Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
“We’ve got to really consider whether we do military… help getting this aid in to save the starving people of Venezuela,”
By Alberto Luperon @ LawandCrime.com, April 14, with related ABC News video clip/tweet
[....] President Donald Trump‘s team are worried most about what former White House Counsel Don McGahn might have told Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 30-plus hours of interviews, according to ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jon Karl. McGahn “has visibility on all of this,” Karl said on a Sunday episode of This Week. He added that he was told the discussions lasted much more than 30 hours.
“And here’s the astounding thing,’ Karl said. “After all of that time before the special counsel, nobody on the president’s legal team debriefed McGahn about what he was asked by the special counsel, or what he told the special counsel. So the bottom line is they really don’t know.” [....]
McGahn, who left the White House last October, reportedly seems pretty confident that he’ll make an appearance in the final product. “I spent the last couple of years getting yelled at,” he said at an off-the-record lunch, according to sources for Axios. “And you may soon read about some of the more spirited debates I had with the president.” He didn’t cite the Mueller report by name, but sources said that’s what he seemed to mean [....]
Indigenous musicians in Canada are at one another’s throats over the Cree artist Cikwes’s use of a traditional Inuit singing technique
Op-ed by Kenan Malik @ TheGuardian.com, April 14
Another week, another row over cultural appropriation. But this one is different. It’s not a white artist being accused of appropriating the cultural forms of a minority community but an Indigenous Canadian artist being condemned for using the musical style of another Indigenous community [....]
Years of cultivated hatred led to death on a horrifying scale.
By Kennedy Ndahiro (Editor of The New Times) @ TheAtlantic.com, April 13
[....] the dehumanization had started long before RTLM urged its listeners to “exterminate the cockroaches.” The killings in 1994 were a culmination of decades of hate-mongering, the indoctrination that began even before independence.
In 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, a leader of the radical Hutu political party Aprosoma, openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi “vermin.” The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun. When the first of the many anti-Tutsi pogroms broke out that year, Gitera was overjoyed.
Over the years, whenever a sitting government ran into political trouble, it always played the Tutsi card to rally its supporters. Anti-Tutsi incitement came to the fore in November 1992, when an official in the ruling party, Léon Mugesera, openly called for the mass killings of Tutsis and for their bodies to be dumped in a river.
By the mid-1990s, the Hutu leadership was in jeopardy [....]
By Robert Barnes @ WashingtonPost.com, April 13
[....] the Supreme Court’s next case. Iancu v. Brunetti is a trademark dispute in which Los Angeles artist Erik Brunetti sued the government, saying it violated the First Amendment by refusing to register the trademark for his “subversive” clothing line: FUCT.[....]
“Giving offense is a viewpoint,” wrote Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “We have said time and again that ‘the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers.’ ”
Brunetti is challenging a neighboring provision in the law, which prohibits the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks. And his odds look good [....]
By Lea Skene @ TheAdvocate.com, April 11
The suspect accused of burning down three historically black Baptist churches in St. Landry Parish has ties to the "black metal" music scene, a Scandinavian subgenre whose enthusiasts espoused anti-Christian beliefs and were linked to a string of Norwegian church fires in the 1990s.
Subsets of the group have also espoused racist views for decades, including white nationalist ideologies that became associated with the genre as it gained popularity and name recognition in Norway during the 1980s.
Louisiana authorities announced Thursday the arrest of Holden Matthews, 21, and suggested his association with black metal music could be linked to the case. But they stopped short of identifying a motive for the fires, saying the investigation is still ongoing.
Experts have also cautioned against jumping to conclusions based on Matthews' black metal fandom or condemning the entire genre in response to the recent allegations. [....]
By Matthew Hendrickson @ Chicago Sun Times, April 11, VIDEO @ link
A new surveillance video shows Chicago police officers push and drag a student down a set of stairs at Marshall High School on the West Side before punching her and shocking her with a stun gun multiple times.
The video, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, appears to contradict the officers’ statements on how the incident unfolded, including that the student initiated the violent encounter — again raising questions of the oversight, training and stationing of police officers in Chicago Public Schools.
The two officers involved in the incident also held the student down while stepping on her chest, but they didn’t seek help from her father or other school personnel who were nearby, according to an amended lawsuit filed Thursday by the girl’s attorney, Andrew M. Stroth [....]
Cummings says he wants to probe possible ‘illegal conduct’
Republican Jordan says subpoena is an ‘extraordinary abuse’
By Billy House and Shahien Nasiripour @ Bloomberg.com
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said he’ll subpoena documents on Monday from an accounting firm tied to President Donald Trump.
“The committee has full authority to investigate whether the president may have engaged in illegal conduct before and during his tenure in office,” Cummings said in a memo Friday to committee members along with a copy of the subpoena to Mazars USA LLP [....]
During President Donald Trump's visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago, where he told border agents to block asylum seekers from entering the US contrary to US law, the President also told the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, that if he were sent to jail as a result of blocking those migrants from entering the US, the President would grant him a pardon, senior administration officials tell CNN.
By Carl Zimmer @ NYTimes.com, April 11
NASA scientists compared the astronaut to his earthbound twin, Mark, and found changes down to the molecular level. The results hint at what humans would have to endure on long journeys through space.
By Oliver Millman in Philadelphia for TheGuardian.com, April 12
Young Trump supporters are breaking with his environmental views and bringing scientific reality to their party
Communist Youth League students to ‘spread civilisation’ in countryside and ‘promote technology’
Agence France Presse via TheGuardian.com, April 12
[....] The Communist Youth League (CYL) has promised to despatch more than 10 million students to “rural zones” by 2022 in order to “increase their skills, spread civilisation and promote science and technology”, according to a Communist party document.
The aim is to bring to the rural areas the talents of those who would otherwise be attracted to life in the big cities, according to a CYL document quoted in the state-run Global Times daily on Thursday. “We need young people to use science and technology to help the countryside innovate its traditional development models,” Zhang Linbin, deputy head of a township in central Hunan Province, told the Global Times [....]
Compare and contrast: blackface in college. Who pointed these out to CNN? This is what enquiring minds should also want to know.