SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
April, 20 2021, 12:00am EDT
Tuesday April, 20 2021, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Logan Smith
lsmith@bendthearc.us
Bend the Arc Statement on Chauvin Verdict
We rise in solidarity with Black and brown people resisting in the Twin Cities, in Brooklyn Center, in our Jewish communities, and across the country.
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON - Bend the Arc: Jewish Action released the following statement on Tuesday in response to Derek Chauvin being found guilty for the murder of George Floyd:
"Regardless of today's verdict, there can be no justice for George Floyd or the countless other Black and brown people murdered by police," said Stosh Cotler, CEO of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. "Derek Chauvin will still have his life, while the families of George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, and so many others continue to mourn. There can be no justice as long as this racist system of police violence continues to exist."
"We call for our Jewish community, especially white Jews, to rise up for Black lives and dismantle the centuries-old structures of white supremacy that take the lives of too many. We rise in solidarity with Black and brown people - including Jews of color - resisting in the Twin Cities, in Brooklyn Center, in our Jewish communities, and across the country."
"At the same time, Republican-led state legislatures across the country are moving forward legislation that would criminalize Black and brown-led protest, from the recently-passed HB 1 in Florida to bills introduced in Minnesota just this month. We condemn these anti-democratic measures and call on leaders and elected officials to protect the rights of protesters."
Bend the Arc is where progressive American Jews join together to fight for justice and equality for all. We are the only national Jewish organization focused exclusively on progressive social change in the United States.
(212) 213-2113LATEST NEWS
Protesters Target Dutch Microsoft Data Center for 'Genocidal Collaboration' With IDF
"Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians."
Aug 11, 2025
Protesters staged a demonstration Sunday at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands following last week's revelation that the facility is being used by the Israel Defense Forces to plan genocidal airstrikes in Gaza and to store massive amounts of intelligence on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.
Members of the direct action group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) led the demonstration at Microsoft's data center near the northwestern city of Middenmeer. Some activists scaled the roof of a building and lit flares, while others locked themselves to poles and blocked an entrance to the facility.
On its Instagram page, Geef Tegengas said it was targeting "genocide in our backyard."
"Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians," the group said. "Thanks to its Azure cloud service, Microsoft plays a direct role in the genocide of the people of Gaza."
Geef Tegengas demanded that Microsoft "remove all Israeli intelligence data" and urged employees at the facility to "lay down your work."
The group also called on people to boycott Microsoft and support the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.
"We will continue to take action until this genocidal collaboration stops," Geef Tegengas vowed.
Sunday's demonstration followed the publication last week of a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealing that Unit 8200, the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians' phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands.
According to the investigation—which involved interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked company documents—former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington in the United States in 2021 to meet CEO Satya Nadella.
Sniffing a lucrative opportunity, Nadella agreed to grant the cyberwarfare unit access to a special area of the Azure cloud platform. The project's goal was storing "a million calls per hour."
An intelligence source said that some of the Microsoft employees involved in the undertaking were Unit 8200 veterans, making collaboration "much easier."
One leaked Microsoft document showed that company leaders embraced the IDF partnership as "an incredibly powerful brand moment."
Microsoft responded to the investigation by claiming that Nadella was unaware of exactly what kind of data Unit 8200 was storing on the company's servers.
Three Unit 8200 sources told The Guardian that Azure has facilitated IDF airstrikes on Gaza, where 674 days of U.S.-backed IDF bombing, invasion, and siege have left at least 229,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing amid a worsening famine and the specter of ethnic cleansing and full Israeli occupation.
Israel's conduct in the war is the subject of an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
Microsoft said Monday that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review "found no evidence to date that Microsoft's Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza."
A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company "takes these allegations seriously, as shown by our previous independent investigation."
"As we receive new information, we're committed to making sure we have a chance to validate any new data and take any needed action," the spokesperson added.
The Guardian reported Monday that the news outlets' investigation prompted debate last week in the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch Parliament, where Christine Teunissen of the left-wing Party for the Animals pressed the government on what it is doing to prevent data stored in the Netherlands from "being used to commit genocide" in Gaza.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp replied that he would "request further investigation."
"If there are serious indications of criminal offenses in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service," he said.
The Guardian/+972 Magazine/Local Call investigation follows last month's revelation by the latter two outlets that the IDF has undertaken a "dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure."
Big Tech's profiteering from Israel's annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.
Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 "No Azure for Apartheid" vigil for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Nasr told The Guardian after his termination that he was fired "simply because we were daring to humanize Palestinians, and simply because we were daring to say that Microsoft should not be complicit with an army that is plausibly accused of genocide."
Trump Says 'Other Cities Are Hopefully Watching' as He Deploys National Guard, Takes Over DC Police
"The administration's actions are unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful," declared Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb.
Aug 11, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday moved to deploy the National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C., while also officially taking over the city's police department.
What's more, Trump suggested that this could be a model for other American cities.
As reported by NBC News, Trump said during his announcement on plans to deploy the National Guard in the nation's capital that "other cities are hopefully watching this" and that he hoped it would make them "self-clean up, and maybe they'll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all of the things that caused the problem."
Trump then named Baltimore, Oakland, New York, and Chicago as potential future targets for National Guard deployments and other measures.
Shortly after Trump made his announcement, Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb indicated that he was not taking the president's attempt to take over his city's police force lying down.
"The administration's actions are unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful," he declared in a post on X. "There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia. Violent crime in D.C. reached historic 30-year lows last year, and is down another 26% so far this year. We are considering all of our options and will do what is necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents."
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) was also quick to condemn the president's takeover of D.C. law enforcement as an unnecessary power grab.
"The president's attempt to federalize the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard on the streets of our nation's capital is an abuse of power," she said. "It's an egotistical, pathetic attempt to stoke fear and distract from his failures: America is less affordable, healthy, and safe under this administration."
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who last year served as the Democratic Party's vice-presidential nominee, chided critics who had accused him in the past of exaggerating the authoritarian threat of a second Trump term.
"The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you're overreacting," he wrote on X.
The NAACP, meanwhile, compared Trump's enthusiasm for deploying the National Guard in Washington, D.C. to purportedly battle crime with the lackadaisical attitude he took toward deploying the National Guard when his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
"As a reminder: The same president who proclaims he wants to take back our capital during a historic 30-year low crime rate also couldn't find the National Guard on Jan. 6," the organization wrote.
Public Citizen co-presidents Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman issued a joint statement slamming Trump's actions and outright labeling him a "despot."
"As autocrats commonly do, Trump is seeking control over the national capital in order to intimidate and squelch dissent," they said. "Like despots around the world and throughout history, Trump is also relying on the pretextual deployment of military force to intimidate and project power, to suppress protest and undercut democracy."
As reported by Politico, Trump's seizure of the D.C. police is on borrowed time from a legal perspective. While the Home Rule Act gives Trump the power to take control of the D.C. police force for emergencies, this power only lasts for 30 days, after which he must seek authorization from Congress to maintain control.
'Climate Vandalism, Pure and Simple': Defiant BP to Reopen North Sea Oil Field
"The only sensible thing to do is to pivot the North Sea to something we have an abundance of, and something that will never run out—wind," argued one climate advocate.
Aug 11, 2025
As the United Kingdom on Monday faced the onset of its fourth heatwave of this summer, climate campaigners continued to call out BP for its decision to plow ahead with reopening the Murlach oil field in the North Sea, despite fossil fuels pushing up global temperatures and the U.K. government's efforts to limit extraction in the region.
"This is climate vandalism, pure and simple," Kate Blagojevic, Europe team lead at the group 350.org, said in a Monday statement. "BP is putting its profit margins above the survival of communities, ecosystems, and future generations. Every barrel of oil from this project pushes us closer to climate breakdown, more floods, more fires, more heatwaves."
"The era of fossil fuels is over, and BP's desperate attempts to wring out the last drops of oil from the North Sea are a reckless betrayal of the public and the planet. They should be winding down, not doubling down," she declared.
Greenpeace U.K. policy director Doug Parr was similarly critical, saying in a statement that "the North Sea is on death's door. Reserves are drying up, and what's left and untapped is barely enough to keep it on life support."
The Telegraph on Sunday noted recent research from the government's North Sea Transition Authority that found there were over 3 billion barrels of oil and gas in fields already in production, 6 billion barrels in known potential developments, and 3.5 billion barrels in identified exploration zones.
According to the newspaper, BP said the Murlach field contains 20 million barrels of recoverable oil and 600 million cubic meters of gas, and is "expected to produce around 20,000 barrels of oil and 17 million cubic feet of gas per day," due to new technologies that weren't around when it was shut down over two decades ago.
Parr said that "3 billion barrels wouldn't last more than a few years at current rates of consumption, and even that assumes it is economic to extract. Whatever the political rhetoric, the oil and gas is pretty much gone, and soon, so too will the jobs of thousands of workers."
"Unless we want to remain dependent on overseas imports and watch an entire industry collapse with no plan for workers," he added, "the only sensible thing to do is to pivot the North Sea to something we have an abundance of, and something that will never run out—wind."
Although the U.K's current Labour Party leaders have pledged to avoid new licensing for fossil fuel projects in the North Sea, "BP won agreement to reopen Murlach, 120 miles east of Aberdeen, under the previous government and has since been installing equipment, with production potentially restarting next month," The Telegraph explained.
A spokesperson for Ed Miliband, U.K. secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said Sunday that "we are committed to delivering the manifesto commitment to not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis."
"We are delivering a fair and orderly transition in the North Sea, with the biggest ever investment in offshore wind and two first-of-a-kind carbon capture and storage clusters," the spokesperson added.
Miliband in June announced new guidance for environmental impact assessments of proposed oil and gas projects in licensed fields, which came in response to last year's landmark U.K. Supreme Court ruling. After that decision, Judge Andrew Stewart of Scotland's Court of Session ruled in January that Equinor and Shell, which are respectively behind the Rosebank oil and gas field and the Jackdaw gas project, can't move ahead with extraction.
The June guidance means offshore developers can now submit applications for extractions in fields that are already licensed, including Rosebank and Jackdaw. In response to that development earlier this year, Mel Evans, Greenpeace U.K.'s head of climate, said that "it's only right for the government to take into account the emissions from burning oil and gas when deciding whether to approve fossil fuel projects currently pending."
"Since Rosebank and other drilling sites will pump out a lot of carbon while providing little benefit to the economy and no help to bill payers, they should fail the criteria ministers have just set out," Evans added. "Real energy security and future-proofed jobs for energy workers can only come through homegrown, cheap renewable energy, and that's what ministers should focus on."
Most Popular
We cover the issues the corporate media never will.
Please support our journalism.