Source: FDA OKs second COVID booster shot for older Americans | CIDRAP

More than two centuries into the American experiment, lynching is finally, officially a federal hate crime. President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law in a ceremony at the White House, assigning enhanced penalties for a heinous act that defined the height of racialized violence in the 20th century and beyond.

Lynching needs no explanation: historical archives, books and even newspaper articles are filled with graphic depictions of Black people tortured and killed as part of the public spectacle. The bill itself is named for a 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped, tortured, maimed and killed in Mississippi in 1955 by white men who were never convicted of a crime. Source: 246 Years Later, Lynching Is Finally A Federal Hate Crime

Since its launch last month, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent observers around the world scrambling for context. It is a fact, for example, that Russia and Ukraine were once “together” in the communist mega-state that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But it is also a fact that such Soviet togetherness hardly ensured warm feelings between the two lands. An especially relevant chapter of their history is known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, or “death by starvation.” Spanning the years 1932 and 1933, this period of famine resulted in three to six million lives lost — and that according to the lower accepted estimates. Source: When Stalin Starved Ukraine: The Genocide That Russia Has Tried to Cover Up for Decades | Open Culture

Source: Ukraine’s 10-point plan Journalist Farida Rustamova obtained the full list of Kyiv’s proposals to Moscow on March 29 — Meduza

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Calls to break up the Home Office – and redistribute its functions across Whitehall – are about to grow even louder, following Friday’s ruling that the department broke the law by confiscating refugees’ phones.

There are some basic principles of English law that you ought to be able to rely on with absolute security when you deal with the state. One of these is that you cannot be searched by an officer of the state, or have your property seized, without a specific legal basis.

Though this has modern overlays in the form of the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act, it falls mostly into the legal specialism known as the bleeding obvious. Or, to use the politer words of the High Court when considering the spectacular failure of the Home Office: “None of the legal concepts involved is novel or recondite.”

The behaviour that generated this judicial reaction was the Home Office’s policy, during most of 2020, of greeting people arriving on small boats to claim refugee status with an immediate search for their mobile phones, seizing those phones, demanding the passwords for those phones (while falsely claiming that it was an offence not to give them), downloading all the data on those phones onto Home Office systems and, finally, refusing to return the phones.

Source: Priti Patel’s Home Office illegally seized refugees’ phones | openDemocracy

Source: Guide guides on glaucoma care during the pandemic – Mágica Mistura 車