Kenyan police clash with anti-government protesters 

• FRANCE 24 English

Police in Kenya clashed with anti-government protesters Tuesday in the capital, Nairobi, during a fresh round of demonstrations called by the opposition leader. Opposition lawmakers marched to the president's office, in the central business district, to present a petition. Police dispersed them with tear gas.

In Pics: Kenya Opposition Protests

The fresh round of demonstrations in Kenya demanded action to tackle the cost of living and reforms to the electoral commission that oversaw last year's election that was won by President William Ruto.

Photos: AP/Ben Curtis

UPDATED: 03 MAY 2023 

A truck burns after opposition protesters set fire to it after failing to open the container it was transporting, during clashes in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.

Kenyan riot police fire a tear gas grenade during clashes with rock-throwing opposition protesters in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.


Kenyan riot police react as a tear gas grenade they threw explodes next to them, during clashes with rock-throwing opposition protesters in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.

A protestor burns tyres to block the road on the outskirts of Nairobi. Police in Kenya clashed with anti-government protesters in the capital, Nairobi, in a fresh round of demonstrations called by the opposition leader.

A policeman walks past a minibus that was burned and its passengers robbed during clashes near the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.



An opposition protester throws a tear gas grenade back at police during clashes in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya

Onlookers gather on an overpass to watch as opposition protesters clash with police in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.


Opposition protesters throw rocks at riot police during clashes in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.


An opposition protester throws rocks at riot police, in front of a cloud of tear gas, during clashes in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya.

An opposition protester throws a rock at a passing vehicle during clashes in the Kibera slum of the capital Nairobi, Kenya

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Journalist Ozgur Ogret: Turkey is 'a press freedom violations museum' under Erdogan • FRANCE 24

In #ReportersWithoutBorders' 2023 #PressFreedom Index, #Turkey is ranked 165th out of 180 nations for the environment facing #journalists. Among the reasons for the worsening conditions is a crackdown ahead of presidential elections in May, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces his toughest re-election battle yet. Ozgur Ogret, a journalist and Turkey representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, joined us on Perspective to tell us more about the situation. 

Journalists, Rights Groups Urge Ban on 'Sinister' Spyware Like Pegasus

"The use of spyware and unlawful targeted surveillance violates the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and access to information, peaceful assembly and association, freedom of movement, and privacy."


A woman uses an iPhone in front of the building of the NSO Group, developer of the spyware Pegasus in Herzliya, Israel.
(Photo: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT
May 03, 2023

Six dozen civil society groups, journalists, and experts marked World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday with a joint call for "all governments to implement an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, servicing, and use of digital surveillance technologies, as well as a ban on abusive commercial spyware technology and its vendors."

The use of spyware against media workers is "an alarming trend impacting freedom of the press and creating a wider chilling effect on civil society and civic space," the statement argues. "Privacy, source protection, and digital security are essential components of press freedom, allowing journalists to protect the confidentiality and integrity of their work and sources."

"As governments and other entities seek to suppress the press and silence dissent, we are seeing an exponential increase in the market for digital surveillance technologies, including spyware, that overrides these journalistic principles."

"As governments and other entities seek to suppress the press and silence dissent, we are seeing an exponential increase in the market for digital surveillance technologies, including spyware, that overrides these journalistic principles," the statement continues. Such tools "can infiltrate a target's phone, giving the attacker full access to emails, messages, contacts, and even the device's microphone and camera," rendering secure and encrypted platforms useless.

"From El Salvador to Mexico, from India to Azerbaijan, from Hungary to Morocco, to Ethiopia—the list goes on of countries where investigative journalists working to expose corruption, power abuses, or human rights violations, have been targeted by invasive spyware such as Pegasus," the statement adds, referencing spyware from the Israeli firm NSO Group that has been used to target reporters, dissidents, and world leaders.

The advocates of banning this type of surveilleance technology noted that there are at least 180 known cases of potentially targeted journalists across 21 countries. They pointed to multiple examples, including Hungary-based Andras Szabo and Szabolcs Panyi being targeted with Pegasus in 2019, and Raymond Mujuni and Canary Mugume facing the same spyware two years later in Uganda.

According to the statement:

Moroccan investigative journalist Omar al-Radi was targeted with Pegasus spyware between 2019 and 2021, and later sentenced to six years in prison on bogus rape and espionage charges. Meanwhile journalist Hicham Mansouri, who fled from Morocco to France in 2016 following state harassment and detention, was hacked by Pegasus at least 20 times between February and April 2021.

Perhaps the most infamous example of how spyware can facilitate and enable transnational repression and serious human rights violations, including enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing, is the murder of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Consulate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Both prior to and after his death, Mr. Kashoggi's family members and acquaintances were targeted by Pegasus spyware.

"It is clear that the use of spyware and unlawful targeted surveillance violates the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and access to information, peaceful assembly and association, freedom of movement, and privacy," the statement asserts, demanding not only a ban but also accountability for developers and distributors of the technology, and boosted efforts to protect journalists.

The statement was launched at Secret Surveillance: Countering Spyware's Threats to Freedom of the Press and Expression, an event co-hosted by advocacy organizations including Access Now.

"Invasive and abusive commercial spyware that has been used to facilitate human rights abuses globally has no place in our world," declared Access Now surveillance campaigner Rand Hammoud. "Years worth of evidence by civil society has demonstrated that the companies selling these technologies should not be rewarded with governmental contracts that would continue enabling their abuses."



Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now, agreed that "this sinister technology that has been misused and abused by governments around the world is not safe in any hands, and its use can never be justified."

"Discussions do not suffice," Krapiva added. "We expect action: Protect freedom of the press, stamp out the spyware threat."

The spyware statement came as other members of the media acknowledged World Press Freedom Day in various ways, including sounding the alarm about the impacts of artificial intelligence on fact-based journalism, demanding global safeguards for digital privacy, and calling out the U.S. government for continuing to seek the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Crackdown, disinformation: Report rings the alarm on diminishing global press freedoms • FRANCE 24

 

Bombshell Report Exposes Key Argument Against Student Debt Relief as  'Categorically False'

"The Supreme Court risks making a ruling affecting millions of people's lives without essential, accurate information," warns a new analysis from the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) delivers remarks during a protest in support of student debt cancellation as the Supreme Court begins oral arguments on February 28, 2023.
(Photo: Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON
May 03, 2023

The argument at the center of Republican officials' case against President Joe Biden's student debt cancellation plan is "categorically false," according to an explosive new report released Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective.

With debt relief for tens of millions of people hanging in the balance, the GOP state officials who brought the case told Supreme Court justices in late February that they have legal standing to challenge the Biden administration's student debt cancellation plan because if it took effect, it would "cut MOHELA's operating revenue by 40%."

MOHELA is Missouri's state-created higher education loan authority, and the supposed financial harms it would suffer under the student debt cancellation plan are critical to the right-wing officials' case. If the Republican plaintiffs can't prove that MOHELA—which is not itself a plaintiff in Biden v. Nebraska—would suffer concrete harm from student debt cancellation, their case falls apart.

According to the new report by the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective, not only would MOHELA not be harmed by the Biden administration's student debt relief plan—it would actually see its direct loan revenue rise if the plan is enacted.

"Our new research examining this claim suggests that MOHELA's year-over-year revenue from direct loans will actually increase substantially, even after debt relief," the report states. "Assuming President Biden's proposed cancellation goes through, we estimate that MOHELA will service more than twice the number of accounts it serviced at the beginning of the Covid payment pause. It will also earn nearly twice as much revenue servicing federal direct loans as it has in any year prior to cancellation."

The groups said their findings were bolstered by internal MOHELA documents that they obtained through a public records request. MOHELA's "own internal impact analysis," the report notes, "shows it would make more revenue the first year after cancellation is processed than it did in 2022 or any prior year."

"The entire premise of the lawsuit against student debt relief rests on the idea that 43 million student debtors shouldn't get relief for which they were already approved because one of the corporations contracted by the government to collect student debt, and thus the state of Missouri, will be financially harmed in the process," the report concludes. "Our analysis reveals this assertion to be false. In contrast, MOHELA will earn higher revenue than ever before, even after cancellation is administered—contradicting the plaintiffs' argument and calling into question their claims to standing."

Thomas Gokey, a co-founder of the Debt Collective and an author of the report, toldThe Lever on Tuesday that "it's really hard to stop student debt cancellation because you need to find someone who is harmed by it" to establish standing to sue.

"And the truth is, nobody is actually harmed by student debt cancellation," said Gokey. "It benefits everybody. It benefits people who don't have student debt."




Biden v. Nebraska, one of two student debt cancellation cases currently before the Supreme Court, has been placed on a fast track, meaning that "the Republican attorneys general trying to stop student debt cancellation for 43 million borrowers have at no point been obliged to verify the basic facts of this case," the Roosevelt Institute and the Debt Collective stressed.

"As a result, the Supreme Court risks making a ruling affecting millions of people's lives without essential, accurate information," the progressive groups said.

The report also highlights that, as part of its contract with the Department of Education, "MOHELA agreed not to 'object to or protest [Federal Student Aid's] allocation or reallocation of existing borrower loans, and further waives and releases all current or future claims against [FSA]... regarding its current allocation decisions and methodology for existing borrower loans.'"

"Maybe that's why MOHELA never joined the lawsuit," The American Prospect's David Dayen suggested in his write-up of the new report. "But none of that matters to this Supreme Court. They are on the verge of accepting a standing argument of a fake plaintiff who never joined the case, based on an assertion of harm that in the final analysis is actually a benefit, while ignoring a signed contract that flatly prohibits the fake plaintiff from suing at all."

"I know we're in a post-fact era, but this is really something," Dayen continued. "If the court doesn't pay careful attention to this report, more than 40 million student borrowers could experience continued financial hardship because the justices would rather violate numerous principles of jurisprudence than let Joe Biden help anyone. The conservatives on the court are obviously not mathematicians or experts in student debt servicing or financing. But they don't appear to be judges, either, at least in the sense of following the law."

Median Pay of Top US CEOs Jumped to Record $22.3 Million Last Year

"Corporate greed is out of control," said consumer watchdog Public Citizen.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon attends a policy forum with then-U.S. President Donald Trump in the State Dining Room at the White House
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY
May 03, 2023

As workers in a range of industries across the United States demanded fair pay and benefits last year—and in several cases, were forced to strike as companies refused to meet those demands—median compensation for the top chief executives rose to a record-breaking $22.3 million.

The executive compensation research firm Equilar released its annual findings on CEO pay in 2022 Wednesday, showing the 100 highest-paid CEOs of companies with a revenue of $1 billion or more made 7.7% more than in 2021, driven largely by huge stock awards.

Corporations have blamed inflation for higher prices on goods and services, but the supposed financial burden caused by the rising consumer price index has not forced executives to take pay cuts, the study shows—bolstering earlier analysis that has shown companies have used inflation as an excuse to unnecessarily raise prices and have pocketed the increased profits.

With the average U.S. private sector employee earning $1,132 per week last year—up only 3.6% from 2021—the median CEO-to-worker pay ratio rose to 288-to-1. The ratio was 254-to-1 the previous year, an astronomical rise from its level in 1965, when CEOs earned 20 times more than their employees on average.

The Federal Reserve, which on Wednesday raised interest rates for the 10th time to fight the current trend of rising inflation—a tactic that can lead to job losses—has in recent months pushed companies to "get wages down" for workers, even as average pay for workers has remained relatively stagnant and CEO compensation has skyrocketed.

"Just to catch up with what their CEO made in 2018 alone, it would take the typical worker 158 years," said economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in a video he released about CEO pay on Monday.

Median stock awards for executives went up 20% to $13.8 million last year, allowing CEOs who make headlines by taking low salaries to rake in record-breaking compensation nonetheless.

Hamid Moghadam, chief executive of logistics real estate company Prologis, is among the U.S. CEOs who officially take home a salary of just $1 per year, but his stock awards drove his total compensation up to $48.2 million last year—an increase of 94% over 2021.

Richard Handler, CEO of the investment back Jefferies Group, nearly doubled his 2021 compensation thanks to a one-time "leadership continuity grant" of stock awards that was approved by only 59% of his company's shareholders. The grant amounted to $25 million and his total compensation was $56.9 million.

On Tuesday, as television writers represented by the Writers Guild of America went on strike due to their inflation-adjusted pay declining by 23% over the past decade, consumer rights watchdog Public Citizen noted that studio executives made hundreds of millions annually in recent years.



"Corporate greed is out of control," said the group.

THIRD WORLD U$A

The End of Covid-Era Benefits Reveals a Society Still Profoundly Sick

As protections for the poor are being cut, ongoing protections for the rich — including Donald Trump’s historic tax breaks — remain untouched.


People receive food after waiting on line for hours outside of a Brooklyn mosque and cultural center on May 22 , 2020 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

REV. DR. LIZ THEOHARIS
May 03, 2023

TomDispatch

“In order to fully recover, we must first recover the society that has made us sick.”

I can still hear those prophetic words, now a quarter-century old, echoing through the Church Center of the United Nations. At the podium was David, a leader with New Jerusalem Laura, a residential drug recovery program in North Philadelphia that was free and accessible to people, no matter their insurance and income status. It was June 1998 and hundreds of poor and low-income people had gathered for the culminating event of the “New Freedom Bus Tour: Freedom from Unemployment, Hunger, and Homelessness,” a month-long, cross-country organizing event led by welfare rights activists. Two years earlier, President Bill Clinton had signed welfare “reform” into law, gutting life-saving protections and delivering a punishing blow to millions of Americans who depended on them.

That line of David’s has stuck with me over all these years. He was acutely aware of how one’s own health — whether from illness, addiction, or the emotional wear and tear of life — is inextricably connected to larger issues of systemic injustice and inequality. After years on the frontlines of addiction prevention and treatment, he also understood that personal recovery can only happen en masse in a society willing to deal with the deeper malady of poverty and racism. This month, his words have been on my mind again as I’ve grieved over the death of Reverend Paul Chapman, a friend and mentor who was with me at that gathering in 1998. The issue of “recovery” has, in fact, been much on my mind as the Biden administration prepares to announce the official end of the public-health emergency that accompanied the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However briefly, the pandemic showed us that such an American world is not only possible, but right at our fingertips.

For our society, that decision is more than just a psychological turning of the page. Even though new daily cases continue to number in the thousands nationally, free testing will no longer be available for many, and other pandemic-era public-health measures — including broader access to medication for opioid addiction — will also soon come to an end. Worse yet, a host of temporary health and nutrition protections are now on the chopping block, too (and given the debate on the debt ceiling in Congress, the need for such programs is particularly dire).

When the pandemic first hit, the federal government temporarily banned any Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) cuts, mandating that states offer continuous coverage. As a result, enrollment in both swelled, as many people in need of health insurance found at least some coverage. But that ban just expired and tens of millions of adults and children are now at risk of losing access to those programs over the next year. Many of them also just lost access to critically important Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, as pandemic-era expansions of that program were cut last month.

Of course, the announced “end’ of the public-health emergency doesn’t mean the pandemic is really over. Thousands of people are still dying from it, while 20% of those who had it are experiencing some form of long Covid and many elderly and immunocompromised Americans continue to feel unsafe. Nor, by the way, does that announcement diminish a longer-term, slow-burning public health crisis in this country.

Early in the pandemic, Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, warned that the virus was exploiting deeply entrenched fissures in our society. Before the pandemic, there had already been all too many preconditions for a future health calamity: in 2020, for instance, there were 140 million people too poor to afford a $400 emergency, nearly 10 million people homeless or on the brink of homelessness, and 87 million underinsured or uninsured.

Last year, the Poor People’s Campaign commissioned a study on the connections between Covid-19, poverty, and race. Sadly, researchers found the fact that all too many Americans refused to be vaccinated did not alone explain why this country had the highest pandemic death toll in the world. The lack of affordable and accessible health care contributed significantly to the mortality rate. The study concluded that, despite early claims that Covid-19 could be a “great equalizer,” it’s distinctly proven to be a “poor people’s pandemic” with two to fivetimes as many inhabitants of poor counties dying of it in 2020 and 2021 as in wealthy ones.

The pandemic not only exposed social fissures; it exacerbated them. While life expectancy continues to rise across much of the industrialized world, it stagnated in the United States over the last decade. Then, during the first three years of the pandemic, it dropped in a way that experts claim is unprecedented in modern global history.

In comparison, peer countries initially experienced just one-third as much of a decline in life expectancy and then, as they adopted effective Covid-19 responses, saw it increase. In our country, the stagnation in life expectancy before the pandemic and the seemingly unending plunge after it hit mark us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but even among some poorer ones. The Trump administration’s disastrous pandemic response was significantly to blame for the drop, but beyond that, our track record over the last decade speaks volumes about our inability to provide a healthy life for so many in this country. As always, the poor suffer first and worst in such a situation.

The Pandemic as a Portal

In the early weeks of those Covid-19 lockdowns, Indian writer Arundhati Roy reflected on the societal change often wrought by pandemics in history. And she suggested that this sudden crisis could be an opportunity to embrace necessary change:
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway, between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”


There was hope in Roy’s words but also caution. As she suggested, what would emerge from that portal was hardly guaranteed to be better. Positive change is never a certainty (in actuality, anything but!). Still, a choice had to be made, action taken. While contending with the great challenges of our day — widespread poverty, unprecedented inequality, racial reckoning, rising authoritarianism, and climate disaster — it’s important to reflect soberly on just how we’ve chosen to walk through the portal of this pandemic. The sure-footed decisions, as well as the national missteps, have much to teach us about how to chart a better path forward as a society.

Consider the federal programs and policies temporarily created or expanded during the first years of the pandemic. While protecting Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP, the government instituted eviction moratoriums, extended unemployment insurance, issued stimulus payments directly to tens of millions of households, and expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Such proactive policy decisions did not by any means deal with the full extent of need nationwide. Still, for a time, they did mark a departure from the neoliberal consensus of the previous decades and were powerful proof that we could house, feed, and care for one another. The explosion of Covid cases and the lockdown shuttering of the economy may have initially triggered many of these policies, but once in place, millions of people did experience just how sensible and feasible they are.

The Child Tax Credit is a good example. In March 2021, the program was expanded through the American Rescue Plan, and by December the results were staggering. More than 61 million children had benefited and four million children were lifted above the official poverty line, a historic drop in the overall child poverty rate. A report found that the up to $300 monthly payments significantly improved the ability of families to catch up on rent, afford food more regularly, cover child-care expenses, and attend to other needs. Survey data also suggested that the CTC helped improve the parental depression, stress, and anxiety that often accompany poverty and the suffering of children.

How extraordinary, then, that, rather than being embraced for offering the glimmer of something new on the other side of that pandemic portal, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2022 ended. The oppressive weight of our “dead ideas,” to use Roy’s term, crushed that hopeful possibility. Last year, led by a block of unified Republicans, Congress axed it, invoking the tired and time-worn myth of scarcity as a justification. When asked about the CTC, Congressman Kevin Brady (R-TX) claimed that “the country frankly doesn’t have the time or the money for the partisan, expensive provisions such as the Child Tax Credit.” Consider such a response especially disingenuous given that Brady and a majority of congressional Republicans and Democrats voted to increase the military budget to a record $858 billion that same year.

In so many other ways, our society has refused to relinquish old and odious thinking and is instead “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred” through the portal of the pandemic.

There are continued attacks on the health of women and the autonomy of those who can get pregnant; on LGBTQ+ people, including a wave of anti-trans legislation; on homeless people who are criminalized for their poverty; and on poor communities as a whole, including disinvestment, racist police abuse, and deadly mass incarceration at sites like New York City’s Rikers Island and the Southern Regional Jail in the mountains of West Virginia. And while weathering a storm of Christian nationalist and white supremacist mass shootings, this country is a global outlier on the issue of public safety, fueled by endless stonewalling on sensible gun legislation.

To add insult to injury, economic inequality in the United States rose to unprecedented heights in the pandemic years (which proved a godsend for America’s billionaires), with millions hanging on by a thread and inflation continuing to balloon. And as pandemic-era protections for the poor are being cut, ongoing protections for the rich — including Donald Trump’s historic tax breaks — remain untouched.

Another World Is Possible

In the office of the Employment Project where I worked upon first moving to New York City in 2001, there was a poster whose slogan — “Another World Is Possible” — still stays with me. It hung above my head, while I labored alongside my friend and mentor Paul Chapman.

Paul died this April and we just held a memorial for him. He was an activist in welfare rights and workers’ rights, director of the Employment Project, and one of the founders of the Poverty Initiative, a predecessor to the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice that I currently direct.

Paul did pioneering work to bring together Protestant and Catholic communities in Boston, organized delegations of northern clergy to support civil rights struggles in small towns in North Carolina, and sponsored significant fundraisers for the movement, alongside his friend, theologian Harvey Cox. He also spent time in Brazil connecting with liberation theologians and others who went on to found the World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of social movements from across the globe whose founding mantra was “Another World Is Possible.” Over the course of his long life, Paul would do what Black Freedom Struggle leader Ella Baker called “the spadework,” the slow, often overlooked labor of building trust, caring for people, planting seeds, and tilling the ground so that transformative movements might someday blossom. His life was a constant reminder that every organizing moment, no matter how small, is a fundamentally important part of how we build toward collective liberation.

Paul explained many things, including that powerful movements for social change depend on the leadership of those most impacted by injustice. Right next to the WSF poster there was another that read: “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.” Paul spoke regularly about how poor and oppressed people had to be the moral-standard bearers for society. He was unyielding in his belief that it was the duty of clergy and faith communities to stand alongside the poor in their struggles for respect and dignity. As a young antipoverty organizer and seminarian, I was deeply inspired by the way he modeled a principled blending of political and pastoral work.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from him was about the idea of “kairos” time. Paul taught me that, in ancient Greece, there were two conceptions of time. Chronos was normal, chronological time, while kairos was a particular moment when normal time was disrupted and something new promised — or threatened — to emerge. In our hours of “theological reflection,” he would say that during kairos time, as the old ways of the world were dying and new ones were struggling to be born, there was no way you could remain neutral. You had to decide whether to dedicate your life to change or block its path. In some fashion, his description of kairos time perfectly matched Roy’s evocative metaphor of that pandemic portal and when I first read her essay I instantly thought of Paul.

In antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. The image of the vigilant archer remains a powerful one for me, especially because kairos time represents both tremendous possibility and imminent danger. The moment can be seized and the arrow shot true or it can be missed with the archer just as quickly becoming the target. Paul lived his life as an archer for justice, ever vigilant, ever patient, ever hopeful that another better world was indeed possible.

Despite our bleak current moment, I retain the same hope. However briefly, the pandemic showed us that such an American world is not only possible, but right at our fingertips. As the public-health emergency draws to an “official” end, it’s hardly a surprise to me that so many of those in power have chosen to double down on policies that protect their interests. But like Paul, it’s not the leadership of the rich and powerful that I choose to follow. As our communities continue to fight for healthcare, housing, decent wages, and so much more, I believe that, given half a chance, the poor, the hurting, and the abandoned, already standing in the gap between our wounded old world and a possible new one, could help usher us into a far better future.

© 2023 TomDispatch.com


REV. DR. LIZ THEOHARIS is co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. She is the author of "Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor" (2017).

If Biden Believes Journalism Is Not a Crime, He'll Drop Charges Against Julian Assange

Biden spoke powerfully in defense of press freedom Saturday, but his own Department of Justice contradicts this by continuing Trump's attack against the WikiLeaks founder.


People protest in Piazza della Repubblica to demand the freedom of Julian Assange, with banners, placards and silhouettes depicting the journalists in prison, on April 11, 2023 in Rome, Italy. The protest against Julian Assange confinement in Belmarsh marks his fourth year in prison.
(Photo: Simona Granati - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)


JOHN NICHOLS
May 03, 2023

The Nation

President Biden opened his speech at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner with an urgent appeal for the release of imprisoned journalists—and for increased global recognition of the vital importance of robust protections for a free press.

“Tonight, our message is this: Journalism is not a crime!” declared Biden, as he put aside the evening’s punch lines for a serious show of solidarity with jailed and persecuted journalists around the world, including Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been falsely accused of espionage by the Russians, and Austin Tice, a kidnapped American journalist who is believed to be held by the Syrian government.

"The free press is a pillar—maybe the pillar—of a free society, not the enemy,” Biden told the assembled reporters, editors, TV anchors, and radio hosts. “You make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority—and, yes, even to laugh at authority—without fear or intimidation. That’s what makes this nation strong. So, tonight, let us show ourselves and the world our strength, not just by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

It has never been necessary to approve of a particular writer’s views or personal behaviors, or a particular publisher’s tactics, to recognize that, when the First Amendment rights of individual practitioners of the craft are threatened, the future of journalism is imperiled.

The statement was a welcome departure from the attacks on journalism that characterized the administration of Donald Trump, who claimed in 2019 that “the press…is the enemy of the people.” And it anticipated the participation of high-profile Biden administration members, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in events scheduled for Wednesday that will honor World Press Freedom Day.

Unfortunately, while Biden’s rhetoric is better than that of his predecessor, his approach to one of the highest-profile cases involving an imprisoned journalist maintains Trump’s line of attack. The Biden administration continues to seek to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on espionage charges stemming from the 2010 publication of evidence of “Collateral Murder” atrocities committed by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2019, Trump’s Department of Justice indicted Assange on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. DOJ lawyers then engineered Assange’s arrest in London on a U.S. warrant and proceeded to push for his extradition to the United States for a trial on charges that carry a potential life sentence.

Biden’s administration had the chance to end the government’s targeting of Assange. Instead, his Department of Justice has pursued the extradition effort just as zealously as did Trump’s.

Assange is, to be sure, a controversial figure. He has upset both Republicans and Democrats, initially by his uncovering secrets regarding U.S. military wrongdoing and his successful publication of that information—on the platforms of some of the world’s most prominent news outlets—and later by revelations regarding the Democratic National Committee that WikiLeaks circulated during the 2016 election campaign. Assange retains more than his share of critics in the United States and abroad, and they do not hesitate to recall allegations of personal misconduct—including those associated with a Swedish sexual-assault investigation that was eventually dropped.

But crusading journalists throughout history have invariably stirred controversy, and known disdain. President John Adams decried Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, an essential document of the American Revolutionary moment, as “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” A century after Paine’s death, another president, Theodore Roosevelt, dismissed Paine as “a filthy little atheist.” It has never been necessary to approve of a particular writer’s views or personal behaviors, or a particular publisher’s tactics, to recognize that, when the First Amendment rights of individual practitioners of the craft are threatened, the future of journalism is imperiled.

That’s what needs to be understood with regard to the U.S. government’s targeting of Assange. He was indicted because he publicly exposed details of troublesome activities that the government wanted to keep secret—which is another way of saying that he engaged in the practice of journalism. And because he did so, he now faces the potential for prosecution by the administration of a president who proudly proclaims that “journalism is not a crime.”

The fact is that prosecuting Assange on the charges that have been brought against him would criminalize journalism. As Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, has explained:
The prosecution of Julian Assange poses a grave threat to press freedom. Bringing criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations. The government needs to immediately drop its charges against him.

That is not an isolated view. Amnesty International, Pen International, Reporters Without Borders, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and other groups have decried efforts to extradite Assange and called for dropping the charges against him. So, too, have editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País, who argue that the targeting of Assange for prosecution under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

That’s long been the position of the International Federation of Journalists, the global organization that represents working reporters and editors. IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger says, “President Joe Biden must end the years of politically motivated prosecution of Julian Assange by finally dropping the charges against him. The criminalization of whistleblowers and investigative journalists has no place in a democracy.”

Biden is right when he declares that “journalism is not a crime.” Now, he must link words and deeds. The president and his attorney general need to end efforts to extradite Assange and take the steps that are necessary to drop the charges against the WikiLeaks publisher. These steps should have been taken as soon as Biden assumed the presidency in 2021. But, since that did not happen, Biden can and should set things right on World Press Freedom Day 2023.

© 2023 The Nation


JOHN NICHOLS is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His books co-authored with Robert W. McChesney are: "Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America" (2014), "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again" (2011), and "Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy" (2006). Nichols' other books include: "The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism" (2015), "Dick: The Man Who is President (2004) and "The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism" (2006).

High school students learn the basics of base editing to cure “GFP-itis”

Outreach program introduces local students to genome engineering and a career in science

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN DIEGO

Genome editing is used to modify the genes of living organisms to elicit certain traits, such as climate-resilient crops or treating human disease at the genetic level. It has become increasingly popular in agriculture, medicine and basic science research over the past decade, and will continue to be relevant and utilized well into the future. Given this prevalence, researchers at the University of California San Diego have started an outreach program that introduces genome-editing technologies to high school students.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Alexis Komor, and Ph.D. candidates Mallory Evanoff and Carlos Vasquez, designed the Genome Editing Technologies Program as a way to educate students on base-editing technologies, expose them to scientists from diverse backgrounds and invite questions about college, professional development, and the everyday life of a graduate student or faculty member within academia. The program is detailed in April 20 issue of The CRISPR Journal.

Base editors enable scientists to introduce point mutations at targeted sites in the genome of living cells with high efficiency and precision and, thus, have the therapeutic potential to treat thousands of human genetic disorders. Proof-of-concept studies have already demonstrated this technology’s potential in cell therapies and in treating progeria, sickle cell disease and liver diseases.

“As we were testing out some of these tools, we asked ourselves, how do we make base editors accessible to high schoolers? How do we make this process really visible?” said Evanoff.

Komor’s team generated a base-editing reporter system using E. coli bacteria. In this system, base-editing activity results in the expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP). The team installed a mutation in the bacterium’s GFP gene to remove its fluorescence. To emphasize the connection to genetic diseases, this phenotype is called “GFP-itis,” and students are tasked with “curing” the bacteria. Using base-editing technology, students correct the mutation back to wild-type, resulting in bacterial cells that fluoresce green.

The program happens over three days, creating a more meaningful partnership with the school and building a better foundation of trust with the students. “We wanted the students to get to know us better and feel comfortable asking questions about a career in STEM,” said Komor. “A popular question is simply, ‘How do I get into undergraduate research?’ One of the students in the first school we visited, Sage Creek High School, is actually an undergraduate researcher in our lab now.”

That student is Preety Iyer, a first-year human biology major, who recalled Komor’s visit to her high school as “an amazing opportunity to get hands-on experience with gene-editing technology. It seemed like an intangible concept to me when I was learning about it in my biology classes. Being walked through the entire process and being able to do it myself strengthened my understanding of DNA and gene editing.” 

Iyer plans to become a doctor working with patients who have rare genetic disorders, and she’s excited to gain more valuable hands-on experience in Komor’s lab: “I’ve been able to use equipment and practice techniques, like flow cytometry and plasmid preparation, that other students don’t get to use until later in their academic careers.” 

So far, the Genome Editing Technologies Program has visited three local high schools. The schools have had well-developed science classes and much of the equipment needed to run the experiment. The majority of students had also heard of or learned about genome engineering before. Now that Komor’s team has run the program a few times and solicited feedback from students, they hope to expand to schools without such robust science programming. 

“My high school background in science wasn’t strong in large part because of the lack of mentorship,” said Vasquez. “It’s important to us to reach students who may not have even considered a career in STEM or medicine. To look in their eyes and instill confidence, to show we believe in them — having someone like that when I was in high school would have made a world of difference.”

The make the experiment as accessible as possible, the team has simplified the base-editing experiment and provides all the necessary equipment. Accessibility also means making the program available to other institutions that may want to implement something similar. Interested scientists or instructors can order plasmid materials from AddGene, a worldwide nonprofit plasmid repository. These plasmids are the DNA needed to make the GFP-itis cells, as well the plasmids needed to as "cure" GFP-itis.

The goal of the program is not only to make base editing accessible to high school students, but also to encourage critical thinking and reflect on base editing in social and cultural contexts. Komor’s team asked students to think about the difference between a disease and a trait and to consider the implications of germline genome editing, in which edits are inherited by all future descendants of the edited individual, regardless of whether those descendants consent to the procedure.

“The ethical discussion is what hits a home run with the students,” said Vasquez. “They’ll be responsible for future gene-editing policies. It’s interesting to see them thinking about the ethical side of science.”

“We’ve had some really good discussions about what is a disease and what is a trait,” stated Evanoff. “If we have the ability to make genetic-disease corrections, who will be able to afford those treatments? Where does the equitability lie in this technology? We don't have the answers to that. I say to students, ‘That's going to be your job to figure out!’”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (MCB-2048207), the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32 GM007240-41), the National Institute of Health (T32 GM112584), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (GT13672 and the Gilliam Fellowship Program) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship Program.

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JOURNAL

The CRISPR Journal

DOI

10.1089/crispr.2023.0002 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Curing “GFP-itis” in Bacteria with Base Editors: Development of a Genome Editing Science Program Implemented with High School Biology Students

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Apr-2023

COI STATEMENT

A.C.K. is a member of the SAB of Pairwise Plants, is an equity holder for Pairwise Plants and Beam Therapeutics, and receives royalties from Pairwise Plants, Beam Therapeutics, and Editas Medicine via patents licensed from Harvard University. A.C.K.’s interests have been reviewed and approved by the University of California, San Diego in accordance with its conflict of interest policies. All other authors declare no competing financial interests.

Quan­tum com­puter in reverse gear

Reversible logic gates designed for large scale integer factorization

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK

 

IMAGE: MARTIN LANTHALER (LEFT) AND WOLFGANG LECHNER (RIGHT) FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK. view more 

CREDIT: PARITYQC

Today's computers are based on microprocessors that execute so-called gates. A gate can, for example, be an AND operation, i.e. an operation that adds two bits. These gates, and thus computers, are irreversible. That is, algorithms cannot simply run backwards. “If you take the multiplication 2*2=4, you cannot simply run this operation in reverse, because 4 could be 2*2, but likewise 1*4 or 4*1,” explains Wolfgang Lechner, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Innsbruck. If this were possible, however, it would be feasible to factorize large numbers, i.e. divide them into their factors, which is an important pillar of cryptography.

Martin Lanthaler, Ben Niehoff and Wolfgang Lechner from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the quantum spin-off ParityQC have now developed exactly this inversion of algorithms with the help of quantum computers. The starting point is a classical logic circuit, which multiplies two numbers. If two integers are entered as the input value, the circuit returns their product. Such a circuit is built from irreversible operations. “However, the logic of the circuit can be encoded within ground states of a quantum system,” explains Martin Lanthaler from Wolfgang Lechner's team. “Thus, both multiplication and factorization can be understood as ground-state problems and solved using quantum optimization methods.”

Superposition of all possible results

„The core of our work is the encoding of the basic building blocks of the multiplier circuit, specifically AND gates, half and full adders with the parity architecture as the ground state problem on an ensemble of interacting spins,” says Martin Lanthaler. The coding allows the entire circuit to be built from repeating subsystems that can be arranged on a two-dimensional grid. By stringing several of these subsystems together, larger problem instances can be realized. Instead of the classical brute force method, where all possible factors are tested, quantum methods can speed up the search process: To find the ground state, and thus solve an optimization problem, it is not necessary to search the whole energy landscape, but deeper valleys can be reached by "tunneling".

The current research work provides a blueprint for a new type of quantum computer to solve the factorization problem, which is a cornerstone of modern cryptography. This blueprint is based on the parity architecture developed at the University of Innsbruck and can be implemented on all current quantum computing platforms.

The results were recently published in Nature Communications Physics. Financial support for the research was provided by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the European Union and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG, among others.

Publication: Scalable set of reversible parity gates for integer factorization. Martin Lanthaler, Benjamin E. Niehoff & Wolfgang Lechner. Nature Communications Physics 6, 73 (2023) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-023-01191-3

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JOURNAL

Communications Physics

DOI

10.1038/s42005-023-01191-3 

ARTICLE TITLE

Scalable set of reversible parity gates for integer factorization

Taylor & Francis set to open over 50 book titles with Knowledge Unlatched

Initiative enables researchers in disciplines and regions with limited open access publishing support to join Taylor & Francis’ leading OA Books program

Business Announcement

TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP

Taylor & Francis is delighted to announce the results of Knowledge Unlatched (KU) 2023, with support pledged to convert over 50 book titles to open access (OA). Titles to benefit from this support cover a broad range of humanities and social science disciplines as well as key topic areas, including climate change, global health, and gender studies.

Under the KU crowdfunding model, research libraries around the world unite to support the publication costs of new eBooks and enable access for all to important new research. Since 2016, when Taylor & Francis’ partnership with Knowledge Unlatched began, over 100 books have been published OA at no cost to the authors. OA books now available address a wide variety of important issues, including artificial intelligence, terrorism and social media, as well as environmental policy, pandemics, migration, human rights and fake news.

As in previous years, the list of Taylor & Francis books to be made OA in 2023 has a particular focus on supporting disciplines and regions where there is otherwise limited funding for traditional OA models. This includes long standing subject collections within African Studies, providing an innovative publishing solution for Africa-based scholars. Two African Studies titles recently published open access under the program include 'The South African Response to COVID-19' and 'Nigeria's Third-Generation Literature'.

Nicola Parkin, Director of Books Editorial Services at Taylor & Francis, said: “Taylor & Francis has one of the largest portfolios of OA books and we’re delighted that the latest Knowledge Unlatched pledging round will see more than 50 titles added to that list. We believe that open access is the most effective way to amplify the research that fosters human progress. That’s why our KU partnership, which prioritises research on some of the key challenges faced by our societies and our planet, is so important”.

Neil Christensen, Head of Publisher Relations at Knowledge Unlatched, added: "We are excited for the high-quality books that Taylor & Francis and their authors commit to this collective-action model for equitable open access that KU brokers. Made possible by the support of hundreds of libraries, the KU model has made more than 4,000 scholarly books open access in the past 10 years and counting. Taylor & Francis, the authors, and the supporting libraries play a fundamental role in shaping the collective knowledge of our world – and often doing so in areas that suffer from systemic funding shortage. Full details for pledging support for KU 2024 collections are due to be announced in the second week of May at knowledgeunlatched.org".

Open access makes published research freely available for anyone, anywhere to read, download and share, to ensure the widest possible reach and impact. Taylor & Francis has been publishing open access journals since 2006, and in 2013 complemented it with an open access book program. This includes books and chapters across all subjects covered by Routledge, CRC Press and their imprints in the humanities, social sciences and behavioral sciences. The Taylor & Francis open access books program allows authors and their funders to publish open access single- or co-authored books, edited collections and individual chapters. Upon publication, open access titles and chapters are made available in digital format to read and download freely under a Creative Commons license.

Responding to feedback from institutions, funders and knowledge makers, the range of innovative Taylor & Francis OA book publishing options continues to evolve, offering choice, sustainability, impact and value.

The full range of KU Select and African Studies and Gender Studies OA book collections can be accessed from Routledge.com