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During an impeachment hearing Tuesday, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes praised the reporting of a veteran investigative journalist whose work had proven to be a problem for the Democrats and the media.

That journalist is John Solomon, formerly of the Hill and currently a Fox News contributor. Republicans like Nunes have relied on Solomons work during the impeachment inquiry to build the case that Trump was right to be concerned about former Vice President Joe Bidens actions in Ukraine and those of his son, Hunter Biden, and to argue that the real scandal is how the Obama administration tried to get the Ukrainian government to cover up corruption.

But Solomons journalism, particularly on the subject of Ukraine, has been proven to be false, repeatedly. Solomon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Substantial reporting from outlets including ProPublica and the Daily Beast show that Solomon spread disinformation about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. In his work, he effectively laundered dirt provided to him by Donald Trumps attorney, Rudy Giuliani, producing articles that directly led to a whistleblower report alleging that Trump, based on Solomons false assertions, demanded the Ukrainian government investigate the Bidens or risk losing military aid.

The foremost allegation made by Solomon was published by the Hill in March, when Solomon interviewed the former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko. In the interview, he accused then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch of giving him a do-not-prosecute list to stop investigations into corruption. The accusation was proved false, and was ultimately recanted by Lutsenko himself but by then, it was too late.

The falsehood had made it into the right-leaning media ecosystem, where other false allegations surfaced, like that Yovanovitch was anti-Trump and told Ukrainians to ignore him because he would soon be impeached. She was fired from her post in May of this year.

Trump was seemingly laser-focused on Yovanovitch, even referencing her in his infamously perfect call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as being bad news. But Yovanovitchs real crime appears to have been standing in the way of Rudy Giuliani, and, more importantly, his efforts to investigate Joe Biden on behalf of the presidents reelection efforts, according to statements made by the former mayor to the Wall Street Journal.

As Republicans continue to dig in on impeachment, Solomon represents a media figure with mainstream credentials those supportive of Trump can use to burnish their views and their defenses of the president. But ironically, its Solomon, and Solomons misinformation stemming from Giuliani and others, that is responsible for the impeachment inquiry in the first place.

This spring, John Solomon, then the executive vice president of digital at the Hill, posted an interview with former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, whom Solomon introduced as a hero who spent two years in prison for battling Russian aggression.

But that interview was actually part of a long-running smear campaign by Giuliani aimed at undermining the Ukrainian ambassador to help Trump.

As my colleague Andrew Prokop reported:

According to the accounts of other witnesses who have testified in the impeachment inquiry, Yovanovitch was highly respected among her colleagues. But she ran afoul of two powerful people: Trumps personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ukraines prosecutor general (under the previous administration) Yuri Lutsenko.

In an apparent effort to win President Trumps favor, Lutsenko and Giuliani began discussing the possibility that the Ukrainian prosecutor general could launch investigations into Trumps enemies. Hed investigate Burisma (the Ukrainian natural gas company whose board included Hunter Biden) as well as purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

But Yovanovitch got in the way. When Lutsenko asked the US embassy to set up meetings with FBI or Justice Department officials, she objected, saying thats not the typical way these things are handled. Instead, she encouraged him to meet with the FBIs legal attach in Kyiv. I dont think he really appreciated it, she told investigators.

Solomons interview made a blockbuster (and false) assertion: Yovanovitch had given Lutsenko a do-not-prosecute list that included a founder of an anti-corruption group, Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAc). That group, according to Solomon, was funded by Hungarian-American billionaire (and conservative boogeyman) George Soros.

Solomon wrote that the implied message to Ukraines prosecutors was clear: Dont target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.

But there was no do-not-prosecute list, which Lutsenko himself admitted a few weeks later. AntAc was funded by a host of entities, including donations from Ukrainian citizens and the European Union; the United States; the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic; alongside the Open Society Foundations, a Soros-developed grantmaking group. Lutsenko didnt spend time in prison in retaliation for his efforts against Russia he was sent to prison for embezzlement and abuse of office, two years before Russia became making incursions into Ukraine.

And in other articles for the Hill, Solomon made more false assertions about perceived enemies of Trump.

For example, he wrote that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine to remove former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in order to shut down an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company whose board included Bidens son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were turned into a 30-second attack ad for the Trump campaign on Facebook, viewed more than five million times. But former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that Bidens demand for Shokins firing was not at all improper and Biden was hardly alone in wanting Shokin, who was reportedly engaged in corrupt behavior, removed.

Solomon further wrote that a so-called black ledger that showed off-the-books payments made to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort by a pro-Russian political party payments that resulted in Manaforts resignation from the campaign was fake. But that ledger is absolutely real.

In summary, Solomon falsely asserted that Democrats worked with Ukrainian officials to help spread falsehoods about Trump campaign officials and quash investigations into Joe Bidens son, and that Yovanovitch had kept Ukrainian officials who might blow the whistle on the alleged scheme from entering the country. But none of that was true.

Solomons work relied heavily on information fed to him by Rudy Giuliani, who orchestrated, in the words of senior State Department official George Kent, a campaign ... full of lies and incorrect information aimed at getting rid of Yovanovitch by connecting her to George Soros and a conspiratorial effort to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election a theory that former National Security Council official Fiona Hill told Congress earlier this month seemed based on the falsehood that George Soros rules the world and, you know, basically controls everything.

Giuliani sent a host of memos containing misinformation to Solomon. As Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times detailed:

In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said he turned to Mr. Solomon earlier this year with a cache of information he believed contained damaging details about Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and the special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon, Mr. Giuliani said. I had no other choice, he added, asserting that Obama-era officials still infected the Justice Department and wouldnt have diligently investigated the information he had compiled.

So I said heres the way to do it Im going to give it to the watchdogs of integrity, the fourth estate, he said.

Giulianis interest in smearing Yovanovitch centered on her refusal to permit a politically motivated investigation into the Bidens. But Giuliani also worked with two Ukrainian businessmen, Lev Parnas and his partner, Igor Fruman, to spread disinformation about Joe Biden and Yovanovitch, and they had motivations of their own.

As detailed by the New York Times in October, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman boasted that they had worked with Mr. Giuliani to force the recall this spring of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, partly because Parnas believed Yovanovitch was getting in the way of his work in the oil industry. (Both have recently been indicted on campaign finance charges.)

Remember that Solomon interview with Lutsenko, in which Lutsenko said that he had received a do-not-prosecute list from the American ambassador? Parnas set up the interview, and according to ProPublica, watched the interview from the control booth.

More concerningly, Solomon was introduced to Parnas by his personal attorneys, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, who had worked with Giuliani previously and, according to Fox News, were helping the former New York City mayor to get oppo research on Biden.

It was diGenova who was the source of the smear against Yovanovitch regarding her anti-Trump status, saying on Sean Hannitys Fox News show in March, The current United States ambassador Marie Yovanovitch has bad mouthed the president of the United States to Ukrainian officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump policy because hes going to be impeached. More recently, hes claimed that George Soros controls a majority of the State Department.

When Solomon wrote that piece alleging that Yovanovitch had given Lutsenko a do-not-prosecute list, he sent a draft first, to three people: Parnas, diGenova, and Toensing.

As a result of investigations into the validity of Solomons work, Solomons columns were shifted from news to opinion in 2018. The editor-in-chief of the Hill announced Monday that his work is now being reviewed, updated, and in some cases, corrected by the papers staff. And members of Congress have decried his work as having no veracity whatsoever.

But Solomon stands by his stories, and even told Fox News he was considering targeted legal action against those who criticize him.

Controversy isnt exactly new for Solomon, whose previous reporting at larger outlets seems to have focused on blockbuster stories that lacked blockbuster facts. Or as the Washington Posts then-ombudsman Deborah Howell put it, a gotcha without the gotcha.

One example: when he wrote a front-page story for the Washington Post in 2007 about the sale of former Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwardss home. One Washington Post reader said of the story, I read it three times and could not figure out why it was a news story, let alone a front-pager. Whats worse was that the placement, the headline and the tone of the story clearly implied that former senator Edwards had done something sleazy.

As the Columbia Journalism Review detailed in 2012:

As a reporter for the AP and The Washington Post, he dug up his share of genuine dirt, but he also was notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals. In 2006, for instance, Solomon and fellow AP writer Sharon Theimer tried to tie now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to disgraced super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The piece hinged on a series of meetings Reid had with Abramoffs staff to discuss a pending minimum-wage bill and gifts from Abramoff associates who opposed several casino-expansion projects. What it failed to mention is that Reid stuck to his longstanding position on both issuesmeaning that any implications of influence peddling were bogus.

Solomons career in journalism saw him at the Associated Press and the Washington Post in the 1990s and early 2000s before he became editor-in-chief of the Washington Times. There, he tasked himself with making the conservative-leaning newspaper the Washington Times more objective; using the term gay instead of homosexual, for example.

In 2008, he told the Washington City Paper of his work at the Washington Times, The only point I have made with the reporters and editors who write for the news pages is there must be a bright line between opinion and editorializing that rightfully belongs on the op-ed and commentary pages and the fair, balanced, accurate, and precise reporting that must appear in the news sections of the paper.

Solomon left the Washington Times in 2009 over financial issues, but returned in 2013 after a time spent as executive editor at the Center for Public Integrity a tenure marked by no small degree of controversy, particularly over Solomons efforts to turn the Center into a daily reporting outfit (one that would pay a firm run by Solomon roughly 4 million dollars a year in commission, based on that firms projections).

But Solomon had a real talent for boosting traffic and getting attention, which became his focus when he left the Washington Times to go to Circa, a mobile news app that shut down in 2015 before being relaunched that same year by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a right-leaning company perhaps best known for requiring outlets to run specific pro-Trump promotional segments.

Solomon became Circas chief operating officer. It was at Circa where Solomon gained the attention of some of the rights biggest names, like Sean Hannity, for reporting alongside Sara Carter on how Michael Flynn was mistreated. Or how the real Russia investigation should focus on collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Department of Justice and alleged anti-Trump bias in intelligence services.

That line of argument didnt gain him much credence among many journalists one conservative writer told me that Solomon was known to have credibility issues that required readers to find a secondary source for any of his scoops. But in 2017, he joined The Hill, a paper that launched in 1994 and describes itself as the newspaper for and about Congress, breaking stories from Capitol Hill, K Street and the White House. I reached out to the editors at the paper, and will update if and when I hear back.

At The Hill, Solomons work continued to focus on exclusive stories that tended to fall apart under scrutiny, like the Uranium One allegations against Hillary Clinton, or ones that werent very exclusive at all, like a piece alleging that an attorney had sought donor cash for two women who accused Trump of sexual harassment (the attorney in question, Lisa Bloom, had set up a public GoFundMe for one of the alleged victims, which is not unusual).

But it was Solomons work on Ukraine work based largely on misinformation given to him by Rudy Giuliani and associates of Giuliani, including his own attorneys that made the biggest impact. Because it was that work that led to a whistleblower complaint focused on allegations that Trump, working with Rudy Giuliani, was pressuring [Ukraine] to investigate one of the Presidents main domestic political rivals by withholding military aid.

In the White Houses partial transcript of a July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump refers directly to assertions made by John Solomon:

If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, theres a lot of talk about Bidens son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it It sounds horrible to me.

Despite it now being called into question, John Solomons work remains an issue, in large part because it is still taken as fact among some right-leaning pundits and, clearly, the president himself.

On Friday, for example, conservative pundit Glenn Beck alleged that Yovanovitch should be held for perjury when she asserted during sworn testimony that she did not give Lutsenko a do-not-prosecute list. His source?

Award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon.

Read more:
Impeachment hearings: How bad right-wing journalism kicked off the impeachment saga - Vox.com

Emmanuel Macron, France's president, left, speaks beside Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

U.S. tech firms could face new challenges in Europe amid a growing debate about data privacy and security.

Some European leaders across the 28-member bloc are voicing concerns about the reliance on American and Chinese tech companies for storing data. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said last week that many European companies have outsourced their data to U.S. firms. As a result, she argued that Europe should claim "digital sovereignty" by developing its own data platform and thus reducing the dependence on companies such as Google and Microsoft for their cloud services.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has expressed similar worries. He told The Economist last month that if nothing changes in Europe "in 10 years' time, no one will be able to guarantee the technological soundness of your cyber-systems, no one will be able to guarantee who processes the data, and how, of citizens or companies".

Digital sovereignty encompasses the idea that users, being citizens or companies, have control over their data. According to Andrea Renda, senior fellow at the think tank CEPS, about 94% of data in the Western world is stored in the U.S.

"Digital sovereignty can be approached in various ways, but one should not expect European technologies to replace U.S. or Chinese products, services and platforms everywhere," Renda told CNBC via email.

Six out of the 10 biggest tech companies in the world are American; and there is no European firm among that list. Rather than looking to build new tech giants, Europe should further develop regulation and investment to minimize dependency on non-European technology, Renda added.

It will take time to create a coherent framework to make 'digital sovereignty' work in a fair and transparent manner.

Andrew Kitson

Head of telecoms at Fitch Solutions

The European Union has taken steps on the regulation side of technology. It introduced in May of last year the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which gives users some protection over how their data is processed.

The EU's Competition Commission has also opened investigations into big tech companies. Amazon, for example, is under investigation since July as European authorities assess whether the company is using sales data to gain an unfair advantage over smaller retailers.

Georgios Petropoulos, research fellow at Bruegel think tank, said: "I expect that data will play a more prominent role in competition policy cases."

However, some analysts argue that Europe needs to go one step further.

"Europe can't simply be a regulator, but (it) also needs to have the tech companies to match," Dexter Thillien, senior analyst at Fitch Solutions, told CNBC via email.

Germany announced a few weeks ago an initiative called Gaia-X with the aim to set up a "competitive, secure and trustworthy" data infrastructure for Europe; it is the prototype of the future European cloud provider.

"There are concrete plans to scale it up to the EU level, but the contours are still unknown," Renda, from CEPS, said. "My bet is that for critical information infrastructure, European cloud operators will be given priority or exclusivity in the months to come. This applies in particular to public procurement, defence, network industries," he said.

Dexter from Fitch Solutions believes Europe might adopt "some level of protectionism under the prism of national security."

"I don't see (digital sovereignty) as meaning digital protectionism. This is not a matter of excluding foreign players from U.S. or China, but rather to make sure European alternatives exist, which is not really the case now," he added.

Despite Europe's efforts and ambitions, some believe it will take time before it can be digitally sovereign.

"As usual with Europe, there's a lot of talk and many different ideas being proposed, but it will take time to create a coherent framework to make 'digital sovereignty' work in a fair and transparent manner," Andrew Kitson, head of telecoms media and technology told CNBC.

Read more:
Europe's dream to claim its 'digital sovereignty' could be the next big challenge for US tech giants - CNBC

Americans have had a variety of ways of thinking about privacy over the centuries. Though the word privacy is not used in the Constitution, the idea that citizens are to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures is enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Before he was a Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis proclaimed in a 1890 Harvard Law Review article that Americans enjoyed a right to privacy, which he argued was the right to be let alone. In a landmark birth control case in 1965, the Supreme Court embraced the Brandeis view, ruling that the right to privacy can be inferred from the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments. More modern concepts have focused on Americans views that they ought to be able to control their identity and their personal information.

This new survey asked Americans for their own definitions of the words privacy and digital privacy. Their written answers were coded into broad categories, and they reveal that across both questions, participants most often mention their concerns about the role other people and organizations can play in learning about them, their desire to shield their personal activities and possessions, and their interest in controlling who is given access to their personal information. By comparison, fewer participants mention third parties and the selling of their information, tracking or monitoring, crime and other threats of illicit activity, or interference from the government.

When asked what privacy means to them, 28% of respondents mention other people or organizations:

Keeping my personal information out of the hands of the big data companies. Man, 34

My personal information is secure. No one knows my credit card numbers, address info, where I have been, my banking info, my health info, etc. People dont know anything about me I do not intend to share. Woman, 51

Around one-quarter (26%) mention control or their ability to decide what aspects of their lives are accessible to others:

I have control of all my personal and financial information, no one else can access without my permission. Man, 50

Personal privacy means everything about me personally is private unless I personally opt-in to allow it to be public. Opt-in means not by default or convoluted user agreement that circumvents the purpose of privacy laws. Man, 57

Another 15% of respondents focus on themselves and their personal possessions, without referring to outside organizations or people:

Privacy is being able to feel like your personal information is safe. Woman, 18

That I am in complete control of my personal information. Woman, 29

When asked about digital privacy, respondents again focused on similar topics as when they were asked about privacy: control, the role of other people and organizations, and themselves and their personal possessions. Some 17% mention only themselves and the protection of their own personal information, making no reference to other people or organizations:

Personal information such as [Social Security numbers], banking information, medical records remain private and secure. Man, 59

I should be able to surf the web and do it anonymously. Woman, 55

And 14% of respondents mention control and the desire to decide which aspects of their lives are accessible to others:

Digital privacy would mean that you could use digital technology without the fear of your information or messages being vulnerable to someone gaining access to it that was not your intended receiver. Woman, 72

Having control and ownership of my online data. Have control and the ability to delete information I have not explicitly given the right to use or disseminate. Man, 60

Another 13% mention the role other people or organizations play in their digital privacy:

Security and lack of ability to easily find information put into the digital world like on the internet (passwords, ability to find social media posts), via phone/tablet, etc. Woman, 34

Activity/data about me and from my interactions with websites and digital services being unavailable to other people. Man, 22

A smaller share of respondents (9%) believe that digital privacy is a myth and doesnt actually exist:

Digital privacy does not exist, in my opinion. Once one puts something on a computer that is connected to the internet, privacy is compromised and no longer private. Woman, 75

Nothing. No matter what type of security you think you have, any hacker that wants in will get in. Just a matter of time in my opinion. Man, 49

Many of respondents written answers about their definitions of digital privacy repeated thoughts that were in answers about privacy. At the same time, words like social media, online, internet and data were more common when respondents described digital privacy.

Large data breaches have become a regular feature of modern life affecting companies like Capital One, Facebook, Equifax and Uber. To that end, Pew Research Center surveyed Americans about how they feel about their own personal data. This survey finds that seven-in-ten Americans feel their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago, only 6% say their information is more secure, and about a quarter (24%) feel the situation has not changed.

Majorities across demographic groups believe their personal data is less secure than it was in the past, but some groups are more likely to feel this than others. Those with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to believe things are worse. Fully 78% of those with a bachelors or advanced degree say their personal information is less secure, compared with 64% of those with a high school education or less. Those over age 50 are also more likely to think their data is less secure, compared with those ages 18 to 49.

In the midst of this concern, how much attention are Americans paying to privacy issues? Some 57% of Americans say they follow news about privacy very (11%) or somewhat (46%) closely, while 43% say they dont follow it too closely, or at all.

Two-thirds of adults ages 65 and older say they follow privacy news at least somewhat closely, compared with just 45% of those 18 to 29 who do the same. Those living in households earning $75,000 or more a year are also more likely to follow privacy news at the same rate with 60% saying they do so compared with 53% of those with a household income less than $30,000 saying the same.

There is little difference, however, between those who follow news about privacy issues and those who do not when it comes to expressing concern about the way things are trending. Some 74% of those who follow privacy news at least somewhat closely believe their data is less secure than it was five years ago and 64% of those who do not follow privacy news too closely also feel the same way.

When asked about three different types of data breaches or identity theft, 28% of Americans say they have experienced at least one of them in the past 12 months. About one-in-five adults (21%) say someone has put fraudulent charges on their debit or credit card in the past year, while smaller shares say someone has taken over their social media or email account without their permission, or attempted to open a line of credit or apply for a loan using their name.

Black adults (20%) are roughly three times as likely as their Hispanic (7%) or white counterparts (6%) to say someone has taken over their social media or email account in the past year. Black Americans are also more likely to say someone attempted to open a line of credit or applied for a loan using their name in the past 12 months, compared with smaller shares of white and Hispanic adults who say the same.

Read the rest here:
1. How Americans think about privacy and the vulnerability of their personal data - Pew Research Center

Theres a reason Facebook doesnt provide granular brand safety controls for news feed it doesnt think theyre necessary.

We dont believe ad adjacency matters in certain environments and we designed the platform with that in mind, said Erik Geisler, Facebooks director of North American agency partnerships, speaking Thursday at 614 Groups Brand Safety Summit in New York City.

In Facebooks view, people dont associate the ads they scroll past in their feeds with the content they see above or below. Geisler referenced internal research that apparently proves this thesis, but Facebook declined to share any specific numbers or supporting data.

Its a convenient viewpoint considering how difficult it is to protect for brand safety in environments that rely heavily on user-generated content, like the news feed.

Since Facebook doesnt think ad adjacency is an issue in the news feed, the controls advertisers have there are basic. Although Facebook recommendsautomatic placements as the default, buyers can choose to opt out of ad placements on Facebook, Instagram and/or Messenger.

Its a different story for Audience Network placements, ads within publisher content (aka, Instant Articles) and pre- and mid-roll video on Watch all places where adjacency does matter, Geisler said.

And so advertisers have a few more controls in those environments, including inventory filters, block lists, access to a pre-campaign list of potential publishers where ads could run and publisher delivery reports they can see after the fact. Advertisers can also just decide to opt out of a placement completely.

Context is a nuanced affair, so theres an argument to be made for enabling brand safety controls on a sliding scale depending on where an ad is running.

People may feel differently about the relationship between a standard display ad and the article in which its embedded than they do about a pre-roll ad that appears before a video, which could look more like an implied endorsement, said Jed Hartman, chief commercial and strategy officer at Channel Factory and former CRO at The Washington Post.

But not everyone is down with what they view as a lack of robust brand safety controls in the news feed.

I cant say I agree with that at all, said a media executive at a large brand who asked to remain anonymous because it is in the process of negotiating with Facebook for more control.

Ad adjacency is just as key in the feed as anywhere, the executive said. And we need our media to work really well on these platforms especially when were investing as much as we are."

Go here to see the original:
Facebook Has Fewer Brand Safety Controls For News Feed Ads On Purpose - AdExchanger

ACT leader David Seymour also voted against the legislation, but only because of ACT's policy to oppose Government Bills unless the Government asks for support, in which case he would consider doing so.

The purpose of the proposed law is to "ensure the security of all involved in APEC 2021, as well as the security of media and members of the public".

The legislation - which would expire at the end of November 2021 - says foreign protection officers would be able to "apply for the authority to carry and possess a specified weapon during the leaders' event period, along with a permit to import the weapon".

Ghahraman said a time when New Zealand is reforming domestic gun laws it "doesn't make sense to move the other way for this meeting".

"We know that both here and overseas, force is most commonly used against persons of colour, so certain communities are going to be put at most risk."

The Bill's sponsor, Deputy Prime Minister and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, said the temporary law would support New Zealand's security preparations for hosting the event, last held in Auckland in 1999.

"Up to 20,000 visitors are expected throughout the year, including world leaders, ministers and international media," Peters said.

"This Bill will ensure the New Zealand Police has the resources it needs, as well as provide temporary security and safety measures around key meeting locations during the leaders' event."

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed last month that APEC will still be held in Auckland, despite the destruction caused by a massive blaze at the New Zealand International Convention Centre.

The Greens' refusal to support the APEC Bill is reminiscent of last month when the party didn't at first support a proposed anti-terror law that would give police the ability to impose control orders on returning Kiwis involved in terrorism.

The Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill began in a similar way to the APEC Bill, with Labour, National and New Zealand First supporting it and the Greens opposed.

But negotiations broke down between National leader Simon Bridges and Justice Minister Andrew Little and its first reading was initially delayed.

The Greens were then in a position to negotiate the changes they wanted to the legislation and the Justice Minister was willing to give them want they wanted.

Ghahraman told Newshub the situation is different this time because National decided to support the APEC Bill as a caucus and there were no sour negotiations, therefore Labour and NZ First don't need the Greens' support.

"If the National Party pulled their support, we do have very serious concerns about the APEC Bill as we did about the control orders Bill," Ghahraman said.

But she said it's a bit more black and white this time.

She said the Greens would only support the Bill "if we don't allow restricted weapons held by foreign agents who are not trained by us and don't work in our communities".

"Our position on the APEC Bill is that New Zealand's own security laws and policing are enough."

Read the original post:
APEC 2021: Greens oppose law letting foreign security agents carry restricted weapons - Newshub