All posts by nedhamson

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

Salvini crackdown: bulldozers demolish Italian camp housing 1,500 refugees

fascisti!

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San Ferdinando shanty town cleared in first major eviction after launch of hardline immigration measures

More than 1,500 people are being ousted from the refugee camp at San Ferdinando, in southern Italy, in the largest eviction since Italy’s rightwing populist government’s immigration measures kicked in.

On Wednesday morning, almost 1,000 paramilitary police officers surrounded the 400 shacks where the migrants have lived since the camp was established in 2010, near Gioia Tauro, in Calabria. As people were ushered out clutching their few possessions, bulldozers demolished the shanty town of cardboard and wood huts in a matter of hours.

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‘We want to live with them’: wolves airdropped into US to tackle moose problem

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With the wolf population dwindling in a Michigan park, four were trapped in Ontario and transported by helicopter

At a remote national park, four Canadians were recently airdropped into a dizzying new life in America.

They are expert moose hunters, accustomed to cold climates, and covered in fur.

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How many tampons do you need? This man will explain

what was he thinking?

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The astonishing misplaced confidence of some men has been on show again, with one very clever chap attempting to mansplain menstruation to women – using maths

This week, mansplaining on the internet reached giddy new heights as one man tried to calculate just how many tampons are necessitated by “the average period”.

A Twitter user shared a screengrab of a comment, posted on PinkNews’s Facebook page by a plucky gentleman outlining how women might be able to manage their periods affordably with only his trusty man-brain and the power of maths. To his credit, the maths was correct – it was just everything else that was wildly wrong.

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Former Trudeau aide at centre of scandal denies he pressured ex-minister

Gerald Butts said he had one short conversation with Jody Wilson-Raybould at the time about helping SNC-Lavalin Group Inc

A former key aide of Justin Trudeau, who is at the centre of a major political crisis, has denied he had pressured the then justice minister to allow a major firm to avoid a corruption trial last year.

Related: Justin Trudeau’s cabinet rallies behind him after second resignation

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Mark Zuckerberg lays out new ‘privacy-focused’ vision for Facebook

too little, too late #timeisup

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The company has weathered a series of revelations in the last two years about its private data collection and misuse

For 15 years, Facebook has pushed, prodded, cajoled, lured and tricked billions of people into sharing the most intimate details of their lives online, all purportedly in service of making the world “more open and connected”.

On Wednesday, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg put forward a new idea: doing the opposite.

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Ilhan Omar and the weaponisation of antisemitism | Joshua Leifer

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It should not be difficult to recognize the meaningful distinction between Ilhan Omar’s recent comments and the kind of antisemitism surging on the right

Ilhan Omar’s most recent comments have been stripped entirely of their context, their intentions twisted and reversed. During an event in Washington DC last week, she spoke sensitively about her commitment to human rights advocacy, her experiences of Islamophobia, and her compassion for her Jewish constituents. Then Omar said: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country … I want to ask, why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil-fuel industries, or big pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy.”

Related: Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril | Trita Parsi and Stephen Wertheim

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Microplastic pollution revealed ‘absolutely everywhere’ by new research

Oops! This means we are eating and breathing it!

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Contamination found across UK lakes and rivers, in US groundwater, along the Yantze river and Spanish coast, and harbouring dangerous bacteria in Singapore

Microplastic pollution spans the world, according to new studies showing contamination in the UK’s lake and rivers, in groundwater in the US and along the Yangtze river in China and the coast of Spain.

Related: Rivers of waste: Pakistan’s recyclers go out on patrol – in pictures

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S. 648: A bill to ensure the humane treatment of pregnant women by reinstating the presumption of release and prohibiting shackling, restraining, and other inhumane treatment of pregnant detainees, and for other purposes.

Introduced: Sponsor: Sen. Patty Murray [D-WA]

This bill was referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary which will consider it before sending it to the Senate floor for consideration.

9 cosponsors are on that committee.

H.R. 1499: To prohibit brand name drug manufacturers from compensating generic drug manufacturers to delay the entry of a generic drug into the market, and to prohibit biological product manufacturers from compensating biosimilar and interchangeable prod

Introduced: Sponsor: Rep. Bobby Rush [D-IL1]

This bill was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and House Committee on the Judiciary which will consider it before sending it to the House floor for consideration.

Rep. Bobby Rush [D-IL1] is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.