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
Nurse Chris Dindar is demanding answers after facing down a criminal prosecution for alleged crimes against houmous which he says was politically motivated. The crimes against houmous? A protest over Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the companies profiting from it.
Crimes against houmous: a preposterous attack on peaceful protest
The 55-year-old from Hastings in East Sussex was charged with criminal damage in April last year for holding a peaceful protest at a Sainsbury’s supermarket in February where he drew attention to their sale of Sabra houmous.
Sabra has been the target of an international consumer boycott for years as it was then owned by Strauss group which funds the Israeli military, currently in the dock at the world court for carrying out genocide in Gaza.
But last month, nearly a year after the protest, Chris was informed the CPS did not intend to pursue the case as there was ‘not enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction’.
“I’m so angry” said Chris:
The real crime was the way that Sainsbury’s and Sussex Police chose to weaponize the law to try and intimidate me for exposing complicity in genocide and standing up for Palestinian rights. The whole episode has been exhausting and deeply stressful.
Dad-of-two Chris said the manner of the investigation was traumatic for his whole family:
Having three plainclothes detectives barge into my house at eight in the morning, treating me like some sort of dangerous criminal, while my other half and my daughter stood there in their night clothes, shaking, then being taken to a police cell for hours was appalling.
They violated my home and my family, going mob-handed through our property, apparently looking for pro-Palestinian paraphernalia, sifting through my recently late mother-in-law’s protest artwork, asking: ‘Oh, what have we got here then?’ Their attitude was disgusting. We were all traumatised by that invasion.
Chris says that when he was released under investigation he was convinced the charge was not going to go anywhere:
It was so ridiculous, and it was such an obvious, pathetic attempt to kind of silence pro-Palestinian protests so I was gobsmacked when they charged me.
There’s a problem in Hastings – and across the UK
The charge came during the height of Israel’s 15-month assault on Gaza – which has killed over 62,000 Palestinians and left the tiny besieged strip of land uninhabitable – when a number of pro-Palestinian journalists and activists were being charged with criminal proceedings, as well as three local activists who were charged with aggravated trespass for their part in a peaceful protest at General Dynamics arms factory.
The ‘Hastings Three’ were all acquittedduring a trial in Brighton last month, and a spokesperson for the Hastings & District Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which organised the protest said the charges had been politically-motivated in order to deter peaceful protest.
Chair Katy Colley said:
Our justice system is being abused to criminalise peaceful protest, wasting precious court time and taxpayer money to defend companies that profit from supporting illegal occupation, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But Sussex Police have defended their actions in a statement, claiming they were ‘proportionate’ in the circumstances.
The statement read:
We responded to a report of criminal damage after a significant amount of humous was removed from shelves at Sainsbury’s in St Leonards on 23 February and 10 March 2024. The products were unfit for consumption as a result, causing a financial loss to the business.
CCTV led officers to identify a suspect and plain-clothed officers attended his address at around 8.20am on 8 April, arresting him outside of the home at his request. Officers were then led into the address, which they searched and seized a mobile phone for further enquiries to be completed, as is standard practice in order to preserve and gather evidence.
The actions of officers at the time, and the subsequent decision to present a case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), have been reviewed and were considered proportionate in the circumstances. We are aware that the CPS has since dropped the charges.
Hardly proportionate
But Chris says the police actions were far from proportionate, given the trivial nature of the alleged offence. “It’s clear the message has been coming from higher up, from the Home Office, which is actively trying to silence and repress Palestinian activism” he said:
We’ve seen that over the last year there’s been a huge crackdown on peaceful protests, particularly when it comes to Palestine, particularly the last march in London, and the police and the courts have been used as political tools to intimidate people into silence, whether through heavy-handed arrests like mine, or demonstrations with punitive bail conditions or dragging activists like me through the courts on spurious charges.
If you challenge corporation or state complicity in Israel’s crimes, whether you call out those companies individually or the ones that profit from the occupation and apartheid, or you’re protesting arms manufacturers or simply showing solidarity, you‘re treated as a threat.
They want people to be too afraid to take action, but that strategy is backfiring, because every time they try to suppress our movement, it only exposes their desperation, and it certainly strengthens my resolve. I think it probably strengthens our collective resolve to carry on and double down on our efforts.
Stepping up
Chris says he has stepped up his campaigning in recent months, taking a lead within the local movement to draw attention to BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), particularly consumer boycott across a range of goods and outlets:
BDS remains one of the most effective tools that we have to resist the corporation’s complicity with apartheid, occupation and war crimes, companies like Sainsbury’s that stock products from firms that profit from the theft of Palestinian land and the slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.
By highlighting that and by refusing to buy those products, we send a really powerful message that we won’t be complicit in genocide, war crimes, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and displacement.
I feel particularly strongly as a healthcare professional. Who knows how many nurses and doctors have been slaughtered, sniped, bombed, set on fire and tortured by Israel this past year? I’ve worked all over the world as a nurse, including in the Middle East, and human life is sacrosanct and to be protected at all costs. When the person doing that is the one that’s targeted, or the profession that’s doing that is the profession that’s targeted, that’s chilling.
The Houmous One is free
Chris says he would like to thank all the people who supported him.
Being part of the local PSC group has really got me through the last year,’ he said. ‘Without that solidarity and support, it would have been a very different scenario. I’d also like to thank from the bottom of my heart everyone who donated to my defence fund.
It was so heartening to feel the solidarity and support from the scores of people who donated and I am sure they will be happy that what’s left of the fund will be going directly to support our friends in Al-Mawasi, Gaza. Our town has long-standing friendship links with the people there and any defence costs that are returned to me by the court will also be going to Al-Mawasi.
In which case, if this prosecution achieves anything at all, it would be to help to raise funds for our friends in Al Mawasi. I haven’t seen a single supermarket do anything to help the people of Gaza to date. Shame on them all.
Amid anger and protest over the Trump administration’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to monitor and locate “negative” social media discussion about the agency and its top officials, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.
Citing an increase in threats to ICE agents and leadership, the agency is soliciting pitches from private companies to monitor threats across the internet — with a special focus on social media. People who simply criticize ICE online could pulled into the dragnet.
“In order to prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires real-time threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” the procurement document reads.
If this scanning uncovers anything the agency deems suspicious, ICE is asking its contractors to drill down into the background of social media users.
That includes:
“Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE; 2). Information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organization(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence; and 3). Information indicating a potential for carrying out a threat (such as postings depicting weapons, acts of violence, refences to acts of violence, to include empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies; references to violent acts; affections with violent acts; eluding [sic] to violent acts.”
It’s unclear how exactly any contractor might sniff out someone’s “proclivity for violence.” The ICE document states only that the contractor will use “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles” to accomplish its automated threat detection.
Once flagged, the system will further scour a target’s internet history and attempt to reveal their real-world position and offline identity. In addition to compiling personal information — such as the Social Security numbers and addresses of those whose posts are flagged — the contractor will also provide ICE with a “photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates.”
The document also requests “Facial Recognition capabilities that could take a photograph of a subject and search the internet to find all relevant information associated with the subject.” The contract contains specific directions for targets found in other countries, implying the program would scan the domestic speech of American citizens.
The posting indicates that ICE isn’t merely looking to detect direct threats of violence, but also online criticism of the agency.
As part of its mission to protect ICE with “proactive threat monitoring,” the winning contractor will not simply flag threatening remarks but “Provide monitoring and analysis of behavioral and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative).”
“ICE’s attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm.”
Such sentiment analysis — typically accomplished via machine-learning techniques — could place under law enforcement scrutiny speech that is constitutionally protected. Simply stated, a post that is critical or even hostile to ICE isn’t against the law.
“ICE’s attempts to capture and assign a judgement to people’s ‘sentiment’ throughout the expanse of the internet is beyond concerning,” said Cinthya Rodriguez, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Mijente. “The current administration’s attempt to use this technology falls within the agency’s larger history of mass surveillance, which includes gathering information from personal social media accounts and retaliating against immigrant activists. ICE’s attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us.”
The document soliciting contractors appears nearly identical to a procurement document published by ICE in 2020, which resulted in a $5.5 million contract between the agency and Barbaricum, a Washington-based defense and intelligence contractor. A new contract has not yet been awarded. ICE spokesperson Jocelyn Biggs told The Intercept, “While ICE anticipates maintaining its threat risk monitoring services, we cannot speculate on a specific timeline for future contract decisions.”
ICE already has extensive social media surveillance capabilities provided by federal contractor Giant Oak, which seeks “derogatory” posts about the United States to inform immigration-related decision-making. The goal of this contract, ostensibly, is focused more narrowly on threats to ICE leadership, agents, facilities, and operations.
Civil liberties advocates told The Intercept the program had grave speech implications under the current administration. “While surveillance programs like this under any administration are a concerning privacy and free speech violation and I would fight to stop them, the rhetoric of the Trump administration makes this practice especially terrifying,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Threats to ‘punish’ opponents or deport those exercising 1st Amendment rights combine with these invasive practices to create a real ‘thought police’ scenario.”
It generally ends badly. An old tyrant embarks on an ill-considered project that involves redrawing maps.
They are heedless to wise counsel and indifferent to indigenous interests or experience. Before they fail, are killed, deposed or otherwise disposed of, these vicious old men can cause immense harm.
To see Trump through this lens, let’s look at a group of men who tested their cartographic skills and failed: King Lear and, of course, Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte, and latterly, George W Bush and Saddam Hussein.
I even throw in a Pope. But let’s start first with Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself.
Benjamin Netanyahu and a map of a ‘New Middle East’ — without Palestine
In September 2023, a month before the Hamas attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to an almost-empty UN General Assembly. Few wanted to share the same air as the man.
In his speech, he presented a map of a “New Middle East” — one that contained a Greater Israel but no Palestine.
In a piece in The Jordan Times titled: “Cartography of genocide”, Ramzy Baroud explained why Netanyahu erased Palestine from the map figuratively. Hamas leaders also understood the message all too well.
“Generally, there was a consensus in the political bureau: We have to move, we have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten — totally deleted from the international map,” Dr Bassem Naim, a leading Hamas official said in the outstanding Al Jazeera documentary October 7.
Hearing Trump and Netanyahu last week, the Hamas assessment was clear-eyed and prescient.
Donald Trump In defiance of UN resolutions and international law, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, recognised the Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel, and now wants to turn Gaza into a US real estate development, reconquer Panama, turn Canada into the 51st State of the USA, rename the Gulf of Mexico and seize Greenland, if necessary by force.
And it’s only February. The US spent blood, treasure and decades building the Rules-Based International Order. Biden and Trump have left it in tatters.
Trump is a fitting avatar for the American state: morally corrupt, narcissistic, burning down all the temples to international law, and generally causing chaos as he flames his way into ignominy.
The past week — where “Bonkers is the New Normal” — reminded me of a famous Onion headline: “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States”.
The Iranians made a brilliant counter-offer to the US plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and create a US statelet next to Israel — send the Israelis to Greenland! Unlike the genocidal US and Israeli leadership, the Iranians were kidding.
Point taken, though.
King Lear: ‘Meantime we will express our darker purpose. Give me the map there.’
Lear makes the list because of Shakespeare’s understanding of tyrants and those who oppose them.
Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Kent: My life I never held but as a pawn to wage against thy enemies.
Lear: Out of my sight!
Kent and all those who sought to steer the King towards a more prudent course were treated as enemies and traitors. I think of Ambassador Chas Freeman, John Mearsheimer, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, George Beebe and all the other wiser heads who have been pushed to the periphery in much the same way.
Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths.
Napoleon Bonaparte I was fortunate to study “France on the Eve of Revolution” with the great French historian Antoine Casanova. His fellow Corsican caused a fair bit of mayhem with his intention to redraw the map of Europe.
British statesman William Pitt the Younger reeled in horror as Napoleon got to work, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these 10 years,” he presciently said.
Bonaparte was an important historical figure who left a mixed and contested legacy.
Before effective resistance could be organised, he abolished the Holy Roman Empire (good job), created the Confederation of the Rhine, invaded Russia and, albeit sometimes for the better, torched many of the traditional power structures.
Millions died in his wars.
We appear to be back to all that: a leader who tears up all rule books. Trump endorses the US-Israeli right of conquest, sanctions the International Criminal Court (ICC) for trying to hold Israel and the US to the same standard as others, and hands out the highest offices to his family and confidantes.
Hitler “Lebensraum” (Living space) was the Nazi concept that propelled the German war machine to seize new territories, redraw maps. As they marched, the soldiers often sang “Deutschland über alles”(Germany above all), their ultra-nationalist anthem that expressed a desire to create a Greater Germany — to Make Germany Great Again.
All sounds a bit similar to this discussion of Trump and Netanyahu, doesn’t it? Again: whose side should we be on?
Saddam Hussein and George W Bush When it comes to doomed bids to remake the Middle East by launching illegal wars, these are two buttocks of the same bum. Now we have the Trump-Netanyahu pair.
Will countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK really sign up for the current US-Israeli land grab? Will they all continue to yawn and look away as massive crimes against humanity are committed? I fear so, and in so doing, they rob their side of all legitimacy.
Pope Alexander VI There is a smack of the Borgias about the Trumps. They share values — libertinism and nepotism, to name two — and both, through cunning rather than aptitude, managed to achieve great power.
Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, father to Lucretia and Cesare, was Pope in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
1494. The Treaty of Tordesillas hands the New World over to the Spanish and Portuguese. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
He was responsible for the greatest reworking of the map of the world: the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the “New World” between the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Millions died; trillions were stolen.
We still live with the depravities the Europeans and their heritors unleashed upon the world.
I’m sure the Greenlanders, the Canadians, the Panamanians and whoever else the United States sets their sights on will resist the unwelcome attempt to colour the map of their country in stars & stripes.
History is littered with blind map re-makers, foolish old men who draw new maps on old lands.
Like Sykes, Picot, Balfour and others, Trump thinks with a flourish of his pen he can whisk away identity and deep roots. Love of country and long-suffering mean Palestinians will never accept a handful of coins and parcels of land spread across West Asia or Africa as compensation for a stolen homeland.
They have earned the right to Palestine not least because of the blood-spattered identity that they have carved out of every inch of land through their immense courage and steadfastness. We should stand with them.
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.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Endless New Zealand politicians, including the present government, have pointed to our support for a rules-based international system.
The ICC is a key part of that system but Winston Peters has jettisoned this policy in favour of a US-First approach, rather than a New Zealand-First approach.
In fact, we can find no evidence that Peters has ever uttered a word of real criticism of the US in his entire political career.
Within the past two weeks Winston Peters has:
Openly welcomed Israeli soldiers and Israeli war criminals coming into New Zealand, with no questions asked, for “rest and recreation” from their genocide in Gaza
Refused to condemn Trump’s racist plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza so his son-in-law can turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”. This is an intended international crime of epic proportion, and now
The countries we are refusing to join in criticising Trump include two other Five Eyes countries — the UK and Canada — as well as Germany, France, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Portugal, Spain and so on.
Extremist camp
Winston Peters has put New Zealand in the hard-right international minority extremist camp with Trump. This is creepy and cowardly complicity with a state whose values we do not share.
His ministry has been at great pains over the past year to state how much our government supports the work of the ICC. The MFAT website states: “We have also been clear in our support of the International Criminal Court’s mandate in Palestine.”
But when the ICC issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, our government goes completely silent.
Will Winston Peters now copy his master and revoke an immigration ban on 33 Israeli settlers responsible for leading pogroms against Palestinian communities in the Occupied West Bank, as Trump did a few days ago?
US policy towards Palestine underlines the case for New Zealand to leave the Five Eyes US international spy network.
An independent foreign policy means making our own decisions and working with the great majority of like-minded countries who support international institutions, such as the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Instead, we have a foreign minister who is in the US pocket and blindly working for the interests of Trump and his robber barons.
John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
Speaking about the frail, disoriented appearance of the three freed Israeli captives yesterday, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said: “People are starving in Gaza.
“Children are dying of malnutrition because Netanyahu has weaponised hunger and famine.”
“Incidentally”, Bishara told Al Jazeera, “that’s why Netanyahu is sought [on a war crimes warrant] by the ICC [International Criminal Court].
Netanyahu’s ‘weaponised hunger’ in Gaza. Video: Al Jazeera
“Netanyahu is complaining that three individuals lost weight when the entire Gaza Strip was ‘put on a diet’, as the racists in the Israeli government said.
“It’s beyond absurd. It’s beyond racist. The real issue is that thousands of Palestinian prisoners have been tortured in Israel’s jails.”
Hamas ‘theatrical scenes’
Bishara also suggested that today’s “theatrical scenes of Hamas during the exchanges would rub Netanyahu the wrong way, by proving once again that Hamas is not defeated.”
On the other hand, Bishara said that Netanyahu “has succeeded” with the undeclared objective of the total destruction of Gaza.
“[But] I don’t think the Israeli establishment really cares about Gaza.
“It wishes to cut it off and push it into the sea. What it really cares about is the West Bank and the Golan Heights — they think that would secure the [Israeli] settlement for future generations.”
He added: “Zionism is responsible for turning Israelis into occupiers, the torturers, the racists.”
New Zealand should be robust in its response to the “unacceptable” situation in Gaza but it must also back its allies against threats by the US President, says an international relations academic.
Otago University professor of international relations Robert Patman said the rest of the world also “should stop tip-toeing” around President Donald Trump and must stand up to any threats he makes against allies, no matter how outlandish they seem.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters told RNZ that New Zealand would not comment on the plan until it was clear exactly what was meant, but said New Zealand continued to support a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
Dr Patman said the president’s plan was “truly shocking and absolutely appalling” in light of the devastation in Gaza in the last 15 months.
It was not only “tone deaf” but also dangerous, he added, with the proposal amounting to “the most powerful country in the world — the US — dismantling an international rules=based system that [it] has done so much to establish”.
“This was an extraordinary proposal which I think is reckless and dangerous because it certainly doesn’t help the immediate situation. It probably plays into the hands of extremists in the region.
“There is a view at the moment that we must all tiptoe round Mr Trump in order not to upset him, while he’s completely free to make outrageous suggestions which endanger people’s lives.”
Professor Robert Patman . . . Trump’s plan for Gaza “truly shocking and absolutely appalling”. Image: RNZ
Winston Peters’ careful position on a potential US takeover of Gaza was “a fair response . . . but the Luxon-led government must be clear the current situation is unacceptable” and oppose protectionism, he said.
“[The government ] wants a solution in the Middle East which recognises both the Israeli desire for security but also recognises the political right to self determination of the Palestinian people — in other words the right to have a state of their own.”
New Zealand should also speak out against Trump’s threats to annex Canada, “our very close ally”, he said.
He was “not suggesting New Zealand be provocative but it must be robust”, Dr Patman said.
Greens also respond to Trump actions The Green Party said President Trump had been explicit in his intention to take over Gaza, and New Zealand needed to make its position crystal clear too.
Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the Prime Minister needed to stand up and condemn the plan as “reprehensible”.
“President Trump’s comments have been pretty clear to anybody who is able to read or to listen to them, about his intention to forcibly displace, or to see displaced, about 1.8 million Gazans from their own land, who have already been made refugees in their own land.”
France, Spain, Ireland, Brazil and other countries had been “unequivocal” in their condemnation of Trump’s plan, and NZ’s Foreign Affairs Minister should be too, she added.
“New Zealanders value justice and they value peace, and they want to see our leadership represent that, on the international stage. So [these were] really disappointing and unfortunately unclear comments from our Deputy Prime Minister.”
Yesterday Foreign Minister Winston Peters told RNZ that New Zealand still supported a two-state solution, but said he would not comment on Trump’s Gaza plan until officials could grasp exactly what this meant.
Dozens of countries have expressed “unwavering support” for the ICC in a joint statement, after the US President imposed sanctions on its staff.
The 125-member ICC is a permanent court that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression against the territory of member states or by their nationals.
The United States, China, Russia and Israel are not members.
Trump has accused the court of improperly targeting the US and its ally, Israel.
Neither New Zealand nor Australia had joined the statement, but in a statement to RNZ the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had always supported the ICC’s role in upholding international law and a rules-based system.
University of Victoria law professor Alberto Costi said currently New Zealand is at little risk of sanctions and there’s no need for a stronger approach.
“At this stage there is no reason to be stronger. New Zealand is perceived as a state that believes in a rules-based order and is supportive of the work of the ICC.
“So there’s not much need to go further but it’s a space to watch in the future, should these sanctions become a reality.
“But as far as New Zealand is concerned, at the moment there is no need to antagonise anyone at this stage.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
President Donald Trump has frozen billions of dollars around the world in aid projects, including more than $268 million allocated by Congress to support independent media and the free flow of information.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has denounced this decision, which has plunged NGOs, media outlets, and journalists doing vital work into chaotic uncertainty — including in the Pacific.
In a statement published on its website, RSF has called for international public and private support to commit to the “sustainability of independent media”.
Since the new American president announced the freeze of US foreign aid on January 20, USAID (United States Agency for International Development) has been in turmoil — its website is inaccessible, its X account has been suspended, the agency’s headquarters was closed and employees told to stay home.
South African-born American billionaire Elon Musk, an unelected official, whom Trump chose to lead the quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has called USAID a “criminal organisation” and declared: “We’re shutting [it] down.”
Later that day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was named acting director of the agency, suggesting its operations were being moved to the State Department.
Almost immediately after the freeze went into effect, journalistic organisations around the world — including media groups in the Pacific — that receive American aid funding started reaching out to RSF expressing confusion, chaos, and uncertainty.
Large and smaller media NGOs affected
The affected organisations include large international NGOs that support independent media like the International Fund for Public Interest Media and smaller, individual media outlets serving audiences living under repressive conditions in countries like Iran and Russia.
“The American aid funding freeze is sowing chaos around the world, including in journalism. The programmes that have been frozen provide vital support to projects that strengthen media, transparency, and democracy,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF USA.
President Donald Trump . . . “The American aid funding freeze is sowing chaos around the world, including in journalism,” says RSF. Image: RSF
“President Trump justified this order by charging — without evidence — that a so-called ‘foreign aid industry’ is not aligned with US interests.
“The tragic irony is that this measure will create a vacuum that plays into the hands of propagandists and authoritarian states. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is appealing to the international public and private funders to commit to the sustainability of independent media.”
USAID programmes support independent media in more than 30 countries, but it is difficult to assess the full extent of the harm done to the global media.
Many organisations are hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.
According to a USAID fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023 the agency funded training and support for 6200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organisations dedicated to strengthening independent media.
The USAID website today . . . All USAID “direct hire” staff were reportedly put “on leave” on 7 February 2025. Image: USAID website screenshot APR
Activities halted overnight
The 2025 foreign aid budget included $268,376,000 allocated by Congress to support “independent media and the free flow of information”.
All over the world, media outlets and organisations have had to halt some of their activities overnight.
“We have articles scheduled until the end of January, but after that, if we haven’t found solutions, we won’t be able to publish anymore,” explains a journalist from a Belarusian exiled media outlet who wished to remain anonymous.
In Cameroon, the funding freeze forced DataCameroon, a public interest media outlet based in the economic capital Douala, to put several projects on hold, including one focused on journalist safety and another covering the upcoming presidential election.
An exiled Iranian media outlet that preferred to remain anonymous was forced to suspend collaboration with its staff for three months and slash salaries to a bare minimum to survive.
An exiled Iranian journalist interviewed by RSF warns that the impact of the funding freeze could silence some of the last remaining free voices, creating a vacuum that Iranian state propaganda would inevitably fill.
“Shutting us off will mean that they’ll have more power,” she says.
USAID: the main donor for Ukrainian media In Ukraine, where 9 out of 10 outlets rely on subsidies and USAID is the primary donor, several local media have already announced the suspension of their activities and are searching for alternative solutions.
“At Slidstvo.Info, 80 percent of our budget is affected,” said Anna Babinets, CEO and co-founder of this independent investigative media outlet based in Kyiv.
The risk of this suspension is that it could open the door to other sources of funding that may seek to alter the editorial line and independence of these media.
“Some media might be shut down or bought by businessmen or oligarchs. I think Russian money will enter the market. And government propaganda will, of course, intensify,” Babinets said.
RSF has already witnessed the direct effects of such propaganda — a fabricated video, falsely branded with the organisation’s logo, claimed that RSF welcomed the suspension of USAID funding for Ukrainian media — a stance RSF has never endorsed.
This is not the first instance of such disinformation.
Finding alternatives quickly This situation highlights the financial fragility of the sector.
According to Oleh Dereniuha, editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian local media outlet NikVesti, based in Mykolaiv, a city in southeast Ukraine, “The suspension of US funding is just the tip of the iceberg — a key case that illustrates the severity of the situation.”
Since 2024, independent Ukrainian media outlets have found securing financial sustainability nearly impossible due to the decline in donors.
As a result, even minor budget cuts could put these media outlets in a precarious position.
A recent RSF report stressed the need to focus on the economic recovery of the independent Ukrainian media landscape, weakened by the large-scale Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, which RSF’s study estimated to be at least $96 million over three years.
Moreover, beyond the decline in donor support in Ukraine, media outlets are also facing growing threats to their funding and economic models in other countries.
Georgia’s Transparency of Foreign Influence Law — modelled after Russia’s legislation — has put numerous media organisations at risk. The Georgian Prime Minister welcomed the US president’s decision with approval.
This suspension is officially expected to last only 90 days, according to the US government.
However, some, like Katerina Abramova, communications director for leading exiled Russian media outlet Meduza, fear that the reviews of funding contracts could take much longer.
Abramova is anticipating the risk that these funds may be permanently cut off.
“Exiled media are even in a more fragile position than others, as we can’t monetise our audience and the crowdfunding has its limits — especially when donating to Meduza is a crime in Russia,” Abramova stressed.
By abruptly suspending American aid, the United States has made many media outlets and journalists vulnerable, dealing a significant blow to press freedom.
For all the media outlets interviewed by RSF, the priority is to recover and urgently find alternative funding.
How Fijivillage News reported the USAID crackdown by the Trump administration. Image: Fijivillage News screenshot APR
Fiji, Pacific media, aid groups reel shocked by cuts
In Suva, Fiji, as Pacific media groups have been reeling from the shock of the aid cuts, Fijivillage News reports that hundreds of local jobs and assistance to marginalised communities are being impacted because Fiji is an AUSAID hub.
According to an USAID staff member speaking on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s decision has affected hundreds of Fijian jobs due to USAID believing in building local capacity.
The staff member said millions of dollars in grants for strengthening climate resilience, the healthcare system, economic growth, and digital connectivity in rural communities were now on hold.
The staff member also said civil society organisations, especially grantees in rural areas that rely on their aid, were at risk.
Pacific Media Watch and Asia Pacific Report collaborate with Reporters Without Borders.
“OCCRP is a deep state operation. “OCCRP is connected to the CIA. “OCCRP was tasked by USAID to overthrow President Donald Trump.”
How did we end up getting this kind of attention? Old fashioned investigative journalism.
We wrote a simple story in 2019 about how Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine for some opposition research and ended up working with people connected to organised crime who misled him.
Unbeknown to us, a whistleblower found the story online and added it to a complaint that was the basis of President Trump’s first impeachment. We also wrote a story about Hunter Biden‘s business partners and their ties to organised crime but that hasn’t received the same attention.
Journalism has become a blood sport. It’s harder and harder to tell the truth without someone’s interests getting stepped on.
OCCRP prides itself on being independent and nonpartisan. No donor has any say in our reporting, but we often find ourselves under attack for our funding.
It’s not just political interests but organised crime, businesses, enablers, and other journalists who regularly attack us. What’s common in all of these attacks is that the truth doesn’t matter and it will not protect you.
Few attack the facts in our reporting. Instead we’re left perplexed by how to respond to wild conspiracy theories, outright disinformation, and hyperbolic hatred.
At the same time, we’ve lost 29 percent of our funding because of the US foreign aid freeze. This includes 82 percent of the money we give to newsrooms in our network, many of which operate in places [Pacific Media Watch: Such as in the Pacific] where no one else will support them.
This money did not only fund groundbreaking, prize-winning collaborative journalism but it also trained young investigative reporters to expose wrongdoing. It’s money that kept journalists safe from physical and digital attacks and supported those in exile who continued to report on crooks and dictators back in their home countries.
OCCRP now has 43 less journalists and staff to do our work.
Next week, we’ll take on another set of powerful actors to defend the public interest. And another set the week after that.
We are determined to stay in the fight and keep reporting on organised crime and the corrupt who enable and benefit from it. But it’s getting harder and we need help.
Austrian authorities have joined in the harassment of independent journalist Richard Medhurst in connection to his criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He explained on 6 February:
I was detained this week by the Austrian police and intelligence services.
They raided my house, office, and took all my devices.
They are accusing me of being a member of Hamas and threatened me with 10 years in prison.
I was detained this week by the Austrian police and intelligence services.
They raided my house, office, and took all my devices.
They are accusing me of being a member of Hamas and threatened me with 10 years in prison.
In 2024, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) expressed “their grave concern on the apparent mis-use of anti-terror legislation and consequential undermining of media freedom in the wake of the arrest of NUJ and IFJ member Richard Medhurst on 15 August upon his arrival at London Heathrow Airport”.
As the NUJ’s Michelle Stanistreet and the IFJ’s Anthony Bellanger said:
Richard Medhurst’s arrest and detention for almost 24 hours using terrorism legislation is deeply concerning and will likely have a chilling effect on journalists in the UK and worldwide, in fear of arrest by UK authorities simply for carrying out their work. Both the NUJ and IFJ are shocked at the increased use of terrorism legislation by the British police in this manner.
Medhurst categorically denies the allegations. And he believes Austria’s persecution this week was “related to the case in Britain” and being “coordinated with Britain”. As he stressed:
This is insane. This is disproportionate state violence. And it’s not just an attack on me. This is an attack on the entire profession, on freedom of speech, on democracy itself.
Medhurst was also detained last year. On Thursday 15 August 2024, he was escorted off a plane by six cops. They explained that he was being arrested under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 – for, quote:
expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation
Presumably, in Medhurst’s case this was either Hamas or Hezbollah.
He went on to describe how cops took his phone and did not allow him to tell his family they were detaining him. His belongings were confiscated, and cops held him for 24 hours. His cell was monitored by camera for the whole time he was there.
Not the last
Richard Medhurst said that:
I believe this was done to try and rattle me psychologically. That failed.
He is not the first – nor will he be the last – journalist to experience this:
Not a single word on Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Sarah Wilkinson in a UK newspaper either.
I find this more scary than the arrests themselves.
The public realm in Europe lies undefended. The media and civil society has been captured. https://t.co/acpXr3pCzn
Those of us who, like myself, are speaking up and reporting on the situation in Palestine are being targeted
He also pointed out how his arrest must have been pre-planned – the implication being that clearly authorities are monitoring non-corporate media journalists’ output. This is probably one of the worst-kept secrets going. As independent journalist Alex Tiffin found out, the Cabinet Office under Boris Johnson had been monitoring his social media – and Canary journalist’s names cropped up in the data it had been storing on him.
It seems that in 2025, independent journalists are still not safe – whatever country they are in.
The Trump administration is planning to shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency and has placed nearly 170 employees on administrative leave. “I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits,” says Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the environmental justice program at the EPA. He resigned in 2017 to protest a Trump administration proposal to severely scale back the size and work of the agency. “Any time that we place profit over people, then we are putting a crosshair on our most vulnerable, our most marginalized,” says Ali.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The FBI was not pleased. There were mentions of the agency in documents connected to an upcoming forensics conference that it deemed disparaging. So in the weeks before President Donald Trump took office and issued an executive order barring censorship by federal government employees, the FBI set out to do just that.
In mid-December, according to documents obtained by The Intercept, Ted Hunt, a senior policy adviser to the FBI crime lab, approached the president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences — the nation’s premiere umbrella organization for scientists, academics, and attorneys practicing, researching, and litigating forensic science issues — with complaints and a demand.
According to the documents, Hunt argued that the AAFS should excise certain references to the FBI from two workshops scheduled for the organization’s annual conference, to be held later this month in Baltimore. One of the apparently offensive presentations was titled, “Taking on the FBI.”
In an email memo addressed to the AAFS Board of Directors, the chair of the conference workshops wrote that Hunt also complained about one of the workshop presenters, a former DNA analyst turned defense expert named Tiffany Roy who regularly challenges the work of front-line DNA practitioners working in government labs across the country, including at the FBI. According to the memo, Hunt told AAFS representatives, including its board president, that the agency was upset that Roy would be given any platform at the conference.
If the AAFS failed to take action, sources told The Intercept, Hunt told the Academy brass that the FBI, whose forensics leaders and front-line practitioners regularly attend the gathering, would boycott the organization’s famed annual meeting.
Hunt did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the FBI said that the agency “did not make any threats nor consequences” and that it “did not seek to censure any speaker nor have them deplatformed.”
The FBI said that it merely “brought to the attention” of the AAFS material mentioning the FBI that “seemingly violated AAFS’s own bylaws.” Specifically, the agency pointed to a section of the Academy’s Code of Ethics and Conduct that states that no member or affiliate of the Academy “shall issue public statements that appear to represent the position of the Academy” without first obtaining permission from the AAFS board.
It is hard to see, however, how that section could apply to conference materials. The Academy routinely issues disclaimers about the content of conference presentations as not necessarily representing the Academy itself. Moreover, the FBI statement elided the first section of the Code of Ethics and Conduct, which says that every member of the Academy “shall refrain from exercising professional or personal conduct adverse to the best interests and objectives of the Academy,” including to “improve the practice, elevate the standards, and advance the cause of the forensic sciences.”
The workshops at issue had been fully vetted by the Academy as part of its rigorous conference-program acceptance process, and the relevant details already published online. But documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the AAFS Board of Directors — made up of influential members of the forensic science and legal communities — agreed that their organization should ask the presenters to scrub the offending references to the FBI and that if the presenters failed to do so, that their workshops should be canceled.
At least two members of the Academy leadership went so far as to suggest that the organization should apologize to the FBI for offending it. One opined that he didn’t think Roy, a full member of the Academy, should be allowed to present at all.
News of the incident spread quickly among AAFS’s large but tight-knit community. Some suggested parallels to Trump’s promises of retribution for his, and his administration’s, perceived enemies. The incident has also raised concerns that the Academy, whose vision and mission are to “promote justice for all” and to “elevate the standards and advance the cause of forensic sciences,” would seemingly abandon its critical focus in favor of a position of fealty to the FBI.
The AAFS’s current president, psychiatrist Christopher Thompson, did not respond to The Intercept’s repeated requests for comment.
Within the world of forensic science, the FBI’s laboratory has enjoyed an elevated status as a premiere facility — even though it has simultaneously endured criticism, as past practices in some forensic disciplines have been pilloried in the criminal legal system. In short, the FBI lab is not immune to the issues that have long plagued forensic science writ large. To date, false or misleading forensic evidence has been implicated in nearly 30 percent of the nation’s wrongful convictions.
Many consider standard forensic practices — like fingerprint examinations, ballistics and toolmarks comparisons, or blood pattern analysis — to be foolproof. But these practices were developed by law enforcement agencies for law enforcement, and not by scientists first subjecting them to standard, rigorous testing processes designed to ensure they stand on a solid scientific foundation.
That was the dirty little open secret of forensics in the criminal legal system until 2009, when a groundbreaking report from the National Academy of Sciences laid it bare: With the exception of standard DNA analysis, the report read, “no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.”
These criticisms were reiterated, even more bluntly, in a 2016 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST, which concluded that so-called pattern-matching practices — where an analyst examines a piece of evidence, say a bloody fingerprint found at a crime scene, and tries to match it to a sample from a suspect — were lacking sufficient scientific foundation. “Without appropriate estimates of accuracy, an examiner’s statement that two samples are similar — or even distinguishable — is scientifically meaningless: It has no probative value and considerable potential for prejudicial impact.”
These and other brutal assessments of long-standing forensic practices hit the community hard. Some practitioners took the findings to heart and quickly set themselves on a path to shore up the foundation of their disciplines. Still others dug in or pushed back — including in the Department of Justice. Shortly after the PCAST report was released, Loretta Lynch, who served as attorney general during Obama’s second term as president, publicly dismissed the concerns raised and recommendations outlined in the report.
A former front-line prosecutor in Kansas City, Missouri, Hunt served on the National Commission on Forensic Science, where he voted against even modest reforms, like reining in language that analysts use in their reports and court testimony to ensure they aren’t overstating the science or the significance of their findings. After assuming office in 2017, the first Trump administration essentially shuttered the NCFS, and instead Hunt was installed as the head of its quasi-successor, the vaguely named “forensic science working group.”
Hunt has remained inside the Justice Department since then. While he occasionally defended the forensics status quo quite staunchly during Trump’s first presidency, during Biden’s term in office he seemed to maintain a much lower profile — at least until the administration’s waning days, when he approached AAFS leadership about squelching negative mention of the FBI in conference materials.
There are two workshops that have apparently offended the oddly sensitive FBI. One, known as Workshop 19, is titled “Unmasking the Evidence: How Defense Experts Prevented Wrongful Convictions.” According to the workshop description, the point of the four-hour session is to “highlight the challenges faced by legal professionals who may lack the scientific background needed to assess forensic evidence accurately” and to highlight the “critical role that defense experts play in preventing wrongful convictions” by scrutinizing the work of the prosecution’s forensic experts.
Within that workshop was a scheduled 45-minute talk titled “Taking on the FBI.” Among the “educational objectives” outlined by the workshop organizers was to explore “the impact of prestigious institutions like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on perceptions of evidence credibility.”
The second offending presentation, involving forensic document examination and known as Workshop 25, was titled “Death of an ‘Expert’ Witness: Discrediting Document Examiners Who Violate Acknowledged Standards or Binding Laboratory Policies or Who Express Handwriting Opinions With Low Levels of Certitude.” This workshop included an hourlong talk about how the work of a particular document examiner was discredited in a California civil case (the examiner at issue was not an FBI lab employee), along with a separate 20-minute talk titled “How the FBI Has Failed to Enforce Its Own Explicit Standards Applicable to Handwriting Comparison and Improperly Restricts the Use of Blind Verification in Handwriting Cases,” to be delivered by D. Michael Risinger, a veteran law school professor and expert in evidentiary matters.
According to an email memo to the AAFS board by Kevin Kulbacki, a document examiner and the chair of the Academy’s conference workshop committee, the FBI contacted the Academy after the workshop program was published to complain about “the content of these workshops and mentions explicitly of the FBI that were not made by FBI staff.” Kulbacki wrote that on December 16, 2024, he and other members of AAFS leadership took a 30-minute call with Hunt to hear the agency’s concerns.
Regarding the mentions of the FBI in Workshop 19, Kulbacki opined that they aren’t even disparaging of the FBI. “It is common sense that prestigious organizations like the FBI affect perceptions of evidence credibility,” he wrote. “This isn’t controversial, and it takes one look at past discredited methodologies and case failures to see this.” The mentions of the FBI in the workshop “are valid criticism that the Academy should welcome as promoting justice for all and integrity through forensic science, even if potentially uncomfortable conversations arise. This is how we, as a field, get better by acknowledging and addressing issues.”
Where Workshop 25 was concerned, Kulbacki acknowledged that the references to a particular document examiner and to the failures of the FBI’s questioned documents unit “are certainly more antagonistic,” and he suggested that perhaps the Academy should ask the workshop organizers to remove the examiner’s name and to retitle Risinger’s talk to omit direct reference to the FBI in favor of the more anodyne “How an organization has failed” to enforce its own handwriting comparison standards.
“The point is that the FBI’s primary concerns are not with the content of the Workshops but with one of the people associated with one of the Workshops.”
However, Kulbacki was also clear that “99% of the specific complaints raised by the FBI” were about Tiffany Roy, one of the organizers of and presenters in Workshop 19. Kulbacki recalled that Hunt complained about something Roy said during the 2024 AAFS conference in Denver — the gist of which was that real forensic science reform would begin once the old guard, so wedded to past ways of doing things, had passed on. Hunt also took issue with comments she’d posted on LinkedIn regarding the questionable testimony of an FBI DNA analyst in a case where she was serving as a defense expert. (The prosecution ultimately decided against having the FBI’s expert testify in court.)
Kulbacki also noted that the “FBI voiced displeasure at Mrs. Roy’s efforts to hold the FBI” to the standards detailed in a new report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology regarding DNA analysis that seek to mitigate the impact of human biases. Roy was a member of the working group that developed and authored the “Forensic DNA Interpretation and Human Factors” report.
The FBI’s specific grievances about Roy were unwarranted, Kulbacki opined. “The point is that the FBI’s primary concerns are not with the content of the Workshops but with one of the people associated with one of the Workshops,” he wrote. “That is not and should not be grounds for a threat by AAFS of content removal simply because they don’t like someone affiliated with the workshop.” (Emphasis in original.)
“This needs to be a far more nuanced decision than giving the FBI their wish carte blanche.”
Kulbacki wrote that workshop vetting is designed as a blind process to keep such biases out of the mix. “By ensuring that reviewers are unaware of the authors’ backgrounds, blind reviews focus solely on the quality, relevance, and rigor of the content, leading to fairer and more objective evaluations.” Both workshops at issue went through this process, Kulbacki wrote. “I am not here to tell you, the Board of Directors, how you should act” on Hunt’s complaints, he wrote but said that he would be “remiss if I, as the Workshop Chair … did not firmly voice that this needs to be a far more nuanced decision than giving the FBI their wish carte blanche.”
On December 17, the AAFS board voted unanimously (with one member absent) to ask the organizers of the two workshops to censor their presentations or face cancellation. Two members of the board also suggested an apology to the FBI might be in order. “This will go a long way in mending fences,” one board member suggested in an email. Kulbacki’s memo — with all its context regarding Hunt’s complaints — was sent to the board in the wake of their vote. It is unclear whether the full board knew all the details before casting their votes, and minutes from the meeting are brief and spare. Still, it appears Kulbacki’s memo did not give the members any pause about carrying out their plan.
In a statement to The Intercept, the FBI denied that it acted to censor or deplatform anyone and said “there was no discussion” of the Human Factors report.
Kulbacki declined to comment. But sources have confirmed for The Intercept that at least one other Academy member on the call with Hunt verified the details of the conversation memorialized in Kulbacki’s email.
The situation infuriates Andrew Sulner, an attorney and document examiner who is one of the organizers of Workshop 25. He first caught wind that something peculiar was going on when he received an email from the Academy’s executive director a day after the board vote, letting him know that Christopher Thompson, the organization’s president, wanted to have a “short conversation” with him.
Sulner said Thompson told him that Hunt wanted mention of the FBI removed from Risinger’s presentation to “avoid having a title memorialized in print and online that disparages the FBI,” he recalled. Thompson also suggested that removing mention of the agency “would maintain ‘congeniality,’ but I informed him that congeniality has nothing to do with such a request,” Sulner said. Risinger’s presentation was solely about the questioned documents unit of the FBI lab “and not some other crime lab, and that’s why the FBI should be mentioned in the title,” Sulner said he told Thompson.
“They’re operating as a trade union for prosecutors and law enforcement.”
Sulner said he was appalled to see the organization “buckle under pressure from the FBI — but that’s what they do, and that’s the problem. They’re operating as a trade union for prosecutors and law enforcement,” he said, and less like the scientific organization they’re supposed to be. “It is unacceptable and violates the long-standing educational mission of the Academy, which is to improve forensic sciences by promoting good practices and exposing bad practices, period.”
Sulner and his co-organizer, who is also on the AAFS board, agreed to several small changes to their workshop language, but Risinger refused to remove the FBI from the title of his talk and instead opted to pull his presentation from the workshop. For his part, Risinger said that the incident underscores the main point of his presentation — and the underlying paper on the same topic that he intends to publish this year. Risinger said he’ll be using “the history of this development, that would not allow me to have the ‘FBI’ in the title, in the article that I’m writing as more evidence of the extreme nature of the cultural problem at the FBI laboratory.”
“You’ve got censorship on the one hand and an unwarranted revenge campaign on the other.”
Sulner also takes issue with the complaints Hunt made about Roy. He said that he sees the effort to muzzle Roy as vindictive. “I see the requests to excise references to the FBI and to silence Tiffany Roy as raising two separate issues, both very troubling,” he said. “You’ve got censorship on the one hand and an unwarranted revenge campaign on the other.”
In response to the AAFS vote in favor of Hunt’s complaints, Roy and her fellow workshop organizer, also a former DNA analyst, removed the portion of the workshop titled “Taking on the FBI,” which her co-organizer was slated to present, and tweaked the workshop objectives to remove mention of the FBI.
Still, after learning about Hunt’s personal complaints about her, Roy penned a lengthy email of her own to the AAFS board accusing them, in part, of disparate treatment.
In the run-up to the 2024 conference, Roy had approached Academy leadership with technical concerns she had regarding a particular workshop. Specifically, she alleged that the workshop presenters would be providing inaccurate instruction on an emerging field of DNA analysis, but her concerns were summarily dismissed. In contrast, she noted the board appeared to jump through hoops to address Hunt’s concerns — without ever reaching out to her or her co-presenter. And she noted the irony in their actions regarding the decision to excise the “FBI” from the educational objective in Workshop 19 that references exploring the impact of institutions like the agency’s lab on the perceived credibility of forensic evidence. “You all are putting on a MASTERCLASS on exploring the impacts of prestigious institutions like the FBI and I cannot WAIT to present this series of events during our workshop,” she wrote.
In response to Roy’s email, the AAFS board has offered her 10 minutes to speak during one of its scheduled meetings during the Baltimore conference.
For Roy, the incident also points to another serious flaw in the way forensic sciences are deployed in the criminal legal system: Control over forensics and crime labs is largely left in the hands of law enforcement agencies — like the FBI — with little to no independence, which hinders efforts to ensure fidelity to science comes first. One of the as-yet unfulfilled recommendations of the 2009 NAS report was that labs should exist as independent government entities out from under the thumb of police or prosecutor oversight.
“The actions of the FBI in their effort to silence me as an advocate for oversight underscore the dangers of governmental control of the forensic sciences,” she wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Only when science is independent and objective can it serve truth or justice. Science beholden to an adversarial entity is a pawn in a game with no winners.”
The ongoing trial of Chelsea footballer Sam Kerr has thrown up an ongoing issue with the Met Police in their pursuit of racially-related charges. Kerr was travelling in a taxi with her partner when she claims that the driver locked the cab and started speeding and swerving. Kerr told the court that she was “terrified” as her and her partner attempted to escape being “held hostage.”
‘Very dangerous and very erratic’
The Guardian recounted Sam Kerr’s statement to the court:
She said he [the taxi driver] “instantly starting screaming after putting the window up” and it “became very dangerous and very erratic”. Kerr said the car was going “dramatically faster than before” and that it was “swerving in and out of lanes”.
Sam Kerr explained that her partner, Kristie Mewis, was also scared:
She was very distressed, crying, quite emotional to be honest and scared. It made me more scared, because I realised how serious the situation was, but it also put me in protection mode for her.
The two then began to kick at the windows in an attempt to leave the cab.
Why, then, would Kerr be the one who ended up arrested?
When a police officer cast doubt as to whether Kerr and her partner were actually being held hostage, Sam Kerr is believed to have called the officer:
fucking stupid and white.
Kerr is accused of racially aggravated harassment because of this comment and, importantly, denies the charges.
Sam Kerr and her experiences of racism growing up
Sam Kerr recounted that as a white Anglo-Indian she has experienced racism throughout her life:
At school, I experienced being in situations where teacher had instigated that I was the troublemaker, or had started trouble.
Kerr also explained that she has had constant experiences with racism on social media, and in person. Kerr’s account is one that will be familiar for people of colour. A traumatising ordeal which, when escalated to figures of authority is compounded with racist treatment.
The officer in question, PC Lovell, only reported his upset at being called “stupid and white” 11 months after the incident. As the Guardian reported:
It was revealed that the Crown Prosecution Service, the body which has the final say on whether a criminal prosecution can go ahead in England and Wales, initially decided against charging Kerr as the evidence did not meet the required threshold.
But the CPS decided to charge her with racially aggravated intentional harassment after a second statement was provided by Lovell in December 2023, 11 months after the incident.
Sam Kerr explained that she was in “a scared and distressed state.” She did also express her regret at how she articulated herself but said:
I feel the message was still relevant.
She also emphasised that she believed officers at the station treated her differently because of:
what they perceived to be the colour of my skin.
Sam Kerr and the trial: a familiar story
The trial is still ongoing, and it remains to be seen how the court will deal with Sam Kerr’s charges. However, already we can see how sympathy and the benefit of the doubt from authority figures is the preserve of white people. From Kerr’s own account, we see a person who has dealt with racism all her life put in a difficult and distressing situation. Then, while in a vulnerable moment, describing police treatment as it appeared to be.
What business does the Met Police have in pursuing charges of racial harassment against a white cop? Just a few months ago, the Met Police were heavily criticised for pursuing charges of a racially aggravated public order offence against Marieha Hussain for calling Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman coconuts on a protest placard. Hussain was found not guilty, but only after a media firestorm where racism was hotly debated by people ill-equipped to do
The Met Police have been found to be institutionally misogynist and racist. It’s little wonder that Sam Kerr was apprehensive at how she may be treated after a distressing situation. Kerr may well have been rude and abrupt, but it simply isn’t possible to be racist to a white person. And, given the context of widespread misogyny and racism, it’s entirely reasonable for someone to be wary of their treatment as a woman of colour in a police station.
Whatever the outcome of the trial, if PC Lovell is still feeling upset might we suggest the advice of one UK judge who told a Muslim man to “rise above” racism during the race riots of 2023?
Diane Wilson had heard rumors for months that Exxon might be coming to Point Comfort, Texas, which sits on the Gulf Coast south of Galveston. She recalls whispers about the global behemoth hiring local electricians and negotiating railroad access. Two days before Christmas, the first confirmation quietly arrived: an application for tax subsidies to build an $8.6 billion plastics manufacturing plant.
Wilson found the news particularly alarming. She has spent years fighting to clean up pollution from another petrochemical plant and won a $50 million settlement against its owners, Formosa, in 2019. Exxon would build its proposed facility across from that factory and discharge waste into the same waterways Wilson has spent decades fighting to protect.
“We have been cleaning the piss out of [Cox Creek], and this is the very place where Exxon is going to try to put its plastics plant,” Wilson, who lives in nearby Seadrift, said of the facility’s potential location. “You see this nightmare of another plant, trying to do the very same thing.”
Exxon’s proposal calls for a steam cracker, a facility that uses oil and natural gas to make ethylene and propylene — the chemical building blocks of plastic. Factories like this produce and sell plastic pellets, called nurdles, to other manufacturers who turn them into intermediary or final goods, like bottles and packaging. Besides ethylene and propylene, steam crackers produce climate pollution and hazardous chemicals like ammonia, benzene, toluene, and methanol.
“It looks like a big facility,” Alexandra Shaykevich, research manager for the Environmental Integrity Project, which tracks fossil fuel development, said of the plan Exxon has dubbed the Coastal Plain Project. But she said that because much of the application was redacted and the company hasn’t made a public announcement, few details are available. “We’re going to be looking at this one closely.”
Beyond the Formosa plant, Point Comfort is home to a nitrile factory, a plastics facility, and a Superfund site. Several other industrial sites dot the coast around Galveston. Many of them sit alongside communities, and previous analyses have shown that steam crackers in particular are disproportionately sited near marginalized groups. According to an environmental justice mapping tool from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than half of Point Comfort residents are people of color, more than half have less than a high school diploma, and more than half of households speak limited English.
“They talk about a sacrifice zone — this is the real deal,” said Wilson.
Exxon filed for tax subsidies from the Calhoun County Independent School District under the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation, or JETI, Act, which uses tax incentives to lure businesses to the state. Lawmakers passed that law in 2023 to replace an earlier tax-break program that critics said undermined school finances and amounted to “corporate welfare.”
Cattle graze outside the Formosa Plastics facility in Point Comfort, Texas. The operation has long released pollution into the air and a nearby creek, and some in town worry the factory Exxon may build there will do the same. Courtesy of Diane Wilson
Exxon wrote in its application that it plans to apply for more abatements from the county, groundwater conservation district, and port authority. In return, it argued, the facility would create 300 jobs during its first five years in operation. Construction would begin next year and, once it’s operating at full capacity in 2032, Exxon says the operation will raise the state’s economic output by $3.6 billion a year.
“These tax incentives have become one of the early battles in these facilities,” said Robin Schneider, executive director Texas Campaign for the Environment, an advocacy organization. She estimates that Exxon could get about $250 million in local tax breaks over a 10-year period — almost $1 million per job.
“Why is this massively profitable business getting this money from taxpayers?” she asked. Exxon brought in $33.7 billion last year, on record-high production, and distributed more money to shareholders than ever before.
School district officials did not respond to requests for comment and, in an email, County Judge (the title given to county administrators in Texas) Vern Lyssy did not answer specific questions, only repeated the language used in Exxon’s statement. A county commissioner, Joel Behrens, expressed support for Exxon and the economic development it could bring, comparing the opportunity to his positive experiences with Formosa. “If they were to pick this area to come to, they’d probably be just as good a neighbor as Formosa,” he said. “They’ve helped the county out when the county needed help.”
Exxon did not respond to questions about the pollution a new steam cracker might create. Company spokesperson Lauren Kight said the application for tax subsidies in Calhoun County does not mean Exxon has committed to building there. The company indicated in its JETI filing that its focus was on “the U.S. Gulf Coast” but that it is still considering other locations, including abroad. “The Gulf Coast presents tremendous advantages,” said Kight, but it’s “very early in our evaluation process.”
The proposal comes at a time of booming growth for the plastics industry, and for the pollution that it inevitably creates. The world produces about 57 million metric tons of plastic pollution every year, according to a study published in September in the journal Nature. World leaders have spent the past two and a half years negotiating a United Nations treaty to “end plastic pollution,” and at least 69 countries say they want to do that by limiting how much is created in the first place.
Plants like the one Exxon is planning are “the absolute opposite direction we should be going,” said Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency official and president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics. She worries that this facility, like others, would spew pollution for decades. “Once these things are built, it’s hard to get them to stop operating.”
Setting aside the environmental argument, financial analysts say it’s imprudent to investin more plastic production. All three credit rating agencies have issued warnings over expanding fossil fuel and plastics infrastructure, including one from Standard & Poor’s in 2021 that cited oversupply of petrochemicals, protests from local residents, and “surging global pressure to reduce carbon emissions as well as chemical and plastic pollution worldwide.”
Nurdles in Cox Creek, behind a Formosa Plastics facility.
Courtesy of Diane Wilson
Abhishek Sinha, an energy finance analyst for the nonprofit Institute for Environmental Economics and Financial Analysis, said that while the Trump administration may be ushering in a period of lax regulation for polluting industries, the petrochemical sector is in “structural decline” — as shown by the poor returns Shell’s chemicals division and Formosa Plastics recently reported.
“I think it’s going to be the same story that’s being told again and again,” Sinha said, referring to Exxon’s proposed steam cracker. “This is not going to be a positive value-add project for them; it’s going to be detrimental to the equity holders in the long run.”
Kight did not directly address these concerns but said that Exxon would “continue to evaluate the market conditions before we make a decision.”
For Wilson, Exxon’s proposal feels like déjà vu. More than three decades ago, the Taiwanese petrochemical conglomerate Formosa proposed its plant, just miles from the Gulf of Mexico, where Wilson’s family had been shrimpers for generations. Her fight against the company started with hunger strikes to protest its permits and eventually became a lawsuit over the exact outcomes she had feared.
Wilson and local environmental groups collected tens of thousands of nurdles from Lavaca Bay and nearby waterways like Cox Creek, and alleged that Formosa had illegally dumped them along with other pollutants. Her $50 million settlement is the largest award in a citizen suit against an industrial polluter in the history of the federal Clean Water Act.
The settlement funded dozens of projects, including cleaning up waterways, and provided $20 million for a fishing cooperative aimed at helping rebuild that battered industry. But Wilson worries another mega-factory coming to the area would undermine that work.
“Where Exxon is going to put their bloody plant is smack-dab in front of one of the largest oyster farms in Texas,” said Wilson, who is not convinced that any plastics factory can operate without polluting. She noted that Formosa has already violated its settlement agreement nearly 800 times, racking up over $25 million in fines. “Exxon is going to be exactly like Formosa.”
Wilson considers the fact that Exxon could still decide not to build in Calhoun County an opportunity to resist, and plans to fight the company at every step of the process.
“A lot of people over the years have asked me what my one regret is, and I always say: ‘I didn’t try hard enough to stop Formosa,’” reflected Wilson. This time, she said, “I will do everything I can, for as long as I live, to stop that plant from coming in.”
On Friday, Ed Martin, the interim head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington, fired around 30 government attorneys who had been hired to work on January 6 cases.
In an email on Friday announcing the dismissals — one of a string of missives at all hours sent in the early days of the administration — Martin cited an attached memo from acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove offering up a legal justification for the firings.
Martin highlighted language in the memo that widened a Trump administration investigation into January 6 charges to include how the January 6 prosecutors were hired and instructed employees of the Justice Department office to hang onto potential evidence.
“Finally, the circumstances of the conversions are the subject of an ongoing inquiry at the Justice Department including pursuant to President Trump’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order entitled, ‘Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government,’” said the section of Bove’s memo cited by Martin. “Please take all steps necessary to preserve all records, including documents, emails, text messages, and other electronic communications, relating to the conversions and other personnel decisions regarding attorneys hired to support casework relating to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
The firings may appear to be the culmination of a yearslong effort by Martin, a “Stop the Steal” organizer, to advocate for the January 6 defendants. In addition to calling for charges to be dropped, Martin helped lead a group that fundraised for the defendants. (Martin did not respond to mulitple requests for comment.)
The inquiry indicates that the terminations, however, aren’t the end of Martin’s campaign. He has also called for cash reparations for January 6 defendants and — ominously, for the subjects of the investigation — demanded jail time for those responsible for bringing the charges in the first place.
“We have to find & throw in jail the person in Biden’s Administration who ordered the 1512(c) prosecutions of peaceful J6 defendants,” he tweeted in December 2023, referring to a statute used in many January 6 cases.
During a June 2024 podcast episode, Martin said the upcoming election was crucial to ensuring hundreds of Democrats would be jailed for their conduct regarding January 6 prosecutions.
“These people that perpetrated these sets of lies, they used their government office to do it, and that’s against the law,” he said. “And there needs to be accountability.”
For years, Martin’s advocacy for January 6 defendants has centered on D.C. federal prosecutors’ use of 18 U.S. Code 1512(c)(2), a statute that comes with a maximum 20-year prison sentence for anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”
In June, the Supreme Court ruled the cases were outside the scope of the statute. In an internal memo to staff sent on January 27, which was obtained by The Intercept and previously reported on by CNN, Martin referred to his investigation into prosecutors’ use of 1512 as a “special project.” “Obviously, the use was a great failure of our office – S. Ct. decision – and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Martin wrote in the memo.
Martin asked for all information surrounding the cases and the decisions behind them, including involvement from people who had already left the office.
Martin — who once resigned as the Missouri governor’s chief of staff amid controversy spurred by, among other things, his deletion of emails to avoid public records requests — reminded employees to compile all records of their involvement in using 1512.
“Please be proactive – if you have nothing, tell the co-chairs,” he wrote, referering to the officials he’d named to lead the investigation into the use of 1512. “Failure to do so strikes me as insubordinate.”
Until recently, Martin served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a group that raised money and provided legal defense for January 6 defendants. An online archive of the group’s website lists Martin as a board member as recently as January 29.
Patriot Freedom Project’s site pushes conspiracy theories, sells January 6-related merchandise, and features a database of defendants, with links to their fundraising platforms and information on which prison they were in. Shortly after the 2024 election, the Gettr account for the group reposted a status saying: “All January 6 prosecutors should be removed. YOU’RE FIRED!”
For members and supporters of the Patriot Freedom Project, the January 6 defendants are heroes. Martin has said that those who participated in the Capitol riot should be lionized, not condemned.
Martin explained in a June 2024 episode of the Tea Party Power Hour podcast that January 6 defendants should be “actually revered.” He said he hopes in the future that they will be recognized as “a pawn in a bitter struggle between forces of darkness for our country, and therefore we will remember you with a certain fondness. And we help you get jobs, and we help your kids go to college, and we help your family recover.”
“I want reparations for the January 6 defendants. They were pawns of a government scheme,” Martin continued. “I think that these families should be protected, they should be honored.”
By that point, Martin had spent months advocating for compensation for January 6 defendants.
“I have finally come around to reparations,” Martin said in another podcast on January 2024. “I believe that everyone who has been targeted on January 6, they should get a big pot of money, like the asbestos money we got for asbestos victims.”
Martin has suggested the rioters were pushed to violence by the state, thus absolving them of their actions.
A year before Trump’s reelection, Martin vowed to keep fighting for the January 6 defendants even if they were pardoned.
“I’m not quitting when we get pardons for everybody,” Martin said on a November 2023 podcast. “We gotta be here for the long haul for these families that got really, really mistreated.”
Martin added that no one in U.S. history had been so mistreated “since probably the Civil War,” when soldiers did not receive regular paychecks.
Waking up, day after day, and seeing continuous disasters visited upon the Palestinian people forecasts a day of facing the light at an increasingly dark level. It is impossible to be unaware of the genocide; yet an entire nation reinforces it. The American people are disposed to the sufferings its government inflicts upon others.
Election of an authoritarian to the highest office, who appoints cabinet positions with qualifications that require little experience in government affairs and extensive experience in extramarital affairs, completes the mystification. Elise Stefanik, selected as America’s representative to the United Nations, agrees to the proposition that “Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank.” Shuddering! Doesn’t qualification for a cabinet position require knowledge that the bible does not determine right and that the Earth is round and not flat? Hopefully, UN security guards will bar entry of her and other vocal terrorists into the UN building.
Maintaining the Declaration of Independence and Constitution will be a battle. Refusing to have the Old Testament on a night table and the Ten Commandments on the living room wall will be challenging . Knowing that America is in a dystopia, “livin’ a vida loca,” will be difficult to absorb. These are not the principal problems that prevent America from being great again. The principal problem in the United States is a government that has been unable to resolve its problems. For decades, a multitude of problems have surfaced, talked about, and been ignored. Suggestions for solutions are cast aside as empty words ─ U.S. governments are only interested in donor offerings and contributing lobbyists; attention to the people’s problems is time consuming and not remunerative.
Look at the extensive record of problems, which has been growing for decades and have some obvious solutions. After these crisp answers, I might elaborate on them in forthcoming articles.
(1) Social Security
The ready to collapse Social Security system has present earners paying for retired workers and closely resembles a national pension plan. Instead of having workers and corporations pay FICA taxes, why not collect revenue from income and corporation taxes and finance a real national pension plan?
(2) Gun Violence
Decades of gun violence and shootings in schools have been succeeded by decades of gun violence and shootings in schools. An idea ─ get rid of the guns; nobody will miss them.
(3) Climate Change
In the 1964 presidential contest between Senator Goldwater and President Johnson, Goldwater posed as the “war hawk,” ready to pounce on the North Vietnamese. Johnson’s famous phrase was, “I’ll not have American boys do what Vietnamese boys should do.” After Johnson won the presidency and had “American boys do what Vietnamese boys should do,” Goldwater voters reminded everyone, “They told me if I voted for Goldwater our military intervention in Vietnam would greatly increase. I voted for Goldwater and they were correct.”
In all elections, voters are reminded that voting Republican enhances global warming. In all elections that the Democrats won, those who voted Republican noted that global warming continued to increase.
(4) Government debt
Mention government debt and blood boils ─ another of those internalized issues, courtesy of the mind manipulators. Government debt is the result of problems and not the problem. The problems are (1) Income taxes are too low to finance meaningful government projects; (2) The military spending is too high and; (3) The economy runs on debt and government debt rescues a faltering economy. Give attention to the real problems and government debt will be greatly reduced.
(5) War
Since its official inception in 1789, the United States has attached itself to war in almost every day of its existence. Not widely mentioned and not widely apparent, U.S. forces are still shooting it up in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and parts of Africa. U.S. arms explode throughout the world. U.S. involvement in the genocide of the Palestinian people is inescapable. Americans do not know they prosper on the degradation of others and they survive well because others do not survive at all. While intending to end all wars, President Trump may learn that the U.S. cannot progress without war; war is a preventive for economic and social collapse in all 50 states.
(6) Immigration
Immigration to the United States has become a political football. Political correctness, catering to voters, and ultra-Right nationalism vs. ultra-Left internationalism have strangled an intelligent and objective analysis of a major issue, which is not immigration. The major issue is that the U.S. has supported oligarchies in Latin American nations. These oligarchies have created significant social and economic problems, which the disenfranchised relieve by fleeing to America’s shores. Uncontrolled emigration to the United States skews nations from their natural growth and conveniently deters them from seeking approaches to resolve their problems. The U.S. contributes to the emigration problem and should resolve the problem and not perpetuate it. Wouldn’t it be beneficial for all countries, including the United States, if the Latinos did not have the urge to emigrate?
(7) International terrorism
The September 11, 2001 attack – the first aerial bombings on American soil – compelled the United States government to wage a War on Terrorism. After more than twenty years of this battle, the U.S. has neither won the war nor totally contained terrorism; just the opposite ─ terrorism has grown in size, geographical extent, and power. Observe Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, and all of North Africa. One reason for this contradiction is obvious; the initial source of international terrorism is Israel’s terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza. The U.S. blends its battle against terrorism with preservation of American global interests. Each blended component contradicts the other and creates confusing missions in the U.S. War on Terrorism.
(8) Economy
A roller coaster American economy of accelerated growth and gasping recessions flattened itself with slow but steady growth in the Democratic administrations that succeeded the George W. Bush recession. Now we have Donald J. Trump, who claims he had the greatest economy ever, when all presidents had, in their times, the greatest economy ever, and previous administrations had more rapid growth and captured much more of world production. By proposing lower taxes, lower interest rates, and blistering tariffs, Trump is heading the U.S. into massive speculation, heightened debt, increased inflation, a falling dollar, and a return to a 19th century economy of robber barons, boom-and-bust, financial bankruptcies, and a drastic “beggar thy neighbor” policy. His sink China policy will sink the United States. America will no longer have friendly neighbors and might become the beggar.
(9) Racism
The United States consists of a mixture of several cultures and has no unique culture. People feel comfortable in their own culture and attach themselves to others and to institutions that reflect that culture. In a competitive society, this extends to gaining economic advantage and security by dominating other cultures. Social, political, and economic agendas use racism to promote this strategy and maintain domination.
Competition between cultures, manifested as racism, is built into the American socio-economic system. Political, legal, and educational methods have ameliorated racism and have not abolished its corrosive effects. Slow progress to an integrated and unified culture, decades away, might finally resolve the problem of racism.
(10) Health Care
Health care is posed as a financial problem, insufficient funds to treat all equally. Health care is a socio-economic problem, where statistics show that nations having the most unequal distribution of income have the most maladjusted health care. More equal distribution of income is a key to adequate health care for all.
(11) Political Divide
Connie Morella, previous representative from Maryland’s 8th congressional district, enjoyed saying, “I sit and serve in the people’s house,” a phrase echoed by many congressionals. No people or sitters exist in the “people’s house.” Representatives stand for the special interest groups, Lobbies, and Political Action Committees (PAC) that donate to their campaigns and assure their return to office. The two political Parties stand united against the wants of the other and the political divide leads to political stagnation. Whatever Gilda wants, Gilda does not get. America coasts on a frictionless surface of contracting previous legislation and inaction, which is its preferred method of government.
(12) Foreign Policy
All administrations, the present included, have had foreign policies driven by two words, “empire expansion.” Until now, the U.S. has sought markets and resources and financed the expansion from its own banks. Donald trump seeks expansion by real estate maneuvers and seeks to have foreign sources finance the expansion. This emperor has no clothes and will bankrupt the U.S. in the same manner as he bankrupted his real estate enterprises.
(13) Drug Addiction
The epidemic drug addiction problem summarizes the attention given to most other national problems — despite a century of organized efforts to subdue the problem, “New numbers show drug abuse is getting worse across the country and in every community. Overdose deaths have never been higher and opioids and synthetic drugs are major contributors to the rising numbers.” President Nixon popularized the term “war on drugs,” but his administration’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 had an antecedent in the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914.
Blaming China for supplying fentanyl ingredients to Mexican manufacturers, only one part of the total drug economy, does not change the source of the drug addiction and provides no resolution to the problem. Looking elsewhere, at nations where drug addiction is minor or has been alleviated is a start. Japan has a “strong social stigma against drug use, and some of the strictest drug laws globally; Iceland responded to high rates of teen substance abuse with “a comprehensive program that included increased funding for organized sports, music, and art programs, as well as a strictly enforced curfew for teens;” Singapore’s “notoriously strict drug laws have resulted in some of the lowest addiction rates in the world, including a zero-tolerance approach to drug use and trafficking, with mandatory death penalties for certain drug offenses;” Sweden “combines strict laws with a comprehensive rehabilitation approach in a ‘caring society’ model that emphasizes treatment and social support over punishment. Time Magazine recommends another approach.
…history exposes the truth: the drug war isn’t winnable, as the Global Commission on Drug Policy stated in 2011. And simply legalizing marijuana is not enough. Instead only a wholesale rethinking of drug policy—one that abandons criminalization and focuses on true harm reduction, not coercive rehabilitation—can begin to undo the damage of decades of a misguided “war.”
Skewing the GDP
Replacing a building destroyed in a catastrophe augments the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in four ways — housing and helping those affected by the catastrophe, responding to mitigating the catastrophe, tearing down the destroyed home, and building a new home. The GDP benefits from the continual and unresolved problems.
Opioid cases generated a cost estimated at $1.5 trillion in the United States for the year 2010.
Gun violence generates over $1 billion in direct health care costs for victims and their families each year.
Climate change during 2011-2020 decade cost $1.5T in losses (Ed: might be debatable).
Health care costs are almost 20 percent of GDP.
The Defense budget for 2025 is $850 billion.
In the disturbing world that is characterizing the United States, a combination of political stagnation, misdirection action, and low level of intellect and knowledge prevents solutions to recurring problems. American nationalists boast about having the highest GDP, not realizing that the boast uses tragedy to disguise more significant tragedies — moral, political, and economic decay of the once mighty USA.
Upside, inside, out
She’s livin’ la vida loca
She’ll push and pull you down
Livin’ la vida loca
Her lips are devil red
And her skin’s the color of mocha
She will wear you out
Livin’ la vida loca
