In October 2022, a group of left-leaning lawmakers released a letter urging President Biden to seek a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine War. While fellow Democrats have often tempered their criticism of Biden’s policy towards Ukraine, the letter was unusually strident in its tone and forthright in its recommendations. “As legislators responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of U.S.
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Last weekend tragedy struck Jacksonville, Florida, after a gunman shot and killed three Black people — Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., Jerrald Gallion and Angela Michelle Carr — at a Dollar General store. The 21-year-old gunman’s attack was motivated by racism: He left behind racist screeds and carried out the attack with a swastika-emblazoned assault-style rifle, according to officials.
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We are experiencing the climate crisis and its dire effects firsthand, from the blistering heat, havoc from natural disasters and destruction of biodiversity. But all hope is not lost. As a climate advocate, I know that fighting climate change can be thankless work, and the scope is overwhelming. However, it’s important to take time to celebrate climate wins because it gives climate advocates…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On July 30, the Israeli Knesset passed a sexual assault law showing, as Israel’s sole liberal newspaper put it, that the “processes of fascism are in full swing.” The law doubles the penalty for sexual assault offenses that were “nationalistically motivated,” however defined. In other words, sexual attacks by Arabs against Jews will face harsher sentences if prosecutors can prove the assailant was…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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August 28 marks the 68th anniversary of the horrific lynching of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was kidnapped, beaten and murdered following malicious and false accusations that he made sexual advances toward a white woman in Mississippi. Despite Till’s youth and innocence, his murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, and his accuser, Carolyn Bryant Donham, died this April at 88…
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Ever get mad at a delivery person for bringing your pizza late? That used to be me. Now I assume it’s late because an overpaid boss is probably making two employees do the job of 10. That’s because I worked for two years at a company with the kind of chronic understaffing that plagues many of America’s largest retailers and fast food corporations. My job was to build merchandise displays at Lowe’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Wildfires raged through Maui this month, leaving a wake of devastation as residents struggled to survive. More than 100 people are confirmed dead, while thousands remain missing. The wildfires began from multiple unrelated fires, some igniting because of power lines that were fanned by strong hurricane season winds. The emergency alert system didn’t activate, leaving residents unprepared.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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I first visited North Korea in 2009. I remember feeling nervous and anxious in the days and weeks leading up to the trip. I had grown up thinking of only the south as my homeland, and the north seemed remote and foreign. This was also the same year that United States journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee had been detained in North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)…
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This weekend, only a few hundred activists will come to Appalachia to support the people directly impacted by the still unfinished 303-mile fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) through their participation in trainings, anti-pipeline actions and a music festival. But in a month, thousands and thousands will descend on New York City to demand that President Joe Biden declare a climate…
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On Wednesday night, seven men and one woman took part in what might go down as the least important debate in presidential campaign history. Throughout the first GOP primary debate of the 2024 election cycle, all the participants desperately tried to establish their bona fides in front of a crowd that seemed — from the booing that former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie received when he went after…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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It has been nearly eight years since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign breathed new life into the U.S. progressive movement, and nearly six since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) upset primary win provided a roadmap for progressive candidates to advance their politics in the electoral arena. Since then, the modern progressive movement has notched many more victories: Candidates have been…
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A Minnesota Public Radio article noted last month that “women are returning to the job market in droves.” While it’s true that women may be returning to work; they are not doing so without challenges. Most people have no idea the systems that must be in place in early childhood education to accommodate women and families and help them get back to work and stay at work. Simply put…
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Next week, I will begin teaching at a public university in Florida. When I announced my move to friends and colleagues, they were horrified. Wasn’t I terrified? Didn’t I know what Gov. Ron DeSantis was doing to public education in that state? In May, Governor DeSantis told Fox News that he would “destroy leftism in this country.” A week before that, Florida Sen. Rick Scott issued what he called a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Natural hair braider Ashley N’Dakpri knows her knots. She practiced as a child on friends and family, attended beauty school in the Ivory Coast, and has 20 years of professional experience in the United States. Yet that’s not enough in Louisiana. The Louisiana Board of Cosmetology requires braiders to spend a year or more in a state-licensed school, whether they need the training or not.
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I should probably be ashamed to admit this but my favorite part of any presidential election season is the Republican primaries, especially the debates. Since Republicans rarely have an incumbent president running (they have only had three Republican presidents in the last 35 years) the primaries are usually a free-for-all that features some very eccentric fringe characters as well as the…
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On July 31, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) announced plans to repurpose 28 libraries into “discipline centers,” sparking widespread protest. Mayor Sylvester Turner denounced the plan for producing “a school district of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’,” where students in low-income schools will have “no place to go to their school library, to study, to check out a book…
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The post Ontarians should take action to address the Greenbelt scandal appeared first on Environmental Defence.
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Last week, former President Donald Trump joked at a campaign event in Alabama that he only needed one more indictment to secure the GOP presidential nomination. After-hours on Monday evening, Trump got his wish when a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury indicted the disgraced ex-president, along with 18 others, on state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges and a slew of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“There should be no private prisons, period, none, period. That’s what they’re talking about — private detention centers. They should not exist. And we are working to close all of them.” That’s what President Joe Biden said during an April 2021 speech in Georgia, where he found himself confronted by immigrant rights activists. Two years later, it’s clear that those were just empty words: The Biden…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On a near-daily basis, former President Donald Trump faces either entirely new indictments or add-ons to existing ones. He’s now got a rap sheet that includes two separate sets of federal indictments and state charges in New York. He has been found liable, in a civil case, for sexual assault, and his business empire has been found guilty of a variety of malpractices. Fulton County, Georgia…
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In a single academic year, political and judicial leaders have escalated their anti-democratic, anti-educational movement aimed at dismantling higher education’s focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), initiating a furiously paced rejection of racial, sexual and ethnic diversity — as well as basic humanity. Multiple states have instituted curricular gag orders through “divisive concept”…
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Photographs of the open casket at Emmett Till’s funeral, a choice his mother insisted on because it would force the world to face what happened to him, showed the 14-year-old boy disfigured from a horrific beating by a group of white vigilantes. They had attacked him based on an unfounded accusation of whistling at a white woman. Circulating widely via Jet magazine (while more mainstream media…
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On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country’s High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what’s known as the “reasonability” standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians were defying massive crowds that had, for months on end…
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New Yorkers across the five boroughs recently mourned the life of O’Shae Sibley, a gay Black man killed in Brooklyn while dancing in public. The 28-year-old was returning home from a birthday party with friends before he was stabbed. While stopping for gas, the group began dancing. Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album played as Sibley and his friends vogued, a dance style created by Black and Latinx…
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A 20-year-old born in Gaza, Khaled (who asked to use a pseudonym for his own safety) has been climbing trees since he was a toddler. He recalls the “beauty and freedom you feel when you climb to the top of an olive tree and see all the greenery.” But Khaled explains that now there are no trees to climb. In May 2021, on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr celebration, Israeli missiles were fired into…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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After a two-year legal battle against Biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific, descendants of Henrietta Lacks won a settlement over the use of their relative’s DNA. Seventy years ago, Johns Hopkins Hospital removed tissue from Lacks’s cervix without her consent as she was dying of cervical cancer. Her cells, named HeLa after the first two letters of her first and last name, were the first human…
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When COVID-19 broke out across the world in 2020, it produced widespread support for expanded public health measures, including “lockdowns,” that are estimated to have saved up to a million lives in the U.S. and millions more worldwide. As tragic as the pandemic has been, as many mistakes were made, we should be grateful to the health care workers, public health officials and vaccine researchers…
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The public learned last fall of one particularly controversial element of United States Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the U.S. Postal Service that would be rolling out soon. Essentially, the function of sorting and delivering mail would be consolidated into regional centers, leaving empty former sorting space in the back of post offices. No layoffs were announced.
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