Tag Archives: WorldNews

Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy

Raids targeting journalists this week are the latest examples of how far the country’s government will go to scare officials and reporters into submission, media experts say.

NYPD Officer On Trial For Eric Garner’s Death Will Testify Via Secret Document, Won’t Be Questioned

NYPD Officer On Trial For Eric Garner's Death Will Testify Via Secret Document, Won't Be Questioned

Five years after Eric Garner was killed during a violent arrest in Staten Island, on the sixth day of an NYPD disciplinary trial that has spread languorously over 24 days, New Yorkers learned that the NYPD officer charged with killing Garner with an illegal chokehold won’t have to say anything publicly about his conduct, and won’t have to answer any questions either. [ more › ]

YouTube says homophobic abuse does not violate harassment rules

wtf – When Trans people are bing killed by those who are inspired by such videos?

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Video-sharing site defends American user who called journalist ‘lispy queer’

YouTube has sparked outrage by defending an American man who subjected a journalist to repeated homophobic abuse in videos presented to millions of people, arguing that his “criticism” was debating rather than harassment.

Carlos Maza, a video journalist for the US news site Vox, went public last week with a complaint that the rightwing YouTube personality Steven Crowder was engaged in a long-term homophobic harassment campaign. In a compilation video Maza created of some of his mentions on Crowder’s show, the host attacks Maza as a “gay Mexican”, “lispy queer” and a “token Vox gay atheist sprite”.

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Why do US evangelicals support Trump? They’re giving Christianity a bad name | Tim Farron

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The politicisation of evangelicals is dangerous – especially when they’re supporting a loveless, graceless amoralism

• Tim Farron is the former Lib Dem leader

In the UK, the United States president is dismissed or condemned from almost all quarters, and most of us struggle to get our heads around the idea that millions of people voted for Donald Trump. One significant group of these voters were white evangelical Christians. According to the exit polls from the 2016 US election, white “evangelical Christians” voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 81% to 16%.

It has not been unusual for presidential candidates to court the so-called “evangelical Christian vote” in recent history. If you vote for a president, it doesn’t necessarily mean you support everything they stand for. I recognise that: the 81% represents a whole host of motivations and degrees of support rather than a united mass gathering under Trump’s banner. But it’s still a big number.

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US-China trade war to cost $455bn in lost output, says IMF

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Christine Lagarde says world must avoid the ‘self-inflicted wounds’ of a tit-for-tat wrangle

The International Monetary Fund has called for a speedy end to the deepening trade war between the United States and China after calculating that the tit-for-tat tariffs will cost $455bn (£357.5bn) in lost output next year – more than the size of South Africa’s economy.

Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, underlined her organisation’s growing concern at the most serious outbreak of trade tension since the 1930s and said “self-inflicted wounds” had to be avoided.

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Brexit Britain and Trump’s America are a betrayal of the values D-day was fought for | Martin Kettle

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The D-day commemorations have never felt so uneasy. Trump and Brexit are tearing apart the bonds forged after 1945

They are saying that Thursday – the 75th anniversary – will be the last of the international D-day commemorations in which the veterans of 1944 participate. For obvious reasons that may well be so. The surviving soldiers who fought their way up the beaches of Normandy are in their 90s now, so it seems poignantly unlikely that more than a handful will return in 2024.

But there is a more political reason why this week could be the start of a less unified approach to marking the liberation of Europe at the end of the war against Hitler’s Germany. The reason is that Donald Trump’s US and Brexit Britain, though both still immeasurably and justifiably proud of the roles their predecessors played in this epic climax of the war in the west, are each in their own way turning their backs upon the European order that the invasion of 6 June 1944 made possible.

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Biden: Democratic candidate criticized for supporting abortion funding ban

#TimeIsUp

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Campaign confirms Biden still supports the Hyde amendment, a law that bars the government from paying for abortion services

Reproductive rights groups have criticized the US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for supporting an abortion restriction called the Hyde amendment.

The 40-year-old law bars the US government from paying for abortion services, even when recommended by doctors. The measure has the practical effect of excluding abortion services from Medicaid, a public health insurance program for the poor and disabled, which nearly 17 million women of reproductive age rely on.

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US to label nuclear waste as less dangerous to quicken cleanup

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Energy department says labeling some waste as low-level at sites in Washington state, Idaho and South Carolina will save $40bn

The US government plans to reclassify some of the nation’s most dangerous radioactive waste to lower its threat level, outraging critics who say the move would make it cheaper and easier to walk away from cleaning up nuclear weapons production sites in Washington state, Idaho and South Carolina.

The Department of Energy said on Wednesday that labeling some high-level waste as low level will save $40bn in cleanup costs across the nation’s entire nuclear weapons complex. The material that has languished for decades in the three states would be taken to low-level disposal facilities in Utah or Texas, the agency said.

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Climate crisis and antibiotic use could ‘sink’ fish farming industry – report

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Investors’ network warns of serious risk to aquaculture from global heating as well as over-reliance on medicines

The climate crisis, drug use and feeding farmed fish with wild stocks risks “sinking” the $230bn (£180bn) aquaculture industry, according to an ethical investment network.

Fish farms now surpass wild fisheries as the main provider of seafood on our plates, but combined risks from global heating, excessive use of antibiotics, a dependence on wild stocks for feed, and poor governance threatens the lucrative and fast-growing sector, warned Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (Fairr), a $12trn-backed network.

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