ICE bars new foreign students from U.S. if classes are fully online – Axios (ICE Racism resurfaces to damage US economy again)

What they’re saying: “In accordance with March 2020 guidance, nonimmigrant students in new or initial status after March 9 will not be able to enter the U.S. to enroll in a U.S. school as a nonimmigrant student for the fall term to pursue a full course of study that is 100 percent online,” ICE said Friday.

  • “Additionally, designated school officials should not issue a Form I-20 to a nonimmigrant student in new or initial status who is outside of the U.S. and plans to take classes at an [Student and Exchange Visitor Program]-certified educational institution fully online.”

The big picture: ICE introduced and withdrew guidance earlier in July that would have forced international students to leave the U.S. or transfer schools if their universities moved classes entirely online this fall.

  • The Trump administration has faced backlash and lawsuits supported by more than 200 universities and 18 states over the directive released earlier this month.

Source: ICE bars new foreign students from U.S. if classes are fully online – Axios

Serbia protests point to crisis of legitimacy for Vučić government

Young people wearing masks sitting on a street in Belgrade during anti-government protest on July 10, 2020. Serbia.

Peaceful protest in Belgrade, 10 July 2020. Photo by Wikipedia user OakMapping, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Over the past several years, Belgrade has been the setting for mass protests demanding transparency and accountability from the government led by President Aleksander Vučić of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

Protests against gentrification and non-transparent development such as the initiative Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own (Ne da(vi)mo Beograd) brought thousands to the streets and made international headlines, while mass movement “1 out of 5 million” marched for weeks on end against corruption and for free and fair elections. Yet none of these mass anti-government protests were touched by state violence—that changed in early July of this year.

On the night of July 6 and for several nights afterward, police broke up protests in front of the national parliament with tear gas, stun grenades and beatings. Witnesses like Goran Sandić, an associate at the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, saw indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force even blocks away from the parliament—violence that was caught by cellphones in several instances and was widely distributed on Serbian social media.

Kakva je ovo sramota! Zauvek obrukali srpsku uniformu! Zauvek! pic.twitter.com/PRkZ39UgkU

— Balša Božović (@Balshone) July 7, 2020

What a shame! Serbian uniform disgraced forever! Forever!

“We saw with our own eyes and on video that the police attacked people physically,” says Sandić, who attended the second night of protests as an observer. Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) mapped numerous incidents of attacks against both protesters and journalists and an umbrella of NGOs has filed complaints with the public prosecutor and ombudsman calling for an investigation into the incidents.

Why did these protests, unlike the waves of mass protests during the years prior, evoke such a violent crackdown from the authorities? Observers point, on the one hand, to the nature of the protest that was initially underestimated as being mainly anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and supporters of the far-right before swelling to thousands of citizens from all different ages and backgrounds.

A vanguard group of protesters surrounded the parliament and were able to enter it before the police began to break up the scene. “The 5th of October [2000, when Slobodan Milošević’s regime collapsed] was finished by entering the parliament, so it is very symbolic”, says Zdravko Janković, an activist with Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own who has attended numerous public protests in the last decade.

On the other hand, though, these protests represent a unique threat to a president voted in by a minority, plagued by accusations of corruption, and presiding over an unfolding public health and economic emergency. As Sandić notes, “This is literally a life or death situation.”

False Reporting of the COVID-19 Numbers

After months of a strict nationwide lockdown, President Vučić announced that the country had successfully contained the pandemic and enacted a loosening of measures in late May, coinciding with the run-up to rescheduled parliamentary elections.

OSCE’s election observatory body commented on the campaign, “A notable aspect was the meshing of the SNS’s campaign with media coverage of the president and the government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.” The ruling party received considerably more media coverage than any other and benefited from having their supposedly successful combating of COVID-19 repeated by all major media channels. Meanwhile, normal life resumed in some measure, and Belgrade even hosted Europe’s first football derby since the lockdown, with 25,000 fans in attendance.

This made it all the more jarring when Vučić announced, a mere two weeks after highly contested elections that were boycotted by close to 50% of the electorate, that the country would head back into a strict lockdown. This gave the impression that the lifting of the sanctions had been a political move to enable elections.

In the meantime, new information started to cast significant doubts about the government’s rush to reopen the country. An investigation by BIRN showed that authorities significantly under-reported the number of deaths from COVID-19, according to information from the government’s own database. It appeared that “they had one report for the government and one report for the public,” says Janković. Numbers on international tracking sites like the World Health Organization still reflect the government’s numbers—they list a total of 491 deaths as of July 24 for Serbia, whereas the data reported by BIRN showed 632 death as of June 1.

Despite denials by the government and accusations of fake news, the report apparently managed to reach a large number of people, who felt that the government had manipulated them for political ends. “The real journalism has found its way to crawl up in the pile of rubbish journalism,” adds Sandić.

Infiltrators or Agitators

The presence of right-wingers as well as hooligans at the protests on July 6 and the days following is indisputable, but the government’s claims that the protests were dominated by such forces, or even foreign agitators, are highly suspect. Attendees and observers, as well as video footage, show a wide range of protesters from all walks of life.

#NoviSad pic.twitter.com/Vpmo3lfvyj

— Goran Radojev (@RadojevGoran) July 8, 2020

“I was there to monitor and what I could see … the demographics of the protest were such that there were older people, younger people, middle-aged people with children, etc., but from the moment where the clashes started it was mostly young males, dressed in black who started provoking the police,” says Sandić. “What is clear is that there was an attribution of the scenes of violence to all citizens in the protest instead of to hooligans.”

“The only opposition is reality”

Despite attempts by Vučić and some in the media to cast the protests as the work of anti-science conspiracy theorists and people angry exclusively (and irrationally) about lockdown measures, the scenes of police brutality and tear-gassing of journalists that were widely broadcast both on public and social media have jolted Serbian society, and apparently deeply threatened the government’s ability to control the narrative about the pandemic.

The doubts over the official coronavirus numbers have reached members of the medical community, a large group of which has called for the resignation of the government task force and an investigation into possible concealment efforts by the regime. A planned reintroduction of a curfew was revoked. Suspicions over the legitimacy of the elections and the presence of irregularities continue to dog the SNS, even as they dominate the parliament with a super-majority. And long-standing suspicions of the party’s connections to organized crime were re-awakened by a report by investigative outlet KRIK that caught the president’s son watching the Belgrade derby together with a “football hooligan” who has suspected ties to a Montenegrin crime klan.

The continuous drip of bad news for this government undermines their ability to gain public cooperation at a moment when the country faces an unprecedented double threat of an out-of-control pandemic and roiling economic turmoil. “They are facing a problem of their legitimacy—which is quite complicated at this stage of the pandemic in Serbia,” notes Janković. The link between trust in the government and the ability to impose measures to combat these threats has been observed in other countries like the United States, but coming on top of years of anger and despair over corruption as in Serbia, it amounts to a potentially dangerous situation, particularly if the government continues to show itself unwilling to address the mounting accusations levied against it by outraged members of the public.

For observers like Sandić, the concern that the government will fight hard to maintain its grip over authority is as much a concern as the ongoing threat from COVID-19. “I am afraid that the spark that will light up the fire of change could end up in deaths, and that would be the worst scenario.”

The violence and lack of accountability bared openly for the nation to witness during July’s protests after years of restraint suggest these fears may not be unfounded.

Written by Christina Lee · comments (0)
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Michigan State’s entire football team to isolate for 14 days after positive tests

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  • Team to quarantine for two weeks after multiple positive tests
  • Surveillance testing will be repeated again after two weeks

Michigan State University said on Friday that all members of its football team will quarantine or isolate after another staff member and an athlete tested positive for Covid-19.

The team had already paused workouts once after a staff member tested positive on Wednesday. The athletic department said Friday that testing conducted over the last week included a second staff member and an athlete testing positive.

Continue reading…

National Museum of the American Latino Act (H.R. 2420) – GovTrack.us

With the nation’s capital hosting an African American museum and American Indian museum, should a Latino museum come next?

Context

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016. It was the sixth-most visited Smithsonian museum last year, behind only such decades-long mainstays as Air and Space, Natural History, American History — and ranking even higher than the National Zoo.

The National Museum of the American Indian also attracted 1.1 million visitors last year, after opening in 2004.

Yet there is no similar Latino museum, despite more Americans claiming Hispanic or Latinx affiliation than those other two groups combined. Hispanics and Latinos currently comprise 18.1% of the population, compared to 13.4% for African-Americans and 1.3% for Native Americans or American Indians.

Source: National Museum of the American Latino Act (H.R. 2420) – GovTrack.us

Your phone is tainted by misery of 35,000 children in Congo’s mines | Siddharth Kara

via aleksey godin thanks

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My field research shows that children as young as six are among those risking their lives amid toxic dust to mine cobalt for the world’s big electronics firms

Until recently, I knew cobalt only as a colour. Falling somewhere between the ocean and the sky, cobalt blue has been prized by artists from the Ming dynasty in China to the masters of French Impressionism. But there is another kind of cobalt, an industrial form that is not cherished for its complexion on a palette, but for its ubiquity across modern life.

This cobalt is found in every lithium-ion rechargeable battery on the planet – from smartphones to tablets to laptops to electric vehicles. It is also used to fashion superalloys to manufacture jet engines, gas turbines and magnetic steel. You cannot send an email, check social media, drive an electric car or fly home for the holidays without using this cobalt. As I learned on a recent research trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this cobalt is not awash in cerulean hues. Instead, it is smeared in misery and blood.

Continue reading…

Hard Talk…Hard Truth: We are a hijacked nationnadiaharhash.comHard Talk…Hard Truth: We are a hijacked nation  I was watching Hard Talk with Hussam Zomlot, the Palestinian Ambassador to London. Mr. Zomlot is the superstar of the Palestinian diplomacy. Elo…

Nadia Ilham Isam Harhash نادية إلهام عصام حرحش
@NadiasJerusalem
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nadiaharhash.com

Hard Talk…Hard Truth: We are a hijacked nation  I was watching Hard Talk with Hussam Zomlot, the Palestinian Ambassador to London. Mr. Zomlot is the superstar of the Palestinian diplomacy. Elo…

Eurosurveillance | A large COVID-19 outbreak in a high school 10 days after schools’ reopening, Israel, May 2020

On 13 March 2020, Israel’s government declared closure of all schools. Schools fully reopened on 17 May 2020. Ten days later, a major outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) occurred in a high school. The first case was registered on 26 May, the second on 27 May. They were not epidemiologically linked. Testing of the complete school community revealed 153 students (attack rate: 13.2%) and 25 staff members (attack rate: 16.6%) who were COVID-19 positive.

Source: Eurosurveillance | A large COVID-19 outbreak in a high school 10 days after schools’ reopening, Israel, May 2020

Coronavirus case surge exacerbates California inequities – Los Angeles Times

COVID-19 has already killed nearly triple the number of people in L.A. County than died from flu or pneumonia during the most recent eight-month flu season. Between October and May, 1,521 people died from the flu and pneumonia; as of Thursday, 4,263 people have died from COVID-19 in L.A. County.

Source: Coronavirus case surge exacerbates California inequities – Los Angeles Times

Trump Moves to Repeal Anti-Segregation Laws in Suburbs aka: Trump Still Thinks Cosplaying As Richard Nixon Will Help Him Win the Votes of (White) Suburban Women

Take Jane Scilovati, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher who recently told the New York Times that the way Trump handles issues of race is a “disgrace” and “deplorable,” and that she regrets her decision to vote for him in 2016. “He doesn’t have any compassion or empathy; he doesn’t reference historical facts correctly,” she told the Times. “He’s brought more division to this country than we’ve seen since the Civil Rights Act.”

All the suburb-dwellers like Jane want is some peace and quiet, not necessarily a new civil rights movement. They want a president who can say the right words about racism, and not necessarily do anything to combat decades (or centuries, if we want to be accurate) of discrimination and segregation. But all Trump has in his playbook is division and white grievance. It may have worked once, but if polls are to be believed, it’s unlikely to work again.

 

Source: Trump Moves to Repeal Anti-Segregation Laws in Suburbs