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The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers – including three Britons – using a UK-made drone. The news only serves to increase pressure on the Tories to ban arms exports to Israel.

read more: https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2024/04/04/world-central-kitchen-drone-strike/

A Palestinian teacher describes being targeted by Zionist groups with doxing and public harassment. He urges the New York City Chancellor of Education to take action before it turns violent.

On January 31, 2024, a billboard truck, a box truck covered in LED screens that publicly advertise or display information, drove around downtown New York City defaming me as part of a Zionist rally. On February 14, a billboard truck harassed teachers and the overall school community at an elementary school in Brooklyn for their pro-Palestinian views. Similar trucks have been used to harass students and staff at Columbia, Harvard, University of California at Berkley, and various City University of New York campuses where students have spoken out against the “Israeli” genocide of Palestinians (in using quotes when discussing “Israel” I reject the premise of the entity – the a settler-colonial project invented through the forced displacement, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide of the native Palestinians – and instead recognize the entirety of the region as my homeland, Palestine).

On February 28, I was harassed at the school where I teach by a billboard truck. The truck drove around our school building for hours, defaming me as “New York City’s Leading Anti-Semite,” disrupting education and intimidating the community. Later that day, my family and I were harassed at our home by that same truck and menaced by a camera crew pretending to be journalists.

Billboard trucks have been weaponized as tools for harassment and doxing on college campuses, at schools, accompanying rallies, and for menacing in general public spaces. This isn’t the first time I’d been doxed by Zionists, but it was the first time it occurred in person. It was the first time they terrorized me at my home. Make no mistake, I was targeted because of my identity and convictions; I was doxed because I am a Muslim Palestinian. I am not the first person to fall victim to these serial abusers, and I won’t be the last.

In their campaign to terrorize, silence, and kill the opposition, Zionists have added doxing to their arsenal. No one is safe from this public attack. It is so easy to look up a person’s private information with the intent to terrorize them virtually and in public. Bad actors have used doxing to harass people for years now. These people have gotten better at public harassment in ways that avoid accountability in recent years. They are better at terrorizing others and getting away with it. Their doxing to harass has extended to the abuse of students, public school teachers, and school community members. I am a New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) teacher. In New York City, Chancellor David Banks has done nothing to protect the NYCPS staff and community from public doxing and retaliation by Zionist staff members and their external affiliates other than offer hollow platitudes and engage in viewpoint discrimination. His inaction has compromised the safety and security of NYCPS staff and community members who are targeted by Zionists.

read more: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/zionists-have-tried-to-silence-me-through-doxing-and-intimidation-they-wont-succeed/

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read more: https://clickhole.com/environmental-fail-nostalgia-ftw-this-3-mile-wide-garbage-patch-in-the-pacific-ocean-is-100-composed-of-troll-dolls/

read more: https://clickhole.com/3-classic-norwegian-fairy-tales-parents-used-to-scare-their-children-out-of-going-on-shark-tank-without-a-clear-pitch/

The allegation that the revered Kenyan author used to beat his wife should start a new conversation on tradition, patriarchy and women’s rights on the continent.

On March 12, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the Kenyan American poet and author, who is the son of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the famed writer widely seen as a giant of African literature, took to X, formerly Twitter, to allege that his father was an abusive husband.

“My father Ngugi wa Thiong’o physically abused my late mother. He would beat her up. Some of my earliest memories are of me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge.”

read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/4/4/ngugi-wa-thiongo-literary-giant-revolutionary-hero-domestic-abuser

On September 21, 1970, the New York Times ran its first “op-ed” page. Short for “opposite the editorial,” this new feature provided space for writers with no relationship to the newspaper’s editorial board to express their views. Before long, other newspapers followed suit. More than fifty years later, in order to compete with electronic media news, traditional newspapers have come to utilize opinion pages as a means to attract and keep readers.

Newspaper editors understood the power of opinion pieces as early as 1921 when editor Herbert Bayard Swope of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York World said: “Nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial… and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”

The pioneering opinion pieces Swope published were written by newspaper staff; and, while he may have ignored some facts in the opinions he published, contemporary newspapers claim to aspire to journalistic integrity. In its op-ed guidelines, the Washington Post, for example, notes that all op-eds are fact-checked. Post guidelines explain that authors with “important titles,” like “senators, business leaders, heads of state,” are held “to a particularly high standard when considering whether to publish them in The Post.”

As competition for the public’s attention stiffens in a social media and online communications-saturated environment, it’s perhaps not surprising that conflicts of interest arise in the op-ed pages. In 2011, more than 50 journalists and academics urged greater transparency about conflicts of interest among New York Times op-ed page contributors. In an October 6, 2011, letter to Arthur Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, they criticized the practice of “special interests surreptitiously funding ‘experts’ to push industry talking points in the nation’s major media outlets,” absent reporting of those writers’ vested interests.

In their letter to the Times, the signatories called out the unreported bias of Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce. The Institute received millions of dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry. Bryce’s promotion of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, they wrote, flew in the face of his “masquerading as an unbiased expert.”

Corporate media consolidation has strategically limited the diversity of perspectives and the quality of journalism and unduly influenced audience opinion. With a handful of large corporations controlling a majority of media outlets, content homogenization and profit prioritization often replace journalistic integrity. For instance, the acquisition of hundreds of weekly and daily newspapers by conglomerates like Gannett has led to a reduction in independent voices, an increase in editorial uniformity, biased editorials and op-eds, and news deserts.

read more: https://www.projectcensored.org/op-ed-abuse/

One afternoon in 1957 in Johannesburg, Benjamin Pogrund walked into a classroom at the University of the Witwatersrand to meet his fiancée Astrid. He found her in conversation with her teacher, Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer in isiZulu (his official title at the university was “language assistant”). Astrid had spoken warmly of Sobukwe before and Pogrund took an easy liking to him, even though, as he later wrote, in the early days of their friendship he was not particularly impressed by Sobukwe as an intellectual (finding him “too academic and too timid”). No record of Sobukwe’s early impressions of Pogrund is available in the archives. They began to meet at Sobukwe’s office at Wits and later at Pogrund’s home in the whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg; Pogrund would “abuse” his journalistic privileges to visit Sobukwe at his home in Mofolo, a suburb of the Soweto township, sometimes socializing there with other men from the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) such as P.K. Leballo, Zephaniah Mothopeng, and Peter Raboroko.

Sobukwe and Pogrund were both very similar and very different men. Similar in that they shared the social and intellectual formation of those educated in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment. Pogrund was less critical of this formation than Sobukwe, whose influences were more diverse. Sobukwe would later describe his taste in reading as “Catholic,” which is an apt way to describe who he was as an intellectual and a person. He had, for instance, the prodigious facility for and interest in language that is natural to anyone whose life has not been narrowed by a fascistic political context but particularly commendable in one whose life was interfered with in just such a way. Although the structure of settler society meant that settlers could get by as monolinguals, while natives were in general multilingual, Sobukwe’s openness to and interest in other languages and their cultures was probably unusual. He spoke the Afrikaans of both town and location fluently, as well as isiXhosa, seSotho, isiZulu, and English (the neat divisions between some of these languages, and indeed the idea that there are clear points at which one part of the spectrum of language can be marked off from another, was itself the product of colonial linguistics and anthropology). As an adult he became interested in Arabic, wishing to study it while in prison.

Both Pogrund and Sobukwe became active opponents of apartheid for which each man paid his price. Pogrund was serially harassed by the state (and periodically thrown into jail), while the newspaper he worked for was taken to court on account of his journalism. Sobukwe spent nine years in prison—six in solitary confinement on Robben Island—for his role in the Pan Africanist Congress’s anti-pass campaign and was then banished to the administrative district of Galeshewe in Kimberley in what was then the Cape province.

read more: https://africasacountry.com/2024/04/speaking-as-one-african-to-another/

Jackson, Mississippi, residents will now have a formal seat in negotiations that could determine the future of clean water access.

The change comes from a “motion to intervene” in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) case against the city of Jackson. Filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and the People’s Advocacy Institute, it marks the first time in decades that Jackson residents will have a voice in the rehabilitation of the water infrastructure.

“This is a very significant win for us,” said Danyelle Holmes, an organizer with the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and a resident of Jackson. “This is what we have been long fighting for — a voice at the table and being able to be a part of the governance process as it relates to the water and sewer infrastructure here in the city of Jackson.”

For years, the water infrastructure in the capital city of 150,000 residents has failed against extreme weather, such as flooding and freezing temperatures. Worsening climate events are emerging pressures on the water system. Still, advocates say the reasons Jacksonians lack access to reliable, safe water are reflective of a deeper pattern of anti-Black city planning, sub-par infrastructure funding, and a failed promise from the federal government to invest in “environmental justice” communities.

“Residents have been left in the dark when it comes to public health,” said Jessica Vosburgh, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Intervenor status might change that.

read more: https://truthout.org/articles/residents-finally-get-to-participate-in-negotiations-over-jacksons-water-crisis/

When Tamera Hutcherson was arrested on January 8 in Dallas, she says, she was ordered by a woman officer to remove her hijab and lift up her shirt with the instruction: “Lift up your top like it’s Girls Gone Wild.” When she did, her waist beads — worn as part of a deeply-held spiritual belief — were revealed, and the officer allowed her to continue wearing them.

But then, she says in a new lawsuit, she was escorted to take a mugshot. Another officer, a man, ordered her to remove her hijab again, this time in view of both men officers and inmates. She tried to explain that she wore her hijab — a head covering — for religious reasons but was ignored. Hutcherson eventually complied but was shaking and crying so violently that the photograph had to be taken three times just to capture an in-focus image.

Hutcherson was arrested alongside two other women wearing hijabs that day — Donia El-Hussain and Nidaa Lafi — after participating in a protest demanding that the Biden administration call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The three women have filed a civil lawsuit against Dallas County, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and the individual officers involved, saying their religious garments were unlawfully removed for mugshot photos. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Huma Yasin, the lawyer representing El-Hussain, Hutcherson and Lafi, said she hopes this legal action prompts policy changes.

read more: https://19thnews.org/2024/04/women-dallas-lawsuit-hijabs-mugshots/

*Campaigners have issued a “red alert” over language included in the 2024 Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act that could pave the way toward banning student loan cancellation.

The current draft of the routine bill bars executive branch officials from cancelling or forgiving student loans taken out to pursue flight training or education at the undergraduate level, the Debt Collective warned on Wednesday.

“They’re trying to make relief illegal,” the group posted on social media.

Buried 1,000 pages in, the language flagged by the Debt Collective comes under the heading, “Prohibition on mass cancellation of eligible undergraduate flight education and training programs loans.”

“The secretary, the secretary of the treasury, or the attorney general may not take any action to cancel or forgive the outstanding balances, or portion of balances, on any federal direct unsubsidized Stafford loan, or otherwise modify the terms or conditions of a federal direct unsubsidized Stafford loan, made to an eligible student, except as authorized by an act of Congress,” the text reads.

read more: https://truthout.org/articles/new-bill-could-pave-the-way-toward-banning-student-debt-cancellation/

The layoffs were prompted by a diversity, equity, and inclusion ban that went into effect in January.

The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) announced on Tuesday that it was firing dozens of people who used to work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at the university. At least 60 total staff members were laid off — 40 of whom worked in the Division of Campus and Community Engagement, which is closing.

In a joint letter, Texas NAACP and the Texas Conference of American Association of University Professors (AAUP) said that none of the staff who were fired currently work in DEI. The letter also says that the organizations see the layoffs as “potential attacks on First Amendment freedoms” and as clear retaliation that shows that “racial and ethnic discrimination was the clear purpose of this action.”

Professors at UT-Austin saw the firings as a “purge” that disproportionately affected staff from marginalized backgrounds.

“I can’t help but see this as a purge of any staff who have training in DEI — literally like a McCarthy-era purge — because none of the staff who’ve been fired have any DEI in their portfolio right now,” said Karma Chávez, the chair of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “All they had is a history of being in a DEI-related position.”

read more: https://truthout.org/articles/university-of-texas-at-austin-fires-60-staff-focused-on-diversity-and-inclusion/