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For Immediate Release
March, 09 2009, 10:55am EDT
Contact:
Timothy Karr: 201-533-8838,,tkarr@freepress.net
Pickering, Free Press and OIC to Discuss Broadband Stimulus Programs
WASHINGTON
Today, former Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) will join Free Press and
the Open Internet Coalition on a national conference call to outline
ways to implement model broadband stimulus programs that promote the
public interest and guide future technology policy. The three federal
agencies charged with overseeing $7.2 billion in broadband funds will
hold their first joint public meeting tomorrow to discuss these
programs.
DATE: Monday, March 9
TIME: 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT
SPEAKERS:
Former Rep. Chip Pickering
Ben Scott, Free Press
Markham Erickson, Open Internet Coalition
*** To join the conference call, dial (888) 792-8352, passcode 89510171 or FREE PRESS ***
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, signed into law last
month by President Barack Obama, allocates $4.7 billion to the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for broadband
adoption and deployment in "unserved," "underserved" and low-income
communities; $2.5 billion to the Department of Agriculture's Rural
Utilities Service (RUS) for rural broadband; and directs the Federal
Communications Commission to develop a national broadband strategy.
The NTIA, RUS and FCC are expected to hold several public meetings
as the agencies work to establish robust broadband grant programs.
Today's call will focus on the priorities, policies and procedures that
should direct the grantmaking process.
Read Fress Press' Putting the Angels in the Details: A Roadmap for Broadband Stimulus Success: https://www.freepress.net/files/Angels_in_the_Details.pdf
Broadband meeting agenda: https://www.ntia.doc.gov/broadbandgrants/Agenda_090310.pdf
Free Press was created to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media. We believe that positive social change, racial justice and meaningful engagement in public life require equitable access to technology, diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, and journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what's actually happening in their communities.
(202) 265-1490LATEST NEWS
'A Revolting Moral Outrage': Israeli Soldiers Reportedly Torture Gaza Toddler
Reports of 1-year-old Karim Abu Nassar being burned with a cigarette and pierced with a nail followed the publication of a United Nations analysis detailing Israel's "systematic" torture of Palestinians since October 2023.
Mar 23, 2026
Israeli soldiers in Gaza allegedly tortured an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler in an effort to force a confession from his father, local and international media outlets reported Monday.
According to Al Jazeera, Karim Abu Nassar was with his father, Osama Abu Nassar, near the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza on Saturday when they came under Israel Defense Forces fire. Eyewitnesses told Palestine TV that IDF troops ordered the man to leave the child on the ground and advance to a nearby checkpoint, where he was stripped naked and searched.
Witnesses said IDF soldiers then tortured Karim in front of his father to pressure him to confess to something. Journalist Osama Al-Kahlout interviewed the child's mother, who said the toddler suffered a cigarette burn to one leg and a nail puncture to the other. Al-Kahlout's video shows wounds on the child's legs—injuries reportedly confirmed by an unspecified medical authority.
Karim was reportedly released to relatives via the International Committee of the Red Cross after 10 hours of detention. The ICRC has not issued a statement regarding the matter and rarely does so absent an investigation.
The Palestine Chronicle reported that Osama Abu Nassar remains in custody, in a system rife with torture—sometimes deadly—and other abuse.
The IDF has not commented on the alleged incident.
In the United States, the story is being amplified by prominent figures including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which issued a statement calling the accusations "revolting."
“Israel’s use of a nail and cigarette burns to torture a 1-year-old child and force a confession from his father is a revolting moral outrage that demands immediate action from Congress," the group said. "No child, anywhere in the world, should be subjected to such cruelty, especially with American taxpayer dollars. These actions constitute grave violations of international law and basic human decency."
“Our nation must end its complicity in these crimes," CAIR added. "Congress has a responsibility to ensure that American taxpayer dollars are not used to support the torture or slaughter of more children. Every lawmaker with a conscience must vote to end military aid for the out-of-control Israeli regime.”
The US has given Israel hundreds of billions of inflation-adjusted dollars in aid to Israel since the country was established in 1948, including more than $20 billion since October 2023.
A new report published by UN Palestine expert Francesca Albanese examines the "systematic use by Israel of torture against Palestinians," finding "practices that meet the threshold for genocide" under the Genocide Convention—the basis of the ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) case brought by South Africa.
A summary of the report states:
Torture has become integral to the domination of and punishment inflicted on men, women, and children—both through custodial abuse and through a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation, and the destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering. A continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror is being imposed, designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity, and force them from their land. This is not incidental violence. It is the architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanization and maintained by a policy of cruelty and collective torture.
Palestinian victims—including minors—and witnesses, as well as Israeli soldiers, veterans, and medical professionals have described widespread torture and other abuses including rape and sexual assault by male and female soldiers, electrocution, mauling by dogs, beatings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and exposure to loud music and temperature extremes.
At least scores of Palestinian detainees have died or been killed in Israeli custody, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton. Many bodies of former Palestinian prisoners returned by Israel have shown signs of torture, execution, and mutilation.
Since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded at least 250,000 Palestinians, including more than 65,000 children. Israeli troops have been accused by Palestinians, Western medical volunteers, and their own colleagues of deliberately targeting children with sniper fire and executing them along with their adult relatives during massacres.
In addition to facing the ICJ genocide case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.
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As TrumpRx Scam Does Virtually Nothing, Big Pharma Jacks Up Prices on Cancer Drugs
"As they continue to hike prices, the pharmaceutical industry is also working overtime to block reforms that would lower them, and patients are paying the price."
Mar 23, 2026
A report released Monday found that Big Pharma has continued raising prices on dozens of cancer drugs, despite President Donald Trump's repeated false claims that he and his administration have slashed drug prices by a mathematically impossible 600%.
The analysis, conducted by Patients for Affordable Drugs, found that pharmaceutical companies increased prices on 64 oncology drugs in the first weeks of 2026, with the vast majority of price hikes coming in above the rate of inflation.
Patients for Affordable Drugs noted the heavy financial toll that paying for treatments takes on US cancer patients, and said the latest price increases would only exacerbate the crisis.
"Cancer drugs are among the most expensive drugs on the market, costing $74,000 more on average than non-cancer drugs," the group explained. "More than 42% of cancer patients in the US fully depleted their savings within two years of diagnosis to cover their care. More than half of Americans with cancer go into debt because of the cost of their care."
Making matters worse, the group added, is that Big Pharma is heavily lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would further delay small molecule drugs, including "widely used, high-cost cancer treatments," from becoming eligible for Medicare price negotiations.
Merith Basey, CEO of Patients for Affordable Drugs, stressed that the latest price increases were unacceptable given that "cancer is a leading cause of death among American seniors, and the treatments patients rely on are already among the most expensive."
"Yet as they continue to hike prices, the pharmaceutical industry is also working overtime to block reforms that would lower them," added Basey, "and patients are paying the price."
While the Patients for Affordable Drugs report focuses on cancer drugs, a December report from Reuters found that at least 350 branded medications are set for price hikes in 2026, including “vaccines against Covid, RSV, and shingles,” as well as the “blockbuster cancer treatment Ibrance.”
The total projected number of drugs seeing price increases in 2026 is significantly higher than in 2025, when 3 Axis Advisors estimated that pharmaceutical companies raised prices on 250 medications. The median price increase for drugs in 2026 is projected at 4%, roughly the same as in 2025.
All of these price increases have come despite Trump's false claims that he has lowered the prices of drugs to the point where pharmaceutical companies would actually be paying patients to take them.
An analysis released last week by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that the president's TrumpRx initiative, which was created to purportedly offer Americans cheaper prescription drugs, offered genuinely lower prices on "exactly one" of the 54 medications listed on its website.
CAP also found that nearly one-third of the drugs available on the TrumpRx website have generic alternatives that were cheaper than what was being offered, and that the website made no mention of this.
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'Every Key Climate Indicator Is Flashing Red' in New UN Report
“Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record," said the secretary-general of the United Nations. "When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."
Mar 23, 2026
The annual State of the Global Climate report by the United Nations' top meteorological agency was released Monday, marking the first time the authors of the report have included the Earth's energy imbalance as a key indicator of the climate emergency.
The World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) inclusion of the imbalance only provides more evidence of what scientists have been warning for decades: The continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane to build up in the atmosphere and is causing planetary heating, which is leading to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, and severe hurricanes and cyclones.
The State of the Global Climate report explains that in a stable climate, incoming solar energy is roughly equal to the amount of energy leaving the Earth.
But with greenhouse gases at their highest level in the atmosphere in at least 800,000 years, that equilibrium has been thrown off, and the energy imbalance—which has increased steadily over the past two decades—is at its highest since the observational record began in 1960.
Instead of leaving the Earth system, energy is increasingly staying in the planet's surface and deep within the oceans.
Ashkay Deoras, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not associated with the report, compared the trapped energy to a hot room.
“If you open the window, naturally, you will allow the hot air to escape,” Deoras told The New York Times. “But now what is happening is that, because of all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”
The report emphasized that the higher temperatures humans feel at the Earth's surface—which have been the hottest in history over the past 11 years—represent just 1% of the excess energy that isn't leaving the planet system.
Five percent of the excess heat is stored in continental land masses, while more than 91% is stored in the ocean.
As fossil fuel emissions have increased and built up, the ocean has been absorbing about 18 times the energy used by humans each year for the past two decades, according to the report.
“Scientific advances have improved our understanding of the Earth’s energy imbalance and of the reality facing our planet and our climate right now,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that in addition to the energy imbalance, "every key climate indicator is flashing red" in the new report.
Last year was the second- or third-hottest year on record, depending on the data set, owing to La Niña conditions that temporarily cooled the planet. Earth was about 1.43°C warmer than the pre-industrial average, and 2024—when hotter El Niño conditions were in effect—remains the hottest year with global temperatures averaging 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.
About 3% of excess energy warms and melts ice, and ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland lost significant mass in 2025, while the average Arctic sea-ice extent last year was the lowest or second-lowest on record.
The loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice is driving the long-term rise in the global mean sea level, with was around 11 centimeters higher at the end of 2025 than it was in January 1993, when satellite records began.
“The State of the Global Climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits," said Guterres. “Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."
The secretary-general added in a video posted on social media that the world must "accelerate a just transition" to renewable energy to protect "climate security, energy security, and national security."
In this age of war our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing the climate, global economy & global security.
Now more than ever, we must accelerate a just transition to renewable energy.
Renewables deliver climate security, energy security & national security. pic.twitter.com/TrphJ2Zwa2
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 23, 2026
Saulo noted that the impact of catastrophic planetary heating grew increasingly evident in 2025, with "heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms, and flooding" causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses.
The World Weather Attribution found that a heatwave across the western US last week would have been "virtually impossible" without the climate emergency. Climate researchers also concluded last summer that devastating floods in central Texas were caused by "very exceptional meteorological conditions," and the climate crisis "supercharged" the conditions that led to the extreme rainfall and flooding that killed 1,750 people in South Asia late last year.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump—whose country is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—has taken steps to weaken the world's ability to respond to the climate emergency, withdrawing from dozens of climate- and energy-related international treaties and slashing climate research and emergency response spending.
Trump has also pushed for more fossil fuel emissions—investing in the expensive, pollution-causing coal industry; demanding that the Pentagon obtain energy from coal plants; and mandating oil and gas lease sales.
"The way ahead," said Guterrres, "must be grounded in science, common sense, and the courage to take urgent climate action."
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