“WITHIN THE FOG” Trees standing, trees empty and alone, Mountains’ cold, high above below. All around, within the fog life stands’ still, A layer of white, floating, hovering so low. Within the fog, a world hidden from the light, Vanishes, disappears’ as the suns’ warmth overpowers. Beauty and life lie beneath, within the fog. Keith […]
WITHIN THE FOG — keithgarrettpoetry
Alleged Kenosha Shooter Fervently Supported ‘Blue Lives,’ Joined ‘Local Militia’

Despite wearing a full replica police uniform — complete with tie, bomber jacket and trooper hat — Kyle Rittenhouse looked a lot more like a Halloween trick-or-treater than an actual cop in the photo taken in 2017. After all, Rittenhouse was not even 15 years old when he posed for the picture that remained for years on the Facebook page of a “public safety cadet program” in Chicago’s far northern suburbs. And he still looked younger than his actual age this week when the now-17-year-old from Antioch, Ill., was arrested in connection with two fatal shootings in Kenosha, Wis. Police said two people were killed and another was injured in the shootings Tuesday during the third night of civil unrest sparked by a white police officer shooting a Black man repeatedly in the back. Antioch police took Rittenhouse into custody Wednesday, and he is being held in the Lake County, Ill., Hulse Juvenile Detention Center without bond, according to court records. He is wanted in Kenosha County for first
Betsy DeVos Rewrote Campus Sexual Assault Rules, But Survivor Activists Aren’t Backing Down
Student activists like Kendrick have tried to influence this process by pressuring their schools to go beyond what’s required of them. For instance, DeVos’ rules permit, but do not require, that schools use a higher standard of evidence in sexual assault hearings; Aggies Without Fear’s petition asked NC A&T to opt for the Obama-era standard. At Carnegie Mellon University, the Graduate Student Assembly has been negotiating with the Title IX office for months, says Divyansh Kaushik, the assembly’s director of external affairs. Kaushik, a language technology grad student, is concerned that the DeVos regulations do not cover violence or harassment in off-campus housing. (All 7,500 Carnegie Mellon grad students live off-campus.)

Frances Kendrick, a 18-year-old pre-nursing student at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, was scrolling through Instagram this spring when a post caught her attention. A black-and-red graphic, posted by the sexual assault survivor advocacy group Know Your IX, warned that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was about to institute new regulations that would reduce schools’ responsibility to respond to sexual misconduct among their students. Kendrick, who had made a sexual assault report to her school months earlier, was alarmed that the new rules would eliminate the 60-day timeframe for investigating reports; her own case was still dragging on, and she felt unsupported by NC A&T, a historically Black public university. “I automatically made that connection,” she says. “Like, oh hell, if this is how they’re treating us now, wait ’til they actually don’t have to be accountable.”
The panel convened to hear Kendrick’s case ultimately found the other student not responsible, and her appeal was denied. But Kendrick was already beginning to organize. The day after her hearing in June—which took place over Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic—she wrote an open letter a friend posted on Twitter. “I went to an HBCU because I wanted to live in a space where I was cared for,” she wrote. “But it is clear that this school does not care about me as a survivor.”
She started a group, Aggies Without Fear, and launched an online petition demanding the school to go “above and beyond” the requirements in DeVos’ new rules, which let schools resolve cases within a “reasonably prompt” time. Kendrick’s letter asks for investigations and hearings to be conducted within 30 days; her own case had taken nearly 200. (NC A&T associate vice chancellor Todd Simmons declined to comment on Kendrick’s case due to federal privacy laws.)
Students have always been the drivers of the movement against sexual violence in schools. Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education, has been their most powerful tool since 1992, when the Supreme Court ruled that a 10th grader could sue her school for not intervening after she reported being harassed and sexually abused by a teacher. But anti-rape advocates say much of the law’s utility to survivors has been undercut by the Trump administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX, which took effect on August 14. Now, as campuses across the country must adapt to the new rules while grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, students like Kendrick are adapting as well, looking for new ways to pressure their schools to assist students at all levels who endure sexual abuse or harassment.
“Historically, we viewed Title IX as a great tool to improve campus policies. Now, it’s a bit more figuring out how to get around Title IX.”
“Historically, we viewed Title IX as a great tool to improve campus policies,” Sage Carson, the manager of Know Your IX, told nearly 200 victim advocates and students during a webinar about the new regulations last week. “Now, it’s a bit more figuring out how to get around Title IX.”
Trying to get school administrators’ attention while many students are not physically on campus also presents a new challenge for activists. “Often survivors have to use interruptive tactics to get schools to pay attention,” Carson says in an interview. “They need to occupy buildings. They have to make noise on campus. They have to make themselves a nuisance for schools to even listen to them. And it’s much harder to make yourself a nuisance when someone can simply block your emails, or when someone can just ignore your phone calls.”
DeVos’ new regulations follow nearly a decade of activism, conflict, and backlash over campus sexual assault policy. Survivors-turned-advocates have filed a wave of complaints with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and pressured the department to hold schools accountable for violating the law. They found a sympathetic ear in the Obama White House, which launched a national task force on campus sexual assault and issued guidance on how schools could respond “promptly and equitably” to sexual misconduct complaints. Many colleges and universities began taking sexual assault and harassment more seriously, changing or adopting new policies to address it.
But the momentum shifted after President Donald Trump took office. DeVos quickly pulled the Obama-era Title IX guidelines, declaring that they had gone too far in complainants’ favor and had created a system that “lacked basic elements of due process and failed to ensure fundamental fairness.” She issued new temporary guidelines followed by proposed regulations that reduced schools’ legal obligations to respond to survivors, in part by narrowing the definition of sexual harassment.
The regulations were framed as a way to ensure fairness for both survivors and students accused of sexual misconduct. They required colleges to adopt live, courtroom-like sexual misconduct hearings in which an accused abuser’s advisor—or attorney—could cross-examine the complainant. A recent investigation in the Nation found the rules were partially written by the main funder behind the men’s rights group Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, which pushes the untrue narrative that false sexual assault allegations are rampant.
The final rules were met with fierce opposition from survivor advocates. “Students should have a right to receive an education free from violence, and not have to be tangled up in incompetent, really half-assed, dangerous rules that protect no one,” says Kenyora Parham, executive director of End Rape on Campus. Multiple groups, including the ACLU as well as attorneys general in 17 states and Washington, DC, sued the Education Department to stop the new regulations from taking effect. Federal judges blocked their attempts earlier this month.
Now colleges and universities are rolling out new Title IX policies to comply with the administration’s requirements. Some, such as Harvard and Princeton, established two separate processes for handling claims: one that covers the Education Department’s new, narrower definitions of prohibited conduct, and another for everything the new regulations do not cover, such as sexual assault on study abroad trips. NC A&T’s interim sexual misconduct policy, announced on August 14, hews closely to the new regulations, though it adds that sexual misconduct may also be covered by other campus policies governing workplace violence, harassment, and discrimination.
“Students should have a right to receive an education free from violence, and not have to be tangled up in incompetent, really half-assed, dangerous rules that protect no one.”
Still, some schools have not announced any changes, according to Carson. There’s still a lot of uncertainty about what exactly is required by the new rules, which were released in their final form three months ago along with about 2,000 pages of accompanying legalese, sending college administrators scrambling. “My impression is, everybody’s trying to write the paper and get it in on time,” one Title IX coordinator told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Student activists like Kendrick have tried to influence this process by pressuring their schools to go beyond what’s required of them. For instance, DeVos’ rules permit, but do not require, that schools use a higher standard of evidence in sexual assault hearings; Aggies Without Fear’s petition asked NC A&T to opt for the Obama-era standard. At Carnegie Mellon University, the Graduate Student Assembly has been negotiating with the Title IX office for months, says Divyansh Kaushik, the assembly’s director of external affairs. Kaushik, a language technology grad student, is concerned that the DeVos regulations do not cover violence or harassment in off-campus housing. (All 7,500 Carnegie Mellon grad students live off-campus.)
Even though some school administrators may choose to investigate cases not covered by Title IX under the DeVos rules, the Education Department will no longer hold the schools accountable if they mishandle those cases. To Carson, this is a major setback. “The reason that survivors have fought so deeply for Title IX is because schools haven’t done the right thing in the past,” she says. “Now we’re met with a really messy, complicated Title IX that is weak around enforcement, weak on survivor protections, and only requires schools to do the bare minimum. While survivors can use that to demand that their school do that absolute bare minimum, that’s not exactly helpful for most people.”
Rather than focusing on Title IX, student survivors may begin turning to other laws. During last week’s webinar, National Women’s Law Center director of justice for student survivors and senior counsel Shiwali Patel pointed to the Clery Act, a federal law governing campus safety. Public Justice staff attorney Alexandra Brodsky suggested that survivors who need accommodations from their schools might find disability discrimination laws “more powerful” tools than Title IX, particularly if they experience post-traumatic stress disorder. Parham, who plans to focus End Rape on Campus’s work on supporting survivors who have been marginalized because of their backgrounds or identities, says that advocates need to think more seriously about using other federal anti-discrimination laws.
At least 20 states already have laws that require schools to provide services to survivors, mandate sexual assault prevention programs, or govern responses to reports of harassment or violence. According to Carson, state legislation offers a lot of promise at a time when survivors feel abandoned by the Education Department. Know Your IX is recruiting students to push for new state-level sexual assault laws across the country. A group of current students and young alumni called the Every Voice Coalition has written bills that have been introduced by lawmakers in several states.
“Once it became clear that this DeVos administration was not going to be listening to students and survivors, we took the only recourse we could think of, which was to push for stronger protections at the state level,” says John Gabrieli, Every Voice’s co-chair. “Fortunately, the one silver lining with these regulations is that they’re a floor, not a ceiling, for what states can do.” In July, Gov. Chris Sununu signed Every Voice’s bill into law in New Hampshire. The group plans to introduce similar legislation in Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia.
This spring, shortly after Gabrieli quit his job to work on Every Voice full-time, the pandemic sent students and lawmakers home. COVID-19, he says, “totally crushed our legislative momentum.” At NC A&T, Kendrick, who just moved back into her apartment on campus, is figuring out how to continue building Aggies Without Fear despite social distancing. Last Friday, she received a response from the school to her petition; it said that parts of its newly issued interim Title IX policy already go “above and beyond” DeVos’ minimum requirements. It also offered to listen to her feedback. Simmons wrote in an email that the school “strives to create an environment that is free from sexual misconduct and violence and that supports survivors, as well as respects due process,” and that it would be working to improve through “listening sessions” with students.
Kendrick is trying to keep up the pressure, using social media to push out information about Title IX and campus sexual assault while negotiating with the school. “Our goal is to say, regardless of COVID, regardless of where your students are,” Kendrick says, “you still are accountable to us. “
Desperate to Leave Beirut, Young Lebanese Are Also the Ones Fixing It

The young people leading the huge volunteer effort after the recent blast are bringing hope, but have lost it themselves. “I want to at least have Beirut on its feet before I go,” one said.
Black Diabetics Lose Limbs at Triple the Rate of Others. Here’s How Health Care Leaders Are Starting to Act.

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Prompted by a ProPublica story that detailed how Black Americans with diabetes lose limbs at a rate triple that of others, the American Diabetes Association has included an initiative to prevent unnecessary amputations as part of an unprecedented campaign to reduce racial disparities in diabetes care.
“The ProPublica article raised the consciousness of what the problem is,” said Tracey Brown, the CEO of the ADA. “Every four minutes, someone is losing a limb from diabetic complications. That’s ridiculous. We have got to find a way to drive change.”
The story highlighted obstacles to equitable care for diabetic patients at risk of amputation, from the government’s decision not to endorse screening at-risk patients for vascular disease in the legs, to the inadequate incentives for certain specialists to move to underserved areas, to the health system’s failure to consider limb-saving options before permitting surgeons to apply a blade.
In the weeks that followed publication, several congressional and state legislative offices reached out to the association to ask for guidance on drafting policy to reduce disparities in diabetic amputations. In response, the organization decided to build an agenda around the issue.
The ADA’s Health Equity Now campaign, which addresses the cost of diabetes care, nutrition, discrimination and more, was motivated by the racial health disparities that have been exposed by COVID-19, which has hit Black Americans with diabetes particularly hard. As part of the project, the association has built a Health Equity Bill of Rights, asserting that all diabetes patients are entitled to affordable drugs, healthy food, the latest medical advances and other protections.
The right to avoid preventable amputations is the only complication of uncontrolled diabetes that is included in the list. The organization is sharing the document with policymakers, practitioners and patients as it begins to look toward policy change. It is also encouraging members of the public to ask their governors to support the project.
Dr. Ronald Dalman, the president of the Society for Vascular Surgery, said: “I commend the ADA for doubling down on this particular complication of poorly managed diabetes. It’s a long overdue prioritization.” He added that it’s a “moment in time where we can leverage this concern about health care disparities to call out a very specific problem: the prevalence of amputation in certain subsets of the population.”
Dr. Gary Puckrein, the head of the National Minority Quality Forum, a nonprofit focused on reducing health care disparities, said that the ADA’s efforts are just a step. “The American health care system was organized during an era when inequality was acceptable and mainstream in American society,” he said. “It’s not that African Americans are sicker, it’s that the health care delivered is unequal.”
He hopes that the national conversation on health disparities will mirror the conversation about police violence against Black Americans. “You, in effect, have your knees on their neck in the health care system as well when you don’t provide them with the care that they need.”
Two weeks after publication of the story, Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, honored Dr. Foluso Fakorede, the main subject of the ProPublica article, for his work in reducing unnecessary amputations in Bolivar County, Mississippi. The acknowledgement, made in the House of Representatives, referenced ProPublica’s findings.
The co-chairs of the Congressional Peripheral Artery Disease Caucus — Rep. Donald M. Payne Jr., a Democrat from New Jersey, and Rep. Gus Bilirakis, a Republican from Florida — have also begun work on a bill to address disparities in amputations, particularly for people with peripheral artery disease, a condition in which clogged arteries in the legs limit the flow of blood.
“The ProPublica article has brought strong awareness and real interest from a variety of parties — from the medical field and from patients and from potentially future patients,” said a spokesman for Payne. “We have been working with Bilirakis and other members to move this forward, with the ultimate goal of introducing legislation.”
Summer Blevins, deputy chief of staff for Bilirakis, added that their legislative ambition “is based on the basic principle that prevention, education and early intervention is best for the patient and also saves money.”
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India reports record daily jump of 75,760 coronavirus infections

MUMBAI (REUTERS) – India reported on Thursday (Aug 27) a record daily jump of 75,760 coronavirus infections, taking its total caseload to 3.31 million as cases surged across the country, data from the federal health ministry showed.
India is the worst affected country in Asia and third behind the United States and Brazil in terms of total cases. It has posted the highest single-day caseloads in the world since Aug 7, according to a Reuters tally.
Deaths in the same 24-hour period increased by 1,023, taking the death toll to 60,472.
With coronavirus cases surging faster in India than anywhere else in the world for the past three weeks, the pandemic has shifted into the countryside, engulfing rural areas and placing further strain on the country’s shaky healthcare system.
There are concerns that the health infrastructure in rural areas is not equipped to handle the pandemic.
India’s rise in cases also comes on the back of increased testing, with nearly 925,000 tests done on Wednesday, the health ministry said.
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Mary Ann Mendoza dropped from RNC lineup after sharing antisemitic theory
Mary Ann Mendoza, a mother who had been scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night, was dropped from the program after she urged her Twitter followers to read a thread from an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene shared antisemitic and Islamophobic video
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