Category Archives: Viva!

As the toll of Australia’s frontier brutality keeps climbing, truth telling is long overdue | Paul Daley

3000.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

The myth of benign, peaceful settlement persists today – even as historians reveal a far more sinister picture

• The Killing Times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Australia must confront
• A massacre map of the frontier wars – interactive

A friend sent me a photograph he’d taken in north-west Queensland of the memorial to the Kalkadoon warriors who, in 1884, fought what was perhaps the biggest battle against government forces to unfold on this continent.

Local oral history, black and white, has it that dozens of Indigenous fighters were shot dead after they charged native police contingents under the command of Sub-Inspector FC Urquhart at Battle Mountain, about 60km from Cloncurry.

Continue reading…

Facebook faces backlash over users’ safety phone numbers

4369.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Contact details supplied by users to enable two-factor authentication led to reduced privacy

Facebook has been accused of abusing a security feature in order to weaken user privacy, after the social network was found using phone numbers initially handed over for account safety for other purposes.

The company now faces criticism that it will be harder to convince users to take other necessary security measures if users view this as an abuse of trust.

Continue reading…

Police union appeals against firing of officer who shot dead Tamir Rice

No sense, shame, or sanity.

4608.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Timothy Loehmann cleared in 2014 shooting but fired in 2017 for failing to disclose he had been forced out by another department

A police union says it has appealed against the firing of a white Cleveland officer who shot dead Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy who was playing with a pellet gun.

Related: Black Lives Matter: birth of a movement | Wesley Lowery

Continue reading…

Fox News reportedly killed Stormy Daniels story to help Trump win

3683.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Diana Falzone ‘had obtained proof’ of alleged affair but was told: ‘Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go’

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel knew about Donald Trump’s illegal hush money payment to a pornographic film actor ahead of the 2016 election but killed the story because the media mogul wanted him to win, it was reported on Monday.

Related: Mueller report to be ‘instantly’ printed as a book, if made public

Continue reading…

Theresa May ‘did not understand EU when she triggered Brexit’

2482.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Former UK ambassador Ivan Rogers says PM’s negotiating strategy was doomed to fail

Theresa May and her circle of advisers did not understand how the European Union works, and consequently followed a negotiating strategy in 2016 that was doomed to fail, the former UK ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers has said.

Speaking to the Institute for Government on Monday, Rogers said the people around the prime minister at the start of the article 50 process “didn’t know very much about European councils or that much about the EU”.

Continue reading…

After 40 years in solitary confinement, activist Albert Woodfox tells his story of survival

3291.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

The former Black Panther and member of the Angola 3 reflects on how he turned his cell from a place of confinement to a space for personal growth

My wrists were handcuffed to my waist by a leather strap. These restraints would become standard for me for decades to come. They walked me to a car and I got in. A captain next to me started elbowing me in my chest, face, and ribs. They drove me to a building just inside the front gate that housed the reception center and death row. Inside was a cellblock called closed cell restricted, or CCR: another name for solitary confinement. In the stairwell they beat me viciously. I couldn’t fight back or defend myself because of the restraints.

My body was badly bruised from being beaten but I was still able to move around the cell on my own. I walked to shake off the pain. The cell was 9ft long and 6ft wide. I could take four or five steps up and back the length of the cell.

Continue reading…

American Citizen In Detention

Profiteering traitor Trump!

In Saner Thought

Closing Thought–04Mar19

Our president is always going on and on about the “hostages” he has helped release from countries like North Korea…..and yet an American citizen is being held in Saudi Arabia and he is silent and prefers to deal with it with inaction……

A US citizen has been detained and tortured in Saudi Arabia and may be on his last leg, sources tell the New York Times. Walid Fitaihi was apparently held against his will in November 2017 at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, where guards blindfolded, stripped, slapped, and bound him, then shocked him with electricity for about an hour. A friend says the Harvard-trained doctor was whipped so badly he couldn’t sleep on his wounded back for days. “It is believed that Dr. Fitaihi has been and is tortured at least psychologically during his imprisonment,” his attorney Howard Cooper wrote the State Department in January, per

View original post 179 more words

Buffy Sainte-Marie and Andrea Warner on Amplifying Native Voices and Killing Colonialism

kpnl61z0khyfwn8geyfa.png

Buffy Sainte-Marie has spent spent more than 50 years at the center of the action, and outside of it. The indigenous Canadian singer-songwriter, a member of the Cree First Nation, was among the artists who comprised the much-mythologized Greenwich Village folk scene in the ‘60s, but her name is often left out among…

Read more…

Politicians Are Still Losing Their Minds Over Ilhan Omar 

yowhdggfxh9ggwwrgxvg.jpg

No one who pays attention to how racism in this country works should be surprised at the continuing freak out over Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women to ever serve in Congress. After February’s overblown scandal over Omar’s tweets regarding the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC’s influence on Congress,…

Read more…