Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not the only great supreme court justice to have made her name with dissent in the name of progress
The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent collar is a small part of a larger history. Unlike some other high courts, the US supreme court accepts strong dissent. Ginsburg stood in the tradition of John Marshall Harlan – the only justice with the courage, foresight, humanity and constitutional vision to object to the odious 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision that approved racial segregation.
Although a few states have seen large increases in vaccination rates among Black and Latino Americans, most are still trailing behind
When vaccines became increasingly available throughout America, US health officials moved quickly to try to convince large numbers of Americans to get vaccinated. But amid the mass vaccination rollout, Black and Latino communities, who are disproportionately affected by the pandemic, have been left behind in vaccination efforts, creating racial disparities about who was more likely to get a Covid-19 shot.
Amid federal and local efforts to address vaccine disparity, vaccination rates for Black Americans and Latinos lag behind the general population, leaving many communities of color still unprotected against the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ahmed Muhammad, in his valedictory speech, reflected on the unprecedented circumstances that shaped the class of 2021
Ahmed Muhammad recently became the first Black male valedictorian in the 106-year history of Oakland Technical high school in Oakland, California, graduating at the top of his class with a 4.73 grade point average (GPA) and offers from 11 top universities. A video of his moving graduation speech subsequently went viral, drawing widespread attention on social media and even earning praise from the state’s governor.
“I recently became the first Black male valedictorian in our school’s history. And I want to say something about that...“
Thank you, Ahmed for your powerful words. Look out world -- Oakland Tech is coming with some serious change makers! pic.twitter.com/vqANk21T5k
In 30 years as an activist, he has fought to stop black gay men being forgotten, broken taboos about homosexuality and campaigned to make life-changing PrEP medication available on the NHS
Marc Thompson was 17 when he found out he had HIV. He had been out as gay for only a year when a friend suggested he get himself tested. “I thought: ‘Yeah, why not? I’m not going to be positive.’ You had to wait two weeks for the results back then – I’d actually arranged to have lunch with a friend on the day they were due, because it never occurred to me that I would be positive.”
Thompson says he will never forget how he felt that day – partly because he is still asked about it all the time. As one of the UK’s leading HIV, Aids and queer black men’s health campaigners, sharing his own experience comes with the job. “I felt complete and utter numbness,” he says. “All I could hear was white noise. I was walking around in a daze.”
‘Don’t do as we did,’ says Pippa Biddle, who highlights colonial structure of industry where unqualified Western tourists pay to volunteer abroad
Seven years ago, Pippa Biddle wrote a blog post about volunteering abroad. She recounted her struggles speaking Spanish to children living with HIV in the Dominican Republic and how local people in Tanzania would spend all night redoing the construction work she and her classmates had done poorly.
“Taking part in international aid where you aren’t particularly helpful is not benign,” Biddle wrote. “It’s detrimental.”
Misjudged comments to prime minister of Spain sought to play up the South American country’s ties with Europe
Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, has triggered a Twitter storm and a regional race debate with misjudged comments to visiting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain that sought to play up the South American country’s ties with Europe.
“The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came from the ships. And they were ships that came from Europe,” Fernández said, referring to the many European migrants who arrived in the country. He later apologized for the comments and said his country’s diversity was something to be proud of.
The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithms
Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.
You’ve written a book critical of AI but you work for a company that is among the leaders in its deployment. How do you square that circle? I work in the research wing of Microsoft, which is a distinct organisation, separate from product development. Unusually, over its 30-year history, it has hired social scientists to look critically at how technologies are being built. Being on the inside, we are often able to see downsides early before systems are widely deployed. My book did not go through any pre-publication review – Microsoft Research does not require that – and my lab leaders support asking hard questions, even if the answers involve a critical assessment of current technological practices.
The 90-year-old German American director, who completed a trio of documentaries during lockdown, reflects on his career, his black activism and asking his father difficult questions about Nazi occupation
Manfred Kirchheimer, the US’s least-known great documentarian, may be 90 years old, but his memory is as sharp as a knife. “I wasn’t always a film aficionado,” he recalls. “Then, in 1949, I was at Manhattan’s City College and the students were on strike against two professors – one antisemite, the other anti-black. I saw someone filming a police horse and I asked him why. He said: ‘I’m making this for the film department.’ I had signed up for chemistry, but I didn’t like chemistry. So I went to the office of its head – the film-maker Hans Richter – and I said, ‘Professor, are there any opportunities in film?’ He said, ‘Yes – opportunities are plenty. But no jobs!’ I went anyway.” He chuckles fondly.
Kirchheimer was born in 1931 in Saarbrücken, Germany. His Jewish parents, sensing which way the winds were blowing, moved to the US five years later, eventually landing in New York’s Washington Heights, where they joined a close-knit and prosperous community peopled by so many exiles it was sometimes known as Frankfurt-on-the Hudson. Kirchheimer might have stopped practising the faith in his early 20s, but across the decades, his films all benefit – rely, even – on his migrant eye. They’re endlessly curious about how his adopted city works, searching for its often-overlooked architectural or environmental details, alive to its marginal voices.
Rev Dr William J Barber II sang 'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around' with the three living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre at the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Tuesday, after Joe Biden gave a speech honouring the anniversary. Biden became the first sitting US president to visit the site where hundreds of Black Americans were massacred by a white mob in 1921, as he marked the country's legacy of racial violence
Statues of historical figures are lazy, ugly and distort history. From Cecil Rhodes to Rosa Parks, let’s get rid of them all
Having been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game for the kind of moral panics that might make headlines in rightwing tabloids. It’s not like I hadn’t given them the raw material. In the course of my career I’d written pieces with headlines such as “Riots are a class act”, “Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people” and “End all immigration controls”. I might as well have drawn a target on my back. But the only time I was ever caught in the tabloids’ crosshairs was not because of my denunciations of capitalism or racism, but because of a statue – or to be more precise, the absence of one.
The story starts in the mid-19th century, when the designers of Trafalgar Square decided that there would be one huge column for Horatio Nelson and four smaller plinths for statues surrounding it. They managed to put statues on three of the plinths before running out of money, leaving the fourth one bare. A government advisory group, convened in 1999, decided that this fourth plinth should be a site for a rotating exhibition of contemporary sculpture. Responsibility for the site went to the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
For many descendants, the past is still present. They explain how the legacy of the massacre, which was suppressed for so long, lives on today
Earlier this month, the three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre testified in Congress about the world they lost when a white mob burned their thriving community to the ground. “The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich – not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community and heritage,” said Viola Fletcher, who was visiting the US capital for the first time in her 107 years. “Within a few hours, all of that was gone.”
Using individual children to ‘sell’ schemes to rich donors is similar to ‘poverty porn’ images of past, say experts, as calls grow to decolonise aid
International child sponsorship schemes have come under attack for perpetuating racist thinking, as an apology by a charity to thousands of children in Sri Lanka has sparked a debate over the money-raising schemes.
Plan International last week admitted it had made “mistakes” over its exit from Sri Lanka in 2020, following criticism from donors and former employees that it had failed 20,000 vulnerable children in the country.
In 1921, a white mob attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people, but it wasn’t talked about until recently
There was no memorial to it in town. Teachers made no mention of it, not even during a half-semester devoted to local history. The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.
On 12 August 2020 at 7.48am the first of a series of Home Office flights carrying asylum seekers left Stansted. This is the harrowing story of the hours before it took off and the anguish of those on board
At 7.15am, half an hour before charter flight Esparto 11 took off from Stansted airport, a detainee with a documented history of self-harm asked to use the plane’s bathroom. He was taken to the toilet by an escort working for the Home Office who held the door ajar with his foot and, after several minutes, peered inside to discover the detainee had slashed his wrist with a blade.
Pinning the man with his body weight to gain “control”, another officer squeezed into the bathroom and placed a handcuff on the wrist. According to an account written by officers, the handcuff was used to “[give] him pain”, a reference to a restraint technique which involves deliberately inflicting suffering to gain submission. In this case, most likely by twisting the cuff or pushing it into the wrist.
Leeds headteacher forced to apologise after saying Palestinian flag was seen as ‘call to arms’
The recent Middle East conflict has prompted a wave of pro-Palestine protests in British schools and controversy over the staff response, with pupils being accused of antisemitism and one headteacher describing the Palestinian flag as a “call to arms”.
Mike Roper, the headteacher of Allerton Grange high school in Leeds, was forced to apologise after he claimed in an assembly that some people saw the flag as a “symbol of antisemitism”.
Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccine deployment minister, is responding to a Commons urgent question.
He says average Covid deaths are now down to nine per day.
The conclusions of the report (pdf) into Islamophobia in the Conservative party as set out in the document itself (pages 59 to 61) are much stronger, and more interesting, than the conclusions as set out in the press notice from the inquiry. (See 10.50am.) Here are the key points.
Judging by the extent of complaints and findings of misconduct by the Party itself that relate to anti-Muslim words and conduct, anti-Muslim sentiment remains a problem within the party. This is damaging to the party, and alienates a significant section of society.
The Conservative and Unionist party of the United Kingdom has faced sustained allegations of discriminatory behaviours and practices against minority groups, with Islamophobia being the most prominent and damaging allegation in recent years. The perception that the party has a ‘Muslim problem’ is widespread, with numerous instances of party members and elected officials alleged to have behaved in a discriminatory manner.
We discovered some examples of discrimination and anti-Muslim sentiment, most of which were at local association level. We did not, however, find evidence of a party which systematically discriminated against any particular group as defined by the Equality Act 2010, or one in which the structure of the party itself disadvantaged any group, on a direct or indirect discriminatory basis.
While the party leadership claims a ‘zero tolerance approach’ to all forms of discrimination, our findings show that discriminatory behaviours occur, especially in relation to people of Islamic faith. The data collection of such incidents is weak and difficult to analyse, hampering early identification of problems and effective remedial action. The party needs to be explicit and specific about what ‘zero tolerance’ means in the context discrimination, both in policy and practice.
There are shortcomings in the codes of conduct, too, which are not adequate given the twenty-first century social media landscape and 24-hour rolling news cycle. As we have suggested, these should be strengthened and merged into a single code of conduct.
The Investigation recommends that all major political parties consider, in discussion with the EHRC, the creation of a cross-party, non-partisan, and independent mechanism for handling complaints of discrimination against their parties or party members on the basis of Protected Characteristics. This could be similar to the current Parliamentary Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme for Sexual Misconduct.
The investigation has chosen not to recommend or endorse any particular form of equality or diversity training. Our brief perusal of published literature confirms that few, if any, of the suggested training models have been proven to show any sustained change in behaviours or attitudes, while there is some evidence of potentially adverse consequences such as promoting divisions, fostering a ‘shame and blame’ culture and the training being perceived as patronising and infantilising. In healthcare, where cultural diversity training has been extensively used to reduce health inequalities, evidence for its effectiveness is lacking.
At least 15 states are trying to ban schools from teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. The reactionary movement stretches back to the 1920s and the KKK
On 25 May 2020, a man died after a “medical incident during police interaction” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The man was suspected of forgery and “believed to be in his 40s”. He “physically resisted officers” and, after being handcuffed, “appeared to be suffering medical distress”. He was taken to the hospital “where he died a short time later”.
It is not difficult to imagine a version of reality where this, the first police account of George Floyd’s brutal death beneath the knee of an implacable police officer, remained the official narrative of what took place in Minneapolis one year ago. That version of reality unfolds every day. Police lies are accepted and endorsed by the press; press accounts are accepted and believed by the public.
Members of George Floyd’s family, and others who lost loved ones to police encounters, have joined crowds in Minneapolis for a march that was one of several events planned nationwide to mark the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death.
Hundreds of people gathered on Sunday for the rally in front of the courthouse in downtown Minneapolis where a month ago former policeman Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering the black man by kneeling on his neck.
Major survey will explore evolution of black British identity
A major national survey, launched by Cambridge University, I-Cubed Ltd and the Voice Newspaper, will explore the evolution of black British identity, from the generations who lived through the 1970s and 1980s to the students leading the Black Lives Matter movement today.
At the launch of the Black British Voices Project, the Guardian asked three people, from different generations, what it means to them to be black British.
Shooting in Southwark, London came after numerous death threats, says her Taking the Initiative party
The Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson is in a critical condition after sustaining a gunshot wound to her head in an incident in south London, her affiliated group, Taking the Initiative party, has announced on social media.
In a statement on the group’s Facebook page, the party said that the incident happened in the early hours of Sunday and followed “numerous death threats”.