All posts by nedhamson

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

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Description: 10,000 Afro-Brazilian women march against racism
By Ned Hamson
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Bullshit Artist Donald Trump’s 9/11 Cheering “Evidence” Immediately Debunked: Gothamist

Donald Trump took a break from demanding that America kill children, mistreating people with disabilities, and re-arranging photos of himself on his desk to continue pushing a fourth-hand 9/11 NJ “cheering” narrative that has now been debunked and refuted multiple times. But because Trump is a dangerous snake oil salesman who remains on top of the Republican presidential nominee tire fire, it’s important to make it abundantly clear when Trump’s particular brand of bigoted racism lapses into outright fantasy.

Source: Bullshit Artist Donald Trump’s 9/11 Cheering “Evidence” Immediately Debunked: Gothamist

10,000 Afro-Brazilian women march against racism

Activists from across Brazil gathered in the country’s capitol this month to participate in the Black Women’s March and draw attention to the discrimination and disproportionate levels of violence that Afro-Brazilian women face.

Young Black women with natural hair pose for a picture.

Participants from the Natural Hair Empowerment March in Salvador pose for a photo. November is Afro-Brazilian culture month in Brazil. Image by Marco Musse.

Over the past decade, violence against Afro-Brazilian women has significantly increased, while violence against White women has been in a slow decline. Scary facts like these have motivated Brazilians to take action and cultivate a vibrant anti-racist community with close ties to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the US. A year ago I wrote about a similar march, protesting police violence against Afro-Brazilians (trigger warning):

The violent policing of low-income communities of color speaks closely to what is happening in Ferguson, reminding us that though racism looks different throughout the Americas, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy continue to threaten Black and brown lives in similar ways. In Brazil, about 2,000 people are killed by law enforcement every year, most of them Black or dark-skinned, many of them women. And in the same way that state violence against young men has a color, in Brazil, six in ten women murdered are Black. Last month, Joana Darc Brito was shot in a favela in Rio de Janeiro and died en route to the hospital.  Maria de Fátima dos Santos and her daughter Alessandra de Jesus were executed in an ally. Claudia Silva Ferreira was shot by law enforcement back in March, and died after falling out of their car and being dragged for two blocks.

This year’s march was cut short when a white man calling for President Dilma’s impeachment and military intervention in Brazil shot a firearm into the air, dispersing march participants and exemplifying the violence Afro-Brazilian women face daily.

See more images from the march.

Header image by Vinicius Carvalho

Learning from Ebola: Why MERS needs to be taken seriously

As with Ebola, there are few, if any, tools currently available to use in the case of a major outbreak of MERS. Experts point to last spring’s crippling outbreak in South Korea — 186 cases, 37 deaths, hospitals closed to new admissions, all stemming from a businessman who came home sick from the Middle East — as evidence of the danger of underestimating the coronavirus.Because the MERS virus can be transmitted through coughs and sneezes, its spread could be even more difficult to stop than Ebola, which people only catch if they have contact with blood and body fluids.You can generally avoid someone else’s bodily fluids, if you know you need to. But breathing is not an optional endeavor.

Source: Learning from Ebola: Why MERS needs to be taken seriously

In Oldham, Jeremy Corbyn is just another face of ‘poncified’ Labour | Rafael Behr | Comment is free | The Guardian

Ukip sympathies in Oldham carry a note of wounded expropriation. A refrain is that politics no longer belongs to “people from round here”. Hopes that Corbynism might be the adhesive reconnecting a dislocated core to the party seem misplaced. It feels more like a catalyst for decline, another iteration of tin-eared disregard for local sensibilities – distinct from Blairism only in the sense that they are opposite sides of one Islington coin.Labour MPs report similar problems across the north of England. A relationship of long estrangement is reaching closure. People cared about Lab our when they thought the feeling was mutual. Now they are over it and Corbyn isn’t winning them back.“He’s an idiot,” says one middle-aged lady in Royton, outside Oldham town centre. Asked to explain what prompts that view she shrugs. “It’s all the things he comes out with. He needs to get his act together.”

Source: In Oldham, Jeremy Corbyn is just another face of ‘poncified’ Labour | Rafael Behr | Comment is free | The Guardian

Doc Explores Mitrice Richardson’s Suspicious Death After Malibu Arrest: LAist

Lost Compassion, directed by Charles Croft and Chip Croft, explores the case of Richardson, a young woman who disappeared after she was released from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Malibu/Lost Hills Station at 27050 Agoura Rd. in Agoura, and whose body was found a year later in a remote area known as Dark Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains.The case remains open, according to the L.A. Daily News. L.A. County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Rod Kusch said in an email to the outlet that former leads have been exhausted, but that “any new leads will be pursued when they are received by the Sheriff’s Department. It is a death investigation at this time, as the coroner’s office has not ruled it a homicide.” Richardson’s mother, Latice Sutton, believes her daughter was murdered. The tagline for the film is, “Someone knows.”Richardson was 24 years old when she disappeared in September of 2009, according to reporter Mike Kessler, who dove deep into the case for Los Angeles Magazine in 2011. She was sent to jail for allegedly refusing to pay her bill at a restaurant in Malibu. Though she was behaving strangely, she was not held by police for a psychological evaluation. Instead, she was released alone that same night, after midnight, into the remote area surrounding the Lost Hills station. She did not have any money, her car had been impounded, and she did not have her phone. After she was released, she simply disappeared.

Source: Doc Explores Mitrice Richardson’s Suspicious Death After Malibu Arrest: LAist