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Tens of thousands of people, led by indigenous leaders, are expected to again bring Ecuador to a standstill today in massive ongoing anti-government protests. Demonstrators flooded the streets of Quito Tuesday to decry government-imposed austerity measures and a steep hike in fuel prices, despite a severe police crackdown. Civil unrest has been growing since President Lenín Moreno ended a decades-old fuel subsidy program last week as part of a so-called reform plan imposed by the International Monetary Fund after Ecuador took a $4.2 billion loan from the IMF earlier this year. Hundreds of people have been arrested as the government cracks down on protesters and the media. Tuesday’s mass demonstrations come one day after Moreno said he was temporarily moving government operations from Quito to the southern city of Guayaquil. We go to Quito to speak with David Cordero Heredia, a law professor at Pontifical Catholic University. He is one of the lawyers representing protesters who have been detained in this latest round of protests.

The post Indigenous-Led Anti-Austerity Protests Shut Down Quito Forcing Ecuadorian Government to Move Capital appeared first on KPFA.

More than 700 people have been arrested in civil disobedience actions as the group Extinction Rebellion kicked off two weeks of protests in 60 cities worldwide, demanding urgent government action on the climate crisis. Its members have superglued themselves to government buildings, occupied public landmarks, shut down roads and taken to the streets to sound the alarm about the impending catastrophe of global warming. Extinction Rebellion, a nonpolitical movement, launched last year in the U.K. and rose to prominence in April, when it disrupted traffic in Central London for 11 days. For more about the significance of the coordinated global protests, we speak with Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook.

The post This Is Not a Drill: 700+ Arrested as Extinction Rebellion Fights Climate Crisis with Direct Action appeared first on KPFA.

U.S. troops have begun withdrawing from northeast Syria as Turkey prepares to invade Kurdish-controlled areas of the country. For years, the Kurds have been close allies to the United States in the fight against ISIS. On Sunday, however, the White House released a statement that surprised many in the region, announcing that Turkey would be “moving forward with its long-planned operation in Northern Syria,” following a phone call between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in that operation, and the United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial ‘Caliphate,’ will no longer be in the immediate area,” the statement said. The announcement marks a major shift in U.S. policy, since as recently as January President Trump threatened to “devastate Turkey economically” if it attacked Kurdish forces in Syria. Meanwhile, in neighboring Iraq, the death toll continues to rise as police and soldiers fire on people defying a government-imposed curfew in mass anti-government protests. For more on events in the region, we speak with Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper.

The post “A Shakespearean Act of Betrayal”: Trump Agrees to Let Turkey Invade Kurdish-Controlled Syrian Area appeared first on KPFA.

President Donald Trump called openly Thursday for the leaders of Ukraine and China to investigate Trump’s campaign rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter for corruption. Trump’s explicit remarks during a press conference came as leaders of the Democratic-led House pushed ahead rapidly with their impeachment investigation. President Trump is just the fourth U.S. president to face a formal impeachment inquiry, joining Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. We spend the hour looking at back at the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and is the focus of a documentary titled “Watergate — Or: How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President.” Drawing on 3,400 hours of audiotapes, archival footage and declassified documents, the film chronicles the dramatic events surrounding the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in 1972, which precipitated Nixon’s eventual resignation two years later under threat of impeachment. We play clips from the film and speak with its director, Charles Ferguson, who won an Academy Award for his documentary “Inside Job.”

The post From Trump to Nixon: “Watergate” Film Explains “How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President” appeared first on KPFA.

A Cameroonian immigrant died this week in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in California. The man, identified as 37-year-old Nebane Abienwi, died on Tuesday after suffering a brain hemorrhage. This comes as California lawmakers passed a bill last month that would ban private prisons statewide, a major blow to the for-profit prison industry in the U.S. that is deeply entangled in immigration detention. The legislation also orders the closure of four ICE prisons that can jail up to 4,500 immigrants. The bill is currently awaiting the signature of Governor Gavin Newsom, who said in his January inaugural address that California should “end the outrage of private prisons once and for all.” Incarceration at for-profit prisons in California peaked at about 7,000 prisoners in 2016, but state officials have been shifting prisoners to publicly run prisons in recent years. Hamid Yazdan Panah, an immigration attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, joins us for a conversation about the bill and immigrant detention in California.

The post As Man Dies in ICE Custody, California Moves to Ban For-Profit Prisons, Including Immigrant Jails appeared first on KPFA.

China held its largest military parades ever in Beijing this week to mark 70 years of Communist rule. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, police escalated violence Tuesday by firing live ammunition at demonstrators for the first time in the months-long protests. In a widely viewed video posted online, a riot police officer is seen firing his gun into the chest of 18-year-old protester Tony Tsang. The teenager is reportedly in stable condition. Police also fired tear gas and water cannons, while protesters were seen throwing Molotov cocktails. Ninety-six protesters were arrested on Tuesday on rioting charges.
 For more on the Hong Kong protests, we speak with Kevin Lin, China Program officer at the International Labor Rights Forum. He was born and raised in Beijing, and has spent years researching the labor movement and civil society in China. His recent piece for Jacobin is headlined “Four Points on the Hong Kong Protests.” He is also the author of “How Should the U.S. Left Think About China?” in the journal New Politics.

The post Hong Kong Youth Face Military Crackdown While Fighting “One of the Most Unequal Societies Anywhere” appeared first on KPFA.

House Democrats subpoenaed President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani Monday, seeking documents related to his work in Ukraine. Last week, Guliani admitted on television that he had urged the Ukrainian government to investigate Trump’s political rival and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. This comes as House Democrats continue to build their case for impeaching the president, following a whistleblower complaint focused on a phone call in which Trump asked the Ukranian president to do him a “favor” investigating the actions of Democrats, including Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Meanwhile, Trump is continuing to threaten lawmakers who are pushing impeachment, and publicly admitted he is trying to find out the identity of the anonymous whistleblower, in possible violation of whistleblower protection laws. We host a debate on impeachment with John Bonifaz, co-founder and president of Free Speech for People, one of the organizations demanding Trump’s impeachment, and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist.

The post To Impeach or Not to Impeach? Chris Hedges & John Bonifaz Debate What Congress Should Do Next appeared first on KPFA.

As a whistleblower complaint against President Trump rocks Washington, Democrats begin an impeachment inquiry and Trump threatens “big consequences” for the person who came forward, we continue our conversation with one of the world’s most famous whistleblowers: Edward Snowden, now in exile in Russia. Six years ago, he shocked the world when he leaked a trove of secret documents about how the United States had built a massive surveillance apparatus to collect every single phone call, text message and email, and pry into the private lives of every person on Earth. He has just published a memoir titled “Permanent Record.” In Part 2 of our interview, he talks about how the government initially attempted to say that he was just an outside contractor and not a key figure, but he describes the central role contractors play in the intelligence community.

The post Edward Snowden: Private Contractors Play Key Role in U.S. Intelligence’s “Creeping Authoritarianism” appeared first on KPFA.

Source: www.democracynow.org

James Risen: Whistleblower Complaint Shows “Trump Is a Habitual Criminal” Abusing His Office; James Risen: I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine in 2015. The Right-Wing Media Twisted My Reporting; Over 2,000 Arrested in Egypt in Growing Protests Against Sisi, Trump’s “Favorite Dictator”.

 

The post James Risen: Whistleblower Complaint Shows “Trump Is a Habitual Criminal” Abusing His Office appeared first on KPFA.

Six years ago, Edward Snowden leaked a trove of secret documents about how the United States had built a massive surveillance apparatus to spy on Americans and people across the globe. Snowden was then charged in the U.S. for violating the Espionage Act and other laws. As he attempted to flee to Latin America, Snowden became stranded in Russia after the U.S. revoked his passport. He has lived in Moscow ever since. Snowden just published his memoir, “Permanent Record,” in which he writes about what led him to risk his life to expose the U.S. government’s system of mass surveillance. From Moscow, he speaks to Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Juan González about his life before and after becoming an NSA whistleblower.

The post Permanent Record: Why NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden Risked His Life to Expose Surveillance State appeared first on KPFA.