#but she kept talking about how hamas is the only palestinian group and she associates them w suicide bombings from decades ago

[spidergvven]

accidentally started talking about palestine w my mom and not only did she agree that israel was a far right apartheid state but when she started talking about hamas this hamas that terrorism blah blah blah i explained the pflp to her and she was like well that would be fine which had me dumb founded. like. one state solution communist palestine and she was like yeah. sounds good.

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Biden heads to Europe this week. Some Europeans are wary. (Washington Post) President Biden embarks later this week on the first foreign trip of his presidency to attend a series of European summits. He’ll attend the meeting of the Group of Seven nations in Britain. Then, he’ll head to a NATO summit in Brussels where he’ll rub shoulders with the majority of the European Union’s leaders. All of that will precede what is likely to be a tense encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16. After spending the past five months focused on domestic affairs and battling the pandemic, Biden will try to demonstrate how his administration is “restoring” U.S. leadership on the world stage. No doubt, Biden’s European counterparts are relieved by the drastic change of tone between his administration and that of President Donald Trump. But elements of Trump’s trade war are still in place, while the Biden administration maintains pandemic-era restrictions on E.U. citizens traveling to the country even as the continent opens up to a legion of eager U.S. tourists. Experts see the fact that Biden has yet to name ambassadors to either NATO or to the European Union in Brussels as a sign of inattention from Washington. European commentators also recognize that, no matter Biden’s imminent bonhomie in London and Brussels, the United States increasingly views Europe at best as a junior partner in its intensifying competition with China. A survey of European attitudes published Monday by the German Marshall Fund (GMF) of the United States found only limited confidence in Washington. In France and Germany, slender majorities see the United States as the world’s most influential power. Only 51 percent of Germans surveyed viewed the United States as a “reliable” partner.

Jails emptied in the pandemic. Should they stay that way? (AP) It wasn’t long after Matthew Reed shoplifted a $63 set of sheets from a Target in upstate New York that the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Instead of serving a jail sentence, he stayed at home, his case deferred more than a year, as courts closed and jails nationwide dramatically reduced their populations to stop the spread of COVID-19. But the numbers have begun creeping up again as courts are back in session and the world begins returning to a modified version of normal. It’s worrying criminal justice reformers who argue that the past year proved there is no need to keep so many people locked up in the U.S. By the middle of last year, the number of people in jails nationwide was at its lowest point in more than two decades, according to a new report published Monday by the Vera Institute of Justice. “Reducing the incarcerated population across the country is possible,” said Jacob Kang-Brown, a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice and author of the new report.

Harry and Meghan Announce Birth of Second Baby, Lilibet Diana (NYT) Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, on Sunday announced the birth of a daughter, whose name, Lilibet, pays tribute to Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, after a year of estrangement between the couple and the British royal family. The baby, who was born on Friday morning in Santa Barbara, Calif., will go by the name Lili, an abbreviated version of the nickname given the queen when she was a young girl. The baby’s middle name, Diana, honors Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997. This is the couple’s second child, and her birth adds a joyful note to what has been a year of turmoil.

AMLO’s majority shrinks (Foreign Policy) Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Morena party and its allies came out of legislative elections on Sunday with a reduced majority, dashing the president’s hopes of enacting constitutional changes—which require a two-thirds majority. Morena is still expected to hold between 265 and 292 seats in Mexico’s lower house, according to the national election body. The results of 15 state governors races are not yet known, although pre-election polling favored Morena in most of those contests.

Colombia’s unrest (Foreign Policy) Colombian president Ivan Duque will ask lawmakers to approve new measures to address accusations of police brutality during weeks of protests that have morphed into an anti-government protest movement. Duque is calling for increased oversight of police officers as well as better training after human rights groups reported dozens of killings at the hands of police in recent weeks. Negotiations between the government and protest leaders have stalled over disagreements between the two sides on preconditions for the talks.

Not Russian Into The Spotlight (Washington Post/Bloomberg) Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t talk much about his adult daughters, only that he has two of them. He’s never even confirmed their identities. Russian independent and foreign media outlets have reported on them, but no one really talks about them, per Kremlin Policy. However, the more they’re in the public eye, the harder it is to keep quiet. One daughter is genetics researcher Maria Vorontsova. The other, 34-year-old Katerina Tikhonova, is the deputy director for the Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems at Moscow State University. While they’re not directly involved in politics, they hold influential positions in businesses that have close ties to state enterprises. The approach runs counter to other countries, where the children of world leaders are often in the spotlight. Even former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara made news when she said she wouldn’t run for a North Carolina Senate seat in 2022.

Train barrels into another in Pakistan, killing at least 45 (AP) An express train barreled into another that had derailed in Pakistan before dawn Monday, killing at least 45 people, authorities said. More than 100 were injured, and rescuers and villagers worked throughout the day to search crumpled cars for survivors and the dead. At around 3:30 a.m., the Millat Express train derailed and the Sir Syed Express train hit it minutes later, said Usman Abdullah, a deputy commissioner of Ghotki. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the derailment, and the driver of the second train said he braked when he saw the disabled train but didn’t have time to avoid the collision.

India re-opens major cities as new COVID-19 infections hit 2-month low (Reuters) Key Indian cities re-opened for business on Monday, with long queues for buses in the financial hub of Mumbai while traffic returned to the roads of New Delhi after a devastating second wave of coronavirus that killed hundreds of thousands. The 100,636 new infections of the past 24 hours were the lowest in the world’s second most populous nation since April 6, and well off last month’s peaks of more than 400,000, allowing authorities to re-open parts of the economy. Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal ordered half the capital’s shops to open on odd and even numbered days of the month respectively, in a bid to limit crowds, but allowed offices and the Delhi underground rail network to run at 50% of capacity.

Israeli security chief issues rare warning over potential for Jan. 6-style mob violence ahead of Netanyahu departure (Washington Post) The head of Israel’s internal security service said that “extremely violent and inciting discourse” targeting the lawmakers who are seeking to end Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure as prime minister could take a potentially lethal form—a grim echo of the warnings ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman said Saturday that the spike in vitriol targeting Netanyahu’s opponents online and in public demonstrations “may be interpreted by certain groups or individuals as one that allows for violent and illegal activities that may even, God forbid, become lethal.” He called on public officials to rein in the groups that have vowed to do “anything possible” to prevent the swearing in of a new power-sharing government that has been spearheaded by centrist politician Yair Lapid. Netanyahu has said he condemns any incitement and violence, but he said at a meeting with his Likud party on Sunday that “incitement against us is also raging.” He called on lawmakers to vote against the formation of the “fraudulent” alternative government.

Palestinian teen bears scar of eviction battle in East Jerusalem (Reuters) Jana Kiswani, a 16-year-old Palestinian, was entering her home in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah when an Israeli police officer shot her in the back with a sponge-tipped bullet, her family said. Her spine fractured, the teen bears testimony to the tensions and violence surrounding an Israeli court-ordered eviction of eight Palestinian families from homes claimed by Jewish settlers. Last month, the Sheikh Jarrah dispute helped to trigger 11 days of intense fighting between Israel and Gaza’s ruling Hamas militant group, and frequent protests and confrontations with Israeli police in the neighbourhood have kept tensions high. Clashes were under way in Sheikh Jarrah on May 18 when Kiswani was shot. She said she was obeying police orders to go inside when the police officer fired. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t pick up a rock, or even say a word to him or argue with him or anything, he had no right to shoot me,” Kiswani told Reuters. Asked about Kiswani’s shooting, an Israeli police spokesperson did not comment directly on the incident but said some events that day were under investigation. CCTV footage from the teenager’s home showed her falling to the ground in the courtyard and a stun grenade exploding as her family rushed to her aid.

Malaria is far deadlier in Africa than the coronavirus. Why is the vaccine taking so long? (Washington Post) NANORO, Burkina Faso—No hospital in this rural community has recorded a covid-19 death. But another menace fills graves on a grimly predictable schedule. The seasonal downpours that soak the red dirt roads here nurture clouds of mosquitoes that spread malaria. Researchers call it a forgotten epidemic: The parasitic disease kills more than 400,000 people each year. Most victims are children in Africa. The coronavirus pandemic, by contrast, has claimed about 130,000 lives on the continent in the past 15 months, according to World Health Organization estimates. Yet only the coronavirus has commanded a surge of global resources that fast-tracked vaccines, smashing development records and reshaping attitudes toward what is pharmaceutically possible. “We are all frustrated in Africa to see how covid gets so much attention compared to malaria,” said epidemiologist Halidou Tinto, regional director of Burkina Faso’s Institute of Research in Health Sciences. “If malaria concerned the West, the attention would be much more focused.”

An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. (Artnet News) From the department of “They sold that for how much?!” comes today’s story, about an Italian artist who, for the cool price of €15,000 ($18,300), recently auctioned an artwork that is… well, nothing. Last month, the 67-year-old artist Salvatore Garau sold an “immaterial sculpture”—which is to say that it doesn’t exist. For Garau, the artwork, titled Io Sono (which translates to “I am”), finds form in its own nothingness. “You don’t see it but it exists; it is made of air and spirit,” he explained. “It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination, a power that anyone has, even those who don’t believe they have it.” Indeed, many people on the internet seem to be having trouble tapping into that power. “So you really just taped a square and called that a sculpture?” reads the most-liked comment on the video page.