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Oakland Sports Teams Are Raising Money For Warehouse Fire Victims
In the wake of Friday’s deadly Oakland warehouse party fire that killed at least 36 people, the city’s professional sports teams are raising funds for victims and their families. MLB’s Oakland Athletics set up a YouCaring page this weekend to solicit donations for fire assistance and relief, promising to match up to $30,000. The NFL’s Oakland Raiders joined the campaign and made the same pledge. On Monday the two teams announced they would each match up to $50,000. Sunday night, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors also announced a $50,000 donation to help families affected by the fire, which is believed to be one of the worst in the city’s history. “We’re all with you out here,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said…
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Ayotzinapa: the events that shook the Mexican youth
The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles. Posters with the faces of the 43 students disappeared in Ayotzinapa. Demotix/Alberto-Sibaja Ramirez. All rights reserved. Eight months ago, on September 26, 2014, six young peoples were assassinated and 43 disappeared after having being arrested by the police of the Mexican City Iguala and given over to drug cartels. Eight months later, the 43 students of the Escuela Normal Rural of Ayotzinapa are still missing. Their story has shown the extension of violence and collusion between the drug cartels and politics in Mexico. On the eve of September 24, 2014, Mexico, a…
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How many people have to die before we start talking responsibly about immigration?
Wrecked boats in Lampedusa. Image: Marco Molino It’s easy to forget, when a dehumanised mass of “immigrants” is invoked in political debate, that these are people no different from you and me, our families and our friends. The Guardian cites “one survivor of a [migrant boat] sinking off Malta [who] recounted spending several days clinging to a buoyancy aid along with a teenage Egyptian whose hope was to pay for heart medicine for his father. The youth drowned before they could be saved”. In the space of last week alone, an estimated 1,200 such people died in two separate disasters in the Mediterranean. And we need to be crystal clear…
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7 Promises Trump Is Set To Break In 2017
Trump made a lot of promises for both his first 100 days and his presidency in general. It has become normal for candidates to make wild promises with no hope of fulfilling them, but Trump’s campaign was (at least some would hope) chock-full of totally unworkable pledges and empty promises, starting with his vague slogan to “Make America Great Again.” The most obviously absurd proposition is that of building a wall between the United States and Mexico, which Trump claims is not a flamboyant rhetorical device to bring attention to undocumented migration, but will be an actual big, great, shiny wall—with a door, no less. Mexico, he said, would pay for it. (Mexico has,…
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A day of reckoning, 39 years later…
If you are like me, I am sure you are tired of reading about the results of the last Israeli election. Or on Benjamin Netanyahu's Hebrew pledge running up to the election and his flip-flopped English version after winning the election. I want instead to highlight the native Palestinian Israeli citizens who ran on a united list for the first time since they started to participate in the election. These Palestinians were the sons and daughters of approximately 150,000 who remained in their original homes, or became internal refugees when their villages were among the 500 that were destroyed by Israel in 1948. Tomorrow, these Palestinians will mark the 39th…
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After Ghost Ship, Cities And Artists Clash Over DIY Venues
It’s been a surreal week for Bay Area musician Mykee Ramen, who lost a friend in the fire that killed 36 during an electronic music show at Ghost Ship—an Oakland warehouse that had been converted into an underground artist collective/living space/concert venue. Ramen’s former housemate Sam “Peaches” was also in attendance and has been placed in a medically induced coma with severe lung burns. Then, a few days ago, Ramen watched in horror as Tom Butt, mayor of Richmond, California, where Ramen owns the all-ages DIY venue and living space Burnt Ramen, said on national television that Ramen’s venue would be “the next Ghost Ship.” “The mayor called us out by our…
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The utter failure of the international community to protect civilians in Syria
A water collection point in Atmeh refugee camp, Syria. Image: J.I.Wessels. All rights reserved. On 14 June, thousands of panicking Syrian civilians pushed themselves through a narrow fence opening at the northern Syrian border crossing of Tel Abyad-Akcakale, fleeing the heavy fighting between the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish YPG on one side and the Islamic State (IS or Da’esh) on the other. The town of Tel Abyad is strategically located; it is the closest border crossing to Raqqa, a rural city that is an IS/Da’esh stronghold and self-appointed central city of the so-called Islamic State. These Syrian civilians were wedged between this and the Turkish border, which was initially…
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Go To AlternativeFacts.Com Right Now—You'll Thank Us Later
Click:chinese novel Ever since Kellyanne Conway went on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday and claimed the White House wasn’t lying about inauguration crowd numbers, but simply providing “alternative facts,” social media has had a field day calling her out. This, combined with the fact that White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s has made several false claims throughout Trump’s campaign and during the first few days of his presidency, should set off alarm bells for all of us. Their denial to acknowledge indisputable, factual information revealed how far the Trump administration is willing to go to gaslight and confuse its citizens while ushering in a new era of extreme censorship.…
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Has Sisi lost control over state repression?
Hussein Tallal/Demotix. All rights reserved. Egypt is currently undergoing one of the worst periods of repression in its modern history. Thousands languish in overcrowded prisons, hundreds have been sentenced to death, and the use of sexual violence is unprecedented. There has been a qualitative change in the nature of state violence in Egypt. During the years of the Mubarak regime, the state used violence and torture, as it does now, but its use was kept at a level that was socially acceptable to the urban middle class. A class that was largely immune to such violence. Although the judiciary played its role in state repression, there was the appearance of…
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The uses and abuses of history
Christopher Clark, the distinguished author of a bestselling account of the outbreak of the First World War, has come up with an ingenious explanation of why the Russians are currently behaving so badly: they are suffering from ‘false memory syndrome.’ In a piece which Mr Clark wrote with Kristina Spohr in the Guardian on 25 May, he picks on the way Mr Putin has justified his annexation of Crimea when the Russian President claims that the West ‘has lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs… This has happened with NATO’s expansion to the east.’ But, says Mr Clark, the Russians never asked for any guarantees that NATO…