Quadrantid meteor shower: 1st meteor shower of 2021 set to peak this weekend
NASA calls the Quadrantids "one of the best annual meteor showers."
The Quadrantid meteor shower in the skies over China in 2019.Qu xianlei / Imaginechina
/ Source: TODAY
By Alyssa Newcomb
The Quadrantid meteor shower, which is one of the strongest spectacles in the sky but can be difficult to see at times, is set to peak Saturday night, marking the first meteor shower of 2021.
The annual meteor shower is known for its "bright fireball meteors" and is "considered to be one of the best annual meteor showers," according to NASA.
This year, a bright waning gibbous moon may make it harder to spot the meteors, which usually illuminate a dark night sky, according to EarthSky. However, it's still worth gazing to the heavens for a glimpse of the annual light show.
Here's what to know about the 2021 Quadrantid meteor shower:
The Quadrantids aren't an ordinary meteor shower. While most meteor showers are caused by when tiny bits of debris from a comet burn up upon entering Earth's atmosphere, the Quadrantids are believed to be caused by debris from an asteroid or possible "rock comet," according to NASA.
Every year, those debris trails come into contact with Earth's atmosphere, where they burn up and create colorful spectacles in the night sky.
The International Meteor Organization forecasts the peak will be on January 3 at 14:30 pm UTC, which means people in North America have their best chance of seeing the shower during the predawn hours of January 3rd.
While some meteor showers peak for days, the Quadrantids have a window of just a few hours and have been known to not always show up right on schedule.
The Quadrantids favor those in the Northern Hemisphere. The American Meteor Society recommends people "face the northeast quadrant of the sky and center your view about half-way up in the sky."
"By facing this direction you be able to see meteors shoot out of the radiant in all directions. This will make it easy to differentiate between the Quadrantids and random meteors from other sources," the group explained in a blog post.
This year's show might not be as flashy as past years due to the moonlight, however there could be as many as 100 meteors whizzing through the sky every hour during its peak, according to AccuWeather. However, the outlet reported it's more likely people will see just a quarter of the action.
Next year's shower is expected to be even better. The American Meteor Society said the 2022 Quadrandtids are forecasted to peak on January 3rd at 21:00 UT with no moon present. That timing will favor an audience of sky gazers in Asia.
The Trump Death Clock is a billboard in Times Square located on Broadway and West 43rd Street. displaying the "theoretically claimed" number of deaths attributable to President Donald Trump's alleged inaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The clock was created by Eugene Jarecki.
LYRICS for THE TRUMP DEATH CLOCK
There is a billboard in Times Square.
It’s called the Trump Death Clock.
And whether or not you think that’s fair,
the clock just goes tick-tock.
The clock just goes tick-tock.
It lists the people who have died,
but only certain ones;
from slow response that was applied,
sounding the death drums,
sounding the death drums.
The White House claims Obama failed
to leave a pandemic plan.
The plan was there just not unveiled.
It was in the garbage can.
It was in the garbage can.
Obama’s work routinely scorned,
McConnell’s way to attack.
Of virus danger they were forewarned
but there was no going back.
No, there was no going back.
At first, he said “It’s just fifteen.
Next week it will be none."
Then with his miracle machine
"It will just disappear in the sun.”
It will just disappear in the sun.
He claims he acted quick and great
with China checks in place,
which happened 40 days too late.
New York had its two hundredth case.
When he finally chose to act
it was several months too late,
so he played doctor to distract
from the unprecedented death rate.
From the unprecedented death rate.
Suggesting that ultra-violet light
could work intra corpus,
while bleach and cleaning fluids could smite
the virus through the caboose,
the virus through the caboose.
Then there's hydroxychloroquine.
he says he takes it now.
An obese man with a heart problem,
gotta question his know-how.
He tried to design a quick fix
while silencing the scientists.
No logic and no intellect
yet revered by his tribalists.
He's revered by his tribalists.
There is a clock placed in Times Square
that’s called the Trump Death Clock.
Incompetence paid for with lives
Will you be next? Tick-tock.
Will you be next? Tick-tock.
SOURCE MUSIC
"The House of the Rising Sun" is a traditional folk song, sometimes called "Rising Sun Blues". It tells of a life gone wrong in New Orleans; many versions also urge a sibling or parents and children to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by British rock group The Animals, was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and also in the United States and France. As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the "first folk rock hit".
Like many classic folk ballads, "The House of the Rising Sun" is of uncertain authorship. According to Alan Lomax, "Rising Sun" was used as the name of a bawdy house in two traditional English songs, and it was also a name for English pubs. Lomax proposed that the location of the house was then relocated from England to New Orleans by white Southern performers. However, folklorist Vance Randolph proposed an alternative French origin, the "rising sun" referring to the decorative use of the sunburst insignia dating to the time of Louis XIV, which was brought to North America by French immigrants.
"House of Rising Sun" was said to have been sung by miners in 1905. The oldest published version of the lyrics is that printed by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925, in a column "Old Songs That Men Have Sung" in Adventure magazine. The lyrics of that version begin:
There is a house in New Orleans, it's called the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin of many poor girl
Great God, and I for one.
There is a common perception that prior to The Animals the song was about and from the perspective of a woman. This is incorrect, as the narrative of the lyrics has been continually whipped back and forth from a female to a male cautionary tale. The earliest known printed version from Gordon's column is about a woman's warning. The earliest known recording of the song by Ashley is about a rounder, a male character. The lyrics of that version begin:
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
Where many poor boys to destruction has gone
And me, oh God, are one.
FOCUS: Charles Bethea | Can Democrats Win Georgia - and the Senate? Charles Bethea, The New Yorker Bethea writes: "When news networks called Georgia for Joe Biden, on November 13th, Nsé Ufot, the C.E.O. of the New Georgia Project, was atop Stone Mountain, a hunk of granite east of Atlanta that is home to the largest Confederate monument on earth."
In order to do so, the candidates will need high voter turnout in a state where it tends to drop during runoffs, especially among the Party’s own supporters.
She was with colleagues, taking a staff photo and celebrating the work they’d done to turn out voters in record numbers. As word of Biden’s victory spread, some people teared up, Ufot said, but not her. Her organization, which was founded, in 2014, by Stacey Abrams, had made three million phone calls, sent two million text messages, and carefully knocked on half a million doors. Biden won the state by around twelve thousand votes. The New Georgia Project’s efforts, and those of a handful of similar groups, put him over the top. They also insured that Georgia would have not one but two runoff elections for the U.S. Senate, on January 5th, pitting a pair of Republican incumbents against Democratic challengers. I asked Ufot whether Georgia had “turned blue,” as headlines proclaimed. “I get the desire to, like, make scorching takes,” she said. “But can we just enjoy this before we get back to work?”
The deadline to register new voters for the runoffs was a few weeks away. Early voting would begin on December 14th and end December 31st. The New Georgia Project planned to knock on roughly a million doors in metro Atlanta and another million in the state’s rural areas. The incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, “do not give a damn about the fact that Black folks are dying at an alarming clip in our state,” Ufot said. (Neither senator responded to multiple interview requests.) Health disparities are particularly stark in Georgia’s rural Black Belt, she noted, where the pandemic has taken a heavy toll. “What an incredible holiday gift it would be to send Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the United States Senate so they can go there to do the people’s work,” she added.
Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church—a position once held by Martin Luther King, Jr.—has not run for office before. Ossoff, the C.E.O. of a company that produces investigative documentaries, ran for the U.S. House of Representatives three years ago, losing but raising a lot of money and getting a lot of press in the process. “Their audiences will bleed over to one another,” Ufot said. “White suburban moms of Atlanta, who ride for Jon Ossoff, will get introduced to Warnock, this Black pastor from the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. And Warnock lends credibility to Ossoff in the Black pockets around the state that he couldn’t buy.” Ufot believes that progressive politics can win in the South. “But it all depends on getting out the vote and making sure the votes are counted,” she said.
Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory and the author of “The Turnout Gap,” told me that turnout tends to drop by forty per cent or more for runoff elections. In Georgia, he explained, the drop-off is typically more severe among Democrats. But he didn’t expect this runoff to be typical. We might see a drop-off as small as fifteen per cent, he suggested. “But will that historically low drop-off be disproportionately Republican or Democratic?” he asked. “That’s what these groups on the ground are trying to decide.”
“Most folks have taken their foot off the gas and turned their eyes towards the holidays,” Ufot told me. But she was counting on early and mail-in voting to help close the usual gap between young and old voters and white voters and voters of color. “I’ve got to figure out how to make the ‘Twelve Days of Voting-mas’ not sound corny,” she said.
On the first day of December, I opened my laptop to watch Ossoff and Warnock speak to metro Atlanta chapters of Alpha Phi Alpha and Alpha Kappa Alpha, two venerable Greek organizations for Black students. It seemed like a chance for Ossoff to ride Warnock’s coattails a bit; among the illustrious past members of A.P.A. is Warnock’s legendary predecessor at Ebenezer. Ossoff, who’s thirty-three, grew up in the suburbs northeast of Atlanta and attended a local private school before going to Georgetown and the London School of Economics. He sat, a tad rigidly, in his home office, and spoke, as he tends to do, somewhat grandly—about joining “the political arena at this moment in history” and about the mentorship of the late congressman John Lewis, whom he first met in his teens. He described his investigative film work at a “twenty-eight-year-old company.” He also talked about housing and health care, student debt and equal justice under the law.
Warnock speaks with a rousing fluency that befits his day job. Earlier, I had asked him whether he saw Biblical precedent for the country’s predicament, and he’d told me about sermons he preached after the pandemic began, paraphrasing a passage from the Book of Joel—“Even upon the slaves, the most marginalized members of the human family, I will pour out my spirit,” the verse reads, more or less—and offering a gloss: “There is a word of hope even in the midst of this sick darkness.” He spoke to A.P.A. and A.K.A. about growing up as the eleventh of twelve children in a Savannah housing project and getting a Pell Grant, calling himself “the embodiment of what happens when personal responsibility meets good public policy.” He talked about COVID-19 and “COVID-1619,” by which he meant “the ongoing struggle with race and justice in our country.”
Warnock and Ossoff have raised more than two hundred million dollars since late October. You cannot turn on a television or radio without hearing their ads, many of which emphasize Loeffler and Perdue’s twin stock-trading scandals and the failure of the Senate, until recently, to secure additional pandemic relief. Volunteers outside the state are calling, texting, and sending postcards to Georgia residents. (I have received more handwritten postcards asking me to vote than holiday cards from friends and family.) Various show-business people—Pearl Jam, Eva Longoria, the cast of “Elf”—are touting Warnock and Ossoff on social media and hosting virtual get-out-the-vote events.
I’ve heard the occasional grumble from fellow-Georgians about the deluge, and there are those who believe that the waves of out-of-state cash in other Senate races made it easier for Republicans to portray Democratic challengers as beholden to their party’s leadership or to its left wing. Andrew Yang, who announced in November that he was temporarily moving to Georgia, told me that “some very well-known folks” had said they wanted to join him. But then, he said, there were “crosscurrents” from “various folks in the Democratic party, about not wanting to nationalize the race,” and “people who were on the fence about it just stood down.” Some Democrats feared energizing the other side, he said. “So you’re resisting trying to maximize our vote because you’re afraid it’s going to maximize their vote?” he asked.
We spoke in early December, as Yang knocked on doors in southwest Atlanta with Martin Luther King III. The pair, in suits and masks—Yang’s said MATH—passed an elderly man bathing in his yard with a bucket. They waved and continued on. Yang said that he’d sold knives door-to-door as a teen in Westchester. “I don’t know how we’d do it without you here, Martin, though,” he added, chuckling—and feeling, perhaps, like a bit of an outsider. At two of the first five homes they visited, people told King that they had been his childhood playmates. (He wasn’t sure that all of them recalled correctly.) Few recognized Yang, who participated in seven Presidential primary debates.
In between stops, Yang pulled up a CNN op-ed on his phone, which argued that Democrats should treat the races as national campaigns. “ ‘Move the Biden transition headquarters to Atlanta,’ ” he read aloud. He and King said, in near unison, “Yes!”
Yang went on, “ ‘Send in the ex-presidents.’ ”
“Yes!”
Fraga told me that nationalizing the races had been a boon for Democrats in the fall, that it spurred interest and brought in money that helped drive turnout. Ufot said that things like the postcard barrage simply work. “It’s part of our ‘ten touches,’ ” she said, explaining that receiving ten reminders about an election increases the likelihood that a registered voter will actually show up.
Yang stepped up to another porch and was soon talking with an elderly man in a mask. He introduced King—which triggered a story. “You know,” the man said, “I got registered April 4, 1969.”
“Wow,” King said, with real surprise. His father was assassinated exactly one year earlier.
“God is good,” Yang said. “Well, fantastic. Let’s win this one.”
“We gonna win it,” the man said. “This a good thing y’all doing. Hit the streets. Let the people see faces.” The man mentioned that he had a picture of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first Black mayor, knocking on doors to get out the vote fifty years ago.
After they left the porch, King explained to Yang who Jackson was.
Twelve days later, Biden came to Georgia. Early voting had just begun. Around a hundred sixty eight thousand Georgians voted in person on the first day, a thirty per cent increase from the first day of the general election. I spoke to the former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed, who lives in southwest Atlanta. “We lost fourteen out of the last fifteen runoffs,” he said, of his fellow-Democrats. “But I think that there is something in the air that’s going on.” He added, “I got up and drove my area today, and the lines for early voting are just substantial.” Warnock, in particular, he told me, had excited Black voters he’d talked to. “I spend a lot of my time in local stores, barber shops, beauty salons,” he said. “I think that Warnock is catching on at a good time. I think that his performance will impact Jon Ossoff’s performance in a positive way.”
Biden’s event, a drive-in rally, was at a former train yard in a gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood. Jeffrey Brower, the owner of a construction company, waited for the President-elect in a leather jacket and vintage Nikes, holding a plastic cup of whiskey and another of beer. “God gave me two hands for a reason,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t get an invite inside,” he half-joked, explaining that he’d given Warnock and Ossoff a few thousand dollars. “I’d rather make donations to cancer charities, the homeless,” he said. “But times aren’t normal.”
A retiree named Linda sat nearby on a chair and smoked. She said that she’d voted for Mitt Romney but had no trouble choosing the Democrats this time. “We need to bring back some normalcy to this country,” she said. “And health insurance, too.” As Stacey Abrams took the stage, I spoke with a man in his fifties named Darrell White, who’d grown up across the street and happened upon the event as he went for a walk. “We used to play football and fly kites right here,” he said. Warnock “has been through some of the stuff I been through,” he added. “So I know exactly what he’s talking about.”
A few protesters stood outside the event, holding signs that read “Wearing The Mask To Stop The Virus Is Like Wearing A Diaper To Stop A Fart! #science” and “Just Say No To Communism.” They chanted “China owns Joe” and “stop the steal.” One, a man named Caesar Gonzales, had a brief exchange with a Biden supporter—which ended with Gonzalez saying, “I’ll break your motherfucking nose.” Gonzalez told me that he was going to run for Congress in 2022.
A volunteer from Los Angeles named Michael watched all this unfold. “I’m trying to ignore them and not catch COVID,” he said of the protesters. He’d been in Atlanta for two weeks. “I’m mostly doing get-out-the-vote rallies and registration for the Asian community,” he explained, noting that “the A.A.P.I. community made a difference in November.” Fraga had made the same point to me. “I don’t think anyone was anticipating this level of engagement of Asian-American” turnout, he said. Michael told me, “It’s probably going to drop off, but we’re doing everything we can.”
Biden thanked Georgians for his win in the state, adding, “Guess what? Now you’re going to have to do it again.” He called Abrams a “hero” and mocked an attempt by the Texas attorney general to overturn election results in four states, including Georgia, an effort that Loeffler and Perdue supported. “Maybe your senators were just confused,” he said. “Maybe they think they represent Texas.” But Biden mostly focussed on what lay ahead, mentioning voting rights and health care in particular. “We need senators who are willing to do it, for God’s sake,” he said.
A week later, I called Ufot. “I feel really good,” she told me. She had just left an early-voting location, where she’d been giving out water and “delicious pudding.” She was headed to a suburban Atlanta county that went for Biden. “People are definitely voting,” she said, despite “how hard the G.O.P. is going after voting rights and voting locations.” She said that there were eighty counties where Republicans were challenging the voter rolls, mostly unsuccessfully. Of these efforts, she said, “We feel like they’re designed to put up hurdles that make it difficult for people to vote.” But she sounded optimistic. By the end of early voting, more than three million Georgians had cast their ballots, and the early data appeared to favor the Democrats: there were thousands of new voters, a high percentage of Black voters, and somewhat lower turnout—so far; Election Day voting may rebalance things—in conservative parts of the state. The county that had come closest to matching its November total was Randolph, a poor county in the Black Belt, which has been ravaged by the pandemic. Ufot’s hopeful tone reminded me of the biggest applause line at the Biden rally, which was delivered, not surprisingly, by Warnock. “It’s dark,” he’d said. “But morning is on the way. Hold on.”
Leaked Terrorism Guide Shows FBI Still Classifying Black 'Extremists' as Domestic Terrorism Threat Jana Winter, Marquise Francis and Sean D. Naylor, Yahoo News Excerpt: "More than three years after the FBI came under fire for claiming 'Black identity extremists' were a domestic terrorism threat, the bureau has issued a new terrorism guide that employs almost identical terminology, according to a copy of the document obtained by Yahoo News."
ore than three years after the FBI came under fire for claiming “Black identity extremists” were a domestic terrorism threat, the bureau has issued a new terrorism guide that employs almost identical terminology, according to a copy of the document obtained by Yahoo News.
The FBI’s 2020 domestic terrorism reference guide on “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism” identifies two distinct sets of groups: those motivated by white supremacy and those who use “political reasons — including racism or injustice in American society” to justify violence. The examples the FBI gives for the latter group are all Black individuals or groups.
The FBI document claims that “many” of those Black racially motivated extremists “have targeted law enforcement and the US Government,” while a “small number” of them “incorporate sovereign citizen Moorish beliefs into their ideology, which involves a rejection of their US citizenship based on a combination of sovereign citizen ideology, religious beliefs, and black separatist rhetoric.”
In 2017, a leaked copy of an FBI report on “Black identity extremists” sparked an outcry from activists, civil rights groups and Congress, who criticized the bureau for portraying disparate groups and individuals as a single movement, even though the only common factor was that those associated with the term were Black Americans. Those critics also faulted the FBI for equating isolated attacks against law enforcement with those perpetrated by white supremacists, which even the FBI said represent the majority of domestic terror attacks in recent years.The American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the government as part of a Freedom of Information Act request for records on the FBI’s use of the term “Black identity extremist” and its targeting of Black activists, said the new report continues to show underlying problems with the bureau’s approach to domestic terrorism.
“As evidenced by this reference guide, white supremacists are the ones actually carrying out violent attacks, yet the FBI continues to equate them with Black activists and Black-led organizations who exercise their First Amendment-protected right to speak out against racism and racial violence committed by police,” Mark Carter, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, told Yahoo News. “Putting Black activists in the same category as violent racists is absurd and illogical.”
In 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that the bureau had abandoned the term “Black identity extremist” and had instead moved toward the term “racially motivated violent extremist.” Yet the new terrorism reference guide outlines two types of such racially motivated extremists: those who are motivated by the belief in the superiority of the white race, and those who are Black and motivated by political causes, including racial injustice.
The current language used in the guide appears to be identical to how the FBI previously identified “Black identity extremists.”
Mike German, a former FBI agent and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, says the latest guide shows the FBI has altered the language but is still mischaracterizing the issue. The guide “reprises the faulty analysis the FBI used to manufacture what it previously called the Black identity movement to describe this new subcategory of Black ‘racially motivated violent extremists,’” he told Yahoo News.
“Just as with the [‘Black identity extremist’] report, it cobbles together several disparate and even conflicting motivations and ideologies into this new subcategory where the sole distinctive feature is being Black,” German said. “Then it uses dubious language to suggest that Black people angry over ‘alleged’ police brutality and ‘perceived’ racial injustice in the legal system are part of this ‘violent extremist’ category, clearly painting Black Lives Matter activists and supporters as potential threats to law enforcement.”
The debate over the FBI’s designation of “racially motivated extremists” comes amid a larger shift in the debate about domestic terrorism, as violent acts committed by domestic extremists with no known foreign affiliation have far outstripped those carried out by individuals affiliated with groups like al-Qaida or the Islamic State. And those tracking domestic extremists say the data shows that white supremacists commit the vast majority of such attacks.
Russ Travers, who previously headed the federal government’s National Counterterrorism Center, said attacks committed by Black nationalist groups weren’t a focus when he was there. “There certainly have been instances over the past few years — Jersey City being the most recent I recall,” he said, referring to the attack last year targeting a police officer and a kosher deli.
One of the two assailants, who both died in the subsequent shootout with police, was reportedly tied to the Black Hebrew Israelites, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a hate group.
But the number of such attacks is simply “not in the same league” as those committed by white supremacists, according to Travers. “I certainly haven’t seen any spate of black nationalist violence since I left,” he added.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, recently conducted its own study of attacks and found that, as of October, white supremacists and “like-minded extremists” were responsible for two-thirds of domestic attacks.
Seth Jones, director of the center’s Transnational Threats Project, told Yahoo News that while Black nationalist groups might have presented a threat in the 1960s or 1970s, he didn’t recall seeing any examples in the recent data. “It’s a threat, but how big of one, especially now?” he said. “I’d be skeptical.”
Even with white supremacists conducting the majority of recent attacks, the FBI terrorism guide lists six “notable” incidents from the past several years evenly split between those linked to white supremacists and those connected to Black individuals who law enforcement believed may have had political motivations for their attacks. Omitted from the list is the attack carried out by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine Black people in a 2015 shooting in a Charleston, S.C., church.
German, the former FBI agent, said that “by equally dividing the six incidents it describes, the report appears to equate white supremacist violence with violence by Black ‘racially motivated violent extremists,’ which mischaracterizes the data.”
Malkia Devich-Cyril, the founding director and a senior fellow at MediaJustice in Oakland, Calif., also took issue with the FBI’s classification of Black separatists as racial extremists alongside white supremacists. “The fact is, Black radicalism, including Black separatism, has long been about winning equity, peace and justice for Black people, not about denying it to anyone else — while white supremacist violence has been responsible for the vast majority of domestic terror attacks in 2020 and throughout the last several decades,” she said.
Another concern for Black activists has been the FBI’s seeming conflation of Black Lives Matter with extremism. The FBI reference guide asserts, for example, that “retaliation and retribution for alleged or actual police brutality and the perception of unjust legal proceedings surrounding the officers involved are organizing drivers” for racially motivated violent extremists.
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., told Yahoo News in an interview that comparing people fighting for social justice to white supremacists is “not only disrespectful, it’s not true.”
Henderson, who has been active in the Black Lives Matter movement, said there is “a level of intentionality behind labeling ‘Black identity extremist’ movements and [law enforcement’s] targeting of the Black liberation movement.”
In a statement to Yahoo News, the FBI defended its classification of racially motivated extremists.
“While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, the FBI routinely shares information with our law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve,” it said. “The FBI is focused on individuals who commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
In its statement to Yahoo News, the FBI said attacks by those classified as racially motivated extremists “were the primary source of ideologically motivated lethal incidents and violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001.”
It added, however, that its data, which is based on fiscal years, shows that in “2020 the three lethal domestic violent extremism attacks were perpetrated by anti-government violent extremists.”
Over the past four years, critics have taken aim at President Trump for failing to condemn white supremacist attacks, particularly after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in which a counterprotester was killed in a vehicle attack. Under pressure, Trump condemned the violence but also said there were “very fine people, on both sides.”
Since then, the president’s critics have pointed to repeated cases where he immediately condemned as terrorism attacks involving Muslims, yet has often remained silent in cases where the perpetrator was white. Most recently, he has remained silent on the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville; the man named as responsible for the attack, Anthony Warner, who was white, died in the explosion.
Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, which had previously called out the FBI for its use of the term “Black identity extremist,” said the new terrorism guide appears to perpetuate the same flawed approach and shows that the FBI continues to be “tone deaf.”
Johnson criticized the new guide for “shifting the focus to a community that has not demonstrated any act of violence or domestic terrorism this entire year.”
“We’ll be calling on Congress to hold hearings,” he said.
23-year-old Dolal Idd was killed in a shootout with police.
"We are angry right now, we are frustrated right now, because we said 'No' after George Floyd was killed, but it didn't take long until another body fell," protester Jaylani Hussein told Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP Thursday night.
Idd's death is the first at the hands of Minneapolis police since Floyd died on May 25, igniting protests across the country for police reform and racial equality.
Idd was killed Wednesday evening in a shootout with Minneapolis Police Department officers during a traffic stop. Police say Idd was a suspect in a felony.
Body camera video released to the public within 24 hours showed police repeatedly ordering Idd to "stop your car." Police squad cars boxed in Idd's white car before the driver's window shattered and police fired into the car, the video shows.
"When I viewed the video that everyone else is viewing … it appears that the individual inside the vehicle fired his weapon at the vehicle first," MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo said Thursday. He also said witnesses confirmed that the suspect fired first.
Arradondo said the MPD officers had been conducting a "probable cause" weapons investigation, which resulted in the traffic stop at a gas station. Arradondo said he didn't know whether there was a warrant for Idd's arrest.
Idd was pronounced dead at the scene. The woman he was with in the car and the officers at the scene were uninjured.
A weapon was recovered at the scene, officials said.
Protesters are demanding more details and more video beyond the 28 seconds of footage that was released. Others are questioning if police could have done more to de-escalate the situation.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is leading the investigation into the incident. Arradondo said he expects more video from the shooting to be released during the course of the probe.
Arradondo said he met with Idd's family members and allowed them to view the body camera footage before it was made public.
The names of the officers involved in the incident have not yet been released.
When asked whether the officers were justified in firing into the vehicle, Arradondo said his officers are "trained to respond" when they are "experiencing gunfire."
Arradondo also said he wants to protect everyone's right to demonstrate peacefully, but says the city "cannot allow for destructive criminal behavior."
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Thursday acknowledged the "raw emotion" Minneapolis is experiencing and said that "the details of what transpired last night does not negate the tragedy of yesterday's death."
A mother from Honduras holds her child as they surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents. (photo: David J. Phillip/AP)
Citing the Pandemic, CBP Has Expelled Newborn US Citizens With Their Migrant Mothers Felipe De La Hoz, The Intercept De La Hoz writes: "US Customs AND Border Protection has used a controversial Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order authorizing the expulsion of asylum-seekers on supposed public health grounds to send multiple U.S.-born infants - who are by law U.S. citizens - and their migrant families across the southern border to Mexico."
EXCERPT:
In interviews with The Intercept, three asylum-seeking mothers who crossed the border while pregnant described giving birth in U.S. hospitals, only to be swiftly sent back under false pretenses and without an evaluation of their particular humanitarian circumstances or claims of danger. The Intercept has reviewed medical and immunization records for the women and their infants, which prove U.S. hospital births, and is referring to the mothers by pseudonyms due to their precarious status as asylum-seekers and the danger they believe they still face in Mexico, where all three remain. None immediately received citizenship paperwork for their infants, and they are unsure if and when they’ll be allowed to tender an asylum claim.
“The law does not allow for the rapid expulsion of U.S. citizens,” said Nicole Ramos, director of the Border Rights Project at Al Otro Lado, a legal and social services organization that is investigating the expulsions. Al Otro Lado, which has a presence in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Tijuana, Mexico, said it is aware of a total of eight mothers in this situation, two of whom it’s lost contact with and the rest of whom remain in Mexico.
One such mother, Lupe, was the subject of a complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security this summer. At the time, CBP claimed that she had departed voluntarily with her toddler and chalked the situation up to a fluke. In an interview with The Intercept, Lupe said that not only had she not been asked about the expulsion or given affirmative consent for her citizen child to be expelled alongside her, but also she wasn’t even aware that she was being turned back to Mexico until she saw the Mexican border agents waiting for her.
Juana, an asylum-seeker fleeing gang threats in Honduras, said she arrived at the border nine months pregnant and with her 8-year-old son in July. She was already experiencing labor pains and decided to cross the border and seek help. Border Patrol officers called an ambulance and took her son to the processing center known as La Perrera, or the kennel. She was moved to Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista in Chula Vista, California, and gave birth to an infant son the next morning. According to Juana, CBP personnel assured both her and a social worker who had been assigned to her case that she and her sons would be able to stay in the United States to await an immigration proceeding. Instead, they were loaded into a vehicle and only realized that they were being taken to Mexico as they were brought to the port of entry. (The hospital declined to make the social worker available for comment and said it does not track how many new mothers in immigration custody it treats.)
Per an agreement with Mexico, the CDC order is meant to apply only to citizens of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Yet The Intercept spoke with a mother from Haiti who was sent back to Tijuana two days after delivering a baby daughter under CBP custody after attempting to petition for asylum at a port of entry in mid-July. “When I crossed the border, that’s when I realized I was being taken to Mexico,” Angeline told The Intercept. “I started screaming, ‘What am I going to do with a baby, I don’t have any place to stay, anywhere to sleep.’”
The expulsion policy was first issued in March, ostensibly as a countermeasure to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s based on a statute that deals with public health, not immigration, and gives the CDC director “the power to prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate” in order to prevent the introduction of such a disease. The Wall Street Journal reported in October that senior officials at the CDC thought the measure was unnecessary, but implemented it under political pressure from White House Adviser Stephen Miller. Its legal premise was questioned in a recent federal court decision that prevented the administration from continuing to expel unaccompanied minors.
Nonetheless, the order was reissued in mid-October for an indefinite period of time, at the CDC director’s discretion, and remains active. It generally calls for people who are not U.S. citizens or residents and do not otherwise have entry paperwork to be expelled from the country as quickly as possible, without even the opportunity to file a case for humanitarian protections. Between mid-March and mid-October, over 204,000 expulsions took place, with only a tiny fraction of people exempted under humanitarian categories. Migrants are either sent across the border to Mexico or on flights to their countries of origin, including minors with their families and unaccompanied minors, prior to the federal injunction.
The CDC order specifically exempts U.S. citizens, and no part of U.S. immigration law appears to authorize the expulsion of people who were born in the United States. CBP spokesperson Matthew Dyman declined to discuss particular cases and said the agency does not keep data on the total number of mothers and newborn U.S. citizen infants expelled under the order. He echoed a previous claim by immigration authorities that migrant mothers who are expelled from the U.S. voluntarily choose to take their children along rather than leave them behind — a choice that CBP has been known to pose to parents who are being removed. The U.S. government “does not expel (under title 42) nor deport American citizens,” Dyman wrote. “A U.S. citizen departing the country with an alien who has no legal presence and is being expelled or deported would be accompanying that expelled/deported individual.”
A protest for Mapuche rights in Chile. (photo: IMPAKTER)
Chile: Mapuche Political Prisoners Continue Struggle for Land and Freedom Edgars Martínez Navarrete, NACLA Martínez Navarrete writes: "On May 4, Mapuche spiritual leader Machi Celestino Córdova, imprisoned in Chile's Temuco prison, launched a hunger strike to demand respect for Indigenous rights as enshrined in international law. Several Mapuche in another prison joined him. Weeks later, the total number of Mapuche on hunger strike behind bars in the cities of Temuco, Angol, and Lebu rose to 27."
Sea Shepherd conducts patrols in the Gulf of California, the exclusive home range of the critically endangered vaquita. (photo: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society)
Collision at Sea as Sea Shepherd Vessels Attacked in Mexico's Vaquita Refuge Sea Shepherd Excerpt: "At approximately 07:00 on the morning of December 31st, a group of assailants in 5-7 fishing boats (known locally as pangas) launched a violent attack on Sea Shepherd vessels Farley Mowat and Sharpie inside the Zero Tolerance Area of Mexico's federally-protected Vaquita Refuge."
The incident began as the crew of the Farley Mowat undertook efforts to retrieve a gillnet from the protected region, home to the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. Gillnet fishing is banned in the region, and Sea Shepherd is working with Mexican authorities to deter poaching and remove illegal fishing gear from the area. As the conservation vessel attempted to remove the net from the refuge, several pangas aggressively approached the ship, launching lead weights and Molotov cocktails at the crew and military officials on board.
Following routine anti-piracy procedures, the Farley Mowat undertook defensive maneuvering to avoid the attacks. As the vessel attempted to leave the scene, one of the pangas aggressively swerved in front of the Farley Mowat, crashing directly into the hull of the former U.S. Coast Guard Cutter. CCTV footage recorded on the bridge of the Farley Mowat captured images of the incident.
The panga split into two pieces, expelling its passengers into the sea. Crew and military personnel on board Sea Shepherd’s second vessel in the area, Sharpie, responded immediately, recovered the two men, who had been picked up by one of the other pangas involved in the attack, and brought them on board. Sea Shepherd’s Medical Officer, Corrine Perron, provided emergency first aid.
One assailant was not breathing when brought on board the conservation vessel. Sea Shepherd’s Medical Officer used the ship’s AED and administered immediate CPR and emergency oxygen. The second assailant has suspected broken ribs. Two medics from the Mexican Navy arrived at the scene and provided additional emergency care to the men. As the medics continued to tend to the injured parties, two assailants illegally boarded the Sharpie, threatened its crew and the Mexican officials on board, and smashed the camera being used to document the emergency first response. Assailants in nearby pangas threw projectiles and fuel at Sharpie, catching its bow on fire. Sharpie crew and military officials successfully put out the fire and removed the two men who had illegally boarded the ship. Sea Shepherd rushed the injured men to two nearby naval vessels, a defender and an interceptor, for follow-up medical treatment. They have since been airlifted to the hospital.
As Sharpie departed from the scene, the pangas continued to attack, launching additional Molotov cocktails at the vessel, setting the recovered fishing gear collected on the vessel’s aft-deck on fire. The crew and military personnel on board were able to extinguish the fire. On shore, assailants set fire to Sea Shepherd’s truck.
The Mexican Navy is investigating the incident.
This morning’s attack is the latest in a series of increasingly violent assaults launched against Sea Shepherd’s ships over the past month. Assailants have hurled Molotov cocktails, knives, hammers, flares, bottles of fuel, and other deadly projectiles at the vessels, crew, and military personnel on board. No serious injuries have occurred prior to today’s incident.
The Vaquita Refuge is a UNESCO-recognized region in the Upper Gulf of California that is home to the world’s most endangered marine mammal – the vaquita. The endemic porpoise has experienced a rapid population decline over recent years due to entanglement in gillnets. There are fewer than 20 vaquitas left alive. Scientists believe the remaining vaquita population is concentrated in a high-priority zone of the Vaquita Refuge known as the Zero Tolerance Area.
Working closely with Mexican authorities, Sea Shepherd monitors the Vaquita Refuge to deter poaching and remove the illegal nets that threaten the survival of the species. This partnership has resulted in the retrieval of over 1,000 gillnets to-date.
ore than three years after the FBI came under fire for claiming “Black identity extremists” were a domestic terrorism threat, the bureau has issued a new terrorism guide that employs almost identical terminology, according to a copy of the document obtained by Yahoo News.
