Interpol seizes 19,000 stolen artefacts in international art trafficking crackdown

101 suspects arrested and rare cultural treasures recovered in huge global investigation

KARMA PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL 

Sam Jones in Madrid  Fri 8 May 2020
 

Spanish police recovered a unique Tumaco gold mask. Photograph: Interpol


Two huge international police and customs operations targeting the trade in stolen artworks and archaeological artefacts have led to the arrest of 101 people and the recovery of more than 19,000 items, including a pre-Columbian gold mask, a carved Roman lion and thousands of ancient coins.

A Menaion from 1760 was seized in Romania as well as coins. Photograph: Interpol

The joint initiatives – which involved officers from Interpol, Europol, the World Customs Organization and many national police forces – focused on the criminal networks that steal from museums, plunder archaeological sites and take advantage of the chaos in war-afflicted countries to loot their cultural treasures.

Details of the two concurrent investigations carried out last autumn are emerging only now for operational reasons.

Police officers in Spain recovered several rare pre-Columbian objects at Madrid’s Barajas airport, including a unique Tumaco gold mask, gold figurines and pieces of ancient jewellery. All had been illegally acquired by looting in Colombia.

Three traffickers were arrested in Spain, while Colombian police carried out a series of searches in Bogotá, resulting in the confiscation of a further 242 pre-Columbian objects – the largest such seizure in the country’s history. 

Colombian authorities retrieved 242 objects. Photograph: Interpol

Spain’s Guardia Civil police force said nine people were arrested in the country during the crackdown, and a Roman lion carved in limestone was recovered, as well as a frieze and three Roman columns.

Argentinian federal police seized 2,500 ancient coins, Latvian state police a further 1,375 coins, and Afghan customs officials at Kabul confiscated 971 cultural objects bound for Istanbul.

Other items recovered during the operations included fossils, paintings, ceramics and historical weapons

Cultural objects seized in Italy. Photograph: Interpol

Interpol said particular attention had been paid to monitoring online marketplaces. In the course of a “cyber patrol week”, officers led by the Italian carabinieri gathered information and identified targets that led to the seizure of 8,670 cultural objects offered for sale online.

“The number of arrests and objects show the scale and global reach of the illicit trade in cultural artefacts, where every country with a rich heritage is a potential target,” said Interpol’s secretary general, Jürgen Stock.

“If you then take the significant amounts of money involved and the secrecy of the transactions, this also presents opportunities for money laundering and fraud as well as financing organised crime networks.

”
Afghan customs recovered 971 cultural objects at Kabul airport. Photograph: Interpol

Europol said law enforcement agencies across the world needed to combat what it termed a “global phenomenon” that went well beyond the trade in looted artefacts, and that was closely related to other kinds of widespread criminal activity.

“Organised crime has many faces,” said its executive director, Catherine de Bolle. “The trafficking of cultural goods is one of them: it is not a glamorous business run by flamboyant gentlemen forgers, but by international criminal networks. You cannot look at it separately from combating trafficking in drugs and weapons: we know that the same groups are engaged, because it generates big money.”

Spanish dig closes in on burial site of Irish lord Red Hugh O'Donnell

Valladolid archaeologists find human skull in chapel where Christopher Columbus was also buried


Sam Jones in Madrid and Rory Carroll in Dublin
Wed 27 May 2020 

 

The excavated site reveals a human skull and bones. Photograph: Mayor of Valladolid/Twitter

Somewhere beneath a street in north-west Spain – probably between a bank branch and a budget clothes shop – lies the ruined chapel where an eight-toed rebel Irish lord was buried after his final, fatal mission 418 years ago.

Red Hugh O’Donnell, who escaped captivity and led a rebellion that almost expelled the Tudor English forces from Ireland, fled to Spain after the Battle of Kinsale in 1602 when the rebels tried to team up with a beleaguered Spanish expeditionary force.

He came to the country to lobby for a fresh Spanish invasion but died of a suspected tapeworm infection near the city of Valladolid aged 29.

Four centuries after O’Donnell’s death, investigators and archaeologists in the city are hunting for the chapel where he was buried – and which also held the body of Christopher Columbus before the explorer’s remains began a long intercontinental voyage of their own. Three years after he was buried in the Valladolid monastery, Columbus’s remains were moved to Seville and later sent to the Caribbean. After a sojourn on the island of Hispaniola – present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic – they went to Cuba before returning to Seville in 1898.
Oscar Puente(@oscar_puente_)

En la capilla de las Maravillas, en el lugar exacto donde se cree que se enterró a Red Hugh O’Donnell así como en su día a Cristobal Colón, han aparecido algunos restos y dos ataúdes. pic.twitter.com/yP0KTP0jPIMay 26, 2020

Efforts to locate the Chapel of Wonders, which was part of Valladolid’s huge St Francis monastery, began last year after an Irish visitor asked the local authorities if anyone knew where O’Donnell lay.


Óscar Burón, an architect for the city council, was one of those consulted. A year on, Burón, his fellow investigator Juan Carlos Urueña and a team of archaeologists are into their second week of excavations and believe they are closing in on the chapel.

“The monastery, which had been built at the end of the 13th century, was the most significant in the city in terms of both size and importance,” said Burón.

By the time O’Donnell died in the nearby village of Simancas, he added, Valladolid was serving as the seat of the court of Philip III and the monastery would have been “at the height of its splendour”. But the site was sold and destroyed in 1836 during a wave of monastic expropriations.

Using records, digital technology and the only surviving plan of the monastery, which dates from 1835, the team set about looking for the chapel.

“We’ve been piecing together the plans and looking for the trail over the past 200 or 300 years to find out where certain walls and lines are now,” said Burón.

“Now it’s just a question of putting that together – and praying a lot. On Monday morning, the archaeologists said they’d come across another of the walls we were expecting to find, which means we’re getting very close.” 

The dig in the centre of Valladolid, Spain. Photograph: Jesús Guerra
The project has turned up hundreds of bone fragments and on Wednesday found six more-or-less intact skeletons, leading the team to suspect they are already in or around the Chapel of Wonders.

The dig has attracted considerable interest from Ireland, where O’Donnell remains a romantic – and romanticised – figure, and a symbol of defiance on a par with Scotland’s William Wallace. O’Donnell was born in 1572 in what is today County Donegal, a north-west corner of Ireland that had held on to its Gaelic identity and independence against English encroachment.

He clashed with local rivals, raided cattle and pillaged much of Galway but Irish schoolchildren tend to focus on 1592, when he escaped imprisonment in Dublin Castle and lost two toes to frostbite while fleeing over the Wicklow mountains.

With his father-in-law, Hugh O’Neill, he led a nine-year campaign that scored notable victories against Queen Elizabeth I’s forces before defeat at Kinsale. From there, he struck out for Spain.

“He was a formidable operator – powerful and probably quite charismatic,” said Jane Ohlmeyer, a professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin and author of Making Ireland English: the Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century.

“He was a very significant regional powerbroker and periodically a thorn in the side of the English crown. Taking him out would have been a priority for Queen Elizabeth and her officials in Ireland.”

Were they to be found, his remains could yield DNA that would confirm or scotch a theory that he was poisoned, said Ohlmeyer. “You can tell a lot from people’s bones. They could tell us not only how he died but how he lived.”

Burón, however, is adamant that no one should be holding their breath. The monastery was used as a burial site for hundreds of years and the bones it held were churned and mixed up when it was destroyed in 1836. And besides, he added, real-life archaeological quests seldom end as neatly as they do in Indiana Jones films.

“People in Ireland are hoping that a skeleton missing two toes will turn up and that it’ll be poor old Red Hugh,” said the architect. “But it would be impossible to do a DNA test on each of the 300 or 400 bone fragments we’ve found – unless a Bill Gates type wants to come along and spend their millions on it.”

For him and the rest of the team, the project is about much more than bones, no matter how illustrious. “What we’re doing is trying to locate the chapel where Columbus and O’Donnell were so that the site can get the respect it deserves,” said Burón.

“It’s important for the people of Valladolid and important for the people of Ireland. This monastery was one of the biggest in Spain at the time and it’s very sad that a place with so much heritage and history was lost overnight. It’s so valuable and yet it’s been forgotten.”

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: gripping not-just-for-kids cartoon that openly centres queer love

(ALWAYS SUSPECTED THAT SHE WAS THE PAL OF GAY HUNK HE-MAN)

Ostensibly a children’s show, She-Ra is a fantastical, nuanced treatment of good and evil that feels oddly relatable in these times

Megan Maurice

Thu 28 May 2020
 

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is quite joyful to watch with a small child. Photograph: Netflix


“We’ve gotta find every bit of strength that we have and never let it go,” urges the theme song of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, as it draws you into its warm embrace.

It feels relatable in these times. Sure, the reason I need “every bit of strength” is to figure out how to work from home while parenting a small child rather than to save the universe from unspeakable evil, but it’s comparable.

It’s one of many ways that She-Ra is perfect lockdown viewing. A reimagining of the 1980s spin-off of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the reboot delivers colourful escapism that’s gripping and plot-driven while also leaving you with the sense that you’d dive right in and fight alongside the rebellion if given the chance.

Riverdale: a campy, maximalist romp that leans into its own post-comic book absurdity

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I originally tuned in when it began in 2018 because it looked like something my then four-year-old daughter might be interested in. By the time I discovered it was a few more steps towards terrifying than Bluey or Doc McStuffins, it had become essential family viewing.

The show centres around teenage soldier Adora, who was adopted into the Horde as a baby and has spent her life in the Fright Zone training to fight to wrest control of Etheria from the evil princesses that rule the planet. Just as she is preparing to embark on her first real mission, she stumbles across a mysterious sword and meets Glimmer and Bow, enemies of the Horde.

 Shadow Weaver and Adora: ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters in She-Ra are equally humanised. Photograph: Netflix

In a moment reminiscent of Mitchell and Webb’s “Are We the Baddies?” sketch, Adora suddenly realises she has been fighting on the side of evil and the people she considers family are terrorising Etheria. Her connection to the sword becomes clear as she realises she can transform into She-Ra, a mythical princess with superhuman powers.

For all of its excitement and action, what I like best is the way it blurs the line between good and evil in a way that’s incredibly nuanced for what is ostensibly a children’s show. From Adora’s childhood best friend Catra, to the hug-loving butch Scorpia and even second-in-command Shadow Weaver who at first appears to be the epitome of an irredeemable villain, the members of the Horde are humanised and have as much depth to their characters as those in the rebellion.

This depiction of the characters as complex people with varying amounts of light and shade makes the relationships, illustrated against a background of a war zone, come to life. While elemental princess Mermista and the flamboyant sea captain Seahawk provide much of the comic relief with their unlikely romance, it’s the way She-Ra openly centres queer love and romance that’s really powerful.

Seahawk, Mermista, Perfuma and Scorpia. Photograph: Netflix

From married princesses Netossa and Spinnerella, to Rebellion archer Bow’s two dads, showrunner Noelle Stevenson put her cards on the table early in the series and continued to develop queer relationships that become more and more central to the plot as the series progresses.

It’s something that is quite joyful to watch with a small child. After years of seeing Disney princesses marry copy-and-paste princes, being able to see my daughter connecting with all these diverse relationships has been wonderful.

At the heart of the show is the relationship between Adora and Catra – fighting on opposite sides, they are at war for much of the show but through a series of flashbacks we see the depth of their connection as children and understand what they mean to each other. It’s a complicated relationship that’s tied up in friendship, hate, jealousy, power and love.

While the backdrop might not be of this world, the characters are as familiar as old friends, and finding every bit of strength that you have and never letting go is something we can all relate to, whether we’re fighting for our lives or just hoping to one day go back outside.

• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a Netflix Original, is streaming on Netflix

The long read
How the free press worldwide is under threat

 Illustration: Guardian Design

From Mexico to Malta, attacks on journalists and publishers have proved deadly to individuals and chilling to broader freedoms. And now Covid-19 is being used as an excuse to silence more voices. 

By Gill Phillips
Thu 28 May 2020

Just after 7am on the morning of 23 March 2017, journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea, a 54-year-old mother of three, was driving her 14-year-old son to school in the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, when a man walked up to her car and shot her eight times. According to reports, her son was not injured, but Breach died on the way to hospital.

The Mexican newspaper la Jornada reported that a cardboard note was found at the scene of the murder, which read: “For being a snitch. You’re next, Governor – El 80.” According to Mexican police, “El 80” was Carlos Arturo Quintana, son of the leader of an organised crime syndicate known as La Línea, which in its heyday controlled one of the lucrative smuggling routes for the supply and transfer of drugs from Colombia to the US. Three days before Breach was murdered, Quintana’s father had been killed in a confrontation between rival gangs.

Breach worked for la Jornada and for the regional paper Norte de Ciudad Juarez, covering politics and crime; she had also set up her own news agency, Mir. She had reported extensively on the links between organised crime and politicians in Chihuahua state. On 4 March 2016, Breach wrote in la Jornada about the alleged criminal connections of mayoral candidates in several small towns in western Chihuahua. Breach had received threats to her life on at least three occasions as a result of her reporting. In October 2016, she had told a meeting of the Federal Mechanism for Journalists and Human Rights Defenders that she had been threatened. Nevertheless, on the day she was killed, she had no protection.

 

A protest in Mexico City after the murder of Miroslava Breach in 2017. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Breach’s story is not an isolated one. She was one of six journalists killed in Mexico in 2017; more than 150 journalists have been killed there since 2000, 22 of them in the state of Chihuahua. In 2019, according to data compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Mexico had the seventh-highest number of unsolved murders of journalists in the world, behind Somalia, Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, the Philippines and Afghanistan. On 18 May this year, gunmen killed the owner of a newspaper, Jorge Miguel Armenta Ávalos, and one of the policemen assigned to protect him, following earlier threats. Armenta, who is at least the third journalist to be murdered in Mexico in 2020, was attacked in broad daylight while leaving a restaurant.

According to the World Press Freedom Index for 2020, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and released in March, journalists in Mexico face a dire situation: “Collusion between officials and organized crime poses a grave threat to journalists’ safety and cripples the judicial system at all levels. Journalists who cover sensitive political stories or organized crime are warned, threatened and often gunned down in cold blood.”

Attacks on journalists around the world take many forms, some of which are sanctioned in law. Legal or quasi-legal mechanisms include the use of civil or criminal legal actions, covert surveillance, overt censorship and financial threats (such as withdrawing state advertising), as well as more direct intimidation and threats.

In recent years, another way of silencing journalists has proliferated: the use of what are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or Slapps, where defamation or criminal lawsuits are brought with the intention of shutting down forms of expression such as peaceful protest or writing blogs. Originally regarded as an American legal mechanism, such lawsuits are now fairly widespread in Europe. Before she was killed in 2017, the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing around 40 libel lawsuits filed by companies, government officials and individuals, which were described by her son Matthew as a “never-ending type of torture”.

Věra Jourová, the vice-president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, has been working on introducing protections against Slapp lawsuits, the defence of which can cost individuals a fortune and tie up their time and resources. Justin Borg-Barthet, a legal academic at Aberdeen University, has called for EU law to be changed to prevent “forum shopping” to countries with claimant-friendly laws, so that defamation suits would have to be filed in the courts of the country where the media organisation or journalist was based. Slapp lawsuits are commonly used against journalists investigating government corruption or exposing corporate abuses, but are also used against civil society organisations, activists such as environmental campaigners, trade unionists and academics, to shut down or silence acts of criticism and protest.

In France, media organisations and NGOs have been hit with what they view as Slapp suits for publishing accusations of land-grabbing from villagers and farmers in Cameroon by companies associated with the Bolloré Group. In the UK, fracking companies including Ineos, UK Oil & Gas, Cuadrilla, IGas and Angus Energy have since 2017 sought and been granted wide-ranging court injunctions, often directed against persons unknown, to prevent protests and campaigning activities at drilling sites. These injunctions had a chilling effect on the right to protest and free speech, until the court of appeal ruled in April 2019 that parts of an Ineos injunction prohibiting protests on the public highway and against the Ineos supply chain, and which had been used as a template for similar orders granted to other oil and gas companies, were unlawful.

 

Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered by a car bomb in 2017. Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

Alongside Slapp suits, there are more traditional ways to keep journalists quiet. More than 150 countries retain some sort of criminal defamation laws, many of which include the possibility of imprisonment. Blasphemy and insult laws remain commonplace in many countries, and are often used by politicians and government officials against any critical media. A number of countries including Turkey and Egypt have expansive definitions of “terrorism” that allow them to arrest and detain anyone who voices political dissent or opposition, including journalists.

In countries such as Hungary and Poland, governments and political allies exercise quasi-legal control of public information. Media owners can be pressured on what content to publish by threats to limit access to finance and advertising revenues.

Separately, the lack of legal protections for journalists against those who attack them acts as a strong deterrent. Impunity fuels a vicious cycle of violence, bolstering those who aim to silence public debate and block sensitive information.

In 2013, the UN published a plan of action on the safety of journalists, and the problem of impunity for perpetrators. The plan provides a framework for co-operation between UN bodies, national authorities, media actors and NGOs. Spearheaded through Unesco, the plan was incorporated into the Declaration of the Council of Europe in April 2014, and in guidelines published by the EU soon after. In April 2016, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation on the protection of journalism and safety of journalists and other media actors.

By the end of 2018, the Council of Europe’s Platform for the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists, set up to record information on serious concerns about media freedom and the safety of journalists in Council of Europe (CoE) member states, had registered more than 500 alerts, with year-on-year rises of incidents in every year except 2017. Nearly half of all alerts are marked as category 1, covering the most severe and damaging violations of media freedom, such as murder, direct threats to life and physical assaults. The majority of threats came from the state, with physical attacks and detentions making up nearly half the alerts. Since 2015, only 11% of all alerts have been marked as resolved, a figure that goes down to 1.82% for alerts entered in 2018. Interviews with journalists echo these statistics. In 2017, a study that interviewed 940 journalists from all CoE member states found that a staggering 40% of them had suffered slander.

According to a May 2020 report by Peter Noorlander on the implementation of the 2016 CoE recommendation, attacks against journalists remain insufficiently investigated, and a very high percentage of incidents go unpunished. “Journalists have little confidence that attacks or threats against them will be investigated, and often do not report them,” the report said. “This has a grave effect on them, and many no longer report attacks but instead self-censor and shy away from potentially controversial issues … [CoE] Member States have committed to creating an enabling environment for freedom of expression, yet, what journalists experience on the ground is increased violence, threats, denigration, arbitrary arrests and detention.”

Some of the most high-profile cases of attacks against the media in the last few years have involved journalists in countries where neither democracy nor the rule of law is respected. Many of the more recent attacks have been perpetrated or encouraged by heads of state.

They include cases such as the politically sponsored harassment of Philippines journalist Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, a social news network. Under Ressa, the site has revealed the activities of the online “troll army” that supports the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte and spreads disinformation about his opponents. Rappler has also reported critically on extrajudicial killings, human-rights violations and the rising death rates from Duterte’s war on drugs. The law suits that would follow were presaged during Duterte’s state of the union speech in July 2017, when he declared that Rappler was “fully owned” by the Americans, and therefore in violation of the constitution.

In January 2018, the Philippine securities and exchange commission revoked Rappler’s licence. The government then investigated Rappler for tax evasion, and a warrant for Ressa’s arrest was issued in November 2018. In February 2019, Ressa and Rappler were hit with another lawsuit alleging libel relating to a story published in 2012, using a law enacted four months after the story was published.

Other infamous cases of state-sponsored crimes against journalists include the brutal murder, on 2 October 2018, of Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. The CIA have concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the journalist’s assassination. On 19 July 2019, the office of the UNHCR released a report describing Khashoggi’s death as “premeditated extra judicial execution”.

In many western countries, there is a risk that intimidation and violence against the media is becoming normalised. On Czech election day in October 2017, Czech president Miloš Zeman held up a mock assault rifle with an inscription that was translated as “At journalists”. Donald Trump has regularly shouted at and abused journalists, and a BBC camera operator was violently shoved and abused at a Donald Trump rally in 2019; in May 2017, a Guardian reporter was assaulted by a Republican candidate, now an elected congressman. Most recently there have been threats against reporter Glenn Greenwald from the far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. This sort of hostility towards journalists by political leaders has global as well as domestic repercussions.

Czech President Milos Zeman holds a mock assault rifle with “At journalists” inscribed on it in October 2017. Photograph: CTK/Alamy Stock Photo

The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is currently held in HMP Belmarsh, while the UK decides if he can be extradited to the US, where he has been charged with violating the Espionage Act, and faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison if he is found guilty. As Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, has written, the charges against Assange are “attempting to criminalise things journalists regularly do when they receive and publish true information given to them by sources or whistleblowers”.

According to the RSF, “the next 10 years will be pivotal for press freedom because of converging crises affecting the future of journalism: a geopolitical crisis (due to the aggressiveness of authoritarian regimes); a technological crisis (due to a lack of democratic guarantees); a democratic crisis (due to polarisation and repressive policies); a crisis of trust (due to suspicion and even hatred of the media); and an economic crisis (impoverishing quality journalism).”

It is easy to dismiss concerns about press freedom as relevant only to countries led by repressive, unelected regimes. But that would be a mistake. In 2007, Thames Valley police searched the home and office of Sally Murrer, a local journalist. “I was just pottering around doing typical local stories and in May 2007, eight police officers swooped at my home while eight swooped simultaneously at the office,” she told reporters from the Press Gazette. “They seized all my computer equipment, searched my house, phones, laptops. They took me into custody where I stayed for a couple of days, strip-searched me. I honestly had no idea [why]. They said the charge was aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office and it carried life imprisonment.

“It was only later when they interviewed me, which they did copious times, and played me tapes and showed me transcripts of texts, that I realised I had been under surveillance for the previous eight weeks. It was just a ghastly feeling.”

Thames Valley police had secretly recorded a conversation that took place between her and a police officer. Murrer was accused of receiving sensitive stories from the police officer and selling them to the News of the World. “The stories were about a local GBH committed by a footballer, and the murder of a local man where there was a link to cannabis and his wife was the secretary of the then-MP.” After 19 months, during which she had been on police bail, Murrer’s trial collapsed after the judge ruled police had breached her rights.

More recently, in August 2018, the police in Northern Ireland arrested two journalists, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, over the alleged theft of documents from the Northern Ireland police ombudsman into the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, when members of a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, burst into a pub with assault rifles and fired on the customers. Six were killed and five wounded. Birney and McCaffrey’s homes and offices were raided. In May 2019, three appeal judges quashed the search warrants. 

Journalists Trevor Birney (left) and Barry McCaffrey in Belfast last year after judges ruled police search warrants against them illegal. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA

In the US in 2019, San Francisco police officers investigating the leak of a police report following the death of a public defender, Jeff Adachi, obtained a warrant “to conduct remote monitoring on a journalist’s telephone number device, day or night, including those signals produced in public, or location not open to public or visual surveillance”. In May 2019, the police raided the journalist Bryan Carmody’s home and office, and seized computers, phones and other electronic devices. A court has now ruled that the raid was unlawful, and the San Francisco police department has reportedly paid a substantial amount of damages to the journalist.

In Australia, in June 2019, police launched raids on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sydney HQ, with search warrants naming two reporters and a news director; and on the home of a News Corporation journalist. The ABC raid related to articles published in 2017 about alleged misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, “based off hundreds of pages of secret defence documents leaked to the ABC”. The raid on the home of the News Corporation journalist was in response to a story she had written about how the Australian Signals Directorate was seeking new powers to spy on Australian citizens. In February, a court ruled the search was legitimate as the police were investigating valid national security offences. ABC’s managing director, David Anderson, described the decision as “a blow for public interest journalism” and argued that it highlighted a “serious problem” with Australia’s national security laws.

Since the outbreak of coronavirus, protections for journalists have become more urgent than ever. According to RSF’s secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, “The coronavirus pandemic illustrates the negative factors threatening the right to reliable information, and is itself an exacerbating factor.”

“Both China and Iran censored their major coronavirus outbreaks extensively. In Iraq, the authorities stripped Reuters of its licence for three months after it published a story questioning official coronavirus figures. Even in Europe, prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary had a ‘coronavirus’ law passed with penalties of up to five years in prison for false information, a completely disproportionate and coercive measure.” RSF also say reporters have been arrested in Algeria, Jordan and Zimbabwe while reporting on lockdown-related issues, and that Cambodia’s prime minister has used the coronavirus crisis to bolster his authority.

In March, the Guardian journalist Ruth Michaelson was forced to leave Egypt after she reported on a scientific study that said Egypt was likely to have many more coronavirus cases than have been officially confirmed, and the New York Times Cairo bureau chief was reprimanded over supposed “bad faith” reporting on the country’s coronavirus cases. The Columbia Journalism Review, in an article entitled “Covid-19 is spawning a global press-freedom crackdown”, reported at the end of March that police in Venezuela had violently detained a journalist in reprisal for reporting on the pandemic, and that in Turkey, seven journalists were detained in reprisal for their reporting. In South Africa, the government has enacted a new law that makes it a crime to publish “disinformation” about Covid-19.


In light of the pandemic, the UK and other members of the executive group of the Media Freddom Coalition (Canada, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands and the US), agreed a statement on 6 April 2020, reaffirming the fundamental importance of media freedom, and calling on all states to continue to protect access to free media and the free exchange of information. The statement said that the executive group were concerned by the efforts by some states to use the crisis to put in place undue restrictions on a free and independent media: “Such actions deny societies critical information on the spread of the disease and undermine trust in responsible government”. It also urged “governments to continue guaranteeing the freedom and independence of media, the safety of journalists and other media professionals, and to refrain from imposing undue restrictions in the fight against proliferation of the coronavirus”.

On the day of the murder of Miroslava Breach Velducea in 2017, Mexico’s federal special prosecutor for crimes against freedom of expression stated that a federal investigation had begun. Seven days later, according to la Jornada, Chihuahua’s attorney general said that two suspects had been identified in the shooting, and that Breach was killed because her reporting affected the interests of organised crime.

Later that year, the finger of blame for the killing was pointed at “Los Salazares”, a criminal organisation linked to the Sinaloa cartel, led by the Mexican drug lord El Chapo, who has since been convicted in the US for trafficking tons of cocaine, heroin and marijuana and engaging in multiple murder conspiracies, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison . A hitman linked to Los Salazares – Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa, alias “El Larry” – was arrested by authorities on Christmas Day 2017 during an early morning raid. Surveillance cameras had captured him walking in the vicinity of the murder scene.

In March 2020, a federal court judge found Morena guilty of overseeing the journalist’s murder. Testifying under the alias “Apolo”, the son of the leader of Los Salazares gave evidence about how his father was upset that a relative lost a mayoral election in the town of Chinipas, el Heraldo newspaper reported. The judge found that Morena supervised the crime and enlisted the help of two other people, Jaciel Vega Villa, who allegedly drove the car to Breach’s home, and Ramón Andrés Zavala Corral, who was suspected of having fired the shots that fatally wounded her. Zavala had been found dead in December 2017, a few days before Moreno Ochoa’s arrest. Vega remains at large, a fugitive from justice.

Rwanda’s Khashoggi: who killed the exiled spy chief?


The guilty verdict came too late to save Breach’s newspaper. In April 2017, the editor of Norte de Ciudad Juarez, where Breach had worked, announced that the paper was closing. In an editorial published shortly after the assassination, Oscar Cantú said he could not continue to publish in the face of the violence against journalists in Mexico and the impunity of those responsible. “There are neither the guarantees nor the security to exercise critical, balanced journalism,” he wrote. “Everything in life has a beginning and an end, and a price to pay, and if the price is life, I am not prepared for any more of my colleagues to pay it, nor am I prepared to pay it either.”

The work of journalists in all media around the world is even more important at a time when misinformation and disinformation spread so rapidly across the internet, and when powerful political and business actors can attack journalists with impunity. As Unesco said in their campaign literature for this year’s World Press Freedom Day: “Today, citizens are on lockdown, eager for news like never before. And more than ever, the news must be fact-checked, verified. Because disinformation spreads as fast as the virus itself, and journalists are on the frontline in the fight against the distortion of truth. More than ever we need facts. Facts to avoid spreading fear, fake news and panic. More than ever we need a free press.”

Gill Phillips is director of editorial legal services at the Guardian

• This article was amended on 28 May 2020 to clarify details of the respective raids on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on the home of a News Corporation journalist in 2019.

David Attenborough to publish 'witness statement' on climate crisis

Broadcaster and historian says A Life on Our Planet book will record ‘dreadful damage wrought by mankind’ and propose solutions


Alison Flood

Thu 28 May 2020

David Attenborough, pictured in Iceland while filming the 2019 BBC documentary Seven Worlds, One Planet. Photograph: Alex Board/AP

David Attenborough is to publish his “vision for the future” of Earth this autumn, laying out “the dreadful damage” done by humanity, and the ways “we can begin to turn things round”.

A Life on Our Planet, which the 94-year-old has described as his “witness statement”, will cover his career documenting the natural world and his first-hand observations of the decline of the planet’s environment and biodiversity, as well as possible solutions.

“This book records some of the dreadful damage mankind has already wrought upon the natural world, and the real and imminent danger that things could get much, much worse if we do not act now,” said Attenborough. “But it is also a hopeful book: it offers a different future. It describes some of the ways in which we can begin to turn things around, if only we all have the will to do so. Surely together we must now find that determination, and begin to make that change, for the sake of all the inhabitants of our planet.”

The broadcaster and natural historian said he has had “an extraordinary life”, and that “it’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary”.

He added: “As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world – but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day: the loss of our planet’s wild places, its biodiversity. I have been a witness to this decline, and this book contains my witness statement, and my vision for the future – the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake. And how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.”

Attenborough, whose career with the BBC spans six decades, has written several bestselling books including Adventures of a Young Naturalist, Journeys to the Other Side of the World, Life on Air and Life on Earth.

Publisher Ebury described A Life on Our Planet as “legacy-defining” for Attenborough. It will be released in October, coinciding with a Netflix documentary film of the same name commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s David’s masterpiece – a book with huge heart and urgency, and a message the world needs now more than ever,” said publisher Albert DePetrillo, who is using the book as the launch title for a new imprint devoted to natural history books by writers who help us “see the world, and make it better”.

Studies add to alarm over deforestation in Brazil under Bolsonaro

Research published after video shows environment minister calling for deregulation while public distracted by Covid-19


Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro Thu 28 May 2020
 

Smoke rise over a deforested plot of the Amazon jungle in Porto Velho, Rondonia state, Brazil, last August. Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Two studies have raised further alarm about deforestation in Brazil during the first year of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s government.

One study showed the country lost 12,000 km2 (4,633 sq miles) of forest last year and also provided important information about those behind deforestation. The other research flagged a 27% increase in the destruction of tropical forests in eastern Brazil.

Both studies were released days after it was revealed that the environment minister, Ricardo Salles, had advocated that the government use the cover of the coronavirus pandemic to further weaken the country’s increasingly shaky environmental protection laws. Amazon deforestation and fires have soared since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, vowing to end the “fines industry” of environment agencies and develop the rainforest.

“We need to make an effort while we are in a quiet moment for press coverage because they only talk about Covid,” Salles said in a ministerial meeting in April. Video of the meeting was released on Friday and showed the minister using an expression about cattle to push for “changing all the rules and simplifying norms”.

Environmentalists had warned that this was what the government had been doing.

“The government’s position is weaken policies and this increases deforestation,” said Mariana Mota, a public policy specialist at Greenpeace Brasil. “The deforestation numbers don’t lie.”

The first annual study by MapBiomas – a coalition of NGOs, universities and technology companies – confirmed deforestation alerts from Brazil’s Space Research Institute with high resolution images.

The study found 7,700km2 of the deforestation was in the Amazon. More than three-quarters happened on land registered via a self-registration system Brazilian farmers use to claim ownership - and 99% of deforestation was illegal, MapBiomas found.

The Bolsonaro government is trying to approve a law that would allow farmers who had illegally occupied land on protected reserves before a cutoff date to claim legal title, legislation environmentalists have called the “land grabbers” bill.

Brazil’s vice-president, Gen Hamilton Mourão, leads an “Amazon council” and an environmental operation by thousands of Brazilian soldiers whose effectiveness has been questioned by local media. On 15 May he said the law would help the government fight deforestation.

“[If] we do not know who owns the land, we cannot bring [anybody] to justice,” Mourão said. A vote on the law was postponed this week amid outrage over Salles’s comments.

The MapBiomas study shows Brazil already knows who is responsible for deforestation. The issue is not finding the offenders, it is that fines are often ignored. A study by Human Rights Watch shows that Amazon fines have been suspended since October after the introduction of new procedures by the Bolsonaro government.

The NGO SOS Atlantic Forest has also released figures that showed a 27% increase in the destruction of tropical forests in 17 states in eastern Brazil from October 2018 to October 2019 after two years of falling deforestation. The study showed 145km2 were felled in the region.

BOURGEOIS POLITICAL ECONOMY
Lack of international cooperation will hinder economic recovery

There has been no consistency to the regulatory changes during the coronavirus crisis


Howard Davies Thu 28 May 2020
 

The European Central Bank says eurozone banks will be given “ample” time to rebuild capital. Photograph: Daniel Roland/AFP/Getty Images

The years after the 2007-09 global financial crisis were characterised by an orgy of rule-making by financial regulators around the world to address the weaknesses exposed by the upheavals. Importantly, a renamed and reinforced Financial Stability Board (FSB), reporting to a series of G20 summits, oversaw the process of reregulation.

Despite the economic impact of the measures and the complexity of making rules to suit the needs of different financial systems, a remarkable degree of consistency was achieved. While the US had never fully implemented the Basel II framework, Basel III – featuring, for example, higher reserve requirements – found its way, in more or less recognisable form, into the rulebooks of all the different US banking regulators.

This time is different. Many regulatory changes have been introduced around the world in the last two months, understandably in haste, as national policymakers responded to the Covid-19 crisis with measures to keep credit flowing to affected economic sectors.

How to avoid a W-shaped global coronavirus recession
Jeffrey Frankel


Sadly, signs of international cooperation are few. There have been no emergency summits. Regulators have not converged on Switzerland for all-night rösti-fuelled sessions to hammer out amendments to Basel committee on banking supervision rules and guidance. Perhaps supervisors have been Zooming into each others’ spare bedrooms. We do not know. But the announced measures have certainly been piecemeal.

Are the changes made so far broadly consistent from country to country, or is the international consensus forged by the FSB starting to unravel?

For the most part, what we have seen is not another orgy of rule-making but rather a bonfire of controls. The Institute of International Finance has faithfully logged 312 initiatives and is still counting. Most drop into one of three buckets: amendments to capital requirements, guidance on loan loss provisioning and controls on dividends and other capital distributions like share buybacks.

The changes to capital requirements have mainly affected the buffers imposed on banks since the last crisis under the general heading of macroprudential regulation. Many bankers had come to think that macroprudential supplements would only work in one direction: buffers imposed in credit upturns would be retained in the downturn. Faced with a sharp decline, economic regulators have shown welcome flexibility.

Countercyclical buffers have been removed and banks have been told it is acceptable to dip below their previous minimum capital requirement as loan losses mount. Ten of the OECD’s 37 countries have so far removed the countercyclical buffer. A number of others have adjusted national capital or liquidity buffers. Comparisons are complex but the changes look broadly similar in effect.



These changes are typically described as temporary. So, banks that may avail themselves of the current flexibility are keen to know when the buffers might be reimposed and how long they would then be given to meet them.

The European Central Bank has said that eurozone banks would be given “ample” time to rebuild capital. The Bank of England has said the time would be “sufficient”. Academic linguists may debate which word implies a longer period. Unfortunately, lawyers will get involved if regulators do not say more clearly what they mean.

Nonetheless, all this activity does look broadly compatible (at least before the tough timing decisions come to be made). So far, no national regulator has taken an axe to the trunk of the Basel requirements.

There is one potential concern, however. Nicolas Véron of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has argued that the Federal Reserve’s changes to the supplementary leverage ratio amount to a serious breach of Basel III. The Fed has exempted banks’ holdings of Treasury bills from the calculation of their assets, which are explicitly part of the Basel definition. Véron warns that while the change in itself may not be of great consequence, “if the non-compliance trend is confirmed, the most damaging consequences may be to the United States itself”.

The changes in the second bucket, provisions for loan losses, are harder to assess, partly because the US has not adopted International Accounting Standards, and International Financial Reporting Standard 9 is new and untested. Banks need some guidance on how to interpret it, especially in relation to government-guaranteed loans and loans subject to requested interest holidays. There will be a need to ensure that different national interpretations of IFRS 9 can be justified. It is too early to be confident of that.

The third area, capital distributions, is the one where international divergence is more evident. Regulators in Europe have taken the rigorous view that dividends and buybacks should be suspended. The Fed and the Reserve Bank of Australia have left it to banks to decide whether it is safe to pay a dividend.

Some explanations for this difference seem straightforward. For example, in the last year, 73% of US banks’ distributions have been in the form of share buybacks, and only 27% as dividends, while in Europe 96% of distributions have been paid as dividends. US banks voluntarily undertook to suspend buybacks, which the Fed took into account when taking a more relaxed view on dividends.

Nonetheless, decisions on each side of the Atlantic have attracted strong criticism. Senator Sherrod Brown of the Senate banking committee told the Fed that “you have been too eager to provide what you call ‘regulatory relief’ – and what the rest of us call favours for Wall Street”. Similarly, the Banking Policy Institute in Washington has maintained that there is “a good chance that the actions of UK and EU regulators have done significant long-term damage to their banks”.

Who is right? It is too soon to say. But the Basel committee will have a lot to discuss when it is next allowed to assemble. The priority should be to assess the changes that members have made during the crisis and to address those that have skewed the playing field. That will be a delicate exercise but it is essential if the global financial architecture painfully rebuilt after the last crisis is to be sustained.

• Sir Howard Davies, the first chairman of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, is chairman of RBS. He was director of the LSE and served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and CBI director general.

U.N. warns 14M in Latin America could go hungry due to pandemic


The U.N. World Food Programme is urging countries to do more to help those in Latin American countries facing severe food insecurity. Photo courtesy of World Food Programme

May 28 (UPI) -- The U.N. World Food Programme warned that some 14 million people in Latin America could go hungry this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The figures released late Wednesday for 11 countries in the region including the Caribbean suggest a substantial increase of some 10 million people suffering from severe food insecurity this year compared to the 3.4 million facing the same conductions last year.

Miguel Barreto, WFP regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said assistance is needed to prevent the "COVID-19 pandemic from becoming a hunger pandemic."

"It is vital and urgent that we provide food assistance to the growing number of vulnerable people in the region, as well as those who depend on informal work," he said.

The forecast is calculated based on the comparison between food insecurity in 2019 for the region and analysis of economic indicators after the COVID-19 pandemic began -- and the analysis for 2020 is not encouraging, the WFP said.

According to statistics from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the region is expected to experience a contraction of 5.3 percent in 2020, which is forecast to further exasperate the already precarious financial position of millions of people with limited access to food.

On Tuesday, the Pan American Health Organization said the Americas had surpassed Europe to become the epicenter of the pandemic, showing particular concern over Latin countries, many of which have seen growing numbers of new cases.

Brazil has recently leaped into second in the world in terms of infections with 414,661 cases and recorded 22,301 cases on Wednesday, the most of any country during the 24-hour period, according to data compiled by worldometers.info.

The WFP is urging countries to provide additional support to those in need and to expand their coverage to migrants and people without formal employment.

"Working together, we can minimize the risk of food insecurity and protect the most vulnerable countries and communities from the potentially devastating effects of the pandemic," Barreto said.

AI robots, automated popcorn dispensers: Cinemas in South Korea go contactless

"Checkbot," an AI-powered robot, takes tickets, answers questions and gives directions at CGV's contact-free "untact" cinema in Seoul. Photo by Thomas Maresca/UPI

SEOUL, May 27 (UPI) -- As South Korea continues to loosen its social distancing guidelines amid the COVID-19 outbreak, hard-hit movie theaters are trying to find ways to lure customers back.

For theater chains such as CGV, the country's largest, an automated, contactless cinema experience could be the key to revitalizing an industry that has seen empty seats during the pandemic.

CGV, owned by South Korean conglomerate CJ, is running a trial of a contact-free theater at a branch in Seoul's Yeouido business district and it offers a glimpse of what the moviegoing future may look like.

The system, which has been in operation since April 20, eliminates virtually all face-to-face interactions between customers and staff. Patrons buy tickets at touchscreen kiosks or via a smartphone app and then scan them at QR code readers installed at the entrance to each theater.

A five-foot-tall, AI-powered "Checkbot" robot with a large front-mounted screen wheels around the cinema, scanning tickets, answering questions using voice recognition technology and leading customers to the restroom or their theater.

The "Popcorn Factory" self-service area features vending machines that provide popcorn, hot dogs and sodas. Other snacks such as nachos, grilled squid and beer can be ordered by app or kiosk. They are then placed by a staff member in a numbered pickup box that the customer opens with a special code. The theater even authenticates parking automatically.

Interest in contactless services -- known as "untact" locally -- has grown dramatically during the COVID-19 outbreak, as online shopping and food delivery usage has spiked and the government Is looking to deregulate telemedicine.

Theater chain Lotte also introduced a version of contactless services to roughly two dozen of its branches in late April.

The changes that CGV is trying out in Yeouido will likely become a part of everyday life going forward, said Lee Jung-woo, manager of the theater chain's smart innovation team.

"The COVID-19 outbreak has raised the need for untact services for customer safety in all industries, and the non-face-to-face needs of movie theater audiences are expected to become part of the new normal," Lee said.

The industry is certainly in need of a boost as ticket sales have plunged during the spread of the coronavirus, particularly after a major outbreak in late February that was centered around the southeastern city of Daegu.

The government never officially mandated that movie theaters had to close, but chains shut down many branches due to lack of customers.

South Korea's box office fell by 65.3 percent over the first quarter of the year compared to the same period last year, according to data from firms S&P Global Market Intelligence and OPUSData.

Even as the country has largely managed to contain the spread of COVID-19 through an aggressive testing and tracing program, movie patrons have been slow to return.

The number of moviegoers fell to a record-low in April, according to the Korean Film Council. Only 970,000 tickets were sold nationwide, a drop of 92.7 percent from a year ago.

After a brief surge in early May over a long holiday weekend, sales have remained flat for the past three weeks, the Korean Film Council reported Tuesday, with theaters suffering from a lack of new releases and lingering customer hesitation. The top-grossing film in theaters over the weekend was a 2017 retread, the Hugh Jackman feature The Greatest Showman.
Lee said the new untact theater hasn't yet drawn nervous customers back.

"There isn't a significant change in the occupancy rate of seats," he said. "However, we've been receiving positive feedback."

Some moviegoers at the near-empty Yeouido theater on a recent weekday evening said they had not been expecting the new automated services.

"It's my first time back to see a movie since the coronavirus outbreak and I was quite surprised at first," said 22-year-old Kim Song-eun. "I didn't expect such a radical change."

Kim said she was impressed with the ease of use of the new system and thought it would be a factor in her choice of theaters in the future.

"It would be good to maintain this system going forward," she said. "I'd definitely choose an untact theater over a normal one if it was not too far away."

Other customers said they felt safer going to the contactless theater.

"The coronavirus spreads easily through face-to-face contact," said 20-year-old Hong Min-seo. "The untact theater is more convenient and It's less stressful for customers and the staff."

In addition to the automated services, theaters are routinely disinfected and seating is spaced out by alternating rows to maintain social distancing, Lee said.

This Yeouido location is just the start, Lee added. Depending on customer response, it may become the standard platform for all branches of the chain.

"We are considering expanding untact cinema to all theaters in the future," he said. "It is expected to enhance customer convenience and streamline the operation of the theater."

Energy investment on pace for record decline, IEA analysis says

Global energy investment could sink to its lowest level in history due to fallout from the coronavirus pandemic,


A board on the the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on March 18 shows declining oil prices as a result of the coronavirus pandemic's impact on world energy markets. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

May 27 (UPI) -- Global energy investment could sink to its lowest level in history due to fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the International Energy Agency said in an annual report Wednesday.

The World Energy Investment report said it expects travel and other restrictions to lead to an investment drop it called "staggering in both scale and swiftness."

"The baseline expectation for 2020 is a widespread global recession caused by prolonged restrictions on mobility and social and economic activity," it states.

"Oil is bearing the brunt of this shock because of the curtailment in mobility and aviation, which represent nearly 60 percent of global oil demand," it added.

"After oil, the fuel most affected by the crisis is set to be coal. Coal demand could decline by 8 percent."

The pullback in energy spending cuts across all sectors, from fossil fuels, renewables and efficiency, the report said.

"It means lost jobs and economic opportunities today, as well as lost energy supply that we might well need tomorrow once the economy recovers," IEA Executive Director Faith Birol said in a statement. "The slowdown in spending on key clean energy technologies also risks undermining the much-needed transition to more resilient and sustainable energy systems."

The report assesses trends in global energy investment through mid-May, including individual projects, interviews with energy leaders and investors and the industry's most recent analysis.

"A combination of falling demand, lower prices and arise in cases of non-payment of bills means that energy revenues going to governments and industry are set to fall by well over $1 trillion in 2020," the IEA said. "Oil accounts for most of this decline as, for the first time, global consumer spending on oil is set to fall below the amount spent on electricity."

There have so far been 5.6 million COVID-19 cases worldwide and 350,800 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Many countries are still under strict national and international travel restrictions, which is driving down energy use.

"Now in its fifth edition, the World Energy Investment report is the annual IEA benchmark analysis of investment and financing across all areas of fuel and electricity supply, efficiency, and research and development," the agency said.

"The energy industry that emerges from this crisis will be significantly different from the one that came before."