As part of a special series on climate in partnership with The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Cipher Brief Expert and Senior Editor Kristin Wood, The Cipher Brief is focusing on the national security implications of climate change. 

This report is derived from a half-day conference in April 2021 co-sponsored by the Intelligence Project and the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, along with the Center for Climate and Security and The Cipher Brief. It explores the requirements of the U.S. IC to fulfill the mission prescribed by President Biden, DNI Haines, and Secretary Kerry. The IC must rise to challenge, unshackled from the past, to re-imagine its role in combatting climate change.

The Authors

Calder Walton, Asst. Director, Belfer Center’s Applied History Project and Intelligence Project, Harvard University

Calder Walton is Assistant Director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project and Intelligence Project. Calder’s research is broadly concerned with intelligence history, grand strategy, and international relations. The

Sean Power, Masters in Public Policy Candidate, Harvard Kennedy School

Sean Power is a Masters in Public Policy 2021 candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to HKS, he managed the analyst program at Kobre & Kim LLP, where he assisted on matters involving government enforcement defense and internal investigations.

The Report

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, has stated that climate change needs to be at the center of U.S. foreign policy and national security. It is a threat multiplier that impacts every function of government and society: territorial integrity, economic well-being, social stability, and military capabilities are all impacted by climate change, directly and indirectly. However, in addressing climate change, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is currently unsure of its mission space and hitherto has been relying on boilerplate responses to it. In an exclusive discussion, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, Secretary John Kerry, who should be a principal consumer of intelligence about climate change within the U.S. government, stated that the U.S. IC must deliver significantly more.

The increasing effects of climate change are arising at a moment when the nature of intelligence itself is undergoing a revolution—from the collection of hidden secrets to collation of non-obvious (but knowable) data frequently hiding out in the open. This watershed in intelligence and national security requires bold, innovative, ideas for the U.S. IC to adapt and anticipate security threats derived by climate change. It must establish its mission space and alter its own architecture to ensure it is providing its customers with intelligence about them needed. Its mission will not be about spies disseminating secrets to policymakers; rather, it will require a new intelligence and national security paradigm that must reach across society, allowing the general public to consume climate intelligence and hold policymakers to account.

Background

The twenty-first century presents globalized threats that will require globalized solutions, the greatest of which is climate change. As the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated, no country is immune from actor-less threats like novel disease outbreaks and climate change. When combined with other security threats like transnational terrorism and ubiquitous cyberattacks, it becomes clear that existing national security frameworks are insufficient. New relationships and lines of communication will need to be forged, both within the U.S. government, in the private sector, and internationally with allies and adversaries. The U.S. IC needs to determine the requirements of its customers regarding climate change and how its unique collection and analytical capabilities fit into this new mission space.

The IC has incorporated climate change into its analysis and threat assessments for decades, but climate has not received the attention it requires given the magnitude of the threat it poses. On January 27, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order on tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad, establishing that “climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security.” The order also called for the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the national and economic security impacts of climate change within 120 days.

The Climate Change, Intelligence, and Global Security conference at Harvard’s Belfer Center earlier this year, brought together senior climate experts, current and former intelligence officers, and leaders in the private sector and academia to discuss the climate threat and generate innovative ideas on role the IC will play in combatting that threat. Led by Paul Kolbe, Director of the Intelligence Project, Kristin Wood, Intelligence Project Non-Resident Fellow, and Erin Sikorsky, Deputy Director of the Center for Climate and Security, the conference facilitated an urgent opportunity for productive dialogue on the climate threat.

Climate change as a threat to international security

Policymakers and the public need to understand that climate change impacts seemingly unrelated challenges and magnifies existing threats. The direct effects of climate change are readily apparent around the world—melting glaciers, rising sea levels, thawing permafrost, longer droughts, hotter heat waves, persistent wildfires, torrential rains, and catastrophic storm systems. These effects create disastrous consequences for humans like crop failures, fishery collapses, water insecurity, and the inundation of coastal regions, all of which lead to mass migration and displacement. These situations lead to fragile states and regions where increased conflict over scarce resources allows malign actors thrive. In this way, climate change is a threat multiplier that touches every aspect of international security.

Professor John P. Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, noted that the big picture on how climate change will impact the planet is clear, but the detailed effects are difficult to predict with precision and confidence, in part because we do not know exactly how human societies will react. This uncertainty exacerbates the security threat posed by climate change. We know it will increase the number of displaced persons in the world, but we do not know when they will be displaced, how many there will be, or where they will go.

Climate change also impacts the effective functioning of the U.S. military: to meet traditional security threats and protect Americans at home and abroad. U.S. bases around the world function as launching pads for everything from quick tactical operations to large-scale disaster relief missions. When severe weather damages those bases or limits their ability to operate at full capacity, America’s security is put at risk. Disasters like the flooding at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, headquarters for U.S. Strategic Command, and Hurricane Michael’s destruction of Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida show that this threat knows no geographic bounds. Their effects are costly as well—the Air Force requested nearly $5 billion to rebuild those two bases alone.

The overall impacts of climate change on international security are inevitable, consequential, and predictable. Previously the U.S. government has undertaken more extensive, and expensive, actions on the basis of proportionally less intelligence about security threats. The U.S. IC must give climate change the proportional attention it deserves.

Role of U.S. intelligence in addressing climate change

Climate change poses an existential, global, non-state security threat, making it fundamentally different from past threats. Its unprecedented nature will require unprecedented thinking by the U.S. IC and requirements from it. Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon stated clearly that it is not enough to just say that the U.S. IC should focus more on climate— rather, the challenge lies in determining what its specific contribution will be, and then evaluating what changes need to occur to make that contribution happen. Answering these questions will require difficult, but necessary, upfront work. Without that work, the U.S. IC is likely to lead with its current capabilities, rather than identifying and developing capabilities needed to meet the nature of the new threat we face.

The U.S. IC must play to its strengths in carving out its climate mission. Intelligence is no longer just about stealing secrets; it is about providing policymakers with decision advantages to influence events, which is the same as the past, but with a key difference that doing so now requires mastery of is a vast eco-space of openly-available information. To accomplish its mission, the U.S. IC must leverage its analytic tradecraft to present objective assessments about climate change to policymakers. This means collecting intelligence, assessing it, removing bias, and delivering timely and relevant assessments to customers. The U.S. IC must also leverage its global relationships with partners and competitors in performing these tasks. These relationships lie below politics and can help elicit understanding that allows policymakers to distinguish facts on the ground from prevailing political rhetoric of the day.

The U.S. IC’s workforce and technology will need to advance and adapt to serve the climate mission. It does not need to have the foremost climate experts, but it does need to have dialogue with them, and develop its own climate expertise. Like other threats, the IC needs personnel that are devoted to understanding this new threat and understand its place in larger risk frameworks. Predictive models are critical to understanding climate science, and the IC should invest more resources into artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities (AI/ML) that can inform them. Intelligence professionals will not need to advance science, and scientists will not need to assess national security; but collaborations between the IC and the federal science community are necessary and will benefit both by allowing them to identify and meet shared objectives.

Climate change intelligence cannot be siloed. As DNI Haines promised, it must be integrated into traditional security threat assessments, and those emerging threats from other globalized challenges, bio-hazards, cyber capabilities, and weaponized information, if we want to understand how they interact and manifest around the globe. Compared to the twentieth century, when intelligence was dominated by governments, the twenty-first century offers more democratic forms of intelligence: the private sector offers major capabilities to collect and analyze intelligence. It has disrupted and transformed the nature of intelligence. The IC’s advantage in this new environment will come from thinking deeply about these issues and using its unique analytical and collection capabilities to identify patterns and trends others might overlook.

The future of intelligence cooperation and climate change

Climate change is an indiscriminating challenge unlike anything humanity has encountered before. Understanding how it is different helps illustrate the need for intelligence cooperation among states, large and small, to combat it. Carol Dumaine, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, noted that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted many of the ways in which the climate threat is unique. It is non-state, non-adversarial, non-linear, boundary-less, and its root causes can be found in human economic activity. Unlike pandemics, however, combatting climate change will require something we have never done: decades of consistent cooperation across states with an eye towards tackling a systemic problem that will persist for centuries.

The U.S. IC needs to determine how it will work with other countries to combat the shared threat of climate change. The big first step is determining what the security collective is trying to accomplish. One area ripe for collaboration is foresight and early warning systems. During the Cold War the famous “red telephone” connected the White House and the Kremlin, enabling direct communication to avoid nuclear brinksmanship. Similar innovate thinking will be needed on climate change cooperation. Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee, Climate Change and Sustainability Strategy Lead for the UK Ministry of Defence, emphasized that the biggest danger on climate change is not a morass of bureaucracy, but instead a lack of imagination in understanding its impact and generating solutions for it.

Relying on existing partnerships, such as the Five Eyes alliance or NATO, will not be sufficient. Those agreements will play a role, but they do not include some of largest contributors to greenhouse gases or the countries that will suffer the largest initial impacts from climate change. Intelligence communities are by nature competitive and adversarial, but when it comes to climate change they will need to be cooperative. The U.S. IC needs to identify areas of cooperation even with adversaries like China and Russia. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Senior Fellow and former Director of the Intelligence Project, tasked the U.S. IC to look for a peace dividend—areas where collaboration on climate will yield multilateral benefits. Even though spying will still exist, as it always had, we cannot let espionage stand in the way of climate collaboration.

Any collaboration on climate intelligence will certainly require American leadership. That means America needs to treat the climate threat with the seriousness it deserves. Climate change is siloed into a one-page length analysis in the 27-page Annual Threat Assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in April 2021. The six pages focusing on China and Russia make no mention of how those are contributing to climate change or working to combat it. The IC must continually reinforce that climate is a serious and central threat. We cannot wait until the impacts are painfully obvious for every individual across the globe to treat it with the seriousness it requires.

The private sector, intelligence, and climate change

The threat from climate change reinforces the fact that intelligence is no longer a domain solely for governments. Mekala Krishnan, Partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, underscored that the private sector is also seeking to take climate risk out of a sustainability silo and integrate it into all aspects of decision making affected by risk and finance. Companies are thinking about how climate interacts with physical capital, natural resources, labor supply, and food supply—the factors of production in an economy that fundamentally affect our lives and livelihoods. One of the most important factors in a country’s national security is the health of its economy. The U.S. IC needs to be working with the private sector to understand what the economic effects of climate change will be.

In many respects, the U.S. government is still one of the few parties that can afford the costs to collect data on climate change, much like space exploration and early Internet research. The private sector can innovate ways to extract insights from that public data. Harnessing that with government capabilities will require innovative public-private partnerships with a shared strategy to help combat climate change. The U.S. IC must develop a level of transparency on climate data that will allow the private sector to identify where incentives for research and development exist. It will not matter how good the climate intelligence collected by the U.S. IC is if it does not get into the hands of public and private users in the right shape and form.

At the same time, the IC cannot be everywhere at once, collecting troves of climate data at significant cost. Richard Jenkins, CEO of Saildrone, noted that the private sector has the capability to deploy significant private money to develop and test new technologies that advance climate data collection, which the government can purchase at great value and incorporate into climate intelligence analysis. New technology is democratizing intelligence; it will force the U.S. IC to change how it interacts with the private sector— for the better.

Conclusion

In a moderated discussion with Dr. Calder Walton, Secretary Kerry stated unambiguously that the U.S. IC needs to start providing policymakers with a decision advantage on climate change in order for the U.S. government to lead the world on meeting this unprecedented threat. That starts with treating climate change seriously. The U.S. IC will need to determine its requirements, play to its strengths, and adapt its workforce to best serve its mission. It will need to cultivate deeper cooperation with allies and adversaries, develop new relationships with the private sector, and approach climate change with a fresh mindset to seek and find what others overlook.

When it comes to climate change, the U.S. IC should also reframe who its customers are, not just policymakers, to whom it gives secret briefings, but also the public. By publicly disseminating assessments, the U.S. IC can effectively democratize intelligence about climate change, with the public holding policymakers to account for their actions or inactions on the basis of shared intelligence.

The Cipher Brief is proud to be continuing our coverage on Climate with a series of webcast briefings beginning in July 2021.

Read also:

The Climate and US National Security Conversation with Admiral Jim Stavridis (Ret.)

How to Integrate Climate in Future National Security Risk

Russia’s Climate Problem and Opportunity

Why the Intelligence Community Needs a Climate Change Task Force

 

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When the PRC decides to move on Taiwan, it is unlikely to move in a manner that makes a US decision on intervention clear cut.  Should China decide, initially at least, against a full-scale invasion of that island nation, it could instead opt to try to “win without fighting.” Beijing might do so by using its large, state-controlled fishing fleet to cut smaller Taipei-controlled islands off from Taiwan itself much as the PRC is now massing fishing boats to expand Chinese-controlled seas to press claims on the Japanese Senkakus and Whitsun Reef in Philippine waters. Chinese state-owned fisheries companies – part of the so-called ‘Maritime Militia’ – serve as fronts for PLA intelligence. Using their fleets to operate in a manner somewhere between peace and conflict in the gray zone of contested control around Taiwan would allow Beijing to test whether the US and its allies are willing to help defend the island’s independence without being seen to initiate open conflict.

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The Chinese envoy to the European Union has reiterated Beijing’s goal of peacefully reuniting Taiwan with the mainland but stated the country’s preparedness to use “decisive measures.”

Speaking on Tuesday, China’s ambassador to the EU, Zhang Ming, said Beijing would never change its position on Taiwan. “If anything changes, it is that the Chinese people’s resolve to realize complete reunification of our country grows even stronger,” Ming told an online think tank event in Brussels.

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A screen at a restaurant in Beijing showing Chinese President Xi Jinping's virtual meeting with US President Joe Biden. © Reuters / Tingshu Wang
Biden & Xi agree to avoid conflict

“Some people in Europe seem to underestimate the Chinese people’s aspiration for a reunification of our country,” he added, noting also that the bloc must lift its sanctions if a new Sino-EU investment deal is to be ratified. 

In May, Brussels halted an investment pact agreed with China last December, after Beijing imposed sanctions on several members of the European Parliament. The EU responded, introducing its own sanctions related to the treatment of the Uyghur people and alleged genocide in Xinjiang. 

In recent years, China has become increasingly assertive about reuniting its wealthy island neighbor with the mainland. Beijing claims Taiwan is an inalienable part of the country and has called on Western parties to refrain from interfering in Chinese internal affairs. Western nations, notably the US and UK, have shown willingness to defend the democratic island. 

Taiwan considers itself to be independent of China since 1949 when the communist forces overthrew the government of the Republic of China on the mainland, forcing the Kuomintang-ruled state to relocate there.

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Austria will introduce a full lockdown that could last for three weeks on Monday in an attempt to tackle a new wave of Covid-19 infections. The government has also ordered the entire population to get vaccinated from February 1.

On Friday, conservative Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg told a news conference that a complete lockdown of the nation would begin on Monday and last for an initial 10 days.

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French President Emmanuel Macron (FILE PHOTO) © REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier
Macron discloses whether lockdown for unvaccinated will be necessary in France

He stated that the restrictions could be extended if infection rates did not start to fall, but he insisted the lockdown would not exceed 20 days.

The measures concern the entire Austrian population. The government has already imposed a partial lockdown on the unvaccinated in an effort to reduce hospitalization rates amid a surge in Covid-19 cases.

When the full lockdown ends, restrictions will remain in place for the unvaccinated.

Schallenberg’s announcement came after a meeting of nine state governors, two of whom had already vowed to introduce full lockdowns in their regions on Monday, in the western province of Tyrol.

The chancellor also announced that vaccinations would be mandatory from February 1. “We haven’t been able to convince enough people to vaccinate. For too long, I and others have assumed that you can convince people to get vaccinated,” he added, giving his rationale for the mandate.

Schallenberg said he lamented the political forces, radical opposition, and fake news fighting against vaccination.

Austria has one of the lowest vaccination rates in western Europe, with only 65% inoculated against the deadly virus according to data from Johns Hopkins university.

Infection rates are almost among the highest on the continent. The seven-day incidence rate stands at 971.5 per 100,000 people.

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We’re starting a new segment on The Cipher Brief’s Open-Source Collection Podcast and adding to the line-up of curated headlines we bring you from around the world with expert insights on today’s news. 

The Cipher Brief’s Brad Christian talked with former CIA Officer Marc Polymeropoulos this week about what’s next for the US Government when it comes to investigating ‘Havana Syndrome’, making sure Afghan interpreters aren’t left behind and why a White House visit by Jordan’s King Abdullah was a bigger deal than some may realize.  

Cipher Brief Expert Marc Polymeropoulos served 26 years in the CIA before retiring from the Senior Intelligence Service in June 2019.  His positions included field and headquarters operational assignments covering the Middle East, Europe, Eurasia and Counterterrorism. 

Christian: What’s top of mind for you this week in the world of national security?

Polymeropoulos:  Havana Syndrome, CIA’s response to the Afghan withdrawal, and the visit of Jordan’s King Abdullah to D.C. Let’s start with Havana Syndrome.

You saw in the press the last couple of days, the notion that the CIA’s inspector general is conducting a review of CIA’s handling of healthcare, of how officers were coming to them starting in 2016 after these attacks started in Cuba. I think that’s a good thing. It’s a necessary evil. I think a lot of your listeners and readers know that I was affected by this in December of 2017. It caused my retirement in July of 2019. I’ve been very vocal on the need for healthcare for our officers.  We have to think about Havana Syndrome in three bins.

The first, is accountability and that’s good. It’s a necessary evil, but we have to look at how the agency responded to officers because that’s critical. The agency workforce is watching. I think the IG review by the CIA is good as well as a look at what’s happening in the House and Senate oversight committees as well.

The second, is continued healthcare for officers, the officers getting to Walter Reed’s National Intrepid Center of Excellence. CIA Director Bill Burns is doing that, so that’s positive.

And then the last piece is culpability. I think you also saw recently in the press, that a senior intelligence service officer who was integral in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, has been named to the task force. So, a lot of stuff is happening on Havana Syndrome, I think all of it is moving in a positive direction. I applaud Director Burns. This is something that I think is going to be at the top of the news cycle for days, weeks, and months to come.

Christian: Do you feel like now there’s a unified awareness at the entire government level outside of CIA?  Is Congress focused on this? Is the White House focused on this in the ways that you think they need to be?

Polymeropoulos: What a great question. The White House for sure. Congress has been absolutely integral both in the Senate and the House. They’re about to pass the Havana Act, which is going to provide financial relief for officers affected, but in all US government agencies. I will say that the Department of State has been woefully behind and that’s a big concern of mine. I feel for my State colleagues. There are 41 State Department officers who have been affected by this. Secretary of State Blinken has not even met with them while Director Burns has met with nearly all of the CIA victims, so State’s got a long way to go. I think we’ll look to the White House and to Congress to keep the pressure on.

Christian: These are events that are still occurring, even as they’re being investigated. Tell us a little bit about the latest that’s happened on the attack front.

Polymeropoulos: I think you see what the press reports of what can only be considered a kind of slow-rolling mass casualty event in Vienna, Austria. There were numerous State Department and intelligence officers affected at our Embassy there. Again, this is coming out in the press, so it’s important to note that. But these things are still happening and I think that we have to look back to the old counter-terrorism model that CIA employed so effectively of detect, disrupt, and deter attacks by our terrorist adversaries. We have to apply that same type of mindset to this problem set.

Go beyond the headlines with expert perspectives on today’s news with The Cipher Brief’s Daily Open-Source Podcast.  Listen here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Christian: The Afghanistan withdrawal, there’s a lot going on there. We’ve seen reports of US airstrikes supporting Afghan forces in Kandahar. This week, it was reported that just under 50 Afghan troops requested refuge in Pakistan when their border posts near Chitral, which is a Pakistani city, was overrun. The Pakistani government let them in. And we’re seeing now an Afghan strategy focusing on protecting the capital regions and maybe ceding some of those provincial capitals.

Polymeropoulos: I look at this from a narrow optic. As a former CIA officer who was the base chief in Afghanistan between 2011 and 2012, I ran one of our paramilitary bases in eastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan. What is unique about life as a CIA officer out in the field, particularly in the bases, was that there were only a few of us. We had a very small number of Americans, yet we had hundreds, if not over 1,000 Afghanistan indigenous personnel, whether they were troops who were fighting with us or whether they were support personnel.  We lived with them. I think this is a little bit different than perhaps big US military’s experience with the Afghan national army.

I trusted my life to these guys. They were armed in front of us all the time. We ate together at the mess hall. We sat around the fire pit together, certainly went on patrols together. So, it’s really personal for me. I remember our Afghan interpreters. I remember our indigenous personnel and I really worry about them. The future, I think is one that certainly is bleak. I don’t support the administration’s decision for a full withdrawal. I don’t understand why we couldn’t have left a residual force, but that policy decision has been made.  I think that the things I’m looking to in the near future are even after the end of August, will the US military still conduct airstrikes in support of Afghan forces?  There is something about betraying those who really made that pact with us. That’s just something as a CIA officer that’s ingrained in us that we don’t want to do that. So, this is something I really worry about. I remember the faces of our interpreters and indigenous personnel every day. These were great heroes. I think a lot of us at CIA wouldn’t be alive today without their heroism.

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Christian: The third issue you raised was interesting, the visit to D.C. by Jordan’s King Abdullah. It didn’t get a lot of press.  But you say it’s a significant story.  Tell us why.

Polymeropoulos: President Biden has had a long-standing relationship with King Abdullah. It’s a sign that Jordan is back. We call Jordan the lily pad for the United States for a lot of reasons. I mean, when you think back to 2006 and Jordan’s integral role in the Anbar Awakening, that’s when we were rallying the tribes in Iraq to fight terrorism. When you think about how the US has access to strategic bases in Jordan and when you think about the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate as one of the US Government’s most critical counter-terrorism partners. But the fact of the matter is that under the last administration, Jordan was not treated well, so it’s really significant that Abdullah was here. I think this is a really good thing. Don’t forget that CIA Director Bill Burns was ambassador in Amman quite some time ago. I think this is a really positive development, not only for the United States going back to an old strategic partner, but also for Jordan as well, which has been a steadfast ally not only during King Abdullah’s reign, but also of course, under King Hussein before him.

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France shouldn’t remain silent on Julian Assange, leftist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has said, after the imprisoned WikiLeaks co-founder’s father suggested that Paris could offer asylum to his son.

The life of Assange – who is being held in solitary confinement at London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison while a British court considers an extradition request by the US – is under threat, Melenchon wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

“For years, we’ve been calling for France to accept him,” the head of the leftist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party said, insisting that “France shouldn’t remain silent.”

The statement by Melenchon, who won 19.6% of the ballot in the first round of the French presidential election in 2017, follows a visit by Assange’s father, John Shipton, to the Whistleblower Meeting in Paris on Monday.

During the event, Shipton told Sputnik news agency that it would be “an honorable thing” for the French government to grant his son asylum. 

“I feel that France hasn’t attacked Julian over the last 12 years and consequently France is free to act in return for the information that WikiLeaks and Julian brought to France,” he said, referring to the website’s revelations of the US intelligence agencies spying on French presidents and hacking into local banks.

Several dozen French lawmakers have also recently called upon Paris to take Assange in, with the Australian-born publisher’s legal team saying last year that their client was hoping to find asylum on French soil.

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FILE PHOTO: Julian Assange and partner Stella Moris are seen in an undated photo shared by Moris on social media November 11, 2021.
UK caves, allows Assange to get married in jail

Assange could face up to 175 years behind bars if he’s extradited to the US, where he’s wanted on espionage charges over the release by WikiLeaks of classified documents on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and others.

He was placed in Belmarsh in April 2019 over breach of bail, after being holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years.

The publisher had been fleeing an arrest warrant issued over sexual assault allegations which he has always denied, and which failed to result in any actual charges due to lack of evidence.

Assange’s supporters insist that he has actually been persecuted over his legitimate journalistic activities and revealing the truth to the public.

The UK High Court is expected to rule on the appeal by the US against a lower court decision to bar the WikiLeaks co-founder’s extradition to America due to the 50-year-old’s poor health condition and risk of suicide.

Assange’s team will then be able to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court if it’s not favorable.

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The stars of the Harry Potter films will reunite for a 20-year anniversary special on HBO, minus author JK Rowling. Fans and commenters wondered if Rowling’s absence had anything to do with her views on transgender issues.

‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ premiered 20 years ago this week, catapulting actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson to superstardom. Warner Bros announced on Tuesday that the three stars – ​​as well as a whole range of supporting actors from the franchise – will travel back to Hogwarts for an “enchanting making-of story” airing on New Year’s Day, entitled ‘Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts’. 

Conspicuously absent from the production is author JK Rowling. A Warner Bros’ press release made no mention of Rowling, and a lengthy Instagram post by actress Emma Watson thanked fans and fellow cast members, but also made no mention of Rowling, whom other Harry Potter actors said they “owe everything” to.

Rowling’s PR team did not comment on the author’s absence, and the Hollywood Reporter claimed that the author will only appear in the show in archival footage. 

Commentators online reckoned that Rowling had been canceled from the retrospective special due to her high-profile clashes with transgender activists. A self-described feminist, Rowling has spoken out against gender-neutral language, arguing that it “erases” the concept of sex and therefore the concept of womanhood. She has also stated that sex is a binary concept, and argued against gender-neutral bathrooms, claiming that by allowing men into women’s bathrooms, women are made less safe.

Rowling’s comments on gender issues generated intense backlash from LGBT organizations, and death and rape threats from the most zealous transgender ideologues online. Actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson also both spoke out against Rowling’s defense of biological sex last year, with Radcliffe declaring that “transgender women are women,” and apologizing to upset fans “for the pain [Rowling’s] comments have caused you.”

“Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are,” Watson chimed in.

Rowling has repeatedly stated that she is against anti-trans discrimination, but would not change her position on sex. “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it,” she wrote last year.

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UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has acted to proscribe the Palestinian group Hamas “in its entirety,” stating that it has significant capacity to carry out terrorist acts and has facilities to train attackers.

In a tweet on Friday, Patel stated that she had banned the Palestinian group Hamas and designated it a terrorist organization, as she reiterated the British government’s commitment to “tackling extremism and terrorism wherever it occurs.”

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The Imperial War Museum (FILE PHOTO) © REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett
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“Hamas has significant terrorist capability, including access to extensive and sophisticated weaponry, as well as terrorist training facilities,” she wrote.  

The home secretary’s tweet came during her visit to Washington and followed speculation on Friday morning that she was soon to outlaw the group.

Pre-empting Patel’s announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett welcomed Britain’s “intention” on Twitter.

“Hamas is a radical Islamic group that targets innocent Israelis & seeks Israel’s destruction. I welcome the UK’s intention to declare Hamas a terrorist organization in its entirety – because that’s exactly what it is,” Bennett wrote, thanking the leadership of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.  

Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, also hailed the expected move against Hamas, saying it was “part of strengthening ties with Britain.” 

Until now, only Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, had been outlawed by the British government. The EU and the US have already proscribed all of Hamas.

Hamas political official Sami Abu Zuhri rejected Britain’s move, claiming it showed “absolute bias toward the Israeli occupation and is a submission to Israeli blackmail and dictations.” 

In a separate statement, the group claimed it had a right to resist occupation by all available means, “including armed resistance.”

Hamas seized total control of Gaza in 2007, on the back of an election victory in 2006.

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