It’s Movement Time
It’s movement time.
As the Trump presidency take shape, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Disbelief meshes with despair, and some are quite frankly desolate.
Dry your tears, blow your noses, and join movements of resistance to this madness. Blacks in America have never known a time when resistance wasn’t necessary, including life under a Black president.
For centuries for generations, people have had to struggle for freedom, for respect, for justice. Why should this time be any different?
The ancestors, like the revered Frederick Douglass, lambasted Abraham Lincoln as a fool or coward who wouldn’t fight the civil war with thousands of willing Black troops. Said Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Said Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”
So let us struggle. Let us build movements that lift our hearts. Let us remake our history with the brick and mortar of struggle.
—Prison Radio, November 21, 2016
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/it-is-movement-time/
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Israel’s Genocide Day 401: Israel continues Gaza ethnic cleansing campaign as Smotrich announces plan to annex West Bank
As accusations that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza continue to grow, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declares 2025 will be the year of “expanding Israeli sovereignty” to the West Bank.
Casualties
· 43,603 + killed* and at least 102,929 wounded in the Gaza Strip, including 59% women, children and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*
· 7809+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,243 Lebanese killed and more than 14,134 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 5,065 others since October 7.****
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on November 7, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of November 7, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on November 7, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Israel Keeps Attacking Journalists. When Will the U.S. Intervene?
By Kavitha Chekuru, Nov. 10, 2024
Ms. Chekuru is a journalist and a producer of a documentary investigation into the killings of civilians in Israeli military attacks in Gaza.
“Decades of what rights groups have called a pattern of Israeli impunity in the killings of journalists, combined with its accusations of reporters of being fighters, compromises the world’s ability to know what’s happening in Gaza. And Washington’s anemic response tells the Israeli military there will be no consequences.”
Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hunted.
That is how Hossam Shabat recently described his life as a journalist in northern Gaza.
Just days earlier, the Israeli military accused him and five other Al Jazeera journalists of being fighters in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The accusations, which the network has said are “baseless” and which Mr. Shabat and the others have denied, effectively put targets on these journalists and come amid a horrific recent Israeli offensive in northern Gaza. In the past month, this small group of journalists has provided important documentation of what the United Nations human rights chief has said are possible “crimes against humanity.”
At least 129 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza started last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; the Gaza media office puts that number much higher, at 188. This has been the deadliest year for journalists since the C.P.J. began recording the numbers in 1992. The group has said that in the first 10 weeks of the war, more journalists were killed than had been killed in any country over an entire year.
The C.P.J. has also determined that five journalists who were killed, including one in Lebanon, were “directly targeted” by Israeli forces, and the organization is investigating more than 20 others. (The Israel Defense Forces has repeatedly denied targeting journalists.)
The record number of journalists killed has been met with little response from Israel’s most important ally, the United States. The Biden administration has powerful tools to help pursue accountability for these killings. It could ensure independent investigations, enforce the Leahy law, which prohibits the United States from assisting foreign military units suspected of having committed human rights abuses, or even impose sanctions, which it did for far less just a few months ago in response to a Georgian law that could limit press freedoms.
Decades of what rights groups have called a pattern of Israeli impunity in the killings of journalists, combined with its accusations of reporters of being fighters, compromises the world’s ability to know what’s happening in Gaza. And Washington’s anemic response tells the Israeli military there will be no consequences.
Two weeks before Israeli authorities accused the six journalists of having ties to militant groups in Gaza, Mr. Shabat and one of the other journalists, Anas al-Sharif, survived what they said was a harrowing attack by Israeli forces. One of their colleagues, a cameraman named Fadi al-Wahidi, was shot in the neck as the group tried to flee a quadcopter that chased and then fired on them, according to Mr. al-Sharif. After Mr. al-Wahidi was shot, his colleagues began to film. In the footage, he can be seen lying facedown on a sidewalk. His navy blue press jacket is stark against his white shirt, starker still for how little protection it offered him.
The image of Mr. al-Wahidi lying prone as his colleagues cried out to him is a haunting echo of the shooting of another journalist, the Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in the occupied West Bank in May 2022. In video of that attack, Ms. Abu Akleh was also shown facedown in the street, motionless, the “Press” label on her flak jacket large and clearly visible. Several investigations found that Ms. Abu Akleh and the other journalists she was with were most likely targeted. A few months after her killing, the Israeli military said that there was a “high possibility” that she was shot by an Israeli soldier but that she was not targeted and that no soldier would be charged.
In 2022 my colleagues and I investigated her killing for Al Jazeera English, where I was previously a documentary producer. We interviewed her brother, Anton, in his home in East Jerusalem, where he was surrounded by photos of her, his only sibling. He told us not just about who she was and why journalism was important to her but also about his family’s near-impossible search for justice. “If no one is held accountable,” he told us, “it will just go on and on.”
Her family is still waiting. Although Ms. Abu Akleh was an American citizen, the Biden administration issued a cursory summary of the killing based on reports from the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority, in addition to an inconclusive ballistics analysis. Two years ago, there were reports of an F.B.I. investigation opened independently of the White House, but it has yet to release any concrete findings.
In the two decades before Ms. Abu Akleh’s death, the C.P.J. found that at least 19 other journalists were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied territories. No one was charged in any of those attacks, either. A May 2023 report by the C.P.J. found a pattern of Israeli response “that appears designed to evade responsibility” and said that Israeli authorities regularly accused journalists of being terrorists without providing credible evidence. Israeli forces have admitted they have killed Palestinian journalists, both during and before the current war. In some instances they said the reporters were caught in the crossfire; in others they justified the killings by claiming the journalists were combatants or had ties to militant groups, releasing documents they said they had found as proof. Watchdog and human rights groups that looked at some of the allegations found them to be unproven or not credible.
An Al Jazeera correspondent, Ismail al-Ghoul, was killed on July 31, along with a cameraman, Rami al-Rifi. After their killings, the Israeli military released a document it said supported several claims, including that Mr. al-Ghoul received a military ranking from Hamas in 2007 — when he was 10 years old. Mr. al-Ghoul and Mr. al-Rifi were two of the five journalists the C.P.J. has determined died in targeted killings.
The most recent accusations against the six men are brazen and chilling. It’s difficult to see the list of names as anything short of a hit list. The military claims its intelligence backs up its accusations, but the head of the C.P.J. said the documents did not appear credible. She also said she was concerned the accusations were an attempt “to excuse any potential future attack on these six journalists. It makes them extremely vulnerable, and they were already extremely vulnerable.”
The timing of the accusations against the six is impossible to ignore, coming during one of the most intense and devastating phases of Israel’s war in Gaza yet. Israeli officials have ordered about 400,000 people to leave their homes in the north, with no true guarantee of safety or return. The entire population is at risk of starvation, and each new statement from U.N. officials and the few remaining doctors there is increasingly dire. With Israel continuing to bar foreign media from entering Gaza independently, the burden of documenting this war has fallen almost entirely to Palestinian journalists. With every journalist killed, another voice is silenced, and the world’s window on Gaza becomes even smaller.
According to an Al Jazeera spokesperson, Mr. al-Wahidi, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was shot on Oct. 9, was paralyzed as a result of his injuries and is in a coma in a hospital in Gaza. With Gaza’s health system destroyed, he, along with Ali al-Attar, another Al Jazeera journalist injured in a separate attack, are in need of immediate medical evacuation that Israeli authorities have, as of yet, not allowed.
“For an entire year, we have been sharing the same scenes — the same displacement, the same massacres and the same bombings over the heads of civilians,” Mr. Shabat recently said in a livestream. “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”
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2) Immigration Lawyers Prepare to Battle Trump in Court Again
Nearly eight years after the first challenges to his immigration policies, Donald Trump is returning to the White House promising a more aggressive crackdown.
By Miriam Jordan and Jazmine Ulloa, Nov. 10, 2024
Donald Trump, shown visiting the U.S.-Mexico border in California in 2019, has vowed to undertake the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
It was just days into his first term when President Trump issued an order banning the entry of people from several predominantly Muslim countries. An SOS went out to immigration lawyers across New York to head to Kennedy Airport, where arriving passengers were already being detained.
By noon, hundreds of lawyers were interviewing relatives and friends of travelers who were being held, challenging their detention and drafting petitions for their release.
The mobilization that morning in 2017 spawned a network of hundreds of lawyers who are now ready to fight the crackdown on immigrants that Mr. Trump promised to carry out in a second term in office.
After his decisive victory over Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump is expected to name key cabinet choices in the coming days and weeks, including his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security. And in the coming four years, a harsher crackdown on migrants is expected, something immigration lawyers have prepared for months.
The Supreme Court upheld a version of the ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, which the Biden administration eliminated in 2021. But earlier this fall, Mr. Trump said he would “bring back the travel ban.”
During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to undertake the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, though he skirted questions about whether the sweeps would target undocumented immigrants who had long lived in the country, people who had more recently crossed at the southern border or both. About 11 million undocumented people resided in the United States as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, with nearly two-thirds having been in the country for at least a decade.
While deporting millions of people would be all but impossible with current enforcement resources, Mr. Trump has said he would consider stationing American troops at the border with Mexico and working with governors to deploy the National Guard into the interior of the country.
In his victory speech early on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that voters had handed him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to pursue his agenda.
Indeed, the immigrant advocacy community will face a very different political landscape when Mr. Trump returns to the White House in January. Voter sentiment has shifted markedly, with far more Americans expressing concerns about immigration and a willingness to support tougher policies.
Unlike in 2016, when he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump won both in this election, the first Republican to prevail in the national vote in two decades, after campaigning on harsh immigration policies. And he will enter office with a Supreme Court that counts three of his first-term nominees among the nine justices.
“We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that,” he said on Wednesday.
Lawyers for immigrants said they have been preparing for months for the possibility of large-scale workplace raids, roundups in immigrant enclaves, new restrictions on asylum, the expansion of detention and the termination of programs temporarily shielding some people from deportation.
“The Trump team might think they are ready,” said Camille Mackler, chief executive of Immigrant ARC, who sent an SOS email that brought hundreds of lawyers to Kennedy Airport that day in 2017. “But so are we.”
Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sued the government over the Muslim ban, said that winning the popular vote was not a license to ignore the law. “He can’t act outside the bounds of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” she said.
Having battled one Trump administration, she and her allies are ready for a second, Ms. Heller said. “We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people,” she said.
“Trump has told us what to expect — hate and persecution and concentration camps,” she said, referring to his team’s plans to use military funds to build “vast holding facilities.” “None of us have any illusions about what we are up against this time.”
The new president’s immigration agenda will have battle-tested allies in some of the country’s state capitals. A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, have systematically challenged the Biden administration on key immigration policies.
The results have been mixed, with some challenges temporarily blocking President Biden’s efforts but others being turned back by the courts. The challenges have kept the fight over immigration in the news and on voters’ minds, and given the Biden administration even more to worry about.
While the states that have been mounting those legal fights are not likely to be challenging the incoming Trump administration, they could play a crucial role in carrying out some of the expected federal efforts on immigration, said Lenni Benson, a professor of immigration law at New York Law School.
After extensive civil rights litigation, Arizona’s attorney general opined in 2016 that sheriffs could enforce “a show-me-your-papers law,” as long as they asked for documents from every person arrested.
Mr. Trump, who made immigration his calling card again this campaign, is expected to issue a spate of executive orders on his first day in office, such as to seal the border and arrest undocumented immigrants, including ones in the interior of the country.
Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers have said that, while criminals would be prioritized in making arrests, no one unlawfully in the country would be spared, a shift from Mr. Biden and other presidents, who focused resources on targeting serious criminals.
Lawsuits are expected to pile up.
“We have spent the last nine months planning for this, and are prepared to go to court as often as necessary, just like the first time,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who argued many immigration cases, including one to halt the policy of separating migrant families at the border.
The A.C.L.U. filed many legal challenges against Trump policies during his first administration. It defeated his attempt to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census at the Supreme Court and won a settlement for the families split up at the border. In a full-page ad published in The Times’s print paper on Friday, the organization wrote an open letter to Mr. Trump, saying it planned to defend people’s rights “in the courts, at state legislatures and in the streets.”
Tom Homan, a senior immigration official in the last Trump administration who is expected to return to government, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last month that large-scale worksite raids would resume. Such operations, which can lead to the arrest of hundreds of unauthorized workers, are costly and complex, and have not been conducted under Mr. Biden.
Bruna Bouhid-Sollod, senior political director for United We Dream Action, a national group led by young immigrant activists, said the organization has been crafting plans for a second Trump presidency.
Those strategies include “know-your-rights” training, letter writing campaigns to encourage elected officials and public art and vigils to show support for undocumented immigrants.
One of the biggest concerns is the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program known as DACA, which has shielded from deportation and granted work authorization to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Ms. Bouhid-Sollod said she was among many DACA recipients who joined United We Dream after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, out of fear that Mr. Trump would kill the program. He tried to, but the Supreme Court kept the program in place in a 5-4 ruling, saying the Trump administration hadn’t followed proper procedures for ending it.
Since then, Texas and several other states have sued to end DACA, and a federal court ruling in their favor is under review by an appeals court that has several Trump-nominated judges and has embraced some of the most aggressive conservative arguments in American law.
And of course, the incoming Trump administration itself could try again to end DACA.
“We are cleareyed about the challenges ahead,” Ms. Bouhid-Sollod said. “That is the big difference between 2016 and 2024.”
Benjamin Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the organization has long been analyzing Mr. Trump’s immigration promises, preparing litigation to challenge policies they believe would violate their clients’ rights to have their cases heard and fairly processed under the law.
In his campaign, Mr. Trump spoke of using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out mass deportations, a law under which people of Japanese descent were held in internment camps during World War II.
Mr. Trump also has said the deportations would be modeled after those under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration used sweeps, raids and blunt forms of racial profiling in the 1950s to round up and expel mostly Mexican and Mexican American laborers.
“He has threatened to use powers — some that haven’t been used in a century, since World War II — to arrest, detain and imprison people without any judicial review,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to Mr. Trump. “We are going to have to find ways to meet the moment.”
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3) Israeli Strike Kills 23 People North of Beirut, Lebanon Says
The strike in the Jbeil district of Lebanon came amid an apparent diplomatic push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Isabel Kershner, Nov. 10, 2024
Rescuers searching for survivors after an airstrike in the Lebanese village of Almat on Sunday. Credit...Hassan Ammar/Associated Press
An Israeli strike on a village north of Beirut killed at least 23 people and wounded six others on Sunday, Lebanon’s health ministry said, amid what appeared to be a new diplomatic push for a potential cease-fire there between Israel and Hezbollah.
Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to visit Washington in the coming days and was in Russia last week for discussions regarding the possibility of a Russian role in enforcing a potential cease-fire in Lebanon, according to an official familiar with the matter.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said significant efforts were underway to reach at least a temporary cease-fire in the coming days or weeks.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday that he had spoken three times in recent days with President-elect Donald J. Trump to tighten the alliance between Israel and the United States.
Many former Israeli officials and analysts have warned that the final weeks of the Biden administration could prove challenging for Israel and its ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon against Iranian-backed groups. For example, a U.S. threat that it could cut off military support to Israel if the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza does not dramatically improve could be fueling Israel’s motivation to show good-will and readiness for a truce on the Lebanon front, they say, though there is no guarantee the efforts will succeed.
Hours after the strike in Almat, in the Jbeil district on the Lebanese coast, rescue workers were still searching the rubble, the Lebanese authorities said, adding that three children were among the dead.
Photographs from the scene showed a bulldozer on a steep hillside scooping piles of debris from at least one building that appeared to have been destroyed, while emergency workers also picked through the wreckage. The twisted remains of several vehicles also stood nearby.
There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military about the strike in the Jbeil district, which is around 18 miles northeast of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
The Israeli military has been widening its campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, across Lebanon in recent weeks. On Sunday, Syria’s state news agency reported explosions near Damascus, which the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said were from an Israeli strike on buildings that housed Hezbollah members. The observatory, a British-based group that monitors violence in Syria, said that three people were killed. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But even as Israel’s military said it was pounding “dozens” of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Sunday and Hezbollah fired more rockets across the border, Israel’s new defense minister added to the sense that Israel might be signaling readiness to wrap up the fighting when he declared in a speech on Sunday that the military had essentially “defeated Hezbollah.”
The defense minister, Israel Katz said, the military needed “to keep up the pressure” and “realize the fruits of that victory” by ensuring a new security situation in southern Lebanon and preventing the rearmament of Israel’s adversaries.
Mr. Netanyahu said his talks with Mr. Trump were “very good and important.”
“We see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its aspects, and on the dangers they reflect,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement, adding, “We also see the great opportunities facing Israel, in the area of peace and its expansion, and in other areas.”
Mr. Trump has said that he wants to end wars, not start them.
Israel’s operations against Hezbollah were initially focused on southern Lebanon, with the stated aim of crippling the militant group’s ability to fire rockets across the border into Israel. But they have expanded to include cities and towns across Lebanon, including places far from that border — like the Jbeil district.
Another target of the widening campaign has been the Bekaa Valley in northeastern Lebanon, which is home to the historic city of Baalbek. Israeli strikes killed 20 people in Baalbek and the towns around it on Saturday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Baalbek has been hit repeatedly in recent weeks. Dozens of people have been killed and most of the city’s population has fled. The Israeli military said it had struck “Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure sites” near Baalbek and the port city of Tyre on Saturday.
Lebanon’s health ministry cited five separate deadly incidents in Baalbek and the surrounding area on Saturday, including one in which 11 people were killed. In a statement on Saturday night, it added that 14 people were wounded. The ministry gave few details of the attacks and did not say whether the casualties were civilians or Hezbollah fighters.
Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks have persisted even as Israel’s campaign has intensified. The group fired 70 projectiles — likely missiles or drones — across the frontier on Saturday and at least 20 on Sunday, according to Israel’s military. Many were intercepted by Israel’s air defenses or fell in open areas, it said.
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4) Israeli Strike in Gaza Kills Over 30 Palestinians, Emergency Services Say
The strike hit a house in Jabaliya, a city that has repeatedly come under attack as the Israeli military has pressed an offensive in northern Gaza.
By Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 10, 2024
Israel’s military struck a house in northern Gaza where displaced families were sheltering on Sunday, killing at least 34 people, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense, the main emergency service in the territory.
Dr. Mohammed Al Moghayer, a spokesman for the group, said that 14 children were among the dead after the strike in the city of Jabaliya on Sunday morning. People were still trapped under the rubble, he added, warning that the death toll was likely to rise.
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that the house, which was “crowded with residents and displaced people,” was destroyed. It said that a “large number” of wounded people were taken to the nearby Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
In response to questions about the strike on Sunday, Israel’s military said that it had hit “a terrorist infrastructure site” in Jabaliya where militants who posed a threat to troops had been operating and that it had taken “numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.” The military, which said that the details of the episode were under review, did not provide evidence for its assertions.
Ahmed Radwan lives next to the house that was struck in Jabaliya and said its residents were all civilians. He said he heard the explosion as he was about to begin his dawn prayer.
“It was terrifying,” he said in a voice message on Sunday, adding that his home was severely damaged by the strike.
“When I went outside to see what happened, I found my neighbors, the Allush family, scattered in the street from the intensity of the blast,” Mr. Radwan said.
“Some were missing a leg, others an arm, and many were dead,” he added.
Hours after the strike, a number of bodies were still under the rubble of the multistory family home, Mr. Radwan said.
“We don’t know how to get them out,” he said. “All we have is a shovel and a grub hoe.”
Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, said that his hospital had received “distressing calls about people trapped under the rubble” on Sunday but was unable to help. Kamal Adwan is one of the last semi-functional hospitals in northern Gaza but has been damaged by Israeli attacks and a raid over the last weeks.
Jabaliya has come under repeated attack as the Israeli military has stepped up an offensive in areas of northern Gaza over the past month, saying it was trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence there. Israel’s military has issued widespread evacuation orders for parts of northern Gaza, and Israeli troops, tanks and armed drones have bombarded the area almost daily.
The United Nations, aid groups and the Gazan health authorities have warned that the Israeli offensive in the northern part of the enclave is causing widespread devastation and has killed hundreds of civilians.
The Israeli military’s evacuation orders have displaced nearly 100,000 people from areas of northern Gaza to Gaza City over the last month, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It said that 75,000 to 95,000 people were estimated to remain in northern Gaza.
Some people have refused to evacuate out of fear of being permanently displaced from their homes. Some worry that they would face greater threats from destroyed roads or frequent bombardment if they were to move elsewhere, while others lack the financial means to relocate.
People who remain in northern Gaza are facing “an imminent and substantial likelihood of famine,” a U.N.-backed panel warned on Friday. The panel, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said that action was needed “within days, not weeks” to alleviate the immense suffering in the enclave.
A separate strike on a residential building in Gaza City killed five Palestinians on Sunday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said in a statement, adding that the search for survivors was continuing.
But the emergency service added that its teams were “forcibly disabled” from working in all areas of northern Gaza because of the “ongoing targeting and Israeli aggression,” leaving thousands there “without humanitarian and medical care.”
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
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5) Once China’s ‘Worst Nightmare,’ Labor Activist Refuses to Back Down
Neither jail nor exile to Hong Kong has stopped Han Dongfang, a former Tiananmen Square protest leader, from championing workers’ rights. “If you’re born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn.”
By Alexandra Stevenson, Reporting from Hong Kong, Nov. 10, 2024
“‘Democracy is about who decides our salaries,’ Mr. Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. ‘Workers should be able to take part in the decision.’”
Han Dongfang is one of China’s last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Han Dongfang was just another dot in a sea of agitated university students during the mass protests in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago when he suddenly jumped onto a monument to speak.
“Democracy is about who decides our salaries,” Mr. Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. “Workers should be able to take part in the decision.”
It was one of the first times during the protests that anyone had mentioned workers. And it marked the beginning of Mr. Han’s three-decade fight for their rights in China, a struggle that was almost brought to an immediate halt.
On June 4, 1989, just weeks after Mr. Han began his speeches, the People’s Liberation Army fired on pro-democracy protesters in the square, putting a bloody end to the democracy movement and free speech in China.
The crushing response also disbanded the labor union he had helped to create during the protests — the first and only independent union since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. After Mr. Han was placed on a “most wanted” list, he turned himself in to face prison, where he served 22 months.
Today, Mr. Han is one of China’s last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Stripped of his Chinese passport and kicked out of mainland China in 1993, he does his work from Hong Kong.
“I prefer to be open rather than to hide,” he said from the windowless meeting room in the office of China Labor Bulletin, a nongovernmental organization that Mr. Han started in 1994.
His faith in the power of transparency has kept Mr. Han in Hong Kong, even though nearly all other China-focused civil society organizations have left since 2020, when Beijing imposed a national security law and dismantled the protections that gave the city its semiautonomous status.
Where his peers have essentially surrendered in the face of the crackdown, Mr. Han has pushed ahead, telling colleagues to operate as though everything they do and say is being monitored by the authorities.
“I’m sure that the Chinese state security turned this organization’s records upside down and inside out 50 times,” Mr. Han said. “And Hong Kong’s national security police, too.”
After high school, the Beijing-born Mr. Han in 1980 joined the military, where he remembers being disillusioned by the fact that officers were fed chicken, while soldiers like him got bread so dry “it could kill someone.”
He then took a relatively well-paid job as an engineer for the state railways, where he was working in April 1989 as students started protesting in Tiananmen Square near where he lived. Mr. Han joined them.
It was done mostly out of curiosity, he said. But as he listened to the students quote thinkers he had never read, and as he tried to relate their visions of democracy to his own life, he realized that workers could have a say outside of the Communist Party’s system.
“It was a completely new idea that directly contradicted many years of propaganda about the working class being the leading class,” he said.
Mr. Han took a leading role in an unofficial union that had begun to organize in the square called the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation.
After the Tiananmen massacre, the union was quickly declared illegal, and nothing like it has been allowed again. Ever since, Mr. Han, who is understated but not easily deterred, has been propelled by one goal: empowering workers to take collective action.
“That’s my character,” he said. “If you’re born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn.”
His fervor led The New York Times to call him “the Chinese government’s worst nightmare: a man who is less afraid of it than it is of him.” At the time of that article, in 1992, he was still able to live in mainland China. He was expelled the following year, resettling in Hong Kong.
Under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, groups like his have been shut down and other labor activists jailed. But Mr. Han has stayed active — and optimistic. He continues to believe it is possible to advance Chinese workers’ rights through unions.
On paper, China has one of the strictest sets of labor protections in the world. Every worker has the right to join or start a trade union. In practice, every union must be associated with what is effectively a state-sponsored union: the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a government body that typically works with companies when setting up unions. The employees have little power.
Mr. Han has tried to work within this stifling system, focusing on convincing branches of the All-China Federation to negotiate on behalf of workers instead of siding with management.
He has also tried to gain an assist from an unlikely source: Mr. Xi.
Worried about social unrest amid an economic slowdown, China’s leader has called for the official labor union to do more to help low-paid workers.
“You can say that I’m helping Xi Jinping to hold officials accountable,” Mr. Han said with a faint smile.
In the China Labor Bulletin office, bookshelves and tables are piled with books and brochures about Chinese labor law. Mr. Han and his team of a dozen employees meet once a week to talk about strikes and protests that surface on Chinese social media. They also use state media stories, police reports and images with clues like street signs to try to identify the names and locations of companies where the labor unrest is occurring.
Once they have identified a company whose workers need help, Mr. Han will call local union officials to try to get them to take action.
Mr. Han, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of China’s labor laws, will remind the officials of their duty to make sure workers’ needs are being represented.
The conversation can be heated because officials with the All-China Federation tend to look the other way when worker violations occur. Often, they are complicit when company bosses do things like bring in private security to beat striking workers.
“When we call, we say, ‘The law says this,’” said Mr. Han. “In some cases they would say, ‘If you really follow the law, all the factories in China should be closed.’”
His approach has achieved some successes, and over the years, China Labor Bulletin has been involved in some of the biggest labor disputes in China.
Last year, when a 20-year-old employee of an electronics factory was found dead in his dorm room after working for 33 days with little rest, the local authorities made a “humanitarian” payment to the family.
Mr. Han contacted the local official union and the factory and warned them that the company, which had foreign customers, could be held responsible under a German law requiring companies to identify and fix human rights abuses in their supply chains. Eventually, the worker’s family was paid an additional amount that was double the first payment.
To describe Mr. Han as willful would be an understatement.
During his almost two years in jail, prison wardens tortured him and placed him in a ward with tuberculosis patients even though he was healthy. He called it “hell” and “unbearable,” but also “an achievement.”
When Beijing released him because he had contracted tuberculosis and was near death, he traveled to the United States for treatment. He lost a lung. When he recovered, the Chinese authorities told him to stay away; instead he tried to sneak back in, more than once.
On his last attempt in 1993, he made it to Guangzhou, a city 80 miles from Hong Kong, then still a British colony. Eventually, the police dragged him back to Hong Kong.
He responded to the ordeal by setting up China Labor Bulletin.
Despite the past successes he can point to, Mr. Han said he feels powerless to help the victims of Beijing’s current clampdown on China’s decades-long property boom: the construction workers, painters, landscapers and others who have not been paid as companies went bankrupt.
Many workers are suffering, and some are protesting and speaking out, but there is little he can do. “We don’t see any hope because the root of the finance is dry,” he said, “there is no more water coming out.”
“The scale is beyond anyone’s imagination,” Mr. Han said. “It’s huge.”
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6) Caught Between Wars, Syrian Refugees in Lebanon Return Home
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians who escaped civil war at home over the past decade have now fled the conflict in Lebanon, seeking safety in their own shattered country.
By Ben Hubbard, Reporting from al-Rai, Syria, Nov. 11, 2024
The children of Mohammed Najjar (not pictured) and his sister-in-law riding in a bus back to their hometown in Syria after fleeing Lebanon. Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
When the civil war in Syria threatened his village more than a decade ago, a farmer and his family fled to neighboring Lebanon.
The farmer, Ali Kheir Khallu, 37, found work there growing oranges and bananas. Life was hard, he said, but at least he felt safe.
That feeling vanished last month as Israel ramped up its war with Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia, heavily bombing sites that it said belonged to the group. When the bombs fell near Mr. Kheir Khallu’s house, he packed up his family, left behind the new lives they had built in Lebanon and fled back to Syria, where they are now struggling to start over, yet again.
“You want to make up for all that you have lost,” he said. “But you are still in shock.”
As the war in Lebanon expands, more than 1.2 million people — one-fifth of the population — have been displaced from their homes, the government says.
While most have sought safety in other parts of Lebanon, more than 470,000 people, mostly Syrians, have crossed into Syria in the last six weeks, aid groups say.
Since Syrian rebels tried to topple the government in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad has fought to stay in power, with his forces bombing and besieging opposition communities and repeatedly using chemical weapons. The war drew in Russia, the United States, the jihadists of Islamic State and other forces, displacing about 12 million residents, or more than half the country’s population.
More than 1.1 million Syrians registered as refugees in Lebanon, most of them deeply impoverished and in Lebanese communities that wanted them to leave. Some of these refugees have now decided to try their luck in their own shattered country rather than under the bombs in Lebanon. But they must navigate Syria’s tattered economy, damaged communities and a government long known to trample on human rights.
Mr. al-Assad’s authoritarian government controls most of Syria’s major cities, but large parts of the country are dominated by either Turkish-backed armed groups in the northwest or a Kurdish-led militia supported by the United States in the northeast.
Human Rights Watch warned recently that Syrians returning home could face repression by the government, including forced disappearance and torture.
Mr. Kheir Khallu and other returning refugees spoke to The New York Times in the village of al-Rai in northern Syria during a visit facilitated by the Turkish authorities who oversee the area.
His uncle, Abdel-Majid Dahdou, 48, has also recently returned from Lebanon and said that Syrian war and the passage of time had transformed their village, Celame. Shelling damaged his house and looters cleaned it out, he said, leaving him to now borrow mattresses and blankets for his family.
When he left years ago, rebels were fighting the Syrian government. Now, Turkey supports the local security forces and provides basic services.
But the new Turkish-backed authorities there have refused to recognize his Syrian government identity card, he said, meaning that he cannot enroll his children in school or connect his house to the electric grid. So while trying to figure out how to get a local ID, he charges his cellphone at a relative’s house.
“At night, we sit in the dark,” he said.
Other Syrians said they had also found it hard to return.
Mohammed Najjar, 42, left his home and housewares store in the town of Azaz on the Turkish border in 2013 to go to Lebanon, where he sold clothes at an outdoor market and worked as a day laborer in agriculture. His family registered as refugees with the United Nations, he said, but stopped receiving aid years ago.
Then work grew scarce as Lebanon sank into a deep economic crisis that began in 2019, compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.
So when Israel began bombing near where his family lived, he said, he decided to head home.
“It was war. There was no money, and we worried about the children, how to pay the rent, where we would live,” he said. “So we decided it was safer to come home.”
He returned with his brother’s wife, Hamida Brimo, who had gone to Lebanon at age 10 and come home a 22-year-old mother of three. She got married in Lebanon, but her husband did not make the move to Syria with her and their children, she said, because he feared being forced to serve in the Syrian Army.
She said she didn’t know when she would see her husband again, but she hoped that at least she and her daughters would be safe in Syria.
“We came back, but we don’t know how our lives here will be,” she said. “We have to return and start over.”
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7) Israel’s Military Announces Small Expansion of Gaza Humanitarian Zone
The move comes just before a Biden administration deadline for Israel to deliver more aid to the enclave or risk a cutoff of military supplies.
By Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 11, 2024
Lining up for meals cooked by a charity kitchen in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, on Sunday. Credit...Ramadan Abed/Reuters
Israel’s military said on Monday that it had expanded a humanitarian zone it created in southern Gaza. The move came just before the expiration of a Biden administration deadline for Israel to deliver more aid to the enclave or risk a cutoff of military supplies.
In a statement, the Israeli military said that the zone would now include field hospitals, tent compounds, shelter supplies and provisions of food, water, medicine and medical equipment, though it did not specify whether any new additions had been made to the resources already present. The military provided a map showing nine areas added to the zone.
Aid agencies have said that supplies are desperately needed to offset the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially in the north, where Israel has stepped up military operations against the militant group Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, assault in Israel that started the war.
The Israeli military’s announcement came as the 30-day deadline set on Oct. 13 by the Biden administration is about to expire. The deadline is also set to expire just days after a United Nations-backed panel warned that famine was imminent in the northern Gaza Strip and that action was needed “within days, not weeks” to alleviate the suffering in the enclave.
In one of the starkest American warnings since the war began, the Biden administration said that Israel’s failure to provide more aid to Gaza’s 2.2 million residents before that deadline “may have implications for U.S. policy,” including on the provision of the military assistance upon which Israel depends.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that the United States would evaluate this week “what kind of progress” Israel had made on allowing more aid into Gaza. Speaking on “Face the Nation” on CBS, Mr. Sullivan said President Biden would then “make judgments about what we do in response.”
It remains unclear whether the expansion announced by Israel’s military would lead to any improvement in conditions in the humanitarian zone, known as Al-Mawasi, a coastal area of southern Gaza that was sparsely populated before the war but that is now overcrowded with displaced families.
The area, designated as safe for civilians by Israel’s military this year, has frequently been damaged by Israeli strikes and lacks sufficient medical services. Israel’s military has said that its strikes have targeted Hamas militants and that it takes steps to avoid civilian casualties.
Israel has issued evacuation orders that have affected parts of the humanitarian zone, effectively shrinking the already overcrowded area by more than a fifth.
Israel has repeatedly ordered Palestinians in other areas of Gaza to evacuate to the humanitarian zone, despite protests from aid groups that the area lacks adequate shelter, water, food, sanitation and health care.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
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8) Attack, Withdraw, Return: Israel’s Bloody Cycle of War in North Gaza
Israel said its forces had returned to northern Gaza to fight a Hamas resurgence. That has brought a new round of suffering for residents.
By Jack Nicas, Adam Rasgon and Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 12, 2024
A Palestinian woman who lost her leg when her family home was destroyed in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza last week. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Israeli forces first swarmed into Gaza last year, they targeted North Gaza, an area stretching across densely packed urban centers and small strawberry farms near the border with Israel.
The military said that hardened Hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians there, so it struck residential neighborhoods, hospitals and schools turned shelters. It was one of the deadliest moments of the war.
Now, almost exactly a year later, it is all happening again.
North Gaza is the epicenter of a renewed Israeli offensive that, over the past five weeks, has unleashed some of the Israeli military’s most devastating attacks yet. In an effort to stamp out what the military has called a Hamas resurgence, troops, tanks and armed drones have hammered the area almost daily, displacing 100,000 residents and killing likely more than 1,000 others, according to the United Nations. (Those statistics do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.)
There are so many corpses, multiple residents and a local doctor said, that stray dogs have begun to pick at them in the streets.
“Life over the past four weeks, if I can sum it up, is a people being exterminated,” said Islam Ahmad, 34, a freelance journalist from North Gaza who described helping bury neighbors in a mass grave.
The return of fighting to the northernmost reaches of the Gaza Strip shows how Israel’s approach has led to a bloody carousel of sorts, with the Israeli military chasing Hamas fighters in circles — and civilians often caught in the crossfire.
Two Israeli security officials compared it to cutting the grass, using a phrase that has circulated among Israeli officials for years, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Each time Hamas cells regrow, they say, Israeli forces will come back to cut them down.
This sort of cyclical combat reflects Israel’s murky strategy in a war now in its 14th month. Israel has eliminated much of Hamas’s senior military leadership, killed thousands of its fighters and collapsed many of its tunnels — yet Israel has shown no sign of letting up.
That is in part because Israeli forces have avoided holding much ground and Mr. Netanyahu has not committed to a viable postwar plan. Hamas has filled the resulting power vacuum.
North Gaza is the northernmost of Gaza’s five governorates, just north of Gaza City. Israeli forces left after pummeling the region last year. In May, they returned for an intense bout of fighting and recovered the bodies of seven hostages seized in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year. Then they left again. Hamas fighters regrouped, and now, once more, the military is back.
The goal this time is to isolate Hamas fighters in North Gaza from others in Gaza City, according to a senior Israeli security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe military tactics. Israel captured 500 suspected Hamas fighters and killed another 750 in North Gaza last month, the official said. He said the military had encouraged civilians to evacuate but did not track civilian casualties. He said forces planned to remain for at least another month.
Gadi Shamni, a retired general who once commanded Israeli forces in Gaza, said full occupation would demand tremendous resources, but the current approach is a temporary fix, with ugly consequences for residents.
“As soon as you evacuate those alleys and streets, Hamas will regain control immediately,” he said. “The main problem here is that the government of Israel, and Netanyahu himself, is trying to bypass the real solution of finding an alternative to Hamas” to govern Gaza.
The situation on the ground, by some measures, is even more dire than a year ago. Infrastructure is crumbling, humanitarian aid is severely restricted, and many emergency workers and aid groups have left. On Friday, a U.N.-backed panel said that famine was likely “imminent” within northern Gaza.
The Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service run by Hamas’s interior ministry, said it had officially halted rescue operations in the region last month because of the intense threat.
The Palestinian Red Crescent, one of the few aid groups still operating there, said that no ambulances could reach the hardest-hit parts of North Gaza. When a woman recently called for rescue after a relative lost a limb, the dispatcher provided instructions over the phone on how to treat the amputation, the spokeswoman said.
Hosam Al Sharif, 46, a father of four in Jabaliya, said that at the start of the latest siege, help was available. Now, he said, people with “any minor injury will bleed until they die.”
Hospitals are also teetering, leaving many treatable patients to die. On Oct. 30, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, issued an urgent plea saying that the hospital lacked surgeons but had multiple victims needing surgery.
Over the next five days, the hospital was bombed three times, according to Dr. Abu Safiyah.
Gazan health officials said Israeli forces had bombed the hospital. The World Health Organization said one Israeli strike had destroyed medical supplies that it had delivered just days earlier. The Israeli military said one of the cases was caused by an explosive device planted by militants. It said at the time it had no information about the other two cases. It has said it has targeted Hamas militants hiding at the hospital in the past.
“We are still besieged inside the hospital,” Dr. Abu Safiyah told The New York Times last week. “We urgently appealed to the world, international and humanitarian organizations. We didn’t get a response.” He said he did not witness militants in the hospital but would treat any victim.
The United Nations has said that Israel has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid to North Gaza. A U.S. deadline for Israel to allow more aid expires this week.
Mr. Ahmad, the journalist, said North Gaza had been relatively calm for months. Then fighting exploded again in October.
On Oct. 29, he said, he heard a loud explosion before dawn. When he went to investigate, the street was littered with mangled bodies, he said.
The Israeli military said it had bombed a five-story building because forces had spotted a militant on the roof. There were also, according to local officials and residents, dozens of families sleeping inside. The Gaza Health Ministry said that 93 people were killed, including many children. The Israeli military disputed that number.
Mr. Ahmad, who took photos of the aftermath for Agence France-Presse, said he had also counted 93 bodies as they were carried on donkey carts to a mass grave.
“We stacked every three bodies on top of one another,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of honoring the dead.” They lacked enough sand, he said, so they laid tiles on the grave to keep the dogs out.
Fewer than 95,000 people remain in the region, a fifth of its prewar population, according to the United Nations. Israeli officials said there are far fewer. The relentless bombing has fueled fears among Palestinians that Israel is intent on depopulating northern Gaza permanently.
Since the start of the war, Israel has urged Gazans to migrate south for their safety — even though it has also repeatedly bombarded the south. The Israeli government has acknowledged having studied a plan put forth by a prominent former general to expel the remaining 400,000 people in the broader northern Gaza region and force Hamas to surrender there by cutting off food and water.
Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, said Monday that residents could return to northern Gaza after the war.
In Beit Lahia, a farming community, residents were trying to rebuild earlier this year. Yousef Abu Rabee, a farmer, returned in February to plant crops to feed his neighbors, including eggplant, squash and fava beans. An American farmer helped him raise $90,000. He provided seedlings to 50 farms and posted videos to Instagram showing him and others sowing fields, including in craters left by missile strikes.
“We’re trying to grow food on our land, or what is left of our land, in order to save ourselves and our fellow people in the north,” he said in a video posted last month. Several days later, another video showed the fruits of his work: a field of sprouting crops.
About a week later, according to a family member and a friend, he was killed in a strike.
Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Istanbul, Abu Bakr Bashir from London and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.
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9) Russian Doctor, Accused of Antiwar Stance, Is Jailed After Child’s Testimony
The mother of a 7-year-old boy accused the Moscow pediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, of telling him that his father’s death while fighting in Ukraine was justified.
By Nataliya Vasilyeva, Nov. 12, 2024
Nadezhda Buyanova, left, a pediatrician charged with spreading false information about Russia’s army, in court in Moscow last week. Credit...Tatyana Makeyeva/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A 68-year-old Russian doctor was convicted on Tuesday and sentenced to five and a half years in prison, according to her legal team, on accusations that she told a young boy during a medical appointment that his father, who was killed while fighting in Ukraine, deserved to die.
The conviction of the Moscow pediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, is one of a flurry of criminal cases punishing ordinary Russians for voicing opposition to the war. But it is unusual because it relied in part on the testimony of a 7-year-old boy, whose mother originally said he was not in the room to hear the doctor’s comments but then changed her account a month later and allowed her son to be interviewed for the case.
Ms. Buyanova was charged with “disseminating false information” about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. She denied the accusation in court, saying that she did not discuss the war with the boy.
The court did not allow the boy to be questioned during the trial; instead, prosecutors submitted minutes of a pretrial interview. A lawyer for Ms. Buyanova questioned the veracity of the statement, saying that the notes read like a prepared narrative with words and syntax too complex for a 7-year old.
“Those phrases like ‘legitimate target’ and ‘aggression’ — I very much doubt that a young child can say that, let alone remember and repeat it,” the lawyer, Leonid Solovyev, said in an interview.
The case has provoked condemnation among rights groups and health care workers, more than 1,000 of whom signed an open letter posted on social media this year in support of Ms. Buyanova. The case, they said in the letter, sends a “strong signal to young people: Don’t enter the medical profession, don’t help people — they can always speak against you, and you will land in jail.”
Some doctors also recorded a video protesting the charges, filming at their hospitals or clinics.
Ms. Buyanova’s legal troubles began at the end of January when a 34-year old divorced mother of two posted a teary-eyed video online as she was walking away from a doctor’s appointment on a snow-covered street in Moscow.
The woman, Anastasia Akinshina, said that when the doctor on duty asked why her 7-year old boy was misbehaving, she explained that her son had anxiety issues because his father had been killed in Ukraine. Ms. Akinshina said the doctor had replied that her husband was a “legitimate target” for Ukrainian troops.
“I won’t let them sweep it up under the carpet!” Ms. Akinshina, visibly distraught, yelled in the video.
“Where do I go to complain,” she asked, so that the doctor would get “kicked out of this country or sent to prison?”
The video was picked up by the pro-Kremlin news media, and soon Alexander I. Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which deals with high-profile crimes, took the case under his personal control.
“The fact that Bastrykin paid attention to it played a key role here,” Mr. Solovyev, the lawyer, said in the interview.
“I hear a lot from law enforcement officials that they receive a lot of denunciations: Neighbors complain about neighbors, spouses against spouses,” he said, adding, “but those complaints mostly die” at a lower level.
Mr. Bastrykin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Memorial, the Russian rights organization that received the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has listed Ms. Buyanova as a political prisoner. It asserts that Mr. Bastrykin’s personal intervention likely sparked the prosecution of a crime that was never committed.
After such a high-placed intervention, Memorial said in a statement, “law enforcement officials typically have to react and launch criminal prosecution even with a glaring lack of criminal offense, often resorting to the falsification of evidence.”
Russia keeps nearly 800 political prisoners behind bars, most of them convicted or facing charges for opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Memorial.
The Kremlin has typically used a law banning “fake news” about the Russian army to go after high-profile political opponents. They include Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in late 2022 for speaking out against Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha (Mr. Yashin was released in a multicountry prisoner exchange in August); and Aleksei Gorinov, a Moscow lawmaker jailed for seven years for calling for a moment of silence for the victims in Ukraine.
But the Russian authorities have in recent months ramped up the prosecution of any expression of antiwar sentiment, and investigators have grown eager to handle those cases to improve their crime statistics. Often the prosecutions stem from Russians who report their fellow citizens’ supposed transgressions.
In April, a court in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk arrested a butcher from a local farmers market after a stall owner whose son was fighting in Ukraine denounced him for antiwar views. In southern Russia, a court in January sentenced a 72-year-old woman to five and a half years in prison for spreading “fake news” about the Russian army in two social media posts.
In Ms. Buyanova’s case, prosecutors presented no ironclad evidence that the doctor spoke out against the war.
There was no audio recording from inside the room, and CCTV footage showed the boy walking out the door alone before the mother and doctor came outside together, according to reporters who viewed the video in court.
A month after an investigation into the episode was launched, Ms Akinshina said she now remembered that her son was in the room when Dr. Buyanova was said to have made the antiwar comments.
The doctor’s defense believes Ms. Buyanova was targeted for her Ukrainian heritage.
Ms. Akinshina told the court last month that “pieces of the puzzle came together” when she found out that Dr. Buyanova, who has practiced medicine for almost four decades, was born in Lviv, western Ukraine. “Western Ukraine hates Russians,” Ms. Akinshina said in court. “They don’t even hide that.”
Ms. Buyanova, who broke into tears during a hearing last week, rejected the accusation. “I’m related to the three ethnicities: Russia, Ukrainian and Belarusian,” she said. “I don’t want to have to choose between the three of them.”
Nikolai Lyaskin, a rare Russian opposition figure still in Russia, last week described the doctor’s prosecution as an “extremely dangerous precedent: Any ‘patriot’ whose feelings were hurt can now write a complaint and send anyone to jail.”
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