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clairemann

In Kabul's Streets, Dogs Rule the Night - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Almost every city in the world has to deal with street crime, and some with dog packs. But few, if any, have to navigate such an underworld while also confronting unrelenting war.
  • Civilians in Afghanistan’s capital live in constant fear of being killed in a targeted attack as the war with the Taliban and other extremist groups drags on. But at night, a different war is being fought — against criminals, and packs of stray dogs stalking the streets.
  • The stray dogs roam throughout the city and are a strange and sad fixture of Kabul, known for snapping, snarling and attacking people passing by, mostly those just trying to eke out a living. By day, the animals rest, conserving their energy until twilight, when they, along with the criminals, command the streets.
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  • Despite repeated efforts from the city’s municipality to kill them — and the presence of several shelters, Afghan pet owners and empathetic dog-friendly foreigners eager to adopt — the animals thrive in the streets.
  • Rabies vaccinations are frequent, especially in Kabul, and take a chunk out of the Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health budget. It spends around $200,000 a year on the vaccines across the country, said Masouma Jafari, a spokeswoman for the ministry.
  • “If you carry anything after 7 at night they will attack you,” Mr. Ahmad Shah said, referring to both the thieves and the hounds.
  • “The government and the police, they do what they can,” Mr. Ibraheem said. “But they don’t have the capacity to fight dogs, terrorists and thieves.”
anonymous

Opinion | How Many Women Have to Die to End 'Temptation'? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • After the attack on three Georgia spas on Tuesday, which took the lives of eight people, Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old charged with the slayings, told the police that the women murdered were “temptations” he needed to “eliminate.”
  • For too long, women have been punished and killed because of men’s inability to deal with issues around rejection, desire and shame. Women of color are especially at risk; they’re disproportionately attacked and more likely to be blamed for the violence perpetrated against them.
  • Thanks to decades of academic and activist work, we know more than ever about why men lash out at women in this way and how we can curb the violence. Still, the occurrence of mass killings targeting women shows no sign of stopping.
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  • The story has become a horribly familiar one: A young man, bemoaning his virginity or singleness or his anger, sets out to slaughter women (though men also lose their lives in these rampages).
  • In 2019, Christopher Wayne Cleary was arrested in Denver before he could carry out his plan to kill “as many girls as I see.”
  • In part, these attacks are a predictable outcome of extremist online sexism. Young, mostly white men seek community and commiseration in violent forums. There they are radicalized to believe women are to blame for all their problems, especially those around sex.
  • Mr. Long’s views on sexuality, for example, appear to stem from his religious upbringing. Reportedly, he didn’t own a smartphone because he was afraid he would be tempted by online pornography. He is said to have felt ashamed of masturbating and was suicidal over his belief that his habit of visiting sex workers meant he was “living in sin.”
  • This kind of purity culture has a reach far beyond religion. Abstinence-only education classes taught in over half the states across the country tell young people that the onus is on girls not to tease or tempt boys, whose sexual compulsions, they say, are near uncontrollable.
  • These ideas are so pervasive that they can also be found in school dress codes, which almost exclusively target young women, explicitly telling them that the way they dress distracts their male classmates and teachers.
  • The National Women’s Law Center has also found that Black female students are more likely to be cited for dress code violations than their white peers — another indication of how girls and women of color are hypersexualized and punished.
  • After a Maryland high school student shot 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey in the head, The Associated Press initially described him as a “lovesick teen.”
  • Across culture and institutions, the message is the same: Male sexual violence is to be expected. It becomes harder and harder to treat these crimes as aberrations when the values that drive them are so clearly normalized.
  • There are countless ways to curb massacres like the one in Georgia: Editors could take a closer look at the way they cover sexualized violence; pop culture creators could rethink their objectification of women, especially women of color; schools could teach comprehensive sex education that dismantles gender stereotypes and myths about desire and consent.
mattrenz16

Biden Nominees Vow to Avoid Politicizing Justice Dept. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON — President Biden’s nominees to fill out the Justice Department’s leadership ranks pledged at their confirmation hearing on Tuesday to tackle domestic extremism, racial inequality and other thorny issues within the bounds of the law, seeking to restore order to a department battered by political attacks during the Trump administration.
  • Lisa Monaco, a Justice Department veteran and national security expert nominated to be deputy attorney general, and Vanita Gupta, a civil rights lawyer known for her criminal justice overhaul work tapped as the department’s No. 3, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that they were committed to ensuring that the department meted out equal justice under the law.
  • “Throughout my career, these norms have been my North Star,” Ms. Monaco said.
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  • The remarks were met with approval by committee members, who agreed that the department had been improperly wielded for political gain — even as Democrats and Republicans disagreed about whether such politicization occurred under the Trump or the Obama administration.
  • Ms. Monaco said the Justice Department’s efforts to combat domestic extremism would be among her top priorities, especially in light of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. She said the department needed to understand how “we could have such an attack that I personally never thought I would see in my lifetime.”
  • She pledged to deploy law enforcement resources to learn what motivated the insurrectionists and to prevent a repeat, calling the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack “nothing less than the defense of our democracy.”
  • And civil libertarians have raised questions about how the F.BI. will investigate extremists for activities protected by the First Amendment.
anonymous

Report: Instagram's algorithm pushes certain users to COVID-19 misinformation - UPI.com - 0 views

  • Instagram's algorithm recommended new users following COVID-19 misinformation to more of the same amid the pandemic, a report said Tuesday.
  • Instagram's algorithm has been "pushing radicalizing, extremist misinformation to users,"
  • as the pandemic swept the world, Instagram launched a new feature encouraging users to view conspiracy theories and lies about COVID and vaccines," Ahmed told The Guardian. "This feature was created in the name of profit, to keep people scrolling so more adverts could be served to them."
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  • "We share the goal of reducing the spread of misinformation, but this research is five months out of date," a spokesperson for Instagram's parent company Facebook said in a statement, The Guardian reported. "It also uses a sample size of just 104 posts, compared to the 12m pieces of harmful misinformation about vaccines and COVID-19 that we've removed from Facebook and Instagram since the start of the pandemic."
aidenborst

Jayapal asks for investigations into three GOP members for their role in instigating the Capitol Insurrection - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington has sent letters to the House Committee on Ethics and the Office of Congressional Ethics requesting they launch investigations into three Republican lawmakers, over accusations of the trio "instigating and aiding" the deadly January 6 riot on the Capitol.
  • Jayapal asks the two groups to "thoroughly investigate" the activity of the three members of Congress -- Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Mo Brooks of Alabama and Paul Gosar of Arizona -- in the time leading up to the insurrection and refer all potential criminal wrongdoing to the Department of Justice.
  • For each member, Jayapal lists examples of their conduct in the weeks before January 6.
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  • Boebert filming herself carrying a concealed firearm around the Capitol Grounds, the fiery speech Brooks gave at the Trump rally on the day of the insurrection and Gosar's ties to extremist groups. The letter also makes note of Boebert's tweets regarding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's location on the day of the insurrection.
  • "It's clear what I believe to be clear violation of our ethical standards and our responsibilities as members of Congress. That is what the House Ethics Committee can look at," Jaypal said in an interview with CNN. "But I also think that there are other pieces here that are even beyond just service in the House that are federal statutes. And so that's why we asked for the referrals to the Department of Justice."
  • "I still worry about my safety and my security when I'm inside Congress, not just when I leave," Jaypal said. "And that is very troubling. I've only been here for four years, but I've not felt that before. And, and I feel it from my colleagues. I don't know, who my colleagues are engaging with, I don't know what their role was. And I do think that that is part of the reason these letters are so important."
  • Gosar's denials have been less clear. In a tweet on that day he posted a photo of rioters scaling a wall of the Capitol "let's not get carried away."
  • Federal authorities have said they are investigating the possibility that some of those that participated in the riot may have been given tours ahead of time, but have stopped short of saying any lawmakers did so with the express purpose of helping the rioters prepare to attack the Capitol.
  • "These three members seem to be emboldened by the fact that there hasn't been really any accountability for them. There hasn't been any accountability at all," she said. "And that is unacceptable I think and that's why I'm asking for these investigations."
  • In a tweet on January 18, Boebert wrote "All claims of my involvement with the attacks on January 6th are categorically false. These lies are irresponsible and dangerous."
  • Jayapal is not the only Democrat looking into the role her colleagues may have played in the events leading up to January 6th. Rep. Zoe Lofgren recently released a 2,000-page report that outlined the social media activity of several GOP members ahead of the insurrection.
saberal

Merrick Garland Is Confirmed as Attorney General - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Senate voted to confirm Merrick B. Garland on Wednesday to serve as attorney general, giving the former prosecutor and widely respected federal judge the task of leading the Justice Department at a time when the nation faces domestic extremist threats and a reckoning over civil rights.
  • Judge Garland was confirmed 70 to 30, with 20 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in supporting him
  • At his confirmation hearing, Judge Garland, 68, said that becoming attorney general would “be the culmination of a career I have dedicated to ensuring that the laws of our country are fairly and faithfully enforced and the rights of all Americans are protected.”
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  • Department employees have said that Judge Garland’s performance at his confirmation hearing, a largely amicable affair, made them hopeful that he would restore honor to the agency and lift up its 115,000-person work force demoralized by the Trump-era rancor.
  • “I’m voting to confirm Judge Garland because of his long reputation as a straight shooter and legal expert,” Mr. McConnell said o
  • He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.
  • His first briefings this week were expected to be with the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, to discuss the threat and with Michael R. Sherwin, the departing top prosecutor in Washington who has led the Justice Department inquiry.
  • “I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”
  • The investigations helped cement Judge Garland’s reputation as a fair-minded centrist. After his appeals court confirmation, he did not make major headlines again until 2016, when Mr. Obama nominated him to serve on the Supreme Court, a choice that won bipartisan support, including from conservative stalwarts like the former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr.
mattrenz16

Kyle Rittenhouse Trial In Kenosha Killings Delayed Until November : NPR - 0 views

  • A Wisconsin judge on Wednesday delayed the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who is charged with fatally shooting Black Lives Matters protesters in Kenosha last summer.
  • Prosecutors as well as Rittenhouse's defense attorneys had asked for the postponement, arguing they needed more time to build their respective cases. Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder also set a meeting for May, to ensure that the new timeline still works for the two legal teams.
  • Months after his release, Rittenhouse was spotted in a Wisconsin bar with possible members of the Proud Boys, an extremist group that federal prosecutors say played a critical role in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
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  • In February, Schroeder refused to issue a new arrest warrant or increase Rittenhouse's bail, after he failed to update his current address with the court. But he did prohibit the shooter from associating with white supremacists.
  • On Wednesday, Rittenhouse's lawyers said they needed extra time to finish up a public opinion poll "to get a feel for whether Rittenhouse can expect to get a fair trial in the county, or if there might be reason to seek a change of venue or a jury pool from another county," the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.
aidenborst

Merrick Garland finally got his Senate vote. Now comes the hard part - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Merrick Garland faces multiple crises to address and politically tough decisions to make as he belatedly takes the reins at the Justice Department as attorney general.
  • He'll try to heal a workforce that was battered during the Trump era, deliver on President Joe Biden's liberal priorities and campaign promises and oversee some of the most complex investigations in a generation.
  • Garland got a bipartisan nod of approval of 70-30, earning the support of 20 Republicans in a Senate where zero-sum partisanship is the new normal. But that was the easy part for Garland, who's been a federal appellate judge since 1997.
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  • "He is exactly what the DOJ needs at this historic moment in our nation's history," said Michael Zeldin, a former CNN contributor who previously served in several senior roles at the Justice Department. "He knows the department, he's a legal scholar, and he recognizes the inflection point the criminal justice system is at and understands the imperative of getting it right."
  • Some issues percolated to the front-burner before Garland was confirmed. Under Biden, the Justice Department already revoked some hardline immigration policies and told the Supreme Court that it was reversing the Trump-era position that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
  • Other issues pose long-term challenges. Biden made big promises on criminal justice and police reform. At the peak of last summer's protests against racial inequality, Biden said at an NAACP town hall that the US had reached "a moment where we must make substantive changes now."
  • Another related priority looms at the Justice Department. Biden vowed to crack down on White supremacists and right-wing extremist groups. It's now up to Garland to make that happen.
  • "Garland will be watched closely for his handling of domestic terrorism matters," said Jessica Carmichael, a DC-area defense attorney who specializes in privacy and surveillance issues. "I hope (that he) approaches this issue in keeping with a broader goal of criminal justice reform and not simply advocating for more criminal laws, more surveillance, and more incarceration."
  • It will be an uphill climb -- especially in this heated political climate and with disinformation running rampant -- to convince Americans that these investigations are being handled without bias. After repeated abuses and attempts by Trump to politicize the Justice Department, experts have said that it could take many years to restore the public's faith in federal law enforcement.
  • If Democrats stay united, they can confirm Lisa Monaco to the No. 2 post, Vanita Gupta to the No. 3 spot, and Kristen Clarke to run the Civil Rights Division. But the GOP hasn't made it easy.
  • Gorelick continued, "He was talking about the Justice Department as 'we' during his confirmation hearing because he grew up there, and it will be very natural for him to return."
hannahcarter11

Veteran charged in Capitol attack worked in Marine One unit - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • One of the veterans charged in the Capitol insurrection worked in the Marine Corps unit responsible for transporting the president and operating his helicopter, Marine One, according to Pentagon records.
  • Military records obtained by CNN show that John Andries served in the Marine Corps from 2004 to 2009 and was assigned to the Marine Helicopter Squadron One, the unit responsible for transporting the president
  • It is not immediately clear to CNN whether he ever had any direct contact with former President George W. Bush or former President Barack Obama while serving in the helicopter unit, which requires higher security scrutiny for members.
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  • Prosecutors say Andries, 35, breached lightly-protected barriers outside the Capitol and entered the building through a broken window. Video footage shows him facing off with police inside the Crypt, in the basement of the complex, getting "within inches" of officers but not physically engaging with them, prosecutors said.
  • He has pleaded not guilty to five federal crimes: entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, violent entry into the Capitol, impeding passage through the Capitol and unlawful demonstration at the Capitol.
  • The Justice Department did not seek his detention and a federal judge released him shortly after his arrest last month. He isn't charged with any violent crimes, and the five counts against him are misdemeanors.
  • Veterans are disproportionately represented among the nearly 300 people facing charges in connection with the Capitol attack. At least 29 current and former servicemembers have been charged so far, and several are allegedly part of extremist groups, according to a CNN analysis of Pentagon records and court documents.
cartergramiak

The Afghanistan War Is Ending. A Pennsylvania Town Exhales. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • But straight out of high school, Aidan fulfilled his dream in this patriotic town south of Pittsburgh, where there are crisp American flags around memorials to veterans in front of the municipal building. Today, Aidan is 20 and stationed with the Army in Kentucky. And this past week, his father exhaled in profound relief when President Biden announced that American troops would be coming home from Afghanistan.
  • That view, by a Democratic president in a deeply partisan era, is largely shared among people in southwestern Pennsylvania — a region generally hostile to Democrats, but where even voters who opposed Mr. Biden’s election approved of his withdrawal plan.
  • “It’s a very complicated question,” said Rick Palma, standing outside McGrogan’s Tap Room, reflecting on Mr. Biden’s decision. Mr. Palma is a retired manager at a United States Steel mill in nearby Clairton, which is the fictional setting for “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 movie that powerfully evoked blue-collar communities whose young men went to Vietnam.“Is it time to bring them home? Perhaps,” Mr. Palma, a former Army officer, said. “If you bring them all the way back, there’s the possibility that Al Qaeda will regroup.”
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  • “I’m not a Biden fan but I’m for that, pulling the troops out of there,” said Mr. Miller, 46, a salesman. He dismissed the arguments of some Republican officials and military leaders that Taliban extremists would overrun the country once Americans left. “We can’t babysit everybody,” he said.
  • “The real problem here is we can’t be isolationist,” said Howard Dean, the Democrat who ran a 2004 presidential campaign as an early opponent of the Iraq War. He proposed a series of excruciating questions that Americans might face about using military force in the near future: What if China invades Taiwan? What if Russian tanks roll across Ukraine?
  • Ms. Pallatto, 59, said Mr. Biden should not have announced a withdrawal deadline. “You televise to the Taliban we’re going to be completely gone at this date,” she said. America’s Afghan partners won’t be able to stand on their own “and we’re going to end up back there again,” she said.
  • Not everyone on Pike Street was aware of the president’s decision to leave Afghanistan, a reflection of how the drawn-out conflict, with relatively low American casualties, has dropped from the headlines. Just 12 percent of Americans told an Associated Press/NORC poll last year that they closely followed events in the war.
mattrenz16

Israel-Palestinian Hostilities: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Clashes between Arab and Jewish mobs on the streets of Israeli cities gave way to warnings from Israeli leaders that the decades-old conflict could be careening toward a civil war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the scenes of arson and violence as “anarchy” and appealed for an end to “lynchings.”
  • Israel carried out more airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, where the death toll rose on Thursday to 83 people since the fighting began early this week, according to the Gaza health ministry. Palestinian militants fired volleys of rockets that reached far into Israel, where seven have died.
  • Palestinian leaders, however, said the talk of civil war was a distraction from what they see as the true cause of the unrest — police brutality against Palestinian protesters and provocative actions by right-wing Israeli settler groups.
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  • “The police shot an Arab demonstrators in Lod,” said Ahmed Tibi, the leader of the Ta’al party and a member of Israel’s Parliament, referring to the mixed Arab-Jewish city in Israel where some of the worst clashes occurred. “We don’t want bloodshed. We want to protest.”
  • In one seaside suburb south of Tel Aviv, dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking a man presumed to be Arab, even as he lay motionless on the ground. To the north, in another coastal town, an Arab mob beat a man they thought was Jewish with sticks and rocks, leaving him in a critical condition. Nearby, an Arab mob nearly stabbed to death a man believed to be Jewish.
  • It is the first intense round of fighting since Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, a long-fought prize and a delicate balancing act.
  • The Aqsa raid might have been the spark for the current round of hostilities, but the fuel was years of anger from Israel’s Arab minority, who make up about 20 percent of the population. They have full citizenship, but rights advocates say they are victims of dozens of discriminatory regulations.
martinelligi

1 in 10 US Capitol riot defendants have military ties - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • One in 10 people charged in the US Capitol insurrection are veterans or current servicemembers, according to a CNN review of court documents and Pentagon records.
  • A quarter of the defendants with military ties are also connected to right-wing extremist groups, like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. These groups had a big presence at the January 6 riot, and they've attracted significant attention from federal prosecutors investigating the attack and from Pentagon officials who are coming to grips with the problem of extremism in the military.
  • This is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date of the outsized role that veterans played in the insurrection. They represent 10% of all defendants charged in the riot, but only make up about 6% of the US adult population, according to government statistics from recent years.
saberal

Biden declares white supremacists 'most lethal threat' to US as he marks Tulsa race massacre - as it happened | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Joe Biden delivered remarks in Tulsa to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the city’s race massacre. The president emphasized the importance of acknowledging the lives and livelihoods lost in the massacre, which resulted in the death of at least 300 African Americans and the destruction of 35 blocks of Black real estate. “For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness,” Biden said. “My fellow Americans, this was not a riot, this was a massacre.”
  • The administration formally ended the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy that forced thousands of asylum seekers from Central America to wait in Mexico while the US to process their cases. The program w as paused in January. In a memo sent to agency leaders today, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the policy did not “adequately or sustainably enhance border management.”
  • Human rights groups are calling on the Biden administration and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to put an end to a digital surveillance program that keeps tabs on nearly 100,000 immigrants.
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  • The “alternatives to detention” program tracks 96,574 individuals, but the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request calls to increase that number by approximately 45,000 to 140,000.
  • Biden met with the three living survivors of the massacre before delivering his speech. All three survivors – Viola “Mother” Fletcher, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis and Lessie “Mother Randle” Benningfield Randle – are over 100 years old. Biden acknowledged them in his remarks, saying, “Now your story will be known in full view.”
  • Under Biden’s proposal, multinational corporations would be prevented from shifting profits across borders to exploit the most attractive low-tax locations as their profits would be taxed at a minimum global corporation tax rate either where they are booked or headquartered.
  • “Well, [massacre survivor] Mother Fletcher said that when she saw the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, it broke her heart,” he continued: “A mob of violent white extremists, thugs, said it reminded her of what happened here, 100 years ago, in Greenwood. Look around at the various hate crimes against Asian Americans and Jewish Americans, hate that never goes away.”
  • Harris could do to change these realities. Having served in the Senate for four years, she has some ties in the chamber. But Biden, who served in the chamber for nine times has long, is thought to have much deeper relationships with Senators – and has been unable to win them over.
  • Biden also appeared to criticize two moderate Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, referencing “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends”. Manchin has said he opposes the For the People Act.
  • Joe Biden noted that he is the first US president to ever visit Tulsa to commemorate the anniversary of the 1921 race massacre that killed at least three hundred African Americans.
  • Joe Biden is now meeting with the three living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, according to the latest White House pool report.
saberal

'It's easy to dismiss Black women's lives': Texas drags feet on maternal mortality crisis | Texas | The Guardian - 0 views

  • When medical staff prepped Shawn Thierry for an emergency C-section, she knew something was very wrong. After an epidural, excruciating pain ran through her legs. Soon, she could barely breathe.
  • The US has the highest maternal death rate among similarly developed countries and is the only industrialized nation where such deaths are rising. But according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Texas the maternal mortality rate is above the US average, at 18.5 deaths per 100,000 live births.
  • They did not advance in 2019, or in the current legislative session which ends this weekend. Focused on restricting abortion rights, the male- and Republican-dominated state legislature has dragged its feet on maternal mortality.
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  • “It was really striking,” said Dr Amy Raines-Milenkov, a University of North Texas Health Science Center professor and member of the review committee. “We found that most of these deaths could have been prevented but the system is just not set up to prevent them. And we found a large racial disparity, which is a reflection of how we in society value women, especially African American women.”
  • the ultra-conservative Texas Senate – which ushered through extremist anti-abortion bills in March – did not pass the bill until the final minutes of its session. Even then, the legislation was not what was proposed. Without explanation, Republican Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham reduced the year of coverage to six months.
  • “Black women are dying at an alarming rate for reasons that could be prevented and our state leaders cut down the main proposal that a state-appointed committee recommended to help them – why would that even happen?” said Jones. “I think it’s because it’s so easy to dismiss Black women’s lives.”
  • In an ideological quest to punish abortion affiliates, Republicans have decimated the Texas reproductive health safety net by blocking low-income Medicaid patients from receiving life-saving preventative care at Planned Parenthood, a move resulting in reduced access to contraception and increased rates of Medicaid births, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
mattrenz16

Michael Flynn and the endless insurrection - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The insurrection is far from over.In the same week, the sitting US President warned that US democracy is in peril, a group of scholars said the American experiment could fail and a retired US general -- who served, briefly, as national security adviser -- seemed to endorse a military coup.
  • On the one hand, the retired general -- that's Michael Flynn -- is disgraced in the eyes of his former colleagues, was prosecuted on charges of lying and foreign lobbying and then pardoned by Trump. He appeared this past weekend at a fringe conspiracy theory conference and said there's no reason what's happening in Myanmar (a violent coup by the country's military) shouldn't happen in the US.
  • "Let me be VERY CLEAR - There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort," he said. Read more from CNN's Donie O'Sullivan.
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  • At the same conference this weekend, he and Powell suggested Trump could just be reinstated. Here's a fact check on that from CNN's Tara Subramaniam.
  • A coup after an election, actually. What's happening in Myanmar wasn't just any coup; the military seized control of the country after the election in November. QAnon extremists have been fixated on it.
  • So is it sedition? Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, now a Democrat, argued Monday on CNN that Flynn should be prosecuted for sedition.
  • Treason: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
  • Rebellion or insurrection: "Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
  • Seditious conspiracy: "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."
  • It's also not that Republicans in Arizona and Georgia are still trying to selectively audit their states' election results months after the elections ended and a shocking number of Republican voters question the legitimacy of Biden's win.
  • To them, it is the raft of restrictive voting laws being passed in key states by Republican legislatures around the country that threatens democracy.
  • "Democracy is more than a form of government. It's a way of being; it's a way of seeing the world. Democracy means the rule of the people -- the rule of the people. Not the rule of monarchs, not the rule of the moneyed, not the rule of the mighty -- literally, the rule of the people."
lmunch

Opinion: The lies that were told to sustain the US and UK mission in Afghanistan - CNN - 0 views

  • The lies American officers told were necessary ways of pretending the country they were handing to the next rotation of troops was better off than when they found it. "Turning the corner" and "winning hearts and minds" each summer and year being the "most important yet" to "turn the tide."
  • Bar this, there really was no specific "thing" the coalition would count to quantify success. It was much easier to arbitrarily claim progress instead. The artifice was to maintain morale, funding, careers and, presumably, belief among those on the frontline that there was an overriding success in their endeavor.
  • There was also the larger, comforting confection America recites to itself about how much it cared: God bless our troops. Too heartfelt to be a lie, but undermined by how stagnantly the Afghanistan war has been treated as a policy issue for so long. It's also a phrase echoing in America, where only about 1.3 million people -- less than half of 1% -- are on active duty. And the other 99% seem either barely aware there is a war, or passionately believe the troops' sacrifice is either an essential bedrock of their freedoms, or wasteful.
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  • They maintain there aren't extremists here, reportedly issuing decrees that their militants not harbor foreign jihadists. But Al-Qaeda, according to the US Treasury on January 4, is "gaining strength" under Taliban protection.
  • Yet for Afghans it goes on. Without American airpower holding back Taliban advances, the truths will be more violent, unpalatably bitter and lead to more lies, as a new chapter in decades of violence churns and swirls.
lmunch

Opinion: The last chance to save Alexey Navalny - CNN - 0 views

  • Last summer, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny narrowly survived an assassination attempt, widely believed to have been organized by Russia's security services, through a Novichok nerve-agent poisoning. Now, without concerted action, he may die from medical neglect in a Russian penal colony where the authorities locked him up following a mockery of a trial. The botched nerve-agent attack, since exposed, was supposed to have been accomplished with deniability. If Navlany now dies in prison, the blame will lie unequivocally with the Kremlin.
  • It's not hard to see why Russian authorities are now sparing no effort to make Navalny -- and his backers -- believe that political opposition is futile and to make them pay a very high price for their activism. Navalny's support was once said to extend no further than the intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg, but he eventually built a following across the country. Indeed, it was while he was visiting supporters in distant Siberia that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's main successor, apparently tried to kill him.
  • Russian authorities' imprisonment of Navalny has only boosted his profile. Now from his prison cell, he is highlighting the Kremlin's refusal to give him independent medical care he can trust for what appears to be a combination of an undiagnosed respiratory illness and serious back pain. His three-week hunger strike has brought him to what his doctors say from afar could be the brink of death. One of the doctors said that test results he received from Navalny's family showed sharply elevated levels of potassium, which could lead to cardiac arrest, and signs of kidney failure.
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  • As Navalny's health rapidly declines behind bars, his supporters' freedom may also be in jeopardy. On Friday, the Moscow prosecutor's office petitioned a court to have three organizations affiliated with him declared "extremist" -- the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the Foundation for Protection of Citizens Rights, and "Navalny's Headquarters." That could lead to all three groups being outlawed, putting their numerous staff members and backers across the country at great personal risk, including of criminal prosecution. This broader movement needs defending.
  • The logic goes: if you are a critic, you must be foreign, and if you're foreign, you're the enemy. The new legislation also codified equating a series of single-person pickets with "mass protests." Under a 2014 law, if you're found guilty more than twice in a 180-day period for "unlawful" protesting, you can go to prison.
saberal

Opinion | Some Statues Tell Lies. This One Tells the Truth. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It’s shameful that a mob fringe has even come for Abraham Lincoln. His statue was torn down by extremists in Portland last fall.
  • Washington State has chosen to immortalize Billy Frank Jr., a Native American truth-teller, genuine hero and role model, who died in 2014, at the U.S. Capitol in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
  • Replacing the statue of Marcus Whitman, an inept Protestant missionary who tried to Christianize the natives, with a Native American who was arrested more than 50 times for practicing his treaty rights to fish for salmon is a karmic boomerang.
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  • I could tell him about the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded Mr. Frank, a leader of the Nisqually tribe, during the Obama administration, or how his struggle led to a monumental 1974 federal court ruling on resource equality known as the Boldt decision, awarding his people 50 percent of the salmon in their waters.
  • If culture is an expression of our refined and uplifting impulses, he spread many ripples in the heritage of humanity. He’ll join Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Adams, Helen Keller as well as several other Native Americans in the Capitol not because it’s his turn. But because his life exemplifies the best values of a nation’s shared stories.
  • “The people need to know the truth,” he used to say, by way of explaining an 1854 treaty between the tribes of Puget Sound and the American government that guaranteed tribal fishing rights for eternity.
  • The same cannot be said of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, a man who was indicted on a charge of treason, and another traitor, his vice president, Alexander Stephens — both of whom are still in Statuary Hall, even after waging war on the United States. Mr. Stephens said the Confederacy was founded “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
  • The outgoing statue of Mr. Whitman in buckskin and a Bible is a totem to the Big Lie that he saved the Oregon Country from the British, a founding myth of the Pacific Northwest. “It was the kind of lie that many Americans still love — simple, hero-driven, action-packed, ordained by God,” Mr. Harden told me. “Replacing Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. is sweet symbolic justice.”
  • But I also wanted to summon the spirit of the man I knew as just Billy — his guts, his wisdom, his unbroken big heartedness. “Being with Billy is like floating on a steady, easy river,” his wife Sue Crystal, who died of cancer in 2001, once said. “He’s the happiest person I know.”
anonymous

Texas Man Arrested With Guns, Ammo Outside Of Vice Presidential Residence : NPR - 0 views

  • A man was arrested Wednesday afternoon near the Naval Observatory and charged with several counts related to weapons and ammunition, according the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department.
  • Paul Murray, 31, of San Antonio was first detained by the U.S. Secret Service based on an intelligence bulletin originating from Texas. He was later formally arrested by Washington police. A rifle and ammunition were recovered from his vehicle.
  • The arrest comes as the district is in a state of heightened security following the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol. Violent pro-Trump extremists, fueled by the idea that President Biden and Harris had stolen the election from Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol, threatening lawmakers and law enforcement.
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  • security and intelligence officials have redoubled their warnings of the dangers of homegrown extremism and the way it manifests.
rerobinson03

Justice Dept. Links Oath Keepers and Proud Boys Ahead of Capitol Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Leaders of the Oath Keepers militia and the far-right group the Proud Boys were in communication in the weeks before the Capitol riot and appear to have coordinated some plans for the day of the attack, prosecutors said in court papers.
  • The new disclosure about the links between two extremist groups was contained in a motion filed late Thursday night by prosecutors seeking to keep Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, in jail before his trial. Prosecutors cited several of Mr. Meggs’s private Facebook messages in which he told others that as many as 100 Oath Keepers planned to be in Washington for a rally in January answering a call by President Donald J. Trump.“He called us all to Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” Mr. Meggs wrote on Dec. 22. “Sir yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC.”
  • According to the messages, Mr. Meggs had already been in touch with a leader of the Proud Boys whose name was redacted in the papers. Apparently expecting a conflict with the antifascist activists known as antifa, the two men had devised a plan to catch their left-wing adversaries in a kind of pincer move on the streets. “We will have the proud boys get in front of them,” Mr. Meggs wrote. “The cops will get between antifa and proud boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them.”
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  • From the start of the investigation, agents and prosecutors have focused on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, if for no other reason than the two groups both sent large contingents of members to the Capitol. The organizations have a history of working and appearing together at right-wing street events dating to the early days of the Trump administration.
  • This week, The New York Times published an article saying that federal prosecutors were weighing sedition charges against some of the Oath Keepers arrested in connection with the Capitol attack — a rare crime that has not been successfully prosecuted in more than 20 years. The article came on the heels of an unusual interview that Michael R. Sherwin, the prosecutor who until recently was leading the riot inquiry, gave to “60 Minutes” in which he said that evidence obtained by the government investigators almost certainly meets the bar needed to file sedition charges.
  • In a separate filing issued on Wednesday, prosecutors revealed evidence that two of Mr. Meggs’s co-defendants in the Oath Keepers case, Jessica Watkins and Donovan Crowl — both Ohio residents — swapped messages on Facebook just days after the Capitol attack, discussing a “bugout plan” if then-President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. actually took office.
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