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The Trump Administration Is Facing Scrutiny for How It’s Handing Out Billion-Dollar Border Wall Contracts
The post The Trump Administration Is Facing Scrutiny for How It’s Handing Out Billion-Dollar Border Wall Contracts appeared first on ProPublica.
The Department of Homeland Security has released little information to the public on its plans to build new border infrastructure through the Big Bend region. Hannah Gentiles When Tommy Fisher set out to build a section of border wall in South Texas during the first Trump administration, the project quickly became ensnared in controversy. Experts raised concerns about shoddy construction and signs of erosion. Beyond that, Fisher’s company had received funding from a group called We Build the Wall, an influential conservative nonprofit that included President Donald Trump’s then-political strategist Steve Bannon as a board member. Some of its leaders eventually went to prison for their involvement in the venture. Even the president denounced the project. “I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads,” Trump wrote on X in response to reporting by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune in 2020 detailing problems with the wall project. “It was only done to make me look bad,” the post continued. But none of this stopped Fisher’s company from getting subsequent border wall contracts, including from the state of Texas. And now the federal government has awarded his company over $9 billion to build even more border wall — including a $1.2 billion contract in the Big Bend region of Texas, where residents have continued to press for answers about the government’s plans in and around one of the country’s largest national parks. And, as during Trump’s first term, Fisher’s work is stirring up controversy again. A New York-based construction company has sued the Trump administration after it awarded the bulk of new Texas border wall contracts to North Dakota-headquartered Fisher Sand & Gravel and another company. Posillico Civil Inc.’s lawsuit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., on May 13, offers one of the first public glimpses into the procurement process along the border in Texas. The suit claims that out of the 11 prequalified vendors for the wall projects, U.S. Customs and Border Protection awarded nearly $14 billion — about 73% of the value of the contracts — to just two: Fisher’s firm and Barnard Construction, based in Montana. The work also includes wall projects around El Paso, Laredo, Del Rio and the Rio Grande Valley. The Trump administration has come under scrutiny for awarding no-bid contracts and for the lack of transparency around its accelerated border wall construction plans, moves designed to help the president achieve his key campaign promise of securing the border. During his first term, Trump’s moves also faced criticism. A 2020 investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune found that the government was awarding contracts before acquiring titles to the land, leading to millions of dollars in costs related to delays. A review of federal spending data by the news organizations also revealed how the first Trump administration had made hundreds of contract modifications, increasing the cost of the border wall project by billions. The administration has shown no signs of slowing down: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security secured $46.5 billion to build the border wall in 2025, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Having prequalified contractors is not uncommon, as the system is structured to help the government move through projects quicker, but it is not meant to remove competition, said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS “is picking contractors for loyalty and from confidence that they will do its bidding, rather than, as every other administration has done, picking contractors for best value,” Tiefer said, referring to reports that then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem awarded a $220 million ad campaign contract to a firm she had connections to. In response to ProPublica’s reporting, DHS said the department “has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors” and that it doesn’t control or weigh in on who contractors hire. “They got huge blank checks, and they want to write them as fast as possible,” Tiefer said. The White House declined to comment for this story. A CBP spokesperson said in a written statement that the bidding process has been fair. “Contracts awarded are based on the contractor’s qualifications to perform the work in a timely manner and at prices deemed fair and reasonable,” the spokesperson wrote, saying neither CBP nor DHS have an affiliation with We Build the Wall. An attorney for Posillico declined to comment. The company has previously built 43 miles of federal wall in South Texas and also won a contract to construct sections of Gov. Greg Abbott’s state border project. The state project experienced many of the same construction delays and cost overruns as Trump’s border wall. Posillico alleges in the lawsuit that it incurred “substantial bid preparation and proposal costs” drawing up plans for federal solicitations that were “not genuine competitive opportunities.” While these are just allegations, Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said border wall contracts have long been controversial and raised questions on what the government is getting for the cost, as well as the political connections of some of the contractors. Amey closely followed border wall procurement during the first Trump administration. “There’s a cost, and ethics and contracting questions that all come up whenever you mention anything with the border wall,” Amey said. Representatives for Fisher Sand & Gravel and Barnard did not respond to requests for comment. Barnard has filed as an intervenor in the case, meaning it isn’t a party in the suit but wants to participate. Although the vast majority of the new funding is going to Fisher and Barnard, several other companies got smaller percentages of the contracts: Spencer Construction LLC; Granite Construction Co.; and Southwest Valley Constructors, which recently won another $1.7 billion contract for barrier construction in and around Big Bend National Park. Representatives for the other companies did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Posillico’s lawsuit claims that the contracts issued to the other companies went beyond the original scope of wall construction work the federal government told bidders it was seeking. In CPB’s Big Bend Sector project, for example, contractors were ultimately required to install cattle fencing and cattle guards — something Posillico’s lawsuit contends was not what the government originally asked of potential contractors. Had the government been clearer on the scope, the lawsuit argues, the company may have had a better chance of winning a contract. As part of the new scope of work, winning contractors, including Fisher Sand & Gravel, will also have to work with the International Boundary and Water Commission, the federal agency that administers treaties around the Rio Grande and the physical border with Mexico. Fisher has previously clashed with the commission. In 2019, the commission filed a lawsuit claiming Fisher had violated a binational water treaty between the U.S. and Mexico after the company constructed fencing in South Texas. The investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune found that a 3-mile stretch of border wall Fisher built on the banks of the Rio Grande was at risk of collapsing if not fixed. The company also built a segment of border wall in Sunland Park, New Mexico, without following proper procedures. Both projects involved We Build the Wall, the nonprofit. In the end, four of the nonprofit’s top leaders, including Bannon, were arrested on fraud and other charges connected to the fundraising scheme. Three men, including an Air Force veteran, were convicted and sentenced to prison. Trump pardoned Bannon, who was awaiting trial. Fisher and the government reached a settlement in 2022 in which Fisher Sand & Gravel agreed to conduct quarterly inspections, maintain an existing gate and keep a $3 million bond for 15 years or until the property was transferred to the government to cover expenses in case the structure failed. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="501" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="Protesters stand on a sidewalk alongside a road, holding signs that read “Save the Big Bend” and “Save Nature.”" class="wp-image-79765" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NBBW-PRESIDIO-PROTEST-3754_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> Local residents protest new wall infrastructure in Presidio, Texas, in March. Hannah Gentiles “The Rules Don’t Really Apply” The Posillico lawsuit offers a rare peek behind the veil at the high-dollar world of border wall construction, an industry that has sprung up over the past 10 years in response to Trump’s recurring campaign promise to build a wall. The procurement process has been especially obscure around border wall contracting, thanks to Noem waiving dozens of laws regulating financial transparency and competitiveness in government contracting for the entire southern border. That act marked the first time in American history these waivers were applied to all 1,954 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. In its lawsuit, Posillico made explicit that it did not contest the use of waivers to expedite construction of the wall. For residents of border communities, the waivers have meant that DHS has released very little information detailing the massive infrastructure projects coming to their communities. This spring, the Center for Biological Diversity filed two lawsuits in federal court related to border wall construction in the Big Bend area, specifically over DHS’ failure to respond to a series of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to the project and challenging the agency’s authority to waive laws without Congress’ approval. The government has not filed answers to the complaints yet, with a deadline of June 1 for the FOIA complaint and early June in the congressional authority lawsuit. In the Posillico lawsuit, DHS moved to seal documents in the case, including any depositions or affidavits; Judge David A. Tapp signed off on the motion. In the absence of publicly posted requests for proposals and direct communication from Washington, residents in the Big Bend region have been relying on an online map posted by CBP that says it tracks contracts as they’re awarded. Lines on the map have shifted dramatically over the past few months, raising questions about what the government actually plans to build. The agency briefly took the map down altogether, around the same time that protests about the possibility of a physical wall in Big Bend National Park reached a fever pitch. When the map was restored to the website, it appeared to show a mix of “vehicle barriers” and “patrol roads” planned instead of steel walls within park boundaries. Fisher Sand & Gravel is currently slated to build a wall-related project in Big Bend Ranch State Park, bordering the national park to the west, though it hasn’t publicly released any plans for what alternate border barriers might look like. Landowners in communities adjacent to the park are still gearing up to face eminent domain challenges from the federal government. Barnard is working on a project outside the parks. Documents in Posillico’s lawsuit revealed that CBP has flagged sections of wall in Hudspeth, Jeff Davis and Presidio counties for “fast-track” construction by the company. To support that work, a pecan farm near the small ranching community of Lobo has started clearing a swath of land for a 500-person camp and petitioning the local water conservation district for approval to use agricultural well water for the project. Amey, the contracting expert, said the Trump administration seems to want to make the exception the rule, considering controversial practices like Noem’s decision to award the huge border ad contract and the fact the government has waived so many contracting rules to accelerate the wall’s construction. “It seems as if this administration, especially this time around, has decided that the rules don’t really apply,” he said. The post The Trump Administration Is Facing Scrutiny for How It’s Handing Out Billion-Dollar Border Wall Contracts appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Sam Karas.
Rats and Poor Sanitation Deepen Misery in Gaza Displacement Camps
Since February 2026, camps for displaced Palestinians in occupied Gaza have suffered severe rodent infestations that have received little attention from major US news outlets. Nour Abo Aisha, a Palestinian freelance journalist, reported firsthand from ...
Since February 2026, camps for displaced Palestinians in occupied Gaza have suffered severe rodent infestations that have received little attention from major US news outlets. Nour Abo Aisha, a Palestinian freelance journalist, reported firsthand from a camp in western Gaza City for Truthout, documenting the devastating impacts of rats and… The post Rats and Poor Sanitation Deepen Misery in Gaza Displacement Camps appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Harmful Health Effects of Glyphosate and Herbicide Use in California
A 2026 report by Nate Halverson at Mother Jones exposes the widespread use of glyphosate-containing pesticides throughout California’s forests. Monsanto, the producer of the controversial chemical, widely used in forestry and agriculture, is unde...
A 2026 report by Nate Halverson at Mother Jones exposes the widespread use of glyphosate-containing pesticides throughout California’s forests. Monsanto, the producer of the controversial chemical, widely used in forestry and agriculture, is under investigation for its many initiatives to muddy the waters and sow scientific disinformation to limit public… The post Harmful Health Effects of Glyphosate and Herbicide Use in California appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
An Iranian Man Wants America to Attack Again
This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.
CPJ urges heightened awareness for journalists traveling to US for FIFA World Cup
May 21, 2026, New York, NY — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has advised journalists traveling throughout the United States for the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup may face questioning or hostility from immigration officials at the border or around venues. The World Cup spans games across cities in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada...
May 21, 2026, New York, NY — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has advised journalists traveling throughout the United States for the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup may face questioning or hostility from immigration officials at the border or around venues. The World Cup spans games across cities in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada from June 11 to July 19, 2026. CPJ, a press freedom organization that works globally, has published resources for journalists reporting on the World Cup from this year’s host countries, including a travel advisory and legal rights guide. FIFA has accredited an estimated 50,000 journalists and media workers to cover the games. The majority of World Cup matches will be held in the U.S. where in recent months there have been cases of journalists being arrested, detained, and deported in relation to their work. “Based on the experiences of recent months in the United States, journalists traveling to the United States need to know that their press credentials won’t necessarily protect them at the border or when out reporting,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “We’ve seen immigration enforcement used as a tool to silence reporting, with authorities detaining, denying entry to, or deporting journalists not because of any crime, but because of their journalism.” International journalists, commentators, and writers traveling to the U.S. have previously been denied entry at the border and had visas revoked under the current administration. CPJ urges reporters to complete a risk assessment, identify emergency contacts, develop a check-in procedure and keep those contacts on paper in case devices are confiscated. Reporters have also been assaulted by officials while covering protests in the United States. Journalists should prepare for possible additional screening at the border. Failure to comply with a request from a border guard could result in devices being seized and, depending on the journalist’s immigration status, delays or denial of entry. In Mexico, journalists covering stories of corruption or human rights around the World Cup may face harassment, threats, or physical violence. Attacks on journalists covering the World Cup may be especially acute for those of marginalized genders. In Canada, there have been cases of journalists stopped at the border and, very rarely, arrests of reporters covering protests. To access safety information while reporting, journalists can text CPJ’s safety chatbot on WhatsApp by messaging “hello” to +1-206-590-6191 and selecting from a menu of safety topics. ### About the Committee to Protect Journalists The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. Media contact: press@cpj.org Note to journalists needing advice: Journalists seeking emergency assistance or safety advice can email CPJ at emergencies@cpj.org. They will be asked to provide information about their circumstances, needs, and work as a journalist. All information is confidential but may be shared with a small network of trusted partners for vetting purposes. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
New Center Tackles Seedling Shortages to Replant New Mexico’s Burn Scars
Since 2000, New Mexico wildfires have burned seven million acres of land, causing flash flooding, displacing wildlife, and contaminating water sources. Wildfires are burning through forests more quickly than they can be recovered through natural regene...
Since 2000, New Mexico wildfires have burned seven million acres of land, causing flash flooding, displacing wildlife, and contaminating water sources. Wildfires are burning through forests more quickly than they can be recovered through natural regeneration or with human reforestation efforts, an issue exacerbated by a national shortage of seedlings… The post New Center Tackles Seedling Shortages to Replant New Mexico’s Burn Scars appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Pro-Palestine speech silenced at CUNY Law
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Most Americans Can’t Afford “Minimal Quality of Life,” Study Finds
Wage stagnation, coupled with increasing prices, makes it increasingly difficult for many Americans to meet their basic needs. A May 2025 article by Sharon Zhang for Truthout shared an analysis from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (...
Wage stagnation, coupled with increasing prices, makes it increasingly difficult for many Americans to meet their basic needs. A May 2025 article by Sharon Zhang for Truthout shared an analysis from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), which found that “a ‘minimal quality of life’ is out of… The post Most Americans Can’t Afford “Minimal Quality of Life,” Study Finds appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Humanitarian crisis deepens in Gaza amid ceasefire delaysAfghanistan ruling erodes women’s rightsResponse to Ebola outbreak ramps up
Humanitarian crisis deepens in Gaza amid ceasefire delaysAfghanistan ruling erodes women’s rightsResponse to Ebola outbreak ramps up This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Jolina Dong.
Cuba denounces ‘cruel and ruthless aggression’ of US as White House indicts Raúl Castro
<img width="1024" height="676" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273419189-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C676&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Cuba's former President Raul Castro (C) and former Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura (R) attend a May Day rally marking International Workers' Day in Havana on May 1, 2026. Photo by YAMIL LAGE / AFP via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343658" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/cuba-denounces-cruel-and-ruthless-aggression-of-us-as-white-house-indicts-raul-castro/cuba-politics-social-labour-may-day-demo" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273419189-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1691&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1691" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 8","caption":"Cuba's former President Raul Castro (C) and former Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura (R) attend a May Day rally marking International Workers' Day in Havana on May 1, 2026. (Photo by YAMIL LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1777646603","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"CUBA-POLITICS-SOCIAL-LABOUR-MAY DAY-DEMO","orientation":"1","alt":""}" data-image-title="CUBA-POLITICS-SOCIAL-LABOUR-MAY DAY-DEMO" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Cuba’s former President Raul Castro (C) and former Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura (R) attend a May Day rally marking International Workers’ Day in Havana on May 1, 2026. Photo by YAMIL LAGE / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273419189-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C515&ssl=1"> In a speech described as “Orwellian,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed Cuba’s suffering on the military-run company founded by Fidel Castro’s brother.
<img width="1024" height="676" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273419189-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C676&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Cuba's former President Raul Castro (C) and former Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura (R) attend a May Day rally marking International Workers' Day in Havana on May 1, 2026. 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Photo by YAMIL LAGE / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273419189-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C515&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 20, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. As the US Justice Department indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro on Wednesday in what could be a prelude to military action, the Cuban government denounced the US for “cruel and ruthless aggression.” The 94-year-old Castro, who served as Cuba’s leader until 2021 after taking over for his brother Fidel in 2008, was indicted on one count of conspiracy to kill US nationals for his alleged role in the shooting down of planes operated by the anti-Castro Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of four Cuban Americans. “For nearly 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said as he announced the charges at Miami’s Freedom Tower. “My message today is clear: The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.” While Blanche described the four men as “unarmed civilians,” the Cuban government said the group had repeatedly violated its sovereign airspace and that it had warned the US government before shooting down the plane. Declassified documents from a month before the incident show that officials in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) viewed the Brothers’ activities as “taunting” and feared the Cuban government might shoot a plane down. “Is a sovereign state like Cuba obligated to tolerate illegal and continuous incursions into its territory? Under no circumstances,” the Cuban embassy in the US said in a statement published on Wednesday on social media. “International law and global civil aviation conventions protect the sovereignty of nations over their airspace.” “When formal warnings to the [International Civil Aviation Organization], the FAA, and political authorities are sustainedly ignored, the defense of borders and national security becomes an unavoidable duty for the protection of the country.” MythBreakers: Exposing the Brothers to the Rescue hoax Is a sovereign State like Cuba obligated to tolerate illegal and continuous incursions into its territory? Under no circumstances. International law and global civil aviation conventions protect the sovereignty of… pic.twitter.com/p9UC0shT95 — Cuban Embassy in US (@EmbaCubaUS) May 20, 2026 The indictment comes as the Trump administration issues threats that have been widely interpreted as signals that another military regime change operation could soon be on the horizon, following the administration’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran already this year. “CUBA IS NEXT! Thank you [President Donald Trump] and [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]!” cheered US Rep. Carlos Giminez (R-Fla.), one of many Miami-based politicians who have called for aggressive action by the Trump administration against Cuba in recent days. He was responding to a video posted by Rubio on Wednesday directed at the Cuban people in which he again denied that the crippling oil blockade imposed on Cuba by Trump bore any responsibility for the economic ruin the island’s population currently faces. After effectively cutting off Cuba’s primary supplier of oil in January when the US conducted its illegal operation to abduct Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump threatened to impose steep tariffs on any country that provided oil to Cuba, scaring off its other main suppliers, including Mexico, Russia, and Algeria. Last week, Cuba’s energy minister announced that the country had “absolutely no fuel oil, no diesel.” pic.twitter.com/nwEePVJ1lX — Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) May 20, 2026 But Rubio told the Cuban people in Spanish on Wednesday: “The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil ‘blockade’ by the US. As you know better than anyone else, you have been suffering from blackouts for years. The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is that those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.” He specifically laid the blame at the feet of the accused, the military-run company Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), founded by Raúl Castro in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The company has come to control large swathes of the Cuban economy, from hotels and grocery stores to gas stations and banks, and is estimated to control between 40-70% of Cuba’s overall economy, according to a recent New York Times report—though the secrecy of the organization makes it difficult to determine its true value. Rubio said that the entrepreneurs running GAESA “have $18 billion in assets and control 70% of Cuba’s economy,” which was first reported by the Miami Herald last year based on balance sheets obtained from the company. But the Cuban government and other critics have disputed this figure, arguing that it actually refers to Cuban pesos, which would make its holdings closer to about $746 million. Regardless, Rubio omitted any mention of the fact that even prior to the oil blockade enacted in January by Trump, the US still had a strict trade embargo in place against Cuba for more than 60 years, which the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America has estimated cost the country more than $130 billion since it was imposed—more than the total gross domestic product of the entire country in 2020. Rubio said on Wednesday the US was ready to open a “new chapter” with Cuba, but that the thing getting in the way was “those who control their country.” Rubio now full Orwellian: the total blockade that we have put on your country after decades of an embargo has nothing to do with the scarcity in your lives or the fact that we are intentionally starving your children. https://t.co/OLLHJfyo3E — Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) May 20, 2026 In light of Trump’s persistent suggestions that he wants to “take” Cuba and “do anything I want with it,” the Cuban government described Rubio’s message as one meant to justify further US coercion. “The reason why the US secretary of state lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously when referring to Cuba and trying to justify the aggression to which he subjects the Cuban people is not ignorance or incompetence,” said Carlos Fernández de Cossío, the deputy minister for foreign affairs in Cuba, in a social media post on Wednesday. “He knows full well that there is no excuse for such a cruel and ruthless aggression.” Last week, the US offered to give Cuba $100 million in humanitarian assistance to deal with the crisis it has imposed through its oil blockade, but only if it agrees to “meaningful reforms” and “fundamental changes” to its government that would allow greater access to US companies. Cuba’s current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, contended that an easier way to alleviate Cuba’s suffering would be “by lifting or easing the blockade, as it is well known that the humanitarian situation is coldly calculated and induced.” Update (2:00 pm ET): This story was updated to include comments from acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche following the announcement of a formal indictment on Wednesday. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Prager.
Louisiana’s Anti-Homeless Bill Plans to Criminalize Sleeping Outside
In April 2026, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed Bill 211, which the National Homelessness Law Center has called “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country,” according to a report by Stephen Prager for Common Dreams. The bill e...
In April 2026, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed Bill 211, which the National Homelessness Law Center has called “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country,” according to a report by Stephen Prager for Common Dreams. The bill effectively criminalizes sleeping on the streets in cities across Louisiana,… The post Louisiana’s Anti-Homeless Bill Plans to Criminalize Sleeping Outside appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Sanders, Lee move to rein in super PACs amid growing billionaire grip on US elections
The financialization of the American electoral process is well documented. Now two key progressive legislators are proposing a new law to do something about it. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Democratic Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12) introduced the ...
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) (R) conduct a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343647" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/sanders-lee-move-to-rein-in-super-pacs-amid-growing-billionaire-grip-on-us-elections/senators-sanders-and-lee-discuss-bill-to-abolish-super-pacs" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"4","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R1","caption":"WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 20: U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) (R) conduct a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2026 in Washington, DC. Sen. Sanders and Rep. Lee held a news conference to introduce a bill to abolish super PACs. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1779291954","copyright":"2026 Getty Images","focal_length":"98","iso":"3200","shutter_speed":"0.0025","title":"Senators Sanders And Lee Discuss Bill To Abolish Super PAC's","orientation":"1","alt":""}" data-image-title="Senators Sanders And Lee Discuss Bill To Abolish Super PAC&#8217;s" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) (R) conduct a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2277357083-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> The financialization of the American electoral process is well documented. Now two key progressive legislators are proposing a new law to do something about it. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Democratic Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12) introduced the Abolish Super PACs Act on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. It’s a measure they say will eliminate one the primary ways billionaires funnel cash into elections: super PACs. The bill would limit donations to super PACs to $5,000 for both individuals and corporations. “Today, the average American gets one vote. Billionaires, however, through their super PACs, can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect the candidates of their choice and to defeat candidates who stand up for working families or a just foreign policy,” Sanders said. The measure is necessary, Lee said, to save a democratic process that is under strain from unlimited sums of money poured into elections by billionaires and corporations. “Our bill would ensure that millionaires, billionaires, corporations, corporate interests, special interests would no longer be able to get around the guardrails, the limitations that everyday individuals like you and I have,” Lee said. A super PAC, or political action committee, is an entity that can currently raise unlimited donations from individuals, corporations, and unions. It can spend that money to independently support or oppose candidates, including through advertising and other election-related expenditures. Candidates cannot formally coordinate with a super PAC. But that limitation is often skirted, leaving the wealthiest Americans with disproportionate influence over electoral outcomes. Both Sanders and Lee pointed to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010 as a key motivator to overhaul current election laws sooner rather than later. Since the controversial ruling opened the door for unlimited outside spending on elections, corporations and billionaires have turned to super PACs to unleash a barrage of spending. “I don’t want people to think this is just another issue. It is a more important issue,” Sanders said at the press conference announcing the bill. “We are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare. Why is that? You think it may have something to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies who spend millions of dollars making sure we don’t move to a Medicare for All system?” “This is an issue that touches on every single issue facing working people in this country,” said Sanders. Billionaire Elon Musk used his America PAC to pour roughly $288 million into Trump’s and other Republlicans 2024 presidential campaign. The Abolish Super PACs Act comes as a smaller and wealthier group of donors fund a growing proportion of campaign spending. The New York Times reported that just 300 billionaires and their families accounted for 19% of all federal campaign spending in the US in 2024, much of it funneled through Super PACs. Before the Citizens United ruling, contributions from billionaires made up only 0.3%. “It corrupts, it discourages, I call it functionally disenfranchising the political process from every aspect, from every angle,” Lee said. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham.
‘You can’t say ‘genocide’’: How US media sanitized Israel’s destruction of Gaza
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="A balloon reading 'CNN lies, Gaza dies, Tell the truth' is flown by protestors during a demonstration outside of the CNN bureau in Washington, D.C. on August 25, 2025 in an effort to disrupt the shows of reporters Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer, whom they accuse of covering up war crimes by Israel. Photo by Bryan Dozier/Anadolu via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343640" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/you-cant-say-genocide-how-us-media-sanitized-israels-destruction-of-gaza/gettyimages-2231355133" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1708&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1708" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","alt":""}' data-image-title="GettyImages-2231355133" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" A balloon reading ‘CNN lies, Gaza dies, Tell the truth’ is flown by protestors during a demonstration outside of the CNN bureau in Washington, D.C. on August 25, 2025 in an effort to disrupt the shows of reporters Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer, whom they accuse of covering up war crimes by Israel. Photo by Bryan Dozier/Anadolu via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “These journalists and these editorial boards—they need to be held accountable… I have fantasies of somebody holding my book at the Hague and calling out the media at the International Court of Justice.”
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="A balloon reading 'CNN lies, Gaza dies, Tell the truth' is flown by protestors during a demonstration outside of the CNN bureau in Washington, D.C. on August 25, 2025 in an effort to disrupt the shows of reporters Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer, whom they accuse of covering up war crimes by Israel. Photo by Bryan Dozier/Anadolu via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1025&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1366&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1334&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343640" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/you-cant-say-genocide-how-us-media-sanitized-israels-destruction-of-gaza/gettyimages-2231355133" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1708&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1708" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","alt":""}" data-image-title="GettyImages-2231355133" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" A balloon reading ‘CNN lies, Gaza dies, Tell the truth’ is flown by protestors during a demonstration outside of the CNN bureau in Washington, D.C. on August 25, 2025 in an effort to disrupt the shows of reporters Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer, whom they accuse of covering up war crimes by Israel. Photo by Bryan Dozier/Anadolu via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2231355133-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> In her new book, The Complicit Lens, media scholar Robin Anderson reveals how legacy media in the US presented Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza as defensive and justified, casting doubt on IDF bombings, employing passive language to deflect blame for atrocities, and repeating Israeli talking points, often word-for-word. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Anderson about the ways US media has systematically run interference for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, aligning its coverage with Israeli military narratives while downplaying—and even condoning—the wholesale massacre of Palestinians. Guests: Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University and an award-winning author of a dozen single- and co-authored books. Her work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. Anderson edits the Routledge Focus Book Series on Media and Humanitarian Action, serves as a Project Censored Judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Andersen is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), where she also writes regularly, and is an Izzy Award Judge for the Park Center for Independent Media. Her writing has appeared in a range of outlets, including CounterPunch, LA Progressive, The Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, and ScheerPost. Additional links/info: Robin Anderson, OR Books, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Credits: Producer: Rosette Sewali Studio Production: David Hebden Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And just once again, we’re looking at Israel-Palestine and the disaster that’s happening there to bring you the intimate details of what people are facing and what can be done. And we’re talking today to Robin Anderson, who has The Complicit Lens, which is an incredible piece of work. Robin is Professor Emerita of media studies at Fordham University, award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. Her work examines films, television, media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. And she edits the Rutledge Focus Book series on media and humanitarian action and serves as project centered judge and contributes to the annual state free press and joins us here today and this latest book we’re talking about is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. And Robin, welcome, good to have you with us. Robin Anderson: Thank you for inviting me. Marc Steiner: Going through all this work that you did on media coverage and what’s actually happening in Israel-Palestine. I want to get to the bottom of things first and why the major media in America is so complicit in telling the lies about what’s happening in this war. I mean, there have been decades and decades of anti-Semitic stuff about the Jewish control of the media. That’s not it. There’s something really fundamentally deep about what’s going on here and why they are willing to tell the lies they’re telling and push the agenda they’re pushing. So let’s start there. Robin Anderson: Yeah. Well, the theme through the book is exactly what happened in the US media to just actually compel them to completely abandon their basic role as journalists. And I think the Israeli lobby is a big one. I devoted an entire chapter to talking about the influences in the New York Times and a few other press, but they’ve been watched and monitored by a group called Camera, by honest reporting. Just as students and faculty have been doxed, if they get identified, many of them have by Canary mission, they will call up their employers and they will tell them not to employ them and that has happened in numerous cases. So it’s not only journalism, it’s kind of the civil society and the public sphere and our discourse has for years been very constrained. I’m not sure that US journalists anymore, even though they’re supposed to be the seasoned professionals at some of the most prominent and legacy media, I’m not sure they know the background anymore of Israel. I’m not sure that they understand really the international rules of war because if you’re blocked by the directives such as the New York Times and CNN, if you have your editors openly telling you to cover the press in a certain way, which is what we have, we had it at the CNN and the New York Times, and those are very influential legacy media sources. If we have them doing that over a period of a few years, you’re not proficient anymore really in understanding the rules of war or the Geneva Conventions. And then when you leave those basic core understandings out of coverage, either through self-censorship, editorial censorship, or simply just ignorance, you can’t tell the story. Marc Steiner: I want to get very specific here, the stuff you’ve written about in terms of the New York Times and CNN and exactly what they did, exactly what the leadership has told their reporters what they can and cannot do and how can they even be possible. But this is really explain that in greater depth. Robin Anderson: Well, I think that was so shocking and I think the intercept, well, a number of articles came out on the intercept, but CNN was putting all of its copy through its Jerusalem Bureau and the IDF had eyes on that stuff and CNN tried to play it down and say, “Oh, really? They hardly had anything to say.” And the staffer who had leaked to the intercept this information said, “Oh yes, every single word was shaped by Israeli censors.” So they told them, “No, there are things you can and cannot say. You can’t say genocide.” That’s a taboo word. But the really weirdly obscured things that a lot of us began to notice where you couldn’t identify Israel as the perpetrator of the dropping of 2000 pound bombs. So you couldn’t say you just had to say explosion. So a lot of people identified these headlines and indeed the press did not identify that these were Israeli bombs until the Israelis themselves would say, “Oh, okay. Well, we got a Hamas commander.” As soon as they said they got a Hamas commander, then you could justify any loss of human civilian life and then you could talk about Israel having done the bombing. So lots of very strange things like that, that you can actually … So what I did in a couple chapters is look at the coverage and compare them to these directives. New York Times, same thing. New York Times was more explicit about pulling out any of the principles really of international law about occupation when the New York Times staffer that leaked it to the intercept said, “How can you not talk about occupation?” That is at the core of the conflict. We’re not able to represent this more accurately without talking about the occupation, but they couldn’t talk. So a lot of them, refugee camps, that’s very, very important. You have to know that these people in Gaza, many of them were refugees or the descendants of refugees that were victims of the Nakba. So all of that background history allowed them to start the war at October 7th, say, “This was only Hamas. It came from nowhere, the evil of Hamas and therefore all of the subsequent reporting was either justified or retaliatory. They started it and they didn’t start it. There’s a long history of how Israel was constantly actually committing war crimes already before October 7th. Marc Steiner: So there’s a lot of what you said here. Before we get back to Israel and Hamas, which I’d like to do, given what you’ve written, what do you think the political dynamic is that allows the journalistic leaders and others in those two organizations, CNN and New York Times? Look, I read the New York Times every day and every Sunday. I mean, I’ve been doing it for the last 40 years. Robin Anderson: Sorry to hear that, Marc. Really. Marc Steiner: There’s a lot of good stuff from there, but this is not one of them. What the dynamic is that allows that to happen. Robin Anderson: Right. Well, I actually devoted an entire chapter to the New York Times and you really have to look at their Jerusalem bureau. Their Jerusalem bureau over a period of years has been shaped to be very Israeli focused and Israeli-centric. So right off the bureau in the New York Times in Jerusalem sits atop on the air above a house where a BBC reporter, a Palestinian BBC reporter had to leave his house, put his wife and children in a taxi, leave their things and never come back. So right away the New York Times has a vested interest in no right to return. That’s a major issue for Palestinians, the right to return. And right away, well, wow, that geostructural bias, if they had the right to return, the New York Times, the House that they spent money on that Thomas Friedman presided in and all of these other bureau chiefs stayed there admitting that many times their children were in the IDF. And for one, Elizabeth Kershner, who’s still writing for the New York Times, her husband was intimately involved with doing PR for the Israeli military. So these are conflicts of interest of all sorts. At one point, one of the public monitors for the New York Times said, wow, wouldn’t you get a different point of view if you had somebody in the West Bank that could really see what the settlers did to people and all that. So if you get a different view of the situation, but they never did that. In fact, they listened to a canary mission, either a canary mission or an honest reporting briefing that criticized one of their photojournalists and he was fired from the New York Times well before October 7th. So they got rid of Palestinian journalists at the same time they kept nurturing this very individualized point of view from Israel. Marc Steiner: So a couple of things here, but I want to take a step backwards for just a minute to explain to the people listening to us what the Canary Commission is. You’ve referred to it like three or four times here. People need to understand what it is. Robin Anderson: It’s originally an Israeli based organization that monitors students and faculty and other kind of people canary mission and has docs people and students and faculty at university campuses and many times it has resulted in students being sanctioned and faculty being sanctioned. Of course, I wrote about this happening at Hunter College in the book. Honest reporting is basically a propaganda organ, which not only creates their own media, propagandized media, but that also puts pressure. And this is external pressure coming into newsrooms and into universities where they’ve got no business in these kinds of civil society venues and institutions of higher education and legacy media that is supposed to know how to manage its own electoral boards and its own electoral staff. Marc Steiner: What you bring out in complicit lens, I mean, has very frightening in terms of what it means not just for Israel, Palestine, and what’s going on there, but for the future of media in this country. It’s not new that the media is influenced by people who own the media. That’s been a battle forever. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but it’s been a battle inside the media forever. But what you’re describing here is something pretty frightening. And I think that the whole … It’s one of the reasons I think they don’t really cover the opposition inside of Israel from Jewish Israelis saying, no, we’re not participating and why they don’t cover those things as well and what life is like inside of Palestinian villages. So I think this is a really, what you’ve written, what you put together is important for people to wrestle with in terms of how you get your information. How do we know what’s really happening? Robin Anderson: Well, one of the reasons, as a consequence of this type of reporting, the media has lost legitimacy, terribly lost legitimacy, but young people particularly who don’t look at legacy media, if I was in front of a class and I asked my students who read The New York Times this morning, nobody would have. So they’re getting their information from their handheld devices and that’s where they’re getting their news and they were on their handheld devices when Palestinian journalists were being killed in large numbers for documenting things on the ground. So we as Americans, we had these two different realities really. We had the documentation and the visuals, the testimony, the aftermath, the pictures of rubble and the suffering and the Palestinians. And that I believe really accounts for so much of why the United States is now rejecting the state of Israel and for a very long time, the majority of adults in the United States has not wanted our government to send weapons to Israel. So we caught onto that. And I think in this barrage of propaganda, I think it’s notable that we have resisted it and I think that’s really incredible on the part of the American people. In terms of I would like to talk about how we fix this and I believe- Marc Steiner: That was my next question, but go right ahead, please. I Robin Anderson: Believe these journalists and these editorial boards, they need to be held accountable. They really do. The three Israeli leaders including Isaac Hertzag, the president of Israel to kind of a figurehead Netanyahu’s the prime minister. Marc Steiner: Right, but the president doesn’t have much power inside the Israeli structure. Well, Robin Anderson: He’s coming to New York City. He’s coming to New York City and he’s being hosted and honored by the Jewish religious seminar. Marc Steiner: Yeshiva or Union Theological? Robin Anderson: Union theological And he’s going to be here in May and a UN commission found that it is very likely that he is responsible for inciting genocide. So the rules of genocide, very much part, you can’t have a genocide without a language that incites it. And these people were inciting this language and saying how Hamas was animals by extension Palestinian people and Herzog came right out and said, Palestinian civilians are guilty. So I think he shouldn’t be coming to New York City at all. I think he should be being hauled up in front of the Hague. At one point in the CNN, one of the staffers said, “Many of us noticed that our anchors didn’t have much pushback, if any, to these Israeli leaders who at a time, and here’s the language of the incitement statute is it has to be a time of great tension. You have to be a public figure and you have to have a platform, a legitimate … You have to be on a mainstream media platform and they all fit that bill. So that’s what we call incitement. And as the CNN staffer said, we came very close to that by not challenging these demonization of the Palestinian people, which also is another theme that goes throughout the book is over and over again, Marc Steiner: Palestinians Robin Anderson: In frame and in adjectives and in every way were dehumanized over and over again. Marc Steiner: Yeah. And as I was reading what you wrote, I thought about my friends in Israel-Palestine on both sides and how I remembered distinctly this big fight that took place when one of my friends who was an Israeli, these were theater people and I used to do theater with Israeli Palestinian companies. I said something about Palestinians and he spit on the ground. And then a fight ensued between him and one of the women in the company over that spit who was also Jewish. And people don’t realize how deep the divide is, I think, inside Israel. It’s not evenly split, but it’s a deep divide over where everything is going. Robin Anderson: I think recent polls that have come out of Israel have shown that the majority of Israelis thought that all of the Palestinian civilians were guilty as well and they were a threat. They’ve been propagandized now for a very long time, even though the newspaper Haretz is one of my major sources because after October 7th, when they called in the Hannibal directive, Marc Steiner: Which Robin Anderson: Is just kill everybody, don’t let anybody take any hostages. We don’t want to negotiate. When they called that in, you had Israelis pilots in Apache helicopters indiscriminately bombing the festival grounds when Hamas was trying to get their hostages, of course that’s a war crime. It’s true that Hamas committed some war crimes, committed war crimes. Nothing could compare, however, to what Israel has done. And at the time, what’s so fascinating is that the demonization again and again of Hamas, particularly in Palestinians as animals, they justified and served to cover up and to be the beheaded baby stories. As Richard Sanders, the filmmaker said, it wasn’t what Hamas did. It was what they didn’t do that the media reported on. So Hamas was guilty. They made stuff that was really over the top saying that Hamas did so they could carry out the genocide. And I think over time that the Israeli people have been incentivized and propagandized to believe that. Marc Steiner: When you look at American media coverage as you do with intensity, and it seems that it’s changed significantly over the last 10 years, talk a bit about your analysis about why that is and why- Oh Mark, Robin Anderson: I’ve been writing about media and war for an awfully long time. Marc Steiner: Yes, you have. Yes, you have. Yes, you have. That’s why I asked you the question. Robin Anderson: I see this whole … I think one of the really big changes was when the US media embedded with the troops during the war on terror. This did two things. It showed you one side of the war, the US soldier’s side and emphasized that side because they were right there over the shoulder. And then the other thing is they allowed them to talk about it as if it were a reality show. And so we had these entertainment frames coming in with the war on terror, first a reality show, the invasion. Then of course there was the rescue of Saving Private Lynch, which was just the movie plot to Saving Private Ryan. And then you had all of the first person shooter game soldiers would come back and help them with the technology, help them with making it look like real shooters. So for a long time, the whole beginning of the 21st century, war was turned into entertainment by our media. Sadly, what happened in Gaza was that it was so horrible. The media tried something else. Well, I’m just going to say what the Israelis say and have this outlandishly pro- Israel coverage, but people had their alternative information sources and they were looking through their handheld devices at the suffering of the people in Gaza. And I think they understood finally that war is not a game. It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s horrible. It’s destructive. It kills people. It puts them in conditions of catastrophic no water, no food and no hospital. One of the things that I read and was the hardest chapter for me to write, Mark, was the hospital chapter, Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system and the attacks on El Shifa and all the subsequent hospitals. And it was so outrageous the way the media covered that, just distortions and one-sided. And those are the real things that I would really like to see them held accountable for that Marc Steiner: Kind of thing. And I’ve covered some of that with doctors from Palestine in Gaza talking about what’s been going on. I’m curious how you think we get to that point where they’re held accountable and well, let me just stop there because the other part is a much deeper question that we may not have time to get into. Well, I’ll say it anyway, which is that hatred of Jews just bubbles below the surface in our world. Antisemitism just bubbles below the surface. This is exploding it. Robin Anderson: That’s right. Marc Steiner: Absolutely. Robin Anderson: And I put that in a number of places in the Marc Steiner: Book Robin Anderson: About how this is really building antisemitism. The way that antisemitism is defined as you cannot say anything against the state of Israel implies that all Jews now are for the state of Israel. That implies that it’s a monolithic community. Marc Steiner: And it’s not. Robin Anderson: And it is absolutely Marc Steiner: Not. Robin Anderson: It’s not. And so when Jewish people are against the genocide, that gets lost in that equation. And now everybody’s going to look to the Jewish people as having perpetrated a genocide. And I think that’s a real problem. Marc Steiner: And in terms of the media coverage itself, one of the things I thought about as I was reading what you wrote, it shows the power of the media to influence the world in extremely negative and dangerous ways. Robin Anderson: Yes. So as long as the perpetrators are genocide, as long as the global elites, as long as the West unquote can look at a newspaper and stay in this beltway, if you will, this beltway bubble or stay … I think the New York Times and legacy media know that young people who are anti-genocide, they know they’re not watching them. All they care about is the elites and the governments and the congressmen who are under the same influence that the media is. 82% of our Congress people take money from APAC, both Republicans and Democrats. We know the influence that this Israeli lobby has had and that is now becoming toxic. That’s beginning to change. And now we’re going to have the anti-APAC primaries. You take APAC, you’re going to get primaried. Marc Steiner: But you have APAC along with the conservative Christian world together are really pushing this agenda. Robin Anderson: They Marc Steiner: Absolutely Robin Anderson: Are. Marc Steiner: Yeah. Robin Anderson: Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism and white supremacists. I mean, I was just writing something about Pete Hegthest, Christian Crusade cross on his chest and as Jesuit priest said in the Pope, this is not Christianity. This is a cartoon version. This is actually a war game, Crusader Kings. This is actually gaming again, this twisted version of Christianity that now is marked that this is at the White House and Trump thinks he’s God and it’s really horrible. Marc Steiner: So before we have to close, I’m curious all that you’ve written, and I really do encourage people to read this, it’s incredible analysis that you put inside your work that we’ve only touched the surface so we may have to do this again. How do you see this unfolding in terms of our future, in terms of resistance to it and what it might all pretend? Robin Anderson: Well, I think we need to act to preserve alternative media in every way, independent and alternative media and the internet. We need to really focus on that. We need to find the parallels between AI narratives and the kind of empire boomerang that we have going on where so much that has happened in Gaza is now being repeated, if you will, in Lebanon and now the media just isn’t covering it. But I think we really need to look carefully at more of the mechanisms and interconnections that drive the media and that drive the military industrial complex. We’ve now also are entering an era of elite capture where billionaires, the Ellison family is now controlling CBS and they may well control other outlets. And I think these are incredibly dangerous and I think we need to focus our attention there. And I think holding legacy media for their coverage of Gaza Responsible is really primary. I mean, maybe this is a fantasy of MindMark, but I see my book. I have fantasies of somebody holding my book at the Hague and calling out the media at the International Court of Justice and actually telling them for the rest of us how they manipulate the media frames. Marc Steiner: That could happen. I mean, I could see that happening. That’s a good idea. I like that idea. I think this is really important to explore in greater depth and also the contradictions that are involved and the dangers involved in this on so many levels. And I think that I want to encourage people, if you have a chance just to check out the book, The Complicit Lens, US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, it’s really worth kind of wrestling with and looking at, plus the articles you’ve written you can find that we’ll be linking to here in this interview. And Robert Anderson, I do hope we stay in touch. You have a lot to say. We’ve barely touched the surface what you have to say and I look forward to many more conversations. Robin Anderson: I do too, Mark. Thanks so much, Brad. Marc Steiner: Thank you for being with us today. Once again, let me thank Robin Anderson for joining us today. We’ll be linking to her work and check out her book on Gaza. It’s entitled The Complicit Lens: Our Mainstream US Media Covered Gaza. And in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be delving more deeply into all of this. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, audio editor, Stephen Frank, for working his magic, Rosette Sowali for producing the Mark Steiner show, the Tylers Keller Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at the real news for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, just write to me at mss@threwnews.com and I’ll get back to you right away. Once again, thank you, Robert Anderson, for joining us today. So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.
State “Tax the Rich” Campaigns Gain Momentum Across the Country
Coordinated “Tax the Rich” campaigns have launched across the country, spurred by Massachusetts’s “millionaires tax” that has raised billions to fund public services. According to Brad Reed for Common Dreams in January 2026 and Lex McMenamin for The Gu...
Coordinated “Tax the Rich” campaigns have launched across the country, spurred by Massachusetts’s “millionaires tax” that has raised billions to fund public services. According to Brad Reed for Common Dreams in January 2026 and Lex McMenamin for The Guardian in April 2026, a coalition of labor organizers and community advocates… The post State “Tax the Rich” Campaigns Gain Momentum Across the Country appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
“Failures of ‘America First Global Health’”: U.S. Global Health Cuts and DRC Conflict Fuel Ebola Crisis
Sweeping U.S. cuts to critical global health programs, including funding and staffing reductions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the U.S. withdrawal...
Sweeping U.S. cuts to critical global health programs, including funding and staffing reductions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), have dangerously weakened the world’s ability to respond to rapidly evolving infectious disease threats, including the escalating Ebola outbreak unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the region, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) said today. “This outbreak is unfolding amid devastating cuts to global health and humanitarian assistance in the DRC that have weakened disease surveillance, strained already fragile health systems, and reduced the capacity to detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks,” said <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCRuxqeoYqUAafXea1UUfVxO9kw5h9RTY8qTDEcq-2FCyBDbx_q_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pb-2Bfil-2BkjkO7OHxypixy6X52o-2Bv6Fk0QLVuRMiFMfl72FZ8Zoi5jsx0p4oBWvBf6dm4EfohfGr75rJCCIqveolNNFuiE4hkOGNKcxr3A1tQjes1qdAFN-2FK1mLMs9mCr6Rh-2F7ya1ydP3EzwELCB6AA6chsBzvCPYVE0yFi0VIC1GG" rel="noopener noreferrer" >Thomas McHale, SM, public health director at PHR. “Physicians for Human Rights has documented how abrupt U.S. foreign aid cuts disrupted frontline health services and infectious disease programs in conflict-affected eastern DRC, leaving communities more vulnerable at precisely the moment sustained international public health engagement when it is needed most. ” The current Ebola outbreak, which the WHO <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCTisUzbFMySf-2B0mc9xvfJNGOfluBAzjd9G5k47QaNh0-2BqNWeJNq-2FshozX4GCf-2BXoYmdPxya1fxA-2B0p19g1f4YPOsWHBoMp49nITnUh80KdG846OuZ2ZVHRsvbc2ZFyCLpZWpeNRyFo1njP72o-2FmYFnn-2F5QNVrf-2BHWY5ExNyHIRnESvVzrmjJsEnW-2BUIki3eOMcATD1mJxa5RuE342kEBDuTFeyZYVavT46eu9niJSJIvzaqF_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pazOhlh8-2FCR10cJGocd6IgTnQOYprrHMZuggY65VGo4xykxC8SxXDl62yNMKJ1pRr8S9JahKQ94VGQBQ-2F7NyB7WvH-2BLlRdl6dQxNylmEAox2HpzlUvXPnQEqx-2BGJXJnWOaBWUXYgc48Juqcs98JDMRWK0Y-2BoC5Sq57rE3135O1qm" rel="noopener noreferrer" >declared a “public health emergency of international concern,” involves the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which there is no approved vaccine or targeted treatment. Cases have already been <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCTisUzbFMySf-2B0mc9xvfJNGOfluBAzjd9G5k47QaNh0-2BqNWeJNq-2FshozX4GCf-2BXoYmdPxya1fxA-2B0p19g1f4YPOsWHBoMp49nITnUh80KdG846OuZ2ZVHRsvbc2ZFyCLpZWpeNRyFo1njP72o-2FmYFnn-2F5QNVrf-2BHWY5ExNyHIRnESvVzrmjJsEnW-2BUIki3eOMcATD1mJxa5RuE342kEBDuTFeyZYVavT46eu9niJSJIvTxeW_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pbItfwLdkSbtFl0gGBptXA8zleIYBBmrggd4TgKc3wXmAr7xC8bnC0OUcipNZe3DKTJuSAWXEXQj8RxqUKr8BE5jVujV0P6mwQTpXx3UuAASGPpkMyJZJYygul-2BY2M0k5rE3cIcQdtfWF-2BCY7mgVcGSYCb8iMBHgKFXM8e9RK-2BSD" rel="noopener noreferrer" >identified in and around Bunia, Goma, and Bukavu in eastern DRC as well as in Kampala, Uganda, which are densely populated urban areas, and health workers themselves have become infected. The crisis is unfolding with the rapid and unchecked spread of infections and the sharply rising death toll, with 139 confirmed deaths reported to date.-A devastating set of emergencies are converging in eastern DRC, where ongoing armed conflict, attacks on civilians and health facilities, and mass population displacement have already pushed fragile health systems to the brink. Violence in and around Ituri and Goma, where several cases of Ebola have been detected, has severely disrupted humanitarian access and public health operations precisely as Ebola is spreading rapidly through affected communities. PHR’s network of medical and humanitarian partners in DRC are reporting mounting tolls from the outbreak and scarce resources to confront the emergency. A doctor in an Ebola-affected area of DRC tells PHR that “…this outbreak is occurring at a time when we are no longer truly able to carry out proper epidemiological surveillance because of the disruption in USAID funding. To continue this surveillance, we are forced to rely on our own personal resources, including purchasing phone credit, fuel, and paying transportation costs. This is extremely difficult given the current level of need.” Health workers in DRC told PHR that they need support for disease surveillance, materials to support safe disposal of bodies, including body bags, access to laboratories to process samples quickly, and infection prevention and control supplies, including masks, protective suits, face shield and other personal protective equipment to allow health workers care for Ebola patients safely. The same doctor told PHR that “…without rapid support, surveillance, case confirmation, the safe management of bodies, and the protection of health care workers all risk being seriously compromised.” U.S. global health funding cuts have <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCTud6ZAjCKgYJdX3X09e7n2WAR8eXgnWK8voYW6rim7D9CzfE1lpmoOActP5BjtRcHugvEmKOMGRKLqizWIL6mODUjA5UvB94e-2F4JjWmNKnXP5FQ_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pbaZAkn8D8b71jhhVAaeGTCrD8BrRqUXa1C-2BodMravXtp2j6Teq9rZ-2FSJLIhfJYNQDvIXbv7Bf-2BCmLCI84lf8z5yC9ABgUIiUi24EiAW1Vy-2BTLYK7F1KMMUNOrcBQDO-2FIRhXRIV7Hm2dw2XlmWQ4MZW-2FAAXLWlkynwumOr2dosgw" rel="noopener noreferrer" >contributed to the global health emergency posed by the Ebola outbreak. Decades of U.S. investment helped build the disease surveillance systems, laboratory infrastructure, trained workforce, community outreach networks, and emergency coordination mechanisms necessary to detect and contain outbreaks early before they spiraled into regional and global crises. But those systems are now being <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCXpV8Oq7YfFOSozqXIciqSdrVRDtBTHKCqsTtUPM8BGP3MlqIv83zIrMnYrm8CMmJ5xr4po-2B4km9JxYTHD-2BKtSUhtZiDDsZBEugp5fjCo15EnhEj8Zev3keWJjC-2BO2Y7-2Fg-3D-3D2tCt_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pQhBOWw9MajwxQZnBoXwdRylFcnChieY-2B2kP4iYAxJPOH-2FWnO98Ip68mm7zWgbZZ2x6PogPXH6V-2BfGokZhj74S3t-2Bdzkv1uTvGURh6mQcsEQS07wrOqI5GAW9f0cJmR02csmmLexYY6J-2BtJRvaKzfZFo1eeMkVr5NSXJsDAoS24G" rel="noopener noreferrer" >hollowed out. The Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to U.S. global health funding in January 2025 have undermined public health efforts around the globe, resulting in impacts such as disruptions to HIV and TB prevention and treatment programs, the elimination of services for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and undermining critical disease monitoring. U.S. funding cuts are degrading public health response capacities in eastern DRC, across Africa, and globally at a moment when rapid response care and robust international coordination is urgently needed. Public health experts have expressed alarm that the latest outbreak of this rare strain of Ebola <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCV50Pr5OKyJHEdWBQ7rMu0imF1N9NZ-2FbwjFMbmFUWOROf2r9lXD2ohUUWKZ6cPud-2FwphZCpowSBia8vYUQFHWHfx7wIpJh0W-2BOeeSG5dFSztSqDO4MzgJMG0mg-2FHArlfSC-2BS06wjJrATw9txkznQq7rZMc4bNF2AT9c1fKecOzuF58-2B6pB3rIZYIuKFiJRulTw-3D-3DQ0QT_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pe2XNcCVDMifAkXPIavvkuXfFrZ9Ww8zOSwI5yYBr-2BBPV-2FUgX-2BX5D5oIjxh4fJwVIbQaa5hd9wUKvZqQVNlvPQGxvdlREyWs3lCALz-2BQb2zQwnE4NwRe2pkPwvnUTJ0yPVVF-2FPMuHkkOGWaqjBcC5on4jNxx9mG7SAysrlyZYsgm" rel="noopener noreferrer" >likely went undetected for two months, allowing the virus to spread further and losing critical opportunities to trace, isolate, and treat individuals who were exposed or infected. “The outbreak of Ebola in DRC is another example of the failures of the America First Global Health strategy,” said McHale. “At its best, U.S. global health leadership can help identify, address, and prevent infectious disease outbreaks before they spiral out of control. But this outbreak comes at a time when the United States has shuttered USAID, slashed CDC funding and work force, cut resources for humanitarian response in DRC, including <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCTud6ZAjCKgYJdX3X09e7n2WAR8eXgnWK8voYW6rim7D9CzfE1lpmoOActP5BjtRcHugvEmKOMGRKLqizWIL6mODUjA5UvB94e-2F4JjWmNKnX2Oio_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pcMysJcbDNIaWywmgh5NH6QEXhwN-2FQmvkwXCFxiXMWMlR2BY7sxlGEqXzABUcqsC4tzHk8g8tIA0dP0MneNUp66jZUJl9RBMo8UyatndxKp2Mecm43SM93PP2pW02Bnkm4EFcI2KsJJX4tXaZ-2F873KzAvSruSsWQtMRpfjDYOTZL" rel="noopener noreferrer" >disease surveillance capacity, and hampered the ability of health care workers on the ground to respond to the emerging Ebola crisis.” PHR’s recent report, <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCeYTo-2F03zXOdaRJN4ypo-2FC2hcjHdfXkfjn1U58OPsKNUsVZcznZ8M4I5ZskQo9LxNhsAekmTYNZD0LNpqIeN-2BthslMS5UbuthY4jz-2BSZpDc1qEL0lQTzTufyYw5IItGWmvnn1yodimGo2IN9JDZ74ElxXiBKMr5owDLxmDJMbGDQpgBhvx89Oi7BNOVh3y3U9g-3D-3D3nXn_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pQxTvNPJ7Jn0BqbtxEQaHxLBWidutmZtJFFMtanUFVLe63EEkWB7EQPozoYBhHcacWmhYMQH25Fk4YVWIIljQd11b9UbYM4-2Fx5HdfzU-2FrGdtgeJEX0YMesx2TZBjnnbl1RMxyvf1vmqkdQK572QIkvkc1-2ByTWgue-2BqyYGT9waZxx" rel="noopener noreferrer" >“Wasted Investments, Looming Crisis,” documents how reductions in US support for global health have dismantled research platforms, surveillance infrastructure, and frontline health systems that are essential not only for HIV and TB programs, but also for responding to future outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases. A research brief by PHR (<a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.IylbKHiJb99DpROGmsOHCeYTo-2F03zXOdaRJN4ypo-2FC0DfQJvUkU9mrxPVR0tPZGxTUuj8K7YkzsT-2B8rhlvSFSEVob4OX4MKg9gd9uzc-2FMBukOdnHumaajdYM-2FqyLGR1CGmkwV-2BT18eVALKv9jX6UpNVD6KsDAlUw3r7ox8FVU4o7gWkszig-2BbV8-2FBEygpDBJOrW-2Fm-2Fjs5UWyrIfc9U2CYw-3D-3DjNLg_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2BCjnlOQYPqng71B9hRl6Rd4Nu9KpWjs-2FDnxb0GfN9CXhdW9lMQtkqdEpsJg5tZwpD7W-2FWwDATEA27GMKFr8WFOLG60umPuiLWe8hDdk4LiLvXvBz9zPisY8oaZYzW0KY77cIg3yCueGJCxkVi38-2B2pfuNvquSmA3n5L7Y-2FJKXI0DwDTgFdfpKwZLW2ABmHC01-2Fb4ZQLC08IxzmT-2BrYosy-2Fu8hdm2UFbQPu8ge8BBp4iZenNMmm0M0e5SgabyVlHnSmK1yEedLIfhHrusVRqTTlwlV03S-2BmXArw-2FuTxtC-2BkrH6-2BhYOIpsUTnkwrCPlOIxE" rel="noopener noreferrer" >“Abandoned in Crisis”) documented the early impacts of U.S. aid cuts on health services in DRC. “Due to the Trump administration’s cuts, we no longer have the full measure of global coordination and operational capacity needed to rapidly track transmission, monitor cross-border spread, support frontline clinicians, and swiftly identify and treat people who may have been exposed,” said McHale. “In the conflict-affected regions of eastern DRC, where insecurity and displacement are accelerating disease transmission and limiting access to care, these losses are especially dangerous and further deepening the polycrisis. Global health security depends on sustained international cooperation — not retreat.” As world leaders gather at the World Health Assembly in Geneva this week, governments must urgently promote a rights-based Ebola response that is grounded in science, transparency, and respect for human dignity, while ensuring affected communities have access to timely, evidence-based care and information. Immediate support is needed to protect frontline health workers through the provision of adequate personal protective equipment and infection prevention and control supplies, as health workers remain at heightened risk of exposure. World governments should urgently scale support for epidemiological surveillance, laboratory testing, contact tracing, safe clinical care, community engagement, and dignified and safe burials, including the provision of body bags and other essential supplies for the safe management of the deceased, and essential personal protective equipment for health care workers. Sustained investment in supply chains, local response capacity, and research into Bundibugyo-specific diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines are essential to preventing further spread and protecting the right to health. The United States should also strengthen coordination with the WHO and fully disburse congressionally-appropriated global health funds to support an effective response to the Ebola crisis, including urgent measures to track and protect exposed individuals and communities, and strengthen frontline response capacities to prevent further spread of the virus. All parties to the conflict in the DRC, including occupying forces, should uphold existing ceasefire agreements and guarantee safe and unhindered access for health care workers and humanitarian personnel to support populations in areas affected by violence. This should include enabling the immediate reopening of Goma International Airport so that life-saving medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid can reach at-risk communities. This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
Dispatches from Project Censored: On Media and Politics
Mischa Geracoulis On December 22, 1984, Bernie Goetz—“the subway vigilante”—shot four unarmed Black teenagers on a New York City subway after one had asked Goetz for five dollars. Pulling an unregistered Smith & Wesson revolver from his waistband, ...
Mischa Geracoulis On December 22, 1984, Bernie Goetz—“the subway vigilante”—shot four unarmed Black teenagers on a New York City subway after one had asked Goetz for five dollars. Pulling an unregistered Smith & Wesson revolver from his waistband, Goetz fired five shots with expert precision at the teens, gravely wounding… The post From Ersatz Fear to Epic Fury appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
This content originally appeared on Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes and was authored by Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes.
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 21, 2026
"They’re Trying to Silence Us": Students, Faculty on Censoring Pro-Palestine Voices at Graduations
Rising Conflict in DRC, Sudan, Other African Countries Linked to Trump’s Gutting of USAID: Study
Trump Resettles White South Africans at "Record Pace" While Blocking Refugees from Everywhere Else
CPJ, partners call on incoming Guatemalan attorney general to end persecution of journalists
In a joint letter led by the Committee to Protect Journalists, eight international press freedom and human rights organizations urged Guatemala’s incoming attorney general, Gabriel García Luna, to end the use of criminal prosecutions against journalists, drop politically motivated cases, and ensure safe conditions for exiled reporters to return. Over the past eight years, the...
In a joint letter led by the Committee to Protect Journalists, eight international press freedom and human rights organizations urged Guatemala’s incoming attorney general, Gabriel García Luna, to end the use of criminal prosecutions against journalists, drop politically motivated cases, and ensure safe conditions for exiled reporters to return. Over the past eight years, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has been used to systematically target independent journalists through legal harassment, forced exile, and arbitrary detention. Journalist Jose Rubén Zamora, whose imprisonment has been widely condemned as retaliation for his corruption reporting, has become the most visible symbol of this crackdown. More than 20 journalists fled the country between 2022 and 2023, while killings of media workers continue with near-total impunity. The organizations call on García Luna to dismiss all unfounded cases tied to journalistic work, guarantee safe return conditions for exiled reporters, and restore the independence and credibility of the prosecutor’s office. Read the full statement here. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Bernie Sanders declares war on billionaire election donations- the Abolish Super PACs Act
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
CPJ calls for humane treatment, release of press detained aboard Gaza-bound flotilla
Beirut, May 21, 2026 — The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply alarmed by the video showing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, taunting those detained aboard the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla at Ashdod Port in Israel, which included at least 14 international journalists, while they were handcuffed and held in stress positions on the...
Beirut, May 21, 2026 — The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply alarmed by the video showing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, taunting those detained aboard the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla at Ashdod Port in Israel, which included at least 14 international journalists, while they were handcuffed and held in stress positions on the floor. In the video, published on X by the minister, he can be heard yelling, “Welcome to Israel, we are the landlords,” while waving a large Israeli flag over dozens of detainees forced to kneel side by side on the floor, their hands tied behind their backs and their heads lowered to the ground. Another clip shows security forces violently throwing a handcuffed activist to the ground after the activist shouts, “Free Palestine” at Ben Gvir. The minister also said the detainees should be imprisoned for “a long, long time.” “International humanitarian law is unequivocal: detainees — including journalists — must be protected from humiliation, intimidation, degrading treatment, and abuse,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Publicly displaying restrained detainees for political messaging raises serious concerns about dignity, due process, and the treatment of those in custody.” CPJ has identified at least 14 members of the press from multiple nationalities aboard the vessels intercepted in international waters near the Mediterranean island of Cyprus starting on May 18, as they attempted to reach Gaza on a humanitarian mission. They include: Alex Colston, American journalist, regular contributor for Zeteo and Drop Site News Lautaro Rivara, Argentinian freelance investigative journalist, works for Diario Red & Canal Red Jubair Islam Khan, British-Bangladeshi filmmaker owns independent video production company Film Soul LTD Gijs Sanders, Dutch journalist with BNNVARA Diederick Willem Groenewoud, Dutch investigative journalist with BNNVARA Andre Prasetyo Nugroho, Indonesian journalist with Tempo TV Thoudy Badai Rifan Billah, Indonesian photojournalist with Republika. Bambang Noroyono, Indonesian journalist with Republika Rahendro Herubowo, Indonesian freelance journalist who contributes to GPCI media Simona Losito, Italian freelance investigative journalist with InsideOver. Alessandro Mantovani, Italian journalist with Il Fatto Quotidian newspaper – confirmed released Zainal Rashid Ahmad, Malaysian independent journalist, who runs his independent digital media platform ZRA STRIM Ignacio Ladron de Guevara Duran, Spanish journalist with EL PAÍS Ümmü Gülsüm Durmuş, Turkish journalist with GZT Following his deportation from Israel, Italian journalist Alessandro Mantovani told reporters he was “taken to Ben Gurion airport in handcuffs and with chains on our feet and put on a flight to Athens”. “They beat us up. They kicked us and punched us and shouted ‘Welcome to Israel’,” he said of his treatment by Israeli security forces. Adalah, an Israel-based legal advocacy group whose lawyers have visited the detainees, told CPJ of widespread due process violations, physical and psychological abuse, and violence, including the repeated use of tasers and rubber bullets, against the detainees. The group said at least one journalist reported being violently beaten while in custody. After intercepting the Gaza bound vessels, Israeli forces brought the approximately 430 people detained to the port of the Israeli coastal city of Ashdod for deportation, as had occurred in previous attempts to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Palestinian territory. CPJ calls on Israeli authorities to uphold their obligations under international law and guarantee the safety, rights, and humane treatment of all detainees, and immediately and unconditionally release all journalists currently being held. We further urge the international community and the governments of the detained journalists’ home countries to act decisively by demanding transparency and accountability, and ensuring immediate access to legal representation and humanitarian protections. The normalization of humiliation and abuse against detainees cannot be normalized. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
Ukrainian Drones Strike Oil Refinery Deep Inside Russia
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
“They’re Trying to Silence Us”: Students, Faculty on Censoring Pro-Palestine Voices at Graduations
As colleges hold graduation ceremonies across the country, many schools are attempting to silence pro-Palestine speech at the commemorations, including canceling speakers and eliminating live speeches by students altogether. There will be no l...
As colleges hold graduation ceremonies across the country, many schools are attempting to silence pro-Palestine speech at the commemorations, including canceling speakers and eliminating live speeches by students altogether. There will be no live student speakers at the City University of New York’s School of Law or at New York University’s school-specific ceremonies after former students gave speeches that included expressing support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. Rutgers University canceled biotech CEO Rami Elghandour’s commencement speech at its School of Engineering’s convocation, citing complaints about his social media posts on Israel and Palestine. And the University of Michigan’s president issued a public apology after professor Derek Peterson praised pro-Palestine students during his commencement address. “Our students are being told that your families, Palestinian families, are expected to suffer and die, and you should be OK with it,” says Noura Erakat, a Palestinian human rights attorney and professor at Rutgers University. Erakat adds that Rutgers professors have been asked not to teach about the conditions in Gaza. “We are asked to betray the empirical record, including the one on genocide and apartheid, and we refuse to do that.” “This will be the third graduation and commencement ceremony in a row where we do not have a student speaker, we do not have a faculty speaker and we do not have a live-stream commencement,” says Shivani Desai, a member of CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine. “They took all of that away from us, and they took that away specifically because of Palestine repression.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The decades-old U.S. humanitarian aid agency USAID was largely dismantled in the early days of President Trump’s second term by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The authors of a new study in the journal Science conc...
The decades-old U.S. humanitarian aid agency USAID was largely dismantled in the early days of President Trump’s second term by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The authors of a new study in the journal Science conclude, “The abrupt withdrawal of USAID led to a significant and sustained increase in conflict across Africa’s most USAID-dependent regions.” We are joined by Austin Wright, one of the study’s authors and a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. “What we found is that that shutdown had these large effects,” says Wright. “These are often double-digit percentage increases in the incidence, severity and lethality of violence across Africa in the affected regions.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
LETUCE – A Take Away Show • Rio de Janeiro, 2011
“Clear Racism”: Trump Admin Blocks Refugee Resettlement, Except for White South Africans
The Trump administration is advancing plans to resettle an additional 10,000 white South Africans in the United States as refugees. Under President Trump’s proposal, which was submitted to Congress on Monday, the U.S. would lift its reco...
The Trump administration is advancing plans to resettle an additional 10,000 white South Africans in the United States as refugees. Under President Trump’s proposal, which was submitted to Congress on Monday, the U.S. would lift its record-low refugee admissions figure from 7,500 to 17,500, with the additional openings reserved for Afrikaners. This comes as the administration continues to block the entry of refugees from other countries. The U.S. has resettled just over 6,000 refugees between October and April — all except three were from South Africa. Trump has said Afrikaners face racial persecution and genocide in South Africa, claims that have been rejected by the U.N. Human Rights Office, among others. Last year, he cut off aid to the country and boycotted the G20 summit in Johannesburg. “Whiteness is being recast as endangered,” says Lebohang Pheko, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg. “There is a move towards the alt-right, the MAGA discourse, which is about replacement theory, and which is absolutely about displacing the idea that anything other than whiteness is normative.” Pheko also suggests that Trump’s actions toward South Africa are retribution for the genocide case it brought against Israel at International Court of Justice. “We are processing resettlement cases for white Afrikaners at a record pace,” adds Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which is currently litigating a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States refugee program. “This program has never been a fast program, and it’s being expedited for just this one population.” While Afrikaners are being quickly resettled, “thousands of other people who have went through years of vetting, who have went through years of persecution and violence,” are being blocked from entering the U.S., says Aly. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Iran Announces “Controlled Maritime Zone” in Strait of Hormuz , 20 Million in Sudan Face Acute Hunger as Rival Military Factions Continue Deadly Strikes, Cuba Promises “Fierce Resistance” as USS Nimitz Arrives in Southern Caribbean, Israel Continues Attacks on Lebanon Even After Agreeing to Extend “Ceasefire”, Israeli Settlers Erect Illegal Outpost and Burn Palestinian Vehicles in Occupied West Bank, Israeli Drones and Bullets Kill Four Palestinians in Gaza, Video Shows Israeli Security Minister Ben-Gvir Taunting Handcuffed Gaza Flotilla Activists, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and OpenAI Confirm Plans to Go Public, Meta Lays Off 10% of Workforce and Assigns Thousands to New AI Initiatives, Sen. Sanders and Rep. Lee Unveil New Bill to Abolish Super PACs, Colbert Signs Off Tonight on the Final Broadcast of “The Late Show”, Demonstrators in Bolivia Call for President Paz to Step Down
Iran Announces "Controlled Maritime Zone" in Strait of Hormuz 20 Million in Sudan Face Acute Hunger as Rival Military Factions Continue Deadly Strikes Cuba Promises "Fierce Resistance" as USS Nimitz Arrives in Southern Caribbean Israel Continues Attacks on Lebanon Even After Agreeing to Extend "Ceasefire" Israeli Settlers Erect Illegal Outpost and Burn Palestinian Vehicles in Occupied West Bank Israeli Drones and Bullets Kill Four Palestinians in Gaza Video Shows Israeli Security Minister Ben-Gvir Taunting Handcuffed Gaza Flotilla Activists Elon Musk's SpaceX and OpenAI Confirm Plans to Go Public Meta Lays Off 10% of Workforce and Assigns Thousands to New AI Initiatives Sen. Sanders and Rep. Lee Unveil New Bill to Abolish Super PACs Colbert Signs Off Tonight on the Final Broadcast of "The Late Show" Demonstrators in Bolivia Call for President Paz to Step Down This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Thursday, May 21, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Spanish MEP accuses EU of failure to act over Israeli ‘kidnapping, hijacking’ of Gaza flotilla activists
By Beyza Binnur Donmez in Strasbourg Spanish Member of the European Parliament Irene Montero has accused the European Union (EU) of failing to protect European citizens aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla intercepted by Israel, directing sharp criticism at the bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas during a plenary session on the Middle East. Addressing Kallas in
By Beyza Binnur Donmez in Strasbourg Spanish Member of the European Parliament Irene Montero has accused the European Union (EU) of failing to protect European citizens aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla intercepted by Israel, directing sharp criticism at the bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas during a plenary session on the Middle East. Addressing Kallas in the parliament chamber on Tuesday, the Podemos lawmaker condemned Israel’s actions in the Mediterranean and accused EU leaders of remaining silent, reports Anadolu Ajansi. “Israel has been in the middle of the Mediterranean for 24 hours, and that is saying something, hijacking ships and kidnapping European citizens,” Montero said. READ MORE: Tehran says it is reviewing US response to peace proposal — and global anger over Israeli treatment of Gaza flotilla activists Israel begins deporting Gaza aid flotilla activists amid global outcry Peters condemns Israeli minister over flotilla video as 3 Kiwis detained Peace Action demands NZ summon Israeli ambassador over brutal action against activists Other Gaza flotilla reports “You find that amusing, don’t you? It doesn’t amuse me at all,” she said, asking: “Are you ever going to lift a finger to protect them?” Montero questioned how the EU would react if another country had carried out similar actions. “What would you do if it were Iran, if it were Russia standing in the middle of the Mediterranean to kidnap European citizens?” she asked. “But since it’s Israel, you just smile and look the other way. Shame on you.” Shared her speech footage Later on Wednesday, Montero shared footage of her speech in a post on the US social media platform X, accusing the EU of helping “genocidaires.” “Israel assaults and hijacks ships loaded with aid for Gaza right in the middle of the Mediterranean, and this lady finds it amusing and doesn’t lift a finger to defend the kidnapped people,” she wrote. “They help the genocidaires without even hiding it.” ❝Ms. Kallas, Israel has spent the last 24 hours, which is no small matter, in the middle of Mediterranean hijacking ships and kidnapping European citizens. You find that amusing, don’t you? It doesn’t amuse me at all❞ Spanish MEP Irene Montero confronted EU foreign policy… pic.twitter.com/YIHm7SZeHI — Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) May 20, 2026 Deportation begins The Global Sumud humanitarian aid flotilla said Tuesday that all 50 vessels in its aid convoy and about 430 crew and activists had been seized by Israel. Al Jazeera reports that Israel has begun deporting detained Gaza flotilla activists amid a global outcry over their “appalling” treatment by their Israeli captors. They were being released from the Ktziot detention facility where they were forcibly taken to. The Adalah legal rights group said it had received confirmation from the Israeli Prison Service and state authorities that all detained members of the Global Sumud Flotilla and Freedom Flotilla Coalition were being transferred for deportation. According to Adalah, most of the activists are being taken to Ramon Airport to be flown out of the country, while its legal team is monitoring the process to ensure that all activists are safely and fully sent without further delay. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128250" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide-1.png" alt="Israeli navy officers boarding a Gaza flotilla boat" width="680" height="441" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide-1.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide-1-300x195.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide-1-648x420.png 648w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Israeli navy officers boarding a Gaza flotilla boat to seize and abduct the crew. Image: AJ screenshot APR 37 MEPs demand ‘accountability’ Meanwhile, Global Sumud Aotearoa reports that while the activists remained detained after their illegal kidnapping, 37 Members of the EU Parliament circulated and co-signed a protest letter. Although the flotilla are now being released, the demand for accountability in the MEP letter remains the same: “On 18 May 2026, Israeli naval forces violently abducted the humanitarian workers of the Global Sumud Flotilla in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea. “Their abduction constitutes yet another flagrant violation of the rights and principles enshrined in EU law. A previous interception of this same flotilla on 29 April produced documented testimony of systematic torture, severe physical abuse and sexual violence against detained participants. “The EU–Israel Association Agreement contains binding human rights obligations. Those obligations are being openly and repeatedly violated. Continued inaction by European institutions renders the EU complicit in this pattern of impunity. “We therefore demand: Immediate suspension of the EU–Israel Association Agreement pending compliance with its human rights provisions; Immediate and unconditional release of all detained flotilla participants; An independent international inquiry into the full scope of EU member state complicity in the abduction, detention, and documented physical and sexual violence inflicted upon flotilla participants by Israeli forces. “Europe cannot continue to look away. Each failure to act is a signal to Israel that there is no cost to lawlessness. That signal must end now.” This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
CIRCASSIA (sonic exploration of an ancient land)
Burgers, Brats, and Busted Budgets: Summer Staples Up 13%, Travel Prices Surging Ahead of Memorial Day
New data released today by Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation shows how President Trump’s reckless economic policies and war in Iran are driving up the costs of summer cookouts and travel season. Prices for backyard barbecue staples j...
New <a href="https://us.cisionone.cision.com/c/eJwszs2ynCAUBOCngd25BciPLljcja8xdYTjDBHEgGMmb58ydbdfd1d19GoMWlhOXjo3DcZZo_jL61Frubg1SovGhGldglYYlBJDiHI1PHmLgqILdw3jQzoclkVoqY3QxLToKdKWfkPBlKl1MDYGE-3kInz6xx1fd8Czf53n0dnwzdTM1Pxs9b3HP7VtoeaMS214pou-ansyNd_O1Iwd-rsUarClsHWo6wqFSm0JM0T8C_3EI1OH9wFygLoDXtTwSYB7hLPhRRmOlgJ16BUbLxQTQqNM2AlS9P_h8QNs-FajU9bx5n_VnWkRail1j42w9Psa72cjKveSSIZlpAlGZwNoqQbA0U2gpVPSrUKik_zy6l8AAAD__zy1ehM" rel="noopener noreferrer" >data released today by Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation shows how President Trump’s reckless economic policies and war in Iran are driving up the costs of summer cookouts and travel season. Prices for backyard barbecue staples jumped 13% on average since last year, more than four times the rate of inflation. Burgers will run families 20% more, Kraft Heinz ketchup jumped 14%, and grilled corn on the cob costs nearly twice as much as it did last year. Even a to-go plate will also cost families more as aluminum foil prices climbed 18%. If working families manage to get through the holiday weekend within budget, their summer travel plans may still be out of reach. Airfare prices are up 26% and expected to keep rising this summer, while gas prices are hovering around $4.50 nationally. As Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy <a href="https://us.cisionone.cision.com/c/eJwsiztyJCEQBU8DXk3wL8bAkNPXUBRQ7LDqjxZa29LtFaOQl5HvZU0mFqeC5KQR79Zj8EY-kvLVO6ZA1UYKuTZbXDQNdfbUWsuyp0CKKxanM1J91Ug2Z-W088qxcGr2ym_9H2zUVx4TfKjF13DHCp_zE99vz0Gu6XGe71PYF2EWYZbrum57Ljtf81aOTZjlicIsHxN-aTLtUD9a-4J6nND6YMhU3qCMfvby84PBtPbzC-bjuGCUnaxzzkS5ce0Eg1emydBr-hGvv0LYFxPRBJQj_T124VQ5tu3Y62Da5u0Yf-Q8B_P2LJl1yZHvEDEUcNpYoIh3cBqNxqY0oZb_k_kOAAD__1aXcPI" rel="noopener noreferrer" >wraps up his family’s seven-month, all-expenses-paid road trip, working families are wondering whether they’ll be able to afford traveling at all this summer. All in, <a href="https://us.cisionone.cision.com/c/eJxMyzGSGyEQheHTQNYqYICGgGATXWOrB1pa7GGQgbXWt3fJ5WCzV9-rvyQTslVectKIcXPonZEfCaOyNnBk9sVkvwW2MThPZeeoIrOsyZPigtnqHam8a6Rt35XV1inLwqpZC_-sv6BRPXhMcL5kV3zEAl_zCx-X1yGP9LHWY4rtTZirMNfn83kZ_TjqeZ-rn3zJvQlzffSjrprntwk3pvU5-GWT6YTyebv9gftgWkCNR810wuhUYI36gDtN0GZzziv0UZirbFwqweCDaTLUkv7B-38Q25sJaDzKkX70U1iVe2v9LIOpzUsfdznXYG6vklnnPXCEgD6D1WYDChjBajQab0oTavk7mb8BAAD__x1fdBQ" rel="noopener noreferrer" >reports find that the Duffy’s corporate-sponsored vacation would cost at least $900 in fuel expenses – and that’s not including the luxury cruise the family was given to cap off their trip. Trump and his Cabinet couldn’t be more out of touch with working families this Memorial Day weekend. Groundwork’s Chief Economist, Breyon Williams, released the following statement: “Trump’s senseless tariffs and illegal war are robbing American families of their relaxing summer vacation. From the ticket counter to the cookout, consumers are scaling back and going without in the face of Trump’s summer sticker shock.” Janelle Jones, Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, shared her response: "Prices are rising because of tariffs and the war—two decisions the president made and can undo whenever he wants but by his own admission he doesn't spend any time thinking about Americans' financial situation. Families are getting squeezed on the price of everything and leaders in Washington don't seem to be paying attention." Eat Up: Barbecue Essentials More Expensive Thanks to Trump Beef, hot dog, and bratwurst prices are through the roof (up 20%, 12%, and 28% respectively) as consumers consider firing up the grill this holiday weekend. Fresh produce prices have increased under Trump thanks to higher fertilizer prices and a struggling farm economy. Tomatoes cost 22% more, while corn prices have increased 98% and lettuce is up 19%. Trump’s war in Iran has also driven up the price of plasticware popular at cookouts: disposable plasticware prices are up about 20% compared to last year due to the unrest in the Middle East. These price impacts will last beyond summer barbecue season. Flights, road trips, and even staycations will cost more this summer A family of four can expect to pay an extra $300 on plane tickets this summer as Trump’s war drags on. All major U.S. carriers have announced price hikes of about $10 per checked bag heading into vacation season, on top of skyrocketing airfare. Budget airline Spirit shut down this month partially due to unexpected increases in jet fuel costs while airline CEOs anticipate passing higher operating costs onto consumers via price hikes. Southwest Airlines CEO Andrew Watterson revealed to shareholders in a recent call that there have been five industrywide fare hikes so far this year, and he anticipates more on the way. United CEO Kirby also admitted prices will not come down, saying “The longer consumers pay these prices and airlines get used to this revenue stream, the more likely it is [to hold].” Flyers who can afford higher prices will be crammed onto smaller planes with fewer flight options. Airlines have cut over two million seats and 12,000 flights worldwide in late April and early May, an unprecedented level of cancellations. United Airlines has removed over 21,000 flights from its summer schedule, while Delta and American cut nearly 12,000 combined. Gas prices are at the highest level since 2022, hitting around $4.55 nationally, up more than 50% from $2.98 before the president’s war in Iran started. Working families looking forward to a restful staycation at home may find it more difficult as temperatures rise: Trump’s tariffs have driven up the cost of HVAC systems, and his administration has ended tax credits Americans relied on to upgrade their air conditioning. To talk to a Groundwork expert about rising prices and the economic fallout of Trump’s agenda, email press@groundworkcollaborative.org. This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
French National Assembly allows ‘native’ voters to take part in local provincial elections
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk The French National Assembly has voted to allow “native” voters to take part in New Caledonia’s local provincial elections scheduled for next month. However, the French parliament’s Lower House also refused to include their “spouses”, just like the Senate did two days earlier. Amid debates in
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk The French National Assembly has voted to allow “native” voters to take part in New Caledonia’s local provincial elections scheduled for next month. However, the French parliament’s Lower House also refused to include their “spouses”, just like the Senate did two days earlier. Amid debates in Paris on Wednesday evening (Thursday NZT), the vote to include people who were born in New Caledonia since 1998 came at an absolute majority of 386 in favour and 127 against. READ MORE: French Senate endorses change to New Caledonia’s ‘frozen’ electoral roll Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports But the vote on this “organic bill”, only weeks ahead of crucial elections to be held on in the French Pacific territory, is still subject to the verdict of the French Constitutional Council. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who took part in the heated debates, said the main purposes of the partial “unfreezing” of New Caledonia’s electoral restrictions was to rectify “growing distortions” in New Caledonia’s electoral roll. He said the restrictions were imposed as part of the implementation of the autonomy Nouméa Accord signed in 1998 (since referred to as the “frozen” electoral roll). But since 1998, due to demographic changes, the proportion of “native” people (from all ethnic groups) has grown from seven percent to 17 percent — an estimated 10,500 people. ‘Small step’ but ‘major’ Lecornu reacted to the vote to include “natives”, saying even though it could be regarded as a “small step”, it was a “major step forward” and a “victory for good sense”. But the French Lower House’s vote failed to endorse another amendment regarding the “spouses” of qualified voters and whether they could also be included in the “special electoral roll” (specifically designed for provincial elections). The vote on this specific topic was one vote short (164 against and 163 in favour). The “spouses” category includes about 1700 people who are married to qualified voters — either by legal marriage or by way of a civil union pact (what the French civil status refers to as PACS) for a minimum period of five years. Pro-independence FLNKS MP Emmanuel Tjibaou, during debates, repeated that New Caledonia’s electoral roll could not be modified “without the agreement of the colonised people” (the indigenous Kanak population) and that a prior “consensus on a comprehensive agreement” was required. Talks in view of such a comprehensive agreement were mooted by Lecornu, after the crucial elections to be held on 28 June 2026. The French PM also promised that a comprehensive agreement on New Caledonia’s political future would be finalised “by the end of this year”. Tjibaou assurance Tjibaou, during debates, assured that his pro-independence camp remained engaged in view of the announced post-elections discussions, sometime in July. However, for the pro-France side (parties that wish New Caledonia to remain a part of France), the inclusion of natives but not of the “spouses” was mainly regarded as “disappointing” and “insufficient”. An emotional pro-France MP for New Caledonia, Nicolas Metzdorf (Les Loyalistes), during debates on Wednesday, said even though he was “very happy for the natives of New Caledonia” — “for us, this is far from being enough”. “You are the shame of the Republic, you are the shame of New Caledonia”, he lashed out at French MPs. He warned that since the “spouses” were still denied the right to vote at those local elections, his party would not take part in the announced talks with the French government after the poll and that they would now wait until the next French Presidential elections in 2027. “We have nothing left to expect from this government”, he told the House. Local reactions New Caledonia’s Senator Georges Naturel (Les Républicains, rightwing), who was the mover of the motion in the French Parliament, hailed the lawmakers’ vote (both in the Senate and the National Assembly), saying the inclusion of “natives” was “a gesture of justice and democratic consistency”. However, he remained cautious on the upcoming verdict from France’s Constitutional Council, saying the legal framework was “narrow”. One of the leaders of moderate pro-independence group “UNI” (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance, which split from FLNKS in 2024), Victor Tutugoro, said this was a “wise decision” on the part of French MPs, because it was in keeping with the spirit of the 1998 Nouméa Accord. Speaking on behalf of the moderate Wallisian-based Éveil Océanien party, Milakulo Tukumuli said he was rather satisfied with the outcome of the vote, because “it is totally in keeping with our position”. The very issue of modifications to New Caledonia’s conditions of eligibility for voters was perceived as one of the main triggering factors that led to riots in May 2024, causing 14 deaths and more than 2 billion euros (NZ$3.9 billion) in material damages, a drop of 13.5 percent in the local GDP, as well as thousands of unemployed due to the destruction of hundreds of businesses. Due to the riots, New Caledonia’s provincial elections have been postponed three times since 2024. Those elections are crucial in the sense that they will choose new members for New Caledonia’s three provincial assembles (North, South and the Loyalty outer islands) and then, proportionally, will determine the makeup of the territorial Congress and its “collegial” government, as well as its president. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4
Thursday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD
Thursday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4 and was authored by Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4.
This Sheriff’s Office Says Racial Profiling Reforms Are Too Costly. Auditors Found It Misused $163 Million.
The post This Sheriff’s Office Says Racial Profiling Reforms Are Too Costly. Auditors Found It Misused $163 Million. appeared first on ProPublica.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office misused $163 million intended to address racial profiling reforms, according to a court-mandated audit. More than $7,000 in cable TV subscriptions. An $11,000 golf cart. $1.5 million in renovations to office space in a swanky Phoenix high-rise. And another $1.7 million for Tasers. Those were among more than $200 million in expenses that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office billed to a class-action settlement aimed at rooting out racial profiling in the department. A federal judge in 2013 found the department under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers, and the court has required sweeping reforms. These include documenting all traffic stops to detect patterns of racial bias, employing additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct and appointing a monitor to oversee the settlement. Since Sheriff Jerry Sheridan took office last year, he and Republicans on the county’s Board of Supervisors have cited the cost of complying with these orders to call for an end to the settlement of the case known as Melendres v. Arpaio — even as reviews of the department’s traffic stops continue to show racial disparities affecting Latino residents. The lingering disparities amplified Latino leaders and community members’ concerns as the second Trump administration has boosted local law enforcement’s involvement in its mass deportation campaign. Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s population, has approved $353 million in spending related to the settlement since 2013. But an audit of the sheriff’s office spending ordered by the court and a review of the public ledger by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica show millions of dollars went to expenses that had little or nothing to do with the settlement. (The audit focused on $226 million that the sheriff’s office charged to the settlement over a 10-year period; it didn’t examine legal and monitoring costs or the two most recent department budgets.) The auditors, who were hired by the monitor, found that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. For example, the full cost of some services and salaries was assigned to the settlement when those jobs were completely unrelated or only partially related to court orders. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said. Upon releasing its findings late last year, the two-member auditing team, led by an individual with decades of experience in public finance, noted that overstating the cost of the reforms undermines the court’s credibility. “This mischaracterization misleads the public on the cost of reform efforts and calls into question MCSO’s credibility, transparency, and truthfulness of its reporting,” they stated. The financial ledgers detail many of these expenses, including more than $310,000 for travel and professional development. Among them are $1,261 for travel in 2020 to research buying a boat and swift-water rescue training — for deputies who work in the desert, $4,070 to train and test whether to buy a horse for the mounted unit in 2021 and $5,077 to attend National Police Week in Washington, D.C., in 2023. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="275" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?w=752" alt="An illustration of a red inflatable raft with yellow accents floating on water." class="wp-image-77439" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png 4029w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=300,110 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=768,281 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=1024,375 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=1536,562 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=2048,750 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=863,316 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=422,154 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=552,202 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=558,204 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=527,193 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=752,275 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=1149,421 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=2000,732 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=400,146 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=800,293 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=1200,439 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/combined-boat-water.png?resize=1600,586 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office billed $1,261 to train and research buying a rescue boat as part of a racial profiling settlement. The audit concluded that the county Board of Supervisors, which approves the sheriff’s annual budgets, provided no “meaningful” oversight of its spending and had no process to verify if funds were being used appropriately to comply with court orders. Indeed, as costs ballooned, the Board of Supervisors rarely questioned the expenses, Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica found based on a review of nearly a decade of public budget hearings. The supervisors responded to the audit by telling U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow that the reforms, and in particular the audit’s scrutiny of county spending, had far exceeded the original racial profiling complaints. “Hispanic residents of Maricopa County concerned with racial profiling are unaffected by how the County and MCSO allocate costs,” the filing read. “Nor does any member of the Class experience a constitutional violation because MCSO purchased a golf cart.” Snow’s 2013 ruling found deputies had relied on race to pull over Latino drivers during immigration actions, violating their rights to equal protection and against unreasonable seizures. Attorneys for the county have filed a motion to end court oversight. That motion is pending. “Digging into county finances and trying to minimize the cost of Melendres compliance is not just an insult to taxpayers, it’s beyond the federal court’s jurisdiction,” Republican supervisors Thomas Galvin and Kate Brophy McGee said in a November statement. “Nothing about our budgeting or accounting practices violates federal or state law. This is why we decline to participate in further arguments over compliance costs.” Sheridan, whose tenure was not covered by the audit period, dismissed the findings and defended his department’s spending practices. The sheriff’s attorneys joined the motion to end court oversight. The past two years, the Board of Supervisors have approved Sheridan’s budget request, billing an additional $72 million to the settlement. The auditors, William Ansbrow and Eric Melancon, are barred by Snow from speaking publicly about their work. Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the five-member Board of Supervisors, has opposed ending court oversight of the sheriff’s office. He said the focus should remain on eliminating biased policing. The sheriff’s office is above 90% compliance with the two major court orders, but Snow has yet to clear the department in two key areas: racial disparities in traffic stops and a backlog of uninvestigated misconduct claims against deputies. “We should be having benchmarks in terms of, how do we get in full compliance,” Gallardo told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in April. “Others are going to say, ‘Well, they keep moving the goalpost.’ Well, let’s continue to move forward. I mean, that should be our overall goals: How do we get in full compliance with the Melendres case?” The sheriff’s office did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions about the spending. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1021" width="527" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?w=527" alt="An illustration of the Washington Monument obelisk standing on a patch of green grass, surrounded by small American flags at its base against a plain white background." class="wp-image-77428" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png 1784w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=155,300 155w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=768,1488 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=529,1024 529w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=793,1536 793w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=1057,2048 1057w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=863,1672 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=422,818 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=552,1069 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=558,1081 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=527,1021 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=752,1457 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=1149,2226 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=826,1600 826w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=400,775 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=800,1550 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=1200,2325 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/monument.png?resize=1600,3100 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 527px) 100vw, 527px" /> The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office expensed $5,077 to attend National Police Week in Washington, D.C., as part of a racial profiling settlement. An audit determined it had nothing to do with the settlement. While the audit and county ledger showed spending that appeared unrelated to the court’s orders, they also showed spending spiraling on things the court had ordered. In 2013, Snow required the sheriff’s office to purchase body cameras for patrol deputies and sergeants who conduct traffic stops. The audit found that the number of employees required to wear the cameras ranged from 434 in fiscal year 2023 to 513 in fiscal year 2021. Yet the department had purchased 950 cameras from Axon, a Scottsdale company, at a cost of $8.6 million. About $2.9 million of the spending “exceeded the Court’s requirements,” the audit found. The sheriff’s office also purchased Tasers from Axon, bundled with the body cameras, and charged them to the settlement. The court had not required deputies to carry Tasers. The sheriff’s office contended that buying the cameras separately would have been more costly. Even so, the audit found, the cost for Tasers — roughly $1.7 million — should have been charged to the department’s general fund instead of the settlement. To operate body camera docking stations, the department purchased high-speed internet. But monthly invoices revealed that from fiscal years 2020 to 2024, the charges included cable television subscriptions, which were unrelated to the settlement, totaling $7,670. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="535" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?w=752" alt="An illustration of a black Taser weapon." class="wp-image-77430" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png 2594w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=300,213 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=768,546 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=1024,728 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=1536,1092 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=2048,1457 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=863,614 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=422,300 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=552,393 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=558,397 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=527,375 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=752,535 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=1149,817 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=2000,1423 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=400,285 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=800,569 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=1200,854 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/taser.png?resize=1600,1138 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office expensed Tasers to a racial profiling settlement. An audit determined the purchase should have been charged to general funds instead. Since 2016, Snow has required the sheriff’s office to house the Professional Standards Bureau, its internal disciplinary body, separately from its downtown Phoenix headquarters. The order was intended to encourage residents to report deputy misconduct after Snow found department leadership had routinely interfered in discipline of deputies. (Sheridan was Arpaio’s chief deputy at the time.) To shuttle employees between headquarters and the standards bureau, the sheriff’s office purchased in June 2019 a golf cart valued at $11,800. At the same time, the department was also paying an average of $34,000 a year for additional parking at the bureau building to accommodate visitors and employees, according to the audit and county ledgers. The sheriff’s office added to these costs in July 2024 by moving the bureau for a second time in less than a decade, the audit shows. The bureau now occupies two floors inside a premium midtown Phoenix high-rise, the court’s auditing team found, citing public real estate listings. The department spent $1.5 million refurbishing the new offices, which auditors found was inappropriately charged to the settlement. The bureau had already been housed separately from department leadership, they noted. During a visit to the offices last year, a member of the audit team found that some of the space was empty and noted that the bureau could have been housed in “various unused publicly owned properties.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="614" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?w=752" alt="An illustration of a white golf cart with blue seats, a red flashing siren on the roof and “MCSO” markings on the side." class="wp-image-77425" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png 2915w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=300,245 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=768,627 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=1024,836 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=1536,1255 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=2048,1673 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=863,705 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=422,345 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=552,451 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=558,456 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=527,430 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=752,614 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=1149,939 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=1959,1600 1959w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=400,327 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=800,653 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=1200,980 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=1600,1307 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/golf-cart.png?resize=2000,1634 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> The Professional Standards Bureau, the disciplinary body for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, bought an $11,000 golf cart to ferry employees from their office to headquarters. The expense was unjustified, according to a court-mandated audit of spending on racial profiling reforms. Sheridan says the bulk of spending on the settlement goes toward staffing. Snow called for the creation of two divisions that enforce the court’s orders: the Court Implementation Division and the Bureau of Internal Oversight. The sheriff’s office also hired additional investigators for the Professional Standards Bureau, as it works to clear a backlog of 433 pending investigations. “We went from having an internal investigation division with maybe 15 people to well over 50,” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “You can see those costs right away.” During a February town hall meeting, Sheridan criticized the audit and said the court had required the sheriff’s office to hire 25 sergeants. His chief financial officer said those positions cost about $3 million a year. But the audit determined the sheriff’s office misused funds by charging unrelated or partially related staffing expenses to the settlement. It found that starting in fiscal year 2016, the department shifted the cost of the sergeant positions from general county funds to the settlement. The audit determined that of the 209 positions charged to the settlement at the start of the 2025 fiscal year, only 55 could be reasonably attributed to Snow’s orders. Another 84 were “inappropriately attributed to Melendres,” while an additional 70 were partially related and should have been prorated to reflect the share of the work related to the settlement versus other duties. Expenses related to these employees further exaggerated the cost of the settlement. The sheriff’s office charged $1.3 million to purchase 42 patrol vehicles for positions that the audit found were inappropriately attributed to court orders, including six vehicles for employees whose jobs had no connection to the case. In May 2022, the sheriff’s office began to charge car washes to the Melendres fund for vehicles it purchased for new patrol supervisors. Deputies expensed $3,259 in car washes that were not justified under the court’s orders, according to the audit. In all, the sheriff’s office misattributed to the settlement or inappropriately expensed about $144 million in personnel costs from 2014 to 2024, the audit determined. The auditors concluded that the department continues to misattribute funds, citing accounting practices that remain in place. As a result, they warned, taxpayers could be on the hook for millions of dollars more that have nothing to do with rooting out racial profiling. Galvin and Brophy McGee, two of the Republican supervisors, defended the county’s handling of its finances. “We stand by our budgeting practices and the 209 positions we created as a direct result of the Melendres Orders,” they said in November. “It would be a complete waste of taxpayer money to engage the federal courts in a back-and-forth over what is clearly an issue of local jurisdiction.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1508" width="527" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?w=527" alt="An illustration of a black remote control with various buttons, including a prominent circular directional pad and a red power button at the top right." class="wp-image-77429" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=105,300 105w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=358,1024 358w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=537,1536 537w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=422,1208 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=552,1580 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=527,1508 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/remote-control.png?resize=400,1145 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 527px) 100vw, 527px" /> The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office charged $7,669 in cable television subscriptions to a racial profiling settlement. An audit determined those charged were not justified. Before the audit was released in October, Republican supervisors were calling for an end to judicial oversight to protect the rights of Latino residents, claiming it had become too costly. “It’s a huge expense to the Maricopa County taxpayers,” Supervisor Debbie Lesko told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in July. “It seems like it’s never-ending because the judge just changes; they put out a new order. They move the goalposts, and so we need to resolve this.” Their attorneys argued in court that the Melendres lawsuit has been a success and the settlement was no longer needed. The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which joined the lawsuit in 2008, opposes ending oversight until the sheriff’s office is in full compliance with Snow’s orders. But it signaled a willingness to reduce monitoring of a few requirements that the department has complied with for at least three years. At a January hearing, Snow said he was reluctant to allow the county to “use cost orders both as a sword and a shield and make statements to the public which may, in fact, be completely inaccurate.” He doesn’t intend to police supervisors’ speech, Snow said, but he could require the county to justify the costs. Attorneys for the county and the sheriff’s office asked the judge for an opportunity to challenge the findings, which Snow approved. But they soon dropped it, citing the “unnecessary” cost of examining department spending. Public finance experts said county boards have an obligation to taxpayers to ensure they can account for how each dollar is spent. Zach Mohr, an associate professor at the University of Kansas who teaches public budgeting, accounting and financial management, reviewed the audit for Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. He said that if the board disagrees with the findings, “the way to solve that would be to get another audit.” Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica attempted to contact all current and former Maricopa County supervisors who had approved sheriff’s office spending during the case. Only Gallardo and one former supervisor agreed to comment. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="775" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?w=752" alt="An illustration of a brown horse’s head and neck, wearing a bridle with reins, against a plain white background." class="wp-image-77427" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png 2984w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=291,300 291w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=768,791 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=994,1024 994w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=1491,1536 1491w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=1988,2048 1988w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=863,889 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=422,435 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=552,569 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=558,575 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=527,543 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=752,775 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=1149,1184 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=1553,1600 1553w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=400,412 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=800,824 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=1200,1236 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=1600,1648 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/horse.png?resize=2000,2060 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office inappropriately charged $4,070 to train and research buying a horse as a part of a racial profiling settlement, a court-required audit determined. The news organizations’ review of past budget hearings showed supervisors had been more likely to probe spending during the early years of the settlement, as the county created infrastructure to implement reforms. In 2016, for example, Sheridan — then the department’s second-in-command — responded to a question about the court’s requirement to purchase body cameras for deputies, saying it was the sheriff’s office’s idea. “They’re more cutting-edge, and they’re more flexible. They travel with the deputies everywhere. And so it was our desire to do the body cameras,” he said at the time. In later years, however, supervisors rarely questioned publicly how the sheriff’s office spent the money. This year was different. Galvin asked the sheriff’s chief financial officer if their Melendres budget request for $36.5 million had been vetted. The officer said yes, adding that requests for the past 13 years were also vetted by the county budget office and state auditor. Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, who served on the board from 1993 to 2014, was the lone Latina and Democrat during most of her tenure. She told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica she objected to Arpaio’s spending and focus on immigration enforcement — which led to racial profiling, lawsuits and the settlement that continues today. “The others really didn’t, and they found Melendres was way over the top. But they knew they had to comply.” She recalled previous allegations of misspending by the sheriff’s office. In 2011, a county audit found the department used $100 million from jail funds to pay patrol deputies. At the time, Sheridan chalked it up to a bookkeeping error, referring to it as a “systems issue.” The board approved an oversight resolution, adopting rules to prevent the problem from happening again. “Hopefully, this is a chapter in Maricopa County’s history that we close and we never see such an abuse of funds again,” Wilcox told The Arizona Republic in 2011. The post This Sheriff’s Office Says Racial Profiling Reforms Are Too Costly. Auditors Found It Misused $163 Million. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Rafael Carranza.
CPJ, RSF warn Iran using 83-day blackout to hide press crackdown
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) are warning that the Iranian government is using an ongoing 83-day nationwide internet blackout to hide a severe crackdown on independent media. According to the monitor NetBlocks, the 12-week shutdown is the longest and most severe ever recorded in the country, effectively turning Iran...
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) are warning that the Iranian government is using an ongoing 83-day nationwide internet blackout to hide a severe crackdown on independent media. According to the monitor NetBlocks, the 12-week shutdown is the longest and most severe ever recorded in the country, effectively turning Iran into an information black hole designed to conceal the harassment and arbitrary arrest of local reporters. The digital blackout has directly targeted the press, making safe and accurate reporting nearly impossible. Local journalists are cut off from secure communications and sources, while international press freedom groups face immense difficulty confirming arrests or documenting abuses. This information vacuum has heightened concerns for journalists and media workers already behind bars, including Iranian-American journalist Reza Valizadeh, who remains detained in Tehran‘s Evin Prison with little known about his health or legal status. The joint statement calls on Iranian authorities to immediately restore full internet access across the country, cease all judicial harassment and arbitrary detentions of media workers, and release all journalists imprisoned for their reporting. Read the full statement here in English, Persian (فارسی), and French (français). This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
As seas rise, where will Louisiana’s fishers go?
A new paper says New Orleans must relocate inland. But that’s a lot harder when your economy revolves around seafood.
A new paper generated a fair amount of consternation and eye-rolling when the authors claimed that New Orleans, the largest city in Louisiana, is at risk of being surrounded by open water by the end of the century. As human-caused global warming continues to drive sea-level rise, coastal Louisiana, the paper states, has likely “already crossed the point of no return.” Under the current warming trajectory, the projected loss of the remaining coastal wetlands in southern Louisiana puts over 1 million residents “in harm’s way,” according to the authors. Though that may sound shocking, it wasn’t the controversial part of the paper, which was published in Nature Sustainability this month — at least not to some outspoken critics. Instead, the authors were criticized for arguing that New Orleans should consider managed retreat, or relocating further inland to higher ground to avoid the worst climate impacts. “[P]lease stop saying ‘relocate New Orleans.’ That’s not going to happen,” wrote Christopher Ard, an 11th-generation New Orleanian, in an opinion column in The Lens, a local non-profit newsroom. Ard added, “If people want to move, they will,” and that researchers should instead use “words like ‘abandon’ or ‘give up on’ or maybe even ‘find somewhere new,’” to describe this out-migration. “Relocate just sounds silly,” he wrote. In their paper, the authors estimate coastal Louisiana could face 3 to 7 meters of sea-level rise and further predict that parts of the state’s shoreline will move inwards by 100 kilometers, closer to Baton Rouge. And while they acknowledge that the timeline for these processes is unclear, they insist that the region has a matter of decades to plan for migration away from these dangers, not centuries. The paper does not propose how and when those living in the Mississippi River Delta should move, but rather urges that preparing for projected sea-level rise “is a long process that cannot be put off.” Left out of the paper’s scope is what happens to people whose jobs and livelihoods are tied to the coastline — like fisherpeople — in a managed retreat scenario. Louisiana is the second-largest producer of seafood in the United States, after Alaska, and New Orleans is a central hub for fisheries that catch shrimp, crabs, and fin fish from the wild, as well as harvest oysters, catfish, crawfish, and alligators. “For the fishermen in the state of Louisiana, the loss of, or not being able to use New Orleans as a hub, as a source of infrastructure, as a place to sell seafood — New Orleans consumes a lot of seafood as a market — would be devastating,” said Jeffrey Plumlee, an assistant professor at the School of Renewable Natural Resources at Louisiana State University. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1164447889.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="a small white boat sits abandoned in coastal waters, surrounded by dead cypress trees in Venice, Louisiana" data-caption="An abandoned boat sits in coastal waters and marsh in Venice, Louisiana. " data-credit="Drew Angerer / Getty Images"/> An abandoned boat sits in coastal waters and marsh in Venice, Louisiana. Drew Angerer / Getty Images It’s important to note that while the paper advocates for managed retreat from the coast, the authors caution against overstating the impacts of sea-level rise. “Eventually, yes, this is not going to be a livable place anymore,” said Torbjörn Törnqvist, one of the paper’s co-authors. But “New Orleans is still going to be around by the end of the century,” he said — it just may look a lot more like Venice, Italy, a city completely surrounded by open water. Such a process would undoubtedly impact the seafood industry in Louisiana, which has already been hit hard by worsening hurricanes — among other factors that have turned the fishing profession into precarious work. Severe storms have badly damaged critical infrastructure for fisheries, like ice houses and fuel docks. When those facilities are destroyed — or if they’re never repaired or replaced — the work becomes harder, and people start looking for opportunities elsewhere. Additionally, young people see the challenges of the industry and start considering other lines of work. “It’s called the graying of the fleet,” a term that describes how the fishing workforce is aging, said Plumlee. This process is not dissimilar from what is happening in southern Louisiana more broadly, where the population has fallen four times in the last five years according to census data. That population decline is not only or specifically tied to extreme weather or environmental conditions. “What you notice in coastal Louisiana is the aging of the population. “Young people are leaving to go find jobs and places where they have more opportunities,” said Beth Fussell, a sociologist and demographer at Brown University, who peer-reviewed the managed-retreat paper. This out-migration, she says, has “most likely has nothing to do with their perception of environmental risk.” It’s true that it is difficult to say with certainty who qualifies as a climate migrant or climate refugee — and in the case of coastal Louisiana, Törnqvist and his co-authors acknowledge movement out of this area is “multi-causal.” But it’s undeniable that environmental factors also shape what jobs and economic opportunities are available — for example, insurance companies have been raising prices or even pulling out of Louisiana entirely. According to Lawrence Huang, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, the challenge of moving to a new place and finding new ways to make a living is exactly why people in low-lying communities like New Orleans should make plans sooner rather than later. “This is why starting early and planning now matters, because it takes such a long time to help people find new skills and new occupations,” said Huang. In a situation where a major U.S. city becomes unlivable due to sea-level rise and decides to relocate, he added, “we’re going to have to reskill people so that they can find jobs in their new location. That is the unfortunate reality.” Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Aerial view of riverbank dwellers carrying banana produce over the dry Solimoes riverbed" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=330%2C220&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=768%2C512&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=150%2C100&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1067" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> The world is getting too hot to feed itself Ayurella Horn-Muller If the notion of picking up a whole community and moving it sounds far-fetched, one only needs to look at recent history — and particularly, the experiences of Indigenous peoples — to see that Huang is right. In southern Louisiana, the Isle de Jean Charles, a state-recognized Native American tribe, received nearly $50 million from the federal government in 2016 to relocate to higher ground, after the island on which the tribe lived lost 98 percent of its landmass due to severe coastal erosion and subsidence. The tribal nation is considered the nation’s first climate migrants. In a 2022 interview with StoryCorps, Albert Naquin, the chief of the Isle de Jean Charles, noted that members’ ways of sustaining themselves shifted along with the geography of the island. “Where we used to walk at, now we use boat to travel in,” said Naquin. “And where we used to trap and raise cattle, now we shrimp.” Nevertheless, according to many tribal members, the relocation was a bust. “It’s not worth it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody,” one tribal member who relocated told the New York Times. The issues with relocating are myriad, and go beyond what job one will have after migrating. Huang emphasized that, “Planned relocation and managed retreat are not popular terms and it’s because people don’t want to move.” Any conversation around climate-driven human migration, therefore, should “start from that point,” he argued. Still, he admitted, “It’s a good conversation to be having.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As seas rise, where will Louisiana’s fishers go? on May 21, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.
Montenegro Might Join The EU. But What Will Brussels Call Its Language?
Georgia’s PSC elections have become a referendum on energy prices
Democrats won big in last year’s election. This year, they’re aiming to win a majority on the commission.
Georgia is one of only ten states that elects its utility commission — the board that has final say over how much millions of Georgians pay for electricity. The state’s public service commission, or PSC, also has substantial say over how that electricity is made and, because fossil fuel power plants are a leading producer of the greenhouse gases, the PSC’s decisions directly influence Georgia’s climate future. From 2006 until last year, all five members of the PSC were Republicans. Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson won upset victories and have since made it more difficult for Georgia Power to have their decisions rubber stamped. Those elections have had ripple effects in other utility commission races around the country: In Arizona, national activist groups on both sides of the aisle have gotten involved in the race; Alabama lawmakers overhauled their commission in an attempt to shield it from the chance that voters will oust its Republicans. On Tuesday, Georgia held party primaries for two seats on the PSC. November’s elections, then, will be the Democrats’ next chance to win a majority presence on the commission, and could lead to more renewable energy in Georgia and more scrutiny of Georgia Power’s ongoing expansion plans. In the District Five race, Democrat Shelia Edwards defeated opponents Craig Cupid and Angelia Pressley. Republicans Bobby Mehan and Josh Tolbert will square off in a runoff on June 16. Libertarian Thomas Blooming is also running for the seat. “I’m running to be that third vote that’s gonna help them change the trajectory of the PSC,” said Edwards in an interview before the primary. “And to bring some balance to something that’s been completely imbalanced for years.” Edwards, Mehan, and Tolbert have all said they support clean energy, but the Republican candidates clarified they don’t support any sort of renewable energy mandate. “I do not think there is a place on the commission for advocates,” said Tolbert. “It’s not a legislative body. It doesn’t set particular policies. Its job is to ensure that Georgians have reliable, affordable electricity.” Tolbert’s main pitch to voters has been his technical expertise as an engineer with experience working in multiple types of power plants. Mehan, meanwhile, has said his business experience means he can find innovative solutions to problems. He described himself as a pro-gas, pro-nuclear, “all the above energy guy.” Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Photo of gas station price board with regular gasoline at 6.19 per gallon" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/high-gas-prices-San-Diego.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="900" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> The Iran war is destroying oil demand. Could it also spark a shift to clean energy? Kate Yoder Control of the commission does not hinge only on Edwards’s race, however. It will also come down to whether Hubbard can retain his seat. The race for District Three could come down to a rematch between Hubbard and Fitz Johnson. Last year’s election in District Three, which Hubbard won, was only for a one-year term. Hubbard ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, but the Republican race was too close to call as of Wednesday afternoon. Johnson leads his primary opponent Brandon Martin by less than 3,000 votes. The results fall within the margin for a recount should Martin request one. Martin did not reply to requests for comment on the result. The winner will serve a full, six-year term. Unlike most candidates from both parties in the primary, Johnson says the commission has done enough to protect ordinary ratepayers from the costs of serving data centers — a hot-button issue as more data centers flock to the state and Georgia Power spends billions of dollars on new resources to serve them. The commission’s votes on that utility expansion help drive home the repercussions of this election. In December, after the two Democrats’ resounding election victory but before the new commissioners took their seats, the five Republican commissioners voted unanimously to approve Georgia Power’s proposal to add 10 gigawatts of energy, most of it made with natural gas. Earlier this year, advocates pushed the commission to reconsider some of the new energy, arguing that the plan would generate more electricity than the utility’s own forecast calls for. The commission, they argued, overstepped its legal authority. The new Democratic commissioners voted to reopen the issue, but the effort failed — with all three Republicans voting against it. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia’s PSC elections have become a referendum on energy prices on May 21, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Jones.
Civic engagement duo Soft Power Vote (Melissa Sáenz Gordon and Molly Salas) on connecting with community
Can you both tell me a little more about your backgrounds and what led you to decide to collaborate on a project?
Can you both tell me a little more about your backgrounds and what led you to decide to collaborate on a project? Melissa: My background is pretty diverse and non-linear. I have a background in social media, storytelling, and editorial work, as well as restaurant work. And my organizing background was shaped by growing up in San Francisco, a city that was pretty seasoned in community organizing, information sharing, and skill-building. So when I first started voting, I would get information from various sources, from talking to my parents, but also going to coffee shops in college and seeing ephemeral printed matter that would share information about the ballot. I started organizing little get-togethers in San Francisco with my friends to go over what was on the ballot and whatnot. When I came to New York in 2017, I noticed that New York didn’t have as much independent information. So in 2019, I pitched the Soft Power Vote idea to a couple of friends of mine, and we launched it, and Molly joined within the first year. Molly: I’m a music supervisor, so my first job was in television, and then I was at MTV, but it didn’t have music anymore. I grew up in San Diego, a border and military town, which has all of these politics that California doesn’t share, or it is also kind of in between these two cultures, which is why it’s not my place. In 2020, I was working as a music supervisor in a big, scary tech company and hated it. And Soft Power Vote was something that a friend had recommended, who was doing some jail support during the early part of the pandemic. And I was like, where do you go for the judges? Who do you trust? I quit my job and really wanted an outlet to help. Luckily, Soft Power Vote blended the creative industry that I work in and my political wonky nerdiness, and here we are. Molly, is there a place, a person, or a moment that tends to spark your best ideas? Molly: It’s less a particular place than it is a setting. Over the years, I’ve figured out particular playlists or vibes that help me accomplish different tasks. There’s one that helps me get in the zone for projects that are really creative writing involved, others for more rote data entry, lots of music that is best for deep diving research. It’s a little like music supervising my own creativity, but now that it’s been a practice of mine for years, it helps me focus and dedicate time to things that are important to me. Settling in with a playlist, a coffee or something, and a cozy place to sit is the first step to feeling really grounded before diving in. Melissa, as you mentioned, you grew up in San Francisco, a city known for social movements and a vibrant artistic community. How important do you think it is to have mentors or role models to develop your creative discipline or to get into making art? Melissa: Growing up in San Francisco definitely shaped me as a person and my creative practice with Soft Power Vote. The reality is that I’ve had a community of mentors, with friends and peers proving to be my most vital collaborators. I’m someone who needs to workshop ideas, methods, and discuss the world around us—this simply cannot be done alone. Right now, the fabric of the San Francisco arts community is being challenged, with recent closures of major art schools like the San Francisco Art Institute (founded in 1871) and the California College of the Arts (founded in 1907, FKA California College of Arts & Crafts), but folks are already organizing around it, because the opportunity is there and so is the creative spirit and will—it’s inspiring to witness. I’ve found NYC to be a super collaborative city, but it’s also easy to feel overwhelmed, [either] with opportunity or simply distracted by the amount of fun things to do, so it’s important to have grounding moments to pause and connect with people one-on-one, in-person, and talk about projects, life, and more. Mentors and role models are pretty core to a creative person’s artistic expression, nurturing ideas that may lead to projects or movements, but they may not be who you expect, so stay open-minded about that. When launching a project, there’s the creative idea, but also the strategy: how it will land, how it’s planned, and how it’s tested. Before you launched Soft Power Vote, how much did you think through those elements? Melissa: It’s a little bit of both. The project is about five years old now, so at this point we’ve seen what works and what we realistically have the bandwidth for. That’s always the balance with this project. It’s a passion for both Molly and me, so it’s hard not to want to invest everything in it–but it can also take over your time. In the nascent years and months of building, the project was also just a totally different cultural moment. I was unemployed and just had so much time on our hands, and that was also what really informed the nature and the structure of it. From the beginning, we were intentional about it being digital-first. We cared a lot about the aesthetics, something catchy and shareable that people would want to circulate online. There was definitely experimentation in the launch: testing what worked, figuring out our voice, and seeing how people responded. Molly: A big part of our strategy was making our research publicly accessible. We wanted to empower people to seek out the information themselves and to demystify politics. For us, that connection between politics and the cultural community is systemic and fundamental. Melissa: And also on a practical level, launching was scrappy. You come up with the idea, pitch it to friends, secure the Instagram handle, make an email account, and start talking to your community. A lot of it was grassroots–making sure the people who needed the information were actually getting it. On a higher level, a big mission of the project is to show how politics and being engaged in this subject matter aren’t just for a certain type of person. It’s so easy to just be like, that’s not my thing, or, I’m not interested in it. I wanted to create a project that made it easier for us to connect those dots. Some social media platforms are prioritizing a certain kind of content. Since a lot of your work is published online, is there anything that you’ve learned about protecting your work in a digital space, for example, archiving content, or anything else that has been helpful? Melissa: I don’t think we necessarily do it intentionally, but in some cases and in some iterations of the project, we were creating a community folder where we would put all of our digital assets. These platforms force us to get creative with how we preserve and share content. As platforms can now read text, they’ll sensor and shadow ban posts that use certain language, so we’ve had to adapt, circling back to things like pager code to work around that. It also forces us to think about how our content lives and survives on these platforms. In terms of archiving, we want our resources to endure, not just as something people rely on, but as a starting point for their own research. Part of protecting the work is also making sure it points outward, beyond just our platforms. We’ve also learned that collaborating with other creators is very helpful to extend the life and reach of the content. Another thing that we have learned is that, rather than trying to do everything ourselves, we work with people who are already doing certain things really well, and we fill a different need. That’s been a helpful strategy for sustaining the project long-term. Lastly, it’s a little bit of learning the new updates and what is evolving. Also reminding us that you don’t have to chase trends all the time. We get to curate what we think makes the most useful and interesting, and we stay true to our mission. You both seem to juggle a lot of different activities and projects. How do you manage your time while also maintaining healthy boundaries? Molly: I got a new full-time job in September, and before that, I was a 1099 freelance music supervisor and had consistent work that felt good, but I had a lot of free time during the workday, so I would open my laptop and do work related to Soft Power Vote. I don’t have the luxury of that time in this new job now. I’m still adjusting. I’m figuring out how to set boundaries with my own time, but I also find this work to be really interesting, fun, and generative. But just sitting in my little container, making a big spreadsheet is really fun for me. This work usually brings me joy, but right now it’s bumming me out. And it can be really hard, especially for creative pursuits–in the world we live in, we’re expected to hustle or monetize it. That is part of how creative work is oriented around your own values. It’s hard to set aside the time, particularly when you’re often encouraged to earn income for the things that pay you money, especially if you’re struggling to live in a city as expensive as New York. Melissa: Just to build on that, I consider this my creative practice and my creative output in a lot of ways. And like any other practice, you have to choose to do it. That’s just something that is always in the back of my mind. And money is such an interesting thing to bring up with this, because, even though we’re doing it for free, we still invest in it, and it requires capital to keep going. That’s also why I love highlighting that artists are teachers, organizers, restaurant workers–people with full lives outside their creative practice. It was fun to have and create a project that really blended it all, because that’s kind of how we live our lives. Melissa, in 2020, you wrote an article in Hyperallergic called “We Need More Creatives in Politics.” What were your major findings from that article, and what has changed, or what are any new insights that you’ve had since you published it? Melissa: What we can see is that when artists run for office, they’re great leaders. Some of our most exciting new electeds are all people who have an arts and a creative background. For example, Jabari Brisport was an actor and a public school teacher. My main finding is that art is also something that, just like politics, if you don’t know a lot about it, it can feel very intimidating. Some people like it that way, and I don’t. There are lots of studies that show that art makes neighborhoods safer, it makes us more excited, and it makes our walk more enjoyable. It just makes life more enjoyable, and it helps us learn how to relate to each other. I grew up in San Francisco, and a lot of art spaces and venues are closing. And nightlife is a huge part of a healthy culture in society. And for us to be able to go out and see all this crazy stuff on the news and see just all the crazy stuff that’s happening in the world, to have spaces where we can decompress is also really important. I’m sure you have spent a lot of time working on something that did not work out. What advice would you give to creative people who invest a lot of time and effort into something, and they don’t achieve the result they expected? Melissa: Hope and joy are two of the most vital and powerful feelings. And we can see the kind of impact we would have if we all just show up. Much like Soft Power Vote, it’s just get out there and try something. There’ll be a lot of disappointment, but it’s more like, how can we turn that L into a win? Molly: For this project, I feel successful when a bunch of my peers feel more empowered to do the thing. It can be a bummer. There is so much fear of the undesired outcome that it often results in not trying. And I am grateful for the platform we created because, at the very minimum, it means that we’re always trying. We’re always trying to continue imagining the best New York City that we can. And for creatives more broadly. It can be disappointing when the outcome doesn’t work out the way that you expected it to. And often the work of trying or the effort might unlock some other things that you weren’t expecting. You both have worked on many creative projects involving organizing groups and producing events. In your experience, what do you think sparks engagement and excitement from audiences? Molly: Authenticity is really important. Audiences can see through trying to be sold to or cajoled into doing something. It’s true in politics, and it’s true in art. An authentic connection is a much more meaningful one, and builds trust, which then keeps those audiences engaged, than something that feels forced or trying too hard. It’s a big learning, too, to be able to follow your creative gut rather than try to fit into something prescriptive, branded, or following trends. The creator economy tends to lend itself to lots of folks copying each other, chasing viewers and followers, but it’s refreshing and captures attention when creative people try something new. Melissa: Timing is a big factor. You may want to coordinate an event or project launch to dovetail with a specific date or venue, but sometimes you just have to go for it. In the end, just getting it over the finish line is the most important element. What sparks engagement and excitement in people is simply the opportunity to gather around a topic or theme, so creating that opportunity and platform is the ultimate objective. Saw this line a decade ago (probably on a coffee cup or on Instagram), and it echoes in my mind when clouded with logistics: “Finished is better than perfect.” So just execute the thing and apply your learnings to the next one. Molly Salas recommends: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 I’m working my way through this now, and it’s such an imaginative exploration of what we can do if we stop accepting the status quo, fight for the collectives, and completely subvert our understanding of society, commerce, and more. It’s daunting to imagine some of the steps in our future this alternative history describes, but being set against the backdrop of a future New York City makes it lofty and tangible at the same time. Sudan Archives - The BPM Saw her live recently, I don’t know what she puts in that violin but it keeps me coming BACK. The Word Is Change bookstore in Bed-Stuy. Support small businesses! Get off of Amazon! They have a great selection of new and used books, often with a leftist lean, and the events they host reflect their values and their politics. We love to see it. Take a ferry ride on NYC Ferry. One day it will be warm again in New York City, and the ferry is such a nice way to see the city, get to where you’re going, maybe have a beer in the sunshine on the roof deck. Whatever youth that runs their Instagram is also such a chaotic good. Laziza, also in Bed-Stuy, a vinyl listening bar and restaurant that is delicious, has great funk records curated with care, amazing staff, great vibes, no notes. Melissa Sáenz Gordon recommends: Love regional audio, so I’d be remiss not to suggest tuning into local FM radio wherever you are. In an age of AI-playlists, it’s so grounding to enjoy thoughtfully curated tracklists by a human, which often reflect a given area’s local culture and history. A couple of quick hits: In NYC, I listen to Brian Lehrer on WNYC in the mornings, Jazz on 88.3 WBGO, and 89.9 WKCR. Love 89.5 KPOO when I’m in the Bay Area. What I’m listening to right now, however, is Joe Bataan’s “I Wish You Love,” Parts 1 and 2. Take public transit to LaGuardia Airport (Slayguardia if you will). 1# log of organic butter from the farmer’s market (affordable luxury, you deserve it). “The Gift of Strawberries,” a chapter from the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A preview: “A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.” (Page 30) It’s an election year! Double-check your voter registration and find your representatives at the link in bio @SoftPowerVote on Instagram (shameless plug). Remember: We the people hold the power! This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.
One Racist Christo-Fascist Homeland Under God
In retrospect, Sunday's taxpayer-funded blasphemy fest to "rededicate" America as a Christian nation though it's not and never was looks ever more obscene amidst an unholy regime's mounting crimes and abuses. Its sectarian shit-show - ICE milled, vend...
In retrospect, Sunday's taxpayer-funded blasphemy fest to "rededicate" America as a Christian nation though it's not and never was looks ever more obscene amidst an unholy regime's mounting crimes and abuses. Its sectarian shit-show - ICE milled, vendors urged "WIVES SUBMIT," zealots screeched "We welcome Jesus!", speakers attested God is eager for the ballroom - just queasily re-shaped a 250-year-old America into the kind of country it once sought freedom from. "Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving," a "constitutional abomination wrapped in layers of blasphemy and demagoguery," sought to proclaim America "One Nation Under God," but only a white male evangelical God; Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, commies, Jews, atheists, agnostics, black, brown, queer, Native people and even mainline Protestants need not apply. As such, it attacked what Jefferson deemed an unalienable right of conscience "which lies solely between Man & his God," defied the core constitutional tenet of separation of church and state, and "torpedoe(d) the best of American traditions - inclusivity and diversity" with, essentially, "a Jubilee of Christian Nationalism." Its state-sponsored, right-wing fever dream marked the successful MAGA hijacking of Congress’ bipartisan, 2016 America250 commission, meant to honor the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and its core values of equality and agency before the law. Instead, Trump concocted his own Christo-fascist Freedom 250 to celebrate a racist, corporate, jingoistic narrative of America, rewriting history to create an imaginary, monolithic, jingoistic, white, male, Christian national identity that celebrates "God’s presence in our national life throughout 250 years of American history," and what is this inequality or oppression of which you speak? Freedom 250 swiftly collected most of the $150 million appropriated by Congress, along with support from patriotic sponsors like ExxonMobil, Mastercard, Palantir, Amazon, Coinbase. Year-long festivities have included a weekly America Prays initiative; a series of Interior Department events celebrating “the triumph of the American spirit” plastered with flags, logos, Trump National Park passes; a fleet of nationwide “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums offering right-wing takes on US history created with PragerU; a national Freedom 250 Patriot Games - Hunger Games anyone? - competition for high school athletes; a revamped Great American Farmers Market in DC with a "MAHA Monday." On social media, meanwhile, DHS has begun declaring itself "One Homeland Under God," complete with image of church and cross and highlighted Bible verse; for April 19, it urged, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." The Washington Monument was transformed into “the world’s tallest birthday candle," with projections celebrating historic achievements by white men like Christopher Columbus and Henry Ford, with no black, Native, female people in sight. To re-enforce the white-centric narrative, organizers have also promised a Summer Surge of thousands more ICE and DHS thugs to make the nation still whiter. Sunday's Jubilee continued the rebrand of a newly pristine, godly history, with 14 of 15 speakers Christian, arched stained-glass windows and a looming white cross all "glorifying the name of Jesus over our nation’s capital." "Our nation more than any other was shaped by the idea that faith brought freedom," said Marco Rubio in a prerecorded speech. "This is who we are." Virginia pastor Gary Hamrick concurred, but added the imaginary threat of a "spiritual war," perhaps best personified by the scary scattered signs of protesters urging, “Celebrate Democracy, Not Theocracy.” "This is a battle in our day between good and evil," he said. "Our hope is built on Jesus' blood." Also, Jesus merch. As the faithful braved three-hour lines in the heat and prayed, arms lifted to the sky, vendors handed out "Jesus Saves" bracelets and buttons that said, “WIVES SUBMIT, HUSBANDS LOVE, CHILDREN OBEY.” There were "Thank you Jesus!" signs, a huge "Jesus Make America Godly Again" banner, $47 Freedom 250 baseball caps, t-shirts that read, "God Guns Family Freedom" and "Forever In Our Hearts, Charlie Kirk." "We welcome Jesus into this place!" declared one speaker. Another noted, "It's hard to believe it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom to stand where it needs to stand." (Jesus.) Pete Hegseth,on video, was typically unshy about praising Jesus. He dubiously zeroed in on The Prayer at Valley Forge, a 1975 painting by Arnold Friberg of George Washington praying in the snow widely deemed a romanticized legend, not fact. Historians argue Washington was a deist and freemason who rarely mentioned God or Jesus, whose favorite Biblical quote - "But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid" - symbolizes peace, safety, religious freedom, and who always prayed standing. Still, Hegseth ran with it: Washington "did not lose faith," and "let us pray as he did...without ceasing...on bended knee, for our Lord and savior Jesus Christ." Trump took an even more sketchy approach: He went golfing and sent in a slurry, pre-taped Bible reading recycled from the last fake Christian event three weeks ago. Then, moments after it aired, the self-described peace president went on a frenzied, genocidal social media spree, posting on his crappy app over 30 times in two hours. He threatened Iran: "The Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them." He posted bizarre, AI, warmongering images: Manning a spacecraft, firing away with massive explosions and mushroom clouds, personally arresting an alien, a real one. Say what? Praise Jesus. Still, spineless, smarmy, unholy Mike Johnson was the worst. Having already whined about "naysayers" who view Christian Nationalism as "a derogatory term," he gave a long hollow prayer about his task to "bring us straight to the Lord, whose mighty hand has been upon our (freest and most benevolent) nation since the very beginning." But now "sinister ideologies sow confusion among our people," attacking our history as "one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure." So "grant us the moral clarity to rise above partisan differences," says the guy who keeps shutting down Congress to block Dem policies. Finally, unconscionably, he prayed for “mercy upon our land.” Mercy. He seeks mercy. Mercy for the hundreds of people in the Congo and elsewhere dying of an Ebola outbreak after Trump gutted USAID and its dedicated outbreak response team because it helped people who aren't white, thus triggering what could be over 14 million preventable deaths by 2030? Mercy for those killed at San Diego's biggest mosque amidst a Trump-fuelled rising tide of Islamophobia? Mercy for those ripped off and betrayed by a $1.8 billion slush fund, or "pardon on steroids," from the most corrupt regime in history? Mercy for the estimated 145,000 U.S. citizen brown children who had a parent detained by ICE and are now scattered across the country, or the 22,000 who lost both parents? Mercy for the woman, a domestic violence victim, detained and deported whom ICE is now blaming for the murder of her own child by her ex-partner? Mercy for the 21-year-old Honduran with no criminal record just arrested and detained by ICE outside a New York immigration court less than 24 hours after a federal judge's ruling such arrests are illegal, because, as one ICE thug responded when shown the ruling, "We don't care"? Mercy for 18-year-old, Chicago-born, Mexico-raised Kevin González, being treated in Chicago for metastatic stage-four colon cancer when his health began failing? His parents in Mexico sought emergency visas to travel to the US to say their final goodbyes; when DHS denied them, citing “previous unlawful entries into the US," in desperation they tried to cross the border without permission and were detained by ICE in Arizona. Kevin pleaded in vain for their release; ultimately, he checked himself out of the hospital and flew to his grandmother's home in Mexico to be with family at the end. Finally, in Kevin's last hours, a judge in Arizona ordered their release. They arrived at his bedside on the afternoon of May 9. His sobbing mom called him, “Chiquito," "little one”; his father knelt by his son's bed, asking for forgiveness if he ever let him down. Kevin died the next day. Mercy? Does Mike Johnson want mercy for Kevin and his parents? Fuck Mike Johnson and all his cohort. Fuck their prayers, and their Jesus, and their cruelty, and their fucking despicable hypocrisy, which knows no bounds. What would Jesus do? Not this, any of it. This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.
The conspiracy that wasn’t: How a fake investigation into India, Myanmar rebels and rare earths went around the world
This is the first of a three-part investigation into a coordinated influence operation targeting India’s efforts to secure rare earths from Myanmar’s Kachin region. It traces how a fabricated conspiracy... The post The conspiracy that wasn’t: How a fake investigation into India, Myanmar rebels and rare earths went around the world appeared first on Alt News.
This is the first of a three-part investigation into a coordinated influence operation targeting India’s efforts to secure rare earths from Myanmar’s Kachin region. It traces how a fabricated conspiracy story alleging secret roads, weapons transfers and a covert India-KIA partnership was manufactured, published across a network of pay-to-publish websites, and amplified on social media by accounts overwhelmingly originating in Pakistan. Subsequent parts examine the story’s claims against the evidence, and investigate who may be behind the campaign and why. This is Part One. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ On November 18, the website Tech Bullion ran a strange piece. Sandwiched between CEO profiles, marketing how-tos and product reviews, the “exclusive investigation” claimed that India was conspiring with the Kachin Independence Army in northern Myanmar to develop a corridor for transporting rare earths. It also alleged that India was supporting the KIA militarily to “systematically erode Myanmar’s sovereignty and resources.” An investigation conducted by Alt News in collaboration with freelance journalists Emily Fishbein and Jauman Naw found that the story’s publication and amplification were were part of a coordinated influence operation. This investigation also identified evidence of the operation extending beyond Myanmar and India. Initially published on five content-amplification websites, the story was then published on at least four websites and news outlets focusing on Myanmar and northeast India. It was further amplified through four rounds of coordinated social media posts on X and one round on Facebook, overwhelmingly by accounts that appear to have originated in Pakistan. Margot Fulde-Hardy, an investigator at the American social network intelligence platform Graphika, conducted research which contributed to these findings. Further research conducted by Fulde-Hardy also found that the online infrastructure used to distribute the KIA-India rare earth conspiracy story partially overlaps with that used by pro-China networks involved in an influence operation known as Spamouflage. Whether Spamouflage, or any government, was involved in the KIA-India rare earth conspiracy story’s publication could not be confirmed, but it is nonetheless significant in three key ways. First, it helps to identify the shared use of influence operation infrastructure by Spamouflage networks and social media accounts originating in Pakistan, which has not previously been reported. “The recruitment of Pakistani accounts to disseminate Spamouflage-linked content suggests a departure from Spamouflage’s current tactics that we tracked at Graphika,” said Fulde-Hardy. Second, the story touches on transnational geopolitical flashpoints. Myanmar is the world’s largest source of certain rare earth elements, with most mining sites concentrated in territory controlled by the KIA. China currently processes all rare earth mined in Myanmar; although India does not yet possess the capacity to compete with China in this regard, Reuters reported last year that India and the KIA had engaged in preliminary conversations about a potential rare earths cooperation. If carried out, such a cooperation would undercut China’s dominance over the industry. Both China and Pakistan are longtime rivals of India. India and China have openly backed the Myanmar military junta since its 2021 coup, while competing for influence in the country. The three hashtags used by Pakistani accounts when sharing the KIA-India conspiracy article on social media — #StopIndiaHegemony, #DefendMyanmarSovereignty, and #StopRareEarthExploitation — reflect this complexity. According to Angshuman Choudhury, a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London who specialises in India-Myanmar relations and border politics, the KIA-India conspiracy story appears to represent a new convergence of particular interests in the disinformation space. “Every piece of disinfo is aimed at achieving something at the behest of someone. In this case too, it prima facie sought to destabilise India’s covert outreach to the KIA on the rare earth issue,” he said. “That the piece came out and was fairly widely circulated shows the high stakes nature of this outreach and its potential to reshape some part of the regional geopolitical landscape.” The story’s subject matter also reflects a rising trend in the global disinformation space. A recent study published in The Extractive Industries and Society, an academic journal, identified a rise in narrative warfare about critical minerals alongside an increase in global demand. Critical minerals is a term used to describe geostrategic metals; while the precise definition and list varies by country, rare earth elements are generally included. “Owing to their complexity, opacity, and geopolitical significance, critical minerals uniquely lend themselves to information manipulation,” said the study. In January of this year, Climate Information Watch, a youth-led nonprofit that researches disinformation related to climate change, proposed using the term “mineral disinformation” to capture this trend. The organization’s founder, Andjelija Kedzic, said in written comments for this article that the suppression of independent voices including journalists, activists and civil society globally was a key part of this strategy. “This systematic silencing primarily of the local voices points to a wider transnational effort to gain strategic discursive dominance and limit accountability and scrutiny in the global competition over critical minerals,” she said. She identified particular risk factors for Myanmar, where the jailing of journalists and other tactics have hindered independent access to data about the rare earth mining industry and contributed to a “climate of repression that directly shapes what information becomes visible or suppressed.” “Myanmar’s civil conflict has created an extremely dangerous, constrained, and volatile information environment,” she said. “Critical voices are consistently marginalized, which lays fertile ground for mineral disinformation to likely be perceived as relevant information.” The KIA-India rare earths conspiracy story plays into these vulnerabilities, using credible pieces of information as launch points for introducing claims that are both provocative and difficult to verify. According to Kedzic, it also uses established information warfare techniques in the critical minerals battleground. “This case utilizes a well-known tactic that is used within both climate and mineral disinformation, where the strategic production of content is designed for amplification across social media ecosystems,” she said. “Fabricated articles from false media outlets, often citing vague ‘investigations’ or unnamed ‘analysts,’ can easily be shared by bots, trolls, and genuine users on platforms such as Facebook or X.” <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-315279 " src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-40-610x1024.jpg" alt="" width="664" height="1115" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-40-610x1024.jpg 610w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-40-179x300.jpg 179w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-40-768x1289.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-40.jpg 894w" sizes="(max-width: 664px) 100vw, 664px" /> <img decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-315280 " src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-41-754x1024.jpg" alt="" width="662" height="899" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-41-754x1024.jpg 754w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-41-221x300.jpg 221w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-41-768x1043.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-41.jpg 1104w" sizes="(max-width: 662px) 100vw, 662px" /> First Round of Publications The story appeared on five websites in November over a span of eight days; all of these websites offer content promotion, with a focus on finance, technology and entrepreneurship. <img decoding="async" class="wp-image-315281 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-42-1024x848.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="671" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-42-1024x848.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-42-300x248.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-42-768x636.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-42.jpg 1500w" sizes="(max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> Archived version of an article published on the website Tech Bullion on November 18, 2025. The article was removed from the website after the editors were contacted for this investigation on February 5, 2026. It was first published in Tech Bullion on November 18 with a byline for Zeeshan Yousaf. A link to his author bio leads to a LinkedIn profile for a Pakistan-based content writer specializing in search engine optimization and increasing website and application traffic. When contacted by e-mail, Zeeshan Yousaf replied, “Send me your WhatsApp number. I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”. He did not respond to questions about the India-KIA conspiracy piece. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315282 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-43-1024x800.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="633" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-43-1024x800.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-43-300x234.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-43-768x600.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-43.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> The LinkedIn profile of Zeeshan Yousaf. Screenshot captured on March 20, 2026. Tech Bullion claims to be a London-based financial technology news platform and a project of the Rich Media Network, a self-described digital media company that specializes in content publishing and marketing. OpenCorporates, a free online database of information collected from corporate records, lists Angela Scott-Briggs and Joachim Okechukwu Mba as Tech Bullion’s ultimate beneficial owners. Angela Scott-Briggs’ profile on the Tech Bullion website describes her as its editor. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315283 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-44-1024x416.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="329" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-44-1024x416.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-44-300x122.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-44-768x312.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-44.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> The Tech Bullion homepage. Screenshot captured on March 20, 2026 <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315284 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-45-1024x767.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="607" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-45-1024x767.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-45-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-45-768x575.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-45.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> The “our services” page on the Rich Media Network website. Screenshot captured on March 21, 2026. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315285 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-46-1024x339.png" alt="" width="810" height="268" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-46-1024x339.png 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-46-300x99.png 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-46-768x254.png 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-46.png 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> Angela Scott-Briggs’ profile on the Tech Bullion website. Screenshot captured on March 24, 2026 A list of questions sent to Angela Scott-Briggs and Tech Bullion’s general email initially elicited what appeared to be an auto-response signed by Scott-Briggs, explaining the terms, conditions and rates for publishing paid content. Two minutes later, Scott-Briggs replied, “The said post has now been deleted” — an apparent reference to the article in question, which was scrubbed from the Tech Bullion website. Scott-Briggs did not reply to further emailed questions. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315286 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-47-1024x948.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="750" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-47-1024x948.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-47-300x278.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-47-768x711.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-47.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> An auto-response from Tech Bullion in response to questions about its publication of an inauthentic article alleging a conspiracy between India and the Kachin Independence Army to access Myanmar’s rare earths. On November 19, a day after the story’s initial publication, it was republished on the website Digital Journal, with attribution to Binary News Network. This version ends with a disclaimer that the article includes information provided by an independent third-party content provider, and notes that readers can email Binary News Network if they would like to request the article’s removal. Digital Journal claims to be a Canada-based online platform operating under the Binary News Network, a content syndication network for PR wires. Binary News Network did not reply to an emailed list of questions, but the article was removed from the Digital Journal website hours after the email was sent. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315287 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-48-1024x727.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="575" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-48-1024x727.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-48-300x213.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-48-768x545.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-48.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> An archived version of the article published on the website Digital Journal on November 19, 2025. The article was removed from the website after the editors were contacted for this investigation on February 5, 2026. On November 20, the article was republished on Daily Silicon Valley, a website that presents itself as a magazine for entrepreneurs. Its contact page provides an email for a Sunita Pariyar. She did not reply to an emailed list of questions. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315288 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-49-1024x969.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="766" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-49-1024x969.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-49-300x284.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-49-768x727.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-49.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> A version of the article posted on the website Silicon Valley Daily. Screenshot captured on March 24, 2026. The website Silicon Valley Times ran a new version of the story on November 24, with similar content, but different wording and quotes. Although this is the fourth site on which the story was published, it is referenced by other outlets during a second wave of publication in December. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315289 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-50-1024x771.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="610" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-50-1024x771.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-50-300x226.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-50-768x578.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-50.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> A version of the article published on the website Silicon Valley Times. Screenshot captured on March 20, 2026. A technical audit of Silicon Valley Times’ digital footprint using a Google analytics tracking tag uncovers its shared Google account usage history with Think7Figures. This finding indicates that Silicon Valley Times and Think7Figures are managed under the same Google account. Research on LinkedIn identified the founder of Think7Figures as a Nepali national named Sujan Pariyar. Further tracking using Google analytics shows that he runs at least three active websites of a similar style. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315290 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-51-1024x339.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="268" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-51-1024x339.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-51-300x99.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-51-768x254.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-51.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> Profile of Sujan Pariyar on the Silicon Valley Times website. Screenshot captured March 21, 2026. An analysis of Sujan Pariyar’s public Instagram posts shows that he has a sister who goes alternately by Sumitra and Usha. Photos on her Instagram profile match a Quora profile for a Sunita Pariyar, indicating she is the same person as the listed contact for Daily Silicon Valley. This is further confirmed by her LinkedIn profile, which shows that she identifies as working in “content marketing” and posts content from Daily Silicon Valley as well as Think7Figures. The connection between Sujan and Sumitra Pariyar indicates that two publishers of the KIA-India conspiracy story, Daily Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley Times, could be nodes in a family-run operation, possibly designed to amplify content. Questions emailed to the editors of the Silicon Valley Times did not elicit a response. Further research conducted by Fulde-Hardy of Graphika found that the websites Daily Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Times, Think7Figures and another site called The Los Angelers are hosted on the same infrastructure, suggesting these domains are part of the same network. Fulde-Hardy also found that Vefogix, a self-described “AI-powered link building and guest post marketplace,” advertised “guest post” content placement on siliconvalleytime.com for $92.00. This investigation could not determine whether the KIA-India conspiracy story was published with assistance from Vefogix or any other third-party site. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315291 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-52-1024x433.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="343" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-52-1024x433.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-52-300x127.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-52-768x325.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-52.jpg 1500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> An advertisement on the website Vefogix to publish content on siliconvalleytime.com for a fee of $92. Screenshot captured March 27, 2026. The website Big News Network published a similar version of the story on November 26. Big News Network claims to be a “specialist online news service” incorporated in the United Arab Emirates, with offices in Australia. A report published in 2020 by the EU Disinfo Lab, an independent nonprofit, found that Big News Network previously distributed inauthentic content related to India across hundreds of smaller sites, in what appeared to be an effort to improve the articles’ search engine indexation. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315292 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-53-817x1024.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="1015" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-53-817x1024.jpg 817w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-53-239x300.jpg 239w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-53-768x962.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-design-53.jpg 1197w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> An archived version of an article published on the website Big News Network on November 26, 2025. The article was removed from the website after Big News Network was contacted for this article on February 5, 2026. Big News Network credits authorship of the KIA-India conspiracy article to BusinesNews Wire, a website which specializes in press releases and search engine optimization. It is registered in Glasgow, with Uzair Hassan, a Pakistani national, listed as the director and beneficial owner. Uzair Hassan, who also goes by Uzair Hassan Butt, is also the CEO of Big News Network, and is listed as an author on the Tech Bullion website, where his profile describes him as a “professional business expert and SEO blogger” working in PR distribution with more than 500 media websites and blogs. Uzair Hasan’s connection to both Tech Bullion and Big News Network indicates another possible attempt to amplify content and thereby increase search engine optimization. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315293 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-132901-885x1024.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="937" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-132901-885x1024.jpg 885w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-132901-259x300.jpg 259w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-132901-768x889.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-132901.jpg 1246w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> Profiles for Uzair Hassan Butt, also known as Uzair Hasan, on the websites for BusinesNews Wire and Tech Bullion. Screenshots captured March 24, 2026. A list of questions sent to the general contact email for BusinesNews Wire elicited a response from Uzair Hasan. He wrote that the KIA-India conspiracy article was a “third party guest post story” provided by a freelancer. He also said that it was “paid by a platform called Fiver” — an apparent reference to fiverr.com, an online marketplace connecting freelancers to people or businesses looking for services. He did not reply to further questions; the article was subsequently deleted from the Big News Network website. It is not the first time that Fiverr has been linked to the distribution of inauthentic content by pro-Pakistan networks. A 2021 investigation by the nonprofit news organization Coda Story found that a network of inauthentic social media accounts posing as news outlets had hired freelancers using Fiverr to spread propaganda favorable to Pakistani interests. The report built on research by Graphika showing connections between these accounts and a digital marketing firm based in Pakistan. Coming in Part Two: The conspiracy story’s claims — secret roads, weapons transfers, pledges to suppress Indian insurgents — are examined against what investigators actually found. We also trace how the story jumped from fringe content sites to established newsrooms in Myanmar and Northeast India, and why none of those outlets sought comment from the two parties named in the allegations before publishing. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Emily Fishbein is a freelance journalist and fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. Jauman Naw is a freelance journalist from Myanmar. The post The conspiracy that wasn’t: How a fake investigation into India, Myanmar rebels and rare earths went around the world appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.
Matthew Wale Wins Solomon Islands PM Vote: What It Means
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
Nauru orders public servants, govt bodies to follow ‘One China’ policy
RNZ Pacific Nauru’s government has issued a directive to all public servants and employees of state-owned enterprises in-country and abroad to adhere to the “One China” policy. The Cabinet directive comes as the Micronesian island nation marks its 58th constitution Day this week. In January 2024, Nauru became the first nation to switch diplomatic recognition
RNZ Pacific Nauru’s government has issued a directive to all public servants and employees of state-owned enterprises in-country and abroad to adhere to the “One China” policy. The Cabinet directive comes as the Micronesian island nation marks its 58th constitution Day this week. In January 2024, Nauru became the first nation to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China just two days after Lai Ching-te was elected president. READ MORE: Other ‘One China’ reports Taiwan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry at the time accused China of “offering economic assistance as incentive to persuade” Nauru terminate diplomatic relations with Taipei. However, since then Nauruan officials have described the relationship with Beijing as reaching “new heights” and “manifesting into concrete tangible actions” for the two countries. “Following Cabinet decision on 15 May 2026, all personnel representing the Government and State-owned Enterprises of the Republic of Nauru in-country and abroad are further directed by Cabinet to observe the One-China Principle,” the government said in a statement on Wednesday. It added officials must “ensure consistency in the use of terminology and references in official conduct, communications, engagements, and administrative practices across all government departments, instrumentalities, statutory authorities, state-owned enterprise, government-controlled enterprise, agencies, and affiliated bodies”. It further advised officials to “avoid using terminology, symbols, flags, emblems, or representations which are inconsistent with the One China Principle”. “All official communication relating to the Taiwan Province of China must comply with the diplomatic position of the Government of Nauru. “Officials must not enter into official relations and arrangements with the Taiwan Province authorities or participate in programs funded by the Taiwan Province.” Taiwan no longer has a diplomatic presence in Nauru after the island nation switched its allegiance to Beijing. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
The US indicted Raul Castro for deterring CIA-backed terrorists
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
Satellite imagery shows new North Korea-Russia bridge nearing completion
Experts say the rush to open the bridge indicates Kim Jong Un’s enthusiasm for cooperation with Moscow.
Satellite imagery has revealed that North Korea and Russia are scrambling to complete a new high-capacity road bridge across their Tumen River border, and experts told Radio Free Asia that the fervor for completing the project quickly is a sign of increased cooperation and warm relations between Pyongyang and Moscow. Until now, the only bridge connecting the two countries has been the Bridge of Friendship, a much smaller rail-only bridge that was built in 1959 and had been intended to be a temporary measure until a permanent bridge could be built. That never happened, until now. According to satellite imagery, North Korea and Russia are rushing to complete final construction work of customs facilities, roads, and checkpoints linked to the Tumen River Bridge. (RFA) The new bridge, set to open next month, will be capable of handling up to 300 vehicles, and transporting 2,850 people across the border per day, according to Russia’s Ministry of Transport. It spans about a kilometer (3,280 feet) long and will connect the North Korean city of Rason, with the Russian town of Khasan. “It appears both sides are pushing hard to complete the final construction in time for the official opening scheduled for this summer,” Bruce Songhak Chung, a senior researcher at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for Security Strategy, told RFA. “The project is showing approximately 80% to 90% completion ahead of the official opening.” Satellite images from March 10, April 22, and May 16, show the progression of construction on a customs building on the North Korean side. Roofing work is now finished, and ground leveling and paving around the building have progressed significantly, Chung said. Paving work on access roads linking the customs facility is also in its final stages, he said. Construction of the North Korean customs building, roof structures, and surrounding access roads appears to have been completed or is in its final stages. (RFA) On the Russian side, construction of a large-scale customs complex has advanced rapidly. Satellite images from February and April show that building construction with concrete work, access road paving, and site clearing had all moved forward considerably. A small checkpoint building to inspect vehicles before the bridge is also under construction. June grand opening North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to build the new bridge at a summit in Pyongyang in June 2024. Since then both governments have held events to commemorate its progress. A groundbreaking ceremony occurred in April 2025, and on April 21 this year, delegations from both countries virtually participated in a bridge connection ceremony. The Russian customs complex is still under construction. Significant progress was made between March and April 2026 and remains actively underway. (RFA) On the same day as the connection ceremony, the Russian Embassy in Pyongyang announced that the bridge would be completed on June 19 — six months ahead of its original completion date. Experts suggest the year-round road crossing will further develop trade, economic, and people-to-people ties between the Russian Far East and North Korea. Moscow and Pyongyang rapidly increased trade and cooperation following Russia’s isolation from the international community following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, the two countries have ramped up trade and cooperation, with North Korea even sending weapons and soldiers to fight on the Russian side. Military and economic cooperation will only improve once the new bridge is completed, Joung Eunlee, the director of the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification, told RFA. “Road transport can move larger volumes of freight more quickly than rail and allow more people to travel, so bilateral trade is expected to grow once the bridge opens,” she said. North Korea could also use the bridge to more aggressively deploy overseas workers to Russia, Kang Dong Wan, a professor of political science at Dong-A University in Busan, South Korea, told RFA. The cash-strapped North Korean government routinely skirts sanctions by sending legions of workers overseas to earn foreign wages, then confiscates most of it. The new bridge would further erode the effectiveness of sanctions, experts warned. Tumen Bridge vs. Yalu Bridge (A barometer of relations) The rapid progress on the Tumen River Bridge stands in sharp contrast to the New Yalu River Bridge between North Korea and China, which was structurally completed in 2014, but has not yet opened because completion of infrastructure on the North Korean side has stalled. It was built as a symbol of North Korea-China economic cooperation, with China providing active investment. <img src="https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/EMWHWYUSDJEYDBX5VU2BPB33WM.png?auth=d783038681e036b5d4073ece7df7ab15ea2ef50afdf986f496799117a05ee693&smart=true&width=1500" alt="The New Yalu River Bridge between North Korea and China has remained unopened for 12 years. Construction of the North Korean customs facilities has yet to be finished, and it remains unclear when the bridge will officially open." height="2000" width="1500"/> The New Yalu River Bridge between North Korea and China has remained unopened for 12 years. Construction of the North Korean customs facilities has yet to be finished, and it remains unclear when the bridge will officially open. (RFA) Recent satellite imagery of that bridge shows construction of customs facilities in North Korea have made considerable progress, but some areas still have empty lots and construction materials, Chung said. Analysts say the diverging fates of the two bridges reflect Kim Jong Un’s strategic tilt toward Moscow over Beijing. North Korea has been less than enthusiastic about opening the New Yalu River Bridge because it fears increased Chinese interference and influence, Andrei Lankov, a Russia-born North Korea expert and professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, previously told RFA. Kim Jong Un has blocked the completion of that bridge to stop Chinese-style reform from flowing in and destabilizing the existing power structures in North Korea, Ri Jong Ho, a former senior North Korean official, who defected to South Korea in 2014 and currently lives in Virginia, told RFA. <img src="https://www.rfa.org/resizer/v2/7QZ57NOTW5CO7OQAO4MOY2H6SA.png?auth=a9453c9af96068c43442bb5376af10422750bc4fcf8b87b53574a33b708eaddc&smart=true&width=1500" alt="North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their visit to Beijing to attend China's commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, in Beijing, China, September 3, 2025." height="2000" width="1500"/> North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their visit to Beijing to attend China's commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, in Beijing, China, September 3, 2025. (KCNA via Reuters) “The New Yalu River Bridge has become a barometer of North Korea-China relations. It could open within months depending on Kim Jong Un’s decision — or it could take another decade, or remain closed beyond the Kim Jong Un era,” Ri said. The rapid push to complete the Tumen River road bridge reflects Kim’s judgment that cooperation with Russia is far safer and more advantageous than with China, Ri said. Edited by Eugene Whong. This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Noh Jung Min for RFA.
Peters condemns Israeli minister over flotilla video as 3 Kiwis detained
By Niva Chittock, RNZ WorldWatch presenter/producer New Zealand has joined international condemnation of Israel’s far-right national security minister, even summoning the Israeli ambassador to convey that message. A video posted by Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, showing him taunting detained flotilla activists, drew international condemnation on Thursday. The video showed kneeling activists, with their
By Niva Chittock, RNZ WorldWatch presenter/producer New Zealand has joined international condemnation of Israel’s far-right national security minister, even summoning the Israeli ambassador to convey that message. A video posted by Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, showing him taunting detained flotilla activists, drew international condemnation on Thursday. The video showed kneeling activists, with their hands zip-tied, while Ben-Gvir shouted “they came as big heroes, see how they look now… not heroes, nothing, terror supporters”. The video released by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir READ MORE: Peace Action demands NZ summon Israeli ambassador over brutal action against activists Several nations summon Israeli envoys as Ben-Gvir taunts flotilla activists 87+ Gaza aid flotilla activists abducted by Israel now on hunger strike Family pleas for kidnapped 3 Kiwis as Gaza flotilla demands global activists’ freedom from Israel Other Gaza flotilla reports Ben-Gvir also said he had told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “give them to me for more much time, give them to us for the terrorist prisons, this is how it should look”. He posted the video with the caption “welcome to Israel”. In a statement on X, Foreign Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand condemned Ben-Gvir’s behaviour. “Last year, New Zealand placed a travel ban on Minister Ben-Gvir for severely and deliberately undermining peace and security and removing prospects for a two state solution. Further vindication His latest conduct with respect to the Gaza flotilla, which has been seriously criticised by his own Prime Minister, is further vindication of that position. Peters said ministry officials had been instructed to call in the Israeli Ambassador on Thursday to directly pass the government’s grave concerns. New Zealand condemns the behaviour of Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Last year, New Zealand placed a travel ban on Minister Ben-Gvir for severely and deliberately undermining peace and security and removing prospects for a two state solution. His latest conduct with… — Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) May 20, 2026 <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128207" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-shorts-680wide.png" alt="Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir gloating in the Gaza flotilla detainees video" width="680" height="502" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-shorts-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-shorts-680wide-300x221.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-shorts-680wide-80x60.png 80w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-shorts-680wide-569x420.png 569w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Israeli navy officers point their guns at the crew of a Global Sumud Flotilla boat before boarding this week. Image: AJ screenshot APR “We expect Israel to adhere to its international legal obligations, including in its treatment of New Zealanders participating in the flotilla.” The US, the UK, France, Italy and Canada were among the countries which expressed alarm at the video, which Ben-Gvir shared on social media. A global pro-Palestinian humanitarian aid movement said three New Zealanders were detained by Israel after their boats were intercepted while taking part in a flotilla to Gaza. The Global Sumud Flotilla had repeatedly tried to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Palestinian territory. In a statement, the group said New Zealanders Mousa Taher, Hāhona Ormsby and Julien Blondel were now in Israeli custody. It said Mousa and Julien had returned to the flotilla after an earlier interception. MFAT comment RNZ approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) for comment. In a previous statement provided to RNZ earlier this month, MFAT said it understood up to six New Zealanders had been caught up in the interception and it was aware of allegations made about the treatment of New Zealanders in custody. Consular officials in New Zealand and Europe had been working to get information and support the New Zealanders involved, it said. “The New Zealand government made it clear to Israel that the safety of New Zealanders involved was paramount and that international law must be upheld,” the previous statement said. New Zealand had a long-standing “do not travel” advisory in place for Gaza, explicitly warning against any attempt to enter by sea, MFAT said. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. Pacific Media Watch reports that 428 Gaza flotilla humanitarian activists from 40 countries were abducted from more than 50 boats in the Israeli operation this week, according to organisers. The boats were carrying humanitarian aid in a bid to break the illegal blockade of Gaza. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Central Sahel: Hearing On The Worsening Human Rights Situation
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
ILO Labor Treaty Should Protect All Gig Workers
Israel bombed this hospital, called it a ‘terror HQ’
Peace Action demands NZ summon Israeli ambassador over brutal action against activists
Asia Pacific Report New Zealand needs to summon Israeli ambassador to protest over the illegal and brutal treatment of Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian aid activists — including three New Zealanders — kidnapped in international waters this week. Peace activists are demanding this in the response to Israel ambassadors being summoned by several host governments over
Asia Pacific Report New Zealand needs to summon Israeli ambassador to protest over the illegal and brutal treatment of Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian aid activists — including three New Zealanders — kidnapped in international waters this week. Peace activists are demanding this in the response to Israel ambassadors being summoned by several host governments over the “degrading” treatment. Media footage broadcast by Al Jazeera and other media show Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir taunting activists in Israeli custody, including the three New Zealanders — Mousa Taher, Julien Blondel and Hāhona Jason Ormsby. READ MORE: Several nations summon Israeli envoys as Ben-Gvir taunts flotilla activists 87+ Gaza aid flotilla activists abducted by Israel now on hunger strike Family pleas for kidnapped 3 Kiwis as Gaza flotilla demands global activists’ freedom from Israel Other Gaza flotilla reports The latest protest came from the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, who condemned a video showing Ben-Gvir abusing activists as they were forced to kneel on the floor with their hands tied behind their backs. Kallas described the treatment of the abducted activists as “degrading and wrong” and said rightwing minister Ben-Gvir’s conduct was “unbecoming of anyone holding office in a democracy”. Several countries — including Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Canada — have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their capitals to express “indignation” over Israel’s treatment of the Gaza flotilla activists. Other countries condemning the incident include South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Germany, Poland, Qatar, Slovenia, Turkiye, Austria, Belgium, Colombia and the United Kingdom. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128189" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-mistreatment-AJ-680wide.png" alt="Mistreatment of activists revealed on the video released by Israeli Security Minister Ben-Gvir" width="680" height="504" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-mistreatment-AJ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-mistreatment-AJ-680wide-300x222.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-mistreatment-AJ-680wide-80x60.png 80w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-mistreatment-AJ-680wide-567x420.png 567w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Mistreatment of activists revealed on the video released by Israeli Security Minister Ben-Gvir. Image: AJ screenshot APR Ben-Gvir’s actions ‘unacceptable’ French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot denounced Ben-Gvir’s actions as “unacceptable”, calling for the release of French citizens “as soon as possible”. Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand called the incident “deeply troubling”, adding that Ottawa would summon the Israeli ambassador over the incident. “The world is finally moving after seeing the cowardice and the violence of the Zionist regime against our non-violent solidarity humanitarian mission,” a flotilla organiser, Brazilian Thiago Ávila, posted on X. “But the key problem is that this level of unacceptable violence is still nothing compared to what they do to Palestinians every day.” All 428 activists from 40 countries were part of the peaceful flotilla of more than 50 boats taking humanitarian aid to Gaza in a bid to break Israel’s illegal blockade. “We call on the Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, to summon the Israeli Ambassador,” said Valerie Morse, member of Peace Action Wellington. “He needs to stand up for these New Zealanders who are being detained illegally and tortured by the Israeli military. “The video footage shows the activists held in stress positions while Ben-Gvir parades around shouting at them. <img decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128191" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Flotilla-activists-AJ-680wide.png" alt="Flotilla activists being humiliated on board an Israeli prison ship after being kidnapped in international waters" width="680" height="507" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Flotilla-activists-AJ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Flotilla-activists-AJ-680wide-300x224.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Flotilla-activists-AJ-680wide-80x60.png 80w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Flotilla-activists-AJ-680wide-265x198.png 265w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Flotilla-activists-AJ-680wide-563x420.png 563w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Flotilla activists being humiliated on board an Israeli prison ship after being kidnapped in international waters. Image: AJ screenshot APR ‘Peters ignored responsibilities’ “Thus far, he has completely ignored his responsibilities as Foreign Minister. We have not heard a word of condemnation for Israel’s blatant kidnapping of ordinary people peacefully sailing in the Mediterranean Sea,” Morse said. “Peters is greenlighting more Israeli impunity by failing to take action for New Zealanders in extremely vulnerable positions. “He must demand the immediate release of these New Zealanders without delay and without harm.” The world is finally moving after seeing the cowardice & the violence of the Zionist regime against our non-violent solidarity humanitarian mission. But the key problem is that this level of unacceptable violence is still nothing compared to what they do to Palestinians every day pic.twitter.com/8Z7mgJa5uc — Thiago Ávila (@thiagoavilabr) May 20, 2026 This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by ProPublica.
Corporate Sponsors Spend Millions Supporting “America First” Messaging
Corporations, including Mastercard, Deloitte, and ExxonMobil, are spending millions to sponsor Freedom 250, a Trump-led organization celebrating the country’s semiquincentennial with “America First” messaging. While the organization bills itself as non...
Corporations, including Mastercard, Deloitte, and ExxonMobil, are spending millions to sponsor Freedom 250, a Trump-led organization celebrating the country’s semiquincentennial with “America First” messaging. While the organization bills itself as nonpartisan, internal documents obtained by Judd Legum for his newsletter, Popular Information, reveal “the events will actually promote pro-Trump political… The post Corporate Sponsors Spend Millions Supporting “America First” Messaging appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
New Research Finds US Responsible for $10 Trillion in Climate Damage
New research published on March 25 by the scientific journal Nature has found that the United States has caused $10 trillion in climate damage since 1990, as reported by Oliver Milman for The Guardian. The Guardian reports that the US is the largest ca...
New research published on March 25 by the scientific journal Nature has found that the United States has caused $10 trillion in climate damage since 1990, as reported by Oliver Milman for The Guardian. The Guardian reports that the US is the largest carbon emitter in history, causing greater harm… The post New Research Finds US Responsible for $10 Trillion in Climate Damage appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Protect English Learners in Nation’s Schools
Multilingual education is not merely workforce preparation. It is about equal opportunity.
Multilingual education is not merely workforce preparation. It is about equal opportunity. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by John Pascarella.
A new rule change will allow the government to count having a place to sleep as income, and deduct it from SSI payments.
A new rule change will allow the government to count having a place to sleep as income, and deduct it from SSI payments. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Mike Ervin.
[Episode Cut] Unions Can Save US Democracy Experts Say
This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.
Censored Classrooms Shaping Student Learning
Despite ongoing pressure for academic freedom in recent years, political intervention in 2025 has increased threats to classroom autonomy across the United States. In a February 2026 article for Exposed by CMD, Mari Hernandez reported that state legisl...
Despite ongoing pressure for academic freedom in recent years, political intervention in 2025 has increased threats to classroom autonomy across the United States. In a February 2026 article for Exposed by CMD, Mari Hernandez reported that state legislatures, federal agencies, and right-wing advocacy groups are reshaping what educators can teach,… The post Censored Classrooms Shaping Student Learning appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Under Trump’s Leadership, Airstrikes in Somalia Have Reached a Record-High
Under Trump’s Leadership, Airstrikes in Somalia Have Reached a Record-High US Africa Command (AFRICOM) carried out 124 bombings in 2025, and 58 so far in 2026. According to reporting by Dave DeCamp for antiwar.com on April 23, “If AFRICOM keeps up the ...
Under Trump’s Leadership, Airstrikes in Somalia Have Reached a Record-High US Africa Command (AFRICOM) carried out 124 bombings in 2025, and 58 so far in 2026. According to reporting by Dave DeCamp for antiwar.com on April 23, “If AFRICOM keeps up the current pace, it’s on track to break its… The post Under Trump’s Leadership, Airstrikes in Somalia Have Reached a Record-High appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Pharma Industry Abuses Patent System to Increase Profit, Reduce Competition
Pharmaceutical companies are abusing the patent system to maximize profits and stifle competition, according to a report summarized by Helen Santoro for The Lever on June 16, 2025. Research by the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK...
Pharmaceutical companies are abusing the patent system to maximize profits and stifle competition, according to a report summarized by Helen Santoro for The Lever on June 16, 2025. Research by the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) found that expensive medications for weight loss, diabetes, and blood thinning were… The post Pharma Industry Abuses Patent System to Increase Profit, Reduce Competition appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
LandBack Movement Advances Across Western US
Indigenous land returns across the United States over the past decade have addressed historical injustices and advanced climate justice. In a February 16, 2026, article for High Country News, Chad Bradley and Anna V. Smith discussed advances in the Lan...
Indigenous land returns across the United States over the past decade have addressed historical injustices and advanced climate justice. In a February 16, 2026, article for High Country News, Chad Bradley and Anna V. Smith discussed advances in the LandBack movement in the Western US, including the Yurok tribe regaining… The post LandBack Movement Advances Across Western US appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Virginia Prisoners Set Themselves on Fire to Escape Brutal Prison Conditions, State Probe Dismisses Their Claims
A series of self-immolation cases by Black incarcerated individuals led to retaliation by guards at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, but a 2026 state inspector general investigation dismissed accounts of brutal prison conditions and racial violence a...
A series of self-immolation cases by Black incarcerated individuals led to retaliation by guards at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, but a 2026 state inspector general investigation dismissed accounts of brutal prison conditions and racial violence as unsubstantiated, The Appeal reported in April 2025. Dozens of incarcerated individuals have experienced… The post Virginia Prisoners Set Themselves on Fire to Escape Brutal Prison Conditions, State Probe Dismisses Their Claims appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Israel rigs a race – Max on Judge Napolitano
‘Aiding and abetting genocide’: US sanctions peaceful Gaza Flotilla organizers
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 19, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. Palestine defenders decried Tuesday’s announcement by the Trump administration of US sanctions targeting four n...
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testifies before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on February 05, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1366&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1334&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343627" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/aiding-and-abetting-genocide-us-sanctions-peaceful-gaza-flotilla-organizers/secretary-bessent-delivers-financial-stability-oversight-councils-annual-report" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"3.2","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R1","caption":"WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 05: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testifies before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on February 05, 2026 in Washington, DC. The Committee met to hear testimony on the Financial Stability Oversight Council\u2019s Annual Report to Congress. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1770286380","copyright":"2026 Getty Images","focal_length":"119","iso":"3200","shutter_speed":"0.002","title":"Secretary Bessent Delivers Financial Stability Oversight Council's Annual Report","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Secretary Bessent Delivers Financial Stability Oversight Council&#8217;s Annual Report" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testifies before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on February 05, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2260088782-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 19, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. Palestine defenders decried Tuesday’s announcement by the Trump administration of US sanctions targeting four nonviolent campaigners involved in the recent humanitarian flotillas that tried to break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza. The US Department of the Treasury said in a statement that its Office of Foreign Assets Control “is taking action against four individuals associated with the pro-Hamas flotilla organized by the US-designated Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA) that is attempting to access Gaza in support of Hamas.” The sanctioned individuals are Saif Abu Keshek, a Palestinian with Spanish and Swedish citizenship and PCPA leader who helped organize and lead Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) missions; Jordan-based PCPA president Hisham Abdallah Sulayman Abu Mahfuz; Mohammed Khatib, who is based in Belgium and is the European coordinator for Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network; and Jaldia Abubakra Aueda, Samidoun’s coordinator in Madrid. This latest weaponization of US dominance over global banking and finance and tech monopolies in service of Israel follows the sanctions placed on four leading Palestinian human rights groups and 11 elected officials of the @IntlCrimCourt as well as Francesca Albanese — Maureen Murphy (@maureenclarem) May 19, 2026 “The pro-terror flotilla attempting to reach Gaza is a ludicrous attempt to undermine President [Donald] Trump’s successful progress toward lasting peace in the region,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement Tuesday. “Treasury will continue to sever Hamas’ global financial support networks, no matter where in the world they are.” There is no substantiated evidence that the Gaza flotillas are linked to Hamas. Meanwhile, United Nations experts, numerous national governments, human rights groups, and experts say Israel is perpetrating genocide, apartheid, colonization, occupation, and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. Samidoun called the sanctions—which freeze any of the targets’ US assets and ban Americans from doing business with them—“the latest manifestation of the ongoing US genocidal war on the Palestinian people” and pointed to Israel’s ongoing violent interception and seizure of GSF vessels on the high seas off the coast of Gaza. “Today’s sanctions by the US come hand-in-hand with today’s Israeli piracy of the Global Sumud Flotilla and the Freedom Flotilla, and the abduction of hundreds of international activists at sea,” the group said in a statement. “All of these sanctions targeting Palestinian organizations, not only those targeting us, are aiding and abetting genocide.” Since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, the Biden and Trump administrations have supported Israel with tens of billions of dollars worth of armed aid and diplomatic cover, including vetoes of numerous United Nations Security Council Gaza ceasefire resolutions. Total US financial support for Israel since it was founded in 1948—largely via the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs—is approaching $300 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Since returning to office, Trump has cracked down on pro-Palestinian activists, students, organizations, and foreign nationals. Critics—including advocacy groups, academics, and some judges—have condemned what they have called attacks on free speech, association, and academic freedom. The Trump administration has sanctioned International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan and other numerous other ICC jurists after the Hague-based tribunal issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders who were killed by Israeli attacks. On Tuesday, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that the ICC is also seeking his arrest, and that he would “fight back” by ordering the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of Palestinians from their homes in the illegally occupied West Bank. The US administration has also sanctioned independent UN Palestine expert Francesca Albanese and her family—a move that was temporarily blocked earlier this month by a federal judge who asserted that the Italian humanitarian “has done nothing more than speak.” “Every time Palestinians and their supporters organize internationally, Washington reaches for the terrorism label to shut them down,” Isabelle Hayslip, advocacy manager at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday. “The net keeps widening. Palestinian diaspora communities now live under constant threat of designation for demanding their rights.” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Brett Wilkins.
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 20, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 20, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 20, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Trump’s deal with DOJ could benefit his allies
Bolivian government charges labor leader with terrorism as police crack down on protests
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Riot police fire tear gas to demonstrators during a protest demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, in La Paz, on May 18, 2026. Photo by AIZAR RALDES / AFP via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343618" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/bolivian-government-charges-labor-leader-with-terrorism-as-police-crack-down-on-protests/bolivia-politics-protest" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 9","caption":"Riot police fire tear gas to demonstrators during a protest demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, in La Paz, on May 18, 2026. Bolivians have taken to the streets for the past two weeks, blocking roads into La Paz and disrupting deliveries of food, medicine and other goods to the seat of government, while demanding higher wages, economic relief and the resignation of centre-right President Rodrigo Paz amid a severe economic crisis. (Photo by AIZAR RALDES / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1779127662","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"BOLIVIA-POLITICS-PROTEST","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="BOLIVIA-POLITICS-PROTEST" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Riot police fire tear gas to demonstrators during a protest demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, in La Paz, on May 18, 2026. Photo by AIZAR RALDES / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> The leader of the country’s main labor federation said officials were responding to protesters who have marched hundreds of miles in recent days with “militarization and repression instead of listening to the people.”
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Riot police fire tear gas to demonstrators during a protest demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, in La Paz, on May 18, 2026. Photo by AIZAR RALDES / AFP via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343618" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/bolivian-government-charges-labor-leader-with-terrorism-as-police-crack-down-on-protests/bolivia-politics-protest" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 9","caption":"Riot police fire tear gas to demonstrators during a protest demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, in La Paz, on May 18, 2026. Bolivians have taken to the streets for the past two weeks, blocking roads into La Paz and disrupting deliveries of food, medicine and other goods to the seat of government, while demanding higher wages, economic relief and the resignation of centre-right President Rodrigo Paz amid a severe economic crisis. (Photo by AIZAR RALDES / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1779127662","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"BOLIVIA-POLITICS-PROTEST","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="BOLIVIA-POLITICS-PROTEST" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Riot police fire tear gas to demonstrators during a protest demanding the resignation of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, in La Paz, on May 18, 2026. Photo by AIZAR RALDES / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2276417770-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 19, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. A leader of Bolivia’s main labor federation, the Bolivian Workers’ Union, said late Monday that the country’s public prosecutor is “trying to silence” mass protests that have included Indigenous communities, miners, peasants, and teachers in recent days, as the government issued arrest warrants for labor and grassroots organizers. TeleSUR reported that State Attorney General Roger Mariaca confirmed his office was charging Mario Argollo, executive secretary of the union, known in Spanish as Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), with public instigation to commit crimes and terrorism. “They will not subdue us in the struggle we have undertaken,” Argollo said in a statement. “They are trying to silence us as leaders with popular actions and criminal charges.” Drop Site News also reported that the public prosecutor issued an arrest order targeting Justino Apaza Callisaya, a leader of the Federation of Neighborhood Councils of La Paz (FEJUVE), “an influential grassroots organization tied to urban protest movements and labor mobilizations.” BREAKING: New documents purport to show arrest and detention orders issued by Bolivia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office in La Paz against protest leaders and labor organizers connected to recent nationwide strikes and road blockades. It says prosecutors are investigating several… https://t.co/9lVZV3IL1R — Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 19, 2026 The office is also reportedly investigating “several individuals” following COB’s declaration of a general strike on May 1. “The accused are being investigated for extremely serious offenses including: public incitement to commit crimes, criminal association, terrorism, financing terrorism, attacks on transportation security, [and] attacks on public services,” reported Drop Site. The mass mobilization has included dozens of road blockades across the country as the union and other groups have demanded the resignation of President Rodrigo Paz, whose administration ended a fuel subsidy amid an economic crisis; higher wages; and an end to privatization, including through Law 1720, which opponents say would allow the transfer of Indigenous and peasant land to corporations. Protesters have spent days marching from their communities to La Paz, where thousands were met by riot police armed with tear gas canisters on Monday. Protesters from Bolivia’s indigenous movements filled the streets of central La Paz on Monday, with demonstrations stretching across Plaza San Francisco, Plaza Murillo, the Casco Urbano Central, and near the Casa del Pueblo and national legislature. Photos obtained by Drop… pic.twitter.com/FaXpVu4K6o — Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 19, 2026 Al Jazeera reported that some protesters brandished “dynamite sticks and slingshots” as they arrived in the capital city. An unspecified number of protesters were injured Monday as the government deployed the police and the military to try to break the road blockades, Al Jazeera reported. TeleSUR said that at least four demonstrators were reportedly killed. About 90 arrests were made. The US State Department said Sunday that it supported Paz’s efforts to “restore order for the peace, security, and stability of the Bolivian people.” COB said the government was responding with “militarization and repression instead of listening to the people.” “History will remember who defended the citizenry and who turned their backs. No force should be above the people or their rights,” said COB. The arrest documents and government investigations, said Drop Site, showed that “the Bolivian government is escalating its response to the protests by describing parts of the strike movement not simply as civil unrest, but as potential terrorism and organized criminal activity.” A student leader at the Public University of El Alto told Drop Site, “No matter what the Paz government attempts to do, repress the protesters or sanction us as terrorists… we will continue to uphold the sovereignty and rights of our peoples.” A former Altiplano mayor and Aymara social leader was direct about the betrayal: "This government was clearly elected with a mandate from the social movements and from indigenous peoples — who have been stabbed in the back the minute they entered office. They have attempted to… pic.twitter.com/tS80WqG1Zi — Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) May 18, 2026 An Indigenous leader told the outlet that Paz’s government “was clearly elected with a mandate from the social movements and from indigenous peoples—who have been stabbed in the back the minute they entered office. They have attempted to use the state to go after the very forces that got them to power.” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Julia Conley.
Journalist Yelis Ayaz arrested in Turkey for ‘spreading disinformation’
Istanbul, May 20, 2026—Turkish authorities must release journalist Yelis Ayaz without delay and stop punishing journalists for doing their jobs, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. Ayaz, publisher and editor-in-chief for the local newspaper Aydınpost in the western province of Aydın, was arrested pending trial by a court on May 15 on suspicion of...
Istanbul, May 20, 2026—Turkish authorities must release journalist Yelis Ayaz without delay and stop punishing journalists for doing their jobs, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. Ayaz, publisher and editor-in-chief for the local newspaper Aydınpost in the western province of Aydın, was arrested pending trial by a court on May 15 on suspicion of “publicly spreading disinformation” regarding reports on a politician’s son who was allegedly bringing weapons to school. A trial date will be set after the journalist is indicted. “Yelis Ayaz’s arrest was the latest unfortunate link in the lengthy chain of journalists imprisoned under the pretext of spreading disinformation in Turkey,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Authorities must immediately release Ayaz, who was simply doing her job and didn’t cause any panic among the population by her reporting, as the law dictates is required to prosecute.” Ayaz wrote a column on April 20 regarding the allegations, without mentioning whose son the student in question was. She was briefly detained afterwards but released after being questioned by a prosecutor, her lawyer said. Aydınpost published a story on May 14 reporting that the underage son of Seda Sarıbaş, a parliamentary deputy of Aydın for the leading Justice and Development Party (AKP), was bringing a knife and a gun to school. In another column by Ayaz, published after her arrest, she stood by her story and said that multiple parents from the school had filed complaints about the student. Sarıbaş said in a post on X on May 15 that she was targeted for “character assassination” by fake news, without mentioning Ayaz. Introduced in late 2022, the disinformation law dictates that anyone found guilty of publicly spreading false information in order to cause concern, fear, or panic will face a sentence of one to three years in prison. While supporters of the legislation at the time offered reassurances that the law would not be used against journalists, it has since become one of the most frequently used laws against the media. The Aydın chief public prosecutor’s office released a written statement on the day of Ayaz’s arrest arguing that the journalist’s reporting was untrue and that the complaints were about a toy gun brought to the school. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
How ICE Detention Centers and “Zombie Prisons” are a National Concern
Faced with a national shortage of detention space due to the increased imprisonment of immigrants by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency is reopening previously closed prisons. In an August 2025 report for The Marshall Project, Sha...
Faced with a national shortage of detention space due to the increased imprisonment of immigrants by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency is reopening previously closed prisons. In an August 2025 report for The Marshall Project, Shannon Heffernan documented the spike in reopenings, described the revived facilities as… The post How ICE Detention Centers and “Zombie Prisons” are a National Concern appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Ebola outbreak risk is high inside DR Congo but it’s no pandemic emergency: TedrosUN chief calls for Security Council reform during Japan visitUN launches $529 million plan for Afghan returnees
Ebola outbreak risk is high inside DR Congo but it’s no pandemic emergency: TedrosUN chief calls for Security Council reform during Japan visitUN launches $529 million plan for Afghan returnees This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Edouard De Bray.
Kim Kelly: Coal miners are dying, and Trump betrayed them
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt='Coal miners listen as President Donald J Trump speaks and signs executive orders about coal production during a "Unleashing American Energy Executive Order Signing Event" in the East Room at the White House on Tuesday, April 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images' data-attachment-id="343607" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/kim-kelly-coal-miners-are-dying-and-trump-betrayed-them/gettyimages-2209223651" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-2209223651" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Coal miners listen as President Donald J Trump speaks and signs executive orders about coal production during a “Unleashing American Energy Executive Order Signing Event” in the East Room at the White House on Tuesday, April 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “We don't expect anything good to come out of the kind of people that Trump puts in charge of these agencies, or Trump himself, but it's like, what is the constituency for ‘Kill More Coal Miners’?”
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Coal miners listen as President Donald J Trump speaks and signs executive orders about coal production during a "Unleashing American Energy Executive Order Signing Event" in the East Room at the White House on Tuesday, April 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343607" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/kim-kelly-coal-miners-are-dying-and-trump-betrayed-them/gettyimages-2209223651" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-2209223651" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Coal miners listen as President Donald J Trump speaks and signs executive orders about coal production during a “Unleashing American Energy Executive Order Signing Event” in the East Room at the White House on Tuesday, April 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2209223651-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> Since the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and his acolytes, right-wing media, and coal industry barons and lobbyists have obsessively painted the picture of Trump as a friend to coal miners and the so-called “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal.” But as labor journalist Kim Kelly reports at In These Times, “the simpering ​’Trump digs coal’ image the administration seeks to project is vastly at odds with the actions it’s taken to limit miner protections, endanger their health, and exacerbate the black lung crisis consuming Central Appalachia.” In this episode of Working People, we speak with Kelly about the Trump administration’s latest betrayal of coal miners and their families and its underreported attack on the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission and abrupt, unprecedented firing of FMSHRC Commissioner Moshe Z. Marvit. Additional links/info: Kim Kelly website, X/Twitter page, TikTok, Bluesky page, and Instagram Kim Kelly, In These Times, “Trump’s latest target: Coal miners’ safety” Jordan Barab, Confined Space, “Friday night massacre at Mine Safety Review Commission” Kim Kelly, In These Times, “The Trump administration ramps up its war on coal miners” Kim Kelly, In These Times, “Trump to coal miners: Drop dead” Featured Music: Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song Credits: Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’re talking about coal miners and workers in the coal mining industry and what the government is doing to help them or hurt them under President Trump. Mr. I love coal miners. It’s been a meme ever since the 2016 presidential election. Trump loves throwing on a coal miner’s helmet and lining up coal miners around him for the cameras. He loves talking about bringing coalback quote unquote. He loves talking about quote beautiful clean coal. Trump and right-wing media are so obsessed with cultivating this image of him as the coal miners champion and this so- called blue collar billionaire who really gets the working class. And obviously the industry itself is all for it. Earlier this year, Trump was even crowned the quote undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal. And he was presented with this big stupid trophy by the Washington Coal Club, which is an advocacy group with financial ties to the coal industry. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s one video that the White House posted on Instagram in early February of this year. President Donald Trump: The most important people here today are those who get their hands a little bit dirty to keep America running at full speed. Our frontline coal workers. Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford): My name is Kayla Blackford. I work at the Bear Run Mine. I drive a haul truck and I think what the president has done for the coal industry is really important and we’re able to keep electricity prices down. Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III): My name is Vernon Roche III. I’m a coal miner in Alabama, Shoal Creek Min. We know that President Trump loves clean coal. Coal Miner 3 (Drew): Been in the coal industry for 16 years and the time with Trump being in office. It’s been a great deal for my family, from a small coal mining town in Southern West Virginia originally. Coal Miner 4 (Scott): Conveyor belts are the machines that we use to transport coal from 600,000 feet below ground to the surface where it goes to power plants that fuel America’s energy. Coal Miner 5 (Matt): We are thankful for President Trump’s commitment to coal to bring affordable energy to American people. It gives us the ability to sell coal to the power plants to get us to the extreme cold temperatures, the extreme heats in the summers when our energy grid would be struggling. It always has been and always will be affordable, reliable source for electricity. President Donald Trump: The really dependable form of energy that we have and that’s clean, beautiful coal. Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford): Thank you, President Trump. Child 1: Thank you, President Trump. Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III): For knowing the clean coal. Child 1: Clean, beautiful coal. Coal Miner 3 (Drew): Keeps the lights on. Coal Miner 5 (Matt): Keeps the lights on. Coal Miner 4 (Scott): Thank you, President Trump for knowing that clean coal keeps the lights on. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. So now that we’ve got that Trump marketing machine BS version of reality, let’s contrast that with the shocking news about what the Trump administration is doing to protect those coal miners that they call brave and claim to love so much. And in her latest report for in these times, Kim Kelly writes, “On May 1st, International Workers Day, Trump administration officials targeted the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the FMSHRC, abruptly firing Commissioner Moshe Marvit, and closing down one of the agency’s three offices. In total, the FMSHRC lost 16 workers as well as the entire Pittsburgh office that day. Marvit has spent the bulk of his career, including 12 years as a supervisory attorney advisor at the FMSHRC unabashedly representing workers’ interests, both in court and as a freelance journalist for outlets like in these times, the Washington Post and dissent. The pro worker reputation preceded him when President Joe Biden first nominated him for a commissioner position back in 2022. It took three tries to get him confirmed to his current role and he’s not giving it up without a fight. On May 7th, Marvit filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over what he calls his quote unlawful and unjustified purported termination, which has left a backed up FMS HRC even more shorthanded. The Trump administration’s war on coal miner’s health has become especially pronounced during the president’s second term, Kelly continues. The simplering Trump digs coal image the administration seeks to project is vastly at odds with the actions it’s taken to limit minor protections, endanger their health and exacerbate the black lung crisis consuming Central Appalachia, where one in five veteran minors has black lung and one in 20 has the most severe and totally disabling form of the disease. So to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined once again by friend of the show. You love her, you know her. She’s the one and only. Kim Kelly herself. Kim, for those who don’t know and have been living under a rock, is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. She is a labor writer for in these times and regularly contributes to many other publications including The Real News Network, he first book, Fight Light Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and the Young Reader’s Edition, Fight to Win. Heroes of American Labor are both available from One Signal Simon & Schuster publishers. Kim, thank you so much for joining us against this. I really, really appreciate it. I want to just kind of jump in and toss it to you. Please pick up where I left off reading from your really important article, which we’ll link to in the show notes, but just break down for folks like what the hell is actually happening here with this little known agency that actually has really important consequences for the lives and health of coal miners and their families. Kim Kelly: So here’s the thing, the FMS HRC, I kind of think of it as like talking about a ship named after Hillary, the FMS HRC. A lot of acronyms. I mean, honestly, the acronyms of it all, that kind of plays into the issue here.This is a smaller, respectfully not that sexy little government agency that impacts a very specific group of workers and communities. And it’s being absolutely torn apart as part of this ongoing kind of Trump administration push to deregulate and de- skill and dethrone every possible government employee imaginable that isn’t expressly falling in line with their authoritarian project. I did get to interview someone with very deep knowledge of the agency. Obviously I had to keep their identity to ourselves because there’s only like 30 people left and he was just kind of saying it felt like the thought of someone in Trump world just kind of going down a list of agencies and like it’s their turn. And this has happened to a lot of other like smaller commissions, boards, OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, their equivalent of this commission they got, got like the NLRB has gotten all types of jacked up. It feels as if we’re in kind of a new stage of this dismantling. We had the Doge era where it was like really big, bombastic slash and burn Intel’s going through your computer, like lots of press coverage. And then Doge, it was KIA, took about back, shot, done with that. But this ongoing project has not ceased. It’s just become quieter and arguably more insidious because public attention has understandably shifted towards all of the other cataclysms that our country and our government is responsible for right now. But this came across my radar. Of course, we need to shout out Jordan Barab, the worker safety guy. He incredibly experienced runs confined spaces, fantastic publication. He reported on this first and that’s how it came to my attention. And honestly, the thing that stuck out to me besides the fact that it was about coal miners, coal miner safety is kind of my thing, but I recognize that name, Moshe Marvit, because I remember earlier fights to get him confirmed to this arguably pretty atypical, pretty non-controversial agency. He’s a lawyer, he’s pro- worker, seems like a fairly inoffensive type of guy to end up on this type of agency that essentially deals with civil cases and worker discrimination cases, but he had a hell of a time getting confirmed and I think it is because he’s an outspoken worker advocate who’s written for lefty publications and was very clearly like pro- worker and he was nominated by Biden. It took forever for him to actually get confirmed and now he gets fired out of nowhere and it seems very clear that there is some kind of ideological purging kind of effort behind this and he is fighting back. The reason I wasn’t able to interview him personally, we chatted a bit, but I couldn’t speak to him on the records because he’s suing the government over this. I think Jordan mentioned that this was the first time in I think the 50 years of this agency’s existence that someone had been removed from the commission in this way. And this commission was created as part of the 1977 Mine Act, which is really mostly one of our, I think, lesser known but more impressive pieces of labor legislation in this country is obviously coal miner specific, but it really did a good job of laying out very specific protections and building up agencies like MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. It’s a good law. It’s a good law. And this is something that obviously the people that run coal mines and make money off of coal mines and get their little clean, greedy fingers all over coal miners paychecks, of course there’s stuff in there that they would prefer not to have to deal with like safety regulations like worker safety laws, like union organizing rights. And something that stuck with me when I was talking to this anonymous worker at the agency, they were saying the fact that there’s three people left, one’s Republican, then there’s two Democrats whose terms end in August. And with Moshi currently out of the picture, if they lose people, they lose the ability to have a quorum, which essentially means they can’t do anything. And I asked them, “Do you think more people will be confirmed? What do you think will happen?” And they said something that I thought was so interesting and terrible like, “Well, what if the reason that there isn’t a big rush to confirm even Trump loyalists is that they just don’t want to deal with enforcing this law at all What if they’re trying to kind of kill it by a thousand cuts by just chipping away at things?” And I thought that was a really astute and stressful observation to make because this is the thing, right? It’s not all like this onslaught against worker safety and human rights and every other possible decent thing that people are able to derive from this government. So much of it has been big, bombastic, like big fights, but a lot of it has been happening behind the scenes in these little agencies, these smaller commissions, boards, federal, like places with beige offices that they’re not as exciting, they’re not as photogenic, they’re not going to get headlines necessarily, but they really have a very important role to play. There’s a reason they exist and they have an impact on people’s lives. For example, the FMS HRC, there are coal miners who are waiting for cases to be heard. There’s workers who have filed discrimination complaints over them being discriminated against for calling out safety issues at work. Those are people. There’s civil penalty cases in which MSHA has basically found that a mine is unsafe, that it’s engaging in unsafe practices or violating safety practices. Someone has to do something about that. I know it can be a little like red tapey and bureaucracy and all of this. It’s a little convoluted reading up on this stuff enough to write a useful article took a little bit of time, but that’s almost kind of part of it, right? Like what they do in the shadows. Maximillian Alvarez: And that work done in the labor done in the shadows in these government agencies that you’re talking about, it is such a shame that we have so little understanding of that and the media is as culpable for that as anybody, but your average citizen doesn’t understand that and thus can’t see past the word and the hatred for the concept of government bureaucracy. And so when these cuts from Doge or Trump or wherever they are, the firings from Trump, the cuts from Doge, people just see a sort of attack on that bureaucracy, but they’re not seeing the people who are responsible for resolving these disputes and claims that matter a hell of a lot to coal miners who are spending their lives underground and trying not to be taken advantage of for it. They matter to … I interviewed some whistleblowers who were both fired from HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year or last year and they were whistleblowers talking about how that agency has effectively become defunct and like the people like them who were lawyers who were responsible for ensuring that like battered women and people in life threatening situations get the housing that they need, that they’re not being exploited by like landlords or anything. These are real people in life critical circumstances that all of that, like you said, Kim, is now just being sort of hushed and silenced at the same time that the media industry and the whole media ecosystem is going haywire. And so it’s a real crisis, but you are one of, again, those sterling examples of like a committed journalist who has maintained through the chaos a commitment to the coal miners that you report on, the industry, the working conditions in this industry, the environmental conditions. You’ve been doing excellent reporting on the black lung crisis in this country. We connected and worked together here at the Real News for years as you were reporting on the Warrior Met coal strike in Alabama. So with all of that knowledge and firsthand contact with people in the industry, I wanted to ask before I let you go, what state was the coal industry and coal workers in going into the second Trump presidency and how has whatever the hell this administration is doing, like for all it says it loves coal miners, like is it actually helping coal miners? Is it helping the coal industry? What’s actually happening here? Kim Kelly: It’s interesting. I think back to the beginning, I guess of this, not even this one, I think back to like 2020, 21 in the earlier days of these things, and I remember talking to a minor in Alabama who had said, “Just so you know, I’m a Trump guy and he brought coal prices have been super high since he got in. ” And I was like, “Oh, well, have you seen any of that? ” And he’s like, “Well, no ma’am.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And that always plays in the back of my mind when it comes to this reporting because it is I think a true thing that coal industry interests have found the Trump administration to be positive at the very least just in terms of skewing the playing field in their favor and trying to destroy previously approved and funded renewable energy projects. They’ve been pushing this coal line incredibly strongly against anyone’s conventional wisdom or scientific wisdom, really just like a fool’s errand and that’s endeared them to the industry movers and shakers. But for the workers, it’s been bad. It has not been bad. Wages haven’t gone up. The jobs aren’t coming back. I think we’re down to about probably less at this point. I think last year, the year before, it was about 33,000 coal miners left in the country. If I double check the stats now, I’m sure it’s gone down. And some of the big worker safety wins that coal miners across any political persuasion, because it is not a monolith, it’s not just a whole bunch of white guys voting for Trump. I’ve met plenty of people that do not fit that description and have talked to union representatives for the UAW that are very aware that they have a pretty diverse coalition of, well, not even coalition, just a diverse group of people in their union. Retirees are one thing, but the younger folks and other generations, you’d be surprised. But a lot of the work that has been doing around these sort of community issues like the black lung crisis, like worker safety, like pensions, like black lung payments out of this fund, the existing black lung benefits fund for workers and former workers who have been diagnosed and disabled by black lung. A lot of that work actually started bearing some fruit during the Biden administration because there weren’t as many roadblocks. The one thing I learned through reporting on agency doings that I hadn’t known that much about before I kind of dove in was how pivotal it is that there is a nominally at least pro- worker or not cartoonishly anti-worker at least a person in the executive chair and then the administration because a lot of the people, especially pre-Trump purges that work in these agencies are just trying to get shit done, but their ability to do so can be either helped or hindered by who’s in charge. So for example, in 2024, at the very end of the Biden administration, minors and their advocates, because they did the real work, they finally got this new silica exposure rule basically approved. The process is a whole situation, but we’ll just say they got it, right? They got this new rule that was going to limit the amount of silica dust that coal miners could be exposed to during their work days. This is not a new thing since 1974. We’ve known that silica dust is toxic, 20 times more toxic than coal dust. It is the absolute biggest factor driving the uptick in black lung cases and severe black lung cases among coal miners, especially those that are much younger have much less time underground. We’re talking late 20s, 30s, 40s folks dealing with the most severe and debilitating form of this disease. Silica is the biggest reason. And up until this rule finally got through, coal miners were legally able to be exposed to twice as much silica dust as any other worker in the entire country because silicate is something that exists in a lot of other professions. There’s construction workers, courts countertop workers in California that are dealing with their own silicosis crisis right now, but we know all this workers have been trying to do something about this for a really long time. Finally got to the finish line, 2024. It was supposed to be implemented April 2025. What happened between those two things happening, Trump got elected all of a sudden that rule very specific, very much not something the coal industry wanted to deal with because it required them to follow some more rules and maybe spend a couple more dollars on safety equipment and engineering controls and ate into their profits the tiniest bit. They didn’t want anything to do with it. And so this rule that took decades of activism and law being organized and by coal miners and public health advocates and everybody who wasn’t a total thickhead were trying to get this through and it kept being delayed, just kicked down. At first, I think it was a three month delay. Then it was like a six month delay. It just kept getting delayed, the implementation and enforcement to the point where the most recent development is that it’s been basically pulled back for more judicial review, further study, more changes for essentially they’re going to make it easier for the coal industry interest to come in and weaken it and just chop it all up.This is something that should not be controversial no matter what values you have. Making it so that fewer people get black lung seems pretty infensive, seems like a decent win even at the point where some of Cold State senators like full on Trump zombies came out earlier during the Doge era when NIOSH and black lung monitoring services were getting slashed up. They’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, maybe can we keep some of that? ” And the administration pulled back. So all that to say, things have gotten worse. They’ve gotten worse. It’s just as dangerous, if not worse, because there’s this emphasis on coal and this emphasis on trying to open new mines and new coal fired facilities. It’s not going to be good for anyone but the people who have been making money off of these workers, blood, sweat, tears, and lung tissue for centuries now. And it’s really disappointing. We don’t expect anything good to come out of the kind of people that Trump puts in charge of these agencies or Trump himself, but it’s like, what is the constituency for killmore coal miners? Who is asking him and them to make it harder for workers to have safety discrimination cases heard? Who’s voting for that? It’s not like these are big popular … No one’s like, “You know who really deserves a comeup into those fat cats at the FMSHRC.” It’s like, who is this for? There’s like one cold guy somewhere who’s like, “Yeah, We got them.” And it’s just unfortunate. And I’ve been reporting this for a long time. This is one of my things I report on. I ended up being that guy. And the one thing that … Well, there’s a lot of things that make me sad, but one thing that makes me sad and frustrated when I share stories on social media like, “Here’s this article I wrote, please clap.” There is always, always some people, some commenters who are like, “Well, they voted for this. ” Well, that’s what they get. Who did they vote for? Who do they vote for? And that has been a recurring theme ever since I first started writing about coal miners, gosh, almost like six, seven years ago. There’s a real lack of empathy and a real sort of spitefulness from some folks who just assume that coal miners are all the same, they’re all the same kind of person, they all voted the same way. And it’s just disappointing to see because I guarantee you, no one voted to get black lung and lose the ability to breathe or play with their grandkids or their kids. People being sold a bill of goods, I don’t think anybody deserves to die because they voted for someone who lied to them. Maximillian Alvarez: No, I wholeheartedly agree. And it’s like the exact same thing I say to people who say those exact same comments when I’m reporting from East Palestine, Ohio or that train derail. They’re like, “Well, they voted for that. They deserve it. ” I was like, “Are you kidding me? Do you see what they’re going through?” How could you say that on a video that is showing you that they’re dying? Have we lost so much of our humanity that we can’t even empathize with each other on that basic level? And again, I could talk to you about this for days, but I know I got to let you go. And I want to underscore for people that that is why Kim’s work is so important and why we work so well together with Kim here at the Real News is because if you’re not tending to that human stuff, then you’re not actually interested in the truth, right? You’re interested in an argument about the truth and how you can twist the truth into something else for your own purpose. We are reporters who care about human beings. So we go out and get the truth wherever it lives in the complex lives of complex people, like the ones that Kim is talking about. And Kim, with just a two-minute maybe wrap up, I wanted to end on that note, not asking you to speak for anyone or any group of people, but just any points you want to impress upon people who are thinking that way, especially in an election year. Well, they voted for that. Why should I care about that? What do you want them to know about what black lung actually does to your body? What do you want them to know about what it’s actually like to work in a coal mine or live in a coal mining community? Just anything you want to leave folks with before we let you go and wrap up. Kim Kelly: So years ago, I made friends with a retired coal miner named Danny Witt and he got diagnosed with black lung in 1988, that’s the year I was born. So for my entire life, his lungs have been struggling to function. He’s had a hard time walking. He had to stop doing a job that he works to care for his family and put food on the table and he kind of got off easy in a way, which is a wild way to frame it. But Danny’s lungs are full of coal dust. I’ve met people my age, I’m 38. I’ve met people my age and a little bit younger who have lungs full of silica and they can’t breathe on their own. They can’t really walk anymore. If you’ve seen photos of what a lung with black lung coal miners pneumoconiosis, it’s government name, it literally turns black. There’s a man named John Moore, a black father of three in West Virginia who he wasn’t even a career coal miner. He picked up some shifts while he was doing other stuff. He had a wig shop, he does events now. He was all over the place. He was hustling and he’s dying and he’s 42 and I don’t think he deserves that. I don’t think he voted for Trump, but he might have. I didn’t ask. I asked what he was doing to take care of himself and how his daughters were coping. And I think there is so much humanity that is missed when we give into these kind of divisions and this manufactured tribalism. I know there’s people that I report on that probably think I am just the worst godless calmy piece of trash. And you know what? Join the club. I’ve been online for a long time. Not everybody has to … You don’t have to like me. I still don’t think you need to choke to death. I might wonder why does some tattooed broad from Jersey going down to Alabama all the time talking to coal miners? Well, because they remind me of my dad. He works in construction. He has terrible political opinions, but there’s a lot of things we do agree on and I’ve been able to move him a little bit towards the way to seeing the world I see it. Not that it’s the right way, but it makes sense to me. I think we need to give each other a little bit more grace. And it is easy for me to say that I’m a whitebroad from Jersey. There’s a lot of structural things. There’s a lot of racist things. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t have to think about that other folks have to think about because of who they are Or how they’re born, where they’re from, how they identify. And I understand why some people would be like, “Well, I don’t have any sympathy for these people. Why would I care? They don’t think that I deserve to exist.” And that’s fair. You’re allowed to think that. I get why you would. I would just ask if you have the time to think about it a little bit, maybe nobody should suffer. Maybe there’s some things we can sort out after the revolution. If we just have to ensure that enough of us make it there to have time to sit down and have those conversations. Maximillian Alvarez: All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the indomitable Kim Kelly, freelance journalist and labor writer. Go find Kim’s book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and follow more of her writing using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network across all our different platforms. And we’re doing grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real news newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.
THE GREAT JIHAD • sufism in Chechnya (third ritual)
Executions Spike in Iran as Gov’t Intensifies Domestic Repression Amid U.S.-Israeli Attacks
"Dictatorship in Action": David Cay Johnston on $1.8B Slush Fund
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 20, 2026
87+ Gaza aid flotilla activists abducted by Israel now on hunger strike
Asia Pacific Report At least 87 people kidnapped by Israeli forces from a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza have begun a hunger strike, say organisers, after Israeli forces intercepted the last remaining vessel in international waters. The group is striking “in protest of their illegal abduction and in solidarity with the over 9500 Palestinian
Asia Pacific Report At least 87 people kidnapped by Israeli forces from a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza have begun a hunger strike, say organisers, after Israeli forces intercepted the last remaining vessel in international waters. The group is striking “in protest of their illegal abduction and in solidarity with the over 9500 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli dungeons”, the Global Sumud Flotilla wrote on X, reports Al Jazeera. Late on Tuesday evening, Israeli forces “kidnapped” six people on board the Lina al-Nabulsi boat, organisers said. READ MORE: Family pleas for kidnapped 3 Kiwis as Gaza flotilla demands global activists’ freedom from Israel Foreign ministers of 10 countries say Israel’s storming of the aid flotilla is blatant violation of international law Greenpeace calls on global govts to ensure safety of Gaza flotilla stormed by Israeli military ‘They threatened to kill us at gunpoint,’ says NZ Gaza flotilla activist After Israel’s brutal attack on Kiwis the NZ government does nothing Other Gaza flotilla reports The boat was the last in a group of more than 50 vessels that left Turkiye’s port city of Marmaris last week to sail towards Gaza, with the goal of breaking Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-128171 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Acacia-OConnor-GSFAotearoa-400tall-.png" alt="Acacia O'Connor of the Global Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa delegation presents a message" width="400" height="712" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Acacia-OConnor-GSFAotearoa-400tall-.png 400w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Acacia-OConnor-GSFAotearoa-400tall--169x300.png 169w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Acacia-OConnor-GSFAotearoa-400tall--236x420.png 236w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" /> Acacia O’Connor of the Global Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa delegation presents a message on Instagram appealing for New Zealanders to contact MFAT. Image: Instagram/@aotearoanz_globalsumud Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed late on Tuesday that its forces were taking hundreds of flotilla participants to Israel. “Another PR flotilla has come to an end. All 430 activists have been transferred to Israeli vessels and are making their way to Israel, where they will be able to meet with their consular representatives,” a ministry spokesman said, calling the effort “nothing more than a PR stunt.” Israeli forces began overtaking the vessels in international waters off the coast of Cyprus on Monday, organisers said, where they raided boats, allegedly fired rubber bullets and abducted participants. Nine Indonesians, 3 New Zealanders The detainees included nine Indonesian citizens, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s foreign ministry said Wednesday. Indonesia called for the immediate release of all vessels and said that “every diplomatic channel and consular measure will continue to be fully utilised”. Some 15 Irish citizens, including Dr Margaret Connolly, the sister of Irish President Catherine Connolly, were among those being held. Countries including Turkiye, Spain, Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, Libya, and the Maldives denounced the Israeli interceptions as “blatant violations of international law and international humanitarian law”. Three New Zealanders were also abducted on the flotllla but their government has not spoken out. They are Mousa Taher, turning 39 next week; Hāhona Ormsby, 56; and Julien Blondel, 47. The United States, however, imposed sanctions on four activists for their involvement in flotillas that have tried to reach Gaza, claiming without evidence that the organisers were acting “in support of Hamas”. Some previous flotilla participants have refused food upon being detained by Israel. Pro-Palestine activists jailed in the UK also participated in a high-profile, months-long hunger strike that began last year and led to severe health effects. More information at the Global Sumud Flotilla New Zealand delegation Instagram page NZ EMBASSY (responsible for the illegally occupied Palestinian terroritories) in Ankara, Turkey +90(312)4463333 Email: NZEmbassyAnkara@mfat.govt.nz <img decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128172" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NZers-abducted-GSFAotearoa.png" alt="The three New Zealanders abducted by the Israel military" width="680" height="300" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NZers-abducted-GSFAotearoa.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/NZers-abducted-GSFAotearoa-300x132.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> The three New Zealanders abducted by the Israel military . . . Mousa Taher (from left), Hāhona Ormsby, and Julien Blondel. Image: Instagram/@aotearoanz_globalsumud This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Amnesty: Executions Spike in Iran as Gov’t Intensifies Domestic Repression Amid U.S./Israeli Attacks
Amnesty International’s 2025 report on the global use of the death penalty finds that executions have surged to their highest recorded number in over 40 years, driven largely by the expanded use of political executions in Iran to “...
Amnesty International’s 2025 report on the global use of the death penalty finds that executions have surged to their highest recorded number in over 40 years, driven largely by the expanded use of political executions in Iran to “create a climate of fear and intimidation in the society and deter dissent.” Amnesty recorded 2,707 executions in 2025. But the data excludes China, believed to be the world’s top executioner, because its government does not release any public data on executions. While the majority of countries around the world have banned the use of the death penalty, Raha Bahreini, who contributed to the report, says the 17 countries that carried out executions last year “keep insisting on the use of the death penalty as a tool of control and repression.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Is an Invasion of Cuba Next? Peter Kornbluh on U.S. Move to Indict Raúl Castro & CIA’s Widening Role
In the latest escalation of the decadeslong U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba’s communist government, the Trump administration is expected to unseal an indictment against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, later tod...
In the latest escalation of the decadeslong U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba’s communist government, the Trump administration is expected to unseal an indictment against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, later today. The charges stem from the 1996 shootdown of four pilots with Brothers to the Rescue, the U.S.-based anti-Castro organization formed by Cuban exiles and dissidents. Peter Kornbluh, a Cuba specialist at the National Security Archive, says that the indictment will send “a clear warning” to Cuban leaders and provide justification for a possible future attempt to capture or assassinate Castro. “Military options are on the table and coming soon,” says Kornbluh. “It is absolutely clear that the U.S. military is preparing contingency operations in case Trump’s impatience runs out because Cuba has not met his imperial demands fast enough.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Liberia: School Fees Block Children’s Access to Education
Report from Havana: Cubans Starving & Dying Because of Intensified U.S. Blockade
In Havana, we speak to journalist Ed Augustin, who calls the Trump administration’s strict fuel blockade of Cuba, in place since the beginning of 2026, “the collective punishment of a population, particularly targeting poor communi...
In Havana, we speak to journalist Ed Augustin, who calls the Trump administration’s strict fuel blockade of Cuba, in place since the beginning of 2026, “the collective punishment of a population, particularly targeting poor communities, pregnant women, children and the elderly.” Augustin shares stories of hardship faced by everyday Cubans who are increasingly forced to go without electricity, drinking water and medical care. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
“Dictatorship in Action”: David Cay Johnston on $1.8B Slush Fund & Shielding Trumps “Forever” from IRS
In a shocking and unprecedented move, the Justice Department issued a memo Tuesday saying the IRS is “forever barred” from investigating past tax returns of President Trump, his family, company and “related companies.” ...
In a shocking and unprecedented move, the Justice Department issued a memo Tuesday saying the IRS is “forever barred” from investigating past tax returns of President Trump, his family, company and “related companies.” It came just a day after the department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to “compensate” people prosecuted for supposedly political reasons by the Biden and Obama administrations — a move expected to benefit January 6 insurrectionists, other Trump allies and even Trump himself. It’s all part of an agreement between the Department of Justice and President Trump’s personal attorneys in exchange for Trump dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over leaked tax returns. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — President Trump’s former personal attorney — will appoint the commission overseeing the Justice Department’s new fund. “This is dictatorship in action,” says reporter David Cay Johnston. He calls the “anti-weaponization” fund “a slush fund to pay a criminal enforcement arm, a violent arm of Trump supporters to intimidate people” and says the order to not investigate the Trump family’s dealings “screams that Donald Trump is, in fact, a criminal-level tax cheat.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Israel is ‘doing a Ukraine’ in Lebanon but world stays silent, says war reporter
Asia Pacific Report Celebrated Italian war reporter Francesca Mannocchi has condemned the double standard over Israel’s war mongering. “What Israel is doing in southern Lebanon is, quite simply, no different from what Russian troops have been doing in Ukraine,” she said in an interview. “It’s the same thing… READ MORE: At least 22 killed in
Asia Pacific Report Celebrated Italian war reporter Francesca Mannocchi has condemned the double standard over Israel’s war mongering. “What Israel is doing in southern Lebanon is, quite simply, no different from what Russian troops have been doing in Ukraine,” she said in an interview. “It’s the same thing… READ MORE: At least 22 killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 24 hour – ceasefire death toll tops 3000 “Since 2022, have we ever read a headline saying, ‘Putin is building a security buffer zone in Mariupol’? No. “We’ve always called it what it is: a military occupation. “Yet when Israeli troops do the exact same thing in southern Lebanon, we call it a ‘security buffer zone’. That framing clearly shaped perception, Mannochi said. ‘Same dynamics, same methods’ “We are talking about the same dynamics, the same methods, the same displacement of civilians, the same destruction. And yet, on one side it is widely seen as a war crime; on the other, as a legitimate security operation.” Mannochi asked why the difference? “Because in recent years there has been a gradual erosion in how international law is perceived and applied. And it has its convenient enemies. “Putin is an easy one: no one would seriously argue that the Russian Federation is a democracy. Israel, on the other hand, continues to be described, and accepted, as a ‘democracy’, even when that label is increasingly contested. “Why? Because this implicates us. While we no longer feel allied, morally or politically, with Russia, many in the West still see themselves as morally and militarily aligned with Israel.” Italian war reporter Francesca Mannocchi: “What Israel is doing in southern Lebanon is, quite simply, no different from what Russian troops have been doing in Ukraine. It’s the same thing… Since 2022, have we ever read a headline saying “Putin is building a security buffer… pic.twitter.com/yRM0p7BBDp — Paolo Mossetti (@paolomossetti) May 18, 2026 This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Headlines for May 20, 2026; “Dictatorship in Action”: David Cay Johnston on $1.8B Slush Fund & Shielding Trumps “Forever” from IRS; Report from Havana: Cubans Starving & Dying Because of Intensified U.S. Blockade; Is an Invasion of Cuba Next? Peter Kornbluh on U.S. Move to Indict Raúl Castro & CIA’s Widening Role; Amnesty: Executions Spike in Iran as Gov’t Intensifies Domestic Repression Amid U.S./Israeli Attacks
Democracy Now! 2026-05-20 Wednesday Headlines for May 20, 2026 "Dictatorship in Action": David Cay Johnston on $1.8B Slush Fund & Shielding Trumps "Forever" from IRS Report from Havana: Cubans Starving & Dying Because of Intensified U.S. Blockade Is an Invasion of Cuba Next? Peter Kornbluh on U.S. Move to Indict Raúl Castro & CIA's Widening Role Amnesty: Executions Spike in Iran as Gov't Intensifies Domestic Repression Amid U.S./Israeli Attacks Download this show This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Iran Threatens War Will Spread Beyond Middle East If Trump Resumes Attacks, Lebanon’s Health Ministry Says at Least 22 People Killed in Israeli Attacks Despite Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Intercept Last Remaining Boats with Gaza Sumud Flotilla, Abducting Over 400 Activists, Israel’s Far-Right Finance Minister Smotrich Says ICC Seeks Arrest Warrant Against Him, Victims of Islamic Center Shooting in San Diego Identified, DOJ “Forever” Bars IRS From Probing Trump, His Sons and Their Family Business, Democratic Senators Grill Transportation Secretary Duffy About Reality TV Road Trip Project, WHO: 600 Cases of Ebola and 139 Suspected Deaths in Congo and Uganda, Nigeria’s Military Confirms Joint Strikes with U.S. Against Islamic State, Killing 175 People, Trump Admin Plans to Resettle 10,000 Additional White South Africans in the U.S., Federal Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s $150B Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman, GOP Congressmember Massie Loses Primary to Trump-Backed Challenger Gallrein, Biotech CEO Rami Elghandour Speaks at “The People’s Convocation for Palestine” at Rutgers University
Iran Threatens War Will Spread Beyond Middle East If Trump Resumes Attacks Lebanon's Health Ministry Says at Least 22 People Killed in Israeli Attacks Despite Ceasefire Israeli Forces Intercept Last Remaining Boats with Gaza Sumud Flotilla, Abducting Over 400 Activists Israel's Far-Right Finance Minister Smotrich Says ICC Seeks Arrest Warrant Against Him Victims of Islamic Center Shooting in San Diego Identified DOJ "Forever" Bars IRS From Probing Trump, His Sons and Their Family Business Democratic Senators Grill Transportation Secretary Duffy About Reality TV Road Trip Project WHO: 600 Cases of Ebola and 139 Suspected Deaths in Congo and Uganda Nigeria's Military Confirms Joint Strikes with U.S. Against Islamic State, Killing 175 People Trump Admin Plans to Resettle 10,000 Additional White South Africans in the U.S. Federal Jury Rejects Elon Musk's $150B Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman GOP Congressmember Massie Loses Primary to Trump-Backed Challenger Gallrein Biotech CEO Rami Elghandour Speaks at "The People's Convocation for Palestine" at Rutgers University This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Tell Us About Your Experience With Kentucky’s Addiction Recovery Care
The post Tell Us About Your Experience With Kentucky’s Addiction Recovery Care appeared first on ProPublica.
Dongyan Xu for ProPublica As reporters at the Lexington Herald-Leader, we first started hearing troubling stories in 2023 from former clients and staff of Addiction Recovery Care, once Kentucky’s largest residential addiction treatment service provider. Over the last three years, we have spoken with dozens of former and current ARC clients and staff. And in April, we teamed up with ProPublica to publish a story detailing how ARC allegedly used staff to falsely bill Kentucky Medicaid for millions, an allegation the company denies. For our next story, we want to take a closer look at how ARC treated the people who came to the organization seeking help with their sobriety. We are particularly interested in hearing from clients, as well as staff who worked closely with clients to deliver care. If you were or are an ARC client or employee, tell us about your experience with the treatment provider. Your perspective will help guide our reporting, ensuring we understand the issues from all sides. You can fill out our brief form or email Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Alex Acquisto aacquisto@herald-leader.com. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our project. The post Tell Us About Your Experience With Kentucky’s Addiction Recovery Care appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Peter.DiCampo@propublica.org.
Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts.
The post Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts. appeared first on ProPublica.
Dominic Bodden for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune In October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued pharmaceutical companies tied to Tylenol in state court, repeating claims made a month earlier by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the pain relief drug was linked to autism and ADHD in children. Paxton, a close ally of the Trump administration who had already announced a U.S. Senate bid, accused drugmakers of marketing Tylenol to pregnant mothers without disclosing its dangers. “The reckoning has arrived,” the state’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies Johnson & Johnson, Kenvue Brands and Kenvue Inc. “By holding Big Pharma accountable for poisoning our people, we will help Make America Healthy Again,” Paxton proclaimed in a news release that echoed Kennedy’s slogan. Paxton hired the Chicago law firm Keller Postman to argue the case in state court. The firm had served as lead counsel in a similar case about Tylenol’s safety that was dismissed a year earlier by a New York federal judge who found the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses unreliable. But the court the attorneys chose to bring the suit in wasn’t in Austin or any of the state’s large counties that have extensive experience and multiple judges handling large, complex litigation. It was in Panola County, a community of 23,000 residents on the Louisiana border that Trump carried by 67 points two years ago and whose sole state district court judge is a Republican. At a hearing that month in the three-story brick courthouse in the county seat of Carthage, Kim Bueno, the lawyer representing the drugmakers, accused Paxton’s office of pushing a baseless lawsuit through forum shopping — seeking out judges and juries that plaintiffs believe will be most favorable to them, rather than filing suit in the courts that most commonly handle similar cases. “These claims have been rejected over and over and over again in courts of law by the same plaintiff’s counsel,” said Bueno, who declined an interview request. “And now they’re trying, once again, to suggest that Tylenol is harmful for women when pregnant. And it’s been soundly rejected.” The case was not the first that Paxton’s office had filed in a county with little connection to the allegations of wrongdoing made by his office. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have identified at least 30 cases filed by the attorney general over the past nine years that have a tenuous connection to the counties in which they were filed. The filings mark a striking departure from Paxton’s previous opposition to the practice. In a 2017 legal brief that Paxton wrote on behalf of 17 states, he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to crack down on forum shopping in federal courts. The practice, he wrote, “has the pernicious effect of reducing confidence in the fairness and neutrality of our Nation’s justice system.” Paxton’s approach also subverts what the Legislature intended when it passed a law in the 1990s that required plaintiffs to file lawsuits in counties where a “substantial” part of the alleged violation took place, according to three legal experts. That was done at the behest of conservatives who felt trial lawyers were flocking to venues favorable to them to win big damage verdicts against businesses. “It looks like the attorney general’s office is interested in engaging in litigation games that it would otherwise decry if the shoe were on the other foot,” said Michael Ariens, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, who has studied laws regulating where lawsuits can be filed. Neither of Paxton’s Republican predecessors, Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, appears to have employed this strategy. ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed hundreds of cases filed outside of the state’s five large urban counties during their tenures. Each had a clear connection to the venue Abbott or Cornyn chose. Neither Abbott nor Cornyn, who Paxton is trying to unseat, responded to requests for comment. Trump on Tuesday endorsed Paxton in the race. Texas’ major consumer protection law gives the attorney general some flexibility with those cases despite the state’s broader restriction on forum shopping. The office does not have to prove that a substantial part of the events in a consumer protection case happened in the place where it files suit but can instead file in counties where a defendant has done business. But Paxton has stretched the boundaries of that law, too, according to legal experts and to former staffers of the attorney general’s office who argued against him in court. Last year, for example, the attorney general filed a lawsuit against the gaming platform Roblox in King County, a ranching community of about 200 people east of Lubbock. Its key justification for selecting the tiny county was that residents there had internet access. Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment or to written questions, has not spoken publicly about his office’s decisions to file lawsuits in courts with little connection to the cases. At the November hearing in Panola County, Judge LeAnn Rafferty, a Republican first elected in 2016, did not question the attorney general’s office on its venue choice but asked, “Do you disagree with the defendants’ assertion that Tylenol is the safest choice for pregnant women who have a fever?” “It depends on — oh, you said for having a fever? That probably is true,” replied J.J. Snidow, a partner at Keller Postman. “There are not alternatives in the pain relief space to Tylenol that don’t also have risks.” Tylenol makers, Rafferty said, already tell pregnant women to consult with a doctor before taking the drug. Rafferty declined to comment about the case. Snidow said Keller Postman had no comment. Paxton has repeatedly turned to the firm as he has grown increasingly reliant on private attorneys to litigate major cases for his office. Kenvue directed ProPublica and the Tribune to a statement on its website that said there is “no proven link” between acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and autism. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson said the company has had nothing to do with making or selling the drug since splitting with Kenvue in 2023. Rafferty threw out five of the six claims in the attorney general’s lawsuit. She dismissed one for insufficient evidence. In the other four, Rafferty ruled that the state did not have jurisdiction over Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue Inc. because they do not manufacture or sell Tylenol in Texas. She allowed one claim to proceed that alleged Kenvue Brands had violated the state’s consumer protection act by making false claims about Tylenol’s safety. With most of the claims thrown out, the attorney general’s office doubled down on its strategy. Two weeks later, it filed a new case against the pharmaceutical companies. This time, it chose Bailey County, a community of 7,000 residents on the New Mexico border. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="3000" height="2000" js-autosizes src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" alt="Ken Paxton, wearing a blue suit jacket and bright red tie, amid a crowd of people. In the background, a campaign sign reads “PAXTON 26 #TexasFirst.”" class="wp-image-79284" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260303-Paxton-Watch-Party-19-JJ_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /> Attorney General Ken Paxton Johnathan Johnson for The Texas Tribune Paxton’s Pivot For decades, plaintiffs’ attorneys from across the U.S. swarmed courts in small Texas counties that had reputations for sympathetic judges and generous juries. The practice became so ubiquitous that The Wall Street Journal branded the Texas judicial system a “Wild West embarrassment.” In 1995, Robert Duncan, then a Republican state representative from Lubbock, resolved to crack down on the practice. He authored a bill that required a “substantial part” of a lawsuit’s claims be connected to the county of filing. An attorney himself, Duncan recalls traveling hundreds of miles from his home in the Texas High Plains to the Rio Grande Valley for cases that had no connection to the border region. Forum shopping, Duncan told ProPublica and the Tribune, had led to too many attorneys choosing courts where there was “no reason to be there other than the bias or prejudice of whatever the plaintiff’s lawyer is trying to establish that would favor the case, as opposed to giving the defendant a fair opportunity.” Duncan declined to comment on Paxton’s practice of filing lawsuits in counties with little connection to the allegations of wrongdoing. Paxton was not in the Legislature when Duncan’s bill passed but, as a freshman representative in 2003, he supported legislation that gave judges more power to dismiss lawsuits they concluded belonged in another state. He also railed against “rampant forum shopping,” asserting that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 should restrict the practice after plaintiffs in patent infringement lawsuits began flocking to courts that most often ruled in their favor. The Eastern District of Texas had become the most popular venue for the lawsuits, even though few of the cases had clear connections to the area. Most cases landed on the docket of a judge based in rural Harrison County, 140 miles east of Dallas, where plaintiffs won 78% of the time, according to legal researchers. That waned after justices ruled that federal courts must strictly enforce a decades-old law requiring corporations in patent disputes to be sued only in their home states. Since then, Paxton has repeatedly engaged in forum shopping in state courts, legal experts said. In fact, his office, or attorneys on behalf of his office, have filed 11 cases in Harrison, the same county where he argued that federal courts should limit plaintiffs from filing. “It’s hypocritical for the AG to criticize patent litigants for forum shopping but then to forum shop himself,” said Paul Gugliuzza, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “Forum shopping, judge shopping — it’s usually not unlawful, but it is highly opportunistic, and, in many circumstances, probably shouldn’t be lawful.” Paxton notched one of the biggest wins of his tenure in Harrison County. He secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta after alleging that the Facebook parent company captured Texans’ biometric data without their consent. Paxton’s office contended in court filings that Harrison was a proper venue for the 2022 lawsuit because the company had done business in the county and a substantial part of the alleged lawbreaking occurred there. The office did not provide specifics. Meta has an office in Travis County, home to Austin, not in Harrison, where only about 0.2% of Texans live, but the company did not challenge the venue. The company didn’t admit to wrongdoing in the settlement and did not respond to questions about the case. It’s unclear why its lawyers did not seek a different venue, but the judge in the case, Republican Brad Morin, denied a transfer in at least one other lawsuit involving Paxton during the Meta litigation. Paxton has not limited his efforts to find more favorable courts solely to small counties. The attorney general has repeatedly filed cases, particularly political ones, in Tarrant, the state’s largest Republican county and home to Fort Worth. In August, Paxton’s office chose the county as the venue to sue former Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and his political organization, Powered By People, after the group helped pay expenses for Democratic members of the Texas Legislature who left the state to block the passage of new congressional maps. The maps, drawn at Trump’s behest, favored the GOP. The attorney general’s office stated in court documents that the case had a “substantial” connection to Tarrant County because the group planned a rally in Fort Worth. When O’Rourke sought to move the case to El Paso County — where he lives and where the group is headquartered — Paxton accused him of forum shopping. O’Rourke did not respond to an interview request. Paxton secured a court order in Tarrant that prohibited Powered by People from fundraising while the case was pending. But within weeks, the 15th Court of Appeals overturned the decision. It noted that Paxton was a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, which created an incentive to blunt Democrats’ ability to campaign. The judges said the order infringed on the organization’s free speech rights before a court had determined guilt. Legal experts say such forum shopping erodes trust in the court system. It is especially problematic when it comes from the attorney general, who is supposed to defend state laws and preserve public trust in the justice system, they said. “It’s hard to respect the system if you think it’s being employed in a way you fundamentally think is unfair,” said Paul Grimm, a former U.S. district judge in Maryland and an advocate of restricting forum shopping. “Not the Law” In at least two recent cases, Paxton has tested a novel interpretation of state law governing where lawsuits can be filed. His office has argued that if a company does business over the internet, it can be sued in any Texas county. One such case was a 2022 lawsuit against pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. Two law firms filed the case against the company under a law that allows private attorneys to sue on behalf of the attorney general. The lawsuit accused AstraZeneca of defrauding Medicaid by giving kickbacks to healthcare workers in exchange for prescribing the company’s products. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, said in legal filings that the lawsuit sought to punish its innocuous outreach to doctors and did not identify a single patient harmed or taxpayer dollar wasted. Paxton’s office formally joined the case in July. Attorneys working on behalf of his office argued that Harrison County was the proper venue because the firm’s website could be accessed from there, company salespeople had visited the county and a local clinic had a brochure for one of the company’s drugs. When AstraZeneca asked Morin, the lone Harrison County judge, to transfer the case to Travis County, he refused without explanation. The company appealed and, in November, the 15th Court of Appeals overruled Morin’s decision. The court concluded that he abused his discretion in declining to move the case. Morin did not respond to a request for comment. The court also found that Paxton’s office failed to provide proof that any of the alleged lawbreaking occurred in Harrison County. It ordered the case transferred to Travis County, where it is ongoing. That month, the attorney general’s office argued that Roblox could be sued in King County, an expanse of rolling plains with no incorporated communities, because third-party retailers there sold gift cards to access the online gaming company. Then the office made another bold claim: that companies with websites can be sued anywhere, no matter how small the county. “This is a case about ubiquity, about being online and accessible to all children throughout the state,” Mark Pinkert, a Florida lawyer whom Paxton’s office had hired as outside counsel, argued at a hearing to discuss a request from Roblox that the case be moved to Travis County. “They are advertising broadly.” Pinkert did not respond to a request for comment. Roblox’s attorney Ed Burbach was stunned by the argument. He’d previously led the civil litigation division at the attorney general’s office under Abbott. The office’s longstanding practice, Burbach told the judge, was to file statewide consumer protection cases in Travis County. This new argument by the attorney general’s office would obliterate the Legislature’s attempts to limit forum shopping by allowing any company to be sued in any county, Burbach said. “That is simply not the law,” Burbach said, adding that most Texans, including lawmakers, would “be shocked to hear that outside counsel of the AG’s office would be arguing that.” The judge transferred the case to Travis County, where it is ongoing. Burbach declined to comment, but Paul Rogers, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, warned of the dangers if Paxton succeeds at getting courts to side with his expansive interpretation. The attorney general, he said, would have “a lot of power to file any lawsuit, in any county, for any reason, whether the underlying lawsuit has merit or not.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="859" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=1149" alt="A two-page legal transcript regarding a venue dispute in a Texas court. The yellow highlighted text argues that the lawsuit is a statewide case rather than one tied to a specific county because the digital content and advertising on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook are ubiquitous and accessible to children all across the state." class="wp-image-79271" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,224 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,574 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,766 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,1149 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2048,1532 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,646 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,316 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,413 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,417 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,394 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,562 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,859 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,1496 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,299 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,598 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,898 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/012926.KING-50-copy_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,1197 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Paxton’s team argued the Roblox case could be tried anywhere in Texas because of the online nature of the company. Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Doubling Down In Washington, Trump and Kennedy’s public rebukes of Tylenol have tapered off. Paxton, however, continues to vigorously pursue his lawsuit against the drugmakers in state court. After the setback in Panola County, the attorney general’s office filed an urgent request in Bailey County, arguing that Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue should be barred from selling any products in Texas until they filed paperwork and paid a $750 fee to register with the secretary of state. (Such registration would allow Paxton’s office to strengthen its case in Panola County.) Though Paxton’s office was already involved in a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies in Panola County, the attorney general’s office stated in court filings that it did not know the companies’ attorneys, so it could not notify them of the suit. Without hearing from the drugmakers’ lawyers, Judge Gordon Green ordered the companies to register. He said they could be barred from doing business in Texas if they didn’t. Paxton proclaimed the ruling a “major win” over Big Pharma. The victory was short-lived. A week later, the drugmakers’ lawyer Aaron Nielson, who had previously served under Paxton as the state’s solicitor general, attended a hearing in Green’s court. He accused Paxton’s office of sleight of hand by trying to relitigate claims that had already failed to persuade the Panola County judge. “This is blatant forum shopping and taking another bite at the apple,” said Nielson, who did not respond to a request for comment. “They decided to bring Your Honor into this, rather than let the Court that they chose continue with its own proceedings, which we think is highly improper.” At the end of the hearing, Green withdrew the order requiring the companies to register. He did not respond to a request for comment. The Panola and Bailey county cases are awaiting a ruling from the 15th Court of Appeals. In the meantime, the attorney general’s office tried yet another gambit in Panola, where the judge had allowed one of its original claims to move forward. Paxton’s lawyers amended their original lawsuit in the county. They noted that Green had ordered the drugmakers to register to do business in Texas, which meant Texas now had jurisdiction to pursue the claims that had been dismissed. They omitted the fact that Green voided that order. By referencing the order as if it were still in effect, the attorney general’s office risks losing credibility with the Panola County judge, Gugliuzza said. “If you knowingly are presenting false information to the court, that is textbook sanctionable conduct,” Gugliuzza said. The post Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Zach Despart.
Wednesday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD
Wednesday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4 and was authored by Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4.
This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then a Cop Was Killed With One of Its Guns.
The post This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then a Cop Was Killed With One of Its Guns. appeared first on ProPublica.
Range USA’s gun store and shooting range in Merrillville, Indiana, where a gun used to kill a Chicago police officer allegedly was purchased Jim Vondruska for ProPublica Launched as a new kind of gun retailer in 2012, the Range USA chain was built to look and feel different from the smaller, unwelcoming shops and gun ranges often associated with the industry. Its founder and president, Tom Willingham, wanted to make the experience of buying and shooting firearms more mainstream. So he modeled his company on big box chains, striving for bright, comfortable outlets that would be inviting to women, novices and others put off by some older gun stores. Today, Range USA has bloomed into a formidable brand, with 50 stores in 14 states, a footprint that spans from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Coast. But despite efforts to set itself apart, the company is beset with the same vexing problems faced by more traditional retailers. Federal regulators have repeatedly cited its employees for failing at basic protocols designed to help thwart illegal sales, and guns purchased at its stores keep getting recovered by police. Take the recent killing of Chicago police officer John Bartholomew, who was fatally shot on April 25. The suspect who used a 10-millimeter Glock 29 to shoot Bartholomew was not the original owner of the gun. It was first purchased in 2024, according to investigators, in an illegal transaction at a Range USA store in the northwest Indiana town of Merrillville, a short drive from Chicago. Records obtained by ProPublica show that, in the years before the gun in the fatal shooting was purchased, the store was cited for serious compliance failures on multiple occasions by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency tasked with oversight of the nation’s gun retailers. The Merrillville store faced revocation of its license following a 2022 inspection that determined a background check was missing for one sale, according to ATF inspection records. Inspectors also determined that the company made “no significant improvement” toward rectifying over a half dozen previous violations, ATF records show. In their response to the findings, Range USA managers blamed the store’s antiquated system for filing federal sales paperwork, telling inspectors the underlying problems would be cured once the company moved to an electronic system. The ATF later rescinded the recommendation on the Merrillville store after proof was found that the background check had been conducted. Records show that between 2020 and 2024, federal authorities recommended revoking the licenses of three other Range USA locations, including two in Ohio. In 2021, inspecting the Range USA in Dayton, the ATF determined an employee sold a firearm to a person who failed a background check, records show. Company representatives admitted to the agency that the employee had failed to follow store policy and “missed the appropriate connections” concerning illegal sales, despite training. They said the company would implement new policies to head off additional lapses. A year later, at the Range USA in Lewis Center, an ATF inspector found that a sales clerk had falsified records of a gun sale after accepting an expired conceal-and-carry permit in lieu of conducting a background check, records show. In response, Range USA managers disputed that its employees lied intentionally. All the Range USA stores that faced revocations are currently open, according to the company’s website, though some have paid fines. Now, as Range USA contends with another controversial gun sale, the ATF is weakening Biden-era penalties for failures to ensure compliance with federal gun regulations, including those meant to deter criminals. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. It has often responded to ATF findings by blaming employee mistakes and staff turnover while making promises of improved training, records show. Meanwhile, the chain has continued to grow. In 2025, Range USA sales, according to industry trade publications, increased by just over 5% even as the industry cooled. With that momentum, the company is eyeing another expansion. It plans to open three new locations by 2027. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="625" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="An ATF document regarding a compliance inspection and the suggested revocation of a Federal Firearms License. It includes several redacted sections, notably a large black bar citing “(b)(3)(112 Public Law 55 125 Stat 552).” A yellow highlighted section states that a Report of Violations was issued with seven violations, recommending revocation. Listed reasons include failure to initiate new NICS checks after 30 days and the unlawful sale or delivery of a firearm to a prohibited person." class="wp-image-77497" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 2480w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,249 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,638 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,851 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,1276 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2048,1702 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,717 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,351 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,459 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,464 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,438 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,625 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,955 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1925,1600 1925w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,332 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,665 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,997 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,1330 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Violation2024-01213-418_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,1662 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> The ATF has issued dozens of violations against Range USA, including its store in Naperville, Illinois. In response, Range USA told ATF it was putting a new policy in place to prevent illegal sales. ATF originally sought revocation of the store’s license. The company paid a fine, and the store remains open. Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica. Redactions original. Amid this success, Willingham became a staunch advocate for the industry. In the last five years, he’s contributed to a political action committee that has sought to elect candidates friendly to the interests of gun retailers like Range USA. Both Range USA and Willingham personally have given to a committee run by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association that lobbies for the gun retail industry. Range USA has given $35,000, and Willingham $5,000. The violations cited at Range USA shops sometimes have grown out of investigations into straw sales, transactions where customers lie to purchase guns on behalf of someone prohibited by law from buying them. These guns are typically resold for profit and sometimes end up being used in crimes. In Chicago, where gun sales are banned, Bartholomew is not the first officer to be killed with a straw sale executed in Indiana, just the most recent. Nearly five years ago, Ella French was shot to death by Emonte Morgan during a traffic stop. The gun he used was purchased by another man, Jamel Danzy, from Deb’s Gun Range in Hammond, Indiana, in March 2021. Danzy lied by claiming on a required form that he was purchasing it for himself, when in fact he intended to pass it along to Morgan, according to federal investigators. He was ordered to serve two and a half years in prison for making false statements on federal forms. Morgan was sentenced to life without parole following his 2024 conviction for French’s killing. In recent weeks, Chicago was confronted with the loss of another public safety officer. Bartholomew was inside a hospital when he was shot to death while guarding Alphanso Talley, a suspect in an armed robbery who allegedly drew the concealed gun and opened fire. Talley has been charged with murder and has yet to enter a plea. That gun was allegedly purchased two years prior at the Merrillville Range USA by Olivia Burgos, who now faces criminal charges for making false statements in order to facilitate the sale. According to federal investigators, Burgos told store employees that she was purchasing the gun for herself. In actuality, investigators allege, she bought the gun on behalf of her boyfriend, a felon prevented from legally purchasing one. She also allegedly lied by indicating on federal purchase documents that she was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the sale. According to federal investigators, Burgos told them she was addicted to fentanyl and was on the drug when she signed the papers for the gun. Federal authorities have charged her with making a false statement while purchasing a firearm. The gun eventually made its way to Talley. An investigation into its path to Chicago is ongoing. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="501" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=752" alt="A woman in a lavender sweatshirt ties a blue ribbon around a metal pole in a residential neighborhood, while a young boy watches from nearby. To the right, an American flag hangs from a separate pole in front of a brick house." class="wp-image-77269" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,682 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1023 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2272802656_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1066 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> A woman hangs blue ribbons on a block for Chicago police officer John Bartholomew, who was shot and killed in April with a gun allegedly purchased at a Range USA location in Indiana. Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images Last year, advocates with the gun control advocacy group Brady United alleged negligence by Range USA, several Range employees and Willingham in a straw sale from a different shooting, linked to its store in Shorewood, Illinois, about 50 miles outside Chicago. The suit grew from a 2023 incident where then-18-year-old Maxwell Williams shot a woman through the neck amid an argument at a large house party. He later pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with a firearm and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Illinois state prison. Williams, who at the time wasn’t old enough to buy a firearm, had his girlfriend illegally purchase one on his behalf, the suit alleged. According to court records, the Range USA sales clerk proceeded with the sale despite signs that the girlfriend was not the actual buyer. Video taken of the transaction shows Williams verbally directing her on which gun to buy and counting out the cash for the purchase himself, the lawsuit alleges. The girlfriend pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in the shooting. Range USA has denied the allegations from Brady and moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that its employees had no knowledge of any criminal intent by Maxwell or his girlfriend. Attorneys for the company also cited the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which they said preempts lawsuits against gun retailers and their employees over harm caused by guns bought at their stores. A solution to the problem of detecting and preventing illegal sales like those that preceded the deaths of the two Chicago police officers has eluded lawmakers and industry figures alike. Employees at retail gun stores are generally taught to notice typical signs of straw purchases and are entitled to end any suspect transaction. But even with good-faith efforts, straw sales persist. For its part, the ATF has established several surveillance programs requiring retailers to report potential or suspected straw purchases. The trigger for one such effort was so-called “crime guns,” those recovered by police within three years of being sold at retail. Stores with more than 25 such guns annually were targeted for enhanced scrutiny, a program known as Demand Letter 2. Under the Biden administration, the program was used to connect guns purchased on underground markets to the original sellers. Last year, Trump officials announced the program would be discontinued. According to an analysis by Brady, about two-thirds of Range USA locations were included in the Demand Letter 2 program between 2022 and 2023. Gun industry figures consistently deny responsibility for straw sales, putting the blame on the buyers who are breaking the law by lying about their intentions. Part of their solution rests on educational programs and training for retailers on how to spot signs of straw buyers. In 2021, under President Joe Biden, the ATF began a new strategy — sometimes referred to as the “zero-tolerance policy” — of conducting more frequent inspections and applying harsher penalties to retailers who repeatedly failed to comply with federal guidelines governing gun sales. After it was adopted, the industry saw a huge increase in the number of recommendations for gun-store license revocations issued by the ATF. Those do not lead to immediate closures, as stores are allowed to fight the revocations through administrative hearings and court appeals that can last years. The revocations plummeted under Trump last year. Whether the Biden-era policies effectively reduced gun trafficking is still a matter of debate. One expert reached by ProPublica said that the enhanced enforcement didn’t begin in earnest until the middle years of the Biden administration. Before it could take root, they said, the Trump administration upended the policy. Last month, Trump officials gathered in Washington, D.C., to mark the agency’s pivot away from the Biden-era enforcement measures and usher in a more industry-friendly approach. ATF Director Robert Cekada said that as part of its new direction, the agency will streamline and modernize gun-sale paperwork to help cut down on clerical errors and make consequences for good-faith mistakes more lenient. “We are proposing to remove unnecessary hurdles that were standing in the way of law-abiding citizens and businesses,” Cekada said. “We are proposing to restore clarity and predictability in our standards.” He also stressed that public safety remains one of its top priorities. “ATF remains the greatest friend to state and local law enforcement officers, and we believe that these rules will not negatively impact public safety,” he said. Asked to comment on the end of the zero-tolerance policy, an ATF spokesperson told ProPublica in an emailed statement: “These are administrative and regulatory changes to processes and definitions, not changes to the underlying prohibitions that keep firearms out of dangerous hands. The ATF does not believe any recently released proposed rules will jeopardize public safety.” Professor Daniel Webster, a longtime researcher of gun trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, said the ATF’s new direction sends a “dangerous signal” to retailers and the public that surveillance of straw sales is no longer a priority. The new rules tell retailers, “Do whatever you want,” he said. “My take is that this ATF is more interested in protecting the industry than in the American public.” In an emailed statement, NSSF spokesperson Mark Oliva said the organization and its members are “committed to ensuring firearms remain beyond the reach of those who cannot be trusted to possess them. That category includes criminals.” The post This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then a Cop Was Killed With One of Its Guns. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Vernal Coleman.
The Iran war is destroying oil demand. Could it also spark a shift to clean energy?
As the oil crisis deepens across the globe, households and industries are using less fossil fuel — maybe permanently.
With the average price of gasoline in the United States above $4.50 a gallon — about a 40 percent rise since the Iran war began in late February — Americans have been climbing into their cars less often, and stepping into trains and buses instead. It’s been declared the largest oil supply disruption in history, with U.S. drivers paying $45 billion more for gasoline and diesel compared to last year. Some 44 percent of U.S. adults say they’ve cut back on driving because of high gas prices, according to a survey in late April from ABC News, the Washington Post, and Ipsos. Cities across the country have seen rising numbers of people riding public transit, from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. Sales of used electric vehicles and hybrid cars have grown substantially over the past couple of months. People are replacing car trips with bikes and scooters; railroads like Amtrak have reported more riders than usual. Much of America is built around highways and suburbs, however, making alternative transportation difficult. So, many people are cutting down on driving without ditching their vehicles, by carpooling, consolidating errands, or working remotely more often. It could be the start of a green, global shift, according to some experts — even if most Americans eventually end up hopping back in their cars. That’s because the crisis is hitting the hardest in Asia, which was projected to account for nearly all the increase in oil and gas use over the coming decades, but is now rethinking its reliance on fossil fuels. “If Asia turns around and says, ‘No, we’re not going to grow with fossil fuels, we are going to grow with electrotech,’ that means fossil fuels will peak, and will peak sooner than we think,” said Daan Walter, who leads strategy research on the future of energy for the think tank Ember. “It’s very likely that if this crisis continues to be as bad as it is, and we see this conversion happening, that we’re currently living in the peak year of oil, and that demand will just never come back to the level that it was just before Hormuz closed.” With roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil shipments choked off in the Strait of Hormuz, households and industries have found ways to use less of it. This can create what economists call “demand destruction” for oil — meaning that the world simply won’t need as much as it used to. The phenomenon is already happening across the globe, according to the International Energy Agency. Last week, the agency reiterated that demand for oil is being destroyed, forecasting a contraction of 420,000 barrels a day this year. It’s a silver lining in an otherwise grim situation: Price shocks driven by conflict in the Middle East are nudging people away from fossil fuels. While people sometimes use “demand destruction” as a dramatic way to refer to a short-term drop in demand, the phrase more accurately describes a deeper economic shift. “To me, the term demand destruction really only makes sense if you’re talking about it as a longer-term thing. Like, it’s truly destroyed the source of demand,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University. The destruction in global oil demand has been concentrated in Asia rather than in the U.S., where the country’s overall wealth enables people to pay more for fuel relative to much of the world, even as it strains the budgets of low- and middle-income Americans. Factories in Japan are producing fewer petrochemical products — demand for naphtha, used to make plastics and chemicals, fell by a quarter year-over-year — amplifying the country’s “long-term declining trend” in oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency. Its report notes that gasoline demand in South Korea fell by about 5 percent as prices rose at the pump, suggesting that behavioral changes are also contributing to demand destruction. As the crisis in the Middle East deepened, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for a sharp shift to renewable energy, saying, “Our future will be at serious risk if we continue to rely on fossil fuels.” Countries and companies are also decreasing their oil use in response to the crisis. Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have all introduced four-day work weeks to encourage fewer commutes. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/D-line-subway-train-Manhattan.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Photo of a subway train full of people" data-caption="A woman puts makeup on while riding the D line subway train in New York City on May 15, 2026. " data-credit="Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images"/> A woman puts makeup on while riding the D line subway train in New York City on May 15, 2026. Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images To what extent these fuel-saving adjustments stick around is an open question. President Donald Trump has promised that oil prices will “drop like a rock” once the war in Iran ends. But even after shipping through the Strait of Hormuz resumes, oil supplies could remain tight for months as facilities are repaired and wells get restarted. The Iran war is also the second oil shock in recent years, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and experts say that this pattern of oil crises is more likely to lead to a prolonged fall in demand. “If prices are low for a very, very long time, and then you have a shock, it’s easy to write it off as not a big deal, not going to happen again. But if you continue getting shocks, then you’re like, ‘Maybe I should really start thinking about making some changes,’” Gillingham said. A report from Ember, co-written by Walter, makes the case that the “twin fossil shock” of the 2020s opens up new political possibilities, just as the double oil shocks in the 1970s prompted investments in energy efficiency and nuclear power. “The parallels with the 1970s oil shocks are striking. But so too is the difference,” the authors write. “For the first time, there are scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and other electrotech offer a permanent route out of fossil dependence.” The report predicts that Asia, affected the most by the current oil crisis, will fast-track electrification, switching to EVs and pushing liquefied natural gas out of power generation. The first sign that may already be happening: After the start of the bombing campaign in March, China’s exports of solar, batteries, and electric vehicles surged. “It really shakes countries and companies around the world out of this complacency of thinking that there is a path back to a normal stable fossil system,” Walter said. “Import dependency is just incredibly risky at the moment, and the second crisis kind of confirms that.” And some of the new routines people adopt during the oil crisis could endure. “A shock like the big increase in gas prices, or an earthquake that closes a freeway, is really helpful in getting people to change behavior,” said Susan Handy, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. “It is really hard to get people to change behavior without those kinds of shocks — not that we want these things to happen, but it is what pushes behavior change.” When a bridge that collapsed reopens, for instance, most people will go back to driving, but some of them will keep their new biking routine, she said. So what determines whether a habit sticks? It comes down to what people grow to like, Handy said. People might realize they enjoy riding a bike around town or reading on the bus, as opposed to sitting behind the wheel in traffic, once they have reason to try it. “I think there are probably more alternatives out there than people realize, or the alternatives may be better than they realize,” Handy said. Rising prices can also prompt people to adopt more energy-efficient vehicles or appliances, locking them into lower fuel usage going forward. Of course, Americans are still driving a lot — and will probably continue to do so. “We’ve seen oil prices go up and down many, many times in our history, even in recent history,” Gillingham said. “Generally, those shorter-term behaviors tend to bounce back to where they were before.” But in the global picture, it’s looking more and more likely that the second oil crisis in half a decade, at a moment when alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming cheaper and widespread, may lead to more lasting changes, accelerating the decline of oil — and the rise of cleaner replacements. As the author Rebecca Solnit wrote in a recent newsletter: “What if in a decade or a century people remember this as the point when the world really turned away from this filthy, corrupting, unreliable, destructive resource?” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Iran war is destroying oil demand. Could it also spark a shift to clean energy? on May 20, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.
Solve ‘genocide embassy’ issue – expel Israeli ambassador, says PSNA
Asia Pacific Report The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has called on the New Zealand government to resolve a tenancy controversy over the Israeli embassy — by expelling the ambassador and staff. Noting the world pariah status of the country after the International Criminal Court (ICC) has reportedly sought arrest warrants for war crimes against
Asia Pacific Report The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has called on the New Zealand government to resolve a tenancy controversy over the Israeli embassy — by expelling the ambassador and staff. Noting the world pariah status of the country after the International Criminal Court (ICC) has reportedly sought arrest warrants for war crimes against up to five more Israeli officials, the PSNA said today the shift of the Israeli embassy into the Fisher Funds building in Wellington had concerned other tenants in the office high rise. Citing The Post front-page article on Monday, it said only some occupants of the 13-storey site had been told that Israel was moving in. READ MORE: Israeli far-right minister Smotrich says ICC seeks his arrest Israeli Embassy on the move ‒ but not all new neighbours happy, despite heightened security promise Family pleas for kidnapped 3 Kiwis as Gaza flotilla demands global activists’ freedom from Israel Other Gaza genocide reports PSNA spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said in a statement “the building’s owner was obviously trying to keep the arrival of the embassy a secret” to avoid objections. “It’s pretty obvious why. The Fisher Funds building is owned by Prime Property Group, which is controlled by rich-lister and former Israeli Defence Force major, Eyal Aharoni,” she said. “He’s looking after his own.” According to Al Jazeera and news agencies, Israeli far-right Finance Minister ⁠Bezalel Smotrich said he had been informed that the ICC ⁠in ⁠The Hague ⁠had ⁠requested a warrant for his arrest. Smotrich did not specify who had informed him about the warrant and said it was a “declaration of war”. The process of seeking warrants ⁠is confidential. Displacement orders The ICC accusations reportedly centre on Smotrich’s forced displacement orders for Palestinians, his support for moving Israeli settlers into occupied territory, and his claim it may be “justified and moral” to starve Palestinians in Gaza. Another report, by the independent Haaretz newspaper, named five officials — including Smotrich — as the subject of arrest warrants, but the ICC described this as “inaccurate”. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Tamimi said the solution to the embassy location concern was the New Zealand government could expel the ambassador and his staff. “We broke off diplomatic relations when it was discovered Israel’s Mossad spy agency had been getting fake New Zealand passports. So, there is a precedent,” she said. “It all comes down to the fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It’s the world’s worst atrocity of this century and shamefully its ongoing perpetrators are flying their flag over our capital city. ‘Kidnapping citizens’ “At this very moment, Israel is firing on the Sumud Flotilla trying to bring aid to Gaza and kidnapping and assaulting New Zealand citizens on that convoy. “Our ministers are shaking hands with the people who represent this illegal violence in international waters.” Tamimi said that although Fisher Funds did not own the building it operated out of, “it must have powers as the holder of naming rights”. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Trump’s EPA vows to fight ‘forever chemicals’ by loosening regulations
“It seems like they have largely adopted the positions of the chemical industry.”
The Trump administration has announced what it is calling “a major step forward” in the fight against a class of toxic chemicals called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Extended exposure to PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they can persist indefinitely in the environment, has been linked to various cancers, autoimmune diseases, and other harms. On Monday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lauded Trump as the first president who is “completely committed” to removing forever chemicals, which are found at unsafe levels in tap water in some 80 percent of congressional districts and lurk in the blood of 97 percent of Americans. But what Kennedy considers a step forward looks like a big step back to most of those who have long kept an eye on the issue. That’s because the Trump administration is unraveling key parts of the PFAS limits approved by the Biden administration in 2024, which are the first and only regulations to put limits on PFAS in drinking water in the nation’s history. Restrictions on four substances in the PFAS class would be rescinded entirely, while water utilities would be given two additional years to comply with limits for two other substances. The Environmental Protection Agency first signaled its intention to make these changes last year, just a few months after Trump took office. The changes will be finalized after a 60-day public comment period expires. Secretary Kennedy, who is known for his pledge to “Make America Healthy Again,” turned attention instead to the EPA’s recent announcement of $1 billion in grant funding for small and disadvantaged communities to detect and eliminate PFAS. “We have a president who has made a greater financial commitment than any president in U.S. history,” Secretary Kennedy said. But the commitment was not exactly Trump’s to make: The $1 billion comes from an appropriation made by Congress in 2021, when Joe Biden was president. PFAS has been used in a wide variety of products, including industrial firefighting foams, for decades. As evidence of health harms linked to these substances has mounted, many manufacturers have developed new types of PFAS that have comparatively shorter lifespans. But this new generation of chemicals, of which there are thousands of members, may also cause adverse health impacts. “The Biden administration had at least set health protective limits for six of these chemicals out of the literally thousands that have been registered for use in the marketplace,” said John Rumpler, clean water director for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Environment America. “Now the EPA is walking back from even that small step toward protecting our drinking water.” On Monday, the administration tried to rationalize the proposed rollbacks by saying that Biden-era PFAS limits were approved in a rush that would have made them vulnerable to ongoing legal challenges. Water utilities and chemical companies have sued the EPA over its PFAS rules, arguing that the regulations are procedurally flawed, financially onerous, and require compliance on timelines that are too tight. But the Trump administration’s EPA has itself sought to undermine the limits since Trump took office last year, asking a federal appeals court to summarily vacate Biden-era restrictions on four types of PFAS last fall. The EPA has since stopped defending the standards in court. “This is about being realistic,” Zeldin said at an event alongside Kennedy on Monday. “A deadline you cannot physically meet is not a public health protection.” He pointed to the fact that technology capable of removing the chemicals is improving, and may eventually bring costs down for utilities burdened by the price of removing PFAS from tap water. In a statement provided to Grist, the EPA said that “the previous administration’s rule set deadlines many water systems simply could not meet — risking costly violations that punish communities without removing a single part per trillion from anyone’s tap.” So far, the EPA has offered little in the way of a regulatory substitute for the limits it is removing. “I don’t think there’s anything new here,” said Jared Thompson, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental protection group that is one of several groups defending the Biden-era limits in ongoing litigation brought by chemical companies. “It seems like they have largely adopted the positions of the chemical industry challengers and the water industry challengers who are saying that these standards are not appropriate,” he added. Zeldin asserted that the EPA is going to “do it right” this time, and the EPA’s statement to Grist said that “it is entirely possible the result will be more stringent requirements” once the four PFAS substances whose limits are being rescinded are reviewed a second time. But some outside experts think Zeldin is already doing it wrong. The Safe Drinking Water Act, which Congress passed in 1974, has a provision that states that the EPA can’t weaken drinking water standards once they’ve been set. “There are going to be legal challenges,” said Richard L. Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law and former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Biden. “They’ll have to give reasons and those reasons are very likely to be inadequate.” Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s EPA vows to fight ‘forever chemicals’ by loosening regulations on May 20, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.
Once a climate leader, Canada is now doubling down on oil
Mark Carney is counting on Alberta’s oil sands to help him survive Trump’s trade agenda.
Before he became prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney was perhaps one of the world’s biggest supporters of the idea that climate action was good business. He led the clean energy investment fund for Brookfield, one of the world’s largest financial firms, and founded a global alliance of bankers and politicians who wanted to channel their resources toward green energy. When he took over from outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, many expected that he would follow the previous Liberal leader’s ambitious climate agenda, which included taxing fossil fuels and subsidizing clean technology. But just like in Carney’s beloved sport of hockey, momentum in the climate world can change fast. In the year since he took over, Carney has unveiled a suite of new policies to gut Canada’s ambitious climate regulations and support the country’s powerful fossil fuel industry. This reversal reached a climax last week when he struck a deal with the province of Alberta to prop up its tar sands oil industry and vowed to expand the country’s power grid through the use of natural gas. Carney is pitching the reversal as a political and economic necessity. Canada is facing the prospect of a severe economic downturn as a result of President Trump’s disruptive trade agenda, and a group of conservatives in Alberta are waging a campaign to secede from Canada altogether. He has claimed that the country can achieve economic security by investing in oil and gas production while still making progress toward reducing its own carbon emissions. “It will be an opportunity to accelerate the energy transition across Canada, and it’s also an opportunity for Canada to be a reliable supplier for partners across the globe, and to do so in a manner that makes Canada more prosperous and independent,” said Carney in announcing the strategy. The reversal reveals a stark truth about the direction of global climate action: Despite the rapid deployment of clean energy, even countries and politicians once seen as climate leaders are turning to fossil fuels to protect against the turmoil of Trump’s trade disputes and the war in Iran. But Carney’s new strategy doesn’t seem to have pleased anyone. Major oil producers and conservatives in Alberta are still pressuring Carney for further concessions, and a broad spectrum of left-wing politicians and civil society groups have condemned it as short-sighted. The critics argue that doubling down on fossil fuel exports is the wrong move at a time when the rest of the world may be shifting away from them. “The problem is we’re defaulting back to what Canada’s known how to do in the past, rather than what the world’s going to need in the future,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia who served as chair of the federal government’s climate policy advisory board until he resigned late last year. Carney has already rolled back several of Trudeau’s climate initiatives. He scrapped Canada’s federal electric vehicle mandate and eliminated the country’s unpopular consumer carbon tax, which added a surcharge on gas stations and power bills. The one major policy he left alone was the “industrial carbon price,” which charges polluters a fee for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit. The nation’s biggest emitters are multinational oil and gas companies, which produce sticky crude from the massive “tar sands” fields in Alberta; the oil sector produces about 30 percent of Canada’s emissions, more than buildings or cars. Canada and Alberta have a mutual dependence. Oil makes up more than 15 percent of Canada’s export volume, and Alberta’s oil wealth makes it a net contributor to the federal budget. Under the Canadian constitution, provinces have control over natural resources, and Alberta leaders have long viewed the industrial carbon tax as a threat to their sovereignty. But the oil industry in Alberta needs help from the Liberal government too. The inland province is producing more oil than it can sell, and the industry’s future growth depends on building another pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, which needs federal support. (The existing pipeline to the Pacific is nearing capacity. Oil producers are also seeking to build new pipelines to the United States. Last week, Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith unveiled a “grand bargain” meant to resolve this conflict: Carney removed a proposed hard cap on carbon emissions from the oil sector, and in exchange Alberta agreed to support a long-term increase in carbon prices. The federal government will also expedite permitting for a new Pacific Coast pipeline, while oil producers agreed to build a massive carbon capture system that would offset emissions from oil drilling. Climate advocates in Canada say the final deal is toothless, and makes major concessions to the oil and gas industry. The deal will lower the headline price of the industrial carbon tax and slow down the rate of the price increase by three-quarters, whereas Carney had at first proposed to tighten the price. The proposed carbon capture project has also shrunken to a fraction of its original size, and the oil industry hasn’t agreed to it yet. “It would have been a big enough motivator to find those emissions cuts, but it wouldn’t have jeopardized the possibility of oil and gas companies making money,” said Julia Levin, the associate director for national climate policy at the nonprofit Environmental Defence. She noted that under the previous framework, the per-barrel cost of the carbon tax comes out to the price of a Timbit, the Canadian equivalent of a Munchkin donut hole: about 50 cents. Now, she says, “the companies don’t have to do anything at all for 15 years.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Syncrude-Fort-McKay.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A Syncrude oil sands mining facility near Fort McKay, Alberta. Prime Minister Mark Carney is relying on oil produced in Alberta to help Canada weather the economic turbulence of President Trump's trade war." data-caption="A Syncrude oil sands mining facility near Fort McKay, Alberta. Prime Minister Mark Carney is relying on oil produced in Alberta to help Canada weather the economic turbulence of President Trump’s trade war. " data-credit="Photo by Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images"/> A Syncrude oil sands mining facility near Fort McKay, Alberta. Prime Minister Mark Carney is relying on oil produced in Alberta to help Canada weather the economic turbulence of President Trump’s trade war. Photo by Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images Even early news of a potential deal triggered a revolt within Carney’s own party, leading to the resignation of his climate minister, Steven Guilbeault, as well as two members of the government’s independent climate advisory panel. But the industry isn’t satisfied either. The chief executive of the Canadian oil company Cernovus said last week he doesn’t think the country should have a carbon price at all, saying it “doesn’t incent us to decarbonize,” and some producers have said they still worry about making money even under the loose regulations. A leader of the Alberta separatist campaign said the deal only made him more convinced the province needs to leave Canada. Richard Masson, a longtime oil sands executive who has worked for Shell and the government of Alberta, said that companies should see the carbon tax as the price of doing business in a country where most voters want some action on climate change. “The producers will probably take a little bit less return, but in the world we’re in, there’s enough money to go around,” he said. “You’re saying, ‘I’m going to spend a premium on this to prevent having the world turn its back on me.” Masson also said that the ultimate climate impact of the deal depends on whether a pipeline to the Pacific actually comes together. Carney has already eased environmental permitting laws to make it easier, and last month he created a $25 billion development fund that could help pay for construction. But there is still no private company that has come forward to build it, and a number of First Nations tribes with treaty rights on the Pacific coast have rejected the idea. “No offer of equity or ownership will change our position, and no proponent is acceptable to us,” said Marilyn Slett, president of the Coastal First Nations, in response to the pipeline plan. First Nations have ironclad consultation rights under British Columbia provincial law, and securing a pipeline without tribal agreement will be impossible. Even so, in what seemed to be a further embrace of fossil fuels for economic security, Carney also unveiled a “national electricity strategy” at the same time as the Alberta deal. This strategy seeks to double the size of Canada’s grid by 2050 through investments in renewable energy and a new network of transmission lines connecting the provinces. But it also calls for natural gas to have a major role on Canada’s future power grid, even though the country has made major investments in zero-carbon power and gets most of its electricity from hydropower dams and nuclear reactors. Here again, the Carney government framed the decision as a necessary step toward geopolitical resilience. The strategy claims that “Canada’s economic growth and long-term competitiveness will depend on its ability to attract and retain investment in high-growth, electricity-intensive sectors, including artificial intelligence … liquid natural gas export facilities, mining, and critical minerals.” Underlying all these moves is the assumption that fossil fuels will provide protection against economic uncertainty. As long as Canada can extract and export natural resources, it will be able to balance its budgets and keep its citizens safe. But despite Carney’s reputation as a shrewd central banker, critics of his government view the prime minister’s new strategy as short-sighted — Carney is pinning his economic hopes on the sale of a commodity that the world is starting to abandon. “This is the sort of decision that they’re probably happy about today, and we will look back in 10 years and think, ‘what the hell were we doing?” said Donner, the former chair of the government’s climate advisory board. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Once a climate leader, Canada is now doubling down on oil on May 20, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.
Hyderabad: ‘Cow vigilantes’ raid truck, find plywood instead of cattle, vandalize it anyway
On May 16, around midnight, a group of self-proclaimed cow vigilantes in Gudimalkapur in suburban Hyderabad raided a truck on suspicion that it was illegally transporting cattle. However, when the... The post Hyderabad: ‘Cow vigilantes’ raid truck, find plywood instead of cattle, vandalize it anyway appeared first on Alt News.
On May 16, around midnight, a group of self-proclaimed cow vigilantes in Gudimalkapur in suburban Hyderabad raided a truck on suspicion that it was illegally transporting cattle. However, when the vehicle was stopped, it was found to be carrying plywood. Despite this, the mob allegedly vandalised the truck and pelted stones at it, injuring at least three people, including the driver, Rasul Sheikh, his brother and a police officer. On May 18, Gudimalkapur police registered an attempt to murder case against the alleged cow vigilantes. Separately, based on Rasul’s complaint filed on May 17, another first information report (FIR) was registered at the Tappachabutra police station. FIR Against 10 Unidentified Individuals Alt News accessed a copy of the FIR filed at the Tappachabutra police station. According to the complaint, 58-year-old Rasul Sheikh, a resident of Maharashtra’s Beed district, was transporting plywood from Chennai to Hyderabad for one Jameel Qureshi. Rasul was driving a Maharashtra-registered truck and was accompanied by his brother, Afsar Sheikh, who worked as the cleaner of the vehicle. The two had left Chennai on May 15 and reached Noman Trading Company in Hyderabad around 11:45 pm on May 16. However, because of an obstruction near the store that prevented parking, Rasul parked the truck by the roadside near the Royal Sea Hotel. The FIR states that shortly thereafter, 10-12 individuals forcefully stopped the vehicle and demanded to know what the truck was carrying. As a crowd gathered, an altercation broke out. Around 12:05 am, police arrived at the spot and dispersed the crowd. AIMIM MLA Majid Hussain also reached the scene and sat inside the truck with Rasul. He later staged a protest outside the office of the deputy commissioner of police (DCP), Golconda zone, along with a group of supporters. Speaking to the media, Hussain criticised the police response and said they should have pacified the crowd instead of appearing nervous, which, according to him, worsened the situation. He also stressed that there should be no “balancing act” by filing cases against both sides. “Here, one side did not engage in any wrongful activity; they have been telling the police since the start that they were carrying plywood. If the police do not keep these things in mind, the public will have no faith in the police,” he said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by AIMIM (@majlis_official) The FIR names 10 unidentified persons and invokes Sections 189(2) (being a member of an unlawful assembly), 126(2) (wrongful restraint), 351(2) (criminal intimidation), and Section 3(5) of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS), which deals with acts committed by several individuals in furtherance of a common intention. <a href="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/plugins/pdfjs-viewer-shortcode/pdfjs/web/viewer.php?file=https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/105_2026-1.pdf&attachment_id=315517&%23038;dButton=true&%23038;pButton=true&%23038;oButton=false&%23038;sButton=true&%23038;editButtons=true&%23038;v=3.1.1&%23038;_wpnonce=5b4c2f1ee9%23zoom=auto&%23038;pagemode=none" aria-label="Open PDF in fullscreen mode">View Fullscreen Skip to PDF content <iframe width="100%" height="800px" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/plugins/pdfjs-viewer-shortcode/pdfjs/web/viewer.php?file=https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/105_2026-1.pdf&attachment_id=315517&%23038;dButton=true&%23038;pButton=true&%23038;oButton=false&%23038;sButton=true&%23038;editButtons=true&%23038;v=3.1.1&%23038;_wpnonce=5b4c2f1ee9%23zoom=auto&%23038;pagemode=none" title="PDF document: 105_2026-1.pdf" aria-label="PDF document: 105_2026-1.pdf" class="pdfjs-iframe" tabindex="0" loading="lazy" style="max-width: 100%;"> Alt News reached out to Rasul Sheikh, who was driving the truck and was injured when the cow vigilantes attacked. As per his account, the gau rakshaks chased the truck even after the police had intervened and had instructed Rasul to drive it to the police station. The vigilantes, whom Rasul referred to as kids/young boys, vandalised the truck and injured Rasul, Afsar and a policeman in the process. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-315541 size-large" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rasul-with-truck-768x1024.jpeg" alt="" width="768" height="1024" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rasul-with-truck-768x1024.jpeg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rasul-with-truck-225x300.jpeg 225w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rasul-with-truck-1152x1536.jpeg 1152w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rasul-with-truck.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /> Rasul Sheikh with the truck vandalised by ‘cow vigilantes’ “I had loaded plywood from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, which was supposed to be delivered to a store in Hyderabad, and we had reached the spot by 11 pm. But the store said that we would be unloading the plywood later, since there was a function going on near the shop and the road was blocked. So, we parked at one place, as we had to sleep in the truck, and wait for it to be unloaded in the morning. Then, suddenly, 3-4 kids came and started questioning about what was inside the truck, and they enquired if we were carrying cows. We clarified that it is only plywood. Then, I saw them speaking to someone on the phone, and suddenly, 10-12 more individuals showed up. They climbed up the truck, tore the tarpaulin cover apart and started throwing the plywood materials on the ground,” Rasul said. He further stated, “At this point, a police van approached the scene and told me to drive the truck to the police station. I clarified to them that I am carrying plywood, and if they wanted to check, then they could do it here only, and then the matter can be quickly resolved. But, they made me drive the truck to the police station. As we were driving towards the police station, more individuals started gathering. They were chanting ‘Jai Sri Ram’ and throwing stones at the truck. A few of them also sat in front of the truck and threw stones, which broke the windshield and the broken shards of glass injured me, my brother and a police officer who was sitting with us in the truck. They threw the plywood on the road and attempted to vandalise the truck, which caused us a lot of monetary loss.” In an interview with HN10 News, injuries on Rasul’s face are clearly visible. Videos from the incident show several men climbing onto the truck and throwing plywood sheets onto the road, while others standing below can be seen pelting stones at the vehicle. Hyderabad: Vi0lence erupted in #Gudimalkapur area on Saturday night after #cow vigilantes stopped a container truck suspecting cattle smuggling. #Police later confirmed it was carrying only cardboard and plywood. The incident triggered a confrontation and stone pelting between… pic.twitter.com/zo6xGqJox9 — MuslimMirror.com (@MuslimMirror) May 17, 2026 “After some time, MLA Majid Hussain arrived at the police station, and that is when they (cow vigilantes) fled from there. MLA sahaab then sat in my lorry with me and helped us bring back our truck. Then, the next morning, on May 17, I drove the truck to the store where the plywood was supposed to be unloaded and went to file the complaint. I left the same evening for home and got back to Beed,” Rasul told Alt News. “I have been driving trucks for 33-35 years now, and till now, no such thing has taken place. The police could have stopped them (cow vigilantes) from vandalising the truck and from attacking us, but they did not, even though there was no cattle in the truck. MLA Hussain has saved our lives”, he added. Police Action According to a report by The Siasat Daily, apart from the FIR registered on Rasul’s complaint at the Tappachabutra police station, another FIR was filed at Gudimalkapur police station against five individuals, including one Sai, whom police identified as the head of the gau rakshaks involved in the incident. The accused have been booked under Sections 109(1) (attempt to murder), 189(4) (unlawful assembly), 191(3) (aggravated rioting), 121(1) (voluntarily causing hurt to a public servant), 324(4) (mischief), and 126(2) read with 3(5) (wrongful restraint) of the BNS. All five accused are currently absconding. The report further stated that police are also registering another case against those who organised an unlawful protest outside the office of the DCP, Golconda zone. Alt News contacted the Gudimalkapur SHO, who said that while the five accused had been identified, they were still absconding. The SHO added that the investigation had not yet established whether they belonged to any organised gau raksha group. Alt News also spoke to L Raju, the senior inspector and investigating officer at Tappachabutra police station handling Rasul’s complaint. “Some of the individuals have been identified by the Gudimalkapur police station, and we are also trying to identify more of them based on the videos of the incident. But it has been difficult to identify them so far because the lighting is very bad. Once they are identified, we will be able to investigate if they were part of any groups,” he said. The post Hyderabad: ‘Cow vigilantes’ raid truck, find plywood instead of cattle, vandalize it anyway appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.
Iran Turns Mass Weddings Into a Patriotic Show | US Iran Update
Musician Ninajirachi on figuring out who you are
You taught yourself music production. What were some challenges with that? What kept motivating you to learn?
You taught yourself music production. What were some challenges with that? What kept motivating you to learn? I learned everything from YouTube. The hardest thing was not even knowing what I don’t know, so not really knowing what to look up. Once I had watched a really long bunch of tutorials about the general interface of a digital audio workstation (DAW) and what, conceptually, everything is, it was easier. The challenge was having a problem you want to solve, but not even being able to put words to the problem to type into YouTube to find a tutorial about it. Once I had a tutorial in front of me, it was like, “Okay, great, this is just step one, step two.” But sometimes, when I was younger, I would hear something in music and be like, “I want to learn how to do that,” but I didn’t even know what it was called to Google it. I can imagine the problem of not being able to Google it being so difficult. How did you solve it? When I was younger, I didn’t know anyone who made music. I didn’t know anyone in the music industry or anyone closely related to music production. I was so far removed. I didn’t have the understanding or vocabulary to look up how to use a compressor because I didn’t even know that was a thing. I would see it in the list of plugins and be like, “What is the purpose of that?” That was a big block. Once I knew that, “Oh, you use a compressor to do X, Y, and Z, and it’s an important thing to know to achieve A, B, C,” then it’s easy to look up how to use a compressor. I don’t know how I overcame it. It was just so much time. It probably took me five years of just fumbling around, clicking stuff, and turning things to even become a decent, competent producer. It was just trial and error, honestly. I didn’t have any producer friends to learn things from until I was already releasing music. Before that, I was just clicking things and turning dials until they sounded like a certain thing. I used to use FL Studio, and I would go through, say, Harmor presets or something, and eventually, I probably decided to look up, “what is an envelope?” or something, or “how to get this sound.” It really was a lot of clicking around in the dark. What you just said makes me wonder: Is there something you wish somebody had told you when you were first starting to make music? I probably would’ve learned a lot quicker if I knew basic stuff like EQ and compression really early. I would just put things in and happy-accident things together. When I was younger, every good song I made felt like a fluke, but if I listen back to them now, the songs that were good and felt like flukes were actually just because I used sounds that worked well together. They were already pre-compressed in a nice way, or they were EQ’d. There are songs I could have improved when I was younger if I had been able to identify what was wrong with them, and what was wrong with them might have been like, “There’s five synths all competing here.” From very young, I’ve never had a problem with ideas, songwriting, structure, melodies, or chords. It just took me a long time to learn the more technical side of things, and it’s just because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was dragging and dropping things and clicking around until it sounded good. I also like where I am right now, and I don’t wish I could go back and bestow knowledge on my younger self because then the present might be different, and the present’s pretty good. Listening to “Sing Good,” I find it really moving how you talk about just wanting to write music because it felt good regardless of your technical proficiency or songwriting chops. To what extent is that still your motivation today? How has that changed? I don’t really think it’s changed, to be honest. Since my album came out, it’s the first time more than a couple of people have paid attention to my music, and every interview I do, people are asking me, “What’s next?” I think it would be counterproductive to put that pressure on myself because I felt no pressure when I made this album that so many people love and that I love. I could start considering my audience, but you still can’t even know what the audience would like. It would be silly if I made something to appease someone other than myself, and then it flopped and no one’s happy, and I don’t like it and the audience doesn’t like it. It’s only productive to make things I like or think are valuable, because at the end of the day, if I’m the only one who hears it, then I have to be happy with it. I’ve read you say something along the lines of, “I’m going to take my time with the next album. I’m going to let the success of I Love My Computer be a slow burn, not something I rush through.” How has that whole process been going, just living in the moment and not rushing what’s next? It’s funny because I’ve also never toured this much, and I do feel very inspired at the moment. I didn’t just finish my album and be like, “That’s all I’ve got for now.” I’ve got a lot more music in me, and touring is so fun—I’m having the best time—but it can be frustrating because, sometimes, I just want to cancel everything and go and make music. It’s just a new thing for me. I’m not used to this cycle where artists will put out an album, and then the next one happens in three years because they’re touring and doing all this other stuff in between. That’s new for me. I’m trying to have patience, but some of the inspiration I have feels very urgent, and it feels kind of wrong to stifle it. At the same time, it’s really difficult to make music while traveling so much. I used to not understand that. I used to think, “Why couldn’t you make music and tour?” It’s like that feeling of, if you’re on a flight and you get locked in on something, and then you really get in that flow state and you’re like, “Wow, I’m really onto something here.” And then, you have to close your laptop and de-board the plane. It’s like, “Fuck, I don’t want to.” It’s heartbreaking. It’s too hard to get that excited feeling, get on a roll, and then have to stop and start. It’s so nice when there’s just a chunk of time to have a go at it. You released five EPs before I Love My Computer. How do you know when something is an EP versus an album and when it’s done? I wanted my first album to be really good and meaningful and have something to say, rather than just be a bunch of songs put together. I waited until I had a really strong sense of what my debut album would sound like, look like, and be about. For some artists, maybe that happens at the very start of their career, but it took me a while to figure out who I am or what I have to say. Some artists never release an album too, and that’s cool. Especially in dance music, it’s not always—especially not pop dance, but club dance music—it’s a lot of singles and EPs. Knowing when a song is finished is a matter, for me, of listening to it with my eyes closed until I can’t hear any to-do list items on it. If I listen to it with my eyes closed and then I write in the Notes app, “That part is too long” or “That part is too muddy”—I just will keep doing that until it’s like, “I’ve combed over it. There’s nothing to do here.” In terms of a project being done, for I Love My Computer, it was a time thing, honestly. There was meant to be another song on there that got cut because it was just not done. I was like, “12 songs is good. 12 is an album. I’m really glad it’s 12. That’s a nice number.” For the EP I did called 4x4, that was easy because I knew I wanted to make a four-track EP called 4x4. Then, it was just a matter of picking the four songs that felt like they went together. Same with Girl EDM. I wanted it to be a sister EP, so it was another four songs, and then, putting them together, 10 felt like a nice number, so then I made it 10 songs. It’s a bit feelings-based. I know that’s a really wishy-washy answer, but that’s the kind of ephemeral thing that’s hard to communicate. You just know what you want to say in your gut. After you’ve put out a song, have you ever listened back to it and been like, “I wish I had changed that. I wish I had done that instead”? Yes, all the time. It’s probably a really different experience for artists who produce their own music. If it’s an artist who doesn’t have any hand in the production, or maybe less of a hand in the production, I don’t know how that experience would be. There’s an Ableton project for every song. I have the projects because I produce them. When I’m making my songs, there’s a thing that they look like. There’s a visual component to making the music on the screen. Sometimes, if I’m looking at the DAW when I’m making the music for so long, it’s almost like, you can see the timeline of the song, and you can see the clip for every fill and gap. You can see the automation for when something’s muted, so you can almost see when things are coming. That’s why it’s really important for me to know when a song is done, because I need to look away and listen to the song while looking at the wall or anything else, because then it’s less predictive listening. I’m listening as if I’m an audience that didn’t produce the song and can’t see when things are coming. Obviously, I still made the song, so I still know when things are coming, but it gives a slightly more bird’s-eye perspective on the song. Inspired by your recent Frost Children collaborations, what have you learned about yourself by remixing someone else’s music or having your own remixed? This kind of ties back to the start of our conversation. When you’re learning to be a producer, remixing other people’s music is the best way to learn, and then, after doing a bunch of remixes, trying to recreate other people’s music. Obviously, you shouldn’t release a copy of someone’s song, but for the exercise, for the practice, it was so good. I’m so glad I did a bunch of remixes when I was little. You just learn so much. It’s almost like if you’re teaching a child to read or write and you give them a sentence like “I went to the beach” and you omit a word, and they can comprehend most of the sentence and they have to figure out what word is missing and spell that word. That’s what making a remix is when you’re learning, because you have a bunch of parts that already sound good and work well together, and your job as the remixing learner is to fill in the blanks. Your first remix, if you’re a brand-new producer, might be just to take out the drums of a song and remake the same structure, but just remake the drums. If it’s a rock song, you might take out the drums and do dance drums underneath, and then, you’ve learned something from that. After you get comfortable with that, you might take out the vocal and write a new vocal over the top, or then you might remake the chords. Eventually, you might be like, “I’m going to challenge myself to remake every element of this song.” I wasn’t thinking about this when I was working with Frost Children, but for learning when I was younger, that was so valuable. I love working with them. We’ve made a bit more music together. We’ve made original music together. They are so cool and talented. They just do everything. It’s awesome. They remixed “Fuck My Computer.” They just texted me and asked for the stems. That happened organically because they had an idea for it. We decided we would do a remix swap because we had both had albums coming out really close together, and we have a lot of similar fans and thought it would be a good idea. I asked if I could remix the song “Sister.” At first, my instinct was to make something like their “Fuck My Computer” remix. I play it in every one of my shows because it lands so well. I wanted to return the favor and make something with a similar energy. I didn’t imagine writing a verse on it. I imagined redoing the drums and making it a four-to-the-floor banger. But when I sat down to do it, I started thinking of melodies and just went with it. I didn’t know if they would be like, “Oh, bummer.” They really liked it. They said what I wrote inspired them to write more. And then we passed the stems back and forth until it became this thing. We didn’t sit down and be like, “We’re going to do a joint ‘Sister’ remix where we both sing.” It just happened naturally, which was lovely. I hope we can keep making more music together because I think we have a lot of the same taste and sensibilities, and I’m just such a fan. If there’s anything more you want to say about creativity or something more you want to add to a question I previously asked, take a moment. When I do shows and meet people after, a lot of people also make music, or they’re learning to make music, and they ask for tips. The one I’m always repeating is, you just have to do a bit every day. It’s like fitness. You just have to go to the gym every day. With fitness, it’s more valuable to do a little workout every day, or every couple of days, than to do one massive workout a month, because it’s training a muscle, and it’s almost like training your discipline as well as your actual technician skills on the DAW. You just have to show up every day, even if you don’t feel like it. 10 minutes a day is better than nothing. The official Ninajirachi starter pack: “iPod Touch” official music video “Fuck My Computer” official music video “Infohazard” official music video Frost Children, Ninajirachi: “Sisters” Full triple j live set This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.
Hey JD Vance, Ukraine is Winning (And Putin is Petrified)
Ukraine is winning, and a botox-bloated Putin looks like a dead-man walking. While the spineless MAGA right still tries to block aid, Ukrainian innovation has turned Russia's imperialist delusion into an embarrassing nightmare, as predicted on Gaslit Nation at the start of the full-scale invasion. Award-winning war reporter James Verini, author of The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, joins Gaslit Nation to discuss the desperation rattling Moscow. Putin wanted a grand Cold War rematch, but instead, he's trapped in a catastrophic, modern-day Afghanistan with a staggering one million Russian casualties. The reality the MAGA death cult and isolationists ignore? Ukraine is the true vanguard of global democracy. They are out-innovating Goliath with world-leading drone technology and defending the open society while MAGA lackeys play craven partisan games. Putin's radical, Dugin-fueled imperial ego has officially broken Russia, much like Trump's is breaking the U.S. To beat Big Tech censorship, subscribe to Gaslit Nation's Patreon at the Truth-Teller level or higher today. Thank you to everyone who supports the show and joins our lively Monday salons–recordngs are available, only on Patreon. EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION: Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community New! There's now a California Signal Group for Gaslit Nation listeners to find each other and connect in that state. Join on Patreon. The Gaslit Nation Outreach Committee discusses how to talk to the MAGA cult. Join on Patreon. Minnesota Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other. Join on Patreon. Vermont Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other. Join on Patreon. Arizona-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to connect. Join on Patreon. Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join. Join in Patreon. Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, join on Patreon. As always, keep it kind in our chat groups, extend grace and assume good faith. A culture of care is how we build a better world. Join our community of listeners and get bonus shows, ad free listening, group chats with other listeners, ways to shape the show, invites to exclusive events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Discounted annual memberships are available. Become a Democracy Defender at Patreon.com/Gaslit Show Notes: Opening clip: Spanish actor Javier Bardem at the Cannes Film Festival, saying what needs to be said: https://bsky.app/profile/hannibal.bsky.social/post/3mm4eomatbk2t The Theater Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War By James Verini https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Theater/James-Verini/9781668062203 Russia in No Mood for Celebration on Kremlin's Biggest Day of the Year: As the country heads into Victory Day, the economy is stalling, internet restrictions are growing and the Kremlin is fearing Ukrainian attacks. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/world/europe/russia-mood-victory-day.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.mQvz.bsjmfvh1AxHe&smid=url-share Ukraine is forging the future of war: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/world/killer-robots-ukraine-ebola-qatar.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.Tkdm.TaPFOgd0QcG8&smid=url-share Kyivan Rus, then and now: How has Russia distorted the history of Kyivan Rus? https://kyivindependent.com/kyivan-rus-then-and-now/ The men who could succeed Vladimir Putin https://theweek.com/feature/briefing/1024619/putins-potential-successors Democrats bypass Mike Johnson on Ukraine aid with GOP help https://www.axios.com/2026/05/13/ukraine-aid-discharge-petition-mike-johnson-kiley Putin health fears as Russian president appears at victory parade with 'swollen' face https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/putin-health-fears-as-russian-president-appears-at-victory-parade-with-swollen-face/ar-AA22ZIE7
Ukraine is winning, and a botox-bloated Putin looks like a dead-man walking. While the spineless MAGA right still tries to block aid, Ukrainian innovation has turned Russia's imperialist delusion into an embarrassing nightmare, as predicted on Gaslit Nation at the start of the full-scale invasion. Award-winning war reporter James Verini, author of The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, joins Gaslit Nation to discuss the desperation rattling Moscow. Putin wanted a grand Cold War rematch, but instead, he's trapped in a catastrophic, modern-day Afghanistan with a staggering one million Russian casualties. The reality the MAGA death cult and isolationists ignore? Ukraine is the true vanguard of global democracy. They are out-innovating Goliath with world-leading drone technology and defending the open society while MAGA lackeys play craven partisan games. Putin's radical, Dugin-fueled imperial ego has officially broken Russia, much like Trump's is breaking the U.S. To beat Big Tech censorship, subscribe to Gaslit Nation's Patreon at the Truth-Teller level or higher today. Thank you to everyone who supports the show and joins our lively Monday salons–recordngs are available, only on Patreon. EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION: Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community New! There's now a California Signal Group for Gaslit Nation listeners to find each other and connect in that state. Join on Patreon. The Gaslit Nation Outreach Committee discusses how to talk to the MAGA cult. Join on Patreon. Minnesota Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other. Join on Patreon. Vermont Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other. Join on Patreon. Arizona-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to connect. Join on Patreon. Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join. Join in Patreon. Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, join on Patreon. As always, keep it kind in our chat groups, extend grace and assume good faith. A culture of care is how we build a better world. Join our community of listeners and get bonus shows, ad free listening, group chats with other listeners, ways to shape the show, invites to exclusive events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Discounted annual memberships are available. Become a Democracy Defender at Patreon.com/Gaslit Show Notes: Opening clip: Spanish actor Javier Bardem at the Cannes Film Festival, saying what needs to be said: https://bsky.app/profile/hannibal.bsky.social/post/3mm4eomatbk2t The Theater Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War By James Verini https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Theater/James-Verini/9781668062203 Russia in No Mood for Celebration on Kremlin's Biggest Day of the Year: As the country heads into Victory Day, the economy is stalling, internet restrictions are growing and the Kremlin is fearing Ukrainian attacks. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/world/europe/russia-mood-victory-day.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.mQvz.bsjmfvh1AxHe&smid=url-share Ukraine is forging the future of war: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/world/killer-robots-ukraine-ebola-qatar.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.Tkdm.TaPFOgd0QcG8&smid=url-share Kyivan Rus, then and now: How has Russia distorted the history of Kyivan Rus? https://kyivindependent.com/kyivan-rus-then-and-now/ The men who could succeed Vladimir Putin https://theweek.com/feature/briefing/1024619/putins-potential-successors Democrats bypass Mike Johnson on Ukraine aid with GOP help https://www.axios.com/2026/05/13/ukraine-aid-discharge-petition-mike-johnson-kiley Putin health fears as Russian president appears at victory parade with 'swollen' face https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/putin-health-fears-as-russian-president-appears-at-victory-parade-with-swollen-face/ar-AA22ZIE7 This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
Mexican journalist, IPFA recipient Maria Teresa Montaño targeted in possible malware, surveillance attacks
Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders
Mexico City, May 19, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Mexican authorities to immediately and credibly investigate possible malware and digital surveillance attacks against Mexican journalist Maria Teresa Montaño Delgado and The ObserverMX, and take appropriate steps to guarantee her safety. Montaño, a 2023 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award (IPFA), told CPJ on May...
Mexico City, May 19, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Mexican authorities to immediately and credibly investigate possible malware and digital surveillance attacks against Mexican journalist Maria Teresa Montaño Delgado and The ObserverMX, and take appropriate steps to guarantee her safety. Montaño, a 2023 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award (IPFA), told CPJ on May 18 she believes her laptops and smartphones may have been compromised by malicious software after she discovered on April 29 that an unknown device was connected to her email account, as well as a number of files she did not recognize on one of her laptops. “Aggressive surveillance and malware attacks against Maria Teresa Montaño, known for investigating sensitive topics, is especially heinous given Mexico’s status as the deadliest country for journalists in the western hemisphere and its abysmal record on illegal surveillance of journalists,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative. “Mexican authorities must prove they take digital attacks seriously.” Montaño is the founder and editor of The ObserverMX, which investigates graft, corruption, human rights abuses, and fact-checks public officials in Estado de México, a state neighboring Mexico City. Montaño has been repeatedly targeted by threats and harassment by public officials in the past. In 2021, she was briefly kidnapped by unknown assailants who threatened her and seized her equipment. Montaño has since enrolled in a protection program overseen by the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders. An official for the Mechanism, who asked not to be named as he is not authorized to comment publicly, confirmed to CPJ that Montaño is still enrolled in the program and that his agency would contact her to analyze the recent incidents. Montaño told CPJ that she does not know whether the digital attacks are directly linked to any of The ObserverMX’s current investigative work. She added that the recent incidents followed an email sent to her on April 13, in which an unknown sender asked her about “investigations into unknown fraudulent contracts.” CPJ contacted the Estado de México state Human Rights Commission and the state Institute for the Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders. Officials with both institutions, who asked not to be named, were unable to immediately provide comment but committed to following up on the case. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Family pleas for kidnapped 3 Kiwis as Gaza flotilla demands global activists’ freedom from Israel
Asia Pacific Report Three New Zealanders are being illegally held hostage by the Israeli military after security forces boarded more than 50 boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla carrying humanitarian aid bound for the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza. They have been named by the flotilla Aotearoa delegation as Mousa Taher, Hāhona Ormsby, and Julien
Asia Pacific Report Three New Zealanders are being illegally held hostage by the Israeli military after security forces boarded more than 50 boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla carrying humanitarian aid bound for the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza. They have been named by the flotilla Aotearoa delegation as Mousa Taher, Hāhona Ormsby, and Julien Blondel. All three were among the almost 500 humanitarian aid activists from 40 countries detained by the Israeli forces when they illegally intercepted the flotilla in international waters near Cyprus over the past two days. READ MORE: Foreign ministers of 10 countries say Israel’s storming of the aid flotilla is blatant violation of international law Greenpeace calls on global govts to ensure safety of Gaza flotilla stormed by Israeli military ‘They threatened to kill us at gunpoint,’ says NZ Gaza flotilla activist After Israel’s brutal attack on Kiwis the NZ government does nothing Other Gaza flotilla reports Mousa Taher was aboard the Kasri Sadabat, one of the final 10 boats to be intercepted. A father of seven, Mousa left his children a message before being illegally abducted, writing on a sign for the livestream camera, “I love you”, and “Salaam Baby!” His 11-year-old son has written a plea to the New Zealand government to intervene: “To Mr Government: I want to ask you to please help my Dad, Mousa Taher, so his boat doesn’t get intercepted by Israelis. I miss him very much and I hope to see him untouched, not hurt, and in good conditions. The people in Gaza deserve support, especially all the kids like me. Help my Baba to help Palestinians please.” — From: Shay Yusuf. Age 11 Taher, who was previously illegally intercepted by the IOF on April 29 alongside Julien Blondel, returned to the flotilla for a second time. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128095" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Mousas-childs-letter.jpeg" alt="Eleven-year-old Shay Yusuf's appeal letter for his father" width="680" height="385" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Mousas-childs-letter.jpeg 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Mousas-childs-letter-300x170.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Eleven-year-old Shay Yusuf’s appeal letter for his father to the New Zealand government. Image: GSF Aotearoa delegation Taher, who was previously illegally intercepted by the IOF on April 29 alongside Julien Blondel, returned to the flotilla for a second time. Message to ‘fellow Kiwis’ Yesterday, before his illegal interception, Taher sent the Aotearoa delegation a message announcing, “I have a message to my fellow Kiwis and the New Zealand government. “I’m on my boat which has humanitarian aid, on the way to Gaza to break the illegal siege of the israeli occupation forces. “What I would like to say is that, for three years, I watched the uncontested demolition and obliteration of a people. It was on the TV for all of us to watch. “Our government chose time and time again to do nothing. To be complicit, and to allow this to happen. “There has been war crime after war crime, and yet the New Zealand government has been investing and shaking hands with these war criminals who are committing war crimes.” “Our government has a choice. Are you going to uphold international law? Are you going to uphold humanitarian values? Are you going to be the New Zealand that we know and love? “Or are you going to allow these oppressors to continue?… Please just be humans. And stop the killing of babies… this is my request and my plea. Kia Kaha, and we will see you in Gaza hopefully.” <img decoding="async" class="wp-image-127237" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel--257x300.png" alt="Julien Blondel’s face . . . bloodied but unbowed" width="300" height="350" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel--257x300.png 257w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel--360x420.png 360w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel-.png 680w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> The face of Julien Blondel . . . bloodied but unbowed, he and three other New Zealand peace activists along with dozens of other international Gaza humanitarian protest crew members were savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers who attacked the Global Sumud flotilla in international waters near the Greek Island of Crete last month. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz Blondel abducted second time Also abducted is New Zealander Julien Blondel, a dual citizen to Switzerland, who was beaten in the face in Israeli military custody after the first interception on April 29. Despite the beatings, sexual harassment, and abuse that flotilla participants experienced during this abduction, both Blondel and Taher have returned to the flotilla to try and break the siege once more, the Aotearoa delegation said in a statement. “They returned because they remain steadfast in their solidarity with the Palestinian people and their belief in a liberated world,” the statement said. Hāhona Chris Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto), father of five children, is the third New Zealander to be illegally abducted. Before the illegal interception, he said, “we are now only days away from Gaza… we need your eyes on us. Your eyes then become the government’s eyes on us. <img decoding="async" class="wp-image-128113 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Hahona-Ormsby-APR-300wide-.png" alt="Hāhona Ormsby at an Auckland pro-Palestine rally before leaving last month to take part in the Global Sumud Flotilla " width="300" height="384" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Hahona-Ormsby-APR-300wide-.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Hahona-Ormsby-APR-300wide--234x300.png 234w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> Hāhona Ormsby at an Auckland pro-Palestine rally before leaving last month to take part in the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian aid mission for besieged Gaza. Image: Asia Pacific Report “It keeps us safe. It keeps us out of harm’s way by the IOF… My freedom is not real if yours is denied. Free Gaza.” The Aotearoa delegation said: “To echo Hahona’s words, we implore New Zealand to keep its eyes on the abducted flotilla participants to keep our whānau safe. We demand that the New Zealand government does everything in its power to protect them.” Flotilla organisers demand release The abducted participants are being taken to a port in Israeli-occupied Palestine. The Global Sumud Flotilla organisers have demanded the immediate, unconditional release of all the participants, alongside the more than 9000 “unjustly detained Palestinian political prisoners facing a codified regime of state-sanctioned terror”. GSF has also called on world leaders to demand the release of the flotilla participants, the release of the Palestinian political prisoners and hostages and an end to the genocide and blockade on Gaza. Meanwhile, the Global Humanitarian Convoy has been blocked on the outskirts of Sirte in Libya while attempting to reach Gaza. This is despite the unambiguity of the Fourth Geneva Convention: all parties are obligated to allow the free passage of humanitarian aid and personnel. “The international community must act now and protect the lives of the vulnerable,” said the GSF. “Blocking humanitarian aid is a violation of international law both at sea and on land. “Our governments must speak up.” 10 countries condemn Israel Al Jazeera reports that several countries have condemned the Israeli attacks on the aid flotilla. The foreign ministers of Turkïye, Spain, Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, Libya, and the Maldives released a joint statement, describing Israeli forces’ actions as “blatant violations of international law and international humanitarian law”. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128038" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-soldiers-AJ-GSF-680wide.png" alt="Israeli soldiers board a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla vessel and hold the crew at gunpoint" width="680" height="481" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-soldiers-AJ-GSF-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-soldiers-AJ-GSF-680wide-300x212.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-soldiers-AJ-GSF-680wide-100x70.png 100w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-soldiers-AJ-GSF-680wide-594x420.png 594w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Israeli soldiers board a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla vessel and hold the crew at gunpoint. Image: Al Jazeera/Global Sumud Flotilla This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
New bid to tackle Papua New Guinea’s chronic lack of women MPs
Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates Commission
By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific senior journalist A new law in Papua New Guinea, requiring a political parties to meet a quota for fielding women candidates, is being described as a step in the right direction, but maybe not far enough. The new elections rule that women must make up 10 percent of parties’ endorsed
By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific senior journalist A new law in Papua New Guinea, requiring a political parties to meet a quota for fielding women candidates, is being described as a step in the right direction, but maybe not far enough. The new elections rule that women must make up 10 percent of parties’ endorsed candidates was recently announced by Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates Commission (IPPCC). The law is an affirmative action aimed at trying to address the chronic lack of women as elected representatives in the country. READ MORE: Other women in PNG politics reports There are currently three women MPs in PNG’s 111-seat Parliament. Since the country gained independence 50 years ago, only 10 women have been elected MPs. Persistent cultural norms continue to disadvantage women, but attitudes are slowly changing. Yet to be tested A PNG academic specialising in gender equity in governance, Dr Orovu Sepoe, who is also a former chair of the commission, said Parliament passed the law but it has yet to be tested. “We’ll wait and see how it turns out in the 2027 election. As an affirmative direction, it’s good, but could have been thought out carefully,” she said. “There are other issues. How many political parties will actually actively seek out women candidates? They’re not very good at doing that for women candidates in the PNG context.” Dr Sepoe said that the law’s compliance measures could mean it has limited impact. The penalties for parties who fail the quota in consecutive elections are de-registration and a fine of 5000 kina (about NZ$1900), which she admitted was “peanuts” for the main political parties. “There is a catch here that I thought might present challenges because the penalties will only apply after two consecutive elections, rather than just one, rather than straight away,” she said, noting that a general election takes place only every five years. Dr Orovu Sepoe . . . admits the 5000 kina fine is “peanuts” for the main political parties. Image: PNG Council of Churches Party leaders People’s Reform Party leader and East Sepik Governor Allan Bird said the rule was a good idea, indicating the main parties should have no trouble complying. “I think everyone complies, all the political parties comply. In the case of my party, we’re running about 30 candidates, and so three of those will definitely be women, in order to comply,” Bird said. Social Democratic Party leader Powes Parkop also said his party would meet, if not exceed, the threshold. Parkop, who is also chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, described the rule as a positive discrimination measure, saying it was a welcome step, even if temporary. “We need to take all steps necessary towards achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment, and more importantly, creating a environment by which we can overcome all the barriers that impede women from having a equal playing field to be able to contest with everybody else, men especially, to have a chance to be elected to National Parliament,” he said. Rai Coast MP Kessy Sawang . . . highest ranking woman MP in the current PNG Parliament as Minister of Labour. Image: United Nations Compensation Commission Parkop said whether other parties follow the rule would depend on their selection processes, acknowledging that women are disadvantaged at every level of the political process. “The reality in PNG is that everything is tough against women in PNG, especially having access to resources, financial resources, is hard for them, and culturally they are not seen as leaders, or traditionally not playing that leadership role.” Unfinished business PNG’s Parliament has grappled with affirmative action on gender equality in politics before. Back in 2011, a proposal to create 22 reserved seats for women in the Haus Tambaran gained limited support among PNG’s “big men” of politics, and subsequent other attempts got nowhere. “It is still an unfinished agenda, as far as I’m concerned, at the moment,” Dr Sepoe said. “In the recent past, we’ve not had the political will to make it come into effect, so that’s where we are now. “There have been talks, there have been conversations, discussions about doing a lot more, but we’re only a year away from the election, and how much time do we have to bring any substantive changes for special seats in parliament?” In the past two general elections in PNG, women made up only around five percent of overall candidates. The fact that it resulted in less than three percent of MPs elected being women is telling. This new quota rule may be a small step, but in PNG any step towards addressing the gender imbalance in Parliament is better than nothing. Parkop said the move may not change the entire dynamics, but it is a step in the right direction. “And that’s what PNG needs. We need to create a step by which we can enable women to have an opportunity to be elected.” This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
North Korea’s Football Team Returns to South Korea After 8 Years
Xi-Trump talks cast fresh spotlight on Taiwan as part of China’s maritime strategy
Analysts say Beijing views both Taiwan and the South China Sea as integral to strategic rivalry with U.S.
Chinese President Xi Jinping used his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump last week to reiterate that Taiwan remains the most sensitive issue in U.S.-China relations, and analysts told Radio Free Asia that the Taiwan issue will be front and center according to Beijing’s latest Five-Year plan. During talks in Beijing, Xi warned Trump that mishandling the Taiwan issue could lead to “clashes and even conflicts” and urged Washington to “exercise extra caution” over arms sales to Taiwan, according to Chinese state media and media reports following the summit. Xi’s statements, combined with concepts outlined in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, released in March, suggest Beijing increasingly sees Taiwan and the South China Sea as part of a connected strategic theater tied to regional security, maritime control and long-term competition with Washington, the analysts said. Mainland communist China considers democratic Taiwan to be a rogue province and Beijing appears to be entering “a phase of taking more concrete steps to accelerate the push for reunification,” William Yang, a Northeast Asia analyst at the Belgium-based International Crisis Group think tank, told RFA. A restaurant in Taipei on May 14, 2026 shows the meeting between the U.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing. (I-Hwa Cheng/AFP) “While the Communist Party still mentioned peaceful development across the Taiwan Strait, they have connected the mission of ‘reunification’ to the goal of achieving national modernization, suggesting that Beijing wants to start making more concrete progress on the issue of unification with Taiwan,” he said, talking about the content of the Five-Year Plan. Maritime strategy The plan reflects a leadership increasingly concerned about “uncertainty and instability” in the global environment while seeking to strengthen Beijing’s position around Taiwan and the South China Sea, according to a new report by the U.S.-based think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute, or FPRI. The report described growing Chinese efforts to strengthen control over nearby maritime areas, including renewed island-building activity at Antelope Reef in the South China Sea. Yang said Beijing increasingly viewed Taiwan and the South China Sea through the same strategic lens. “China certainly views the Taiwan and South China Sea theater as closely connected, so its strategic planning and preparation around Taiwan and the South China Sea should also be viewed as highly relevant,” Yang said. “Beijing’s activities around Taiwan and the South China Sea should be viewed as part of its larger efforts to strengthen its posture and expand its presence and control across the critical sea lanes and maritime choke points.” He added that Washington’s own assessment of China’s intentions was evolving. “The longstanding, dominant narrative in Washington regarding China’s calculation and plan for Taiwan and the South China Sea has always been that Beijing is seeking to assert its dominance over Taiwan and the South China Sea to achieve its hegemonic ambition in the Indo-Pacific region,” Yang said. “However, the U.S. intelligence service already came out to overthrow that assessment earlier this year by arguing that they don’t think China would be looking to invade Taiwan by 2027.” Speaking after meeting Xi, Trump said the two sides had “talked a lot about Taiwan” but said he had made no commitments to Beijing. He also declined to say whether the United States would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Trump further described a pending U.S. arms package for Taiwan as “a very good negotiating chip,” prompting concern in Taiwan over whether Washington’s support could become tied to broader negotiations with Beijing. Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te later defended U.S. arms purchases as “the most important deterrent” against regional instability, while Taiwan officials stressed there had been no change in longstanding U.S. policy toward the island. Strategy of strength Rather than signaling a dramatic strategic shift, the Five-Year Plan represents a more systematic effort to strengthen China’s position over time, Sylwia M. Gorska, a Ph.D candidate in international relations at the University of Lancashire in the United Kingdom, told RFA. “The underlying priorities remain largely consistent: securing China’s maritime periphery, reducing vulnerability to external pressure, and limiting the ability of the United States and its allies to constrain Chinese influence close to the mainland,” Gorska said. She said Beijing increasingly appeared focused on “steadily strengthening its position across contested waters” through coast guard operations, maritime militia activity and persistent military pressure below the threshold of open conflict. China's President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump arrive to attend a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2026. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP) “There does appear to be a closer linkage emerging between Beijing’s Taiwan strategy and its posture in the South China Sea,” Gorska said, noting that the trend was visible in Beijing’s confrontations with the Philippines around Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed Spratly Islands chain, as well as in the growing Chinese naval and air activity around Taiwan. “The issue is not only territorial control, but also the creation of conditions that could complicate external military responses during a future regional crisis.” The FPRI report also argued that Beijing’s growing emphasis on instability and “security” suggested the Chinese Communist Party increasingly saw strategic opportunity in a distracted United States and a fragmented international environment. U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One during his departure from Beijing on May 15, 2026. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP) It said China was likely to continue promoting its “Community of Common Destiny” vision and broader governance initiatives through multilateral institutions including the United Nations. Gorska cautioned against viewing China’s strategic moves as preparing for an inevitable conflict. “Beijing still appears more focused on expanding its leverage, constraining U.S. freedom of maneuver, and improving its long-term position than on triggering a near-term war,” Gorska said. Edited by Eugene Whong. This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Taejun Kang for RFA.
What will become of ISIS-tied families in al-Hawl?
What will become of ISIS-tied families in al-Hawl? This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Santiago Montag.
Lesson from the Iran War #42,765: Making enemies makes us poorer
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343591" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/iran-war-making-enemies-makes-us-poorer/president-trump-signs-executive-orders-in-the-oval-office-of-the-white-house-2" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"10","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R5m2","caption":"WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 25: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Furthering his federal takeover of the capital city\u2019s law enforcement, Trump signed orders ending cashless bail in the District of Columbia, mandating prosecution for people who desecrate the American flag -- including by burning it -- and other orders. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1756120779","copyright":"2025 Getty Images","focal_length":"200","iso":"12800","shutter_speed":"0.008","title":"President Trump Signs Executive Orders In The Oval Office Of The White House","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="President Trump Signs Executive Orders In The Oval Office Of The White House" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> Pete Hegseth's live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343591" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/iran-war-making-enemies-makes-us-poorer/president-trump-signs-executive-orders-in-the-oval-office-of-the-white-house-2" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"10","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R5m2","caption":"WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 25: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Furthering his federal takeover of the capital city\u2019s law enforcement, Trump signed orders ending cashless bail in the District of Columbia, mandating prosecution for people who desecrate the American flag -- including by burning it -- and other orders. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1756120779","copyright":"2025 Getty Images","focal_length":"200","iso":"12800","shutter_speed":"0.008","title":"President Trump Signs Executive Orders In The Oval Office Of The White House","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="President Trump Signs Executive Orders In The Oval Office Of The White House" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens to President Donald Trump talk to journalists after signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on August 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2232038596-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission. Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to be opposed to this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated. The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Straits of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves, but there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices, due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war. The Military is Really Big Bucks There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them. It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter ten seconds and add maybe ten words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7% of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008% of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not. It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the Covid relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6% of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4% of the budget) annually. And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0% of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7% over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6% of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0% of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy. The Peace Dividend In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1% of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Reagan and Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7% of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies. At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world. Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well. It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded. This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO. It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand Eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly. The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War President Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration, could be push by Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher. But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5 percent of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money. That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for healthcare, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about. The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the U.S. economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20% of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt? Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell. As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget. In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Dean Baker.
How Hackers Breached An FBI Phone & Mexico City’s CCTV
Minnesota charges ICE agent over shooting
Photojournalist kettled while covering protest near NYC synagogue
U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database
Photojournalist Neil Constantine was held in a police kettle while covering a protest in New York, New York, on May 5, 2026.The protest was taking place near a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was holding an event to promote real estate sa...
Photojournalist Neil Constantine was held in a police kettle while covering a protest in New York, New York, on May 5, 2026. The protest was taking place near a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was holding an event to promote real estate sales in Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the latter of which are widely believed to violate international law. The New York City Police Department formed a buffer zone around the synagogue, prohibiting access to the block it was located on and directing pro-Palestinian and a smaller group of pro-Israel protesters, as well as press, onto surrounding avenues, according to news reports and journalists who spoke to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Constantine, who was freelancing for NurPhoto Agency and whose New York City press credential was clearly visible, told the Tracker that at one point, NYPD officers suddenly barricaded a sidewalk on nearby Third Avenue. The officers pushed metal barricades into protesters to prevent them from accessing an area that had previously been open. Members of the press were standing behind the officers, documenting the police actions. In a video Constantine posted on Instagram, uniformed police and plainclothes public information officers can be seen placing metal barricades around a group of press, separating them from the area where the NYPD was pushing protesters back. In the video, Constantine can be heard saying, “This is kettling,” and “We are being blocked in here right now.” View post on Instagram Constantine told the Tracker that when journalists asked to leave the area, they were either told that they couldn’t, or were given conflicting instructions about where to go by officers who were within a few feet of one another. In addition, the officers wouldn’t answer their questions about why they were keeping them there. He said they were kept in the kettle for around 15 minutes. The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
Livestreamer arrested during May Day protests in downtown LA
Livestreamer Gonzalo Gonzalez was arrested and charged with failure to disperse while documenting workers’ rights and immigration protests in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026.Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as par...
Livestreamer Gonzalo Gonzalez was arrested and charged with failure to disperse while documenting workers’ rights and immigration protests in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026. Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May Day Strong” demonstrations that also called for an end to the war in Iran and the immigration raids that have swept the city since June 2025. Gonzalez, who broadcasts live and publishes videos through his YouTube channel EastLos Audits, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he arrived shortly before noon to document a planned rally in front of City Hall. After around 30-45 minutes, LA Police Department officers arrived, establishing a skirmish line. “I went live from that point, and they started pushing the crowd on Spring Street toward the front of City Hall,” he said. “I stayed live for about an hour or so, and I got behind the police line, the scrimmage line, because I already know: If I’m in front of it, I’m going to get shoved and pushed, and I don’t want to do that.” Gonzalez, who doesn’t carry press credentials, told the Tracker that he identified himself as media to the officers, who recognized and treated him as such. Officers ultimately pushed the crowd of protesters back to clear an employee entrance for a nearby courthouse, and the demonstrators then marched out of the area, Gonzalez said. He ended his live reporting and left once the police dispersed their skirmish line. Several hours later, the livestreamer was in his vehicle and ready to end his reporting day when he heard over his police scanner that officers were planning to corral demonstrators near the Metropolitan Detention Center, where immigrant detainees are being held and which has been a focal point for protests over the past year. “When I got there, they already had the crowd pushed out on Alameda,” Gonzalez said, referring to the street in front of the detention center. “So again, I get behind the skirmish line, and there’s a lot of media there. But in front of the skirmish line, there’s media too.” Gonzalez said he continued to identify himself as press, complying when an officer directed him to cross the street and then back again, as she looked for a way to have him join other journalists covering the protest. He continued to broadcast live as officers began to corral the crowd. “I started documenting all that, and I want to get as close as I can so I can document, because I don’t just want to catch video, I also want to catch audio, to hear what they’re saying,” Gonzalez told the Tracker. “I get on the street because I can get a better view and audio from the street, which is only, I would say, about three or four feet off the sidewalk.” Despite other members of the press being permitted to walk in the street — which officers had shut down — a lieutenant approached Gonzalez and ordered him to get back onto the sidewalk. Gonzalez told the Tracker he tried to explain to the officer that he was just documenting, but was told that he was too close to the officers’ emergency scene. He compiled, asking the officer his name while stepping backward and onto the sidewalk. “I understand that we have the right to be there,” Gonzalez told the Tracker. “And again, I can see media, mainstream media, on the street. So it irritated me that he wanted us on the sidewalk. “So I was being a little bit of a jerk back, I’m not going to lie,” he said. As his interaction with the lieutenant became more heated, the officer directed another to arrest Gonzalez and take him in. He told the Tracker that he was initially informed that he was going to be charged with obstruction, but his citation lists his violation as a failure to disperse. A subclause of that part of the California penal code specifically exempts journalists from unlawful assembly dispersal, protects them from interference or obstruction by law enforcement, and bars them from being charged with failure to disperse, curfew violations or resisting arrest. At least four other journalists were detained in the kettle Gonzalez was documenting, one of whom — independent photojournalist Nick Stern — was arrested but later released without charges. Gonzalez said he was held in police custody for a little over two hours before he was released, and a hearing in his case is scheduled for May 27. The LAPD did not immediately return a request for comment from the Tracker, but in a statement posted on May 1, it wrote: “The Los Angeles Police Department fully supports the rights of individuals to peacefully assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights.” In an earlier statement following the March 28 “No Kings” rally — which resulted in more than two dozen press freedom violations — Chief Jim McDonnell said that any use of force or allegations of mistreatment involving media members would be investigated and addressed. “The LAPD recognizes the media’s right to cover events and makes reasonable efforts to accommodate, with those efforts consistent with our primary duty to maintain public safety and order,” that statement said. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 19, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 19, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 19, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
How The Cartels Are Winning the Digital Drug War | Proton Data Wars | VICE News
DR Congo/Uganda Ebola outbreak: the search for patient zeroMyanmar hunger crisis deepens, EU boosts aid via WFPWorld trade wavers as Middle East crisis remains unresolved
DR Congo/Uganda Ebola outbreak: the search for patient zeroMyanmar hunger crisis deepens, EU boosts aid via WFPWorld trade wavers as Middle East crisis remains unresolved This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.
Linda Sarsour on San Diego mosque shooting, anti-Muslim hate
CPJ, partners call on Gulf states to end crackdown on information
The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 26 other organizations in calling on Gulf states to end their attacks on the free flow of information. The Iran war has sparked a sweeping new crackdown across the Gulf, as governments move to control what their populations can see, say, and share about the attacks unfolding in their...
The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 26 other organizations in calling on Gulf states to end their attacks on the free flow of information. The Iran war has sparked a sweeping new crackdown across the Gulf, as governments move to control what their populations can see, say, and share about the attacks unfolding in their own cities. The crackdown has directly targeted journalists and media workers. In Kuwait, US-Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was detained for 52 days, and later his citizenship — and that of his two sisters — was revoked. In Bahrain, photographer Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cases of brief detention have also been reported in the UAE and Qatar. The UAE’s public prosecutor has also blocked access to several X accounts, including that of Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya. The joint statement calls on Gulf governments to release all individuals detained solely for filming, posting, or sharing footage of the attacks — including journalists —, uphold the right to freedom of expression and press freedom, and repeal all laws that criminalize legitimate expression. Read the full statement here. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Workers have a secret weapon against the AI build-out
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2217198328-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Gas turbines are visible at an xAI data center on Riverport Rd in Memphis, TN on April 25, 2025. Photo by Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343570" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/workers-have-a-secret-weapon-against-the-ai-build-out/memphismusk" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2217198328-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"5.6","credit":"The Washington Post via Getty Im","camera":"NIKON D850","caption":"MEMPHIS, TN - APRIL 25: Gas turbines are visible at an xAI data center on Riverport Rd in Memphis, TN on April 25, 2025. (Photo by Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1745595870","copyright":"2025 The Washington Post","focal_length":"200","iso":"100","shutter_speed":"0.000625","title":"MEMPHISMUSK","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="MEMPHISMUSK" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Gas turbines are visible at an xAI data center on Riverport Rd in Memphis, TN on April 25, 2025. Photo by Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2217198328-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> The AI build-out depends on gas turbines and power transformers made by a handful of workers at a handful of plants in the US South. That bottleneck is a vulnerability — and a rare opportunity for labor to exercise real power over the tech giants.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2217198328-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Gas turbines are visible at an xAI data center on Riverport Rd in Memphis, TN on April 25, 2025. 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(Photo by Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1745595870","copyright":"2025 The Washington Post","focal_length":"200","iso":"100","shutter_speed":"0.000625","title":"MEMPHISMUSK","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="MEMPHISMUSK" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Gas turbines are visible at an xAI data center on Riverport Rd in Memphis, TN on April 25, 2025. Photo by Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2217198328-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="629" height="169" data-attachment-id="271557" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/its-apartheid-naked-unabashed-apartheid/jacobin-logo" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?fit=629%2C169&ssl=1" data-orig-size="629,169" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1620904940","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="jacobin-logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?fit=629%2C169&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?resize=629%2C169&ssl=1" alt="Jacobin logo" class="wp-image-271557 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?w=629&ssl=1 629w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?resize=300%2C81&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?resize=400%2C107&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 629px) 100vw, 629px" /> This story originally appeared in Jacobin on May 11, 2026. It is shared here with permission. We’re really going into what we believe is the early chapters of an investment supercycle in the US for electricity growth,” Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, told Barron’s during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. “If you take a step back, we probably haven’t seen an analogous period of time like this since 1945.” The AI build-out being undertaken at lightning speed is big business for companies like GE Vernova, which, along with Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, supply over 75 percent of the world’s gas turbines. GE Vernova’s equipment alone supplies 25 percent of the world’s electricity, and a staggering 55 percent in the United States. In the first quarter of this year, the company racked up $2.4 billion in sales related to orders for data centers, more than total sales for the previous year. Orders for gas turbines are booked out into 2030. In February, Siemens Energy announced it was investing $1 billion to expand its production of grid equipment in response to soaring demand for electrification, including restarting production of gas turbines at a plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had stopped producing them in 2020. Hitachi Energy invested $37 million to expand an existing facility in South Boston, Virginia, that produces large power transformers — another key piece of equipment in meeting the energy demands of the AI build-out. The company has invested over $1.5 billion into its transformer business alone. Like the gas turbine business, more than 50 percent of the large power transformer market is controlled by the same three companies, alongside Hitachi Energy and Toshiba Energy Systems. Even beyond these key suppliers, AI investment propped up an otherwise anemic economy, accounting for anywhere from half to 75 percent of GDP in the first quarter of this year. The windfall of profits for these manufacturers, however, reflects a severe supply crunch for these critical pieces of equipment, with both gas turbine and large power transformer orders backed up for years and associated costs rising. These pieces of machinery are generally made to order and are incredibly capital- and labor-intensive, taking over a year to deliver after an order is placed. The supply strain is so severe that the White House is considering bumping orders for GE Vernova turbines from other countries to move up US-based hyperscalers in their place. What industry publications warn is a growing “hardware bottleneck” that threatens to limit the AI build-out and the ensuing profit-making for many corporations and Wall Street speculators could be a key point at which workers can leverage power in the living struggle breaking out around AI and its quickly expanding impacts on conditions for the working class, the climate, and government. The Destruction of Labor Power? In a 2021 blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mused that his work at the company reminded him daily of “the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital.” Left to their own devices, the likes of Altman and the other titans of the tech billionaire elite would like nothing more than to remake society into one where all else is subservient to their profit margins. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is currently on a fundraising spree to bring in $100 billion to Project Prometheus, of which he is the co-CEO. Describing itself as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” the fund aims to buy up, hollow out, and implement AI and other forms of automation across manufacturing firms in various sectors. Linking the broader fight against AI with worker organizing efforts at key choke points in the data center supply chain is a critical strategy and a potent weapon. This future is being actively contested on multiple fronts. Communities across the country have banded together to fight the construction of data centers in their towns and have won moratoriums blocking future construction in others. Unions are beginning to bargain around AI and workers are developing tactics to fend off the impacts of AI in an increasing number of workplaces. In 2024, automation, though not directly related to AI, was a central issue of the three-day strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) that shut down ports across the East and Gulf Coasts. The impacts, however, are already being felt. Young people entering the workforce face a particularly bleak job market. The Dallas Federal Reserve reports that “workers age 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since 2022.” Unemployment rates among young people and recent college graduates are the highest in years. This comes alongside grim warnings from the AI architects themselves on the massively disruptive impact AI may quickly have on a wide range of industries, though particularly among white-collar workers. In 2024, Elon Musk announced that he would build the largest supercomputing facility in the world in Southwest Memphis — the facility, called Colossus, was built with no public input whatsoever. Powered by thirty-five gas turbines, this facility emits more pollution into a nearby black community at one time than the levels of pollution emitted from the Memphis International Airport, according to Memphis Community Against Pollution. Musk was recently awarded a permit to build a second facility nearby. Memphis, a majority black city, has been particularly targeted by the right-wing billionaire class. National Guard troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were mobilized to the city by the Trump administration, and it was just split apart in redistricting efforts to deprive the city of political representation and hand another congressional seat to the Republicans. Data centers across the country are driving up power bills, using tremendous amounts of water and causing related water quality issues, emitting pollution from turbines and other machinery, and even causing illness among those living nearby. With eye-popping amounts of capital at their disposal — and plans to increase their investments — the Big Tech companies show no signs of stopping the rapid build-out and their attempts to integrate AI into as many parts of the economy and our lives as possible. Linking the broader fight against AI with worker organizing efforts at key choke points in the data center supply chain is a critical strategy and a potent weapon. AI’s Limiting Factor: Electricity Agas turbine is a colossal machine. Weighing in at more than 400 tons and measuring nearly fifty feet long, a single turbine can generate enough electricity to power a modestly sized city, or between 100 and 400 megawatts. Faced with order backlogs, many manufacturers and hyperscalers are opting for smaller turbines, called aeroderivatives, that are essentially jet engines repurposed for energy generation. “[Energy] is the bottleneck,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told Joe Rogan during an interview in late 2025, adding emphasis on “the.” The industry analysis firm Industrial Info Resources (IIR) reports that around $2.4 trillion in AI data center development is currently underway in the United States. The power needs of these data centers have continued to increase. IIR reports that electricity demand in the United States has “risen from roughly 23 GW of new load in 2023 to about 42 GW today, with another 32 GW under construction.” By comparison, in 2024, data centers consumed 24 GW of energy. IIR estimates that by 2030, new load demand may reach around 90 GW, if not higher. Hyperscalers have few options available to them to quickly meet these energy needs besides gas turbines and large power transformers. Many companies are scrambling to develop nuclear small modular reactors (SMR), but that technology is likely still years away from being readily deployed. Increasingly, battery production capacity — spurred by policies and investments by the Biden administration primarily to assist electric vehicle (EV) production, which were subsequently nixed under Donald Trump — is being redirected toward producing energy storage solutions for the growing power needs of data centers. Power generation and distribution are thus key sites of struggle for workers to exercise power in the battle over AI and its potentially wide-ranging impacts on work, life, the environment, and government. Not only are these machines in high demand and capital- and labor-intensive, but they are also manufactured domestically in only a few locations. GE Vernova’s main gas turbine production facility is located in Greenville, South Carolina, with over 2,500 workers; Siemens Energy’s main production facility is in Charlotte, North Carolina, with around 1,500 workers; and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ main plant is in Savannah, Georgia, with over 500 workers. Large power transformer production is clustered in a similar geographic area, with key plants like Hitachi, Prolec GE, Siemens (at the same facility that produces gas turbines), and Eaton, among others, located from southern Virginia through North Carolina and into Upstate South Carolina. Production of various input components and other production related to the grid is also fairly concentrated in this same general geography. Because these critical machines are manufactured in so few locations, and those locations are clustered together, any disruptions to production would have cascading and wide-ranging impacts, giving workers powerful leverage over the AI build-out. Power generation and distribution are key sites of struggle for workers to exercise power in the battle over AI. In addition to direct outreach to workers in this sector and at these key facilities, capital investment in these plants means many are or will soon be hiring. For the last two years, the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) — where I serve as organizing coordinator — has been recruiting workers through its Rank and File Program to get jobs in strategic industries to organize. The primary focus of this effort to date has been the electric vehicle and battery supply chain. As a result, in-plant organizers are now rooted at key facilities and are building out a network across the sector, connecting committee-building efforts across the region rather than confining organizing activity to a workplace-by-workplace basis. Recruitment and committee building are ongoing. Another area of work is now emerging to build out a similar network of worker militants engaged in committee-building efforts and connected together through an industrial network in power generation production. With the stage set for a general strike on May Day 2028, the role this sector of workers could play in exercising power behind a broad set of working-class demands — around AI implementation and automation, for the climate, and for redistribution of the exorbitant profits of these companies toward social needs — would be quite significant. The United States is the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy by output. Large-scale, capital-intensive plants in heavy manufacturing make for stable, important targets for worker organization. A company that invests $13.9 billion in a brand-new factory (the cost of Toyota’s new EV and hybrid battery plant in North Carolina, for example), is planning on staying put for the long term and obtaining a profitable return on its investment — even if it’s confronted with labor unrest and worker organizing. The massive strikes and organizing sweeps of the 1930s and ’40s rightfully serve as inspiration for worker militants today. There is much to be learned and studied from that period, particularly as it pertains to how workers laid the groundwork for the upsurges and pitched battles that took place by building similar networks of worker militants rooted in key facilities today. But no doubt the social turmoil of the period in general played a large role, as it may now, in opening an opportunity to advance the working-class movement in a more militant and combative direction, focused among the unorganized sections of the class in these simultaneously vulnerable and strategic sectors of the economy. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ben Carroll.
G7 Finance Ministers Let Big Oil Off the Hook Again
On Monday and Tuesday, Paris hosted the G7 Finance Ministers’ meeting, bringing together finance ministers and central bank governors from some of the world’s most powerful economies, alongside counterparts from Brazil, India, Kenya, South Korea, Ukra...
On Monday and Tuesday, Paris hosted the G7 Finance Ministers’ meeting, bringing together finance ministers and central bank governors from some of the world’s most powerful economies, alongside counterparts from Brazil, India, Kenya, South Korea, Ukraine, Syria, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But behind the diplomatic pageantry,and despite the G7’s call for innovative financial instruments to urgently address overlapping crises,French host Roland Lescure squandered a major opportunity. While fossil fuel companies raked in billions in profits in the first quarter of 2026 amid the South-West Asia conflict, campaigners at 350.org condemn the French G7 presidency’s glaring inaction on windfall and excess profits taxes targeting the oil and gas industry. Fanny Petitbon, 350 France Country Manager, said: “France has built its G7 presidency on the bold promise to use this forum as a lever to reinforce economic security in times of crisis and to respond to the legitimate concerns of citizens. But fine words ring hollow. When it comes to taxing the obscene profits recently made by oil and gas corporations, Paris chose complete silence. Not a single word appeared in the final communiqué. Once again, the interests of a powerful minority are being protected. Companies like TotalEnergies, which boast of their so-called foresight while doing little more than speculating on war and human suffering, have cashed in billions,while families around the world pay the price at the pump and on their energy bills. The G7’s initiative to expand insurance coverage for people and countries experiencing extreme weather events is welcome. But without turning off the fossil fuel tap and forcing the biggest polluters to foot the bill, climate finance risks becoming little more than taxpayers cleaning up a mess that oil giants are still being paid to create. President Macron has positioned himself as a global leader on climate and economic justice. Yet this silence tells a very different story. Is this really the legacy he wants to leave in his final G7 presidency? The Leaders' Summit, to be held in Évian from June 15 to 17, is the last chance to course-correct and finally choose people over profit.” This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
CPJ calls on Israel to release press detained on Gaza-bound flotilla
Beirut, May 19, 2026 —The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Israeli authorities to immediately release all journalists and media workers detained after Israeli forces intercepted vessels from the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla, and to disclose the location and legal status of those being held. According to organizers, on May 18, Israeli forces began intercepting...
Beirut, May 19, 2026 —The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Israeli authorities to immediately release all journalists and media workers detained after Israeli forces intercepted vessels from the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla, and to disclose the location and legal status of those being held. According to organizers, on May 18, Israeli forces began intercepting vessels in international waters near the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, as they attempted to reach Gaza on a humanitarian mission. The flotilla media office told CPJ the following morning that those detained were still being held at sea and had not yet been taken to Israel for deportation, as had occurred in previous attempts to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Palestinian territory. CPJ has identified at least seven journalists and media workers aboard the flotilla. “Israel’s interception and detention of journalists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla follows years of documented arrests, attacks, and killings of journalists and media workers covering Gaza and attempts to report on it,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “International law is clear that journalists performing legitimate reporting are civilians and must not be arbitrarily detained or obstructed. Israeli authorities must immediately release all detained journalists and end the cycle of impunity surrounding the attacks on the press.” Tempo Media Group, an Indonesian media company, said in a May 19 statement that its reporter Andre Prasetyo Nugroho was among those detained by Israeli forces. . The flotilla departed from Marmaris, Turkey, on May 14 with dozens of vessels and hundreds of participants from multiple countries, according to media reports. CPJ emailed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for comment, and was referred to the foreign ministry, which did not respond to specific inquiries about the detention of journalists and media workers aboard the flotilla. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
Russia adds CPJ to its list of ‘undesirable organizations’
New York, May 19, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists has been included on a Russian government list of “undesirable organizations” — a label used to suppress media outlets, NGOs, and other independent voices that the Kremlin deems a threat to its narrative control. CPJ, which was not notified of the decision or the reasons behind...
New York, May 19, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists has been included on a Russian government list of “undesirable organizations” — a label used to suppress media outlets, NGOs, and other independent voices that the Kremlin deems a threat to its narrative control. CPJ, which was not notified of the decision or the reasons behind it, calls on Russia to reverse the ban. CPJ was added to the Russian Ministry of Justice’s list on May 12, according to the ministry’s website, having been designated “undesirable” by the Russian prosecutor general’s office on April 28. Hundreds of other organizations globally are already on the list, including other press freedom groups and media outlets. “By including the Committee to Protect Journalists on its list of ‘undesirable organizations’, the Kremlin is once again showing its determination to repress journalism and stop Russian citizens from having access to independent information,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Journalism is not a crime, and neither is defending it. CPJ will continue to document Russia’s flagrant violations of press freedom, at home and abroad, to seek accountability for those responsible, and to support independent journalists pushing back against the relentless tide of Kremlin propaganda.” Under a 2015 law, organizations classified as “undesirable” are banned from operating in Russia. The law is particularly threatening to anyone inside Russia seen as cooperating with these organizations or their activities, who can face up to six years in prison and administrative fines. The designation also makes it a crime to distribute the organization’s content or donate to it from inside or outside Russia. CPJ, which does not have any presence in Russia, contacted the Russian Ministry of Justice for comment but did not immediately receive a reply. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Minnesota Officials Charge ICE Agent Who Shot Venezuelan Immigrant & Falsely Reported What Happened
"Ask E. Jean" Film Profiles the Woman Who Twice Sued Trump & Won, for Sexual Assault & Defamation
3 Killed in Devastating San Diego Mosque Shooting: Linda Sarsour on Rising Anti-Muslim Hate & More
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 19, 2026
Robert Reich: Has Trump’s Republican Party become a criminal enterprise?
ANALYSIS: By Robert Reich On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the US Capitol. Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who
ANALYSIS: By Robert Reich On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the US Capitol. Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.) Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney. READ MORE: Trump says Iran attack held off upon Gulf states’ request Other Donald Trump reports Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose US military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticise Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary. Trump is marshaling the full force of his MAGA machine — spending more than $30 million on a House Republican primary — to purge another of his political enemies from the Republican House. Even Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth is flying to Kentucky to campaign for Massie’s challenger. It’s all seen as an investment in intimidating and disciplining Republican office-holders who might otherwise think of straying. Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries. The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out. In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump: “Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. “And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.” Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party. As Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.” Former generations of Republican politicians had principles, beliefs, ideals. They thought the federal government too large. Or believed it spent too much money. Or was too lenient on criminals. Or was too eager to support the civil rights of Black people. Or any number of issues with which Democrats disagreed. Today’s Republican Party no longer has any purpose other than achieving whatever Trump wants, which is mainly to make Trump richer and more powerful. The GOP is now Trump’s; it is no longer America’s. Today’s Republican voters, by contrast, are showing increasing frustration with Trump. Those who think of themselves as traditional Republicans don’t like Trump’s expansive use of federal power. Those who are fiscally conservative, like Thomas Massie, are upset by Trump’s wanton spending, tax cuts, and soaring debt. “America-first” Republican voters are concerned about Trump’s intrusions into Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere. And they want the rest of the Epstein files released. Yet for elected Republicans, survival now depends on personal loyalty to Trump. All of which raises a fundamental question: Has the official Republican Party — now nearly purged of anyone willing to reflect the concerns of Republican voters rather than Trump’s will — become complicit in Trump’s criminality? Is it aiding and abetting Trump’s lawlessness? A case can be made that the official Republican Party is indeed complicit. For Trump, the first and most basic sign of loyalty to him — and therefore survival as a politician in Trump’s Republican Party — is a willingness to publicly proclaim as truth what we know to be two big lies: that Trump won the 2020 election, and that he did not seek to overturn its results by illegal means. As a result, almost all congressional Republicans are now election deniers. Trump has also made it clear that loyalty to him bars any criticism of his unlawful immigration dragnet, which has so far resulted in the murders of three US citizens by ICE agents and the detention and deportation, without a hearing, of people suspected of being in the US illegally. To Trump, loyalty requires full support of his foreign policy — including the abduction of a foreign leader, an undeclared war with Iran, and the killing on the high seas of people only suspected of smuggling drugs, in violation of international law. Loyalty also demands unquestioned support for other of his lawless acts — using the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents, building a mammoth White House ballroom, issuing no-bid contracts to his friends, promoting his family’s businesses and implementing policies favorable to them, accepting gifts from foreign powers, and defying court orders. Is it fair to conclude from all of this that today’s official Republican Party — the people who are in office because Trump has put them there, or who maintain their office because they back whatever Trump wants — has in effect become a criminal organisation, analogous to the mafia or a drug cartel, whose members are blindly loyal to their criminal bosses? Robert Reich is a US professor, former Secretary of Labor, co-founder of Inequality Media and writes at robertreich.substack.com This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
State prosecutors in Minnesota have filed criminal charges against an ICE officer who allegedly shot a Venezuelan immigrant in north Minneapolis in January, then lied about what happened. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday...
State prosecutors in Minnesota have filed criminal charges against an ICE officer who allegedly shot a Venezuelan immigrant in north Minneapolis in January, then lied about what happened. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that federal agent Christian Castro will face four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime when he allegedly shot Julio Sosa-Celis through a door. Federal authorities have refused to cooperate with the investigation, as well as separate probes into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Emilia González Avalos, executive director of the Minnesota-based social justice organization Unidos MN, welcomes the charges as a victory for civil society and the rule of law. “That is what democracy looks like. It looks like separation of powers and getting material consequences [for] wrongdoing,” she says. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
“Ask E. Jean” Film Profiles the Woman Who Twice Sued Trump & Won, for Sexual Assault & Defamation
President Donald Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to toss two verdicts against him resulting from civil litigation brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. In 2019, the famous advice columnist published a memoir describing an encounter in the ...
President Donald Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to toss two verdicts against him resulting from civil litigation brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. In 2019, the famous advice columnist published a memoir describing an encounter in the 1990s when she says Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store. When Trump denied the account, Carroll sued him and won $5 million in damages, with a unanimous New York jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. After Trump made disparaging remarks about Carroll, she sued him again and won a second defamation judgment for $83.3 million. Federal courts have upheld both verdicts, but now Trump’s attorneys are asking the Supreme Court to overturn them, asserting he has “absolute immunity” as president. Carroll’s life and her legal fight against Trump are the focus of a new documentary, Ask E. Jean, by award-winning filmmaker Ivy Meeropol. “This is an incredible opportunity for audiences to see what really goes on when a woman brings a case like this, especially against a powerful man,” Meeropol says. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Two teenage gunmen in California fatally shot three people on Monday at the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in the city. Among the dead was a security guard — Amin Abdullah, a father of eight — whom police credit with preventin...
Two teenage gunmen in California fatally shot three people on Monday at the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in the city. Among the dead was a security guard — Amin Abdullah, a father of eight — whom police credit with preventing more casualties. The 17- and 19-year-old suspects were found dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car near the scene. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime. The Council on American-Islamic Relations noted the attack comes as anti-Muslim bias complaints reached their highest level since they began tracking them in 1996, with 8,683 complaints filed nationwide. “This is a mosque that has opened its doors to the community,” says Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, co-founder of the Muslim rights and advocacy group MPower Change. “This is the epitome of a mosque that shows our true values as Muslims, in community and in solidarity. So, it’s just devastating, and no house of worship should have to ever experience this.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Trump Says He Called Off “A Very Major Attack Tomorrow” to Give Iran Negotiations More Time, U.S. Imposes Entry Ban on Travelers from DRC, Uganda and South Sudan as Ebola Deaths Top 130, World Leaders Condemn Israel’s Abduction of Activists from Gaza-Bound Aid Flotilla, Teenage Attackers Kill 3 at San Diego Islamic Center in Suspected Hate Crime, Charges Filed Against ICE Officer Who Shot a Venezuelan Immigrant in Minneapolis, Report: 100,000 Children in U.S. Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Crackdown, DOJ Announces $1.776B Fund to Compensate Trump Allies, EPA Proposes to Kill Drinking Water Limits for Four Forever Chemicals, Long Island Rail Road Strike Ends After MTA and Unions Reach Tentative Agreement, NYC Mayor Mamdani Announces City’s First Municipally Owned Grocery Store in the Bronx
Trump Says He Called Off "A Very Major Attack Tomorrow" to Give Iran Negotiations More Time U.S. Imposes Entry Ban on Travelers from DRC, Uganda and South Sudan as Ebola Deaths Top 130 World Leaders Condemn Israel's Abduction of Activists from Gaza-Bound Aid Flotilla Teenage Attackers Kill 3 at San Diego Islamic Center in Suspected Hate Crime Charges Filed Against ICE Officer Who Shot a Venezuelan Immigrant in Minneapolis Report: 100,000 Children in U.S. Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Crackdown DOJ Announces $1.776B Fund to Compensate Trump Allies EPA Proposes to Kill Drinking Water Limits for Four Forever Chemicals Long Island Rail Road Strike Ends After MTA and Unions Reach Tentative Agreement NYC Mayor Mamdani Announces City's First Municipally Owned Grocery Store in the Bronx This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Tuesday, May 19, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It.
The post This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It. appeared first on ProPublica.
Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica At the beginning of his three-year federal prison sentence for felony tax evasion, Roger Shoffstall lost his telephone privileges when a guard caught him running his small Alaska phone company from behind bars. He’s lost a lot of privileges over the years. Shoffstall, 75, can’t serve on a federal jury. Unlike most Alaskans, he doesn’t receive an annual Permanent Fund dividend check. And he is not allowed to own a gun. One thing never changes, however: Each year, the federal government sends his company, Summit Telephone, more than $1 million. The money comes from a special government subsidy program that Congress created to bring fast, affordable phone and internet service to hard-to-reach places. You help pay for it. Pull up your latest phone bill and look for a line labeled “Universal Service Fund.” Some phone companies list it as a “Universal Connectivity Charge” or fold it into a “Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee.” It’s all the same thing: a surcharge added to the monthly bill of phone customers throughout the United States. The federal government and phone companies don’t call it a tax — but it acts like one. Carriers must currently contribute 37 cents of every dollar of their interstate and international phone revenues to the fund. In Alaska, where many communities can only be reached by plane or boat, the Federal Communications Commission has given telecommunications companies $4.6 billion in these subsidies since 2016. That’s more than $600 per Alaskan per year. More per resident than in any other state. Yet after all that spending, Alaska still ranks near the bottom for access to the very land-based, high-speed internet service the money was meant to deliver. Some communities have yet to be wired at all. In others, fiber-optic cables or microwave towers offer internet with speeds that were recently clocked, statewide, as the slowest in the country. Even with the subsidies, the service comes at a steep price to customers: often hundreds of dollars a month for internet one-tenth what the FCC considers broadband quality. The federal program has kept money flowing to companies like Shoffstall’s whose operators have troubled pasts. It also gives money to companies like Shoffstall’s regardless of how many people use their services. And fewer and fewer Alaskans have done so since low-earth satellites from Starlink entered the market at better prices. (Satellite internet doesn’t qualify for the subsidy but costs about $90 to $130 per month for download speeds up to 280 megabits per second in the same service area as Summit Telephone. According to Summit’s website, its fastest internet plan in the same region maxes out at 25 Mbps and costs $135 a month.) We’re Investigating Alaska Internet Companies. We Need Your Help. Alaskans pay the most for phone and internet but get the slowest service. Please fill out our quick survey to share how much it costs you to get online and what you think of the service. Share Your Experience All of these excesses appear to fall within the program’s rules or the FCC’s discretion. A telecom on the Aleutian island of Adak receives more than $350,000 a year to provide phone and low-speed internet services to 306 buildings, according to FCC records, even though the state Department of Labor says the island is home to fewer than 80 people. One business owner said everyone he knows on the island has moved on to Starlink anyway. GCI, the state’s largest telecom and its largest subsidy recipient, got $466 million just two years after its settlement with the federal government for alleged fraud related to the same subsidy program. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.) Shoffstall and his attorney did not respond to repeated interview requests or answer detailed questions sent by email. On Thursday, Shoffstall sent two documents to the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asserting that he is a sovereign citizen of the United States, an ideology that the FBI has described as “those who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.” The FBI has categorized the extremist version of this movement as “domestic terrorism.” Larry Mayes, the owner of Adak Eagle Enterprises, the company that receives the subsidy to provide internet on Adak, declined to answer questions about the funding. “You’ll have to talk to the FCC about that,” he said, hanging up the phone. In a written response to questions, GCI said it and other Alaska telecoms depend heavily on the subsidies to provide services across the state. “Before and after the settlement, GCI continued to work with the FCC and customers to provide high-quality communications services in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” the GCI statement said. “The settlement did not change Alaskans’ growing demand for these services, GCI’s willingness to provide them, or the criticality of USF funding to the sustainability of those services.” The FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency is weighing the future of the program and recently circulated a proposal to overhaul or potentially sunset elements of the subsidy that funds companies like Summit. Alaska telecom lobbyists and executives said that the state provides some of the most challenging geography to serve in the United States, and that they have made great progress in bringing internet access to Alaska. Christine O’Connor, executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, said the subsidies have improved access and lowered costs for rural Alaskans. “There is simply no way that rural Alaskan communities could be connected with Anchorage or with the rest of the United States and the world” if consumers living in rural Alaska communities had to pay the full cost, she wrote in a statement to the Daily News and ProPublica. But Daniel Lyons, a former attorney whose law firm represented Verizon and AT&T and who now teaches internet law at Boston College Law School, said the subsidy program is broken. The fundamental problem: No one has ever rigorously tested whether it works. “It’s not proven how successful it is,” said Lyons, who specializes in telecommunications and internet law, “because the FCC is not very good at auditing its program.” In Shoffstall’s case, the FCC pays his company what works out to about $800 per month per customer. Lyons has advocated scrapping this approach and sending the subsidy directly to consumers instead, letting them choose which provider gets their money. In Alaska, that might mean Starlink, though some new users say they are being charged a “high demand” fee of $1,500 to sign up, or its future satellite competitors like Amazon Leo. “If the goal is to make sure everybody gets online,” Lyons said, “you try to find the families that can’t afford service at market rates and you give subsidies to them directly.” Money for Homes With No Internet Alaska’s outsized share of the subsidy traces back to a man memorialized with a life-sized bronze statue in the Anchorage airport. Sen. Ted Stevens — “Uncle Ted” — spent 40 years delivering federal money to Alaska and was nearing the height of his power in 1996 when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, creating the modern Universal Service Fund. It was before smartphones or Netflix. Most homes in America had no internet, and by the late 1990s “high-speed” service meant 200 kilobits per second — faster than dial-up modems but too slow to play high-definition video. Today, the FCC defines broadband, which is just another way of saying high-speed internet, as 100 Mbps. That’s 500 times faster than in the ’90s. As chair of the committee that controlled the FCC’s budget, Stevens ensured Alaska telecoms received special treatment, according to Carol Mattey, a former FCC official who oversaw efforts to reform the subsidy. “It would be suicidal to do something to make the head of the Appropriations Committee angry at you,” said Mattey, who served as deputy chief of the commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau. Stevens lost reelection in 2008 while under a corruption indictment that was later dropped. He died two years later in a plane crash on a trip from a private lodge owned by GCI, the Alaska telecom giant. GCI’s current president and chief operating officer, Gregory Chapados, is Stevens’ former chief of staff. A GCI spokesperson wrote that while Stevens chaired the Appropriations Committee, he did not at the time chair the Senate Commerce Committee, which drafted the Telecommunications Act and oversees the subsidy program. Chapados, who served as chief of staff for Stevens from 1986 to 1992, was not involved in developing the Telecommunications Act, the company said. The company said it “maintains constructive working relationships with all members of our delegation to advocate on behalf of our customers and all other Alaskans.” Nationally, the subsidy program allows payments to any company that the FCC or state regulators have designated as an “eligible telecommunications carrier.” How much they get depends on whether they want to provide internet to village schools, health care clinics or simply remote communities. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="841" width="527" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?w=527" alt="A man with gray hair and glasses wearing a tie and U.S. flag lapel pin gestures with his hand toward the camera. An out-of-focus U.S. flag can be seen behind him." class="wp-image-78740" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg 1879w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=188,300 188w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=768,1226 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=641,1024 641w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=962,1536 962w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=1283,2048 1283w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=863,1378 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=422,674 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=552,881 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=558,891 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=527,841 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=752,1201 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=1149,1834 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=1002,1600 1002w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=400,639 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=800,1277 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=1200,1916 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP080919071847.jpg?resize=1600,2555 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 527px) 100vw, 527px" /> Sen. Ted Stevens in 2008 Al Grillo/AP In its statement to ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News, GCI said, “There are no provisions in the Telecom Act extending special treatment for Alaska.” But the state is treated differently in practice. In 2016, the FCC created a program called the Alaska Plan specifically for carriers here, allowing them to negotiate their own performance targets rather than being subject to the same cost models applied elsewhere. Alaska’s geography made it especially difficult for the agency to estimate the cost of serving customers in the state, Mattey said. The FCC assumed the companies would only set goals that they would be able to achieve. They tried to adjust the national formula for distributing money to account for this factor, Mattey said, but Alaska telecoms kept pushing back and FCC officials gave up. “We tried so hard not to treat Alaska differently because our goal was to create defined deployment obligations for all companies, and we failed,” she said of the 2016 reforms. “The political pressure was too strong.” Summit has received $12 million over the past decade by promising to deliver internet to 337 locations across a collection of woodsy, roadside neighborhoods just north of Fairbanks. Filings by Summit report dozens of new connections in some years, a combined total of 271 as of 2025. But according to the FCC’s interactive map of all locations U.S. telecoms report actually serving with internet, the number of customers using Shoffstall’s service is far smaller. In a phone interview, the company’s acting general manager, James Perry, said that Summit has about 120 internet customers and 160 in total. Mattey said the rules of the program say nothing about making sure the lines that a subsidy recipient builds actually get used — only that they get built. Companies that fall behind on building out their network can have their subsidies reduced. But they are allowed to go on collecting cash long after the technology they use has become outdated, customers have moved on to cheaper and faster alternatives or their community has become a ghost town. “They’re playing by the rules, so to speak,” Mattey said. “It’s a flat amount of money the government has decided they are entitled to.” Off the Grid Shoffstall’s penchant for setting his own rules first landed him in trouble in 1996. State prosecutors charged him with a misdemeanor when he mailed documents whose tone and language mimicked court orders to an Alaska bank, demanding money. The trial ended without a verdict when Shoffstall agreed to change his plea from not guilty to no contest. He received a suspended imposition of sentence, a judgment entering a conviction with no jail time, contingent upon completing probation. Over the decades since, he has continued to file paperwork in state court, federal court and with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources claiming to be a sovereign citizen not bound by the same court systems as other Alaskans. An electrical technician by trade, Shoffstall bought the business for about $675,000 in 2000. Shoffstall’s customers live mainly in the hillsides north of Fairbanks. Some right off the highway. Some at the end of snowy roads littered with warning signs like: “You are no longer a trespasser. You are a target.” People moved here when the famously independent and rough-edged city of Fairbanks felt too urbane. They moved here to get off the grid. Not on it. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="862" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?w=1149" alt="Coniferous trees surround a lone wooden cabin sitting on a snowy hill with snow covering the roof. In the background is a blue sky with white clouds." class="wp-image-78741" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg 5712w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=300,225 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=768,576 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=1024,768 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=1536,1152 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=2048,1536 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=863,647 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=422,317 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=552,414 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=558,419 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=527,395 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=752,564 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=1149,862 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=2000,1500 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=400,300 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=800,600 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=1200,900 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6396-toned.jpg?resize=1600,1200 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Many of Summit Telephone’s customers live in rural, remote places in Alaska, including Cleary Summit, north of Fairbanks. Kyle Hopkins/ADN Among Shoffstall’s customers was a Sunday school teacher who’d arrived in Alaska in 1981, answering phones for a small insurance company. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, still the days of landlines and dial tones, Lois Sannes found herself frustrated with a surcharge added to calls in the Summit service area. She began complaining to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. She wrote so many letters to the governor that someone wrote back. Sannes met with an attorney, who she said told her the IRS had launched a criminal investigation into Shoffstall. Separately, Shoffstall’s company was under scrutiny from the regulatory commission itself. When Summit sought approval for the rates it charged other telecom companies to use its phone lines, the commission allowed them to look at Summit’s unredacted financial reports. A consultant hired by the rival telecom companies testified to the commission that Summit’s spending appeared unusually high, poorly documented and in some cases tied to transactions between the company and Shoffstall himself. Roughly 95% of the company’s revenue around this period came not from phone customers but the federal subsidy program and payments redistributed through the telecom industry itself, according to audited financial statements Summit filed with state regulators. The dispute before the regulatory commission ended when Summit and its competitors agreed to a settlement. The commission issued no findings on whether there were indeed problems with Summit’s books, as the consultant’s report had outlined. But a new legal issue arose for Shoffstall — this time from the IRS, whose investigation Sannes had heard about. On Sept. 15, 2009, a federal grand jury indicted Shoffstall on allegations of felony tax evasion. The charges said he “willfully evaded the payment of his income taxes” for at least eight years beginning in 1996. Shoffstall’s former accountants testified against him. “I told him that he was going to get nailed, that’s not a question,” certified public accountant Garry Hutchison told the jury. “The only question is whether or not it would bring the company down.” A Fairbanks jury found Shoffstall guilty on Feb. 5, 2010, after a five-day trial. The FCC has the power to cut off subsidies to recipients convicted of fraud and other financial crimes related to the subsidy program. How closely related the crime must be to the subsidy payments is up for interpretation by the agency. On one hand, Shoffstall’s indictment said he used his position running a federally subsidized company to obstruct the IRS investigation. On the other, the conviction was for tax evasion related to money he personally owed the IRS. There is precedent for the FCC closely scrutinizing a subsidy recipient who’s been convicted of evading personal income taxes. The FCC Wireline Competition Bureau directed the Universal Service Fund’s administrator to look into whether Hawaii-based Sandwich Isles Communications misused its subsidy dollars. The action followed owner Albert Hee’s conviction on federal tax crimes in 2015. The FCC fined Sandwich Isles and Hee $49.6 million and ordered the company to repay $27 million in what it described as improperly received subsidies. Hee’s attorneys contested the charges, arguing that he had concealed nothing and that the government mistook accounting errors for criminal intent. A jury disagreed. It’s not clear whether the FCC investigated Shoffstall after his conviction; the agency did not respond to questions about the case. But records show that Shoffstall’s company steadily continued to receive Universal Service Fund subsidies, even while Shoffstall was in prison. Two months after his release in January 2013, Summit reported collecting $1.1 million in annual subsidies. When Shoffstall’s probation officer told a federal judge that Shoffstall was ignoring his probation requirements, he was arrested on Dec. 9, 2013, and went back to prison for several months. His company received $859,393 in Universal Service Fund subsidies during that time. In the years that followed, the subsidies to Summit grew. FCC data shows Summit in 2016 received one of the highest levels of federal subsidies per customer in the country. As of that year, Shoffstall’s company paid him an annual salary of up to $121,000 and paid an annual dividend of up to $155,000 to a holding company for which he was the sole shareholder. His company stopped publicly disclosing that information after 2016, as the Regulatory Commission of Alaska stopped requiring detailed annual reporting, leaving far less financial information available to the public. Sannes, the former Summit customer who once pressured state regulators to take a closer look at the company, now lives in Wisconsin. Asked if she was surprised to learn that the company’s subsidies not only continue today, but have increased to $1.5 million a year, Sannes said she had assumed his criminal conviction alone would have been enough to cut off the money. “I’m horrified,” she said. Unplugged Summit Telephone is named for a mountaintop, Cleary Summit, outside Fairbanks. Sled dogs can be heard howling from their plywood houses, and every so often a semitruck barrels down the highway, swirling snow as it hauls gold ore from open-pit mines. In the winter, you might see a rocket launch from a valley a few miles north, from the world’s only rocket launch site operated by a university. The hills are known for world-famous aurora borealis displays, and a collection of Airbnbs and lodges line winding roads. As the subsidies flowed to Summit, Shoffstall continued to create and distribute documents intended to look like court orders. He submitted paperwork in federal court arguing he didn’t have to pay taxes — in one 2017 filing accusing the federal government of “high crimes” against him, in another issuing what he called a “summary judgment” against President Donald Trump for “fraud, collusion and conspiracy.” None of this stopped the state’s telecom industry from spotlighting him as a poster child. O’Connor, the executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, cited Summit to state lawmakers in 2018 as an example of a company forced to “muddle along with the obsolete technology” rather than upgrade its network due the burden of state overregulation. Raising the rates to provide upgrades would have required Summit to make its case to regulators that the fee increases were necessary. Asked whether it was an appropriate use of public funds for a company like Summit to receive roughly $10,000 per customer per year in federal subsidies, O’Connor did not directly answer. In a written response, the Alaska Telecom Association said the program “is specifically designed to support building and operating telecommunications networks in high-cost areas” and that participating providers “are subject to FCC program requirements, reporting obligations, and oversight.” Asked whether it stood by its 2018 characterization of Summit, O’Connor said her testimony was focused on the challenges facing smaller providers generally. Shoffstall never upgraded to expand its service. According to the FCC broadband map, Summit’s equipment today remains incapable of delivering internet faster than 25 Mbps — one-fourth the FCC’s current definition of broadband. Meanwhile, the internet marketplace has changed. Some Alaskans no longer need or want the slower subsidized service. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="629" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?w=752" alt="A grid of headshots. Shoffstall’s photo shows him wearing sunglasses, an aqua shirt and gray pants in front of a river, holding a large, reddish-gray fish." class="wp-image-78743" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg 1004w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=300,251 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=768,643 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=863,722 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=422,353 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=552,462 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=558,467 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=527,441 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=752,629 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=400,335 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/shofstall-board-grid-toned.jpg?resize=800,669 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> Members of the Alaska Telecom Association board, including Shoffstall, middle of bottom row. Despite his conviction for personal tax evasion, the association highlighted Shoffstall and Summit in 2018. Screenshot by ProPublica One recent Saturday, 74-year-old Philip Marshall shoveled a waist-high tunnel through the snow to a cabin near the top of the mountain. A wood carver, he wore a red ski cap decorated with the flag of Denmark. Asked about his internet access, he invited a reporter inside and made a pot of black tea. Marshall said his wife, Janet, moved into this cabin before he met her. The construction boom for the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline had raised rents so high within Fairbanks’ city limits during the mid-1970s that she moved here out of town. Like many cabins outside Fairbanks, the home is “dry,” meaning there’s no running water. Old-timers hauled the building itself up the side of the mountain on sleds. In interviews, several of Marshall’s neighbors said they have no complaints about the internet speeds Summit provides. One said she pays Summit $95 a month and the internet is fine for her needs. Another, who retired after a career working on remote Alaska radar sites, said he uses the service too. But he’s recently added satellite internet. Others who have opted for the low-orbit satellite dishes, which deliver speeds up to 10 times faster than Summit for about the same price, have dropped their Summit plans altogether. One especially clear evening recently, Marshall stood in the snow and counted 18 satellites passing overhead within nine minutes. “Starlink,” he said. The company and corporate parent SpaceX did not respond to questions and do not publicly release the number of users in Alaska. But Ookla, a company that offers tools people can use to test their internet speed, offered a proxy measure: About 1 in 10 Alaskans who tested their home internet speed through Ookla connected via Starlink, compared with roughly 1 in 67 in California. The Marshalls haven’t felt the need to pay for either service. Their cellphones give five-bar, 5G service from a nearby tower. Finishing his tea, Marshall pulled on his jacket to head back outside. Still have to shovel a path to the outhouse, he said. In the corner of the room, a plastic box the size and color of a concrete brick sat near the floor. It was for the Summit internet line that public subsidies pay the company roughly $10,000 a year to provide. Unplugged and unused. The post This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Kyle Hopkins.
We’re Investigating Alaska Internet Companies. We Need Your Help.
The post We’re Investigating Alaska Internet Companies. We Need Your Help. appeared first on ProPublica.
Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica We’re investigating Alaska internet companies this year, and we need your help. Alaskans pay higher costs for slower internet speeds than most Americans. The government has spent billions of dollars of public money to try to fix the problem, and we want to know how it’s really going in your community. Please fill out this quick survey to share how much it costs you to get online and what you think of the service. Take our quick survey to help in the reporting. If you know someone in Alaska who is not able to access the internet and wants to share their experience, they can contact reporter Kyle Hopkins at 907-854-8540 (phone or WhatsApp). We will add more options for participation soon — stay tuned! We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We will contact you if we wish to publish any part. The post We’re Investigating Alaska Internet Companies. We Need Your Help. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Shoshana.gordon@propublica.org.
Tuesday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD
Tuesday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4 and was authored by Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4.
Press crackdowns in Gulf spike following Iran war, risk becoming permanent
Washington, D.C., May 6, 2026 — Since the Iran war started late February, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented a crackdown on the press across the Gulf, and tracked unpublicized cases of arrests, intimidation, legal and financial actions against journalists and their media outlets. The escalation represents a significant and underreported threat to press...
Washington, D.C., May 6, 2026 — Since the Iran war started late February, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented a crackdown on the press across the Gulf, and tracked unpublicized cases of arrests, intimidation, legal and financial actions against journalists and their media outlets. The escalation represents a significant and underreported threat to press freedom in the Gulf countries where media freedoms were already severely curtailed. Many of these incidents have not been disclosed publicly, as journalists and media outlets fear further retaliation from authorities. CPJ warns that this points to a widening crackdown that is reshaping how, and whether, the Iran war is reported. While limitations on reporting are often justifiable during active conflict to protect troop movements or enable effective military operations, the current restrictions go well beyond genuine national security concerns. Rather than focusing on tactical secrecy, these new measures utilize vague language to criminalize reporting that undermines “state narratives” or “public morale.” By targeting journalists not for exposing secrets, but for sharing verified, publicly available information, authorities are bypassing traditional security needs to enforce ideological conformity. “What is publicly known is only the tip of the iceberg,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Far beyond the cases we can publicly confirm, a growing number of attacks go unreported—silenced by fear of further reprisals. This climate of intimidation is forcing journalists into self-censorship, choking the flow of truth at its source. We cannot allow this to become the norm. Governments must act now to protect press freedom, ensure accountability, and create conditions where journalists can report without fear.” At the heart of this crisis is a chilling historical precedent: the concern that these emergency “war-time” restrictions will not be dismantled when the fighting stops. History shows that laws enacted during crises— such as Bahrain’s 2011 State of National Safety, which established a legal architecture of censorship that persisted long after the emergency ended, or Saudi Arabia’s 2014 Counter-Terrorism Law, which expanded the definition of “terrorism” to permanently criminalize peaceful dissent—frequently outlive their original purpose, becoming permanent fixtures used to stifle dissent during “peace-time”. Intersecting patterns of arrests and charges Across Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, authorities have relied on strikingly similar grounds to detain journalists and media workers since the start of the war. These cases consistently involve punishing individuals and news organizations for routine journalistic activity such as photographing, filming, or publishing information about events occurring in public view. “The war exposed the already existing censorship inside the Gulf, but Gulf monarchies also took advantage of it to expand their repression,” Abdullah Alaoudh, Senior Policy Advisor for Gulf Issues at the American Committee for Middle East Rights, told CPJ. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" height="683" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?w=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-588153" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg 3868w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=2048,1366 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=570,380 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=652,435 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=760,507 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=1140,760 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=2000,1334 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-02-28T180432Z_1513091388_RC26VJAYBDY4_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-BAHRAIN.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Smoke rises from a burning building hit by an Iranian drone strike, after Israel and the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, in Seef district, Manama, Bahrain, February 28, 2026. (Photo: Reuters/Hamad I Mohammed) The charges brought in these cases also show a clear pattern. Authorities have repeatedly used broadly and vaguely defined legal provisions such as “spreading false information,” “harming national security,” “misusing communication devices,” and violations of cybercrime or anti-rumor laws. In many instances, these charges are applied simultaneously, giving prosecutors wide discretionary power over cases that often involve verified or publicly accessible material. In several documented cases, journalists were detained without immediate access to legal counsel, or contact with their families, or held for extended periods before formal charges were clarified. Others were released under restrictive conditions, including suspended sentences or obligations tied to “good conduct,” leaving them exposed to renewed prosecution. Regional similarities of enforcement practices Gulf countries are sensitive to uncontrolled information in part because their economic models rely on an image of absolute stability to attract foreign investment and tourism. For hubs like Dubai or Doha, footage of missile interceptions threatens this “safety brand.” While critics argue these states use the war as a pretext to expand already restrictive cybercrime laws, there is a tangible military logic: in the age of precision strikes, viral videos act as real-time Battle Damage Assessments (BDA) that help adversaries recalibrate their targeting. This approach is not unique; nations from Israel to Ukraine maintain strict censorship and operational security (OPSEC) rules, arguing that protecting infrastructure and preventing mass panic must temporarily supersede independent reporting during active hostilities International law provides a strict framework for such restrictions. Under Article 19(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), any limitation on press freedom must be “necessary and proportionate” to achieve a specific security goal. In other jurisdictions, this balance is managed through far more targeted mechanisms than the broad crackdowns currently seen in the Gulf. For instance, in the United States, the Supreme Court’s “Pentagon Papers” ruling established that the government must prove publication would cause “direct, immediate, and irreparable damage” to justify stopping the press. Human rights bodies like the Council of Europe emphasize that such rules must not be used as a pretext for the “chilling” of legitimate public debate or the detention of journalists for sharing verified information. “What is publicly known is only the tip of the iceberg. Far beyond the cases we can publicly confirm, a growing number of attacks go unreported—silenced by fear of further reprisals. This climate of intimidation is forcing journalists into self-censorship, choking the flow of truth at its source. We cannot allow this to become the norm. Governments must act now to protect press freedom, ensure accountability, and create conditions where journalists can report without fear.” – CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah Kuwait Restrictions tightened rapidly following the start of the Iran war as Kuwait, a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA), like many Gulf neighbors, sought to limit reporting on the country’s involvement in the war in the name of national security. Kuwait’s interior ministry said ​on February 28 the public should refrain from filming missile interceptions, sharing such footage on social media, and filming security personnel at work, ​urging people to rely on official sources. However, its stance rapidly hardened. Two weeks later, the government enacted Decree-Law No. 13, imposing penalties of up to 10 years in prison for disseminating information about military entities deemed capable of “undermining public confidence.” Later that month, it established a specialized court for state security and terrorism-related crimes to “resolve cases with high speed.” Kuwaiti authorities claimed such courts were “necessary due to the extreme danger terrorism poses to national stability and peace.” <img decoding="async" height="576" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?w=1024" alt="Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, an award-winning Kuwaiti-American journalist, was imprisoned in Kuwait for 52 days. " class="wp-image-580313" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png 1200w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=300,169 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=768,432 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=1024,576 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=570,321 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=652,367 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=760,428 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=1140,641 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ahmed-Shihab-Eldin-screenshot-041326.png?resize=367,206 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, an award-winning Kuwaiti-American journalist, was imprisoned in Kuwait for 52 days. (Screenshot: Legendiary/YouTube) The most high profile case under the new laws is that of award-winning U.S.-Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, who was held for more than 52 days while visiting family in Kuwait. Prior to his arrest, the journalist shared a geolocated video, verified by CNN, showing a U.S. fighter jet crash near a U.S. air base in Kuwait; but had not filmed or undertaken reporting himself during his. Shihab-Eldin was later acquitted on a charge of spreading false information, but prosecutors have not pronounced on other charges, including harming national security – which could carry a sentence up to 10 years in prison. Following his release, authorities revoked his citizenship. “I am free—but many remain behind bars,” Shihab-Eldin said after his release. The case highlights the expanding use of legal tools that extend beyond criminal prosecution to include long-term punitive measures such as denationalization. Since October 2024, authorities have increasingly used citizenship revocation to silence dissent. More than 71,000 people — or about 4.6% of the country’s official population of more than 1.5 million — have lost their citizenship as of April 2026. While Shihab-Eldin’s revocation was justified under Kuwait’s Nationality Law, which prohibits dual citizenship, Sultan Alamer, an affiliated scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies said “the law has been politicized and weaponized against political dissent.” In addition to the personal toll, for journalists, losing citizenship can also mean losing the right to own or obtaining a media license. In August 2025, authorities revoked the licenses of Al-Sabah newspaper and TV, after stripping Dr. Barakat Hudaiban Al-Rashidi, the editor-in-chief and owner of the outlets, of his citizenship. Further restrictions followed Decree-Law No. 13, including aban on publishing or circulating any details related to state security cases currently under review by the Kuwaiti State Security Court, involving individuals active on social media. A Kuwait policy analyst confirmed to CPJ that Ahmed’s case was among those covered by the ban, which explains why his case — widely reported across major international media outlets — received no coverage from Kuwaiti media. <img decoding="async" height="538" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?w=1024" alt="A video shows a US F-15 jet shot down by friendly fire in Kuwait amid the Iran war" class="wp-image-588101" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png 3402w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=300,158 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=768,403 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=1024,538 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=1536,807 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=2048,1076 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=570,299 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=652,342 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=760,399 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=1140,599 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=2000,1051 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kuwait-jet-screenshot.png?resize=367,193 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> A video shows a US F-15 jet shot down by friendly fire in Kuwait amid the Iran war. (Screenshot: The Mirror/ Youtube) On April 16, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information announced the referral of seven media outlets to the Public Prosecution. The ministry identified “clear violations” involving the publication of inaccurate information and the circulation of unverified news without proper sourcing from official authorities. Restrictions on press and expression in Kuwait had already intensified following the suspension of parliament in 2024 and the expansion of executive powers – a move widely described as the end of the Gulf’s last semi-democratic exception. “Kuwait was not as repressive as it is now,” Mansoor Al-Muhareb, an exiled Kuwaiti blogger, told CPJ. “There was a margin for press freedom. Everything changed after May 2024.” Yitzchak Horowitz, a journalist for the weekly Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) newspaper BeKehila, reported that he was also arrested in Kuwait on suspicion of espionage after photographing U.S. warships off the Gulf Coast. He said he was questioned about his identity, ties to Israel, and whether he had a military background for several hours before being released. Khalid Ibrahim, Executive Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, told CPJ that tens of people have been arrested in Kuwait since the war began in cases related to freedom of expression. “It has become a kingdom of fear and censorship,” he said. Bahrain In Bahrain—a key UK ally that recently saw Rashid Al Hamer of the Bahrain Journalists Association elected as an adviser to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Executive Committee—media freedom faces a deepening chill. A court sentenced photojournalist Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel to 10 years in prison after he filmed and shared footage of a residential area following an apparent strike. Authorities later imposed broad restrictions on photographing or publishing military-related content, though local press groups said the rules were not clearly defined at the time of his arrest. On March 4, officials banned the filming, photographing, or sharing of any military operations, movements, or sites, as well as related content on social media, citing national security concerns. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="512" height="290" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unnamed-22.png?w=512" alt="Bahraini photographer Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel was sentenced to ten years in prison." class="wp-image-585340" style="width:864px;height:auto" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unnamed-22.png 512w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unnamed-22.png?resize=300,170 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unnamed-22.png?resize=367,208 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px" /> Bahraini photographer Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel was sentenced to ten years in prison. (Screenshot: abdulhadiaman9392/YouTube) “Baqer’s verdict is a complete mockery of Bahrain’s justice system,” Sayed Alwadaei, director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, told CPJ. “His so-called ‘crime’ was filming a residential area after it was bombed while he was at the scene and sharing the footage on social media.” Bahraini blogger and journalist Khalil Buhazaa was arrested on May 3 without official explanation, according to local rights and press freedom groups. Reports said he was questioned over his blog and X posts, including one that said “laws and institutions are in freefall.” CPJ could not independently confirm the reasons for his arrest or the charges he is accused of. Similarly to Kuwait, Bahrain has also revoked the citizenship of 69 people over ​what it described as sympathy with Iran’s hostile acts and ‌collaboration with foreign entities, the kingdom’s interior ministry said in a statement. The ministry said it included accused individuals and their family members, and that they ​were all of non-Bahraini origin. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" height="683" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?w=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-589370" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg 5000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=570,380 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=652,435 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=760,507 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=1140,760 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-12T080914Z_820705659_RC2V2KAX607E_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-BAHRAIN-AFTERMATH.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Smoke rises over Bahrain’s capital, Manama, following a reported Iranian drone strike on the fuel storage facility of Bahrain International Airport on March 12, 2026. (Photo: Reuters/Stringer) Prior to this war, Bahrain’s media environment was characterized by a systematic dismantling of independent journalism following the 2011 pro-democracy protests. While the government has touted reforms like the removal of direct imprisonment for journalists under specific press laws, critics argue this is “misleading.” Journalists were frequently prosecuted under the Penal Code or Anti-Terrorism Law, which allow for harsh prison sentences for crimes such as “inciting sedition” or “spreading false news.” CPJ’s data shows that at least 5 journalists remain behind bars in Bahrain, with at least one of them, journalist Abduljalil Al-Singace, serving a life sentence. United Arab Emirates (UAE) In the UAE, a strong U.S ally, authorities detained at least 109 individuals for allegedly filming or sharing war-related content, according to the United Nations, with dozens referred to expedited trials. The UAE, like other Gulf countries, warned citizens and residents against photographing, filming, publishing, or circulating images and videos of the Iranian attacks shortly after the war began, saying it could result in up to one year of imprisonment and financial fines. The government has also issued decrees blocking several media accounts, including Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya, independent outlet Noon Post, Saudi journalist Malek Al-Rougui, Algerian journalist Ahmed Hafsi, and Egyptian journalist Osama Gaweesh, based in the United Kingdom, accusing them of spreading false information and insulting the state. CPJ is aware of additional unreported incidents involving raids and heavy fines, though many news organizations remain unwilling to go on the record for fear of further retaliation. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" height="676" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?w=1024" alt="Smoke rising from an area near the Dubai International Airport is seen through the windshield of a vehicle, after a drone attack hit a fuel tank, according to Dubai authorities, on March 16, 2026." class="wp-image-587999" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg 3902w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=300,198 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=768,507 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=1024,676 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=1536,1014 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=2048,1353 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=570,376 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=652,431 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=760,502 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=1140,753 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=2000,1321 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-16T070048Z_750883969_RC2F5KA7NMM6_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES-INCIDENT.jpg?resize=367,242 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Smoke rising from an area near the Dubai International Airport is seen through the windshield of a vehicle, after a drone attack hit a fuel tank, according to Dubai authorities, on March 16, 2026. (Photo: Reuters/Stringer) “I am shocked by the accusations of publishing false news and insulting the state, as if a journalist’s role were simply to follow the UAE’s official narrative rather than comment on its policies,” Gaweesh told CPJ. “What I do on my social media platforms is daily journalistic work — reporting and commenting on news based on published sources.” Dr. Mira Al Hussein, Gulf expert at the Alwaleed Centre, University of Edinburgh, said the UAE’s blocking of social media accounts was exceptional among Gulf countries: “No other country in the Gulf has adopted this measure,” she told CPJ. “The UAE government is not trying to control the narrative — it is trying to monopolize it.” On March 17, authorities in Fujairah City arrested an Arab photojournalist working for a London-based media outlet after he filmed in restricted areas without the required permits, according to Khaleej Times. Later, Semafor also reported that photojournalists were arrested in the UAE — and in response, some global newswires stopped publishing original images showing damage from Iranian missile and drone strikes on the country. The UAE’s 2026 crackdown on war-related content is rooted in a decade-long legislative effort to centralize control over digital and traditional media. This foundation was solidified by Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021, which significantly expanded the state’s power to penalize the “spreading of false news” and content deemed harmful to public interest. This was further tightened by Federal Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023, which overhauled the nation’s media regulations to grant the UAE Media Council sweeping authority over digital influencers and international outlets. These laws have been frequently used to target independent voices; for instance, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that in 2024, a mass trial resulted in life sentences for activists, many of whom were already imprisoned for their online commentary. Furthermore, reports from Freedom House andAmnesty International have long classified the UAE as a restrictive environment for press freedom, noting that the infrastructure for the 2026 “monopolization of the narrative” was built through years of blocking critical websites and detaining journalists who strayed from the official line. “Governments in the region are using the cover of war to settle old scores with independent voices and tighten their grip on the narrative,” said CPJ’s Qudah. “These measures create a chilling effect that extends far beyond the battlefield.” Qatar Like other countries in the region, another MNNA ally, Qatar’s interior ministry warned against photographing and sharing content related to the conflict. In March, Qatari authoritiesarrested more than 300 individuals linked to content sharing and alleged rumor dissemination. Palestinian columnist and media commentator Saeed Ziad was arrested on March 15, reportedly in connection with tweets and commentary addressing the war. He was released on March 20. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" height="683" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?w=1024" alt="Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following United States and Israel strikes on Iran, as seen from Doha, Qatar, March 1, 2026." class="wp-image-589422" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg 5500w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=570,380 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=652,435 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=760,507 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=1140,760 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-01T082509Z_445718270_RC2KVJAAMMHV_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-GULF-QATAR.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Smoke rises after reported Iranian missile attacks, following United States and Israel strikes on Iran, as seen from Doha, Qatar, March 1, 2026. (Photo: Reuters/Mohammed Salem) Journalists have told CPJ that the environment has resulted in increased self-censorship, particularly among those covering politically sensitive issues. An international journalist based in Qatar told CPJ, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, that the hostile environment that has emerged during the war—directed primarily at media commentators whose views do not align with the Qatari government—has pressured several journalists and columnists to refrain from reporting or using their social media accounts. Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia—another MNNA ally of the U.S that recently achieved a milestone in media diplomacy by securing its first-ever seat on the IFJ Executive Committee through Adhwan Al-Ahmari— has similarly issued warnings under its cybercrime framework, reinforcing a region-wide approach in which digital reporting on the conflict is treated as a potential security violation, reinforcing a regional pattern in which coverage of politically sensitive issues is treated as a national security offense. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" height="574" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?w=1024" alt="A US radar aircraft was destroyed in an Iranian strike on a Saudi Arabian airbase on March 27, 2026." class="wp-image-587948" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png 2020w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=300,168 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=768,430 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=1024,574 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=1536,861 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=570,319 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=652,365 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=760,426 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=1140,639 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=2000,1121 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-10.38.41-AM-1.png?resize=367,206 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> A US radar aircraft was destroyed in an Iranian strike on a Saudi Arabian airbase on March 27, 2026. (Screenshot: CNN/ YouTube) Despite this expanding role in global media institutions, Saudi Arabia continues to reinforce an approach where digital reporting on conflict is treated as a potential security violation. Saudi Arabia remains one of the world’s most repressive environments for the press. CPJ documented at least 10 journalists behind bars on December 1, 2024, making the kingdom the world’s 10th worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s annual prison census that year. Saudi authorities have continued to prosecute journalists, writers, and online commentators on vague charges including terrorism, treason, and undermining national unity. In June 2025, Saudi authorities announced the execution of prominent columnist Turki al-Jasser, who had been detained since 2018 and convicted on charges including treason, foreign collaboration, and endangering national security. Press freedom and human rights groups condemned the execution as part of the kingdom’s intensifying crackdown on dissent. Saudi authorities routinely target journalists, human rights defenders, and political critics for peaceful expression, including social media activity, often imposing lengthy prison sentences after trials widely criticized for lacking due process. The 2018 killing of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul remains one of the most notorious attacks on the press in recent history. Since his murder, CPJ has continued to advocate for transparency, accountability, and justice in the case. CPJ has also documented the deadly impact of U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, including at least seven journalists killed in the airstrikes. The pursuit of justice is far from over and we will hold the Saudi government accountable for its press freedom violations. Underreporting and information constraints CPJ notes that the full scope of arrests and intimidation is likely broader than what has been publicly documented. Journalists across the region report withholding material, limiting coverage, or avoiding sensitive topics due to fear of arrest or legal action. In some cases, international media organizations have restricted the publication of imagery from the Gulf following the detention of photographers. This has contributed to a narrowing of independently verified reporting from the region. Concerns have also been raised about detention conditions in national security cases, including allegations of ill-treatment and restricted access to legal counsel in similar cases in parts of the Gulf, particularly where detainees are held incommunicado. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" height="683" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?w=1024" alt="A view of the Dubai skyline, including the Burj Khalifa, amid the Iran war." class="wp-image-588050" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg 5472w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=570,380 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=652,435 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=760,507 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=1140,760 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03-06T202555Z_2129237965_RC21ZJANCXNS_RTRMADP_3_IRAN-CRISIS-EMIRATES.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> A view of the Dubai skyline, including the Burj Khalifa, amid the Iran war. (Photo: Reuters/Amr Alfiky) Kuwait continues to face criticism over allegations of torture and ill-treatment in detention. In a 2024 report, the UN Committee Against Torture voiced concern over what it described as consistent reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, a 126% overcrowding rate, and the use of shackling and food deprivation as disciplinary measures. In the same year, a U.S Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor report said “the constitution and law [in Kuwait] prohibited torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, but media and NGOs reported torture and mistreatment by police and security forces.” According to a 2023 HRW report, Saudi Arabia ”sentenced people to decades-long prison terms or death sentences for social media posts. Abusive practices in detention centers, including torture and ill-treatment, prolonged arbitrary detention, and asset confiscation without any clear legal process, remain pervasive.” UN experts and other NGOs have raised alarms over the use of enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, and torture against those held on national security or counter-terrorism charges in UAE. Similarly in Bahrain, human rights groups, such as the GCHR and HRW, have documented instances where detainees were subjected torture and denial of medical care. Historical parallels: wartime controls on the press The use of restrictions in war is not unique to the Gulf. However, journalists and analysts warn that the current slew of curtailments in Gulf countries represent a significant tightening that risks further stifling what little press freedom existed in the Gulf. “The Gulf has never had an independent press — outlets must ensure they are permitted to publish on certain issues before doing so,” said Al Hussein of the Alwaleed Centre. “What we are witnessing now is not only an attempt to control the current narrative around the war, but to shape the historical record itself — ensuring that it does not contradict the official state narrative.” The restrictions now emerging across the Gulf reflect patterns seen in earlier regional conflicts, where governments used wartime conditions to impose lasting constraints on journalism. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" height="685" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?w=1024" alt="In 1991, Kuwaiti exiles read the latest news on the fate of their Iraqi-occupied homeland in a local English newspaper in Dubai." class="wp-image-589319" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg 4500w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=300,201 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=768,514 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=1024,685 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=1536,1027 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=2048,1369 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=570,381 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=652,436 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=760,508 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=1140,762 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=2000,1337 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2025-01-06T223358Z_1789146229_RC20CY30AECB_RTRMADP_3_REUTERS-ARCHIVE.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Kuwaiti exiles in 1991 read news on the fate of their Iraqi-occupied homeland in a local English newspaper in Dubai. (Photo: Reuters/Greg Bos) During the Gulf War in 1990, coalition forces implemented a tightly controlled media system that limited independent reporting. Journalists were required to operate within a “pool” structure, granting access only to selected reporters whose coverage was subject to military oversight before publication. Movement in conflict zones was heavily restricted, and coverage of casualties and damage was tightly managed. These measures significantly reduced the ability of journalists to independently verify events on the ground. Between 1991 and 2003, Gulf countries utilized security laws—later codified as cybercrime laws —to arrest hundreds of people, including journalists, for simply filming missile interceptions or strike locations. The 2026 war echoes the 1990s justification of “operational security”. Today, authorities justify these measures as preventing “rumors” and “panic” that could aid enemy intelligence. Although the military press pool system ended after the Gulf War, there is no evidence in credible reporting that broader information-control laws or restrictive media practices in Gulf states were ended afterward, as such frameworks continued and were later expanded under national security and cybercrime legislation. Such measures contribute to the normalization of restricting journalistic access, expanding the use of security-based legal frameworks to censor information that goes well beyond the bounds of militarily sensitive information. “The new restrictions on reporting go well beyond temporary wartime measures and instead signal the consolidation of a long-term system for managing and restricting information,” said Qudah. “History shows emergency powers to control information flow during war often extend well beyond the stated emergency and are used to control a vast swathe of content that is not in any way related to the war. What’s happening in the Gulf is failing to grab international attention in part because of the high levels of self-censorship – this needs to change if the trend is to be reversed.” This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Mohamed Mandour.
With a Chance at Freedom, They Faced an Unexpected Obstacle: Their Own Lawyers
The post With a Chance at Freedom, They Faced an Unexpected Obstacle: Their Own Lawyers appeared first on ProPublica.
Milique Wagner spent more than a decade in prison fighting his murder conviction. One obstacle he faced along the way to winning his freedom was opposition from his own lawyer. Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer Milique Wagner always insisted that his 2013 murder conviction was built on an informant’s lie. But Wagner said he couldn’t persuade his trial lawyer to investigate that, even after the informant confessed to the murder and testified that Philadelphia police and prosecutors knew the truth. In 2015, Wagner’s appeal failed, and he faced life in prison. But Wagner had another chance at freedom under a state law that allowed him to get a new court-appointed lawyer to help him challenge his conviction. Court records show that the attorney never spoke with the informant or looked into the detective on the case, who made headlines after being benched for secretly paying a witness. Instead, Wagner’s lawyer urged the judge to shut down his client’s petition, writing in June 2017, “There are no meritorious issues that could be raised.” Wagner would remain in prison another six years before prosecutors acknowledged that police had hidden evidence suggesting that the informant had committed the murder and the detective was corrupt. Although Wagner maintains his innocence, he agreed to a plea deal for third-degree murder that allowed him to leave prison. The opposition Wagner faced from his own lawyer is permitted under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act, the law that allows people in prison to raise newly discovered evidence or argue that their previous lawyer mishandled the case. The state provides a lawyer in these cases, but with a catch: The attorney can argue against the client’s claims and withdraw from the case by filing what’s known as a “no-merit” letter. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="703" width="527" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=527" alt="A man in a red graduation gown and cap holds a diploma up for the camera under a sign that reads, “Graduation 2022.”" class="wp-image-79014" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 2250w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,1024 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1152,1536 1152w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,2048 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,1151 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,563 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,736 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,744 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,703 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,1003 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,1532 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,1600 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,533 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,1067 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,2133 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_2813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,2667 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 527px) 100vw, 527px" /> Wagner received a graduation certificate after completing a carpentry program at the State Correctional Institution Frackville, a state prison about 100 miles north of Philadelphia. Courtesy of Milique Wagner A Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found case after case in which court-appointed attorneys did minimal work to examine their clients’ claims and rejected what later turned out to be legitimate legal issues. The findings reveal that Philadelphia’s post-conviction system repeatedly delayed or denied justice for wrongfully convicted people who then spent years or decades behind bars. The news organizations reviewed 250 of Philadelphia’s reversed convictions and sentences since 2018 in violent felony cases. Wagner was one of at least 50 people whose lawyers said there was no basis to challenge their cases, only for judges to later decide they deserved new trials or sentences. While in some cases the exonerating evidence did not emerge until years after the no-merit letter was filed, a majority were tossed out based on issues the PCRA lawyers overlooked or rejected. Three years of invoices appointed attorneys submitted to the court, covering 83 homicide PCRA cases in which the lawyers filed no-merit letters, show the extent of lawyers’ efforts. Those attorneys did not arrange a single phone call with the client, contact the trial lawyer or obtain the police or prosecution case files about three-quarters of the time. Those case files have been a key source of evidence in overturned convictions since Philadelphia’s district attorney began making them available to lawyers six years ago. Lawyers Did Little Before Declaring Cases Meritless Homicide cases are the most serious ones a lawyer can handle. But many lawyers handling homicide Post Conviction Relief Act cases never spoke with their clients before rejecting their claims. Here’s how often they took basic steps in 83 cases. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="476" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?w=752" alt="" class="wp-image-79176" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png 1500w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=300,190 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=768,486 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=1024,648 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=863,546 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=422,267 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=552,349 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=558,353 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=527,333 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=752,476 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=1149,727 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=400,253 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=800,506 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/philly-exonerations-chart-fallback_223ec1.png?resize=1200,759 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> Data is drawn from all invoices submitted in 2023, ’24 and ’25 for no-merit letters filed in a total of 83 homicide cases. In some cases, records show the attorneys rejected their clients’ claims just days or weeks after being appointed and submitted filings with factual errors, including the wrong defendant’s name. They filed no-merit letters despite red flags, such as a client’s co-defendant having already been exonerated or a detective who locked the client up having been arrested for assaulting witnesses or tampering with evidence. Daniel Anders, the administrative judge who oversees Philadelphia’s court-appointed counsel system, did not respond to requests for comment. Judge Barbara McDermott, who oversaw many PCRA cases before recently retiring from Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, defended the system and said it is working as intended. “We’re never going to be a perfect system, but within the system we’ve had we’ve done the best we can,” she said, adding that no-merit letters play an important role in shutting down pointless challenges. “At some point, there has to be finality to cases.” In Pennsylvania, a person looking to challenge their conviction starts by filing a PCRA petition, often handwritten on a state-issued form. If it’s a person’s first PCRA, a judge will assign a lawyer to amend it. Robert Dunham, a lawyer who spent years training attorneys across the state to litigate death-penalty appeals, said appointed lawyers are too often limiting their review to the issues their clients raised. He said the job is to reinvestigate the entire case to catch things previous lawyers missed. “[The clients are] not lawyers. In many cases they are impaired,” Dunham said. “They don’t have the ability to conduct a factual investigation because they’re in jail.” Stephen T. O’Hanlon, the attorney appointed to Wagner’s case, sent no-merit letters to nine clients who would later have their convictions or sentences overturned. That was more than any other attorney identified in the Inquirer and ProPublica examination, but O’Hanlon also handled among the most PCRA cases. Five of the nine cases were later overturned in state or federal court based on issues with the trial or plea he rejected or did not raise. O’Hanlon said the attorney code of ethics prevents him from making arguments he knows to be false or frivolous and that, in each case, the judge and prosecutor agreed with him at the time. “Yes, it’s good that they got off on some kind of five-years-later technicality,” he said, “but it’s wrong to suggest there was any problem with” the no-merit letters. O’Hanlon said he conducted a diligent review of Wagner’s case and exchanged numerous letters with him. According to court records, he sent an investigator to interview multiple witnesses. “I knew he wasn’t going to fight for me.” Milique Wagner Wagner provided the Inquirer and ProPublica a copy of a letter he said he wrote to O’Hanlon in 2016, asking him to look into Philip Nordo, the corrupt homicide detective who’d typed up the informant’s statement. O’Hanlon said Wagner never raised Nordo as an issue at the time. Pointing to Wagner’s eventual plea deal, he said Wagner is “factually guilty” of the murder. Wagner said O’Hanlon seemed to be against him from the outset. He pointed to a letter O’Hanlon wrote him, six weeks after he was appointed, seemingly unaware that Wagner had been convicted by a jury. “Didn’t you eventually enter a plea on your case? I’m having a hard time understanding how your issues can get around [that].” Wagner asked the judge for a new lawyer, arguing the letter proved O’Hanlon was not interested in advocating for him. “I knew he wasn’t going to fight for me,” Wagner said in a recent interview. The judge kept O’Hanlon on the case. “A Meaningless Ritual” The roots of Pennsylvania’s no-merit letter go back to the case of Dorothy Finley, who in 1979 filed a PCRA challenging her conviction for a robbery-murder in North Philadelphia. As required in Pennsylvania, a judge appointed her a lawyer. After Finley’s lawyer decided her conviction was sound and asked to be taken off the case, a Philadelphia judge told him to file a letter with the court explaining why there was no merit to the issues she raised. The state appeals courts agreed with Finley that her post-conviction lawyer didn’t do his job adequately. But in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case and ruled that she did not have a constitutional right to a lawyer once her case hit the post-conviction stage. The decision left it to Pennsylvania to decide what counts as effective representation and what’s required of a lawyer who wants to drop a case. Justice William Brennan Jr., in dissent, warned that the ruling would create a double standard in the justice system. Guaranteeing a lawyer to people who couldn’t afford one and then allowing that lawyer to oppose their client’s case turns the right to counsel into “a meaningless ritual,” he said. Meanwhile, a defendant who can afford private counsel would receive a “meaningful review” of their claims. Finley died in prison a decade later. The no-merit letter that attorneys file in PCRA cases is now commonly known as a Finley letter. The requirements to file a Finley letter are minimal: A lawyer only needs to describe what was done to review the case, list each claim the client wants raised, explain why the claims are bogus and notify the client of their rights. “It puts the burden on the client, and it sets up the defense lawyer as an extra prosecutor.” Jennifer Merrigan, co-founder of the nonprofit law firm Phillips Black Nationally, few states have set standards for post-conviction representation. But appeals standards published in at least 10 other states urge lawyers to avoid filing no-merit briefs when possible. The National Legal Aid & Defender Association says there should be “extremely strict” limits on them and that they should never be filed if clients are serving life terms. In Philadelphia, court data and invoices show, appointed lawyers file them in about half of all homicide PCRA matters. Court records are filled with examples of Philadelphia lawyers filing letters attacking clients who would eventually prevail in court, calling their claims “self-serving and unfounded,” “unfathomable,” “outrageous” and “specious.” “The fault lies with [my client,] not the courts,” lawyer Earl Kauffman wrote in a 2021 Finley letter. Pennsylvania’s Superior Court rejected Kauffman’s determination in a 2023 opinion. In an interview, Kauffman said he didn’t recall the case but stands behind his work. “Whatever they decide, they decide — whether they agree with me or disagree with me,” Kauffman said of the higher court’s opinion. “I did what I did. I saw what I saw. I analyzed what I analyzed.” O’Hanlon wrote a 2015 no-merit letter calling his client’s actions unjustifiable, in that he “emptied his gun, firing eight shots, at a fleeing car in a public street” — even though a federal judge, in ruling that he deserved a new trial, would interpret the same evidence as supporting the client’s self-defense claim. Asked about that finding, O’Hanlon said the judge’s observation had no bearing on the case. Jennifer Merrigan, a co-founder of the nonprofit law firm Phillips Black, said Finley letters routinely contain adversarial language and often breach confidentiality to use information lawyers have uncovered against the clients. She viewed these as “some of the most egregious ethical violations I’ve seen in my career.” “Some read like a prosecutor’s closing argument,” she said. “It puts the burden on the client, and it sets up the defense lawyer as an extra prosecutor.” Merrigan helped analyze 100 Finley letters filed in Philadelphia homicide cases for a recent Harvard Law Review article. The authors of the study — an attorney at Merrigan’s firm and a Finley letter recipient who later got his conviction overturned — concluded that the letters revealed “entrenched routine disloyalty and incompetence, even in extremely high-stakes criminal cases.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A man and woman hug as another woman and man, smiling, look on in front of a courthouse. " class="wp-image-79015" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3594286_JGA03555_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Lawyer Jennifer Merrigan, left, leaves the Philadelphia criminal courthouse in January with her newly exonerated client, Chris Powell, center; his sister Chantel Powell-Brinkley; and paralegal Steven Lazar, right. Powell had received a no-merit letter even after one of his co-defendants had been exonerated of the 2006 shooting. Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer Clients can pay a steep price, said Dunham, the longtime appeals lawyer. “Sometimes any lawyer is better than having no lawyer — but sometimes having any lawyer is worse than having no lawyer,” he said. “What happens when you get a bad lawyer in the Finley process is you lose your rights.” That’s because if a lawyer discards a valid issue, it is forfeited forever. That’s what happened to Quahir Trice, who argued that when Philadelphia prosecutors used a statement by his co-defendant to convict him, the move improperly prevented Trice’s lawyer from cross-examining the witness against him. Trice’s new lawyer, appointed by the court to handle his PCRA, filed a Finley letter. But by the time Trice’s case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices wrote that although Trice would have had a winning claim, the issue was dead. Trice’s lawyer had missed an “obvious means” to raise it in his PCRA and was now barred from doing so. Trice was ultimately freed in 2022 after the Philadelphia district attorney’s office let his lawyers access his police file, which contained long-hidden evidence that police had alternative suspects and that witnesses lied at his trial. But five lawyers who handle court-appointed cases said the process set up by the Pennsylvania courts has made clear that their duties in PCRA cases are limited, and that digging into the police file or even speaking with the client is, in many cases, unnecessary. “Sometimes any lawyer is better than having no lawyer — but sometimes having any lawyer is worse than having no lawyer.” Attorney Robert Dunham George S. Yacoubian Jr., who has filed close to 100 Finley letters since 2018, said the courts have made those parameters clear. “A PCRA attorney is not supposed to be going back to the very beginning and investigating every possible thing,” he said. He added that while he has an ethical duty to his client, he has a “higher obligation to the system of law” to not present frivolous cases. Yacoubian has written Finley letters in about 80% of his PCRA cases since 2018, court records show. He said that’s to be expected. “If a client pleads guilty and there is nothing in the transcript to suggest the plea was coerced or forced or involuntary or unknowing, there is very little if anything that can be done for those defendants,” Yacoubian said. However, dockets showed that a majority of his Finley letters were for clients who had gone to trial, not taken pleas. We are continuing to report on this issue and want to hear from anyone with insight into Pennsylvania’s post-trial system, including lawyers, judges and people fighting to overturn wrongful convictions. We’re especially interested in tips that explain how funding levels and judicial oversight in your county are shaping how the system works. And we’re interested in seeing your Finley letters and other court documents that can shed light on whether the system is working as intended to correct past injustices. Contact reporter Samantha Melamed at smelamed@inquirer.com or by phone at 215-854-5053. Three Yacoubian clients, whose claims he rejected, would later be granted new trials after privately retained lawyers found valid claims to raise. Teri Himebaugh, the lawyer who won one of those PCRA cases, said it “really wasn’t all that difficult” to crack, but she said the prior lawyers had done little to investigate the case. Pennsylvania’s Superior Court sent three other Yacoubian cases back to the lower court. Twice they determined his clients deserved a hearing on the issues Yacoubian had rejected. In the other case, the higher court said it was unclear whether he’d understood his client’s claim, because there was no indication they had ever spoken. Yacoubian declined to discuss specific cases but said his filings were based on the issues in front of him. “There are some claims that a petitioner makes that are completely baseless,” he said. “Sometimes Finley letters are just necessary.” “You’re Supposed to Be Fighting for Me” O’Hanlon, the lawyer who handled Milique Wagner’s case, has filed more than 100 Finley letters since 2018. Half, dockets show, were filed less than a month after he was formally appointed. That’s a tight window in which to thoroughly investigate a case, said attorney Daniel Silverman, who in 2021 won a new trial for one of O’Hanlon’s Finley letter recipients. In a court filing, Silverman wrote that O’Hanlon’s Finley letters suggest he “often performs little or no investigation in these cases and views his role more as an agent of the courts, helping to quickly dispose of cases, than as an advocate for his client.” That case was thrown out based on a flawed jury instruction. The federal court partly blamed O’Hanlon for “overlooking obvious issues.” An Annotated Finley Letter The Philadelphia Inquirer examined the Finley letter in Wagner’s case, showing how his lawyer handled it. In another case that was overturned, prosecutors wrote in a court filing that O’Hanlon had “failed to fully read” a PCRA by a client who said his lawyer had neglected to call a key defense witness. O’Hanlon wrote, incorrectly, that his client had not named any such witness. A federal judge agreed to toss out the conviction. O’Hanlon said in an interview that he didn’t overlook the issues, but based his Finley letters on Pennsylvania court precedent and the factual circumstances of each case. O’Hanlon said that Finley letters often result from clients having missed filing deadlines. And, he said, he had to work with the issues his clients raised, not manufacture new ones. “If there are negotiated guilty pleas, almost all of those should be Finleys,” he added, because those clients have stated on the record that that plea was knowing and voluntary. But in three guilty-plea cases, the Superior Court later disagreed with him and said his clients’ issues at least merited a hearing. In one, the appeals court eventually threw out the client’s sentence altogether. O’Hanlon said he has won relief for numerous clients in PCRA cases and digs deep into each case, but sometimes he uncovers more evidence of guilt. He emphasized that even those who won new trials ended up taking pleas. “They’re still substantively guilty of murder,” he said. In seven of the nine cases that would later be overturned, O’Hanlon’s Finley letters reflect his certainty that his clients are guilty, often describing the evidence of guilt as “overwhelming” or “compelling.” One client O’Hanlon said had no claims that could outweigh his “overwhelming” guilt was Byshere Lawrence, who was 15 when he was arrested for murder in 2011. Court records show that his trial lawyer never met with him, which Lawrence claimed resulted in an unfair trial. How Lawyers in Pennsylvania Can Argue Against Their Clients Watch a video from The Philadelphia Inquirer about the case of Ronald Rogers, of one Stephen T. O’Hanlon’s clients. Another, Ronald Rogers, argued his lawyer should have objected when the judge overseeing his 2011 murder trial threatened a recanting witness with a perjury charge and “the maximum consecutive sentence” unless he reverted to his prior testimony accusing Rogers. O’Hanlon sent Finley letters to both rejecting those claims. Judges would later throw out each conviction based on the ineffectiveness of each man’s trial lawyer, and both took plea deals rather than continue fighting their cases. Rogers described that as a decision born of desperation. “I thought, I gotta get home,” he said. “I gotta see the people I love one more time.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A man stands on the steps in front of a brick building. Next to him is a patio with a table and umbrella and the front entrance to a home." class="wp-image-79019" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/RS3600981_JGA05217_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Ronald Rogers came home in December after nearly 17 years in prison. A federal appeals court said his lawyer’s failure to object when a judge threatened a witness amounted to a violation of his right to counsel. Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer He was released in December after nearly 17 years in prison. His two children had to grow up with their father behind bars. O’Hanlon said that he could not have raised the issues that later won the clients’ relief, either due to the clients’ instructions at the time or due to state court precedent. “There are years and years of subsequent procedural history, with multiple courts agreeing with me and some not agreeing with me,” he said. But former clients said the letters undermined one of their last shots at freedom. Hakeem Moore, who received one of those letters before his family finally hired a lawyer who uncovered evidence that led to his conviction being overturned, said getting that letter in his prison legal mail was devastating. O’Hanlon noted Moore ultimately took a guilty-plea deal, and said the evidence that freed him was not available when he handled the case. “It’s like a betrayal. You’re supposed to be fighting for me,” Moore said. “I was scared that I was going to have to die in jail.” Left to Their Own Devices For almost 40 years, the requirements created in the Finley case have set the minimum for what’s required of court-appointed PCRA lawyers in Pennsylvania. Beyond that, lawyers are largely left to decide what constitutes a meaningful review. They are subject to some oversight: Pennsylvania courts require judges to independently review the record before accepting a Finley letter. And the whole court-appointed system is overseen by a supervising judge who has the power to review complaints and remove lawyers. The analysis of invoices in homicide PCRA cases showed that even though most lawyers filing Finley letters did not take basic investigative steps, judges approved of the work that attorneys had done in more than 90% of the letters filed. “There are years and years of subsequent procedural history, with multiple courts agreeing with me and some not agreeing with me.” Stephen T. O’Hanlon, the attorney assigned to Milique Wagner’s case And even if judges take issue with lawyers’ work, that does not necessarily affect their ability to take more cases. Once on Philadelphia’s court-appointment list, lawyers can remain there indefinitely. That’s a sharp contrast to the federal court for Pennsylvania’s Eastern District, where lawyers must reapply every three years, self-reporting everything from previous case outcomes to disciplinary actions to judicial findings that they were ineffective in court. In Philadelphia, the supervising judge has the authority to remove lawyers from the list in response to complaints. But formal reprimands from the state disciplinary board and criticism from the state appeals court have not affected some lawyers’ eligibility to continue taking appointed cases. One lawyer, Lee Mandell, was officially reprimanded last year for waiting six years to schedule a PCRA hearing, during which time two key witnesses died. James Lloyd was reprimanded in 2020 for failing to contact his client for 10 months after being appointed, then making up a letter to cover up that fact. Judges still appointed both to handle cases, and Philadelphia’s court leadership in 2022 tapped Lloyd to lead a training on PCRAs for other lawyers. Lloyd did not respond to emails or phone calls requesting an interview. Mandell declined to comment. Also continuing to receive appointments is attorney Douglas Dolfman. The state Superior Court criticized his PCRA work six times over the last six years, finding he abandoned two clients and “deprived [another] of meaningful representation.” In one case, the Superior Court said the lower court could consider “sanctions including, but not limited to, reporting him to the disciplinary board.” The state bar directory shows no disciplinary action followed. In an interview, Dolfman said he diligently investigates each case and fights hard for his clients. “If the person has been in jail for 20 years, you’re pretty much not finding anything. Most likely everything has been exhausted already,” Dolfman said. He didn’t address the appellate court’s criticism. As for Milique Wagner, after receiving the Finley letter he’d spend another nine years in prison for the murder to which the prosecution’s star witness had confessed. But in 2022, the disgraced detective who built the case against him, Nordo, was convicted of raping informants and funneling them crime reward money. A year later, the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit agreed that the prosecutor’s failure to disclose evidence about Nordo and the informant who testified against Wagner had resulted in an unfair trial. Wagner came home from prison in January. He’s starting over in life at age 37 and looking for work. He married a woman who has been taking care of his ailing grandmother. He said he has not given up on clearing his name in court, but he’s decided to represent himself going forward. He no longer has faith that a lawyer would help him. “It’s like a game to them,” he said. “I’m not going to gamble. I know how it turned out before.” The post With a Chance at Freedom, They Faced an Unexpected Obstacle: Their Own Lawyers appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Samantha Melamed.
Trump gutted USAID. Hunger and violence followed.
Researchers are just beginning to understand the human cost of America's retreat from international aid.
For decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, worked across many of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-besieged regions, funding thousands of humanitarian, healthcare, food, and disaster relief programs. That all changed last year when, days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Then, last July, the administration informally dissolved the agency — leading to the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than sixty years. A new study published May 14 in the journal Science suggests the sudden USAID shutdown could have been linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa, with some of the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. Outside experts, however, caution that the findings are preliminary and may not capture the bigger picture. Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict, and when conflict occurs food security worsens because it can limit communities’ access to food. At the same time, deepening food insecurity in fragile political states contributes to social unrest. Climate impacts then layer onto this fragility. Extreme weather is second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, according to a UN report. That’s in part because it increasingly causes people to migrate as they flee places destroyed by rising seas and cataclysmic storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict. “It is undeniable that USAID programming around food aid, including emergency food kitchens, therapeutic foods, and health and water programming on which basic food and nutritional security is built, provided a critical lifeline to millions of women, children, and families in severe nutritional deficits,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly, in so many places, when the direct result is people suffering and dying?” In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services, the Science paper’s authors found that in the roughly ten months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid, areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict. Using two global datasets that track funding disbursements and violent conflict, the study suggests that, in areas with high historical USAID funding, there was an 12.3 percent increase in conflict overall and a 7.3 percent surge in armed battles; protests and riots in these areas rose by 6.8 percent and battle-related fatalities by 9.3 percent after the shutdown. According to Austin Wright, a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict, and a co-author of the paper, the effects have been swift and destabilizing. “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown, in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale,” said Wright. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Aerial view of riverbank dwellers carrying banana produce over the dry Solimoes riverbed" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=330%2C220&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=768%2C512&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-2175300723.jpg?resize=150%2C100&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1067" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> The world is getting too hot to feed itself Ayurella Horn-Muller Established in 1961, USAID was created to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering the Cold War influence of the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has, in recent decades, been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID,” said Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under Biden, who was not involved in the Science paper. The study showing that violence may have been less severe in places where USAID had helped build stronger institutions, she said, only underscores the value of those aid investments. One example is the largely-discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across Sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. But what many tend to forget, says Marcho, is that USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early warning systems. Although some of these systems have since been restored, the gaps in monitoring coupled with the decreased capacity across aid organizations means it is all the more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground. Indeed, the end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. “The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” said Marcho. “How do we actually get the data we need?” Mehrabi finds the new paper creates “more questions than answers.” He argues the mechanisms of measurement are unclear, the analysis period is too short, and the authors don’t adequately disentangle USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other U.S. international funding sources, such as the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” he said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.” Wright, for his part, acknowledges the study has limitations, including a short post-shock observation window of just 10 months, a disbursement baseline drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts, and a geographic scope confined to Africa — leaving much open to future research. He says the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix. After running his own reanalysis of their data, Mehrabi, however, remains unconvinced. What’s more, he warns against the possible takeaway that the presence of American developmental intervention equates to stability. The U.S., he argues, could more effectively help deter widespread conflict and hunger in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, through more equitable benefit-sharing of natural resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. This would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” proposed Mehrabi. Nevertheless, with an annual budget of tens of billions, and an institutional history spanning 64 years, USAID’s developmental footprint throughout the African continent was no small thing. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again, or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done,” said Wright. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump gutted USAID. Hunger and violence followed. on May 19, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.
Māori climate risk worsened by colonization, report finds
A sweeping national climate assessment argues that exclusion from decision-making has amplified Indigenous vulnerability to floods, storms, and erosion.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, record-breaking storms and flooding are impacting Māori land, health, and culture. And, according to a new national climate report, colonization has intensified those risks. The 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment is composed of four reports, including a companion document focused on Māori communities. That report argues that climate change is likely to deepen existing inequities shaped by colonization, exclusion from decision-making, and chronic underinvestment. To mitigate the impacts of climate change, the assessment points to Māori-led adaptation as uniquely effective. It calls for policy grounded in Māori customs and knowledge, Indigenous data sovereignty, and stronger Māori authority in climate decision-making. “For more than 150 years Māori have been pushed to the margins, literally, by an aggressive colonization process,” said Paora Tapsell, who is Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, and the director of the Kāika Institute of Climate Resilience at Lincoln University. The assessment, released earlier this month, adds to a growing body of national reports that highlight the harmful impacts of colonial policies on Indigenous peoples and the environment. In 2023, the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment found that land theft and colonization had exacerbated climate change’s impact. The year before, Australia’s State of the Environment report was prepared with an Indigenous lead author for the first time; it found that Indigenous peoples were more likely to be impacted by extreme weather events like fires. It too called for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into climate policies. Despite these findings, Indigenous leaders around the world say national governments are still not listening to them. Aotearoa New Zealand recently experienced one of its most active severe weather seasons on record, with multiple declared states of emergency across the nation’s two islands. It also found that the country’s Indigenous peoples are essential in responding to such disasters. “The report accurately acknowledges that many kāinga [Māori settlements], despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the frontline of increasingly severe climate events,” Shaun Awatere, who is Ngāti Porou and lead author of the companion report, said. The assessment’s seven interconnected risk areas span environmental, cultural, and economic domains. It says the loss of protected endemic species is not only a biodiversity issue, but also affects food gathering places, the Māori lunar calendar, traditional customs, and intergenerational knowledge systems. According to the report, some species could face near-irreversible decline in parts of the country under high-emissions scenarios by 2090. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 2000w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?resize=1200%2C678&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?resize=768%2C434&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?resize=1536%2C868&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/unfpii-2026-finance.jpg?resize=150%2C85&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1130" width="2000" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change — and get almost none of the money to fight it Anita Hofschneider Across Māori lands, climate-driven extreme weather events have had a destructive impact on infrastructure. But the report outlines how flooding, erosion, storms, and wildfires also present cultural risks by threatening tribal meeting places, burial sites, and communal homes. It warns that repeated damage and displacement could lead to long-term cultural fragmentation and disconnection from ancestral land. Climate impacts may also be felt economically. Māori-owned forestry, farming, aquaculture, and horticulture enterprises face rising pressure from climate hazards, costs, and underinvestment in adaptation. Without structural reform and targeted support, the assessment says that economic vulnerability will increase. Awatere says the findings confirm what tribes have been saying for years. “Climate events do not arrive one at a time,” he said. “A storm floods a road, damages a marae [tribal meeting place], erodes whenua [land], disrupts access to mahinga kai [food gathering places], and overwhelms health and welfare systems that were already stretched, all at once. Each of those harms compounds the next.” The assessment also said climate-driven displacement and ecological degradation could disrupt the transmission of language, customary practices, lineage relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems between generations. Awatere highlighted ongoing structural exclusion of Māori from climate planning and adaptation systems, despite the government’s obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi, which is the country’s founding document. The report describes legal exclusion and governance failure as a major risk multiplier, compounding climate impacts across all domains. Awatere says the central question is whether adaptation plans will reflect that evidence, or whether Māori communities will continue to carry a disproportionate risk of harm. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Māori climate risk worsened by colonization, report finds on May 19, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Te Aniwaniwa Paterson.
French Senate endorses change to New Caledonia’s ‘frozen’ electoral roll
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk The French Senate has endorsed proposed changes to New Caledonia’s restricted electoral roll to allow “native” people to vote in next month’s local elections. The proposed changes relax current vote restrictions enforced under the Nouméa Accord, signed in 1998, a situation often referred to as the
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk The French Senate has endorsed proposed changes to New Caledonia’s restricted electoral roll to allow “native” people to vote in next month’s local elections. The proposed changes relax current vote restrictions enforced under the Nouméa Accord, signed in 1998, a situation often referred to as the “frozen” electoral roll. The relaxing measure concerns an estimated 10,000+ voters, who were born in New Caledonia since 1998 and have since reached the voting age of 18. READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports The measures, initially perceived as a way to protect against any dilution of the indigenous Kanak voters, only concerned about 8 percent of the population. But as time went by, it was now barring 17 percent, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told French Senators on Monday evening Paris time. He said this growing proportion infringed on France’s principles of universal and equal suffrage. After hours of debates in Paris, the vote on Monday was 304 in favour and 20 against. Obtained a pledge Over the past few weeks, Lecornu held more talks with New Caledonian politicians from all sides of the spectrum, and said he had obtained a pledge that after the 28 June 2026 provincial elections, everyone would come back to the table and resume comprehensive political talks concerning New Caledonia’s future status. He said the talks would start as soon as July 2026 and would have to bring an outcome “before the end of the year”. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" src="https://media.rnztools.nz/rnz/image/upload/s--iQXhmIY6--/c_scale,f_auto,q_auto,w_1050/v1779151629/4JODV5H_French_Senate_endorses_changes_in_New_Caledonia_s_electoral_roll_for_provincial_elections_PHOTO_Senat_fr_jpg?_a=BACCd2AD" alt="French Senate endorses changes in New Caledonia’s electoral roll for provincial elections – PHOTO Senat.fr" width="1050" height="552" /> French Senate endorses changes in New Caledonia’s electoral roll for provincial elections. Image: Senat.fr/RNZ Pacific Yes to ‘natives’, no to ‘spouses’ But the Senate did not approve of another amendment which aimed at extending the “unfreezing” of New Caledonia’s electoral roll to “spouses” of qualified voters. The inclusion of those who are regarded as spouses was aimed at those who had been married (or entered into a French Civil Union pact) there for at least five years and latest estimates showed this concerned between 1500 to 1800 people. New Caledonia’s Senator (Les Républicains, right-wing) Georges Naturel, who was the mover of the motion, admitted himself that this additional clause for “spouses” would potentially expose the text to a censure from the French Constitutional Council. New Caledonia’s other Senator Robert Xowie (pro-independence FLNKS) warned of yet another attempt of “passage en force” which would probably make the provincial elections campaign “even more radical”. The proposed changes to New Caledonia’s electoral makeup come less than six weeks ahead of crucial elections in the French Pacific territory. The provincial elections are scheduled to be held on 28 June and, based on proportional representation, they will determine not only New Caledonia’s three provincial assemblies (North, South and the Loyalty Islands), but also the territorial Congress, its local government and its president. Lecornu: Status quo would sow seeds of fresh violence Taking the floor on Monday before the Senate, Lecornu stressed that not changing New Caledonia’s electoral rule “cannot be a solid base for the future”. Lecornu said not doing anything would potentially sow the seeds of fresh violence in New Caledonia. Earlier attempts to change New Caledonia’s status under the French Constitution, in May 2024, have led to insurrectional riots, which caused 14 deaths and over 2 billion euros (abot NZ$3.9 billion) in damages, as well as thousands of jobs lost due to the destruction of hundreds of businesses. Lecornu said his government’s Bill was meant to offer New Caledonia’s political stakeholders — both pro-France and pro-independence — a “balanced” compromise. But this reform for “natives” still has many hurdles to pass. On Wednesday (local time), the French Lower House, the National Assembly, which is divided and less likely to approve the French Organic Bill, is also to vote on the same text. On April 2, the National Assembly rejected an earlier attempt to change France’s Constitution to implement the outcome of talks held in July 2025 (Bougival talks) and in January 2026 (Matignon-Oudinot talks). The process was proposing to create a “State” of New Caledonia and a correlated “Nationality”, all under the French framework. New Caledonia’s Congress building in Nouméa: Image: RRB Mixed feelings from New Caledonia’s polarised Congress A few hours earlier on Monday in Nouméa, New Caledonia’s Congress was also convened at the request of the French government. The meeting was also dedicated to the Organic Bill later debated in the Senate. The request was to provide French lawmakers with a snapshot of the parties’ views regarding the text. The sitting lasted hours in Nouméa and, once again, it was the reiteration of each party’s stance on the proposed changes to the electoral roll conditions of eligibility. The final vote reflected a polarised landscape, with each party camping on their respective positions. On the pro-France side, most were in favour of opening the vote to the “natives”, but many regretted that the same could not be done for their spouses. “Which country in the world is barring its own children to choose their local representatives? None,” an indignant pro-France Rassemblement group leader Virginie Ruffenach said. “Not now,” replied UC-FLNKS group leader Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro, who said the electoral roll was “a fundamental pillar of (New Caledonia’s decolonisation process, as enshrined in the (1998) Nouméa Accord”. Tutugoro said this could not be modified outside of a wider political agreement. The final vote in the Congress on the inclusion of “natives” reflected those divisions: 25 in favour (including pro-France Rassemblement and pro-independence UNI [Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance]), 14 against (pro-independence Union Calédonienne-FLNKS [Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front]) and 13 abstentions (pro-France Les Loyalistes). More pre-election local moves on the local front Meanwhile, over the weekend, the four main components of the pro-France block announced a pact to contest the upcoming provincial elections as a united front. These are Sonia Backès (Républicains Calédoniens), Nicolas Metzdorf (Génération NC), Alcide Ponga (Rassemblement — Les Républicains) and Gil Brial (Mouvement Populaire Calédonien). In a joint statement, they have announced they have chosen the “general interest”, based on common candidates. “Together, we share the essential: our indefectible attachment to France, civil peace, democracy and institutional stability,” they wrote. “On 28 June, the choice will be simple: between division that paralyses and union that builds”. At a media conference held on Friday, May 15, FLNKS leader Christian Téin said they remained open to talks with other parties. He said there was a “will to build our country with all voluntary groups”, including in New Caledonia’s Southern province (where the capital Nouméa is located and traditionally perceived as pro-France). Security reinforcements to arrive soon: French High Commissioner Speaking to local Radio Rythme Bleu on Monday, France’s High Commissioner in New Caledonia Jacques Billant said preparations were currently being made in preparation of the French Pacific territory’s provincial elections. “My priority as High Commissioner is that the elections take place in a serene atmosphere so that every political force can campaign in the best possible conditions and that each and every voter can exercise their civic right”. He said the French Ministry of Interior (Home Affairs) “will allow reinforcements for New Caledonia. They will arrive gradually starting mid-June”. “We’re talking about over 300 gendarmes who will arrive to reinforce the 2000 police force and gendarmes already deployed.” This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Author Avigayl Sharp on loving the process even when it hurts
How did you become a writer? It’s always an interesting question to think about, because retroactively, your life appears so inevitable, but I don’t think that I’m someone who wanted to be a writer from childhood. I read a lot. I was a pretty lonely kid. Books were my friends. I was one of those people. And over time writing became something that I did more seriously. I was a dabbler. I dabbled in everything. I sang. I was a theater kid. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that writing became the thing that I knew that I was going to do, although now it feels like, “of course, I couldn’t have been anything else.” I think that writers are people who have difficulty expressing themselves, and I had difficulty saying or knowing what I meant. I had fantasies of people really listening to me. When you write something, no one can speak back, you inhabit other people’s minds. And so that might have been what really ended up drawing me to [writing]. That one way mirror. The feeling that you can make someone see what you see. Of course, people can stop reading, but there’s a fantasy where you draw them in. In real life, I’m a people pleaser. I try to say what I think people want me to say. Writing became a place where I didn’t have to do that, or maybe at the beginning it was, and then, later it changed. I started writing more seriously in college. I took an Intro to Fiction course with a teacher who was tough on me in a good way, and my dabbling just became something else. And it became something that I really, really, really wanted to be good at. It began to feel like a vocation. What do you mean by “tough on you”? I felt like everything I wrote was wonderful, but he was like, “there’s a lot here that needs work.” There’s a moment when you decide to do something for the good of itself. You’re like, “okay, maybe I really want to see what I can do. Maybe I’m really willing to work. Maybe it’s not going to come easily to me and that’s okay.” That was the beginning of my love of working, instead of just loving the praise. Did you always know you wanted to write a novel? This novel? The whole process of writing a novel was surprising to me. I did not always know that I wanted to write a novel. I was a short story writer. I loved short stories. I actually felt like I had this fundamental sense that I would be incapable of writing a novel. Novels were what I read. I read a lot of short stories too, but I loved the novel as a form. It felt really impenetrable to me, maybe because of the length, sustaining a voice for that long, sustaining one mode for that long, building a structure that could maintain itself for that long. So no, I absolutely did not always know that I was going to write a novel, or this novel in particular. By the time I felt that I wanted to write a novel, I didn’t have an idea, it was more so that I just felt compelled enough by the form that I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know what it was going to be at all. It ended up coming together because I got a fellowship in Provincetown. Maybe the way I work is that I really need something to latch on to, something that I can extrapolate from, and moving to this really small coastal, weird, beautiful, mysterious town in the offseason, in the fall, suddenly opened something up for me. A couple weeks in, I wrote the first scene of the book. I had gone to a bar and I started writing about the bar, and then this voice sort of began to emerge. And I had worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a voice that could sustain the book, but I was like, “okay, maybe there’s something here.” I felt like it could propel me. The whole thing was surprising, and I never knew if it was going to hold together. How long did it take from beginning to end? It was faster than I would have imagined, because I am generally a pretty slow writer. I spent seven months working on it at this fellowship in Provincetown, and then I left, and had to do work for money. And then I finished the first draft after seven weeks at another residency. So it ended up taking a year, and then there was some editing and revision. I don’t really do multiple drafts. I really have to nail something down before I can move on. So, the first chapter took me forever, and the second chapter took me forever, and then I had to go back and fix it. The final quarter of the book was much faster to write. Why do you think that is your process? What is it about your personality that requires such a level of scrupulousness? Oh, it’s such a good question! It’s the only way I can work. I don’t know. What I enjoy about writing, what attracts me to it, is the nailing down of language. So if it doesn’t sing to me, I have no interest in moving on. I never know what’s gonna happen next. I don’t have a plan. So, if I can’t lock in what it’s doing, then I have nowhere to move. But it also makes it really scary. I really felt like the whole time I was writing into the dark, totally into the dark, no idea if I would finish. The voice of your protagonist is so singular, so zany. How did you find her voice? And the voices of your other characters. Your style of dialogue is so effervescent. Voice is the thing that comes first. Even if it’s third person, if I don’t have a narrative voice, I don’t know where to go. I think the voice of this novel, the voice of probably everything I’ve written, comes from so many books that I’ve read and so many different influences that come together unconsciously. I was reading a lot of W.G. Sebald-influenced novels, and I thought there would be something funny about merging that tradition with something a lot more insane, with an extreme comic sensibility. There’s a lack of quotation marks in the dialog. There’s something about dialogue that is reported and dialogue that exists without quotations, that I think allows the voice of the narrator to seep a little bit more into the voices of other characters. And there are moments where it can get really porous between those things. So, I wanted that kind of effect where sometimes the novel as a whole feels more singular, like one single breath. Let’s talk about autofiction. Does your fiction ever resemble your actual life? What is your take on this played out term? I’m trying to decide if I hate this question, or I don’t know? I have no idea. I am not an autofiction hater. I think there are a lot of autofiction haters out there in this economy. I love autofiction. I love the tradition. I don’t consider my work autofiction. There are resemblances. You’re from “the city in the middle of the country.” Yeah, exactly. I think there are some very surface level biographical similarities that I can take from my life. I was about to say, out of laziness, which is not exactly true, but out of a sort of need to hold on to something. Or maybe it’s that I need something to grab me, or it’s things that I am preoccupied with. But then everything that happens in this novel is all made up. I’ve worked at a school, but I was an administrative assistant. I was interested in the school conceptually. I was interested in the idea of a campus novel and of teachers, but I never taught Bleak House. I’ve never taught troubled girls. I’ve never worked at a boarding school. Your writing is so funny leaning towards the absurd. How does humor play into your creative process? Why is humor important to you? Is it? I’m not funny in real life. Yes, you are! I’m like a normal amount. I’m a normal person. I take humor really seriously, as an aesthetic mode. It helps us get close to things that we don’t want to look at. I think that is a seductive technique. It’s a kind of spasm, when you laugh, it’s like a spasm of your consciousness, and it’s a little bit out of control. Humor, when it’s working well, can draw you somewhere that you really don’t want to go, that you didn’t expect. I really love books that have no sense of humor, but I’m picky about humor in books. I tend to want it to be doing something more. I’m interested in humor that sort of works with defenses as a way of breaking through them. Sometimes you read something and you feel that it really is defensive, or it’s ingratiating. It wants you to like it. It wants you to laugh desperately. I don’t want to be desperate. It’s really the mood that I’m drawn to. What humor books do you like? I love Nabokov. I love Joy Williams. Muriel Spark. Dostoyevsky. There are parts of Notes from Underground that I think are the funniest things I’ve ever read, but are also dark. Lots of famous canonical novels are featured in Offseason, like Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Kafka’s The Trial. Who or what are you inspired by? Some of the people I just named are big inspirations for me, for the book in general. In terms of contemporary writers, I really love Fernanda Melchor, she’s a writer that I find just absolutely incredible. Also, Claire-Louise Bennett. I was interested in working with the canon in Offseason, because it is sort of a book about literature. In a way, it is a book about the novel. And I thought there would be something both very funny and very serious about taking a figure like Charles Dickens and taking that really seriously as an obsession. When I read Bleak House, I lost my mind. I was like, this is an absolutely incredible, incredible, incredible book. I know you are off social media for the most part. Has this distance from the distraction machine made you a better, more disciplined writer? Or what have you learned about yourself and/or society while off of it? I went off social media because I’m not strong enough. The temptation of creating an image, creating an image around yourself, creating a narrative around yourself is too strong for me, too painful, too tempting. I admire people who are able to engage with it in a way that doesn’t pull their whole self into it. At a certain point, I realized that there was something about it that was making me sick. Spiritually sick. And so I had to leave. And sometimes I do feel like, “Oh no, I’m a little out of touch.” And it’s true. I also think the internet is like a material part of the way we live now. And I’m not a writer who is a Luddite. I don’t want to pretend that technology doesn’t exist. In my work, I don’t want to pretend social media doesn’t exist. So, I do think about it. My attention span is still pretty bad. There are many things that I can scroll on my phone, like Google.com. I can find anything. But I do think it has helped me detach from being perceived, from wanting to be loved. I think it’s bad for me as a writer to want to be loved too much. It makes my work bad. I know you’ve been living in Germany the last year or so, how has this change of scenery impacted your creative work? I don’t even yet know what is going to come of that year, my year abroad. I think that disorientation, being dislocated from your language, are all really useful things for a writer. I’m also interested in Americanness. Where is your mother from, again? Soviet Lithuania. And the narrator’s mother is also from Soviet Lithuania? Yes. Surprise! Having a parent who was not born in the States makes me feel even more American. I am compared to her. And I think she really, really sees me as an American. But I also, to a certain extent, feel some level of alienation. I’m interested in what that means. And so living abroad in Germany was interesting, but I don’t know what’s going to come of it. I haven’t written much that’s reckoned with any of it yet. What do you love most about writing and being a writer? Hmm. Dedicating your life to something outside of yourself, to art, it’s a great honor. It’s a gift to be able to love something and do something that I think matters. The fact that I can live a life of literature, I couldn’t imagine a greater gift. It’s really sappy, but I think it’s lucky. I think it’s very lucky. I don’t know what it means to be a writer. I don’t know at what point you’re like, “I am a writer.” Like that is my identity. My professional identity. What is it that makes you a writer? Is it publishing something, or is it writing? I think you know if you’re a writer. If you do, you write. If you commit your life to it. What do you love least? Well, writing is really hard. Like, I’m not someone who’s like, “I’m walking on sunshine.” Sometimes it feels really sublime. Sometimes it’s devastating. And my own lack and the fact that you can never make something that is as good as it appears in your mind, it’s very painful. But I still love that part. I think that’s part of what makes it beautiful. There’s this Thomas Mann quote that I saw the other day: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” That is true. I think grappling with the difficulty is what makes it a worthwhile challenge. I also think the real difficult part is turning art into a product, into a commodity. Art becomes commerce. No one likes that. That’s pretty universal. Maybe there are some writers who are like, “I love that part. I love commerce. I love the part that is commerce.” What is your relationship to creativity? What advice would you give other writers and artists on how to harness their creativity? My relationship to creativity is fraught. I am someone who goes through fertile and fallow periods. I’m not someone who is like “I write every day and every day it’s a joy.” There are times when I feel like I’m in despair and I’m never gonna write again, and that happens to me almost every time I finish something. I do think you have to have faith in your unconscious, in your intuitions, in the sense that what has to be will be. And people talk about this all the time, but it’s so true: the more you read, the more you encounter the world, something will come of it. I used to have a bad habit of waiting for the muse. “I’m waiting for the muse, I’m waiting for the muse.” And something that writing a novel taught me was that I had to impose a pretty rigid schedule on myself, and I really had to commit to working. What did your schedule look like? I tried to write five or six times a week. I took one day off. I would read a short story when I woke up, and then I would write. I would put my phone in a lockbox. I have to stop talking about this lock box. I’m literally constantly talking about it. I would have to sit and write, or if I wasn’t writing, I’d be thinking about writing, and then I would read novels in the afternoon. I’d go for walks and also do other things. Elizabeth McCracken once said something to me that was really helpful, where she was like, “you have to romanticize the good parts of your process.” Some people romanticize the bad parts of their process, which is something that I was definitely doing. I do think process is really, really individual. But it has to be yours. Now that your first novel is out in the world (both the US and the UK!), what advice would you give to your past self if you could go back in time and talk to her? To her? I’d be like, “Have a little more faith. Calm down.” I would get so worked up. The whole thing is so mysterious. You’re so lost. And I think I would try to tell myself to accept being lost, enjoy it. Avigayl Sharp recommends: Mike Leigh’s High Hopes tapioca pudding the science of psychoanalysis Muriel Spark’s The Comforters custom orthotics This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.
Greenpeace calls on global govts to ensure safety of Gaza flotilla stormed by Israeli military
Asia Pacific Report Greenpeace International has condemned Israeli armed forces for illegally attacking a peaceful Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters for the second time. The flobal environmental movement said in a statement it echoed the Global Sumud Flotilla’s urgent demand for safe passage for their peaceful humanitarian mission. “Governments must act now to
Asia Pacific Report Greenpeace International has condemned Israeli armed forces for illegally attacking a peaceful Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters for the second time. The flobal environmental movement said in a statement it echoed the Global Sumud Flotilla’s urgent demand for safe passage for their peaceful humanitarian mission. “Governments must act now to stop these illegal acts of aggression,” the Greenpeace statement said. READ MORE: Irish president’s sister, 2 Kiwis among Gaza flotilla activists detained by Israel The Flotilla Tracker map showing the location of the vessels Live streams from the flotilla Other Gaza humanitarian flotilla reports Greenpeace spokesperson Pujarini Sen said: “In Palestine, in Lebanon and now in international waters, Israel’s disregard for human rights and international law cannot be tolerated. “How long will the world stand by and watch Israel act with such impunity? ‘Protect the flotilla’ “Greenpeace calls on all governments to act with urgency to uphold international law and ensure the immediate release and protection of the Global Sumud Flotilla with concrete steps to ensure its safe passage to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.” The Global Sumud Flotilla is a peaceful international movement sailing to oppose Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza, to confront the complicity that enables occupation, and to stand with the Palestinian people. The Israeli government continues to enforce a blockade by land and sea of aid and food from international organisations. Blocking aid and targeting those who attempt to deliver it are violations of international humanitarian law.⁣ CPJ protest over journalists In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called on international governments to demand the immediate release and protection of all civilians detained after Israeli forces attacked and intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters, including at least seven journalists on board. “Detaining journalists for documenting a humanitarian mission is a grave violation of press freedom and international law,” said CPJ’s MENA regional director Sara Qudah in a statement. “Israeli authorities must restore communications, ensure the safety of all passengers, and allow independent media to report without intimidation, violence, or arbitrary detention. “Governments worldwide must act now to prevent further Israeli attacks on journalists and humanitarian civilians.” At least 40 countries are represented by some 500 protesters and humanitarian activists on board the flotilla. Israel is reported to have boarded and seized more than 60 boats in the flotilla. At least two New Zealanders are reported to have been kidnapped by the Israeli military. CPJ calls on international governments to demand the immediate release and protection of all civilians detained after #Israeli forces attacked and intercepted #the_Global_Sumud_Flotilla in international waters, including at least 7 #journalists on board. Detaining journalists for… pic.twitter.com/OpcQ33Jgrj — CPJ MENA (@CPJMENA) May 18, 2026 This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Eleven Fiji police officers investigated for ties to Auckland drug trade links
By Kaya Selby, RNZ Pacific journalist A multinational police investigation implicating 11 Fiji police officers in collusion with drug traffickers has been handed over to prosecutors. The Fiji police announced that the investigation, lasting nearly six months, now awaits advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) on how to proceed. On December 1 last
By Kaya Selby, RNZ Pacific journalist A multinational police investigation implicating 11 Fiji police officers in collusion with drug traffickers has been handed over to prosecutors. The Fiji police announced that the investigation, lasting nearly six months, now awaits advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) on how to proceed. On December 1 last year, a social media activist posted more than 100 screenshots of Viber messages between the officers and a member of an Auckland-based organised crime group. READ MORE: Other Fiji crime reports Police personnel depicted in the screenshots ranged from beat cops to Criminal Intelligence Division (CID) officers to the head of the Narcotics Bureau. The texts purportedly showed the Narcotics Bureau chief and others demanding a hit be put out on an individual, providing tip-offs about possible locations and movements. They also depicted officers demanding payments, with details of drop zones and pickup arrangements. Police said that each officer’s financial histories was investigated. Commissioner Rusiate Tudravu told local media on 19 December 2025 that the Narcotics Bureau chief had been placed on leave. NZ ‘assisted’ investigation A statement confirmed that Australian and New Zealand authorities “assisted” in the investigation. Tudravu confirmed in a press conference that United States authorities were also involved. New Zealand police said they were “in touch” from December onwards. “Fiji Police is leading the investigation, and New Zealand Police has offered any support that Fiji Police may require,” they said. On December 2, Tudravu announced the investigation, with the officers’ phones confiscated shortly after. Police confirmed the investigation concluded last week. The US Embassy in Wellington, where an FBI office is set up, declined to comment. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
‘There’s no ceasefire’: Sister of assassinated Hamas leader to The Grayzone
Evo Morales to The Grayzone: ‘The people have reached their breaking point’
Irish president’s sister, 2 Kiwis among Gaza flotilla activists detained by Israel
Asia Pacific Report Irish President Catherine Connolly’s sister is among the Gaza-bound Global Sumud flotilla activists detained by Israeli forces, reports Middle East Monitor. Dr Margaret Connolly was among at least six Irish citizens aboard the aid flotilla detained by Israel, the Irish Independent reported, citing activists. At least two New Zealanders — Hāhona Ormsby
Asia Pacific Report Irish President Catherine Connolly’s sister is among the Gaza-bound Global Sumud flotilla activists detained by Israeli forces, reports Middle East Monitor. Dr Margaret Connolly was among at least six Irish citizens aboard the aid flotilla detained by Israel, the Irish Independent reported, citing activists. At least two New Zealanders — Hāhona Ormsby and Julien Blondel — have also been detained, according to the Global Sumud Aotearoa — support delegation. READ MORE: Spain summons Israeli envoy over Gaza flotilla interception, calls it ‘new violation of international law’ Türkiye condemns new Israeli ‘piracy’ against Gaza aid flotilla in international waters The Global Sumud Flotilla Tracker Other Gaza flotilla reports WATCH: An Al Jazeera Instagram report showing the Israeli military storming the flotilla <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-128020 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dr-Margaret-Connolly-Sumud-300tall.png" alt="Detained . . . Dr Margaret Connolly, sister of Ireland's President Catherine Connolly" width="300" height="434" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dr-Margaret-Connolly-Sumud-300tall.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dr-Margaret-Connolly-Sumud-300tall-207x300.png 207w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dr-Margaret-Connolly-Sumud-300tall-290x420.png 290w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> Detained by Israeli military . . . Dr Margaret Connolly, sister of Ireland’s President Catherine Connolly, in a video released by the Global Sumud Flotilla. Image: GSF screenshot APR A third New Zealander, Mousa Taher, was still sailing toward Gaza aboard the Kasri Sadabat. According to the Global Sumud Flotilla, 10 boats from a 60-vessel convoy were intercepted in international waters and boarded by Israeli forces earlier on Monday. Organisers said the interception took place around 70 nautical miles off the island of Cyprus, with at least six of the 15 Irish participants detained. The flotilla released videos from Connolly and five other activists that appeared to have been recorded before the interception. ‘If you are watching . . . ‘ “If you are watching this video, it means I have been kidnapped from my boat in the flotilla by the Israeli occupying forces, and I’m now being held illegally in an Israeli prison,” Connolly said in the video. “I am so proud to be taking part in this flotilla — it is the largest to date,” she added. The Israeli army attacked and intercepted the Gaza-bound Global Sumud humanitarian flotilla in international waters and detained around 100 activists as the mission sought to break Israel’s blockade on the Palestinian enclave. The flotilla, consisting of more than 50 boats, set sail on Thursday from the Turkish Mediterranean district of Marmaris in a renewed attempt to break the Israeli blockade imposed on Gaza since 2007. Organisers said the mission included 426 participants, among them 96 Turkish activists and participants from 39 other countries, including Germany, the US, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Algeria, Indonesia, Morocco, France, South Africa, the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Canada, Egypt, Pakistan, Tunisia, Oman and New Zealand. On April 29, Israeli forces also attacked the Global Sumud aid flotilla off the coast of the Greek island of Crete. Pacific Media Watch reports: A Global Sumud Aotearoa statement said today: “Overnight, the Israeli military has illegally boarded and intercepted over 35 vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla, including the two vessels carrying New Zealanders Hāhona Ormsby and Julien Blondel. “Hāhona and Julien are now in israeli custody. “New Zealander Mousa Taher is aboard one of 18 vessels still sailing through the night to Gaza. “The safe and unimpeded passage of the remaining vessels is protected under international law, including the UNCLOS Treaty. “We sail with the legacy of a people who have resisted for eight decades, rooted in steadfastness, in Sumud. We will not stop until the siege is broken and until Palestine is free.” Global Sumud Flotilla Live Feed <img decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128024" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lidd-Nablus-intercepted-GSF-680wide.png" alt="The Lidd (Nablus) being intercepted by the Israeli military" width="680" height="372" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lidd-Nablus-intercepted-GSF-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lidd-Nablus-intercepted-GSF-680wide-300x164.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> The Lidd (Nablus) being intercepted by the Israeli military . . . one of more than 60 boats attacked. Image: Global Sumud Flotilla Live Tracker This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
More Than 100,000 American Kids Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates
The post More Than 100,000 American Kids Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates appeared first on ProPublica.
Volunteers escort a 2-year-old American boy to be reunited with his mother, who awaited deportation in February. Christopher Lee for ProPublica Far more American children have likely been separated from their parents during immigration sweeps than previously understood, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Brookings. The report published Monday estimates more than 100,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign began last year. The analysis cites reporting from ProPublica on the detention of parents, which can often lead to family separations. During Trump’s first administration, a policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border ended after widespread outrage. Now, the breakup of families is happening amid sweeps by immigration agents across the country. About 400,000 people have been detained by immigration agents since Trump returned to office, Brookings noted. But it’s nearly impossible to know how many family separations that has caused, since the administration does not track it. Families are also now being split up in ways that are more dispersed, more hidden and harder to track. Brookings created its estimate by using census information to approximate the number of children that detainees have. It estimated that roughly 200,000 children, including 145,000 American kids, have had a parent detained. The think tank notes that the actual number could be somewhat higher or lower. ProPublica used a different, more conservative, approach that relied on government data obtained through a public information lawsuit by the University of Washington. We found that in just the first seven months of Trump’s second term, at least 11,000 American children had a parent detained. We also found that Trump has been deporting about four times as many mothers of American children per day as President Joe Biden did. As we noted, our figures are almost certainly undercounts. For instance, the government data relies on detainees self-reporting whether they have children. In some cases, agents may not ask and parents may not share details about their families out of fear of what might happen to their children. “There are a lot of families that are in the situation that are not being written down,” said Tara Watson, one of the authors of the Brookings report. It’s “important both for transparency and from a child health and wellbeing perspective to know what’s happening to the kids. How many of them are leaving the U.S.? How many of them are staying in the U.S. with close family? How many of them do we really not know what their situation is?” ProPublica also followed multiple families through their sudden separations and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children. Doris Flores, a mother from Honduras, was separated from her breastfeeding infant after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested her and her fiance at the same time. In the rush to find someone to care for the baby and Flores’ 8-year-old daughter, she called on their local pastor to take the children in. In response to the Brookings findings, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, sent an oft-repeated statement that the agency “does not separate families,” adding that parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or instead to have them placed with a person the parent designates. DHS said this is consistent with the practices of past administrations. However, guidelines for ICE officers encountering parents have changed. A document known as the Parental Interests Directive was given a new name under Trump — the Detained Parents Directive. Its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was “humane,” has been stripped of the word. The post More Than 100,000 American Kids Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Mica Rosenberg.
ProPublica Selects 11 Journalists for Investigative Editor Training
The post ProPublica Selects 11 Journalists for Investigative Editor Training appeared first on ProPublica.
From left to right, top row: Aaron Sankin, Deblina Chakraborty, Josh McGhee, Rosalie Chan, Padma Rama. Middle row: Karen Chávez, Kynala Phillips, Yoohyun Jung, Margaret Ho, Kevin Uhrmacher. Bottom row: Thy Vo. Collage by ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of the journalists. Eleven journalists from across the country join the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program, which seeks to expand the ranks of editors in newsrooms across the country whose work is aimed at accountability and impact. Established in 2023, the program has trained more than 31 journalists to date. It begins with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually throughout the course of the year for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers. Alumni continue to work in the field in newsrooms like The Boston Globe, KQED, The Texas Tribune, ESPN and ProPublica. This year, more than 130 journalists applied for a spot in the program. “Each year, we are thrilled by the number of people who reach out to us for this training,” Managing Editor Ginger Thompson said. “It’s ProPublica’s way of supporting investigative reporting at a time when our mission couldn’t be more vital.” Introducing the 2026 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program: Aaron Sankin is the data editor at The Marshall Project, a criminal-justice-focused nonprofit news organization. He was previously an investigative reporter with The Markup, where he won the Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting on predictive policing, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Journalism Award for an investigation into racial and socioeconomic disparities in internet service pricing, and the Gerald Loeb Award for an innovative online privacy inspection tool. He also covered online extremism at The Center for Investigative Reporting and helped launch HuffPost’s San Francisco vertical. He is a graduate of Rice University and lives in New York. Deblina Chakraborty is senior science editor at CNN, where she oversees coverage of science and space, leading a team of writers and editors who explore intriguing discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and daring missions. Previously, she was a general features editor and an off-platform editor for CNN. She’s also managed editorial teams at Denver7 and HLN Digital and hosted the award-winning podcast “Stuff You Missed in History Class.” Josh McGhee is the Chicago bureau chief of MindSite News and covers the intersection of criminal justice and mental health with an emphasis on public records and data reporting. He previously reported for Injustice Watch, The Chicago Reporter, DNAinfo Chicago and WVON covering criminal justice, courts, policing, race, inequality and politics. Kynala Phillips is the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Neighborhood Dispatch, a new initiative that partners with residents to cover community voices, concerns and improvements. Previously, she led the events program at Kansas City PBS, and worked as a service journalism reporter at The Kansas City Star, where she covered housing, public services and marijuana legalization. She holds a master’s degree in engagement journalism from the City University of New York and an undergraduate journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Karen Chávez is executive editor of USA Today’s Asheville Citizen Times in North Carolina. During her more than 20-year career at the paper, she served as investigations editor, assistant sports editor and an outdoors and environment editor. Previously, Chávez, a New York native, also worked as a reporter in Montana, Idaho and Arizona. Chávez’s reporting exposed a district attorney’s wrongdoing and led to his removal for willful misconduct in office (which won a Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Award). Her reporting also exposed a decadeslong pattern of alleged sexual abuse of students at the Asheville School by faculty and other students (which won North Carolina Press Association awards). At the Citizen Times, Chávez led national coverage of Tropical Storm Helene, the deadliest and costliest natural disaster in North Carolina history. The team she led was honored for their dogged coverage, including a first place National Headliner Award for public service journalism. Kevin Uhrmacher is the deputy news applications editor at ProPublica, where he leads a team of developers who use code to report and build interactive stories and databases. He joined ProPublica in August 2025 after 11 years at The Washington Post as a reporter and editor on the graphics team focused on politics and public policy. At ProPublica, he led the development of the Rx Inspector database that shows patients which factories made their prescription generics. He has edited graphics for three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. Uhrmacher graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Margaret Ho is an assistant editor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where she collaborates with reporters who cover the Justice Department, the rule of law and political fact-checking. She started at the Times in 2010 as a copy editor on the business desk after working as a grant writer for a charter school in Harlem, New York. Padma Rama is a senior political editor at NPR focused on national politics. She works with NPR’s network of member stations. Previously, she was a congressional reporter and senior producer at The Associated Press and worked at CNN’s D.C. bureau. Rosalie Chan is a senior editor helping to drive editorial strategy for Business Insider’s tech coverage. She joined the company as an enterprise tech and cloud reporter, reporting on key industry players like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Broadcom, VMware and more. As a reporter, she has broken scoops on those companies and delved into a wide array of topics, like the open source licensing wars, the rise and fall of various developer startups, coding boot camps and sexual harassment in tech. Most recently, she was an editor on a Business Insider team investigation into the environmental and economic impacts of data centers that won the George Polk Award. Chan holds a bachelor of science degree in journalism and computer science and a master of science in law from Northwestern University. Thy Vo is an investigative editor for InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom covering the Pacific Northwest. She’s worked as a community journalist in the West for nearly a decade, covering government, politics, courts and immigrant communities for outlets like The Colorado Sun, Law360, The Mercury News and Voice of OC. Vo grew up in Anaheim, California, and now lives in Colorado. Yoohyun Jung is The Boston Globe’s data editor, leading a team of computational journalists focused on delivering compelling data-driven journalism. She was part of the Spotlight team honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2025 for its investigation on Steward Health Care, a troubled Boston-born hospital chain that ultimately collapsed. Previously, she was the deputy data editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she worked on some of the organization’s most ambitious data-driven storytelling projects. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jung began her journalism career in Arizona, where she worked for two of the state’s largest newspapers in Phoenix and Tucson covering numerous beats, including criminal justice and education. The post ProPublica Selects 11 Journalists for Investigative Editor Training appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Talia Buford.
Trump turning budget into a “collection of slush funds”
Higher Gun Ownership Linked to Higher Maternal Homicide Rates
In a November 2025 study, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers found the firearm homicide rate for pregnant women was 37 percent higher than the rate for nonpregnant women, as Nada Hassanein reported for Stateline. The study ...
In a November 2025 study, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers found the firearm homicide rate for pregnant women was 37 percent higher than the rate for nonpregnant women, as Nada Hassanein reported for Stateline. The study found that suspected perpetrators were mostly male for both nonpregnant… The post Higher Gun Ownership Linked to Higher Maternal Homicide Rates appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Ecuador journalist describes country’s role in deadly US boat strikes; Palestinians in Gaza mark 78th anniversary of Nakba displacement of Palestinians – May 18, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. 1870 map of Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela Journalist Galarza reports from Ecuador on deadly US strikes on boats, Ecuador military regime’s role; Organizers of Global Sumud Flotilla say 400 people taking part in 3rd humanitarian aid mission to Gaza, expecting Israeli interception; Palestinians in Gaza mark 78th anniversary of Nakba displacement of Palestinians during creation of Israel; World Health Organization declares International Health Emergency as fears grow of Ebola spread beyond Congo; Voting rights activists rally in Montgomery, Selma Alabama, say GOP redistricting could unseat 1/3rd of Congressional Black Caucus The post Ecuador journalist describes country’s role in deadly US boat strikes; Palestinians in Gaza mark 78th anniversary of Nakba displacement of Palestinians – May 18, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. Journalist Galarza reports from Ecuador on deadly US strikes on boats, Ecuador military regime’s role; Organizers of Global Sumud Flotilla say 400 people taking part in 3rd humanitarian aid mission to Gaza, expecting Israeli interception; Palestinians in Gaza mark 78th anniversary of Nakba displacement of Palestinians during creation of Israel; World Health Organization declares International Health Emergency as fears grow of Ebola spread beyond Congo; Voting rights activists rally in Montgomery, Selma Alabama, say GOP redistricting could unseat 1/3rd of Congressional Black Caucus The post Ecuador journalist describes country’s role in deadly US boat strikes; Palestinians in Gaza mark 78th anniversary of Nakba displacement of Palestinians – May 18, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Iranian TV Presenter Fires Gun At UAE Flag
Record 83.4 Million People Internally Displaced in 2024
A record 83.4 million people were displaced within their home countries at the end of 2024, according to the Diplomatic Courier. Regional conflicts, violence, and natural disasters force internally displaced persons (IDPs) to flee their homes, like ref...
A record 83.4 million people were displaced within their home countries at the end of 2024, according to the Diplomatic Courier. Regional conflicts, violence, and natural disasters force internally displaced persons (IDPs) to flee their homes, like refugees, but they don’t cross an international border. Diana Roy wrote for the… The post Record 83.4 Million People Internally Displaced in 2024 appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Brazilian TikToks Banned in US, Resulting in Censored ICE Criticism
An American journalist discovered that Brazilian TikToks are banned in the United States after his interaction with Brazilian federal police went viral. A February 11, 2026 article in Payday Report by Mike Elk described how he was detained in Brazil fo...
An American journalist discovered that Brazilian TikToks are banned in the United States after his interaction with Brazilian federal police went viral. A February 11, 2026 article in Payday Report by Mike Elk described how he was detained in Brazil for accidentally overstaying his visa, but officers merely fined him… The post Brazilian TikToks Banned in US, Resulting in Censored ICE Criticism appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Massive AI Podcasting Network Reusing Original News Content
News outlets are “ever more vulnerable to the systematized scraping of their articles for the generation of derivative content,” Alexios Mantzarlis reported in a February 2026 article for Indicator, which focused on an AI-generated podcast network know...
News outlets are “ever more vulnerable to the systematized scraping of their articles for the generation of derivative content,” Alexios Mantzarlis reported in a February 2026 article for Indicator, which focused on an AI-generated podcast network known as The Daily News Now! (DNN). Mantzarlis noted that this network generates roughly… The post Massive AI Podcasting Network Reusing Original News Content appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Framing Atrocity: Photojournalism and Press Freedom
First up, researcher and editor Michelle Eid joins the show to talk about literal framing when it comes to photojournalism, and how extractive dehumanizing journalism turns people’s pain and suffering into career-boosting material, perpetuating harmful...
First up, researcher and editor Michelle Eid joins the show to talk about literal framing when it comes to photojournalism, and how extractive dehumanizing journalism turns people’s pain and suffering into career-boosting material, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and bolstering the dangerous disconnect that allows atrocities to continue. Michelle highlights the importance of relationship building and archival work, but that how this work is done is critical. Next up, Mickey Huff and Eleanor Goldfield sit down to dissect some recent news that didn’t make the news, contextualize what press freedom looks like from the US to Sweden, and why AI should never be in charge of telling us what news is. The post Framing Atrocity: Photojournalism and Press Freedom appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
‘A $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer’: Trump to drop IRS suit in exchange for MAGA slush fund
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2243239645-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343553" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/a-1700000000-fraud-on-the-american-taxpayer-trump-to-drop-irs-suit-in-exchange-for-maga-slush-fund/u-s-president-trump-departs-malaysia-en-route-to-japan" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2243239645-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1706&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1706" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"3.5","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"ILCE-1M2","caption":"IN FLIGHT - OCTOBER 27: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Trump is in route to Japan after attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Malaysia, and will travel on to South Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1761578413","copyright":"2025 Getty Images","focal_length":"36","iso":"4000","shutter_speed":"0.004","title":"U.S. President Trump Departs Malaysia En Route To Japan","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="U.S. President Trump Departs Malaysia En Route To Japan" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2243239645-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “This is a massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2243239645-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. 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Trump is in route to Japan after attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Malaysia, and will travel on to South Korea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1761578413","copyright":"2025 Getty Images","focal_length":"36","iso":"4000","shutter_speed":"0.004","title":"U.S. President Trump Departs Malaysia En Route To Japan","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="U.S. President Trump Departs Malaysia En Route To Japan" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 27, 2025, in flight. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2243239645-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 15, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday accused US President Donald Trump of “orchestrating a $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies” amid new reporting on the terms Trump is seeking in talks to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. ABC News reported late Thursday that Trump is expected to drop his lawsuit in the coming days “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government. The president is also expected to receive a public apology from the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first White House term. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement that the reported settlement terms represent “another installment” in Trump’s “ongoing effort to turn the federal government into a personal cash machine for his unpopular extremist movement.” “This is a massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people,” said Raskin. “Worse still, this is only the beginning—a declaration that the prior payouts were just a down payment, and that he now intends to earmark billions more in taxpayer dollars for his political allies, sycophants, and private militia of unemployed insurrectionists.” “The president has no authority to conjure up billion-dollar compensation schemes or raid the Judgment Fund, which exists to settle valid lawsuits. Trump is systematically converting neutral government mechanisms into a presidential slush fund to build his army of political dependents,” Raskin continued. “Congress must act immediately to reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government.” According to ABC, which cited unnamed sources who emphasized that the settlement’s terms should not be considered final until officially announced, the deal is “expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.” “The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight,” ABC noted. “Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars.” ABC’s story came on the heels of reports earlier this week revealing internal Justice Department discussions on settling Trump’s lawsuit, which he filed in late January. Last month, a federal judge questioned the constitutionality of Trump’s suit, noting that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.” “Real story: Judge was about to throw out the case because Trump controls both parties,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) wrote late Thursday. “Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a ‘settlement.’ Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency.” “Mind-boggling corruption,” Goldman added. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jake Johnson.
Laws deny communities the ability to chart their own course.
Laws deny communities the ability to chart their own course. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Eleanor J. Bader.
Outlandish Merger of Giant Power Companies NextEra and Dominion is ‘Contrary to Public Interest’
Massive Florida-based power company NextEra Energy announced today its plan to acquire Virginia’s Dominion Energy, citing the growth of A.I. data centers as the impetus for the move. In response, Public Citizen Energy Program director Tyson Slocum iss...
Massive Florida-based power company NextEra Energy announced today its plan to acquire Virginia’s Dominion Energy, citing the growth of A.I. data centers as the impetus for the move. In response, Public Citizen Energy Program director Tyson Slocum issued the following statement: “This absurd proposal to merge two massive, well-capitalized utilities should be dead on arrival for state and federal regulators. Household customers have everything to lose and nothing to gain by allowing two behemoths, NextEra and Dominion, to merge. “The claim that the tie-up is needed to address data center demand is a false narrative; the merger will do nothing to increase generating capacity, let alone desperately-needed renewable generating capacity. These mega-utilities are merely using rising concern about data centers as an excuse to concentrate political and economic power of two giant utilities to maximize financial returns to shareholders. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state regulators should reject this outlandish, unnecessary merger as completely contrary to the public interest.“ This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergency
Cuba runs out of oil amidst suffocating US blockade
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="People walk on a street during a blackout in Havana on May 13, 2026. Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343546" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/cuba-runs-out-of-oil-amidst-suffocating-us-blockade/topshot-cuba-us-crisis-energy-blackout" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 8","caption":"TOPSHOT - People walk on a street during a blackout in Havana on May 13, 2026. Cuba blamed the United States for the "particularly tense" situation in its power grid on May 13, 2026, which has been plagued by prolonged blackouts, while Washington once again offered $100 million in aid to the island. (Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1778723249","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"TOPSHOT-CUBA-US-CRISIS-ENERGY-BLACKOUT","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="TOPSHOT-CUBA-US-CRISIS-ENERGY-BLACKOUT" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" People walk on a street during a blackout in Havana on May 13, 2026. Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> The UN has condemned the blockade as a violation of international law and an “extreme form” of economic coercion.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="People walk on a street during a blackout in Havana on May 13, 2026. Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343546" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/cuba-runs-out-of-oil-amidst-suffocating-us-blockade/topshot-cuba-us-crisis-energy-blackout" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 8","caption":"TOPSHOT - People walk on a street during a blackout in Havana on May 13, 2026. Cuba blamed the United States for the \"particularly tense\" situation in its power grid on May 13, 2026, which has been plagued by prolonged blackouts, while Washington once again offered $100 million in aid to the island. (Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1778723249","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"TOPSHOT-CUBA-US-CRISIS-ENERGY-BLACKOUT","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="TOPSHOT-CUBA-US-CRISIS-ENERGY-BLACKOUT" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" People walk on a street during a blackout in Havana on May 13, 2026. Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2275526486-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="780" height="218" data-attachment-id="277549" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/half-a-million-south-korean-workers-walk-off-jobs-in-general-strike/truthout-logo" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?fit=874%2C244&ssl=1" data-orig-size="874,244" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1634742558","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="truthout-logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?fit=780%2C218&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?resize=780%2C218&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-277549 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?w=874&ssl=1 874w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?resize=300%2C84&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?resize=768%2C214&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?resize=400%2C112&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?resize=706%2C197&ssl=1 706w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px" /> This article was originally published by Truthout on May 15, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Cuba’s government has announced that it has run out of oil. On Wednesday night, Cuba’s energy minister Vicente de La O Levy said that the country has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, and that the national grid is in a “critical” state. He further described how in the capital city of Havana, “the blackouts today exceed 20 or 22 hours.” “The situation is very tense, it’s becoming hotter,” he added, referring to the start of summer that brings a need for more energy. At the start of January, Trump halted Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba, following the U.S.’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and de facto takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry. Later that month, Trump imposed a total oil blockade on Cuba, imposing tariffs on countries that supply oil to the country, pressuring Mexico to stop its oil shipments to Cuba, and seizing oil shipments traveling to the island country. At the end of March, a Russian tanker arrived in Cuba carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of crude oil, breaking the U.S. blockade and temporarily easing the crisis. The crude was refined in April and provided relief for a few weeks. But this fuel has run out, Cuban officials explained. This was the sole shipment of fuel allowed to enter Cuba in more than four months. .Cuba began suffering from power cuts in 2019, after the first Trump administration imposed “maximum-pressure sanctions.” But since January, these have become more frequent and severe, at times lasting several days. Trump’s blockade has decimated Cuba’s universal health care system, causing deaths and forcing hospitals to close. Schools and government offices have also been forced to close. In February, the UN Human Rights Office warned that “Intensive care units and emergency rooms are compromised, as are the production, delivery, and storage of vaccines, blood products, and other temperature-sensitive medications.” “In Cuba, more than 80 percent of water pumping equipment depends on electricity, and power cuts are undermining access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene. The fuel shortage has disrupted the rationing system and the regulated basic food basket, and has affected social protection networks — school feeding, maternity homes, and nursing homes — with the most vulnerable groups being disproportionately impacted,” the statement went on. On April 30, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) wrote on X, “Cuba’s infant mortality has soared by 148% from the tightening of U.S. sanctions. This is every parent’s nightmare. I can’t fathom the heartbreak of the thousands of Cubans who have lost their babies because of a cruel and broken U.S. policy.” “It’s time to end sanctions on Cuba,” she added. UN human rights experts also condemned Trump’s blockade on Cuba as a “violation of international law” and an “extreme form of unilateral economic coercion.” Trump has frequently threatened that Cuba will be “next” after Iran. In March, he said he expects to “have the honor of taking Cuba,” and that “Whether I free it, take it – think I could do anything I want with it.” On May 1, Trump again said the U.S. will be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.” Republicans in the Senate have suggested that Trump focus on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Many have expressed that they hope Cuba’s government will fall from the U.S.’s economic sanctions, rather than direct military intervention. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported that more than 30 members of Congress sent a letter to Trump urging him against military intervention in Cuba, and to stop using the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay for detention of migrants. They warned that increased aggression on Cuba would lead to more migration from the island. The Trump administration has hoped its pressure would force “regime change” on Cuba, but has also been concerned about a rise in migration from the country due to its aggressive policies. On Thursday, Trump’s CIA director John Ratcliffe visited Havana, offering an aid package to help ease the effects of the blockade. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said that for conditions to improve, the U.S. should lift its blockade. Earlier this month, Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel responded to Trump’s comments, saying, “When they say we are an extraordinary and unusual threat to the United States — and we are sure that is not how the American people feel, but rather how the U.S. government feels, or the pretext that the U.S. government uses to attack us — one has to ask: What is the threat? What is extraordinary about that threat? What is unusual about that threat, when Cuba is a country of peace?” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Shireen Al-Adeimi.
WHO supports response as Ebola confirmed in DR Congo’s Goma LGBTIQ+ face mounting violence, discrimination: UN rights chief South Sudan: Families return to Akobo, aid resumes after conflict
WHO supports response as Ebola confirmed in DR Congo’s Goma LGBTIQ+ face mounting violence, discrimination: UN rights chief South Sudan: Families return to Akobo, aid resumes after conflict This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.
Inside CoreCivic’s Detention Camp for Children and Families in Dilley, TX
Russia carries out large-scale attacks on Ukraine
This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.
"Staggering Corruption": Rep. Raskin on Trump’s $10B IRS Lawsuit, Stock Trades & Family Business
Trump’s Christian Nationalist Agenda & Taxpayer-Funded DC Prayer Rally: Bishop Barber & Sarah Posner
As WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency, Did USAID Cuts Worsen the Crisis?
Behind the "Tic Tac" UFO Sighting of 2004
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 18, 2026
Türkiye condemns new Israeli ‘piracy’ against Gaza aid flotilla in international waters
Asia Pacific Report Türkiye has condemned Israel’s intervention against the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters, describing it as “a new act of piracy”, reports TRT World News. In a statement, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said Israeli forces had yesterday intervened against the flotilla, which was carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Three New Zealanders
Asia Pacific Report Türkiye has condemned Israel’s intervention against the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters, describing it as “a new act of piracy”, reports TRT World News. In a statement, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said Israeli forces had yesterday intervened against the flotilla, which was carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Three New Zealanders were reported to be facing illegal interception — including Hāhona Ormsby, Mousa Taher, and Julien Blondel — according to Sumud Flotilla statement. READ MORE: Israeli forces storm Gaza-bound aid flotilla off Cyprus Global Sumud Flotilla Live tracker Other Gaza flotilla reports The Turkish ministry said: “We condemn the intervention carried out by Israeli forces in international waters against the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was formed to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and which constitutes a new act of piracy.” The ministry noted that citizens from nearly 40 countries were on board the flotilla of more than 50 vessels and said Israel’s “attacks and intimidation policies” would not prevent international solidarity with the Palestinian people. It called on Israel to immediately halt the intervention and unconditionally release the detained participants. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-128000 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-Flotilla-LiveFeed-680wide.png" alt="A live tracker image showing the moment Israeli forces started boarding flotilla boats" width="680" height="383" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-Flotilla-LiveFeed-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-Flotilla-LiveFeed-680wide-300x169.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> A live tracker image showing the moment Israeli forces started boarding flotilla boats. Soldiers can be seen boarding a boat in the central image. Image: Global Sumud Flotilla screenshot APR The ministry also said Turkish authorities were taking necessary steps to ensure the safe return of Turkish citizens aboard the flotilla and were closely monitoring developments in coordination with other countries. Israeli military attack The Israeli army attacked the Gaza-bound Global Sumud humanitarian flotilla in international waters on Monday. Live broadcasts from the flotilla showed Israeli naval forces intercepting the vessels one by one. Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported that activists detained aboard the flotilla were being transferred to a navy ship described as a “floating prison” before being taken to the port of Ashdod. The Global Sumud aid flotilla demanded “safe passage” for its humanitarian mission to Gaza, accusing Israel of carrying out “illegal acts of piracy.” In a statement, the flotilla said Israeli forces attacked the first of its boats “in broad daylight” in international waters while military vessels intercepted the fleet. “We demand safe passage for our legal, non-violent humanitarian mission,” the statement said. A Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa statement in Auckland last night said three of the boats being illegally intercepted carried New Zealanders on board. They were reported to be: Hāhona Ormsby aboard the Diabolo Mousa Taher aboard the Kasri Sadabat Julien Blondel aboard the Abodes “This is an illegal interception of a peaceful humanitarian flotilla sailing under international law.” said Phoebe McLean of the Aotearoa Delegation. “We must speak out. We must protect our people. We must protect Palestine.” ‘Propaganda campaign’ In a background statement, the Aotearoa Delegation statement said this latest military interception followed a “coordinated week-long propaganda campaign” broadcast by state-controlled Israeli regime media outlets, and amplified by their own “self-proclaimed propaganda yacht filled with influencers spreading the israeli regime’s lies”. “This established playbook seeks to manufacture consent to carry out war crimes and crimes against humanity against an unarmed, non-violent civil society mission composed of doctors, journalists, and humanitarians.” The Global Sumud Flotilla legal team has formally stated that the participants are entirely unarmed, and any violence executed on these vessels remains the sole legal responsibility of the israeli regime. Active criminal investigations are moving forward across 20 countries, and individual liability will also be pursued in international courts for all forces “enforcing this genocidal siege”, the statement said. Also, the naval interception of the flotilla “occurs in tandem with an aggressive containment strategy on land”. The Global Sumud Land Convoy — comprising more than 30 vehicles, including 7 specialised ambulances and 20 mobile homes — has been halted near Sirte, Libya. Eastern Libyan authorities, reportedly acting under direct political pressure from Egypt, have positioned military forces to block the overland humanitarian route toward Rafah. <img decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-128008" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide.png" alt="A screenshot of Al Jazeera coverage yesterday as Israeli military storm the flotilla boats" width="680" height="409" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Israeli-navy-AJ-680wide-300x180.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> A screenshot of Al Jazeera coverage yesterday as Israeli military storm the flotilla boats. Image: AJ screenshot APR This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
CPJ urges European Commission to not invite the Taliban to Brussels
The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday called on the European Commission to scrap reported plans to invite the Taliban to Brussels. According to media reports, the technical talks would focus on the return of rejected asylum seekers and Afghans convicted of crimes. The European Union does not officially recognize the Taliban, and formal engagement...
The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday called on the European Commission to scrap reported plans to invite the Taliban to Brussels. According to media reports, the technical talks would focus on the return of rejected asylum seekers and Afghans convicted of crimes. The European Union does not officially recognize the Taliban, and formal engagement has been conditioned in part on compliance with international standards on human rights. “It is outrageous that, as the Taliban attacks the media, the European Commission extends an invitation to Brussels,” said Tom Gibson, CPJ’s deputy advocacy director, EU. “By doing so, it legitimizes a regime responsible for severe repression and censorship and strengthens their public relations as an international player. The European Commission must scrap such plans.” Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, it has forced the shutdown of independent media, imprisoned journalists, enforced strict surveillance, and censored the media environment. Journalists in the country work in fear, while much of the national media coverage has increasingly become propaganda for the Taliban. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
“Staggering Corruption”: Rep. Raskin on Trump’s $10B IRS Lawsuit, Stock Trades & Family Business
Donald Trump on Monday dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a leak of his personal and business tax records, a bizarre case of a sitting president suing his own government and essentially acting as both pla...
Donald Trump on Monday dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a leak of his personal and business tax records, a bizarre case of a sitting president suing his own government and essentially acting as both plaintiff and defendant. This comes amid reports that Trump’s Department of Justice was considering settling the case in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate victims of so-called weaponization of the DOJ under the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump allies who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol could file claims and be compensated. “They want a $1.7 billion slush fund, which comes to a million dollars a head in terms of Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways,” says Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who spoke with Democracy Now! shortly before news broke of Trump dropping the IRS lawsuit. Raskin last week introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which is geared toward curbing the president’s profiteering from public office. “Corruption is the whole purpose of the Trump administration,” says Raskin. “It’s not like some eccentric peripheral thing; it’s a vast money-making operation.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Trump’s Christian Nationalist Agenda & Taxpayer-Funded D.C. Prayer Rally: Bishop Barber & Sarah Posner
Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sunday for “Rededicate 250,” a taxpayer-funded Christian evangelical service backed by President Trump. The eight-hour lineup featured songs, prayers and rem...
Thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Sunday for “Rededicate 250,” a taxpayer-funded Christian evangelical service backed by President Trump. The eight-hour lineup featured songs, prayers and remarks by top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The event included religious leaders like evangelist Franklin Graham and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. “Nothing was Christian about what we saw yesterday,” says Bishop William J. Barber II. “This is idolatry. This is heresy. This is a form of religious nationalism. This is Trump worship. This is trying to make someone a messiah figure.” Barber, the president of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, took part in a counter-event on Sunday called Redirect 250. “This is really a battle for the soul of America,” says Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. The Supreme Court has eroded the separation of church and state in recent decades, particularly under President Trump, adds Posner. She also notes that “evangelicals, for decades, have been marinating in Christian Zionist theology and ideology, which holds that, in their view, America has a biblical duty to defend Israel, and in particular defend Israel from aggression, both nuclear and otherwise, from Iran.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on Saturday due to the rapid spread of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Ebola causes severe hemorrhagic fever and is often fatal. There’s no appr...
The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on Saturday due to the rapid spread of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Ebola causes severe hemorrhagic fever and is often fatal. There’s no approved vaccine for the strain of Ebola responsible for the current outbreak, known as the Bundibugyo variant. The WHO said in a statement that the outbreak is potentially much larger “than what is currently being detected and reported.” Public health professor and emergency room physician Dr. Craig Spencer, who is an Ebola survivor, says this Ebola outbreak could be the fourth largest in history. “This is going to be a really difficult outbreak to manage and respond to,” says Spencer. The ability of healthcare workers to address the outbreak in eastern Congo, “given the violence and conflict, is anything but ideal.” Spencer adds that cuts to USAID and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization have increased the likelihood for viruses to spread nationally and internationally, citing outbreaks of measles in the U.S. and Ebola and hantavirus abroad. “This is not all just a coincidence,” says Spencer. “This is a consequence of us cutting back our support.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Trump Escalates Threats Against Iran as Ceasefire Negotiations Remain Deadlocked, Israel Kills at Least Six People in Southern Lebanon, Including Three Paramedics, Israel Assassinates Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the Head of Hamas’s Military Wing, Israeli Cabinet Approves Plans to Build Military Compound at Former UNRWA Site, Israeli Forces Begin Intercepting Ships with the Global Sumud Flotilla, World Health Organization Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency, GOP Senator Cassidy Loses Primary After Trump Backs His Opponent, New Financial Disclosures Show Trump Made Between $220M and $750M in Securities Trades in 2026, U.S. Government Officials Participate in Taxpayer-Funded Christian Gathering on National Mall, U.S. Supreme Court Ends Redistricting Bid by Virginia Democrats, Thousands Rally in Alabama to Protest Lost Voting Rights, Long Island Rail Road Workers Strike After Wages Fail to Keep Pace with Inflation
Trump Escalates Threats Against Iran as Ceasefire Negotiations Remain Deadlocked Israel Kills at Least Six People in Southern Lebanon, Including Three Paramedics Israel Assassinates Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the Head of Hamas's Military Wing Israeli Cabinet Approves Plans to Build Military Compound at Former UNRWA Site Israeli Forces Begin Intercepting Ships with the Global Sumud Flotilla World Health Organization Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency GOP Senator Cassidy Loses Primary After Trump Backs His Opponent New Financial Disclosures Show Trump Made Between $220M and $750M in Securities Trades in 2026 U.S. Government Officials Participate in Taxpayer-Funded Christian Gathering on National Mall U.S. Supreme Court Ends Redistricting Bid by Virginia Democrats Thousands Rally in Alabama to Protest Lost Voting Rights Long Island Rail Road Workers Strike After Wages Fail to Keep Pace with Inflation This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Monday, May 18, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
[Full Uncut Conversation] Unions Can Save US Democracy Experts Say
Trita Parsi: Is Trump poised to restart the Iran war?
Quincy institute for responsible statecraft
Tehran believes Trump will attack in the next 48 hours — and is ready to counter-escalate, writes US-Iran affairs analyst Trita Parsi. ANALYSIS: By Trita Parsi The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran. Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday,
Tehran believes Trump will attack in the next 48 hours — and is ready to counter-escalate, writes US-Iran affairs analyst Trita Parsi. ANALYSIS: By Trita Parsi The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran. Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner. Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours. READ MORE: Iran says talks ongoing through Pakistan with a focus on ending war Israeli forces storm Gaza-bound aid flotilla off Cyprus Other Gaza and Iran “ceasefire” reports We should first recognise that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit– the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades. Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realise that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow. As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hardliners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness. Vindicated assessment In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp. Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets. First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities. Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon. At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China. This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures. Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use. Logic straightforward The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position. Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack. Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices. Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale. Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be. Trita Parsi is an Iranian-Swedish political analyst and foreign policy scholar specialising in Middle East geopolitics and US-Iran relations. He is the co-founder and executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Republished with permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Investigative reporter Tom Wright faces criminal defamation charge in Thailand
Mae Sot, May 18, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Thai politician Vorapak Tanyawong to drop his criminal defamation suit against Whale Hunting newsletter’s investigative reporter Tom Wright, and urges Thailand to reform its criminal statutes so that they cannot be abused to silence the press. Wright told CPJ that he faces criminal charges...
Mae Sot, May 18, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Thai politician Vorapak Tanyawong to drop his criminal defamation suit against Whale Hunting newsletter’s investigative reporter Tom Wright, and urges Thailand to reform its criminal statutes so that they cannot be abused to silence the press. Wright told CPJ that he faces criminal charges and $1.5 million in damages for Whale Hunting’s reporting alleging Vorapak is involved in a criminal network that launders funds from Cambodian online scam centers through Thai financial institutions. Vorapak resigned as deputy finance minister in October, days after Whale Hunting published its document-backed investigation. “Thai politician Vorapak Tanyawong must immediately drop his criminal defamation suit against Whale Hunting reporter Tom Wright, which is a textbook abuse of Thailand’s legal system to silence public-interest reporting,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Thailand must urgently reform its criminal defamation statutes so that powerful figures can no longer weaponize them against the press.” Wright, the corruption-focused newsletter’s Singapore-based co-founder, told CPJ that Whale Hunting “will not be deterred” and is “prepared to fight this in court to protect the truth.” Maximum penalties under Thailand’s punitive criminal defamation law carry a maximum two-year prison sentence. Journalists in Thailand are frequently targeted with Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), which are abusive lawsuits filed to silence critical reporting using lengthy, costly legal proceedings, rather than seeking to address actual wrongs. On May 22, hearings are due to begin in another criminal defamation case, where Kowit Phothisan, an editor with the local The Isaan Record, is facing charges for sharing on social media allegations of bribery, reported by his outlet, involving environment minister Suchart Chomklin. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
50 rights groups blast Meta for brazen policy reversal of Instagram end-to-end encrypted messaging
Fight for the Future, Access Now, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and other leading human rights organizations are demanding Meta immediately course correct and make good on promises to protect Instagr...
Fight for the Future, Access Now, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and other leading human rights organizations are demanding Meta immediately course correct and make good on promises to protect Instagram DMs with end-to-end encryption by default. Led by Fight for the Future, 50 human rights groups are expressing outrage over Meta’s decision to discontinue “opt-in” end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages, as well as its apparent reversal of plans to protect Instagram messages with end-to-end encryption by default. The groups sent <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfsVqLH3mMCAC8Hq-2BD5RKRHE5cAL7MVuFmg8ZJLluxCv-2BA2tt4Y5zRXLMhByToFb8zWUp8WRxT0r5bXg-2FXKQVlxUUICOnX5tLSfVVM6uLvpQQG-Us_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7LnkWuhZTGhg-2BwfHb-2FgyuKjfdaFRLsdpgxyvvBNZPOsg9xbNbSqwj1BA-2BDMu0w5UFzANqs0VhTOD2YOqc1DFbs1MxeoGM8GcM-2BwcJCSS9xd2J2IB9oXMiAfg-2FWp1ZttTbBnHyBg8bQxSfcJca9bRE85yd4JoT0SycLQgChuA-2BDgr-2F3" rel="noopener noreferrer" >a letter to Meta calling on the company to immediately course correct and follow through on promises to ensure users’ direct messages (DMs) are safe from third-party access. For the communities represented by the organizational endorsers of the letter, including activists, LGBTQ+ people, abortion seekers, journalists and other targeted groups around the world, privacy online is not “optional.” It’s a matter of life and death. Meta’s removal of “opt-in end-to-end encryption” for direct messages on Instagram—a feature only available to users in certain regions—<a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfskS-2B6IbzUuvoAoUHvDkf-2FKEaGV5K3ZPtAJA9yGz-2Fg4OJxfWtizb7hO4n3rbE0n1QjDL90xD1zjOttBib3QR5Az3bdAKiwh-2BjjMfQqyQRPhKFU0S2zdVcxdYt4Xme8OBjg-3D-3DUpaH_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7Lnmu-2BvSAnYdXYJz08CW5Fbv1VByLPgiJHt8E2aszPJpZIxBlSOlYLn9pqTHQ9RTfliNRPV0gKKBwa1LglDR3PjUOmSvtT-2BjmyZ-2BzrgVYOP4D3z1mau4n1a-2FdO7KPw1pzT1QNQiYsG-2F5RtmiHA4dItl2riPEswEZsDifxi2sXdygLV" rel="noopener noreferrer" >took effect on May 8, 2026. Meta has claimed the move was driven by “lack of interest from users.” The decision and rationale represent a complete reversal of Meta’s <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfr2w2esg0mP05DNHAtO-2BU4akxSToSo3x1yjbGpsoDGgpeo2ewsWQE0He3TMehUNVLw-3D-3DLfrd_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7LnmzEQ4WC5v7TakbPZMM8o2MvXpV-2FY1yZY9PxqOCpIbUSZ5KfD0ReP5IMQu1oqeRCiKLt6f5B7YuKBRJC1lV-2BYDLx5gTmcR9zyh-2BHl8RQsA0-2Bu9Pr2W2Gx2uAwuqNTIQglgKTV7sCvk9Ef-2F-2BV74HQdvGPBrxXqMrWHdkg4mtd4j-2FV" rel="noopener noreferrer" >well-established commitments to end-to-end encrypted communications, as well as its promises to make end-to-end encryption <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfsVqLH3mMCAC8Hq-2BD5RKRHEERDNAsEHxo4T7x-2BwXKxJXvjVoqCYpLqrNStBAWYPEdohUjQDhDJ4F5arpKkK8hSg491aKKeFgdloP41kd35JD4Bh-2FsXHLWYsJGe8QFEBdJw-3D-3D6usC_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7Lnr2ZEr6zRuei8NG7GbiWpxXeEsNt95pEThAZD-2FjzafEIury1Ovijs10fAgO51JjLD-2BUjmxIDozDWksr1MlnQZIN3ac2pJjzY-2FUpU-2F8QoinmCWt8BCyqaRl7bDl6Z4hd1nZyw8axNsKfE9wR8qQFUaERFaNIEZsz5-2FJsQ3GPMFLWN" rel="noopener noreferrer" >the default setting for Instagram messages. ”Meta has repeatedly articulated the importance of end-to-end encryption, sometimes mirroring the exact language our organizations have used for years to explain why online messages must be protected and private. Does Meta expect us to simply forget this history? Does the company expect us to accept the absurd justification that ‘users aren’t interested in E2EE’ when Meta knows very well we shouldn’t be forced to opt-in to life-saving privacy features?” said Leila Nashashibi, Campaigner at Fight for the Future. “Meta has defended E2EE in the past, even when it wasn’t politically convenient. Clearly the company’s political calculus has shifted. Is Meta axing its E2EE plans in order to curry favor with Trump, who wants unfettered access to our messages so his administration can spy on us and target us? Or does the company believe that the profit potential of violating our privacy and harvesting our most sensitive information—our private messages—is simply too great to pass up? We deserve to know the truth behind this total betrayal of users’ safety and privacy. We’re calling on organizations and users all over the world to reject this shameful move. If Meta wants to keep its Instagram users, it must make DMs safe NOW.” ”Secure E2EE messaging is a BASIC digital need and right. Several years ago, we joined in asking Meta to encrypt DMs. As Meta has acknowledged, privacy online is actually critical to people’s safety online AND offline. Now, Meta says they’re rolling this safety measure back after offering E2EE as a difficult to find optional setting? That’s so disingenuous and disappointing,” said Maya Morales of WA People’s Privacy. “If Meta wants people to use its platforms, it has to ensure that using them doesn’t actively endanger us. Without encryption, our personal conversations have been fed straight to government agencies or officials we might critique, to DHS/ICE, to data brokers, into AI models, you name it. This is not a trivial issue. Unsecured DMs can—and have—resulted in people’s entire lives being destroyed. E2EE should be the default setting for all apps that offer messaging, and AI should never be used in ANY messaging service without non-coerced, opt-in consent. If Meta’s not going to keep users safe, is it prepared for a mass-exodus?” Fight for the Future and a coalition of civil society organizations strongly applauded Meta’s implementation of <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfqyOoz8XoLdmAjiVvGu0qREjJQTr271fnAxeYn-2FSQs5TLSikE9s-2B4ydBmF1l7o1-2BGvA4-2F-2F-2FwIiiXOmhsr-2F9DaMSImbvJv8SfnEKvRQEn717urYdk_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7LniTOoTAejKwH9bfSrR1ISDXl0brwxXLDc9meUnB0IlpbbqDPeiZhDpZ6zGGXbuh70S6T7ffh5NSswJER3Mv1n84zFZDhdaFXIdXapf8h-2BUoLbvCiSwPXBk-2F9TqO-2FvjBaMxRaX52d66aBYce0YNynOPSrWF-2FeWTuhjMizNywvIAQu" rel="noopener noreferrer" >default end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger in December 2023. The move came after public outcry and pressure in response to Meta handing over unencrypted Messenger direct messages between a Nebraska teenager and her mother to law enforcement—messages that led to the teen’s <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfuEov8Wr5GxaA8PL74uyqgMhpCo8b5m3dzMq8hBaj7IClVNnNFfcr1-2BM9Hc1VvS2-2BhkZryq1iBnya738f4pIyjIeKwNDMc-2FOPyNC6L6ADjVRg9tJ_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7Lnn1P9COQMR97HBMM43ZDytwjTbQaIINmZxmsw2PyYi09aoAfNHEvrRbZrKiTlTKhb7oSCZT3rXKy0y3rNA8PQPbj-2B-2BSBU9IH-2FOtgfFfZm2rBJNG0Y7pK07pqtrYTExB1SsBPNq3KJyz07dWH6iaMiEHrw66anPp5q3iDZM8Fm5ds" rel="noopener noreferrer" >prosecution for choosing to have an abortion. In the months preceding the December 2023 announcement, Rob Sherman, VP and Deputy Chief Privacy Officer for Policy at Meta, <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfsVqLH3mMCAC8Hq-2BD5RKRHEERDNAsEHxo4T7x-2BwXKxJXvjVoqCYpLqrNStBAWYPEdohUjQDhDJ4F5arpKkK8hSg491aKKeFgdloP41kd35JD4Bh-2FsXHLWYsJGe8QFEBdJw-3D-3D8qlH_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7LnoL9poX8YnHry3UJM96qLNLUl8wqO5iwqI4QxSgbryaJDFwnViOX7JR6Lf4-2B9hJ6xKhHPPaKTwrFm241Eq6PCtlBms-2F95sGXModDPl20oe8foUYkSCqIY2WCjWFoZCCMJKxhfiA32tldJIYClC-2BRkRn528gqiWvay-2F-2B5wfBPjIMn" rel="noopener noreferrer" >sent a letter to Fight for the Future stating: “We remain committed to rolling out default end-to-end encryption for private conversations on Messenger in 2023, and shortly afterwards for Instagram.” In the the letter, Mr. Sherman notes: People expect technology companies to provide the best security to protect their personal information, and we believe end-to-end [encryption] is an important component of building trust with our users because it: Promotes a fundamental right to privacy, which allows loved ones to communicate without fear. Helps prevent both serious and common crimes like hacking and identity theft. Enables journalists, civil society, religious groups, scholars, and artists to exercise their rights to free and private speech without surveillance or retaliation. Meta’s backtracking on its end-to-end encryption commitments comes on the heals of yet another disappointing decision: On May 5, Meta <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.QxU2xauAJ9nFZczvGsewfoCO6l-2BAQKnRtY-2B-2FYNgaY4yBTymj92ZeDwRs5qRJBGr-2Fwqt0cwVlxn0q3o6q-2Bm6EkFl-2BfQspVz44CP83ozA-2B6-2F68S6uWuRFGmFHkq5MX4gzQoT1TqLk-2BqpLwbcJ7-2FhwusRujJqKeXO1Giofi-2BLucwPBh-2BpbEji50UAL2jC-2FL2gkktnocLR3XbelW3mRCmFlYo-2BblvrmWNn0yiGeE2X4ofbS83lHWnRq-2F2D-2B4VSxhv1HXJTqOS8WydddsP7JXe8o-2BHkP97Bl-2BO-2FdfdCLRF0NcuMYyNIj7tKTo9-2FCDs9cXIXL9WnjervmRdDqc9YdWh8hKGjmayGnpO6wCi9raI5veUb0Rd18CQ5h3o6jSvLAY3wnYm7lt4OP7Qlhz52jCGkA7ic8FXs5wzYAz4xW9HxaC-2FW-2BroePXrNz0MvryEHC7x9-2FvGvSiAhEl5jkUyq6sSlTiWMt4M04DYcCxx8GtYrL-2B3aYPVgUpn4UKAT-2FsEyxPTj1VoTXzG3suTyiSN76iRM6kS-2B8ghRehqmSoFBsctIt24NXQeAFUQ2Kz1K9ZOBmtsf2A-2FmBYppAqpxa7rWvhqGtqoL75L6LTSsAN1B0Z3rPv4ubrgS-2FdFbbZsdpBUfDuJ9-2BPP6NrIQlwoM4RnjX8eVACBkWVLWBFfpMzWuUTaU8A2aRDJgFsYwZSt1qPw1KynncWfJ3-2BxVxo7ALsihwB-2FanAj0Wf9nELNmatMWvbJ7HX3i409JsRBgi6YZw297tOD-2BDKIxreBttmmtcGTPe999snWrq4R6Q57YNUN9bLwJa6T913BCCe5bc-2B2n-2BGt1MCWbw89iqrtBjgh76-2BjgFSRn1bp4sUDetSmw3ap2fSCJwOU5i1JimrEnVcDioXna1HlRHLaVB9l1w026ihnIpW6E82mN7nc0OvmTp0L1t0huTK9HM39KfC4zBrJvuK2NRDhFTtYrsgbthf3wZopTaCM9G1pG-2FItG38dZTU8PYKs1SwrQw-3Dzhaj_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPZ7CvygO9jxiRAMn5pClU-2B15cpW0Q3-2B2OjlGBmEGDqVtpIec0xRqBb5EkWv5lkuxUih-2BzoOSDC196JpLVVFQuvSkyEB3FeWNhOGaNV37az6tEHo-2FIF5qTLniiuOXvIAkREIH2ySq39Zw9bgvNBmrHJxYChgFWLSazPTXSiwW7LnpRuz2zsaE8X34dP6rtwdzgXr3lpcvlc-2FqVpmUmBoTTQ-2BYeDCAoT38ibuUL5TR3zlO-2Fqh3-2FCMUZshnjlJEZ6J5ZaxqfHeL-2FgnXVCcCSMy6q7Qt0F28yjLE8IjnIzDj2v7FFGr24EAIR0GRCPFeGNQx-2FKERsvlTf1ZtsijcuVbUAl" rel="noopener noreferrer" >announced that the company will be “developing” a tool that can determine a user’s age based on visual, physical characteristics. Under the guise of kids safety, this will mean scanning every single picture posted on the platform to determine people’s ages, with no guardrails. Fight for the Future has been warning for years that online ID checks in all of its forms, regardless of the public relations term in use (age assurance, age verification, age estimation) is a censorship and privacy nightmare that will lead to Big Tech companies cobbling together even more information about users of all ages. This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help.
The post Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help. appeared first on ProPublica.
The Meredith family, from left: Lakely, Fletcher, Mitch, Kara and Tennessee Katie Campbell/ProPublica It was their dream home, a newly built, 2,500-square-foot modern farmhouse with a playroom that Mitch and Kara Meredith had saved for 12 years to buy for their growing family. During construction, family members had written their favorite Bible verses on studs throughout the house. For four idyllic years on Darlene Lane, the couple hosted birthday parties for their two young daughters, who became fast friends with the other children in the recently built subdivision in Fort Gibson. Film Screening Join The Frontier and ProPublica in Tulsa on May 20 for a public screening of a documentary film featuring the Meredith family. Then one evening last summer, five weeks after the couple’s third child was born, their bathroom flooded. When their 7-year-old ran into the garage to report that water was all over the floor, Mitch assumed a pipe had burst, or perhaps the toilet was backed up. Then he entered the bathroom. A thick, black fluid with an oily sheen covered the floor. Kara yelled from their bedroom for him to come quickly; the same substance was flowing out of the floor next to their bed. Mitch, along with several family members, fought the flood all night, vacuuming up the sludge and emptying buckets out the window. Black goo covered their arms. Shiny rainbow patterns covered their shoes. After pulling the bathtub away from the wall, Mitch saw that the substance was gushing through the house’s foundation. It was clear this wasn’t a plumbing problem. Last August, dark, oily fluid came up through the floors of the Merediths’ house and flooded their bathroom, bedroom and closet. Video collage by ProPublica. Photographs and videos courtesy of the Meredith family. Around 5 a.m., Mitch’s uncle turned to him. “I think this is oil,” he said. The family called the fire department, and Kara rushed their three children, including their infant, to her grandmother’s house. “And that’s the last time we got to be in our home,” Mitch said. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="720" height="960" js-autosizes data-id="77849" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" alt="A man, a woman holding a young girl, and another girl stand together in the snow, posing for a photo in front of a large house that is being built." class="wp-image-77849" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 720w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,563 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,736 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,744 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,703 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143356_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,533 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" /> Mitch, Kara and their two daughters, Tennessee and Lakely, as their house was being built. “We assumed we were getting a perfect house,” Mitch said. Courtesy of the Meredith family <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="657" height="876" js-autosizes data-id="77858" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg" alt="A wooden stud in a house has the words written on it: “When you pass through deep waters, I will be with you. When you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, the flames will not set you ablaze.”" class="wp-image-77858" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 657w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,563 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,736 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,744 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,703 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260224_143402-PDcrop_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,533 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 657px) 100vw, 657px" /> The Merediths invited family members to write Bible verses on the studs of the house. “Our faith is what’s most important to us, and we wanted to put that into the bones of the house,” Kara said. Courtesy of the Meredith family <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1003" width="752" data-id="77850" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A pregnant woman takes a photo of herself with her phone in the mirror of her bedroom, with one hand holding her belly." class="wp-image-77850" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 2250w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,1024 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1152,1536 1152w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,2048 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,1151 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,563 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,736 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,744 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,703 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,1003 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,1532 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,1600 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,533 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,1067 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,2133 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111803_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,2667 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1003" width="752" data-id="77851" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A man sitting in a large chair sleeps with a baby boy on his chest. A deer head is mounted on the wall above him." class="wp-image-77851" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 2250w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,1024 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1152,1536 1152w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,2048 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,1151 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,563 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,736 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,744 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,703 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,1003 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,1532 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,1600 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,533 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,1067 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,2133 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_20260427_111859_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,2667 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> The couple’s third child, Fletcher, was born in July 2025. Forty days later dark, oily water surged through the foundation of their home. Courtesy of the Meredith family The Frontier and ProPublica’s reporting on oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma over the last year has shown how old oil wells abandoned by the industry pose severe public and environmental health risks. Officially, the state lists 19,000 orphan wells that state regulators are responsible for cleaning up, but the true figure is likely over 300,000, according to federal researchers. State records suggest that the Merediths’ house may have been built on top of an improperly plugged oil well drilled in the 1940s. And on that fateful Saturday last August, something woke it up. Mitch drilled a hole into his home’s concrete foundation in hopes of diverting the sludge out of the house and into the yard. It worked: The foul-smelling water began to pour out of the cavity, filling a deep trench they had dug. Many of their possessions were ruined. A strong smell of gas hung throughout the house, permeating clothes, sheets and mattresses. After leaving Darlene Lane, the family moved four times in four months — at times paying their mortgage and rent simultaneously. At the outset of the crisis, the family had pinned most of their hopes on the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the regulatory agency responsible for overseeing oil and gas — including pollution from the industry and plugging old wells. They wanted the agency to figure out what happened — and help them clean it up. It did not take long for their hopes to transform into anger. In a September call, Mitch argued with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission about his case. Courtesy of the Meredith family State regulators, according to the family, have done little to help them. “They wanted to act like it would go away,” Mitch said. In October, more than a month after the flooding began, Jeremy Hodges, the director of the commission’s oil and gas division, met with Mitch and Kara at the house. He told them that when his team stuck a gas reader into the hole in their bathroom floor, where the oily water continued to flow, it showed gas concentrations at explosive levels, according to a recording that the Merediths provided to The Frontier and ProPublica. The local public works authority had also brought out a gas reader. It found gas levels that constituted a “serious and immediate hazard,” according to a report. Old, unplugged wells — like the one that state records indicate is near or possibly under the Merediths’ house — are known to leak gas and toxic fluids. Hodges also told the couple that the agency would likely have to tear down the house to look for the well and plug it. Subsequent sampling conducted by the commission showed salt readings that suggested the presence of wastewater resulting from the production of oil and gas. Other testing by the state’s environmental quality department found elevated levels of heavy metals commonly found in oil field wastewater including barium and bromide. Mitch took his own samples and paid an environmental lab to test them. The results also pointed to oil and gas pollution. Mitch didn’t realize when his family rushed out of their house last August that they wouldn’t be able to return. Katie Campbell/ProPublica But as the months wore on, the agency never stated explicitly that the mysterious substance contaminating the Merediths’ home was the byproduct of oil and gas production. It simply referred to the pollution as “water” in public statements. In a packed town hall in March convened after the family began criticizing the agency on social media, community members grilled Hodges and several other high-ranking agency representatives about the Merediths’ situation for two hours, pressing them about the environmental risks and demanding action. About half of Oklahomans live within 1 mile of oil and gas wells. “Would you live there?” a woman in the audience asked Hodges. “I’m not going to answer that,” he responded, prompting jeers from the crowd. “So you’re saying that you don’t want to answer the question of whether you would actually live in that house?” asked Mitch’s brother, Matt Meredith. “That’s a hypothetical,” Hodges said. “I’m not going to answer that.” “God, we just continue to pray that you will put a heavy conviction on these people’s hearts, and that they would do the right thing,” Kara prayed before a town hall meeting held by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to discuss the pollution on the family’s property. Katie Campbell/ProPublica Homeowners facing such an event should file damages with their insurance companies, Jim Marshall, an administrator with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, said from the front of the community center conference room. But the family’s insurance company had denied their claim last fall — citing exclusions for pollution and water damage — without ever inspecting the damage, according to the Merediths’ attorney. The Merediths have sued American Mercury, their insurance company, which did not answer questions about the case because of pending litigation, as well as their developers, who did not respond to requests for comment. At the public meeting, Marshall suggested underground water sources could be pushing fluid into the home, noting that the Merediths’ neighborhood once contained several ponds. If the culprit is not oil and gas, that would shift the responsibility for cleanup to other state agencies. Marshall, Hodges and an agency attorney repeatedly told the crowd that with the house likely blocking access to the well, the agency had reached the end of its legal ability to help the Merediths. Jack Damrill, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, did not answer questions about what the agency thinks is causing the pollution but said it “recognizes the seriousness of the concerns raised regarding the Meredith family matter, as well as the broader public interest.” The agency, he said in a statement, has “devoted significant investigative time, technical expertise, and regulatory resources to reviewing the situation and will continue to evaluate any new, relevant information as it becomes available.” Last week, Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill introduced by the Merediths’ state senator, Avery Frix, that would create a fund to compensate homeowners whose houses have been damaged by oil and gas pollution. While hopeful that the legislation will help them, Mitch noted that it requires the commission to confirm the presence of an old well, something the agency has yet to do at the Merediths’ home. On Darlene Lane, the flow of contamination increased in late April and continues to seep into their neighbor’s yard. “What I’ve begged for from the beginning is for them to help me contain it,” Mitch said. “They have refused to do anything.” Nine months after they were forced to flee their dream home, the family of five is crammed into a 900-square-foot, two-bedroom bungalow on Mitch’s parents’ farm where the couple had lived as newlyweds. The girls share a bunk bed. The baby sleeps in Mitch and Kara’s room. The Merediths are staying in a house that’s less than half the size of their Darlene Lane house. “It’s been tough on them,” Kara said of her daughters. “They don’t understand how we can’t just go buy a new house. We have a mortgage on a house that’s uninhabitable.” Katie Campbell/ProPublica The girls often ask to play with the neighbors they had to leave behind, along with many of their possessions. Their toys still line the shelves of their bedrooms in the house on Darlene Lane, awaiting their return. Wet clothes sat in the washer for months. Half-packed boxes are scattered around the floor, evidence of the family’s panicked retreat last August. The house is stuck in time, like a museum of the Merediths’ old life. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="423" width="752" data-id="78788" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A dark bedroom, dimly lit by light from the windows. Sheets and pillows are on the bed, disheveled, and water is pooled on the floor." class="wp-image-78788" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 1920w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,576 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,485 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,237 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,311 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,314 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,296 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,423 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,646 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,225 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,450 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,675 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still001_middle_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,900 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="423" width="752" data-id="78789" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A pair of cowboy boots." class="wp-image-78789" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 1920w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,576 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,485 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,237 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,311 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,314 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,296 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,423 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,646 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,225 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,450 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,675 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still013_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,900 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> Kara and the children avoid visiting the house on Darlene Lane because of the methane fumes and the emotional toll. Katie Campbell/ProPublica <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="423" width="752" data-id="78790" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A doll lies in a doll bed, lit by a window behind it, with several household items around it." class="wp-image-78790" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 1920w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,576 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,485 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,237 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,311 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,314 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,296 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,423 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,646 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,225 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,450 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,675 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still010_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,900 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="423" width="752" data-id="78791" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A deer head mounted on a wall, with a wilted houseplant on the furniture beneath it." class="wp-image-78791" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 1920w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,576 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,485 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,237 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,311 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,314 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,296 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,423 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,646 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,225 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,450 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,675 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Meredith_OilHouse_Still005_lighter_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,900 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> “We’re in a position where we can’t move on,” Mitch said. “We know we’re going to lose the house. Everything we worked for is gone.” Katie Campbell/ProPublica Mitch took matters into his own hands, drilling a hole in the side of the house to drain the fluid. He dug a pit and installed a sump pump to divert the flow into an aerobic septic tank. As of late April, the cloudy contamination was still flowing out of the house. Katie Campbell/ProPublica Help Us Report on the Impact of Oil Field Waste in Oklahoma Toxic wastewater from oil fields keeps pouring out of the ground in Oklahoma. For years, residents have filed complaints and struggled to find solutions. We need your help to understand the full scale of the problem. Share Your Experience The post Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Nick Bowlin.
Monday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD
Monday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4 and was authored by Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4.
Tiny Footprints, a Blue Blanket: What I Can’t Forget About the Babies Who Died of Vitamin K Deficiency
The post Tiny Footprints, a Blue Blanket: What I Can’t Forget About the Babies Who Died of Vitamin K Deficiency appeared first on ProPublica.
Footprints of an infant in an autopsy report from Arizona Obtained and redacted for privacy by ProPublica I recently wrote about babies dying from a rare but fatal condition called vitamin K deficiency bleeding. To report the story, I analyzed hundreds of rows of data, contacted more than 50 hospitals and birthing centers, and filed nearly 90 public records requests. But autopsy reports — one record of how these babies died — painted the clearest picture of these tragedies. I’m sharing some of the most critical lessons I learned from the autopsy reports in hopes of creating a greater awareness of this condition and highlighting what decades of research and interviews with dozens of doctors found: In almost every case, the deaths could have been prevented with a simple shot of vitamin K at birth. ProPublica is not sharing the babies’ names, the dates or years of death, or the locations within a state to protect the families’ privacy. Read More Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth Babies need vitamin K to help their blood clot, but they aren’t born with enough of it in their system. Two researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for their discovery of vitamin K and its ability to form clots and stop bleeding in babies, and the vitamin K shot has been a standard intervention for newborns in the U.S. since the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended it more than 60 years ago. But in recent years, parents have started refusing the shot. Although the vitamin K shot is not a vaccine, it has become entangled in the anti-vaccine movement. False and misleading information online has led some parents to believe the shot is harmful. In addition, some parents have voiced a desire for a more natural birthing experience, one without pharmaceutical intervention. And some simply don’t want their babies to go through the pain of an injection that they don’t believe is necessary. Hospital data and research studies have documented this shift. In December, a national study of more than 5 million births found that the rate of babies not receiving vitamin K jumped 77% from 2017 to 2024. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that newborns who don’t get the shot are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding. In many cases, there are no warning signs. The babies are healthy and happy just days and sometimes hours before they suffer catastrophic bleeding. 1. The role vitamin K deficiency played in the babies’ deaths <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="720" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=752" alt="A heavily redacted medical document with personal information, including names, dates and locations, obscured by black bars. Under the “Manner” section, “Natural” is checked. Under “Cause,” two lines are highlighted in yellow: “1: Vitamin K deficiency bleeding” and “2: Postnatal vitamin K prophylaxis not received.”" class="wp-image-77444" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 2407w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,287 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,735 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,980 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1470 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1960 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,826 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,404 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,528 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,534 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,504 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,720 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,1099 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1672,1600 1672w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,383 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,765 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,1148 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1531 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence1-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1914 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> An infant’s autopsy report from Minnesota Obtained and redacted for privacy by ProPublica Not all deaths are investigated by a medical examiner or coroner, but I filed open records requests in several states and counties to obtain those that were. One of the first things that stood out was how clear the role of vitamin K was in many of the cases. Vitamin K deficiency was listed in the autopsies as the immediate cause of death or as contributing to it. Details about parents refusing the vitamin K shot also were usually included. In this autopsy from Minnesota, the medical examiner determined the baby died of vitamin K deficiency bleeding. The second line included the fact that vitamin K was not received as part of preventive care after the baby was born. Seeing vitamin K deficiency listed as a cause of death was important because it removed doubt that the bleeding could have been caused by another factor, such as an injury. The other autopsies I examined also used similar language. One of the challenges around vitamin K deficiency bleeding is the data. State and federal agencies don’t track which babies don’t get the shot and which babies suffer bleeds or die. Many medical experts told me that the number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K — fewer than a dozen annually — are only part of the story. Hundreds of babies die every year from spontaneous bleeding in the brain. Some of those deaths, these experts said, likely are related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding. This has led doctors to call for better reporting and tracking. 2. What items accompanied the babies <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="331" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A snippet of black text on a white background containing three descriptive lines. The first line is numbered “10” and mentions a hospital name band on a right ankle, with the baby’s name redacted by a black bar. The second line states that the “body is dressed in a dry and unsoiled disposable diaper weighing 20 g.” The final line, centered below, notes that a blue blanket accompanied the body." class="wp-image-77445" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 2071w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,86 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,221 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,295 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,443 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,590 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,249 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,122 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,159 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,161 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,152 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,217 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,331 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,577 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,115 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,231 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,346 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence2-V3_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,461 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Autopsy reports reviewed by ProPublica often included lines about what items the infants arrived with. Obtained and redacted for privacy by ProPublica Most of the autopsies didn’t just list medical findings. They contained summaries and descriptions, including a baby’s weight, length, hair and eye color. One of the details that struck me is what the babies came to the morgue with: a hospital band around the ankle, an unsoiled diaper, a blue blanket. It reminded me of Tim O’Brien’s classic collection of linked short stories, “The Things They Carried,” about what soldiers take with them, both physically and emotionally. These items were a heartbreaking reminder that these babies were just that — babies who had yet to take their first step or kick their first soccer ball. 3. What the babies endured <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="240" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A short paragraph of black text on a light gray background titled “Opinion.” The text describes a 1-month-old infant diagnosed with hemorrhagic disease of the newborn following a home birth without supplemental vitamin K. A sentence is highlighted in yellow: “The autopsy revealed subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhage with cerebral edema and necrosis of the brain.” The paragraph concludes by noting that no obvious inflicted trauma was identified." class="wp-image-77446" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 2330w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,63 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,161 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,214 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,321 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,428 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,180 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,88 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,115 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,117 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,110 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,157 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,240 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,418 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,84 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,167 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,251 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence3-V2_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,334 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Some reports, like this one from Alabama, described intracranial bleeding. Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica The autopsies described, often in painstaking detail, what the babies endured. In this case of a 1-month-old from Alabama, the autopsy found that the baby had suffered subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhage, which are types of bleeds that occur in different areas immediately on top of the brain. The first, subdural, occurs when blood collects under one of the layers of tissue inside the skull that protect the brain. A subarachnoid bleed occurs in the space below a different layer. A cerebral edema is a type of swelling in the brain, and necrosis of the brain is the death of living brain tissue. The autopsy also described the cause as “hemorrhagic disease of newborn,” the previous name of vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which some clinicians still use. Autopsies are official records and often are written as such. I reached out to pathologists and other doctors to help me understand and translate the medical terminology. As agonizing as it was, it was important to document. Our job as reporters is to bear witness to the truth, as distressing as it may be. 4. How hard doctors tried to save them <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="201" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A snippet of black text on a light gray background, labeled with the letter “f.” The text reads, “At the time of hand-off, he again coded and was worked on for thirty to thirty-five minutes before resuscitative efforts were stopped at the request of infant’s parents.”" class="wp-image-77447" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 1512w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,52 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,134 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,179 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,151 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,74 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,96 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,97 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,92 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,131 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,201 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,70 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,140 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence4-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,210 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Many of the reports cited the attempts by doctors to save the infants’ lives. Obtained by ProPublica Some of the autopsies had a section titled “Evidence of Medical Intervention.” In it, the pathologists described what steps the doctors and nurses took to try to save the babies. Doctors inserted tubes into the babies’ airways, connected them to IVs, ordered blood transfusions. It’s an excruciating section to read because if things had gone differently, the baby may have survived. In this case from Kentucky, the medical team attempted several lifesaving measures. Still, the baby coded twice. Doctors were able to resuscitate him the first time, but the second time, after about half an hour of trying to bring him back again, his parents finally told them they could stop. 5. How tiny the babies were when they died <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="742" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=752" alt="A pair of black ink footprints from an infant centered on a white page. Above and below the footprints are several rows of official form fields and identifying information, all of which have been redacted with solid black bars." class="wp-image-77448" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 2334w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,296 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,758 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,1010 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1516 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,2021 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,852 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=70,70 70w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,416 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,545 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,551 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,520 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,742 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,1134 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1622,1600 1622w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,395 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,789 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,1184 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1579 1600w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Evidence5-V1_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1973 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> An infant’s autopsy report from Arizona Obtained and redacted for privacy by ProPublica The autopsies underscored just how preventable these deaths could have been. Seeing the tiny footprints of one of those babies in the autopsy records is a haunting reminder of that. Parents frame their baby’s footprints to hang on the wall or tuck into keepsake boxes. The footprints often elicit a rush of happy memories. But when those footprints appear in autopsy records, they transform into a tragic reminder of how tiny the babies were when they died. Are You a Family Member, Doctor, Nurse or Midwife? I want to understand more about why families decline a vitamin K shot. I know how difficult it is to talk about losing a child and how hard it can be to process this kind of grief. Words can’t express how sorry I am for your loss. ProPublica’s goal is to give the public the best, most trustworthy information. If you have a story to share, I hope you will reach out to me when you’re ready. Duaa Eldeib Send me your tips, stories and documents. Reach me by email or securely on Signal at 312-730-4797. I take the protection of my sources extremely seriously. Contact Me The post Tiny Footprints, a Blue Blanket: What I Can’t Forget About the Babies Who Died of Vitamin K Deficiency appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Duaa Eldeib.
Utah’s fragile desert could feel like the Sahara if America’s biggest data center gets built
The Great Salt Lake is drying up. What happens when a data center as large as a city sits next to it?
Plans for a celebrity-backed “hyperscale” data center in rural Utah, so massive that it would consume more than double the state’s current electricity use, have generated an intense public and political backlash in a state where the motto is “industry” and a Republican supermajority tends to be deferential to development. The project, brought by “Shark Tank” TV personality Kevin O’Leary, would span 40,000 acres, demand 9 gigawatts of power once completed, and raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64 percent, according to estimates. While its water needs remain unknown, the sprawling data center would neighbor the northernmost tip of the shrinking Great Salt Lake, which will likely hit a record-low elevation this year following an unprecedented dry winter. It could also create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University. Davies estimated that the finished project would cover about as many square miles as Washington, D.C., making it the largest data center on the planet, and that it could produce enough heat to spike nighttime temperatures by as much as 28 degrees Fahrenheit in the high-desert valley. “I suspected it would not be good,” Davies said. “What I’ve found is, it’s so much worse than I even thought it would be.” News of the proposed data complex, dubbed the Stratos Project, became public in April after the three commissioners of Box Elder County, the mostly agricultural community that would host it, approved the project. They pointed to the project’s approval by more powerful state agencies and asserted that stopping it was out of their hands, while refusing to hear comments from more than 1,000 people who showed up to share their concerns. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, has since walked back some of his full-throated support. “Many are asking questions about water, air quality, energy, land use, and the long-term impact on rural Utah,” Cox wrote in a thread on X earlier this month after intense public outcry over the project. “Those are real concerns, and all Utahns should expect clear standards and accountability.” The controversy in Utah is a stark illustration of a wider trend. Across the United States, data centers are drawing bipartisan backlash as communities clash with tech giants and developers over strained water supplies and spiking energy costs. At least two other massive data campus projects are proposed elsewhere in Utah, but they have not received anywhere near the pushback as the Stratos Project. Many opponents have pointed to efforts state leaders have made in recent years to support water conservation — Utah is among the driest states in the country — and the state legislature’s multi-million dollar investments to help the Great Salt Lake refill. The lake’s drying bed has already become a source of toxic dust threatening the health of millions of residents living on the Wasatch Front, Utah’s urban core. It seems contradictory, then, to build a potentially water-intensive and explosively hot industrial development right next door to such an endangered and iconic spot. “The greed behind this deal is clearly blinding the officials to just how much is at stake for the rest of us,” wrote Monika Norwid of Salt Lake City, one of the Utah residents who sent comments to the state’s Division of Water Rights protesting the project. “I refuse to let this greed imperil our already fragile wildlife, I refuse to allow some useless technology steal the rest of our insufficient water for a project that is way beyond the scale of this area.” In an interview with CNN, O’Leary downplayed the environmental impact of his project, saying Stratos is “not going to destroy air quality” and “not going to drain the Great Salt Lake.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kevin-OLeary-2274830964.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="An investor, Kevin O'Leary, has both hands up while in conversation." data-caption="Kevin O’Leary attends Consensus Miami 2026 at Miami Beach Convention Center on May 06, 2026 in Miami Beach, Florida. " data-credit="Romain Maurice / Getty Images"/> Kevin O’Leary attends Consensus Miami 2026 at Miami Beach Convention Center on May 06, 2026 in Miami Beach, Florida. Romain Maurice / Getty Images Austin Pritchett, a cofounder of West GenCo, the developer partnering with O’Leary Digital Limited on the project, said that they plan to purchase roughly 3,000 acre‑feet of on‑site water rights and already have around 10,000 acre‑feet under contract from the nearby town of Snowville if needed. Added together, that’s enough water to supply the basic needs of more than 20,000 Utah households. Utah’s Division of Water Rights has only received one application for the project so far — to transfer 1,900 acre-feet currently used for irrigation by the Bar H Ranch. That application was pulled last week, but a representative with the ranch said it will refile and “fully intends to move forward with the project.” A division spokesperson said they anticipate more applications from the data center developers soon. Some scientists worry the project’s power demands and resulting heat island effect will transform its high-desert climate into something more akin to the Sahara. Stratos would build its own power plant, state supporters have said, and its fuel will likely come from a corridor carrying natural gas from Wyoming to Nevada, Oregon, and California called the Ruby Pipeline. O’Leary specifically chose Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley to build the complex because the pipeline spans it, state officials have said. “It could generate power at a significant level,” said Paul Morris, executive director of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a powerful quasi-governmental state agency that provides tax incentives for development, during a public meeting in April. “This location was picked because of the gas pipeline.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/3TD3NG4DBNE2BCN3P3HQZBVUU4.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Hansel Valley, a rural area in Utah" data-caption="Utah’s Hansel Valley, on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. " data-credit="Rick Egan / The Salt Lake Tribune"/> Utah’s Hansel Valley, on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. Rick Egan / The Salt Lake Tribune Davies, the physics professor, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations to better understand the sheer scale of the 9-gigawatt project. And what he’s penciled out so far has him alarmed. “Nine gigawatts, that’s a number that’s really challenging to get your brain around,” the professor said. ”Communicating the scale has been a real problem.” The entire project will actually produce roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal energy, according to Davies. It starts with the massive on-site power generation, which will generate 7 to 8 gigawatts of waste heat just producing the needed electricity for the data center, since gas plants are only about 57 percent efficient. And once that electricity reaches the data center, every watt will turn into pure heat, because anytime a gadget consumes power, it converts it into heat, Davies explained, whether it’s a toaster, a car, or a sprawling rack of computer servers. Typically, waste heat from end uses of electricity is dumped far from a power plant, in homes, businesses, or on roads where it dissipates. In this case, the Stratos project will release roughly 16 gigawatts of thermal energy into Hansel Valley, according to Davies. That trapped thermal load is the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day,” Davies said. That doesn’t mean the project would wipe out the landscape with an explosion or release dangerous nuclear radiation, but the heat it creates could devastate the local ecology. “What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high-desert environment? A valley?” Davies thinks dumping that much heat into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by 5 degrees F during the day and up to 28 degrees at night. “That’s the difference between Utah’s semi-arid climate and the Sahara Desert,” said Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University who has reviewed Davies’ estimates. “This would absolutely change the landscape.” Evaporation would spike. The dew point could collapse, with devastating consequences on wildlife, plants, and the fertility of land owned by other ranchers in the valley, Abbott and Davies said. Abbott suspects Hansel Valley would become another source of dust on the Wasatch Front, in addition to the exposed and drying lake bed of the shrinking Great Salt Lake. “I’m happy to be further educated. Maybe I’m getting something wrong here,” Davies said. “But that is kind of the point, right? You literally have a hyperscale project that is getting no due diligence.” Salt Lake Tribune reporter Samantha Moilanen contributed to this story. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utah’s fragile desert could feel like the Sahara if America’s biggest data center gets built on May 18, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Leia Larsen.
“MIN JIBAAL” ~ The Sounds of a Kingdom𐩘ᐂ𐄘 recordings from JORDAN ᐂ𐄘 official teaser
Gas prices are rising. So is public transit ridership.
Mass transit systems are seeing more riders as fuel prices rise, but experts say most Americans still have little choice but to drive.
Higher gas prices are bringing some Americans back to public transit. The increase in ridership comes as the war in Iran has disrupted oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, pushing the national average price of gasoline beyond $4.50 per gallon. In California, drivers are paying more than $6.15 per gallon on average. Rising fuel prices have historically pushed at least some Americans toward buses and trains, particularly commuter rail. But experts caution that decades of car-oriented development and inconsistent transit funding still leave most people with few practical alternatives to driving. For those reasons, ridership is rising most sharply in places with robust transit systems and steep fuel prices. California is a clear example. Transit agencies in San Diego, Los Angeles County, and the San Francisco Bay Area have seen ridership jump in recent weeks. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency –– which, like others in California, received an emergency loan from the state in February –– saw its highest ridership totals since the pandemic in March. Mark Olson, a spokesman for the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System, said gas prices probably drove the 6.5 percent jump in ridership it experienced in March compared to the previous year. Until the agency surveys riders, however, that remains an educated guess. “A lot of our riders are low income, and certainly gas prices can be much more sensitive to lower income residents and riders,” Olson said. In an effort to court riders, the agency, which faces a $500 million budget deficit over the next four years, has launched a commute calculator that compares the cost of driving and public transit. Michael Roccaforte, a spokesman for the San Francisco MTA, said it is too early to link higher gas prices to ridership increases, but called the return of riders to Muni — which has undergone speed and reliability upgrades in recent years — “a promising sign.” “It’s a service that really matters to everyone here in San Francisco,” he said. The ridership gains aren’t limited to California. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in the Washington, D.C. and Valley Metro in Texas also reported increases. Intercity passenger rail operators Amtrak and Brightline have seen a boost, too. The trend mirrors past research showing that sustained increases in fuel costs can push some people toward public transit. Hiroyuki Iseki, an urban studies and planning professor at the University of Maryland, co-authored a study on how gasoline prices affect public transit in 10 cities between 2002 and 2011. He found that when gas prices climbed 10 percent over the course of 13 months, light rail ridership increased by 1.2 percent and bus ridership by 0.8 percent. Iseki’s study also found psychological effects as gas prices passed different thresholds. For example, when gas prices rose by 10 percent and topped $3 per gallon, ridership of all forms of mass transit increased by about 1.2 percent. A 10 percent increase that pushed prices beyond $4 led to a 9.3 percent jump for light rail. “Usually the people who use commuter rail, take rail only for commuting, just one round trip between home and their work location,” Iseki said. “Commuter rail, the travel distance is longer than other transit trips, so the longer the distance of travel the more pricey the gasoline cost.” Some people are better positioned to leave their cars at home, said UCLA urban planning professor Michael Manville. Those with access to commuter rail, which tends to be time competitive with driving, might make a change. But the more likely outcome is people continue driving to work and make shorter or fewer trips or even cut back on other expenses, he said. That’s because of the cognitive hurdle often required to make a switch to mass transit. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Look, I’m just not going to drive quite as much as I used to in a discretionary way,’” Manville said. “It’s quite another for the typical person to then say, ‘I’m not gonna drive to work. I’m gonna figure out how the bus works.’” There is a societal challenge as well. The U.S. has since the end of World War II made cars the focal point of city planning. “We made a bunch of policy decisions that turned them into bad masters, but they are also good servants,” Manville said of automobiles. “You throw the family in them, and you don’t have to worry about the chaos of your kids and all their stuff.” A fundamental shift from car travel to public transit would require better-funded systems that offer greater reliability and convenience. Transit has accounted for less than a third of federal transportation funding since 1956. As of 2017, 87 percent of trips in the U.S. were taken by car. Federal policy has an enormous impact on who does and does not have access to something like commuter rail. Elisa Ramirez, who works on policy for Transportation for America, would like to see the federal government treat mass transit as a core priority with consistent funding. Until that happens, car travel will likely continue to be the dominant mode of transport. “Time is money, and even though people can afford a $2 fare, they can’t afford to be late for work or miss doctor’s appointments,” she said. “For most Americans, driving is not optional, and that’s my big thing. How much does gas impact people moving to transit? First we need to have reliable transit.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gas prices are rising. So is public transit ridership. on May 18, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Benton Graham.
Israel becomes world’s most disliked country, global survey finds
Middle East Monitor Israel is now perceived more negatively than any other country in the world, according to new global polling published by Nira Data as part of its 2026 democracy and country perception research. The five most positively perceived countries were Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden and Italy. The findings place Israel at the bottom
Middle East Monitor Israel is now perceived more negatively than any other country in the world, according to new global polling published by Nira Data as part of its 2026 democracy and country perception research. The five most positively perceived countries were Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden and Italy. The findings place Israel at the bottom of the Global Country Perceptions 2026 ranking, a survey of 46,667 respondents assessing how 129 countries and three international organisations are viewed around the world. READ MORE: As Israel becomes a global pariah, leaked Meta data reveals soaring costs for its brands Israel to spend $730m on propaganda as global image collapses over Gaza genocide Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’ Other Gaza and war on Iran reports The ranking was published alongside Nira Data’s 2026 Democracy Perception Index, which surveyed 94,146 respondents across 98 countries on how citizens experience democracy in their own countries. The result marks another sign of Israel’s deepening international isolation amid its genocide in Gaza, mass displacement of Palestinians, starvation policies and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, and attacks on Lebanon in breach of a so-called “ceasefire”. Israel’s global image has collapsed as human rights organisations, UN experts and international courts have warned of grave violations of international law by the occupation state. The United States has also suffered a dramatic collapse in global standing. The US is now ranked among the five most negatively perceived countries in the world, below both Russia and China in international favourability. Its net perception score fell from +22 per cent in 2024 to -16 per cent in 2026, a 38-point drop in just two years. Growing anger over Trump US decline came amid growing anger over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, including strained relations with NATO allies, aggressive tariffs, threats relating to Greenland, cuts to Ukraine aid and Washington’s role in the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. The survey found that the US is now viewed as a major global threat, behind Russia and Israel. The wider 2026 Democracy Perception Index describes itself as the world’s largest annual democracy survey. Unlike expert-based democracy rankings, it asks citizens directly how they experience democracy through questions on elections, freedom of speech, political pluralism, civic education, separation of powers, rule of law, government transparency and peaceful transitions. The collapse in Israel’s standing comes as global public opinion has shifted sharply against the occupation state over its assault on Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, destroyed most of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, displaced nearly the entire population and imposed conditions that UN experts and genocide scholars have described as genocidal. For the US, the findings point to the steep cost of Washington’s continued military, diplomatic and political support for Israel. While successive US administrations have shielded Israel from accountability at the UN and continued arms transfers despite mounting evidence of war crimes, the survey suggests that global publics increasingly associate American power with impunity, double standards and destabilising wars. Republished from Middle East Monitor. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Illustrator and author Yumi Sakugawa on unlearning the self-punitive model of making art
What have you been meditating on recently?
What have you been meditating on recently? One of the ideas I’ve been meditating on lately is what does it mean to be colonized? In the inverse, what does it mean to decolonize, to reindigenize? I’ve only recently started grappling with those questions in wanting to connect more with my Okinawan side and thinking about the history of Okinawa being colonized by Japan and how the colonization of Okinawa relates to the colonization of other colonized people in other places in the world. Thinking energetically, what does colonization do to your spirit? In turn, how can we reclaim what was taken from us? Not in the sense of faithfully recreating what was in the past, but to claim our agency while also paving new patterns for the future. What is your process for acquiring inspiration? It’s a mix of receptivity as well as listening to my intuition. It’s improvising with the universe and then there may be a stray idea or suggestion. Then I follow that rabbit hole and see where I end up. I love the idea of improvising with the universe. Have most of your creative projects come out of that play? Yes, I think so. Most of my published books were not planned. A lot of my published books are the results of me making a web comic because I really wanted to excavate a certain feeling or making a zine because I wanted to delve more into my meditation practice. And then just very serendipitously, they ended up becoming books. One example in particular is my book, Fashion Forecasts, which is about futuristic Asian American intergenerational fashion designs that’s also a little silly. That started as me wanting to make silly fashion designs out of boredom. And then that all accumulated serendipitously into being able to exhibit the artwork generated at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries building through the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, which then became a zine and an exhibit where my friend actually made these fashion designs come to life through costumes on mannequins, which eventually became a book. A lot of my artistic career was very unplanned; they came as a result of me wanting to put work out there based on my interests. Do you have a strong intuition of what to say yes to, what to say no to? When do you say no to something? I definitely have a strong intuition as far as what to say yes to, what to say no to. I am pretty committed to having a daily meditation practice, which expands your intuition the more you do it. I’ve also done a lot of therapy and self-help, so I’ve unpeeled the layers of people pleasing and unlearning the tendency to say yes to things and overfilling my plate. Also I’ve done a lot of work as far as being more somatically attuned to my body. Listening somatically to when my body says yes and when my body says no. I generally follow that somatic intelligence of how my body feels when confronted with a choice. When something is a no, it’s like my body constricts or I feel flat and I don’t feel any nudge or curiosity, and so I know to not do the thing. What does a yes feel like? A yes can feel like different things. There is a sense of an opening, a feeling of ease, a feeling of excitement, but also sometimes it may feel intimidating. There may be that somatic gaslighting, like your lizard brain being like, “No, this is scary.” But there is this other layer of inner intelligence that says, “Well, let’s still explore this.” Ultimately it’s the sense of opening and wanting to move forward. Fear and excitement can feel very similar somatically, but that’s when you have to investigate further. To your point, is it regressive or is it progressive? It’s hard to tell sometimes. Absolutely. But the more you practice exercising your discernment, it gets so much easier with time and practice and repetition. I’m curious about your relationship with failure and how you internalize your lessons. Tell me about how you learn. I feel like the only failure is not doing anything, not trying. Even if things don’t go as planned… I can’t think of anything in my creative life that would necessarily be categorized as failures. I see them all as experiences, experiments, and data points to then glean from for future experiences. My friend wanted to know—she’s a Sagittarius—do you identify with being a Sagittarius? Absolutely! The aspect of Sagittarius energy I have always related to the most is the love of freedom and autonomy and deep hatred of anything that takes away my freedom and autonomy and personal space. The other stereotype of Sagittarius energy is that they’re very brash truth tellers. I was very shy and introverted and quiet and socially awkward as a kid. I didn’t relate to that as much but as I become more my own person, I relate to that brash Sagittarius energy. And of course, I love traveling, I love novelty, I get bored easily, I love big picture thinking over detail oriented thinking. I have that joyful, lucky optimism that’s associated with Sagittarius energy, and I feel like I do have a lot of abundance and luck in my life. I love being a Sagittarius and I love other Sagittariuses. Tell me more about your recent obsession with Human Design. Human Design is like astrology on steroids. My knowledge is pretty cursory; I know the most about my own archetype, the Manifestor. Manifestors, like the name implies, are all about channeling ideas and making them a reality. Whereas other archetypes, for example like Reflectors, are about holding space and reflecting other people’s energies in a container and helping people find themselves. Projectors, I get the impression that when they’re invited to do a task, that’s where they thrive. And Generators thrive in doing stuff constantly, keeping busy. The thing I relate with Manifestor energy is that we are capable of bringing ideas from the realm of ideas to bring them towards reality, but we don’t necessarily have to be the person that then does all the nitty-gritty of finalizing the thing into completion. In a revolution, not everybody should be a leader. You also need planners and people who can feed everyone. So I love this idea of everything being collaborative. It eliminates this very common widespread notion of the artist as a solo genius. Tell me about your relationship with collaboration. I’m glad you brought up the myth of the solo isolated artist because I definitely remember believing in that when I was younger and also when I was an undergrad at art school. In later years, I was able to unlearn that. Even though on paper it seems like I’m working alone a lot, I’m still in collaboration. For example, if I want to sell my zines in public spaces, I’m collaborating with the independent bookstores I like to distribute my work. If I publish a book, then I’m collaborating with the publisher, my literary agent, and then that whole ecosystem of booksellers and bookstores who bring my book to other people. I’ve definitely collaborated with friends on facilitating workshops together, as well as co-authoring a zine or co-hosting events. I am very picky about who I collaborate with. It comes down to, again, that somatic knowing of, “Okay, this person vibes with me. We’re on resonant frequencies and we understand each other.” When you have that baseline, everything else falls into place pretty quickly. What is your relationship with wellness? How do you define wellness in your day-to-day? Wellness for myself these days is embodying an ongoing sense of wholeness and excitement. It’s whatever contributes to that feeling of wholeness and also excitement to live your life. Depending on what you’re going through in your life, that can mean different things. I remember a time in my post-college adulthood feeling like I didn’t have a close network of friends. So at the time my wholeness was finding and cultivating really good friendships. Most recently, I turned 40, so I’ve been thinking a lot about proactively being really healthy in a way that is also sustainable and not self-punitive. Making an effort to cook healthy meals for myself, being physically active, prioritizing sleep, and being protective of my energy. It’s also really important to recognize the greater societal structures that we are in, especially the oppressive structures. Because with mainstream wellness, it falls into the trap of hyperindividualism and throwing money at a problem to feel better about yourself. A more holistic view of wellness has to include a critical analysis of the oppressive systems and the historical factors that made these oppressive systems possible and how supremacy culture is the backbone of so many beauty standards and insidiously shows up in conventional expectations and aspirations of wellness. There’s this Malcolm X quote: “When ‘I’ is replaced by ‘we,’ even illness becomes wellness.” I feel like modern wellness is so divorced from this sense of community wellness and I love what you said about how it’s not about restriction. You teach a webinar about discipline as pleasure—discipline as something that’s not restrictive, but rather pleasurable. What is your relationship and philosophy around discipline? I wanted to unlearn toxic ideas around discipline, especially as it pertains to creative practice, because many of us associate discipline with restriction, self-punishment–forcing yourself into working towards a “better version of yourself.” I tried doing discipline with those mindsets and it did temporarily work in the sense that I did generate a lot of art and accomplish impressive things, but it wasn’t sustainable in the sense that I was constantly in the state of feeling that I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t working hard enough. There was always this horizon I was chasing rather than acknowledging and celebrating where I was in the present. And so I really wanted to reframe the idea of discipline, not just in creative practice, but in general. We also have childhood associations with discipline. And as a child, you likely experience discipline as a form of punishment, restriction, your freedom, and autonomy being taken away, you being forced to do something that you didn’t want to do. There are other people who experience the inverse of that where they had no discipline or structure in childhood, so then they grow up into adults and they have no idea what it means to give yourself discipline and structure in a way that isn’t self-punitive or restrictive. I aim to reframe discipline as self-love, something that you give to yourself because you desire to prioritize something that is important to you, whether that is creative practice or having more time to do the hobbies that you love, or to spend more time with loved ones, or to treat your body really well because you really value your body. The other is to reframe discipline as devotion. What does it mean to be devoted to your creative practice? That completely changes the energetic frequency of whatever activity it is that you’re doing. When you replace discipline with devotion, it becomes an ongoing journey, a curiosity, a relationship. The other thing that really helps me in reframing discipline as it pertains to creative practice is that ultimately it’s about deepening your relationship to yourself, as well as your creative practice, as well as the art that you are generating. So when I think of discipline as a relational model, then it’s not so much, “How can I work harder?” The question then becomes, “How can I connect more deeply with myself? How can I connect more deeply with my creative practice? How can I show up better in this relationship that is important to me?” It inevitably will make your art stronger as well because you are connecting deeper with those parts of yourself. Have you surprised yourself with the creative things that have come out of this practice? Unlearning the self-punitive model of making art also comes with getting older. I’m so much less attached to proving myself to an external barometer. I’ve been able to reclaim the actual fun of being creative. I am pleasantly surprised by how much I was able to release these more egoic attachments to making art. It’s not about proving I have the right to be an artist. It’s more this desire to generate work I desire to share with other people. It’s not so much begging people to give me validation and proof that I’m allowed to be an artist. It’s now coming from a much more generative place where I’m thinking more, “What do I desire to share with the collective and how can I think, be of service to that?” What is that intersection of my passions, interests, curiosities—the ideas and principles and paradigms I glean from to alchemize in a way that is then transmitted to the collective? Yumi Sakugawa recommends: Get the BRICK app. You’re welcome. The most recent (as of April 2026) season of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End and Jujutsu Kaisen. IYKYK Table at the next AZN ZINE FEST if you are an Asian diasporic zine-maker or have never made a zine and need an excuse to do so. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici HONNO PARK in Okinawa. Small art gallery and store tucked away on the second floor of a nondescript building next to a park run by cool people. This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.
Illustrator and author Yumi Sakagawa on unlearning the self-punitive model of making art
Illustrator and author Yumi Sakagawa on reframing discipline as pleasure
How North Korean Hackers Stole $570M in Crypto in 4 Months
Thom Beanal – saluting a human rights legacy for Papua’s ‘father’
ANALYSIS: By Laurens Ikinia in Jakarta The eighth floor of the Tempo building in Jakarta became the setting for a gathering rich with meaning. What brought together community leaders, politicians, academics, religious figures, journalists, and the family of the late Thom Beanal was not merely a book launch. It was an earnest attempt to revisit
ANALYSIS: By Laurens Ikinia in Jakarta The eighth floor of the Tempo building in Jakarta became the setting for a gathering rich with meaning. What brought together community leaders, politicians, academics, religious figures, journalists, and the family of the late Thom Beanal was not merely a book launch. It was an earnest attempt to revisit the essence of struggle, leadership, and hope for the land of Papua. The event, which took the form of a discussion and review of a three-volume book series on Thom Beanal, opened with greetings in multiple traditions — from an Amungme war cry to salutations representing all major tribes in Papua. READ MORE: Tom Beanal, the true indigenous of Papua ‘They’re wiping us out’ – church leader warns about young West Papuans killed in escalating conflict Papuan women ‘living in fear’ condemn military violence Other West Papua reports That gesture alone reflected the very spirit of the man being honoured: a leader who embraced diversity and respected every single man and woman. The gathering coincided with three historic moments, making it even more significant. First, it marked exactly 27 years since Thom Beanal, standing before President B. J. Habibie, boldly expressed the heartfelt desire of his people. With courage and clarity, he called for recognition as a nation that wanted to cooperate honestly, peacefully, and democratically. Second, the event served as a memorial, three years after Beanal’s passing — a man who left a deep imprint on the struggle of Indigenous Papuans. Third, it celebrated the culmination of two years of work by a writing team, resulting in a trilogy that chronicles the journey of a lay pastor, a tribal chief, and what many now call a “father” to the indigenous Papuan. From lay pastor to Indigenous defender Thom Beanal was no ordinary leader. Born on 11 July 1947 into the Amungme tribe in Timika, he completed his education from primary school to a Catholic theological academy, then served as a catechist teacher in Wamena and Paniai and as a lay pastor in several parishes. Yet behind his calming smile and disciplined demeanour lay a profoundly thoughtful mind. Witnessing firsthand the human rights abuses and ecological destruction caused by PT Freeport Indonesia, Beanal resigned from his pastoral duties. He felt a more urgent calling: to defend indigenous communities whose lands and lives were being uprooted. In 1994, he founded LEMASA, the Amungme Traditional Deliberative Council, as a vehicle for indigenous advocacy. Two years later, he took an audacious step — suing Freeport in a New Orleans court. That legal action set a precedent: for the first time, a Papuan had dared to take on a multinational giant on foreign soil. His fight did not stop there. Beanal went on to push for a one percent allocation of mining revenue for affected communities. Although limited in scope, that achievement brought a measure of justice to people who, for decades, had borne the negative impacts of mining without enjoying the wealth of their own land. Reform era and a unique role Entering the reform era, Beanal’s role expanded. Together with other Papuan figures and students, he helped establish FORERI, a forum that channelled Papuan aspirations during the early wave of reform. When the Papuan Council (Dewan Papua) was formed in 2000, he served as its vice chairman. He later became chairman of the Papuan Traditional Council from 2002 to 2007. Remarkably, President Abdurrahman Wahid — known as Gus Dur, a leader with genuine concern for justice in Papua — appointed Beanal as a commissioner of PT Freeport Indonesia. Serving until 2018, Beanal found himself in a unique position: an indigenous rights fighter sitting on the board of the very company he had long opposed. Yet despite those strategic roles, speakers at the book launch event described Thom Beanal as a humble man, disciplined and rich in metaphor. He never offered instant answers. Instead, he opened spaces for collective reason to search for truth. In every balance of history, he arrived precisely when the Papuan people were not in a good state. And sadly, three years after his passing, the reality facing Papua remains far from encouraging. A grim reality for Papua today The presentations at the Tempo building painted a grim picture. Terms like genocide, ecocide, and ethnocide were mentioned as ongoing threats to Indigenous life. Papua’s gold and other natural resources, it was argued, remain mortgaged until 2061 under a contract deemed uncivilised because it ignores the basic rights of the customary landowners. Suffering, the speakers said, is still the daily bread of Papuans. It is against this backdrop that the three books on Thom Beanal were written — not to lament the past, but to read the present clearly and to weave solutions for the future. The 47 contributors to the third volume, divided into six sections, provided reflections and testimonies that enrich the books. They came from diverse backgrounds: family members, prominent figures of the Amungme tribe, academics, activists, and religious leaders. The head of the writing team, Markus Haluk, expressed his highest appreciation to everyone who supported the two year process. Moral support and advice from religious, traditional, and political leaders were cited as a key source of strength. Special thanks were directed to the book’s reviewers, including Dr Budi Hernawan, Dr Suraya Afiff, Yorrys Raweyai, Inayah Wahid, and Emanuel Gobay, for their critical engagement with the content. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-127944" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Thom-Beanal-book-launch-Jubi-680wide.png" alt="A celebration of Thom Beanal's human rights legacy in Jayapura" width="680" height="502" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Thom-Beanal-book-launch-Jubi-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Thom-Beanal-book-launch-Jubi-680wide-300x221.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Thom-Beanal-book-launch-Jubi-680wide-80x60.png 80w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Thom-Beanal-book-launch-Jubi-680wide-569x420.png 569w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> A celebration of Thom Beanal’s human rights legacy in Jayapura in February. Image: Jubi Six strategic demands for the future More than a launch, the event became a platform for six strategic recommendations and hopes. First, the books should serve as historical source material and references for young Papuans and the wider public. The concern that the struggles of national figures might vanish with time underscores why documentation and dissemination are so urgent. Without conscious efforts to write and spread the stories of past heroes, dark chapters could repeat, and the sacrifices of predecessors might become meaningless. Second, the book launch was not meant to be a time for complaining or blaming one another. Instead, it is time to speak honestly about Papua’s current realities and then collectively formulate comprehensive, strategic solutions. This constructive mindset is a legacy of Beanal’s way of thinking — seeing problems as challenges to be solved, not excuses for despair. Third, participants were called to continue the prophetic voice exemplified by several great figures. Mentioned were bishops such as Monsignor Staverman, Monsignor Monninghoff, Monsignor Laba Ladjar, Monsignor John Philip Saklil, Father Neles Tebay, Monsignor Yanuarius You, and Monsignor Bernardus Baru OSA. Among executive leaders, two presidents known for their deep concern for Papua — B. J. Habibie and Gus Dur — were hailed as models of dignified, peaceful struggle. The goal is noble: to save the people, culture, and natural world of Papua, which remains the last remaining lung of the Asia Pacific region. Achieving this requires genuine solidarity across sectors and religions. Fourth, a firm call was directed at the Indonesian government, especially President Prabowo Subianto and relevant ministers: stop the mortgaging of Papua’s natural wealth, stop the gold theft, and stop the destruction of the universe that is the Papuan people’s home. The contract binding Papua until 2061 is seen as a form of structural injustice that must be corrected. Rejection of all forms of natural resource pledging for the benefit of a few — especially to foreign parties — was voiced loudly before dozens of attendees. Fifth, recognition of and respect for the rights of the Papuan people over politics, land, natural resources, and human dignity are non negotiable demands. The threats of genocide, ethnocide, and structural violence must be halted immediately. The absence of genuine recognition of these basic rights has been the root of decades of conflict and suffering in the land of Papua. Sixth, and perhaps most fundamental, is the call to build honest, peaceful, and democratic negotiations between the Papuan people and the Indonesian government. This is not a new idea. It is precisely what Thom Beanal himself voiced when he stood at the State Palace on 26 February 1999. He laid before the president the sincere desire of his people, offering equal dialogue based on honesty and peace. Twenty seven years later, the same call must be repeated — proof that a massive homework assignment still lies before the Indonesian government. Continuing the struggle, not grieving The subsequent discussion session opened the floor for strategic ideas from participants. The emphasis was that this gathering was not for grieving or lamenting fate, but for continuing the struggle. Attendees were encouraged to step out of their comfort zones and contribute according to their capacities. An academic might contribute through critical research, a journalist through balanced and in-depth reporting, a politician through pro-people policy advocacy, a religious leader through moral and spiritual reinforcement, and an artist through works that raise awareness. The event closed with a beautiful, touching metaphor drawn from Thom Beanal himself. He once reflected on the rain that welcomed his funeral in Timika. In his poetic logic, he hoped that the words spoken by those who continue his struggle would water the still thirsty soil of the fight. The land of Papua, with all its natural wealth and cultural diversity, has long been like an arid field waiting for the rain of justice, recognition, and respect from the wider Indonesians. A test of national commitment The gathering at the Tempo building ultimately served as a test of Indonesia’s national commitment. Do we truly want to learn from a figure like Thom Beanal? Can we draw wisdom from the journey of a lay pastor who left his religious duties to pursue social justice? Do we have the courage to admit that for decades, systematic structural injustice has occurred in Papua? And most importantly, do we possess the political will to stop all forms of exploitation and violence, and to build equal, dignified dialogue? The trilogy on Thom Beanal, launched that day, is not merely a collection of stories from the past. It is a mirror for understanding today’s reality, and a compass for stepping into the future. It is a document of courage from a child of the nation who chose not to remain silent, despite great risks. It is a legacy for young Papuans so they do not lose their historical roots, and for young Indonesians outside Papua, so they do not lose empathy and a sense of justice. In the end, the gathering affirmed that Thom Beanal’s struggle is unfinished. His legacy still needs many hands to carry it forward. Amid threats of genocide, ecocide, and various forms of structural violence, prophetic voices like those modelled by the bishops, priests, and presidents who dared to side with justice are still desperately needed. Will the Indonesian government listen? Will today’s leaders — including President Prabowo Subianto and his ministers — respond to the call to stop mortgaging natural wealth and to start honest, democratic negotiations? These questions still hang in Jakarta’s hot air, while in Timika, the rain may continue to fall, waiting for the words that can water the still thirsty land. Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta. He is also an honorary member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 17, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 17, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 17, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Ukraine Hits Moscow Region, Four People Killed
Meet the Lebanese rescue workers being targeted by Israel
Strait of Hormuz ‘open’ except for enemies, as new Iran insurance regulatory plan touted
Asia Pacific Report Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is “open to all except its adversaries”, and any passage through the trajectory of this significant chokepoint should be coordinated with the Iranian military, reports AL Jazeera. Sources say the number of ships transiting through the strait has slightly increased, but is still very low compared
Asia Pacific Report Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is “open to all except its adversaries”, and any passage through the trajectory of this significant chokepoint should be coordinated with the Iranian military, reports AL Jazeera. Sources say the number of ships transiting through the strait has slightly increased, but is still very low compared with pre-war times, reports Tohid Asadi from Bandar Abbas, a city on the strait. Asadi has filed several exclusive reports from the strait area in the past few days. READ MORE: Drone hits UAE power plant; Israeli attacks on Lebanon continue Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’ Other Gaza and war on Iran reports He reports that Iran also said it was critically important for the US to lift the blockade on Iranian ships as a condition that could be taken into consideration when it comes to taking the strait into a normal situation. Iran says it will soon reveal its plan to manage traffic ⁠through the strait, including the charging of tolls, while Trump has warned Tehran will have a “very bad time” if a peace deal is not reached soon. On Saturday, Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, said his country would no longer allow “enemy” military equipment to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Tohid Asadi reporting from the Strait of Hormuz. Video: Al Jazeera insurance-based framework The Lebanese-based satellite news service Al-Mayadeen reports that Iran is advancing an insurance-based framework to manage the strait, of H aiming to expand maritime oversight and generate post-war revenue while remaining within international law. Iran’s Ministry of Economy is reportedly advancing a proposal to manage the Strait of Hormuz through an insurance-based framework aimed at enabling post-war oversight of the strategic waterway in accordance with international law, while also creating a new source of revenue for the country. According to a document obtained by Fars News Agency, the initiative seeks to establish a mechanism through which “management of the Strait of Hormuz becomes possible via insurance,” in a way that would remain acceptable to foreign states under non-war conditions while still allowing Iran to exercise effective control over maritime activity in the strait. Under the proposed framework, Iran would gain broader oversight capabilities, including expanded access to maritime data and the ability to distinguish between vessels from different countries transiting the waterway. Since the onset of the US-Israeli war, Iranian officials have maintained that “security of the Strait of Hormuz lies with the armed forces of the Islamic Republic”. Against that backdrop, the proposal argues that management of the strait should remain under Iranian authority due to the damage Tehran has sustained from the passage of hostile vessels through the corridor. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-127925 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Strait-of-Hormuz-map-AJ-680wide.png" alt="The Strait of Hormuz " width="680" height="579" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Strait-of-Hormuz-map-AJ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Strait-of-Hormuz-map-AJ-680wide-300x255.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Strait-of-Hormuz-map-AJ-680wide-493x420.png 493w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> The Strait of Hormuz . . . the special “safe” routes that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have designated for commercial shipping to follow. Map: Al Jazeera/IRGC This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Chevron wants a school district tax break for a data center power plant
The move could save the oil company hundreds of millions in Texas, even as state lawmakers start looking at reining in incentives for data centers.
A major oil company is seeking a state tax break in Texas worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build a massive power plant. The energy won’t be going to residential customers, though. Instead, the gas plant will be used to power a data center whose eventual tenant could be Microsoft. Chevron subsidiary Energy Forge One has filed an application with the State Comptroller’s board to obtain a tax abatement for a power plant it’s building in West Texas. In late January, the comptroller’s office made a recommendation to support the application’s approval — the first such approval under the program for a power plant intended solely for data center use. In March, following news reports that Microsoft was looking into purchasing power from the Energy Forge project, Chevron said that it had entered into an “exclusivity agreement” with Microsoft and Engine 1, an investment fund involved in the project. In January, Microsoft pledged to be a “good neighbor” in communities where it is building data centers, including promising to pay a “full and fair share of local property taxes.” The potential tax abatement for the project comes as big tech companies are battling rising public fury about data centers and electricity costs. It also comes as lawmakers start to cast a more critical eye on ballooning incentives for data centers, some of which have cost some states — including Texas — $1 billion or more each year. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Two cooling towers have a Google logo on them and a Texas and US flag draped over another" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GoogleDataCenter.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="900" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> Texas is giving data centers more than $1 billion in tax breaks each year Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune Chevron spokesperson Paula Beasley told Wired in an email that all tax incentives under consideration for the Energy Forge project “apply solely to the power generation facility” to “support new energy infrastructure, and do not extend to any future data center facilities that may be served.” Beasley also said that there is currently “no definitive agreement” with Microsoft for this power plant. “Microsoft is in discussions with Chevron,” Rima Alaily, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and general counsel for infrastructure, said in a statement to Wired. “No commercial terms have been finalized, and there is no definitive agreement at this time.” Chevron is applying for a tax abatement for the project under Texas’ Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) Act. Passed in 2023, the program is intended to incentivize businesses to build large infrastructure projects in the state in exchange for guarantees to bring jobs and revenue. Accepted projects get a cap set on the amount of taxable property they can be charged through local school district taxes. The Pecos-Barstow-Toyah school board approved the project’s application at a meeting in February. The state pays for the tax abatement, so the school district itself does not lose out on any money. According to documents from the state, the Chevron project could net more than $227 million in savings for the company over a 10-year period, depending on the eventual size of the project and investment. The application says the plant will provide “over 25 permanent, full-time jobs,” though there’s no requirement to do so because it’s considered an electricity generation facility. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="The downtown of Murphy, a rural community in the mountains of North Carolina, is glimpsed through the trees." class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 7360w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?resize=1200%2C801&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?resize=330%2C220&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?resize=768%2C513&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?resize=1536%2C1025&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?resize=2048%2C1367&quality=75&strip=all 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-491791844.jpg?resize=150%2C100&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="4912" width="7360" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> First crypto, now data centers: How tech is reshaping this North Carolina community Katie Myers The planned gas plant won’t connect to the grid, instead providing “electricity for direct consumption by a data center,” according to its application. So-called behind-the-meter gas plants have become increasingly popular for data center developers facing yearslong waits to connect to the grid. According to data from nonprofit Global Energy Monitor, the U.S. at the start of the year had nearly 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power in the development pipeline solely to power data centers, with several more massive gas projects announced since the data was published. A Wired analysis of less than a dozen power plants being constructed to explicitly serve data centers, including the Chevron project, found that these power plants are permitted to emit more greenhouse gases than many small- to medium-size countries. The Energy Forge plant alone could emit more than 11.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent annually — more than the country of Jamaica emitted in 2024. Beasley told Wired that the plant “is being designed to comply with applicable environmental regulations, including all applicable federal and state air quality standards.” West Texas is a major fossil fuel production hub, which has helped it emerge as a hot spot for both data centers and behind-the-meter gas development. However, Energy Forge’s JETI application notes that the site is one of six across the U.S. under consideration. Without tax incentives, the other sites would be “more attractive locations” to build a gas plant, according to its application, and “Texas would lose the opportunity to attract billions of dollars in new tax revenues.” This type of claim on applications for tax abatements is pretty routine, says Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. An earlier version of the JETI program, originally created to draw more manufacturing jobs to Texas, handed out incentives to businesses with little oversight, often giving millions in tax breaks to companies already planning on building in the state. While the JETI program significantly curbs the problems and excesses of the old program, Jensen says that the guardrails for a project like Chevron’s are still relatively low. The JETI tax incentive isn’t the only tax break the power plant could receive. According to county documents, the Energy Forge project could also be eligible for a local incentive that exempts all or part of a property’s value from taxes for up to a decade, under another part of the Texas tax code. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 2500w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=2048%2C1152&quality=75&strip=all 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/margiepadilla-1.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1406" width="2500" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> California will soon have more than 300 data centers. Where will they get their water? Steven Rodas, Inside Climate News Developers have taken advantage of other tax abatements across the U.S. A report released in April from Good Jobs First, a corporate watchdog group, found that at least three states — including Texas — are losing more than $1 billion in revenue each year from data center sales tax abatements. A bipartisan group of politicians in Texas, including Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, have expressed mounting concern about the impact tax breaks for data centers are having on state coffers. In March, Patrick ordered the legislature to “study the cost and consequences” of the sales tax exemption — which the state projects could balloon to $3 billion by 2029 — and “make recommendations providing safeguards to ensure that Texans benefit from data center investment.” In January, Microsoft rolled out a series of pledges on its website, promising to “add to the tax base” in communities where it operates. “We won’t ask local municipalities to reduce their local property tax rates when we buy land or propose a data center presence,” the pledge states. The company did not respond to questions about whether this pledge extends to projects owned by other entities that the company intends to use to power its data centers, or to data center developers that may be building data centers in which Microsoft will be a tenant. Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, notes that Microsoft’s pledge doesn’t mention tax abatements (the amount of value a person or business’s property is assessed at), which are different from tax rates (the number used to calculate the amount of taxes owed for the property). “If they don’t say, ‘We will refuse tax abatements,’ then they’ve got their fingers crossed behind their back,” LeRoy says of Microsoft’s pledge. Tax breaks given to projects like data centers are difficult to track across states: The Good Jobs First report found that 14 states don’t disclose how much revenue they might be losing on data center abatements. As behind-the-meter power becomes an increasingly popular option for data center developers, though it’s not clear how widespread the practice of asking for tax abatements for these specific facilities is. There are no other behind-the-meter power plants currently being funded by the Texas JETI program or in the application pipeline. Data centers are specifically excluded from being eligible for the JETI program. Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute and a climate official under President Biden, is the author of a recent report that suggests ways to use the AI boom to incentivize tech companies to help pay for needed upgrades to the grid. Tax abatements, the report says, should be restructured to make sure that data center builders connect power to the grid, making behind-the-meter gas options less attractive. Flegal also advocates for permitting reform to make sure that more clean energy can get added to the grid as quickly as possible. “We should fix our tax code so it’s much more progressive, and we should tax the shit out of these people and use federal money to plan and build a grid that benefits all of us,” she says. “Alas, that is not where we are.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chevron wants a school district tax break for a data center power plant on May 17, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Molly Taft, WIRED.
Palestine on patrol – how a flag-dress caused a writers’ stir for justice
COMMENTARY: By Kathrine Ross What a blast at the Auckland Writers Festival today, I had tickets for Marika and I to attend Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi’s talk and decided to dress up and wear my Palestine-flag-dress. Little did I know the stir it would cause — the Aotea Centre security literally chased me through the
COMMENTARY: By Kathrine Ross What a blast at the Auckland Writers Festival today, I had tickets for Marika and I to attend Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi’s talk and decided to dress up and wear my Palestine-flag-dress. Little did I know the stir it would cause — the Aotea Centre security literally chased me through the building and around the auditorium where Tareq would be talking, saying I had to “remove my flag”. But it was attached to my dress, so it was not “removeable” — unless I took my dress off (which was an option if things got too heated). READ MORE: Israel becomes world’s most disliked country, global survey finds – Middle East Monitor Israel to spend $730m on propaganda as global image collapses over Gaza genocide Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’ Other Gaza and war on Iran reports <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-127963 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Fire-in-Every-Direction-KR-300wide.png" alt=""Flag meets Fire". " width="300" height="389" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Fire-in-Every-Direction-KR-300wide.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Fire-in-Every-Direction-KR-300wide-231x300.png 231w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> “Flag meets Fire”. Image: Kathrine Ross So I kept on walking, staying in view of all the people who were witnessing and sticking up for me. Yes, members of the public were challenging those security guards chasing me and questioning them about why I couldn’t keep my flag-dress as it was. This went on until I managed to disappear into the rows of seats — what a great example of humanity that was. Later, after the talk, when I met gorgeous Tareq for the book signing, he also praised the dress and the action to dodge the security guards (there was only one witness who totally disappointed by their lack of support and sourness). But the rest of humanity was totally behind this unplanned and unintentional statement. Kathrine Ross is an activist with the Palestine Soidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This commentary was first published on her Facebook page. Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi’s moving memoir, Fire In Every Direction, as described in the festival storybook: “At once a love story, a coming-of-age tale and diasporic narrative, it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present, as Baconi traces generations of his family’s displacement through war, as well as his own political and queer awakening in the face of other forms of exile and expression.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-127964 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Free-Palestine-with-Tareq-Baconi-KR-680tall.png" alt=""Palestine will be free" . . . PSNA activist Kathrine Ross makes a statement with Palestinian author Tareq Baconi" width="680" height="877" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Free-Palestine-with-Tareq-Baconi-KR-680tall.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Free-Palestine-with-Tareq-Baconi-KR-680tall-233x300.png 233w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Free-Palestine-with-Tareq-Baconi-KR-680tall-326x420.png 326w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> “Palestine will be free” . . . PSNA activist Kathrine Ross makes a statement with Palestinian author Tareq Baconi at the Auckland Writers Festival. Image: Kathrine Ross This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Int. Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia
‘They’re wiping us out’ – church leader warns about young West Papuans killed in escalating conflict
By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific senior journalist A West Papuan church leader has warned that ongoing killings of young Papuans allegedly by Indonesian security forces have the hallmark of genocide. Since the start of the year there has been no stop to violent incidents in the Indonesian-ruled Papua region known internationally as West Papua. Indonesia’s
By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific senior journalist A West Papuan church leader has warned that ongoing killings of young Papuans allegedly by Indonesian security forces have the hallmark of genocide. Since the start of the year there has been no stop to violent incidents in the Indonesian-ruled Papua region known internationally as West Papua. Indonesia’s government blames recent violence on armed, pro-independence West Papuan fighters. READ MORE: Papuan women ‘living in fear’ condemn military violence Other West Papua reports However, human rights defenders say the violence is escalating, while the young, indigenous people of West Papua are in the firing line. High school students shot Last week a 17-year old Papuan girl was killed as a result of a military operation reportedly targeting civilian mining camps in Tembagapura. Also last week, several Papuan high school students were shot when tensions flared at a graduation parade through the town of Kobakma in Papua’s central highlands. Police had objected to them wearing the Papuan Morning Star flag — a symbol of the independence movement. Last month, Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) said it was investigating a shooting incident that left up to 12 Papuan civilians dead as the result of an Indonesian military operation in Kembru district. According to human rights researchers, a 5-year old girl and a 77-year old woman were among the dead. Komnas HAM’s commissioner for monitoring and investigation Saurlin Siagian said it was difficult to ascertain the exact ages of each victim in the Kembru incident, but he told RNZ Pacific that two pregnant women were among those killed. Earlier in April, five people, including a 12-year old boy, were shot dead in Dogiyai regency in an alleged retaliatory attack by police after a policeman was killed. The list goes on, stretching back to January — dozens of people reported dead, dozens more people injured and many more people displaced from their villages. Pastor Jimi Koirewa, the head of the human rights and justice department of the GIDI Evangelical Church of Indonesia in Papua . . . “The children are being killed, the women are being killed. That is a part of genocide.” Image: RNZ Pacific Disturbing pattern The head of the human rights and justice department of the GIDI Evangelical Church of Indonesia in Papua, Pastor Jimi Koirewa, said there was a disturbing pattern to these attacks. “The children are being killed, the women are being killed. That is a part of genocide, because the women will give birth to babies, the kids, the children, the youth, they are the future of Papua, and killing them is part of a genocide. “They’re wiping us out. There will be no more people there standing in Papua. The old people will die gradually,” Pastor Koirewa told RNZ Pacific. Indonesia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry declined to comment on the pastor’s claim. It said it could not discuss recent incidents while investigations are underway. However, the Human Rights Minister in Jakarta, Natalius Pigai, has admitted the situation is a serious concern. After a violent year in 2025 — when Komnas HAM recorded 97 violent incidents and armed conflicts in Papua — the situation has deteriorated further this year. Pigai noted that the country’s independent human rights body has identified 26 cases of violence in Papua from January to April 2026. “Based on records from both domestic and international sources, there is an escalation. In just under a month, no fewer than 20 people died in 5 incidents in Dogiyai, Yahukimo, Puncak Papua, Timika, and Tembagapura,” Pigai said in a statement on Sunday. Natalius Pigai, a former chair of Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM), a West Papuan who has been the target of racial slurs . . . seeking a peaceful solution. Image: Tekdeeps/RNZ Pacific Pigai claimed the government was continuing to seek a peaceful solution that can address the root causes of the conflict. For the past several years Indonesian security forces in Papua have been engaged in conflict with “armed criminal groups”, their label for Papuan pro-independence fighters within the wider OPM Free West Papua Movement. Lack of justice: ‘Shooting the people’ Pastor Koirewa said the Indonesian military forces had been amassing in large numbers in recent months. “There’s so much military deployment coming into Papua and the reason, they said, is they want to get rid of the rebels, OPM, that’s what they call rebels. They said that they want to get rid of the OPM so that development can happen, the government can come and build the land,” Koirewa said. “But when they come in, they are not shooting the combatant, the OPM, but they are shooting the people. So I see that the it’s escalating.” Koirewa said police rarely investigated the violent incidents thoroughly, leaving Papuan communities mistrustful of the justice system. The GIDI church has raised its concern with the upsurge in violence. “Our church, we have no influence in Jakarta at all. We already made some communications through the formal way to Jakarta, yeah, through the our Parliament, let them know what is happening. “But Jakarta is not responding. They don’t care. “They just come in with their programme, and they don’t care at all. That’s why the church now is looking for aid outside of our country,” Koirewa said, adding that the aid they sought is for internally displaced people and Papuan schools. Papuans in poverty Jakarta has been promoting major agri-business projects in Papua provinces — including oil palm, rice and sugarcane — as well as large scale mining and forestry projects in the interior. The government argues that increasing development and economic activity raises the standard of living for everyone in Papua. “Which part of Papua are they developing? Why are the Papuans still the poorest among the whole Indonesian population. They have been for with us about more than 60 years. And why are the Papuans still the Papuans still in poverty?” Koirewa said. “We see that there has been no output at all. They will only bring more non-Papuans in to take over our land.” A camp of displaced West Papuans in Papua’s highlands. Image: RNZ Pacific Koirewa said changing demographics due to Indonesian transmigration added to the sense that Papuans were being out numbered in their homeland and facing a bleak future. “There’s no hope,” he said. The displacement of Papuan villagers is also a factor, with the latest Internally Displaced Persons update from Human Rights Monitor group saying more than 107,000 West Papuans remain displaced by armed conflict. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Close vote sees Niue’s Dalton Tagelagi back in as prime minister
By Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific bulletin editor Niue’s assembly has re-elected Dalton Tagelagi as its prime minister, continuing his leadership for the next three years. Tagelagi, 57, has led Niue since 2020 and was nominated alongside Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui during the leadership vote. The 19th Niue Assembly was officially sworn in on Wednesday local time. READ
By Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific bulletin editor Niue’s assembly has re-elected Dalton Tagelagi as its prime minister, continuing his leadership for the next three years. Tagelagi, 57, has led Niue since 2020 and was nominated alongside Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui during the leadership vote. The 19th Niue Assembly was officially sworn in on Wednesday local time. READ MORE: Other Niue reports Billy Talagi was sworn in as the new Speaker of Parliament. Pacific Media News reported Tagelagi won a narrow 11-9 leadership vote, and the result confirms continuity in leadership but exposes a deeply divided Parliament with MPs split almost evenly between the two leadership nominees. Niue’s 20-member Assembly is elected every three years, made up of 14 village representatives and six common roll MPs elected across the country. Addressing parliament after his re-election, Tagelagi called for unity in the new term. ‘Challenging times’ “These are challenging times when we go into elections because we have different perspectives and understanding that sometimes this might divide our families and affect our relationships with one another,” he said. “I ask you to come together in this Assembly, that we make decisions for the good of the people. I humbly ask you all to work together as we move forward with the 19th Legislative Assembly and government.” PMN’s Inangaro Vaka’afi told RNZ Pacific Waves Tagelagi had been adamant he wanted another term. “And also try and complete some of the work that they have already started,” she said. She said there is a mixture of reaction to how Tagelagi had led the country so far. “I think it’s not necessarily individual MPs, but you remember that they are representing their village constituency or a common role seat. “So perhaps there has been some sentiment on the ground in terms of situation on the island, or where the economy is at the moment, also just knowing what’s happening, because some of the work that’s been done doesn’t necessarily get filtered down to grassroots. ‘Finest of margins’ “But I know that there are people on island who are quite satisfied and happy with the direction that they’ve been going, and then there are others who are not, especially when you think about — he represents a village constituency for Alofi South, which is the largest voting population on the island, and he managed to secure his seat by the finest of margins, by one vote. “And if one were to sit back and just analyse that there’s obviously, I guess, requests or some want from within his constituency to pay a bit more attention to the village. And understandably, because you are the leader of the country, you do have to put the interest of a whole nation in front of mind. “But don’t forget that you also were placed in that position by your village constituency.” The new 19th Legislative Assembly also saw a record seven women elected, making up 35 percent of the House — the highest in the nation’s history. The six common roll seats went to Robert BJ Rex, Moira Enetama, Richmond Lisimoni-Togahai, Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui, Sonya Talagi and Kahealani Hekau, alongside village representatives, several of whom were elected unopposed. Robert BJ Rex, who topped the common roll vote with 560 ballots, told BCN he was honoured by the outcome. “My life is based in community. Not only my community, but just my presence around any group or any community, I have tried to be there and get involved and support in any way I can.” This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
I swear I won’t do anything for Muslims, says Bengal BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari
Days after the BJP formed its first government in West Bengal under chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, a speech by BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari has sparked outrage online. “In these 74... The post I swear I won’t do anything for Muslims, says Bengal BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari appeared first on Alt News.
Days after the BJP formed its first government in West Bengal under chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, a speech by BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari has sparked outrage online. “In these 74 years of elections in West Bengal, I am most likely the first MLA from this constituency who has not received a single vote from a Muslim. Therefore, only those who have voted for me have the right to me. We didn’t go to ask for votes from those who did not vote for us,” Tiwari says in the viral video. “Today, in front of Baba Bholenath, I swear, I will not do one job for them (Muslims) in the next five years. Will not issue any certificate for them. I am saying this live. I do not care about what anyone else says or thinks. Modiji says, ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas’. I agree with him; he is my leader. But during this election, he added another phrase to it: ‘Sabka Hisaab’. That is how it should be, right?” he adds. ALSO READ: Day 1 of regime change in Bengal: Bulldozer in New Market, biriyani shop told to shift, Muslim names erased Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slogan “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas”, he adds, “But during this election, he added another phrase to it: ‘Sabka Hisaab’.” Tiwari won the Kashipur-Belgachia seat in the recently held assembly elections by defeating Trinamool Congress heavyweight Atin Ghosh by 1,651 votes. In both 2016 and 2021 assembly polls, Trinamool Congress had won the seat with huge margins. कोलकाता: “भोलेनाथ की कसम, एक काम मुसलमानों के लिए नहीं करूंगा” ◆ काशीपुर बेलगाछिया सीट से BJP विधायक रितेश तिवारी अपने विवादित बयान के लिए सुर्खियों में आए ◆ तिवारी ने कहा, “मैं लोकतांत्रित तरीके से सबका हिसाब करूंगा” BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari | #Bengal | Bengal pic.twitter.com/ndnzhRaGMy — News24 (@news24tvchannel) May 14, 2026 ‘Trinamool Sought to Establish Islamic Rule’ We found the full live recording of Ritesh Tiwari’s speech on his official Facebook page, where it was posted on May 11. The 20-minute video of the programme held at Tiwari’s constituency begins with supporters garlanding Tiwari before he takes the stage. He starts speaking at the 4:48-minute mark. The viral portion of the speech begins at the 15:44-minute mark. As Tiwari says he would not work for Muslims, the crowd can be heard applauding loudly. During the speech, Tiwari invokes the ‘Love Jihad’ conspiracy theory and says women should be taught from childhood not to enter Muslim households. He also claims that those carrying Trinamool Congress flags wanted to establish “Islamic rule” in West Bengal. At the 8:35-minute mark, Tiwari says: “This was not just another election. This state has been witnessing elections since 1952. And today’s youth who are aged 18 and above… You should start learning about how demography is changing. What is demographic change? It’s not just economic or gender disparity. Economic disparity can be addressed in the coming times. And gender discrimination, which used to exist, society has awakened and abolished that; the number of female foeticides has gone down. I am a father of two daughters and have no regret about not having a son… We have received independence from gender discrimination. But now it’s time to move our focus to demographic change, the way our daughters and sisters are being lured into relationships with false promises of love, with the help of technology, the way these jihadis are attacking, the women need to become more aware about these things.” He continues: “We need to identify the main issue, that no woman should go into a Muslim’s house, but people don’t say that, as they are scared. And we can’t stop this from happening, hence, now is the time to talk about it openly, to start building confidence and to make them aware of these issues since childhood… (Before elections) when I used to see those people sitting there with Trinamool’s flags, they weren’t some special people, they weren’t descendants of Anwar Khan, or had any royal lineage, they were people like you and me. And who were they standing with? They were waving flags of those who want to bring Islamic rule to West Bengal… In the past five years, the people who tortured you while waving Trinamool flags, it is now time to identify them all and boycott them socially.” ALSO READ: ‘Gaza-like lesson’ to ‘everyone’s CM’ — Suvendu’s inclusive pitch contrasts sharply with past communal rhetoric Ex-VP Hamid Ansari Slams Tiwari’s Comments In an interview with Karan Thapar on The Wire, former vice-president Hamid Ansari criticized Tiwari’s comments and described them as unconstitutional and against the ethos of democracy. Ansari said, “If that is the prevailing ideology of the winning party then it’s a very unfortunate comment on the system we pretend to operate… we pretend to be a democracy, we pretend to swear by a Constitution and the first page of that Constitution, which is the Preamble, has certain basic principles spelt out there. Does this statement of his conform to any of those principles?” “If you swear by the Constitution which we swear by, if you swear by the Preamble which we swear by, then you cannot draw a distinction between one citizen and another citizen.” He added, “Are you going to ignore 15% of your population? Is that what you mean by fraternity? Is that what you mean by the last word of the Preamble?… Can a political party seriously say that it does not care for 15% of its population? It cannot do that … the Muslims are the biggest minority in the country and together with other minorities, Christians, Sikhs and others, they constitute 20% of the population of India which means one-fifth of the population. You cannot operate democracy on that basis (of ignoring them). You can operate any other form of governance but not a democracy.” The post I swear I won’t do anything for Muslims, says Bengal BJP MLA Ritesh Tiwari appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.
Meet the Lebanese rescuers being targeted by Israel
"The Nakba was not a single passing event"
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 16, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 16, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 16, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Ralph speaks to Dr. Marina Nord of the V-Dem Institute about this year's V-Dem Democracy Report and how the Trump Administration is dismantling democracy in the US. Then, Ralph welcomes Dr. Ralph Estes to discuss corporations' shady accounting practice...
Ralph speaks to Dr. Marina Nord of the V-Dem Institute about this year's V-Dem Democracy Report and how the Trump Administration is dismantling democracy in the US. Then, Ralph welcomes Dr. Ralph Estes to discuss corporations' shady accounting practices. Dr. Marina Nord is a postdoctoral research fellow at the V-Dem Institute. She is co-author of V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2026: “Unraveling The Democratic Era?”. Only six countries during the 21st century have registered larger one-year drops on the aggregate Liberal Democracy Index [than the United States] —and all of them are coups. If you look at the last almost 250 years (so for which we have data going back to 1789), there were only thirty-five instances of more rapid dismantling of democracy—almost all of them were either military coups or international interventions. Dr. Marina Nord We do not measure [Trump’s] words. We measure how institutions function de facto. And what is a lot more important for us is not only what he says, but how other institutions (checks and balances) function to constrain him. And one of the things that we see, for example, is that Congress is not constraining him in any way. And this is very, very serious, because if you have a President who violates the law, who violates the Constitution, you should have the judiciary who stand up, the Supreme Court who should stand up to protect the Constitution. You should have the Congress who is not allowed to [abdicate power to the executive]. And this is something that is very, very concerning, a lot more concerning than what Trump is saying. What I find a lot more concerning is that there are no checks and balances to constrain him. Dr. Marina Nord When looking at the data, we also looked at the countries who managed to stop autocrats similar to Trump. And we tried to analyze which factors contributed to stopping democratic backsliding and turning it around. So research shows that, of course, there is no single recipe, but there are several combinations of factors that may help. One of them is: use whatever institutional safeguards that you still have in the United States…The second thing that we know that still works quite well is robust societal action. And by that we mean not only demonstrations similar to the No Kings protests, but sustained protests, mass pro-democracy protests…And then, of course, one of the things that still should be a possibility to turn things around is the midterm elections. Dr. Marina Nord Dr. Ralph Estes is Emeritus professor of business and accounting at American University in Washington, D.C., co-founder and vice president of The Center for Advancement of Public Policy, and Emeritus Trustee at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of several books, including Tyranny of the Bottom Line: Why Corporations Make Good People Do Bad Things and Fight the Corpocracy, Take Back Democracy: A Mad As Hell Guide for the 99%. The public has no way of fairly evaluating a corporation except through the press, what it sees in corporate press releases and their claims about being, for example, environmentally responsible and very favorable to customers. And there are no measures on that. Corporation doesn’t give us any. Corporation produces a set of financial statements. You won’t know how relevant those financial statements are to you and me. They’re not relevant at all… In terms of social performance, there’s nothing in the corporate reports, the formal reports, that is reliable. Again, you’re stuck with what the corporation claims or what the politicians who are lobbying for contributions will admit corporations do… But this is a problem. If the corporation doesn’t report it, if the citizens don’t know about it, the politicians can try to do something, but they have to start from scratch. Dr. Ralph Estes News 5/15/26 * We begin this week with a bombshell story from Latin America. This week, El País broke what they are calling “Hondurasgate,” an expose centering on leaked audio recordings of conversations between President Donald Trump, Argentinian President Javier Milei and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison on drug trafficking charges in the U.S. but pardoned by Trump last year. In these leaked recordings, the three current and former heads of state discuss the creation of a “channel of spreading fake news with the intention of misinforming and destabilizing” Leftist governments in the region, including those of Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico. According to this report, the leaks reveal the involvement of another world leader – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – in the decision to pardon Hernández. El País writes the leaks prove the pardoning of Hernández was “not a gesture of clemency, but the down payment of a broader agreement.” Expect more damning information to come out as more recordings are unearthed, even if so far the American media has largely blacked out this stunning story. * At the same time the Trump administration is seeking to subtly undermine governments like Mexico’s, they are executing considerably less subtle covert operations there as well. On March 28th, an explosion blew up the car of alleged narco Francisco Beltran just outside Mexico City. CNN now reports that, while “Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion,” multiple sources confirm that this was “a targeted assassination,” carried out by the CIA. Not only that, this operation is reportedly just one of several assassinations carried out by the CIA against rank-and-file cartel members on foreign soil which began last year. Troublingly, CNN notes these operations could be illegal under Mexican law, which prohibits foreign agents from participating in law enforcement operations without the express permission of the federal government. Omar Garcia Harfuch, Mexico’s Secretary of Security released a statement indicating that the Mexican government has not granted any such permission, writing “The Government of Mexico categorically rejects any version that seeks to normalize, justify, or suggest the existence of lethal, covert, or unilateral operations by foreign agencies on national territory.” * One ironic aspect of the joint right-wing destabilization effort and CIA covert operations campaign both currently underway in Mexico is the fact that the Sheinbaum government has affected a stunning reduction in murders throughout the country. According to Mexico Solidarity Media, the daily average of intentional homicides has been reduced by 40% between the beginning of the Sheinbaum administration in October 2024 and April 30, 2026, with that last month hitting the lowest level in over a decade – comparable in fact to the United States. We can only hope that Sheinbaum is able to stay the course and continue to drive down the murder rate while simultaneously avoiding the destabilization campaigns being waged against her government. * In Colombia, another state targeted in the Hondurasgate plot, Ivan Cepeda continues to consolidate progressive forces in that country ahead of the presidential election, aiming for a first round victory. This week, Luis Gilberto Murillo, a center-left presidential candidate, dropped out and endorsed Cepeda. While Murillo never rose very high in the polls, he has held high positions in the Colombian government – including Minister of Environment and governor of the department of Choco as well as Colombia’s ambassador to the United States and later foreign minister under Gustavo Petro. Colombia One notes that this is the second such withdrawal in recent weeks, with Senator Clara López doing the same, indicating a serious intention among the progressive forces in Colombia to stave off a second round of the presidential election, which could see the right-wing consolidate against Cepeda in a way they have thus far been unable to do ahead of the first round. * Meanwhile, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, a standard bearer for the Latin American Right and a close ally of President Trump, is mired in a new scandal involving his dealings with the MS-13 gang and his ensuing attempts to silence the press. According to PBS, last month the Salvadoran outlet El Faro, in conjunction with PBS FRONTLINE released a documentary titled The Deal: Trump, Bukele & the Gangs of El Salvador, which “uncovered evidence that Bukele’s administration had offered privileges to gang leaders in prison in exchange for a reduction in homicides and voter support in territories the gangs controlled.” Now, in retaliation for publishing this story, Bukele has reportedly “frozen the personal assets of two of [El Faro’s] shareholders,” including editor-in-chief Carlos Dada who said in a press conference that “These are not fiscal measures…They are political measures trying to silence us.” This article notes that the facts presented in The Deal are particularly damning to Bukele, because of his public claims that he “would never negotiate with gangs” because it would grant them legitimacy. Just as it is ironic that the Trump administration is seeking to destabilize the Mexican government while it dramatically reduces murders, so too is it ironic that it is seeking to bolster the Bukele regime even as it carries out secretive deals with the very gangs the U.S. claims to be fighting. * In a wholly different part of the world, the centrist Labour Party government of Keir Starmer in the UK is teetering on the brink of collapse. Starmer’s popularity has been declining precipitously ever since he entered office, but the crisis of confidence from within his own party accelerated after the disastrous results of the May 7th local elections. Now, according to CNN, over 100 members of his party in Parliament are calling for him to resign, but the only way to trigger a leadership challenge is for at least 81 Labour MPs to coalesce around a single challenger – and as yet, none have crossed that threshold. Starmer himself has refused to stand down, challenging any other claimants to come forward. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has come the closest to openly challenging Starmer, even resigning his post in the government but stopping short of formally announcing a leadership challenge, the BBC reports. For now, Starmer continues to cling to power but each day could be his last at No. 10. * Turning to American foreign policy news, this week the Senate voted down yet another War Powers Resolution on Iran – the seventh such attempt since the war began in late February. What is notable about this resolution is that it won the support of the most GOP Senators yet – Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – yet still failed by a margin of 50-49 because Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania crossed party lines to vote against the resolution. This from CBS. Even with Fetterman’s disloyalty, this vote is significant for the number of Republicans who broke ranks, perhaps indicating a growing unease with the war and particularly its impact on the price of consumer goods, beginning with gasoline and cascading from there. * In more congressional news, Southern states are scrambling to act in the wake of the Callais decision. In South Carolina and Mississippi, state officials have rejected attempts to call special sessions to redraw congressional maps before this year’s midterms. But, NPR reports Alabama is moving towards a new map that, like Louisiana, will likely include just one single largely Black, Democratic-leaning congressional district. However, even though some of these states are holding off on redrawing these districts today, it does not mean those districts will be safe tomorrow. And in Tennessee, where the legislature is moving ahead with a plan to do away with the state’s majority Black 9th congressional district in a special session – resulting in a revolt by Democrats in the legislature – the Republicans are retaliating by stripping all Democrats from their standing committee seats for “creating disorder,” per StateAffairs.com. Expect this process to get more contentious, and plain uglier, as it grinds ahead. * Next, a story in Fortune highlights the cost of data center construction. According to this story, the nearly 50,000 permanent residents of the California ski resort town of Lake Tahoe – which regularly attracts 25 to 28 million visitors annually – will soon be disconnected from their traditional power source, NV Energy. NV supplies the power to Liberty Utilities, which services the area directly, and NV has informed Liberty that it will stop providing power after May 2027. That power will instead be redirected to data centers, leaving Liberty Utilities less than a year to find another power source. This story notes that “Northern Nevada has become one of the fastest-growing data-center corridors in the country,” with Google, Apple, and Microsoft all having built or planning to build facilities in the area. Gallingly, just last fall NV Energy’s director of business development said the company was “eager to serve the new industrial load” but that it would not “impact [their] existing customer base.” This is a troubling preview of what may come as data center expansion continues unchecked. * Finally, in a story that proves once again that corporate greed knows no limits, the Lever is out with a new report on a class-action lawsuit by consumers against “private equity-backed bowling giant Bowlero.” According to the Lever, the suit accuses Bowlero of executing a “‘multi-year anticompetitive scheme to consolidate bowling centers,’ which has led to skyrocketing bowling prices, deteriorating lanes, and ‘the veritable destruction of the decades-old pastime of bowling in America.’” The numbers back up this narrative. Bowlero, which had just six locations in 2012, has exploded to 350 today. The company is said to control roughly 35 percent of U.S. bowling revenue – and 95% of all lanes in some markets – as well as acquiring the Professional Bowling Association itself. As with any monopoly, once it had cornered the market Bowlero proceeded to jack up prices, even using AI to do so algorithmically. In a sense, this is a story we have all heard too many times to be surprised, but we can still be shocked by the base greed of corporate executives, even in something as seemingly anodyne as the bowling industry. This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.
Congressman’s own truckers have been involved in deadly crashes as he vows to make roads safer
How Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Puts You at Risk #politics #trump
This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.
Wild blueberry farms across Maine suffer as climate change upends growing seasons
Like lobster rolls, wild blueberries are iconic in Maine. But heat and drought have set the plants back to a point where many small farmers are struggling against reduced yields and increased costs for mulch and irrigation.
Last summer, the wild blueberry fields at Crystal Spring Farm turned red too soon. Severe drought had gripped most of the state of Maine. At his farm near the town of Brunswick, Seth Kroeck knew the leaves were changing color prematurely because the blueberry plants were stressed. Berries shriveled before they could ripen. The farm’s 2025 harvest was almost a total loss. “We got about 7 percent of our expected harvest,” Kroeck, 55, said. Standing in his blueberry fields in April, he pointed out the new growth, still only a few inches high, and commented that last year’s yield was “a lot of raking with not a lot to show for it.” This was just the latest in a series of devastating weather for Crystal Spring Farm’s 72 acres of wild blueberries. “In the last seven years, we’ve lost the crop three times, almost completely,” he said. As the climate changes, these losses are getting more common for wild blueberry farmers. And, experts say, the solutions are pricey. Maine’s quintessential fruit Wild blueberries are an iconic food in Maine, like lobster rolls or whoopie pies. But they aren’t the same as the fruits sold by the pint in a grocery store. Wild blueberries are smaller and have a stronger flavor than their cultivated counterparts. They’re typically packed and frozen rather than sold fresh. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=683&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6249-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Wild blueberry bushes grow on sandy and gravelly soil in Maine, which can be difficult to irrigate. " data-credit="Sydney Cromwell / Inside Climate News"/> Wild blueberry bushes grow on sandy and gravelly soil in Maine, which can be difficult to irrigate. Sydney Cromwell / Inside Climate News Maine’s farms contribute almost the entirety of the United States’ commercially sold wild blueberries. The industry harvested nearly 88 million pounds of fruit in 2023, bringing $361 million in revenue to the state, according to the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine. “It’s really something that’s a backbone industry to the state and a part of the state’s character,” Kroeck said. A father of two, Kroeck grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and said gardening with a friend “spiraled” into an agricultural career. In college, he studied printmaking — a degree that he jokes is useful every day on the farm. One of the few native North American fruits, wild blueberry patches have often existed in the same spot for longer than the farms that now harvest them. “The blueberry plants have been there for millennia, and they have been cared for by generations of farmers before me, and then the Indigenous community [before that],” said Kroeck, who also grows row crops and pasturage. An individual bush only produces fruit every other year, so farmers typically harvest about half their acreage in any given year. Also called “lowbush” blueberries, the plants grow in dense mats on sandy, gravelly, or otherwise low-nutrient soil, primarily in eastern Canada and New England. “Blueberry soil is not nutrient-rich. Nothing else wants to grow there … but wild blueberries love it,” said Rachel Schattman, a professor of sustainable agriculture and leader of the Agroecology Lab at the University of Maine. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WildBlueberry.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Wild blueberries are smaller and have a stronger flavor compared to cultivated blueberries. " data-credit="Courtesy of Rachel Schattman"/> Wild blueberries are smaller and have a stronger flavor compared to cultivated blueberries. Courtesy of Rachel Schattman Schattman, 43, started working on vegetable and dairy farms in high school and continued farm work through the completion of her master’s degree. She owned a commercial vegetable farm for 10 years while pursuing her interest in agricultural research and earning a doctorate at the University of Vermont. Schattman said the financial challenges of running a small farm eventually led her to pursue research full time. She worked for the USDA on climate change’s interactions with agriculture before moving to Maine in 2020, where she met the wild blueberry for the first time. “It holds a really special place in the culture of Maine,” she said. Each patch has a variety of genetics rather than a monoculture. You can see — and taste — the plant’s diversity once it begins producing berries, Kroeck said. “If you were to fly over our blueberry field while they’re fruiting, you’d see a lot of subtly different shades of blue and black,” he said. Despite their crop’s hardy nature, wild blueberry farms are struggling to deal with recent extremes of temperature and precipitation. It’s got the entire industry worried. “It would be a real cultural loss to have fewer wild blueberry farms and fewer berries available in the future,” said Lily Calderwood, a wild blueberry specialist at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension whose research focuses on disease and pest management. She grew up surrounded by agriculture in Massachusetts and became fascinated with it on a trip to a Cape Cod cranberry bog as an undergraduate student. Calderwood, 39, worked at the nonprofit Earthwatch Institute, then earned her doctorate at the University of Vermont and later worked at the Cornell Cooperative Extension before coming to Maine eight years ago. Stressed seasons Maine’s wild blueberry populations are caught in a climate hotspot, driven partially by rapid warming in the Gulf of Maine, Schattman said. According to 2021 research, the state’s blueberry barrens are warming faster than the rest of the state, especially in locations closer to the coast. In response, the berries are ripening sooner, and farmers can miss part of their harvest if they’re caught unaware. Calderwood said the crop was traditionally harvested in early or mid-August, but now most fruits are ready by late July. High heat also makes the harvest window shorter, she said, meaning farmers need additional labor and equipment to finish in time. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PassiveHeat2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Scientists at the Wyman’s Research Center in Maine study the effect of rising heat and changing rainfall on wild blueberries, one of the state’s signature crops. " data-credit="Courtesy of Rachel Schattman"/> Scientists at the Wyman’s Research Center in Maine study the effect of rising heat and changing rainfall on wild blueberries, one of the state’s signature crops. Courtesy of Rachel Schattman Kroeck said he was unprepared for the early ripening in some years, and harvesting late meant lower yields and worse fruit quality. “As farmers, we’re very much attached to the season, and you kind of get into your ideas of when things need to be done,” he said. Now, he has to spend more time observing conditions directly in the fields. Farmers can’t rely on traditional knowledge — some of it passed down through families of growers — to plan their schedules anymore, Calderwood said. The farmers she works with have “absolutely no doubt” that climate change is already affecting their livelihoods. Kroeck worked on farms in California, Massachusetts, and New York before he and his wife, a Massachusetts native, decided they liked the Maine farming community and moved to Crystal Spring Farm 22 years ago. In the last decade, he said, the unpredictable weather has far exceeded the typical year-to-year variation he was used to. “If you look at the research, it’s pretty hard to deny that we’re living in a period of changing weather,” he said. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=683&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ResearchFarm1-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Scientists at the Wyman’s Research Center in Maine study the effect of rising heat and changing rainfall on wild blueberries, one of the state’s signature crops. " data-credit="Courtesy of Rachel Schattman"/> Scientists at the Wyman’s Research Center in Maine study the effect of rising heat and changing rainfall on wild blueberries, one of the state’s signature crops. Courtesy of Rachel Schattman Kroeck serves on the boards of the Organic Farmers Association and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, both organizations that address climate change’s impact on agriculture. Maine experienced severe droughts in 2020, 2022, and 2025, plus one of its wettest years on record in 2023. Too-wet conditions encourage disease and unchecked weeds in blueberry fields. Droughts, on the other hand, reduce the number of flowers that form and shrivel the fruit. Farms also contend with surprise frosts in late spring, which can kill flower buds right as they start to form, Kroeck said. Occasionally, warm autumns have caused the bushes to flower again just before winter, sapping energy and reducing their berry production the following year. Wild blueberries are dependent on steady levels of moisture throughout the growing season, Calderwood said. That’s getting less and less common. “The plant needs more water to keep the berries on the stems. And with less water and higher temperatures, they will shrivel and drop to the ground before a farmer can get to them,” Calderwood said. And since wild blueberries only fruit every other year, Kroeck said extreme weather can have effects on multiple seasons. “A drought year is obviously going to affect the size of our fruit, but it’s also going to affect that other half that’s still in the vegetation state,” he said. “If they’re stressed from water and from temperature, they’re not going to grow as robust as they would, and the fruit they put out is not going to be as big as it could.” A cycle of loss Last year, Maine saw a wet spring followed by hot, dry conditions that started in June. The drought intensified in August and lasted through the rest of the year and into 2026. Calderwood called it “a classic example of climate whiplash.” The Maine Wild Blueberry Commission estimates the industry lost $30 million in 2025. “It was devastating for many farms in that region,” said Calderwood, who is also on her town’s conservation commission. Many blueberry farmers reported the loss of a third to half of their yields. “There were reports of many, many acres of blueberries going unharvested because the berries had basically dehydrated on the bush,” Schattman said. 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Climate change is scrambling where the world’s food is grown. Ayurella Horn-Muller Kroeck’s 2025 losses were higher than most because his farm sits on exceptionally sandy soil, which doesn’t hold water well. He has crop insurance, which covers some of the loss, but that insurance is partly based on the value of previous years’ yields. “If you have losses in close succession, then your average harvest goes down,” he said. Kroeck said he has applied for state and federal relief, but that money would be applied to his 2023 losses from a late freeze, which have been on the farm’s books for nearly three years. The state’s wild blueberry industry has declined in recent years, both in the number of farms and the total acreage of commercial fields, according to Wild Blueberry Commission data, and financial stress is one of the reasons for that. Even Wyman’s, one of the state’s largest producers, plans to sell nearly 800 acres of blueberry fields this year. “There have been some pretty significant hits to wild blueberries in Maine in general,” Kroeck said. Researchers like Schattman and Calderwood are trying to prevent climate change from being another reason that farms go under. Modeling blueberries’ future At the Wyman’s Research Center farm in Old Town, Schattman and the climate adaptation research team are trying to simulate potential futures for Maine’s wild blueberries. Researchers are halfway through a four-year study of how temperature, rainfall, and irrigation affect wild blueberries’ growing conditions — from soil health to pollination — and fruit yields. They’re also testing different climate scenarios for the end of the century to see how the plants handle extremely wet, extremely dry, or variable conditions. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=683&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/IMG_6225-1024x683-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="At Crystal Spring Farm, Seth Kroeck is adding irrigation lines to part of his blueberry fields this year to protect them from drought. " data-credit="Sydney Cromwell / Inside Climate News"/> At Crystal Spring Farm, Seth Kroeck is adding irrigation lines to part of his blueberry fields this year to protect them from drought. Sydney Cromwell / Inside Climate News The wild blueberries are grown under a range of conditions: Some have irrigation systems, some have mulch to slow moisture evaporation, and others have neither. Some bushes are grown in isolation, while others are clustered together to see how community and genetic diversity affect the plant’s resilience. Schattman said open-top plexiglass structures passively trap heat around some of the blueberry plants on the farm, while others have heating coils to simulate heightened temperatures. “We’re collecting a massive amount of data,” she said. Irrigation and, to a lesser extent, mulching are already showing promise in reducing drought impact. Mulch barriers reduce soil temperatures, lower the risk of disease, and slow weed growth, but they aren’t enough to avert the effects of a severe drought like 2025. “[Mulching] is a really healthy thing to do for our fields,” Calderwood said. “It can be used as a buffer for drought, but it cannot replace irrigation.” Irrigation can be difficult with wild blueberries, since their preferred soil often isn’t great for building wells or installing pipes, Schattman said. Most small growers don’t have irrigation systems, leaving them vulnerable when droughts overlap with the growing season. “Obviously, it’s useless to install an irrigation system if you don’t have a reliable water source,” she said. When the climate adaptation study is complete, Schattman said she hopes to have data that can create a roadmap for farmers to keep their crops healthy in future conditions. Calderwood’s work at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension overlaps with Schattman’s research, but much of it is hands-on in the fields of local blueberry farms. This summer, Calderwood will be working with a large producer, Brodis Blueberries, to see how plants develop in irrigated and non-irrigated portions of their fields, and whether they show signs of stress during dry periods. It’s key to figure out when the timing of irrigation can make the most impact, Calderwood said, especially for farms that can’t cover their entire acreage or may only be able to afford irrigation once or twice. “Every time the pump runs, it is an expense,” she said. ‘It’s always expensive’ Affordability is the roadblock that wild blueberry farmers keep running into when it comes to climate change, both Schattman and Calderwood said. From buying equipment to drilling wells to trucking in loads of mulch, major one-time investments are difficult for small farms with thin profit margins. “Every farm needs irrigation, but they just simply can’t afford it,” Calderwood said. 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Is there a fix? Ayurella Horn-Muller At Crystal Spring Farm, Kroeck is trying to apply the University of Maine’s recommendations. He has brought in over 100,000 square feet of mulch, which covers less than half of his 72 acres of blueberries. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, which is part of the USDA, subsidized some of the costs, which range between $5,000 and $10,000 each year. “Farmers would not do that if NRCS was not paying for it,” Calderwood said. Kroeck also bought irrigation equipment, which arrived in December. It cost $90,000 for the equipment and the new well, which will cover about a quarter of his blueberry fields. “It’s always expensive, and it’s always a gigantic cash flow game,” he said. Additional state and federal investment, from funding to technical expertise, could also fast-track irrigation for small farms, Calderwood said. But in the past year, funding has trended in the opposite direction. The NRCS has lost funding and about a quarter of its staffing — more than 2,000 people — due to USDA budget cuts since the beginning of the current Trump administration. Maine also lost $15.5 million, intended for a pilot program that would have brought water management practices to between 25 and 45 wild blueberry farms, due to federal grant clawbacks. The state Drought Relief Fund has given grants for farmers to create water management plans, drill wells, or build storage ponds, but only two dozen of those were funded last year across all types of agriculture. Meanwhile, profitability of wild blueberries is being squeezed by low market prices and competition from cultivated blueberry producers, Schattman said. Costs of fertilizer, labor, and equipment have risen too. Farms are earning about 50 percent less per pound of wild blueberries than they were a few years ago, according to the Wild Blueberry Commission. Kroeck said he knows many small farms are having a hard time getting their products into large grocery store chains. “The pricing is not very good as far as what those large chains are willing to pay,” he said. “The market for wild blueberries has been flat or has been decreasing somewhat, and that’s also very worrisome.” Kroeck is part of a group of farmers looking into selling more berries fresh instead of frozen, a move that would open up a new, potentially more profitable customer base but would also require new equipment and additional labor. Wild blueberry farmers need new markets or higher prices to afford expensive long-term projects, Schattman said. “That’s much more difficult when you’re struggling to reach your sales goals,” Kroeck said. In the absence of financial and technical support, Calderwood said it’s likely that only the largest berry producers will be able to protect themselves from a warming future. “It’s a puzzle to figure irrigation out, and it needs federal funding,” she said. With or without irrigation, Calderwood said she doesn’t think climate change will spell doom for a plant as resilient as the wild blueberry. “Every year, there will be blueberries to harvest,” she said. But whether there will be enough berries to keep farms in business is another matter. “I hope that we’re going to be able to make the pivots that we need to make to save the crop,” Kroeck said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wild blueberry farms across Maine suffer as climate change upends growing seasons on May 16, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sydney Cromwell, Inside Climate News.
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A 46-second video is being widely shared on social media with the claim that anti-Hindi protests have erupted across Tamil Nadu after the newly formed TVK government assumed office. The... The post Tamil Nadu anti-Hindi protests from March falsely linked to TVK assuming power appeared first on Alt News.
A 46-second video is being widely shared on social media with the claim that anti-Hindi protests have erupted across Tamil Nadu after the newly formed TVK government assumed office. The viral clip shows a group of people smearing black paint over Hindi signboards at railway stations. X user Bhakt Prahlad posted the video on May 10, 2026. The post has garnered over 270,000 views and 1500 reshares. The bio of the user says “Lawyer | Sanatani | Proud Hindu”. (Archive) Anti-Hindi Hate started in TamilNadu after Swearing-in of TVK Vijay. This is the only thing they knew & call BJP a communal party pic.twitter.com/zPE8rxW5go — Bhakt Prahlad (@RakeshKishore_l) May 10, 2026 The video was also shared by X user Anuradha Mishra with a similar claim on May 12, 2026. (Archive) Hindi text defaced at Chennai railway station after Vijay’s oath!!! I pity Tamil Nadu, state which is a Sanatan hater, hindu hater and a hindi hater pic.twitter.com/FTOaBH0N3A — Anuradha Mishra (Modi’s Family) (@Anuradham1805) May 12, 2026 The same video was posted by several social media users around May 10-12 echoing similar claims. They either called it ‘fresh protests’ or linked it directly to TVK and Joseph Vijay. Click to view slideshow. Fact Check We extracted a few keyframes from the viral video and performed a reverse image search on them. This led us to a Threads post by Sun News dated March 12, 2026, which carried the same footage. According to the post, activists protesting against the alleged imposition of Hindi had smeared black paint over Hindi lettering on signboards at railway stations such as Chromepet and Nungambakkam in Chennai. The on-screen Tamil text in the video, translated using Google Lens, read: “In Chennai Rail Station, Hindi Letters Removed”. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-315469" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-16-105325-1024x970.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="767" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-16-105325-1024x970.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-16-105325-300x284.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-16-105325-768x728.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-16-105325.jpg 1257w" sizes="(max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> The visuals match exactly with the video which is now going viral. Local media outlet Unseen Chennai posted the same video on Facebook and on Instagram, on the same date — March 12. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Unseen Chennai (@unseenchennai) Anti-Hindi protests erupted in Chennai and adjoining in March following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Tamil Nadu on March 11, 2026. The demonstrations were spearheaded by an organization called 17 May Movement and its leader, Thirumurugan Gandhi. To sum up, the viral video of Hindi letters on railway station boards being defaced is more than two-month old. It is being falsely linked to TVK coming to power in Tamil Nadu. The post Tamil Nadu anti-Hindi protests from March falsely linked to TVK assuming power appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Anindya Hazra.
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New chapter for Hapi Isles – Matthew Wale takes the helm as PM
PROFILE: By Campion Ohasio The Solomon Islands has entered a new political era. In a historic morning at Parliament House yesterday, Matthew Cooper Wale was elected as the nation’s new Prime Minister. His victory marks the culmination of a dramatic week in Honiara and signals a potential shift in both the country’s internal management and
PROFILE: By Campion Ohasio The Solomon Islands has entered a new political era. In a historic morning at Parliament House yesterday, Matthew Cooper Wale was elected as the nation’s new Prime Minister. His victory marks the culmination of a dramatic week in Honiara and signals a potential shift in both the country’s internal management and its place on the global stage. Wale, the longtime Leader of the Opposition, defeated former Foreign Minister Peter Shanel Agovaka in a secret ballot, winning 26 votes to 22. READ MORE: China’s growing grip on the fragile Solomon Islands media sector Solomon Islands PM Jeremiah Manele ousted after just over two years in power Other Solomon islands reports The result was greeted with cheers from supporters gathered outside Parliament, Honiara and around the country, as the 57-year-old leader prepared to take the oath of office before Governor-General Sir David Tiva Kapu. The road to victory The path to the premiership was anything but simple. Just eight days ago, the previous government led by Jeremiah Manele collapsed after losing a motion of no-confidence. For years, Matthew Wale has been the most prominent voice of dissent in the Solomon Islands, often coming close to the top job but never quite reaching it. After falling short in the 2019 and 2024 leadership votes, many viewed Wale as the perpetual runner-up. However, today’s result proves that his persistence and his message of “breaking the shackles” finally resonated with a majority of his fellow Members of Parliament. In his first address following the announcement, Prime Minister-elect Wale was humble but realistic. “We take the government at a difficult time,” Wale told the press. “Change is coming. These changes are necessary, and they may be painful. I ask that you join your government in putting your hand to the plough.” Profile of a leader Who is Matthew Wale? Born on 13 June 1968, in Ambu Village, Malaita Province, Matthew Cooper Wale is a seasoned veteran of the Pacific political landscape. Before entering the world of policy and Parliament, he was an accountant — a background that many believe informs his disciplined approach to the national budget. Wale first entered Parliament in 2008 during a byelection for the Aoke/Langalanga constituency. He quickly made a name for himself as a fiery and articulate speaker. Unlike many politicians who stay in the background, Wale has never been afraid of a verbal scrap on the floor of Parliament. Over the past 18 years, he has served in various roles, but he is best known for leading the Solomon Islands Democratic Party (SIDP) and acting as the primary check on the power of former Prime Ministers Manasseh Sogavare and Jeremiah Manele. In late 2024, he was even awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for his long service to the public and political life of the country, a testament to his standing both at home and within the Commonwealth. A vision of ‘economic liberation’ What does a Matthew Wale government look like? Throughout his career, Wale has championed a few core beliefs that he calls his “pillars of change”, “anti-corruption and “elite capture”. Wale’s most frequent target is what he calls “elite capture” — the idea that a small group of powerful people in Honiara control most of the country’s wealth. He has promised to dismantle these systems to ensure resources reach the rural provinces. Education and health: A vocal advocate for the “ordinary family”, Wale has consistently pushed for increased funding for hospitals and free, high-quality education. He believes that a nation cannot flourish if its citizens are not healthy and skilled. Political stability: To end the cycle of “grasshopping” (where MPs switch parties for personal gain), Wale has signaled he will seek to strengthen laws that keep political parties disciplined and accountable. The ‘China question’ and global relations: Perhaps the most watched aspect of Wale’s new leadership will be his foreign policy. For years, Wale was a staunch critic of the 2022 security pact signed with China, warning that it could “jeopardise” relationships with traditional partners like Australia and the United States. Tone has evolved However, as a pragmatist, Wale’s tone has evolved. While he is expected to rebalance the nation’s relationships — likely warming ties with Canberra and Washington — he has acknowledged that Chinese infrastructure is now a reality in the Solomon Islands. He is unlikely to tear up existing agreements overnight, but observers expect a more “balanced” approach that prioritises Solomon Islands’ sovereignty above all else. As the sun sets on the nation today, the atmosphere is one of cautious optimism. The challenges facing Prime Minister Wale are immense: a struggling economy, high cost of living, and a deeply divided Parliament. But for today, the man who spent nearly two decades in the wings finally has the chance to lead. Matthew Wale’s message to the people is clear: the road ahead will be hard, but the destination — a fairer, more transparent Solomon Islands — is worth the effort. The “Hapi Isles” are watching, and the world is, too. Campion Ohasio is a Solomon Islands-based self-taught visual artist, graphic designer, and prominent political cartoonist known for capturing South Pacific social issues. He gained early recognition in the 1990s for his work on Uni Tavur at the University of Papua New Guinea and later as a editor for the Solomons Voice. This commentary is republished with the author’s permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Somersaulting Voters: Stopping Rabid Gerrymandering
By Ralph Nader May 15, 2026 “Gerrymandering” is the historic term for politicians picking their voters by manipulating Congressional and state electoral districts. Redistricting usually happens every ten years. It is fair to say that most voters don’t ...
By Ralph Nader May 15, 2026 “Gerrymandering” is the historic term for politicians picking their voters by manipulating Congressional and state electoral districts. Redistricting usually happens every ten years. It is fair to say that most voters don’t want politicians rigging the system to help one party win elections. Both the Republican and Democratic parties… This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader and was authored by matthew.
‘Seismic shift’ toward Aussie orbit likely under Solomon Islands’ new prime minister
Charley Piringi and Eugene Whong for RFA
Experts say that Matthew Wale will be ‘more moderate’ and ‘less enthusiastic’ about China than his predecessors.
HONIARA — The Solomon Islands’ choice of longtime opposition leader Matthew Wale as its new prime minister could be a sign that a diplomatic shift away from Beijing and toward Canberra is likely, experts told Radio Free Asia. Wale was sworn in on Friday after winning 26 out of 50 votes in parliament, edging out the 22 votes for Foreign Minister Peter Shanel Agovaka, and drawing to a conclusion the political chaos surrounding Wale’s predecessor Jeremiah Manele, who last week was ousted in a no-confidence vote. “Fellow Solomon Islanders, change is coming,” Wale said during his inaugural address. The new prime minister takes office amid mounting geopolitical tension across the Indo-Pacific, and he will likely take a more moderate stance toward engagement with China, unlike the two prime ministers before him, Graeme Smith, associate professor at the Department of Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University, told RFA. “I think it’s a pretty seismic shift in the diplomatic sense. It does bring the Solomons more back into kind of an Australian, and to a lesser extent U.S. orbit,” he said. “It’s certainly a development that will have, I think, pleased people in Canberra.” Wale has been opposition leader for roughly seven years, dating back to the beginning of the fourth term of Manasseh Sogavare, during which it could be said that Honiara decisively entered into Beijing’s sphere of influence – in 2019 the Solomon Islands stopped recognizing Taiwan in favor of China, and in 2022 entered into a secretive controversial security pact with Beijing, which, at the time, Wale criticized as undermining the security of the country. Chinese police personnel on the grounds of the parliament building during the prime ministerial election in Honiara, Solomon Islands, May 15, 2026. (Charley Piringi/RFA) When Sogavare’s term was up in 2024, parliament chose his foreign minister Manele to succeed him, in what was largely seen as an extension of Sogavare’s pro-China stances. Smith said that the switch to Wale likely would not vastly change relations with China, but “but he certainly will be much more moderate in his language around Beijing and certainly far less enthusiastic than his two predecessors in both Manele and Sogavare.” Wale during his speech described the current global climate as a difficult period shaped by geopolitical rivalry and economic uncertainty, pressures he said the Solomon Islands cannot escape. “We take government at a difficult time given what is happening throughout the world,” Wale said. “We are not immune from the impacts of these geopolitical events.” He pledged that his government would pursue disciplined and prudent management to guide the country through the challenges ahead. Wale’s election reflects a broader struggle over the future foreign policy direction of the Solomon Islands, international relations scholar Alexander L. Vuving of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, told RFA. “For the people of Solomon Islands, the key concerns are economic and political issues within the country,” Vuving said. “But for the wider Indo-Pacific, the most important question is how the next government positions itself among the major powers.” Wale vs. Agovaka The political contest was widely interpreted as a choice between maintaining close ties with Beijing or recalibrating relations toward Australia and Western allies. Agovaka, who had served as foreign minister under Manele but then led an exodus of lawmakers from the ruling coalition in defecting to the opposition in March, was widely estimated to have been the favorite to succeed him, especially after Manele endorsed him after his ouster. A vote for Agovaka therefore would have been seen as a vote to stay the course in maintaining close China ties, whereas a vote for Wale would favor a more cautious approach to China’s expanding security footprint while favoring stronger engagement with Australia and the United States, Vuving said. “The election can turn Solomon Islands in a very different direction about how it positions itself among the major powers,” he said, adding that Wale’s victory was likely to be welcomed in Western capitals as evidence that China’s growing influence in the Pacific can still be challenged. Solomon Islands' new prime minister Matthew Wale, left, is sworn in by Governor-General David Kapu at the Government House in Honiara, Solomon Islands, May 15, 2026. (Solomon Islands government via AFP) Smith acknowledged that Wale’s victory came as a surprise. “He’s been opposition leader for four seven years now, and I think a lot of people assumed that he’d missed his chance and this day would never come,” he said. “I think a lot of people I assumed it would be Agovaka that would get the job given that he was sort of the lead critic of Manele, and in many ways sort of was the main person pushing the no confidence motion.” Smith said that Agovaka’s world view was much more pro-China, and that among parliament there is more support for China over Taiwan, pointing out that Wale’s coalition might not be very stable, as he won the “bare minimum” of 26 votes in a 50 seat parliament. “Wale will be looking to get a few more numbers across and that may mean that he has to give a signal that he’s a bit more pro-China,” he said. “So he will not be stridently anti-China but he’ll certainly be less pro than Agovaka would have been. Challenges ahead Holding on to power could be difficult with such a slim majority, Joseph Foukona, a history professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who hails from the Solomon Islands, told RFA. “It’s going to be a challenge for him in terms of trying to continue to maintain the numbers on his side,”Foukona said. “If there’s any political disagreement or tensions within his group, we might see people moving or changing sides again.” Smith said Wale will be under pressure to publicly release the details of the 2022 security agreement with Beijing, which he had been a huge critic of and which until now has been confidential, save for a leaked draft of the deal prior to its finalization. Wale might then push to revise parts of it, he said. Foukona said that Wale would likely be more transparent than his predecessors, not just about the 2022 security pact, but also in other arenas. “Often when he speaks he sort of emphasizes transparency and accountability and this is one area that we must see some changes in terms of going forward,” Foukona said of Wale. He said Wale’s government might put more resources into the country’s anti-corruption commission, and disclose details about international agreements signed by the previous government. Strategic importance Located in the South Pacific and relatively close to Australia, the Solomon Islands occupies maritime space considered important for regional security and trade routes. During World War II, the islands were a major battleground. Today, competition has shifted toward infrastructure, technology, and access to resources. One major area of rivalry involves undersea telecommunications cables, which carry nearly all global internet traffic. “The undersea cables have become critical infrastructure,” Vuving said. “China is trying to gain influence in that business, and that has triggered pushback from the United States and particularly Australia.” In this September 15, 2012 photo, a woman makes dishes out of palm leaves at Bonegi Beach in Honiara. (Daniel Munoz/Reuters) The cables are part of a larger telecommunications infrastructure competition in the islands. Chinese technology giant Huawei recently completed the installation of more than 160 telecommunications towers across the country under a Chinese-funded project. Vuving also said that the Solomons controls a vast Exclusive Economic Zone rich in fisheries and seabed minerals, including resources increasingly important for renewable energy technologies and artificial intelligence industries, but which the country lacks to capacity to exploit. “Countries like the Solomon Islands need major powers with the capability to mine those minerals, and China is looking for that,” said Vuving, who said that China’s expansion in the Pacific has been gradual. He described China’s approach as “salami slicing.” “You don’t see a big shift overnight,” Vuving explained. “Every day, they expand a little bit. After years, they gain huge influence and can lock people into those relationships.” He said that regardless of who is in charge of the Solomons, the country would still have to balance influence by foreign powers. “You’re small, and you’re playing the game with giants,” he said.“In that way, you’re very vulnerable.” Vuving argued that the Solomon Islands must diversify its international partnerships to avoid overdependence on any single country, strengthening ties not only with China, Australia, and the United States, but also with partners such as Japan, India, France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. He said the long-term challenge for the Solomon Islands will be maintaining political independence while navigating relationships with competing global powers. “The fate of great power competition may not be decided entirely in Solomon Islands,” Vuving said. “But for a small Pacific nation, it is extraordinary to find itself at the centre of such an important geopolitical contest.” Eugene Whong reported from Washington. Edited by Charlie Dharapak. This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Charley Piringi and Eugene Whong for RFA.
CPJ, press freedom organizations renew call for justice on 9th anniversary of journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas’ murder
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joined family members, journalists and other press freedom organizations in Culiacán, the capital of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa, to renew a call for justice in the murder of journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas. Valdez, a correspondent for Mexico City newspaper La Jornada and co-founder of weekly investigative magazine Ríodoce,...
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joined family members, journalists and other press freedom organizations in Culiacán, the capital of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa, to renew a call for justice in the murder of journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas. Valdez, a correspondent for Mexico City newspaper La Jornada and co-founder of weekly investigative magazine Ríodoce, was killed May 15, 2017, in Culiacán. He was a 2011 International Press Freedom Award recipient. According to a federal investigation, his murder was ordered by Dámaso López Serrano, an alleged high-ranking operative of the Sinaloa Cartel criminal organization. While two of the triggermen were captured and received prison sentences, López Serrano surrendered to U.S. authorities several months after the killing. López Serrano, also known as ‘El Mini Lic,’ is serving a five-year jail sentence for drug trafficking in the United States. He was previously reported to have cooperated as a witness in other criminal cases. In Culiacán, Valdez’s widow Griselda Triana, Ríodoce co-founder Ismael Bojorquez, CPJ, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), ARTICLE 19 and Mexican press freedom organization Propuesta Cívica urged Mexican authorities to redouble their efforts to have Dámaso López Serrano extradited to Mexico so he can stand trial for his role in Valdez’s killing. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
When a Liquified Natural Gas Facility Moves In
Why have immigration agents detained this citizen three times?
Palestinians in Gaza are facing a unique financial crisis.
Palestinians in Gaza are facing a unique financial crisis. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Hassan Herzallah.
Journalist kettled while covering protest near NYC synagogue
Independent journalist Talia Ben-Ora was penned in a police kettle while covering a protest in New York, New York, on May 5, 2026.The protest was taking place near a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was holding an event to promote real est...
Independent journalist Talia Ben-Ora was penned in a police kettle while covering a protest in New York, New York, on May 5, 2026. The protest was taking place near a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was holding an event to promote real estate sales in Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the latter of which are widely believed to violate international law. The New York City Police Department formed a buffer zone around the synagogue, prohibiting access to the block it was located on and directing pro-Palestinian and a smaller group of pro-Israel protesters, as well as press, onto surrounding avenues, according to news reports and journalists who spoke to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Ben-Ora told the Tracker that at one point, NYPD officers suddenly barricaded a sidewalk on nearby Third Avenue, pushing metal barricades into protesters and using chemical irritants to prevent them from accessing an area that had previously been open. Members of the press were standing behind the officers, documenting the police actions. Then, “NYPD flooded that space and closed us in, not allowing press to move away, resulting in a strange press-only kettle,” Ben-Ora said. In a video Ben-Ora posted on Bluesky, uniformed police and plainclothes public information officers can be seen telling press to back up from the protest, then surrounding them with metal barricades, penning them in. Situation deteriorated as protest marched from Lex/68 back to their original protest location. Press kettled as NYPD pushed in on protestors, other press. We are now stuck beside the SRG line. Unclear if any arrests. — talia jane (@taliajane.bsky.social) 2026-05-06T00:46:31.945Z “They prevented us from leaving by not moving from in front of where the barricades were up against the wall, ignoring us, as other cops were pushing into the crowd,” Ben-Ora said, adding, “I didn’t get the sense that we would be arrested, just that they were freezing our movement in any direction, including away from where they were fighting protesters.” Ben-Ora said that members of the press were allowed to leave the kettle after a few minutes, but were “still separated by a police line and barricades from the protest.” The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
Israel threatens NYT with defamation suit
Fiji’s journalists celebrate belated World Press Freedom Day – but warn of threats
Fijian Media Association Fiji’s media workers finally got to celebrate their World Press Freedom Day this week 11 days late — on Thursday, May 14. The event was pushed back from its traditional May 3 global date — which fell on a Sunday this year — to accommodate a packed news cycle dominated by parliamentary
Fijian Media Association Fiji’s media workers finally got to celebrate their World Press Freedom Day this week 11 days late — on Thursday, May 14. The event was pushed back from its traditional May 3 global date — which fell on a Sunday this year — to accommodate a packed news cycle dominated by parliamentary sittings and the Coca-Cola Games. The events across Suva and Savusavu highlighted both the grit of local journalists and the very real threats still hovering over the industry. READ MORE: Other World Press Freedom Day reports In the capital Suva, the day started before sunrise. At 5am journalists met at the Bowling Club for a morning walk down to My Suva Park and back, catching up over a networking breakfast. Later that evening, the focus shifted to Gordon House at the British High Commissioner’s Residence for a reception backed by BBC Media Action, Women in Media Fiji, and the Fijian Media Association (FMA). Permanent Secretary for Information Eseta Nadakuitavuki described reporters as “real warriors” who required courage and “a very thick skin”. While she praised the media’s fearless role in holding the powerful accountable, she also pointed to modern digital threats. She warned that while AI brought innovation, the rise of fake news and deepfakes meant ethical journalism and rigorous fact-checking were more crucial than ever. BBC Media Action mentorship The night also carved out time to recognise seven local journalists who completed a BBC Media Action content production mentorship under seasoned journalist Elenoa Baselala. Up North, a different kind of gathering took place at the Hot Springs Hotel in Savusavu. FMA general secretary Stanley Simpson joined journalists for a dinner supported by the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS). The Savusavu event was an acknowledgment of the mental toll carried by reporters outside the capital who usually “survive on roti and bean between assignments”. Remembering the heavy weight these journalists carry, it was highlighted that in 2017, Northern reporters had to cover two back-to-back tragedies involving children: a fatal house fire, followed just two days later by a father drowning his three kids and himself. With no debrief rooms or on-call counselors in the North, these reporters — including Peceli, Shratika, Naca, Feroz, Sampras, Nitesh, and Josese — just had to file their heartbreaking stories and keep going. There was plenty of reason to celebrate on a national level, as Fiji recently jumped 16 spots to 24th globally on the 2026 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index — a massive climb from 84th place in 2023. However, the FMA made it clear that Fiji’s press freedom gains remained fragile. Navigating complexities The industry is still navigating the complexities of Fiji’s hard-drugs crisis and dealing with disquieting developments like journalists being summoned to testify in court. There is also ongoing friction with government officials; recently, Minister for Information Lynda Tabuya criticised the media in Parliament over “mal-information” regarding a broken lift at the CWM Hospital, subsequently calling for an end to “doorstop-style” interviews. The FMA firmly defended the practice as a necessary tool for holding officials accountable in a democracy. Despite the challenges, the media fraternity is already looking ahead to its next major gathering. In September, the focus will return to Fiji as it hosts the region for the Pacific Media Summit. Republished from the Fijian Media Association FB page. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Ghada Karmi: How Gaza shattered the myth of coexistence
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Palestinians inspect the extensive damage at buildings following an Israeli air strike on the Al-Shati Camp violating the current ceasefire agreement in western Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on May 09, 2026. Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343526" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/ghada-karmi-how-gaza-shattered-the-myth-of-coexistence/gettyimages-2274677768" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-2274677768" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Palestinians inspect the extensive damage at buildings following an Israeli air strike on the Al-Shati Camp violating the current ceasefire agreement in western Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on May 09, 2026. Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “For the first time in my life I'm contemplating the physical end of Palestine. That's something I never, ever thought would happen.”
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Palestinians inspect the extensive damage at buildings following an Israeli air strike on the Al-Shati Camp violating the current ceasefire agreement in western Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on May 09, 2026. Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343526" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/ghada-karmi-how-gaza-shattered-the-myth-of-coexistence/gettyimages-2274677768" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-2274677768" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Palestinians inspect the extensive damage at buildings following an Israeli air strike on the Al-Shati Camp violating the current ceasefire agreement in western Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on May 09, 2026. Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2274677768-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has shattered long-held hopes for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence and exposed the global systems sustaining the decades-long destruction of Palestine and the dispossession of Palestinians. In this special edition of the The Marc Steiner Show, commemorating the solemn anniversary of the Nakba, Marc speaks with world-renowned author and physician Ghada Karmi about the destruction of Gaza, the collapse of faith in a political solution, and the deepening despair felt by many Palestinians and Israelis alike today. Guests: Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem. Forced from her home during the Nakba, she later trained as a Doctor of Medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British-Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. She is the author of numerous books, including the best-selling memoir In Search of Fatima and One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel. Credits: Producer: Rosette Sewali Studio Production: Cameron Granadino Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. As we begin our conversation, it’s important to remember that since October 7th, 2023, when the Gaza War began after the kidnapping of Israelis, 73,000 Palestinians have been killed. Over 20,000 of them being children and the land itself has been totally devastated. The program today is dedicated to the Nakhba. The day of remembrance when almost a million Palestinians were forced to flee from their homes, forced to flee for their lives, to live the rest of their lives as refugees. One of those people is my guest today, who was a child when she and her family were forced to flee their home during the Nakba. Dr. Ghada Karmi is a physician, author of numerous books about Palestine, Israel, and the state of Palestinians. Her latest work is a novel called Mojana, a novel of medieval Baghdad. And Ghada, welcome. It’s good to see you. Good to have you with us. Ghada Karmi: Thank you. I’m very glad to be here. Marc Steiner: So Ghada I… I’ve been covering Israel-Palestine for years now and been involved since I was a child since I’m Jewish, that family in Israel, Palestine, and then my Palestinian friends over the years as well. So it’s gigantic part of my life. And I’m just saying that to say I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a moment as dire as the one we face now, other than the Nakba itself, that we’re in that kind of moment. Could you describe just analytically where you think we are, what we’re facing when it comes to Israel-Palestine, this moment? Ghada Karmi: First of all, I agree with you. I don’t remember a time as bad as this and you say excluding the original Nakba, I would not exclude that because I think what I’m seeing now is worse than the Nakba that I lived through as a child in 1948. It is actually worse because always previously I never really believed in my heart of hearts that Israel would last for long, that it would survive and that we would not be looking at a situation where as in my case, because I was evicted with my family in 1948, I never believed that in my lifetime I would not be able to return to my homeland, which would be the same as saying that the state of Israel would have been terminated. That’s what I always lived by. And I think all Palestinians live with that hope in their hearts. However, I have to tell you, for the first time in all those years, I have begun to doubt that. Marc Steiner: As you were speaking, one of the things I thought about as a young man, a very young man, I was in the Zionist groups. The last one was in Karsha Mahatzeer with the Marxist Scionists who believed at that time in a binational state where everybody lived together in peace. I raised that only to ask you in all your life as a Palestinian woman, as a scholar, as an activist, is that dream gone completely where people you think could live together in that space, have we actually, because of the oppression and Palestinians, completely terminated that possibility? Ghada Karmi: Yes. I have advocated for what I would call one democratic state Marc Steiner: Solution Ghada Karmi: For many years. Be careful not by national, not by national. Marc Steiner: Got you. I understand. Ghada Karmi: Indeed, I don’t recognize that there is another nation in Palestine. I don’t. And for many, many years, my vision for the future has always been that we Palestinians would return home to Palestine. We and our children and grandchildren, we would return that, number one, as a matter of priority. And number two, the question of what is to be the future for the settler community because this is really what we Palestinians think of Jewish-Israelis. They’re settlers and children and grandchildren of settlers apart from the very small minority of originally indigenous, what we called Arab Jews. The rest came from outside. So what is to be done with them has been a secondary matter, but I’ve always believed that it would be only a right, humane and moral to invite them to stay if they would like to stay with us in a democratic state framework and enjoy equal rights and equal citizenship with us. If they’re not prepared to do that, then they must leave. And that is really my vision for the future. Now I have to tell you, as you point out so rightly, I’ve begun to doubt that because I look at the Israeli Jewish population since the Gaza genocide and we look at opinion polls and we see that a majority of ordinary Jewish people in Israel are in support of the genocide. They support the destruction of the Palestinian people. And I cannot, as an activist, ask my fellow Palestinians to contemplate embracing people like this and saying, “Why don’t we live together?” And we can forget the past, we can get on. It’s not true. It’s no longer true. Marc Steiner: When I think about this, I spent years working in the anti-apartheid struggle around South Africa and places like South Africa, like Israel, there’s two alternatives. A, is either the Jewish population in Israel, Israel-Palestine is wiped out or they’re forced to leave or there’s one democratic state. There’s a poster I have on my wall that I got in Cuba in 1968. It’s a map of all of Palestine, all of the Holy Land. And on one side is the Palestinian flag, the other’s an Israeli flag. And down the front it’s written one state, two people, three face. Do you think that’s an absurdity? Ghada Karmi: I don’t think it’s a possibility, no. Marc Steiner: Okay. Tell me why. Ghada Karmi: I don’t. You see the Jewish Israelis are settler colonialists. That’s what they are. So it’s like saying, if you rephrase it, you are saying the flag of the indigenous population, Palestinians and the flag of the settler colonists, Jewish Israelis. Now, how would you then imagine these two communities living together in an arrangement where the rights of the colonists are equal to the rights of the indigenous people? That is not the case. Now, South Africa is confusing. I respect your activism on South Africa and correctly so, but South Africa, you see the majority of the population were indigenous. Marc Steiner: Correct. Ghada Karmi: They were indigenous natives of the land. The minority of whites had come as settler colonists in the same way as Jewish Israelis, but much, much further back. Now, the disparity in numbers in the South African situation makes it a nonsense to say to this minority of whites, “You must have your own space and we have our own space.” It’s a nonsense. So of course it made sense. Here with Palestine, the problem is that it’s about half and off. So if you discount the exiles and the refugees who are living outside the area altogether, what you end up with is a 50% Jewish population, 50% Palestinian Arab population, but it doesn’t alter the basic nature of the Jewish population who are settler colonists and their descendants. Now, that’s not acceptable. I cannot, as a Palestinian, be asked to accept these people as equivalent to myself, especially given the suffering that they have caused for us Palestinians and especially in the last three years. I mean, it’s not moral, it’s not right, it’s not human to ask the victims, which is us, to take account of the victimizers and say, “Well, no, nevermind all is forgiven. Let’s all live together.” It can’t be done. Marc Steiner: I’m very curious. I’ve read a lot of your writing and work you’ve done over the years and looking forward to talking about your latest work another day. So then what do you see as a solution? How do we get to a place where the out of destruction of Palestinians is stopped, the murder of Palestinian people is ended and we come to a place of peace. How do you see that happening? Ghada Karmi: Well, good question. I can’t see it happening, not given the present circumstances. And by that I mean not just the murderous Israeli leadership and to a large extent, the population, not just that, but the support that Israel still enjoys after all this, you can wonder, be astonished at the continuing support that this genocidal state still enjoys without that support. Now there’s an argument. Now, if you could actually work on the support end that the Western states and particularly the United States, if you could work on them and get them to give up on Israel, then I think there’s a very great hope that the whole thing will come to an end. But given the current arrangement where you’ve got a powerful Israeli state supported, funded, shielded by the West, which is very powerful, this combination, you can’t expect a small people like the Palestinians, given their friends who are many in the world, even men, you cannot expect them to fight that kind of setup. It’s not possible. So your question is really a very good question. How do you do it? I wish I knew the answer. I know what it would take. I know the mechanisms which you’d have to remove in order to get that result. I wouldn’t know how you could persuade Western countries that are addicted, it seems to me. They are addicted to Israel or the idea of Israel. It’s quite remarkable. How can you get them to give up their addiction? I honestly don’t know. Marc Steiner: That’s really an interesting way to put it. I’ve never thought about it in the way you described it as an addiction. The piece I wrote that didn’t sit well with many of my fellow Jews was if there had never been a Holocaust, there would never be in Israel. Ghada Karmi: That’s true. Marc Steiner: And that is the reason that it exists. I mean, the United States refused to let Holocaust victims in. People went to Palestine took what wasn’t theirs and created a place for themselves. It’s refugees creating other refugees. I wrestle with this as well about how we end it. And I got exceedingly frustrated trying to find an answer. And I’ve had hundreds of interviews with people around this issue over the decades, but I’ve never felt that we’re at a moment that we are A, as I said, on a precipice of total disaster for both Israelis and Palestinians. And I don’t see how you stop that collision from happening. Ghada Karmi: Nor do I. Because if I go back to an earlier answer I gave you, Marc Steiner: Which Ghada Karmi: Is how do I feel at this moment? Well, I feel very, very hopeless because for the first time in my life I’m contemplating the physical end of Palestine. That’s something I never, ever thought would happen. But given the license that Israel has to do whatever it likes, it’s currently continuing this genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and it’s continuing the ethnic cleansing that it’s getting away with on the West Bank. So if it’s allowed to do that unhampered and nobody stops it and nobody’s strong enough on our side to fight it and to stop it, I can’t see any other future other than that they will succeed in emptying the land of a majority, let’s say not everybody, but a majority of Palestinians. So it’s looking pretty bleak, I have to say. And of course my concern is with the Palestinians, but you mentioned Israelis and I agree with you. I think Jewish Israelis don’t have a future. They don’t have a future now. Whatever they do to the Palestinians, they’re finished because imagine what is the future for Israel? What is it? Given it’s now completely exposed as a utterly belligerent state which cannot survive without perpetual war. It cannot. Now, how on earth can you imagine a future for its people with this way of life? Unless they accept at some point that they are actually like other people and they must settle down and stop fighting other people and killing them unless they accept that. I don’t see any future for them at all. So even though they’re not my primary concern- Yeah, no, Marc Steiner: Right. I understand. They’re right. No, I do understand. Ghada Karmi: They don’t have a future and we certainly don’t have a future, not given the current situation. Marc Steiner: I had no idea the direction our conversation was going to take today, though I’ve been reading a lot of what you’ve written. I’ve been in touch with friends in Israel who are Israelis and family and friends who are Palestinians who live in Ramallah and other places in the West Bank, people I’ve known forever. And a bleakness took over in those conversations over the last week, thinking about you coming on as well. And so that’s why the tenor of my questions and discussion is because of what I see as a real hopelessness that we’re facing at this moment. For me, it’s the question I ask them is, how do we who have been so oppressed oppress another? How do we let that happen? Yeah. So do you think the era of dialogue and hope are really over? Ghada Karmi: Look, I’m reluctant to say anything is absolutely over. Marc Steiner: I understand. Yes, I understand. Ghada Karmi: Yes. But having said that, you ask the question which says, how can people who’ve been oppressed be so oppressive? Well, I can think of a mechanism which explains all of this. You see, one of the self-defense postures that people can adopt when they are persecuted is to create an idea that they are very special and that they are better than other people. The fact that they’re being attacked by lesser people can be made to feel not so painful if you are encouraged to believe that you are special, that you are being attacked by a load of barbarians who don’t understand how special you are and how superior you are to them. So this idea of superiority I think has taken over with many, I was going to say most Jews, whether in Israel or out of Israel, that that is the mechanism. That’s how it was created, I think. So we end up with a situation where the oppression that Jews were subjected to was met by this feeling of we’re better than them. Okay, they can kill us, but we know we’re much better. Now, if you carry that kind of mentality into Israel-Palestine, you’ve created a population of Jewish-Israelis who really do think they’re supremacist, that they are special, and that everybody else around them, the Palestinians first and foremost, are lesser human beings. So you can do with them what you like. It doesn’t feel that you’re oppressing them like you’re oppressing them because they are subhuman anyway. So that I think is one explanation that interests me a great deal and I would want to put forward to explain, as you say, this depressing reality that the people who underwent the Holocaust, or some of them did, or their children, their descendants can behave in the same way, by the way, as the Nazis. So that would be what I would say to that. Marc Steiner: So you’ve lost your home, been forced out of the country of birth and you’ve been teaching and working in medicine and as a scholar all these years, which is not easier to do given the situation that you face and face. And when we see Donald Trump in the White House who is probably around Israel, Palestine, Palestine, Israel is probably one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had and only kind of pushes the neofascist control inside of Israel itself and agrees with it with Netinyahu and his crew. How do you see it ending? I don’t often answer this question, nor do I get confused about how to ask the question very easily. But after years of being in a struggle, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, running camps, fighting to end the occupation, all the things to come to the moment we’re on now, I really don’t know where we go. I don’t know how we find the road to peace because it’s between the two people who are at odds and between the Israelis, oppression of the Palestinians. Ghada Karmi: Yeah, it’s very difficult to see. Now you could imagine a number of scenarios which would end it. I don’t know how likely any of them are or how likely or in what order they might happen, but you can see, you can see a way in which the whole thing would change. Let’s take Iran supposing that things become much more acute or dramatic with Iran, with President Trump, in my view, obeying Israeli orders and bombing the hell out of Iran. Now Iran will bomb the hell out of Israel, There’s no doubt about that. So now imagine a scenario in which that happens and the Israelis cannot continue to hide behind no internet, no showing of anything, no publicity, no information about the damage that’s being done. It’s already, I gather Tel Aviv and other areas in Israel are badly damaged already by the bombing by the missiles from Iran and this could be very, very much worse to a point where the state seesis to function. If you add that to the fact that fewer and fewer young Israelis will volunteer for the army, which is already happening. And if you add that to the fact that the economy, which is not badly affected now as we speak, but will become affected in the future. So if you take a number of these factors together and don’t forget Hezbollah, which is also lobbying missiles over the border at Israel, that’s one possible scenario that could happen. Now, I can imagine another scenario in which unbelievable as it seems at the moment, Donald Trump actually realizes the danger he’s in domestically and drops Iran and drops Israel in it and withdraws, just withdraws. So there’s another way because the main support for Israel, of course, is the United States. So if something threatens that, then Israel has finished, it’s had it. So that’s another possibility. Now, how likely all these are, I don’t know. I add to that a third factor which we are seeing, which is the level of popular support for Palestine and an accompanying disenchantment with Israel, particularly in the United States. Now, where does that lead? I don’t know, but here’s another potential which could make things very difficult for the Israelis. Looking at the situation in general and wondering which bit or maybe more than one of these scenarios could come together and would make an enormous difference to the outcome. Now, if you then add the internal factor in Israel that is nevermind all this stuff from outside internally Israeli society is split. Marc Steiner: Yes. Ghada Karmi: There is a problem between the Orthodox, the right-wingers and the liberal- Marc Steiner: The secular population. Yep. Ghada Karmi: Yeah. And the Haredeme of the Docs which refuse to fight for the army and then maybe force to fight and that’ll create a hell of a big problem. So it’s like a cocktail of impending disasters, any of which or some combination of which would bring about the end of the current awful situation we have. Marc Steiner: There’s also one other factor in that you can’t forget that Israel’s also a nuclear power. Ghada Karmi: Yeah. I haven’t forgotten. Marc Steiner: No, no, I’m sure you have not. I don’t mean you’ve forgotten. I mean, we cannot forget that that exists and that if Israel feels its back is completely against the wall, it’s going to use that power. Ghada Karmi: Yeah. And that is really a real possibility. That’s what I meant by I hadn’t forgotten because it often crosses my mind that Israel is mad enough, honestly, it’s psychotic enough to do something like that. Marc Steiner: Yeah. I mean, one of the stories in Jewish history is about the Massada. Ghada Karmi: Sure. Marc Steiner: And it’s in the consciousness of everybody who’s Jewish. You grow up with that, just like you grew up in the Holocaust or my grandparents who suffered the pogroms and were almost killed by the Kasaks. So all that’s an oppressed consciousness and I can see the powers within Israel, especially the right wing powers with Israel, saying if we’re going to die, they’re all going to die. Ghada Karmi: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Very well put. And I tell you, it’s a terrible fear that I have. It’s Samson all over again. And in Arabic, the whole Samson story has a line in it on me and on all my enemies and perfectly illustrates the situation. Yes, it’s very frightening. I don’t know what we can do except to express our fear of such an eventuality Marc Steiner: And we have to keep fighting for the alternative. We have to keep fighting for the peace to happen and to make- Of Ghada Karmi: Course. Marc Steiner: Of Ghada Karmi: Course. Marc Steiner: You can’t give up. Ghada Karmi: Yes. But I need to say when you’ve said before earlier in this interview, you said again, you said about peace. Look, peace can only come about if people understand what the problem is as well as me, that there’s a tremendous amount of obfuscation, of confusion, of sentimentality, of all kinds of things have been chucked at this story. The Bible, the Holocaust, all these factors mean that in the end, people are actually confused. What does peace mean? What would it mean? Now in my terms, the only peace that I can envisage is one where we Palestinians go home. It’s very, very simple. We all have to go home. And of course, if we go home, then the whole structure of the current state of Israel automatically changes and in my view, for the better. Marc Steiner: The right of return. Gadakaria, I want to thank you for the work you do. I want to talk to you next about your latest book and I want to thank you for joining us today. It’s been an important conversation and I deeply appreciate you to being with us today. Ghada Karmi: It was a great pleasure for me to talk to you. Marc Steiner: Once again, I want to thank Dr. Ghada Karmi for joining us today for the work she does and we’ll be linking to her work, which is extensive. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program today, audio edits received from Frank for working his magic, Rosette Sewali, for producing the Marc Steiner Show and puting up with me and the titles, Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at The World News for making this show possible. Please, let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening and take care. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.
The Times they are a changing – The Grayzone live
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 15, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 15, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 15, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Todd Blanche targets press, leakers as acting attorney general
As President Donald Trump’s second term continued in 2026, he removed Pam Bondi as attorney general. Her deputy, now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, joined Trump in efforts to punish and intimidate news outlets that have covered Trump and his adm...
As President Donald Trump’s second term continued in 2026, he removed Pam Bondi as attorney general. Her deputy, now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, joined Trump in efforts to punish and intimidate news outlets that have covered Trump and his administration critically. We’re documenting Blanche’s efforts in this regularly updated report. Read about how Trump’s appointees and allies in Congress are striving to chill reporting, revoke funding, censor critical coverage and more here. This article was first published on May 15, 2026. May 12, 2026 | Acting attorney general defends DOJ subpoenas to WSJ, others April 7, 2026 | Acting attorney general willing to subpoena journalists in leak investigations May 12, 2026 | Acting attorney general defends DOJ subpoenas to WSJ, others Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the issuing of federal subpoenas to The Wall Street Journal as part of a leak investigation, after the legal orders were made public on May 11, 2026. In a May 12 social media post, Blanche wrote, “Prosecuting leakers who share our nation’s secrets with reporters, in turn risking our national security and the lives of our soldiers, is a priority for this administration. “Any witness, whether a reporter or otherwise, who has information about these criminals should not be surprised if they receive a subpoena about the illegal leaking of classified material,” he continued. A Justice Department official emphasized to CBS News the same day that the subpoenas were issued as part of an investigation into the source behind the leaks, not the journalists themselves. Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is a project, condemned the subpoenas and the use of “national security” as justification. “These subpoenas are a direct threat to the public’s right to know, and the Journal is correct to fight them,” FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said. “Since the Department of Justice has abandoned the First Amendment, it’s up to the courts to restrain the government’s attempts to crush investigative journalism.” The subpoenas to the Journal are just the latest instance of the news media being caught up in or deliberately targeted in federal investigations since then-Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Biden-era protections for journalists in April 2025. Earlier this year, the DOJ subpoenaed The Washington Post, and the FBI executed a search warrant at the home of its reporter, Hannah Natanson, seizing her equipment. Independent photojournalist Robert Scherle was questioned by two FBI agents at his home seeking information about protesters. And FBI Director Kash Patel has reportedly ordered investigations into two reporters following unfavorable coverage. Back to Top April 7, 2026 | Acting attorney general willing to subpoena journalists in leak investigations During his first press briefing as acting attorney general on April 7, 2026, Todd Blanche said he would not hesitate to subpoena members of the press to uncover sources behind leaks of classified information. The previous day, President Donald Trump vowed to investigate the source behind a leak concerning the downing of a U.S. fighter jet by Iran. “We’re going to go to the media company that released it,” Trump said, “and we’re going to say, ‘National security — give it up or go to jail.’” When asked about Trump’s comments, Blanche said that classified information leaks will always be investigated. “If that means sending a subpoena to the reporter, that’s exactly what we should do, and that’s exactly what we will be doing,” Blanche said. “If it means doing regular investigations to identify who within the government feels like it’s OK to leak classified information, to put lives at risk, then we’ll try to root him or her out as well.” Back to Top This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
How Trustworthy is Military Footage of UAP?
End ICE Abuse: Tom Morello Joins Immigrant Rights Protest in NYC
Bangladesh tribunal shows journalists Rupa and Babu arrested over 2013 reporting
May 15, 2026, New Delhi—Bangladeshi authorities must release journalists Farzana Rupa and Mozammel Babu, who were recently arrested in a crimes-against-humanity case filed at the country’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday. On May 14, the ICT in the capital Dhaka showed Rupa, a former chief reporter and presenter at...
May 15, 2026, New Delhi—Bangladeshi authorities must release journalists Farzana Rupa and Mozammel Babu, who were recently arrested in a crimes-against-humanity case filed at the country’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday. On May 14, the ICT in the capital Dhaka showed Rupa, a former chief reporter and presenter at privately owned Ekattor TV, and Babu, the channel’s founder and former editor-in-chief, arrested in a case linked to the May 2013 crackdown on a rally by Islamist group Hefajat-e-Islam at Shapla Chattar. The tribunal sent the two journalists back to jail and set June 7 for submission of the investigation report. Former foreign minister Dipu Moni was also named in the case. “Editorial decisions on covering a contested political incident are not crimes against humanity, and using an international criminal law framework to punish journalists circumvents the basic protections guaranteed to the press under Bangladesh’s own constitution while also violating international human rights conventions,” said CPJ Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator Kunāl Majumder. “Bangladeshi authorities must stop weaponizing the international criminal tribunal to target journalists and immediately release Farzana Rupa and Mozammel Babu.” Prosecutors allege that Rupa, in a report aired on Ekattor TV after the incident, used statements from “controversial individuals” and spread misleading information that diverted attention from killings during the crackdown. Babu, as managing director of the channel at the time, is accused of overseeing the broadcast as part of what the chief prosecutor described as a “systematic” to conceal the death toll. CPJ has not been able to independently review the Ekattor TV broadcasts aired before, during, and after the Shapla Chattar operation that the prosecution cites as evidence. However, CPJ has reviewed a widely circulated 2013 YouTube documentary, presented by Rupa, that investigates the aftermath of the crackdown and challenges the casualty figures attributed to it — including by tracking down individuals named in widely reported death tolls who were later found alive. Rupa and Babu have been held in pre-trial detention since August and September 2024, respectively, in connection with separate murder cases linked to deaths during the July 2024 mass uprising that ousted the Awami League government. On May 11, the High Court in Dhaka granted Rupa ad-interim bail in six of those cases, but she remains in jail because of pending charges, including the ICT case. The ICT was originally constituted in 2010 under a 1973 law to try crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War. During the Awami League government under then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the tribunal was used to prosecute her political opponents, including senior leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, several of whom were sentenced to death and executed for alleged war crimes committed during the 1971 war. Since the political transition of August 2024, the interim government has reconstituted the tribunal and amended the law to prosecute figures linked to the Awami League government, including Hasina, who was sentenced to death in absentia in November 2025. Bangladesh’s Ministry of Law and the Office of the Chief Prosecutor did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Methane gas ignites fire at drinking water pump in Nigeria
The People vs. The Autocrats: How to Fight Back – TEASER
Convicted felon Trump went to China and brought his son Eric along on the nepo-baby express. Eric runs the family business. And by "family business," we mean a transnational crime network of bribes operating like a geopolitical yard sale, selling out our country to the highest bidder. While they were there, Dictator Xi Jinping told the U.S. to back off defending Taiwan. And Trump, in defiance of decades of established U.S. foreign policy, is suddenly sounding suspiciously wishy-washy on approving arms deals for Taiwan. Which is just music to Xi's ears. It's the 1930s all over again, complete with secret alliances of transactional autocrats, and the people forced to build their own resistance networks in the storm. How do we get through this era without having to literally storm the beaches of Normandy again? To help us figure it out, we're bringing you Part II of our discussion with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. She is a Brennan Center fellow, a law professor at Stetson University, and the author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians. (And if you missed Part I, where we discussed how American corporations funded Trump's violent January 6th coup attempt, go back and listen to it right here). It's easy to despair right now, but the resilience of the people, especially powerful community networks, reminds us that the Constitution still matters, and protects everyone on our soil. We are not powerless against a corporatocracy eager to cash in on transactional autocrats. We just need to confront the absolute, unmitigated disaster that was the Reagan Revolution, undo its damage by building localized power through groups like the States Project, and commit to a relentless, stubborn defiance. We can and will do it, together. Because there's no other choice. To listen to this full episode, subscribe at the Truth-teller tier, which is just $5 a month, or higher on Patreon. We have discounted annual subscriptions, and you can even give the gift of membership to that uncle who still thinks trickle-down economics works. A massive thank you to everyone who subscribes to Gaslit Nation—we literally could not make this show without you. Show Notes: Corporatocracy How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians https://nyupress.org/9781479828371/corporatocracy/ Corporatocracy - Part I: https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/corporatocracy 'No idea it was coming': Pentagon officials stunned by Hegseth decision on troops in Poland https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/14/poland-pentagon-hegseth-troop-withdrawl-surprise-00922169 Eric Trump, Who Runs the Family Business, Hops Along on the Plane to China https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/politics/eric-trump-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ilA.uxcA.YKSI7CnAWkZs&smid=url-share Poland railway blast was unprecedented act of sabotage, says Donald Tusk https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/17/poland-railway-blast-was-unprecedented-act-of-sabotage-says-donald-tusk Opening clip: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mlvc3nzpjc23
Convicted felon Trump went to China and brought his son Eric along on the nepo-baby express. Eric runs the family business. And by "family business," we mean a transnational crime network of bribes operating like a geopolitical yard sale, selling out our country to the highest bidder. While they were there, Dictator Xi Jinping told the U.S. to back off defending Taiwan. And Trump, in defiance of decades of established U.S. foreign policy, is suddenly sounding suspiciously wishy-washy on approving arms deals for Taiwan. Which is just music to Xi's ears. It's the 1930s all over again, complete with secret alliances of transactional autocrats, and the people forced to build their own resistance networks in the storm. How do we get through this era without having to literally storm the beaches of Normandy again? To help us figure it out, we're bringing you Part II of our discussion with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. She is a Brennan Center fellow, a law professor at Stetson University, and the author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians. (And if you missed Part I, where we discussed how American corporations funded Trump's violent January 6th coup attempt, go back and listen to it right here). It's easy to despair right now, but the resilience of the people, especially powerful community networks, reminds us that the Constitution still matters, and protects everyone on our soil. We are not powerless against a corporatocracy eager to cash in on transactional autocrats. We just need to confront the absolute, unmitigated disaster that was the Reagan Revolution, undo its damage by building localized power through groups like the States Project, and commit to a relentless, stubborn defiance. We can and will do it, together. Because there's no other choice. To listen to this full episode, subscribe at the Truth-teller tier, which is just $5 a month, or higher on Patreon. We have discounted annual subscriptions, and you can even give the gift of membership to that uncle who still thinks trickle-down economics works. A massive thank you to everyone who subscribes to Gaslit Nation—we literally could not make this show without you. Show Notes: Corporatocracy How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians https://nyupress.org/9781479828371/corporatocracy/ Corporatocracy - Part I: https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/corporatocracy 'No idea it was coming': Pentagon officials stunned by Hegseth decision on troops in Poland https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/14/poland-pentagon-hegseth-troop-withdrawl-surprise-00922169 Eric Trump, Who Runs the Family Business, Hops Along on the Plane to China https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/politics/eric-trump-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ilA.uxcA.YKSI7CnAWkZs&smid=url-share Poland railway blast was unprecedented act of sabotage, says Donald Tusk https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/17/poland-railway-blast-was-unprecedented-act-of-sabotage-says-donald-tusk Opening clip: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mlvc3nzpjc23 This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
Somalia: ‘real and credible risk of famine’, warn aid teamsSudan: 825,000 small children face near-starvation: UNICEFUkraine: another UN convoy attacked twice in Kherson
Somalia: ‘real and credible risk of famine’, warn aid teamsSudan: 825,000 small children face near-starvation: UNICEFUkraine: another UN convoy attacked twice in Kherson This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.
“We Will Find You and We Will Kill You” ⎹ The Intercept Briefing
Convoy controversy: Rajasthan MP’s cavalcade video falsely linked to BJP, PM Modi
A 21-second viral clip showing a long convoy of cars moving along a road is being widely shared on social media with the claim that it shows a political convoy... The post Convoy controversy: Rajasthan MP’s cavalcade video falsely linked to BJP, PM Modi appeared first on Alt News.
A 21-second viral clip showing a long convoy of cars moving along a road is being widely shared on social media with the claim that it shows a political convoy in Rajasthan, where the BJP is in power. The video has gone viral in the backdrop of PM Narendra Modi’s May 10 appeal urging citizens to use petrol, diesel and cooking gas with “great restraint” amid the ongoing West Asia conflict. In his address, Modi also suggested measures such as using public transport, carpooling and reviving the work-from-home culture to reduce fuel consumption. He further advised people to postpone foreign travel and gold purchases for at least a year. Several social media users and critics of the BJP shared the viral clip to accuse the Prime Minister of hypocrisy, alleging that he appealed for fuel conservation while travelling the very next day with a massive convoy of vehicles. Among those amplifying the claim was Dhruv Rathee, who posted a video on X on May 12 criticising PM Modi for allegedly not practising what he preached. At the 36-second mark of the video, Rathee plays the viral clip and remarks that the Prime Minister’s convoy did not include any electric vehicles (EVs), which, according to him, would have reduced energy consumption. The post has garnered over 511,500 views and more than 10,000 reposts. (Archive) Modi’s DOGLA Advice to Indians pic.twitter.com/Wpfd1Wg3b7 — Dhruv Rathee (@dhruv_rathee) May 12, 2026 Congress media coordinator from Assam, Harmeet Kaur K, also shared the viral clip in response to another post and claimed that the video showed PM Narendra Modi’s convoy in Rajasthan. (Archive) So did their leader after appealing to their countrymen to drastically measure to conserve fuel & oil , did back to back unnecessary road shows , rallies with more than 50 car convoys, wasted foreign trips to different countries in private jets ?? And why did he make such a big… pic.twitter.com/K90xvtYM3o — Harmeet Kaur K (@iamharmeetK) May 12, 2026 Some other social media users shared the same video and claimed that it showed a convoy of Madhya Pradesh BJP leader Saubhagya Singh Thakur travelling from Ujjain to Bhopal. Some asserted that the convoy included 700-800 vehicles. X page named BIG TV Breaking News (@bigtvtelugu) posted the viral clip on May 13, claiming that the video shows BJP leader Saubhagya Singh’s convoy. (Archive) 50 కార్లతో బీజేపీ నేత కాన్వాయ్ మధ్యప్రదేశ్ బీజేపీ నేత సౌభాగ్య సింగ్ నిర్వాకం టెక్స్ట్ బుక్స్ కార్పొరేషన్ ఛైర్మన్‌గా ఉన్న సౌభాగ్య సింగ్ బాధ్యతల స్వీకరణ కోసం వెళ్లే క్రమంలో ఉజ్జయిని నుంచి భోపాల్‌కు 50 కార్లతో కాన్వాయ్ ఇంధనం వాడకం తగ్గించాలని ప్రధాని మోదీ చెప్పిన మరుసటి రోజే… pic.twitter.com/YJTCXQHiEM — BIG TV Breaking News (@bigtvtelugu) May 13, 2026 Several other users shared the above-mentioned clip while targeting BJP, including Congress national spokesperson Dr. Shama Mohamed. Below are a few instances. Click to view slideshow. Fact Check Upon closely examining the viral clip, we noticed that a person travelling in one of the vehicles in the convoy was holding a green-coloured flag. Although the footage is blurry, a white circular emblem with a logo could be seen at the centre of the flag. This suggested that the convoy was unlikely to be associated with any BJP leader. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-315411" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-6.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="628" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-6.jpg 1200w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-6-300x157.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-6-1024x536.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-6-768x402.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /> To further verify the claim, we extracted several keyframes from the viral clip and performed a reverse image search on them. This led us to an X post by user Lala (@FabulasGuy), who had shared a screenshot of the original Instagram post from which the now-viral video appears to have originated. Dhruv Rathee has nothing original of his own anymore. Now he just puts into his videos whatever goes viral on Twitter/X. This video is actually from two days ago and belongs to Rajasthan’s RLP party Which he is falsely presenting as PM Modi’s convoy. We are very well… pic.twitter.com/vsLi5Yrwpm — Lala (@FabulasGuy) May 12, 2026 Following this lead, we located the Instagram page @rocky_sou_jat, where the original video had been posted on May 10 with the caption: “Beniwal’s convoy en route to Shri Dadupalka Bhairana Dham.” The post contained the same clip that is now viral. The caption makes it clear that the convoy belonged to Hanuman Beniwal, founder of the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) and MP from Nagaur, Rajasthan. It is worth noting that RLP split from NDA in December 2020 over farm laws. View this post on Instagram A post shared by चिमनाराम सोऊ जाट गोदावास (@rocky_sou_jat) Armed with these clues, when we compared the flag seen in the viral video with the RLP flag, we noticed similarities. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-315408" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-5.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="628" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-5.jpg 1200w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-5-300x157.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-5-1024x536.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-5-768x402.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /> Next, we found that the same Instagram user had shared another video in which Beniwal could be seen inside his car. View this post on Instagram A post shared by चिमनाराम सोऊ जाट गोदावास (@rocky_sou_jat) Looking at the background of the above video, we could deduce that the viral clip and the aforementioned video are from the same place. Below, we have marked the similarities. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-315416" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-8.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="628" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-8.jpg 1200w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-8-300x157.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-8-1024x536.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-8-768x402.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /> <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-315417" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-7.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="628" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-7.jpg 1200w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-7-300x157.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-7-1024x536.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/FI-7-768x402.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /> A similar video of a long convoy of vehicles was also shared on Hanuman Beniwal’s official Instagram page. The caption said, “On Sunday, I participated in the movement being carried out by saints and great personalities at Shri Dadupalka Bhairana Dham in Bhairana, located in Maujmadabad tehsil of Jaipur district”. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hanuman Beniwal (@hanumanbeniwal77) As per reports, saints and local residents of Bhairana Dham, a prominent religious site in Rajasthan’s Behror region, have been protesting against a proposed project by the Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation Ltd., the Rajasthan government’s industrial development agency. Protesters allege that the project would result in the felling of around 40,000 trees. Amid the ongoing protests, the RLP leader travelled to Bhairana Dham along with several supporters and devotees to express solidarity with the saints and residents opposing the project. Therefore, it is clear that the viral video does not show PM Modi or any BJP leader’s convoy; it depicts RLP leader Hanuman Beniwal’s convoy, and the video is from Rajasthan. At the same time, it is true that BJP leader Saubhagya Singh has been show-caused by the MP government for using a 50-car convoy while travelling from Ujjain to Bhopal. The post Convoy controversy: Rajasthan MP’s cavalcade video falsely linked to BJP, PM Modi appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.
"Israel: What Went Wrong?": Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov & Haaretz’s Gideon Levy Debate Zionism
Nakba Day: Muhammad Shehada on Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza & Ongoing Palestinian Resilience
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 15, 2026
“Israel: What Went Wrong?”: Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov & Haaretz’s Gideon Levy Debate Zionism
We speak to two prominent Israeli thinkers, historian Omer Bartov and journalist Gideon Levy, about the founding beliefs of Zionism. Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, is the author of the new book Israe...
We speak to two prominent Israeli thinkers, historian Omer Bartov and journalist Gideon Levy, about the founding beliefs of Zionism. Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, is the author of the new book Israel: What Went Wrong? Bartov says the early Zionist movement had liberatory intentions, aiming to emancipate the persecuted Jewish minority in Europe and modeling itself after other contemporary ethnonationalist movements. He then argues that while Israel had the opportunity to “become a normal state” and “issue a constitution that would provide equality to all its citizens, would define its borders and create a legal framework” that could also acknowledge and redress the Nakba, it chose another path. Instead of remedying its foundational violence, he says, the modern Israeli state has become increasingly “militaristic, centralized, expansionist, racist and, as we’ve seen since October 2023, genocidal.” Though Bartov does not identify as an anti-Zionist, he says Israel “must discard Zionism, it must put it on the garbage heap of history, and it must redefine itself, going all the way back to 1948.” Levy, on the other hand, says Zionism has never been reformable, because the movement, from its very beginning, “started wrong, without the belief or the conviction that we can live together.” He contests Bartov’s assertion that early Zionist intentions became warped over the 20th century, and says instead that the violent dispossession of Palestinians is embedded into the premise of the movement. “This very same attitude, this very same policy never stopped ever since ’48,” Levy contends. His latest piece in Haaretz is titled “Zionism Didn’t Go Wrong, It Was Always Built This Way.” Both Bartov and Levy also respond to the Israeli government’s threat to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times for publishing a column by longtime opinion writer Nicholas Kristof about systemic sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. “That has become the policy of the country — to abuse, to humiliate, to rape systematically,” says Bartov. Levy explains Israel’s reaction “is to attack the messenger.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Palestinians around the world are marking Nakba Day, 78 years after their forced mass displacement led to the establishment of the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Decades later, Palestinians still face widespread oppression and violence from ...
Palestinians around the world are marking Nakba Day, 78 years after their forced mass displacement led to the establishment of the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Decades later, Palestinians still face widespread oppression and violence from the Israeli state as it continues its expansionary project. “Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it. Our people are still there, resilient,” says Palestinian writer Muhammad Shehada, who was born in Gaza and now lives in Denmark. Shehada discusses the ongoing process of the Nakba, including its latest intensification after October 7, 2023. “Now this veneer of civility has fallen off. The mask was taken off. And now it’s a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians.” Shehada also describes current conditions in Gaza — still under Israeli blockade and occupation — and what he calls the “disarmament trap” of unfairly weighted negotiations designed to strip Palestinians of political autonomy. “The 'realistic' proposal that Israel is putting on the table is surrender, capitulate, become fully defenseless, weaponless, and entrust the very army that carried out a genocide against you to be merciful towards you once you are an easier target than you ever were before.” Finally, he responds to the Israeli government’s recent threat to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, after the paper published a column by longtime opinion writer Nicholas Kristof about systemic sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. “It’s the newspaper of record. It’ll be spread and disseminated widely to an American audience,” says Shehada about the allegations levied in Kristof’s piece. “So we see, basically, an Israeli panic attack in return.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
On Tuesday, a coalition of groups held a rally to protest ICE’s abuses at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, a 41-story federal building in lower Manhattan that houses immigration courts, ICE field offices, immigrant detention spaces, and U.S. Cit...
On Tuesday, a coalition of groups held a rally to protest ICE’s abuses at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, a 41-story federal building in lower Manhattan that houses immigration courts, ICE field offices, immigrant detention spaces, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The protest, organized by Hands Off NYC, included advocates from Make the Road New York, the New York Immigration coalition, and a surprise guest — musician Tom Morello, who performed “This Land Is Your Land.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
House Narrowly Rejects Latest War Powers Resolution to End Trump’s Attacks on Iran, CENTCOM Commander Denies U.S. Killed Civilians in Iran: “No Way That We Can Corroborate That”, Iran’s Foreign Minister Asks BRICS Nations to Unite Against U.S. “Bullying”, Trump Departs China Without Agreements on Taiwan, Iran or Strait of Hormuz, CIA Chief Travels to Havana as Cuba’s Oil Reserves Run Dry Amid U.S. Fuel Blockade, UNICEF Says Israeli Attacks Have Killed or Wounded 59 Children in a Week, Despite Ceasefire Deal, Israeli Nationalists March Through Jerusalem’s Old City, Chanting “Death to Arabs”, 24 Killed as Russian Missile Slams into Kyiv Apartment Building, Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, Who Oversaw Mass Deportation Campaign, Abruptly Resigns, Court Orders Trump Administration to Return Colombian Woman Deported to Congo, Supreme Court Preserves Broad Access to Abortion Medication Mifepristone, ABC: Trump Set to Unveil $1.7 Billion IRS “Compensation Fund” to Benefit MAGA Allies , Boeing to Pay Family of Samya Stumo Nearly $50M over Fatal Crash of 737 MAX Jet, Bolivian Unions Lead Nationwide Strikes Demanding Ouster of President Paz, Richard Glossip Freed on Bond After Nearly 30 Years on Oklahoma’s Death Row
House Narrowly Rejects Latest War Powers Resolution to End Trump's Attacks on Iran CENTCOM Commander Denies U.S. Killed Civilians in Iran: "No Way That We Can Corroborate That" Iran's Foreign Minister Asks BRICS Nations to Unite Against U.S. "Bullying" Trump Departs China Without Agreements on Taiwan, Iran or Strait of Hormuz CIA Chief Travels to Havana as Cuba's Oil Reserves Run Dry Amid U.S. Fuel Blockade UNICEF Says Israeli Attacks Have Killed or Wounded 59 Children in a Week, Despite Ceasefire Deal Israeli Nationalists March Through Jerusalem's Old City, Chanting "Death to Arabs" 24 Killed as Russian Missile Slams into Kyiv Apartment Building Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, Who Oversaw Mass Deportation Campaign, Abruptly Resigns Court Orders Trump Administration to Return Colombian Woman Deported to Congo Supreme Court Preserves Broad Access to Abortion Medication Mifepristone ABC: Trump Set to Unveil $1.7 Billion IRS "Compensation Fund" to Benefit MAGA Allies Boeing to Pay Family of Samya Stumo Nearly $50M over Fatal Crash of 737 MAX Jet Bolivian Unions Lead Nationwide Strikes Demanding Ouster of President Paz Richard Glossip Freed on Bond After Nearly 30 Years on Oklahoma's Death Row This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Headlines for May 15, 2026; Nakba Day: Muhammad Shehada on Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza & Ongoing Palestinian Resilience; “Israel: What Went Wrong?”: Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov & Haaretz’s Gideon Levy Debate Zionism
Democracy Now! 2026-05-15 Friday Headlines for May 15, 2026 Nakba Day: Muhammad Shehada on Israel's Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza & Ongoing Palestinian Resilience "Israel: What Went Wrong?": Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov & Haaretz's Gideon Levy Debate Zionism Download this show This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
ANALYSIS: By David Robie, Pacific Media Watch When the Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders released their annual World Press Freedom Index dossier online three days before World Press Freedom Day, journalists in the Asia-Pacific region were quick to check out their ranking. Overall the prognosis wasn’t very flattering. No country in the region was
ANALYSIS: By David Robie, Pacific Media Watch When the Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders released their annual World Press Freedom Index dossier online three days before World Press Freedom Day, journalists in the Asia-Pacific region were quick to check out their ranking. Overall the prognosis wasn’t very flattering. No country in the region was ranked in the top 20 of the 180 countries surveyed, and even New Zealand, which has traditionally done well in the past – including even being in the top 10 a few years ago — had continued its downhill slide. “New Zealand (22nd) remains the region’s model for press freedom, despite slipping six places,” said the World Press Freedom Index report. “Other Asia-Pacific democracies, such as Taiwan (28th), Timor-Leste (30th) and Australia (33rd), face real challenges to upholding the right to reliable information, yet continue to offer broadly protective environments. READ MORE: How Israel’s unprecedented killing of Palestinian journalists in Gaza makes accountability reporting almost impossible — Majdolin Hasan and Wadih Sabbagh, GIJN We analysed thousands of news articles: here’s the proof of the pro-Israel bias in mainstream media – Adam Johnson, The Intercept Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them – David Robie, Declassified Australia Gaza, genocide and media: Will journalism survive? — Pacific Journalism Review The 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index “They stand as exceptions in a region where press freedom is being steadily eroded.” Fiji scored a remarkable 16-place climb to 24th, just two places behind New Zealand, after the scrapping of the draconian Media Industry Development Act in 2023, but this was certainly no grounds to be complacent. Responding to the rankings and after a woman journalist in Tonga was threatened at gunpoint at Kele’a Voice FM radio station by a jailed-for-life drug gangster’s hooded henchman in Tonga, Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) president Kalafi Moala (himself Tongan and a doyen of Pacific media) declared: Tongan armed threat against journalist troubles Pacific media freedom <iframe class="wp-embedded-content" sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" title="“Tongan armed threat against journalist troubles Pacific media freedom” — Asia Pacific Report" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/05/09/tongan-armed-threat-against-journalist-highlights-pacific-media-freedom/embed/#?secret=9lX9K8RFuZ%23?secret=ntZFZvizfv" data-secret="ntZFZvizfv" width="600" height="338" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"> “Threats against press freedom are unfortunately ongoing in the Pacific. The incident in Tonga demonstrates that the enemies of press freedom can come from anywhere — not always the government or those in power, but anyone averse to truth and transparency. “Whether it is in Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, French Polynesia or anywhere else in the Pacific, media freedom must be protected, advocated for and exercised to the fullest.” Smear. Kill. Repeat: The constant horror for journalists in Gaza Video: Al Jazeera Deafening silence on Gaza But for all the lively debate and responses across the Asia-Pacific to this year’s Press Freedom Index results, there was a deafening silence and lack of collegial concern from New Zealand to Taiwan about the elephant in the global media freedom room: the unprecedented and chilling wholesale assassinations of Palestinian (and now Lebanese) journalists by the Israeli military forces. Many of them were targeted and murdered for doing their jobs. And those still surviving have been risking their lives (and those of their families) day and night while truth-telling to the world with extraordinary courage. “Under Article 79 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), journalists on ‘dangerous professional missions in armed conflict’ must be treated as civilians. It is one of the clearest protections in international law,” write Majdolin Hasan and Wadih Sabbagh of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN). “Yet in Gaza, their cameras and press vests have become targets.” Statistics on this Israeli bloodlust are varied, depending on the source and methodology and criteria in compiling the information. According to the latest figures on the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Gaza database, 264 journalists have been killed, 174 wounded and 107 imprisoned. These figures include war-related killings of journalists and media workers in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran and Israel. “By silencing the press, Israel is silencing those who document and bear witness to what human rights groups and UN experts agree is a genocide. CPJ calls on the international community to hold Israel to account for its unlawful attacks on journalists; ensure international media is given immediate, independent access to Gaza; and open humanitarian corridors for journalists.” Death toll even higher Some media counts put the death toll even higher. A United Nations human rights web page, for example, cites UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk saying in a statement to mark World Press Freedom Day that the situation for journalists in Gaza is a “death trap”. “Israel’s war in Gaza has become a death trap for the media. My office has verified the killing of nearly 300 journalists since October 2023, with many more injured,” Türk said. He urged States to investigate all violations against media workers and expressed alarm at the lack of accountability for killings of journalists. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-106190 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gaza-Press-AJ-680wide.png" alt="Gaza press flak jackets" width="680" height="482" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gaza-Press-AJ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gaza-Press-AJ-680wide-300x213.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gaza-Press-AJ-680wide-100x70.png 100w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gaza-Press-AJ-680wide-593x420.png 593w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Gaza press flak jackets . . . Media freedom watchdogs put the death toll as between 267 and more than 300 killed by Israel since 7 October 2023. Image: Al Jazeera File “This year alone, at least 14 journalists have been killed. Over the past 20 years, only around one in 10 killings has led to full accountability,” Türk said. In January 2024, I wrote an article for Declassified Australia that was already an “early warning” indicator of the growing death toll among Palestinian journalists. My earlier media freedom articles had frequently dealt with the Philippines, which used to be among the worst countries for the killing of journalists. In the article, “Silencing the messenger”, I also warned against the growing censorship in what was already emerging as the greatest moral issue of our times: “Western journalists taking a stand against their media outlets’ biased coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza are being targeted with career threats and even dismissal. But their colleagues in Palestine are suffering a worse fate.” I called on journalists to make a stand for truth-telling and in solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-95314" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Junket-list-Crikey-680wide.png" alt="Crikey's running checklist on Australian journalists" width="680" height="635" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Junket-list-Crikey-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Junket-list-Crikey-680wide-300x280.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Junket-list-Crikey-680wide-450x420.png 450w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Crikey’s running checklist on Australian journalists who have been to Israel. Image: Crikey screenshot APR Shameful NZ silence Yet while the silence in the Pacific is perhaps not surprising given the conflicted collaboration of several governments, such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea, on the wrong side of history, in New Zealand it is shameful. At least in Australia, there has been a strong pushback by journalists against the bias in the mainstream, and one independent publication, Crikey, has been publishing a “register” of journalists who have been on paid junkets to Israel and are regarded as potentially compromised. Media editor Daanyal Saeed wrote: “It’s become clear that a number of Australian politicians and journalists have been on organised tours to the Middle East — many of them sponsored by pro-Israel lobby groups and interest organisations.” A similar grooming of New Zealand journalists has also been carried out by pro-Israel lobby groups’ “sponsorship” in recent years, but no media has published a comprehensive list. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-123569 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/John-Minto-APR-680wide.png" alt="PSNA co-chair John Minto" width="680" height="517" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/John-Minto-APR-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/John-Minto-APR-680wide-300x228.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/John-Minto-APR-680wide-80x60.png 80w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/John-Minto-APR-680wide-552x420.png 552w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> PSNA national campaigns coordinator John Minto . . . “Long history of false smears of antisemitism against anyone criticising Israel.” Image: Asia Pacific Report Is this “captive journalists” phenomena one of the factors for the perceived bias of much of the New Zealand media? John Minto, national campaigns coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), the largest and most visible advocacy and protest group in the country, agrees: “The large number of journalists here, who should know better, who have taken all expenses paid trips to Israel are part of Israel’s building of a propaganda base. “Another important factor is the long history of false smears of antisemitism against anyone criticising Israel. Editors think twice about reporting anything showing Israel in a bad light. “Just last week an RNZ journalist talked on radio about an interview she had done with UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, and that the interview would be heard on the Nine to Noon show early the following week. The interview was then advertised to be broadcast on the Monday morning but then never appeared on the programme. “Pressure from the anti-Palestinian racists in the pro-Israel lobby is the only sensible explanation. Most likely it will simply be buried — along with what’s left of RNZ’s journalistic integrity.” Limited independent reportage It needs to be realised too that New Zealand media has a limited independent “international” reportage tradition in contrast to Australia and many other countries. What international coverage with a New Zealand perspective that did exist, largely disappeared after the closure of the country’s only independent news agency, the 131-year-old NZ Press Association cooperative. This shut down in 2011. Minto blames the narrow range of international news as another factor in why New Zealand media seems so slanted. “The media industry here takes its overseas content solely from Western news sources such as AP [Associated Press, American], Reuters and the BBC [both British-based] alongside UK and US newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post and Daily Telegraph. It is packaged by Israeli sympathisers embedded in senior positions across these outlets and the inevitable result is a stream of pro-Israeli propaganda rather than balanced and accurate journalism. “The recent analysis by The Intercept underscores this built-in bias in favour of Israel and against Palestinians.” The Pacific Journalism Review also ran a special edition in July 2024 focused on systemic bias in the New Zealand and some international media. The provocative title theme was “Gaza, genocide and media: Will journalism survive?” and it was aimed at alerting journalists that declining credibility was at stake over this critical moral issue of our times. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-121490" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Maher-at-Warehouse-APR-680wide.png" alt="PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal explains the purpose of the giant protest letter to The Warehouse city branch duty manager Alyce in Auckland today" width="680" height="404" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Maher-at-Warehouse-APR-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Maher-at-Warehouse-APR-680wide-300x178.png 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Palestine Forum chair Maher Nazzal . . . “Much of the New Zealand media coverage on Palestine has been shaped through Western political narratives.” Image: Asia Pacific Report Maher Nazzal, a Palestinian New Zealander who is a community advocate and chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand, echoes this view. “Much of the New Zealand media coverage on Palestine has been shaped through Western political narratives and reliance on international wire services that often frame events primarily through an Israeli lens,” he says. “This has contributed to the dehumanisation or invisibility of Palestinian voices, including journalists working under unimaginable conditions in Gaza.” Courage and professionalism A good point. The courage and professionalism of Gaza journalists has been widely acknowledged around the globe, including their collectively winning the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in 2024, yet NZ journalists seem to be reluctant to recognise this, let alone give statements of solidarity. Why?| “What Gaza journalists have shown over the past 19 months is extraordinary courage and professionalism,” says Nazzal. “Many continued reporting while displaced, grieving family members, facing starvation, or living under bombardment. “Some paid with their lives simply for documenting the truth. Their work has become one of the few direct windows into what is happening on the ground. “Unfortunately, solidarity from many mainstream media institutions in New Zealand has been limited. There appears to be hesitation, fear of controversy, or political sensitivity around speaking openly on Palestine compared with other global conflicts. “This silence itself becomes part of the problem.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-118898" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Luxon-and-journalism-APR-680wide-1.png" alt="A demonstration placard last weekend against Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's weakness over Palestine and condemning Israeli oppression against Gazan journalists" width="680" height="554" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Luxon-and-journalism-APR-680wide-1.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Luxon-and-journalism-APR-680wide-1-300x244.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Luxon-and-journalism-APR-680wide-1-516x420.png 516w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> A demonstration placard last weekend against Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s stance over Palestine and condemning Israeli oppression against Gazan journalists. Image: Pacific Media Watch An independent New Zealand journalist who has been based in the occupied West Bank for two periods during the Israeli war on Gaza — in 2024 for two months and again last year – is also unimpressed with the local reportage. Video and photojournalist Cole Martin from Ōtautahi Christchurch believes there is a serious lack of understanding in New Zealand media of the context of the structural and institutional violence towards the Palestinians. “It is a media scene in Aotearoa that repeats very harmful and inaccurate narratives,” Martin says. “Also, there is this idea to be unbiased and neutral in a conflict, both perspectives must have equal legitimacy.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-104984 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Anas-al-Sharif-AJ-680wide.png" alt="Al Jazeera's northern Gaza reporter Anas al-Sharif" width="680" height="483" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Anas-al-Sharif-AJ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Anas-al-Sharif-AJ-680wide-300x213.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Anas-al-Sharif-AJ-680wide-100x70.png 100w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Anas-al-Sharif-AJ-680wide-591x420.png 591w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Al Jazeera Arabic’s northern Gaza reporter Anas al-Sharif . . . known for his frontline reporting, he was assassinated by Israeli forces on 10 August 2025. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR Israel regularly condemned Reporters Without Borders has regularly condemned Israel for refusing to allow journalists from international media into Gaza, except on rare occasions embedded with Israeli military — they saw merely what Tel Aviv wanted them to see. RSF has joined unsuccessful legal proceedings led by the Foreign Press Association (FPA) at Israel’s Supreme Court to challenge the ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza. It has also file multiple complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) calling for investigations into war crimes against journalists. Minto believes New Zealand journalism is generally embedded with the “built-in bias of Western media” and with very few exceptions local journalists “are as complicit as journalists overseas”. “I’m the first to admit it’s not easy for journalists to speak up and confront the bias — it’s easier to look the other way. “Having said that I can’t understand why they would not report on Gaza journalists receiving awards for heroic reporting in circumstances when they know they are on an Israeli hit list. Journalistic solidarity based on fearless reporting which speaks truth to power is sorely missing.” In general, says Minto, New Zealand journalists wait until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or US President Donald Trump make a statement before they report anything on Gaza or Palestine. “And it’s not just reporting on the genocide in Gaza. Again and again I hear stories from our journalists — particularly in our state broadcaster TVNZ and RNZ — being directed towards reporting stories alleging antisemitism here rather than Islamophobia which is a far greater threat to our social fabric. “It’s as though we never had a terrorist attack in 2019 which killed 51 Muslim worshippers.” Media releases ignored Mainstream news media routinely ignore media releases by Palestinian and solidarity groups. “They are read by news editors and chief reporters but are otherwise disregarded,” admits Minto. “In fact, pretty much the only time our mainstream media report on PSNA is when we are attacked by the pro-Israel lobby as they did when we opposed Israeli soldiers coming here for rest and recreation from the genocide in Gaza or when we were attacked for ‘selective morality’ by an Iranian supporter of the old despotic Shah of Iran. “On the other hand, our media releases are avidly read by our supporters and get good pickup on social media.” While there was a fierce pushback by pro-Israel groups over PSNA’s controversial “Genocide Hotline” in New Zealand media, there was a more sympathetic response by many international media. In fact, many campaigns in other countries, partly due to the inspiration of the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), are going further and actively seeking prosecutions of dual-citizen Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers on rest and recreation to their countries. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-110234 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Hind-Rajab-Onlylorem28Jan25-300tall.png" alt="The five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, shot 355 times by Israeli soldiers on 29 January 2024" width="300" height="389" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Hind-Rajab-Onlylorem28Jan25-300tall.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Hind-Rajab-Onlylorem28Jan25-300tall-231x300.png 231w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> The five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, shot 355 times by Israeli soldiers on 29 January 2024 . . . a meme a year later. Image: @Onlyloren/Instagram The Brussels-based foundation is dedicated to “breaking the cycle Israeli impunity and achieving justice for all the victims of the Gaza genocide” — more than 72,000 people so far, mostly women and children. It was established to honour the memory of five-year-old Hind Rajab who was murdered along with her family on January 29, 2024, in a brutal act of genocidal violence by the IDF. Hind survived the initial attack, but was left trapped in a car alongside the bodies of her family. Her cries for help were broadcast to the world before being killed by an Israeli tank crew. An investigation found that the car was hit by 335 bullets. The inhumanity of this act has been captured in the 2025 docudrama film The Voice of Hind Rajab. Hasbara propaganda The PSNA and other groups have regularly complained to TVNZ and the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) about the “appalling reporting” and “systemic bias”, but with little success. At a national hui in Rotorua earlier this month, the PSNA discussed plans to step up its campaign to push back against Israeli disinformation in response to the Knesset’s approval last month of a fivefold budget boost to $730 million for Hasbara — Israeli “public policy”, or propaganda. In spite of the many obstacles, Maher Nazzal says public awareness about the Palestine struggle has grown significantly in Aotearoa as well as globally: “Community movements, independent journalists, academics, and grassroots organisations have helped challenge dominant narratives and push for more balanced coverage and accountability.” To improve media coverage, Nazzal would like to see a greater inclusion of Palestinian perspectives, stronger journalistic independence, and willingness to apply universal human rights standards consistently, regardless of who the victims are. Dr David Robie is convenor of the Asia Pacific Media Network’s Pacific Media Watch project, a former media professor and who previously worked as a journalist and editor with several global news agencies, including Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Gemini News Service. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times?
The post Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? appeared first on ProPublica.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica When immigration agents pulled U.S. citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas from his car this month and shackled him, he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t scared. He was tired. As ProPublica detailed last fall, he had already been detained twice before. A year ago, Garcia Venegas was filming his brother’s arrest during a raid on their coastal Alabama construction site when he was tackled by agents, who ignored his pleas that he was a citizen. A few weeks later, an officer entered the home Garcia Venegas was building and refused to trust the now-26-year-old’s Alabama REAL ID, which only citizens and legal residents can get. Videos of the incidents went viral. He appeared before Congress. He also has a suit pending against the Trump administration. But all the attention hasn’t changed much. On May 2, agents followed him back to his home. They again didn’t believe his claims of citizenship or the REAL ID he once again tried to show them. Now, after that latest detention, Garcia Venegas sounds demoralized. “Honestly, it feels terrible,” Garcia Venegas told ProPublica. The mental burden of wondering when it will happen again weighs on him, bringing stress and depression. “I drive to work every morning and I know, at any moment, they could pull me over again.” Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen, was recently detained for a third time by immigration authorities. Joanna Shan/ProPublica While immigration sweeps have receded from the headlines, Garcia Venegas’ most recent incident highlights how the mistaken detention of Americans has continued despite congressional inquiries and denials by senior immigration officials. Days after Garcia Venegas’ latest detention, masked agents tackled an American teen in the Bronx. When they finally realized he was a citizen, they left him in an unfamiliar neighborhood, bloody and bruised. The same week both citizens were held, administration officials spoke on a panel at a border security conference in Phoenix and downplayed and denied that citizens have been mistakenly detained. Recordings of the conference were shared with ProPublica. “Since the start of this administration, we have not had any arrests of U.S. citizens for false identification, where we thought they were an illegal alien but they were actually a U.S. citizen,” said Matthew Elliston, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. “That’s happened zero times.” In another panel, the outgoing head of ICE, Todd Lyons, acknowledged immigration agents sometimes detained American citizens in cases where those citizens allegedly put “hands on law enforcement.” He also said the arrests operated as “a deterrent.” As ProPublica and others have reported, citizens — including Garcia Venegas — accused of assaulting officers have not always been charged with assault. Video footage has often also contradicted Department of Homeland Security claims that its agents were attacked. In response to questions from ProPublica, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement that despite the shackles, Garcia Venegas was “NOT detained.” The statement continued: “ICE conducted a routine vehicle stop on a car registered to an illegal alien. After Venegas’ identity was established, he was released.” DHS also stated that the teen in the Bronx was “NOT arrested” but rather “temporarily detained.” The agency said it is “NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake. DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted.” But it’s not clear what, if any, intel agents have used in the repeated detention of Garcia Venegas. Garcia Venegas said agents and local law enforcement at the scene blamed him for his most recent arrest because he was driving a car registered to his brother. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="501" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=752" alt="A split image shows a group of law enforcement officers in tactical vests standing around a person near a gray car in a grassy yard, left, and a dark, close-up view of a person’s ankles in metal cuffs inside a vehicle, right." class="wp-image-77371" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/LeoVisualEvidenceV2_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> Immigration agents and local law enforcement with a shackled Garcia Venegas Photos courtesy of Leonardo Garcia Venegas “The officers told me that I risk being stopped again until I register the license plates in my own name,” Garcia Venegas said in a recent filing in his lawsuit. “But the officers could have known immediately that I was not my brother just by checking the REAL ID that was in my hand when they pulled me from the truck and tackled me to the ground.” Garcia Venegas’ incidents bear the hallmarks of what have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Those are stops in which, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a case last fall, agents are allowed to stop people based in part on their “apparent ethnicity” (Garcia Venegas is Latino), job (he works in construction) and language (he primarily speaks Spanish). Americans, Kavanaugh said, have no reason to worry. Agents will establish their citizenship and “promptly let the individual go.” (In a later case on another issue, Kavanaugh included a footnote that “officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”) In his latest stop, Garcia Venegas was let go after about 15 minutes. But the fallout is far from over. Even though he was born in Florida and graduated high school in the same county where keeps getting detained, Garcia Venegas sometimes wonders if he should pick up and move to his family’s home in Mexico. “I just want to live in peace,” he said. Last fall, when Garcia Venegas filed his federal lawsuit against the government, he demanded more than compensation. He has insisted agents stop “unconstitutional” raids in his area. The government said in court that the immigration sweeps are “based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause and the Constitution.” ProPublica is still tracking U.S. citizens who are detained by immigration agents. Do you have information about how immigration agents are treating U.S. citizens and children during enforcement operations? Send tips to nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal to nicolefoy.27. After Garcia Venegas was held for the third time, his lawyers rushed to update his lawsuit with details of his latest detention. But the government’s lawyers have argued that Garcia Venegas’ case still has no merit. Garcia Venegas also filed a separate claim for damages with the government last fall. He received a denial from ICE in mid-April that contained no explanation. His third detention came roughly two weeks later. During the border security conference this month, the head of Customs and Border Protection, Rodney Scott, was asked about ProPublica’s reporting on citizens’ detentions and how the agency is addressing them. “I’m not going to do anything to not arrest U.S. citizens,” he said. “Because we arrest criminals, period.” The post Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Nicole Foy.
In a Private Meeting, Colorado Marijuana Regulators Acknowledge the Extent of Illegal Hemp Sales
The post In a Private Meeting, Colorado Marijuana Regulators Acknowledge the Extent of Illegal Hemp Sales appeared first on ProPublica.
Despite regulators’ concerns, Colorado lawmakers abandoned a bill that would have let voters decide whether to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants. Raymond Boyd/Getty Images A top regulator for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division acknowledged in a private meeting with industry representatives that the amount of chemically converted hemp being illegally sold as marijuana is far greater than the agency has publicly disclosed. The remarks confirmed testing by The Denver Gazette and ProPublica, which found signs of hemp in marijuana vapes sold at dispensaries, as well as reporting that regulators have discovered that some hemp-derived vapes were contaminated with a toxic chemical. The virtual meeting, an audio recording of which was reviewed by the news organizations, was convened by members of Colorado Leads, a marijuana industry trade group, in March to discuss a problem they said had “metastasized” and now posed an “existential threat” to the nation’s first legal recreational marijuana market. During the meeting, Kyle Lambert, the enforcement division’s deputy senior director, said the number of hemp-derived products is “larger than we can quantify.” He said the agency feared the prevalence of banned hemp was driving down the price of marijuana in the state and helping facilitate the diversion of high-grade marijuana out of Colorado and into the black market in other states. Describing anomalies in the system the state uses to track marijuana production and sales, Lambert told the industry players that the extent of suspicious transactions in the system “would probably explode your minds.” Two weeks after that meeting, the division sent a bulletin to the industry that it plans to crack down on companies that illegally sell cheaper and potentially hazardous hemp products as marijuana and that it would pursue emergency rules. But it hasn’t done so yet, and other reform efforts failed during this year’s legislative session. Despite the regulators’ concerns, Colorado lawmakers, who weren’t at the March briefing, abandoned a bill that would have let voters decide whether to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants. (The Denver Gazette and ProPublica investigation found that other states have adopted stronger safety measures.) Dominique Mendiola, the senior director of the Marijuana Enforcement Division, said in a statement that the agency has “consistently been proactive in pursuing the necessary rules, legislation and authority to combat this issue.” “Lambert was speaking frankly to highlight the scale and complexity of the problem, as nominal-dollar transactions do not amount to definitive evidence of non-compliance,” Mendiola said. She added that investigations into such transactions require extensive resources and can take significant time. The problem of companies substituting hemp for marijuana dates to 2018, when Congress legalized hemp, a close cousin of marijuana that has only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive compound that makes people high. Federal lawmakers had hoped to support farmers while satisfying advocates who believe the high levels of the nonintoxicating compound CBD in hemp help with seizures, pain and sleep. But hemp manufacturers quickly figured out how to convert CBD in hemp into THC through a process that involves toxic solvents, creating products that sometimes contain harmful chemicals and that can be more potent than products made from marijuana. Colorado became one of the first states to ban that chemical conversion process and prohibit the sale of intoxicating hemp products to its residents. But manufacturers were allowed to produce hemp products for export to other states, and some companies continue to rely on hemp within Colorado because it is cheaper than using marijuana to make the honey-colored THC distillate that goes into vapes and edibles, industry insiders say. “This has become pervasive to where it’s, like, half the market,” said Jordan Wellington, a marijuana industry lobbyist and consultant, during the meeting with Lambert and a four-person investigative team that handles the agency’s most difficult cases. “We’re past Stage 1 cancer of it being, like, one spot. It’s fully metastasized.” He said “rampant” use of hemp and other illicit material was putting pressure on honest manufacturers to cut corners to survive. “It might be the most important and existential threat we’ve ever faced as an industry,” Wellington said. When the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, it promised to establish a “seed-to-sale” system to track marijuana from the initial planting to the purchase of pot, vapes and other products in dispensaries. Close tracking would prevent marijuana grown in Colorado from being diverted to states where it remained illegal, supporters promised. Tracking also was supposed to assure consumers that they were buying safe, quality products. But during the March video conference, Colorado regulators confided to industry lobbyists that the tool for rooting out fraud isn’t working. “There’s a lot of really crap data in there that is hard for us to proactively go take action on,” Lambert said of the tracking system. Extensive fraud in sales transaction reporting likely means the state has lost out on millions of dollars in marijuana excise tax revenue while businesses that follow the law have paid more than their fair share, industry insiders claim. Unprocessed marijuana typically can fetch more than $600 a pound on the open market, depending on the category, but manufacturers often report to the state’s tracking system unrealistic nominal sales, often as low as a penny or dollar a pound, Lambert said. When pressed by regulators, businesses typically defended those valuations, arguing that they had submitted placeholder numbers while they were still negotiating the price of products, Lambert said. The division, which employs 26 investigators to monitor roughly 2,100 marijuana businesses, doesn’t have the resources to investigate all cases adequately, he said. “We’d love to set up, you know, surveillance on places and track vehicles and see where they come from,” he said. “Did they come from a hemp plant? Did it come from here? Where did it go? We’re not resourced or equipped to do those types of investigations.” In April, state Sens. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, and Marc Snyder, D–Colorado Springs, introduced the Cannabis Consumer Protection Act, which would have placed a ballot measure before voters this fall to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants, bringing Colorado in line with other states. The ballot measure would have put private labs in charge of collecting marijuana samples for the testing required before products go to dispensaries. Currently, manufacturers can select their own samples. Regulators have caught companies gaming that system by substituting samples that were different from what they sold in stores or by treating the samples with chemicals. The act also would have shifted oversight of safety and testing from the Marijuana Enforcement Division to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and funded a program in which regulators would randomly collect marijuana products from dispensaries to test them for contaminants. But the legislation collapsed as different segments of the marijuana industry clashed over a provision tucked into the bill that would have increased taxes on products with higher amounts of THC. Manufacturers of highly concentrated THC products argued that the proposed potency tax would cut into their profits while lowering costs for manufacturers of edibles like gummies. Consumer safety groups also weren’t satisfied and wanted the bill to be tougher, pushing for a strict cap on potency like Vermont has. Ultimately, the main industry trade group opposed it, and Gov. Jared Polis, through a spokesperson, said he feared the bill would cause too much regulation. The bill died, though Snyder, the cosponsor of Senate Bill 26-161, said he plans to revisit the issue in the 2027 legislative session. Snyder said he had hoped to give regulators more tools to tackle fraud. “One of the problems in being first, like Colorado was, into the legalizing of cannabis,” he said, “is that you have to learn all the unintended consequences and unforeseen outcomes the hard way.” The post In a Private Meeting, Colorado Marijuana Regulators Acknowledge the Extent of Illegal Hemp Sales appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Christopher Osher.
Friday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD
Friday Democracy Now! show for rebroadcast - HD This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4 and was authored by Democracy Now! for Broadcasters - HD MP4.
At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign.
The post At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign. appeared first on ProPublica.
Charles Mauldin was near the front of the line to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, a day that became known as “Bloody Sunday” after police brutally beat demonstrators. Charity Rachelle for ProPublica Charles Mauldin remembers that his lungs felt like they were imploding when he breathed in tear gas more than 60 years ago. It was Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Mauldin, who was 17, joined hundreds of other demonstrators in a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans. Mauldin stood near the front of the line — just two rows behind John Lewis, who would go on to become a civil rights icon and U.S. representative — when the march attempted to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Law enforcement officers waited on the other side. They ordered the group to disperse. After about a minute and half, Mauldin said, police began to attack the demonstrators with billy clubs. They also launched tear gas into the crowd, which included teenagers like Mauldin. “We didn’t know what to expect,” Mauldin recalled. “I was fearful. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear.” Now 78, Mauldin watches the news and sees videos and pictures of children being tear-gassed again — not by local police in 1965, but by federal immigration officers in 2026. “Having people like ICE treat people the way we were treated 61 years ago, it’s horrible,” Mauldin said. “It’s traumatizing for young kids, and I’m just starting to realize how traumatizing it is for me.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="Hands hold a framed black-and-white photograph of a line of people walking across a bridge." class="wp-image-77884" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 2879w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260428-Rachelle-ICE-Kids-Tear-Gassed-6-PDedit_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1066 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Mauldin holds a photograph of demonstrators crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Mauldin is in the third row of people, in the center of the photograph, looking at the camera. Civil rights icon John Lewis is in the first row at the right. Charity Rachelle for ProPublica <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="777" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A black-and-white photograph shows a line of police officers advancing from the left side with billy clubs drawn and a group of Black men standing together on the right side. A crowd of people look on in the background." class="wp-image-77885" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,203 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,519 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,692 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1038 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1384 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,583 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,285 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,373 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,377 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,356 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,508 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,777 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1352 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,270 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,541 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,811 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-05-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1082 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Police advance on the demonstrators. Mauldin is second from the right. “I was fearful. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear,” he said. Spider Martin/The Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection We reached out to Mauldin because we recently published an investigation that found at least 79 children have been physically harmed by tear gas and pepper spray during President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. The children include a 6-month-old baby who briefly stopped breathing, a 12-year-old boy who developed hives and a 17-year-old who suffered from a severe asthma attack. They were mostly going about their days when they were exposed to the tear gas or pepper spray. The 6-month-old was in his family’s car when a tear gas canister rolled underneath it, and the 12- and 17-year-olds were in their respective homes. There is no national standard governing the use of tear gas and pepper spray, leaving federal immigration officers with more latitude to deploy the weapons than some local police departments have. In many of the cases where children were harmed, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, the officers were justified in using tear gas or pepper spray, but they did not address how the weapons affected bystanders, including children. “DHS does NOT target children,” the agency said in a written statement. Read More Kids Are Being Harmed by Tear Gas, Pepper Spray Under Trump. There Could Be Long-Term Consequences. “DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “We remind the public that rioting is dangerous. Obstructing law enforcement is a federal crime and assaulting law enforcement is a federal crime and felony.” We interviewed dozens of witnesses and people with firsthand knowledge of the harm, reviewed videos from bystanders and officer-worn cameras, and closely examined lawsuits. And we kept asking experts: Have children ever been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray on the scale we’re seeing now? Is this unprecedented? We quickly realized there is no single entity that tracks every instance when law enforcement officers use tear gas or pepper spray. There is no requirement to identify or follow up with the people who were harmed. We also learned that there isn’t much research on the long-term consequences of exposure to these weapons. Some historians we spoke with suggested the Civil Rights Movement as a point of comparison. So, we turned to Mauldin to help us understand how being tear-gassed as a teenager during that time has affected him. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="776" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A black-and-white photograph of a scene that is obscured by a cloud of tear gas. Two police officers and one other man are visible. Another person is barely visible in the haze as they fall to the ground." class="wp-image-77886" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,203 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,519 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,692 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1037 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1383 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,583 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,285 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,373 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,377 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,356 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,508 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,776 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1351 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,270 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,540 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,810 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Selma-Is-Now-13-_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1081 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Tear gas fired by police wafts through the air on “Bloody Sunday.” Spider Martin/The Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection As police began beating people around him, Mauldin said, he remembers Lewis being struck over the head with a club. “I’ll never forget the sound of his head being cracked,” he recalled. Then, troopers turned to tear gas. “What tear gas does, it makes your skin burn, it forces you to run away from it — it makes your lungs seem to implode,” Mauldin continued. He got as low to the ground as possible. Then, he said, he and others ran to the river and eventually made their way back to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. There was “nothing to do unless you can escape it,” Mauldin said. “It’s a pretty harrowing experience, especially for kids.” In the years after Mauldin was tear gassed, he was diagnosed with asthma. There’s no research that shows tear gas as the cause of an asthma diagnosis, but it’s technically possible since the chemicals can cause lung injury, Sven Jordt, a professor at Duke University School of Medicine who’s an expert on tear gas, told ProPublica. In one of the court declarations we read as part of our reporting, the mother of the 12-year-old who broke out in hives said her son also developed “chronic respiratory issues” and now needed an inhaler after months of breathing in tear gas that seeped into their home. The family lives near an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, where federal officers routinely shot chemical munitions at protesters. Another parent living near an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, told us she’s taken her 7-year-old daughter to urgent care about five times since last fall, when officers repeatedly used tear gas against protesters. “She’s been complaining about her throat,” the mother said of her daughter. “It gets to the point she can’t breathe.” For Mauldin, who said he is the last living person from the front of the line on that Sunday in 1965, being tear-gassed at a young age left an emotional toll — one he said he is still coming to terms with. Experts we spoke with emphasized how important it is for children who were recently tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed to seek help for their mental health. That includes children who were not only directly harmed by these chemicals but also those who saw other people hurt by law enforcement, said Dr. Sarita Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, who studies pediatric disaster preparedness and response. “Without support, this could be a lifelong burden.” At first, children may struggle to sleep or eat, or have difficulty concentrating after experiencing a traumatic event, said Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. That’s especially true for younger children who can’t grasp what’s happening, he said. These reactions may dissipate over time, but the core event may stick with a child for much longer: “Some of them will remember this for a very, very, very long time.” Mauldin only recently began sharing his experience about what happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an event of police brutality that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Processing that trauma began after visiting the bridge some years ago with historians, who Mauldin said helped get him to open up memories and emotions he had suppressed. “If you don’t realize it, and you don’t get help with it … it’ll limit your experience to grow and be the best that you can be,” Mauldin said. “You have to be able to kill a part of yourself to be able to sustain that trauma.” The post At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Maya Miller.
Nebraska wonders which is riskier: The fires it starts, or the fires it fights
Fires have burned nearly a million acres in Nebraska this year. Are even more the solution?
As the fast-moving blaze rolled toward Fire Chief Jason Schneider’s district in Cozad, Nebraska, he and his crew faced a literal uphill battle. The Cottonwood Fire was tearing through the Loess Canyons, an area defined by steep slopes, narrow valleys, few roads, and pockets of invasive eastern red cedar trees, which can throw embers and ash and even explode when they burn. “You think you would have it put out, and you keep on moving north, and you’d look back south and it’s just going again behind you,” Schneider said of the March blaze. But the situation started to improve when Schneider’s crew connected with the South Loup Burn Association, a group of landowners and ranchers who were also fighting the fire. They showed Schneider and his volunteer crew how to do back burns — setting controlled, low blazes in the path ahead of the Cottonwood Fire to consume any flammable material — to contain the wildfire. About 92 percent of Nebraska’s fire departments listed with the National Fire Department Registry are volunteer-based. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/CottonwoodFire_1_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A drip torch owned by Austin Klemm was used to help contain the Cottonwood Fire that burned in Nebraska's Dawson, Lincoln, and Frontier counties in March." data-caption="A drip torch owned by Austin Klemm was used to help contain the Cottonwood Fire that burned in Nebraska’s Dawson, Lincoln, and Frontier counties in March. " data-credit="Courtesy of Austin Klemm"/> A drip torch owned by Austin Klemm was used to help contain the Cottonwood Fire that burned in Nebraska’s Dawson, Lincoln, and Frontier counties in March. Courtesy of Austin Klemm “It would have burned a lot more if they hadn’t showed up and helped us get it stopped where we did,” Schneider said. Unlike other parts of the country where wildfire season peaks in summer and late fall, Nebraska is set ablaze in the spring. This year has marked the state’s worst on record. As of May 6, conflagrations burned about 981,502 acres and dealt a blow to ranchers. They also brought to the forefront the growing debate over a controversial and centuries-old land management practice: using fire to fight fire. The Cottonwood Fire, contained by prescribed burn techniques and past prescribed fires, made the case for the practice. But during the same month, separated by just a county, heavy winds turned the smoldering remnants of a prescribed burn in the Nebraska National Forest into the Road 203 wildfire, which devoured nearly 36,000 acres. Decades of fire mismanagement and climate change have primed America’s landscapes to burn. Today, fire districts, land managers, and local authorities from California to Florida to New Jersey are increasingly embracing the use of prescribed burns to prevent the most severe blazes. According to the National Association of State Foresters and the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina burned between 250,001 and 1 million acres, while California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona burned between 50,001 and 250,000 acres, in 2020 alone. In the Great Plains, these burns are now common practice in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, said Dirac Twidwell, a rangeland and fire ecologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In Nebraska, too, particularly in east and central parts of the state. The Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council estimates that 2025 saw the most acres burned by prescribed fire in one year during recent times. But in areas of the state like the western Sandhills, the practice has sparked backlash. “There was a [prescribed burn] group that tried to establish a couple of years ago up around the Tryon, Mullen area up in there. And they almost lynched that group,” Keystone-Lemoyne Fire and Rescue Chief Ralph Moul said. “They said ‘No, we do not want fire in the Sandhills,’ because there’s nothing to stop it up here.” Despite the fear, there is overwhelming evidence that prescribed burns, when done correctly, can help prevent massive wildfires by burning up volatile fuels like cedar trees. They can also replenish nutrients in soils, making the land ecologically healthier, boosting plant and wildlife diversity and saving ranchers money. The grass that comes back after a burn is often preferred by cattle. “The wildfires you’ve seen here in Nebraska the last few years are also a consequence of removing fire from the landscape,” said Kent Pfeiffer, program manager for the Northern Prairies Land Trust. “You don’t get rid of fire, you just change the nature of it … instead of having frequent low-intensity fires, you end up with infrequent, high-intensity fires.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/burns_drought_map_fires.png?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="a map of Nebraska showing drought extremity levels by color alongside shapes of wildfires" data-caption="Nebraska’s mild and dry winter set up the state for major wildfires early this spring. " data-credit="Graphic by Quentin Lueninghoener of Hanscom Park Studios for the Flatwater Free Press. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor and wildfire.gov"/> Nebraska’s mild and dry winter set up the state for major wildfires early this spring. Graphic by Quentin Lueninghoener of Hanscom Park Studios for the Flatwater Free Press. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor and wildfire.gov The issue is growing more urgent as the state faces dual threats. Suppression of natural fires has allowed cedar woodlands to creep into Nebraska’s native grasslands, with more large swaths at risk and an already costly headache for ranchers. Meanwhile, climate change is bringing more extreme conditions, including intense stretches of drier and hotter weather that can fuel more destructive, less controllable blazes. “What we know is that overall, our fire management is not working,” Twidwell said. Tucker Thompson was in his 30s back in the early 2000s when he first helped out on a prescribed burn on another person’s property near Gothenburg. The rancher, who summers cattle in the Loess Canyons, knew some neighbors would be upset, but cedar trees were starting to sprout across his land. He wanted to get ahead of the problem, and he was curious. By today’s standards, the group’s equipment was basic and their knowledge limited. Even though everything went fine, Thompson left thinking the entire practice was insane. He went home and took a chainsaw to the cedar trees across about 400 acres of his property. “I’m like, ‘I am never going to be responsible for another fire,’” Thompson said. “And then five years later, they all start coming back. Ten years later, it’s like, I have no choice. There’s no way of killing these dang things, so I burned them.” Now, Thompson continues the practice and is a member of two burn groups. He helped firefighters contain the Cottonwood Fire, even as it ravaged his grazing lands. Prescribed burns “decrease the fuel load in these canyons, so we can control these fires to some degree,” Thompson said. The Loess Canyons area has one of the most advanced prescribed fire cultures in the entire country, Twidwell said. It has reduced the risk of catastrophic fire and made the land more suitable for grazing, which has boosted landowners’ profits. Up until the last 150 years, fire was common in Nebraska. Wildfires would naturally control species like eastern red cedar, and Indigenous peoples would run prescribed burns to clear underbrush, remove dead biomass, replenish soil nutrients, and encourage new plant growth. Prescribed burn associations, nonprofits, and state, federal, and municipal agencies burned more than 92,700 acres in prescribed fires in the first six months of 2025 alone, according to a survey by the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council. It’s likely the most acres burned through prescribed fire in the state in one year during recent times, the council said. But conducting these burns requires a lot of planning, monitoring, money, machinery, and manpower. And even when it comes together, a change in weather can cancel the whole operation on a moment’s notice. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP23236538176229_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Brian Sprenger checks on his cattle Wednesday, June 21, 2023, in Sidney, Neb." data-caption="Brian Sprenger checks on his cattle in 2023, in Sidney, Nebraska. Cedar trees are creeping into the state’s grasslands, fueling more several wildfires. " data-credit="AP Photo / Brittany Peterson"/> Brian Sprenger checks on his cattle in 2023, in Sidney, Nebraska. Cedar trees are creeping into the state’s grasslands, fueling more several wildfires. AP Photo / Brittany Peterson Semi-retired rancher Jon Immink coordinates burns across multiple landowners’ properties near the Nebraska-Kansas border to help manage cedar trees. He plans years ahead as he maps out which plots of land need to burn when, typically in the stretch from January to March. “I do not sleep well in burn season. You wake up 4 o’clock in the morning and all you can think of is … you prepare for what could go wrong,” Immink said. In order to conduct a land management burn, a landowner or tenant has to apply for a permit and submit a burn plan to their local fire chief, who decides whether to waive Nebraska’s standing open burn ban. By law, the plan requires a lot of documentation and forethought, including a list of on-hand equipment and a description of the weather conditions needed to burn safely. Fairbury Fire Chief Judd Stewart’s jurisdiction is filled with landowners and managers who use prescribed burns. Stewart had to cancel 40 to 50 burn permits in March when Governor Jim Pillen ordered a temporary statewide halt in issuing due to the devastating wildfires. Stewart wishes the governor would have given more consideration to areas like southeast Nebraska, where fire danger was lower. “These areas that people had this heavy vegetation, and now they still have that heavy vegetation, but they’ve got new grasses growing in it, and it makes it very difficult to burn,” Stewart said. “As we approach mid- to late summer, when we start getting high temperatures … that vegetation will carry fire again, and now we’ve got those heavy fuel loads that are going to be hard to contain.” The governor’s order has impacted landowners and managers who have invested thousands of dollars, conducted years of planning, and deferred grazing for prescribed burns that might now have to wait another year, said Austin Klemm, board member of the South Loup Burn Association, the group that helped Schneider and others contain the Cottonwood Fire. Right now, he is working with about six landowners who have invested roughly $250,000 to $275,000 to plan a burn that might not happen this year. “Some of these guys have invested tens of thousands of dollars in prep work to be able to burn,” Klemm said. “These guys have deferred grazing, did not graze at all last year, had to go find a place to stick cows or feed cows all last year.” Becky Potmesil doesn’t have to look far to see the devastation wildfire can cause. Potmesil raises cattle in the Alliance area of the Panhandle, on the western edge of the Sandhills. To the south, the Morrill Fire burned an estimated 642,000 acres, making it the largest on record in the state’s history. To the southeast, the Ashby Fire burned another 36,000 acres. The winds have blown away the black, burnt grass, leaving behind only sand dunes. It looks like a moonscape, she said. “Anybody who’d do a prescribed burn out here in the [western] Sandhills in western Nebraska is crazy, and it’s dangerous,” she said. While she sees how there could be benefits in some parts, like the meadows, she doesn’t think it would be worth the risk in her area. Moul, the Keystone-Lemoyne Fire Chief, is cautious about issuing burn permits in his district, especially in the Sandhills. He likes for there to either be snow or green grass on the ground. Unlike in other parts of the state, the Sandhills have fewer fire breaks, less infrastructure, and more extreme weather conditions like high-speed winds and very little humidity, Moul and Potmesil noted. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PrescribedBurn_2_AustinKlemm_cropped.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A prescribed burn conducted south of Callaway, Nebraska in 2022 by the South Loup Burn Association." data-caption="A prescribed burn conducted south of Callaway, Nebraska, in 2022 by the South Loup Burn Association. " data-credit="Courtesy of Austin Klemm"/> A prescribed burn conducted south of Callaway, Nebraska, in 2022 by the South Loup Burn Association. Courtesy of Austin Klemm Moul, who was an incident commander on the Morrill Fire, understands that prescribed fire has its place if it is done safely. However, after seeing damages from prescribed burns escaping in his career, he said fire chiefs should not allow prescribed burns on or right before red flag days in their districts. “Some of these burn groups, they’ve been burning for years and years and years. For the most part, they know what they’re doing out there, but there are a few, like I said, that have convinced these fire chiefs to write the permit on red flag days, because that’s when they get the best kill of the trees,” Moul said. “But it was my experience when I worked with the state that we went to a lot of escaped fires because of prescribed burns that got away.” The Road 203 wildfire initially started as a prescribed burn in the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest. More than a day after the fire ignitions ended, heavy winds created a spot fire outside the original boundary as firefighters mopped up and patrolled the area, according to the Forest Service. The agency said 99.84 percent of its prescribed burns go according to plan. This one didn’t. According to the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council’s survey last year, 1.6 percent of burns surveyed escaped and required outside assistance, primarily from volunteer fire departments. Changing weather patterns and the spread of cedar trees are the primary reasons for escapes, the Fire Council said in an email. “When the gap between prescribed fire acres and fuel load increases, it also increases fire behavior in both prescribed fire and wildfires, causing us to adapt to riskier burns with increased planning and equipment,” the Fire Council said. When Twidwell came to Nebraska in 2013, he was told prescribed fire would never be used in the Sandhills. Since then, he’s seen multiple burns happen there as the culture continues to shift. He knows some landowners will never be convinced, and he understands their concern. But beyond protecting the grasslands, Twidwell believes Nebraska needs to have more conversations on how to mitigate the large wildfires that have torn through the state. “Everybody understands … the wildfire risk playing out. Fewer understand the benefits and why certain groups are using prescribed fire,” Twidwell said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nebraska wonders which is riskier: The fires it starts, or the fires it fights on May 15, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anila Yoganathan.
The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love
Politicians across the spectrum want more housing. Apartments are a great answer, because they also slash carbon emissions in a big way.
Democrats and Republicans agree on virtually nothing at this point, except the desperate need to build more housing in the United States. Depending on your viewpoint, the country needs new domiciles because it puts people to work and stimulates local economies, or because it creates affordable homes and drives down housing costs, thus reducing homelessness. Affordability, including in housing, is now one of the biggest political issues in America. Neither party, though, is talking about the secret superpower of new apartment buildings: They’re much better for the planet than constructing single-family homes. According to a new report, these units are “an almost automatic form of building decarbonization,” because three-quarters of new apartments are heated electrically. That means they can run on rooftop solar panels or tap into grids humming with clean energy, instead of burning plant-warming natural gas in furnaces or boilers. While the Trump administration and the Republican Party at large try to roll back as much climate progress as they can, they’re inadvertently bolstering that progress by calling for new construction. Deep-red Montana, for instance, recently passed a flurry of bills to get more multi-family housing built. “Apartments are the climate solution hiding in plain sight,” said Alan Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, which authored the report. Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons. For one, residents share walls, floors, and ceilings with their neighbors, surrounding them with excellent insulation. Secondly, the square footage of each unit tends to be smaller than detached homes, so there’s less air to manage. Accordingly, it takes less energy to climate-control apartment units and keep people comfortable: The typical resident of a downtown high-rise emits one-third as much greenhouse gases as a resident of a detached house in the suburbs. Because of this inherent efficiency, apartment builders have for decades opted to install what’s called electric resistance heating, like baseboard heaters, instead of gas furnaces. That’s because wiring them up is cheaper than piping in all that methane. “If I am building something with the intention of renting it, I really want to minimize my upfront costs,” said Amanda D. Smith, senior scientist at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, who studies the built environment but wasn’t involved in the new report. “Often electric water heaters and electric heaters for space heating make sense from that perspective.” Economic forces, then, have long encouraged the adoption of such systems: 68 percent of apartments built since the early 1970s have been heated with electricity, the report notes. Half a century ago, no one was campaigning to decarbonize buildings to fight climate change — going electric was just the better option. Today, if you live in an apartment, you’re 60 percent more likely to be all-electric than your neighbor living in a house. And apartments can get even greener. Heat pumps — which move warmth from outdoor air inside, instead of generating it like a gas furnace does — are around three times more efficient than space heaters. Over the past few decades, the technology has gotten more powerful, capable of extracting heat from even freezing outdoor air. That’s helped heat pumps proliferate across even the chilliest climes: Maine installed 100,000 of the appliances two years ahead of schedule, and almost two-thirds of households in Norway use them. Heat pumps are increasingly popping up in American apartment buildings, too: While quite rare in the decades after the 1950s, heat pumps have been incorporated into 18 percent of these structures in the Northwest since 2010, the report notes. (Overall, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for several years now.) While traditional electric heat pumps work like air conditioners, in that you need an outdoor unit that connects to an indoor one, new varieties are easier to incorporate into apartments and condos. One from a company called Gradient fits like a saddle over a window sill and plugs into a regular outlet, with installation taking less than a half hour. (Think of it like those old-school AC units jutting out of city apartment windows, only much cooler looking.) Another launching this winter combines the two units into one attached to an interior wall, where it exchanges air with the outside. “Making retrofits simpler will be a game-changer,” Smith said. If new buildings in hotter parts of the U.S. rely upon gas heating, they’d still need an air conditioning system. The beauty of a heat pump is that it can reverse in the summer to fill a home with cool air. As temperatures rise across the country, heat pumps will not only work more efficiently than space heaters and gas furnaces to warm apartments, but to provide invaluable cooling to keep people healthy. Already in the U.S., heat kills more people every year than all other forms of extreme weather combined. Making a building’s heating fully electric encourages the adoption of another appliance critical for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: the induction stove. “If you’re building a building and you’re heating and cooling with heat pumps, it doesn’t really make sense to hook it up to the gas system to pipe a tiny bit of gas in for people to cook on their gas stoves a couple of times a week,” said Matt Casale, managing director of states and regions at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition, which wasn’t involved in the report. All this electrification could potentially slot into a burgeoning technology known as networked geothermal. Instead of a building’s heat pump using outdoor air, it uses liquid pumping underground. Because the earth’s temperature remains a more consistent temperature year-round than the air, these heat pumps are even more efficient at warming a space. If all of an area’s buildings — apartments or otherwise — are hooked into a networked geothermal system, there’s no need to pipe gas into the neighborhood at all. “It’s a real community-based energy system, and you’re using energy that’s literally homegrown,” Casale said. “It’s right under your feet.” Beyond their superior energy efficiency and tendency to go electric, apartment buildings provide denser housing, fitting far more people into a footprint than a single-family home could manage. If located near daily essentials, like grocery stores, residents can walk instead of drive, further reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to. Building big apartment buildings of just apartments, though, just won’t cut it, said Cécile Faraud, head of the clean construction program at C40, a global network of climate-focused mayors. These structures need mixed uses, where living spaces sit atop commercial spaces, like markets and doctors’ offices. “So you can access care, you can access education, you can access your needs in terms of shopping,” said Faraud, who wasn’t involved in the report. “But also in terms of health, so being able to exercise in parks, etc., and access to nature.” Indeed, what surrounds these apartment complexes matters too. Green spaces reduce temperatures, boost residents’ mental health, and provide habitats for native plant and animal species. Better yet, “agrihoods” surround working farms with multi-family housing, generating nutritious produce for residents to enjoy or sell. (Faraud stresses that in addition to creating more housing, cities need to retrofit existing buildings to be more energy efficient, like with double-paned windows and better insulation.) Constructing apartments, though, is often way more difficult than it should be, housing advocates say. The new report notes that “apartment buildings of at least four stories are currently allowed on less than 1 percent of the residential land in all but 10 Oregon cities” — even in progressive Portland, that figure is 14 percent. “The main thing that we need to do is re-legalize apartments in a much larger area of our cities,” Durning said. Cities and states are responsible for that, not the feds. But the growing national push from both parties to get more units built will be a win-win for people and the planet. “Even across a political landscape that’s as fractured and divided and as contentious as what we’re seeing now,” Smith said, “I think most people are willing to say: We want people to have homes.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love on May 15, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.
Ukraine’s $2,000 Drone Is Destroying Russia’s $50,000 Shaheds. And Everyone Wants It
Energy bills keep rising. These candidates in Georgia say they can help.
With the state’s energy future hanging in the balance, 10 people are vying for two seats on the powerful utility commission.
Ten candidates are vying for two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission in the May 19 primary. Early voting is already underway. The commission oversees utilities, including telecommunications, natural gas, and electricity, and has final say over how Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, makes energy and what it charges customers. This gives commissioners substantial power over Georgians’ energy bills and the state’s climate future, because burning fossil fuels to make electricity is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. By the PSC’s own description, “very few governmental agencies have as much impact on peoples’ lives as the PSC.” Still, elections for the commission have rarely received much attention. That changed last year. Amid frustration over rising energy bills, voters overwhelmingly ousted two Republican incumbents, sending Democrats to the five-member commission for the first time in 20 years. With two seats up for election again this year, majority control of the commission is at stake. Most candidates, regardless of party, broadly agree on the issues commanding the most attention: that energy bills should be kept in check and that the commission should do more to protect ordinary customers from the costs of powering data centers. But they bring different backgrounds and approaches to the job. District 3 The seat for District 3, which encompasses the metro Atlanta counties of Clayton, Dekalb, and Fulton, was on last year’s ballot, but only for a one-year term. Democrat Peter Hubbard won that election and is now running for reelection as the incumbent. Hubbard told Grist he’s running for reelection because he needs more time to enact changes like expanding renewable energy and ensuring Georgia Power is getting the most out of existing resources before building expensive new ones. A full six-year term, he said, would include the “big, meaty decisions” of Georgia Power’s long-term resource plan and rate case. Hubbard said he wants to take an active role in shaping those plans, rather than reacting to what the utility proposes. “There’s just a baseline to acting as a shield to imprudent spending. But I also think that a proactive commissioner can find even lower-cost solutions than what otherwise would be provided,” he said. Republican Fitz Johnson, who had been the incumbent last year, lost to Hubbard in 2025 and is running against him again. He told Grist at a campaign event that he’s “got some unfinished business.” While most other candidates in the race have said the commission should do more to shield ordinary customers from data center costs, Johnson said the commission has “100 percent, without doubt” protected them. “When it comes to the data centers and the large loads, we put the ratepayers first,” he said. “We said we’re not going to put any burden on our ratepayers.” Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="solar panels in a field" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20250422DesotoSolarFarm-194-edited.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="900" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> Many companies want clean energy. Georgia Power will soon let them build it. Emily Jones During his time on the commission, Johnson voted for the current rate freeze and the contract terms designed to ensure data centers pay for their own infrastructure, though critics argue those protections aren’t enough. He also voted in favor of Georgia Power bill increases that became the focus of last year’s election and for the utility’s multibillion-dollar expansion to serve rising demand coming mostly from data centers. Another Republican, Brandon Martin, is running against Johnson for the party’s nomination. He did not respond to requests for an interview. According to his campaign website, Martin is a graduate of Georgia Tech and now works as a purchasing manager in a “multi-billion dollar industry.” His website stresses the importance of reliable energy for Georgia’s growing economy and calls for electricity generation that’s “flexible and as U.S.-centric as possible” in light of uncertain global fuel markets, though the site does not offer specifics. District 5 District 5 covers a stretch of west Georgia from the Tennessee border south nearly to Columbus. Republican Tricia Pridemore has held the seat since 2018 and is running for U.S. Congress instead of seeking reelection. Three Democrats, three Republicans, and a Libertarian are all running to replace her. All three Democrats stressed that their party’s majority on the commission would bolster support for renewable energy programs. “Two commissioners can demand better analysis. Three can stop the rubber-stamping of utility requests,” said electrical engineer and lawyer Craig Cupid, one of the Democrats running in District 5. He grew up in a working-class family, he said, after his parents immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Augusta. “Every penny counted,” Cupid said. “I understand when a rate increase affects someone, particularly lower-income families.” Cupid also emphasized his technical background, saying it gives him the expertise to act as a “watchdog against monopoly utilities.” Democrat Shelia Edwards told Grist that she was inspired to run for a seat on the PSC after getting a power bill of nearly $500. Edwards could pay it, she said, though it was “painful.” “But what about the families that are struggling to keep a roof over their head, or food on the table or medicine?” she said. “How are they gonna afford this situation?” That was in 2022. Edwards won the party’s District 3 primary that year and was preparing to face Fitz Johnson in the general election when it was canceled because of a voting-rights lawsuit. Edwards, who has worked on political campaigns and in local environmental advocacy, is running again in District 5. The third Democrat on the ballot in District 5 is Angelia Pressley, who told Grist she’s running because of the PSC’s “dismissal” of the public’s environmental and cost concerns. “The public has to have more voice,” she said. “There has to be more balance at the commission between business concerns and public concerns.” Pressley said if elected, she plans to host listening sessions around the state to hear Georgians’ concerns and educate them about the work of the commission. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP24219738440753.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Sparta residents at a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing. " data-credit="Charlotte Kramon / AP Photo"/> Sparta residents at a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing. Charlotte Kramon / AP Photo The Republican candidates all stressed the importance of reliable energy. They said they support affordable clean energy as part of the utility’s overall mix, but would not impose a renewable mandate. Republican Bobby Mehan has spent most of his career in health care records technology and now works as a mediator. He said that work has taught him “to be open-minded and kind of take this all-the-above approach,” a philosophy he said is key to innovating the energy grid. In a debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club, Mehan pledged that he would not vote for new rate hikes and pushed his opponents to do the same. “I’m willing to put my neck out there and say, ‘six years, not a single rate increase from Bobby Mehan,’” he said in the April debate. When pressed on the feasibility of that promise, Mehan clarified that he meant he personally wouldn’t vote for rate hikes. Carolyn Roddy is a regulatory lawyer who has worked for the Federal Communications Commission and on a rural electric service program in the first Trump administration. She is also running in the Republican primary for District 5 and told Grist her experience would help her keep utility costs in check. “The Georgia Public Service Commission can do a better job of what they’re doing,” she said. “How dare you impose these kinds of rate increases when people’s family budgets are already stretched really thin?” The commission, she said, should question and guide utilities but should not be either “a big impediment or a big rubber stamp” for their plans. Republican Joshua Tolbert is an engineer who’s worked in several different types of power plants, a perspective he said is missing from the commission. Without specific technical expertise, Tolbert said, commissioners are less able to question and push back on proposals from utilities. That pushback is critical, he said, because Georgia Power is a monopoly, so the commission has to provide the kind of “consequences and feedback” that would normally come from free market competition. The Libertarian party doesn’t have a primary, so the path to November’s election for Libertarian Thomas Blooming is different from the other candidates. He needs signatures from voters to appear on the ballot, though the party can collect those signatures for their slate of candidates as a whole. Blooming is an electrical engineer who’s worked on data centers for Google and Facebook and now works for Utility Innovation Group, which builds microgrids with a focus on decarbonization and resilience. Blooming stressed that he’s not against data centers, but that problems come up when the grid can’t support them. More nuclear energy could be one route to serving data centers, he said. Blooming also highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on any one source of energy. Too much natural gas could drive up costs, he said, while overreliance on renewables could make the grid less reliable. “You have to protect the ratepayers, but you also have to make decisions that keep Georgia Power healthy,” he said. “It doesn’t do anyone any good to just absolutely lock down on Georgia Power and then they’re not able to provide the power that they should.” Rahul Bali contributed to this report. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Energy bills keep rising. These candidates in Georgia say they can help. on May 15, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Jones.
Once dismissed as weeds, native plants are now flying off the shelves
Gardeners across the country are flocking to climate-resilient native plants as concerns about extreme heat, flooding, and pollinators grow.
Renee Costanzo cranked on the rusty pulley with both hands, watching the greenhouse roof creak open in sections. A breeze of spring air swept over 12,000 seedlings lined up in plastic trays in the Kilbourn Park greenhouse. Costanzo, the Chicago Park District’s only full-time employee at the northside greenhouse, spearheads a months-long effort to grow more than 15,000 plants, including vegetables, greens, and flowers, to get them ready in time for the Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale. The massively popular sale, which took place earlier this month, typically draws upwards of 1,100 people every year, with local gardeners lining up around the park waiting to snatch up plants at $4 a piece. But this year, attendance broke records — over 2,300 shoppers turned out. “We generally start these annuals at the end of February,” said Costanzo, pointing to rows of popular annual flowers like zinnias, marigolds, and geraniums, which provide bright blooms all summer long before dying at the end of the season. “So we’ve been coddling and loving these babies for months now, and we just want to get them into happy homes.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070600-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Volunteers transplant seedlings to prepare for annual sale." data-caption="Volunteers at Kilbourn Park prepare for the Mother’s Day plant sale. " data-credit="Manuel Martinez / WBEZ"/> Volunteers at Kilbourn Park prepare for the Mother’s Day plant sale. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ For decades, Chicago gardeners flocked to the Kilbourn Park sale to pick up tomatoes, cucumbers, and some annuals — the standard starter kit for backyard gardeners. But this year, the park responded to a relatively new demand: Nearly 1 in 5 plants for sale are native plant species that have adapted to the local climate and wildlife and are generally low maintenance. “Just in the last five years, people have asked for more natives, which is why we’ve been increasing our production,” said Costanzo, who experimented with 30 different native species in November ahead of the plant sale this year. For a long time, native plants were seen as little more than weeds, but their value has grown significantly in recent years. Other local plant sales across Chicago and the country are incorporating native species at a pace surprising to even veteran horticulturalists who remember a time when they couldn’t give them away. “I’ve watched this for 44 years, from almost zero to now,” said Neil Diboll, the president of Prairie Nursery, a Wisconsin-based nursery dedicated to growing and shipping native plants across the country. “It’s not a fad,” Diboll said. “This is a long, steady climb.” Last year, Diboll said his nursery experienced a 7 percent increase in native plant sales. This year, they’re shipping out about 500,000 plants and even more seeds. Back in 1982, when Diboll first started selling plants, business was tougher: The company grossed just over $13,000. These days, he said, “you can add a few zeros on there.” That relatively new mainstream demand has been driven, in part, by concerns about dramatic declines in insect species and climate change-powered extreme heat, drought, and flooding. The caterpillars of the Monarch butterfly, for example, depend on native milkweed as a food source. But as land use patterns have changed, local milkweed species have disappeared, leading to recent declines in Monarch populations. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070639-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Plants in seed trays" data-caption="The Kilbourn Park annual plant sale is now in its 30th year. " data-credit="Manuel Martinez / WBEZ"/> The Kilbourn Park annual plant sale is now in its 30th year. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ “Native plants have been adapting to change for thousands of years,” said Tiffany Jones, who leads habitat education throughout the Great Lakes region for the National Wildlife Federation. “They need less water, less maintenance, and they’re incredibly resilient — not to mention they help flood prevention with their deep root systems and provide habitat for all kinds of crucial species and pollinators. They’re practical and beautiful.” In Minnesota, Becky Klukas-Brewer, co-owner and head of marketing and sales at Prairie Moon Nursery, a popular native plant nursery, said the Midwest greenhouse is shipping more plants and seeds than ever before. “In the last seven years, we have seen a 350 percent increase in sales, which is pretty awesome,” said Klukas-Brewer. At the same time, the 44-year-old nursery has seen its orders triple. She credits that success, in part, to the growing number of local plant sales across the country, drumming up interest in ecologically-minded gardening. For nearly 50 years, Wild Ones, a national nonprofit, has been educating the public about the benefits of reintroducing native plants back into their habitat. What started as a gardening club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ballooned into a nationwide organization with over 14,000 gardening enthusiasts putting on plant sales, seed giveaways, and exchanges. The group has also been noticing an uptick in native plant sales. Over 110,000 native plants were sold last year through the organization’s 107 plant sales last year, according to Josh Nelson, development director with the Wild Ones. He added that another 40,000 native plants were distributed as part of the group’s various programs. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/KILBOURNPLANTSALE_2605070532-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A volunteer fills a large bowl with soil." data-caption="Lourdes Valenzuela works on transplanting young plants before Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale. " data-credit="Manuel Martinez / WBEZ"/> Lourdes Valenzuela works on transplanting young plants before Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ As the native plant business continues to grow, the annual Kilbourn Park plant sale is helping meet some of that demand. To make it happen, a team of local volunteers came out on a weekly basis over several months to help sort, pot, and move seedlings. “It’s completely worth it,” said Lourdes Valenzuela, a retired schoolteacher who has volunteered at the north side plant sale for 12 years. Valenzuela is part of the Friends of Kilbourn Park Greenhouse, a dedicated group of local volunteers who fundraise to help expand the resources at the nursery. With help from funds collected at previous plant sales, they’ve been able to buy benches, a shed, and even a patio — increasing the footprint of the educational center. The goal this year was to raise $25,000, about half of the total projected cost, for a new outdoor learning center. But Valenzuela said the plant sale was a huge hit, and they easily surpassed the goal. The Chicago Park District confirmed the sale generated approximately $48,000. “We literally sold every possible plant, all the compost, lots of baked goods,” she said. “We’re not fighting against the climate here. We’re working with it because it’s what’s native to this area, and they’re beautiful.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Once dismissed as weeds, native plants are now flying off the shelves on May 15, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.
Grifty Colossus Strikes Again and Again and…
Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold pho...
Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold phones - others have taken his lead with their own patriotic spinoffs. Cue "Fuck You" upgrades, a Strait to Hell arcade for a video-game war, and a Trump/Epstein "Memorial Reading Room" packed with 3.5 million pages of files, where "the truth is hard to deny." Trump's narcissistic vandalizing of D.C. - couldn't his KKK dad have just hugged him now and then? - is "something dictators have done throughout history," noted Bernie Sanders of his proposed SERVE Act, or Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego. Co-sponsored by six Senate Dems, the bill would bar any sitting president from naming federal properties after themselves, an act both "arrogant" and illegal. At this rate many weary Americans would likely argue, "Let the chiseling off begin," but for now the bill sits in legislative limbo and we're stuck with the resulting atrocities; they continue to multiply like locusts, even as he's proposed a $10-billion fund for more "beautification" projects around "the capital of the greatest Nation in the history of the world." Though he increasingly nods off in public - or per the White House, blinks - he still clutches at a farcical show of dominance he's leaned on in the endless self-glorification campaign that is his execrable life. There are posts quoting fictional "fans": "Remarkable leadership,” "Master of the Deal,” "THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN." From the guy who's "confused the country for his living room," there's D.C's re-branding: the plaques, name changes, razed East Wing for a billion-dollar "albatross" nobody wants. There are new massive Stalin-esque banners at construction sites proclaiming, “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP”- "like Michael Scott buying himself a World’s Best Boss coffee mug" we paid for - to which unenthused residents added, "Fuck You Cunt." Snug in a delusional bubble where his approval is def not in the toilet, he feels free to rant, lie, melt down online without consequence. In one manic night, he posts 55 times in three hours: “Arrest Obama the traitor” and “DEMONIC FORCE,” also Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Kelly. Asked how much he thinks about the cost to Americans of his calamitous war, he blurts, “Not even a little bit.” His lackeys follow suit: Ka$h Patel yells, lies, hustles bourbon, pads his stats and takes a "VIP snorkel" in Pearl Harbor around the tomb of 900 U.S. soldiers as Sean Duffy takes his nine offspring on a "patriotic," seven-month Great American Road Trip filmed for YouTube and complete with "head-spinning" corporate sponsorship, both on the taxpayers' now-rapidly-shrinking dime. Meanwhile, another project nobody asked for - draining and repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, aka "reflective pond," from traditional grey to garish blue - has shockingly veered off course. After boasting his bestest golf course pool painters could easy-peasy do a no-bid, $1.8 million, "smart and beautiful construction" that Dems stupidly opposed - "Dumacrats love sewage" - the cost has soared to $13.1 million, it's now by a contractor he "did not know and have never used before,” staff are worried the job is behind schedule, with "uneven application" leaving bubbles, holes and "mottled shades of blue" in the pool, and a judge has set a May 21 hearing for a lawsuit charging the project wasn't properly vetted, ditto a color "more appropriate to a resort or theme park." More winning in Miami, where another lawsuit charges three acres of prime waterfront land were illegally grifted by DeSantis to Trump for his presidential “library,” actually a gaudy skyscraper and hotel with no books but more vitally two gold statues of, you know. They will presumably join in grotesque kinship with the $300,000, crypto-bro-funded, bronze and gold leaf Don Colossus just unveiled at Doral Miami, "where the Republic is currently moldering." Before "a robotic chorus of evangelical functionaries who (have) transformed themselves into the most theologically humiliated cohort in modern memory," the statue was honored as, not an idolatrous golden calf, insisted Pastor Mark Burns, but "a celebration of life" and symbol of "the hand of God over (Trump’s) life." Definitely not a cult. Tacky is as tacky doesBluesky screenshot Despite being heralded as God's second favorite son - one who "understands the Scriptures better than the Pope" - Trump is also widely deemed "an economic serial killer" presiding over an "America First Corporate Graveyard," skyrocketing inflation, national debt, farm bankruptcies, and energy costs, and possibly "the largest single act of grand larceny in American history" with a $10 billion payout by his own DOJ against his own IRS to settle his bullshit lawsuit for their leak of his tax returns, which every other president has released. Still, because grifting chutzpah thy name is, and because there's never enough money to fill the ugly gaping hole where a soul should be, he's still running penny-ante scams. Up next: Trump Mobile, "for the forgotten MAGA man." Last June, his huckster spawn announced the launch of "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance.” The T1 Phone, "proudly designed and built in the United States,” would be available in August at $499. For almost a year, they urged followers to make $100 "deposits" to "pre-order" the beauties; over half a million did, ponying up about $59 million. Then, the bait and switch. The terms of service quietly changed: The "deposit" provided "a conditional opportunity" to buy if Trump Mobile chose to sell. Pricing, production schedules, shipping costs were "non-binding." "Made in the USA" became "Proudly American Designed." "Delivery" dates got pushed back. Unexplained charges appeared. A reporter who called "Customer Service" got “Omega Auto Care." To date, no fantasy Trump phones have shipped. Cheap Crooks 'R Us. "Service for the forgotten MAGA man"Image from Bluesky Also, liars. With even neo-cons now deeming the Iran War potentially more of a debacle than Vietnam, the good folks at Secret Handshake, creators of the Trump/Epstein bestie statues, decided that with the regime hyping war like a video game, they might as well turn it into one. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell , which is also online, features three working, arcade video games set up inside DC's War Memorial; they promise "high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground...pure pixelated patriotism," or, per Hegseth, "laser-focused maximum reps annihilation mission crushing (with) sustained unrelenting pressure." Battles - by tweet, not gun - pit US forces against ”Iranian schoolgirl,“ "DEIyatollah,“ low-flow shower heads, the Pope and other "threats to American freedom." Games open with Trump declaring, “Another big, beautiful day as the best President ever.” Options for the prompt, “Ready to ROCK Iran back to the Stone Ages?” are “Not Yet...” “Yes” and “Hell Yes.” Yells Pete, “Let’s liberate some oil!” Trump can order a Diet Coke or bomb Iran; search for barrels of oil, ideas for Truth Social posts, or endless threats that lead nowhere; he vows to “fight this war and win it by hamburger o’clock.” Melania: “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET...Did you burn the files yet?” JD, fat-faced: “I love couch.” The only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, which abruptly ends the game; otherwise, it’s impossible to end or win it. Irony never dies: Images have surfaced of bored National Guardsmen - a $1 million a day deployment - playing. Another piece of protest art brings the truth of "one of the most horrific crimes in American history” to Trump's hometown. "The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” in New York's Tribeca, is a first-of-its-kind, 5,000-square-foot installation containing all the unsealed Epstein files - 3.5 million pages printed and bound into 3,437 volumes weighing 17,000 pounds, "a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime." The pop-up project in the Mriya Gallery was created by the non-profit Primary Facts; it took them about a month to print the files. The exhibit is on view through May 21; admission to groups for a one-hour session is free; organizers are raising funds to cover the New York premiere and bring it to other cities. The Trumpsonian installation is built around a candlelit tribute to Epstein's more than 1,200 victims and survivors, whose names are all redacted here in closed binders - unlike at the DOJ, where they were badly, only partly redacted, a failure adding insult to injury along with an ongoing, multi-pronged cover-up. The Trump and Epstein Reading Room also includes a timeline documenting the decades-long crimes, legal proceedings and intersections between the two men's lives, all underlining the criminal absurdity of federal claims "there's nothing left to investigate." The vast trove of information, organizers say, is "what 3.5 million pages of evidence looks like." Trump, as deeply complicit as he is narcissistic, "wanted his name on stuff." Now, here it is. From the TrumpsonianImage from Memorial Reading Room This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.
Fake video: Clip showing Suvendu Adhikari talking about ‘finishing’ Muslims is AI generated
A video of West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari is viral on social media, purporting to show him make several controversial statements. In the video, Adhikari starts off by expresses... The post Fake video: Clip showing Suvendu Adhikari talking about ‘finishing’ Muslims is AI generated appeared first on Alt News.
A video of West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari is viral on social media, purporting to show him make several controversial statements. In the video, Adhikari starts off by expresses his satisfaction at winning the seats of Bhabanipur and Nandigram. Then, he goes on to say: “We will work only for Hindus, and exterminate the 27% Muslim population in West Bengal. In this way, our work will ensure that the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) stays in power for more than 100 years.” X user (@Naira_Seth1) posted the viral clip, adding, in the caption, that this was a case of “majoritarian extremism” dressed as politics. (Archive) Suvendu Adhikari openly bragged about defeating Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram, then reportedly declared that BJP will “only work for Hindus” and “eliminate the 27% Muslims of West Bengal” to stay in power for 100 years. This is not governance. This is majoritarian extremism pic.twitter.com/MyIgERbyD2 — Naira Seth (@Naira_Seth1) May 7, 2026 X user (@Divyayadav98178) posted this video, which managed to rack up more than 8,000 views and over 50 shares. An archived version of the post, which has now been removed from the platform, can be accessed here. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-315395" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_256.jpg" alt="" width="798" height="854" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_256.jpg 798w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_256-280x300.jpg 280w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_256-768x822.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 798px) 100vw, 798px" /> X user (@nilakshirabhaa) had also posted the clip with the viral claim. It was later taken down. Fact Check It is clear from the video that it is AI generated. The man seen in the later part of the clip is not Suvendu Adhikari. See below: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315418" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-103436.jpg" alt="" width="736" height="415" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-103436.jpg 736w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-103436-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 736px) 100vw, 736px" /> Neither does the voice match Adhikari’s. The microphones placed in front of the speaker display garbled and distorted text, which is a common visual indicator of artificially generated videos. See below: <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315419" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-103707.jpg" alt="" width="738" height="415" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-103707.jpg 738w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-103707-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 738px) 100vw, 738px" /> On inspecting the video, we noticed several other inconsistencies with the accent, the lip sync, as well as the movements of the head, mouth, and hands. We also ran relevant keyword searches to check if any news outlet had published a report on the controversial statements, but could find none. We ran the video through Hive’s AI detection tool, which showed a strong possibility of it being artificially created, peaking at 98.8% around the 0:25 timestamp. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-315399" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_261.jpg" alt="" width="1509" height="854" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_261.jpg 1509w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_261-300x170.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_261-1024x580.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot_261-768x435.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1509px) 100vw, 1509px" /> Thereafter, we broke down the video into keyframes. A reverse image search on one such keyframe led us to an excerpt of a press byte given by Suvendu Adhikari. It was uploaded by PTI, on May 6. VIDEO | Kolkata, West Bengal: BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari says, “I urge everyone to remain calm, all TMC goons will be tackled through law.” (Full video available on PTI Videos – https://t.co/n147TvrpG7)#Kolkata pic.twitter.com/XK6SAhLG8q — Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) May 6, 2026 In this excerpt, Suvendu Adhikari promises that lawful action will be meted out to criminals. He makes no mention of Hindus or Muslims. To sum up, the viral video, allegedly showing West Bengal CM Suvendu Adhikari promising to exterminate the Muslim population in West Bengal to ensure BJP’s stay in power, is AI-generated and not genuine. The post Fake video: Clip showing Suvendu Adhikari talking about ‘finishing’ Muslims is AI generated appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.
Media miss: The questions never asked behind the US-Israel war on Iran
ANALYSIS: By Alison Broinowski of Declassified Australia Most of the Western media refuse to join the dots and explain Israel’s decades-long obsession with defanging Tehran. The war in Iran is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has planned for four decades. He has always wanted Israel to extend from Egypt to the Euphrates and in the
ANALYSIS: By Alison Broinowski of Declassified Australia Most of the Western media refuse to join the dots and explain Israel’s decades-long obsession with defanging Tehran. The war in Iran is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has planned for four decades. He has always wanted Israel to extend from Egypt to the Euphrates and in the process have the United States overthrow seven neighbouring countries, the last and latest being Iran. That was also America’s plot, hatched by the neo-conservative authors at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000. The list of targeted countries, confirmed by US General Wesley Clark in 2007, was based on a proposal published in Israel in 1982. READ MORE: Lifting secrecy plans to censor jornalists Other war on Palestine, war on Iran reports Ambitious as they were, these long-held intentions have now culminated in the US-Israel war on Iran, which seems sudden but was carefully planned, a former British Ambassador claims. US President Donald Trump was not “bounced into it” by Israel: it had been in gestation for months, says Craig Murray, Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004. Well in advance, Trump had weapons ordered for fast delivery from Lockheed Martin, naval ships and troops were moved to the Gulf, and CIA and Mossad agitators reportedly stirred up Iranians in several cities, already exasperated by their theocratic rulers and by US sanctions. If Murray is right, Trump and Netanyahu must have been planning this in their frequent meetings before and since the “12-day war” against Iran last year. Or for longer: Trump has reminded the world that as far back as 1987 he wanted the US to take over some of Iran’s oil, and to go to war for it. Everything is a ‘deal’ But Trump’s shambolic war shows that he regards everything as a “deal’” and while aggrandising himself, he fails to understand that Iranians don’t accept transactionalism about their country, whoever its leader is. He appears not to remember that under the Shah, Iran was on good terms with Israel and the US, until the uprising against the Pahlavis in 1979. He doesn’t mention the CIA’s overthrow in 1953 of Prime Minister Mossadegh, who merely wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil. Instead of understanding Iran and its people, Trump claims to trust his “gut instinct” about the war, and he regularly gets it wrong. The state of the president’s mental, cognitive and physical health has been raised again lately by his niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist. She observes symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in Trump, and recalls that his father and her grandfather, Fred Trump sr., died with dementia. Other specialists detect signs of “malignant narcissism”, and note that the President’s repeated threats, exaggerations, and reversals are more likely to be the results of incapacity than of intent. Still, Trump’s erratic statements keep attention focussed on him, keeping the world guessing and confused, and his narcissistic self on centre stage. For Trump, as for Netanyahu, the personal is paramount. Both of them face coming elections (Trump has to face the mid-terms in November while Netanyahu has a general election before the end of the year); both want to stay alive and out of jail; and the continuing war further enriches them, their families and friends. Plans for war Netanyahu’s project derives from the 1982 Yinon Plan, named after its author, an Israeli diplomat, journalist, and former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (“Directions”) as “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, it reappeared in a 1996 policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, prepared for Netanyahu by American neoconservative strategists. They also produced their “Project for the New American Century”, advocating a “catastrophic and catalysing event” that would convince Americans of the need for war. The “Clean Break” document argued that Israel should abandon land-for-peace diplomacy and instead pursue a strategy that would weaken or remove hostile regimes in the region, particularly Iraq and Syria. The goal was not mere military victory but a geopolitical restructuring of the Middle East in Israel’s favour. In 1997, some of the same people involved with that report established the Project for the New American Century think tank, which produced several major reports, especially “Rebuilding America’s Defences” in the year 2000. It argued for preserving US military preeminence in the Middle East and two other theatres with a “revolution in military affairs” that might be accelerated by a “catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”. Just a year later on 9/11, such an event occurred, leading Congress quickly to pass the Authorisation for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, and the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act. Track the planning process forward to 2001, and a former CIA operator confirms what many conspiracy analysts have suspected for years: that Israel, together with Saudi Arabia, was potentially informed about conspirators in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 before they occurred. John Kiriakou, a former CIA bureau chief for Pakistan, points to the involvement of the Saudi royal family in Al-Qaeda’s plan. As well, Kiriakou says that Mossad was thick on the ground on the US east coast in 2001 and Israel knew what was to happen, but did nothing to stop it. Furious response over Saudis Kiriakou points to the furious response to Riyadh by US agencies on learning of the Saudis’ dominant involvement in 9/11. It produced three sudden deaths in a week in July 2022: Princes Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz (in hospital after an operation), Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki (in a car accident), and Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir (of thirst in the desert). The latter two were both in their mid-twenties, while Ahmed was 43. Seven months later Mushaf Ali Mir, Pakistan’s Air Marshal, died in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly Northwest Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants. 9/11 researchers have found out a lot more about what two US “allies”, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, knew in advance of 9/11 and did in support of al-Qaeda. US lawyer Gerald Posner’s account is based on al-Qaeda operative Ali Zubaydah’s claims about his capture and interrogation, and his admissions about his work with Saudi and Pakistani officials. From Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held without charge for more than two decades, he told Posner that both Prince Ahmed and Mushaf Ali Mir, Pakistan’s Air Marshal, “knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day”. Like Israelis, they did nothing to stop it. The Report of the 9/11 Commission, which some said was “set up to fail”, read more as a call to arms against al-Qaeda than a forensic criminal report. The GW Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations prevented the US Congress accessing 28 pages from the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after 9/11. Eventually released by Biden in June 2016, the pages identified Saudi Arabian diplomats, officials, and members of the ruling family as contributors to preparations for the attacks, but not Israelis. Yet when US President Bush declared a “war on terror” in response to 9/11, he realised Netanyahu’s aim for the US to attack Israel’s neighbours. And war, says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, “is always the first option, not the last one in Israel“. An Israeli strike on Tehran, Iran, on 13 June 2025. Image: Meghdad Madadi/Tasnim News Agency/DA Heavy insider trading was recorded in New York in advance of September 11, including put options on United Airlines, American Airlines, and other related stocks. A majority of those polled by The New York Times in the five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Washington thought the government was lying or was hiding something. Even some staff, investigators, and members of the 9/11 Commission knew that senior military officials and CIA director George Tenet had lied to them, while others’ evidence was suppressed. But their knowledge was excluded from the final report. Terrorists, neo-colonialists, tyrants and war criminals This history reveals the need to be sceptical of Washington’s claims about terrorism from 9/11 to today’s war against Iran. “Terror” is repeatedly used as propaganda to manufacture consent for war and to demonise enemies of the West, while what the US and Israel do is “not terrorism”. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a war crime, said NATO and its friends: yet the US coalition’s long wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria were not. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its former territory, was an outrageous land grab: Israel’s annexations of Syria’s Golan and the Palestinians’ West Bank territory were not. Hamas’ breakout from Gaza on 7 October 2023 was terrorism; Israel’s recurrent attacks on Palestinians since 1948 and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza since 2023 were not. Hamas and Hezbollah’s retaliation and the Houthis’ attacks are terrorism: Israel’s bombing and occupation of Gaza and southern Lebanon are not. Iran’s leaders are murderous tyrants: Israel’s indicted war criminals Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant (both wanted by the International Criminal Court on arrest warrants for crimes against humanity).are not. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC are designated terrorist organisations: the IDF, CIA, and Mossad are not. The US assaults on Venezuela and Iran, to be followed by Cuba, are claimed to be against terrorism or drugs: in fact they are about who controls oil and makes and unmakes governments. It does not occur to most Americans and Israelis that their own activities are state terror. Instead, they claim a right to defend US hegemony and all Jews’ right to Eretz Israel and greatness as “God’s chosen people”. Palestinians who resist have no such rights and are called subhuman terrorists, and under a new law, Arab Israelis will be executed for terrorism, while Jewish Israelis are not. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis made similar claims about the superiority of their civilisation to justify the Holocaust. No wonder some now detect a resurgence of fascism in the US, Israel, and elsewhere. Others observe the sudden rise of anti-Semitism since October 2003. A growing number expect the US war to fail, leaving Israel to do its worst in Iran and Lebanon. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis have been added to Al-Qaeda on the list of designated terrorists. The wars that followed culminate in Iran, labelled by Trump a “terrorist regime”. Candidate Trump took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to “move fast and break things”. He has done it as president. What ends up broken is now the whole world’s concern. Dr Alison Broinowski AM is an Australian former diplomat, academic and author. Her books and articles concern Australia’s interactions with the world. She is president of Australians for War Powers Reform. Republished with permission from Declassified Australia. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Palestine Forum slams NZDF share in military exercises with ‘genocidal’ Israel
Asia Pacific Report The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has criticised plans for the country taking part in next month’s military exercises with Israel and the United States, saying Wellington must not be seen aligning militarily with a state “facing serious allegations of war crimes and genocide before international legal institutions”. In a statement today,
Asia Pacific Report The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has criticised plans for the country taking part in next month’s military exercises with Israel and the United States, saying Wellington must not be seen aligning militarily with a state “facing serious allegations of war crimes and genocide before international legal institutions”. In a statement today, the Palestine Forum expressed “deep concern” over the reports that the NZ Defence Force (NZDF) would participate in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercises with Israel and the US in Hawai’i between July 21 and 31. “New Zealand has long claimed to uphold international law, human rights, and an independent foreign policy,” the statement said. READ MORE: NZDF plans upcoming RIMPAC training with Israel and the US Other RIMPAC reports “Participating in joint military exercises alongside Israel fundamentally contradicts those values and risks damaging New Zealand’s international reputation.” Such exercises should not happen at a time when the world was witnessing the ongoing devastation in Gaza and growing international condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Palestine Forum said. “There should be no military cooperation with states engaged in ongoing conflicts and facing credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian law.” The Palestine Forum called on Christopher Luxon’s coalition government to “immediately review” New Zealand participation in these exercises and “ensure the country does not become complicit directly or indirectly in legitimising violence, occupation, or collective punishment”. Stand on side of justice, peace New Zealanders expected their country to stand on the side of justice, peace, and international accountability, not military cooperation with governments accused of grave human rights abuses. Valerie Morse, a member of Peace Action Wellington, yesterday released a statement about RIMPAC 2026 from the NZDF obtained in response to an Official Information Act (OIA) request last month. “The NZDF is sending the largest contingent of troops and materiel in a decade to the this year’s RIMPAC including three ships and 328 service personnel,” Morse said. “This is while Israel continues its genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the US and Israel wage an illegal war on Iran.” This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
The maps are being redrawn to diminish the voting power of Black Americans.
The maps are being redrawn to diminish the voting power of Black Americans. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Megan Thiele Strong.
Artist Hannah Tishkoff on why art is easy
What was your process for creating the works in your recent show?
What was your process for creating the works in your recent show? A lot of the show was driven by exploring new materials. I started using Flashe and oil. The title of the show, Beginning of a Poem, is this homage to having a beginner’s mind and the exploratory experience you have when you are trying out a material, which I feel like is also a metaphor for a loosened approach to living. Your show makes the beginning feel like a place. The beginning is also the middle and the end. And the middle and the end are the beginning. The materials are my entry point. I’m specifically using found materials and materials that I don’t feel like I have mastery over; I am able to access a level of freedom with them. It’s more challenging to access otherwise, so it’s like I am playing a game with myself, where I say, “Well, I have nothing to lose.” And then you’re in the thick of it, and you become invested. Through that process, I become excited and satisfied. Hannah Tishkoff, L.I.F.E. (Line In Forward Exploration), 2026, acrylic, oil, flashe, and collage on found wood, 15 x 27 x 1 in., 38.10 x 68.58 x 2.54 cm. I like that it’s a trick for yourself. It does feel like a trick. I mean, there’s so much muck in your mind that you have to get through to make art. In the fall I felt a lot of pressure—I was starting grad school—to make nice, new, successful things, and it really dulled me. It felt like I was trying to produce from the front door of my mind. I felt stuck and uninspired. And then I got sick over winter break and I was home a lot, laying low for a couple weeks. During that period of time, I let go of everything, and right after that I made basically all the work in the show. I felt that in grad school as well: I was trying to make work that was more grown up and complete than I was. And then I had to unlearn that a little. The creative process is completely mysterious and requires a lot of self-trust and surrender, but I think wanting to win people over is also an important part of the process. And in some ways, I think art should be about winning people over. I don’t want to alienate people. I feel like if I happen to be in a position where I, for whatever reason, can be hopeful, then it feels like a responsibility to express that. It’s like the waves of the ocean. You get tangled up and stressed out, and you want to please everyone, and then you go crazy, and say, “Screw all that. Cut me loose. I want to be free.” And then you do it all over again. Hannah Tishkoff, Beginning of a Poem, 2026, colored pencil on found wood, 9 x 9.5 x 1 in., 22.86 x 24.13 x 2.54 cm. Does the work come out of both sides of that cycle? When I wasn’t sure if there was going to be a show, I was able to just have a good time and amuse myself. I have to play these games with myself to stay entertained. And then, once I’m there, I can keep playing games forever. I never want to go home from the play date. What do the games look like? One of the games is using found materials. I use a lot of canvases that I find. I tell myself, “The stakes are zero because this is garbage; it can only go up from here.” Sometimes I’ll incorporate elements of the previous painting into what I do, and that feels like an instruction or a map. Color is a big way that I play games because it’s so satisfying to try to figure out which colors look good together. It feels like being a hummingbird, tapping into this instinct that’s like, “My survival depends on finding the prettiest flowers with the closest proximity to each other, and I need to drink from them.” I want the fun and expressiveness to be central to my work. It’s like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of paranoid reading versus reparative reading. I want my work to invoke a reparative reading: the pleasurable experience that I’m having while figuring out how to be alive. I want the pleasure I take in delivering that experience to be transferable to the viewer, so that they can have a sense of participation. I don’t want to alienate people. It’s a conversation. I think that’s why language is important to my work. Language is extremely specific and comes from inside of your body, but it’s also a communal resource that we all share. Hannah Tishkoff, Art is Easy, 2026, graphite, fingernail clippings, tape, and cardstock on paper, mounted on panel, 20 x 16.5 x 1.75 in., 50.80 x 41.91 x 4.45 cm. Words are a huge part of your artwork. I’m obsessed with words. Words are a big way I play games, because words are so evocative, and I like to take them out of context. Another game I play with myself, which is a game I’ve been playing since I was probably a 7th grader, is playing music I really like and then writing down the lyrics and drawing them. I love song lyrics. I was just talking to my friend about how we want paintings to feel like beat drops. I love the accessibility of pop music of all kinds. Any genre of music can be considered pop music if it has that zing. A painting is a moment. Painting happens in the moment of encountering the artwork. It has the potential for the “beat drop” feeling. There are lines in a short story or a novel that are “beat drop”-adjacent, too. One of the works in the show has a line from one of Kenneth Patchen’s picture poems where he writes, “Beyond love, there is no belief,” which is the most beautiful sentence I’ve ever read. It’s a translation. Yeah. A translation of this syncopated, emotional quack science that I formulated in collaboration between myself and reality. Sometimes the response will be that my work is very playful or childish, and I think that’s always something I’m negotiating. On the one hand, what comes out of me looks like this and I can’t think about it too much. Still, I have this paranoia about childishness being opposed to rigor. But really, I think there’s nothing more rigorous than trying to be free. What could be a tougher job than trying to reach a free, preverbal flow state? Ultimately, my work comes from a place of need. I need to figure these things out. I need to understand how to live. I guess there is a pedagogical bent in that orientation because I have a background as a teacher. Hannah Tishkoff, The Shape of Things To Come, 2026, flashe, acrylic, oil, and paper on Masonite mounted on panel, 36 x 24 in., 91.44 x 60.96 cm. Are there connections between your teaching background and your art? I think there’s a generosity in a teacher’s understanding of what art is and what it is capable of that resonates with me. I think art is a practical tool to teach people about the world. I feel like I see that coming through in the work, especially in one of my favorites, “Art is Easy.” It felt like a beat drop in the show. But is it always true that art is easy? I think what I mean by “art is easy” is that art is natural. So much of being an artist is paying attention and being attuned to what is already happening materially and socially. One of my favorite essays about art is by John Berger. It’s called “The White Bird.” He writes that the artist tries to imitate these fleeting moments of nature and turn that moment of attention into an unceasing experience. Is it ever not easy? It’s not easy if you’re judging yourself and putting pressure on yourself and having a certain expectation of what the outcome is. Then it’s impossible. Art is easy, or it’s impossible. It’s a tragedy when art becomes impossible because it’s also so easy. Art is so normal. It’s the least crazy thing to do. It’s hard not to make value judgments between those two experiences when you’re thinking, “I’ve hit my stride. I found my way. This is better than when I was lost in the dark.” But you only know what light is in relationship to that darkness. Hannah Tishkoff, Things Fall Back, 2026, oil, flashe and acrylic on found wood, 10 x 13 x 1.5 in., 25.40 x 33.02 x 3.81 cm. I see echoes of LA art in your work: Mike Kelley, John Baldessari, even a little Chris Burden. We both grew up in Los Angeles, in the Valley, and we live here now. How does LA filter into your work? LA filters in at every single level. When I was a senior in high school, the Mike Kelley retrospective came to MOCA. Honestly, I don’t think I would be an artist if that show didn’t plant ideas in my head about using language, being anti-institutional—all from a place of a deep love of life. I think a teenage part of me is still trying not to lose that magic. I’m a third-generation Angeleno. I’m inspired by the patchwork spirit of the city. LA is so loose and weird. All the loose marbles roll down here, and I come from a lineage of loose marble people. Those are my people, that’s my audience. In LA, artists are also rebelling against the sheen of the entertainment industry. It’s really formative to how I grew up. If you’re a kid growing up in Los Angeles, you always feel a little pissed off that you’re not being discovered at the mall. After that it’s easier to say, “Screw all of this. I’m going to make art. I’m not going to be in a commercial.” But at the same time, LA is a site of reinvention. Being ahistorical is the game that we’re all playing. The truth is this nimble, moving target. Hannah Tishkoff, Beyond Love There is No Belief, 2026, acrylic, oil, and pennies on headboard 36.25 x 63 x 2 in., 92.08 x 160.02 x 5.08 cm. Do you have any dream projects? Beat drops. I want to be in a rock band. I love rock and roll. Musicians are the most powerful artists. They’re the ones that I’m the most jealous of. Music is so powerful. You can’t sing along to a painting. I think you could be a pop star. I want to be a pop star. Hannah Tishkoff recommends: Swimming in the ocean on New Year’s Day The Bonaventure Hotel, a brutalist maze in Downtown Los Angeles “Nothing good gets away,” John Steinbeck’s 1958 letter to his son in love Maggie’s Organics cotton socks are the best socks ever Poto and Cabengo, amazing documentary about identical twins who invented their own language This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Claudia Ross.
Defending NZ values in a volatile world – but in what kind of a world?
COMMENTARY: By Frances Palmer While appreciating certain points in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s speech “Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World” on current challenges to international law, enshrined “rules” and “order”, we must take a hard look at the solutions he offers to enhance security. Security now clearly is shaped in a global context.
COMMENTARY: By Frances Palmer While appreciating certain points in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s speech “Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World” on current challenges to international law, enshrined “rules” and “order”, we must take a hard look at the solutions he offers to enhance security. Security now clearly is shaped in a global context. The world’s geopolitical issues affect us all, not just those near sites of military engagement, as wars on Ukraine and Iran show. So it’s misleading to consider security as simply a national or even regional issue, though people within range of military missiles and drones suffer the most horrendously. READ MORE: New Zealand in ‘big trouble’ amid growing global uncertainty, US-China relations, expert says Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World — Luxon speech <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-127819 size-medium" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Frances-Palmer-Scoop-500wide--300x269.png" alt="Peace advocate Frances Palmer" width="300" height="269" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Frances-Palmer-Scoop-500wide--300x269.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Frances-Palmer-Scoop-500wide--468x420.png 468w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Frances-Palmer-Scoop-500wide-.png 500w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> Peace advocate Frances Palmer . . . “We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order.” Image: Scoop/APR We would agree, as Luxon claims in closing remarks, that we have values worth defending. What kind of a world and what network of values do we most want to defend? And how can we do this without compromising those same values? Does anyone really believe that cultural and political values such as democracy are best defended by doubling military spending as he proposes? Or that 20th century national security perspectives and “bomb them to hell” strategies are fit for purpose today, while nuclear arsenals grow month by month, no longer restrained by arms control agreements? We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order”. Australia, now our only officially acknowledged defence partner, is closely linked militarily with the US. Exercises against ‘enemy’ Last year. NZ’s navy joined US and Israel in regular RIMPAC military exercises, to prepare for war against those labelled “enemy”. Judith Collins justified this on the basis that the US sent the invitations; NZ didn’t create the guest list. (Jack Tame interview, The Nation). Clearly it’s time to weigh up our bedfellows more judiciously, and what values their actions, rather than their words, show they are defending. It’s hard to see how one defends values like democracy by preparing for war alongside nations whose “Ministries of War” commit and enable genocide in Gaza, threaten to add Canada and Greenland to the US real estate portfolio, and bomb weaker nations back to the Stone Age, while kidnapping presidents of other nations if US corporate interests could benefit. Luxon is right in stating that this is a historical inflection point, and the way in which we react, along with other nations, will determine “what kind of world comes next”. How are our values best defended? With weapons and threats? Or by joining like-minded nations to call out all who undermine the values, rules and institutions that endeavoured since the end of World War Two and the United Nations Charter to enhance genuine human security worldwide? Only ethically grounded values, policy and strategies, supported by inspired multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution skills, can promote such values and the multilateral order which supported them. War is a barbaric, blunt tool from a past age which cannot deal with worsening 21st century existential threats which need global collaboration to solve, if most of humanity is to survive the future. We owe it to our descendants to defend ethical values appropriately to build the foundations of a world that is fit for them. Frances Palmer is a peace and conflict studies advocate and commentator. She was a SCF nurse in Vietnam and Khmer refugee camps 1975, 1980. Palmer wrote history resources for schools on “Cambodia, Faces of Violence, Hegemony & Holocaust” and “Aotearoa NZ 1980s-1990s, Participation & Resistance to International War”. This article was first published at Scoop. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
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‘Arrest wanted Filipino former police chief’ call by Amnesty after escape
Asia Pacific Report Amnesty International says it is “deeply alarmed” over the obstruction of justice and chaotic scenes — including gunfire — witnessed at the Philippines Senate this week over a fugitive from the International Criminal Court. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who faces an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, escaped from the Senate
Asia Pacific Report Amnesty International says it is “deeply alarmed” over the obstruction of justice and chaotic scenes — including gunfire — witnessed at the Philippines Senate this week over a fugitive from the International Criminal Court. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who faces an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, escaped from the Senate premises in the early hours of yesterday, May 14, after the gunfire incident on Wednesday night. Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano confirmed his exit yesterday afternoon. READ MORE: Bato dela Rosa, wanted by ICC, evades arrest, escapes Senate premises Authorities must arrest former police chief The independent news website Rappler reported Dela Rosa’s escape yesterday morning, citing information relayed by the Senate secretariat to a credible source. In response to reports that Dela Rosa had fled the Philippines Senate building allowing him to evade the arrest warrant, Ritz Lee Santos III, executive director of Amnesty International Philippines, said: “We are deeply alarmed at the obstruction of justice and chaotic scenes witnessed at the Philippines Senate,” he said. “Ronald dela Rosa’s position as Senator offers him no special protection from an ICC arrest warrant, neither under domestic nor international law. It is hugely concerning that fellow Senators and others appear to have assisted him in evading arrest and in delaying the execution of the arrest warrant — effectively facilitating his escape for now. “Despite seeking to distance themselves from these events, President Marcos and relevant agencies remain ultimately responsible for ensuring Dela Rosa’s arrest. Philippine senator wanted by ICC escapes Video: Al Jazeera Key role in ‘war on dugs’ Santos said Dela Rosa held a key role in the “war on drugs” under former President Ridrigo Duterte, who is in The Hague awaiting trial on ICC charges of crimes against humanity. The former police chief was a “clear flight risk” and appeared intent on avoiding accountability, said Santos. “He should be promptly located, arrested and surrendered to the ICC to answer allegations of crimes against humanity. “The place for Dela Rosa to challenge his case and the crimes against humanity he is alleged to have committed is in The Hague, in impartial and independent trial proceedings. “Political authority must not place anyone above the law. In the interest of justice for victims, survivors and their families, those alleged to have committed grave crimes must be held to account, no matter how long it takes.” Three-day stand-off After a three-day standoff between law enforcement and dela Rosa at the Philippines Senate, he was reported to have left the Senate building at 2.30am local time yesterday. His whereabouts are currently unknown. The night before, gunshots were fired inside Senate premises while some Senators and media were still inside. There remain conflicting reports on what led to the shooting. Various senior administration representatives, including President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, denied that there were attempts to execute an arrest warrant. On May 11, the ICC confirmed it had issued an arrest warrant for the sitting senator. The warrant states that the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber found there were “reasonable grounds to believe” Dela Rosa had committed the crime against humanity of murder, citing incidents in which 32 people were killed between 2016 to 2018. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-127801" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Bato-AI-680wide.png" alt="Fellow lawmakers accused of facilitating the escape of Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa" width="680" height="263" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Bato-AI-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Bato-AI-680wide-300x116.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Fellow lawmakers accused of facilitating the escape of Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa from the Philippines Senate building. Image: Amnesty International Philippines This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Community Schools Are at the Forefront of a ‘Neighborism’ Movement
Public schools in New York City’s network of community schools offer an alternative to top-down systems that are indifferent to the needs of working families.
Public schools in New York City’s network of community schools offer an alternative to top-down systems that are indifferent to the needs of working families. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Jeff Bryant.
Alex Honnold: ‘You just see how much it matters’
At Grist’s Turning the Tide event at SF Climate Week, free solo climber and solar energy advocate Alex Honnold shared how his love of climbing became a passion for empowering communities.
Climber Alex Honnold is best-known for his daring feats, recently scaling Taiwan’s Taipei 101 tower live on Netflix, but he’s more typically climbing some of the world’s most challenging natural landscapes. But he’s also an advocate for renewable energy, and the foundation he started, the Honnold Foundation, supports community-led solar energy growth around the world. How do those two interests fit together? For Honnold, the connection seems clear. “Go on enough trips like this,” he said, referencing his climbing trips to remote locations, and “you just see how much it matters.” “A lot of these projects basically help protect the land in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily assume,” he said. “Empowering local communities is always a good way to protect the land on which they live.” Honnold was interviewed by Grist Editor-in-Chief Katherine Bagley at Grist’s live event Turning the Tide: Stories of Climate Solutions, held during San Francisco Climate Week. In his own climbing experience, Honnold shared, he’s seen how landscapes have changed even in the span of just a few years due to rising temperatures. “A lot of things that used to be approaches or descents up snowy couloirs … those are mostly melted out,” Honnold said. “Basically, big mountains you see change very quickly right now. It’s pretty sobering.” But he also emphasized the need for positive stories that help people understand that progress is happening. “I personally am just not inspired by pessimism at all,” he said. “The environment has been severely degraded, we’ve lost a lot for sure, but if you were just dropped onto this planet right here, right now, and you just looked around in the natural world, you’d think, ‘This is incredible.’ There’s so much life, the natural world is still amazing, and there’s still so much to protect.” Watch the full video of the event, including Honnold’s interview, or read a few excerpts (lightly edited for clarity) below. Katherine Bagley: You and I are about the same age, and I remember as kids growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was like the recycling ads and the oil spills and that we had to save the ozone layer. And I’m curious when climate became part of the conversation for you. Alex Honnold: Yeah, honestly, I’m not sure. None of those things really speak to me. I think that I was probably not that environmentally aware as a child. I mean, my parents are both professors. I grew up in Sacramento, just sort of a suburban California kid. And I think those weren’t big things in my house. I don’t think either of my parents were profound environmentalists in any way, even though we went camping and stuff, but that’s kind of different. And so I think it really was as I started to travel as a rock climber and go on expeditions. I mean, basically I just started reading a lot more. I read a ton of environmental nonfiction and just started to care a little more and then to see a little bit more. And sort of seeing some of the links between energy access and global poverty and climate change — basically the transition to renewables. And those are all things that I was kind of interested in starting in, I guess 2009. Basically when I started doing some of my first overseas rock climbing expeditions, I was like, “Oh, I care about the way the rest of the world works and I’m interested.” And really the more I learned, the more it was like, “Oh, this seems important. This seems like something I should be more stressed about.” Emily [Teitsworth, executive director of the Honnold Foundation] was just talking about Kara Solar, this organization that the Honnold Foundation supports in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And this is in Guyana [referencing an onscreen photo], which is the other side of the Amazon. It’s a different river base and everything. This is called a tepui. It’s like this giant rock face. And this was an expedition for a TV show in National Geographic. But anyway, we basically took river transit boats all the way to the end of the river kind of thing, and then walked for a week through the jungle to get to these walls. And so, I mean, I think that has really helped inform my environmental activism. Do you call it activism? Basically, the reason I care. And it’s that you go on enough trips like this and you’re kind of like, Well, we took two-stroke gas-powered boats to the end of the fricking world and then hiked for a week into the jungle to go climb this wall. And you see how these communities — basically you just see how much it matters. * * * Bagley: Have you noticed climate change or other environmental impacts that have impacted some of your favorite places to climb? <blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYFEJbvv9xD/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:500px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"> <g stroke="none" stroke-width="1" fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd"><g transform="translate(-511.000000, -20.000000)" fill="#000000"><g><path d="M556.869,30.41 C554.814,30.41 553.148,32.076 553.148,34.131 C553.148,36.186 554.814,37.852 556.869,37.852 C558.924,37.852 560.59,36.186 560.59,34.131 C560.59,32.076 558.924,30.41 556.869,30.41 M541,60.657 C535.114,60.657 530.342,55.887 530.342,50 C530.342,44.114 535.114,39.342 541,39.342 C546.887,39.342 551.658,44.114 551.658,50 C551.658,55.887 546.887,60.657 541,60.657 M541,33.886 C532.1,33.886 524.886,41.1 524.886,50 C524.886,58.899 532.1,66.113 541,66.113 C549.9,66.113 557.115,58.899 557.115,50 C557.115,41.1 549.9,33.886 541,33.886 M565.378,62.101 C565.244,65.022 564.756,66.606 564.346,67.663 C563.803,69.06 563.154,70.057 562.106,71.106 C561.058,72.155 560.06,72.803 558.662,73.347 C557.607,73.757 556.021,74.244 553.102,74.378 C549.944,74.521 548.997,74.552 541,74.552 C533.003,74.552 532.056,74.521 528.898,74.378 C525.979,74.244 524.393,73.757 523.338,73.347 C521.94,72.803 520.942,72.155 519.894,71.106 C518.846,70.057 518.197,69.06 517.654,67.663 C517.244,66.606 516.755,65.022 516.623,62.101 C516.479,58.943 516.448,57.996 516.448,50 C516.448,42.003 516.479,41.056 516.623,37.899 C516.755,34.978 517.244,33.391 517.654,32.338 C518.197,30.938 518.846,29.942 519.894,28.894 C520.942,27.846 521.94,27.196 523.338,26.654 C524.393,26.244 525.979,25.756 528.898,25.623 C532.057,25.479 533.004,25.448 541,25.448 C548.997,25.448 549.943,25.479 553.102,25.623 C556.021,25.756 557.607,26.244 558.662,26.654 C560.06,27.196 561.058,27.846 562.106,28.894 C563.154,29.942 563.803,30.938 564.346,32.338 C564.756,33.391 565.244,34.978 565.378,37.899 C565.522,41.056 565.552,42.003 565.552,50 C565.552,57.996 565.522,58.943 565.378,62.101 M570.82,37.631 C570.674,34.438 570.167,32.258 569.425,30.349 C568.659,28.377 567.633,26.702 565.965,25.035 C564.297,23.368 562.623,22.342 560.652,21.575 C558.743,20.834 556.562,20.326 553.369,20.18 C550.169,20.033 549.148,20 541,20 C532.853,20 531.831,20.033 528.631,20.18 C525.438,20.326 523.257,20.834 521.349,21.575 C519.376,22.342 517.703,23.368 516.035,25.035 C514.368,26.702 513.342,28.377 512.574,30.349 C511.834,32.258 511.326,34.438 511.181,37.631 C511.035,40.831 511,41.851 511,50 C511,58.147 511.035,59.17 511.181,62.369 C511.326,65.562 511.834,67.743 512.574,69.651 C513.342,71.625 514.368,73.296 516.035,74.965 C517.703,76.634 519.376,77.658 521.349,78.425 C523.257,79.167 525.438,79.673 528.631,79.82 C531.831,79.965 532.853,80.001 541,80.001 C549.148,80.001 550.169,79.965 553.369,79.82 C556.562,79.673 558.743,79.167 560.652,78.425 C562.623,77.658 564.297,76.634 565.965,74.965 C567.633,73.296 568.659,71.625 569.425,69.651 C570.167,67.743 570.674,65.562 570.82,62.369 C570.966,59.17 571,58.147 571,50 C571,41.851 570.966,40.831 570.82,37.631"></path></g></g></g> View this post on Instagram Honnold: Yeah, I mean, one of my favorites is Yosemite. And so you don’t really see climate change impacts in Yosemite that much. I mean, other than beetle kill and obvious things like that, where you’re sort of like, “Oh, the forests have changed composition very quickly,” and drought, and fire, and those types of impacts. But you really see it in some places that aren’t necessarily my favorite places to climb, bigger mountains with glaciers. I don’t like ice climbing, which is a good thing, because it’s all falling down anyway. Like, that ship has sailed. Because actually, one my last experiences in Patagonia in southern Argentina — if anyone’s ever been to some of the climbing areas in Patagonia, the key to success in Patagonia, basically the weather’s always horrible, is to always have a whole spreadsheet of objectives so that depending on the weather window, you can choose the correct objective. If you’re like, “Oh, we have one day of marginal weather in between two storms, what’s the right objective for that?” Anyway, so we had a really, really bad weather window with marginal conditions and cold temperatures. And we’re like, perfect for an ice climbing objective, let’s go in and do an ice route up this one spire. And we hiked in. And hiking in is no joke. It’s like a couple of days to walk into the town and you get to the mountain and we get up there. Anyway, we got there and there was no ice route anymore. The whole thing had fallen down and it was gone. And we were just like, huh. Like, that’ll probably never reform. Like, that’s just gone. You see that all over the world with glaciers and with ice features. And a lot of things that used to be approaches or descents up snowy couloirs, like basically just hike up a chute in a mountain, those are mostly melted out. And so now it’s just like a rock chute with things falling down it the whole time. Basically big mountains you see change very quickly right now. It’s pretty sobering, because those landscapes don’t seem like they should change. Because when you look at it, you’re just like — since time immemorial, this has been these rugged mountains. And then you’re sort of like, “Oh, no, actually since four years ago, that’s completely changed.” I mean have any of you guys been to Chamonix? Anybody skied in Chamonix? They have a whole tourist attraction with labels and dates and stairsteps to the level of the glacier so basically you can get off and you’re sort of like, in 1850 the glacier was up to here and then you go down literally hundreds and hundreds of stairs, you drop hundreds of vertical feet down to this, like, tiny, tiny little piece of ice and, like, here’s the glacier now. And you’re kind of like, “Whoa, that’s changed a lot in the last hundred years.” It’s insane. * * * Bagley: I feel like there would be this assumption based on your climbing and where you go that your go-to would be land conservation, but your foundation does solar energy work, and I’m just curious how that interest came about in particular. <blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYAxVATvq4L/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:500px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"> <g stroke="none" stroke-width="1" fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd"><g transform="translate(-511.000000, -20.000000)" fill="#000000"><g><path d="M556.869,30.41 C554.814,30.41 553.148,32.076 553.148,34.131 C553.148,36.186 554.814,37.852 556.869,37.852 C558.924,37.852 560.59,36.186 560.59,34.131 C560.59,32.076 558.924,30.41 556.869,30.41 M541,60.657 C535.114,60.657 530.342,55.887 530.342,50 C530.342,44.114 535.114,39.342 541,39.342 C546.887,39.342 551.658,44.114 551.658,50 C551.658,55.887 546.887,60.657 541,60.657 M541,33.886 C532.1,33.886 524.886,41.1 524.886,50 C524.886,58.899 532.1,66.113 541,66.113 C549.9,66.113 557.115,58.899 557.115,50 C557.115,41.1 549.9,33.886 541,33.886 M565.378,62.101 C565.244,65.022 564.756,66.606 564.346,67.663 C563.803,69.06 563.154,70.057 562.106,71.106 C561.058,72.155 560.06,72.803 558.662,73.347 C557.607,73.757 556.021,74.244 553.102,74.378 C549.944,74.521 548.997,74.552 541,74.552 C533.003,74.552 532.056,74.521 528.898,74.378 C525.979,74.244 524.393,73.757 523.338,73.347 C521.94,72.803 520.942,72.155 519.894,71.106 C518.846,70.057 518.197,69.06 517.654,67.663 C517.244,66.606 516.755,65.022 516.623,62.101 C516.479,58.943 516.448,57.996 516.448,50 C516.448,42.003 516.479,41.056 516.623,37.899 C516.755,34.978 517.244,33.391 517.654,32.338 C518.197,30.938 518.846,29.942 519.894,28.894 C520.942,27.846 521.94,27.196 523.338,26.654 C524.393,26.244 525.979,25.756 528.898,25.623 C532.057,25.479 533.004,25.448 541,25.448 C548.997,25.448 549.943,25.479 553.102,25.623 C556.021,25.756 557.607,26.244 558.662,26.654 C560.06,27.196 561.058,27.846 562.106,28.894 C563.154,29.942 563.803,30.938 564.346,32.338 C564.756,33.391 565.244,34.978 565.378,37.899 C565.522,41.056 565.552,42.003 565.552,50 C565.552,57.996 565.522,58.943 565.378,62.101 M570.82,37.631 C570.674,34.438 570.167,32.258 569.425,30.349 C568.659,28.377 567.633,26.702 565.965,25.035 C564.297,23.368 562.623,22.342 560.652,21.575 C558.743,20.834 556.562,20.326 553.369,20.18 C550.169,20.033 549.148,20 541,20 C532.853,20 531.831,20.033 528.631,20.18 C525.438,20.326 523.257,20.834 521.349,21.575 C519.376,22.342 517.703,23.368 516.035,25.035 C514.368,26.702 513.342,28.377 512.574,30.349 C511.834,32.258 511.326,34.438 511.181,37.631 C511.035,40.831 511,41.851 511,50 C511,58.147 511.035,59.17 511.181,62.369 C511.326,65.562 511.834,67.743 512.574,69.651 C513.342,71.625 514.368,73.296 516.035,74.965 C517.703,76.634 519.376,77.658 521.349,78.425 C523.257,79.167 525.438,79.673 528.631,79.82 C531.831,79.965 532.853,80.001 541,80.001 C549.148,80.001 550.169,79.965 553.369,79.82 C556.562,79.673 558.743,79.167 560.652,78.425 C562.623,77.658 564.297,76.634 565.965,74.965 C567.633,73.296 568.659,71.625 569.425,69.651 C570.167,67.743 570.674,65.562 570.82,62.369 C570.966,59.17 571,58.147 571,50 C571,41.851 570.966,40.831 570.82,37.631"></path></g></g></g> View this post on Instagram Honnold: Well, I would actually say the energy access work in some ways is land conservation or ties in to land conservation in many ways. Just to go back to this project in the Ecuadorian Amazon, when you reduce the cost of river power transit, you know, basically when you make the boats solar, you don’t have to buy gas. It reduces the need for communities to cut roads through the forest. And so that is basically land conservation because once you cut a road to any of these communities, then those roads are jumping off points for illegal mining, illegal deforestation, basically extractive industries can easily take hold there. A lot of these projects basically help protect the land in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily assume. Basically, empowering local communities is always a good way to protect the land on which they live. * * * Bagley: You now go to a lot of the Climate Week events, a lot of these other kinds of events all over the country, and I think for a long time, there was this narrative of just everything is horrible. I’ve been covering climate change as a journalist for 20 years, and it’s a pretty depressing beat a lot of the time. I remember when you and I were talking the other week in preparation for this, you wanted to stress the optimism that there is actually a lot that we can do about climate change, and that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. So can you talk a little bit about the need for that narrative shift? Honnold: So I was at New York Climate Week, six months ago or whenever, last year in New York, and there were just so many questions about existential doom and gloom, or like, “Climate, it’s a lost cause, we’ve already lost so much,” blah, blah, blah. And at a certain point, you know, maybe like two days into climate week, I just kind of snapped. I’m personally a pretty optimistic person, and just often see the good in things, but I was kind of like: Yeah, I mean, the environment has been severely degraded, we’ve lost a lot for sure, but if you were just dropped onto this planet right here, right now, and you just looked around in the natural world, you’d think, “This is incredible.” There’s so much life, the natural world is still amazing, and there’s still so much to protect. I think we’re better off highlighting what we have and what we can save, rather than mourning what we’ve already lost. Because in a way, what’s lost is lost. You basically only have from the present moving forward. And that’s still pretty freaking great. I interview climate folks all the time, and one of the things that I’m often struck by is I interview a lot of marine biologists and people working in ocean conservation, and when you protect reefs — basically anytime you make something a no-fishing zone or you protect it in any way, life just returns. I mean the oceans seem to recover even faster than things on land. Every time I’m just like, man, there’s such a capacity for restoration if you give nature even the slightest chance. And I feel like to date, humans haven’t really given nature much of a chance. We haven’t really chosen to make that much effort yet. I mean, obviously in some cases, local communities can put tremendous effort into saving one river, let’s say. But at a big picture, humans haven’t really tried that hard yet. And I’m kinda like, man, humans are capable of a lot when we try. And so that keeps me pretty optimistic. * * * Everybody here knows more about all of this than I do. I just love rock climbing, and I’m trying to do my small part to do something useful in the world. But I do think that there’s something lost in the pessimism around environmental storytelling and all that kind of stuff. Just because at least I personally am just not inspired by pessimism at all. I’m kind of like, “Oh, well, if it’s already lost, then screw it, it’s already lost.” But if I’m making progress, if I am improving, then I’m very motivated to keep making progress and keep improving. And I mean, that’s kind of a personal thing. That’s true for training, that’s true for all the things that I do in sport and climbing. If I feel like I’m making progress then it’s easy to get up and try hard and absolutely try my best. And so I feel with environmental issues, it’s like you’re better off focusing on the places that you can make progress. I mean like seeing a river restored like that and just seeing the absolute transformation in just a few years [referencing the restoration of the Klamath River after the removal of dams], that’s incredible. It’s stories like that I think are worth highlighting. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alex Honnold: ‘You just see how much it matters’ on May 14, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist staff.
Statement by Ralph Nader on Boeing Verdict
For Immediate Release May 14, 2026 For more information, call: 202-387-8030 Statement by Ralph Nader Yesterday, an Illinois jury in a civil suit rendered a verdict of $49.5 million to the family of Samya Rose Stumo, who was killed in Ethiopia i...
For Immediate Release May 14, 2026 For more information, call: 202-387-8030 Statement by Ralph Nader Yesterday, an Illinois jury in a civil suit rendered a verdict of $49.5 million to the family of Samya Rose Stumo, who was killed in Ethiopia in the March 2019 crash of Boeing’s criminally defective 737 MAX. The verdict… This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader and was authored by matthew.
[Vali Nasr] The U.S. War on Iran: Origins & Consequences
On February 28th, Israel attacked Iran. Almost immediately, the U.S. joined the fray. The claims against Iran are eerily similar to those made against Iraq in 2003. Remember back then, Baghdad supposedly was a great danger. Today, it is Iran we are to ...
On February 28th, Israel attacked Iran. Almost immediately, the U.S. joined the fray. The claims against Iran are eerily similar to those made against Iraq in 2003. Remember back then, Baghdad supposedly was a great danger. Today, it is Iran we are to fear. It’s an “imminent” threat we are told. No evidence is given. None is needed. The master has spoken. The U.S. must take military action. To paraphrase an old song, “propaganda runs deep, into your brains it will seep.” Washington has never forgiven Iran for ousting the Shah. If the U.S. didn't destroy democracy in Iran in the 1953 coup, things would have turned out differently. The geopolitical and economic consequences of this war will be felt not just in the U.S. but around the world for years to come. Recorded at Princeton University. This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.
This content originally appeared on International Rescue Committee and was authored by International Rescue Committee.
Georgia Gov. calls special session to rig US House map for GOP, SC expected to follow
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343517" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/georgia-gov-calls-special-session-to-rig-us-house-map-for-gop-sc-expected-to-follow/president-trump-speaks-at-the-republican-governors-association-meeting" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1706&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1706" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"3.5","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R1","caption":"WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 20: U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump discussed his legislative agenda in his remarks. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1740080129","copyright":"2025 Getty Images","focal_length":"115","iso":"3200","shutter_speed":"0.0025","title":"President Trump Speaks At The Republican Governors Association Meeting","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="President Trump Speaks At The Republican Governors Association Meeting" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “We will not sit back and watch while Gov. Kemp takes orders from a felon-in-chief to turn Dr. King’s dream into a nightmare,” said the head of Common Cause Georgia.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343517" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/georgia-gov-calls-special-session-to-rig-us-house-map-for-gop-sc-expected-to-follow/president-trump-speaks-at-the-republican-governors-association-meeting" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1706&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1706" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"3.5","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R1","caption":"WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 20: U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump discussed his legislative agenda in his remarks. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1740080129","copyright":"2025 Getty Images","focal_length":"115","iso":"3200","shutter_speed":"0.0025","title":"President Trump Speaks At The Republican Governors Association Meeting","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="President Trump Speaks At The Republican Governors Association Meeting" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) as he delivers remarks at the Republican Governors Association Meeting at The National Building Museum on February 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2200939590-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 13, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. Republican state leaders are forging ahead with President Donald Trump’s campaign to rig congressional districts for the GOP, with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday signing a proclamation for a special legislative session and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster expected to make a similar announcement soon. While GOP policymakers facing pressure from Trump have pursued mid-decade redistricting in several states ahead of the November midterm elections—in which Democrats aim to reclaim majorities in both chambers of Congress—Kemp’s proclamation explicitly states that any changes in Georgia would be for 2028, which is the next presidential cycle. Kemp’s proclamation cites the US Supreme Court’s decision last month that a Louisiana map predating Trump’s redistricting push was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” which gutted the remnants of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. In a statement condemning the proclamation, Common Cause Georgia director Rosario Palacios pointed to the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a key figure in the movement that led to the VRA as well as the Civil Rights Act the previous year. “We will not sit back and watch while Gov. Kemp takes orders from a felon-in-chief to turn Dr. King’s dream into a nightmare. Too many civil rights leaders have done work in our state for us [to] take this sitting down,” Palacios declared. “Common Cause is mobilizing thousands of people to stop state lawmakers from passing any new maps before 2030 that destroy Black voters’ power for political gain. Voters should not have to rely on lawsuits to protect their right to fair representation. Congress must end this abuse once and for all so every voter can cast a ballot in free and fair elections, no matter their political party.” US Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who is up for reelection in 2028, similarly ripped the Georgia redistricting effort on social media Wednesday: “There is an extreme movement in this country that will stop at nothing to hold on to power, even if it means stripping representation away from millions. I will fight this with everything I have.” Republicans in various states have moved to “shamelessly capitalize” on the April ruling from the high court’s right-wing supermajority. On Monday, as the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Alabama GOP to rescind the creation of its second Black-majority district, Memphis voters sued over a new map targeting Tennessee‘s only majority-Black congressional district. The Congresswoman who represents Selma, Alabama, @RepTerriSewell Alabama’s AG has said he wants maps that turn all of Alabama red. https://t.co/SKtZUs0qgd — Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) May 13, 2026 On Tuesday, as the Missouri Supreme Court declined to strike down a new congressional map that state voters are working to challenge with a referendum, five Republican South Carolina senators joined Democrats in blocking a GOP effort to advance Trump’s gerrymandering campaign in their state. However, The Post and Courier’s Nick Reynolds reported Wednesday that South Carolina Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (R-25) believes the governor “will call legislators back into a special session amid the redistricting fight.” Also reporting on the anticipated move Wednesday, Politico’s Andrew Howard and Alec Hernandez noted that “McMaster’s plan—confirmed by four people familiar with the decision, who were granted anonymity to share private details—is a reversal of his position earlier this month and follows pressure” from the president and his allies. A redistricting push in South Carolina is expected to target the seat held by Democratic Congressman Jim Clyburn—who last month warned that the Supreme Court ruling on Louisiana’s map and the VRA “threatens to send our country deeper into the thicket of never-ending redistricting fights, with repeated aggressive map redraws, protracted legal battles, and relentless partisan tugs-of-war, all of which are destined to result in more regressive court decisions.” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jessica Corbett.
ICE detainees signed deportation Papers. Why are they still held in detention?
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 14, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 14, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 14, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Symbols Of The Shah’s Secret Police Seen At Iranian Royalists Rallies Abroad
Molly Crabapple on the Jewish Labor Bund, opposing antisemitism and Zionism
UAP Investigator’s Breakdown of New Disclosure
Former police chief flees Philippines senate building
"I look at the world, and I shout, ‘I am human and I deserve to be a human.’"
Sudan war: staggering civilian suffering continues alongside famine riskUkraine: aid teams condemn night of heavy Russian attacks in Kyiv - OCHAGaza reconstruction envisages building ‘islands’ out of rubble
Sudan war: staggering civilian suffering continues alongside famine riskUkraine: aid teams condemn night of heavy Russian attacks in Kyiv - OCHAGaza reconstruction envisages building ‘islands’ out of rubble This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.
UFO Disclosure Has Started w/ Jeremy Corbell on Sleeping Dog | Shane Smith Has Questions
Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump
The post Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump appeared first on ProPublica.
<img src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2194586803_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A man in a suit, carrying a green folder, looks through a large wooden door. On the other side is a room in the White House that has various flags, a painting, books and, at the forefront, a lectern with the presidential seal. "> Sebastian Gorka, senior director for counterterrorism, at the White House Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats. The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts. Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists, a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida. “A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.” Do You Know More About This Topic? ProPublica’s still reporting. If you know more about U.S. counterterrorism efforts, please reach out. Hannah Allam I’m interested in tips about counterterrorism, court cases involving surveillance or civil liberties, national security personnel changes, threat assessments and the proximity of extremist movements to federal power. Contact Me Gorka’s strategy — the subject of a recent ProPublica report — lavishes praise on President Donald Trump’s national security agenda but offers few details about plans to tackle the administration’s top priorities: Latin American “narcoterrorists,” Islamist militant groups, and violent leftist antifascists and anarchists. Gorka, who coordinates White House counterterrorism policy at the National Security Council, has called the document a “return to common sense” after a 2021 strategy by President Joe Biden centered on mostly far-right domestic threats. The new strategy mentions Biden seven times. “What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data, to what our allies are seeing globally, or to where the biggest threats of violence come from or how they might be prevented,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. Republican leaders often portrayed Biden’s focus on the violent far right as the Democrats cracking down on conservative organizing. That idea fueled Trump’s blanket pardon of more than 1,500 defendants, including those who attacked police, in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. Gorka did not reply to a request for comment. The White House, asked about criticisms of the plan, referred to a number of Gorka’s public statements touting it. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, added in an email, “President Trump is crushing terrorist threats to the United States and will never let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity.” Here are five notable aspects of the plan, compiled from interviews with counterterrorism personnel and researchers’ published critiques: 1. It’s about Trump, not terrorism. The counterterrorism strategy begins with a signed foreword by Trump, who sets the tone by claiming credit for ending “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.” Analysts say the rest of the strategy often reads like a valentine rather than a sober national security communique. Under Trump’s leadership, it states, “America is again the world’s most powerful nation, with the largest economy in history, the most advanced technologies, and the bravest and most skilled warfighters the world has ever seen.” The strategy’s top threat categories align with the president’s pet issues, including the villainizing of Democrats and leftist dissent. The language also echoes debunked right-wing conspiracy theories the president has shared about a stolen election, a purported genocide of Christians and existential threats to Western civilization by what the strategy calls “alien cultures.” One section refers to Christians as “the most persecuted people on Earth.” “This was once a serious document written by serious people” across Democratic and Republican presidencies, veteran terrorism analyst and former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem lamented on X. “Now it reads like a partisan screed.” 2. Data counter the priorities. Analysts say the most obvious hole is the omission of violent far-right movements. Federal authorities have said for years that neo-Nazi and anti-government militia groups pose the most active and lethal domestic threats, though recently authorities have noted increases in leftist and mixed-motive attacks. For example, on Sept. 10, the same day conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an outdoor event in Utah, a 16-year-old gunman who was steeped in online forums for white supremacy and mass-shooter fandom opened fire at a Colorado high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself. The strategy is concerned only with the kind of violent extremism the White House ascribes to Kirk’s alleged shooter, who is labeled a violent left-wing “radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut; the suspect, who has yet to go to trial, reportedly comes from a Republican family but had shifted politically and had expressed opposition to the “hatred” he said Kirk spread. Just last week, a lawsuit related to a deadly shooting last year at Florida State University revealed that the gunman had used ChatGPT to explore “his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism” and other far-right topics. In a social media post, Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher who has written extensively about the militant right, called the case a “friendly reminder that the #Trump administration’s new United States Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention far-right violent extremism.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="771" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A man in a suit with a serious expression stands behind a gate with his hands clasped together. He has his eyes fixed on the foreground, where President Donald Trump is a blurred figure addressing a crowd." class="wp-image-78615" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,201 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,515 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,687 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1030 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1374 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,579 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,283 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,370 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,374 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,353 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,504 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,771 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1341 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,268 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,537 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,805 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2153465813_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1073 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy begins with a signed foreword by President Donald Trump, who claims credit for ending “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation.” Justin Lane/Getty Images 3. Policies undermine strategy. Several of the White House’s stated counterterrorism objectives conflict with the president’s own actions, analysts say. For one, the pledge of stepped-up efforts to thwart plots doesn’t factor in the diminished capacity of federal agencies since Trump slashed the national security workforce last year and diverted counterterrorism resources to his mass deportation campaign. Terrorism analyst Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center and a Gorka critic, summarized the document as “highly partisan & mostly incoherent.” It touts the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation as the important capture of a “narco-terrorist outlaw.” But weeks before the Maduro raid, Trump had granted a pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. Another U.S. goal is to aggressively counter anti-American propaganda by Islamist extremist groups, which the administration says have been driven from strongholds in the Middle East and are “exploiting the ungoverned spaces” across Africa. Places where “a resurgent terror threat is the reality,” according to the strategy, include West Africa, the Sahel region, Sudan and Somalia. Yet efforts to counter anti-American messaging are undermined by increased U.S. airstrikes with civilian casualties, particularly in Somalia and Yemen, and the cutoff of humanitarian programs across the continent, conflict monitors say. U.S. aid has been a lifeline for communities whose desperation can be exploited by militant recruiters. The strategy calls for a “light military footprint” in Africa, with the expectation that African leaders will take on a greater share of counterterrorism work. But Trump’s halting of foreign aid hobbled regional counterterrorism programs. Conflict monitors, now watching with alarm as Islamist militants capture territory and stage attacks in Mali, urge the administration to pay closer attention to the restive Sahel region and other hot spots. “Terrorists are on the verge of recreating a new caliphate sanctuary that could serve as an incubator for attacks against the US homeland and interests abroad,” Alex Plitsas, a security analyst and former Obama-era Pentagon official, wrote this month after visiting U.S. Africa Command. “The result is a warning for Washington: when the United States and its partners step back, jihadist groups and adversarial powers fill the space,” Plitsas wrote. The strategy also disparages “failed ‘forever war’ policies” at a time Trump’s base is wrestling with his decision to launch the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism. In a call with reporters after his plan was released, Gorka got defensive when asked how the Iran operation was not a “forever war” that could endanger Americans. He called critics “testicularly challenged.” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, drew a distinction: “Unlike the ‘forever wars’ of the past with vague objectives and ever-expanding timelines, President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and he kept Americans apprised of the scope and defined objectives for Operation Epic Fury.” 4. Successes are exaggerated. Trump’s preface opens by celebrating counterterrorism achievements that analysts describe as inflated or lacking in nuance. One example is the claim that, within 43 days of Trump’s return to office, the U.S. had apprehended “the terrorist mastermind” of the deadly Abbey Gate attack in Kabul. In 2021, a suicide bomber detonated in a crowd of civilians outside an airport gate during the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, killing more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members. In March, the Justice Department hailed the arrest of Afghan national Mohammad Sharifullah, an Islamist militant it said had “orchestrated” the attack. Gorka has publicly recounted the dramatic scene of waiting on the tarmac in the cold at 3 a.m., alongside several Cabinet members, to welcome the plane carrying the handcuffed “man who was responsible for the murder, the massacre.” Last month, just before Gorka’s strategy was released, a federal jury dealt a blow to the “mastermind” narrative by returning a mixed verdict. Sharifullah was convicted of aiding the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan, but the jury deadlocked on whether there was sufficient evidence to hold him responsible for the Abbey Gate deaths. The difference shapes how much time Sharifullah could spend behind bars — the more serious charge was eligible for a life sentence. A Justice Department news release about the conviction (but not the deadlock) was scrubbed of references to Sharifullah as an orchestrator and did not use the “mastermind” language that appeared days later in the White House strategy. Analysts also expressed skepticism about the blueprint’s claim that “hundreds of Jihadist terrorists in multiple countries” had been killed in recent U.S. counterterrorism operations. The administration releases virtually no details about the identities of those targeted or the circumstances of their deaths. Humanitarian groups say they fear the operations could be causing uncounted civilian casualties. 5. Opponents are targeted. Rights watchdogs say the strategy hints at ways Trump administration officials will attempt to build terrorism cases against U.S. leftist and Muslim activists through nebulous or nonexistent ties to transnational militant movements. A link to a foreign entity formally designated as a terrorist group opens the door for government surveillance and potential charges related to providing aid — “material support” in legal jargon — to a foreign terrorist organization. Analysts say that’s why the Trump administration has pursued designations targeting leftist militant groups in Europe under the label of antifa, as well as some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is a century-old Islamist group that renounced violence in the 1970s, though spinoffs such as Hamas remain active and on the U.S. blacklist. Republicans have long tried to portray U.S.-based Muslim advocacy groups as a foothold for the Brotherhood. The document also calls for the rapid “neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Researchers called the terms ill-defined and said they aren’t used in international counterterrorism work. Miller-Idriss’ overarching concern about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine: “How damaging could it be? Both in the things it’s ignoring and the things that it’s emphasizing.” The post Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Hannah Allam.
Oren Ziv: Israel is erasing the West Bank’s boundaries
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="An Israeli settler stands next to diggers in Har Ebal (Mount Ebal) settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus , on April 28, 2026. Photo by ilia YEFIMOVICH / AFP via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343498" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/oren-ziv-israel-is-erasing-the-west-banks-boundaries/gettyimages-2273032993" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1708&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1708" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-2273032993" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" An Israeli settler stands next to diggers in Har Ebal (Mount Ebal) settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus , on April 28, 2026. Photo by ilia YEFIMOVICH / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “[Israeli] settlers have continued their attacks since the beginning of March. 13 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank during settler raids on Palestinian villages, some of them by civilians, some of them by settlers who serve in the army."
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="An Israeli settler stands next to diggers in Har Ebal (Mount Ebal) settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus , on April 28, 2026. Photo by ilia YEFIMOVICH / AFP via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1025&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1366&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1334&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343498" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/oren-ziv-israel-is-erasing-the-west-banks-boundaries/gettyimages-2273032993" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1708&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1708" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-2273032993" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" An Israeli settler stands next to diggers in Har Ebal (Mount Ebal) settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus , on April 28, 2026. Photo by ilia YEFIMOVICH / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273032993-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> While the world’s focus has shifted to the war in Iran, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has continued, and Israeli settlers are rapidly and violently expanding illegal land seizures across the occupied West Bank, with the full backing of the Israeli government, military, and police. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with award-winning Israeli journalist, political commentator, and photographer Oren Ziv about how settler violence, land seizures, and the dismantling of the Oslo Accords-era boundaries are accelerating Israel’s efforts to permanently confine Palestinians and erase the possibility of a Palestinian state. Guests: Oren Ziv is an award-winning Israeli journalist, political commentator, photographer, and reporter for Local Call and +972 Magazine. Ziv the co-founder of The Activestills Collective. Additional links/info: Oren Ziv & Ariel Caine, +972 Magazine, “‘Erasing the lines’: How settler outposts are seizing new regions of the West Bank” Credits: Producer: Rosette Sewali Studio Production: David Hebden Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on the real news. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us as usual. And my guest today, Oren Ziv, has written an incredibly powerful piece called “Erasing the Lines: How Settlers are Seizing New Regions of the West Bank” and it is published in the Nation Magazine and in +972. Oren is a reporter photographer, co-founder of The Activestills Collective and since 2005, has documented social and political issues in Israel-Palestine and has joined us numerous times before and joins us once again with his new work. And Oren, welcome. Good to have you with us. Oren Ziv: Thank you for having me. Marc Steiner: So just to begin as we talk, before we start our conversation formally here, just to describe as an Israeli, as somebody living in the midst of all this madness taking place, what it’s like and what changes have taken place since the news even that you were just describing a moment ago to me. Oren Ziv: Yeah. So even since we published this article over a month ago about how Israeli settlers are taking over Area A and B areas that according to the Oslo Accords in the mid ’90s and even since we published the article, the Israel government had approved 34 new settlements, many of them based on those kind of outpost or outposts that are officially even illegal by the Israeli law, although they get all the support from the Army police. And the government, of course, settlers have continued their attacks since the beginning of March. 13 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank doing settlers raid on Palestinian villages, some of them by civilians, some of them by settlers who serve in the army. And even while we’re speaking during the last 24 hours while Israel is marking its Independence Day, free Palestinians have been killed by settlers in two different incidents. So what we can see is that the situation is escalating. All the activities on the ground, doesn’t matter if it’s civilian settlers, if it’s settlers who were recruited to the Israeli Army to reserve duty. All this is A, very coordinated and working according to a plan of the Israeli government. They don’t hide it, they say it openly. And B is supported by all the different authorities from the simple soldier on the ground. And in our investigation, we also spoke to soldiers who served in the West Bank in the last two and a half years too high up to the government who give those settlers the tools to carry on these attacks from the weapons to the ATVs they drive into Palestinian villages and of course the facilities, the outposts they establish. Marc Steiner: A couple of things here. Even though it’s not directly in the article, which is really a very thorough and interesting piece, what is the connection between Israel attacking the West Bank at this moment and trying to seize territory and close things down and what happened with Iran? What’s the connection? Oren Ziv: So I think as we saw after October 7th, the Israeli settlers and of course also the government are taking advantage that the international attention, also the Israeli attention, everybody’s attention is to something else and they really know how to identify those moments and really escalate the situation and create facts on the ground. So for example, after October 7th, really in the first days after it, before the genocide escalated in the way we’ve seen it afterwards, settlers have been pushing Palestinian communities out. So they started with Area Sea that is under fullysraeli control in the West Bank, pushing herding communities, farmer communities on the open areas between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley in other areas. They managed to force out around 60 or 70 communities. And what we’ve seen now during the war against Iran is the same policy of escalating in this situation when nobody’s looking to the West Bank erecting new outpost, raiding Palestinian villages, killing it always come those outposts. It’s the same method. Sometimes it happens in the course of a few months. Sometimes it’s very fast and it happens in a few days, but they establish a new outpost. They prevent Palestinian from going out and grazing With their sheeps, with their animals, and then they start invading to the houses, to the communities, stealing sheep, terrorizing the village. If it’s a herding community, if it’s a Bedouin community, many times they managed to force people out even though those are refugees, many times from the Nakba from 48 that had to relocate to the West Bank. They were forced to the West Bank and many times it’s a fourth or fifth time they’re being displaced. If it’s villages, they focus in the beginning of the outskirts of the village, taking over houses, farming area, making people afraid to go out because we’re talking about proper villages with houses, municipality, schools, buildings of sometimes thousands of people and the settlers and they openly say it, now they’re targeting the big villages. And the idea is very similar to what Smotich, Minister Smotich spoke about is that there will not be, of course, a Palestinian state, that Israel will control all the area. And Palestinians will be concentrating six or so areas in the West Bank that are the big Palestinian cities and settlers are taking this policy into action on the ground forcing people to hide in their homes. Marc Steiner: This was not necessarily article, but I’m really curious as to what’s the reaction inside of Israel? I mean, are there movements of any size, groups of Israelis saying no to this action? What’s the struggle like on the ground in Israel? Oren Ziv: So on the ground, you have very small group of radical left doing activists that protest this both inside Israel and more important, also go and do protective presence in those communities, in those villages together with international activists together, of course, with Palestinian activists and community organizers. They’re doing something that is called protective presence that is just being in places in communities that are being attacked again and again by settlers in the army, by army with the settlers or by settlers followed by the army. They sleep there, they spend the nights and days there. In the past, they would help Palestinians go out to the farming areas to the open lands to graze their sheep. Nowadays, it’s more focusing on protecting the community, documenting, trying to call the police or the army, though many times they would come and arrest the Palestinians and the activists. And we know also it’s effective because settlers and the police and army have been targeting those activists arresting them, issuing closed military areas that force them not to be there. And then it’s easier for the settlers to push Palestinian out and also targeting them physically. We’ve seen escalation in the recent months in the attacks. In the past, Israeli or international activists had some kind of protection that settlers were afraid to attack them. Now we’ve seen since the war of Gaza began and escalation that also they’ve been attacked same as Palestinians. Just one day on the 27th of March, one day before the attack against Iran, two Israeli activists, one of them, 50-year-old, 51, 172, went to the village of Kustalan in Nablus to help Palestinian to go back to his house where settlers forced them out. And Israeli settlers on this famous ATV that the government gave them came a mask with clubs and attacked them and injured them so badly Israeli medics had to take them with a helicopter to a hospital inside Israel. They foster almost dead. And of course, even though the Israelis, and it was widely published even in Israel media who usually doesn’t cover these kind of things, some settlers were arrested. It’s a very small outpus. It’s outputs in Area B. It’s very easy to find who did it. Settlers were arrested for two or three days and then released. I contacted the police just last week regarding this. Nobody’s arrested since nobody Marc Steiner: Is Oren Ziv: Held accountable. And of course, this is not an isolated incident from this output. Later a Palestinian was killed attacks against the villages around continue and the army sometimes evicts the tent or the structure the settlors living off, but a few hours later they built it again. And of course, as I said, it serves the Israeli official policy because it’s also convenient for the official Israel, for the army to say, no, these are settlers. It’s not the official policy, but on the ground, this is the official policy. Also, many, many, many mainstream Israelis from the so- called center left, the Zionist center left. They might not like what settlers are doing. Definitely when there’s more extreme violence, they oppose it, but a lot of them and also the mainstream media separate between the extreme settlers and then just the settlers in the West Bank and their leadership and the army and the police and they refuse to see it as one system in the end of the day, the extreme, the so- called extreme settlers and the most violent one, the few hundreds or few thousands that are in the frontline attacking Palestinian, killing them, pushing them out, they’re serving the rest, but more important, they’re getting backup because at the end of the day, each output have support from a nearby settlement that is legal according to the Israeli law. When they attack, they go out from a settlement, they come back. In many attacks, we see more than five or 10 settlers. We see dozens or even hundreds who come from all around the area, not just from illegal outposts according to the Israeli, but also from very well established settlements. Settlements Marc Steiner: That are in the West Bank you’re talking about, not in Israel. Oren Ziv: No, we’re talking about the West Bank. When we’re talking about outposts, it’s settlements that were established by settlers without prior permission by the Israeli government and are authorized later. So at the time they’re even illegal according to the Israeli government. Of course, they get the support from the army many times from the government, but they’re illegal even according to the Israeli law and by time the government recognized them. Marc Steiner: Before we go on, I wish you could explain to people listening to us now when you describe the zones of A, B, and C, what they mean, how they would derive, and what they have to do directly with the oppression of the Palestinians in their land. Oren Ziv: Yeah, definitely. So the Oslo Accord signed by Israekabin and Niasar Alfat in the mid ’90s were supposed to be a path to a Palestinian state. Many argue today that this was never the intention and it was used by Israel just to expand the control over the West Bank, but I’ll put it aside for the moment. And in this agreement, there are three zones in the West Bank. One is Area C where the settlements are, the areas near the border of Israel, where many of the open areas are, the Georgian Valley, many of the agriculture areas. And these areas are according to the accord still are under full Israeli control, both security-wise and municipality and planning-wise. Then you have Area B, which is under Israeli security control and under planning and municipality control, civil control of the Palestinians. And then you have area A, the big cities, Ramallah, Hebron, Lucaram, Jenin, Jericho, Nablus, that they are supposedly under full Palestinian control, meaning the Palestinian police is there, the Palestinian governments is there. Of course, Israel violates the also accords and goes into this Palestinian areas area A and conduct arrests and searches and other actions. But I’m talking about the agreement. It’s important to say that in the future, all this should have been a Palestinian state. Now, as we hear from soldiers and settlers, Area C, they decided, although you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in area seats, the vast majority of the open areas in the West Bank, Israel settlers in the Army decided that area sees all Israelis. So the Palestinians who live there under strict restrictions, house demolitions, searches, checkpoints, and they’re not allowed to build without permits. And in general, Israeli is trying to push Palestinians from Area C to Area B and A, so they can enact, if not officially, enact the facto area A to Israel. And on the ground, it’s almost like that. Then you have Area B, which as I said, there’s over 12 outposts in the outskirts of Palestinian towns and villages. And even in recent months, we’ve seen some changes in the discourse of Israeli politicians after an Israeli settler died during what Palestinians describe as a car accident. Some settlers claim it was an attack. A settler and his brother were so- called touring with ATV supplied by the government in Area A and near their illegal outpost. This settler died in this accident/other event. And since then, his family, but later also right-wing politicians have announced this campaign of erasing Oslo. A, B, and C is all Israel, it’s all ours. Just now settlers after his death, settlers established five settlements in Area B, they let it evicted because it’s where the CNN crew was attacked last month incident that got a lot of attention in the US and worldwide. And in general, Israeli settlers and the government are trying to erase this separation between the areas and to make sure that even the very symbolic and very small Palestini authority that exist will be erased. Marc Steiner: So what you’re describing, I was thinking about this. I was reading your article and what you’re saying now. What you’re describing really is a push by the Israeli government to seize control of every aspect of what is now Palestinian life and the West Bank make it actually part of Israel to stop the charade that it’s some kind of other place that can be negotiated, that actually they take it over. And so talk a bit about that and what you think the political reality is around that and what would happen if that actually happens. If they keep this push and they do that and they take over the West Bank completely and build these new syllables. Oren Ziv: Yeah. So as we look on the map of the settlements and since the establishment of this extreme government three and a half years ago, we’ve seen approval of more than 100 settlements. And if you look on the map, it really fits A, the outputs that we describe in our article and B, it really fits Smartridge plan to concentrate the Palestinian in specific areas across the West Bank in very, very small and limited areas. So the settlements are all around them. The official settlements the government approve are not only Area A and B, but they’re really limiting the movement between Palestinian citizen towns and together with the Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks, metal gates, this really makes it hard for the movement of Palestinians and even any imagination of a Palestinian state. That’s of course the official Israeli plan, but as always with Netanyahu and its partners, they don’t want officially to announce the West Bank. They had the plan in 2018, this was put outside and they don’t want to fully enact the West Bank. They don’t want to, of course, talk about one democratic state and to give rights to those Palestinians who they announce. I’m not talking about if Palestinians choose it or not, but on the Israeli side, of course, they’re not talking about annexation even with the limited rights. For example, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem have that they have a residence card and they can move freely all across the territory. So of course they’re not talking about that, but on the ground they’re making changes that even in half a year there will be elections and some less extreme government will be elected. It will be very hard to reverse. Now, of course, everything is changeable. Everything can be removed. We’ve seen it Across history. We’ve seen it also in Israel and Palestine that this engagement from Gaza in 2005 and before that, the withdraw from Southern Lebanon and from Sinai desert in Egypt. So things can change, but they’re kind of making sure that this will be hard. And from past experience with center right governments, we see that not so quickly they cancel or reverse decisions by previous governments. It’s not so easy for them to do it politically and publicly and especially when the extreme right and the settlers of the West Bank, if they will be under position, I think they will make it very, very hard to reverse anything. So they’re creating facts on the ground and for them, they want to make sure there’s no Palestinian state. I think Netanyahu said it in his own voice in recent years and they want to make sure that no matter what, the West Bank will be under Israeli control. Marc Steiner: Forever. Oren Ziv: Yes, correct. Marc Steiner: So as I was reading your article, and I would encourage everybody, we’re going to link to it, it really gives very thorough analysis of what’s happening on the West Bank, what’s happening in the Palestinian villages. This might be an absurd question, but I’ll ask it anyway. Go Oren Ziv: Ahead. Marc Steiner: So what do you think the future holds then? I mean, all the things you wrote about in terms of dismantling Palestinian life, taking over villages, pushing people out, and then often taken over by very right wings and Orthodox settlers moving in to take more control. And you’ve been involved in this and standing up to it as of other Israelis. So where do you think this goes? What do you think the future holds for Israel and the Palestinians if this continues? Oren Ziv: Yeah, it’s a very hard question. And of course on one hand, from what you look now, it’s very pessimistic. On the other hand, on the ground, they don’t manage to push Palestinians out of the West Bank as they want. So after the genocide begin in Gaza, we’ve seen across the West Bank billboards with a photo from Gaza, one of the famous photo of Palestinians from Northern Gaza being forced out into South Gaza with all the belongings, this photo that reminds the 48 Nakaba and was written in Arabic, there’s no future in Palestine. So the settlers, maybe answers a bit your previous question, the settlers do see connection between what happened in Gaza and what’s happening in the West Bank. And at least a year or two ago when they still thought they can force Palestinians out of Gaza, that at least from parts of Gaza, at least from Gaza city. And the Northern part of Gaza, they fought they can duplicate it to the West Bank in Gaza despite the horrific genocide that Israel committed there. They didn’t manage with the plan that we wrote also in 1972. It was a governmental plan to push Palestinians out to Egypt or to other countries. And we’ve seen many reports about these attempts of Israel by plains by Jordan through Egypt, this failed. And I think also in the West Bank, despite the horrific price, Palestinians are paying daily. The big plan is not working. People don’t live. Maybe they’re pushed, I hope, for short time, but they’re pushed to the big cities and towns and out of the farming area, the grazing area, but the push, but the plan to push them out of the West Bank is not working. And it’s important to say that many of the tactics we’ve seen in Gaza, the army is also implemented in a much smaller scale in the West Bank, in the refugee camp, in Ghanina refugee camp, Tulkarian refugee camp, and Nurasham’s refugee camp after years of pressure from Israeli settlers and Israeli right wing politician, they took over a year ago, they forced all the residents out. We’re talking about over 40,000 residents that are refugees from 48 Israel from the Nakaba and started demolishing houses, open roads, not demolishing all the camp, but making it a place that people cannot live at least till they allow them to come back and demolishing dozens of houses with the excuse of opening new roads and shaping in. And same like in Gaza and same like in the war of Israel against the UN, against Unra, also against the refugee camps, they really want to raise the refugee issue and you could say the Palestinian issue in general, but also the fact that so many people in Gaza and in the West Bank are refugees from 48. Marc Steiner: So as you describe in verbally here, but also in your writing, when people resist what’s happening, both Palestinians and Israelis have gone in to help Palestinians to resist, it’s become pretty violent. Oren Ziv: Yes. So before October seven, we’ve seen many protests across the West Bank from the historically, of course, but also in recent years against new settlements two decades ago against this apartheid separation war for prisoner in solidarity of prisoners for many things. And since October 7th, the Israeli army and also the police made it very clear that it’s too dangerous to protest that and people will play enormous price. So we haven’t seen across the West Bank many protests, but as I said, people find alternative ways to show Sudarit is if it’s with the protective presence being on the ground, Israeli international activists, we know we also published on Plus 972 magazine how Bangville formed a special unit in the West Bank police police that doesn’t function when it comes to killing of Palestinians, attacks against human right defense and so on. They have a special unit in the West Bank police to locate arrest and deport international activists. So in their eyes, the problem is not the violence or the human rights violation. It’s the fact that people come to witness it, document it and when they go back also to spread it to their France family and of course wider community. So we’ve seen really a escalation against activists. We’ve seen in numerous villages that activists have been present twenty four seven. The army comes issues a closed military area that theoretically should also limit settlers from going in and arresting the Palestinians. But de facto, it’s not being enforced on settlers and just the activists cannot be with the Palestinians. And unfortunately, at least in a few cases, it forced the Palestinians to leave because they were left with no protection. So it’s an interesting thing to look at how on the ground in very simple and small tools, but the army and the police are assisting those attackers to evict Palestinian communities. And we’re talking about the most vulnerable communities. But as you said, people are present in dozens of villages across the bank. Also, there’s other villages that the Palestinians are organizing to night shifts, tours around the village to protect with … Of course, they’re not allowed to have any weapons to protect themselves, but with flashlights and cars patrolling around the village being present in the most vulnerable families who live in the outskirts, if they live in a farm, if they live in the last houses. And also against that, we’ve seen the army arresting people who are involved in that, demolishing tents that are made as an outpost to look where settler race. But people on the ground are trying to resist in all the methods they have. Marc Steiner: You said one thing I’m curious, so Palestinians are not allowed to have weapons of any kind? Oren Ziv: The Palestinian authority and the Palestinian security bodies have weapons in Area A. They’re not allowed to travel with it to Area C and B. And no, of course not, they’re not allowed to have weapons, but even when they go out to protect themselves from settler raids with stones or stick, they’re being shot and arrested. So we’ve seen many examples that settlers raid a village attack it. When people go out, the army comes to assist the settlers and then shoot or arrest Palestinians. So yeah, Palestinians, of course, they’re not allowed legally to have weapons. They’re not allowed to protect themselves in the most basic tools, even to go out and to stand in front of a settler who’s trying to graze their land or to steal their land. The army might come and say, “You’re not allowed to block this person.” I’m not talking about with a stone or everything just standing and trying to tell the settler you’re not allowed in. Many times the army would come and with orders from the settlers will arrest the Palestinians saying you blocked them, you disturbed them and many other claims. So yeah, the fact is that Palestinians, and this is, I think, is the purpose also that they’re not safe even in their garden in their home. This is the reason settlers establish those outputs so close or sometimes in Palestinian communities, invade the communities days after day to tire the people and harass them when trying to make them live. In many places, people refuse to leave despite the high price they pay. Marc Steiner: Let me just read a line here from your article, which we’ll be attaching to so people can really see what’s going on because you’ve written a really important piece here. When you quote Smart Rich, one of the right wing leaders of the Israeli government saying, “We will erase the lines, the demarcations, the letters. We will settle our land in all its parts.” And then you have local activists saying in response, “Two years authorities have been closing off the village and tightening control over it as much as possible. The last village remaining in Ramallah area that borders the Jordan Valley, the West Bank’s Eastern flank of which Israel is rapidly consolidating control.” I mean, it sounds like a 1984 dystopian nightmare that’s taking over in the West Bank. And as an activist, as somebody who’s Israeli and standing up to this, I’m curious how you maintain your sense of struggle and your optimism in this fight to build a land for all. I mean, I’ll disclose, I have this poster in my study at home that I got in 1968. It has a map of all of the Holy land. It says one state, two people’s three faiths, well, the Palestinian flag on one side and Israeli flag on the other, which I think is a dream of some of us, which probably may never happen. So I’m curious just how do you maintain the sense of struggle in standing up to all this? Oren Ziv: Yeah, I think it’s a good question. One answer that I think about it a lot is that I’m on the ground when I visit those villages, those communities and you see Palestinians that I’m privileged, I have a press card, I have Israeli citizenship. Of course, I can be attacked. I can be harassed. We’ve seen escalation also against us in recent years, but still we’re much, much, much, much more safe and protected than the Palestinians on the frontline on those communities on this town. So when I see them A, standing there and insisting of staying despite all the obstacles, and really they have zero protection. A settler can decide that he comes and opens the outputs in their garden, the army will come, the police will come and might arrest the Palestinian. And then these are daily examples. So that gives me a lot of hope. And also as I mentioned before, when I see the activists, the Palestinian, Israeli international that go there and stay there twenty four seven for weeks, for months. Now because those attacks happen daily, when you stay in a village for every week, when you come often, it just unfortunately, it’s a matter of statistic till you will get attacked. It might be severe, it might be something like, but as we show in the article, and as we talked, settlers nowadays have no border, no lie, no red line because they get support from the government, the army and the police, so they can do almost everything and they will not be held accountable. So when I see those brave activists, when I see those brave families, unfortunately, I documented many, many communities leaving and one of them was a community of Rasanel Uja near the Jordan Valley that has been there for decades and were forced to leave a community of over 1,00 people, refugees also from the negative NACAB in Israel 48. And today the settlers made it a touristic area with the water spring that was used for Palestinians. Now it’s like a touristic site for the settlers. So when I talked to them, they said that without the presence of activists there, they wouldn’t survive this two years and a half of war. They would leave long time ago. So even from the lowest point where somebody has to pack their home and they smelled their home and leave really a second of third Nakba, the hardest thing you can photograph, in my opinion, harder than funerals sometimes or other things, when you hear it from people that it does mean for them that people come and stand with them and Send in solidarity and we are still in contact with many of the families that had to displace to other areas. So it does give you some hope and does give you hope that one day they will be able to return to their land and to their homes and live in some kind of peace and in better conditions. Marc Steiner: It’s always powerful and interesting to talk to you. I really appreciate the time you took and we’re going to link to the articles, people can read it and we’re going to link to your photographs as well so we can see the work that you do and understand exactly what’s going on and look forward to many more conversations with you over the time as we face all this together. And I hope you stay safe. I hope your friends, everybody with you stays safe and thank you so much for your work and your writing and taking your time to be with us today. Oren Ziv: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Marc Steiner: Once again, let me thank Oren Ziv for joining us today and we’ll link to his work to his photographic work and writing at orenziv.net. That’s O-R-E-N-Z-I-V.net. And we’re also going to his article that inspired today’s conversation. And thanks to David Hebden for the program today, audio editor Steven Frank for working his magic who was at Sowali for producing the Mark Steiner Show and the title is Kayla Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@realers.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Oren Ziv for joining us today and for the work he does, you can see his photography and writing in the links below. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening and take care. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.
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"Here Where We Live Is Our Country”: Molly Crabapple on Resurfacing Jewish History of Anti-Zionism
Xi Warns Trump of Potential "Conflict" over Taiwan in Beijing Summit on Iran, Trade, Tech & More
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“Here Where We Live Is Our Country”: Molly Crabapple on Resurfacing the Jewish History of Anti-Zionism
We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist r...
We speak with the acclaimed artist and author Molly Crabapple about her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Although largely forgotten today, the Jewish Labor Bund was once a powerful secular, socialist revolutionary party that fought for freedom and dignity for Jews in Europe. The movement formed in the waning days of the Russian Empire in an atmosphere of intense antisemitism, but it “rejected, from the very start, calls to create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine,” Crabapple says. “They felt that Zionism was a capitulation to the same bigots that wanted to kick Jews out of Europe.” Bund members — known as Bundists — navigated profound historical changes from the founding of the movement in 1897 until its ultimate destruction in the Holocaust. But Crabapple, who learned Yiddish for the book, says the Bund is not just Jewish history. “This is a history that belongs to all rebels. It belongs to everyone who believes in the necessity of human solidarity,” she says. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Xi Warns Trump of Potential “Conflict” over Taiwan in Beijing Summit on Iran, Trade, Tech & More
U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump’s first administration. Trade, the Iran war, ...
U.S. President Donald Trump is in Beijing for a highly anticipated summit with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. It is the first U.S. state visit to China since 2017, during Trump’s first administration. Trade, the Iran war, artificial intelligence and the fate of Taiwan are some of the issues being discussed, although it’s not clear if any new agreements are likely. Trump traveled to China with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with a delegation of top U.S. executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. The summit comes after years of rising hostility between the two superpowers, but leaders recognize the importance of improving the bilateral relationship, says Zhao Hai, director of international political studies at the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. “This is a very critical historical moment [at] a crossroad, and both sides now are working together to establish a stable relationship that will have a global ramification,” he says. We also speak with Jake Werner, a historian of modern China and director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He says the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting economic chaos have strengthened China’s position. “China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran,” says Werner. “So it has some experience in this realm, sort of acting as a broker towards peace.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Apartment Block Collapses In Kyiv During Massive Russian Attack
Xi Jinping Warns U.S. of Potential “Conflict” over Taiwan After Beijing Summit with Trump, Senate Narrowly Rejects Iran War Powers Resolution for Seventh Time, Children Among the Dead as Israel Continues Bombing Lebanon Despite Ceasefire, Israeli Police Kill Palestinian Attempting to Scale West Bank Wall to Find Work, Study Finds Israel Increased Attacks on Gaza After Halting Strikes on Iran, Judge Temporarily Blocks U.S. Sanctions Against U.N. Expert on Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israeli Prime Minister Claims He Made “Secret” Visit to the UAE in March, U.S. Senate Votes to Confirm Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve Chair, Trump Admin Withholds $1.3 Billion in Medicaid Reimbursement Payments from California, Former Private Prison Official to Be Named Acting Director of ICE, Louisiana Police to Pay More Than $4.8 Million to Settle Wrongful Death of Ronald Greene, U.N. Warns Drones Cause More Than 80% of Civilian Deaths in Sudan, Mexican President Denies Reports CIA Officers Assassinated Cartel Members, Israel Qualifies for the Eurovision Song Contest Final Amid Protests and Calls for Boycott
Xi Jinping Warns U.S. of Potential "Conflict" over Taiwan After Beijing Summit with Trump Senate Narrowly Rejects Iran War Powers Resolution for Seventh Time Children Among the Dead as Israel Continues Bombing Lebanon Despite Ceasefire Israeli Police Kill Palestinian Attempting to Scale West Bank Wall to Find Work Study Finds Israel Increased Attacks on Gaza After Halting Strikes on Iran Judge Temporarily Blocks U.S. Sanctions Against U.N. Expert on Occupied Palestinian Territories Israeli Prime Minister Claims He Made "Secret" Visit to the UAE in March U.S. Senate Votes to Confirm Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve Chair Trump Admin Withholds $1.3 Billion in Medicaid Reimbursement Payments from California Former Private Prison Official to Be Named Acting Director of ICE Louisiana Police to Pay More Than $4.8 Million to Settle Wrongful Death of Ronald Greene U.N. Warns Drones Cause More Than 80% of Civilian Deaths in Sudan Mexican President Denies Reports CIA Officers Assassinated Cartel Members Israel Qualifies for the Eurovision Song Contest Final Amid Protests and Calls for Boycott This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Thursday, May 14, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Thai journalist Kowit Phothisan could face years in prison for defamation
Bangkok, May 14, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Thai politician Suchart Chomklin to immediately drop his criminal defamation lawsuit against Kowit Phothisan, editor of the independent online outlet The Isaan Record, and on Thai authorities to strengthen protections against strategic lawsuits targeting journalists. Kowit faces charges for sharing a Facebook post related to...
Bangkok, May 14, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Thai politician Suchart Chomklin to immediately drop his criminal defamation lawsuit against Kowit Phothisan, editor of the independent online outlet The Isaan Record, and on Thai authorities to strengthen protections against strategic lawsuits targeting journalists. Kowit faces charges for sharing a Facebook post related to The Isaan Record’s reporting in January on a Department of Special Investigation case alleging that Suchart, the minister of natural resources and environment and a ruling Bhumjaithai Party parliamentarian, accepted bribes from Thai brokers and private Finnish companies in a labor recruitment scandal, the outlet’s editor-in-chief Hathairat Phaholtap told CPJ. “Thai politician Suchart Chomklin must immediately drop his criminal complaint against journalist Kowit Phothisan and stop harassing The Issan Record’s staff with frivolous lawsuits,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Thailand’s criminal defamation laws have become a weapon of choice for the powerful against the press, and that must end now.” The journalist has been charged under Sections 326 and 328 of the Penal Code, which carry maximum prison penalties of one and two years, respectively, said Hathairat. A parallel civil defamation against Kowit seeks 1 million baht ($30,900) in damages. Hearings in the cases began on April 27. Suchart earlier filed criminal and civil defamation suits against Hathairat, seeking 50 million baht ($1.54 million) in damages, over the same bribery-related news report, but withdrew the complaint on April 26, The Issan Record reported. Journalists in Thailand are frequently targeted with Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) lawsuits, filed under Thailand’s punitive criminal defamation law. SLAPPs are abusive lawsuits filed by powerful officials, businesspeople, or corporations against journalists or news outlets to silence critical reporting, using lengthy, costly legal proceedings to prevent further reporting, rather than seeking to address actual wrongs. Thailand’s Senate Committee on Political Development, Public Participation, Human Rights, Rights, Freedoms and Consumer Protection is studying measures to prevent the filing of SLAPP cases and will hold a parliamentary panel hearing on the issue on May 22, one of its organizers told CPJ, on condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak publicly. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
NSW antisemitism hearings ‘drowned’ in the Bondi Royal Commission
The NSW Parliament’s antisemitism report was folded into the Bondi Royal Commission, missing the airing of contesting views and rigorous questioning, reports Michael West Media. COMMENTARY: By Stephen Lawrence Throughout 2025, I served on Australia’s first parliamentary inquiry into society-wide antisemitism. When the Bondi terrorist atrocity occurred, we had yet to finalise a report, and
The NSW Parliament’s antisemitism report was folded into the Bondi Royal Commission, missing the airing of contesting views and rigorous questioning, reports Michael West Media. COMMENTARY: By Stephen Lawrence Throughout 2025, I served on Australia’s first parliamentary inquiry into society-wide antisemitism. When the Bondi terrorist atrocity occurred, we had yet to finalise a report, and I supported the decision to simply send our evidence to the Royal Commission. A notable feature of our inquiry was the care taken to test evidence and contentions through robust questioning. This included testing key witnesses vigorously as to the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, and on other key contentions and demands of Jewish representative groups of a Zionist perspective. READ MORE: Other Bondi Royal Commission reports This didn’t please all the witnesses, for example, it led Lynda Ben-Menashe, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, to later publicly label me as “NSW’s Gaslighter-in-Chief”. This was for daring to even suggest that a wrongful conflation of Israel and the Australian Jewish community could be driving antisemitism. In my limited observations so far of the Royal Commission, this degree of scrutiny seems not to be present, particularly when witnesses have sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The evidence in our inquiry made clear the absolute centrality in Zionist advocacy in Australia of this conflation, which is no new phenomenon, as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban famously said of his work, “the chief task of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all”. This conflation, however, seems to be worsening antisemitism. Critising Israel not antisemitic The Jewish Council of Australia spoke in their evidence of “a politicised and divisive discourse which seeks to label any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, thereby increasing antisemitism by linking Jewish identities to the state of Israel and its human rights abuses”. A central insight I took from the inquiry is that political leaders need to exercise restraint and responsibility in not treating the Jewish community as a monolith (itself an antisemitic trope), but also in how we respond to political demands from pro-Israel Jewish representative groups. We should undoubtedly treat these groups as important voices and witnesses on antisemitism and recognise their right to lobby, but if we subcontract the development of policy to them, counterproductive policies focused on criticism of Israel will inevitably be the result. This has certainly been the case with the appointment of Jillian Segal, someone, as I put to her in our inquiry, with no obvious expertise on the core question of how to reduce racism across a community. Long before Bondi, Segal played a central role in demanding the banning of pro-Palestine protests from the CBDs of major cities, and she undoubtedly contributed to the divisive and unconstitutional post-Bondi ban on protests. I challenged Segal in the inquiry on whether this demand was actually pernicious, because such bans would be unconstitutional and calling for them created fear and suggested the Jewish community was deliberately not being protected. She unsurprisingly disagreed. Shared understanding missing Another topic at the inquiry was the importance of dialogue at a community level, building shared understanding between communities sitting on each side of the conflict. I put to a number of witnesses that perhaps this should be a two-way street. On the one hand, non-Jewish communities are gaining an understanding of Jewish history, why Israel is so important to so many Jewish people and why the tropes of antisemitism are false. On the other, Jewish people gaining an understanding of Palestinian history, which perhaps might reduce perceptions of antisemitism arising from Palestinian activism. Segal was asked in this regard whether, “there might be a role for education within the Jewish community about the history of the Palestinian people” and tartly responded, “education is always valuable, but the focus of the plan is protecting Australians from hate, not asking vulnerable communities to adjust their sensitivity to it”. Similar evidence emerged from Joshua Kirsch, a Jewish community advocate, of whom I asked: “Do you think there are ways to deepen community understanding on both ‘sides’, if I can use that term, such that there can be a greater alignment of understandings, or greater understanding of the perspective of the other? We’ve heard evidence about perceptions of antisemitism having a pernicious influence themselves, and people interpreting things in a genuine way as antisemitism that is not intended as antisemitism is intended, for example, things that Palestinians might say about their situation.” He answered, “I think my priority as a Jewish person, and I think as a person who is involved with Jewish organisations, is not to educate Jewish people about why their feelings are not valid.” Indeed, what became clear in the evidence was that many of the political demands of pro-Israel groups actively prevent the development of some semblance of a shared understanding of history. This came up directly in the inquiry when I questioned Waverley Mayor Will Nemesh, whose council has adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which suggests that it is antisemitic to label Israel a “racist endeavour”. “If you had a Palestinian resident who came to you and said, ‘I was expelled in 1967 from what is now Israel. I’ve been denied a right of return. I think Israel is a racist endeavour,’ is that resident an antisemite?” Namesh replied, “There are strong views in terms of Israel and Palestine. What is crucial is understanding there are two peoples and both claim connection to the land. I think both are very valid”. It seemed to me that the IHRA definition could, in that public exchange, hardly be defended, because to do so would have been to directly and blatantly deny Palestinian history and identity to an absurd degree. Yet inevitably, it will continue to be advocated for by many Jewish representative groups. Zionist denials In that vein, prominent Australian Zionist Alex Ryvchin attended the inquiry and directly denied that any ethnic cleansing had occurred during the formation of Israel. A level of denialism, contradicted by the historical record, that is difficult to square with a dedicated commitment to inter-community dialogue. The evidence in our inquiry convinced me that ensuring our Jewish community is not conflated with Israel is central to dealing with growing antisemitism. Callow future Australian political leaders might return from Israel impressed after free study tours, but the difficult, albeit obvious, truth is that Israel is an Apartheid state, founded on ethnic cleansing, a premeditated determination to create a Jewish super majority and then a denial of the right of return. The world’s expert human rights organisations do not have this wrong. These facts, the criminality of the destruction of Gaza and Israel’s increasingly expansionist tendencies, mean Israel will continue to attract a growing storm of criticism. But Australia is a free society, and our Jewish community is allowed to be as supportive of Israel and Zionism as they wish. No other community in Australia is expected to distance itself from a country with which they identify, no matter how illiberal and criminal its government is, and it should never be demanded of any part of our Jewish community. Ultimately, the only people responsible for the actions of the state of Israel are the officials of that state. While most people will agree on this statement, the difficulty is found in how broader narratives and policies, including the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, impact across the community. It is in this fiendishly difficult context that we look to Royal Commissioner Bell to chart a way out of the downward and divisive spiral we seem to be in. She truly will need the wisdom of Solomon to unpick this knot of growing antisemitism in Australia. Stephen Lawrence is a member of the NSW Legislative Council. He was a barrister prior to being elected to Parliament and is a former Mayor of the Dubbo Region. Lawrence had a national legal practice specialising in public law. Republished from Michael West Media with permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Humanity Must Win at the 2026 FIFA World Cup
As tick bites surge, conspiracy theories follow
Where scientists see climate change at work, others see the designs of a global cabal.
“Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse. Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90 percent of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species. But where scientists see the hand of climate change at work — average temperatures in Maine have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1985 — others see the designs of a global cabal. “Human engineered biological warfare,” read a comment on Maciel’s video posted by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right former member of the Belgian government who was recently convicted of violating the country’s Holocaust denial laws. The comment got 32,000 likes. “It’s Bill Gates,” someone else posted. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/tick_collecting.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth. " data-credit="John Ewing / Portland Press Herald / Getty Images"/> Chuck Lubelczyk, a vector-borne ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth. John Ewing / Portland Press Herald / Getty Images These posts are part of a wave of tick-related conspiracy theories garnering millions of views online. In April, a self-proclaimed holistic doctor on Instagram claimed to have spoken with multiple farmers in the Midwest who told her that they were finding boxes of ticks dumped on their properties. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she posted alongside a video that got 10 million views across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The MAHA Moms Coalition, a nationwide group inspired by the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, reposted the claim asking affected farmers to come forward. The theory dates back to 2023, with viral claims that Pfizer and Valneva, pharmaceutical companies developing a vaccine for Lyme disease, were planting boxes of ticks on farms to drum up demand for their product. A separate theory that gained traction around the same time linked a British research program to genetically modify cattle ticks, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to rising cases of red meat allergies in the U.S. The biggest problem with that theory is that the allergy, Alpha-gal syndrome, is caused by the bite of a Lone Star tick — a completely different species from the cattle ticks in the research program. While all these conspiracies involve different ticks, different diseases, and different alleged culprits, they are often treated as interchangeable evidence of the same broader claim: that rising tick encounters are a part of a nefarious human plot. The theories are right about one thing: Ticks are getting worse. Some of the same ecological changes fueling Maine’s winter tick boom are also making tick encounters more common in broad swaths of the U.S. The arachnids are showing up earlier in the year, expanding into new terrain, and biting people more often than they used to. But the force driving those shifts is not a clandestine bioweapons program, a vaccine plot, or Bill Gates — it’s climate change. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1032 1032w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1376 1376w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/tick-conspiracy.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="A screenshot of an Instagram post furthering the unproven claim that Midwestern farmers are finding boxes of ticks left behind on their properties. " data-credit="Instagram"/> A screenshot of an Instagram post furthering the unproven claim that Midwestern farmers are finding boxes of ticks left behind on their properties. Instagram Richard Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said a warming world is “bringing ticks out earlier in the year” in states like New York, where he lives. “It used to be we were pretty safe in the month of May,” he said. “Now, not so much.” Tick season is off to an unusually early start across most of the U.S. this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said in an alert published late last month. Emergency room visits for tick bites in four of the five geographic regions the agency tracks are the highest they’ve been for this time of year since the CDC started keeping tabs on tick-borne illness rates in 2017. While the CDC hasn’t said what’s behind the uptick in bites this spring, ample snow cover earlier in the year helped insulate adult ticks from the cold of winter, and an early spring bloom across much of the U.S. likely brought those hungry adults out of the leaf litter earlier than normal. But regardless of the specific dynamics at play this year, rising average temperatures will lead to more robust tick exposure on balance. That’s because warmer temperatures both coax ticks north into territory that was once too cold to host them and also extend the length of time that ticks are active every year. More tick bites mean more opportunities for infection — and the list of infections doctors are watching for is getting longer. Positive tests for alpha-gal syndrome have increased 100-fold since 2013; nearly half a million people in the U.S. now carry an allergy to red meat. Cases of anaplasmosis, a disease carried by black-legged ticks that hospitalizes roughly 30 percent of the people who contract it, increased 16-fold between 2000 and 2017. Babesiosis, a malaria-like illness also carried by black-legged ticks, has risen roughly 10 percent year-over-year since 2015. It’s not uncommon now for a single tick to carry two or more diseases. Ecologists who study ticks see an interwoven mix of factors driving these increases. Land-use and wildlife changes are increasing contact between humans and ticks, invasive and expanding tick species are bringing different disease risks to new parts of the country, and better testing and reporting of tick-borne illnesses is making diseases more visible. But there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that those trends are unfolding against the backdrop of climate change. Ostfeld worries that the complexity of the factors that lead to higher rates of tick-borne disease, paired with the allure of online conspiracies, will make it harder for people to understand why backyards in some parts of the country are getting more dangerous. “The more I read about people actually believing some of these conspiracy theories, the more I worry that even moderately complex explanations or phenomena we care about — like how likely we are to get bitten by a tick — might be too much,” he said. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/lone-star-ticks.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A close-up of pink hands holding a clear plastic tube containing three small black ticks" data-caption="Scientists collect Lone Star ticks, which can cause an allergic reaction to red meat, for research. " data-credit="Ben McCanna / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images"/> Scientists collect Lone Star ticks, which can cause an allergic reaction to red meat, for research. Ben McCanna / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images It doesn’t help that conspiracies about ticks have now been legitimized by federal government officials. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has at various times in his career opined that Lyme disease, which now affects an estimated half a million Americans every year, was created as a byproduct of vaccine research and originally used as a military bioweapon. (This flies in the face of genomic evidence that the bacteria causing Lyme has existed in North America for at least 60,000 years.) Both Kennedy and Tucker Carlson, one of America’s most prominent Republican-aligned media figures, have hosted the writer Kris Newby on their podcasts in recent years. In both cases, Newby espoused debunked claims about the military origins of Lyme. The idea that Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses were created by a U.S. military bioweapons program is so pervasive that a formal initiative to investigate the origin has twice been introduced by lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Chris Smith, a Republican representative from New Jersey who spearheaded those efforts, was successful on his second attempt. A directive in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, signed by President Donald Trump last December, includes a provision requiring the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to investigate whether the military used ticks as biological warfare agents in the middle of the twentieth century. “GAO will be fully empowered to leave no stone unturned, and now it’ll have a congressional mandate to get to the bottom of it, because they were weaponizing ticks,” Smith said at a Lyme disease roundtable convened by Secretary Kennedy last year. But away from the congressional roundtables and viral videos, the plot begins to lose some of its drama. Even in the Midwest, where millions of social media viewers have been told that boxes of ticks are being dumped on unsuspecting farmers, evidence of foul play is hard to find. Terry Hoerbert and her husband Bob own Little Brown Cow Dairy, a small dairy farm in Delavan, Illinois. The lane down to the farm is short, Terry said, so she would have seen someone dropping off packages of ticks. Had the Hoerberts heard of any other farms in the area receiving packages of live ticks? “We have not,” Terry told me. “You are the first to enlighten us.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As tick bites surge, conspiracy theories follow on May 14, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.
Mosques vandalized, Muslim homes burnt down in Meerut? No, Hapur video falsely viral
A 28-second video showing a mob carrying saffron flags vandalising a structure and brutally assaulting a man is viral on social media with communal claims. Users are claiming that the... The post Mosques vandalized, Muslim homes burnt down in Meerut? No, Hapur video falsely viral appeared first on Alt News.
A 28-second video showing a mob carrying saffron flags vandalising a structure and brutally assaulting a man is viral on social media with communal claims. Users are claiming that the incident took place in Meerut after Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath allegedly made “blasphemous” comments, following which six mosques were vandalised, 52 Muslim homes were set on fire, and several Muslims were burned alive. Among those sharing the claim was X user Anushi Tiwari, whose bio identifies her as a supporter of the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi. The post, shared on May 10, has garnered over 75,000 views and more than 1,900 reposts at the time of this article being written. (Archive) Breaking In Meerut city, 6 mosques belonging to Muslims were demolished, and #UttarPradesh CM @myogiadityanath allegedly committed blasphemy, after which the situation became tense. 52 Muslim houses were set on fire,& #Muslims were reportedly burned alive.@meerutpolice pic.twitter.com/A5ZSNwHZH0 — Anushi Tiwari Proud INDIAN (@ProudIndianNa) May 10, 2026 Several other users shared the video claiming the same. Below are a few instances. Click to view slideshow. Fact Check To verify the authenticity of the viral video, we extracted several keyframes from the clip and performed reverse image searches. This led us to a report by Dainik Bhaskar, which carried the same visuals. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-315412" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-094457-1024x884.jpg" alt="" width="810" height="699" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-094457-1024x884.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-094457-300x259.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-094457-768x663.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-094457-1536x1326.jpg 1536w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-15-094457.jpg 1891w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 810px) 100vw, 810px" /> The report was titled, “Maharana Pratap Jayanti rally turns violent in Hapur: Youth pushed from rooftop, cars vandalised; 6 injured”. According to the report, the incident took place in Hapur during a Maharana Pratap Jayanti procession. The rally had stopped to garland a statue of Maharana Pratap when some participants reportedly went to a nearby shop in Dehra village. An argument broke out between a youth and a shopkeeper, which soon escalated into a physical fight and triggered violence in the area. We also found a report by Amar Ujala, which stated that the dispute began over the consumption of gutkha. As tensions escalated, both sides allegedly resorted to stone-pelting. Several men from the procession climbed onto rooftops in the village and vandalised houses. The report further noted that some youths participating in the procession alleged that the attack was pre-planned and claimed that stones had been stockpiled on rooftops beforehand. We then came across a video statement by Hapur police superintendent Kunwar Gyananjay Singh shared from the official X account of the Hapur Police. At the beginning of the interaction, a reporter asks whether bulldozer action would be taken against those involved in the violence. In his statement, SP Singh said that three individuals had been arrested and five others detained as part of the ongoing investigation. According to the press note shared alongside the video statement, the arrested individuals were identified as Zahid, Mehtab and Nausher. They were booked under Sections 191(2), 191(3), 190, 115(2), 352, 109 and 351(3) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), along with Section 7 of the Criminal Law Act. थाना धौलाना पुलिस ने त्वरित कार्यवाही करते हुए महाराणा प्रताप जयंती के अवसर पर ग्राम देहरा में शोभायात्रा के दौरान आपस में हुई पत्थरबाजी की घटना में संलिप्त 03 अभियुक्तों को किया गिरफ्तार एवं संदेह के आधार पर 05 संदिग्ध व्यक्तियों को हिरासत मे लेकर पूछताछ की जा रही है। इस सम्बन्ध… pic.twitter.com/JFehUxXbYR — HAPUR POLICE (@hapurpolice) May 10, 2026 We also found that Meerut Police had replied to the X post by @ProudIndianNa clarifying that no such incident had been reported in Meerut. प्रकरण जनपद मेरठ से संबंधित नहीं है न ही इस प्रकार की कोई घटना उत्तर प्रदेश में कहीं भी हुई है उक्त ट्विटर हैंडल के विरुद्ध FIR पंजीकृत की जा रही है साइबर सेल द्वारा इस अकाउंट के ओरिजन तथा अन्य क्रैडेंशियल्स की जांच की जा रही है — MEERUT POLICE (@meerutpolice) May 13, 2026 To sum up, from the above findings, it is clear that the incident is not from Meerut, it’s from Hapur, and the clip does not depict vandalism of mosques. The post Mosques vandalized, Muslim homes burnt down in Meerut? No, Hapur video falsely viral appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.
First crypto, now data centers: How tech is reshaping this North Carolina community
Cryptocurrency mines are being repurposed to power the AI boom, sparking a regional backlash.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. In Murphy, North Carolina, a peaceful mountain town once defined by birdsong and swaying trees, a steady electric hum cuts through the calm. The noise from a nearby cryptocurrency mine has intruded on Rebecca and Tom Lash’s lives since it opened in 2021. “There was nothing in this little pasture but these electric lines,” Rebecca Lash said, as she and Tom stood on the hill overlooking the mine. “And it was just nice and quiet.” The Lashes came to Cherokee County eight years ago to settle down and enjoy their older age in view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They grew more and more incensed as three cryptocurrency mines opened near their home within the last five years. Now, the landscape is shifting again as one of those mines becomes an artificial intelligence data center. Western North Carolina is seeing a local manifestation of a national trend. Across the country, communities that spent years trying to stop cryptocurrency mines are confronting a new and potentially larger wave of digital infrastructure that powers AI. As profits from crypto mining have fallen, the companies behind it have begun converting their operations into facilities designed to handle the computing that underpins that burgeoning industry. “The big AI centers and the big data centers, there’s some horror stories about people that live near those,” said Tom Lash. This transition is triggering a growing backlash. Residents and local officials in Cherokee County and beyond fear that these immense operations — which consume as much electricity and water as small towns — will alter rural communities with few land-use restrictions. Towns and counties across western North Carolina have begun passing moratoriums and considering new regulations as they scramble to respond to an industry many say arrived faster than local authorities could understand or control it. The shift is possible because crypto mines and AI data centers rely on the same underlying resources: enormous amounts of electricity, industrial-scale cooling systems, and large buildings capable of housing thousands of servers that run constantly. That infrastructure has made crypto operations attractive targets for companies racing to build AI computing capacity. Political and environmental conditions of Cherokee County are easing the transition, especially in post-industrial communities that need economic invigoration. In Marble, Core Scientific’s cryptocurrency mining site-turned-data-center once housed American Thread, which produced thread for the garment industry until it closed in 2015, taking hundreds of jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual taxes with it. The region’s abundant water, mild climate, and lack of zoning restrictions make it attractive. Late last year, Core Scientific announced plans to merge with CoreWeave, which leases computing power to AI companies. Though that deal fell through in October, Core Scientific has publicly said it is still converting facilities like the one in Marble to handle artificial intelligence workloads. That facility consumes as much power as a medium-sized town. Core Scientific did not respond to a request for comment. CoreWeave declined to comment. Becoming an AI data center has required quite an expansion. According to Cherokee County commissioners and a public records request filed by commissioner Ben Adams, the company submitted a site plan last year that included more than 170 diesel generators, most of which would provide backup power. Records released by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality after an inquiry by Grist showed that they were exempt from air-quality permitting requirements because they were classified as backup systems. The site spreads across 250,000 square feet, or 7 acres. The company is working with neighboring utilities to meet its water and sewer needs, and it’s digging three wells to tap the local water table. The data center sought a wastewater contract with the nearby town of Andrews, but Mayor James Reid told Grist officials denied the request because the company lacked an environmental plan. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 2000w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/GettyImages-1235716024_data-center-construction.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1125" width="2000" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> Data centers are straining the grid. Can they be forced to pay for it? Naveena Sadasivam He’s also not happy that a soccer complex Core Scientific had promised hasn’t materialized. What’s more, he thinks the facility is an eyesore. “I wouldn’t wish this on any county or entity, ever,” said Reid. “It’s absolutely destroyed Marble.” Taxes, at least, are back. The county received $268,000 in 2024 from the Marble facility’s last full year of the crypto operation, with a steep drop last year, mostly because of data center construction. In an email, County Tax Assessor Teresa Ricks said her office is working with a contractor to appraise the value of the Marble data center and its equipment in hopes the community will receive every cent it’s entitled to. Adams doesn’t think the revenue is worth the impact the operation has on the community. He ran on an anti-crypto campaign in 2022. Although he wants to lure new business, he doesn’t want to see the county’s rural nature change and worries the data centers will bring noise and pollution. During a commissioners’ meeting in January, he begged his colleagues to renew a moratorium on crypto mining that expired a year ago and include AI data centers in the restriction. “If we don’t do something, our little peaceful town’s going to turn into something else and people are going to come here looking to put stuff in our town,” he said at the time. Another commissioner expressed concern that the Trump administration’s efforts to discourage local regulation of AI would hamstring any county action. “It would require a tremendous amount of resources, money to fight that back,” one commissioner said. In the end, nothing happened that evening. But Cherokee County’s circumstance has alarmed communities throughout the region. Since January, officials across western North Carolina — in towns like Boone and Clyde, and counties like Swain and Clay — and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have adopted temporary bans or moratoriums on new data centers. In Canton, where a recently decommissioned paper mill might become a data center, the town council approved a moratorium in February before a crowd so large it couldn’t fit in the town hall building. The temporary bans, like the one that existed in Cherokee County from 2024 to 2025, are meant to give communities breathing room as they consider more permanent limits. Like Canton’s ordinance, many of the moratoriums were passed before any formal data center proposals emerged. In April, Democratic state representative Lyndsey Prather introduced legislation that would scale back incentives for data centers and require them to pay the full cost of their energy use. The tide is also beginning to turn against these operations elsewhere in the U.S. Lawmakers in Maine are considering a statewide ban, and similar bills are under consideration from New York to Oklahoma to Michigan. But as Cherokee County shows, a moratorium can come and go without a clear result, even as data center construction continues to hum. Adams, who is in his final year in office, is reconvening the county planning board to explore ways to limit new data centers without imposing zoning laws. A pro-business conservative, Adams said he has struggled to reconcile his support for economic growth with what he sees as a need to preserve the county’s rural character and manage its rapid transformation. “I do believe, one, that we are stewards of our property,” Adams said. “Two, I think we can’t possibly keep out all these bad elements coming in. Three, growth is inevitable, but I hope that we can maintain it and keep it more of a peaceful community.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline First crypto, now data centers: How tech is reshaping this North Carolina community on May 14, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.
The Brazilian government keeps giving out mining licenses in the Amazon – in spite of evidence of gold ‘laundering’
An InfoAmazonia investigation found patterns of illegal gold laundering in the Tapajós River basin in Pará state, where Indigenous communities like the Munduruku people face mercury contamination from mining activity.
In the kitchen of Alnice Poxo Munduruku, fresh fish keeps the ancestral traditions of those who live along the vast Tapajós River alive. As the fire burns, the family cleans the fish while keeping a close eye on 11-year-old Aleckson. Born with cerebral palsy, which limits his mobility and speech, he has needed continuous care since birth. Like everyone here, he loves fish. But the village’s food carries an invisible danger. Tests by scientists from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, or Fiocruz, show that Aleckson, his parents, and nearly everyone in neighboring communities have mercury levels above the safe threshold. Research by Fiocruz indicates that the contamination stems from gold mining, where mercury is used to separate the metal and then spreads through the rivers into the food chain. This poisoning results not only from illegal mining but also from decisions and omissions by the Brazilian government. An exclusive InfoAmazonia investigation has found that Brazil’s National Mining Agency, or ANM, still maintains mining permits with signs of irregularities, such as reported gold production with no evidence of extraction consistent with the declared volumes — a practice identified by oversight bodies as illegal gold laundering. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_61-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A little boy sits sandwiched between his worried parents" data-caption="Aleckson has cerebral palsy, a condition that restricts his mobility and speech. He has required continuous care since birth. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Aleckson has cerebral palsy, a condition that restricts his mobility and speech. He has required continuous care since birth. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia Created in 1989 to regulate mining during the Tapajós gold rush that ran from the late 1970s to the 1990s, Garimpeiro Mining Permits (PLGs) were meant to be a simplified authorization for supposedly small-scale, low-impact operations. Decades later, what began as artisanal mining has become industrial-scale extraction involving heavy equipment, dredges, and mercury. These permits now give a veneer of legality to large-scale illegal mining in Tapajós, sidestepping legal limits. For more than a decade, oversight agencies have warned the mining authority about the irregular use of PLGs. In 2022, the Comptroller General of the Union uncovered a series of illegalities in an audit. The following year, Operation Sisaque — carried out by Brazil’s Federal Police (PF), Federal Revenue Service, and Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) — exposed one of the Amazon’s largest gold-laundering schemes, which relied on PLGs in Tapajós. In 2025, the Federal Court of Accounts reached similar conclusions, identifying structural flaws that enable gold of illegal origin to be legalized. Even so, our reporting found that between 2022 and 2026, of the 540 PLGs that declared gold sales in the Tapajós River basin, nearly half (263) showed no evidence of extraction consistent with the amounts reported. This suggests these permits may be used to launder gold extracted illegally elsewhere — a practice known as “gold laundering.” Roughly 70 percent of the mining activity in the region lies within 10 kilometers of the PLGs that declared gold production. This proximity suggests that illegal mining operations, including those operating inside conservation areas and Indigenous lands, may be using these permits to bring their gold into the formal market. Nearly 60 percent of the gold from legalized mining in Brazil has passed through a Tapajós PLG over the past four years, totaling $2.03 billion (10 billion Brazilian reais) in declared production in the basin during that period. The information for this investigation comes from the VEIO (Verification and Investigation of Gold Origin) platform, which cross-references mining and deforestation data with mineral production taxes and gold export figures. The tool was developed by InfoAmazonia in partnership with Instituto Dados, with support from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. The PLG is a “sham document” that sustains this system despite the Brazilian government’s inability to put an end to gold mining in the Amazon, according to Danicley Aguiar, coordinator of Greenpeace Brasil’s Indigenous Peoples Front. “It is environmentally impossible for these permits to meet even minimal conditions. Yet they continue to exist because they are part of a structural problem,” he says. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_09_crop-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="The view of a wide river" data-caption="Gold mining along the Tapajós River impacts the health of communities in the Sawre Muybu Indigenous territory. Here, a dredger operates in an area linked to mercury contamination. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Gold mining along the Tapajós River impacts the health of communities in the Sawre Muybu Indigenous territory. Here, a dredger operates in an area linked to mercury contamination. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia PLGs have become the backbone of illegal mining in Tapajós: Without them, gold would have to be transported through clandestine routes, often across borders, before entering the formal market. With them, gold can be declared as legally sourced and leave the Amazon already carrying a stamp of legitimacy. Multiple mining fronts Gerson Harlei Selzler, president of the Minuano Cooperative of Miners and Prospectors, previously headed the Cooperativa dos Garimpeiros do Brasil, whose members were investigated in Operation Sisaque for “gold laundering.” Among them were his father, Nelson Selzler, accused of supplying gold to the scheme using falsified documents, and Lillian Rodrigues Pena Fernandes, who, according to the PF, owned a company used to launder gold and ran the operation with her husband, Diego de Mello. Although not indicted in Operation Sisaque, Gerson reported selling $548,780 (2.7 million Brazilian reais) in gold in 2023 through a PLG whose area shows no signs of extraction, such as deforestation characteristic of mining activity. He also jointly administered a PLG with Nelson Selzler in which InfoAmazonia identified declarations of gold unsupported by evidence of exploitation. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=513&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsMinuano_Planet.png?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A satellite map" data-caption="Fragmented into seven individual permits, the Minuano Cooperative garimpo authorized inside the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA) reports gold overproduction in only two PLGs, shown in red. " data-credit="Planet Inc. (09/2025). Source: ANM"/> Fragmented into seven individual permits, the Minuano Cooperative garimpo authorized inside the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA) reports gold overproduction in only two PLGs, shown in red. Planet Inc. (09/2025). Source: ANM Founded in 2022, Minuano began declaring production only in 2024, coinciding with when the main suspects in Operation Sisaque stopped reporting gold transactions. Since then, the cooperative has declared roughly $9.76 million (48 million Brazilian reais) in gold production linked to two PLGs inside the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA), where it operates without authorization from the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, or ICMBio, the office responsible for managing federal protected areas in Brazil. According to VEIO’s analysis, the volume declared in these PLGs exceeds by a factor of 10 the extraction estimates cited in studies, which suggest around 20 grams of gold per hectare explored. The two PLGs used by Minuano are part of a group of eight permits held by the cooperative inside the Tapajós APA. Seven of them are contiguous, extending along the Creporizinho River, a tributary of the Crepori and Tapajós rivers, which run through the conservation unit. Satellite images show an operation functioning as an integrated whole, despite being formally divided into parcels of up to 50 hectares, the maximum area allowed for individual mining under an ANM resolution issued in 2025. As a result, the work falls under more permissive environmental rules, since each parcel has its own authorization and environmental license issued by the city government of Itaituba. This arrangement enables large-scale extraction under simplified requirements, and satellite images reveal that the mining has already altered the river’s course. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=600&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Captura-de-tela-2026-05-11-175745.png?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="The February meeting in Brasília regarding PLGs in the Tapajós region brought together, from right to left, Diego de Mello (accused by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office of "gold laundering"), Fernando Lucas (president of the Federation of Garimpeiros Cooperatives of Pará), state legislator Wescley Tomáz (Avante), and José Fernando (director of the National Mining Agency — ANM). " data-credit="Instagram"/> The February meeting in Brasília regarding PLGs in the Tapajós region brought together, from right to left, Diego de Mello (accused by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office of “gold laundering”), Fernando Lucas (president of the Federation of Garimpeiros Cooperatives of Pará), state legislator Wescley Tomáz (Avante), and José Fernando (director of the National Mining Agency — ANM). Instagram Minuano holds 15 PLGs in total, including the eight within the Tapajós APA, covering 2,200 hectares. According to ICMBio, the cooperative has requested authorization to operate inside the conservation unit, but the application remains under review. Beyond Minuano’s PLGs, Gerson also holds mining permits as an individual. He recently obtained from the ANM the transfer of rights to conduct gold prospecting on a 3,200‑hectare area, also within the Tapajós APA. For that area, VEIO found that mining was already underway, yet no production had been reported to the regulator. Despite mounting evidence and repeated warnings, the ANM continues to engage with suspicious actors in the sector. In March of this year, under the banner of expanding mining legalization in the region, the Pará state government backed the Legal Mining Expedition, an initiative supported by the mining agency and cooperatives. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260222_Itaituba_e_Miritituba_38-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A storefront where Gold is painted outside" data-caption="Itaituba, a city in the Tapajós region, is home to Brazil’s largest mining front. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Itaituba, a city in the Tapajós region, is home to Brazil’s largest mining front. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia Diego de Mello, accused by the Federal Police of running the laundering scheme revealed in Operation Sisaque, attended a meeting in Brasília alongside ANM director José Fernando. The expedition held meetings in mining areas and opened channels to help legalize PLGs with applications already filed with the agency. Mining concentrated in the hands of a few There are currently 9,101 mining applications to exploit the Tapajós APA, including 6,255 PLGs. This report found that 21 individuals control more than half (3,382) of these applications. Some have declared gold production in more than 30 different PLGs, a situation the Federal Court of Accounts described as a “real circumvention of the area limits established by law.” One such figure is lawyer José Antunes, who chairs the Environmental Law Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association in Itaituba and holds 162 PLGs of 50 hectares each within the conservation unit, more than 8,000 hectares in total. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=827&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/PLGsJoseAntunes_Planet-1.png?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A grid map" data-caption="José Antunes holds 162 PLGs in the Tapajós APA, spanning more than 8,000 hectares. In 31 of them, highlighted in red, he has reported production — including in areas with no detectable mining activity. " data-credit="Planet Inc. (09/2025). Source: ANM"/> José Antunes holds 162 PLGs in the Tapajós APA, spanning more than 8,000 hectares. In 31 of them, highlighted in red, he has reported production — including in areas with no detectable mining activity. Planet Inc. (09/2025). Source: ANM Between 2022 and 2023, Antunes reported $13 million (64 million Brazilian reais) in gold sales across 31 PLGs. In several of them, there is no evidence of mining activity; in others, the extraction appears to extend beyond licensed boundaries. In December 2024, inspectors from Ibama, Brazil’s environmental regulator, documented active, unauthorized mining in areas covered by Antunes’s PLGs, including illegal mercury use, river alteration, and deforestation in Permanent Preservation Areas (APPs). Hot gold on the market, mercury in the body Aleckson was born already contaminated with mercury. He has never walked, uses a wheelchair, and depends on his mother, Alnice, for nearly every task. Soon after birth, he was diagnosed with spastic tetraparesis, a neurological condition that causes weakness and muscle stiffness in his limbs. The disability was attributed to a lack of oxygen during a long and painful labor. In his most recent test, Aleckson had 6.9 micrograms of mercury per gram of hair (µg/g) in his system, three times the upper safe limit of 2.3 µg/g defined by the World Health Organization and Brazil’s Ministry of Health. <img class="article-asset " src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Fish grill over a fire" data-caption="Indigenous residents prepare fish for a meal in the Sawre Muybu Indigenous territory. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 2700w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?resize=330%2C220&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?resize=768%2C512&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&quality=75&strip=all 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?resize=150%2C100&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1800" width="2700" loading="lazy" decoding="async" /> <img class="article-asset " src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="A woman cuts fish" data-caption="Indigenous residents prepare fish for a meal in the Sawre Muybu Indigenous territory. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 2399w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?resize=330%2C220&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?resize=768%2C512&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?resize=2048%2C1366&quality=75&strip=all 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_48_crop_baixares-1.jpg?resize=150%2C100&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1600" width="2399" loading="lazy" decoding="async" /> <img class="article-asset " src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Fish roast on a large leaf" data-caption="Indigenous residents prepare fish for a meal in the Sawre Muybu Indigenous territory. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 2700w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?resize=330%2C220&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?resize=768%2C512&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&quality=75&strip=all 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_53-1.jpg?resize=150%2C100&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="1800" width="2700" loading="lazy" decoding="async" /> Indigenous residents prepare fish for a meal in the Sawre Muybu Indigenous territory. Luis Ushirobira/InfoAmazonia “We eat fish almost every day. It’s very hard to change that, because this is how we were raised,” says Alnice, as her son devours a stew of surubim and barbado prepared by her sisters. In one of her tests, Alnice recorded 9 µg/g of mercury, more than four times the safe limit. Researcher Isabela Freitas Vaz, from Fiocruz, has followed the case since the first tests. “The signs we’ve observed, not only in Aleckson’s case but in many children, point to a high-risk scenario,” she says. Although a definitive causal link between mercury exposure and the observed clinical conditions has yet to be proven, researchers say the warning signs are consistent: people with high exposure levels exhibit indicators associated with the potential development of mercury-related diseases. “The next step is to establish this causal connection between contamination levels and the symptoms we are seeing, so it can guide public policy,” explains Isabela Vaz. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_25-2.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="A pregnant woman from the Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory participates in a Fiocruz study with researcher Isabela Freitas Vaz on the effect of mercury on Munduruku health. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> A pregnant woman from the Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory participates in a Fiocruz study with researcher Isabela Freitas Vaz on the effect of mercury on Munduruku health. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia The Tapajós basin lies in western Pará state, extending into northern Mato Grosso and southern Amazonas. It consists of the Tapajós River and major tributaries such as the Jamanxim, Teles Pires, and Juruena, which converge toward Santarém. Mining is concentrated in the Tapajós Gold Province, centered on Itaituba and including Jacareacanga and Novo Progresso. This area is home to Brazil’s largest active mining front. In February, InfoAmazonia traveled along stretches of the rivers feeding the basin and accompanied Fiocruz researchers as they collected samples from pregnant women and newborns of the Munduruku people. The researchers are investigating how mercury contamination in the Tapajós may be linked to Minamata disease, a severe neurological syndrome caused by acute exposure to methylmercury, the metal’s most toxic form. Identified in the 1950s in Minamata, Japan, the disease struck thousands who were acutely poisoned by large volumes of industrial mercury waste dumped into the fishing bay. Many victims were left with lifelong impairments, and more than 900 died. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="A sample of a baby’s hair is collected for Fiocruz research into the effect of mercury on Munduruku health. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> A sample of a baby’s hair is collected for Fiocruz research into the effect of mercury on Munduruku health. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia Unlike the disaster in Minamata, scientists say contamination in the Tapajós occurs slowly and persistently. It is chronic rather than sudden, and its effects can take years to appear. “The main source of contamination in the Amazon today is fish consumption. The mercury used in mining enters the river, becomes organic [methylmercury], and accumulates in the food chain,” says Pedro Basta, an analyst with the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health and a member of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Pregnant Women and Newborns Exposed to Mercury in the Amazon. Because the metal accumulates over time, it remains in the environment for decades, even in places where mining has ceased. In the Tapajós basin, it is most concentrated in carnivorous fish such as barbado, surubim, and tucunaré, species widely consumed by local communities. Since 2019, when studies began in some villages, nearly half of the children examined have shown heavy metal levels above the safe limit. Among pregnant women, concentrations reach up to five times the recommended threshold, passing the substance to the fetus. “Mercury causes irreversible brain damage. It can cause tremors, numbness, muscle weakness, and long-term neurological problems,” says Basta. The most significant harm may not be visible deformities but progressive neurological impairment, including delayed development, cognitive difficulties, and reduced learning capacity. For those with levels above 6.9 µg/g, considered high risk, the recommendation is to reduce fish consumption. In practice, that means altering the dietary foundation of entire communities. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_23.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Pedro Basta, an analyst with the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health and a member of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Pregnant Women and Newborns Exposed to Mercury in the Amazon. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Pedro Basta, an analyst with the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health and a member of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Pregnant Women and Newborns Exposed to Mercury in the Amazon. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia In the Tapajós between the Sawré Muybu and Sawré Bap’in Indigenous lands, the water no longer retains its natural color. When we visited in February, a dozen mining rafts churned the river’s emerald green into a murky brown, five operating within a 6,700-hectare PLG authorized by the National Mining Agency (ANM) for the Cooperativa dos Garimpeiros da Amazônia, or Coogam. One raft worked less than a kilometer from the Daje Kapap village. The area Coogam exploits along this stretch of the Tapajós forms a kind of barrier between the two territories, where the noise and movement of the mining barges are nearly constant. According to ANM records, the cooperative’s PLG authorization (850.796/2009) expired in January 2025; its environmental license expired in June 2024 and was resubmitted only early this year. Even so, the barges continued operating. ANM scheduled a task force to inspect this and other PLGs on the Tapajós, but says the inspection never occurred because of a lack of funds. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_02_detalhe.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A barge on a river" data-caption="A mining dredger releases sediment into the Tapajós River during gold extraction near the Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> A mining dredger releases sediment into the Tapajós River during gold extraction near the Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia Between 2022 and 2026, this PLG reported $5.49 million (R$27 million) in gold sales. Coogam holds 32 PLGs in the Tapajós region and has declared $22.97 million (R$113 million) from seven of them over the past five years. ‘Regulatory permissiveness’ In December 2024, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) filed a public civil action seeking to suspend all mining permits within the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA). According to Federal Prosecutor Gilberto Batista Naves Filho, who filed the lawsuit, the permits were issued without prior ICMBio analysis, a requirement explicitly stated in Article 17 of Law 7.805/1989 for activities in conservation units. “We are facing an evident lack of mercury control, an unacceptable risk for rivers and public health, especially for Indigenous and vulnerable populations who depend on the region’s rivers for their survival,” Naves Filho states in the civil action. ICMBio told InfoAmazonia that mining activities within the Tapajós APA require prior authorization from the environmental agency, which has not been granted in most cases. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260226_Poxo_Muybu_baixares_32.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="While gold miners use mercury, Indigenous communities in the Tapajós basin consume fish contaminated by it. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> While gold miners use mercury, Indigenous communities in the Tapajós basin consume fish contaminated by it. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia The result, according to the MPF, is an ongoing environmental collapse. With 83,000 hectares already affected, an area larger than New York City or Chicago, the Tapajós APA has become Brazil’s federally protected area most heavily degraded by mining, according to MapBiomas data compiled by Greenpeace at InfoAmazonia’s request. ICMBio reports that at least 829 PLGs have been authorized by ANM within the Tapajós APA without any review by the management body. ANM interprets the law differently and argues in the MPF lawsuit that environmental authorization is required only when exploration begins, not when permits are issued. For the MPF, this interpretation nullifies environmental oversight and turns mining permits into tools that give a veneer of legality to illegally extracted gold. The agency describes ANM’s actions as “merely notarial,” issuing permits without assessing environmental feasibility or the cumulative impacts of hundreds of mining fronts. The lawsuit seeks $20.33 million (R$100 million) in collective moral damages from the ANM. After an unsuccessful conciliation hearing in March, the case awaits a ruling from the Federal Court. The Federal Court of Accounts reached similar conclusions. In an audit completed in July 2025, the court identified “regulatory permissiveness” and systemic failures in oversight of the gold supply chain. The report notes that ANM’s omissions enable PLGs to launder illegal gold and artificially fragment areas, making large-scale operations viable under rules intended for small-scale mining. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_55-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Children play jump rope in a field" data-caption="Children play in the Sawré Muybu village. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Children play in the Sawré Muybu village. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia The court ordered ANM to cancel irregular authorizations within 90 days. That deadline has passed. On the ground, the pattern repeats. Between December 2024 and January 2025, Ibama ordered the suspension of 342 PLGs in the Tapajós APA after an operation against illegal mining. Inspectors found multiple violations, including lack of ICMBio authorization, destruction of vegetation, mining in permanent preservation areas, and extensive mercury use. For Ibama’s director of environmental protection, Jair Schmitt, the issue goes far beyond isolated violations. Even permits considered “regular,” he says, contain structural illegalities, from municipal-level licensing, contested by the federal agency and MPF, to lack of meaningful environmental oversight. “There is no mercury legally available for mining in Brazil today,” Schmitt says. “For this reason, even PLGs considered regular are not, because there is likely no lawful mercury available for their operations.” Ibama estimates that producing one gram of gold requires roughly one gram of mercury. But after the Minamata Convention took effect in 2017, Brazil stopped importing the substance and sharply restricted its use. According to Schmitt, this means the current scale of mining cannot be reconciled with any legal scenario. Although the agency claims it has no authority over the need for prior authorization for exploration in the Tapajós APA, it has begun notifying PLG permit holders within the conservation unit that they must secure ICMBio approval before starting exploration. Still, there is no news of any permits operating within the conservation unit being revoked. The management plan for the Tapajós APA, in development since 2020, is expected to be completed this year. The proposal includes creating zoning areas within the territory, including an urban-industrial zone, the largest in the unit, to organize landscapes already heavily degraded by mining and deforestation, where ICMBio says there may still be potential for mining. The plan’s drafting has been marked by pressure from groups linked to the mining sector, pushing to formalize the activity within the conservation unit, a move environmentalists criticize because of its environmental and social impacts. ‘Water becomes like milk’ In September 2025, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Santarém recommended annulling 15 PLGs granted in areas adjoining the Sawré Muybu, Sawré Bap’in, Munduruku, and Sai-Cinza territories, including the Coogam PLG documented during our February reporting trip. According to the MPF, these permits were issued without prior consultation with Indigenous communities, as required by International Labor Organization Convention 169. The agency also notes that barge and mining operations near the villages violate measures ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to contain mercury contamination. “It is unacceptable for state-licensed projects to inflict the same harm on Indigenous people as illegal mining,” prosecutor Thais Medeiros da Costa wrote in a recommendation sent to ANM in September 2025. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_08.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Chief Juarez Saw Munduruku from the Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Chief Juarez Saw Munduruku from the Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia “When the prospectors arrive and start working, the water becomes like milk,” said Chief Juarez Saw Munduruku of the Sawré Muybu Indigenous Land. “We can’t bathe anymore; it causes itching. It used to be joyful; children played along the riverbank. Today that’s over,” he says. According to the chief, mercury exposure has become part of daily life for families, with symptoms resembling those researchers are investigating as possible effects of poisoning. “My son’s contamination level has reached the limit. He already feels numbness in his legs and arms. We keep wondering … could this be what’s causing these symptoms?” the chief asks. Deivison Saw Munduruku, the chief’s son, is among the cases with the highest contamination levels recorded by researchers, nearly 10 times above the safe threshold. Aldira Akai Munduruku, deputy coordinator of the Pariri Indigenous Association and a teacher in Sawré-Muybu village, believes contamination may be linked to some children’s learning difficulties. “We notice that some children struggle to learn, and this is not normal,” she says. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_27.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="A classroom at the Sawre Ba’ay school in the Sawré Muybu village. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> A classroom at the Sawre Ba’ay school in the Sawré Muybu village. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia In 2019, the Pariri Association approached researcher Paulo Basta — the father of analyst Pedro Basta and coordinator of Fiocruz’s “environment, diversity, and health” research group — after the death of environmentalist Cássio Beda, who had lived among the Munduruku and developed a severe neurological condition. While mercury poisoning has not been confirmed as the cause, the physician who treated him noted the possibility of “secondary motor neuron disease and mercury intoxication” in a July 2017 report, as reported by Repórter Brasil. “We monitor the results and try to warn people. But it’s not only the Munduruku who can change this. We need more effective public policies,” Aldira says. Among the Indigenous residents interviewed, suspected miscarriages, numbness in the limbs, memory lapses, and tremors appeared frequently, symptoms the medical literature associates with high mercury levels. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_65.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="Children sit in a classroom" data-caption="Aldira Akai Munduruku, vice coordinator of the Pariri Indigenous Association and a teacher in the Sawré-Muybu village. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Aldira Akai Munduruku, vice coordinator of the Pariri Indigenous Association and a teacher in the Sawré-Muybu village. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia For Paulo Basta, who coordinates research in the region and is working to determine which symptoms are linked to mercury exposure, one conclusion is clear: continual exposure, combined with precarious living conditions in the villages, creates extreme vulnerability. In this setting, he says, mercury exacerbates existing inequalities, hindering child development and shaping the entire life trajectory of affected populations. “A child with mental deficits today becomes an adult with mental deficits tomorrow. They will struggle in school and later in the job market,” Basta explains. Paradoxically, when the Tapajós River swells during the Amazon’s winter rains, access to water becomes even more limited. As the river floods, contamination spreads into the streams supplying the villages, bringing mud and mercury. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260225_Sawre_Muybu_baixares_50.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="Indigenous residents swim, bathe, fish, and wash clothes in the Tapajós River. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Indigenous residents swim, bathe, fish, and wash clothes in the Tapajós River. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia On February 13, a federal court ruling underscored the severity of the health crisis in the Tapajós, ordering the federal government to provide drinking water to Indigenous communities and recognizing the structural abandonment aggravated by mining-related contamination. The National Mining Agency (ANM) stated that PLGs with environmental licenses are considered valid and that it is not the agency’s role to “question the validity of the documentation submitted,” saying it relies on licenses issued by other authorities. Regarding the Tapajós APA, the agency acknowledged the requirement for ICMBio approval and said it is working to identify and regularize permits lacking it. The agency maintains it is not responsible for identifying illegalities because it received the licenses “in good faith.” On the issue of irregularities, ANM said it does not authorize mercury use in PLGs. It acknowledged knowing of evidence of the laundering of gold, a practice linked to weaknesses in the self-declaration system, and said it uses inspections, data cross-checking, and satellite monitoring to detect inconsistencies between explored areas and reported production. <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_02-1-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="A view of a small village in the middle of a green forest" data-caption="The Sawré Muybu village. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> The Sawré Muybu village. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia “There are ongoing administrative investigations, some confidential, others public, into indications of irregularities in the gold production chain, including possible cases of laundering,” the ANM stated. The agency also said it has discussed prior consultation with Indigenous peoples but noted there is no automatic ban on mining within 10 kilometers of Indigenous lands, considered a direct-impact zone. In a statement to InfoAmazonia, it said it had no knowledge of the so-called “Legal Mining Expedition,” supported by the Pará state government, and did not comment on the meeting between representatives of the initiative and one of its directors. The report also contacted Coogam president Tânia Oliveira Sena, who declined to be interviewed. We also reached out to the defense of Nelson Selzler, who declined to comment on his mention in the Federal Police investigation and the activities of the Minuano Cooperative in the Tapajós APA. The report was unable to reach Gerson Harlei Selzler, Diego de Mello, or his wife, Lillian Rodrigues Pena Fernandes. Lawyer José Antunes has contested oversight authorities’ findings that no signs of mining were present in the PLGs where he declared production. He argues that the satellite images used to reach this conclusion “are not reliable for the Tapajós biome.” He also disputes the irregularity arising from lack of ICMBio authorization, saying his operations were licensed by Pará’s state environmental agency. Regarding the concentration of PLGs, Antunes claims it “represents almost nothing compared to the area of the Tapajós APA” and insists they “are all fully up to date.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=2048 2048w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260224_Sawre_Muybu_drone_03-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="An aerial view of a wide river" data-caption="Aerial view of the Tapajós River beside the Sawré Muybu village. " data-credit="Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia"/> Aerial view of the Tapajós River beside the Sawré Muybu village. Luis Ushirobira / InfoAmazonia Responding to Ibama’s citations for illegal mercury use in the area of his PLGs, Antunes said in a statement that the violations “were committed by miners who have no link to me, as they themselves stated.” He also criticized what he called sweeping generalizations in the investigations and argued for greater legal certainty for the sector, insisting he acts in good faith and within the law. For Danicley Aguiar of Greenpeace, the state’s failure to address the region’s economic dependence on mining ensures the activity will continue to thrive, even under a veneer of legality, while inflicting ongoing environmental and social harm. “Mining violates human rights in a widespread and systematic way. How can the state tolerate such an activity? How can it claim this is essential for regional development?” he asked. For the Munduruku, the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” areas does little to change daily life. Mining continues to contaminate the river, and the river remains the center of their existence. Methodology VEIO uses data from mining processes (SIGMINE) and mineral production declarations (CFEM), both provided by the National Mining Agency for the Legal Amazon. The tool cross-references this information with georeferenced data from DETER/Inpe deforestation alerts, Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and gold export figures from Comex Stat, Brazil’s foreign trade statistics system, to automatically analyze and flag potential irregularities. These alerts are updated weekly and indicate whether illegal activity is affecting Indigenous Lands, Quilombola Territories, Conservation Units or Rural Settlements. 1 of 1 Translated from the Portuguese original by Matt Sandy. This investigation was carried out with support from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Brazilian government keeps giving out mining licenses in the Amazon – in spite of evidence of gold ‘laundering’ on May 14, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Fábio Bispo, InfoAmazonia.
Niger suspends 9 French media outlets for alleged public order threat
Dakar, May 14, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in Niger to reverse the suspension of nine France-based news outlets and to release all four journalists jailed since last year. The affected outlets are state-funded broadcasters France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI), Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, TV5Monde network, the pan-African weekly...
Dakar, May 14, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in Niger to reverse the suspension of nine France-based news outlets and to release all four journalists jailed since last year. The affected outlets are state-funded broadcasters France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI), Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, TV5Monde network, the pan-African weekly Jeune Afrique, the independent investigative outlet Mediapart, the privately owned news channel TF1 Info, and the online outlets LSI Africa and France Afrique Média. “Niger’s new media regulator, which is supposed to safeguard press freedom, is already proving a disappointment. By suspending major news outlets, it is cementing a wave of media repression unfolding across the Alliance of Sahel States,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s Francophone Africa representative. “Nigerien authorities should immediately allow the nine suspended outlets to reach audiences in the country and cease their other censorship strategy of detaining journalists.” <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" height="683" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?w=1024" alt="Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso (from left), General Assimi Goïta of Mali, and General Abdourahamane Tchiani of Niger attend a summit in Mali in December 2025." class="wp-image-588261" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg 7152w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=2048,1366 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=570,380 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=652,435 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=760,507 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=1140,760 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=2000,1334 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AP25357451476873.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso (from left), General Assimi Goïta of Mali, and General Abdourahamane Tchiani of Niger attend a summit in Mali in December 2025. (Photo: Mali Government Information Center via AP) Following military coups, Niger and neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso expelled French troops from their territories, turned to Russia for military support, and formed an alliance to fight al-Qaeda and Islamic State-linked extremists. Niger’s National Communication Observatory (ONC), which was set up in September to regulate the media, said in a May 8 statement that it was suspending the nine outlets over the “repeated dissemination of content likely to seriously undermine public order, national unity, social cohesion, and the stability of republican institutions.” On May 5, Burkina Faso’s regulatory Superior Council of Communication (CSC) also banned TV5Monde, citing “numerous violations of the law, ethics, and professional standards” in its coverage of anti-terrorism operations in Burkina Faso and the April 25 attacks in Mali. Authorities united under the Alliance of Sahel States are increasingly aligned in their actions against media outlets covering the region’s ongoing security crisis. Separately, on May 8, Gazali Abdou Tasawa, a correspondent for German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) was provisionally released in Niger, after 105 days in detention. “Proceedings against him are still ongoing,” DW said in a statement, reviewed by CPJ. Niger was the second worst jailer of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa in CPJ’s latest annual prison census — tied with Rwanda and Ethiopia — with five journalists behind bars on December 1, 2025. Four remain in prison — Hamid Mahmoud, Ibro Chaibou, Oumarou Abou Kané, and Youssouf Sériba. CPJ’s calls to request comment from the ONC and CSC went unanswered. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
DR Congo: M23 Rebels Commit Atrocities in Uvira
Palestinian photojournalist wins Pulitzer for breaking news photography
By Kim Wingerei Saher Alghorra, a Palestinian photojournalist, has won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of photographs published in The New York Times. What’s the scam? The scam is that so far, not a single Australian or New Zealand mainstream media outlet has reported on it, let alone dared show the “haunting images” from
By Kim Wingerei Saher Alghorra, a Palestinian photojournalist, has won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of photographs published in The New York Times. What’s the scam? The scam is that so far, not a single Australian or New Zealand mainstream media outlet has reported on it, let alone dared show the “haunting images” from the Gaza genocide. Instead, the focus has been on Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and, of course, the excesses of the rich and famous at the Met Gala. READ MORE: Palestinian photographer wins Pulitzer Prize for Gaza war images See the images Established in 1917, the Pulitzer Prizes are annual awards given by Columbia University for achievements in “journalism, arts and letters”. It’s the equivalent of our Walkley Awards (not the Walkey) and New Zealand’s Voyager Awards. Saher Alghorra won for his “haunting, sensitive series showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from the war with Israel.” The Pulitzer profile says: Saher Alghorra is a photojournalist who was born, lives and works in Gaza. He got his first camera in 2017, and immediately began chronicling the fragile existence of everyday Palestinians. Alghorra began his work as a freelance photojournalist in 2021 with many international agencies and institutions. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Time magazine, The Telegraph and The New York Times. In July 2023, he became the ZUMA Press Wire Service chief photojournalist in Gaza. In 2023, an image of his was chosen as one of TIME Magazine 100 best photos of the year. In 2024, he won Best in Show at the Communications Arts Photography Annual, for his coverage for ZUMA in Gaza during the ongoing war. See the series here. Kim Wingerei is a businessman turned writer and commentator. He is passionate about free speech, human rights, democracy and the politics of change. Originally from Norway, Kim has lived in Australia for 30 years. Author of ‘Why Democracy is Broken – A Blueprint for Change’. Republished from Michael West Media with permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
A Unique Oregon Law Allows It to Block Healthcare Deals. In Five Years, the State Hasn’t Done So Once.
The post A Unique Oregon Law Allows It to Block Healthcare Deals. In Five Years, the State Hasn’t Done So Once. appeared first on ProPublica.
Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica Dana Gibbon was 18 weeks pregnant with her first baby when her OB-GYN told her at an appointment that she wouldn’t be her doctor anymore. OB-GYN services were ending at the clinic in Corvallis, a college town of 60,000 in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The doctor said all of the Corvallis Clinic’s OB-GYNs were resigning. “We have appreciated the opportunity to participate in your care and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the clinic said in a subsequent letter to patients. The closure of the Corvallis OB-GYN practice came two years after a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, bought the clinic. The subsidiary, Optum Oregon, cited a national shortage of physicians that made it hard to replace doctors who left and increased the workload for those who remained. Gibbon frantically looked for another doctor. Friends recommended two other obstetrics practices, but both had closed. Gibbon settled on a small hospital close to home with four dedicated maternity beds — all of which were full when she was due to deliver in April, delaying her induction three times. Her healthy baby boy was eventually born on April 29 by cesarean section, a procedure she’d hoped to avoid. “It’s impossible not to wonder if things may have gone differently if there had been more labor and delivery beds in the area,” she said. Corvallis patients like Gibbon faced this disruption despite a unique Oregon law intended to prevent it. In 2021, the state became the first in the country to give its state health department the broad power to block acquisitions and mergers of hospitals, hospices and medical practices, an effort to counteract the consolidation that research shows is cutting competition and driving up costs nationwide. Lawmakers said Oregon’s novel oversight power would stop multibillion-dollar deals from reducing care and increasing costs. State regulators got the authority to reject transactions or to add conditions and levy fines if companies disregarded them. The law was hailed as a national model. Five years later, Oregon has not formally blocked a single transaction or issued any fines. While the new oversight is credited with leading to the withdrawal of two high-profile transactions — a merger of two Portland-area hospital systems and the acquisition of a nonprofit that provides Medicaid benefits to half a million Oregonians — some people who supported the law say it has not been nearly as effective as hoped. Dr. John Santa, a retired physician and former member of the Oregon Health Policy Board, which oversees the state agency responsible for implementing the new law, said his interactions with the program were “so disappointing and fell so short of what I expected. I never imagined it would perform as poorly as it has.” Of the nine healthcare deals for which regulators have done follow-up reviews, at least three had outcomes the law was meant to forestall, ProPublica’s examination of state records found. UnitedHealth Group acquired a home health provider, LHC Group, for $5.4 billion in 2023. It shuttered a rural hospice agency in Central Oregon two months later, funneling staff and patients to a location nearly 30 miles away. The state later said the move raised concerns about a potential reduction in access. A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the closure did not reduce services because patients and staff were reassigned and it continued to serve the same areas. After Amazon bought One Medical for $3.9 billion that same year, it closed the group’s downtown Portland practice while cutting $100 million in operating expenses nationwide. It saw a drop in Oregon patient satisfaction scores, as measured by an outside group, a state review noted. Amazon declined to comment on the One Medical deal. Oregon in 2022 approved the acquisition of a hospice provider by a private equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The firm told regulators that it wouldn’t change locations or staffing. Oregon took the company at its word — then watched it close a Salem hospice after the deal closed. In a follow-up report, the state noted the closure and alluded to “some changes” in Oregon staffing; it would not disclose whether this referred to adding employees or cutting them, saying the companies involved had designated the information confidential. A spokesperson for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice didn’t address the closure but said in a statement that its hospice acquisition was “premised on the company delivering high-quality care.” The firm’s hospice providers in 2024 and 2025 received higher ratings than any other national provider in standardized consumer surveys, the spokesperson said, and the company improved its ratio of nurses to patients by 5.5% over its ownership period. Clare Pierce-Wrobel, the health policy and analytics director for Oregon’s health department, the Oregon Health Authority, acknowledged that the state held some mergers to a lower standard while the program was just getting started. “I think if those notices were received when the program was fully up and running, there may have been a different result,” she said. Dr. Nicole Kruppa had a thriving OB-GYN practice at the Corvallis Clinic before it was taken over by Optum. She told ProPublica that she quit after the sale because her workload grew unsustainable. She said burnout became so intense that she worried she would either make a medical mistake or get in a late-night car accident while driving to deliver a baby. Optum didn’t fill vacancies when medical staff went out on planned leave, she said. Annual medical exams had to be postponed so the remaining OB-GYN staff could attend to emergencies, she said. “I felt I could no longer provide my patients the care that they deserved,” Kruppa said. A UnitedHealth spokesperson, Tyler Mason, said Optum helped keep the Corvallis Clinic’s doors open. “Our focus has been stabilizing practices, expanding access, and strengthening clinical services to preserve local care, maintain critical services and ensure patients can continue receiving the care they depend on close to home,” Mason said. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="501" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?w=752" alt="A woman stares directly into the camera smiling and lying on a pillow. An out of focus baby wearing a hat and swaddled in a blanket lies on her chest." class="wp-image-77870" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Dana-Gibbon-OR-healthcare-acquisitions-hi-res.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> Dana Gibbon gave birth to a healthy 7-pound, 2-ounce boy on April 29. Gibbon was 18 weeks pregnant when her OB-GYN at the Corvallis Clinic told her she wouldn’t be her doctor anymore, causing Gibbon to search frantically for a new doctor. Amanda Gibbon When Oregon lawmakers created the merger and acquisition oversight program in 2021, they said they weren’t trying to stop every healthcare deal — just to ensure that those transactions made sense. Consolidation in the healthcare industry is rife. About 50% of the country’s doctors were employed by a hospital system in 2024, research has shown, up from less than 30% in 2012. As competition narrows, studies show, prices can increase, the quality of care can decline and treatment can be harder to access, especially in rural areas. Following Oregon’s example, five states last year approved laws that expanded their authorities over healthcare consolidation. One of them, Maine, adopted a bill this April that requires state review and approval of the sale of healthcare facilities when private equity firms are involved. New Mexico in 2024 also adopted a bill similar to Oregon’s. Pierce-Wrobel, the health authority official, said Oregon is clearly a national leader. “People in Oregon are lucky to have a program like this in place,” she said. “The ability to actually see how these decisions are made and how it’s actually impacting your healthcare before it happens is novel and addresses a real, pressing issue,” she said, “which is affordability in healthcare, which impacts all of us.” Although Oregon hasn’t blocked any of the 65 transactions it has evaluated, it has imposed conditions on 15. It has required doctors to continue serving patients covered by Medicare, the federal insurance program for seniors and the disabled. It has required reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare to continue and ordered detailed annual reporting. The state also has required a deeper six-month review in seven cases, three of which are still underway. The other four deals were withdrawn, notably: the proposed merger of Oregon Health & Science University and Legacy Health, two major Portland-area hospital systems; and a proposed merger involving CareOregon, which administers Medicaid plans for more than 500,000 low-income people. Facing a public outcry, the healthcare organizations canceled their deals. Dr. Jane Zhu, a primary care physician and associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University who studies healthcare access, said programs like Oregon’s add sorely needed transparency to medical dealmaking. But they “don’t necessarily change the equation” when it comes to the trend toward consolidation, she said in an email. Especially in rural areas, the fact remains that “regulators can approve the merger and prices go up and consolidation worsens, or they can block a merger and maybe there’s an immediate effect on the clinic’s solvency or sustainability.” According to Larry Kirsch, a health economist, one problem is that Oregon regulators have typically chosen the fastest option for reviewing acquisitions allowed under the law, 30 days. Kirsch said that’s not enough time to adequately study what a transaction will do to medical care. “I was gobsmacked by how superficial, how inconclusive, how nonrobust the investigation was,” said Kirsch, who has examined dozens of Oregon’s oversight reviews. “Some of them were so outrageous, you’d have to say that their eyes were totally closed.” Pierce-Wrobel said Oregon welcomes “public input to inform our review of individual transactions — as well as opportunities to improve how we implement this new program — in order to advance Oregon’s goals of health equity, lower costs, increased access and better care. That said, the program must operate within its statutory limits.” Nowhere are the limitations of the review process more evident than in the city of Corvallis, home to both Oregon State University and the Corvallis Clinic, which had operated as an independent, doctor-owned practice since 1947. Perhaps ironically, one of the clinic’s executives testified against the law in 2021 on behalf of the Oregon Independent Medical Coalition, a lobbying group for private practices. Scott Shollenbarger said that the group’s members were committed to remaining independent. “We passionately believe that healthcare is best delivered in an independent business model that is owned and governed by the owners of the business that also are responsible for the delivery of medical services to our respective populations,” he wrote at the time. But by 2023, the clinic’s finances had deteriorated and it struck a deal to be acquired by Optum Oregon. Kruppa, the former Corvallis employee and shareholder, said the clinic was losing up to $1 million a month at the time. With hundreds writing to the state to oppose the acquisition, regulators developed conditions to protect patients. They drew up requirements for the new owner to preserve existing clinical programs and accept an independent monitor to ensure compliance. As Oregon reviewed the deal, the clinic’s finances worsened, Kruppa told ProPublica. Doctors went without paychecks in the month before the deal went through, she said, in order to keep the clinic’s doors open until the transaction was approved. Then a Russian-linked ransomware hack targeted Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that provides payment and claims processing to hospitals and doctors’ offices. The attack disrupted medical practices across the country, including the Corvallis Clinic. Kruppa said the clinic was preparing for a bankruptcy filing, worried that the hack would further delay closing the deal. UnitedHealth said after the hack that it extended $9 billion in no-interest loans to hospitals and medical practices nationwide. In testimony to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, then-CEO Andrew Witty said: “I want this committee and the American public to know that the people of UnitedHealth Group will not rest — I will not rest — until we fix this.” Two weeks after the hack, the clinic told the state it was at risk of going under and asked for an emergency exemption from the ongoing review of the sale. Clinic attorneys assured the state the transaction was “expected to maintain essential services at or above current levels.” By creating a more stable operation, they wrote, the sale would also “improve the Clinic’s ability to attract and retain high-quality candidates for open positions.” Oregon’s oversight program agreed to dispense with its review — the only exemption it has granted — in just five days. The state jettisoned the guardrails it proposed previously. Pierce-Wrobel said the state cannot apply conditions to emergency requests that meet exemption criteria specified in the statute, nor can it review the deals afterward to measure their impacts. “I understand and hear the criticism, but we are responsible for implementing the law that established this program, and that is what was done,” she said. A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the company extended a zero-interest loan to the Corvallis Clinic within three weeks of the hack. The practice was “facing serious operational and financial challenges that put patient access at risk” before the hack, the spokesperson said. Since the purchase, “we’ve been working to stabilize practices, recruit clinicians, expand services and improve systems to help ensure patients continue to get the care they need.” The Corvallis Clinic’s changes became apparent soon after the sale. ProPublica spoke to more than 10 current or former patients. They described sometimes extensive disruptions to their care after the practice was sold: procedures delayed, longer waits for appointments and a steady stream of doctors leaving. One woman said her scheduled pap smear at the Corvallis Clinic was delayed more than six months. Another said she lost a doctor she trusted so deeply to deal sensitively with her history of trauma that she had no desire to find another doctor, even though she’s supposed to get frequent cancer screenings. Rebecca Geier, 67, said she has lost four doctors at the clinic in the last year. “It wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was disruptive to my continued care with these doctors,” she told ProPublica in an email. “The dreaded letters from Optum informing me that my doctor had left or was soon leaving the clinic just kept coming, one after another.” Three doctors at Mid-Valley Gastroenterology, a local practice, wrote to state regulators in March 2025 to say that two of the Corvallis Clinic’s gastroenterologists had withdrawn from a pool of area physicians who handled on-call care for emergencies at a major regional hospital system. They said Optum made the specialists opt out to save money. Optum “prioritized corporate profit and physician convenience over the well-being of both the patients they serve and the other medical professionals they work alongside,” the doctors wrote. Mason, the UnitedHealth spokesperson, said Optum did not interfere with or direct the physicians’ decisions. “Physicians make their own decisions about participating in on-call coverage based on what they can reasonably manage alongside caring for their patients,” Mason said. If Oregon hadn’t exempted the transaction from its oversight, it’s the type of impact that would have faced regulatory scrutiny during a follow-up review. The state convened a public forum about the deal, hearing testimony about what had happened. But regulators said they couldn’t investigate any further. The post A Unique Oregon Law Allows It to Block Healthcare Deals. In Five Years, the State Hasn’t Done So Once. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Rob Davis.
Writer M Lin on working through discomfort
You write about aiguo 爱国, or love of one’s country, as well as love of one’s family, one’s village, one’s spouse. What does loyalty mean to you, and why is it such a ripe topic?
You write about aiguo 爱国, or love of one’s country, as well as love of one’s family, one’s village, one’s spouse. What does loyalty mean to you, and why is it such a ripe topic? The part about aiguo, patriotic love, is unavoidable and drilled into every Chinese child if you grew up there. Patriotic education, which is mentioned in the collection, is very robust. Leaving the country and seeing it constantly now, from very far away—in both the Chinese context and how it’s portrayed in English language media—I feel I had to reflect on that emotion and discover that it’s not how it was taught to me. I still have patriotic feelings for China, but it’s no longer in the ways shaped by my political education. There was one place in the collection where the character was considering how China—as a country, people, and culture—has existed for thousands of years. What we know as [the People’s Republic of] China has only been around since 1949. There’s nuance. I’ve been discerning what my feelings are. Covid-19 is prominent in the collection. Covid put China at the center of the world’s attention—and by extension, Chinese people. Chinese citizens living abroad, Chinese Americans, and Asian people had different relationships with how China was perceived. Since I started writing this book during Covid, I dealt with the complexity of that feeling through my characters. In terms of loyalty, it’s different from love, but I’m interested in the fact that you put them together. Now when I think of loyalty, I think of Trump, because that’s someone to whom people’s loyalty is important. With the word loyalty, or the concept of loyalty, there’s a blindness in that idea. Love is more expansive. In the first story of The Memory Museum, “Scenes from Childhood,” the narrator feels she should act a certain way in front of her village relatives. She asks, “Is this my hometown? Do I belong here?” Your second story, “Magic, or Something Less Alluring,” features a couple drawn together even in the middle of a divorce. Would you say you wrote those stories more on love? One question that was prominent for me during the start of 2020 was, “Is it possible that we can love each other without understanding each other?” It’s a question that I’m trying to answer. That’s the question for the couple, where they don’t understand each other but still have feelings. The woman is disgusted by the man’s political views, but she feels that a person is more than that, and she feels affection for him. Understanding is an intellectual exercise, but love is more than that. The first story is based on my upbringing. My cousins all live in the county seat of the village that’s 20 minutes away; we still have the village house, and the older generation live there. I went back in the summer, having written [my book] and knowing that it was coming out. I have a certain understanding of their life, but they have almost zero understanding of my life, how I grew up in Beijing, and what my life is like here—not to say anything of the life of a writer. It’s far away from their world, but it doesn’t affect the fact that they love me and I love them. Of course it’s complicated—love—but I [tried to explore] the idea of guilt in the first story and how that’s part of love. That first story is a powerful framing story and overture to open the collection. In it you say, “There is home… and there is hometown.” What is your home and hometown? How does it feel being in one or the other? More literally, hometown feels like a place. Even though New York feels like home now, I would never call it my hometown. Beijing is my hometown. Home is an ephemeral idea because it’s simpler if your home and hometown is the same place, and that could have been my life. I felt very secure growing up in Beijing, and many of my friends have never left there—or left and returned—and they feel secure in that at-home sort of feeling. Being away from Beijing has created a stronger [feeling or affiliation] because I have to constantly hold onto it. Otherwise, I feel I can no longer claim it as my home. There is a freshness to being away. This time when I was there, I couldn’t help but imagine what my life could have been like if I stayed. I realized that I probably wouldn’t have wanted to live there as the person I am now. But because I can’t have it, there’s always this longing, and the alternative always seems better. You’ve said that Beijing is the book’s ancestral home, and it will never be read in its mother tongue. When you think of the identity of your first book, what are some words that describe your intention? I want to call it an emigrant book instead of an immigrant book. The characters—and I—deal more with the consequences of leaving instead of entering. This is different from the immigrant literature about a person trying to build a new life or find their place in another country. The description of The Memory Museum says it’s a Chinese diaspora book. I agree with that, though… [the term diaspora] is an academic term that I don’t feel qualified to define. In Chinese, the diaspora is translated as lisanrenqun 离散人群. Li is leaving, and san is scattered. The Chinese translation is very close to the Greek roots of the word. I’m very interested in both of those concepts, leaving and scattered. Chinese people are scattered all over the world. It’s interesting to see how such scattered people can have so much in common. I was intentional about writing about younger, millennial women mostly from 28 to 36, which is a narrow range. One of the pressing things on these characters’ minds is motherhood. That’s something that Chinese culture has a particular focus on. Women are forced to think about it at a certain age. I would also say it’s a political book, and I have yet to see the consequences that I will have to face. I consider myself a Chinese writer, even though I write in English. I consider the book more in conversation with contemporary Chinese literature, translated or not… Because of Chinese censorship, I’m hoping this book will fill a void that Chinese writers are not able to write in China. Some stories can be written in English about the reality of China that people are not able to articulate in Chinese. Could you speak about the challenges in writing political fiction, as well as any rewards? First, the impulse is natural. The challenge is to have courage. Writing in English and not thinking about publishing when I’m writing helps me to do that. At first, it was just something private that I wanted to do personally. The other challenge is when I was writing “野火烧不尽 / no prairie fire can destroy all the weeds,” the story about the White Paper Protests, the story went dark for me. I was like, “This is awful.” I was getting depressed writing that story, living through that world, and expressing my darkest fears about the politics in China. I was in despair after writing that story, which led me to write [the title story] “The Memory Museum,” set in an imagined utopia where it’s the opposite of where the country is in the previous story. There’s so much dystopian fiction. All of them are justified because we can see how everything could be heading that way. But it’s also important to imagine a future and a world that we want to live in and we are hopeful for. If we can’t even realize it in our imagination, how are we even going to do it in real life? I’m not an activist, and my fiction’s aim is not political. If I wanted to actually change things, I should have been an activist. But I also have this hope that fiction would have real-life consequences and political writing would make people reconsider their real lives. How did your story collection take shape? Did it start with a central story or that “Memory Museum” seed? No, “The Memory Museum” is the last story I wrote. I started writing fiction in September 2020, wrote my first two short stories, sent them to MFA [programs], and got in. I started writing short stories because the workshops are geared toward short stories. I did not have time to think because I didn’t have a reserve of stories that I could bring into workshop. I just had to write new ones. So I was literally writing whatever came to mind. I was so new in fiction writing, so far away from ever considering publishing. I didn’t have any ideas for a collection. [Writing a query letter for] Tin House Writers Workshop was maybe the first time I [realized] I should work toward a short story collection. I probably articulated in that letter the One-Child Policy generation in China, which is still what the book is about. From their age, all the characters are by default part of that generation. There are ramifications that the government couldn’t foresee. They didn’t consider how this policy would go down in five decades. The things I wrote about are particular to the One-Child generation, which is the generation that coincided with the economic boom, China taking its place on the world stage politically, the coming-of-age of the country. When I wrote the story “Yulan,” I wanted to write a story about someone who lives abroad but returns to China. After writing the protest story, I was interested in exploring joy as an idea, of joy as a form of resistance, which came from an art show I saw at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston [called Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina], about pottery or ceramics that enslaved Black people made. Slavery is such a horrible life, but they were able to have small personal joys through making ceramics, and there was poetry carved on the ceramics. I was really inspired by that. Then, I must have also seen a nice symphony. Everything just came together. Was there a specific audience you hoped would read The Memory Museum? First and foremost, I wrote this book for people like me: Chinese people who moved away from China or who have lived elsewhere. This is something I’ve talked to other writers of color about. I feel like anyone who considers themselves on the margin of what’s mainstream in terms of identity, or in any way worries that other people are not going to be interested in their stories because they don’t share their identity, I hope that is not true. I believe this book has many entry points for different people. I found your prose clever yet simple, both very Chinese traits. Who has influenced your voice? I’m more interested in what other people can tell me my influences are… Even to consider writing in English as a Chinese person, I’m indebted to those who come before me, like Yiyun Li, Ha Jin, Xiaolu Guo. Who else? There are really very few. These writers made it possible for me to even consider writing in a language that’s not my first. Then there are also other second-language writers who are not writing in their first language, such as Aysegül Savas. I don’t exactly know at what point of their lives they started living in English and being able to compose in English. Just knowing about these second-language writers gives me more confidence. Do you have a favorite story? I don’t, but I would like to say that I’ve stolen a lot in this collection. For example, “You Won’t Read This in the News”: that story’s perspective is from Jennifer Egan’s “Safari,” where it’s multiple points of view, all third person, and it also goes into omniscient voice, into the future of the characters. The title of “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” is from a Japanese film called Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021). “Scenes from Childhood” is from Schumann’s piano suite of the same title. I wanted to write about the village. I had all these vignettes, and I didn’t know how to put them in a linear story. Then, I came upon “Scenes from Childhood” and saw the titles. I thought, “This is my story.” I stole the structure of that. All these things I hold dear, because of how they inspired work in this book—mostly on a craft level, less on an emotional level. You mentioned Schumann. Could you tell me about piano playing and other creative practices that exist in tandem with your writing practice? I started studying piano around age 9, and I stopped around 16. I tried to keep playing, but I didn’t take classes again until very recently… I took a semester of piano lessons at Juilliard, relearning or even learning for the first time, because I don’t think I had a prestigious piano education back in China. The teacher told us, “If it feels hard, you’re probably doing something wrong.” Your hands are always supposed to feel comfortable and relaxed. Sometimes I feel like [playing] is impossible, but it’s just something I haven’t figured out yet. I’m not embodying the music or even my own body. I think this is true for writing sometimes. I was 10,000 words into writing my first novel, and I was feeling so wrong. The whole thing felt so wrong, even though it was how I pictured it. There’s a certain instinct that you need to follow. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s probably not, and you can do something else with it. The other thing about comfort, that I learned from doing yoga, is that you have to work with the discomfort. It’s not necessarily that something is wrong, you just have to work through it. It’s basically stretching. Every time you stretch past your comfort zone a tiny bit, that’s how you can get stronger or more flexible.You have to find that balance with comfort and discomfort in writing. I have had experiences in meditation—and this happens to probably anyone who really meditates—where memories will come up. That sort of subconscious creative work is what writing is to me. When you are really in a piece of writing, things come up on their own. These practices are very related. In periods when you’re stuck—contemplating or writing without writing—what do you do to ignite your creative spark? One thing that’s not a hobby but is something I have to do is walk my dog. I’m not the first person to say walking is helpful. For writers, leaving the mental space and returning to a physical sensation in your body is important. Even playing piano is like a physical sport. Because we live so up here [gestures above her head] when we’re writing. The other thing is watching movies and going to art shows. One thing that’s different now that I’m writing is I am more tolerant or sympathetic to anyone who creates anything. I would always, now, prefer to see something interesting than something perfect and good. So I have a lot of leniency for movies that I know are not that good, but I could see that the filmmaker is trying to do something. Maybe they failed, but that’s okay because they were trying to do something new or interesting. I’m not purely enjoying something as a spectator or a viewer, but I think thinking this way has opened more windows in terms of my own creative practice. M Lin recommends: Hudson River Park. Looking at an expanse of open water or sky is therapy. Public libraries around the world. Some favorites are the Rose Main Reading Room in NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá, and Amsterdam Public Library. CAAAV, a nonprofit community organizer based in New York. The real recommendation is to stop doomscrolling/virtue signaling & do something! Happy Hour (2015), directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi Drinking warm water. This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Amy Y.Q. Lin.
Two years after New Caledonia’s violent uprising, tensions remain high
Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front
ANALYSIS: By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk As New Caledonia marks the second anniversary of a spate of unrest and riots that broke out on 13 May 2024, the situation on the ground remains tense, on the political, economic and security levels. Politically, over the past two years, there have been sequences
ANALYSIS: By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk As New Caledonia marks the second anniversary of a spate of unrest and riots that broke out on 13 May 2024, the situation on the ground remains tense, on the political, economic and security levels. Politically, over the past two years, there have been sequences of discussion between local stakeholders and the French State. Under the now former Minister for Overseas Territories, Manuel Valls, a series of talks in the suburbs of Paris (Bougival) in July 2025, led to a document that seems to provide a roadmap for more powers for the French Pacific territory, including the prospect of a “State” of New Caledonia, with its associated “nationality”. READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports This Bougival process was, however, denounced by the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) which said, after its delegates had initially signed the agreement, that their signatures were withdrawn. Other parties, including the “moderate” pro-independence PALIKA and UPM, committed to the agreement. But the legislative byproducts of the Bougival document, including a constitutional amendment and an organic law, could not be enacted, especially as a result of a rebuke from the French National Assembly on April 2 this year. Through a game of alliances between local and mainland French parties, the rejection of the Bougival-inspired bills came from both left (Socialists) and far-left (La France Insoumise) parties and even from the far-right Rassemblement National (RN). As French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced earlier this month, after holding a fresh series of talks with local politicians, he had decided that crucial local elections should be held on June 28, most of the local parties have now entered into campaign mode. The poll, which had been postponed three times since May 2024 (the date originally set) is now once again at the centre of debates, especially on the sensitive question of who will be qualified to cast their votes. Since the Nouméa Accord was signed in 1998, and as part of its implementation, the electoral roll is currently “frozen”. It means it excludes people who were born or have resided in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted 10 years after November 1998. There have been talks on an “adjustment” of the sensitive electoral roll to at least include people who were born in New Caledonia and have reached voting age since 1998. Relaxing this criterion — which was originally designed as a temporary measure to guard against a potential risk of “diluting” the indigenous Kanak population vote — would concern about 10,000 new voters, usually referred to as “the natives”. But this issue is crystallising again tensions and passions in New Caledonia, just like it did in reaction to an earlier attempted constitutional amendment which, in May 2024, was also perceived as the main trigger for the demonstrations, followed by unrest, staged by pro-independence parties. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-114640" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/NC-riots-May-2024-RNZ-680wide.png" alt="Flames and a column of smoke in New Caledonia's capital Nouméa during 2024 riots" width="680" height="490" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/NC-riots-May-2024-RNZ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/NC-riots-May-2024-RNZ-680wide-300x216.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/NC-riots-May-2024-RNZ-680wide-583x420.png 583w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Flashback to May 2024: Flames and a column of smoke in New Caledonia’s capital Nouméa during the pro-independence riots . . . “It was like the country was [at] war. Every[thing] was burning,” says journalist Coralie Cochin. Image: Twitter @ncla1ere The violence caused 14 deaths and more than 2 billion euros (NZ$3.9 billion) in material damage, thousands of jobs lost due to the destruction of businesses, as well as a 13.5 percent drop in New Caledonia’s GNP. But two years on, French Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou and French PM Lecornu, have launched another attempt to “adjust” the provincial roll, focusing on the inclusion of the “natives”. The provincial elections in New Caledonia elects new members for the three provincial assemblies. Based on the results, they will also determine proportionally, the makeup of New Caledonia’s Congress, the makeup of New Caledonia’s collegial government and its president. The organic law to integrate the natives is scheduled to be tabled before the Senate on May 18, and later before the Lower House, the National Assembly. On the same day in Nouméa, the local Congress will be asked to vote and therefore express its position on the same matter, even though the vote would be non-binding for the French lawmakers. New Caledonia’s special electoral card for Congress and provincial elections. Image: RNZ Pacific Under a particularly tight schedule, the proposed organic law is also supposed to be endorsed by France’s Constitutional Council before the end of May 2026. If it fails, New Caledonia’s provincial elections will still take place, but without any change to the “frozen” electoral roll. In a special, 30-minute long address dedicated to New Caledonia, on social networks on May 8, Lecornu said the “status quo is not a destiny”. After the provincial polls, Lecornu intends to bring politicians together again sometime in July to resume wider talks on New Caledonia’s political future. In preparation for the poll, most of New Caledonia’s political parties and groups, whether pro-independence or pro-France (those who wish New Caledonia to remain a part of France), have already positioned themselves, especially on the electoral roll issue. In the pro-France camp, there are ructions within leading parties, such as Rassemblement-LR and other components, such as Les Loyalistes or Nicolas Metzdorf’s Génération NC. Rassemblement president and head of the local government Alcide Ponga’s suggestion that his party should run the provincial elections behind Metzdorf — who is also one of New Caledonia’s two representatives at the French National Assembly — has drawn criticism and several resignations from Rassemblement. Since August 2024, the FLNKS has lost two of its pillars: the PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) and the UPM (Progressist Union in Melanesia) have formed their own “UNI” (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance) group, mostly based on their disapproval of the hardline approach promoted by the main component of FLNKS, Union Calédonienne and its allied “pressure groups”. One of those groups, the CCAT (Field Action Coordination Committee), was perceived as the main force behind the protests that later degenerated into riots, in May 2024. In August 2024, CCAT leader Christian Téin was elected as FLNKS president, even though he was at the time serving a pre-trial jail term in Mulhouse (north-east of mainland France). Pending the ruling on his case for alleged crime-related charges, which has not happened yet, Téin was allowed to return to New Caledonia. <img decoding="async" class="wp-image-107653 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Christian-Tein-RNZ-680wide.png" alt="Kanaky New Caledonia's CCAT leader Christian Téin detained in France" width="680" height="494" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Christian-Tein-RNZ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Christian-Tein-RNZ-680wide-300x218.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Christian-Tein-RNZ-680wide-324x235.png 324w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Christian-Tein-RNZ-680wide-578x420.png 578w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> CCAT leader Christian Téin . . . elected as the FLNKS president in August 2024. Image: RRB/RNZ Pacific ‘The fight is not over’: FLNKS On Wednesday, CCAT and FLNKS leaders and supporters staged another protest, gathering an estimated 200 participants in Nouméa’s popular neighbourhood of Vallée-du-Tir. The purpose of the march was to reaffirm that “the fight is not over” and to pay homage to the Kanak “martyrs” of May 2024. “We are here because what happened in 2024 is about to happen again,” FLNKS politburo member Henri Juni told the crowd, denouncing what he terms another “passage en force” from the French State. Juni said the FLNKS now aimed at restoring “maximal unity” within the pro-independence camp to obtain maximal results at the coming provincial elections. FLNKS’s official stance on the matter is that the electoral roll can be modified, but that this can only take place as part of a comprehensive agreement on the future of New Caledonia. PALIKA, on its part, held an extraordinary congress over the weekend that mostly concluded that its commitment to the Bougival process, further reinforced by more talks in January 2026, had now de facto come to an end, since it regarded this process as also de facto ended due to the April 2026 French parliament’s rejection. In view of the June 2026 provincial polls, PALIKA is now calling for “mobilisation” from voters “in order to create the conditions of a ‘rapport de force’ to support our project of full sovereignty in partnership”. On the sensitive issues of relaxing the restrictions of the electoral roll, PALIKA says in a release published on Tuesday that they are in favour of a readjustment for the “natives”. One heart, one voice On the pro-France side, parties are in support of the relaxation of the electoral roll, not only for the “natives”, but also for qualified “spouses”. A local association named “Un, Coeur, une voix” (One heart, one voice, or OHOV) is campaigning against the minimal inclusion of “natives”, but calls for a wider opening for the roll. “This is a minimal adjustment that institutionalises a durable exclusion”, OHOV wrote to French President Emmanuel Macron early in May 2026. OHOV is also preparing to bring the matter to a court, in opposition to the partial “readjustment” of the proposed organic law to eventually contest the future outcome of the provincial polls. “You have thousands of (New) Caledonians who were born there, or their spouses, … And they cannot vote… This is a matter of justice, of balance also and this is not a great demographic upset, it’s a point of equilibrium”, Minister Moutchou pleaded earlier this week during an interview with French national media France Info. Security issues On the security front, French High commissioner Jacques Billant has already enforced a ban on the sale of alcohol between 11 and 17 May 2026. The only exception being the sale of alcohol at New Caledonia’s international airport, Nouméa-La Tontouta. Billant said this was “to prevent any public order unrest”, or “events and demonstrations” taking place around the symbolic date of 13 May 2024. Earlier in April, 3-star Lieutenant-General Pierre Poty, who commands all gendarmerie forces in France’s Overseas Territories, told New Caledonian media French forces were “ready to confront fresh unrest, thanks to its prepositioned forces and their armoured components”. But he said he did not see “any precursor sign of a resumption of violence”. Meanwhile, in Nouméa, a neighbourhood watch group of so-called “Citizen Resistance Collective” (CRC), said earlier this week they have remained vigilant and would not allow “another May 13 to happen, because the response would be immediate and determined”. The CRC was formed during the 2024 unrest, mainly to protect their property against burning and looting from protesters. Early in May 2026, the French High Commission in Nouméa revealed latest statistics showing that in 2025, the number of burglaries on residential properties has risen by 46.7 percent, mostly in the capital Nouméa and its urban surroundings. Economy New Caledonia’s economic situation remains a matter for concern. Most private sector stakeholders have sounded the alarm bell over the past months, despite French assistance being deployed over the past two years, mostly to refinance the construction of destroyed public buildings and infrastructure. Businesses, employers and employees are up in arms against the current situation which deprives business leaders and investors of the required “visibility” to regain confidence. Most of them are demanding that a political agreement be reached, which would provide them a minimum of predictability in the long term. “We don’t believe things are getting better”, New Caledonia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) vice president Stéphane Yoteau told an economic forum earlier this month. Yoteau said businesses in New Caledonia have now reached “a degree of absolute urgency”. “The situation is catastrophic, we’re now caught in a vicious circle that is feeding itself: less business (-20 percent), less employment (-12,000), less spending revenues (household budgets have lost 10 percent on average), so there is less consumption, therefore less public tax income, etc. And so on”, the CCI leader explained. The forum gathered representatives from employers federations MEDEF-NC, CPME-NC (small and medium industries confederation) and FEINC (federation of industries of New Caledonia). ‘A degree of absolute urgency’ They are asking for five emergency measures, including a postponement or a tax holiday for some social contributions. They said these measure could be drawn from French government assistance and re-directed to help small and medium businesses keep their heads above water. They say New Caledonia’s economy is “on the verge of collapse” and “economic breakdown”. “The question today is not even to access financing faculties. There is no more business in New Caledonia. Everything stops,” FEINC President Xavier Benoist told local media. He said 40 percent of businesses only have a few weeks of visibility and 45 percent have only three months left in terms of cash flow. Despite the recent announcement from the French PM of a “re-foundation” plan for more than 2 billion euros over the next five years, business leaders are asking for an immediate emergency package to “save New Caledonia’s economy”. “What we are asking is not a favour, it’s not assistance. It’s something to keep our economic fabric alive. Otherwise, it will continue to go down”, said Sonia Critg, vice-president of the small industries branch of the CPME. “Not doing anything today amounts to deliberately choosing a much deeper and much more expensive social crisis tomorrow”, she stressed. On May 11, more than 100 business leaders, employees, unemployed, retired workers, staged a protest march in front of New Caledonia’s government building in downtown Nouméa. Once again, at the heart of their plea, was a cry for assistance to ease their situation which, they said, was “no longer bearable”. Minister for Economy Christopher Gygès received a delegation and promised some exemption measures were in the pipeline, especially targeting small and very small businesses. Recently appointed head of the French inter-ministerial mission for reconstruction, Amaury Decludt recently completed his first mission in the French Pacific territory. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://media.rnztools.nz/rnz/image/upload/s--OPySzA0---/ar_16:10,c_fill,f_auto,g_auto,q_auto,w_1050/v1718564967/4KOGG4A_thumbnail_New_Caledonia_s_government_minister_Christopher_Gyg_s_holds_a_press_conference_on_13_June_2024_Photo_Government_of_New_Caledonia_jpg?_a=BACCd2AD" alt="New Caledonia’s government minister Christopher Gygès holds a press conference on 13 June 2024 – Photo Government of New Caledonia" width="1050" height="681" /> New Caledonia’s Minister for Economy Christopher Gygès . . . “Promised some exemption measures were in the pipeline.” Image: New Caledonia govt He assured that out of the more than 2 billion euros earmarked by France, about 10 percent was ready to be mobilised, mainly for large infrastructure projects such as one road across New Caledonia’s main island or a project to build bus exchange stations in rural areas. He said talks were ongoing regarding New Caledonia’s crucial nickel mining sector and has been facing major difficulties over the past few years.. Out of the three companies currently in existence, two (one in the North of the main island, the other in the South) were currently up for sale. Decludt also said the French government was also in contact with the European Union to persuade Brussels of the appeal of New Caledonia’s nickel. New Caledonia’s nickel industry has been facing major structural challenges over the past few years, mainly due to the rise of world-class competitors in Indonesia, as well as high costs of production mainly related to high cost of the energy. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Trump in Beijing: Can U.S.-North Korea Diplomacy Restart?
Papuan women ‘living in fear’ condemn military violence
By Aida Ulim in Jayapura Papuan women attending a free speech forum organised by the Dogiyai Student Association in Jayapura have condemned what they describe as ongoing violence against women and children in Papua. The gathering took place in the Lingkaran Abepura area, Abepura District, Jayapura, on Monday. Activist Vero Hubi said Papuan women continued
By Aida Ulim in Jayapura Papuan women attending a free speech forum organised by the Dogiyai Student Association in Jayapura have condemned what they describe as ongoing violence against women and children in Papua. The gathering took place in the Lingkaran Abepura area, Abepura District, Jayapura, on Monday. Activist Vero Hubi said Papuan women continued to bear the impact of prolonged conflict, including violence, displacement, and the loss of family members. READ MORE: West Papuan graduation parade turns violent after police object to Morning Star flag ‘Genocide continues’ as Indonesia massacres 10 West Papuans, says ULMWP Other West Papua reports “I speak on behalf of Papuan women who have become victims of violence, forced displacement, and the loss of loved ones due to the prolonged conflict in Papua,” she said. “Many Papuan women today live in fear and under constant pressure,” Hubi said. She stressed that Papuan women would no longer remain silent in the face of continued suffering. Hubi also drew attention to the condition of internally displaced communities in several conflict-affected regions, saying many women and children had been forced to flee after homes were allegedly occupied by security forces. Wounded in bomb blasts She further alleged that some women were wounded in bomb explosions while attempting to protect their children. According to Hubi, women across Papua will continue speaking out against all forms of violence targeting women and children. She also urged institutions responsible for women’s and children’s protection to investigate alleged human rights abuses in Papua and publicly release the findings. “We demand transparency in the investigation process and justice for the victims,” she said. Another participant, Yustina Butu, spoke about the psychological burden experienced by Papuans, particularly students from Dogiyai living in Jayapura. Butu called on Dogiyai police to thoroughly investigate and take responsibility for a number of incidents, especially those involving teenage victims in Dogiyai Regency. She also said alleged acts of violence committed by security personnel against civilians in Yahukimo and Mimika regencies, including against women and children, must be held accountable. Duty to protect civilians According to Butu, the duty of the military and police is to protect civilians, yet many civilians have instead become victims of violence. “We are calling on Dogiyai police to conduct a comprehensive evaluation regarding the shootings of civilians,” she said. She further urged the Dogiyai Regency administration in Central Papua to work together with police authorities in addressing the cases. Butu emphasised the role of women as mothers who nurture and raise children, saying both the government and security forces must properly fulfill their responsibilities to safeguard the public. “We want our children to grow up safely and peacefully — not in fear or exposed to violence and inhumane treatment. We hope the state and the government will hear and consider our demands,” she said. Republished from Jubi News with permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
ICE’s prison-for-profit machine may be undermining its own deportation push, congresswoman says
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="A federal agent threatens to Taser protestors during a protest over federal immigration enforcement raids and detainees transfer at Delaney Hall Detention Facility on June 13, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images." data-attachment-id="343488" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/ices-prison-for-profit-machine-may-be-undermining-its-own-deportation-push-congresswoman-says/gettyimages-2219329286-protesters-rally-outside-ice-dentention-facility-in-newark-nj" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1706&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1706" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-2219329286 Protesters rally outside ICE dentention facility in Newark NJ" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" A federal agent threatens to Taser protestors during a protest over federal immigration enforcement raids and detainees transfer at Delaney Hall Detention Facility on June 13, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images. " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> Rep. LaMonica McIver says ICE detainees who agreed to voluntarily leave the country and signed their deportation papers are still being held for months in detention centers, while private prison contractors report growing revenues and lucrative government contracts.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="A federal agent threatens to Taser protestors during a protest over federal immigration enforcement raids and detainees transfer at Delaney Hall Detention Facility on June 13, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images." decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343488" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/ices-prison-for-profit-machine-may-be-undermining-its-own-deportation-push-congresswoman-says/gettyimages-2219329286-protesters-rally-outside-ice-dentention-facility-in-newark-nj" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1706&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1706" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-2219329286 Protesters rally outside ICE dentention facility in Newark NJ" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" A federal agent threatens to Taser protestors during a protest over federal immigration enforcement raids and detainees transfer at Delaney Hall Detention Facility on June 13, 2025 in Newark, New Jersey. Photo by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images. " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2219329286-Protesters-rally-outside-ICE-dentention-facility-in-Newark-NJ-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> Accusations that ICE is a giant ATM machine for private prison contractors have been a common critique of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But a key congresswoman in the fight against the agency has taken the criticism a step further. Rep. LaMonica McIver (NJ-10) says the push for profits within the mass deportation-industrial complex has put it at odds with the Trump administration’s goal of deporting millions of immigrants as quickly as possible. For McIver, efforts to hold ICE accountable have become personal. She is facing up to 17 years in prison for making contact with an ICE agent outside the Delany Hall ICE facility in Newark, New Jersey. Federal prosecutors have charged her with three counts of forcibly interfering with a federal officer. During an interview on Capitol Hill, the first-year lawmaker said she had spoken to multiple detainees at the Delany Hall facility who told her they had voluntarily agreed to leave the country, but were still being held in the US months afterward. “When I go to Delaney Hall I speak to numerous detainees there. They tell me how they have signed a voluntary deportation agreement months ago and are literally still being held at the detention center,” she added. “So this is all about money.” ICE did not respond to our request to comment on the length of detention time for people who voluntarily agree to leave the country. However, their own statistics suggest that the average duration of a detainee’s stay has increased markedly. Between September 2023 and September 2025, the average in-custody length of stay has risen by roughly a third. The average period of time a person is held has increased from 52 days to 70 days. This increase comes as the number of people held in ICE detention has more than doubled, rising from roughly 24,000 in late January 2023 to nearly 60,000 by late September 2025. The upswing in inmates has been good for business. CoreCivic and GEO Group, the primary detention center contractors, have reported increased profits and revenues in 2025. Both companies have contracts that reward occupancy, with some allowing per diems that pay more based on the number of beds filled. CoreCivic and GEO Group, the primary detention center contractors, have reported increased profits and revenues in 2025. Both companies have contracts that reward occupancy, with some allowing per diems that pay more based on the number of beds filled. Last year CoreCivic reported $2.2billion in revenue, up 13%, and GEO Group’s revenue almost doubled, to $38.3 million. McIver’s allegations come as the fiscal watchdog raises alarms over a plan to give ICE and its partner agency, Customs and Border Protection, even more money. Earlier this month the House and Senate approved a framework for adding an additional $70 billion in funding for ICE and CBP. The money is additional to the roughly $140 billion allocated for both in the Big Beautiful Bill. “Teeing up a second reconciliation bill to fund ICE and CBP is not about any immediate funding need, it’s about insulating these agencies from congressional oversight for the remainder of the president’s term in office,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Teeing up a second reconciliation bill to fund ICE and CBP is not about any immediate funding need, it’s about insulating these agencies from congressional oversight for the remainder of the president’s term in office.” Gabe Murphy, Policy Analyst for Taxpayers for Common Sense “Furthermore, this funding is financed by adding to our national debt. The budget resolution that included these reconciliation instructions does not require the spending to be offset by cuts to other programs or increased revenue.” Republicans plan to push through the increase through a process called reconciliation. It allows legislation to bypass the Senate filibuster provided it meets certain criteria—primarily, that the bill has a fiscal impact on federal spending. To ensure Congress has better access to ICE facilities, McIver introduced a bill this week to strengthen the already existing language that requires the right to unannounced visits to all ICE detention centers for legislators. “I did not dream of going to jail for doing my job in Congress,” McIver said. “ICE tried to stop us for what should be a routine, showing up for the people we represent.” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background. Credit: Deagreez / Getty Images." data-attachment-id="343469" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/the-war-on-our-sight/composite-photo-collage-of-angry-tired-human-eyes-inside-macbook-device-screen-fire-flame-overworked-break-isolated-on-painted-background" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"","caption":"Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background.","created_timestamp":"1711100996","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background" data-image-description=" Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background. Credit: Deagreez / Getty Images. " data-image-caption=" Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background. Credit: Deagreez / Getty Images. " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “It is not an accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos—are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they're gobbling up everything else. This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it.”
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background. Credit: Deagreez / Getty Images." decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343469" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/the-war-on-our-sight/composite-photo-collage-of-angry-tired-human-eyes-inside-macbook-device-screen-fire-flame-overworked-break-isolated-on-painted-background" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"","caption":"Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background.","created_timestamp":"1711100996","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background" data-image-description=" Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background. Credit: Deagreez / Getty Images. " data-image-caption=" Composite photo collage of angry tired human eyes inside macbook device screen fire flame overworked break isolated on painted background. Credit: Deagreez / Getty Images. " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2204513146-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> An earlier version of this speech was delivered at the 2026 Izzy Awards ceremony at the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, NY, on April 21, 2026. Friends, colleagues, fellow human beings, You don’t need to read Project Censored’s latest State of the Free Press report to know that the state of the free press in America is not good (but, obviously, you should still read the report). And it’s not just President Trump, his administration, and the MAGA faithful repeatedly, publicly expressing their hatred and verbalizing threats towards journalists and media organizations that don’t tow the Supreme Leader’s line. It’s not just Trump and his cabinet bullying and berating journalists at press briefings, restricting their access, and trying to make them sign loyalty pledges. It’s also Trump’s absurd and gangsterish lawsuits targeted at ABC News, which is owned by Disney, and CBS News, which is owned by Paramount, and the morally spineless, financially self-serving capitulation of these corporate cowards to Trump by settling, rather than fighting, those lawsuits—setting the precedent for more shakedowns. It’s the multi-pronged attempt by the Trump administration and the ruling-class-serving authors and executors of Project 2025 to destroy the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which they succeeded in doing, and to defund and destroy PBS and NPR, which they are still trying to do now. It’s the federal harassment, capture, imprisonment, and even deportation of journalists like Estefany Rodríguez, Mario Guevara, Sami Hamdi, and Georgia Fort. Even Don Lemon. Even Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was snatched off the street last year by plainclothes federal thugs for co-authoring an op-ed in her campus newspaper. It’s the professional journalists, student journalists, and citizen journalists alike covering the federal invasions of our cities and the protests against them, from LA to Minneapolis, who are being targeted by law enforcement, shot in the head or body with rubber bullets, detained, menacingly scanned and tracked by masked agents with shadowy surveillance tools. It’s the professional journalists, student journalists, and citizen journalists alike covering the federal invasions of our cities and the protests against them, from LA to Minneapolis, who are being targeted by law enforcement, shot in the head or body with rubber bullets, detained, menacingly scanned and tracked by masked agents with shadowy surveillance tools. It’s the ongoing, longstanding, bipartisan effort to silence and punish whistleblowers who risk their jobs, their freedom, and even their lives to inform the public. And then, on top of that, it’s Trump and his administration seizing or deliberately dismantling the state infrastructure of recorded, verified, and publicly available information that is in the public’s necessary interest—from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Weather Service to the uncertain futures of FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, from the feds commandeering and hiding the “investigation” into the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis to the coverup of the Epstein Files. It’s industry lapdog, fanatical ideologue, and literal Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr using his post as Trump’s appointed head of the FCC to impose Trump’s will on the world of broadcast media and speedrun the corporate consolidation of control over it, from the major networks to all the local TV and radio stations we still have left. All of this is part of the multi-frontal assault on and erosion of press freedom and the people’s right to know. It’s TV shows canceled, web verticals discontinued, people let go, newsrooms restructured, either in reaction to Trump and MAGA’s ire, in fear of it, or in self-serving pursuit of profit from it. It’s the acceleration of yearslong trends of newspapers closing, news outlets merging and consolidating or getting bought out, followed inevitably by mass layoffs, ever-expanding the number of unemployed journalists and media workers and the size of America’s local news deserts, where there are no longer professionals being employed and paid to find and document and verify the truth of what’s actually happening. Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report listed over 130 newspaper closures in the US in 2025, bringing the total to nearly 3,500 newspapers and over 270,000 newspaper jobs lost over the past two decades. And more, deeper cuts are coming, especially with the world- and industry-changing introduction of AI. Nearly one-half of the Washington Post staff was laid off in February; 30,000 more at Amazon in recent months because of an AI pivot, including many jobs in the media, gaming, and entertainment arm of the Bezos behemoth. Large layoffs announced last month at Disney. In 2026, like we saw in 2025, like we saw in 2024, the media industry job cuts keep coming, and they are deep, widespread, and significant: CNN, NBC, Vox Media, HuffPost, Politico, CNBC, Time, Univision, Nexstar Media Group, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Wall Street Journal, and so many more. To say nothing of all the big layoffs and AI-impacted restructuring in tech, from Meta to Microsoft to Google to X (aka Twitter) to Amazon. Now, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, “Geez, Max Alvarez, I didn’t realize you cared so deeply for all these legacy media giants and Big Tech mega-corporations…” But it’s not about that. All I’m saying is that, if you start to look at all of this stuff happening together with the cold focus of an air-traffic controller or a general surveying the battlefield, you realize that something big is clearly happening in media, to media, and big moves are being made by the people who own the media that all of us, across the political and consumption spectrum, depend on. It’s TV shows canceled, web verticals discontinued, people let go, newsrooms restructured, either in reaction to Trump and MAGA’s ire, in fear of it, or in self-serving pursuit of profit from it. Also, as someone who interviews workers for a living, I have to stress one other point here: More often than not, these job cuts, even when they hit at networks and parent companies we rightly despise, are hitting the few people left who are still trying to do actual journalism or keep our media products and tech platforms from getting worse than they already are. For example, last year, I was honored to win the Izzy Award with the great Steve Mellon for reporting we had done on the aftermath of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Steve did all that reporting, and so much more, all while he and his fellow union members were on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. These incredible workers were on strike for over three years. And after they finally won that strike and returned to work at the end of last year, the paper’s rich, law-breaking owners, the Block family, announced at the beginning of this year that they would be closing the Post-Gazette—a paper whose roots go all the way back to 1786. Then, news broke in April that the Post-Gazette had been bought by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the owners of the Baltimore Banner back home. Then, in the beginning of May, the union learned that the new leadership was cutting at least 40 percent of its staff, including 80 percent of the union workers who participated in the recently ended strike. This is a travesty. And this is the journalism industry, such as it is, today. All of this, too, is part of the multi-frontal assault on and erosion of press freedom and the people’s right to know. (What does “press freedom” even mean when there are hardly any press left? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are collectively and individually losing our ability to discern what’s true and real as we continue to lose the organizations that exist and the people who are paid to find, document, expose, and communicate the truth responsibly, and to quality-control and fact-check the stories we’re presenting as true to the public.) I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are collectively and individually losing our ability to discern what’s true and real as we continue to lose the organizations that exist and the people who are paid to find, document, expose, and communicate the truth responsibly, and to quality-control and fact-check the stories we’re presenting as true to the public. And it’s also this horrifying, techno-feudal arrangement of billionaire oligarchs and their corporate empires gobbling up all legacy and social media and controlling the information chokepoints that connect us to the world beyond our immediate sight. From fourth richest person in the world Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post to billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong owning the LA Times, from fifth richest person in the world Mark Zuckerberg and Meta (aka Facebook) also controlling Instagram, Whatsapp, and Threads, to richest man in the world Elon Musk buying Twitter, to Paramount Skydance just winning the bid to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN and HBO, further expanding the vast media empire of Trump-loving tech moguls Larry Ellison (the sixth richest person in the world) and his son David Ellison—an empire that also includes CBS News and a significant chunk of the now “American owned” TikTok 2.0. The buyouts and mergers and consolidations and corporate capitulations to Trump have been so swift and so massive, it’s honestly head-spinning. And the billionaire oligarchs are openly putting their hands on the scales to try to condition us, to influence our thoughts and control our sight; to normalize and invisibilize genocide, ecocide, and Epstein-level atrocities; to try to forcibly shift the Overton window in the realm of public discourse by publishing more viewpoints and content that align with Trump’s agenda, just like they did with all the so-called “woke” stuff when it was profitable for them. Because these oligarchs have their own agendas, too: they want to bend and push and twist the world to serve them, to benefit their bank accounts, and to continuously, endlessly deliver more wealth and power and market dominance to them at the expense of us, our societies, and the planet we live on. And they are pursuing those agendas through Trump and with his help, from the Ellisons installing Bari fricken Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS and very visibly steering the network and the reputation it still had into the Trumpstream, to the fricken Washington Post editorial board publishing an endless litany of missives that read like they were written by Mr. Monopoly, including an opinion last month titled “America’s income tax is already progressive”; subtitle, “The rich already pay more than their fair share.” Jesus Christ, man… [T]hese oligarchs have their own agendas, too: they want to bend and push and twist the world to serve them, to benefit their bank accounts, and to continuously, endlessly deliver more wealth and power and market dominance to them at the expense of us, our societies, and the planet we live on. And they are pursuing those agendas through Trump and with his help… It’s hard to get your hands and mind around all this at once, and it’s going to keep getting harder. That’s the point. To get an accurate picture of the media ecosystem we are operating in today, and the massive changes that have shaped it into what it is (and shaped us in the process), we have to remember something. For all the long-running historical dynamics and political, economic, and industry trends that are always also at play here—in media and journalism, in the United States, and in the world writ large—a lot has happened, or dramatically accelerated, in a really short amount of time. Since the end of the last Trump administration, and in comparison to the world we lived in during the last Trump administration: COVID hits us in 2020, a lot of people die, everyone else goes kinda berserk (some people a lot more than others), and we all become more “socially distanced” than ever before and more dependent on media to connect us to the outside world—and, thus, more vulnerable to the whims and designs of the owners who control those points of connection. In 2021, Twitter bans and Facebook suspends Donald Trump’s accounts after the failed January 6 insurrection—a move that, in retrospect, marked the last gasps of the limp-wristed and seemingly doomed-from-the-start era of social media content moderation. Trump launches Truth Social in the beginning of 2022 (where he doesn’t post “tweets,” but posts “truths,” which you can “like” and “retruth”). Then, at the end of 2022, Elon Musk buys and acquires Twitter, which he subsequently destroys and turns into the bizarre cesspit called X—an event that, whatever you think or thought of Twitter, completely reorients the way our whole media ecosystem works and how people, governments, and corporations participate in it. In 2023, Tucker Carlson is fired from Fox News. Carlson tries to launch his new show on Musk’s X, which fails spectacularly, so then he launches a new streaming service. By July of 2024, The Tucker Carlson Show, for the first time, hits the #1 spot on Spotify podcasts, briefly ousting Joe Rogan. Conservative broadcast giant Nexstar Media Group—the largest owner of local TV stations in the US, right above Sinclair—announces its deal to acquire Tegna Inc. in August of 2025. Over time, like everything else in this post-competition capitalist hellhole of a country, local television stations have been gobbled up by conglomerates. “Despite a federal rule that restricts any one company from owning stations that reach 39 percent of all households,” David Dayen notes, “the Nexstar-Tegna merger would join together 265 stations in 44 states and raise that coverage to 80 percent.” 80 percent! Now, there is a glimmer of hope that the deal may be on the rocks after a federal judge halted it in court last month. But the halt is only temporary, and it could be overcome. While all of this is happening, Substack is exploding as a major new player in the increasingly hyper-fragmented, post-COVID, post-content-moderation media ecosystem. Now, Substack was founded in 2017, and its largest outside shareholder is Andreessen Horowitz, led by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump donor and advisor Marc Andreessen. But in 2023, Substack really takes a warp-speed jump to becoming the player it is today by adding the Notes feature—effectively making it a new social media platform resembling the old Twitter—and by introducing new video creating and editing tools, enabling content creators to launch and host original shows on the platform. In January of this year, the company announced Substack TV, a standalone app for Apple TV and Google TV that will support videos and livestreams. That same month, January 2026, a deal finally closes that was set in motion in 2024 when then-President Biden signs a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in the US. This is Biden’s and the Democrats’ answer to the reality that a majority of the population is seeing Israel’s genocide in Gaza for what it is and seeing how Biden and the US are facilitating it: blame and take control of the platforms where they’re seeing it. So, now, a majority stake in TikTok’s US operations is owned by a “US-led” investor group, which includes the Ellisons, who “will ‘retrain, test, and update’ TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm on US user data.’” 2024 was a big year for them, too. The Ellison-led merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media is announced in July 2024. Paramount Skydance installs Bari Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS in October of 2025. Just last month, Paramount Skydance and the Ellisons win the bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, after a failed buyout by Netflix. And, of course, amid all of this, there’s the giant elephant in the room of AI: The commercial phase of generative AI makes broad contact with the general public with the rollout of ChatGPT in November of 2022. AI generated or altered content starts visibly flooding social media feeds and YouTube, and permeating cable shows and TV commercials between 2023-2024. The rolling waves of layoffs related to AI (or layoffs that companies say are related to AI) start hitting around 2024-2025, and have continued to rise since. The scale-at-all-costs phase of AI—and the mutual dependence of Silicon Valley, the government, and the economy on it—reaches new heights in July of 2025, when President Trump signs Executive Order 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” slashing regulatory and permitting hurdles and unleashing the rapid expansion of AI data centers around the country. For all the long-running historical dynamics and political, economic, and industry trends that are always also at play here—in media and journalism, in the United States, and in the world writ large—a lot has happened, or dramatically accelerated, in a really short amount of time. This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but it should be an illustrative one. And, of course, you can’t really get an accurate picture of the changing media ecosystem over the last 5-6 years without factoring in three key historical ruptures that occurred in this time, and that changed people’s perceptions and media consumption habits, for better and for worse. And these were ruptures, in part, because they were also profound media events: First there’s the war in Ukraine, which began for much of the outside world as a media event with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, but which erupted out of a history going back to the end of the Cold War. Then there’s the genocide in Gaza, which began for much of the outside world as a media event with the Hamas-led attacks on Israeli settlements on Oct. 7, 2023, but which erupted out of a history going back to 1948. Throughout this period, those of us witnessing these events from afar are being overwhelmed by the pain and death and crimes against humanity we’re seeing on our phones daily, but it’s also becoming more apparent in the media ecosystem where we’re seeing those things, where we’re not, and who wants to obscure the truth or keep it from being seen altogether. The virally visible double standards and Orwellian editorial doublespeek that are on display in how these events are being covered in the media and talked about by political leaders; the naked elevation of certain voices and suppression of all others to sustain the empire-serving, reductive, and often nakedly racist narratives of the US, NATO, and Israel; the outright free-for-all of lies; the censorship and criminalization of pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist speech; so many blatant, top-down attempts—from the US, from Israel, from corporate media—to hide or bend or muddle the full truth of what’s happening and why. All while people are being bombarded by innocence-destroying images of death and suffering for weeks and months and years, and as they are simultaneously seeking in independent media the perspectives, voices, context, and analysis they noticeably haven’t been getting in corporate media (which includes all of this year’s incredible Izzy Award winners, it includes us at The Real News and all of our Movement Media Alliance partners—Project Censored, Mondoweiss, Prism, Truthout, The Progressive, In These Times, and so many more). And if we’re just focusing on the media side of things for now, the point is these profound historical events have had profound effects on us and our world through media, they’ve had profound effects on the whole media ecosystem, and on how people are using media to find the truth about the world beyond their immediate physical-visible sphere. The other profound media event to account for is the 2024 presidential election, particularly when it comes to the impact of non-legacy media (and the Trump campaign’s deft use of it) on the election itself: podcasts, YouTube, Joe Rogan, the manosphere, the whole assemblage of contemporary rightwing media. To say nothing of all the other media-related events that shaped our very, very strange election—from Biden’s disastrous televised debate to the reality-splitting circus of lies and stipulations of no fact checking in subsequent debates, to the politics-as-spectacle era reaching dizzying new heights with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. All of that has to be factored in. [T]hose of us witnessing these events from afar are being overwhelmed by the pain and death and crimes against humanity we’re seeing on our phones daily, but it’s also becoming more apparent in the media ecosystem where we’re seeing those things, where we’re not, and who wants to obscure the truth or keep it from being seen altogether. And then, well, we enter the era of the spectacular, deadly, brain-numbing, neverending media event of the second Trump presidency. And that’s when you really start to see all this shit coming to a head. An authoritarian political regime of sociopaths, thieves, liars, and conmen, half of whom are creatures of corporate and rightwing media themselves who crawled out of their screenworlds, like the girl from The Ring, into the halls of power. A chaotic reality in which the Trump administration’s war on press freedom and the people’s right to know is happening simultaneously with a “flood-the-zone” policy blitz that is overwhelming us and our screen-glued brains with a daily bombardment of horror and stupidity and (good/bad/fake) information. A reality where the difference between politics and media spectacle has completely collapsed; where Trump tries to rule the world through his social media posts and dictate reality from his phone; where a former Fox News host is the Secretary of War and quoting fake Bible quotes from Pulp Fiction to justify real war crimes in a real-life war with Iran; where incredibly consequential policy decisions—from illegally invading and kidnapping the President of Venezuela to sending federal troops into American cities—are made according to the “logic” of a shitty 1980s action movie, and where the reality of what’s actually happening on the ground anywhere is profoundly muddled by fake news, AI slop, bots, scrambled timelines and search engines, platform suppression, etc.; where virtually all of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who own the media and control the means of communication and reality-perception are fully collaborating with the regime, sitting at Trump’s inauguration, in the White House, providing horrifying surveillance tech to the government, securing massive contracts for their companies, taking a chainsaw to government agencies and exposing our government data. I don’t need to tell you, but I will: This is a nightmare scenario, and the nightmare is here. It is not just press freedom: It’s the First Amendment itself—and all the basic freedoms that fall under that umbrella—that is under full-on attack. Regarding the current state of press freedom in America and the people’s right to know, none of what I’ve discussed so far can be disentangled from the simultaneous authoritarian attacks on the free speech of students and professors on college campuses, as well as teachers and librarians at K-12 schools—attacks coming from the federal government, certain state governments, and from criminally complicit administrators who are throwing the very people and constitutional principles they’re supposed to protect into the woodchipper. None of this can be disentangled from the federal attacks on the labor movement—from charges filed against union leaders like David Huerta to bullets fired into union members like Alex Pretti, to Trump firing or stripping union bargaining rights from millions of federal workers and crippling the National Labor Relations Board. None of this can be disentangled from the firings and investigations into people for posting online after events like the assassination of Charlie Kirk; from the federal machinations to use Big Tech to surveil and police all of us, to centralize and expose all our sensitive data, to try to create a national registry of voter information, and try to criminalize our constitutionally protected speech, posts, and protests by redefining them as “terrorism”; from politically weaponized lawsuits, investigations, and threats to use the vicious might of the federal government and the prison-industrial complex against nonprofits and activists and more. It is not just press freedom: It’s the First Amendment itself—and all the basic freedoms that fall under that umbrella—that is under full-on attack. And none of this has even yet touched on the greatest crime against press freedom and the people’s right to know, which we continue to bear witness to to this day. The crime of our journalist colleagues and comrades who are fulfilling their sacred duty to help us get the truth out of places like Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and who are being murdered in cold blood for it. We’ve never seen anything in our lifetimes like the mass slaughter and targeting of journalists that’s happened around the world over the past 4 years, with Israel being by far the worst offender, murdering hundreds of journalists and media workers with the full financial and political support of our country. I am sickened and shattered that humanity has allowed this to happen. Yet I am eternally, mournfully grateful for our brothers, sisters, and siblings who have made the ultimate sacrifice, in pursuit of the ultimate good, and with the ultimate hope that the horrifying realities they’ve documented would be seen and not forgotten. I am honored to be here with all of you keeping that fire burning and carrying on this noble and necessary mission for truth at all costs. I am fueled by it, and I am here, like you, to fight for it. As I already said, you don’t need me telling you how bad things have gotten out there, and how much worse they’re getting month after month. All you need to do is open your eyes and see for yourself. But in the Year of Our Lord 2026, even that most basic of existential needs—to see and know the world we’re living in—is under direct assault, with disastrous individual and societal consequences. And that’s really what I came here to talk to you about today… We are seeing and experiencing these changes at the same time that they are changing how we see and experience things. Again, many of these great, terrible, and swift changes to our media ecosystem and our political reality have unfolded in a relatively short amount of time, in pretty rapid succession. We have experienced these changes as average people in the world, as media users and consumers, and we’re navigating them as best we can as professional journalists and media makers, all while life continues to get harder, scarier, more expensive, and the conditions for making a good living are increasingly precarious or nonexistent for most people. We are seeing and experiencing these changes at the same time that they are changing how we see and experience things, all while the world spins madly into chaos, war, fear, neo-feudal wealth inequality, and industrial-scale violence, and while our cyborg brains are being cooked from too much news, too much content, too much awfulness, too little IRL contact with other people, and a rapidly decreasing ability to individually and collectively discern what’s real. But I am here to stress that this generalized existential state we’ve entered in the 2020s is not a byproduct of neutral technological advancements or big industry changes that have simply happened around us. They are effects of a war being fought against us—a war that we are currently losing. It is a war on our eyes, on our minds, and on our human faculties, developed over millenia, to understand the world we inhabit and to figure out what is true and what is not. We are not just increasingly exhausted and discombobulated because more awful shit is happening in faster succession in our country, in the world, in the news cycle, and because we are seeing more of that awful shit on a daily basis across a media ecosystem that permeates more of our lives than ever before. That is part of the reason, for sure. Humans have undergone a compressed evolution in the digital age unlike anything in our species’ history, and for all the good it’s done, it has also, frankly, fried our brains, frayed our hearts, and immobilized the parts of us and the organs of our being that turn information into action, reducing them and us to pure consumers, scrollers, clickers, and red-eyed observers. [T]his generalized existential state we’ve entered in the 2020s is not a byproduct of neutral technological advancements or big industry changes that have simply happened around us. They are effects of a war being fought against us—a war that we are currently losing. But it is not an unrelated accident that this is all happening to us while we careen towards civilizational oblivion. We are cooking our planet at a blinding pace and life is dying off en masse all around us, war and genocide and imperialist plunder are ripping our world and our people apart, the maga-rich are speedrunning our society to collapse and pillaging everything they can like Earth is having a going-out-of-business sale. We have descended quickly into what sisters Astra Taylor and Noami Klein rightly call “end-times fascism.” The levers of power are controlled by a ghoulish death cult of sociopathic billionaire oligarchs, war hawks, bigoted misanthropes, religious fanatics, and monstrous pedophile cabals who have given up on this world and the very notion that we can have a society that works for everyone, opting instead for a future that only works for them. It is not an unrelated accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos, are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they’re gobbling up everything else. This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of. As journalists and media makers, we are trained to focus on one side of this war. You could say that I and everyone at The Real News Network are class-war correspondents, reporting around the US and around the world from the front lines of the ruling-class assault on working people’s lives, our health, our communities, our freedom, our democracy, our planet, and on life itself. But you cannot do this work today and not also realize that the very people, governments, and capitalist entities whose crimes we’re trying to report on are waging an all-out effort to demolish the very cognitive and societal foundations of our human abilities to see and know and remember the truth, to speak the truth and be heard, to trust what our eyes are seeing as truth. To be clear: “All governments lie,” as Izzy Stone famously said, and power lying to us is not new. Oligarchs controlling the media and bending and warping the truth for their own ends is not new. What is new about what we face today is the scope and scale of the ability of society’s powerbrokers and power-wielders to collaboratively seize the means of communication and reality-perception and to attack our minds to the point that we have no idea what is true. It is not an unrelated accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos—are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they’re gobbling up everything else. I say this not to depress you, not to overwhelm you, but to motivate you. The fate of journalism itself has never been more precarious, but the need for truth, truth telling, and defenders of truth has never been more clear. This is real Lord of the Rings shit: it’s light versus darkness, truth versus lies, people versus profit and the profiteers; it’s a future in which we’ve collectively chosen to reclaim our reality, preserve the power of truth, and rebuild a better, truer democracy versus the future we’ll get if we don’t. There is no neutral territory here, no safe harbor, no sidelines to stand on. The class wars in reality and on reality are accelerating, the ruling class is winning, and the disastrous effects concern all of us, our future, and everything we hold dear. It’s time we start acting like this is the case, and stop operating under the daily delusion that we can keep doing our work like normal and all of this will go away like a bad dream, that we can somehow remain “objective” and evade getting sucked into a war that’s already changing us and everything around us. In closing, my message to all of you—to my journalist colleagues, to our students and future journalists—is this: We are not just doing a job here, and you are not just preparing for a career; we are, all of us, soldiers on the front lines of a war that is already being fought against us, our profession, and our ability to see and discern what’s real. So let’s start acting like it! Don’t just see press freedom and the people’s right to know as things that are under attack and must be defended, but wear them as armor and hold them high like flags in an offensive charge to defeat these lying, reality-warping, planet-gobbling psychopaths and hold them accountable for their crimes. This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of. Our journalistic ability to find and tell the truth is only half the battle; the other half is fighting, adapting, and moving strategically to get people to see the truth and to make truth mean something in a world where the richest and most powerful are doing everything they can to dilute the power of truth and inoculate themselves from it. Don’t let them get away with it! Don’t let them win! Use media and journalism as weapons to fight back. Accept that, in 2026, to be a journalist is not simply to be a documenter and teller of truths, but to be an activist for truth as such. Be better at telling the truth than they are at selling lies. Be rigorous and ferociously committed to the truth, but be creative, too, and be cunning, be collaborative, be persistent. Use every tool at your disposal to make reality undeniable and make resistance to unreality irresistible. And recognize that media can only do so much to make that happen: We must use media to do the most good we can with media, but independent media can and must also play a role in catalyzing or facilitating immediate, in-person connection and grounding people in a shared, agreed-upon reality. No politics, no grassroots movements, can survive without that. With all of our skills, tools, platforms, and networks, those of us in independent media must be a critical rebel force, fighting in a digital and analog battlefield not just for the truth, but for our very ability to see and know and remember and act. Really, when it comes down to it, the fact is that we’re fighting for the very mindful faculties that make us human against the inhumane designs and insatiable desires of those who would reduce us to mindless cattle—and who are reducing our world to rubble. They must be stopped, and we must beat them. Not just our profession, but our future depends on it. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the battle lines couldn’t be clearer. I know which side I’m on. Do you? This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.
Utah Housing Model Is the Wrong Way To Go
A new report suggests the state's plan to centralize homeless services could be doomed to fail.
A new report suggests the state's plan to centralize homeless services could be doomed to fail. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Garrett Grainger.
A network of rank-and-file union members and immigrant solidarity activists in Washington State banded together to stop a deportation in process.
A network of rank-and-file union members and immigrant solidarity activists in Washington State banded together to stop a deportation in process. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Emily Markwiese.
Stephen Miller Owned Up to $250,000 in Palantir Stock at Time of ICE Contract
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, owned up to $250,000 in Palantir stock when he entered his role. On June 24, 2025, Sharon Zhang of Truthout and Edith Olmsted of The New Republic reported Miller’s apparent co...
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, owned up to $250,000 in Palantir stock when he entered his role. On June 24, 2025, Sharon Zhang of Truthout and Edith Olmsted of The New Republic reported Miller’s apparent conflict of interest due to Palantir’s surveillance software contracts… The post Stephen Miller Owned Up to $250,000 in Palantir Stock at Time of ICE Contract appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
‘These are the mistakes a dying empire makes’
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Gas prices rise to about $10 a gallon as oil prices surged to a wartime high today, topping out at $120 a barrel with no end in sight of the war standoff, on April 30, 2026 in Fenner, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images." data-attachment-id="343474" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/these-are-the-mistakes-a-dying-empire-makes/gas-prices-continue-to-rise-as-oil-surges-to-a-wartime-high-of-120-a-barrel" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1708&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1708" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"8","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R5m2","caption":"FENNER, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 30: Gas prices rise to about $10 a gallon as oil prices surged to a wartime high today, topping out at $120 a barrel with no end in sight of the war standoff, on April 30, 2026 in Fenner, California. International fear is growing that the U.S. war against Iran will drag on and further tighten global energy supplies. Most of California is experiencing an average of just over $6 a gallon. Fenner is located on Route 66 in the eastern Mojave Desert. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1777536996","copyright":"2026 David McNew","focal_length":"100","iso":"100","shutter_speed":"0.00625","title":"Gas Prices Continue to Rise as Oil Surges to a Wartime High of $120 a Barrel","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="Gas Prices Continue to Rise as Oil Surges to a Wartime High of $120 a Barrel" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Gas prices rise to about $10 a gallon as oil prices surged to a wartime high today, topping out at $120 a barrel with no end in sight of the war standoff, on April 30, 2026 in Fenner, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images. " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> A conversation with professor and economist Richard Wolff on operation “Economic Fury” and the fragility of the petrodollar.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Gas prices rise to about $10 a gallon as oil prices surged to a wartime high today, topping out at $120 a barrel with no end in sight of the war standoff, on April 30, 2026 in Fenner, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images." decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1025&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1366&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1334&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343474" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/these-are-the-mistakes-a-dying-empire-makes/gas-prices-continue-to-rise-as-oil-surges-to-a-wartime-high-of-120-a-barrel" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1708&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1708" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"8","credit":"Getty Images","camera":"Canon EOS R5m2","caption":"FENNER, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 30: Gas prices rise to about $10 a gallon as oil prices surged to a wartime high today, topping out at $120 a barrel with no end in sight of the war standoff, on April 30, 2026 in Fenner, California. International fear is growing that the U.S. war against Iran will drag on and further tighten global energy supplies. Most of California is experiencing an average of just over $6 a gallon. Fenner is located on Route 66 in the eastern Mojave Desert. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1777536996","copyright":"2026 David McNew","focal_length":"100","iso":"100","shutter_speed":"0.00625","title":"Gas Prices Continue to Rise as Oil Surges to a Wartime High of $120 a Barrel","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Gas Prices Continue to Rise as Oil Surges to a Wartime High of $120 a Barrel" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Gas prices rise to about $10 a gallon as oil prices surged to a wartime high today, topping out at $120 a barrel with no end in sight of the war standoff, on April 30, 2026 in Fenner, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images. " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2273255310-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="780" height="174" data-attachment-id="275848" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/instead-of-a-war-on-terror-imagine-if-we-spent-the-last-20-years-fighting-climate-change/in-these-times-logo" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?fit=897%2C200&ssl=1" data-orig-size="897,200" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="In These Times logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?fit=780%2C174&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?resize=780%2C174&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-275848 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?w=897&ssl=1 897w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?resize=300%2C67&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?resize=768%2C171&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?resize=400%2C89&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?resize=706%2C157&ssl=1 706w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In-These-Times-logo.jpeg?w=370&ssl=1 370w" sizes="(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px" /> This story originally appeared in In These Times on May 4, 2026. It’s been more than two months since President Donald Trump dropped the first bombs in his illegal war with Iran, and U.S. consumers are increasingly footing the bill. With traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remaining a tiny fraction of what it was before Trump began this latest regime-change campaign, oil prices reached a four-year high of more than $125 per barrel last week. Over the course of the same week, average gas prices surged more than 30 cents to reach $4.45 per gallon, roughly $1.50 higher than the pre-war average. With no sign of reversing course, economists continue to warn of recession. In late April, Norwegian professor Glenn Dieson sat down with Richard Wolff, one of the world’s most prominent Marxist economists, to discuss how these impacts to the global economy will shape Trump’s war plans (or lack thereof), and why the last two months have signaled the ​“decline of the American empire.” Glenn Diesen Welcome back. We are joined today by Professor Richard Wolff to discuss ​“Economic Fury,” the new arm of the U.S. war against Iran. Richard Wolff Glad to be here, Glenn. Diesen [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent has now complemented [“Operation Epic Fury”] with ​“Economic Fury,” the sanctions policies against Iran. It’s been a bit confusing, because first there’s a sanction on all Iranian oil, then they open up the Iranian oil to help stabilize the markets. Then there’s a blockade on Iranian ports. How do you assess this new effort to strangle Iran? Wolff Well, we have stopped following the kind of herky-jerky, on-again off-again statements, because they are so often inconsistent one with the other. Either you are going to take the steps that make oil supply more plentiful and drive down the price, or you’re not. By the way, Mr. Bessent is now going to have to decide on the request of the Gulf states for what are called dollar swaps. This is not unimportant. The reason you establish [a dollar swap] is you have reason to believe that there’s going to be a shortage of dollars. All the swap means is that a foreign central bank doesn’t have to go into the market and buy dollars if it’s short of them. It can simply grab a bunch from a swap agreement. It used to be that this was done on a weekly basis. Now it is done on a daily basis, which is already a warning sign: Somebody is very worried about access to dollars. You discover who’s worried, which shouldn’t surprise you: The Gulf states. Many of them have now put pressure on the United States to give them credit swap facilities, or if they do have them, to make them much larger. Why would they do that? They have dollar-denominated debts. They expected to be able to pay off their dollar-denominated debts around the world, with the dollars coming in from oil and gas. But there are no dollars coming in because the Strait of Hormuz is shut, and the blockade makes it worse. So they can’t pay off their debts. I’m going to guess that they’re going to start selling their ownership of [U.S.] assets. They’re going to sell Treasury securities. A fire sale of Treasury securities brings their price down, and that raises the interest rate. We are on the edge of a recession right now. If the Gulf states, en masse, were to sell lots of treasuries, you’re going to see a dangerous spike in interest rates in this country at a time when the Trump administration wants everything other than that. You’re beginning to see why a significant number of commentators are waving their fingers warning that this event, which seems to be localized in the Persian Gulf and the [Arabian Sea] and so on, is in fact, dangerous for the whole world economy. Diesen So essentially, the petrodollar is being unraveled to some extent. The Gulf states are not exporting, which means they’re not getting the dollars, which means they’re not reinvesting them into the United States. How long can the United States hold on to this position? Wolff I don’t have a crystal ball. But Mr. Trump has lost a great deal of his base. People who voted for him because of one or two or three issues — those people, he has now lost. Trump cannot afford a spike in interest rates. He is, at this point in my judgment, relying on two things to survive politically: Whatever remains of the MAGA base, and the richest 10% of the United States. The stock market is very high. It took a momentary dip with the Iran war, but it basically presumes that this war will be over soon and it will not cost any rich person anything. Therefore, Glenn, here is the closest I’m going to come to a prediction. My guess is the government will give the states all the swap they want, give them access to as many dollars as they need to pay off as many debts as they have without selling treasuries or disinvesting in the U.S. stock market, because it’s too dangerous. They told themselves that they could go into Iran and decapitate the Ayatollah and kill a few other leading generals and advisors, and that the system would collapse. [The] United States could then dictate terms for a new government, regime change and a new Shah of Iran, replicating more or less what the Shah of Iran used to do for the United States. There’s a clip of Vance [almost] a year ago talking about war in Iran. It has Vance explaining why going into the war with Iran is a good idea. A very strong endorsement by the vice president, in which he says [something like] the following: Previous presidents all knew that Iran was a disaster for the United States, but they were too dumb to do anything about it. The difference is, Trump isn’t too dumb, and we’re going to do it when, well, Obama didn’t and Bush didn’t, and Clinton didn’t, and we’re going to do it. That’s why, when Tulsi Gabbard and other intelligence officials told them they were wrong about Iran, they just didn’t listen. It was too attractive. And now the on again, off again oil management. This is a desperate government whose plan is shot, whose opportunities in that direction are all gone, and it’s trying desperately to figure out how to get out of this. For several months, they would kill two or three people in a boat near Venezuela. No arrests, no trial, no lawyer. When we arrest people for drug traffic, which we do inside the United States, they automatically are entitled to a lawyer, a trial, to defend themselves. So here we have a complete negation of the entire legal apparatus, and that is too much for a significant number of people who otherwise would like Trump, but they can’t go with this. Diesen If the war continues, the United States will suffer immensely. However, if Trump leaves, and the Strait of Malacca is under Iranian control then Iran has already announced its measures. It has now set up a toll which it will get its reparations from, so it can rebuild from the U.S. attack. No matter what the United States does now, there’s no going back to the way things were. “This is a desperate government whose plan is shot and it’s trying desperately to figure out how to get out of this.” Wolff Trump has declared that the assassination of the Ayatollah equals regime change. He’s made that simple equation so he can repeat over and over again. He is going to overwhelm the media. He’s probably going to have some dramatic maneuver that he can sell as a victory. There’ll be some Marines who take over an island somewhere in the Persian Gulf. At the same time, you and Israel bomb a few bridges, an electric plant, maybe a desalination plant, who knows? And then say, The Iranians have asked us to have peace, and now that there’s a new regime, we change the regime and we punish them. That will be the best he can do. Tucker Carlson isn’t that stupid, nor is Marjorie Taylor Greene, nor are all the others who are critical. So he will suffer. But that will be the comic book story that will be told to large numbers of people – even those who don’t like him– because it conforms. Let me give you the proof: When I travel around the country, and I’m asked to give a talk about the 20th and 21st century U.S. economic development, I mention the war in Vietnam. ​“In 1975, the war ended. The United States lost, and the Communist Party of North Vietnam won. And how do you know they won? Because they’re the ones in charge of Vietnam now, and that’s a big clue.” The students laugh, but I would bet my money that more than half of the students in the room, if asked by questionnaire in the next 10 minutes who won the war in Vietnam, they would answer the United States. It’s not because they never studied the war, it’s that in the United States, America wins. When the President of the United States says that ever since World War II, the European nations have taken advantage of the United States, that’s what most Americans probably believe. We won World War II, then the Marshall Plan was our extraordinary kindness in helping you over there rebuild after the war, and some of those debts you haven’t even paid back. And when I explained to people that the Marshall Plan required that the dollars given to Europe be spent on American exports, and therefore it was a kind of Keynesian stimulus, they know what I’m saying, but they don’t want to go there. They resist. That’s what I think he’s going to do. He’s going to play the one hand he has left: the American desire for a victory. “That’s what I think he’s going to do. He’s going to play the one hand he has left: the American desire for a victory.” Diesen The history in Europe isn’t always well-remembered. There’s very interesting polling in France from 1945. They asked who was mostly responsible for defeating Nazi Germany, and there’s an overwhelming majority saying that was the Soviet Union. In 2018 only 15% of the French believed that it was the Soviet Union who contributed the most. If you challenge this, people will go to great lengths to ignore it. Wolff We have a senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville. When he ran for office, he gave a speech saying he was proud of his father, who fought in World War II against the communists, and he had to wait until the reporters explained to him, the communists were our allies. Fascists were the enemy. Diesen Do you see any ways of saving the petrodollar where we are now? Wolff The way I make sense of the larger context of what’s going on is the decline of the American empire. You go to war in Iran, you think it’ll have no more effect than snatching Mr. Maduro and his wife from their bedroom, you’re making unbelievable mistakes. In my judgment, those are the mistakes a declining empire makes, and those are the mistakes that accelerate the decline. The dollar is not playing the role it once did. The Iranians are accepting payment not in dollars anymore for oil. I don’t see any reason to suspect that other countries won’t do that. I don’t see any strategy in the United States that can cope with that. The promise of the last 10 presidents was to reverse the decline of American manufacturing. None of them delivered it. Mr. Trump is not delivering it either. Manufacturing is being handled by China and a few other places. In China, inflation for the last several years has been less than 1%. They are producing enough material that they can produce drones and missiles forever. They have an immense border with Russia so they can share all of that with Russia. And Russia has the Caspian Sea, which allows it to share it with Iran. Of course Iran isn’t going to run out. If Russia and China help, which they are, you have to face that. Venezuela had none of that. And for me, these are symptoms of a declining empire whose people have never been prepared to imagine that their empire would decline. The United States is at the top, and so it will be forever. Once you lay it out, it’s so crazy that you realize the denial is also a part of the decline. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Glenn Diesen and Richard D. Wolff.
[episode cut] The Data Center Revolt: John Cassidy & Faiz Shakir
Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages
The post Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages appeared first on ProPublica.
During a military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a large dog bit into tenant Tolulope Akinsulie’s right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica On the night of the military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a loud boom woke the Nigerian man who lived in Unit 215. Tolulope Akinsulie stood up from his bed and saw heavily armed federal agents rushing into his apartment. He then felt the jaws of a large dog biting into his right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Akinsulie screamed as the dog tore the flesh from his ankle, thighs, hip and wrist. Down the hall, agents took a Venezuelan mother and her 16-year-old son from their apartment at gunpoint to another unit. There, they saw agents hit a man with what looked like the butt of a rifle and kick another who was lying on the floor. As he watched, her son began to hyperventilate. “Here is another one,” agents said about a Mexican man who lived in Unit 502, before zip-tying his hands behind his back and marching him out of the building. Agents told the man he wasn’t welcome in the United States, took his city of Chicago identification card and ripped it up in front of him. While much has been documented about the Sept. 30 raid by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, new accounts from 17 men, women and children detained that night paint a violent and terrifying portrait of how the federal agents conducted the operation. Their descriptions form the basis of administrative claims filed on their behalf Tuesday against DHS and several other federal agencies that took part in the midnight raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. The claims mark the tenants’ first step toward seeking accountability, their lawyers said, as well as millions of dollars in damages, for federal agents’ actions during the raid, a key moment in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago. The claims allege that agents didn’t have warrants before entering apartments. “There was no reason to do me like that,” Akinsulie said in an interview with ProPublica. His body still bears the dark scars from the dog bites. The complaint, he said, is meant to send a message that officials are not above the law. “Everybody can get a check and balance,” he said. “People have to learn how to act right.” The claims allege that federal agents caused physical injuries, emotional trauma, “brutal detention” and financial loss. Each of the claimants — 15 are immigrants, and two are U.S. citizens — is seeking about $5 million, an amount the attorneys believe is comparable to similar court judgments in Chicago. “There is no amount of damages that will compensate our clients for the trauma they experienced that night,” said Susana Sandoval Vargas, the Midwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national Latino civil rights organization that is representing some of the tenants. “It is about holding the federal government accountable for their unlawful actions.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="791" width="527" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?w=527" alt="A man’s leg with his pant leg rolled up. Above his ankle, there are scars." class="wp-image-78007" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=200,300 200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=768,1152 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=683,1024 683w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=1024,1536 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=1365,2048 1365w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=863,1295 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=422,633 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=552,828 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=558,837 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=527,791 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=752,1128 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=1149,1724 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=1067,1600 1067w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=400,600 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=800,1200 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=1200,1800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260511-Kelter-Davis-Chicago-ICE-Raid-Complaint-3-1.jpg-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000-1.jpg?resize=1600,2400 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 527px) 100vw, 527px" /> “There was no reason to do me like that,” Tolulope Akinsulie said. His leg still bears the dark scars from where a dog bit him on the night of a federal raid on his apartment complex. Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica A DHS spokesperson said Wednesday that the “operation was performed in full compliance of the law” and that tenants are not owed compensation. “DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous criminal illegal aliens.” The spokesperson did not respond to questions about Akinsulie’s injuries. But federal immigration agents have said they issued verbal warnings as they entered Akinsulie’s unit and believed he had been trying to hide and evade arrest, according to documents filed in an unrelated lawsuit. Akinsulie said he was in a deep sleep and did not hear any warnings or the dog barking. Within DHS, the South Shore tenants’ claims also were submitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In addition, they were sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, neither of which responded to questions from ProPublica. An 18th claim also was filed Tuesday on behalf of a tenant who was detained outside the building a week before the raid and lost property. The Federal Tort Claims Act provides one of the only avenues for people who believe they were harmed by federal employees acting unlawfully and allows for compensation for emotional distress, property damage, injury or death. If the agency does not respond or settle a claim within six months, or if it denies a claim, individuals can then file a lawsuit. DHS would not say how many claims have been filed since last year. But already there have been dozens across the country: A pregnant woman in California said she went into premature labor after being detained and shackled. A Marine Corps veteran said he was tackled by federal agents while protesting in Oregon. A Chicago alderperson said agents swore at her, shoved her and handcuffed her after she questioned their presence in a hospital emergency room. The DHS spokesperson said the three individuals were obstructing or interfering with law enforcement. In interviews, a half dozen attorneys said they expect to see more claims in the coming months. “Hopefully this case and others will be a check against the most aggressive and reckless forms of (immigration) enforcement,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which worked on the case along with MALDEF, the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago and the MacArthur Justice Center. During the South Shore raid, some 300 heavily armed agents stormed the dilapidated, five-story building; some descended from a Black Hawk helicopter. They hurled flash grenades, broke down apartment doors and zip-tied dozens of immigrants and U.S. citizens who lived in the building. The drama was captured by a television crew that accompanied agents. The Trump administration repeatedly justified its actions by claiming it had intelligence that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building, and that there were guns, drugs and explosives inside. ProPublica journalists, who over the past several months have interviewed 16 of the 37 immigrants detained that night, previously reported that there was little evidence to back the government’s claim. To this day, federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested. The tort claims detail what families, including those with young children, allegedly experienced during the raid. A Venezuelan mother and father huddled together in their apartment with their four children, the youngest a 1-year-old U.S. citizen, who “screamed and cried in terror” while agents pointed guns at them. Agents marched them outside in their pajamas and separated the father. One of the boys, now 9, had a panic attack, according to the claim. DHS officials previously insisted children were not zip-tied, but the account from the 16-year-old boy who hyperventilated at the sight of agents assaulting immigrants said he and his mom were zip-tied outside the building. DHS called that an “abject lie” and said no children were handcuffed or restrained. While the tenants were detained, the records allege, many of their possessions were stolen or lost: shoes, Playstations, smartphones, jewelry, mattresses, a backpack with $1,300 in cash and toys. Several reported losing their vehicles, too. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?w=1149" alt="A large apartment building with a lawn and gate in front of it. There are two large trees framing the entrance of the building." class="wp-image-78008" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20251016-Vondruska-ICERaid-5_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> The South Shore apartment complex after the raid Jim Vondruska for ProPublica The raid upended tenants’ lives. Many of the immigrants, mostly Venezuelan, have already been deported. Many U.S. citizens who lived in the building, including some on public housing assistance, were forced to relocate late last year after a judge ordered the building shuttered for safety issues and code violations. José Miguel Jiménez López, 42, the Mexican man who lived on the fifth floor, worked as a welder in Chicago before the raid disrupted his life. Jiménez said he wasn’t a gang member or involved in criminal activity. So even when agents pointed guns at him, zip-tied his hands and told him to go back to his country, he thought they would let him go. They didn’t. Over the next four months, he was shuttled to detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky and Louisiana before being released at the Mexico border in February. He is now living in his childhood home in the state of Guanajuato. “I have friends and family who are still there, and they are afraid,” he said in an interview. “I wouldn’t like to see them go through what I had to go through.” His claim details harsh conditions at the facilities, including insufficient food and water, constant air conditioning during winter and little time outside. Others described getting sick from the drinking water, a lack of adequate medical care and a constant worry that they would never see their loved ones again. The DHS spokesperson said the “safety and well-being of detainees are prioritized” and that detainees have access to medical care and nutritious meals. In his claim, Jiménez alleged that “ICE officers treated him and other detainees as if they were sub-human and not entitled to basic dignity or respect.” He said he lost $3,000 worth of property, including a TV and a drill. Meanwhile, the Venezuelan woman and her 16-year-old son were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. They spent three weeks there until they were released into the U.S. on electronic monitoring. The woman now has trouble sleeping, while her son sees a psychiatrist to process what happened that night. Akinsulie, 42, said he is grateful to be alive. A devout Christian, he finds peace reading the Bible and in prayer. But while he was in detention, he had so many nightmares that he needed to see a psychiatrist. He dreamed about dogs barking behind him. Chasing him. Talking to him. “The one that really baffled me was when the German shepherd was chasing me. Then I was running,” Akinsulie said. “The German shepherd was about to bite me. That really scared me because I don’t want no more bites.” The nightmares stopped after he was released in March; the government had conceded that he and others had likely been arrested unlawfully. Akinsulie, who said he has lived in Chicago since 2007, has no criminal history, according to the arrest report from the night he was detained. He is back in Chicago now, staying with a friend and doing odd jobs. He finds it difficult to stand for a long time, and sometimes pain shoots from his hip to his right foot. Once an avid soccer player, he said he can’t kick the ball or run like he used to. He worries that the injuries might be permanent, but he can’t afford to see a doctor. The post Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Melissa Sanchez.
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 13, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 13, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 13, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Iran versus the jungle – Max live on The Judge
Do you recognize any of the artists featured in this video? 🤩🙌 #music
This content originally appeared on Playing For Change and was authored by Playing For Change.
How The War In Iran Is Shaping The Trump-Xi Summit
‘Alabama is a purple state if enough people turn out.’
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Donnita Hathaway, 45, prepares to participate in the Black Voters Matter's 57th Selma to Montgomery march at the Wright Chapel AME Church on March 09, 2022 in Selma, Alabama. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343444" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/alabama-is-a-purple-state-if-enough-people-turn-out/gettyimages-1383523350" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-1383523350" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Donnita Hathaway, 45, prepares to participate in the Black Voters Matter&#8217;s 57th Selma to Montgomery march at the Wright Chapel AME Church on March 09, 2022 in Selma, Alabama. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> "We’ve got to show up like never before... take control of our government and then we can finally do the work of the people."
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Donnita Hathaway, 45, prepares to participate in the Black Voters Matter's 57th Selma to Montgomery march at the Wright Chapel AME Church on March 09, 2022 in Selma, Alabama. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343444" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/alabama-is-a-purple-state-if-enough-people-turn-out/gettyimages-1383523350" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-1383523350" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Donnita Hathaway, 45, prepares to participate in the Black Voters Matter&#8217;s 57th Selma to Montgomery march at the Wright Chapel AME Church on March 09, 2022 in Selma, Alabama. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1383523350-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> Alabama US Senate candidate Dakarai Larriett joins Mansa Musa on Rattling the Bars to expose the rising tide of voter suppression and the battle for the Democratic ticket. Ahead of the May 19, 2026, primary, Larriett takes aim at opponent Kyle Sweetser—a former three-time Trump voter—calling his sudden party shift disingenuous while vowing to ‘fight like hell’ against racist redistricting in the South. Credits: Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded on May 11, 2026. Following the recording, a US Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for Alabama to implement a new congressional map that effectively dismantles one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Since the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana versus Cowan, significantly weakening protection under the Voting Rights Act. Several Southern states have redrawn district lines leading to concerns over the delusion of Black political representation. From the Supreme Court decision in Virginia, striking down Democrat drawing maps to Texas Governor Greg Abbott redistricting plans, receiving formal approval, the national landscape is shifting. Today we are following up with the Dakarai Larriett, a candidate for the United States Senate of Alabama to discuss these nationwide shifts and their impact on the midterm and the balance of power in Congress. Dakarai, welcome to Rattling the Bar. Dakarai Larriett: Oh, good to be back, man, sir. Mansa Musa: So let’s dive into how you see this latest decision coming out of the Supreme Court and how you assessing it in terms of the trend. Dakarai Larriett: Well, I think the story’s going to be different state by state. And here in Alabama, we’ve had our own issues with voting rights that go back 60 plus years. So here in our state, we’ve already been under direction due to Shelby versus Holder that we have to use the same map until 2030. So we think that we are going to survive this particular challenge when it gets to the Supreme Court, but we got to keep fighting. We got to keep fighting because just this week the Alabama governor, Kay Ivy brought back the legislator in an emergency session, wasted millions of dollars and essentially they brought up the old racist maps just in case the court decides to be lawless again and open this up for discussion before 2030. Mansa Musa: Okay. So how has the current legal climate impacted Alabama’s court order two black districts? Because it seems like it’s systemic. They trying to roll back voting rights, but they also, if they are successful in doing what they’re doing, a lot of the electoral gangs that have been accomplished by minorities is going to be reversed. So how is these things impacting the two black districts and more importantly, what’s y’all’s strategy in terms of dealing with it? Dakarai Larriett: We have really two pathways. One is fighting like hell in the streets and then of course we are suing left and right. And so I just met with one of the Black Lives Matter activists this morning. We’re all going to be in Montgomery again in protest over the weekend. But the bottom line is this. The Milligan case established the Second Congressional District here in Alabama as a second minority opportunity district. And Shamari Figures won that seat and we are so happy to have him there representing us. Mansa Musa: Alabama Dakarai Larriett: Population is about 26, 27% Black out of a overall population of 5.25 million people. So when you do the math, we should have at least two Black opportunity districts in the state. And again, with the decision from the Milligan case, we believe that we should be able to survive this particular assault on our voting rights and we should not be looking at any new maps until the 2030 census. Mansa Musa: Okay. So let’s shift to your campaign as I open up you running for the United States Senate. So talk about, because the primary is fastly approaching May the 19th, that’s like what, this weekend? Today. Yeah. So how’s your ground game building momentum and what are your core policies you believe will unite voters across the different backgrounds and economic classes? Because we are in Alabama and you just say 23% of the population is minorities. So how is your coalition coming along? Because I know in order to get elected on a statewide level, you have to have a course. So what’s your coalition looking like? Dakarai Larriett: So you’re right. So you can’t just make it about race and it shouldn’t be. It’s about how you impact people in their daily lives. So who do we have in our coalition? When I look at my endorsement board, it is doctors, it is lawyers, educators, armors, divine nine, you name it, preachers. My pastor endorsed me here in Birmingham, Alabama. So we are meeting people where they are. I’ve been traveling the state for a year and building diverse coalitions across the state from urban to rural. And we’re really excited. We’re using every piece of technology we can to reach people as well as reaching them face-to-face. So if that’s texting, voicemail, social media, you name it, we are meeting people where they are even in their churches or in their nightclubs. Mansa Musa: All right. Nan, let’s talk about the campaign in different candidates. All right, Kyle Schwester is a Republican Dakarai Larriett: Running as a Democrat. Mansa Musa: And running as a Democrat while this might not be a widespread tactic of the GOP in general, but they throw the rock and hide their hands. They famous for throwing the rock and hide their hand, pointing the finger to somebody else. We see this party switching occur in several states and local elections. Some of these candidates claim anti-Trump. You’ve pointed out in your press release that Switzerland is publicly admitting to voting for Trump three times. Talk about this strategy and what it means for the primary. Dakarai Larriett: So we had some very deep discussions within my team strategically about how we approach this. And what we landed on Mantle is that we are trying to win a Democratic primary first Mansa Musa: And Dakarai Larriett: Democrats wake up on Tuesday, May 19th, they want to vote for a Democrat. So we realize we’re going to upset a few Republicans or maybe Republicans that have seen the light with our campaign. But the bottom line is this, Kyle is not a Democrat Mansa Musa: From Dakarai Larriett: His voting history, not from his donation history. I think it’s really important to note that yes, he did campaign for Harris in 2024, but he is a Republican. He was on the stage telling us to vote for Harris and he continued donating to Republicans. And he likes to talk about how he spent $40 million on an ad campaign billboards around the state saying vote for Harris, but he didn’t flip a single county. So his whole premise of his campaign that he’s going to flip 200,000 Republicans in the state of Alabama is a farce. Mansa Musa: Okay. Yeah. So basically he really selling snake oil and telling people it’s a medical cure, huh? Sure. Okay. So in a recent article, an Alabama political reporter Switzer responded to your criticism saying, “Car is alleging that a Republican is choosing to run as a Democrat instead as a Republican in Alabama. For what possible reason would someone choose to take the hardest path possible to win the election? All while the Republicans are in special session trying to read electoral map so no Democrats can win in Alabama ever. Dakari clearly has a very low opinion of the intelligence of Alabama Democrat voters. What’s your response? Dakarai Larriett: Well, I think Kyle’s response is a non-response, man. I mean, my goodness, I can’t pretend to understand what his ulterior motives are, but we have some really good intelligence that Kyle actually tried to run this 2026 cycle as a Republican and the Republican Party in the state of Alabama said, absolutely not, because of his anti-Trump alleged stance. So here he is now running as a Democrat. And I want to be clear, I’m running as a Democrat because I’m a lifelong Democrat, not because it’s a backup party. So we don’t know what this guy is trying to do. Is he planning to be a fetterman? Is he planning to get in and switch parties on us as soon as he takes the oath of office? But the bottom line is he doesn’t represent our values and Alabama Democrats can do better this May 19th. Mansa Musa: Okay. So as we wrap up, let’s talk about some of the issues that are important to you that you can currently work, that you are currently working on, have been working on and why you believe you are the best choice for a senator in the state of Alabama. Dakarai Larriett: Yes. Well, when I started my campaign, I said, “We need leaders who listen.” And that’s what I did. I spent all of last summer traveling the state, polling Alabamians and figuring out what mattered to them. And that’s how we built our policy and it really is around kitchen table issues. So it’s education, it’s healthcare, it’s economic opportunity and investing in these areas so that we can all excel here in state. So ensuring that our teachers are paid fairly, that we have a real Department of Education that’s run by a professional teacher, healthcare. I actually went to Washington and protested the big beautiful bill right shoulder to shoulder with Representative Maxine Waters. I knew that this was going to devastate our healthcare in our state and it has. It’s only getting worse. More hospitals are closing. And then finally, economic opportunity, Americans, Alabamians need a pay raise. We’ve got to do something about the minimum wage. We’ve got to create training programs and pathways for everyone to excel in this state. So this is what Alabamians tell me they care about and that’s what I’m committed to fighting for every single day in Washington. Mansa Musa: You had the last word, you just articulated your views, but talk about what you see the future of Alabama looking like. Dakarai Larriett: Well, before we can get to investing in our people, we’ve got to get control. And this is what I tell people all the time is protesting activism has its place. I’ve done it for 20 years, but when I look at the optics of last week in Montgomery with D Reed being dragged from the State House, right from the Capitol, what I saw was that we didn’t have enough people officially in power on the floor voting. So we’ve got to show up like never before on May 19th. We have the votes. We just don’t show up enough. Our turnout is so poor in the state Alabama is a purple state if enough people turn out. And we saw that in 2017 when Doug Jones won this very same Senate seat. So we got to show up like never before take control of our government and then we can finally do the work of the people. Mansa Musa: We want to ask our audience to look at this interview and understand that we’re not endorsing no candid. We’re bringing people on this space to talk about issues and concerns of their constituents and more importantly, the latest Supreme Court decision that has a serious impact on voting rights amendment that people lost their lives for in order to have a right to vote. And we recognizing that as a result of them losing their lives and the sacrifice they made, we have gained some political gains in the form of congressional seats, municipalities. It’s all come from the Voting Rights Act now that it’s being decimated. We asking that you look at this and see, do you have an interest in understanding what that means to you as a citizen of the United States, but more importantly, have a voice in what you think should be done about the electoral process in this country. We ask that you continue to look at the real news, because guess what? We’re actually the real news. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.
US Government Plans AI-Driven Production of Mass Propaganda
The United States Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) plans to acquire AI technology in the next five to seven years with the purpose of creating massive amounts of curated propaganda, according to a SOCOM document reviewed by Sam Biddle for The Inter...
The United States Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) plans to acquire AI technology in the next five to seven years with the purpose of creating massive amounts of curated propaganda, according to a SOCOM document reviewed by Sam Biddle for The Intercept. The document revealed that SOCUM plans to use the… The post US Government Plans AI-Driven Production of Mass Propaganda appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
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US military construction projects in Guam are accelerating the destruction of Pacific coral reefs, according to a February 2026 report by Inside Climate News. Researchers say that dredging projects connected to US military expansion in Guam are stirrin...
US military construction projects in Guam are accelerating the destruction of Pacific coral reefs, according to a February 2026 report by Inside Climate News. Researchers say that dredging projects connected to US military expansion in Guam are stirring up sediment that is breaking down reefs already weakened by warming ocean… The post Military Expansion Threatens Pacific’s Coral Reefs appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
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Wholesale Horror: Producer Price Index Spells Disaster for Economic Outlook as Trump’s War in Iran Drags On
Trump’s war in Iran is now bleeding through the wholesale pipeline. April’s Producer Price Index (PPI) report shows wholesale prices rose 6% over the past year, the largest annual increase since December 2022, with core wholesale inflation at 4.4%. De...
Trump’s war in Iran is now bleeding through the wholesale pipeline. April’s Producer Price Index (PPI) report shows wholesale prices rose 6% over the past year, the largest annual increase since December 2022, with core wholesale inflation at 4.4%. Despite the grim report, Trump said this week that he “[doesn’t] think about Americans’ financial situation,” and it’s clear. The president could not be more out of step with Americans. For working families struggling with high prices, their financial situation is top of mind. The PPI reading comes just one day after the April CPI report revealed that consumers faced the sharpest inflation in nearly three years, and shows inflation pressures are still building. Rising diesel and jet fuel prices are increasing transportation-related costs. These upstream price increases indicate that families will face additional price hikes at the grocery store and across other everyday expenses in the months ahead. Groundwork’s Executive Director, Lindsay Owens, shared her reaction to the news: “Trump’s war in Iran has driven prices through the roof and today’s reading shows there is no end in sight. Inflation has now eaten through a year’s worth of wage gains, painting a brutal picture for working families’ budgets heading into summer. Rather than focus on making life more affordable for Americans, Trump is spending time – and taxpayer funds – on his billion dollar ballroom.” BACKGROUND Wholesale inflation is running hot, signaling higher prices for consumers in the months ahead. Final demand producer prices climbed 6% over the past year, the largest annual increase in three years, and 1.4% in April alone, while core wholesale prices (less foods, energy, and trade services) rose 4.4% over the past year and 0.6% in April alone. Wholesale inflation typically runs ahead of consumer prices, so today’s print suggests further price increases are on the horizon for consumers. Trump’s war in Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz for more than two months, and the resulting energy shock is feeding into wholesale prices. Final demand energy prices surged 7.8% in April alone, with wholesale gasoline up 15.6% in the month and 39.3% over the past year, diesel fuel up 12.6% in April and 73.8% over the past year, jet fuel up 36.4% in April and 103.8% over the past year, and natural gas is up 4.9% in April and 27.3 percent over the past year. The energy shock is increasing wholesale transportation prices: transportation and warehousing is up 5% in April, which includes truck transportation of freight, rising 8.1%, and air transportation of freight, increasing 3.6%. These wholesaler price hikes will feed into price hikes for consumers in the months ahead. Trump’s war in Iran is layered on top of his tariffs that continue to raise wholesale prices for tariff-exposed goods. Wholesale final demand goods (less food and energy) climbed 4.6% over the past year and 0.7% in April alone. Wholesale prices for tariff-exposed goods continued rising, including metals up 35.6% in the past year, electronic components up 27.6%, and communication equipment up 11.9%. This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
Analysts: Ending Chinese visa-free travel could cripple Northern Marianas tourism
EVS-TAP program makes it easier for Chinese to visit the U.S. territory, but presents security risks, critics say.
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands —A growing push in Washington to restrict Chinese travel to the Northern Mariana Islands could kneecap economic recovery in the U.S. territory as it rebuilds from the havoc left last month by Super Typhoon Sinlaku, analysts and residents told Radio Free Asia. Supporters of the Economic Vitality and Security Travel Authorization Program, or EVS-TAP, say that ending its 14-day Chinese visa-free travel allowance would put a serious dent in the economy of the islands, officially a commonwealth and abbreviated as CNMI, where according to a 2025 economic study, tourism accounts for more than two-thirds of GDP. Though the program was introduced in 2024 with the intent on boosting tourism, a group of lawmakers expressed their concern, saying it encourages birth tourism and suggesting that it could allow Beijing to influence U.S. elections in the future. The federal scrutiny began weeks before the typhoon rolled through, but the resulting destruction has magnified the stakes in the islands. Tropical getaway or stay away? As the CNMI works to restore power, repair damaged infrastructure and revive a tourism industry still far below pre‑pandemic levels, its tourism sector must still compete with other tropical getaway destinations in the Pacific. In a file photo, a vehicle lies upside down at Saipan International Airport after Super Typhoon Sinlaku struck the Northern Mariana Islands in mid‑April 2026. (Bryan Manabat/RFA) Sinlaku knocked out power to more than 15,600 customers, toppled hundreds of poles and transformers, and forced Saipan International Airport into limited daytime‑only operations. Officials estimate overall damage could reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting homes, government facilities and tourism‑dependent infrastructure. The territory is roughly 6,000 miles from the U.S. mainland but only hours from major Asian hubs, and China remains the only large‑scale tourism market capable of restoring pre‑pandemic visitor volumes, according to statistics from the Marianas Visitors Authority. The CNMI welcomed 487,008 visitors in 2019, including 185,526 from China. By 2023, total arrivals had fallen to 215,543, and Chinese arrivals dropped precipitously to 10,764 in fiscal 2025, brought on by a sudden halt in EVS-TAP processing at the beginning of the current administration. Even though the program has restarted, the market remains a fraction of its former size. The visa‑waiver program remains “critically important” to the tourism economy, Marianas Visitors Authority managing director Jamika Taijeron, told RFA. “China was one of our top source markets prior to the pandemic, generating significant revenue through airlines, hotels, restaurants, retailers and small businesses,” she said. She noted that a sudden suspension of the program last year led to months‑long loss of direct air service from Hong Kong. “Our tourism stakeholders need consistency and predictability in federal travel policies so they can plan long‑term operations, maintain workforce stability and stay committed in their Marianas investments,” she said. Still, many in Washington are more concerned about security, and have characterized the program as “Communist China’s back door” into the United States. On March 9, more than a month before Sinlaku’s landfall, 34 members of the House of Representatives urged the secretaries of Homeland Security, State and the Interior to shut down EVS-TAP and other federal entry programs that allow Chinese nationals to visit the CNMI without visas. Their letter echoed concerns raised in January by three U.S. senators and mirrored a bipartisan push last year citing birth‑tourism cases and human‑smuggling prosecutions. The lawmakers cited estimates that more than 3,300 babies have been born in the CNMI to Chinese nationals since 2009, with annual births rising from fewer than 10 to nearly 600 at the peak. They warned that many of these U.S.-born children were raised in China and could reach voting age by 2030, a scenario they said could allow a “hostile nation” to influence American elections. In public statements, Kimberlyn King‑Hinds, the CNMI’s delegate to Congress, rejected the claims, saying that Washington often misunderstands the islands’ circumstances. Critics have accused her of supporting policies that benefit Chinese interests, but she said her position is rooted in economic necessity. An advertisement in simplified Chinese characters and English promoting gaming at Best Sunshine Live Casino is displayed at Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, Nov. 22, 2016. (Farah Master/Reuters) “It’s not about China. It’s about retirement. It’s about paying employees,” she said. “This is about the economy. This is about tourism. This is about customers. We need customers for this economy to keep moving. That’s just the reality.” Legal analyst and former CNMI resident Chanho Roh told RFA the debate in Washington reflects broader tensions in U.S. immigration enforcement, with unusually high stakes for the islands. “Even when Congress closes one legal loophole, new methods or pathways often emerge,” he said, noting that birth tourism and visa‑waiver policy are politically linked but “not identical policy questions.” Roh said visa‑waiver arrangements typically rely on reciprocity, and CNMI residents do not receive comparable visa‑free access to China, including Hainan Island. But he warned that eliminating the program without an “alternative economic strategy” risks worsening the Commonwealth’s decline. “The aftermath is already visible — abandoned developments, unresolved legal disputes involving Chinese investors, and deteriorating properties that affect the islands’ appearance and economy,” he said. Stalled recovery In <a href="https://www.mvariety.com/news/local/local-news-saipan-chamber-evs-tap-is-a-secure-effective-and-essential-program-for-nmi-economic-stability/article_c1eb823d-8d06-4e09-8a36-154df4c52f86.html/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRwLnBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFDUFkxSGU5enNPVGV2dkxVc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHjW--WS9_5KZRev5X8e8lIUe0YzUEW2cEBBDAqCKW5A9lpaWCesOEyOjJGdG_aem_gZsq8XVTlXMA3YuoPi3OAA&fbclid=IwY2xjawRwLnBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFDUFkxSGU5enNPVGV2dkxVc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHjW--WS9_5KZRev5X8e8lIUe0YzUEW2cEBBDAqCKW5A9lpaWCesOEyOjJGdG_aem_gZsq8XVTlXMA3YuoPi3OAA" rel="">a letter that addressed the claims of the 34 lawmakers, the Saipan Chamber of Commerce said terminating the visa‑waiver programs would deepen the CNMI’s economic strain and jeopardize its fragile recovery. Lawful tourism supported by the programs, the group said, remains essential to sustaining small businesses and protecting jobs for U.S. citizens and residents. The Chamber acknowledged that birth tourism was once a challenge but said it is no longer a prevailing issue. Targeted policy changes, enhanced screening and close coordination with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have “effectively mitigated” the problem. People walk outside of Saipan International Airport in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, June 28, 2024 (Yuichi Yamazaki/AFP) The CNMI’s heavy reliance on tourism leaves it exposed to sudden shocks, such as the recent super typhoon, Betty Bai of Saipan Chinese News and a tourism events operator, told RFA. She noted that competitors such as Thailand, Maldives, Palau and Fiji offer visa‑free or visa‑on‑arrival access for Chinese travelers. “CNMI lost its edge,” she said. Rather than debating extremes, she said, the focus should be on managing the visa policy properly and “making it work.” But even if EVS-TAP is left alone, diversification is necessary in the tourism industry, Steve Jang, an entrepreneur and operator of Plumeria Steakhouse in the bustling tourist hub of Garapan, told RFA. “Eliminating the waiver would almost certainly reduce arrival numbers, leading to lower occupancy rates, reduced business revenue and potential job losses,” he said. “Relying too heavily on any single market is a risk. Diversification would make our local economy more resilient.” Edited by Eugene Whong. This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Bryan Manabat for RFA.
Family Demands Release of Salah Sarsour, Milwaukee Muslim Leader Taken By ICE
Salah Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian immigrant, green card holder and president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, has been locked up in an ICE jail since late March. Despite his lawful permanent resident ...
Salah Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian immigrant, green card holder and president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, has been locked up in an ICE jail since late March. Despite his lawful permanent resident status, the government says he could be subject to deportation for failing to disclose a conviction by Israeli military authorities when he was a teenager in the occupied West Bank. Sarsour says he never understood the charges presented against him in Hebrew and that he was tortured in Israeli custody. Supporters view the case as an escalation of the Trump administration’s crackdown on Pro-Palestinian speech. Munjed Ahmad, a member of Salah Sarsour’s legal team, says, “Salah’s case will be a litmus test. Will we allow the administration to gut those rights and to strip people from their free speech?” Ahmad is joined by Sarsour’s son Kareem, who calls Trump’s federal immigration agents “kidnappers” and says his family initially had no idea what had happened to his father. While incarcerated, Salah Sarsour missed the birth of his ninth grandchild. “He’s a community pillar,” says Kareem Sarsour. “The entire thing shook us as a family.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Astra Taylor on AI Data Center Resistance & Fighting “Billionaire Big Tech Agenda”
As the “supercharged” construction of new data centers to power artificial intelligence blankets the country, a growing resistance movement to these massive corporate projects amid a lack of public oversight is not far behind. As o...
As the “supercharged” construction of new data centers to power artificial intelligence blankets the country, a growing resistance movement to these massive corporate projects amid a lack of public oversight is not far behind. As organizer Astra Taylor explains, local fights across the country are leveraging this “industry chokepoint” to force important questions, from the distribution of land, water and energy resources to democratic governance over an industry currently driven by a “billionaire Big Tech agenda.” While AI boosters frame the technology as inevitable, Taylor says, “I think that many people are more skeptical than that. … That’s part of what it means to have democratic governance over AI, to say, 'No, we don't need this technology to take over every facet of our existence.’” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Trump’s commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Martin Makary, has resigned. During Makary’s 13-month tenure, he attempted to split the difference between Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.&#821...
Trump’s commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Martin Makary, has resigned. During Makary’s 13-month tenure, he attempted to split the difference between Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda and a more traditional approach to regulation, ultimately angering both camps. “Nobody was happy with what he did,” says Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Shortly before his resignation, Makary had drawn the ire of President Trump for attempting to block the approval of fruit-flavored vapes, and anti-abortion groups for not placing harsher restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone. But even before Makary took the helm, mass layoffs and the loss of scientific expertise had already thrown the FDA, which has oversight powers extending to more than a fifth of the U.S. economy, in turmoil. The FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, Kyle Diamantis, will now assume Makary’s position in an acting capacity. Diamantas, a personal friend of Donald Trump Jr., does not have a background in medicine. The abrupt leadership shakeup is worrisome for the future of health and medicine in the United States, says Dr. Robert Steinbrook, the health research director at watchdog organization Public Citizen. “We need a strong public health agency,” he explains. “[But] when you pick them apart for particular theories and the idiosyncrasies of the Health and Human Services secretary, you destroy things which take years, if not decades, to rebuild.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Pentagon Comptroller Says Cost of Iran War Has Risen to $29 Billion, U.S. Inflation Rate Rose to 3.8% in April, WSJ Receives Subpoenas for Records of Journalists Reporting on Internal Discussions of Iran War, Peace Activists Disrupt Politico Defense Summit, Confronting Iranian Opposition Leader Reza Pahlavi, Israeli Attacks Kill 8 in Lebanon in Latest Breaches of U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire, Senators Grill FBI Director Kash Patel over Reports of Excessive Drinking, U.S. Negotiates with Denmark to Open New Military Bases in Greenland, CNN: CIA Officers in Mexico Are Directly Involved in “Targeted Assassinations” of Cartel Members, Immigration Lawsuits Surge Under Trump’s Mass Deportation Campaign, House Field Hearing in Palm Beach Brings Epstein Survivors to “The Scene of the Crime”
Pentagon Comptroller Says Cost of Iran War Has Risen to $29 Billion U.S. Inflation Rate Rose to 3.8% in April WSJ Receives Subpoenas for Records of Journalists Reporting on Internal Discussions of Iran War Peace Activists Disrupt Politico Defense Summit, Confronting Iranian Opposition Leader Reza Pahlavi Israeli Attacks Kill 8 in Lebanon in Latest Breaches of U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire Senators Grill FBI Director Kash Patel over Reports of Excessive Drinking U.S. Negotiates with Denmark to Open New Military Bases in Greenland CNN: CIA Officers in Mexico Are Directly Involved in "Targeted Assassinations" of Cartel Members Immigration Lawsuits Surge Under Trump's Mass Deportation Campaign House Field Hearing in Palm Beach Brings Epstein Survivors to "The Scene of the Crime" This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Wednesday, May 13, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Iran Could Cut the Internet for Millions. And It’s Already Threatened To | US Iran Update
Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari did not speak against girls’ education
A video of Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari is going viral on social media, with many users, including opposition party leaders, claiming that he said girls did not need education.... The post Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari did not speak against girls’ education appeared first on Alt News.
A video of Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari is going viral on social media, with many users, including opposition party leaders, claiming that he said girls did not need education. Notably, Tiwari assumed charge as Bihar’s education minister on May 9, 2026. A user named Manish RJ shared the viral clip, writing, “Meet Bihar’s new education minister, Mithilesh Tiwari. He says girls don’t need education and should stay at home.” Quoting the post, Manish Sisodia said, “This is why I hate the BJP. The BJP believes educating girls is wrong. If you don’t believe it, listen to this statement from their education minister.” (Archive link) <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315323" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-12.51.00-PM.jpg" alt="" width="1186" height="1552" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-12.51.00-PM.jpg 1186w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-12.51.00-PM-229x300.jpg 229w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-12.51.00-PM-783x1024.jpg 783w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-12.51.00-PM-768x1005.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-12.51.00-PM-1174x1536.jpg 1174w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1186px) 100vw, 1186px" /> Congress party’s youth wing, Indian Youth Congress, shared the viral video and wrote, “Bihar’s new education Mminister Mithilesh Tiwari asks why daughters need education.” (archive link) <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315324" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-11-144355.jpg" alt="" width="892" height="1307" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-11-144355.jpg 892w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-11-144355-205x300.jpg 205w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-11-144355-699x1024.jpg 699w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-11-144355-768x1125.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 892px) 100vw, 892px" /> A similar claim was made from the Instagram handle of Aam Aadmi Party. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Aam Aadmi Party | AAP (@aamaadmiparty) A user named Dr. Laxman Yadav posted the video and slammed Tiwari. (Archive link) The Logical Indian also posted this video and made a similar claim. India TV anchor Romita Tiwari posted the video, saying, “There’s a lot of talk about women’s empowerment and respect for women in the country. And yet Bihar’s education minister Mithilesh Tiwari is asking why daughters need education.” (archive link) Click to view slideshow. Fact Check We searched YouTube using keywords related to the viral video and found a detailed report uploaded on the YouTube channel of News4Nation on May 9, 2026. The report contains the full media interaction of Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari, a clipped portion of which is now being circulated on social media. <iframe loading="lazy" id="_ytid_36951" width="810" height="456" data-origwidth="810" data-origheight="456" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qOOW4sJVgJQ?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&%23038;cc_load_policy=0&%23038;cc_lang_pref=&%23038;iv_load_policy=1&%23038;loop=0&%23038;rel=1&%23038;fs=1&%23038;playsinline=0&%23038;autohide=2&%23038;theme=dark&%23038;color=red&%23038;controls=1&%23038;disablekb=0&%23038;" class="__youtube_prefs__ epyt-is-override no-lazyload" title="YouTube player" allow="fullscreen; accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen data-no-lazy="1" data-skipgform_ajax_framebjll=""> Watching the full media interaction makes it clear that the viral claim is false and misleading. The conversation in the video was not about “education” but about the “agitation” by candidates protesting over the BPSC TRE 4 examination. The reporter questioned minister Mithilesh Tiwari about allegations that male police personnel used force against female protesters during the demonstration. Responding to this, at around 3 minutes and 54 seconds into the video, Tiwari said, “What is the need for agitation? Our daughters are our strength, the foundation of our prosperity, and why do those daughters need to come out on the streets when Modi is standing in reverence for women’s empowerment?” When he was told, “For rights,” Tiwari replied, “You will get your rights anyway…” So, to sum up, Alt News’ investigation found that in the viral clip, Mithilesh Tiwari used the word ‘agitation’, which several social media users misrepresented as ‘education’ to falsely claim that he said girls do not need education. That said, Alt News does not endorse Mithilesh Tiwari’s remarks. While the viral claim falsely portrayed his statement as being against girls’ education, his actual response made in the context of allegations of force being used against female protesters can still be seen as dismissive of women’s right to participate in democratic protest and public dissent. UPDATE This story was originally published by Alt News in Hindi on May 11. Even after that, major news organisations such as The Times of India, News18, Mint, The New Indian Express, and Moneycontrol misrepresented Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari’s statement and ran false reports stating he had opposed girls’ education. Click to view slideshow. The post Bihar education minister Mithilesh Tiwari did not speak against girls’ education appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.
The Hindu clipping on Indira Gandhi urging people not to buy gold in 1967 is fake
A viral image claiming to be a June 6, 1967 front page of The Hindu is viral on social media. The clipping, shared by several social media users, journalists, and even... The post The Hindu clipping on Indira Gandhi urging people not to buy gold in 1967 is fake appeared first on Alt News.
A viral image claiming to be a June 6, 1967 front page of The Hindu is viral on social media. The clipping, shared by several social media users, journalists, and even a few media outlets, claims that then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appealed to citizens on June 5, 1967, not to buy gold and to maintain “national discipline.” The viral clipping surfaced after Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently urged Indians to avoid purchasing gold for a year in order to ease pressure on the country’s foreign exchange reserves. The appeal triggered sharp political reactions, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi calling it a sign of the government’s economic failure, arguing that the country had reached a point where citizens were being told what they should and should not buy. Against this backdrop, several BJP leaders, Right-wing influencers, journalists, and commentators circulated the alleged 1967 clipping to argue that such appeals were not unprecedented and had also been made during Congress rule. Senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai shared the clipping on social media, writing, “In India, the more things change the more they remain the same: from 1967 to 2026. Only this time we can’t really blame it on Indira Gandhi or Nehru.” He later deleted the post. Times Now also published a report based on the clipping before subsequently updating the story. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315315" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184619.jpg" alt="" width="1018" height="1633" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184619.jpg 1018w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184619-187x300.jpg 187w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184619-638x1024.jpg 638w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184619-768x1232.jpg 768w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184619-958x1536.jpg 958w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1018px) 100vw, 1018px" /> BJP MP Nishikant Dubey targeted Rahul Gandhi by sharing the purported clipping of ‘The Hindu’. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315316" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184747.jpg" alt="" width="894" height="1150" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184747.jpg 894w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184747-233x300.jpg 233w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184747-796x1024.jpg 796w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184747-768x988.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 894px) 100vw, 894px" /> BJP supporter Gaurav Pradhan, who is often found spreading misinformation, shared the same image. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315317" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184955.jpg" alt="" width="891" height="1138" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184955.jpg 891w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184955-235x300.jpg 235w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184955-802x1024.jpg 802w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-184955-768x981.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 891px) 100vw, 891px" /> BJP leader Professor Gaurav Vallabh, while sharing the viral clipping, wrote that the Opposition’s task was not to oppose everything, but to support meaningful suggestions given in the national interest. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315318" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-185218.jpg" alt="" width="891" height="1315" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-185218.jpg 891w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-185218-203x300.jpg 203w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-185218-694x1024.jpg 694w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-12-185218-768x1133.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 891px) 100vw, 891px" /> Fact Check We searched relevant keywords to verify the format of The Hindu in 1967 and found archived copies of the newspaper from that period on the collectibles website Bid Curious. A comparison between the viral clipping and authentic editions revealed several inconsistencies. For instance, The Hindu was (and continues to be) published in an eight-column broadsheet format, whereas the viral clipping features only five columns, a layout more typical of tabloid newspapers. We also found discrepancies in the newspaper’s tagline. Authentic editions carried the tagline “India’s National Newspaper,” while the viral clipping instead reads “Indian National Newspaper.” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-315319" src="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Viral-ClippingGGF.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="1018" srcset="https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Viral-ClippingGGF.jpg 1500w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Viral-ClippingGGF-300x204.jpg 300w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Viral-ClippingGGF-1024x695.jpg 1024w, https://www.altnews.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Viral-ClippingGGF-768x521.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> The Hindu group issued an official statement clarifying that the front page image of June 6, 1967, which had gone viral on social media, was not authentic. A digitally altered image purporting to be a front page of The Hindu from June 6, 1967, is currently circulating on social media. We wish to clarify that this is not an authentic page from our archives. The Hindu urges readers to exercise caution and verify before sharing. — The Hindu (@the_hindu) May 12, 2026 Nistula Hebbar, political editor of The Hindu, also shared a comparison of the original front page of the paper from June 6, 1967, and the viral image. In reality, the front page lead story that day was on the Arab-Israel War. The front page of @the_hindu dated June6, 1967 being posted on SM over gold controls is fake, likely AI generated. The actual front page on that day was headlined by the Arab-Israel war. Both posted below. Thank u for your attention to this matter! pic.twitter.com/whSADF5bXB — Nistula Hebbar (@nistula) May 12, 2026 Overall, it is clear circulating in the name of The Hindu is fabricated. However, it is historically true that India witnessed stringent gold control measures during Indira Gandhi’s tenure. The roots of India’s gold control regime predate her prime ministership. Following the Sino-Indian War, mounting pressure on India’s foreign exchange reserves prompted the government to adopt strict measures to curb gold consumption and imports. Then finance minister Morarji Desai introduced several restrictions, including the recall of gold loans from banks and a ban on gold futures trading. In 1963, the government further prohibited the manufacture of gold jewellery above 14 carats. When these measures failed to achieve the desired results, the government enacted the Gold Control Act in 1968 during Indira Gandhi’s tenure, with Morarji Desai serving as Finance Minister. The law prohibited citizens from holding gold bars and coins. Existing holdings in the form of bars and coins had to be converted into jewellery and declared to authorities. The Gold Control Act remained in force until 1990, when it was repealed as part of broader economic liberalisation measures aimed at integrating India’s gold market with the global economy. The post The Hindu clipping on Indira Gandhi urging people not to buy gold in 1967 is fake appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.
Opposition MPs say former TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman ‘hounded’ into resigning
By Lillian Hanly, RNZ News political reporter Opposition New Zealand MPs say former TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman was “hounded” into resigning, after a “witch hunt” while public broadcasters are under “immense pressure” from the governing coalition. There has also been an outpouring of reaction from other broadcasters and commentators. Many were grieving over the
By Lillian Hanly, RNZ News political reporter Opposition New Zealand MPs say former TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman was “hounded” into resigning, after a “witch hunt” while public broadcasters are under “immense pressure” from the governing coalition. There has also been an outpouring of reaction from other broadcasters and commentators. Many were grieving over the loss to political journalism, some questioning the support TVNZ gave its reporter and others stating it should not have been a sackable offence. READ MORE: TVNZ’s ‘first wahine Māori’ political editor Maiki Sherman resigns The Maiki Sherman saga: What actually happened — Lyric Waiwiri-Smith ACT leader David Seymour is seeking to undermine public broadcasting — Steven Cowan Oceania and global media freedom reports Other Maiki Sherman reports Others have argued the scrutiny and pressure applied by the media should also apply to its own reporters. Sherman resigned last Friday following a period of scrutiny over an incident during pre-Budget drinks in Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ office a year ago. She had used a homophobic slur against Stuff journalist Lloyd Burr in response to “deeply personal and inappropriate remarks,” she said. She apologised at the time and informed her manager. Stuff journalist Lloyd Burr . . . Sherman had used a homophobic slur against him in response to “deeply personal and inappropriate remarks”. Image: Stephanie Soh Lavemaau/RNZ The resignation also came after a suspension from Parliament due to breaching parliamentary rules by pursuing an interview with National’s chief whip Stuart Smith, during a period of scrutiny on Luxon’s leadership. Written in support Prior to her resignation, veteran political journalists Richard Harman and Audrey Young had both written in support. Harman told The Post there was a “bit of a public beat-up of Maiki going on at the moment” and that TVNZ should back its reporter. Young wrote in her column in The New Zealand Herald at the end of April the level of hate against Sherman was “just incredible” and “clearly goes well beyond journalistic critique”. The day the story about the incident in Willis’ office broke in a blog written by Ani O’Brien, Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour told reporters if the content was accurately reported, “it’s absolutely disgraceful”. “But the fact that it hasn’t been a story for nearly a year is in itself a disgraceful double standard, and I think we should all just be glad that one woman with a substack actually made it a story, because we all know that in the same circumstances, a member of Parliament would have got wall-to-wall coverage night after night after night, don’t we?” At the time, he suggested Parliament’s speaker should consider Sherman’s access to Parliament. Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour . . . “The fact that it hasn’t been a story for nearly a year is in itself a disgraceful double standard.” Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii Opposition politicians speak out Labour MP Willie Jackson said Sherman had been “hounded” into resignation after she “made a mistake”. He acknowledged her as a “trailblazing” wahine Māori broadcaster, and despite a “number of run-ins with her over the years” was very proud of her. “It’s a shame TVNZ let her down so badly, deciding obviously with pressure from this government, that her position was untenable.” Labour MP Willie Jackson . . . “It’s a shame TVNZ let her down so badly.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone Green MPs Hūhana Lyndon and Steve Abel also spoke out. Lyndon said the right “came out hard to hunt her down” and suggested considering the context where public broadcasters under “immense pressure and threats” from ministers of the coalition government created a “chilling effect”. Abel called it a “witch-hunt” and said something was “rotten” in New Zealand with right wing politicians targeting journalists. He also said TVNZ bosses needed to be questioned, because Sherman’s statement implied she no longer had the backing of her employer. “Why would the bosses in a public media institution whose duty is upholding the principle of free and independent media not be backing a journalist who has clearly been targeted for political reasons.” Green MP Steve Abel . . . “Why would the bosses in a public media institution whose duty is upholding the principle of free and independent media not be backing a journalist who has clearly been targeted for political reasons.” Image: RNZ/Angus Dreaver ‘Deeply upsetting to witness’ Te Pāti Māori MP, and former broadcaster, Oriini Kaipara also took to social media, calling Sherman’s treatment “deeply upsetting to witness”. “Maiki is one of the sharpest political journalists in the country. Intelligent, fearless, composed, and uncompromising in holding power to account. “Her rise mattered. Not just professionally, but culturally. “So many Māori, especially wāhine and rangatahi, saw themselves in her. Many only turned the news on or anticipated any political story because of Maiki.” Kaipara said it felt “personal” and reeked of “foul play”. Te Pāti Māori MP and former broadcaster Oriini Kaipara . . . “Maiki is one of the sharpest political journalists in the country. Intelligent, fearless, composed, and uncompromising in holding power to account.” Image: Te Tari o te Kiingitanga/RNZ Voices from outside Parliament There had also been an outpouring of support, including from Māori broadcasters, and questions about double standards. Scotty Morrison gave a mihi during Te Karere’s show the day the news broke, acknowledging the loss for TVNZ and the brilliance of Sherman’s work. Miriama Kamo wrote on social media, acknowledging the pressure of the high-profile job while Sherman juggled being a mother to six kids as well. Kamo also questioned how TVNZ had supported its reporter, and how it planned to “address the vacuum her departure has left”. Broadcaster Moana Maniapoto said “somewhere someone is raising a glass,” and the resignation was not good news for the public in election year. Broadcaster Moana Maniapoto . . . The resignation isn’t good news for the public in election year. Image: Moana Maniapoto/RNZ Former Māori Party chief-of-staff Helen Leahy wrote the relationship between the press gallery and politicians was never an easy one. “But you don’t get the breaking news by sitting noho puku [sitting still]. You don’t get a leader opening up and being vulnerable without mutual respect. Maiki would persevere.” Political commentator Liam Hehir queried a double standard, asking why comments of a prominent journalist at a work-function were “inherently off limits”. On X, pollster David Farrar wrote the resignation was “sad”. “I don’t think one regrettable moment should cost you your job. We need less cancel culture, not more.” Former Prime Minister Helen Clark wrote that at a party in the Minister of Finance’s office, “where one assumes alcohol flowed”, there was an exchange between journalists. “The aftermath — one was later hounded from her job. The other wasn’t. All in the context of public media being undermined. Shameful.” Former Prime Minister Helen Clark . . . “All in the context of public media being undermined. Shameful.” Image: RNZ/Diego Opatowski ‘Rules broken all the time’ Former political editor Duncan Garner wrote that after nearly 20 years inside Parliament, he knew how the place worked. “The rules were broken all the time. By journalists. By MPs. By ministers. By people who later got promoted, protected, forgiven, knighted and sent off to cushy jobs. “So why Maiki?” And blogger O’Brien — who posted the original blog breaking the story — said for years journalists and commentators, including Sherman, had “enthusiastically participated in a culture where politicians and public figures were subjected to career-ending moral scrutiny for comments or conduct less severe than this”. “The modern media class has normalised the idea that professional ruin is an acceptable and even righteous outcome for personal failings. “It is difficult now to object when that same standard is turned inward.” Politik blog political writer Richard Harman posted online saying this was the “most hostile environment within which to be a political journalist I have known in my 55 years as a journo”. “The mob is ruling at the moment. They have tasted blood. Who will they turn on next?” This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her.
The post A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her. appeared first on ProPublica.
Travelers wait at the Detroit airport, where a 57-year-old who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S. was detained for 30 hours. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France. But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation. Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Immigration and election experts say her case, which hasn’t previously been reported, marks a new escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to find and prosecute instances of noncitizen voting, despite voluminous evidence showing it is rare. (Estelle asked that her last name not be used because of safety concerns.) Historically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has played no part in election-fraud investigations. But the transcript of Estelle’s interview, which was provided to ProPublica by her attorney, makes clear that the agency had flagged her for special scrutiny and that officers knew her voting history. Estelle told the officer during questioning that she thought she could vote in local elections because a state motor vehicles department employee had told her when she renewed her driver’s license that she was eligible. Kerry Doyle, a deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security in the Biden administration, said she’d never heard of someone being detained at a port of entry on suspicion of voting illegally. “It took them a whole lot of energy and effort to sift through all these things to find this needle in the haystack,” said Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney. “And it is a needle in the haystack.” A CBP spokesperson confirmed that officers detained a woman matching Estelle’s description at the Detroit airport, placing her in removal proceedings. The official didn’t answer questions about whether the agency is now routinely questioning noncitizen travelers about voting at ports of entry but emphasized that voting illegally is a deportable offense. “The Trump Administration will continue to enforce our nation’s laws,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required.” Estelle’s attorney, Matthew Hoppock, said she had no prior criminal history and hadn’t otherwise violated the terms of her green card. He said she registered to vote as part of renewing her driver’s license in 2023. Estelle voted in a November 2023 election that included races for city council and school boards, according to Douglas County records. She did not vote in any subsequent election, including the 2024 presidential election. An immigration judge granted a request from Estelle to cancel her removal proceedings, after Hoppock spoke with DHS officials about her case. It’s unclear whether she will face any future criminal charges. (CBP declined to comment about whether there are any pending.) Still, Hoppock said, CBP had overstepped in its aggressive handling of the matter, which he called “really something.” “It’s clear as day she wasn’t trying to break the law,” he said. Though Trump has repeatedly claimed that millions of noncitizens vote, data shows there are few such cases and that, of these, most involve people like Estelle, who register in error, said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit voting rights organization. “My concern is about the publicizing of these kinds of incidents as a tool to frighten people,” Weiser said. When these rare cases do happen, they are typically identified by local and state election officials who refer them to law enforcement. They often do not move forward, according to several election lawyers, because the voter often was registered by mistake by an elections clerk or voted without knowing it was illegal. Depending on the charges, prosecutors may have to prove that it was intentional. Trump has made it clear he wants the federal government to do more to prevent and punish election fraud, despite the paucity of evidence that it’s a widespread issue. He pushed unsuccessfully for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would have required Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship when they registered to vote. In March 2025, he issued an executive order that, in part, directed federal agencies to use their resources to help find and prosecute noncitizen voters. His Justice Department began demanding that states hand over their voter-roll information, and DHS revamped a tool to allow states to check registered voters’ citizenship status en masse. As ProPublica has reported, the tool proved highly error-prone. But despite its flaws, it appears DHS is still using the tool to pursue noncitizen voting prosecutions. DHS said in a recent statement that a branch of the agency, Homeland Security Investigations, will look into more than 24,000 voters flagged by SAVE as potential noncitizens. A former CBP official, who spoke anonymously because their current job doesn’t permit them to comment publicly, said it is likely that potential noncitizen voters have been flagged in the system that customs officers use to check the records of international travelers, such as passports. If that’s the case, officers would see in the person’s file that they should be questioned further on their voting histories. Hoppock said Estelle was detained on a layover, as she traveled home from visiting her ailing father in France. According to the transcript of her interview with a customs officer, the official asked Estelle if she had ever registered to vote or voted, and she told him yes, she had voted once. The officer then asked if she had voted in the Nov. 7, 2023, local election, which she had. After questioning Estelle, officers put her in the cell with a thin mattress on top of the concrete slab and a blanket donated by an airline, Hoppock said. She heard officers talking about Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, he said, and worried she might be moved there next. Instead, she was released after more than 30 hours in custody. Jamie Shew — the clerk for Douglas County, Kansas, where Estelle was registered — said in an interview that he found out about Estelle’s case on March 23, when he received an administrative subpoena from CBP asking for her voter registration application and voting records. Shew said he didn’t have the application, just data passed on by the secretary of state’s office showing she’d registered in September 2023 and wasn’t affiliated with a political party. Shew said he’s only supposed to be given registrations to process if the would-be voter attests they are a U.S. citizen, as federal law requires. Estelle insists she told the employee at the motor vehicles department she was not a citizen. Shew said Estelle reached out shortly after he received the CBP’s subpoena. She asked him to cancel her voter registration, he said, and he did on March 31. Hoppock worries that by moving straight to deportation proceedings, the federal government has found a way to skip prosecuting and convicting. “You’re going to get people like Estelle,” he said, “who haven’t meant to do anything wrong, getting detained in a jail cell in Michigan.” Do You Know More About This Topic? Our team is still reporting on attempts to prosecute noncitizen voters. Jen Fifield Send me tips on the Trump administration’s actions related to voting and elections, along with local or national threats to accurate, fair and secure elections. Contact Me The post A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Jen Fifield.
Wall Street is betting big on clean energy tech
Fervo Energy's IPO could raise $1.8 billion in one of the largest renewable energy public offerings ever, signaling growing investor confidence in clean energy.
When the NASDAQ opens on Wednesday morning, the exchange will include a new ticker symbol: FRVO. The company, Fervo Energy, is in the geothermal electricity business and aims to raise $1.8 billion. An initial public offering of that magnitude would be one of the biggest Wall Street debuts for renewable energy in U.S. history and a promising sign for clean tech’s future. “This is a very, very big deal,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “Money speaks.” At the simplest level, geothermal generation is the process of harnessing the heat within the earth to produce steam, which then spins turbines to generate much-needed electricity. But locating suitable geology and getting deep enough to make power on a utility-scale isn’t easy. Fervo uses horizontal drilling and fiber-optic sensing to tap previously out of reach sources. “Innovation is allowing these technologies to cover a wider variety of sites,” said Zainab Gilani, a geothermal analyst with research firm Cleantech Group. Fervo, she noted, is using some of the same techniques that the oil and gas industry uses, with the hope of cutting the price of geothermal from $7,000 to $3,000 per kilowatt as it grows. This initial public offering, or IPO, could prove a bellwether for not only that technology, but clean tech more broadly. “If Fervo demonstrates that there is money to be made for investors,” said Wagner, that “is going to draw a lot of attention well beyond just the narrow advanced geothermal community.” Fervo has successfully deployed its technology in Nevada, producing enough clean energy to power for about 2,600 homes. It is building a much bigger facility, Cape Station, in Utah that would produce more than 100 times that amount of electricity and is slated to go online later this year. The prospect has attracted a slew of high profile investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which has also signed contracts with the company to supply power to its data centers. Now it’s the public’s turn to weigh in. When Fervo announced it was going public earlier this year, it said it would sell 55.6 million shares at around $21 to $24 each. Its debut comes as electricity demand is rapidly rising in the U.S. The race to build the data centers needed to sustain the artificial intelligence boom has strained grids nationwide, and has made the appetite for reliable energy seem insatiable. The Iran war has only exacerbated energy prices, and this week Fervo boosted its target to 70 million shares, at around $25 or $26, which would value the company at $7.4 billion. The line has reportedly been out the door. Still, the road ahead won’t be easy, and bringing the price of geothermal down will take time. “They’re just not here yet on any large scale,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a power sector consultant. “They are great 2040 and 2050 options.” Regardless of whether Fervo’s stock sinks or sails in the coming months or years, some see its initial offering as a promising sign for a clean energy industry that has faced political whiplash in recent years. The Inflation Reduction Act that President Joseph Biden signed in 2022 was the nation’s most ambitious climate legislation ever and included billions for solar, wind, geothermal and other green technologies. But, since returning to office, President Donald Trump and Congress have largely dismantled that legislation, rolled back much of the nation’s wind development, and pushed fossil fuel as the answer to the country’s energy woes. While many major projects were cancelled in the wake of those changes, Fervo has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in additional financing for Cape Station, and could be about to have a blockbuster IPO. “You’re in this situation where it is very obvious that the oil and gas sector is doing the best it can,” said Jigar Shah, a former senior official at the Department of Energy under Biden. “But the climate sector is the one that’s surging.” Earlier this year, Amazon-backed nuclear reactor developer X-Energy raised $1 billion with its public offering, and is valued at more than $9 billion. Shah, who is a managing partner at the investment firm Multiplier, says IPOs like these bode well for clean tech. “There is a level of confidence coming to our sector, which I think is great,” said Shah. “For a long time, our space has acted as if we’re alternative energy. But when you’re 90 percent of everything that gets added to the grid every year, you’re no longer alternative.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wall Street is betting big on clean energy tech on May 13, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.
DRC journalist detained since January, another in hiding after mining impact report
Kinshasa, May 13, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to release journalist Stéphane Shisso, who was arrested in January after reporting on erosion caused by mining, and to ensure the safety of his colleague Guelord Shamba, who is in hiding. “It is a grave injustice that...
Kinshasa, May 13, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to release journalist Stéphane Shisso, who was arrested in January after reporting on erosion caused by mining, and to ensure the safety of his colleague Guelord Shamba, who is in hiding. “It is a grave injustice that DRC authorities have detained journalist Stéphane Shisso for more than four months, without bringing him before a court or disclosing charges against him,” said CPJ Africa Director Angela Quintal. “It is no surprise that journalist Guelord Shamba, who worked with Shisso, then fled. Authorities must guarantee his safety so that he can return home and reassure family and colleagues who have not heard from him since January.” On January 6, 2026, soldiers from the presidential guard arrested Shisso, a camera operator for Nyota TV, owned by opposition politician Moïse Katumbi, took him to Kimbembe military camp in the southeastern city of Lubumbashi, and transferred him to the capital, Kinshasa, 10 local journalists told CPJ, on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. The journalists said that Shisso and Shamba had reported from Kolwezi, about 300 kilometers northwest of Lubumbashi, on damage from erosion caused by mining. The video, which was broadcast on Nyota TV and Mbengu TV, also owned by Katumbi, included interviews with residents denouncing local authorities’ failure to act. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="744" height="436" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kolwezi-DW-NewsYouTube.png?w=744" alt="The eastern Congolese town of Kolwezi sits on huge reserves of cobalt." class="wp-image-587545" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kolwezi-DW-NewsYouTube.png 744w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kolwezi-DW-NewsYouTube.png?resize=300,176 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kolwezi-DW-NewsYouTube.png?resize=570,334 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kolwezi-DW-NewsYouTube.png?resize=652,382 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Kolwezi-DW-NewsYouTube.png?resize=367,215 367w" sizes="(max-width: 744px) 100vw, 744px" /> In Kolwezi, mining has caused environmental destruction and displacement, rights groups say. (Screenshot: DW News/YouTube) Kolwezi is a global center for mining cobalt, a mineral used in cell phones and electric car batteries. Rights groups say people are being forcibly evicted to make way for the giant mines. Article 18 of the DRC constitution requires that anyone who is arrested must be “immediately informed of the reasons,” has the right to contact their family or legal counsel, and cannot be held for more than 48 hours before being released or transferred to a “competent judicial authority.” Local media reported in mid-April that Shisso was being held in Kinshasa’s Ndolo military prison. Three people close to Shamba told CPJ that he went into hiding, fearing attack or arrest, and they have not heard from him since late January. They believed that Shisso was arrested because of the duo’s report from Kolwezi. Two of those people also told CPJ that Shamba and Shisso both recently lost their fathers and were unable to attend their funerals. Government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya did not answer CPJ’s calls to request comment. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
The EPA wants to shift monitoring of toxic coal ash to states
The move comes at a time when many state environmental budgets have been slashed.
All across Georgia, on the banks of the Coosa, Chattahoochee, and Ocmulgee and other rivers, sit large lagoons filled with coal ash, the toxic residue left behind after coal is burned. These massive impoundments hold millions of tons of toxic stew, and most are unlined. As a result, heavy metals in the coal ash — such as arsenic and mercury — quietly leach into the ground and nearby water bodies. In 2015, the Obama administration passed rules requiring utilities to clean up the ponds and implement monitoring requirements, transforming the Environmental Protection Agency into the chief regulator overseeing these sites. States were also given the opportunity to assume this regulatory role — as long as they met minimum federal requirements. Georgia was among the first to do so. In 2019, the EPA approved the state’s authority to oversee coal ash management. But in their first official act — a “bellwether” for future decisions — regulators at the state’s Environmental Protection Division approved a permit to leave coal ash partly submerged in groundwater at one of Georgia Power’s plants. Despite outcry from communities and a rebuke by the EPA, the agency continues to hold its regulatory authority and has approved another 20 permits for coal ash ponds at roughly a dozen coal plants across the state. The Trump administration is now signaling it wants to transfer coal ash oversight to even more states and roll back federal protections. Five states currently have approved coal ash programs, including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Oklahoma and Georgia were approved during Trump’s first term, Texas received approval during the Biden administration, and North Dakota and Wyoming were approved in the last year. The Trump administration is also in the process of approving Virginia for local coal ash permitting. “The state agencies that have programs where they can issue permits, we’ve seen, unfortunately, that they’ve not been rigorous in enforcing standards,” said Nick Torrey, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “We know that they are underfunded, underresourced. The utilities are often the most powerful entity in the state and call the shots.” The coal ash decision is part of a broader campaign to shift environmental regulation to the states. During Trump’s first term, the EPA handed over wetlands permitting in Florida to state regulators — the first state to apply for and receive the authority in 25 years. In January, the administration began the process of accepting so-called “Good Neighbor Plans” from eight states. These plans had previously been rejected by the Biden administration for failing to prevent ozone emissions from crossing state lines. And over the past year, the administration has expanded state authority over underground carbon sequestration, giving West Virginia, Arizona, and Texas supervisory authority of carbon injection wells. According to the EPA, there are more than 670 coal ash ponds across the country. The lagoons range in size from a few acres to a thousand or more. Over the years, many of these ponds have repeatedly spilled coal ash into waterways. One of the worst accidents took place in 2008 when a dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority pond failed, releasing more than a billion gallons of coal ash. The flood buried homes, and residents are still reporting health issues. Similar incidents have occurred on the Dan River in North Carolina and in eastern Kentucky. The Obama administration’s 2015 rules — the first oversight of coal ash — required utilities to monitor groundwater near coal ash ponds for contamination and for new ponds to be lined. In cases where there was evidence coal ash was leaching into water, the companies were required to close the ponds, either by draining them or excavating the ash and moving it elsewhere. But the rule had major loopholes and didn’t cover all coal ash disposal sites. Lagoons that weren’t actively receiving new material and located at retired coal plants weren’t covered. And crucially, dump sites — where coal ash is collected before being moved into lagoons — were not included in the rule. As a result, when testing indicated heavy metals were leaching into groundwater, utilities could point to the dump sites and claim they were to blame. “Utilities would point to these areas and say, ‘We don’t have to clean up our groundwater pollution because we think the pollution is coming from these exempt areas. Therefore, the pollution is exempt,’” said Torrey. About six years ago, the Altamaha Riverkeeper, a local nonprofit, tested groundwater near the coal-fired Plant Scherer in Monroe County, Georgia, and began notifying residents that their well water was contaminated with compounds found in coal ash. The county eventually ran water lines, but some low-income residents unable to afford water bills still rely on church waterfilling stations, said Fletcher Sams, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper. “This is an area where the median household income is $30,000,” said Sams. “It’s pretty rural, and some people can’t afford to run pipe from the road and the hookup and the monthly fee for the water.” The EPA and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division did not respond to a request for comment. In 2024, the Biden EPA attempted to close these loopholes by expanding coverage with a new rule that applied to all coal ash disposal sites, including so-called “legacy ponds.” But the Trump administration is now attempting to unwind these protections. In April, the EPA proposed exempting older or inactive coal ash disposal sites from the rules and granting state officials more leeway in overseeing coal ash monitoring plans. In press releases announcing these plans and the EPA’s intent to overhaul how coal ash is managed, administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency “will advance cooperative federalism to allow states to lead the charge on local issues, with federal support. This is just one of many examples where this agency can and will work with our state partners to deliver for the American people.” This move comes at a time when state legislatures have slashed budgets for environmental agencies. According to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA enforcement officials under both parties, more than half of states have cut funding for environmental agencies in the last 15 years. Mississippi’s budget has dropped by more than 70 percent during this time period, while South Dakota had its budget slashed by 61 percent. Three of the five states overseeing coal ash disposal — Texas, Georgia, and Wyoming — have had budget cuts of at least 20 percent over this time. Georgia has reduced its staffing by about 16 percent. Not all states that have applied for coal ash authority have received it. In 2024, the EPA rejected Alabama’s application to manage its coal ash ponds because it did not meet standards set in federal law. “Alabama’s permit program does not require that groundwater contamination be adequately addressed during the closure of these coal ash units,” the agency noted in its decision. Torrey said the Trump administration appears poised to rubber stamp state requests, putting public health and the environment at risk. “There’s a real retreat from the EPA doing the job it was created to do,” Torrey said. “When you combine that with the weakening and choking of funds for state agencies, it means that people are getting dramatically less protection from pollution.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wants to shift monitoring of toxic coal ash to states on May 13, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.
Novelist, filmmaker and musician Eliza Barry Callahan on developing tolerance for uncertainty
The Hearing Test reflects heavily on themes of chronology. Is there a set process that you follow when it comes to making things?
The Hearing Test reflects heavily on themes of chronology. Is there a set process that you follow when it comes to making things? I have no order of operations. I work non-linearly. It might be alarming for someone to look at a document of mine, as it would be filled with not only unfinished paragraphs but a lot of unfinished sentences. I jump around often mid-thought, and I guess leave room for the unconscious to fill in a bit over time… to understand why I started the sentence, the paragraph, the project in the first place. A lot of my writing begins more like an abstract, gestural thing before it becomes figurative. When I commit to a project or a line of questioning, I follow it as far as I can and seem to find that I have always begun something for a reason…It can be hard for me to tell when I’m making progress or if I’m actually making anything at all. Then suddenly there’s a critical mass, and it starts to make sense, why I started whatever it is to begin with. Some questions start to become defined…and that is when a project has its sort of second beginning. Then I find my way to the end with a more conscious intention. Is there any pressure to finish those unfinished statements? There is always pressure–and some discomfort. But it’s more comfortable to have a sentence that you’ve started and not finished than to have no sentence at all. How is your process integrated into your day-to-day? If I am writing prose, I write very early in the morning and for only about three hours. If I’m working on a script, I can write for a full day. And then there are the hours reserved for corresponding… I teach, and that also becomes somehow part of my process. I can’t write as much during the semester, but I get charged up by teaching, and I can edit and plan. If I’m directing a project, then everything else falls away, and that’s just all I’m doing. Overhearing and listening to conversations is very important to my process—hearing how people speak, narrate their lives. I try to spend conscious time each day listening to other people talk… I write to music always. Music without lyrics or lyrics in another language. How do you relate to past iterations of yourself in past projects? I don’t usually think too hard about past projects. I tend to be pretty concerned with what I am making or the question of “what will I make?” I’ve recently been back in the world of the book [The Hearing Test] because I’ve been writing a script that takes from it. It’s been nice to revisit the material I wrote four years ago, like going back to visit a home you once lived in. And staying there again as a guest. After you finish making something, it’s no longer yours. As a musical artist and performer, there is this expectation from a perceived audience for you to present the work as yourself. Since your writing is considered auto-fiction, and your filmmaking exists in a similar vein… how is the self involved in your work? I just try to make work from a place that is honest, however that might look. Often, I try to notice what I shy away from and then try to make work from there. The thing that is feared usually is the most interesting! The narrator in the novel is not me, but she is some analog I used to walk around and have her play out things I was curious about and don’t understand, perhaps, about other people, about myself, about living… I feel far away from her on a character level, but what I shared with the narrator is her sensory circumstance, and this total outsideness from one’s life that allows for some internal investigation. Because of this, after the book came out, people assumed everything in it was true, which it’s not at all; it’s a work of fiction. I gave her my name because I was interested in twisting selfhood. The part that feels like “self,” and in many ways more vulnerable than any plot point or character trait, is just how writing reveals one’s way of thinking and assembling material. Revealing how one’s mind works is more intimate than any fact, I think. You did have partial hearing loss, which was completely out of your control. How do you relate to the mundane and novelty as inspiration for making, relative to the fact that you experienced something so dramatic? I wrote the novel as I was losing my hearing. I was dealing with the prospect of total deafness within a year to two years, and…it was also the pandemic. Although it was a painful moment, and I felt I might genuinely not only lose my hearing but also my mind, I have a lot of gratitude for that time because I think certain moments in our lives do function as these little portals that close over time. Access isn’t unlimited. I had access to a different well during that period. That well feels sealed up, not dry, but I have the memory of knowing it. It was definitely a moment of a prolonged opening for me, in its outside-ness from my life and routine. Noticing the physical and experiential shifting through recording my experience was a mode of survival and a way to avoid the reality of my situation. Though I do not believe you need to go through something intense to make things. What is your relationship with control and collaboration in your work? I love to collaborate. I also love to be in control. Directing a film excites me because you rely on the art and talent of so many people. And it’s pleasurable to be able to give up control–in certain ways. I like that a big part of filmmaking can feel like chance, even though it’s so structured (often) in its process. Writing a book, you can get a God complex in the document. People can say that about directing, too, but I find it’s the opposite; for me, directing is about listening, guiding, and creating a circumstance. You have to trust many people, and that’s very freeing. Whereas in a document, the only chance thing is not knowing what your next thought will be. Jumping between both is very gratifying. Is the “toggling” seamless? The external deadlines can drive the necessity to toggle, but it’s also nice because whenever there’s something I shouldn’t be working on from a deadline perspective, that’s the thing that I want to be working on. I pity the thing that’s not getting watered. I write a list every day of my projects, current and ones I intend to make. A little compulsive. What characterises your lists? I’ll write the projects that I am working on, want to be working on, need to be working on, things I need to pick up from the grocery store, and who I’m seeing that night, the standard to-dos, maybe even a note of gossip–something I want to tell someone. It’s all in one place, and whatever doesn’t happen on one day gets carried over to the next. So I will keep writing down the title of a piece that I have maybe not even started, or that I’m halfway through, as well as things that are due the next day, the next month, and so on. It makes the larger-scale things feel more manageable, and the small-scale things feel important. I’ve found that when I look back on my list, it’s like, okay, that thing wasn’t crossed off for like 80 days, and then on day 80, you did cross it off. It’s the way I keep the plates in the air, even if it’s in the back of my head, I don’t let myself forget. I see my lists as writing. I don’t journal, I list. How do you navigate burnout and blocks? I work in cycles. I can find myself feeling a bit empty if I’m just focused on one thing for too long or if I’m working alone for too long, which is why having a few projects at different phases at once is useful. Often, when I feel what one might call blocked is when I realize I haven’t been reading or watching things. When I get too far into myself. I usually don’t feel burned out while I’m working a lot. I feel it when I’m too far away from my work. I’m not plugging away at one document for hours every day. This can make me admittedly self-conscious at times when I’m in a room with novelists who’ve just put out a novel and are already done with the next, and ask me what I’m working on, and the best answer I have is just all sorts of things. I can feel like a hack even though I work very hard. There’s also the pressure to produce to live! Part of each day is spent figuring out how I will make money, what will my next gig be. How are you…? Pieced together through teaching, writing, film work, and design work that I do as well, and I am always trying to figure out new ways to make a living by making things. There’s the dread of figuring out surviving off my own work, which is met by the delusion that one day it will be possible, and each day those two things battle, and each day one or the other wins. Usually, the dread sets in when I don’t feel I’ve gotten enough done. And the delusion sets in when I’ve written a sentence I love. As though the sentence will buy me a house… I fear my sense of general satisfaction is tied entirely to productivity in relation to making things…and I’m always waiting for the hit of feeling like I’ve done something. An addiction! What does that “addiction” look like? Well, I just get pretty agitated if I’m not working on a project. I think every day I’m always doing little things to scratch the itch too. It can extend to moving furniture around in my home or just coming up with a little melody, re-arranging my rocks… Just a little transfer of energy. Other than making things, teaching is the only other thing I have done that I can feel confident and okay with going off and being like I deserve to be doing something that might feel like leisure. Such as? Well, I’m a pretty social person, but I always have this guilty feeling like there’s something I have to “go be doing”. So, how do you balance your social life? Depends on the phase I am in with whatever project I’m working on. It can be hard when you’re around people who don’t make things or who work on a conventional schedule. They’re like but it’s Saturday night, why are you working? I have a few friends with whom my ongoing dialogues feel incredibly central to my process/practice. These conversations are picked up often while “hanging out,” but I also am always texting these certain people…or finding times for long phone calls. In general, I love talking, and I love listening to people talk. How does the audience play a role in your work? I’m not really thinking of an audience ever. I’m writing towards a single person, but not to anyone in particular. How did you get to where you are now? I’m not so sure. I just knew I was always going to be living by making things. My parents were always encouraging of me when I was young. The way wasn’t clear and still isn’t. I feel very grateful that I get to do this with a lot of my time. Something I really enjoyed about The Hearing Test was this recurring theme of a “permanent temporary situation.” How do you relate to this idea of constant renewal? Often, when you choose a life of making things, you’re choosing a life where you’re always starting again. You’re also promised nothing. …of course, we’re never really promised anything. It’s funny, I find my friends who make things to be the most delusional people, and at the same time, they have what feels like the closest relationship to reality. You have to have some outsized tolerance for not knowing. There is optimism in the constant of not knowing. Yes. I had a lot of strange occurrences in my childhood. Regarding my health, not internal like my loss of hearing, but accidents—external things. Innocent bystander things. I got hit in the head and fractured my skull and suffered intense amnesia when I was in middle school, then a year later, I was hit in the face with a golf ball at a putt-putt place and had my jaw wired shut for months, and underwent two facial reconstructive surgeries. And then I suffered two other pretty significant head injuries. A metal rack came down on my head at school and caused another bad concussion. There was more. I won’t bore you. But this was all within a few years. I think these events primed me a little for some level of acceptance of unknowns. When you’re put through certain things, I think you can start to play this game of trying to find logic, which I think is what the narrator does in The Hearing Test. Finding reason for things that we can’t understand…that is maybe the job description? Finishing a body of work is such a small part of the experience. How do you come to terms with the end of your work on a project? Finishing things is, of course, gratifying and also sad. I actually wrote the end of the novel right after I wrote the beginning, but I did not know that would be the end. I love being in the middle of a project. I’ve been complaining for like a year, saying, “I wish to be in the middle of something.” The middle is where the certainty is. Yes, or [to] just to be so inside of something that it surrounds you and you have to go through to get out. Whereas the beginning is not only full of possibility but also that sense of “maybe I could turn back. I know where the exit is.” When you’re in the middle, you don’t know where or when or how you’ll be shot out the other side. How do you define success and failure in your process? I don’t know that I ever think about failure or success. That feels too dangerous. But something feels successful when it draws out associations for someone else. That feels like a success to me. The transfer is so satisfying when you feel like it’s been received, and the material has been transformed by a new interaction with someone else’s mind who has lived a different life until that point, and you changed it a little or brought them back to somewhere they’ve been. What do you do when it’s not received, as somebody who hasn’t always been as open in sharing their work? I think that one can always find a way to be received. There’s always room for that transfer; it’s just about finding the right person to share with. Eliza Barry Callahan recommends: The Shadow Of The Object by Christopher Bollas–I am very taken by his idea of “the unthought known”.. read and find out what you perhaps already know. . . The artwork of Pati Hill–My friend, the writer Tan Lin, introduced me to her work. She made great use of the photocopier, which she refers to as “a found instrument—a saxophone without directions.” Bio Coffee–The only alkaline coffee. It’s just a drink. Comes in sachets you add to hot water. You have to think of it as coffee-flavoured tea, not coffee. James Baldwin’s essay The Creative Process–I like to give this to my students. It always surprised no one ever gave this to me to read in all my years in school. “NOTHING STABLE UNDER HEAVEN.” Projeto Memoria Brasileira: Viva Garoto–I’ve been writing to this record of Brazilian guitar music nearly every day for the last year… my neighbours must think something is wrong with me. I write to music always–never music with lyrics .. then when I write, I feel like I’m soloing… This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Kali Flanagan.
Tongan media faces new type of challenge, following threat
By Atereano Mateariki, RNZ Pacific journalist Previously it was reporting on governments or politics that brought trouble for Tonga’s journalists — now it’s reporting on drugs or gangs. Tongan journalists are coming to terms with new pressures on media freedom over reporting on the country’s drug crisis, and the role of gangs in it. This
By Atereano Mateariki, RNZ Pacific journalist Previously it was reporting on governments or politics that brought trouble for Tonga’s journalists — now it’s reporting on drugs or gangs. Tongan journalists are coming to terms with new pressures on media freedom over reporting on the country’s drug crisis, and the role of gangs in it. This comes after a journalist at Kele’a Publications was threatened at gunpoint in Nuku’alofa, following reporting on drugs issues two weeks ago — the same week as World Press Freedom Day. READ MORE: Tongan armed threat against journalist troubles Pacific media freedom Tongan police investigate journalist threatened at gunpoint after gang-related report Other Pacific media freedom reports While Tonga police are still searching for the suspect who threatened a journalist, the manager of the Kele’a Publications said police should do more to protect the press. According to Teisa Cokanasiga, journalist freedoms were usually tested by previous governments when reporting on the police, but the current situation was different and represented a new type of challenge for Tonga’s media. “The threat was regarding reports that we did about drugs and a specific gang member who is currently serving life in prison. So now we are aware that we have that kind of threat. “In terms of freedom of the press, to report on political issues and controversial issues concerning the leadership in the country. I think we are fine with that.” More awareness needed Cokanasiga said there needed to be more awareness around this kind of threat as it could happen to any member of Tonga’s media. “It’s just disheartening. And we are now aware that we can get that kind of challenge or risk, not only, I mean, from the public as well.” For now, Cokanasiga said her team was supporting the journalist, and also being cautious while continuing daily duties. “We’ve been trying to be, you know, encouraging of each other and at the same time give them space, especially the concerned journalist, and for her to slowly get back to working.” Attack on Tongan’s constitutional rights The Media Association of Tonga (MAT) said the incident was an assault not only on the safety of an individual journalist but on the constitutional right of every Tongan to receive information without fear or favour. MAT’s president, Katalina Uili Tohi, said a climate of fear and intimidation targeting media personnel undermined democratic principles and silenced the very voices that hold power to account. She said journalists must be able to work without the threat of violence or death. Meanwhile, the co-chair of the Pacific Freedom Forum, Lepailetai Tosi Tupua has commended the courage and professionalism of the journalist and her colleagues and their swift reporting to police. He said they awaited the outcomes of a thorough and impartial police investigation into this incident, ensuring public safety and including safety on the job for all media workers reporting these matters. Police have yet to arrest anyone, but Cokanasiga said they remained in regular contact with both her and the journalist. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
No Soldiers, Just Robots: How Ukraine Captured A Russian Position | Ukraine Front Line Update
The West’s bubble of illusion about Israel – and about itself – is finally being burst
The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy, writes Jonathan Cook. ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel. On the one side, an official Western narrative portrays a plucky,
The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy, writes Jonathan Cook. ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel. On the one side, an official Western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape. Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed. READ MORE: Shoot Palestinians, not settlers: Israeli general exposes double standard Jonathan Cook’s website Other reports on the war on Gaza, Lebanon Iran A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority. A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”. It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state — armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft. On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force. No middle ground possible Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible. The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria. Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other. Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up? Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making? Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a Western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming? The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own Western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="wp-image-127629 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Protest-at-Devonport-naval-base-APR-680wide.jpg" alt="The "Hands off Iran" protest at New Zealand's Devonport Naval Base" width="680" height="383" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Protest-at-Devonport-naval-base-APR-680wide.jpg 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Protest-at-Devonport-naval-base-APR-680wide-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> “The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own Western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.” . . . A protest against Israel in New Zealand’s Devonport Naval Base last weekend. Image: Asia Pacific Report Ambassador let slip In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies — apart from one. Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.” That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny. So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes — citing the need for cuts — rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes. If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media. For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media. Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it. Israel kills, jourmalists, first responders Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class. Israel declares “yellow lines“ in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalise its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal. Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye. Which Western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine? An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel — rather than Russia — carrying them out. Comparing the coverage of the most “serious” establishment British news outlets — the BBC, The Guardian and Sky — with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes. Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 per cent of Al Jazeera’s. As Newscord noted: “Half the time, BBC readers aren’t told who killed the person in the story.” Hind Rajab headline That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline: “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help.” In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl — the sole survivor of an earlier attack — who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too. In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel’s attacks used the convoluted passive — rather than active — voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel’s culpability and savagery. The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” Health Ministry — even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its capacity to count the dead. The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports. Similarly, the BBC and The Guardian made the decision to humanise Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state. The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 — more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited. Sickening practice Contrast that with the media’s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor’s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs trained for that very purpose. There has been a flood of accounts from Palestinians held captive by Israel of their systematic rape and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers and medics. Little of this is making headway in the Western media. Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews Western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved — that is, an accurate — light. For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down. It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities. Starkly, in Israel’s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity. Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy — all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand. Same story since 1948 This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel’s violent creation on the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by Western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled”. The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for Western publics, one where our own crimes — and those of our allies — remain invisible to us. Note in this regard the UK government’s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight. Predictably, Keir Starmer’s government rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby. That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers from pro-Israel lobbyists. The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel’s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon — in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire. Israeli soldiers have told local media that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist”, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages. Colonising occupied lands That fits with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonise the occupied lands in Lebanon with Jewish settlers. Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel’s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon. Responding to these videos with a rare “mainstream” report on the campaign of destruction, The Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described — absurdly — by the paper as “bittersweet”. Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only levelling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has levelled almost every building in Gaza, too. But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age. Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another — even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and Western leaders were extolling Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East. Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them. Villify the messenger If the message inhering in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalised — as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media — then a different strategy is required: villify the messenger. This is the political task of our times. The anti-racist left are demonised as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities. Last month, Starmer’s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing “cumulative disruption” — that is, repeat protests like those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked. Last week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest. Britons who try to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israel’s factories of death located in the UK or by holding placards in support of this kind of direct action, continue to be treated as “terrorists”, even after a court ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is unlawful. With juries often proving reluctant to convict, the British state has set about openly rigging the trials. Juries are blocked from learning about the reasons for the targeting of Israeli weapons factories — the accused’s main defence. Judges instruct juries to convict. Long-established right Members of the public who silently hold signs outside court are arrested for reminding juries of a long-established right in law to defy such instructions, follow their consciences and acquit — a police abuse contravening hundreds of years of legal precedent, and one the courts appear increasingly ready to condone. There are gags, being dutifully obeyed by the media, on other secret malpractices designed to help the British government secure the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know because Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has used parliamentary privilege to draw attention to them. It was telling last week that, in the current repeat trial of six Palestine Action defendants, five of them dispensed with their barristers for the closing speeches. They noted, darkly, that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions made by the court”. Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and let more reliable judges decide these political show trials alone. Welcome to the rapid unravelling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights — needed chiefly, it seems, to protect a far-off country that, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), commits the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza. Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published on the author’s website and republished with permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
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Did NZ’s Prime Minister just commit treason? PM ignores terrorist attack on his own citizens
COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle “Whoever uses a citizen ill, indirectly offends the state, which is bound to protect this citizen; and the sovereign should avenge his wrongs, punish the aggressor, and, if possible, oblige him to make full reparation; since otherwise the citizen would not obtain the great end of the civil association, which is,
COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle “Whoever uses a citizen ill, indirectly offends the state, which is bound to protect this citizen; and the sovereign should avenge his wrongs, punish the aggressor, and, if possible, oblige him to make full reparation; since otherwise the citizen would not obtain the great end of the civil association, which is, safety.” Swiss jurist Emmerich Vattel expounded this principle in his landmark The Law of Nations, 1758. It is universally accepted today that every State has an obligation to protect its nationals when they are overseas. As Vattel explained back in the day: this is a duty arising from the bond of nationality. A leader who betrays this principle of citizenship is unworthy of high office. Such a man is New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Late in the night of April 29, a large Israeli force made up of several warships, a prison ship, aircraft, and drones attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of over 60 humanitarian vessels drawn from dozens of nations across the globe. READ MORE: Why the Global Sumud Flotilla hasn’t given up in spite of the Israeli attacks Gaza Freedom Flotilla Tracker Eyes Of Fire Rainbow Warrior educational resource The Sumud flotilla, in international waters near the Greek island of Crete, was Gaza-bound. The plan was to open a humanitarian aid corridor to the enclave that is suffering genocide at the hands of Israel and its Western allies. Over 20 vessels were boarded, many dozens of activists beaten, some later requiring hospitalisation. Once the crews were transferred to the prison ship, the vessels were sabotaged and abandoned in international waters. For the next three days the Israelis beat dozens of the Sumud crew, tortured some, terrorised others with threats of murder, guns in their faces, and performed other unlawful acts including denying essential medication, forcing hostages into stress positions, forcing others to hug the Israeli flag, flooding decks to make sleep impossible, and many other sadistic acts. Several Kiwis were among those who were savagely kicked and punched in the head, back and ribs. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-127237" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel-.png" alt="Julien Blondel’s face . . . bloodied but unbowed" width="680" height="794" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel-.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel--257x300.png 257w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Julien-Blondel--360x420.png 360w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> The face of Julien Blondel . . . bloodied but unbowed, he and three other New Zealand peace activists along with dozens of other international Gaza humanitarian protest crew members were savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers who attacked the Global Sumud flotilla in international waters near the Greek Island of Crete on April 29. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz Like many Western governments, New Zealand leaders did absolutely nothing to condemn the attack, nor initiate action against Israel. They did not even offer material support to their citizen-victims once they had been dumped onto Crete without money, adequate clothing or phones. Rainbow Warrior attack Let’s be clear: according to international law, sovereignty does not end at the borders of a country. New Zealand suffered the most serious state terrorist attack on its own citizens since the French government bombed and sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985. This time the state was Israel. Both events bear uncanny resemblances and disturbing differences that are immensely consequential. The similarity: a state terrorist attack on vessels on peaceful humanitarian missions. The difference: the response to the two events by both the New Zealand governments and media of the day. In 1985, when news that terrorists had infiltrated New Zealand and attached limpet mines to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior, blasting a hole below the waterline, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, the government, the media and the population of New Zealand went into a frenzy. <img decoding="async" class="wp-image-30271 size-full" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Death-of-a-Warrior-David-Robie-Aug1985-IsBus-p10-widecrop-680wide.jpg" alt="Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985" width="680" height="606" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Death-of-a-Warrior-David-Robie-Aug1985-IsBus-p10-widecrop-680wide.jpg 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Death-of-a-Warrior-David-Robie-Aug1985-IsBus-p10-widecrop-680wide-300x267.jpg 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Death-of-a-Warrior-David-Robie-Aug1985-IsBus-p10-widecrop-680wide-471x420.jpg 471w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> David Robie’s cover story for the Fiji-based Islands Business news magazine on the Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985 as told in his book Eyes Of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. Image: PMC I will never forget those momentous times. Within days the culprits had been identified: they were agents of the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French equivalent of the CIA. Two of the large squad of French agents, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were caught. It eventually emerged that this terror plot — which the French impudently codenamed “Opération Satanique” — reached all the way to President François Mitterrand. The story riveted and animated New Zealand for months. The government relentlessly pursued the villains, eventually forcing the resignation of high officials including defence minister Charles Hernu and the head of the DGSE, Pierre Lacoste. As part of the settlement the French had to pay for a replacement vessel for Greenpeace and the two spies were sentenced to 10 years prison, part of which were spent in New Zealand jails before they were transferred to internment on Hao Atoll. Within two years the French welched on the terms and let their agents return to France for awards and promotions. The consequences for New Zealand were enormous. New Zealanders were shocked when they learnt Australia helped some of the attackers to escape, and the country’s other closest allies, the UK and USA, uttered not a single word of condemnation to the French. This betrayal and the terror attack itself fundamentally altered New Zealand’s relationship with its Western allies and set it on a path towards an independent foreign policy, the high-points of which was the Nuclear Free Zone Act 1987 and New Zealand’s expulsion from the ANZUS security pact with the US and Australia, both within two years of the attack. It was a time when many felt proud to be New Zealanders. <img decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-127691" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lange-v-Luxon-Sol-680wide.png" alt="Prime Minister Luxon’s conduct is reprehensible on so many fronts" width="680" height="411" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lange-v-Luxon-Sol-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Lange-v-Luxon-Sol-680wide-300x181.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Prime Minister Luxon’s conduct is reprehensible on so many fronts . . . Prioritising “strategic alignment” with Israel and the US over the physical safety of New Zealanders is a betrayal of his most fundamental duty. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz Shame of reporters Fast forward 41 years and we have the most serious state terror attack on New Zealand since the Rainbow Warrior bombing. The media, to the shame of reporters I have spoken to off the record, treated it as a minor story and quickly moved on. The government told the victims of this terrorist attack they had to fend for themselves and offered not a breath of condemnation. No mainstream reporter grilled the government over this inaction. Prime Minister Luxon’s conduct is reprehensible on so many fronts. Prioritising “strategic alignment” with Israel and the US over the physical safety of New Zealanders is a betrayal of his most fundamental duty. Even a neo-con like US President Ronald Reagan got the memo: “A government’s first duty is to protect the people,” he said in 1981. Luxon’s failure to defend his citizens — however contemptible it may be — probably does not reach the threshold of “treason” under the Crimes Act 1961 definition (lawyers may disagree) but it does confirm that the man has no place as the leader of a sovereign and democratic nation. The Prime Minister constantly refers to himself as a “chief executive” or CEO, so I appreciate politics isn’t his strong card. Political philosophy is clearly a weakness too. So permit me, Christopher, a few observations. Among my first lessons as a tender-faced youth attending political science classes at Victoria University was Thomes Hobbes’s principle that the only reason individuals surrender their liberty to a sovereign is for protection. If certain categories of citizens come to realise the state is willing to see them beaten and abused to please a foreign state, it breaks all sorts of bonds that should not be broken. In other words, the litmus test for a sovereign democracy is not how the state treats docile citizens and its buddies but how it protects even vociferous dissenters when they are in the hands of a foreign power. The Sumud flotilla crew are anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-genocide; in other words, the opposite side to the Prime Minister and the New Zealand government. They deserve protection and medals not boots in the head and abandonment. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-127147" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-flotilla-2-RNZ-680wide.png" alt="Global Sumud Flotilla boats have been intercepted illegally by Israeli Defense Forces" width="680" height="493" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-flotilla-2-RNZ-680wide.png 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-flotilla-2-RNZ-680wide-300x218.png 300w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-flotilla-2-RNZ-680wide-324x235.png 324w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Sumud-flotilla-2-RNZ-680wide-579x420.png 579w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> Global Sumud Flotilla boats were intercepted illegally by the IDF. Image: Global Sumud Flotilla/ Breaches torture convention The mistreatment of the Sumud prisoners also breaches the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and meets the threshold for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The Kiwis are free now and I know from speaking to some of them that they are shell-shocked and traumatised but also mindful that their ordeal was short and less than the medieval mistreatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli concentration camps today. As a minimum the New Zealand government should confront the Israelis and demand two things: Non-repetition and Reparations. Non-repetition is a commitment that such wrongful acts won’t happen again. The government should issue a “Note Verbale” — a formal warning to Israel of real consequences if citizens are in any way abused. They — and all governments — should have done so before the Sumud flotilla sailed. Secondly, the government should demand Full Reparations — payment for medical bills, evacuation costs, trauma, and damage to property, including the millions of dollars in damage to all the vessels sabotaged, and return of stolen property (including Sean Janssen’s pounamu pendant, a Māori taonga (treasure) that was ripped from his neck by an Israeli stormtrooper). I was proud to be a New Zealander when our government stood with Greenpeace following the French state terrorist attack in 1985. Today, I am proud of the men and women of the Global Sumud Aotearoa Delegation, including Hāhona Ormsby, Julien Blondel, Jay O’Connor, Samuel Leason, Mousa Taher, Sean Janssen and Rana Hamida. They keep alive the flame of hope that one day New Zealand will again stand for humanity, international law, peace and an independent foreign policy. Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
As NATO Trains In Sweden, Ukraine Share Expertise In Drone Warfare
Beaten, Imprisoned, and More Determined Than Ever
Global Sumud Flotilla activists say they’re not giving up, even after being violently intercepted by the Israeli military.
Global Sumud Flotilla activists say they’re not giving up, even after being violently intercepted by the Israeli military. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Tamara Davison.
Bulgarian Hackers Use Trending AI Site to Conduct Phishing Scam
Bulgarian Hackers Use Trending AI Site to Conduct Phishing Scam Hackers are going to extreme lengths to steal people’s sensitive personal information, including creating fake AI websites to steal users’ credentials, according to a March 2026 story writ...
Bulgarian Hackers Use Trending AI Site to Conduct Phishing Scam Hackers are going to extreme lengths to steal people’s sensitive personal information, including creating fake AI websites to steal users’ credentials, according to a March 2026 story written by Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media. The outlet said it was alerted… The post Bulgarian Hackers Use Trending AI Site to Conduct Phishing Scam appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Report: Nevada’s lithium boom comes at the expense of Indigenous rights
As demand for critical minerals surges, Indigenous leaders and Amnesty International say mining projects are advancing without tribal consent.
As the Trump administration continues its push to secure critical minerals like lithium, the U.S. government and private corporations have ignored Indigenous peoples’ rights in Nevada. That’s according to a report released today by Amnesty International, which is calling for the suspension of federal permits for all lithium mines in the state. The Silver State has emerged as a key source of lithium, the main component in electric vehicle and other batteries. About 85 percent of the country’s known reserves are in Nevada, and several Indigenous nations and organizations, alongside environmentalists, have been fighting for years against its extraction and the environmental risks that creates, including water contamination and biodiversity loss. “This is our land,” said Fermina Stevens, a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone and the executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project. “We should have a say in what happens. But I know that they don’t want us there because Nevada is so rich in all of these minerals.” The three projects Amnesty International highlights in its report are Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, Nevada North Lithium Project, and Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project. Each is located primarily on public land that the Western Shoshone and Paiute people consider unceded territory. Thacker Pass is under construction and Rhyolite Ridge is slated to begin construction this year, while Nevada North is in the exploratory phase. Amnesty International’s report says all three are violating Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent. That principle, known as FPIC, is an international standard that affirms Indigenous peoples’ right to approve or deny projects that impact their land and communities. Although the projects were approved by federal agencies, Amnesty International argues the review processes fell short of FPIC and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP. “They’ve got to come down on the right side,” Mark Dummett, the organization’s head of business and human rights, said of the mining companies. “They’ve got to come down on the side of human rights, rather than getting the minerals at all costs.” He added that, regardless of domestic laws in the countries in which they operate, these firms must follow international human rights standards. The report also highlights the impact of the Trump administration’s push for deregulation, including fast-tracked permits and limited environmental review, which reduces the ability of Indigenous peoples to offer full consent. In a statement, a spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Interior said, “The climate crazed activists behind this report are notorious for making baseless claims, repeatedly rejected by courts, as part of their pathetic rage against energy production that is not only bipartisan, but proven to benefit the American people.” They also said that a review of lithium projects in Nevada by the federal Bureau of Land Management included extensive environmental review and opportunity for tribal engagement. Nevada is experiencing a lithium boom that has seen more than 20,000 claims filed. The report also comes amid global resistance by Indigenous peoples to “green transition” mining that they say comes at the expense of their land and rights. Given the increasing demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper, Dummett said that mining companies around the world are taking advantage of gaps in regulation and human rights enforcement. “The way that this mining has always taken place has been incredibly damaging to the environment and people,” Dummett said. “We don’t want to see the mistakes of the past repeated.” Stevens said that although her people have experienced a long history of land theft and abuse by the U.S. government and corporations, consultation has grown even more perfunctory amid the worldwide drive for lithium, which has surged since the war in Iran. “War and the military complex is all that they can see,” she said. “And so they’re blinded to the things that are sacred, that are more important for human survival. And I just don’t think that they care about those things.” Lithium Americas, the owner of the Thacker Pass mine, disputed many of the report’s claims in a response submitted to Amnesty International, including inadequate consultation, environmental risks, and violation of Indigenous rights. Its reply also noted that UNDRIP is not binding in the United States, but argued that the project complies with it anyway. “The Thacker Pass Project has the potential to significantly advance America’s electrification efforts, reduce carbon emissions, and strengthen domestic supply chains for critical minerals — strengthening America’s energy future. LAC has made stakeholder engagement, including with Tribes, an important part of the development of the Project,” its response reads. A spokesperson for Ioneer, the owner of the Rhyolite Ridge project, said the company “respectfully but firmly disagrees with the findings released by Amnesty International,” and highlighted the company’s engagement with tribes. “We take great pride in our compliance with all U.S. legal requirements and remain committed to a transparent process that respects tribal sovereignty while delivering a reliable and secure domestic supply of critical minerals,” the spokesperson said. Surge and Evolution, the owners of the Nevada North Lithium Project, did not respond to a request for comment, but in a response to Amnesty International, Evolution said, “We take all reasonable efforts to conduct proactive and ongoing engagement with Indigenous peoples.” Indigenous leaders said they do not expect the mining companies to change, but will continue the fight to protect their land. “We can survive without technology, but we can’t survive without water,” Stevens said. “We can’t save the Earth through the energy transition while we’re simultaneously destroying biodiversity.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Report: Nevada’s lithium boom comes at the expense of Indigenous rights on May 12, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Lee.
Journalists Targeted for Covering ICE Operations
As of December 2025, US law enforcement officers arrested or detained at least thirty-two journalists, nearly 90 percent while covering immigration-related protests, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s US Press Freedom Tracker. The Track...
As of December 2025, US law enforcement officers arrested or detained at least thirty-two journalists, nearly 90 percent while covering immigration-related protests, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s US Press Freedom Tracker. The Tracker documented nearly as many assaults on journalists that year as in the previous three… The post Journalists Targeted for Covering ICE Operations appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
10 days in Israel: Gaza flotilla activist describes detention
FAA Moves to Criminalize Use of Drones to Track ICE
In a January 2026 update, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) set temporary flight restrictions that prohibit all unmanned aircrafts from flying near Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facilities, individuals, and operations, Jason Koebler rep...
In a January 2026 update, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) set temporary flight restrictions that prohibit all unmanned aircrafts from flying near Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facilities, individuals, and operations, Jason Koebler reported for 404 Media. This order extends beyond locations, but also prohibits drone flying, upwards to 3,000… The post FAA Moves to Criminalize Use of Drones to Track ICE appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 12, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 12, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 12, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Here’s the Proof of Pro-Israel Bias in Mainstream Media #politics #gaza
Open Letter to Democrats in Congress 3.12.26
RE: IMPEACH PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP NOW OUT OF SELF-INTEREST The myopic, anemic, feckless orthodoxy among “leadership” Democrats in Congress mulishly resists seeking to impeach President Donald Trump for a counterrevolution against July 4, 1776. Trump ...
RE: IMPEACH PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP NOW OUT OF SELF-INTEREST The myopic, anemic, feckless orthodoxy among “leadership” Democrats in Congress mulishly resists seeking to impeach President Donald Trump for a counterrevolution against July 4, 1776. Trump has crowned himself with infinite, extraconstitutional powers restrained only by his imaginary moral conscience that daily finds expression in industrial… This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader and was authored by matthew.
Venezuelan journalist details complicated fight for amnesty post-Maduro
After nearly a year in prison, Venezuelan journalist Rory Branker is finally free. But he has yet to liberate himself from what legal experts and press freedom groups describe as trumped-up criminal charges that are hanging over his head. After the U.S. military ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Branker was one of more than two dozen journalists to be...
After nearly a year in prison, Venezuelan journalist Rory Branker is finally free. But he has yet to liberate himself from what legal experts and press freedom groups describe as trumped-up criminal charges that are hanging over his head. After the U.S. military ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Branker was one of more than two dozen journalists to be released from prison after being jailed by Maduro’s repressive authoritarian regime for their critical coverage. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s new government, led by interim President Delcy Rodríguez, also approved an amnesty law, authorizing judges to erase a broad range of criminal charges filed against former political prisoners over the past 26 years. However, Branker, the chief content officer for the independent news site La Patilla, said that when he went to court to ask for amnesty, his petition was denied. As a result, he still faces charges of terrorism, treason, conspiracy to commit crimes, and inciting hatred. If convicted he could be sent back to prison for decades. “I think the Venezuelan government has not yet finished messing with me,” Branker, 47, told CPJ in a May 1 interview. Yet Branker isn’t the only formerly jailed journalist to get out of prison and remain entangled in legal red tape. While most received amnesty or were tried and found not guilty, Venezuela’s National Union of Press Workers (SNTP) says eight of the 28 journalists released from prison following post-Maduro still face criminal charges. “The amnesty law has produced concrete progress, but its application has been inconsistent,” the press workers union said in a statement last month. “The law must be fully applied in a timely manner without restrictive interpretations to guarantee that criminal cases against journalists are closed.” Even though journalists have more space to report the news in post-Maduro Venezuela, the arbitrary application of the amnesty law is just one sign that press freedom remains under threat. Self-censorship is pervasive and many Venezuelan journalists who fled the country over the past decade remain in exile. According to the SNTP and NGO Safe and Free Connection, the websites of at least 65 media outlets are still being blocked by the government inside Venezuela. Many pro-Maduro hardliners have remained in the new government, including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who in 2015 sued La Patilla for defamation. What’s more, the judicial branch continues to answer to the president and journalists seeking amnesty must often petition the same judges that charged them with bogus crimes in the first place. So far this year, 29 journalists have been detained by security forces, though they were quickly released, according to the Venezuela free expression group Public Space. Branker, who has returned to work at La Patilla, recently spoke with CPJ about his convoluted legal case. After working for La Patilla for 15 years, why were you suddenly detained and jailed last year? La Patilla is one of the most-read news sites in Venezuela. But we were always critical of the government. We published stories about the contradictions between what the government said and what it actually did. We covered its ties to groups like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and its links to drug cartels. Because of that, the site was blocked. Even today, you can only read La Patilla in Venezuela if you have a VPN (virtual private network) because the new government has refused to lift the block. After Maduro stole the 2024 election, there was a massive government crackdown on dissent, and many journalists faced a very high risk of being arrested. I think the government targeted me to put pressure on La Patilla, intimidate our reporters and try to force its shutdown. Thank God, that didn’t happen. I was kidnapped on February 20, 2025, and held incognito for seven months. I was the only journalist who was forcibly disappeared for such a long period of time. How were you treated in prison? At first, I was put in isolation cells and tortured. The guards put a hood over my head to suffocate me and try to get information about my colleagues. But I didn’t tell them anything and they had no evidence, so they didn’t know what to do with me. I was transferred to five different prisons. At one point they told me that if I ever was freed, I would have to leave the country. Do you know why you were released after Maduro was captured? I was released because Trump did what he did and Maduro is no longer running the country. Trump also spoke about the problem of political prisoners. The Rodríguez government is releasing prisoners and promoting amnesty against its will. They are not happy that they now have to behave like human beings because of the U.S. pressure. I was the last imprisoned journalist to be released, which happened on February 4, 2026. But remember, there are still about 500 political prisoners behind bars. What happened when you applied for amnesty? Venezuela now has special terrorism courts because under Maduro they enacted many new laws on corruption, terrorism and organized crime. At a preliminary hearing while I was in prison, the judge in my case decided that I would have to stand trial for terrorism, treason, conspiracy and inciting hatred. Once I was released and requested amnesty, a different judge, citing the ruling of the previous judge, decided that my case should go to trial and rejected my petition for amnesty. My lawyer says there is no legal basis for this decision under the terms of the amnesty law, so we are appealing. Meanwhile, I can’t leave the country and have to report to judicial authorities every week. Why do you think other journalists received amnesty, but you did not? The decision in my case was personal. I think the government is trying to punish me, [La Patilla cofounder and editor-in-chief] Alberto Ravell, and La Patilla. It may be coming from Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello who sued La Patilla for defamation. They are still not satisfied with all they have done to me. But I am not worried. I have been to hell and back and have survived much worse things. Despite these problems, I am living a normal life in Caracas and have gone back to work for La Patilla. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Big Tech Favoritism on Display with CEOs Set to Join Trump at China Summit
Sixteen Big Tech CEOs will be joining President Trump on his upcoming summit with president Xi Jinping in China this week, according to media reports. The Big Tech executives in attendance are expected to include Elon Musk and Apple’s Tim Cook. In re...
Sixteen Big Tech CEOs will be joining President Trump on his upcoming summit with president Xi Jinping in China this week, according to media reports. The Big Tech executives in attendance are expected to include Elon Musk and Apple’s Tim Cook. In response, Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman issued the following statement: “It’s telling that when Donald Trump wants to put technology on the agenda for discussion with China, he turns to the Big Tech executives who are his donors, flatterers and enablers, rather than policy experts who might represent the national interest instead of corporate interests. “Big Tech companies have spent at least $653 million cozying up to President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress – including donations to Trump’s inauguration, his gaudy ballroom and his political committees, pricey settlements of bad-faith lawsuits filed by Trump, and Amazon’s sponsorship of the Melania documentary. Big Tech executives’ participation in Trump’s China visit is yet another example of how they are getting back far more than they ever paid in.“ This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
Utah politician knocks phone from reporter’s hand amid data center controversy
State Sen. Jerry Stevenson smacked KTVX/KUCW reporter Bayan Wang’s phone out of his hand as Wang was working on a story related to a data center project in Layton, Utah, on May 6, 2026.The artificial intelligence data center development was approved by...
State Sen. Jerry Stevenson smacked KTVX/KUCW reporter Bayan Wang’s phone out of his hand as Wang was working on a story related to a data center project in Layton, Utah, on May 6, 2026. The artificial intelligence data center development was approved by Utah’s Box Elder County Commission on May 4. Stevenson, a Republican, sits on the board of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, which was created by the legislature to develop land to support defense-related infrastructure and which backed the data center project, KTVX reported. Opponents of the project expressed concern about the potential environmental impact and apparent lack of consultation with the local community. A social media post called for a boycott of J&J Nursery and Garden Center in Layton, a business co-founded by Stevenson, and some employees told KTVX that they had been harassed. Wang, who said he was informed by a Utah Senate staff member that Stevenson was not available for comment on the story, went to J&J Nursery on May 6 seeking to speak to employees about the alleged harassment, according to a report published by the station. “While Wang was in his vehicle in the nursery’s parking lot, he noticed a man screaming at his photographer, who was outside his news vehicle without a camera in hand,” KTVX reported. The reporter then approached the two individuals to find out what was happening, and tried to tell the senator that he had been in touch with staff at the nursery. Wang said Stevenson, who was wearing a Utah Senate jacket, refused to identify himself as a Utah state senator when asked. The reporter said he told Stevenson about the story they were working on, then took out his cellphone and started recording. In a video of the encounter posted by the station, Stevenson is shown asking Wang to leave, saying, “Just get your butt out of here.” “Why are you being hostile to us?” Wang asked. “Because I am tired of you,” Stevenson replied as he walked toward the reporter. He then swung his hand toward Wang, hitting the reporter’s hand and phone. Wang said his phone was knocked out of his hand onto the cement parking lot. After the incident, Layton police arrived, saying they had been called by a witness reporting possible disorderly conduct by three individuals, according to KTVX. Wang showed the officer the video of the encounter. Wang also confirmed to the officer that his phone had been damaged when it fell to the ground. Shortly after, according to Wang, officers told him that Stevenson apologized for the incident, but still did not wish to speak with them. The police also issued the KTVX crew a trespassing notice for J&J Nursery, which is private property. The Salt Lake Tribune, citing an interview with a Layton police officer, reported that Stevenson had asked law enforcement to issue the notice, which is not a charge or a citation, “but a warning that if they return, they could face criminal charges.” Nancy Bauer, news director for KTVX/KUCW, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the news crew did not go to J&J Nursery with the intention of interviewing Stevenson, adding, “What you see on video was an unplanned encounter after Stevenson approached our team in the parking lot.” She said the station “accepts the senator’s apology and intends to respect the trespassing warning issued at that time.” She added, “Bayan Wang is declining to press charges against the senator at this time.” Stevenson did not respond to a request for comment. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
Children shot, stabbed, beaten and pepper-sprayed in occupied West Bank: UNICEFHantavirus transmission kept low thanks to united effort: WHOA world without sand? UN partners push for alternatives amid shortages
Children shot, stabbed, beaten and pepper-sprayed in occupied West Bank: UNICEFHantavirus transmission kept low thanks to united effort: WHOA world without sand? UN partners push for alternatives amid shortages This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.
Amid Trump attacks and Epstein scandals, 4,000 graduate students strike at Harvard University
<img width="1024" height="666" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C666&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Cambridge, MA - April 21: Dozens of unionized graduate students at Harvard University picket the Harvard Science Center on April 21, 2026. Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343435" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/amid-trump-attacks-and-epstein-scandals-4000-graduate-students-strike-at-harvard-university/gettyimages-2271932357" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1665&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1665" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-2271932357" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Cambridge, MA &#8211; April 21: Dozens of unionized graduate students at Harvard University picket the Harvard Science Center on April 21, 2026. Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C507&ssl=1"> “We can't effectively teach or do research if we are afraid of ICE coming onto campus and our colleagues being deported.”
<img width="1024" height="666" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C666&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Cambridge, MA - April 21: Dozens of unionized graduate students at Harvard University picket the Harvard Science Center on April 21, 2026. Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C195&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C666&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C500&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C999&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1332&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C781&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1301&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C507&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C260&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C666&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343435" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/amid-trump-attacks-and-epstein-scandals-4000-graduate-students-strike-at-harvard-university/gettyimages-2271932357" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1665&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1665" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-2271932357" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Cambridge, MA &#8211; April 21: Dozens of unionized graduate students at Harvard University picket the Harvard Science Center on April 21, 2026. Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2271932357-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C507&ssl=1" /> After 14 months of fruitless contract negotiations with the Harvard University administration, over 4,000 workers represented by the Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) walked off the job on an indefinite strike on April 21. According to the union, “Graduate student workers will suspend teaching and research labor until Harvard’s bargaining team takes substantive action in addressing the union’s key issues: pay that keeps pace with the rising cost of living, recourse for harassment and discrimination, support for non-citizen students, protections for academic freedom, and ‘fair share fees’ to equitably distribute the expenses of union representation, among others.” In this episode of Working People, we speak with three striking graduate student workers about the issues at the center of this strike, and about what it’s like to live, work, and strike at the country’s richest university amid political attacks from the federal government, scandals connecting high-ranking Harvard officials to Jeffrey Epstein, and a nationwide cost-of-living crisis. Panelists include: Sara Speller, a fifth-year PhD student in the Music Department at Harvard and president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union; Zoë Feder, a seventh-year PhD student in the Biological & Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School and a research assistant in the Microbiology Department; and Jacob Wolf, a third-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Additional links/info: Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU-UAW Local 5118) website, Facebook page, X/Twitter page, TikTok, and Instagram Harvard Graduate Students Union Strike Update/FAQ Zine Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine, “Harvard graduate student workers strike” Noah A. Ferris, The Harvard Crimson, “Grad students rally outside Garber’s home as strike enters third week” Hugo C. Chiasson & Elise A. Spenner, The Harvard Crimson, “Harvard promised a ‘full’ review of its Epstein ties. Its own files reveal what it left out” Featured Music: Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song Credits: Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working people is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an important episode today about a strike in Cambridge, Massachusetts that is happening right now and involves over 4,000 UAW members at Harvard University. Now, the strike began at the end of April and according to the public announcement which was released by the Harvard Graduate Students Union, “After 14 months of contract negotiations and nearly a year without an active contract, over 4,000 workers represented by the Harvard Graduate Students Union, HGSU UAW Local 5118 launched a strike of indefinite length on April 21st. This move follows a strike authorization vote in which 79% of the union’s voting eligible members participated, with 96% voting in favor. Graduate student workers will suspend teaching and research labor until Harvard’s bargaining team takes substantive action in addressing the union’s key issues, pay that keeps pace with the rise in cost of living, recourse for harassment and discrimination, support for non-citizen students, protections for academic freedom and fair share fees to equitably distribute the expenses of union representation among others. The union is also bargaining for improved workplace conditions that allow graduate student workers to contribute to the university’s mission without fear of harassment or retaliation. Under the current system, graduate students filing claims of workplace harassment and discrimination can only seek recourse through internal processes, leaving the university as the sole arbiter of its own conduct. HGSU UAW has proposed optional grievance processes in which claims can be adjudicated by third party arbitrators selected jointly by the university and the union. Such protections are standard among graduate student worker contracts at comparable institutions like NYU, UPenn, MIT, University of California and Stanford. Claire Traweek, a PhD student in material science and mechanical engineering shared why this process of real recourse is so important for student workers. “When I told my advisor about the ongoing sexual harassment I’d been experiencing in lab, he told my accusers I had tried to report them and then effectively fired me by refusing to sign my advising agreement. “Now in an email sent to the Harvard community just days before the strike began, Harvard Provost John F. Manning and Executive Vice President Meredith L. Weenick defended the university’s position on wages and union security saying that Harvard’s proposal of a 10% increase for salaried appointments is quote in line with recent agreements while also rejecting the union’s demands to standardize research assistant base salaries and restructure other pay scales. Manning and Weenic also claimed that the union’s demand for a third party arbitration process would establish a quote distinct and separate set of non-discrimination, harassment and anti-bullying processes for union members, which they say would “conflict not only with federal regulations for Title IX complaints, but also with the university’s policy that members of our community should have access to the same procedures.” All right, to break down what is happening with the Harvard grad union strike, what is at stake in this strike and what comes next? As we always do, we’re going to take you straight to the front lines of the struggle so you can hear directly from folks who are at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests. Sara Speller is a fifth year PhD student in the music department at Harvard and the president of the Harvard Graduate Students Union. Sara works as a teaching fellow for the music department and the department for the studies of women, gender and sexuality. Zoë Feder is a seventh year PhD student in the program in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard Medical School and a research assistant in the microbiology department and Zoë works in a bacterial genetics lab and Jacob Wolf is a third year PhD student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education who works as a teaching fellow in courses about designing learning experiences. Sara, Zoë, Jacob, thank you all so much for joining us on the show today. I really, really appreciate it. Now, I did my best to give listeners some basic context there in the intro, but I want to start by going around the table and just asking you all to lay this all out in your own words. Why are you as graduate student workers on strike right now and what have the past two weeks on strike look like for you? Sara Speller: Hello, my name is Sara. Thanks for having me. The way that we’ve been framing this and I think it’s very, very true is that all we’re asking for are adequate pay and adequate protections for all of our workers. You really hit the nail on the head with that summary, so thank you. Great job. But I think among other things, we want our wins to be the floor at Harvard and not the ceiling. So I take specific umbrage with the claim that we are trying to create a secondary way of making sure that harassment and discrimination is dealt with for only us because what we’ve said at the table is we want everyone to have access to an arbitration that is neutral, does not rely on the goodwill of the internal processes at Harvard. But as someone who is a teaching fellow and I only make $26,000 a year at this point in my degree because of funding schemes that are really Harvard’s way of trying to push us through our degrees as fast as possible, I think pay equity is so vital and will make the classroom experience so much better and healthier because what we have right now are people juggling three, four individual classes and dealing with all kinds of different assignments and job work that they have to do within that. Oh, and to be clear, the reason why people are juggling so many classes, I myself juggled three different class workloads, I guess you can say, this semester because I needed to make money to be able to pay rent in Boston. It’s so expensive to live here. So if the teaching fellows were able to feel comfortable in the fact that we can pay rent, we can take care of ourselves, we can take care of our dependents, we can keep ourselves protected on a legal front for our non-citizens and international workers by being able to afford or receive payment for having immigration lawyers on hand. How much better would the learning environment here be at the richest university in the world? I think they can afford to do that and they should because what we care about is teaching and learning. And then as for the last few weeks on strike, it’s been very difficult. I love my job, but it also has been very rewarding, especially I’ve been president for about two years and it’s so beautiful seeing people come together from all different corners of the university getting to know each other and sharing in the camaraderie and solidarity. Zoë Feder: I love that. That’s so true. I’ve really enjoyed that, especially because I work on the medical school campus and I don’t always have the chance to interface with the humanities and a lot of the other sciences who work on the Cambridge campus. So that’s been really wonderful for me. I think Sarah did a great job as she always does of articulating what we’re fighting for. I think from my perspective, I have been aware of and seen firsthand this ever present issue of harassment, the sort of threat of harassment and discrimination in academic spaces without appropriate tools to protect people. And in my time as a graduate student worker, I’ve been a part of many different discussions and committes at different forms and levels. And I feel really that our union is the first organization that I’ve been a part of where we’ve made material progress in protecting people from the day-to-day harassment and discrimination that they experience. And so one of the big motivations for me in joining the strike is to address this issue of harassment and discrimination that everyone around me knows is a problem and wants to change. Ultimately, our union and our contract I’ve found have been the most effective tools. So I’m putting all of my energy into strengthening those tools because I’ve seen through experience that’s the fastest and most effective way for me to help protect my coworkers from harassment and discrimination. Jacob Wolf: I agree wholeheartedly with both what Sara and Zoë have shared already. I think to add one thing that has been on my mind as someone who is relatively newer at Harvard and who is just learning the ropes in some ways of union organizing in an academic space, kind of tapped into this process as our union began bargaining, which has now been like 15 months ago. So it’s unfortunately been a lot of time to learn the ropes. But as I’ve tapped into this union organizing and been working to connect with rank and file members at the School of Education where I primarily do my work and research, I’ve just learned how much misinformation there is about the union across our campus and how hard it is to correct that misinformation when the work structures at Harvard are so intentionally, in my opinion, complicated. Everything across all of these various schools and departments functions differently. People have different kinds of jobs that the university tries to treat differently. People often don’t know if they’re eligible for union membership or if their work is protected by the union. When people experience instances of some kind of contract violation, whether that be harassment or even not receiving the wages that they’re supposed to be receiving, they often don’t know that they have union support because Harvard has intentionally made it so difficult to organize as a union. My understanding is that that’s kind of the case across higher ed. Many higher ed institutions have engaged in intentional union busting through these kinds of opaque structures that make it hard for people to know what their rights are. And so the strike has really energized me around our proposals for union security. So things like making it such that all graduate students who are eligible for union membership would have to make an intentional decision either to join the union or to pay a reduced fair share fee that would still contribute to the work that the union still performs for all students through bargaining and through contract enforcement. And so that, though maybe not the sexiest issue has become very driving for me as I’ve been out and about striking. And I mean, the wages part is still so important too. Again, everyone across the university has different forms of compensation. It’s totally unfair that folks who are more advanced in their programs are making so much less than folks who are earlier in their programs. But even me, someone who’s earlier in my program, I’m still very concerned about our wages not keeping up with inflation. My rent is going up 3.25% this coming year because there’s no rent control in the Boston area in Massachusetts and that’s less than Harvard has proposed in wage increases over the next four years, which means I’m taking home a pay cut. Right now our contract is a pay cut and that is not only is it unacceptable, it’s unlivable. When we say we’re fighting for a living wage, it is not a euphemism. Maximillian Alvarez: Let me just pick up on that and let’s go just a little bit deeper on these issues that are so central and so important to y’all and your membership that you would go on strike 4,000 strong to get them, right? Because I think there’s a big perception disconnect here, which I’ve tried to address with this show over the course of many years to get people to understand just because you know that Harvard is, as Sarah said, the richest higher ed institution in the world and it’s got this massive endowment, venerable reputation, yada, yada, yada, that does not mean that the grad student workers who are teaching a lot of the classes are even able to pay their own damn rent. And this is the case in higher ed institutions across the country. I say that as a former grad student who was living below the poverty line. It’s just par for the course and we’re always told, “Well, it’s not a real job. You’re getting an education. The pay and the work are disconnected in this weird way.” And that’s just not the case. No, we’re workers. We need to make a living. We need to keep a roof over our head. And we have an employer-employee relationship with the university telling us what labor to do to get our paycheck. So anyway, I wanted to ask if you guys could just flesh out a little more for folks who are not part of a higher ed community, who are hearing about this story, listening to this interview right now and they’re wondering what is grad student pay and cost of living for a grad student at Harvard and why is this kind of pay proposal so central to this strike and also the arbitration process because that may seem small to some, but it is so massive when you’re facing harassment from your advisor who holds your future career in their hands. And you would think that an institution like Harvard whose former President Larry Summers was just implicated in the Epstein files would be a little more sensitive to this kind of thing. So can you guys just talk a little more about why these are so central to this struggle to the point that they would even lead your membership to strike over them? Sara Speller: Yeah, great question. I’ll tackle the myth of all of us being like 25-year-old white men in grad school. First, I think this is something I hear all the time and for context, I’m first gen low income to college. I have been at fancy private schools the whole time, but I have never known wealth and it is through the mercy of fellowships and scholarships that I got where I am today in the addition of luck. But I think one of the things that people often get wrong, to your point, is this idea that all of us are doing this simply because we need something to do and we don’t want to work. This is a job. I am exclusively responsible for myself. I do not have anything to fall back on. I happen to be very, very interested in a very niche thing. And so the best job for me right now is teaching and working towards a PhD at this institution. If I don’t do a good job teaching my students, what worth is their Harvard degrees? And something that people are often surprised to hear is that students at institutions like this have sections or what we call sections for all of their classes that sort of replace the idea of a study group. So they have their lecture or they have their meeting and then they also have a time where they meet once or twice a week with someone who is a graduate student or some sort of non-tenured teaching labor and they talk through everything. So we have to know what they are learning. We have to be able to guide them through complex terms. We grade their papers. We do all of these things in a way that is akin to being a teacher. We are teachers. We’re also researchers in laboratories. The laboratories don’t function without us. And a lot of us are adults, I think is the other. This sounds crazy to say, but all of the people that I know are not dependent on family or anyone else. This is our nine to five, often our eight to eight and a lot of us have kids. A lot of us have dependents. A lot of us are sending money back home to various places and we live in precarious circumstances. So being an academic worker, being an office worker, being like a sit down job worker is not any different in the reality of precariousness than any other job that we might line up with being in a union. And that’s how union power in America gets dissolved before it can even grow is that we’re told like, “Well, your job is easy or your job is not a real job.” The number of times I’ve heard that from people who are literally accountants and it’s like, “Your job is a real job and you deserve rights.” And I think that is really what our strike is about in a big way is reminding Harvard, reminding each other, reminding everyone that these are real jobs and we can’t subsist on half of the money that it takes to live and work in Boston and also be expected to be doing novel research and also be expected to be doing other things that academic people are expected to do and perform in order to get jobs. We are juggling so much and we are in a place of privilege certainly, but like MIT is paying their researchers and teachers more on a fraction of the budget down the road. And so even within the realm of privilege and like fancy names, Harvard is falling behind and they’re relying on their name recognition to get them through everything, including what you’re talking about with the fact that we’ve had people having to step down due to their associations with Epstein. They are not talking about this with their students. So that also often falls into the role of teaching fellows and mentors like us. They’re just choosing to let things go by so they don’t have to talk about it and relying on their name and that is not a way to make your dream come true if you’re trying to survive for the next a hundred years like they claim to be, which is why the money and the endowment is untouchable. Zoë Feder: I love that. So much of that really resonated with me, especially when you said, Sarah, that we are adults and that that feels silly to say once this is a secondhand story, but one of my coworkers told me they were talking to a faculty member and the faculty member said to them something along the lines of like, “Well, when you’re an adult, you’ll see.” And what they meant was when you have a professor job, and it’s so frustrating and so ironic because on the one hand as PhD students or other kinds of master’s students or whatever we are, we’re expected to be experts in our field and we’re expected to move from consuming knowledge to producing knowledge. But at the same time, we are often condescended to and infantilized in a way that’s just so taken for granted that a professor could accidentally say to a 32 year old when you’re an adult, you’ll see. Yeah, I’m 32 and I’m lucky. I’m fortunate that I can rely on my family for help in a lot of ways. I’m also in one of the highest paid tiers, I guess as a research assistant in the natural sciences on the medical school campus, I make about $49,000 a year or 50 depending on, I guess, who you ask and how you count the benefits. But even with that for really big expenses, like we had to move a couple of years ago and brokers fees were still legal in Massachusetts and we had moving expenses, we had to go to our parents for help and I’m so grateful and lucky that we were able to do that. But even my generous parents, it wears on a family to be helping to support their adult children this far into adulthood. And so many of my classmates, so many of my brightest, most hardworking classmates don’t have those safety networks. And so they’re in incredibly precarious positions. And the frustrating thing is that it’s not just kind of a cruel and undignified position to put your workers in, but also it takes away from the university’s larger mission of advancing research and knowledge because now you have students that have to sort of rearrange their lives or take on additional work if their program allows them to, which it often doesn’t depending on other things. And that takes away from the actual research and the work that we’re here to do. And yeah, it’s frustrating at the richest university in the country, but it’s also a problem that exists at every university. I would really like to see Harvard use its financial safety net to help its most vulnerable workers. Jacob Wolf: I think to add on and add even more context from another part of the university, I think that the mission or goals of the academic world, there can sometimes be misconceptions about them. I think we do a lot of very niche research that is aimed at producing niche knowledge. And I think that that is an extremely valuable thing that we get to do as a society and extremely important. And also I think the mission of universities is quite practical too. Coming from the Graduate School of Education, I teach people who are graduate students who are training to become teachers or who have left the classroom and are now trying to become administrators, school administrators or things like that. And the work that I see myself doing is taking this extremely valuable knowledge that we’re able to produce as a society and helping to actually make it change the lives of people everywhere through the work of a teacher, for example. I was a high school teacher prior to starting the PhD program and so now I draw substantially on that experience as a worker at this university. And so I think the idea that our jobs are not practical, that they’re not having a real impact in the world can be a misconception. And I think it’s important to broaden what it means, to broaden the understanding of what the purpose of a university is. The other thing I wanted to say is that I love the work that I do. So many of the people around me love the work that we do and I’ve had many conversations with my colleagues who are sad about striking. We feel energized by it, but I had to miss the last two weeks of the class that I spent the entire semester teaching where my students were doing their final presentations of projects that they’d been working on that are learning experiences that they’re designing and hoping to take to students that are in classrooms with them. And that was extremely sad for me. And I think it’s important to just underscore that we’re not doing this simply to cause disruption. There are goals that we have that demonstrate how untenable the teaching and working situation is at this university. We have these goals because we don’t feel that we can continue working otherwise. We can’t effectively teach or do research if we are afraid of ICE coming onto campus and our colleagues being deported. We can’t do research and teaching if we’re worried that a professor is going to retaliate against us if we say something in the classroom that they disagree with and those conditions are detrimental to the mission of the university from both this knowledge production angle as well as this making knowledge applied angle. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I think that’s really powerfully put by all of you and just to throw in the other economic kind of point is like you can’t do that work if you don’t know if you’re going to have a roof over your head. And that could be said of any job. Who can do their job well when they don’t know where their next meal’s going to come from, if they don’t know if they’re going to get evicted? I know what that feels like. People who listen to the show know what that feels like. And so it doesn’t matter where you’re working, but if you are not being paid enough to live, it’s insane for bosses to still expect all of us and just to really underscore this for folks listening who don’t live in or near Boston, I just did a quick search on apartments.com and a one bedroom apartment average rent in Boston is over $3,500 a month average one bedroom apartment rent in Cambridge is 3,300 a month or more. So that is not cheap by any stretch. And to say nothing of like the gas being like a billion dollars right now because of the stupid war with Iran. Sorry, I cut somebody off. Sara Speller: No, you’re so fine. I jumped in. It’s the ADHD. But yeah, no, to your point, I’m moving in July and when I went to go look at my little pistachio shell of an apartment I’m about to move to, excited about it. But the management of the building was like, “Oh, you’re lucky. You’ve got one of the apartments that’s under $2,000 in Boston.” It’s 1995 a month not including utilities and it’s like a known thing. It is just very expensive to live here and it’s one of those areas where unless you drive, you kind of have to live in the cities, you have to live in Cambridge, you have to live in Boston. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. I’ve been there, man. I’ve spoken on that campus. It ain’t easy. And even if you do drive, the streets are so nuts over there that I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, but I’m a Southern Californian who’s used to a grid, baby. I’m not used to the Hickelty Picklety streets of Boston, but I digress. I want to take a step back for a second. As a former graduate student worker myself and a former union member at the University of Michigan, shout out GEO, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the academic labor movement. And we have covered on this show and at the real news, labor struggles in higher ed led by students, grad students, non-tenured faculty, tenured faculty. I mean, we’re talking public schools, private schools, strikes, unionization efforts. I even interviewed Harvard grad union folks during the 2019 strike when I was an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. And I say that because of course the demands at the center of this fight that we’ve been talking about here, they echo a lot of the demands that I’ve heard from other academic workers in years past. But of course the elephant in the room is that we are living in a very different era in America right now. You guys are living with Working, teaching, preparing for your careers and bargaining all while massed federal agents are swarming our cities and snatching international students and brown people who look like they’re immigrants like off the street and student protestors from their campuses. The Trump administration has launched an all- out war on institutions of higher education from canceling or holding hostage billions of dollars of federal funds and grants, upending the entire academic research infrastructure to the shaking down of universities including Harvard with these gangsterish lawsuits. There are tenured professors who are getting fired right now for blatantly political reasons. All while university administrations have ramped up their own internal surveillance and repression machines to smash free speech and to smash student protests after all the Gaza encampments. While all of that is happening, like I said, Harvard itself and high profile people like former Harvard President Larry Summers are being implicated in the goddamn Epstein files. The whole point being this is a batshit time to be alive and a batshit time to be a Harvard graduate student worker. I just wanted to ask if you could each kind of give us a worker’s eye view and talk about what it’s been like in your own lives to try to carry on working and getting paid like normal this past year when everything is so grossly not normal. Sara Speller: Yeah, that’s a great question. I can start us out. My research for my dissertation is about media literacy and analysis and reanalysis and fighting fascism. And so it’s been a very crazy time running a union and working on a dissertation like that. So I’ll leave that at that. There’s a wealth of things to write dissertations about inside of that. But as someone who largely teaches undergrads, it has been very hard because there are so many days where I think about the fact that it’s crazy being a grad student now and I was an undergrad during the first Trump term, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like to becoming of age in your late teens, early 20s at this point. And I think so much of what I think is important as a teacher is reminding students that this is an insane world and that they have to take care of themselves in order for their brains to function, in order to get the grades that they so desperately want to achieve. And these are also all kids who have been relentless throughout high school, throughout middle school in order to end up … Again, there is a ton of luck involved in getting into an Ivy league, but these are still kids who are not used to failing and then they come here and even there’s talk. There’s talk being made around the university about putting a tap on the percentage of A’s that can go out to student classes, which as someone in the humanities is absurd because I’m teaching introductory music theory and analysis classes. How are we supposed to be putting a cap on the number of people who get A’s if they walk into the classroom not knowing any theory and walk out of the classroom able to read, able to identify chores. But that’s a little bit inside baseball, but I think it really does illustrate how frustrating it has been to be a teacher and a researcher here and now and here even just being America in general. I think a lot of the things that we’ve seen, this gangsterish ability that the Trump administration believes they have to try and shake down institutions is directly related to the fact that we over the course of the last 30, 40 years have 50 even have completely disengaged with social science, with humanities, with the value of critical thinking and literacy. And it makes our jobs hard as well because we also have AI and AI protections are something that we’re not forefronting in this current fight for our contract because no one knows what’s happening with it. So it’s really rewarding I think to me personally, but that’s again, because I love teaching, I love the work that I do, but it is difficult already. And then to think about the students that I care about that I’ve had to strike from, to Jacob’s point. There were final projects I was excited to hear about and in the back of my head as president, I knew that there was this looming threat of, oh, Harvard’s not going to cooperate with us to the point that we will need to do a work stoppage. I’m not going to be able to see how these kids are doing. A lot of them are graduating. And so I hope they reach out to me once they’re done with their time at this institution so they can say like, “Hey, this is what I’m doing now, because I haven’t been able to see their last few weeks in my class.” But yeah, that’s sort of the feeling that I’ve had for several years at this point is like, holy shit, it sucks to be an adult person under this, but it must really suck to be 19. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s kind of where my mind jumps. Zoë Feder: Yeah, that’s so true. It’s terrifying thinking of what it would be like to be a young person going through this. As a researcher, it’s been a really wild ride because our funding kind of gets turned on and off at the whim of the federal government. It’s particularly been a little crazy to be I’m Jewish and to be a Jewish grad worker at Harvard when our funding is being cut off over accusations of antisemitism. I maintain that it’s antisemitic to put Jewish workers out of jobs, but also, yeah, it is wild on the medical school, we definitely have people who are in the Epstein files and it’s wild to be walking past those labs. It has been good for my imposter syndrome though, because I’ll think to myself, “I messed up this experiment. I’m so dumb. I’m the worst.” And then I’ll think, “Well, at least I never put myself in the Epstein funds.” But more seriously, I feel like in this time in addition to the regular work we’ve been doing, we’ve also been expected to be ambassadors of Harvard to the larger community trying to show that actually we bring value to this nation and to communities across the country, not just our ivory tower bubbles. And so it’s been frustrating to take on that extra role and then not be recognized for any of our labor contributions in a way. And also seeing how much money faculty members or people at Harvard have taken from independent donors like Jeffrey Epstein and actively pursue those kind of donations, I think has helped me feel more firm in my stance on pushing back on Harvard’s claim that they’re too poor to give us better benefits and pay equity because they’re constantly selling off parts of the school, selling off the naming rights like our graduate school, for example, and taking in donations and it just doesn’t line up with the picture that they’re painting of their financial situation. Not that I’m saying they should continue to take donations from people like Jeffrey Epstein, but that they have so many different ways of increasing their wealth. And so it’s frustrating to constantly be told, “Oh, we’re too poor to pay your coworkers and the humanities to teach the next generation of scholars.” Jacob Wolf: Yeah, I want to pick up on the thread too about the image that Harvard is trying to project for itself at this time. Max, as you’ve discussed and described already, we are in honestly very depressing times that make me very concerned for marginalized populations like non-citizens in this country and it’s for me easy to despair in these times. What does give me hope is thinking about the kinds of institutions that we can build that can stand up to these forces. And a year ago, a year and a half ago, Harvard tried to paint itself as one of those institutions. Our president wrote this extensive letter initially pushing back against the Trump administration about protecting our university. And there was a moment where I was hopeful. There was a moment where I was like, “Maybe Harvard is actually going to do something to stand up to these fascist forces.” And over the last 12 months, I think despite that public projection, the lived experience has been completely counter to that. We continue to live in conditions of immense opacity about what the administration is doing, the Harvard administration. I am constantly having conversations with people about little whisperings they’ve heard of the negotiations that are happening between the Trump administration and the Harvard administration. And we all kind of know that there’s a backroom deal brewing and we’re just either waiting for some announcement to drop or perhaps even more scarily waiting for these changes to just start taking place on our campus that demonstrate the acquiescence to the Trump administration without needing to take the heat from that. Yeah, like I said, it leads to despair. It’s hard to stay hopeful, but I think that HGSU, our Graduate Students Union is a counter to that. It is an example of an institution that is genuinely committed to democratic engagement and that is genuinely committed to caring for the experiences and the lives and the wellbeing of all of its members, regardless of whether they are the president of the union or a rank and file member who is still trying to figure out what the union can do for them. Being in the union, being involved in organizing and seeing the power of collective action that we’re able to pull together through our organizing is the thing that’s giving me hope right now as a graduate student worker, but also just as a person living through these troubling times. Sara Speller: If I could add just a little bit to Jacob’s point about the fact that we all had a hope when the university initially pushed back against Trump administration, they’ve introduced these campus use rules, especially since the encampments that are a little draconic to the point that early this year there was a big thing that happened where they made a faculty member take down a huge sign that says Black Lives Matter that had been there since I started here five years ago. And we were not initially given any sort of reasoning why. And then it was like, “Oh, the campus use rules, you can’t put political stuff in Windows.” And they also tried to make a claim that because HTSU went on a small campaign with a lot of other unions across Harvard’s campus of putting them back up and putting up a bunch more little Black Lives Matter signs. And the idea that the HR office offered was like, “Oh, well, this doesn’t have to do with your working conditions.” Which I can easily make the joke, it does for me. And if I’m the president of the union, I fear that it is a labor issue, but what ended up happening was they quietly decided to allow signs like that back up, but they didn’t really mention it. And so I think that’s a very small, almost silly story that feels like it belongs in 2016, but it does show that we have the ability and we have been keeping Harvard to account in a way that I hope every workplace is able to do through unionization or just through collective action. I think that’s kind of the way that I’ve been heartened to Jacob’s point about the kind of times we live in. It’s like, “Oh, the people power is the only power.” And people are starting to realize that and embrace it. Maximillian Alvarez: Oh yeah. Well, and I know I got to let you guys go, but with the kind of final quick turnaround the table, I wanted to focus on that and talk about where things stand now, what happens next and what folks listening can do to stand in solidarity with y’all because again, anyone who’s ever heard about or been a part of an academic labor struggle knows that the university’s got one ace in the hole in its back pocket that it uses every single year, whether it’s a strike or a union campaign or a protest, wait for the summer. Wait for the summer and hope that all the students dissipate. Some of the grad union members graduate out some of the faculty don’t get reappointed. You have a built-in system in higher ed because of the academic calendar that makes it very difficult to maintain kind of momentum for political and labor struggles like this, but that’s not always the case. I mean, we’ve reported on many strikes that supposedly ended at the end of the school year and then picked right back up in the fall. I guess I just wanted to ask y’all, given where we are right now in early May, where do things stand with the strike? What comes next? And yeah, what can folks listening do to stand in solidarity with y’all? Sara Speller: Yeah. I think one of the things that people can do is continue to share this kind of information with other people. Our website, hgsu.org or Linktree/HGSU has sources where you can donate to our hardship fund, where you can sign on as a community member. So all of these things are definitely things that we love and support, but I think Harvard really cares the most about its image and it doesn’t like that we are talking about it. And the only reason why we’re talking about it is because we want to change it. And I’ll just add that despite it all, like our ongoing strike, I think we’re like halfway through week three at this point. The university has not offered us any additional bargaining sessions. So our next one is May 14th and that runs dangerously close to the finals period and the end of the grading period. So this is a really difficult and powerful time to strike and I think we’re holding the line really strongly. To your point, they can always say like, “We’ll wait till the summer and we can just as easily say wait till the fall,” but I think we’re still deciding and planning how we want to keep this leverage up and call Harvard to account. We do have faculty members who are getting rather tired of the strike, so we’re happy to se them join our ranks. But yeah, all kinds of sharing, donating, all of that is immensely helpful. Zoë Feder: Yeah, definitely knowledge is power. And I think that Harvard, the administration and the representatives at the bargaining table, they rely on the fact that the public and even many members of the Harvard community will believe the stories they’re puting out that they just can’t afford to give us the benefits and the pay equity we’re asking for. And the more everyone pushes back on that, including people that don’t live in this area but all across the country, like I’m from a small town in a red district and I think it’s really powerful to build solidarity with people in my hometown because they have representatives in Congress that hold power and we don’t have any other connection to those people or those representatives. So this summer, one thing I’m going to focus on is connecting back up with some of the working class movements in my hometown and strengthening those partnerships. Jacob Wolf: Yeah. I think at the risk of sounding corny, I do think that just participation in this growing labor movement is what seems most important to me right now because it’s across the country and around the world. I think we are starting to see changes in labor, changes in labor organizing. And I think that those are really powerful. What will happen with us is extremely important and we’re committed to that fight, but it’s just one small fight amongst this many fights that are going on across the country and around the world right now. I think just like doing what we can to support labor organizing is important, whether it’s at Harvard or in a hospital in the cab of a delivery truck. There’s many places that we need labor organizing right now and that seems urgent and important. Maximillian Alvarez: All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Sarah Speller, Zoe Fetter and Jacob Wolf, all graduate student workers at Harvard University and all members or officers of the Harvard Graduate Students Union, which has been on strike since April 21st. You can stay up to date on the strike and follow the grad union using the links that we provided for y’all in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today, I promise you guys it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever. This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.
The Nakba and the Logic of Manifest Destiny
Maldives jails 2 journalists over documentary about President Muizzu
New Delhi, May 12, 2026—Maldivian authorities must immediately release journalists Mohamed Shahzan and Leevan Ali Nasir and end judicial harassment of their news outlet, Adhadhu, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday. According to a report by Adhadhu and a post on X by the Maldives Journalists Association, a court in the capital Malé sentenced...
New Delhi, May 12, 2026—Maldivian authorities must immediately release journalists Mohamed Shahzan and Leevan Ali Nasir and end judicial harassment of their news outlet, Adhadhu, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday. According to a report by Adhadhu and a post on X by the Maldives Journalists Association, a court in the capital Malé sentenced Shahzan, a reporter with Adhadhu, to 15 days in jail after he was removed from a May 11 press conference for questioning President Mohamed Muizzu about allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of power raised in the outlet’s documentary, “Aisha.” Authorities later barred Adhadhu from briefings, citing a criminal court gag order on discussing the film. In a separate case, Nasir, a journalist with the same publication, received a 10-day sentence over a report on the same gag order, which the court deemed a violation, Adhadhu reported. The rulings represent an escalation of the government’s campaign against the outlet, which included an April 27 police raid, equipment seizures, and travel bans on senior staff, as documented by CPJ. “The jailing of Mohamed Shahzan and Leevan Ali Nasir is a punitive attempt to criminalize investigative journalism and shield the presidency from scrutiny,” said CPJ Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator Kunal Majumder. “The authorities must free both journalists, return seized equipment from the Adhadhu news room, and allow the press to operate without fear in Maldives.” On May 8, CPJ and six other groups wrote to President Muizzu calling for an end to criminal proceedings against Adhadhu. The Maldives Police Service and the President’s Office did not immediately respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via email. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
Perspective: Be wary of China twisting Trump’s words during summit with Xi Jinping
Beijing has misrepresented statements made by visiting dignitaries to imply support for its repressive policies.
During U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to China, pay special attention to China’s track record of manipulating information. The Chinese government has distorted the statements of foreign visitors and used them to serve its own rule over the people under its control. For example, during the 2022 visit of United Nations High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet to China, her statement “I admire China’s economic development” was expanded and promoted as “I admire China’s economic and human rights development.” China ignored corrections issued by the UN office, and the misleading report remained on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s website for more than two years. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet during a virtual meeting with China's President Xi Jinping, in Guangzhou, China, May 25, 2022. (OHCHR via AFP) Another distortion occurred in 2019, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited China and said, “I wish for the Uyghurs to live happily,” became “Uyghurs are living happily.” The Turkish government later recognized China’s distortion and issued a clarification. These distortions happen often. For a government like China, which rules not only through force but also through strict control of information, this practice is routine. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is welcomed by Chinese President Xi Jinping during a in Beijing, July 2, 2019. (Wang Zhao/AFP) Words such as “my friend,” “smart,” or “great”— could easily be taken out of context and mischaracterized by Chinese state media. Such words can be used to portray the United States as supporting or at least tolerating China’s policies. On January 19, 2021, the United States was the first country to officially declare the situation of the Uyghurs as genocide. Following this, more than 20 governments and parliaments, as well as two other members of the U.N. Security Council have described the situation similarly. RFA learned that 15 days prior to this week’s planned visit by President Trump, a series of security measures were implemented in the Uyghur region. In addition to routine measures such as prohibiting the spread of information online and blocking calls from overseas, authorities also restricted petitioners from traveling to file complaints, especially those going to Beijing. These restrictions make it clear that China wants nothing to get out of the Uyghur region so they can control the narrative while the U.S. delegation is there. It is therefore very likely that Beijing will be looking for opportunities to twist even the most innocuous statements made by the delegation to reinforce its claims about the Uyghur region. Shohret Hoshur is a journalist with RFA Uyghur. He fled the Uyghur region in 1995 after his reporting about Beijing’s repressive policies against Uyghurs made him a target of the Chinese government. An 18-year veteran at Radio Free Asia, he won awards for his exclusive reporting from inside the Uyghur region, where Beijing denies human rights violations and closely guards the flow of information. Shortly after joining RFA, Chinese authorities began monitoring anyone known to have had contact with Hoshur, even arresting many of his family members. Edited by Eugene Whong and Charlie Dharapak. This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shohret Hoshur for RFA.
CPJ condemns Trump’s order for DOJ to subpoena journalists
Washington, D.C., May 12, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists demands that the United States Justice Department immediately withdraw grand jury subpoenas targeting reporters at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in connection with their reporting on the Iran war. CNN reported that President Donald Trump ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to submit the subpoenas using a sticky...
Washington, D.C., May 12, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists demands that the United States Justice Department immediately withdraw grand jury subpoenas targeting reporters at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in connection with their reporting on the Iran war. CNN reported that President Donald Trump ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to submit the subpoenas using a sticky note on which he wrote “treason.” “This isn’t a leak investigation — it’s an attempt to shut down reporting,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Conflating journalism with treason is dangerous and anti-democratic. We call on the Justice Department to withdraw these subpoenas now.” WSJ was subpoenaed March 4 for reporters’ records tied to a February 23, 2026 story on Pentagon warnings about the risks of an extended Iran campaign, the paper reported. In a statement, Dow Jones called the subpoenas “an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering” and vowed to fight them. The groundwork for this legal action was laid last year when then-Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Biden-era rules limiting prosecutors’ ability to target journalists as part of leak investigations. In January, federal agents searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and seized her electronic devices, signaling the administration’s willingness to use more aggressive tactics. CPJ’s email to the Justice Department for comment on why reporters were subpoenaed for simply doing their jobs did not receive an immediate reply. Blanche wrote on X, “Prosecuting leakers who share our nation’s secrets with reporters, in turn risking our national security and the lives of our soldiers, is a priority for this administration.” This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
Gaslit Nation unmasks the real villain: the corporations hijacking our democracy, using Trump as a distraction as they loot and destroy our country. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Brennan Center fellow and professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, and author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, explains how corporations funded Trump's violent coup attempt on January 6, 2021. In Part I of our discussion, Torres-Spelliscy shows us the inner-workings of corporate greed, and why boardrooms are fine with Trump chaos. In Part II of our discussion, out Thursday in our bonus show for Patreon (get access to that for $5/month at the Truth-teller level), we discuss concrete ways to fight back, including as the corporate lobbyists on the Supreme Court kill what's left of the Voting Rights Act, which Americans gave their lives for. Gaslit Nation is being censored by the corporations that run Big Tech. We see a drop in views after one of our videos, on a topic such as exposing Epstein's transnational crime network, receives a lot of views. We immediately see a drop in viewership of our videos that come after. Your help amplifying Gaslit Nation–sharing our episodes on your social media, joining our Patreon even as a free member to help amplify our voice–makes a big difference in fighting back. America is sinking in a Trumpian swamp of corporate greed and corruption, but the people can and must organize to build a better world–like generations before us who prevailed to give us the rights under attack today. Thank you for everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you. Join our community of listeners and get bonus shows, ad free listening, group chats with other listeners, ways to shape the show, invites to exclusive events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Discounted annual memberships are available. Become a Democracy Defender at Patreon.com/Gaslit EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION: Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community New! There's now a California Signal Group for Gaslit Nation listeners to find each other and connect in that state. Join here! The Gaslit Nation Outreach Committee discusses how to talk to the MAGA cult, available on Patreon. Minnesota Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other, available on Patreon. Vermont Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other, available on Patreon. Arizona-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to connect, available on Patreon. Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon. Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon. As always, keep it kind in our chat groups, extend grace and assume good faith. A culture of care is how we build a better world.
Gaslit Nation unmasks the real villain: the corporations hijacking our democracy, using Trump as a distraction as they loot and destroy our country. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Brennan Center fellow and professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, and author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, explains how corporations funded Trump's violent coup attempt on January 6, 2021. In Part I of our discussion, Torres-Spelliscy shows us the inner-workings of corporate greed, and why boardrooms are fine with Trump chaos. In Part II of our discussion, out Thursday in our bonus show for Patreon (get access to that for $5/month at the Truth-teller level), we discuss concrete ways to fight back, including as the corporate lobbyists on the Supreme Court kill what's left of the Voting Rights Act, which Americans gave their lives for. Gaslit Nation is being censored by the corporations that run Big Tech. We see a drop in views after one of our videos, on a topic such as exposing Epstein's transnational crime network, receives a lot of views. We immediately see a drop in viewership of our videos that come after. Your help amplifying Gaslit Nation–sharing our episodes on your social media, joining our Patreon even as a free member to help amplify our voice–makes a big difference in fighting back. America is sinking in a Trumpian swamp of corporate greed and corruption, but the people can and must organize to build a better world–like generations before us who prevailed to give us the rights under attack today. Thank you for everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you. Join our community of listeners and get bonus shows, ad free listening, group chats with other listeners, ways to shape the show, invites to exclusive events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Discounted annual memberships are available. Become a Democracy Defender at Patreon.com/Gaslit EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION: Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community New! There's now a California Signal Group for Gaslit Nation listeners to find each other and connect in that state. Join here! The Gaslit Nation Outreach Committee discusses how to talk to the MAGA cult, available on Patreon. Minnesota Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other, available on Patreon. Vermont Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other, available on Patreon. Arizona-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to connect, available on Patreon. Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon. Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon. As always, keep it kind in our chat groups, extend grace and assume good faith. A culture of care is how we build a better world. This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
Beyond Decree 54: Tunisia’s latest measures to silence the press
CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program
New York, May 12, 2026 — For years, Tunisia was viewed as one of the few post-Arab Spring success stories for press freedom in the region. In the decade following the 2011 revolution, journalists gained greater space to investigate corruption, criticize authorities, and report more openly than anywhere else in North Africa. Those gains, while...
New York, May 12, 2026 — For years, Tunisia was viewed as one of the few post-Arab Spring success stories for press freedom in the region. In the decade following the 2011 revolution, journalists gained greater space to investigate corruption, criticize authorities, and report more openly than anywhere else in North Africa. Those gains, while incomplete, marked a significant break from decades of authoritarian control over the media. By 2026, however, this trajectory has reversed. While President Kais Saied continues to rely on Decree-Law 54, which he forcefully imposed in 2021, to criminalize critical speech and prosecute journalists, authorities are now deploying a wider set of tactics to weaken independent media. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented how Tunisian authorities have used financial crime charges, administrative restrictions, banking freezes, and dissolution proceedings to pressure journalists, media outlets and civil society organisations alike. Together, these developments point to a broader strategy: not only punishing journalists individually, but dismantling the infrastructure that allows independent journalism to survive. Decree 54 and the threat of prison <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" height="683" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?w=1024" alt="Tunisian lawyer and writer Sonia Dahmani speaks at home in Tunis on November 27, 2025 after her release from prison." class="wp-image-548009" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg 5788w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=570,380 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=652,435 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=760,507 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=1140,760 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AFP__20251127__86DQ2G8__v1__HighRes__TunisiaPoliticsRightsTrial.jpg?resize=367,245 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Tunisian lawyer and writer Sonia Dahmani speaks at home in Tunis on November 27, 2025 after her release from prison. (Photo: AFP/Fethi Belaid) Recent sentences against prominent journalists and commentators highlight how Tunisia continues to rely on Decree Law 54 to criminalize speech. Political commentator and lawyer Sonia Dahmani was sentenced on April 13 to 18 months in prison, while Ghassen Ben Khelifa, editor-in-chief of the local independent newspaper Inhiyez, received a two-year sentence in March 2026. Although neither is currently behind bars, both remain under constant threat of detention.This legal limbo, where sentences remain enforceable at any moment, has become a powerful tool of intimidation in itself. “Tunisian authorities have turned Sonia’s freedom into a threat. By keeping the sentence hanging over her, they’re forcing us into silence, because if we speak up, she [Dahmani] could be taken to prison the next day,” Ramla Dahmani, Sonia’s sister, told CPJ over the phone. Dahmani has faced at least five separate legal cases, all linked to her media commentary. While some have resulted in prison sentences, at least two cases remain ongoing, meaning she risks facing additional sentences and further prison time in the future. Ben Khelifa’s prosecution shows how authorities revive older cases to deliver punishment over time. He was first arrested in September 2022 and detained for<a href="https://www.nessma.tv/ar/%D8%A3%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D9%88%D8%B7%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9/actu/%D8%A5%D8%B7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%82-%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AD-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D8%AD%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%BA%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A8%D9%86-%D8%AE%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%81%D8%A9/410115#:~:text=%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%85%D8%AA%20%D9%82%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%A9%20%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%A9%20%D8%A3%D9%86%D9%87%20%D8%AA%D9%85%20%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AD%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%85,%D9%84%D9%85%D8%AF%D8%A9%20%D8%AE%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A9%20%D8%A3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%85%20%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%A9%20%D9%84%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%AF%20%D9%88%D8%B0%D9%84%D9%83%20%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89"> five days before being released pending investigation. The two-year sentence issued in March 2026 stems from that same case, which has remained open for more than three years and is linked to a social media page authorities allege was connected to him. In a separate case, journalist Zied el-Heni, editor-in-chief of news site Tunisian Press, was arrested for criticizing the prosecution of freed journalist Khalifa Guesmi on his Facebook page, and sentenced on May 7 to one year in prison. “My father is being prosecuted simply for doing his job as a journalist—denouncing failures in the judicial system and calling for accountability,” Ela el-Heni, Zied’s daughter, told CPJ. “The harassment against him was clearly meant to silence his voice and make an example of him to instill self-censorship among journalists.” Financial charges to prolong detention <img decoding="async" height="512" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?w=1024" alt="An image of journalists Borhen Bsaies (left) and Mourad Zghidi (right)." class="wp-image-389831" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg 1500w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=300,150 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=768,384 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=1024,512 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=570,285 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=652,326 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=760,380 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=1140,570 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2tunisiasentenced.jpg?resize=367,184 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> A Tunis court convicted radio journalists Borhen Bsaies (left) and Mourad Zghidi of defamation and spreading false news. (Screenshots: Carthage Plus/YouTube; IFM/YouTube) Beyond Decree 54 prosecutions, authorities are increasingly turning to financial crime charges to extend detention periods and deepen judicial harassment. The cases of radio journalists Mourad Zghidi and Borhen Bsaies exemplify this shift. Both men were arrested alongside Dahmani in May 2024, and initially prosecuted under Decree 54, receiving reduced sentences on appeal. However, rather than being released, they were subjected to new investigations involving allegations of money laundering and illicit enrichment. In January 2026, a Tunis court sentenced them to three and a half years in prison, accompanied by hefty fines and asset seizures. Yesmine Zghidi, Mourad’s daughter, described the charges as retaliatory measures intended to justify continued detention and reframe the journalists as criminals. “Our lives stopped when our father was arrested,” she told CPJ over the phone.“The hardest part is knowing he did nothing wrong, yet he’s in a cell for no reason.” Targeting independent outlets and civil society Civil society organizations in Tunisia have faced a growing wave of administrative restrictions, funding obstacles, and public smear campaigns, and independent news outlets are not exempt. Toward the end of April 2026, Tunisian authorities suspended the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), a member of the National Dialogue Quartet, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015, for one month, targeting one of the region’s oldest and most prominent rights organizations. One of the clearest examples is the move to dissolve Al Khatt, a key player in Tunisia’s independent media landscape for over a decade and the association behind the investigative outlet Inkyfada. A hearing on the government’s dissolution request is scheduled for June. Since late 2023, Al Khatt has faced escalating pressure, beginning with repeated banking restrictions that blocked its funds for months at a time, followed by extensive administrative audits, documentation requests, and a one-month suspension of its activities in 2025. According to Inkyfada co-founder Malek Khadhraoui, the organization complied with every request while authorities continued escalating pressure. “The most damaging obstacle has been the banking restrictions,” Khadhraoui told CPJ over the phone. “Transfers related to our projects or services are blocked for months without explanation and no one tells us why or for how long.” <img decoding="async" height="544" width="1024" src="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?w=1024" alt="Tunisian journalist Zied el-Heni was recently arrested for allegedly insulting the president. (Screenshot: YouTube/IFM)" class="wp-image-294351" srcset="https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png 2878w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=300,159 300w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=768,408 768w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=1024,544 1024w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=1536,817 1536w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=2048,1089 2048w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=570,303 570w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=652,347 652w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=760,404 760w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=1140,606 1140w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=2000,1063 2000w, https://cpj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tunisia_06-21-2023.png?resize=367,195 367w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> Tunisian journalist Zied el-Heni was recently sentenced to one year in jail. (Screenshot: YouTube/IFM) When CPJ interviewed Khadhraoui in 2022, he warned that President Saied was threatening to restrict foreign funding for civil society organisations. Four years later, those threats have evolved into a systematic campaign of financial pressure targeting independent media and NGOs. “Al Khatt’s battle is not just its own—it is a battle for all civil society,” he said. Other outlets have faced similar measures. Independent news outlet Tumedia saw a routine international transfer from a donor suddenly become blocked off by the bank, according to a Tumedia journalist who spoke with CPJ on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Authorities requested extensive financial documents, including details about the donor’s own funding sources and despite submitting the needed documents, the funds remain frozen with no clear explanation, the journalist said. The outlet’s editor-in-chief, Khaoula Boukrim, has also been targeted by what appears to be a coordinated smear campaign online. Independent news outlet Nawaat was likewise suspended for one month in October 2025 following a series of investigations, financial and tax controls, and harassment incidents. Together, these cases suggest a broader strategy. By targeting both journalists and the outlets they work for, authorities are shrinking the space for independent reporting from multiple angles. What Tunisia’s information ecosystem needs today “Together, these latest developments show how far Tunisia has drifted from its post-2011 reputation as a regional refuge for freedoms, as authorities now move beyond targeting journalists to dismantling the conditions that allow press freedom to exist,” said CPJ Chief Programs Officer Carlos Martínez de la Serna. The growing range of measures deployed against the press in Tunisia underscores the need for sustained international pressure on Tunisian authorities. In 2025, CPJ brought Ramla Dahmani to the European Parliament to advocate for her sister. The body subsequently adopted a resolution expressing concern about Sonia’s imprisonment, as well as the situation in Tunisia. Sonia Dahmani was released the same day the resolution passed, demonstrating the influence Brussels can have on press freedom in Tunisia. CPJ continues to press the leadership of the European Commission and the European External Action Service to build on that momentum and press for the release of Mourad Zghidi and Borhen Bsaies. CPJ continues to call on Tunisian authorities to immediately end the misuse of Decree 54 to prosecute journalists for their work and public commentary and instead implement the press code Decree 115 when prosecuting journalists.. Authorities should protect independent media organizations and stop efforts to dissolve their parent associations or restrict funding. CPJ’s email to Tunisian authorities requesting comment did not receive any reply. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program.
I Was Kidnapped by Israel in Int’l Waters, Jailed for 10 Days: Gaza Flotilla Activist Saif Abukeshek
A Return to Jim Crow? Ex-DOJ Civil Rights Chief Kristen Clarke Slams Gutting of Voting Rights Act
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 12, 2026
Independent journalist detained in LAPD kettle at May Day protest
Independent journalist Mel Buer was detained by police while covering a workers’ rights and immigration protest in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026.Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May Day St...
Independent journalist Mel Buer was detained by police while covering a workers’ rights and immigration protest in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026. Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May Day Strong” demonstrations that also called for an end to the war in Iran and the immigration raids that have swept the city since June 2025. Later, demonstrators gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, where immigrants are being held. Buer told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that as the evening went on, LAPD officers kettled a group of mostly press, sealing them inside a tightened perimeter. Kettled, half of us are press. NLG lawyer, press freedom lawyer. This is insane. — Mel Buer (@melbuer.bsky.social) 2026-05-02T02:43:42.584Z “There was a real moment where I genuinely thought I’d end up in a police car,” Buer wrote. She added that the kettle was tighter than the one she was detained in amid protests in March, and the officers were unfamiliar. “They had already cited Lex, and didn’t seem interested in even having a dialogue, even with the ACLU lawyer attached to the press freedom case in the kettle with us,” she continued, referencing journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray and LA Press Club attorney Weston Rowland. Journalists Tina-Desiree Berg and Nick Stern were also among those detained; both Stern and Rowland were arrested. “When Nick was arrested, and then the ACLU lawyer, I was the only press left in the kettle, and they hadn’t asked me to leave yet,” Buer told the Tracker. “Couldn’t confidently say I was safe until they walked me out of the kettle.” Buer estimates that she was detained for 30-45 minutes. Rowland told the Tracker that the police response that day showed a blatant disregard for the legal protections afforded journalists covering demonstrations. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for them to understand that the freedom of the press is well protected under our constitution,” Rowland said. “In 2025 and 2026, it seems like they’re doing things that are specifically targeting the press. That’s stepping back, not forward.” The LAPD did not immediately return a request for comment from the Tracker, but in a statement posted on May 1, it wrote: “The Los Angeles Police Department fully supports the rights of individuals to peacefully assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights.” In an earlier statement following the March 28 “No Kings” rally — which resulted in more than two dozen press freedom violations — Chief Jim McDonnell said that any use of force or allegations of mistreatment involving media members would be investigated and addressed. “The LAPD recognizes the media’s right to cover events and makes reasonable efforts to accommodate, with those efforts consistent with our primary duty to maintain public safety and order,” that statement said. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
“We were hearing, every day, the screams of other Palestinians who were being tortured inside this investigation center.” Spanish citizen Saif Abukeshek, an activist of Palestinian origin, speaks with Democracy Now! about spending ...
“We were hearing, every day, the screams of other Palestinians who were being tortured inside this investigation center.” Spanish citizen Saif Abukeshek, an activist of Palestinian origin, speaks with Democracy Now! about spending 10 days in Israeli detention after he was abducted in international waters. He was among 175 international activists sailing to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, which has for years tried to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians. Abukeshek and Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila were the only flotilla members detained for “questioning” inside Israel, where they say they faced severe physical abuse in detention. Abukeshek, speaking from Turkey, says being dual nationals provided them some protection because of international attention. “Imagine how Palestinians are being treated. Imagine the violations that people from Palestine are receiving,” he says. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
A Return to Jim Crow? Ex-DOJ Civil Rights Chief Kristen Clarke Denounces Gutting of Voting Rights Act
We speak with Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, about growing threats to democracy in the United States following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican lawmakers across the South ar...
We speak with Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, about growing threats to democracy in the United States following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican lawmakers across the South are responding to the ruling by racing to redraw their congressional maps, which is expected to lead to a historic drop in the number of Black representatives in Congress. “The Supreme Court’s devastating decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case has really turned our country upside down,” says Clarke, who previously served as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department in the Biden administration. She says that given the history of racial discrimination in the United States, particularly in the Deep South, “it is unsurprising” to see lawmakers “race at lightning speed to eradicate the gains that have been made over the decades.” Clarke also discusses President Trump’s efforts to take federal control of elections in at least eight states, which Clarke says is part of his administration’s goal to “lock out certain voters” and commit “mass disenfranchisement.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Trump Warns Iran Ceasefire Is “On Life Support”, Saudi Aramco Warns Of “Catastrophic Consequences” Unless Strait of Hormuz Reopens, Israeli Military Issues New Evacuation Orders for Residents of Southern Lebanon, Israeli Forces Continue Deadly Violations of U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire, Palestinian Family Says Israeli Settlers Forced Them to Exhume West Bank Gravesite , EU to Impose Sanctions on Israeli Settlers in the Occupied West Bank, Protests Erupt at Real Estate Expo Advertising Properties for Sale in the Occupied West Bank, SCOTUS Allows Alabama to Adopt Congressional Map Eliminating a Black-Majority District, Trump Set to Arrive in China with Entourage of Billionaires, Senate Democrats Blast GOP Plan to Spend $1 Billion in Taxpayer Funds on Trump’s Ballroom, Haiti’s Prime Minister Says Country Is Too Unstable to Hold Presidential Elections, Philippines Senator Flees Federal Agents Serving ICC Arrest Warrant
Trump Warns Iran Ceasefire Is "On Life Support" Saudi Aramco Warns Of "Catastrophic Consequences" Unless Strait of Hormuz Reopens Israeli Military Issues New Evacuation Orders for Residents of Southern Lebanon Israeli Forces Continue Deadly Violations of U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire Palestinian Family Says Israeli Settlers Forced Them to Exhume West Bank Gravesite EU to Impose Sanctions on Israeli Settlers in the Occupied West Bank Protests Erupt at Real Estate Expo Advertising Properties for Sale in the Occupied West Bank SCOTUS Allows Alabama to Adopt Congressional Map Eliminating a Black-Majority District Trump Set to Arrive in China with Entourage of Billionaires Senate Democrats Blast GOP Plan to Spend $1 Billion in Taxpayer Funds on Trump's Ballroom Haiti's Prime Minister Says Country Is Too Unstable to Hold Presidential Elections Philippines Senator Flees Federal Agents Serving ICC Arrest Warrant This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Tuesday, May 12, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Taliban raids TOLOnews office in Afghanistan after detaining 2 journalists
New York, May 12, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Taliban authorities in Afghanistan to immediately and unconditionally release two journalists from TOLOnews and end the harassment of media workers following a raid on the broadcaster and its parent company, Moby Group. Taliban intelligence agents detained TOLOnews presenter Mansoor Niazi on May 7 in...
New York, May 12, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Taliban authorities in Afghanistan to immediately and unconditionally release two journalists from TOLOnews and end the harassment of media workers following a raid on the broadcaster and its parent company, Moby Group. Taliban intelligence agents detained TOLOnews presenter Mansoor Niazi on May 7 in the capital, Kabul, according to multiple news reports. Two days later, authorities detained political editor Imran Danish near the network’s office. On May 10, shortly after TOLOnews reported the detentions on social media, dozens of Taliban intelligence officers raided Moby Group’s office in Kabul. Armed personnel confiscated employees’ phones, questioned staff for several hours, and placed staff under surveillance, according to sources cited in news reports. “The Taliban’s detention of Mansoor Niazi and Imran Danish, followed by a sweeping raid on a major independent media organization, underscores the climate of fear facing journalists in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator Kunal Majumder. “Taliban authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the detained journalists and ensure the press can operate without interference.” Taliban intelligence agents also took control of Niazi’s social media account following his detention and posted messages suggesting he was at home, raising concerns about coercion, reported London-based television station Afghanistan International. Taliban authorities have not publicly commented on the reason for the raid or the detentions. Taliban Deputy Spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat did not reply to CPJ’s text messages requesting comment. Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban have decimated Afghanistan’s independent media sector and supplanted it with their own propaganda empire. Taliban authorities have arrested a number of journalists reporting for exiled media and forced hundreds to flee to neighboring countries. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
Israel’s destruction of civilian high-rise buildings
He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway.
The post He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.
Anna Vignet/KQED Jason Agan was impossible to miss at Angelo Rodriguez High School. The San Francisco Bay Area teacher was loud and gregarious, a fixture on campus since the Fairfield school opened in 2001. He ran the student government and called himself the man behind the curtain, organizing pep rallies and prom. He taught AP calculus, so advanced math students ended up in his classroom, jostling for his approval and letters of recommendation. Some considered him a mentor who inspired a love of math — and even a second father. But for years students also whispered about Agan’s behavior, according to interviews with 14 Rodriguez High graduates, most of whom he had taught. He touched some of them in public in ways that made them uncomfortable, they said, including hugging students and massaging their shoulders. And he seemed fixated on enforcing the dress code, calling out girls whose shorts were too short. Nearly two decades into Agan’s tenure, and on the heels of the #MeToo movement, students had enough. At least 11 students and one parent submitted written complaints about his behavior to school administrators in 2018, drawing at least two warnings to stop, a KQED and ProPublica investigation found. By January 2019, the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District had taken steps to fire him, suspending him without pay. Agan pushed back, and nearly a year later an independent panel convened by the state to hear his case deemed him “unfit to teach.” The panel’s decision meant that the popular educator was officially out of the job where he had spent his entire teaching career. But the panel’s review only addressed his employment at this one school district, and its finding was not shared publicly. It would be up to the state’s teacher licensing agency to determine whether additional discipline would be imposed, including whether Agan could keep teaching in California public schools. Over the next three years, Agan was hired at a second school and then a third. During that period, the state issued a one-week suspension of his teaching license for his behavior at his first school. Then, Agan faced another accusation of unwanted touching — this time, by an eighth grader at his second school, according to school records. The state’s teaching credentialing agency did not inform the other schools or the parents of students in Agan’s classes of the full extent of what went on at Rodriguez High. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1707" width="2560" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=2560" alt="A page in a yearbook that includes a photo of a man looking through a doorway and a feature on Jason Agan under the title, “Equations & Headaches.”" class="wp-image-77542" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-12_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /> Math teacher Jason Agan, in the 2017-18 Rodriguez High School yearbook, said his goal was to “make RHS a place where all students can feel comfortable and safe.” The school district fired him in 2019 for sexually harassing students. Beth LaBerge/KQED Agan, now 47, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, and someone at his address hung up when a reporter rang his apartment buzzer and identified herself. Nor did he respond to questions sent via email or certified mail to his home about students’ accusations and his job history. He previously denied any sexual motivation in touching students, telling the independent panel that he was simply offering students support and encouragement — not massaging them, according to records obtained by the news outlets. A broad look at California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing by KQED and ProPublica shows a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that have allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other misconduct of a sexual nature. Agan’s case is one of at least 67 in which the state has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct, according to a review of available records from 2019 through 2025 obtained by the news outlets. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools, and of those, at least 12, including Agan, still work in education, according to a review of school websites and employment records provided by schools. Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the state automatically revokes teachers’ credentials when they are convicted of sexual criminal offenses, but not necessarily when a district determines they have committed sexual misconduct. She said the state Legislature — not the licensing agency — determines the type of misconduct that results in automatic revocation. The agency appoints a committee to assess noncriminal cases of misconduct, she said. Agan has not been accused of a crime. “The Commission’s authority balances protecting students as well as the legal rights of educators who have been accused but not convicted of specific crimes,” Fitzhugh said in a written statement. “If our job as teachers is to keep children safe, we have to be held accountable for things we do that could harm them.” Alicia DeRollo, former commissioner on California’s teacher licensing agency The agency’s disciplinary process is unique among licensing bodies in California in how much is kept secret, Fitzhugh said. The fact that a teacher has been disciplined is noted on a state website of credentialed educators, but the database does not explain why. In contrast, the licensing bodies governing dozens of other professions in California, including doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers, make the reasons that disciplinary actions were imposed easily accessible on their websites. And at least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers. “If our job as teachers is to keep children safe, we have to be held accountable for things we do that could harm them,” said Alicia DeRollo, a longtime teacher who served as one of 19 commissioners on California’s teacher licensing agency from 2011 to 2020. Amid this gap in oversight, Agan found two new jobs and remains in the classroom. Student Complaints Start Piling Up For 17 years, Agan taught at Rodriguez High, a sprawling open-air campus nestled alongside rolling hills where cows graze. The school serves the racially diverse commuter town of Fairfield, halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A sign that reads, “Rodriguez High School,” and, “Home of the Mustangs,” outside surrounded by trees and bushes." class="wp-image-77549" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-05_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> The entrance to Rodriguez High School in Fairfield, California Beth LaBerge/KQED Then in 2018, several sophomores in his accelerated math class reported him to school administrators. One girl alleged that he took her phone out of her back pocket while she was sitting down taking a test and that he would massage girls’ shoulders in class, according to school records. Assistant principal Gary Hiner cautioned Agan to be careful, sharing that students had told him they were uncomfortable when the teacher walked around class and touched them, according to a summary Hiner wrote about the spoken warning. In March 2018, a father emailed another administrator after Agan wore a shirt to school that used the Pi symbol to spell out “Pimp.” The father wrote that a teacher should not be wearing a shirt making light of someone who “sexually exploits people for profit.” This time, assistant principal Allison Klein emailed Agan, reminding him that school was not the place for “physically touching students, inappropriate innuendo, or jokes in poor taste.” But the next school year, more students complained, records show. In October 2018, a student told her school counselor and then Hiner that Agan had come up behind her and started massaging her neck beneath her long hair. The student said she felt violated and froze, unsure of what to do, records show. She talked to her peers about Agan to see if others had similar experiences, and told Hiner those classmates said he also made inappropriate comments and touched students in his leadership class. The student was so distraught she asked to transfer out of the math class and had a panic attack two days later in the school psychologist’s office, school records show. Neither Hiner nor Klein agreed to be interviewed. Within weeks, at least nine more students submitted written complaints, alleging that Agan had massaged their shoulders and singled out female students for what they wore. “This was a case of someone overstepping boundaries, and we’re not afraid to call this person out,” said Julia Steed, who was a 15-year-old sophomore when she wrote to school administrators alleging that Agan “had tendencies to touch students,” including palming her head during class. “We were like, ‘Oh no, we’re not dealing with this.’” <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1707" width="2560" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=2560" alt="A woman in her 20s sits on a sofa and looks at the camera with a serious expression." class="wp-image-77550" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260324-CATeacherDiscipline-17_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /> Julia Steed, a Rodriguez High graduate, had complained to school administrators about Agan touching students. Beth LaBerge/KQED Steed, now 23, told KQED and ProPublica that she and her classmates were emboldened by the #MeToo movement to speak out as teenagers across the country were gaining more awareness of boundaries and consent. By the end of 2018, the Fairfield-Suisun school board approved the superintendent’s recommendation to fire Agan. Agan objected and demanded a hearing, something tenured California public school teachers facing termination are entitled to. His case would be evaluated by an independent panel, which would decide whether to uphold the district’s recommendation. School districts rarely fire tenured teachers because losing a case is expensive and the teacher can wind up back in the job. Instead, many districts negotiate settlements that allow teachers to resign. But in Agan’s case, Kris Corey, the Fairfield-Suisun superintendent at the time, said she and the school board believed they had a strong case for termination. “The board said, ‘We don’t care how much this costs. We are going to a hearing,’” Corey said. “It’s the principle of the matter. This is not OK.” For eight days in the Fairfield-Suisun district office beginning in July 2019, the three-member panel, including a teacher selected by Agan, heard testimony from students, teachers and administrators. “This was a case of someone overstepping boundaries, and we’re not afraid to call this person out.” Julia Steed, Rodriguez High graduate Seven students, three administrators, a former guidance counselor and a parent spoke against Agan. Six of the students told the panel that Agan made them uncomfortable by touching them or commenting on their clothing, including calling one girl “short shorts.” Four of them, including Steed, said they did not feel comfortable going to Agan for extra help with math because they did not want to be alone with him. Several also said they refrained from speaking in class to avoid attracting his attention. Four former students, three teachers and a staff member spoke on Agan’s behalf. The former students described Agan as a supportive mentor and caring teacher and said they felt at home in his classroom. All four students said he squeezed, rubbed or touched their shoulders, but that his actions did not make them uncomfortable. One of those students told KQED and ProPublica that her opinion about the teacher’s behavior has changed in recent years. She said she had considered his physical contact normal while in high school. But her perspective shifted as she got older, she said. “I went to college and talked to people and realized it wasn’t normal,” said the former student, now in her 20s. “Looking back at it, I would have jumped to the other side, to be quite honest.” During the hearing, Agan testified that he would have stopped touching students’ shoulders if he had been clearly warned, according to a summary included in the panel’s decision. He said he became comfortable with his leadership students, and his actions carried over to math students even though he wasn’t as close with them. He denied massaging students’ shoulders and said students misinterpreted “squeezes or shakes” as massages. He said he did not intend to make students feel uncomfortable and regretted that some students did not feel safe in his class. One of the administrators, former director of human resources Mike Minahen, told the panel that the details students shared with him during his investigation “weighed heavy” on him. He said it was unusual for high school students to “break the code” and come forward to make a complaint about a teacher, “especially a leadership teacher who has influence over student activities throughout the entire school.” Minahen, who has retired, declined to comment. In November 2019, the panel unanimously decided Agan should lose his job. Even the teacher chosen by Agan agreed. “The likelihood of recurrence is high,” the panel wrote in its decision. “Over time he has shown that he cannot or will not exercise good judgment.” One of the panelists told KQED and ProPublica that she voted to terminate Agan’s employment in part because his alleged behavior continued even after administrators issued warnings. “His actions were making students, particularly young women, want to not take advanced math classes. They didn’t want to be touched,” said the panelist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize her job in education. “All that directly impacts their access to good colleges because he was a calculus teacher.” In December 2019, school district officials sent documentation of Agan’s firing, along with details of their investigation, to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, as state law requires for public school teachers who resign or are fired for misconduct. The educator licensing agency would decide whether Agan would be disciplined further, such as receiving a public warning, facing a suspension or losing his license to teach in a California public school. The disciplinary process typically takes one year, according to the agency. It would take the state licensing board nearly 500 days to decide what to do in Agan’s case. How Agan Returned to the Classroom As the state considered the matter, Agan applied for a job at a Sacramento middle school about an hour away from Rodriguez High in May 2020. It was a time of heightened teacher shortages, especially in subjects like math, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Agan provided stellar letters of recommendation from former teaching colleagues in his application, which school representatives provided to KQED and ProPublica in response to a public records request. “Math is a difficult subject for many and my actions were meant as a means of encouragement.” Jason Agan in a job application Any school searching Agan’s name on California’s credentialing database would have seen a clean record and valid credentials indicating he was legally fit to teach. That’s because while the state licensing agency knew Agan had been fired for what the district described as sexually harassing students, California law prevented the agency from disclosing information about the case. Nowhere in the online public records did it say that Agan remained under investigation by the agency — let alone any details of his employment record. In his application for the middle school job, Agan acknowledged that he had been fired after being “accused of inappropriately touching students on the shoulders during class.” He wrote that he disagreed with the dismissal and explained that he would often place his hands on students’ shoulders while helping them. “Math is a difficult subject for many and my actions were meant as a means of encouragement; a way to say, ‘It’s ok that you’re having trouble, keep trying,’” Agan wrote, adding that he recognized his actions “made some students feel uncomfortable.” Agan started teaching at Ephraim Williams College Prep Middle School that fall. The 175-person school is part of the Fortune network of charter schools. Administrators at Ephraim Williams at the time of Agan’s hiring did not respond to questions about how the school vetted him. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A school building with a sign in front of it that shows a photograph of a student and text that reads, “Enroll Today! 6-8 grades.”" class="wp-image-77551" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-20_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Ephraim Williams College Prep Middle School, a charter school in Sacramento Beth LaBerge/KQED Former Fortune human resources consultant Rick Rubino, who helped the middle school recruit, interview and hire candidates at the time Agan was applying, said the school was not aware that Agan’s former employer concluded that he had sexually harassed multiple students. “Do you think any reasonable school district or principal would hire that person?” Rubino said. “No. So clearly, Fortune School did not get that information.” Rubino said he “would guarantee that somebody at Fortune called the principal at the school where Jason Agan was teaching in Fairfield and got a good report.” He said he does not remember making that call himself. The former principal at Rodriguez High did not respond to questions about a reference check. But a Fortune School spokesperson, Tiffany Moffatt, said school officials follow “​all​ ​state​ ​guidelines​ ​and​ ​regulations​ ​and​ ​conduct ​thorough​ ​vetting,​ ​making​ ​decisions​ ​based​ ​on​ ​the​ ​information​ ​available​ ​to​ ​us.​” It wasn’t until near the end of Agan’s first school year at Ephraim Williams that the state licensing agency issued its decision regarding his actions at his first school. In May 2021, the state suspended Agan’s license for seven days; two of those days fell on a weekend. The sanction — along with a red flag icon — appeared in the state’s public database of credentialed educators. This would be the only visible clue schools would have of anything amiss in Agan’s work history. Corey, the former superintendent of Fairfield-Suisun Unified, told KQED and ProPublica that she was “flabbergasted” that he had only been suspended for seven days. “It was a real mismatch of what happened,” Corey said. “What a disservice it was to those girls.” Steed, one of Agan’s accusers, said students had done the right thing and shared their concerns about Agan with their school, only for adults at the state level to give him the opportunity to teach elsewhere. “What’s even the point of going through this whole process?” she said. A Middle School Student Details Unwanted Touching In September 2021, a month after Fortune students returned to in-person learning, an eighth grader at Agan’s second school complained about his conduct. The student told her doctor during a routine physical that Agan had touched her lower back, according to a summary of the complaint. The girl’s mother told KQED and ProPublica that she reported the incident to the principal, who connected mother and daughter with Rubino, Fortune’s human resources consultant. The mother told Rubino that Agan was giving her daughter a disproportionate amount of attention. The girl, who is now 17, spoke to KQED and ProPublica on the condition that only her middle name, Sherelle, be used because she is a minor. Leslie, the student’s mother, is also being identified by her middle name to protect her daughter’s identity. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="1707" width="2560" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=2560" alt="A 17-year-old girl and a woman stand outside with their backs to the camera. The woman rests her hand on the girl’s back in an embrace." class="wp-image-77552" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260318-ProPublica-AnonymousPhotos-09_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /> Sherelle, left, and her mother, Leslie, at their home Beth LaBerge/KQED In that same meeting, Sherelle told Rubino that Agan removed his hand from her lower back after she asked him to stop, and he returned to the front of the classroom. But he came back moments later and placed his hand on her shoulder, according to a letter of warning Rubino wrote to Agan after interviewing the girl. “I felt disrespected. I felt uncomfortable. I felt mad,” Sherelle told the news outlets about the incident. “I felt like even speaking up didn’t matter.” In his letter, Rubino directed Agan to stop touching students and “dial back” his praise for the girl. Rubino also cautioned that failure to comply could result in further disciplinary action, up to suspension or termination. Agan denied the allegations in a written response to Rubino obtained by KQED and ProPublica. “I would like to be on record that I dispute it being listed as a ‘fact’ that I touched [the student] on the lower back,” Agan wrote. “I have been extremely diligent in avoiding personal contact with scholars due to my previous experience.” Leslie had texted Rubino expressing concern about how Agan was vetted for the job after she said she saw online posts by students at his former school alleging that he had touched them inappropriately. “Actually, I was the one who investigated the matter in the Fairfield Suisun School District when Mr. Agan was a candidate,” Rubino texted back that same day in messages reviewed by KQED and ProPublica. “I also checked social media and Google to see if I could find any information about the incident in Fairfield, but I did not find anything.” Rubino did not answer subsequent questions about the details of his investigation or how much he knew about Agan’s conduct at the teacher’s previous school. After the state licensing agency recommends educators be disciplined, California law allows it to release its findings, which include a summary of the case, to current supervisors and prospective employers who request it within five years. Fortune appears never to have asked for such findings, according to the logs of these requests between 2020 and 2024 provided by the agency to KQED and ProPublica. A Fortune spokesperson did not say why the charter school did not ask for the information. “The whole education system would rather protect him.” Leslie, the mother of a student who complained about Agan’s conduct Leslie said her daughter’s experience at Ephraim Williams only worsened after she reported Agan. Math has always been Sherelle’s favorite subject. But as the school year went on, her grades in Agan’s class plummeted. She needed help but said Agan ignored her. With just weeks left in the school year, Leslie pulled her daughter out of Ephraim Williams to finish eighth grade at another school. She only learned about Agan’s disciplinary history when KQED and ProPublica contacted her in January. “The whole education system would rather protect him,” Leslie said. “You let him loose on all these kids.” Fitzhugh, spokesperson for the teacher licensing agency, said the commission is “committed to keeping all students and schools safe” but is bound by the law in how it disciplines teachers. “The Commission stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes,” she said. Starting the following year, in 2022, records show that Fortune offered Agan a role supporting new teachers rather than assigning him his own classroom. Fortune administrators did not respond to questions about why he was offered the position, which he declined because he had received another job offer in the Bay Area. “Thank you for the last two years,” Agan wrote, resigning from the school. “It has meant more to me than you could ever know.” By August 2022, Agan would begin teaching at Clifford School, which serves students in pre-K through eighth grade in Redwood City. He received tenure in 2024. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="766" width="1149" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?w=1149" alt="A school building with a sign in front of it that reads, “Clifford School.”" class="wp-image-77553" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg 3000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1024,683 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=863,575 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=422,281 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=552,368 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=558,372 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=527,351 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=752,501 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1149,766 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=2000,1333 2000w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=400,267 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=800,533 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1200,800 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/260417-ProPublica-CATeacherDiscipline-02_preview_maxWidth_3000_maxHeight_3000_ppi_72_embedColorProfile_true_quality_95.jpg?resize=1600,1067 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px" /> Clifford School, a public school for children in prekindergarten through eighth grade in Redwood City, California Beth LaBerge/KQED Wendy Kelly, deputy superintendent at the Redwood City School District, declined to answer questions about Agan’s hiring or say whether the school district was aware he had been accused of misconduct at two previous schools. She told KQED and ProPublica that the district, when hiring, typically calls candidates’ immediate supervisors and checks the database of licensed educators. She said school districts rely on decisions by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to “put the best people in the classroom.” “I was pleased to see that the suspension was only seven days,” Kelly said of Agan’s discipline. “I have to trust that when the CTC reinstates the teacher that the issue has been either resolved, learned from, there’s been consequences in place, which is why they’re employable to the next organization.” How We Reported This Story KQED and ProPublica obtained detailed teacher disciplinary records from school districts after filing public records requests with the 300 largest districts in California. We asked for records of sexual misconduct complaints from 2019 through 2025, including any reports to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. More than 150 districts provided records. If the district determined that an educator had committed misconduct that it characterized as sexual, including sexual harassment by unwanted touching, sending sexual electronic messages and making sexual remarks, we checked the state licensing database to see whether the state had revoked the teacher’s license or imposed other discipline. Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California If you have experience with the state’s opaque teacher disciplinary process, KQED and ProPublica want to hear from you. Share Your Experience The post He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Holly McDede.
‘Gaza-like lesson’ to ‘everyone’s CM’ — Suvendu’s inclusive pitch contrasts sharply with past communal rhetoric
On May 9, Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP chief minister of West Bengal after the party’s sweeping victory in the 2026 assembly elections. In his oath... The post ‘Gaza-like lesson’ to ‘everyone’s CM’ — Suvendu’s inclusive pitch contrasts sharply with past communal rhetoric appeared first on Alt News.
On May 9, Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP chief minister of West Bengal after the party’s sweeping victory in the 2026 assembly elections. In his oath of office, Adhikari pledged allegiance to the Constitution and vowed to govern “without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.” Soon after the ceremony, the state’s ninth chief minister visited Jorasanko Thakurbari to pay tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on his 166th birth anniversary, where he sent a message of inclusivity, saying, “I belong to everyone.” #WATCH | West Bengal CM Suvendu Adhikari says, “The political party based on the ideals of Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee doesn’t need any certification. I am the Chief Minister now, and I belong to everybody. Those who are still discussing the results, may they be guided by… pic.twitter.com/UxKeI9fUlY — DD News (@DDNewslive) May 9, 2026 Addressing supporters in Nandakumar near his hometown of Contai, Adhikari again emphasized restraint and inclusivity later in the day, remarking that “a chief minister must weigh their words” and promising governance guided by “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas.” When supporters mentioned “sabka hisaab bhi hoga”, Adhikari responded, “Well, I am not saying that anymore”. However, even as he tried to distance himself from any divisive statements, his post swearing-in moderation stood in sharp contrast to the communal rhetoric that defined much of his election campaign and continued even after his victories from Bhawanipur and Nandigram. Kolkata, May 4, 2026: “Muslims Voted for Hijabi Mamata” After collecting his certificate for winning the Bhabanipur assembly seat, where he defeated three-time chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Suvendu Adhikari openly framed the result along communal lines while speaking to the media. Claiming that Muslims in Bhabanipur had not voted for him and had instead backed Banerjee, whom he referred to as “hijabi Mamata”, Adhikari said Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists had ensured his victory, which he described as “a victory of Hindutva.” “I bow in gratitude to all the Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists who voted for me. The Muslims of Bhabanipur did not vote for me… It was very important to defeat Mamata Banerjee. Her political retirement has now happened,” he said. Referring to voting patterns in specific wards, Adhikari claimed that Muslims had “openly voted” for Banerjee, while Bengali Hindus in areas such as Chetla and Ward No. 82, along with Gujarati, Jain, Marwari, Purvanchali and Sikh voters, had backed him. At one point in the interaction, when a journalist remarked that his victory margin in Bhabanipur was much larger than in Nandigram, Adhikari attributed the difference to the Muslim population in the constituency. “There were more Muslims in Nandigram, so the margin was smaller… Here, there were 35,000 Muslims, so the margin became larger,” he said, before adding, “Muslims did not vote for me. Muslims voted for their real people… they voted for hijab-wearing Mamata.” The repeated use of the term “hijabi” by Adhikari is problematic because the term is used in a pejorative and communal sense, portraying a marker of Muslim identity as something suspect or undesirable. In the context of election results, the entire statement risks deepening communal divides as it frames political identity and electoral support through a religious lens. Haldia, May 5, 2026: “Will Work only for Hindus of Nandigram” After Adhikari received his Nandigram assembly winning certificate from Haldia, he spoke with news agency ANI and explicitly mentioned that the Muslims in Nandigram had not voted for him and hence he was committed to focusing solely on the welfare of the Hindus in Nandigram. #WATCH | Haldia, West Bengal: BJP leader and winning candidate from Bhabanipur and Nandigram seat, Suvendu Adhikari says, “…This time I won the election with almost ten thousand votes. The Hindu people of Nandigram made me win again. There, the entire Muslim vote went to TMC…… https://t.co/VTjw3JrW93 pic.twitter.com/8uOh5qEtyI — ANI (@ANI) May 4, 2026 “Last time I won by 1,956 votes; this time I have won by nearly 10,000 votes. And once again, the Hindu people of Nandigram have made me victorious. The entirety of Muslim votes there went to the TMC. These people are extremely radical. That is why my path is correct. I will work only for the Hindus of Nandigram…” Kolkata, Haldia, May 4, 2026: ‘Muslim EVM’, ‘Madrasa’ Jibe On May 4, while counting was on, Adhikari addressed reporters and claimed that all Hindus had unitedly voted for Modi. He stated that he had seen and was well aware of the electronic voting machines (EVMs) and the voting trends. #WATCH | Kolkata: On the early trends, West Bengal LoP and BJP candidate from Nandigram and Bhabanipur, Suvendu Adhikari, says, “All Hindus are united in favour of Narendra Modi… After four rounds of counting, the BJP is forming its government. Hindu EVMs mean BJP, Muslim EVMs… pic.twitter.com/jw1gzs7qzP — ANI (@ANI) May 4, 2026 “All Hindus are united in support of Narendra Modi… We have seen it now… a Hindu EVM means BJP, a Muslim EVM means TMC. Except for Malda, Murshidabad, and Uttar Dinajpur, because the Muslims there favour Congress more.” Later on the same day, after the results were declared, a reporter asked Adhikari, “With the numbers you have secured, a lot of responsibility has come upon you. But what is being seen everywhere is that the TMC had threatened that after the 4th, scores would be setlled. As an MLA elected from two seats, what message do you have for the opposition…?” To this, Adhikari replied: “BJP workers are disciplined people, and mainly Hindus and Adivasis support the BJP; they do not do such things. To do such things, one has to study in a madrasa. None of us studied in a madrasa.” Just like the ‘hijab’ remark, the pejorative reference to madrasa is problematic because it directly links madrasa education, and implicitly Muslims, with violence and criminal behaviour. By saying that “to do such things, one has to study in a madrasa,” Suvendu Adhikari portrayed Muslim educational institutions as breeding grounds for lawlessness, reinforcing a deeply prejudicial and communal stereotype, and thereby appeared to be vilifying an entire community. Kolkata, December 2025: “Must Teach them a Gaza-Like Lesson” Perhaps the most deeply inflammatory of Suvendu Adhikari’s remarks came in December 2025, months before the election. Amid reports of attacks on minority Hindus in Bangladesh and the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das, Adhikari endorsed a “Gaza-like” response, saying, “sabak sikhana chahiye. Jese Israel ne sikhaya Gaza meh. Us tarikhe se hamare bharat ki 100 crore hindu, deshka Hindu hit meh chal raha hai sarkar. Sabak sikhana chahiye, jese operation sindoor meh Pakistan ko humlog sabak sikhaya”. (They should be taught a lesson. The way Israel taught one in Gaza. In the same way, the 100 crore Hindus of our country, the government is moving in the interest of Hindus. They should be taught a lesson, just as we taught Pakistan a lesson in Operation Sindoor.) Kolkata, West Bengal: On the lynching of Hindus in Bangladesh, Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari says, “These people must be taught a lesson, just like Israel taught Gaza. Our sacred Hindu values and the government are working in the interest of… pic.twitter.com/Mv0GssyfdF — IANS (@ians_india) December 26, 2025 The remarks sparked outrage, with critics accusing Suvendu Adhikari of invoking genocidal imagery and endorsing the idea of collective punishment against an entire community. Adhikari had also used this rhetoric was after the Pahalgam attack, during a meeting with a woman who had lost her husband. He said, “How dare they kill Hindus in Hindustan? Gaza is finished. Israel obliterated them. We will also finish them. We are disciples of Modi. We are Modi’s sons…” Instances Galore: “Stop Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas”, “Will Throw out Muslim MLAs” In March 2025, Adhikari, then the Leader of Opposition in the Bengal assembly, said that once the BJP won Bengal, the party would throw out Muslim MLAs from the assembly. “We will defeat Speaker Biman Banerjee and chief minister Mamata Banerjee. After the BJP assumes power, we will carry the Muslim MLAs of their (TMC) party, who will win and come to the assembly, and throw them out of the House in another 10 months”, Adhikari said. In July 2024, Adhikari proposed changing the BJP’s slogan from “Saabka saath, saabka vikas” to “Jo hamare saath, Hum unke saath”, calling for the abandonment of the minority morcha. While addressing a state executive meeting of BJP in Kolkata, Adhikari said, “I had spoken about nationalist Muslims and you too had said ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’. But I will not say this anymore. Instead, we will now say, ‘Jo Hamare Saath, Hum Unke Saath’. Stop this ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’. Minority Morcha is not needed.” Later clarified that he meant those who are nationalists, the party should be with them. Those who don’t stand with us work against the nation; we should expose them.” Watch: “We will uphold Hinduism and the constitution. I previously mentioned nationalist sentiments towards Muslims, but we will no longer do so. Instead, we will focus on ‘Jo Hamare Sath Hum Unka Sath’. There is no need for a Minority Morcha,” says BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari pic.twitter.com/DMxHztQFyF — IANS (@ians_india) July 17, 2024 It is worth noting that in the recent 2026 assembly elections across West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, the BJP did not field a single Muslim candidate, and naturally no Muslim MLA was elected from the party in those polls. BJP does not have a single Muslim MP at present. Nationwide, it has only two Muslim MLAs — Achab Uddin from Manipur and Tafajjal Hossain from Tripura. From Regional Populism to Hardline Hindutva Suvendu Adhikari’s communal rhetoric is politically striking because he is not a lifelong RSS-BJP worker but a former Mamata Banerjee lieutenant who spent most of his career in the Trinamool Congress. Unlike traditional BJP leaders shaped by the RSS ecosystem and its ideological training, Adhikari emerged from Bengal’s populist, anti-Left regional politics, where overt Hindutva language was historically less central. His sharp communal turn after joining the BJP, therefore, appears less rooted in long-standing ideological conviction and more in political adaptation to the BJP’s polarisation-driven electoral strategy in Bengal. That is partly why the shift feels especially stark: The rhetoric often appears performative and engineered to establish ideological credibility. A useful comparison is Himanta Biswa Sarma, another powerful regional leader who joined the BJP after rising through the ranks in Congress. Like Adhikari, Sarma was not an RSS product and adopted a far more overt Hindutva line after switching parties. In both cases, the former regional-centrist politicians deployed sharper communal rhetoric than some traditional BJP cadre leaders, partly to signal loyalty to the party’s ideological core and partly because polarisation has proven electorally effective in their respective states. The post ‘Gaza-like lesson’ to ‘everyone’s CM’ — Suvendu’s inclusive pitch contrasts sharply with past communal rhetoric appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.
‘Affront to democracy’ – NZ law change halts landmark climate crisis lawsuit
By Kate Newton, RNZ News climate change correspondent The political activist suing major New Zealand emitters over climate change damage says a law change blocking his case and others like it is “an affront to democracy”. The government announced yesterday it would amend climate laws to prevent companies from being sued over damage caused by
By Kate Newton, RNZ News climate change correspondent The political activist suing major New Zealand emitters over climate change damage says a law change blocking his case and others like it is “an affront to democracy”. The government announced yesterday it would amend climate laws to prevent companies from being sued over damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The change will prevent findings of liability in torts — a type of civil case where one person or entity claims another has caused them harm. READ MORE: Other climate change law reports Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith . . . law change will apply to current and future cases. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said it would apply to current and future cases — stopping a landmark case against Fonterra and five other major emitters in its tracks. In 2024, iwi leader and activist Mike Smith was granted permission by the Supreme Court to sue Fonterra and other major dairy and fossil fuel companies. He argued the companies, which collectively contributed about a third of New Zealand’s emissions, had a legal duty to him and others in communities that are being damaged by the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. The hearing, which was sent back to the High Court, was due to start in April next year. ‘Creating uncertainty’ Dr Goldsmith said Smith’s case was “creating uncertainty in business confidence and investments that the government must address”. The law change would “remove the possible development of a new regime that contradicts the framework Parliament has already enacted to respond to climate change”. New Zealand already had a legal framework to manage emissions, through the Climate Change Response Act and the Emissions Trading Scheme, he said. “Our response to climate change is best managed by the government at a national level and not through piecemeal litigation in the courts.” Smith told RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme the government’s decision was unprecedented and outrageous. “It’s an affront to democracy,” he said. “If Parliament can cancel a live court case, then no legal claim is secure at all, once it becomes politically inconvenient.” ‘Public interest case’ The legal case was asking the court to decide whether the companies involved could be held responsible for their emissions, he said. He said they were not seeking costs or damages and it was instead a “public interest case” to establish that the companies were liable. They hoped to prompt the companies to take action to reduce greenhouse emissions. “These companies are not fools. They’ve got some of the best science available to them … All we’re asking is that they act responsibly, and if they can’t decide that themselves then they need to be nudged along.” He countered Dr Goldsmith’s claims that the case was undermining business confidence. “Real business confidence comes from predictable law — not from government intervention in active court cases.” What the big emitters should really worry about were the effects of climate change itself, Smith said. “If the farmers are feeling nervous about [the case] and lobbying the government to have these cases struck out, if I were them I’d be more nervous about the the droughts that are pending… That’s the real threat to their model.” ‘Shocking abuse of power’ Greenpeace labelled the change a “shocking abuse of power” that would protect climate polluters from paying for the damage they had caused. Greenpeace executive director Russel Norman, told RNZ Midday Report, it was “outrageous” and he believed it was being done to protect large corporations. “People will have their right to go to court removed. “They intervened mid-case. It is an outrageous overreach.” Lawyers for Climate Action president Jenny Cooper KC said the decision was shortsighted. Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick . . . Government “ripping away New Zealanders’ and the courts’ ability to do what this government lacks the spine to do.” Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii “What it looks like is a kneejerk reaction to legislate over the top of the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Smith and Fonterra before that’s gone to trial.” That would leave New Zealanders with no avenue to claim damages or compensation against emitters in future, she said. “It’s really hard to understand why we would want to legislate now to say we could never bring claims against emitters for the harms and losses we’ve suffered. “If they are not responsible for paying then who does? Well, everybody, basically.” Climate ‘wrecking ball’ Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the goverment was using its “dying breaths” to remove New Zealanders’ right to hold emitters accountable. “They’ve spent two and a half years taking a wrecking ball to climate laws and, at the 11th hour, they’re now ripping away New Zealanders’ and the courts’ ability to do what this government lacks the spine to do.” The minister’s claims that common law could cut across the government’s climate change framework made no sense, she said. “The Climate Change Response Act and the ETS do not deal with this issue at all — there is no framework or mechanism for any type of compensation for climate related harm.” Instead, the change “appears to be cutting off the only potential mechanism we have at the moment before we are anywhere near having legislation that would address these issues.” The law change would not alter the government’s responsibilities under the Act, and businesses that had obligations under the ETS would still be required to meet them, Dr Goldsmith said. Another landmark climate case, taken against Climate Change Minister Simon Watts over the government’s plan to tackle climate change, is also unaffected. That case was heard in March and a reserved decision is expected later this year. The case against Watts was taken jointly by the Environmental Law Initiative (ELI) and Lawyers for Climate Action. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California
The post Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California appeared first on ProPublica.
Anna Vignet/KQED KQED has teamed up with ProPublica to report on how California handles cases of alleged teacher misconduct. The state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing releases few details about cases, leaving the public largely in the dark. From our interviews with former commission members and students, as well as a review of records, we found dozens of cases in which the state did not revoke teachers’ licenses after findings of sexual misconduct. We know there are other issues with this system, and we need your help to get a full picture. We want to hear about your experience with the disciplinary process, whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, administrator or credentialing commission member, or you have other insight. Your perspective will help guide our reporting, ensuring we understand the issues from all sides. You can fill out a brief form or contact KQED reporter Holly McDede on Signal at hollymcdede.68 or via email at hmcdede@kqed.org. We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our project. With your permission, we may share your response with a partner newsroom interested in following up. As journalists, our role is to write about issues. We cannot provide legal advice or other support. However, there are resources available. We know these cases can stem from painful experiences, and mental health support is available if you need it: The National Sexual Assault Hotline is available online, by calling 800-656-4673 or by texting “hope” to 64673. The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available online or by calling or texting 988. The Trevor Project provides support to LGBTQ+ youth. You can connect online, by calling 866-488-7386 or by texting 678678. If you would like to reach out about a case outside of California, you can contact ProPublica engagement reporter Asia Fields. The post Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Peter.DiCampo@propublica.org.
How climate change could help hantavirus find more hosts
Experts say extreme weather is boosting the odds that the pathogens carried by rodents will spill over into human populations.
The cruise ship departed Ushuaia, Argentina, in April with plans to ferry 147 passengers and crew members to some of the most remote places on earth, including Antarctica. But the ship, named the MV Hondius, had its voyage cut short by a rare virus that has killed three and infected several others. Hantaviruses are an ancient family of rodent-borne pathogens that likely caused disease in humans long before they first appeared in medical records in the 1950s. The viruses infect people via rodent waste — often through the inhalation of dust containing trace amounts of the excreta. Andes hantavirus, the strain that gripped the MV Hondius on its polar cruise, is one of a few hantaviruses known to cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare but often deadly illness. The Andes strain is also the only known hantavirus that can be transmitted human-to-human — a characteristic turning a rare rodent-borne infection into a multinational emergency, just a few years after the world was caught flat-footed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The good news is that the Andes hantavirus, while uniquely deadly, is likely nowhere nearly as transmissible as COVID-19. Nevertheless, the outbreak is illuminating the complexity of responding to infectious disease outbreaks as international cooperation on public health issues has become fractured and contentious — all while global pandemics are only becoming more likely overall. A month before the first patients onboard the MV Hondius became symptomatic, Argentina officially completed the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization, joining the U.S. in leaving a global health alliance that exists in large part to coordinate responses to these very kinds of cross-border disease outbreaks. The emergency also points to another growing challenge for global public health: Climate change is altering the rainfall, vegetation, and habitat conditions that influence rodent populations — changes that experts say boost the odds that the pathogens these animals carry will spill over into human populations. While the hantavirus’s one-to-six-week incubation period means the outbreak could have originated in any of the passengers’ home countries, a possible culprit is the ship’s stop for a birding expedition near Ushuaia, which is home to a landfill that attracts rodents looking for food. Argentina’s health authorities have already documented a sharp rise in hantavirus this season: 101 infections have been recorded since June 2025, about twice as many as there were in the same period a year earlier. The country’s health ministry hasn’t yet determined what’s behind the surge, but research suggests that climate change may play a role. Argentina and neighboring countries in South America endured years of severe drought between 2021 and 2024, including Argentina’s worst dry spell in more than 60 years in 2023, followed by extreme rainfall last year. Weather extremes exacerbated by global warming change how rodents behave, according to Kirk Douglas, a senior scientist who studies hantaviruses and climate change at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in Barbados. Prolonged drought sends rats and mice into populated areas in search of food, which can put people at higher risk of contracting the virus. Sudden rainfall following drought causes trees and shrubs to produce a windfall of nuts and seeds, which tend to benefit rodents and boost their numbers — all the while increasing the risk of transmission from animal to human. That doesn’t mean there’s a one-to-one relationship between global temperature rise and rodent-driven risk, however, and climate change is hardly the only force at play. A complex web of natural and manmade landscape changes can increase or decrease contact between humans and rodents. Increased temperatures and humidity, for example, don’t seem to influence the disease ecology of hantavirus in the same way that drought and precipitation do. “Hantavirus is sensitive to the changes climate change will bring,” Douglas emphasized. “It’s all dependent on what the prevailing climate impact is.” That complexity makes hantavirus risk difficult to predict — and easy to overlook. In the United States, hantavirus has been rare since federal surveillance began in 1993. There were fewer than 1,000 total confirmed cases up to 2023, the latest year that data is available. About 35 percent of those cases, almost all of which occurred west of the Mississippi River, resulted in death. As in South America, the dynamics of hantavirus in the U.S. may be shifting. The places most at risk, federal scientists reported in a study published last year, are dry landscapes where homes are spread out, many kinds of rodents live nearby, and communities may have fewer resources to prevent or respond to disease — conditions that describe broad swaths of the American West. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change could help hantavirus find more hosts on May 12, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.
CPJ urges Trump to prioritize Jimmy Lai’s release in meeting with Xi Jinping
New York, May 12, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges U.S. President Donald Trump to do everything possible to secure the release of jailed Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai during his meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Lai, a British citizen and founder of the defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was sentenced to...
New York, May 12, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges U.S. President Donald Trump to do everything possible to secure the release of jailed Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai during his meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Lai, a British citizen and founder of the defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for collusion with foreign forces and sedition in February this year, in a court ruling that is effectively a life sentence for the 78-year-old. Lai’s conviction has become emblematic of the general crackdown on press freedom and civil liberties in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed the National Security Law in 2020. CPJ welcomes Trump’s commitment to raise Lai’s case with Xi for a second time during his Beijing visit scheduled for May 14-15. “President Trump’s promise to raise Jimmy Lai’s case with Xi Jinping must be tied to concrete commitments,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Trade talks and normalization of U.S.-China relations should be conditional on credible efforts from Beijing to address human rights violations, including the arbitrary detention of journalists. Given Lai’s advanced age of 78 and serious health concerns, the urgency of his release cannot be overstated.” CPJ urges Trump to demand the immediate and unconditional release of Lai, given his age and health concerns, and to make his case a high-priority issue in diplomatic discussions with China. More than 100 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to Trump ahead of the visit urging him to secure the release of Lai in light of his declining health, before his case becomes an “irreversible tragedy.” Hong Kong remains an international financial hub that is home to tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and a base for more than 1,400 U.S. companies. Lai’s imprisonment raises broader concerns about judicial independence, transparency, and the rule of law in Hong Kong — issues that directly impact U.S. and international interests in the city. Trump previously raised Lai’s case during an October 2025 meeting with Xi in South Korea and renewed his promise to “save” the successful businessman during his national security trial last year. Lai has been in jail since 2020 and spent much of his detention in solitary confinement. His age and prolonged periods of isolation with restricted access to daylight and limited opportunity to exercise have taken a toll on his health, according to his family and lawyers. Lai suffers from multiple illnesses including hypertension, diabetes, and cataracts. This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.
Singer-songwriter Arlo Parks on letting the work reveal itself to you
How did you first start making music? I started making music in my bedroom when I was around 13 or 14. I taught myself garage band and had this little $20 mic, and I would record my little songs in secret up there. It was very much just for me. I feel like that came from a love of poetry and storytelling, which is something I had done for a long time before that. But it started off as this really private practice that I kind of did just for me as this place to put things. What kind of poetry and storytelling were you reading or writing before that? I was reading a lot of June Jordan and Audrey Lorde. I was very inspired by The Beat Generation in New York, and reading Patti Smith and William Burroughs and Alan Ginsburg. I was just really inspired by poetry that sat outside traditional forms. There was something to me about disruptive poetry that I always gravitated to. My own poetry took a lot of different forms. Sometimes it felt like almost a letter to somebody, or it felt like fragments, but it was always this more loose, expressive form of poetry rather than anything that rhymed or sat in more traditional structures. When you’re writing a song, do you feel like the poetry of it typically comes first or does the music come first? I feel like the poetry comes first simply because before I even start making a record, I spend a few months beforehand just collecting fragments of conversation and journaling and thinking about what I want the songs to really be about, and almost documenting the life that I’m living as I’m living it. And then when I go to the studio, I’m often applying things that I’ve collected and words to the music. But with this latest record, I think I was very focused on the song as a whole rather than the song being poetry on top of music. It felt a lot more intertwined. Why do you think that is? Because I’m inspired by a lot of music that was in nocturnal spaces and dance spaces. And I feel like with some of my favorite songs in that genre, it feels very symbiotic. Everything feels like it’s working together. Often some of those lyrics are very poetic, but they feel embedded in the music and there’s this sense of momentum that I was really inspired by. Could you talk a little bit about the inspiration behind your most recent album? Sonically, I was really inspired by Bristol trip-hop specifically, Massive Attack and Portishead. With Massive Attack, I loved the way that they were blending American hip-hop with Caribbean sound system culture and really creating the super influences. And I was also listening to a lot of ambient music, a lot of EDM, listening to Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin and a lot of listening to Post by Bjork, listening to a lot of Radiohead, and then also listening to D’Angelo and De La Soul and Erykah Badu because the way that they flow in their music was really inspiring to me. When it came to literature or books in general, I had a lot of photography books that I was exploring, people like Carrie Mae Weems and Tyler Mitchell and Cindy Sherman and reading some books around certain exhibitions like the Mike Kelly Retrospective. I also read a lot of books around club architecture. There’s this one called Temporary Pleasure that I love. And a lot of memoirs as well, because I was really inspired by people’s lives and people’s inner workings. And so I was reading a lot of those too. There’s this one called Raving by McKenzie Wark. I’m curious about how long that process takes–collecting all of your inspirations–and also what your day-to-day looks like when you’re making the record. I mean, it’s kind of constant. I listen to music 99 percent of my days every day, and I always have. So [collecting inspirations] is kind of happening in tandem with the creative process. It’s not like I store it up beforehand and then apply it to the music. In terms of my daily routine when I was making a record, it was very simple to be honest. I would get up, I would go to the gym, and I would go to the studio, bringing whatever book I had been reading at the time. Baird and I would work out of the studio in downtown L.A. that he shares with his brother. This wonderful, chaotic living room space of sewing machines, and surfboards on the wall and 10 pianos. And it just felt like this creative hub. We would just sit and work. We would file through different ideas that we had made and piece things together. We would sit and just freestyle over beats and loops. Honestly, we would just do that pretty much all day. And then I would go home and have dinner and go to sleep. And it was that for many years. We got into this flow state that I’m really grateful for, because it felt like we could really build a world around ourselves and make a record that felt like it was only for us. And in a way that is, I think, the record that a lot of people will connect to because it does feel kind of unobserved, I hope. I once saw a video of someone interviewing you about your favorite books and I was really in awe because you had such a cool range of books that you were talking about. As a writer, I feel like when I listen to a record, I’m really drawn to musicians who are storytellers and who are writers. I’m really drawn to lyricism above everything else, which is why I really like your music. You’ve talked about it a bit, but I’m curious if you also see yourself as a writer in addition to being a musician and if you have any kind of separate writing practice, or if you ever thought about writing things other than poetry. I feel like I’m a writer above all else to be honest. Not that I’m not a musician, but if I had to forsake anything, I could never give up writing. That feels like such a big part of me. I’m not sure about the timing or anything, but I would love to write a novel. I would love to do a collection of essays. I’d love to write a screenplay. I think that’s very much my daily practice, writing. It just feels like a big part of the way that I understand myself and understand the world. Do you have specific thoughts about what you would want the novel or the essay collection to look like? Are you working on anything right now? I’m thinking more about film right now; more about a screenplay or something like that. I think it’s also a challenge to myself because a lot of lyricism or even some of the fiction that I love or the memoirs, it’s about saying it exactly how it was, and remembering every fragment and bringing that to life. But so much of the script is the unsaid and the body language and what’s in between, what’s inferred. It definitely is a challenge for me to write in that way, but also as somebody who’s mostly inspired by people and their dynamics, and the things that we hide, and the things that we reveal, it feels really in line with what I’m curious about at the same time. So yeah, it’s been an interesting challenge for sure. And I would love to do that with friends, or even the other way around to soundtrack a budding director, or budding filmmaker’s film, and have a longstanding relationship with them. Was there anything that felt different about the creative process for this record than your past albums? I think time. I think I had a lot more time, and I think I was a lot more patient with allowing the record to reveal itself. And I also was able to create something that felt maybe the most cohesive that it’s ever felt because of that time. I spent a lot of time trying to weave it together into the story that felt like one whole, that’s the main thing that I can think of. I think having more time changes a lot of things about the process, and how you’re able to problem-solve in a way that feels like you’re allowing the muse to come. You’re allowing the solutions to present themselves rather than chasing after it so hard. There’s more of a sense of ease and acceptance. Do you think that there was a particular reason you had more time? I just gave myself more time. I just felt like I needed it. I’ve always known that I wanted to be a career artist, and that I wanted there to be this sense of it being a long arc journey for me creatively. So there wasn’t any need for me to rush into a third record. It just felt like it made sense. I’m really curious about that, and I imagine it blends into what we were just talking about in terms of you wanting to make art in lots of different ways and not necessarily just albums. Do you feel like you’re making any particular decisions right now, aside from allowing yourself time, to make sure that you can sustain yourself over the arc of your career, and sustain yourself emotionally as well? I think making sure that I’m maintaining doing things just for myself, and that not everything is put out into the world. The fact that I have little projects that I’m keeping alive just for myself. I think also acknowledging the fact that acclaim will ebb and flow and change, and that I need to be open to that change and that growth over time. Being surrounded by like-minded people who also have a pure approach to what they do. I think it makes you feel more free when you’re surrounded by people who are free and going down their own path. So I think being surrounded by good people is definitely a fixture in my life that I think will help ensure longevity for sure. Thinking back to when you were 13 and you were starting to write songs, what would you have told yourself then before you started this professional music making journey? Write down a little manifesto of why you’re doing this, and write it down on paper, and keep it with you at all times so you’ll never forget why you started doing this. Because it’s important to hold onto that as a child, and it’s important to not be clouded by how you’re seen by the world, or how your art is interpreted, and keep that piece of paper with you and stay true. Arlo Park recommends: V&A Storehouse Close Up cinema in Shoreditch The album Cymande by Cymande Palais in Peckham The book Raving by McKenzie Wark This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mary Retta.
Netanyahu stresses the need for more propaganda as Israel’s Hasbara budget soars
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone In a fawning softball 60 Minutes interview released on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of winning “the propaganda war” on social media. This comes as Israel moves to quadruple its propaganda budget to $730 million a year. Major Garrett (which apparently is a real name belonging to a real guy
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone In a fawning softball 60 Minutes interview released on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of winning “the propaganda war” on social media. This comes as Israel moves to quadruple its propaganda budget to $730 million a year. Major Garrett (which apparently is a real name belonging to a real guy who works for 60 Minutes) told the CBS audience that “Netanyahu attributes the reputational harm to Israel almost entirely to social media, which he calls the eighth front of the war”. “This is yours, right?” asked Netanyahu, picking up Garrett’s phone. “You’re not immune either. Because you can penetrate this machine, you can penetrate this little instrument, and you can say about Major Garrett anything you want. LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley “And I can paint you as a monster. And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.” According to a Pew survey published last month, 60% of U.S. adults viewed Israel unfavorably, up nearly 20 points in four years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the rise of social media is a major reason for this decline. https://t.co/QP4ESNtjGq pic.twitter.com/miCEwFYLX3 — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 10, 2026 “We have seen the deterioration of the support for Israel in the United States almost – I would say, it correlates almost 100 percent with the geometric rise of social media,” said Netanyahu, adding, “We have several countries that basically manipulated social media. “And they do it in a clever way. And that’s something that has hurt us badly. “Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war,” the prime minister lamented. Netanyahu stresses the need for more propaganda Video: Caitlin Johnstone Netanyahu has been repeatedly stressing the need for more aggressive propaganda manipulation as public opinion of Israel plummets worldwide. Earlier this year he told The Economist that “I’d like to do everything I can to fight the propaganda war waged against us,” complaining that “we’ve been using cavalry against f-35s, because they’ve flooded the social networks with the fake bots and many other things.” Despite having the entire Western political-media class bending over backwards to protect Israel’s image, Netanyahu consistently frames his country’s struggle for narrative control as a brave little David figure standing up against the colossal Goliath of anti-Zionist social media users. Last year the Israeli leader claimed that Israel was losing the propaganda war because “there are vast forces arrayed against us,” denouncing “the algorithms of the social network that are driving a lot of everything else”. Here Netanyahu admits that TikTok and X are weapons of war Source: Shayan Nikzad In a meeting with American social media influencers last year, the prime minister spoke of how vital the forced sale of TikTok had been for Israeli information interests, and said that Elon Musk could help facilitate Israeli PR on the X platform as well. “We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers,” Netanyahu said. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are on social media.” Of course, the possibility of Israel improving its public image by simply murdering fewer people and doing fewer evil things is never even considered. It is taken as a given that shoving pro-Israel messaging down everyone’s throat is the only way to sway public opinion in a positive direction. It is under this framing that Israel has again massively increased its propaganda budget for the year, after having massively increased it from what it was the year before. The Jerusalem Post reports the following: “Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis. “Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023. “The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey shows declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.” So you know how you’re already seeing an insane amount of pro-Israel propaganda and running into aggressive Zionist trolls online? You can expect that to get a whole lot worse. If you saw a guy spending 730 million dollars on media operations to manipulate people into thinking he is not an asshole, what could you reasonably conclude about that guy’s personality? https://t.co/giH4e1vYUY — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 5, 2026 Narrative manipulation has served Israel well over the years, but there’s a limit to how much propaganda can accomplish. If I walked up to you and spat in your face, there’s no amount of verbiage I could throw at you to convince you I’m actually a nice person. There’s only so much carnage people can watch on their phones before you can no longer convince them it’s not what it looks like. The propaganda has already hit a point of diminishing returns, and soon it’s going to start having a reverse effect. People are going to start hating Israel for all the evil things it’s been doing, and then hating it even more for all its in-your-face perception management operations to manipulate their thoughts and feelings. At some point the hasbarists are themselves going to inadvertently become anti-Zionist propaganda agents, just because they make Israel look so creepy with the way they’re always trying to stick their rapey fingers into everyone’s mind. The truth can only be concealed and distorted for so long. Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes the website Caitlin Johnstone and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Fiji army commander admits military ‘at fault’ for custody death
RNZ Pacific Fiji’s military chief has made a public admission at a church service that the institution was “at fault” for the death of Jone Vakarisi while he was in military custody. Local media reported that Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) commander Ro Jone Kalaouniwai, while addressing officers at a military family service, admitted
RNZ Pacific Fiji’s military chief has made a public admission at a church service that the institution was “at fault” for the death of Jone Vakarisi while he was in military custody. Local media reported that Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) commander Ro Jone Kalaouniwai, while addressing officers at a military family service, admitted “we are at fault” for Vakarisi’s death. “We must be held accountable,” he was quoted as saying by local media outlets. READ MORE: Other Fiji military reports State broadcaster FBC reported that Kalouniwai described Vakarisi’s death as an “unintentional” and “regrettable” incident, while the two national dailies reported him saying no one imagined or knew it would end up the way it did. Vakarisi, 37, was notorious for being at odds with law enforcement and had been linked to criminal networks. He died on April 16 after being detained by soldiers and taken to RFMF’s Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Suva to be questioned regarding “national security investigations”, which included allegations of trying to break in and access military assets. Commander Kalouniwai initially attributed Vakarisi’s death to “pre-existing conditions”. However, he was forced to issue a “correction” after the police announced they had classified Vakarisi’s death as murder. Murder investigation A murder investigation is currently ongoing, with no one charged, almost a month since Vakarisi’s death. The Fiji police and military have launched joint security operations to take down criminal networks in the country. The operations have resulted in a heightened military visibility around the country. The Fiji police and military have launched joint security operations to take down criminal networks in the country. Image: FB/Fiji Police Force Kalouniwai said the security forces had made progress but “an unforeseen incident occurred at the camp”, the FBC report said. He urged military officers to adhere to the law. RNZ Pacific contacted Fiji police last week seeking an update on the murder investigation. In an email reply, Commissioner Rusiate Tudravu said he would not let media dictate police actions and advised RNZ Pacific to continue liaising with the police’s media liaison officer. Over the weekend, graphic and distressing photos of Vakarisi’s body began circulating and being shared widely on social media. Fiji’s Online Safety Commission said it was “deeply concerned” about the images being circulated. “The images being shared are highly distressing, show the deceased in a vulnerable and exposed state, and have caused further pain and trauma to the grieving family members,” it said. “We strongly urge members of the public to refrain from sharing, reposting, forwarding, or publishing such material across any social media platform, messaging publication, or online platform.” This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Rutgers pulls graduation speaker over Palestine
Reporter detained in LAPD kettle amid May Day protests
Status Coup reporter Tina-Desiree Berg was detained by police while covering a workers’ rights and immigration protest in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026.Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May...
Status Coup reporter Tina-Desiree Berg was detained by police while covering a workers’ rights and immigration protest in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026. Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May Day Strong” demonstrations that also called for an end to the war in Iran and the immigration raids that have swept the city since June 2025. Berg told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the Los Angeles Police Department responded aggressively to demonstrations that day from the beginning. “The thing hadn’t really even gotten started yet, and 20 LAPD cars with their sirens blaring come down the street, they jump out of their vehicles with their batons and start forming a skirmish line,” Berg said. “They hadn’t even done their speeches yet. They never even marched.” When some protesters made their way to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where detained immigrants are being held, Berg said she followed, hoping to film as another march came in from the city’s Boyle Heights neighborhood. Dozens of motorcycle officers arrived at the scene about an hour later and began ordering everyone back on the sidewalk. Suddenly, an officer walked directly to L.A. Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray and arrested him, Berg told the Tracker. Berg said she confronted the officers, telling one that Ray had not been blocking traffic and explaining the protections afforded journalists as they cover demonstrations and other breaking news. “You know what he said to me? He’s like, ‘You are not a member of the LA Press Club. You’re a professional agitator.’ And then he turned around and walked away,” Berg told the Tracker, noting that she was visibly wearing her LA Press Club credentials at the time. Ray was ultimately released after being issued a citation for being in the roadway. As the evening progressed, Berg and Ray found themselves among other members of the press, legal observers and protesters in a kettle, surrounded by police. “They told me, ‘You’re under arrest. Sit on the curb and put your hands in the air.’ And I’m like, ‘The fuck? Yeah, that’s not happening,’” she recounted. “I said, ‘Where’s your PIO? Here are my press credentials. I’m a member of the press, you can’t arrest me.’ “And he’s like, ‘Yes I can. Get on the curb and put your hands in the air.’” From inside the arrest kettle. None of these officers have been trained properly on 409.7. — Tina-Desiree Berg (@tinadesireeberg.com) 2026-05-04T20:04:00.170Z Berg told the Tracker that she was released after more than 30 minutes without charges, but that the experience was enraging. “I just feel like I’ve been pushed to the end of my rope. The police consistently are doing this stuff and it’s unnecessary,” she said. “I’m really tired of them saying that we’re interfering in their operations when we are clearly not. We’re just filming, and we’re allowed to do that.” Weston Rowland, an attorney representing the Los Angeles Press Club who was arrested alongside reporter Nick Stern at the protest, told the Tracker that the police response that day showed a blatant disregard for the legal protections afforded journalists covering demonstrations. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for them to understand that the freedom of the press is well protected under our constitution,” Rowland said. “In 2025 and 2026, it seems like they’re doing things that are specifically targeting the press. That’s stepping back, not forward.” The LAPD did not immediately return a request for comment from the Tracker, but in a statement posted on May 1, it wrote: “The Los Angeles Police Department fully supports the rights of individuals to peacefully assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights.” In an earlier statement following the March 28 “No Kings” rally — which resulted in more than two dozen press freedom violations — Chief Jim McDonnell said that any use of force or allegations of mistreatment involving media members would be investigated and addressed. “The LAPD recognizes the media’s right to cover events and makes reasonable efforts to accommodate, with those efforts consistent with our primary duty to maintain public safety and order,” that statement said. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
Midterms Heighten Need for Social Media Regulation
A March 2026 report from the nonprofit organization Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) warns that recent changes to social media platform policies could significantly shape the information bubble surrounding the 2026 US midterm elections. As d...
A March 2026 report from the nonprofit organization Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) warns that recent changes to social media platform policies could significantly shape the information bubble surrounding the 2026 US midterm elections. As digital platforms are now mediating much of the communication between political figures and the… The post Midterms Heighten Need for Social Media Regulation appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Investigation Reveals ICE Surveillance of School Cameras
In February 2026, Mark Keierleber reported in a joint investigation by The 74, a non-profit education news organization, and The Guardian, that police are using school security cameras to assist President Donald Trump as well as Immigration and Customs...
In February 2026, Mark Keierleber reported in a joint investigation by The 74, a non-profit education news organization, and The Guardian, that police are using school security cameras to assist President Donald Trump as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on immigration enforcement raids. As Rachel Dobkin reported for… The post Investigation Reveals ICE Surveillance of School Cameras appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Public Largely Unaware of Third-Party External Review Process for Denied Healthcare Claims
Warning: this story contains language about self-harm. Independent news outlet ProPublica published a report on October 7, 2025, exposing millions of Americans who were unaware that they could challenge their health insurance claim denials through exte...
Warning: this story contains language about self-harm. Independent news outlet ProPublica published a report on October 7, 2025, exposing millions of Americans who were unaware that they could challenge their health insurance claim denials through external review. The report reveals how this system can be used to Americans’ advantage by… The post Public Largely Unaware of Third-Party External Review Process for Denied Healthcare Claims appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Reporter detained in police kettle at May Day protest in LA
L.A. Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray was detained by police while covering a workers’ rights and immigration protest in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026.Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May D...
L.A. Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray was detained by police while covering a workers’ rights and immigration protest in Los Angeles, California, on May 1, 2026. Thousands rallied in downtown LA for International Workers’ Day as part of nationwide “May Day Strong” demonstrations that also called for an end to the war in Iran and the immigration raids that have swept the city since June 2025. Later, demonstrators gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, where immigrants are being held. Ray told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that LA Police Department officers had already formed a skirmish line by the time he arrived at the detention center, where officers on motorcycles started ordering people onto the sidewalk. One of the officers grabbed and arrested Ray, ultimately issuing the journalist a citation for being in the roadway before releasing him. Later, LAPD officers kettled a group of mostly press, sealing them inside a tightened perimeter. Yesterday, LAPD officer Cisneros Escoto jabbed me in my chest w/ her baton when I calmly asked for her serial number. I was asking for her serial number because a few moments earlier she shoved me with her baton while I filmed an arrest. This happened while LAPD kettled mostly press. — Shot On 35mm (@shoton35mm.bsky.social) 2026-05-02T18:49:39.940Z “We basically had nowhere to go, and we were surrounded by cops,” Ray said. “It was mostly just press at the end of the protest, very few protesters, so we should have never been kettled in the first place.” Ray remained inside the kettle for about 15 minutes before being released and moved to a media staging area on the sidewalk. “After I left, a journalist was arrested. I was able to document them taking him to a van or something to process them,” Ray said, referring to photojournalist Nick Stern. “But I wasn’t there when he was actually being arrested, and I would have liked to be, and it wasn’t the most ideal spot to be.” Ray has been involved in 16 incidents in LA documented by the Tracker, half of which took place in the past year. He said what happened May 1 was “one of the most egregious examples” of how police have treated the press at demonstrations. California law exempts journalists from dispersal orders and protects them from arrest or interference by police, including use of force. A federal preliminary injunction against the city is in place to uphold those protections. Weston Rowland, an attorney representing the Los Angeles Press Club who was arrested alongside Stern, told the Tracker that the police response that day showed a blatant disregard for these legal protections. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for them to understand that the freedom of the press is well protected under our constitution,” Rowland said. “In 2025 and 2026, it seems like they’re doing things that are specifically targeting the press. That’s stepping back, not forward.” The LAPD did not immediately return a request for comment from the Tracker, but in a statement posted on May 1, it wrote: “The Los Angeles Police Department fully supports the rights of individuals to peacefully assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights.” In an earlier statement following the March 28 “No Kings” rally — which resulted in more than two dozen press freedom violations — Chief Jim McDonnell said that any use of force or allegations of mistreatment involving media members would be investigated and addressed. “The LAPD recognizes the media’s right to cover events and makes reasonable efforts to accommodate, with those efforts consistent with our primary duty to maintain public safety and order,” that statement said. This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
Protect the Rights of Students with Disabilities
Having laws on the books is not enough. There has to be enforcement.
Having laws on the books is not enough. There has to be enforcement. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Margaret Thornton.
Children of Missouri Death Row Inmates Share Stories of Loss, Stigma, and Resilience
In an October 2025 article published by The Marshall Project, Katie Moore dove into the often-overlooked emotional and social toll of the death penalty through the eyes of the children whose fathers were executed in the state of Missouri. The report de...
In an October 2025 article published by The Marshall Project, Katie Moore dove into the often-overlooked emotional and social toll of the death penalty through the eyes of the children whose fathers were executed in the state of Missouri. The report details the experiences of Summer Shockley, Marcellus “Sadir” Williams… The post Children of Missouri Death Row Inmates Share Stories of Loss, Stigma, and Resilience appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Rats, Ruins, and the Theft of Tranquility
In Gaza, our refuge has become an enemy.
In Gaza, our refuge has become an enemy. This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Nour Abo Aisha.
Basem Khandakji: ‘Genocide didn’t start in Gaza in 2023’
<img width="1024" height="704" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C704&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="GAZA, GAZA STRIP, PALESTINIAN TERRITORY - 2018/10/26: Palestinian protester seen holding a flag while using a slingshot to hurl stones during the clashes following a demonstration near the border with Israel. Photo by Nidal ALwaheidi/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343410" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/basem-khandakji-genocide-didnt-start-in-gaza-in-2023/gettyimages-1054044374-1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1761&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1761" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}' data-image-title="GettyImages-1054044374 (1)" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" GAZA, GAZA STRIP, PALESTINIAN TERRITORY &#8211; 2018/10/26: Palestinian protester seen holding a flag while using a slingshot to hurl stones during the clashes following a demonstration near the border with Israel. Photo by Nidal ALwaheidi/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C536&ssl=1"> “It’s a war against my people. Genocide didn't start just in Gaza in 2023. The genocide against us started since 1948,” award-winning Palestinian author and former political prisoner Basem Khandakji tells TRNN.
<img width="1024" height="704" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C704&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="GAZA, GAZA STRIP, PALESTINIAN TERRITORY - 2018/10/26: Palestinian protester seen holding a flag while using a slingshot to hurl stones during the clashes following a demonstration near the border with Israel. Photo by Nidal ALwaheidi/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C206&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C704&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C528&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1057&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1409&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C825&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1376&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C537&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C275&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C704&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343410" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/basem-khandakji-genocide-didnt-start-in-gaza-in-2023/gettyimages-1054044374-1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1761&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1761" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="GettyImages-1054044374 (1)" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" GAZA, GAZA STRIP, PALESTINIAN TERRITORY &#8211; 2018/10/26: Palestinian protester seen holding a flag while using a slingshot to hurl stones during the clashes following a demonstration near the border with Israel. Photo by Nidal ALwaheidi/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-1054044374-1-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C536&ssl=1" /> Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza is the culmination of a violent settler-colonial project that goes all the way back to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa speaks with award-winning Palestinian author and former political prisoner Basem Khandakji about the decades-long destruction of Palestinian society and mass displacement of Palestinians from their homeland, as well as the perseverance of Palestinian prisoners under the totalitarian conditions of Israeli prisons. Guests: Basem Khandakji, born in 1983 in Nablus, is a Palestinian novelist, poet, and journalist. Arrested in 2004 at the age of twenty-one for his political activities, he continued to write from prison, producing a body of work that has earned wide recognition across the Arab world. Khandakji was released from Israeli prison in 2025, one year after his novel A Mask the Color of the Sky won the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Credits: Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today we are joined by Basem Khandakji, an award-winning author and former political prisoner who was held in Israel’s prisons for 21 years. Baising was released this past October and joins us today from Cairo. Let me say before I welcome you, he was released under the terms that Israelis concocted to release hundreds of Palestinians under the pretense that if Hamas released so- called hostages, he was released along with other people, but in being released as you’ll see as the story unfold, he was released from this concentration camp and then placed in the exile for no other reason as you’ll learn than that he wanted to be treated as a human being. Basemq, thank you so much for joining us. Basem Khandakji: Thank you. Thank you, Brother Mansa. And I salute you and I really touch to meet you and I salute your 48 years inside the injustice prisons in United States. Mansa Musa: And we definitely are honored anytime we have anyone of Palestinian origin or anybody that stand up for their rights. Whenever we have them in this space, we are honored to be able to say, “Let’s turn the volume up on your voice.” So that’s what we’d be doing today. But first, introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your life prior to being kidnapped and then specifically your time as a student and a revolutionary socialist. Basem Khandakji: I wonder every time how can I introduce myself before I’ve been in prison? But first of all, let me say maybe my English language, it’s not influent language like the science of the West like it. I prefer the anti-colonial language. So I hate grammars of all languages. So I try to introduce myself, but I really wonder who I am before I was being in prison. If I really was a human or a human being or a boy, a young man, I don’t know, but I just know that I was in the middle of war, the second antifather. I was a student in the university inside my city, Najah University. I joined journalism college in the university, but when the Intifada start, the Israeli war against my people in West Bang and Gaza and Jerusalem. So I think between me and myself, what can I do? How can I defend myself? I saw all my friends was being killed by the Israeli forces. They assassinated them. They killed our children, our women. At that time, I was a member in the Communist Party, the Palestinian Communist Party. And my party at that time, the political program, my party in some part of it, they don’t believe in the revolutionary violence, let’s say. They just believe in public resistance. But I don’t find myself at that time in that program. So I joined some military cell. It’s for the Palestinian public front and me and my comrades, we tried to fight the Israeli forces. And since that time I discovered that the whole issue and the main matter, it’s about who is me. And I discovered that Israeli soldier or that Israeli politician is ambitious and he tried every time to dehumanize me Mansa Musa: Until Basem Khandakji: Now. So at that time today when I remembered this era, that era, and it’s so hard, it’s so complicated because I told you it’s not just a rebeal, it’s not just antifada. We call it in Palestine and in Arabic. It’s a war. It was a war, a Mansa Musa: Comprehensive Basem Khandakji: War against my people. And genocide didn’t start just in Gaza in 2023. The genocide against us started since 1948. Mansa Musa: That’s right. The reason why I asked that question, I’m big on our always understanding that Palestinian people are human. The narrative that we see in this country is always a narrative that’s painted as inhuman that people that don’t have no sense of dignity, pride, or respect. In this country, this is what we see in this country. So it’s important that our audience first recognize that social conditions propelled you into a state of mind or into a position where if you’re going to get killed sitting on your porch or you’re going to get killed fighting back. A great poet in this country called Claude McKay, he got this poem, he say, “If I must die, I’m back pressed against the wall, dying, but fighting back.” So your back is pressed against the wall and you dying, you going to die, but it’s how you die. Talk about, as we segue into this, in this country we often say when the court system fails, then we go to the court of public opinion. We organize people to understand that this is an injustice and try to get people to take a position against the injustice that is taking place. Could you speak to the circumstances of your imprisonment, specifically the forced contraction and the legal process? And here, when I talk about the legal process, if you can understand what I’m saying, I want you to make it clear to our ordinance that you have the military court and then you have the civil, you have the criminal court. And are Palestinian people being tried under military court or are they being tried under criminal court? And if it’s different, talk about your circumstances. Yeah, Basem Khandakji: It’s different. The Palestinians who live in West Bank and in Gaza Strip and in East Jerusalem, they tried in military court. This military court established after 1967 and only the Palestinians tried at that court. So it’s illegal court. It’s the injustice court. There is no such a thing we can call it a legal process inside the Israeli judgment system or Israeli courts. So when they tried me at the military court, I told them from the beginning, I refused to organize that court. It’s illegal court and the confession you took from me, it’s by force. And the judges who judge me at that time, they are colonials in the Israeli army. And at that time when they judged me three life sentence, the judge give me a permission to speak before they send me back to prison from the court and I give a speech about how they kill my humanity. I Mansa Musa: Told you. Come on. Basem Khandakji: Yeah. I told them, “You killed my humanity and now you judge me about that. ” And I told him also if I was lived in Eastern Europe in the World War II during the Holocaust and during the Nazi final solution for Jews and communists and homosexuals at that time, I will hide the Jew inside my house and I will give all my solidarity and all my protection too and I will support the Jews by hiding them inside my house. But when the Israeli soldier killed that girl in Gaza and put in her chest more than 20 bullets, he must at that time just remember that Jews girl at the gate of Oswitz in Boland and he will throw out his rifle and cry. So the judge look at me and he thought to himself, “Is he really a human who speak like that? ” Are the Palestinians can say Mansa Musa: Something Basem Khandakji: Like that? Yes, we can say something like that because our struggle, it’s a struggle to restore our humanity, Mansa Musa: To Basem Khandakji: Reclaim our Mansa Musa: Human. Yeah, claim it. That’s right. That’s Basem Khandakji: Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, to reclaim our humanity. And I remember at that time my mother was in the court and she’s shouting on me, “Be a man, be a man. Don’t give up inside the prison. It’s okay. They give you a three life sentence. You will be free soon. Don’t Mansa Musa: Give Basem Khandakji: Up.” Yeah. Mansa Musa: Thank God for that. And during your imprisonment, you wrote it and published The War Winning Hour, Mass, The Color of the Sky. One, can you share the process of writing this book and give our audience a brief summary of the story and tell us what inspired it. Also, how did the publication become a collective … How many hands was involved in making sure that this work got out? So talk about that book, talk about how it came about and talk about the network that came out of that space to make sure that it got published so that we could be able to talk about it today. And once again, going back to your last point about your humanity, this right here shows your humanity despite what they did and try to do to you, you were still able to arrive, raise your level of thinking and your consciousness to document your humanity. Basem Khandakji: Yeah. First of all, let me tell you about my motivations for writing inside the prison. Since day one inside the prison, I decide to write and I saw the writing, the aspects of writing inside the prison, it’s an act of resistance. It’s an act of freedom, an act of salvation. Through writing, I can just through writing inside the prison, I can reclaim all my values and my principles and try to searching for my humanity and to my identity as a human being, as a Palestinian. So I start writing since the beginning. I start with poetry first, but after that, I believe that the poetry can’t represent my ideas and my narrative. I turn to a novel, I start to write fictions and about circumstances of writings, it’s complicated. It’s not easy process. It’s resistance really because writing inside the prison, it’s writing in secret all the time because the jailers all the time searching us and try to forbidden pens and papers and books, especially during the genocide after 2023. And if the writing, it’s a resistance or let’s say a resistance operation also to smuggle the words and the papers outside the prison, that’s the whole issue. That’s the matter. At that time I find that my word, it’s not just words, it’s a part of my soul. It’s a part of my heart. It’s like children, my children. So I have to smuggle it outside the prison by many ways. One of that ways is to swallow the papers. Yeah. And when there was prisoners get their free freedom, we give them these papers and they swallow these papers. And after that, for me, my family, it’s my, let’s say a secure net for me. They Mansa Musa: Protect Basem Khandakji: My word and they support me every time, especially my father wrist in peace. Yes, Mansa Musa: Definitely Basem Khandakji: West in peace. Yeah. And now my brother Yusefe is the one who has all the credit to publish my words and to especially this novel, Mask, the Color of the Sky. This novel, it’s a new project of me. It’s talked about, I just want to say that this course and the context of that novel, it’s about the literary of engagement, how we can write anti-colonial narrative inside the colonial context, how we can decolonial this context and to write about the other, the Zionist and try to find his main ideas and his main concept about us as Palestinians. So I draw that character. His name is Norishadi and he is a Palestinian, a young Palestinian man. He is an archeologist and he tried to find Tom of the Mary Magdalena, the ignorance character inside the New Testimony and by accident he find that idea, the Ashkenazi idea for some Jews in a bucket of a jacket. And he faked this idea, he put his picture at that idea because he look like him and he have this blue eyes and white face, but inside himself, he is just not a human for the Israelis. So I used Franz Venon vision about that, France Vanon vision in the Richard of the earth and in his article about white masks, black skins. Mansa Musa: Black skin, right, right. Basem Khandakji: Yeah. Yeah. I use it, but I use the mask at the novel as a technique. It’s not an answer for Norishe, the Palestinian man or the Palestinian human. The mosque, the Ashkenazi, the Israeli mosque, this white mask, it’s just a technique for me to enter, throw it inside the Zionism concept, this totalitarian concept about us to discover the racism, the discrimination, the oppression, to discover the injustice of this movement to try every time to represent itself as a nationalism movement and it’s an emancipation movement for the Jewish people in all the world. And this novel, it’s three but it’s a theology and party three recently published in Beirut. And I just concentrate in my narrative in my discourse about how we can engage the Israeli literary and the Israeli discourse and how we can launch this cultural front against him just to reclaim our human narrative and how we can shape our identity again and our faces until today for me as a Palestinian, okay, I’m a former political president inside the Israeli presence, but today I am an exile. They Mansa Musa: Exam me. Basem Khandakji: And why is that? It’s not just a silly thing to do to exile someone. It’s about small details. The whole concept of colonialism, it’s about small details, how he can punish me all the time through these small details. You know what? They refuse to give my mom a permission to visit me here in Egypt and my mother and my mother suffering from a priest cancer. Every time she go to the checkpoint in the British between Palestine and Jordan, they send her back to Naples, my city. Mansa Musa: And Basem Khandakji: You know what? The strongest army in the Middle East, this Israeli army, they fighting me, throw my mother Mansa Musa: Hug. Basem Khandakji: Yeah, they refused to just to let me hug her. But it’s not okay, but I have to hold on and I have to resist every time. Mansa Musa: You definitely resisting because this novel, let you know the response to the novel, the response to the writing response that like, one time in this country it was illegal for a black person to know how to read and write. It was punishable by death in certain parts of the South. If they found out that a black person that was a slave could read or write, they killed him. And the reason why they killed him wasn’t because he could read or write or she could read or write, was the prospect of her teaching or him teaching somebody else how to read and write. And the response that you got from this novel, it wasn’t because you wrote the novel and no, it was the fact that you had the audacity to hold onto your humanity to the extent where you felt as though that you was able to articulate it and put it into perspective. And to your point, the whole thing is the whole design of this system is to dehumanize us to the point where we give up. But what your mother told you when you was in court said, “Look, be your man, don’t give up.” So that right there at the end of the process and at the end of the day, you can hold your head high knowing that you heard what your mother said and you stay in that space. But let’s talk about this. Now I did 48 years in prison prior to being released and during that time we had a sense of camaraderie amongst some of the prisons, not all of the prisoners, but the majority of us had a sense of comradery and we became politicized and in our political thinking we felt compelled to look out for each other. How did y’all under the circumstances, and you described them in a couple of interviews, the humanity of the imprisonment, how were y’all able to maintain a sense of camaraderie and how did that look under them circumstances? Basem Khandakji: We are just like you. We are politicized inside the prison and we have this kind of organized frameworks outside the prison we built and we established this frameworks and inside this frameworks we get our sessions, our lessons, our every day every day. And we take history, philosophy about our Palestinian history, sociology, and we learn Hebrew also. I learn Hebrew and I consider that as a war prize. I get that language from his mouth because he is a wolf. I get this language as a war brother from his mouth and he was upset about that because when you know your enemy language, That’s a tool or that’s a weapon with you and you can understand him and you can understand his mind, how he think and how he can use this oppression against you. So inside the prison, and I said that many times, really I thank the prison because the prison, it give me that platform to create myself as a writer, as an intellectual and as a freedom fighter also, but not the Israeli jailers. When I talk about prison, I talk about this position, this cultural position and this cultural location. I stand on it and I look at the world and I shout, I’m a human and I deserve to be a human because for me as a Palestinian, I was not born to be a killer and I was not born to be killed. I just born to be equal and to be a free man like everyone in this world. And really when we read about your struggle in the United States, about the Black banters and I saw many documentaries and many movies inside the prison, but before October 2023. And for me, I always feel that there is this common sense between me and you, this common things and this soldierity between me and this kind of struggle inside the United States. And also after 2012, there was a huge term in the Brazil when we bring in academic programs and I finished my master degree inside the prison in the Israeli studies. And that helped me so much in how to understand this Zionism movement and how to understand the whole conceptions about the conflict between the Zionist and us inside colonized Palestine. And after that, I discovered that I’m not under occupation. It’s not an occupation. It’s a bad joke to say that Palestine, it’s under occupation. It’s a colonialism. And all the time we describe that as a colonial abarthit regime. It’s a hybrid colonialism. It’s an apartheid and colonialism. And there is so many levels of that colonialism and many kind of biopolitics. For example, in Gaza, they use genocide policy in Gaza. In West Bank, they use set elements when Mansa Musa: They want. Basem Khandakji: Inside colonized Palestine since 1948, they use discrimination. They use oppression. They use injustice inside their courts against Palestinians when they legitimize some kinds of laws that can give the racism legitimacy. Mansa Musa: Going to your point, to your point about colonialization, there’s at one point we call it the Jim Crow Earth and the Jim Crow, we call it the Jim Crow South, but basically the attitude, it’s very astute on your part to make that observation on how in different parts of the colony, colonialized Palestine and different parts, they use different techniques based on what their objective is. We use settlements in here, we use direct force here, but talk about this here and before I get you to talk about it, I like your point that you made earlier and I want to emphasize, I want to raise that elevate that point again that you said what you told them when you was in court, say, “Man, you made this in me. Now you going to punish me for what you created.” But talk about what’s going on with you now. Tell our audience about since they put you in exile and I made reference to how they was using exile as a ways when they was releasing Palestinians, they were saying, as opposed to put them back to where you took me from, you send me somewhere, you exile me into a country that I’ve got fragile relationship with them, but more importantly, I can’t have no established no relationship, physical relationship with my family. Talk about your current state. Basem Khandakji: Today I am an exile and I stay in Egypt and Egypt is the biggest Arabic country, but it’s an exile for me. It’s not my streets, it’s not my areas, it’s not my time, it’s not my city, it’s not my first tip inside my home. So until now I can’t undermine the spaces, the distance between spaces. Egypt, it’s a huge country and I try to find every time something can let me feel that I am in my homeland, that I am in Palestine, but there is no such a thing. And every time they keep asking me, how does it feel in the freedom life? Mansa Musa: And Basem Khandakji: I say, until today, I can’t say that I find the meaning of my freedom. Maybe by small details I can find something, but until today I keep saying that I’m still in the bus. The bus who took us from the Rafah checkpoint to Cairo, I’m still In that bus because why? Why is that? Because the meaning of the freedom, it’s a trip. It’s a journey. If I can achieve my whole freedom, that’s mean I’m a dead man. There is no such thing like a total freedom or a comprehensive freedom. So every time I try throw this small details to find the meaning of freedom, but at the same time, I have to live my life because my people give a precious price for my freedom. They give their bloods in Gaza. There are a flood of blood in Gaza. So after 70,000 Palestinians was being killed in the genocide, the Zionist genocide in Gaza for my freedom and for my comrades freedom. But if you ask me as a writer, I only find my freedom through my writing. When I write, I feel that I’m a free man after all because I live in the, we call it metaphor. I live in the metaphor. I don’t live in the real world. And when they exhaled me, when the Security officers say at the negative prison, he told me, “You will never come back to Palestine. You will never going to see your family. You will never drink the water of Naples, my city, Naples.” And I say, “It’s okay. I believe that after 21 years in a prison, after all, I am free man. So I’m going to come back Mansa Musa: To Basem Khandakji: My country, to Palestine. But if you like, I can just briefing you about what’s happening now inside this prison, inside this colonial prison. Because until now I live sometime at the time of prison. My friends, my comrades who we living there and since 2023 when the Israelis launched their genocide against my people, they also launched genocide against the Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli prisons. They use a new kind of politics against us, a new kind of killing politics against us. They’re starving us. Now, while we talking, there is prisoners suffering from starving and they suffering from scabias and they suffering from diseases. We live in the 21st century, the century of the AI. And today they torture the Palestinian prisoners inside the prisons and they refuse to let them know anything about their families. They put them in a total isolation. And I was there. And sometimes I feel like I’m still there with my friends as an act of solidarity with them. Mansa Musa: Right. Yeah. The entire conversation, you emphasize this point and I want our audience to understand this and I can’t drum this home hard enough. This is about people that want to be treated as human beings and it’s about your humanity and that you have a right under the law to be treated as human being. And I want to say this here. I think it’s a surreal in the Quran, El Kalam, the pen. So yeah, you definitely represent that part of the narrative that your pen, they say the pen is mighty than the sword. In this case it is. But tell our orient what you want. You got the last word. You raised the voices of our comrades in the Dungeons. So whatever else you want to say, you got to lay final say. Basem Khandakji: Yeah. I just can say that I can’t be like my enemy. I can’t be like him. When they tortured us inside the prison, when they use this necropolitics against us inside the prison, every time I say to myself, can I be like him? If I become in his position? No, I will never be like him because my struggle today is, and my whole conflict today is how to reclaim my humanity and how to write a new narrative for my people and to represent our Palestinian people in the cosmopolitan dimension, let’s say. And my message today through you, my brother Mansa is there is human beings inside Israeli presence and they are suffering all the time twenty four seven. They are suffering, they are dying, they are starving and no one given care about them. Even the international associations who cared about human rights, they don’t do anything because the Israeli security service don’t let them to visit the prisons. And at the end, I really salute you and it was really a pleasure to talk with you. And when I told my friends I will made that interview with you, I told them Brother Manas has been 48 years in the prison. And they said, oh my God, how old is he now? But I see now a young man and I Mansa Musa: Salute Basem Khandakji: You. Mansa Musa: I appreciate that. And you know what? And I can’t describe the honor anytime I get in this space to talk to anyone of Palestinian origin. It’s a y’all spirit. The Black Panther Party always out the forefront in emphasizing, exercising the rights y’all rights are. But it was an honor speaking to you, Bassem. Basem Khandakji: The honor is mine. Mansa Musa: We want to let our audience know that you the author of a Mass, The Color of the Sky, which won the 2024 International Prize for Arab Fiction. Thank you. We ask that you continue to support the real news and rallying the bar, because guess what? We actually, the real news, This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.
RFA project on war-torn Myanmar community wins at AAJA Awards
Former Radio Free Asia (RFA) journalists Jim Snyder and Gemunu Amarasinghe were named winners at this year’s Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) Journalism Excellence Awards.
WASHINGTON—Former Radio Free Asia (RFA) journalists Jim Snyder and Gemunu Amarasinghe were named winners at this year’s Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) Journalism Excellence Awards. The duo’s project, “Battling a dictatorship, building a democracy: In the jungles of eastern Myanmar, insurgents fight the junta and dream of a new state,” which was supported by RFA’s Burmese Service, Investigative, and Multimedia teams, documents the creation of democratic institutions in an active warzone in Myanmar. It won the award for Excellence in International Reporting. “RFA’s journalists braved extraordinary conditions to bring us this insightful and powerful study of community resilience in war-torn Myanmar,” said RFA President and CEO Bay Fang. “Their multi-part project goes beyond battlefield statistics to show the personal impact of armed conflict—a story that would otherwise not see the light of day. “As RFA rebuilds, this impactful series speaks to the uncensored, accurate journalism that our audiences expect from us.” In their winning report, the duo trekked through the perilous Myanmar jungle to reach the conflict-ridden Kayah state, where they spent three weeks interviewing dozens of residents including healthcare workers and insurgent fighters, all working to build a more stable community. The four-part series examines the locals’ efforts to install an enduring democratic system in Myanmar, build a reliable police force in Kayah state, and profiles the doctors and nurses treating rebel fighters in a secret hospital in the jungle. RFA Burmese, along with other language services, resumed content production in late 2025. Since returning, their Facebook video views hit 12.7M in April as interactions grew 15%. The Service also launched a new podcast, “Challenges of Myanmar Youth,” which has attracted millions of listeners. In March, RFA Burmese published an exclusive video report about a town in a high-conflict area of Sagaing that lacked sufficient safe houses, leaving many locals vulnerable. Soon after RFA’s report, the National Unity Government donated the residents additional shelters, with local residents crediting RFA for this development. This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
Why a former U.S. Marine spent 5 days protestingatop D.C. bridge
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 11, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 11, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 11, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
Following pattern set by Venezuela and Iran assaults, US surveillance flights off Cuba surge
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters after they briefed Senators on the recent US military actions in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 7, 2026. Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343400" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/us-surveillance-flights-off-cuba-surge/topshot-us-venezuela-conflict-congress" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 9","caption":"TOPSHOT - (L/R) US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters after they briefed Senators on the recent US military actions in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 7, 2026. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1767803575","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"TOPSHOT-US-VENEZUELA-CONFLICT-CONGRESS","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="TOPSHOT-US-VENEZUELA-CONFLICT-CONGRESS" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters after they briefed Senators on the recent US military actions in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 7, 2026. Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> The Trump administration has conducted more than two dozen surveillance and reconnaissance flights off Cuba’s coast since early February, according to CNN.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters after they briefed Senators on the recent US military actions in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 7, 2026. Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1365&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1333&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343400" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/us-surveillance-flights-off-cuba-surge/topshot-us-venezuela-conflict-congress" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"AFP via Getty Images","camera":"NIKON Z 9","caption":"TOPSHOT - (L/R) US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters after they briefed Senators on the recent US military actions in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 7, 2026. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1767803575","copyright":"AFP or licensors","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"TOPSHOT-US-VENEZUELA-CONFLICT-CONGRESS","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="TOPSHOT-US-VENEZUELA-CONFLICT-CONGRESS" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters after they briefed Senators on the recent US military actions in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 7, 2026. Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2254480640-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 11, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. US surveillance and reconnaissance flights off the coast of Cuba have surged in recent months as President Donald Trump has issued increasingly belligerent threats to seize the island nation by force. CNN reported Sunday that the US Navy and Air Force have conducted more than two dozen surveillance flights—mostly of them near Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the country’s largest cities—since early February, after the Trump administration invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. The outlet noted that “similar patterns, in which ramped-up rhetoric by the Trump administration coincided with an uptick in publicly visible surveillance flights, occurred in the lead-up to US military operations in both Venezuela and Iran.” “The flights are notable not only for their proximity to the coast, which puts them well within range of gathering intelligence, but for the suddenness of their appearance—prior to February, such publicly visible flights were exceedingly rare in this area—and for their timing,” CNN reported. CNN published its story days after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions targeting a conglomerate operated by Cuba’s military and a natural resources firm, intensifying the United States’ decades-long economic war against the island nation. “Our people already know the cruelty behind the actions of the US government and the viciousness with which it is capable of attacking us,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in response to the sanctions. “They understand, just as the rest of the world does, that this is a unilateral aggression against a nation and a population whose sole ambition is to live in peace, masters of their own destiny and free from the pernicious interference of US imperialism.” In a New York Times op-ed on Monday, US Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) wrote that the Trump administration’s “blockade of fuel to Cuba, on top of the longest embargo in modern US history, defies the norms of international law that provide for state sovereignty, nonintervention in domestic affairs and the right of nations to trade freely.” “It amounts to an economic assault on the basic infrastructure of Cuba, designed to inflict collective punishment on the civilian population by manufacturing a humanitarian crisis in which healthcare, running water, agriculture and transportation are no longer available,” wrote Jayapal and Jackson, who visited Cuba in April and witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of US economic warfare. “During our visit, we spoke with a wide range of Cuban citizens—political dissidents, religious leaders, entrepreneurs, and members of civil society organizations and humanitarian aid groups,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote. “We also met with the families of Cuba’s political prisoners. Everywhere, there was agreement: America’s blockade must end, and a US invasion must not take place.” Trump has repeatedly threatened a military assault on Cuba in the months since his administration illegally attacked Venezuela and abducted its president. “Cuba is next, by the way,” Trump declared at a Saudi-backed investment summit in Miami in late March. “Pretend I didn’t say that, please.” Citing unnamed US officials, The Associated Press reported last week that the Trump administration “is not looking at imminent military action against Havana” as the two sides continued to negotiate a diplomatic agreement. AP added that the administration officials cautioned “that Trump could change his mind at any time and that military options are still on the table.” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jake Johnson.
AI Companies Are Recklessly Racing Toward a Cybersecurity Crisis
Google researchers announced Monday that cybercriminals recently used an artificial intelligence model to help create a dangerous zero-day vulnerability capable of exploiting computer networks at scale, marking what experts say is a major turning poin...
Google researchers announced Monday that cybercriminals recently used an artificial intelligence model to help create a dangerous zero-day vulnerability capable of exploiting computer networks at scale, marking what experts say is a major turning point in the cybersecurity landscape. A “zero-day” vulnerability is a hidden flaw or weakness in software that hackers discover before the company or public knows about it or has a fix available. It’s considered especially dangerous because attackers can exploit the flaw immediately, giving defenders “zero days” to protect themselves. The findings come as leading AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, continue developing increasingly advanced models capable of identifying and exploiting critical software vulnerabilities. Google warned that malicious actors are already using AI to increase the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyberattacks, while researchers have observed state-backed hacking groups linked to China, Russia, and North Korea leveraging AI technologies to automate and refine offensive cyber operations. The developments have intensified concerns that powerful AI systems are being deployed faster than governments and regulators can establish meaningful safeguards to prevent catastrophic misuse. In response to the growing concerns, Public Citizen’s AI governance and technology policy counsel, J.B. Branch, issued the following statement: “Cybersecurity experts are sounding the alarm, yet AI companies continue racing to release increasingly powerful models with little regard for the societal consequences. It is unthinkable and irresponsible to release technologies capable of destabilizing critical systems and then worry about the fallout afterward. Americans are increasingly rejecting this destabilizing AI arms race. We need enforceable AI regulations that require rigorous safety testing, independent review, and meaningful oversight before these systems ever reach the public. Regulators cannot remain in a perpetual game of catch-up while Big Tech gambles with the safety and stability of modern society.” This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
Are President Trump’s Advisors Failing Him?
Maryland residents to pay $1.6 billion more in power bills due to out-of-state data centers: complaint
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Rural Michigan residents rally against the $7 billion Stargate data center planned on southeast Michigan farm land. Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images" data-attachment-id="343392" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/maryland-residents-to-pay-1-6-billion-more-in-power-bills-due-to-out-of-state-data-centers-complaint/protest-against-michigan-data-center" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta='{"aperture":"5.6","credit":"UCG/Universal Images Group via G","camera":"Canon EOS 5D Mark IV","caption":"Saline, Michigan, 1 December 2025, Rural Michigan residents rally against the $7 billion Stargate data center planned on southeast Michigan farm land. Protesters say the Data Center is being fast tracked by DTE Energy, the large electric utility, and that it could raise residential electricity rates and endanger the water supply.. (Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1764605245","copyright":"Copyright \u00a9 Jim West","focal_length":"67","iso":"800","shutter_speed":"0.005","title":"Protest Against Michigan Data Center","orientation":"1"}' data-image-title="Protest Against Michigan Data Center" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Rural Michigan residents rally against the $7 billion Stargate data center planned on southeast Michigan farm land. Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1"> “Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects, nor will they meaningfully benefit from them,” said Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp.
<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1" class="attachment-rss-image-size size-rss-image-size wp-post-image" alt="Rural Michigan residents rally against the $7 billion Stargate data center planned on southeast Michigan farm land. Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?w=2560&ssl=1 2560w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=1024%2C683&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C1024&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=2048%2C1366&ssl=1 2048w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=2000%2C1334&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1 780w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C267&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?w=2340&ssl=1 2340w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=1024%2C683&ssl=1&w=370 370w" sizes="(max-width: 34.9rem) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 53rem) calc(8 * (100vw / 12)), (min-width: 53rem) calc(6 * (100vw / 12)), 100vw" data-attachment-id="343392" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/maryland-residents-to-pay-1-6-billion-more-in-power-bills-due-to-out-of-state-data-centers-complaint/protest-against-michigan-data-center" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2560,1707" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"5.6","credit":"UCG/Universal Images Group via G","camera":"Canon EOS 5D Mark IV","caption":"Saline, Michigan, 1 December 2025, Rural Michigan residents rally against the $7 billion Stargate data center planned on southeast Michigan farm land. Protesters say the Data Center is being fast tracked by DTE Energy, the large electric utility, and that it could raise residential electricity rates and endanger the water supply.. (Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)","created_timestamp":"1764605245","copyright":"Copyright \u00a9 Jim West","focal_length":"67","iso":"800","shutter_speed":"0.005","title":"Protest Against Michigan Data Center","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Protest Against Michigan Data Center" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Rural Michigan residents rally against the $7 billion Stargate data center planned on southeast Michigan farm land. Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images " data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/GettyImages-2249621488-scaled.jpg?fit=780%2C520&ssl=1" /> <img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="600" height="150" data-attachment-id="268291" data-permalink="https://therealnews.com/this-is-why-deregulation-is-deadly/cd_stacked_white_600" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" data-orig-size="600,150" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Common Dreams Logo" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?fit=600%2C150&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=600%2C150&ssl=1" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=600&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?resize=300%2C75&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=370&ssl=1 370w, https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png?w=400&ssl=1 400w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 08, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license. A top state utilities regulator is calling foul on an effort to shift the power cost of out-of-state artificial intelligence data centers onto Maryland residents. Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel on Thursday filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) against electric grid operator PJM Interconnection objecting to plans that it said would force residents in the state to pay $1.6 billion in data center-driven transmission costs over the next decade. The complaint states that the transmission cost allocation methodology PJM is using “broadly socializes” the cost of increased power demands that is being driven by AI data centers. “That result is unjust and unreasonable and violates the cost causation principles that have long governed transmission cost allocation and that this commission has repeatedly affirmed,” the complaint says. “PJM’s tariff imposes these costs on Maryland electric customers even though Maryland customers do not meaningfully cause nor benefit from those investments.” The Office of People’s Counsel pointed to the massive number of data centers built in neighboring Virginia as a primary culprit for added strain on the electric grid. “Amidst national data center growth, Virginia stands as the epicenter,” the complaint says. “Virginia is the largest data center market in the world… As of December 2024, data centers represented 3.6 GW of demand… reflecting, since 2013, a 660% increase in megawatt-hour consumption.” This explosive growth in energy demand is only expected to intensify over the next several years, the complaint continues, noting that “PJM projects 32 GW of peak load growth across its territory by 2030, of which approximately 30 GW is attributable to data centers.” As a remedy, the complaint asks FERC to “require PJM to take immediate action to assign data center-driven transmission costs to the PJM zones where the data center customers are located” instead of shifting the cost to Marylanders. Commenting on his office’s complaint, Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp said that the attempt to saddle Maryland consumers with a $1.6 billion bill for facilities outside the state’s borders shows “PJM’s cost allocation rules are broken.” “Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects,” Lapp added, “nor will they meaningfully benefit from them.” Data centers have become political lightning rods in recent months, as residents from across the country object to their mass resource consumption, which is leading to a major spike in utilities bills, as well as the noise pollution they generate. As CNBC reported earlier this year, PJM currently projects that it will be a 6 GW short of its reliability requirements in 2027 thanks to the added demand from data centers. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) earlier this year introduced a bill that would impose a nationwide moratorium on AI data center construction “until strong national safeguards are in place to protect workers, consumers, and communities, defend privacy and civil rights, and ensure these technologies do not harm our environment.” This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Brad Reed.
‘Genocide Didn’t Start in Gaza in 2023’ w/ Basem Khandakji
ICE Black Sites and Press Freedom Decline
First up, Eleanor Goldfield sits down with investigative reporter Logan M. Davis to talk about his exclusive reporting on ICE hold rooms, these unofficial black sites that serve as torturous liminal spaces in the larger network of kidnappings, forced d...
First up, Eleanor Goldfield sits down with investigative reporter Logan M. Davis to talk about his exclusive reporting on ICE hold rooms, these unofficial black sites that serve as torturous liminal spaces in the larger network of kidnappings, forced disappearances, and deportations. Logan explains how these bus stops with cell doors are acquired, used, and hidden from public view, that the cruelty and terror are the point, and how folks can organize in their local communities to stop them. The post ICE Black Sites and Press Freedom Decline appeared first on Project Censored. This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.
Strait of Hormuz de-escalation is urgent for African planters and people, says UN chiefHantavirus: WHO assesses exposure risk as cruise liner docks in TenerifeSudan war: armed drones caused 80 per cent of civilian killings (OHCHR)
Strait of Hormuz de-escalation is urgent for African planters and people, says UN chiefHantavirus: WHO assesses exposure risk as cruise liner docks in TenerifeSudan war: armed drones caused 80 per cent of civilian killings (OHCHR) This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.
Open Letter to Congress on Trump and the 25th Amendment— May 11, 2026
We strongly urge legislation pursuant to section 4 of the 25th Amendment to depute Congress in lieu of the Vice President and principal officers of the executive departments with the power to determine whether the President is “unable to discharge the ...
We strongly urge legislation pursuant to section 4 of the 25th Amendment to depute Congress in lieu of the Vice President and principal officers of the executive departments with the power to determine whether the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” As regards President Donald Trump, the attached letter… This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader and was authored by matthew.
The so-called “Rubber-Stamp Rule”, an effort by the Trump administration to “Make America Nuclear Again”, violates key components of the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) and Energy Reorganization Act, according to comments filed this week by 13 organizations i...
The so-called “Rubber-Stamp Rule”, an effort by the Trump administration to “Make America Nuclear Again”, violates key components of the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) and Energy Reorganization Act, according to comments filed this week by 13 organizations including the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and Beyond Nuclear. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) proposed rule will allow reactor designs that the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) have approved to bypass required safety reviews by the NRC. In a separate comment filing in March, 11 state attorneys general concurred with the organizations’ findings that the Department of Energy ‘s new policy to exclude “pilot reactors” from both NRC licensing and environmental reviews violates existing law. In that case, the Department of Energy announced, in violation of federal law, that it would exempt previously untested reactors that it approves to be built and operated from any review of their environmental impacts. “Along with the DOE’s environmental ‘free pass’ policy, the whole ‘expedited licensing’ regime the administration is attempting to set up appears to be illegal,” said Tim Judson, executive director of NIRS and co-author of comments filed to the NRC. “The White House is trying to create a ‘regulatory tunnel’ around NRC’s safety regulations. That would mean DOE’s biases and obviously false assumptions about the safety of nuclear power plants become the new normal, exposing the public to unacceptable dangers to our health and safety.” The NRC’s proposed regulation would allow companies that want to build a nuclear reactor of the same design as one DOE has previously approved to merely submit documentation of that approval and claim that the previously built reactor “is safe.” Such companies would likely never have to go through a detailed safety review by NRC to build and operate such reactors. In 1974, Congress amended the Atomic Energy Act to prohibit such a scheme. “Fifty years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished because they became too much of a promoter and lost the confidence of Congress and the public over safety,” said Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project at Beyond Nuclear. “The NRC was established to provide a regulator that prioritizes safety and is obligated not to take shortcuts for a production agenda. Instead, half a century later, we are on the same dangerous collision course, casting aside the NRC in favor of the DOE, which doesn’t have the experience or the staff to get the industry in line with safety and security. This capitulation to the Trump agenda could lead to the NRC being abolished altogether, because nobody will have confidence in them.” The groups also told NRC that it cannot simply “rubber-stamp” reactors that the military builds, either. “And while the law allows the DOD to build its own nuclear reactors,” said Tim Judson of NIRS, “it does not allow the NRC to skip safety reviews for civilian nuclear plants just because they use the same designs. The military routinely exposes its personnel to dangers that civilians are supposed to be protected from.” “In its eagerness to short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best – demonstrating a complete disregard for the law,” said Linda Pentz Gunter, executive director of Beyond Nuclear. “But nuclear technology is too inherently dangerous to operate as an outlaw. Ignoring those dangers will put millions of Americans at risk of another catastrophic nuclear accident.” NIRS, BN, et al comments on NRC Proposed Rule — https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/DocketID_NRC-2025-1503_Comments_-BeyondNuclear-NIRS-etal.pdf Comments on DOE Categorical Exclusion Policy — https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2026.03.04-NIRS-et-al-Comments-re-DOE-categorical-exclusion-for-advanced-nuclear-reactors.pdf This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.
Hindu Raksha Dal chief Pinky Chaudhary refuses food to Muslims at community feast
In yet another act of open bigotry, Bhupender alias Pinky Chaudhary, chief of Hindu Raksha Dal, has been seen refusing to serve food to Muslims at a community feast at... The post Hindu Raksha Dal chief Pinky Chaudhary refuses food to Muslims at community feast appeared first on Alt News.
In yet another act of open bigotry, Bhupender alias Pinky Chaudhary, chief of Hindu Raksha Dal, has been seen refusing to serve food to Muslims at a community feast at Rajendra Nagar Sector-2 in Sahibabad area of Ghaziabad. In a two-minute video uploaded to Chaudhary’s Facebook page, he is seen snatching a plate away from someone. It is unclear who he snatched the plate from or what prompted the exchange, but immediately afterward he says, “Mulla na awe mere paas” (“Muslims should not come to me”) and “Koi Musalmaan humara khana na khaye” (“No Muslim should eat our food”). He further declares that Hindus are welcome to eat or even take his life, but Muslims should not partake in the feast, drawing laughter from people around him. His son Harsh Chaudhary is seen alongside him in the video. After facing backlash on social media, Bhupender Chaudhary released a video statement doubling down on his remarks, claiming that Muslims spit in and urinate on food served to Hindus. “I would have been glad if Muslims had opposed my actions, but I feel disappointed when criticism comes from my Hindu brothers. You must have seen videos of Muslims spitting and urinating in the food they serve Hindus… When you go to eat kheer at the homes of those who talk about brotherhood, they spit in the food before serving it to you… If they truly believed in brotherhood, then teenage girls would not be getting raped in Pakistan, and our brothers would be safe there… If you want the same situation in India, and do not want a single Hindu left here, then you can oppose me…,” he says in the statement. He further claims that Muslims do not feed Hindus at their community feasts and argues that Hindus, therefore, should not do so either. Pinky Chaudhary has around 25 cases registered against him across police stations in the Delhi NCR and Ghaziabad regions. These cases relate to allegations of communal speeches, violence, intimidation and obstruction of authorities. He is currently out on bail. Lalit Sharma, the Dehradun chief of Hindu Raksha Dal, also released a video backing Bhupender Chaudhary’s stance. Using expletives, Sharma defended Chaudhary by arguing that since Muslims do not participate in Hindu religious ceremonies, they should not be allowed to eat at the feast either. “If things went my way, we should stop oxygen and water too. We will install four or five refrigerators and say that cold water is only for Hindus. Our water and blood should only be touched by Hindus… we are for Sanatanists and Sanatanists are for us. We want Sanatani brothers to stay so far away from Muslims that they never have to go near them. Muslims and Islam are out to destroy our religion the way termites eat through wood… our water, our food, and every other facility… When I go to donate blood, I always ask who the blood will go to. If it is meant for a Muslim, I will not donate,” he says in the video. The Hindu Raksha Dal has often been in the news for their violent and communal tactics. Recently, Sharma and his team openly called for violence against ‘Mohammed’ Deepak Kumar, who stood up against the Bajrang Dal’s intimidation of an elderly Muslim shop owner in Uttarakhand. Sharma had released a video threatening Deepak and directing HRD members and other Hindutva fringe groups to gather outside Deepak’s gym on Thursday, January 12, to “fix his brain.” More recently, some female Hindu Raksha Dal members were arrested for spray painting communal slogans on a crash barrier along the Delhi–Dehradun National Highway in Uttar Pradesh. The graffiti read “मुसलमान के लिए रोड नहीं है” (“This road is not for Muslims”) in Hindi and “This Road Not Allow Muslim” in English. On December 29, Pinky Chaudhary and other members of the outfit announced distribution of swords to Hindu families from their office in Ghaziabad citing atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh. They announced that if Islamic fundamentalists harassed any Hindu family in India, HRD would teach them a lesson. Just one day prior to the incident in Ghaziabad, swords had been distributed from HRD’s office in New Delhi on December 28. While the swords were being handed out, Chaudhary accused the central and Delhi governments, as well as the BJP administration in Uttar Pradesh, of failing to provide security to the Hindu community. He demanded that weapons be provided to all Hindus. On January 6, 2026, Ghaziabad police arrested Pinky Chaudhary and his son Harsh in connection with this. Nine days later, on <a href="https://www.jagran.com/uttar-pradesh/ghaziabad-hindu-raksha-dal-leader-pinky-chaudhary-son-released-on-bail-40109215.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com#:~:text=%E0%A4%B6%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%A8%20%E0%A4%A5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BE%20%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82%20%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%B2%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%AC%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%9F%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%94%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%89%E0%A4%97%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%A6%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B6%E0%A4%A8%20%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82%20%E0%A4%86%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8B%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A4%20%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%82%20%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B7%E0%A4%BE%20%E0%A4%A6%E0%A4%B2%20%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BE%20%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%9F%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%AF%20%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B7%20%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%80%20%E0%A4%9A%E0%A5%8C%E0%A4%A7%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%80%20%E0%A4%94%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%89%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BE%20%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%9F%E0%A4%BE%20%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B7%20%E0%A4%9A%E0%A5%8C%E0%A4%A7%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%80%20%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%83%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8B%20%E0%A4%9C%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%A4%20%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B2%20%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%AC%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%B0%20%E0%A4%86%20%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%8F%E0%A5%A4%20%E0%A4%87%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%82%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%20%E0%A4%87%E0%A4%B8%20%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%A8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%20%E0%A4%86%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8B%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%20%E0%A4%AD%E0%A5%80%20%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B2%20%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%9B%E0%A5%82%E0%A4%9F%20%E0%A4%9A%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%87%20%E0%A4%B9%E0%A5%88%E0%A4%82%E0%A5%A4" rel="noopener">January 15, Chaudhary was granted bail. The post Hindu Raksha Dal chief Pinky Chaudhary refuses food to Muslims at community feast appeared first on Alt News. This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.
Rutgers Disinvites Biotech CEO Rami Elghandour as Graduation Speaker over Palestine Stance
Meet Guido Reichstadter, the Marine Veteran Who Scaled D.C. Bridge to Protest Iran War & AI
Starmer Out? Pressure Grows on U.K. PM to Resign as Far-Right Reform Party Surges in Local Elections
Today is Andrea's birthday. Gaslit Nation is celebrating the only way we know how: by re-reading Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay, "Who Goes Nazi?", on how to tell who among you at your next dinner party would become a Nazi if given the chance. How does she know? She met these types during the Nazi takeover of her beloved Austria and Germany, hotbeds of intellectual thought and progressive movements, including for LGBTQ and women's rights, before traditional conversatives and business elites put an end to all that by joining forces with a fringe death cult led by a narcissist conspiracy theorist. Our Gaslit Nation Salon at 4pm ET will open with the reading of the first ten pages of Andrea's screenplay-in-progress, read by Gaslit Nation listeners, and featuring voices from the past reminding us how to overcome the threats we face. To join us today, sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit -- discounted annual memberships are available and you can give the gift of membership. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you. Want to hear Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chats, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!
Today is Andrea's birthday. Gaslit Nation is celebrating the only way we know how: by re-reading Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay, "Who Goes Nazi?", on how to tell who among you at your next dinner party would become a Nazi if given the chance. How does she know? She met these types during the Nazi takeover of her beloved Austria and Germany, hotbeds of intellectual thought and progressive movements, including for LGBTQ and women's rights, before traditional conversatives and business elites put an end to all that by joining forces with a fringe death cult led by a narcissist conspiracy theorist. Our Gaslit Nation Salon at 4pm ET will open with the reading of the first ten pages of Andrea's screenplay-in-progress, read by Gaslit Nation listeners, and featuring voices from the past reminding us how to overcome the threats we face. To join us today, sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit -- discounted annual memberships are available and you can give the gift of membership. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you. Want to hear Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chats, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit! This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
Top U.S. & World Headlines — May 11, 2026
New Caledonian freight vessel begins service to Vanuatu despite diplomatic row
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk Despite a trade-related controversy that erupted last week between the governments of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, the French territory’s freight vessel MV Karaka began a new service to Port Vila and Luganville. Last week, New Caledonia’s territorial government announced it had suspended all trade cooperation with
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk Despite a trade-related controversy that erupted last week between the governments of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, the French territory’s freight vessel MV Karaka began a new service to Port Vila and Luganville. Last week, New Caledonia’s territorial government announced it had suspended all trade cooperation with Vanuatu after Port Vila hosted the leader of New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS group — a move seen as a lack of respect by the government in Nouméa. It followed with the top French diplomat in Port Vila, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, making multiple Facebook posts on the issue, including his meeting with Vanuatu Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Ati to clear misunderstanding and promote the notion of “constructive dialogue”. READ MORE: Other New Caledonia and Vanuatu reports However, the Vanuatu’s Foreign Affairs Ministry described Vilmer’s decision “to go public through social media platforms” as “extremely unfortunate”. “The Ambassador’s posts on social media have unnecessarily provoked public misunderstanding and divided national opinions on the actual state of play,” it said in a statement on Friday. It added that “matters relating to sovereignty and bilateral relations are best addressed through established diplomatic channels”. But despite the diplomatic spat, the Nouméa-based vessel MV Karaka, which is normally dedicated to a connection between Nouméa and New Caledonia’s Loyalty Islands group (north-east of the main Island, Grande Terre), made its maiden voyage to Vanuatu. Port Vila service The MV Karaka is now starting to service the capital Port Vila, as well as Luganville, on the northern island of Espiritu Santo. Vanuatu authorities held official welcoming ceremonies on Friday to launch the service in Port Vila in presence of French Ambassador Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer. The ceremony was also attended by Vanuatu ministers Samson Samsen (Trade) and Johnny Koanapo Rasou (Finance), the Vanuatu Daily Post reports. They were quoted as stressing that even though “issues remained” between France and Vanuatu, they “do not affect “friendship, partnership and diplomatic ties” between the two countries. The new maritime service, operated by French company CMI (Compagnie Maritime des Îles), is transporting close to 300 tonnes of freight from New Caledonia for export to Vanuatu. On the way back to Nouméa, it is expected to carry a freight of products for sale in the French Pacific territory, CMI general manager Thomas Quiros told media earlier last week. The MV Karaka is planning to operate the Vanuatu route once a month. The service was described by Samsen as “an important connection” to develop new opportunities on both sides in terms of investment, trade and even tourism developments. Generally, it is also perceived as an instrument to boost the volume of trade between New Caledonia and Vanuatu, an aim that was perceived as shared by both countries. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Canceled over Palestine: Biotech CEO Rami Elghandour on Rutgers Disinviting Him as Graduation Speaker
Two weeks before Rami Elghandour was expected to address newly minted engineering graduates at his alma mater Rutgers University, the CEO of biotech firm Arcellx received a shocking call from school administrators. Citing “vague” c...
Two weeks before Rami Elghandour was expected to address newly minted engineering graduates at his alma mater Rutgers University, the CEO of biotech firm Arcellx received a shocking call from school administrators. Citing “vague” complaints about his social media posts on Israel and Palestine, the school abruptly withdrew its convocation invitation. We speak to Rami Elghandour about the decision, which he tells Democracy Now! he finds not only “heartbreaking,” but also illogical. “Having a different point of view is not harming these students in any way to lead to this sort of outcome,” he says. Elghandour, an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab, adds that the silencing of pro-Palestine speech stems from a “false equivalency” between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine voices. “There are two sides, but they couldn’t be more historically different.” This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Outraged by the civilian casualties from the war on Iran, protester Guido Reichstadter scaled the 168-foot Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. He remained on the bridge for over five days. Upon descendin...
Outraged by the civilian casualties from the war on Iran, protester Guido Reichstadter scaled the 168-foot Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. He remained on the bridge for over five days. Upon descending, he was arrested and charged by law enforcement for trespassing. Reichstadter says he undertook his protest as a form of nonviolent opposition against both the Trump administration’s war on Iran and the unchecked acceleration of artificial intelligence systems — some of which have been used by the United States military to select targets for deadly missile strikes. “We the people, in whose name these murders are being committed, we’ve got the power and the responsibility to nonviolently withdraw our support, our cooperation, from the system, from the regime,” he explains. Reichstadter is a former U.S. Marine who left the service after refusing to deploy to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is now an outspoken social justice activist and the founder of the grassroots coalition Stop AI. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Far-Right Anti-Immigrant Party Surges in U.K. Elections; Calls Grow for Labour PM Starmer to Resign
This year’s local election results from the United Kingdom are in. The far-right, anti-immigrant Reform UK party made substantial gains, while the ruling Labour Party suffered heavy losses, signaling what London-based journalist Daniel T...
This year’s local election results from the United Kingdom are in. The far-right, anti-immigrant Reform UK party made substantial gains, while the ruling Labour Party suffered heavy losses, signaling what London-based journalist Daniel Trilling calls a “wider fragmenting of politics” and a generational shift away from the two-party political system. We get an overview of major developments to the U.K. political scene from Trilling, including how Donald Trump’s transformation of the U.S. right-wing movement has inspired Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, and how the Labour Party’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activism led to rising support for the left-wing Green Party. Trilling also discusses how populist sentiment continues to influence other countries in Europe after Hungary’s extremist leader Viktor Orbán suffered a major election defeat last month. This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Trump Blasts Iran’s Response to U.S. Ceasefire Proposal as “Totally Unacceptable”, Iranian Political Prisoner Narges Mohammadi Hospitalized After Collapsing in Prison, Israeli Strikes on Lebanon Kill Dozens, Including Infant and Medics, Despite Ceasefire Deal, Israeli Forces Kill Three Palestinians in Latest Violations of Gaza Ceasefire, Israel Deports Two Activists It Abducted from Gaza-Bound Humanitarian Aid Flotilla, Palestine International Marathon Includes Amputees Who Lost Limbs to Israeli Attacks, Gaza Documentary Censored by BBC Wins BAFTA Award, Party of Far-Right U.K. Populist Nigel Farage Makes Historic Gains in Local Elections, Virginia High Court Strikes Down Voter-Approved Congressional Map in Major Win for GOP, Justice Department Rushes to Deport Palestinian Activist Mahmoud Khalil, Couple Jailed by ICE Reunites with Terminally Ill Son One Day Before He Dies of Cancer, Pentagon Says Latest Boat Strike Killed Two, Leaving One Survivor, U.S. Military Surges Surveillance Flights Off Cuba’s Coast, Ukraine and Russia Exchange Fire as U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire Fails to Hold, Hungary’s Péter Magyar Sworn In as Prime Minister, Ending 16 Years of Rule by Viktor Orbán
Trump Blasts Iran's Response to U.S. Ceasefire Proposal as "Totally Unacceptable" Iranian Political Prisoner Narges Mohammadi Hospitalized After Collapsing in Prison Israeli Strikes on Lebanon Kill Dozens, Including Infant and Medics, Despite Ceasefire Deal Israeli Forces Kill Three Palestinians in Latest Violations of Gaza Ceasefire Israel Deports Two Activists It Abducted from Gaza-Bound Humanitarian Aid Flotilla Palestine International Marathon Includes Amputees Who Lost Limbs to Israeli Attacks Gaza Documentary Censored by BBC Wins BAFTA Award Party of Far-Right U.K. Populist Nigel Farage Makes Historic Gains in Local Elections Virginia High Court Strikes Down Voter-Approved Congressional Map in Major Win for GOP Justice Department Rushes to Deport Palestinian Activist Mahmoud Khalil Couple Jailed by ICE Reunites with Terminally Ill Son One Day Before He Dies of Cancer Pentagon Says Latest Boat Strike Killed Two, Leaving One Survivor U.S. Military Surges Surveillance Flights Off Cuba's Coast Ukraine and Russia Exchange Fire as U.S.-Brokered Ceasefire Fails to Hold Hungary's Péter Magyar Sworn In as Prime Minister, Ending 16 Years of Rule by Viktor Orbán This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! Monday, May 11, 2026 This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
[full uncut conversation] The Data Center Revolt: John Cassidy & Faiz Shakir
A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm.
The post A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm. appeared first on ProPublica.
Georgia congressman Mike Collins spent most of his life running a trucking business. ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data shows that truckers for the business have a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of similar companies in recent years. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens. “If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.” Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has pushed the policy forward even though its own officials have written that there’s no empirical evidence to show that foreign truckers cause more crashes than truckers who are American citizens. At the same time, however, Collins has opposed rules that experts say actually would reduce the odds of serious crashes. Those rules could have required that Collins’ family business sink substantial money into new safety measures for its fleet. Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for Collins’ business killed five people and injured more than 50 people — including one woman who now needs around-the-clock care due to a severe brain injury — according to federal data, court filings, plaintiffs’ attorneys and police records. Drivers and passengers who were injured in those crashes later claimed in lawsuits that truckers for Collins’ business have caused them to collectively incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. The figure the business has paid out is not known because the settlements it reached with crash victims have been confidential, as is common in such suits. Court filings in one suit state that both parties agreed to a $1 million payout from the business’s insurer. Collins’ business denied wrongdoing by truckers and the business itself in those cases. ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data from the past two years shows that Collins’ business has a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of trucking companies with substantial mileage. The analysis also shows that the company’s recent crash rate sits around the median of similar companies, while the rate of injury from those crashes sits in the top fifth. Safety experts told ProPublica that some of the technologies opposed by Collins, which include devices on semitrucks to limit their speed and sensors on big rigs to automatically brake in the face of a potential collision, reduce the odds of crashes leading to serious injuries and deaths. The country’s largest trucking trade group — a group that Collins’ family business is a member of, according to the company’s website — has supported mandates for those technologies. “These are proven technologies,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, which advocates on behalf of crash victims and their families. He added that the technologies would “protect those we hold dear on our roads from horrific tragedy.” Neither Collins’ campaign nor his congressional office responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to questions about his family business’s safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety. His campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview. The business did not respond to questions sent by ProPublica; an employee told ProPublica that press inquiries about the business are handled by Collins’ congressional office. In recent years, Collins has described his efforts to keep foreign truckers off the roads as “purely a safety issue.” He has also questioned the effectiveness of other safety measures and said that they would have saddled his industry with extra costs. “We want to be safe,” Collins said in one congressional hearing. “I don’t know of a trucking company out there that doesn’t want to be safe. And when they are not safe, they are taken off the road.” Toward the end of 2023, his first year in Congress, Collins had one of his first chances to support a measure that experts believed could make the roads safer. The Biden administration had proposed a rule that would require the installation of devices to limit the speed of trucks, capping it as low as 60 miles per hour. But Collins questioned the need for the rule. He told officials at a transportation committee hearing that the federal government shouldn’t require the safety measure. He said insurance companies already serve as a sufficient speeding deterrent, because they have the ability to cut off coverage to truckers with unsafe driving records. He also said the rule wasn’t needed because of yet another deterrent that had long been in place. “They are called speed limit signs,” he said. “They are enforced by law enforcement.” Collins’ position stood at odds with the industry’s largest trade group, American Trucking Associations, which that year had expressed support for capping the speeds of trucks between 65 and 70 miles per hour. Collins did not respond to questions about why his views are at odds with ATA, which represents the interests of 37,000 members, including Collins’ family business. In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the speed limiter proposal. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy celebrated the decision as one that would get “D.C. bureaucrats OUT of your trucks.” Collins also pushed back against a different proposal, which would have required trucks to have automatic emergency braking systems. That technology can force a truck to slow down if the potential for a collision is detected. Federal officials had estimated that the braking system mandate could prevent more than 8,000 injuries a year. ATA supported much of the proposal, too. Yet Collins, whose family business has used those systems in some trucks, explained at recent congressional hearings that the technology was “very expensive” and didn’t work that well. “People don’t understand that these things are actually hurting more than they’re helping right now,” Collins said at a hearing last year. Some of Collins’ truckers have been involved in crashes because of their alleged failure to slow down, according to citations and police reports obtained by ProPublica. Over the past five years, three people hurt in those crashes have sued Collins’ fleet because its truckers allegedly failed to maintain a safe distance, leading them to cause crashes. The plaintiffs claimed that they sustained serious injuries that cost five to six figures in medical expenses. The truckers and Collins’ business denied wrongdoing in the cases. The three cases were dismissed. Lawyers for two plaintiffs said the cases ended in a settlement; a lawyer for the third plaintiff did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the dismissal of the case. The fate of automatic emergency braking requirements is now up in the air, too. The Trump administration has delayed the rule from going into effect and, according to ProPublica’s reporting last year, may narrow the scope of it. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" js-autosizes height="407" width="752" src="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?w=752" alt="A smiling man wearing a long-sleeve button-down and jeans drives inside of a truck cab with an overlay of text: “Mike Collins: Businessman Trucker.”" class="wp-image-77223" srcset="https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png 1919w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=300,162 300w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=768,415 768w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=1024,554 1024w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=1536,831 1536w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=863,467 863w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=422,228 422w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=552,299 552w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=558,302 558w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=527,285 527w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=752,407 752w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=1149,622 1149w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=400,216 400w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=800,433 800w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=1200,649 1200w, https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-1.34.59-PM-1.png?resize=1600,865 1600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" /> A still from Mike Collins’ ad for his U.S. Senate campaign from July 2025. Collins has used his identity as a trucking business owner as political clout, despite his company’s history of crashes and safety concerns. Screenshot by ProPublica via Facebook Collins has said that his decades in the business make him especially attuned to safety measures that work, compared with bureaucrats who have “beaten to death” his industry with too many regulations. In the late 1980s, Collins became the head of the family’s trucking company before he had graduated college. He took over for his dad, Mac Collins, who served as a congressman from 1993 to 2005. Shortly into Mike Collins’ time as president, one of his company’s truckers lost control of his trailer. The crash that followed sent a 19-year-old woman to the hospital. The trucker later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine. The business drew scrutiny because that trucker had pleaded no contest to drunk driving earlier that year but was allowed to stay on the road. A political opponent later aired a TV ad that accused the family’s trucking business of being cited for “more than a hundred” safety violations. At the time, Mac Collins blamed the company’s insurer for missing the drunk-driving conviction in a background check. He said the ad contained “falsehoods” but didn’t specify what was wrong. The company ultimately fired the trucker after the crash, Mac Collins told the Ledger-Enquirer in 1994. The larger the Collins trucking fleet grew — into one of about 100 trucks, hauling timber for Georgia-Pacific as well as tires and steel — the more traffic citations and inspection violations its truckers received. The data ProPublica reviewed showed that truckers have gotten into more than 90 crashes that have led to at least 51 injuries and five deaths since 2001. In 2007, one Collins trucker veered into oncoming traffic on a North Carolina highway and hit a white Honda CR-V. The CR-V’s driver, Bridget Murphy, and the trucker both died. Murphy’s estate and two of Murphy’s passengers filed a lawsuit and, according to a court filing in 2009, agreed to a $1 million payout from the company’s liability insurance coverage. The company wrote in a filing that the trucker had been “stricken by a physical impairment beyond his control.” In 2021, another trucker switched lanes on an Indiana highway and collided into a car driven by Larkin Cooper. She claimed in a lawsuit that the trucker’s “negligent and reckless” driving caused injuries that forced her to drop out of nursing school and switch to a lesser-paying career. Her lawyer wrote that the total damages were likely to exceed $75,000. In 2023, a trucker failed to stop quickly enough while approaching a red traffic light on a northeast Georgia highway, causing a four-vehicle crash, according to court records. Drivers in two vehicles later said in lawsuits that they had sustained serious medical injuries. One of them claimed that the costs to treat his back, knee and neck totaled more than $120,000. Collins did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the lawsuits. Lawyers for the family’s business denied wrongdoing in the suits in Indiana and Georgia. Soon after, the business settled for undisclosed sums. During a televised debate in April, just weeks before the May 19 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race, Collins told viewers that his time in the trucking business had taught him how to work across the aisle in Washington, D.C. His political ads feature him behind the wheel of a rig, and his yard signs have a logo of an American flag in the shape of a semi. Yet his messaging about making roads safer centers on one main idea: getting noncitizen truckers off the road. In one social video from November, Collins was on one side of a split screen, speaking about a sign on the other screen. “You know what this sign says?” Collins asked. “Nah, neither do I.” “Y’all, It’s a road sign from Uzbekistan, which is exactly why I’m able to drive a truck in Georgia, but not Uzbekistan,” he continued. “But somehow, y’all, that common sense, well, it didn’t apply to one man on our roads.” Collins then replaced a photo of the sign with a mug shot of an undocumented trucker named Akhror Bozorov. Collins said he had been “wanted in Uzbekistan for terrorism and spreading Jihad.” After Bozorov was arrested last year, the Department of Homeland Security published a press release that criticized Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s transportation department for issuing a license to Bozorov and President Joe Biden’s administration for granting the trucker his work authorization. Collins went one step further and used the trucker’s story to attack the politician he’s trying to unseat, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., for not being tough enough on immigration. He also cited Bozorov’s story as justification to strip noncitizen truckers of their licenses — but failed to present evidence that noncitizen truckers make the roads less safe. In March, the Trump administration enacted its rule that could eventually revoke commercial licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen drivers. But according to the administration’s initial analysis of its own rule last year, “There is not sufficient evidence, derived from well-designed, rigorous, quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship” between a trucker’s citizenship status and safety outcomes. A letter from nearly 20 Democratic state attorneys general pointed out that the Trump administration cited only five fatal crashes last year that were caused by noncitizens with commercial driver’s licenses, out of more than 4,000 deaths involving CDL drivers nationwide. The letter said that the Trump administration’s rule presented “no facts” to support the claim that revoking thousands of licenses would “benefit public safety.” Public interest lawyers have also filed a legal challenge to the rule. The challenge is pending. “The notion that immigrant drivers are less safe than other drivers is not supported by the facts,” said Wendy Liu, one of the lawyers who filed the challenge. The same week that Trump’s rule was enacted, Collins doubled down on his calls to restrict commercial licenses for noncitizens, writing in an Instagram post that “this isn’t some game. Lives are at stake. Deport these thugs now.” How ProPublica Analyzed Federal Motor Vehicle Data To examine the safety record of Collins’ trucking company, ProPublica used data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which tracks inspections, violations and crashes for trucking companies. The analysis was limited to crashes and violations over a recent two-year period that feed into the agency’s Safety Measurement System. Using the most recent annual mileage total for each company from the FMCSA data, ProPublica calculated a per-mile rate for crashes, injuries, unsafe driving violations and speeding violations (which are a subset of unsafe driving violations). ProPublica compared Collins’ company — which reported about 7 million miles driven in 2025 — with other active trucking companies with more than 1 million annual miles logged recently, around 21,000 companies. During the two-year period examined from March 27, 2024, to March 26, 2026, Collins’ company had 31 unsafe driving violations, 11 of which were speeding violations, as well as four crashes resulting in six injuries. The data includes only crashes involving a tow-away, injuries or deaths. One crash, which involved an injury, was labeled as nonpreventable. Not all crashes are evaluated for preventability, and research has found crash involvement to be a strong indicator of future crash risk, regardless of role in the crash. When compared to the other trucking companies in our analysis, Collins’ family business’s crash rate per mile ranked higher than that of around 40% of other companies, while its per-mile rates of injuries, unsafe driving violations and speeding violations were higher than those of roughly 80% of other companies. The post A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm. appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Max Blau.
Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit
The post Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit appeared first on ProPublica.
Members of the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team conduct a raid on a smoke shop in lower Manhattan in 2024. Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal. But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for many officers in one aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers. The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision. In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor. The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams. The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops. The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall. Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents. In a letter to the court, the federal monitor said the newly discovered failure means the monitor’s own figures on the CRT’s rate of compliance with the Constitution is probably wrong. The actual rate, the monitor wrote, is “likely lower” than reported. The court-appointed monitor, Mylan Denerstein, lambasted the NYPD and its failure to review the stops. “The failure to audit these stops means unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches went undetected,” Denerstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “This is unacceptable. The City must do more and prevent this from happening.” In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it moved to fix the issues: “Under Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch the NYPD has taken significant additional steps to increase oversight and accountability. The Monitor and the NYPD identified this error, and the NYPD is working collaboratively with the Monitor to address it.” For the first two and a half years after the unit was created in 2023, the failure to properly review stops affected just part of the unit, which was led by top brass. But last fall, the issue became more widespread after the NYPD restructured the CRT to put officers stationed across the city under a central command. The move was intended to increase oversight of the team, which had new commanders. But in the process, stops for the entire unit, which had grown to about 180 officers, went unaudited. One of the unit’s former commanders, John Chell, defended its record. “This team really changed the game,” said Chell, who retired as the department’s top uniformed officer last year. “Did we make mistakes? Sure. But we stabilized the city. We did our job.” Lawmakers and civil rights advocates, however, have long criticized the CRT’s aggressive policing and said the latest reporting failure underscores a need to disband the unit. “The Community Response Team has operated with too little oversight and caused too much harm,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who has recalled being wrongfully stopped and frisked by the NYPD more than a decade ago. “A unit with this record should not continue.” Lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the original litigants in the stop-and-frisk case, also called for the CRT to be shuttered. “These units have a long history of aggressive policing against people of color. There is no basis for them,” said Daniel Lambright, the organization’s director of criminal justice litigation. “They do more harm than good and they need to go.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January and pledged during his campaign to reimagine public safety, has endorsed shuttering another unit that has drawn scrutiny for its heavy-handed approach to protests, but his office declined to address the rising calls to disband the CRT. “We’re aware of issues raised about the Community Response Team, as well as the steps the NYPD has taken to address them,” a mayoral spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. “The Mamdani administration is committed to improving public safety in a way that meets the needs and values of New Yorkers.” When it started three years ago, the CRT focused on Adams’ shifting priorities, such as cracking down on illegal motorcycles. The unit roamed the city proactively looking for crime rather than waiting for calls, the same approach once used by one of the NYPD’s most notorious units. The CRT quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Just months after the unit started, one officer in an unmarked police car spotted a man on a dirtbike and swerved across a yellow line into oncoming traffic, hitting the motorcyclist head-on and sending him flying. The man later died from his injuries. The NYPD said that it punished the officer by taking 13 days of vacation from him. Department leaders told ProPublica that even they had a hard time overseeing the unit’s work because it was essentially created off the books — a setup that ultimately led to the dropped reviews of stops. Officers who were part of the unit were often not formally assigned to it, meaning their conduct wasn’t properly tracked. “It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” one former department official told ProPublica last year. That approach extended to stop-and-frisk. When the monitor learned about the CRT in the unit’s early days, the NYPD assured the monitor that it would not do many stops. Only later, the monitor noted in a report last year, it discovered the team was “frequently” doing them. In 2025, the CRT recorded 1,400 stop-and-frisks, according to data from the monitor and the NYPD. More than 900 were not properly reviewed. The post Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit appeared first on ProPublica. This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Eric Umansky.
New Orleans wants to fix its Mardi Gras mess. So why is the trash pile still growing?
This year's Carnival resulted in 1.4 tons of beads, beer cans, and other trash along the city’s parade routes — the highest total on record.
When cleaning crews dug deep into New Orleans’ clogged drains in 2018, they pulled up leaves, mud — and 46 tons of Mardi Gras beads. The sheer magnitude of waste accumulated over decades of Carnivals — and its impact on the flood-prone city’s drainage system — shocked many residents and city officials. “Once you hear a number like that, there’s no going back,” then-Public Works director Dani Galloway said at the time. “So we’ve got to do better.” But nearly a decade later, New Orleans is generating more Mardi Gras garbage than ever. During the roughly five weeks of this year’s Carnival season, crews collected 1,363 tons of beaded necklaces, beer cans, plastic cups, and other refuse along the city’s parade routes — a 24 percent increase from the year before and the highest total on record. The trash tonnage is the equivalent of 741 cars. In New Orleans terms, it’s roughly the weight of the Steamboat Natchez or more than 1 million king cakes. Mardi Gras revelers are leaving behind more trash than ever Tons of trash collected from New Orleans parade routes, 2011–2026 *No Carnival in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Source: City of New Orleans Dennis Dean / Verite / Clayton Aldern / Grist / Alexander Grey / Unsplash <path d="M137 98.5C133 98.5 132 97.5 132 92.5V50.2C133.579 49.0591 135.454 48.3993 137.4 48.3C140.5 48.3 143.2 49.6 147.5 54.7C148.8 56.3 150 57 151.3 57C153.3 57 154.5 55.7 154.5 53.4V38H151.5C147.812 37.9397 144.155 38.6872 140.786 40.1901C137.418 41.6931 134.419 43.915 132 46.7V38H108V41.5H112C116 41.5 117 42.5 117 47.5V92.5C117 97.5 116 98.5 112 98.5H108V102H145V98.5H137ZM158.5 41.5H161.2C165.2 41.5 166.2 42.5 166.2 47.5V92.5C166.2 97.5 165.2 98.5 161.2 98.5H156.8V102H189.9V98.5H186.2C182.2 98.5 181.2 97.5 181.2 92.5V38H158.5V41.5ZM195.4 102H199.1V101C199.1 98.7 200.8 98.8 202.8 99.5C210.5 102.2 214.4 103 220.5 103C236.8 103 244.5 95.4 244.5 82.7C244.5 74.2 239.6 66.7 227.3 63.1L211.2 58.4C203.5 56.1 201.2 53 201.2 49.7C201.2 46.4 204.2 43.4 209.1 43.4C216.6 43.4 223.8 48 234.3 56.3C235.151 57.0952 236.241 57.5873 237.4 57.7C239.4 57.7 240.6 56.4 240.6 54.1V38H236.9V39C236.9 40.7 235.8 41.5 233.7 40.7C226.3 37.9 221.8 37 217.6 37C203.1 37 196 45.2 196 56.9C196 65.3 201.8 72.4 215.2 76.5L229.6 80.9C236.8 83.1 239.3 86 239.3 89.9C239.3 93.8 236 96.6 231.1 96.6C224.3 96.6 215.3 93.2 202.1 83C201.131 82.094 199.911 81.5015 198.6 81.3C196.6 81.3 195.4 82.6 195.4 84.9V102ZM257.8 83.9C257.8 96.3 265.1 103 278.7 103C285.1 103 294.8 101.2 302.3 98.7V87C302.3 84.7 301.1 83.4 299.1 83.4C297.9 83.4 296.8 84.1 295.6 85.9C288.4 96.7 282.8 99.6 278.2 99.6C274.2 99.6 272.8 97.8 272.8 92.7V49.5H304.7V38H272.8V14H269.1V14.7C269.1 29 260.3 40.4 247.8 42.8V49.5H257.8V83.9ZM166.2 30H181.2V12.5H166.2V30ZM84.9 64V88.3C79.1 91.9 72.6 94 67.1 94C39.7 94 15.1 64.1 15.1 33C15.1 18.4 24.7 6.9 41.4 6.9C51.9 6.9 72.3 13.6 87.4 29.8C87.8588 30.38 88.4339 30.8576 89.0884 31.2021C89.7428 31.5465 90.4621 31.7502 91.2 31.8C93.2 31.8 94.4 30.5 94.4 28.2V2H90.7V3C90.7 6.6 88.6 7.6 83.4 6C72.9626 2.50408 62.0057 0.813193 51 1C18.1 1 0 26.8 0 52C0 80.8 21.9 103 51 103C63.148 102.914 74.9783 99.11 84.9 92.1V102H99.4V50H46.4V64H84.9Z" fill="#3C3830"></path> “To see the waste go up that much, it’s just absurd,” said Brett Davis, founder of Grounds Krewe, a nonprofit group trying to make Mardi Gras more sustainable through recycling and waste reduction efforts. It’s a century-old tradition for riders on parade floats to shower crowds with beaded necklaces, toys, and other items — collectively known as “throws.” Most are cheap plastic trinkets. The beads are often laden with toxic chemicals, including unsafe levels of lead. Many throws are dropped moments after they’re caught, then crushed under feet and eventually swept up and hauled to landfills. City officials initially blamed the rise in rubbish on the popularity of this year’s festivities, which ran from January 6 to February 17 and included more than 30 float parades. An estimated 2.2 million people visited downtown New Orleans during the Carnival season, about 10 percent more than in 2025, according to the Downtown Development District, which drew on data from location analytics company Placer.ai. “The increase from last year was directly associated with the larger crowds,” Matt Torri, the city’s sanitation director, told the City Council in March. “Anybody who was out at this year’s parades definitely took note that there seemed to be more people enjoying the Carnival season, which is great for the city.” But a Verite News analysis of annual attendance and city cleanup records shows no clear relationship between crowds and trash levels. Overall, Mardi Gras waste tonnage has trended upward over the past decade, regardless of the year-to-year changes in attendance. The Mardi Gras season in 2020, for instance, drew more people — about 2.4 million — but produced roughly 241 fewer tons of garbage than in 2026. In the early 2010s, trash tonnage hovered around 880 tons. It spiked in 2017, surpassing 1,320 tons, and has not fallen below 1,000 tons since. The only exception was 2021, when no trash was recorded because the city canceled parades and most Carnival festivities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. <img decoding="async" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/nola-mardi-gras-attendance-trash-light.png?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="" data-caption="" data-credit=""/> Carnival trash hit a record even as attendance lagged behind 2020 levels Downtown attendance vs. city-wide trash collection during Mardi Gras, 2020–2026 Attendance (downtown) Trash (city-wide, tons) Source: Placer.ai / New Orleans Downtown Development District / City of New Orleans Dennis Dean / Verite / Clayton Aldern / Grist <path d="M137 98.5C133 98.5 132 97.5 132 92.5V50.2C133.579 49.0591 135.454 48.3993 137.4 48.3C140.5 48.3 143.2 49.6 147.5 54.7C148.8 56.3 150 57 151.3 57C153.3 57 154.5 55.7 154.5 53.4V38H151.5C147.812 37.9397 144.155 38.6872 140.786 40.1901C137.418 41.6931 134.419 43.915 132 46.7V38H108V41.5H112C116 41.5 117 42.5 117 47.5V92.5C117 97.5 116 98.5 112 98.5H108V102H145V98.5H137ZM158.5 41.5H161.2C165.2 41.5 166.2 42.5 166.2 47.5V92.5C166.2 97.5 165.2 98.5 161.2 98.5H156.8V102H189.9V98.5H186.2C182.2 98.5 181.2 97.5 181.2 92.5V38H158.5V41.5ZM195.4 102H199.1V101C199.1 98.7 200.8 98.8 202.8 99.5C210.5 102.2 214.4 103 220.5 103C236.8 103 244.5 95.4 244.5 82.7C244.5 74.2 239.6 66.7 227.3 63.1L211.2 58.4C203.5 56.1 201.2 53 201.2 49.7C201.2 46.4 204.2 43.4 209.1 43.4C216.6 43.4 223.8 48 234.3 56.3C235.151 57.0952 236.241 57.5873 237.4 57.7C239.4 57.7 240.6 56.4 240.6 54.1V38H236.9V39C236.9 40.7 235.8 41.5 233.7 40.7C226.3 37.9 221.8 37 217.6 37C203.1 37 196 45.2 196 56.9C196 65.3 201.8 72.4 215.2 76.5L229.6 80.9C236.8 83.1 239.3 86 239.3 89.9C239.3 93.8 236 96.6 231.1 96.6C224.3 96.6 215.3 93.2 202.1 83C201.131 82.094 199.911 81.5015 198.6 81.3C196.6 81.3 195.4 82.6 195.4 84.9V102ZM257.8 83.9C257.8 96.3 265.1 103 278.7 103C285.1 103 294.8 101.2 302.3 98.7V87C302.3 84.7 301.1 83.4 299.1 83.4C297.9 83.4 296.8 84.1 295.6 85.9C288.4 96.7 282.8 99.6 278.2 99.6C274.2 99.6 272.8 97.8 272.8 92.7V49.5H304.7V38H272.8V14H269.1V14.7C269.1 29 260.3 40.4 247.8 42.8V49.5H257.8V83.9ZM166.2 30H181.2V12.5H166.2V30ZM84.9 64V88.3C79.1 91.9 72.6 94 67.1 94C39.7 94 15.1 64.1 15.1 33C15.1 18.4 24.7 6.9 41.4 6.9C51.9 6.9 72.3 13.6 87.4 29.8C87.8588 30.38 88.4339 30.8576 89.0884 31.2021C89.7428 31.5465 90.4621 31.7502 91.2 31.8C93.2 31.8 94.4 30.5 94.4 28.2V2H90.7V3C90.7 6.6 88.6 7.6 83.4 6C72.9626 2.50408 62.0057 0.813193 51 1C18.1 1 0 26.8 0 52C0 80.8 21.9 103 51 103C63.148 102.914 74.9783 99.11 84.9 92.1V102H99.4V50H46.4V64H84.9Z" fill="#3C3830"></path> Since 2020, when the Downtown Development District began tracking visits in the Central Business and Warehouse districts, annual attendance has stayed within a relatively tight range, between 1.9 million and 2.4 million. Still, the trash tally has swung wildly, indicating that other factors are at play. The development district doesn’t track citywide visits, but its annual downtown tally is considered the most accurate indication of Carnival attendance. The office of Mayor Helena Moreno and the city’s sanitation department did not respond to requests for comment. Parade trash remains a problem for the city’s drainage system. After the infamous bead blockage of 2018, the city began installing temporary filter contraptions, known as “gutter buddies,” at catch basins along parade routes, but conservation groups say the outfalls still spew more litter into canals and Lake Pontchartrain during the Carnival season. The upswing in trash is occurring alongside a seemingly contradictory trend of waste reduction. In recent years, many parade organizations, called krewes, have cut back on plastic beads and other “junk” throws. They’ve opted for higher-value items like socks, baseball caps, wooden cooking spoons, and metal drinking cups. Grounds Krewe and other groups have also expanded their recycling efforts. They set set up stations to collect bottles, cans, and reusable throws, and some volunteers even pick through the parade debris for recyclable items. This year, the groups diverted about 28 tons from landfills. That’s despite the city pulling back its support for recycling this year because of budget concerns. Even if the city government spent the $200,000 it initially earmarked for recycling, “it’s not going to reverse the 24 percent gain” in waste, Davis said. There was some hope that the volume of throws would be curbed by rising prices for beads and other trinkets, a result of higher inflation and President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on imports from China, where most beads are made. Some parade-goers said they noticed the change, taking to social media to complain about stingier krewes. “We are really perplexed,” Davis said. “All that is happening, with people throwing fewer beads and a lot of krewes switching to higher-quality throws, but waste is still going upward.” The swelling tonnage may have less to do with the throwers and more with the catchers. Davis and some city leaders say parade-goers are setting up earlier, staying longer, and bringing even more of the comforts of home: folding chairs, canopy tents, coolers, grills, and wagonloads of food. They’re also chaining together walls of ladders, erecting scaffolding, installing portable toilets, and plunking down generators and old sofas. As the season ends, many of these items are broken, dirty, or too much of a hassle to haul home. These abandoned items, which can range in weight from 5 pounds for a folding chair to 300 pounds for a couch, are an increasingly heavy lift for cleanup crews, City Council President JP Morrell said. “The reality is that they get their use out of this stuff, and then it becomes a tremendous amount of debris that our workers have to deal with because these people had no intention of ever picking this stuff up,” he said. “It goes towards a sense of abject entitlement — that our entire city exists to serve other people’s whims.” <img decoding="async" src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=330 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1536 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=160&h=90&crop=1 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=640&h=853&crop=1 640w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=96&h=96&crop=1 96w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=150 150w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mardi-gras-beads-ground-trash.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1024w" alt="people walk alongside a street covered in colorful plastic beads and trash" data-caption="Discarded Mardi Gras beads and trash cover a street after 2014 Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, Louisiana. " data-credit="Gerald Herbert / AP Photo"/> Discarded Mardi Gras beads and trash cover a street after 2014 Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, Louisiana. Gerald Herbert / AP Photo Many of these gear-laden revelers are territorial, roping off patches of sidewalk or spreading tarps across grassy street medians, known locally as neutral grounds. These public-space appropriators have come to be known as the “Krewe of Chad,” after the name, spraypainted across a large patch of grass, went viral in 2013. These “Chadders,” as Morrell calls them, appear emboldened by the recent ebb in the enforcement of the city’s parade rules. Officially, early birds aren’t supposed to set up until four hours before a parade starts, but this rule is regularly flaunted. In 2024, the list of banned items grew to include many of the things that have become commonplace — tents, tarps, and viewing platforms among them. A crackdown that year, which included the seizure of truckloads of encampment gear, appeared to briefly change behavior, Davis said. But last year, the city announced it would scale back enforcement and prioritize security after a terror attack on New Year’s Day killed 14 people on Bourbon Street. Enforcement was further scaled back by the city’s current budget crisis. Amid layoffs and other cutbacks aimed at reducing a $220 million deficit, Morrell admitted that efforts to clear Carnival encampments would be “spotty.” “How are they going to enforce it? Well, to be honest, we’re hard up for cash,” Morrell said on an Instagram post in early February. He stressed that police and other city departments would “do their best,” but enforcement wouldn’t be as “robust as it could be.” Torri, the sanitation director, said the city had the capacity to clear large items on just one day before the final cleanup on Fat Tuesday. “Mardi Gras Day was a major undertaking,” he told the council in March. Crews started working at 8 a.m. and didn’t finish until 1 a.m. “It’s a full day of cleaning because of everything that people have brought. Tarps, ladders, tents, coolers, grills are left because they’re disposable things that were only intended to last the weeks of Mardi Gras.” Davis predicted the trend toward fewer but better throws will continue, and his organization will keep pushing for more reuse and recycling. But, he added, the policies meant to curb parade encampments — and the waste they leave behind — are only as effective as their enforcement. “Having the krewes throw less is great, but what’s really heavy is a couch and all the stuff people brought out in wheelbarrows,” Davis said. “Unless we have police out there and the trucks to haul it away, this kind of behavior creeps back. And that’s what we’re seeing now.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New Orleans wants to fix its Mardi Gras mess. So why is the trash pile still growing? on May 11, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tristan Baurick.
Artist and technologist Angie Fan on putting in the time and thought
Your work has a quality of pulling the reader or viewer inside of it. Is that something you think about intentionally, or does it just happen?
Your work has a quality of pulling the reader or viewer inside of it. Is that something you think about intentionally, or does it just happen? That’s such an interesting way to describe it. I feel like when I write, it’s an encapsulation of my own thought processes. It’s sort of my little mark to say, “Hey, I was here. I’m out here. If you see me, let me know.” I think that has to do with so much of my foundational creative come-up being on the internet. The old internet felt much more like a place where you could carve out your own little world. People would leave little treasure troves around that you could find. I love getting to see into other people’s minds, into other worlds that they’ve created. That always felt so special to me. I think that’s something I’m still reaching for in my own work, whether it’s my writing or websites. They are little transmissions I’m putting out there. I’ve always loved the “message in a bottle” nature of digital environments. There’s a certain thrill to thinking about who might find what we share and how they will engage with it. That process can also be turned inward: one breadcrumb of a project or an idea can lead you to the next. When you look at your body of work, can you see a trail that you’ve left for yourself? Absolutely. I think there’s a constant thread through everything I do, and I find myself coming back to the same things over and over again. I’ve always been obsessed with technology as a means of transmission, as a means of communication. The internet and the computer are where I found my own voice. It’s also where I’ve made so many of my friends and connections. I think things come back to me again and again until I acknowledge them and try to give them a form. How do you know the difference between going in circles with a project versus actually going somewhere? I think looping and iteration are very much a part of the creative process. Often I find myself starting with a feeling or an idea. I know I want to get to a place and then it’s just a matter of putting in the time, the thought, and the effort until I get there. You can be looping and looping, and then sometimes you’ll have a conversation with a friend, or you’ll encounter new ideas about technology while you’re working, and that’s what kicks off new ideas. Maybe you’re running a lot of loops simultaneously and they’re all informing each other—so it’s not so much a closed, but expansive system. I don’t think of loops as a trap. In data theory and the theory of transmission, sending a signal is about sending transmissions over and over until you’re able to pull something out—until you get enough resolution to make sense of the signal. It can be obsessive. What are you obsessed with? I think one big one would be cuteness. I felt strongly enough to dedicate two years of my thesis to researching it—both publishing research and creating a virtual reality experience around cuteness. Cuteness is such an interesting container for understanding the world around us, including how humans interact with technology. It encompasses so many frameworks and ideas. Cuteness is an aesthetic—you can see a puppy or a baby and think, “Wow, that’s so cute.” But cuteness also elicits certain behaviors. It’s almost physiologically built into the way we perceive the world as a biological factor. Cuteness is a driver or a catalyst for the way we actually live our lives and the decisions we make. Even though my work is meant to be about cuteness and our relationship to it, it’s also meant to be observing cuteness. When you’re interacting with cuties, it’s reflecting back to you. It’s almost a blank canvas. It’s cute enough that you’re biologically going to engage with this creature, but then what happens in that space is up to you. You can hug them, pet them, care for them—or some people decide to box with them, punch them, throw them off into space, generate them and then absolutely destroy the horde. Those interactions say a lot more about the person who’s interacting with the cuties than about cuteness itself. Do you think there’s something about technology that our bodies sense but that our minds haven’t caught up to yet? I think humans are very willing to suspend their disbelief, and I think a lot of technology takes advantage of that. Our brains are created to fill in the blanks. We want that complete experience, that embodied experience… We like to have that complete picture. There’s so much research around how technology is hijacking our attention, how technology has created systems—maybe inadvertently—that control our behavior or shift the way that we act in an antisocial way. One of the things I wanted to explore with Applied Cuteness Research is to try to break us out of that loop and say, “Hey, do you see how a few design and aesthetic choices can change the way you’re perceiving this technology, the way you’re engaging with it, the way you’re behaving?” Or it can change the way you are feeling. Can you talk about a time in your creative life when technology hurt your feelings? I’ve become more frustrated with the direction that online ecosystems are going, especially with generative AI technologies and the way that slop is seeping into every corner of online media. Even a year ago, it was possible to go online with the expectation that you are engaging with individual voices—that what you’re seeing is reflective of one person’s thoughts or world. But now when I log on, I log on with the expectation of AI slop. And that really offends and upsets me when I think about it. It’s clear from the work you’ve done with communities and building platforms like Kinfolk or Community Bread that individual voices are something you value deeply. The discovery that I could use a computer and write my own code, and make a website and then people would see what I made, was so freeing. Creating websites were my first acts of agency as a child. I loved the amount of freedom and personal power it gave me. When I see the ways technology is being used now—especially when it comes to the platforms, and infrastructures, and systems being built by big tech—it makes me so angry. And I think that anger drives me to do the work I do in community. I see what’s happening and I have this sense of justice. Technology is supposed to help people. It’s not supposed to control them or force them into systems they didn’t sign up for. I really believe that technology should be built to free people, to support people, to help us live better lives. If you’re seeing that this is not happening, you have to be the one who does it. In the process of deciding to do the work, I found out there are other people thinking about this. That’s where the community emerges from. That’s where the power emerges from. I think what I share in public makes it seem like I am this dedicated strategist or organizer, but I really feel like I fell into this role because the things I want in this world are not happening. I just have to do it. It’s not a natural positioning for me. I much prefer to be behind the scenes, working deep in the server room where the mechanisms are. But I realized that work’s not going to happen if people aren’t also pushing it forward and putting it into the public imagination. I am intrigued by the idea of surrender in your work. What does that look like? Surrender is something I’ve had a reckoning with in the last year. I’ve realized that surrender is an important part of the process. I’ve been forced to surrender in many ways when it comes to my own art practice because I’ve been dealing with a massive bout of burnout. Back in 2023 I wrapped up the cuteness research, the virtual reality experience, and published research on it. And I realized that I pushed myself too hard in that process. I hate failing, so I pushed myself really hard. The last three years have been about me trying to figure out how to reframe the way I approach my work, my art, how I’m building—and learning that I have to make space for myself. I have to cherish my own health and body, because if that’s gone, I can’t do anything. It hasn’t looked like producing in a traditional sense, which doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. A lot more of my work has been internal. I’ve created spaces for myself to continue being creative, but I haven’t pressured myself to be public about it. Sometimes I log off work and just stare at a wall. What role does fantasy play in your work? And what is the fantasy? Is it cute? Fantasy is an extension of my actual surname, which is Fan. It’s also a reference to the fact that what you’re seeing online is a sort of persona. What you’re seeing of me as an artist, what’s being presented, is real, but it’s also slivers of what I’m choosing to share. Fantasy as a vehicle is so interesting because it can carry so many things. You can treat fantasy as a sort of archetype. But fantasy also establishes a space for exploration, for absurdity. Even though I sometimes think and talk about serious topics, I also like to make fun of myself. I like to use humor as a way to remind myself that it’s actually not that serious in the end. Angie Fan recommends: Staring at walls Keeping an album of cute animals Ryukin, a virtual goldfish app by Masataka Hakozaki Ursula M. Franklin’s lecture on “The Real World of Technology“ Hexas, a graphic novel by Ben Ross Davis This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Pola Pucheta.
In a triumphal move back toward democratic rule, Hungary's new leader Péter Magyar took his oath of office Saturday in a "regime-change" ceremony rich with symbolism before tens of thousands of jubilant constituents. The sense of a hopeful new politic...
In a triumphal move back toward democratic rule, Hungary's new leader Péter Magyar took his oath of office Saturday in a "regime-change" ceremony rich with symbolism before tens of thousands of jubilant constituents. The sense of a hopeful new political era resonated in both Magyar's tribute to the achievements of "ordinary, flesh-and-blood people," and in the gleeful moves and air guitar of unstoppable "dancing machine" and new Health Minister Zsolt Hegedűs. Lookit this guy boogie. Damn, we can't wait. The day's celebration" marked Magya's stunning defeat last month of authoritarian Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power. A 45-year-old lawyer who founded the center-right Tisza party in 2024, Magyar won a two-thirds majority over Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party, which will allow him to roll back many of Orbán’s policies. Tisza now controls 141 seats in the 199-seat Parliament, with over a quarter held by women; Fidesz won 52 seats, down from 135, and far-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) took six. Magyar has vowed to restore democratic institutions, clamp down on corruption, repair ties with the EU, where Orbán often vetoed key decisions including support for Ukraine, and unlock about $20 billion of EU funds to help jump-start Hungary's struggling economy, Magya was sworn in at the sprawling Parliament building as thousands of Hungarians gathered outside in Kossuth Square. Marking the sea change his victory represents, the EU flag flew for the first time since Orbán’ removed it in 2014, and the Beethoven-inspired European anthem Ode to Joy, symbolizing peace and solidarity, rang out. "Today, every freedom-loving person in the world would like to be Hungarian a little," Magya told the crowd in a message aimed at healing the deep divisions of Orbán's rule. "You have taught (the) world that the most ordinary, flesh-and-blood people can defeat the most vicious tyranny...Today is the fulfillment of a long journey made together (to) once again be a common homeland for all Hungarians." As the party went all day and into the night - when Magyar took on DJ duties - the high point of its joy and fervor may have come after Magyar's speech when Zsolt Hegedűs, unable to restrain himself, broke out into dancing as the singer Jalja began performing The Hanging Tree: "Strange things have happened here." Hungary's new 56-year-old Health Minister and an internationally recognised orthopaedic surgeon who spent 10 years working for the UK's NHS, Hegedűs had already gone viral last month when, on stage after Magyar's landslide victory, he busted out some fiery dance moves and air guitar in his excitement. This time, he said he wasn't planning a repeat performance. Then the music started... "I could see the audience had been waiting for this," he said. "I didn’t want to let down the people.” So off he went, delighting everyone (except, possibly, his kids if he has any) with his slick moves. The next day, he ascribed it all to his "emotional roller-coaster" since Magyar's victory, with his chance to repair Hungary's health care system, take down Orbán's hate-mongering propaganda, urge people to focus on their mental health. "It's not that I'm going to start dancing in Parliament, but I want (to) encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle...Go outside, dance, be together," he said. "The weight has begun to lift from people’s shoulders." America, weary, ravaged, hungry for peace, just imagine the miracle of it. And for now enjoy his glee. - YouTube www.youtube.com This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.
Call for Rotuman people to speak language or it could be ‘lost forever’
By Luka Forman, RNZ journalist A community leader from a tiny island says preserving her native tongue is more important than ever, as schools on the island itself have stopped teaching it. Rotuma is an island about 650km north of Fiji and is a dependency of Fiji. UNESCO lists Rotuman as definitely endangered and says
By Luka Forman, RNZ journalist A community leader from a tiny island says preserving her native tongue is more important than ever, as schools on the island itself have stopped teaching it. Rotuma is an island about 650km north of Fiji and is a dependency of Fiji. UNESCO lists Rotuman as definitely endangered and says there has been a sharp decline in fluent speakers. READ MORE: Other Language Week reports: NZ celebrates Rotuman language as part of Pacific Language Week series Solomon Islands elder in Wellington helping preserve Pijin language for the future Papua New Guinean woman says indigenous language ‘so important to hold on to’ ‘Preserve, revitalise, and promote’ PNG language Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group chair Rachel Mario, who also manages the NZ Rotuman Community Centre in Mt Roskill, said that made it even more important for the community here in New Zealand to keep learning and speaking it. “If we don’t revive the language or don’t do enough about it, we’ll lose it forever, so it’s quite important that anyone with Rotuman blood out there adhere to that,” she said. “If you don’t teach your kids and you don’t learn it, or you don’t speak it at home, it’s going to be lost forever.” According to the 2023 census, 1323 Rotumans live in New Zealand, though Rachel Mario said the number could be higher depending on how the ethnicity question was framed. ‘Also empowering’ “It’s their identity, it’s their culture. It’ll also empower them once they know who they are.” Rotuman Language Week started on Sunday, something Mario fought for two years to have recognised. NZ Rotuman Community Centre manager Rachel Mario . . . “Our culture and language are totally different from Fijian.” Image: RNZ/Mabel Muller “They kept saying no, because they think we’re Fijian and our culture is totally different. We speak different languages, we’re totally different from the Fijians.” The Rotuman Community Centre will be running activities throughout the week, including a church service, a decolonisation symposium and a seniors day. The Rotuman people are a distinct ethnic group, with their own Polynesian language culture and identity. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. Today’s event – “Let’s Talk: Decolonisation and safeguarding our Rotuman language” — 6.30pm, NZ Rotuman Community Centre, 165 Stoddard Rd, Mt Roskill <img decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-127603" src="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rotuman-Language-Week-2026.jpg" alt="The NZ Rotuman Community Centre's 2026 Language Week programme, May 10-17" width="680" height="954" srcset="https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rotuman-Language-Week-2026.jpg 680w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rotuman-Language-Week-2026-214x300.jpg 214w, https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rotuman-Language-Week-2026-299x420.jpg 299w" sizes="(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px" /> The NZ Rotuman Community Centre’s 2026 Language Week programme, May 10-17. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Majuro reels from huge power rate increase, as govt steps up cash programmes
By Giff Johnson, Marshall Islands Journal editor/RNZ Pacific correspondent One of the biggest electricity increases in the history of the Marshalls Energy Company was implemented last week — the first of a two-step tariff increase. Power charges rose by 6c per kWh across the board for government, business and residential. On May 18, the price
By Giff Johnson, Marshall Islands Journal editor/RNZ Pacific correspondent One of the biggest electricity increases in the history of the Marshalls Energy Company was implemented last week — the first of a two-step tariff increase. Power charges rose by 6c per kWh across the board for government, business and residential. On May 18, the price will rise another 5c per kWh, to put in place an 11-cent increase this month, according to a “tariff rate adjustment” announcement posted by the government utility company to its website earlier in the week. READ MORE: Other Pacific war on Iran fallout reports The power rate increases are expected to result in local businesses passing on the costs of the 21 percent electricity rate hike to consumers. This is the latest economic shock, following skyrocketing gas and diesel prices that have seen gas prices at the pump soar to US$8.40 per gallon, and diesel hit the US$10.35 mark. These led the local taxi industry to implement a 50 percent hike in taxi fares. While these fuel shocks continue to cascade in this small island nation, the government has responded in an unprecedented way, with more initiatives that put money into the hands of Marshallese citizens. The Marshall Islands government delayed the power company’s need to raise rates by providing a US$4 million subsidy for its power plant fuel purchase in early April. Postponed tariff The aim, said Finance Minister David Paul, was to postpone the power company’s tariff increase to allow time for a new tax break to take effect, putting additional money into the every-two-week paychecks of local workers. In late April, a few days before the power rates increased, the government’s unprecedented tax cut went into force, giving all workers paid on a biweekly basis US$25.60 more net income per paycheck. This plan was initiated over a year ago as part of a major revamp of the tax system and was supposed to go into effect next year. But when the US and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February, the measure that exempts the first US$8,320 from eight percent income tax was fast-tracked to go into effect at the end of April. Finance Minister David Paul said in an interview this week that workers in Marshall Islands will take home an additional US$665.60 on an annual basis from this initiative. It is the latest demonstration of President Hilda Heine’s government putting money into the hands of individual citizens. During her first term in office, from 2016-2020, Heine negotiated with the World Bank to support an Early Childhood Development programme to focus on cash transfers to mothers of children from birth to five years of age to counteract severe malnutrition in this age group. Since its inception in 2019, the World Bank-funded programme is now in its second phase and has injected US$40 million into the project. Mothers receive debit cards associated with their bank accounts at Bank of Marshall Islands and the programme provides regular conditional cash transfers to the mothers to help with needs of their young children. ‘Individual Support Distribution’ As a result of a proposal pushed by Paul when he was an opposition member of Parliament in the 2022-23 period, United States and Marshall Islands negotiators included an “Individual Support Distribution” provision in the Compact of Free Association treaty between the two countries. This set the stage for the Marshall Islands to become the first nation ever to provide universal basic income quarterly payments to every citizen when the program started last November with a payment of $203 to 33,000 citizens. Since then, an additional 7000 signed up so the universal basic income programme is paying 40,000 people per quarter at a rate of about $160. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="moz-reader-block-img" src="https://media.rnztools.nz/rnz/image/upload/s--K6E2_h6Q--/ar_16:10,c_fill,f_auto,g_auto,q_auto,w_1050/v1778292495/4JR4O04_enra_payment_ecc_gym_3_27_2026_gj_IMG_5773_JPG?_a=BACCd2AD" alt="Marshall Islanders lined up at the national gymnasium in Majuro to collect their quarterly universal basic income payment" width="1050" height="700" /> Marshall Islanders lined up at the national gymnasium in Majuro to collect their quarterly universal basic income payment. Image: Giff Johnson/RNZ Pacific The third quarterly payment for universal basic income recipients is expected to be released at the end of May. A new social support system that pays a $100 per month stipend to people with disabilities of any age and retirees who are not otherwise eligible for retiree payments was rolled out in April. This is putting cash into the hands of over 1000 Marshallese citizens each month. The tax reduction for workers, the universal basic income programme, the social support system monthly stipends, and the Early Childhood Development programme are all putting money into the hands of citizens in the Marshall Islands. Whether these cash programmes are enough to mitigate the inflation caused by the attack on Iran remains to be seen. On top of this, a $9 million grant from the World Bank, negotiated over a week ago, is now pending final board approval, said Paul. Budgetary support “This will be a grant for government “budgetary support,” meaning it is to “help us navigate through this crisis,” he said. The Marshalls Energy Company’s rate hike means that the cash power charges will increase twice in two weeks. The following shows the previous rate compared to what the rate will be per kWh from May 18 once the entire 11 cent increase is factored in. Government from 52¢ to 63¢ Commercial from 51.6¢ to 62.6¢ Residential from 43.2¢ to 54.2¢ “The $4 million subsidy in April bought some time to allow the tax cut to go into effect,” said Paul. “Any increase is hard for families, but MEC (Marshalls Energy Company) is giving it incrementally.” Paul added: “There are no easy answers (and) we don’t know how long this (high prices) will go on. Everything is aimed for MEC to land on firm footing and avoid insolvency.” The Finance Minister said the next universal basic income payment will be out at the end of May, providing $6.5 million to 40,000 Marshallese. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Ukraine, Russia Both Report Violations Of Three-Day Cease-Fire Deal
The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 10, 2026
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 10, 2026 appeared first on KPFA.
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 10, 2026 appeared first on KPFA. This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.
This summer, the American water crisis becomes real
Concerns over water access are poised to consume summer in the U.S., as crises in Corpus Christi and across the Colorado River threaten to boil over.
Two high-profile water crises, juiced up by climate change and industrial overuse, are building in the U.S. From a city in Texas staring down a drought emergency to a decades-long political crisis coming to a head for the states that rely on the Colorado River, water issues in the West will take center stage this summer — and experts tell WIRED that other places should take notes and start planning ahead for their own future. In February, following a winter of record-breaking heat, snowpack in various mountain ranges across the American West reached record lows. March came in even hotter, smashing records in states across the region. “What happened in March was unprecedented and stunning and disturbing and out of this world, frankly — we had temperatures the likes of which we have never seen and couldn’t have happened without human-caused climate change,” said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center. “We had a crummy snowpack that went from crummy to god-awful in three weeks.” This snowmelt crisis is having dire impacts on the Colorado River, one of the most crucial water sources in the West, which provides water for 40 million people across seven states. River flow in some areas on the Colorado had slowed to a trickle last week, thanks to the early snowmelt this year. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="A skier passes by an area of low snow coverage at Vail Ski Resort as temperatures reach into the 50s on March 18, 2026 in Vail, Colorado." class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/western-snowpack-drought-summer-water.jpeg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="900" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> The West’s unprecedented winter could fuel a summer of disaster Tik Root The Colorado River isn’t just a crucial water supply: It also provides power for more than 25 million people through dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the country. Low water levels in those reservoirs spell trouble for electricity generation. As of Tuesday morning, Lake Mead was sitting at just 17 feet above its record low level, set in July of 2022. This record dry season is also colliding with a decades-long political crisis on the Colorado River. For years, the states drawing water from the river have sparred over how to equitably divide the supply from the river, as the growth of agriculture and a series of climate-charged droughts have begun threatening the long-term water supply. Alfalfa for cattle feed is the biggest consumer of water from the Colorado, using more water than all of the cities along the river combined. States have missed key deadlines, including one in February, to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which regulates how water in the region is distributed. Each state gets an annual allotment, and the total amount of water is supposed to be divided evenly between an upper basin and a lower basin. Earlier this month, following dire projections for the summer, the U.S. Interior Department stepped in, announcing a series of actions intended to keep hydropower at Lake Powell running. The government acknowledges that this could lessen hydropower at Lake Mead as well as water availability in states along the lower part of the river. With all this chaos, there’s a chance, Udall said, that this season’s scarce water could cause a historic first in the next few years: States in the upper basin of the river could fail to deliver enough water to states in the lower basin, violating the 1922 agreement for the first time. This could trigger a potential lawsuit between states. “What’s frustrating to somebody like myself is this is all foreseeable,” said Udall. “Those of us who are kind of in the know, and that includes a lot of people in the Colorado River Basin, have seen something like this coming for a long, long time.” Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="A man stands looking at his phone next to the open door of a truck, with a power plant spewing smoke in the background" class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/GettyImages-2234529725-1.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="900" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> In Texas, Corpus Christi’s water crisis may be a glimpse into the future Rebecca Egan McCarthy Even with this dire set of circumstances, it’s unlikely that the millions of people who rely on the Colorado River will reach Day Zero, the term for when municipal water sources run dry. No U.S. city has ever gotten to that point. However, there’s a region that could be inching closer to this kind of catastrophe. Officials in Corpus Christi, the eighth-largest city in Texas, said last week that the city is set to reach a Level 1 drought emergency — what it defines as 180 days of water demand outpacing supply — by September. Some projections say that, barring major weather patterns that bring more rain, municipal water sources could run dry by next year. People living in Corpus Christi are already under restrictions for their water use, including limits on lawn watering and car washing. Residential water bills also increased by an average of just under $5 this year. City officials said that industrial customers would be asked to cut use by 25 percent in September. “We don’t want to wreck our economy,” Corpus Christi city manager Peter Zanoni told NBC News of the decision to wait until September to declare a Level 1 drought emergency, which would force those industrial customers to curb their use. “We don’t want to have operations close down.” Corpus Christi’s water supplies come overwhelmingly from surface water sources. Two of the most important local sources — the Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi — have reached critically low levels over the past few years as drought has gripped the region. As of Tuesday, they were sitting at 7.4 percent full and 8.7 percent full, respectively. Read Next <img src="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?quality=75&strip=all" alt="Construction of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company "megafab" plant in Phoenix. The Taiwanese company is investing $165 billion in multiple plants in the region." class="js-modal-gallery__hidden" srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?quality=75&strip=all 1600w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?resize=1200%2C675&quality=75&strip=all 1200w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?resize=330%2C186&quality=75&strip=all 330w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?resize=768%2C432&quality=75&strip=all 768w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?resize=1536%2C864&quality=75&strip=all 1536w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?resize=160%2C90&quality=75&strip=all 160w, https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TSMC-fab-Arizona.jpg?resize=150%2C84&quality=75&strip=all 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" height="900" width="1600" loading="lazy" decoding="async"> Arizona’s water is drying up. That’s not stopping the data center rush. Jake Bittle Many of the city’s problems stem from industrial water use. Corpus Christi is a major petrochemical hub, and the largest industrial consumer of water in the area, according to permit statistics obtained by Inside Climate News, is a joint Exxon Mobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation plastics plant. The plant used an average of 13.5 million gallons of water each day between 2022 and 2024. The average residential customer, according to the city, uses 6,000 gallons per month. (Exxon Mobil did not return a request for comment.) The city has discussed building a desalination plant to provide water to its industrial customers — including the Exxon plant, which began operating in 2022 — for years. But the project’s potential costs ballooned to more than $1 billion, while residents expressed concerns about the ecological impacts the plant could have. Last year, regulators voted to pass on the project, with no backup plan for water supply in place. On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office had denied Corpus Christi additional funding for a separate desalination plant. “Some lessons to learn from this situation that are important for a lot of cities, especially in the Southwest, is that water infrastructure projects are getting more expensive with time,” said Shane Walker, director of the Water and the Environment Research Center at Texas Tech University. “If you think you can wait around and get a cheaper deal on a water infrastructure project, it’s probably the opposite.” This push and pull between attracting business and what a city can maintain waterwise, Walker said, is a common tension for city planners. As more cities in Texas see population growth — and struggle with planning out their water needs — more of them need to be thinking much farther ahead. “You have to think of a 20-year time horizon as urgent,” Walker said. “If you’re relying on groundwater — groundwater is a finite resource. Lakes are vulnerable to drought. What’s your alternative supply?” There could be some short- and medium-term relief for both Corpus Christi and the Colorado River. At a water update briefing last week, Zanoni said that recent rains had been “beneficial” to the region, helping to boost water levels in Lake Texana, another water source for the city. Udall said that recent wet weather has also helped stabilize some conditions out West. And the upcoming El Niño phenomenon — forecast to be one of the most intense El Niños on record — could bring a heavy monsoon season to the West this summer. But both the municipal situation in Corpus Christi and the regional crisis for the Colorado River have specific similarities: a lack of attention to slow-building problems, exacerbated by industrial use. Climate change is pushing water crises like these to a new type of breaking point. “Around the world we’ve seen climate change events that are really big and massive,” Udall said of the crisis on the Colorado River. “Maybe this is the first worldwide climate change crisis that’s going to force really fundamental policy-level decisions to be made, and fundamental changes in how we operate. Seven states, two nations, 40-plus million people, a whole bunch of farmers, and major cities are going to have to completely rethink how they use this resource.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This summer, the American water crisis becomes real on May 10, 2026. This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Molly Taft, WIRED.
Iran war fallout – Trump is going to Beijing on bended knees
COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean Why is US President Donald Trump carrying on with his State visit to Beijing this week on May 14? I wouldn’t if I were him. It also shows that he is surrounded by incompetent officials. Any competent advisor would advise him against undertaking this trip. He goes as the leader of
COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean Why is US President Donald Trump carrying on with his State visit to Beijing this week on May 14? I wouldn’t if I were him. It also shows that he is surrounded by incompetent officials. Any competent advisor would advise him against undertaking this trip. He goes as the leader of a “defeated” nation, against a foe on which the United States has imposed the stiffest sanctions for 47 years. He will be viewed by the Chinese as the President that ended the American empire. READ MORE: Iran warns of attacks on US bases; Kuwait intercepts ‘hostile drones’ Other Palestine, attacks on Iran reports He thinks he is going as a conquering hero and can wow the Chinese with his empty boasts that America won a huge victory and destroyed Iran. He will be met by President Xi and the Chinese leadership with polite smiles and smirks of the greatest disrespect. If he has any EQ, he will know that his treatment in Beijing is going to be brutal. The Chinese may even gift him the symbolic white flag of surrender. You will see that in this summit, the US will be very much the junior partner. Iran will never give this defeated President the satisfaction of a peace agreement which he so desperately needs, and is begging for, before his trip to Beijing. They will make sure he goes to Beijing as a defeated man. Iran is not after a peace deal, but the total and comprehensive defeat of America as the global hegemon. Iran will see to it that the US gets out of the Middle East totally so that Israel is isolated and the Greater Israel project totally destroyed. Security architecture shifting Even as I write, the security architecture of the Middle East is shifting rapidly. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman are shifting their allegiances increasingly toward Iran, Russia and China. Fifty-five years of being America’s poodles are coming to an end. These countries have realised that the US is an unreliable partner and cannot guarantee their security. The stupid countries are the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, which still hitch their wagons to the Americans and Israel. They have dug their own graves. History has never witnessed another event as dramatic as the Iran war, where a global power has lost power and prestige in such a short period of 4 months. Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Australian ‘antisemitism’ – the Royal Conflation Commission is in session
Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
The Bondi Royal Commission started its public hearings in Australia last week — and the mainstream media is lapping up the “antisemitism” narrative while ignoring other Jewish voices, reports Michael West Media. ANALYSIS: By Stephanie Tran The first block of public hearings for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion began last week, focusing
The Bondi Royal Commission started its public hearings in Australia last week — and the mainstream media is lapping up the “antisemitism” narrative while ignoring other Jewish voices, reports Michael West Media. ANALYSIS: By Stephanie Tran The first block of public hearings for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion began last week, focusing on the prevalence and key drivers of antisemitism in Australia. Questions about representation and balance have already emerged, with critics arguing that the hearings are dominated by established, pro-Israel Jewish organisations, while progressive and non-Zionist voices remain marginal. A number of peak Jewish bodies giving evidence, including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Zionist Federation of Australia, National Council of Jewish Women of Australia, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and the Dor Foundation, are being represented by the same barristers and solicitors, Arnold Bloch Leibler. READ MORE: Australian antisemitism or anti-Zionism? Other Stephanie Tran reports In her opening remarks on Monday, Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell said she was “satisfied that these organisations represent the majority of Australian Jews”. The hearings will also include evidence from senior community figures, with counsel assisting Zelie Heger noting that they will provide a “bird’s-eye overview” of antisemitism in Australia. They include Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal and Jeremy Leibler, partner at Arnold Bloch Leibler and president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. Conflating Jewish identity with Israel Peter Wertheim, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told the Royal Commission on Tuesday that the pro-Palestine protests in the wake of October 7 were “shocking” and called the “endless repetition of the genocide charge” an attempt to “re-stigmatise Jews collectively”. Commissioner Bell granted limited leave to the Jewish Council of Australia to examine expert witnesses on the IHRA definition and survey data relating to antisemitic attitudes, describing it as representing “a distinct but much smaller section of the Jewish community”. That characterisation has been contested by some Jewish academics and advocates, who argue that the Jewish community is far more politically and ideologically diverse. Antony Loewenstein, an independent journalist, filmmaker and author of The Palestine Laboratory, and an advisory committee member of the Jewish Council of Australia, said it was “highly questionable” whether the organisations appearing before the commission reflected the breadth of Jewish opinion in Australia. “The Australian Jewish community is culturally, politically and religiously diverse, and it’s highly questionable if the most pro-Netanyahu, pro-Israel lobby groups represent the majority of Jews in the country.” Loewenstein criticised the tendency among these organisations to conflate Jewish identity with the actions of the Israeli state. “Conflating Israel and Judaism, pursued by the so-called mainstream Jewish groups in Australia, is both historically inaccurate and dangerous, tying Jews to the actions of a genocidal Jewish state.” Professor Linda Briskman, the Margaret Whitlam Chair of Social Work at Western Sydney University and also on the advisory committee of the Jewish Council of Australia, said her research into Jewish Australians critical of Israeli government policies pointed to a different picture from that presented by peak bodies. Briskman co-authored Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out, a report examining the experiences of Australian Jews who oppose Israeli policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “What we’ve found is that opposition to Israel’s actions is grounded not in the rejection of Jewish identity but in deeply held ethical commitments rooted in Jewish traditions of justice,” she said. She added that Jews expressing dissenting views often face “significant personal and social consequences”, and said that antisemitism should be addressed alongside other forms of racism. “We should be concerned about all forms of racism,” she said. “Racism against Jewish people shouldn’t be treated as the exception. We know that Islamophobia has risen greatly since October 7, but that doesn’t get nearly as much publicity or attention.” Jewish Council of Australia The Jewish Council of Australia, which represents Jewish Australians and supports Palestinian rights while opposing antisemitism and racism, was granted leave on Friday to cross-examine expert witnesses on the IHRA definition and data relating to antisemitism. In a letter to supporters, executive director Sarah Schwartz said the group was seeking to raise funds to cover legal representation at the hearing. “Pro-Israel legacy organisations, who receive significant public funding, have already formed a conglomerate and briefed a large team of barristers and lawyers,” she wrote. Schwartz said the balance of representation would shape how the hearings are understood publicly, telling Michael West Media: “If the only Jewish groups represented in these hearings are Israel-aligned, it will have a significant impact on the narrative.” “Having us in the room will be the single most effective way we can ensure these hearings are not exploited to pursue a right-wing agenda and demonise Palestinians, Muslims, immigrants and those speaking out against Israel’s genocide.” IHRA definition The hearings will scrutinise the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. In opening remarks, Commissioner Bell acknowledged divisions within the Jewish community over the definition, noting concerns that it could be used to suppress criticism of Israel. “The Jewish community is not monolithic, and there exist divisions of view amongst them about matters that include the politics of the Middle East,” she said. “I’m conscious that some Jews and other members of the Australian community believe that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism can be weaponised in order to suppress criticism of Israel.” However, Commissioner Bell defended its use, arguing that conduct must be assessed in context. “I consider that some of the criticisms of the IHRA definition proceed on a misconception,” she said. “The examples of conduct under that working definition that may constitute antisemitism are just that. “In every case, the question of whether the conduct is to be assessed as antisemitic is considered in its overall context. “I expect the application of the IHRA definition will be fleshed out in the course of the evidence of witnesses in this first block of hearings by witnesses who have appropriate expertise.” ‘When anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism’ Counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Richard Lancaster SC, said a key task for the inquiry “is to identify when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism”. He described Zionism as “the belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral and biblical homeland of Israel”, which he said is a “core value” for many Australian Jews. Lancaster said that some examples within the IHRA definition suggest that, depending on context, “it could be antisemitic to deny that right to self-determination,” attribute collective responsibility to Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, or express hatred on the basis of perceived loyalty to Israel. “A further aspect of this is that current Australian political and social commentary undoubtedly displays many instances of very strongly expressed criticism of the polarising actions of Israel’s current government,” he added, stating that expert witnesses would be asked to help distinguish between legitimate political criticism and antisemitic rhetoric. “One of the experts to be called is Dr Dave Rich, who is the director of policy at the Community Security Trust in London, as research fellow at the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism,” Lancaster said. Rich “is a leading expert on left-wing antisemitism”. He has rejected the UN’s finding that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, stating that UN’s finding “has put the final nail in the coffin of Israel’s reputation, but it is as shoddy and partisan as every other attempt to pin the genocide label onto the Jewish State”. In March, Rich delivered a keynote at a conference launching a new national approach to addressing antisemitism in Australian schools, developed by UNESCO and implemented by the Office of the Special Envoy on Combating Antisemitism. Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award. This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
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