COMMON DREAMS: Top News: Blinken Faces Calls to Resign Over Lie That Israel Not Blocking Gaza Aid

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 ■ Today's Top News  Rights Group Condemns Texas National Guard for Firing Pepper Balls at Migrants "In separate incidents this summer, witnesses saw Texas National Guard members firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants who posed no risk to National Guard members or anyone else." By Edward Carver Rights Groups List 50+ Calls for Gaza Genocide on Israel's Channel 14 "Incitement to war crimes is part of the Channel 14 poison machine, and its aim is to create a forever war here," said one campaigner. By Brett Wilkins With All Eyes on Gaza, Israel Bulldozed 'Mile After Mile' of West Bank "We watched their bulldozers tear up streets, demolish businesses, pharmacies, schools," said one local leader. "They even bulldozed the town soccer field, and a tree in the middle of a road." By Jessica Corbett Progressive US Lawmakers Call for Arms Embargo to Halt Israeli Escalation in Lebanon "We cannot continue to stand idly by while innocent civilians are being bombarded with our tax dollars," said U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar. By Jake Johnson Landmark Declaration of Rights Safeguards Biobío River in Chile "A paradigm shift is necessary," said an advocacy group. "Let's recognize now that the Biobío River has value in itself." By Julia Conley Blinken Faces Calls to Resign Over Lie That Israel Is Not Blocking Gaza Aid "When a senior American official lies to Congress in the middle of genocide so that the government can keep funding that genocide, he is deliberately flouting the law and prolonging the suffering of millions of innocent people." By Jake Johnson JOIN THE MOVEMENT As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover the issues the corporate media never will. Your contribution supports this bold media model—free, independent, and dedicated to reporting the facts every day. Stand with us in the fight for economic equality, social justice, human rights, and a more sustainable future. JOIN WITH US TODAY ■ More News CBO: GOP Social Security Plan Would Cut Benefits by Thousands, Not Extend Solvency After Latest US Execution, Progressives Say 'Abolish the Death Penalty' Working-Class Independent Dan Osborn Giving GOP Senator Run for Her Money in Nebraska Dan Osborn, a mechanic and union leader running to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer in Nebraska, told an Omaha news station on Tuesday that recent polling showing a highly competitive race didn't come as a surprise to him. "It's what I'm seeing on the ground," he told KETV of a Survey USA poll showing 45% of respondents supporting him, compared with 44% backing Fischer. "People, I think, are ready for a change." Osborn describes himself as a "lifelong Independent," and has not sought or accepted endorsements from either major political party. He does have the backing of the United Auto Workers, which said in June, "It's time for labor to get behind candidates who look like us, talk like us, and know the issues facing working-class people." Osborn began working as an industrial mechanic for a Kellogg's plant in 2004, and eventually rose to the presidency of his union local, Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) Local 50G. In that role in 2021, he led 500 of his co-workers at the cereal plant in a work stoppage that lasted 77 days, with workers protesting a two-tier hiring system that left new employees with lower pay and no pensions and demanding fair working schedules and pay. The strike forced the company to agree to cost-of-living raises, no plant closures through 2026, and no permanent two-tier system. "I've gone up against a major American corporation," Osborn told The New York Times in February. "I stood up for what I thought was right, and I won." The Fischer campaign and its supporters have taken notice of the senator's opponent as multiple polls have shown the two candidates neck-and-neck. Last month, Fischer was up by just one point, with 23% undecided. Conservative super political action committee Heartland Resurgence has spent $479,000 in a new ad campaign opposing Osborn, repeating the same false claims about his support for abortion care as those Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made at his debate against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month: that Osborn "supports abortion until the moment of birth." Osborn told the independent rural news outlet Barn Raiser in March that he believes "a woman's decision on whether or not to have an abortion is between her and her doctor, it's not the federal government's place to dictate those things to people. Deb Fischer believes in a complete abortion ban. I strongly disagree with that position." In an ad released this week, Osborn is seen next to a stand-in for Fischer, who wears a blazer decorated with the logos of some of her major corporate donors: Northrop Grumman, which has given her $64,827 over her career; Union Pacific Corp., which has donated $141,651; and Goldman Sachs, which has donated $18,200 this election cycle. Osborn says in the ad that the Senate is made up of "millionaires controlled by billionaires." "Deb Fischer is part of the problem," he says. "She's taken so much corporate cash she should wear patches." Columnist John Nichols said the latest poll numbers in Nebraska suggest "that a willingness to take on millionaires, billionaires, and the politicians who serve them plays well everywhere." Pro-worker media organization More Perfect Union pointed to earlier polling in July that showed Osborn and Fischer tied 42-42. "Fifty-seven percent of the state's GOP voters say they're open to voting for an Independent," the outlet reported. "Osborn, a long-time union worker, could kick a Republican out of the Senate." Deadly Flooding in Central Europe Made Twice as Likely By Climate Change: Study VIEW ALL NEWS ■ Opinion Even a Good President With a Gun Won’t Save Us VP Harris’ recent political messaging about guns has been less about curbing them and more about how she and her running mate Tim Walz possess them. But that won’t prevent mass shootings. By Will Bunch Please Vice-President Harris, Stay Away from Wall Street! Whoops, too late. By Les Leopold It’s Time for the US to Kick Its War Habit and Get Mad at MAD Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD. By Frida Berrigan VIEW ALL OPINION Call 207.775.0488 to donate by phone or mail a check to: Common Dreams · PO Box 443 · Portland, ME 04112-0443 · USA Common Dreams is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your contribution is tax-deductible. EIN: 20-3368194

Burning Books and Destroying Education on the Path to Fascist Dictatorship

 

Burning Books and Destroying Education on the Path to Fascist Dictatorship

From Nazi Germany to the Pinochet regime in Chile, global parallels with where this type of repression leads should set off alarms.

CHUCK IDELSON

Feb 28, 2023Common Dreams

Widening the lens on the escalating assault on education and those who teach it offers chilling thoughts on the future of U.S. democracy.

From book bans to classroom demonizing trans youth and LGBTQ lives, to eradicating the real history of the U.S. and its ongoing legacy on racial and gender oppression, to the intimidation of educators and purging those who don't toe the line, global parallels with where this repression leads should set off alarms.

Chile provides a case study. After the 1973 coup, led by Augusto Pinochet with U.S. support against democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, "the military seized control of campuses and swept out those they felt sympathized with Allende rule," as the Christian Science Monitor put it.

Active-duty generals were appointed to run the universities and primary and secondary schools were placed under the rule of mayors appointed by Pinochet to promote full government control of classroom instruction.

Targeting educators was a priority with strict penalties imposed on what could be taught, leading to the firing of thousands of university professors and teachers, while others were forced out by sweeping cuts in educator pay.

Privatization, sharp cuts in public education funding, and corporate control of curricula was a major goal, including the elimination of political science and sociology in favor of vocational and business programs, and banning of texts.

The cuts and restrictions "sharply increased economic discrimination in higher education," said Allende's former education superintendent Iván Núñez, producing a privatized, corporatized school system that became more elitist. Implicit was the recognition that an egalitarian education system produces generations of young people who study the society they live in, think critically, and pose a major impediment to dictatorial rule. It would take 17 years until democracy finally was restored in Chile.

Comparisons with Nazi Germany are always fraught with overstatement. But it is worth emphasizing Hitler's reign started not with death camps, but with an onslaught on education and those it deemed as undesirables. Just weeks after Hitler's rise to Chancellor in 1933, Germany enacted a Civil Service law that as historian Jarrell Jackman wrote in The Muses Flee Hitler, immediately "forced over 1,000 scholars from their academic positions as either 'politically unreliable' or 'non-Aryan'."

On May 10, 1933, Nazi student groups carried out book burnings in 34 university towns across Germany.

Comparisons with Nazi Germany are always fraught with overstatement. But it is worth emphasizing Hitler's reign started not with death camps, but with an onslaught on education and those it deemed as undesirables.

On the bonfires went some 25,000 "un-German" books especially those by Jewish writers from Albert Einstein to Sigmund Freud, socialists, and communists, like Bertolt Brecht, August Bebel, and, of course, Karl Marx, literary and political critics of fascism and the Nazi regime, and foreigners considered advocates of social justice, such as Helen Keller targeted for championing rights for women, workers, and the disabled.

Speaking at the largest boon bonfire in Berlin, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would declare that "Jewish intellectualism is dead" and he endorsed the students' "right to clean up the debris of the past." In the prescient words of banned, 19th century Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people."

"Nazi mentality," wrote Jackman, "held that only a small segment of humankind belonged among the chosen citizenry" and that the 'undesirables' should be '"segregated from the rest of society." Those defined as "non-Aryan" or undesirables—which would also include people of color, lesbians and gays, the disabled, Gypsies, socialists, communists and any other opponents of the regime "were linked together in one form of conspiracy to destroy the purity of the German Volk."

"Since everyone was either supportive of German purity, or too scared to speak up for fear retribution, the Nazi Party could push any policy they wanted," writes Julia Rittenberg, calling it "a necessity for dictatorial control. Fascist leaders seek to crush any thoughts that might encourage resistance to their regime."

U.S. history is stuffed with examples of racial and gender oppression, repression of those viewed as "undesirable," censorship of education and history, and book banning, all intended to suppress any perceived threat to the dominant political class and white supremacy. In the wake of Trump's demagogy and attempted coup, the past two years illustrate the most dangerous illustration of those attacks on democracy.

Last year alone, more than 1,600 books were banned from school libraries, involving 138 school districts in 32 states, according to a report from PEN America.

Books sympathetically portraying diversity, especially featuring LGBTQ individuals and works, including children's books, describing struggles against racism by Black, Latino and civil rights figures, and human sexuality lead the list.

In Tennessee where one school district notoriously banned the graphic novel series "Maus" about the Holocaust, Rep. Jerry Sexton, sponsor of a bill to police school libraries, said he would burn books he considered inappropriate. A Texas school district official told educators if they kept books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they would be required to offer "opposing" viewpoints to comply with a new state law.

Since January, 2021, reportsEducation Week, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism; 18 states have imposed the bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.

After heavy criticism from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely leading candidate for President in 2024, the national College Board on the first day of Black History Month this February released an official curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies that stripped key parts of its content.

On top of the DeSantis' infamous "Don't Say Gay" and "Stop Woke Act," bills, a bill introduced in late February would bar colleges and universities from spending any money to fund educational programs or activity that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion, and could eviscerate programs on African American, gender studies, and other vulnerable curriculum.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelly describes these moves as "attacking the whole concept of racial justice and equity. It's an ongoing struggle to roll back anything that's perceived as diminishing white power. They want to convince white working people… if they can get control of the narrative inside classrooms, their lives would be better. Racism actually damages all of our prospects and futures."

As in Chile and Germany, educators are a major target. Multiple bills have threatened teachers with discipline, including termination, fines, criminal penalties, and loss of their teaching credentials for perceived violation of the laws, including the complaint of even one parent.

In Texas, Republican officials have called for criminal charges against school officials who make certain books available to young adults.

In New Hampshire, a conservative mom's group is offering a $500 bounty to catch teachers who break a state law prohibiting certain teachings about racism and sexism.

A high school English teacher in Missouri lost her job following parents' complaints that one of her assignments taught critical race theory after assigning a worksheet titled "How Racially Privileged Are You?" as prep material for reading the school-approved book "Dear Martin," a novel about a Black high school student who is physically assaulted by a white police officer.

In Tennessee, a teacher was fired after telling her class that white privilege is a fact. In Texas, a Black principal lost his job after parents accused him of promoting critical race theory based on a letter he had written more than a year earlier, calling for the community to come together and defeat systemic racism in the days following the murder of George Floyd.

DeSantis and Florida are again leading the charge. A substitute teacher in Jacksonville, was fired after posting a video to Twitter showing rows of empty bookshelves at the school's library.

DeSantis insisted the video was fake, even though in Duval County Public Schools administrators also instructed faculty to cover or remove their classroom libraries, mentioning the felony risk in a video on how to comply with the new law.

Another teacher near Naples, FL was fired after a classroom discussion prompted by LGBTQ students asking if they could create art expressing their own sexualities and identities.

DeSantis has also gone after teacher unions, seeking to defund them, along with other restrictions, and the newest bill would allow a faculty member's tenure to be reviewed "at any time."

Activists across the country are fighting back. In Indiana, for example, a coalition of organizations mobilized to defeat two anti-critical race theory bills after a Republican state senator urged teachers to be impartial on "isms," and a history teacher went viral for saying he refuses to be impartial when teaching Nazism.

And, in New Hampshire, a group called Granite State Progress boasted wins in all 34 of the school board races where it supported candidates who pledged to resist pressure to restrict the teaching of the history of racism.

"The history of Nazi book burning is one of the most obvious antecedents to the censorship of books in the U.S.," notes Julia Rittenberg. "While book banners and censorship supporters paint their concerns as specific to contemporary issues, it's a common way to consolidate power."

In a commentary in the New York Times, prominent historian, educator Henry Louis Gates cited the work of historian Carter Woodson, pioneer in 1926 of what has become Black History Month. Woodson was "keenly aware of the role of politics in the classroom," said Gates, "if you can control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his action."

September 11, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

September 11, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON SEP 12 Yesterday, President Joe Biden was in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he and General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong announced they were elevating U.S.-Vietnam relations from the comprehensive partnership agreement President Barack Obama signed in 2013 to a comprehensive strategic partnership, Vietnam’s highest tier of international partnership. The earlier measure called for cooperation in transnational crime and public health; the new measure will boost Vietnam's high-technology sector and security.  The visit to Vietnam was part of the administration’s continuing push to loosen China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific by strengthening other countries in the region. China has had a comprehensive strategic partnership with Vietnam since 1998; Russia has had one since 2012.  Biden’s visit to Vietnam came just after Vice President Kamala Harris’s attendance at the U.S.- Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Biden’s attendance at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi, where he and the leaders of India, Brazil, and South Africa—all members of BRICS, the economic bloc that includes China—reaffirmed their “shared commitment to the G20 as the premier forum for international economic cooperation to deliver solutions for our shared world.” Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy has been central to his presidency, and he has marked a number of firsts in U.S.-Indo-Pacific relationships. In September 2021, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. announced a trilateral security pact called AUKUS. In May 2022 the White House held the ASEAN summit in Washington, D.C., for the first time in the organization’s 45-year history; later that summer the U.S. opened a number of embassies in the Pacific Islands region and appointed the first-ever U.S. envoy to the Pacific Islands Forum. In June 2023, Biden hosted a state dinner for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. In August, Biden held a historic trilateral meeting at Camp David with the leaders of Japan and the Republic of Korea. At the same time, the administration has worked to improve communications with China. In June 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing for two days and met with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Since then, the administration has tried to demonstrate that it is willing to work with China on economic issues, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen traveled to China in July and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited at the end of August. Raimondo emphasized that the U.S. is not interested in “containing China’s economic development,” as Chinese leaders have charged, but needs to protect U.S. national security, preventing exports of U.S. technology that can be used by the Chinese military. Raimondo emphasized that the world needs the U.S. and China to manage their relationship “responsibly.” She said the Biden administration wants “to have a stable commercial relationship, and the core to that is regular communication.” Chinese officials praised Raimondo, saying her visit rendered “rational, candid, pragmatic and constructive communications on China-U.S. relations and economic and trade cooperation.” But facing the twin problems of a faltering economy and negative population growth, Xi appears to be trying to shore up an economic bloc—BRICS—in which China can exercise a more powerful influence than it can in the G20. He chose not to attend the G20 summit in New Delhi, possibly to downplay India’s growing global power, and observers were concerned that Premier Li Qiang, who attended in his place, might throw a monkey wrench in the works of a G20 joint statement. Instead, Xi’s absence allowed India’s president Modi to take center stage, and the summit produced a joint statement on its first day.  After the summit, Biden traveled to Vietnam, which shares an 806-mile (~1,300 km) land border with China and has an ongoing dispute with China over Beijing’s asserting authority over parts of the South China Sea that are more than 1,000 miles (~1,600 km) from China’s coast. Last month, satellite images appeared to show that China is building an airstrip on an island Vietnam claims as its territory.  Amidst news that Vietnam is secretly engaged in talks to buy arms from Russia, Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer told the press that the U.S.-Vietnam partnership shows that the U.S. and aligned countries can offer an alternative to countries that have previously worked with Russia and are now finding that relationship “increasingly uncomfortable.” When asked if that partnership might eventually include military aid, Finer responded that the partnership is “comprehensive and strategic” and that “[i]t’s hard to imagine a relationship that is both comprehensive and strategic that doesn’t have a security dimension.”  While acknowledging in speeches the changing relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam over the past 50 years, Biden was careful not to appear to have forgotten the American experience in the Vietnam War. Before leaving for India and Vietnam, he awarded the Medal of Honor to 81-year-old Captain Larry Taylor, who as a 1st lieutenant during the war in Vietnam flew his Cobra attack helicopter into heavy enemy fire to rescue four members of a reconnaissance team who were surrounded by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in a maneuver army officers said had never before been attempted. In more than 2,000 combat missions, Taylor never lost a man. “You just do whatever is expedient and do whatever to save the lives of the people you’re trying to rescue,” he said. After his discharge from the Army in 1970, Taylor ran a roofing and sheet metal company in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  In Hanoi, Biden visited a memorial for the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who was a prisoner of war in Hanoi for five and a half years from 1967, when he was shot down, to 1973. “I miss him,” Biden said. “He was a good friend.” Biden and McCain served in the Senate together for three decades. Biden’s tribute to McCain contrasted sharply with the 2019 request from then-president Trump’s White House team that a warship named for McCain, his father, and his grandfather, be hidden from Trump during a visit to Japan. McCain had clashed with Trump despite their shared political affiliation. Like Biden, Vietnam’s leader Vo Van Thuong welcomed “an enduring, stable long-term framework that opens up a vast space for further development of the bond between us for decades to follow.” But he did note in his remarks at a state luncheon at the presidential palace that President Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam during the early years of the Vietnam War, had asked President Harry Truman for just such a relationship only months after Vietnam gained its independence from France in 1945. “As history would have it, this desire had to confront countless turmoil and challenges,” he said, “all of such we have overcome…. From former enemies to Comprehensive Strategic Partners, this is truly a model in the history of international relations as to how reconciliation and relationship-building should proceed after a war.” In other international news today, the administration announced it has cleared the way for a deal with Iran to release five U.S. citizens detained in Iran. Last month, Iran moved four dual citizens from the infamous Evin Prison to house arrest, and now it is expected to release those four and one more who was already under house arrest in exchange for five Iranian prisoners and the release of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue currently held in South Korea. Several Republicans have opposed the deal. The senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James E. Risch of Idaho, said that the “unfreezing” of funds “incentivizes hostage taking & provides a windfall for regime aggression,” and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) called the money “ransom” and said it was a “craven act of appeasement.”  But in an op-ed on the national security website Defense One last month, Ryan Costello, the policy director for the National Iranian American Council, called the deal a win-win. The Iranian money will be released to Qatar, which will release it for purchases of food and medicine, which are not sanctioned. Medicine is desperately needed in Iran, and as Biden said in 2020: “Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people.” Today is the 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of leftist President Salvador Allende, a coup aided by the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency under President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger. The State Department issued a statement calling the anniversary “an opportunity to reflect on this break in Chile’s democratic order and the suffering that it caused.”  While remaining silent on the U.S. role in that coup, the State Department noted that the Biden administration had sought to be transparent about that role by declassifying information. It said, “We pay our deepest respects to the victims of the repression that followed and honor the extraordinary bravery and sacrifices of countless Chileans who stood up for human rights and fought for an end to dictatorship and a peaceful return to democracy,” and it reaffirmed the U.S. “fullest commitment to supporting democracy and upholding human rights.”  This reassurance likely seems too easy to the human rights advocates who worry that stronger U.S. ties to India and Vietnam, both of which have troubling human rights records, will send a message that the U.S. is willing to tolerate human rights violations in strategically important countries. Biden says he pushes human rights in private talks with those countries’ leaders.  After commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at Ground Zero in New York City, and at the Pentagon in 2021 and 2022, Biden today spoke at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on his way home from Vietnam. He called for national unity to honor the nearly 3,000 people lost that day, urging people to remember “what we can do together. To remember what was destroyed, what can we repair, what was threatened, what we fortified, what was attacked—an indomitable American spirit prevailed over all of it.” In his speech, Biden recalled Senator McCain as a man who always put country “above party, above politics, above his own person. This day reminds us we must never lose that sense of national unity. So, let that be the common cause of our time: let us honor September 11 by renewing our faith in one another.” — Notes: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-biden-japan-united-states-58fb1071c04114c2f2371fed2b768fdc https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/12/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-commitments-to-strengthen-u-s-partnership-with-the-pacific-islands/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/18/the-spirit-of-camp-david-joint-statement-of-japan-the-republic-of-korea-and-the-united-states/ https://apnews.com/article/china-biden-raimondo-economic-competition-investment-controls-2d2a0cad36df8d43383fa05ab8c42bf5 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-10/g20-india-modi-vs-xi-who-won-and-lost-top-things-from-leaders-summit https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/09/10/fact-sheet-president-joseph-r-biden-and-general-secretary-nguyen-phu-trong-announce-the-u-s-vietnam-comprehensive-strategic-partnership/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66725790 https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2012/10/09/the-russia-vietnam-comprehensive-partnership/ https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3231431/south-china-sea-beijing-appears-be-building-runway-disputed-island-claimed-vietnam https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/china-watcher/biden-goes-all-in-on-vietnam/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2023/09/10/press-gaggle-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-deputy-national-security-advisor-jon-finer/ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-awards-medal-honor-pilot-rescued-soldiers-vietnam-rcna103532 https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4197434-biden-pays-respects-to-mccain-memorial-in-vietnam/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48456742 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/09/11/remarks-by-president-biden-and-president-vo-van-thuong-of-vietnam-at-a-state-luncheon/ https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-statement-on-bidens-ransom-to-iran https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/statement-from-vice-president-joe-biden-on-sanctions-relief-during-covid-19-f7c2447416f0 https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2023/08/latest-iran-deal-win-win/389330/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/10/iran-releases-americans-evin-prison-house-arrest/ https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-prisoners-blinken-3e834df0a845ef2cc5c52af14598c66f https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/09/09/joint-statement-from-the-united-states-india-brazil-and-south-africa-on-the-g20/ https://www.npr.org/2023/09/10/1193755188/chile-coup-50-years-pinochet-kissinger-human-rights-allende https://www.state.gov/the-50th-anniversary-of-the-military-coup-in-chile/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/04/politics/biden-september-11-new-york-pennsylvania-pentagon/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/politics/biden-september-11-remarks/index.html https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-prisoners-blinken-3e834df0a845ef2cc5c52af14598c66f ​​​​https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-accused-sidelining-vietnam-india-rights-over-strategic-interests-2023-09-12/ https://alaskapublic.org/2023/09/11/president-biden-commemorates-anniversary-of-9-11-attacks-at-memorial-in-anchorage/