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Jane Fonda and Greenpeace USA Kick off Fire Drill Fridays in 2022 With International Advocates Fighting for a Fossil Free Future
Fonda will host a livestream with Catherine Abreu and Romain Ioualalen on Friday, January 21st at 11AM PST/2PM EST
WASHINGTON
WHAT: Today, Jane Fonda will kick off the year LIVE with Catherine Abreu, Founder & Executive Director of Destination Zero, and Romain Ioualalen from Oil Change International to talk about the launch of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance during COP26. The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance or "BOGA" is the first-ever diplomatic alliance dedicated to keeping oil and gas in the ground - and a huge step in the right direction. Jane and her guests will walk through exactly what the alliance entails, how it came to be, and how it will help countries around the globe end the era of fossil fuels.
Catherine Abreu is the Founder & Executive Director of Destination Zero, a new organization focused on building community for a fossil free future. An award-winning campaigner and coalition builder, Catherine has spent 15 years developing creative strategies that put people and community at the heart of climate action. She has been helping to build the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance since the very beginning, imagining a renewed vision of what climate leadership looks like.
" Climate justice will remain a distant dream as long as countries ignore the basic scientific reality that there is no future for fossil fuels. But the ground is shifting: keeping fossil fuels in the ground is no longer just a civil society slogan, it's become a topic global leaders can no longer ignore," said Catherine.
Romain Ioualalen is the Global Policy Campaign Manager at Oil Change International, based in Paris. He works to push countries to ban new oil and gas projects and to plan a just and equitable phase out from global fossil fuel production. He has been very active in the creation of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.
"Winning the fight for a livable planet requires us to tell the truth about the root cause of the climate crisis. For decades governments have been able to claim climate leadership while continuing to pump-out coal, oil and gas - but 2021 has changed that for good. It's time to face fossil fuel dependency head-on, and double down on the just and equitable transition we need to a fossil free future," said Romain.
WHEN: 11am PST/2pm EST, Friday, January 21st
WHERE: Facebook Event
WHO:
Jane Fonda, Actor and Activist
Catherine Abreu, Founder & Executive Director, Destination Zero
Romain Ioualalen, Global Policy Campaign Manager, Oil Change International
ABOUT FIRE DRILL FRIDAYS:
In October 2019, Jane Fonda launched Fire Drill Fridays as a weekly rally in the nation's capitol to demand action from leaders to address the climate crisis. The movement grew quickly reaching millions of people through weekly rallies and marches through the capitol's streets, star-studded arrests at the Hart Senate Building, and live-streamed teach-ins from the Greenpeace USA headquarters. In January of 2020, Fire Drill Fridays expanded nationally with Fonda hosting actions across the state of California. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the movement moved online and has garnered over 8.3 million views across platforms. Up until Fonda recently started filming again for her hit series 'Grace & Frankie', Fire Drill Fridays aired live episodes weekly. The event now takes place on a monthly basis via Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube. Fire Drill Fridays aims to bring together activists, actors, youth, Indigenous leaders, climate experts, and concerned individuals to take action to pressure politicians to adopt a Green New Deal, end new fossil fuels, and enact a just transition to a renewable economy that protects workers and communities. Fire Drill Fridays is a collaboration between Jane Fonda and Greenpeace USA. To join the movement or learn more, visit https://firedrillfridays.com/.
Greenpeace is a global, independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
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'Era of Unconstrained Nuclear Competition' Looms With US-Russia New START Treaty Expiring
“The United States and Russia already have enough deployed nuclear weapons to kill tens of millions of people in an hour and devastate the world," said one expert, warning a lapse will "only make the world less safe."
Feb 03, 2026
If New START expires on Thursday, it will be the first time in decades that the United States and Russia don't have a nuclear arms control treaty, and experts have been sounding the alarm about the arms race that likely lies ahead.
“The expiration of New START would be massively destabilizing and potentially very costly both in terms of economics and security," said Jennifer Knox, a research and policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Global Security Program, in a Tuesday statement.
"The United States and Russia already have enough deployed nuclear weapons to kill tens of millions of people in an hour and devastate the world," Knox pointed out. "Letting New START lapse would erase decades of hard-won progress and only make the world less safe."
New START was signed in April 2010, under the Obama administration, and entered into force the following February. A decade later, just days into the Biden administration, it was renewed for five years. In 2022, Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine—an ongoing conflict—and the next year, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his country's participation in the treaty, though he has not withdrawn.
"The global security environment facing the United States is very different from when New START was first negotiated, but it remains true that bounding an open-ended, costly arms race will still require some form of agreement between Washington and Moscow," said Ankit Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Nuclear Policy Program, in a statement.
"The public and lawmakers alike must recognize that we are on the cusp of a fundamentally new nuclear age—one that is more unpredictable, complex, and dangerous than anything we've witnessed post-Cold War," warned Panda, one of the experts participating in a Wednesday briefing about the treaty. "A big risk is that without any quantitative limits or hands-on verification, we'll end up with compounding worst-case-scenario thinking in both capitals, as during the Cold War."
While Putin has halted US inspections of Russian nuclear facilities, he has still proposed extending the treaty for a year. Tara Drozdenko, director of the UCS Global Security Program, said that "abiding by New START for another year would be a win-win-win for the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world... The Trump administration should take swift action to publicly acknowledge that the United States will continue to abide by New START in the interim."
However, US President Donald Trump—who fancies himself as a deal-maker—hasn't expressed an interest in fighting for the pact, telling the New York Times last month that "if it expires, it expires," and "I'd rather do a new agreement that's much better."
Trump has called for China—which has the most nuclear weapons after Russia and the United States, and is building up its arsenal—to be part of a new deal, but Beijing hasn't signaled it will do so. Putin has proposed participation from France and the United Kingdom. The other nuclear-armed nations are India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan.
Noting Trump's comments to the Times and aspiration for the Chinese government to join, Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, declared that "this is wishful thinking–if the administration thinks getting a new 'better' treaty after this one lapses will be easy, they are mistaken."
"New START's end brings few benefits and lots of risks to the United States, especially as Washington tries to stabilize relations with rivals like Russia and China," she said, suggesting that Trump "would be better off hanging on to the agreement he has a little longer before trying to get a better one."
Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally who signed the treaty while serving as president and is now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said in a Monday interview with Reuters, TASS, and the WarGonzo project that "our proposal remains on the table, the treaty has not yet expired, and if the Americans want to extend it, that can be done."
"For almost 60 years, we haven't had a situation where strategic nuclear potentials weren't limited in some way. Now such a situation is possible," he noted. "I spent almost my entire life, starting from 1972, under the umbrella of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty."
"In some ways, even with all the costs, it is still an element of trust," Medvedev said. "When such a treaty exists, there is trust. When it doesn't, that trust is exhausted. The fact that we are now in this situation is clear evidence of a crisis in international relations. This is absolutely obvious."
Considering New START's potential expiration this week, the Russian leader said that "I don't want to say that this immediately means a catastrophe and a nuclear war, but it should still alert everyone. The clock that is ticking will, in this case, undoubtedly accelerate again."
According to Reuters, he was referencing the Doomsday Clock. Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board set the symbolic clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe, citing various developments, including a failure to extend the treaty, Russian weapons tests, and China's growing arsenal.
"In 2025, it was almost impossible to identify a nuclear issue that got better," Jon B. Wolfsthal, a board member and director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), said last week. "More states are relying more intently on nuclear weapons, multiple states are openly talking about using nuclear weapons for not only deterrence but for coercion. Hundreds of billions are being spent to modernize and expand nuclear arsenals all over the world, and more and more non-nuclear states are considering whether they should acquire their own nuclear weapons or are hedging their nuclear bets."
"Instead of stoking the fires of the nuclear arms competition, nuclear states are reducing their own security and putting the entire planet at risk. Leaders of all states must relearn the lessons of the Cold War—no one wins a nuclear arms race, and the only way to reduce nuclear dangers is through binding agreement to limit the size and shape of their nuclear arsenals," he argued. "Nuclear states and their partners need to invest now in proven crisis communication and risk reduction tools, recommit to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, refrain from nuclear threats, and pursue a more predictable and stable global security system."
Regarding New START specifically, FAS Nuclear Information Project associate director Matt Korda stressed this week that "we are about to enter an era of unconstrained nuclear competition without any guardrails. Not only will there no longer be anything stopping the nuclear superpowers from nearly doubling their deployed nuclear arsenals, but they would now be doing so in an environment of mutual distrust, opacity, and worst-case thinking."
"While New START was a bilateral agreement between Russia and the United States, its expiration will have far-reaching consequences for the world," he said. "There are no benefits from a costly arms buildup that brings us right back to where we started, but there would be real advantages in pursuing transparency and predictability in an otherwise unpredictable world."
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Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine Team Quits Over Blocked Report on Right of Return
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” said resigning staffer Omar Shakir.
Feb 03, 2026
Two Human Rights Watch employees—the group's entire Israel-Palestine team—resigned after senior staffers blocked a report calling Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees' right of return to their homeland a crime against humanity.
Jewish Currents' Alex Kane reported Tuesday that HRW Israel-Palestine team lead Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari are stepping down over leadership's decision to nix the report, which was scheduled for release on December 4. Shakir wrote in his resignation email that one senior HRW leader informed him that calling Israel's denial of Palestinian right of return would be seen as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” Shakir—who is also member of Jewish Currents' advisory board—wrote in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.”
In an interview published Tuesday by Drop Site News, Shakir—who was deported from Israel in 2019 over his advocacy of Palestinian rights—said: “I’ve given every bit of myself to the work for a decade. I’ve defended the work in very, very difficult circumstances... The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told."
Ansari said that "whatever justification" HRW leadership "had for pausing the report is not based on the law or facts."
The resignations underscored tensions among HRW staffers over how to navigate a potential political minefield while conducting legal analysis and reporting of Israeli policies and practices in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
As Kane reported:
The resignations have roiled one of the most prominent human rights groups in the world just as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure. In a statement, HRW said that the report “raised complex and consequential issues. In our review process, we concluded that aspects of the research and the factual basis for our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards.” They said that “the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research,” and that the process was “ongoing.”
Kenneth Roth, a longtime former HRW executive director, defended the group's decision to block the report, asserting on social media that Bolopion "was right to suspend a report using a novel and unsupported legal theory to contend that denying the right to return to a locale is a crime against humanity."
However, Shakir countered that HRW "found in 2023 denial of a return to amount to a crime against humanity in Chagos."
"This is based on [International Criminal Court] precedent," he added. "Other reports echoed the analysis. Are you calling on HRW to retract a report for its first time ever, or it just different rules for Palestine?"
Polis Project founder Suchitra Vijayan said on X Tuesday that "the decision by Human Rights Watch’s leadership to pull a report on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, after it had cleared internal review, legal sign-off, and publication preparation, demands public reckoning."
"This was not a draft in dispute and the explanation offered so far evades the central issue of 'institutional independence' in the face of political pressure," added Vijayan, who is also a professor at Columbia and New York universities. "Why was the report stopped, and what does this decision signals for the future of its work and credibility on Palestine?"
Offering "solidarity to Omar and Milena" on social media, Medical Aid for Palestinians director of advocacy and campaigns Rohan Talbot said that "Palestinian rights are yet again exceptionalized, their suffering trivialized, and their pursuit of justice forestalled by people who care more about reputation and expediency than law and justice."
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's former Middle East and North Africa director and currently executive director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Drop Site News on Tuesday that “We have once again run into Human Rights Watch’s systemic ‘Israel Exception,’ with work critical of Israel subjected to exceptional review and arbitrary processes that no other country work faces."
The modern state of Israel was established in 1948 largely through a more than decadelong campaign of terrorism against both the British occupiers of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs and the ethnic cleansing of the latter. More than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, sometimes via massacres or the threat thereof, in what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or abandoned, and their denizens—some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes—have yet to return. Today, they and their descendants number more than 7 million, all of whom have been denied the right of return affirmed in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
Many Palestinians and experts around the world argue that the Nakba never ended—a position that has gained attention over the past 28 months, as Israel has faced mounting allegations of genocide for a war that's left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the coastal strip and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Bolopion told Kane Tuesday that the controversy over the blocked report is “a genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues on complex legal and advocacy questions."
“HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years," he added.
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‘This Rogue Agency Should Not Receive a Single Penny,’ Progressives Say of ICE as Trump Signs Funding Bill
As some Democrats suggest compromising in order to reform the agency, Rep. Rashida Tlaib said that “ICE was built on violence and is terrorizing neighborhoods. It will not change.”
Feb 03, 2026
President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a bill to end a brief government shutdown after the US House of Representatives narrowly passed the $1.2 trillion funding package.
While the bill keeps most of the federal government funded until the end of September, lawmakers sidestepped the question of funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which Democrats have vowed to block absent reforms to rein in its lawless behavior after the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and a rash of other attacks on civil rights.
The bill, which passed on Tuesday by a vote of 217-214, extends funding for ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for just two weeks, setting up a battle in the coming weeks on which the party remains split.
While most Democrats voted against Tuesday's measure, 21 joined the bulk of Republicans to drag it just over the line, despite calls from progressive activists and groups, such as MoveOn, which Axios said peppered lawmakers with letters urging them to use every bit of "leverage" they can to force drastic changes at the agency.
House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who voted for the bill, acknowledged that it was "a leverage tool that people are giving up," but said funding for the rest of the government took precedence.
The real fight is expected to take place over the next 10 days, with DHS funding set to run out on February 14.
ICE will be funded regardless of whether a new round of DHS funding passes, since Republicans already passed $170 billion in DHS funding in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Democrats in both the House and Senate have laid out lists of reforms they say Republicans must acquiesce to if they want any additional funding for ICE, including requirements that agents nationwide wear body cameras, get judicial warrants for arrests, and adhere to a code of conduct similar to those for state and local law enforcement.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair emerita of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who voted against Tuesday's bill reiterated that in order to pass longterm DHS funding, "there must be due process, a requirement for judicial warrants and bond hearings; every agent must not only have a bodycam but also be required to use it, take off their masks, and, in cases of misconduct, undergo immediate, independent investigations."
Some critics have pointed out that ICE agents already routinely violate court orders and constitutional requirements, raising questions about whether new laws would even be enforceable.
A memo issued last week, telling agents they do not need to obtain judicial warrants to enter homes, has been described as a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. Despite this, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Tuesday that Republicans will not even consider negotiating the warrant requirement, calling it "unworkable."
"We cannot trust this DHS, which has already received an unprecedented funding spike for ICE, to operate within the bounds of our Constitution or our laws," Jayapal said. "And for that reason, we cannot continue to fund them without significant and enforceable guardrails."
According to recent polls, the vast majority of Democratic voters want to go beyond reforms and push to abolish ICE outright. In the wake of ICE's reign of terror in Minneapolis, it's a position that nearly half the country now holds, with more people saying they want the agency to be done away with than saying they want it preserved.
"The American people are begging us to stop sending their tax dollars to execute people in the streets, abduct 5-year-olds, and separate families," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who gathered with other progressive lawmakers in the cold outside DHS headquarters on Tuesday. "ICE was built on violence and is terrorizing neighborhoods. It will not change... No one should vote to send another cent to DHS."
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who comes from the Minnesota Somali community targeted by Trump's operation there, agreed: "This rogue agency should not receive a single penny. It should be abolished and prosecuted."
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