Society's Child
The Southern Poverty Law Center's "Whose Heritage?" map depicts the southeastern US as positively bristling with racism, in the form of brightly colored tags representing Confederate monuments. Updated last year to reflect the removal of more than 100 such sites, it still boasted 1,747 at the time of its republication. As anti-Confederate fever flares up amid the George Floyd protests against racism and police brutality, and rioters take sledgehammers to any monument they believe they can link to slavery, Vice has helpfully trotted out the SPLC's map again, handing the angry mob a to-do list that could keep them busy for months.
Don't see your favorite monument on the map? Readers who think the map is "missing" a site can suggest an addition via a helpful submission form, which Vice provides a link to. Not that the invitation will be abused at all at a time when statues of even Thomas Jefferson - who, despite being a founding father and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, held slaves and therefore had to go - are being pulled down.
In televised remarks on Tuesday, Steinmeier took a somewhat inflexible stance on how to ensure equality in Germany.
"No, it's not enough not to be a racist. We have to be anti-racists! Racism requires taking a counter-position, counter-speech, action, criticism and - perhaps most difficult - self-criticism, self-examination," he proclaimed.
The German president went on to pontificate that "anti-racism must be learned, practiced and lived."
Since Huawei was placed on the U.S. entity list -- a trade blacklist-- in May 2019, American companies have been required to obtain a special license from the Commerce Department to have any business dealings with Huawei and its affiliates. This rule change allows companies to disclose U.S. technologies to the Chinese telecom giant without a license if it is for the purpose of 5G standards development.
The amendment is meant to ensure Huawei's placement on the entity list "does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei's pervasive participation in standards-development organizations," according to the Commerce Department announcement.
The latest is China's biggest online classified firm 58.com, which on Monday agreed to a buyout deal led by private equity firms Warburg Pincus and General Atlantic. An investor group backed by Chinese tech tycoon Pony Ma's Tencent Holdings said last week it will take Bitauto Holdings private in a deal valuing the car-listing website at $1.1 billion.
So far this year, U.S.-listed Chinese companies have announced four go-private deals with a combined value of $8.1 billion including debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's up from zero during the same period last year. It's also the highest value for any full year since 2015, when $29.8 billion of such buyouts were announced.
The uptick comes as President Donald Trump weighs tighter scrutiny on Chinese companies after a string of accounting scandals including Luckin Coffee that have burned some of Wall Street's biggest names. Nasdaq is planning new rules that would make initial public offerings more difficult for some Chinese firms, potentially curtailing their access to the world's biggest capital market.
The 2020 Integration Barometer, commissioned by the Norwegian Integration and Diversity Directorate (IMDI), recently published the results from its ninth survey since 2005 and they make for unsettling reading for immigration advocates.
Only one fifth of respondents said that immigration worked 'very' or 'quite' well, while 79 percent of Norwegians argued any shortcomings of integration are due to lack of effort from immigrants themselves.
Some 52 percent believe the values of Islam are incompatible with Norwegian society, with 56 percent are skeptical of having a Muslim son-in-law or daughter-in-law, 45 percent are skeptical of Muslims overall, while 70 percent were skeptical of those with a "strong Muslim faith."
However, many also expressed wariness towards those with strong Christian beliefs (54 percent) which was a higher degree of reticence than towards those of a "moderate Muslim faith" (34 percent). "We thus see that skepticism about religious beliefs is not just about specific religions, but also about how strong the beliefs are perceived," the report said.
Airlines including Easyjet and KLM in Europe, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines in the United States, and Asia's Virgin Australia, are suspending all or part of their alcoholic drinks service in response to COVID-19.
It's part of a widespread revision of the industry's food and drink service to minimize interaction between crew and passengers and to ensure a safer journey for all.
With face masks already mandatory on pretty much all flights around the world, and new legislation introduced in January 2020 to curb anti-social behavior on flights, it's another in a line of barriers — literal and legal — to getting high in the sky.
Many airlines are limiting drink options to water only. As face masks must be kept on other than when passengers are eating and drinking, it's a way of ensuring passengers are lingering over their refreshments for no longer than necessary.
I don't know much about ZeroHedge, but the contention that the Federalist (where I worked as a senior editor from 2013 to 2019) is "far-right," as reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser claims twice in her piece, is utter nonsense. The Federalist publishes a wide variety of opinions. Some pieces are more provocative than others. Some are very provocative. So what? NBC News is trying to make the site sound like the Daily Stormer, when in fact it has contributions from well-known mainstream libertarians, social conservatives, and moderate Republicans. All of the content falls well within normal parameters of contemporary political discourse — which is exactly what outlets such as NBC News are trying to shut down.
Comment: Senior Federalist journalist Mollie Hemingway fires back:
Wider commentary reported by RT:
Google confirmed the Federalist was never actually demonetized in a tweet after NBC updated its article. However, the original version of NBC's article cited a Google spokesperson clearly stating "we've removed both sites' ability to monetize with Google," explaining that both sites "violated its policies on content related to race."
While it's impossible to tell without a link, the Federalist specifically called out NBC for directing its reporters not to use the word "riot" to describe the violent unrest unfolding in Minneapolis in the days following George Floyd's killing - an act which might have triggered the network's wrath.
The deplatforming raised more than a few eyebrows on social media as commenters wondered when it became acceptable journalistic practice to rat out one's competitors for insufficient wokeness.
Some questioned when Google had begun demonetizing sites over the content of their comment sections - a policy that would seem to fly in the face of Section 230 protections, which don't only apply to giant tech platforms.
A handful of threats ominously suggested the Daily Caller was "next."
The conservative outlet filmed and reported on Washington DC rioters' attack on an NBC news crew just after midnight on June 3 - something the channel itself conspicuously avoided doing, going out of its way to avoid mentioning the violent interruption to what was otherwise reportedly a peaceful night.
Led by activist Heshy Tischler and a number of state assemblymen, the group was seen in videos shared to social media on Monday breaking the lock off a gate barring the entrance to a park in Williamsburg, allowing a crowd gathered outside to enter, to cheers of "Heshy!"
Comment: Update:
Protests good, playgrounds bad? NYC mayor chews out locals reopening kids' parks after cheering on George Floyd marchers
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had harsh words for parents and neighborhood groups "taking the law into their own hands" by cutting locks on city playgrounds, but has continued to defend the protesters who crowd city streets.
The mayor scolded New Yorkers for busting open padlocked playgrounds, during a press conference on Tuesday at which he reminded reporters that the sites are set to remain closed until "Phase 2" of post-coronavirus reopening.
We're not going to allow people to take the law into their own hands. It just doesn't work.Insisting the continued closure of children's play-spaces is "for a reason," de Blasio insisted he'd been "very sympathetic" and tried to "make it work," but blamed parents for not following the rules. He also threatened to postpone Phase 2 or even return to full lockdown if city residents refused to cooperate, hinting that any suggestion the virus was spreading would push any hoped-for playground reopening into the distant future.
De Blasio's recriminations were playground-specific for a reason, however. The mayor was photographed marching with protesters in East Harlem on Sunday, and has repeatedly defended the George Floyd protesters' flouting of the Covid-19 social distancing measures he insists on applying elsewhere with an iron fist, proclaiming that "an extraordinary crisis seated in 400 years of American racism" trumps "the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person."
A Hasidic Jewish group was filmed cutting the lock on Williamsburg's Middleton Playground on Monday, presumably reasoning that with the massive protests that have thronged the streets over the past three weeks, the logic that children must be barred from climbing on play equipment for the sake of "social distancing" has been utterly shredded.
Eager to commit an act of vandalism but have little experience and want to make sure you don't accidentally hurt your co-conspirators in the process? Rest reassured, Popular Mechanics is here to lend a helping hand and a piece of expert advice.
In its article published on Monday, the science magazine provided elaborate step-by-step guidelines on how to "bring that sucker down without anyone getting hurt." Rallying behind the rampant destruction of historical monuments across the US amid allegations that they celebrate a legacy of racism, the magazine said that it asked "scientists for the best, safest ways to bring it to the ground without anyone getting hurt - except, of course, for the inanimate racist who's been dead for a century anyway."
The Middle East is easily the most conflict-prone region in the world, and there's no sign the violence is going to end any time soon, says Seth J. Frantzman, a Middle East affairs analyst at the Jerusalem Post.
In an article for the newspaper on Monday, the observer asked why the region has so many more wars than any other place on Earth. The answer, he believes, is the region's complexity, its home to great power competition, and the sense of "impunity" that some regional powers have "to traffic weapons and send their armies across borders."
Comment: None so blind as those who will not see.
- History of the June 1967 "Six Day War": Some Israeli leaders do sometimes tell the truth
- Demystifying the myths of Israel's Six-Day War
- What Really Happened in the "Yom Kippur" War?
- Israel admits to torpedoing Lebanese refugee ship, killing 25 people, in 1982 war against Lebanon
- Israel admits using phosphorus bombs during war in Lebanon
- Lebanon, Iraq, Iran call out Israel's 'declaration of war' after it bombs 3 COUNTRIES in one weekend
- Israeli attacks on Syria: How Israel backs terrorists against Syria
- Israeli pathological war in photos: Israel relentlessly bombs Gaza, West Bank protests repressed
- Psychopathic Israel: Relentlessly brutalizing millions of Palestinians for decades
- What Zionists really mean when they say "there was no Palestine" - and why they're "not even wrong"















Comment: Telling people what they have to do in order to be politically correct to an intolerant group of scolding hypocrites is not a good idea as a politician. Steinmeier can virtue signal all he wants, but people typically don't like their leaders getting on moral high horses and shaking their finger at the populace for their perceived lack of morals.