August 18, 2022 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

 

August 18, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 19

On this day in 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by the narrow vote of 50 to 49. A mirror of the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, the new amendment read:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War, as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields, and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.

But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “males,” inserting that word into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was outraged. The laws of the age gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.

The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a larger reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.

That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” listing the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisting that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote, and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.

The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

Suffragists had hopes of being included in the Fifteenth Amendment, but when they were not, they decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.

In Missouri, a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous decision in 1875, deciding that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections, until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada, recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on this day in 1920 made it the law of the land. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years.

Yesterday the Department of Justice filed a friend of the court brief in the case of League of Women Voters v. Secretary of State of Florida alleging that “in the face of surging turnout in the 2020 election, the Florida Legislature responded by enacting provisions that impose disparate burdens on Black voters” when it imposed new voting restrictions.

A hundred years later, we are still fighting the same fights.

—

Notes:

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/old-friends-elizabeth-cady-stanton-and-susan-b-anthony-made-histo

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22139463-fl-ca11-amicus-br-as-filed

FWD: Marjorie Taylor Greene called adoptive parents ‘fake’

 

Hi, it’s Marcus Flowers, Democratic Army Veteran running for Congress against Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

My opponent, who claims to be pro-life, said children are in danger when raised by adoptive, non-biological parents and called them “fake” parents. 

Look, this is personal to me. I was raised by foster parents. And I wouldn’t dream of calling the people who raised me “fake parents.” It’s insulting, and I won’t stand for it. 

Anyone who believes that adopted parents are “fake” shouldn’t serve at any level of our government, let alone Congress. 

Please, help me hold Marjorie Taylor Greene accountable for her hateful rhetoric by donating to my campaign. 

----Begin forwarded message----

From: Defeat QAnon <info@marcusforgeorgia.com>
Subject: Marjorie Taylor Greene called adoptive parents ‘fake’
Sent on July 18, 2022, at 3:05 p.m.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene faced criticism on social media this weekend for calling non-biological parents "fake mom and fake dad" as Republicans push adoption as an abortion alternative in the wake of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.

On Greene’s show MTG Live, she explained one reason she worries for children is because some are raised by “fake” parents.

"Children are in the greatest danger in America today because traditional family values are being destroyed—the idea that mom and dad together, not fake mom and fake dad, but the biological mom and biological dad, can raise their children together and do what's right for their children.” —Marjorie Taylor Greene

Friends, this is disgusting. And no one who believes that adopted parents are “fake” should serve at any level of our government, let alone Congress.

Let’s hold Marjorie Taylor Greene accountable for her hateful rhetoric by electing Marcus Flowers, the Democratic Army Veteran running to unseat her.

Overturning Roe was a disaster for our state (and for our country, for that matter). Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hatred is only making it worse. Let’s send her a message this November, Team Flowers for Congress         Paid for by Marcus for Georgia PO Box 532 Rome, GA 30162 United States

Marcus Flowers for Georgia · GA 30162, United States

RSN: James Risen | FBI Search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago Triggers Slow-Motion Rerun of January 6 Insurrection

 

 

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James Risen | FBI Search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago Triggers Slow-Motion Rerun of January 6 Insurrection
James Risen, the Intercept
Risen writes: "A new wave of attacks and threats against the FBI show that Trump's followers are unrepentant, continuing their assault on democracy."

A new wave of attacks and threats against the FBI show that Trump’s followers are unrepentant, continuing their assault on democracy.

The brutal days since the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home have brought America a slow-motion rerun of the January 6 insurrection.

Pro-Trump cultists have once again declared war on the U.S. government, just as they did on January 6, 2021, and are once again bent on overturning the rule of law. It is yet another warning of what the pro-Trump Republican Party has become: a violent, apocalyptic cult of personality. The nation is on notice of what will happen if Trump once again becomes president.

Ricky Shiffer, who died at age 42 for Trump’s sake, is the perfect symbol of Trump’s rage-filled GOP.

Shiffer tried to attack the FBI’s Cincinnati office on August 11 in an act of revenge for the bureau’s court-authorized search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Just after the FBI’s August 8 search, an account under Shiffer’s name on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, urged people to “get whatever you need to be ready for combat.”

He tried to break through a bulletproof barrier outside the FBI’s office by shooting his nail gun, then fled into a running gun battle with police. While he was fleeing, he apparently took time to post on social media again, writing, “Well, I thought I had a way through bullet proof glass, and I didn’t. If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I., and it’ll mean either I was taken off the internet, the F.B.I. got me, or they sent the regular cops.”

Within hours, he was dead in a cornfield after a shootout with police.

Shiffer was just one of many Trump supporters who have engaged in either violence or threats of violence in recent days against the FBI, the Justice Department, and the federal judge who approved the warrant used by the FBI in last week’s search.

Adam Bies, of Mercer, Pennsylvania, was arrested on August 12 after he posted a series of violent threats against the FBI. The hate-filled rhetoric he used underscores just how dangerous the threats from Trump’s disciples have become. “Every single piece of shit who works for the FBI in any capacity, from the director down to the janitor who cleans their fucking toilets deserves to die,” Bies wrote on Gab, a right-wing social media platform. “You’ve declared war on us and now it’s open season on YOU. … HEY FEDS. We the people cannot WAIT to water the trees of liberty with your blood.”

At the same time, a group of heavily armed Trump supporters, including some with assault weapons, stood outside the FBI’s Phoenix office last weekend to protest — and intimidate — after the Mar-a-Lago search. Meanwhile, the threats against the federal judge who approved the search warrant have become increasingly dark; one Trump cultist posted, “I see a rope around his neck.” The threats against the FBI, the Justice Department, and the judge have become so frequent and ominous across the country since the Mar-a-Lago search that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin on August 12 warning about them.

Shiffer, Bies, and many others were primed for violence by Trump, who triggered this latest wave of threats on the day of the FBI search by using rhetoric purposefully designed to incite, claiming that Mar-a-Lago was “currently under siege, raided, and occupied.” It was the same type of language of violence mixed with victimhood that Trump used to incite the mob to storm the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.

The insurrection involved a mob of thousands who attacked the building in order to try to stop the congressional certification of the election of Joe Biden as president. Incited to march on the U.S. Capitol by Trump when he spoke to his supporters at a rally near the White House that day, the mob overwhelmed the police guarding the Capitol and succeeded in delaying the certification and nearly stopping it.

Yet today Trump’s followers are unrepentant and unashamed, despite hundreds of arrests, a high-profile House investigation that has revealed the depths of the danger to democracy from the insurrection, and an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation of January 6 and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

None of that matters to the Trump cultists. They are at it again.

Broadening Attacks

The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago was just the latest excuse Trump cultists have used to intensify their attacks, though the militia wing of the Republican Party has been active since January 6, 2021. They have gone after a wide array of targets that they consider enemies: On June 11, for example, just two days after the first House hearing investigating the insurrection, police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, stopped a U-Haul truck and arrested 31 members of a white nationalist group called Patriot Front. They were on their way to a Pride event, where officials said they planned to start a riot.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the upsurge of violence and threats of violence in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search are just part of a steady and intensifying march of Trump supporters toward a permanent war against American democracy.

To be sure, right-wing extremist hatred of the federal government goes back long before Trump. That hatred soared over the last few decades, particularly in the wake of the bloody Branch Davidian raid by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and the Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho by the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service in 1992. Right-wing extremist groups still have as their bible a racist, antisemitic novel written more than 40 years ago called “The Turner Diaries.” The violent and dystopian novel, first published in 1978, depicts a bombing of FBI headquarters as well as the hanging of members of Congress. The parallels between the novel’s plot and the real-life events of the January 6 insurrection, and the most recent threats of violence against the FBI, are unnervingly close. Trump has brought the hellscape of “The Turner Diaries” out of the realm of perverted fantasy and into grim reality.

Shiffer was a true soldier in Trump’s war. There’s social media evidence that he was at least January 6-adjacent. He appeared in a video at a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House the night before the insurrection, and he apparently posted on Twitter that “I was there” in reply to a photo of January 6 insurrectionists scaling the Capitol’s walls.

Bies, meanwhile, has been an aggressive anti-vaxxer — showing that his newfound hatred of the FBI is part of a larger hatred of the entire government. “I threw away my 25-year career in software and marketing after refusing the vaccine,” Bies wrote on Gab. “I will never treat you scumbag democrats with respect, or be friends with you in any way for the rest of my life. I cannot wait to see all of you stupid pieces of shit drop dead from your vaccine side effects.”

Far from trying to rein in Trump and his brown shirts, GOP leaders have stoked the threats of violence. They quickly followed Trump’s lead in the days after the FBI search in Florida and began issuing calls to defund the FBI, claiming that it was just like the Gestapo. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., compared the search to the actions of “3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” while other Republicans announced that they were now at war with the U.S. government. Carl Paladino, a Republican congressional candidate in New York, said in a radio interview with right-wing Breitbart News that Attorney General Merrick Garland should “probably be executed” before quickly claiming that he was being facetious. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., threatened the Justice Department with an investigation if Republicans retake the House, while saying that the Justice Department was now in an “intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”

Republican politicians have also worked to purge all anti-Trump dissidents from the party, filling key state posts that will have influence over future elections with radical-right figures who still question the 2020 presidential election. The purification of the party extends to affiliated groups that once sought to bring new ideas to conservatism but now are nothing more than shills for Trump. That was clear earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, where a fake jail cell holding a supposed January 6 insurrectionist was set up; it was meant to symbolize how Republicans now view the insurrectionists as political martyrs. (Reporters at the conference wrote that a right-wing group run by Brandon Straka was responsible for the cage and that Straka may have been the person inside, although his identity couldn’t be confirmed. Straka was convicted for his role in the January 6 insurrection and later cooperated with the FBI.)

Like a mafia leader, Trump is seeking to exploit the violence, threats of violence, and the GOP’s broad acceptance of his agenda. Last weekend, he reportedly had an ally try to contact Garland about lowering the political temperature surrounding the FBI search — even as he continued to rail against the raid as a witch hunt. It was straight out of Trump’s long-standing playbook: Pretend to be the victim, rant and rave, and then play games with his adversary.

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A missile at a demonstration show in Russia. (photo: Getty Images)

Russia Says It Moved Hypersonic Missiles to Kaliningrad Region
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The Russian military has said it deployed warplanes armed with state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles to the country's Kaliningrad region, in close proximity to European Union member states and NATO assets."

The deployment of MiG warplanes to Russia’s westernmost exclave comes amid soaring tensions over the war in Ukraine.

The Russian military has said it deployed warplanes armed with state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles to the country’s Kaliningrad region, in close proximity to European Union member states and NATO assets.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said three MiG-31 fighters with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles arrived at the Chkalovsk airbase as part of “additional measures of strategic deterrence” and will be placed on “round-the-clock combat duty”.

A video released by the ministry on Thursday showed the fighters arriving at the base but not carrying the missiles, which were apparently delivered separately.

The deployment of Kinzhal missiles comes amid soaring tensions with the West over Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which is nearing the sixth-month mark.

The Russian exclave located between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast has been at the forefront of Moscow’s efforts to counter what it described as NATO’s hostile policies.

Moscow has strongly criticised the deliveries of Western weapons to Ukraine, accusing the United States and its allies of fuelling the conflict.

In turn, it has methodically bolstered its military forces in Kaliningrad, arming them with state-of-the-art weapons, including precision-guided Iskander missiles and an array of air defence systems.

The Russian military said the Kinzhal has a range of up to 2,000km (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who unveiled the Kinzhal missile in 2018, termed it “an ideal weapon” that is extremely difficult to intercept.

Kaliningrad became a flashpoint in June after Lithuania moved to limit goods transit to the region through its territory, with Russia promising retaliation. The EU, however, said Lithuania must allow Russian goods to transit with the exception of weapons.

Russia’s westernmost state was part of Germany until the end of World War II, when it was given to the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. It has roughly one million residents, mainly Russians but also a small number of Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians.

The exact number of soldiers stationed there is unknown; estimates range from 9,000 to up to 200,000 military personnel.

Earlier on Thursday, Finland’s Defence Ministry said that two Russian MiG-31 jets were suspected of violating its airspace near the city of Porvoo, on the Gulf of Finland 150km (about 90 miles) from Russia.

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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., arrives at the Capitol for a vote on Aug. 3. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Steven Rattner | Kyrsten Sinema Has Made Sure the New Tax Bill Doesn't Go Near the Wealthy
Steven Rattner, The New York Times
Rattner writes: "Early in my deal-making career, a Wall Street veteran counseled me to 'never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.'" 

Early in my deal-making career, a Wall Street veteran counseled me to “never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, may have had similar advice in his head as he relentlessly corralled his 49 Democratic colleagues into passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which emerged as not just a good bill, but a great bill, as President Biden described it when he signed it on Tuesday.

Yet without trouble from one intransigent Democratic senator and a significant political misjudgment by the Biden administration, we would have had an even more consequential package.

The obstinate Democrat was, in the end, not Joe Manchin of West Virginia — who fought hard for his beliefs and his constituents in the course of signing on — but Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona freshman who prides herself on a quirky individualism seemingly patterned on one of her predecessors, the iconoclastic Republican John McCain.

When she helped block what would have been the first increase in the federal minimum wage since 2009, she did so by mimicking Mr. McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down vote in 2017 on proposed cutbacks to the Affordable Care Act.

While many of Mr. Manchin’s changes improved the bill — such as by turning it from deficit raising to deficit lowering — it was solely Ms. Sinema’s demands that drastically weakened the tax portion of the resulting legislation.

No increase in the egregiously low corporate income tax rate. No reversal in overly generous deductions for businesses. No rise in income tax or capital gains rates paid by the wealthy.

Wealthy individuals escaped essentially unaffected by the new legislation. Ms. Sinema even objected to closing the indefensible carried interest loophole, through which many private equity executives and some hedge fund managers pay only a 23.8 percent tax rate on gains achieved on their share of investors’ capital.

Here’s how muddled Ms. Sinema’s logic was: As a House member, Ms. Sinema voted against Donald Trump’s signature $1.9 trillion tax cut of 2017, whose benefits mostly larded up businesses and wealthy individuals. That did not dissuade her from insisting that the Inflation Reduction Act not reverse any of those changes.

Consequently, Mr. Schumer and other architects of the I.R.A. were forced to resort to adopting a new method of taxing the profits of large corporations — assessing them based on a company’s reported income under generally accepted accounting principles (known as GAAP) rather than based on computations dictated by the tax code.

In addition to added complexity, this change creates the potential for companies to manipulate their tax obligations by tinkering with accounting methodologies that the Internal Revenue Service would be unable to oversee.

Ms. Sinema also insisted that certain elements of the new 15 percent corporate tax on “book” profits be rolled back — including one that would have adversely affected private equity — thereby creating a revenue hole that Democratic leaders chose to plug largely by adding a new 1 percent tax on stock buybacks by companies.

Happily, that probably isn’t large enough to discourage many stock buybacks, but it’s still a step in the wrong direction.

Contrary to public impression, stock repurchases can be a positive for the economy; responsible companies buy their own stock when they do not have a productive use for the capital. Stockholders who sell back their shares can take that money and put it into other, more attractive investments, helping economic growth.

Meanwhile, on the expenditure side of the ledger, we lost the chance to enact many other worthy initiatives, like continuation of the expanded child tax credit; tuition-free community college; parental leave and an augmented earned-income tax credit.

That’s because of a consequential misjudgment by the Biden administration. Believing that his election constituted a mandate for major change, Mr. Biden took office with an armada of plans, an estimated total of $6.4 trillion of new outlays.

The first of his three planned packages, the almost completely unfunded $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, was mostly designed to counter the lingering economic effects of Covid via proposals that included more stimulus checks for individuals and more aid for states and localities, which proved unnecessary.

Passed on a party-line vote, the provisions substantially increased the nation’s budget deficit and added to the inflation fires that have now become a major challenge for Democrats.

For legislative strategy reasons, the president’s other two packages were combined into a possible $3.5 trillion behemoth, which quickly met resistance from moderate Democrats concerned about the potential impact on the deficit and inflation.

Imagine if the Biden administration had started its tenure by pushing for its more meritorious proposals that would have aided long-term economic stability instead of the superfluous and inflationary American Rescue Plan. Even Mr. Manchin, who voted for that plan and who was willing last summer to support a $1.5 trillion package, would likely have come on board.

Instead, we got about $500 billion of new spending and tax breaks (along with about $300 billion of deficit reduction over the coming decade).

With Mr. Biden’s popularity at a low ebb and Democrats expected to lose control of at least the House in November, we’ve blown the chance for even greater transformational legislation.

It was a missed opportunity of extraordinary scale.

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A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)

Apple Warns of Security Flaws in iPhones, iPads and Macs
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Apple disclosed serious security vulnerabilities for iPhones, iPads and Macs that could potentially allow attackers to take complete control of these devices."

Apple disclosed serious security vulnerabilities for iPhones, iPads and Macs that could potentially allow attackers to take complete control of these devices.

Apple released two security reports about the issue on Wednesday, although they didn't receive wide attention outside of tech publications.

Apple's explanation of the vulnerability means a hacker could get "full admin access" to the device. That would allow intruders to impersonate the device's owner and subsequently run any software in their name, said Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security.

Security experts have advised users to update affected devices — the iPhone6S and later models; several models of the iPad, including the 5th generation and later, all iPad Pro models and the iPad Air 2; and Mac computers running MacOS Monterey. The flaw also affects some iPod models.

Apple did not say in the reports how, where or by whom the vulnerabilities were discovered. In all cases, it cited an anonymous researcher.

Commercial spyware companies such as Israel's NSO Group are known for identifying and taking advantage of such flaws, exploiting them in malware that surreptitiously infects targets' smartphones, siphons their contents and surveils the targets in real time.

NSO Group has been blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department. Its spyware is known to have been used in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America against journalists, dissidents and human rights activists.

Security researcher Will Strafach said he had seen no technical analysis of the vulnerabilities that Apple has just patched. The company has previously acknowledged similarly serious flaws and, in what Strafach estimated to be perhaps a dozen occasions, has noted that it was aware of reports that such security holes had been exploited.

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Students in a classroom. (photo: JHU)

Students Lose Access to Books Amid 'State-Sponsored Purging of Ideas'
Hannah Natanson and Lori Rozsa, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The start of the 2022-2023 school year will usher in a new era of education in some parts of America - one in which school librarians have less freedom to choose books."

Measures across the country aim to restrict what children can read.

In one Virginia school district this fall, parents will receive an email notification every time their child checks out a book. In a Florida school system, teachers are purging their classrooms of texts that mention racism, sexism, gender identity or oppression. And a Pennsylvania school district is convening a panel of adults to sign off on every title that school librarians propose buying.

The start of the 2022-2023 school year will usher in a new era of education in some parts of America — one in which school librarians have less freedom to choose books and schoolchildren less ability to read books they find intriguing, experts say.

In the past two years, six states have passed laws that mandate parental involvement in reviewing books, making it easier for parents to remove books or restrict the texts available at school, according to a tally kept by nonprofit EveryLibrary. Five states are considering similar legislation. Typical of these is an Arizona bill, signed by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) in April, that requires districts to send parents who ask lists of the books their children check out, as well as to publish the titles of all library materials bought after Jan. 1. Policies are proliferating at the district level, too: One Nebraska system will require that parents sign permission slips for library books. A Texas system will divide its library into “juvenile,” “young adult” and “adult” sections, with parents choosing the “level” their child can access.

“This is a state-sponsored purging of ideas and identities that has no precedent in the United States of America,” said John Chrastka, EveryLibrary’s executive director. “We’re witnessing the silencing of stories and the suppressing of information [that will make] the next generation less able to function in society.”

No one is tracking how many districts have adopted such rules. But Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said she has never seen such a strong, successful movement to limit the ability to read. She warned of lasting consequences for the current generation of students — especially given that school libraries are often the “only source of vetted, reliable information” on topics such as health care.

“This shows an inability to respect the rights of individual students, particularly older students,” she said. “It’s treating them like 5-year-olds, which is not the most helpful or useful thing we could be doing, and is in fact teaching lessons in censorship.”

Mounting book challenges, bans and clandestine removals, all of which reached historic highs during the past school year, are also eroding students’ freedom to read. Simultaneously, Republican legislators in at least nine states are pushing laws that force school library databases to block certain content. Everywhere, the books targeted are mostly written by and about people of color and LGBTQ individuals, according to analyses conducted by the American Library Association and PEN America.

Parents and students are stepping into the fray. Some are fighting to increase schoolchildren’s access to literature with book clubs and giveaways, while others are spreading awareness of texts they believe are inappropriate. Emily Maikisch, a mother in Florida, this year launched a book reviewing website, BookLooks.org, aimed at “parents who want to make ... content-based decisions for their child,” she said.

The sharp increase in oversight and control of children’s reading at school is welcomed by some parents, conservative pundits and lawmakers who argue that unsupervised students will stumble across texts that expose them to sexual topics too early or that undermine their family’s beliefs and values. Library advocates say that existing book challenge procedures, as well as the expertise of credentialed school librarians, were already sufficient to ensure school book collections remain appropriate.

Florida teachers race to remake lessons as DeSantis laws take effect

The spike in regulation of school reading has some educators reconsidering the profession, amid a catastrophic national teacher shortage. Among them is Cassandra Oetinger-Kenski, a third-grade teacher in Florida’s Palm Beach County. Oetinger-Kenski was recently told to yank any books from her classroom that are not “in compliance” with new state laws circumscribing instruction on race, racism, gender and LGBTQ issues.

Oetinger-Kenski, who is married to a woman, does not want to hide books that feature families like hers. As the school year begins, she has decided not to comply.

“I have books in my library that talk about all kinds of family makeups, two moms, two dads, one dad and a grandma, you name it,” Oetinger-Kenski said. “I am not removing them.”

If pressured, she said, “I would strongly consider leaving.”

‘Books they would have read are gone’

In July, the school board of Central Bucks County, Pa., voted 6-3 to overhaul the way its librarians do their jobs.

Under a new five-page policy, book purchases must be approved by a vaguely defined set of administrators, possibly including the superintendent, with input from “parents and community members.” The policy prohibits any materials that contain “sexual acts” (or “nudity” at the elementary and middle-school levels); requires libraries to publish inventories; makes it easier for parents to remove books; and asserts parents can, at any time, receive a list of books their children have checked out.

The document concludes: “While librarians are trained in selecting materials … the ultimate determination of appropriateness for a minor lies with the parent.”

Before the vote, the proposed policy drew protests and complaints from the local NAACP and the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Carolyn Foote, a former Texas librarian and co-founder of the group FReadom Fighters, wrote a letter to the board warning that the policy would lead to censorship regulated only by the prejudices of untrained administrators.

“When we put the decision-making solely in the hands of one person like a superintendent who is not involved typically in the landscape of understanding what’s in school libraries … it leads to unnecessary restrictions of content,” Foote said in an interview. “Right now there is a lot of focus on LGBTQ-type characters and content or books that might talk about race ... You’re restricting certain topics from students [and that creates] an implication that there’s something wrong with this content.”

But after the vote, Central Bucks superintendent Abram Lucabaugh — who did not respond to a request for comment — defended the policy, telling a local reporter it “seeks to identify things that are age-inappropriate.”

Katherine Semisch, a 62-year-old former English teacher in Central Bucks, disagrees.

“I think the intent of the policy is to frighten teachers and librarians into a very high degree of self-censorship, and it will work beautifully,” she said, adding that ex-colleagues of hers are already boxing up their classroom libraries. “Kids will find that topics they might have discussed in another year in school will be squashed. Books they would have read are gone.”

Setups like the one in Central Bucks, which privilege parental and administrative preferences over librarians’ know-how and students’ interests, contravene proven methods schools have long used to select books, said Caldwell-Stone of the American Library Association.

For decades, she said, most schools relied on librarians — who in many states earn master’s degrees — to select the books they believed would supplement classroom lessons and foster a love of reading. Librarians in turn relied on book reviews and maturity rating websites such as Common Sense Media.

Not anymore. The Central Bucks policy is nearly identical to book selection guidelines published by the Texas Education Agency in April, versions of which have been implemented by at least two districts there. In the past month, policies giving parents power to help determine which books appear in libraries were adopted for all Utah schools, in Massachusetts’ Haverhill Schools and in Tennessee’s Hamilton County schools.

In Florida, the Flagler County district debuted a three-tiered library system this past spring.

The first level grants students access to the entire library. At level two, parents can specify up to five titles their children cannot check out. At level three, children have no access to books except titles specified by their parents.

“We saw what was happening within our district, in our state, and across the country,” said LaShakia Moore, Flagler’s director of teaching and learning. “What we were hearing was ‘Choice.’ Parents wanted to decide for their children.”

Another increasingly popular tactic is to require parental sign-off before librarians hand books to children. One of the districts doing so is Virginia’s Bedford County Public Schools, which has debuted a book-lending system that emails parents every time their child checks out a book. For the first time, the district is also requiring parents to sign a document at the start of the school year formally indicating approval of their child’s curriculum. Parents can request that any book be made unavailable to children.

Amy Snead, a mother of four and chair of the Bedford County chapter of parental rights group Moms for Liberty, said her organization pushed for the books policy. She said it will prevent children from encountering sexually explicit material.

“Parents throughout the county are really pleased,” Snead said.

But Lily Van Bergen, 18, who graduated from the Bedford system this spring, is worried. She said her hometown is largely White, Christian and conservative. She predicted parental supervision of reading will shrink students’ understanding of the world.

“Parents are going to see these emails and say, ‘Oh, well, my child is checking this out and I don’t like that,’ ” Van Bergen said. “It’s going to be harder and harder to escape the beliefs you were taught when you were growing up.”

And in Central Bucks, Alexandra Coffey, a rising high school junior, is likewise feeling anxious. Coffey, 16, has “always been obsessed” with reading, she said, once skipping a day of third grade to finish an 800-page Harry Potter novel.

When she heard about her district’s new book selection policy, she was flooded with the same rage she felt as a little girl whenever she saw a book that had been mishandled, its spine bent or pages torn.

“All that came rushing back to me,” Coffey said. “It’s wrong. What they’re trying to do.”

‘We consider this our ministry’

As states and districts adjust their reading rules, parents and students are working to change things, too. Teens in Texas, for example, have formed “banned book clubs” — while in Missouri, students are suing their district to restore eight pulled books.

Meanwhile, a flurry of parent-staffed websites reviewing books for inappropriate content have appeared — including “Between the Book Covers,” whose website says “professional review sites cannot be entrusted,” and BookLook.info, “a place for taking a closer look at the books in our children’s hands.” (Virginia’s Bedford County district now suggests the latter as a resource for parents.) There are also Facebook groups like Utah’s “LaVerna in the Library,” which “collects naughty children’s books.”

Maikisch, her husband and a group of families in Florida’s Brevard County launched BookLooks.org this March. The site promises to find “objectionable content ... in your child’s book before they do.” Parents volunteer their time to review titles for BookLooks, Maikisch wrote in an email, judging texts by “things in the traditional obscenity spectrum (sex, drugs use, violence, etc.).”

BookLooks ratings range from 0, “For Everyone,” to 5: “Aberrant Content” for “Adult only.” A BookLooks review of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye,” often taught at the high school level, labeled it a “4” — meaning it should not be read by anyone under 18.

“This book contains profanity and derogatory terms; sexual activities including sexual assault and molestation; alcohol use; inflammatory racial and religious commentary,” the eight-page review concludes.

To date, BookLooks has reviewed more than 260 books. The group relies on word of mouth to promote its work, Maikisch wrote, although it is in contact with “parents and groups in several states.”

“Our goal would be for when one parent asks another if they’ve heard of a particular book, they’d be told they could probably look it up on our site,” Maikisch wrote. “We consider this our ministry and calling.”

Jen Cousins and Stephana Ferrell, both of Orange County, are purchasing books that feature diverse lifestyles and distributing them to school librarians free. They launched the Florida Freedom to Read Project after an Orange County school board demanded last year that the book “Gender Queer,” a memoir, be removed from schools.

“I was thinking, ‘That’s not okay. You can’t do that,’” said Cousins, who has four children in Orange schools, including one who identifies as nonbinary.

The women worked with media specialists from the Orange and Osceola districts to assemble a list of titles. Using donations from supporters, they have collected 1,000 books and handed out roughly 500 at giveaways in public spots. They are planning ways to deliver the rest.

In other places, book purges are proceeding quietly — sometimes by unwilling hands.

This winter, a 16-year-old in Florida’s Broward County stepped into his school library to find the librarian looking a little ashamed.

The 16-year-old, who is transgender and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, loves to read — especially books that feature LGBTQ characters, because they give him hope for a happy life. He volunteers in his school library every week, restocking shelves, thrilling in the feel and smell of the pages.

But on that winter day, the librarian pulled him over to the computer screen. Awaiting was an email from administrators mandating the removal of about two dozen books featuring LGBTQ people for “sensitive content.”

The Broward school district did not respond to a list of questions about the incident.

The student carried the books to a backroom. He placed them beside titles pulled for graphic images of the Holocaust. He felt sick.

“It was really hard for me to believe at the time that LGBTQ life, my life, could be compared to something like genocide,” he said. “Now it just hurts. A lot.”

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Police officers and soldiers take a man to a detention center in San Salvador, El Salvador. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)

El Salvador Extends State of Exception as Arrests Hit 50,000
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "El Salvador's Congress has approved a one-month extension to a state of exception used to round up alleged gang members, as the chief of police announced more than 50,000 people had been detained under the extraordinary measures."

Government defends the measure as helping to dismantle ‘terrorist structures’ amid criticism from human rights groups.

El Salvador’s Congress has approved a one-month extension to a state of exception used to round up alleged gang members, as the chief of police announced more than 50,000 people had been detained under the extraordinary measures.

The country’s 84-seat unicameral assembly agreed late on Tuesday to grant the government’s newest request to maintain the decree, with 66 members voting in favour of an extension through mid-September.

President Nayib Bukele‘s administration imposed the state of exception in late March after dozens of people were killed in a single weekend of gang-related violence, and Bukele has defended the measure as key to tackling “terrorists”.

“We have strongly impacted the terrorist structures,” Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said in presenting the extension request to lawmakers. “We have witnessed how Salvadorans were able to enjoy the safest vacations in history”, he added, referring to recent national holidays.

“We can inform the Salvadoran people that we have already reached 50,000 recorded detentions during the period of the emergency regime,” Mauricio Arriaza, director of the National Civil Police, also said.

But rights groups and international observers have accused the government of committing “massive human rights violations” during its gang crackdown.

The state of exception suspends certain civil liberties, including the right to association, the right to be informed of the reason for an arrest and access to a lawyer. Many Salvadoran families also say loved ones with no gang ties have been detained in the sweeping arrests campaign, while Amnesty International reported that dozens of people have died in custody.

The Alliance for Peace movement opened an office for legal counselling and said recently it had received 500 complaints for arbitrary arrests.

Meanwhile, El Salvador’s human rights ombudsman, Apolonio Tobar, said his office has 28 open investigations into the deaths of people who perished while in custody under the state of exception.

Outside Congress before the vote, 25-year-old Virginia Guadalupe Solano Lopez said her husband, Jose Alfredo Vega, had been relaxing in their home with their daughter on March 27 in Jiquilisco in eastern El Salvador when police hauled him away without explanation.

She has not seen him since. “He’s not a criminal … he doesn’t have a record, he’s not stained,” she told The Associated Press news agency. “They took him because someone accused him of being with the gangs.”

Armed gangs, which have been estimated to count some 70,000 members in their ranks, have terrorised El Salvador for decades, controlling swathes of territory and extorting and killing with impunity.

Almost 69 percent of the detainees are accused of belonging to the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang – also known as MS-13 – followed by the Surenos faction of the Barrio 18 gang (17.7 percent) and the Revolucionarios faction of the same group (12.7 percent).

To house some of the detainees, Bukele ordered the construction of a gigantic prison for 40,000 people in a rural area of the city of Tecoluca, in the centre of the country, which should be ready before the end of the year.

However, experts say the government’s focus on arrests and mass incarceration will not solve the problem of gang violence.

“Any serious initiative aimed at dismantling gangs and reducing crime needs to address the structural causes of gang membership, including the social marginalization that leads youth into gangs and the lack of rehabilitation programs to offer former gang members employment and education opportunities,” Juan Pappier, senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote in June.

“Moreover, governments should aim at strengthening democratic institutions in El Salvador, including by promoting judicial independence. Independent courts and prosecutors are needed to ensure justice for the victims of gang violence and to take serious steps to dismantle the gangs,” he said.

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A woman walks over drainage pipes that flow into the Bagmati River in Kathmandu, Nepal, in June. (photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP)

Sewage and Trash Clog Nepal's Holy Bagmati River
Associated Press
Excerpt: "High on a mountain in the Himalayas, pristine drops fall from the mouth of a tiger statue installed at a stream thought to form the headwaters of the Bagmati River, long revered as having the power to purify souls."

Waters have deteriorated so greatly that the river is the country’s most polluted.

High on a mountain in the Himalayas, pristine drops fall from the mouth of a tiger statue installed at a stream thought to form the headwaters of the Bagmati River, long revered as having the power to purify souls. From there it wends its way downhill past verdant forests and merges with other waterways, irrigating fields of rice, vegetables and other crops that are a livelihood for many Nepalese.

But as the Bagmati reaches the valley of Kathmandu, the capital, its color changes from clear to brown and then to black, choked with debris, its contents undrinkable and unsuitable even for cleaning. During the dry season, an overwhelming stench pervades the area by its banks.

Tainted by garbage and raw sewage that is dumped directly into the waterway, Nepal’s holiest river has deteriorated so greatly that today it is also the country’s most polluted, dramatically altering how the city of about 3 million interacts with the Bagmati on daily, cultural and spiritual levels.

In the capital, the Bagmati’s sludge oozes past several sacred sites, including the Pashupatinath Temple, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979. The sprawling complex comprises a golden-roofed main temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, surrounded by hundreds of smaller ones.

Hindus flock to the riverbanks in Kathmandu to worship at shrines and celebrate festivals. Women dip in the river to wash away sins during Rishipanchami, a day for worship of the seven sages revered as enlightened beings guiding humanity through the ages.

Visitors also wade in during the festival of Chhath, praying to the sun god Surya. During Teej, married women come to pray for the health and prosperity of their husbands, and single women, to find a good one.

Families have long carried the bodies of deceased loved ones to these banks to wash the feet of the dead on a stone slab and sprinkle their faces with river water. Beliefs hold that that washes away a person’s sins and sends their soul to heaven before their physical remains are cremated atop heaps of wood, also alongside the river, and their ashes scattered into the waters.

People still bring departed loved ones to the Bagmati, but many no longer dare to have any contact with its contents. While the bodies are still cremated here, they’re cleansed with purified water bought in nearby stores.

“That is no more now. The water is so dirty and stinks. People are forced to bring bottled water and do the rituals,” 59-year-old Mithu Lama, who has been working with her husband at the Teku ghat cremation grounds since she married him at age 15, said on a recent day as she stacked wood for a funeral pyre.

Grieving families who resort to bottled water typically are loath to discuss it openly, for having failed to follow the sacred funeral tradition.

People have also traditionally collected river water to sprinkle on their homes to purify them. The river is significant to Buddhists, too, many of whom cremate bodies on the Bagmati’s banks.

Born and raised next to the Bagmati, Lama recalled using its waters for cooking, bathing, washing and even drinking. Today that feels like a long-ago dream dashed by decades of dumping human waste and refuse, and one she doesn’t expect to see again anytime soon.

“I now have serious doubt that it will be cleaned in my lifetime,” Lama said. “Not that there has not been any efforts, there have been several cleaning campaigns, but there are more people dirtying it. People are the problem.”

Indeed, there have been efforts by both private volunteers and the government to clean up the river. Among those initiatives, every Saturday for the past seven years hundreds of volunteers have gathered in Kathmandu to pick up garbage and remove trash from the Bagmati.

There almost every weekend is Mala Kharel, an executive member of the governmental High Powered Committee for Integrated Development of the Bagmati Civilization, which was set up to help clean up the river. She volunteers her time not only for cleanup duty but to raise awareness among the population about avoiding pollution.

Kharel said that over the years the campaign has succeeded in collecting about 80% of garbage along the riverbank, recovering all sorts of refuse from decaying animals to even, shockingly, the bodies of dead babies dumped there. But the pickup efforts admittedly fall short of perfection, in part since frequent disruptions to trash collection services encourage more dumping than they can keep up with.

In addition, many thousands of people have built huts, shacks and brick homes illegally along the river and refuse to leave.

As for the sewage, according to Kharel, the committee is working on several projects including the construction of canals and pipes, built parallel to the river, to connect to sewer lines and prevent their waste from reaching the Bagmati. It also is considering a treatment plant, and working on upstream dams where rainwater can be captured and stored during the monsoon season and released during the dry months to flush the river, moving the waste downstream from Kathmandu.

Work on the pipe and canal system began around 2013, but no completion date has been announced. Construction on two dams is ongoing — but said to be near done — while another remains in the process of getting started. But campaigners have high hopes for the near term.

“In the next 10 years, I am hoping the river will be flowing clear and the banks will be clean and lined with trees,” Kharel said. “We are working hard with this target.”

That optimism isn’t shared by everyone. Some environmentalists aren’t sure the dams, for instance, will be of much help.

“There is too much expectations from these dams. Bagmati is a natural river and not a canal that can be cleaned so easily,” said Madhukar Upadhya, a watershed expert who studies the river closely and said its bed no longer has any sand left.

Instead, today it’s lined with clay and mixed with chemicals dumped by industrial activity such as handwoven carpet makers, popular in the 1990s but now banned from the capital.

“So much damage has already been done to it,” Upadhya said, “that it can perhaps be cleaned to some degree but not restored to its past glory.”

Hindu priest Pandit Shivahari Subedi, who has spent three decades on the stone steps between the Bagmati and the Pashupatinath Temple performing rituals for devotees, takes a similarly dim view of the various cleanup campaigns he has seen. Divine intervention, he believes, is needed.

“There have been too many assurances from political leaders and top people, but they have all not been fulfilled. ... It looks like unless the gods create some kind of miracle, the Bagmati will not return to its glory,” Subedi said. “To clean the water naturally, by the grace of god, there needs to be huge flooding of water flushing the dirt.”

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