“After more than a year of neglect from global leaders and massive funding gaps for humanitarian assistance, the war in Sudan has reached a critical tipping point. Warring parties are waging a deadly battle for control of El Fasher — the capital of the state of North Darfur and, until recently, one of the last safe havens for civilians. If the city falls, experts warn there will be dire human rights consequences, ranging from ethnic cleansing to outright genocide for millions of people.
What’s happening in El Fasher is just the latest in the year-long conflict between two rivaling military groups struggling for power after working together to oust Sudan’s former president and his successor. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the general of the country’s military, known as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), became the de facto ruler of Sudan in 2021 — but tensions with his temporary ally, the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), soon boiled over as the leaders attempted to integrate the RSF into the SAF. This tension grew into a civil war last year, one that has created the world’s largest displacement crisis: On Monday, the United Nations told the AP that more than 10 million people — about a quarter of the population — have already been internally displaced since the war began.
The SAF and RSF have clashed sporadically in El Fasher, which is the government military’s last foothold in all of western Sudan, but the town has largely been spared the worst of the war until recent weeks. That changed on the morning of May 10, when heavy fighting between the two groups broke out. Near daily bombings, indiscriminate shelling, and airstrikes have rocked the city since. More than 1,000 civilians have been injured and 206 people have died, according to Claire Nicolet, the emergency program manager at Médecins Sans Frontières. Hospitals and camps for internally displaced people have been damaged by gunfire and explosions. Very few aid convoys carrying food and health supplies have reached the estimated 2 million civilians in the city. ”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/354112/sudan-darfur-el-fasher-genocide-humanitarian-aid-neglect
“Two Canadians planned to conduct assassinations in the U.S. on behalf of Iran’s intelligence services, according to allegations in a newly unsealed indictment.
The suspects are accused of plotting to shoot a man and woman living in Maryland, one of them a defector from Iran.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-allegedly-hired-canadians-to-conduct-assassinations-on-us-soil-according-to-indictment-192921168.html
“Laura Ann Carleton, 66, a California business owner, was shot and killed last weekend after a gunman tore down an LGBTQ Pride flag hanging outside her store and shouted homophobic slurs. Since then, law enforcement has revealed that the gunman — who was killed in an encounter with police — also posted numerous anti-LGBTQ posts on social media accounts they believe are affiliated with him.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/8/23/23843063/california-pride-flag-shooting-laura-ann-carleton
“despite the total number of mass killings staying static, the number of events with extremist ties has increased, resulting in a higher percentage of extremist-linked mass killings.”
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“reports from the DHS and ADL also indicate far-right extremists make up the plurality of violent attacks with extremist ties.”
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““Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have committed the majority of extremist-related killings in all years but one — 2016, the year of the shooting spree at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a person motivated by Islamist extremism,” the report read. “Of the 444 people killed at the hands of extremists over the past 10 years, 335 (or 75%) were killed by right-wing extremists.” The report also found that the majority of deaths caused by these killings are from shootings — over 80 percent of the victims of deadly extremist violence were killed with firearms in each of the last five years.”
“During the summer of 2020, the federal government seemed poised to offer some sort of reform to qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields local and state government actors—not just police—from facing federal civil suits when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, so long as the way they infringe on the Constitution has not been “clearly established” in prior case law. That explains, for example, why two cops who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant could not be sued for that act: While we would expect most people to know that was wrong, there was no court precedent that said theft under such circumstances was a constitutional violation.
It’s an exacting standard that can defy parody in the ways in which it prevents victims of government abuse from seeking damages in response to government misconduct. In the case of Tyre Nichols, for example, it’s quite plausible that the officers who killed him could be convicted of murder and still receive qualified immunity—a testament to how disjointed and unforgiving the doctrine can be.”
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“Those skeptical of qualified immunity reform typically cite an uneasiness about bankrupting officers. They can take heart that cities indemnify their employees against such claims, meaning the government pays any settlement. It’s certainly an imperfect solution in terms of holding individual bad actors accountable, but it gives victims of state abuse an outlet to achieve some semblance of reparation. Make it so any settlements come out of a police pension fund, and you’ve created a major incentive for departments to excise its consistently problematic actors.”
“Women account for less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings, but according to our analysis of the Post’s data, almost 20 percent of the women fatally shot by police are Black, even though Black women make up only around 13 percent of women in the U.S. And since 2015, when the Post first began tracking fatal police shootings, at least 51 Black women have been killed. Half of those women have gotten some national media attention in the 60 days surrounding their death, according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of media reports, but in most cases, the coverage is limited — five stories or fewer.”
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“Researchers at Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland analyzed nearly 300 phrases used as Twitter hashtags between August 2014 and August 2015, a year after the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Though these hashtags are often used to name Black victims of police brutality, not one specifically mentioned a Black woman or girl.
“Mainstream narratives are often still written by men or are tailored toward a male perspective,” said Keisha Blain, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the president of the African American Intellectual History Society. “For these reasons, among others, Black women’s experiences with police violence are too often marginalized.””
“police killings are not the whole story. The protests, and all the policy recommendations that have come with them, are pushing back against other systemic problems too.
Some of those injustices are specific and quantifiable: shootings, unfair traffic stops, arbitrary arrests. Others are vague but no less concerning: feeling you have no recourse for complaints about police, the calculus that can go into the decision to call 911, the sense that an investigation into a reported crime won’t be prioritized, the nervousness and fear that must be tamped down as one works to stay calm and keep an officer calm — all while wondering if you are living your final moments.
Not all of these problems can be measured. The number of police killings per year is a statistic that can be tabulated and broken down into easily digested parts: killings per region, per department, per time of day, per ethnicity. But how police make people feel is not quite as easily captured in data. There are ways to try — surveys asking whether officers make one tense or whether one trusts law enforcement — but such questions offer limited insight into what is causing those results or what effect they have.
Meanwhile, the issues behind the answers to those surveys do have a clear effect: They leave many black Americans frustrated with and fearful of police.”
“injunctions. When a court enjoins a particular defendant, they don’t just order that defendant to cease a particular behavior, they also can enforce that order with criminal sanctions or by imposing escalating fines until the defendant ceases their illegal conduct. A party subject to an injunction, in other words, can be squeezed so hard by court sanctions that they have no choice but to change their behavior.
Consider the case of Eric Garner, who was killed by a New York police officer’s chokehold in 2014. Although the NYPD had a formal policy barring chokeholds, it was frequently unenforced. The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board received 219 chokehold complaints against NYPD officers in just one year.
If one of the victims of those chokeholds had obtained an injunction against the NYPD, then a court could have imposed strict sanctions on the city until police chokeholds ceased. And Eric Garner might be alive today.”
“in order for this strike to be legal without congressional authorization, it would have to be in response to an imminent threat to the United States. And then we immediately enter into a discussion about what “imminent” and “threat” actually mean.”
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“Many of the people who have shaped our legal understanding of “imminent” over the years understood it to mean that the threat was unfolding right now and there’s no time to do anything other than to kill the person.
The Soleimani killing doesn’t appear to meet that threshold.”
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“If this is just a thing we did, then Congress doesn’t need to be notified. But if it’s an act of war, then clearly Congress needs to be notified.”
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“for better or worse, at a point where the majority of lawmakers have basically acquiesced to the administration’s interpretation of the law when it comes to war, and again, this goes back to the George W. Bush era. So if that’s the case, then eventually the law becomes whatever the current administration says it is. That’s where we are.”
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“there were several AUMFs but none of them, in any way, were directed at Iran. Each of them very clearly gave the executive branch the power to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and later, ISIS in Iraq. And in fact, Iran has been on our side in the fight against ISIS and the Taliban. So there’s just no plausible legal justification under which you could stretch any of the AUMFs to include an attack on an Iranian official.”