07 December 22
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This is a big win, for Warnock of course, but also for the balance of power in the Senate and for what it says about the state of politics in America.
The narrative from November continues — an overperformance by Democrats, especially considering the now-dated conventional wisdom that once swirled around a presumptive “red wave.” We can see it was more of a purple ripple.
While Democrats lost control of the House, they have now expanded their majority in the Senate. This has profound implications for how committees are run and how the Senate works more generally.
Warnock’s win over Herschel Walker in this runoff election has more storylines than a season of “Game of Thrones.” But a major one is that this represents another stark data point that the former president who pushed the Walker candidacy is a loser who drags down Republican electoral chances. And yet, the party can’t quit him. At least not yet. Will another stinging loss change the dynamic? If the past is prologue, it’s not likely.
For those who covered Georgia in a far different time, the results tonight are striking. This state has changed rapidly. It’s certainly not a blue state, but Warnock’s victory proves Biden’s win in 2020 was not a fluke. It also shows that candidate quality matters, which is a relief for all who want our nation to be led by people of character. Nevertheless, the fact that it was this close with a candidate of Walker’s nature should give Democrats pause.
There will be more to analyze about what these results mean, but for now we felt inclined to share a performance by Ray Charles singing a song apt for the evening: It’s “Georgia on My Mind.”
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A demonstrator holds a 'Justice Matters' sign while protesting outside Trump Tower ahead of an announcement by former president Donald Trump in New York on November 15. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg)
Much more dangerous investigations are looming.
Two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization were found guilty on 17 counts of tax fraud and other financial crimes. The charges were specifically about whether the company properly paid taxes related to “fringe benefits” that its former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg received as part of his salary. Trump himself was not charged.
Weisselberg, who initially was charged with the company, struck a plea deal with prosecutors in August and testified at this trial, but he did not implicate Trump himself in any wrongdoing. An attorney for Trump said the company would appeal the verdict.
Though the verdict is embarrassing for Trump, this trial was not a particularly serious legal threat to the former president or his business. The company can be fined a maximum of $1.6 million at sentencing, which it can surely handle.
Instead, Trump’s real legal dangers lie elsewhere. Most notably, new Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has taken over investigations into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and into whether Trump mishandled classified information. A district attorney in Georgia is also looking into Trump’s attempt to change the state’s presidential election outcome. And a separate civil fraud suit from New York’s attorney general might be more threatening to his business.
What the Trump Organization trial was about
Various Trump associates have been convicted of crimes during and after his presidency, but the former president has not been charged with anything, and his companies had been only charged with civil suits.
That changed in the summer of 2021, when New York state prosecutors working under then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance indicted the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Weisselberg, as well as other related corporate entities, for criminal tax fraud.
The charges alleged that Weisselberg and the Trump Organization did not properly pay taxes related to $1.7 million worth of “fringe benefits” Weisselberg received as part of his compensation package — most notably apartment and car leases for Weisselberg and private school tuition for his grandchildren. (I described these charges in more detail in a previous article.) The company pleaded not guilty — as did Weisselberg, initially.
These charges, prosecutors hoped, would be just the start. Vance was trying to build a broader case against Trump’s company and likely Trump himself. To do so, he hoped to “flip” Weisselberg and turn him into a cooperating witness (because, some legal experts believed, it would be difficult to prove Trump’s knowledge of company financial crimes without Weisselberg’s testimony). Yet when Vance retired and was succeeded by Alvin Bragg, that investigation appeared to stall, and top prosecutors resigned in protest. (Bragg more recently said the investigation was continuing.)
This August, Weisselberg changed his plea to guilty, striking a deal with prosecutors and agreeing to testify at the trial of the Trump Organization. Yet this wasn’t the hoped-for flip — though Weisselberg admitted his own guilt, he steadfastly refused to implicate Trump, the New York Times reported. Weisselberg instead said he acted for personal gain. Jurors, however, concluded that he acted on “behalf” of the Trump companies in committing fraud, and therefore found the Trump Organization guilty on all counts.
What it means for Trump
Though it’s noteworthy that the former president’s company was convicted of crimes, there was no case here against Trump himself, and the maximum fine is rather low for a company of this size. So this particular verdict probably won’t change much for him.
Yet Trump has lately found himself in a much more dangerous legal morass, with both federal and state prosecutors building cases against him.
One enormous threat to Trump is the Justice Department’s investigation of his attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. This probe ramped up in intensity over the course of this year, and dozens of Trump aides and associates are under scrutiny. Recently, Trump lost a legal battle to prevent lawyers who worked in his White House counsel’s office from testifying to a Washington, DC, grand jury.
The DOJ also has a seemingly simpler case into whether Trump violated the law by keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left office. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August, and though no charges have yet been brought, court filings have revealed they seized roughly 100 documents marked as classified.
In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is specifically looking into Trump’s attempts to interfere with her state’s presidential election result by, for instance, urging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”
And in New York, Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump’s company in September that could come with much more serious financial penalties — she accused the company of fraudulently making $250 million based off false statements of its financial condition. She’s also said she would file a referral to federal prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, laying out her findings so they can decide whether criminal charges are merited.
Even Bragg’s Manhattan district attorney’s office is getting involved again, having recently refocused on the long-dormant investigation of whether Trump violated the law by secretly paying adult film actor Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t allege an affair with him before the 2016 election.
Trump has not yet been criminally charged in any of these other cases, however.
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Police in Germany arrest far-right extremists planning to 'overthrow the state.' (photo: Guardian UK)
Minor aristocrat, an ex-paratrooper and a former AfD MP among those detained in operation
Twenty-five people including a 71-year-old prince, a retired military commander, and an acting judge and former MP for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) were planning a violent overthrow of the state, including an armed attack on the parliament, inspired by the storming of the US Capitol, according to prosecutors.
The group was apparently driven in ideology by the deep-state conspiracy theories of QAnon and the Reichsbürger (“empire citizens”) movement, which denies the right of modern Germany to exist. It was planning to renegotiate the country’s post-second world war settlement, insisting the “Deutsche Reich” still had legitimacy despite having ended with the Nazis’ defeat in 1945.
Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, called the group the “enemies of democracy”, saying it was as yet unclear as to how advanced its plans had been, or how likely it was to have succeeded.
She said the government would respond against such plots with the “full force of the law”, adding: “The investigations provide a glimpse into the abyss of a terrorist threat from the Reichsbürger milieu.”
Relatives of the group’s alleged ringleader, Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuß von Greiz, who claims descent from a royal line that ruled for 800 years in Thuringia until the breakup of the German monarchy, told the Ostthüringer Zeitung newspaper in August he was a “bitter old man” with “crazy conspiracy theory views” who had turned his back on the family years ago. The family said it distanced itself “very clearly from his political and historical views”.
Peter Frank, Germany’s public prosecutor general, said the ringleaders of the group were being held in police custody. He confirmed reports that an armed wing of the group, which was meant to form the basis of a new German army and included former active members of the military, had planned to violently storm the German Bundestag or parliament.
“Those who have been arrested are supporters of conspiracy myths, from a conglomerate of narratives relating to the ideologies of the Reichsbürger and QAnon ideologies,” he told reporters in Karlsruhe.
The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told public radio he was “deeply concerned” by the alleged plot, describing it as a “new level”.
In what is believed to have been the biggest police investigation in Germany against extremists, a surveillance team under the auspices of the federal criminal police office (BKA) and the federal public prosecutor, began monitoring 52 suspects at the start of September under the codename “Shadows”, including monitoring telephones, chat groups and checking bank accounts. The operation followed a tip-off from someone in Berlin.
Investigators say they quickly established strong ideological links between the members, who included Reichsbürger, as well as members of the coronavirus denial Querdenker movement and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The group, under the leadership of Heinrich XIII and a former commander of a paratrooper battalion, had been preparing for so-called “Day X”, on which about two dozen people were to storm the Reichstag building, home to the German parliament, and to handcuff and arrest MPs and parliamentary staff in an operation taking as its example the 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
After their takeover, the group had envisioned renegotiating the treaties Germany signed after the end of the second world war. “For now, the Russian Federation was exclusively to be the central contact for these negotiations,” prosecutors said.
While Heinrich XIII had made efforts to reach out to Moscow, prosecutors said: “There is no indication that the contacts reacted positively to his approach.” A Russian woman named only as Vitalia B, among those arrested on Wednesday, is suspected of having facilitated those contacts, prosecutors added.
Russia’s embassy in Berlin denied any Russian state involvement in the group. In a statement, it said: “Russian diplomatic and consulate offices in Germany have no contact to representatives of terrorist groups or other illegal units.”
As details of the group’s members emerged, they revealed what one investigator referred to as a “motley crew” – from a coronavirus-denying roofer to a gourmet cook, whose son-in-law is a professional footballer, a pilot with a German airline and a tenor who was due to be installed as culture minister after the group’s takeover.
German politicians expressed their relief that the plot had been thwarted, though Sara Nanni, of the Greens, said initial indications were that the group might have lacked the means or wherewithal to carry out their plan.
“More details keep coming to light that raise doubts about whether these people were even clever enough to plan and carry out such a coup,” she said in a post on the social media network Mastadon. However, she acknowledged that “no matter how crude their ideas and how hopeless their plans”, even the attempt was dangerous.
Federal prosecutors said 3,000 officers had conducted searches at 137 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states, including a palace in the state of Thuringia, and that 22 German citizens whad been detained on suspicion of “membership in a terrorist organisation”. Three other detainees, including a female Russian citizen, - reportedly Heinrich’s romantic partner – were suspected of supporting the organisation, they said.
Der Spiegel reported that locations searched included the barracks of Germany’s special forces unit, KSK, in the south-western town of Calw. The unit has in the past been scrutinised over alleged far-right involvement by some soldiers. Federal prosecutors declined to confirm or deny that the barracks was searched.
But among those arrested was a former senior field officer at the German army’s paratrooper battalion, identified as 69-year-old Rüdiger von Pescatore and believed to have been a commander in Calw. He was also described as a ring leader of the group.
He and Heinrich XIII had founded a “terrorist organisation last year with the goal of overturning the existing state order in Germany”, prosecutors said. The men planned to replace it with their own form of state, which was “already in the course of being founded”. Von Pescatore had been in charge of planning the military coup, and Heinrich XIII with mapping out Germany’s future political order.
They had even started to nominate ministers for a transitional post-coup government, according to the newspaper Die Zeit, in which one of the suspects, the former AfD MP Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, 58, a judge by profession, who was arrested at her home in the western Berlin district of Wannsee on Wednesday morning, was to be federal minister for justice.
Along with detentions in Germany, prosecutors said one person was detained in the Austrian ski-resort of Kitzbühel and another in Italy. Italian police confirmed the arrest around Wednesday lunchtime of a 64-year-old former German army officer connected to the group. He was detained in a hotel where “material pertaining to the group’s subversive activity” was found, according to Italian media. The man was expected to be extradited to Germany soon.
The group was said to be convinced modern Germany was run by a “deep state” conspiracy that was about to be exposed by an alliance of German intelligence agencies and the militaries of foreign states including Russia and the US.
“Everything will be turned upside down: the current public prosecutors and judges, as well as the heads of the health departments and their superiors will find themselves in the dock at Nuremberg 2.0,” one of the suspect said in a message posted on Telegram minutes before the start of Wednesday’s raids, Die Zeit reported.
While the suspects believed their aims could be achieved only by military means and with force, prosecutors said, it was unclear whether the group had managed to amass any serious kind of arsenal.
Several of the accused are former members of the military and are suspected of having illegally taken weapons out of the army’s stock during their years in service, while others hold arms licences.
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A special patrolling train in Blue Island during the great railroad strike of 1894. The strike was led by American Railway Union President and political activist Eugene Debs, and those sympathetic to the cause. (photo: The Library of Congress)
Congress was able to break the rail strike last week because of a century-old law designed to weaken the disruptive power of unions. It’s time to cast aside this law and every other government-mandated strike prohibition that ties the hands of workers.
Understanding this contradiction — allowing for strikes but within narrow, government-sanctioned confines — requires a review of the history of the right to strike and its regulation in what came to be called “emergency disputes.” Whereas the US legal system looked askance at workers’ right to walkout for much of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the effective legalization of trade unions during the New Deal transformed the relationship between workers and bosses in the United States. If labor unions were to be legalized, US politicians reasoned, their negotiations with employers had to be regulated in those workplaces where, in the words of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, interruption of service “imperils the public health and safety.”
The Railway Labor Act is the oldest federal statute providing for such regulation — and proved to be one of the most decisive forces in the recent showdown between railroad workers and employers.
When Strikes Were Illegal
The precedent for peacetime intervention in the railroad industry’s labor disputes dates to the efforts — by corporations as well as the federal government — to suppress the great railroad strikes of 1877 and 1894, which erupted after sweeping cuts to workers’ wages during the business recessions of that era.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, employers repeatedly turned to the courts to issue injunctions against trade unions engaged in work stoppages. Owners and managers argued that strikes, especially those national in scope, violated the commerce clause of the US Constitution — because strikes interfered with the free flow of goods, labor, and capital across state boundaries — and, eventually, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, because unions conspired to set wages.
The most famous injunction of the Gilded Age came in 1894, when the federal government sent the US Army to Chicago to enforce a legal decree against the American Railway Union and the strike, led by Eugene V. Debs, that had crippled commerce throughout the country. Debs was barred from even communicating with members of his union. When he violated the edict, he was jailed for six months.
For the next forty years, anti-union employers found the courts a willing partner in suppressing strikes and other forms of working-class collective action. In 1908, the Supreme Court cemented the federal government’s capacity to undercut organized labor by ruling in the famous “Danbury Hatters” case that sympathy strikes and union-organized boycotts violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
“Injunction law” therefore ruled the American work regime throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Felix Frankfurter, a future Supreme Court justice, and George Norris, a progressive Republican senator, railed against this abridgment of labor rights. Frankfurter thought such judicial strike prohibitions created “embitterment in masses of men and women” that led to “the growing conviction that the powers of the government are perverted by, and in aid of, the employers, and that the courts are the instrument of this partisan policy.” It took the onset of the Great Depression to curb such judicial overreach, which pro-labor critics denounced as “injunction law.” In 1932, Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which affirmed labor organizations’ freedom of association and stripped federal courts of the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes.
The Roots of the Railway Labor Act
Yet Norris-LaGuardia had little impact on the railroads, because in 1926 Congress had passed the Railway Labor Act. That law came on the heels of repeated strike threats during and after World War I, when labor’s precautionary attitude was temporarily eclipsed by the period’s militant mood and rapid organizational gains.
In 1916, railway unions — then some of the country’s largest and most potent labor organizations — demanded an eight-hour day, perhaps the greatest unfulfilled quest of the nineteenth-century working class. As in 1894, the executive branch intervened to keep commerce flowing, but in this instance President Woodrow Wilson — mindful of the mass disruptions that railroad labor could cause — requested legislation from Congress granting the shortened workday for interstate railway workers. When Congress passed the Adamson Act later that year, it became the first federal law that regulated the hours of work in private companies.
In 1917, the threat of a wartime strike by railroad workers against companies refusing to comply with the Adamson Act, combined with private mismanagement of an industry now vital to the war effort, triggered the White House decision to seize and run the railroads for the duration of US participation in the Great War. When railroad property was finally returned to private ownership in 1920, Congress established a Railway Labor Board to constrain the strikes and strike threats that had created so much turmoil in this important industry. But the board proved a failure, evident in 1922 when during a wave of falling prices the new government agency ordered a wage cut that provoked a bitter, violent, and sometimes radical work stoppage by 400,000 railroad shop workers. That strike ended only after a federal judge issued a sweeping injunction that imprisoned strike leaders and offered military protection to strikebreakers who crossed picket lines.
The Railway Labor Act (RLA) of 1926 emerged in this anti-union era. Drafted privately by the railroad corporation lawyers and the railway brotherhoods, it was nevertheless written to preserve the hard-won right to strike denied by the injunction courts. Not even the Association of Railway Executives dared to argue that the Congress should legislate forced labor on their employees. Colonel A. P. Thom, general counsel of the executives’ association, told the Congress in January 1926, the law was written
in the spirit not of forcing or attempting to force the application of the last extreme of congressional power. . . . The conclusion of the railroad executives is that the time has not come in the public interest when it is necessary to press down that crown of thorns upon labor’s brow.
Section 9 of the statute reads: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require an individual employee to render labor or service without his consent.”
Under the law, a strike must be postponed for mediation and, failing mediation, the findings of a Presidential Emergency Board. After the exhaustion of these procedures, the parties may strike, lock out their workers, or change their terms of employment. To the conservative leaders of the Railroad Brotherhoods, the preservation of a self-help remedy was a victory which helped to preserve the legitimacy of their organizations. To radicals like William Z. Foster, the 1926 act was “a blow to the vitals of railroad unionism” that “outlaws strikes.” In an era when workers’ struggles had so recently awed the nation, it was a compromise Congress was willing to accept.
Taft-Hartley and the “Cooling-Off” Period
Although the RLA, Norris-LaGuardia, and the 1935 Wagner Act all, to varying degrees, guaranteed unions the right to strike, it took just a few years for the federal government to once again curb workers’ right to withhold their labor. In World War II, the trade unions agreed to a no-strike pledge in return for federal guarantees that their wages would keep pace with inflation and the membership grow as the defense industry hired millions of new workers. “Wildcat” strikes often broke out when workers thought employers or the government were not living up to their side of the bargain. What’s more, these unauthorized strikes were not infrequently accompanied by federal seizure of struck property, a power given statutory basis in the War Labor Disputes Act of 1943 — a resolution to illegal strikes highly unfavorable to the owners of the struck property.
Passed in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act was a product of corporate efforts to erode labor power in a postwar era when employers were growing increasingly militant and organized in defense of their managerial prerogatives. The law may be best known for its provisions barring Communists from union leadership and allowing states to enact anti-labor “right-to-work” laws. But unlike wartime efforts to outlaw strikes in critical industries, this cudgel against labor did not provide a statutory basis for seizing property made inoperable by a labor dispute.
Along with the prohibition against secondary boycotts, Taft-Hartley allows the president to seek a court injunction triggering a back-to-work order for any strike deemed to threaten national security or “imperil the national health or safety.” This kind of presidential injunction would last for an eighty-day “cooling-off” period, during which federal mediators would seek a settlement.
The idea that union hotheads needed a “cooling-off” period to quiet their anger was a comforting fantasy to many an employer and anti-labor politician. In practice, an eighty-day strike hiatus often demoralized workers and gave employers time to build up inventory or take additional measures to weather a strike’s resumption. Most strikes enjoined by a Taft-Hartley presidential edict were settled during the “cooling-off” period.
Presidents have sought back-to-work orders under the Taft-Hartley Act thirty-two times, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, when national unions were potent and almost one-third of the private sector workforce was unionized. Ten of the injunctions involved longshore strikes, with the last coming in 2002 when President George W. Bush ended a walkout that had idled West Coast ports for ten days. No president since has used the strike suspension provisions of Taft-Hartley, surely a testament to labor’s weakness rather than Oval Office moderation.
“The Only Illegal Strike Is an Unsuccessful Strike”
The government is not all powerful, and workers throughout the twentieth century often won strikes deemed illegal by either the courts or a state or federal agency. Many unionists have adhered to the old adage that “the only illegal strike is an unsuccessful strike.”
During World War II, many wildcat strikes, often lasting for a shift or shorter, persuaded foremen, plant managers, and other executives to accommodate union militancy rather than seek governmental intervention. In the 1960s, strikes by schoolteachers and other government employees smashed strike prohibitions and fostered unionization in the public sector. In 1966, when New York subway workers struck for higher pay, the city obtained an injunction prohibiting the work stoppage and imprisoning Transport Workers Union of America (TWU) president Mike Quill and seven other strike leaders. “The judge can drop dead in his black robes!” Quill declared just before he went to jail. The strike continued, ending only when the TWU secured a sizable wage increase and other improvements.
That victory may well have helped inspire the more than 200,000 postal workers who struck for higher pay in 1970 — by far the largest strike ever conducted against the US government, even though it was a federal crime punishable by immediate discharge and prosecution. President Richard Nixon declared a national emergency and sent 25,000 troops into New York City to move the mail then vital to banking, insurance, and stock market operations. But the troops could not do the job, so backroom negotiations with the striking unions soon commenced, yielding a large wage hike and a reorganization of the post office as a more independent part of the federal government.
Such illegal strikes continue. The red state teacher strikes of 2018 openly flouted the law and were largely successful. “At some point, you have to choose between doing what is right and doing what is legal,” a Massachusetts teacher union leader explained this year. “We choose what is right.”
The Railway Labor Act and every other government-mandated strike prohibition should be cast aside. With the economic strength of US labor at a historic low — even as pro-union sentiment reaches new highs — any obstacle to exercising the right to strike forestalls the reemergence of the vibrant union movement we desperately need.
Last week’s congressional vote to impose an “agreement” on rail workers demonstrates just how precarious the victories of the twentieth century are today. It also serves as an object lesson for those seeking legal solutions in the future to pressing economic and social problems in the present: the decisions of courts and legislatures may enforce the norms and standards in the economy, but it is organized action that most effectively alters the balance of power those norms reflect.
A well-organized strike by railroad workers, legal or illegal, could win not just more sick days and more humane work schedules for those unionists but would provide an example of working-class power inspirational to millions of young and not-so-young workers seeking to build their own unions and challenge the entrenched power of capital, from coffee shops to warehouses and beyond.
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Palestinian students carry a mock coffin as they hold a symbolic funeral for slain Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, at al-Azhar University in Mughraqa, central Gaza Strip, May 16, 2022. (photo: AP)
Network says evidence it presented overturns claims by Israeli authorities that the Palestinian journalist was killed in a crossfire.
Abu Akleh, a television correspondent with Al Jazeera for 25 years, was killed by Israeli forces on May 11 as she was covering an Israeli military raid on a refugee camp in Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank.
The 51-year-old Jerusalem native and US citizen was a household name and a widely respected journalist who gave a voice to Palestinians through her coverage of the Israeli occupation.
‘A wider pattern’
The request includes a dossier on a comprehensive six-month investigation by Al Jazeera that gathers all available eyewitness evidence and video footage, as well as new material on the killing of Abu Akleh.
The request submitted to the ICC is presented “in the context of a wider attack on Al Jazeera, and journalists in Palestine”, said Rodney Dixon KC, a lawyer for Al Jazeera, referring to incidents such as the bombing of the network’s Gaza office on May 15, 2021.
“It’s not a single incident, it’s a killing that is part of a wider pattern that the prosecution should be investigating to identify those who are responsible for the killing, and to bring charges against them,” he said.
“The focus is on Shireen, and this particular killing, this outrageous killing. But the evidence we submit looks at all of the acts against Al Jazeera because it has been targeted as an international media organisation.
“And the evidence shows that what the [Israeli] authorities are trying to do is to shut it up,” Dixon said.
Al Jazeera hopes the ICC prosecutor “does actually start the investigation of this case” after the network’s request, Dixon said. The request complements the complaint submitted to the ICC by Abu Akleh’s family in September, supported by the Palestinian Press Syndicate and the International Federation of Journalists.
A new documentary by Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines shows how Abu Akleh and other journalists, wearing protective helmets and bulletproof vests clearly marked with the word “PRESS”, were walking down a road in view of Israeli forces when they came under fire.
Abu Akleh was shot in the head as she tried to shield herself by a carob tree. Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samoudi was also shot in the shoulder.
The new evidence submitted by Al Jazeera shows “Shireen and her colleagues were directly fired at by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)”, Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement on Tuesday.
The statement added the evidence overturns claims by Israeli authorities that Shireen was killed in crossfire and it “confirms, without any doubt, that there was no firing in the area where Shireen was, other than the IOF shooting directly at her”.
“The evidence shows that this deliberate killing was part of a wider campaign to target and silence Al Jazeera,” the statement said.
Troops from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will never be questioned, said Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Tuesday.
“No one will interrogate IDF soldiers and no one will preach to us about morals of combat, certainly not the Al Jazeera Network,” Lapid said.
Defence Minister Benny Gantz expressed condolences to the Abu Akleh family and said Israel’s military operates at “the highest standards”.
Next steps
Speaking outside the entrance of the ICC on the cloudy, brisk morning after Al Jazeera submitted its request, Lina Abu Akleh, who wore a badge with her aunt’s face, said the family was hopeful they would see “positive results soon”.
“We expect that the prosecutor will seek truth and justice and we expect that the court will deliver in holding institutions and individuals responsible of this crime accountable for killing my aunt,” she said.
Abu Akleh’s older brother, Anton, said the network’s submission was significant for the family.
“This is very important to us not only for Shireen – nothing can bring Shireen back – but this will ensure that such crimes are stopped and hopefully the ICC will be able to take immediate action to put an end to this impunity.”
Walid al-Omari, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Jerusalem and a friend and colleague of Abu Akleh, said it is critical to keep the case alive in public opinion. “We don’t think Israel should escape from accountability.”
Once the ICC has reviewed the evidence it will decide whether it will probe Abu Akleh’s killing as part of ongoing investigations.
‘Hold killers accountable’
In 2021, the ICC decided it has jurisdiction over the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory. Al Jazeera’s submission requests the killing of Abu Akleh become part of this wider investigation.
“We’re making a request for an investigation that leads to charges being brought and those responsible being prosecuted,” said Dixon.
Investigations carried out by the United Nations, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, and international news outlets concluded that Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli soldier.
The Abu Akleh family has called for a “thorough, transparent investigation” by the US FBI and Department of State to reveal the chain of command that led to the death of a US citizen.
“In short, we would like [US President Joe] Biden to do in Shireen’s case what his and previous US administrations have failed to do when other American citizens were killed by Israel: Hold the killers accountable,” Lina Abu Akleh wrote in Al Jazeera in July.
In November the US announced an FBI probe into the killing of Abu Akleh, news welcomed by her family.
But, Dixon cautioned, this probe should not be a reason for the ICC not to act.
“They can they can work together with … the FBI, so that this case doesn’t fall between the cracks, and that those responsible are identified and put on trial.”
Shortly after the request was submitted to the ICC, the US said it rejected the move.
“The ICC should focus on its core mission,” State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters. “And that core mission is of serving as a court of last resort in punishing and deterring atrocity crimes.”
Debunking shifting narratives
The Fault Lines documentary also looks closely at Israel’s shifting narratives.
Israel initially falsely blamed armed Palestinians for Abu Akleh’s death, but in September said there was a “high probability” an Israeli soldier “accidentally hit” the journalist but that it would not launch a criminal investigation.
Hagai El-Ad, director of Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, which swiftly debunked the false claim by Israel that a Palestinian gunman was responsible for Abu Akleh’s death, told Fault Lines: “They’re also very used to getting away with lying about killings of Palestinians both in the public arena and in the legal arena.”
“The reason why Al Jazeera made this request is because the Israeli authorities have done nothing to investigate the case. In fact, they’ve said that they will not investigate, that there’s no suspicion of a crime,” said Dixon.
Al Jazeera Media Network calls the killing a “blatant murder” and a “heinous crime”.
“Al Jazeera reiterates its commitment to achieving justice for Shireen and to exploring all avenues to ensure that the perpetrators are held accountable and brought to justice,” said the network.
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Children march with the Haitian and American flags. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it would allow tens of thousands of additional Haitians to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by moving up the program's cut-off date. Previously, only Haitians who had arrived in the U.S. before July 29, 2021 were eligible for TPS, but the new designation will allow those living in the country as of Nov. 6 of this year to apply for the program.
DHS also announced Monday that the U.S. would push back the expiration date for the Haiti TPS program from Feb. 4, 2023 to Aug. 3, 2024. Officials stressed that Haitians thinking of coming to the U.S. illegally should not do so, as they would not qualify for the program and could face deportation.
Created by Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS is a designation given by federal officials that provides deportation protections and work permits to immigrants from countries experiencing armed conflict, environmental disasters and other humanitarian emergencies. The program does not offer permanent legal status.
The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti has long been plagued by crushing poverty, political turmoil, gang violence and devastating natural disasters, including a 2010 earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people.
But Haiti's already grim state has only deteriorated over the past year amid intensifying warfare between violent gangs and the government's struggle to maintain some semblance of order following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. In October, the country's prime minister asked the international community to dispatch a "specialized armed force" to quell the chaos.
In a statement Monday, DHS said it expanded the TPS program for Haitians because of the "prolonged political crisis" in Haiti and the gang violence there, as well as the scarcity of food, water and fuel in the country amid an uptick in cholera cases.
"The conditions in Haiti, including socioeconomic challenges, political instability, and gang violence and crime — aggravated by environmental disaster — compelled the humanitarian relief we are providing today," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.
There are currently 101,000 Haitians in the U.S. enrolled in the TPS program, according to DHS statistics. The government is also reviewing 53,000 pending TPS applications from Haitians. The program's new cut-off date is expected to make another 110,000 Haitians eligible for TPS, the DHS data show.
The Biden administration created its first TPS designation for Haitians in the spring of 2021, saying it was too dangerous to return migrants to Haiti because of security concerns, human rights abuses and the country's dire economic situation.
Democratic lawmakers had been pushing the Biden administration to expand the TPS program for Haitians, saying the move would not only serve a humanitarian purpose, but be beneficial to the economy as well.
"At a time when we have labor shortages and high inflation, they are on the frontlines providing essential services to our nation. Moreover, redesignating Haiti for TPS would allow more Haitian nationals in the U.S. to contribute their skills and talents to the American workforce," 17 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Mayorkas last week.
The Biden administration's treatment of Haitian migrants has previously garnered criticism from progressives. In the fall of 2021, the sudden arrival of thousands of Haitians in the small Texas community of Del Rio caught U.S. border officials unprepared, leading to the creation of a makeshift migrant camp underneath a bridge.
News footage that showed mounted border agents aggressively herding Haitian migrants — with some agents seen swinging split reins, a type of rope used by horse riders — sparked a massive uproar. A government probe later found the agents had used "unnecessary" force when they dispersed Haitian migrants who were seeking to deliver food to their families. But the investigation did not find evidence that mounted agents struck anyone with their reins.
Following the events in Del Rio, the U.S. launched a deportation blitz to Haiti, expelling thousands of Haitians. Since earlier this year, the majority of Haitians who have arrived along the U.S. border have been admitted at legal ports of entry, where the Biden administration has been making humanitarian exceptions to Title 42, a public health order that allows the U.S. to expel certain migrants, federal data show.
Under President Biden, the U.S. has created TPS programs for an unprecedented number of migrants and countries. Certain nationals of 16 countries are currently eligible for TPS, including immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Ukraine and Venezuela, all of whom were made eligible for the program under Mr. Biden.
The Biden administration's TPS policy is a stark departure from the Trump administration, which tried to end the designations for several countries; though its efforts were held up in federal court. The Trump administration argued the TPS authority was abused and improperly extended despite changing country conditions.
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A Jupiter-based shark diving boat captain John R. Moore Jr., 56, and mate Tanner Mansell, 29, who gathered up the three miles of line and freed 19 sharks and a Goliath grouper in August 2020 are now facing five years in prison. (photo: Jeff Rotman/Alamy)
During the August 2020 charter, they came across a commercial fishing longline — a controversial piece of angling gear consisting of sometimes up to several miles of monofilament line, weights and hooks, designed with the purpose of snagging dozens of fish at a time.
The men, boat captain John R. Moore Jr., 56, and mate Tanner Mansell, 29, gathered up the three miles of line and freed 19 sharks and a Goliath grouper, a state-protected species. The three-hour effort was done with the help of their charter passengers, telling them the line was an abandoned “ghost set” of line, U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecutors said.
Two years later, a grand jury indicted Moore and Mansell of theft of commercial fishing gear in federal waters. A jury convicted the men last week, and they now face five years each in federal prison. The line, prosecutors said, belonged to a commercial fishing operator that was licensed to catch all the species of shark that were hooked that day.
Attorneys for Moore and Mansell declined to comment on the case prior to the scheduled Feb. 9 sentencing, but both men maintained throughout their trial they thought the longline was an illegal setup and their only intent was to free the fish, not steal the gear.
Both men have years of experience working on the water. Moore was a former commercial fisherman, according to federal prosecutors. Additionally, Mansell is a noted underwater photographer and handled sharks for a film shoot of the famous Shark Week series on the Discovery Channel in 2021.
His social media accounts are filled with images of sharks he photographed around the world, as well as messages touting shark conservation.
But federal prosecutors said the pair should have been well aware that the longline they handled and eventually brought back to shore was legitimate. It was attached to a large orange buoy clearly marked with the name of the vessel to which it belonged, the Day Boat III, prosecutors said.
According to prosecutors, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer watched as Moore’s boat entered the Jupiter Inlet and stopped the vessel. Moore told the officer the line was an illegal shark fishing set, prosecutors said. The buoy — “which would have established the obvious legality of the shark fishing effort” — was gone, prosecutors said in a statement.
The FWC officer told Moore and Mansell to leave the line, hooks and weights on the dock for evidence, but prosecutors said the pair instead cut up the line and threw all the gear into a dumpster.
“Evidence at trial established that the gear alone cost the vessel owner approximately $1,300, and the value of the lost sharks amounted to several thousand dollars, which represented a significant portion of the income that would be paid to the fishermen,” the prosecutors said.
Moore and Mansell, who their attorneys say are not in federal custody, not only face prison time, but also fines up to $250,000 apiece.
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