#International Press Institute

[endimpunityday]

Session VII: Strengthening Pan-African Mechanisms and synergies for Monitoring and Reporting on Safety of Journalists.

5:15 - 5:45 pm. International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists 2024.

- Mr. Issaka Garba Abdou (TBC), Head, Governance and Human Rights Division, African Union

- Mr. Omar Faruk Osman, President, Federation of African Journalists (FAJ)

- Mr. Churchill Otieno, President, The African Editors Forum (TAEF)

è Ms. Rachel Nakitare, International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IWRT)

- Ms. Nompilo Simanje, Africa Advocacy and Partnership Lead, International Press Institute (IPI)

[crinaboros]

Bullied over a Freedom of Information request for environmental data

As data reporter, I'm used to working with databases, not being the subject of one.

But following an aggressive episode to persuade me to give up on an FOI request pursuing government transparency sent to the Romanian Environment Ministry, I ended up in a database.

In particular, a map of media freedom abuses, which I warmly recommend to any journalist who has ever faced harassment, threats, humiliation or abuse of any kind in pursuit of transparency.

Media Freedom Map features the particulars of this case, currently under investigation at the Romanian Ministry of Environment - https://lnkd.in/ek9ikRH6.

The International Press Institute has expressed “concern over major obstruction facing journalists in accessing public data on illegal logging and deforestation”.

Difficult access to environmental data is part of EU’s logging infringement against Romania, currently unfolding.

[panicinthestudio]

Further reading:

HKFP: Overseas Hongkongers, mainland Chinese hold Tiananmen crackdown vigils as city’s tribute suppressed, June 5, 2023

HKFP: Hong Kong police urged to give explanation after journalist taken away on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary, June 6, 2023

HKFP: Hong Kong police remove ‘seditious’ Tiananmen crackdown candle banner from Sai Kung shop, June 6, 2023

HKFP: Hong Kong law is ‘clearly stated,’ John Lee says when asked about arrests over Tiananmen crackdown anniversary, June 6, 2023

HKFP: Hong Kong pollster axes release of Tiananmen anniversary survey results, citing gov’t ‘suggestions’, June 6, 2023

[probablyasocialecologist]

“The Israeli military has a history of attacks on media structures,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna explained. In May 2021, a tower housing the Qatari media organization Al Jazeera and the American news agency The Associated Press (AP) was destroyed by three missiles, on the basis, the Israeli military claimed, of an imminent threat posed by Hamas’s presence in the building. When questioned publicly, Israel provided no evidence to support this claim. Since October 7, 2023, the phenomenon has taken on unprecedented proportions. In response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli soil, the Israeli military has relentlessly bombarded the Gaza Strip, a 365-square-kilometer territory barely larger than Malta. News coverage in the Gaza Strip has become extremely limited. “When you look at the conflicts around the world … you would usually have the international media on the ground,” said Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. “None of them have been allowed access. Or they’re embedded within the IDF.” Only Gazan journalists can report on what is happening in the Gaza Strip. They struggle daily to survive and find places to take refuge. In many cases, their places of work no longer exist. According to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS), around 70 press organizations, including local radio stations, news agencies, transmission towers, and journalist training institutes, have been partially or completely destroyed since the start of the war. Forbidden Stories has carried out this investigation in collaboration with AFP, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, Le Monde, Paper Trail Media and other international media outlets as part of the Gaza Project. Supported by the analyses of experts in ballistics and audio, it illustrates one of the many strategies used by the Israeli military to stifle information in Gaza: the destruction of press infrastructure.

25 June 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth

It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.

The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.

These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.

Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Beyond providing comfort to "Politically Exposed Persons" and "High Net-Worth Individuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats. These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun – and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.

To fight this "Boomerang Effect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities. They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.

When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups – they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors. Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights – provided they don't target the Russian state.

If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of organized copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK – the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence – Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep

They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab

They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair

Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent. The Golden Passports of the EU – available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese – offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the Khmer Riche – the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/

But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on diplomatic passports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).

All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have extensive properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).

This stuff works. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM Tony Blair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any kind of international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of commodities for sale in the UK to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).

The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.

But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, Gulnara Karimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited – and received – bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan. All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister. She and her husband Timur Tillyaev ran the Dubai-based SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque Scottish Limited Partnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets – a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.

Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador." She was a UNESCO ambassador and commissioned works of monumental art – and also sued the shit out of news outlets that reported factual matters about her family repressive activity at home. She organized AIDS charities in the name of Uzbekistan – even as her father was imprisoning a writer for publishing a book explaining how to have safer sex.

The second case-study is on Isabel dos Santos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries. Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.

Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" – a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm PLMJ. Her enablers are who's who of corruption-loving lickspittles: McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, and the Spanish BigLaw firm Uri Menendez.

Isabel cultivated a public facade of philanthropic giving and public spirited activism, serving as head of the Angolan Red Cross. She attended Davos and spoke at the LSE (she was also invited to Oxford, but her invitation was subsequently rescinded). On social media, she dismissed critics of her wealth and corruption as "colonialists," decrying their "racism" and "prejudice."

Isabel dos Santos's corrupt sources of wealth were finally, irrefutably exposed through the Luanda Leaks, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mapped the network of "top banks, management consultants and legal firms that were central to dos Santos’s operations."

Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world's greatest monsters would falter. It's a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

This point was reiterated by Abigail Disney, in a brave piece on what it's like to grow up subject to the oversight of these millionaires who babysit the children of billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

This is an important contribution to the literature. We naturally focus on the ultrawealthy individuals whose reputations and fortunes are the subject of so much attention, but without the TUSNs, they would be largely helpless.

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Colin (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_from_the_dome_on_Methodist_Central_Hall_(cropped).jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[uwmspeccoll]

Indigenous People's Day

DR. HENRIETTA MANN Cheyenne

On this Indigenous Peoples' Day, we are featuring Matika Wilbur’s recent publication Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America, published by Ten Speed Press in 2023. Wilbur (b. 1984) is a visual storyteller and member of the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples of coastal Washington. She holds a degree from the Brooks Institute of Photography alongside a teaching certificate that has shaped her style of educating through narrative portraits.  

Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America, a book born from a documentary project of the same name, resolves to share contemporary Native issues and culture. In 2012 Wilbur set out from Seattle to visit and photograph all 562 plus Native American sovereign territories in the United States.

Wilbur’s engagement with the communities she visited resulted in the creation of hundreds of dynamic portraits and documentation of conversations about “tribal sovereignty, self-determination, wellness, recovery from historical trauma, decolonization of the mind, and revitalization of culture.” She refers to her portraiture approach as “an indigenous photography method” that includes several hours and sometimes days of interaction with the participants, an exchange of energy and gifts, and asking sitters to choose their portrait location. The outcome is a stunning collection of Native narratives and portraits.  

GREG BISKAKONE JOHNSON Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians

HOLLY MITITQUQ NORDLUM  Iñupiaq

J. MIKO THOMAS Chickasaw Nation

MOIRA REDCORN Osage, Caddo

HELENA and PRESTON ARROW-WEED Taos Pueblo/Kwaatsaan, Kamia

STEPHEN YELLOWTAIL Apsáalooke (Crow Nation)

LEI'OHU and LA'AKEA CHUN Kānaka Maoli

ORLANDO BEGAY Diné

KALE NISSEN Colville Tribes

GRACE ROMERO PACHECO Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians

ISABELLA and ALYSSA KLAIN Diné

NANCY WILBUR Swinomish

DR. JEREMIAH "JERRY" WOLFE Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

RUTH DEMMERT Tlingit

MARVA SII~XUUTESNA JONES Tolowa Dee-Ni' Nation, Yurok, Karuk, Wintu

Matika Wilbur will be speaking on UW-Milwaukee's campus Thursday, November 16 from 6-7p.m. in conjunction with her exhibition Seeds of Culture: The Portraits and Voices of Native American Women on view at the Union Art Gallery November 16 through December 15, 2023. 

-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

We acknowledge that in Milwaukee we live and work on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homelands along the southwest shores of Michigami, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present.

[thousandyearphantombunker]

So I have to write a press release about a crisis for a fictional organization and I'm allowed to be as unrealistic as I want so long as its in AP format and I show off my crisis communication skills. I am basically treating this as a chance to write fanfic but I don't know what organization to chose so Tumblr gets to pick

[satellitebroadcast]

Hamas: Telegram

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful The zionist occupation army's attack today [September 2] on journalists while they were covering the aggression on Jenin, and the direct shooting at them, is systematic state terrorism practiced against journalists, aiming to obscure the truth, and prevent journalists from performing their duty to convey the suffering of our people and the brutal crimes they are subjected to at the hands of the Nazi occupation government. While we commend the courage of journalists working in Gaza and the West Bank, and their insistence on covering the zionist aggression, despite the violations and crimes they are subjected to and the martyrdom of dozens of them by the fire of the zionist enemy, we call on all international press institutions to condemn the repeated crimes of the occupation against Palestinian journalists, and to work to expose them, and to exert pressure by all means to stop them. Islamic Resistance Movement - Hamas Monday: 29 Safar 1446 AH Corresponding to: September 2, 2024 AD

[akajustmerry]

couldn’t find anything about the murdochs suppressing press freedom would you mind sharing links please

ooooooft okay. i do forget that not everyone is aware of these things. but!! if you wanna know why dominant news media in the global north sucks / wanna be more aware of media influence on politics / wanna appreciate succession more - here is a 'fuck the murdochs' reading list

a recent article on the current court case between Fox News (founded by Rupert Murdoch) and Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is claiming defamation after Fox News pushed the lie the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which led to the Jan 6 riots.

Opinion piece by former Aus PM Malcolm Turnball on why he's leading a campaign requesting a Royal Commission into Murdoch's monopoly over Australia's press and Murdoch's unjust influence on Australian politics

here is a podcast breaking down how Lachlan Murdoch (irl Kendall) is suing an independent paper here in Aus for connecting the Jan 6 insurrection to fearmongering of Murdoch press in the States. like, he is literally suing journalists for accurate reporting. that *is* suppressing freedom of the press by definition.

The Murdochs: Empire of Influence (2022). 6 part documentary featuring historians, journalists, ex-employees etc. covers everything there is to know about the family's role in press and politics from world war 1 up to 2022.

Book: Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch Succession by veteran anti-Murdoch journalist Paul Barry. The book is from 2013, but is a thoroughly accessible analysis of on the family's rise

Vanity Fair also recently published this hugeeeeee investigation: Inside Rupert Murdoch's Succession Drama

The official Succession podcast is free and discusses the show's influences pretty openly. it doesn't go super in-depth (probably because they don't want to be sued) but it makes mention and discussion of real events and people that influence the show.

just for good measure: here is a list of every news outlet and publisher and media outlet the Murdoch family own across the US, UK, Europe and Asia. handy for when you do your own research, which you should so you're not reading from *their* sources. The whole reason you have trouble finding this kind of information on them is because they suppress it, or make it hard to find.

like... i know a lot of people don't know this, but Succession is a political satire and is about a very specific group of people who are actively shaping the world for the worst so they can become rich and never live with the consequences. the majority of Jesse Armstrong's work is about how internal dynamics between people in powerful institutions literally shape society. if you don't understand that's what Succession is then you're actually missing a huge part of it. so i hope you, and anyone else who needs it, take a gander at these resources because you won't only understand Succession more, but the state of your local politics and media too.

[versalles]

If you like Moo Deng please read this:

Disclaimer: Animal Abuse

As I have seen the famous Hippo gaining some popularity I’d like to speak up about the story of Gustavito, the Salvadorean Hippo. This is hard for me to tell as it still haunts me and makes me cry, but I think his story must be told. One day, a group ofn entered his space at the national zoo and violently attacked him with metal sticks and wooden sticks, then hit him several times. The reason? Political reasons. This makes no sense at all, the institutions that were supposed to take care of him failed them and they all gave wrong information and changed his autopsy every god damn time, so to the date, there has been 0 acknowledge, 0 people signaled as the culprits, and 0 statements from the government. International institutions did not care to speak about this matter, but thankfully it was all documented by the press. You can look online: Muerte de Gustavito el Hipopotamo Salvadoreño, if you desire to obtain more information about this matter.

Please share so we cannot forget that zoos in third world countries do not protect the animals and that the government and politics are capable of literally anything in order to obtain fame and pretend they are heroes. Who paid this people to hurt a sleeping and sick Hippo at night? How is it possible that no one looked at any of the faces of whoever entered the zoo? Gustavito made us happy, gustavito had no guilt whatsoever to live in this Shithole country.

Raise awareness and please pray for his soul ♡︎ no matter if you are religious or not, i believe that gustavito meant no harm for this world and that he deserves to be remembered as a sweet boy ♡︎

[gothhabiba]

Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)

The Court indicates provisional measures

The Hague, 26 January 2024. The International Court of Justice today delivered its Order on the Request for the indication of provisional measures submitted by South Africa in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).

It is recalled that, on 29 December 2023, South Africa filed an Application instituting proceedings against Israel concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In its Application, South Africa also requested the Court to indicate provisional measures in order to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention” and “to ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide” (see press release No. 2023/77).

Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures were held on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 January 2024.

In its Order, which has binding effect, the Court indicates the following provisional measures:

“(1) By fifteen votes to two, The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke; AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;

(2) By fifteen votes to two, The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke; AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;

(3) By sixteen votes to one, The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judges ad hoc Barak, Moseneke; AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde;

(4) By sixteen votes to one, The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judges ad hoc Barak, Moseneke; AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde;

(5) By fifteen votes to two, The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke; AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak;

(6) By fifteen votes to two, The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order.

IN FAVOUR: President Donoghue; Vice-President Gevorgian; Judges Tomka, Abraham, Bennouna, Yusuf, Xue, Bhandari, Robinson, Salam, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brant; Judge ad hoc Moseneke; AGAINST: Judge Sebutinde; Judge ad hoc Barak.”

*Judge XUE appends a declaration to the Order of the Court; Judge SEBUTINDE appends a dissenting opinion to the Order of the Court; Judges BHANDARI and NOLTE append declarations to the Order of the Court; Judge ad hoc BARAK appends a separate opinion to the Order of the Court.

[calabria-mediterranea]

Italy: Public service RAI becomes a “megaphone” of the government

Public service broadcaster RAI has decided to grant ministers and undersecretaries unrestricted airtime on its programs when referring to institutional matters. On 11 April, journalists and news hosts on the main channels of RAI interrupted news programs to read a statement from the Rai Union of Journalists (USIGRai) statement explaining RAI’s new policy, and condemning it, comparing RAI to the government’s “megaphone”. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ-EFJ) together with their affiliate the Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana (FNSI) condemn this further attempt to politicise public information services for propaganda purposes and demand that RAI respects fundamental journalistic principles.

“The government majority has decided to transform RAI into its own megaphone,” so began the speech of USIGrai journalists in the aftermath of the policies announced by RAI’s Supervisory Commission. This approved a rule allowing government representatives to “speak in talks without time constraints and cross-examination”.

The statement continued: “This is not our idea of public service broadcasting. Journalists’ work should be central, where they ask questions, even uncomfortable ones, verify what has been said, and point out inconsistencies. For this reason, dear viewers, we inform you that we are ready to mobilise to guarantee you independent, balanced and plural information."

Another rule will allow Rai News to broadcast political rallies at any time, and in full, announced only by a short introduction and without journalistic mediation

RAI’s decision illustrates once again Italy’s government's attempts to make use of public service for personal and propagandistic purposes, and in contravention of the main pillars of journalists' work.

President of FNSI, Vittorio di Trapanisaid: “RAI News risks becoming a deluge of electoral rallies, trampling on the editorial autonomy of its journalists and its editorial team.”

The IFJ/EFJ stated: “We stand in full solidarity with RAI journalists, whose press freedom and ethical principles are being undermined by the Italian government. We remind RAI of its need to respect fundamental journalistic principles as they are stated in the IFJ Global Charter of Ethics for journalists. We ask the Supervisory Commission to review its decision and to allow transparent and pluralistic information in compliance with the principles of cross-examination and the public interest.”l

Source: IFJ

[probablyasocialecologist]

Israeli soldiers are no longer shooting and crying. They are shooting and dancing, shooting and grilling, shooting and praying, or just shooting and mutilating. Soldiers post TikTok reels from the frontlines filled with laughter, celebratory songs, prayers, and inspirational messages. Prominent politicians and thousands of regular users respond with exclamation points and flame emojis in widespread demonstrations of support. The posts contrast grimly with the destruction in the background. But in a war of retribution, destruction is the point.

[...]

Some international outlets claim most Israelis are not privy to the suffering in Gaza due to empathy fatigue, confirmation bias, or stringent military censorship of local press. Others report that algorithmically determined news feeds have prevented many Israelis from seeing images of Palestinian suffering. But to say, “If only Israelis could see what is happening in Gaza, they would demand an end to the violence” ignores the political reality and majority. This is arguably one of the most documented wars in history. Accounts of the humanitarian catastrophe and mass death in Gaza saturate foreign press and the social media feeds of people worldwide. The inconvenient truth is decades of war and dehumanization—tacitly supported by the United States and Israel’s other staunch allies—have largely closed one side off to the other’s suffering. In 2002, amid the height of the second intifada—a bloody five-year period marked by suicide bombings in Israeli cities and military raids on Palestinian communities—the critic Susan Sontag observed, “[To] those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or a hero.” As 75 years of photographs attest, this has long been the case in Israel. But the sentiment may be more popular than ever: According to a survey by the Jerusalem-based think tank the Israel Democracy Institute, as of December 2023, 75 percent of Jewish Israelis opposed agreeing to the U.S. demand that Israel decrease the intense bombing of heavily populated areas in Gaza. Only 1.8 percent viewed Israel’s use of force as disproportionate.

20 Mar 2024

[mightyflamethrower]

“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-President Joe Biden, August 16, 2023 

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught, but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

Biden blew up the Abraham accords, nudged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States over to the dark side of Iran, China, and Russia. He humiliated the U.S. on the eve of the midterms by callously begging the likes of Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to pump more oil that he had damned as unclean at home and cut back its production. In Bidenomics, instead of producing oil, the president begs autocracies to export it to us at high prices while he drains the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve for short-term political advantage.

Biden deliberately alienated Israel by openly interfering in its domestic politics. He pursued the crackpot Iran Deal while his special Iranian envoy was removed for disclosing classified information.

No one can explain why Biden ignored the Chinese balloon espionage caper, kept mum about the engineered Covid virus that escaped the Wuhan lab, said not a word about a Chinese biolab discovered in rural California, and had his envoys either bow before Chinese leaders or take their insults in silence—other than he is either cognitively challenged or leveraged by his decade-long grifting partnership with his son Hunter.

Yet another Biden’s legacy will be erasing the southern border and with it, U.S. immigration law. Over seven million aliens simply crossed into the U.S. illegally with Biden’s tacit sanction—without audits, background checks, vaccinations, and COVID testing, much less English fluency, skills, or high-school diplomas.

Biden’s only immigration accomplishment was to render the entire illegal sanctuary city movement a cruel joke. Given the flood, mostly rich urban and vacation home dwellers made it very clear that while they fully support millions swarming into poor Latino communities of southern Texas and Arizona, they do not want any illegal aliens fouling their carefully cultivated nests.

Biden is mum about the 100,000 fentanyl deaths from cartel-imported and Chinese-supplied drugs across his open border. He seems to like the idea that Mexican President Obrador periodically mouths off, ordering his vast expatriate community to vote Democratic and against Trump.

Despite all the pseudo-blue collar dissimulation about Old Joe Biden from Scranton, he has little empathy for the working classes. Indeed, he derides them as chumps and dregs, urges miners to learn coding as the world covets their coal, and studiously avoids getting anywhere near the toxic mess in East Palestine, Ohio, or so far the moonscape on Maui.

Bidenomics is a synonym for printing up to $6 billion dollars at precisely the time post-Covid consumer demand was soaring, while previously dormant supply chains were months behind rebooting production and transportation. Biden is on track to increase the national debt more than any one-term president.

In Biden’s weird logic, if he raised the price of energy, gasoline, and key food staples 20-30 percent since his inauguration without a commensurate rise in wages, and then saw the worst inflation in 40 years occasionally decline from record highs one month to the next, then he “beat inflation.”

But the reason why more than 60 percent of the nation has no confidence in Bidenomics is because it destroyed their household budgets. Gas is nearly twice what it was in January 2021. Interest rates have about tripled. Key staple foods are often twice as costly—meat, vegetables, and fruits especially.

Biden has ended through his weaponized Attorney General Merrick Garland the age-old American commitment to equal justice under the law. The FBI, DOJ, CIA, and IRS are hopelessly politically compromised. Many of their bureaucrats serve as retrieval agents for lost Biden family incriminating laptops, diaries, and guns. In sum, Biden criminalized opposing political views.

Biden has unleashed the administrative state for the first time in history to destroy the Republican primary front runner and his likely opponent. His legacy will be the corruption of U.S. jurisprudence and the obliteration of the American reputation for transparent permanent government that should be always above politics, bribery, and corruption.

If in the future, an on-the-make conservative prosecutor in West Virginia, Utah, or Mississippi wishes to make a national name, then he has ample precedent to indict a Democrat President for receiving bad legal advice, questioning the integrity of an election, or using social media to express doubt that the new non-Election-Day balloting was on the up-and-up, or supposedly overvaluing his real estate.

The Biden family’s decade-long family grifting will likely expose Joe Biden as the first president in U.S. history who fitted precisely the Constitution’s definition of impeachment and removal—given his “high crimes and misdemeanors” appear “bribery”-related. If further evidence shows he altered U.S. foreign policy in accordance with the wishes from his benefactors in Ukraine, China, or Romania, then he committed constitutionally-defined “treason” as well.

Defunding the police, and pandemics of exempted looting, shoplifting, smashing, and grabbing, and carjacking merit no administrative attention. Nor does the ongoing systematic destruction of our blue bicoastal cities, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. All that, along with the disasters in East Palestine or Maui are out of sight, out of mind from a day at the beach at Biden’s mysteriously purchased nearly 6,000 square-foot beachfront mansion.

Biden ran on Barack Obama-like 2004 rhetoric (“Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America).”

And like Obama, he used that ecumenical sophistry to gain office only to divide further the U.S. No sooner than he was elected, we began hearing from the great unifier eerie screaming harangues about “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” dangerous zealots, replete with red-and black Phantom of the Opera backdrops.

What followed the unifying rhetoric was often amnesties and exemptions for violent offenders during the 120 days of rioting, looting, killing, and attacks on police officers in summer 2020.  In contrast, his administration lied when it alleged that numerous officers had died at the hands of the January 6 rioters. In addition, the Biden administration mandated long-term incarceration of many who committed no illegal act other than acting like buffoons and “illegally parading.”

The message was exemptions for torching a federal courthouse, a police precinct, or historic church or attempting to break into the White House grounds to get a president and his family—but long prison terms for wearing cow horns, a fur vest, and trespassing peacefully like a lost fool in the Capitol.

Finally, Biden’s most glaring failure was simply being unpresidential. He snaps at reporters, and shouts at importune times. He can no longer read off a big-print teleprompter. Even before a global audience, he cannot kick his lifelong creepy habit of turkey-gobbling on children necks, blowing into their ears and hair of young girls, and squeezing women far too long and far too hard.

His frailty redefined American presidential campaigning as basement seclusion and outsourcing propaganda to the media. And his disabilities only intensified during his presidency. Biden begins his day late and quits early. He has recalibrated the presidency as a 5-hour, 3-day a week job.

If Trump was the great exaggerator, Biden is our foremost liar. Little in his biography can be fully believed. He lies about everything from his train rides to the death of his son to his relationship with Biden-family foreign collaborators, to vaccinations to the economy. Anytime Biden mentions places visited, miles flown, or rails ridden, he is likely lying.

Biden continues with impunity because the media feels that a mentally challenged fabulist is preferable to Donald Trump and so contextualizes or ignores his falsehoods. Never has a U.S. president fallen and stumbled or gotten lost on stage so frequently—or been a single small trip away from incapacity.

So, yes, Biden’s initiatives have succeeded only in the sense of becoming successfully enacted—and therefore nearly destroying the country.

[workersolidarity]

[ 📹 Civil Defense crews pull the body of a casualty out from under the rubble of his home after the Israeli occupation forces bombed residential buildings in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday. ]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚀🏘️💥🚑 🚨

274 DAYS OF GENICIDE IN THE GAZA STRIP: FUEL RUNS DRY AS HOSPITALS STRUGGLE TO CONTINUE OPERATING, MORE THAN 10'000 PALESTINIANS NOW MISSING UNDER THE RUBBLE, MORE MASSACRES AS ISRAELI OCCUPATION FORCES TARGET CIVILIAN HOMES ENDLESSLY

On 274th day of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a total of 3 new massacres of Palestinian families, resulting in the deaths of no less than 29 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, while another 100 others were wounded over the previous 24-hours.

It should be noted that as a result of the constant Israeli bombardment of Gaza's healthcare system, infrastructure, residential and commercial buildings, local paramedic and civil defense crews are unable to recover countless hundreds, even thousands, of victims who remain trapped under the rubble, or who's bodies remain strewn across the streets of Gaza.

This leaves the official death toll vastly undercounted as Gaza's healthcare officials are unable to accurately tally those killed and maimed in this genocide, which must be kept in mind when considering the scale of the mass murder.

Gaza's Ministry of Health is giving warning today, Saturday, July 6th, on the potential repercussions for the ongoing fuel crises on the few remaining healthcare facilities operating in the Gaza Strip, in light of the austerity measures hospitals have been forced to implement as a result of the scarcity of fuel as the Israeli occupation continued blocking deliveries to the Strip.

In a press conference on Saturday, the Ministry said, "we warn again of the continuing fuel crisis needed to operate hospital generators, oxygen stations, and medicine refrigerators in all health facilities remaining in operation in the Gaza Strip."

"Severe austerity measures are being followed in the face of the distillation policy of supplying very small quantities of fuel," the Ministry continued, going on to add that "many departments within the remaining hospitals operating in the sector have been shut down due to the crisis."

This comes even as the Israeli occupation army continues its bombing campaign, leaving scores of dead and wounded who arrive at hospitals in Gaza with horrific trauma injuries, many of which require intensive care and services such as oxygen that have been in critical shortage since May. That's when the Zionist army took over the Palestinian side of the Rafah and Karm Abu Salem border crossings, burning the Rafah crossing to the ground and preventing humanitarian aid deliveries, including fuel imports.

According to the Palestinian state-run WAFA News Agency, just 15 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip remain in operation, all of them only partially functional, and are all facing a severe shortage of staff, medicines, and medical supplies, including essentials such as anesthesia and antibiotics, leaving healthcare personnel struggling to save lives as the occupation's shelling continues to target civilian neighborhoods.

Additionally, approximately 500 healthcare workers have been killed since the start of the occupation's genocide in Gaza, with hundreds more that have been wounded in Israeli attacks, while the Zionist army has arrested at least 310 medical personnel and destroyed more than 130 ambulances over the last 9 months.

Previously, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the volume of medicines and medical supplies entering the Gaza Strip is insufficient to sustain the healthcare response, while medical evacuations from Gaza for medical treatment abroad also remain suspended.

The Israeli occupation continues to violate the essential rights of Palestinian civilians. International institutions, as well as human rights organizations and the United Nations, have confirmed that the targeting of hospitals and Gaza's healthcare system is a clear violation of the principles and standards of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees special protections for hospitals and health centers during armed conflict and war, and that targeting them constitutes a crime against humanity and a war crime.

Despite this, the Zionist entity continues to target Palestinian hospitals and healthcare infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, completely disregarding all international and humanitarian laws.

On Friday, the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus, warned of catastrophic consequences to Gaza's healthcare system as a result of the fuel shortage, mentioning that just 90'000 liters (23'775 gallons) of fuel entered Gaza on Wednesday, while the health sector alone needs some 80'000 liters (21'134 gallons) per day just to continue its current level of operations, forcing health centers in the Palestinian enclave to make "impossible choices," according to the Director-General.

In other news on Saturday, according to estimates from the human rights organization, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), more than 10'000 Palestinians remain missing under the rubble of the Gaza Strip.

The organization also gave a warning that there is no realistic way of finding those buried under the rubble due to the impossibility of retrieving bodies and storing them, this at a time when no international humanitarian movement can assist in retrieval efforts.

Euro-Med Monitor additionally highlighted that the families of victims of the Israeli occupation's deadly military attacks, which are entering their tenth month, face enormous challenges in recovering the bodies of their dead, with a profound lack of equipment and heavy machinery for civil defense crews, as well as the Zionist entity's ban on the entry of any equipment from outside the Gaza Strip.

Euro-Med Monitor also says it has documented repeated patterns of the Zionist entity's approach of preventing and obstructing the recovery of Palestinian victims and missing persons from under the rubble, including the repeated targeting of civil defense and rescue crews attempting to recover the dead and wounded, while also preventing the entry of fuel needed to operate heavy machinery, which is also being blocked from entering the enclave.

Meanwhile, in more news on the ground, the Israeli occupation forces continued their atrocities against the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip today, bombing and shelling civilian homes and public infrastructure, while continuing to block humanitarian aid from reaching the civilian population.

On Saturday, the Israeli occupation army intensified its airstrikes on various sites in different areas of the Gaza Strip, while occupation armored vehicles made limited incursions into neighborhoods east of the Bureij Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, killing at least 20 Palestinians since dawn.

For several hours this morning, Israeli fighter jets bombed homes in the Nuseirat Camp, also in central Gaza, killing 10 civilians, including 9 from the Jahjouh family.

An occupation warplane also bombed a residential home belonging to the Abu Shakyan family in the Nuseirat Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, killing 10 civilians and wounding a number of others, including 7 brothers.

Zionist forces also bombed a residential house in the Wadi al-Salqa area in the central Gaza Strip, killing two Palestinians and wounding a number of others, while occupation artillery shelling hammered several sites in the Central Governate, with a particular focus on the northern and western neighborhoods of the Nuseirat Camp, in addition to the east of the Al-Maghazi Camp.

According to reporting by WAFA News Agency, the Israeli occupation forces bombed a house and a warehouse belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), in the Al-Maghazi and Nuseirat Refugee Camps respectively, killing at least 9 civilians.

In another atrocious crime, the Israeli occupation forces bombed the home of the Kart family, adjacent to the Al-Hurriya School in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, killing an elderly man and his wife who were taken to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the city.

Witnesses also reported limited advances by Zionist armored vehicles into the east of the Al-Bureij Camp, in conjuction with occupation drones which randomly fired behind the Bureij cemetery.

At the same time, south of Gaza, occupation warplanes bombed sites east of the town of Al-Fokhari, east of Khan Yunis, with no casualties reported in the strikes.

North of Gaza, witnesses reported hearing a massive explosion that came from the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood, east of the city of Gaza, which could be heard from the west of the city, while the Zionist army continues its systematic destruction of Palestinian housing, also in the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood.

Occupation artillery shelling also targeted neighborhoods east of the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, while an Israeli helicopter intermittently fired on the area.

According to Palestinian sources, a total of 5 journalists have been killed in Israeli bombing and shelling in different areas of the Gaza Strip over the last 12 hours, including Saadi Madoukh, Adeeb Sakr, Amjad Jahjouh and his wife Wafaa Abu Dabaan, and Rizq Abu Ashkian.

This brings the number of journalists killed in the genocide to a total of 159 since October 7th, 2023.

Previously, as the Israeli occupation forces bombed across Gaza City last night, an occupation warplane bombed a residential house belonging to the journalist Saadi Madoukh and his family in the Al-Sahaba area of the Al-Daraj neighborhood, east of Gaza City, killing 3 Palestinian civilians and wounding several others.

The Israeli occupation army continued its war crimes when it bombed a house belonging to the Abu Shaar family, in the Al-Nafaq area of central Gaza City, resulting in the deaths of two children and wounding a number of others who were transferred to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the city.

The genocide continued with another occupation airstrike that targeted a civilian vehicle in the Al-Shakoush area, northwest of Rafah, in the south of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of six Palestinians and wounding several others.

The Zionist army also used artillery to shell a gathering of civilians in the vicinity of the Al-Salbah area of the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, killing two Palestinians and wounding several others.

As a result of the Israeli occupation's ongoing war of extermination in the Gaza Strip, the infinitely rising death toll now exceeds 38'098 Palestinians killed, including at least 10'000 women and well over 15'000 children, while another 87'705 others have been wounded since the start of the current round of Zionist aggression, beginning with the events of October 7th, 2023.

July 6th, 2024.

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