All Posts Tagged as 'Politics'

Corey Johnson, the out gay Speaker of the New York City Council, has ended his campaign for mayor, with colleagues saying he has been withdrawn since a bitter battle over police funding.

Johnson publicly cited his battle with depression as a reason for not running, hoping that publicly discussing the issue would help fight the “secrecy and stigmas” that make people with mental health conditions “feel alone.”

His decision may have been driven in part by controversies over funding for police in New York. This past July, the city passed its fiscal year 2021 budget which included a $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s budget in the face of the city’s $9 billion budget shortfall due largely to the COVID pandemic.

Willy Monteiro Duarte was born in Rome to parents from Cape Verde. He had just become an Italian citizen, and at 21 years old, was an aspiring chef at a hotel in a town near Rome.

All of that ended on Sept. 6 when he tried to break up a fight — and instead was beaten to death himself.

“Fascism in Italy has this history of the cult of the male body, of the strong body, of the strong myth of Rome that ruled the world and so on — a myth of domination,” said Marcello Maneri, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Milan Bicocca who studies race and power.

“These people [the two brothers] acted like they owned the community," he said. “They wanted to patrol their territory. In the end, I think when they saw this Black guy, they thought, ‘We are the people who must control this territory, not him.’”

The House on Monday passed a bill that would ban discrimination that stems from race-based hairstyles.

The legislation, called the CROWN Act, would apply in part to situations in employment, housing and federally funded programs.

Rep. Ilhan Omar celebrated the bill’s passage in a Monday tweet.

“For far too long, Black women have been penalized for simply existing as themselves—that ends today,” Omar wrote.

Costco has reportedly removed Palmetto Cheese from store shelves after the owner of the pimento cheese brand called Black Lives Matter a "terror organization."

Brian Henry, the founder of Palmetto Cheese and mayor of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, made a public Facebook post on Aug. 25 saying he was “sickened by the senseless killings in Georgetown.”

According to The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, Henry apologized at a news conference and called his comments “hurtful and insensitive.” He also asked people calling for a boycott of Palmetto to reconsider.

“There is a concerted effort to boycott Palmetto cheese,” Henry said. “Please consider the hundreds of South Carolina jobs that depend on its success. We humbly ask for your support.”

Actress and 'Defund the police' activist Alyssa Milano was quick to call cops when she believed an armed gunman was on her Bell Canyon property on Sunday morning.

The call ignited a response that included seven Ventura County Sheriffs' vehicles, one K-9 unit, a police helicopter and one Los Angeles Fire Department team that sat down the street on standby.

In July, the left leaning activist Alyssa tweeted out to her 3.7 million followers a link, urging them to sign the 'People's Budget L.A.' that demands a 90 percent reduction in police funding.

One neighbor says, 'She can tweet those things because at the end of the day she lives behind gates in a gated community. She knows the police will come to save her. But what about all those people who don't have that luxury and live in unsafe neighborhoods? She obviously doesn't care.

'She uses her platform in hypocritical ways. Why not send your husband into the yard to find out what is actually going on before you call the police? I would guesstimate the response today from law enforcement cost tax payers thousands of dollars.'

Kristie Higgs, 44, had been employed at Farmor’s School in Fairford, Gloucestershire, for seven years, but was sacked for gross misconduct in 2018 over Facebook rants about LGBT+ inclusive education.

In one post, sharing a petition from anti-LGBT+ lobbying group CitizenGo, Higgs accused schools of “BRAINWASHING OUR CHILDREN” [sic] through inclusive relationships education, claiming: “[This] means, for example, that children will be taught that all relationships are equally valid and ‘normal’, so that same-sex marriage is exactly the same as traditional marriage, and that gender is a matter of choice, not biology, so that it’s up to them what sex they are.”

Higgs described inclusive education as a “vicious form of totalitarianism”, adding: “Please sign this petition, they have already started to brainwash our innocent wonderfully created children and it’s happening in our local primary school now.”

But this week, Higgs announced that she would be taking legal action against Farmor’s School, claiming that she was subjected to discrimination and harassment on the grounds of her religious beliefs.

The Trump administration will begin banning downloads and use of popular Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat late Sunday, in a move U.S. officials said was driven by national-security concerns but which drew objections for impinging on free-speech rights.

The Commerce Department issued regulations Friday to bar U.S. companies from providing downloads or updates for the TikTok and WeChat apps after 11:59 p.m. Sunday. Companies will also be banned from providing data-hosting services for WeChat at that time.

“Each collects vast swaths of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories,” the Commerce Department said. “Each is an active participant in China’s civil-military fusion and is subject to mandatory cooperation with the intelligence services” of the Chinese Communist Party.

A Toronto-area mom received an anonymous note accusing her of making her neighbourhood “ghetto” because she had a mural painted on her garage door.

Earlier this week, Sapna Shah, who lives in South Etobicoke, said on Facebook she received a “nasty message” in response to the mural, which shows rolling golden hills and some constellations.

Shah posted the note, which said (in all caps), “You just devalued all of the homes in this area with that hideous graffiti at the front of your house. It has made the entire neighbourhood look like a low income ghetto.”

“Every visitor we have will now have to drive by that shit on the way to us like they’re driving through the hood,” the note said.

The announcements this week came in a formal speech for the State Opening of Parliament in Barbados. The speech is the mechanism by which the government sets out its agenda.

The Queen’s representative, Governor General Dame Sandra Mason gave the speech. However, it is the government that writes it.

In it, Prime Minister Mia Mottley promised wide-ranging changes in Barbados. And she made headlines around the world by announcing the country will drop Queen Elizabeth as its head of state.

But hidden in it was an indication Barbados will drop another vestige of its colonial legacy – its ‘sodomy’ law.

The country rarely enforces the law against gay sex. But it is technically one of the most punitive in the world with a maximum sentence of life in imprisonment. Scrapping it will almost certainly be a pre-requisite for recognizing same-sex relationships.

Columbia University's marching band has claimed to disband after 116 years, declaring itself to be irreparably rooted in racism and oppression.

Following a vote on Saturday, the band's leadership, known as the Bored, issued a statement saying that it has 'maintained a club structure founded on the basis of racism, cultural oppression, misogyny, and sexual harassment.'

'The Band has unanimously and enthusiastically decided to dissolve. The Columbia University Marching Band will not continue to exist in any capacity and will no longer serve as a Columbia spirit group,' the statement added.

The Texas State Board of Education has given preliminary rejection to a plan to include lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity in the sex education curriculum, but LGBTQ+ advocates are fighting back.

The Republican-majority board last week voted down a proposal by member Ruben Cortez, a Democrat, to teach students in middle school and high school about the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, ABC News reports. It also rejected a move to start lessons about consent in middle school, as some board members thought the topic inappropriate for students that age. A final vote will come in November.

Joe Biden was mocked by viewers last night after pulling out his phone and playing the megahit 'Despacito' at a Hispanic campaign event in Florida.

But critics accused Biden of 'pandering' and mocked him for playing a song whose title translates as 'Slowly' - evoking Donald Trump's nickname 'Slow Joe'.

Trump himself shared an edited video in which the song was changed to 'Fuck The Police' by N.W.A., with the president asking: 'What is this all about?'.

Netflix’s “Cuties” may be receiving a torrent of backlash out of North America, but France’s film industry is standing in support of Maimouna Doucouré’s feature debut. On Tuesday, the country’s authors, directors and producers guild, La Société civile des Auteurs Réalisateurs et Producteurs, known as ARP, said calls for the film’s boycott are a “grave attack on freedom of creation” carried on by the “most conservative of Americans.”

A campaign waged against Netflix over “Cuties” and the film’s sexualized portrayal of children produced a surge in U.S. subscription cancellations over the weekend, according to research company YipitData, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations out of Washington, D.C., is the latest org to call on the streaming giant to pull the film due to, it claims, a stereotypical portrayal of Muslims.

In France, the film was released on Aug. 19 without any restrictions and was considered suitable for all audiences. It triggered some debate, but not any backlash. We received unanimous praise in the local press, from L’Humanité to Le Figaro, Telerama and Le Monde. We want people to watch the film and realize it’s about many issues: It’s about being Black and living in France, in a society dominated by white people; it’s about being a woman; it’s about the identity conflict that a child can feel between a traditional, conservative upbringing and everyday life at school. Twerking is a small part of the movie. (The film is rated TV MA — Mature Audiences by Netflix in the U.S.).

Even in a community outwardly campaigning for inclusion and acceptance, exclusion and judgement still exist on a personal level. Now, Bright Light Bright Light is shedding a light on his experience with that phenomenon within the LGBTQ community.

“Feeling like I belonged within the gay community I think has been a bit of a struggle," he said. "The LGBTQ+ community is such a vast umbrella; everyone is so different and trying to work out where you belong within that is hard. It kind of presumes that everybody queer gets on with each other, which they don’t, and that everyone is alike, which they’re not.”

Thomas also said that he wasn't considered "body-appropriate" to some in the community, which made him constantly feel like he was an outsider within a space built for him. “It doesn’t matter because those people don’t matter," he explained. "But I found that a huge struggle -- feeling invisible or not welcome in queer spaces -- even more heart-breaking than not being welcome in heterosexual spaces, because these spaces are there for everybody that needs them.”

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.