Tomomi Akasaka of Kyodo News is among several journalists who have complained about being harassed after covering hate speech against Kurds in Saitama Prefecture. Japan’s small Kurdish community, clustered in the cities of Kawaguchi and Warabi, have been targeted by rightwing groups seeking their expulsion. Reporters who cover the story can often expect a tsunami of abuse.

Hyogo Prefecture has a particular reason to be concerned about violence against journalists. In May 1987, a masked rightist murdered reporter Tomohiro Kojiri at the Asahi Shimbun Hanshin Bureau in Nishinomiya. His colleague, Hyoe Inukai, was badly hurt. The perpetrator has never been caught. “There’s a real possibility of escalation if we cannot put a break on what’s happening, especially when the line between the online world and the real world is so blurred,” Tanaka says.
Tanaka wants local politicians to do more to dampen campaigns against journalists in the interests of democracy. He says his newspaper has received a threat from a caller using the name, “Sekihotai,” the organization that claimed responsibility for killing Kojiri.

fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun-ar…

#DavidMcNeil #JapanesePressBashung

More than a statement, the Declaration is the fruit of an unprecedented collective process: shaped through years of local and regional assemblies, and translated into 18 languages during the Forum to ensure that every voice could be heard and every word shared in equality.
...

The Kandy Declaration calls on movements everywhere to act in unity, defend the commons, and transform global governance so that it serves people, not profit.
Born from collective wisdom and multilingual solidarity, it is a living roadmap for the years ahead – lighting the way toward peace, dignity, and life for all.

viacampesina.org/en/2025/11/th…

#KandyDeclaration #ViaCampesina

/HT
@🦣 ViaCampesinaBE

"The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an “apocalypse” in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical. He urged them to chill the hell out. It was an arrogant and manipulative oracle, uttered with all the privilege of the world’s 19th richest man. A symbol of monopoly capitalism, his individual net worth rivals the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic. And when he responded to #HurricaneMelissa, he did so (not surprisingly, I suppose) in the narrow sectional interests of the world’s wealthiest class in Silicon Valley.
tomdispatch.com/the-hot-tub-of…
#JuanCole on #BillGates
#GatesOnHurricaneMelissa #TomDispatch

The scandals coming into view with Harvard Professors like Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence H. Summers in the Epstien Files have me going back to Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967!!) by Noam Chomsky... It's no surprise the money, power, and status has people lying with few consequences in support of USA corrupt policy for Israel and Wall Street Economics now.. For back then, I wonder if The Kennedy "Intellectuals" may just be lucky there wasn't unencrypted e-mail back then, so we won't know what sort of perverse rapey pricks they were in private life, if their private lives match up with their policy participation like they do for Dershowitz and Summers...

When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration.

It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know.

... there is indeed something of a consensus among intellectuals who have already achieved power and affluence, or who sense that they can achieve them by “accepting society” as it is and promoting the values that are “being honored” in this society. It is also true that this consensus is most noticeable among the scholar-experts who are replacing the free-floating intellectuals of the past.

Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities

chomsky.info/19670223/

#NoamChomsky #ResponsibilityOfIntellectuals with #DwightMacdonald and #ArthurSchlesinger #KennedyIntellectuals #EpsteinFilesMusings #AlanDershowitz #LarrySummers #LawrenceHSummers

Correction on Larry Summers. I mentioned that when I cited his paper on a tax on securities trading, he reacted angrily when a Nation factchecker called him—he didn't want his work used "politically." The way I remembered it, we ran it anyway, but in fact The Nation chickened out. Quoting a footnote from my book Wall Street:

"When he was still an academic, Summers did not like it that his paper tentatively promoting a transactions tax on securities to discourage pointless trading was going to be quoted in an editorial in The Nation; the editorial used his numbers, but was stripped of his timorous endorsement (Nation 1989)"

Citation:
Nation (1989). “Tax the Big Casino,” Nation 249 (August 21), p. 189.

facebook.com/share/p/1CzjAbfDi…

#DougHenwood on #LarrySummers
#TransactionTax #TobinTax
#LarrySummersAsDisciplinedMind

When Lauren Vaughn, a kindergarten assistant in South Carolina, saw reports that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah, she opened Facebook and typed out a quote from Kirk himself.

Gun deaths, Kirk said in 2023, were unfortunate but “worth it” if they preserved “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given Rights.” Following the quote, Vaughn added: “Thoughts and prayers.”

Vaughn, a 37-year-old Christian who has taken missionary trips to Guatemala, said her call for prayer was sincere. She said she hoped reading Kirk’s words in the context of the shooting might prompt her friends to rethink their opposition to gun control.

#CsncelCulture #CancelCultureCK #CharlieKirkShooting #LaurenVaughn
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB