The United States-backed Israeli siege and genocide in Gaza is entering its sixth month. Israel’s relentless bombings and executions by Israeli snipers and soldiers have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with thousands more uncounted and decomposing under the rubble, and more than 70,000 injured. Reports by nonprofit agencies and organizations have detailed the Israeli military’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For years news media bosses warned the creaking business model backing journalism would fail at a major local outlet. It finally happened this week when Newshub’s owners proposed scrapping it. Then TVNZ posted losses prompting warnings of more cuts to come there. Can TV broadcasters pull a crowd without news? And what might the so-far ambivalent government do?
After Warner Bros Discovery top brass broke the bad news to staff on Wednesday, Newshub at 6 that night became a news event in itself.
RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Colin Peacock, RNZ Mediawatch presenter
After Warner Bros Discovery top brass broke the bad news to staff on Wednesday, Newshub at 6 that night became a news event in itself.
In her report, political reporter Amelia Wade reminded viewers more than 30 years of TV news and current affairs — spanning the entire period of commercial TV here — could come to an end in June.
Before TV3 launched in 1989, state-owned TVNZ had been the only game in town.
But for most of its recent history, TV3’s parent company MediaWorks was owned by private equity funds and it was hamstrung with debts.
There were periodic financial emergencies too which seemed to signal the end.
In 2015, the boss Mark Weldon axed the current affairs shows Campbell Live and 3D and replaced them with ones that didn’t pull in more viewers or pull up many trees with their reporting.
“Reports of our death at 6pm have been greatly exaggerated”, host Hilary Barry responded to reports 3 News might be for the chop the following year.
But Weldon persuaded the owners to stump up a significant sum to launch Newshub instead.
When the huge global company Discovery bought MediaWorks loss-making TV channels in December 2020, many in the media were pleased a major media outfit was now in charge.
Using the Official Information Act, Newsroom later reported the Overseas Investment Office fast tracked Discovery’s application and sought no guarantees of a commitment to local news.
The 2021 mega-merger in the US that turned it into “Warner Bros Discovery” excited The Spinoff founder Duncan Grieve.
“Tova O’Brien breaking stories on CNN NZ at 6pm, before an evening of local reality TV souped up by global budgets and distribution — with major sports and drama rights for good measure,” was one scenario.
“It could also swing the other way, with the New Zealand linear asset seen as too small and obscure,” he warned.
After losses including a $35 million one last year, the owners now “propose” to slice out the entire on-screen and online news operation. New Zealand could lose more than 15 percent of its full-time journalists in one go.
Beginning of the end?
“Oh, the irony, right? When those so-called ‘vulture funds’ had it, the operation still continued, albeit always run on the smell of an oily rag. Then a big media organisation was the one which axed it,” long-serving TV3 current affairs journalist Eugene Bingham told Mediawatch.
“I’ve been around long enough to see death by a thousand cuts over the years. But this was a moment we’ll look back on as a watershed moment in democracy and journalism,” Bingham said.
Former MediaWorks executive Andrew Szusterman told RNZ’s Morning Report the next day this decision would also ripple out to local drama and entertainment.
“We’re going to start to see how this is going to impact the production sector. Irrevocably, possibly,” said Szusterman, now the chief executive at production company South Pacific Pictures.
Does Newshub’s demise also kill off Three?
There’s been no shortage of people this week pointing out the appetite for TV news — and linear TV in general — is not what it was. That’s the main reason for the ad revenue slump cited by WBD.
Some who do tune in to Three (and WBD’s other channels) for The Block, Married at First Sight and free movies may not miss the news shows from June 30. So maybe Three will be fine?
“The loss of the newsroom represents the loss of the ability to respond to any event in real time. That is the heart and soul of a traditional TV broadcaster,” Hal Crawford — chief news officer at MediaWorks (and effectively Newshub’s boss) until early 2020 — told Mediawatch.
“When the Queen dies you can send a team to London, you can have someone in the studio talking about it, you can interact in a way that makes people feel like it is alive and a real human entity.”
Channels without the live element news brings are effectively just “content databases”, Crawford told Mediawatch.
“News is the one programme that runs 365 days a year . . . which the schedule is going to rely on to lead into prime time. So the rest of your schedule is going to dwindle. Ratings are gonna fall off and everything is going to go to pieces.
“It really is going to dwindle as a cultural entity in New Zealand because you’re not going to be able to justify the funding from NZ on Air if you aren’t getting audiences. It’s hard for me to see a way out of Three basically going away as a cultural force in New Zealand.”
But TV-style news and current affairs is also now being done online.
After Eugene Bingham’s TV3 show 3D was axed in 2016, four members formed the Stuff Circuit investigative team. Its video documentary productions won awards until it was axed by Stuff late last year.
“Of course, there have been changes in viewing habits . . . but there’s still a reason that the ‘1’ and the ‘3’ on remotes around the country are worn down. Hundreds of thousands of people at six o’clock flip the channel. Without a TV bulletin there, doesn’t (Three) just become like Bravo, where there’s just programmes running and you either switch on or you don’t?”
In the end, journalists have to confront the fact that not quite enough people these days care about what they do — including executives at media companies, politicians not inclined to intervene and members of the public.
Most New Zealanders are happy to use services like Netflix or Google search or Facebook that carry news and local content but contribute almost nothing to it.
“But I don’t think people quite understand the depth of the problem facing media and the implications. That certainly came through to me watching the broadcasting minister saying, well, people can still watch programmes like Sky for news,” Bingham said.
The National Party went into the last election without a media or broadcasting policy or any specific manifesto commitments.
What should/could the government do?
While Wednesday’s announcement shocked the 300-odd staff, the local chief executive Glen Kyne — close to tears on Newshub at 6 — told Newshub’s Michael Morrah he had known about the possibility since January.
The government also got a heads-up earlier this week.
Media minister Melissa Lee told reporters WBD made no requests for help, prompting Glen Kyne to tell Newshub WBD did ask both the current and previous government for assistance, such as a reduction in the multi-million dollar fee paid to state-owned transmission company Kordia.
Lee later clarified her comment but was firm that the government had no role to play because this was a case of a private company taking action because “their business model actually wasn’t working.”
On Morning Report, Andrew Szusterman disagreed.
“Channels 7,9 and 10, SBS, ABC, and Fox in Australia all run news services. I don’t think their government would let the last commercial free-to-air news broadcaster just walk away. The fact the broadcasting minister hasn’t fronted . . . it’s quite shameless,” he told RNZ’s Morning Report.
Stuff’s Tova O’Brien — who famously turned on her former employer MediaWorks on air in real time last year when it closed Today FM — called the minister’s response “cold and tone-deaf” and accused the government of a “glib shrug”.
That was partly because Lee’s first response to the Newshub announcement was to tell reporters: “There’s Sky as well, there’s a whole lot of other media about.”
Sky contracts Newshub to produce its 5.30pm free-to-air news bulletin — and Sky subscribers won’t find any locally-made news on Sky TV’s pay channels.
Lee should have known that. She was a programme-maker before she was an MP and was National’s spokesperson on broadcasting for years in opposition.
Lee declined all interview requests this week — including from Mediawatch — but did tell reporters at Parliament: “I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been. But I am taking this seriously.”
The PM told Stuff he is expecting an update at Cabinet on Monday. The media will be watching that space with pens and cameras poised.
There is legislation currently before a select committee which could compel the big online tech platforms to pay local producers of news for it.
In opposition, Lee opposed it and called it “literally a shakedown” in Parliament. (This weekend Facebook’s owner Meta announced it would not do any more deals with media under Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, prompting a likely confrontation with the government there.)
“The government’s position on this will obviously take into account these latest developments in terms of the wider media landscape. This government is committed to working with the sector on ways to ensure sector sustainability, while still preserving the independence of a fourth estate and avoiding market interference,” Lee said in Parliament on Thursday when questioned.
The government already heavily intervenes in the market by overseeing the state-owned broadcasters and agencies — including TVNZ — and putting over a quarter of a billion dollars every year onto broadcasting, programmes and other content.
The former government also put $80 million over two years into Māori media content, partly in the expectation there might also be a new public media entity to broadcast it.
In 2019, Hal Crawford — boss of Newshub at the time — declared the New Zealand news media is broken.
His chief executive also urged the government to intervene. AM show host Duncan Garner switched the studio lights off as an on-air stunt.
Crawford is now a digital media consultant based in his native Australia. The broadcasting funding agency in NZ On Air hired him in 2021 to review its own spending of public money on the media.
“It’s not a good idea for governments to knee jerk and sponsor particular commercial companies in some sort of bailout,” he said.
“To give money to the people who are in financially the worst position is the most ineffective and unfair use of public money that I can think of. If the market is telling you that something isn’t wanted and needed, you have to listen to that.
“But it doesn’t mean that you have to always listen to the market and do things that have never been done before.”
He cites the Public Interest Journalism Fund which put $55 million into new content and created new jobs for cash-strapped news media companies.
Crawford’s fact-finding report on the planned PIJF in 2021 records media managers feared cuts and possible closures to come.
“Many of our interviewees believed that if an organisation could show that cuts were imminent, they should be able to apply for funded roles under the PIJF. Many saw the dangers in this non-incremental funding, but argued for exceptions in extreme circumstances. Although these arguments are compelling, Funding could evaporate quickly trying to keep the newsrooms of big commercial companies afloat if this became the primary aim of the fund.”
“Around the world and in New Zealand, there’s ample evidence that public funding of journalism is becoming more essential. There has to be a way there, because what we’re seeing with the the planned closure of Newshub is the end result of the factors that we’ve known about for at least a decade,” Crawford told Mediawatch.
“Direct subsidy from the government to a commercial newsroom isn’t going to work. The government has to find a way to sensibly finance news and structure it so that it doesn’t become a political football.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Several conservative media outlets have filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s State Department, alleging that they are actively trying to censor them by having the government label them “misinformation.” Plus, experts are ringing the alarm bells about A.I. creating deep fake videos, sound clips, and images that could have a significant impact on the […]
The post Texas Conservatives Cry Censorship & Experts Fear A.I.’s Impact On 2024 Election appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
An alleged spy for China living in Istanbul evaded detection by Turkish authorities for years, Sadiq Memeteziz’s undercover work taking him to Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Xinjiang in China’s far-west, Turkish media reports said, citing official documents.
Memeteziz, or Shadeke Maimaitiaizazi in Chinese, was one of six arrested on Feb. 20 for allegedly spying for China, Turkey’s Habertürk newspaper and TV channel said Wednesday.
Habertürk revealed the identities of four the six men arrested earlier this week, indicating they met with Chinese intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia.
The media reports didn’t identify the ethnicity of the men, but Radio Free Asia has confirmed that they are all Uyghurs. One of the six, named Ehmetjan, was later released. A seventh one is still at large and wanted by police.
The suspects are accused of spying on prominent Uyghurs and Uyghur associations in Turkey and passing the information to Chinese intelligence officers. The arrests follow a probe by the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s Terrorism and Organized Crime Investigation Bureau, media reports said.
If they are indeed shown to have spied for China, the case would illustrate the lengths that Beijing will go to gather information on Uyghurs abroad as part of its transnational repression.
Uyghur diaspora
With roughly 50,000 Uyghurs living in Turkey — the largest Uyghur émigré population outside Central Asia — the Muslim-majority country has become a focus for Chinese espionage.
Radio Free Asia in February 2023 reported on how the Chinese government’s efforts to coerce Uyghurs to gather information on each other undermines trust and can dampen social and cultural gatherings, preventing Uyghur refugees from rebuilding their communities abroad.
In the past, Turkey offered Uyghurs a safe place to live outside China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and is the only Turkic and Muslim country that has consistently raised the issue of the plight of Uyghurs at the United Nations and in bilateral talks with China.
So this crackdown on alleged spies for China represents a shift on Turkey’s part.
The Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office would not comment on the ongoing investigation. RFA could not reach the Chinese Embassy in Ankara for comment.
Family is shocked
Memeteziz’s son, who lives in Istanbul, told RFA that he does not believe his father is a criminal, and that it is premature to call him such until judicial authorities issue a verdict.
“We also recently came across the news and were shocked by it,” said the son, who declined to be named for fear of retribution. “It was a mix of sadness and disbelief, as we never imagined such a thing could happen.”
The son said he has lived apart from his father for two-and-a-half years, balancing work and studies, and that they occasionally checked in with each other.
“As of now, we haven’t received any updates from the police or the judicial bodies,” he said. “There was no concrete evidence or confirmation, and judicial bodies haven’t said anything like what was reported in the news reports yet. All we’ve heard is that he was arrested.”
“Personally, I find this hard to believe because he has been running his own business for over 20 years,” the son added. “He has his own brand and products, and even when we lived together, he focused on his business and trade with Central Asia. Politics was never his concern due to his business commitments. Hence, I doubt the accuracy of these news reports.”
Details of alleged activities
Based on an arrest notice issued by the Terrorism and Organized Crime Investigation Bureau, Memeteziz, in his mid- to late 50s, moved to Turkey from Xinjiang – where 11 million Uyghurs live – in the 2000s and had contact with someone from the Ministry of National Security, China’s spy agency.
He met with an official named Li from the Chinese Communist Party’s Kargilik (Yecheng in Chinese) County Committee in Xinjiang’s Kashgar prefecture, both via phone and in person, the notice said.
According to information from the Turkish National Intelligence Service, it appears that Memeteziz met with Chinese intelligence officials outside Turkey. He traveled to Hong Kong in February 2023, then proceeded to Xinjiang’s Kargilik county, where he had face-to-face meetings with two spies named Li and Alimjan.
Subsequently, Memeteziz met with Alimjan again in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. To conceal these meetings, Chinese intelligence officials in China and Saudi Arabia provided Memeteziz with two different passports, the Turkish news reports said.
Records indicate that Memeteziz continued to travel to and from Xinjiang with ease, particularly after 2017 when Chinese authorities began detaining Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims en masse in “re-education” camps under the guise of preventing religious extremism and terrorist activities, the reports said.
In 2023, Memeteziz received US$7,000 in Beijing and US$15,000 in Saudi Arabia in exchange for his espionage activities for China, said the reports.
Upon his return to Turkey in August 2023, Memeteziz obtained information about Uyghur organizations and their meetings, and the addresses of prominent Uyghurs living in Turkey. He collected photos and documents to share with Chinese intelligence officials, the news reports said.
The notice from the chief prosecutor’s office said that Memeteziz, under instructions from the Chinese intelligence agency, tried in January 2023 to move to an area where Uyghur religious teacher Abduqadir Yapchan resided, but he could not find accommodations.
China had accused Yapchan of being part of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Muslim separatist group that the U.S. State Department dropped from its list of terrorist organizations in October 2020 because of a lack of credible evidence that it continued to exist. Turkish police arrested him in August 2016 on charges of being a “terrorist” and kept him in detention or under house arrest.
In April 2021, a court in Turkey rejected a request by Beijing to extradite Yapchan to China to face terrorism charges, ending years of detention and legal limbo under the threat of harsh Chinese punishment.
Other suspects
The arrest warrant for a second suspect, Hebibulla Ürümci, said he acted as an intermediary in transferring money from a spy named Alimjan to Memeteziz. It also indicated that Ürümci collaborated with Memeteziz in Pakistan and made multiple international trips, according to Turkish media.
Hashim Sabitoğlu, the third man arrested, recently traveled to Saudi Arabia under the guise of making an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest city for Muslims, but instead met with Chinese intelligence operatives. Memeteziz received payments from China through Hashim under the guise of business funds.
Abdullah Nasir, the fourth suspect, was reported to have continuously met with a Chinese intelligence officer named Zhong Xuegang, who identified himself as a Chinese consulate officer.
Nasir was said to have stayed with Zhong in a hotel in Bursa, a city in Turkey about 92 kilometers (57 miles) south of Istanbul. Nasir was also acquainted with a spy named Alimjan and had a significant number of passport records on file, Turkish media said.
Memeteziz was assigned to gather information about Uyghurs in Syria by using Abdullah, an employee at a Uyghur bakery in Zeytinburnu, a working-class area on the European side of Istanbul.
When RFA contacted Abdullah – the bakery worker, not the suspect Abdullah Nasir – he said he didn’t know Memeteziz but mentioned someone from Kargilik who visited the bakery every two or three days, trying to gather information about Uyghurs in Turkey and in other countries.
“He would chat with me while buying naan,” Abdullah said, referring to Uyghur flatbread. “One day, he mentioned wanting to help people in need and asked if there were any religious kids from Kargilik. He asked me to let him know if I knew any. I told him I didn’t know any.”n
“I can’t confirm if he’s a spy because there’s a lot of gossip in the community,” Abdullah said. “I did’t have a close relationship with him. He didn’t live in Zeytinburnu, and he told me he was coming from the Aksaray area to buy naan.”
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Arslan Tash for RFA Uyghur.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In the age of disinformation and artificial information, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post (WaPo) manages to have some credibility. After its February 22 editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” Jeff Bezos would be wise to sell the newspaper. If those who lead the Editorial Board make childish mistakes and recite obvious falsehoods, can anyone believe in what they read?
Before scolding WAPO’s spurious description of Xi’s world, in which none of the charges are backed with proof, permit the presentation of one of the most serious errors in journalism history. Doubtful the WaPo staff will ever recover from this faux pas. The editorial states:
China recorded a respectable 5.2 percent economic growth rate last year, but the real rate is lower when adjusted for falling prices. Rather than being an economic juggernaut, China seems likely to be entering a period of deflation, the sorts of conditions that led to Japan’s “lost decade.”
Having the real rate of growth to go down with deflation is equivalent to having an auto slow down when the gas pedal is more heavily pressed. How many hands, eyeballs, and minds at WAPO did not know that “inflation occurs when nominal GDP is higher than real GDP and deflation happens when real GDP is higher than nominal GDP.”
Real GDP= Nominal GDP/R
where: GDP=Gross domestic product
R=GDP deflator (R<1 during deflation and >1 during inflation)
Examine the opening paragraph:
For the past decade, Americans have worried increasingly about China, not least because Chinese President Xi Jinping has centralized power, silenced critics, stalled private-sector reforms and taken an increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world
Saying that Xi Jinping silenced critics, without specifying who and how is meaningless. To gain office, all politicians try to overcome critics. A good politician silences critics. China is different; the government runs on consensus, and when a decision is made, including who will be president, there are no remaining critics.
Again, without specifying the nature of Xi’s “increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world?” how can his nature be evaluated? Have the Africans, Latinos, Europeans, Eskimos, and most of Asia found Xi combative or does the WaPo editorial board think Washington is the world?
Instead, Mr. Xi’s China is less free, less prosperous and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course — one not inspired by rivalry with the West or fear of his own people.
“Mr. Xi’s China is less free.”
The intentional insult of replacing President Xi with Mr. XI demeans WaPo.
Western media always considered China devoid of freedom. How can a country be less free when it has always been considered not free? Consider who is setting the criteria and doing the evaluation. If Chinese authorities set the criteria and evaluated freedom in the United States how would they consider freedom of thought in the U.S. after the rise of Trumpism and his cohorts?
“Less prosperous.”
GDP is up 60 percent since Xi’s time in office; how could Xi have made China “less prosperous?”
China GDP (Trillions of US Dollars)
From Trading Economics
“and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course.”
How does anyone know what will happen and what is the different course?” This is speculative speculation, a ridiculous assumption that does not pass the smell test.
Despite Mr. Xi lifting the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, construction in China has slowed, manufacturing prices have declined and consumer spending has flattened. China’s stock market has lost $6 trillion in value in three years.
Reciting a decline in manufacturing prices and a flattening of consumer spending, as if they are always negatives, is not clever thinking. If a recession occurred, then they might be a result of an economic decline. No recession has occurred and their relation is due to consumer prices having dropped, maybe due to increased efficiency and productivity. Consumer transactions have increased and the total sales remained static, or did they? Beijing reports contradictory information and data does not indicate a flattening of consumer spending.
Robust consumption has been thriving and helping to underpin China’s economic recovery, while the country is energetically spurring consumer spending to strengthen one of the pillars needed to support high-quality growth. China’s total retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of the country’s consumption strength, climbed 7.2 percent year on year to reach 47.15 trillion yuan (about 6.63 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2023, an obvious sign of the Chinese people’s growing readiness to purchase.
China Consumer-spending in CNY hundred million
The last of many spurious remarks
To reduce the falling birthrate, he prefers exhorting young women to stay home and have more babies as their patriotic duty.
Another insulting remark to a nation’s president. Falling birthrate is a problem in all advanced nations, and no country seems to have a solution. A mendacious and callous WaPo distorted Xi’s words. At a recent All-China Women’s Federation meeting, President Xi Jinping told the cadres:
…to “guide women to play their roles in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” and “in establishing good family traditions.” They should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing” among women, so they can “respond to the aging of the population.”
Big difference between WaPo’s interpretation and the actual spoken words.
The experts on Xi Jinping China follow up the bashing with tools for him to use, and advice on how Xi can extricate himself and his nation from the damage he caused. Imagined failures solicit imagination of how to cure a patient who is not sick. Noting that, since 1978, except for one year during the COVID-19 epidemic, China had no recessions, while the U.S. suffered a recession every ten years, I doubt the Chinese government needs lectures on how to run their economy. China has a major housing crisis, not much different in scope than the 2008 mortgage crisis in the United States. The latter crisis provoked a huge banking crisis and sent the U.S. into a major recession. China’s housing crisis is now several years old and has not provoked a banking or economic crisis.
Describing people in a totally negative manner and not reciting known positive characteristics is biased editorializing. Xi has guided China to become the leading world power outdistancing the U.S. in the more important GDP/PPP.
Gross Domestic Product at Purchasing Power parity ($Trillions)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Xi probably was not personally involved and criticizing him for “the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022,” is a subjective appraisal. An objective appraisal mentions his administration’s holding the number of Covid cases to 503,302 and deaths to 5,272 compared to U.S. cases of 111,426,318 and deaths of 1,199,436. Use per capita figures of 90,273 cases/1 million population and 896 deaths/1 million population for China and 333,802 cases/1 million population and 3,582 deaths/1 million population for the United States, and a bright light shines on China’s president.
The WaPo editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” is informative. It informs us that WaPo cannot be trusted. It has an agenda and will distort, lie, do somersaults, and deceive its audience to pursue the agenda.
When will we be free from China bashing?
The post The Washington Post Bashes Xi Jinping first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The International Court of Justice (ICC) has held its last day of hearings examining the legality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian lands.
Fifty two countries and three international organisations have addressed the court in the hearings that ended on Monday.
Most called for Israel’s occupation to be declared illegal and for it to end, with some calling for reparations to be paid by Israel to the state of Palestine.
Only the representatives of the United States, United Kingdom and Fiji claimed the occupation was legal while non-government organisations and opposition politicians in Fiji condemned their country’s surprise position.
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst and a Middle East expert, said the final legal arguments had “demolished the shameless defences” of Israel’s illegal occupation.
“Ireland, Algeria and South Africa . . . projected their own experience, their own narrative, their own history, their own struggle with [colonial] occupation, and their own experience with liberation as well,” he said.
“Hence it was both instructive, if you will, not I mean liberating, not depressing.
ICJ hearing: Final Israeli occupation arguments. Video: Al Jazeera
“I want to say it was instructive that they did share with us that but then we had this disingenuous, selective, mind boggling, if not, you know, mind insulting presentations by the United States and the United Kingdom that I think set everyone back.
“You know they were trampling over international law, expropriating international law, confiscating international legality in order to fit their own little geopolitical calculus on behalf of their little client Israel.
“So it was a bit shameful, it was a bit shameless to be honest and that’s why today we’ve heard from the Arab League and the [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)], legal opinions that were basically set or apparently revised in order to counter the arguments of the UK and the US and in that way I thought it was brilliant and it was entertaining almost.”
The African Union lawyers argued that “occuopatiion” and “self-determination” could not exist in the same place at the same time.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Judges urged to keep proceedings as open as possible in case relating to Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey
Allegations that UK police and intelligence spied on investigative journalists to identify their sources will be heard by a secret tribunal on Wednesday, with judges urged to ensure as much as possible takes place in open court.
Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey asked the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) to look into whether police in Northern Ireland and Durham, as well as MI5 and GCHQ, used intrusive surveillance powers against them.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Newshub, one of the key media companies in Aotearoa New Zealand, is to close its newsroom on June 30, reports RNZ News.
Staff were told of the closure at an emergency meeting today.
Newshub is owned by US-based global entertainment giant Warner Bros Discovery which also owns Eden, Rush, HGTV and Bravo.
In 2020, it took over the New Zealand channel’s assets which had been then part of Mediaworks.
Staff were called to a meeting at Newshub at 11am, RNZ News reported on its live news feed.
They were told that the US conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery, owners of Newshub, was commencing consultation on a restructuring of its free-to-air business
This included the closure of all news operations by its Newshub operation
All local programming would be made only through local funding bodies and partners.
James Gibbons, president of Asia Pacific for Warner Bros Discovery, said it was a combination of negative events in NZ and around the world. The economic downturn had been severe and there was no long hope for a bounce back
Revenue has ‘disappeared quickly’
“Advertising revenue in New Zealand has disappeared far more quickly than our ability to manage this reduction, and to drive the business to profitability,” he said.
He said the restructuring would focus on it being a digital business
ThreeNow, its digital platform, would be the focus and could run local shows
All news production would stop on June 30.
The consultation process runs until mid-March. A final decision is expected early April.
“Deeply shocked’
Interviewed on RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme, a former head of Newshub, Mark Jennings, said he was deeply shocked by the move.
Other media personalities also reacted with stunned disbelief. Rival TVNZ’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver said: “Thinking of my friends and colleagues from Newshub.
“So many super talented wonderful people. Its a terrible day for our industry that Newshub [will] close by June, we will be all the much poorer for it. Much aroha to you all.”
Newshub has broken some important Pacific stories over the years.
Jennings told RNZ a cut back and trimming of shows would have been expected — but not on this scale.
“I’m really deeply frankly shocked by it,” said Jennings, now co-founder and editor of Newsroom independent digital media group.
He said he expected all shows to go, including AM Show and investigative journalist Patrick Gower’s show.
Company ‘had no strategy’
“I think governments will be pretty upset and annoyed about this, to be honest.”
“Unless they have been kept in the loop because we’re going to see a major drop in diversity.
“Newshub’s newsroom has been, maybe not so much in recent times, but certainly in the past, a very strong and vibrant player in the market and very important one for this country and again as [RNZ Mediawatch presenter] Colin [Peacock] points out, who is going to keep TVNZ’s news honest now?
“I think this is a major blow to media diversity in this country.”
“First of all, Discovery and then Warner Bros Discovery, this has been an absolute shocker of entry to this market by them. They came in with what I could was . . . no, I couldn’t see a strategy in it and in the time they owned this company, there has been no strategy and that’s really disappointing.
“If this had gone to a better owner, they would have taken steps way sooner and maybe we wouldn’t be losing one of the country’s most valued news services.”
Loss of $100m over three years
Jennings said his understanding was the company had lost $100 million in the past three years, which was “really significant”.
“I wonder if it had been a New Zealand owner, whether the government might have taken a different view around this, but I guess because it’s owned by a huge American, multi-national conglomerate, they would’ve been reluctant to intervene in any way.”
He said Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee, a former journalist who ran the Asia Down Under programme for many years, faced serious questions now.
“It’ll be her first big test really, I guess, in that portfolio.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There’s no way around it – Americans are tired of watching the news. A new report says that news consumption for local news, cable news, newspapers, and even online news has gone way down since just last year. Plus, the immigration debate is one that has been going on in America for decades with no […]
The post News Consumption Plummets Further & Immigrants Mean Big Money For Private Prisons appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
Women have borne the brunt of the Taliban’s repressive laws in Afghanistan, where the extremist group has imposed constraints on their appearances, freedom of movement, and right to work and study.
But women who are unmarried or do not have a “mahram,” or male guardian, face even tougher restrictions and have been cut off from access to health care, banned from traveling long distances, and pressured to quit their jobs.
The Taliban’s mahram rules prohibit women from leaving their home without a male chaperone, often a husband or a close relative such as a father, brother, or uncle.
Single and unaccompanied women, including an estimated 2 million widows, say they are essentially prisoners in their homes and unable to carry out the even the most basic of tasks.
Among them is Nadia, a divorced woman from the northern province of Kunduz. The mother of four has no surviving male relatives.
“These restrictions are stifling for women who now cannot do the simple things independently,” Nadia told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.
The 35-year-old said women also need to have a male escort to visit a doctor, go to government offices, or even rent a house.
She said she had to pay a man to be her chaperone in order to meet a realtor and sign a rental agreement.
Nadia also paid a man in her neighborhood around 1,000 afghanis, or $15, to accompany her to the local passport office. But the Taliban refused her passport application and ordered her to return with her father, who died years ago.
“Even visiting the doctor is becoming impossible,” she said. “We can only plead [with the Taliban] or pray. All doors are closed to us.”
Mahram Crackdown
Women who violate the Taliban’s mahram requirements have been detained or arrested and are often released only after signing a pledge that they will not break the rules again in the future.
In its latest report, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said the Taliban’s notorious religious police was enforcing the rules by carrying out inspections in public spaces, offices, and education facilities as well as setting up checkpoints in cities.
Released on January 22, the report said three female health-care workers were detained in October because they were traveling to work without a mahram.
In December, women without male chaperones were stopped from accessing health-care facilities in the southeastern province of Paktia, the report said.
And in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban visited a bus terminal and checked if women were traveling with a male relative, the report said.
In late 2021, the Taliban said women seeking to travel more than 72 kilometers should not be offered transport unless they were accompanied by a close male relative.
In another incident, the Taliban advised a woman to get married if she wanted to keep her job at a health-care facility, saying it was inappropriate for a single woman to work, the report said.
In a report issued on January 18, the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) said the Taliban’s restrictions on single and unaccompanied women has ensured that female-led households receive less income and food.
“Their share of employment has nearly halved, decreasing from 11 percent in 2022 to 6 percent” in 2023, the report said.
The report noted that female-headed households typically care for more children and get paid less for their work and consume lower quantities of food.
“Female-headed households have greater needs for humanitarian assistance and yet report more restrictions to accessing such assistance,” the report said.
“Unaccompanied access by women to public places such as health facilities, water points, and markets has declined in the past two years,” the report added.
‘Deeply Insulting’
Parisa, an unmarried woman, takes care of her elderly parents in the northeastern province of Takhar.
With her father bedridden and her two brothers working in neighboring Iran, she has been forced to take care of the family’s needs.
But she said she has been repeatedly harassed by the Taliban while trying to buy groceries in the local market, located some 10 kilometers away from her house.
“What can women do when men in their families are forced to leave the country for work?” she told Radio Azadi, giving only her first name for security reasons.
“I have no choice but to look after my family’s basic needs. The Taliban’s attitude is deeply insulting and extremely aggressive.”
Parisa said she has pleaded with local Taliban leaders to relax the mahram requirements. But she said her efforts have been in vain.
“They start abusing and threatening us whenever we try to tell them that we have to leave our houses to meet our basic needs,” she said.
Parasto, a resident of Kabul, said the Taliban’s restrictions are preventing single women from seeking the limited health care that is available.
“The doctors in the hospitals and clinics are reluctant to see unaccompanied women,” she told Radio Azadi.
Parasto said the Taliban’s mounting restrictions on women, especially those who are unmarried or do not have a male guardian, have made life unbearable.
“Single women are trying to survive without rights and opportunities,” she said.
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Gaza. Palestinians. Israel. Genocide. Taylor Swift? This odd cobbling of words is the extent celebrities make a mockery of serious conversation, even in such middle-brow outlets as Australia’s Radio National. Admittedly, it was breakfast, and the presenter a seasoned impressionist of journalism, but surely listeners did not have to know that Swift’s private jet had just arrived in Melbourne, making it an occasion of national significance?
Ground had already been tilled, and seeds scattered, by desperate academics keen to draw gold dust from the Swift worship machine at Melbourne’s Swiftposium 2024. Seriousness was not the order of the day and papers such as “Taylor Swift and the Nuremberg Effect on Teenage Girls” were never going to feature on any panels. Instead, it was an event to give academic circuitry – and sophistry – its deservedly bad name. “We thought we’d be having a small conference with 50 researchers in two rooms in our Faculty,” remarked Eloise Faichney, chair of the Swiftposium Steering Committee. “Then, when we ended up in publications like Rolling Stone and The Guardian, demand from the academic community to take part was like nothing I’ve ever seen before for an academic conference.” Faichney evidently knows little about the bandwagon effect of the academic scavenger, always engaged in a futile quest to find false novelty among the same bones of an argument.
And they were not the only ones. Members of the fourth estate, and many offshoots of that once revered profession, have fallen for the Swiftian rhetoric, be it in terms of the harmony effect or economic stimulus. Forget monetary or fiscal policy; get Swift to do a tour and she will add tens of millions of dollars to the country’s cash registers. Take, for instance, the following, near shameful selection of predicted returns, which the Australian historian, Humphrey McQueen, valuably gathers for us: the Australian Financial Review, A$140 million; the Daily Telegraph, A$130 million to New South Wales; the Herald-Sun, a staggering, fanciful A$1.2 billion for the state of Victoria alone.
A less noted fact is that the Swift phenomenon is costly, inflationary and exploitative. As The Daily Telegraph reported in January, airlines such as Virgin, Qantas and Jetstar were all cashing in on spiked prices, hoping to squeeze every little bit of cash from passengers, Swifties or otherwise. A one-way flight from Brisbane to Sydney with Jetstar would cost anywhere between A$399 to A$460 on the planned Sydney tour date on February 23, as compared to A$92 to A$123 the week prior. Hotels were hardly going to miss out either on the lucrative bonanza: the Marriott Sydney Harbour’s prices, for instance, rising from the pre-Swift level of $A589 to an unforgivable $A1039.
All of this served as the teaser for Swift’s mid-February arrival. Bulletins, even of such self-professed, serious news hounds as those at the twenty-four-hour ABC network, would furnish updates on the songstress’s movements. Every banal detail became significant, the fans worthy of top billing as interviewees.
Political maturity and cultivated disinterestedness also went out the window, expelled with glee. Here was a chance to get close to the phenomenon and cultivate voters – current and future – and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was not going to miss out. In an interview with Hit WA FM, he professed his delight and anticipation in attending one of Swift’s shows. “I am going to Tay Tay,” he sighed. In cringingly shallow fashion and for pure effect, he even suggested that opposition leader Peter Dutton might have a preference for the Canadian rock band Nickelback, a truly wicked contrast. “Or, the angry death metal stuff.”
Newspapers such as The Guardian Australia even urged the PM to get with the Swift program, as her “ubiquity in a fragmented world might carry some broader lessons for a man with a more modest megaphone at his disposal.” She offers, for instance, lessons in collaboration. She had “used her fame to build a network of grassroots support that has its own power, energy and agency.” And, in case you were not listening, Mr Albanese, she offered a “sense of shared joy” instead of privileging conflict.
On the other side of this gushing sludge, the Swift phenomenon manifests as a brooding presence for reactionaries worried that her influence is clandestine and planned by a politburo central committee. Or, perhaps, the Pentagon. Steady yourself, warn the likes of Jesse Watters of Fox: he has evidence that “the Pentagon psychological-operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset.” In some GOP circles, the singer is a deeply embedded psyop with collusion from the NFL. The lunacy comes full circle and Swift is very happy to tease it, telling The Washington Post in 2022 that she, and her legion of fans, have “descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.” Threatening stuff.
This Styrofoam performer, this master of magisterial vacuity, who is all machine, promotion and blare, has perfected the insubstantial, promoted a competent formula and boosted it. In some ways, she has the hallmarks of Tony Blair and the New Labour experiment: start solidly, proclaim a genre, an ideology – then subvert it, discarding most of it on the way. Sincerity evaporates in the heat of its confection. Her success lies in her ability – and that of the Swift dissemination army – to mobilise the image of Swift. Everything else is just costumery, flying private jets, victimising people who monitor her flight paths, and being given stock market advice by Daddy.
The post Swiftie Nonsense Down Under first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Palestine’s UN envoy Riyad Mansour speaking at the International Court of Justice on Monday. Video: Dawn News
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says Muslim Americans are “running out of words” to decry the US president’s support for the “genocide” in Gaza.
“The latest US veto of a UN ceasefire resolution is shameful,” CAIR director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
“President Biden should stop acting like Benjamin Netanyahu’s defence lawyer and start acting like the President of the United States,” reports Al Jazeera.
“We call on the American people to continue expressing their opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the Israeli government’s war crimes by contacting the White House and their elected officials and calling on them to demand a ceasefire, access to humanitarian aid, and the pursuit of a just, lasting peace.”
Meanwhile, Palestine’s envoy to the United Nations broke down in tears when giving a chilling address to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Riyad Mansour, the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the UN, said that the “future of freedom, justice and peace can begin here and now”.
“A finding from this distinguished court that the occupation is illegal and drawing the legal consequences from this determination would contribute to bringing it to an immediate end, paving the way to just and lasting peace.”
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
EDITORIAL: The PNG Post-Courier
Some people are literally making a killing in Enga.
Yes, they really are.
Hired gunmen are getting rich by the day and picking up women and girls as payments as well, leaving deaths and destruction in their wake in what is apparently becoming a booming industry.
The news is disturbing, to say the least, for a province that has got so much going at the moment.
As the illegal industry takes root by the day, we do not see this deadly business which is already stretching the limits of tolerance and the resources of the law and justice sector, ending soon.
Police Commissioner David Manning promised more manpower will be deployed into the province to assist those on the ground to curb the tribal fighting.
At the same time, he is asking for help from the provincial leaders to get down to their communities to stop the fighting and killing.
Grabbed world attention
The recent massacre in Wapenamanda has grabbed world attention again and this time the Australian government, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describing the event as “very disturbing”, promising more technical aid to PNG to address this madness.
Tribal fighting has always been a curse in Enga for years. What started as bow and arrow affairs in the past have now gone high-tech with the deployment of drones, Google maps and high-powered guns, resulting in the high number of deaths
Genocide is the word to describe what is happening.
Powerful tribes are eliminating the weak, and leaving the disciplinary forces helplessly watching by the roadsides as the massacre continues to go.
There is no concern for the lives killed, the injuries or the plight of the hundreds of mothers and children caught up in this mayhem.
In the words of Provincial Police Commander, Superintendent George Kakas, businessmen, educated elites and well-to-do people fund these activities, hire gunmen and purchase firearms and ammunitions.
We would like to add politicians to the list because we suspect that they procured the weapons and left them with their supporters during the elections and these guns are now coming out.
How could they sleep peacefully?
How could these people find the peace to sleep peacefully in the night when their money, the technology, the guns and bullets they supplied are killing in big numbers and the murderers are uploading images of the dead bodies online for the world to see?
Prime Minister James Marape recently promised new legislation to curb domestic terrorism and we wait to see whether this law will ever get passed by Parliament.
This law is needed now to make the facilitators and the killers account for their actions.
In the interim, the government must declare a State of Emergency in Enga to deploy the full force of the law into the fighting zones to deal with the perpetrators.
They are known to the police, the leaders and even the Prime Minister.
What is stopping the police from arresting these culprits? Are they above the law? Are they protected species, vested with the power to end lives of other people in this manner?
Entire tribes wiped out
What are we waiting for?
To see entire tribes wiped out from the face of Enga before we move in to collect the bodies, take the women and children to care centres and keep watching from the roadsides.
Enough is enough. Declare the SOE in Enga. Enact the domestic terrorism legislation. Arrest those that facilitate and kill.
So much is going for Enga today and if nothing is done to end this ugly disease, Enga is doomed.
This PNG Post-Courier editorial was originally published under the title “Genocide in Enga” on 21 February 2014. Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
A major new report has revealed that the drug makers behind Ozempic and Wegovy are doling out huge sums of money to doctors to get them to increase their prescriptions. Then, Facebook’s parent company Meta wants to sell your child’s data to the highest bidder, and they are prepared to go to court to fight […]
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Lawyers seek permission at high court to appeal against WikiLeaks founder’s extradition
Julian Assange faces the risk of a “flagrant denial of justice” if tried in the US, his lawyers have told a permission to appeal hearing in London, which could result in the WikiLeaks founder being extradited within days if unsuccessful.
Assange, who published thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, could be jailed for up to 175 years – “a grossly disproportionate punishment” – if convicted in the US, the high court heard on Tuesday.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with a Russian-made passenger car, according to the North Korean media, the latest sign of the enhanced ties between the two nations.
The gift was handed over to Workers’ Party Secretary Park Chung Chol and the leader’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong on Jan. 18, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Tuesday.
The KCNA cited Kim Yo Jong as saying it was “a most excellent gift and a clear demonstration of the close friendship between the two leaders of the DPRK and Russia.”
DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s official name.
“Kim Yo Jong respectfully conveyed to the Russian side the greetings of gratitude from Comrade Kim Jong Un to Comrade President Putin,” the news agency added.
Putin introduced Kim Jong Un to a Russian-made luxury passenger car, the Aurus, during his visit to Pyongyang last year, though it is unclear whether he presented that specific vehicle to the North Korean leader.
The Aurus is a luxury car brand that has been described as the “Russian equivalent of Rolls-Royce,” and Kim Jong Un sat in the back seat with Putin at the time.
According to the U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea, the direct or indirect supply, sale, or transfer of transport to the North is also prohibited under Security Council Resolution 2397, adopted in Dec. 2017.
Separately, the KCNA reported on the same day that delegations led by senior North Korean government officials in charge of technology, fisheries and sports affairs have left for Russia, another indication of the expanded bilateral cooperation between the two.
The North’s Information and Trade Minister Ju Yong Il and other delegates left Pyongyang on Monday to attend a global IT forum in Moscow, the report said.
According to a schedule posted on the forum’s website, the 20-21 event will be attended by Russian government officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, as well as officials from Iran, Armenia, Afghanistan, the Philippines and Thailand.
Another delegation led by Vice Fisheries Minister Son Song-kuk departed for Russia the previous day to discuss ways to promote bilateral cooperation in the fisheries sector. In addition, Vice Sports Minister O Kwang Hyok headed to Russia to attend a ceremony to sign a 2024 sports exchange protocol between the two countries.
Since the North Korea-Russia summit in September last year, the two countries have stepped up the pace of bilateral exchanges on various sectors, including military, political, economic and cultural fronts.
Pyongyang is believed to have supplied artillery and munitions to Russia for its conflict in Ukraine, potentially in return for Russia transferring weapons technology.
Edited by Elaine Chan.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Europe was burning. Or so I had heard in many media outlets before I boarded a flight to Europe. According to various hysterical outlets in the West, philistines were surging up through Gibraltar and other southbound nodes of ingress to destabilize European culture, that high-flown redoubt of wine and song and literature and art. Lisbon, as I discovered somewhat disappointedly, was serene. No flaming cathedrals. No barricades on the boulevards. Only the prosaic reproduction of daily life, at work in a thousand pastelerias and padarias. Hordes of tourists, like arctic ice floes, coursed through the cobblestone streets with a practiced regularity.
Echoes
These first-world problems felt embarrassingly inconsequential when I turned on the television and saw, with the tiresome predictably of political failure, the latest urgent update on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The airwaves had been crammed with urgent reports from Gaza for some four months now. Hamas had attacked and killed ___. The IDF had attacked and killed ___. All the usual suspects lined up, waiting their cue to go before the cameras. The reporters, always posing as impartial journalists who were deeply concerned for the safety of civilians in the conflict zone, found perches with skyline views where they could point to bombed buildings and streets (hopefully still smoking from the latest attack). Aid workers were summoned to issue urgent appeals for humanitarian assistance and an immediate ceasefire, a demand that felt as feckless as it was rote. Various intellectuals were brought on to gravely explain the roots of the conflict. Several spoke of heartbreak. And lastly the political actors, tiresome in their strident assurances of a just and fierce response. Their singular purpose appeared to be maintaining a posture and position that brooked no dissent, no counterpoint, and yielded to no mitigating circumstances.
The television flickers with images of aftermath. These crises emerged semi-annually for as long as I could remember. Violence was met with violence. Human madness was as strong as ever. The Israeli-Palestine war was the longest running drama in the theater of hate. The principled college freshman I had seen accusing Starbucks of facilitating genocide did not know the weariness of talking truth for years to no effect.
Veteran independent journalist Chris Hedges put it best, bitterly noting: “How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?”
Assigning blame is the ne plus ultra of Middle East politics. Lately the fault lies with the settler colonial regimes. Here the Israelis take after the Americans, of course, with their unexampled template of having exterminated an entire population in order to claim a continent. They also follow the National Socialists of Hitler’s Germany, which waged a devastating and fatal war on Russia because, according to some accounts, the Nazis too wanted their lebensraum, a backyard, to put it plainly. A resource rich hinterland that all empires surely require (United States and Latin America; the Brits and India; France and North Africa). Everyone needs a backyard. An “inevitable expansion” was the birthright of all imperial powers and superior races, as der fuhrer put it. In this case, Israel says it is reclaiming lost territory.
The historian Samuel Huntington put it like this:
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
The numbers suggest as much: 26,000 dead; 63,000 injured; 360,000 housing units destroyed; 1.7M people displaced; 93 percent of the population face a hunger crisis.
Meanwhile, the U.S. vetoes UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire and the resumption of aid deliveries to defenseless civilians, including food, water, medical supplies, electricity, communications technology, and so on.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a fairly damning if disappointingly opaque ruling last month. The ruling on the case nobly introduced by South Africa, which knows about the deprivations of apartheid, established that Israeli actions against Palestinians could reasonably fall within the provisions of the Genocide Convention.
Israel argued self-defense. But as most ambitious nations learn, often too late, as the collapse of their empires bury their ambitions, force does not ensure the security of a people, as the erstwhile French Prime Minister Dominique De Villepin said not long after the October surprise. He went on. Neither force nor vengeance ensures peace and security; what ensures peace and security is justice. Of course this astute if not self-evident statement will be scrupulously ignored as Netanyahu and his radical minions feverishly advance the razing of Gaza. Hamas, elected by Palestinians years ago, will plot their next furious attacks, and scurry through underground tunnels as the bombs rattle the air above them.
A Failed Media Strategy
The coverage of the atrocity weighs in the balance against the essential construct of the occupation, and the dysfunctional relationship between occupier and the occupied. The former is forbidden by international law to attack those it has brutally colonized; the latter conversely has the legal right to resist the occupation, even violently. This fact changes the conversation; it changes the understanding of Palestinian violence; it reduces the condemnatory impulse in sympathizers. Even if to understand is not to forgive and to forgive is not to forget.
Israel and Western media have attempted to elide the wider context from the discussion with a range of tactics. Principally, the “conflict” always seems to begin when Palestinians attack, not when Israel attacks, or oppresses, or suppresses. This conveniently establishes the chronological timeline of the present conflict with Palestinian violence, nicely bookending the story with timestamps that remove the historical backdrop from sight. It is as Theodor Adorno said in another context, “The violence done to them makes us forget the violence they did.” Other tactics include tarring critics with the broad brush of antisemitism; narratives that make Palestinians out to be irrational death cult aggressors and Israel as innocent victims; and a raft of disingenuous vocabulary such as the use of “conflict” for “occupation” and “atrocity” for “resistance.” While both terms may be true the former terms elide the crucial context.
The ICJ ruling will predictably receive scant attention in the mainstream. At best coverage will be diversionary, like that of The Economist. Another story has taken its place. An accusation by Israel that a small group of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) employees helped plan the October 7th attacks on Israel. This claim, having been made by Israel for months, evidence having been obtained via military interrogations of prisoners, supplied by a country with a vested interest in limiting exposure of the ICJ ruling, commands the headlines. The Biden administration immediately cut funding to the UNRWA, which is the main UN organ of Palestinian aid, an act that violates collective punishment strictures in the Geneva Conventions which model international humanitarian law. But this media misdirection does its job of giving the media something else to talk about aside from the ICJ.
This framing reflects the imperial ambitions of the West. The state of Israel was founded most likely not to establish a homeland for Jews but rather to establish a foothold in the Middle East controllable by Washington. Perhaps this is too cynical, but the amount of intolerable behavior countenanced and enabled by Washington suggests as much.
As such, the mainstream media presents the perspective of its owners, elite capital interests that are the true rulers of society. The ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. It is the corporate media that disseminates the ideas. You can be sure the storylines will flatter the owners and protect their interests, locating them neatly beneath an umbrella of moral piety.
But it is not working. The rise of social media has expanded the world’s understanding of the situation: the original ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, the brutal occupation, a mix of apartheid reservations and furious efforts to drive Palestinians into Egypt, cruelty and deprivation the common feature. The world population knows enough now about the settler colonial ambitions of Israel and the concentration camp conditions it imposes on a group of people that appear, quite rightly, to have a clear grievance. The weight of this emerging social consciousness—driven by non-mainstream reportage—is changing the debate in the West. But it has not yet been enough to stop the carnage.
I saw a quote in Lisbon from Nietzsche scrawled on a white tile in a neighborhood bar that said, “He who has a why can bear any how.” The quote is truncated; the “a why to live for” and “almost any how” are shortened; the meaning is changed. But it made me think of Israel-Palestine. The religious zealotry; the intra-semite enmity; the blood in the soil; the whys make some appalling hows bearable.
The post Echoes of Conflict first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The toll of four months of war in Gaza on journalism is “nothing short of horrifying” — Palestinian journalists killed, wounded, and prevented from working without any possibility of safe refuge, reports the Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
RSF has strongly condemned the “eradication of journalism and the right to information” in Gaza by the Israeli army, and has called on states and international organisations to increase pressure on Israel to “immediately cease this carnage”.
In 124 days of conflict, at least 84 journalists have been killed in Gaza, including at least 20 in the course of their journalistic work or in connection with it, according to RSF statistics.
Journalists are being decimated as the days of this interminable war go by, through incessant Israeli strikes from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip, the watchdog said.
Journalists who had survived these four months were “living a daily hell” — in inhumane conditions, they suffered shortages of all kinds, particularly of equipment, as well as regular media blackouts, RSF said.
“In four months of conflict, Palestinian journalism has been decimated by Israeli armed forces with complete impunity, with a staggering death toll of more than 84 journalists killed — at least 20 in the line of duty,” said RSF’s Middle East desk in their statement.
“After filing two complaints with the International Criminal Court and making repeated appeals to States and international organisations, RSF is once again urging the UN Security Council to immediately enforce Resolution 2222 (2015) on the protection of journalists.
Journalists trapped in Rafah
Journalists in Gaza have no way out or any place of safe refuge. Forced to flee to the south of the enclave since October 7, the vast majority have taken refuge in Rafah, where the crossing point with Egypt is still closed and where an invasion of the city could lead to a new bloodbath.
Rafah was described by Israel as a “security zone” at the start of the conflict. Despite RSF’s calls for the Rafah gate to be opened, the Israeli authorities continue to prevent Gazan journalists from leaving and to block access to the enclave for foreign journalists.
As Gaza killings rise, so does the toll on Palestinian journalists. Video: Al Jazeera
A chilling toll
According to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS), about 50 local and international media outlets in Gaza have been totally or partially destroyed by the Israeli army since October 7, in addition to the appalling death toll.
RSF filed two complaints with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 31 October and 22 December 2023 in connection with the killings of journalists and the destruction of media outlets.
In the aftermath of the killings of independent videographer Moustafa Thuraya and Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh on January 7, RSF obtained a decision from the ICC prosecutor to include crimes against journalists in its investigation into the situation in Palestine.
Two days later, RSF called on the UN Security Council to urgently address Israel’s violations of Resolution 2222 on the protection of journalists.
The struggle of journalists in the field
Against this terrifying backdrop, Palestinian reporters in Gaza are showing untold courage in continuing to report on the war.
Most have lost loved ones. Forced to move, they live in tents, with no electricity and very little food or water.
Wounded journalists have very limited access to medical care. In partnership with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), RSF has been providing grants to Gazan journalists since the start of the war to support their reporting work.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
Al Jazeera rejects Israeli forces’ attempt to justify crimes against journalists
Al Jazeera Media Network has rejected the Israeli occupation forces’ attempt to justify the killing and targeting of journalists.
In a statement this week, the network has condemned the accusations against its journalists and recalled Israel’s “long record of lies and fabrication of evidence through which it seeks to hide its heinous crimes”.
The statement continued:
“At a time when its correspondents and field crews are making great sacrifices to cover what is happening in Gaza, Al Jazeera’s employment policies stipulate that employees are not to engage in any political affiliations that may affect their professionalism, and to adhere to the controls and directives contained in the Network’s code of ethics and code of conduct.
“Al Jazeera ensures that all its journalists and correspondents adhere to the editorial standards.
“The network recalls the systematic targeting of Al Jazeera by the Israeli authorities, which includes:
“Given Israel’s unprecedented campaign against journalists, Al Jazeera urges media outlets worldwide to exercise the utmost caution and responsibility when headlining Israel’s justifications for its crimes against journalists in Gaza.”
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) has joined media freedom groups supporting Julian Assange, an Australian citizen whose unjust prosecution continues to undermine press freedoms and human rights.
In light of recent developments and mounting concerns over Assange’s deteriorating health, JERAA said in a statement it had urged the United States to drop all charges against Assange and facilitate his immediate return to Australia.
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been the subject of relentless persecution by the US government for his efforts to expose war crimes and government misconduct.
Assange received a Walkley Award in 2011 for outstanding contribution to journalism through Wikileaks, which included the release of the 2010 “collateral murder” video and the publication of classified US diplomatic cables, shedding light on atrocities committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It is concerning that Assange faces up to 175 years in jail if found guilty of espionage charges — a sentence that would effectively silence whistle-blowers and journalists worldwide,” JERAA said.
The association said it believed that Assange’s indictment set a dangerous precedent and posed a grave threat to the fundamental principles of press freedom and freedom of expression.
‘Enough is enough’
JERAA commended Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for his support in calling for Assange’s release and said it echoed his sentiment that “enough is enough.”
PM Albanese’s recent vote in the federal Parliament for a motion demanding Assange’s return to Australia underscores the legitimacy of our demand. The motion, which received overwhelming support, leaves no room for ambiguity — it is time to bring Assange home.
The WikiLeaks 2010 “collateral damage” video. Video: Al Jazeera
As the UK High Court prepares to rule on Assange’s appeal against extradition in a two-day hearing next week (February 20-21), and with Prime Minister Albanese’s continued efforts to advocate for Assange’s release, JERAA has urged the US to heed the calls for justice and drop all charges against Assange.
It is imperative that Assange’s rights as an Australian citizen be respected, and that he be afforded the opportunity to return home.
JERAA president Associate Professor Alexandra Wake said that while some members might not agree with all Assange has done in his life, it was clear that his work was central to our “understanding of press freedoms and human rights”.
“JERAA upholds the principles of a free and independent press. It is time to end the trial of global media freedom,” she said.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The relentless campaign promoting the inevitability of a direct war with Russia is proceeding without challenge. That does not mean that war could erupt at any moment, or it could never happen. First, war is not based on a timetable. Second, war has no deterministic quality of any sort—it can be avoided. Third, but most important, war is contingent upon deliberation and subsequent decision—without decision, there is no war. For the record, neither the United States nor Russia has ever publically declared that they intend to go to war at some point in the future. So far, we only hear dire threats flying around.
When American think tanks, opinion-makers, and the omnipresent “experts” talk about going to war with Russia, they often disclose the inner workings of the system. Of importance are the ideological processes used to implement agendas and related tactics. World domination themes (our leadership, our national interests, our allies, free world, our values, our democracy, our resolve, state sponsor of terrorism, our sanctions, defending liberty, our this and our that, and all that empty jargon) appear at every turn.
Processes need avenues to formulate. The climax is reached when those avenues become both overlapped and interconnected. As a result, propaganda, fake diplomacy, false reporting, exaggeration, naked lies, vilification, accusation, crocodile tears for Ukraine, and military “assessments” move in unison with the plans of U.S. ruling circles.
As stated early on, since the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, the sole remaining superpower (as the United States likes to call itself) has been obsessively pursuing the goal for world control by any means—including war. The countless wars that the United States has been launching against any country that actively dares pursuing its own policie are testimony. War, of course, is easy on paper. Among powerful nuclear states, war is terra incognita. This fact alone, confirms the reasons why the United States, Britain, and other imperialist states treat the project for war with Russia in theatrical ways while depending on rhetorical bravados, sanctions, seizing of assets, and the arming of Ukraine to elicit concessions.
Now that Russia’s limited military operation in Ukraine has transformed into a wider war involving NATO countries indirectly, what comes next? First, that transformation begs an old-new argument. Do wars have any validity? Posing this argument brings to mind the anti-colonialist wars in the period 1950-1975. Second, although the scope of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine differs from those wars, the basics are the same. Explanation: the struggle for independence, sovereignty, and security can take many forms and transcends time and circumstances. This applies to Russia to a tee. How so?
Discussion: the charge that the anti-colonialist struggle posed challenge to and imperiled peace (as Petra Goedde opined, retrospectively, in her book, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History) is bogus. Discussion: what peace are we debating? Is it peace of mind for occupiers, colonizers, and imperialists or is it pacification by sanctions, blockades, and death and destruction to the occupied and the threatened? By analogy, the argument that Russia should not have disturbed the peace with its intervention in Ukraine is bogus too. For instance, considering that Ukraine has become a powerful American tool to destabilize and attack Russia, was it feasible for Russia to assure its survival from U.S. nuclear encirclement without intervening in Ukraine?
About the principle of armed struggle against all forms of neocolonialism and imperialism: how if not by war could have Algeria, Viet Nam (before U.S. intervention), and Angola, for examples, ended French and Portuguese colonialisms in their respective lands? About Viet Nam: does anyone think that the United States would have left South Viet Nam without being defeated in battle first? Further, because the U.S. and vassals are effectively waging war on Russia while pretending to be defending peace and principles, should Russia smile and wave its arms in jubilation?
The wider argument: The United States and satellites couch their wars under the rubric, “just and unjust wars”. They deem their wars just and wars by others unjust. U.S. think tanks go further by invoking the concept of legality as if the lawless hyper‑empire is the guardian and depositary of legality. On such think tank is the Brookings Institution, the voice of Zionist academia. The hyper-imperialist Michael O’Hanlon (director of research and senior fellow of the foreign policy program at Brookings) wrote a specious article full with inaccuracies and distorted facts on the American invasion of Iraq, and named it as such: “Why the War Wasn’t Illegal”.
O’Hanlon starts his article as follows, “United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was wrong in recently terming the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq “illegal”. So, now we know that the warmongering Zionist O’Hanlon thinks that he knows what is right and what is wrong! Aside from that, not only did he distort facts, but also erased the entire body of evidence confirming that Iraq had been abiding by all so-called U.N. resolutions on the matter of disarmament.
Setting the Record Straight on War and Peace
At present, only one concept can pass the test of rationality thus it is irrefutable. Wars can be either legitimate or illegitimate based on the tenets of the Natural Law, not the laws of the imperialist west and its institutions. The statement leads to an implacable consequence that could never be ignored or dismissed. Opposing legitimate wars (e.g., Russia’s in Ukraine, and the Palestine people resistance’s against the Zionist settler state of Israel, or the improbable but potential war by China for Taiwan) just because we advocate peace is antithetical to the anti-imperialist cause.
For one, wars fought to defend national independence from imperialist or occupying powers are an exclusive category. Consequently, the implication of selling antiwar agendas to aggressed, squeezed, occupied, or threatened states in the name of western-defined peace and goodwill could not be more obvious. It means that the collective chauvinist west would continue trampling on the natural rights of all nations resisting subjugation. Seeing the magnitude of restrictions, sanctions, and destruction heaped upon them, those nations are left with no choice but to resist and fight back to preserve their very existence.
In sum, and as far as it concerns Ukraine, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, it does not matter if the U.S. and European imperialisms define their ongoing wars in any context. The fact remains, no matter what contexts and laws they invent in support of their aims, the targeted countries would not acknowledge them—effectively they have no validity. The implication resulting from rejecting western rules of domination is unambiguous. Legitimate states (not installed by colonialist powers) threatened by marauding imperialists have every right to resort to any form of resistance to preserve their security, improve social welfare, and defend their freedom from the fascist clique that is ruling the world today.
Discussion
The western intelligentsia obliquely calls it the “Suez Crisis”. It wasn’t. By all attributes, it was a standard colonialist war. Briefly, Britain and France (in collusion with the then 8-year old Zionist settler state (Israel) attacked Egypt in July 1956 because it nationalized the Suez Canal Company—English, French, and other European shareholders owned the operating enterprise; Egypt owned the waterway itself. Remark: during that time, no one suggested that war with Britain, France, and Israel had become inevitable because of their war against Egypt.
When the United States intervened in Somalia, then invaded and occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, and then attacked Libya, Syria, and Yemen, no one suggested that going to war with the United States is inevitable to stop its Zionist wars. Pay attention: but when Russia intervened in Ukraine, the uproar reached the moon. The United States and major western powers repeatedly spoke of the inevitability of war with Russia. Are we missing something?
These few facts are enough to corroborate an important assertion. The notion positing the inevitability of war with this or that country is a U.S. stratagem to intimidate all independent nations. Manifest intent: to enforce or induce compliance under the threat of violence. At this stage, do we need to prove that the U.S. obsession for war with Russia goes beyond “Russophobia”, “Russophrenia”, and similar hazy terms? Said obsession is now an ideologically and objectively developed strategic purpose meant as a mechanism to impose the American order on Russia.
Observation: the old paradigm that governed the relation between capitalist America and communist Russia fell in disuse today. Although vanished in its old form, that paradigm (U.S. ideological enmity toward Russia) morphed into something new: strategic hostility. The core of this new anti-Russian stance is not the intervention in Ukraine, but a set of revamped U.S. geostrategic objectives. Accordingly, something very big has pushed the U.S. into chaotic frenzy. This cannot be but the U.S. certainty that Russia had come out into the open, re-asserted its role on the international arena, and challenged the American plan for world domination.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, stated the fixed purpose of the American empire unequivocally. He declared, “The United States must remain the most powerful nation on Earth if peace is to continue between the U.S., China, and Russia.” In other words, the United States is opposing to maintaining peace—meaning it would go to war—with Russia and China should it conclude that either country or both pose threat to its military domination over the planet. By stating that, Milley has implicitly confirmed that war with Russia and China is inevitable under the condition he outlined.
The British Sky News of Rupert Murdock is a gigantic factory of lies, tabloid news, and journalistic prostitution. Armed with such “credentials”, Sky News joins the American crowds in discussing the inevitability of war with Russia. Pretending serious journalism, the online tabloid asks, “Are we heading for World War Three?”
Sky News then provides “verdicts” by its so-called panel of experts. Not surprising was that such experts recycled superficial opinions spread by the American media. Of interest, is the view presented by Sky News’ “military analysist”, Simon Diggins. Using shallow “analysis” and language, Diggins reproduced simplistic clichés taken from Fox News of Murdoch and from worthless stories taken from Microsoft Network (MSN) of Bill Gates.
I’m not going to comment on Diggins’ quote (below) except for putting the “important” stuff in Italics. Purpose: to stress that the italicized text is nearly identical to the phraseology and lingo employed by American imperialists and Zionists in their daily shows. He writes,
In one sense, we are always in a ‘pre-war’ world, as wars can start from miscalculation, from hubris, or misunderstandings as well as deliberate design.
However, the last months have seen some loud rumblings, and the sense that the inevitable tensions of a complex world may only be resolvable by war.
Nothing is inevitable, but the Ukraine invasion in particular has shown that Russia sees war as an instrument of policy, as a tool to change the world order in its favour, and not simply as a means of defence.”
China likewise seeks reunification with Taiwan, and Iran, in its region, wants its ‘place in the sun’.
Josep Borrell, European Union foreign policy chief, never ceases to amaze. His colonialist mindset is closed for reformation, and the bizarre statements he often makes keep getting worse from one to the next. Claiming that Russian influence causing dilemma in Africa’s Sahel, he stated,
Russia’s “very strong” influence in Ouagadougou, Bamako, and Niamey “creates a new geopolitical configuration” in the Sahel. France has had to leave; we have left our military mission – an incipient military mission – in Niger. We have now been invited to abandon Niger with our civilian mission,” he said, adding that EU member states “will have to decide if they want to stay” and extend Mali’s EUTM [European Union Trade Mark], which is set to expire in May. [Italics added]
Comment: Can Borrell explain to us why Russia’s influence on Africa’s Sahel is bad, but the European influence on the same is good? Another issue: does he think that war with Russia has become inevitable because Russia is breaking the “sacred” European colonialist legacy in Africa?
Commenting on article written by the anti-Russian British journalist Gideon Rachman (Financial Times: “How to stop a war between America and China“), American economist Scott B. Sumner made this important remark. He said, “Unfortunately, the article doesn’t tell us how to stop a war between the US and China. …” In fact, all what Rachman tried to do is upholding the U.S. notion of deterrence against China’s legitimate claims on Taiwan. (Before I forget, Rachman won a few prizes and awards for his superficial analyses.)
The Zionist-controlled publication of The Atlantic published an article written by Eric Schmidt and Robert O. Work. The title is intriguing: “How to Stop the Next World War.” You would expect a convincing proposal, or at least a generic idea as how to stop the U.S. mad race for war with everyone. After attentively reading the article, I realized that the authors had already “suggested” how to stop the next war in the subtitle: “A strategy to restore America’s military deterrence”. So, now we know the answer to their question: in order to stop the next world war, the United States should not engage in negotiation or something like that, but it must protect and expand its imperialistic spheres of influence through increased military deterrence.
Comment: U.S. and British imperialist and Zionists are not in the business of stopping wars. On the contrary, they incite for wars and justify them. Their favorite methods are open belligerency and swamping verbosity. In both cases (Rachman’s article and the Atlantic piece), the march toward the inevitable wars with Russia and China was not only hypothesized and marketed, but also rationalized to give the impression of unarguable conclusion.
To sum it up, western governments (especially the U.S. government) and legions of war promotors have been tirelessly theorizing on the inevitability of war with Russia. Conspicuously absent from their coordinated scripts, however, is the postscript—the aftermath of war. That absence is neither lapsus nor negligence. It is a calculated strategy to advance the abstract notion of war without addressing its concrete consequences on their societies.
U.S. post-WWII foreign and domestic policies need no introduction. Summary: in building consensus and silence for its wars around the world, the imperialist state relied on indoctrination, concealment, deception, and propaganda. Aside from being the pillars of control, these four categories form a specialized school of thought. Accordingly, those who govern the direction of domestic affairs (finance, Congress, weapons manufacturing, legislation, executive orders, etc.) will also govern the conduct of foreign policy and wars.
What did the system do to insure that the American people remain passive toward its wars? It relied on a formidable psychological tool: desensitization. Desensitization such as this leads to emotional inebriation. For some (without quantifying), this type of emotions is rewarding whereby the scenes of mass destruction act as psychedelic narcotic. Arguably, the images of victory over a designated enemy are the experience.
Desensitization has another function. In the hands of warmongers and war planners, it is a contraption to eradicate critical thinking vis-à-vis the plethora of factors and actors pushing for war. The odd thing is that visualizing the destruction of enemy while not contemplating own destruction by retaliatory strikes is not normal and raises myriad questions. For instance, could this behavior equate to sedation? Materially though, it lays the emotional foundation for the acceptance of war by protracted induction.
Consider the Newsweek article, “Nuclear Bomb Map Shows Impact if Biden’s New Weapon Dropped on Russia,” published on November 3, 2023. The Zionist-imperialist weekly reports on “A nuclear bomb being developed by the Biden administration could wreak havoc in Moscow’. Newsweek broadcasts the bomb’s destructiveness by including a visualization map made by NUKEMAP. Newsweek continues by saying that with its “360 kilotons TNT, the bomb is 24 times the explosive power of the 15-kiloton bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.”.
Newsweek editors are cynically leaving to the readers the burden of calculating the human cost to Russia. In the case of Hiroshima, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put the number of dead and injured between (200,000 and 340,000); the average therefore is 270,000. Now, 270,000 x 24 = 6,480,000. Effectively, therefore, the United States is telling Russia that it can and has all means to kill or injure about 6.5 million Russians in one single strike. [Note: those will die— consequent to radiation and other causes related to the blast—in the successive six months to the detonation are not included.] No doubt, the U.S. wants to intimidate Russia as if this is incapable of returning the gift of death to selected U.S. cities.
Pay attention: Newsweek did not give details on who divulged the news about this new bomb. Skepticism is warranted; for example, the whole thing could be fiction to scare Russia. But this is unimportant. At this point, we need to learn how the process of indoctrination to war works.
To start, we know that NUKEMAP was created by Alex Wellerstein. A question: did the Pentagon ask Alex Wellerstein to talk about the 360 kiloton bomb, or did Wellerstein, knowing about it from other sources, decide to open the secret? This hypothesis cannot be true—it is unfathomable that the Pentagon allows its most secret weapons to be known to the enemy. Most likely, the Pentagon ordered the divulgence of information to intimidate Russia. Either way, this whole episode casts light on the multi-pronged interactions between the war apparatuses of the United States and its civilian contributors like Wellerstein.
Expanded Discussion
First, NUKEMAP is visualization software designed to help those who covet seeing real nuclear and missile wars. Second, the Pentagon and Wellerstein well know that the program can be used effectively to garner support for war by prospecting a “joyous” outcome, which is visualizing the incineration of Moscow.
Now, could it be that the Pentagon is offering Wellerstein’s visualization to the public as a form of ideological catharsis to release their “repressed violent emotions”? Can this be true? It implies that the American people at large are addicted to visceral violence. But violence, as philosophy and practice, is acquired. In addition, no nation is uniform in its feelings and reactions to wars initiated by their country. With regard to the U.S. wars on foreign nations in the name of “security” and nominal values, indoctrination targeting the American people has worked on two levels: (a) countless Americans see their foreign wars as patriotic, or (b) they are indifferent to the magnitude of death, destruction, and consequences that their country has been inflicting on foreign nations.
Pay attention: Wellerstein did not create NUKEMAP to warn against nuclear annihilation or to bring attention to its horrors. His article NUKEMAP is explicit. Not even once does he refer to the consequences of his concept. His focus was on the praise of his software and the awards it obtained.
Remarks
To summarize, because the ideological devotion to war with Russia has become a vast cult with unpredictable consequences, how many still remember Russell J. Oakes’ book, The Day After, and how many still recall the eponymous adapted film starring Jason Robards?
Next: Part 5
The post Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 4) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When Condé Nast bought the online music publication Pitchfork in 2015, Condé’s Chief Digital Officer Fred Santarpia told the New York Times that the acquisition brought “a very passionate audience of Millennial males into our roster.”
Three years before, in 2012, roughly 88 percent of respondents to Pitchfork’s People’s List, a record of reader-ranked albums from the last fifteen years, identified as male. Pitchfork clarified later that this figure was not “indicative of Pitchfork’s overall demographics.” (To be fair, the characterization was technically accurate, but some things are best left unsaid.)
Pitchfork’s list of 200 albums going back to 1997 was overwhelmingly White and male. Only two Black artists and two albums made by women cracked its top 50. Internally, these trends persisted.
As of 2017, only 11.4 percent of Pitchfork reviews by male authors were of albums by female artists, paling in comparison to female reviewers’ 30.1 percent. In 2019, Pitchfork’s Union cited Pitchfork’s poor labor practices and “lack of diversity across staff” as incompatible with the union’s values.
In January 2024, Condé Nast announced it was folding Pitchfork into men’s magazine GQ, laying off more than half of Pitchfork’s staff, including eight union members. The changes also included the departure of Puja Patel, Pitchfork’s editor-in-chief since 2018, who resharpened Pitchfork’s mission of serving as the “most trusted voice in music.”
Patel not only set out to maintain the integrity of Pitchfork’s signature reviews section but also spearheaded a transformative approach to its features, covering music within the context of social and cultural issues and highlighting underrepresented voices in the music industry, which Pitchfork had dabbled at in the years leading up to the shift.
“After nearly 8 yrs, mass layoffs got me. glad we could spend that time trying to make it a less dude-ish place just for GQ to end up at the helm,” Jill Mapes, former features editor for Pitchfork, shared via Twitter/X.
Music journalism, not unlike the industry it covers, is rife with (primarily White) “dude-ishness.” Jessica Hopper, music critic, former senior editor for Pitchfork, and author of The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Rock Critic, wrote about her experiences as a reporter and the “paternalistic scolding” she often received from men (both industry insiders and outsiders) for incorporating a feminist perspective in her work.
In 2015, Hopper asked her followers a (now deleted) question via Twitter, “Gals/other marginalized folk: what was your 1stbrush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t ‘count’?”
Hundreds of users responded; journalists, sound engineers, producers, artists, and music fans who were made to feel lesser by their peers. The tweet made me recall semi-humiliating moments in my own music career—ones where I felt underestimated and small.
Like the time a male sound engineer asked, as I was loading my gear in from my car, if I was the “groupie” of the guy who was opening for me that night. He talked loudly through my whole set.
Gender and racial disparities are still pervasive in media. An April 2023 Digiday report found that, although major media companies made some progress in terms of diversity and inclusion compared to 2022, they were still primarily hiring white people. And Reuters Institute data compiled by analyzing media companies across twelve countries concluded that only 22 percent of top editors were women.
So, Santarpia’s statement back in 2015 stung not only for its implication that being a thoughtful music listener was somehow distinctly masculine but also because it was a sinister reminder that behind the scenes, at so many different levels, White men were given practically sole power to determine what good music was.
Rolling Stone’s founder Jann Wenner said that he didn’t include women or Black artists in his book The Masters because they don’t “articulate at the level” as the other “philosophers of rock” who were featured in his book.
“You know, just for public relations’ sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism,” Wenner told the New York Times in 2023. “I wish in retrospect I could have interviewed Marvin Gaye. Maybe he’d have been the guy.”
It’s not that a team at GQ is incapable of producing decent music coverage. It’s that when music media suddenly gets absorbed by men’s media, you start to wonder what and who gets left behind.
Many Pitchfork contributors whose diverse perspectives added nuance to Pitchfork’s music coverage have been abruptly dismissed. Newsrooms are shrinking, and online spaces devoted to highlighting underground art are at risk of disappearing.
But women, people of color, queer and non-binary folks, and other marginalized communities have always been innovating, making music, writing about music, and finding ways to introduce new sounds to their circles, even if men like Wenner don’t find those particular histories worthy of exploring.
Brittany Spanos, senior writer at Rolling Stone, said of her colleagues at Rolling Stone following Wenner’s comments, “The most important work we do is creating careers and legacies. And it’s our job to make it clear that those legacies are not reserved just for straight white men.”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The University of the South Pacific journalism programme is hosting a cohort student journalists from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology this week.
Led by Professor Angela Romano, the 12 students are covering news assignments in Fiji as part of their working trip.
The visitors were given a briefing by USP journalism teaching staff — Associate Professor in Pacific journalism and programme head Dr Shailendra Singh, and student training newspaper supervising editor-in-chief Monika Singh.
The students held lively discussions about the form and state of the media in Fiji and the Pacific, the historic influence of Australian and Western news media and its pros and cons, and the impact of the emergence of China on the Pacific media scene.
Dr Singh said the small and micro-Pacific media systems were “still reeling” from revenue loss due to digital disruption and the covid-19 pandemic.
As elsewhere in the world, the “rivers of gold” (classified advertising revenue) had virtually dried up and media in the Pacific were apparently struggling like never before.
Dr Singh said that this was evident from the reduced size of some newspapers in the Pacific, in both classified and display advertising, which had migrated to social media platforms.
Repeal of draconian law
He praised Fiji’s coalition government for repealing the country’s draconian Media Industry Development Act last year, and reviving media self-regulation under the revamped Fiji Media Council.
However, Dr Singh added that there was still some way to go to further improve the media landscape, including focus on training and development and working conditions.
“There are major, longstanding challenges in small and micro-Pacific media systems due to small audiences, and marginal profits,” he said. “This makes capital investment and staff development difficult to achieve.”
The QUT students are in Suva this month on a working trip in which students will engage in meetings, interviews and production of journalism. They will meet non-government organisations that have a strong focus on women/gender in development, democracy or peace work.
The students will also visit different media organisations based in Suva and talk to their female journalists on their experiences and their stories.
The USP journalism programme started in Suva in 1988 and it has produced more than 200 graduates serving the Pacific and beyond in various media and communication roles.
The programme has forged partnerships with leading media players in the Pacific and our graduates are shining examples in the fields of journalism, public relations and government/NGO communication.
Asia Pacific Report publishes in partnership with The University of the South Pacific’s newspaper and online Wansolwara News.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) is working with journalists in the Middle East and Northern Africa to investigate various violations affecting the safety of journalists and their ability to do their work.
Shutterstock
“I find myself wishing there was more protection [for investigative journalists], a sense of safety and even simply just hope. I watch in awe as they investigate crimes that they unfortunately know they could well be victims of in the future, or in some cases already have been.“ Zaynab Al-Khawaja, GCHR’s Journalists Protection Coordinator, working with journalists conducting the investigations
Supported by the Global Media Defence Fund, GCHR’s project Investigating impunity for crimes against journalists in the Arab States, while providing protection has identified a range of threats journalists face, such as arbitrary detentions and gendered threats.
With a strong gender focus, the GCHR ensures that the majority of the investigations are carried out by women, empowering them and shedding light on cases involving women.
One investigation highlights the story of an anonymous woman journalist who quit her job and relocated due to sexual harassment. She writes:
A large proportion of society is aware of widespread harassment in the streets, resulting from an exacerbated hypermasculinity. However, statements by several Iraqi women journalists confirm that this phenomenon did not spare women in press and media outlets, forcing a considerable number of them to quit journalism for good.
The investigation also reported that 41% of women journalists in Iraq have been victims of harassment, forcing 15% to leave their jobs and 5% to quit their profession for good.
This data aligns with UNESCO’s Chilling report, revealing increasing offline and online attacks against women journalists, including stigmatization, sexist hate speech, trolling, physical assault, rape and murder.
Another investigation looked into the imprisonment and silencing of journalists, some facing fabricated allegations of sexual harassment. GCHR collaborates with the NGO Vigilance and 40 partners on a joint appeal to end the persecution and detention of journalists and human rights defenders exercising their right to freedom of expression. GCHR also supported a journalist in the Middle East investigating the case of a disappeared journalist in Syria.
Since 2022, GCHR and UNESCO have joined forces to support investigative journalism, reducing impunity for crimes against journalists and enhancing their safety through the Global Media Defence Fund. Established in 2019, this fund has supported over 120 projects globally, directly benefiting over 5,000 journalists, 1,200 lawyers and 200 non-governmental organizations.
In 2022, UNESCO published recommendations on addressing violence against women journalists, based on The Chilling, a global research project by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). All reports related to this project are available here on UNESCO’s website.
see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/journalist/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
By Karishma Kumari in Suva
The University of Fiji will be offering its journalism and media studies programme at its Samabula campus from this semester.
UniFiji vice-chancellor Professor Shaista Shameem said the programme started at the Saweni campus in Lautoka in 2022 with only five students and had been growing since then.
She said there would now be more students registering for the programme as it was positioned closer to the court and Parliament for better news coverage.
Professor Shameem said the programme was drafted and written with the help of senior journalists and news media people in Fiji including Communications Fiji Limited chairman William Parkinson, Sitiveni Halofaki from Fiji TV, former Fiji Sun managing editor Nemani Delaibatiki, Matai Akauola, Anish Chand from The Fiji Times and Stanley Simpson of Mai TV.
The vice-chancellor said the programme was different from the other universities and student journalists were sent for training in newsrooms during their first year of study so that they could become well known with their bylines.
She said the university also has a newspaper, known as UniFiji Watch, and a radio station, Vox Populi, which had won an international award for college radio.
Industry teachers
The vice-chancellor said that most of the courses were taught by people in the journalism industry and veteran journalists, including Communications Fiji Limited news director Vijay Narayan, Vimal Madhavan and Matai Akoula.
She said the university also wanted to add film and a documentary course to the programme.
Head of department Dr Kamala Naiker said journalism students needed opportunities for innovation. The first lot of student journalists would be graduating next year.
Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
President Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, a U.S. commentator who has made a name for himself by spreading conspiracy theories and has questioned Washington’s support for Kyiv in its fight against invading Russian troops, has been widely criticized for giving the Russian leader a propaganda platform in his first interview with an American journalist since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.
In the more than two-hour interview, released on Carlson’s website early on February 9, Putin again claimed Ukraine was a threat to Russia because the West was drawing the country into NATO — an assertion the military alliance has called false — while avoiding topics such as his brutal crackdown at home on civil society and free speech.
RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.
The interview took place as Putin hopes that Western support for Kyiv will wane and morale among Ukrainians will flag to the point where his war aims are achievable. It also comes as U.S. military support for Kyiv is in question as Republican lawmakers block a $60 billion aid package proposed by President Joe Biden, and a reshuffle of Ukraine’s dismissal of the top commander of the armed forces after a counteroffensive fell far short of its goals.
Putin urged the United States to press Kyiv to stop fighting and cut a deal with Russia, which occupies about one-fifth of Ukraine.
Carlson rarely challenged Putin, who gave a long and rambling lecture on the history of Russia and Ukraine, failing to bring up credible accusations from international rights groups that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine — Putin himself has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the conflict — or the imprisonment of opposition figures such as Aleksei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza on trumped up charges that appear politically motivated.
“Putin got his message out the way he wanted to,” said Ian Bremmer, a New York-based political scientist and president of Eurasiagroup.
Even before the meeting was published, Carlson faced criticism for interviewing Putin when his government is holding Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich and another U.S. journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva of RFE/RL, in jail on charges related to their reporting that both vehemently deny.
Kurmasheva’s case was not even mentioned in the interview, while Carlson angered the Wall Street Journal by suggesting that Putin should release the 33-year-old journalist even if “maybe he was breaking your law in some way.”
The U.S. State Department has officially designated Gershkovich as wrongfully detained by Russia.
“Evan is a journalist and journalism is not a crime. Any portrayal to the contrary is total fiction,” the newspaper said in reaction to the interview.
“Evan was unjustly arrested and has been wrongfully detained by Russia for nearly a year for doing his job, and we continue to demand his immediate release.”
Putin said “an agreement can be reached” to free Gershkovich and appeared to suggest that a swap for a “patriotic” Russian national currently serving out a life sentence for murder in Germany — an apparent reference to Vadim Krasikov, a former colonel from Russia’s domestic spy organization convicted of assassinating a former Chechen fighter in broad daylight in Berlin in 2019.
“There is no taboo to settle this issue. We are willing to solve it, but there are certain terms being discussed via special services channels. I believe an agreement can be reached,” Putin told Carlson.
Carlson, a former Fox News host, has made a name for himself by spreading conspiracy theories and has questioned U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against invading Russian troops. The interview was Putin’s first with a Western media figure since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Putin said during the interview Russia has no interest in invading NATO member Poland and could only see one case where he would: “If Poland attacks Russia.”
“We have no interest in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering. It is absolutely out of the question,” he added.
Describing his decision to interview Putin in an announcement posted on X on February 6, Carlson asserted that U.S. media outlets focus fawningly on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy but that Putin’s voice is not heard in the United States because Western journalists have not “bothered” to interview him since the full-scale invasion.
Carlson has gained a reputation for defending the Russian leader, once claiming that “hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy.”
Numerous Western journalists rejected the claim, saying they have consistently sought to interview Putin but have been turned away. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later confirmed that, saying his office receives “numerous requests for interviews with the president” but that most of the Western outlets asking are “traditional TV channels and large newspapers that don’t even attempt to appear impartial in their coverage. Of course, there’s no desire to communicate with this kind of media.”
Carlson’s credentials as an independent journalist have been questioned, and in 2020 Fox News won a defamation case against him, with the judge saying in her verdict that when presenting stories, Carlson is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “‘nonliteral commentary.”
Carlson was one of Fox News’ top-rated hosts before he abruptly left the network last year after Fox settled a separate defamation lawsuit over its reporting of the 2020 presidential election. Fox agreed to pay $787 million to voting machine company Dominion after the company filed a lawsuit alleging the network spread false claims that its machines were rigged against former President Donald Trump.
Carlson has had a rocky relationship at times with the former president, but during Trump’s presidency he had Carlson’s full backing and he has endorsed Trump in his 2024 run to regain the White House.
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.