We’ll see

Hoping to bring you a live audio podcast this evening at 7pm BST (GMT +1). I’m hoping that it will happen this evening, but tomorrow otherwise. We’ll see. It will be a monologue with me, certainly not too serious, some music and some special ‘guests’.

The intention of today’s podcast is to make sure it’s all working for the ‘Talking About a Revolution’ podcast featuring renowned climate activist Roger Hallam a week from today at 7pm BST (GMT +1).

18.57 BST Apologies, looks like tomorrow.

Continue ReadingWe’ll see

PEN America Cancels Awards Ceremony Amid Boycott Over ‘Disgraceful’ Gaza Response

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel speaks onstage during the 2023 PEN America Literary Gala on May 18, 2023 in New York City. 
(Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for PEN America)

“We cannot, in good faith, align with an organization that has shown such blatant disregard of our collective values,” a group of authors and translators wrote in an open letter.

The prominent free expression group PEN America announced Monday that it has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony amid growing backlash over the organization’s response to Israel’s assault on Gaza and alleged attempts to suppress dissent among its employees.

The decision came after nearly half of the authors nominated for PEN America awards withdrew their names from consideration, accusing PEN America of not sufficiently speaking out against Israel’s war on Gaza and the dire consequences for free expression.

The awards ceremony was scheduled to take place on April 29 in Manhattan.

In an open letter released last week, dozens of authors and translators who refused to accept any honors from the organization wrote that “PEN America has remained shamefully unwilling to speak out against the systematic nature” of Israel’s “often-targeted killings of Palestinian writers, professors, and journalists and their families.”

“We stand in solidarity with one another and with the people of Palestine in our refusal to lend our names and tacit approval to PEN America’s disgraceful inaction,” reads the open letter, which demands the resignation of PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, president Jennifer Finney Boylan, and the group’s entire executive committee.

“We cannot, in good faith, align with an organization that has shown such blatant disregard of our collective values,” the letter adds. “We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine. We refuse to be honored by an organization that acts as a cultural front for American imperialism. We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars. And we refuse to take part in anything that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide.”

“We have been disgusted, for months, by the sight of these leaders clinging to a disingenuous façade of neutrality.”

Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, PEN America’s literary programming chief officer, said in a statement Monday that “we greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not.”

“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful, and hard-working judges across all categories,” Rosaz Shariyf added. “As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”

Outrage over PEN America’s approach to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip has been intensifying for months.

In March, as Common Dreams reported at the time, Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and other high-profile writers pulled out of the PEN World Voices Festival, accusing PEN America of betraying “the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere.”

After initially refusing to do so, PEN America late last month joined its global parent PEN International in calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. But the organization’s critics—including current and former employees—argue it has failed to clearly and forcefully condemn Israel’s assault, which has killed more than 34,000 people in Gaza and fueled a catastrophic humanitarian emergency.

“We have been disgusted, for months, by the sight of these leaders clinging to a disingenuous façade of neutrality while parroting hasbara talking points,” the open letter from PEN America award nominees states. “We have also been appalled to learn that management has sought to suppress the off-hours political speech and activity of its own workers, in part by suggesting language by which staffers could be punished for participating in any political activity that undermines PEN America’s mission.”

The Intercept reported late last month that PEN America staffers also raised concerns in December over Nossel’s decision to visit Israel amid the country’s devastating attack on Gaza.

“We are concerned that Suzanne Nossel’s trip as planned will be perceived as a dismissal of the urgent and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and free expression and human rights violations in the West Bank and in Israel,” the staffers wrote.

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

UN Rights Chief Demands International Probe of Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals

Sanders Pushes Amendment to ‘Cut Billions in Offensive Military Funding to Israel’

‘Damning’ Independent Probe Finds Israel Has Yet to Provide Evidence Against UNRWA

Continue ReadingPEN America Cancels Awards Ceremony Amid Boycott Over ‘Disgraceful’ Gaza Response

UN Rights Chief Demands International Probe of Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk speaks during a press conference in Cairo, Egypt on November 8, 2023.
 (Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images)

“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” said Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

The United Nations’ human rights chief on Tuesday called for an international investigation into mass graves discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently assailed and destroyed, further imperiling the enclave’s barely functioning healthcare system.

Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that he was “horrified” by the discovery of mass graves at the Nasser and al-Shifa medical complexes, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reduced to ruins.

More than 300 bodies were reportedly discovered in the mass grave near the Nasser facility in Khan Younis, Gaza, and eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers executed civilians during their two-week-long raid of al-Shifa last month.

Türk demanded an “independent, effective, and transparent” probe into the killings and mass graves, adding that “given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators.”

“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” he added. “And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees, and others who are hors de combat is a war crime.”

“Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price.”

The IDF’s destructive attacks on Nasser and al-Shifa were part of a broader Israeli assault on Gaza’s healthcare system. An analysis released Monday by Save the Children found that the rate of monthly Israeli attacks on healthcare in Gaza since October has exceeded that of any other conflict around the world since 2018.

The group estimated that Israel has launched an average of 73 attacks per month on healthcare in Gaza—and at least 435 attacks total since October.

“After six months of unimaginable horror, the healthcare system in Gaza has been brought to its knees,” said Xavier Joubert, Save the Children’s country director in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Healthcare workers are risking their lives daily to give Palestinian children a chance at survival. The constant attacks on healthcare are simply unjustifiable and must stop. Palestinian children must have unimpeded access to services, including healthcare and education.”

Türk also used his statement Tuesday to condemn Israeli forces’ killing of women and children in airstrikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in recent days. The human rights official noted that Gaza doctors rescued a baby from the womb of her mother as the latter succumbed to head injuries from an Israeli strike.

“The latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses where 15 children and five women were killed—this is beyond warfare,” said Türk. “Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded. They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingUN Rights Chief Demands International Probe of Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals

Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal – and why it won’t go back

Atomkraft Nein Danke - Nuclear Power No Thanks. Wikimedia Image Flickr: Atomkraft? Nein Danke!
Author	Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Author Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Nordrhein-Westfalen licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal – and why it won’t go back

Trevelyan Wing, University of Cambridge

One year ago, Germany took its last three nuclear power stations offline. When it comes to energy, few events have baffled outsiders more.

In the face of climate change, calls to expedite the transition away from fossil fuels, and an energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin’s move to quit nuclear before carbon-intensive energy sources like coal has attracted significant criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labelled it “a mistake”.)

This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war socio-political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism predated the public climate discourse.

From a 1971 West German bestseller evocatively titled Peaceably into Catastrophe: A Documentation of Nuclear Power Plants, to huge protests of hundreds of thousands – including the largest-ever demonstration seen in the West German capital Bonn – the anti-nuclear movement attracted national attention and widespread sympathy. It became a major political force well before even the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Its motivations included: a distrust of technocracy; ecological, environmental and safety fears; suspicions that nuclear energy could engender nuclear proliferation; and general opposition to concentrated power (especially after its extreme consolidation under the Nazi dictatorship).

Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).

This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the cold war.

Germany’s Energiewende

The contrast here with Thunberg’s latter-day Fridays for Future movement and its “listen to the experts” slogan is striking. The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.

This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party – today the world’s most influential – which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.

That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3% of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8% in 2023.

These figures are all the more remarkable given the contributions of ordinary citizens. In 2019, they owned fully 40.4% (and over 50% in the early 2010s) of Germany’s total installed renewable power generation capacity, whether through community wind energy cooperatives, farm-based biogas installations, or household rooftop solar.

Most other countries’ more recent energy transitions have been attempts to achieve net-zero targets using whatever low-carbon technologies are available. Germany’s now-famous “Energiewende” (translated as “energy transition” or even “energy revolution”), however, has from its earlier inception sought to shift away from both carbon-intensive as well as nuclear energy to predominantly renewable alternatives.

Indeed, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was, significantly, titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.

Consecutive German governments have, over the past two and a half decades, more or less hewed to this line. Angela Merkel’s pro-nuclear second cabinet (2009-13) was an initial exception.

That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan. Small wonder that so many politicians today are reluctant to reopen that particular Pandora’s box.

Another ongoing political headache is where to store the country’s nuclear waste, an issue Germany has never managed to solve. No community has consented to host such a facility, and those designated for this purpose have seen large-scale protests.

Instead, radioactive waste has been stored in temporary facilities close to existing reactors – no long-term solution.

Nuclear remains unpopular

National polls underscore the Teutonic aversion to nuclear. Even in 2022, at the height of the recent energy crisis, a survey found that 52% opposed constructing new reactors, though 78% supported a temporary extension of existing plants until summer 2023. The three-way Social Democratic-Green-Liberal coalition government ultimately compromised on mid-April 2023.

Today, 51.6% of Germans believe this was premature. However, a further deferral was deemed politically unfeasible given the trenchant anti-nuclearism of the Greens and sizeable cross sections of the population.

Despite some public protestations to the contrary (the main opposition CDU party declared in January that Germany “cannot do without the nuclear power option at present”), in private few political leaders think the country will, or even realistically can, reverse course.

As an industry insider told me, talk of reintroducing nuclear to Germany is “delusional” because investors were “burnt … too many times” in the past and now “would rather put their money into safer investments”. Moreover, “it would take decades to build new [nuclear] power stations” and electricity is no longer the sector of concern, given the rapid buildout of renewables, with attention having shifted to heating and transport.

Chart of power production in Germany by source
German nuclear power (purple) has largely been replaced by renewables (yellow), not coal (black and brown).
Clean Energy Wire, CC BY-SA

Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023 – the month before the phaseout – the distribution of German electricity generation was 53% renewable, 25% coal, 17% gas, and 5% nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60% renewable, 24% coal, and 16% gas.

Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.

The country’s energy sector, it seems, has already moved on. In the words of one industry observer: “Once you switch off these nuclear power stations, they’re out.” And there’s no easy way back.

For better or worse, this technology – in its present form at least – is dead in the water here. For many Germans, it will not be missed.The Conversation

Trevelyan Wing, Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics and Centre Researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingWhy Germany ditched nuclear before coal – and why it won’t go back

The obstacles that could still stop flights to Rwanda from taking off

 

Penny Morduant calls Rishi Sunak a sign post
Penny Morduant calls Rishi Sunak a sign post
Natalie Hodgson, University of Nottingham

Rishi Sunak has finally secured the legislation he needs to support his Rwanda plan. A late night session of ping pong between the two houses of parliament culminated with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act.

Under this plan, the UK will send some people who have travelled to the UK by small boat to Rwanda. Rwandan officials will consider their asylum claims and determine whether they are a refugee. If a person is found to be a refugee, they will be resettled in Rwanda.

After the European Court of Human Rights stopped the first flight taking off nearly two years ago, the government is now preparing for its second attempt. In a press conference hours before the crucial vote, Sunak said that flights would begin in July.

But there are still logistical and legal obstacles that the government must overcome before any flights can take off.

Finding an airline willing to fly to Rwanda

The government claims to have secured the airfield and charter flights necessary for removing people to Rwanda. However, campaigners who oppose the scheme are targeting these elements of the policy in an attempt to make flights logistically impossible.

In October 2022, the charity Freedom from Torture successfully convinced the airline Privilege Style to withdraw from the government’s Rwanda scheme. Freedom from Torture have now turned their attention to AirTanker, the government’s current preferred airline. They are coordinating protests against the airline and are asking their supporters to write letters opposing AirTanker’s involvement in the scheme.

UN human rights experts have warned airlines that transporting people to Rwanda could make them complicit in human rights abuses.

Further legal challenges

Charities have also been preparing to support asylum seekers to challenge their removal to Rwanda. We can expect to see several types of legal action in the coming weeks.

First, individual asylum seekers will attempt to convince the Home Office to reconsider its decision to send them to Rwanda. After receiving a letter from the Home Office, a person has a short period – typically one week – within which to challenge the decision. People are likely to raise a range of human rights arguments against their deportation. These arguments might include that a person would face persecution in Rwanda because of their sexuality, or that they have complex medical needs preventing their removal.

If the Home Office upholds its decision, a person can challenge their removal in court. Sunak has recently said that there are 150 judges and 25 courtrooms ready to hear these legal challenges.

If their removal is still upheld, a person might take the last-resort step of applying to the European Court of Human Rights for an interim order blocking their deportation. However, this course of action is complicated by the fact that civil servants have been directed to ignore injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights unless a minister says otherwise.

Under international law, the government is bound to follow an order of the European Court of Human Rights. It would be unlawful for a person to be sent to Rwanda in violation of an order of the European court. The union representing senior civil servants has warned that it might take legal action against the government if civil servants are required by ministers to breach international law.

Asylum seekers are also likely to challenge the Rwanda scheme more broadly, arguing that Rwanda remains an unsafe country for them. The government’s new law declares that Rwanda is safe. However, both the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution and the Joint Committee on Human Rights have maintained that the safety of Rwanda is a matter for the courts, not parliament, to decide.

If a broader legal challenge is brought, it will be for the courts to determine whether the government’s efforts to improve the conditions in Rwanda – which include drafting a treaty with Rwanda and training Rwandan officials – mean that Rwanda is now safe for asylum seekers.

Sunak and his government have staked a lot on this scheme and the passage of the safety of Rwanda bill brings it one step closer to reality. However, even if the government succeeds in getting flights off the ground, the plan is likely to fail in its quest to stop the boats.

There is no evidence to suggest that the Rwanda plan will deter people travelling across the English Channel to seek asylum.

The tragic deaths of five people in the Channel shortly after the government passed its legislation clearly demonstrates that the threat of deportation to Rwanda is not achieving its aim. Despite now being part of UK law, the Rwanda plan remains a political distraction from a failing asylum system that ultimately costs people their lives.The Conversation

Natalie Hodgson, Assistant Professor in Law, University of Nottingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingThe obstacles that could still stop flights to Rwanda from taking off