Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalNew challenger to Viktor Orbn leads huge demonstration in Budapest
Tens of thousands of Hungarians protested against the country’s leadership on Saturday in one of the biggest demonstrations in years, organised by a former government insider who has shaken up Hungary’s political landscape.
Péter Magyar, a lawyer and former diplomat who used to belong to an elite circle around Hungary’s ruling party, publicly broke with the government in February and is now aiming to challenge the position of Viktor Orbán, the powerful prime minister.
Over the past 14 years, critics have accused Orbán of increasingly undermining democratic institutions, cosying up to Moscow and Beijing and overseeing a corrupt patronage network.
The longtime Hungarian leader, who began his career as an anti-communist liberal, has moved his Fidesz party to the right. He served as prime minister between 1998 and 2002, but since returning to power in 2010, he has taken a more nationalist, illiberal path, frequently clashing with the EU.
Now, Magyar – who was previously married to Hungary’s former justice minister – is trying to build a new kind of opposition movement. On Saturday afternoon, young people, pensioners and families with children marched through central Budapest and tried to squeeze into the vast square in front of the parliament, with parts of the crowd spilling over to nearby streets.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/06/protest-march-budapest-hungary-peter-magyar-viktor-orban-government
Trump's bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed
Donald Trump’s speeches on the 2024 campaign trail so far have been focused on a laundry list of complaints, largely personal, and an increasingly menacing tone.
He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.
Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.
Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast Trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how Trump would govern again.
Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/06/donald-trump-speech-analysis
No thanks. I'd have to leave too many times to puke.
'You have imprisoned our democracy': inside Republicans' domination of Tennessee
The murder of six people at a church school in an affluent, largely white enclave of Tennessee’s largest city one year ago sparked a mass protest movement for gun control by Nashville parents. The Republican-dominated legislature met that movement with some spending on school police officers as a gesture to the outrage, a law shielding gun and ammunition manufacturers from liability as a gesture to Tennessee’s powerful gun lobby and the expulsion of the two Black lawmakers as a gesture of warning to people causing too much trouble.
Other antidemocratic displays over the last year would be just as outrageous, if people outside of Tennessee were still paying attention.
The temporary expulsion of Representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones was only the first cautionary tale in a saga of retribution that has continued apace, activists say. Conservative domination – maintained by gerrymandered districts, disenfranchised voters and an increasing sense of political despair – insulates Tennessee Republicans from political consequences for unpopular decisions. Challenged in public by increasing activism on the left and apocalyptic rhetoric on the right, Tennessee Republicans stopped just chipping away at democratic norms and began hammering full-on like coalminers on Rocky Top.
Republicans rode the Tea Party wave of 2010 into a dominant position in Tennessee. Bit by bit over the last 14 years, they have turned Tennessee into a one-party state. About 37% of Tennesseans vote for Democrats in national elections, but Republicans hold a 75-24 supermajority in the Tennessee house and a 27-6 supermajority in the state senate – enough to override a veto and propose constitutional changes. Tennessee fails Princeton’s report card on gerrymandering. Only seven state house seats are considered competitive. No state senate seats are competitive.
The last Democrat to win a statewide office in Tennessee was Governor Phil Bredesen, who left office in January 2011. All five state supreme court justices are Republican appointees.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/05/tennessee-republicans-one-party-state
Why are kids being forced to eat lunch in silence?
When my son started kindergarten, I wondered how he would adjust to a seven-hour school day without an afternoon nap and how quickly he would make new friends. I never imagined lunch would be the worst part of his day.
I was horrified to learn that his A-rated public school in one of North Carolina’s best school systems forced my five-year-old and his schoolmates to endure 15-minute silent lunches. Talking in a whisper would lead to a swift reprimand by the lunch monitor. He could even lose precious play time for excessive talking.
My son found this very stressful. Kindergarten meant much longer stretches of concentration. By lunchtime, he needed time to decompress. He continually mentioned his fear of getting in trouble, even though he was never singled out as far as I know.
When I questioned this policy, his teacher told me the short lunches allowed more time for electives and special academic programming that made their school best in its class. The intent was to maximize instructional time for the school’s prized technology and Spanish lessons – in theory, a good idea. That meant shaving minutes off other activities, and the school found that 15 minutes was not enough time to eat if the children were allowed to talk.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/04/silent-school-lunch-kids-mental-health
15 minutes for lunch? Really? And in silence? What is this, a monastery?
This Kind of Fracking Can Help Solve Our Climate Problems
A limitless supply of heat exists beneath our feet within the Earth’s crust, but harnessing it at scale has proved challenging. Now, a combination of new techniques, government support and the pressing need to secure continuous clean power in an era of climate crisis means that geothermal energy is finally having its moment in the US.
Until recently, geothermal has only been viable where the Earth’s inner heat simmers near the surface, such as at hot springs or geysers where hot water or steam can be easily drawn to drive turbines and generate electricity.
While this has allowed a limited number of places, like Iceland, to use geothermal as a main source of heating and electricity, it has only been a niche presence in the US, providing less than 1 percent of the nation’s electricity. But this could change dramatically, offering the promise of endless, 24/7 clean energy that can fill in the gaps of intermittent solar and wind generation in the electricity grid.
“Geothermal has been used for over 100 years, limited to certain geographic locations—but that is now changing,” said Amanda Kolker, the geothermal laboratory program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
“As we penetrate the grid with renewables that are not available all the time, we need to find a base load, which is currently taken up by gas. There aren’t really many options for zero-emissions base load power, which is why geothermal is entering the picture.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/us-federal-funding-geothermal-energy-clean-power/
It would be nice, too, if it didn't cause earthquakes,
Students with disabilities more likely to be snared by subjective school discipline rules
For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.
Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip.
Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice.
But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school.
The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance.
Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, an investigation by The Hechinger Report found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/03/school-discipline-rules-ensnare-students-with-disabilities/72950642007/
All too familiar with this crap. My son was never suspended, thankfully, because we knew the law, had a good lawyer, and the superintendent was scared of both him and my late ex, probably. But he could have been....
Students with disabilities more likely to be snared by subjective school discipline rules
For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.
Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip.
Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice.
But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school.
The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance.
Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, an investigation by The Hechinger Report found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/03/school-discipline-rules-ensnare-students-with-disabilities/72950642007/
All too familiar with this crap. My son was never suspended, thankfully, because we knew the law, had a good lawyer, and the superintendent was scared of both him and my late ex, probably. But he could have been....
Texas Woman Sues Prosecutors Who Wrongfully Jailed Her Over Self-Managed Abortion
In the final weeks before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case of Texas resident Lizelle Gonzalez—then Lizelle Herrera—sent shockwaves across the country. Gonzalez was wrongfully charged with murder for taking abortion pills in her 19th week of pregnancy and was jailed for two days before prosecutors dropped the charge against her because there was no case.
Two years later, Gonzalez is suing the Starr County prosecutors—District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez and Assistant District Attorney Alexandria Lynn Barrera—who launched the criminal case against her for $1 million in damages. Gonzalez’s suit cites the significant harm she faced from her arrest and incarceration as well as frenzied media coverage of the charges against her.
“The fallout from Defendants’ illegal and unconstitutional actions has forever changed the Plaintiff’s life,” Gonzalez’s lawsuit states. The “humiliation of a highly publicized indictment and arrest” has “permanently affected her standing in the community,” and also subjected Gonzalez to “deprivation of liberty, reputational harm, public humiliation, distress, pain, and suffering.” With her lawsuit, Gonzalez wants “to hold accountable the government officials who violated them.”
The lawsuit also describes in further detail the events that led to her arrest. In January 2022, Gonzalez took misoprostol pills to induce a miscarriage and went to the hospital shortly afterward seeking help. Her lawsuit argues that Starr County Memorial Hospital violated her medical privacy by reporting her to the police on suspicion of having induced an abortion. At the time, even before Roe fell, Texas’ SB8 law banned abortion at about six weeks. Then and now, state laws don’t criminalize people who have or receive abortion care, only penalizing the abortion provider. But Herrera’s case is just one of several examples of how pregnant people can face pregnancy-related criminal charges even without an abortion ban. Her experience is also an indictment of how health care workers’ violations of medical privacy put pregnant patients at serious risk.
https://www.jezebel.com/texas-woman-sues-prosecutors-who-wrongfully-jailed-her-over-self-managed-abortion
Why did more than 1,000 people die after police subdued them with force that isn't meant to kill?
Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.
Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.
And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.
Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. And despite that, each died after police used a kind of force that is not supposed to be deadly — and can be much easier to hide than the blast of an officer’s gun.
Every day, police rely on common tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them, such as physical holds, Tasers and body blows. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death — as happened with George Floyd in 2020, sparking a national reckoning over policing. And while that encounter was caught on video, capturing Floyd’s last words of “I can’t breathe,” many others throughout the United States have escaped notice.
https://apnews.com/article/associated-press-investigation-deaths-police-encounters-02881a2bd3fbeb1fc31af9208bb0e310
Poor education, bad judgment, or simply cops gone bad?
A biased test kept thousands of Black people from getting a kidney transplant. It's finally changing
Jazmin Evans had been waiting for a new kidney for four years when her hospital revealed shocking news: She should have been put on the transplant list in 2015 instead of 2019 — and a racially biased organ test was to blame.
As upsetting as that notification was, it also was part of an unprecedented move to mitigate the racial inequity. Evans is among more than 14,000 Black kidney transplant candidates so far given credit for lost waiting time, moving them up the priority list for their transplant.
“I remember just reading that letter over and over again,” said Evans, 29, of Philadelphia, who shared the notice in a TikTok video to educate other patients. “How could this happen?”
At issue is a once widely used test that overestimated how well Black people’s kidneys were functioning, making them look healthier than they really were — all because of an automated formula that calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently. That race-based equation could delay diagnosis of organ failure and evaluation for a transplant, exacerbating other disparities that already make Black patients more at risk of needing a new kidney but less likely to get one.
https://apnews.com/article/kidney-transplant-race-black-inequity-bias-d4fabf2f3a47aab2fe8e18b2a5432135
Just like a lot of other medical biases, like "Black people don't feel as much pain as 'we' do" etc. SHAME!
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
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