Rouge Forum Dispatch: People make gods. Gods don’t make people. Stop it.
May 19th, 2018 / Author: rgibsonWe Say Fight Back!
School Workers on the March
www.facebook.com/SpectrumNewsNC/videos/10156553192252033/
Thousands of North Carolina teachers marched. Now what? Another Arne Duncan Democrat? Really?
Their main demand is that the General Assembly, where Republicans hold majorities large enough to override any Cooper veto of their legislation, stop tax cuts on upper-income households and corporations due in January, and to channel more spending into public education. Legislative leaders have promised an average 6 percent pay raise for educators, which would be the fifth in five years.
Cooper has proposed an average 8 percent teacher pay raise this year, $25 million for textbooks and digital learning and a $150 stipend for teachers who shell out for classroom supplies.
North Carolina teachers earn an average salary of about $50,000, ranking them 39th in the country last year, the National Education Association reported last month. Their pay increased by 4.2 percent over the previous year — the second-biggest increase in the country — and was estimated to rise an average 1.8 percent this year, the NEA said. But that still represents a 9.4 percent slide in real income since 2009 due to inflation, the union said. Read more here: www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article211311324.html#storylink=cpy
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South Florida teachers take to the street to demand better pay
Think a SC teacher walkout is out of the question? Don’t be so sure
Recent teacher walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona have caused me to wonder whether something similar could take place here in South Carolina. I think it’s possible given that South Carolina also has spent the past 10 years de-investing in education.
There are several factors that I believe come into play.
First of all, teacher pay in South Carolina is, to say the least, inadequate. Pay in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida is as much as $6,000 higher. This is particularly problematic because we are now competing with these same states for teachers, because our colleges and universities are not producing anywhere near the number of teachers we need and will need in the future.
Then there is funding for classrooms and programs. In South Carolina, per-student funding is about $530 below what the law requires, and has been well below the legal requirement for almost 10 years. This means teachers are lacking instructional materials and other critical classroom needs, and schools and districts are lacking programs and services they need to meet the wide range of needs of an increasingly diverse student population. (That said, there is always money for more bubble tests and such superfluous foolishness as “student engagement” surveys.)
Teachers keep spending money from their own pockets, and school communities keep fund-raising to try to fill the void. Unfortunately, the void keeps getting larger, and more bake sales aren’t going to fill it. Frustration on the part of teachers who want to do their best by their students keeps building. A tipping point is approaching, I think, if this trend continues in our state.
Finally, the mindset of teachers about walkouts is changing. Teachers who started their careers 20 or more years ago might see this as betraying their students. I think the younger generation is more likely to reach a point that they will be willing to draw a line in the sand because of their students and because politicians aren’t listening. Further, as was the case in Oklahoma in particular, a great deal of the organizing was done social media. A union or other professional group is no longer essential to organizing a walkout. Read more here: www.thestate.com/opinion/op-ed/article210451474.html#storylink=cpy
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The Little Red Schoolhouse
As DeVos’s Education Dept. Shifts Focus, Revisit FRONTLINE’s Reporting on For-Profit Colleges (and the role of $ in other Segregated Capitalist schools?)
A team at the Education Department focused on investigating alleged fraudulent and predatory practices at for-profit colleges has been unwound, essentially shuttering investigations into several for-profit colleges where key hires of education secretary Betsy DeVos once worked, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
Citing anonymous current and former employees, The Times reported that only three employees remain on what was once a team of approximately one dozen investigators and lawyers, and that “their mission has been scaled back to focus on processing student loan forgiveness applications and looking at smaller compliance cases.”
An Education Department spokeswoman told The Times that the team’s reduced size was due to attrition. She said that the Department’s new employees who had once worked in the for-profit college sector had not reshaped the work of the team, and that the choice to focus the unit’s remaining members on student loan forgiveness “neither points to a curtailment of our school oversight efforts nor indicates a conscious effort to ignore ‘large-scale’ investigations.”
The news about the unit follows years of increased federal scrutiny of for-profit schools’ recruitment techniques and job placement claims — scrutiny that helped lead to the closure of several major for-profit college chains.
In the 2016 documentary A Subprime Education, building on its reporting in the 2010 documentary College, Inc, FRONTLINE investigated allegations of fraud and predatory behavior in the for-profit college industry.
As A Subprime Education explored, for-profit colleges were often advertised as the best option for low-income students who couldn’t afford a more traditional four-year degree. But for years, for-profits had charged students nearly five times as much as community colleges, while getting the bulk of their revenue, up to 90 percent, from student loans and grants — often from the federal government.
“This is the most heavily subsidized private business sector in America,” U.S. Senator Dick Durbin
As DeVos’s Education Dept. Shifts Focus, Revisit FRONTLINE’s Reporting on For-Profit Colleges
Five Years in, Cindy Marten Has Notched Some Successes at San Diego Unified But Black and Brown Students Still Struggle
Five years into San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten’s tenure, the district has moved the needle in some ways, floundered in others and at times behaved in ways that contradicted the “be kind, dream big” rhetoric on which Marten has staked her image. While district-wide test scores have risen, the achievement gap Marten pledged to tackle has gone virtually unchanged.
…Marten’s job would be to take “the pockets of success” she already glimpsed and put them in place districtwide. When that happens, the thinking goes, families will realize they don’t have to look any further than their own backyards to find the answers they’re looking for.
Four months earlier, Marten called the same idea the school board’s “Wizard of Oz theory,” referring to the fact that trustees found their homegrown superintendent serving as principal of a predominantly low-income elementary school in City Heights.
As if to bring the point to life, Marten walked behind a lectern and stepped into a pair of ruby red slippers. She then took center stage and clicked her heels three times.
“There’s no place like home,” she said.
Five years later, the gains have been incremental and difficult to measure. There’s not a quality school in every neighborhood. Enrollment districtwide has declined. And about the same portion of parents are taking their kids across town as when Marten started. www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/five-years-in-cindy-marten-has-notched-some-successes-at-san-diego-unified-but-black-and-brown-students-still-struggle/?utm_source=Voice+of+San+Diego+Master+List&utm_campaign=2dd6efc962-Morning_Report&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c2357fd0a3-2dd6efc962-81862829&goal=0_c2357fd0a3-2dd6efc962-81862829
SDSU to keep Racist Aztec name following racially and politically charged debate within secret tribunal (it’s the old twins, racism and money)
San Diego State University will keep the word Aztec as its nickname but create a more culturally sensitive version of its mascot in a decision that reflects nearly 20 years of racially charged debate about how the school treats indigenous people.
“The Aztec Warrior … will be retained, but as Spirit Leader, not mascot,” interim SDSU President Sally Roush told the Union-Tribune on Thursday.
In January it was announced that a 17-member task force would be formed to make recommendations on the appropriateness of the Aztec identity. The task force was said to consist of four students, four faculty and staff, four alumni and two members of the SDSU community at large. But after its formation in February 2018, the university came under fire from both sides of the debate for not publicly naming its members.
In April 2018, the union representing most California State University faculty voted to condemn the mascot, days before the task force’s deadline to make a recommendation on its use. thedailyaztec.com/89892/news/sdsu-to-keep-aztec-moniker/
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MSU’s $500M payout could mean tuition hike, using taxpayer money
Now that Michigan State University and 332 people have settled lawsuits relating to Larry Nassar’s sexual assaults, one big question remains — how is the university going to come up with $500 million?
That’s a problem the university is currently working on, MSU spokeswoman Emily Guerrant told the Free Press.
Here are some ways it could go:
- Hike tuition. MSU Interim President John Engler has been saying for a couple of months that tuition dollars will likely be used to cover the cost of any settlement. However, state lawmakers have expressed displeasure with any plan that would hike tuition above a 3.8% cap. MSU brought in $859 million in tuition revenue in 2016-17, according to its audited financial statements. That’s 29% of its total revenue of $2.9 billion.
- Hike tuition for graduate and out-of-state students. One way around the tuition cap is hiking tuition by a massive amount on out-of-state and graduate students.
- Get more money from the state. Lawmakers have expressed displeasure with this plan.
- Dip into its reserves. MSU ended the last fiscal year with $1.1 billion in unrestricted net assets. That’s money that isn’t legally contracted to a certain project, but often is set aside for particular projects. It’s like a family’s savings account where money is set aside for a new car, a new roof for the house and other projects. It can be switched to something else, or to cover an emergency, but that means those initial projects can’t be covered. The two biggest chunks of what MSU has set aside are its unrestricted net assets for infrastructure ($557 million) and programs ($400 million).
- Borrow the money. The school could bond for the cost and pay back over time. However ratings agencies have lowered their outlook and rating for MSU, meaning the school will pay higher interest rates.
- Go after insurance. MSU has some insurance to cover the costs. However, Penn State had to sue it insurance carriers to get some money after the Jerry Sandusky scandal. www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/05/16/msu-nassar-tuition-michigan-state/615966002/
Report: Teachers shell out nearly $500 a year on school supplies
Pencils, pens, crayons, construction paper, T-shirts, snacks and, sometimes, a pair of shoes: The costs add up for public school teachers who reach into their own pockets for classroom supplies, ensuring their students have the necessities of learning.
Nearly all teachers are footing the bill for classroom supplies, an Education Department report found, and teachers in high-poverty schools spend more than those in affluent schools.
The report, prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics and released Tuesday, is based on a nationally representative survey of teachers during the 2015-2016 school year. It found that 94 percent of teachers pay for classroom supplies, spending an average of $479 a year. About 7 percent of teachers spend more than $1,000 a year.
Who Needs Computers in the Classroom? Not Students
OLPC is the brainchild of Seymour Papert, an early promoter of computers in the classroom and was soon co-opted by the MIT Media Lab and its extraordinary promoter/director Nick Negroponte, who wowed the World Economic Forum with a $100 prototype.
The whole raison d’etre, though, for the idea stems from the mistaken belief that computers in the hands of children or, for that matter, computers in the classroom are a good thing by definition.
Ironically, as OLPC emerged, a true revolution was taking place that was indeed putting computers in the hands of children around the world: the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. But none of this is education in the traditional sense. Even as a teaching machine utilizing specific learning software, the computer is second to a teacher guiding a student through a chapter in a book. www.pcmag.com/commentary/361231/who-needs-computers-in-the-classroom-not-students
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
An Empire of Nothing at All?
The U.S. Military Takes Us Through the Gates of Hell
By Tom Engelhardt
[This essay is the introduction to Tom Engelhardt’s new book, A Nation Unmade by War, a Dispatch Book published by Haymarket Books.]
As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets). On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.
Keep in mind that such figures, however eye-popping, are only the dollar costs of our wars. They don’t, for instance, include the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably — in these years, almost uniquely — bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called “national security.” That’s not, of course, what would make most of us more secure, but what would make them — the denizens of the national security state — ever more secure in Washington and elsewhere. We’re talking about the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. nuclear complex, and the rest of that state-within-a-state, including its many intelligence agencies and the warrior corporations that have, by now, been fused into that vast and vastly profitable interlocking structure.
In reality, the costs of America’s wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in Libya, or Marawi in the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post–9/11 years, and try to put a price on them. Those views of mile upon mile of rubble, often without a building still standing untouched, should take anyone’s breath away. Some of those cities may never be fully rebuilt.
And how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars: the hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight? How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet? Their presence (or more accurately a growing fear of it) has, for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart. And who could forget the role that those refugees — or at least fantasy versions of them — played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?
Opening the Gates of Hell
America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East — and ultimately the planet — as no other imperial power had ever done. www.tomdispatch.com/post/176423/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_a_staggeringly_well-funded_blowback_machine/#more
Senators Have a New Plan to Expand Indefinite Detention and Endless Global War
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse with this Congress, a bipartisan pair of senators have teamed up to write the single most dangerous piece of unconstitutional legislation of this Congress.
Last week, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) introduced S. Res. 59, which is a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). An AUMF is roughly the modern equivalent of a declaration of war, and the Corker-Kaine AUMF gives President Trump and lots of future presidents the authority to take the country to war against an endless list of groups and individuals in an endless list of countries.
The result will be true global war without end. www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/senators-have-new-plan-expand-indefinite-detention-and-endless-global-war
Anti-American Cleric’s Power Grows, Upending Pentagon’s Plans for Iraq
Over the past four years, American military planning in Iraq has counted on working with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a moderate Shiite Muslim who has managed to rebuild the country’s army, restore sovereignty and partner with both the United States and Iran to defeat the Islamic State.
But the results of the weekend’s national elections in Iraq have torn the American assumptions asunder.
Huge gains in Parliament were made by a party led by the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose implacable opposition to the presence of United States troops in Iraq was a top reason Washington withdrew its combat forces in 2011.
Now, President Trump and the Pentagon must decide whether the United States can move ahead with plans to leave a residual force of about 4,500 American troops in Iraq after the war against the Islamic State.
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
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Racial inequalities in wages, income, and wealth show that MLK’s work remains unfinished
In 2016, the most recent year for which all of these data are available, the median black worker earned 75 percent of what the median white worker earned in an hour; the median black household earned 61 percent of the income the median white household earned in a year; and the value of net worth for the median black family was just 10 percent of the value for the median white family. Related to these relative proportionate differences is also a wide range of absolute differences. While median hourly wages vary by a few dollars ($14.92 for black workers, $19.79 for white workers), the difference in median household income is tens of thousands of dollars ($39,490 for black households, $65,041 for white households), and the difference in median family net worth is hundreds of thousands of dollars ($17,600 for black families, $171,000 for white families).
Black-white ratios of major economic indicators, 2016
| Indicator | Ratio |
|---|---|
| Median hourly wage | 0.753916 |
| Median household income | 0.607155 |
| Median family net worth | 0.1 |
Median hourly wageMedian householdincomeMedian family net worth00.20.40.60.8
Source: Authors analysis of median hourly wages, EPI State of Working America Data Library; Author’s analysis of median household income, Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement Historical Poverty Tables (Table H-5 and H-9); Author’s analysis of median family net worth, Federal Reserve Board, 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances.
All of these measures of racial economic inequality show that we are a long way from remedying the vestiges of racism and the centuries of federal, state, and local policies that created these disparities.
Racial inequalities in wages, income, and wealth show that MLK’s work remains unfinished
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason
Senate Confirms Gina Haspel to Lead C.I.A. Despite Torture Concerns (Dems Key)
The Senate confirmed Gina Haspel on Thursday to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, elevating a woman to the directorship for the first time despite bipartisan misgivings about her role in the agency’s brutal detention and interrogation programs in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Ms. Haspel, the current deputy director and a career clandestine officer, takes the helm at a time of shifting alliances and intelligence threats from Iran to North Korea to Russia, and after President Trump tried to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s judgment as part of his broader attack on the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
But it was Ms. Haspel’s past that transfixed senators — if only for a few weeks — as they grappled anew with the aggressive interrogation policies of the George W. Bush administration in the years after the terrorist attacks. Ms. Haspel supervised a secret prison in Thailand in 2002 when a Qaeda suspect was waterboarded there, and senators raised fresh questions about her role in the agency’s destruction of videotapes of interrogation sessions in 2005.
Democrats and a handful of Republicans pressed Ms. Haspel to repudiate the program and sought assurances that torture would not be revisited under her watch. Ms. Haspel told senators during her confirmation hearing that her moral compass was strong and that she would not revisit such a program. And on Tuesday, under intense pressure, she went further, writing that the program “did damage to our officers and our standing in the world.”
In the end, those assurances were enough to win over a handful of skeptical senators. Two Republican no votes — and opposition from Senator John McCain of Arizona, the victim of torture in Vietnam who was not present for the vote — were more than offset by six Democrats, most of whom represent states that Mr. Trump won in 2016. Ms. Haspel also won over Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had led the interrogation of her record.
She was confirmed 54 to 45. www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/politics/haspel-confirmed.html
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US ‘blocks UN motion’ calling for investigation into Israeli killing of Gaza protesters
Proposed UN Security Council statement expressed ‘outrage and sorrow’ at Israel’s shooting of Palestinian demonstrators and demanded ‘independent and transparent’ probe
The United States has blocked the adoption of a UN Security Council statement that called for an “independent and transparent investigation” into Israel’s killing of Palestinian protestors on the Gaza border.
The statement, drafted by Kuwait ahead of a meeting on Tuesday, expressed “outrage and sorrow” at the deaths of at least 58 people during demonstrations over the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem.
It also demanded all countries comply with a decades-old Security Council resolution calling on them not to station diplomatic missions in the contested holy city.
A US delegation including Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner attended the embassy’s inauguration ceremony on Monday, pledging commitment to “lasting peace” as dozens of Palestinians were shot dead 50 miles away in the region’s bloodiest day since the 2014 Gaza war. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-protests-latest-israel-palestine-trump-blocks-un-security-council-statement-investigation-a8352006.html
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Fisk: How long will we continue to pretend Palestinians are not people ? Video inside
Monstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It’s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two-thousand-four-hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create.
And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of “purity of arms”? And we have to ask another question. If it’s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it’s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel’s bleak excuses – and America’s crude response – raise this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come?
Yes, we know all the excuses. Hamas – corrupt, cynical, no “purity” there – was behind the Gaza demonstrations. Some of the protesters were violent, sent burning kites – kites, for heaven’s sake – across the border, others threw stones; though since when has stone-throwing been a capital offence in any civilised country? If an eight-month-old baby dies after tear gas inhalation, what were her parents doing bringing their infant child to the Gaza border? And so it goes on. Why complain about dead Palestinians when we have the Sisis in Egypt and the Assads in Syria and the Saudis in Yemen to contend with? But no, the Palestinians must always be guilty.
The victims are themselves the culprits. This is exactly what the Palestinians have had to endure for 70 years. Remember how they were to blame for their own exodus seven decades ago, because they followed the instructions of radio stations to leave their homes until the Jews of Israel were “driven into the sea”. Only, of course, the radio broadcasts never existed. We still must thank Israel’s “new historians” for proving this. The broadcasts were a myth, part of Israel’s foundational national history invented to ensure that the new state – far from being founded on the ruins of other’s homes – was a land without people.
And it was a marvel to behold the way in which the same old reporting cowardice began to infect the media’s account of what happened in Gaza. CNN called the Israeli killings a “crackdown”.
References to the tragedy of the Palestinians in many news media referred to their “displacement” 70 years ago, as if they happened to be on holiday at the time of the “Nakba”, the catastrophe, as it’s known, and just couldn’t make it home again. The word to use should have been perfectly clear: dispossession. Because that is what happened to the Palestinians all those years ago and what is still happening in the West Bank – today, as you read this – courtesy of men like Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, a supporter of these wretched and illegal colonies built on Arab lands and appropriated from Arabs who have owned and lived on the land for generations.
And so we come to the most ghastly of all fateful events last week: the simultaneous bloodbath in Gaza and the glorious opening of the new US embassy in Jerusalem.
“It’s a great day for peace,” Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced. When I heard that, I wondered if my hearing was defective. Did he actually say those words? Alas, he did. At times like this, it is an immense relief to find that journals like the Israeli daily Haaretz maintain their sense of honour. And the most remarkable piece of reportage came in The New York Times where Michelle Goldberg caught perfectly the horror of both Gaza and the embassy opening in Jerusalem.
The latter, she wrote, was “grotesque… a consummation of the cynical alliance between hawkish Jews and Zionist evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to Israel will usher in the apocalypse and the return of Christ, after which Jews who don’t convert will burn forever.” Goldberg pointed out that Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor, gave the opening prayer at the embassy ceremony.
Jeffress, who once claimed that religions like “Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism” lead people “to an eternity of separation from God in hell”. The closing benediction came from John Hagee, an end-times preacher who, Goldberg recalled, once said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/gaza-palestine-israel-conflict-us-embassy-jerusalem-jared-kushner-donald-trump-a8355631.html
www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/1199924270149078/
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www.facebook.com/frontline/videos/10155377879106641/
Deafening Democratic Silence on Gaza Is Because They Own It Too
“Democratic party leaders are as always firmly behind their Israeli clients, and their party machinery remains under lock and key.”
Gruesome as the latest Israeli atrocities are, with over 70 murdered and a couple thousand civilians deliberately shot by IDF snipers, it will not be the turning point in relations between the US empire and its Israeli client state. The brutal military campaigns against Gaza in 2009 and 2014 killed thousands, wounded tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands with a Democrat in the White House.
Despite some DSA victories in western Pennsylvania, despite demurrals from Bernie Sanders and a handful of House members, and whatever qualms Democratic voters might have, Democratic party leaders are as always firmly behind their Israeli clients, and their party machinery remains under lock and key.
Even as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump cut the ribbon opening the US embassy in Jerusalem, and hundreds of Palestinians were being gunned down, Democratic senate leader Chuck Schumer declared the latest provocation was “long overdue” and affirmed it as the official policy of both US ruling class parties. California Senator Kamala Harris, widely considered her party’s front runner for the 2020 presidential nomination addressed AIPAC publicly in 2017 and privately this year. In 2017 she embraced the settler myth that “Israel made the desert bloom” bragging that she helped by collecting funds to plant trees on the sites of massacres and dispossessions.
No fewer than 24 states have enacted bipartisan legislation to publicly identify and blacklist individuals or corporations that do business with individuals and entities publicly identified as BDS-friendly blackagendareport.com/deafening-democratic-silence-gaza-because-they-own-it-too
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Meghan Markle’s Estranged Brother Writes a Letter to Prince Harry (EXCLUSIVE)
(Photo Credit: In Touch)
“Not to mention, to top it all off, she doesn’t invite her own family and instead invites complete strangers to the wedding. Who does that?” he asks. “You and the royal family should put an end to this fake fairytale wedding before it’s too late.” Tom concludes his letter with, “Also you would think that a royal wedding would bring a torn family closer together, but I guess we are all distant family to Meg.” www.intouchweekly.com/posts/meghan-markle-brother-prince-harry-letter-159208
Trump targets Planned Parenthood, family planning services with new abortion rule
Groups like Planned Parenthood will be forced to choose between federal funding and offering abortion under the same roof as other services.
The Trump administration moved forward with a proposal Friday that would effectively ban Planned Parenthood and similar organizations from providing abortion and related services under the same roof as operations funded by federal family-planning grants, according to an administration official.
The so-called Hyde amendment prohibits the use of competitive federal family-planning grant funds for abortion, but organizations like Planned Parenthood have traditionally used the federal money for other health services while using private money for abortions and related services — sometimes at the same facilities and with the same staff.
Based on a Reagan-era regulation and championed by abortion-rights opponents, the new rule would force entities that receive so-called Title X family-planning funding to maintain physical and financial separation between taxpayer-backed operations and any related facilities that perform abortions, support the procedures or receive referrals about them, the official said. www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-targets-planned-parenthood-family-planning-services-new-abortion-rule-n875276
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Walter Daum posted this brief note on who represented the US in Jerusalem.
Imperialism’s Glorious Day
Few recent events have so enraged humanity as the mass slaughter of unarmed civilians by Israeli forces along the prison wall that is the border of Gaza – at the same moment that the U.S. was dedicating its new embassy in Jerusalem. To complete the picture, the ceremony in “the Jewish state” was blessed by two pastors, one an anti-Semitic bigot and the other an apologist for Hitler’s genocide of European Jews. And the leading U.S. officials presiding at the event were a predatory real-estate capitalist notorious for his slumlord tactics and a fashion designer whose creations are produced by super-exploited women workers making $1 a day in China and Indonesia. Never was U.S. imperialism more appropriately represented.”
Solidarity for Never
Dante’s Ninth Circle (Treachery)
The last Ninth Circle of Hell is divided into 4 Rounds according to the seriousness of the sin though all residents are frozen in an icy lake. Those who committed more severe sin are deeper within the ice. Each of the 4 Rounds is named after an individual who personifies the sin. Thus Round 1 is named Caina after Cain who killed his brother Abel, Round 2 is named Antenora after Anthenor of Troy who was Priam’s counselor during the Trojan War, Round 3 is named Ptolomaea after Ptolemy (son of Abubus), while Round 4 is named Judecca after Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus with a kiss.
Spy versus Spy
May 20 1949 – In the United States, the Armed Forces Security Agency, the predecessor to the National Security Agency, is established.
Suspect Identified in C.I.A. Leak Was Charged, but Not for the Breach
In weekly online posts last year, WikiLeaks released a stolen archive of secret documents about the Central Intelligence Agency’s hacking operations, including software exploits designed to take over iPhones and turn smart television sets into surveillance devices.
It was the largest loss of classified documents in the agency’s history and a huge embarrassment for C.I.A. officials.
Now, the prime suspect in the breach has been identified: a 29-year-old former C.I.A. software engineer who had designed malware used to break into the computers of terrorism suspects and other targets, The New York Times has learned.
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the Manhattan apartment of the suspect, Joshua A. Schulte, one week after WikiLeaks released the first of the C.I.A. documents in March last year, and then stopped him from flying to Mexico on vacation, taking his passport, according to court records and relatives. The search warrant application said Mr. Schulte was suspected of “distribution of national defense information,” and agents told the court they had retrieved “N.S.A. and C.I.A. paperwork” in addition to a computer, tablet, phone and other electronics.
But instead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault 7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with possessing child pornography, saying agents had found 10,000 illicit images on a server he created as a business in 2009 while studying at the University of Texas at Austin.
Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of the encrypted images of children being molested by adults on his computer, though he advised one user, “Just don’t put anything too illegal on there.”
In September, Mr. Schulte was released on the condition that he not leave New York City, where he lived with a cousin, and keep off computers. He was jailed in December after prosecutors found evidence that he had violated those rules, and he has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan since then. www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/us/cia-hacking-tools-leak.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
CIA assassinated Pakistan first PM Liaqat Ali Khan, reveals US state department documents
The United States assassinated Pakistan’s first prime minister, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, more than sixty years ago, according to US State Department documents.
Quoting the declassified State Department documents, Pakistan Today reported on Friday that Khan was murdered because of his refusal to use his office for securing oil contracts in neighboring Iran for US corporations.
According to the report, Khan said he would neither use his friendship with officials in Tehran for dishonest purposes nor interfere in personal affairs of Iran.
In addition, Khan also called on Washington to vacate air bases in Pakistan which the United States was using against the Soviet Union, upon which then-US President Harry S. Truman threatened the PM with dire consequences.
According to the documents, following these developments, the CIA began to search for an assassin to kill Khan. They could not find a suitable shooter in Pakistan and then turned to Afghanistan for this purpose.
The Afghan government of King Mohammed Zahir Shah had finally found a man, named Syed Akbar, to take the task and also made arrangements for him to be killed. timesofislamabad.com/31-Jul-2017/cia-assassinated-pakistan-first-pm-liaqat-ali-khan-reveals-us-state-department-documents
The Magical Mystery Tour
‘Please Pray’: Santa Fe Is a Town That Has Long Found Comfort in Faith
They are praying today in Santa Fe, Tex. They often are, but after Friday, the need feels bottomless. Even before the gunman stopped shooting, even before the headlines reported tragedy, even before they knew it was 10 dead at the high school in the middle of town, a plea hurried out from person to person, screen to screen.
“Please pray,” began one text message sent to a mothers’ prayer list. “My niece is not accounted for. Was in art when shooting took place.”
“URGENT PRAYER REQUEST!!” read another. “I don’t have details but was just informed that there is an active shooting going on at Santa Fe high school.”
Their requests were heeded. “Prayers lifted for the Santa Fe schools right now,” someone wrote. www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/prayer-santa-fe-high-school.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
All of Chile’s 34 Superstitious bishops RESIGN over a sex abuse and cover-up scandal after crisis meeting with the Pope
All 34 Chilean bishops who attended a crisis meeting this week with Pope Francis about the cover-up of sexual abuse in their country have offered to resign, it has emerged.
The bishops also apologised to Chile, the victims of abuse and the pope for the scandal as they released an extraordinary joint statement.
It was not immediately clear if the pope, who slammed had accepted their resignation.
Video below
Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5744503/Chilean-bishops-offer-resignation-Pope-abuse-scandal-statement.html#ixzz5Fvf4Oet0
Israeli Zionists and Mystical Evangelicals: New U.S. Embassy Signals a Growing Alliance
A night after the dedication of the new United States Embassy in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel convened American evangelicals to plan their next steps.
In a conference room off his office, Mr. Netanyahu thanked the small circle of prominent pastors and activists on Tuesday for pressing President Trump to open the embassy, breaking with decades of American policy that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in peace talks.
Which embassy would be next? Mr. Netanyahu wanted to know, running through a list of other countries with strong evangelical churches. Guatemala, Paraguay and Honduras had already followed the United States in announcing their intention to move their embassies to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, but what about Brazil, India or even China?
“The prime minister was very excited,” recalled Mario Bramnick, the Cuban-American pastor of a Pentecostal church near Miami and a Trump supporter who attended the meeting.
The culmination of decades of lobbying, the dedication of the embassy in Jerusalem this past week doubled as the most public recognition yet of the growing importance the Netanyahu government now assigns to its conservative Christian allies, even if some have been accused of making anti-Semitic statements.
While Israel has long depended on the support of the Jewish diaspora, the Netanyahu government has made a historic and strategic shift, relying on the much larger base of evangelical Christians, even at the risk of turning off American Jews who may be troubled by some evangelicals’ denigration of their faith.
The paradox is well known: The beliefs of many evangelical Christians that Israel is special to God — and, for some, a marker in apocalyptic prophecies — lead many to hawkish support of the Jewish state while they simultaneously insist that salvation awaits only those who accept Jesus as their savior. www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/world/middleeast/netanyahu-evangelicals-embassy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
“Don’t pick my pocket nor break my leg and believe what you wish”: Jefferson:
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So Long
War Criminal Ernest Medina, key figure in My Lai Massacre, dies at 81
Former Army Capt. Ernest L. Medina, a key figure in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, has died in Wisconsin. He was 81.
Medina was an Army captain on March 16, 1968, when American troops under his command killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians. He was acquitted in a court-martial over the massacre.
Medina died May 8, according to an obituary written by his family. No cause of death was given. He was being buried Monday.
Medina was captain of Charlie Company whose mission was to attack a crack Vietcong unit. The intelligence soldiers received was inaccurate and they encountered no resistance in the village of My Lai and a neighboring community. Charlie Company killed 504 villagers in just three to four hours, most of them women, children and elderly men.
It wasn’t until more than a year later that news of the massacre became public. www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Ernest-Medina-key-figure-in-My-Lai-massacre-has-12912559.php