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mimiterranova

8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The man who police say went on a rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area has been charged with eight counts of murder in connection with the attacks.
  • The man who police say went on a rampage at three spas in the Atlanta area, killing eight people, was charged on Wednesday with eight counts of murder in connection with the attacks.
  • The brazen shootings, which took the lives of six women of Asian descent, stirred considerable outrage and fear in the Asian-American community
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  • The suspect told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had carried out the shootings at the massage parlors to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday.
  • Six of the eight people killed in the shootings at Atlanta-area spas on Tuesday were women of Asian descent
  • Ms. Yaun was a customer at Young’s Asian Massage and had been planning a date night with her husband, her half sister, Dana Toole, said. She was killed, and her husband survived after locking himself in a nearby room as gunshots rang out, Ms. Toole said.
  • President Biden said on Wednesday that “the question of motivation is still to be determined” in the Georgia shootings, while renewing his concerns over a recent surge in violence against Asian-Americans.
  • “I know Asian-Americans are very concerned. Because as you know I have been speaking about the brutality against Asian-Americans for the last couple months, and I think it’s very, very troubling. But I am making no connection at this moment to the motivation of the killer. I’m waiting for an answer from — as the investigation proceeds — from the F.B.I. and from the Justice Department. And I’ll have more to say when the investigation is completed.”
  • “This speaks to a larger issue, which is the issue of violence in our country and what we must do to never tolerate it and to always speak out against it,” Ms. Harris said, adding that the motive in the shooting was still unclear.
saberal

Opinion | What We Lose When Only Men Write About Men - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In “The Aspern Papers,” the Henry James novella of literary obsession, a biographer becomes fixated on a stash of secret letters belonging to an elderly woman who was once his subject’s girlfriend. Abandoning all his moral scruples, he persuades her to take him in as her tenant and pretends to court her niece.
  • The book is said to be inspired in part by an anecdote about a fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley who made a similar attempt to win over a former associate of the poet
  • It’s perfectly reasonable for executors charged with sensitive information to vet those who wish to use it. But this system too often rewards cronyism rather than hard work or creativity — and perpetuates the gross inequalities in representation that disfigure the American literary landscape.
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  • To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
  • The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.
  • As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)
  • Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.
  • Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.
  • The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.
anonymous

What We Know About Atlanta-Area Spa Killings: Suspect Charged : NPR - 0 views

  • The suspected gunman in three attacks that killed eight people at Atlanta-area spas on Tuesday has been charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.Cherokee County officials announced on Wednesday afternoon that Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with four counts of murder and one count of assault in the shooting involving three women and two men at Young's Asian Massage. He has also been charged with murder in Atlanta, where four other women were killed in two separate attacks.
  • Police said the suspect has confessed to the crime and told officials about a "temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate."
  • it is too early to determine if he'll be charged with a hate crime.
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  • Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, police said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out,"
  • he has a sexual addiction.
  • Tuesday's violence has amplified fears in the Asian American community, which is already experiencing a spike in attacks and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began.
  • Feelings of anger within the community increased late Wednesday as comments made by a Cherokee County Sheriff's Office official as well as a post on his Facebook page were perceived as inappropriate, insensitive, and anti-Asian.
  • Long was "pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."
  • "[Long] does claim that it was not racially motivated" and cautioned the investigation is still early.
  • screenshots of Baker's Facebook account surfaced showing a post that promoted t-shirts amplifying a racist perception of the coronavirus.
  • As of early Wednesday afternoon, only half of the victims had been publicly identified.
  • In addition, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth was injured,
  • Police in Atlanta say they're not yet publicly naming the victims from the two shootings in that city; a representative says the department is still working to identify them.
  • Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said, "We are still early in this investigation, so we cannot make that determination at this moment."
  • "This was a tragic day, with many victims," Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said.
  • In a later interview with CNN, Bottoms said that she was aware of the suspect's claims that the killings were not racially motivated, "but I am taking that with a grain of salt."
  • The shocking violence could have been worse, Bottoms said,
  • Because of the family's tip, police were able to track Long's cellphone, which helped them narrow his movements after the attacks.
  • Reynolds said his county is mostly a bedroom community and had just one murder in the past year. "We don't have a lot of crime in that area," he added.Long was initially identified through surveillance camera footage from one of the crime scenes, the sheriff said. After his agency posted images to social media, Long's parents got in touch to say they believed it was their son in the pictures.
  • The group Stop AAPI Hate says it has received nearly 3,800 reports of what it describes as hate incidents — including verbal harassment and physical assault — since the COVID-19 pandemic began last March. In the aftermath of the Atlanta-area attacks, officials in cities such as New York and Seattle said they would boost law enforcement's presence in Asian American communities.
  • On Wednesday, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta issued a statement saying that although details are still emerging, the broader context of racial tension in the U.S. cannot be ignored.
  • The first attack targeted Young's Asian Massage in Acworth in Cherokee County, northwest of Atlanta, where the sheriff's office said four people died and at least one other person was injured.
  • Surveillance footage from a neighboring business appeared to show Long's Hyundai Tucson SUV entering the spa's strip mall parking lot around 4:50 p.m. ET.
  • The second and third attacks came about one hour later on Piedmont Road in northeast Atlanta. Women who called emergency dispatchers to ask for help at the pair of Atlanta spas urged police to come quickly, according to 911 audio that was released on Wednesday.
  • Officers arrived at the spa less than two minutes after the dispatch call went out, according to police. They found three women dead from gunshot wounds inside.
  • The second 911 call came in about nine minutes later, from a woman at Aromatherapy Spa, almost directly across the street. Police were dispatched on a report of gunshots fired and arrived two minutes later. When they entered the business, they found that a fourth woman had been killed.
  • From Atlanta, the suspected gunman fled to the south, as police spread the alarm to be on the lookout for his vehicle. As he drove south on Interstate 75, the authorities set a trap for him.Around 8 p.m., Crisp County Sheriff Billy Hancock said, his agency got word "that a murder suspect out of north Georgia was getting close to entering our county."
  • Some 30 minutes later, Georgia State Patrol troopers performed a maneuver on Long's SUV that caused it to spin out of control, Hancock said. The suspect was taken into custody without incident and taken to the county jail, he said. Long was later transferred back to Cherokee County.
  • Long bought a gun on Tuesday before the shooting rampage.
  • As for what Long's plan might have been in Florida, Baker said he understood the gunman wanted to target "some type of porn industry in that state."The FBI is assisting both Cherokee County and Atlanta police in handling the case,
  • "Long has since been moved to the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center, and has been interviewed by both the Atlanta Police Department and FBI."
  • Biden spoke about the killings on Wednesday, saying he was briefed on a phone call with Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
  • I am making no connection at this moment to the motivation of the killer," the president added. "I'm waiting for an answer, as the investigation proceeds, from the FBI and from the Justice Department."
  • Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he and first lady Marty Kemp "are heartbroken and disgusted by the heinous shootings that took place last night. We continue to pray for the families and loved ones of the victims."
kaylynfreeman

Sports Are Returning to Normal. So Is Their Role in Political Fights. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • American society is redrawing cultural norms and protections for citizens’ rights. It shouldn’t be a shock that sports is the most visible battleground.
  • But as we dream of a return to normalcy, what will we now expect from the games we love? A return to the mythical notion that sports should operate at arm’s length remove from the important issues of the day?
  • Then he zeroed in. We both did. We agreed that sports have become society’s prime cultural battleground for every hot-button social and political issue. No matter the subject — race, religion, sexuality, patriotism, the role of the police — the sports world is more powerful than ever as a venue for the often harsh hashing out of opposing views.
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  • Trump provided a powerful accelerant. He stoked the flames amid his ardent supporters who view sports as a last bastion for the good old days and their gauzy myths. The pandemic forced us inside and limited our lives — and also helped give activist athletes and their supporters more time to think and organize. (Hence the walkouts led by the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. last summer.) All the while, the ubiquitous, hyperbolic power of the internet and social media continued to grow at breakneck speed.
rerobinson03

Suspect's Church Calls Atlanta Spa Attacks 'the Result of a Sinful Heart' - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, was charged this week with eight counts of murder in the attacks on three massage parlors in and around Atlanta. A former roommate has described a “religious mania” that marked Mr. Long’s life in the years before the shooting spree. And the police have said that Mr. Long, 21, told them he had a sexual addiction, and that the shootings were an attempt to eliminate temptation.
  • The church statement came amid several developments in the case on Friday, including the official identification of the four women who were killed in two Atlanta spas. President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met with Asian-American leaders in Atlanta, and community members held a vigil in memory of the shooting victims.
  • The records, provided in response to a request from The New York Times, contradict what Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said at a news conference this week: “As far as we know in Atlanta, these are legally operating businesses that have not been on our radar, not on the radar of A.P.D.”
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  • As the community mourned the shooting victims, new details emerged about the arrest of Mr. Long, who was apprehended on Tuesday night on an interstate in Crisp County, about 150 miles south of Atlanta. According to a police report, he asked authorities whether he was going to spend “the rest of his life” in jail.
  • The attacks on the spas have stoked a furious outcry over escalating anti-Asian violence and rhetoric. Anger was also directed at a Cherokee County sheriff’s deputy — who served as the agency’s spokesman for the investigation — for saying that Mr. Long had “a really bad day” before the shootings, and for anti-Asian Facebook posts that he made last year.
anonymous

German Catholic clergy rebel against Vatican over same-sex unions - CNN - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • German Catholic theologians and clergy have mobilized against a recent ruling from the Vatican that said the Catholic Church would not bless same-sex unions.
  • "We decisively distance ourselves from this position," it said.The statement, signed by 266 theologians, said the ruling lacks "theological depth, hermeneutical understanding as well as argumentative stringency."
  • "A document that in its argumentation so blatantly excludes any progress in theological and human scientific knowledge will lead to pastoral practice ignoring it," Georg Bätzing, Bishop of Limburg, said in a statement published on Facebook on Wednesday.
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  • Bätzing's diocese also updated its Facebook profile photo to an image of Limburg Cathedral surrounded by a rainbow, a symbol of the LGBT community, and the phrase "#LoveIsNoSin."Bätzing is the head of the German Bishops' Conference, the Catholic church's ruling body in Germany.
  • "We are here to bless, no matter how and no matter whom," Lentz said in a statement. "We want to be an open church where everyone feels at home."Since Friday afternoon the community has flown a rainbow flag with a phrase from Genesis 12:2 that reads: "You shall be a blessing."
  • While Pope Francis has frequently been praised for his welcoming tone toward LGBTQ people both within and outside the church, he approved the March 15 statement."The blessing of homosexual unions cannot be considered licit," wrote the Vatican's top doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
  • Blessing same-sex unions, the Vatican says, would send a sign that the Catholic Church approves and encourages "a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God."
  • Same-sex unions are the latest issue on which the German Catholic church has clashed with the Vatican in recent years.In 2019, it revealed plans for a two-year process of reckoning and reform, to rebuild public trust in the wake of a shocking report into child sexual abuse in the church.
ethanshilling

As Ethiopia Fights in Tigray Region, a Crackdown on Journalists - The New York Times - 0 views

  • One Ethiopian journalist was taken away by police officers as his distraught 10-year-old daughter clung to him. Another fled the country after she said armed men ransacked her home and threatened to kill her.
  • Six months into the war in Tigray, where thousands have died amid reports of widespread human rights abuses, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has sought to quell critical coverage of the conflict with a campaign of arrests, intimidation and obstruction targeting the independent news media, according to human rights campaigners and media freedom organizations.
  • “It’s a sharply disappointing state of affairs given the hope and optimism of early 2018 when Mr. Abiy became prime minister,” said Muthoki Mumo, representative for sub-Saharan Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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  • When Mr. Abiy came to power, Ethiopia was among the most repressive countries for journalists in Africa, and he quickly won global praise for a series of sweeping reforms.
  • But Mr. Abiy’s ambitious reforms quickly ran into stiff headwinds, including opposition from regional political parties and outbreaks of ethnic violence in several restive regions. His government began to revert to the old ways, shutting down the internet during political protests and detaining journalists under laws that had been introduced by the previous government.
  • After Mr. Abiy began a military operation in Tigray on Nov. 4, hoping to oust a regional ruling party that had challenged his authority, press freedoms deteriorated further.
  • Last week, government officials confirmed that they had revoked the accreditation of Simon Marks, an Irish reporter based in Ethiopia working for The New York Times.
  • In a war that has already caused thousands of deaths, displaced at least two million people and led to charges of ethnic cleansing, news media coverage has become a “very sensitive” topic for the government, said Befeqadu Hailu, an Ethiopian journalist imprisoned for 18 months by the previous regime.
  • Mr. Marks, who works for The Times and other publications, has reported from Ethiopia since 2019.
  • A day earlier, Mr. Marks had returned to Addis Ababa from Tigray, where he interviewed civilians who described atrocities by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, and women who said they suffered horrendous sexual assaults.
  • Officials told Mr. Marks that The Times’ coverage of Ethiopia had “caused huge diplomatic pressure” and that senior government officials had authorized the decision to cancel his papers.
  • The next test of Ethiopia’s openness is likely to be the June 5 election, the first for Mr. Abiy since being appointed prime minister in 2018.
Javier E

Opinion | How the Storming of the Capitol Became a 'Normal Tourist Visit' - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups
  • The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).
  • We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.
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  • In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals.
  • A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists.
  • The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.
  • “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?,” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:
  • What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.
  • “What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”
  • For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.
  • Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).
  • those who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.
  • The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.
anonymous

Lisa Montgomery: Judge halts execution of only woman on US death row - 0 views

  • A US judge has granted a stay of execution to Lisa Montgomery - just hours before the only woman on America's federal death row was due to be given a lethal injection.
  • Montgomery's lawyers had argued she was mentally incompetent to be executed, saying she was born brain-damaged.
  • Lisa Montgomery strangled a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby in 2004. Montgomery, now 52, would have been the first female federal inmate to be put to death in almost 70 years had her execution in Terre Haute, Indiana, gone ahead as scheduled on 12 January.
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  • Ms Montgomery's motion to stay execution is granted to allow the court to conduct a hearing to determine Ms Montgomery's competence to be executed.
  • "Ms. Montgomery's current mental state is so divorced from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government's rationale for her execution.
  • "As the court found, Mrs Montgomery 'made a strong showing' of her current incompetence to be executed. "Mrs Montgomery has brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by the lifetime of sexual torture she suffered at the hands of caretakers," the attorney added.
  • It is the second time that Montgomery's execution has been postponed. Her execution date was originally set for last December - but a stay was put in place after her attorneys contracted Covid-19
  • The last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.Federal executions had been on pause for 17 years before President Donald Trump ordered them to resume earlier last year.There are suggestions that Montgomery now may even escape the death penalty entirely, as President-elect Joe Biden - who is due to take office on 20 January - has said he will seek to end federal executions.
hannahcarter11

Trump's actions in last days as President increase his legal jeopardy - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump's actions during his final days in office have significantly increased his exposure to potential criminal prosecution, lawyers say, complicating his life after the White House.
  • Over five days last week -- beginning with a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State directing him to "find" votes to overturn the election to encouraging the pro-Trump crowd to "show strength" in their march to the Capitol -- lawyers say the President has put himself under the microscope of state and federal prosecutors.
  • The Manhattan district attorney's office has a broad criminal investigation looking into allegations of insurance fraud and tax fraud. The New York attorney general has a civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization improperly inflated the value of its assets.
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  • The new possible criminal exposure comes on top of ongoing New York state investigations into the President's finances and multiple defamation lawsuits related to Trump denying sexual assault accusations by women.
  • He is also facing a civil investigation from the New York attorney general's office, which is looking at whether the President improperly inflated the value of his assets to obtain loans or favorable tax benefits
  • Lawyers have speculated the court may be waiting for Trump's term to end next week before ruling.
  • Sandick and other lawyers, however, say that as alarming as Trump's recent statements have been, there are multiple hurdles for prosecutors to prove that the President violated election laws or those relating to incitement or sedition.
  • The New York criminal investigation has been slowed by a fight over the President's tax records, a scrum that is again before the Supreme Court.
  • Prosecutors have also not been in contact with Rosemary Vrablic, Trump's private banker at Deutsche Bank, which has loaned the President more than $300 million dollars, people familiar with the investigation said.
  • The President's actions this past week have already cost him financially -- the PGA of America said on Sunday night it would not hold its championship in 2022 at the Trump golf course in New Jersey and Deutsche Bank said it would not do business with him -- and the specter of ongoing criminal investigations may have a longer-term impact on his business prospects. New York City announced Wednesday that it is taking steps to cancel contracts with Trump Org for the Ferry Point golf course and carousel and ice skating rink in Central Park.
  • Trump's recent statements will present the Biden administration, which has made calls for unity, and his Justice Department with the dilemma of potentially prosecuting a former president.
  • "There's a long precedent of not prosecuting former presidents over policy differences," said Elliot Williams, a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor. "The difference is we're not talking about policy difference here, and this is perhaps the most egregious conduct we've ever seen from a president while in office
  • Some former prosecutors say that a lot of the conduct is morally reprehensible, but it isn't clear if it will cross the line into violating the law. Investigators will need to prove the President intended to commit crimes, a high bar in criminal cases, not that he was encouraging lawful protests or truly believed that he won the election.
  • Like the riot, the legal liability for Trump's call to Georgia election officials will turn on his statements. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, imploring him to "find" 11,780 votes to give him the edge to overturn the election. It followed a call in December in which Trump told a Georgia elections investigator he would be a "national hero" if he would "find the fraud," a source told CNN.
  • As the end of Trump's presidency nears, sources tell CNN Trump has considered pardoning himself, his family members and other allies from federal charges. Lawyers say it is not clear whether a self-pardon would hold up in court, but a presidential pardon has no bearing on state investigations.
xaviermcelderry

The Capitol Police Had One Mission. Now the Force Is in Crisis. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As old as the Capitol itself, the Capitol Police began in 1801 with the appointment of a single guard to oversee the move of Congress from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. His task, according to a court filing, was to “take as much care as possible with the property of the United States.”
  • “We’re having a hell of a time getting information from Capitol Police leadership,” said Mr. Ryan, who chairs the House committee that oversees the department’s budget. “We fund the Capitol Police. Congress funds the Capitol Police through the Appropriations Committee. We deserve to know and understand what the hell is going on.”
  • A handful of high-profile incidents in recent years — locking down the Capitol but failing to inform Congress; ordering a nearby tactical team not to respond when a gunman opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard; the fatal shooting of a Black woman who made a U-turn at a checkpoint — have raised questions about the department’s procedures and operational paralysis.
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  • In another, an officer assigned to protect high-ranking lawmakers racked up two charges of drunken driving, including one case in which his car struck a Maryland State Police trooper’s unmarked cruiser. The officer continued to climb the ranks, despite an internal investigation for overtime fraud.
  • The responsibilities of the Capitol Police are vastly different from those of ordinary police departments. The force protects the Capitol grounds, members of Congress and staff, and it screens millions of visitors a year. Officers are expected to recognize the 535 lawmakers and to avoid offending them.
  • The delicacy of that task was on full display in 1983, when a House inquiry found that the Capitol Police had botched a drug investigation by creating “the impression that the investigation may have been terminated to protect members” — while noting that, to be sure, no members had been implicated.
  • Allegations of gender discrimination have dogged the department for years. In lawsuits, female officers have described a culture of sexual harassment, with commanders rarely punished for lewd remarks or for sleeping with subordinates
woodlu

Peril ahead - Donald Trump faces an array of legal trouble when he leaves office | Unit... - 0 views

  • Armchair psychiatrists claim that Mr Trump’s lifelong fear of being seen as a loser has inspired his battle against democracy.
  • at the stroke of noon on January 20th, the legal shield that Mr Trump has wielded to stave off lawsuits will vanish, exposing him to an abundance of civil and criminal legal peril.
  • Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, has been investigating several possible financial crimes, including Mr Trump’s alleged hush-money pay-offs to an adult-film star and a Playboy model on the eve of the 2016 election
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  • his old boss directed him to pay these women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, to prevent revelations of extramarital dalliances that could have dented his presidential run. (Mr Trump denies these allegations.)
  • Mr Vance subpoenaed eight years of financial records and tax documents from Mazars USA, Mr Trump’s accountant.
  • the Supreme Court proceeded to sit on a final appeal for three months, staying mum and keeping the documents out of the district attorney’s hands.
  • The ramifications could be serious for Mr Trump as he reprises his role as private citizen: Mr Vance’s office has suggested the investigation may range significantly more broadly than just pay-offs.
  • Potential charges, if evidence is found, could include scheming to defraud, falsification of business records, insurance fraud and criminal tax fraud
  • penalties of up to 25 years.
  • Mr Trump fought assiduously to keep his finances under wraps and soon they may be scrutinised by a grand jury.
  • New York’s attorney-general, Letitia James, is investigating what she says may be fraudulent business practices in which Mr Trump and the Trump Organisation inflated the value of their assets when applying for loans and deflated them to evade tax liability.
  • Ms Carroll wrote in 2019 that Mr Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store; Ms Zervos said he sexually harassed her on set
  • Moments after his second impeachment on January 13th, Ms Carroll tweeted: “Trump tore our democracy. I'm going to tear him to shreds in court.”
  • Mr Racine says some members of the Trump family made a sweet deal with themselves when the inaugural committee—a tax-exempt charity—used non-profit funds to pay the Trump International Hotel $175,000 a day to host events during the 2017 inauguration.
  • a violation of District of Columbia law governing the operation of non-profit organisations.
  • that the non-profit footed the bill for a $49,000 payment that should have been issued by the Trump Organisation, a for-profit business.
  • Persuading someone to use “physical force against the person or property of another” is a federal crime; sparking a riot is a crime under DC law.
  • Given the broad scope for free speech set by the First Amendment, however, it may be hard to make criminal charges stick.
  • whether Mr Trump is guilty of inciting a specific lawless action, as opposed to just general exhortation.
  • Mr Trump could also find himself in legal jeopardy for the hour-long phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state on January 2nd.
  • has asked the Department of Justice and Georgia prosecutors to investigate Mr Trump’s bid to find nearly 12,000 votes to swing the election to him some three weeks after the electoral college voted
  • the president may have “illegally conspired to deprive the people of Georgia of their right to vote” and “to intimidate Georgia election officials in an effort to falsify the count of votes in the presidential election”.
  • Mr Trump’s phone call in July 2019 asking Ukraine's president to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of his eventual rival.
  • it could constitute extortion and criminal conspiracy under New York law.
  • Mr Trump may be tempted to issue himself a presidential pardon.
  • No president has ever attempted such legal onanism, though Richard Nixon contemplated it in 1974
  • Counsel in the Justice Department said it would be out of line with the principle that “no one may be a judge in his own case”
  • A self-pardon may run counter to Mr Trump’s instincts, as it would require him to confess to potential misdeeds.
  • The strategy may also backfire if the courts conclude self-pardons are unconstitutional
hannahcarter11

Thailand Legalizes Early-Term Abortions but Keeps Other Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Thailand’s Parliament has voted to make abortion legal in the first trimester, while keeping penalties in place for women who undergo it later in their pregnancies.
  • to amend a law that had imposed prison terms of up to three years for anyone having an abortion, and up to five years for those who perform one.
  • Advocates say the measure doesn’t go far enough: Anyone in Thailand who has an abortion after 12 weeks, except under conditions set by the country’s Medical Council, still faces potential fines and up to six months in prison.
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  • To make this kind of law, you have to prioritize women’s participation, especially women who have experience having abortions,” she added. “The deliberation process gave roles to lawmakers and human rights lawyers, but there are no women who had experience with abortion or activists in the process.”
  • The Medical Council says pregnancies can be terminated by a qualified professional after 12 weeks if they are the result of a sexual assault or pose a threat to the mother’s physical or emotional health. Abortion is also permitted if the fetus is known to have abnormalities.
  • Many women in Thailand found ways to get abortions under the previous restrictions, but the country still has a high teenage pregnancy rate
  • About 1.5 million babies were born to teenage mothers in Thailand between 2000 and 2014
  • Ms. Supecha said she would watch closely to see whether the Health Ministry extends early abortion services and pressures doctors to comply with the new rule.
  • Some elements of Thailand’s Buddhist-dominated culture are socially conservative. Yet Thailand also has relatively progressive policies on gender and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
  • “When governments restrict abortion, women still have abortions — they just have more dangerous ones,” she wrote.
Javier E

Transgender athlete bills put trans girls at center of America?s culture wars, again - ... - 0 views

  • Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.
  • “What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”
  • But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender
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  • The Montana youth athlete bill passed the state House on a 61-to-38 vote and is moving to the Senate.
  • Democratic opponents of these bills and some political experts charge that the legislative efforts amount to a political power play to rally the conservative base around an issue they see as threatening traditional gender roles.
  • The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group for socially conservative causes, published a blog post this week that charges transgender athletes with hijacking competitive opportunities and calls Biden’s executive order a threat to “gut legal protections for women and girls.”
  • “It’s an easy way for them to show that Democrats have just gone over the edge, that there is no limit to how far they will push these radical ideas.”
  • For generations, anti-trans messaging in the United States has largely focused on transgender women rather than transgender men,
  • Trantham said one of the first people she notified when she decided to file the bill was the head of the LGBTQ advocacy group South Carolina Equality.“I want to make sure you guys understand this is not me trying to hurt the transgender community,” Trantham said she told him. “This is me trying to protect girls in women’s sports.”
  • LGBTQ activists and many pediatricians say that the medical treatments transgender youth receive to align their bodies with their gender identity mitigate the physical disparities in athletics.
  • “I’ve seen arguments that this will be the end of women’s sports,” said Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and bioethicist. “If so, it should have ended already.”
  • “Values always matter and there’s a divide in our country over values,” Deutsch said in a phone interview Thursday. “I stood up and said this is not a hate bill. It’s about biology. It’s science. You can’t change your sex. You can look like a boy, you can take hormones and sex operations but it doesn’t make you a boy. Your gender can be a boy, but you can never change your sex.”
  • while public opinion polls across the board show support for transgender military service and other transgender rights, support softens when it comes to public accommodations and sports, Haider-Markel said.
  • School athletics are “an extremely competitive environment,” said Trantham, whose daughter was a high school basketball player. “If it was my daughter and she needed that scholarship to go to college, it would be very important to me that she was playing on an even playing field.”
  • Serano argues that the disparity is rooted in sexism and misogyny, and the idea that “there’s a certain amount of societal respect for wanting to be a man.” Even when it comes to cisgender children, she said, “people are a lot more disturbed, concerned by feminine boys than they are by masculine girls.”
  • bills about transgender athletes trigger the idea that “this is wrong; this male person is in this space that is supposed to be segregated to protect girls and women,
  • “None of these bills are based on real-life problems,
  • Transgender cross-country runner Juniper Eastwood started competing for the women’s track team at the University of Montana after she began presenting as female and taking testosterone suppression medication. She said running improved her mental health. At one point, Eastwood said, she had contemplated suicide so she wouldn’t have to deal with knowing she was transgender.
  • Eastwood said she’s hopeful that a new generation of conservatives will learn to understand who transgender people are, just as many conservatives have come to accept the gay community.“It’s just going to take a long time,” she said. “It won’t happen this year.”
magnanma

Pol Pot - HISTORY - 0 views

shared by magnanma on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Pol Pot was a political leader whose communist Khmer Rouge government led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that time, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.
  • The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a classless communist society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. Some historians regard the Pol Pot regime as one of the most barbaric and murderous in recent history.
  • In 1934, Pol Pot moved to Phnom Penh, where he spent a year at a Buddhist monastery before attending a French Catholic primary school. His Cambodian education continued until 1949, when he went to Paris on a scholarship. While there, he studied radio technology and became active in communist circles.
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  • Pol Pot, who had begun to emerge as Cambodian party chief, and the newly formed Khmer Rouge guerilla army, launched a national uprising in 1968.
  • Both the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol’s troops purportedly committed mass atrocities. At the same time, about 70,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers stormed across the Vietnam-Cambodian border to fight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops who had taken sanctuary in Cambodia.
  • By the time the U.S. bombing campaign ended in August 1973, the number of Khmer Rouge troops had increased exponentially, and they now controlled approximately three-quarters of Cambodia’s territory. Soon after, they began shelling Phnom Penh with rockets and artillery.
  • Almost immediately after taking power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh’s 2.5 million residents. Former civil servants, doctors, teachers and other professionals were stripped of their possessions and forced to toil in the fields as part of a re-education process.
  • Under Pol Pot, the state controlled all aspects of a person’s life. Money, private property, jewelry, gambling, most reading material and religion were outlawed; agriculture was collectivized; children were taken from their homes and forced into the military; and strict rules governing sexual relations, vocabulary and clothing were laid down.
  • In 1997 a Khmer Rouge splinter group captured Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. He died in his sleep on April 15, 1998, at age 72 due to heart failure. A United Nations-backed tribunal has convicted only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Questions About Youth Gender Transitions - 0 views

  • Take the biggest actual social change, hailed by liberals, of the last couple of decades: marriage equality. We did not spend our time calling out homophobia, attacking the churches, or describing our opponents as “deplorable.”
  • It seems to me that if your argument is better and you make it relentlessly, you’ll win
  • I can’t tell you how many times I debated religious fundamentalists, while never disparaging them. I produced an anthology of the best arguments on both sides.
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  • We made our case carefully; we engaged the other side respectfully; we lobbied state legislatures; more and more gay people told their stories; brilliant lawyers fought various cases, beginning with failure until achieving success at the Supreme Court.
  • But if you avoid actual argument and resort to slurs, cancel culture, and ever more polarizing rhetoric, you’ll lose.
  • Obama is right about the complexity of people. Attack people for their “whiteness,” accuse people of sexual crimes without any proof or certainty, disparage all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, cast every point against gay marriage as bigotry — and you’ll definitely make waves, and be cheered on by your own tribe. But bringing about change? Sometimes I think this kind of activism — damning them while not talking to them — actually prevents change.
Javier E

Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative 'Hot List' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You might think that lawyers representing abuse victims would want to publicly expose such information to bolster their clients’ claims. But that is not how the legal industry always works. Often, keeping things quiet is good business
  • One of the revelations of the #MeToo era has been that victims’ lawyers often brokered secret deals in which alleged abusers paid to keep their accusers quiet and the allegations out of the public sphere. Lawyers can pocket at least a third of such settlements, profiting off a system that masks misconduct and allows men to abuse again.
  • Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger said in interviews that they were looking into creating a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. It would be bankrolled by private legal settlements with the men on the videos.
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  • Such agreements would have made it less likely that videos involving the men became public. “Generally what settlements are about is getting peace,” Mr. Boies said
Javier E

When a DNA Test Says You're a Younger Man, Who Lives 5,000 Miles Away - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Three months after his bone marrow transplant, Chris Long of Reno, Nev., learned that the DNA in his blood had changed. It had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor, a German man he had exchanged just a handful of messages with.
  • it was not only Mr. Long’s blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained his DNA — but also that of his donor. Even more surprising to Mr. Long and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor.
  • Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts
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  • Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
  • The average doctor does not need to know where a donor’s DNA will present itself within a patient. That’s because this type of chimerism is not likely to be harmful. Nor should it change a person. “Their brain and their personality should remain the same,”
  • for a forensic scientist, it’s a different story. The assumption among criminal investigators as they gather DNA evidence from a crime scene is that each victim and each perpetrator leaves behind a single identifying code — not two
  • In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But there was a problem: The man had been in prison at the time of the assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant. The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted.
  • she heard about another disconcerting scenario since then. It involved police investigators who were skeptical of a sexual assault victim’s account because she said there had been one attacker, though DNA analysis showed two. Eventually the police determined that the second profile had come from her bone marrow donor.
  • In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was confirmed by DNA in a kidney, but not in the spleen or the lung, which contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.
  • Fraternal twins sometimes acquire each other’s DNA in the womb; in at least one case that led to unfounded fears of infidelity when a man’s child did not seem to be his. In another case, a mother nearly lost custody of her children after a DNA test.
brookegoodman

Marie-Antoinette - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, Marie Antoinette married the future French king Louis XVI when she was just 15 years old.
  • Marie Antoinette herself became the target of a great deal of vicious gossip
  • Marie Antoinette was arrested and tried for trumped-up crimes against the French republic. She was convicted and sent to the guillotine on October 16, 1793.
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  • Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the powerful Habsburg empress Maria Theresa
  • More than 5,000 guests watched as the two teenagers were married. It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.
  • Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly the American Revolution, in which the French had intervened on behalf of the colonists–had created a tremendous debt for the French state
  • Life as a public figure was not easy for Marie Antoinette.
  • she spent most of her time socializing and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had a model farm built on the palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could dress in elaborate costumes and pretend to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.
  • Before long, it had become fashionable to blame Marie Antoinette for all of France’s problems.
  • There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said that starving peasants should “eat cake” if they had no bread. In fact, the story of a fatuous noblewoman who said “Let them eat cake!” appears in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written around 1766 (when Marie Antoinette was just 11 years old).
  • ordinary people, on the other hand, felt squeezed by high taxes and resentful of the royal family’s conspicuous spending.
  • Louis XVI and his advisers tried to impose a more representative system of taxation, but the nobility resisted.
  • Marie Antoinette continued to be a convenient target for their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French nation.
  • One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered in the street, and revolutionaries paraded her head and body parts through Paris.
  • In July 1793, she lost custody of her young son, who was forced to accuse her of sexual abuse and incest before a Revolutionary tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason and sent to the guillotine. She was 37 years old.
  • She and the people around her seemed to represent everything that was wrong with the monarchy and the Second Estate: They appeared to be tone-deaf, out of touch, disloyal (along with her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen of adultery) and self-interested. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the image of the queen was far more influential than the woman herself.
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