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Year: 2024

Kamala Harris called for removing cops from schools to fight racial ‘inequities’ in 2019 interview

Kamala Harris called for removing cops from schools to fight racial ‘inequities’ in 2019 interview

Vice President Kamala Harris advocated for the removal of police officers from schools in an effort to “demilitarize” school campuses, according to unearthed footage from 2019.  “What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of school. We need to deal with the reality and speak the truth about the inequities around school discipline. Where in particular, Black and Brown boys are being expelled and or suspended as young as, I’ve seen, as young as in elementary school,” Harris said in 2019 in South Carolina, when she served as a California senator running for president during the 2020 cycle.  Harris joined the 2019 Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of that year before she dropped out of the 2020 race and was announced as President Biden’s running mate. A college student asked Harris how she would go about expunging the records of juveniles to allow them to attend college, including expunging “a criminal offense,” not “just a marijuana expungement.” “That’s a great question and a great point, because when we talk about reform of the criminal justice system, we’ve got to understand that the juvenile justice system is in dire need of reform, and I know that. And I’ve seen it,” Harris responded, touting her 2020 campaign’s “plan of action” on criminal justice reform.  CRIME SPIKES FORCE SCHOOLS TO REINSTATE RESOURCE OFFICERS AS DEFUND MOVEMENT COLLAPSES “I will end solitary confinement of juveniles, which includes what we need to do to talk about and have a commitment for less incarceration of juveniles. And have guidelines in terms of exactly what those, those numbers should be, because right now, in so many states, children are being incarcerated for … a child being incarcerated for a couple of days is traumatic, much less the weeks, months and years that we’re seeing that happen,” she explained.  Harris has yet to release her political platform for the 2024 election cycle. Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris-Walz campaign asking if she still supports removing officers from schools but did not immediately receive a reply.  Harris’ comments on removing officers from schools preceded the protests and riots that swept the nation in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing during an interaction with Minneapolis Police and when the coronavirus pandemic and its lockdowns upended society.  NATIONWIDE DEBATE SPARKS CALLS TO REMOVE POLICE OFFICERS FROM SCHOOLS As calls rang out from coast to coast to defund police in response to Floyd’s death and the deaths of other Black Americans during interactions with police, school districts in liberal areas of the country also began cutting ties with police departments with the argument that officers posed a greater threat to students of color than protecting schools from potential threats.  In 2020, just days and weeks after Floyd’s death, school districts in cities like ​​Minneapolis, Portland, Denver and Oakland voted to sever their contracts with police departments and remove school resource officers from campuses. Researchers with the outlet Education Week found in 2022 that at least 50 school districts between May 2020 through June 2022 removed officers or slashed budgets for school officers.  ALEXANDRIA CITY COUNCIL REINSTATES SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICERS AFTER TEACHER, PARENT PLEAS OVER VIOLENCE As students returned to classrooms when lockdown orders for the pandemic were lifted, violence frequently plagued schools, prompting parents in many districts to call on school leaders to reinstate officers. In Montgomery County, Maryland, in 2022, school district officials partially reversed course on removing officers after a shooting injured a 15-year-old. And the D.C. city council last year quietly repealed a plan that worked to gradually remove officers from schools as juvenile crime spiraled in the nation’s capital.  The Denver school district backtracked its 2020 removal of officers last year after a shooting at a high school, reinstating armed officers. The Alexandria, Virginia, school district did the same in 2021.  The Virginia school district was rocked by a spate of violent fights in schools at the start of the 2021-2022 school year that some blamed on the Alexandria City Council voting to do away with the officers in the spring of 2021. VIRGINIA SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICER USES BODY TO SHIELD STUDENT IN HIGH SCHOOL BRAWL “Our students are sending us warning shots, literally warning shots,” Peter Balas, a Alexandria City High School principal, said during an October 2021 meeting about bringing SROs back to campus. “Please reconsider this. My staff, my students. We’re not OK.” In California, the Pomona Unified School Board voted to defund its school police in 2021.  Just four months later, SROs were back on campus after a shooting near Pomona High School that injured a 12-year-old.  MASSIVE INCREASE IN BLACK AMERICANS MURDERED WAS RESULT OF DEFUND POLICE MOVEMENT: EXPERTS Fox News Digital was unable to find Harris making similar remarks about removing officers from schools in other previous statements, but she did call for the investment of “money in states to stop criminal charges for school-based disciplinary behavior” in her 2020 presidential platform.  Harris rose to the top of the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket last month when Biden dropped out of the race amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity. Harris joined her party in Chicago last week, when she officially accepted the nomination and said she would serve all Americans, no matter their political party, if elected to the Oval Office. 

Zuckerberg, expressing regrets, admits bowing to Biden administration pressure to remove content

Zuckerberg, expressing regrets, admits bowing to Biden administration pressure to remove content

Mark Zuckerberg just had to eat several large helpings of crow. And some minor political flap wasn’t on the menu.  As the Wall Street Journal first reported, the CEO of Facebook and Meta expressed regret on such weighty matters as government-induced censorship and free speech. TRUMP THREATENS TO QUIT KAMALA DEBATE AFTER RFK BACKS HIM, DENOUNCES MEDIA It’s good for Zuck to accept some degree of responsibility, but it’s kinda too late. By about three years. The admissions came in a letter to Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman, and is a major win for the Republicans. The onetime Harvard whiz kid usually digs in defensively, with vague promises of future reform. After the pandemic hit, Zuckerberg wrote, senior Biden administration and White House officials had “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.” That is an important distinction. The Biden pressure tactics didn’t always work. Facebook could, and sometimes did, say no. But much of the time, the giant social media site just caved. And Facebook had a publicly proclaimed agenda: prodding millions of people to take Covid vaccines. Zuckerberg said the administration pressure “was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” His company “made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today…I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.” TRUMP, REJECTING ADVICE, TRIES MOCKERY, INSULTS, AI AGAINST KAMALA, BUT IS IT WORKING? I don’t know: How confident are you that Facebook would publicly push back on some hot-button issue today? A Biden White House spokesman, in lawyerly language that didn’t quite respond to Zuck’s accusations, said it had “encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety…Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.” Two years ago, a Free Press reporter who examined the “Twitter Files” found that both the Trump and the Biden administrations “directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.” One document mentioned the White House chief technology officer, who “led the Trump administration’s calls for help from the tech companies to combat misinformation.” The piece also said that Facebook, Google and Microsoft joined in “weekly” calls with the Trump officials to talk about “general trends” at the companies. Sounds euphemistic. But Trump was also a victim. Just four hours after a 2020 campaign video was posted and drew a half million views, Facebook took it down, saying it violated the social network’s policy against Covid misinformation.  The Trump camp had posted a clip from a Fox interview in which the president said children were “virtually immune” from the coronavirus. Most medical experts disagreed at the time. “They’ve got much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this,” Trump said. “They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.” PUT POLICY ASIDE: KAMALA HARRIS WILL WIN OR LOSE BASED ON THE EXCITEMENT FACTOR A White House spokeswoman at the time called the move “another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this president, where the rules are only enforced in one direction.” Zuckerberg, for his part, also made news on the Hunter Biden laptop. He told Jordan that Meta “shouldn’t have demoted” a New York Post story about the laptop shortly before the 2020 election.  Let me stop right there. Demoted is tech jargon for suppressing a story, blatantly burying it so that few if any users see it. This happened after Twitter, as you’ll recall, totally blocked the Post story. Trump allies got access to the laptop from the Delaware computer shop owner, at a time when Biden was the Democratic nominee. Dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter dismissing the laptop story as fake, and in a debate with Trump, Biden said the release of the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Zuckerberg writes: “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.” Right. And it took the New York Times and Washington Post another year and a half to “authenticate” the laptop’s contents. In the 2020 election, Zuck funded nonprofits to set up Covid-era voting booths and equipment sorting mail-in ballots, which Republicans, calling it “Zuckerbucks,” argued with some justification that this unfairly benefited Democratic areas. Zuckerberg now says he won’t repeat the effort this time. Trump said in a posting last month: “All I can say is that if I’m elected president, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time. We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” In his Mar-a-Lago interview with me, Trump made his distaste for Facebook quite clear, in fact using it to justify dropping his opposition to banning TikTok, saying that would only help Zuckerberg’s company. Now some may dismiss all this as old news, given that the events date to the pandemic and the last election. But it raises fundamental questions that continue to reverberate today, when Elon Musk’s endorsement of Trump has prompted many liberals to leave or largely abandon X and join Threads, the Zuckerberg copycat site. Politicians and special interests routinely lobby the federal government. But when they use their considerable clout to pressure tech giants – secretly, behind closed doors, shielded from the public – it is deeply troubling.

‘I wish I was listened to’: NSW to respond to landmark birth trauma inquiry

‘I wish I was listened to’: NSW to respond to landmark birth trauma inquiry

Sydney, Australia – Sam Hall, an Aboriginal woman from Ormiston in southeast Queensland, was 40 weeks pregnant when she felt her baby’s movements slow. She was already anxious about her son’s safety – earlier scans had found possible problems with her pregnancy, and her partner had genetic heart issues. But when she tried to raise her concerns with medical staff at her local hospital, she was dismissed and sent home. “I knew something was wrong,” Hall said. “I was made to feel like a nuisance. They put a lot of it down to me being a ‘paranoid mother’ so I was never taken seriously.” The next night, she went into labour. Terrified, she called the stand-in midwife she had been assigned. She was told to wait until her scheduled induction a day later. “All she told me was to take some Panadol, have a shower and go back to bed,” Hall said. “[In the morning] she said to me: ‘I wish you just held out’ [to the preplanned induction time].” By the time Hall got to the hospital, her son’s heart rate was worryingly fast and she couldn’t feel him moving. It wasn’t until a shift change six hours later that medical staff decided to perform an emergency caesarean. By the time Hall’s son, Koah, was born that evening, one of his lungs had collapsed and he had inhaled meconium, or infant faecal matter. “By the time I first saw him, it was about 9pm,” Hall told Al Jazeera. “I couldn’t see him properly or touch him. He was such a little thing, with so many wires and cannulas attached. He had a CPAP (a mask that opens the airway and delivers oxygen to newborns with breathing difficulties) for the first couple of days. His face was so swollen it was red. Seeing your child like that changes something in you.” When a paediatrician came to give her an update, the trauma of Hall’s experience was compounded. “He was going through everything that was wrong and I started getting upset. He shushed me and told me I needed to be calm so he could get through what he needed to tell me,” Hall said. Hall is one of thousands of women who have spoken out about their experience of giving birth in Australia amid a crisis in its healthcare system that has left parents traumatised, mothers with lifelong physical injuries, and driven healthcare workers out of the profession. A world-first parliamentary inquiry in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has called for sweeping reforms to better protect women giving birth. But as the state government prepares to respond this week to its recommendations, mothers and advocates argue the inquiry did not go far enough. An invisible epidemic A landmark Western Sydney University study in 2022 found that as many as a third of mothers in Australia suffer some form of birth trauma – physical, mental and psychological injury and distress experienced throughout pregnancy and childbirth. The study also found that more than 10 percent of women experienced obstetric violence – a form of violence in which women who are pregnant or in the process of labour experience abuse or dehumanising treatment at the hands of medical professionals. The same year, about 30 women in NSW’s rural Riverina region filed a collective complaint with the state Health Care Complaints Commission. They shared shocking stories of their experiences of delivering children at the local public hospital: doctors sending them home with debilitating injuries, medical staff conducting invasive physical procedures without consent and being denied pain relief during labour. As public interest in the women’s stories grew, other women around the state and the country began sharing their experiences. Public pressure compelled the NSW parliament to convene a special inquiry into birth trauma – the first such investigation anywhere in the world. “As a GP who used to provide antenatal care, I’d heard these stories before I entered parliament, but the sheer number of people who engaged with this inquiry is unprecedented,” said Dr Amanda Cohn, a Greens party politician in NSW and member of the parliamentary committee that conducted the Australian inquiry. A similar inquiry in the United Kingdom, spurred by the NSW precedent, found “a maternity system where poor care is all-too-frequently tolerated as normal, and women are treated as an inconvenience”. Amy Dawes told the inquiry she had life-changing injuries after giving birth [Courtesy of Amy Dawes] While Australian parliamentary inquiries are generally open to the public, they rarely prompt widespread public engagement. The birth trauma inquiry was different. It received more than 4,000 submissions, overwhelmingly anonymous, from members of the public disclosing the pain, trauma and humiliation they had suffered throughout pregnancy and birth. The inquiry recommended the state government overhaul maternal healthcare, including by ensuring new and expectant parents receive continuity of care. It also said free psychological care and postpartum physiotherapy should be provided while medical staff should receive more training on how to support women’s choices during delivery. But even as the state government weighs its response, many of the mothers who told the inquiry their stories are furious that the report failed to acknowledge obstetric violence as a form of gender-based violence. In a dissenting statement, the inquiry’s own chair, Animal Justice Party politician Emma Hurst, said the final report “fails to recognise the very clear evidence that this is a gendered issue”. Rebecca Collier, one of the mothers who gave evidence, told the ABC broadcaster that the definition “was left out to make it more palatable”. “I think we need to call things what they are and we need to be quite fierce about the words and the language that we’re using around this.” The inquiry also exposed the dire conditions for healthcare workers tasked with caring for parents and children. Nurses, midwives, doctors and support staff spoke of enormous levels of burnout, psychological distress, vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue across the health sector. They also talked about not being given

Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 915

Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 915

As the war enters its 915th day, these are the main developments. Here is the situation on Wednesday, August 28, 2024. Fighting At least six people were killed across Ukraine, including in the central city of Kryvyi Rih and in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, in a second day of Russian missile and drone attacks. At least nine people were injured. On Monday, Russia launched its biggest aerial assault since the start of its invasion in 2022. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine would retaliate against Russia for its attacks. The air force said Ukraine brought down five out of 10 missiles and 60 out of 81 drones Russia fired on Tuesday, with some of them destroyed by Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets. It said it lost track of 10 more drones and they probably came down somewhere on Ukrainian territory. One more crossed into neighbouring Belarus. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, said Ukraine had captured 594 Russian soldiers and taken control of 1,294 sq km (almost 500 sq miles) and 100 settlements since launching its incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region on August 6. Rafael Grossi, director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), visited the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant. He said it was vulnerable to a serious accident because it lacked a protective dome that could shield it from missiles, drones and artillery amid the fighting in the region. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s western Belgorod region, said the situation on the border with Ukraine was “difficult but under control” after reports on Russian Telegram channels that Ukraine attacked a border checkpoint at Nekhoteyevka before being pushed back. Speaking on television, Ukraine’s Syrskii said the situation around Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine was “fairly difficult” with Russia trying to disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines to the front. “The enemy is using its advantage in personnel, weapons and military equipment, it is actively using artillery and aviation,” he said. Earlier, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had captured the village of Orlivka, which is near Pokrovsk. Politics and diplomacy Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to United States President Joe Biden and his two potential successors, probably while he is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly next month. The plan was designed to ensure Ukraine was in a strong position going into eventual talks to end the war.  “The main point of this plan is to force Russia to end the war. And I want that very much – [that it would be] fair for Ukraine,” he told reporters in Kyiv. China’s Special Envoy for Eurasian Affairs Li Hui called on more countries to endorse its peace plan for Ukraine, after a round of diplomacy with Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa. “They have maintained communication with both Russia and Ukraine and stay committed to a political settlement to the crisis through dialogue and negotiation,” Li said. China did not attend the peace summit organised by Switzerland in June. It issued a joint peace plan with Brazil earlier this year. Moscow said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin had “exchanged perspectives” on the war in Ukraine. Modi was in Kyiv last week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov condemned Ukraine’s move to ban a Russia-linked branch of the Orthodox Church, describing it as an attack on Christianity and a blow to freedom of religion. Kyiv has accused the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of abetting Moscow’s 30-month-old war by spreading pro-Russian propaganda and harbouring spies. Russia’s FSB security service said it had opened criminal cases against two more foreign journalists who crossed the Russian border to report from the Kursk region after Ukraine’s incursion. The Interfax news agency said the journalists included a reporter for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and a correspondent for Ukraine’s 1+1 TV channel. The FSB has now brought criminal cases against at least seven foreign journalists who have reported from Kursk. Weapons Zelenskyy said the military had recently carried out the first successful test of a domestically-produced ballistic missile. He said he was not able to share more details. Adblock test (Why?)

Harris and Walz to sit down with CNN for first formal interview of campaign

Harris and Walz to sit down with CNN for first formal interview of campaign

Thursday’s interview with presenter Dana Bash will be the first since Harris replaced US President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will sit down with CNN on Thursday in their first formal interview of the United States election campaign. Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate for the White House after he dropped out of the race in July. CNN anchor and chief political correspondent Dana Bash will conduct the interview from the battleground state of Georgia, CNN said. It will air at 9pm (01:00 GMT on Friday). “This is the first time she’s going to take questions in a concerted effort like this, in an interview format, since Joe Biden upended this entire race six weeks ago,” CNN Political Director David Chalian said in an interview on the channel. While Harris has occasionally taken questions from journalists on foreign and economic policies on the campaign trail, she has yet to do a one-on-one media interview or hold a formal news conference, prompting attacks from rival Donald Trump and his Republican Party. On Tuesday, Trump’s campaign reacted to the interview announcement by noting that Harris would be doing the interview with Walz. “She’s not competent enough to do it on her own,” the campaign claimed. Trump has held news conferences and done media interviews in recent weeks but they have mostly focused on criticising the Biden administration’s record instead of detailing his own policy proposals. Harris laid out some broad policy agendas at the Democratic National Convention last week, promising a middle-class tax cut at home and a muscular foreign policy of standing up to Russia and North Korea while backing a ceasefire in Gaza and a two-state solution in the Middle East. During her more than three years as vice president, Harris has done on-camera and print interviews with The Associated Press news agency and many other outlets, often at a pace more frequent than Biden. Harris travels with members of the media on Air Force Two for all trips and nearly always comes to the back of the plane to speak to reporters for a few minutes before takeoff. Her office insists that those conversations are off the record, though, so what she says cannot be shared publicly. The CNN interview will be recorded during a campaign bus tour by the Democratic candidates. Adblock test (Why?)