It was a cold day in Washington, DC, on Tuesday when Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint as President of the United States of America.
On account of freezing temperatures, the inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, and the weather became a primary focus of much pre-inauguration media commentary.
The Reuters news agency reported that this was “one of the coldest inauguration days the US has experienced in the past few decades”, while also providing other crucial ceremony updates such as that “Mike Tyson snacked on a banana in the overflow room”.
I, myself, watched the event on my computer in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where it is precisely the opposite of cold and where I have spent the past several days battling the scorpion population that has taken up residence in my house.
By the end of Trump’s swearing-in, however, I was undecided as to what was less pleasant: killing scorpions or watching the next episode of American dystopia unfold.
I tuned in at 11am, meaning I had a full hour before Trump took centre stage; for much of this time, the audience in the rotunda was treated to musical selections befitting a carousel or a circus.
The frigid weather outside was, meanwhile, at least probably good practice for life on Mars, a territory Trump would soon claim for the United States during his inaugural speech: “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Not the only territorial conquest
This, to be sure, was not the only territorial conquest Trump promised. He also reiterated his determination to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as well as to seize control of the Panama Canal because “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form”.
President Donald Trump . . . “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”. Image: The Conversation
But the Mars comments earned a maniacal grin from one person in the audience: the gazillionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, known for such ideas as that the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”.
Musk was one of various representatives of the earthly super-elite who — unlike poor Mike Tyson — made the cut for a spot in the rotunda. Also present were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok.
As Al Jazeera noted the day prior to the inauguration, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly donated $1 million to the ceremony, while “Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have said they would donate $1 million, along with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who donated $1 million”.
As of January 8, Trump’s inauguration fund had already racked up a record $170 million.
Anyway, what better way to “Make America Great Again” than by supercharging the plutocracy?
Declaring at the start of his speech that “the golden age of America begins right now”, Trump went on to express numerous other hallucinations, including that “national unity is now returning to America”. Never mind that the tyranny of an astronomically wealthy minority is not exactly, um, unifying.
Luckily on Planet Trump, reality is whatever he says it is. And Trump says that “sunlight is pouring over the entire world”.
‘Historic executive orders’
In his speech, Trump announced a “series of historic executive orders” that according to him, will jumpstart the “complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense”.
Among these executive orders was the declaration of “a national emergency at our southern border”, paving the way for the deportation of “millions and millions of criminal aliens” and entailing the deployment of the US military “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country”.
Under Trump’s command, the US “will also be designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations”. Then there’s the new “official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”.
And of course, the more emergencies, the better: “[T]oday I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.”
Recoiling at the very thought of environmentalism, Trump proclaimed: “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
And if we happen to destroy Earth in the process, well, there’s always Mars.
As usual, the continuous invocation of God during the inauguration ceremony made a fine mockery of the ostensible separation of church and state in the US, and Trump revealed the reason he had survived a July assassination attempt in the state of Pennsylvania: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Overlap with Martin Luther King Jr Day
Last but not least, Trump took advantage of the overlap of his inauguration with Martin Luther King Jr Day, celebrated annually in the US on the third Monday of January, to pledge that “we will make his dream come true” — which would probably be easier if Trump himself weren’t a bona fide racist.
Indeed, Trump’s notion that “our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable” would seem to be distinctly at odds with King’s assessment of the US as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.
None of this is to imply that the Democrats have not done their part in terms of purveying global violence or upholding plutocracy, perpetuating brutal inequality, terrorising refuge seekers, and so on.
But Tuesday’s inaugural charade was an exercise in nihilism — and, as I return to my scorpions and Trump goes about making dystopia great again, I think I’ll take Mars over the “golden age of America” any day.
Belén Fernández is the author of Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), and Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016). She writes for numerous publications and this article was first published by Al Jazeera.
The Al Jazeera Network has condemned the arrest of its occupied West Bank correspondent by Palestinian security services as a bid by the Israeli occupation to “block media coverage” of the military attack on Jenin.
Israeli soldiers have killed at least 12 Palestinians in the three-day military assault that has rendered the refugee camp “nearly uninhabitable” and forced displacement of more than 2000 people. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said the Jenin operation was a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and human rights”.
Al Jazeera said in a broadcast statement that the arrest of its occupied West Bank correspondent Muhammad al-Atrash by the Palestinian Authority (PA) could only be explained as “an attempt to block the media coverage of the occupation’s attack in Jenin”.
We’re following with concern the arrest of journalist Mohammed Al-Atrash by the Palestinian security forces in connection with his work at Al Jazeera and call for his immediate release./1 pic.twitter.com/M2ZcEoWqJl
“The arbitrary actions of the Palestinian Authority are unfortunately identical to the occupation’s targeting of the Al Jazeera Network,” it said.
“We value the positions and voices that stand in solidarity and defend colleague Muhammad al-Atrash and the freedom of the press.”
The network said the journalist was brought before a court in Hebron after being arrested yesterday while covering the events in Jenin “simply for doing his professional duty as a journalist”.
“We confirm that these practices will not hinder our ongoing professional coverage of the facts unfolding in the West Bank,” Al Jazeera’s statement added.
The Israeli occupation has been targeting Al Jazeera for months in an attempt to gag its reporting.
Calling for al-Atrash’s immediate release, the al-Haq organisation (Protecting and Promoting Human Rights & the Rule of Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory) said in a statement: “Freedom of opinion and expression cannot be guaranteed without ensuring freedom of the press.”
Rage over AJ ban
Earlier this month journalists expressed outrage and confusion about the PA’s decision to shut down the Al Jazeera office in the occupied West Bank after the Israeli government had earlier banned the Al Jazeera broadcasting network’s operation within Israel.
“Shutting down a major outlet like Al Jazeera is a crime against journalism,” said freelance journalist Ikhlas al-Qarnawi.
He said a December 26 press statement by the Israeli army attempted to “justify a war crime”.
“It unabashedly admitted that the military incinerated five Palestinian journalists in a clearly marked press vehicle outside al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza Strip,” Kuttab said in an op-ed article.
Many Western publications had quoted the Israeli army statement as if it was an objective position and “not propaganda whitewashing a war crime”, he wrote.
“They failed to clarify to their audiences that attacking journalists, including journalists who may be accused of promoting ‘propaganda’, is a war crime — all journalists are protected under international humanitarian law, regardless of whether armies like their reporting or not.”
Israel not only refuses to recognise any Palestinian media worker as being protected, but it also bars foreign journalists from entering Gaza.
“It has been truly disturbing that the international media has done little to protest this ban,” wrote Kuttab.
“Except for one petition signed by 60 media outlets over the summer, the international media has not followed up consistently on such demands over 15 months.”
Three men prosecuted for taking part in a peaceful protest at arms manufacturer General Dynamics were found not guilty of all charges at Brighton Law Courts on Wednesday 22 January. Laurie Holden, 72, Clem McCulloch, 33, and Thomas Delves, 25 – collectively known as the #Hastings3 – were arrested for aggravated trespass on 29 February 2024 during an early morning protest at one of the firm’s two…
Over two days on 29 and 30 January, the Court of Appeal will review the jail sentences imposed on 16 supporters of Just Stop Oil between July and September 2024: the Lord Walney 16. The sentences include the five-year prison sentence imposed on Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, for taking part in a Zoom call to plan a protest against new oil and gas licences…
President Donald Trump throws pens after signing executive orders following the Presidential Parade at Capital One Arena on Monday January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Weather has moved Monday’s inauguraton indoors. Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders, signed on his first day back in the White House, are riddled with illegal and unconstitutional demands. The order aimed at eradicating trans and gender-nonconforming people is no exception, and bears the added honor of spouting unscientific nonsense.
It is a bizarre, wide-ranging document, premised on a pseudoscientific definition of binary sex classification that would be impossible to implement to the letter in everyday life. The order would not stand up to scientific scrutiny or sound legal challenge, but it’s not designed to. It is, like most of Trump’s illegal executive orders, a political speech act intended to sow fear, give license to discrimination, and make life for marginalized communities materially harder.
The text is worth interrogating, however, insofar as it reveals the Trump administration’s brute-force approach to pushing trans people out of public life, couched in unambiguously pro-natalist rhetoric and the risible claim that it is “defending women.”
In the current preferred lexicon of anti-trans campaigners, long desperate to point to something immutable in science to ground their delusional rejection of trans existence, the executive order says, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” And that “‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
The order then defines “female” and “male” as follows:
“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. … ‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
Observers were swift to note that by adding “at conception,” the order bundles in a notion of fetal personhood — a nod to the fact that attacks on gender nonconformity are part and parcel of a pro-natalist agenda, which requires attacks on all reproductive freedoms. It is no accident that the definitions of “female” and “male” are centered solely on reproductive function. The definition is also senseless; at conception, embryos are not sexually differentiated. And at conception, fetuses are also not producing reproductive cells, or gametes, large or small.
But the definition need not make scientific or practical sense to appease gender conformity fanatics. Since this language has now made its way into Trump’s executive order, it’s worth stressing the profound intellectual weakness of such a definition.
Anti-trans ideologues have glommed onto the language of gametes because their previous reliance on chromosomes — XX and XY — didn’t do the anti-trans rhetorical work they wanted. There were too many examples outside the chromosomal binary, like intersex variations, to contend with. Gametes seemed to do the trick for those transphobes who demand that sex be understood as immutable — something of the body that cannot be changed — and more strictly binary. Secondary sex characteristics like breasts, body hair, hormone levels, and shape of genitalia are not so clearly split between all those assigned female and male at birth. Crucially, these are also sex traits that trans people can indeed obtain.
Transphobes thus treat gametes, or reproductive cells, as some sort of definitional gotcha. It is not.
Firstly, not everyone produces reproductive cells. There are many cis women who do not produce large reproductive cells, or ova. When this is pointed out, the typical transphobe response is that these women are atypical, and that these women would produce ova were it not for some sort of dysfunction.
This makes it clear that the anti-trans claim to biological reality must appeal to a fictional biological world, in which all bodies develop in precisely predetermined ways — and those ways are designed toward reproduction. It’s an inherently conservative, indeed religious, view of bodily function and predestiny. In the actual world, though, this gamete definition would discount a good number of people the transphobes themselves would classify as “women” or “female.” Anti-trans bigots have always had a clear vision of who they would like to exclude from the category of womanhood, but this distinction was never based on observing which bodies do or do not produce large reproductive cells.
It’s telling that anti-trans campaigners must continue to find new language to cling to, to push an exclusionary binary, when science fails to draw the clean line between men and women that they wish it did.
It gets worse still, philosophically, for the transphobes. When they reduce the meaning of the word “woman” to “female” — defined by gametes — they must admit that, in the real world, they can’t be sure that they’re using it correctly. Under their terms, any time they use the word “woman,” they could wrongly be applying it to someone who does not produce ova — someone they claim, if we follow their definition, should be excluded from womanhood.
This definition of “woman” could also have only been available after Karl Ernst von Baer discovered mammalian ovum in 1827. Before that, according to anti-trans logic, it was only by guessing that the word “female” could have been correctly used. Since we can’t tell whether someone’s body makes large gametes, except in medical circumstances, recognizing someone as a “large reproductive cell producer” cannot be the definition of “woman.” This is simply not how science or language work. And for those of us who are not obsessed with the stupid game of finding an ideally trans-exclusionary, cis-inclusionary definition of “woman,” none of this is a problem at all. We can continue collectively using our words as makes sense to do so — like referring to trans women as women.
When it comes to the government, we can be sure that federal agencies will not, on receiving Trump’s executive order, initiate a thorough system of gamete checks. If implemented, the order will function like all discriminatory policy: People will be targeted if perceived to fall outside a standard, which is set by white, cis heteronormativity. The definition in the executive order could, however, give further license to the Republican drive toward the surveillance, harassment, and, in some cases, invasive sex-testing of those perceived to fall outside the norms of the gender binary — a perception heavily informed by racist conceptions of femininity, as we have seen in the arena of professional athletics, and vile efforts to exclude (almost always Black) cis women deemed too masculine.
In recent years, laws proposed by Republicans in Ohio, Kansas, New Jersey, among other U.S. states to ban trans girls from sports, opened the door to genital testing requirements on girls whose assigned sex at birth has been questioned. While such testing policies have for now been held at bay, their proposal alone speaks to the lengths — mandated sexual abuse — that these genital-obsessed gender fascists are willing to go to.
Trump’s executive order makes no specific calls for sex testing. Rather it treats its nonsensical, gamete-based definition as if it is an observable given of common sense reality — which, again, it is not.
What the order more explicitly demands is that federal agencies commit to the work of trans exclusion wherever possible. The order directs the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to prevent trans people from selecting their gender on official government documents such as visas and passports — the page on the State Department website where people could apply to make those changes has already been taken down. Since 2021, individuals have also been able to select “X” as a nonbinary gender maker on their passports; it is unclear what Trump’s order will mean for those passport holders. The intent, though, is clear: to make trans people feel afraid to move freely in the world.
The order also tasks the incoming attorney general and secretary of Homeland Security to bar trans people from government-funded single-sex facilities that align with their gender — so trans women would be moved into mens’ prisons and shelters, for example. This would put trans people in immediate and severe physical danger. Trump also directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to end funding for gender-affirming care for trans people in federal prisons, which could lead to trans people being forced to medically detransition. The order also states that federal funds will be removed from institutions found to “promote gender ideology” — a direct threat to schools and universities that rely on federal funds.
In a gesture to the order’s unconstitutionality, Trump also ordered the incoming attorney general to “issue guidance to agencies to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) to sex-based distinctions in agency activities.” In Bostock, the Supreme Court rightly ruled that federal laws prohibiting sex-based discrimination applied to the prohibition of LGBTQ+ discrimination. Bostock made clear that discrimination on the basis of gender identity counted as sex-based discrimination. The executive order appears to recognize that its demands run counter to Bostock, as will no doubt arise in court challenges. Unfortunately, the far-right Supreme Court has already shown itself potentially willing to skirt around or even contradict its own Bostock ruling, for example, when it comes to siding with Republican attacks on trans health care.
It takes a huge amount of work, violence, and coercion to enforce gender conformity.
We can point out the inherent falsehood and nonsense at the executive order’s core — and it’s necessary to do so, given the purchase anti-trans voices maintain on establishment liberal discourse. The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and other LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have promised to challenge the executive order in the courts. But LGBTQ+ and reproductive freedoms — which, as the right understands, are indelibly connected — will not be defended by proving transphobes wrong. The point of the right’s extensive attacks on trans existence is to make trans people’s access to public life as unpleasant and difficult as possible. Our task, then, is to show unwavering solidarity with and material support for trans and gender-nonconforming adults and children. As the enormous Republican effort to legislate against and police trans people makes clear, it takes a huge amount of work, violence, and coercion to enforce gender conformity — it is our job to make that effort harder at every turn.
“There is no clear way to be ready for a world where those in power wish for your demise,” wrote the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, the first trans attorney to argue a case in the Supreme Court. “But we have no choice but to be ready to fight and we will — in court, in legislatures, in our local communities.”
Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad has told an international conference in Bangkok that some of the most severely debt-stressed countries are the island states of the Pacific.
Dr Prasad, who is also a former economic professor, said the harshest impacts of global economic re-engineering are being felt by the poorest communities across this region.
He told the conference last month that the adaptation challenges arising from runaway climate change were the steepest across the atoll states of the Pacific — Kiribati, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands.
Dr Prasad said at no time, outside of war, had economies had to face a 30 to 70 percent contraction as a consequence of a single cyclone, but Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga had faced such a situation within this decade.
He said the world must secure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“There is no Plan B. The two options before the world are to either secure the goals, or face extreme chaos,” he said.
“There is nothing in the middle. Not this time.”
Extreme chaos risk
Prasad said there will be extreme chaos if the world went ahead and used the same international financial architecture it had had in place for years.
“And if we continue with the same complex processes to actually access any grant funding which is now available, then we cannot address the issue of this financing gap, as well as climate finance — both for mitigation and adaptation that is badly needed by small vulnerable economies.”
More and more Pacific states would approach a state of existential crisis unless development funding was sorted, he said.
Dr Prasad said many planned projects in the region should already be in place.
“We don’t have time on our hands plus the delay in accessing financing, particularly climate resilient infrastructure and for adaptation — then the situation for these countries is going to get worse and worse.”
He wants to “decolonise” aid, giving the developing countries more control over the aid dollars.
More direct donor aid
This would involve more donor nations providing aid directly into the recipient nation’s budgets.
Dr Prasad, who is also the Fiji Finance Minister, has welcomed the budget funding lead taken by Australia and New Zealand, and said Fiji’s experience with Canberra’s putting aid into the Budget had been a great help for his government.
“It allows us, not only the flexibility, but also it allows us to access funding and building our Budget, building our national development planned strategy, and built in with our own locally designed, and locally led strategies.”
He said the new Pacific Resilience Facility, to be set up in Tonga, is one way that this process of decolonising aid could be achieved.
Prasad said the region had welcomed the pledges made so far to support this new facility.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A Just Stop Oil supporter has been arrested on suspicion of planning to organise and/or attend a protest at a UK airport last year. In the latest episode of the ongoing farce that is the UK state – something Alan Ayckbourn would struggle to parody – Joe was nicked in some bizarre pre-crime maneuver by the police.
Just Stop Oil: nicked by the UK pre-crime division
Just Stop Oil shared a clip of Joe’s arrest on X. In it, he said:
It’s been alleged that I’ve been involved in plots of protests at airports about a year ago, and now the police have turned up at my door unannounced, told me they’re going to bash the door down, and are currently going through my room.
BREAKING: MET POLICE RAID JUST STOP OIL SUPPORTER'S HOME
Joe was arrested this morning for allegedly thinking about taking nonviolent action at airports last year.
At this point, it is unclear just what protest, if any, Joe was involved in.
As the Canarydocumented across 2024, Just Stop Oil joined around 21 groups across 12 countries. They staged a range of interventions at 19 international airports across the summer last year, causing serious disruption and having a global impact.
For example, in August six supporters of Just Stop Oil nonviolently blocked the departure gates at Heathrow Airport, causing delays:
Dozens of people were arrested. One of those nicked at Heathrow was Di Bligh who was formerly CEO of Reading Borough Council. She said:
Climate breakdown is endangering all we love. Starvation already threatens those who have done the least to cause this mess. Billions will be on the move as they try to find land they can cultivate, water to drink- any safe place.
Electric cars and windfarms won’t do it: governments must act together before we reach more tipping points into chaos than we can prevent. We need our political leaders to act now, by working with other nations to establish a legally binding treaty to stop the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030.
However, Joe did not actively take part in a protest – yet cops have nicked him, anyway. Thanks to the government, though, police are allowed to do this – and already have.
Not the first time
As the Canary previously reported, in August 2024 police arrested four Just Stop Oil supporters near Manchester airport on suspicion of conspiring to cause a public nuisance. That is, they were planning to non-violently disrupt Manchester Airport. Police said it was because Just Stop Oil’s actions “would have brought significant delays”.
As you may well remember, this was at the same time police lost control of parts of the UK to far-right race riots.
Yet cops see fit to arrest Just Stop Oil supporters around the notion of pre-crime. And now, Joe is yet another victim of this authoritarian mindset that’s now infesting the UK. We have of course been here before. My late father, a prominent member of the UK Communist Party in the 1950s and 60s, would always recount stories of their meetings where the chair would, during the introduction, give:
A special welcome to our friends at the back.
The friends were, of course, Special Branch – and as the Spycops saga shows the state has always infiltrated anyone who it deems is or could in the future be a threat to it.
However, this pre-emptive action by cops is hitting another level of repression.
Just Stop Oil: martyrs for us all?
As Joe summed up:
Six police officers turned up for an alleged potential protest over a year ago… You can decide whether that’s a good use of resources.
Any rational, decent person would say ‘no’. But despite the planet burning, non-human animals becoming extinct, and marginalised people being further abused and repressed around the world – apparently it’s some kid with a hi-vis and orange leaflets that’s the problem.
A senior coroner in Kent has found that three men who were killed trying to cross the Channel were unlawfully killed. Mohamed Lamine Toure, Moussa Kouyae, and a third unnamed person were killed when a rubber dinghy holding 39 people “literally fell apart at the seams.”
The Guardian reported that:
The survivors were brought to shore in Dover after a UK fishing boat crew came across the sinking dinghy and rescued them, with help from the RNLI, air ambulance and UK Border Force.
The Guardian also reported that investigating police officer, DI Ross Gurden, said that each of the people on the dinghy were there:
of their own free will.
A disgrace in the Channel – and after
The officer’s comments are a disgrace. Before even examining any further facts of the case, we know that a number of desperate people got into a dilapidated dinghy in an attempt to cross the Channel. Why would someone do that? What must they be running from that is worse than risking an awful death at sea?
Gurden’s comments went unremarked in the Guardian report, a banal comment on the horror of sea crossings. They show a lack of empathy, but it’s a lack of empathy writ large across borders.
Ibrahima Bah, who piloted the boat, was sentenced to just under ten years detention “for manslaughter and facilitating illegal entry to the UK.” A fourth person, Hejratullah Ahmadi, also died but he was not included in the coroner’s inquest because he was part of the criminal trial of Bah. However, the Independent did note that:
Bah was also a migrant but he piloted the boat in lieu of payment to the people smugglers.
There must be some consideration of how and why Ibrahima had to be on that boat. Last month, a Free Ibrahima campaign statement read:
We are devastated at the Court of Appeal outcome which leaves Ibrahima imprisoned as a scapegoat for border policies which continue to cause people to die in the Channel. We will keep fighting for Ibrahima and others as they are criminalised for seeking safety and a better life in the UK.
The criminalisation of Ibrahima is typical of a broken and rotting system that punishes people trying to survive, and ignores the criminals in governments and border forces who view people dying in the sea as disposable non-humans.
A broken and rotting migrant system
Gurden’s remark that the people on the boat chose to be there call to mind poet Warsan Shire’s poem Home, and particularly the concluding stanza:
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Imagine, how hard you would have to run to risk drowning in a freezing cold body of water, knowing that if you somehow survive the plastic boat you’re crammed into with other desperate people, you’ll face border patrol, police officers, and a government who’ll make you pay through the nose for daring to survive on its shores. Imagine that, whether you live or die, you know that the people you encounter along your last ditch journey will claim you had a ‘choice.’
Is something really a choice if there is no other option?
If you stay, you’ll die.
If you go, you’ll die.
If you die, your memory will be left with the cold words of an officer who insists that you made a ‘choice’ with your “free will.”
And, the media that reports on your death, if you are even to be named, won’t bother to correct that officer’s callousness, because there are so many of you that have found a grave in the sea.
Before Donald Trump’s inauguration, advocates were already worried about how aid would be distributed to Los Angeles wildfire victims. Recovery money has long favored the white and wealthy.
On Monday, one of Trump’s first moves could make the problem worse. One of his flurry of executive orders eliminated the “equity action plans” government agencies had created as a first step toward reversing the long-term inequities in welfare distribution.
Among those agencies was a top purveyor of disaster assistance: the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Advocates worry that the recent moves could slow progress toward correcting decades of uneven aid distribution.
“You could throw a pin to any state on the map and see a disaster where there was an inequitable distribution of resources,” said Noah Patton, the disaster recovery manager at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “The message right now to FEMA personnel is there’s nothing wrong continuing with business as usual.”
The wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles destroyed the houses of the rich and famous, but also swaths of the historic Black community of Altadena.
With Republicans in Congress threatening to attach conditions to aid for California, getting aid could become trickier for everyone — but history has shown that the white and well-connected are better at working the system.
Trump’s new order will help maintain that unequal status quo.
Trump’s Order
One of Trump’s first moves on Inauguration Day was to issue an executive order aimed at “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing,” in the words of the White House, referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For months on the campaign trail, Trump took aim at diversity programs as a supposed hot bed of “anti-white” racism. Much of the discourse centered on the U.S. military, especially after Trump’s selection of DEI critic Pete Hegseth to run the Defense Department.
The move was one among many reversals to Biden administration policies. To mixed effect, President Joe Biden seeded diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in at least 24 other federal agencies, including those that dole out disaster aid funds such as FEMA and the Small Business Administration, under the auspices of “equity action plans.”
In some cases, the plans were not much more than bulletpoints listing agency aspirations. FEMA’s plan, for instance, included items calling for better communication with people who lack English proficiency; for making it easier for those who live in mobile homes to “self-certify” that they are the owners; and for increasing aid for low-income disaster survivors to receive help for expenses such as transportation and child care.
Patton said FEMA’s plan was a baby step, but an important one.
“FEMA planned out its areas of focus based on these internal documents that, while they themselves don’t create new reforms or change policy, they’re seen as guiding documents for future policy reform work inside the agency,” he said.
No more: Trump’s executive order Monday calls on agencies to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law,” their equity plans.
Disaster After Disaster
The idea that America’s generals have gone woke might be so fuzzy that it’s hard to debunk, but the notion that American disaster aid disproportionately helps white people and the well-to-do is supported in reams of academic literature.
“Consistently, the finding is often that lower income or minority residents just tended to have worse outcomes after these disasters,” said Steve Billings, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who studied the distribution of housing aid after Hurricane Harvey in Houston.
One study based on a sample of 3,400 households found that recurring disasters increased the racial wealth gap over time. White residents of hard-hit counties increased their wealth by $126,000 versus Black, Latino, and Asian residents. Those groups lost an average of $27,000, $29,000, and $10,000, respectively.
Authors Junia Howell and James Elliott concluded that “how federal assistance is currently administered seems to be exacerbating rather than ameliorating wealth inequalities that unfold after costly natural hazards.”
Another study conducted by news organizations found that the state-administered, federally funded program to help homeowners in Louisiana rebuild after Hurricane Katrina systematically shortchanged the poor, to the point where they received $18,000 less on average than they would have if they were helped at the same rate as the rich.
Billings’s study of Hurricane Harvey found that low-income neighborhoods that were outside of floodplains — and thus generally were not required to obtain flood insurance — had bankruptcies soar by 20 percent. FEMA and Small Business Administration aid were both handed out regressively.
“The people that were in the floodplains in wealthier neighborhoods tended to, if anything, be just as well off as before the hurricane,” Billings said.
Experts say that some the inequities stem from agency practices and others are baked into the process by congressional design.
FEMA, for instance, often issues an initial denial for aid that must be appealed, a process that is harder for working-class people to navigate.
“They don’t necessarily have the time to sit down and figure all this stuff out,” said Patton. “They’re trying to find alternative employment or trying to just survive.”
The agency also requires title documents for residents to show that they own disaster-damaged homes, a requirement that can be daunting for residents of Puerto Rico, where informal titles are common, or for heir’s property, a type of ownership that is more common among Black people.
Then there are inequities tied to congressional mandates. FEMA and the Small Business Administration, which is responsible for many home-rebuilding loans, are mandated to be on the lookout for fraud; critics say they have sometimes been keener to observe that mandate than to help disaster victims.
Meanwhile, many of the biggest funds allocated by Congress are available only to homeowners. And even the homeowners looking for SBA loans must meet creditworthiness requirements — and credit scores come with huge racial disparities.
Some Strings Attached
Congress is only beginning to tackle the topic of how to help California rebuild with long-term aid, a politically fraught question that often becomes enmeshed in partisan politics.
Yet Republicans, though they often blanch at sending disaster without offsets to the federal budget elsewhere, have rarely attempted to apply political conditions to big aid packages. That could be changing.
In the wake of the California wildfires, Trump repeatedly criticized the state’s Democratic leadership. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has suggested imposing policy conditions on aid to the state.
Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, told the Intercept last week FEMA funding has been critical in helping Maui rebuild after devastating wildfires there in 2023.
“I hope that we will continue to fund FEMA, because trying to tie natural disaster relief to whether or not a state voted for Trump is a horrible discussion for anybody to be having,” she said. “So I just would like the federal government to equitably support people who are going through horrible times.”
SPECIAL REPORT:By Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson and Lilomaiava Maina Vai
The Speaker of the House, Papali’i Li’o Taeu Masipau, decisively addressed a letter from FAST, which informed him of the removal of Fiame along with Deputy Prime Minister Tuala Tevaga Ponifasio, Leatinu’u Wayne Fong, Olo Fiti Vaai, Faualo Harry Schuster, and Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster from the party.
The letter also referenced a lack of confidence in Fiame’s leadership and alleged discussions between the Government and the opposition. Papali’i rejected all claims, emphasising that decisions about parliamentary seats must align with the Constitution.
“I have received a letter from the FAST Party concerning the removal of some of their members from the party. The letter raised questions about their parliamentary seats. Let it be clear: neither the Speaker of the House nor Parliament can, at this stage, make a decision that would result in the vacating of these seats in Parliament. The process must align with the rule of law,” the Speaker stated.
The Electoral Act 2019 of Samoa outlines provisions regarding changing party allegiance by Members of Parliament (MPs). These rules are designed to maintain political stability and ensure that MPs adhere to the party alignment under which they were elected.
Fiame and the affected MPs have not declared their exit from FAST or joined another party, ensuring their seats remain legally secure, as affirmed by the Speaker.
In response to FAST attempts to remove her, Fiame dismissed 13 Associate Ministers. They had aligned themselves with La’auli Leuatea Polataivao Fosi Schmidt, the FAST Party chairman and former Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, in an attempt to oust her from the party.
Three ministers removed
Fiame had earlier removed three Cabinet Ministers — Mulipola Anarosa Ale-Molio’o (Women, Community, and Social Development), Toelupe Poumulinuku Onesemo (Communication and Information Technology), and Leota Laki Sio (Commerce, Industry, and Labour).
The Speaker also dismissed references in the FAST letter to alleged discussions between the government and the opposition, citing a lack of verification.
“Legal avenues outside Parliament are available for these matters to be pursued,” he added.
Opposition leader Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, Fiame’s predecessor, confirmed in Parliament that he had met with Fiame but clarified that the discussions focused solely on parliamentary matters and the smooth operation of the government.
In her Parliamentary address, Fiame acknowledged the challenges within the FAST Party. “As Prime Minister, I must acknowledge that the primary cause of this issue stems from the charges against La’auli, the former Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries,” she said.
Fiame removed La’auli from his Cabinet role after he refused to step down following charges filed by the Samoa Police Service. The resulting fallout led to internal dissent within FAST, tit-for-tat removals of Ministers and Associate Ministers, and attempts to oust Fiame from the party and her role as Prime Minister.
Emphasising the importance of adhering to constitutional principles and due process, Fiame further stated in her Parliamentary address, “These challenges are not unprecedented. In 1982, similar divisions within the HRPP led to multiple changes in leadership before the government stabilised.”
‘Rift in alignment of canoes’
Regarding divisions in the FAST party, she said in Samoan: “Ua va le fogava’a.” Translated: there is a rift in the alignment of the canoes.
Despite this she reaffirmed her commitment to her role: “My Cabinet and I remain committed to fulfilling our duties as outlined in the law.”
She apologised to the nation for the disruptions caused by the unrest and called for mutual respect and adherence to the rule of law.
“My leadership defers to the rule of law to conduct my work. The rule of law is the umbrella that protects all Samoans under equal treatment under the law,” Fiame added.
In an unexpected move, opposition leader Tuilaepa expressed full support for Fiame’s leadership.
“Myself and our party — the only thing that we will do is to follow what I have said in the past on 26th July in 2021. I said: ‘Fiame, here is our government, lead the country. We put faith in you and 500 percent support.’”
Tuilaepa’s endorsement, along with the Speaker’s firm stance on upholding the rule of law, has been widely viewed as a stabilising factor during a turbulent time for Samoa’s government.
Filllng the gaps
To fill the gaps left by the dismissed Ministers, four new Cabinet members were sworn in earlier in the week. They are: Faleomavaega Titimaea Tafua (Commerce, Industry, and Labour), Laga’aia Ti’aitu’au Tufuga (Women, Community, and Social Development), Mau’u Siaosi Pu’epu’emai (Communications and Information Technology), and Niu’ava Eti Malolo (Agriculture and Fisheries).
The session marked the conclusion of a 20-day period of political unrest, social media harassment, attacks on press freedom and significant cabinet restructuring. With less than a year remaining in her term, Fiame faces the dual challenge of managing internal divisions within FAST while steering the government toward stability.
The Speaker’s decisive handling of the FAST letter, combined with the opposition leader’s support, has reaffirmed the rule of law as the cornerstone of Samoa’s democracy. While challenges remain, the Government now has a clearer path to focus on its legislative agenda and governance responsibilities.
Samoa faces high stakes, with more twists, turns, and potential crises likely to unfold in the months leading up to the elections. The political landscape remains fragile, and the nation’s stability hangs in the balance.
A steadfast commitment to the rule of law will be crucial as the country navigates this turbulent period.
Adding to the tension is the role of the Samoan diaspora, who amplified the political divide from abroad, fueling the ongoing discord. As the election approaches, only time will reveal how these dynamics will shape Samoa’s political future.
Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a Samoan journalist with over 20 years of experience reporting on the Pacific Islands. She is founding editor-in-chief of The New Atoll, a digital commentary magazine focusing on Pacific island geopolitics. Lilomaiava Maina Vai is the local host of Radio Samoa and editor of Nofoilo Samoa. Republished from the Devpolicy Blog with permission.
Celebration time. Some Palestinian prisoners have been released. A mother reunited with her daughter. A young mother reunited with her babies.
Still in prison are people who never received a fair trial, people that independent inquirers say are wrongly imprisoned. Still in prison kids who cursed soldiers who walked into their villages wielding guns.
Still imprisoned far too many Palestinians who threw stones against bullets. Still imprisoned thousands of Palestinian hostages.
Many of us never knew how many hostages had been stolen, hauled into jails by Israel before 7 October 2023. We only heard the one-sided story of that day. The day when an offence force on a border was taken by surprise and when it panicked and blasted and bombed.
When that army guarding the occupation did more to lose lives than save lives.
Many never knew and perhaps never will know how many of the Palestinians who were kidnapped before and after that day had been beaten and tortured, including with the torture of rape.
We do know many have been murdered. We do know that some released from prison died soon after. We do not know how many more Palestinians will be taken hostage and imprisoned behind the prison no reporter is allowed to photograph.
Israelis boast over prison crime
The only clue to what happens inside is that Israelis have boasted this crime on national television. The clue is that Israeli soldiers have been tried for raping their own colleagues.
Make no mistake, this is a mean misogynist mercantile army. No sensible rational caring person would wish to serve in it.
No mother on any side of this conflict should lose her child. No father should bury his daughter or son. No grandparent should grieve over the loss of a life that should outlive them.
The crimes need to be exposed. All of them. Our media filters the truth. It does not provide a fair or full story. If you want that switch for pity’s sake go to Al Jazeera English.
The Palestinian people were forced to flee their homes in Gaza. Those who were never responsible for any crime were bombed out of their homes, they fled as their families were murdered, burned to death, shot by snipers. They fled while soldiers mocked their dead children.
They return home to ashes. If we want peace we must face the truths that create conflict. We are all connected in peace and war and peace.
Peace is the strongest greeting. It sears the heart and soars the soul.
It can only be achieved when we recognise and stop the anguish that causes oppression.
Saige England is a freelance journalist and author living in the Aotearoa New Zealand city of Ōtautahi.
COMMENTARY:By Steven Cowan, editor of Against The Current
New Zealand’s One News interviewed a Gaza journalist last week who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
For some 15 months, the Western media have framed Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza as a “legitimate” war.
Pretending to provide an objective and impartial view of “the Gaza War”, the Western media has failed to report on the atrocities that the Israel has committed in Gaza. The true face of Israel’s genocidal assault has been hidden behind the Western media’s determination to sanitise genocide.
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed’s appeal to the world and the Western media. Video: Dawn News
Even the deliberate targeting of journalists by the Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF), a war crime, has not moved the Western media to take action. More than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza and the Western media has remained silent.
The New Zealand and Pacific media also have nothing to be proud of in their coverage of events in Gaza. They, too, have consistently framed Israel’s genocidal rampage as a legitimate war and swept Israel’s war crimes under the carpet.
Some news outlets, like NZ’s Newstalk ZB, have gone as far as to defend Israel’s actions.
With the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza last week, One News, for the first time since Israel began its murderous assault, chose to talk live to a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. That journalist was 22-year-old Abubaker Abed.
Ignored by Western media
While One News introduced him as a reporter for the Associated Press, most of Abed’s reports have been for Palestinian news outlets like The Electronic Intifida.
On January 11, Abed made a speech condemning the Western media’s complicity in genocide. While the speech has been widely circulated in the social media, it has been ignored by the Western media.
In New Zealand, the important speech has failed to make it to the One News website.
One News interviewing Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
This article was first published on Steven Cowan’s website Against The Current. Republished with permission.
A litmus test of Israel’s commitment to abandon genocide and start down the road towards lasting peace is whether they choose to release the most important of all the hostages, Marwan Barghouti.
During the past 22 years in Israeli prisons he has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian — a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
As reported last week, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas are all insisting Barghouti, the most popular leader in Palestine, be among the thousands of Palestinian hostages to be freed as part of the ceasefire agreement.
His release or retention in captivity will say volumes about which path the US and Israel wish to take: either more land thieving, more killings, more lawlessness or steps towards ending the occupation and choosing peace over territorial expansion.
Why is Barghouti potentially so important? Despite long years in Israeli jails, he is a political giant who bestrides the Palestinian cause. He is an intellectual and both a fighter and a peace activist.
He is respected by all factions of the Palestinians. He is by far the most popular figure in Palestine and as such he is almost uniquely positioned to complete the vital task of uniting his people.
Back in July last year the Chinese government pulled off a diplomatic masterstroke by getting 14 factions, including Hamas and Fatah, to successfully come together for reconciliation talks and ink the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity. Now they need a unifying leader to move forward together.
Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas is despised as a US-Israeli tool by most Palestinians, 90 percent of whom, according to polling, want him gone. Hamas has represented the most effective resistance to Israel but the time may have come for them to accept partnership with, even leadership by, someone who can negotiate peace.
How Gaza and the West Bank is governed should be determined by the Palestinian people not by anyone else, especially not by Israeli leaders currently under investigation for genocide or US leaders who should join them in the dock for arming them.
Hypocritical rejection of Hamas
Barghouti, however, could untie the Gordian knot that has formed around the West’s hypocritical rejection of Hamas on one hand and the Palestinian people’s determination not to be dictated to by their oppressors on the other.
Barghouti may also be a saviour for the Israelis. Their society has turned into a psychotic perversion of the great hope Jews around the world placed in the Israeli state.
Israel is now the greatest killer of journalists in the history of war, the remorseless destroyer of hospitals and their patients and staff, the desecrator of countless churches and mosques. Tens of thousands of women have been killed for the sake of killing.
Israel is guilty of the crime of crimes — genocide — and needs a way out of the mess it has created.
For all these reasons Marwan Barghouti is a very dangerous man to Netanyahu and the most fanatical Zionists. He believes in peace.
In my profile of him a year ago I quoted his wife, lawyer and activist Fadwa Barghouti: “Marwan’s goal has always been ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Marwan Barghouti believes in politics. He’s a political and national leader loved by his people.
‘Fought for peace’ “He fought for peace with bravery and spent time on the Palestinian street advocating for peace. But he also believes in international law, which gives the occupied people the right to fight for their independence and freedom.”
Alon Liel, formerly Israel’s most senior diplomat, proposed freeing Barghouti because he is “the ultimate leader of the Palestinian people,” and “he is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in.”
Marwan Barghouti has the moral, political and popular stature to reach out to the Israelis, to see past their crimes and to sit down with them. If only. If only. If only.
The horrible reality is Israel and the US have been led by war criminals who fail to grasp the fact that peace is only possible if they abandon the vilification of the Palestinian people and their leaders; that a better world is only possible if the Palestinians are finally given freedom and dignity.
It will be a relief to everyone to see the remaining few dozen Israelis held by Hamas and other groups released. They deserve to be home with their families.
It will be a relief that thousands of Palestinian hostages be freed, many of them, according to Israel’s leading human rights organisation B’tselem, victims of torture, sexual violence and medieval conditions. Hundreds of Palestinian child hostages — all of them traumatised — will be returned to their families.
All these are welcome developments. Strategically, however, Marwan Barghouti stands apart.
Palestinian Marwan Barghouti . . . a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz/
Uniquely suited to lead Palestine
Long considered the “Palestinian Mandela” — not least because of his 22-years continuous imprisonment — the former Fatah leader, the former military leader, has attributes that make him almost uniquely suited to lead Palestine to freedom — if Israel and the US are prepared to abandon the Greater Israel project and accept peace can only come with justice for all.
He has lived for more than 22 years in conditions far more barbaric than the great South African leader had to endure on Robben Island. According to Israeli human rights groups, family and international lawyers, Barghouti has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian – a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resistance to the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
Marwan Barghouti is the same age as me — 65 — and it fills me with horror that a man who has spent decades fighting for freedom, and, if possible, peace, has been subjected to the horrors of an Israeli gulag for so long.
I am not sure I would have had the physical or mental strength to endure what he has but — like Mandela — he kept his humanity and has remained an advocate for peace.
We should never forget that seven million Palestinians remain as hostages held in brutal conditions by the US and Israel. Most are hostages without human rights, political rights, territorial rights.
As Palestinians have pointed out: imprisonment is now part of Palestinian consciousness. But — as Marwan Barghouti has shown with his iron will, his human decency, his determination to continue to be an advocate for peace with Israel — you can imprison the Palestinians but not their struggle.
I’ll give the last word to his son, Arab Barghouti who told Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo this week, “My father used to always tell me that hope is sometimes a privilege, but being ‘hope-less’ is a privilege that we can’t have as Palestinians.”
In the same interview he also said:
“If any Israeli leader really wants an end to this and to have peace for the region, they would see that my father is someone that would bring that and is someone who still believes in the tiny chance left for the two-state solution.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
A temporary security fence seen near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., ahead of the presidential inauguration on Jan. 13, 2025.Photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
This time eight years ago, I was in Washington to protest the inauguration of President Donald Trump. I had no plans to attend the vast Women’s March scheduled for the following day; this was no time, I thought, for a defanged liberal feminism, for kitschy pink accoutrements and pussy puns.
I was there to take partin J20 — January 20 — the antifascist black bloc protest. We aimed to inaugurate Trump’s presidency with disruptive antagonism in the streets. Non-specific calls to “shut it down” carried a renewed sense of urgency then, in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory and the threat of ascendant fascist rule.
Shut it down, we did not. The protest wrought minor property damage, primarily against bank and chain-store windows.
Hours before Trump was sworn in, delivering his sinister vision of “American carnage” on the inaugural stage, our march was overwhelmed by riot police. Over 200 protesters were detained and most arrestees went on to facefelony charges carrying a potential decade-plus in prison — charges that were eventually dropped, but only after 18 agonizing months for the defendants.
I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of are there either.
Eight years later, the start of a second Trump term augurs an authoritarianism more studied and honed. I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of, who convened en masse in the city for J20 in 2017, are there. There is no plan for a giant carnival of #resistance, à la the Women’s March, either.
While the severe cold, which has forced Trump’s ceremony inside, could be blamed, the weather did not stymie mass protest plans – no plans anything close to the scale of 2017 were made.
D.C. authorities have said that there are no known threats to the inauguration, and permitted protests are predicted to be far smaller this time around. The entirety of the D.C. police force will nonetheless be on duty, joined by a reported 4,000 cops from other areas and 7,800 National Guard troops.
I won’t foreclose surprise — Luigi Mangione reminds us not to — but it’s likely that, even indoors, the inauguration will be a dreadful, expensive spectacle, drenched in fascist rhetoric and aesthetics, performed without disruption or notable protest.
The quiet is not necessarily a bad thing. There is little point in going to Washington today to register opposition to Trump’s return. Trumpism never left. No one in the halls of power in Washington is listening. And, above all, the terrain on which we fight Trumpist rule is the rough ground of everyday life. It’s where we’re already standing.
Democrats’ Empty Rhetoric
The absence of significant counter-demonstrations could be seen to signal a fatalism or acquiescence on behalf of Trump’s opponents — and, for liberal centrists and conservative “never Trumpers,” it may well be.
For left-wing movements, however, back-footed as we might be, skipping inauguration protests this year evinces a sober reckoning with the limits of certain tactics in certain moments, and, at best, a keener focus on where energies will be needed for the struggles ahead.
The last eight years, but particularly the second half of Biden’s presidency, proved what many on the left had feared: Liberal Democrats’ antifascist rhetoric was hollow.
The outraged voices of the #resistance to Trump 1.0 have spent the last years pushing Trump-worthy anti-immigration policies, throwing trans people under the bus, backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, fear-mongering over crime rates, and pouring funds into police budgets rather than meeting people’s needs.
Democrats licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist.
They licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist. Whether Democrats’ rightward appeals were ill-conceived electoral strategies or signs of ideological alignment with Trump is irrelevant; the violent political work done is the same either way.
Democratic Party subservience to Trump’s second-term agenda started early, with 48 House Democrats voting alongside Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act last week.
The bill would allow immigration officials to indefinitely detain and potentially deport unauthorized immigrants accused — not even convicted — of minor crimes like shoplifting. And it would let the most Trumpist forces in American politics choose who to deport.
The Front-Line Work
At this point, it is hardly news that we cannot rely on centrist liberals to form an antifascist front. I say this with no joy: Democratic mayors and governors, from New York to Atlanta, have all but signaled that they will offer no institutional protections for communities most vulnerable to Trump’s violent agenda. The left is small and disarticulated. The challenges we face are enormous and growing.
We find ourselves in a grimly defensive position. The task is urgent to build resilient communities, including rapid-response networks to defend neighbors and colleagues from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, or ensuring the wide circulation and accessibility of abortion pills and hormones.
Front-line communities have been doing this work — and long before Trump’s initial rise to power too.
Lest anyone forget, the pre-Trump years were no panacea for abortion access, immigrant rights, or health care, especially gender-affirming health care. Fossil fuel capitalism, austerity, brutal inequalities, and worker exploitation, racist policing, and the carceral state — these were the conditions of disaffection in which the far-right could thrive.
Now, if Trump delivers even a fragment of the authoritarian promises he has made, all these violences will intensify, as will the penalties for fighting them. Things can just get worse. It is a sign of seriousness that many organizers are focusing on community building and various defense strategies, rather than spectacular protests.
Learning as We Go
The time to be in the streets, or for other disruptive public actions, has hardly passed.
The enormous George Floyd uprisings of 2020 were not a mistake or a failure by virtue of facing repression and backlash. They were a potent, necessary articulation of a liberation politics fighting to be realized. The same can be said for the extraordinary student-led movement for Palestinian freedom, which has faced bipartisan demonization, and which will need to continue long after any Gaza ceasefire.
These are long, embattled struggles, with protests only featuring as the most visible facet.
Such visibility is not negligible; we will need to find each other in the streets and intersections again. Actions like the mass swarms at airports against Trump’s “Muslim ban” should have also continued against Biden’s harsh border rule, and will be far more crucial going forward than any counter-inauguration protest spectacle.
The 2017 Women’s March was a lie, even if its organizers and attendees were acting in earnest. It suggested a united liberal-to-left feminist, antifascist front that simply did not exist. Mainstream Democrats have made that all too clear.
J20, meanwhile, was a miscalculation; we did not have the capacity to interfere meaningfully with the inauguration and its huge policing apparatus. Militant protest is always risky, but risks should be as well calculated as possible. A relative quiet today for Trump’s inauguration in D.C. is, I hope, a sign of learning.
Coalition talks, already underway, are set to be complicated because in the last Parliament at least two parties had MPs split across both the government and opposition benches.
Ballot boxes from all around the country have been transported back to Port Vila where the Vanuatu Electoral Commission is conducting the official count.
Others said they were sick of political instability.
Last week’s snap election was triggered by a premature dissolution of Parliament last year — the second consecutive time President Nike Vurobaravu has acted on a council of ministers’ request to dissolve the House in the face of a leadership challenge.
Counting the latest election Vanuatu will have had five prime ministers in five years.
The only polling station, set up in the capital Nouméa near the Vanuatu Consulate-General, counted as part as the Vanuatu capital Port Vila’s constituency.
It was open to voters last Thursday from 7:30am to 8pm.
For New Caledonia, the estimated number of ni-Vanuatu registered voters is about 1600.
Bus shuttles were also organised for ni-Vanuatu voters residing in the Greater Nouméa area (Mont-Dore, Dumbéa and Païta).
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
“A state party cannot escape its human rights responsibility when outsourcing asylum processing to another state,” committee member Mahjoub El Haiba said.
After the decisions were released, a spokesperson for the Australian Home Affairs Department said “it has been the Australian government’s consistent position that Australia does not exercise effective control over regional processing centres”.
“Transferees who are outside of Australia’s territory or its effective control do not engage Australia’s international obligations.
“Nauru as a sovereign state continues to exercise jurisdiction over the regional processing arrangements (and individuals subject to those arrangements) within their territory, to be managed and administered in accordance with their domestic law and international human rights obligations.”
Australia rejected allegations
Canberra opposed the allegations put to the committee, saying there was no prima facie substantiation that the alleged violations in Nauru had occurred within Australia’s jurisdiction.
The committee disagreed.
“It was established that Australia had significant control and influence over the regional processing facility in Nauru, and thus, we consider that the asylum seekers in those cases were within the state party’s jurisdiction under the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights),” El Haiba said.
“Offshore detention facilities are not human-rights free zones for the state party, which remains bound by the provisions of the Covenant.”
Refugee Action Coalition spokesperson Ian Rintoul said this was one of many decisions from the committee that Australia had ignored, and the UN committee lacked the authority to enforce its findings.
Detainees from both cases claimed Australia had violated its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), particularly Article 9 regarding arbitrary detention.
The first case involved 24 unaccompanied minors intercepted at sea, who were detained on Christmas Island before being sent to Nauru in 2014.
High temperatures and humidity
On Nauru they faced high temperatures and humidity, a lack of water and sanitation and inadequate healthcare.
Despite all but one being granted refugee status that year, they remained detained on the island.
In the second case an Iranian asylum seeker and her extended family arrived by boat on Christmas Island without valid visas.
Although she was recognised as a refugee by the authorities in Nauru in 2017 she was transferred to mainland Australia for medical reasons but remains detained.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Some of the Palestine Action activists from the so-called Filton 18 appeared at the Old Bailey on Friday 17 January over an action at a weapons factory that supplies genocidal Israel. Of course, they entered not guilty to the charges the state was brining against them – and they also received huge support from crowds waiting outside.
The Filton 18: ‘not guilty’ say supporters and the activists
In a hearing at the Old Bailey, nine of the ‘Filton 18’ political prisoners have entered ‘not guilty’ pleas on all charges put before them, while supporters amassed in solidarity outside of the court. They were called to court to plea to charges after an action in August 2024 at the Filton, Bristol site of Israel’s largest weapons company Elbit Systems.
Outside of the hearing, supporters of the Palestine Action activists gathered outside in solidarity:
Protesters stand outside the Old Bailey demanding justice for the Filton 18. Eighteen activists are currently being held on remand following a Palestine Action action at Elbit System’s Filton facility in Bristol in August 2024. The activists were arrested under the Terrorism Act that allowed the police special measures including keeping those arrested to be held in solitary confinement for up to a week. Their charges are not terrorist related and they have been accused of causing over £1million in damages when they smashed in to the Elbit Systems facility and brought the factory to a standstill.
Palestinian flags were waved:
While people rallied:
Predictably, the Met Police were in attendance:
Supporters waved off members of the Filton 18 as they left the hearing:
All 18 face charges of aggravated burglary, criminal damage, with some of the 18 additionally facing charges of violent disorder. Six activists were arrested on site for an action that saw them breach the site using a modified van, before dismantling weapons of genocide inside, including ‘quadcopter’ drone models.
12 further people were later arrested and remanded to prison for their alleged involvement. Police have justified their continued detention by alleging that their actions have a ‘terrorism connection’.
The rest of the 18 are expected to enter not guilty pleas later this year.
A spokesperson for Palestine Action said:
We refuse to bow to this continued police intimidation and harassment. It is Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, that is the guilty party: those resisting the UK’s complicity in genocide are not.
Palestine Action: outrageous abuse of powers by police and CPS
The activists have been returned to prison by the judge and are currently awaiting appeal hearings for bail which have been thus-far rejected. Of the 18, 10 have spent over five months in prison since August, with an additional eight detained since November.
At the hearing, the judge confirmed that their case shall be seen with the 18 split across three trial dates, the first taking place in November 2025, the second in May 2026 and the final date is currently unknown.
An additional date is yet to be set in March of this year, when the defence will seek to challenge and dismiss the application of a “terror connection” in this case.
Amnesty International has stated that the Filton 18 case demonstrates “terrorism powers being misused” to “circumvent normal legal protections, such as justifying holding people in excessively-lengthy pre-charge detention”.
The #Filton18 political prisoners have been subjected to arbitrary and repressive treatment while inside prison – including the withholding of phone calls and mail, prohibitions on communicating with other prisoners, and denials of religious practices and medical privacy.
Featured image and additional images via Martin Pope
Samoa’s prime minister and the five other ousted members of the ruling FAST Party are reportedly challenging their removal.
FAST chair La’auli Leuatea Schmidt on Wednesday announced the removal of the prime minister and five Cabinet ministers from the ruling party.
Twenty party members signed for the removal of Fiame Naomi Mata’afa and five others, including Deputy Prime Minister Tuala Iosefo Ponifasio and two original members.
Samoa media outlets have been reporting that in a letter dated January 17, one of the removed members, Faualo Harry Schuster, wrote: “We all reject the letter of termination as relayed as unlawful and unconstitutional.”
In the letter, which is circulating on social media, he claimed they were still members of the FAST party.
Local media reports had suggested members of the FAST party had called for Fiame’s removal as prime minister.
Meanwhile, the government’s Savali newspaper has confirmed the removal of 13 associate ministers of Fiame’s Cabinet.
“The termination of their appointments stem from the issue of confidence in the Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa to continue work with the associate ministers, as well as the associate ministers’ expression of no confidence in her leadership,” it said.
“The official statement emphasises that the functions and responsibilities of the Executive Arm of Government continues under the leadership of the Prime Minister — Fiame Naomi Mata’afa and Cabinet.”
An asylum-seeking boy from Central America runs down a hallway after arriving from an immigration detention center to a shelter in San Diego, on Dec. 11, 2018.
I don’t really know what happened to me in 2018 or how it really affected me. I was 10 then, when I was separated from my mother at the border.
We had just come to the U.S from Honduras. We’d stepped into Texas, turned ourselves in to Border Patrol agents, and asked them for help. Instead, I was taken from my mother a few hours later.
I later found out that she was put on trial for crossing illegally and locked up with a lot of other immigrants. I was put on a plane and flown to someplace I didn’t know. My mother didn’t know either. We were separated for over two months.
The experience was formative — and traumatic.
I’ve been thinking lately that trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember, not always in good ways.
Trauma can make you forget. But it seems it can also make you remember.
The memory of my own agonizing journey has come flooding back since Donald Trump’s reelection. Trump’s loss in 2020 had brought some relief. Joe Biden became president, and his Justice Department settled a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union had brought over the family separation policy — or, to be more honest, the systematic practice of tearing thousands of parents and children away from each other.
My mother and I were part of the ACLU suit. The legal relief we’ve gotten has included government-funded psychotherapy, as well as a special, renewable immigration status called “parole.” Parole hasn’t made us permanent residents. But it has opened the door for us to stay in the U.S. We also have an asylum case in immigration court. If we win, we can eventually get American citizenship.
Until recently, this stability took an edge off the wounds of separation; it put the bad memories on the back burner. Now the edge is back. I don’t know what will happen next.
A year ago, Trump defended his 2018 family separation policy during an interview with Univision. Separation had stopped people from coming to the U.S. “by the hundreds of thousands,” he claimed.
Since then, he’s also suggested that he could cancel the lawsuit settlement or slow its implementation. His Justice Department could also tell immigration judges they can’t consider domestic violence against women as a reason to grant asylum. Trump did this when he was president the first time around.
The ACLU and other groups say they it will fight any such moves, but my mom worries constantly.
As for me, my therapist and I are doing a lot of talking about my memories.
In Honduras, before we came north, I was a quiet little kid, but still had lots of friends. And I was very close to my mother. When I was 9, she had a partner who was violent. One night, I woke up to the sound of them arguing in the kitchen. A moment later, I heard a loud thud. The next morning I saw a long scratch on the fridge and a machete on the ground nearby.
My mother didn’t say anything — I think she didn’t want to worry me — but I could tell she was afraid that next time he would kill her. I know now that this is why we left Honduras: to save her life.
During our weekslong trip to the U.S., my mother seemed frightened. But since I was so young, the journey started out being fun for me in many ways.
From Guatemala, we crossed the river late at night into Mexico on a speedboat. My mother worried that I’d fall in the water, but I was only thinking about the refreshing breeze after the tropical daytime heat. And I enjoyed myself even when we first got to Texas and were put in a fenced-in room with other people.
Many kids my age were detained there. We were given foil blankets, all silvery and shiny. We played fairy tale games with them. One girl put the foil on her head to make a crown, like a queen. I made a cape around my shoulders and was a witch, trying to snatch the queen’s crown without getting caught by her protector kids.
Then, suddenly, the fun came to a screeching halt. I was led away from my mom into another room. Someone in there mentioned that they were going to be deported. I started crying, went up to a guard, and asked if my mom and I were going to be deported too. He wouldn’t look at me. He just gave me some snacks: an apple and a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter in them.
I would cry myself to sleep longing for my mother.
Outside, the night was enveloped by a thick darkness. I didn’t know whether it was early in the morning or late at night. I was put in a car with a woman who spoke only English and taken to a home. She gestured at me to take a shower and to leave my clothes outside. When I came out, my clothes were gone, including my pants with my two bills of Honduran lempira, the currency from home that I always carried as a good luck charm. The clothes I was given were many sizes too large, so baggy as to be uncomfortable.
Adults I didn’t know, many of whom didn’t speak my language, kept directing my movements, this time into yet another car. I wondered where we were going, but I was told nothing.
I desperately hoped we were going back for my mother. We arrived at an airport, and I yearned to find her on the plane, but she wasn’t there.
No one gave me any more information, and I sobbed in desperation. A 15-year-old girl sitting next to me, the only one who spoke Spanish to me, was in the same situation. She held my hand throughout the flight. After we landed, I never saw her again.
I later found out the place I ended up in was in Virginia. It was a shelter for teenage girls, including a 16-year-old who was pregnant. They didn’t have clothes for girls my age. An 11-year-old girl from Guatemala was my only peer. She seemed nervous and hardly talked.
When night fell, I would cry myself to sleep longing for my mother. I wondered how she was doing, in a country she barely knew, separated from her family — separated from me.
I didn’t speak much to the others, but a girl named Jimena mothered me, comforting me and combing my hair. We had to wake up every day at 5 a.m. to clean our rooms. Dragging the large vacuum from the first floor to the second floor was too much for me, and she helped.
Jimena was one of the only girls there who I was comfortable around. Then she left, and I missed her like I missed my mother. It was a loss after loss, each on top of the next.
Almost immediately after, I was reunited with my mom, I forgot a lot of what happened to me. Still, the effects were with me, even then.
My mother told me I had night terrors for weeks, where I bolted upright and screamed in my bed. I would wake up early in the morning, she said, and pretend to clean the house. I was apparently just acting like I had at the shelter, living, no doubt, in a way that had become normal to me. I don’t remember any of it.
Six years later, my mom and I are still in the U.S. I’m in high school and taking college-prep courses.
On the one hand, I think I’m doing well. On the other, I’m questioning my mental well-being. I’m less attached to people than I was before the separation. I’ve had trouble developing friendships; I often feel they’ll only be temporary.
Since I started high school, I’ve been forgetting things more and more. Once I was chatting with a friend about a book we were reading, and she told me things I said I’d liked about it, but I didn’t remember saying those things. I recently got a calendar to record my school assignments because I keep forgetting them; my mind goes blank.
My therapist told me these could all be after-effects of the separation.
In my English class we’ve been reading a novel, “The Memory Police,” by Yoko Ogawa. It’s about a police force that goes around seizing mundane objects that people are forbidden to have, like flowers, pets, and family photographs. Anyone caught with these sorts of items is disappeared or put to death. In class, we work together through questions raised by reading the book: Who controls these Memory Police? What is the government trying to accomplish with them? Why would it want its people to forget their history — even personal history?
In the novel, the memory police take things away. In real life, I have struggled to cast off the pall of what I have hung on to. My own memory keeps things that I wish it wouldn’t. Like cheese crackers with peanut butter. Like apples. I don’t want to even look at those foods anymore, much less eat them.
Especially with Trump coming into office again, with my and my family’s future cast into doubt, I wonder what things our own government might try to make us forget if it could. And what may we end up remembering, even against our will?
I have wrestled with what to say in this urgent moment, long yearned for and that often appeared beyond reach during these last 15 hideous months.
One of the questions that I grappled with was this: What could I possibly share with readers that would even remotely capture the meaning and profundity of an apparent agreement to stop the wholesale massacre of Palestinians?
I had not suffered. My home is intact. My family and I are alive and well. We are warm, together and safe.
So, the other pressing dilemma I confronted was: Is it my place to write at all? This space should be reserved, I thought, for Palestinians to reflect on the horrors they have endured and what is to come.
Their voices will, of course, be heard here and elsewhere in the days and weeks ahead. My voice, in this context, is insignificant and, under these grievous circumstances, borders on being irrelevant.
Still, if you and, in particular, Palestinians will oblige me, this is what I have to say:
I think that there are four words that each, in their own way, bear some significance to Wednesday’s happy news that the guns are poised to go silent.
The first and perhaps most fitting word is “relief”.
There will be ample time and opportunity for the “experts” to draw up their predictable scorecards of the “winners” and “losers” and the broader short- and long-term strategic implications of Wednesday’s deal.
There will, as well, be ample time and opportunity for more “experts” to consider the political consequences of Wednesday’s deal in the Middle East, Europe and Washington, DC.
My preoccupation, and I suspect the preoccupation of most Palestinians and their loved ones in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, is that peace has arrived finally.
How long it will last is a question best posed tomorrow. Today, let us all revel in the relief that is a dividend of peace.
Palestinian boys and girls are dancing with relief. After months of grief, loss and sadness, joy has returned. Smiles have returned. Hope has returned.
Let us enjoy a satisfying measure of relief, if not pleasure, in that.
There is relief in Israel, too.
The families of the surviving captives will soon be reunited with the brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, they have longed to embrace again.
They will, no doubt, require care and attention to heal the wounds to their minds, souls and bodies.
That will be another, most welcomed, dividend of peace.
The next word is “gratitude”.
Those of us who, day after dreadful day, have watched — bereft and helpless as a ruthless apartheid state has gone methodically about reducing Gaza to dust and memory — owe our deepest gratitude to the brave, determined helpers who have done their best to ease the pain and suffering of besieged Palestinians.
We owe our everlasting gratitude to the countless anonymous people, in countless places throughout Gaza and the West Bank, who, at grave risk and at the expense of so many young, promising lives, put the welfare of their Palestinian brothers and sisters ahead of their own.
We must be grateful for their selflessness and courage. They did their duty. They walked into the danger. They did not retreat. They stood firm. They held their ground. They rebuffed the purveyors of death and destruction who tried to erase their pride and dignity.
They reminded the world that humanity will prevail despite the occupier’s efforts to crush it.
The third word is “acknowledge”.
The world must acknowledge the steadfast resistance of Palestinians.
The occupier’s aim was to break the will and spirit of Palestinians. That has been the occupier’s intent for the past 75 years.
Once again, the occupier has failed.
Palestinians are indefatigable. They are, like their brethren in Ireland and South Africa, immovable.
They refuse to be routed from their land because they are wedded to it by faith and history. Their roots are too deep and indestructible.
Palestinians will decide their fate — not the marauding armies headed by racists and war criminals who cling to the antiquated notion that might is right.
It will take a little more time and patience, but the sovereignty and salvation that Palestinians have earned in blood and heartache is, I am convinced, approaching not far over the horizon.
The final word is “shame”.
There are politicians and governments who will forever wear the shame of permitting Israel to commit genocide against the people of Palestine.
These politicians and governments will deny it. The evidence of their crimes is plain. We can see it in the images of the apocalyptic landscape of Gaza. We will record every name of the more than 46,000 Palestinian victims of their complicity.
That will be their decrepit legacy.
Rather than stop the mass murder of innocents, they enabled it. Rather than prevent starvation and disease from claiming the lives of babies and children, they encouraged it. Rather than turn off the spigot of arms, they delivered them. Rather than shout “enough”, they spurred the killing to go on and on.
We will remember. We will not let them forget.
That is our responsibility: to make sure that they never escape the shame that will follow each and every one of them like a long, disfiguring shadow in the late-day sun.
Shame on them. Shame on them all.
Andrew Mitrovica is an award-winning writer and journalism educator at the University of Toronto. He has been an investigative reporter for a variety of news organisations and publications, including the CBC, CTV, Saturday Night Magazine, Reader’s Digest, the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. He is also a columnist for Al Jazeera.
With the temporary ceasefire agreement, we should take our hats off to the Palestinian people of Gaza who have withstood a total military onslaught from Israel but without surrendering or shifting from their land.
Over 15 months Israel has dropped well over 70,000 tonnes of bombs on this tiny 360 sq km strip of land, home to 2.3 million people.
This is more than the combined total of bombs dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the six years of the Second World War.
PSNA national chair John Minto’s “human spirit” letter in solidarity with Palestinians. Image: The Press
Just as we saw in Vietnam and Afghanistan the determination to resist has proven itself more decisive than the overwhelming military firepower of Israel and the US.
Palestinian courage, tenacity and sumud (steadfastness) represent a triumph of the human spirit against overwhelming odds.
For New Zealand, the great tragedy has been our government [Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s National-led three-party coalition] response which has been to condemn every act of Palestinian resistance but refuse to condemn even the most blatant of Israeli war crimes.
Mr Luxon has put us on the wrong side of yet another human struggle for justice.
John Minto National Chair Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA)
Letter published in the The Press, Christchurch, on 18 January 2025.
There should be only one reason why people enter politics. It is for the good of the nation and the people who voted them in. It is to be their voice at the national level where the country’s future is decided.
The recent developments within the Samoan government are a stark reminder that people have chosen politics for reasons other than that. We are at a point where people are guessing what is next.
Will the faction backing Laauli Leuatea Schmidt continue on their path to remove Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa or will they bite the bullet and work together for the better of the nation?
The removal of the prime minister and the nation heading to snap elections has far-ranging implications. While the politicians plot and play a game of chess with the nation and its people, at the end of the day it will be people who will feel the adverse effects.
After the 2021 Constitutional Crisis and then the economic downturn from the effects of the measles lockdown and the covid-19 pandemic, the nation had just started recovering. A snap election would impact this recovery and the opportunity cost would be far greater than people have thought.
According to political scientist Dr Christina La’ala’i Tauasa, should the ruling party proceed with a vote of no confidence against the PM. In terms of party unity, a no-confidence vote could deepen internal divisions within the FAST party, potentially leading to a leadership crisis and a weakened government.
“Overall, there is Samoa’s political stability to carefully take into consideration as a successful vote of no confidence will no doubt destabilise the country’s political landscape, prompting more questions about the state of the party’s cohesion, particularly their ability and capacity to effectively govern and lead Samoa given their first term in government. The country and the FAST party cannot afford to go into a snap election, it would be a loss for all except the Opposition party,” she said.
The nation needs leadership that will drive economic growth, the development of infrastructure and basic services.
There is a hospital that is slowly falling apart, there are not enough doctors and nurses, teachers are needed in hundreds, people are unable to send children to school because of high education costs and the disabled population does not have access to equal opportunities in education and employment, better roads are needed, towns are getting flooded whenever it rains, there is a meth scourge which indicates the need for better control at the border, agriculture and fisheries are in dire need of fuel injection, many families are living in poverty, there is a need for an overhaul of the electricity infrastructure and not every household in the country can access clean water.
The list goes on. This should be the focus of the government and if the government is split then this cannot take place. It seems like there is a race to grab power at the expense of the people.
If politicians are concerned about the good of the nation and its people, all efforts should be made to have a government in place that would focus on these issues.
The days leading up to the first parliamentary session and thereafter will bring to light the true colours of the people we have elected. There will be two kinds, one who chose the path to genuinely help improve the lives of the people and prosper the nation and the second who only wants to prosper their needs.
Time will tell.
This Samoa Observer editorial was first published on 16 January 2025. Republished with permission.
In the days after President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence, 40-year-old Rejon Taylor felt like he’d been reborn. After facing execution for virtually his entire adult life for a crime he committed at 18, he was fueled by a new sense of purpose. He was “a man on a mission,” he told me in an email on Christmas Day. “I will not squander this opportunity of mercy, of life.”
Taylor saw new signs of life all around him. Biden had granted clemency to 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, an unprecedented move that none of them expected. One of his neighbors, a man who long ago seemed to have “fallen into an abyss in his fractured mind, never to return again,” suddenly appeared lucid, talking to Taylor instead of the voices in his head. “He even cleaned up his cell today, something he NEVER does. … He now has hope, despite a life sentence! I’m amazed!”
The sense of renewal was shared by men like Charles Hall, whose years on death row had been especially punishing. In a six-page letter to Biden, he vowed that the decision to grant clemency “will not be wasted on me.” Hall had earned a paralegal certificate while on death row and he planned to continue his education, he wrote, adding that change and positivity are possible “even behind razor wire, fences, walls, and bars.”
The outpourings of gratitude came amid a flurry of activity inside the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Men sorted their belongings and packed their things. They had been told that the unit would likely be shut down and its residents transferred to other prisons. No one knew precisely when this would happen — or where they might end up — but it was best to be prepared. Prison transfers are notoriously disruptive, taking place with no advance notice, and sometimes lasting months.
Yet not everyone was eager for a new beginning. Within days of the announcement, two men had sent handwritten emergency petitions to a federal court in Indiana seeking to block the commutation of their death sentences. Neither of them had applied for clemency and both were adamant that they did not want it, arguing that it threatened to derail their efforts to prove their innocence in court. One of them decried Biden’s commutations as a “publicity stunt.” This week a third man, Iouri Mikhel, similarly objected to Biden’s reprieve.
While people on death row are automatically entitled to legal representation, those serving life without parole are not.
The challenges are a long shot to say the least. “The Court harbors serious doubt that it has any power to block a commutation,” a federal judge wrote in response to the first two filings. But the lawsuits also lay bare a sobering reality for most people who go from facing a death sentence to a life sentence with no chance of release. While people on death row are automatically entitled to legal representation, those serving life without parole are not. And for those who harbor even the faintest hope of overturning their convictions, a commutation can foreclose on legal avenues that once made it possible. This is true even for those who do not claim to be innocent but have challenged their convictions on other grounds, from ineffective advocacy by trial lawyers to racial bias to official misconduct.
With Taylor and his neighbors facing a lifetime behind bars — and with more questions than answers about what will happen next — the mood in Terre Haute has shifted. The initial wave of celebration has given way to anxiety over the future. Rumors have run rampant about the upcoming prison transfers; some days the men hear they will happen imminently, only to be told that it could be a while. Many are nervous about living in general population after years or even decades in solitary confinement.
In the thick of such uncertainty, the man whose mental illness seemed to recede after the commutations has gone back to his previous behaviors, sometimes yelling from behind his steel cell door, Taylor told me recently. “He’s falling back under the weight of his stress again.”
Significant Uncertainty
After an unprecedented 13 executions during Trump’s final six months in office, there was no question that his reelection spelled doom for the men in Terre Haute. Although Biden fell short of abolishing the federal death penalty as he vowed to do during his 2020 campaign, his mass clemency robbed Trump of a chance to carry out another execution spree. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden said upon announcing the commutations.
Biden’s moratorium had been imposed in January 2021 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who also announced a review of the federal protocol used to carry out Trump’s executions. After four years, the results were finally released this week. In a 25-page report, the Department of Justice addressed long-standing concerns over the method of lethal injection used to carry out Trump’s execution spree. Autopsy reports have long revealed that executions carried out by a single dose of pentobarbital (as well as other drug combinations) have led to pulmonary edema, the filling of fluid in the lungs.
Citing “significant uncertainty” about whether the pentobarbital executions inflicted “unnecessary pain and suffering,” Garland rescinded the government’s lethal injection protocol, calling on the Justice Department to “halt the use of pentobarbital unless and until that uncertainty is resolved.”
“The DOJ’s review has confirmed what medical experts have said for many years: pentobarbital causes excruciating pain when used to carry out executions,” death penalty lawyer Shawn Nolan said in a statement. While Garland’s actions could certainly complicate plans to restart federal executions, the truth is that Trump would have been unlikely to be able to carry out new executions soon after returning to office anyway. The three remaining men on death row — Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers — are a long ways off from exhausting their appeals.
Trump could theoretically restart executions sooner if the men fighting their commutations somehow prevail. Winning their lawsuits might allow their post-conviction appeals to continue in the short term — but if their challenges eventually fail, it would set them up for execution.
Shannon Agofsky, who filed his challenge late last year, says that’s a risk he is willing to take. “The fact that I do not want commutation may lead you to believe that I am mentally disturbed, suicidal, or somehow wishful of death,” he wrote in an email sent via his wife, Laura Agofsky, in late December. “That is not the case. I am in full possession of my faculties, and am not eager to die at all; in fact, I have much to live for.”
Agofsky found out about the commutations the same way as his neighbors: through media reports shortly after 5 a.m. on December 23. He immediately called Laura, who lives in Germany and was shopping for Christmas. She cried when she heard the news. “I sort of had a mental breakdown in the grocery store,” she told me in a phone call. Both of them assumed that he would lose his lawyers and that his legal challenges were now null and void. (His lawyers have since reassured him that they will continue to represent him.)
Agofsky was sent to death row after killing a man at USP Beaumont, a maximum security penitentiary known as one of the bloodiest prisons in the federal system. He swore it was an act of self-defense — and a key eyewitness later gave a sworn declaration saying he was coerced into pinning the blame on Agofsky. Nonetheless, in 2004, a federal jury found Agofsky guilty and sentenced him to death based on the fact that he had previously been convicted of a different murder.
But Agofsky is adamant that he is innocent of the first crime. He had been sent to Beaumont after being convicted and sentenced to life alongside his brother for a 1989 bank robbery and killing. The case against him turned almost entirely on fingerprints matched to Agofsky — a type of forensic evidence that, while ubiquitous, has since been revealed to be unreliable, especially given the analytical techniques used at the time.
It was not until Agofsky was sentenced to die that he was able to secure lawyers who investigated both his cases and found evidence questioning his original conviction. Though records in his case remain under seal, he argues that they expose his wrongful conviction — and that Biden’s commutation order came just as he was “on the cusp” of proving his innocence.
Agofsky wrote in an email that he would do “whatever it takes, go to any lengths, to prove that my brother and I did not rob a bank, or kill a banker.” At their 1992 sentencing, his brother Joseph accused the government of manufacturing evidence, telling the court “our innocence will be proven eventually.” Joseph Agofsky died in prison in 2013.
In his legal filing, Agofsky invoked the “heightened scrutiny” courts are supposed to give death penalty cases. “To commute his sentence now, while the defendant has active litigation in court, is to strip him of the protection of heightened scrutiny,” he wrote.
Len Davis, the second man who challenged his commutation in December, for his part argued that he “has always maintained that having a death sentence would draw attention to overwhelming misconduct” in his case.
Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, was convicted and sentenced to death for ordering the murder of a woman who had allegedly filed a complaint against him. Unlike Agofsky, he has no pending appeals remaining. But Davis told me that he is not afraid that his lawsuit would leave him vulnerable to execution. “First, I’m a Born-Again believer in Jesus The Christ,” he wrote in an email. “I can’t be scared with a trip to heaven.” What’s more, he argued, “Trump should be able to empathize with me about D.O.J Misconduct.” He hopes that by rejecting a commutation, he will draw more attention to his innocence claim — and possibly receive a pardon.
On January 14, federal prosecutors filed responses to the emergency petitions, calling the judge’s doubts about his power to block a commutation order “well-founded.” Under existing case law, “a prisoner’s consent is not necessary when the President unconditionally commutes a federal death sentence to a life sentence,” they wrote. Two days later, a lawyer appointed to represent Agofsky and Davis summarized their arguments in response, but ultimately agreed with the government that the court “does not have the power to block” the commutations.
Craving Connections
By the second week of January, rumors swirled among the men in Terre Haute that the transfers would happen far sooner than expected. There were whispers that most, if not all, of them might be headed, at least temporarily, to ADX Florence in Colorado, the highest security penitentiary in the federal system. For Taylor, who craves community and human connection, such an environment would be hard to take. In contrast to the Special Confinement Unit, where residents have access to phone calls and emails, ADX is notorious for its isolation.
An undated photo of Rejon Taylor at the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.Photo: Courtesy of the Taylor family
Taylor found himself unprepared. He had previously heard that the Bureau of Prisons was willing to at least consider housing preferences from the men whose sentences had been commuted. He hoped to get into a residential program that was available right there in Terre Haute. The program, called Life Connections, is “designed for inmates who are sincerely interested in seeking their faith, or improving their social responsibility,” according to the Bureau of Prisons. Participation is up to the chaplain — and Taylor, who is known for his empathy and desire to make a positive impact inside and outside prison walls, could be an ideal candidate.
In an email responding to questions from The Intercept, Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Scott Taylor wrote that the men whose death sentences were commuted “will be transferred to an institution commensurate with their respective safety, security, health, and programming needs.” He did not provide a timeline, but the rumored imminent transfers have not come to pass.
With Trump’s inauguration just a few days away, Taylor and his neighbors remain in limbo. For now, his cell is packed. His beloved art supplies and family pictures are in boxes, which he will send to loved ones for safekeeping. His walls are mostly bare, save for a calendar featuring cityscapes and a photo of one of his paralegals with her French bulldog. Rather than distract himself with TV, he’s trying to prepare himself mentally, he said, the same way he did before the commutations were announced: by envisioning the worst-case scenario while hoping for the best. “If you sit with anxiety, it helps you prepare for the future.”
COMMENTARY:By Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson and Junior S. Ami
With just over a year left in her tenure as Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa faces a political upheaval threatening a peaceful end to her term.
Ironically, the rule of law — the very principle that elevated her to power — has now become the source of significant challenges within her party.
Fiame left the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) in 2020, opposing constitutional amendments she believed undermined judicial independence. Her decision reflected a commitment to democratic principles and a rejection of increasing authoritarianism within the HRPP.
She joined the newly formed Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, created by former HRPP members seeking an alternative to decades of one-party dominance.
As FAST’s leader, Fiame led the party to a historic victory in the 2021 election, becoming Samoa’s first female Prime Minister and ending the HRPP’s nearly 40-year rule.
Her leadership is now under threat from within her own party.
FAST Founder, chairman and former Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries La’auli Leuatea Polataivao Schmidt, faces criminal charges, including conspiracy and harassment. These developments have escalated into calls for Fiame’s removal from her party.
Deputy charged with offences
On 3 January 2025, La’auli publicly revealed he had been charged with offences including conspiracy to obstruct justice, fabricating evidence, and harassment. These charges prompted widespread speculation, fueled by misinformation spread primarily via Facebook, that the charges were related to allegations of his involvement in an ongoing investigation into the death of a 19-year-old victim of a hit-and-run.
Following La’auli’s refusal to resign from his role as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Fiame removed his portfolio on January 10, citing the need to uphold the integrity of her Cabinet.
“As Prime Minister, I had hoped that the former minister would choose to resign. This is a common stance often considered by esteemed public office custodians if allegations or charges are laid against them,” she explained.
In response to his dismissal, La’auli stated publicly: “I accept the decision with a humble heart.” He maintained his innocence, saying, “I am clean from all of this,” and expressed confidence that the truth will prevail.
La’auli urged his supporters to remain calm and emphasised his commitment to clearing his name while continuing to serve as a Member of Parliament for Gagaifomauga 3.
Following his removal, the Samoan media reported that members of the FAST party wrote a letter to Fiame requesting her removal as Prime Minister.
Three ministers dismissed
In response, Fiame dismissed three Cabinet Ministers, Mulipola Anarosa Ale-Molio’o (Women, Community, and Social Development), Toelupe Poumulinuku Onesemo (Communication and Information Technology), and Leota Laki Sio (Commerce, Industry, and Labor) — allegedly involved in the effort to unseat her.
Fiame emphasised the need for a cohesive and trustworthy Cabinet, stating the importance of maintaining confidence in her leadership.
Amid rumors of calls for her removal within the FAST party, Fiame acknowledged the party’s authority to replace her as its leader but clarified that only Parliament could determine her status as Prime Minister.
She expressed her determination to fulfill her duties despite internal challenges, though she did not specify the level of support she retains within the party.
Samoa’s Parliament is set to convene next Tuesday, where these tensions may reach a critical point. La’auli, facing multiple criminal charges, remains a focal point of the ongoing political turmoil.
A day after the announcement, on January 15, four new Ministers were sworn into office by Head of State Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II at a ceremony attended by family, friends, and some FAST members.
The new Ministers are Faleomavaega Titimaea Tafua (Commerce, Industry, and Labour), Laga’aia Ti’aitu’au Tufuga (Women, Community, and Social Development), Mau’u Siaosi Pu’epu’emai (Communications and Information Technology), and Niu’ava Eti Malolo (Agriculture and Fisheries).
FAST caucus voted against Fiame
Later that evening, FAST chairman La’auli announced that 20 members of the FAST caucus had decided to remove Fiame from the leadership of FAST and expel her from the party along with five other Cabinet Ministers — Tuala Tevaga Ponifasio (Deputy Prime Minister), Leatinuu Wayne Fong, Olo Fiti Vaai, Faualo Harry Schuster, and Toesulusulu Cedric Schuster.
In Samoa, if an MP ceases to maintain affiliation with the political party under which they were elected — whether through resignation or expulsion, their seat is declared vacant if they choose to move to another party or form a new party.
These provisions aim to preserve political stability, prevent party-hopping, and maintain the integrity of parliamentary representation, with byelections held as needed to fill vacancies.
Under Section 142 of Samoa’s Electoral Act 2019, if the Speaker believes an MP’s seat has become vacant as per Section 141, they are required to formally charge the MP with that vacation.
If the Legislative Assembly is in session, this charge must be made orally during the Assembly. Fiame and the four FAST members can choose to maintain their seats in Parliament as Independents.
Former Prime Minister and now opposition leader Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi remarked that what should have been internal FAST issues had spilled into the public sphere.
“We have been watching and we continue to watch what they do and how they deal with their problems,” he stated.
Freedom of expression
When asked whether he would consider a coalition or support one side of FAST, Tuilaepa declined to reveal the opposition’s strategy, citing potential reactions from the other side. He emphasised the importance of adhering to democratic processes and protecting constitutional rights, including freedom of expression.
As Parliament prepares to reconvene on January 21, Facebook has become a battlefield for misinformation and defamatory discourse, particularly among FAST supporters in diaspora communities in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Divisions have emerged between supporters of Fiame and La’auli, leading to vitriol directed at politicians and journalists covering the crisis. La’auli, leveraging his social media following, has conducted Facebook Live sessions to assert his innocence and rally support.
Currently, FAST holds 35 seats in Parliament, while the opposition HRPP controls 18. If the removal of five MPs is factored in, FAST would retain 30 MPs, though La’auli claims that 20 members support Fiame’s removal. This leaves 10 MPs who may either support Fiame or remain neutral.
If FAST fails to expel Fiame, La’auli’s faction may push for a motion of no confidence against her.
Such a motion requires 27 votes to pass, potentially making the opposition pivotal in determining the outcome. This could lead to either Fiame’s removal or the dissolution of Parliament for a snap election.
As Samoa faces this political crisis, its democratic institutions undergo a significant test.
Fiame remains committed to the rule of law, while La’auli advocates for her removal.
Reflecting on the stakes, Fiame warned: “Disregarding the rule of law will undoubtedly have far-reaching negative impacts, including undermining our judiciary system and the abilities of our law enforcement agencies to fulfill their duties.”
For now, Samoa watches and waits as its political future hangs in the balance.
Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a Samoan journalist with over 20 years of experience reporting on the Pacific Islands. She is founding editor-in-chief of The New Atoll, a digital commentary magazine focusing on Pacific island geopolitics. Junior S. Ami is a photojournalist based in Samoa. He has covered national events for the Samoa Observer newspaper and runs a private photography business. Republished from the Devpolicy Blog with permission.
Huge crowds are expected next week at the trial of the “Hastings Three”, who were charged nearly a year ago for their part in protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The Hastings Three: up in court
NHS worker Clem McCulloch, 33, artist Thomas Delves, 25, and retired train driver Laurie Holden, 72, were arrested at General Dynamics arms factory on February 29 last year during a peaceful protest organized by the Hastings & District Palestine Solidarity Campaign (HDPSC) and supported by a coalition of community groups including Jewish groups, social justice and climate justice groups, parent groups, and political parties.
All three will plead not guilty to charges of aggravated trespass when they come before a district judge at Brighton Magistrates Court on Wednesday 22 January.
The charge carries a maximum tariff of a three-month jail term and £2,500 fine.
They are expected to be joined by a large number of supporters as local groups across the county – including Brighton Stop the War, University of Sussex Friends of Palestine and Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign (BHPSC) – have called a ‘solidarity rally’ in support of the three men.
Ahead of the trial, BHPSC’s executive committee released a statement:
BHPSC is a sister PSC branch to Hastings & District PSC, and have followed the case of the #Hastings3 with great interest – not least because we in Brighton know too well the indignation caused locally by having an arms factory based in our city – an arms factory (like General Dynamics in Hastings) that is deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by Israel upon the people of Gaza.
The statement went on:
The executive committee of BHPSC sends our solidarity to the three defendants whose case will be heard here in Brighton on the 22nd of January.
Our many local members and supporters will be outside the court in large numbers on the 22nd to voice our support for our Hastings comrades, who are on trial for doing nothing more than exercising their right to peaceful non-violent protest.
Compared with the appalling crimes against humanity being facilitated by the General Dynamics factory in Hastings and other weapons manufacturers in the UK, the actions of the #Hastings3 register as expressions of conscience rather than crimes.
General Dynamics: complicit in genocide
General Dynamics is the fifth largest global arms manufacturer and is responsible for all the MK80 bombs being dropped on Gaza.
Laurie Holden, from Burwash, said:
It is appalling that ordinary people like myself are in the dock instead of General Dynamics, which is making a killing from genocide. This will be the sixth time our case has come before the court, representing a disgusting waste of taxpayer’s money. Meanwhile, General Dynamics made $3.3 billion profit in 2023.
“The Hastings Three are not guilty” said Grace Lally, twinning officer for the Hastings & District PSC:
General Dynamics is guilty of profiting from war crimes and genocide. Two thousand pound bombs made by General Dynamics have been dropped on families sheltering in tents in the so-called safe zone of Al Mawasi, where our friends live and our community has deep connections. Nothing can justify this.
General Dynamics has come under sustained pressure from concerned locals for its part in Israel’s 15-month campaign in Gaza.
Hastings & District PSC has led more than a dozen actions to the two arms factory sites in Hastings since November 2023, including die-ins, marches, pickets and a 48-hour peace camp and the sites have also been subject to regular and spontaneous ‘pop up’ protests.
Supporting the Hastings Three
Mum-of-one Olivia Cavanagh said:
We don’t want this weapons manufacturer here in our town, making money from slaughtering innocent Palestinians, making us complicit in war crimes.
A legal fighting fund for the three men has raised nearly £5,000 but still has some way to go to cover all their legal costs.
“The outrageous and expensive pursuit of the #Hastings3 does not stand in isolation but forms part of a nationwide clamp down on peaceful protest” said Katy Colley, HDPSC Chair:
Our friends are good men of conscience who, like the rest of us, cannot bear to see the wholesale destruction and annihilation we are witnessing in Gaza. The majority in this country stand against genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. For fifteen months, people up and down the country have protested the UK’s complicity in the worst crime of our time, demanding that the UK stops arming Israel. Yet our government refuses to listen and those who speak out are smeared, defamed and persecuted.
There are now over 46,000 confirmed dead in Gaza – mostly women and children – though a report this month in the Lancet estimated the real death toll to be at least 40% higher with the number of deaths in the first nine months alone estimated to be over 64,000.
Men inspect their home following an Israeli airstrike in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, on Jan. 15, 2025.Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP
Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead. So too are scores of aid workers and journalists. Entire communities have been turned to rubble, leaving residents displaced or homeless.
Israel is more isolated than ever. Europe has turned against free speech. And despite a campus protest movement that rivals the opposition to Vietnam War, the U.S. government remains steadfast in its support for Israel’s war machine.
Drones and AI-enabled warfare have cheapened the value of life, while global crackdowns on dissent herald in a new age of censorship.
These are the contours of a world after the war in Gaza — contours carved deep into the political landscape, deep into reality, not soon to be smoothed out. As we await the Israeli cabinet’s decision on a ceasefire in Gaza, the Middle East — and the world — has been completely reshaped as a result of the past 15 months of fighting.
And yet, after the ceasefire, so much will remain the same. A hundred Israelis are, for now, at least, still being held hostage. The Israeli military continues to seize territory by force in the countries that surround it, deepening its 76-year military occupation, and the expansion of its settlements. It reserves the right to keep attacking Palestinians.
Allegations of genocide aren’t disappearing; they grow more credible by the day.
It is, by no means, a given that the ceasefire agreement reached this week will hold. Israel has already signaled that it reserves the right to reengage militarily at any point and that it maintains its aim of “destroying” Hamas. The Palestinian group is unlikely to agree to terms that ensure its own demise.
This is not a true end to the conflict.
In all likelihood, the ceasefire agreement will hold to the pattern of past Israeli deals with the Palestinians: immediate concessions for Israel and then a slow-rolling of the rest of the plan — the rebuilding and anything else that might significantly improve the position of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza.
The virtual destruction of Gaza and the global ramifications are not just a result of the effects of October 7. It’s a 76-year process of deliberate de-development of Palestinian life in their historic homelands. In Gaza, this phenomenon is at its most acute.
Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Gaza has only ever been an open-air prison, or a collection of mass graves.
The rise of Hamas in 2007 was preceded by the blockade in 1991. Even before then, it was abysmal sanitation, inadequate health care, and a lack of adequate employment opportunities that plagued Gaza.
Other than Hamas, the largest employer in Gaza before the war was the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA. This is not an economy, nor could it ever lead to anything sustainable. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Gaza has only ever been an open-air prison, or a collection of mass graves — Israel’s repository for displaced Palestinians from inside what today are Israel’s internationally recognized borders. And nothing about this week’s ceasefire will do anything to change that.
The world bearing witness to the horrors within Gaza’s walls will continue to haunt us all. And the extraordinary escalation of violence and the loss of humanity in the region will stain a generation.
There is little doubt that Israel will become more politically isolated from its neighbors, and that it will need to maintain a forever war. Its position is still buoyed by American support. The global protest movement against the war and crimes in Gaza may lose intensity, but the young people traumatized by them will not forget — and the ongoing suffering of Palestinians will not let them.
Consider what’s not in the deal. Nowhere in the reported terms of the agreement is there a mention of a path away from dehumanization, of a path toward basic human rights, or a path to lasting peace.
An end to the most intense assault on Gaza will be a relief, a temporary respite from more than a year of bloodshed, but there’s little here to celebrate.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.
The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.
The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.
Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”
After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took down the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.
The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.
MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.
“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”
Protests against the war on Gaza started on MIT’s campus in late 2023 — part of the wave of nationwide campus demonstrations about Israel’s assault. MIT leadership has since resisted overwhelming calls from students and faculty to divest from research that supports what critics say is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Inresponses to frequently asked questions posted in May, the office of MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles said only three contracts with the Israeli military are currently active, totaling $180,000.
Solomon, the graduate student, said MIT administrators have tried to suppress the coalition’s new findings.
A campus newspaper retracted an article about the report earlier this month; its op-ed section has since been suspended until further notice. The paper’s editorial team said it had retracted the article — an examination of MIT professor Daniela Rus’s Israeli-funded research that was originally published on November 7 — after deliberation with its executive committee and faculty advisers.
McDonnell, the MIT spokesperson, said that the publication, The Tech, is editorially and financially independent from the school and that MIT had no role in the decision to temporarily suspend the publication’s opinion page or remove the article. Rus did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” publisher Ellie Montemayor wrote in an addendum to the article December 9.
“Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in ‘multirobot security defense and surveillance,’” the authors wrote in a post on the news site Mondoweiss. “Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under consultation with Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed.”
Israeli-Funded Research
“Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception” and “Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Lasers and Imaging” — these are just two of the projects funded by the Israeli military at MIT research labs cited in the new report.
MIT’s research ties to Israel have been a focus of campus protests over the last two years. But the new report underscores the extent of the school’s collaboration with major military contractors like Maersk and Elbit, as well as the potential applications of the school’s research to Israel’s most recent military operations in Gaza.
One lab explored underwater monitoring and autonomous docking technologies that could help Israel police its sea blockade of the coastal Gaza Strip. Then there was the MIT project focused on drone swarms, including armed quadcopters powered by artificial intelligence, which can mimic the sounds of women and children in distress. Israel has reportedly used the technology to lure and kill people in Gaza.
“An ethical scientist and an ethical institution pursue scientific avenues that affirm life, that help repair the world, and that refuse to allow abusive militaries to launder their reputations while they commit mass murder,” the report’s authors wrote.
MIT also has partnerships with multinational corporations whose work helps supply Israel with weapons and equipment to carry out its occupation of Palestine — firms like Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others. Raytheon, which started at MIT and has an active partnership with the school to place students at the company, supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. MIT also partners with other major U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military with weapons, research, and cloud computing services like Boeing, Aurora Flight Sciences, Google, and Amazon.
“These collaborations grant genocide profiteers privileged access to MIT talent and expertise,” the authors wrote.
Cutting off research partnerships with Israel emerged as a core demand of campus protests this spring. In March, 63 percent of undergraduate students voted for a referendum calling on the student union to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza — one of the highest-turnout elections in the school’s history. In April, members of the MIT Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the university cut all research ties with the Israeli military.
The MIT Chancellor Office said that negotiations with students fell short because they hinged on the demand that MIT cut funding ties with the Israeli military. “There are a number of compelling reasons not to unilaterally terminate active research agreements made by individual PIs” — principle investigators — “in compliance with law and policy,” the chancellor’s office explained in the FAQ section on student protests.
MIT has cut ties with other international actors in cases where there are concerns that the university’s research could legitimize or exacerbate abuses of human and civil rights. The school ended partnerships with Saudi Aramco in 2020, for instance, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MIT also conductselevated risk assessments for projects funded by people or organizations in Saudi Arabia and China to address concerns about legitimizing or furthering violations of human and civil rights.
A 2022 report on the university’s engagement with China recommended that MIT not enter into “collaborations that might contribute to human rights abuses by foreign governments against their own citizens.” The report listed circumstances that would disqualify a Chinese company from partnering with MIT, including any direct involvement in government intelligence activities, armed forces, or other services with military applications.
“MIT’s research ties with the Israeli government similarly contribute to elevating the latter’s reputation despite its ongoing crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Why should MIT engage in research sponsorships with the Israeli government at all given the scale of its human rights abuses in Palestine?”
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.
The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.
The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.
Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”
After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took away access to the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.
The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.
MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.
“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”
Protests against the war on Gaza started on MIT’s campus in late 2023 — part of the wave of nationwide campus demonstrations about Israel’s assault. MIT leadership has since resisted overwhelming calls from students and faculty to divest from research that supports what critics say is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Inresponses to frequently asked questions posted in May, the office of MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles said only three contracts with the Israeli military are currently active, totaling $180,000.
Solomon, the graduate student, said MIT administrators have tried to suppress the coalition’s new findings.
A campus newspaper retracted an article about the report earlier this month; its op-ed section has since been suspended until further notice. The paper’s editorial team said it had retracted the article — an examination of MIT professor Daniela Rus’s Israeli-funded research that was originally published on November 7 — after deliberation with its executive committee and faculty advisers.
McDonnell, the MIT spokesperson, said that the publication, The Tech, is editorially and financially independent from the school and that MIT had no role in the decision to temporarily suspend the publication’s opinion page or remove the article. Rus did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” publisher Ellie Montemayor wrote in an addendum to the article December 9.
“Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in ‘multirobot security defense and surveillance,’” the authors wrote in a post on the news site Mondoweiss. “Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under consultation with Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed.”
Israeli-Funded Research
“Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception” and “Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Lasers and Imaging” — these are just two of the projects funded by the Israeli military at MIT research labs cited in the new report.
MIT’s research ties to Israel have been a focus of campus protests over the last two years. But the new report underscores the extent of the school’s collaboration with major military contractors like Maersk and Elbit, as well as the potential applications of the school’s research to Israel’s most recent military operations in Gaza.
One lab explored underwater monitoring and autonomous docking technologies that could help Israel police its sea blockade of the coastal Gaza Strip. Then there was the MIT project focused on drone swarms, including armed quadcopters powered by artificial intelligence, which can mimic the sounds of women and children in distress. Israel has reportedly used the technology to lure and kill people in Gaza.
“An ethical scientist and an ethical institution pursue scientific avenues that affirm life, that help repair the world, and that refuse to allow abusive militaries to launder their reputations while they commit mass murder,” the report’s authors wrote.
MIT also has partnerships with multinational corporations whose work helps supply Israel with weapons and equipment to carry out its occupation of Palestine — firms like Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others. Raytheon, which started at MIT and has an active partnership with the school to place students at the company, supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. MIT also partners with other major U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military with weapons, research, and cloud computing services like Boeing, Aurora Flight Sciences, Google, and Amazon.
“These collaborations grant genocide profiteers privileged access to MIT talent and expertise,” the authors wrote.
Cutting off research partnerships with Israel emerged as a core demand of campus protests this spring. In March, 63 percent of undergraduate students voted for a referendum calling on the student union to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza — one of the highest-turnout elections in the school’s history. In April, members of the MIT Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the university cut all research ties with the Israeli military.
The MIT Chancellor Office said that negotiations with students fell short because they hinged on the demand that MIT cut funding ties with the Israeli military. “There are a number of compelling reasons not to unilaterally terminate active research agreements made by individual PIs” — principle investigators — “in compliance with law and policy,” the chancellor’s office explained in the FAQ section on student protests.
MIT has cut ties with other international actors in cases where there are concerns that the university’s research could legitimize or exacerbate abuses of human and civil rights. The school ended partnerships with Saudi Aramco in 2020, for instance, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MIT also conductselevated risk assessments for projects funded by people or organizations in Saudi Arabia and China to address concerns about legitimizing or furthering violations of human and civil rights.
A 2022 report on the university’s engagement with China recommended that MIT not enter into “collaborations that might contribute to human rights abuses by foreign governments against their own citizens.” The report listed circumstances that would disqualify a Chinese company from partnering with MIT, including any direct involvement in government intelligence activities, armed forces, or other services with military applications.
“MIT’s research ties with the Israeli government similarly contribute to elevating the latter’s reputation despite its ongoing crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Why should MIT engage in research sponsorships with the Israeli government at all given the scale of its human rights abuses in Palestine?”
Two Just Stop Oil supporters who sprayed Heathrow departure boards with orange paint during the Oil Kills, international uprising to end fossil fuels last July have won a temporary reprieve as their jury failed to reach a majority decision.
Just Stop Oil: legal shenanigans
Phoebe Plummer and Jane Touil were appearing before judge Duncan at Isleworth Crown Court accused of criminal damage over £5,000 for their action on 30 July 2024 to demand a fossil fuel treaty to end oil and gas by 2030.
The trial, which lasted nine days, ended when the jury failed to reach a majority decision.
The judge has scheduled a retrial for May 2026.
Phoebe was remanded for 58 days and Jane for 14 days following the action in which the pair used fire extinguishers to spray water-based paint at the departure boards in the terminal. The Crown alleged that the Just Stop Oil action caused £8,000 worth of damages.
Phoebe is currently serving a two year prison sentence for criminal damage for throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting in October 2022. They were sentenced by Judge Hehir at South Crown Court on 27 September 2024, a sentence that is now being challenged in an appeal scheduled for 29-30 January 2025.
During the trial, Judge Duncan ruled out the defence of necessity, saying this did not extend to civil disobedience and what she called the Just Stop Oil defendants’ “honestly held opinions” about climate change.
Jane Touil responded that:
It is not accurate to say that I am acting on my beliefs. It [the climate crisis] is not ‘a cause’. This is physics, an objective reality. I can see that everything is at risk. We only do the right thing if we know what’s going on.
Phoebe was not allowed to be present in court to make their closing speech as during the course of the trial, the heating system in the holding cells at Isleworth Crown court, contracted to the private company Serco broke down and no one currently in custody could be produced in court.
‘Following the law and doing the right thing are not the same thing’
A Just Stop Oil supporter who was present throughout the trial said that:
Phoebe and Jane had all their substantial defences removed, a severely mismanaged prosecution, logistical nightmares and a jury that was told to completely disregard their motivations. This is absolutely huge!
In her closing speech Phoebe Plummer said:
I have struggled with not being able to talk about the climate crisis – hearing it being called irrelevant feels inhumane and dishonest. The prosecution says I’m ‘committed to breaking the law’; my only commitment is to act in line with my conscience.
They say ‘I do what I like without thinking about the law’. I don’t think following the law and doing the right thing are always the same thing.
I cannot be a bystander to suffering where I see it. Nonviolence means being honest and living in line with the truth. I need to tell the truth about what I see. I act in a way that I think will be effective in saving life. When a doctor breaks a rib while doing CPR the doctor’s intent is still obviously saving life not causing grievous bodily harm, the context always matters.
BREAKING: MET POLICE RAID JUST STOP OIL SUPPORTER'S HOME
