US Senators Skeptical of Reported WH Plans to Send Daesh Militants to Guantanamo

Washington, DC (Sputnik) – The notorious US prison in Cuba is largely known for keeping its detainees indefinitely without trial and for allegations of torturing prisoners. The US claims to incarcerate individuals that are too dangerous for conventional prisons there and has refuted UN demands to close the facility. The idea of sending several high-profile Daesh* captives to the offshore US prison in Guantanamo Bay has reportedly been met with stiff criticism by some US politicians, according to NBC News. Senator Jeanne Shaheen expressed concern that sending them to the Cuban prison will turn those terrorists into martyrs, making…

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Meet Haiti’s Founding Father, Whose Black Revolution Was Too Radical For Thomas Jefferson

(Conversation) – Crowds cheered as local lawmakers on August 18 unveiled a street sign showing that Rogers Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn would now be called Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, after a Haitian slave turned revolutionary general. When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first black head of state. Supporting the French colonial perspective, leaders across the Americas and Europe immediately demonized Dessalines. Even in the United States, itself newly independent from Britain, newspapers recounted…

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Across the Country, Basements, Offices and Hotels Play Short-term Host to People in ICE Custody

United States (TexasTribune) – The basement of a federal building in downtown Austin, 10 floors below U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s office. Space in a “fashionable” South Carolina office park. Branches of major hotel chains in Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle. These facilities rarely appear together on government lists, but they all have something in common: They’re nodes in a little-known network of holding areas where people in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spend hours or even days on their way to other locations. The government’s now-suspended “zero…

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DEMAND FOR TRANSPARENCY AFTER CONTROVERSIAL RALEIGH ARREST

Raleigh, NC (PT) – The family of a man, whose beating at the hands of Police went viral on social media following his arrest less than a fortnight ago, have demanded transparency in connection with an incident which community activists have branded as a another example of excessive use of force by Police. Frederick Darnell Hall. Image source; public domain. Exclusive video shot by Thomasi McDonald of the North Carolina ‘News and Observer‘ seems to be suggestive of oppressive conduct by police following the arrest of a man whose story…

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Red-State Politics In and Out of the College Classroom

United States (Conversation) – For two decades, I have taught U.S. women’s and gender history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, a blue town in a blue state, marooned in an ocean of red. Bordered by Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta and the Ozarks, Southern Illinois is surrounded by the country’s poorest rural regions. Some of my students arrive from white farming communities and are the first in their families to attend college. They grow up on church, military, patriotism and traditional family, and they come from a world different from…

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India Has a Sexual Assault Problem That Women Could Help Fix, In a Round About Way

India (Conversation) – India is the most dangerous country for sexual violence against women, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation 2018 survey. The survey, which measures sexual and non-sexual violence, discrimination, cultural traditions, health care and human trafficking, has been criticized for reflecting more perception than data. But India barely fares better in other studies that rank its treatment of women. It placed 131st of 152 countries in the Georgetown Institute’s global ranking of women’s inclusion and well-being. India’s National Crime Records Bureau reported 338,954 crimes against women – including…

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Democrats Move Back Toward Trusting the People

(Garrison) – “[A] political party which wishes to lead,” reads the preamble to the Democratic Party’s charter, “must listen to those it would lead, a party which asks for the people’s trust must prove that it trusts the people …” On August 25, the Democratic National Committee took that passage to heart by limiting the power of “superdelegates” in choosing the party’s presidential nominee. Good move, and long overdue. Proximate inspiration: The disastrous 2016 presidential cycle, in which superdelegates played a key role in assuring the nomination of Hillary Clinton (and the…

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Fraternities and Drinking Clubs, Or Hate Groups – Proud Boys and Identity Evropa

United States (News21) – Behind the anonymity of white faces illuminated by tiki torches, beyond the bloodied fists of street brawls, there are communities of young men who gather on weekends to camp and fish and train in combat sports. The face of hate is changing in America, and the new right is a “millennial male phenomenon,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, an advocacy group that tracks hate and bigotry toward marginalized communities. Brewing among some young men is…

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Tackling the Trolls: How Women are Fighting Back Against Online Bullies

(OpenDemocracy) – Back in 2012, I went to the police to report an incident of online harassment. A man had called me an obscene name, threatened to find out where I lived in order to post my details on 4Chan, and wrote “she must pay!!”. He accepted a caution. This wasn’t my first incident of online abuse. There was the rising academic and popular environmentalist who commented on everything I wrote, in a way that amounted to sustained harassment. When I wrote a piece on abortion rights, he called me a “fucking baby…

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Cases of Missing and Murdered Native American Women Challenge Police, Courts

United States (News21) – Native American women across the country are being murdered and sexually assaulted on reservations and nearby towns at far higher rates than other American women. Their assailants are often white and other non-Native American men outside the jurisdiction of tribal law enforcement. In some U.S. counties composed primarily of Native American lands, murder rates of Native American women are up to 10 times higher than the national average for all races, according to a study for the U.S. Department of Justice by sociologists at the University of…

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