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DC protests: Mayor urges 'calm' after protests erupted near the White House for second ... - 0 views

  • (CNN)DC Mayor Muriel Bowser said Sunday that protesters have the right to exercise the First Amendment but should not "destroy our city" after the nation's capital experienced its second consecutive night of protests as well as some looting Saturday night.
  • The DC Fire Department extinguished two vehicle fires in the area north of the White House Saturday night, as well as several small fires in the downtown area. Some protesters also put up graffiti on some buildings.
  • More than 60 US Secret Service personnel were injured from Friday night through Sunday morning near the White House, according to a statement from the Secret Service.
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  • On Saturday, Trump wrongly accused Bowser in a tweet of not allowing the DC Metropolitan Police Department to help the Secret Service keep control of the situation with protesters in Lafayette Square on Friday night. That claim was later refuted by the US Secret Service who confirmed in a statement that the DC police department and US Park police were on the scene.
  • In a press conference Saturday, Bowser noted how Trump's reference to the "ominous dogs" was "no subtle reminder" of segregationists who would attack African Americans with dogs.
  • Some protesters continued to gather in downtown Washington, DC, at Lafayette Square, which is across from the White House, into Saturday evening, but additional protesters were not being allowed in by police.
  • White House executive office staff received an email urging them to stay away from the White House complex, if possible, due to "ongoing demonstrations."
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Minneapolis businesses, including some that were damaged, are standing in solidarity wi... - 0 views

  • (CNN)The death of George Floyd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man, while in Minneapolis police custody has triggered nights of protests and violence in cities across the country.
  • Their restaurant burned, but they're standing tall
  • When he found out, Islam said he only had one response: "Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served and those officers need to be put in jail."
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  • As the evening raged on, Hafsa said locals did their best to protect Gandhi Mahal by standing in front of it, but within hours, its windows were broken and by morning their restaurant had turned into ashes.
  • "I grew up in a Third World country surrounded by the violence I'm seeing now," he said. "I don't want to see it here. I don't want a police state traumatizing its people. It's time to make a change. We can't make any more excuses for police. This is America. We are here for justice."
  • They transformed their bookstore into a safe space
  • Schwesnedl hung an "Abolish the Police" sign in a window and refused to allow officers to use their parking lot and outdoor space as a staging ground.
  • The couple transformed their space into a "harm free zone," where people set up medic stations for injured protesters to wash out tear gas and clean their wounds.
  • They're using their tattoo parlor to inspire protesters
  • While Nijiya said they knew protesters could still damage their parlor, it did not change their stance on the protests.
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George Floyd: protests and unrest coast to coast as US cities impose curfews | US news ... - 0 views

  • Tense protests over the death of George Floyd and other police killings of black men spread across the US on Saturday night as mayors around the country imposed curfews and several governors called in the national guard amid scenes of violence, injuries and unrest.
  • Governors of six states, including Minnesota, where Floyd died on Monday, called out national guard troops. Many cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus, imposed curfews in anticipation of a restless night ahead.
  • Saturday’s demonstrations had started early but as the night drew on sporadic violence broke out again, seeing businesses torched, police cars set on fire and protesters injured and arrested.
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  • Near Union Square, in the heart of Manhattan, a police vehicle was on fire, sending plumes of black smoke into the air. In Brooklyn, protesters and police clashed for hours in Flatbush. In Los Angeles, a police post was burned in a shopping mall while nearby shops were looted. In Nashville, Tennessee, a historic courthouse was set on fire and in Salt Lake City, Utah, vehicles were burned and a man with a bow and arrow was arrested after he aimed it at protesters.
  • Social media posts showed flames and thick black smoke billowing from a fire in downtown Philadelphia, where an earlier peaceful protest ended with cars being set ablaze, and law enforcement vehicles came under attack in and Chicago.
  • The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, struck a different tone, calling protests against police brutality “right and necessary” but urging an end to violence. “The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest,” he said in a statement.
  • “We will not tolerate actions like these against New York City police officers,” the city’s police department said in a tweet announcing the arrest of “multiple people” for throwing molotov cocktails at police vehicles. The US attorney’s office subsequently announced that it had filed federal charges against three people over the incidents.
  • Numerous media outlets, including CNN, Reuters and MSNBC, reported that their staff covering protests in the city had been hit by rubber bullets fired at them. Media outlets and journalists in numerous cities reported being targeted by police with chemical agents or less-lethal rounds, and several reporters were arrested.
  • “The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters and anarchists,” Trump said, speaking at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center after watching the launch of the historic SpaceX mission.
  • George Floyd’s brother, Philonise, said on Saturday he had briefly spoken to Trump about the death of his brother. “It was so fast. He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak. It was hard. I was trying to talk to him but he just kept like pushing me off like, ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about,’” Philonise told MSNBC.
  • In Atlanta, people set a police car ablaze and broke windows at CNN’s headquarters. In Oakland, San Jose and Los Angeles, protesters blocked highways and police fired teargas. In Louisville, Kentucky, police fired projectiles at a reporter and her cameraman during a live shot. Protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd ignited once again on Friday, as Minneapolis faced another night of chaos and demonstrators clashed with police in cities across the US.
  • You’ve read more than 70 articles in the last six months. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states.
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Opinion | Er, Can I Ask a Few Questions About Abortion? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You know who really reduced abortion numbers in the U.S.? President Obama, with the Affordable Care Act.
  • Millions of American Christians are likely to vote for President Trump on Tuesday because they believe it a religious obligation to support a president who will appoint “pro-life” judges.
  • The National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention both backed a limited right to abortion in the early 1970s, and an article in The Baptist Press welcomed the ruling in Roe v. Wade for advancing “religious liberty, human equality and justice.” A 1970 poll found that about two-thirds of Southern Baptist pastors supported allowing abortion in cases such as rape, deformity or a risk to the mother’s physical or mental well-being.
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  • What mattered to “pro-life” Republicans — more than respect for norms or institutions — was getting justices confirmed who might overturn Roe v. Wade. And many support Trump, despite reservations about him, because their be-all issue is the unborn.
  • The biblical passage most relevant to abortion is perhaps Exodus 21:22: “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined.”
  • Abortion was legal in the United States up to the point of quickening (the fetal movements felt in the second trimester) until the 19th century, when states began to ban abortion.
  • So as Justice Barrett takes the court, I’m hoping that the rethinking among conservative Christians gains ground.
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Election 2020: Why Trump could face a Jimmy Carter scenario - CNNPolitics - 0 views

shared by dytonka on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)The last president facing re-election troubles like Donald Trump's was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Injured by recession and impotent against a national crisis, Carter lost big.
  • "Trump is the worst President ever -- I can't imagine historians will spend more than 10 minutes debating that," says Larry Sabato, who directs the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. But "he really has developed a rock-solid base."
  • "Everybody has PTSD from four years ago," Sabato says
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Opinion | What Will Trump Do After Election Day? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • and it could be one of tumult, banners colliding, incidents at the polls and attempted hacks galore. More likely than not, it will end without a winner named or at least generally accepted.
  • America will probably awaken on Nov. 4 into uncertainty. Whatever else happens, there is no doubt that President Trump is ready for it.
  • They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House.
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  • “at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.”
  • I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs.
  • History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy.
  • You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces.
  • “That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”
  • He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again.
  • Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K.Or not.
  • For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.”
  • “were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ”
  • Senior leadership of the U.S. government went into a panic. Capitol Hill, too. John Bolton, who was still the national security adviser then, and Virginia Boney, then the legislative affairs director of the National Security Council, hit the phones, calling more than a dozen senators from both parties.
  • “Is there any way we can reverse this?” he pleaded. “What can we do?”
  • Mr. Kelly was almost done cleaning out his office. He, too, had had enough. He and Mr. Trump had been at each other every day for months. Later, he told The Washington Examiner, “I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that.”
  • “I think the biggest shock he had — ’cause his assumption was the generals, ‘my generals,’ as he used to say and it used to make us cringe — was this issue of, I think, he just assumed that generals would be completely loyal to the kaiser,”
  • In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general, having auditioned for the job with a 19-page memo arguing in various and creative ways that the president’s powers should be exercised nearly without limits and his actions stand virtually beyond review.
  • “President Trump serves the American people by keeping his promises and taking action where the typical politician would provide hollow words,” she said. “The president wants capable public servants in his administration who will enact his America First agenda and are faithful to the Constitution — these principles are not mutually exclusive. President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve and will always fight for what is best for the American people.”
  • To replace Mr. Coats, Trump selected Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, a small-town mayor-turned-congressman with no meaningful experience in intelligence — who quickly withdrew from consideration after news reports questioned his qualifications; he lacked support among key Republican senators as well.
  • There are many scenarios that might unfold from here, nearly all of them entailing weeks or even months of conflict, and giving an advantage to the person who already runs the U.S. government.
  • “sends letters constantly now, berating, asking for the sun, moon, stars, the entire Russia investigation, and then either going on the morning talk shows or calling the attorney general whenever he doesn’t get precisely what he wants.” The urgency, two F.B.I. officials said, ratcheted up after Mr. Trump was told three weeks ago that he wouldn’t get the “deliverables” he wanted before the election of incriminating evidence about those who investigated and prosecuted his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
  • The speculation is that they could both be fired immediately after the election, when Mr. Trump will want to show the cost paid for insufficient loyalty and to demonstrate that he remains in charge.
  • Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.
  • A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe.
  • Would that mean that Mr. Trump caused any such planned activities or improvisations? No, not directly. He’s in an ongoing conversation — one to many, in a twisted e pluribus unum — with a vast population, which is in turn in conversations — many to many — among themselves.
  • “stand back and stand by” instructions? Is Mr. Trump telling his most fervent supporters specifically what to do? No. But security officials are terrified by the dynamics of this volatile conversation.
  • Conservative media could then say the election was being stolen, summoning others to activate, maybe violently. This is the place where cybersecurity experts are on the lookout for foreign actors to amplify polling location incidents many times over, with bots and algorithms and stories written overseas that slip into the U.S. digital diet.
  • Those groups are less structured, more like an “ideology or movement,” as Mr. Wray described them in his September testimony. But, as a senior official told me, the numbers on the left are vast.
  • That army Trump can direct in the difficult days ahead and take with him, wherever he goes. He may activate it. He may bargain with it, depending on how the electoral chips fall. It’s his insurance policy.
  • Inside the Biden campaign they are calling this “too big to rig.”
  • Races tend to tighten at the end, but the question is not so much the difference between the candidates’ vote totals, or projections of them, as it is what Mr. Trump can get his supporters to believe. Mr. Trump might fairly state, at this point, that he can get a significant slice of his base to believe anything.
  • There were enormous efforts to do so, largely but not exclusively by the Russians, in 2016, when election systems in every state were targeted.
  • The lie easily outruns truth — and the best “disinformation,” goes a longtime C.I.A. rule, “is actually truthful.” It all blends together. “Then the president then substantiates it, gives it credence, gives it authority from the highest office,” says the senior government official.
  • Mr. Trump will claim some kind of victory on Nov. 4, even if it’s a victory he claims was hijacked by fraud — just as he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s three million-vote lead in the popular vote was the result of millions of votes from unauthorized immigrants.
  • In the final few weeks of the campaign, and during Mr. Trump’s illness, he’s done two things that seem contradictory: seeking votes from anyone who might still be swayed and consolidating and activating his army of most ardent followers.
  • The F.B.I. has been under siege since this past summer, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The White House is using friendly members of Congress to try to get at certain information under the guise of quote-unquote, oversight, but really to get politically helpful information before the election,”
  • “They’re the reason he took off the damned mask when he got to the White House” from Walter Reed, the official said. “Those people eat that up, where any reasonable, rational person would be horrified.
  • You ask it to be refilmed, and you take off your mask, which, in my mind, has become a signal to his core base of supporters that are willing to put themselves at risk and danger to show loyalty to him.”
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How Facebook Failed the World - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.
  • these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources.
  • Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.
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  • According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”
  • As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.
  • last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users.
  • Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech.
  • The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents.
  • “It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats.
  • In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.”
  • To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”
  • And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.
  • A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult.
  • Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.
  • “I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”
  • Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”
  • Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence
  • It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible.
  • Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.
  • Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.
  • A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “​​Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”
  • Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.”
  • Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.
  • “I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”
  • What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.
  • solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.
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Yemen: Saudi-led coalition denies targeting detention center after airstrikes kill doze... - 0 views

  • (CNN)The coalition led by Saudi Arabia fighting in Yemen denied that it deliberately targeted a detention center in airstrikes on Friday that killed dozens and caused a nationwide internet blackout.
  • At least 82 people were killed and 266 injured in the attack, the majority of whom are in critical condition, according to Houthi Health Minister Taha Al-Mitwakel. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) earlier said 70 people were killed and 130 were wounded.
  • Another airstrike early Friday hit a telecommunications building in the strategic port city of Hodeidah, causing a nationwide internet blackout, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks network disruptions.
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  • The coalition launched an offensive in 2015 to restore Yemen's internationally recognized government after it was ousted by the Houthis. The coalition has intensified its attacks in the wake of a deadly Houthi missile and drone strike in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi earlier this week.
  • The International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday it was "deeply concerned about the intensification of hostilities" and "deplores the human toll this escalation has caused." US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also called for deescalation.
  • "The escalation in fighting only exacerbates a dire humanitarian crisis and the suffering of the Yemeni people,
  • "From what I hear from my colleague in Sa'ada there are many bodies still at the scene of the airstrike, many missing people," said Ahmad Mahat, head of the MSF mission in Yemen. "It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence."
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Source of Mysterious Gas Leak Explosion in Canadian Town Stumps Officials - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Electricity is cut off. Guards sit in cars on every corner. Hundreds of people are out of their homes, some without access to their clothing or belongings.
  • More than four months after the blast shuttered Wheatley’s downtown and injured 20 of the town’s 2,900 residents, the authorities still don’t know where the gas leak came from, or why it happened.
  • Many are now grappling with whether the center of the town, which was formally recognized in 1865, should be permanently abandoned.
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  • “It still is one of those like really surreal things where you tell people like, yeah, the town blew up,” said Stephanie Charbonneau, a schoolteacher who was forced to flee her house with her family. “Who knows what’s going to happen at the end of all of this? What is Wheatley going to look like?”
  • In the 1890s, gas wells were dug to supply heat and power to homes and businesses in and around Wheatley, which is in southwestern Ontario on Lake Erie. Over time, the wells became obsolete and buildings were constructed directly on top of them; the wells’ locations were loosely, if at all, documented.
  • Before the blast, Wheatley was mostly known for its Lake Erie fishery; a shipyard; and a lakeside provincial park. Few people in the community knew about the gas wells, or that an explosion had leveled a meeting hall in 1936.
  • About 300 people are still not allowed to return to their homes, and 38 of Wheatley’s businesses remain closed. There’s no estimate for when, or if, everyone will be allowed to return home permanently — or whether the destroyed buildings can even be rebuilt. Mr. Shropshire said it may prove impossible to ever safely reopen the area around the blast.
  • Sensors were then installed and quickly began detecting hazardous gases, leading firefighters to evacuate the area around the building twice more during the summer.
  • “Well, here we go again,” Mr. Ingram recalled saying to his wife that evening. “Sooner or later this place is going to blow up.”
  • Local officials quickly opened an investigation. Using ground-penetrating radar, they discovered the site of an old well under a paved parking lot behind the explosion site. Closer to the site, the ground continued to burp gas about every 40 days, which hinted at the source of the gas leak, and also spurred fears of another explosion.
  • “I’m reasonably confident that they’re going to find the source of the gas,” Mr. Shropshire said. “Whether or not it can be mitigated — that’s an entirely different question.”
  • The first sign of trouble was on June 2, when Whit Thiele, a local business owner, went to investigate a foul odor in the basement of a downtown commercial building he owned. There, he saw water pouring through cracks in the foundation and through a drain in the floor before pooling into a fizzing mass.
  • The province has committed about $3.96 million in assistance, but several shop owners said they have yet to see any of that money. They believe individual payments will be far short of what they will need to restart business.
  • At a heated public meeting in November, local officials acknowledged the frustration and anger. But they also emphasized the complexity of the problem and said it will take time to solve it.
  • “I can’t imagine anybody building a building there and feeling safe,” he said.
  • “I don’t want anyone to guess what the problem is, dump concrete on it and 60 years from now my grandkids who could be living in Wheatley have the same darn problem again,” Melissa Harrigan, a member of the town council, said at the meeting. “I am so sorry that it is disrupting your lives in so many ways I can’t imagine, I truly can’t, but I can say we’re trying.”
  • Ms. Declerck said she was concerned that the blast may have left her shop’s building structurally unsound. Like many people in Wheatley, she’s skeptical that a permanent fix for the leaking gas will ever be found.
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Car Bomb in Mogadishu, Somalia's Capital, Kills 8 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In December, President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed suspended Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble over accusations of corruption. Mr. Roble has refused to step down, claiming that Mr. Mohamed — whose official term lapsed in February, but who has stayed in office — is trying “to overthrow the government, the Constitution and the laws of the land.”
    • criscimagnael
       
      This reminded me of our own country's 2020 election and how we are very lucky that it did not get this far. Seeing similar things in other countries shows what could have happened here and that we weren't super far off.
  • A large explosion killed at least eight people and injured nine others in Mogadishu on Wednesday, according to the head of an ambulance service, the latest attack to hit Somalia’s capital as the country grapples with political infighting and a growing humanitarian crisis.
  • The car explosion occurred just before noon on a road leading to Mogadishu’s international airport,
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  • The road also services a major police academy and a compound where United Nations and foreign government staff members and officials live.
  • The bombing, part of a string of attacks blamed on the Qaeda-linked Al Shabab extremist group that have gripped Somalia in recent months, comes as the country’s leaders struggle to resolve a political crisis that has distracted the government from the deteriorating security situation.
  • Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, a government spokesman, condemned what he described as a suicide attack, calling it “cowardly.”
  • “Such acts of terrorism will not derail the peace & the ongoing development in the country,” he wrote on Twitter. “We must unite in the fight against terrorism.”
  • Witnesses said the explosion could be heard in many of the city’s districts.
  • The United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia condemned the attack, and said none of its “personnel or contractors” were in the targeted convoy.
  • The explosion has hit the country as it undergoes a tense election period that has seen growing infighting among its political leaders.
  • The political struggle has threatened to tip the country into violent conflict, like the clashes that broke out in April, and reverse the modicum of peace and stability Somalia has achieved in recent years.
  • As disagreements over the elections have persisted, Al Shabab have stepped up their attacks, particularly in the capital. Over the past two months, the group has carried out car bomb explosions, assassinated government officials and attacked election centers — efforts analysts say are aimed at undermining the electoral process.
  • The security situation in Somalia is deteriorating, and parts of the country are facing their driest season in around four decades. An estimated 3.8 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations, with almost three million displaced within the country.
  • “As long as the election cycle and current tensions drag on, the attention of the political elite will be more inwardly focused, while other priorities lag behind,”
  • “This unfortunately creates greater space for Al Shabab to operate.”
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Pocahontas - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Pocahontas was a Native American woman born around 1595. She was the daughter of the powerful Chief Powhatan, the ruler of the Powhatan tribal nation, which at its strongest included around 30 Algonquian communities located in the Tidewater region of Virginia
  • Pocahontas was named Amonute at birth and went by the name Matoaka. She supposedly earned the nickname Pocahontas, which means “playful one,” because of her happy, inquisitive nature.
  • and made a spectacle of him in front of several Powhatan tribes before taking him to meet Chief Powhatan.
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  • According to Smith, his head was placed on two stones and a warrior prepared to smash his head and kill him. But before the warrior could strike, Pocahontas rushed to Smith’s side and placed her head on his, preventing the attack. Chief Powhatan then bartered with Smith, referred to him as his son and sent him on his way.
  • It’s thought that Pocahontas married an Indian named Kocoum in 1610. Afterwards, she avoided the English until 1613 when she was lured onto the English ship of Captain Samuel Argall and kidnapped during the First Anglo-Powhatan War.Argall informed Chief Powhatan that he wouldn’t return Pocahontas unless he released English prisoners, returned stolen weapons and sent the colonists food. Much to Pocahontas’ dismay, her father only sent half the ransom and left her imprisoned.
  • Pocahontas became known by the colonists as an important Powhatan emissary. She occasionally brought the hungry settlers food and helped successfully negotiate the release of Powhatan prisoners in 1608. But relations between the colonists and the Indians remained strained.By 1609, drought, starvation and disease had ravaged the colonists and they became increasingly dependent on the Powhatan to survive. Desperate and dying, they threatened to burn Powhatan towns for food, so Chief Powhatan suggested a barter with Captain Smith.
  • Soon after, Smith was injured and returned to England; however, Pocahontas and her father were told he died.
  • Smith’s account of Pocahontas’ lifesaving efforts is hotly debated, partly because he wrote different versions of this initial meeting with Chief Powhatan. Many historians believe Smith was never in peril and the placement of his head on the stones was ceremonial.
  • The couple decided to marry, likely for both love and political purposes – although the decision wasn’t an easy one for the staunchly Christian Rolfe until Pocahontas converted.
  • In 1616, Sir Thomas Dale sailed to England to rally financial support for the Virginia Company, the company owned by wealthy Londoners that had financed the Jamestown colony.
  • Much to her surprise, Pocahontas encountered Captain Smith (whom she thought was dead) in London. Although she was overcome with emotion upon seeing him alive and called him “father,” she also reportedly chastised him for his treatment of Chief Powhatan and her people.
  • In March 1617, Pocahontas, her husband and son set sail for Virginia. But they had hardly made progress when she became gravely ill and was taken ashore at Gravesend, England.
  • Pocahontas was buried at St. George’s church in Gravesend on March 21, 1617. Rolfe returned to Virginia, but her son Thomas remained with relatives in England. He returned almost two decades later at age 20 to claim inheritances from his
  • father and grandfather and became a successful gentleman tobacco farmer.
  • colonists declined rapidly.Much of Pocahontas’ life has been romanticized and sensationalized in movies and books. But written accounts and Native American oral history show she lived a brief yet significant life.
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Accused document leaker Jack Teixeira fixated on guns and envisioned 'race war' - The W... - 0 views

  • “Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump.”Teixeira raised his weapon, aimed at an unseen target and fired 10 times in rapid succession, emptying the magazine of bullets.
  • Previously unpublished videos and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with several of Teixeira’s close friends, suggest that he was readying for what he imagined would be a violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews, gay and transgender people — who would make life intolerable for the kind of person Teixeira professed to be: an Orthodox Christian, politically conservative and ready to defend, if not the government of the United States, a set of ideals on which he imagined it was founded.
  • For Teixeira, firearms practice seemed to be more than a hobby. “He used the term ‘race war’ quite a few times,” said a close friend who spent time with Teixeira in an online community on Discord, a platform popular with video game players, and had lengthy private phone and video calls with him over the course of several years.“He did call himself racist, multiple times,” the friend said in an interview. “I would say he was proud of it.”
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  • In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense
  • Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”
  • Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.
  • Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.
  • In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.
  • The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.
  • The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”
  • After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.
  • But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.
  • Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.
  • “He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”
  • “To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.
  • The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.
  • Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”
  • The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.
  • Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.
  • “He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”
  • In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”
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Opinion | Teaching Black Students That They Can't Handle Discomfort Is a Form of Abuse ... - 0 views

  • Many leaders at elite universities seem to think that as stewards of modern antiracism, their job is to decry and to penalize, to the maximum extent possible, anything said or done that makes Black students uncomfortable.
  • In the congressional hearing, the presidents made clear that Jewish students should be protected when hate speech is “directed and severe, pervasive” (in the words of Ms. Magill) or when the speech “becomes conduct” (Claudine Gay of Harvard).
  • But the tacit idea is that when it comes to issues related to race — and, specifically, Black students — then free speech considerations become an abstraction. Where Black students are concerned, we are to forget whether the offense is directed, as even the indirect is treated as evil; we are to forget the difference between speech and conduct, as mere utterance is grounds for aggrieved condemnation.
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  • Sometimes Black students must be protected not only from words, but words that sound like other words. In 2020, Greg Patton was suspended from teaching a class in communications at the University of Southern California. The reason was that one of his lectures included noting that in Mandarin, a hesitation term is “nèi ge,” which means “that …” and has nothing to do, of course, with the N-word. Several Black students said they felt injured by experiencing this word in the class.
  • The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.
  • In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?
  • In my view, the solution is not to decide whether to penalize all hate speech or to allow all of it regardless of whom it is addressed to. Administrators should certainly decry and penalize not just antisemitism but racism on campuses when it is severe and pervasive and constitutes conduct.
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Trump Defends Second Amendment in Speech to NRA Days After Texas Shooting | Politics | ... - 0 views

  • With the nation in fresh mourning and horror over the shooting deaths of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school and the delayed response of law enforcement, many Texas politicians and performers skipped the National Rifle Association convention, which began Friday in Houston.That was not the choice of former President Donald Trump, who headlined the NRA's opening day meeting and chided those who did not "show up" at the event. He started with an homage to the victims, reading each name as a gong resounded offstage. He then segued into a laundry list of policies to control gun violence – some of which have been undermined as details of Tuesday's mass shooting have been revealed.
  • "We witnessed a now familiar parade of cynical politicians seeking to exploit the tears of sobbing families to increase their own power and take away our constitutional rights," Trump said, slamming Democratic lawmakers who have appealed for universal background checks or more restrictive gun laws.
  • Clearly reveling in the warm reception he got from the NRA members – none of whom was allowed to carry guns into the event, since Trump is protected by the Secret Service – Trump pledged that the GOP would be back in control of Congress after this year's elections and back in the "beautiful" White House after the 2024 contest.As the NRA held its convention, officials 275 miles away in Uvalde struggled to explain why law enforcement failed to enter Robb Elementary School even as children lay dying and calling 911 with pleas for help.
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  • And it undercut the first-day assessment by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who praised law enforcement for their "quick response" to the attack, which he said saved lives.
  • Reports since then reveal a grisly, wrenching scene, where terrified students waited for help as the shooter, armed with an assault rifle, continued his rampage. One student told of laying on top of a classmate, smearing her blood on her so both would appear dead, to save them both. The girl who was injured died at the hospital from her injuries, raising questions about whether she would have survived if the reaction had been quicker.Abbott, a vociferous gun rights proponent who last year signed a law allowing people to own guns without a license or training, was originally scheduled to speak at the NRA convention. Thursday night, his office said the governor would instead head to Uvalde, supplying a video speech to show at the NRA meeting.
  • Well-known sports figures decried the gun violence and what they called inaction by elected officials to address it. During Thursday evening's baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, both teams abandoned their usual game-update tweets for a series of tweets on gun violence."The devastating events that took place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable," the Yankees said on the team's official Twitter account, referring to the racist-motivated murder of 10 Black shoppers in Buffalo on May 16.
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Live updates: Latest news on Russia and the war in Ukraine - 0 views

  • U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to send Ukraine more advanced rocket systems and munitions to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield. The White House had been hesitant to send the weapons, which have long been requested by Kyiv.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Russian bombing in the front-line eastern city of Sievierodonetsk as “insanity” given the presence of a large-scale chemical plant.Residents of Sievierodonetsk have been warned not to leave bomb shelters due to the risk posed by toxic fumes.
  • “We believe that the U.S. is deliberately pouring oil on the fire. The U.S. is obviously holding the line that it will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,” Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters.His comments echo those made by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov who had claimed President Joe Biden’s administration increased the risk of direct clashes between Moscow and Washington by supplying rockets to Ukraine.— Sam Meredith
  • Scholz said Germany had been “delivering continuously since the beginning of the war”, pointing to more than 15 million rounds of ammunition, 100,000 grenades and over 5,000 anti-tank mines sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.
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  • His comments come as Russian forces continue their offensive in the Donbas region. The Donbas refers to the two eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk — a major strategic, political and economic target for the Kremlin.
  • Speaking at his general audience to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, he said the block should be lifted because many millions of people depend on wheat from Ukraine, particularly in the world’s poorest countries.
  • Speaking to the RIA Novosti news agency, Ryabkov said of U.S. foreign policy that “the remnants of a responsible, sound approach to the situation have simply been scrapped.”
  • OPEC and non-OPEC countries are scheduled to discuss the next phase of production policy on Thursday.
  • Speaking in an evening address to the nation, Zelenskyy said the cities of Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, and Kurakhove are now at the epicenter of the confrontation.“Given the presence of large-scale chemical production in Sievierodonetsk, the Russian army’s strikes there, including blind air bombing, are insanity,” he said.“But on the 97th day of such a war, it is no longer surprising that for the Russian military, for Russian commanders, for Russian soldiers, any madness is absolutely acceptable.”
  • On average, more than 2 children are killed and more than 4 are injured every day in Ukraine due mostly to attacks using explosive weapons in populated areas, according to reports verified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.Civilian infrastructure critical for children, including 256 health facilities and hundreds of schools, have also been damaged or destroyed in the war.
  • U.S. officials have been hesitant to send MLRS to Ukraine over concerns that Russia may view it as an escal
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Jerusalem, Israel: Violence erupts during controversial flag march - CNN - 0 views

  • Crowds waving Israeli flags set off from Damascus Gate -- the main entry to the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City -- dancing and chanting "the nation of Israel lives" and "death to Arabs."
  • Seventy-nine Palestinians were injured in Jerusalem by rubber bullets, sound grenades and pepper spray, he Palestinian Red Crescent Society said, and one protester was shot with live fire.
  • More than 50 people have been arrested and detained for involvement in incidents of riots and assaulting police officers, Israel's police said in a statement Sunday.
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  • The flag march is an annual parade where mostly nationalist Jewish groups celebrate Israel gaining control of the Western Wall during the 1967 Six-Day War and capturing East Jerusalem, placing the entire city under Israeli control.
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Tulsa shooting: Four dead, multiple injured in "catastrophic scene" at Saint Francis Ho... - 0 views

  • Tulsa Police Department Capt. Richard Meulenberg told CNN multiple people were wounded — he said it was fewer than ten and no one had wounds that were considered life-threatening. He told The Associated Press the medical complex was a "catastrophic scene."
  • The shooting occurred a little before 5 p.m. local time on the campus of Saint Francis Hospital, Tulsa Deputy Police Chief Eric Dalgleish told reporters. Officers responded to the scene within three minutes and made contact with the gunman about five minutes later, he said.
  • The amount of time it took police in Uvalde, Texas, to engage the gunman during last week's deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School has become a key and controversial focus of that probe. Officers waited more than an hour to breach the classroom where the gunman attacked.Dalgleish described the gunman as a Black male believed to be between 35 and 40 years old and said he was armed with a long gun and a handgun. Both weapons appeared to have been fired, Dalgleish disclosed.
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  • Police later received information that the shooter may have left a bomb in a residence in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Muskogee police said Wednesday night. The home was searched by a bomb squad and no explosives were found, CBS Tulsa affiliate KOTV reported, citing Muskogee Police. Surrounding homes were either evacuated or residents were told to shelter in place.Muskogee is located about 50 miles southeast of Tulsa.Tulsa police asked family and friends of the victims and survivors to go to Memorial High School, a block from the hospital campus, to wait to learn the fate of the people at the shooting scene, KOTV said.  
  • Hodges said she was in lockdown for just under two hours.Another employee wondered out loud, "What's going on with the world these days?" A witness observed, "I mean, it's a doctor's office, like, you can't go nowhere no more without something happening. I's just crazy."
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Opinion | How to Reboot Free Speech on Campus - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.
  • There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission
  • Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms, but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?
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  • The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law
  • universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.
  • That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities
  • Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.
  • Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.
  • Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.
  • In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”
  • But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness
  • reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.
  • Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutralit
  • For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
  • In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.
  • But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.
  • The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”
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