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The students were assembled in the auditorium of their high school on Chicago’s North Side, there to celebrate Hispanic heritage — but first, their teachers told them, they had to stand for the national anthem.

When one student — a Latina and U.S. citizen — refused a teacher’s pointed direction to stand, she said he replied with an infamously racist line: “Go back to your country.” The same teacher turned to a black student, who was also sitting down, and asked whether she was part of the public school system’s free and reduced lunch program, telling her she should stand for the people who have died for the country, the students said.They were then told to leave the assembly.

The teacher’s alleged remark appears to be just the latest example of caustic rhetoric that began in the White House and seeped into schools, fueling attacks and bullying against students of color. Since 2016, President Trump’s words have been used to harass children and teens at least 300 times, according to a recent Washington Post analysis.

The national media’s shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy.

Journalists have done a lot right — they have pointed out lies, dug out what’s really happening, skillfully explained and analyzed.

But on Wednesday — as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives — journalists need to be on their game. The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know.

freedom to protest

Meanwhile, government leaders both around the globe and right here in the U.S. are threatening to limit freedom of speech, with everything from legislation to litigation to violent force. 

Individuals can exercise their First Amendment rights in various ways—from writing a letter to a government or community leader, to marching in a protest, putting a sign on their lawn or kneeling for the national anthem. 

if this particular incident is exceedingly strange––almost a caricature of how conservatives think identitarian leftists behave––it also illuminates how the fight over anti-racism could roil many other institutions all across the country.

I asked Tanikawa about the impasse. Trying to capture why she finds it difficult to work with Maron, she recalled a time when she believed that something was racist, and Maron disagreed, rather than deferring to her perspective. “She thinks she can deny my experience as a person of color, and I don’t want to spend a lot of one-on-one time with somebody who denies my reality,” she said, alleging a “seeming lack of acknowledgment that [Maron] has privilege” as the biggest hurdle.

“Within the anti-racist sphere that I work in, we don’t always agree on the same policies. It’s not about disagreement over what to do or how to fix the problem. It’s really the fundamental understanding of the framework we want to operate in, which is the framework of anti-racism.”

Meanwhile, the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee released a nearly 1,000 page long report documenting the extent of the Trump campaign's connections with Russia. It is remarkable because it is a bipartisan report and many of the details are new.

The report strongly suggests that Trump lied to the special prosecutors about his Wikileaks conversations with Roger Stone, and lays out "an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services."  The report includes this dazzling detail:

Kremlin-directed operatives opened champagne when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016... “We uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne ... took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes .... We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great,’” one operative at the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency said in the message obtained by the Republican-led committee.

When Inspector Luca Sita picked up two new N95 masks at his police station in Ferrara in central Italy on Thursday, he was thrown for a loop: One mask was white, and the other was pink.

“Institutionally,” he said, wearing a pink mask “is a bad look.”

The pink in itself was not offensive, he said: A mask of any color other than white, black or blue, which match the national police uniform, would have been just as unacceptable.“Green, orange — any lively color would have been unwearable,” he said.

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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.

he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.

The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.

The difference is that liberals protect people, and P.C. people protect feelings. They don’t do anything. They’re pointing at other people who are somehow falling short of their standards, which could have changed three weeks ago

when I was growing up, the most liberal thing you could do is not see color. Well, that’s wrong now. You see color, always, so you can register your white privilege. But I grew up in the Martin Luther King era: Judge by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I still think that’s the best way to do it. Not see it.

If someone walks in the room, after a minute, I should not be thinking about color. And I am not. That’s how I have always been. I have actual black friends. I don’t think they want me to be always thinking: Black person. Black person.

ALBANY, N.Y. — For most of the past year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has tried to brush away a persistent criticism that undermined his national image as the man who led New York through the pandemic: that his policies had allowed thousands of nursing home residents to die of the virus.

He also asserted that the lack of data on hospital deaths of nursing home residents was due to concern and caution about the accuracy of data that nursing homes supplied — an issue also raised by the attorney general. “D.O.H. does not disagree that the number of people transferred from a nursing home to a hospital is an important data point,” he said.

The report also cast a critical eye on perhaps the governor’s most criticized decision since the beginning of the pandemic last year: a March 25 directive from the Health Department that ordered nursing homes to accept and readmit patients who had tested positive..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-1sjr751{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1sjr751 a:hover{border-bottom:1px solid #dcdcdc;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% - 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:'See more';}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}

Ever since the pandemic started, mental health experts have worried that grief, financial strain and social isolation may take an unbearable toll on American psyches. Some warned that the coronavirus had created the “perfect storm” for a rise in suicides.

While nearly 350,000 Americans died from Covid-19, the number of suicides dropped by 5 percent, to 44,834 deaths in 2020 from 47,511 in 2019. It is the second year in a row that the number has fallen, after cresting in 2018.

But while the number of suicides may have declined over all, preliminary studies of local communities in states like Illinois, Maryland and Connecticut found a rise in suicides among Black Americans and other people of color when compared with previous years.

Thirty years ago, my dad gave me his playbook to put racism to rest, and it inspired me to dedicate my career to executing his vision

Dad’s playbook included one insight that all Americans should hear, at least those who hope that when it comes to addressing racism, we can do better. As an economist, he told me that we have to “increase the cost of racist behavior.” Doing so, he said, would create the conditions for black people to harness the economic power essential to changing the narrative in white America’s mind about race.

To be outed as a racist is to be convicted of America’s highest moral crime. Once we align on what racist behavior looks like, we can make those behaviors costly.

People of color in some of America’s wealthiest cities are significantly more likely to live in houses without indoor plumbing essential for running water, new research reveals.

. Yet access to running water is not universal in the United States, ostensibly the richest country in the world.

Nationwide, almost half a million homes do not have piped water, with the majority – 73% – located in urban areas. In fact, almost half the houses without plumbing are located in the country’s top 50 cities.

In 1996, California became the first of 10 states to pass a ban on affirmative action at its public institutions, outlawing them from considering race or gender when offering people employment, education or contracting opportunities.

Proposition 16 ― a measure that made its way on to the California ballot amid a pandemic that largely affects Black and Latinx people and a reckoning against racist police violence ― could reverse that 1996 law, known as Prop 209. 

The motivation behind Prop 16 is that as soon as California banned its public institutions from using affirmative action

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit

The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.

Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.

You write that Hitler's war aims were impossible—how so? The Germans were trying to win a straightforward conventional war and, at the same time, trying to fight an ideological war: a specifically Nazi war as opposed to a German war. I believe that a true German nationalist—Otto von Bismarck, say, or Helmuth von Moltke—could have won the Second World War, because he wouldn't have made the kind of demands of the German military that Hitler did, which was to win a two-front conventional war while at the same time imposing the policies of the "Aryan master race." Those aims were directly in opposition.

Could the Nazis have won, had they done something differently? Absolutely. If they had not invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and if they had instead thrown at the Allies even a fraction of the 3 million men they eventually unleashed against Russia, they would have chased us out of the Middle East and cut off access to 80 percent of the Allies' oil. We simply would not have been able to continue the struggle.

Was Hitler solely responsible for Germany's military blunders? No, there were plenty of people to blame. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring is a perfect example: He promised Hitler that no Allied bombs would fall on Germany; he promised to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk solely through airpower; he promised to completely supply the German forces at Stalingrad by air. Yet he could not deliver on any of these promises.

Does medieval studies have a white supremacy problem of its own?

“People don’t become medievalists because they want to be political,” said Richard Utz, a literary scholar at Georgia Tech and president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. “Most are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.”

its own origins were hardly apolitical.

(CNN)In 2020, Women's History Month comes amid a time of social upheaval and global fear over the coronavirus pandemic and resulting political turmoil. While for many the 2020 presidential race is now an afterthought, this Women's History Month does also mark the departure of the last remaining women candidates from the 2020 presidential field -- during an election year that also marks the centennial of women's suffrage.

Here is a glimpse at those inspiring stories and figures—who they are, what they've meant to these women in the past and what they mean to them now, looking forward in 2020 and beyond. As trailblazing tennis legend Billie Jean King once said to me, "Whatever you care about, you can make a difference. You really can. Don't ever underestimate yourself. Do not underestimate the human spirit."

Madeleine Albright is the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. She is the author of multiple books, including the shortly forthcoming "Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir."

As President Trump’s impeachment trial speeds to a close, perhaps as soon as Friday, likely without any witnesses, the result looks to be a worst-case scenario.In the beginning, the president’s lawyers made a relatively benign argument: He didn’t do it. No quid pro quo.

But House managers tried their case too well. Evidence piled up

In response, Trump’s defenders shifted to a far more sweeping, and dangerous, defense. They stepped away from denying misconduct and instead declared that the president can do as he pleases — or, as Trump puts it, that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”