Decision to keep Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford college ‘a slap in the face’

The governing body of Oriel College said it will not take down the monument at this stage.

The statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, University of Oxford / PA Archive

Eleanor Busby
THE EVENING STANDARD

20/5/2021

An Oxford University college’s decision not to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes has been called “a slap in the face” by campaigners.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign accused Oriel College of “institutional racism” after the governing body said it would not seek to move the monument at this stage.

The campaigners – which staged protests last summer over the statue of the British imperialist – are urging the college “to reconsider their position immediately” as they pledged to continue their fight.

An independent inquiry to examine Rhodes’ legacy was set up in June last year after the governing body of Oriel College “expressed their wish” to remove the statue from outside the college.

A majority of members on the commission supported the college’s original wish to remove the statue.

The morality of the decision of whether to remove the statue above High Street has been subsumed into a cost-benefit analysis, one that does not take into account the human cost of letting the statue remain

But a statement by Oriel College on Thursday said: “The governing body has carefully considered the regulatory and financial challenges, including the expected time frame for removal, which could run into years with no certainty of outcome, together with the total cost of removal.

“In light of the considerable obstacles to removal, Oriel’s governing body has decided not to begin the legal process for relocation of the memorials.”

The decision comes after a long-running campaign demanding the removal of the British imperialist’s monument gained renewed attention amid the Black Lives Matter movement.

A statement from the Rhodes Must Fall campaign said: “No matter how Oriel College might try to justify their decision, allowing the statue to remain is an act of institutional racism.

“The morality of the decision of whether to remove the statue above High Street has been subsumed into a cost-benefit analysis, one that does not take into account the human cost of letting the statue remain.

“Pretending that this is a choice made due to financial costs is a slap in the face with the hand of white supremacy, fed by the value system of profit before humanity, the same value system that justified enslavement.”

The campaigners added: “We are disappointed at the refusal to listen to not only the voices of the people who have called for the removal of the statue of Rhodes for many years, but their own governing body and the recommendations of the independent commission.


“We will continue to fight for the fall of this statue and everything it represents.”

Black Lives Matter protests / PA Archive


Councillor Susan Brown, leader of Oxford City Council, said: “I am personally deeply disappointed that Oriel College have chosen today to backtrack on their previous decision to remove the Rhodes statue and ignore the views of the commission on this crucial part of their work.

“For people in our city this was the most important action that Oriel College could have taken to show an acknowledgement of the discrimination of the past and they have failed to act.”

But Education Secretary Gavin Williamson tweeted: “Sensible & balanced decision not to remove the Rhodes statue from Oriel College, Oxford – because we should learn from our past, rather than censoring history, and continue focussing on reducing inequality.”

Meanwhile, Dr Samir Shah, vice-chair of think tank Policy Exchange’s History Matters Project, said: “Oriel has rightly decided not to spend time on a fruitless effort to change the past, but to plough resources into trying to change the future, especially for ethnic minority young people.”

Announcing its decision not to remove the statue now, the college said it will focus its time and resources on “improving educational equality, diversity and inclusion” among its student cohort and academic community.

The governing body has agreed to:

– Create the office of Tutor for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion– Fundraise for scholarships to support students from southern Africa– Have an annual lecture on a topic related to the Rhodes legacy, race, or colonialism– Provide additional training for academic and non-academic staff in race awareness– Introduce further outreach initiatives targeted at BME student recruitment

The independent commission was due to publish its findings in January, but the report was delayed due to Covid and the volume of submissions received.

A statement from Oriel College said most of the submissions to the commission backed the retention of the statue, but commission members did not make specific recommendations on the issue.

The report acknowledged the considerable planning and heritage considerations involved in removing the statue from a Grade II* listed building.

The governing body of Oriel College has agreed to contextualise the Rhodes legacy and memorials, including both physical elements at the site and virtual resources, and it will commission a virtual exhibition to provide an arena for contextualisation and explanation of the Rhodes legacy.

Lord Mendoza, provost of Oriel College, said: “It has been a careful, finely balanced debate and we are fully aware of the impact our decision is likely to have in the UK and further afield.

“We understand this nuanced conclusion will be disappointing to some, but we are now focused on the delivery of practical actions aimed at improving outreach and the day-to-day experience of BME students.

“We are looking forward to working with Oxford City Council on a range of options for contextualisation.”

An Oxford City Council spokesperson said: “We note the college’s decision not to remove the statue, but we are ready to progress any planning issues should they revise this decision.”

In 2016, Oriel College decided to keep the controversial statue in place following a consultation despite protests from campaigners.

Last summer, demonstrations took place outside Oriel College, calling for the statue to be removed from the High Street entrance of the building, as well as anti-racism protests, following the death of George Floyd in the US.

 AQUARISTS:

CT scans offer new view of Lake Malawi cichlid specimens in Penn State museum

Modern technology aids effort to characterize fish species in huge southern Africa water

PENN STATE

Research News

 

IMAGE: THIS ILLUSTRATION SHOWS THE VARIATION IN BODY MORPHOLOGY IN CICHLID FISHES IN LAKE MALAWI. THE BODY OF WATER IN SOUTHERN AFRICA, HOME TO BETWEEN 800 AND 1,000 SPECIES OF THE... view more 

CREDIT: JAY STAUFFER JR., PENN STATE

Computed tomography -- CT scanning -- which combines a series of X-ray images taken from different angles around an organism and uses computer processing to create cross-sectional images of its bones, is providing new insight into an old initiative to characterize fishes in Africa's Lake Malawi.

The process, demonstrated in a new study using the high-resolution X-ray computer system in Penn State's Center for Quantitative X-Ray Imaging, is important because it will lead to the identification and management of more of the fish species in Africa's second largest lake, according to lead researcher Jay Stauffer Jr., distinguished professor of ichthyology in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

"Before they can effectively manage fish populations, they have to know what is there," he said.

Regarded by scientists as the most vibrant and diverse body of water in the world, Lake Malawi is home to between 800 and 1,000 species of colorful fish called cichlids; however, the lake is overfished by humans for food. As a result, about 10% of those species are believed to be endangered.

Located between Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique, Lake Malawi is immense. It covers an area of more than 11,000 square miles and holds 7% of the world's available surface freshwater -- by comparison, appreciably more than Lake Erie.

"About half the species in the lake still haven't been described," said Stauffer, who has characterized, or discovered, more than 60 cichlid species himself. Since 1983, he has visited Lake Malawi for extended periods annually, collecting cichlid specimens while scuba diving.

After preservation, those specimens have been housed in the Penn State Fish Museum at Rock Springs, and approximately 35,000 are scheduled to be transferred to the National Research Institute of South Africa this year after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. In the recent study, Stauffer and colleagues performed CT scans on selected specimens in the collection.

The entire head of each fish was scanned, and the researchers focused on the "morphology" -- analyzing the shape and profiles of the skulls and the structure and arrangement of teeth on the pharyngeal jaws and the oral jaws. This helps to determine a species' specialization to capitalize on certain food sources and to compete with other species.

"We chose species to scan that we knew had different feeding repertoires, and then we wanted to compare their head morphology with their species' feeding specializations to determine the relationships between morphology and behaviors," Stauffer said. "The purpose of this research was to show how observed behavioral traits of shallow-water species can be linked with morphological attributes using data collected from selected cichlids. Such associations can be used to predict behavior of deep-water or rare species, based on head morphology."

CAPTION

High-resolution CT scans and photographs of herbivorous cichlids, with key characters emphasized by arrows, such as strong jaws, small close-set teeth, straight-line mouth, deeply set teeth, comb-like triple crown teeth and widely spaced conical teeth.

CREDIT

Jay Stauffer Jr., Penn State

In findings recently published in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers reported that high-resolution CT scanning will enable scientists to infer life history and behavioral characteristics of rare or extinct fishes from a detailed examination of morphology and linkages between morphology and behavior observed in surviving species.

Stauffer and other scientists will use CT scanning as they continue to identify cichlids in Lake Malawi. The technology is nondestructive, he explained, so they can collect data from specimens in museum collections.

"High-resolution computed tomography permits us to view the internal morphology and examine areas that would otherwise be destroyed by dissection," he said. "It will be a great help to me because I'm going over there and spending four to six weeks a year at the institute, identifying fishes that are in its museum."

Many of those older museum specimens are surprising him, noted Stauffer, who is 70 and has no plans to retire. "I'm finding a lot of species I've never seen before in more than 30 years of diving in Malawi. I think they're probably extinct. I'd like to describe these species, and the CT scans will help me to make accurate guesses about what their behavior was in the lake."

Adrianus Konings, ichthyologist, photographer, and founder and publisher of Cichlid Press in El Paso, Texas; and Joshua Wisor, doctoral degree student in wildlife and fisheries science, contributed to this research.

###

Funding for the study was provided in part by the National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health joint program in ecology of infectious diseases and the Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station, Penn State.

World's biggest iceberg breaks off from Antarctica

CBC/Radio-Canada 

20/5/2021

© ESA/Copernicus Sentinel-1 Mission, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO/Reuters A view of the newly calved iceberg designated A-76 by scientists, the largest currently afloat in the world according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and captured by the ESA's Copernicus…

A giant slab of ice has sheared off from the frozen edge of Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg afloat in the world, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday.

The newly calved berg, designated A-76 by scientists, was spotted in recent satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, the space agency said in a statement posted on its website with a photo of the enormous, oblong ice sheet.

Its surface area spans 4,320 square kilometres (1,668 square miles) and measures 175 kilometres (106 miles) long by 25 kilometres (15 miles) wide. That makes it three-quarters the size of P.E.I., which has an area of 5,660 square kilometres, and larger than Spain's tourist island of Majorca in the Mediterranean, which occupies 3,640 square kilometres (1,405 square miles). The U.S. state of Rhode Island is smaller still, with a land mass of just 2,678 square kilometres (1,034 square miles).

The enormity of A-76, which broke away from Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf, ranks as the largest existing iceberg on the planet, surpassing the now second-place A-23A, about 3,380 square kilometres (1,305 square miles) in size and also floating in the Weddell Sea.

Another massive Antarctic iceberg that had threatened a penguin-populated island off the southern tip of South America has since lost much of its mass and broken into pieces, scientists said earlier this year.

A-76 was first detected by the British Antarctic Survey and confirmed by the Maryland-based U.S. National Ice Center using imagery from Copernicus Sentinel-1, consisting of two polar-orbiting satellites.

The Ronne Ice Shelf near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the largest of several enormous floating sheets of ice that connect to the continent's landmass and extend out into surrounding seas.
Not linked to climate change

Periodic calving of large chunks of those shelves is part of a natural cycle, and the breaking off of A-76, which is likely to split into two or three pieces soon, is not linked to climate change, said Ted Scambos, a research glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos said the Ronne and another vast ice shelf, the Ross, have "behaved in a stable, quasi-periodic fashion" over the past century or more. Because the ice was already floating in the sea before dislodging from the coast, its breakaway does not raise ocean levels, he told Reuters by email.

Some ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula, farther from the South Pole, have undergone rapid disintegration in recent years, a phenomenon scientists believe may be related to global warming, according to the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center.

Sharks use Earth's magnetic field as a GPS, scientists say


PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Sharks use the Earth's magnetic field as a sort of natural GPS to navigate journeys that take them great distances across the world's oceans, scientists have found.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Researchers said their marine laboratory experiments with a small species of shark confirm long-held speculation that sharks use magnetic fields as aids to navigation — behavior observed in other marine animals such as sea turtles.

Their study, published this month in the journal Current Biology, also sheds light on why sharks are able to traverse seas and find their way back to feed, breed and give birth, said marine policy specialist Bryan Keller, one of the study authors.

“We know that sharks can respond to magnetic fields," Keller said. “We didn’t know that they detected it to use as an aid in navigation ... You have sharks that can travel 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) and end up in the same spot.”

The question of how sharks perform long-distance migrations has intrigued researchers for years. The sharks undertake their journeys in the open ocean where they encounter few physical features such as corals that could serve as landmarks.

Looking for answers, scientists based at Florida State University decided to study bonnethead sharks — a kind of hammerhead that lives on both American coasts and returns to the same estuaries every year.

Researchers exposed 20 bonnetheads to magnetic conditions that simulated locations hundreds of kilometers (miles) away from where they were caught off Florida. The scientists found that the sharks began to swim north when the magnetic cues made them think they were south of where they should be.

That finding is compelling, said Robert Hueter, senior scientist emeritus at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, who was not involved in the study.

Hueter said further study is needed to find how the sharks use the magnetic fields to determine their location and whether larger, long-distance migrating sharks use a similar system to find their way.

“The question has always been: Even if sharks are sensitive to magnetic orientation, do they use this sense to navigate in the oceans, and how? These authors have made some progress at chipping away at this question,” he said.

Keller said the study could help inform management of shark species, which are in decline. A study this year found that worldwide abundance of oceanic sharks and rays dropped more than 70% between 1970 and 2018.

Researchers say the bonnethead's reliance on Earth's magnetic field probably is shared by other species of sharks, such as great whites, that make cross-ocean journeys. Keller said it's very unlikely bonnetheads evolved with a magnetic sensitivity and other traveling sharks did not.

___

Follow Patrick Whittle on Twitter: @pxwhittle

Patrick Whittle, The Associated Press

A 200 YEAR OLD MEDICAL CHARITY

Wellcome's opaque fossil fuel investments harm its global health mission

Investigation explores the charity's ongoing ties to the fossil fuel industry

BMJ

Research News

 

The Wellcome Trust's commitment to tackle the health impacts of carbon emissions is threatened by its own lingering investments in the fossil fuel industry.

So why does it continue to shun calls to divest while raising the status of climate change in its strategy?

In a special report published by The BMJ today, independent journalist Tim Schwab explains that Wellcome has long faced criticism about its £28 billion endowment's deep investments in fossil fuels. Its most recent annual report states that 4% of its public and private equity holdings are in "energy" equal to around £1bn, including a stake of more than £300m in BP and Shell.

But Schwab has uncovered that Wellcome's financial stake in the continued use of fossil fuels extends well beyond its shareholder positions in oil and gas companies.

In recent tax filings in the United States, Wellcome reported more than $130 million in deductible "qualified expenses" related to "intangible drilling" costs between 2014 and 2018.

Intangible drilling costs usually describe the expenses involved in constructing new oil wells, and the related tax deductions function as government subsidies that prop up the fossil fuel industry - and that can incentivize expanded oil and gas production.

Wellcome said the deductions detailed in its tax forms relate to "a number of legacy private equity positions through funds and co-investments in energy-related businesses," but would not provide The BMJ with details, nor would it agree to interviews.

Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Global Wallace Fund, a US-based charity that chose to divest its endowment from oil, gas, and coal a decade ago, described the news as "absolutely unbelievable." She said: "We receive charitable tax status to serve the public good, and our investments shouldn't be undercutting the public good. There isn't a significant foundation that works on climate or health and doesn't know that this debate is happening, and that they should make the decision to divest."

Robin Stott, a member of the executive committee of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, said: "It worries me that Wellcome may be engaging in this kind of rather covert or oblique way of supporting the fossil fuel industries."

Worldwide, more than 1300 large institutions, including 200 philanthropies, have announced their commitment to divest a total wealth of more than $14trn.

Yet Wellcome has pushed back on divestment as far back as 2015 when the Guardian newspaper announced a campaign targeting Wellcome and the Gates Foundation.

At the time, Wellcome's director Jeremy Farrar called divestment a "grand gesture," arguing that the charity can be far more effective at fighting climate change by having a seat at the table and pressuring fossil fuel companies to change their business practices. However, Wellcome refused to specify what the trust had achieved through his strategy.

Brett Fleishman, head of global finance campaigns at environmental group 350.org, says "nothing has been achieved at the table through shareholder action ... that meaningfully aligns with climate science."

In 2015, Wellcome announced a £75m five year programme called Our Planet, Our Health, described as "a new initiative to investigate the connections between environment and health."

Yet this commitment represented a minuscule portion of the billions of pounds in charitable expenditures Wellcome had made over the previous five years - and seems like a strikingly small sum, considering how prominently the charity promotes its work on climate change, notes Schwab.

Saskia Heijnen, a former Wellcome staffer who helped get the Our Planet, Our Health programme off the ground, notes that while the trust has immense resources at its disposal to aggressively tackle health crises - which it has done in epidemics such as Ebola, Zika, and covid-19 - it hasn't put its full weight behind fighting climate change.

By the end of 2019, the Gates Foundation had divested its $50bn endowment from fossil fuels which could put new pressure on Wellcome to extricate its endowment from fossil fuels, suggests Schwab.

But tax records from 2019 report the foundation having many investments in fossil fuels, including some of the world's largest oil, gas, and coal companies such as Exxon, Chevron, and Glencore, raising questions about what it means to divest.

Brett Fleishman of 350.org, which maintains a database of groups that have pledged to divest, explains: "It would be very weird for an institutional investor to announce divestment but fake it. We are happy to make the adjustment on our database if the Gates Foundation can't meaningfully respond to requests for clarification."

###

Externally peer reviewed? No
Evidence type: Investigation
Subject: The Wellcome Trust

STATIST WAR ON THE POOR

Tensions flare as Toronto homeless camp cleared




Duration: 01:25


Tensions flared at a homeless encampment in Toronto on Wednesday as city officials, flanked by dozens of police officers, moved in to clear the site. Residents and their supporters shouted at police, who in turn threatened many with arrest. At least three activists were handcuffed and taken away from the encampment at Lamport Stadium before city officials moved out. Several hours later, police and the city gave up after clearing out one tent and two small wooden shelters. About two dozen remain.

Israeli city where Jews and Arabs have lived as neighbours now seeing unprecedented violence

Margaret Evans 

CBC NEWS

20/5/2021

© Stephanie Jenzer/CBC A burnt-out car sits on a street near a mosque in Lod, a mixed city in Israel, after violence broke out between Jewish and Arab Israelis last week. Rioting started after police ended a protest organized by Palestinian Arab Israelis over fighting…

At first glance, the Israeli city of Lod in central Israel seems like it's just shut down for a siesta. The weather is hot, the shops are shuttered and even the call to prayer from a nearby mosque seems ready for a nap.

But the husk of a burnt-out car sits on one street in the centre of town, and there are scorch marks on a synagogue just around the corner from it. An unusually large number of Israeli police officers are stationed on mostly empty streets.

Lod has been under a state of emergency since last week, when a bout of vicious and unprecedented inter-communal violence broke out between Jewish and Arab Israelis.


Suliman Zabarqa is confronting some of the officers leaning against the walls outside his restaurant, also shuttered. He's asking why they stood by when Jewish rioters burned his property.

A Palestinian citizen of Israel, Zabarqa says the police didn't act the way they should have, allowing hard-line Israeli nationalists "from outside Lod" to take the law into their own hands.

Neighbours now frightened of each other

The rioting started after Israeli police broke up a demonstration organized by Palestinian Arab Israelis at the start of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza that began more than a week ago.

A man named Musa Hassuna was shot and killed on May 10, reportedly by a Jewish man. The next day, Yigal Yehoshua, a Jewish man, was hit in the head by a brick and attacked by Arab youths, according to reports. He died on Monday of his injuries.

The anger was out of the bottle. Five synagogues were set on fire while Arab Israelis reported firebomb attacks on their homes. Mobs took over the streets, and the unrest quickly spread to other mixed cities in Israel.

© Ammar Awad/Reuters A Jewish settler and a Palestinian protester take pictures of each other with their phones on May 5 amid ongoing tension over a land-ownership dispute in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. Settlers want to evict Palestinian families, claiming the land is theirs.

Now, people who once called each other neighbour are frightened of each other.

"I'm scared for our lives. I have two kids, and I'm unarmed," said Tamer Nafar, standing on the edge of a plaza known as the "Triangle of Religions" in Hebrew.

"Look how beautiful it is," he said. "You have a mosque, you have a church, and you have a synagogue."

Nafar is a well-known Palestinian rapper, born in Lod. He's also an activist who says the anger that recently boiled over onto the streets among Arab Israelis is born of decades of racism and discrimination.  

© Stephanie Jenzer/CBC

 Tamer Nafar, a well-known Palestinian rapper who was born in Lod, says the anger that recently boiled over onto the streets among Arab Israelis is born of decades of racism and discrimination.

"I mean, Israel doesn't consider me Israeli. The [national] anthem says land for the Jews, ignoring the Muslims," he said.

"The things we are going through here, from housing, from demolishing houses, the media only sees it when it escalates, and we've been trying to create a dialogue for years."

On the second day of rioting, Nafar says, he and his wife witnessed armed Jewish hardliners arriving on the scene.

"So, I call the cops because I'm a f--kin' taxpayer, and they take my money every week."

He says the police eventually hung up on him.
Arrival of settlers has changed city's character

Palestinian Arabs make up about 20 per cent of Israel's population and 30 per cent of Lod's.

But in recent years, there's been an addition to the mix in Lod in the form of hardline nationalist and religious settlers moving to the city, part of the Garin Torani movement.

"The main strategy was to establish settlements in the mixed cities," said Amnon Be'eri-Sulitzeanu of the Abraham Initiatives, an Israeli think-tank promoting equality for Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens.

© Heidi Levine/The Associated Press Israeli paramilitary border police detain Jewish settlers during clashes between Israeli Arabs, Jews and police in Lod on May 12.

"To Judaize those places where there is more Arab presence or there is ongoing conflict between the communities or there is a need to demonstrate Jewish sovereignty or to reclaim, if you like, the area," he said.

The settlers' arrival has slowly changed the character of some parts of the city, and when the rioting broke out in Lod, Be'eri-Sulitzeanu says that reinforcements were called in from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Around the corner from the Triangle of Religions, cars pull up to a large yeshiva still bearing the scars of last week's riots.

© Jean-François Bisson/CBC A yeshiva, where Jewish students study traditional religious texts, bears the scars of the violence in Lod.

Young men wearing the uniform of nationalist religious Jews — knitted kippas and long beards and earlocks — are arriving for a meeting of volunteers. They're setting up a sort of neighbourhood watch group to protect the property of Jewish families who fled during the unrest.

Police stand guard outside, and blocks of shabby-looking apartment buildings stand opposite, Israeli flags hanging out of some of the windows. Arab women carry groceries into the building and up the stairs.

"We're standing in front of a building [where] two Jewish families and four, six or seven Arab families have been living together for the past 10 years," said Ayelet Wadler, a physicist and mother of six who lives a few blocks away.

"They have been helping each other change tires, carry groceries. And on Tuesday night, on Monday night, suddenly they've had their neighbours who have been living with them for 10 years point out to rioters, 'Here, this is theirs, this is a Jewish car. Burn it.'"

© Jean-François Bisson/CBC Ayelet Wadler, a physicist and mother of six who has lived in Lod for 15 years, says she's distressed that a number of Jewish families who lived nearby didn't feel safe enough to stay in their homes because of the unrest, and she blames Arab Israelis.

Wadler has lived in Lod for 15 years. She says she believes Arab Israelis are the ones responsible for what happened and is happy to see the men across the street gathering, some of whom stare at bystanders and look menacing.

"I don't see vigilantes," she said. "I see people defending the house."

Wadler says she is extremely distressed that a number of Jewish families didn't feel safe enough to remain in their own homes.

"They were refugees in their own country. That is inconceivable. That's something that cannot happen."
'They are not going away, and we are not going away'

Her failure to connect her comments to the history of her fellow Palestinian citizens speaks volumes about the challenges of reconciliation and understanding in the country.

Palestinians on both sides of the green line between Israel and the occupied territories refer to the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 as al Nakba, the catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced to flee Israeli troops in the war that came with it.

Be'eri-Sulitzeanu says many Jewish Israelis simply don't know the history.

"They don't know that within Israel proper, about a fifth of the Arab population within Israel are internal refugees as well, including most of the Arabs who live in Lod. They themselves are refugees because they arrive in Lod after '48 from destroyed villages throughout Israel."

© Heidi Levine/The Associated Press Haha Nakib looks at one of the several vandalized graves in a Muslim cemetery in Lod on May 14, as fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza intensifies.

By the same token, many Palestinian Arab Israelis do not understand the heart-stopping shudder that many Jewish people will have felt at the mention of pogrom-like attacks against Jews.

"Most [Arab Israelis] don't understand the connotation and what I call the pain baggage that we Jews are carrying on our back," Be'eri-Sulitzeanu said. "They are simply not aware of it."

© Ronen Zvulun/Reuters Torah scrolls, Jewish holy scriptures, are removed on May 12 from a synagogue that was torched during violent confrontations in Lod between Arab-Israeli demonstrators and police.

It's hard to imagine how the city will move forward. Be'eri-Sulitzeanu says the Arab-Israeli community's problem is not with the Jewish community in Lod but with the national religious settlers who have infiltrated it.

But they appear increasingly entrenched, a settlement within an Israeli city.

Suliman Zabarqa is convinced it comes down to the local leadership, a mayor that serves only the interests of the Jewish community.

"I live in the state of Israel, and I have rights as any Israeli. But the state doesn't provide me with [them]. I hope the mayor of Lod will treat everyone in the same way. I hope he pays attention to the Arab sector in this town."

© Stephanie Jenzer/CBC Suliman Zabarqa is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who owns a restaurant in Lod and says Jewish rioters burned his property. He says he feels his rights aren't respected, and he hopes the city's mayor 'will treat everyone in the same way.'

Tamer Nafar says that's a symptom of a much deeper problem.

"When the dialogue between us is 'This is my country, the land for the Jews, not for you,' the whole dialogue has the colour of being superior," he said.

"They need to understand that co-existence needs two sides to exist. They are not going away, and we are not going away."

WW3.0

China Says US 'Creating Risks' With South China Sea Warship Sail-bys

05/20/21
China on Thursday branded the United States an "out-and-out security risk creator" in the South China Sea, after an American warship sailed through waters near the disputed Paracel Islands.

Tensions in maritime waters claimed by both China and many of its neighbours have ratcheted up recently, with Beijing staging live-fire drills and sending hundreds of fishing vessels to a reef claimed by the Philippines.

China's military said the USS Curtis Wilbur, a guided missile destroyer, was warned and driven away from the contested waters near the islands, which are claimed by China.

US actions "increase regional security risks, which easily causes misunderstandings, misjudgements and unforeseen maritime incidents", People's Liberation Army Southern Theatre Command spokesman Colonel Tian Junli said in a notice posted on social media.

China accused the United States of 'creating risks' in the South China Sea after the USS Curtis Wilbur (pictured here in 2018) sailed through disputed waters Photo: US NAVY / Benjamin DOBBS

"This is unprofessional and irresponsible, and fully demonstrates that the US is an out-and-out 'South China Sea security risk creator'."

Beijing on Wednesday had chastised Washington for sailing the USS Curtis Wilbur through the Taiwan Strait earlier this week.

The US Seventh Fleet described it as a "routine" transit.

The United States frequently conducts what it calls "Freedom of Navigation Operations" in the flashpoint waterway.

The South China Sea and its various islands are claimed by multiple countries including China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia and the Philippines. It is home to some of the world's most resource-rich waterways.

US destroyer backs up Biden's tough words in South China Sea


By Brad Lendon, CNN
Published May 20, 2021 





(CNN) -- A United States Navy warship sailed near disputed Beijing-controlled islands in the South China Sea on Thursday -- just hours after US President Joe Biden said the US must protect open access to the waterway.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur performed what the US Navy calls a "freedom of navigation" operation near the Paracel Islands, asserting "navigational rights and freedoms... consistent with international law," Lt. j.g. Nicholas Lingo, spokesperson for the US 7th Fleet, said in a statement.

China calls the Paracels, in the northwestern portion of the South China Sea, the Xisha Islands. They have been under Beijing's control for more than four decades -- despite competing claims from Vietnam and Taiwan -- and China has fortified them with military installations.

Beijing, which claims almost all of the South China Sea as its territory, said the movement of the US warship violated its sovereignty.

PLA warships and planes followed the US ship, a statement from China's People's Liberation Army said.

"US behavior violates international law and basic norms of international relations, increases regional security risks, and are prone to misunderstandings, misjudgments, and accidents at sea," Tian Junli, spokesperson of the PLA's Southern Theater Command, said in the statement.

But Biden, in a speech at the US Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, accused China -- and also Russia -- of "disruptive actions" challenging decades-old international rules protecting maritime commerce in the South China Sea and other waterways.

"Longstanding, basic maritime principles like freedom of navigation are a bedrock of a global economic and global security. When nations try to game the system or tip the rules in their favor, it throws everything off balance," Biden told the graduating class at the academy in New London, Connecticut.

"It's of vital interest to America's foreign policy to secure unimpeded flow of global commerce. And it won't happen without us taking an active role to set the norms of conduct, to shape them around democratic values, not those of autocrats."

Lingo, the US Navy spokesperson, emphasized that point in his statement Thursday.

"Unlawful and sweeping maritime claims in the South China Sea pose a serious threat to the freedom of the seas, including the freedoms of navigation and overflight, free trade and unimpeded commerce, and freedom of economic opportunity for South China Sea littoral nations," Lingo's statement said.

Thursday's operation was the third conducted against Chinese claims in the South China Sea this year, a Department of Defense spokesperson told CNN.

The last challenge to the Chinese, Vietnamese and Taiwanese claims in the Paracels was in February, the spokesperson said

The Paracels were the second US-China hotspot the Curtis Wilbur had visited in three days.

On Tuesday, it transited the Taiwan Strait, the waterway separating democratically controlled Taiwan from mainland China. Beijing also says Taiwan is part of its sovereign territory, but the self-ruled island's autonomy is supported by Washington.

It was the fifth time this year a US warship had transited the Taiwan Strait as the Biden administration strengthens ties with the island.

China on Wednesday denounced the presence of the US destroyer in the strait.

"The US warship's action sent erroneous signal to the 'Taiwan Independence' force, deliberately disrupted and undermined the regional situation, and jeopardized the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait," read a report on the PLA's English-language website.

Biden told the new Coast Guard officers they would be needed to protect US interests in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere.

"As we work together with our democratic partners around the world to both update the rules for this new age... your mission will become even more global and even more important," Biden said. "You have an essential role in our efforts to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific."

The US President touted a recent pact between Taipei and Washington for their respective coast guards to work more closely together.

"Our new agreement for the Coast Guard to partner with Taiwan will help ensure that we're positioned to better respond to shared threats in the region and to conduct coordinated humanitarian and environmental missions," he said.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "US destroyer backs up Biden's tough words in South China Sea"

TOMB ROBBER

Kim Kardashian West Denies Purchasing 'Looted' Ancient Roman Statue

By Parul Soni
05/06/21 

KEY POINTS

The art piece in question is a limestone sculpture, dating back to the 1st or 2nd century

Kardashian says she has no knowledge of the transaction

The statue, seized in the U.S. in 2016, is allegedly stolen from Italy

Kim Kardashian West is in the news again; this time, she has landed herself in an illegal art smuggling controversy after an ancient Roman sculpture was imported in her name to California. According to U.S. officials, the statue was stolen from Italy. But the 40-year-old reality TV star denies purchasing the art piece.

According to court documents filed on Friday in California, the U.S. government has sought the forfeiture of a "looted, smuggled and illegally exported" antique that it believes was being delivered to Kardashian, CNN reported.

A spokesperson for Kardashian told CNN that the star "never purchased this piece" and that "this is the first that she has learned of its existence." The spokesperson, encouraging the investigation into the matter, said that the sculpture “may have been purchased using her (Kim’s) name without authorization and because it was never received (and) she was unaware of the transaction."

News broke in February 2021 that Kim Kardashian West and had filed for divorce from husband of six years rapper Kanye West Photo: GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Dimitrios Kambouris

According to the court documents, the limestone sculpture -- Fragment of Myron’s Samian Athena -- dates back to the 1st or 2nd century AD and was bought by Kardashian from a Belgian art dealer, the Guardian reported.

The statue, which is said to be from the early-to mid-Roman Empire, was seized at Los Angeles port in June 2016 and Italian officials believe it was originally looted from Italy. The art piece was part of a 5.5-ton shipment having 40 objects valued at a total of $745,882, described as antiques, furniture and decorations rather than archaeological finds.

An AFP report said that a form submitted by a customs broker lists the importer and consignee of the items as "Kim Kardashian dba (doing business as) Noel Roberts Trust," of Woodland Hills, California. The Noel Roberts Trust is an entity associated with Kardashian and her estranged husband Kanye West's U.S. real estate purchases, the report added.

According to the CNN report, art dealer and interior designer Axel Vervoordt was identified in the court documents as one of the item's shippers. Vervoordt has earlier worked with Kardashian and West on their properties.

A representative for Vervoodt said that "there is no evidence that this piece was illegally imported from Italy. Our client, as well as our gallery and the gallery from whom we've bought the piece, have always acted in good faith when dealing with the work."

An archaeologist from Italy said the sculpture had been made in a "classical Peplophoros style (early to mid-Roman Empire), which represents a copy of an original Greek sculpture," the filing stated. It added that Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage has requested that "all efforts be made for the return of the ... statue to Italy."

$25 BY 2025 A LIVING WAGE

Bank Of America Raises US Minimum Wage To $25 An Hour

By AFP News
05/18/21 
Bank of America announced plans to lift its minimum

wage to $25 an hour and said Tuesday 

it is requiring US vendors to pay employees at least $15 an hour.

The salary hike for employees will take place by 2025, the company said. In March 2020, the giant US bank lifted its minimum wage to $20 an hour from $17 an hour.

"A core tenet of responsible growth is our commitment to being a great place to work which means investing in the people who serve our clients," said Sheri Bronstein, chief human resources officer.

"That includes providing strong pay and competitive benefits to help them and their families, so that we continue to attract and retain the best talent."

The announcement on vendors means more than 2,000 contracter firms and some 43,000 workers from these companies are now paid at least $15 an hour, the bank said.

The announcement is the latest by a big company to lift wages amid a tightening labor market for hourly employees following moves last week by Amazon, McDonald's and others.

Pending legislation sponsored by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives to lift the national minimum wage to $15 an hour has so far stalled in Congress despite support from President Joe Biden.

Copyright AFP. All rights reserved.