.
Hininger said that his private prisons would cost less and be less likely to be rejected by judges — but there was plenty of market opportunity for everyone.
“I want to be very clear on this: We don’t see that as an either-or. We actually see it as a both of them being utilized,” he said. “They’re going to need really all that capacity to meet the mission and the needs.”
“They’re going to need really all that capacity to meet the mission and the needs.”
Company officials said they were already taking steps to offer immigrant family detention, a policy the Trump administration plans to revive after Joe Biden ended it in 2021.
That order never applied to immigration detention, which makes up a large share of CoreCivic’s operations.
In lobbying for more work with federal agencies like the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service, CoreCivic could face competition from GEO Group, the firm that previously hired now-Attorney General Pam Bondi as a lobbyist.
Some of the groundwork for expanding immigration detention was already being laid in the final months of the Biden administration, leading to criticism from rights groups who said the government should have been focused on permanently shutting facilities down instead.
Israeli PM Netanyahu threatens to resume fighting unless Hamas releases hostages Saturday, UN chief Guterres says resumption of hostilities would “lead to an immense tragedy”
200,000 Greenlanders sign petition to “buy California from Trump”, promise Danish values – Rule of Law, universal health care, fact-based politics
Manuel Valls en Nouvelle-Calédonie : échange tendu entre le ministre des Outre-mer et des personnalités non-indépendantistes
Nicolas Metzdorf et Sonia Backès lui reprochent certaines prises de position depuis la reprise des discussions
