In 2010, social media reporting was in its infancy, the Syrian Civil War had not yet officially begun and the President of the United States was not labeling the press as the enemy of the people. Over the past decade, new technologies, conflicts, attacks and mass movements have shifted the media landscape, providing both new opportunities for members of the media and increased threats to press freedom.

Although social media has allowed more people to participate in global reporting, the world continues to be a dangerous place for reporters. Last month, The Washington Post reported that a total of 554 journalists were killed worldwide in the past decade, some of whom were caught in crossfire or targeted in suicide bombs and shootings by gangs.

While the following is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the most consequential stories of the decade, it is meant to highlight some of the ones that provide significant insight into how the evolution of technology over the past decade has forced reporting to also evolve, how technology such as social media have been used by everyday citizens and how journalists around the world continue to face increased threats and violence.

2010- WikiLeaks

While the international nonprofit organization devoted to publishing classified media initially came on the scene in 2006, it was in 2010 that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, brought to the forefront the question of whether publishing government documents can be justified by claims of freedom of expression and the publics right to information.

In April of that year, the platform posted a classified U.S. military video of a U.S. helicopter firing on what the military said were believed to be armed fighters in New Baghdad, Iraq. Among the 18 people killed in the attack were two Reuters journalists. Pfc. Chelsea Manning was arrested in May by the U.S. military and was charged with leaking the combat video, as well as classified State Department documents by downloading those documents to a personal computer.

In July, WikiLeaks published what it called The Afghan War Logs, which included more than 75,000 documents that revealed previously undisclosed civilian casualties caused by the U.S. and its coalition forces, details of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and accounts of increased violent action by the Taliban.

In the years since, WikiLeaks has continued to publish previously classified material from national governments around the world and, in 2016, gained increased scrutiny following its publishing of nearly 20,000 emails and 8,000 attachments from leaders of the U.S. Democratic National Committee.

Assange was eventually arrested in 2019 after seeking refuge for years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. That year, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment dating back to March 6, 2018 that charged Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.

2011- Social Media in the Arab Spring

In December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest the arbitrary seizing of his vegetable stand by police over failure to obtain a permit. The action sparked a pro-democracy movement that spread throughout the Middle East in 2011. The new tools offered through social media allowed demonstrators to become citizen journalists and tell their stories to the world on a scale that had never been done before.

The Arab Spring also became known to some analysts as the Facebook and Twitter Revolution. According to a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center, communities formed online were crucial in organizing a core group of activists, especially in Egypt. Additionally, a 2012 report by the United States Institute of Peace found that in the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, social media played an integral role in communicating to the rest of the world what was happening on the ground during the uprisings.

In addition to the role social media played in mobilizing protestors and providing news on the events to those outside the region, this new technology has also changed how people in the Middle East receive their information. The 2012 Pew study found that smaller news outlets in the region are now competing with the rise in user-generated content on social media platforms. Newspapers and radio programs have moved online in order to cater to readers who are increasingly turning to the internet for information.

2012- The Kidnapping of Austin Tice

The Syrian Civil War that began in 2011 quickly produced profound impacts on those reporting on the conflict within the country and the surrounding region, displayed notably in the 2012 disappearance of U.S. journalist Austin Tice.

In late August, The Washington Post reported that Tice, a freelance journalist who contributed stories on the civil war to The Post, McClatchy Newspapers and other publications, had been taken into Syrian government custody after weeks of speculation on his whereabouts.

Video footage of the journalist emerged in late September on a Facebook page associated with supporters of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The video showed Tice being held by a group of masked men holding assault rifles before being pushed to his knees and filmed speaking a prayer in Arabic. According to reporting from The Post, Tice then cried out Oh Jesus, oh Jesus in English, before going back to Arabic, seconds before the footage was cut.

While the video initially appeared as though Tice was being held by Islamist militants, various journalists at the time questioned the authenticity of the video. The New York Times Editorial Board wrote that this was partly due to the fact that the captors in the video, did not behave as militants usually do.

To this day, Tice is reportedly still in Syrian custody. Tices parents, Marc and Debra Tice, have said that they are convinced he is alive and have worked for his release, traveling several times to Lebanon, putting pressure on diplomats and organizing events to keep Tices disappearance in the public eye. The F.B.I. has offered a $1 million reward for information that could lead to Tices return to the U.S. Major organizations such as Reporters Without Borders and the National Press Club continue to campaign for Tices release.

2013- The Abduction of Journalists in Syria

As international coverage on the ongoing conflict in Syria increased, journalists continued to face threats to their work and their lives. According to reporting from The New York Times, 2013 saw a sharp increase in the abduction of journalists inside Syria, making the country one of the most hostile conflict zones for news gatherers in recent memory.

Foreign journalists increasingly became targets, especially Europeans who entered Syria to cover the conflict without the permission of the Syrian government. Some journalists appeared to have been taken by armed insurgent extremist groups and criminal networks seeking ransom in cash or weapons, while others had no declared motive.

One of the journalists abducted in 2013 was Jonathan Alpeyrie, a French-American photojournalist for the Polaris agency. Islamist fighters took Alpeyrie near Damascus in April and released him nearly three months later after a $450,000 ransom was paid on his behalf.

The rebels are so desperate they dont care about their reputation abroad, Alpeyrie said in an interview published by the Paris-based Journal de la Photographie. They see guys like us as an opportunity.

2014- The Kidnapping and Murders of American Journalists Abroad

The U.S. and other western countries were again made aware of the dangers journalists face when reporting abroad with the 2014 killings of American journalists James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Luke Somers.

Foley, who disappeared in November 2012 along the Syrian border with Turkey, appeared in a video posted on YouTube by ISIS in which he pleads for his life before being beheaded by one of his captors.

A month later, a video showing the beheading of Sotloff was posted online by the Islamic State as a second message to America to halt airstrikes in Iraq. According to CNN, a masked ISIS figure appeared in the video and spoke directly to U.S. President Barack Obama, saying, Just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.

In December, a U.S. mission in southern Yemen failed to rescue Somers, an American photojournalist, who was being held hostage by Al Qaeda. The hostages killed Somers, along with a South African teacher also being held, when the captors realized a rescue mission was underway. The operation was the second attempt by U.S. forces to rescue Somers.

Following these murders, Joel Simon, head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, called on the U.S. to change its ransom policy, because these journalists are going out on their own to bear witness on behalf of their audiences.

2015- The Charlie Hebdo Attack

While the 2012-2014 kidnapping and murders of international journalists provided alarming indications of the state of press freedom across the world, the 2015 attacks on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo revealed that these dangers extend beyond the Middle East.

The magazine had received criticism for its portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed in controversial cartoons dating back to 2006, with French President Jacques Chirac calling the decision to publish the images an overt provocation. After the magazine published another caricature of the prophet in 2011, its offices were destroyed in a gasoline bomb attack.

On the morning of January 7, 2015, gunmen forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and, according to CNN, allegedly claimed they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed and shouted Allahu akbar, which translates to God is great.

Twelve people were killed in the raids on the office, including eight Charlie Hebdo employees.

Following the attacks, the phrase Je Suis Charlie, or I am Charlie, began appearing on signs held by Parisians during vigils for the victims, eventually spreading on social media as a rallying cry in support of press freedom and freedom of expression.

2016- Fake News

While widely known as a popular phrase used by President Donald Trump to describe American media outlets, fake news better describes the flood of fabricated stories published throughout 2016, whichshowed how misinformation and propaganda became alarmingly easy to spread on social media platforms, especially when perpetrated by foriegn governments such as Russia.

One of these stories was published by a site called WTOE 5 News and falsely reported that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump in the presidential campaign. While the Pope later refuted the claim, arguing that he never comments on electoral campaigns, the story had secured 960,000 Facebook engagements, according to Buzzfeed.

Another article published by The Political Insider in August 2016 claimed that WikiLeaks founder Assange stated that Hillary Clinton and her State Department were actively arming Islamic jihadists, which includes ISIS According to CNBC, Assange had actually said that the Clinton-led State Department had approved weapon shipments to Libya during the 2011 intervention, and that those weapons had later ended up in the hands of jihadists.

A report from Buzzfeed revealed that in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, fake news stories such as these had gained nearly two million Facebook engagements. An investigation traced some of these stories back to a small town in Macedonia called Veles, where more than 140 fake news sites are based.

2017- #MeToo Spreads Across the World

In the weeks following the New York Times publishing of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo Movement spread across social media globally as people shared their experiences with sexual assault or harassment. The hashtag was first posted on October 15 by American actress Alyssa Milano and by the end of that day, people in 85 countries had shared similar hashtags in languages including Arabic, Farsi, French, Hindi and Spanish..

The use of the hashtag across social media revealed the prevalence of discrimination across industries and allowed millions of people across the world to join the conversation.

The movement also brought increased scrutiny to the journalism industry itself. As reported by MediaFile in 2018, journalists in Brazil started the hashtag #DeixaElaTrabalhar (#LetHerDoHerJob) following several instances of harassment against female reporters. Additionally, more than 30 Russian news outlets announced their plans to boycott the State Dumathe lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russiain response to the exoneration of a lawmaker who had been accused by several journalists of sexual harassment.

2018- The Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi

In the last few months of 2018, the world watched as details slowly emerged surrounding the mysterious disappearance of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi, who had written several stories critiquing Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans policies, disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork from Saudi Arabia that would allow him to marry his fiance. Early reports from the Turkish government claimed that Khashoggi was murdered inside the consulate.

Although the CIA eventually found that Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered Khashoggis murder, various world leaders and press freedom advocates across the globe expressed deep concern after U.S. President Donald Trump revealed he would not be taking strong action against Saudi Arabia.

In his last column written for The Post before his disappearance, Khashoggi called for more opportunities for those from Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region to share their stories.

The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events, he wrote. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices.

2019- Press Freedom Continues to Experience a Global Decline

While the 2010s gave the world new and diverse sources of information in the digital media age, the decade also showed that the overall state of press freedom and the safety of journalists worldwide is facing greater threats than ever before.

A June 2019 report from Freedom House argued that global press freedom has experienced a sharp decline over the past 10 years.

The report, titled Freedom and the Media: A Downward Spiral, measured press freedom in law and practice based on standards set in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In addition to direct attacks against journalists, including state-sanctioned violence and imprisonment, the report found that world leaders, specifically those running some of the worlds most prominent democracies, have been using their power to alter public opinion and undermine the role of critical media outlets.

The arrests of two Reuters journalists in Myanmar and the violence faced by journalists covering the mass demonstrations in Hong Kong, as well as the verbal attacks made against the press from world leaders in the U.S., China, Hungary and other countries across the globe, all represent direct threats to journalists and their work.

Related

Link:
A Decade in Review: Top International Press Freedom Stories from the 2010s - MediaFile

Photograph Source: Mattia Luigi Nappi CC BY 4.0

Chelsea Manning is being tortured for her refusal totestify beforea federal grand jury. She already has told a military court as a whistleblower while in the Army about documents pertaining to alleged war crimes that were committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has already been tortured and imprisoned for releasing that information once (Collateral Murdervideo, for example), but here in the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, readers must be protected from reading and viewing documents about the horrors of the endless wars the US fights. Some journalists and publishers must be brought into line when disclosing information to the public about our endless wars.

War is seldom defensive these days, but rather, more about killing people deemed enemies by the government, about massive profits, and about empire.

Thinking about Mannings plight, I recall the little-known book,Fort Dix Stockade: Our Prison Camp Next Doorby Joan Crowell (1974), about how imprisonment and torture was used against those in the stockade at Fort Dix, News Jersey who protested the Vietnam War while in the military. Some accounts of Mannings first imprisonment in a Marine Corps stockade recall the treatment that recalcitrant and protesting soldiers received at the hands of their guards, some of whom were returned Vietnam veterans.Manningwas not beaten by the Marines, but her treatment amounted to torture.

Readers need only look to the masses of US citizens and immigrants, including immigrant children, locked up in the US prison system and detention camps to get the picture of the kinds of grotesque abuse that untold numbers of people suffer while incarcerated. If a nation gets away with the imprisonment and abuse of incarcerated children, just how far behind can a political system of general or selected repression be?

Heres what the UN special rapporteur on torture had to say about Mannings current treatment: an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Top UN official accuses US of torturing Chelsea Manning,Guardian, December 31, 2019).

I guess iis only a certain cohort of troops and veterans that we as a nation support.

Democracy Nows New Years Day program was dedicated to the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt First Lady of the World: Eleanor Roosevelts Impact on New Deal to U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. War destroys all human rights and freedom, Roosevelt said. Roosevelt is adamant in that position in the segments opening and knows firsthand that human rights die with the onset of war.

Where are the patriots like Roosevelt? Where are thepatriotsin the media who havepublished some of Manningsrevelations? Where are those who will stand up and do something about the torture and harassment of those who bring sunlight to the dark corners of power and the dark corners of the empire? Those at the highest levels of power dont like Manning for what she represents and does and theyve made her pay dearly.

Follow this link:
The Government is Torturing Chelsea Manning! Does Anyone Give a Damn? - CounterPunch

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning addresses reporters before entering the Albert Bryan U.S. federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on May 16, 2019.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

On New Years Eve, as personal reflections on the last decade flooded in, Chelsea Mannings accounttweeted that she had spent 77.76 percent of her time since 2009 in jail. That same day, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer publiclyreleased a letter from late last year accusing the United States of submitting Manning to treatment that is tantamount to torture.

Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion.

It does not take a U.N. expert to recognize the current conditions of Mannings incarceration as a form of torture. It is the very definition of torture to submit a person to physical and mental suffering in an effort to force an action from them. Since May, Manning has been held in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning has not been charged with or convicted of a crime. And her imprisonment on the grounds of civil contempt is explicitly coercive: If she agrees to testify, she can walk free. If she continues to remain silent, she can be held for the 18-month duration of the grand jury or, as the U.N. official noted, indefinitely with the subsequent establishment of successive grand juries.

Each day she is caged, Manning is also fined $1,000. If she is released at the end of the current grand jury, she will owe the state nearly $500,000 an unprecedented punishment for grand jury resistance. And Manning has made clear, she would rather starve to death than comply with the repressive grand jury system, a judicial black box historically deployed against social justice movements.

Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion, Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur, wrote of Mannings treatment. Melzers November letter, which was made public this week, stated that Mannings coercive imprisonment fulfills all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and should be discontinued or abolished without delay. The letter asks that the U.S. government provide factual and legal grounds for Mannings ongoing imprisonment and fines, especially after her categorical and persistent refusal to give testimony demonstrates the lack of their coercive effect.

Mannings supporters and legal team have long stressed that no such legal grounds exist. Manning has proven again and again that her grand jury resistance is unshakeable; the coercive grounds for imprisonment are thus undermined and her jailing is revealed to be purely punitive. Federal Judge Anthony Trenga, who ordered Mannings torturous incarceration, should be compelled to release her as a point of law, regardless of U.N. censure. This is not to say, however, that coercive incarceration is defensible in cases where it works to compel testimony it is not. Mannings resistance has highlighted the brutality of the practice tout court.

Mannings attorney, civil rights lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen, said that she hopes the U.N. officials letter calls greater attention to the use of coercive detention generally, as well as the specific cruel treatment of her client. While the United States has failed to live up to its human rights obligations, I remain hopeful that the government will reconsider its policies in light of the U.N.s admonition, Meltzer-Cohen said in a public statement. She also told me that the U.N. special rapporteurs recognition of Mannings refusal to be coerced can serve as further evidence to the judge.

In a statement from jail, Manning said, I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards. The grand jury resister is, however, under no illusions about the U.S. governments willingness to flout its purported human rights obligations in the face of admonitions from the international community. As she put it, even knowing I am very likely to stay in jail for an even longer time, Im never backing down.

I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards.

Indeed, as the U.N. special rapporteur noted, his predecessor wrote a number of appeals to the U.S. government from 2010 onwards regarding the cruel and torturous treatment to which Manning was subjected prior to and during her confinement in military prison. Yet her 35-year sentence was not commuted until 2017 by President Barack Obama. Manning noted in her New Years Eve tweet that she spent 11.05 percent of the last decade in solitary confinement and over half of her years behind bars fighting for gender affirming care. She attempted to take her own life twice during her time at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Suffice it to say, U.N. appeals have never secured Mannings liberty or safety. And as, Meltzer-Cohen noted in her statement on the U.N. officials letter, In the two months since the letter was conveyed to the United States, Ms. Manning has remained confined, and the daily fines imposed upon her have continued to accrue.

If the letter fails to sway the government, it should, at the very least, serve as a public reminder to support a political prisoner. Though the last decade of Mannings life has been marked by torture, she has responded with fierce resistance and struggle for liberatory social justice at every turn. In the tweet tabulating her last 10 years, Manning ended by noting that she devoted 0.00% of her time backing down. The U.N. special rapporteurs recognition of her refusal to be coerced is welcome. Our solidarity is more than deserved.

Link:
UN Letter: Chelsea Manning's Imprisonment Is Torture - The Intercept

The whistleblower occupies an ambiguous and somewhat ghostly position in the pantheon of behavioural role models. Despised by the authority he or she betrays, the revealer of hidden corporate or governmental truths is seldom embraced as a hero by society at large.

Its true that film-makers are drawn to whistleblowers because their struggle the little guy up against the establishment can make for compelling drama: two fine examples being Michael Manns The Insider (starring Russell Crowe) and Gavin Hoods recent Official Secrets (starring fictionalised versions of several of this newspapers journalists).

But the chances are, most people who have seen those films wont remember the names of the whistleblowers they depict: respectively Jeffrey Wigand and Katharine Gun. Even after theyve gone public, whistleblowers tend to remain shadowy figures, cut off from the industries or positions that brought them to prominence, but with no new role to match the notoriety/celebrity briefly visited upon them.

Another reason for their marginal presence is suggested in Tom Muellers expansive study of the subject, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud. Many people who blow the whistle are able to do so precisely because they are not like most of us, or how were told to be, writes Mueller. Theyre not team players, not go along to get along personalities. They can be prickly and doctrinaire. They can seem obsessive, even unstable.

Reading this book, you get the strong sense that if the characters involved didnt start out that way, then they had every reason to develop in that direction. To go against the crowd and the prevailing ethos requires a certain independence of spirit, but to withstand the opprobrium, threats, financial ruin and sometimes imprisonment likely to come your way demands a psychological resilience that is bestowed on very few people who, as it were, look normal on television.

One obvious exception is Daniel Ellsberg, arguably the most famous America whistleblower of the 20th century (and Muellers focus is resolutely on the US), who also turns up in these pages. Photogenic and with a PhD from Harvard, Ellsberg exposed the US governments lies and deception over the Vietnam war when he handed classified documents to the New York Times. For disclosing the so-called Pentagon Papers he faced a 115-year jail sentence, but was found not guilty after a bizarre trial in which it was revealed that Watergate conspirators had broken into Ellsbergs psychiatrists office to steal Ellsbergs file.

Ellsberg remains the go-to guy for the media whenever a major act of whistleblowing hits the headlines, like Edward Snowdens revelations about the practices of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US. Predictably, Snowden and Chelsea Manning are both referenced here in a wide-ranging analysis of intelligence whistleblowers.

Mueller points a critical finger at President Obama, who, he notes, had promised to protect whistleblowers when running for office but once in the White House condemned national security whistleblowers more harshly than any other president in history.

Obama drew, or at least attempted to draw, a distinction between whistleblowers and traitors, but if thats a clear line, its one that different people place in different positions, usually depending on their own relationship to power.

Mueller is a little surprised to find that corporate and governmental whistleblowers have more in common than he first assumed. At their core all are concerned with an ethical crisis of some kind and the binding group mentality against which they turn. Perhaps the most troubling stories in the book are those that operate between the two gravitational fields of big business and government.

Take the case of Allen Jones, an investigator at the Office of the Inspector General in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. One day he discovered that a cheque for $2,000 had been placed in an unregistered bank account of the states chief pharmacist. In the grand scheme of things, it was a tiny figure, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a loose pebble that started an avalanche.

Through diligently following the money, Jones discovered that a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson had persuaded the states of Pennsylvania and Texas to require all doctors at state facilities to use atypical antipsychotics for a variety of conditions, which cost up to 45 times more than the drugs they replaced, though they produced no better results and had more disturbing side-effects.

For his trouble, Jones was ordered by the office of the Republican governor of Pennsylvania to stop his investigations and, when he didnt, he was moved away and, after going public, drummed out of his job. He sued his employers and those responsible but the defendants were granted immunity, he lost his house and had to settle for such a negligible amount that, after paying his creditors, he was left with just $1,200.

No one likes a snitch, they say in criminal circles. If theres one thing beyond all others that Mueller conveys to the reader, its that those circles are a lot bigger than you might think.

Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller is published by Atlantic (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over 15

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Crisis of Conscience by Tom Mueller review what drives a whistleblower? - The Guardian

Surprise, anger, parenting and Lizzo: That's one way to sum up NPR's list of our most engaging stories in 2019, as those themes drew a huge amount of interest from our readers this year. Other big topics included consumerism and climate change and officials behaving badly.

People often linger for several minutes on these popular pages. Collectively, NPR's readers spent the equivalent of more than 35 years' worth of time reading our top five stories. The top draw was a story about how to help kids handle anger; altogether, readers spent nearly 16 years' worth of time reading that report.

1. How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger

At the top of the world, the Inuit culture has developed a sophisticated way to sculpt kids' behavior without yelling or scolding. Could discipline actually be playful?

2. American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 DiedWhen she was 19, Renee Bach founded a charity that went on to care for more than 900 severely malnourished babies and children. Now she is being sued by two of the mothers whose children died.

3. 'The Best Thing You Can Do Is Not Buy More Stuff,' Says 'Secondhand' Expert"Your average thrift store in the United States only sells about one-third of the stuff that ends up on its shelves," Adam Minter says. His book explores what happens to the things that don't sell.

4. U.S. Charges Dozens Of Parents, Coaches In Massive College Admissions ScandalActresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among 33 parents who paid large sums of money to cheat admissions standards at prestigious schools, federal prosecutors say.

5. Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image Of IranThe tweet had experts picking up their jaws from the floor when they saw a photo of an Iranian space facility an image that was almost certainly taken by a classified satellite or drone.

6. The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning

Adrian Lamo was a hero in the hacker community for years. Everything changed when he began exchanging messages with U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

7. FACT CHECK: Trump's State Of The Union AddressNPR reporters provided context and analysis in real time as President Trump delivered the annual speech to Congress: "Remarkably, President Trump did not acknowledge the new power dynamic in Washington."

8. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline"Even the solutions that we have considered big and bold are nowhere near the scale of the actual problem that climate change presents to us," Ocasio-Cortez said.

9. 'Game Of Thrones' Season 8, Episode 5: 'Let It Be Fear'In the series' penultimate episode, the quality of mercy gets seriously strained. And stabbed. And set aflame. And razed. And several characters meet their final fates.

10. NPR's Book ConciergeThe end-of-year Book Concierge recommends more than 350 great reads across 30 genres hand-picked by NPR staff and trusted critics.

In terms of page views, a slightly different list emerges. While some of the top stories are the same, here are the top 10 most-viewed stories that didn't also appear in the above list. All of the pages drew more than 1 million views on NPR's website, not including traffic on other platforms, such as Apple News or Facebook.

1. Lizzo: Tiny Desk Concert

Backed by a band assembled just for this occasion, the breakthrough pop icon performs three joyfully showy songs from Cuz I Love You.

2. Patient With 'Tree Man' Syndrome Says He 'Can Finally Live A Normal Life'The man, who lives in Gaza, has undergone a pioneering treatment by Israeli surgeons for a severe case of this rare condition.

3. Speaker Pelosi Revokes Vice President Pence's House Office SpaceRepublicans had given Pence, a former House member, a first-floor bonus office in the House side of the U.S. Capitol shortly after President Trump was inaugurated.

4. Court Says Using Chalk On Tires For Parking Enforcement Violates ConstitutionA federal appeals court in Michigan cited the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures.

5. 'Not One Drop Of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon

Five young, purebred bulls mysteriously showed up dead on the ranch this past summer, drained of blood and with body parts precisely removed.

6. 3 Indiana Judges Suspended After White Castle Brawl That Left 2 Of Them WoundedA fight apparently started when one of the judges raised a middle finger at two men yelling from a passing SUV. The Indiana Supreme Court found that the three had "gravely undermined public trust."

7. Workers Are Falling Ill, Even Dying, After Making Kitchen CountertopsIrreversible lung disease has started to show up among young workers who cut, grind and polish countertops made of increasingly popular "engineered" stone. The material is more than 90% silica.

8. Taylor Swift: Tiny Desk ConcertAs she settled in for the set at NPR's offices, Taylor Swift looked out over the crowd. "I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them."

9. Notre Dame Cathedral Fire Extinguished; Spire Collapsed, Towers Still StandingAs night fell on Paris and the fire continued to burn, people knelt and sang "Ave Maria" as they watched the blaze.

10. Florida Governor Declares State Of Emergency As Hurricane Dorian Gains ForceAs the storm neared, the National Hurricane Center said Dorian's winds could top 115 mph making it a Category 3 storm.

NPR senior manager for digital analytics Christina Macholan contributed to this report.

Link:
The 20 Top Stories On NPR In 2019 - KRWG

Inviting Russia back to G8 seems likegood idea

Harvey Glatt, in his Dec. 14 letter, writes, "But (Vladimir) Putin, since Russia's membership (in the G8)was suspended, has stepped up both his aggression in Ukraine and his efforts to undermine democratic nations, including the United States."

He follows up with the complaint that President Donald Trump and U.S. Rep. Brian Mast voted to allow Russia back into the G7 summit. Since exclusion, by Glatts own admission, is not working, allowing Russia back seems like a good idea. The adage of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" would seem to apply.

President Barack Obama was cowardly and incapable of facing anyone down. He only bowed and pandered to the world, while demeaning the United States. He did nothing when Russia invaded Crimea, and sent "blankets" to help Ukraine protect themselves from a Russian invasion.

I hardly think trying to isolate Russia is going to accomplish anything except to encourage them to partner up with China It's hard to negotiate anything when you aren't willing to talk.

So kudos to Trump and Mast for their courage and reason in leaving the door open.

Maureen Cotter, Vero Beach

Chelsea Manning during A Conversation with Chelsea Manning at Bard College, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson on Wednesday, February 21, 2018. Manning was convicted of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, including battlefield reports on Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables, while working as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. She has said the leaks were intended to expose wrongdoing.(Photo: John Meore/Poughkeepsie Journal)

Presidential clemency in history

David Horsmans snarky Dec. 15 letter decrying interference by "President Bone Spurs in the military justice system displays a woeful ignorance of presidential clemency involving U.S. military personnel.

President AbrahamLincoln, who did not serve, issued more than 60 pardons for military-related crimes before being assassinated. His successor, Andrew Johnson, granted clemency to many thousands of Confederate troops Christmas Day1868.

More recently, President Bill Clinton, who did not serve, granted posthumous clemency to Henry Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, found guilty of embezzlement but dishonorably dismissed from the Army. President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to many thousands of draft-dodgers from the Vietnam era.

President Barack Obama, who did not serve, commuted the 35-year sentence of Chelsea Manning, who had pled guilty to espionage, freeing the former Army intelligence specialist decades before her scheduled release date of 2045. I must have missed Horsmans letter on that one.

Jim Trout, Sebastian

I wonder why people who stop for a red light stop four car lengths behind the car in front of them.

When the light changes to green, it takes much more time to move through the intersection before the light changes to red again. I am confused as to why so many people think that is a good idea.

Barbara Beach, Stuart

A Dec. 11 Opinion piece about the Listen First Project recommends we listen to one another, particularly in matters of political discussion.

Thats difficult.

When, in a discussion, topics such asMedicare for all, free college tuition, forgiveness of college loans, welfare and driver licenses for non-citizens, etc., come up, and are challenged, you'll get, Well both sides do that; both sides make promises.

Asked for an example from the other side, the person calls you a name, refuses to argue whenin fact you were hoping for a discussion. We see examples of this every day.

This has gradually become the modus operandi of today's Democratic Party. It is not your father's or even grandfather's party. It is not the party of JFK, who famously said, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Today, that party has as one of its more prominent spokespersons Bernie Sanders, who says he's calling for socialism, but claims not to be looking at Cuba or Venezuela, but Denmark and Sweden.

The first two are socialist, the second two are not. (Actually, some Scandinavian countries that did try socialism years ago have since privatized industries and repealed regulations.) Denmark's prime minister recently refuted Sanders statement with, Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. In fact, in economic freedom Scandinavia is near the top. Their emphasis is on self-reliance and hard work.

Socialism crushes freedom as seen in Venezuela and Cuba. It is a system of ownership of the means of production and distribution by government, not individuals. Obviously, as our Constitution is based upon individual rights, it would have to be repealed or revoked by pen or sword to become our system here in the United States.

Audrey Taggart, Hobe Sound

The Dec. 16 letter from teacher Lynn Nissen was well articulated with regard to defining the elements involved in the dissemination of learning to students. In simple terms, teaching involves a behavioral technology designed to stimulate the brain to be receptive to the transmission of important lifelong information.

Indeed, it is not the responsibility of a teacher to function as a social worker, keeping antisocial behaviors from distracting from the learning process. That is the responsibility of educationally trained social workers, who ideally would function as guidance counselors or behavioral therapists.

Unfortunately the current composition of many families does not meet the standards of "the nuclear family. The concepts of single-parent households, dual-wage earners, divorce, and other situations often place an overwhelming and stress-laden burden on supervisory parenting.

When this deficiency manifests, mayhem, physical injury and gunshots may permeate the classroom.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of local school boards along with the FloridaBoard of Education to meet and address this situation. Parents and teachers must understand their designated roles and join together to create the positive classroom atmosphere. Hopefully when each participant fulfills their obligatory duties the educational process shall be enhanced.

Gary S. Weiner, Port St. Lucie

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Letters to the Editor: Dec. 24, 2019 - TCPalm

This past decade has brought about a seismic shift in how Americans view gender and gender expression particularly when it comes to the ever-expanding awareness of what it means to betransgender.

For this you can give at least partial credit to the many powerful pop-culture moments over the years from the coming out of Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning to the premiere of television shows like Transparent and Pose.

And while its impossible to pick just one as having had the most cultural impact, it is worth noting that theres been one young woman whose very public, very proud gender transition has been a consistent influencer now for more than a decade: Jazz Jennings.

Jazz is the Florida teen, reality-show star and transgender activist who first leapt into public view at age 6, during a candid and groundbreaking20/20 interviewwith Barbara Walters in 2007. And she remains squarely in the public eye today, allowing a massive and devoted audience to trail her and her loving family first through a 2011 Oprah Winfrey Network documentary and, as of 2015, on the TLC reality series, I Am Jazz as she goes through pretty much every milestone of adolescence, from dating and dances to college acceptance, not to mention her most personal experience of all: her gender-reassignment surgery.

The show averages over one million viewers per episode, which equals one immense social impact and thats not even counting the other ways Jazz has gotten her story out there over the years.

It's pretty surreal, to be honest, Jazz, now 19, tells Yahoo Lifestyle about her unique and lengthy experience in public view.

When we first decided to share our story, we had no idea how huge of an impact our family would have on so many other lives, she adds, so I think just seeing the way culture has shifted around gender, and people being more open and accepting to transgender people it's just really cool to know that we played a part in all of that.

The Jennings family first went public, through a local newspaper, in response to Jazzs kindergarten not allowing her to use female pronouns or wear dresses; the story was picked up nationally, and then snowballed from there to ABC and beyond. Her story was, for many Americans, their first time hearing about anyone being transgender especially someone so young. I think the main reason why we wanted to do it was just help others who were like me, transgender kids out there, to help them realize that they're not alone in their journey and that there's others like them, Jazz recalls.

When our family first shared our story, there really weren't any transgender kids in the public, or there weren't many who heard of transgender kids. And now I feel like you'll hear about trans kids more frequently, she adds. I think that shift is really amazing to see, because people are finally able to step out of the shadows and be their true authentic selves.

Her story has taken many other forms, as well, certainly widening its impact. In the years since Jazz spoke with Walters as a kindergartener, she returned as a braces-wearing tween for a follow-up in 2012 (and has sat for many other interviews as well), and she has co-written a childrens picture book, calledI Am Jazz, as well as a memoir,Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen.

She has also become aYouTube sensationwith 675,000 followers and blossomed as a reality star, first on the OWN Networks I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition, and then again on TLCs I Am Jazz, which enters its 6th season on Jan. 28. She has starred ina short film, Denim,about a trans teen who gets outed at school, and has conquered social media, amassing 961,000 followers onInstagram, where shes shared everything from her post-surgery debut in a swimsuit to news that she deferred her acceptance to Harvard. She has also starred ina commercial, was named one of Time magazines most influential teens of 2014 (and again in 2015), and became the youngest honoree ever to make both Outs Out 100 and the Advocates 40 under 40.

It is a lot of pressure, she admits.

Jazz Jennings, at 13, flanked by Elle Fanning and Alex Newell onstage during the 24th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles in 2013. (Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for GLAAD)

But the still-rippling impact of her ongoing journey has been unprecedented and groundbreaking, explains Nick Adams, director of transgender representation atGLAAD, which advocates for fair and accurate LGBTQ media representation.

"I think that Jazz and her family's decision to share so many details of her life as a young transgender girl going through both a social and medical transition have had impact in two ways, Adams says. It has allowed Americans who think theyve never met someone who's transgender to get to know Jazzs family and to know what it means to love and support your transgender child. And for families who do have transgender children, it's given them hope and critical information about what their journey may be like as they support their child."

Now, as we slide out of the 2010s and into 2020, hope on the transgender equality front is needed perhaps more than ever. While media visibility has reached an encouraging high point, the Trump administration has triggered a transgender rights rollback in a slew of areas, from serving in the military to receiving medical treatment. And as of Dec. 7 2019 got the dismal distinction of becoming the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans. That date is whenNikki Kuhnhausen, 18, was found dead in in Vancouver, Wash., becoming the 27th transgender homicide victim of the year.

Jazz posted about Nikkis murderon Facebook, saying, simply, She was only 18....the murders must stop.

So does visibility really have the power to bring about change? Adams believes it does.

Backlash has grown against many different marginalized groups of people, he says, but it is often fueled by stoking peoples fears and ignorance about people different from them. So, I believe that the more we can have visibility, the more we can combat that ignorance and that fear and for people who have the safety and privilege to do that, I think it can make a difference. They can change hearts and minds.

Lets take a look back at some moments during the past decade that aimed to do just that.

"The last decade has seen a tremendous increase in visibility for people who are transgender, and media representations are starting to portray trans people in more real and authentic ways, Adams says. Growing cultural awareness about people who are trans has also sparked more conversations among non-trans people about the rigid and outdated gender-based expectations that affect all of us.

Billy Porter attends the 91st Annual Academy Awards. (Photo: Dan MacMedan/Getty Images)

Some of those conversations have come out of basic yet groundbreaking moments whenTide featured a stay-at-home dadin a 2011 commercial, for example, and whenTarget announcedin 2015 that it would eliminate separate boys and girls sections for toys and bedding. Those seemingly tame moments caused both celebration and outrage over the collective message: The time for gender stereotypes had come to an end.

Those gave way to bigger, bolder milestones in gender fluidity such asBilly Porter wearing a gownon the 2019 Oscars red carpet, and Jonathan Van Ness (who would soon announce he was nonbinary) making a similar moveat the 2019 Emmy Awards.

Actor Asia Kate Dillon. (Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Back in 2015, Miley Cyrus noted that she does not relate to being boy or girl, whileAmandla Stenberg opted for they/themsingular pronouns in 2016, and nonbinary actorAsia Kate Dillonmade history on Billions. Later that same year,Jill Soloway, creator of the groundbreaking Transparent series, came out as nonbinary and embraced the singular they, followed bySam Smithin 2019. Its no wonder Merriam-Websterdeclared theyits word of the year.

The transgender milestone moments, meanwhile, deserve their own timeline.

In 2010, there were two major moments at the federal government level: President Barack Obama made a high-profile transgender appointment in Washington, D.C., withAmanda Simpson, to the Department of Commerces Bureau of Industry and Security while the State Department made it possible for trans people, no matter what state they lived in and regardless of whether or not theyd had gender reassignment surgery, to change the gender marker on their U.S passports.

Lea Tbecame known as the first transgender supermodel in 2010, while the first of what would soon become a handful of pregnant transgender men to gain notoriety, Thomas Trace Beattie, made it into Guinness World Records in 2010.

Chaz Bono helped to bring transgender men into the public eye. (Photo: Getty Images)

Chaz Bono also brought transgender men into the spotlight in 2011, by releasing the documentary of his transition, Becoming Chaz, and by being cast on Dancing With the Stars. In 2012, TV show Glee introduced its first transgender character, Unique. And the American Psychiatric Association announced that its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) would remove the term, Gender Identity Disorder, replacing it with Gender Dysphoria, assuring that transgender people may no longer be subject to a lifelong default diagnosis of their mental health,noted GLAADat the time.

In 2013, on the eve of her 2013 sentencing for sharing classified military documents with WikiLeaks,Chelsea Manningcame out as a transgender woman. That same year would seeLaverne Coxstarring in Netflixs hit Orange is the New Black and gracingthe cover of Time magazine.

Transparent debuted on Amazon in 2014 and also that same year,Katie Couric had a public learning momentthat helped observers, too: During an interview with Cox and transgender model Carmen Carrera on her daytime talk show, Couric asked a question about the state of Carreras genitalia, and was promptly schooled by Cox about that being too invasive. Couric later apologized and admitted shed learned a valuable lesson.

That was one of the most important moments in the last decade, Adams says. All of journalism woke up and went, Oh my god, were not supposed to be asking trans people about their genitals?

But 2014 ended with the widely covered, heartbreaking suicide of Ohio transgender teenLeelah Alcorn, which educated people worldwide on the importance of empathetic parents. Her suicide note on Tumblr read, [My mom] told me that I am wrong. ... If you are reading this, parents, please dont tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people dont ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That wont do anything but make them hate them self. Thats exactly what it did to me.

Former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning speaks to the press before a Grand Jury appearance. (Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2015, Caitlyn Jenner brought a new level of celebrity to being trans first by coming out as a transgender woman on a 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer that pulled in a whopping17.1 million viewers, and then by appearing in a white corset on the cover ofVanity Fair and kicking off her reality show, I Am Cait, on the E! network.

A backlash in the form of some politicians using scare tactics to prevent trans people from using the bathroom matching their gender identity went full steam ahead in places around the country, with North Carolina signingHB2, or the bathroom bill,into law in 2016. It required everyone to use the bathroom corresponding with the sex they were originally assigned, but the nationwide protest was so intense that the bill was repealed in 2017.

Also in 2017, transgender activistAshlee Marie Prestoncalled Caitlyn Jenner a "fraud" in a video that went viral, bringing awareness to the vast diversity of opinions within the trans community. That year also saw greater visibility in terms of trans actors:A Fantastic Woman, starring transgender Chilean actress Daniela Vega, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The groundbreakingTV series Pose featuring the largest cast ever of transgender actors in scripted roles and written by trans activist Janet Mock debuted on FX in 2018, fictionalizing the queer ballroom culture of the 80s and 90s that was first brought to light by the documentary Paris Is Burning, whileSupergirl season 4starred actress Nicole Maines as TVs first trans superhero, Nia Nal.

While Pose was bringing acceptance, visibility and fame to so many, however, the rate of murders of trans women, particularly black trans women, was climbing, sparking protests and vigils in cities across the country. Thecollective grief was oddly juxtaposedwith the excitement of Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of Stonewall in June.

As Adams says today, We still have a long way to go before people can be true to themselves without fear of discrimination and violence.

Still, in spite of the continuing threat against trans people, Jazz says she remains ever faithful to the power of representation. I definitely think visibility has a lot of value, she says. I think the more people hear about transgender individuals, the more they can be open to accepting us for who we are. And I just think it needs to continue.

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Jazz Jennings, Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner: How the last decade changed the way we see gender - Yahoo Lifestyle

captionWhitney Houston.sourceKevork Djansezian/Getty Images

As 2019 and another decade comes to a close, Google has shared the top trending searches of the past 10 years.

These are the people, places, things, and news events that saw the biggest spikes in traffic for a continuous period of time compared to the previous year, providing a glimpse into the topics that dominated the public interest over the past decade.

The 2010s brought the tragic deaths of celebrities like Whitney Houston, Robin Williams, and Paul Walker, major news events included Hurricane Irma and the trial of Casey Anthony, and two FIFA World Cups. Nearly every year, a hurricane dominated the search terms.

Heres a look back at the top 10 trending Google searches from each year of the past decade.

In 2010, Spain won its first FIFA World Cup title by defeating the Netherlands in extra time, becoming the eighth nation to win the tournament. Hundreds of millions of fans watched the 64 matches, which were played across nine cities in South Africa and marked the first time an African country hosted the tournament.

Also that year: A massive trove of classified communications between US diplomats was given to Julian Assanges organization Wikileaks by Chelsea Manning, then a soldier in the US Army. A devastating earthquake left hundreds of thousands dead in Haiti. Chatroulette, a website that randomly connects users in webcam chats, launched and quickly became popular. Former child actor Corey Haim died of pneumonia after struggling with prescription drug abuse.

Top 10 trending searches in 2010:

Following the tragic death of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony in 2008, her mother, Casey, stood trial in what became one of the most widely televised cases of the decade. The nation tuned in for drama-fueled testimony and people literally fought to get into the courtroom to watch live. A jury ultimately found Anthony not guilty of first degree murder in 2011.

Also that year: Image-sharing website Pinterest took off. Google entertained users by letting them search do a barrel roll to make the website do a 360-degree spin and let it snow to blanket the page in snowflakes. Hurricane Irene hit the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving dozens dead and causing billions of dollars in damage.

Top 10 trending searches in 2011:

Legendary singer Whitney Houston, the Queen of Pop, died in 2012 at the age of 48. Houston won six Grammy awards and was nominated for 25 for her vocal performances, and remains one of the best-selling artists of all time.

Also that year: Mexican-American Banda singer Jenni Rivera died in a plane crash. 27 people, most of them children, were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Top 10 trending searches in 2012:

Actor Paul Walker, best known for his role as Brian OConner in the popular Fast and the Furious movie series, passed away in 2013 in a car crash at age 40. Walkers death prompted an outpouring of support, especially from fellow cast and crew members, who had grown incredibly close over the years.

Also that year: Glee start Cory Monteith died of a drug overdose. The U.S. government temporarily halted most of its operations after Congress failed to approve its budget. Jodi Arias was found guilty of murdering her ex-boyfriend in a trial that became a cable television spectacle.

Top 10 trending searches in 2013:

Academy Award-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams committed suicide in August 2014 at age 63 after struggling with severe depression as well as dementia. Williams starred in a number of well-known films such as Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, and Disneys Aladdin.

Also that year: mobile game Flappy Bird went viral, earning its creator, Dong Nguyen, $50,000 per day before Nguyen abruptly pulled the plug. Protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, over law enforcements treatment of African-American residents after police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager. Russia controversially invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula, a region of Ukraine, prompting criticism from the international community.

Top 10 trending searches in 2014:

Two-time NBA Championship winner Lamar Odom was hospitalized after being discovered unconscious in a Nevada brothel in 2015, an incident that left him fighting for his life at the time and dominated the news cycle that year. Odom, who was also previously married to the reality TV star Khloe Kardashian, made headlines more recently for his newly announced engagement to personal trainer Sabrina Parr.

Also that year: Terrorist attacks shocked Paris: attacks in November that killed 130 and injured more than 400, and a shooting in January at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. A mobile game called Agar.io skyrocketed in popularity after Frank Underwood, the main character from Netflixs House of Cards played by Kevin Spacey, was seen playing it in the shows fourth season.

Top 10 trending searches in 2015:

The Powerball jackpot hit a record $1.6 billion in 2016 and went to three lucky winners in Tennessee, California, and Florida. The odds that they would land on all of the winning numbers 4, 8, 19, 27, and 34 as well as Powerball 10 were 1 in 292.2 million.

Also that year: A new take on the classic mobile game Snake called Slither.io topped App Store charts. Most of the years other search trends were dominated by the 2016 US presidential election.

Top 10 trending searches in 2016:

Hurricane Irma was the most powerful storm outside the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean when it hit Florida and the Caribbean in 2017. It reached maximum sustained wind speeds of 185 miles per hour, and maintained that intensity for a record 37 hours.

Also that year: Fidget spinners became the years hottest toy, a rare solar eclipse was visible in parts of the United States, and a gunman opened fire and killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas.

Top 10 trending searches in 2017:

France emerged as the victor among the 32 countries that competed in the 2018 FIFA World Cup in what has been perceived as being the best tournament yet. France took the coveted title after a landmark match against Croatia, winning by two points.

Also that year: Iconic fashion designer Kate Spade was found dead in her New York City apartment at age 55, renowned chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain died by suicide, the Marvel film Black Panther topped the box office.

Top 10 trending searches in 2018:

Disneys highly-anticipated streaming service debuted in November 2019, offers movies and TV shows from Walt Disney Studios and Walt Disney Television properties for $7 per month. That means you can get classic Disney movies, Pixar films, Marvel content, and more in one app.

Also this year: Cameron Boyce, the Disney channel star known for his role in the TV show Jessie, died at age 20 after suffering an epileptic seizure, and the HBO phenomenon Game of Thrones finally came to an end.

Top 10 trending searches in 2019:

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These are the top Google searches of the past decade: From Disney Plus to Whitney Houston and the World Cup - Business Insider

In order to evaluate the claims of massive human rights violations of the Uyghurs, an ethnic and religious minority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, it is important to know a few facts.

Xinjiang Province in the far western region of China is an arid, mountainous and still largely underdeveloped region. Xinjiang has significant oil and mineral reserves and is currently Chinas largest natural-gas-producing region.

It is home to a number of diverse ethnic groups, including Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tajiks, Hui and Han peoples.

Xinjiang borders five Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where more than 1 million U.S. troops and even more mercenaries, contractors and secret agents have operated over four decades in an endless U.S. war.

What is happening in Xinjiang today must be seen in the context of what has been happening throughout Central Asia.

Xinjiang is a major logistics center for Chinas ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Xinjiang is the gateway to Central and West Asia, as well as to European markets.

The Southern Xinjiang Railway runs to the city of Kashgar in Chinas far west where it is now connected to Pakistans rail network under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project of the BRI.

The U.S. government is deeply hostile to this vast economic development project and is doing all it can to sabotage Chinas plans. This campaign is part of the U.S. militarys Pivot to Asia, along with naval threats in the South China Sea and support for separatist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet.

Map features Central Asia and China, including Xinjiang.

No U.N. report on Xinjiang

The U.S. and its corporate media charge that the Chinese government has rounded up 1 million people, mainly Uyghurs, into concentration camps. News reports cite the United Nations as their source.

This was disputed in a detailed investigative report by Ben Norton and Ajit Singh titled, No, the UN did not report China has massive internment camps for Uighur Muslims. (The Grayzone.com, Aug. 23, 2018) They expose how this widely publicized claim is based entirely on unsourced allegations by a single U.S. member, Gay McDougall, on an independent committee with an official sounding name: U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that no U.N. body or official has made such a charge against China.

CIA/NED-funded human rights

After this fraudulent news story received wide coverage, it was followed by reports from the Washington-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. This group receives most of its funds from U.S. government grants, primarily from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy, a major source of funding for U.S. regime change operations around the world.

The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders shares the same Washington address as Human Rights Watch. The HRW has been a major source of attacks on governments targeted by the U.S., such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria and China. The network has long called for sanctions against China.

The CHRDs sources include Radio Free Asia, a news agency funded for decades by the U.S. government. The World Uighur Congress, another source of sensationalized reports, is also funded by NED. The same U.S. government funding is behind the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association.

The authors of the Grayzone article cite years of detailed IRS filing forms to back up their claim. They list millions of dollars in generous government funding to generate false reports.

This whole network of supposedly impartial civil society groups, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks and news sources operates under the cover of human rights to promote sanctions and war.

CIA-funded terror

Central Asia has experienced the worst forms of U.S. military power.

Beginning in 1979, the CIA, operating with the ISI Pakistani Intelligence Service and Saudi money, funded and equipped reactionary Mujahedeen forces in Afghanistan to bring down a revolutionary government there. The U.S. cultivated and promoted extreme religious fanaticism, based in Saudi Arabia, against progressive secular regimes in the region. This reactionary force was also weaponized against the Soviet Union and an anti-imperialist Islamic current represented by the Iranian Revolution.

For four decades, the CIA and secret Pakistan ISI forces in Afghanistan sought to recruit and train Uyghur mercenaries, planning to use them as a future terror force in China. Chechnyans from Russias Caucasus region were recruited for the same reason. Both groups were funneled into Syria in the U.S. regime-change operation there. These fanatical religious forces, along with other small ethnic groups, formed the backbone of the Islamic State group (IS) and Al-Qaida.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombing, the very forces that U.S. secret operations had helped to create became the enemy.

Uyghurs from Xinjiang were among the Al-Qaida prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo for years without charges. Legal appeals exposed that the Uyghur prisoners were being held there under some of the worst conditions in solitary confinement.

U.S. wars dislocate region

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the massive U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 created shockwaves of dislocation. Social progress, education, health care and infrastructure were destroyed. Sectarian and ethnic division was encouraged to divide opposition to U.S. occupations. Despite promises of great progress, the U.S. occupations sowed only destruction.

In this long war, U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were notorious. The CIA used enhanced interrogation techniques torture and secret rendition to Guantanamo, Bagram and the Salt Pit in Afghanistan. These secret prisons have since been the source of many legal suits.

According to U.N. investigations, by 2010 the U.S. held more than 27,000 prisoners in over 100 secret facilities around the world. Searing images and reports of systematic torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan surfaced.

Exposing coverup of war crimes

In July 2010 WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 classified U.S./NATO reports on the war in Afghanistan.

In October of that year, a massive leak of 400,000 military videos, photos and documents exposed, in harrowing detai,l torture, summary executions and other war crimes. Army intelligence analyst former Private Chelsea Manning released this damning material to WikiLeaks.

Based on the leaked documents, the U.N. chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, called on U.S. President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of these crimes, including abuse, torture, rape and murder committed against the Iraqi people following the U.S. invasion and occupation.

The leaked reports provided documentary proof of 109,000 deaths including 66,000 civilians. This is seldom mentioned in the media, in contrast to the highly publicized and unsourced charges now raised against China.

Prosecuting whistle blowers

The CIAs National Endowment for Democracy pays handsomely for unsourced documents making claims of torture against China, while those who provided documentary proof of U.S. torture have been treated as criminals.

John Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA between 1990 and 2004 and confirmed widespread use of systematic torture, was prosecuted by the Obama administration for revealing classified information and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Chelsea Mannings release of tens of thousands of government documents confirming torture and abuse, in addition to horrific photos of mass killings, have led to her continued incarceration. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is imprisoned in Britain and faces deportation to the U.S. for his role in disseminating these documents.

Rewriting history

How much of the coverage of Xinjiang is intended to deflect world attention from the continuing crimes of U.S. wars from Afghanistan to Syria?

In 2014 a Senate CIA Torture Report confirmed that a torture program, called Detention and Interrogation Program, had been approved by top U.S. officials. Only a 525-page Executive Summary of its 6,000 pages was released, but it was enough to confirm that the CIA program was far more brutal and extensive than had previously been released.

Mercenaries flood into Syria

The U.S. regime-change effort to overturn the government of Syria funneled more than 100,000 foreign mercenaries and fanatical religious forces into the war. They were well-equipped with advanced weapons, military gear, provisions and paychecks.

One-third of the Syrian population was uprooted in the war. Millions of refugees flooded into Europe and neighboring countries.

Beginning in 2013, thousands of Uyghur fighters were smuggled into Syria to train with the extremist Uyghur group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party. Fighting alongside Al-Qaida and Al-Nusra terror units, these forces played key roles in several battles.

Reuters, Associated Press and Newsweek all reported that up to 5,000 Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs from Xinjiang were fighting in various militant groups in Syria.

According to Syrian media, a transplanted Uyghur colony transformed the city of al Zanbaka (on the Turkish border) into an entrenched camp of 18,000 people. Many of the Uyghur fighters were smuggled to the Turkish-Syrian border area with their families. Speaking Turkish, rather than Chinese, they relied on the support of the Turkish secret services.

China follows a different path

China is determined to follow a different path in dealing with fanatical groups that are weaponized by religious extremism. Chinas action comes after terror attacks and explosives have killed hundreds of civilians in busy shopping areas and crowded train and bus stations since the 1990s.

China has dealt with the problem of religious extremism by setting up large-scale vocational education and training centers. Rather than creating worse underdevelopment through bombing campaigns, it is seeking to engage the population in education, skill development and rapid economic and infrastructure development.

Terrorist attacks in Xinjiang have stopped since the reeducation campaigns began in 2017.

Two worldviews of Xinjiang

In July of this year, 22 countries, most in Europe plus Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, sent a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council criticizing China for mass arbitrary detentions and other violations against Muslims in Chinas Xinjiang region. The statement did not include a single signature from a Muslim-majority state.

Days later, a far larger group of 34 countries now expanded to 54 from Asia, Africa and Latin America submitted a letter in defense of Chinas policies. These countries expressed their firm support of Chinas counterterrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang.

More than a dozen member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N. signed the statement.

A further statement on Oct. 31 to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly explained that a number of diplomats, international organizations, officials and journalists had traveled to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counterterrorism and deradicalization.

What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the [Western] media, said the statement.

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Behind the U.S. anti-China campaign - Workers World

The Afghanistan papers: The criminality and disaster of a war based upon lies 10 December 2019

The publication Monday by the Washington Post of interviews with senior US officials and military commanders on the nearly two-decades-old US war in Afghanistan has provided a damning indictment of both the criminality and abject failure of an imperialist intervention conducted on the basis of lies.

The Post obtained the raw interviews after a three-year Freedom of Information Act court battle. While initially they were not secret, the Obama administration moved to classify the documents after the newspaper sought to obtain them.

The interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2018 in a Lessons Learned project initiated by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The project was designed to review the failures of the Afghanistan intervention with the aim of preventing their repetition the next time US imperialism seeks to carry out an illegal invasion and occupation of an oppressed country.

SIGARs director, John Sopko, freely admitted to the Post that the interviews provided irrefutable evidence that the American people have constantly been lied to about the war in Afghanistan.

What emerges from the interviews, conducted with more than 400 US military officers, special forces operatives, officials from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and senior advisers to both US commanders in Afghanistan and the White House, is an overriding sense of failure tinged with bitterness and cynicism. Those who participated had no expectation that their words would be made public.

Douglas Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as the Afghanistan war czar under the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told his government interviewers in 2015, If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction... 2,400 [American] lives lost. Who will say this war was in vain?

Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser under Bush, was even more explicit in his admission of US imperialisms debacle in Afghanistanand elsewhere. He told his SIGAR interviewers that Washington had no post-stabilization model that works, adding that this had been proven not only in Afghanistan, but in Iraq as well. Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I dont have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.

Ryan Crocker, who served as Washingtons senior man in Kabul under both Bush and Obama, told SIGAR that Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption. Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, its somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.

This corruption was fed by vast expenditures on the part of the US government on Afghanistans supposed reconstruction$133 billion, more than Washington spent, adjusted for inflation, on the entire Marshal Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after the Second World War. As the interviews make clear, this money went largely into the pockets of corrupt Afghan politicians and contractors and to fund projects that were neither needed nor wanted by the Afghan people.

The US National Endowment for Democracys former senior program officer for Afghanistan told his interviewers that Afghans with whom he had worked were in favor of a socialist or communist approach because thats how they remembered things the last time the system worked, i.e., before the 1980s CIA-backed Islamist insurgency that toppled a Soviet-backed government and unleashed a protracted civil war that claimed the lives of over a million. He also blamed the failure of US reconstruction efforts on a dogmatic adherence to free-market principles.

An Army colonel who advised three top US commanders in Afghanistan told the interviewers that, by 2006, the US-backed puppet government in Kabul had self-organized into a kleptocracy.

US military personnel engaged in what has supposedly been a core mission of training Afghan security forces to be able to fight on their own to defend the corrupt US-backed regime in Kabul were scathing in their assessments.

A special forces officer told interviewers that the Afghan police whom his troops had trained were awfulthe bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel, estimating that one third of the recruits were drug addicts or Taliban. Another US adviser said that the Afghans that he worked with reeked of jet fuel because they were constantly smuggling it out of the base to sell on the black market.

Faced with the continuing failure of its attempts to quell the insurgency in Afghanistan and create a viable US-backed regime and army, US officials lied. Every president and his top military commanders, from Bush to Obama to Trump, insisted that progress was being made and the US was winning the war, or, as Trump put it during his lightning Thanksgiving trip in and out of Afghanistan, was victorious on the battlefield.

The liars in the White House and the Pentagon demanded supporting lies from those on the ground in Afghanistan. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone, an Army counterinsurgency adviser to the Afghanistan commanders told SIGAR.

A National Security Council official explained that every reversal was spun into a sign of progress: For example, attacks are getting worse? Thats because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability. Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? Its because the Taliban are getting desperate, so its actually an indicator that were winning. The purpose of these lies was to justify the continued deployment of US troops and the continued carnage in Afghanistan.

Today, the carnage is only escalating. According to the United Nations, last year 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, the highest number since the UN began counting casualties over a decade ago. US airstrikes have also been rising to an all-time high, killing 579 civilians in the first 10 months of this year, a third more than in 2018.

The lies exposed by the SIGAR interviews have been echoed by a pliant corporate media that has paid scant attention to the longest war in US history. The most extensive exposure of US war crimes in Afghanistan came in 2010, based on some 91,000 secret documents provided by the courageous US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is now being held in Britains maximum security Belmarsh Prison facing extradition to the United States on Espionage Act charges that carry a penalty of life imprisonment or worse for the crime of exposing these war crimes. Manning is herself imprisoned in US Federal detention center in Virginia for refusing to testify against Assange.

On October 9, 2001, two days after Washington launched its now 18-year-long war on Afghanistan and amid a furor of war propaganda from the US government and the corporate media, the World Socialist Web Site posted a statement titled Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan. It exposed the lie that this was a war for justice and the security of the American people against terrorism and insisted that the present action by the United States is an imperialist war in which Washington aimed to establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control over not only Afghanistan, but over the broader region of Central Asia, home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.

The WSWS stated at the time: The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration. What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis.

The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for socialism.

These warnings have been borne out entirely by the criminal and tragic events of the last 18 years, even as the Washington Post now finds itself compelled to admit the bankruptcy of the entire sordid intervention in Afghanistan that it previously supported.

The US debacle in Afghanistan is only the antechamber of a far more dangerous eruption of US militarism, as Washington shifts its global strategy from the war on terrorism to preparation for war against its great power rivals, in the first instance, nuclear-armed China and Russia.

Opposition to war and the defense of democratic rightsposed most sharply in the fight for the freedom of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manningmust be guided by a global strategy that consciously links this fight to the growing eruption of social struggles of the international working class against capitalist exploitation and political oppression.

Bill Van Auken

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

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The Afghanistan papers: The criminality and disaster of a war based upon lies - World Socialist Web Site