The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers – including three Britons – using a UK-made drone. The news only serves to increase pressure on the Tories to ban arms exports to Israel.

read more: https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2024/04/04/world-central-kitchen-drone-strike/

A Palestinian teacher describes being targeted by Zionist groups with doxing and public harassment. He urges the New York City Chancellor of Education to take action before it turns violent.

On January 31, 2024, a billboard truck, a box truck covered in LED screens that publicly advertise or display information, drove around downtown New York City defaming me as part of a Zionist rally. On February 14, a billboard truck harassed teachers and the overall school community at an elementary school in Brooklyn for their pro-Palestinian views. Similar trucks have been used to harass students and staff at Columbia, Harvard, University of California at Berkley, and various City University of New York campuses where students have spoken out against the “Israeli” genocide of Palestinians (in using quotes when discussing “Israel” I reject the premise of the entity – the a settler-colonial project invented through the forced displacement, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide of the native Palestinians – and instead recognize the entirety of the region as my homeland, Palestine).

On February 28, I was harassed at the school where I teach by a billboard truck. The truck drove around our school building for hours, defaming me as “New York City’s Leading Anti-Semite,” disrupting education and intimidating the community. Later that day, my family and I were harassed at our home by that same truck and menaced by a camera crew pretending to be journalists.

Billboard trucks have been weaponized as tools for harassment and doxing on college campuses, at schools, accompanying rallies, and for menacing in general public spaces. This isn’t the first time I’d been doxed by Zionists, but it was the first time it occurred in person. It was the first time they terrorized me at my home. Make no mistake, I was targeted because of my identity and convictions; I was doxed because I am a Muslim Palestinian. I am not the first person to fall victim to these serial abusers, and I won’t be the last.

In their campaign to terrorize, silence, and kill the opposition, Zionists have added doxing to their arsenal. No one is safe from this public attack. It is so easy to look up a person’s private information with the intent to terrorize them virtually and in public. Bad actors have used doxing to harass people for years now. These people have gotten better at public harassment in ways that avoid accountability in recent years. They are better at terrorizing others and getting away with it. Their doxing to harass has extended to the abuse of students, public school teachers, and school community members. I am a New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) teacher. In New York City, Chancellor David Banks has done nothing to protect the NYCPS staff and community from public doxing and retaliation by Zionist staff members and their external affiliates other than offer hollow platitudes and engage in viewpoint discrimination. His inaction has compromised the safety and security of NYCPS staff and community members who are targeted by Zionists.

read more: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/zionists-have-tried-to-silence-me-through-doxing-and-intimidation-they-wont-succeed/

read more: https://thehardtimes.net/music/hockey-arena-dj-waiting-for-perfect-moment-to-play-welcome-to-the-jungle/

The UN Human Rights Council passed its first ever resolution on Thursday 4 April over tackling discrimination against intersex people, despite opposition from several countries to the terminology used. The resolution passed in the 47-member council with 24 votes in favour, none against and 23 abstentions.

read more: https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-news/2024/04/04/intersex-people-un-resolution/

read more: https://clickhole.com/environmental-fail-nostalgia-ftw-this-3-mile-wide-garbage-patch-in-the-pacific-ocean-is-100-composed-of-troll-dolls/

read more: https://clickhole.com/3-classic-norwegian-fairy-tales-parents-used-to-scare-their-children-out-of-going-on-shark-tank-without-a-clear-pitch/

The allegation that the revered Kenyan author used to beat his wife should start a new conversation on tradition, patriarchy and women’s rights on the continent.

On March 12, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the Kenyan American poet and author, who is the son of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the famed writer widely seen as a giant of African literature, took to X, formerly Twitter, to allege that his father was an abusive husband.

“My father Ngugi wa Thiong’o physically abused my late mother. He would beat her up. Some of my earliest memories are of me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge.”

read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/4/4/ngugi-wa-thiongo-literary-giant-revolutionary-hero-domestic-abuser

Every year on April 5th, Palestinian Children's Day is observed, where Palestinian children have historically lived under extremely difficult conditions due to the occupation. Since the early years of the occupation of Palestinian territories until today, the occupation has targeted children through various means and methods directly, without any consideration for agreements guaranteeing their rights. Through its practices against children in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, the occupation considers targeting children as one of its main objectives in its war against the Palestinian people.

read more: https://addameer.org/node/5309

Filmmaker Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World follows a production assistant on a long day’s drive to screen injured Romanian workers for a workplace safety video — painting a bleak, darkly funny portrait of a hollowed-out world.

**D |**o Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, the latest film by Romanian writer and director Radu Jude, opens with a phone alarm going off at the ungodly hour of 5:50 a.m. As the overworked, underpaid film production assistant (PA) at the center of the story reaches out to silence the alarm, we see her nightstand, littered with the detritus of a hazy night in: an overturned beer bottle, a mostly empty glass of wine, and Marcel Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Call it greeting the day with a grimace.

Throwing on a sequined dress, Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache) stumbles to her van to start an unending day of driving around Bucharest. As is so often the case in the industry, the hours of driving will go on interminably, stretching well into the night. Jude himself was once a PA, and he has said that the death of a fellow PA in a car crash — a stunningly frequent occurrence in the industry — was part of the film’s inspiration.

Angela’s route is determined by a local production company that has been tasked with making a workplace safety film for an Austrian conglomerate that is seeking to polish its reputation and reduce its liability. The conglomerate wants to have a worker who was injured in its Romanian factory appear in the video, and Angela’s task is to prescreen the many candidates. She goes from one shabby apartment to another, filming the borderline-destitute disabled workers as they audition, hoping for the 500 euros that come with the role. Their desperation is palpable, the anxiety radiating off the thin walls. Some of the workers’ families plead with Angela to put in a good word, but the decision is up to the Austrians; after all, she’s just another worker being exploited by the wage differential between her country and that of the corporate overlords.

In crowded homes, workers recount their misfortunes for the screen. One fell off a platform in the factory, but because she had taken a sip of alcohol handed to her in celebration of a coworker’s birthday, the corporation claims it was her fault. Ditto for a worker with a disturbing facial scar who lost the ability to speak following his accident; Angela breaks the news that the corporation is unlikely to choose someone who is mute. Then there is Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan), the worker who the Austrians ultimately choose, a family man who was hit in the head with a rusty piece of metal being used as a barricade in the company parking lot: the impact put him in a coma, then paralyzed him from the waist down.

This is not a safety video; it’s pure propaganda. The conglomerate clearly shares some of the blame for the injuries, yet the most important part of the script, as Angela tells one worker, is when they implore employees to wear the company’s protective gear and not take irresponsible risks, as if it were their own mistakes that left them injured.

About half an hour into Jude’s film, it occurred to me that I was in for a nearly three-hour car ride with Angela. Claustrophobia threatened as I watched her listen to pounding club music and heavy metal, sucking down energy drinks to try to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. (“I can’t go on like this,” she tells a doorman at one point, to which he responds, “That’s what you think.”) That her driving is only ever interrupted by phone calls, usually from her employer, which her phone announces with the “Ode to Joy” (the European Union’s official anthem), only made the atmosphere ghastlier. Much like Jude’s 2021 Berlinale-winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Much From the End of the World has some trying moments. Spending all day stuck in traffic does suck.

Thankfully, Angela’s deliriously scattered dialogue pulled me back down another rabbit hole before my dread could take hold. She’s a magpie, as familiar with Karl Marx and Jean-Luc Godard as she is with celebrity gossip and raunchy jokes (one story she tells, about a porn star who had to pull up PornHub on his phone mid-scene to stay hard, is especially memorable). The jumble of referents evokes social media: specifically TikTok, with its jump cuts and chaotic juxtapositions. And as it turns out, Angela is big on TikTok.

Or rather, her alter ego, Bobiţă — an Andrew Tate–like figure who tells ludicrously pornographic, deeply offensive anecdotes — is big on TikTok. Angela uses a filter to become Bobiţă, though she betrays no concern that her blond hair and body are often visible in frame, overrunning the bounds of the unsettling filter (at the press screening I attended, we received cutouts of Bobiţă’s face; when I texted a photo of the bald, bushy-browed visage to a friend, he informed me that he had immediately deleted the picture).

read more: https://jacobin.com/2024/04/radu-jude-romania-film-review/

Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) and KMHD Jazz Radio on March 22 voluntarily recognized SAG-AFTRA as the bargaining representative of about 65 on-air staff, hosts, reporters, and producers.

OPB is a public, nonprofit broadcasting network that covers most of Oregon and southern Washington. It includes five television stations and 20 radio stations. OPB also operates KMHD Jazz Radio in partnership with Mt. Hood Community College. The content creators at both organizations will be represented under a joint contract negotiated by SAG-AFTRA. (SEIU Local 503 already represented 26 other workers at OPB, including studio coordinators, help desk specialists, videographers, production techs, and maintenance engineers.)

read more: https://nwlaborpress.org/2024/04/opb-reporters-unionize/

After a 16-year-old boy lost both legs last June in a preventable workplace accident in La Center, a follow-up investigation by Washington Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) found that his employer Rotschy LLC has committed dozens of child labor law violations.

Rotschy is a non-union construction excavation company based in Southwest Washington. In December, L&I fined the company more than $156,000 — the maximum penalty — for allowing a minor to operate equipment without appropriate training or experience. The boy was dragged beneath the blade of a walk-behind trencher he was using to dig a channel for fence posts — while participating in a work-based learning program that allows students to earn class credit for jobs outside the classroom. His injuries were so severe that both legs had to be amputated.

Rotschy appealed the fine. The decision on whether to overturn the fine lies with the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals, which has set a mediation conference for April 8. If the conference does not result in a settlement, the board will forward the case to a hearings judge for a trial.

read more: https://nwlaborpress.org/2024/04/vancouver-firm-fined-in-grisly-accident-is-repeat-child-labor-offender/

On September 21, 1970, the New York Times ran its first “op-ed” page. Short for “opposite the editorial,” this new feature provided space for writers with no relationship to the newspaper’s editorial board to express their views. Before long, other newspapers followed suit. More than fifty years later, in order to compete with electronic media news, traditional newspapers have come to utilize opinion pages as a means to attract and keep readers.

Newspaper editors understood the power of opinion pieces as early as 1921 when editor Herbert Bayard Swope of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York World said: “Nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial… and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”

The pioneering opinion pieces Swope published were written by newspaper staff; and, while he may have ignored some facts in the opinions he published, contemporary newspapers claim to aspire to journalistic integrity. In its op-ed guidelines, the Washington Post, for example, notes that all op-eds are fact-checked. Post guidelines explain that authors with “important titles,” like “senators, business leaders, heads of state,” are held “to a particularly high standard when considering whether to publish them in The Post.”

As competition for the public’s attention stiffens in a social media and online communications-saturated environment, it’s perhaps not surprising that conflicts of interest arise in the op-ed pages. In 2011, more than 50 journalists and academics urged greater transparency about conflicts of interest among New York Times op-ed page contributors. In an October 6, 2011, letter to Arthur Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, they criticized the practice of “special interests surreptitiously funding ‘experts’ to push industry talking points in the nation’s major media outlets,” absent reporting of those writers’ vested interests.

In their letter to the Times, the signatories called out the unreported bias of Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce. The Institute received millions of dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry. Bryce’s promotion of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, they wrote, flew in the face of his “masquerading as an unbiased expert.”

Corporate media consolidation has strategically limited the diversity of perspectives and the quality of journalism and unduly influenced audience opinion. With a handful of large corporations controlling a majority of media outlets, content homogenization and profit prioritization often replace journalistic integrity. For instance, the acquisition of hundreds of weekly and daily newspapers by conglomerates like Gannett has led to a reduction in independent voices, an increase in editorial uniformity, biased editorials and op-eds, and news deserts.

read more: https://www.projectcensored.org/op-ed-abuse/