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Perspective | Congressman calls D.C. schools ‘inmate factories,’ and unites a city

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Perspective | Congressman calls D.C. schools ‘inmate factories,’ and unites a city


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Center faculty instructor Rian Reed has seen how phrases seize on to her college students and cling.

“They care deeply about what individuals say about them,” the D.C. educator mentioned. “So, to have any individual simply say one thing like that about them will keep in entrance of their brains and can impression them.”

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By that she means the insult that Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) hurled at D.C. college students when he known as the town’s colleges “inmate factories” throughout a congressional listening to Wednesday.

Republican congressman calls D.C. colleges ‘crappy,’ ‘inmate factories’

“Your colleges should not solely dropout factories, they’re inmate factories,” the congressman mentioned to a panel of D.C. leaders who have been known as to testify on the listening to.

He additionally known as the colleges “crappy,” however that wasn’t the insult that left individuals throughout the town united in outrage. That’s not what left them describing the lawmaker’s phrases as “demeaning,” “disgusting” and “derogatory.”

Inmate factories. That phrase just isn’t clever or geared toward options. It’s malicious and dismissive. It presents the town’s kids as issues within the making. Lawmakers perceive the ability of phrases. They rise and fall on sound bites. In utilizing that phrase Palmer made a selection, and within the days since that listening to, dad and mom, academics and college students who’ve frolicked in D.C. colleges have additionally made one: to not let his phrases go unchallenged.

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“It actually resembles bullying to me,” mentioned Reed, who works at Kramer Center College in Southeast Washington. “With our college students simply coming off the stress of the pandemic and coping with actual inequities, they don’t deserve somebody coming in and calling them inmates when they’re actually gifted and proficient and have a lot to provide to this world.”

College students at her faculty are informed bullying won’t be tolerated. They’re taught that whenever you harm somebody, you attempt to make it proper.

“I actually imagine that he ought to apologize for his phrases,” Reed mentioned. He ought to acknowledge his actions have been dangerous, whether or not he believes that or not, she mentioned. “He ought to apologize as a result of injury might be completed for the carelessness of his phrase selection.”

Are you listening, Congressman Palmer? You owe D.C. college students an apology. You additionally owe one to the various academics who spend their days attempting to construct up these college students you spent seconds tearing down.

A D.C. instructor makes use of his stimulus verify to start out a nonprofit, so he can take children fishing

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“There are such a lot of motivated academics all through D.C. public colleges that care in regards to the college students, and never simply on an training degree however on a private degree,” Alex Clark, a Dunbar Excessive College instructor, mentioned. He went to Seattle this previous week to provide a presentation to different academics at a nationwide convention.

Clark described Palmer’s phrases as “hurtful” and agreed an apology is required “particularly towards our youngsters.”

“Exhausting to not be angered by somebody solely a mile away referring to the place you’re keen on and work because the ‘inmate manufacturing facility,’” Japanese Excessive College instructor Lee James tweeted. He posted a photograph of scholars on the Holocaust Museum and defined that they have been “studying about how phrases matter.”

Greater than a 12 months in the past, James posted a tweet that includes a video that drew greater than 13,000 views. In that video, pupil Temitayo Adeola tells a college worker that he acquired a full experience to attend Columbia College and he or she screams.

“I’m a product of DCPS,” Adeola mentioned of the town’s public colleges after we talked over the cellphone between his courses at Columbia, the place the 17-year-old is majoring in enterprise and psychology. “DCPS doesn’t produce inmates. DCPS produces students and future leaders.”

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Adeola mentioned one in every of his former classmates is on a prelaw monitor at Louisiana State College, one other is coaching to be an engineer for Pepco and one more joined the hearth academy and has already acquired a number of promotions.

“The checklist goes on,” he mentioned. “They’ve all gone on to do wonderful issues, even when they didn’t go to school.”

It ought to shock nobody that D.C. college students have gone on to attain success. They shouldn’t should persuade anybody of that. However Palmer’s assault made that really feel crucial. It made it really feel crucial to notice that D.C. colleges rank larger than Alabama colleges and level out that almost 75 p.c of D.C.’s college students graduated on the finish of the 2021-2022 faculty 12 months, a rise from earlier years.

‘I hope that they discover normalcy’: What a D.C. dad’s combat for his daughters’ training says about ladies of coloration at school

There isn’t any doubt room for the town to enhance its colleges. Studying gaps exists. Instructor retention stays a problem. Nobody I spoke to denied that extra work is required. However all of them acknowledged that when a grown man in energy dismisses the potential of a metropolis’s kids, that undermines progress.

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“My preliminary ideas? I used to be offended,” mentioned DaSean Jones, a graduate of Anacostia Excessive College who has a daughter in faculty, two kids in D.C. public excessive colleges and one youngster at a constitution faculty. He’s additionally a member of Dad and mom Amplifying Voices in Schooling (PAVE). “I assumed, ‘Who is that this 68-year-old good ol’ boy from Alabama who’s bashing D.C., which throughout my upbringing was properly often known as Chocolate Metropolis?”

Like many individuals, he noticed Palmer’s phrases taking intention at colleges crammed with Black and Brown kids. He additionally noticed them void of recognition that, with out statehood, D.C. doesn’t have the identical benefits as states.

Context issues, and the non-public and societal elements that lead an individual to take one path and one other to go a special approach are extra sophisticated than something made in a manufacturing facility.

“It is very important acknowledge that the historical past of gentrification in D.C. has made it in order that we’ve lots of college students who’re already farther from alternatives than different college students within the nation,” Liv Birnstad, a highschool senior at Capital Metropolis and a pupil consultant on the District’s State Board of Schooling mentioned. “But, regardless of that, we’ve persevered and achieved wonderful issues. Nevertheless, due to sentiments like that expressed from the congressmen, D.C. college students attaining something however incarceration is portrayed as unimaginable.”

That’s particularly problematic, she mentioned, when individuals think about “the cyclical nature of incarceration in households.”

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“A serious a part of staying out of carceral programs is college students having confidence instilled in them that they will break these cycles,” the 18-year-old mentioned, “and when adults in positions of energy say violent issues like that it contributes to these programs.”

Are you listening, Congressman Palmer? That’s what it feels like to talk thoughtfully about crime and to care about maintaining kids from seeing jail as some unavoidable destiny.

On Friday, Birnstad posted an replace about her future on Twitter.

“This Capital Metropolis ‘inmate,’” she wrote, “obtained into Harvard final evening….!!!!”





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US Defence Сhief Says Washington Will Not Let Ukraine Fail

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US Defence Сhief Says Washington Will Not Let Ukraine Fail


Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promised Tuesday that the United States will not let Ukraine fail, even as further aid remains stalled in Congress and Kyiv’s forces face shortages of munitions.

The Republican-led House of Representatives has been blocking $60 billion in assistance for Ukraine, and the United States has warned that a recent $300 million package would only last a few weeks.

The “United States will not let Ukraine fail”, Austin said at the opening of a meeting in Germany of Ukraine’s international supporters.

“We remain determined to provide Ukraine with the resources that it needs to resist the Kremlin’s aggression,” he added.

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Washington announced $300 million in assistance for Ukraine last week, but Austin said it was only possible due to savings on recent purchases by the Pentagon.

“We were only able to support this much-needed package by identifying some unanticipated contract savings”, Austin said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement the day before that it is “critically important for us that the Congress soon completes all the necessary procedures and makes a final decision” on aid for Kyiv.

Top US military officer General Charles “CQ” Brown told journalists en route to the Ukraine meeting that Kyiv’s troops are “having to pay attention to their supply rates, and how they execute.”

There is an “incremental kind of back and forth between Ukraine and Russia”, with “incremental gains on both sides”, Brown said.

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Other Topics of Interest

Ukraine ‘Hacktivists’ Fighting Russia on Digital Front

The hacker group was born out of a call 48 hours into Russia’s invasion by Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov for Kyiv to create an “IT army”.

But he noted that “even as the Russians have gained territory, they do it at a pretty big cost in number of casualties, like in personnel, but also in number of pieces of equipment that are being taken out.”

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Austin said in his remarks Tuesday that “at least 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded” since Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a figure that was previously reported at the end of last year.

Moscow has also “squandered up to $211 billion to equip, deploy, maintain, and sustain its imperial aggression against Ukraine,” he said.

Austin and other US officials have spearheaded the push for international support for Ukraine, quickly forging a coalition to back Kyiv after Russia invaded and coordinating aid from dozens of countries.

Washington is by far Kyiv’s biggest donor of security aid, committing tens of billions of dollars to aid Kyiv since February 2022.



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Analysis | Israel’s war on Hamas brings famine to Gaza

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Analysis | Israel’s war on Hamas brings famine to Gaza


You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.

The warnings were being sounded for weeks. The United Nations, international relief organizations and some foreign governments voiced their fears over the ongoing humanitarian calamity in the Gaza Strip, where more than 2 million Palestinians are caught in the crosshairs of Israel’s punishing campaign against militant group Hamas. Food and other critical supplies remain scarce, while aid deliveries have been stymied by Israeli authorities that encircle Gaza’s borders.

Those warnings reached a crescendo Monday with the release of new report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global multi-stakeholder initiative working on food security and nutrition analysis. It found that 1.1 million people in Gaza — roughly half the beleaguered territory’s population — are expected to face catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation between now and July. Many of those at immediate risk live in Gaza’s devastated northern regions, which are cut off from the south by Israeli forces and receive only a paltry trickle of the already-meagre aid that’s entering Gaza.

The fact of a “famine” is tied up in a complicated set of bureaucratic criteria, as my colleague Andrew Jeong outlined. It is usually declared by governments, though some U.N. officials have done so in contexts where no prevailing governing entity was capable of formally assessing the situation. The IPC uses a five-tiered classification system where “famine” is the fifth tier and “emergency” the fourth.

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“Compared to the IPC’s previous analysis in December 2023, acute food insecurity in the Gaza Strip has deepened and widened, with nearly double the number of people projected to experience those conditions by July,” my colleagues reported. “In the IPC’s five-tier classification of food crises, Gaza now has the largest percentage of a population to receive its most severe rating since the body began reporting in 2004, Beth Bechdol, deputy director general at the Food and Agriculture Organization, told The Washington Post.”

What makes this calamity all the more stunning is that it’s entirely the product of human decisions: Gaza’s civilian population is starving because of an Israeli siege, not an earthquake, extended drought or other natural disasters that have blighted parts of the world subject to famine. That reality is agonizing for U.N. officials.

“We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” Catherine Russell, head of the U.N.’s children agency, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” program Sunday. “I’ve been in wards of children who are suffering from severe anemia malnutrition, the whole ward is absolutely quiet. Because the children, the babies … don’t even have the energy to cry.”

“This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system — anywhere, anytime,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a news briefing Monday. “This is an entirely man-made disaster — and the report makes clear that it can be halted.”

Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s top humanitarian official, said more than 1 million people are at risk because they have been cut off from aid, markets have been collapsed and fields destroyed. “The international community should hang its head in shame for failing to stop this.”

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Israeli officials, chiefly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appear unmoved by the state of affairs. They blame Hamas for bringing about this crisis and reject growing calls for a cease-fire, which now include prominent Democratic lawmakers in Washington. “In the international community, there are those who are trying to stop the war now, before all of its goals have been achieved,” Netanyahu said in an interview on CNN over the weekend. “If we stop the war now, before all of its goals are achieved, this means that Israel will have lost the war, and this we will not allow.”

On Monday, international humanitarian organization Oxfam released a report outlining how Israel has stymied or constrained the delivery of aid, including attacks on humanitarian convoys, “unjustifiably inefficient” processes of inspection of the relief supplies, and denial of access to humanitarian officials and aid groups.

Israel has been using “starvation as a weapon of war,” for more than five months, Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa regional director, said in a statement. She said that the humanitarian situation in Gaza has “actually worsened” since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to enable more aid into the enclave. “Israel’s deliberate manufacturing of suffering is systemic and of such scale and intensity that it creates a real risk of a genocide in Gaza,” she said.

That’s rhetoric that mainstream politicians are also echoing. “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine; we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Monday at the start of a conference on humanitarian aid for Gaza in Brussels. “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war.”

But respite is not in sight, with Israel and Hamas still at loggerheads over the possibility of a cease-fire brokered through U.S. and Arab mediators.

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“For nearly a month, the news coverage has been about efforts being made toward a truce,” Atef Abu Saif, a Gaza-born novelist and the Palestinian Authority’s minister of culture, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that detailed his mother’s death in a tent in Gaza. “Just a temporary truce! After so many weeks of such modest hopes, ‘truce’ has become everyone’s favorite word: a cherished, idealistic, holy concept. It’s such a meager thing to hope for — a few days without killing. But even this feels out of reach.”





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Michigan lawyer who claimed election fraud arrested after Dominion hearing

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Michigan lawyer who claimed election fraud arrested after Dominion hearing


An attorney for former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne was detained at the federal courthouse in Washington on Monday after defending her decision to disseminate internal documents from Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to revive long-debunked claims about the 2020 election.

Stefanie Lambert was facing a bench warrant from a state court in Michigan, where she is accused of taking part in a conspiracy to tamper with voting machines in hopes of finding proof of fraud. She is simultaneously representing Byrne, who is being sued for defamation by Dominion over related falsehoods claiming the firm’s machines enabled vote tampering.

The U.S. Marshals office in a statement confirmed Lambert was arrested on Monday afternoon.

In D.C. court Monday, Lambert admitted that she made public emails she obtained as Byrne’s lawyer and shared them with a southwestern Michigan sheriff who was also investigated as part of that alleged plot. Over 2,000 pages of the documents were put on the social media site X this month by an account using the sheriff’s name and photograph.

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Dominion requested Lambert be removed from the case following the release of the documents.

“It has been nearly four years. When does it stop?” Dominion attorney Davida Brook asked in court. She said the company brought suits against Byrne and others “to stop the lies, to end the threats of violence.” Now, she said, Lambert was “using these very lawsuits … to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.” Dominion employees have received a fresh round of violent threats as a result of the disclosures, Brook said.

Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya said she needed more time to decide whether Lambert should be removed from the case. But the judge said that in the meantime, both Lambert and Byrne could not access to discovery materials, and that Lambert must move to seal the Michigan court document containing Dominion’s records.

After the hearing ended, the other attorneys left while Lambert was asked by the judge to stay behind. Several U.S. Marshals then entered the courtroom and locked the door behind them. Lambert never left through the public courtroom entrance; there is another exit through which detained individuals are transported.

Lambert’s Michigan defense attorney, Daniel Hartman, declined to speak on her whereabouts Monday but said that her failure to appear in court in Michigan “was not willful.” Instead he said it was because of “mixed messages” about whether she had to get fingerprinted while challenging the court’s orders. Just before Lambert appeared in court in D.C., Hartman asked the Michigan judge to reconsider the warrant for her arrest. “To compound onto this entire tragedy, you have an arrest warrant that probably shouldn’t be issued,” he said.

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Lambert only recently became Byrne’s lead attorney in Washington, but she said in court that she had been helping with the case since late last year and gained access to the documents sometime “after the holidays.” Given that she had them for weeks, if not months, Upadhyaya asked why Lambert did not file a motion to undo a protective order, which the lawyer signed, barring disclosure of those documents to anyone not involved in the case.

Lambert responded that she was under no obligation to adhere to the protective order because the emails contained “evidence of a crime,” suggesting the situation was analogous to being handed “a dead body” as part of the case discovery. Specifically, she alleged that they were proof that “Dominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia” to undermine the U.S. election system. Dominion’s attorneys responded that this was a “xenophobic conclusion” based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A Dominion spokeswoman added in an email that “any allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.”

Lambert said in court that she gave only Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf access to the Dominion case discovery storage, which Brook said totals over a million pages. But Lambert said Leaf shared the documents with other sheriffs and members of Congress. Leaf, who has not been charged in the Michigan case, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Lambert said Byrne shared the documents with “the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” She said she did not know which one; there are nearly 100 U.S. attorneys running federal prosecutors’ offices across the country. Lambert argued that Byrne is “a national intelligence asset” who was entitled to “national security information” with law enforcement. Byrne has claimed he was instructed by the FBI to pursue a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a Russian national who was convicted of being an unregistered foreign agent in 2019. (Former FBI officials have called Byrne’s claims “ridiculous.”) He did not appear in court Monday; asked about the documents he said by text message, “I’m just a humble concerned citizen.” Upadhyaya said he must be in court for the next hearing on whether his lawyer should face penalties.

Right now, Upadhyaya said, her goal was “to prevent further bleeding” of protected information into the public sphere. “I will deal with the ‘why’ later,” she said. But, she told Lambert, “the analogy of the dead body rings hollow to me.”

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Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne’s previous attorney, Robert Driscoll, who told them that he had “asked Ms. Lambert to take immediate steps and reasonable efforts to prevent further disclosure of Confidential Discovery Material.” He added that he “had no advance knowledge” of the disclosure, only learning about it when the documents appeared on social media. One such post had already been viewed over 150,000 times by Monday afternoon, Brook said: “The cat is out of the bag.”

Lambert’s criminal trial is set to begin next month. A trial date has not been set in the Dominion case. The company last year settled a similar suit with Fox News for $787 million dollars, and is also suing former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell along with the right-wing television station OAN and the pillow businessman Mike Lindell.



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