Category Archives: Viva!

Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism on social media up 30 percent in January 2018 compared to 2016, WJC report finds

Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism on social media up 30 percent in January 2018 compared to 2016, WJC report finds:

chescaleigh:

YouTube is running rampant with these fucks and the platform is doing nothing about it. It’s beyond disgusting and embarassing.

DACA Recipients and Xavier President Urge Congress to Pass a Clean Dream Act

Father Michael Graham, Xavier University President, comments on need for clean Dream Act

On Thursday, March 1 at 11:00 a.m., 30 community members gathered alongside DACA recipients and the president of Xavier University to call on our local members of Congress to support a clean Dream Act. Following the failure of a bipartisan Senate proposal two weeks ago, and with the coming expiration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on March 5th, Congress must get back to work immediately to protect hundreds of thousands of Dreamers from losing protection from deportation and work permits.

José Cabrera, a DACA recipient and senior at Xavier University said, “We want a clean Dream Act, we do not want a DACA fix. We want a clean Dream Act that will give us a pathway to citizenship. A clean Dream Act that will not put any of our family members in danger.” Heyra Avila, another DACA recipient, echoed Cabrera’s sentiment by saying, “I don’t want my DACA if it means that my parents will face risk of deportation.”

Samantha Searls, Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, explained, “DACA recipients are in school and they have deadlines for their projects so we need to set a good example for our students and make sure that Congress meets the deadline that has been set for them.”

Fr. Michael Graham, SJ, president of Xavier University spoke in support of a clean Dream Act saying, “Beyond this being a common sense nonpartisan cause, it’s a moral issue and a profoundly moral issue. Our stand here at Xavier is grounded not just in our own sense of what is right and wrong, as a Catholic Jesuit university, but also in church teaching.”

On Tuesday, three Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati traveled to Washington, DC to be part of a Catholic Day of Action for Dreamers. Sr. Andrea Koverman framed their decision to participate: “You might think that women who take a vow of obedience would not intentionally break the law, but there is a higher calling than the law of man. We have been taught from Jesus himself that when the laws of man do not align with the laws of God, that we have a moral obligation not to comply. We made the choice to engage in civil disobedience and were arrested in the rotunda with about 40 others.”

When asked why he decided to stand up and speak about DACA, Fr. Graham said “We are a university. As a university we welcome students who come to us from all kinds of different circumstances in their past. We know them up close and personal as talented people who have great futures ahead of them, and enormous amounts to offer the world.”

The post DACA Recipients and Xavier President Urge Congress to Pass a Clean Dream Act appeared first on IJPC | Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center | Cincinnati Ohio.

In a Case of Awful Timing, Trump Administration Seeks Shutdown of New School Safety Research

by Ted Gest

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut at the end of 2012, Congress scrambled to do something in response to the nation’s worst school shooting.

Lacking agreement on gun control measures, lawmakers did what they do best in such situations: spend money on studying the problem.

Thus was born the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI), which aimed at throwing a large pot of federal funds to researchers to examine just about every aspect of what might lead people to commit violence against students of all ages.

The $75 million annually awarded to the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) was an especially large sum for a single crime problem, more than the agency normally spends on researching every other crime issue combined. (The appropriation dropped to about $50 million this year.)

In a case of bad timing, the Trump administration on Feb. 12 asked Congress to bring the program to a halt.

The Office of Management and Budget had no way of knowing that only two days later, a teenage gunman would enter a Florida high school from which he had been expelled and kill 17 students and staff members, an event that like the Newtown, CT, shooting more than five years earlier would start a new scramble in Congress and elsewhere to find ways of preventing a repeat episode.

The question now is whether Congress will pay attention to one of the latest Trump budget-cutting moves, which was buried at the bottom of page 719 of the lengthy spending plan sent to Capitol Hill.

The answer may not be as simple as it may seem at first glance.

That is because some insiders believe it was questionable for Congress to throw so much money at one crime and safety question and expect quick results.

What has happened is that hardly any of the research commissioned as a result of Congress’ 2013 spending action has been completed. That is not surprising, given that major research projects in criminal justice and many other fields of study take several years to complete.

That fact led officials of the Trump-led Justice Department to seek a pause in the school safety research.

Asked to comment on the budget request, which was not highlighted when the DOJ budget was released, the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which includes NIJ, noted that school safety research had received a total of $275 million in the last three fiscal years but that “this program was not intended to be a permanent funding stream.”

The agency added that, “The results of currently funded projects will continue to provide evidence about what works (and what does not) in keeping our schools safe and to inform future resource decisions. Almost all CSSI-funded projects are still active and final reports have not yet been published.”

Nearly a year ago, in its first budget message to Congress, the Trump White House sought to cut back but not eliminate the school safety research program. Lawmakers rejected the request and kept it going with about $50 million.

As The Crime Report reported last spring, at the time NIJ described the results of a few studies that had been completed. In one, the Rand Corp. made several recommendations, such as that “technology developers should turn their focus to the general area of communications, including devising low-cost ways to allow teachers to have direct, layered, two-way communication with a central command and control system.”

NIJ lists the ongoing school safety research on its website, at least some of which could provide information relating to the kind of shooting that hit Parkland, Fl., this month.

For example, a grant was given to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City to do several things, such as providing “a comprehensive understanding of the perpetrators of school shootings and test causal factors to assess if mass and non-mass shootings are comparable.”

Researcher Joshua Freilich said his work is not yet finished. He notes that because school crime encompasses disparate activities such as non-school related incidents such as a drug deal gone bad, workplace violence, suicide, and the intentional targeting of students and employees as happened in Florida, the John Jay project will provide “a typology of event types and their prevalence so as to provide policy makers an accurate assessment of the nature of the phenomenon.”

Examples of grants under the program last year include about $7 million to the Leidos Innovations Corporation of suburban Washington, D.C., to operate a “National Criminal Justice Technology Resource Center,” and another $7 million to the Rand Corp., with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Nebraska Department of Education “to scale-up the Good Behavior Game (GBG),” described as “an evidence-based classroom behavior management approach emphasizing positive reinforcement.”

One expert with an insight into the program is Greg Ridgeway of the University of Pennsylvania’s criminology department, who was acting NIJ director when CSSI began.

Ridgeway says that the initial $75 million provided by Congress may have been an “overinvestment” and that eliminating the program now “would undercut the progress.”

A better way to fund such research, he suggests, would be a smaller but steadier amount each year. He gave the example of research on violence against women, which has received about $4 million annually for more than two decades.

“That modest but sustained investment has resulted in a large body of research, a cadre of researchers and students studying the problem, a comprehensive understanding of the issues, and findings on what works,” he says.

Applying that idea to schools, he says that reducing the funding to about $10 million a year for seven more years would save a lot of money “while still keeping the research community engaged in figuring out what works in school safety.”

Officers of the Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which represents two major criminology organizations, issued a statement Monday saying in part, “We were surprised and troubled to see that the President’s FY 2019 Budget Request–released just two days before the Parkland shooting–did not request a continuation of this funding.”

The group’s leaders added that, “Termination of the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative would result in less research and knowledge to improve school safety in our public schools, and detract from efforts to reduce/avoid future school shootings and violence.” They noted that “one year of funding for CSSI research projects represents approximately three tenths of one percent of the cost of the proposed $25 billion US/Mexico border wall.”

Not everyone will support a liberally funded school crime research program. Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based school safety advocate (who is not related to the president) said that the federal program should be continued “but not to the tune of the millions and millions that the Obama administration put into it.”

Kenneth Trump believes that federal funding on school safety “needs to be balanced out with programs putting resources directly into local schools.”

It is too early to say what will happen to the school safety research program now, but it is a fair bet that after the Florida school shooting, Congress will again spurn the Trump administration and keep it going, albeit at a more modest level.


Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Journalists and Washington bureau chief of The Crime Report where this first appeared. The Crime Report provides comprehensive reporting and analysis of criminal justice news and research in the U.S. and abroad.

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Photo from Columbine High School shooting security video, courtesy of Wikipedia 

‘It’s disgraceful’: Trump announces tariffs on steel, aluminium imports

Disgraceful is a proposal to push up costs for building in US, increase profits for a few companies that will not grow any jobs and lie about past industrialists in US who let Europe and Japan lead in innovation while they hid behind tariffs in 1950s and 1969s!

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After a “night of chaos” in the White House, Donald Trump catches top officials off guard as he declares the US will impose hefty tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, dramatically raising the possibility of a showdown with China and other key trading partners.

‘I dare you to tell me arming teachers will make us safe,’ says student after Georgia incident

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Jesse Randal Davidson, a popular teacher at Dalton high school, is accused of firing shots in class, prompting debate on arming educators

Police say they don’t know why a popular teacher allegedly fired a handgun inside his classroom, causing a chaotic lockdown and evacuation of his Georgia high school. But it immediately pierced the national debate over whether educators should be armed.

Related: Georgia police take teacher into custody after shots fired at school

Continue reading…

Steel and aluminum tariffs trigger sharp US stock market sell-off

Lazy steel industrialists used earlier tariffs of the 1950s and 1960s to let Europe and Japan out innovate the US steel industry. All this will do is up profits for stockholders of few US steel companies left, raise costs of housing, and will increase jobs by $00.00!

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The threat of a trade war with China led the Dow Jones to lose over 570 points and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both to drop close to 2%

US stock markets tumbled on Thursday after Donald Trump said the United States would impose tariffs of 25% on steel imports and 10% on imported aluminum next week.

The threat of a trade war with China and higher goods prices led to a sharp sell-off with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing over 570 points (2.23%) and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both dropping close to 2%.

Continue reading…

Portraits of 10 Women Who Acted as Spies to Stop the Nazis

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The Germans would have done well to take note of William Congreve’s writings during World War II. While the efforts of men in war have been well highlighted, we often forget that women played just as large a role in ensuring victory. Some piloted planes, others worked hard in factories, and a very special few joined the Allied secret service. The following 10 women risked their own lives to scout enemy positions, bomb railroads, and ensure that the Third Reich met its match.

1. Andree Borrel

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Andree was contributing to the war effort even before becoming a spy. This French national and her friend were responsible for an underground railway into Spain, which they used to evacuate downed Allied airmen from occupied France. When the network was betrayed in 1940, she fled to Portugal and eventually joined SOE in 1942.

She was one of the first female agents to parachute into France along with Lise de Baissac on September 24, 1942. After joining the resistance in Paris, she became second in command of the local network by March 1943. Responsible for attacking a power station and other infrastructure, she and three key members were arrested. After proving too tough to crack through interrogation, she was taken to a concentration camp where she was given a lethal injection. Andree regained consciousness after the injection. Fighting the doctors for her life, she was eventually overpowered and cremated while alive.

2. Nancy Wake

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Born on August 30, 1912, in Wellington, New Zealand, Nancy worked as a journalist in pre-war Nazi Germany. After marrying a French industrialist, she joined the French Resistance in occupied France and helped British airmen escape capture. In December 1940, after being betrayed, Wake was captured. After convincing her guards that she wasn’t the woman they were looking for, she traveled to Britain and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE). This was where she learned that her husband had been shot by Gestapo agents—which turned out to be a bad move on their part when Nancy came back with a vengeance.

She was dropped back into France in 1944 to coordinate Resistance attacks with the planned D-Day landings. This time she led an armed raid against Gestapo headquarters and German gun factories. After getting separated from her radio operator during a German counter-attack, she walked 200 kilometers (124 miles) and biked a 100 more kilometers (62 miles) to contact another operator. One of her resistance members said, “She is the most feminine woman I know, until the fighting starts. Then she is like five men.” Nancy died in 2011, at the age of 98.

3. Violette Reine

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A French national, Violette moved to London before the start of the war. It was here that she met, fell in love with, married, and had a child with Etienne Szabo, a French Foreign Legion Officer serving with Free French forces. After Szabo was killed in 1942, Violette joined SOE to avenge his death (a common theme that might suggest making enemies of women was the downfall of Nazi Germany).

Replacing Philippe Liewer, an agent who had been uncovered and was hiding in Paris, she helped to completely restructure and reorder the shattered resistance movement in Normandy in June 1943. She also led sabotage missions against roads and railways as well as spotted potential bombing targets for the British. After briefly returning to Britain, she went on a second mission into France in which her car was ambushed. After holding off German troops with 64 rounds of ammunition so that her colleague could escape, she was captured and deported to Saarbrucken along with two other female agents and 37 male prisoners. During the transit, she used the cover of an Allied air raid to gather water for the imprisoned men in her final valorous act before she was executed on January 27, 1945.

4. Cecile Pearl Witherington

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Cecile, a Brit born in France, joined SOE on June 8, 1943, after fleeing France. When she dropped into France on September 22, 1943, she started as a courier. The Germans, not taking kindly to even the prettiest of girls smuggling illegal weapons and intel, made even this low-level job incredibly dangerous.

When her superior was arrested, Cecile took over his duties. As leader of the Wrestler resistance network, she fielded over 1,500 fighters who played key roles in the Normandy landings. They were so effective that the Germans placed a 1,000,000 franc bounty on her head. In one instance, a force of 2,000 German soldiers were sent to attack her and her men in a battle which lasted 14 hours. The battle saw the death of 86 Germans and 24 of her freedom fighters. In all, 1,000 German soldiers were killed under her command, and railways connecting South and North France were disrupted over 800 times. In the final days of the occupation, she presided over the surrender of 18,000 Germans.

5. Virginia Hall

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Virginia may be the most impressive of the women on this list. While they all kicked Hitler’s butt, Hall did it with only one real foot—the other was a prosthesis, and a terrible prosthesis given the time. No stranger to danger, she served as an ambulance driver during the invasion of France, which we’re sure was an incredibly difficult task with the lack of automatic transmissions and even harder still with the clutch.

Before even becoming an agent, she organized the resistance, helped downed pilots, and carried out raids in 1941 under the guise of an American reporter. The Germans declared the “Limping Lady” one of the most dangerous Allied spies in 1942, and with her very unique limp, she was forced out of France. The American equivalent of SOE recruited Virginia in 1944 and sent her into France via parachute in 1944, with her prosthesis in her backpack. From her landing onward, she disguised herself as a farmhand and trained French resistance troops, organized sabotages, and helped with the resistance role in D-Day.

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5 facts about U.S. evangelical Protestants

My best estimate is that 50% or so Americans do not have a clue who Billy Graham is/was and never heard him preach. He has not been actively doing anything since mid- 1970 – those under 40 years –
Billy who?

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The Rev. Billy Graham, who recently died at age 99, was one of the most influential and important evangelical Christian leaders of the 20th century. As the country remembers Rev. Billy Graham, here are five facts about American evangelical Protestants.