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When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.
The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings.
Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been.
For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.
Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.
“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program.
And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier.
“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.
An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.
No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.
Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers.
“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.
Read Next Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.
While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.”
It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine.
Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.
Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information.
But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Millions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. on Apr 14, 2025.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.
Before examining the opposition media’s error-strewn reports, this article first explains the background: how the tariff was set, whether it is legitimate and how US-Nicaragua trade is changing. Then it turns to the opposition’s mistakes and explains how they are using Trump’s actions to bolster their attacks on Nicaragua’s government and people.
How the tariffs were set
Trump’s chart of tariffs has two sets of figures for each country: the “tariffs charged to the USA” and the “reciprocal tariffs” to be imposed this month. Bizarrely, the “tariffs charged to the USA” do not relate to actual tariffs charged on US imports. Instead, they are the product of a calculation based on each country’s trade gap with the US. For most countries, the value of these “tariffs charged” has been set at 10 per cent, on the basis that the US has no trade deficit with them, or only a small one. All of these countries (including Nicaragua’s neighbors) are hit with a “reciprocal tariff” of 10 per cent on their exports to the US, from this month onwards, even if they buy more from the US than they sell to it.
However, a higher “tariff charged” is calculated for countries with which the US is judged to have a bigger trade deficit. For each country, the White House looked up the deficit for its trade with the US in goods for 2024, then divided that by the total value of the country’s exports to the US. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was distilled into a formula.
For example, these are the figures for China:
1) Goods trade deficit (exports from the US minus imports): – $291.9 billion
2) Total goods imported to the US from China: $438.9 billion
3) A ÷ B = – 0.67, or 67 per cent
4) Half of this is 34 per cent, the new tariff being applied to China.
Based on this formula, the small African country of Lesotho was saddled with the highest “reciprocal tariff” of 50 per cent, while several major SE Asian countries were also hit with very high tariffs.
How Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated
Nicaragua’s “reciprocal tariff” was calculated in the same way. According to US trade figures, in 2024 US goods exports to Nicaragua were $2.9 billion, while US goods imports from Nicaragua totaled $4.6 billion. The US goods trade deficit with Nicaragua was therefore – $1.7 billion in 2024.
The calculation was therefore: trade deficit (- $1.7 billion) ÷ imports ($4.6 billion) = – 0.37, or 37 per cent, halved to produce a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent.
This means that from April 9, there will be a new tax of 18 per cent on Nicaraguan goods sent to the US, payable as a customs duty on their arrival by the company or agency importing the goods.
How Nicaragua might contest the tariff
It seems unlikely that Trump will bend to pressure on the tariffs. However, at least in theory, there are three ways in which Nicaragua might argue that the tariff is wrongly imposed:
1) Nicaragua’s Central Bank shows a smaller trade gap with the US. According to the Central Bank’s figures for 2024, Nicaragua’s exports to the US totaled $3.7 billion, not $4.6 billion, while its imports from the US totaled $2.7 billion, giving a trade gap of $1 billion, not $1.7 billion. On the basis of Trump’s tariff formula, the result should have been a 14 per cent tariff, not 18 per cent, if Nicaragua’s trade figures are correct. (A possible explanation for the difference may be the way that goods, originating in Nicaragua, are processed in other Central American countries before arrival in the US.)
2) Although most Central American countries import more from the US than they export to it, Costa Rica also has a trade surplus with the US, amounting to $2 billion, bigger than Nicaragua’s, yet it is only being penalized by the standard “reciprocal tariff” (10 per cent).
3) Most importantly, as the Guatemalan government pointed out, under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty new tariffs are illegal (under both US federal and international law). The treaty prohibits new tariffs or customs duties between the seven member countries. Therefore, all six of the other countries that are parties to CAFTA-DR are entitled to challenge the US for breaching it.
Action by CAFTA-DR members is complicated by the fact that Nicaragua is not only worst hit by the tariffs but is also a country that the US would like to exclude from the treaty completely, a point picked up below.
Changing significance of Nicaraguan exports to the US
Nicaragua’s Central Bank divides its trade figures between “merchandise” and products from free trade zones (principally, apparel). This, as we will see, confused the opposition media. This is the breakdown:
+ Exports of merchandise (e.g. gold, coffee, meat, etc.) totaled $4.2 billion in 2024, with the US accounting for 38.7 per cent of these, or $1.62 billion.
+ Exports from free trade zones were lower ($3.5 billion) but the proportion going to the US was much higher (59 per cent, or £2.08 billion).
+ Of Nicaragua’s total exports, at $7.7 billion, $3.7 billion went to the US (48 per cent).
+ Exports provide 39 per cent of Nicaragua’s annual income or GDP.
+ Exports to the US therefore account for a significant 18 per cent of GDP.
These figures exclude services, such as tourism and transport, where trade between Nicaragua and the US is roughly in balance (unlike Guatemala and Honduras, with whom the US has a strong trade surplus in services).
Exports to the US have fallen slowly from over 50 per cent of the total two years ago, as the government looks for other markets. Exports to the Republic of China, for example, were four times higher in 2024 than in 2022, but (at $68 million) are still a small proportion. There are other growing export markets, of which the most notable is Canada (now the second biggest buyer of Nicaraguan merchandise).
The Nicaraguan government’s response to the tariffs is likely to involve continued efforts to diversify trade and keeping a watchful eye on the effects on different sectors of the economy. Producers of products like coffee and gold may be less affected as they already have diverse markets. On the other hand the apparel sector, which until this month enjoyed zero tariffs on its $2 billion exports to the US, is geared to the US market and might find greater difficulty in mitigating the tariff’s effects.
Celebration and misinformation in opposition media
Nicaragua’s opposition media, long financed by the US government, admit that they have been hit by Elon Musk’s cuts. How they are now funded is unclear. However, prominent opposition activists enjoy salaried employment in US universities and think tanks, where they call for sanctions that would hit poor Nicaraguans. Naturally, they welcomed Trump’s announcement.
Errors in reporting on the tariffs showed opposition journalists’ unfamiliarity with Nicaragua’s economy. Confidencial, in a piece translated and reproduced in the Havana Times, claimed that the tariff imposed on Nicaragua ignored a trade surplus “of $484 million in favor of the US” which “has been growing in recent years.” This completely ignored exports to the US from the free trade zones. The same error was made a day later by Despacho 505.
According to Confidencial, the reason for the higher tariff on Nicaragua (and on Venezuela, hit with a 15 per cent tariff) was to punish their authoritarian governments. In reality, the higher tariffs on both countries resulted from the application of Trump’s formula, but this deliberate misrepresentation was to be repeated.
In an “analysis” for Confidencial on April 4, Manuel Orozco painted the 18 per cent tariff as specifically aimed at the Nicaraguan “dictatorship” (again, linking it with Venezuela). Orozco is a former Nicaraguan now living in Washington, working for the Inter-American Dialogue, an NGO funded by the US government and its arms industry. It is most unlikely that he was unaware of how the tariff was calculated; misleading his readers strengthened his argument that the higher tariff was a purely political move.
Further articles in Despacho 505 and Articulo 66 also blamed political factors without explaining the arithmetic behind the tariff. In La Prensa, activist Felix Maradiaga wrongly remarked that the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Nicaragua’s exports. According to him, the supposed weakness of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government means the country will struggle to cope (he disregards its remarkable resilience in dealing with the much heavier economic consequences of the 2018 coup attempt and the 2020 pandemic).
Then, also in Confidencial, opposition activist Juan Sebastián Chamorro made the claim that the new tariffs, which of course he welcomes, are entirely compatible with the CAFTA-DR trade treaty. He argued that Washington’s action is justified on grounds of “national security.” This echoes the absurd classification of Nicaragua (during the first Trump administration, continued by Biden) as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Opposition media are trying to present the new tariff as the first round of the stronger sanctions on Nicaragua that they have been urging Washington to adopt. They do this regardless of their illegality under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty or wider international law. The possibility of going further – excluding Nicaragua from the treaty – was trailed by Trump’s Latin America envoy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, in January, although he was careful to note the difficulties. But if this were to happen it would delight the opposition even further.
Obsessed with promoting regime change in Managua, these anti-Sandinista activists disregard the effects of tariffs and trade sanctions on ordinary Nicaraguans. On “Liberation Day” Trump showed his indifference to the millions of people in low-income countries whose livelihoods depend on producing food and other products for export to the US. The likes of Orozco, Maradiaga and Chamorro behave in just the same way.
The post Nicaragua’s Opposition Media Welcome Trump’s New Tariffs – and Ignore How They Were Calculated appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Perry.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Read RFA coverage of this story in Uyghur.
Chinese officials have ordered Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang to send video proof that they are not fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, according to police officers and social media posts by Uyghurs.
In a post on the Chinese social media platform Douyin, a resident of Peyziwat county in Kashgar prefecture said he must record a video of himself eating lunch every day until Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, which this year falls on March 29.
He said he must then send the video to the village cadre responsible for overseeing people living in the community, adding that he’s been doing this “to stay out of trouble.”
“Wherever I go, be it the market or the hospital, I must record a video of me having lunch every day and send it to the village cadre,” he says. “My daily proof is being saved on my phone.”
Daytime fasting during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and most Muslims around the world observe the practice freely.
But for years now, China has banned fasting during Ramadan as part of broader restrictions and bans on religious practice among Muslims in Xinjiang under the guise stamping out religious extremism. Chinese officials also have forbidden Uyghurs from gathering at mosques to pray on Fridays and from observing Muslim holidays.
That, in turn, is part of the China’s even wider, systematic persecution of Uyghurs and their culture, which has included mass detentions, forced labor and efforts to replace the Uyghur language.
Police confirmation
Police and government officials across Xinjiang contacted by Radio Free Asia confirmed that residents are being required to provide proof that they are not eating during Ramadan.
A police officer in Peyziwat county said residents there, including Uyghur police, did not have permission to fast during Ramadan.
“We implemented a system in which residents need to send us video proof that they did not fast during Ramadan,” she said. “I have residents who send their proof to me.”
The measure is being carried out in Gulbagh, Bayawat and Terim townships of Peyziwat county, she said.
A staff member of a government office in Peyziwat county, who declined to be identified so he could speak freely, said that submitting videos as proof that Uyghurs are not fasting has been implemented countywide.
Cadres at lower government levels are requiring residents to send them their videos of eating meals between sunrise and sunset, though the orders from higher-up officials didn’t specify this, he said.
They decided it would be an effective method to ensure that no one under their supervision would fast during Ramadan, the staffer said.
Some cadres even telephoned residents demanding they show that they were eating on the spot, he added.
So far, Uyghur residents have not refused their demand because they are aware that others currently detained have been punished for fasting during previous Ramadans, he said.
Collective feast
A staff member of a government office in Peyziwat’s Misha township said that in addition to the video requirement, authorities are planning a collective feast for the general public to ensure that Uyghurs are eating during the day, she said.
“To disrupt the activities of people who secretly fast, we are planning to organize collective eating activities,” she said.
A staffer at the state security branch of the Kucha County Police Bureau said that “even older people above the age of 65 cannot fast. We have a printed document about this restriction.”
So far this year, Xinjiang government officials and Chinese state media have been relatively quiet about the holy month.
In previous years, authorities held public meetings warning Muslims not to fast and patrolled Uyghur neighborhoods, inspecting homes during daytime and spying on residents at night to make sure they were eating.
They also enforced measures to make sure that Uyghur-run restaurants remained open, distributed food and drink to Uyghur government staff, and organized collective feasts.
“As Muslims around the world observe Ramadan in prayer and reflection, Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned, enslaved in forced labor, and suffocated under relentless surveillance,” said Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Washington-based Campaign for Uyghurs, in a statement on Feb. 28, at the start of Ramadan.
“Stripped of their religious freedom, they are banned from fasting, praying, or even identifying as Muslim — while the Chinese regime brazenly continues its crimes against them.”
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Match Group, the tech company that owns Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge, Tinder and other popular dating services, has known for years which users have been accused of sexual assault and rape, but kept those reports hidden from others on the app, according to a new investigation. Match Group controls half of the world’s online dating market and facilitates meetups for millions of people in scores of countries around the world. “Match Group is aware of a lot of the scale of the harm on their apps. They actually track this on their backend,” says journalist Emily Elena Dugdale, one of the authors of the investigation produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. “Similar to many tech companies, there’s really little regulation that requires them to actually tell you what’s going on on their apps.” We also speak with whistleblower Michael Lawrie, the former head of user safety and advocacy at OkCupid. He says he quit after his concerns about user safety went unheeded. “I was seeing a lot of stuff,” Lawrie says. “It became impossible for me to carry on working there, ethically and morally.”
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Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.
- Medicaid faces challenges under Trump administration, changes could hurt patients
- Congo war flareup threatens civilians, human rights, vital minerals, and regional stability
- Democratic National Committee meets to choose new leader, reckon with last election
- LA wildfires leave risks of future problems from toxic pollution to floods and landslides
- Snow-pack survey shows dry January, could affect future water supplies
The post Congo fighting threatens civilians and rights; Democrats mull last election as they choose new leader – January 31, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.
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With a ceasefire in force in Gaza for a week, the Israeli army and settlers have intensified their attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog programme The Listening Post.
Amid the exchange of captives, images showing legions of Hamas reinforcements puncture the narratives in Israeli media.
Presenter Richard Gizbert, a Canadian broadcaster and creator of The Listening Post series, pays tribute to Palestinian journalists and critiques the failure of Western journalists to support their colleagues under fire in Gaza.
“None of which bodes well for the Palestinians who have survived Israel’s vengeful war on Gaza, including journalists, some of whom symbolically shed their helmets and flak jackets when the ceasefire was announced — only to put them back on when Israel’s attacks resumed,” Gizbert says.
“More than 200 of their colleagues have been killed, many of them targeted, a number that dwarfs the journalistic casualty figures in any other conflict in modern history.
“And there has been a noticeable lack of outcry on that from Western media outlets, a large scale failure to show solidarity.
“Of all the crimes committed against journalists during this war, the one-side pro-Israeli narratives coming out of capitals like Washington, London and Berlin, this one should stick.
‘Against the odds’
“If journalists cannot even bring themselves to defend their own, what is the point?”Senior Palestine analyst Tahani Mustafa of the Crisis Group says: “Palestinian journalists have been indispensable, despite all the odds against them of the Israeli onslaught, or the lack of integrity of the Western media, the complete silence over the fact that their fellow journalists on the ground in Gaza are being targeted . . . ”
“This just feels like a pause in the killing machine.”
Executive director of Sarah Leah Whitson of Dawn says: “If I was working in Gaza as a journalist, I would not remove my helmet or my flak jacket. I have no doubt that Israeli military forces in Gaza will continue to gun down journalists.”
Associate professor Dalal Iriqat of the Arab American University Palestine says: “Their target is not really Hamas but the Palestinian people, the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian rights.
“That’s why they have been targeting media, they have been targeting anybody who tells the truth.”
Contributors:
Dalal Iriqat – Associate professor, Arab American University Palestine
Daniel Levy – President, US/Middle East Project
Tahani Mustafa – Senior Palestine analyst, Crisis Group
Sarah Leah Whitson – Executive director, DAWN
The Listening Post programme of 25 January 2025. Video: Al Jazeera
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Pro-democracy fighters in Myanmar launched a barrage of rockets at junta facilities in the eastern town of Loikaw as the deputy of the ruling military council was visiting, a rebel group said on Wednesday.
There was no confirmation from the junta of the Tuesday night attack and the anti-junta Brave Warriors for Myanmar, or BWM, militia force said it had no information about casualties.
The group said its members fired five 107 mm rockets to the State Hall in Loikaw, capital of Kayah state, and two rockets at a regional military command headquarters in the town as junta deputy Lt. Gen. Soe Win was visiting for Kayah State Day on Wednesday.
“We want to make sure that even the deputy leader of the junta council is worried about his life, that’s why we had to attack,” an official from the militia group told Radio Free Asia.
He said his group was trying to gather information about the attack, which was organized with help from two other militia groups, the Mountain Knight Civilian Defense Forces and the Anti-Coup People’s Liberation Force.
A Loikaw resident said that he heard loud explosions and the sound of shooting on Tuesday night while some pro-junta channels on the Telegram messaging service said rockets had exploded at Loikaw’s airport and nowhere else.
RFA tried to telephone the junta spokesman for Kayah state, Zar Ni Maung, but could not get through.
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Anti-junta forces have on several occasions used short-range 107 mm rockets in actual or planned attacks on junta leaders, including its chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.
It was not the first time that Lt. Gen. Soe Win has been in the vicinity of an insurgent attack.
On April 8, 2024, anti-junta fighters used drones to attack the Southeast Regional Military headquarters in Mawlamyine town when he was visiting.
There was speculation at the time that he had been hurt in the attack and he was not seen in public for about a month afterwards, fueling rumors he had been wounded.
Military-controlled media on Wednesday made no mention of any rocket attack in Loikaw but newspapers did carry a Kayah State Day statement from the junta chief, in which he called for people to reject the armed opposition and blamed the democracy supporters and foreign countries for “terror acts.”
“The current instability and terror acts occurring within the country are the result of individuals claiming to be promoting democracy, but instead, they have resorted to electoral fraud to unlawfully seize state power,” he said, apparently referring to Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, which won elections in 2015 and 2020. He made no mention of any attack in Loikaw.
“Rather than resolving issues through lawful democratic methods, they have chosen armed terrorism approaches,” he said.
The military complained of fraud in the 2020 polls, despite there being no evidence of any major cheating, organizers said, and ousted Suu Kyi’s government in a coup on Feb. 1, 2021. She and many others have been locked up ever since.
Min Aung Hlaing also accused foreign countries of “supporting dictatorship disguised as democracy.”
“Some foreign countries, which claim to be defending democracy, are also supporting and encouraging armed terror attacks that are directly or indirectly against the democratic system,” Min Aung Hlaing said. He did not identify any countries.
While Aung San Suu Kyi and her government attracted diplomatic and economic support from Western countries and some Asian neighbors, no foreign governments are known to have supported any anti-junta forces.
The military gets most of its weapons from Russia and China.
Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn
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Five years after riot police besieged Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University and trapped protesters fought back with catapults and Molotov cocktails, four people who were there say they were trying to stand up for their promised rights and freedoms in the face of ongoing political encroachment from Beijing.
The 10-day siege of PolyU began on Nov. 18, 2019, after around 1,000 protesters occupied the university as part of an ongoing series of actions to achieve the movement’s key demands: fully democratic elections; the withdrawal of plans to allow extradition to mainland China; greater official and police accountability; and an amnesty for detained protesters.
The protesters were then trapped on campus as riot police encircled the area, prompting nearly 100,000 people to turn out to battle riot police across Tsim Sha Tsui, Jordan, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok and other parts of the Kowloon peninsula.
Four young people who were among the besieged protesters spoke to RFA Cantonese on the fifth anniversary of the siege, which ended Nov. 19, 2019, and proved to be one of the last major standoffs between black-clad protesters and riot police after months of clashes sparked by plans to allow extradition to mainland China.
A protester throws a molotov cocktail during clashes with police outside Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, Nov. 17, 2019. A former protester now living in democratic Taiwan, who gave only the nickname Kai for fear of reprisals said he had been in the siege of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from Nov. 13-15, 2019 before responding to a call for help defending PolyU against riot police just a few days later.
He never expected the police to prevent the protesters from leaving, or that the siege would last 10 days.
“I never thought the police would adopt a siege approach,” Kai said. “They cut off our supply lines, and even cut off the water, which was inhumane.”
“Any supplies we had were brought in by older helpers from outside,” he said.
When the protesters did try to leave, they were outflanked by police on both sides, he said.
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“Soon after we ran out, we were intercepted by police in front of us, who forced us to run in another direction before we could move forward, but then after we’d run for a bit, we realized we were outflanked on both sides,” he said.
“All the police in front of us had their guns ready, and were waiting for us, so we had to go back to PolyU and plan our next move,” Kai said.
Kai managed to avoid arrest at the time, but left Hong Kong soon after learning he was on a police blacklist.
He said the political crackdown that followed the 2019 protest movement has shown that the protesters were right to fear Beijing’s encroachment on their city’s promised autonomy.
Protesters are sprayed with blue liquid from a water cannon during clashes with police outside Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, Nov. 17, 2019. He said many young protesters were motivated by a desire to burn their home city to the ground rather than acquiesce in its transformation into another Chinese city under Communist Party rule.
“Nowadays, the Chinese Communist Party is no longer hiding its authoritarian tendencies, and has been sanctioned by the international community, while the Hong Kong economy declines by the day,” Kai said.
“This shows that our idea that we would all burn together was right on the money,” he said.
Around 1,300 people were arrested, with around 300 sent to hospital for injuries related to water cannon blast, tear gas, and rubber bullets, as protesters wielding Molotov cocktails, catapults and other makeshift weapons from behind barricades beat back repeated attempts by riot police to advance into the university campus.
Small groups of protesters continued to make desperate bids for freedom throughout the siege, many of them only to end up being arrested and beaten bloody by police.
Police also deployed tear gas, water cannon, and rubber bullets against a crowd of thousands trying to push through towards Poly U from Jordan district, with hundreds forming human chains to pass bricks, umbrellas, and other supplies to front-line fighters.
“I took part in a lot of protest-related activities from June [of that year] onwards, although I never considered myself a front-line fighter,” a former protester living in the United Kingdom who gave only the pseudonym Kit for fear of reprisals, told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. “But I felt that if I wasn’t prepared to take it further, then we really would lose the rule of law in Hong Kong.”
A fire burns at Hong Kong Polytechnic University during an anti-government protest in Hong Kong, Nov. 18, 2019. The 2019 protests started out as a wave of mass public resistance to a legal amendment that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to face trial in mainland Chinese courts, a move that was generally seen as undermining the city’s status as a separate legal jurisdiction with an independent judiciary.
The movement later broadened to include the “five demands,” that included fully democratic elections, an amnesty for arrested protesters and greater official accountability.
The young protesters, hundreds of whom were minors, soon found themselves running out of food, and faced with a growing hygiene problem, and many tried to leave, only to be tear gassed, fired on with water cannon, or beaten up and taken away by police.
“We made three attempts to break out, but they all failed, so we went back to PolyU,” Kit said. “Everyone was scared, but we couldn’t come to any conclusion.”
“I later tried to get out by myself … but I was arrested by the police,” he said, adding that the movement had soon fizzled under the impact of coronavirus measures introduced by the government in early 2020.
“The government used people’s fear of the virus to make the protests disappear,” Kit Jai said. “The outlook is pretty grim right now, but I still hope that the people of Hong Kong … will keep its culture alive.”
A former protester living in Japan who gave only the nickname Tin for fear of reprisals said he also remembers the three failed attempts at breaking out, and the desperate mood that descended on those inside PolyU after those inside realized they were trapped.
Protesters leave the Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus to surrender to police, in Hong Kong, Nov. 19, 2019. “What impressed me most was that some of the protesters used a homemade catapult to launch Molotov cocktails, which set fire to the police armored vehicle, forcing it to retreat,” he said. “Everyone cheered when that happened.”
“Actually, the situation inside PolyU was total chaos, with a lot of misinformation coming in, and nobody really knew what to do,” he said.
Tin said he had fled Hong Kong and wound up in Japan after traveling to several other countries first.
“I’ve had good and bad experiences over the last five years, but I’ve survived,” he said.
A former protester now living in Germany who gave only the nickname Hei for fear of reprisals said he went to PolyU on Nov. 17 to try to persuade his fellow protesters to leave while they still could.
Before he knew it, he was trapped inside.
“I wanted to persuade them to leave, because the situation was critical, with helicopters flying overhead,” Hei said. “But they refused to leave.”
Hei never thought he’d be stuck there for as long as he was.
“When it became clear at around 9.30 that evening that those of us left inside weren’t going to be able to leave, things got pretty dark,” he said. “One guy told us to make a written statement pledging not to commit suicide.”
So he stayed behind to resist the advance of the riot police.
“The police offensive was really intense,” he said. “I was on the platform of A Core for the entire night.”
Pro-democracy lawmakers stand amid items left behind by protestors in Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, Nov. 26, 2019. “Just below us were the frontline fighters, and the police water cannon truck, which sprayed us on the platform with blue water from time to time,” Hei said. “Then at about 6.00 p.m. on the 18th, the police suddenly launched an offensive and fired large numbers of tear gas rounds and rubber bullets from a high altitude at the Core A platform.”
“I opened my umbrella and squatted down next to a tree, and the bullets kept cracking on the umbrella,” he said. “We lost the position pretty quickly, but I was able to make it back to PolyU luckily.”
Inside, rumors were swirling that the police would burst in to arrest everyone, so Hei managed to escape by following a lawyer who had come in to try to help the young people inside.
He had a lucky escape. Anyone arrested during the siege was eventually charged with “rioting,” with some receiving jail terms of up to 10 years.
“They only took my ID details,” said Hei, who wasn’t arrested, and who later left Hong Kong for Germany.
He said the siege taught him how hard it is to stand up to an authoritarian regime.
“But I have no regrets, because anyone with a conscience or any sense of justice would have chosen to stand up,” he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Yitong Wu and Kit Sung for RFA Cantonese.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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We go to Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, where we get an update from Arwa Damon of the humanitarian organization INARA on “deteriorating conditions” as Palestinians are “slowly exterminated” by disease and starvation caused by Israel’s brutal siege. A special U.N. committee has found that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” Palestinians in Gaza feel that “they are living through their own annihilation,” says Damon. “There is actually a real sense that the worst is yet to come.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Three years ago, Erin Primer had an idea for a new summer program for her school district: She wanted students to learn about where their food comes from. Primer, who has worked in student nutrition within California’s public school system for 10 years, applied for grant funding from the state to kick off the curriculum, and got it. Students planted cilantro in a garden tower, met a local organic farmer who grows red lentils, and learned about corn. “Many kids didn’t know that corn grew in a really tall plant,” said Primer. “They didn’t know that it had a husk.”
The curriculum, focused on bringing the farm into the school, had an effect beyond the classroom: Primer found that, after learning about and planting ingredients that they then used to make simple meals like veggie burgers, students were excited to try new foods and flavors in the lunchroom. One crowd pleaser happened to be totally vegan: a red lentil dal served with coconut rice.
“We have had students tell us that this is the best dish they’ve ever had in school food. To me, I was floored to hear this,” said Primer, who leads student nutrition for the San Luis Coastal district on California’s central coast, meaning she develops and ultimately decides on what goes on all school food menus. “It really builds respect into our food system. So not only are they more inclined to eat it, they’re also less inclined to waste it. They’re more inclined to eat all of it.”
Primer’s summer program, which the district is now considering making a permanent part of the school calendar, was not intended to inspire students to embrace plant-based cooking. But that was one of the things that happened — and it’s happening in different forms across California.
Students participate in an annual food-testing event for the Los Angeles Unified School District, with a menu that included vegan chickpea masala.
Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesA recent report shows that the number of schools in California serving vegan meals has skyrocketed over the past five years. Although experts say this growth is partly a reflection of demand from students and parents, they also credit several California state programs that are helping school districts access more local produce and prepare fresh, plant-based meals on-site.
Growing meat for human consumption takes a tremendous toll on both the climate and the environment; the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock production contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, cattle and other ruminants are a huge source of methane. Animal agriculture is also extremely resource-intensive, using up tremendous amounts of water and land. Reducing the global demand for meat and dairy, especially in high-income countries, is an effective way to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the rate of global warming.
The climate benefits of eating less meat are one reason that school districts across the country have introduced more vegetarian — and to a lesser degree, vegan — lunch options. In 2009, Baltimore City Public Schools removed meat from its school lunch menus on Mondays, part of the Meatless Mondays campaign. A decade later, New York City Public Schools, the nation’s largest school district, did the same. In recent years, vegan initiatives have built upon the success of Meatless Mondays, like Mayor Eric Adams’ “Plant-Powered Fridays” program in New York City.
But California, the state that first put vegetarianism on the map in the early 20th century, has been leading the country on plant-based school lunch. “California is always ahead of the curve, and we’ve been eating plant-based or plant-forward for many years — this is not a new concept in our state,” said Primer. A recent report from the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth found that among California’s 25 largest school districts, more than half — 56 percent — of middle and high school menus now have daily vegan options, a significant jump compared to 36 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, the percentage of elementary districts offering weekly vegan options increased from 16 percent to 60 percent over the last five years.
A view of the greenhouse used for a Los Angeles magnet school’s after-school program focused on climate knowledge.
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesStudent nutrition directors like Primer say the foundation that allows schools to experiment with new recipes is California’s universal free lunch program. She notes that, when school lunch is free, students are more likely to actually try and enjoy it: “Free food plus good food equals a participation meal increase every time.”
Nora Stewart, the author of the Friends of the Earth report, says the recent increase in vegan school lunch options has also been in response to a growing demand for less meat and dairy in cafeterias from climate-conscious students. “We’re seeing a lot of interest from students and parents to have more plant-based [meals] as a way to really help curb greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. A majority of Gen Zers — 79 percent — say they would eat meatless at least once or twice a week, according to research conducted by Aramark, a company provides food services to school districts and universities, among other clients. And the food-service company that recently introduced an all-vegetarian menu in the San Francisco Unified School District credits students with having “led the way” in asking for less meat in their cafeterias. The menu includes four vegan options: an edamame teriyaki bowl, a bean burrito bowl, a taco bowl with a pea-based meat alternative, and marinara pasta.
Stewart theorizes that school nutrition directors are also increasingly aware of other benefits to serving vegan meals. “A lot of school districts are recognizing that they can integrate more culturally diverse options with more plant-based meals,” said Stewart. In the last five years, the nonprofit found, California school districts have added 41 new vegan dishes to their menus, including chana masala bowls, vegan tamales, and falafel wraps. Dairy-free meals also benefit lactose-intolerant students, who are more likely to be students of color.
Still, vegan meals are hardly the default in California cafeterias, and in many places, they’re unheard of. Out of the 25 largest school districts in the state, only three elementary districts offer daily vegan options, the same number as did in 2019. According to Friends of the Earth, a fourth of the California school districts they reviewed offer no plant-based meal options; in another fourth, the only vegan option for students is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I was surprised to see that,” said Stewart.
In their climate-focused after-school program, students learn about farm-to-table cooking, composting, greenhouse sciences, and more. Making school lunches without animal products isn’t just a question of ingredients. It’s also a question of knowledge and resources — and the California legislature has created a number of programs in recent years that aim to get those tools to schools that need them.
In 2022, the state put $600 million toward its Kitchen Infrastructure and Training Funds program, which offers funding to schools to upgrade their kitchen equipment and train staff. This kind of leveling up allows kitchen staff to better incorporate “scratch cooking” — essentially, preparing meals on-site from fresh ingredients — into their operations. (The standard in school lunch sometimes is jokingly referred to as “cooking with a box cutter,” as in heating up and serving premade meals that come delivered in a box.) Another state program, the $100 million School Food Best Practices Funds, gives schools money to purchase more locally grown food. And the Farm to School incubator grant program has awarded about $86 million since 2021 to allow schools to develop programming focused on climate-smart or organic agriculture.
Although only the School Food Best Practices program explicitly incentivizes schools to choose plant-based foods, Stewart credits all of them with helping schools increase their vegan options. Primer said the Farm to School program — which provided the funding to develop her school district’s farming curriculum in its first two years — has driven new recipe development and testing.
All three state programs are set to run out of money by the end of the 2024-2025 school year. Nick Anicich is the program manager for Farm to School, which is run out of the state Office of Farm to Fork. (“That’s a real thing that exists in California,” he likes to say.) He says when state benefits expire, it’s up to schools to see how to further advance the things they’ve learned. “We’ll see how schools continue to innovate and implement these initiatives with their other resources,” said Anicich. Stewart says California has set “a powerful example” by bettering the quality and sustainability of its school lunch, “showing what’s possible nationwide.”
One takeaway Primer has had from the program is to reframe food that’s better for the planet as an expansive experience, one with more flavor and more depth, rather than a restrictive one — one without meat. Both ideas can be true, but one seems to get more students excited.
“That has been a really important focus for us. We want [to serve] food that is just so good, everybody wants to eat it,” Primer said. “Whether or not it has meat in it is almost secondary.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More schools than ever are serving vegan meals in California. Here’s how they did it. on Oct 15, 2024.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Vietnam has denounced what it called the brutal behavior of Chinese law enforcement personnel who it said beat and injured Vietnamese fishermen on a boat intercepted near the Paracel Islands.
Vietnamese media said the Chinese attackers boarded the fishing boat near an atoll in the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea on Sunday and beat the crew with iron bars, seriously injuring four of them. They told Vietnamese authorities the men smashed the boat’s equipment and took away its catch.
China denied the accusations saying “on-site operations were professional and restrained, and no injuries were found.”
Both countries, as well as Taiwan, claim the islands but China occupies them entirely.
What are the Paracel Islands?
Known as Xisha in China and Hoang Sa in Vietnam, the archipelago consists of some 130 reefs and small coral islands, 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of central Vietnam and 350 km (220 miles) southeast of China’s Hainan island. They are 760 km (472 miles) north of the Spratly Islands, the other main disputed archipelago in the South China Sea.
The South China Sea is a strategically important shipping route with an estimated US$3.4 trillion worth of trade cruising through its waters every year.
The Paracels are believed to sit on top of large reserves of natural gas and oil though the extent is not known, as there has been little exploration of the area, partly due to territorial disputes over the islands.
The archipelago is surrounded by rich fishing grounds that generations of Chinese and Vietnamese fishermen have worked.
A Vietnamese boat (L) that was rammed by a Chinese vessel and sank near the disputed Paracel Islands, seen near a Marine Guard ship (R) off Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province, on May 29, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Stringer History of the Paracel Islands
Both Vietnam and China say that the Paracels are mentioned in their ancient texts. The name Paracel, however, was adopted in the 16th century after Portuguese explorers named the islands “Ilhas do Pracel”. “Pracel”, or parcel, is a Portuguese term used by navigators to refer to a submerged bank or reef.
France claimed the archipelago as part of the French Indochinese Union in the 19th century and put it under the same colonial administration as Vietnam’s southern mainland, known at the time as Cochinchina. The Chinese nationalist Kuomintang, now one of the main political parties in Taiwan, claimed the Paracels as territory of the Republic of China in January 1921.
Japanese forces occupied the archipelago between 1939 and 1945. Disputes over the islands continued in later years between the governments of the then South Vietnam, which annexed some reefs, and the People’s Republic of China.
On Jan. 19, 1974, Chinese troops attacked and defeated South Vietnamese forces deployed on the islands, killing 74 South Vietnamese sailors and soldiers in the so-called Battle of the Paracel Islands. Chinese troops then occupied the whole archipelago.
China’s construction
In 2012, China established Sansha City, headquartered on Woody Island, the largest Paracel island, which China calls Yongxing. The administrative headquarters is in charge of all of the features China claims in the South China Sea, including the Paracels and the Spratlys to the south.
Aerial view of Sansha in the disputed Paracel chain, on July 27, 2012. (STR/AFP) According to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative think tank, China has at least 20 outposts in the Paracels. Three of them have harbors capable of handling large numbers of naval and civilian vessels and five have helipads. China opened the civil-military Sansha Yongxing Airport in 2014.
Woody Island has been developed into a complete urban hub protected by HQ-9 surface-to-air missile batteries. It is home to a growing civilian population of at least 2,300.
Upgrades of island facilities have included a kindergarten and primary school in 2015. The island also has a courthouse, a cinema, banks, hospitals, post offices and a stadium, according to a report in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post in May 2023.
Vietnam’s claim
Vietnam has not abandoned its claim over the Paracel islands, which it officially classifies as a district of Danang City, called the Hoang Sa District, established in 1997.
In its complaint about China’s treatment of the fishing crew, Vietnam’s foreign ministry referred to the islands as Vietnamese.
“Vietnam is extremely concerned, indignant and resolutely protests the brutal treatment by Chinese law enforcement forces of Vietnamese fishermen and fishing boats operating in the Hoang Sa archipelago of Vietnam,” foreign ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said in a statement on Oct. 2.
An anti-China protest to mark the 43rd anniversary of China’s occupation of the Paracel Islands, in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Jan. 19, 2017. (Reuters/Kham) Confrontations
In one of the most serious escalations of the dispute between Hanoi and Beijing over the archipelago, in May 2014 China moved an oil-drilling platform into waters near the Paracels, leading to a three-month standoff. The crisis triggered an unprecedented wave of anti-China protests in Vietnam, until China withdrew the oil rig a month earlier than scheduled.
Fishing crews from central Vietnam operate around the Chinese-occupied reefs and are often subjected to harassment by Chinese maritime militia and law enforcement personnel, fishermen say.
In 2020, a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat. Vietnam lodged an official protest, saying: “The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago and threatened the lives and damaged the property and legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen.”
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Luna Pham for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
