News

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8452759

I 'member.

The media coverage of the recent anti-ICE protests in LA provides a counterpoint to coverage of the "pro-democracy" protests in Hong Kong in 2019-20. Inconsistencies in coverage abound. Yet we can contrast the relative restraint of the HK police as compared to the LA police. Is this a case of authoritarianism vs. democracy?

A former employee of Wikipedia’s parent company has filed a federal lawsuit alleging she was fired after reporting her direct supervisor for gender discrimination and harassment.

The woman, Kayla Mae, was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation in November 2022, where she worked as a software engineer for nearly two years.

Her role allowed her to work remotely from Texas, and she was assigned to work on a team managed by Dennis Mburugu, a Wikimedia employee based in Kenya.

Within the first few months of her employment, she encountered problems with Mburugu, according to her complaint. Among other things, Mburugu asked her inappropriate questions about her sexual identity — she is a transgender female — and inquired about her medical history, Mae wrote in the complaint.

The second Trump administration has rapidly escalated the bipartisan assault on immigrant workers and their families, massively expanding the machinery of detention and deportation.

This offensive, built upon a foundation of joint Democratic and Republican Party anti-immigrant policies, aims to divide the working class and scapegoat immigrants for the systemic crises of capitalism. It is also generating immense profits for private prison corporations like The GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Atlanta Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens, who has spearheaded a law-and-order campaign against the residents of Atlanta, inaugurated on April 29 the sprawling 85-acre militarized “public safety training center” popularly known as “Cop City.”

The sprawling complex will be used to train the state’s numerous police forces in urban warfare. Firing ranges, mock buildings and city streets have been constructed, providing police the “training” they need to violently raid people’s residences and to crush protests or rebellions the state and city authorities target. According to American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), “43% of the training at Cop City will be for officers outside of Atlanta, including military training with the infamous Israeli [sic] Defense Forces.”

Speaking before a select audience, which included arch-reactionary Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp and the CEO of the privately funded Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), Dave Wilkinson, Dickens triumphantly declared the building and opening of the police training center as a singular achievement of his three-year-old administration. Both Kemp and Dickens have worked in close coordination to unleash ferocious police violence against peaceful protesters by the state, city and county police forces.

After five weeks of hearings with more than 90 witnesses, the MOVE Commission determined the city’s bombing was an “unconscionable” act.

At the intersection of Osage Avenue and the Cobbs Creek Parkway, in West Philadelphia, a historical marker stands. It’s blue with yellow letters, as is any other marker of this kind in the city. But this one is special.

First, because it commemorates a tragedy: the MOVE bombing, which killed six adults and five children and destroyed dozens of homes on May 13, 1985, when a State Police helicopter dropped a bomb on one of the block’s houses. It was one of the darkest days in Philadelphia’s history. This year marks its 40th anniversary.

Second, because the proposal for this marker was championed not by activists or historians, but by a group of passionate 13- and 14-year-old students from a local school.

The marker, unveiled in 2017, is more than just a sign; it is a testament to the power of young people determined to keep the past alive and a school that encourages them to do so.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28634800

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28038058

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has launched a campaign calling on the University of New Hampshire and Harvard to withdraw their hirings of former President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan and former White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk. CAIR said in a statement the two men “spent four years acting as shadow presidents and executing foreign policy disaster after foreign policy disaster, from the botched U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to President Biden’s embrace of dictators he once pledged to ostracize to the horrific genocide in Gaza.”

Men wearing street clothes identifying themselves as “the police” whisked away an international graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts after she co-authored an op-ed critical of Israel.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the U.S. on a student visa, was detained on Tuesday in Somerville by two men wearing street clothes and masks. In a video posted on social media by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ozturk is seen walking down a sidewalk when she is stopped by a man wearing a hat and hoodie. After saying, “Hi, ma’am,” the man – who did not appear to flash a badge of any kind – seizes her phone as a second man approaches. Those two men eventually handcuff her as others, wearing masks, stand guard.

At one point, one of the men can be heard saying, “We’re the police,” but he did not identify an agency or department.

“You don’t look like it,” a bystander can be heard saying. “Why are you hiding your faces? Why are you hiding your faces?”

One bystander told The Boston Globe that Ozturk informed the men, “I’m a student.” The paper said the bystander spoke on condition of anonymity “for fear of retaliation from the government.”

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” Ozturk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai told The New York Times. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

https://archive.ph/oLkPE

The Navy plans to send a second warship to patrol the waters off the U.S. by the end of this week after a destroyer was deployed on Saturday as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration and the border, a U.S. official confirmed to Military.com on Wednesday.

The official, who was given anonymity to discuss military plans, told Military.com that a second destroyer will deploy from the West Coast, joining the USS Gravely, which left a naval base in Virginia over the weekend headed for the waters around the U.S.-Mexico border.

https://archive.ph/FqGF0

Ahead of his confirmation hearing Thursday to become assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Keith Bass is facing tough questions from a prominent Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Bass, a retired Navy commander and substance abuse counselor who previously led the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Medical Services and the White House Medical Unit, was nominated Dec. 22 to manage the Defense Department's $61 billion health system, which serves 9.5 million beneficiaries, including 1.3 million active-duty troops.

According to an article in SpyTalk cited by Warren, Bass allegedly was fired as head of the CIA medical office following his mishandling of the investigation into Havana syndrome, also known as anomalous health incidents, that affected more than 330 U.S. State Department, intelligence and defense officials as a result of exposure to painful, piercing noise from an unknown source.

The article also pointed to Bass' alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 response at the agency, "afflicting its rank and file."

This week on CounterSpin: In early February, when Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Rep. Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say—because a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people—including students—with disabilities.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement Tuesday criticizing attacks by President Trump and his allies on federal judges. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he said. Roberts’s statement came after Trump called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the Trump administration to stop using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants. On Saturday, the administration ignored Boasberg’s order to turn around three deportation flights bound for El Salvador. We speak with The Nation's justice correspondent Elie Mystal on the Trump-led breakdown of constitutional order. “There's not a coming constitutional crisis,” says Mystal. “We are in a constitutional crisis right now.”

The Social Security Administration is considering drastic new anti-fraud measures that could disrupt benefit payments to millions of Americans, according to an internal memo first obtained by the political newsletter Popular Information. The changes would force millions of customers to file claims in person at a field office rather than over the phone. An estimated 75,000 to 85,000 elderly and disabled adults per week would be diverted to field offices. This comes even as the Trump administration slashes jobs and closes offices at the agency. Officials in the Social Security Administration who spoke with reporter Judd Legum, founder of Popular Information, have told him that there is an “effort to break the organization.”

Elon Musk’s political action committee is offering voters in Wisconsin $100 to sign a petition opposing what he calls “activist judges” ahead of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on April 1. Two Musk-backed groups have spent over $20 million on the race to support Republican Brad Schimel over Democrat Susan Crawford. The race will decide control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

In other immigration news, The Washington Post is reporting the IRS is close to agreeing to a deal to give addresses and other personal information about suspected undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security. One former IRS official told the Post, “It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes.”

In other related news, DHS has shut down three internal watchdog agencies that advocated for immigrants, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.