CALGARY, Alberta, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Summit Nanotech Corporation (“Summit”), a leader in sustainable lithium extraction technology, announced today that it has successfully closed US$25.5 million in funding led by Evok Innovations and BDC Capital’s Climate Tech Fund, with participation from Xora Innovation, Capricorn Investment Group, Mitsui Kinzoku – SBI Material Innovation Fund, and LG Technology Ventures.
“This funding comes at a pivotal time for Summit as we strengthen our strategic partnerships and transition from demonstration to full-scale commercial design,” said Amanda Hall, Founder and CEO. “We are ready to provide our industry-leading solution to lithium mining companies who want to maintain a strong focus on economics and environmental responsibility.”
Summit’s innovative direct lithium extraction (“DLE”) technology, denaLi™, combines system and fully integrated water recycling. Data analytics and AI are harnessed for advanced process control that ensures reduced water use, maximum sorbent lifespan, maximum lithium recovery and leading on-stream reliability, driving levelized lithium costs down. By unlocking more resources economically, Summit’s technology will strengthen international supply chains.
Nobuyoshi Sogabe, General Manager at Mitsui Kinzoku, expressed enthusiasm about the investment: “We are committed to make an effort to achieve a lithium supply chain from brine by collaborating our advanced material synthesis, processing, and scaling technologies with Summit’s innovative denaLi™ system, thereby contributing to the realization of a sustainable society.”
In the last six months, Summit has achieved key milestones, including commissioning a demonstration plant in Northern Chile, successful sorbent qualification results with a major lithium mining company, and launching their proprietary data analytics platform. With strong investor backing and a commitment to innovation and cost reduction, Summit is well-positioned to drive the future of sustainable lithium extraction.
“The demand for electric vehicles will soon outpace growth in lithium supply. Summit’s technology addresses this challenge by optimizing lithium extraction from brine to produce high-quality lithium at a lower cost,” said Cheri Corbett, Partner at BDC Capital’s Climate Tech Fund. “We need to get more competitive lithium to market if we are to meet the global demand for electric vehicles. That’s why we’re working with results-driven leaders like Amanda and her team. A great example of a growth-minded Canadian business, exactly the kind that BDC is designed to help get to the next level.”
About Summit Nanotech Corporation
Summit is a leading provider of direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology for the lithium mining industry. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Summit has invented a patented sorbent, DLE process technology, and data analytics platform that, when combined, improves project economics by over $1,000 per tonne LCE and unlocks additional plant capacity compared to competing DLE technologies. Its technology selectively and efficiently captures lithium ions from brine which, after conversion, can be sold directly to a battery manufacturer. Summit partners with mining and oil and gas companies to accelerate and optimize their lithium resources.
As the world shifts toward electrification, Summit is committed to building a cleaner, more responsible lithium supply chain for future generations.
Learn more at summitnanotech.com.
Media Contact:
Kristen Gray Manager, Communications and Investor Relations media@summitnanotech.com
SAN FRANCISCO, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Delinea, a pioneering provider of solutions for securing human and machine identities through centralized authorization, today announced the close of its 2024 fiscal year with several key achievements, cementing its leadership in identity security. The company delivered annual recurring revenue (ARR) approaching $400 million, with recurring revenue now comprising 95% of Total GAAP Revenue. Additionally, Delinea continued to grow its SaaS ARR, representing the majority of total ARR, demonstrating the value its cloud-native platform brings to its customers, particularly as organizations require advanced identity security solutions to secure AI-driven systems.
Delinea also continued to achieve an operating profile that reflects its ability to drive profitable growth, showcasing its strength in executing a sustainable business model. To build on this momentum and drive continuous innovation in a rapidly evolving market, the company is expanding its global footprint to Mexico City. This strategic investment allows the company to build centralized teams, increase capacity, and scale operations more efficiently, strengthening its position as a leader in identity security.
“2024 was a transformative year for our industry, with AI rapidly reshaping how organizations operate and intensifying the need for advanced identity security,” said Art Gilliland, Chief Executive Officer of Delinea. “We’re committed to staying ahead of this shift, helping customers secure AI-driven systems and adapt to emerging threats. Expanding to Mexico City is a key part of our strategy to foster innovation, enhance collaboration, and scale operations, ensuring we continue to deliver the solutions our customers need to thrive in an evolving digital landscape.”
To further accelerate its growth and innovation roadmap, Delinea has strengthened its leadership team with key executive hires:
Chris Kelly, President – A visionary leader with deep expertise in enterprise software growth and strategy, bringing valuable experience from his tenure at CyberArk.
Pierre Mouallem, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) – A seasoned security expert dedicated to strengthening Delinea’s cybersecurity leadership with a proven track record from SailPoint.
Missy Ballew, Chief People Officer – An accomplished people leader with extensive experience scaling high-growth SaaS companies, including time at Hewlett Packard, focused on driving talent and culture to support Delinea’s expansion.
“Our execution remains strong, driven by high market demand for our solutions,” said Stephanie Reiter, Chief Financial Officer at Delinea. “With ARR approaching $400 million and our SaaS business at the forefront, we are well-positioned to continue shaping the future of identity security for modern enterprises – especially as AI adoption accelerates.”
Delinea is a pioneer in securing human and machine identities through intelligent, centralized authorization. Our solutions empower organizations to seamlessly govern interactions across the modern enterprise, ensuring robust security while maintaining operational efficiency. Leveraging AI-powered intelligence, Delinea’s cloud-native Identity Security Platform applies context across the entire identity lifecycle — from cloud and infrastructure to data, SaaS, and AI – enabling real-time threat detection and rapid response. By securing all users and identities — including workforce, IT admin, developers, and machines — Delinea guarantees secure access regardless of location or device. With deployment in weeks, not months, 90% fewer resources to manage than the nearest competitor, and a guaranteed 99.99% uptime, Delinea delivers security and efficiency without compromise. Learn more about Delinea on delinea.com, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
TORONTO, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Volaris Group announced the acquisition of Nydus Systems Informatica. Based in São Paulo, Brazil, with a branch in Recife, Brazil, Nydus specializes in Human Resources Management Systems & Payroll solutions tailored to small-to-medium sized businesses across Brazil.
“We are thrilled to welcome Nydus, a reputable company with more than 34 years in the marketplace!” says Ricardo Pinho, Volaris Group LATAM Group Manager. “With Nydus’ innovative HR solutions, engaged team and a shared commitment to excellence, we look forward to working together to enhance service for our clients, drive business growth and achieve success.”
Founded in 1991 by Adalberto Argente and Lominita Silva, Nydus has evolved into a trusted leader in the Brazilian HR technology sector. Their platform simplifies payroll processing, benefits administration, and recruitment, ensuring compliance with Brazil’s LGPD regulations and union standards. Additionally, Nydus caters to the BPO market, providing comprehensive payroll outsourcing services.
“After more than three decades of entrepreneurial journey, I realized that, although Nydus was constantly growing, we needed a new boost to expand our horizons. That’s when the opportunity to participate in Volaris’s Group acquisition process emerged, and throughout this journey, I became increasingly certain that I was on the right path,” explains Adalberto Argente, Nydus Founder, and CEO. “I am excited about the opportunity to join the Volaris Group and share experiences with other entrepreneurs in a global environment. Being part of such a solid organization can help accelerate our innovation process and take us to levels we’ve dreamed of reaching. Knowing that Nydus will have a permanent home within this esteemed organization gives me confidence that our legacy will be preserved and enhanced. Now, alongside Volaris’s Group leaders, we can continue to deliver exceptional value to our clients and partners, with even more resources and possibilities,” concludes Adalberto Argente.
Nydus Systems Informatica will continue to operate under the leadership of CEO & Founder Adalberto Argente.
About Nydus Systems Informatica Nydus serves a diverse clientele spanning various industries including construction, transportation, healthcare, business services and retail. In 2024, the company was nominated as a Best HR Supplier, a testament to its commitment to excellence.
About Volaris Group Volaris acquires, strengthens, and grows vertical market technology companies. As an Operating Group of Constellation Software Inc., Volaris strengthens businesses within the markets they compete, enabling them to grow – whether that growth comes through organic measures such as new initiatives and product development, day-to-day business, or through complementary acquisitions. Learn more at www.volarisgroup.com.
For more information:
Ryan Hill Volaris Group Tel: +1 416-831-0305 ryans.hill@volarisgroup.com
FREMONT, Calif., March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Enphase Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENPH), a global energy technology company and the world’s leading supplier of microinverter-based solar and battery systems, today commended the introduction of Brazil’s new fire safety standard, Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) NBR 17193, which outlines stringent recommendations like rapid shutdown functionality requirements for solar installations in all buildings.
The new standard emphasizes the importance of safety in solar energy systems, particularly focusing on reducing fire hazards associated with high-voltage direct current (DC) energy components like centralized “string” inverters. Enphase’s microinverter technology intelligently converts low-voltage DC from solar panels into safe low-voltage alternating current (AC) right at the panel, inherently aligning with the new safety standard objectives by eliminating the need for high-voltage DC in residential and commercial solar installations.
Additionally, all Enphase microinverters support rapid shutdown functionality, a critical safety feature that allows for the immediate de-energization of the system in emergency situations. The new safety standard recommends that all solar installations in Brazil have rapid shutdown functionality before connecting to the grid. This capability not only helps protect property, people, and emergency personnel but also aligns with global best practices for solar system safety. Brazil installers and distributors can learn more about the standard on the Enphase website (English and Portuguese).
“Enphase’s microinverters have revolutionized our approach to solar installations,” said Adriano Coury, CEO of Onway Energy, an installer of Enphase products in Brazil. “The low-voltage AC design not only simplifies the installation process but also significantly reduces fire risks to help protect homeowners and emergency response teams.”
“Safety is paramount in our operations,” said João Lucas Silva, CEO of Solusun, an installer of Enphase products in Brazil. “With Enphase’s microinverters, we can offer our clients a solution that complies with the latest safety standards and provides peace of mind.”
“Enphase’s microinverters arrived in the Brazilian market meeting all safety requirements, ensuring protection for installers and homeowners,” said Marcel Ciriaco, founder of EnergySeg, an installer of Enphase’s products in Brazil. “The NBR 17193 corroborates the compliance of Enphase’s microinverters with global safety standards. Therefore, our Enphase customers will continue to benefit from the credibility and technological efficiency of our solution.”
“This critical new safety standard is a significant milestone for the Brazilian solar industry, setting new benchmarks for safety and reliability,” said Ken Fong, senior vice president and general manager of the Americas and APAC at Enphase Energy. “Our microinverter technology is designed to meet and exceed these standards, providing Brazilian customers with safe, reliable, and high-performance solar energy solutions.”
Installers of Enphase’s products in Brazil can order IQ8P™ Microinverters today, with peak output AC power of 480 W, supporting newer high-powered solar modules. All IQ8P Microinverters activated in Brazil come with a 25-year limited warranty. For more information about Enphase Energy in Brazil, please visit the website.
About Enphase Energy, Inc.
Enphase Energy, a global energy technology company based in Fremont, CA, is the world’s leading supplier of microinverter-based solar and battery systems that enable people to harness the sun to make, use, save, and sell their own power—and control it all with a smart mobile app. The company revolutionized the solar industry with its microinverter-based technology and builds all-in-one solar, battery, and software solutions. Enphase has shipped approximately 80.0 million microinverters, and approximately 4.7 million Enphase-based systems have been deployed in more than 160 countries. For more information, visit https://enphase.com/.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements, including statements related to the expected capabilities and performance of Enphase Energy’s technology and products, including safety, quality and reliability. These forward-looking statements are based on Enphase Energy’s current expectations and inherently involve significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements as a result of such risks and uncertainties including those risks described in more detail in Enphase Energy’s most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents filed by Enphase Energy from time to time with the SEC. Enphase Energy undertakes no duty or obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release as a result of new information, future events, or changes in its expectations, except as required by law.
~ Strengthens Portfolio with Strategic Expansion in Latin America ~
~ First of Four Anticipated Acquisitions in 2025 ~
NEW YORK, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Nuvini Group Limited (Nasdaq: NVNI) (“Nuvini” or the “Company”), a leading acquirer of private B2B SaaS companies in Latin America, today announced that it has entered into a term sheet (the “Term Sheet”) for the acquisition of Munddi Soluções em Tecnologia Ltda. – ME (“Munddi”), an online platform that connects brands with consumers, suppliers, and retail chains based in São Paulo, Brazil. This acquisition, if completed, will mark the first of four planned for 2025 as part of Nuvini’s ongoing expansion strategy. The transaction is expected to close in approximately 60 days, subject to the execution of the relevant definitive transaction documents and the satisfaction of applicable conditions precedent.
“The acquisition of Munddi is a perfect fit for our portfolio and a strong start to our 2025 acquisition pipeline,” said Pierre Schurmann, CEO of Nuvini. “Munddi’s platform aligns seamlessly with our existing companies, including Onclick, Leadlovers, and Mercos, creating new synergies that drive revenue growth and enhance our ecosystem of B2B SaaS solutions. We remain committed to our strategy of acquiring, managing, and scaling companies that add strategic value to our network.”
Strategic Fit & Growth Potential
After the acquisition, Munddi will strengthen Nuvini’s growing ecosystem of SaaS businesses, particularly in retail and supply chain solutions. Its integration with Onclick, Leadlovers, and Mercos will unlock cross-selling opportunities, optimize business intelligence, and expand service offerings for Latin American enterprises.
About Munddi
Founded in 2015, Munddi helps small retailers acquire new customers by providing strategic insights and facilitating online product sourcing from regional suppliers. The platform empowers both manufacturers and retailers with data-driven business opportunities, streamlining the connection between buyers and sellers in the retail supply chain.
About Nuvini
Headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, Nuvini is Latin America’s leading private serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies. The company focuses on acquiring profitable, high-growth SaaS businesses with strong recurring revenue and cash flow generation. By fostering an entrepreneurial environment, Nuvini enables its portfolio companies to scale and maintain leadership within their respective industries. The company’s long-term vision is to buy, retain, and create value through strategic partnerships and operational expertise.
Disclaimer and Forward-Looking Statements
Any obligation of the Company under the Term Sheet is subject to, among other things, the execution of the relevant definitive transaction documents, the result of a due diligence on Munddi, the satisfaction of conditions precedent for a transaction of this nature. There can be no assurance that any definitive transaction agreements will be entered into or that the potential Munddi acquisition will be consummated on the terms set forth herein, or at all. Therefore, it is possible that such potential acquisition may never occur.
Statements about future expectations, plans and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the potential Munddi acquisition and the Term Sheet, including the Concurrent Investment and the other terms thereof. The words “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “will,” “would” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including, without limitation: the Company’s ability to negotiate and enter into a definitive agreement with respect to the potential Munddi acquisition or any other alternative proposals on terms satisfactory to the Company, as well as the desirability of any such potential Munddi acquisition compared to alternatives which may be available to the Company; if a definitive agreement is reached, the Company’s ability to complete the potential acquisition on the anticipated timeline or at all; general market conditions that could affect the consummation of the potential acquisition; if definitive documents with respect to a potential acquisition are executed, whether the parties will achieve any of the anticipated benefits of any such Proposed Transaction; and other factors discussed in the “Risk Factors” section of the Company’s Quarterly and Annual Reports filed with the SEC, and the risks described in other filings that the Company may make with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof, and the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Investor Relations Contact Sofia Toledo ir@nuvini.co
Honduran National Police officers and rescue teams from the Honduran government work in rescue operations after a small plane crashed into the sea, on Roatan island, Honduras, on March 17, 2025. [Photo/Xinhua]
At least six people were killed after a small plane lost control and crashed on Monday evening upon taking off from Roatan Island in northern Honduras, said Octavio Pineda, minister of Infrastructure and Transportation of Honduras.
The plane carried 18 people, including 15 passengers and three crew members, said the official.
The aircraft lost power upon takeoff and fell into the sea some 1 km from the side of the airstrip, Miroslava Cerpas, the presidential commissioner of the National 911 Emergency System of Honduras told Xinhua.
The aircraft of the Lanhsa company was carrying out a local flight from the Juan Manuel Galvez International Airport in Roatan to the city of La Ceiba.
BRIGHTON, Mass. — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apprehended Sostenes Perez-Lopez, 59, an illegal Guatemalan alien charged with two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child in Brighton, Feb. 18.
“Sostenes Perez-Lopez stands accused of some horrific crimes against a child in Massachusetts,” said ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde. “We will not tolerate the victimization of our residents at the hands of alien offenders. ICE Boston will continue to prioritize the safety of our public by arresting and removing illegally present lawbreakers.”
Perez illegally entered the United States on an unknown date, at an unknown location and without being inspected by a U.S. immigration official.
ICE lodged an immigration detainer against Perez with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, Nashua Street Jail Nov. 28, 2024, following Perez’ apprehension for indecent assault and battery on a child under 14.
The Boston Municipal Court, Brighton Division, arraigned Perez Nov. 29, 2024, on two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. Following his arraignment, the court ordered Perez committed to the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in lieu of posting bail in the amount of $8,000.
The Boston Municipal Court ignored the ICE detainer and released Perez on bail Dec. 12, 2024. The court fitted Perez with GPS to include special conditions pending the outcome of his case.
ICE served Perez with a notice to appear before a Department of Justice immigration judge following his arrest and he remains in ICE custody.
Members of the public can report crimes or suspicious activity by dialing the ICE Tip Line at 866-DHS-2-ICE (866-347-2423) or completing the online tip form.
Learn more about ICE’s mission to increase public safety in our communities on X: @EROBoston.
When Marlena Edmonson, a social worker and elementary school counselor from Indiana, considered running for political office, she thought she needed to be an expert in economics or political science if she wanted to throw her hat into the ring.
Joshua Levin ’25 (MSW), a student at the UConn School of Social Work, had toyed with the idea of running for office, but felt like he needed more information on how to actually run an effective campaign.
Also a student at UConn, Quinn Meehan ’26 (MSW) is passionate about making things like political social work, campaigning, and being involved in politics more accessible for those living with disabilities.
And Kashmir Flood, a Master of Social Work student at the Columbia University School of Social Work, sees herself incorporating political work and social work practice together in some way – whether by running for office herself or supporting candidates in the future.
For many of the 130 social workers and students who traveled to Hartford on the first weekend in March and spent two days in a chilly, windowless conference room at the Downtown Marriott hotel in Hartford, the idea of launching, running, or participating in a campaign for political office had seemed like a daunting task.
How do you get started?
Why are the rules so complicated?
And, if I run for office, will I really have to call people on the phone to ask them for money?
But travel they did, from 20 different states and the District of Columbia – some coming from as far as California, New Mexico, Iowa, and Arkansas – to take part in the 29th iteration of the Campaign School for Social Workers, presented by the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work and to learn, step-by-step, the ins and outs of running a political campaign at any level of government.
Founded in 1995 by the late former UConn School of Social Work dean, Nancy A. Humphreys, her namesake institute works to increase the political participation and power of social workers and the communities they serve.
Since 1996, the Campaign School has trained thousands of social workers, students, and faculty from both the U.S. and abroad on what it’s like to get involved in politics as volunteers, staff, advocates, and candidates; to navigate systemic barriers; and to uphold the social work profession’s values and code of ethics while participating in the political process.
Charles Lewis, founder and director of the Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy in Washington D.C.; Kimberly Hardy, second vice chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party and president of the Society for Spirituality and Social Work; Connecticut State Representative Cristin McCarthy Vahey; and Tanya Rhodes Smith, outgoing director of the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work at UConn, speak at a panel during Humphreys Institute Campaign School, held on March 7 and 8, 2025. (Thomas Rettig/UConn Photo)
Despite the typical public perception of what social workers do, notes the Humphreys Institute’s outgoing director Tanya Rhodes Smith, social work was founded as a political profession and has always been committed to not only working with individuals, but also to working on solutions to the complex issues impacting the communities that they serve.
And a big part of that is, and always has been, the profession’s active and visible role in the political process.
“Democracy reflects the priorities of those who show up,” Rhodes Smith told the participants on the first day of this year’s Campaign School, “and hint: it’s a small group of people. So, it matters who votes, who holds office, who works on campaigns, and who donates money.”
The skills that make someone a great social worker, Rhodes Smith explained, also make someone a great candidate, and learning how to take part in politics and campaigning is as much about developing leadership skills as it is figuring out financing rules and putting out yard signs.
She also warned that Day One of campaign school would be “like drinking out of a firehose.”
“But we’re going to teach you to live your life as a candidate, so that you will be ready when you decide or are asked to run or serve by others,” Rhodes Smith said.
Have a Plan. Write it Down.
“Close your eyes,” ordered Kate Coyne-McCoy, the person who’s been holding that proverbial firehose at nearly every Campaign School.
“Imagine you’re back in grade school, and you take the bus to your friend Susie’s house, and you go in, and you call your mother, and you say, ‘Mom, I’m at Susie’s and I just invited myself to dinner.’ If you’re like my mother, there’s an audible gasp. You don’t invite yourself to dinner,” Coyne-McCoy continued.
“Now, open your eyes. It’s 2025. You’re not just going to invite yourself to dinner. When you get there, you’re going to ask for money.”
Coyne-McCoy is a social worker who has trained more than 9,000 individuals to run for elected office, is a former Congressional candidate herself, and served as the chief trainer for the Harvard Square to the Oval Office program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
And fundraising, she told the participants, is the barrier to most candidacies – the thing you don’t want to do more than anything.
“You cannot get elected to anything if you don’t have the money to communicate with the people you need to,” Coyne-McCoy said. “I know that 90 percent of you are sitting here saying, ‘Nope.’ You can – you all can. But are you willing to do it?”
Though this year marked Coyne-McCoy’s final Campaign School training, she didn’t try to ease the water pressure from her firehose of information. Day One was a nonstop onslaught starting with becoming a candidate, ending with volunteer recruitment, and covering everything in between.
The depth and breadth of the material was surprising to some of the attendees.
“I was afraid it would be more local, and not enough of the others,” said Edmonson, who is interested in running for federal office. “But I feel like I got what I needed.”
You cannot get elected to anything if you don’t have the money to communicate with the people you need to. I know that 90 percent of you are sitting here saying, ‘Nope.’ You can – you all can. But are you willing to do it? — Kate Coyne-McCoy
“I didn’t think it was to be this amount of information at this level of expertise,” Meehan said. “I didn’t think it was going to be complete experts in the field, from so many different organizations, and so, that was really what impressed me.”
Early on in the day, Coyne-McCoy – who spent all of Day One on her feet, roaming around the room while barreling through her training materials and engaging the participants as they peppered her with questions and hypothetical scenarios – explained that it doesn’t matter what office someone is running for: They need to a have a campaign plan and write it down.
That plan needs to include details on their campaign team, their fundraising and budget, messaging, research, and their timeline.
Over the rest of the day, she’d periodically quiz the participants on these essentials.
“What’s the most important part about campaign planning?” she’d call out.
As the day went on, the chorus of voices that responded grew stronger and louder as they’d answer back.
“Have a plan. Write it down.”
The day also included a messaging component where the participants worked to craft their own personal story, a 90-second pitch that explained why they were running and why someone should vote for them – something not just valuable on a campaign, but also in their lives and as social workers.
“Telling your story is about you,” Coyne-McCoy explained. “It’s the thing you should do when you walk into a job interview. It’s what you would do when you walk into a legislator’s office.”
A few participants shared their stories, including a young woman who beat addiction and wants to see those who lack access to health care find the services they need.
And a teacher who saw the lack of resources her students experienced and saw how it made them feel – as though they didn’t matter.
And a social worker and teenage mother who wants her peers to join her in consistently upholding the values and ethics of the social work profession.
That code of ethics – a set of standards set forth by the National Association of Social Workers – was a consistent theme of this year’s Campaign School, Rhodes Smith said, because whether seeking to serve in local, state, or federal office, the code can be applied to help social workers navigate all types of challenges, including conflicts with values that might occur in politics.
“Politics and campaigns exist in a partisan context, but the code rises above party,” she said, “and it’s our superpower and guide through every sticky situation or ethical dilemma.”
‘Any one of you could do it’
The firehose of Day One gave way to a quieter, more thoughtful approach on Day Two, where discussions started a day dedicated to processing everything learned the day before and figuring out how participants might apply it in their own lives.
In-depth discussions with social workers serving in various elected offices were encouraging but realistic about what it means to both run for and hold office.
“We need to demystify how to run for office,” said Justin Roias, a city councilor in Providence. “It feels complicated, and that feels intentional. There’s a lot of things hidden that you need to learn yourself. But once you do, you’ll get there.”
“When I think about local politics, I think about cultivating future leaders,” said Kai Belton, a state representative from Middletown. “And then, I’m looking in this room full of social workers, and I’m like, oh my god, this is amazing. I can’t tell you how many of my colleagues up at the legislature say, ‘Kai, we need more social workers up here.’
UConn Social Work Student Jacob Pierce – with Tanya Rhodes Smith, outgoing director of the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work – at the Humphreys Institute Campaign School on March 7, 2025. (Thomas Rettig/UConn Photo)
“There are so many people who want to see you win, and you will have the support that you need. I think that this looks intimidating, but it’s really not, and I think that any one of you could do it.”
Discussions with community organizers and panelists looking to navigate power imbalances and improve representation in politics stressed the importance of perseverance.
“Embrace the long game,” encouraged Katrina Huff-Larmond, a city councilor in Randolf, Massachusetts. “We have to understand that what we are fighting for is not going to happen tomorrow. And there’s so much work we need to do in the community, it’s going to take time. We can’t give up.”
The day concluded as participants revisited their personal stories – with some choosing to share and present them while standing at the podium before their peers – and with a challenge from Rhodes Smith: To share what their next step would be when they left campaign school.
Edmonson plans to get in touch with a local official to talk about her potential future campaign.
Meehan wants to work with a co-organizer to help mobilize people with disabilities and help them register to vote, especially people living in institutions.
Others plan to attend local board or city council meetings, volunteer, get involved.
For Flood, the weekend helped her find the connection and encouragement that she needed.
“I knew it would make me want to think about ways that I could find myself in social work and politics,” Flood said, “but it just really solidified for me that, ok, this is really what I want to do. And I didn’t think I could have any more fire in my belly than I do now. So, I’m so happy and really excited.”
And Levin, who said he plans refer back to his notes from the weekend for a while to come, said anyone considering committing the time to go to Campaign School should, “Do it.”
“It’s so easy to convince ourselves to not do something,” Levin said. “There’s always going to be 1,000 reasons to not do something, but that one reason is definitely more important.”
-Accretive transaction valued at approximately U.S. $85 million-
-Bitfarms to reinvest capital in U.S. growth opportunities-
This news release constitutes a “designated news release” for the purposes of Bitfarms’ second amended and restated prospectus supplement dated December 17, 2024, to its short form base shelf prospectus dated November 10, 2023.
TORONTO, Ontario, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitfarms Ltd. (NASDAQ/TSX: BITF), a global Bitcoin and vertically integrated data center company, today announced the successful completion of the sale of its 200 MW data center in Yguazu, Paraguay to HIVE Digital Technologies, Ltd. (“HIVE”).
Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon stated, “We are pleased to have expeditiously completed the sale of our Yguazu site to HIVE, allowing us to streamline our operations and further rebalance our portfolio towards North America. We now anticipate that our year-end 2025 proforma energy portfolio will be ~80% North American and ~20% international, marking a significant milestone in our transition from an international Bitcoin miner to a North American energy and compute infrastructure company.”
CFO Jeff Lucas stated, “This accretive sale is expected to significantly reduce our 2025 capex requirements, while reducing our average power costs by 10%. We plan to reinvest the savings and capital from this sale towards our 1.1 GW U.S. growth pipeline for Bitcoin mining and HPC/AI infrastructure, in line with our strategy to grow in the U.S. and diversify beyond Bitcoin mining.”
About Bitfarms Ltd.
Founded in 2017, Bitfarms is a global Bitcoin and vertically integrated data center company that sells its computational power to one or more mining pools from which it receives payment in Bitcoin. Bitfarms develops, owns, and operates vertically integrated mining facilities with in-house management and company-owned electrical engineering, installation service, and multiple onsite technical repair centers.
Bitfarms currently has 15 operating Bitcoin data centers in four countries: the United States, Canada, Paraguay, and Argentina. Powered predominantly by environmentally friendly hydro-electric and long-term power contracts, Bitfarms is committed to using sustainable and often underutilized energy infrastructure.
To learn more about Bitfarms’ events, developments, and online communities:
HPC/AI = High Performance Computing / Artificial Intelligence
GW = Gigawatt
Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain “forward-looking information” and “forward-looking statements” (collectively, “forward-looking information”) that are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release and are covered by safe harbors under Canadian and United States securities laws. The statements and information in this release regardingthe sale of the Yguazu, Paraguay Site, the merits of the rebalancing operations to North America, the reinvestment of the proceeds of the sale for growth and projected growth, the North American energy and compute infrastructure strategyand other statements regarding future growth, plans and objectives of the Company are forward-looking information. Any statements that involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as “expects”, or “does not expect”, “is expected”, “anticipates” or “does not anticipate”, “plans”, “budget”, “scheduled”, “forecasts”, “estimates”, “prospects”, “believes” or “intends” or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results “may” or “could”, “would”, “might” or “will” be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking information and are intended to identify forward-looking information.
This forward-looking information is based on assumptions and estimates of management of the Company at the time they were made, and involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such factors include, among others, risks relating to: the failure to receive payments owing pursuant to the sale of the Yguazu, Paraguay Site on the terms as announced or at all; the reinvestment of the proceeds of the sale may not occur on an economic basis; the anticipated benefits of the rebalancing of operations to North America and the North American energy and compute infrastructure strategy may not be realized; an inability to apply the Company’s data centers to HPC/AI opportunities on a profitable basis; a failure to secure long-term contracts associated with HPC/AI customers on terms which are economic or at all; the construction and operation of the Company’s facilities may not occur as currently planned, or at all; expansion may not materialize as currently anticipated, or at all; the digital currency market; the ability to successfully mine digital currency; revenue may not increase as currently anticipated, or at all; it may not be possible to profitably liquidate the current digital currency inventory, or at all; a decline in digital currency prices may have a significant negative impact on operations; an increase in network difficulty may have a significant negative impact on operations; the volatility of digital currency prices; the anticipated growth and sustainability of hydroelectricity for the purposes of cryptocurrency mining in the applicable jurisdictions; the inability to maintain reliable and economical sources of power for the Company to operate cryptocurrency mining assets; the risks of an increase in the Company’s electricity costs, cost of natural gas, changes in currency exchange rates, energy curtailment or regulatory changes in the energy regimes in the jurisdictions in which the Company operates and the adverse impact on the Company’s profitability; future capital needs and the ability to complete current and future financings, including Bitfarms’ ability to utilize an at-the-market offering program ( “ATM Program”) and the prices at which securities may be sold in such ATM Program, as well as capital market conditions in general; share dilution resulting from an ATM Program and from other equity issuances; the risk that a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting could result in a misstatement of the Company’s financial position that may lead to a material misstatement of the annual or interim consolidated financial statements if not prevented or detected on a timely basis; any regulations or laws that will prevent Bitfarms from operating its business; historical prices of digital currencies and the ability to mine digital currencies that will be consistent with historical prices; and the adoption or expansion of any regulation or law that will prevent Bitfarms from operating its business, or make it more costly to do so. For further information concerning these and other risks and uncertainties, refer to the Company’s filings onwww.sedarplus.ca(which are also available on the website of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission atwww.sec.gov), including the restated MD&A for the year-ended December 31, 2023, filed on December 9, 2024. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended, including factors that are currently unknown to or deemed immaterial by the Company. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate as actual results, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking information other than as required by law.Trading in the securities of the Company should be considered highly speculative. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, or any other securities exchange or regulatory authority accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Investor Relations Contacts:
Tracy Krumme SVP, Head of IR & Corp. Comms. +1 786-671-5638 tkrumme@bitfarms.com
MEASURES TO PREVENT DRUG ABUSE AND COMBAT ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE
Posted On: 18 MAR 2025 3:26PM by PIB Delhi
To address the problem of Drug Abuse, Government has formulated and implemented the National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction (NAPDDR) under which the Government is taking a sustained and coordinated action for arresting the problem of substance abuse. This includes:
Launched Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (NMBA) in all districts of the country through more than 10000 master volunteers. It has reached out to more-than 14.79 crore people including 4.96 crore youth and 2.97 crore women.
350 Integrated Rehabilitation Centers for Addicts (IRCAs) are supported by the Government to provide treatment for the drug victims, preventive education, awareness generation, motivational counseling, detoxification/de-addiction, after care and re-integration into the social mainstream.
46 Community based Peer led Intervention (CPLI) Centers supported by the Government focuses on vulnerable and at risk children and adolescents.
74 Outreach and Drop In Centers (ODICs) supported by the Government provide safe and secure space for treatment, rehabilitation, screening, assessment, counseling, referral, linkage for treatment and rehabilitation services for substance users.
142 Addiction Treatment Facilities (ATFs) has been established in Government hospitals through All India Institute of Medical science (AIIMS), New Delhi.
124 District De-addiction Centres (DDACs) which provides all three facilities provided by IRCA, ODIC and CPLI under one roof have been set up so far.
A Toll-free Helpline for de-addiction, 14446 is operated for providing primary counseling and immediate assistance to persons seeking help.
Government through its autonomous body National Institute of Social Defense (NISD) and other collaborating agencies like State Counsel of Educational Research and Training (SCERTs), Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, etc. provides for regular awareness generation and sensitization sessions for all stakeholders including students, teachers, parents.
Navchetna Modules, teachers training modules have been developed by Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment (MoSJE) for sensitizing students (6th – 11th standard), teachers and parents on drug dependence, related coping strategies and life skills.
As per latest data published by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) pertaining to the year 2022; Drug-wise seizures under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act during 2018 to 2022 is at Annexure-I.
The Government made various efforts to tackle the illegal drug trade in border areas, some of which are as under: –
A 4-tier Narco-Coordination Centre (NCORD) mechanism for ensuring better coordination between Central & State Drug Law Enforcement Agencies and other stakeholders in the field of controlling drug trafficking and drug abuse in India has been established. An all-in-one NCORD portal has been developed for information related to drug law enforcement.
A dedicated Anti-Narcotics Task Force (ANTF) headed by Additional Director General/ Inspector General level Police Officer has been established in each State/ Union Territory to function as the NCORD Secretariat for the State/ Union Territory and follow-up on compliance of decisions taken in NCORD meetings at different levels.
To monitor the investigation of important and significant seizures, a Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) under the Chairmanship of Director General, Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has been set up.
National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been empowered under NDPS Act, 1985 in the year 2020 for investigation of narco-terrorism cases.
Border Guarding Forces (Border Security Force, Assam Rifles and Sashastra Seema Bal) have been empowered under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985 to carry out search, seizure and arrest for illicit trafficking of narcotic drugs at international border. Further, Railway Protection Force (RPF) has also been empowered under NDPS Act to check drug trafficking along the railway routes.
Narcotics Control Bureau coordinates with other agencies like, Navy, Coast Guard, Border Security Force, State ANTF, etc. to conduct joint operations to control the drug trafficking.
A high level dedicated group has been created in National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) in November 2022 to analyze the drug trafficking through maritime routes, challenges and solutions (Maritime Security Group – NSCS).
Director General Level Talks are organized with neighboring and other countries such as Myanmar, Iran, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Singapore, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, etc. to resolve various issues on drug trafficking having international implications.
As a part of international co-operation, India has signed Bilateral Agreements with 27 countries, Memorandum of Understanding with 16 countries and Agreements on Security Cooperation with 02 countries for combating illicit trafficking of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) and Chemical Precursors as well as related offences.
India is closely associated with International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) and all its programs viz. PEN (Pre-Export Notification), PICS (Precursors Incident Communication System), and IONICS (International Operations on New Psychoactive Substances Incident Communication System).
Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) co-ordinates with various international organizations such as South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation- Drug Offences Monitoring Desk (SAARC-SDOMD), Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), Colombo Plan, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), ASEAN Senior Officials on Drug Matters (ASOD), Bay of Bengal Initiative For Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Co-Operation (BIMSTEC), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC),
International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), etc. for sharing information and intelligence to combat trans-national drug trafficking.
NCB India takes part in real-time information sharing with various Drug Liaison Officers of other countries such as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of the United States of America, the National Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) of Canada, Australian Federal Police (AFP) of Australia, Office Anti-Stupefiants (OFAST) of France, etc for operational and intelligence information.
This was stated by the Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs Shri Nityanand Rai in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.
The country is greatly dependent on other Asian countries for raw materials, mineral processing, battery and other basic requirements for production and promotion of e-vehicles in the country, since the basic raw material for production of electric vehicles is lithium and other critical materials. At present, investments in manufacturing and overall value addition for Advanced Chemistry Cells (ACCs) are negligible in India and almost entire domestic demand of ACCs is still being met through imports. In order to reduce dependency of imported ACC battery for electric vehicles, the Government on 12th May, 2021 approved a Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for manufacturing of Advance Chemistry Cell (ACC) in the country. The total outlay of the scheme is Rs.18,100 Crore for a period of 5 years. The scheme envisages to establish a competitive ACC battery manufacturing set up in the country (50 GWh).
As per the information received from Ministry of Mines, the Union Cabinet has approved the launch of the National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM) on 29th January, 2025, for a period of seven years from 2024-25 to 2030-31, with a proposed expenditure of Rs.16,300 crore and an expected investment of Rs.18,000 crore by Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and other stakeholders. The NCMM aims to secure a long-term sustainable supply of critical minerals and strengthen India’s critical mineral value chains encompassing all stages from mineral exploration and mining to beneficiation, processing, and recovery from end-of-life products.
In order to boost domestic production and reduce India’s dependence on imported lithium, cobalt and other key materials required for EV batteries, the Government of India has taken significant steps, which are as under:
The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 (MMDR) has been amended through the MMDR Amendment Act, 2023 w.e.f. 17.08.2023. The Amendment Act, 2023 provides for:
A list of 24 critical and strategic minerals in Part D of Schedule-I.
Omission of six minerals from the list of 12 atomic minerals in Part B of Schedule-I namely Lithium, Titanium, Beryl and beryllium bearing minerals, Niobium, Tantalum and Zirconium bearing minerals and their inclusion in the list of aforesaid 24 critical and strategic minerals.
Section 11D of the Act, which empowers Central Government to exclusively auction mining lease and composite license for critical & strategic minerals specified in Part D of the Schedule-I.
Exploration license for 29 minerals included in Schedule-VII of the Act.
In addition, Ministry of Mines has been empowered to auction blocks for grant of Exploration License through an order dated 21st October, 2024 under Section 20A of MMDR Act 1957. Central Government has successfully auctioned 24 blocks of critical and strategic minerals in 04 tranches in 2024.
The exploration of critical minerals has been significantly increased. Over the past three years, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) has undertaken 368 exploration projects focused on critical and strategic minerals. In the FY 2024-25, 195 projects are being executed, and 227 projects have been approved for the upcoming financial year.
100% FDI is allowed under “Automatic” route for mining and exploration of metal and non-metal ores. A foreign company may incorporate an Indian subsidiary company or invest in an existing Indian Company to become eligible for grant of mining and exploration rights.
To support the critical minerals sector, Government has eliminated customs duties on 25 minerals and reduced Basic Customs Duties (BCD) on 2 minerals in the Union Budget for 2024-25.
In the Union Budget 2025-26, the Government proposed to fully exempt cobalt powder and waste, the scrap of lithium-ion battery, Lead, Zinc and 12 more critical minerals to secure their availability for manufacturing in India and promote more jobs for India’s youth.
Ministry of Mines is engaged in various multilateral and bilateral platforms for strengthening the critical minerals value chain, focussing on multiple objectives, including the processing and recycling of critical minerals such as Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), the UK-India Technology Security Initiative (TSI) and others.
The Ministry of Mines has taken a significant step to acquire overseas mineral assets through the establishment of a joint venture company, KhanijBidesh India Ltd. (KABIL). Its overarching mission is to identify and acquire overseas mineral assets that hold critical and strategic significance, specifically targeting minerals like Lithium, Cobalt and others. KABIL has signed an Exploration and Development Agreement with CAMYEN, a state-owned enterprise of Catamarca province of Argentina, for Exploration and mining of Five Lithium Brine Block in Argentina with an area of around 15,703 Ha.
This information was given by the Minister of State for Steel and Heavy Industries, Shri Bhupathiraju Srinivasa Varma in a written reply in the Lok Sabha today.
Austin, TX and Barcelona, Spain, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Integration plays a critical role in enabling applications and digital services to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Today WSO2 is empowering software developers to gain new levels of productivity in creating and managing AI integrations with the introduction of its WSO2 Ballerina Integrator open-source software and Devant by WSO2 AI enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS).
WSO2 Ballerina Integrator and Devant, available now, address the dual demands around AI-enabled software integrations. They allow software developers to seamlessly switch between low-code and pro-code when creating integrations—an integration market first—while also utilizing AI-assisted development to streamline their efforts. At the same time, the products provide comprehensive support for connecting to large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and any system or application, and building AI agents that can then be used to execute intelligent integrations and power AI-driven applications.
WSO2 is demonstrating the new WSO2 Ballerina Integrator and Devant offerings and their AI capabilities at WSO2Con 2025, which runs March 18-20, 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
“AI-driven integrations are enabling a powerful new generation of intelligent applications and digital services, but they also bring new layers of complexity,” said Selvaratnam Uthaiyashankar, WSO2 senior vice president and general manager – integration. “With the introduction of our open-source WSO2 Ballerina Integrator and Devant AI enterprise iPaaS, we’re helping software developers to innovate new AI-driven experiences and improve their own productivity by cutting through that integration complexity.”
WSO2 Ballerina Integrator WSO2 Ballerina Integrator is a new AI-driven integration environment. It provides out-of-the-box support to connect anything—APIs, AI agents, systems, databases—across any environment and protocol, and it is complemented by 200-plus pre-built connectors. A component of the WSO2 Integrator product, it can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud, or across hybrid environments.
Low-Code/Pro-Code. WSO2 Ballerina Integrator is powered by Ballerina, the open-source programming language designed specifically for integration. It leverages Ballerina’s unique ability to let developers seamlessly switch between graphical low-code and textual pro-code interfaces and even view them side-by-side.
AI Development Assistance. Using the widely adopted Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor available with WSO2 Ballerina Integrator, developers can create integrations faster and tap WSO2 Copilot to further increase their productivity. For example, they can describe integration requirements in natural language to get AI-generated integration code, use an AI-powered test framework to automatically generate test cases, and utilize an AI assistant to map data fields between source and target schemas.
AI Agent and RAG Support. WSO2 Ballerina Integrator provides out-of-the-box support for building AI agents by using built-in capabilities combined with comprehensive connectivity to LLMs, vector databases, and other systems. It also supports the development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications that help LLMs to tap additional data sources to improve their accuracy.
Devant by WSO2 Devant by WSO2 is the new AI enterprise iPaaS designed for the AI-native era, enabling users to build intelligent integrations using both low-code and pro-code. It simplifies the development, deployment and management of integration flows while leveraging AI for automation, optimization, and real-time insights. Devant also delivers proven performance, since it is powered by the same technology that drives the Choreo internal developer platform as a service and WSO2 Integrator, including its WSO2 Ballerina Integrator and WSO2 Micro Integrator components.
Built to Create and Utilize AI Functionality. Devant provides all the capabilities of WSO2 Ballerina Integrator for AI-assisted development; features for creating AI agents and RAG applications; functionality for using AI agents in integration flows; and comprehensive support for integrating third-party AI services, vector databases and other systems. This empowers developers to use integration as a foundation for building intelligent (generative AI) digital experiences, streamlining workflows, and enhancing data connectivity for smarter decision-making.
Offering Enterprise PaaS Capabilities. Devant utilizes the same PaaS technology employed by Choreo to deliver the robust functionality organizations expect. It provides the ability to convert integrations as APIs into managed APIs, discover and reuse APIs, and create databases and message brokers. Devant also offers built-in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps support, zero trust security, and secret management. Additionally, it includes support for organizations and projects with configurable roles, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployment, and observability and usage insights.
Integration and Deployment Flexibility. Devant is supported by more than 200 pre-built connectors along with functionality for creating custom adapters. Additionally, customers have the option of a private data plane deployment with Devant, which can be hosted in either the enterprise’s own cloud environment or WSO2’s cloud environment.
Availability and Support WSO2 Ballerina Integrator 1.0 open-source software and the Devant AI enterprise iPaaS are now generally available. More details are covered in today’s integration product blog posts: WSO2 Ballerina Integrator and Devant. Additionally, developers and other technology professionals can visit WSO2’s website to download WSO2 Ballerina Integrator and try Devant for free.
About WSO2 Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the largest independent software vendor providing open-source API management, integration, and identity and access management (IAM) to thousands of enterprises in over 90 countries. WSO2’s products and platforms—including our next-gen internal developer platform, Choreo—empower organizations to leverage the full potential of artificial intelligence and APIs for securely delivering the next generation of AI-enabled digital services and applications. Our open-source, AI-driven, API-first approach frees developers and architects from vendor lock-in and enables rapid digital product creation. Recognized as leaders by industry analysts, WSO2 has over 800 employees worldwide with offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, the UK, and the US, with nearly USD100M in annual recurring revenue. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more. Follow WSO2 on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
Austin, TX and Barcelona, Spain, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — API management plays a central role in enabling applications and digital services to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Today WSO2 is empowering software developers to gain new levels of productivity and governance in creating and managing AI APIs with its latest API management offerings: the latest release of its market-leading, open-source WSO2 API Manager software and new Bijira AI API management software as a service (SaaS).
The newest release of WSO2 API Manager has been rearchitected for AI-driven API governance and compliance, AI API management, multi-gateway management and federation, and extended Kubernetes-native API gateway support, among other features. Bijira significantly expands upon and replaces Choreo for API Management to serve as an AI API management SaaS that brings the latest capabilities of WSO2 API Manager to a robust, proven cloud environment. WSO2 is demonstrating the latest WSO2 API Manager and Bijira offerings and their AI capabilities at WSO2Con 2025, which runs March 18-20, 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
“Organizations are increasingly modernizing their digital API ecosystems to innovate new classes of intelligent applications and services faster while reinforcing best practices,” said Christopher Davey, WSO2 vice president and general manager – API management. “With our rearchitected open-source WSO2 API Manager release and new Bijira AI API management SaaS, we’re helping enterprise software developers to meet their evolving needs by utilizing AI-assisted API management while ensuring security, scalability and governance.”
AI-Driven API Governance and AI Gateway WSO2 API Manager and Bijira now deliver AI-driven capabilities for automating API governance and creating APIs, as well as more effectively managing AI APIs.
AI-Powered, Automated API governance: API sprawl and inconsistent governance are major challenges for large organizations. Building on WSO2’s traditional governance capabilities, the new AI Governance feature uses generative AI to automatically ensure API compliance with organizational policies and industry standards. It interprets documentation, standards and specifications and then scans API designs to find inconsistencies and violations. By reducing the time needed to create and maintain complex rulesets, it enhances scalability and the ability to adapt to evolving compliance needs to ensure a consistent and secure API ecosystem.
Expanded AI Gateway: WSO2’s AI Gateway capability (formerly called Egress API Management) provides visibility and control over third-party APIs for AI services and large language models (LLMs). It has now been expanded to include multi-model backend support—becoming one of the first solutions to allow seamless, dynamic routing of AI API requests between OpenAI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, and Mistral models. APIs can intelligently select the best AI model based on cost, availability or performance, optimizing response times and reducing expenses. The AI Gateway capability is available with WSO2 gateway runtimes managed by WSO2 API Manager.
AI API Design Assistant: WSO2 API Manager and Bijira enable faster, more efficient API design by using WSO2 Copilot to enable natural language-based API creation, Swagger user interface visualization, and interactive refinement for REST, GraphQL, and AsyncAPIs.
Centralized Control with WSO2 API Manager WSO2 API Manager is WSO2’s comprehensive, industry-leading platform for full lifecycle API management, executing 60 trillion-plus transactions each year. The open-source software maximizes deployment flexibility, since it can run on-premises, in the cloud, or within a hybrid environment. With this latest release, WSO2 API Manager introduces a componentized architecture that combines centralized control with flexible API gateway management to meet organizations’ evolving needs.
Unified Control Plane: The new WSO2 API Control Plane (WOS2 ACP) provides a single interface for designers, consumers and operations for visibility of the entire API lifecycle, across all gateways in the ecosystem. This results in enhanced governance, security, and overall management capabilities across the API ecosystem. WSO2 ACP complements WSO2 API Manager’s gateways: WSO2 Universal Gateway (formerly WSO2 API Gateway) featuring built-in mediation, WSO2 Kubernetes Gateway (formerly WSO2 API platform for Kubernetes) for Kubernetes-native API management, and WSO2 Immutable Gateway (formerly WSO2 API Microgateway) for offline and edge use cases.
Gateway Federation and Multi-Gateway Management: The combination of ACP and an extensive connector architecture enables developers to manage federated third-party gateways, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) API Gateway and Solace, in addition to API gateways from WSO2.
B2B API Management with Organization Support: WSO2 API Manager enhances its comprehensive role-based access control with hierarchical API access and organization-specific API policies to manage APIs across B2B scenarios with complex organizational structures and hierarchies. This gives enterprises far greater flexibility in deploying an API management platform that fits the entire business, not the other way around.
Bijira AI API Management SaaS Bijira by WSO2 is a next-generation, AI-native API management solution designed for the cloud native era. Combining the comprehensive capabilities of WSO2 API Manager and Choreo for API Management, it offers a developer-friendly approach to API lifecycle management, enabling seamless governance, automation, and optimization. At the same time, Bijira goes beyond traditional API SaaS offerings by providing greater flexibility, scalability, and innovation to modern enterprises.
WSO2 API Manager Features in the Cloud: Bijira incorporates the API lifecycle management functionality of WSO2 API Manager, including features from the newest release: AI-powered API governance, AI-driven API creation, support for federated gateways and multi-gateway management, and B2B API management.
Unified API Gateway and Data Plane Control: Like WSO2 API Manager, Bijira also provides a unified control plane, enabling organizations to manage APIs across cloud and private data planes, ensuring centralized policy enforcement and streamlined operations.
Robust SaaS Environment: Building on Choreo for API Management SaaS technology, Bijira facilitates self-service and delivers the robust functionality organizations expect, including built-in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps support, zero trust security, and secret management. Additionally, it offers support for organizations and projects with configurable roles, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployment, and observability and usage insights.
Availability and Support WSO2 API Manager 4.5 open-source software and the Bijira AI API management SaaS are now generally available. More details are covered in today’s API management product blog posts – WSO2 API Manager and Bijira. Additionally, developers and other technology professionals can visit WSO2’s website to download WSO2 API Manager 4.5 and try Bijira for free.
About WSO2 Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the largest independent software vendor providing open-source API management, integration, and identity and access management (IAM) to thousands of enterprises in over 90 countries. WSO2’s products and platforms—including our next-gen internal developer platform, Choreo—empower organizations to leverage the full potential of artificial intelligence and APIs for securely delivering the next generation of AI-enabled digital services and applications. Our open-source, AI-driven, API-first approach frees developers and architects from vendor lock-in and enables rapid digital product creation. Recognized as leaders by industry analysts, WSO2 has over 800 employees worldwide with offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, the UK, and the US, with nearly USD100M in annual recurring revenue. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more. Follow WSO2 on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
Austin, TX and Barcelona, Spain, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — WSO2, the leader in enterprise digital infrastructure technology, today announced an update to Choreo, its AI-native internal developer platform (IDP) as a service. Designed to accelerate enterprise innovation, this release introduces two transformative features: a platform engineering perspective that empowers teams to define and manage infrastructure at scale and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that amplify productivity across platform and software engineering teams. Initially available as a cloud service, the Choreo IDP is now also offered as downloadable open-source software for the first time—maximizing enterprises’ deployment flexibility.
In a landscape where enterprises race to harness AI for competitive advantage, Choreo eliminates the bottlenecks of complex development ecosystems. The platform streamlines software delivery, operations, and enterprise engineering, enabling teams to focus on creating business value. WSO2 is demonstrating the latest Choreo release at WSO2Con 2025, which runs March 18-20, 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
“AI holds an opportunity for enterprises seeking to compete with new intelligent digital experiences, but the complexity of today’s infrastructure is hindering their efforts,” said Kanchana Wickremasinghe, WSO2 vice president and general manager – Choreo. “The latest release of our Choreo AI-native IDP, available in the cloud and as open-source software, is clearing the way for enterprises to innovate by extending AI capabilities that help software engineers deliver new apps faster while enabling platform engineers to quickly respond to developers’ ever-changing requirements and expectations.”
A Platform for Platform Engineers Choreo provides a unified platform for platform, DevOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to configure and manage infrastructure, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and environments, and operate securely at scale. New capabilities include:
Advanced Pipeline Handling: Customizable CI pipelines and parallel deployment options support multi-cloud architectures and rapid hotfixes.
Self-Service Data Planes (Beta): Customers can transform Kubernetes clusters into fully-managed, production-ready Choreo data planes via an intuitive UI.
FinOps with AI: Machine-learning-driven insights identify cost patterns, detect anomalies, and recommend optimizations, empowering proactive cloud cost management.
Application Alerts: Teams can monitor applications based on metrics and logs and receive automatic alerts.
Support for Local Pipelines and Observability: Organizations now have the option to run pipelines and observability metrics entirely within customer-managed infrastructure to provide greater control, visibility and flexibility.
Together, the capabilities enable platform engineers to adopt a cloud native internal developer platform that allows them to respond dynamically to evolving developer needs and maintain compliance and control while empowering developers to self-service and focus on building digital experiences.
Enhanced Productivity for Software Engineers Choreo supports software engineers with a Copilot for AI-assisted documentation and testing; an enterprise marketplace; API management; managed databases, caches, and Kafka; and support for a cell-based architecture. New capabilities include:
API-Key Support: Choreo simplifies API security by supporting the use of encryption keys for APIs used by machines.
Hotfix Pipelines: Choreo’s new hotfix deployment pipelines let teams deploy fixes in an emergency to production environments faster.
Streamlined configuration management: Choreo helps to reduce redundancy, simplify deployment, and minimize errors through support for environment-aware configuration groups and unified configuration declaration across projects and component types.
New Choreo Open-Source IDP Software Version WSO2 is also introducing an open-source software version of the Choreo internal developer platform that is ready to use out of the box. Now enterprises that want an IDP they can manage on-premises or in a private cloud can gain all the benefits provided by the Choreo IDP as a service, including greater productivity across platform and software engineering teams, significant cost efficiencies, and faster time to market.
For platform engineers, Choreo provides extensive control over infrastructure management, deployment workflows, security governance, etc. For developers, the platform offers self-service capabilities across software delivery and engineering where developers can build, deploy, and run applications using automated CI/CD pipelines, while leveraging built-in API management, service mesh, and observability features. And for team members across the organization, AI-driven tools foster even greater visibility, governance and productivity.
Availability and Support The new features in Choreo are generally available with the exception of self-service data planes now in beta. Developers and platform engineers can subscribe to Choreo directly from WSO2 or via the Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) marketplaces. More details are covered in today’s Choreo release blog post and Choreo open-source release blog post. Additionally, developers and other technology professionals can visit WSO2’s website to try the Choreo IDP as a service for free or download the new open-source IDP software.
About WSO2 Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the largest independent software vendor providing open-source API management, integration, and identity and access management (IAM) to thousands of enterprises in over 90 countries. WSO2’s products and platforms—including our next-gen internal developer platform, Choreo—empower organizations to leverage the full potential of artificial intelligence and APIs for securely delivering the next generation of AI-enabled digital services and applications. Our open-source, AI-driven, API-first approach frees developers and architects from vendor lock-in and enables rapid digital product creation. Recognized as leaders by industry analysts, WSO2 has over 800 employees worldwide with offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, the UK, and the US, with nearly USD100M in annual recurring revenue. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more. Follow WSO2 on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
Austin, TX and Barcelona, Spain, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are disrupting business models and opening opportunities to drive cost-efficiencies and new revenue streams. However, few AI proof-of-concept projects actually make it to production because current software platforms lack the abstractions and building blocks to include AI components in production-grade applications in a way that is easy and scalable. Today, WSO2 is closing this gap with the next generation of its industry-leading, open-source platform, which has been reinvented for the AI era.
AI is now a first-class concept across the entire spectrum of products that comprise the WSO2 software stack—enabling enterprises to easily create (code), integrate, manage and secure intelligent digital products and services. The newest WSO2 product offerings are generally available, and their AI-native capabilities are being demonstrated at WSO2Con 2025, which runs March 18-20, 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
Taking a Comprehensive Long-View to AI WSO2’s AI-native platform is the result of the long-term strategy that WSO2 product and research teams have built around generative AI (GenAI) and the agentic economy. It builds on WSO2’s breadth of functionality and experience to cover an AI application’s entire lifecycle, from coding through delivery, monitoring and observability.
The platform brings together low-code and pro-code programming for building AI agents, applications that leverage Gen AI and AI agent capabilities, and a novel programming approach that combines natural language and code. Additionally, the open WSO2 platform integrates out-of-the-box with AI ecosystem libraries, agent frameworks, knowledge bases, and GenAI APIs. Together, the capabilities allow enterprises to build resilient, scalable, secured and observable AI APIs, applications and agents while leveraging WSO2’s GenAI productivity support to reduce both costs and time to market.
Enterprises can also onboard AI agents built on their framework of choice and apply WSO2’s quality of service capabilities—including security, governance or monitoring. Moreover, the open, highly extensible WSO2 platform is designed to evolve with AI technology developments, providing enterprises with a future-proof platform for their intelligent digital experiences.
“AI is fundamentally changing the applications that enterprises are building, as well as how they are building them,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “WSO2 is on a transformational journey across the company to help our customers use AI to boost their own productivity and deliver great digital experiences. As part of this journey, we are building on our commitment to open-source software, a key enabler of AI adoption. We’re also investing in our team, and we are excited to have AI expert Rania Khalaf join WSO2 as Chief AI Officer to spearhead our company-wide strategy and roadmap for delivering on the promise of the AI era.”
Supporting AI Across the Software Development Lifecycle “The modern application is AI native. The current software development lifecycle (SDLC) and software application stack are not,” said Rania Khalaf WSO2 chief AI officer. “What is happening is a fundamental co-evolution of both—at every level and stage—as generative AI boosts developer productivity and pushes multi-modal understanding and synthesis deep into the development stack. WSO2 is positioned at the center of this shift with an open-source platform that, for the first time, brings AI-native capabilities to functions across the SDLC.”
Today, product offerings across the WSO2 platform bring together the AI-native capabilities enterprises need to easily code, integrate, manage and secure intelligent digital products and services.
Code: WSO2 supports a new AI-native “natural programming” approach via its Ballerina specialized integration language. WSO2 also provides the ability to create AI agents and AI APIs, as well as build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other AI-driven applications using capabilities from the Choreo internal developer platform as a service (IDPaaS), WSO2 Integration Manager and Devant integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and WSO2 API Manager and Bijira API management software as a service (SaaS). Additionally, these products feature a range of AI-powered tools to support developer productivity.
Integrate: WSO2 enables developers to use AI to create intelligent integrations, supported by extensive connectivity to large language models (LLMs), vector databases, AI agents, APIs and systems using WSO2 Integration Manager and the Devant IpaaS. Meanwhile the AI Gateway employed by WSO2 API Manager and Bijira API management SaaS provides visibility and control over third-party APIs for AI services and LLMs along with multi-model backend support for seamless, dynamic routing of AI API requests between OpenAI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, and Mistral models.
Manage: WSO2 empowers development teams to manage AI APIs, AI agents, and AI integrations using Choreo, WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 Integration Manager, Bijira and Devant. WSO2’s API management products also add AI-driven governance to automatically ensure API compliance with organizational policies and industry standards. Additionally, the Choreo IDPaaS delivers new AI-driven capabilities to help teams identify spending patterns, detect anomalies, and recommend cost-saving actions, enabling organizations to proactively manage cloud costs and improve financial efficiency.
Secure: AI agents are first-class citizens in WSO2 identity and access management (IAM) products—securing access to agents and controlling what agents can access, as well as enabling the delegation of access from human users to the agents that are helping them get work done. The products include WSO2 Identity Manager, WSO2 Private Identity Cloud, and the Asgardeo identity as a service (IDaaS). At the same time, all WSO2 cloud offerings, including Choreo, Asgardeo, Devant and Bijira provide robust zero-trust security.
For More Information To learn more about WSO2’s AI-native capabilities, visit the WSO2 AI page and reference the press announcements synchronized with WSO2Con 2025 for WSO2’s Choreo, API Management, Integration, and IAM business units.
About WSO2 Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the largest independent software vendor providing open-source API management, integration, and identity and access management (IAM) to thousands of enterprises in over 90 countries. WSO2’s products and platforms—including our next-gen internal developer platform, Choreo—empower organizations to leverage the full potential of artificial intelligence and APIs for securely delivering the next generation of AI-enabled digital services and applications. Our open-source, AI-driven, API-first approach frees developers and architects from vendor lock-in and enables rapid digital product creation. Recognized as leaders by industry analysts, WSO2 has over 800 employees worldwide with offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, the UK, and the US, with nearly USD100M in annual recurring revenue. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more. Follow WSO2 on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
NEW YORK AND SANTIAGO, March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Nasdaq (Nasdaq: NDAQ) and nuam (NUAM: nuam), the merger of Santiago, Lima, and Colombia stock exchanges, today announced an extension of their strategic technology partnership, which will see all three exchanges’ central securities depositories (CSD) adopt Nasdaq’s CSD platform to optimize post-trade processing in the region.
The agreement expands Nasdaq’s existing relationship with nuam, with the exchanges currently consolidating their trading infrastructures on Nasdaq’s platform to help attract global sources of liquidity. It also builds on Nasdaq’s longstanding technology partnership with Chile’s CSD, Depósito Central de Valores (DCV), one of the region’s most advanced CSD platforms.
nuam’s integrated post-trade infrastructure will benefit from a unified solution based on international standards, while greater interoperability across both trading and CSD infrastructure will reduce the costs and barriers associated with accessing the individual markets, increase liquidity, and enhance operational efficiencies across the three exchanges.
“Having high technological standards is essential for providing security and confidence to investors, as well as expanding investment opportunities and access to new markets,” said Juan Pablo Córdoba, CEO of nuam. “Our alliance with Nasdaq reaffirms our commitment to building an integrated, efficient, and accessible capital market in Latin America. The adoption of this technology will optimize connectivity, strengthen our infrastructure, and facilitate access for global investors, boosting competitiveness and the growth of the Latin American financial ecosystem,” Córdoba noted.
“Enhancing the infrastructure underpinning global capital markets is essential to maintaining systemwide resilience and an incredibly powerful catalyst for growth,” said Magnus Haglind, SVP and Head of Marketplace Technology at Nasdaq. “nuam is at the heart of Latin America’s extraordinary journey, with the region’s markets embracing modernization at a phenomenal rate. By adopting world-leading technology they can attract international investors while ensuring they have the agility to incorporate innovative, new technologies to better serve the three markets and unlock new sources of revenue.”
According to a recent Nasdaq survey, 84% of respondents said that they are keen to increase their investment in Latin America1. Yet the survey also revealed structural challenges that restrict flows and adds to costs: 59% of respondents said that market structure issues impose limits on their investment flows. Specifically, fragmentation, processing errors and a lack of standardization are hampering operations, with respondents seeking greater cohesion and automation to increase efficiency and improve market access.
The implementation of Nasdaq’s CSD technology will introduce more standardized business processes and connectivity, simplifying investors’ ability to settle trades across each market. Removing barriers to investment can help attract more international capital to nuam exchanges and support the rapid development of the Latin American economy.
Nasdaq’s technology is used by 97% of global systematically important banks, half of the world’s top 25 stock exchanges, 35 central banks and regulatory authorities, and 3,500+ clients across the financial services industry. As a scaled platform partner, Nasdaq draws on deep industry experience, technology expertise, and cloud managed service experience to help financial services companies solve their toughest operational challenges while advancing industrywide modernization.
nuam (Stock Exchanges: NUAM) is the first multi-country stock exchange integration, bringing together the Chilean, Colombian, and Peruvian markets. It aims to standardize trading conditions and regulations across the three countries while adhering to the highest international standards. This, in turn, attracts foreign investment flows with greater strength and confidence, ultimately improving the lives of citizens in Chile, Colombia, and Peru. Through this integration, the company seeks to position itself as a key player in the global market infrastructure industry. For more information: www.nuamx.com.
About Nasdaq:
Nasdaq (Nasdaq: NDAQ) is a leading global technology company serving corporate clients, investment managers, banks, brokers, and exchange operators as they navigate and interact with the global capital markets and the broader financial system. We aspire to deliver world-leading platforms that improve the liquidity, transparency, and integrity of the global economy. Our diverse offering of data, analytics, software, exchange capabilities, and client-centric services enables clients to optimize and execute their business vision with confidence. To learn more about the company, technology solutions, and career opportunities, visit us on LinkedIn, on X @Nasdaq, or at www.nasdaq.com.
Information set forth in this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Nasdaq cautions readers that any forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and that actual results could differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as “will” and “can” and other words and terms of similar meaning. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements related to the benefits of Nasdaq’s central securities depository infrastructure and related technology solutions. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond Nasdaq’s control. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in Nasdaq’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q which are available on Nasdaq’s investor relations website at http://ir.nasdaq.com and the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Nasdaq undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Former ambassador Phil Goff is the latest (so far) and (probably) the least of many ‘statesmen’ who have invoked Munich and the ‘resolute’ Winston Churchill (a backbench MP in 1938) in the cause of good-war mongering. (Refer Winston Peters sacks Phil Goff as UK High Commissioner RNZ 6 March 2025, and What Was Actually Wrong With What Phil Goff Said?, Giles Dexter, RNZ and Scoop, 7 March 2025.)
The Munich narrative is central to the ‘Good War’ morality trope, through which democracies (especially the United States) justified wars of aggression; what used to be called ‘gunboat-diplomacy’ in the British days of empire. It’s the now-commonplace narrative that frames any putative war to be fought by a ‘liberal democracy’ against an ‘autocracy’ (ie fought by us against them) as a contest between Good and Evil; and if we don’t “stand up to” Evil – anywhere and everywhere – then Evil goes on to ‘win’, and subsequently to dominate and exact tribute as a regional or global hegemon.
The corollary of the Munich narrative is that Good should never give up, even if Evil is winning on the battlefield; Good neither surrenders to Evil nor negotiates with Evil. Not ‘at any cost’. The logical conclusion of this is that, if that’s what it requires for Good to prevail, life on Planet Earth could be forfeit; better Dead than Red or Black. Earth’s tombstone, left for a future intergalactic explorer to discover, might read: “At Least ‘Atila the Hun’ [substitute any Eurasian ‘Devil’] Did Not Win”. Peter Hitchen (see below, p.27) notes: “one day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all [through our rulers’ vanity]”.
Phil Goff is an example of persons who know just enough fragments of popular history to think they can use a historical argument to substantiate their rhetoric. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, meaning that superficial knowledge may be more problematic than ignorance. On the Munich question, Phil Goff is in good company. Peter Hitchens, in The Phoney Victory (p8, p20), cites the former Prince of Wales (now King) as making the same mistaken views about World War Two and the Ukraine-Russia War, as moral crusades.
(Meanwhile, as well as trying to cut disability benefits as a result of boxing itself into a corner, Keir Starmer UK government – unlike the political leadership of Canada and the European Union – is doing everything it can to appease Donald Trump on international trade and other matters.)
For readers’ interest, Stevan and Hugh Eldred-Grigg have written a New Zealand take on World War Two that does not follow the ‘Good War’ trope: Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society during the Second World War, Otago University Press 2017.
Were Neville Chamberlain’s actions at the September 1938 Munich Conference wrong?
No, neither with foresight nor hindsight. If Britain and/or France had signed a pact with Czechoslovakia similar to the one they signed with Poland in 1939, they would have been committed to declaring at most a phoney war. Neither had the capacity to wage war on Germany nor to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid. At best, British hostilities against Germany in 1938 would have been as ineffective as they were in Archangel, Russia, in 1918.
Popular sentiment was absent in 1938 in the United Kingdom towards war with Germany. That situation had changed by March 1939 after Germany fully annexed Bohemia and Moravia, the territories that make up twenty-first century Czechia. Due in part to changed popular sentiment, the British and French responded differently when Poland was similarly threatened in 1939. The western ‘powers’ declared war on Germany following the first attack on Poland, but did almost nothing to fight Germany or to protect Poland during what became known as the ‘Phoney War’. (The phoney war ended with the German conquest of France in May 1940.)
The 1939 declaration of war was arguably more duplicitous than the 1938 declaration of peace. Poland’s half-century-long tragedy – far worse than anyone today, except for a few professional and amateur historians, realise – began to unfold. (France briefly invaded Germany’s Saarland in 1939, southeast of Luxembourg, before withdrawing. Nowhere near Poland.) The war in 1939 in Poland, remote to the United Kingdom, was far from ‘phoney’.
Examples of invoking or evoking ‘appeasement’ and /or ‘Munich’ and/or Churchill on behalf of ‘democracy’:
Peter Hitchens gives these post-WW2 examples (pp.13-17):
President Harry S Truman, in December 1950, re the continuation of the Korean War
Anthony Eden, 1956, to justify the Suez War (which first brought Israel into an external war of aggression)
President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965, justifying the escalation of the Vietnam War
US Secretary of State George Shultz in February 1984, re conflict in Nicaragua
US Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, in August 1989, before the US invasion of Panama
George Bush (senior) in June 1990, re the first war against Iraq (noting that the initial response to the immanent invasion of Kuwait was not unlike Churchill’s lesser-known response in 1938, to the German reoccupation of the Rhineland [“more talks”])
Bill Clinton’s 1999 comparison of Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler, in the context of the probable secession of Kosovo from Milosevic’s Serbia
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, in 2003, justifying the second invasion of Iraq
President Trump’s aids in June 2017, referring to Barack Obama’s Cuba initiative
Winston Churchill’s worst Appeasement, and Atrocities
The worst act of appeasement that I can think of was Winston Churchill’s kowtowing to Joseph Stain at Yalta (Crimea) in the second week of February 1945 (ref Hitchens p.6 and Wikipedia citing Leo McKinstry, “Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace”, Atlantic Books, 2019, Ch 22). According to McKinstry “When Churchill arrived at Yalta on 4 February 1945, the first question that Stalin put to him was: ‘Why haven’t you bombed Dresden?’.”
Ten days later, Churchill did indeed firebomb Dresden, immolating 25,000 people – mostly civilians and refugees. Stalin (metaphorically) said “jump”, Churchill said “how high?”. And Churchill delivered.
Dresden was far from Churchill’s only actual or intended atrocity. Operation Gomorrah, on Hamburg at the end of July 1943, was a worse 24-hour atrocity than Dresden. The malevolent intent of that ‘raid’ lies in the biblical name given to the operation. While it was largely a test-run and forerunner for later bombings – including a forerunner of the firebombing of Tokyo exactly 80 years ago – it killed more than 35,000 mostly civilians “in their homes”.
(As a single event the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 – Operation Meetinghouse – caused easily more deaths [100,000] than Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima [70,000] or Nagasaki [35,000]. In the mainstream media, I saw no 80th-anniversary commemoration stories of this ‘worst-ever in the history of the world’ attack on civilians. Now is a timely time for us to be reminded about this kind of aerial megadeath.)
The third Churchill atrocity to mention was the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. Encyclopedia Britannica says that “the 1942 halt in rice imports to India did not cause the famine, and the 1943 crop yield was actually sufficient to feed the people of Bengal. It was ultimately special wartime factors that caused this difficult situation to become a disastrous famine. Fearing Japanese invasion, British authorities stockpiled food to feed defending troops, and they exported considerable quantities to British forces in the Middle East”. Churchill’s atrocities have been justified on the basis that the casualties were to them while saving some of our lives. But the people of Bengal were, at least notionally part of us, citizens and civilians of the British Empire.
In Wikipedia: “Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: “The War Cabinet’s shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India.” Indeed, Bengal was required to export rice to Ceylon to support British naval operations there. Of Churchill’s major atrocities, this was the only one to be mentioned in Netflix’s recent over-the-top account Churchill at War.
The Netflix ‘docuseries’ does at least mention Churchill being sidelined by the Americans in late 1943 and 1944. Churchill was sidelined from the top table of war-command largely on the basis of his penchant for atrocities and his unwillingness to confront Germany head-on (an unwillingness that could have been interpreted as ‘appeasement’, and probably was understood as such by the Americans). Churchill indulged in a number of side-wars, including a successful invasion of Madagascar in 1942; an invasion that put paid forever to the 1940 German fantasy of resettling Eastern European Jews there.
The Americans took much longer than Churchill to become convinced about the merits of holocaust-scale bombing than did the British. It would seem that the British burning of Hamburg – which was bombed because it was there, easily accessible from Britain – left quite a bad taste upon some American commanders, and indeed upon President Roosevelt himself. (We note that the atrocious American incendiary bombings of Japan in March 1945 were undertaken after Harry Truman became Vice President, and in the context that Roosevelt was seriously ill, and died soon after the February Yalta ‘Peace’ Conference.)
Churchill’s final atrocity to mention here never actually happened, except to create an environmental disaster on a Scottish Island (Gruinard, Britain’s mysterious WW2 ‘island of death’ Myles Burke, BBC, 22 April 2024). It partly explains some of Churchill’s reticence towards the D-Day invasion of Occupied France. Churchill had another plan, which he seems to have kept secret from his Allies: biological warfare, Anthrax.
“The plan was to infect linseed cakes with Anthrax spores and drop them by plane into cattle pastures around Germany. … The proposed plan would have decimated Germany’s meat supply, and triggered a nationwide anthrax contamination, resulting in an enormous [civilian] death toll. … The secret trials carried on until 1943, when the military deemed them a success, and scientists packed up and returned to Porton Down. As a result, five million linseed cakes laced with Anthrax were produced but the plan was ultimately abandoned as the Allies’ Normandy invasion progressed, leading the cakes to be destroyed after the war.” The test programme on Gruinard was cynically called ‘Operation Vegetarian’. “Gruinard was not the only site where the UK conducted secret biological warfare tests, but it was the first. The consequences of what happened there stand as a grim testament to both the dangers of biological warfare and humanity’s capacity for destruction.”
Have Bill Clinton and subsequent US presidents drawn inspiration from Brezinski’s 1997 essay as a clarion call for world domination?
Zbigniew Brezinski’s call for US world hegemony seems not much different to what Richard Evans claims was Hitler’s aim: “Hitler’s obvious drive for European and eventually world conquest.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997; review of Peter Hitchens’s Eurosceptic take on the Second World War, by Richard J Evans, New Statesman, 26 Sep 2018.)
Evans’ claim about Hitler is obvious hyperbole; Germany never could have had the capacity to “conquer” the world. (Think of the socio-geographic limits to the Roman Empire.) But the Nazi imperial vision for Germany was to create a mega-state in Central Eurasia that would have hegemony over the rest of the world. Is there any country in the twentieth or twenty-first century which has sought such ‘unipolarity’; sought to be the world’s one-and-only superpower, which expects other countries to say “how high?” whenever it says “jump”?
Perhaps there is? Did Brezinski – Henry Kissinger’s 1970s’ foreign policy rival – spell it out in 1997?
Finally
‘Appeasement’ is like ‘Antisemitism’; the powers-that-be only have to say either word to silence commonsense debate about peace and war and genocide. As Hitchens points out (p.27): “We have mythologised the experience so completely that [politicians] only have to say the word ‘appeasement’ to silence opponents and bring legislators and journalists to their side, on any wild adventure.” Phil Goff is a hapless victim of what Joseph Mali and Shlomo Sand have called “mythistory”.
Wars since the 1930s are no more ‘moral’ than were wars before that time. (Indeed, if we wish to personalise it, WW2 at its core was a war between Hitler and Stalin; neither men are commonly described as ‘moral’.) In fact, recent wars are less moral. WW2 became the first major war in which civilians were actively targeted as a predominant military gambit. This approach to war is now becoming entrenched, with drones replacing soldiers, and civilians evermore in the firing line.
We should not be coerced into supporting wars on the basis of narratives by powerful know-not-much persons or cliques dropping words like ‘appeasement’, ‘Munich’, ‘Churchill’ or ‘Hitler’. Wars are very costly, but the costs are not usually paid – at least in the short term – by those elites who promote them from far away.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
As most of us appreciate, there is a whole geopolitical world that overlays the formal political world of about 200 ‘nation states’ (aka ‘polities’). Geopolitical fractures – a result of the ‘big games’ over and above the ‘rules-based order’ – occur in all sorts of places, sometimes through provinces, even counties. Their significances wax and wane, as geopolitics itself is a dynamic game of changing exceptions and allegiances, and the expansions or contractions of ‘real estate assets’.
How about this one, given the apparent detaching of the United States of America from the liberal democratic western alliance? (Is the western alliance – which includes Canada – in the process of becoming a set of American proxies, like certain Latin American countries, rather than a partnership? Or is it a process of divorce?) Point Roberts is a United States enclave within the Greater Vancouver urban area. Should Canada – or British Columbia – file for Point Roberts? It would be the tidy thing to do, as part of the divorce settlement.
Geopolitics operates on at least two levels. There are the big fractures, where potential world wars – hot and cold – are simmering. Then there are the smaller fractures, such as those between the European Union and its neighbours: Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Cyprus. And those within the world’s mini-empires: Denmark vis-à-vis Greenland; Australia vis-à-vis Norfolk Island; New Zealand vis-à-vis Cook Islands; France vis-à-vis New Caledonia.
At an intermediate level are boundary disputes between Japan and Russia (Kuril Islands), India and Pakistan (Kashmir), India and China (Himalayas), and Rwanda and the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Then there are new hot-fractures being created through civil wars; such as that between the Arabic and African worlds within Sudan, Islamic and Buddhist populations within Myanmar, and different ethno-cultural minorities within (and on the edges of) Syria and in the west of China.
There’s also a growing north-south sectarian divide in Nigeria (reflecting complex geopolitical game-playing in the Sahel, to Nigeria’s north and northwest), Africa’s most populous country. And there are geopolitical pushes and pulls in the non-EU Balkans. Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina (European countries with majority Islamic populations) have become effective proxies of the United States; the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina is fractured almost fifty-fifty, the other part being the autonomous though unrecognised Russian-aligned Republika Srpska. (China is currently building a north-south railway through the Balkans from Piraeus in Greece to Budapest in Hungary, while the European Union is sponsoring a new railway from Albania in the Adriatic Sea to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.)
Finally, there’s a big geopolitical tension within the core Islamic world, which has led to the long-running civil war in Yemen; the two sides being proxies for Iran and for Saudi Arabia; for Tehran and for Riyadh.
The players – the ‘Great Powers’
At present, it would seem, the United States of America, which sees itself as the world’s preeminent geopolitical player, is impatient for conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine to end, so that it can get on with its ‘game of choice’, namely the ‘new cold war’ conflict with China.
We should note that, in Geopolitics, the players are typically identified by the countries’ capital cities. Thus, the United States becomes Washington, the United Kingdom becomes London, and the European Union becomes Berlin or Brussels. Sometimes the players are or have been referred to by power-centres within cities, such as the Kremlin (Moscow), or the Quai d’Orsay (Paris). (The New Zealand equivalent might be ‘Bowen Street’!)
Beijing and Taiwan; and Washington
I saw this Daily Telegraph story in the New Zealand Herald last weekend: Chinese navy practices amphibious landings with new barges in South China Sea. To this end Taiwan is the American proxy through which the conflict may be waged; just as Ukraine and Israel are American proxies; proxies in the most visible of the world’s current geopolitical hot wars.
From the story: ‘Emma Salisbury, a sea power research fellow at the Council on Geostrategy’ says “The fact Beijing has permitted details of these barges to become public signals the threat China poses in the region.” No, it doesn’t. It indicates that China is – had has been for decades – playing the geopolitical game of ‘optics’. Beijing is saying to Washington “don’t mess with us”, rather than “we are going to mess with you”.
Kinmen and Lienchiang Counties, Fujian. But what country?
Is this the world’s least understood geopolitical faultline?
The central piece of geography in the New Cold War is understood to be the Taiwan Strait; indeed we routinely see pictures of that Strait on our news bulletins. Usually, they look like these BBC versions:
The clear tale being told here in these maps is that there is a simple border in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and China, and that there are two countries, Taiwan and China. The constitutional reality is that there are two regimes claiming constitutional sovereignty over a single estate. We may call these regimes China-Taipei and China-Beijing. (In the Olympic Games and other sports, Taiwan competes as Chinese-Taipei.) The official name of the two regimes are Republic of China (RoC), and Peoples Republic of China (PRC). (I once watched a story on TV3 News involving some Beijing-Chinese people in New Zealand. TV3 mistakenly showed pictures of a China Airlinesaircraft, when it should have been Air China.)
The BBC’s two-country optics are neat and tidy (compared to the one-territory two-regime reality), but is negated by the presence of two Taiwanese counties in the territory of Fujian province, PRC; Kinmen and Lienchiang (although Kinmen is sometimes called Jinmen or Quemoy, and in China Lienchiang is spelt ‘Lianjiang’). At its closest point, Kinmen (Taiwan) is 4km from the large Chinese city of Xiamen (and 190 km from the Taiwanese mainland); indeed Kinmen is located in Xiamen harbour, just as Rangitoto Island is in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. (Xiamen has the same population size as New Zealand, just over five million people.) Lienchieng is the Taiwanese portion of Lianjiang county, a subdivision of Fujian. (We note that Taiwan still uses the ‘postal’ style of anglicisation of Chinese names that was generally used before the 1970s; eg Peking instead of the Pinyin form, Beijing.)
From the inception of the United nations in 1945, until 1971, China-Taipei (aka Taiwan) held a permanent seat on the Security Council, with the right of veto). This only changed in 1971 after US President Nixon, committing to reality over narrative, moved towards rapprochement towards China (although the United States was not ready for the UN recognition switch in 1971); while at the same time fudging the issue of the status of Taiwan. That fudge remains the official status quo in the international ‘rules-based-order’.
We should also note that Taiwan (RoC) withdrew from the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games, due to its erosion of status as a recognised nation-state, with particular note that Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada, had led the realpolitik move, recognising China in 1970.
This map correctly shows all of Taiwan, noting the black dashed lines. And this shows Taiwanese Fujian. This huge geopolitical boundary between West and East passes through the Chinese province of Fujian.
Geopolitical Implications
Presumably the people in these counties, for the most part, prefer the status quo and hope that it can be maintained indefinitely, and without military hostilities.
If there was a push for Taipei to repudiate its constitutional claim to all of China – for example as a means to de jureindependence as its own sovereign state – it is difficult to see how this could happen without Taipei ceding Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to Beijing. That would indeed be the minimum price Taipei would have to pay for Beijing to abandon its claim over all of Taiwan.
In effect, these two counties are hostages to both regimes. If the United States or any other United States’ aligned nation-state invaded China, then it would be realistic to expect that Kinmen and Lienchiang would be snaffled-up by Beijing; maybe one county immediately and, for leverage, the other staying on as a hostage.
On the other hand, if the United States was to escalate its optical war against Beijing into a fully-fledged ‘cold war’, it might install threatening military equipment into Kinmen or Lienchiang, much as the Soviet Union did in Cuba in 1962. Thus these counties represent leverage of Taipei (acting as a proxy for the United States) over China.
It would be hard to see China not-responding to such provocation. Further, in such a hostile context, China would be tempted to activate its claim over the whole of Taiwan, and not just the two counties in Fujian.
So, the untidy one-country two-regime status quo should be simply left as it is. Speculative political rhetoric against Beijing or Taipei should be treated by the international community as tantamount to diplomatic ‘hate-speech’. And simplistic media stories which represent Taiwan only as an island 100 kilometres away from China, should be corrected. Responsible media – unlike the BBC or the Daily Telegraph – do not distort the known truth.
We don’t want to end up in a major geopolitical conflict as a result of politicians and political journalists not even knowing or understanding the location of the China/Taiwan border. The border anomalies result from the pragmatic settlement of a military conflict between the two Chinese regimes; a conflict that took place in the decade after 1949.
Lessons for the Ukraine-Russia conflict
The present military boundary between Ukraine and Russia passes inside three recognised provincial boundaries of Ukraine: Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. (The provinces of Luhansk and Crimea should be off the negotiating table; the world has to accept that they are now, for better or worse, de facto or de jure, territories of Russia; albeit unrecognised in the same way that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are Russian territories unrecognised by the United Nations. (And Northern Cyprus for that matter, as an unrecognised Turkish territory inside the European Union nation of Cyprus; a territory which untidily passes through the Cyprus’s capital, Nicosia.)
Successful negotiations to end wars have to take account of military realities. China’s 1950s’ concessions to Taiwan over Kinmen and Lienchiang show that such splits need not impede a long-lasting and workable peace. What does impede a transition to peace is the insistence on substantial one-sided deviations from the military reality at the time of a ‘cease-fire’; certainly, the side that is at a military disadvantage should not be demanding one-sided concessions from the other side.
Lessons for Palestine-Israel conflict
In 1967 and 1973, there were major wars between, in essence, Israel and Egypt. The lands most under contention were those that we call ‘Occupied Palestine’ (and ‘Occupied East Jerusalem’) today; though other lands were captured (especially the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria). The 1967 War was started by Israel under the pretext that Egypt was about to invade Israel. Israel unambiguously won this war. (In 1967, Israel even attacked – deliberately – an American naval vessel: USS Liberty.)
Israel had not thought-through the strategic consequences of its annexation (from Egypt and Jordan) of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel was working towards an acceptable way of incorporating Palestinian Israelis into the ‘Jewish State’. Now, all of a sudden, they found themselves with an enlarged country with a majority (or near-majority) Palestinian population. A legal fiction – replacing the language of ‘annexation’ with that of ‘occupation’ – enabled the non-Jewish populations of the ‘occupied territories’ to be treated as, at best, third -class citizens.
The 1973 War – started by Egypt, principally to regain its Sinai territory – triggered changes to the global architecture of capitalism. After the advantage switched from Egypt to Israel, Israeli troops crossed the Suez Canal and were heading towards Cairo when the cease-fire was called. Subsequent negotiations, over six years, saw Israel’s military successes eroded into something like the present situation in which Palestinians living in Palestine are citizens of nowhere.
After two military victories, through the 1978 Camp David Accords, Israel found that it had forfeited almost all its military gains; for Israel it felt like they had won the war but lost the peace. The result of the process was a substantial and unfortunate switch to the Right in Israeli politics. Since then, especially since the 1990s, Israel has been looking for ways to annex a Palestine free of Palestinians; to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians as part of an unapologetic annexation process undertaken with the full blessing of its geopolitical patron.
Proxy Warfare
Most wars today, including ‘civil wars’, are proxy-wars funded (on one side at least) by external patrons. While Ukraine has been a proxy of the United States for most of this century, Ukraine is now morphing into a proxy of Brussels and London; of the barely-elected Starmer (one-third of the vote in a low turn-out election) and an unelected Ursula von de Leyen (a bureaucrat who’s not even a Member of the European Parliament).
On Al Jazeera News (6am New Zealand summer time, 18 March 2025), it was reported that Donald Trump posted this message on his favoured social-media platform: “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” (See this quote on U.S. Air Campaign Against Houthis Continues Into Third Day, TWZ, The War Zone.)
This is a clear statement that the United States President, at least, believes that the patrons of proxies are the real antagonists, and should be deemed responsible – indeed ‘criminally responsible’ for misdeeds of aggression – for acts performed by their proxies. It should be quite easy to apply this dictum, at least allegorically, to the big hot wars of the moment: Ukraine and Palestine.
Conclusion
We can avoid most wars by finding pragmatic solutions to geopolitical conflicts, accepting realities as they stand, and avoiding inflammatory rhetoric towards others. We have avoided violent conflict in and around the Fujian geopolitical faultline by not, so far, trying to find and impose final tidy solutions.
Likewise, to find peace in the world’s current military hotspots, we have to accept and negotiate around the current realities of those situations. Most importantly, we follow the ‘first law of holes’: ‘if you are in a hole, stop digging’. Inflaming sensitive situations through speculative assertions about the other side’s escalating malevolence are unhelpful.
In today’s wars the western ‘liberal democratic’ side is not even close to being the ‘good guys’ in wars framed as good-versus-evil. The conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine demonstrate that these wars – like most past wars – represent the ‘hot’ phases of geopolitical game playing; wars are ‘bad guys’ versus ‘bad guys’, and such wars end through transactional deals. (The antagonists may be different shades of bad; and there are always good victims, though many of these are not ‘perfect victims’.) The ‘bad guys’ include the patrons of the proxies. Further, contemporary warfare targets civilians rather than soldiers.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Source: Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
Port au Prince- 16 March 2025: Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) strongly condemns the intentional opening of fire upon four of its vehicles while they were seeking safety for their staff amid escalating violence in Port au Prince, Haiti.
The escalating violence close to the Turgeau Emergency Centre has forced MSF to suspend again its activities in the hospital on the 15th of March and evacuate its teams from the hospital as a precautionary measure. During one of the evacuation movements, the MSF identified convoy was repeatedly and intentionally fired upon, despite prior coordination with authorities. While fortunately no one was killed, our staff suffered minor injuries.
“This attack serves as stark reminder that no one is safe amidst the ongoing violence between armed groups and law enforcement. Despite our precautions, we have been targeted and this is unacceptable. We urgently call on all parties for the respect of medical staff, facilities and patients at all times,” says Benoit Vasseur, Head of Mission for MSF in Haiti.
Since end of February, the situation in Turgeau, where MSF runs a Referral and Emergency Centre, has worsened sharply. On March 12 alone, our Emergency Centre treated 27 victims of violence, including women and children, from the surrounding area. During the night of March 14-15, the violence escalated further. Armed groups moved within meters of the hospital, threatening to turn it into a frontline. “We had to make the painful decision to suspend activities at the MSF Turgeau Emergency Centre to protect our staff and patients. Currently, it is impossible to continue operations at the hospital, but we are committed to reopening our facility as soon as the situation allows us to do so safely,”says Benoit Vasseur.
Before suspending activities, MSF successfully referred all patients from the Emergency Centre to other medical facilities. Between February 24 and March 2, our teams at the Turgeau Emergency Centre treated 314 patients. In February 2025 alone, our teams conducted over 2,500 medical consultations and more than 400 physiotherapy sessions at the Turgeau Emergency Center.
This is the second time in less than four months that MSF has been forced to suspend operations at the health facility. On November 22, 2024, MSF halted all activities in Port-au-Prince following multiple attacks and repeated threats against medical staff. After months of engagement with authorities and assurances from all parties regarding the protection of MSF’s medical mission, the organization partially resumed operations in January, reopening the Turgeau hospital on January 20, 2025.
However, the resurgence of violence and the deliberate attack on our vehicles during this evacuation make it clear that these assurances and engagements with authorities have failed to translate into real safety for our staff and patients.
Our MSF team has been providing emergency medical care in Turgeau since 2021. MSF maintains multiple medical programs in other areas of Port au Prince and Haiti, notably for maternal and newborn care, severe burns, trauma and victims of sexual violence. Continuing these vital medical services requires clear guarantees about the security of our movements.
MSF is an international, medical, humanitarian organisation that delivers medical care to people in need, regardless of their origin, religion, or political affiliation. MSF has been working in Haiti for over 30 years, offering general healthcare, trauma care, burn wound care, maternity care, and care for survivors of sexual violence.
MSF is an international, medical, humanitarian organisation that delivers medical care to people in need, regardless of their origin, religion, or political affiliation. MSF has been working in Haiti for over 30 years, offering general healthcare, trauma care, burn wound care, maternity care, and care for survivors of sexual violence. MSF Australia was established in 1995 and is one of 24 international MSF sections committed to delivering medical humanitarian assistance to people in crisis. In 2022, more than 120 project staff from Australia and New Zealand worked with MSF on assignment overseas. MSF delivers medical care based on need alone and operates independently of government, religion or economic influence and irrespective of race, religion or gender. For more information visit msf.org.au
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – A jury has returned a guilty verdict against a 28-year-old Sullivan City resident on two counts of transporting illegal aliens within the United States, announced U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei.
They deliberated for less than 45 minutes before convicting Alberto Chavez Jr. following a one-day trial.
Testimony revealed that on Nov. 2, 2024, Chavez pulled up to the Border Patrol (BP) checkpoint in Falfurrias for a routine immigration inspection with two passengers in the vehicle. He claimed they were all cousins and were going north to find work.
However, the jury heard that neither of the passengers were related to Chavez in any way. Both were actually citizens of Honduras who were illegally present in the United States.
The jury heard from both men who explained they had crossed the Rio Grande River approximately one month prior and had been placed in various stash houses until Chavez picked them up the night before they arrived at the checkpoint.
Testimony revealed Chavez bought them clothes to make them appear more “American” and coached them on what to say when trying to pass through the checkpoint. The aliens also stated they had specifically informed Chavez they were illegally present in the United States.
The defense attempted to convince the jury that Chavez had simply agreed to give the aliens a ride. They did not believe those claims and found Chavez guilty as charged.
U.S. District Judge David S. Morales presided over trial and has set sentencing for June 18. At that time, Chavez faces up to five years in prison and a possible $250,000 maximum fine.
Previously released on bond, the court ordered Chavez into custody pending sentencing.
BP conducted the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph Griffith and Zachary Bird are prosecuting the case.
Source: United States Senator for Washington Maria Cantwell
03.17.25
In Seattle, Cantwell Draws Contrast Between PNW’s Innovation Strategy and Trump’s Trade War
Cantwell joins Washington Council on International Trade for Q&A with former USTR head on how the current admin’s tariffs harm the Pacific Northwest In WA state, 2 out of every 5 jobs are tied to trade-related industries; Trump’s actions are “a threat to our ethos,” Cantwell says
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, joined the Washington Council of International Trade (WCIT) for a Q&A session on the whiplash caused by the administration’s chaotic tariff policies – and how they particularly harm the Pacific Northwest, which is among the most trade-dependent regions in the country.
The Q&A was moderated by WCIT President Lori Otto Punke and joined by former U.S. Trade Representative and current National Foreign Trade Council President Demetrios Marantis. Sen. Cantwell said that the current administration’s approach to trade – with a focus on punitive tariffs, even with America’s largest trading partners and closest allies, as opposed to innovation and alliance-building– is fundamentally at odds with how the Pacific Northwest has historically built its trade economy.
“The consequences to us in the Pacific Northwest is really a threat to our ethos. We are one of the most trade-dependent states in the country, and we just see the world differently. We believe that innovation matters more than the tariffs in a fight [on] who’s going to win in aerospace or agriculture or software or any of these issues. It is like we are in this horse race, but the President wants to put 25 pounds on our horse and make it harder.
“And what do we want to do in the Northwest? We like opening markets. We like building alliances. We like innovating our way to success.
“So make no mistake about it — one of the states that could see the biggest economic impacts from this is ours. And we have to be very loud about how foregoing an alliance approach of building more opportunities is really what we should be doing, if we want to win in an economy that changes in the blink of an eye,” Sen. Cantwell said.
WCIT is the Northwest’s premier organization advocating for trade and investment policies that increase the competitiveness of Northwest workers, farmers, and businesses. In addition to Sen. Cantwell, speakers at the Summit included U.S. Representatives Suzan DelBene (D,WA-01), Rick Larsen (D, WA-02), Dan Newhouse (R, WA-04), Kim Schrier (D, WA-08), Adam Smith (D, WA-09), and Emily Randall (D, WA-06).
In Washington state, two out of every five jobs are tied to trade and trade-related industries. More information on how President Trump’s tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada, and China will affect consumers and businesses in the State of Washington can be found HERE. Nationwide:
A 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico would add an estimated $144 billion a year to the cost of manufacturing in the United States.
Tariffs on Canada and Mexico could increase U.S. car prices by as much as $12,000.
According to the Yale Budget Lab, Trump’s proposed tariffs would result in the highest U.S. effective tariff rate in more than 80 years, and depending on the level of retaliation by other trading partners, will result in increased costs of between $1,600 and $2,000 per household. According to their analysis, food, clothing, cars, and electronics will all see above-average price increases.
Sen. Cantwell has remained a steadfast supporter of increased trade to grow the economy and keep prices in check in the State of Washington and nationwide. Sen. Cantwell was the leading voice in negotiations to end India’s 20% retaliatory tariff on American apples, which was imposed in response to tariffs on steel and aluminum and devastated Washington state’s apple exports. India had once been the second-largest export market for American apples, but after President Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum in his first term, India imposed retaliatory tariffs in response and U.S. apple exports plummeted. The impact on Washington apple growers was severe: Apple exports from the state dropped from $120 million in 2017 to less than $1 million by 2023. In September 2023, following several years of Sen. Cantwell’s advocacy, India ended its retaliatory tariffs on apples and pulse crops which was welcome news to the state’s more than 1,400 apple growers and the 68,000-plus workers they support.
For the past six weeks, President Trump has been sowing economic chaos across the country with unpredictable and ever-changing tariff announcements. His back-and-forth announcements and actions, which have whipsawed American businesses and consumers, as well as close neighbors and allies, include:
On January 31 — citing punishment for failing to crack down on fentanyl trafficking — the Trump administration announced plans to impose a 25% tax on many goods imported into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tax on goods imported from China, then abruptly postponed those tariffs.
Last month, he doubled down, announcing an additional 25% tax on all steel and aluminum imports.
At 12:01 a.m. ET on March 4, President Trump’s long-promised 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and 10% tariff increase on goods from China took effect, causing stock prices in the United States to plummet.
Then, on March 5, he announced that automobiles from Canada and Mexico would be exempt from his tariffs for one month.
The morning of March 6, he announced that he would suspend the tariffs for some products from Mexico. Then, later that same afternoon, he announced he was suspending most new tariffs on products from both Mexico and Canada until April 2.
On March 11, Trump threatened to double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum – increasing them to 50% – before reversing himself later the same day.
On March 13, he threatened 200% tariffs on alcoholic products from the European Union, including all wine and Champagne.
Video of Sen. Cantwell’s Q&A today is HERE; audio is HERE; photos are HERE; and a transcript is HERE.
Source: United States Senator for Iowa Chuck Grassley
BUTLER COUNTY, IOWA – Amid Sunshine Week, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is highlighting the historic scale of his recent oversight work, which secured victories for national security, government transparency, health care and more.
Grassley in the 118th Congress sent over 600 oversight letters to federal, state and private sector entities, as well as all 74 Offices of the Inspector General and the Office of Special Counsel – sending more oversight letters over the past two years than in any Congress prior. Grassley’s oversight – a hallmark of his time in public service – inspired bipartisan laws and prompted action from numerous federal agencies to address government waste, fraud and abuse.
“The Framers of our Constitution tasked Congress with conducting oversight as part of our system of checks and balances. I take this constitutional responsibility very seriously, and always have,” Grassley said. “My oversight and investigations help ensure the government is a service to the people of Iowa and the American taxpayer. I’m proud of the work I’ve done to safeguard our national security, improve health care outcomes, protect patriotic whistleblowers and hold agencies’ feet to the fire. I’m keeping my nose to the grindstone this Congress as I continue fighting for a more transparent and accountable government.”
Grassley gave an overview of his oversight achievements in a speech on the Senate floor. He noted: “We’re [now] in the 119th Congress. As this Congress gets underway, I have become Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. My oversight is already full-speed-ahead, and I look forward to what the next couple of years produce.”
Highlights of Grassley Oversight in the 118th Congress
Digging into agency mismanagement | Grassley:
Unveiled the “most detailed picture” of the Secret Service’s communication failures leading up to the first assassination attempt against President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General opened a formal review into the Secret Service just hours after receiving a request from Grassley to do so. Grassley’s request ultimately resulted in five ongoing reviews into the Secret Service’s protection processes.
Shone light on inappropriate expenditures billed to the Environmental Protection Agency under the guise of “environmental justice.”
Revealed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) misclassified employees as law enforcement, an illegal practice that cost taxpayers billions.
Demanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) come clean on its failure to investigate child sex crimes and crack down on sexual misconduct among its workforce, including questionable disciplinary patterns allowing wrongdoers to evade accountability.
Spearheaded efforts to root out partisan bias at the FBI, stop the weaponization of government against law-abiding Americans for their religious faith and expose bureaucratic sabotage of congressional oversight.
Built on his yearslong oversight of the Pentagon by crafting a bipartisan measure to ensure the U.S. Armed Forces identify items the Defense Department (DOD) could produce itself through reverse engineering. Grassley’s bill, introduced with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), was signed into law as part of the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.
Exposed U.S. Attorney David Weiss for lacking the authorities then-Attorney General Merrick Garland publicly asserted Weiss had to fully prosecute the Hunter Biden case. Grassley further exposed, through legally protected whistleblower disclosures, that the FBI had dozens of sources who provided potentially criminal information relating to the Biden family.
Protecting whistleblowers | Grassley:
Forced the ATF, Executive Office of Immigration Review and Internal Revenue Service to update its nondisclosure agreements with language informing whistleblowers of their rights.
Demanded all Offices of Inspectors General review their parent agency’s whistleblower protection measures to ensure federal agencies maintain lawful anti-gag provisions.
Unanimously passed a resolution and delivered remarks celebrating National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.
Supporting crime victims | Grassley:
Shone a light on Credit Suisse’s failure to disclose Nazi-linked accounts the bank historically serviced. Credit Suisse reinitiated an internal investigation of the accounts thanks to Grassley’s probing.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a global Jewish human rights organization, recognized Grassley for his work to right historic wrongs.
At Grassley’s request, Argentinian President Javier Milei has agreed to cooperate with the investigation to provide Argentine-based records related to Credit Suisse’s use of Nazi “ratlines.”
Secured a Government Accountability Office study of the Justice Department (DOJ)’s Crime Victims Fund to ensure DOJ doesn’t squander money intended to support victims of crime. The DOJ Office of Inspector General opened its own audit following Grassley’s oversight.
Cracking down on Biden border chaos | Grassley:
Spurred a federal investigation into potential trafficking of unaccompanied migrant children. Homeland Security Investigations followed up on 102 investigative targets Grassley identified.
Brought Health and Human Services (HHS) whistleblowers before a congressional panel to expose the abuse they witnessed in HHS’ Unaccompanied Children program.
Earned recognition as “the only person in a position of power” who exhibited consistent dedication to addressing government-funded migrant child trafficking.
Called on dozens of federal contractors and grantees to account for what actions they’ve taken to safeguard unaccompanied migrant children in their care.
Brought Customs and Border Protection whistleblowers before a congressional panel to discuss the government’s unlawful refusal to collect DNA from all individuals encountered at the border.
Advancing life-saving health care reforms | Grassley:
Championed a bipartisan law to reform the U.S. organ transplant system for the first time in four decades. The Securing the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network Act ensures the best-qualified contractors manage and operate nationwide organ donations and placements, providing patients with the highest-quality care and ensuring generous donations are used to save lives.
The nonpartisan Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy recognized Grassley and his bipartisan colleagues for their work to “[achieve] the best outcome for the American people.”
Spearheaded a bipartisan investigation with then-Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) into private equity ownership of hospital systems that operate across the country, including in Iowa. Grassley and Whitehouse pulled back the curtain on access and quality changes that had occurred at hospital systems purchased by private equity.
Cutting off resources to Mexican drug cartels | Grassley:
Published a detailed report revealing federal agencies’ decades-long failure to conduct oversight of U.S. resources sent to Mexico, allowing taxpayer dollars to fall into the hands of cartels and fuel drug trafficking operations.
Informed by his report, Grassley authored bipartisan, bicameral legislation to improve intercountry drug destruction efforts. The bill passed the House of Representatives last Congress.
Exposed how Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) loopholes enable drug cartels to transport illicit drugs on U.S. registered planes. Grassley’s bipartisan bill to close FAA’s loopholes was signed into law as part of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024.
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NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA – EDGARDO AMADOR-RODRIGUEZ, age 27, a native of Honduras, was indicted on March 13, 2025, for re-entry of a removed alien, in violation of Title 8, United States Code, Section 1326(a), announced Acting U.S. Attorney Michael M. Simpson.
According to the filed indictment, on or about March 7 2025, in the Eastern District of Louisiana, the defendant, EDGARDO AMADOR-RODRIGUEZ, was found in the United States, after having been officially deported and removed therefrom, on or about June 8, 2018.
EDGARDO AMADOR-RODRIGUEZ faces up to two years imprisonment, a fine of up to $250,000, up to one year of supervised release, and a mandatory special assessment fee of $100.00, if convicted of re-entry of a removed alien.
Acting U.S. Attorney Simpson reiterated that an indictment is merely a charge, and the guilt of the defendant must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Acting U.S. Attorney Simpson praised the work of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, in investigating this matter. Assistant United States Attorney Carter K.D. Guice, Jr. of the General Crimes Unit is in charge of the prosecution.
This case is part of Operation Take Back America, a nationwide initiative that marshals the full resources of the Department of Justice to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from the perpetrators of violent crime. Operation Take Back America streamlines efforts and resources from the Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETFs) and Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN).
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — iQor CXBPO™, an award-winning customer experience business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions provider, today announced the appointment of Fleurette (Flo) Navarro as Regional President – Philippines, marking a historic leadership milestone as the first Filipina executive to lead the company’s Philippines’ organization. This appointment is part of a broader leadership realignment aimed at enhancing local decision-making, agility, and strategic growth across global markets.
Country leaders will now oversee administration, facilities, human resources, and recruiting functions within their respective regions, enabling localized execution, streamlined decision-making, and seamless integration of local policies and cultural priorities. Sonia Goyal will lead Global Human Resources Operations, driving strategic HR initiatives and overseeing a Center of Excellence dedicated to transforming people practices through technology and AI.
“These strategic leadership realignments reinforce our commitment to excellence, innovation, and employee engagement,” said Chief Administrative Officer Art DiBari. “Flo is the first Filipina executive to lead our Philippines organization—a milestone that brings immense pride to our team. We are confident these changes will enhance our ability to deliver world-class CX solutions while fostering an agile, collaborative, and people-centric culture.”
As Regional President – Philippines, Navarro will oversee human resources, recruiting, and administrative functions in the Philippines, while managing external relationships with industry bodies, government agencies, and academic institutions. With 17 contact centers spanning the Philippine archipelago and a workforce of 31,000 in-country solutionists, this new role will drive continued growth in the region. Navarro will report to DiBari.
With more than 25 years of experience in the BPO industry, Navarro has held senior leadership positions at HSBC, CapitalOne, and Tata Consultancy, gaining deep expertise in operations, account management, training, quality assurance, and human resources. Since joining iQor in 2017, she has played a pivotal role in reshaping the company’s talent strategy, earning Great Place to Work® Certifications™ in the Philippines, India, and Colombia. Most recently, as Global Chief People Officer (2023–2025), she led human resources, recruiting, payroll, compensation, and benefits strategies, significantly impacting iQor CXBPO™’s workforce and business outcomes.
“I am honored to take on this role and excited to continue elevating iQor CXBPO™’s Philippines organization,” said Navarro. “Our people are at the heart of everything we do, and I look forward to strengthening our presence, fostering innovation, and driving meaningful results for our employees, clients, and stakeholders.”
Goyal will lead Global Human Resources Operations, overseeing human resources and recruiting functions outside Colombia, India, the Philippines, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Since joining iQor in 2014, Goyal has implemented transformative human resources strategies that have enhanced performance, profitability, and employee engagement. She has also led major global hiring initiatives, including the launch of iQor CXBPO™’s Trinidad sites and the expansion of bilingual operations in Medellín, Colombia.
“I’m excited to lead our global HR operations at such a pivotal time for iQor CXBPO™,” said Goyal. “This realignment strengthens our ability to attract and retain top talent while driving excellence in HR practices worldwide.”
For more information about iQor CXBPO™ and its leadership, visit www.iqor.com.
About iQorCXBPO™ iQor CXBPO™ is a trusted partner in intelligent customer experience solutions, delivering exceptional results for global brands. With 40,000 employees across 10 countries, we combine 30 years of industry expertise with cutting-edge AI-driven innovations to optimize customer interactions at every stage. Our agile, scalable solutions ensure seamless omnichannel engagement, driving loyalty and measurable business success. Recognized as a Great Place to Work® and a leader in CX excellence, we elevate performance through a people-first approach, operational expertise, and secure, technology-enabled solutions. Learn more at iQor.com.
What was left unsaid is that the individuals would be knowingly placed into a prison system in which a range of sources have reported widespread human rights abuses at the hands of state forces.
A first transfer of U.S. deportees from Venezuela has now arrived into that system. On March 16, the U.S. government flew around 250 deportees to El Salvador despite a judge’s order temporarily blocking the move. Bukele later posted a video online showing the deportees arriving in El Salvador with their hands and feet shackled and forcibly bent over by armed guards.
We have also heard firsthand of the human rights abuses that deportees and Salvadorans alike say they have suffered while incarcerated in El Salvador, and we have worked on hundreds of asylum cases as expert witnesses, testifying in U.S. immigration court about the nature and scope of human rights abuses in the country. We are deeply concerned both over the conditions into which deportees are arriving and as to what the U.S. administration’s decision signals about its commitments to international human rights standards.
For the past three years, Bukele has governed with few checks and balances under a self-imposed “state of exception.” This emergency status has allowed Bukele to suspend many rights as he wages what he calls a “war on gangs.”
The crackdown manifests in mass arbitrary arrests of anyone who fits stereotypical demographic characteristics of gang members, like having tattoos, a prior criminal record or even just “looking nervous.”
As a result of the ongoing mass arrests, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The proportion of its population that El Salvador incarcerates is more than triple that of the U.S. and double that of the next nearest country, Cuba.
Safest country in Latin America?
Bukele’s tough-on-gangs persona has earned him widespread popularity at home and abroad – he has fostered an immediate friendship with the new U.S. administration in particular.
But maintaining this popularity has involved, it is widely alleged, manipulating crime statistics, attacking journalists who criticize him and denying involvement in a widely documented secret gang pact that unraveled just before the start of the state of exception.
Bukele and pro-government Salvadoran media insist that the crackdown on gangs has transformed El Salvador into the safest country in Latin America.
But on the ground, Salvadorans have described how police, military personnel and Mexican cartels have taken over the exploitative practices previously carried out by gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18. One Salvadoran woman whose son died in prison just a few days after he was arbitrarily detained told a reporter from Al Jazeera: “One is always afraid. Before it was fear of the gangs, now it’s also the security forces who take innocent people.”
Bukele has ordered a communication blackout between incarcerated people and their loved ones. This means no visits, no letters and no phone calls.
Such lack of contact makes it nearly impossible for people to determine the well-being of their incarcerated family members, many of whom are parents with young children now cared for by extended family.
Despite the blackout, scholars, international and national rights’ groups and investigative journalists have been able to build up a picture of conditions inside El Salvador’s prisons through interviews with victims and their family members, medical records and forensic analysis of cases of prison deaths. What they describe is a hellscape.
Incarcerated Salvadorans are packed into grossly overcrowded cells, beaten regularly by prison personnel and denied medicines even when they are available. Inmates are frequently subjected to punishments including food deprivation and electric shocks. Indeed, a U.S. State Department’s 2023 country report on El Salvador noted the “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
The human rights organization Cristosal estimates that hundreds have died from malnutrition, blunt force trauma, strangulation and lack of lifesaving medical treatment.
Often, their bodies are buried by government workers in mass graves without notifying families.
Although El Salvador is a signatory to the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture, Amnesty International concluded after multiple missions to the country and interviews with victims and their families that there is “systemic use of torture” in Salvadoran prisons.
Likewise, a case-by-case study by Cristosal, which included forensic analysis of exhumed bodies of people who died in prison, determined in 2024 that “torture has become a state policy.”
‘At risk of irreparable harm’
What makes this all the more worrying is the scale of potential abuse.
El Salvador now houses a prison population of around 110,000 – more than three times the number of inmates before the state of exception began.
To increase the country’s capacity for ongoing mass incarceration, Bukele built and opened the Terrorism Confinement Center mega-prison in 2023. An analysis of the center using satellite footage showed that if the prison were to reach its full supposed capacity of 40,000, each prisoner would have less than 2 feet of space in their cells.
It is to this prison that deportees from the U.S. have been taken.
There are serious concerns over both the process and the legality of transferring U.S. prisoners to a nation that has not protected the human rights of its detained population.
Moreover, the agreement through which the Trump administration is seeking to moving migrants detained in the U.S. to El Salvador faces scrutiny under international law, given what is known about the country’s prison conditions.
International human rights is governed by laws that prohibit nations from transferring people into harm’s way, be it returning foreign nationals to countries where “there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm,” or transferring detainees to jurisdictions in which they are at risk of being tortured or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
The efforts of human rights organizations, journalists and scholars to document prison conditions point to an unequivocal conclusion: El Salvador does not meet the terms necessary to protect the human rights of deported and incarcerated migrants.
Mneesha Gellman received funding from Emerson College’s Faculty Development Fund. She is the Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative.
Sarah C. Bishop has received research funding from the Fulbright Organization, The Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society at Villanova University, the Robert Bosch Stiftung Foundation, and the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York. She serves on the board of directors of the nonprofit organization Mixteca.
Marc H. Silverman, Acting United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, announced that EDDIE LIMAS, 35, of New Britain, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Sarala V. Nagala in Hartford to 144 months of imprisonment, followed by five years of supervised release, for trafficking fentanyl.
According to court documents and statements made in court, in 2022, the FBI’s Northern Connecticut Gang Task Force received information that Limas and others were receiving kilogram quantities of fentanyl from sources in the Dominican Republic, storing the drug at a stash house in the Bronx, New York, and distributing it in central Connecticut. Between January and April 2022, investigators made five controlled purchases of distribution quantities of fentanyl from Limas.
On May 13, 2022, Connecticut State Police stopped a vehicle driven by Limas’ uncle, Hector Limas, on I-84 in Danbury after investigators suspected that he had delivered narcotics to Eddie Limas’ residence on Chapman Street in New Britain. A search of the vehicle revealed approximately 700 grams of fentanyl and approximately $19,000 in cash.
Also on May 13, 2022, law enforcement attempted to arrest Eddie Limas in Hartford, but he crashed his vehicle into a Hartford police cruiser and fled at a high rate of speed. At the same time, investigators maintaining surveillance at Eddie Limas’ residence saw a neighbor remove bags and boxes from the residence, lock them in a car that was parked in front, and give the key fob to Carmen Hernandez, who had also exited the residence. A search of the car revealed more than two kilograms of fentanyl, more than 300 grams of cocaine, approximately one kilogram of marijuana, items used to process and package narcotics, and a .380 caliber pistol. Hernandez also possessed a quantity of fentanyl, and a search of Limas’ residence revealed a loaded .40 caliber pistol and additional narcotics.
Eddie Limas eluded capture until May 9, 2023, when he was arrested in New Britain after conducting additional drug sales. He has been detained since his arrest. On September 18, 2024, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute, and to possess with intent to distribute, 400 grams or more of fentanyl.
Hector Limas, 59, of the Bronx, and Hernandez, 61, of Hartford, pleaded guilty to related charges. On November 8, 2023, Hector Limas was sentenced to 90 months of imprisonment, and on January 14, 2025, Hernandez was sentenced to 24 months of imprisonment.
This matter was investigated by the FBI’s Northern Connecticut Gang Task Force, the Hartford Police Department, the East Hartford Police Department, the New Britain Police Department, and the Connecticut State Police. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Reed Durham.
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA – ENRIQUE TORRES-BEIZA, a/k/a “Enrique B. Torres,” age 39, a native of Mexico, was indicted on March 13, 2025, for re-entry of a removed alien, in violation of Title 8, United States Code, Section 1326(a), announced Acting U.S. Attorney Michael M. Simpson.
According to the filed indictment, on or about October 26, 2024, in the Eastern District of Louisiana, the defendant, ENRIQUE TORRES-BEIZA, a/k/a “Enrique B. Torres,”,was found in the United States, after having been officially deported and removed therefrom, on or about December 26, 2018
ENRIQUE TORRES-BEIZA, a/k/a “Enrique B. Torres,” faces up to two years imprisonment, a fine of up to $250,000, up to one year of supervised release, and a mandatory special assessment fee of $100.00, if convicted of re-entry of a removed alien.
This case is part of Operation Take Back America, a nationwide initiative that marshals the full resources of the Department of Justice to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from the perpetrators of violent crime. Operation Take Back America streamlines efforts and resources from the Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETFs) and Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN).
Acting U.S. Attorney Simpson reiterated that an indictment is merely a charge and that the guilt of the defendant must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Acting U.S. Attorney Simpson praised the work of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office in investigating this matter. Assistant United States Attorney Carter K.D. Guice, Jr. of the General Crimes Unit is in charge of the prosecution.
Freedom of the press — a bedrock principle of American democracy — is under threat in the United States.
Here at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism we are witnessing and experiencing an alarming chill. We write to affirm our commitment to supporting and exercising First Amendment rights for students, faculty, and staff on our campus — and, indeed, for all.
After Homeland Security seized and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs, without charging him with any crime, many of our international students have felt afraid to come to classes and to events on campus.
They are right to be worried. Some of our faculty members and students who have covered the protests over the Gaza war have been the object of smear campaigns and targeted on the same sites that were used to bring Khalil to the attention of Homeland Security.
President Trump has warned that the effort to deport Khalil is just the first of many.
These actions represent threats against political speech and the ability of the American press to do its essential job and are part of a larger design to silence voices that are out of favour with the current administration.
We have also seen reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport the Palestinian poet and journalist Mosab Abu Toha, who has written extensively in the New Yorker about the condition of the residents of Gaza and warned of the mortal danger to Palestinian journalists.
There are 13 million legal foreign residents (green card holders) in the United States. If the administration can deport Khalil, it means those 13 million people must live in fear if they dare speak up or publish something that runs afoul of government views.
There are more than one million international students in the United States. They, too, may worry that they are no longer free to speak their mind. Punishing even one person for their speech is meant to intimidate others into self-censorship.
One does not have to agree with the political opinions of any particular individual to understand that these threats cut to the core of what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy. The use of deportation to suppress foreign critics runs parallel to an aggressive campaign to use libel laws in novel — even outlandish ways — to silence or intimidate the independent press.
The President has sued CBS for an interview with Kamala Harris which Trump found too favourable. He has sued the Pulitzer Prize committee for awarding prizes to stories critical of him.
He has even sued the Des Moines Register for publishing the results of a pre-election poll that showed Kamala Harris ahead at that point in the state.
Large corporations like Disney and Meta settled lawsuits most lawyers thought they could win because they did not want to risk the wrath of the Trump administration and jeopardize business they have with the federal government.
Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided that the paper’s editorial pages would limit themselves to pieces celebrating “free markets and individual liberties.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration insists on hand-picking the journalists who will be permitted to cover the White House and Pentagon, and it has banned the Associated Press from press briefings because the AP is following its own style book and refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
The Columbia Journalism School stands in defence of First Amendment principles of free speech and free press across the political spectrum. The actions we’ve outlined above jeopardise these principles and therefore the viability of our democracy. All who believe in these freedoms should steadfastly oppose the intimidation, harassment, and detention of individuals on the basis of their speech or their journalism.
The price of eggs has risen dramatically in recent years across the US. A dozen eggs cost US$1.20 (92p) in June 2019, but the price is now around US$4.90 (with a peak of US$8.17 in early March).
Some restaurants have imposed surcharges on egg-based dishes, bringing even more attention to escalating costs. And there are also shortages on supermarket shelves.
In the coming months, the US plans to import up to 100 million of this consumer staple. Government officials are approaching countries from Turkey to Brazil with enquiries about eggs for export.
Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously said that one option to the crisis was for people to get a chicken for their backyard, suggested in the Wall Street Journal that prices are unlikely to stabilise for some months. And Donald Trump recently shared an article on Truth Social calling on the public to “shut up about egg prices”.
The main cause of the problem is an outbreak of avian flu that has resulted in over 166 million birds in the US being slaughtered. Around 98% of the nation’s chickens are produced on factory farms, which are ripe for contagion.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the flu has already spread to several hundred dairy cattle and to one human. The USDA recently announced a US$1 billion plan to counter the problem, with funding for improved bio-security, vaccine research and compensation to farmers.
In January 2025, Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, blamed the previous administration for high egg prices. It is true that birds were slaughtered on President Joe Biden’s watch, but this was and remains standard practice at times of bird flu outbreaks and had also been the case during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
However, this points to the way the rising price of eggs has become a political touchstone. It was referred to regularly in campaign speeches and press briefings as a sign of things going wrong and a symbol of the US economy faced. Donald Trump promised to fix the price of eggs swiftly if elected, but so far the issue shows no sign of going away.
Prices are still trending up. Even when prices suddenly drop, as they have this week, the public know how much cheaper they used to be until recently, and do not tend to feel better.
There are a number of reasons why egg prices have become an important to US politicians. First, almost everyone buys eggs. So the shortage and subsequent price rise is newsworthy and affects consumers in all income brackets.
Secondly, they are a measure of broader economic vulnerabilities, so egg-related problems tend to be part of a larger story about how weak the economy is. And thirdly, egg prices are political because of Trump’s promise to bring them down.
Polls showed that the economy and inflation were key factors in voter choice on election day 2024. In February 2025, Donald Trump did an interview with NBC News in which he said he won the election on the border and groceries.
On immigration, voters often base their opinions on what they perceive to be true. For example, tough rhetoric on building a wall may equate with a sense of feeling that the president is taking strong action, whether anything tangible actually materialises or not.
With groceries, reality trumps perception. The price of eggs is printed on the box and the cost is paid directly by voters.
Donald Trump on what he’s doing on egg prices and the economy.
Then there are the egg producers. US farmers tended to overwhelmingly support Trump on election day, so it is prudent for him to feel their pain, or at least appear to. Farming areas voted for him increasingly in his three election efforts, even increasing their support for him in 2020 after trade wars and price increases which would have negatively impacted them.
Another factor that may push up egg prices is that an estimated 70% of the factory farm workforce is immigrant labour, and as many as 40% are undocumented. Should the administration’s plans for high tariffs and mass deportations come to fruition, the industry would struggle to function.
Further food price increases will be inevitable, with potential exacerbation via the funding freezes for some USDA programmes that Trump has enacted. As of March 2025, US$1 billion in cuts has been announced, the consequences of which are already being felt by farmers. The “pain now for gain later” message is a tricky political sell.
Even in the current era of international turbulence, elections are largely won on more pedestrian matters. Specifically, “kitchen-table” economics is relatable to every voter, regardless of how grand, or not, their table is.
Americans will be aware that in neighbouring Canada, egg prices have not risen dramatically and there have not been shortages. But prices in Canada have been traditionally higher than the US, this is in part at least because farming standards differ.
The US does not have high welfare standards for agricultural workers or animals, and this shortcoming needs to be addressed in order to help reduce future risk of flu, but this is likely to also raise prices.
Blaming the previous incumbent is not a durable stance for Donald Trump. As former president Harry Truman might remind him: “The buck stops here.” Right at his desk.
Clodagh Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jonathan Cazabonne, Doctorant en mycologie et écologie des vieilles forêts, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT)
Fungi are among the most important organisms on Earth. Even though most of the world’s described 157,000 fungal species are only visible with a microscope, these organisms are essential to our ecosystems, our societies and economies.
Fungi are also important to human cultures — including as a source of food, medicine and art. Economically, fungi also support a growing economy centred around mycotourism — with a growing number of travellers visiting Canada and Spain each year to forage for wild mushrooms.
All the benefits fungi provide to humans are estimated to be worth the equivalent of US$54.57 trillion. This is why it’s an understatement to say that the world’s ecosystems and human societies are shaped by fungi.
And yet fungi continue to be an important but overlooked element of conservation strategies.
Why fungi are forgotten
Conservation efforts have long focused on protecting well-studied animals and plants. This is reflected in the number of species that have been assigned a conservation status by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Around 84 per cent of known species of vertebrates have received an IUCN conservation status. But just 0.5 per cent of all described fungi — 818 fungal species — are currently present on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Considering scientists estimate that there could be around 2.5 million fungal species in the world — of which we currently only know about six per cent of them — this means just 0.03 per cent of all fungi have been assigned a conservation status.
Several factors explain this alarming reality.
Fungi are difficult to study in both nature and under experimental conditions. This is because of many species’ microscopic size, their short lifespan and the hidden habitats they call home — such as soils, the tissues of other organisms and dung deposits.
Many species of fungi are difficult to study because of their microscopic size. (Shutterstock)
Fungi are also considered “uncharismatic” — meaning they don’t have the level of human appeal that some other species have. Much of their diversity is cryptic, as well. This means that while many fungi were once considered to be a single species, in reality they’re made up of multiple species that may look similar but are genetically distinct from one another. Because of this, conservation projects for fungi are poorly funded and do not easily capture public interest.
Protecting the unknown
In recent years, there’s been momentum within the scientific community to recognise fungi as a distinct kingdom within conservation strategies — one that’s on equal footing with animals and plants.
A significant milestone in this movement has been the adoption of the term “funga,” which mirrors “fauna” and “flora”. This designates the fungal diversity within a given environment or habitat.
Another important advancement was the recent pledge for fungal conservation that was presented at the 2024 Conference of Parties (COP16) in Colombia. This pledge urged parties to make fungal conservation a priority given fungi are central to achieving the biodiversity targets set out by the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework.
More local initiatives are also emerging. In Québec, over 70 mycologists and biologists signed an opinion letter encouraging the government to integrate fungi into its legislative framework.
Such progress is not trivial and may help correct misconceptions about fungi that continue to be present among the public, economic sectors and policymakers. For example, the misconception that fungi are plants is something that still persists to this day. Allowing this misconception to continue being perpetuated is harmful to the field of mycology, and may be preventing it from becoming a standalone discipline that deserves dedicated funding and specialists.
Still, there’s much we don’t know about these unique, important organisms. And in order for us to be able to protect and preserve the planet’s fungi, we need to begin by formally identifying areas where knowledge is lacking and close these gaps.
Last year, researchers used Laboulbeniomycetes — a class of poorly understood microfungi — as a case study to understand what biodiversity and conservation shortfalls continue to affect funga. This group of fungi includes species that rely on arthropods to disperse their spores or act as hosts for them. Many of these fungi live as minute parasites on the surface of insects such as cockroaches and ladybirds.
The case study uncovered four major biodiversity shortfalls that are undermining the conservation of funga. These include knowledge gaps in species diversity, distribution, conservation assessments and species persistence.
Part of conservation
Failing to protect fungi means, by extension, failing to protect the roles they play in our ecosystems and daily lives.
This is especially timely, as fungi, like animals and plants, are also facing numerous threats. Habitat degradation, pollution, invasive species and climate change may all increase their risks of extinction.
And, as recently exemplified in vertebrates, many undescribed species of fungi may be even more at peril than we might know. This is because they’re most likely to be found in remote geographical regions — such as tropical rainforests — and thus heavily susceptible to human-induced changes.
A key priority to better integrate fungi into conservation biology is to accumulate data on species diversity. But in order to accumulate data and understand how we can better protect fungal species worldwide, we need to fund research on fungi and make mycology a more attractive field for young scientists.
One thing remains certain: the more we explore, the more we realise just how little we know.
Jonathan Cazabonne is financially supported by a B2X doctoral research fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT).
Danny Haelewaters receives funding from the Czech Academy of Sciences (Lumina Quaeruntur Fellowship LQ200962501).
