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Lehigh University covered up prof's sex harassment to avoid appearing racist, claims lawsuit

james peterson
A Pennsylvania professor is suing her university, claiming that it covered up sexual harassment claims against a black faculty member for years to avoid appearing racially discriminatory.

The professor, Monica Miller claims in the lawsuit obtained by Campus Reform that she was promoted to head the Africana Studies department following the suspension of Dr. James Peterson after "years" of sexual harassment allegations, according to The Morning Call. Miller also accuses Peterson of harassing her.

Miller claimed that Peterson made multiple attempts to kiss Miller, called her high heels "sexy," asked and then attempted to pull Miller onto his lap, and rubbed her leg. Miller "felt compromised given the high stakes of the job process and the primary/formative role that Peterson [who headed the Africana Studies department at the time] played throughout," the lawsuit states.

Flashlight

'Woke' injustice: Jussie Smollett's politicized escape from responsibility

Jussie Smollett
© Getty images
Before actor Jussie Smollett’s whopper unraveled, it was wildly parroted by a media too eager to believe anything that confirms its conviction that America is boiling with hate, Finley says.
The expunging of the 16-count felony indictment against actor Jussie Smollett for faking a hate crime against himself is being treated as a manifestation of Chicago machine politics.

Feminist attorney Tina Tchen, the former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama, had contacted the Cook County prosecutor, Kim Foxx, about the case on behalf of a member of Smollett's family.

But the dismissal of a seemingly watertight case, based on the sworn confessions of Smollett's two co-conspirators and reams of physical evidence, represents more than celebrity justice. It is rather the latest example of the incursion of academic identity politics into the workings of government.

Had Smollett been a straight white male who had staged his own attack by fake Antifa Trump antagonists, he would most certainly still be facing a trial and the prospect of prison time.

Comment: See also:


TV

Brazen Jake Tapper claims CNN didn't get 'anything' wrong in Russiagate reporting

jake tapper
© CNN
Jake Tapper
The host of CNN's State of the Union, Jake Tapper, tried to defend the network's coverage of Russiagate, claiming it actually got nothing wrong. The bold claim, however, was challenged by other journalists.

Tapper made the controversial remark while talking to acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday.

"I'm not sure what you're saying the media got wrong. The media reported the investigation was going on. Other than the people in the media on the left, not on this network, I don't know anybody that got anything wrong," Tapper stated.

Comment: CNN's ratings have been tanking over their humiliating championing of the Russiagate debacle. Market forces!

Fake news flops: CNN's February ratings down 19 percent


Heart - Black

Hundreds of women secretly filmed undressing for treatment at San Diego hospital

surgery
© Reuters / Carlos Garcia Rawlins
A San Diego hospital secretly filmed 1,800 women undressing, giving birth and undergoing gynecological procedures using hidden cameras, a lawsuit filed by 81 of the women claims.

Sharp Grossmont Hospital set up hidden cameras in three operating rooms in their women's health center in El Cajon between July 2012 and June 2013. The motion-activated cameras filmed women giving birth, undergoing hysterectomies, sterilizations and miscarriage procedures, with the cameras capturing the women's faces and "their most sensitive genital areas," the suit filed in the California Supreme Court on Friday reads.

The hospital said it was recording as part of an investigation into whether an employee was stealing the anesthesia drug propofol. The cameras were located on the drug carts in the operating rooms and continued to film after movement nearby had stopped.

Bulb

Costco reportedly pulls Roundup from shelves after $80million awarded in second cancer case

costco
Costco has reportedly decided to stop selling Roundup weedkiller after a federal jury in San Francisco awarded more than $80 million to 70-year-old California man, Edwin Hardeman, who was diagnosed with cancer after spraying the herbicide on his property for decades.

According to the founder of Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt, Costco will no longer carry Roundup or other glyphosate-based herbicides in their spring shipments.
Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt, whose petition calling for Costco to stop selling Roundup has more than 150,000 signatures on Change.org, wrote on her website:

"I called the headquarters, and after two days of messages and calls, I did finally confirm with three people that Costco was not ordering Roundup or any glyphosate-based herbicides for the incoming spring shipments."

Costco has yet to issue an official statement on the petition. However, in conversations with the administrative staff at various stores, Big Think has learned that the product was pulled off the floor this week per corporate orders - meaning, Costco's removal of Roundup applies to "all locations." -Big Think
Honeycutt's group is now petitioning Home Depot and Lowe's to pull Roundup from their shelves as well.

Airplane Paper

Technical glitch causes thousands of flights to be delayed across multiple US airlines

airport delay
© Leah Millis / Reuters
Passengers wait to board a delayed Southwest flight at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia on April, 1, 2019.
A technical glitch caused flight delays across multiple U.S. airlines Monday morning.

A program called Aerodata, which monitors the weight and balance of planes, was down between 5:25 a.m. and 6:12 a.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration

Southwest, United Airlines, JetBlue, Alaska and Delta were all experiencing residual delays due to the outage, the FAA said.

Airports in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Dallas experienced the heaviest delays.

Both Delta and Southwest responded to customers on Twitter who were expressing their dismay with the travel disruption.

Comment: See also:


Books

Professor at Catholic university docks essay grades for not using 'inclusive language' on gender

John Carroll University
© John Carroll University
John Carroll University
'Wording excludes a group that makes up half the population'

Students in a theology course at a Catholic university were forced to redo an assignment after the professor took off points for "exclusive language," one of the students told The College Fix.

He said he "got points taken off an essay assignment" because the professor told him he used "exclusive language," the student wrote in a series of text messages Wednesday.

"World of Grace" is taught by a part-time professor at John Carroll University, David Buhrow. It explores "the Christian vision of the entire world as grace-filled, resonant with the Holy," according to the course description in the syllabus provided by the student. (The Fix is not naming him because the class is still going.)

Comment: David Buhrow's excessive political correctness has not earned him much gratitude among his students.


Books

The historical amnesia Milan Kundera warned us about is happening again

milan kundera
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera is 90-years old on April 1, 2019 and his central subject - The Power of Forgetting, or historical amnesia - could not be more relevant. Kundera's great theme emerged from his experience of the annexation of his former homeland Czechoslovakia by the Soviets in 1948 and the process of deliberate historical erasure imposed by the communist regime on the Czechs.

As Kundera said:
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
I first read Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) back in 1987, when I was a member of the British Communist Party. The book shook my beliefs and Kundera's writing became a part of a process of truth-speaking that shook the USSR to the ground in 1989.

In the 90s we believed we were living in a "post-mortem" era in which all the hidden graves of the 20th century would be exposed, the atrocities analyzed, the lessons learned. Lest we forget. We also thought we'd entered a time in which the Silicon Valley dream of digitizing all knowledge from the entire history of the printed and spoken word would lead us towards the infinite free library, the glass house of truth and the global village of free information flow. The future would be a time of endless remembrance and of great learning.

How wrong we were. The metaphor of the glass house has turned into that of the mirrored cube. The global village has collapsed into tribal info-warfare and the infinite library is now a war zone of battling conspiracy theories. The internet has become a tool of forgetting, not remembrance and the greatest area of amnesia is the subject that Milan Kundera spent his entire life trying to preserve, namely the horrors of communism.

Comment: Morrison has a point, even if his delivery leaves something to be desired. We all 'remember' the Nazi atrocities, but forget, write-off, or ignore the Communist ones. But atrocities are only the secondary effect of a root cause that Morrison himself seems unaware of: ponerogenesis, as described by Andrew Lobaczewski. Communism as an ideology is ripe for abuse by individuals characterized by dangerous personality disorders, and the more normal people they can spellbind into following their agenda. But behind the communist nightmare of the 20th century lies something more concrete. For more info, see:


Attention

'This is a system-wide collapse!" Surge of Central American migrants overwhelm Texas border city

Migrants
© am1070theanswer.com
Democrats like to deride President Trump's warnings about a crisis at the southern border as a "fake emergency" reliant on "nonsensical" numbers about the flow of migrants. They even tried, and failed, to terminate his emergency declaration, which has also triggered a flurry of lawsuits, but that won't change the fact that the first tranche of money from Trump's expanded border wall has already been approved by the DoJ.

And the timing couldn't have been better, because over the past month, as reports about the number of migrant families declaring asylum between border checkpoints climbing to an all-time high were picked up by the mainstream press, the true weight of the ongoing disaster at the border has suddenly become difficult to ignore. Even the peso, which had mostly shrugged off his prior threats, tumbled when Trump warned that he would close the border next week if Mexico doesn't try to stop illegals from entering the US.

And in the latest report that, like the others, will be difficult for the public to chalk up to more conservative fear mongering, USA Today published a story on Saturday about a border city that has seen public resources overwhelmed as asylum seekers are released into the city at a rate of more than 800 per day.

Comment:




Ambulance

Son of the head of MI6 dies in accident in Scotland

Sam Younger
© UNIVERSAL NEWS AND SPORT (EUROPE)
Sam Younger, 22, in a photograph issued by his family following his death
The son of Alex Younger, the head of MI6, has died in an accident on a private estate in Scotland.

Police said Sam Younger, 22, described as a "fun loving" former pupil of Dulwich College, died following "an accident involving a motor vehicle".

The Edinburgh University student is the son of Mr Younger, who has served as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service since 2014, and his wife Sarah Hopkins.

His family issued a photograph of the student, apparently taken in 2017 on an overseas motorcycle trip.