Sweden to call Security Council meeting over Jerusalem

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Margot Wallström (Social Democrat) is the minister for foreign affairs.

Lyssna: Sweden to call Security Council meeting over Jerusalem

Sweden plans to call for a special meeting of the UN Security Council, where Sweden has one of the rotating seats, after the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Foreign minister Margot Wallström tells Swedish Radio News the American move is not part of a two-state-solution and calls for restraint right now.

 

Beatrice Janzon
beatrice.janzon@sverigesradio.se

Loukas Christodoulou
loukas.christodoulou@sverigesradio.se

Ex-Cop Michael Slager sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing Walter Scott

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The Year Women Had No More F*cks to Give

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Trump Recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital, Escalating Israeli Apartheid

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump announced that the United States will formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, ordering the U.S. embassy to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. While unsurprising, the move is an escalation of U.S. collusion with Israel at the expense of Palestinian lives. The decision has been widely condemned by Palestinians and world leaders, including the United… View On WordPress
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The Year Women Had No More F*cks to Give

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Trump Recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital, Escalating Israeli Apartheid

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump announced that the United States will formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, ordering the U.S. embassy to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. While unsurprising, the move is an escalation of U.S. collusion with Israel at the expense of Palestinian lives.

The decision has been widely condemned by Palestinians and world leaders, including the United Nations, and progressive activists. The move is a flagrant violation of international law — and signals increased conciliation to the decades-old military occupation: majority-Arab East Jerusalem was illegally annexed by Israel forces in 1967. Since then, Israel has demolished 28,000 homes in the city and revoked the residency of almost 15,000 Palestinian residents in what Noura Erakat describes as an explicit pursuit of a Jewish demographic majority. This process of settler colonialism is enforced by Israeli state violence — including the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children — and apartheid rule, under which Arabs are subject to racist laws that ghettoize neighborhoods and deny Arabs freedom of movement and equal access to work and education. No country in the world recognizes Israel’s ownership of Jerusalem as legitimate, including (until now) the United States.

Of course, our government has long supported the Israeli occupation — and ensuing human rights abuses of Palestinians. So it is odd then, to call this the “kiss of death for peace” in the Middle East, as some have characterized Trump’s decision. Neither Israel nor the United States (even under Democratic administrations) has expressed any interest in a genuine peace that respects the humanity of the Palestinian people. Instead, the United States has allowed Israeli violence to go unchallenged for decades, bankrolling an occupation that has displaced 7.2 million Palestinians. The occupation — and the mass incarceration, police brutality, rape and sexual abuse specifically targeting Palestinian women and girls, and forced deportations that support it — are undoubtedly a feminist issue, and one that Americans are complicit in perpetuating.

Given this history, Donald Trump alone is hardly to blame for Israeli expansionism. Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has found a far-right ally in Trump, the United States’ uncritical support of Israel’s human rights abuses is bipartisan. During a week of atrocious actions by Trump and the GOP, from the tax scam that will kill poor people to the Muslim Ban 3.0, Democrats chose to focus on supporting Trump’s plans in Israel: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “urged” Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital and Kamala Harris recently returned from a trip to visit Netanyahu. Earlier this year, Democrats and Republicans alike tried to criminalize protesting Israel, originally including liberal darling Claire McCaskill and Kirsten Gillibrand. In a political moment where the GOP is wreaking havoc against marginalized people everywhere, it is indefensible for the Democratic Party to spend time lobbying for Israeli occupation rather than poor people, Muslims, immigrants, queer & trans people, and people of color fighting for survival. Even more terrifying is liberal Zionists colluding with the very Nazis who have historically and currently inflicted violence and widespread terror against Jewish people and communities of color.

It is clear that liberation for marginalized people — in the U.S. and in Palestine — will not come from elite political parties. It will come from the people themselves. Resisting state violence is a human right. Let’s not mischaracterize Palestinian protests in the coming days as “violence” or blame Palestinians for resisting the occupation that has destroyed lives and communities.

As Erakat, a Palestinian human rights attorney, tells CBS,

“Trump has done today is to say that the global North will continue to help the evisceration of a Palestinian people and to force us into ghettoized sovereignty where we no longer make those claims. But that is untenable. No people has ever accepted that. And this just means that there is a new chapter of Palestinian freedom fighting and now to end apartheid completely.”

Watch the rest of her incredible interview here.

Header image: BDS Movement
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Trust no one: Scholar risked all to document Islamic State

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North Korea is ready to open direct talks with US, says Russia’s Sergei Lavrov

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  • Pyongyang ‘wants above all to talk to the US about guarantees for its security’
  • Lavrov says he informed Rex Tillerson in Vienna on Thursday

North Korea is open to direct talks with the US over their nuclear standoff, according to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said he passed that message to his counterpart, Rex Tillerson, when the two diplomats met in Vienna on Thursday.

There was no immediate response from Tillerson but the official position of the state department is that North Korea would have to show itself to be serious about giving up its nuclear arsenal as part of a comprehensive agreement before a dialogue could begin.

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UK outbreak probe points to Salmonella reservoir in faulty restaurant drains

Lisa Schnirring | News Editor | CIDRAP NewsDec 07, 2017 A restaurant’s faulty drainage system—thought to harbor Salmonella bacteria in biofilms—was the likely source of a long and perplexing outbreak in England, investigators determined.
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Nothing is Safe! Google Translate Makes Gender Neutral Languages Sexist

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Image courtesy Pixabay

Back on the 28th of November, a tweet by Iranian-American scholar Alex Shams went viral.

Turkish is a gender neutral language. There is no “he” or “she” – everything is just “o”. But look what happens when Google translates to English. Thread: http://pic.twitter.com/mIWjP4E6xw

— Alex Shams (@seyyedreza) November 27, 2017

He explained in the comments that Turkish is a gender neutral language, but when you enter Turkish sentences into Google Translate, the sentences get automatically gendered. And of course, in the most stereotypical manner possible. As his tweet shows, gender-neutral sentences get translated into sexist assumptions, like the idea that engineers are male, and nurses are female, and “she” naturally loves “him”.

Now, Facebook user Dina Utami has found a similar pattern in Bahasa Indonesia, a similarly gender-neutral language.

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Shams explains in his thread that this happens because Google Translate picks up on how these words are commonly used online. So if the majority of references in its database to “engineers” are male, it categorises the word as male. He explains the danger of this phenomenon quite comprehensively. “Google Translate magnifies biases that exist in our culture – like unequal access to employment for women in all fields, or culturally constructed notions that women are unhappy, lazy, hopeless romantics always looking for husbands – and transforms them into translations. It has been argued that technology overcomes the biases of human beings, and because it is neutral the increasing automation of the world offers a way out of inequality. But as this small example shows, technology is far from neutral. Technology, like anything else, is what you make of it – and the way we are using technology is currently reinforcing the inequalities and biases of the world around us.”

The post Nothing is Safe! Google Translate Makes Gender Neutral Languages Sexist appeared first on The Ladies Finger.