Tag: journalists

‘Can’t Make This Up’: Journalist Arrested Under UK Anti-Terror Law Hours After Criticizing It

Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British independent journalist who defends Palestinians’ right to resist Israeli apartheid, occupation, and other crimes, said this week that he was recently arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport and held for nearly 24 hours for allegedly running afoul of a highly controversial anti-terrorism law critics say is used to silence legitimate dissent.

Medhurst – who is known for his work opposing U.S., British, and Israeli war crimes in the Middle East and for his advocacy for formerly imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – said on social media Tuesday: “I criticized the Terrorism Act before getting on the plane, then got arrested under the Terrorism Act upon landing. Can’t make this up.”

In a nearly nine-minute video posted Monday night on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, Medhurst said that “on Thursday, as I landed in London Heathrow Airport, I was immediately escorted off the plane by six police officers who were waiting for me at the entrance of the aircraft.”

“They arrested me – not detained – they arrested me under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 and accused me of allegedly ‘expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a prescribed organization,’ but wouldn’t explain what this meant,” he continued.

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Salt Lake Tribune journalist fired after offering to buy sexually explicit books for high schoolers

Left-wing Salt Lake Tribune reporter Bryan Schott has been fired after he offered to buy sexually explicit books for high schoolers in Utah, per sources at the Utah legislature. He posted his intentions on social media and backlash promptly ensued. 

On Thursday, Schott took all his associations with the Salt Lake Tribune off his social media profiles and posted: “When news outlets that are supposedly protectors of the first amendment try to curry favor with the far right and wannabe fascists, you should take a hard look at whether that organization is serving the public.”

Earlier last week, Schott posted a list of books that had been taken out of Utah’s public school system that included novels such as “Blankets” by Craig Thompson as well as “Milk and Honey” by Rupi Kaur. In response to Utah taking the list of books out of schools, Schott posted, “These books are now banned in every school library. If you are a high school student who wants to read one of these books (and your parents say it’s ok) I will purchase it for you.”

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Israel’s admission that it targeted a journalist exposes crude attempt to control war narrative

Ismail Al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami Al-Refee were observing the conflict-zone-reporting best practice, as they motored back from their assignment on the last day of July. Having reported issues facing the displaced people of northern Gaza, they were leaving the scene of greatest danger. Blast vests bearing the insignia “PRESS” protected their bodies. Minutes earlier they had updated the Al Jazeera newsroom with their location.

None of this would save their lives when an Israeli drone strike blasted their car. The explosion blew off Al-Ghoul’s head – an image subsequently shared on social media. Al-Refee and Khalid Shawa, a boy who happened to be passing by on a bicycle, also died instantly.

Unusually, we know that the killing was deliberate – because the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has admitted as much.

The occupation army justified the assassination, arguing that the journalist’s name appears on a list of “senior Hamas officers” that it captured earlier in the conflict. This allegation is strenuously denied by Al-Ghoul’s family, his employer and his union. And Israeli “evidence” in similar cases has appeared questionable. Indeed, Al-Ghoul spent enough time “on camera” that his capacity outside journalism would have been limited.

Critically, however, he was arrested by Israeli soldiers in March and held for 12 hours before being released without a charge. Surely, if the evidence of his Hamas membership justified his killing, there must have been sufficient basis for his prosecution?

This admission of targeting confirms much of what have for months been swirling allegations about Israeli operations. We know that it has software – Pegasus – that secretly invades mobile phones and shares its user’s locations, communications and the identities of those who they meet.

We know that the Israeli army uses software called “Lavender” that deploys AI to sort operational intelligence and suggest targets for assassination. A further tool, “The Gospel”, uploads targets’ geo locations to killer drones dramatically faster than had been possible with manual programming.

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WSJ Reporter Sentenced to 16 Years in Prison, Employer Calls It a ‘Disgraceful, Sham Conviction’

An American reporter for the Wall Street Journal was sentenced Friday to 16 years in prison after being convicted of espionage in what his employer called “a hurried, secret trial that the U.S. government has condemned as a sham.”

Evan Gershkovich was ordered to serve the sentence at a high-security penal colony, the Journal reported.

“The court’s Friday verdict — after three days of hearings — was widely viewed as a foregone conclusion, since acquittals in Russian espionage trials are exceedingly rare,” according to the report.

“This disgraceful, sham conviction comes after Evan has spent 478 days in prison, wrongfully detained, away from his family and friends, prevented from reporting, all for doing his job as a journalist,” Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker and Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour said in a statement.

Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 by Russian authorities while on assignment for the Wall Street Journal in Yekaterinburg.

Russian officials “have produced no public evidence to support their allegations,” the Journal reported.

“Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the U.S.,” the Associated Press reported.

The U.S. State Department said Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained” and said it is working to secure his release.

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The Gaza Project Exposes Israel’s ‘Chilling Pattern’ of Killing Journalists

With more than 100 media professionals – nearly all of them Palestinian – killed in Gaza since October, a group of 50 reporters from 13 international organizations this week shared the results of a new investigative journalism initiative aimed at exposing the deadly toll Israel’s onslaught has taken on those reporting it to the world.

The Gaza Project – led by the Paris-based nonprofit Forbidden Stories – “analyzed nearly 100 cases of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, as well as other cases in which members of the press have been allegedly targeted, threatened, or injured since October 7,” when Hamas-led attacks on Israel left more than 1,100 people dead and over 240 others kidnapped.

“Faced with what is being reported as the record number of journalists killed, Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to pursue the work of journalists who are killed because of their work, set out to investigate the targeting of journalists,” the group said.

“For four months, Forbidden Stories and its partners investigated the circumstances of their killings, as well as those who have been targeted, threatened, and injured in the West Bank and Gaza,” it added. “These investigations point to a chilling pattern and suggest some journalists may have been targeted even though they were identifiable as press.”

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Journalist threatened with jail over publishing trans shooter Audrey Hale’s deranged journal writings

A journalist from the Tennessee Star is being summoned to appear in court and faces jail time for publishing journal writings of transgender shooter Audrey Hale, sparking freedom of the press concerns.

The article revealed that Hale, who shot and killed six people at the Covenant Elementary school in March 2023, wrote about her ‘imaginary penis’ and how she would ‘kill’ to get puberty blockers weeks before her horrific act.

For more than a year, Nashville Chancellor I’Ashea Myles has been presiding over a public records case wherein the plaintiffs are suing to get the right to release documents related to the shooting. Families of the victims are on the exact opposite side, trying to bury the documents and keep them out of the public eye.

But since the case in ongoing, Myles is claiming that the Tennessee Star may have published ‘certain purported documents and information’ that should have remained under seal. 

At Myle’s request, Tennessee Star editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy will appear in court Monday to explain why his news outlet didn’t violate the court order.

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NIH Was Feeding Gain-Of-Function Disinfo To Journalists: Documents

House investigators on the Energy and Commerce Committee released a 73-page report yesterday documenting NIH officials lying about dangerous gain-of-function virus research to reporters and withholding information from Congress. These latest revelations follow reporting last week that Tony Fauci lied to the New York Times about his involvement in a Nature Medicine piece that advanced the theory that the pandemic could not have started in a lab Fauci himself was funding in Wuhan, China.

The House began the investigation following a September 2022 article in Science Magazine that reported on the dangers of monkeypox virus, spreading across the globe with the potential to adapt to humans and become more transmissible or deadly. Bernard Moss, a veteran poxvirus researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Science Magazine that monkeypox evolves to replicate faster in humans.

Science noted that Moss had begun gain-of-function experiments—swapping out genes from various variants—to understand why some are more dangerous or transmissible than others.

Moss has been trying for years to figure out the crucial difference between two variants of monkeypox virus: clade 2, which until recently was found only in West Africa and is now causing the global outbreak, and clade 1, believed to be much deadlier, which has caused outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo for many decades. He’s found that clade 1 virus can kill a mouse at levels 1000 times lower than those needed with clade 2. To find out why, Moss and his colleagues swapped dozens of clade 2 genes, one at a time, into clade 1 virus, hoping to see it become less deadly, but with no luck so far. Now, they are planning to try the opposite, endowing clade 2 virus with genes from its deadlier relative.

Moss’s disclosure that he planned to insert genes from the more deadly clade 1 monkeypox strain into the more common and transmissible clade 2 monkeypox virus triggered a second story in Science Magazine with scientists expressing alarm at the study’s dangers.

On the other hand, Ohio State University researcher Linda Saif told Science Magazine’s Jocelyn Kaiser that she was worried that excessive regulation could “greatly impede research into evolving or emerging viruses” and drive research overseas, where U.S. regulations don’t apply or are looser. Oddly enough, I previously reported that Saif helped orchestrate a February 2020 essay ghostwritten by Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that called the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident a “conspiracy.”

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US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration’s Foreign Policy

Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist.  He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.  

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.  

Had Congress listened to Mr. Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of our soldiers and the waste of trillions of tax dollars. Over one million Iraqis died as a result of the US attack on their country. America’s financial and moral debt will never be able to be repaid, but would not exist if we had simply looked at the evidence he presented.

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Police are still arresting journalists. Why?

Journalists Carolyn Cole and Molly Hennessy-Fiske were reporting for the Los Angeles Times on the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis on May 30, 2020, when they were brutally attacked by the Minnesota State Patrol. Last week, they settled a lawsuit against the city for $1.2 million.

It’s a welcome sign of accountability for police who violate the rights of journalists covering protests. But nearly four years after the Floyd protests led to a spike in journalists arrested and assaulted, protests remain a dangerous place for reporters.

Just a few months into 2024, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented four arrests or detentions of journalists covering protests in New York, Tennessee, and California.

None of these arrests have received much attention or public outcry. That’s a shame. These arrests violate journalists’ rights, and they undermine the right of the public to learn about newsworthy events happening in their communities.

They also show the disturbing and stubborn persistence of a system of policing that either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about First Amendment rights. A closer look at each of the cases documented by the Tracker so far this year reveals that — even after large settlements or acknowledgments by the federal government that journalists must be allowed to cover protests — police around the country are still routinely arresting reporters who are simply doing their jobs.

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House Judiciary Committee Opens Investigation into DOJ’s Arrest and Persecution of Journalist Steve Baker and J6 Political Prisoners

Independent journalist Breanna Morello announced on Tuesday that the House Judiciary Committee is launching an investigation into the DOJ’s selective prosecution of The Blaze journalist Steve Baker and other January 6 defendants.

In a letter sent by Chairman Jim Jordan to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, Jordan is asking for internal documents and communications related to Baker and J6 defendants.

Chairman Jordan is also calling out the DOJ for targeting Baker while ignoring other journalists that were inside the US Capitol that day.

Breanna Morello reported this on X – via Emerald Robinson.

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