#United States Conference of Mayors

[celebratesocia1]

Exceptional Leaders in the Arts are honored by Americans for the Arts and the United States Conference of Mayors

Exceptional Leaders in the Arts are honored by Americans for the Arts and the United States Conference of Mayors #ericb #djredalert #GovernorDanMcKee, #MayorDavidHolt #MayorJonMitchell

Governor Dan McKee, Mayor David Holt, Mayor Jon Mitchell, and Artists Louis “Eric B” Barrier and Kool DJ Red Alert Understand the Importance of Arts and Culture in Society As part of the U.S. Conference of Mayors 91st Winter Meeting in Washington, DC on Friday, January 20, 2023, American for the Arts and the United States Conference of Mayors presented three elected officials with Public…

[magnetictapedatastorage]

full article under the cut

June 12, 2024

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.

[beardedmrbean]

A community is grieving after a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed by a police officer in upstate New York on Friday night.

The teenage victim was identified as Nyah Mway, a member of the Karen refugee community who had graduated from 8th grade earlier that week.

In body camera footage released by the department, Mway begins to run after an officer said he was about to be patted down for a weapon, leading to a brief chase during which the boy flashed what looked like a gun, according to police and their slowed-down version of footage released.

“During the course of his flight the juvenile displayed what appeared to be a handgun,” said Utica Police Department in a statement. Authorities later acknowledged it was a pellet gun that resembled a Glock handgun.

In the footage, an officer chasing Mway yells, “Gun!” and tackles him to the ground. As authorities hold Mway on the ground, an officer shot his weapon once, killing Mway.

The incident occurred after officers from the Utica Police Department stopped Mway and another boy on a street in downtown Utica. Police say they stopped the boys around 10:15 p.m. at the 900 block of Shaw Street while searching for the suspects in two robbery investigations, described as “Asian males” or “one Asian male and one dark-skinned male.”

A GoFundMe fundraiser for the family, apparently started by Mway’s sibling, says that the family moved to the United States nine years ago seeking refugee from ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.

“My brother was returning home from an 8th grade graduation barbecue. He has never gotten in trouble with law enforcement before, he was a good kid,” the description of the fundraiser says.

The description goes on to question the police’s account of the events. It says that police told Mway’s family that there was a “shoot out” when they informed them of the incident.

A family member told The New York Times that police told the parents their son was in the hospital but by the time they arrived he had already died.

Police say they stopped the two boys “based on the listed identifying factors” and that Mway was “walking in the roadway in violation of New York State Vehicle and Traffic Law 1156a,” meaning that he was just simply walking in the road.

Officer Patrick Husnay, who shot Mway, and the three others involved have been placed on paid administrative leave.

“Our heartfelt thoughts and prayers are with his family during this time. We will continue to be as transparent and accessible to the family and community as legally allowed as this process continues,” a statement from the police department says.

Members of the local community have expressed outrage over the incident, demanding justice for the young boy and his family.

“No justice, no peace,” people yelled at City Hall on Saturday as the mayor and police chief gave a press conference.

A candlelight vigil was held for the teenage boy with locals bringing signs, balloons, flowers and more to honor Mway.

The Police Department, as well as the New York Attorney General’s Office, will investigate the matter. Utica city and police officials told locals they would be “transparent” during their investigation.

[mariacallous]

BERLIN (JTA) – Several thousand Berliners braved a chilling rain Sunday to demonstrate against antisemitism at an interfaith rally at the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate.

The event — which drew a broad coalition of politicians and religious leaders as well as popular stars — was a response to a record increase in reported antisemitic incidents across Germany in the month after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

Dubbed “Never again is now — Germany stands up,” the rally was organized by a Jewish real estate magnate, Nicolai Schwarzer.

In announcing the event, Schwarzer, 48, said he wanted “to send a powerful and unmistakable signal to the world — from the heart of the capital — that no form of antisemitism, hatred or xenophobia will be tolerated in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany.”

The rally joins several others organized in major cities in Europe and the United States to demonstrate opposition to antisemitism. They have been organized in part as a counterpoint to the large pro-Palestinian rallies that have taken place in many of those cities. Such rallies have been relatively muted and heavily monitored by police in Germany, where antisemitic speech and criticism of Israel are circumscribed by laws enacted in part because of the country’s role in perpetrating the Holocaust. Still, pro-Palestinian sentiment, including among Germany’s large immigrant population, is high.

“Sometimes I don’t recognize this country, something has gone out of control,” Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at the rally.

He described a pro-Hamas protest that took place at Berlin’s University of the Arts on Nov. 13, where he said participants “dressed in black to look like Hamas terrorists. They had painted their hands red — a clear reference to the murder of two Israeli soldiers by an Islamist mob in Gaza more than 20 years ago. The whole thing was orchestrated by visiting professors from the global south – how can that be?” Schuster said the incident was proof of the danger of the movement to boycott Israel, which has been considered officially antisemitic in Germany since 2018.

Bärbel Bas, the president of Germany’s parliament, read through a litany of antisemitic incidents: “Swastikas and Stars of David have been daubed on synagogues, memorials and even private homes.” In one notable incident on Oct. 18, two Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Jewish community center that houses a synagogue as well as a kindergarten.

Bas described hearing from a student who was the only child to attend class at her Jewish school on a day when fear reigned about a Hamas call for violence abroad.

“Jews are afraid, and they feel left alone. And it’s not only hate that creates this feeling, but also silence and indifference,” she said. “And that’s why it’s important that we make a powerful, wipeable and loud statement here today. Never again is now.”

Other speakers included Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor; Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner; author Michel Friedman; 1990s pop music icon Herbert Grönemeyer; and Hubertus Heil, Germany’s minister of labor and social affairs.

The rally began with the lighting of a Hanukkah menorah by Rabbi Yehudah Teichtal, the head of Berlin’s chapter of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Representatives of Catholic and Protestant churches lit advent candles.

Eren Güvercin, a member of the German Islam Conference — which the German government started as a forum for dialogue in 2006 — delivered a prayer of his own, for “peace for the souls” of the Israelis murdered on Oct. 7 and for the hostages and their families, “who fear for their loved ones.”

“And we pray for peace for the people who are now suffering the consequences of this terrorist organization’s crimes in Gaza,” he added. “Nothing we say here today will solve the Middle East conflict. But we raise our voices to remind everyone who lives together here in this city, in this country: Faith is a source from which we draw to create peace. Faith must not divide us. It must unite us.”

Organizers claimed 11,000 people had taken part in the rally, though police estimated the attendance at 3,000. Those gathered were praised by many speakers for braving the weather to show their support. They included members of Berlin’s Jewish community, estimated at over 30,000, as well as non-Jewish allies.

“This is the third time we have been here in front of the Brandenburg Gate since Oct. 7,” said Berliner Melanie Schmergal, 55. “It upsets me that you don’t see any big demonstrations for Israel’s right to exist and against antisemitism. You see other people screaming quite a bit. [But] I believe… that the others are not in the majority.”

“It is important to take a stand against any kind of extremism,” said Christian Götz, 60. “And that Israel has a right to defend itself, and that we as a population have to show, especially here in Berlin, that we are on Israel’s side.”

The pair, who are not Jewish, said they had met the descendants of Jews who used to live in their building in Berlin, and who were either deported or managed to flee Nazi Germany.

“It’s so incredible that something like this seems possible again,” Schmergal said.

***

On Dec. 8, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Lower Saxony hosted a public panel discussion marking 75 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically addressing the issue of antisemitism after the Hamas terrorist attack.

Next week, the Berlin-based Tikvah Institute is co-hosting the presentation of a study on how Russian-speaking Jews in Germany perceive antisemitism after Oct. 7. About 90% of all Jews in Germany today are migrants from the former Soviet Union.

And though not in Germany, the annual Claims Conference International Holocaust Survivors Night on Dec. 11 — a star-studded event whose virtual guests of honor will include German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — “takes on unique significance,” said the organization’s president, Gideon Taylor: “We are reminded that some of the strongest among us survived during the darkest of times.”

Despite the alarming statistics in Germany and elsewhere, Jews are in a better position today in terms of world support than they were in the 1930s-40s, said New Yorker Menachem Rosensaft, who was born at the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen and participated in the recent round table at the memorial.

“President Biden, for one, is the polar opposite of FDR in his unequivocal support for Israel after Oct. 7 and his equally unequivocal repudiation and condemnation of all manifestations of antisemitism,” said Rosensaft, who is also the chair of the Advisory Board of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation.

[nadiegesabate1990]

A crowd of protesters takes to the streets of Seattle, in the United States, and prevents the opening of the 3rd Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization. The millennium comes to an end with protests against globalization and neo-protectionism in rich countries.

On November 30th, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was preparing to deliver the opening speech at the 3rd Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the so-called "Millennium Round". But Albright could do nothing. Shortly before the event began, a storm would sweep through Seattle. At Pike Place Market, just a few miles from the city's commercial center, a crowd began to gather. According to an environmental activist from the NGO Sierra Clube, at 6 am there were more than 10,000 people gathered at the site - some dressed as sea turtles.

Nearby, in the Memorial Stadium parking lot, over 20,000 trade unionists were meeting, including representatives of unions and associations from different countries, including the CUT and Força Sindical, from Brazil. Finally, the two groups, armed with posters and plaques and many of their members in costume, marched determinedly towards the Convention Center where the WTO meeting would take place, shouting in defense of ecology and subsidies and against globalization. The super demonstration brought together people of all stripes - environmentalists, right-wingers, paranoids, neo-Nazis, anarchists, religious people and various left-wing groups.

The congestion was enormous, stranding the limousines of the big shots and the vans intended for the bodyguards. In the vicinity of the Westin hotel, where the North American delegation had stayed, there were at least 5 thousand people surrounding the visitors. The city hall, evidently, placed riot troops on the streets and tried to contain the crowd with tear gas bombs. There were fights, police beating and dragging people through the streets. By Friday the 3rd, there were 500 prisoners and 40 injured, including a police officer in serious condition.

It was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration, assured the main organizers, the AFL-CIO union and a coalition of ecological groups. But this was not what young, more radical anarchists intended. For months, kilograms of announcements about the storm had been being sent via the Internet. The scenario for confusion, therefore, was already properly designed, and at 10:30 am it was already known that the opening of the WTO meeting was compromised. Furthermore, the police were not adequately prepared to maintain order. As for the big shots, they were also warned by the Secret Service about what could happen.

At 8:30 pm that Tuesday, the confusion escalated to such an extent that it became out of control. Supposed anarchists began burning trash cans and stacking mailboxes; Then the riots (window windows, large stores) and graffiti began. The situation became critical and Mayor Paulo Schell declared a state of emergency, called in the National Guard and instituted a curfew, a regime that would be extended until the weekend. Trade unionist John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, said in an interview with the magazine: "What unites us all here is the fact that the WTO makes decisions in the absence of civil society." Meanwhile, the United States' chief negotiator, Charlenne Barshefsky, agreed with the protesters, who accused the organization of being just a body where decisions are made secretly, behind closed doors and without democratic consultation.

On Thursday, President Clinton, before speaking to WTO representatives, told the farmers' association that free trade is something that could be good for everyone and that the government would fight for the international organization's decisions to be made. in a clearer way and with the participation of civil society interest groups.

[boricuacherry-blog]

Even by the standards of history's most destructive war, the Rape of Nanking represents one of the worst instances of mass extermination, when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Chinese city of Nanking and tortured its inhabitants in the most barbaric ways possible. While it is true that in the twentieth century, Hitler killed about 6 million Jews and Stalin more than 40 million Russians, these deaths were brought about over some few years. In the Rape of Nanking, the killings were concentrated within a few weeks.

The death toll of Nanking - one Chinese city alone - exceeds the number of civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire war.

The worst air attacks of the war [WWII] did not exceed the ravages of Nanking. It far exceeded deaths from the American raids on Tokyo, even exceeding the combined death toll of the two atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet this massacre remains neglected in most of the historical literature published in the United States, and remains virtually unknown to people outside of Asia. Only in Robert Leckie's book, Delivered from Evil: The Saga of World War II, did I find a single paragraph about the massacre: "Nothing the Nazis under Hitler would do to disgrace their own victories could rival the atrocities of Japanese soldiers under General Iwane Matsui."

That the Nanking massacre my parents told me about was not merely folk myth but accurate oral history hit me in December 1994, when I attended a conference sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, which commemorated the victims of the Nanking atrocities. In the conference hall the organizers had prepared poster-sized photographs of the Rape of Nanking - some of the most gruesome photographs I had ever seen in my life. Even children and infants were tortured and killed.

Though I had heard so much about the Nanking massacre as a child, nothing prepared me for these pictures - stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open, and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame.

At the time, no one had written a nonfiction book on the Rape of Nanking in English, and there were only two fiction novels that were in the works. Why had nobody else?

I soon had at least part of the answer as to why the massacre had remained relatively untreated in world history. The Rape of Nanking had not penetrated the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.

Furthermore, an atmosphere of intimidation in Japan stifled open and scholarly discussion of the Rape of Nanking, further suppressing knowledge of the event. In Japan, to express one's true opinions about the Sino-Japanese War could be - and continues to be - career-threatening and even life-threatening. (In 1990 a gunman shot Motoshima Hitoshi, mayor of Nagasaki, in the chest for saying that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II.)

What baffled and saddened me during the writing of this book was the persistent Japanese refusal to come to terms with its own past. It is not just that Japan has doled out less than 1 percent of the amount that Germany has paid in reparations to its war victims. It is not just that, unlike most Nazis, who, if not incarcerated for their crimes were at least forced from public life, many Japanese war criminals continued to occupy powerful positions in industry and government after the war. And it is not just the fact that while Germans have made repeated apologies to their Holocaust victims, the Japanese have enshrined their war criminals in Tokyo - an act that one American wartime victim of the Japanese has labeled politically equivalent to "erecting a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin."

Strongly motivating me throughout this long and difficult labor was the stubborn refusal of many prominent Japanese politicians, academics, and industrial leaders to admit, despite overwhelming evidence, that the Nanking massacre had even happened. In contrast to Germany, where it is illegal for teachers to delete the Holocaust from their history curricula, the Japanese have for decades systematically purged references to the Nanking massacre from their textbooks, removed photographs from museums, tampered with original source material, and excised from popular culture any mention of the massacre.

The ugliest aspects of Japanese military behavior during the Sino-Japanese War have indeed been left out of the education of Japanese schoolchildren. But they have also camouflaged the nation's role in initiating the war within the carefully cultivated myth that the Japanese were the victims, not the instigators, of World War II. The horror visited on the Japanese people during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped this myth replace history.

-Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

BY BREE NEWSOME BASS

BLACK COPS DON’T MAKE POLICING ANY LESS ANTI-BLACK

The idea that we can resolve racism by integrating a fundamentally anti-Black institution in the U.S. is the most absurd notion of all

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

Amid recent growing calls for defunding police this summer, a set of billboards appeared in Dallas, Atlanta, and New York City. Each had the words “No Police, No Peace” printed in large, bold letters next to an image of a Black police officer. Funded by a conservative right-wing think tank, the billboards captured all the hallmarks of modern pro-policing propaganda. The jarring choice of language, a deliberate corruption of the protest chant “no justice, no peace,” follows a pattern we see frequently from proponents of the police state. Any word or phrase made popular by the modern movement is quickly co-opted and repurposed until it’s rendered virtually meaningless. But perhaps the most insidious aspect of modern pro-police propaganda is reflected in the choice to make the officer on the billboard the face of a Black man.

This is in keeping with a narrative pro-police advocates seek to push on a regular basis in mass media — that policing can’t be racist when there are Black officers on the force, and that the police force itself is an integral part of Black communities. When Freddie Gray died in police custody, police defenders quickly pointed out that three of the officers involved were Black, implying that racism couldn’t be a factor in a case where the offending officers were the same race as the victim.

When I scaled the flagpole at South Carolina’s capital in 2015 and lowered the Confederate flag, many noted that it was a Black officer who was tasked with raising the flag to the top of its pole again. When an incident of brutality brings a city to its brink, Black police chiefs are paraded to podiums and cameras to serve as the face of the United States’ racist police state and to symbolically restore a sense of order. One of the most frequent recommendations from police reformists is to recruit and promote more Black officers. This is based on an argument that the primary problem with policing centers on a “breakdown of trust” between police forces and communities they have terrorized for decades; the solution, then, is to “restore trust” between the two parties by recruiting officers who resemble the communities they police. Images of police officers dancing or playing basketball with Black children in economically deprived neighborhoods are often published as local news items to help drive this narrative home. The idea gained traction in the aftermath of numerous urban rebellions in the 1960s and has seen a resurgence in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprising.

When protests broke out in Atlanta this past summer in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, the city’s Black mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, held a press conference flanked by some of Atlanta’s most famous and wealthy Black residents. Together they pleaded for protestors to go home and leave property alone. Soon after, Rayshard Brooks was killed by white police officers in Atlanta. The moment exposed a class divide that exists in cities all over the nation: A chasm between the image of Black affluence promoted by Black politicians and the Black petite bourgeoisie (middle class) and the lived realities of the majority of Black residents in those cities, many of whom still face disproportionate unemployment, displacement by rapid gentrification, and policies that cater to white corporate interests. If the solution to racism were simply a matter of a few select Black people gaining entry to anti-Black institutions, we would see different outcomes than what we’re witnessing now. But the idea that we can resolve racism by integrating what is perhaps the most fundamentally anti-Black institution in the U.S. — its policing and prison industry — is the most absurd notion of all.

Part of the reason why calls to defund police have sent such shock waves through the nation, prompting placement of pro-police billboards and pushback from figures of the Black establishment, is because it cuts right to the heart of how structural racism operates in the United States. At a time when the Black elite would prefer to measure progress by their own tokenized positions of power and symbolic gestures like murals, the push to defund police would require direct confrontation with how the white supremacist system has been organized since the end of chattel slavery — when the prisons replaced plantations as the primary tool of racial control. Actions that may have been widely seen as adequate responses to injustice just a couple of decades ago now ring hollow to many observers who see that Black people continue to be killed by a system that remains largely unchanged.

Police forces represent some of the oldest white fraternal organizations in the United States. The rules of who is empowered to police and who is subject to policing are fundamental to the organization of the racial caste system. Even in the earliest days of integrating police forces, Black officers were often told they couldn’t arrest white people. The integration of police forces does nothing to alter their basic function as the primary enforcers of structural racism on a daily basis, and the presence of Black officers only serves as an attempt to mask this fact.

Police forces in America began as slave patrols, and their primary function has always been to act in service of the white ownership class and its capitalist production. In one century, that meant policing and controlling enslaved Black people, with the purview to use violence against free Black people as well; in another, it involved cracking down on organized labor, for the benefit of white capitalists. Receiving a badge and joining the force has been an entryway to white manhood for many European immigrants — providing them a sense of citizenship and superiority when they would have traditionally been part of the peasantry rather than the white owner class.

That spirit of white fraternity remains deeply entrenched in the culture of policing and its unions today, regardless of this new wave of Black police chiefs and media spokespeople. Police forces became unionized around the same time various other public employees sought collective bargaining rights — however, under capitalism, their role as maintainers of race-property relations remains the same. The most fundamental rule of race established under chattel slavery was that Black people were the equivalent of white property (if not counted as less than property). This relationship between race and property is most overt during periods of open rebellion against the police state, where officers are deployed to use lethal force in the interest of protecting inanimate property. We see swifter and harsher punishments handed out to those who vandalize police cars than to police who assault and kill Black people. (This is a major reason why the press conference in Atlanta with T.I. and Killer Mike struck people as classist and out of touch with the majority Black experience.)

This same pattern extends throughout the carceral state. Roughly a quarter of all bailiffs, correctional officers, and jailers are Black, yet there’s no indication that diversifying the staff of a racist institution results in less violence and death for those who are held within it. That’s because the institution continues to operate as designed. It is not “broken,” as reformists are fond of saying. The fallacy is in believing the function of police and prisons is to mete out punishment and justice in an equitable manner and not to first and foremost serve as a means of maintaining the race, gender, and class hierarchy of an oppressive society.

Believing that the system is “broken” rather than functioning exactly as intended requires a certain adherence to white supremacist and anti-Black beliefs. One has to ignore the rampant amount of violence, fraud, and theft being committed by some of the most powerful figures in society with little to no legal consequence while massive amounts of resources are devoted to the hyper-policing of the poor for infractions as minor as trespassing, shoplifting, and turnstile jumping at subway stations.

The Trump era has provided some of the starkest examples of this dynamic. The most powerful person in the nation and his associates have been able to break the law and violate the Constitution — including documented crimes against humanity — in full view of the public while he proclaims himself the upholder of law and order. Wealthy celebrities involved in the college admissions bribery scandal have gotten away with a slap on the wrist for orchestrating a multimillion-dollar scheme while a dozen NYPD officers surrounded a Black teenager, guns drawn, for the “crime” of failing to pay $2.75 for a subway ride.

The propaganda that depicts this type of policing as being essential to public safety and order is fundamentally classist and anti-Black. It traces its roots to the Black Codes that were passed immediately after the Civil War to control the movements of newly freed Black people. It relies on the racist assumption that Black people would run amok and pose a threat to the larger society if not kept under the constant surveillance of a police force that has authority to kill them if deemed necessary, and with virtual impunity. That’s why we are inundated with a narrative that depicts the police officer who regularly patrols predominantly Black communities as being an essential part of maintaining order in society.

One of the primary talking points against calls to defund and abolish police is that Black communities would have no way to maintain peace and order, and that a state of chaos would ensue. In wealthier neighborhoods, if an officer is present at all, they’re most likely positioned by a gate at the top of the neighborhood to monitor who enters. Meanwhile, the officer assigned to the predominantly Black community is there to keep a watchful eye on the residents themselves, and to ensure they are contained in their designated place within the larger city or town.

The current political divide on this issue falls exactly along these lines, separating those who think the system is simply in need of reform and those who correctly define the problem as the system itself. The reality is that Black people fall on both sides of this divide, which is why we find so many Black officers in uniform arguing for a reformist agenda even as every reform they propose is vociferously opposed by the powerful, majority-white police unions and most of the rank and file. Reformists remain committed to preserving the existing system even though the idea of reforming it to be the opposite of what it was designed to be is an unproven theory that’s no more realistic than the idea of abolishing police altogether.

The most pressing question remains: Why are we seeking to integrate and reform modern manifestations of the slave patrols and plantations in the first place? In Mississippi and Louisiana, state penitentiaries are converted plantations. What is a reformed plantation — and what is its purpose?

We must remember that many of these so-called “reforms” are not new. For as long as the plantation and chattel slavery systems existed, there also existed Black slaveowners, Black overseers, and Black slave catchers who participated in and profited from the daily operations of white supremacy. The presence of these few Black people in elevated positions of power did nothing to change the material conditions of the millions of enslaved people back then. And it makes no greater amount of sense to believe they indicate a shift in material conditions for Black people now.

[ausetkmt]

Earlier this month, over a dozen civil rights and religious groups sent a letter to the White House calling on President Joe Biden to act on reparations by signing an executive order to study reparations by Juneteenth. This comes after a decadeslong push to establish a 13-person reparation commission in Congress.

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved families were promised by Union leadership 40 acres and a mule. The promise was never fulfilled, however a reminder of the centuries-old promise remained in Congress for decades. H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, has been introduced in every legislative session since 1989.

In this May 19, 2021, file photo, Hughes Van Ellis, a Tulsa Race Massacre survivor and World War II veteran, and Viola Fletcher, oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, testify before the Civil Rights and Civil Liber...

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images, FILE

In recent years, the bill has gained traction politically. In 2019, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hundreds of members of Congress and over 350 organizations such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors, NAACP and ACLU publicly announced support for reparations. H.R. 40 was able to pass out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021, however, it has failed to come to a vote in the House or Senate.

When asked about the letter from racial justice advocates calling for Biden to meet with them and sign the H.R. 40 executive order, now former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she was unaware of the letter. However, she said there was a range of executive orders the White House was considering including police reform and student debt.

Psaki previously reiterated in 2021 that President Biden supported the study of reparations. However, when asked if he would support a bill on reparations Psaki said, "We'll see what happens through the legislative process.”

Asked if Biden supports an executive order on the study of reparations, Psaki said at the time, "it would be up to him, he has executive order authority, he would certainly support a study, and we'll see where Congress moves on that issue."

A source familiar with White House proceedings told ABC News that Biden’s support of H.R. 40 has not changed, however he feels that “we don't need a study to continue to advance racial equity.”

In this April 13, 2021, file photo, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including House Majority Whip James Clyburn, Sen. Raphael Warnock, R...

Pete Marovich, Pool/Getty Images

Dreisen Heath, a researcher and advocate in Human Rights Watch's United States Program focusing on racial justice issues, said that the push for an executive order for H.R. 40 is a necessity. She said if a “commission Bill cannot advance through both chambers, then that's why you have other branches of government, who have also promised to execute on a study for reparations and developing reparations proposals, to commit to executive action and do it.”

Heath added other bills have dealt with the legacy of enslavement with majority support from Republicans, including Anti-lynching legislation that stalled for over a century.

“If Juneteenth is a consensus, then reparations also has to be a consensus. And if the congressional chambers aren't going to commit to doing something that they all publicly said that they were going to do, then the President has to do what he also publicly promised that he was going to do," Heath said.

For many fighting for reparations, Tiffany Crutcher is seen as an example of the cumulative impacts that enslaved people have overcome.

In this June 19, 2020, file photo, Dr. Tiffany Crutcher is seen on stage with family members during events to mark Juneteenth, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Lawrence Bryant/Reuters, FILE

The Oklahoma native said she believes race is a factor in why reparations has happened in the centuries since it was first proposed. “I think that people believe and repair and reparations when it comes to everybody, but Black people.”

To her reparations is about more than just cash payments. “We're talking about decades and centuries of harm. That caused my mother to recently pass away of COVID-19 because of the continued harm. We're talking about decades of harm that caused my brother to take his last breath alone.”

She added, “laws that are in place that allow the brutality of Black people in this country is so much more than money."

H.R. 40’s lead sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told ABC News, “We can't allow a question of slavery and its impact on the descendants of enslaved Africans today, African Americans to go unanswered. Because we believe the momentum is there, because President Biden is a President that understands equity and is committed to and who has recognized the importance of African Americans in this nation this is a diverse nation, but he recognizes the importance of not only African Americans, but our history.”

Jackson Lee told ABC News one of the things that she hopes will happen if H.R. 40 gets signed by Biden is the retelling of human stories.

“There are many human stories about the impact of slavery, because there are descendants who can clearly document their life and their history to the slaves who were enslaved over 200 years," Jackson Lee said.

In this March 1, 2022, file photo, President Joe Biden embraces Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee after Biden delivered the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the U.S. Capitol's House Chamber in Washington, D.C.

Win McNamee/Getty Images, FILE

University of Connecticut professor Thomas Craemer has studied the topic of race and reparations for over 15 years. Craemer published study in 2015 estimating that the costs of slavery and loss of wealth through slavery cost a conservative estimate of $14.5 trillion through 2009, which didn’t account for inflation. His study also didn’t account for colonial slavery or the loss of wealth due to discrimination after slavery.

Craemer told ABC News when H.R. 40 was introduced, it was a progressive idea, however he says with the amount of research into the impacts of slavery, “setting up a commission to study is not enough. The goal should actually include actual reparations payouts, as a stark starting amount rather than only studying it because they could be a delay tactic. Investment.”

He said reparations “is not a past injustice but a injustice, and it has to do with loss inheritances, and taken inheritances, rights as given. We ignore it when it comes to African American inheritances, and this is a present day wrong that needs to be right.”

“The time is urgent more than ever before,” Crutcher told ABC News on the 108th birthday of Tulsa Race Massacre survivor Mother Viola Fletcher. She notes the last three remaining survivors of the Massacre have waited a lifetime for restorative justice.

Crutcher said for Mother Leslie Randall, 107, and Uncle Hughes Van Ellis, 101, “there's no greater time. How much longer will they have to wait for justice?”

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.27 (after 1950)

1954 – Alger Hiss is released from prison after serving 44 months for perjury. 1965 – Vietnam War: The Pentagon tells U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson that if planned operations are to succeed, the number of American troops in Vietnam has to be increased from 120,000 to 400,000. 1968 – Penny Ann Early becomes the first woman to play major professional basketball for the Kentucky Colonels in an ABA game against the Los Angeles Stars. 1971 – The Soviet space program's Mars 2 orbiter releases a descent module. It malfunctions and crashes, but it is the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars. 1973 – Twenty-fifth Amendment: The United States Senate votes 92–3 to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President of the United States. (On December 6, the House will confirm him 387–35). 1975 – The Provisional IRA assassinates Ross McWhirter, after a press conference in which McWhirter had announced a reward for the capture of those responsible for multiple bombings and shootings across England. 1978 – In San Francisco, city mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk are assassinated by former supervisor Dan White. 1978 – The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) is founded in the Turkish village of Fis. 1983 – Avianca Flight 011: A Boeing 747 crashes near Madrid's Barajas Airport, killing 181. 1984 – Under the Brussels Agreement signed between the governments of the United Kingdom and Spain, the former agrees to enter into discussions with Spain over Gibraltar, including sovereignty. 1989 – Avianca Flight 203: A Boeing 727 explodes in mid-air over Colombia, killing all 107 people on board and three people on the ground. The Medellín Cartel will claim responsibility for the attack. 1992 – For the second time in a year, military forces try to overthrow president Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela. 1997 – Twenty-five people are killed in the second Souhane massacre in Algeria. 1999 – The centre-left Labour Party takes control of the New Zealand government with leader Helen Clark becoming the first elected female Prime Minister in New Zealand's history. 2001 – A hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extrasolar planet Osiris by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extrasolar planet. 2004 – Pope John Paul II returns the relics of Saint John Chrysostom to the Eastern Orthodox Church. 2006 – The House of Commons of Canada approves a motion introduced by Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognizing the Québécois as a nation within Canada. 2008 – XL Airways Germany Flight 888T: An Airbus A320 performing a flight test crashes near the French commune of Canet-en-Roussillon, killing all seven people on board. 2009 – Nevsky Express bombing: A bomb explodes on the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, derailing it and causing 28 deaths and 96 injuries. 2015 – An active shooter inside a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, shoots at least four police officers. One officer later dies. Two civilians are also killed, and six injured. The shooter later surrendered. 2020 – Iran's top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, is assassinated near Tehran. 2020 – Days after the announcement of its discovery, the Utah monolith is removed by recreationists.

[journalsmente]

At least 36 people have died in fires burning through Hawaii, county reports

The fires were the latest in a series of problems caused by extreme weather around the globe this summer. Experts say climate change is increasing the likelihood of such events.

WAILUKU: At least 36 people have died in the Lahaina fire in Hawaii, Maui County wrote in a statement posted to the county website Wednesday evening.

Wildfires, whipped by strong winds from Hurricane Dora passing far to the south, took the island of Maui by surprise, leaving behind burned-out cars on once busy streets and smoking piles of rubble where historic buildings had stood. Flames roared throughout the night, forcing adults and children to dive into the ocean for safety.

Officials said earlier that 271 structures were damaged or destroyed and dozens of people injured.

On Wednesday, crews were continuing to battle blazes in several places on the island. Authorities urged visitors to stay away.

Lahaina residents Kamuela Kawaakoa and Iiulia Yasso described a harrowing escape from under smoke-filled skies Tuesday afternoon. The couple and their 6-year-old son grabbed a change of clothes and ran as the bushes around them caught fire.

“We barely made it out in time,” Kawaakoa said at an evacuation shelter on Wednesday, still unsure if anything was left of their apartment.

As Kawaakoa and Yasso fled, a senior center erupted in flames. They called 911, but didn’t know if the people got out. Fire alarms blared. As they drove away, downed utility poles and fleeing cars slowed their progress.

Kawaakoa, 34, grew up in the apartment building, called Lahaina Surf, where his dad and grandmother also lived. Lahaina Town dates back to the 1700s and has long been a favorite destination for tourists.

“It was so hard to sit there and just watch my town burn to ashes and not be able to do anything,” Kawaakoa said. “I was helpless.”

The fires were the latest in a series of problems caused by extreme weather around the globe this summer. Experts say climate change is increasing the likelihood of such events.

As winds eased somewhat on Maui, some flights resumed Wednesday, allowing pilots to view the full scope of the devastation. Aerial video from Lahaina showed dozens of homes and businesses razed, including on Front Street, where tourists once gathered to shop and dine. Smoking heaps of rubble lay piled high next to the waterfront, boats in the harbor were scorched, and gray smoke hovered over the leafless skeletons of charred trees.

“It’s horrifying. I’ve flown here 52 years and I’ve never seen anything come close to that,” said Richard Olsten, a helicopter pilot for a tour company. “We had tears in our eyes.”

State Department of Education Superintendent Keith Hayashi said in a statement Wednesday that a team is working on contingency plans and preparing for the possible loss of an elementary school that had been in Lahaina for more than a century.

“Unofficial aerial photos show the King Kamehameha III Elementary campus — on Front Street in Lahaina — sustained extensive fire and structural damage,” he said. “The Department is striving to maintain regular school schedules to provide a sense of normalcy but will keep most Maui schools closed for the remainder of this week,” he said.

The Coast Guard said it rescued 14 people who jumped into the water to escape flames and smoke, including two children.

Among those injured were three people with critical burns who were flown to Straub Medical Center’s burn unit on the island of Oahu, officials said. At least 20 patients were taken to Maui Memorial Medical Center, officials said, and a firefighter was hospitalized in stable condition after inhaling smoke.

Richard Bissen Jr., the mayor of Maui County, said at a Wednesday morning news conference that he didn’t have details on how or where on the island the six deaths occurred. He said officials hadn’t yet begun investigating the immediate cause of the fires, but officials did point to the combination of dry conditions, low humidity and high winds.

More than 2,100 people spent Tuesday night in evacuation centers. Another 2,000 travelers sheltered at Kahului Airport after many flights were canceled. Officials were preparing the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu to take in thousands of displaced tourists and locals.

Mauro Farinelli, of Lahaina, said the winds had started blowing hard on Tuesday, and then somehow a fire had started up on a hillside.

“It just ripped through everything with amazing speed,” he said, adding it was “like a blowtorch.”

The winds were so strong they blew his garage door off its hinges and trapped his car in the garage, Farinelli said. So a friend drove him, along with his wife Judit and dog Susi, to an evacuation shelter. He had no idea what had happened to their home.

“We’re hoping for the best,” he said, “but we’re pretty sure it’s gone.”

President Joe Biden said he’d ordered all available federal assets to help with the response. He said the Hawaii National Guard had mobilized Chinook helicopters to help with fire suppression as well as search and rescue efforts on Maui.

“Our prayers are with those who have seen their homes, businesses, and communities destroyed,” Biden said in a statement.

Former President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, said on social media that it’s tough to see some of the images coming out of a place that is so special to many.

Alan Dickar, who owns a poster gallery and three houses in Lahaina, said tourists who come to Maui all tend to visit Front Street.

“The central two blocks is the economic heart of this island, and I don’t know what’s left,” he said.

Dickar took video of flames engulfing the main strip before escaping with three friends and two cats.

“Every significant thing I owned burned down today,” he said. “I’ll be OK. I got out safely.”

Wildfires were also burning on Hawaii’s Big Island, Mayor Mitch Roth said, although there had been no reports of injuries or destroyed homes there. Roth said firefighters had needed to extinguish some roof fires and there were continuing flareups of one fire near the Mauna Kea Resorts.

The National Weather Service said Hurricane Dora, which was passing to the south of the island chain, was partly to blame for the strong winds.

About 14,500 customers in Maui were without power early Wednesday. With cell service and phone lines down in some areas, many people were struggling to check in with friends and family members living near the wildfires. Some were posting messages on social media.

Tiare Lawrence was frantically trying to reach her siblings who live near where a gas station exploded in Lahaina.

“There’s no service so we can’t get ahold of anyone,” she said from the Maui community of Pukalani.

Acting Gov. Sylvia Luke said the flames had wiped out communities and urged travelers to stay away.

“This is not a safe place to be,” she said.

Luke issued an emergency proclamation on behalf of Gov. Josh Green, who was traveling. Green’s office said he’d cut short his trip and was returning Wednesday evening.

Fires in Hawaii are unlike many of those burning in the U.S. West. They tend to break out in large grasslands on the dry sides of the islands and are generally much smaller than mainland fires. A major fire on the Big Island in 2021 burned homes and forced thousands to evacuate.

Yasso, who fled her home with boyfriend Kawaakoa, said residents are going to need time to regroup and that people shouldn’t plan to visit right now.

“It’s everybody losing their memories of growing up,” she said. “It’s the memories for everybody. We all lost our homes with this.”

[thoughtportal]

By Hurubie Meko and Wesley Parnell

Published Aug. 8, 2023Updated Aug. 9, 2023, 8:53 a.m. ET

In the days after O’Shae Sibley, a Black gay man, was killed during an altercation outside a gas station in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, the picture that emerged suggested an explosive combination of homophobia, religious intolerance and racism.

A witness said a group of men that included the teenager charged in the killing used homophobic slurs and told Mr. Sibley that they were Muslim, and he should stop dancing. Some initial media reports picked up that account. Mayor Eric Adams and the police held a news conference at which the mayor stressed that the killing was not evidence of Muslim hatred of gay people.

Now, it appears the man charged with Mr. Sibley’s murder is not Muslim at all. The suspect, Dmitry Popov, 17, is Christian, his lawyer said, altering at least one aspect of a killing that has drawn national attention.

Mr. Sibley’s death had raised concerns about how the charged accusations could hurt relations between two marginalized communities, gay people and Muslims. In fact, the two groups stood together.

At the news conference on Saturday, Mr. Adams, joined by leaders from the city’s gay and Muslim communities, said that both L.G.B.T.Q. people and Muslims have been victims of hate, and the two communities “stand united against fighting any form of hate in this city.”

Mr. Sibley, a dancer and choreographer, was returning from New Jersey to his home in Brooklyn on the evening of Saturday, July 29, when he and his four friends stopped at the gas station, the police said. As the men filled up their car, they played music by Beyoncé and danced, and a group of men approached and told them to stop.

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The men yelled homophobic slurs and anti-Black statements at Mr. Sibley and his friends, according to Joseph Kenny, an assistant chief at the Police Department’s detective bureau, at a news conference on Saturday.

Summy Ullah, a 32-year-old gas station attendant who witnessed the encounter, said one of the young men said, “I’m Muslim. I don’t want this here.”

Within minutes, the heated verbal altercation had turned violent, according to the police. Mr. Sibley was stabbed once in the chest, Mr. Kenny said. He was taken to Maimonides Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Mr. Popov, 17, a high school student from Brooklyn, turned himself in last Friday and was charged with second-degree murder, second-degree murder as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon. He was denied bail in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Monday and is being held in detention.

Court documents said that a witness heard the group with Mr. Popov say, “Stop dancing here, we are Muslim.”

But at the court hearing and in an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Popov’s lawyer, Mark Henry Pollard, pushed back against some of the initial narrative: Mr. Popov is not Muslim, Mr. Pollard said.

“He’s Christian,” he said in a phone interview. “Somehow they got it confused, he’s not a Muslim. I could understand if there were other friends that were, but he was the only person arrested.”

Right after Mr. Sibley was stabbed, Mr. Ullah tried to chase down the attacker.

“I’m Muslim myself,” said Mr. Ullah, who immigrated from Pakistan. “When I saw them dancing, I was laughing too, but I wasn’t making fun of them. Everyone has their own perspective, gay, transgender. We have gay people in our countries as well. You don’t make fun of them. They don’t say anything to you. They aren’t making fun of you.”

Sayeda Haider, 23, arrived at the gas station shortly after the stabbing and found Mr. Sibley’s friends weeping. She comforted them and told them she hoped their friend’s killer would be caught.

Days later, Ms. Haider, who is Muslim, said she had reflected on the possibility that someone used her religion to justify an act of violence.

“It can’t be because of religion, because we dance,” she said. “We are strict, but we’ll dance at parties.”

In Islam, as in many religions, there are extremists who reject L.G.B.T.Q. people, she said, but she said that she had been raised to let people live their lives as they choose.

“We also came here because of freedom, because of the rights, so let other people have their rights too,” she said.

Soniya Ali, executive director of the Muslim Community Center, who also spoke at the news conference on Saturday, said it was not a “surprise or a shock” that the narrative that the person who killed Mr. Sibley was Muslim spread in the news media. Ms. Ali said she had neither experienced or witnessed any backlash from the gay community since Mr. Sibley’s killing.

She said she spoke on Saturday to show support for the L.G.B.T.Q. community in New York City, who she said were the first ones to reach out after former President Donald J. Trump instituted a travel ban soon after taking office barring visitors from six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.

What’s important now, she said, is making sure that the focus remains on the tragedy of Mr. Sibley’s “senseless murder.”

“He was murdered. It was a hate crime,” she said. “That’s the gist of it.”

For Beckenbaur Hamilton, 51, a neighbor and friend of Mr. Sibley, the attacker’s religion is not important.

“That part isn’t even relevant,” said Mr. Hamilton, who is gay. “It doesn’t matter if he is Christian, Muslim, Jewish. If a person takes a person’s life he should be held accountable.”

[texasobserver]

If city budgets are a reflection of what a community holds precious, one thing is glaring in Texas: Policing and incarceration are cities’ crown jewels. 

Texas’ five largest cities—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth—spend far more on criminal justice than on community services, and in the case of Fort Worth, more than six times as much. This is according to a recent study by the Social Movement Support Lab that analyzed the budgets of the largest cities in the United States to determine the ratio of spending on mass criminalization—including police departments, court systems, and corrections departments—to spending on community care—services like affordable housing, parks and recreation, and mental health programs. 

“What we must offer is a vision of true public safety with reliable services that actually prevent violence and crime at their roots,” said Eduardo Martinez, mayor-elect for the city of Richmond, California, during a press conference ahead of the report’s release. Richmond was used as a case study in the report. “Most issues do not require a badge and a gun to solve.” Read more at the Texas Observer.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

#20yrsago Aaron Swartz’s report from US Copyright Office DRM hearings https://www.aaronsw.com/2002/may14-1201

#15yrsago California may legalize Communist Party membership for state employees https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/16/usa1

#15yrsago California Supreme Court rules for same-sex marriage https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/05/why-the-california-supreme-court-did-more-than-legalize-gay-marriage.html

#10yrsago Law profs and librarians to Congress: government edicts should not be restricted by copyright https://law.resource.org/pub/edicts.html

#10yrsago Toronto mayor sprints out of community council event to stick fridge magnets on cars in the parking lot https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/05/14/toronto_mayor_rob_ford_spreads_his_message_with_fridge_magnets.html

#5yrsago The secret, unaccountable location-tracking tool favored by dirty cops has been hacked (and it wasn’t hard) https://www.vice.com/en/article/gykgv9/securus-phone-tracking-company-hacked

#5yrsago Bay Area nurses protest, demanding removal of Mark Zuckerberg’s name from their hospital https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2146352/angry-nurses-want-mark-zuckerbergs-name-removed-san

#5yrsago Ajit Pai: portrait of a Vichy nerd who transformed from debating-society darling to thin-skinned, brooding manbaby https://www.wired.com/story/ajit-pai-man-who-killed-net-neutrality/

#5yrsago Comcast charges you $90 to “install” cable in houses that are already wired by Comcast https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/comcast-charges-90-install-fee-at-homes-that-already-have-comcast-installed/

#5yrsago Zuck tells Parliament they’ll have to arrest him if they want him to testify https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/zuckerberg-again-snubs-uk-parliament-over-call-to-testify/

#1yrago Amy’s Kitchen, a case-study in the problems with consumerism https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/16/through-the-meat-grinder/#hells-kitchen

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[beardedmrbean]

Mexico will deport certain migrants from some of its northern border cities as part of an agreement with U.S. immigration officials who have reported a sharp increase of migrants attempting to cross the border in recent weeks, according to Mexico's immigration enforcement authority.

Mexico's National Migration Institute said it wants to "depressurize" the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras, Tijuana and the northern state of Tamaulipas, where large numbers of migrants have recently crossed the border and where U.S. Border Patrol agents have arrested thousands of them.

The institute didn't say when the deportations will begin or how long they will last, adding that it will first negotiate with Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia and Cuba to make sure those countries will receive its citizens.

"It should be noted that CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] representatives offered the Mexican authorities all technical assistance to address the immigration issue at airports or other inspection points such as trains to reduce the numbers of people who use these mobility routes," the institute said in a statement.

The statement also said Mexican immigration officials will take into custody migrants who have been expelled by the United States at an international bridge connecting El Paso and Juárez.

The agreement was announced after Mexican and American officials met in Juárez on Friday. Officials with Ferromex, Mexico's largest rail operator, were part of the meeting; hundreds of migrants have arrived at the border after hopping aboard freight cars.

"We are continuing to work closely with our partners in Mexico to increase security and address irregular migration along our shared border," said CBP acting Commissioner Troy A. Miller, who attended the meeting. "The United States and Mexico remain committed to stemming the flow of irregular migration driven by unscrupulous smugglers, while maintaining access to lawful pathways."

The move comes as Eagle Pass and El Paso have scrambled to find shelter for recently arrived migrants, or help them get transportation out of the border cities, after they have been processed and released by immigration officials.

On Saturday, CBP said that it reopened a port of entry to rail and vehicular traffic in Eagle Pass; agents had closed it on Wednesday to help process the hundreds of migrants who were waiting to be processed under the bridge.

CBP said in a statement last week that it "swiftly vetted and processed approximately 2,500 individuals into custody and cleared the area" under one of the Eagle Pass' international bridges on Thursday. Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. told CNN that on Friday, immigration agents apprehended between 800 and 1,000 migrants in Eagle Pass.

In August, federal agents encountered an average of 957 migrants each day in the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass, according to government data.

In El Paso, more than 2,000 migrants have arrived each day, Mayor Oscar Leeser said in a news conference on Saturday afternoon. That's nearly double the 1,073 daily encounters that the El Paso sector, which includes New Mexico, recorded in August, according to government data.

As of Monday, immigration agents were releasing 1,200 migrants per day into the city, according to the city's website. That's up from between 300 to 400 migrants per day just six weeks ago, the mayor said.

The city has come to "a breaking point," Leeser said. "We're preparing for the unknown."

On Saturday, the city opened an overflow shelter at the Nations Tobin Recreation Center, which can hold 400 individuals, Deputy City Manager Mario D'Agostino said at the news conference.

Last week, the El Paso Independent School District's board agreed to sell a vacant middle school building to the city for $3.8 million for use as an overflow shelter. The city council will vote on the purchase on Monday.

Officials for three shelters in downtown El Paso said the facilities are at capacity and have had to turn away single men in order to shelter women and children first. The shelters can house up to 450 people.

"We're now at numbers that none of us have ever seen," Blake Barrow, CEO of the Rescue Mission El Paso, said during a news conference on Friday.

Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said the large number of migrants who arrived in Eagle Pass last week was a tactic by organized crime to draw immigration agents' focus to that region to make it easier to smuggle drugs elsewhere on the border.

"I believe it's a money-making opportunity for those smugglers," he said during an interview with ABC News on Good Morning America.

In the months after the emergency health order known as Title 42, which immigration officials used to turn away many migrants at the border, expired on May 11, the number of migrant apprehensions dropped significantly. But in the past few weeks, the number has skyrocketed.

According to CBS News, which cited unpublished federal government data, immigration officials on average made 6,900 apprehensions per day along the southern border in the first 20 days of September -- a 60% increase from the daily average in July.

Many of the migrants are from Venezuela who are fleeing the country to escape an authoritarian government, death threats from organized crime and a collapsed economy.

Last week, the Biden administration announced it will allow Venezuelans who entered the United States on or before July 31 to receive temporary protected status, a program Congress approved in 1990 that allows undocumented people to get a work permit and defer deportation for 18 months.

[mariacallous]

(New York Jewish Week) — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a new “hate and bias prevention unit” to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate on Monday.

The unit will include public education and outreach efforts, a “rapid response team” to assist communities affected by a bias or hate incident, and regional councils where community members can share concerns, host events and conduct training, among other functions.

Hochul’s announcement came during a 90-minute conference held by the Orthodox Union at Manhattan’s Lincoln Square Synagogue to discuss the rise of antisemitism. The event also featured Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas.

Hochul said that the new prevention unit will be implemented statewide and embedded in the Division of Human Rights. “It’s not just going to be sitting in a bureaucratic office,” Hochul said, adding the new unit will also be used as “an early warning system.” 

“We can be in the prevention business, by educating people as to what the signs are,” Hochul said. “I’m going to make sure that this organization is actually an effective instrument for change.” 

The new unit will also mobilize support to “areas and communities in which a bias incident has occurred,” according to a press release from the governor’s office.

The new regional councils will be organized by the Division of Human Rights.

Hochul’s announcement follows her signing of a bill in late November that requires mandatory hate crime prevention training for individuals convicted of hate crimes. 

The state also made $50 million available to strengthen security measures at organizations at risk of hate crimes, as well as $46 million in federal funding for 240 such organizations across the state. 

The New York Police Department reported that antisemitic attacks in the city in November 2022 last month were up by 125% when compared to the same month last year.  

Also, a report from the Anti-Defamation Leage counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents across the country in 2021 — a 34% increase from the previous year, and the highest since it began tracking in 1979. 

During the Monday morning conference, Adams reiterated what he said last week about building up a pipeline of new relationships between the Black and Jewish community to combat hate. He also said that “there should be a no plea bargaining rule” when it comes to hate crimes.  

“I don’t believe we have one person who has been arrested for a hate crime that served time in jail,” Adams said. “That is unacceptable. That sends the wrong message.”  (An analysis earlier this year by The City news site found that between 2015 and 2020, only 87 cases, or 15% of hate crime arrests, resulted in a hate crime conviction.)

Sen. Schumer warned about the “dramatic resurgence of antisemitism” and called out former President Donald Trump for having dinner last month with Kanye West, the rapper who has shared a torrent of antisemitism in recent weeks, and white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

“Rather than apologize afterwards, [Trump] lectures American Jewish leaders for insufficient loyalty,” Schumer said, referring to remarks Trump made Friday on his social media platform, Truth Social. “It is incumbent on all of us to speak out.” 

Schumer said added that antisemitism is “seeping into our society” from not only the far right, but also the far left. “I must say that some, certainly not all, of the anti-Israel sentiment among some here in this country seeps right over into antisemitism,” he said.

The Orthodox Union’s managing director, Maury Litwack, who introduced the mayor and governor at the event, told the New York Jewish Week that the conference wasn’t just about denouncing antisemitism but included “concrete actions.” “This is about tachlis,” Litwack said, using the Yiddish expression meaning “brass tacks.” “It’s not enough to simply say ‘denounce this.’ Each elected official has a responsibility. Like so many other communities, it’s our job to step and have that conversation.” 

Major players from leading New York Jewish organizations attended the event, including Agudath Israel of America, UJA-Federation of New York, the Community Security Initiative, the Hasidic Bobov sect and even former “Real Housewives of New York” cast member Lizzy Savetsky. There was a notable Orthodox presence.

Rabbi Moishe Indig, a Satmar community activist who has a close relationship with both the governor and mayor, told the New York Jewish Week that the event was important to bring awareness to the issue of rising antisemitism.  

“If you don’t speak up, if you don’t do anything about it, if you don’t bring awareness, then you barely know what it is,” Indig said. “We are calling it out and trying to do prevention.”  

Tzvi Waldman, a Rockland County activist and one of the few Jewish representatives at the meeting from outside the five boroughs, told the New York Jewish Week that it was important to show elected officials that there is an interest in these issues.

“If we’re willing to work with them, they’ll work with us,” said Waldman, who is also suing the governor for not allowing guns in synagogues and other houses of worship. Avi Greenstein, the CEO of the Boro Park Jewish Community Council, told the New York Jewish Week that it’s important to “hold our elected officials accountable.” 

“Having the opportunity to hear from our elected leadership about their resolve to stand up for us, it brings out a cautious hope,” Greenstein said.  

[ultrajaphunter]

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the Dalai Lama making an obviously uncomfortable child kiss him and suck his tongue.

Dalai Lama Previously Took Selfie With Democrat Mayor Charged With Possession of Child Pornography

The Democrat mayor of College Park, Maryland, resigned from the position one day before being arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography. Disgraced mayor Patrick Wojahn, 47, was arrested on Thursday after stepping down on Wednesday. Wojahn is facing a total of 56 charges related to child pornography. Prince George’s County Police Department (PGPD) wrote in a press release, “on February 17, 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified the PGPD that a social media account operating in the county possessed and distributed suspected child pornography. 

The image and videos had been uploaded to the social media account in January of 2023. 

Through various investigative techniques, PGPD investigators discovered the social media account belonged to Wojahn.” Eleven days later, on February 28, PGPD detectives served a search warrant at Wojahn’s home. 

They seized multiple cell phones, a hard drive, a tablet, and a computer. “Wojahn is charged with 40 counts of possession of child exploitative material and 16 counts of distribution of child exploitative material. 

He is in the custody of the Department of Corrections,” the press release continued. Law enforcement said that there is currently no indication that Wojahn produced any of the child pornography himself. “We send a clear message to anyone involved in this type of material that units like this are looking, they’re working every day to make sure that we have a safe county and a safe state,” said Prince George’s County Police Chief Malik Aziz during a press conference. Wojahn’s case remains an open and active investigation and anyone with information is being asked to call detectives at (301) 772-4930. The department added that “callers wishing to remain anonymous may call Crime Solvers at 1-866-411-TIPS (8477), or go online at www.pgcrimesolvers.com, or use the “P3 Tips” mobile app (search “P3 Tips” in the Apple Store or Google Play to download the app onto your mobile device.) 

Please refer to case number 23-0009239.” The City of College Park released a statement saying, “last night, after business hours, Mayor Patrick L. Wojahn submitted his letter of resignation as Mayor of the City of College Park, effective immediately on March 2. 

Mayor Wojahn has served in this position since 2015 and on Council since 2007. 

The City of College Park thanks Mayor Wojahn for his many years of dedicated service. “Effective immediately, Mayor Pro Tem Denise Mitchell will serve as presiding officer until a Special Election is held and a new Mayor has been sworn in. 

Per the City Charter, a Special Election must be held within 65 days. 

The City’s Board of Election Supervisors will convene to schedule the date of the Special Election. 

Details about the upcoming Special Election, including candidate packets and voting information, will be posted on the City’s website at www.collegeparkmd.gov. 

The candidate elected as Mayor in the Special Election will serve until the next Mayor is seated following the November 5, 2023 General Election.” Wojahn’s resignation letter reads as follows: “It has been a profound honor and privilege to serve the City of College Park since 2007 as a City Councilmember and your Mayor. 

However, effective immediately, I must resign my position. On February 28, 2023, a search warrant was executed on my residence as part of an ongoing police investigation. 

I have cooperated fully, and will continue to cooperate, with law enforcement. While this investigation does not involve any official city business of any kind, it is in the best interests of our community that I step aside and not serve as a distraction. I have great trust in the ability of Mayor Pro Tem Mitchell, the City Council, and our staff to carry forward what we have accomplished. Many of you have already reached out with well wishes and thoughts, and I am eternally grateful. 

I am stepping away to deal with my own mental health.

 I ask that you continue to keep me and my family in your prayers. Sincerely, Patrick L. Wojahn”