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Opinion | It's Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html facebook monopoly social media antitrust politics policy
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.
  • Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones
  • Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
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  • This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations
  • In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
  • Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
  • Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.
  • Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products
  • Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.
  • When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
  • Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved
  • The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
  • Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.
  • As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum
  • In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.
  • As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)
  • I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur
  • It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen
  • a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination
  • It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
  • It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”
  • Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.
  • We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.
  • The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
  • The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
  • The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
  • Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.
  • What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
  • In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”
  • As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
  • No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
  • Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control
  • Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
  • In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
  • I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
  • We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
  • Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
  • First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.
  • How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.
  • Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
  • others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
  • The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
  • But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit
  • The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
  • The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time
  • The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
  • Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media
  • We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
  • These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation
  • I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak
  • Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”
  • Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.
  • The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
  • This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
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Opinion | The Complicated Truth About Recycling - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-plastic-paper-aluminum.html recycling analysis
shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Recycling has been called a myth and beyond fixing as we’ve learned that recyclables are being shipped overseas and dumped (true), are leaching toxic chemicals and microplastics (true) and are being used by Big Oil to mislead consumers about the problems with plastics.
  • Recycling is real. I’ve seen it. For the past four years, I’ve traveled the world writing a book about the waste industry, visiting paper mills and e-waste shredders and bottle plants. I’ve visited all kinds of plastics recycling facilities, from gleaming new factories in Britain to smoky, flake-filled shredding operations in India
  • While I’ve seen how recycling has become inseparable from corporate greenwashing, we shouldn’t be so quick to cast it aside. In the short term, at least, it might be the best option we have against our growing waste crisis.
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  • One of the most fundamental problems with recycling is that we don’t really know how much of it actually happens because of an opaque global system that too often relies on measuring the material that arrives at the front door of the facility rather than what comes out
  • What we do know is that with plastics, at least, the amount being recycled is much less than most of us assumed.
  • According to the Environmental Protection Agency, two of the most commonly used plastics in America — PET (used in soda bottles) and HDPE (used in milk jugs, among other things) — are “widely recycled,” but the rate is really only about 30 percent
  • Other plastics, like soft wraps and films, sometimes called No. 4 plastics, are not widely accepted in curbside collections.
  • The E.P.A. estimates that just 2.7 percent of polypropylene — the hard plastic known as No. 5, used to make furniture and cleaning bottles — was reprocessed in 2018
  • Crunch the sums, and only around 10 percent of plastics in the United States is recycle
  • the landfill-happy United States is far worse at recycling than other major economies. According to the E.P.A., America’s national recycling rate, just 32 percent, is lower than Britain’s 44 percent, Germany’s 48 percent and South Korea’s 58 percent.
  • the scientific research over decades has repeatedly found that in almost all cases, recycling our waste materials has significant environmental benefits
  • We need clearer labeling of what is and is not actually recyclable and transparency around true recycling rates
  • Recycling steel, for example, saves 72 percent of the energy of producing new steel; it also cuts water use by 40 percent
  • Recycling a ton of aluminum requires only about 5 percent of the energy and saves almost nine tons of bauxite from being hauled from mines
  • Even anti-plastics campaigners agree that recycling plastics, like PET, is better for the climate than burning them — a likely outcome if recycling efforts were to be abandoned.
  • The economic perks are significant, too. Recycling creates as many as 50 jobs for every one created by sending waste to landfills; the E.P.A. estimates that recycling and reuse accounted for 681,000 jobs in the United States alone.
  • That’s even more true in the developing world, where waste pickers rely on recycling for income.
  • before we abandon recycling, we should first try to fix it
  • Companies should be phasing out products that can’t be recycled and designing more products that are easier to recycle and reuse rather than leaving sustainability to their marketing departments.
  • Lawmakers can help by passing new laws, as cities like Seattle and San Francisco have done, to help increase recycling rates and drive investment into the sector.
  • Governments can also ban or restrict many problematic plastics to reduce the amount of needless plastics in our everyday lives, for instance in food packaging
  • According to a 2015 analysis by scientists at the University of Southampton in England, recycling a majority of commonly tossed-out waste materials resulted in a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions
  • Greater safety regulations are needed to reduce toxic chemical contents and microplastic pollution caused by the recycling process.
  • consumers can do their bit by buying recycled products (and buying less and reusing more).
  • Yes, recycling is broken, but abandon it too soon, and we risk going back to the system of decades past, in which we dumped and burned our garbage without care, in our relentless quest for more. Do that, and like the recycling symbol itself, we really will be going in circles.
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Opinion | Yes, Nikki Haley, the Civil War Was About Slavery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...haley-civil-war-slavery.html civil war US slavery causes economics politics history
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery
  • it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?
  • The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.
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  • there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.
  • But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.
  • Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.
  • In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom
  • serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.
  • But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:
  • Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:
  • Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”
  • Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.
  • Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs
  • landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.
  • again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.
  • Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places
  • Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.
  • As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.
  • Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth
  • Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.
  • But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories
  • This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.
  • And this posed a problem for the South
  • Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.
  • This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.
  • For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:
  • So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.
  • So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom
  • And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.
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Saudis Back Syrian Rebels Despite Risks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...despite-a-lack-of-control.html
shared by B Mannke on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Abu Khattab saw something that troubled him: two dead children, their blood-soaked bodies sprawled on the street of a rural village near the Mediterranean coast. He knew right away that his fellow rebels had killed them.
  • The commander brushed him off, saying his men had killed the children “because they were not Muslims,” Abu Khattab recalled recently during an interview here.
  • It was only then that Abu Khattab began to believe that the jihad in Syria — where he had traveled in violation of an official Saudi ban — was not fully in accord with God’s will.
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  • the great challenge now facing Saudi Arabia’s rulers: how to fight an increasingly bloody and chaotic proxy war in Syria using zealot militia fighters over whom they have almost no control.
  • The Saudis fear the rise of Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria, and they have not forgotten what happened when Saudi militants who had fought in Afghanistan returned home to wage a domestic insurgency a decade ago
  • Abu Khattab also mentioned proudly that he is no stranger to jihad.
  • There is a shortage of religious conditions for jihad in Syria,” he said. Many of the fighters kill Syrian civilians, a violation of Islam, he added.
  • He proudly trumpets his return to jihad on his Twitter feed, which features a picture of him clutching a rifle with his mangled hands.
  • You cannot prevent all young men from leaving the kingdom. Many of them travel to London or other places, and only then to Turkey, and Syria.”
  • “They especially like Saudis, because the Saudis are more willing to do suicide operations,” he said.
  • In the end, it was the slaughter of innocents that made him decide to quit, he said, and a broader feeling that the rebels alongside him were not doing it for the right reasons. “If the fight is not purely to God, it’s not a real jihad,” he said. “These people are fighting for their flags.”But there was another reason he gave up the fight.
  • The real war is not against Bashar himself, it is against Iran. Everything else is just a false image.”
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Rural Alaska is getting Covid-19 vaccinations right. Here's what the rest of the US can... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html covid
shared by katherineharron on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The immovable challenges of living in Alaska would, in theory, make it a nightmare to vaccinate all of its 731,000-plus residents: It's the largest state in the US in terms of land size, has some of the most extreme weather of any state and many resident Alaska Natives, who are disproportionately dying from Covid-19, live in the remote throes of the state.
  • And yet, at 40 doses administered per 100 people, Alaska is one of the leading states in the US when it comes to Covid-19 vaccinations.
  • What works in Alaska won't work everywhere -- it's over 660,000 square miles, after all, and not every state requires health care workers to travel by dog sled to administer vaccines. But the rest of the US can take cues from the state's unique approach to its unique problems.
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  • Alaska's public health structure was built for complications -- its size and tendency for inclement weather require it. So when it came time to start vaccinating residents, the state didn't have to build a robust public health system from scratch like some others, said Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska's chief medical officer.
  • A localized approach to vaccination hasn't worked everywhere, but it's worked in Alaska, Zink said. The state distributes vaccines to different regions but doesn't give directives, she said -- it's up to the communities to decide how to administer vaccines based on their needs.
  • Because so much power has been turned over to different regions of Alaska and the health care providers trusted in those areas, health care workers have been able to "meet people where they're at," Zink said: That means they'll deliver vaccines by boat, dog sled, helicopters and small planes, or go door-to-door in small communities to vaccinate as many community members as possible.
  • Vaccine eligibility in Alaska is more expansive than it currently is in most other states: Vaccines are available to anyone 55 years or older, people with certain underlying conditions, essential workers, residents of a multigenerational household, anyone who assists a senior in getting vaccinated and anyone who lives in a community where 45% of houses don't have pipes or septic tanks.
  • In areas where the population is mostly Alaska natives, there's a greater amount of people living in multigenerational housing. That qualifies young people who may live with an at-risk elderly person to get vaccinated, too, said Dr. Bob Onders, administrator of the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. And since 25% of rural Alaska doesn't have running water or sewage, which can heighten residents' risk for respiratory illness, it didn't make sense to exclude rural residents from the first round of vaccinations, Onders said.
  • Alaska Natives have borne the brunt of Covid-19 in the state -- the Kaiser Family Foundation's Covid-19 data tracker shows that Alaska Natives make up more than a quarter of Covid-19 cases but 15% of the population, compared to White residents, who made up 38% of cases but 68% of the population.
  • "Rather than a top-down mechanism, where someone from outside of Alaska or rural Alaska is dictating how things are going, it's much more about giving them supplies," Onders said.
  • Alaska asked the federal government to be treated "like a territory instead of state," so it would receive a monthly allocation of vaccines versus a weekly or biweekly lot. That made it easier to plan ahead and deliver vaccines "creatively," Zink said.
  • It can be costly to transport vaccines to some remote reaches of Alaska -- over $15,000 for one trip, in some cases, Zink said. To make vaccinations more cost-efficient, some areas that are less densely populated receive their entire vaccine allotment, which makes it possible to vaccinate entire communities in one go.
  • "We've been doing redistribution of vaccines for years," said Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska's chief medical officer. "It was pretty easy for us to stand up our existing [public health] structure."
  • Invest in protecting minority communities. Alaska expanded its eligibility for the first round of vaccines to include Alaska Natives and low-income residents of the state that are more vulnerable to Covid-19. While there's still work to do to alleviate that disproportionate risk, Onders said so far, it's working.
  • Another way to alleviate that burden is to prioritize zip codes in addition to age and health status, Karmarck said. Vaccinating residents of low-income neighborhoods or areas where the majority of residents are Black, indigenous or people of color could reduce Covid-19's disproportionate impact, though backlash is likely: In Dallas, county officials axed their plan to prioritize residents in "vulnerable zip codes" after the state threatened to reduce its vaccine allocation, the Texas Tribune reported in January.
  • Enlist trusted members of communities to educate. In communities where residents are hesitant to get the vaccine, particularly among Black and Latino Americans, sharing information about vaccine access is crucial to address Covid-19 racial disparities, Karmarck said.
  • Customize the approach. States that were lagging in vaccinations are catching up, Karmarck said, as they formalize an approach to vaccination that best fits their state. In Massachusetts, for example, large vaccination sites have opened up at Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium to accommodate more people and storage the vaccines require. It's improved the state's vaccination rates, she said.
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Hundreds of Thousands of Cruise Fans Volunteer to Be First to Sail Again - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cruise-lines-covid.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Since March of last year, cruise ships carrying more than 250 people have been prohibited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from sailing in U.S. waters.
  • On May 25, Royal Caribbean became the first cruise line to receive approval from the C.D.C. to conduct simulated voyages, which are planned for its Freedom of the Seas ship starting from PortMiami in Florida in late June.
  • Several major cruise companies have already announced Alaska sailings starting in late July, which will require all passengers to prove that they are vaccinated. But in Florida, the cruise lines’ biggest U.S. departure point, recently enacted state law bans businesses from requiring proof of immunizations from people seeking to use their services.
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  • On MSC European cruises, all guests receive antigen tests when they board and if they test positive, they are given an additional PCR test. Non-vaccinated guests boarding its cruises in Britain must also present proof of a PCR test taken 48 hours before they embark.
  • Florida officials have said they will not exempt the cruise lines. If cruise companies decide to sail with a mix of vaccinated and non-vaccinated passengers, they will have to carry out simulation cruises with volunteers to test health and safety protocols.
  • The simulated voyages must be between two to seven days in length with at least one overnight stay, according to C.D.C. guidelines. They are required to test embarkation and disembarkation procedures, medical evacuations, onboard activities such as meal service and entertainment, re
  • Passengers are also tested mid-cruise after three or four days and are required to wear contact tracing bracelets so that they can be tracked down if someone they have come into contact with tests positive.
  • Cruise ships, she said, “have always been a cesspool for viruses, like planes, and I think there were risks at the height of the pandemic, but now with vaccines and health and safety measures I think they are ready to go again.”
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US coronavirus: The slowing Covid-19 vaccination rate is worrying experts. Here's what ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As the US may miss a vaccination goal set by President Joe Biden for July 4, officials are warning against complacency and states are ramping up measures to encourage reluctant residents to get the Covid-19 vaccine.
  • A multitude of states and companies in the last month have hoped to create demand for vaccines by awarding prizes to those inoculated.
  • It had fallen to under a million a day on average earlier in the week.
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  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Friday that the best way for the country to avoid another Covid-19 surge -- and another shut down -- is to get vaccinated.
  • A recent CNN analysis of CDC data found that the pace of newly-vaccinated adults will fall short of the Biden administration's goal of 70% of adults with one dose by July 4.
  • At present, 12 states have already met Biden's one-dose goal: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.
  • The push to increase vaccinations is highlighted by further evidence that the mass vaccination programs this year have contributed greatly in the fight against Covid-19.
  • A daily average of 49,000 new cases reported to the CDC at the start of May has fallen to less than 14,000 Thursday.
  • Nearly 170 million people -- just over half of the total US population -- have received at least one dose of vaccine, and about 137.5 million people -- 41.4% of the population -- are fully vaccinated.
  • The CDC says vaccinated people may stop wearing masks in most cases, but unvaccinated people should continue to use them.
  • About 1.4 million new doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered since Thursday,
  • In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear announced the state's new Covid-19 vaccine incentive which will give vaccinated adults "a shot at a million dollars," he said.
  • More than 2 million Kentuckians have already been vaccinated, but Beshear anticipates "a significant increase" following Friday's announcement, he said.
  • In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis presented Sally Sliger with a super-sized check for $1 million as the winner of the first drawing in the state's 'Comeback Cash' initiative.
  • As vaccines continue to go into the arms of eligible teens and adults, health officials remain concerned over the safety of children. Only those ages 12 years and older are currently eligible to receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the US.
  • Research showing an increase in Covid-19 hospitalization rates among adolescents in the US is a reminder that even children can suffer from the virus,
  • As a result, bans on school mask mandates in states like Texas are irresponsible and could result in more children getting sick, Offit said.
  • Hawaii, which has maintained some of the toughest travel restrictions throughout the pandemic, is beginning to loosen rules on air travel, dropping its testing and quarantine requirements for people flying between the Hawaiian islands starting June 15. All pandemic restrictions will be lifted once the full vaccination rate reaches 70%,
  • The FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), on which Offit sits, is set to meet on June 10 to discuss what the FDA should consider in either authorizing or approving the use of coronavirus vaccines in children under 12.
  • Both Moderna and Pfizer are running trials for their vaccines in children ages 11 and under.
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Hopes for Tokyo's Summer Olympic Games Darken Due to Virus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tokyo-olympics.html
shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As coronavirus cases rise throughout Japan and in several large countries in Europe and the Americas, officials both in Tokyo and with the International Olympic Committee have begun to acknowledge that holding a safe Games might not be possible, endangering dreams that the Olympics could serve as a global celebration of the end of the pandemic.
  • For weeks, Japanese and Olympic officials have insisted that the Games will go forward, and that a further delay is not possible. Organizers have been trying to come up with plans to hold the Games in a manner acceptable to the Japanese public, announcing an array of safety measures.
  • In a survey conducted this month, the Japanese broadcaster NHK found that nearly 80 percent of respondents believed the Games should be postponed again or canceled entirely. In October, less than half of respondents said that. The figure rose to 71 percent in December.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Organizers in Tokyo and at the I.O.C. agreed in March to postpone the Games for one year. The biennial sports festival, the world’s largest, was supposed to take place last July and August. The opening ceremony for the Summer Games is now scheduled for July 23.
  • Hopes for the Games had risen as several major sporting events were held around the world without major problems, albeit on a much smaller scale and with few or no fans in attendance.
  • The rollout of the vaccines has been slower than expected, however, and much of humanity will remain unvaccinated by this summer. Japan does not plan to begin vaccinating its citizens until late February, a process that will take months.
  • It is not yet clear whether organizers would allow spectators to attend the Games, or travel from outside Japan for the Olympics. Japan has instituted a travel ban for all international visitors that is scheduled to end Feb. 7, but it could be extended. Elite athletes are no longer exempt from it.
  • While Japan, a country of more than 125 million people, has recorded just over 300,000 cases and 4,200 deaths — far fewer than many Western countries — it has had record caseloads and death tolls in recent days. It reported more than 6,000 new cases on Thursday.
  • Officials have proposed screening and testing visitors upon arrival. Athletes may be subject to multiple tests, and their movements may be limited. They may have to leave the Olympic Village as soon as they are finished competing, and may be restricted in whom they can associate with while in Tokyo.
4More

Covid-19 News: Live Global Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-19-coronavirus Covid spread
shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Britain, one of Europe’s worst-hit countries during the pandemic, leads the world in identifying the exact genetic sequence of virus samples, known as genomic surveillance. That capacity enabled it to put the world on notice with an announcement on Dec. 14 that it had detected the variant scientists call B.1.1.7, along with the disturbing news that it was most likely the cause of skyrocketing infections in London and the surrounding area.
  • None of the variants is known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease, but increased transmissibility adds to caseloads that further strain hospitals and result, inevitably, in more deaths. Their emergence adds to the urgency of mass vaccination campaigns, which have had troubled starts in Europe and the United States; are only beginning in many other countries, like India; and are at minimum months away in many others.
  • Nearly 20 European countries have found B.1.1.7 so far. In Denmark on Saturday, the authorities said more than 250 cases had been detected in samples taken since November. The country’s health minister has predicted that the variant will predominate by mid-February. The country’s coronavirus monitor also reported that it had identified a case of the variant found in South Africa, Reuters reported.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • On Saturday, Britain reported eight cases of one of the variants found in Brazil, hours after the British authorities imposed a travel ban from Latin American countries and Portugal, which is linked to Brazil by its colonial history and by current travel and trade ties. Italy also suspended flights from Brazil, its health minister, Roberto Speranza, announced on Facebook.
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Biden Seeks Quick Start With Executive Actions and Aggressive Legislation - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cutive-action-legislation.html
shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • On his first day in office alone, Mr. Biden intends a flurry of executive orders that will be partly substantive and partly symbolic. They include rescinding the travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries, rejoining the Paris climate change accord, extending pandemic-related limits on evictions and student loan payments, issuing a mask mandate for federal property and interstate travel and ordering agencies to figure out how to reunite children separated from families after crossing the border, according to a memo circulated on Saturday by Ron Klain, his incoming White House chief of staff, and obtained by The New York Times.
  • He also plans to send sweeping immigration legislation on his first day in office providing a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people in the country illegally.
  • Along with his promise to vaccinate 100 million Americans for the coronavirus in his first 100 days, it is an expansive set of priorities for a new president that could be a defining test of his deal-making abilities and command of the federal government.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Mr. Biden will be the first true creature of Capitol Hill to occupy the White House since President Gerald R. Ford in the 1970s. More than recent predecessors, he understands how other politicians think and what drives them. But his confidence that he can make deals with Republicans is born of an era when bipartisan cooperation was valued rather than scorned and he may find that today’s Washington has become so tribal that the old ways no longer apply.
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Airbnb Canceling All D.C. Area Reservations For Inauguration Week : Insurrection At The... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...o-d-c-during-inauguration-week
shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Airbnb says it is canceling reservations made in the Washington, D.C., metro area during inauguration week, citing various officials' requests that people not travel to the area during this time
  • The service will also block new bookings in the area during that period. Airbnb says it will refund guests whose reservations were canceled and reimburse hosts for the money they would have earned from the canceled reservations.
  • Additionally, we are aware of reports emerging yesterday afternoon regarding armed militias and known hate groups that are attempting to travel and disrupt the Inauguration."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The company said it has taken steps to "ensure hate group members are not part of the Airbnb community" — banning "numerous individuals" from using its platform if Airbnb has learned they "are either associated with known hate groups or otherwise involved in the criminal activity at the Capitol Building."
  • Neighborhood message boards in D.C. lit up in recent days with reports of shouting matches between pro-Trump Airbnb guests and D.C. neighbors, and of hosts hearing guests talking afterward about taking part in the riot.
  • Some neighbors urged D.C. Airbnb hosts to be careful who they rent to, while others cautioned hosts not to run afoul of nondiscrimination policies.
  • "Members of hate groups are never welcome on Airbnb," the company said,
14More

The Assassination Complex - 0 views

theintercept.com/...the-assassination-complex assassination drones US crisis policy obama leaks
shared by katyshannon on 16 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • DRONES ARE A TOOL, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, targeted killings.”
  • When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it has offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.
  • The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an “area of active hostilities” if a target represents a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides.
  • The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.
  • Two sets of slides focus on the military’s high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive unit, Task Force 48-4.
  • Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.
  • One top-secret document shows how the terror “watchlist” appears in the terminals of personnel conducting drone operations, linking unique codes associated with cellphone SIM cards and handsets to specific individuals in order to geolocate them.
  • The ISR study also reveals new details about the case of a British citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, who was stripped of his citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012. British and American intelligence had Berjawi under surveillance for several years as he traveled back and forth between the U.K. and East Africa, yet did not capture him. Instead, the U.S. hunted him down and killed him in Somalia.
  • Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington’s 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects.
  • They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.
  • These secret slides help provide historical context to Washington’s ongoing wars, and are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.
  • Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.
  • katyshannon on 16 Oct 15
     
    The Intercept's release of top-secret government documents detailing U.S. drone strikes in the Middle East and Africa.
7More

Militants kill eight Egyptian police officers in a Cairo suburb - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-bfaf-ae539f235646_story.html
shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • The police, all in plainclothes, were inspecting security in the southern Cairo suburb of Helwan early Sunday when four gunmen in a pickup truck attacked them, according to Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency.
  • The Islamic State said in a statement on Twitter that “a carefully selected group of the soldiers of the caliphate” c
  • t said the attack was to commemorate 1,000 days since Egyptian security forces massacred what human rights groups describe as hundreds of protesters in August 2013 at Rabaa Square in Cairo.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And others have railed against Sissi’s decision to hand over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.
  • These are the heroes of the police. Their blood is mixed with the dust every day, and they rise above all challenges,”
  • he security forces are accused of extrajudicial killings, torture and forced disappearances. Thousands of opponents of the regime have been jailed or placed under travel bans and other restrictions.
  • In October, the affiliate claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula that killed all 224 onboard.
6More

American Universities in a Gulf of Hypocrisy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wn-in-a-gulf-of-hypocrisy.html universities US mideast cybersecurity censorship corruption free speech gulf
shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • In college at New York University, in 2013, I had spent a semester of study abroad in the United Arab Emirates; I am now a master’s candidate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and at the time of Wahedk87’s email I was a week away from traveling to Qatar. My “dirty mission” was my thesis research, and the “confidential information” I sought was about the labor conditions of migrant workers in the capital, Doha.
  • When I landed in Qatar in June, Wahedk87’s threat became clear. I was denied entry and detained at the airport in Doha. Qatari immigration officers informed me that my name appeared on a “blacklist” maintained by member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council because I had “made trouble” in the U.A.E. Later, Emirati officials told the State Department that they had placed me on the blacklist for unspecified “security-related reasons.”
  • From this, I suspect that it was the U.A.E., an ally of the American government, that hacked my email and shared its intelligence about my research plans with the Qatari authorities
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In 2013, while studying at New York University Abu Dhabi, I condemned the treatment of migrant workers who were building my university’s new campus on Saadiyat Island, an estimated $1 billion enterprise.
  • Georgetown’s response to my ban was troubling, stating that “access to study and residence visas varies across individuals and over time.” The administration stressed that they take academic freedom very seriously, even as the university is expanding “to work in increasingly difficult places.”
  • N.Y.U., my alma mater, had made similar statements after the Emirati authorities denied access to one of its professors, Andrew Ross, in March 2015
9More

UK isn't welcoming Donald Trump with open arms - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by wgatti on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • UK isn't welcoming Donald Trump with open arms
  • Presidential candidates have long used foreign travel to project a statesman-like image, burnish their foreign policy credentials, divert an unpleasant media storyline or take a break from the hyper-vigilant coverage at home.
  • But for every triumph, there are often pitfalls.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • While then-presidential candidate Barack Obama basked in the roaring approval of 200,000 Berliners in 2008
  • Trump, who has drawn support from some conservative European politicians, has already ruffled feathers in the UK with statements he's made during his campaign. His comments about Mexicans and Muslims have affected the fortunes of the Turnberry golf course and hotel he'll visit June 24 and drew a rebuke from Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has already announced she won't meet Trump when he comes this month.
  • Cameron had already described Trump's suggestion for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. as "divisive, stupid and wrong."
  • His comments, as well as Trump's labeling Mexicans entering the U.S. "rapists," also seemed to hurt the fortunes of the Turnberry golf resort that Trump bought in 2014 for some $50 million and then spent almost $290 million renovatin
  • The British newspaper The Independent reported that following the candidate's comments on Mexicans and Muslims, a group that governs golf in the UK decided not to go forward with a plan to return a prestigious tournament to Turnberry in 2020.
  • wgatti on 03 Jun 16
     
    Trump has some conservative support in Europe however most don't support him. It will be interesting to see how this affects our relationship with other countries of he becomes president, especially with the UK. 
21More

Paul Ryan endorses Donald Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...aul-ryan-endorses-donald-trump
shared by cjlee29 on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) ended a month-long holdout by formally backing his party’s presumptive presidential nominee: Donald Trump.
  • On Thursday, the speaker penned a guest column for his hometown newspaper in which he trumpeted the controversial real-estate mogul as someone who could support the speaker’s conservative agenda.
  • Ryan became the last senior Republican congressional leader to throw his weight behind Trump’s candidacy.
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  • id not signal any level of comfort with Trump’s sometimes bombastic style
  • The move marks a big about-face for Ryan, who four weeks ago declared he was “not there yet” in terms of endorsing Trump and questioned whether the controversial businessman was even a conservative
  • Ryan and Trump met once in person in mid-May when the billionaire crisscrossed Capitol Hill for meetings with House and Senate leaders.
  • Throughout the talks, neither side agreed to switch any of their policy positions,
  • endorsement should not be construed as the sort of “real unification” of Republicans
  • Ryan’s move may also signal that the speaker and other top Republicans are worried about keeping the House and Senate in Republican hands come November, and believe the best way to do that is to unite the party.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was among the first top leader to say he would back Trump.
  • Like many senior Republicans, Ryan’s endorsement came with its share of caveats about the speaker and the presumptive nominee’s remaining policy differences
  • Ryan’s chief communications adviser, Brendan Buck, said reporters need not mince words to figure out what it all meant.
  • “Paul Ryan in many ways is the antithesis of Donald Trump; he’s everything that Donald Trump is not. He’s a decent human being. He is a conservative. He is steeped in public policy. He cares about ideas. He’s a person who conducts himself with civility and grace in public life. He doesn’t put down his opponents,”
  • Ryan’s column in his local newspaper left no doubt where he stood after speaking “at great length” with Trump since he initially declared hesitation about his candidacy.
  • House Republicans will be inseparably tied to their toxic front-runner in November, case closed,
  • Ryan’s dragged out decision underscores how truly vulnerable Donald Trump makes House Republicans in swing districts
  • at odds with Trump’s positions on key policy planks dear to mainstream Republicans of the past 40 years
  • free trade agenda and the effort to rein in federal spending on entitlements.
  • Those issues were the hallmark of Ryan’s early congressional career and Trump stands squarely against them.
  • Trump’s proposals to ban all Muslim travel into the United States and the candidate’s brusque comments regarding minorities, women and the disabled gave Ryan pause.
  • Those concerns appear to remain, and Ryan vowed to speak out against Trump if he crosses lines again.
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Donald Trump's most bone-chilling tweet (opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html donald donald trump trump tweet opinion
shared by redavistinnell on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump's most bone-chilling tweet
  • On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump may have unleashed his most bone-chilling tweet -- at least to those who believe the United States should not become a Trump-led dictatorship
  • Here is Trump's truly jaw-dropping tweet from Saturday morning: "The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!"
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But Trump is apparently attempting to delegitimize our federal judiciary by calling Judge James Robart, a George W. Bush-appointed judge, a "so-called" judge while arguing that his decision is "ridiculous."
  • The President truly appears to be leading a master class in transforming the United States into a dictatorship. Trump -- and it's fair to assume it is by design -- has sought to undermine anyone or anything that tries to counter him.
  • The practical result is that when the media calls out Trump's lies and presents objective facts to counter him, his followers will likely dismiss the media reports and instead side with Trump.
  • Would
  • But this time it's far more disturbing given Trump is not a candidate, but president of the United States. The rationale must be assumed to be the same, namely that Trump wants to delegitimize the judiciary so that court decisions Trump disagrees with will be viewed by his followers as at the least horribly partisan, or at worst invalid.
  • hen Trump went after our intelligence agencies because he didn't agree with their views on Russia's involvement in our recent election. Trump lashed out, calling these agencies, charged with gathering information for our national security, "disgraceful" and accusing them of leaking information, comparing it to "something that Nazi Germany would have done."
  • Trump do the same if he had passionately disagreed with the Court's decision or would he simply ignore it while attacking the legitimacy of our judiciary, sparking a constitutional crisis? And would certain Trump-supporting federal agency heads, or even federal officers, refuse to follow court orders (or at least do it very slowly) because Trump has convinced them the federal judiciary's decisions cannot be trusted?
  • And according to a CNN/ORC poll, while Trump has only a 44% approval rating overall, 90% of Republicans think he's doing a good job.
  • Trump's concerted attacks to delegitimize our media, our intelligence community and now our federal judiciary would have no doubt alarmed them. And it should be terrifying to every American who truly believes in our Constitution and in the promise of America.
9More

Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517893 Islamophobia politics anto-Semitism
shared by rachelramirez on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks?
  • In the ten days following Trump’s victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled one hundred attacks—or threatened attacks—against American Jews and 49 against American Muslims.
  • the period between election day and February 9, the liberal blog Think Progress counted 70 anti-Jewish incidents and 31 anti-Muslim ones.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The ratio of anti-Jewish to anti-Muslim incidents, in other words, appears slightly over two to one, which mirrors the ratio of Jews to Muslims in the population.
  • Of the 70 anti-Jewish incidents that Think Progress catalogued, only one involved physical attack. (The large majority were bomb threats). Of the 31 anti-Muslim incidents, by contrast, nine did.
  • There’s been no similar pressure on Trump to condemn attacks on American Muslims. The press has certainly covered Trump’s attitudes—and those of his top advisors—toward Islam, particularly since he announced a ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim nations on January 27
  • But attacks on American mosques have received far less attention
  • One answer is assimilation. With the exception of African Americans, American Muslims are a largely immigrant community. By contrast, most American Jews came a century ago. That helps explain why Jews are better represented at elite levels of the press and government, and in a better position to press their community’s concerns.
  • There is no Muslim equivalent of the ZOA or Simon Wiesenthal Center.
1More

Exclusive: Trump's travel ban polarizes America - Reuters/Ipsos poll - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...n-poll-exclusive-idUSKBN15F2MG politics US
shared by marleymorton on 01 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 01 Feb 17
     
    Americans are sharply divided over President Donald Trump's order to temporarily block U.S. entry for all refugees and citizens of seven Muslim countries, with slightly more approving the measure than disapproving, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday.
4More

Trump: Hollywood's political obsession led to Oscars blunder - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...ars-blunder-hollywood-politics us trump politics
shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Trump: Hollywood's political obsession led to Oscars blunder
  • "They were focused so hard on politics that they didn't get the act together at the end," Trump said in an interview with Breitbart News. "It was a little sad. It took away from the glamour of the Oscars."
  • When "La La Land" producer Jordan Horowitz revealed moments later that "Moonlight" had actually won, audience members and viewers were left in shock.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Referencing Trump's travel ban and stance on immigration, Kimmel joked that in Hollywood, "we don't discriminate against people based on where they're from. We discriminate against them based on their age and weight."
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