January 27 roundup: Israel in the dock for genocide, Germany's AfD on the ropes, Media collapse, air safety, NYPD union kneecaps protest settlement

Start the day out right, kids.

It's been what they call "a week," and we'll get further into it below. I'm extremely deep in reporting this week so not much on the preamble except to say if you have children, NEVER let them play on Roblox without supervision. The same goes for Discord.

Monday saw the first time I've used Bleeding Edge to break news with an-in-the-weeds post about Rise Above Movement founder and Neo-Nazi influencer Robert Rundo's legal defense ahead of his trial this spring on federal Anti-Riot Act charges in Southern California. It's a subscriber-only article and original reporting, like the Skeleton Key segment I did with Jake Hanrahan earlier this month. You'll see more posts like that as the year rolls on and some of these bigger projects come to fruition, along with some deep dives into older investigations and shorter articles that either delve further into topics I cover for another organization.

Now, brass tacks.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-The top court of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, found sufficient cause in South Africa's complaint of genocide against Israel over its assault on Gaza to allow the case to proceed. While the court stopped short of ordering Israel to halt its offensive, the American head of the 17-judge panel, Joan Donoghue, said the tribunal was "deeply concerned about the continuing loss of life and suffering" and directed the IDF to limit harm to the besiedged Palestinians in Gaza, where more than 25,000 have been killed in the past four months. I've linked to the Financial Times writeup below, for reasons best outlined by historian Adam Tooze earlier today. The ICJ's refusal to toss the case is a major blow to Israel, and amplifies pressure on the United States and European Union to dial back their support for Netanyahu's war of political survival.

-Germany's struggle with the legacy of National Socialism is a constant of that country's history, despite whatever starry-eyed American academics claimed about the de-Nazification process a few years back. Growing up with Turkish roots made me particularly aware of the 1990s Neo-Nazi resurgence during the post-unification era, as well as the struggles to integrate the millions of descendants of gastarbeiters. In the succeeding decades, Germany's immigrant population has grown significantly, especially after the 2015 influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa that prompted a major backlash and the rise of the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternatif fur Deustchland party. AfD is essentially a rebranding of older Fascist parties descended from the remnants of Hitler's NSDAP with a slick modern overlay.

Earlier this month, the investigative outlet Correctiv published a staggering expose of a secret AfD's secret conference in Potsdam (the city where the Final Solution was devised) where party leaders and extremists discussed plans to denaturalize and deport Germans of foreign origin - something in the order of 20+ million people. The article, which was co-published in French, English, Turkish and Arabic, triggered massive protests across Germany which are still ongoing. The AfD, like many right wing parties in Western Europe, is in the ascendance and could enter into government within the next few years if it manages to avoid a ban or dissolution.

-The news industry is bleeding out for a number of reasons. Ill-advised mergers, the burst of the venture capital-funded online news bubble, asset-stripping by predatory hedge funds, Silicon Valley's digital advertising duopoly - take your pick. Jack Shafer at Politico has the best writeup of the overarching story below.

Much (digital) ink has been spilled on the topic but this last week was a disaster, with the Los Angeles Times laying off 115 journalists on top of 8% cuts at Business Insider . The paper was reportedly losing $30-40 million a year, but is owned by an erstwhile billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiung, whose massive fortune ostensibly should be able to cover losses of this scale and still have plenty of money left over. However, Soon-Shiung appears to have incurred some serious financial losses in his investment portfolio since deciding to become a media tycoon, and the largest news organization on the West Coast is suffering the consequences. The LAT union has been out of control for over a year and a half, and Shoon-Shiung appears to be growing disenchanted with the independence of a newsroom that refused to let his daughter meddle in news coverage and apparently was sniffing around the affairs of one of the billionaire's ultra-wealthy friends, a story which he personally tried to kill.

-The Lever (another excellent new journalism organization that also runs on Ghost.io) dove into federal safety records pertaining to Boeing's 737 Max jet liner, which is the aircraft that lost a door and depressurized earlier this month during an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon to Southern California. Though catastrophe was avoided, the aircraft's safety record and cost-cutting measures by Boeing to please stockholders have come under heavy scrutiny. Reporter Freddy Brewster unearthed records documenting 1,8000 complaints by airlines about mechanical problems with the 737 Max, which has been widely taken out of service since the near-miss. Terrific accountability reporting on the airline industry, which has consolidated to an alarming degree and is essentially allowed to self-regulate by federal authorities. Take the train whenever you can, folks.

-2020's George Floyd Uprisings against police brutality saw some of the largest protests in American history, and a similarly unprecedented law enforcement crackdown. I won't go long on that history, but New York City saw some of the most vicious protest repression in the country, with thousands of arrests and wanton violence by NYPD personnel, spearheaded by the Strategic Response Group "goon squad," created by cryptkeeper/Police Commissioner William Bratton under fauxgressive Mayor William Wilhelm (he spiced up his background by taking his mother's name, De Blasio, after moving to NYC) with the dual mission of counter-terrorism and counter-protest duties. I went deep into the SRG's 2020 exploits for The Appeal and documented the legal fallout of the 2020 protests for New York in Fall 2022.

Last Fall, civil rights attorneys appeared to have won a victory of sorts in agreeing with the city and NYPD on a legal settlement that would have established some limits on the way New York City polices protests. However, U.S. District Court Coleen McMahon allowed the city's largest police union, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, to intervene in the lawsuit. Predictably for one of the most reactionary cop unions in the U.S., the PBA proceeded to flip the whole car over and object to the settlement over potential changes to NYPD policy (that's the whole point of a settlement agreement/consent decree, and the New York Attorney General helped bring one of the class actions at issue here). Hellgate co-founder Nick Pinto summed up this whole sad saga and potential undercutting of some incremental but genuine progress on oversight for the country's largest and most intransigent police department ahead of a court hearing on Monday that will determine the course of this settlement, three and a half years after the incidents in question. Plus ça change....

BOOK OF THE WEEK - Michael Mann is the sort of director who inspires obsessive devotion to an almost unhealthy degree, and with good reason. Thief, Miami Vice, Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Collateral - Mann is a stylist of the first order and knows how to spin a story. However, in my eyes his greatest film is Heat, the heist/cops-and-robbers opus that sets Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino on opposite sides of the law and is so loaded with talent that you'll miss Danny Trejo and Henry Rollins' terrific supporting roles if you blink (not to mention Charlize Theron, Jon Voigt, Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer).

Bestselling author relished collaboration for 'Heat' follow-up

Mann also loves his film so much that in 2022, he and mystery writer Meg Gardiner co-authored a prequel/sequel, Heat 2, that gets into Vincent Hanna, Neil McCauley and Chris Shiherlis' trajectories before and after the explosive events of the 1995 film. I won't spoil it, but the narrative tracks from Chicago to Paraguay and Southeast Asia by way of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Mann's meticulous attention to detail comes through on every page, and Gardiner's style is an excellent compliment. A true page-turner that desperately needed a better title.

FILM - Watch "Little Odessa" if you haven't already. James Gray's 1994 noir about Eastern Bloc emigre gangsters in South Brooklyn is one of the true gems of 1990s New York City film-making and a tone-perfect account of Brighton Beach. This is part of a Criterion Channel (yes, them again) capsule of Gray's films, which include flashier big-budget efforts like 2007's Joaquin Phoenix/Marky Mark vehicle We Own the Night, which has an excellent Robert Duvall performance but is far thinner than the earlier production, where Tim Roth absolutely shines.

MUSIC - At the top of this post, I hinted at some of the reporting I've been immersed in. Unpleasant shit, and when I'm in that sort of mode I turn to music that takes the edge off. The Upsetters' "Super Ape" is precisely that. Lee "Scratch" Perry channeling nyah bingi drum patterns into a dub album that stands up almost half a century later. Enjoy.