Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Oklahoma’s Bathroom Ban Will Endanger Transgender Children | Human Rights Watch (Me: Lawmakers do not care a bit for rights of transgender youth – period!)

If enacted into law, Senate Bill 615 would further isolate and stigmatize transgender children who are already prone to bullying, rendering schools an unsafe and hostile environment. Many students are effectively “outed” through these bans as they are compelled to implicitly disclose their transgender status through their bathroom usage.

Oklahoma’s lawmakers have chosen to expand a nationwide assault on transgender children’s rights. Officials should instead ensure transgender children have safe and comfortable access to bathrooms, and an education free from discrimination. Lawmakers should defend the rights of all students, not undermine them.

 

Source: Oklahoma’s Bathroom Ban Will Endanger Transgender Children | Human Rights Watch

Uvalde school shooting ends with 18 children, 3 adults dead | The Texas Tribune

Source: Uvalde school shooting ends with 18 children, 3 adults dead | The Texas Tribune

Tory MPs have too much riding on Johnson’s lies to call them out now | Rafael Behr | The Guardian (Me: Brits’ Trump – no shame, no class, no government – Boris)

Conservative MPs do not need any new information to judge whether Boris Johnson is fit to stay in office, and since they haven’t removed him yet there has to be a good chance they never will.

Sue Gray’s report into breaches of lockdown regulations in Downing Street will embellish and illustrate a story that is already known. Laws imposed on the country in a public health emergency were flouted at the centre of government and the person ultimately responsible – the prime minister; lawmaker number one – was himself a lawbreaker. When asked about it in parliament, he lied.

That much has been known for months. Johnson’s reprobate character has been displayed for years. That makes two categories of Tory MP. There are those who were truly appalled when they realised their leader was a scoundrel, and those who never objected to his malpractice on moral grounds, but worry that it is an electoral liability.

If the first group were large enough to force their leader’s resignation, they would have done it already. The second group has enough data to infer that the Tory majority might be imperilled if Johnson leads his party into a general election, but no way of being sure. Byelection defeats, opinion polls and lost council seats prove that voters are unhappy now, but there is always the possibility they will cheer up again.

 

Source: Tory MPs have too much riding on Johnson’s lies to call them out now | Rafael Behr | The Guardian

Partygate: Insiders tell of packed No 10 lockdown parties – BBC News

Insiders who attended events at Downing Street during lockdown have told the BBC how staff crowded together and sat on each other’s laps and how party debris was left out overnight.

For the first time, insiders who were at some of the events have told BBC Panorama in detail what they saw.

They describe arriving for work the morning after a get-together to find bottles lying around parts of the building, bins overflowing with rubbish and empties left on the table.

They also tell of events with dozens of staff crowded together, and parties going so late that, on occasion, some ended up staying in Downing Street all night.

And they say staff mocked others who tried to stop what was going on.

The prime minister’s official spokesman said that Boris Johnson took revelations about what happened in Downing Street during lockdown “very seriously”.

 

Source: Partygate: Insiders tell of packed No 10 lockdown parties – BBC News

Israel may have killed Shireen Abu Akleh in targeted attack – report – The Jerusalem Post

Salim Awad, a Jenin resident who filmed the incident, told CNN that there were no armed Palestinians in the area.

“There was no conflict or confrontations at all. We were about 10 guys, give or take, walking around, laughing and joking with the journalists,” he told CNN. “We were not afraid of anything. We didn’t expect anything would happen, because when we saw journalists around, we thought it’d be a safe area.”

Rather, he claimed that shots were fired at Abu Akleh and three other journalists as they approached IDF vehicles.

“They were shooting directly at the journalists.”

Jamal Huwail

Another individual at the scene, Jamal Huwail, a professor at Jenin’s Arab American University and former Fatah lawmaker who helped move Abu Akleh’s body, told CNN that “They were shooting directly at the journalists.”

 

Source: Israel may have killed Shireen Abu Akleh in targeted attack – report – The Jerusalem Post

‘Almost nobody is happy with Putin’ Meduza’s sources say a new wave of pessimism in the Kremlin has Russia’s hawks demanding more brutality in Ukraine while others scout for presidential successors — Meduza

Now, three months into the war, pessimism is staging a comeback. “It won’t be possible to live like before. Any talk of development is out the window. But life goes on. There are gray imports. There’s trade with China and India,” said a source close to the prime minister’s cabinet.

At the same time, officials in the Kremlin still see no realistic scenario in which President Putin could end the hostilities in Ukraine and retain his high approval rating in Russia. As Meduza reported previously, the administration’s domestic policy team has been brainstorming strategies to “withdraw with dignity” since just a few weeks into the invasion, but officials have yet to come up with anything.

Unhappiness on all sides

“There’s probably almost nobody who’s happy with Putin. Businesspeople and many cabinet members are unhappy that the president started this war without thinking through the scale of the sanctions. Normal life under these sanctions is impossible. The ‘hawks’ are mad about the pace of the ‘special operation’; they think more decisive action is possible.”

 

Source: ‘Almost nobody is happy with Putin’ Meduza’s sources say a new wave of pessimism in the Kremlin has Russia’s hawks demanding more brutality in Ukraine while others scout for presidential successors — Meduza

Research: Humanitarian Pathways for Central Americ.. | migrationpolicy.org

Since 2015, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans—primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—have left their home countries due to an intertwined set of factors, including poverty, food insecurity, gang-related violence, and human-rights violations. Many have taken perilous journeys to seek protection in neighboring Mexico and the United States, where the scale and diverse profiles of asylum seekers have challenged the governments’ processing capacity.

For most of these Central Americans, traveling by their own means to Mexico or the United States is the only avenue to seek international protection. While refugee resettlement programs allow states to vet and select individuals who have fled their country and are living in another, resettlement has typically been used on a very limited basis in the region.

Some policymakers, notably in the United States and Canada, have begun to reconsider the role that resettlement could play in addressing these protection needs. This brief assesses how resettlement and other humanitarian pathways have operated in the region to date, and explores the opportunities and obstacles to scaling up these programs.

 

Source: Research: Humanitarian Pathways for Central Americ.. | migrationpolicy.org

The Xinjiang Police Files | The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies

From 2017, the Chinese state detained Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in so-called Vocational Skills Education and Training Centres (VSECs). Previously, witnesses and leaked state documents outlined the securitised nature of these re-education facilities. Now, the “Xinjiang Police Files,” a major cache of classified files obtained by a third party from internal XUAR police networks, provides an unprecedented inside view. Detailed re-education camp security instructions describe special police units carrying military assault weapons and show guards handcuffing detainees. The files include thousands of images of detained Uyghurs and show that in 2017/18, over 12 percent of Uyghur adults were detained. Candid internal speeches show leading officials’ impassioned demands to treat persons from ethnic groups like dangerous criminals, and to readily open fire to stop escapees and to safeguard the camps. This article authenticates and contextualises the Xinjiang Police Files within the growing field of published internal XUAR government documents. Scholars have argued that political paranoia is a common feature of atrocity crimes. Here, it is suggested that the pre-emptive internment of large numbers of ordinary citizens can be explained as a devolution into political paranoia that promotes exaggerated threat perceptions.

Source: The Xinjiang Police Files | The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies

Also: (Thousands of detained Uyghurs pictured in leaked Xinjiang police files – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/24/thousands-of-detained-uyghurs-pictured-in-leaked-xinjiang-police-files)

“Se stanno devastando l’Amazzonia in cerca di oro, c’è un mercato degli acquirenti. Chi compra questo oro? I grandi marchi e i marchi del mondo della moda?” Chi allora compra quest’oro come gingillo? Per favore assicurati che non sei tu!

Barbara Crane Navarro

“Fondazione Cartier & Triennale Milano – Yanomami osservando un sito minerario d’oro nel loro territorio” – Foto degli Yanomami, Alto Orinoco, Amazonas, Venezuela e fotomontaggio: Barbara Crane Navarro

PER FAVORE, ASCOLTA IL MESSAGGIO DELLO SCIAMANO YANOMAMI – L’APPELLO DELLA FORESTA PLUVIALE!

«Ehi, guardaci!

Ti vediamo

Cerchiamo di mostrartelo

Non ti sei mai preso la briga di imparare la nostra lingua

Guardavi sempre in basso

Ti avvertiamo dall’inizio

La terra è viva

Questa terra non può essere posseduta

Questa terra siamo noi

Tutti noi

Volevi le pietre

Oro

Le tue cose splendenti

Titoli – Bandiere – Profitti

L’hai chiamato progresso

Cerchiamo di insegnarti

Ma sei sempre stato così avido

Troppo primitivo – troppo selvaggio

capire

Adesso porti ancora maledizioni sugli Yanomami

Malattie

E di nuovo moriremo

E tutte le terre native si trasformano in

cenere e fango

Cinque secoli

Non hai mai alzato gli occhi per scoprirlo

quello che teniamo al…

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