Hoarfrost still coated the Capitol lawn in Olympia, Washington, as Alfredo Juarez led 16 farmworkers across the grounds to the first of three meetings with lawmakers from the state’s 40th legislative district. The cadre marshaled by Juarez, the campaigns director for the farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, was 1 of 5 making rounds, lobbying policymakers, and inviting them to a people’s tribunal that the union and a partner organization were hosting that afternoon.
For the last 12 years, Familias Unidas and Community to Community Development, an ecofeminist nonprofit that supports farmworkers, have convened a tribunal where farmworkers share the injustices and indignities they face and advocate for policies to improve the well-being of their families and communities. These tribunals started as small affairs that seemed to make little impact on the business occurring at the Capitol, but over the years their influence has grown, and organizers have notched tangible policy victories and gained sway with elected officials.
Rosalinda Guillen, the founder of Community to Community, or C2C, has been an organizer since the 1980s. She has long believed in the importance of participatory democracy, and has convened all kinds of assemblies to bring people together to discuss problems, imagine solutions, and develop strategies to advance them. But as Guillen and her colleagues in C2C continued to reckon with the fact that policymakers were writing laws without engaging affected populations in a meaningful way, they realized that if they wanted to be heard, they’d have to make the hike to Capitol Hill.
Their people’s court has no legal standing. They are overseen not by judges but by women with a track record of trust and leadership in marginalized communities. Their role is to hear testimony, compile a report detailing common and recurring themes, and outline the policies and regulations required to address them.
Past tribunals have helped win guaranteed overtime pay for farmworkers, which the legislature passed in 2021 with support from labor unions and others. They’ve helped press the state Department of Labor and Industries to adopt permanent heat protections that took effect in June 2023, mandating cooling breaks when temperatures top 90 degrees. The tribunal was also instrumental in the creation of the Agricultural and Seasonal Workforce Service Advisory Committee, which provides additional oversight and protection for the state’s seasonal farmworker program.
These accomplishments highlight the effort’s growing political influence and provide a model for organizers beyond Washington. “The tribunal used to be just us in a tiny room,” said Familias Unidas’ political director, Edgar Franks. “And now it’s filled to capacity. We need overflow rooms. And legislators and senators show up. They want to be there and listen and participate.”
This year, at least 60 farmworkers filled the chairs on one side of the hearing room, while some 70 allies and supporters sat in chairs, knelt on the floor, and stood along the walls on the other. Another 40 or so gathered in a nearby church to watch the proceedings on Zoom. Half a dozen legislative staffers attended, listening and taking notes, but state Senator Liz Lovelett, who represents the district where C2C and Familias Unidas are based, was the only lawmaker to attend.
Lovelett has attended four tribunals in the six years she’s been in the senate. Not only does attending them help build trust and credibility with farmworkers, it also helps ensure she can explain to colleagues what these workers are experiencing to “try to underscore the importance of any particular policy,” she said. On a human level, she finds the testimonies powerful. “Can you think of another group of workers that has to ask for things like shade and bathrooms and basic dignity?” Lovelett asked.
Alfredo Juarez’s 14-year-old sister, Alia, skipped school to testify to how this nation’s system of farm labor — a system that Guillen often reminds people is rooted in slavery — impacts her family. With a weary voice, Alia spoke about how, as the eldest daughter still at home, she has to cook and clean and care for her siblings while her parents work long hours for wages that barely support their family. That burden means she struggles to keep up with school, and her youngest sister has taken to calling her “mom.” So what Alia wants is for her parents’ income to reflect how hard they work, so they can spend more time at home.
But beyond the recurring themes of wages and hours, a major point of concern throughout the day was the rising threat of deportation. The state’s Republicans have introduced a bill that would reverse the state law barring police from supporting federal immigration enforcement; the bill would also prohibit cities from adopting policies that create sanctuaries for undocumented people. Throughout their lobbying meetings, the farmworkers called on legislators to vote against it.
In one meeting, Representative Alex Ramel, a Democrat, promised Juarez and his group that the bill had no chance of passing. (Democrats hold a majority in both houses of the legislature.) Juarez translated the assurance into Spanish and Mixteco for the workers around him, and many seemed relieved. As the meeting continued and subjects like rent stabilization and universal health care came up, Ramel said the tribunal and similar gatherings are key to enacting such policies because they demonstrate support and hold officials accountable to their constituents’ demands.
Still, despite the tribunal’s growing influence, Washington is the only state to regularly hold one. But Familias Unidas, which is 1 of just 2 farmworkers’ unions in the country, and C2C supported a binational farmworkers tribunal, hosted by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, in New York last March. It brought together dozens of workers in person and online who work in Canada and the U.S., but come from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, to discuss their shared struggles and how to resolve them.
Guillen attributes the dearth of tribunals to the fact that most states lack farmworkers’ unions and the supporting organizations required to marshal the time, energy, and effort to bring something like this together. People also have to trust the organizers. Guillen and C2C have spent over 20 years building that trust so that people know that C2C will always be there to serve them. The tribunal is just one of the tools they use to do that.
Most people’s tribunals, however, occur as one-off affairs that only resurface if some gross injustice has taken place. But for Guillen, C2C, and Familias Unidas, they have made a commitment to support farmworkers through these forums and others until the workers themselves feel like justice has been delivered. “It’s their vision, it’s their goal, and we’re supporting it to the end,” Guillen said.
“No matter what the political environment, no matter what happens, we’re moving forward together.”
A new report from Amnesty International says “green colonialism” — the appropriation of land and resources for environmental purposes — threatens indigenous Sámi culture in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Written with the input of the Saami Council, a voluntary nongovernmental organization, the report highlights human rights violations connected to Sámi lands being treated like sacrifice zones for global climate goals and green financial interests.
“We see that states continue to promote the same types of industrial activities and exploitation of nature as before, but now under new labels and justifications,” said Saami Council President Per-Olof Nutti. “These processes are often extremely lengthy and complex, leaving the Sámi with little or no opportunity to influence our own future.”
Sámi homelands, known as Sápmi, stretch across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and the report’s authors highlight that climate change threatens Sámi people in two ways: direct environmental impacts, and an increasing number of green energy projects and extractive industries needed for the green transition.
A map of Sápmi, the Sámi homelands that cross through Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
The report focuses on three case studies in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Because of the war in Ukraine, the authors said it was impossible to do research there. In Norway, the Fosen wind farm was greenlit in 2010 without Sámi consent and resulted in legal battles spanning years. In 2021, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the wind farm was unconstitutional; however, turbines are still in operation because of a settlement last year. In Finland, exploration permits to build a mine in Sápmi have angered Sámi leaders, but the Sámi lack the legal mechanisms to protect the area. In Sweden, a nickel mine in Rönnbäcken, in reindeer-herding territory, was given exploration permits starting in 2005. The Sámi say the effort threatens the land essential to herding reindeer, and the long battle has exacerbated racism from non-Sámi locals in the area.
“There are many more,” said Elina Mikola, an Amnesty International researcher. “This development is really worrying, and it’s obvious that there will be more and more of these land-use conflicts in the near future.”
The report’s authors highlight that the Sámi, as Indigenous people, have collective rights that are enshrined in international treaties and law — specifically, the right to self-determination: the right of Indigenous peoples to freely determine their political status and futures through the exercise of free, prior, and informed consent, also known as FPIC. However, the report also reveals that Sweden, Finland, and Norway have failed to adequately implement FPIC and other international laws that would protect Sápmi from exploitation.
The report took three years to complete, partly, because of intersecting laws in different countries. Like many Indigenous communities, Sámi homelands don’t sit squarely within one state’s borders and can span multiple jurisdictions. Mikola said that the report wanted to focus on the Sámi and not individual countries. “It’s a bit of a de-colonial approach because we really wanted to treat the Sámi as all one nation, one area.”
In addition to including FPIC reform, the report recommends Finland, Sweden, and Norway review their regulations and implement laws that strengthen the protection of traditional livelihoods like reindeer herding. The authors also recommend that Sámi people be compensated for their time when consulting with companies and governments — a practice enshrined in international human rights law that would allow the Sámi to maintain cultural traditions.
Spokespersons from Finland, Norway, and Sweden did not respond to requests for comment by publication.
Gaie Delap’s family and friends have released a statement following her release under Home Detention Curfew on Friday 31 January. Gaie Delap, a grandmother, Quaker, and ‘earth defender’ who was sentenced to 20 months in prison for joining a Just Stop Oil action on the M25 in November 2022, was recalled to prison before Christmas after a suitable tag could not be found to allow home monitoring.
On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”
That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction. DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.
“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”
The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison. The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker. He’d only just purchased it as a hunting ground, and it was an easy sell. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.
The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond, and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land.
Some in Letcher County, which saw 5.2 percent of its population leave between 2020 and 2023 and grapples with a 24 percent poverty rate, believe the prison will replace jobs and tax revenue lost with the decline of coal. Federal prison construction has boomed in central Appalachia as mining has faltered, with eight of the 16 penitentiaries built there, often atop mines, located in Kentucky alone.
“Those are all expressions of the economic crisis that has occurred due to the collapse of the coal industry, and for which the prisons and the jails are proposed,” said Judah Schept, a professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University. In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.
Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County is one of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem. The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about two acres of wetlands. (The agency has promised to compensate the state.)
The Federal Bureau of Prisons plans to build a penitentiary on land near Roxana that was leveled by strip mining. A coalition of nonprofits raised $160,000 to buy 63 acres, a move that could force the agency to revise its plans.
Jordan Mazurek
DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia. In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.
Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, and United Keetoowah Band did not respond to requests for comment.
DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there. She is working with the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna.
The plot sits at the edge of the 500-acre site outlined for the prison, which would hold over 1,300 people in the main facility and adjoining camp. A representative of the Bureau of Prisons told Grist land acquisition will continue.
This isn’t the first time the agency has hit such a pothole. Six years ago, Letcher County master falconer Mitch Whitaker refused to sell nearly 12 acres, requiring the agency to revise its plans. The prospect of doing so again led Representative Hal Rogers, who represents the area in Congress and has been the leading champion for the prison, to lambaste ARP and its allies.
“This land purchase comes as no surprise from a group led by Kentucky outsiders and liberal extremists,” he said in a statement.
But many of those on-hand that Wednesday to celebrate the sale were local residents like Artie Ann Bates, who grew up in Letcher County and saw waves of strip mining damage her family’s land. “It’s just really hard seeing a place you love be destroyed,” she said. The purchase is a “sign of progress,” she added, bundled up at the foot of the mine site alongside her neighbors.
Speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves, Sir Collin said leaders had a duty to protect people from inaccurate public health statements.
He said he was “absolutely horrified” that the person who “is the most influential individual in the US health system” could “tell lies and keep a straight face”.
“But [I am] not surprised because Kennedy has a history of subscribing to fringe, incorrect knowledge, conspiracy theories, and odd things of that type.”
He said Dr Ekeroma was very clear and direct in his condemnation of the lies from Kennedy and the group.
‘Call it for what it is’
“I encourage all of our people who are in a position to call these people for what it is.”
Sir Collin is the chair of the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.
He said Kennedy’s comments and attitude toward vaccination will feed the anti-vaxxers and and discourage parents who might be uncertain about vaccines.
“So, [it is] potentially going to have a negative impact on immunisation programmes the world over. The United States has a significant influence on global health policy.
“These kinds of proclamations and attitudes and ideologies will have disastrous consequences.”
He believes that the scientific community should speak up, adding that political and business leaders in the region should also condemn such behaviour.
Sir Collin Tukuitonga . . . “horrified” that the “most influential individual in the US health system” could “tell lies and keep a straight face”. Image: Ryan Anderson/Stuff/RNZ
Withdrawal of US from WHO Sir Collin described President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the WHO as “dangerous”.
He said Washington is a major contributor to the money needed by WHO, which works to protect world health, especially vulnerable communities in developing countries.
“I understand they contribute about a fifth of the WHO budget,” he said.
“The United States is a world leader in the technical, scientific expertise in a number of areas, that may not be as available to the rest of the world.
“Research and development of new medicines and new treatments, a large chunk of which originates in the United States.
“The United States falling out of the chain of surveillance and reporting of global outbreaks, like Covid-19, puts the whole world at risk.”
He added there were ‘a good number of reasons” why the move by the US was “shameful and irresponsible”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On December 28, 21-year-old student journalist Shatha Al-Sabbagh was assassinated near her home in Jenin. Her family accused snipers from the Palestinian Authority (PA) deployed in the camp of shooting her in the head.
Al-Sabbagh had been active on social media, documenting the suffering of Jenin residents during the raids by Israel and the PA.
Just a few days after Al-Sabbagh’s assassination, the authorities in Ramallah banned Al Jazeera from reporting from the occupied West Bank.
The author Eman Mohammed . . . “Growing up in Gaza, I watched how my people were oppressed by Israeli forces and by the PA.” Image: APR
Three weeks later, PA forces arrested Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamad Atrash.
These developments come as the Israeli occupation has killed more than 200 media workers in Gaza and arrested dozens across the occupied Palestinian territories. It has also banned Al Jazeera and refused to allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza.
The fact that the PA’s actions mirror Israel’s reveals a shared agenda to suppress independent journalism and control public opinion.
To Palestinian journalists, that is hardly news. The PA has never been our protector. It has always been a complicit partner in our brutalisation. That is true in the West Bank and it was true in Gaza when the PA was in power there. I witnessed it myself.
Collaboration with Israel
Growing up in Gaza, I watched how my people were oppressed by Israeli forces and by the PA. In 1994, the Israeli occupation formally handed over the Strip to the PA to administer under the provisions of the Oslo Accords.
The PA remained in power until 2007. During these 13 years, we saw more collaboration with the Israeli occupation than any meaningful attempt at liberation.
For journalists, the PA’s presence was not just oppressive, it was life-threatening, as its forces actively stifled voices to maintain its fragile grip on power.
As a journalism student in Gaza, I experienced this suppression firsthand. I walked the streets, witnessing PA security officers looting shops, their arrogance apparent in the brazen act of theft. One day, when I attempted to document this, a Palestinian officer violently grabbed me, ripped my camera from my hands, and smashed it to the ground.
This wasn’t just an assault, it was an attack on my right to bear witness. The officer’s aggression only ceased when a group of women intervened, forcing him to retreat in a rare moment of restraint.
I knew the risks of being a journalist in Gaza and like other media workers, I learned to navigate them. But the fear I felt near the PA forces’ ambush points was unlike anything else. That was because there was never logic to their aggressive actions and no way to anticipate when they might turn on you.
Walking near the PA forces felt like stepping into a minefield. One moment, there was the illusion of safety, and the next, you faced the brutality of those who were supposedly there to protect you. This uncertainty and tension made their presence more terrifying than being on a battlefield.
Dangerous but predictable
Years later, I would cover the training sessions of Qassam Brigades under the constant hum of Israeli drones and the ever-looming threat of air strikes. It was dangerous but predictable — much more so than the actions of the PA.
A group of Palestinian journalists protest in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council headquarters against the decision of the Palestinian Authority to close Bethlehem-based private TV channel Al-Roah in Gaza City in 1999. Image: AJ File
Under the PA, we learned to speak in code. Journalists self-censored out of fear of retribution. The PA was often referred to as “cousins of Israeli occupation” – a grim acknowledgement of its complicity.
As the PA was fighting to stay in power in Gaza after losing the 2006 elections to Hamas, its brutality escalated.
In May 2007, gunmen in presidential guard uniforms killed journalist Suleiman Abdul-Rahim al-Ashi and media worker Mohammad Matar Abdo. It was an execution meant to send a clear message to those who witnessed it.
When Hamas took over, its government also imposed restrictions on press freedoms, but its censorship was inconsistent. Once, while documenting the new policewomen’s division, I was ordered to show my photos to a Hamas officer so he could censor any image he deemed immodest.
I often managed to bypass these restrictions by swapping my memory cards preemptively.
The officers weren’t fond of anyone overriding their orders, but instead of outright punishment, they resorted to petty power plays — investigations, revoked access, or unnecessary provocations.
Unlike the PA, Hamas did not operate within a system of coordination with Israeli forces to suppress journalism, but the restrictions journalists faced still created an environment of uncertainty and self-censorship.
Swift international condemnation
Any violation on their part, however, was met with swift international condemnation– something the PA rarely faced, despite its far more systematic repression.
After losing control of Gaza, the PA shifted its focus to the West Bank, intensifying its campaign of media suppression. Detentions, violent crackdowns, and the silencing of critical voices became commonplace.
Their collaboration with Israel was not passive; it was active. From surveillance to campaigns of violence, they play a crucial role in maintaining the status quo, stifling any dissent that challenges their power and the occupation.
In 2016, the PA’s collusion became even more apparent when they coordinated with Israeli authorities in the arrest of prominent journalist and press freedom advocate Omar Nazzal, who had criticised Ramallah for how it handled the suspected murder of Palestinian citizen Omar al-Naif at its embassy in Bulgaria.
In 2017, the PA launched a campaign of intimidation, arresting five journalists from different outlets.
In 2019, the Palestinian Authority blocked the website of Quds News Network, a youth-led media outlet that has gained immense popularity. This was part of a wider ban imposed by the Ramallah Magistrate’s Court that blocked access to 24 other news websites and social media pages.
In 2021, after the violent death of activist Nizar Banat in the PA’s custody sparked protests, its forces sought to crack down on journalists and media outlets covering them.
In this context, the prospect of the PA returning to Gaza following the ceasefire agreement raises serious concerns for journalists who have already endured the horrors of genocide.
For those who survived, this could mean a new chapter of repression that reflects the PA’s history of censorship, arrests and stifling of press freedoms.
Despite the grave threats that Palestinian journalists face from Israel and from those who pretend to represent the Palestinian people, they persevere. Their work transcends borders, reflecting a shared struggle against tyranny. Their resilience speaks not only to the Palestinian cause but to the broader fight for liberation, justice and dignity.
Eman Mohammed is an award-winning Palestinian-American photojournalist and Senior TED fellow currently based in Washington, DC. Republished from Al Jazeera under Creative Commons.
As a teenager, Dr. Susan Walsh loved the TV show “The X-Files.” She was particularly drawn to the character of Dana Scully, a hyper-rational doctor-cum-FBI agent who brought a scientist’s skepticism to investigations of paranormal phenomena and deployed her medical training to determine cause of death for the show’s victims.
The fact that Scully used science to solve problems and pursue justice intrigued Walsh. She wanted to explore a career in forensics but was on the fence about how to do it. Should she go into law enforcement? Become a scientist? The show helped her to decide. She loved the science. “It did start with Scully, if I’m being honest,” she said.
Walsh studied biochemistry and, while working on her master’s degree in DNA profiling, she happened onto a research paper that caught her attention. Australian scientists had found DNA markers corresponding to eye color, and Walsh began to wonder whether those techniques could be applied to criminal investigations. If crime-scene DNA could be analyzed for markers that relate to physical appearance, Walsh suspected that could help investigators identify suspects — and take crime fighting to a new level.
“Oh wow, that’s so cool that we’ll one day be able to predict what people look like,” using DNA, she thought. “In an application of a forensic setting, that’s amazing.”
Susan Walsh has devoted her career to researching whether DNA can be used to predict someone’s face — but she doesn’t think the science is there yet.Photo: Indiana University Indianapolis School of Science
That was 2005. Today, Walsh is at the top of her field. An assistant professor in the School of Science at Indiana University Indianapolis, she runs a lab researching what is now known as forensic DNA phenotyping, or FDP. Walsh has worked on locating genes related to eye, hair, and skin color and has built an open-source tool for people, including in law enforcement, who want to use DNA to predict those traits. She has also investigated connections between DNA markers and the appearance of various facial features, known as facial morphology.
Through her research, she came to learn that FDP works as she imagined it could: An unknown DNA sample can be parsed for genetic markers related to various traits, like hair or eye color, offering criminal investigators a glimpse into what the owner of the DNA might look like. That, in turn, could be useful information for prioritizing suspects to investigate. If the DNA says a person is likely to have red hair, for example, detectives could bump redheads to the top of their suspect list.
Still, Walsh remains cautious about how she describes what DNA can and cannottell us about what a person might look like. At present, the idea that DNA can be used to predict facial structure — for example, what a person’s chin might look like — is more science fiction, like her beloved “X-Files,” and less science fact. The human face is a complicated structure defined by both nature (so, DNA) and nurture (like, if you’ve had your nose broken). Like others in her field, Walsh is unsure that research into morphology will ever bear reliable fruit. “We can’t even do a nose right now,” she said.
Walsh is adamant: It’s scientifically premature to deploy these methods to predict a person’s face, especially when their life and liberty is at stake. Not everyone in the field has been as chary.
“The Science Isn’t There”
A private company based in Reston, Virginia, Parabon NanoLabs was founded in 2008 with the mission of creating “breakthrough products” using DNA, with an initial focus on developing cancer therapies. It has since evolved into a prominent purveyor of forensic products, including DNA phenotyping, to police agencies. Though it’s well known among forensic scientists, it maintains a fairly low public profile and publishes few details about its operation online.
According to Parabon, its Snapshot FDP System “accurately” predicts not only eye, hair, and skin color, but also face shape. For a fee, the company will provide law enforcement agencies with a rendering of its predictions in the form of a color composite sketch, along with a “corresponding measure of confidence” in the predicted traits. The company says it has worked with hundreds of police agencies in the nine years it’s been doing this work.
As Parabon’s foothold in the world of forensics deepened, so did the concern among scientists and legal experts, who warn that the company’s sketches are, at best, misleading. Leading experts agree the science has not evolved enough to accurately and reliably provide the kind of singular image Parabon produces for police investigations. Even a scientist who helped develop the technology says it’s not ready for real-world use.
Parabon’s methodology for generating its phenotype predictions is a closely guarded secret; its system has not faced independent scientific verification and validation — the gold standard among scientists for vetting the efficacy of computer-based programs — nor has it been peer reviewed. Still, Parabon insists that its phenotyping work is based on good science. While it acknowledges that its program has not gone through traditional scientific review processes, it says the proof of Snapshot’s ability and value is in the number of law enforcement agencies that use it and say it has helped them solve cases.
Selling these singular images to police is “detrimental to the field and something we need to stop.”
For years, Walsh privately pressed the company to explain its work and grew frustrated by Parabon’s refusal to engage with her questions. Her concerns were not just hypothetical: In a criminal legal system rife with wrongful convictions and racial bias, there are countless ways using an unproven tool to solve crimes can, and does, go wrong.
Those frustrations came to a head during a March 2024 workshop at the National Academy of Sciences covering the good and bad of several next-generation forensic tools used by law enforcement, where Walsh and others sharply criticized Parabon. Selling these singular images to police is “detrimental to the field and something we need to stop,” Walsh said.
Police pay hundreds per case for appearance prediction, yet “how these tools function remains shrouded in secrecy,” noted Rebecca Brown, the former policy director for the Innocence Project and the founder of Maat Strategies, a criminal legal policy consulting firm. Speaking at the workshop, Brown cautioned against the use of FDP and other novel disciplines absent robust validation and regulation. There are “too many examples of investigative tools that become runaway trains,” she said.
Parabon’s FDP service follows a predictable pattern in forensic science: Novel techniques are developed, often by private industry, and pressed into service for law enforcement purposes before their limitations have been fully assessed and addressed.
As with other forensic innovations, like forensic genetic genealogy or facial recognition, FDP is sold as an “investigative tool” — that is, a product not intended for use as evidence in a criminal proceeding, but as a behind-the-scenes aide to police searching for perpetrators. But selling a scientifically questionable product as a mere investigative tool can have real-world consequences.
For FDP in particular, experts warn that the composite images can reinforce racial stereotypes, encourage the over-surveillance of marginalized communities, and deny criminal defendants important information about how they became a target of an investigation, which raises serious implications for Fourth Amendment privacy rights. Composites like those Parabon sells could also inadvertently taint the memories of eyewitnesses to a crime, risking potentially valuable evidence.
Paula Armentrout, Parabon’s co-founder, provided written responses to questions from The Intercept about the company’s Snapshot program. In part, the company said that The Intercept “should not quote any of the presenters” at the NAS workshop, who it claims “made many false, uninformed, and misleading statements that were not based on evidence or facts, but on misinformation propagated by inaccurate media articles, hearsay, and their own personal and political agendas.”
Walsh insists her criticisms are motivated solely by her fidelity to the science and to ensuring the transparency and accuracy of forensic tools used in the criminal legal system. To that end, she was emphatic during the workshop: Law enforcement should not be allowed to purchase phenotyping composites. “The science isn’t there. We shouldn’t be doing it,” she said. At this juncture, she said, those sketches are about as scientific as “my son drawing them.”
2
Marketing a DNA Blueprint
Parabon’s foray into forensics began in 2009, when the company secured the first of several contracts with the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which was looking for a way to identify individuals in combat zones responsible for building improvised explosive devices. Parabon proposed extracting physical traits from DNA collected from the weapons to get the job done, and a subsequent 2012 contract led to the development of the Snapshot system. “Traditional DNA analysis treats DNA like a fingerprint, useful for identification,” Parabon co-founder and CEO Steven Armentrout told the military’s Success Stories publication in2022. “But Snapshot treats it like a blueprint for how to build a human.”
The company began marketing the service to police agencies in 2015, an effort that has been “extremely successful,” Ellen McRae Greytak, the company’s director of bioinformatics, said during a webinar for a military organization in 2020. In her presentation, Greytak briefly outlined Parabon’s work to create Snapshot: how researchers collected existing DNA information for individuals across the world to home in not only on markers for hair, skin and eye color, but also for specific geographic ancestry information; how they used machine learning to create the algorithm that generates predictions; and how, at the time, the company was developing a phone app to help gather three-dimensional images of faces to aid its morphology work.
Once the software makes a phenotype prediction, a forensic artist steps in to shade the composite. Of course, the process has its limitations, Greytak acknowledged. It can’t predict hairstyle, for example, or any other form of non-genetic modification — like scarring, tattoos, or dyed hair — and it can’t discern a person’s weight. Parabon’s composites are developed for what a person would look like as “a young adult at a normal body weight,” she said, which the company defines as a body mass index of 22.
Hampden County District Attorney Anthony Gulluni announces on Sept. 18, 2017, that Gary Schara has been apprehended as a suspect in the 1992 slaying of Lisa Ziegert.Photo: Dave Roback/The Republican via AP
Parabon had already worked on “hundreds of cases,” Greytak said during the webinar, sharing a couple of alleged success stories. In 2016, Massachusetts police investigating the 24-year-old cold-case murder of Lisa Ziegert used crime-scene DNA to obtain a Parabon sketch of her possible murderer.
Detectives used the composite information to narrow down the pool of “thousands” of people who, over the years, had been noted in the case file, Greytak said. There “were maybe five guys who closely matched the predictions we made,” she said, so the cops went knocking on their doors. Gary Schara wasn’t home when the police arrived at his place, so they told Schara’s roommate to pass on the message that “we’d like to speak to him,” Greytak explained. “When Gary hears that, he flees.” Police were eventually able to track Schara down and to match his DNA to the crime, she said, prompting him to confess. “They were finally able to close this homicide case.”
According to news reports, Schara was more than just a note in the case file. In fact, he had long been a suspect: His wife gave him up to police in 1993, and he was subsequently interviewed multiple times by investigators, including from the FBI.
After police received the Parabon phenotyping report and returned once again, talking to his roommate, Schara penned a confession and tried to kill himself. Police found him the next day in a Connecticut hospital. Schara ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
It is unclear why detectives were unable to close the case years earlier. The Hampden district attorney’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment, but in 2019, MassLive reported that District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said the “embrace of new technology” had helped to solve the case. Still, it appears the most Parabon can claim credit for is reminding cops of at least one of their top suspects.
Susan Walsh, left, and a doctoral student at Indiana University Indianapolis analyze the data of people used in their research around genetics and forensic science, on Oct. 25, 2024.Photo: Liz Kaye/Indiana University
A Singular Image
Susan Walsh had been working on FDP for nearly a decade when Parabon’s service debuted for law enforcement agencies. Back then, Walsh was mostly curious. She started asking Parabon questions. “I was saying, ‘Oh, what [DNA] markers are you using? And where’s your paper? Where can I read it? And what data set are you working with? And what’s your algorithm?’” she recalled. “And I was just getting nothing back.”
She approached company representatives at conferences and asked how the program worked. “They just didn’t answer my questions,” she said. “And then I was like, ‘OK. Well, I don’t think that you should be allowed in the field if you’re not going to answer the questions a scientist asks you.’” Scientists should be open to having their work scrutinized by peers, she said; they should be forthcoming about what parameters they’re using, about what their tool does well — and where it fails. “I was a bit curious at first and then kind of a little bit angry.” It felt to her like snake oil, selling hope in the form of a tool that could provide answers in cases that had long gone cold.
Walsh repeatedly tried to raise the alarm within the forensics community, but “it still wasn’t working.” By the time the NAS workshop rolled around in March, she did not mince words. Parabon’s sketches are “detrimental,” she said to the the scientists, legal scholars, academics, and advocates gathered at the National Academies’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., for the two-day event. “I was just sick of saying it all the time — that we need science,” she later told The Intercept. “We need publications. We need peer review.”
Walsh emphasized that she believes selling composite images is scientifically indefensible. Experts agree that the most accurate way to describe phenotypic predictions is individually — the likelihood of brown eyes or blonde hair, for example — which offers police solid and actionable intelligence without tipping into science fiction, she said. Currently, each of the three predictions available via Walsh’s tool, which has been validated and peer reviewed, are reported to be approximately 80 percent accurate.
Although Walsh’s tool is available to law enforcement agencies free of charge, she said she doesn’t get that many cases. She suspects that’s because she won’t offer the cops a composite. “They go off and they pay because they want that singular image.”
For that, they can turn to Parabon.
3
Proprietary Methods
For Parabon, independent verification and peer review are superfluous pursuits. In response to a series of questions from The Intercept, the company said its program can’t be externally vetted because the code is “proprietary.” As for peer review, while it is a “valuable process for academic research because it allows researchers to contribute to the broader body of knowledge,” the company said, Parabon instead focuses on “delivering actionable results” to law enforcement customers.
“Unlike academics, whose primary goal is to contribute to scientific literature and educate, our priority is to serve the immediate needs of our clients,” the company wrote. Peer review can “sometimes become bogged down in theoretical debates,” it opined, noting that if Parabon had gone that route and hadn’t started selling its system to police, the service “would still not be available to them.”
The proof that Parabon’s system works is in the real-world validation the company has received from law enforcement agencies that have hired it to help solve cases. The 70 composites the company has posted online “from actual cases where identifications were later made,” it wrote, “represent the most stringent and authentic performance evaluation possible.” Many of those cases “would not have been solved without Snapshot phenotyping,” the company insists, “a fact to which the involved agencies can attest.”
The company sidestepped specific questions about how it is able to predict facial characteristics when other scientists say that isn’t currently possible. Instead, the company said it approaches things differently than the “academic literature,” using what’s known as principal component analysis — a statistical method that essentially sorts and makes sense of complex, noisy data — to fuel its predictions.
The company said its predictions are based on data collected from more than 1,000, mostly young-adult volunteers, 37 percent of whom “self-identify as White.” Although asked twice to do so, Parabon did not supply the total number of volunteers or a detailed breakdown of the population. Instead, it said the entire sample is “diverse and balanced,” including individuals from various ethnic backgrounds, “such as African, Asian, European, Hispanic/Latino, and Middle Eastern,” as well as individuals with mixed heritage. “This diversity helps ensure the robustness and applicability of our predictions.”
Left/Top: Parabon used a statistical method known as principal component analysis to predict what it says are the five main face shapes. Right/Bottom: Parabon used DNA from director of bioinformatics Ellen Greytak (left) and co-founder Paula Armentrout (right) to predict their face shapes using its Snapshot program.Diagrams: Parabon NanoLabs
Parabon also provided two diagrams that purport to show how its Snapshot system sorts data to predict face shape, using DNA from Greytak and co-founder Paula Armentrout as an example. The first diagram features a star-like array of blank, gray faces, which Greytak said represent the five main face shapes deduced through principal component analysis. To the side is a heat map of those five faces, which supposedly shows which portions of each face is fueling the ultimate prediction. The second is a more sparse but similar diagram showing the two women’s faces alongside the face shapes the program predicted.
The company declined to say which DNA markers it uses in this process, saying the specific genetic markers were “chosen based on our proprietary analysis.”
Mark Shriver, a geneticist and professor of anthropology at Penn State University who is a leading expert on phenotyping, reviewed the diagrams and relevant portions of the responses that Parabon provided to The Intercept. He said they are fundamentally flawed. “If you want to study variation within a population, then you need a large sample from just that population,” he said. “If you want to distinguish the two white women like they were doing in their example figure … then you need 1,000 white people.”
Garbage In/Garbage Out
Shriver knows better than most how Parabon’s model works. More than a decade ago, Shriver collaborated with the company on its Pentagon contract. He and a colleague conducted the research that now underpins the Snapshot system, he said, including the information from the 1,000 or so volunteers. It was designed more as proof of concept, and in need of significantly more time, research, and work to transform into a truly predictive model. But Parabon was not interested in doing that work, Shriver said, which led him and his colleague to part ways with the company. “It became clear they just wanted to take it to market immediately,” he said.
In Parabon’s telling, its relationship with Shriver “ended without acrimony” at the conclusion of his subcontract. His “concerns … were never communicated to us,” Paula Armentrout wrote to The Intercept in an email.
Shriver told The Intercept that Parabon’s data set is far too small to support the kind of individualizing predictions the company sells to police. “And this was one of the points I made clear to them from the start,” Shriver said.
“One of the phrases that goes way back in computer science is ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” he said. “The input data is fundamental to any kind of analysis, any kind of conclusions, any kind of predictions you’re going to be able to do from it.” A thousand volunteers from one population could, “perhaps, start to get you some information about what’s going on within that population,” he said. But the sample Parabon is working with was selected to cover a “bunch of populations.” Meaning, the system is primed for drawing general conclusions, but not for making detailed predictions about individuals.
The company pursued an approach that differs from the “methods being explored in academia,” Armentrout reiterated in response to questions about Shriver. “Dr. Shriver was developing his own face prediction methods for casework, although we’re not aware if they have ever been used in a forensic case.”
Armentrout is right that Shriver hasn’t deployed his research forensically in the way Parabon has — with good reason. Though his research now includes data from tens of thousands of people — from both diverse populations and within closed groups, including families — he cautions that there is still more to be done to develop an effective, predictive tool. He won’t put it to work until it has been tested, validated, and peer reviewed.
“It really isn’t science until it’s been looked at by somebody who could understand what you did wrong and what you did right,” Shriver said. “And not just one person, but the whole community has to be able to review what you’ve done if you want to call it science.”
“Otherwise,” he said, “you’re just playing games in the closet.”
Edmonton Police Service members patrol the city streets, on April 17, 2024, in Edmonton, Canada.Photo: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via AP
“That Could Be the Guy”
Investigators at the Edmonton Police Service in Alberta, Canada, were desperate to solve the violent rape of a young woman in March 2019. The man who attacked her was a stranger and had been bundled up against the cold, leaving her with few details about his appearance. There was no CCTV footage or other witnesses, save for DNA left behind.
Three years later, the department turned to Parabon for help. The company used the DNA to generate a sketch of a nondescript Black man. According to Parabon, the suspect is of East African descent — as well as part South and West African — and likely has dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and no freckles. The police department posted the generic image online, including to its social media accounts.
The backlash was fierce. The image did little more than implicate nearly every Black man in Edmonton, critics noted, essentially encouraging racial profiling and the continued over-surveillance of minority and other marginalized communities. “If they’re generating an image of a face of a Black person, like what happened in Canada, and then releasing that image to the general public … then you have a bunch of white people who are looking at Black people around them and thinking, ‘Oh, well, that could be the guy,’ and then they just report on that person,” Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept.
“It obviously doesn’t help the investigation in any sense,” Lynch continued, “because it’s not a real image of a person, certainly not the real image of the perpetrator, and it can only harm both the investigation and communities of color, because it puts them at greater risk of arrest for things that they didn’t do.”
“It’s not a real image of a person, certainly not the real image of the perpetrator, and it can only harm both the investigation and communities of color.”
Two days after posting the image, the Edmonton police pulled it offline and issued a statement. “The potential that a visual profile can provide far too broad a characterization from within a racialized community and in this case, Edmonton’s Black community, was not something I adequately considered,” Enyinnah Okere, the agency’s chief operating officer said.
Despite the police department’s actions, Parabon kept the image on its website. The sketch merely reported “what the signals in the DNA” indicated about the perpetrator’s “traits and biogeographic ancestry,” the company told The Intercept. It was “unfortunate the community misunderstood the purpose of the composite and reacted the way it did.” Besides, Parabon added, it had been told an arrest was made in the case and that “our prediction was accurate.”
That was news to the Edmonton police. In emails to The Intercept, spokesperson Sgt. Dan Tames said no suspect has been arrested in the case. He also said that after receiving The Intercept’s inquiry, the agency asked Parabon to remove the image from its website. Nearly two years after it was posted, the image was finally removed. Parabon did not respond to an additional request for comment.
The case is a potent example of the way that FDP, and Parabon’s composites in particular, can perpetuate other harmful practices within the criminal legal system. Faulty eyewitness identifications are a leading cause of wrongful convictions, and science has repeatedly demonstrated that people have a harder time correctly identifying people of a different race.
Research has also shown that introducing a composite image to a witness can reshape their memory, potentially corrupting their initial recollection. “The presentation of a single photograph explicitly to ask about whether or not that person is maybe who the witness saw commit the crime has been found to be really suggestive,” said Dr. Kara Moore, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah.
And if police were to tell a witness that a composite is based on DNA phenotyping, that could be even more suggestive, Moore said. “People find DNA evidence to be really persuasive. So this idea that this facial composite was based on DNA may have some implications for accuracy in the person’s mind,” she said. “People might truly believe this is really what the person who committed the crime looks like.”
“The accuracy of the composite is an interesting component too,” she added. “If it’s wrong, you’re negatively contaminating the eyewitness’s memory and really harming your eyewitness. But even if it’s right, you might be artificially inflating the person’s memory and confidence for the face.”
For Walsh, the potential conflating of ancestry with appearance is another cause for concern. While DNA can offer ancestral information, that intel cannot be cribbed into assumptions about what a person looks like, including about facial features and skin color. “Some individuals can be biased by skin pigmentation to infer ancestry, or ancestry to infer pigmentation,” she wrote in an email. “Unless you actually test for the specific trait … you cannot assume either.” Cautioning that she doesn’t know how Parabon’s system works, she said she worries that using ancestral data to produce an image could cause police to “focus on a particular population without foundation.”
In a January 2024 story in Wired, Greytak seemed to suggest that Parabon’s system does take ancestry into account when making some phenotypic predictions. “What we are predicting is more like — given this person’s sex and ancestry, will they have wider-set eyes than average,” she said. But, she said, “there’s no way you can get individual identifications from that.”
Parabon did not directly address The Intercept’s question about Greytak’s comments to Wired, but insisted that it does not use ancestry categories to inform its morphology predictions. “Categorical divisions are artificial and not reflective of the continuous nature of human genetic variation across the globe,” it said.
Either way, critics say current science does not support Parabon’s individualizing composites. As Rebecca Brown, the policy consultant at Maat Strategies, put it, the automated facial composites are “putting a veneer of science on an already problematic identification procedure.”
4
Behind the Scenes
Parabon markets its Snapshot phenotyping service not as a tool for positive identification, but a tool to generate investigative leads. The company stressed this in its responses to The Intercept. “It’s crucial to understand that the DNA phenotyping information we provide to agencies is not used for definitive identification or conviction,” it wrote. That is, the phenotyping is only intended for use in developing suspects; from there, law enforcement agencies would try to use traditional forensic DNA testing to see if the suspect can be linked to crime-scene evidence. “Our work does not change this process in any way,” the company insisted.
But using such a program merely to generate leads is itself questionable. Parabon told The Intercept that it does “not have an exact count” of all the law enforcement agencies that have purchased its phenotyping services but said that “hundreds of agencies” have used Snapshot for casework. Of those, the company only posts to its website images that its client police agencies have already made public.
To date, Parabon has published only 70 composites. That means there are potentially hundreds of cases where law enforcement has used a composite behind the scenes to inform an investigation — information that almost certainly has not, or will not, be made available to the defense in a criminal prosecution, even if it did help to narrow the cops’ focus onto a particular individual.
That’s because the tools police use to generate investigative leads are generally not considered evidence in criminal cases, meaning the state is not required to share information about those tools or the leads they generate with defense lawyers. So, for example, if police use a Snapshot composite to lead them to a suspect who they then charge with a crime, the defense will likely never know unless the police choose to publicize it.
The lack of transparency is alarming to defense attorneys and civil libertarians. “I would say, if there’s a single biggest issue here, it’s that,” said Clare Garvie, a lawyer with the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Garvie is an expert on the use of face recognition, another tool whose outputs are often hidden from scrutiny during criminal prosecutions. “The logic behind asserting that it’s an investigative lead only, is, in theory, to protect people from having adverse action taken against them based on unreliable methods,” she said. “But what it has functionally meant is that — in the face recognition context, but very, very likely in other investigative contexts — the defense never finds out that these searches are run.”
Back in 2016, for example, Garvie discovered that police in Pinellas County, Florida, who had been using facial recognition technology since 2001, were using it, “on average, 8,000 times a month.” But at the same time, she noted, the public defender’s office there “had never had a single case in which it had been disclosed.”
Chanel Lewis sits at the defense table on the sixth day of his retrial in Queens, N.Y., for the August 2016 murder of Karina Vetrano on March 26, 2019.Photo: Charles Eckert/Newsday via AP
Ensnared in a Dragnet
Where FDP is concerned, there is at least one current case where police use of Parabon’s work to identify a suspect is being challenged in court. After the 2016 murder of Karina Vetrano, who was killed while jogging near her family home in Queens, the New York Police Department hired Parabon to do phenotyping. The results reportedly came back that the suspect was of African descent, which the NYPD apparently took to mean the person was Black, subsequently undertaking a vast DNA dragnet of hundreds of Black men in the area. Ultimately, the cops landed on a young, developmentally delayed man named Chanel Lewis, who could not be excluded as a source of a trace amount of DNA found at the crime scene.
The fact that the police had used Parabon’s service at all contradicted their public stance about the case — the official line was that a policeman’s hunch and shoe-leather investigation had cracked it — and the prosecution failed to tell Lewis’s defense the whole story. Eventually the fact that the NYPD had employed Parabon was leaked to Lewis’s trial attorneys by a department insider. After a hung jury during his first trial, Lewis was found guilty in 2019. He has appealed his conviction, which his lawyers argue was tainted by the state’s failure to disclose its questionable use of phenotyping to target their client.
At specific issue is whether police violated Lewis’s Fourth Amendment rights when they collected his DNA as part of the dragnet — a question that largely turns on what police had in mind when they approached Lewis. Did they have a reasonable and individualized suspicion that Lewis might be Vetrano’s killer? And, importantly, what was it that made them suspicious of him? Was it solely the phenotyping prediction that the killer was a Black male?
“If you’re getting a phenotyping conclusion that says, it was a Black man, and then you have an investigative strategy where you only take DNA samples from Black men,” then you are using the phenotyping not just to eliminate people, but to target them, said Rhidaya Trivedi, one of Lewis’s attorneys. “Then the scientific integrity of phenotyping enters that Fourth Amendment inquiry: Was it reasonable that they thought [the suspect] was a Black man?”
None of the questions about the scientific integrity of Parabon’s phenotyping have been answered in court. “It’s a huge question, an unanswered question: Can police use phenotyping to affirmatively generate suspicion?” Trivedi asks. “And if so, under what circumstances? Because I doubt that Chanel’s case is the only one where this happened.”
In an expert affidavit filed with Lewis’s appeal, Shriver, the Penn State geneticist, detailed at length the kinds of questions that law enforcement agencies and courts should be asking of any phenotyping service before it is deployed. That includes whether and how the program has been validated, how any results were explained to police, and whether a distinction between geographic ancestry and any facial trait predictions were “communicated and understood.”
Silencing Critics
Jeanna Matthews is something of an evangelist for verification and validation of computer programs used in the criminal legal system. A professor of computer science at Clarkson University, she is also the vice chair of the AI Policy Committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as the IEEE, which has long promulgated standards for ensuring the scientific integrity of computer-based systems.
For Matthews, the issue is straightforward: Forensic tools like Parabon’s phenotyping program need to be independently verified and validated against accepted scientific standards, like those developed by the IEEE, if they’re going to be deployed in the criminal legal system. Put simply, the tools need to be fully reviewed from code to output to determine whether they are built and function as intended.
This kind of detailed, ground-up review is common in mission-critical fields — like with medical devices or air traffic control systems — but it has not been implemented in the criminal legal system. The verification and validation process, known as V&V, “is pretty much ubiquitous when we all agree that it’s important that the software be accurate,” Matthews said. “Why isn’t it done for criminal justice software? We don’t all seem to agree it’s important enough to do it carefully.”
“The idea that anyone is hiding behind trade secrets when life and liberty is at stake, we have to ask ourselves some serious questions.”
In part, the problem is that many newer forensic tools are developed by private companies that, like Parabon, say their system is “proprietary” or make claims of trade secrets to keep outsiders from looking closely at the tools they’re selling. And that, experts say, should be unacceptable for a system that routinely locks people up or kills them.
“The idea that anyone is hiding behind trade secrets when life and liberty is at stake, we have to ask ourselves some serious questions about what we’re about,” said Rebecca Wexler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, “if we’re sort of like, ‘Nope, that profit motive must transcend this person’s ability to prove their innocence.’”
Parabon, it seems, is not only uninterested in having its phenotyping program externally vetted, but also is not too keen on hearing any criticisms of its work.
In addition to admonishing The Intercept not to quote from the NAS workshop in which its Snapshot system was discussed, Parabon said that it had approached the organization about the workshop and was “pleased to report that after an internal review,” the NAS had removed video recording of the event from its website.
An NAS spokesperson acknowledged that the videos were removed but did not respond to repeated questions about the specific reason. “Concerns were raised about comments made at the workshop,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Although any statements made at the workshop solely reflect the personal opinions of individual presenters and not the views of all workshop participants or the National Academies, we decided to remove the videos of the workshop from our website.”
Though it may no longer be accessible online, the workshop had a lasting impact on Walsh. She said it helped her to think about her work — and its implications — in new ways. In particular, she more seriously ponders how her work could be misused, and about how she can counteract that possibility. She wants to be sure her predictions are made based on robust population samples and that her tools are described openly, and accurately, so that anyone can understand what they can and cannot do.
“I think along the lines of, ‘How can I protect people more?’” she said. “‘How can I make sure that there is no way this can be used badly?’”
Sultan Barakat, a professor at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University, says the release of Palestinian prisoners is a “symbolic win” rather than a victory for the Palestinians, primarily showing the inhumane conditions they live under.
“Israel can capture people in the West Bank and Gaza because they all live in a confinement area under the control of Israel,” he told Al Jazeera.
Dr Barakat discussed the way Palestinians were “arbitrarily rounded up, taken to prison and treated badly” by Israel.
A total of 183 Palestinian prisoners were released today from Israeli jails as part of the exchange for three Israeli hostages under the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.
They included 18 serving life sentences and 54 serving lengthy sentences, as well as 111 detained in Gaza since 7 October 2023.
Barakat stressed that the release of prisoners also “shows the unity of the Palestinians in the face of occupation”.
“The prisoners are not all necessarily Hamas sympathisers — some were at odds with Hamas for a long time,” the academic said.
“But they are united in their refusal of occupation and standing up to Israel,” he added.
Hamas ‘needs to stay in power’
Another academic, Dr Luciano Zaccara, an associate professor at Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Center, told Al Jazeera that Hamas needed to stay in power for the ceasefire agreement to be implemented in full.
“How are you going to reconstruct Gaza without Hamas? How are you going to make this deal complied [with] if Hamas is not there?” he questioned.
Dr Zaccara also said Israel seemed to have no plan on what to do in Gaza after the war.
“There was never a plan,” he said, adding that Israel did not want Hamas or the Palestinian Authority in the enclave running the administration.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, quoting a security source, reported that the Red Cross had expressed “outrage” at how the Israel Prison Service handled the Palestinian prisoners being released from Ketziot Prison.
Ha’aretz said the Red Cross alleged that the prisoners were led handcuffed with their hands above their heads and bracelets with the inscription “Eternity does not forget”.
The newspaper quoted the Israel Prison Service spokesman as saying that “the prison warders are dealing with the worst of Israel’s enemies, and until the last moment on Israeli soil, they will be treated under prison-like rule.
“We will not compromise on the security of our people.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Why has any discussion about Israel, its violations of international law, and the international legal expectations for third party states to hold IDF soldiers accountable not been addressed in Aotearoa New Zealand?
ANALYSIS:By Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa national chair John Minto’s campaign to identify Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers in New Zealand and then call a PSNA number hotline has come under intense criticism from the likes of Winston Peters, Stephen Rainbow, the Jewish Council and NZ media outlets. Accusations of antisemitism have been made.
Despite making it clear that holding IDF soldiers accountable for potential war crimes is his goal, not banning all Israelis or targeting Jewish people, there are many just concerns regarding Minto’s campaign. He is clear that his focus remains on justice, not on creating divisions or fostering discrimination, but he has failed to provide strict criteria to distinguish between individuals directly involved in human rights violations and those who are innocent, or to ground the campaign in legal frameworks and due process.
Any allegations of participation in war crimes should be submitted through proper legal channels, not through the PSNA. Broader advocacy could have been used to address concerns of accountability and to minimise any risk that the campaign could lead to profiling based on religion, ethnicity, or language.
While there are many concerns that need to be addressed with PSNA’s campaign, why has the conversation stopped there? Why has the core issue of this campaign been ignored? Namely, that IDF soldiers who have committed war crimes in Gaza have been allowed into New Zealand?
PSNA’s controversial Gaza “genocide hotline” . . . why has the conversation stopped there? Why has the core issue about war crimes been ignored? Image: PSNA screenshot APR
Why has any discussion about Israel, its violations of international law, and the international legal expectations for third party states to hold IDF soldiers accountable not been addressed? Why is criticism of Israel being conflated with racism, even though many Jewish people oppose Israel’s war crimes, and what about Palestinians, what does this mean for a people experiencing genocide?
Concerns should be discussed but they must not be used to protect possible war criminals and shield Israel’s crimes.
It is true that PSNA’s campaign may possibly target individuals, including targeting individuals solely based on their nationality, religion, or language. This is not acceptable. But it has also uncovered the exceptionally biased, racist, and unjust views towards Palestinians.
Racism against Palestinians ignored
Palestinians have been dehumanised by Israel for decades, but real racism against Palestinians is being ignored. As a Christian Palestinian I know all too well what it is like to be targeted.
In fact, it was only recently at a New Zealand First State of the Nation gathering last year that Winston Peter’s followers called me a terrorist for being Palestinian and told me that all Muslims were Hamas lovers and were criminals.
The question that has been ignored in this very public debate is simple: are Israeli soldiers who have participated in war crimes in Aotearoa, if so, why, and what does this mean for the New Zealand Palestinian population and the upholding of international law?
By refusing to address concerns of IDF soldiers the focus is deliberately shifted away from the actual genocide happening in Gaza. If IDF soldiers have engaged in rape, extrajudicial executions, torture, destruction of homes, or killing of civilians, they should be investigated and held accountable.
Countries have a legal and moral duty to prevent war criminals from using their nations as safe havens.
Since 1948, Palestinians have been subjected to systematic oppression, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, violence and now, genocide. From its creation and currently with Israel’s illegal occupation, Palestinian massacres have been frequent and unrelenting.
This includes the execution of my great grandmother on the steps of our Katamon home in Jerusalem. Land has been stolen from Palestinians over the decades, including well over 42 percent of the West Bank. Palestinians have been denied the right to return to their country, the right to justice, accountability, and self-determination.
Living under illegal military law
We are still forced to live under illegal military law, face mass arrests and torture, and our history, identity, culture and heritage are targeted.
Almost 10 children lose one or both of their legs every day in Gaza according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNWRA). 2.2 million people are starving because Israel refuses them access to food. 95 percent of Gaza’s population have been forced onto the streets, with only 25 percent of Gaza’s shelters needs being met, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.
One out of 20 people in Gaza have been injured and 18,000 children have been murdered. 6500 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip were taken hostage by Israel who also stole 2300 bodies from numerous cemeteries. 87,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on all regions in the Gaza Strip.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Al Shifa and Al Ahly Baptist hospital and who is part of Medicine Sans Frontiers, estimates as many as 300,000 Palestinian civilians, most of them children, have been murdered by Israel.
This is because official numbers do not include those bodies that cannot be recognised or are blown to a pulp, those buried under the rubble and those expected to die and have died of disease, starvation and lack of medicine — denied by Israel to those with chronic illnesses.
‘A Genocidal Project’: real death toll closer to 300,000. Video: Democracy Now!
As a signatory to the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and UN resolutions, New Zealand is expected to investigate, prosecute and deport any individual accused of these serious crimes. This government has an obligation to deny entry to any individual suspected of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
IDF has turned war crimes into entertainment
Israel has violated all of these, its IDF soldiers filming themselves committing such atrocities and de-humanising Palestinians over the last 15 months on social media.
IDF soldiers have posted TikTok videos mocking their Palestinian victims, celebrating destruction, and making jokes about killing civilians, displaying a disturbing level of dehumanisation and cruelty. They have filmed themselves looting Palestinian homes, vandalising property, humiliating detainees, and posing with dead bodies.
They have turned war crimes into entertainment while Palestinian families suffer and mourn. Israel has deliberately targeted civilians, bombing schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and even designated safe zones, then lied about their operations, showing complete disregard for human life.
Israel and the IDF’s global reputation among ordinary people are not positive. Out on the streets over 15 months, millions have been demonstrating against Israel. They do not like what its army has done, and rightly so. Many want to see justice and Israel and its army held accountable, something this government has ignored.
Israel’s state forced conscription or imprisonment, enforced military service that contributes to the occupation, ethnic cleansing, systematic oppression of a people, war crimes and genocide is fascism on display. Israel is a totalitarian, apartheid, military state, but this government sees no problems with that.
The UN and human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly condemned Israeli military operations, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the use of white phosphorus, and sexual violence by Israeli forces.
While not all IDF soldiers may have committed direct atrocities, those serving in occupied Palestinian territories are complicit in enforcing illegal occupation, which itself is a violation of international law.
Following orders not an excuse
The precedent set by international tribunals, such as Nuremberg, establishes that following orders is not an excuse for war crimes — meaning IDF soldiers who have participated in military actions in occupied areas should be subject to scrutiny.
This government has a duty to protect Palestinian communities from further harm, this includes preventing known perpetrators of ethnic cleansing from entering New Zealand. The presence of IDF soldiers in New Zealand is a direct threat to the safety, dignity, and well-being of our communities.
Many Palestinian New Zealanders have lost family members, homes, and entire communities due to the IDF’s actions. Seeing known war criminals walking freely in New Zealand re-traumatises those who have suffered from Israel’s illegal military brutality.
Survivors of ethnic cleansing should not have to live in fear of encountering the very people responsible for their suffering. This was not acceptable after the Second World War, throughout modern history, and is not acceptable now.
IDF soldiers are also trained in brutal tactics, including arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, and the assassination of Palestinian civilians. The presence of war criminals in any society creates a climate of fear and intimidation.
Given their history, there is a concern within New Zealand that these soldiers will engage in racist abuse, Islamophobia, or Zionist hate crimes not only against Palestinians and Arabs, but other communities of colour.
New Zealand society should be scrutinising not just this government’s response to the genocide against Palestinians, but also our political parties.
Moral bankruptcy and xenophobia
This moral bankruptcy and neutral stance in the face of genocide and racism has been clearly demonstrated this week in Parliament with both Shane Jones and Peter’s xenophobic remarks, and responses to the PSNA’s campaign.
Winston Peter’s tepid response to Israel’s behaviour and its violations is a staggering display of double standards and hypocrisy. Racism it seems, is clearly selective.
His comments about Mexicans in Parliament this week were xenophobic and violate the principles of responsible governance by promoting discrimination. Peters’ comments that immigrants should be grateful creates a hierarchy of worthiness.
Similarly, Shane Jones calling for Mexicans to go home does not uphold diplomatic and professional standards, reinforces harmful racial stereotypes and discriminates based on one’s nationality. Mexicans, Māori, and Palestinians are not on equal standing as others when it comes to human rights.
Why is there a defence of foreign soldiers who may have participated in genocide or war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, but then migrants and refugees are attacked?
“John Minto’s call to identify people from Israel . . . is an outrageous show of fascism, racism, and encouragement of violence and vigilantism. New Zealand should never accept this kind of extreme totalitarian behaviour in our country”. Why has Winston Peter’s never condemned the actual racism Palestinians are facing — including ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and apartheid?
Why has he never used such strong language and outrage to condemn Israel’s actions despite evidence of violations of international law? Instead, he directs outrage at a human rights activist who is pointing out the shortcomings of the government’s response to Israels violations.
IDF soldiers’ documented atrocities ignored
Peters has completely ignored IDF soldiers’ documented atrocities and distorted the campaign’s purpose for legal accountability to that of violence.
There has been no mention of Palestinian suffering associated with the IDF and Israel, nor has the government been transparent in admitting that there are no security measures in place when it comes to Israel.
For Peters, killing Palestinians in their thousands is not racist but an activist wanting to prevent war criminals from entering New Zealand is?
Recently, Simon Court of the ACT party in response to Minto wrote: “Undisguised antisemitic behaviour is not acceptable . . . military service is compulsory for Israeli citizens . . . any Israeli holidaying, visiting family or doing business in New Zealand could be targeted . . . it is intimidation towards Jewish visitors . . . and should be condemned by parties across Parliament.”
This comment is misleading, and hypocritical.
PSNA’s campaign is not targeting Jewish people, something the Jewish Council has also misrepresented. It is about identifying Israeli soldiers who have actively participated in human rights violations and war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.
It intentionally blurs the lines between Israeli soldiers and Jewish civilians, as the lines between Palestinian civilians and Hamas have been blurred.
Erases distinction between civilians and a militant group
Even MFAT cannot use the word “Palestinian” but identifies us all as “Hamas” on its website. This erases the distinction between civilians and a militant group, and conflates Israeli military personnel with Jewish civilians, which is both deceptive and dangerous.
The MFAT website states the genocide in Gaza is an “Israel-Hamas” conflict, denying the intentional targeting of Palestinian civilians and erasing our humanity.
Israel’s assault has purposely killed thousands of children, women and men, all innocent civilians. Israel has not provided any evidence of any of its claims that it is targeting “Hamas” and has even been caught out lying about the “mass rapes and burned babies”, the tunnels under the hospitals and militants hiding behind Palestinian toddlers and whole generations of families.
Despite this, MFAT had not condemned Israeli war crimes. This is not a just war. It is a genocide against Palestinians which is also being perpetrated in the West Bank. There is no Hamas in the West Bank.
The ACT Party has been silent or outright supportive of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes. If they were truly concerned about targeting individuals as they are with Minto’s campaign, then they would have called for an end to Israel’s assaults against Palestinians, sanctioned Israel for its war crimes, and called for investigations into Israeli soldiers for mass killings, sexual violence and starving the Palestinian people.
What is clear from Court and Seymour (who has also openly supported Israel alongside members of the Zionist Federation), is that Palestinian lives are irrelevant, we should silently accept our genocide, and that we do not deserve justice. That Israeli IDF soldiers should be given impunity and should be able to spend time in New Zealand with no consequences for their crimes.
This is simply xenophobic, dangerous and “not acceptable in a liberal democracy like New Zealand”.
New Zealand cartoonist Malcolm Evans with two of his anti-Zionism placards at yesterday’s “march for the martyrs” in Auckland . . . politicians’ silence on Israel’s war crimes and violations of international law fails to comply with legal norms and expectations. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Erased the voice of Jewish critics
ACT, alongside Peters, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Labour leader Chris Hipkins, and the Jewish council have erased the voice of Jewish people who oppose Israel and its crimes and who do not associate being Jewish with being Israeli.
There is a clear distinction, something Alternative Jewish Voices, Jewish Voices for Peace, Holocaust survivors and Dayenu have clearly reiterated. Equating Zionism with Judaism, and identifying Israeli military actions with Jewish identity, is dangerously antisemitic.
By failing to distinguish Judaism from Zionism, politicians and the Jewish Council are in danger of fuelling the false narrative that all Jewish people support Israel’s actions, which ultimately harms Jewish communities by increasing resentment and misunderstanding.
Antisemitism should never be weaponised or used to silence criticism of Israel or justify Israel’s impunity. This is harmful to both Palestinians and Jews.
Seymour’s upcoming tenure as deputy prime minister should also be questioned due to his unwavering support and active defence of a regime committing mass atrocities. This directly contradicts New Zealand’s values of justice and accountability demonstrating a complete disregard for human rights and international law.
His silence on Israel’s war crimes and violations of international law fails to comply with legal norms and expectations. He has positioned himself away from representing all New Zealanders.
While we focus on Minto, let’s be fair and ensure Palestinians are also being protected from discrimination and targeting in New Zealand. Are the Zionist Federation, the New Zealand Jewish Council, and the Holocaust Centre supporting Israel economically or culturally, aiding and abetting its illegal occupation, and do they support the genocide?
Canada investigated funds linked to illegal settlements
Canada recently investigated the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of Canada for potentially violating charitable tax laws by funding projects linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, which are illegal under international law.
In August 2024, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) revoked the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s (JNF Canada) charitable status after a comprehensive audit revealed significant non-compliance with Canadian tax laws.
On the 31 January 2025, Haaretz reported that Israel had recruited the Jewish National Fund to illegally secretly buy Palestinian land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
What does that mean for the New Zealand branch of the Jewish National Fund?
None of these organisations should be funnelling resources to illegal settlements or supporting Israel’s war machine. A full investigation into their financial and political activities is necessary to ensure any money coming from New Zealand is not supporting genocide, land theft or apartheid.
The government has already investigated Palestinians sending money to relatives in Gaza, the same needs to be done to organisations supporting Israel. Are any of these groups supporting war crimes under the guise of charity?
While Jewish communities and Palestinians have rallied together and supported each other these last 15 months, we have received no support from the Jewish Council or the Holocaust Centre, who have remained silent or have supported Israel’s actions. Dayenu, and Alternative Jewish voices have vocally opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and reached out to us. As Jews dedicated to human rights, justice, and the prevention of genocide because of their own history, they unequivocally condemn Israel’s actions.
Given the Holocaust, you would expect the Holocaust Centre and the Jewish Council to oppose any acts of violence, especially that on such an industrial scale. You would expect them to oppose apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the dehumanisation of Palestinians as the other Jewish organisations are doing.
Genocide, war crimes must not be normalised
War crimes and genocide must never be normalised. Israel must not be shielded and the suffering and dehumanisation of Palestinians supported.
We must ensure that all New Zealanders, whether Jewish, Israeli or Palestinian are not targeted, and are protected from discrimination, racism, violence and dehumanisation.
All organisations are subject to scrutiny, but only some have been.
Instead of just focusing on John Minto, the ACT Party, NZ First, National, and Labour should be answering why Israeli soldiers who may have committed atrocities, are allowed into New Zealand in the first place.
Israel and its war criminals should not be treated any differently to any other country.
We must shift the focus back to Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and impunity, while exposing the hypocrisy of those who defend Israel but attack Palestinian solidarity.
A West Papuan advocacy group is calling for an urgent international inquiry into allegations that Indonesian security forces have used the chemical weapon white phosphorus against West Papuans for a second time.
The allegations were made in the new documentary, Frontier War, by Paradise Broadcasting.
In the film, West Papuan civilians give testimony about a number of children dying from sickness in the months folllowing the 2021 Kiwirok attack.
They say that “poisoning . . . occurred due to the bombings”, that “they throw the bomb and . . . chemicals come through the mouth”, said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda.
They add that this was “the first time they’re throwing people up are not dying, but between one month later or two months later”, he said in a statement.
Bombings produced big “clouds of dust” and infants suffering the effects could not stop coughing up blood.
“White phosphorus is an evil weapon, even when used against combatants. It burns through skin and flesh and causes heart and liver failure,” said Wenda.
‘Crimes against defenceless civilians’
“But Indonesia is committing these crimes against humanity against defenceless civilians, elders, women and children.
“Thousands of Papuans in the border region were forced from their villages by these attacks, adding to the over 85,000 who are still internally displaced by militarisation.”
Journalists uncovered that victims were suffering deep burns down to the bone, typical with that weapon, as well as photographing yellow tipped bombs which military sources confirmed “appear to be incendiary or white phosphorus”.
The same yellow-tipped explosives were discovered in Kiwirok, and the fins from the recovered munitions are consistent with white phosphorus.
“As usual, Indonesia lied about using white phosphorus in Nduga,” said Wenda.
“They have also lied about even the existence of the Kiwirok attack — an operation that led to the deaths of over 300 men, women, and children.
“They lie, lie, lie.”
Frontier War/ Inside the West Papua Liberation Army Video: Paradise Broadcasting
Proof needed after ‘opening up’
Wenda said the movement would not be able to obtain proof of these attacks — “of the atrocities being perpetrated daily against my people” — until Indonesia opened West Papua to the “eyes of the world”.
“West Papua is a prison island: no journalists, NGOs, or aid organisations are allowed to operate there. Even the UN is totally banned,” Wenda said.
Indonesia’s entire strategy in West Papua is secrecy. Their crimes have been hidden from the world for decades, through a combination of internet blackouts, repression of domestic journalists, and refusal of access to international media.”
Wenda said Indonesia must urgently facilitate the long-delayed UN Human Rights visit to West Papua, and allow journalists and NGOs to operate there without fear of imprisonment or repression.
“The MSG [Melanesian Spearhead Group], PIF [Pacific Islands Forum] and the OACPS [Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States] must again increase the pressure on Indonesia to allow a UN visit,” he said.
“The fake amnesty proposed by [President] Prabowo Subianto is contradictory as it does not also include a UN visit. Even if 10, 20 activists are released, our right to political expression is totally banned.”
Wenda said that Indonesia must ultimately “open their eyes” to the only long-term solution in West Papua — self-determination through an independence referendum.
Scenes from the Paradise Broadcasting documentary Frontier War. Images: Screenshots APR
Long live the king and long may he reign, so goes the traditional proclamation. In Tonga, King Tupou VI has shown he has every intention of doing that.
After a tumultuous and tense year of the chess board of politics, the monarch appears to have won, with ordinary citizens and democratic rule taking a backward step.
With the swearing in of Tonga’s new cabinet, including the appointment of his son Crown Prince Tupouto’a ‘Ulukalaka from outside Parliament to the defence and foreign affairs portfolios, the king has triumphed.
It’s almost 12 months since the king withdrew “confidence and consent” in then prime minister Siaosi Sovaleni, as armed forces minister, along with Fekita ‘Utoikamanu, the country’s first female foreign affairs minister. The move appeared to overstep the reduced royal powers outlined in the country’s 2010 constitution.
No details for the withdrawal of confidence and consent were disclosed. Noticeably neither Sovaleni or ‘Ulukalaka are aristocrats and the roles of foreign affairs and defense have traditionally been held by a male noble or members of the royal family.
Last February, Tupou VI acted against Sovaleni while he was overseas, seeking medical treatment. His cabinet responded by rejecting the king’s position, issuing a legal opinion from Tonga’s attorney general stating it was “contrary” to the constitution.
One thing seemed to be clear, that Tupou VI was reasserting his role in the affairs of state in a way not seen since the constitutional reform in 2010.
King has his way
A year later, and the king has had his way. Solaveni stood down as prime minister on Christmas Eve as he faced a no confidence motion in Parliament. It would likely have passed with the support of a bloc of noble MPs, appointed by the king, allied with opposition members.
Now Tonga faces an uncertain nine months with newly elected Prime Minister ‘Aisake Eke at the reins until elections in November. The 65-year-old was formally appointed by Tupou VI as Tonga’s 19th prime minister at the Nuku’alofa Palace, after he was elected by Parliament in December.
The much awaited announcement of who would be in cabinet was delayed several times, with the process of getting the king to approve each minister taking much longer than usual or expected.
The prime minister has the power to recommend up to four people outside parliament to his ministry, and he did, including the crown prince. He also recommended two women — ‘Ana ‘Akau’ola as Minister of Health and Sinaitakala Tu’itahi as Minister of Internal Affairs — the most ever in cabinet.
Tonga in 2010 amended its constitution to remove many of the monarch’s powers and allowed elections after more than 150 years of absolute rule. The move to greater democracy occurred with the cooperation of the then monarch George V.
The nation of about 107,000 people is the only Pacific island nation with an Indigenous monarch.
Previously, the monarch had almost absolute power with the right to appoint the prime minister, cabinet ministers and members of parliament, except nine MPs elected as the peoples’ representatives.
King retains some powers
Under the new constitution, cabinet ministers are appointed or removed by the king on the prime minister’s recommendation, or a vote of no confidence in Parliament. But the king — defined as a sacred person in Tonga’s constitution — retained some powers including veto over government legislation and the right to appoint about a third of Parliament’s members, who are nobles.
Another major constitutional change was to increase the number of elected people’s representatives from nine to 17, while the number of noble representatives remained at nine. This meant that if the people’s representatives could stand together on any issue, they could form a majority and dominate the 26-seat chamber.
But that has not often been the case in the past 15 years, with the people’s representatives at odds with each other. As a result the nobles have held the balance of power, as in the recent standoff in Parliament over the proposed vote of no confidence that led to the eventual resignation of Sovaleni.
The group of MPs that came together to eventually force his exit were not united by a political vision, and were not so much “pro-Eke” as “anti-Sovaleni.”
Seven of the nine nobles voting against then former prime minister Sovaleni in December was a clear sign of the involvement of the king in this latest political turmoil. The nobles almost always act in Parliament according to what they understand as “the wish of His Majesty.”
“I hope there will be a time when we’ll work together,” he said pointedly, acknowledging the noble representatives.
‘There’s still enslavement’
“I thought this land had been granted freedom, but there’s still enslavement,” Sovaleni continued through tears. He added that he was quitting “for the good of the country and moving Tonga forward.”
Sovaleni suggested that the people’s representatives should see this as an opportunity to collaborate. “If the nobles can pull themselves together, I don’t know why can’t we overcome our differences,” he said.
Eke after his election travelled to New Zealand for an audience with the king, but the king decided to take his time. What used to be a prompt and routine formality to swear in the government and cabinet was delayed. And a month later the king now has what he sought in February last year.
The late George V declared that the 2010 reform was to make Tonga “more democratic”. Despite these changes, Tonga’s taste of democracy under his brother has, in the past 15 years, been a bitter-sweet journey that started with good intentions, but has now turned from bad to ugly.
Tongan-born Kalafi Moala has been a journalist and author for 35 years, establishing the country’s first independent newspaper, Taimi ‘o Tonga, writing on the country’s social, cultural and political history, and campaigning for media freedom at home and in the Pacific region. This article was first published by BenarNews and is republished with permission.
We were polarised by the United States last week, but in the same way that a windscreen wiper distracts you from the rain, our Pacific news cycle and local coconut wireless became dominated by a whirlwind of speculation after New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters announced a review of New Zealand’s aid to Kiribati.
This followed what was perceived as a snub by our President Taneti Maamau.
The New Zealand media, in its typical fashion, seized the opportunity to patronise Kiribati, and the familiar whispers about Chinese influence began to circulate.
Amidst this media manufactured drama, I found myself reflecting on “that” recent experience which offered stark contrast to the geopolitical noise.
We had the privilege of attending the ordination of a Catholic Priest in Onotoa, where the true spirit of Kiribati was exemplified in the splendour of simplicity. Despite limited resources, the island community, representing various faiths, came together to celebrate this sacred event with unparalleled joy, hilariousness and hospitality from silent hands that blessed you with love.
Hands that built thatched huts for us to sleep in, wove mats, cooked food, made pillows and hung bananas in maneabas to provide for guests from all over Kiribati and Nauru. Our President, himself a Protestant, had prioritised and actively participated, embodying by example, the unity and peace that Bishop Simon Mani so eloquently spoke of.
We laughed, we cried, and we felt the spirit of our loving God.
Spirit of harmony
That spirit of harmony and hope we carried from recent experiences felt shaken overnight by news of New Zealand’s potential aid withdrawal. Social media in Kiribati erupted with questions and concerns, fuelled by an article claiming that New Zealand was halting aid due to President Maamau “snubbing” of Deputy Prime Minister Peters.
Importantly: President Maamau would never in a millennium intentionally “snub” New Zealand or any foreign minister. The reality is far more nuanced.
At the end of 2024, President Maamau announced to his Cabinet Ministers that he would delegate international bilateral engagements to Vice-President Dr Teuea Toatu or other Ministers and Ambassadors appropriately. Thereby enabling him to focus intently on domestic matters, including the workplan for our national necessities outlined in the KV20 vision and 149 deliverables of his party manifesto.
NZ’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters . . . his spat with Kiribati described as a “storm in a teacup”. Image: RNZ/Reece Baker
While the Vice-President was prepared to receive the New Zealand delegation, it seems Minister Peters was insistent on meeting with the President himself, leading to the cancellation of his trip.
This insistence on bypassing established protocol is not only unusual but also, well let’s just say it with as much love as possible: It’s disrespectful to Kiribati’s sovereignty.
It is also worth noting that the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia recently visited Kiribati and engaged with the Vice-President and Cabinet Ministers without any such reluctance.
New Zealand’s subsequent announcement of an aid review, including a potential threat to the $2 million funded RSE scheme, has understandably caused serious anxiety in Kiribati.
Devastating impact
The potential loss of funding for critical sectors like health, education, fisheries, economic development and climate resilience would of course have a devastating impact on our people.
After committing $102 million between 2021-2024 these are major threats to public health where $20 million was invested in initiatives like rebuilding the Betio Hospital, training doctors, building clinics, NCD strategic planning and more, $10 million in education, $4 million in developing the fisheries sector, it’s an expansive and highly impactful list of critical support for capacity strengthening to our country.
While New Zealand has every right to review its aid programme to Kiribati or any developing country, it is crucial that these kinds of decisions are based on genuine development processes and not used as a tool for political pressure.
Linking Pacific aid to access to political leaders sets a questionable precedent and undermines the principles of partnership, mutual respect and “mana” that underpins the inextricably linked relationships between Pacific nations.
The reference to potential impacts on I-Kiribati workers in New Zealand under the RSE scheme is particularly concerning. These hardworking individuals contribute significantly to the New Zealand economy in a mutually beneficial arrangement.
We deserve to be treated with fairness and respect, not weaponised to cut at the heart of what drives our political motivations — providing for our people, who are providing for our children.
Despite this unfortunate situation, I believe that dialogue and understanding along with truth and love will prevail.
Greater humility needed
In the spirit of the “effectiveness, inclusiveness, resilience, and sustainability” that upholds New Zealand’s own development principles, we should all revisit this issue with greater humility and a commitment to resolving such misunderstandings.
As a New Zealand-born, Australian/Tuvaluan, I-Kiribati politician representing the largest constituency in Kiribati, I have zero pride or ego and will never be too proud to beg for the needs of the people I serve, who placed their faith in a government that would put them first.
We would love to host Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and a New Zealand government delegation in Kiribati, and we are indescribably grateful for the kinds of support provided since we gained independence in 1979. Our history stretches back even further than that, when New Zealand’s agricultural industry was nourished by phosphate from Banaba, and we continue to treasure the intertwined links between our nations.
Let us prioritise cooperation and mutual respect over ego and political posturing. Let’s drink fresh coconuts and eat raw fish together and talk about how we can change the world by changing ourselves first.
The “tea party” of Pacific partnership must continue to strengthen, and deepen, ESPECIALLY when challenged to overcome misunderstandings. It should always be one where Pacific voices are heard and respected lovingly, while we work towards a collective vision of health, peace and prosperity for all.
But if development diplomacy ever fails, we’ll remember that I-Kiribati people are some of the most determined and resilient on this planet. Our ancestors navigated to these “isolated isles of the Pacific” surrounded by 3.5 million km of ocean and found “Tungaru” which means “a place of JOY”.
We arrived in this world with nothing, and we’ll leave it with nothing, and we get to live our whole lives not feeling sorry for ourselves in this island paradise of ours, this place of joy, where we are wealthy in ways that money cannot buy.
We will survive
Ruth Maryanne Cross Kwansing was elected an independent member of Parliament in Kiribati in 2024. She later joined the Tobwaan Kiribati Party.
In a fervent appeal to the global community, Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea has called on US President Donald Trump to “rethink” his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and current global climate initiatives.
Marape’s plea came during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, on 23 January 2025.
Expressing deep concern for the impacts of climate change on Papua New Guinea and other vulnerable Pacific Island nations, Marape highlighted the dire consequences these nations face due to rising sea levels and increasingly severe weather patterns.
“The effects of climate change are not just theoretical for us; they have real, devastating impacts on our fragile economies and our way of life,” he said.
The Prime Minister emphasised that while it was within President Trump’s prerogative to prioritise American interests, withdrawing the United States — the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide– from the Paris Agreement without implementing measures to curtail coal power production was “totally irresponsible”, Marape said.
“As a leader of a major forest and ocean nation in the Pacific region, I urge President Trump to reconsider his decision.”
He went on to point out the contradiction in the US stance.
US not closing coal plants
“The United States is not shutting down any of its coal power plants yet has chosen to withdraw from critical climate efforts. This is fundamentally irresponsible.
“The science regarding our warming planet is clear — it does not lie,” he said.
Marape further articulated that as the “Leader of the Free World,” Trump had a moral obligation to engage with global climate issues.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape’s plea to President Trump. Video: PNGTV
“It is morally wrong for President Trump to disregard the pressing challenges of climate change.
He must articulate how he intends to address this critical issue,” he added, stressing that effective global leaders had a responsibility not only to their own nations but also to the planet as a whole.
In a bid to advocate for small island nations that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts, PM Marape announced plans to bring this issue to the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).
He hopes to unify the voices of PIF member countries in a collective statement regarding the US withdrawal from climate negotiations.
US revived Pacific relations
“The United States has recently revitalised its relations with the Pacific. It is discouraging to see it retreating from climate discussions that significantly affect our region’s efforts to mitigate climate change,” he said.
Prime Minister Marape reminded the international community that while larger nations might have the capacity to withstand extreme weather events such as typhoons, wildfires, and tornadoes, smaller nations like Papua New Guinea could not endure such impacts.
“For us, every storm and rising tide represents a potential crisis. Big nations can afford to navigate these challenges, but for us, the stakes are incredibly high,” he said.
Marape’s appeal underscores the urgent need for collaborative and sustained global action to combat climate change, particularly for nations like Papua New Guinea, which are disproportionately affected by environmental change.
16 Just Stop Oil supporters are appealing their draconian sentences at the Court of Appeal today and tomorrow. The mass appeal concerns 16 political prisoners with combined sentences of 41 years handed down between July and September 2024. They are known as the Lord Walney 16. On Thursday, the second day of the hearing, at noon, the campaign group Defend Our Juries will stage a lawful and…
Implementation of Israel’s ban on the UN Palestinian relief agency UNRWA will be disastrous, the aid agency’s chief has told the Security Council, saying Israel’s actions jeopardise “any prospect of peace”.
The ban is set to come into force tomorrow after months of an intensified Israeli campaign against UNRWA, which it has claimed supports terrorism without providing evidence.
“In two days, our operations in the occupied Palestinian territory will be crippled,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told the 15-member Security Council.
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini . . . “In two days, our operations in the occupied Palestinian territory will be crippled.” Image: UN
“Full implementation of the Knesset legislation will be disastrous.”
Lazzarini also slammed Israel’s “propaganda” campaign against UNRWA, which has seen Tel Aviv invest in billboards in major cities and Google Ads.
“The absurdity of anti-UNRWA propaganda does not diminish the threat it poses to our staff, especially those in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza — where 273of our colleagues have been killed,” he said.
Seven European nations jointly condemn Israel
Seven European Union countries — Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Slovenia, and Spain — have told the UN Security Council they “deeply deplore” Israel’s decision to shut down UNRWA’s operations in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In a joint statement, they condemned Israel’s withdrawal from its 1967 agreement with UNRWA and any efforts to obstruct its UN-mandated work.
The group also called for the suspension of Israeli laws banning the agency, arguing they violate international law and the UN Charter.
The “non-suspenders” – – in #UNSC meeting on #UNRWA:
We deeply deplore the adoption by the Israeli Knesset of legislation aimed at abolishing UNRWA’s activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
UNRWA remains more essential than ever. https://t.co/Ihp5pmdf3zpic.twitter.com/SSBiaYlZAT
However, Israel vowed at the UN to push ahead with the controversial ban.
“UNRWA must cease its operations and evacuate all premises it operates in Jerusalem, including the properties located in Maalot Dafna and Kafr Aqab,” Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon told the council.
“Israel will terminate all collaboration, communication and contact with UNRWA or anyone acting on its behalf,” he said.
UNRWA said operations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank will also suffer. It provides aid, health and education services to millions in the Palestinian territories and neighbouring Arab countries of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
‘Irresponsible’ UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the Security Council have described UNRWA as the backbone of the humanitarian aid response in Gaza, which has been decimated by 15 months of Israel’s war on the enclave.
The United States, under new President Donald Trump, supports what it called Israel’s “sovereign right” to close UNRWA’s offices in occupied east Jerusalem, acting US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea told the Security Council.
Under Trump predecessor Joe Biden, the United States provided military support for Israel’s war, but urged Israel to pause implementation of the law against UNRWA.
“UNRWA exaggerating the effects of the laws and suggesting that they will force the entire humanitarian response to halt is irresponsible and dangerous,” Shea said.
“What is needed is a nuanced discussion about how we can ensure that there is no interruption in the delivery of humanitarian aid and essential services,” she said.
“UNRWA is not and never has been the only option for providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza,” she said.
Other agencies working in Gaza and the West Bank include the children’s organisation UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and the UN Development Programme.
Who fills the gap? But the UN has repeatedly said there is no alternative to UNRWA and that it would be Israel’s responsibility to replace its services. Israel, whose creation in 1948 was preceded by the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland during the Nakba, rejected that it was responsible for replacing UNRWA’s services.
“Since October 2023, we have delivered two-thirds of all food assistance, provided shelter to over a million displaced persons and vaccinated a quarter of a million children against polio,” Lazzarini told the Security Council.
“Since the ceasefire began, UNRWA has brought in 60 percent of the food entering Gaza, reaching more than half a million people. We conduct some 17,000 medical consultations every day,” he said.
Israel has long been critical of UNRWA, claiming that the agency’s staff took part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. The UN has said nine UNRWA staff may have been involved and were fired.
The UN has vowed to investigate all accusations and repeatedly asked Israel for evidence, which it says has not been provided.
Lazzarini also said today that UNRWA had been the target of a “fierce disinformation campaign” to “portray the agency as a terrorist organisation”.
Last Friday afternoon, Kara Sternquist, a trans woman in custody at a federal women’s prison in Fort Worth, Texas, was taken from her unit. A guard told Sternquist that she had an unexpected psychiatric appointment in the chapel.
“She was lied to,” said Deviant Ollam, a friend who speaks with her regularly by phone. “Once she was away from everyone else, they took her.”
According to Ollam, Sternquist told him that she is one of almost a dozen trans women who have been taken from the general population at FMC Carswell and moved into an administrative segregation unit that is typically used for inmates on suicide watch. (The Intercept has been unable to reach Sternquist directly, and an official at FMC Carswell declined to answer questions when reached by phone on Monday.)
The women were told they would be moved to a men’s prison, Ollam said, under President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order, which directs the Bureau of Prisons to ensure “that males are not detained in women’s prisons” and that inmates don’t receive gender-affirming health care using federal funds. On Monday, Trump issued another bigoted order barring trans people from military service, which was quickly challenged in federal court.
Trans women who are forced to live in men’s prison facilities face disproportionate risk of sexual assault and violence, as the Bureau of Prisons’ manual on trans inmates, issued in 2022, acknowledges.
On Tuesday afternoon, a warden unexpectedly told Sternquist she could return to her unit for now, Ollam told The Intercept. “She’s still very worried but optimistic,” Ollam said after he got off the phone with her.
Sternquist’s four-day ordeal and ongoing uncertainty about where she will serve the rest of her sentence reflects the precarious position of hundreds of trans people in federal prisons, who are being targeted by Trump and his hard-right allies.
“The worst part for her is not knowing what will happen next,” said Allegra Glashausser, Sternquist’s attorney. “She doesn’t know whether she will be held with men. She doesn’t know if she will receive her hormones as scheduled. Everything is uncertain. I am exceptionally worried for Kara’s physical safety and her mental health.”
“Trans people in custody, and trans women, in particular, are bearing the brunt of the immediate harms of this executive order,” said Shayna Medley, a litigation attorney at Advocates for Trans Equality.
This is not Sternquist’s first experience facing a dangerous housing assignment in federal prison.
In 2022, after she was arrested on firearms charges and for possession of fraudulent government badges, Sternquist was initially put into the men’s unit at the notorious MDC Brooklyn facility, even though her passport and driver’s license reflect that she is female.
It took two court orders and the threat of sanctions from a federal judge for the Bureau of Prisons to transfer Sternquist to women’s housing at MDC Brooklyn. “The DOJ and BOP proceed under the misapprehension that court orders are advisory,” wrote Magistrate Judge Sanket Bulsara in a September 2022 order. “Such contumacious conduct risks a contempt sanction.”
In another order, in November 2022, a judge directed the Bureau of Prisons to change Sternquist’s gender marker in prison databases to female. “To fail to do so would only continue to cause the mis-gendering problems that Defendant has faced while in custody,” U.S. District Court Judge Dora Irizarry wrote.
In August 2024, after Sternquist pleaded guilty to the firearms count, Irizarry sentenced her to a prison term of 60 months. The judge’s sentencing order specifically recommended that Sternquist be assigned to FMC Carswell “or another women’s medical facility” and that the Bureau of Prisons “provide gender-affirming and other medical care.”
“It’s moving heaven and earth to get them on the right unit,” Ollam said of the process, even under the Biden administration’s rules, for getting trans inmates placed into the appropriate facility. “If they are moved, they will very likely be lost forever.”
Ollam, who posts video updates about Sternquist’s case and condition, told The Intercept that Sternquist does not know when she will be transferred, but she fears it could happen at any moment. In the meantime, prison officials have started addressing Sternquist and the other trans women by male pronouns, according to Ollam. “When the staff come in, they address them as ‘gentlemen,’” Ollam said.
The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to inquiries about the trans women held at FMC Carswell or plans to transfer them. But another inmate at the facility, Ángel Espinosa-Villegas, who is transmasculine, closely mirrored Ollam’s account in messages sent to friends.
“I don’t know what else to do except sound the alarms.”
On Friday, guards “took the trans women out of every unit,” Espinosa-Villegas wrote in one message that day, which was shared with The Intercept. “You should have seen the evil looks of triumph as they escorted the trans women crying out of here.”
Espinosa-Villegas also wrote about fears among transmasculine inmates that “we’re next on Trump’s list.”
“Now there’s talk about us transmascs getting sent to [administrative segregation] until ‘Trump finds a place for us,’” Espinosa-Villegas wrote. “There’s officers saying that shit. They’ve refused to give me my [testosterone] shots every time I go and ask for them.”
“God watching the trans women get hauled away was evil,” Espinosa-Villegas wrote in another message. “I don’t know what else to do except sound the alarms.”
On Sunday, another trans woman in federal custody — identified in court records by a pseudonym, Maria Moe — filed the first lawsuit challenging the executive order.
“Maria Moe has lived as a woman and has taken hormones continuously since she was a teenager,” reads a complaint filed in federal court in Massachusetts. “During her term of incarceration, she has always been treated as a woman by federal correctional officials and her peers. She has never been housed in a men’s facility and has never stopped taking hormones.”
But last week, like Sternquist and others at FMC Carswell, Moe was removed from the general population of a women’s facility, according to legal filings, which redacted the name of the specific prison. The day after Trump signed the executive order, Moe was confined to the “Special Housing Unit” and “has not been permitted to have contact with others for at least four days.”
Moe’s lawyers argue that the executive order’s provisions about inmate housing violates the Eight Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, among other provisions of the Constitution and federal law, as does the prohibition on providing hormone therapy and other care.
“Transferring Maria Moe to a men’s prison will pose a substantial risk of serious harm, including an extremely high risk of violence and sexual assault from other incarcerated people and BOP staff,” reads her complaint.
Although Moe’s case was quickly sealed, Ollam said he, Sternquist, and the other trans women at FMC Carswell are watching closely, in hopes that the judge overseeing Moe’s challenge might block the executive order nationwide. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked another of Trump’s orders regarding birthright citizenship.
“The girls just want their message to be: silence equals death,” Ollam said.
What will happen to Australia — and New Zealand — once the superpower that has been followed into endless battles, the United States, finally unravels?
With President Donald Trump now into his second week in the White House, horrific fires have continued to rage across Los Angeles and the details of Elon Musk’s allegedly dodgy Twitter takeover began to emerge, the world sits anxiously by.
The consequences of a second Trump term will reverberate globally, not only among Western nations. But given the deeply entrenched Americanisation of much of the Western world, this is about how it will navigate the after-shocks once the United States finally unravels — for unravel it surely will.
Leading with chaos Now that the world’s biggest superpower and war machine has a deranged criminal at the helm — for a second time — none of us know the lengths to which Trump (and his puppet masters) will go as his fingers brush dangerously close to the nuclear codes. Will he be more emboldened?
The signs are certainly there.
President Donald Trump 2.0 . . . will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division? Image: ABC News screenshot IA
So far, Trump — who had already led the insurrection of a democratically elected government — has threatened to exit the nuclear arms pact with Russia, talked up a trade war with China and declared “all hell will break out” in the Middle East if Hamas hadn’t returned the Israeli hostages.
Will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division?
This, too, appears to be already happening.
Trump’s rants leading up to his inauguration last week had been a steady stream of crazed declarations, each one more unhinged than the last.
Denial of catastrophic climate consequences
And will Trump be in even further denial over the catastrophic consequences of climate change than during his last term? Even as Los Angeles grapples with a still climbing death toll of 25 lives lost, 12,000 homes, businesses and other structures destroyed and 16,425 hectares (about the size of Washington DC) wiped out so far in the latest climactic disaster?
The fires are, of course, symptomatic of the many years of criminal negligence on global warming. But since Trump instead accused California officials of “prioritising environmental policies over public safety” while his buddy and head of government “efficiency”, Musk blamed black firefighters for the fires, it would appear so.
Will the madman, for surely he is one, also gift even greater protections to oligarchs like Musk?
“…pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal agencies”.
So, this too is already happening.
All of these actions will combine to create a scenario of destruction that will see the implosion of the US as we know it, though the details are yet to emerge.
The flawed AUKUS pact sinking quickly . . . Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with outgoing President Joe Biden, will Australia have the mettle to be bigger than Trump. Image: Independent Australia
What happens Down Under?
US allies — like Australia — have already been thoroughly indoctrinated by American pop culture in order to complement the many army bases they house and the defence agreements they have signed.
Though Trump hasn’t shown any interest in making it a 52nd state, Australia has been tucked up in bed with the United States since the Cold War. Our foreign policy has hinged on this alliance, which also significantly affects Australia’s trade and economy, not to mention our entire cultural identity, mired as it is in US-style fast food dependence and reality TV. Would you like Vegemite McShaker Fries with that?
So what will happen to Australia once the superpower we have followed into endless battles finally breaks down?
‘Trump has promised chaos and chaos is what he’ll deliver.’
His rise to power will embolden the rabid Far-Right in the US but will this be mirrored here? And will Australia follow the US example and this year elect our very own (admittedly scaled down) version of Trump, personified by none other than the Trump-loving Peter Dutton?
If any of his wild announcements are to be believed, between building walls and evicting even US nationals he doesn’t like, while simultaneously making Canadians US citizens, Trump will be extremely busy.
There will be little time even to consider Australia, let alone come to our rescue should we ever need the might of the US war machine — no matter whether it is an Albanese or sycophantic Dutton leadership.
It is a given, however, that we would be required to honour all defence agreements should our ally demand it.
It would be great if, as psychologists urge us to do when children act up, our leaders could simply ignore and refuse to engage with him, but it remains to be seen whether Australia will have the mettle to be bigger than Trump.
Republished from the Independent Australia with permission.
Ali Abunimah is executive director of important pro-Palestinian media outlet The Electronic Intifada. And Switzerland is facing demands for “an apology and reparations” after its highly controversial political decision to detain him over the weekend. Activists in Switzerland had invited Abunimah to speak at an event on 25 January. But “three plainclothes police officers violently arrested” him…
A letter organised by the British Palestinian Committee, the largest umbrella organisation of Palestinian groups in this country, has expressed grave concern at Met policing of a pro-Palestine march on Saturday 18 January, which resulted in 77 arrests and charges under the Public Order being brought against organisers. The letter to the home secretary Yvette Cooper joins calls for an…
Climate protester Gaie Delap has been told that she must serve a further 20 days in prison for being “unlawfully at large” – just as 25 leading charities call on the Labour government to release her. Gaie’s additional 20 days is accounted for by the days that followed Serco/EMS’s report of 28 November on their failure to fit an appropriate tag on her wrist, and her eventual return to prison…
On Friday 24 January, a Palestine Action political prisoner was released from HMP Dovegate after spending almost a month on remand. It was over a Christmas Day action at UAV Engines – a company directly complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Bryn Higgs, from Ullapool, was arrested on 25 December 2024 alongside four others following an action which destroyed the walls at the premises of UAV…
Among his first official acts on returning to the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”.
An RSF statement strongly refutes Trump’s “distorted vision of free speech, which is inherently detrimental to press freedom”.
Trump has long been one of social media’s most prevalent spreaders of false information, and his executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” is the latest in a series of victories for the propagators of disinformation online.
Bowing to pressure from Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, whose Meta platforms are already hostile to journalism, did away with fact-checking on Facebook, which the tech mogul falsely equated to censorship while throwing fact-checking journalists under the bus.
Trump ally Elon Musk also dismantled the meagre trust and safety safeguards in place when he took over Twitter and proceeded to arbitrarily ban journalists who were critical of him from the site.
‘Free speech’ isn’t ‘free of facts’
“Free speech doesn’t mean public discourse has to be free of facts. Donald Trump and his Big Tech cronies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are dismantling what few guardrails the internet had to protect the integrity of information,” said RSF’s USA executive director Clayton Weimers.
“We cannot ignore the irony of Trump appointing himself the chief crusader for ‘free speech’ while he continues to personally attack press freedom — a pillar of the First Amendment — and has vowed to weaponise the federal government against expression he doesn’t like.
“If Trump means what he says in his own executive order, he could start by dropping his lawsuits against news organisations.”
Trump should immediately drop both lawsuits and refrain from launching others while in office.
After a campaign where he attacked the press on a daily basis, Trump has continued to berate the media and dismissed its legitimacy to critique him.
During a press conference the day after he took office, Trump reproached NBC reporter Peter Alexander for questions about Trump’s blanket pardons of the January 6th riot participants, saying, “Just look at the numbers on the election.
“We won this election in a landslide, because the American public is tired of people like you that are just one-sided, horrible people, in terms of crime.”
An incoherent press freedom policy The executive order also flies in the face of his violent rhetoric against journalists.
The order asserts that during the Biden administration, “the Federal government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”
It goes on to state, “It is the policy of the United States to ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
This stated policy, laudable in a vacuum, even if made redundant by the First Amendment, is rendered meaningless by Trump’s explicit threats to weaponise the government against the media, which have recently included threats to revoke broadcast licenses in political retaliation, investigate news organizations that criticise him, and jail journalists who refuse to expose confidential sources.
Instead, the policy appears designed to amplify disinformation, which benefits a President of the United States who has proven willing to spread disinformation that furthered his political interests on matters small and large.
“If Trump is serious about his stated commitment to free speech, RSF suggests he begin by ensuring his own actions serve to protect the free press, rather than censoring or punishing media outlets,” the watchdog said.
“The United States has seen a steady decline in its press freedom ranking in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index over the past decade to a current ranking of 55th out of 180 countries, with presidents from both parties presiding over this backslide.
“While Trump is not entirely responsible for the present situation, his frequent attacks on the news media have no doubt contributed to the decline in trust in the media, which has been driven partly by partisan attitudes towards journalism.
“Trump’s violent rhetoric can also contribute to real-life violence — assaults on journalists nearly doubled in 2024, when his campaign was at its apex, compared to 2023.”
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has misled the Australian Parliament and is liable to prosecution — not that government will lift a finger to enforce the law, reports Michael West Media.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Michael West
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has misled the Australian Parliament. In a submission to the Senate, the company claimed, “Foxtel also pays millions of dollars in income tax, GST and payroll tax, unlike many of our large international digital competitors”.
However, an MWM investigation into the financial affairs of Foxtel has shown Foxtel was paying zero income tax when it told the Senate it was paying “millions”. The penalty for lying to the Senate is potential imprisonment, although “contempt of Parliament” laws are never enforced.
The investigation found that NXE, the entity that controls Foxtel, paid no income tax in any of the five years from 2019 to 2023. During this time it generated $14 billion of total income.
The total tax payable across this period is $0. The average total income is $2.8 billion per year.
Foxtel Submission to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee Inquiry into The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (2021 Measures No.1) Bill. Image: MWM screenshot
Why did News Corporation mislead the Parliament? The plausible answers are in its Foxtel Submission to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee Inquiry into The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment.
In May 2021 — which is also where the transgression occurred — the media executives for the American tycoon were lobbying a Parliamentary committee to change the laws in their favour.
By this time, Netflix had leap-frogged Foxtel Pay TV subscriptions in Australia and Foxtel was complaining it had to spend too much money on producing local Australian content under the laws of the time. Also that Netflix paid almost no tax.
Big-league tax dodger
They were correct in this. Netflix, which is a big-league tax dodger itself, was by then making bucketloads of money in Australia but with zero local content requirements.
Making television drama and so forth is expensive. It is far cheaper to pipe foreign content through your channels online. As Netflix does.
The misleading of Parliament by corporations is rife, and contempt laws need to be enforced, as demonstrated routinely by the PwC inquiry last year. Corporations and their representatives routinely lie in their pursuit of corporate objectives.
If democracy is to function better, the information provided to Parliament needs to be clarified, beyond doubt, as reliable. Former senator Rex Patrick has made the point in these pages.
Even in this short statement to the committee of inquiry (published above), there are other misleading statements. Like many companies defending their failure to pay adequate income tax, Foxtel claims that it “paid millions” in GST and payroll tax.
Companies don’t “pay” GST or payroll tax. They collect these taxes on behalf of governments.
Little regard for laws
Further to the contempt of Parliament, so little regard for the laws of Australia is shown by corporations that the local American boss of a small gas fracking company, Tamboran Resources, controlled by a US oil billionaire, didn’t even bother turning up to give evidence when asked.
This despite being rewarded with millions in public grant money.
Politicians need to muscle up, as Greens Senator Nick McKim did when grilling former Woolies boss Brad Banducci for prevaricating over providing evidence to the supermarket inquiry.
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is reopublished with permission.
When Alexei arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border last June, he expected he’d have to wait a few weeks — maybe a month at most — while immigration officials determined whether he was eligible to enter the U.S.
Under the Refugee Act of 1980, people fleeing persecution on “account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” can apply for asylum when they reach the U.S. This status grants them protection from deportation and an eventual pathway to citizenship.
As Alexei told an officer in an interview, he had good reason to flee his native Russia: The 27-year-old artist from Moscow had put out music with antiwar lyrics after Russia invaded Ukraine. He watched other musicians face threats of prison time and accusations of being “foreign agents” over their activism, and he began to fear for his life.
But after being told he passed that interview, and waiting three weeks in the Imperial Regional Detention Facility near the town of Calexico, California, Alexei was handed a piece of paper by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer stating that he would not be released. He would have to argue his case for asylum from detention, because he was considered a threat to national security.
In the last seven months of the Biden administration, immigration officials detained thousands of asylum-seekers like Alexei, who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity because he fears repercussions for his immigration status in the U.S. Many of these immigrants were detained because they came from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, asylum-seekers and their attorneys told The Intercept. Attorneys representing immigrants from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, or several other countries in Central Asia that have significant numbers of Russian speakers have also told The Intercept that their clients have been forced to wait in detention centers until their asylum claims could be heard before a judge. Reporting from other outlets has unearthed memos that appear to back up this policy.
This is a departure from previous policy, when most asylum-seekers were granted parole, which releases them into the country to stay with family or friends until they can appear in court to argue their case for asylum. Detention has typically been reserved for people deemed to pose a threat to national security or a flight risk — labels now applied to the majority of Russians and other asylum-seekers from post-Soviet countries, The Intercept found.
It could be a preview of what’s to come under the new administration, when detention is likely to be applied much more broadly; one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders this week directed immigration officials to grant parole only for “urgent humanitarian reasons or a significant public benefit” from the asylum-seeker being present in the U.S. Trump has also suspended new asylum applications until what he’s called an “invasion at the southern border has ceased,” although the cases of those who already managed to apply before he took office will still have to make their way through the courts.
Alexei ended up spending five months in detention, first in California — where he said about half of his center was of Russian-speaking origin — and then in Texas. His wife, who traveled with him, was held in a different detention center in California and then moved to Louisiana; they were only able to have three 10-minute phone calls during the entire time they were detained. And although both of them won their immigration cases and were able to enter the U.S. after being granted asylum, the psychological stress and uncertainty of their detention continues to weigh on Alexei.
“They did not explain the reason for [labeling] you a security threat, they simply [labeled] absolutely everyone,” Alexei said over the phone a few weeks after his release in mid-November, from a temporary home near Chicago where he’s staying with relatives. “Because of this, all of us Russians lived with the hope that if not today, then tomorrow, this ban would be lifted.”
Harsher treatment of asylum-seekers began in June of last year, asylum-seekers and attorneys told The Intercept. That’s around the same time that the Washington Examiner published a leaked memo, which instructed Border Patrol officers in the San Diego sector to automatically place citizens of six countries — Russia, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan — into expedited removal proceedings. U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions from The Intercept asking to confirm the authenticity of the memo.
Being placed in expedited removal allows people from these countries to be deported without an asylum hearing unless they claim that they fear returning to their home countries and pass a “credible fear interview.” Asylum-seekers who pass this interview are also more likely to be detained, as they are banned from posting bond, which would allow them to put up a sum of money as a guarantee that they would show up for their asylum hearings.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations that asylum-seekers from post-Soviet countries were being targeted for detention or expedited removal based on their national origin.
No publicly available data exists to show the rate at which different nationalities are detained after applying for asylum. But data provided by the Department of Homeland Security to comply with a congressional request show that last year, immigration officials denied parole requests for 18 percent of asylum-seekers from Uzbekistan who applied through CBP One, an app that immigrants were required to use to apply for asylum from May 2023 until the end of the Biden administration (Trump canceled the use of CBP One on his first day in office). This was the highest rate of any of the nationalities listed; the average denial rate for all nationalities was just over 4 percent. Russian, Afghan, Chinese, and Iranian nationals also had higher-than-average detention rates.
This new detention regime comes as migration from Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus reaches an all-time high. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent military mobilization sent young men fleeing and left fewer options for Central Asians, who frequently migrated to Russia to find employment. Ethnic minorities, including Central Asians with Russian passports, are also disproportionately being sent by Russia to the front lines of war. With legal options such as the green card lottery limited, more people have decided to try and reach U.S. soil to apply for asylum through the border with Mexico. Border Patrol agents recorded 3,200 encounters with Uzbeks at the southern border in 2022, up from less than 700 in 2021; more than 23,000 Russian nationals were apprehended that same year.
The rise in migration from these countries coincided with an increase in immigration attempts overall, as CBP encounters with migrants at the Mexican border peaked in December 2023. Though they have since fallen drastically, border security became a flashpoint in the presidential election. Claims that these immigrants would take jobs and commit crimes have gone hand in hand with long-standing fears of terrorists infiltrating the southern border. This came to a head last fall, when the White House announced that the FBI was working to track down more than a dozen Uzbek immigrants who entered with the help of a smuggler believed to have “ties to ISIS.”
Though none of them were accused of having any affiliations with extremist groups themselves, NBC News reported in June that DHS had arrested over 150 immigrants “from Central Asia and elsewhere” who crossed into the U.S. in the past three years through an “ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network.” These reports were seized on by conservative members of Congress and right-wing organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform to urge the government to crack down on Central Asian immigrants in the U.S. by raising fears that they could be terrorists. CBP officials began detaining asylum-seekers who “fit the profile associated with individuals who were facilitated by this network,” a national security spokesperson told CNN.
“There [was] political pressure on the Biden administration to tighten up immigration enforcement for specific regions — to demonstrate that they’re taking threats [to national security] seriously,” said Maksim Fuchs, an attorney based in New York who works with Russian and Central Asian clients.
Abadir Barre, an immigration lawyer based in New York, said DHS left notes on his detained Central Asian clients’ cases saying that they were a national security risk “by virtue of their travel to the United States via a migration pathway that has connections to individuals with a nexus to foreign terrorist organizations.” Barre says this likely meant the Uzbek smuggler that was accused of having ties to ISIS.
For immigrants from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, though, paying smugglers to get them to the U.S. was often the only way to claim asylum; getting an appointment through the CBP One app meant waiting in Mexico for months, and language barriers made it difficult to use. People “are not even aware of these smugglers’ connections,” Fuchs said, and many of them are scammed or otherwise taken advantage of in the process.
“None of them were proven to be a national security risk. It’s a big bogeyman.”
But arriving with the help of this smuggler still gave immigration officials an excuse to detain people, Barre said. He started visiting his clients in detention centers like the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana and noticed that up to a third of the people detained there were Uzbek. That’s when he began to believe asylum-seekers from this region were being targeted for detention.
“None of them were proven to be a national security risk,” Barre said. “It’s a big bogeyman. They’re misusing national security, but it’s really Muslims and Uzbeks.”
An immigrant from Uzbekistan shows his passport while being taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the border on Dec. 7, 2021, in Yuma, Ariz.Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
Scrutiny of Central Asians by the media and law enforcement has mounted in the U.S. in recent years since the 2015 arrest of three Uzbeks living in Brooklyn for allegedly attempting to join ISIS, and the 2017 killing of eight people on a Manhattan bike path by an Uzbekistan citizen who professed allegiance to the Islamic State group. These cases sparked a media firestorm, and Uzbeks living in New York were subjected to surveillance by local police and federal officials, reminiscent of the widely documented system of New York City Police Department spying on Muslim communities that took off in the wake of 9/11. Fear of Central Asian extremists has been exacerbated by reports that in June, ICE agents arrested eight citizens of Tajikistan for “suspected ties to the Islamic State,” according to The Associated Press.
These reports have created “overblown fears of terrorism when it comes to ISIS,” said Steve Swerdlow, a human rights lawyer who specializes in Central Asia. Though not all asylum claims are legitimate and scrutiny is warranted, he cautioned that painting asylum-seekers from certain countries with a “broad brush” puts those who legitimately fear returning back to their home countries at significant risk.
Many asylum-seekers from Uzbekistan are in fact fleeing religious persecution from a repressive government that fears extremism just as much, if not more, as the U.S., and could be jailed or tortured if they are deported, especially once tarred with American officials’ suspicions that they could have links to terrorism. “When I see planeloads of people being sent to Uzbekistan, I have to ask, have U.S. officials really examined the risk?” Swerdlow said.
The detention of Russians is more puzzling and also more recent. Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country began in February 2022. Russian asylum-seekers have only reported receiving parole denials en masse in the last seven months, according to Julia Nikolaev, an immigration attorney based in San Francisco who works mainly with Russian-speaking clients. In May, she started noticing that those who secured an appointment through CBP One and presented themselves in front of an immigration officer were ending up in detention, where previously they would have been released.
“Their parole requests were being denied for no specific reason,” Nikolaev said. “100 percent of people with Russian passports were ending up in detention — including women, which never happened before.”
She has now worked with about 35 clients, including Alexei, who have been detained, and had to turn down requests from dozens more. Even if they win their asylum cases from detention, government attorneys can immediately appeal, allowing them to continue detaining applicants for another 30 days at minimum. In informal conversations, those attorneys told her that “there is some internal directive that bans the release of Russians and a few other post-Soviet Union countries,” Nikolaev said.
In interviews with The Intercept, multiple Russian asylum-seekers who were detained starting in May 2024 said that ICE officers received word on June 14 that detainees with passports from Russia and several Central Asian countries would not be released on parole. One man, who is still in detention in Washington, said officials told him at the time it was “an email of some kind” that changed the policy.
Although The Intercept was not able to confirm the existence of this email, DHS had previously indicated its shift in policy. In November 2023, a month after the first reports of an ISIS-affiliated smuggler bringing Uzbeks into the U.S. were made public, DHS announced that Uzbek nationals caught trying to enter the United States via Mexico illegally would be detained rather than released on parole, Uzbek media reported.
The detentions have led asylum-seekers to increasingly speak out against their confinement. In December, Albert Khamitov, who fled Russia due to his opposition to President Vladimir Putin and status as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, began a second hunger strike after spending seven months in detention, during which he won his asylum case but continued to be detained after an appeal from the government. In a video recording that spread through Russian-language social media channels such as Telegram, Khamitov alleged that detention officers called him and other Russians “terrorists” and appealed to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, to intervene.
It’s not clear whether it’s legal to apply a blanket detention policy to people from a certain nationality, or to target them for expedited removal. “A lot of deference is usually given by courts to detention decisions,” said Jon Bauer, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law who directs the school’s Asylum and Human Rights Clinic. He pointed out that a 2009 ICE directive instructs officers to strongly consider releasing asylum-seekers who pass a credible fear interview, but that this directive has been violated in the past.
Discrimination in the asylum process is also not without precedent. In 1990, the federal government agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by a coalition of religious, legal assistance, and human rights organizations, who claimed that immigration officials were systematically discriminating against asylum-seekers from Guatemala and El Salvador. And in 2003, the attorney general directed judges to uphold the detention of Haitian asylum-seekers who arrived in the U.S. by boat, claiming that releasing them would pose a national security risk.
Keeping people in detention while they await their hearings negatively impacts their chances of receiving asylum, said Ingrid Eagly, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who published a paper analyzing data on asylum decisions earlier this year. It can be more difficult to access legal counsel, especially if detainees are moved to faraway centers in states like Louisiana, as well as to gather evidence to present in their defense.
Immigration officials are sometimes forced to make decisions based on how much capacity they have to detain people, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, an attorney and member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. A pandemic-era rule allowing CBP to immediately deport people who crossed illegally without processing their asylum claims expired in May 2023, leading to an influx of migrants at the southern border. “CBP has to triage,” Ibañez Whitlock said, which can mean prioritizing the detention of certain nationalities. Asylum-seekers from “hard to remove countries” that don’t often accept deportation flights from the U.S., which included the six countries listed in the leaked CBP memo from June, might end up in detention over others that can be easily removed.
Barre, though, believes DHS’s actions are against the law. In March, he filed a class-action lawsuit representing 35 asylum-seekers from Uzbekistan who were held in detention while they waited for their asylum cases to be decided — including several who were arrested by ICE after already being released on parole to await their hearings. In it, he alleged that the government was violating his clients’ right to due process purely based on their nationality and religion; shortly after he filed the suit, ICE started releasing his clients from detention, and the case was dismissed in August. Barre then filed two other lawsuits on behalf of Russian asylum-seekers, one of which is still moving forward with 276 plaintiffs. He hopes that aside from securing the release of his clients, he can gain more information on the specifics of DHS’s decision to target certain nationalities through the legal discovery process.
The Trump administration is now planning to detain immigrants who are awaiting decisions in their immigration cases rather than releasing them to live with sponsors, a move that could overwhelm detention centers and prisons; ICE is planning to more than double its detention capacity in preparation, the Washington Post reported. It’s unclear what this means for asylum-seekers from Russia and Central Asia who have already been pushing to be released from detention for months. But even if they win their cases and are granted asylum, one of the goals of the detention system is to deter others from coming to the U.S. in the first place, Bauer said. And in that, immigration officials may be succeeding.
“People who went through persecution in their own country, they believe that the U.S. is a country that upholds the law and protects human rights,” Nikolaev said. “They flee here believing in the U.S. But I had many clients who are sitting in detention tell me, ‘Why did I come here? What I ran from, I see it here.’”
A co-founder of a national Palestinian solidarity network in Aotearoa New Zealand today praised the “heroic” resilience and sacrifice of the people of Gaza in the face of Israel’s ruthless attempt to destroy the besieged enclave of more than 2 million people.
Speaking at the first solidarity rally in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau since the fragile ceasefire came into force last Sunday, Janfrie Wakim of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) also paid tribute to New Zealand protesters who have supported the Palestine cause for the 68th week.
“Thank you all for coming to this rally — the first since 7 October 2023 when no bombs are dropping on Gaza,” she declared.
“The ceasefire in Gaza is fragile but let’s celebrate the success of the resistance, the resilience, and the fortitude — the sumud [steadfastness] — of the heroic Palestinian people.
“Israel has failed. It has not achieved its aims — in the longest war [15 weeks] in its history — even with $40 billion in aid from the United States. It has failed to depopulate the north of Gaza, it has a crumbling economy, and 1 million Israelis [out if 9 million] have left already.”
Wakim said that the resistance and success in defeating Israel’s “deadly objectives” had come at a “terrible cost”.
“We mourn those with families here and in Gaza and now in the West Bank who made the ultimate sacrifice with their lives — 47,000 people killed, 18,000 of them children, thousands unaccounted for in the rubble and over 100,000 injured.
Grieving for journalists, humanitarian workers
“We grieve for but salute the journalists and the humanitarian workers who have been murdered serving humanity.”
Janfrie Wakim speaking at today’s Palestine rally in Tamaki Makaurau. Video: APR
She said the genocide had been enabled by the wealthiest countries in the world and the Western media — “including our own with few exceptions”.
“Without its lies, its deflections, its failure to report the agonising reality of Palestinians suffering, Israel would not have been able to commit its atrocities,” Wakim said.
“And now while we celebrate the ceasefire there’s been an escalation on the West Bank — air strikes, drones, snipers, ethnic cleansing in Jenin with homes and infrastructure being demolished.
“Checkpoints have doubled to over 900 — sealing off communities. And still the Palestinians resist.
“And we must too. Solidarity. Unity of purpose is all important. Bury egos. Let humanity triumph.”
Palestinian liberation advocate Janfrie Wakim . . . “Without its lies, its deflections, its failure to report the agonising reality of Palestinians suffering, Israel could not have been able to commit its atrocities.” Image: David Robie/APR
90-year-old supporter
During her short speech, Wakim introduced to the crowd the first Palestinian she had met in New Zealand, Ghazi Dassouki, who is now aged 90.
She met him at a Continuing Education seminar at the University of Auckland in 1986 that addressed the topic of “The Palestine Question”. It shocked the establishment of the time with Zionist complaints and intimidation of staff which prevented any similar academic event until 2006.
Wakim called for justice for the Palestinians.
“Freedom from occupation. Liberation from apartheid. And peace at last after 76 years of subjugation and oppression by Israel and its allies,” she said
She called on supporters to listen to what was being suggested for local action — “do what suits your situation and energy. Our task is to persist, as Howard Zinn put it”.
“When we organise with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress,” she said.
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
Introduced to the Auckland protest crowd today . . . Ghazi Dassouki, who is now aged 90.
As a symbol for peace and justice in Palestine, slices of water melon and dates were handed out to the crowd.
Calls to block NZ visits by IDF soldiers
Among many nationwide rallies across Aotearoa New Zealand this weekend, were many calls for the government to suspend entry to the country from soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
“New Zealand should not be providing rest and recreation for Israeli soldiers fresh from the genocide in Gaza,” said PSNA national chair John Minto.
“We wouldn’t allow Russian soldiers to come here for rest and recreation from the invasion of Ukraine so why would we accept soldiers from the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel?”
As well as the working holiday visa, since 2019 Israelis have been able to enter New Zealand for three months without needing a visa at all.
This visa-waiver is used by Israeli soldiers for “rest and recreation” from the genocide in Gaza.
Minto stressed that IDF soldiers had killed at least 47,000 Palestinians — 70 percent of them women and children.
“All these red flags for genocide have been visible for months but the government is still giving the green light to those involved in war crimes to enter New Zealand,” Minto said.
Last month, PSNA again wrote to the government asking for the suspension of travel to New Zealand for all Israeli soldiers and reservists.
Meanwhile, 200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails have been set free under the terms of the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Seventy of them will be deported to countries in the region, reports Al Jazeera.
Masses of people have congregated in Ramallah, celebrating the return of the released Palestinian prisoners.
A huge crowd waved Palestinian flags, shouted slogans and captured the joyful scene with their phones and live footage shows.
The release came after Palestinian fighters earlier handed over four female Israeli soldiers who had been held in Gaza to the International Red Cross in Palestine Square.
The smiling and waving soldiers appeared to be in good health and were in high spirits.
Brussels, January 24, 2025–European Union officials and foreign ministers must seize the opportunity provided by the Gaza ceasefire at January 27’s Foreign Affairs Council meeting to ensure that a free press can prevail, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.
CPJ urges the EU to call for independent investigations into the deliberate targeting of journalists during the 15-month war in Gaza, for international journalists to be granted independent access to the territory, and for Israel to reform laws that restrict press freedom.
“The EU cannot continue to turn a blind eye to strong evidence of crimes of international law and the decimation of a generation of Palestinian journalists,” said Tom Gibson, CPJ’s EU representative. “If accountability, justice, and access demands cannot be met, EU leaders must call for a suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.”
The agreement sets out the EU’s legal and institutional framework for political dialogue and economic cooperation with Israel, including respect for human rights as an essential element.
The Israel-Gaza war has taken an unprecedented toll on journalists since October 7, 2023, with at least 167 journalists and media workers killed, overwhelmingly in Gaza. It has been the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.
According to CPJ’s investigations, at least 11 journalists and two media workers were directly targeted by Israeli forces; the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime under international law.
CPJ has documented multiple other abuses in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, that require investigation, including assaults, threats, and allegations of torture during the war. Israel was the world’s second-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s latest annual prison census, with 43 Palestinian journalists in Israeli custody on December 1, 2024.
At least 10 journalists are being held indefinitely without charge in the West Bank. The EU should join the repeated calls by U.N. special mandate holders for Israel to end this practice, which the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has repeatedly found unlawful.
Throughout the war, Israel has obstructed and punished media coverage and banned international reporters from Gaza, except for on rare trips with the military. Israel must revoke its censorship laws, including one used to ban Al Jazeera and retaliatory directives against domestic media. Israeli, Egyptian, and Palestinian authorities must immediately allow unconditional access for all journalists to enter and operate in Gaza.
The European Union must be true to its values and support these demands.
– in 
