It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The billionaires who run the world’s most phenomenally profitable sport have just decided to “share the wealth” — with the greediest of their fellow rich. By a 31-1 margin, the owners of the 32 pro football franchises that make up the NFL have just voted to crack open their money-making machine to the investment fund kingpins of private equity.
The NFL isn’t exactly welcoming in private equity with totally open arms. Only some NFL-pre-approved private equity firms will initially be able to buy up stakes in NFL franchises, and the NFL will allow no single private equity stake to amount to over 10 percent of a franchise’s total value.
The current NFL billionaire owners, in other words, will still be calling all the shots. These owners are essentially counting on their new private equity pals to make them even more powerful shot-callers.
How so? Right now, for instance, NFL owners have to bargain with elected officials over how lush the taxpayer subsidies they expect and extract will be. Welcoming private equity into the NFL will only strenghten the owners’ bargaining position. They’ll be able to leverage their new access to private equity cash to tighten their squeeze on local pols: Give us what we want or we’ll build our new stadium outside your jurisdiction.
The downside of letting private equity in? NFL owners don’t see one. After all, every other major pro sport — from baseball and basketball to hockey and soccer — is already sporting a private equity presence.
In Major League Baseball, that presence began after MLB took control over the baseball minor leagues in 2020, knocked a number of small cities out of the minor league system, and eliminated the prohibition against the ownership of multiple minor league teams. That made the minors a tempting target for a private equity greed grab.
Silver Lake Partners, the world’s 15th-largest private equity firm, has taken the lead on that grabbing. Silver Lake has been underwriting Diamond Baseball Holdings, an operation that has already bought up over a quarter of Major League Baseball’s 120 minor league franchises and has no plans to stop buying up franchises anytime soon.
The basic Diamond Baseball Holding’s gameplan with these franchises? Demand public subsidies that have so far cost local communities hundreds of millions of dollars. This foisting of costs onto taxpayers, notesBoondoggle analyst Pat Garofalo, comes “with the ever-present threat of moving teams out of communities that don’t comply.”
Silver Lake is currently managing over $100 billion in overall combined assets, and the ownership of these assets can get complicated. Diamond Baseball Holdings, for instance, originated as an enterprise owned by the Silver Lake-backed Endeavor entertainment industry colossus. Silver Lake is now planning to take the publicly traded Endeavor private in a transaction some are calling the largest in media and entertainment history.
This transaction will be particularly rewarding for the executives involved.
Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel will receive a $25 million “asset sale transaction bonus.” Endeavor COO — chief operating officer — Mark Shapiro, Deadline.com reports, will see his base salary jump to $7 million a year, with a guaranteed annual $15 million bonus. He’ll also be “eligible for a $15 million transaction bonus when Endeavor is privatized” as well as a maximum cash bonus of $100 million “upon the completion of certain qualifying asset sales.”
Emanuel and Shapiro will also each receive a private plane.
The private-equity industry has, over time, been generating plenty of windfalls like these. For decades now, private equity firms have been buying up firms, charging them enormous fees, and stripping them of their assets. The private equity execs, their pockets full, then sell off what remains of the firms they’ve so ruthlessly exploited and depart the scene, leaving behind laid-off workers and unhappy consumers.
America’s largest participation sport — bowling — has been experiencing a good bit of this classic private equity pattern. Private equity investors have enabled one giant company, Bowlero, to dominate what used to be a locally controlled leisure-time enterprise.
Just 10 years old, Bowlero now runs over 350 bowling centers nationwide. Prices at these centers have gone up, the Lever’s Amos Barshad reports, and maintenance has gone down. Bolero has even introduced “Uber-like surge pricing.” A few hours of bowling at a Northern California Bowlero can now set a family back more than $400. Bathrooms at another Bolero can “go days without being cleaned.”
Private equity top execs, meanwhile, are certainly cleaning up at pay time. The CEO of the Blackstone private equity giant, Steve Schwarzman, last year pocketed $896.7 million in dividends and compensation, just a bit off the $1.1 billion he inhaled back in 2021.
Numbers like these have caught the attention of some members of Congress. This past April, U.S. senator Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin and 14 of her Senate colleagues introduced legislation that would nearly double the federal tax rate on the income private equity firms pull in. Success with that legislation could lead to stronger controls on private equity in other realms.
But that success won’t come easy. Private equity execs are spending more than ever these days on politics. In the current election cycle, notes the Center for Media and Democracy, the top 50 national contributors to political campaigns include 11 private equity giants.
These 11 have already contributed over $223 million to congressional and presidential candidates and the super PACs that back them. In the 2016 election cycle, candidates and political committees only collected $92 million from the 147 private equity firms the Center was then tracking.
In the meantime, we don’t need to leave the future of our beloved sports to the whims of billionaires. Another model for how sports franchises could operate does exist. Indeed, a hint of that model exists right within the NFL, with the Green Bay Packers, the most unique franchise in U.S. pro sports.
The Packers have operated as a publicly owned, nonprofit corporation since 1923. No billionaire owns the Packers, and no billionaire, the team’s 538,967 stockholders maintain, ever will. The franchise’s articles of incorporation “prohibit any person from owning more than 200,000” of the 5.2 million franchise shares now outstanding.
The average shareholder, the Green Bay Press-Gazettepoints out, holds fewer than 10 shares, and these shares can’t be traded, only transferred to family members. Shareholders don’t get dividends, but they do get to elect the franchise’s board of directors.
Sounds pretty good, right? Not to the owners of the NFL’s other 31 franchises. The NFL now has in place bylaws that prevent any other franchise from operating along the Green Bay model. Back in 1960, relates the Guardian’s Katie Thornton, the NFL “wrote into the league’s constitution — in a section known as the ‘Green Bay Rule’ — that future teams must be organized as for-profit entities.”
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop — and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the cold war and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.
America Is Losing the Battle of the Red Sea
Hal Brands Tuesday - 10 September 2024
Even by the Middle Eastern standards, the past year has been full of surprises. A bolt-from-the-blue attack by Hamas produced the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The resulting Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has now lasted longer than nearly anyone first imagined. Iran launched perhaps the largest drone and missile strike in history against Israel, which was blunted by unprecedented cooperation.
Yet the biggest surprise is also the most ominous for global order. A radical, quasi-state actor most Americans had never heard of, the Houthis of Yemen, have mounted the gravest challenge to freedom of the seas in decades — and arguably beaten a weary superpower along the way.
The Houthis began their campaign against shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb, which connects the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, in late 2023. They are nominally attacking out of sympathy for the Palestinian people, but also to gain stature within the so-called “Axis of Resistance”, a group of Middle Eastern proxies cultivated by Iran.
In January, Washington responded with Operation Prosperity Guardian, which features defensive efforts (largely by US destroyers) to shield shipping from drones and missiles, and also airstrikes against Houthi attack capabilities within Yemen. The results have been middling at best.
This saga combines dynamics old and new. The Bab al-Mandeb, Arabic for “gate of tears,” has long been a locus of struggle. This chokepoint is surrounded by instability in the southern Arabian Peninsula and Horn of Africa. That situation has invited conflict and foreign intervention for decades, but the Houthis’ campaign also displays newer global troubles.
One is the falling cost of power-projection. The Houthis aren’t a traditional military juggernaut; they don’t even fully control Yemen. Yet they have employed drones and missiles to control access to vital seas.
The Houthis have had help in doing so: Iran has provided weapons and the know-how needed to manufacture them. But the Red Sea crisis still shows how seemingly minor actors can use relatively cheap capabilities to extend their destructive reach.
The second feature is strategic synergy among US foes. The Houthis became more fearsome thanks to mentorship by Iran and Hezbollah. Since October 2023, they have allowed most of China’s shipping to pass without harm. The Houthis have also received encouragement — and, it seems, direct support — from a Russia that is eager to exact vengeance on Washington.
Beijing and Moscow reap geopolitical rewards when America is burdened by Middle Eastern conflicts, so both are willing to let this crisis fester, or even make it worse.
Further inflaming matters is a third factor: America’s aversion to escalation, which is rooted in military overstretch. A global superpower has been reduced to an inconclusive tit-for-tat with a band of Yemeni extremists.
The core issue is that Washington has hesitated to take stronger measures — such as sinking the Iranian intelligence ship that supports the Houthis, or targeting the infrastructure that sustains their rule within Yemen — for fear of inflaming a tense regional situation.
That approach has limited the near-term risk of escalation, but allowed Tehran and the Houthis to keep the showdown simmering at their preferred temperature. It also reflects the underlying fatigue of a US military that lacks enough cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, strike aircraft and warships to prosecute the campaign more aggressively without compromising its readiness for conflicts elsewhere.
Thus a fourth feature: The rotting of norms the international community has taken for granted. The global commercial damage caused by the Houthis has actually been limited, thanks to the adaptability of the shipping networks that underpin the world economy. But the precedent is awful: The Houthis have upended freedom of the seas in a crucial area and paid a very modest price.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is simultaneously stressing another bedrock principle, the norm against forcible conquest. Revisionist actors are challenging the global rules that underpin the relative affluence, security and stability of our post-1945 world.
A dramatic course correction by the US probably isn’t imminent. President Joe Biden is still chasing that elusive Israel-Hamas cease-fire; this would at least deprive the Houthis and other Iranian proxies of their pretext for violence, even if no one is really sure whether it would end the Red Sea shipping attacks. He hopes to get through the presidential elections without more trouble with Tehran.
But this muddle-through approach may not survive for long after that. Whoever becomes president in 2025 will have to face the fact that America is losing the struggle for the Red Sea, with all the pernicious global implications that may follow.
Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies
*Bloomberg
HRW: Both Warring Parties in Sudan Acquired New Weapons
Women shout slogans as they take part in a demonstration on the opening day of Sudan ceasefire talks, in Geneva, on August 14, 2024. (AFP)
Both warring parties in Sudan, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have newly acquired modern foreign-made weapons and military equipment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on Monday.
It called on the UN Security Council to renew and expand the arms embargo and its restrictions on the Darfur region to all of Sudan and hold violators to account.
HRW said it analyzed 49 photos and videos, most apparently filmed by fighters from both sides, posted on the social media platforms Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, and X, showing weapons used or captured in the conflict.
The apparently new equipment includes armed drones, drone jammers, anti-tank guided missiles, truck-mounted multi-barrel rocket launchers, and mortar munitions, and are produced by companies registered in China, Iran, Russia and Serbia.
Although HRW did not specify how the warring parties acquired the new equipment, it noted that the Sudan conflict is one of the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights crises.
“The warring parties are committing atrocities with impunity, and the newly acquired weapons and equipment are likely to be used in the commission of further crimes,” it said.
HRW warned that the SAF and the RSF may use such weapons and equipment to continue to commit war crimes and other serious human rights violations not just in Darfur, but across the country.
It said the UN Security Council is expected to decide on September 11 whether to renew the Sudan sanctions regime, which prohibits the transfer of military equipment to the Darfur region.
The organization noted that since April 2023, the new conflict has affected most of Sudan’s states, but Security Council members have yet to take steps to expand the arms embargo to the whole country.
HRW said its findings demonstrate both the inadequacy of the current Darfur-only embargo and the grave risks posed by the acquisition of new weapons by the warring parties.
“A countrywide arms embargo would contribute to addressing these issues by facilitating the monitoring of transfers to Darfur and preventing the legal acquisition of weapons for use in other parts of Sudan,” it stressed.
The NGO said that the Sudanese government has opposed an expansion of the arms embargo and in recent months has lobbied members of the Security Council to end the sanctions regime and remove the Darfur embargo altogether.
“The prevalence of atrocities by the warring parties creates a real risk that weapons or equipment acquired by the parties would most likely be used to perpetuate serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, harming civilians,” HRW wrote in its report.
It therefore called on the Security Council to publicly condemn individual governments that are violating the existing arms embargo on Darfur and take urgently needed measures to sanction individuals and entities that are violating the embargo.
Activists Fury After Alleged ‘Russian Spy’ Whale’s Cause of Death Revealed
‘MORE QUESTIONS’
Activist groups are not convinced by the results of a preliminary autopsy that confirms early indications as to how the beluga whale named Hvaldimir died.
Matt Young Night Editor Published Sep. 10, 2024 Jorgen Ree Wiig/Sea Surveillance Service/Reuters
Norwegian police have dismissed claims from local animal rights organizations that the death of a beluga whale suspected of being used as a Russian spy was a deliberate act.
Dubbed “Hvaldimir”—which takes from the Norweigan word for whale and adds part of the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin–the whale was discovered dead in waters off southwestern Norway on August 31.
Hvaldimir gained worldwide attention after the animal was spotted off Norway’s Arctic coast with a harness attached its body that appeared to support a mounted camera.
Upon the discovery of the body, NOAH, Norway’s biggest animal rights nonprofit, and OneWhale, whose mission it was to protect the whale, suspected that Hvaldimir had been illegally shot and filed a complaint.
However in a press release Monday, police, citing Amund Preede Revheim, head of the North Sea and environment section at the joint intelligence and investigation unit in the Sør-West police district, said a report on preliminary investigations indicate “there are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot.” Activists Claim Legendary Russian ‘Spy’ Whale Was Shot Dead LICENSE TO KRILL Dan Ladden-Hall
Instead, a stick measuring 35 cm long (14 inches) and approximately 3 cm wide (1.2 inches) was discovered “stuck inside Hvaldimir's mouth.”
“The autopsy showed that his stomach was empty. In addition, most organs had broken down. There is nothing in the investigations that have been carried out to establish that it is human activity that has directly led to Hvaldimir's death,” the release continued, citing Preede Revheim.
Police described visible wounds on the body as “completely superficial” and the injuries “have not affected vital organs or are of a fatal nature. The preliminary autopsy report does not conclude what caused these injuries.”
“Among other things, an X-ray was taken of the front part of the more than four-metre-long (13-feet) whale, where the wounds are. Here, nothing has been found to indicate that these injuries stem from gunshots. No projectile has been found either,” Revheim said.
“The autopsies have gone all over Hvaldimir on the outside, and no signs of further external damage have been found.”
Police said that since the findings, they will no longer actively investigate the case. The final autopsy report will be available within two weeks.
Activists, however, are not convinced. In a Facebook post Monday, OneWhale announced a $5000 reward for more information surrounding the death of Hvaldimir.
“Today it was announced that local police in Norway will not be conducting an investigation at this time,” a statement read.
“Many organizations who claimed he was ‘safe with human monitors’ would like the ‘inconclusive’ preliminary report on Hvaldimir’s death to be the end of it. But despite the barrage of on-line abuse, we aren’t hasty to sweep his death under the rug. We look forward the the final vet report, which for now leaves us more questions than answers.”
NOAH, meanwhile, pointed again to the marks on Hvaldimir's body, claiming in a statement that police “still cannot account for what the bullet-like marks are on his body.” It added, “NOAH is now demanding a thorough explanation on what actually happened to Hvaldimir,” claiming “we believe it is too early to dismiss the investigation into a young, healthy whale dying in a healthy condition with unexplained injuries. The police’s current explanation of the finding of a stick in Hvaldimir's mouth raises more questions than answers, and NOAH wants to ensure that all the facts are revealed. It is our duty to ensure full transparency about what has happened to Hvalidmir!”
The trouble with nuclear technology, of any kind really, is that it depends on sensible and even intelligent decisions being made by supremely fallible human beings. The consequences of even a simple mistake are, as we have already seen with Chornobyl, catastrophic.
To add to the danger, nuclear technology also relies on other seemingly elusive human traits, beginning with sanity but also something that ought to be — but all too often isn’t —fundamentally human: empathy. That means not wanting to do anything to other people you wouldn’t want to endure yourself. But of course we see humans doing these things every day, whether at the macro individual level or on a geopolitical scale. We just have to look at events in Congo, Gaza, Haiti, Sudan; the list goes on.
IAEA chief, Rafael Grossi, center, visited the threatened Kursk nuclear power plant in Russia last week, but continues to promote nuclear power expansion. (Photo: IAEA Imagebank)
And of course we cannot ignore what is playing out in Ukraine and now Russia. Because of the war there, dragging on since Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, we remain in a perpetual state of looming nuclear disaster.
Currently, the prospects of such a disaster are focused on Russia, where that country’s massive Kursk nuclear power plant is the latest such facility to find itself literally in the line of fire as Ukrainian troops make their incursion there in response to Russia’s ongoing war in their country.
But we cannot forget the six-reactor site at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine either, embroiled in some of the worst fighting in that country, the plant occupied by Russian troops for more than two years and also perpetually one errant missile away from catastrophe.
Ukraine relies heavily on nuclear power for its electricity supply, with 15 reactors in all at four nuclear power plants, when all are fully operational. In 2023, even as the war raged around the nuclear sites, Ukraine was still providing a little over half of the country’s electricity from nuclear power.
Russia is far more dependent on natural gas, a product it also exports, and only draws just over 18 percent of its electricity needs from its estimated 37 reactors, situated at 11 nuclear sites.
There are also some fundamental technological differences between the Zaporizhzhia and Kursk nuclear power plants themselves. Kursk, like Zaporizhzhia, is also a six-reactor site, one of the three largest nuclear power plants in Russia. (Zaporizhzhia is not only the biggest nuclear power plant in Ukraine but also Europe’s largest.)
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, made up of six Russian VVER reactors. (Photo: IAEA Image bank/Wikimedia Commons)
But while Zaporizhzhia is made up of six Russian VVER reactors, more akin to the pressurized water reactors used in the United States and much of Europe, the Kursk reactors are of the old Soviet RBMK design.
This is the same model as the Chornobyl unit that exploded in 1986, irradiating land across Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and much of Europe, contamination that persists in many areas today.
Alarmingly, because the Kursk RBMK reactors lack a secondary containment dome, they are even more vulnerable to war damage than Zaporizhzhia’s.
Furthermore, unlike Zaporizhzhia, where all six reactors are fully shut down — making a meltdown less likely but not impossible — two of Kursk’s reactors are still running. And the Russians have already told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that they found the remains of a drone just over 300 feet away from the Kursk nuclear plant. Ukraine has of course denied responsibility for any attempted assault on the plant just as Russia has disavowed accusations it tried to attack the Zaporizhzhia nuclear site
.
A control room inside the Kursk nuclear power plant. (Photo: RIA Novosti/Wikimedia Commons)
IAEA chief, Rafael Grossi, duly went off to visit the Kursk site, to remind whoever is listening from either side that having a war around nuclear power plants is frightfully inconvenient when your agency is busy telling the world how safe the technology is and how badly we need more of it.
However, like a helpless pre-school teacher with naughty toddlers, Grossi’s only recourse appears to be to tell both the Russians and Ukrainians repeatedly to stop. And since he can’t exactly take away their candy, and in fact has no “or else” to implement, they simply ignore him.
Most of us do still feel empathy for those whose lives we watch extinguished each night as ever more horrific news reports pour in from the countries where war and strife have become a seemingly endless and unstoppable ordeal.
Most of us don’t want another Chornobyl, either, for Ukrainians, for Russians or for anyone. And since we can’t rely on human beings to use nuclear power responsibly, this is one “toy” we have to take away.
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. This article is written in her personal capacity. Views are her own.
South Africa
Construction mafia suspects have previous convictions that weren't disclosed
10 September 2024
By MFUNDO MKHIZE Andile Jiyane, 29, Elias Phetha,45, Nhlanhla Makhathini, 37, Sibonelo Khanyile, 37, and Thabani Nkomo, 35, with their advocate Kevin Chetty in the Camperdown magistrate's court Image: Mfundo Mkhize
Two of five men charged with extortion after allegedly halting work at a construction site in KwaXimba last month have previous convictions which were not disclosed.
That is according to W/O officer Sizwe Molapo evidence during a bail hearing in the Camperdown magistrate's court on Monday.
Andile Jiyane, 29, Elias Phetha,45, Nhlanhla Makhathini, 37, Sibonelo Khanyile, 37, and Thabani Nkomo, 35, were arrested by the provincial reaction task team established to curb the construction mafia.
The state alleges that on August 22 and 23 the suspects “induced fear in Cyril Ngcobo and Lungisani Nduli that no work would continue" at a bridge construction project in uMsunduzi unless they were hired. The state is opposing bail.
Molapo told the court public order police officers arrested the five based on complaints from and identification by members of the public and site workers.
Prosecutor Zwelethu Mata said according to Molapo’s affidavit, the accused were driving a VW Polo on the first day of the disruption.
Molapo said the construction project was to fix infrastructure damage caused by flooding in KwaZulu-Natal.
The Durban-based company WSM (Pty) Ltd was awarded the contract.
Molapo alleged a group of about 30 people invaded the site on August 22, making demands they should be given the contract for security reasons and be offered jobs or the site should be shut down.
Molapo said he believed if the accused were released there was a strong probability they would endanger the safety of the public and other businesses. He alleged during their disruption at the construction site they had blocked roads.
He said if the accused are found guilty they were likely to face a minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars.
Molapo told the court Phetha and Khanyile are alleged to have convictions which they omitted to place on record.
He said Phetha has a 1996 rape conviction while Khanyile has a 2004 charge of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
“They [accused] are not trustworthy to their legal representative,” said Molapo.
He said since their arrests, work was progressing smoothly at the site.
“Close proximity of the applicants and witnesses can jeopardise the matter. Their release will have a direct impact on public order,” said Molapo.
Defence advocate Kevin Chetty questioned Molapo's attempt to discredit his clients about undisclosed records and asked for a copy of the police document stating previous convictions.
Chetty said his clients weren't a threat to their community as all had lived in the vicinity of Esiweni in Cato Ridge for not less than 20 years.
“They have been residing in the same area and they don’t pose any flight risk. They don’t have travel documents,” said Chetty.
A strong security presence kept a watch on proceedings in the court, which was packed with family members.
Chetty told the court all the accused were pleading not guilty to the charges and were willing to pay R500 bail.
He said they are not aware of the identity of state witnesses and had no intention to interfere with them.
Chetty said the court should not be dictated to by a public outcry calling for no bail to be granted. He said the men were willing to stand trial and abide by bail conditions.
Makhathini placed on record a 2005 assault conviction for which he was sentenced to three years in imprisonment with one year wholly suspended. He also had drunken driving and driving without a permit charges in 2013, but could not remember what fine he received for the offences.
The matter was adjourned to September 13 to hear further evidence from Molapo.
TimesLIVE
Vietnam jails journalist for 7 years for ‘propaganda’
Nguyen Vu Binh told the court he was practicing his right to freedom of expression.
By RFA Vietnamese 2024.09.10
Journalist Nguyen Vu Binh from a Nov. 2, 2020 post on his Facebook page. Binh was sentenced to seven years in prison for "propaganda" by a court in Hanoi on Sept. 10, 2024.
Facebook: Nguyen Vu Binh
A court in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi on Tuesday jailed journalist Nguyen Vu Binh for seven years for “propaganda against the state,” a charge that carries a maximum 12-year sentence, his sister, Nguyen Thi Phong, told Radio Free Asia.
Binh, 56, was arrested in February and charged under Article 117 of the criminal code, which international rights groups say is vaguely worded in order to provide a catch-all clause to suppress freedom of speech.
Binh is a freelance journalist who contributed to RFA Vietnamese from 2015 until his arrest. He wrote about corruption, land rights, police brutality, unfair trials, the right to peaceful protest, the economy, education, the environment, and Vietnam’s relationships with China and the United States.
He was prosecuted for “making, storing, disseminating or propagating information, documents and items with fabricated content, causing confusion among the people” for his comments in videos posted on YouTube in January and March 2022.
Authorities said the clips contained content “propagating psychological warfare arguments, spreading fabricated news and causing confusion among the people.”
According to Binh’s lawyers, the indictment against him said he told investigators the videos contained political, economic, and social news collected from newspapers, social media and the internet. He said he commented on the clips in order to tell viewers the truth about domestic and international events.
Prosecutors said Binh knew the YouTube channel TNT Media Live was created by a foreigner. The channel is owned by U.S.-based broadcasting outlet Tieng Nuoc Toi, or “My Country’s Language.”
Binh said, however, he did not remember who created, managed, and contributed to the channel or who posted video clips on it.
While Binh “expressed a cooperative attitude or contrition,” he was guilty of “dangerous recidivism," according to the indictment.
Binh was represented in court by three lawyers, Le Dinh Viet, Le Van Luan, and Nguyen Thi Trang.
He admitted to the actions described in the indictment but told the court he was practicing his right to freedom of expression. He does not plan to appeal the sentence, according to one of his lawyers, who didn’t want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the case.
On Monday, Human Rights Watch called on the Vietnamese government to drop the charges and release Binh immediately.
“It’s absurd that the Vietnamese government – which monopolizes all media and ensures that they publish only what the government wants to hear – cannot take a word of criticism from a lone independent voice like Nguyen Vu Binh,” the New York-based rights group’s Deputy Asia Director Patricia Gossman said.
“When will Vietnam’s leaders learn to tolerate dissenting voices, and when will countries with close ties to Vietnam speak out about the oppression there?”
Binh is the eighth activist to be brought to trial since former public security minister To Lam was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, Vietnam’s top job, in early August.
Activists Nguyen Chi Tuyen, Tran Minh Loi, Le Phu Tuan, Phan Dinh Sang, Tran Van Khanh, Phan Ngoc Dung, and Bui Van Khang, all received prison terms for criticizing the government.
During Lam’s tenure as head of the police force, from 2016 to 2024, Vietnam arrested at least 269 people for peacefully exercising their basic civil and political rights, Human Rights Watch said.
Le Anh Hung, who recently completed a prison term for “abusing democratic freedoms” said Binh had been fighting for democracy and human rights since the turn of the century when the movement was still young and the number of campaigners could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
“Nguyen Vu Binh has been a very peaceful activist, he behaves very modestly in social interactions, especially with government agencies. He also advocates changing the country peacefully,” Hung told RFA ahead of Tuesday’s trial.
In 2003, Binh was sentenced to seven years in prison and three years house arrest for “espionage.” He secured early release in 2007 and immediately resumed his human rights campaigning.
Phan Van Bach holds a sign protesting the increase in gasoline prices. (Facebook/Phan Van Bach)
In another case involving Article 117, a Hanoi court set Sept. 16 as the date for former broadcaster Phan Van Bach’s trial.
He was arrested last December for posting articles and video clips on social media with content authorities said "distort the Party's policies and guidelines, defame the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, deny the leadership role of the Communist Party of Vietnam, disseminate edited images that defame state leaders and incite the masses."
Bach’s wife, Nguyen Thi Yeu, told RFA she only found out about the trial when his lawyer called her.
Yeu visited her husband in police detention in Hanoi in June. She said she didn’t recognize him because he was emaciated due to stomach problems, weighing only 40 kilograms (88 pounds) compared with 65 kilograms before his arrest.
Bach, 49, took part in demonstrations against China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea in 2011, the Green Trees environment movement in 2015 and the protest against a toxic spill from a Formosa Plastics factory in 2016.
In 2017, he joined YouTube channel CHTV, reporting on Vietnam’s socio-economic issues. After stepping down the following year, he concentrated on business projects.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.
