The police director of Elizabeth, N.J., has rebuffed calls to resign, and the mayor has declined to remove him.
All posts by nedhamson
Trump UN human rights snub will buoy repressive regimes, top Democrat warns
- Bob Menendez condemns administration in letter to Pompeo
- State department has not responded to UN’s official complaints
The Trump administration’s refusal to engage with UN human rights monitors risks undermining standards around the world and will embolden repressive regimes such as China and Russia, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee has charged.
Related: Trump withdraws from UN arms treaty as NRA crowd cheers in delight
Is there a policy, either formal or informal? What is that policy?
Facebook Frenzy: How the German Right Wing Dominates Social Media
A comprehensive analysis has revealed the degree to which German right-wing populists from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party are dominating the social media landscape. They might be getting help from abroad.
Joe Biden and the Apologies that Weren’t
Politicians can make mistakes. People should be allowed to evolve. But first, they have to say they’re sorry.
US Takes Back Signature on Arms Trade Treaty | Inter Press Service
The US, in effect, joins three other “rogue states” – North Korea, Iran and Syria – who voted against the treaty at the UN General Assembly back in April 2013, along with 23 countries that abstained on the voting, including China, Russia, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
Source: US Takes Back Signature on Arms Trade Treaty | Inter Press Service
Far-right pod found on mainstream streaming platforms
Spotify un-right yourself!
Some well-known platforms host rightwing podcasts.
Lyssna: White supremacists air views on podcasts
White supremacists in Sweden are using podcasts – published on well-known platforms – to spread their messages online, reports newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
Daniel Poohl, editor-in-chief at Expo, a magazine that’s long covered right-wing extremism in Sweden, says podcasts have become a more popular medium among alt-right groups to spread their message and to help recruit new members.
Spotify, one of the platforms that features a podcast by the Swedish far-right group Nordic Alt-right, did not respond to Dagens Nyheter for comment about the podcast.
Poohl says it wouldn’t take much for platforms to be more vigilant against hosting content that’s racist and that could incite hatred.
Liv Lewitschnik
liv.lewitschnik@sverigesradio.se
Austrian deputy leader endorses far-right term ‘population replacement’
nazification in Austria – deja vu

Heinz-Christian Strache says term associated with extreme right is a ‘term of reality’
Austria’s deputy leader has said his party is fighting against a “replacement” of the native population, endorsing a term usually employed by the extreme right, as the country’s rightwing populists double down on their rhetoric before the European elections.
Heinz-Christian Strache, the deputy chancellor in Austria’s conservative-nationalist coalition government and the leader of the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ), told the Krone newspaper on Sunday that his party was “consistently following the path for our Austrian homeland, the fight against population replacement, as people expect of us.”
Breastfeeding reduces child obesity risk by up to 25%, WHO finds

Organisation says marketing claims formula is as good for babies as breast milk are misleading
Breastfeeding can cut the chances of a child becoming obese by up to 25%, according to a major study involving 16 countries.
World Health Organisation (WHO) experts who led the Europe-wide research are calling for more help and encouragement to women to breastfeed, as well as curbs on the marketing of formula milk which, said senior author Dr João Breda, misled women into thinking breast was not necessarily better.
Ebola spreading at record pace in DRC, now 1,466 cases
The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History
viva! 
About 71,000 VHS and Betamax cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work.
“She was interested in access to information, documenting media, making sure people had the information they needed to make good decisions,” says the film’s director, Matt Wolf.
The year 1980 brought the launch of CNN, and the 24-hour news cycle. Soon, three, four, five, and sometimes as many as eight tapes were spinning away at once in Stokes’s apartment, recording news broadcasts, commercials, and everything in between on multiple networks. While many people assumed that television networks held on to everything they aired, that wasn’t the case. Studios were constantly erasing and recycling broadcast tapes in order to save money and free up storage space.
“We’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes.”
Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer. From 1968 to 1971, she had co-produced Input, a Sunday-morning talk show airing on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate, with John S. Stokes Jr., who would later become her husband. Input brought together academics, community and religious leaders, activists, scientists, and artists to openly discuss social justice issues and other topics of the day.
“Our vision is really aligned with Marion’s,” says Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive. “It’s really bold and ambitious: universal access to all knowledge.” Marion’s son had contacted the Internet Archive when he was trying to find a home for her tapes in 2013. Macdonald immediately seized the opportunity. Within 20 minutes, the two were on the phone.
Macdonald recalls asking Metelits, “How could you physically manage taping all this stuff? And he said, ‘Well, we’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes’ … that was one of the cycles of their lives, tape swapping.”
In addition to her son Michael and her husband, Stokes’s nurse, secretary, driver, and step-children were enlisted to assist in her around-the-clock task of capturing every moment on television. She would also involve them in active conversations, asking those around her what they thought about how the issues of the day were being handled on broadcast television.

Having been surveilled by the government for her early political activism––she and her first husband, Melvin Metelits, had attempted to defect to Cuba together before splitting up––Stokes was exceedingly cautious about her recordings while she was alive. She eschewed Tivo, and although she was an early and evangelical investor in Apple Inc., she never sent an email in her life. She even managed to convince the rest of the already-wealthy Stokes clan to buy Apple stock, which paid off in spades. She funneled these funds into her recording project and the massive storage space she required as the sole force behind it.
“She’s already excluded from power and established institutions, so it makes sense that she’d want to pursue her life’s work privately,” says Wolf.
Now, Stokes’ work will be made publicly available on the Internet Archives, bit by bit, offering everyone the opportunity to examine history––and perhaps to set the record straight.
You must be logged in to post a comment.