CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

US prosecutors explore racketeering charges in short-seller probe

Reuters
Sun February 20, 2022


US prosecutors are exploring whether they can use a federal law originally enacted to take down the mafia in a sprawling probe of hedge funds and research firms that bet against stocks, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

The Justice Department last year issued subpoenas to dozens of firms, including such well-known names as Citron Research and Muddy Waters Research LLC, as part of the sweeping probe focused on potentially manipulative trading around negative reports on listed companies published by some of their investors, Reuters and other media outlets have reported.

Although prosecutors haven't made any decisions yet, potential charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) were an option on the table, the sources said.

In the past, prosecutors have built RICO cases alongside other allegations, such as manipulation. One of the most high profile cases brought under the RICO Act included that of Michael Milken, who was indicted in the 1980s for racketeering and securities fraud but reached a plea deal, pleading guilty to securities violations but not racketeering or insider trading.


Reuters could not ascertain which types of charges the agency was leaning toward at this stage of the investigation or whether the probe would eventually lead to charges.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department in Washington and the US attorney's office in Los Angeles, which are involved in the probe according to the sources, declined to comment.

Citron declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Muddy Waters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The potential use of the 1970 law, which has not been previously reported, provides new insights into the scale and ambition of the investigation. The probe marks a new frontier for the Justice Department's unit in Washington tasked with rooting out corporate crime.

A racketeering case could allow prosecutors to ensnare a broad swathe of investors involved in an alleged "criminal enterprise," even if they participated indirectly, lawyers said.

But such a case would also face more challenges than a narrower one aimed at a smaller group of people. That's in part because prosecutors have to establish a pattern of activity, they said.

Among the activities the Justice Department is investigating is whether funds conspired to perpetrate a so-called "short and distort scheme," sources have previously told Reuters.

In such a scheme the funds would have placed trades that stood to profit if a company's stock fell and then issued false or misleading negative research reports about the company.

Prosecutors are also investigating the relationships between the short-sellers who publish the reports and hedge funds and other investors that may have profited, the sources have said.

They are examining whether there is coordinated trading designed to boost trading volumes and exaggerate price drops on news of the short reports, Reuters previously reported.

RICO charges have historically been used to combat bribery, money laundering or drug trafficking conducted by organized criminal enterprises such as the mafia. They are unusual in the world of finance but not unprecedented.

US prosecutors in 2019 charged then-current and former JPMorgan Chase executives with racketeering and manipulating prices of precious metals.

"RICO statutes haven't been used in this realm often in recent years, but they aren't limited to organized crime," Robert Frenchman of Mukasey Frenchman LLP in New York said. "It's certainly in the prosecutors' toolbox."

Sudan hospital patient killed amid protests against military rule: Medics

Demonstrators march during ongoing protests calling for civilian rule and denouncing the military administration, in the Sahafa neighbourhood in the south of Sudan's capital Khartoum on February 20, 2022. (AFP)

Reuters
Published: 21 February ,2022:

A patient standing on a hospital balcony was killed by a stray bullet fired by security forces in Sudan on Sunday, medics said, as protesters pursued a four-month campaign against military rule.

A 51-year-old man was shot while trying to get fresh air amid heavy tear gas in the city of Bahri, across the Nile from Khartoum, the Central Committee for Sudanese Doctors, a group aligned with the protest movement, said.

The death brought the number of people killed since the protests began to 82.

Police had no immediate statement on the death and could not be reached for comment.

The protests against the October 25, 2021, coup have faced crackdowns that have drawn local and international condemnation. The military leadership has vowed to investigate the deaths.

In protests in Khartoum on Sunday, security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades, and water cannon sprayed red water at protesters, a Reuters reporter said. Gunfire could be heard.

Some protesters were carried away bleeding on motorcycles, the reporter said.

The protesters managed to reach within less than 500 meters of the heavily protected presidential palace for the first time in more than a month.

“We will continue taking to the streets until we succeed, defeating the coup and achieving democracy,” said Iman, a 35-year-old protester.

Protests were also held in the neighboring city of Omdurman and cities across the country, including Gadarif and El-Obeid.

Recognition at last! Matchwomen to be honoured with a blue plaque

Historian LOUISE RAW charts her journey of discovery of how a group of impoverished East End workers became the mothers of the modern trade union movement – and the resonance their story of battling adversity had with her own life


AFTER 134 years, an English Heritage blue plaque will at last mark the site of a groundbreaking strike by east London matchwomen.

I’ve spent a little less than that, but still almost half my life, learning and telling their story — pursuing women I could never meet, but who still changed my life, through the pages of history, and East End memory.

It started with a chance discovery in an archive in 1997.

I was a trade union steward researching an essay for a labour history course; I’d left school at 15 and knew shockingly little about working-class history (we “did” kings and queens — the rest of the population made only rare appearances, invariably either rioting or dying of one plague or another).

And how I sweated that first essay: I didn’t know how to write it, though I did know who I wanted to write about: the only women we’d really covered, the “matchgirls.”

We’d learned that their strike in 1888 was mainly noteworthy as a small harbinger of greater things to come.

From 1889, hundreds of thousands of working-class people began taking strike action to force employers to let them unionise.

This became known as New Unionism, and was a stepping stone to the foundation of the Labour Party.

New Unionism was traditionally dated from 1889, not 1888. The matchwomen’s strike was judged too “minor” to have influenced the men who later took action; and was also supposed to have been orchestrated not by workers themselves but by Annie Besant, “celebrity socialist” and middle-class activist — definitely not a matchwoman.

This made the matchwomen little more than puppets, taking their agency from them.

Having been on strike with women from East End families myself, admittedly a century later, this didn’t make sense to me — how, and why, did Besant persuade them to do it?

They were wholly dependent on their wages and had no savings; having no union, they’d get no strike pay. And the Fabian Society, of which Besant was a key member, were hardly syndicalists.

History books hadn’t helped me solve the conundrum: the strike was usually dealt with in a few lines, and sometimes not mentioned at all, in books on New Unionism.

It simply seemed to have been accepted that Besant had “made” them strike for vague political motivations.

Determined to crack the case, one lunchbreak I went down to the Rose Lipman library in Hackney, which held the Bryant & May company archives.

Embarrassed to admit I didn’t have a clue how to use an archive, I dived into the documents — then all over the place chronologically, just as they had been when the old factory became a gated community and the company papers were dumped at the library.

Two crucial documents leapt out at me. First, a foreman’s list of suspected “ringleaders” of the strike — five women inside the factory.

The second was a copy of Besant’s own political paper the Link, in which she’d printed a blistering exposé of the women’s terrible working conditions: “phossy jaw,” the potentially fatal necrosis caused by white phosphorus; starvation wages, illegal random fines; violence from foremen.

History usually quotes this piece, “White Slavery in London,” and considers it case closed for a Besant-led strike; but I kept turning the pages.

Later in the same issue, I found Besant rubbished the idea that workers like the matchwomen could, or even should, take strike action — they’d just be sacked, she said; trade unionism might “brighten the lives” of poor women a little, she thought, but overall was only for the better-educated skilled worker.

Alarm bells couldn’t have rung louder — these weren’t the words of a woman preparing to lead a strike. I started digging deeper, and discovered Besant hadn’t known the strike had begun, and immediately urged the women back to work when she did.

The East End dockers who began the 1889 strike, on the other hand, were hugely impressed. They’d invited the matchwomen to address them after — against all the odds — the women won, returning to work the victorious members of the brand new Union of Women Matchmakers; the largest union of women and girls in the country.

During the Great Dock Strike, leaders constantly invoked the matchwomen’s example: “Remember the matchgirls, who won their fight and formed a union.”

It began to dawn on me what this meant. If the matchwomen had essentially begun New Unionism, they were the mothers of a movement supposed to be an essentially male one, to which women came late.

As a young trade unionist I’d been told by older, male stewards that women “shouldn’t really” be in the workplace taking men’s jobs, and that they were useless trade unionists, who didn’t attend the meetings (you’d often hear that these were at 3.30 in the local pub — this being school pick-up time didn’t seem to register). I knew it would have made a huge difference to me if I’d had examples like the matchwomen’s.

I began to trace their descendants — Joan Harris, Jim Best and Ted Lewis were matchwomen’s grandchildren who brought the women to life for me, not as oppressed waifs but a kind of cool girl gang, based on friendship and mutual respect. Matchwomen would literally “pass the hat” for workmates sacked or sick.

They also enjoyed life as much as humanly possible: matchwomen loved the music hall, and took pride in learning the words of new songs before anyone else, singing them as they walked home arm in arm from a rare night out (“A little wearying for the quiet loving citizen” sighed a middle-class local).

They knew that their supposed betters thought them the “lowest of the low,” but refused to be cowed: instead of shrinking into the shadows they developed distinctive fashions which were too loud, too bright and frankly too sexy for the middle classes (who were said to run inside when the women came off shift, rather than risk being subjected to “cheek” and bad language!)

Because they couldn’t afford to look up to the minute on their meagre wages, the matchwomen paid into “feather clubs” to buy communal hats, to be borrowed on high days and holidays.

I imagine they wore them in 1882 when Bryant & May unveiled a statue to William Gladstone on Bow Road. The women had been forced to contribute to its cost and attend the ceremony.

As the great and good assembled on Bow Road, they suddenly rushed at the statue, pricking their fingers with hatpins and dripping blood onto the stone, crying: “Our blood paid for this!”

That’s what you call a political gesture; and it’s still recalled today in the regular surreptitious painting of Gladstone’s hands bright red, by person or persons unknown.

What could I do to get the message out? I was lucky enough to have the help of my union to get onto an MA course and develop my research.

All this had an effect on my everyday life. Some local chaps were hostile to my career change. “You’re supposed to be a historian now? But you work in the pub.”

“Which man are you reading that book to impress?” one of my regulars asked once when I was studying.

It didn’t go down well at home either. Women developing independence can be seem like a threat to controlling and violent partners — and as soon as I started the course, occasional assaults by from the man I lived with became more constant and more serious.

He’d attack me without warning when I was sweating over that first essay, once throwing out on to the street in winter with no coat, keys, money or shoes when I was working to a deadline.

I remember always feeling tired, not just from combining work and study but from being attacked at night when I was asleep.

I discovered women like the matchworkers experienced domestic violence too — and stuck together through it, physically protecting each other when they could.

Then I found out one of the strike committee, Eliza Best, was believed by family to have killed herself to escape her violent husband.

That wouldn’t be me, I decided. I fixed two goals for myself — getting the matchwomen’s story out there to inspire other women, and escaping the violence, which would eventually escalate to an attack I barely survived.

I achieved both, in the end, and with just as much help from incredible women as the matchwomen gave one another.

MPs Lyn Brown and Diana Johnson and parliamentary worker and matchwoman descendant Kevin Morton helped get my work debated in Parliament — and Ted Lewis, who shared the life of his matchwoman grandmother Martha Robertson with me and became a good friend, was there to hear it.

“They said our grandmothers weren’t ladies — but they were to us,” he told me afterwards. “Great, East End ladies.”

Jeremy Corbyn would eventually acknowledge the women as the “mothers of our movement.”

Through Lyn Brown I met the marvellous Liz Aitken at Bow Quarter — today’s name for the original match factory, which has been turned into flats — and together we began the blue plaque application.

Liz and Sandra Docking at Bow Quarter pursued it tenaciously and finally, in November last year, I sat in the old factory with them, long-term resident and matchwomen fan Simon Smith, and Cathy Power and Rebecca Preston from English Heritage, to hear the decision — a blue plaque would be granted.

I will be celebrating with a gin or two when it’s unveiled in July, and look forward to taking descendants, students and friends over the next years to see this memorial to what a “powerless” group of women could achieve using their numbers, and the secret weapons the massed power of the Establishment couldn’t break — solidarity and sisterhood.

Louise Raw is the author of Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History (Continuum).

1. 

   Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History eBook : Raw, Louise: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store
   
   
   

1. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

   www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/981
   

   

   Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening-- the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl,

Climate activists stage 'Stonehenge drilling prank' at British Museum to highlight BP's cultural vandalism


The group said the parody exhibition — in which performers pretended that BP was planning to drill for oil at Stonehenge — was aimed at highlighting the “hypocrisy” of the sponsorship while BP’s operations threaten other ancient sites around the globe

CLIMATE activists staged a Stonehenge oil drilling prank at the British Museum today, targeting a new BP-sponsored exhibition.

The institution has prompted renewed anger over its ongoing collaboration with “cultural vandal” BP, which is the sponsor of its “World of Stonehenge.”

Dressed in suits, members of the activist theatre group BP or not BP staged a fake exhibition complete with a “photorealistic image” of drilling rigs and pipelines at Stonehenge on the opening weekend of the new display.

The group said the parody exhibition — in which performers pretended that BP was planning to drill for oil at Stonehenge — was aimed at highlighting the “hypocrisy” of the sponsorship while BP’s operations threaten other ancient sites around the globe.

Explaining the action, the group said: “It also includes a label explaining that — while BP isn’t really planning to drill at Stonehenge — the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it appears, as BP’s drilling operations are causing irreversible damage to ancient cultural sites elsewhere in the world.”

Performers pointed to damage to the aboriginal rock art of Murujuga in western Australia from industrial pollution caused by the Burrup Peninsula gas extraction project, part owned by BP.

The oil giant is pushing to expand the fuel extraction project, despite warnings that emissions could destroy the ancient rock art.

One of the protesters, Deborah Locke, said: “It’s beyond ironic that BP is sponsoring an exhibition of ancient art, while simultaneously pushing forward with destroying one of the largest, densest and most diverse collections of ancient artworks in the world in Australia.

“How can the British Museum even be considering renewing their partnership with this cultural and ecological vandal?

“It’s time the museum stopped cosying up to its corporate buddies and acted to preserve the world’s climate and cultural heritage.”

It comes as more than 300 archaeologists and historians wrote to the museum’s trustees last week calling on them to drop BP over its role in contributing to the climate emergency.

“Refusing further sponsorship from BP would send a strong signal that fossil fuel corporations — like tobacco and arms companies — are no longer welcome in cultural life,” the letter reads.

“By diminishing BP’s ‘social licence to operate,’ it would help to support our society’s transition away from fossil fuels.”

The British Museum was approached for comment.

Conflict and Climate Change Ravage Syria’s Agricultural Heartland

Drought and a decade of war have brought failing crops and poverty to a region once known as Syria’s breadbasket. Even the bread has changed.

On Feb 20, 2022

At a government bakery in Hasaka, Syria, a faded image of former President Hafez al-Assad looms over the aging machinery and clanging steel chains of the assembly line. The painting dates from long before the war, when this region of northeast Syria was still under government control.

Outside, a long line of families and disabled men wait for bags of subsidized flat bread, which sells at about a quarter of the market price.

What is new at this bakery, the largest in the region, is the color of the flour dumped into giant mixing bowls: It is now pale yellow instead of the traditional stark white.

“This is a new experiment we started three or four months ago,” said Media Sheko, a manager of the bakery. “To avoid bread shortages, we had to mix it with corn.”

In a region ravaged by ISIS and armed conflict, prolonged drought and drying rivers have made stability even more precarious. Here, the normally abstract idea of climate change can be seen in the city’s daily bread.

The new recipe is not entirely welcome.

“We feed corn to chickens,” said Khider Shaban, 48, a grain farmer near the town of Al Shaddadi, where bare earth has replaced most of the wheat fields because of lack of water. “What are we — chickens?”

The prolonged drought in the region has been linked to climate change worldwide. But in northeast Syria, the country’s historic breadbasket, its effects have been compounded by more than a decade of war, a devastated economy, damaged infrastructure and increasing poverty, leaving a vulnerable society even more at risk of destabilization.

Across Syria, the U.N.’s World Food Program reported last summer that almost half of the population did not have enough food, a figure expected to rise higher this year.

Many of the fields of red earth have been left fallow by farmers who can no longer afford to buy seeds, fertilizer or diesel to run water pumps to replace the low rainfall of previous years. The wheat they do grow is lower quality and sells for much less than before the current drought two years ago, according to farmers, government officials and aid organizations.

This semiautonomous breakaway region in northeastern Syria, desperate for cash and stable relations with Damascus, still sells much of its wheat crop to the Syrian government, leaving little for its own population.

And farmers who cannot afford to feed and water their animals are selling them off at cut-rate prices.

“This problem of climate change is combined with other problems, so it’s not just one thing,” said Matt Hall, a strategic analyst for Save the Children in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. “There’s a war, there are sanctions, the economy is devastated. And the region can’t pick up the slack by importing wheat because it no longer has the money.”

For thousands of years, the Euphrates River and its largest tributary, the Khabur River, which cuts through Hasaka Province, nurtured some of the world’s earliest farming settlements. But the rivers have been drying up.

The U.S. space agency, NASA, which studies climate change, says the drought that began in 1998 is the worst that some parts of the Middle East have seen in nine centuries.

In northeast Syria, the drought has been particularly acute over the past two years. But lower than average rainfall is only part of the problem.

Turkey, which controls the region’s water supply from parts of northern Syria that it controls through proxy fighters, has been accused of reducing the flow to the area inhabited by the Kurds, whom it considers an enemy.

Since Turkey captured the Alouk water pumping station, the main water source for Hasaka Province, in 2019, aid agencies say forces under its command have repeatedly shut down the pumps, putting about a million people at risk.

Turkey has denied the accusation, blaming outages on technical problems and the lack of electricity from a dam outside of its control.

Whatever the cause, UNICEF says the water supply has been disrupted at least 24 times since late 2019.

The effects of the drought are on vivid display in the small city of Al Shaddadi, 50 miles south of Hasaka. The Khabur River, which flows through the town and was so vital in ancient times that it is referred to in the Bible, has been reduced to puddles of murky water.

Muhammad Salih, a president of the municipality, said 70 percent of the farmers in the area left their fields fallow this year because it would cost more to grow crops than they would receive selling them.

The low level of the Khabur, which many farmers depend on to irrigate their fields, means they have to operate their diesel-powered pumps longer to get the same amount of water. And the cost of diesel fuel has soared, along with prices of other essentials, because of an economic embargo on the region by its neighbors, Turkey and the government-controlled part of Syria, and American economic sanctions against Syria, which also affect this region.

Mr. Salih also blamed Turkey for reducing the water supply at the Alouk pumping station.

“One day they open the water and 10 days they do not,” he said.

He estimated that 60 percent of the local population was now living under the poverty line. “Some people are eating just one meal a day,” he said.

“This climate change, this drought is affecting the entire world,” he said. “But here in the autonomous administration we don’t have the reserves to cope with it.”

The war against ISIS left entire sections of Al Shaddadi in ruins. U.S.-led airstrikes destroyed a large residential complex, water pumping stations, schools and bakeries used by ISIS, according to local authorities. The main bakery and some schools have been rebuilt.

Farmers from the countryside drive motorcycles through dusty streets. Women with their faces covered by black niqabs walk past chickens few people can afford to buy anymore.

In the surrounding farmlands, thin stalks of wheat and barley in the few fields planted last fall are less than half their height in pre-drought years.

“We can only pray for God to send us rain,” said Mr. Shaban, the wheat farmer. He said that he had to sell his sheep two years ago at reduced prices because he could not afford feed or water.

“I had to make the choice to give water to my family for drinking or give it to the sheep,” he said.

On a neighboring farm, Hassan al-Harwa, 39, said the high cost of feed meant his sheep were subsisting on straw mixed with a small amount of more nutritious barley instead of the higher-grain diet they used to consume.

“They should be fatter and healthier,” Mr. al-Harwa said. “When there was rain two years ago, we had enough milk to get milk and cheese but now it is barely enough for their lambs.”

Before, he said, each sheep could fetch about $200 in the market. Now they sell for $70 or less, he said, because they are skinnier and because few people can afford to buy them.

The next day, four of the lambs had died. Mr. al-Harwa thought it was a virus but with no veterinarian it was hard to be sure.

Across the region, intense poverty and lack of opportunity have contributed to young men joining the Islamic State.

“It’s one small piece of this large, disastrous puzzle,” said Mr. Hall of Save the Children. “The grievances that are exacerbated by climate change are the same ones that drive disillusionment and recruitment” by ISIS.

The persistent drought has also been driving families from farms held for generations to the cities where there are more services but even less opportunity to make a living.

“The water is holding together many of these areas,” Mr. Hall said. “These agricultural communities are the social foundation for many areas. If you take away the agricultural capacity there is nothing holding these towns together.”

 

 

Source:  The New York Times 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the Observatory.

Opinions

US gun companies are making a killing in Mexico

And the US government actively enables them.

• 
  
  Belen Fernandez

  Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

Published On 20 Feb 202220 Feb 2022

A Mexican soldier holds up a gun next to other weapons seized from alleged drug traffickers or handed in by residents before they are destroyed at a military zone in Mexico City on September 2, 2016 [File: Reuters/Henry Romero]

In December, I flew from the Mexican state of Oaxaca – where I have been residing since the onset of the pandemic – to the US state of Kentucky, where my parents recently moved. On the ride from the Louisville airport to my parents’ apartment, I passed a billboard advertising an upcoming gun show on January 1 and 2.

A website promoting the event offered enticing details: “If you are a gun collector or are a hunting enthusiast, the gun show at the Kentucky Fair & Expo Center in Louisville… is a great place to spend some time”. In addition to guns, military surplus items would also be available for purchase, and children aged six to 12 received a discounted ticket price of $4 – or $6.50 for the “VIP” children’s ticket, which exempted its holder from waiting in lines.

I fled the country again on January 1 and was, therefore, unable to attend the show, but the billboard and the ubiquitous gun shops in Louisville – from Skull Firearms to Everything Concealed Carry to Gunz Inc – had constituted a marked change from the landscape south of the border. As the Louisville Courier-Journal itself notes, the entire country of Mexico “has just one gun store and issues fewer than 50 gun permits a year”.

And yet Mexico is hardly exempt from the fallout of US gun psychosis – pardon, “freedom”. The nation ranks third in gun-related deaths worldwide and, in 2019 alone, more than 17,000 homicides were linked to trafficked weapons, the vast majority of them from the US.

Just across the US-Mexico frontier in the state of Texas, there are no fewer than 7,000 licensed firearms dealers, a geographically convenient arrangement for the Mexican drug cartels responsible for much of the bloodshed – cartels that, it bears underscoring, would never have evolved into their current massively destructive iteration if not for the United States’ simultaneous criminalisation of and ravenous appetite for drugs. Some half a million firearms are reportedly trafficked annually from the US into Mexico.

In an unprecedented move in August 2021, the Mexican government filed a $10bn lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court against 10 US gun companies – including Smith & Wesson, Colt, Beretta, and Glock – which stand accused of willfully fuelling violence in Mexico.

According to the suit, these firms have designed and marketed military-style assault weapons and other assorted lethal goodies so as to appeal to the cartels and other criminal outfits. Colt, for example, “does not even try to hide its pandering to the criminal market in Mexico”, the Mexican government alleges. The lawsuit invokes the case of the Colt pistol emblazoned with the image of Emiliano Zapata – one of Mexico’s revolutionary heroes – that was used in 2017 in the city of Chihuahua to assassinate Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach, who often reported on organised crime and drug trafficking.

In response to the litigation, the gun companies have argued that the episode represents a “clash of national values” – as if there is something to be “valued” about a nation that regularly produces headlines like this NBC one from January 5: Toddler Shoots Mother, Infant Sibling Outside Texas Walmart.

Then there is the handy old Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which essentially renders gun manufacturers immune from responsibility for any sort of carnage that may result from the use of their products. How’s that for national values? In their official request to a federal judge that the Mexican lawsuit be dismissed, the US gunmakers contend the following: “Under bedrock principles of international law, a foreign nation cannot use its own law to reach across borders and impose liability”.

This is a charming assessment, no doubt, from companies whose cross-border reach literally kills people – and which form a pillar of society in an imperial superpower that could not care less about international law or borders aside from its own. Just ask Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Louisville Courier-Journal quotes a line from the Mexican lawsuit stating: “As a result of the continued use and possession of many of these [US-manufactured] guns, residents of Mexico will continue to be killed and injured by these guns, and the public will continue to fear for their health, safety, and welfare”. And while this is objectively true, it is also true that residents of Mexico will continue to be killed, injured, and traumatised by armaments belonging to Mexican security forces themselves – many of which happen to hail from these very same US manufacturers.

The Mexican military is a top buyer of US weapons, and, like many a US-armed outfit throughout the world, maintains an appalling human rights record. As The Intercept reported in October, the Biden administration was “pressing forward” with a $5m gun sale to Mexican navy and marine forces linked to a spate of kidnappings and extrajudicial killings as well as “widespread torture and sexual abuse”.

US-manufactured guns were also utilised, the report notes, in “one of the most notorious crimes in Mexican history”: the 2014 disappearance by Mexican security forces of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the state of Guerrero.

Mexico’s drug war, meanwhile, which was launched in 2006 with US backing and has thus far killed hundreds of thousands of people, is a fine example of how capitalism works its lethal magic. And as US weapons surge south across the border and gun companies make a killing off of arming both the state and the cartels in a lucrative cycle of violence that disproportionately harms the poor, it is way past time to put a stop to business as usual.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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• 
  Belen Fernandez

  Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

  Belen Fernandez is the author of Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.

Journalist covering labor strike threatened with arrest in Phnom Penh

Cambodia|Freedom of Assembly
Cambodian Centre for Independent Media (CCIM)

20 February 2022

A police officer stands in front of workers from the NagaWorld casino calling for the reinstatement of their colleagues, during a protest outside the National Assembly building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 4 January 2022, 

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP via Getty Images

A foreign journalist was harassed by authorities while reporting on the ongoing labor strike at NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh.

This statement was originally published on ccimcambodia.org on 10 February 2022.

The Cambodian Center for Independent Media (CCIM) and the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia (OPCC) condemn the recent harassment, intimidation and threat of arrest of a foreign journalist while they were reporting on labor strike activities in Phnom Penh. The incident marks the latest documented violation of press freedom in Cambodia.

On the afternoon of February 5, 2022, the journalist was photographing and filming interactions between authorities and NagaWorld casino strikers in a public space in the capital when a man in plainclothes, who identified himself as an immigration officer, stopped the journalist, demanded their passport and work permit, and declined to show his own credentials.

The journalist, who is employed by CCIM’s news outlet VOD and is a member of the OPCC, showed their CCIM-issued ID card and offered to show a copy of their passport. The officer, however, demanded to see original documents and threatened the journalist with arrest if they continued taking photos and video, and did not leave the area, compelling the journalist to stop reporting and leave.

Uniformed officers spoke to the man in plainclothes multiple times while he was questioning the journalist. The man also suggested to the journalist that he stopped them because they were working as a journalist.

While authorities have the right to justly enforce laws, journalists equally have the right to report the news. The 1995 Press Law prohibits pre-publication censorship, like what was exhibited during the incident on February 5.

If a truly free press is to exist in Cambodia, then all journalists must be allowed to work without unjust impediment by authorities. This includes freely interviewing sources, and observing, photographing and filming people, events and actions in the public interest.

When authorities arbitrarily use their power and infringe on the freedom of the press, society suffers from a lack of freely available news and information. We call for an end to any such arbitrary abuse of power, as well as harassment and threats against our colleagues. We call for independent investigations into any such violations.

CCIM and OPCC stand in solidarity with all professional journalists facing harassment and intimidation. We stand for a free press in which journalists can work without fear.

View/download statement in English

What is the nutritional value of yoghurt made in space? A few children STUDENTS are trying to find out

The exercise aims to investigate whether different probiotic strains of bacteria can be used to make yoghurt directly in space.

Sara Webb, The Conversation & Rebecca Allen, The Conversation

NASA    ISS

It is probably no surprise that keeping healthy in space is incredibly important. And without the typical resources found on Earth, creative solutions have to be explored.

Right now, some excited Class 10 and Class 11 students from around Victoria in Australia are waiting with anticipation as their space-made yoghurt – fresh off the International Space Station – heads back to Australia from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration facilities in the United States.

The students worked with researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology to design an experiment investigating the nutritional values of space-made yoghurt. The results could provide insight into how to best help astronauts with vital nutrition during long-haul spaceflight.

Human gut

A critical factor in human health is the overall health of our gut microbiome, which is estimated to host more than 100 trillion bacteria.

Maintaining the health and diversity of these bacteria might be even more important in space than on Earth. In 2019, NASA released groundbreaking results from a year-long study on astronaut twins Mark and Scott Kelly.

In 2016, Scott spent 365 days on the space station, experiencing reduced gravity, while Mark remained on Earth. A fascinating result from the study was that Scott experienced significant changes to his gastrointestinal microbiome when in space – and which did not persist after he returned to Earth.

In 2016, Mark and Scott Kelly were part of a study on how living in space can affect the human body.

 Photo credit: Robert Markowitz/ NASA

It is theorised the changes in microbiome experienced by astronauts are due to the lack of exposure to the “everyday” microbes encountered on Earth. Additionally, astronauts in space are exposed to less gravity, and high levels of radiation, which increase as they travel further away.

Understanding how to supplement astronauts’ gut bacteria and sustain its health is one of NASA’s current research goals. NASA is exploring this through both the use of capsule probiotics and simulated gravity experiments.

Why yoghurt?

Yoghurt is made by the bacterial fermentation of milk. The lactic acid produced in this process acts on the milk’s proteins to create yoghurt’s signature tart taste and thick texture. We wanted to see how this process is affected in the space environment.

Our student-led experiment is investigating whether different probiotic strains of bacteria can be used to make yoghurt directly in space. The ideal outcome would be to show that healthy, living bacteria cultures can be generated from frozen bacteria and milk products sent to space. This has not yet been achieved, although yoghurt has been made using bacteria returned from space previously.

This would be hugely beneficial during long space flights, where fresh food is limited and typical probiotic capsules would lose potency. Yoghurt also offers the nutritional benefits of the milk the bacteria are feeding off.


Road to space

Our brilliant students began this journey via two paths. Through the ongoing Swinburne Haileybury International Space Station Experiment program, six exceptional STEM students from Victoria’s Haileybury school worked with Swinburne staff and student mentors to develop, prototype and produce an experiment for the space station.

In the past, this program has sent human teeth, chia seeds and magnetorheological fluid to the International Space Station. For the 2021-’22 experiment, the students had 24 five-millilitre vials (things have to be tiny in space) in which to build their detailed experiment.

The second path was via the inaugural Swinburne Youth Space Innovation Challenge, which provides the opportunity to send an experiment to space as part of the Swinburne/Rhodium Scientific payload.

Teams from four Victorian schools undertook an 11-week crash course in space applications before pitching their dream experiment. The winning team from Viewbank College was assigned six dedicated experimental vials, with all other teams also awarded a vial – all working towards the goal of investigating probiotics, bacteria and yoghurt in space.

The 2021 Swinburne Youth Space Innovation Challenge winning team from Viewbank College blew the judges away with their insightful idea of investigating magnetic fields on plant growth in space. 

Pictured (L-R): Tarnie Jones, Belle Shi, Madeline Luvaul and Paisley Noble. Photo credit: Author provided

Aboard the ISS

Once ready for flight, the final bacteria samples were prepared and put into deep freeze by our Rhodium Scientific partners at the Kennedy Space Centre in the United States.

The experiment samples were prepared at the Kennedy Space Centre (left), which involved putting them through a rapid-spinning vortex procedure (right). 

Photo credit: Rhodium Scientific

All 33 vials boarded their rideshare to the International Space Station via the SpaceX Crew Dragon 24 and were launched on December 24. Once onboard, the samples were removed from the deep freeze by Astronaut Mark Vande Hei and set aside in a room-temperature experiment chamber in the Japanese Experiment Module, named Kibo.

After the allotted 48- and 72-hour timestamps (the time it takes to typically make yoghurt on Earth) the samples were placed back in deep freeze to preserve the progress. It is expected they would have become yoghurt during this time.

The samples returned to Earth in late January and will be investigated by staff and students in the coming months, once they return to Australia.

The Rhodium Probiotic Challenge samples were boarded on the SpaceX Crew Dragon 24 spacecraft.

Likely findings

The students chose to explore six different bacteria strains mixed together in various combinations, as well as certain strains isolated. With both the space-based experiment and control experiments conducted on Earth, we will be able to determine whether the bacteria sent to the International Space Station were significantly affected by reduced gravity.

Working from the lab at Swinburne, we will use methods such as DNA sequencing to isolate any variations in the genetic makeup of the bacteria, and investigate how many generations (or cell divisions) have occurred in the samples.

The students also purposely designed the experiment to test both dairy and non-dairy milk options, to see the potential differences in nutritional output. But perhaps the most exciting part for all involved will be the final taste test – and finding out if space yoghurt really is out of this world.

Sara Webb is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing and Rebecca Allen is Coordinator, Swinburne Astronomy Online, Program Lead of Microgravity Experimentation, Space Technology and Industry Institute at Swinburne University of Technology.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Pink Floyd musician joined by Noel Gallagher and others demanding release of Kurdish singer Nudem Durak


Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters has demanded the release of Kurdish singer Nudem Durak

PINK Floyd musician Roger Waters has demanded the release of Kurdish singer Nudem Durak, who has been jailed for 19 years in Turkey for performing songs in her native language.

He called on authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to release Ms Durak, who has been held in Bayburt prison since 2015.

“She’s our sister,” Mr Waters said. “Whatever you think of the Kurds’ desire for recognition, it is unacceptable for a country with a great historical art heritage like Turkey to treat artists like this.”

Ms Durak was jailed for “membership of a terrorist organisation” and “spreading terrorist propaganda” after singing at an event to mark Newroz, the Kurdish new year.

A global campaign for her release is supported by Mr Waters and others, including fellow musicians and veteran US communist Angela Davis.

Ms Durak’s acoustic guitar was broken by guards during a cell inspection in 2017.

Mr Waters has sent his black Martin acoustic guitar, signed by rock legends including Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Pete Townsend, Noel Gallagher and Mark Knopfler, to Ms Durak to highlight her plight.

“We have an absolute responsibility to support her and the hundreds of thousands of others who continue to suffer her fate with false imprisonment all over the world, not least in the United States and the United Kingdom,” he said.

The Free Nudem Durak campaign can be found on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

US businessman faces jail after torturing Kurd who raised concerns over illegal weapons project

by Steve Sweeney
International editor

US businessman Ross Roggio has been charged with torturing a worker in Iraqi Kurdistan while he was managing the construction of a weapons factory in the semi-autonomous region in 2015.

The Pennsylvania man arranged for Kurdish peshmerga forces to abduct the employee for more than a month after he raised concerns over the project, a US Justice Department statement said on Friday.

“The grand jury charges that the defendant directed and participated in the systematic torture of an employee over the course of 39 days by Kurdish soldiers in Iraq,” US Attorney John C Gurganus said.

According to the indictment, Mr Roggio led multiple interrogation sessions during which he directed Kurdish soldiers to suffocate the victim with a bag, tasering him in the groin and other areas of his body.

They are alleged to have beaten him with fists and rubber hoses, jumped violently on his chest while wearing military boots, and threatened to cut off one of the victim’s fingers under the instructions of the US citizen.

On at least one occasion, the indictment said, Mr Roggio wrapped his belt around the victim’s neck, yanked him off the ground, and suspended him in the air, causing him to lose consciousness.

“The heinous acts of violence that Ross Roggio directed and inflicted upon the victim were blatant human rights violations that will not be tolerated,” FBI assistant director Luis Quesada said.

Mr Roggio and the Roggio Consulting Company LLC were charged in 2018 with illegally exporting firearms parts and tools from the US to Iraq and part of the weapons project in Kurdistan.

He faces a maximum 20 years in jail for each of the torture charges and a maximum statutory penalty of 705 years’ imprisonment for the remaining 37 counts.

Turkish politics will never be free of Kurdish presence, says HDP chair

Feb 20 2022 

The government will not be able to purge the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) from Turkish politics, the party’s co-chair Pervin Buldan said on Sunday, as she dismissed the closure case against the group.

Previous governments have tried, but none have been successful in eliminating Kurdish representation from Turkey’s political sphere, T24 cited the HDP co-chair as saying in a party congress in southern Mersin province.

The HDP, Turkey’s third largest party in parliament, is faced with a closure case over terror links, a claim the party denies. The case against the HDP follows a years-long crackdown on the opposition party, in which thousands of its members have been tried on mainly terrorism-related charges linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group that has been at war for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey for 40 years.

“We grow larger as they attack us,” Buldan said, noting that the case filed by the Court of Cassation’s Chief Public Prosecutor was the only way the government believed it could tackle the HDP.

“Because we do not allow for them to defeat or stand before us politically. Because they have witnessed and understood that they cannot defeat us in the ballot boxes,” the HDP chairwoman added.

Several of its senior leaders have been arrested and imprisoned for years, including former leaders Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ. Since 2019, the government has also seized nearly all the local administrations the HDP controls in the predominantly Kurdish eastern region of Turkey.

“Your Kenan Evren failed, your Tansu Çiller failed and you will, too,’’ Buldan said, referring to the late Turkish president and former prime minister of Turkey. “Your dream of a HDP free politics will never become reality.”