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A local Democratic volunteer leader of the Cincinnati AIPAC chapter sat down in Vic’s living room and I recall him saying that he would like to raise $5,000 for our campaign and would also like to see Vic take a public stance on two relatively obscure issues relating to Iranian sanctions, arms sales to Israel, or some ...
Vic and I both thought of ourselves as pro-peace, not pro-Israel. We both felt icky about doing it; it was too hawkish and too quid pro quo. But we were desperate. So I read the AIPAC position papers that the volunteer left with us, I wrote up a statement saying that Vic supported AIPAC’s stance on its two pet issues o...
It was, I am ashamed to say, definitely about the Benjamins. We never would have done it otherwise. AIPAC’s power is about more than money, certainly. It’s about great organizing (they built a local chapter, and sent a local Democratic volunteer emissary who then facilitated the contributions). It’s about diligence (th...
Technically, AIPAC doesn’t make the political contributions. Instead, as it notes proudly on its website, individual members of its “Congressional Club,” like that Cincinnati resident, do the bundling and donating directly, both as individuals and through Political Action Committees that AIPAC and its members have set ...
Omar is right to point all this out. These dynamics are not unique to the Israel-Palestine issue, however, and there is no reason that Americans should be surprised or offended by what she and I are saying. The NRA and the broader gun lobby operate in the same way. Same with ExxonMobil and the fossil-fuel lobby. But si...
AIPAC and its partners, which include Christian Zionists and military contractors, are a central pillar of the Israeli occupation. Without congressional support, the Likud/anti-Palestine/pro-occupation project would be radically undermined. The money that AIPAC and the rest of the lobby spend is indispensable to that w...
We do, in fact, have a growing anti-Semitism problem in America. But Omar and Tlaib are not a part of it. They are allies of mine and of Jews across this country who are fighting for peace, racial justice, immigrants’ rights, and the defeat of fascism. The anti-Semites are the Nazis and white supremacists who marched a...
The Israel lobby flexed its muscles in response to Omar’s tweet. Almost all of Capitol Hill, sadly including the Democratic leadership that I have supported, was up in arms. It flexed with equal potency last month in marshaling through the Senate a clearly unconstitutional law to ban speech promoting a boycott of Israe...
For 12 years, I have harbored minor private shame for advising Vic to endorse AIPAC’s position papers and more significant shame for not doing enough to stop the oppression of the Palestinian people.
I am speaking up now because it may be my last chance. Although I am only 35, I am dying. As I write these words, I am sitting with my wife in the waiting room of the Santa Barbara hospital emergency room, slowly bleeding from my stomach into a pile of gauze. I had a feeding tube inserted four days ago but it isn’t hea...
This is my chance to redeem my Jewish guilt, to speak out against the oppression that is being perpetrated in my name, and I do not intend to let a minor obstacle like ALS stop me.
Young Jews across America increasingly agree with Omar and me, and that is making the Israel lobby very nervous. As it should: The occupation is too immoral, illegal, and inhumane to survive an open and honest conversation in the marketplace of ideas. That is why AIPAC and its associates work to silence criticism of Is...
The ugly truth is that the Israel lobby, like other powerful lobbies led by Jew and gentile alike, wields its money strategically and effectively. Outrage should be directed not at those who point this out (most often Muslims and people of color) but at the suffering of the Palestinian people and the simultaneous depen...
I do not expect to live to see the liberation of the Palestinian people. But I maintain hope that my toddler son will. If he does, it will be because young American Jews like him do the honest self-reflection taught by our forebears, take pride in our tradition of justice, and join in solidarity and struggle with fello...
Patton Junior High School eighth-grader Isaac Searle will go on to compete in the state spelling bee next month in Wichita, Kan.
The correct spelling of these words is what led to Patton Junior High School eighth-grader Isaac Searle being declared the winner of the 59th annual Leavenworth Area Retired School Personnel Association-run Leavenworth County Spelling Bee Feb. 1 at Eagles Lodge No. 55 in Leavenworth.
For his win, Searle was awarded a first-place medal and a plaque from LARSPA, and a cash award from The Leavenworth Times. He will go on to compete in the state spelling bee next month in Wichita, Kan.
“He worked hard,” said Melinda Searle, Isaac’s mom.
LARSPA has been running the spelling bee since the group was formed in 1960.
“As retired educators, we think spelling is important because for some reason if you don’t have a cell phone, if you don’t have spell check, you still got to know how to spell words if you’re going to communicate in writing,” Bristow said. “So, we just feel like it is important that you still have that foundation, and ...
The spelling bee featured 36 students representing 18 area schools’ top spellers in fifth through eighth grade. Following the Sunflower Spelling Bee rules, the bee lasted two practice rounds and 11 regular rounds when Searle correctly spelled “arachnid” and “mesmerize” after second-place winner Elisabeth Wangsgaard, La...
MacArthur Elementary School sixth-grader Ava Johnson took third place after correctly spelling “fuchsia,” “worrisome,” “mirage,” “amnesia” and “marzipan,” before misspelling “lieutenant” in round six.
Wangsgaard and Searle were also given awards for their second- and third-place wins, and all contestants received goodie bags filled with items donated by local businesses.
Searle and Johnson were two of seven students from Fort Leavenworth schools who participated in the county spelling bee after coming out on top at their school spelling bees in January.
Page 2 of 2 - Fifth-grader Ryan Horn and sixth-grader Rachel Dawes represented Bradley Elementary School; fifth-grader Sarah Franchitti represented Eisenhower Elementary School; fifth-grader Amanda Shea and Johnson represented MacArthur; and seventh-grader Andrew Quinn and Searle represented Patton.
Horn said he was nervous but excited going into the spelling bee.
Horn’s parents — Air Force Maj. Donnie Horn, Command and General Staff Officer Course student, and Jamie Horn — said they were proud of him for making it to the county spelling bee.
“This is the first academic competition that he’s done, anything pertaining to school, and I think it was a great start to win something,” said Jamie Horn. “He’s always done really well academically, but this is the first time stepping out to show his academic skills with confidence. So, it is a really proud moment.
Quinn said he was also excited about making it to the county level.
1. In case you didn't know, it's really REALLY cold across most of the US right now.
2. I mean, like, REALLY COLD.
21. And look at this pole. It's shivering. SHIVERING!
26. But, hey, at least it's not cloudy... right???
If you ever stumble across these alternative sites, it might take a few seconds for you to clock that you’ve happened upon one of the alt-right’s online enclaves. Infogalactic is built with MediaWiki, the same open-source software behind Wikipedia, while Voat is based on an old version of the open-sourced code behind R...
Things, however, are not going well on the alt-right’s internet. Bedeviled by technical faults and stymied by other platforms, hosting sites and payment providers, the alternative internet is limping its way forward, ever so slowly, while it faces a final plunge into online obscurity. Maybe because the alt-right never ...
One of section of Gab, called Introduce Yourself, reveals how some people end up on the website. “Twitter banned yet again,” wrote a user called Michelle. “This time for making a joke I guess they took offence to. Trump support. Anti-Islam. Anti-refugee. Dog lover.” Another user, who went by the name JSM, said they wer...
“There are so many people that share these views that cannot express them anywhere,” says Torba, who describes most Gab users as “libertarian conservatives, normal, working class, blue-collar people”. On the recommend users tab, a recent top result was for an account called End Cultural Marxism, a pro user paying a sub...
But aside from a core group of super-posters, which includes the likes of Alex Jones, Gab is something of a ghost town. Not long after its founding, alt-right self-promoters including Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich flocked to the platform, with that pair alone racking up 88,000 followers between them. Now it has ...
Out of the top ten Gab users (by follower count) identified in an academic paper published in March 2018, only three of them have posted in the last month. The same study found that 43 per cent of users on the platform aren’t following a single user. Despite this, Torba thinks that his platform could be as big as Drudg...
Through pro subscriptions and by taking a percentage of on-site donations, Gab is almost breaking even, and Torba has plans to use this financial stability to host the site independently. Last year, Gab’s domain registrar, AsiaRegistry, asked the site to take down a post mocking Heather Heyer, a woman murdered at the C...
Bane estimates that his site, which has 2,500 monthly active users, is growing by between 200 and 300 users each month. Although, the alt-right tends to dominate, he argues that his site features a broad range of people, including feminists and communists. “I think that alt-tech, if I can call it this, is for everyone,...
Although it may have been designed with everyone in mind, WrongThink skews in one direction: to the far-right. A sidebar of the platform’s ‘pro’ users is a smorgasbord of the usual alt-right talking points: white nationalism, Holocaust denial and Hitler worship.
It’s no surprise that sites purporting to allow a range of views quickly become dominated by the alt-right, says Squirrell. People with less extreme views would be quickly put off by the deluge of hate running through the alt-web. “Everything is just racism, it’s awful,” he says.
The non-alternative internet isn’t helping. “They have quite a big problem with drawing in moderates,” Squirrell adds. In August 2017, the Gab app was booted from the Play Store for violating Google’s rules on hate speech. Apple, too, has consistently thwarted Gab’s attempts to get through the App Store approval proces...
But the rest of the world doesn’t even need to clamp down on the alternative web to relegate it to irrelevancy. The reason why these echo chambers are mostly ghost towns, Squirrell says, is that they deprive posters of the one thing that many of them crave: attention. “A huge amount of the culture that these people hav...
And to do that, you’re better off on the real internet. “If you want to produce something that will eventually get out into the world, 4chan is the place to do it,” Squirrel says. On Reddit’s r/thedonald there is an endless stream of alt-right content, a far cry from the relative desert of alt-Reddit, Voat. On Twitter ...
With the president of the United States espousing an agenda that could have come straight off the homepage of Infowars or Breitbart, there’s not much that’s alternative about the online far right. “Their views have been mainstreamed,” Squirrell says, with the alt-right already dominating conversations across social med...
According to Bloomberg, Michael Dell’s daughter Alexa has decided that “social media” isn’t for her.
The family of famed PC-company Dell became big news when Alexa posted a picture of her brother on Instagram, which got picked up by a Tumblr called “The Rich Kids of Instagram.” It’s not an honor, as the picture of Zachary on the family jet made them look as douchey as you’d expect.
Alexa took the photo a few extra steps by linking to her personal Twitter account where she described how wonderful the trip was, and exactly what route the Dell family was taking. Date and times included, oy. Basically, it was a security nightmare for the family.
Now, Alexa Dell has either been instructed to, or decided to by herself, delete all of her social profiles on the Web. Her dad apparently spent $2.7M last year to keep his family safe, and Alexa didn’t make that any cheaper.
This is yet another social Web cautionary tale that shows that some sharing is not only oversharing, but can be dangerous. There have been quite a few situations where family members of wealthy person like Michael Dell have been kidnapped for ransom. By posting locations and photos of the family, Alexa put the Dell’s a...
The Black Feminist Collective is a voluntary student organization focused on social awareness, service and support dedicated to the affirmation and advancement of those struggling to eliminate racial, [hetero]sexual, gender and class oppressions. By increasing social support and political awareness of the issues surrou...
Email blackfeministcollective@gmail.com or visit the group on facebook.
The ceremony aboard an Italian Navy ship in the port of Valletta, Malta, had all the trappings of a European Union affair. But the “cadets” being awarded certificates on a recent morning were an unusual group — 89 Libyans who the European Union hopes can help solve its migrant problem.
Officers in the Libyan Coast Guard, they were trained by the Italians to intercept and rescue migrant boats near the Libyan coast before they reach international waters. Normally, European forces intercept migrant boats and must take them to Italy.
But if the migrants are picked up by the Libyans in their own waters, they can be taken back to Libya instead.
For European leaders, training the Libyan Coast Guard is in many ways an attempt, against long odds, to shift the answer to Europe’s migration crisis off its shores, and deal with it at the source.
The plan is to give money, resources and training to the Libyans to keep the migrants there, an idea somewhat similar to the European Union’s deal with Turkey, only this one is with a country run by competing militias and multiple weak governments.
It is not the first time Italy has forged an agreement with Libya to stem the flow of migration. But the most effective attempt was before Libya descended into chaos with the collapse of its government in 2011.
Libya has since become the prime launching point for many of the 180,000 migrants who reached Italy last year, when more than 5,000 people died trying to make the Mediterranean crossing.
Even previous agreements met criticism for the sometimes brutal tactics that North African countries used to hold back migrants. Embryonic as it is, this latest plan to stem the flow is already being criticized as both potentially unworkable and inhumane.
Some international experts are skeptical about the scope of the operation, and human rights groups fear the plan is the equivalent of throwing the migrants back into the frying pan of Libya, where many are fleeing dangers and dire conditions.
The internationally backed Libyan government the European Union is dealing with has barely a toehold in the fragmented, violence-plagued country, and may even be verging on collapse. Much of the Libyan coast remains in the hands of criminal and rebel groups.
“It’s a first step taken with an interim government that doesn’t really control the country, but it’s a first step,” said Natalino Ronzitti, professor emeritus of international law and an adviser at the Institute for International Affairs in Italy.
“We need to see whether it complies with human rights and whether Europe will open identification centers for migrants in Libya, or will help Libya do so, but we know little about that at present,” Professor Ronzitti said.
The pilot program is the first of its kind within Operation Sophia, the European Union’s anti-immigrant trafficking operation, and is part of an effort that European leaders agreed to this month at their summit meeting in Malta, where they pledged “sustainable and predictable” funding to train the Libyan Coast Guard.
The day before the Malta meeting, Italy’s prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, signed an agreement with the Libyan premier, Fayez Serraj, to curb migrant trafficking from Libyan shores.
In exchange, Italy will provide money, technology, medicine and training to set up migrant holding centers in the country, which it ruled as a colony between 1911 and 1943.
Italian Embassy officials were the last European delegation to leave Tripoli in 2015, and last month became the first to return to their original compound.
This week, Italy’s Interior Ministry hosted a meeting in Rome with 10 Libyan mayors from the southern region of Fezzan, the main gateway for migrants into Libya, to underscore Italy’s intention to help them control the border.
“We can’t expect such a large phenomenon to have an immediate solution,” Roberta Pinotti, Italy’s defense minister, acknowledged one recent morning aboard the aircraft carrier stationed in Valletta’s harbor.
“But it’s a phenomenon that we want to be able to govern,” she said, citing the thousands of weekly arrivals in Italy, even in winter.
Joseph Muscat, Malta’s prime minister, echoed the sentiment. “The training didn’t take place because there is a crisis, but to try to prevent a crisis,” he said.
The migrant holding centers are among the most contentious components of the plan.
Hussein Thwadi, the mayor of the western coastal city of Sabratha, Libya, the busiest departure point for Mediterranean crossings, has said that keeping migrants in Libya is a “dangerous step” because the country does not have the resources to deal with them.
Huge numbers of migrants are already in Libya, and they face constant threats, humanitarian groups point out.
Last year, Doctors Without Borders highlighted the “alarming levels of violence” against migrants and refugees in Libya, including sexual attacks and killings, not only from smugglers, but also from myriad armed groups and individuals.
Migrants reported being detained by militiamen for months in dire conditions. Others were kept in a form of slavery by private individuals who forced them into labor, often in exchange for scarce food.
Anything that stems the flow of migrants in Libya also runs the danger of running up against the interests of the powerful armed groups that control the trade. In a country racked by conflict, migrant smuggling has become a lucrative business for a bewildering array of criminal gangs and associated militias.
European leaders concede that Libya’s instability and widespread violence were causes of concern.
“The young men who received this training, when they return to their country, will face enormous pressure from criminal gangs and smugglers who have an influx of millions of euros a week,” Mr. Muscat, Malta’s prime minister, acknowledged.
Most smugglers’ boats depart from remote beaches along a 230-mile stretch of coastline in the west of the country, between Misurata and the border with Tunisia.
Theoretically, this territory is controlled by the U.N.-backed unity government led by Mr. Serraj, which installed itself in Tripoli last March with backing from the United States and other Western countries.
In reality, much of the coastline, as well as the desert towns through which the migrants pass, is controlled by a network of criminal and militia groups with a vested financial interest in the continuation of the trade.
Few believe the unity government has the military muscle, political clout or money to stop the trade, given that it barely controls even the capital, Tripoli.
Its forces control the city port and a handful of government ministries, but otherwise compete for turf with a rival administration led by a coalition of Islamists and militants from Misurata.
Gunmen from dueling factions frequently clash on the city streets in violence that has intensified in recent weeks, prompting warnings from Western officials that the unity government is in danger of being completely marginalized, if not worse.
The U.N.-backed administration is also under pressure from rivals in the east of the country, where forces led by the strongman Gen. Khalifa Hifter have taken near-complete control of the country’s second-largest city, Benghazi.
General Hifter has consolidated his forces, with backing from Egypt and Russia, and has shunned the unity government. During an Egyptian-led effort to broker peace between rival Libyan factions in Cairo this week, Mr. Serraj and Mr. Hifter refused to meet.
The Italian plan to train the Libyan Coast Guard has already run afoul of Libya’s fractious political scene after the San Giorgio, an Italian Navy vessel participating in the program, docked in western Libya last month.
In an indication of the potential pitfalls ahead, leaders in the east of Libya accused the Italians of illegally entering the country.
Because of an editing error, an article on Feb. 18 about a European Union plan to train Libyan Coast Guard members to intercept and rescue migrant boats near the Libyan coast referred incorrectly to a professor emeritus at the Institute for International Affairs in Italy. The professor, Natalino Ronzitti, is a man.
Gianni Cipriano and Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting.
Posted by Susan A. on November 18, 2014. Brought to you by yahoolocal.
Posted by Amber L. on March 31, 2014. Brought to you by yellowpages.
China 1 is located at 5676 Springboro Pike, Dayton, OH. This business specializes in Restaurants.
China 1 can be found at Springboro Pike 5676. The following is offered: Restaurants. The entry is present with us since Sep 9, 2010 and was last updated on Nov 14, 2013. In Dayton there are 237 other Restaurants. An overview can be found here.
Jeff had always been able to hold a steady job. Between working seasonal construction, he did snow removal and served as a local handyman. Jeff’s employers didn’t always provide health insurance for him and his young family so they got by with the help of Medical Assistance. He had always seen his family doctor as reco...
This is the future Minnesota we will inherit if the GOP’s proposed (SF 3611/HF 3722) work requirements are passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Mark Dayton. Such a proposal, made possible after the Trump administration upended decades of policy, threatens the health of thousands of Minnesotans.

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