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Longtime Texas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson dies at 88

U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, one of the most prominent Democrats from the Dallas area, died on Sunday at the age of 88.  The Dallas Morning News also confirmed her death with an unnamed source close to the family. No cause of death was given. Johnson was born in Waco and grew up in the segregated South. Dallas’ once-segregated Union Station was renamed in her honor in 2019.  She served in the U.S. House for three decades after becoming the first registered nurse elected to Congress and the first Black chief psychiatric nurse at Dallas’ Veterans Affairs hospital.  Johnson went on to become the first Black woman to chair the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and she also led the Congressional Black Caucus. She left office in January after repeatedly delaying her retirement. Before Congress, she served in the Texas legislature. Her own experience with racism helped spur her to get involved in politics. She recalled that officials at the VA hospital were shocked that she was Black after they hired her sight-unseen, so they rescinded their offer for her to live in a dorm on campus.  REPUBLICANS FUME AT BIDEN FOR VACATIONING AS BORDER CROSSINGS EXPLODE: ‘DERELICTION OF DUTY’ President Biden said Johnson was a “dedicated nurse, state legislator, and longtime U.S. congresswoman with immense courage and a commitment to the promise of America.” Biden hailed her “immense courage” and called her “an icon and mentor to generations of public servants, through whom her legacy of resilience and purpose will endure.” “For three decades, Chairwoman Johnson was a powerful force in the United States Congress, always focused on the future,” House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said in a statement, praising Johnson as “a tenacious trailblazer, a talented legislator and a devoted public servant.” Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford said Johnson was also “a fierce advocate for expanding STEM opportunities to Black and minority students” who also played a key role in helping the Biden administration pass a major package of incentives for computer chip manufacturers. “She was the single most effective legislator Dallas has ever had,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said in a statement. “Nobody brought more federal infrastructure money home to our city. Nobody fought harder for our communities and our residents’ interests and safety. And nobody knew how to navigate Washington better for the people of Dallas.” The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II to abdicate after 52 years on the throne

Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II to abdicate after 52 years on the throne

The Danish queen announces January 14 abdication during New Year’s Eve address live on TV, making way for son, Crown Prince Frederik. Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II will abdicate on January 14 after 52 years on the throne and will be succeeded by her eldest son Crown Prince Frederik, she said in her annual New Year’s speech. The 83-year-old queen, who took over the throne in 1972, is the longest-serving monarch in Europe following the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. In February, she underwent a successful back surgery. “The surgery naturally gave rise to thinking about the future – whether the time had come to leave the responsibility to the next generation,” she said in the speech on Sunday. “I have decided that now is the right time. On 14 January 2024 – 52 years after I succeeded my beloved father – I will step down as queen of Denmark,” she said. “I leave the throne to my son, Crown Prince Frederik,” she added. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen confirmed the decision in a news release. He paid tribute to the monarch, offering a “heartfelt thank you to Her Majesty the Queen for her lifelong dedication and tireless efforts for the Kingdom”. In Denmark, formal power resides with the elected parliament and its government. The monarch is expected to stay above partisan politics, representing the nation with traditional duties ranging from state visits to national day celebrations. Born in 1940, Margrethe has been one of the most popular public figures in Denmark. The 1.82m (6-foot) tall, chain-smoking monarch often walked the streets of Copenhagen virtually unescorted and won the admiration of Danes for her warm manners and for her talents as a linguist and designer. A keen skier, she was a member of a Danish women’s air force unit as a princess, taking part in judo courses and endurance tests in the snow. Margrethe remained tough even as she grew older. In 2011, at age 70, she visited Danish troops in southern Afghanistan wearing a military jumpsuit. As monarch, she crisscrossed the country and regularly visited Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, the two semi-independent territories that are part of the Danish Realm. Adblock test (Why?)

The displaced Afghans making gruelling journeys to survive

The displaced Afghans making gruelling journeys to survive

The barren desert plain among the mountains of eastern Afghanistan is filled with hundreds of thousands of people. Some live in tents. Others live out in the open, among the piles of the few belongings they managed to take as they were forced from neighbouring Pakistan. The sprawling camp of people returning to Afghanistan through the Torkham border crossing is the latest facet of Afghans’ long, painful search for a stable home. More than 40 years of war, violence and poverty in Afghanistan have created one of the world’s most uprooted populations. Some 6 million Afghans are refugees outside the country. Another 3.5 million people are displaced within the country of 40 million, driven from their homes by war, earthquakes, drought or resources that are being depleted. Pakistan’s decision earlier this year to deport undocumented Afghans has struck them hard. Many Afghans have lived for decades in Pakistan, driven there by successive wars at home. When the order was announced, hundreds of thousands feared arrest and fled back to Afghanistan. Often, Pakistani authorities prevented them from taking anything with them, they say. Their first stop has been the camp in Torkham, where they might spend days or weeks before Taliban officials send them to a camp elsewhere. The expulsions from Pakistan have swelled the already large numbers of Afghans who are trying to migrate to Iran, hoping to find work. Adblock test (Why?)

‘Outraged’: Brazilian Muslims face growing Islamophobia over Gaza war

‘Outraged’: Brazilian Muslims face growing Islamophobia over Gaza war

Sao Paulo, Brazil – It wasn’t unusual for patients to arrive in a foul temper at the hospital emergency room in São Paulo, Brazil, where physician Batull Sleiman worked. After all, every day brought new medical crises, new requests for urgent care. Sleiman had seen it all. But she was not expecting the level of anger she received several weeks ago. A patient had arrived in her examination room frustrated over the time he spent waiting for a doctor’s care. Sleiman recalled his issue was “not urgent”. Still, as she treated him, he accused her of being impolite. “You’re being rude with me because you’re not from Brazil,” Sleiman remembers him saying. “If you were in your country…” Batull Sleiman believes one of her patients lashed out after seeing her hijab [Courtesy of Batull Sleiman] Sleiman said she turned away rather than hear the rest. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she believes the man reacted the way he did because of one thing: her hijab. “I was surprised and outraged,” Sleiman told Al Jazeera. But, she added, the atmosphere in Brazil had grown more tense since the war in Gaza had erupted. “I’ve been noticing that people have been staring more at me on the street since October.” But Sleiman is not alone in feeling singled out. As the war in Gaza grinds on, Brazil is one of many countries facing increased fears about religious discrimination, particularly towards its Muslim community. A survey released last month from the Anthropology Group on Islamic and Arab Contexts — an organisation based at the University of São Paulo — found that reports of harassment among Muslim Brazilians have been widespread since the war began. An estimated 70 percent of respondents said they knew someone who experienced religious intolerance since October 7, when the Palestinian group Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,140 people. Israel has since led a military offensive against Gaza, a Palestinian enclave, killing more than 21,000 people. That response has raised human rights concerns, with United Nations experts warning of a “grave risk of genocide”. While Palestinians are an ethnic group — and not a religious one — the University of São Paulo’s Professor Francirosy Barbosa found that the events of October 7 resulted in incidents of religious intolerance in Brazil, as Palestinian identity was conflated with Muslim identity. She led November’s survey of 310 Muslim Brazilians. Respondents, she explained, reported receiving insults that reflected tensions in the Gaza war. “Many Muslim women told us they are now called things like ‘Hamas daughter’ or ‘Hamas terrorist’,” she told Al Jazeera. The survey, conducted online, also found that many of the respondents also had firsthand experience with religious intolerance. “About 60 percent of the respondents affirmed that they suffered some kind of offence, either on social media or in their daily lives at work, at home or in public spaces,” Barbosa said. Women in particular, the study noted, reported slightly higher rates of religious intolerance. A Palestinian Brazilian woman holds up a sign at a protest in Brasilia on October 20 that reads, ‘Muslim women of Brazil: anti-Zionism, anti-militarism, anti-extremism’ [File: Eraldo Peres/AP Photo] The question of Islamophobia was catapulted into the national spotlight this month when a video spread on social media appearing to show a resident of Mogi das Cruzes, a suburb of São Paulo, rushing towards a Muslim woman and grabbing at her headscarf. The video was even broadcast on news outlets like CNN Brasil. One of the women involved, Karen Gimenez Oubidi, who goes by Khadija, had married a Moroccan man and converted to Islam eight years ago. She told Al Jazeera that the altercation involved one of her neighbours: She was upset after their children had argued. “She came down with her brother and was very aggressive. She called me a ‘cloth-wrapped bitch’. I soon realised it was not only about the kids’ fight,” Gimenez Oubidi said. Neighbours attempted to separate the two women. One man in the video, however, grabbed Gimenez Oubidi from behind, wrapping an arm around her throat to hold her down. Gimenez Oubidi identified him to Al Jazeera as her neighbour’s brother. Karen Gimenez Oubidi, known as Khadija, was the subject of a viral video that raised questions about Islamophobia [Courtesy of Karen Gimenez Oubidi] “He said a few times to me, ‘What are you doing now, terrorist?’ He didn’t say it loudly: It was just for me to hear. He knew what he was doing,” Gimenez Oubidi said. She added that the fight her son had had with the neighbour’s child was also over her hijab. The woman who attacked Oubidi, Fernanda — she said she did not want her full name revealed for fear of a public backlash — disputed this account. Fernanda said her son had been hit by Oubidi’s son in the playground, and while she had physically attacked Fernanda, she had not referenced her religion. “I never insulted her for her religion. That simply didn’t happen. I’d never do something like that,” she said. A government report from July noted that religious intolerance “occurs most intensely against those of African origin, but it also affects Indigenous, Roma, immigrant and converted individuals, including Muslims and Jews, as well as atheist, agnostic and non-religious people”. Brazil is predominantly Christian, home to an estimated 123 million Catholics — more than any other country in the world. But it has a long-standing, if smaller, Muslim population. Academics believe Islam arrived in the country with the transatlantic slave trade, as kidnapped African Muslims continued to practice their religion in their new surroundings. One group of enslaved Muslim Brazilians even launched a rebellion against the government in 1835, called the Malê uprising — a term derived from the Yoruba word for Muslim. Brazil’s Muslim population grew with waves of immigration in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Arab immigrants, particularly from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, came to know Brazil as their home.

Assad forces target crowded market, kill two: Syria’s White Helmets

Assad forces target crowded market, kill two: Syria’s White Helmets

Meanwhile, Israel bombed Aleppo and Neirab, leaving Syrians trapped between two forces raining fire from the sky. Idlib, Syria — Two civilians, including a child, were killed, and 16 others, including four children, were injured in an artillery attack by Syrian regime forces targeting a popular market in the centre of Idlib city on Saturday evening, according to the Syria Civil Defence. “We received two martyrs and 14 injuries, including two critical cases, at the hospital, and they are now in the operating room,” said Ismail al-Hassan, the head of the emergency department at Idlib University Hospital. Al-Hassan told Al Jazeera that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had recently intensified its targeting of the area, necessitating a constant state of preparedness to receive any injuries within the city or its vicinity in the event of any bombardment. “For nearly 13 years, we have been working to save civilian casualties targeted by the Assad regime and Russia,” al-Hassan said. The Syria Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, said that earlier on Saturday, a child was wounded as a result of artillery shelling targeting the city of Atarib in the western Aleppo countryside. “The timing and location of today’s attack in Idlib indicate that its goal is to kill the largest number of civilians,” said Ahmed Yazji, a board member of the Syria Civil Defence. Yazj told Al Jazeera that the attacks by the Syrian regime and Russia on the Idlib region consistently aim to target vital centres, schools, and hospitals with the intention of killing civilians. “Since the beginning of 2023 until today, we have documented more than 1,200 attacks by the Assad regime and Russia on the northwestern Syria region, including 27 attacks on schools and 16 attacks on displaced camps,” he said. “The attacks of the Assad regime and Russia on the region can only be described as terrorist attacks seeking to undermine stability in the area.” Idlib province, the last stronghold controlled by Syrian opposition fighters, is considered the most densely populated area in northwestern Syria, hosting 4.5 million people, including 1.9 million living in internally displaced camps, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Within moments, the market turned into a pool of blood and thick dust,” said Abdullah Aloush, a displaced person from Khan Shaykhun and the owner of a nearby shop in the targeted area in Idlib city. Aloush told Al Jazeera that the market was targeted at a time when it was crowded with civilians. “Initially, myself and those with me in the shop were helpless, not knowing what to do, before we went out to check on our neighbours and assist the injured.” Earlier on Saturday, Israeli warplanes conducted air strikes on Aleppo and Neirab airports, as well as several points belonging to the Syrian regime south of Aleppo. The Israeli air strikes targeted farms between the villages of Zahabiya and Sheikh Saeed in the Neirab military airport area, housing warehouses and headquarters for Iranian militias. A missile also fell in the area of Aleppo International Airport and Neirab military airport, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London. “As usual, the Assad regime, unable to respond to Israeli raids on its sites, targets civilians in northwestern Syria,” said Mohammed al-Saleh, 34, the owner of a cafe on the street in Idlib that was bombed. Al-Saleh, who was approximately 15m (50 feet) away from the bombing, warned everyone in the cafe not to leave the place for fear of a repeat of the bombing in the area and to avoid new casualties. “At these moments, our feeling can only be described as being in the embrace of death,” said Al-Saleh. “In these days, while people around the world are preparing to celebrate the start of a new year, we in Idlib are preparing to bury our friends and family who were killed today.” Adblock test (Why?)

Harvard honor council student says Claudine Gay got by on ‘lower standard’ in plagiarism case, should resign

Harvard honor council student says Claudine Gay got by on ‘lower standard’ in plagiarism case, should resign

An undergraduate member of Harvard’s Honor Council believes university president Claudine Gay is “getting off easy” from her recent plagiarism allegations. The student, who remained anonymous, wrote an op-ed published in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper on Sunday. Gay is facing widespread accusations of antisemitism and plagiarism, but the university’s board has declared it still supports her. “I have served as a voting member of the Harvard College Honor Council, the body tasked with upholding the College’s community standards of academic integrity,” the student began. “In my time on the Council, I heard dozens of cases. When students — my classmates, peers, and friends — appear before the council, they are distraught. For most, it is the worst day of their college careers. For some, it is the worst day of their lives. They often cry.” “It is because I have seen first-hand how heart-wrenching these decisions can be, and still think them necessary, that I call on University President Claudine Gay to resign for her numerous and serious violations of academic ethics,” the student continued. COLLEGE ADMISSIONS CONSULTANT IN ‘COMPLETE SHOCK’ AS MULTIPLE STUDENTS REJECT HARVARD EARLY ACCEPTANCE OFFERS “When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her,” the student wrote. The student went on to argue that evidence suggests Gay’s plagiarism was “routine and pervasive” throughout her career. LAW FIRM TO CEASE ON-CAMPUS RECRUITING AT HARVARD DUE TO UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT’S CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY The piece then blasted the university’s leadership for allowing Gay to simply retroactively correct the instances of plagiarism in her work to avoid consequences, something students would never be allowed to do. HARVARD COLLEGE SEES DROP IN EARLY APPLICANTS COMPARED TO LAST YEAR: ‘HARVARD’S REPUTATION HAS BEEN DAMAGED’ “There is one standard for me and my peers and another, much lower standard for our University’s president. The Corporation should resolve the double standard by demanding her resignation,” the student concluded. The Harvard Crimson noted that it allowed the op-ed’s author to publish the piece anonymously, “to protect the author from retaliation, and because the proceedings of the Harvard College Honor Council are sensitive and confidential.”