All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

246 Years Later, Lynching Is Finally A Federal Hate Crime

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

When Stalin Starved Ukraine: The Genocide That Russia Has Tried to Cover Up for Decades | Open Culture

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

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

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

Turkish Tuesdays and language learning for empathy building as part of Adulting education?

Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better

  (Updating this post, but need to find the episode again, as the video link is dead…)

My favorite family TV show of all time, a modern Turkish equivalent of Bewitched meets Harry Potter, was crucial to me in learning Turkish while I lived there, and to helping me (some years less than more) keep from entirely forgetting my Turkish in the 15 years since. 

sihirli_annem_logosu

#SihirliAnnem 116. Bölüm   sihirli-annem-4-sezon/sihirli-annem-116-bolum

7:03 

Episode 116

“Savasa Hayir” NE GUZEL!!!

“No to War” WONDERFUL!!

#peace

 

So, it turns out that using Twitter for tracking my language learning was less helpful than I’d expected.  The tweets get lost in a sea of other tweets, nearly never to be seen again (yes, like Nearly Headless Nick’s neck…), and then the links to the show disappear as it is bought by other networks or moved to other servers.  I did manage to…

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Shanghai’s experiment on middle-way COVID-19 control model ends with citywide lockdown · Global Voices

After two weeks of soft lock-down under the pandemic control strategy of “Precise Prevention and Control,” Shanghai, home to 25 million residents, started a two-phase shutdown as the city’s public health system is on the verge of collapse and the number of confirmed Omicron cases has continued surging.

Many believe that the decision for a large-scale lockdown signifies the failure of the Shanghai model, a middle path between the zero-COVID-19 and living with COVID-19 strategies.

As China’s domestic financial center, Shanghai had been avoiding a complete shutdown of the city despite the outbreak of Omicron. Instead, the city has adopted a Precise Prevention and Control strategy which involves district-level massive testing and lockdowns. The rationale is to control the outbreak scale and prevent the collapse of the public health system.

However, on 27 March, Shanghai officials announced that they were splitting the city into two big districts, each of which would be locked down for 5 days. All public transportation would be suspended and residents had to go through rounds of testing during the lockdown period.

The sudden announcement triggered panic buying. Videos on various social media platforms show people fighting over food in supermarkets.

Source: Shanghai’s experiment on middle-way COVID-19 control model ends with citywide lockdown · Global Voices

Un día antes

Santiago Galicia Rojon Serrallonga

SANTIAGO GALICIA ROJON SERRALLONGA

Derechos reservados conforme a la ley/ Copyright

Los minutos y las horas se consumen irremediablemente. Apenas ayer, los instantes eran hoy y pronto se volvieron pasado. Con los momentos que se han desintegrado, se marcharon pedazos de mi vida. Cada instante me noto menos entero. No soy el niño ni el adolescente de entonces; tampoco me parezco al joven que fui. Mi edad madura avanza a otras estaciones, a comarcas y a sitios que antaño me parecían distantes. Quizá es la razón por la que apenas me reconozco. Veo que, ante la caminata de las manecillas, mi travesía deja, en otros puertos, remembranzas de mi paso que, algún día, a cierta hora, probablemente se transformarán en olvido. +Quiero pensar. Lo necesito. Por eso es que, un día antes de que se marche mi edad presente, abro un paréntesis y me columpio en sus espacios, con mis…

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