Leeds May Day march. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
WORKERS rallied across Britain this weekend for May Day and International Workers’ Day in solidarity with all those in struggle for peace and justice, and in particular with their brothers and sisters in Palestine.
At Cardiff’s rally on Saturday — coinciding with World Press Freedom Day — the NUJ’s David Nicholson warned comrades that journalism was under attack at home and around the world, not least in Gaza and the West Bank.
“There were 1,000 journalists and media workers working in Gaza when Israel invaded in October 2023,” he said. “Almost 20 per cent have been killed by the Israeli military, with 171 dead and hundreds injured.
“This targeting of journalists is a war crime, and the NUJ and the International Federation of Journalists are building a case for the International Criminal Court.“
The Israeli government will not allow international journalists into Gaza — what have they got to hide,” he said.
UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during the daily briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 2025. (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
The news outlet has been barred from presidential events for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico by the president’s chosen name, “the Gulf of America.”
Accusing the White House of a “targeted attack” on editorial independence that “strikes at the very core of the First Amendment,” The Associated Press on Friday filed a lawsuit against three Trump administration officials over its blocked access to all presidential events.
The administration announced earlier this month that AP reporters would not be permitted to cover press events at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, or on Air Force One due to its editorial decision to continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name that has been internationally recognized for more than 400 years.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January stating that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America. Trump has the authority to change a body of water’s name for official government purposes, and some bodies of water are called by different names in different countries—for example, the Gulf of California is known as the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.
The AP said it would acknowledge Trump’s chosen name for the body of water, but continue officially referring to it as the Gulf of Mexico.
“The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
As Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said this month as she threatened to sue Google for changing the Gulf of Mexico’s names in its maps feature, the U.S. does not have sovereignty over the body of water, and Trump cannot unilaterally order other entities to call it by his chosen name.
The AP on Friday said in its lawsuit that “the press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
The suit names White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has said in briefings that it is “a fact” that the body of water off the western coast of Florida and the southern coasts of several other states is called the Gulf of America.
The news outlet called on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. to stop the White House from blocking its journalists from gathering news at presidential events.
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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One after signing a proclamation renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on February 9, 2025. (Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s at times like these that journalists need to put down their pens and advocate for accountable leadership,” asserted one campaigner.
First Amendment defenders are calling on media organizations and journalists to stand up to bullying and intimidation by U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration on Friday confirmed the indefinite exclusion of one of the world’s largest news agencies from White House press briefings and Air Force One flights over its refusal to adopt the Republican leader’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich said that because The Associated Press “continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change” of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, it will be indefinitely banned from White House news conferences and the president’s official airplane.
“The level of pettiness displayed by the White House is so incredible that it almost hides the gravity of the situation.”
The New York-based AP, which provides news content to roughly 15,000 media outlets in over 100 countries, has explained that, because the gulf is an international body of water, it will continue to call it the Gulf of Mexico because Mexico—whose president on Thursday threatened to sue Google for adopting Trump’s name change—and other countries do not recognize the new name.
In contrast, the AP said it will call Denali, the highest peak in North America, Mt. McKinley following a name change by Trump because the Alaska mountain is located entirely inside the United States.
Budowich said the AP‘s decision on the Gulf of Mexico exposes the agency’s “commitment to misinformation.”
“While their right to irresponsible and dishonest reporting is protected by the First Amendment, it does not ensure their privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces,” he argued.
But critics said the Trump administration’s behavior is about a lot more than just a spat over a name change.
“Of course, this is just more petty behavior by a president seeking to punish any news organization that doesn’t follow his dictates, regardless of how ridiculous they may be,” Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press, told Common Dreams on Friday.
“It’s at times like these that journalists need to put down their pens and advocate for accountable leadership,” Karr stressed. “They need to advocate for themselves, their colleagues, and for journalism writ large.”
“The good news is that more than a dozen of the mass market news outlets have refused to adopt Trump’s name change for the Gulf of Mexico,” he added. “That’s a start. They now need to speak out against his First Amendment threats, despite the consequences. There is much more at stake now than just having access to the White House.”
“By defying Trump, the AP has created a rallying point for other organizations and individuals to find their spines and defy him as well.”
Writing for Public Notice Friday, Noah Berlatsky commended the AP for “not changing their style to suit the whims of a would-be tin-pot dictator.”
“And by defying Trump, the AP has created a rallying point for other organizations and individuals to find their spines and defy him as well,” Berlatsky added.
“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels said earlier this week.
RSF USA executive director Clayton Weimers said in a statement that “the level of pettiness displayed by the White House is so incredible that it almost hides the gravity of the situation.”
“A sitting president is punishing a major news outlet for its constitutionally protected choice of words,” Weimers added. “Donald Trump has been trampling over press freedom since his first day in office.”
President Trump banning the Associated Press from an event over their usage of "Gulf of Mexico" instead of "Gulf of America" may seem more absurd than alarming, but Trump's attacks on the free press are no joke.
Numerous experts highlighted what they called the unconstitutionality of banning a media outlet from press briefings for political reasons.
“The AP—a major news agency that produces and distributes reports to thousands of newspapers, radio stations, and TV broadcasters around the world—has had long-standing access to the White House,” Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote on Friday.
“It is now losing that access because its exercise of editorial discretion doesn’t align with the administration’s preferred messaging,” Terr added. “That’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional.”
Berlatsky wrote: “As ABC, Meta, the LA Times, The Washington Post, and Google demonstrate, you lose 100% of the fights you preemptively and despicably surrender. The AP has already won an important victory by refusing to change the Gulf of Mexico to some random other name at the whim of a power-mad orange gasbag.”
“If any portion of Trump’s agenda is to be stopped, we need people and organizations who are willing to defy him and speak truths he doesn’t want to hear,” he added. “Despite Trump, the AP still calls the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico. In doing so, it’s reminding us what freedom looks like. It’s also demonstrating us that if you don’t want to lose your freedoms, you have to use them.”
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An aerial view of repair vehicles at sunset passing near beachfront homes that burned in the Palisades Fire on January 15, 2025 in Malibu, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
“Too much of the coverage has simply ignored the climate crisis altogether, an inexcusable failure when the scientific link between such megafires and a hotter, dryer planet is unequivocal,” wrote the founders of Covering Climate Now.
Covering the who, what, when, where, and why is journalism 101. So why are too few media outlets explaining the role that the climate crisis plays in the “why” behind the fires ravaging the Los Angeles region?
That’s the central question posed in an opinion piece published in The Guardian and elsewhere on Thursday authored by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, the founders of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of over 500 news outlets aimed at improving climate coverage, of which Common Dreams is a part.
Hertsgaard and Pope wrote that “too much of the coverage has simply ignored the climate crisis altogether, an inexcusable failure when the scientific link between such megafires and a hotter, dryer planet is unequivocal.”
They added: “Too many stories have framed the fires as a political spat between U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and California elected officials instead of a horrifying preview of what lies ahead if humans don’t rapidly phase out fossil fuels. Too often, bad-faith disinformation has been repeated instead of debunked.”
Misinformation, in many instances stemming from right-leaning sources, have proliferated since the blazes broke out last week. Trump in a social media post appeared to point the finger at California’s statewide water management plans for fire hydrants running dry as firefighters fought the blazes last week. Southern California does have plenty water stored, but the city’s infrastructure was not designed to respond to a fire as the large as the ones that broke out, experts told PBS. Another user on the platform X falsely claimed that California turned away fire trucks from Oregon because of their emission levels, according to KQED.
Hertsgaard and Pope also called for outlets to name names. “Rarely have stories named the ultimate authors of this disaster: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies that have made gargantuan amounts of money even as they knowingly lied about their products dangerously overheating the planet,” they wrote.
While the fires are still burning, researchers are already drawing the links between climate change and the blazes. In a thread on Bluesky, the climate scientist Daniel Swain explained the concept of climate “hydroclimate whiplash”—which southern California experienced in 2024—and how this can create ideal conditions for fires to spread.
The authors of the opinion piece noted that there have been bright spots when it comes to covering the fires with an eye toward the climate emergency and debunking false and misleading claims about the fires. The duo highlight a Time story that is titled “The LA fires show the reality of living in a world with 1.5C of warming” and a column written by the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth, which began: “Los Angeles is burning. Fossil fuel companies laid the kindling.”
Hertsgaard and Pope wrote, “When a house is on fire, by all means let journalism show us the flames.”
“But tell us why the house is burning, too,” they added.
A bomb remnant retrieved following Israel’s October 25, 2024 attack on a compound housing journalists in southern Lebanon. (Photo: Anoir Ghaida via Human Rights Watch)
“Israel’s use of U.S. arms to unlawfully attack and kill journalists away from any military target is a terrible mark on the United States as well as Israel,” said a researcher from Human Rights Watch.
A leading international human rights organization said Monday that Israel’s deadly bombing of a Lebanese residential compound housing journalists last month was carried out using a munition guidance kit supplied by the United States.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said its investigation determined that the October 25 strike in southern Lebanon, launched in the early hours of the morning as most of the journalists staying in the compound slept, was “most likely a deliberate attack on civilians and an apparent war crime.”
The group’s investigators visited the Hasbaya Village Club Resort, the target of the strike, and found no evidence that the compound was being used for military activity, undercutting Israel’s initial claim that it hit a building from which “terrorists were operating.”
HRW also said it reviewed information indicating that Israel’s military “knew or should have known” that journalists were staying in the compound. Journalists who were at the compound when Israel’s strike hit said the Israeli military did not issue a warning ahead of the attack.
“All the indications show that this would have been a deliberate targeting of journalists: a war crime.”
The airstrike killed at least three journalists and injured several others. Remnants from the scene of the strike collected by the targeted resort’s owner were “consistent” with Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that the U.S. has provided to the Israeli military.
One fragment, according to HRW “bore a numerical code identifying it as having been manufactured by Woodard, a U.S. company that makes components for guidance systems on munitions.” Boeing, a major U.S. military contractor, assembles and sells JDAMs, which are attached to bombs with the stated goal of making airstrikes more precise.
Other remnants HRW reviewed were consistent with materials from a 500-pound bomb equipped with a JDAM.
A bomb remnant retrieved following Israel’s October 25, 2024 attack. (Photo: Anoir Ghaida via Human Rights Watch)
Richard Weir, a senior researcher at HRW, said in a statement Monday that “Israel’s use of U.S. arms to unlawfully attack and kill journalists away from any military target is a terrible mark on the United States as well as Israel.”
“The Israeli military’s previous deadly attacks on journalists without any consequences give little hope for accountability in this or future violations against the media,” said Weir. “As evidence mounts of Israel’s unlawful use of U.S. weapons, including in apparent war crimes, U.S. officials need to decide whether they will uphold U.S. and international law by halting arms sales to Israel or risk being found legally complicit in serious violations.”
The Guardian conducted a separate investigation of the Israeli strike and reached conclusions mirroring HRW’s, reporting Monday that “Israel used a U.S. munition to target and kill three journalists and wound three.”
“On 25 October at 3:19 am, an Israeli jet shot two bombs at a chalet hosting three journalists—cameraman Ghassan Najjar and technician Mohammad Reda from pro-Hezbollah outlet al-Mayadeen, as well as cameraman Wissam Qassem from the Hezbollah-affiliated outlet al-Manar,” the newspaper observed. “All three were killed in their sleep in the attack which also wounded three other journalists from different outlets staying nearby. There was no fighting in the area before or at the time of the strike.”
Nadim Houry, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, told The Guardian that “all the indications show that this would have been a deliberate targeting of journalists: a war crime.”
“This was clearly delineated as a place where journalists were staying,” Houry said.
The findings were published just days after the U.S. Senate voted down an effort led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to block new sales of American weaponry to Israel. One of the resolutions put forth by Sanders would have blocked the imminent transfer of over $260 million worth of JDAMs to Israel’s military.
In a fact sheet, Sanders’ office pointed to six examples in which Israel’s military used JDAMs in deadly attacks on civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, including children.
“The United States is complicit in these atrocities,” Sanders said in a floor speech ahead of last week’s vote. “That complicity must end.”
Leeds May Day march. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
