October 23, 2021

ICE deported men back to Cameroon and Uganda restrained in "the Wrap" for hours

When Godswill entered the San Ysidro Port of Entry in the summer of 2019 to request asylum from his home country of Cameroon, he thought he had finally reached a safe haven.

But what he says happened in U.S. custody, particularly as he was being deported back to Cameroon, left him feeling betrayed.

Before Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials put him on a deportation flight in November 2020, they cinched him into a restraining device called The WRAP, which held his legs tightly straight and together while pulling his head and chest down towards his knees at a sharp angle, Godswill said. Because of his vulnerable situation, he asked to be identified only as the pseudonym given to him in the complaint.

“It’s something I would never wish for my enemy,” Godswill said in an interview. “It is humiliating. It is demoralizing. It is a high degree of torture.”



The complaint also raises the question of whether the treatment was motivated by racism. So far, the only deportees that advocates have identified as having experienced The WRAP were Black asylum seekers from African countries.

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The WRAP, created by California-based Safe Restraints Inc., was designed to allow law enforcement officers to restrain someone without holding the person face down, according to the company’s president and CEO Charles Hammond. It is meant to be used to hold someone upright at a 90-degree angle or leaning back slightly.

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He recalled some officers pushing his back so his head would go down further towards his legs as they tightened the straps. He waited on the tarmac while other deportees boarded the plane. Then the officers carried him “like a bunch of wood,” and “dumped” him onto a set of three seats on the plane, he said. He had to travel sideways because of the device.

“I cried like I’ve never cried before. I cried like a child,” Godswill said. “I believed they were killing me.”

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/story/2021-10-13/ice-torture-asylum-seeker-deportation

October 23, 2021

USC Sigma Nu frat prez is the main suspect in rape, students surround & cover frat house with signs

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1451921352244482048

https://twitter.com/dailytrojan/status/1451782923699384322

https://twitter.com/dailytrojan/status/1451782926048194564

https://twitter.com/LMarieVResists/status/1451938308972433415


https://dailytrojan.com/2021/10/22/protests-continue-for-second-day-after-sexual-assault-reports/

October 22, 2021

Swedish rapper Einar shot dead at 19, stoking outrage over gang violence

Einar, 19, whose real name was Nils Gronberg, was killed in the upmarket Stockholm suburb of Hammarby Sjostad, and no arrests had been made so far. In a previous incident last year, Einar was abducted and assaulted by rival rappers.

"A young life has been extinguished, and I understand that he meant a lot to many young people. It is tragic," Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told TT, Sweden's national news agency.

Gronberg, who made his debut at 16, issued four albums, had tens of millions of streams on music platforms and won several Swedish Grammys and other awards.

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Sweden has suffered gang-violence for years and gone from having one of the lowest rates of gun crime in Europe to having one of the highest over the past two decades.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/22/europe/swedish-rapper-einar-dead-scli-intl/index.html

October 22, 2021

'Needle Spiking' of Women in Britain Stirs Alarm Over New Kind of Assault

‘Needle Spiking’ of Women in Britain Stirs Alarm Over New Kind of Assault
Women are reporting being injected with syringes at crowded clubs in a horrifying variation of dropping pill into drinks. “This is a new depth,’’ said a former chief of police.

NOTTINGHAM, England — Lizzie Wilson was standing in a crowded nightclub on Monday night with three friends when she felt a sharp pinch in her back, as if she had been pricked by a needle. Ten minutes later, she was struggling to stand.

Ms. Wilson, 18, said she had heard about young women being injected with syringes at crowded clubs and immediately feared she was another victim. Her friends rushed her to the hospital, where she spent hours disoriented and without sensation in her legs.

“Nobody should ever go through that,” said Ms. Wilson, a student in her first year of college in Nottingham in central England. “The most upsetting thing is, I could not control anything.”


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Now come alarming reports, if still relatively small in number, of women being injected with syringes at crowded pubs and nightclubs, in a variation of “spiking,” in which drugs are dropped into someone’s drink, a crime that often targets women. A number of police forces in England are investigating reports of “needle spiking,” including 12 incidents in Nottinghamshire. Police in Scotland are looking into similar reports.


https/www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/world/europe/needle-spiking-uk.html

October 22, 2021

'I've lost my joy': Anti-vax Republican has covid, blames nasal swab test for giving her covid

Business Insider
'I've lost my joy': Anti-vax Republican, who worked for the Trump campaign and embraced QAnon, says she has COVID-19

https://news.yahoo.com/ive-lost-joy-anti-vax-215403731.html

Lauren Witzke was the 2020 GOP Senate nominee in Delaware.

She ran against Democratic incumbent Sen. Chris Coons, winning 37.9% of the vote.

She has suggested COVID-19 vaccines are part of a satanic plot.

A Delaware Republican who said coronavirus vaccines were part of a satanic plan to cause "mass death" is recovering from COVID-19, she announced Thursday, saying the illness had caused her to lose "all of my senses."

Lauren Witzke, a self-styled "Christian nationalist" who embraced QAnon and support from white supremacists, was the Delaware GOP's candidate for Senate in 2020, receiving 186,000 votes in her failed run against Democratic incumbent Sen. Chris Coons.

In a post on Gab, a social network popular with right-wing extremists, Witzke claimed she was "recovering from this insane bio-weapon called Covid." The 33-year-old, who has worked as a political commentator for the right-wing Christian conspiracy site TruNews, said she had decided not to tell anyone earlier so as not to alert "the shitlibs in the media."

"This bio-weapon is demonic," she wrote. "I've lost all of my senses and struggle with constant indifference, brain fog, and I've lost my joy."

In posts shared on her Telegram channel, Witzke blamed TruNews for making her aware of the infection, insisting that nasal swabs were ultimately responsible for her getting COVID-19. "I'm an idiot for submitting to their demands and getting tested," she wrote, "and yes I know I need a good husband in my life to keep me from making bad decisions."

October 22, 2021

Hackers Invade New Trump Site with fake accounts, pics of defecating pigs, profane rants

Hackers Invade New Trump Site Almost Immediately
Truth Social platform bombarded with fake accounts, pics of defecating pigs

Donald Trump created Truth Social to "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," but the former president's new social media platform doesn't have the legs yet to stand up to hackers. Just a couple of hours after Trump on Wednesday introduced Truth Social and its parent company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, someone breached a private version of the still-to-be-launched social media site. They went to town, first creating a fake "donaldjtrump" account, then setting up even more not-real handles under the names of Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, and Twitter's own Jack Dorsey, reports the New York Times.


From there, the hackers went the scatological route, posting profane rants that targeted Dorsey, as well as photos of defecating pigs. Claiming responsibility for the breach: the infamous hacking collective Anonymous, with members telling the Times the move was part of their "online war against hate." "We had a fun time trolling it to high heaven," one hacker says. Mikael Thalen of the Daily Dot talked to a representative from the group, who told him they sussed out the name of a developer involved in the project then used the Shodan search engine to do some digging.

Not long after, they found a web domain "that appeared to be running the mobile beta for Truth Social." Thalen himself demonstrated how easy it was to infiltrate the site, setting himself up as donaldtrump. Truth Social eventually caught on to what was happening and took the domain offline. This hack comes just days after Trump's regular DonaldJTrump.com site was breached, apparently by a Turkish "hacktivist" who embedded a nationalist video of controversial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reports Gizmodo

https://www.newser.com/story/312491/hackers-invade-new-trump-site-almost-immediately.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top

October 22, 2021

SEPTA train rape narrative is NOT TRUE...

The story of a horrific rape last week aboard a SEPTA train on the outskirts of Philly seemed to get even worse when cops revealed that bystanders sat by and did nothing to help, instead holding up their phones to record the incident. Now, Delaware County's chief prosecutor says that narrative is a false one, and that there's surveillance video to prove it. "That is simply not true. It did not happen," District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said Thursday of the story floating that fellow passengers "watched this transpire and took videos of it for their own gratification," per NBC Philadelphia.


Stollsteimer says SEPTA security footage shows a "handful" of travelers hopping on and off the elevated commuter train on Oct. 13, but he adds they may not have realized exactly what was happening, especially during the times when the train was moving. As for everyone sitting around recording the rape, Stollsteimer says there may have been two people who did so, but at least one of them "probably" flagged down SEPTA staff. "People in this region are not, in my experience, so inhuman and callous" that they would do such a thing "for their own private enjoyment," Stollsteimer notes.

The original passengers-did-nothing narrative emerged from SEPTA officials and Upper Darby Police Department Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt, with Bernhardt calling it "disturbing." On Thursday, Stollsteimer didn't appear to point the finger at anyone in particular, but he slammed what he said was "misinformation" and compared the case to that of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in Queens in 1964. The story at the time was that dozens of witnesses similarly ignored her pleas for help, but it's a tale that's since been debunked, Stollsteimer noted, per the Philadelphia Inquirer.

https://www.newser.com/story/312469/da-not-true-others-filmed-rape-for-own-gratification.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_world_login

October 21, 2021

Searching For the Graves Of Canada's Indigenous Children

For more than a century, Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend residential schools, where many endured sexual and physical abuse. Thousands were never seen again. We followed a team of archaeologists who came to the Muskowekwan First Nation to search for the graves of these lost children. Based on historical documents and interviews with survivors, researchers said they expected to find more than 80 unmarked graves.

In this video, we embedded with a group of archeologists who, using ground-penetrating radar technology, can get a detailed look of disturbances in the ground. They’re looking for shallow pits of about 1 meter in length when looking for the unmarked graves of children.

Their research is helping prove what residential school survivors have long talked about, but were often ignored outside their communities.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/20/video/indigenous-graves-children-canada-video.html

VIDEO AT LINK

October 21, 2021

The Married Will Soon Be the Minority

Some people were delaying marriage. But others were forgoing it altogether.

This trend has only continued, and we are now nearing a milestone. This month, the Pew Research Center published an analysis of census data showing that in 2019 the share of American adults who were neither married nor living with a partner had risen to 38 percent, and while that group “includes some adults who were previously married (those who are separated, divorced or widowed), all of the growth in the unpartnered population since 1990 has come from a rise in the number who have never been married.”

This came on the heels of data released by the National Center for Health Statistics last year, which showed that marriage rates in 2018 had reached a record low.

We are nearing a time when there will be more unmarried adults in the United States than married ones, a development with enormous consequences for how we define family and adulthood in general, as well as how we structure taxation and benefits.

Of course, the unmarried and unpartnered portions of the population vary among demographic groups. As Pew pointed out:

Among those ages 25 to 54, 59 percent of Black adults were unpartnered in 2019. This is higher than the shares among Hispanic (38 percent), white (33 percent) and Asian (29 percent) adults. For most racial and ethnic groups, men are more likely than women to be unpartnered. The exception is among Black adults, where women (62 percent) are more likely to be unpartnered than men (55 percent).

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/opinion/marriage-decline-america.html

October 21, 2021

With the federal eviction moratorium over, many call Las Vegas' Desert Moon Motel home

With the federal eviction moratorium over, many call Las Vegas’ Desert Moon Motel home


LAS VEGAS — Jake Crandall took a deep pull from his vape as a woman emerged from the darkness of Fremont Street and into the parking lot of the Desert Moon Motel. She gripped the final $20 she owed him.
“Here you go,” she said. He didn’t ask how she got it.

“Thanks,” Crandall, the property manager, replied. “We will figure it out again tomorrow.”

It was just after 9 p.m., and since she had now paid the full daily rate — $57 — Room 5 would again be hers for the night, a welcome reprieve from the woman’s other option: the back seat of her red Pontiac sedan. Crandall knew the woman, who asked that her name not be used because of the sensitivity of her situation, didn’t have anywhere else to stay.

For much of the last week, she and her two teenagers, both autistic, alternated between sleeping at the motel or inside the car. The 45-year-old woman said she lost her one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever since, she’s been traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, staying with family when she can.

Crandall, a 19-year-old self-described beatnik in his gap year who recently moved from Santa Cruz, runs the day-to-day operations at the Desert Moon for his uncle, who owns the aging, 30-room motel.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-10-21/las-vegas-motel-provides-eviction-relief-amid-covid-economy