“After a weekend of protests, inspired by a police beating, French President Emmanuel Macron and his ruling party are backing off from supporting a proposed law that would severely curtail, if not eliminate, the sharing of footage and images of law enforcement officers at work.
The proposal at issue, Article 24, would not officially outlaw photographing and sharing images of police. But it would threaten a yearlong jail sentence and a fine of 45,000 euros ($54,000) to anyone who takes or shares images of law enforcement with an “obvious intention to harm.” Experts in France, including the government’s own ombudsman, warned that the law was too vague and would have a chilling effect on the movement to expose police brutality.
And France does have a police brutality problem. This weekend’s protests were inspired by the beating of a 41-year-old black man, Michel Zecler, a music producer, who was stopped by police in Paris for not wearing a mandatory coronavirus mask on Nov. 21. According to NPR, surveillance footage captured three officers forcing their way into his studio and beating him. The beating only stopped when others came to Zecler’s aid. A fourth police officer threw a canister of tear gas into the studio.”
“Over the past month, rail ridership on Metro has been down around 80 to 90 percent of where it was at this point last year. Bus ridership was down by about 50 to 60 percent on weekdays, and down about 30 percent on weekends.
Even before coronavirus, transit ridership in the D.C. area has been well-below its peak thanks to a number of factors, from falling costs of driving to the deteriorating quality of public transit itself, not to mention the rise of alternatives like ridesharing and microtransit.
The idea of such drastic service cuts has already provoked D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to call for additional federal aid.”
“In a close 27 to 25 vote (with one abstention)..members of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) backed a World Health Organization (WHO) proposal to take cannabis and cannabis resin off the list of Schedule IV drugs—i.e., those which the international body says are “particularly liable to abuse and to produce ill effects” and should therefore be most strictly controlled around the world. Schedule IV drugs include heroin, fentanyl, and—from 1961 until now—cannabis.”
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“While the U.N. vote “doesn’t totally free the plant from treaty control, it’s a giant step toward the normalization of cannabis in medicine above all but also in our societies generally””
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“These recommendations might not be legally binding, but they can wield significant influence around the globe.
For instance, after the WHO change, Argentina’s government “issued a decree authorizing sales and self-cultivation of cannabis for medical use, and the justification explicitly refers to the outcome of the critical review and the WHO recommendation to delete cannabis from schedule IV,” noted Jelsma.”
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“The rescheduling “is even more important when you consider that cannabis was placed into Schedule IV without ever having been subject to any scientific assessment,” suggests For Alternative Approaches to Addiction Think & do tank (FAAAT) in a press release. “Schedule IV for cannabis is a relic of the most extreme international drug laws inherited from 1950s morals … The removal from Schedule IV is, therefore, phenomenal news for millions of patients around the world and a historical victory of science over politics.””
“The assault on the city marks the latest clash in a conflict between Ethiopia’s federal government and the TPLF, an Ethiopian political party, that began earlier this month when the TPLF launched what it called a preemptive strike against a federal military facility in Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia. The federal government claimed the party hoped “to loot” the base, and responded to the attack with a full military offensive that is now pushing the country toward a massive humanitarian crisis.”
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“There have also been widespread reports of atrocities as the conflict continues. According to the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Tigrayan security forces retreating from Ethiopian federal troops massacred at least 600 civilians from other ethnic groups in early November, and the EHRC says the eventual death toll could be even higher.
On the other side of the conflict, refugees in Sudan told the Washington Post of a “genocide against Tigray people.”
“They’re killing people madly,” one refugee said. “We saw a lot of dead people on the way. We didn’t bring any food or clothes — we just escaped to save our lives and our children’s lives.””
“President-elect Joe Biden may want his administration to focus on long-term issues like the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, rebuilding alliances, and America’s relationship with China, but some key near-term foreign policy problems will likely require his attention first.
After the assassination of its top nuclear scientist by an unknown attacker, Iran might be less willing to engage in diplomacy with America and instead seek revenge by targeting US officials. North Korea could test an intercontinental ballistic missile early in Biden’s term to try to gauge the new administration’s response. The last remaining nuclear arms control deal between the US and Russia is set to expire just over two weeks after Biden takes office. And the reduced number of American troops in Afghanistan could derail sputtering peace talks and worsen the country’s security situation.
Such a dilemma wouldn’t be unique to Biden. Every new president comes in with ideas on how to handle larger global problems, only to have the colloquial “tyranny of the inbox” monopolize their time. “If you assume that foreign policy is less than half, and maybe a quarter, of the president’s time, then that really shines a light on how serious this inbox problem is,” said Christopher Preble, co-director of the New American Engagement Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank.
Once he’s in the Oval Office, then, Biden will likely find his hopes of tackling grander foreign policy challenges dashed by the effort he’ll have to expend cleaning up more immediate messes.”
“ProPublica interviewed 15 teenagers and young adults in Bensenville alone who said they work or have worked as minors inside more than two dozen factories, warehouses and food processing facilities in the Chicago suburbs, usually through temporary staffing agencies, and nearly all in situations where federal and state child labor laws would explicitly prohibit their employment.
Though most of the teens interviewed for this story are now 18, they agreed to speak on the condition that they not be fully identified and that their employers not be named because they feared losing their jobs, harming their immigration cases or facing criminal penalties.
Some began to work when they were just 13 or 14, packing the candy you find by the supermarket register, cutting the slabs of raw meat that end up in your freezer and baking, in industrial ovens, the pastries you eat with your coffee. Garcia, who is 18 now, was 15 when he got his first job at an automotive parts factory.”
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“The teenagers use fake IDs to get the jobs through temporary staffing agencies that recruit immigrants and, knowingly or not, accept the papers they are handed.”
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“Before they disappeared into crowded assembly lines, the young Guatemalan immigrants in Bensenville arrived in the United States as part of a new wave of young Central American asylum-seekers who have captured the nation’s attention in recent years.
Many of them passed through the federal network of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors that came under scrutiny in 2018 during the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents. As they waited weeks or months to be released to sponsors, they grew anxious about their mounting immigration debts, desperate to get out and work so their relatives back home didn’t suffer the consequences of a loan default.
“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the teens are coming to work and send money back home,” said Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a national organization that advocates for immigrant children in court. “They want to help their parents.””
“The new regulations require utilities to clean up contaminants if they are found at high enough levels beyond the boundaries of their plant sites. By extending those boundaries through land purchases, Georgia Power could push back the day it has to deal with its legacy of pollution”
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“Georgia Power spokesperson John Kraft said in a recent statement that the purchased properties were intended for use as a construction buffer while the company closes its unlined ponds, a lengthy process that includes pumping water out of the disposal site and burying the remaining coal ash in place. He did not respond to direct questions about whether the purchased land would help the company delay cleanup costs.
He noted that the company, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, the nation’s second-largest energy provider, has hired experts to monitor test wells positioned around the ash ponds for signs of groundwater contamination. Based on the results of those tests, he added, the company “has identified no impact to drinking water.””
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“On Dec. 22, 2008, more than a billion gallons of a toxic slurry of coal ash and water breached a dike at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant about 40 miles west of Knoxville. The wave — roughly five times the volume of liquid spilled by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico two years later — tore up railways, toppled power lines, knocked a home off its foundation and caked the Emory River in a thick, gray sludge.”
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“Utilities produce over 100 million tons of coal ash annually, according to the EPA, making it the nation’s second-largest source of industrial waste after household garbage.
Coal ash is the fine residue left when coal is burned to produce power. The ash contains contaminants associated with long-term health risks, including damage to the kidney (from mercury), stomach (from boron) and nervous system (from arsenic). To dispose of it, utilities can either transport the waste to a landfill with a protective liner on the bottom or mix it with water in an ash pond without a layer underneath.”