Tag Archives: WorldNews

Russian police detain 317 people over election protest: monitor

No shame, no democracy. Russian police detained 317 people on Saturday, including prominent opposition activists, around a political protest in Moscow which authorities had declared illegal.

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The world knows what is happening to the Uighurs. Why has it been so slow to act?

because no trading partners with China are willing to act and Russia as well as USA don’t really care!

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A reluctance to offend China and an information blackout has meant the persecution of the ethnic minority has gone under the radar. But pressure for change is building

On Wednesday, Sadam Abdusalam went to Australia’s federal Parliament House for the first time and spent almost 12 hours meeting politicians – meetings he has spent almost two years hoping for – in which he pleaded for their help to bring his wife and nearly two-year-old son home.

Last week Abdusalam’s story was broadcast on Four Corners, detailing how his wife and son are trapped in China because they are Uighurs – ethnic minority Muslims.

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‘Unprecedented’: more than 100 Arctic wildfires burn in worst ever season

Huge blazes in Greenland, Siberia and Alaska are producing plumes of smoke that can be seen from space

The Arctic is suffering its worst wildfire season on record, with huge blazes in Greenland, Siberia and Alaska producing plumes of smoke that can be seen from space.

The Arctic region has recorded its hottest June ever. Since the start of that month, more than 100 wildfires have burned in the Arctic circle. In Russia, 11 of 49 regions are experiencing wildfires.

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Republicans block election security efforts despite Mueller’s warnings

GOP leadership wants Russian and uber-rightwing interference in the next election. Selling out nation…!!!

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Senators stand in way of multiple bills within 24 hours of former special counsel’s testimony on Russian threat

Senate Republicans have twice blocked legislation aimed at strengthening US election security in the 24 hours since the former special counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russian election interference was happening “as we sit here”.

Since Mueller left the witness stand on Wednesday, Republican senators have blocked a House-backed bill and a separate trio of bills meant to beef up US election security.

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New UK PM Johnson to begin hiring 20,000 extra police officers

Impossible to vet and hire 20,000 competent police in weeks – the lies and buffoonery begin. Britain’s new Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced plans to start hiring an extra 20,000 police officers in the next few weeks, reversing cuts made under previous governments in a pitch to voters concerned about rising violent crime.

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We Found Photos of Ole Miss Students Posing With Guns in Front of a Shot-Up Emmett Till Memorial. Now They Face a Possible Civil Rights Investigation.

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

OXFORD, Miss. — Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.

One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The photo, which was obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, shows an Ole Miss student named Ben LeClere holding a shotgun while standing in front of the bullet-pocked sign. His Kappa Alpha fraternity brother, John Lowe, stands on the other side with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. A third fraternity member squats below them. The photo appears to have been taken at night, the scene illuminated by lights from a vehicle.

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LeClere posted the picture on Lowe’s birthday on March 1 with the message “one of Memphis’s finest and the worst influence I’ve ever met.”

Neither LeClere nor Lowe responded to repeated attempts to contact them.

It is not clear whether the fraternity students shot the sign or are simply posing before it. The sign is part of a memorial effort by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, a Mississippi civil rights group, and has been repeatedly vandalized, most recently in August 2018. Till’s death helped propel the modern civil rights movement in America.

Five days after LeClere posted the photo, a person who saw it filed a bias report to the university’s Office of Student Conduct. The complaint pointed out there may have been a fourth person present, who took the picture.

“The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of ‘likes,’ and no one said a thing,” said the complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. “I cannot tell Ole Miss what to do, I just thought it should be brought to your attention.”

The photo was removed from LeClere’s Instagram account after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica began contacting fraternity members and friends. It had received 274 likes.

Kappa Alpha suspended the trio on Wednesday, after the news organizations provided a copy of the photo to fraternity officials at Ole Miss. The fraternity, which honors Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” on its website, has a history of racial controversy, including an incident in which students wore blackface at a Kappa Alpha sponsored Halloween party at the University of Virginia in 2002.

Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, takes down a bullet-riddled sign honoring the slain youth, whose death helped propel the civil rights movement in America.
(Courtesy of Emmett Till Interpretive Center)

“The photo is inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. It does not represent our chapter,” Taylor Anderson, president of Ole Miss’ Kappa Alpha Order, wrote in an email. “We have and will continue to be in communication with our national organization and the University.”

After viewing the photo, U.S. Attorney Chad Lamar of the Northern District of Mississippi in Oxford said the information has been referred to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for further investigation.

“We will be working with them closely,” he said Thursday.

University officials called the photo “offensive and hurtful.”

University spokesman Rod Guajardo acknowledged that an Ole Miss official had received a copy of the Instagram picture in March. The university referred the matter to the university police department, which in turn gave it to the FBI.

Guajardo said the FBI told police it would not further investigate the incident because the photo did not pose a specific threat.

Guajardo said that while the university considered the picture “offensive,” the image did not present a violation of the university’s code of conduct. He noted the incident depicted in the photo occurred off campus and was not part of a university-affiliated event.

“We stand ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter,” Guajardo said.

He said the university will continue to build programs to engage students in “deliberate, honest and candid conversations while making clear that we unequivocally reject attitudes that do not respect the dignity of each individual in our community.”

Since the first sign was erected in 2008, it has been the object of repeated animosity.

Vandals threw the first sign in the river. The second sign was blasted with 317 bullets or shotgun pellets before the Emmett Till Memorial Commission officials removed it. The third sign, featured in the Instagram photo, was damaged by 10 bullet holes before officials took it down last week. A fourth sign, designed to better withstand attacks, is expected to be installed soon.

News of the suspensions and referral to the Justice Department came as Till’s cousin, Deborah Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, was already planning a moment of silence Thursday to honor her cousin with a gathering of supporters and friends dressed in black and white in “a silent yet powerful protest against racism, hatred and violence.” Thursday is Till’s birthday. Had he lived, he would have been 78 years old.

This is not the first time Ole Miss fraternity students have been caught up in an incident involving an icon from the civil rights movement.

Weems taking down the bullet-riddled sign.
(Courtesy of Emmett Till Interpretive Center)

In 2014, three students from the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house placed a noose around the neck of a statue on campus of James Meredith, the first known black student to attend Ole Miss. They also placed a Georgia flag of the past that contains the Confederate battle emblem.

According to federal prosecutors, the freshmen students hatched the plan during a drinking fest at the house, where one student disparaged African Americans, saying this act would create a sensation: “It’s James Meredith. People will go crazy.”

One pleaded guilty and received six months in prison for using a threat of force to intimidate African American students and employees because of their race or color. Another student also pleaded guilty. He received probation and community service after he cooperated with the FBI. A third man wasn’t charged.

All three students withdrew from Ole Miss, and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity’s national headquarters shuttered its chapter on the Ole Miss campus after its own investigation, blaming the closing on behavior that included “hazing, underage drinking, alcohol abuse and failure to comply with the university and fraternity’s codes of conduct.”

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Trump in the White House is a national security nightmare – and Mueller knows it | Walter Shapiro

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Mueller is at his core a moralist and a patriot – and the House intelligence committee knew it as they lured him out of his heavily guarded Fortress of His Own Rectitude

A word of belated advice for dejected House Democrats: believe Robert Mueller next time he tells you in advance that he would be a terrible and reluctant public witness on legal matters.

Appearing before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday morning, Mueller was even more buttoned-down than his crisp white shirt. Not only did the former special counsel refuse to read aloud from his own report (“I’m happy to have you read it,” he said repeatedly), but a flustered Mueller also failed to remember which president had appointed him to his first major justice department post. (It was Ronald Reagan and not, as Mueller guessed, George HW Bush.)

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Donald Trump vetoes bills prohibiting arms sales to Saudi Arabia

He owes them too much money.

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Arms package includes thousands of precision-guided munitions and aircraft maintenance support

Donald Trump has vetoed a trio of congressional resolutions aimed at blocking his administration from selling billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, last month cited threats from Iran as a reason to approve the $8.1bn arms sale to the two US allies in the Gulf.

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Amazon deforestation accelerating to unrecoverable ‘tipping point’

world tipping point

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Data confirms fears that Jair Bolsonaro’s policy encourages illegal logging in Brazil

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.

The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.

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