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Tag: discrimination

  • LAPD arrests suspect in shootings of 2 Jewish people, which police are investigating as potential hate crimes | CNN

    LAPD arrests suspect in shootings of 2 Jewish people, which police are investigating as potential hate crimes | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Police in Los Angeles have arrested a man suspected of shooting two Jewish people this week and are investigating the attacks as possible hate crimes, authorities said Thursday.

    An “exhaustive” search for the suspect was launched after the victims were shot separately in the city’s western Pico-Robertson neighborhood on Wednesday and Thursday, about three blocks apart, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a release.

    Both victims were Jewish men, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said. Officials have not publicly identified the victims or suspect.

    “These attacks against members of our Jewish community in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood are absolutely unacceptable,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “At a time of increased anti-Semitism, these acts have understandably set communities on edge. Just last December, I stood blocks away from where these incidents occurred as we celebrated the first night of Hanukkah together.”

    The shootings come amid a rise in antisemitic violence nationwide. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic attacks reached an all-time high in the US in 2021 – up 34% from 2020.

    The suspect was found in Riverside County, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, police said. Detectives found several pieces of evidence, they said, including a rifle and handgun.

    Earlier, authorities said they were searching for a suspect described as an Asian male with a mustache and goatee, possibly driving a white compact car. A license plate recorded near the scene of one of the shootings assisted authorities in locating and arresting the suspect, a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN.

    “The facts of the case led to this crime being investigated as a hate crime,” Los Angeles police said. The FBI is also investigating the attacks as hate crimes, Bass said in her statement.

    At around 10 a.m. Wednesday, the first victim was walking to their vehicle when a man drove by and shot twice before fleeing the scene, a police spokesperson told CNN.

    The following day, at around 8:30 a.m., the second victim was walking toward his home nearby when a man drove up and shot at him from inside a car, and then fled, the spokesperson said.

    Both victims were taken to local hospitals and were in stable condition, the spokesperson said.

    They were walking home from places of worship when they were shot, said Laura Fennell, Director of Communications for the Anti-Defamation League West.

    The man shot Thursday is a member of the Beit El synagogue, which is about two blocks away from where police say he was shot, the synagogue confirmed to CNN. They did not identify the victim but said his injuries were minor.

    “The victim that was shot today is a pillar of our community here at Beit El. He has been a dear member for many years,” Beit El said in an email Thursday. They added, “The victim had just concluded morning prayer services, walked to his car donned in his kippah, and was shot three times at point-blank range.”

    “Our community is shaken to its core,” by the two shootings, Beit El said. “But we are strong and united.”

    The synagogue said it is working with police to implement security measures. Luna also said Los Angeles police are increasing law enforcement presence and patrols around Jewish places of worship.

    “The Los Angeles Police Department is aware of the concern these crimes have raised in the surrounding community. We have been in close contact with religious leaders as well as individual and organizational community stakeholders,” the department’s release said.

    The investigation, which includes state and federal authorities, is ongoing and more information will be released in the coming days, police said.

    The shootings in Los Angeles happened just a week after San Francisco authorities added a hate crime enhancement to charges against a man they said fired a replica gun inside a Bay-area synagogue earlier this month. No one was hurt.

    The hate crime allegation against the suspect is tied to statements he made during the incident as well as social media posts he made involving “several postings of an individual in Nazi-type clothing,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a news conference. An attorney for the suspect, Deputy Public Defender Olivia Taylor, said outside the courthouse that the man is “not guilty of any hate crime.”

    Days earlier in New Jersey, a man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue in Bloomfield in an arson attempt. The suspect has been charged with a federal crime.

    And in December, a 63-year-old man was assaulted in New York’s Central Park in what police called an antisemitic attack.

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  • Amnesty accuses Peruvian authorities of ‘marked racist bias’ in protest crackdown | CNN

    Amnesty accuses Peruvian authorities of ‘marked racist bias’ in protest crackdown | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Amnesty International has accused Peruvian authorities of acting with “a marked racist bias” in its crackdown on protests that have roiled the country since December, saying “populations that have historically been discriminated against” are being targeted, according to a report released on Thursday.

    Drawing on data from the Peruvian Ombudsman’s Office, Amnesty says it “found that the number of possible arbitrary deaths due to state repression” were “disproportionately concentrated in regions with largely Indigenous populations.”

    Amnesty also says that areas with majority indigenous populations have accounted for the majority of deaths since the protests began. “While the regions with majority Indigenous populations represent only 13% of Peru’s total population, they account for 80% of the total deaths registered since the crisis began,” Amnesty wrote.

    The Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the report, telling CNN that there is an ongoing investigation being carried out by the country’s public prosecutor office, with which they are collaborating.

    “Not only have we delivered all the requested information, but we have supported the transfer of (the public prosecutor’s) personnel (experts and prosecutors) to the area so that they can carry out their work. The Ministry of Defense is awaiting the results of the investigations,” the ministry’s spokesperson added.

    CNN also reached out to the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, for comment.

    The Andean country’s weeks-long protest movement, which seeks a complete reset of the government, was sparked by the impeachment and arrest of former President Pedro Castillo in December and fueled by deep dissatisfaction over living conditions and inequality in the country.

    While protests have occurred throughout the nation, the worst violence has been in the rural and indigenous south, which saw Castillo’s ouster as another attempt by Peru’s coastal elites to discount them.

    “In a context of great political uncertainty, the first expressions of social unrest emerged from several of Peru’s most marginalized regions, such as Apurímac, Ayacucho and Puno, whose mostly Indigenous populations have historically suffered from discrimination, unequal access to political participation and an ongoing struggle to access basic rights to health, housing and education,” Amnesty wrote.

    Protests have spread to other parts of the country and demonstrators’ fury has also grown with the rising death toll: As of Tuesday, at least 60 people have died in the violence, according to Peru’s Ombudsman’s Office, including one police officer.

    Castillo’s successor, President Dina Boluarte, has so far refused to resign, while Peru’s Congress has rejected motions for early elections this year – one of the protesters’ main demands.

    Peruvian President Dina Boluarte gives a press conference at the government palace in Lima, Peru, on February 10, 2023.

    The human rights group accuses security forces of using firearms with lethal ammunition “as one of their primary methods of dispersing demonstrations, even when there was no apparent risk to the lives of others” – a violation of international human rights standards.

    Amnesty says it documented 12 fatalities in which “all the victims appeared to have been shot in the chest, torso or head, which could indicate, in some cases, the intentional use of lethal force.”

    There have also been instances of violence by some demonstrators, with the use of stones, fireworks and homemade slingshots. CNN has previously reported on the death of a policeman who was burned to death by protesters. Citing Health Ministry figures, Amnesty found that “more than 1,200 people have been injured in the context of protests and 580 police officers have been wounded.”

    But overall, police and army have responded disproportionately, firing “bullets indiscriminately and in some cases at specific targets, killing or injuring bystanders, protesters and those providing first aid to injured people,” Amnesty said.

    It cites the death of 18-year-old student John Erik Enciso Arias, who died in December 12 in the town of Andahuaylas, in the Apurímac region, where citizens had gathered to observe and film the protests. Erik’s death has been confirmed by the Peruvian ombudsman.

    According to Amnesty, “videos and eyewitness accounts suggest that several police officers fired bullets from the rooftop of a building in front of the hill that day. State officials confirmed to Amnesty International the presence of police on the rooftop and the organization has verified footage showing that John Erik was not using violence against the police when he was killed.”

    In another incident, as CNN has previously reported, Leonardo Hancco, 32, died after being shot in the abdomen near Ayacucho’s airport, where protesters had gathered with some trying to take control of the runway.

    “Witnesses indicated that the armed forces fired live rounds for at least seven hours in and around the airport, at times chasing demonstrators or shooting in the direction of those helping the wounded,” Amnesty said of its investigation into the December 15 incident.

    CNN has not verified the circumstances of each death as described by Amnesty.

    Demonstrators hold a protest against the government of President Dina Boluarte and to demand her resignation, in Puno, Peru, on January 19, 2023.

    Relatives and friends of victims of recent clashes with the Peruvian police -- within protests against President Dina Boluarte -- carry pictures of their loved ones during a march commemorating one month of their death on February 9, 2023, in Juliaca, Puno region.

    The report also cites the death of 17 civilians, who were killed during a protest in the southeastern Puno region on January 9 “where a high percentage of the Indigenous population is concentrated,” it writes.

    The city’s head of legal medicine told CNN en Español that autopsies of the 17 dead civilians found wounds caused by firearm projectiles.

    “The Attorney General’s office itself declared that the deaths were caused by firearm projectiles, provoking one of the most tragic and disturbing events in the whole country,” Amnesty wrote.

    “The grave human rights crisis facing Peru has been fueled by stigmatization, criminalization and racism against Indigenous peoples and campesino (rural farmworkers) communities who today take to the streets exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, and in response have been violently punished,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas Director, said in a statement.

    “The widespread attacks against the population have implications regarding the individual criminal responsibility of the authorities, including those at the highest level, for their action and omission to stop the repression.”

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  • High school students responsible for racist video no longer enrolled at school | CNN

    High school students responsible for racist video no longer enrolled at school | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The students responsible for a racist video – which surfaced on social media earlier this month showing one girl spray painting another girl’s face black while making racist comments – are no longer enrolled at the high school, according to a statement from the school.

    “The young women who (sic) responsible for this situation have been identified and they are no longer members of this school community,” Saint Hubert Catholic High School For Girls wrote in a statement published Saturday. The decision was made following an investigation into the incident, according to the statement.

    In the video, a girl is seen spray painting the face of another girl black as she says, “You’re a Black girl! You know your roots! It’s February! You’re nothing but a slave … and after this, she’s doing my laundry.” People in the video can be heard laughing as this occurs. One person is seen filming the incident on her phone. The girl who had her face painted black says, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”

    A Black parent whose daughter attends the Catholic school in Philadelphia told CNN the video was sent directly to his daughter and niece, along with other Black students.

    When asked about whether the video was initially sent to Black students at the school, Kenneth Gavin, chief communications officer for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, told CNN, “At this time it is unknown as to the exact distribution. My understanding is that it was posted and shared on social media.”

    The video was taken outside of school and after school hours, a statement provided to CNN by the archdiocese said.

    The school denounced the behavior in the video as “repugnant,” writing that the Anti-Defamation League would offer anti-bias workshops at the school on February 20.

    Faculty and students returned to Saint Hubert Catholic High School on Monday, the school wrote in its statement, adding there would be a “visible and active police presence around the campus perimeter.”

    The school wrote it would be addressing all students to outline its plan for “safety and healing moving forward.”

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  • Congressman who raised issue of antisemitism on Twitter says he was bombarded with antisemitic tweets | CNN Business

    Congressman who raised issue of antisemitism on Twitter says he was bombarded with antisemitic tweets | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A Jewish lawmaker who spoke about the problem of antisemitism on Twitter during a House Oversight hearing this week focused on the company was later bombarded with antisemitic messages on the platform, he explained in a letter to new owner Elon Musk on Thursday.

    “What happened on Twitter directly after the hearing proves my exact point that antisemitism is real and Twitter has become a hate-filled playground for Nazis and anti-Semites,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz told CNN about the hateful comments he received.

    At the hearing on Wednesday, which focused on Twitter’s handling of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the leadup to the 2020 election, the Florida Democrat criticized his Republican counterparts for saying “God bless Elon Musk.” Moskowitz asked: “God bless the guys who is allowing Nazis and antisemitism to perpetuate on Twitter?” He also cited statistics from the Anti-Defamation League, stating there has been a more than 60% increase in antisemitic comments on Twitter since Musk took over the platform.

    Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has slashed its staff, relaxed some of its content moderation policies and reinstated a number of incendiary accounts that were previously banned. Those moves raised concerns that Musk’s Twitter could contribute to a rise in public displays of hate and antisemitism offline.

    Musk, however, has repeatedly pushed back at claims that hate speech is rising on the platform. In December, for example, Musk claimed “hate speech impressions,” or the number of times a tweet containing hate speech has been viewed, “continue to decline” since his early days of owning the company.

    Twitter, which eliminated much of its public relations team during last year’s layoffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Moskowitz and many other Democrats on the subpanel used their allotted time to grill the former Twitter executives testifying at the hearing about the company’s policies for policing hate on the platform. During his questioning, Moskowitz also rebuked former President Donald Trump for hosting white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last year. He brought a large copy of a hateful post that Fuentes had tweeted at Moskowitz, telling the room, “No, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I gotta tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. So I have questions about that.”

    In his letter to Musk, Moskowitz said he shared a clip showing his line of questioning on his official government Twitter account, after which “the reply section of my post was flooded with hateful, antisemitic comments and images.” He added: “At the time that I am writing this letter, I have received over 200 such comments on one tweet. This does not include other posts of mine that have since received antisemitic comments, including a video honoring the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.”

    Moskowitz pointed to a November 30 National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warning from the Department of Homeland Security, which “issued domestic terror threats to multiple groups, including the Jewish community,” as evidence of his heightened concern. “DHS notes that threat actors have recently mobilized to violence, and there is an ‘enduring threat’ to the Jewish community,” he writes.

    “With this direct and heightened threat environment in mind, how will you work with other stakeholders to combat the rise of antisemitism on Twitter?,” Moskowitz concludes in his letter to Musk.

    Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, echoed Moskowitz’s concerns.

    “Antisemitism has no place on any social media platform that doesn’t want to further the harassment and exclusion of marginalized communities,” Greenblatt told CNN Thursday. “While Twitter ostensibly has an anti-hate policy that includes antisemitism, it is unclear the degree to which it is being enforced.”

    Greenblatt said the ADL continues to flag “batches of antisemitic content” to Twitter, but he said the company has only taken action on “a fraction of them” since Musk acquired the company. He also raised concerns about the staff cuts and the reinstated accounts that were banned previously.

    “These findings, combined with Twitter gutting its trust and safety operations, suggest serious issues will continue to persist on the platform as it pertains to effective content moderation and the proliferation of antisemitism,” Greenblatt said.

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  • A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

    A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.

    Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”

    “The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?

    “That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.

    A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.

    Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

    In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.

    That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.

    Guy Oseary and Madonna at a 2016 Billboard Women In Music event. Oseary said both bought NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

    The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.

    When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”

    A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.

    The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”

    Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.

    Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.

    Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”

    The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.

    The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.

    CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.

    The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.

    One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.

    Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.

    Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”

    “The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”

    Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.

    Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”

    Mad Dog Jones' SHIFT// goes on view as part of 'Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale' at Sotheby's in June 2021. NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art.

    The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”

    But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.

    Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.

    In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)

    Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.

    Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

    To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”

    Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”

    This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.

    “I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.

    So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.

    “Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”

    Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.

    This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.

    Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”

    In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.

    The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”

    “It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.

    Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.

    In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”

    “I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”

    – CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.

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  • Philadelphia high school students disciplined after video shows one using black spray paint on another’s face while saying racist comments | CNN

    Philadelphia high school students disciplined after video shows one using black spray paint on another’s face while saying racist comments | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    At least two Philadelphia high school students are facing disciplinary action after a racist video recorded outside of school surfaced on social media showing one girl spraying black paint on another girl’s face as they made racist comments a week into Black History Month.

    Two of the girls in the video that began circulating online on Tuesday attend Saint Hubert Catholic High School for Girls, according to Kenneth A. Gavin, the chief communications officer for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. A third girl in the video is not a student there, he said.

    “We will not disclose finite details of individual disciplinary actions but the level of behavior calls for a minimum of suspension and counseling and a maximum of expulsion,” Gavin told CNN in an email Wednesday.

    In a statement released Wednesday, Franklin Towne Charter High School said the former student who participated in the video or any other students who exhibit such conduct “have no place at our school.”

    “The content of this video does not reflect the values and culture of our Towne family,” the school said on it website. It’s unclear whether the former student was enrolled at the time of the video recording.

    A Black parent whose daughter attends the Catholic school told CNN the video was sent directly to his daughter and niece as well as other Black students.

    When asked whether the video was initially sent to Black students at the school, Gavin told CNN, “At this time it is unknown as to the exact distribution. My understanding is that it was posted and shared on social media.”

    Saint Hubert Catholic High School serves roughly 500 students grades 9 through 12 while nearly 1,300 students attend Franklin Towne Charter High School, their respective data shows. Both schools are majority white, the data shows.

    The video began circulating on social media a week into Black History Month.

    In the video, a girl is seen using black spray paint to color the face of another girl as she says, “You’re a Black girl! You know your roots! It’s February! You’re nothing but a slave… and after this she’s doing my laundry.”

    People in the video can be heard laughing as this occurs. One person is seen filming the incident on her phone. The girl who had her face painted black says, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”

    The video was taken outside of school and after school hours, a Wednesday statement provided to CNN by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia said.

    “We recognize and understand that the actions of these students have reopened societal wounds in a deeply painful way. Those allegedly responsible are not present in school and are being disciplined appropriately,” the archdiocese said.

    The archdiocese added the school and the Office of Catholic Education are conducting a review into the incident. “Should that process determine involvement by any other students, they will also face disciplinary action,” the statement said.

    Footage shot by CNN affiliate KYW showed parents and activists protesting outside Saint Hubert Catholic High School for Girls on Wednesday holding signs that read, “No More Racism” and “Hate Hurts.”

    Catherine Hicks, president of the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP, expressed in a statement Wednesday her strong disappointment in the video and called on the school to “ensure action takes place immediately.”

    “It is extremely disheartening to have to address this, especially during the observance of Black History Month, that honors the accomplishments and rich history of black people,” the statement said.

    “The video showing the egregious acts of Philadelphia Archdiocese white female students spray painting a young lady’s face black is totally unacceptable,” the statement continued. To say the act was done in jest “is not only appalling but shows us the continued cycle of racism that we are constantly fighting against.”

    In its statement, the archdiocese said: “We take this opportunity to be abundantly clear that there is no place for hate, racism, or bigotry at Saint Hubert’s or in any Catholic school. It is not acceptable under any circumstances or at any time. The use of any racial epithet is inconsistent with our values to treat all people with charity, decency, and respect.”

    The archdiocese noted that the students’ behavior violates the code of conduct and the policy on technology use, which applies to students inside and outside the school.

    According to the statement, general threats were made Tuesday afternoon against the school community after the video surfaced on social media.

    The threats were reported to law enforcement, and no extracurricular activities will be held at the school for the remainder of the week, according to the statement.

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  • Man who allegedly fired replica gun inside San Francisco synagogue faces hate crime enhancement over public comments | CNN

    Man who allegedly fired replica gun inside San Francisco synagogue faces hate crime enhancement over public comments | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A man arrested after allegedly firing a replica gun several times in a San Francisco synagogue now faces a hate crime enhancement, the city’s district attorney said Wednesday.

    The hate crime allegation against 51-year-old Dmitri Mishin is tied to statements he made during the incident as well as social media posts he made involving “several postings of an individual in Nazi-type clothing,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a news conference.

    While officials did not share what Mishin said while inside the synagogue, prosecutors believe he “harbored antisemitic views and that was the motivation for his actions,” Jenkins said. The hate crime allegation will enhance punishment guidelines if he is convicted, she added.

    Mishin was arrested Friday, days after he allegedly stepped inside a synagogue in the Richmond District during a gathering and “made a verbal statement,” pulled out what appeared to be a firearm and shot several times inside the building, police have said.

    Police recovered expended shell casings at the scene and at the time said they believed he had been firing blanks.

    Mishin was charged Wednesday morning with two felony counts of “making threats obstructing exercise of religion,” and six misdemeanor counts of disturbing a religious meeting and brandishing a replica firearm, the district attorney’s office announced.

    He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of all charges, according to Jenkins. CNN has been unable to identify an attorney for Mishin.

    “It is clear that antisemitism is still active and strong even here in San Francisco, in such a diverse place, and it’s something that will not be tolerated by this office or by myself,” Jenkins said.

    Mishin was originally scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday but will now be arraigned Thursday, Jenkins said. Her office will request he be detained without bail, she added.

    “Anyone who would walk into a synagogue of that sort, and make the statements that he did and displayed what appeared to be a firearm, is somebody who poses a public safety risk,” Jenkins said.

    The incident at the San Francisco synagogue came just days after a man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a New Jersey synagogue amid a backdrop of recent incendiary antisemitic incidents, including tweets from Kanye West, signs over a major Los Angeles bridge and messages projected on buildings in Florida.

    The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which has tracked incidents of US antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault since 1979, found 2,717 incidents of antisemitism in the US in 2021, up a significant 34% from the previous year.

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  • Atlanta area residents report finding antisemitic flyers in driveways | CNN

    Atlanta area residents report finding antisemitic flyers in driveways | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Police in suburban Atlanta are investigating after residents reported finding flyers with antisemitic imagery and messaging in their driveways.

    They were found Sunday morning in Sandy Springs and Dunwoody, according to officials in both cities, home to many Jewish families.

    On Twitter, Georgia Rep. Esther Panitch said on Twitter she received a flyer in her driveway.

    “Welcome to being a Jew in Georgia-my driveway this morning. @SandySprings_PD came & took for testing. Govern yourselves accordingly, GDL and Anti-Semites who seek to harm/intimidate Jews in Georgia,” Panitch’s tweet said. “I’m coming for you with the weight of the State behind me.”

    According to Panitch, “many” Jewish families in Fulton and DeKalb counties received the flyers in their driveways.

    In a statement on Facebook, Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch said residents “of many faiths” in at least three neighborhoods also woke up to find the flyers in their driveways.

    Deutsch said the purpose of the flyers is to cause fear and division. She also said Dunwoody police are aware and investigating the incident.

    “We are actively investigating this incident and working closely with the Sandy Springs Police Department, as their community was victimized as well,” Dunwoody Police Chief Billy Grogan said in a statement. “If you have any information related to this case, please contact 911. There is no place for hate in Dunwoody.”

    “On behalf of the Dunwoody City Council, I want to assure everyone that hateful, divisive, and anti-Semitic rhetoric has no place here,” Mayor Deutsch said in her statement. “Dunwoody is a community that values our diversity and is home to people of all faiths, races, ethnicities, and more. We live, work, serve and play together. At our Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, Jews, Christians, and Muslims worked together planting daffodils in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust.”

    Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp tweeted the following statement:

    “This kind of hate has no place in our state and the individuals responsible do not share Georgia’s values. If needed, state law enforcement stands ready to assist Sandy Springs Police and Dunwoody Police in their investigations. We will always condemn acts of antisemitism.”

    The flyers found this weekend follow hundreds of antisemitic flyers that showed up in driveways and mailboxes in neighboring Cobb County in November, CNN affiliate WSBTV reported.

    The language on the flyers mirror language seen in scrolling messages in Jacksonville, Florida, public spaces in October, as well as on banners hung from a freeway overpass in Los Angeles earlier that month by a group appearing to make Nazi salutes.

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  • DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics

    DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Facing accusations of whitewashing history after his administration blocked a new Black studies course for high-achieving high schoolers, Gov. Ron DeSantis has countered that Florida students already must learn about the triumphs and plight of African Americans.

    “The state of Florida education standards not only don’t prevent, but they require teaching Black history,” DeSantis said last week. “All the important things, that’s part of our core curriculum.”

    Indeed, Florida has required its schools to teach African American history since 1994, long before the recent push in many states to move toward a more complete telling of the country’s story. The stated goal at the time was to introduce the Black experience to a generation of young people. That included DeSantis himself, then a student in Florida’s public school system when the mandate became law.

    But nearly three decades later, advocates say many Florida schools are failing to teach that history. Only 11 of the state’s 67 county school districts meet all of the benchmarks for teaching Black history set by the African American History Task Force, a state board created to help school districts abide by the mandate. Many schools only cover the topic during Black History Month in February, said Bernadette Kelley-Brown, the principal investigator for the task force.

    “The idea that every Florida student learns African American history, it’s not reality,” Kelley-Brown said. “Some districts don’t even realize it’s required instruction.”

    The persistent focus in Florida on instruction of African American topics comes as DeSantis has partially built his Republican stardom by targeting public schools for signs of progressive ideologies. His administration has forced K-12 schools to comb their textbooks and curriculum for any evidence of Critical Race Theory or related topics and he championed a new law that puts guardrails on lessons about racism and oppression. Both measures were cited in the state’s decision last month to block a new Advanced Placement class on African American Studies from Florida high schools. (On Wednesday, the College Board, which oversees AP courses and exams, released an updated framework of African American Studies class that did not include many of the authors and topics DeSantis had objected to. His administration said it was reviewing the changes to see if the course now complies with state law.)

    Black Democratic lawmakers say the state Department of Education under DeSantis has shown far more zeal in enforcing these new restrictions on how race can be taught in schools than the state, in almost 30 years, has ever demonstrated toward ensuring that Black history is taught at all.

    “If we say that the speed limit is 70 and someone goes 80, the Highway Patrol is there with some consequences,” state Sen. Geraldine Thompson said at a recent press conference. “But there have been no consequences for not teaching African American history.”

    The governor’s office and the Florida Department of Education did not respond when asked about the state’s efforts to enforce the mandate to teach Black history. But DeSantis recently elaborated on how he expects the subject to be taught.

    “It’s just cut and dried history,” DeSantis said. “You learn all the basics. You learn about the great figures, and you know, I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history.”

    For a state that had to be dragged to desegregate all of its schools well into the 1970s, the move to require African American history in Florida classrooms was notably unceremonious. Lawmakers unanimously approved the mandate in 1994 with little debate. Few newspapers covered then-Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles signing the bill into law.

    After it passed, the state created the African American History Task Force to help school districts with this new directive and to come up with a strategy for implementation. But neither the law nor the Florida Department of Education set a deadline for districts to comply.

    Former state Rep. Rudolph Bradley, the Black lawmaker who sponsored the bill to require African American history back then, now says there was a major flaw in the legislation that kept it from accomplishing what he set out to achieve: Lawmakers didn’t set aside any money for school districts to update their textbooks, buy new instructional materials or train teachers.

    “The mistake on my part, being a freshman, I didn’t understand the importance of attaching appropriations,” Bradley told CNN in a recent interview. “I didn’t understand what an unfunded mandate was and how difficult that would make it for school districts to incorporate it.”

    Even districts that had sought to comply with the law faced hurdles. Among those early adopters in 1994 was Pinellas County, where efforts to incorporate African American history into their lessons were underway prior to the law’s passage – and where a teenage DeSantis was entering sophomore year of high school that fall.

    At Dunedin High School, a predominantly White school within walking distance of Florida’s gulf shores, DeSantis should have been among the first wave of students to be exposed to this more complete telling of history. The school already offered African American history as an elective and the district had tapped the teacher of that class, Randy Lightfoot, to guide Pinellas schools into compliance with the new law. (Lightfoot said DeSantis was not a student in his African American history class.)

    Lightfoot and his team met after school for three hours a day, four times a week for months to forge a plan to incorporate Black history, culture and figures into every grade level, he told CNN in a recent interview. They printed a blueprint called “African American Connections.”

    The accurate teaching of African American studies, the document said, “explains the causes of racial division in society, including prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination” and the “systematic oppression perspective of Africans and African-Americans and their resistance to that oppression.”

    The state heralded Lightfoot’s efforts as a model for adhering to the new law, according to news accounts from the time. The Florida education commissioner liked it so much he handed a copy to every school district, Lightfoot said. DeSantis more recently has called the idea of systemic racism “a bunch of horse manure.”

    By 1996, Lightfoot was warning that his efforts were being stymied by lack of resources. Lightfoot struggled to convince the Pinellas school board to acquire textbooks that included the new lessons on Black history, according to the St. Petersburg Times, which also noted that the district cut his staff.

    The attempts to expand the curriculum to teach African American history also came during a period of racial strife in Pinellas County. In 1996, riots broke out in St. Petersburg, the city 20 minutes south of DeSantis’ suburban home, after the police killed an unarmed Black teenager during a traffic stop, and again when the officers involved were cleared of charges. Meanwhile, graduation rates for Black male students remained stubbornly low in Pinellas, the Times reported, and the county school board had broached the controversial idea of curbing forced busing to desegregate the public schools, leading to a period of distrust between the board and Black residents.

    By the time DeSantis graduated in 1997 – having earned recognition as a decorated Advanced Placement history student, according to his senior yearbook – getting African American history in Pinellas schools was still a work in progress, Lightfoot said.

    Statewide, only a handful of schools had earned “exemplary” status from the African American History Task Force by the end of that decade, meaning they had reached benchmarks for compliance. “Exemplary” school districts must demonstrate their curriculum included African American topics beyond Black History Month, training for teachers in the subject, involvement of parents in the learning and collaboration with a local university for support. In 1999, a bill that would have required public school textbooks to include African American history went nowhere in the state legislature.

    Carlton Owens, a Black classmate of DeSantis’ at Dunedin High, said he only saw people like himself reflected in the curriculum during Black History Month or lessons around slavery and the Civil Rights movement.

    “There’s so much more history that’s inspiring that is interwoven in the American story as a whole,” Owens, now a lawyer and small business owner, said. “And that wasn’t highlighted then, and that needs to be happening now.”

    The state “put the material out there for districts,” said Lightfoot, now a history professor at St. Petersburg College. “But they didn’t put the kind of money in to check and make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

    “We were trying to fill in the gaps and the holes in history,” he added. “At the same time, we had Black male students who we thought we could help improve their grades if they saw their stories in history and science and literature. Where it worked, we had pretty good success with it. But we had the support of state leaders to do it. It was a different climate then.”

    In a 2019 press release, the Florida Department of Education announced it would require districts for the first time to report how they were teaching required subjects including “Holocaust education, African American history, Hispanic heritage, women’s history, civics and more.”

    A CNN review of those reports for the 2021-22 school year found wide discrepancies in how districts lesson-plan around the subject of African American history. Some districts provide lengthy plans for weaving the African American experience into social studies from kindergarten through high school graduation; others suggest exploration comes primarily during Black History month. More than a dozen submissions largely parroted the requirements listed in state law without including any details of the instruction.

    Leon County, declared an exemplary school district by the African American History Task Force, included details like its lessons on African American scientists, songwriters and artists during grades K-5. Dixie County, near the Florida Panhandle, submitted 1,600 words on how it teaches African American history to high schoolers. Madison County, a school district near the Florida-Georgia border, simply wrote: “Courses are taught on a daily basis by a Florida certified teacher. The district also stresses Black History Month with daily mini-lessons for all grade levels.”

    The Florida Association of School Superintendents did not respond to a request for comment.

    Democrats and advocates contend the state has done little with this information. They also say the administration has not yet indicated how it will ensure schools are complying with a new state law signed by DeSantis that requires annual instruction of the 1920 Ocoee massacre, when dozens of Black Floridians were murdered in a horrific Election Day racial cleansing.

    Democratic lawmakers say they intend to introduce legislation that would require the state to enforce whether school districts are teaching African American history as the law intends, though its supporters acknowledge any bill is unlikely to gain traction in a statehouse controlled by Republicans.

    “It won’t go anywhere,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a member of the legislature’s Black caucus. “But it’ll be a helluva message that we’re getting behind true and accurate Black history being taught in the state of Florida.”

    Early in his first term, there was some hope from the state’s Black community that DeSantis would forge a different path than some of his Republican predecessors. In one of his first acts as governor, DeSantis voted to pardon the Groveland Four – two Black men who were lynched and two who received lengthy sentences for allegedly raping a White woman in 1949 – widely considered one of the darkest episodes in Florida’s violent past. Former Gov. Rick Scott, who served two terms prior to DeSantis taking office, had refused to pardon the four men despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence.

    But DeSantis’ posture changed following the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. DeSantis responded to the national unrest by mobilizing the state’s national guard and pushing through what he called an “anti-riot” law that included harsh new penalties for protesters if a demonstration turns violent.

    DeSantis then turned his attention to schools. In June 2021, he urged the state Board of Education to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory, an academic framework based around the idea that systemic racism is embedded in many American institutions and society. His administration then rejected math textbooks on the grounds that they included Critical Race Theory and other forbidden topics. Last year, lawmakers approved one of DeSantis’ top legislative priorities: the so-called “Stop WOKE Act,” which said schools cannot teach that anyone is inherently racist or responsible for past atrocities because of their skin color. The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also said schools could teach that oppression of races has existed throughout US history but not persuade students to a particular point of view.

    The controversies around these actions have catapulted DeSantis into the national conversation on teaching race and helped fuel his rise as a potential presidential contender. Throughout these episodes, DeSantis has often maintained that African American history is built into Florida’s education framework.

    “Florida statutes require teaching all of American history including slavery, civil rights, segregation,” DeSantis contended during his debate against his Democratic opponent last year, Charlie Crist. “It’s important that that’s taught. But what I think is not good is to scapegoat students based on skin color.”

    Reginald Ellis, a professor of History and African-American Studies at Florida A&M University, said if students were adequately learning Black history, he would see it first hand in his classroom.

    “What I find, even at a historically Black college, the vast majority of students have not really been exposed to much African American history and experience,” Ellis said. “It is a law on the books. There is a task force. But, for the most part, it clearly isn’t a curriculum that is being enforced. School districts effectively have the option to opt-in or opt-out.”

    Bradley, the original bill sponsor, said the law’s shortcomings fall on those who have held power in Tallahassee and in school districts for the past three decades, and not DeSantis. Bradley, who changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican later in his political career, said he was supportive of DeSantis’ education agenda and accused activists of using schools to “drive a wedge between Blacks and Whites.”

    “The law is still a work in progress, but if we want to use it as a tool to divide then that is a total violation of the spirit of the law,” Bradley said. “When I passed that bill, it was designed to bring people together, not divide.”

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  • Two wounded in shooting in Jerusalem, police say, after synagogue attack leaves seven dead | CNN

    Two wounded in shooting in Jerusalem, police say, after synagogue attack leaves seven dead | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two people were wounded in a shooting attack in Jerusalem on Saturday, emergency services say, the day after a gunman killed at least seven people near a synagogue in the city.

    The two men injured in the City of David area of Jerusalem on Saturday, one aged 22 and one in his 40s, are father and son, according to police. A 13-year-old who police say shot and wounded the pair was “neutralized and injured” by “two passers-by carrying licensed weapons.”

    Tensions in Israel and the Palestinian territories remain high after Friday’s shooting, which police chief Yaakov Shabtai described as “one of the worst terror attacks in the past few years.” The shooter in that attack was also later killed by police forces, according to police.

    “As a result of the shooting attack, the death of 7 civilians was determined and 3 others were injured with additional degrees of injury,” police said.

    Five of the shooting victims were pronounced dead at the scene, Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency rescue service said: four men and a woman. Five people were transported to hospitals, where another man and woman were declared dead. Among the wounded is a 15-year-old boy, the MDA said.

    The attack occurred around 8:15 p.m. local time on Friday, near a synagogue on Neve Yaakov Street, according to a police statement.

    Shabtai said the gunman “started shooting at anyone that was in his way. He got in his car and started a killing spree with a pistol at short range.” He then fled the scene in a vehicle and was killed after a shootout with police forces, police said.

    Police identified the gunman as a 21-year-old resident of East Jerusalem, saying in a statement that he appeared to have acted alone. East Jerusalem is a predominantly Palestinian area of the city, which was captured by Israel in 1967.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged people against revenge attacks on Friday night. “I call on the people not to take the law into their own hands. For that purpose we have an army, police and security forces. They act and will act according to the cabinet instructions,” he said.

    Friday’s incident came one day after the deadliest day for Palestinians in the West Bank in over a year, according to CNN records.

    On Thursday, Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians and wounded several others in the West Bank city of Jenin, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, prompting the Palestinian Authority to suspend security coordination with Israel. A tenth Palestinian was killed that day in what Israel Police called a “violent disturbance” near Jerusalem.

    Overnight, on Friday morning local time, Israel launched air strikes on the Gaza strip after rockets were fired towards Israel.

    Israel’s controversial National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visited the scene of the attack on Friday evening, telling people who were chanting angrily that “it cannot continue like this.”

    “I can tell you, [the people chanting] you are right. The burden is on us. It cannot continue like this,” Ben Gvir, who also leads the far-right Jewish Power party, said.

    Some people on the scene were chanting support for Ben Gvir, saying “You are our voice, we support you.”

    CNN’s Hadas Gold and team, who were also at the scene of Friday night’s shooting, heard what sounded like celebratory gunfire and car horns honking from the nearby predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina.

    The White House condemned the “heinous terror attack” at a synagogue in Jerusalem on Friday and said the United States government has extended its “full support” to Israel, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

    The US State Department also condemned the “apparent terrorist attack” in Jerusalem “in the strongest terms.”

    “This is absolutely horrific,” said State Department Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel. “Our thoughts, prayers and condolences go out to those killed and injured in this heinous act of violence.”

    Patel said no change to the schedule of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s upcoming trip to Egypt, Israel and the West Bank was expected.

    Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir speaks with Israeli forces on January 27, 2023.

    The European Union, France and the UK also condemned the shooting.

    “I am appalled by reports of the terrible attack in Neve Yaakov tonight. Attacking worshippers at a synagogue on Erev Shabat is a particularly horrific act of terrorism. The UK stands with Israel,” Neil Wigan, the British ambassador in Israel wrote on Twitter.

    The EU ambassador to Israel, Dimiter Tzantchev, also condemned the “senseless violence,” saying in his tweet, “Terror is never the answer.”

    And the French embassy in Israel tweeted that the incident was “all the more despicable as it was committed on this day of international remembrance of the Holocaust.”

    United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres also condemned Friday’s deadly attack, his spokesman said.

    “It is particularly abhorrent that the attack occurred at a place of worship, and on the very day we commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” he said.

    Guterres also expressed worry “about the current escalation of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory,” urging all “to exercise utmost restraint.”

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  • Five former Memphis police officers indicted on charges of murder and kidnapping in Tyre Nichols’ death | CNN

    Five former Memphis police officers indicted on charges of murder and kidnapping in Tyre Nichols’ death | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Five former Memphis police officers who were fired for their actions during the arrest of Tyre Nichols earlier this month were indicted on charges including murder and kidnapping, Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced Thursday.

    The former officers, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin and Desmond Mills Jr., have each been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, two charges of aggravated kidnapping, two charges of official misconduct and one charge of official oppression, Mulroy said.

    “While each of the five individuals played a different role in the incident in question, the actions of all of them resulted in the death of Tyre Nichols, and they are all responsible,” he said.

    Live updates on the Tyre Nichols case

    Second-degree murder is defined in Tennessee as a “knowing killing of another” and is considered a Class A felony punishable by between 15 to 60 years in prison.

    The criminal charges come about three weeks after Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was hospitalized after a traffic stop and “confrontation” with Memphis police that family attorneys have called a savage beating. Nichols died from his injuries on January 10, three days after the arrest, authorities said.

    Four of the officers remained in custody Thursday evening, after being booked into the Shelby County Jail. Bond was set at $350,000 for Haley, 30, and Martin, 30, and $250,000 for Bean, 24, and Smith, 28, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Mills, 32, posted $250,000 bond Thursday evening and was released, according to jail records.

    In a joint news conference Thursday afternoon, Blake Ballin, an attorney for Mills, and William Massey, Martin’s attorney, said they have not yet watched the video of the police encounter, which is expected to be released to the public Friday.

    Ballin described Mills as a “respectful father,” who was “devastated” to be accused in the killing. Mills, previously a jailer in Mississippi and Tennessee, was in the process of posting bond Thursday to secure his release and plans to enter a not guilty plea in court, his attorney said. Ballin said he had not spoken to Mills specifically about Nichols.

    Martin also intended to post bond and will also plead not guilty, his attorney said. “No one out there that night intended for Tyre Nichols to die,” Massey said.

    Other officers’ attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    Police nationwide have been under heightened scrutiny for how they treat Black people, particularly since the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the mass protest movement known as Black Lives Matter. Officials in Memphis have braced for potential civil unrest due to Nichols’ death and have called for peaceful protests.

    President Joe Biden said in a Thursday statement the killing is a “painful reminder that we must do more to ensure that our criminal justice system lives up to the promise of fair and impartial justice, equal treatment, and dignity for all.”

    Video of the fatal police encounter, a mix of body-camera and pole-cam video, is expected to be released publicly after 6 p.m. Friday, Mulroy said.

    Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday night, Mulroy said that while he can’t definitively say what caused the encounter to escalate, the video shows that the officers were “already highly charged up” from the start of the video and “it just escalated further from there.”

    The video doesn’t capture the beginning of the altercation between the officers and Nichols but rather “cuts in as the first encounter is in progress,” Mulroy said.

    “What struck me (about the video) is how many different incidents of unwarranted force occurred sporadically by different individuals over a long period of time,” the district attorney added.

    Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch said the fatal encounter was not proper policing.

    “I’m sickened by what I saw and what we’ve learned from our extensive and thorough investigation,” he said. “I’ve seen the video, and as DA Mulroy stated, you will too. In a word, it’s absolutely appalling.”

    Nichols’ family and attorneys were shown the video on Monday and said it shows officers severely beating Nichols and compared it to the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King in 1991.

    “The news today from Memphis officials that these five officers are being held criminally accountable for their deadly and brutal actions gives us hope as we continue to push for justice for Tyre,” attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said Thursday.

    Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis took on the position in June 2021.

    The five Memphis police officers, who are also Black, were fired last week for violating policies on excessive use of force, duty to intervene and duty to render aid, the department said.

    In a YouTube video released late Wednesday, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis condemned the officers’ actions and called for peaceful protests when the arrest video is released.

    “This is not just a professional failing. This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual,” Davis said in the video, her first on-camera comments about the arrest. “This incident was heinous, reckless and inhumane.”

    “I expect our citizens to exercise their First Amendment right to protest to demand action and results. But we need to ensure our community is safe in this process,” said Davis, the first Black woman to serve as Memphis police chief. “None of this is a calling card for inciting violence or destruction on our community or against our citizens.”

    The five terminated officers all joined the department in the last six years, according to police. Other Memphis police officers are still under investigation for department policy violations related to the incident, the chief said.

    In a statement posted Thursday, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said the city had initiated an “outside, independent review” of the training, policies and operations of the police department’s specialized units. At least two of the officers belonged to one of those special units, according to their attorneys.

    Two members of the city’s fire department who were part of Nichols’ “initial patient care” also were relieved of duty, a fire spokesperson said. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced an investigation into Nichols’ death and the US Department of Justice and FBI have opened a civil rights investigation.

    Mulroy said the investigation is ongoing and there could be further charges going forward.

    Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies nationwide are bracing for protests and potential unrest following the release of video, multiple sources told CNN.

    The Memphis Police Department has terminated five police officers in connection with the death of Tyre Nichols. Top: Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmit Martin. Bottom: Desmond Mills Jr., Justin Smith

    Nichols, the father of a 4-year-old, had worked with his stepfather at FedEx for about nine months, his family said. He was fond of skateboarding in Shelby Farms Park, Starbucks with friends and photographing sunsets, and he had his mother’s name tattooed on his arm, the family said. He also had the digestive issue known as Crohn’s disease and so was a slim 140 to 145 pounds despite his 6-foot-3-inch height, his mother said.

    On January 7, he was pulled over by Memphis officers on suspicion of reckless driving, police said in their initial statement on the incident. As officers approached the vehicle, a “confrontation” occurred and Nichols fled on foot, police said. The officers pursued him and they had another “confrontation” before he was taken into custody, police said.

    Nichols then complained of shortness of breath, was taken to a local hospital in critical condition and died three days later, police said.

    In Memphis police scanner audio, a person says there was “one male Black running” and called to “set up a perimeter.” Another message says “he’s fighting at this time.”

    On Thursday, Mulroy offered a few further details, saying the serious injuries occurred at the second confrontation. He also said Nichols was taken away in an ambulance after “some period of time of waiting around.”

    Attorneys for Nichols’ family who watched video of the arrest on Monday described it as a heinous police beating that lasted three long minutes. Crump said Nichols was tased, pepper-sprayed and restrained, and Romanucci said he was kicked.

    “He was defenseless the entire time. He was a human piñata for those police officers. It was an unadulterated, unabashed, nonstop beating of this young boy for three minutes. That is what we saw in that video,” Romanucci said. “Not only was it violent, it was savage.”

    Nichols had “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to the attorneys, citing preliminary results of an autopsy they commissioned.

    Among the charges, the officers were indicted on two counts of aggravated kidnapping: one for possession of a weapon and one for bodily injury.

    “At a certain point in the sequence of events, it is our view that this, if it was a legal detention to begin with, it certainly became illegal at a certain point, and it was an unlawful detention,” Mulroy said.

    Less than a month after the murder of Floyd, the Memphis Police Department amended its duty to intervene policy, according to a copy of the policy sent to CNN by the MPD.

    “Any member who directly observes another member engaged in dangerous or criminal conduct or abuse of a subject shall take reasonable action to intervene,” the policy, sent out on June 9, 2020, said.

    “A member shall immediately report to the Department any violation of policies and regulations or any other improper conduct which is contrary to the policy, order, or directives of the Department.”

    The policy went on to say “this reporting requirement also applies to allegations of uses of force not yet reported.”

    Correction: A previous version of this story gave the wrong spelling for the name of one of the arrested officers. According to the indictment, it is Tadarrius Bean.

    Previous versions of this story spelled Emmitt Martin’s name incorrectly.

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  • Emhoff to visit Auschwitz to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day | CNN Politics

    Emhoff to visit Auschwitz to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff is traveling this week to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, visiting key sites in Poland and Germany to honor those lost in the Holocaust and renew a pledge to “Never Forget.”

    As the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president, Emhoff has made countering the recent global scourge of antisemitism a key priority. The goals of this trip abroad will build on that, senior administration officials told reporters before his departure, focused on Holocaust education and remembrance, as well as combating antisemitism worldwide.

    “There will be many events focusing on honoring the victims of the Holocaust, and having a second gentleman educating the public on the true nature of the Holocaust. You will see the second gentleman push back against Holocaust denial, distortion and disinformation, and educating the next generation about the Holocaust,” a senior administration official said.

    Emhoff, the official added, “will be meeting with and working with our European partners, both those in and out of government to strengthen our efforts to combat the rise in antisemitism and to deepen our relationships with these European partners as we take on the challenge together.”

    The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which has tracked incidents of US antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault since 1979, found 2,717 incidents of antisemitism in the US in 2021, up a significant 34% from the previous year. And in recent months, there have been multiple incidents of incendiary antisemitic incidents in the public sphere, including tweets from Kanye West, a link posted by Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving to a video filled with antisemitic tropes, a sign over a major Los Angeles bridge and other troubling views shared by political figures.

    The second gentleman has a packed schedule of events aimed at highlighting Jewish history and the Holocaust, and combating antisemitism, though officials cast the trip as “more of a listening session” than focused on “big policy deliverables.”

    On Friday, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Emhoff is set to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial and Museum in Poland, where he will receive a tour, then participate in a candle-lighting and wreath-laying. He will also attend the commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz, per his office.

    On Saturday, Emhoff will visit Schindler’s Enamel Factory museum, a key site commemorating the Holocaust, and attend a roundtable on antisemitism in Krakow.

    “The goal here is to hear directly from experts, religious leaders, and academics on their work in Poland to promote tolerance, education, and inclusiveness. And throughout that, the second gentleman will be signaling to them our eagerness to work with them and that we are with them in their fight,” the official said.

    He is also set to meet with Ukrainian refugees and United Nations officials at a UN community center.

    On Sunday, he will tour Krakow’s Jewish quarter and then visit historic Jewish sites in Gorlice, Poland, before traveling to Berlin.

    In Berlin on Monday, Emhoff joins a Convening of Special Envoys and Coordinators on Combating Antisemitism, where he will be joined by US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt. He is later set to visit Berlin’s Topography of Terror Museum and the Museum of Jewish Life.

    On Tuesday, he will participate in a roundtable with interfaith leaders.

    “Interfaith dialogue has been an area of focus for a second gentleman. And the basic idea is here, which he will be speaking about throughout the trip, is that we know that Semitism is not only a threat to Jews, it is often accompanied or the precursor to other forms of hatred and intolerance, including against other ethnic or religious minority groups or immigrants. So we view this engagement as about building coalitions across all groups to combat hate in all its forms,” the senior official said.

    Emhoff will meet with Ukrainian refugees at the Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue. He will also visit multiple memorials, including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where he will meet with “a small group” of Holocaust survivors.

    The trip takes on special significance for Emhoff, whose “great grandparents (fled) persecution from what is now Poland at the beginning of the 19th century,” the senior official said.

    “That is a pretty incredible moment for him to return as an American Jew, as the first second gentleman, as the first Jewish spouse of the president or vice president, and work on these issues,” the official said.

    Emhoff has previously warned of an “epidemic of hate facing our country” as he convened a roundtable on antisemitism at the White House last month.

    “We’re seeing a rapid rise in antisemitic rhetoric and acts,” Emhoff said at the start of the roundtable. “Let me be clear: words matter. People are no longer saying the quiet parts out loud – they are literally screaming them.”

    In addition to the roundtable, as second gentleman, Emhoff has met with students to discuss domestic antisemitism, hosted a virtual Seder, lit the menorah and affixed a mezuzah outside the entrance of the vice president’s Naval Observatory residence.

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  • A new partisan era of American education | CNN Politics

    A new partisan era of American education | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he’s protecting kids from indoctrination and political agendas, but the zeal with which he has pushed expansive efforts to remake the Florida education system also represents an effort to influence young minds.

    However you view DeSantis’ motivations, he is getting results.

    The College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Advanced Placement program offered across high schools, said it would change a new AP African American studies course that DeSantis said violated a state law to restrict certain lessons about race in schools.

    His state’s Department of Education complained the college-level course mentioned Black queer theory and the idea of intersectionality. Read more about why Florida rejected the course.

    “Governor DeSantis, are you really trying to lead us into an era akin to communism that provides censorship of free thoughts?” the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said at a press conference on Wednesday in Florida, where he announced he would sue DeSantis on behalf of three high school students if DeSantis would not negotiate with the College Board about the AP course.

    DeSantis recently demanded a list of names of staff and programs related to diversity at public colleges and universities, part of a crackdown on “trendy ideology.”

    Separately, he wants details on students who sought gender dysphoria treatment at state universities.

    DeSantis also wants to remake the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal arts school, as a sort of “Hillsdale of the South,” according to Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz.

    Hillsdale, as USA Today points out, is a private, conservative Christian college in Michigan.

    A new DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida board of trustees has clashed with board officials over his request to open every meeting with a prayer.

    Republicans across the country are focused on education. They want to guard against anything perceived as pushing equity rather than merit.

    Virginia’s governor sees a conspiracy in how school districts recognize distinction in a scholarship program based on scores on the PSAT.

    The state attorney general has launched a discrimination investigation into whether the Fairfax County Public Schools system – including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a nationally recognized Virginia magnet school – discriminated against students by not informing them of recognition under the National Merit Scholarship program.

    The students qualified for recognition but did not advance in the competition for a scholarship.

    Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, according to CNN’s report, claimed these revelations were a result of the “maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.”

    “The failure of numerous Fairfax County schools to inform students of their national merit awards could serve as a Virginia human rights violation,” the governor’s office said in a previous statement provided to CNN.

    Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent Michelle Reid told CNN the recognitions should have come earlier, but cited a lack of a “division-wide protocol” rather than any kind of mania about equity. Read more about the controversy.

    Texas officials also have their eyes on the state’s colleges and universities, according to CNN’s Eric Bradner.

    “Our public professors are accountable to the taxpayer because you pay their salary,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in an inauguration speech. Bradner notes Patrick has pushed to end tenure at Texas public colleges and universities.

    “I don’t want teachers in our colleges saying, ‘America is evil and capitalism is bad and socialism is better,’” he said. “And if that means some of those professors that want to teach that don’t come to Texas, I’m OK with that.” Read Bradner’s full report.

    Meanwhile, in South Dakota, lawmakers are looking to develop a social studies curriculum based on “American exceptionalism,” propelled by the governor’s desire to put more patriotism in the classroom.

    The focus by Republican politicians on issues of race in colleges and the classroom is mirrored by the potential for a court-mandated turnaround in how American students are viewed for admissions.

    The Supreme Court heard arguments in October in two separate cases regarding affirmative action and seems poised to say colleges and universities cannot consider race in admissions.

    Nine states have already outlawed affirmative action for public universities. Voters in California were the first to do so, and the end result was falling enrollment, in particular among Black students at top public schools in the University of California system and at the University of Michigan. Those states both encouraged the Supreme Court not to outlaw affirmative action.

    Florida, which also ended the practice, encouraged the court to throw affirmative action out.


    Education was a major focus for Republicans in the recent election. While it clearly worked for DeSantis in Florida and a year earlier for Youngkin in Virginia, the mixed results for Republicans writ large may call the strategy into question as the 2024 election looms.

    I read on the education news website Chalkbeat about a new study that predicts more politics in the classroom as Americans increasingly sort themselves by political ideology.

    In the working paper, David Houston, an education policy professor at George Mason University, argues that previous debates over desegregation, prayer and sex education in public schools were divisive but not inherently partisan.

    He points to the moderate positions of previous presidents as proof. Then-President George W. Bush worked with then-Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy on education reform in 2001. Former President Barack Obama was praised by Republicans in 2012 for his work on education.

    Those stories feel like they’re from a different universe when today’s Republican governors are looking to root out liberal extremism in schools.

    Houston argues in his study, which is based on survey data, that the US may be on the cusp of a new and divisive era with “heightened partisan animosity across all aspects of education politics.”

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  • Russian intelligence agents believed to have directed White supremacists to carry out bombing campaign in Spain, US officials say | CNN Politics

    Russian intelligence agents believed to have directed White supremacists to carry out bombing campaign in Spain, US officials say | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US officials believe that Russian intelligence officers directed a Russian White supremacist group to carry out a letter-bombing campaign that rocked Madrid late last year, targeting the prime minister, the American and Ukrainian Embassies as well as the Spanish defense ministry, according to current and former US officials.

    Spanish authorities have yet to make any arrests in connection with the attacks, which wounded one Ukrainian Embassy employee, but they were widely suspected at the time to be linked to Spain’s support for Kyiv.

    Some details of how, exactly, the campaign was directed and carried out remain fuzzy, two US officials said. It’s not clear how much knowledge – if any – the Kremlin or Russian President Vladimir Putin himself had.

    Still, US officials now believe that the attack was likely a warning shot to European governments which have rallied around Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February of last year.

    The New York Times first reported on the alleged involvement of Russian intelligence in the attacks.

    A State Department spokesperson declined to comment “on matters involving leaked intelligence or active law enforcement investigations,” and referred to the Spanish government “for information related to their ongoing investigation.”

    “We condemn all attempts by entities to harm and intimidate government officials and foreign embassies,” the spokesperson added.

    As the war rages on – and particularly if Russia’s battlefield position deteriorates – US officials expect Russia to try to look for proxy groups it can work with to drive up fear of possible terrorist attacks carried out by Russian-backed groups in Europe and the Middle East, one US official explained.

    The State Department designated the White supremacist group, the Russian Imperial Movement, as a global terror organization in 2020. The group is believed to have connections to Russian intelligence agencies and has been used as a proxy force before, current and former officials familiar with US intelligence told CNN. But those connections are murky, these people emphasized, in part because the US lacks good visibility inside RIM.

    But the possibility that an organ of the Russian government – the military intelligence agency, the GRU – appears to have been involved in the attacks is likely to drive up pressure on the Biden administration to name Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, according to one current and one former US official. The administration has so far been loathe to take such a step, despite pressure from key congressional officials, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

    There are drawbacks to taking that step, one US official noted, in particular that it limits the administration’s ability to engage with Russia in areas where it might want to.

    The White supremacist group, RIM, has associates across Europe and operates military-style training centers within Russia but is not formally affiliated with the Russian government. But, one former US official said, “There’s no question that RIM operates in Russia because it’s allowed to operate in Russia.”

    The GRU, meanwhile, has carried out increasingly bold operations across Europe and beyond, including assassination attempts. It is also believed to have offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing US troops in Afghanistan, although in that instance, too, the intelligence reporting remained murky, and the Kremlin’s involvement was unclear.

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  • GOP Rep. George Santos denies claims he performed as a drag queen | CNN Politics

    GOP Rep. George Santos denies claims he performed as a drag queen | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Embattled Republican Rep. George Santos is strongly denying claims that he once performed as a drag queen.

    “The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” the New York congressman tweeted Thursday after a Brazilian drag performer posted a photo of herself with another individual dressed in drag that she claims is Santos.

    “The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results. I will not be distracted nor fazed by this,” the tweet continued.

    Santos, who represents New York’s 3rd District, has been under immense scrutiny over the past month for lying and misrepresenting his educational, work and family history, including falsely claiming he was Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. He also faces federal and local investigations into his campaign finances. Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his resume but has maintained he is “not a criminal.”

    The congressman – an out gay man – was identified by a longtime local performer who says Santos went by the name Kitara Ravache. On January 12, performer Eula Rochards posted a picture of herself with another person in drag who she alleged was Santos at a Rio de Janeiro-area parade.

    The photo is from a newspaper clipping from 2008 and identifies the person Rochards says is Santos as Kitara Revache.

    Rochards also provided to CNN another, clearer image of the person she claims is Santos, in addition to the clipping.

    CNN has not independently verified the images.

    In an interview with CNN, Rochards said that it’s Santos in the pictures, adding that she knew him from LGBTQ events he attended in the town of Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, where she said he was well known in the gay community.

    Rochards said she recognized Santos from a recent news report and dug up the old pictures but was surprised to learn that Santos was a Republican.

    “I don’t know him now, I only knew him then,” she said.

    “But if [Jair] Bolsonaro can win here, why wouldn’t Santos win there?” she added, referring to the former Brazilian president.

    Rochards said she wishes Santos would own up to this part of his past.

    “It’s marvelous work [to be a drag queen]. He can’t discriminate against what he himself did, and if he does he is discriminating against me,” she said.

    Santos has not replied to CNN’s request for comment. He told NBC News in a previous interview that he has “never experienced discrimination in the Republican Party.”

    Santos has voiced support in the past for policies seen as discriminatory against LGBTQ individuals. In April 2022, he posted a video on Facebook vocalizing his support for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ legislation in Florida banning certain teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms. In the video, he accused Democrats of “wanting to groom our kids” – a homophobic term that invokes an idea that LGBTQ people corrupt children.

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  • LGBTQ people, allies dodge $1,500 fines in North Dakota

    LGBTQ people, allies dodge $1,500 fines in North Dakota

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    As more than a dozen states consider passing anti-transgender legislation this year, North Dakota lawmakers rejected a bill Friday that would have made people pay $1,500 each time they refer to themselves or others with gender pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth.

    “The main purpose of the bill was to eliminate state funding for entities including education that would promote, allow or support the ideology of transgenderism,” said Republican sponsor Sen. David Clemens, of West Fargo. Others testified at a Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the bill is designed to discriminate, and could impact the state’s behavioral health providers.

    The vote tally came to 39 senators against the bill and eight in favor.

    Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had said they agreed with the bill’s purpose, but that it was poorly written and would be difficult to enforce. It would also have harmed people who do not identify as transgender and would possibly violate First Amendment rights, they said.

    Christina Sambor of the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition testified against the bill Wednesday. “Its very purpose is gender-based discrimination,” Sambor said.

    Reed Eliot Rahrich, who identifies as transgender, added that the bill is “a poorly thought out affront to human rights.”

    Dan Cramer, a psychologist and clinical director at the state Department of Health and Human Services, said it would create “significant problems” for human service centers in meeting basic accreditation standards and funding requirements. Those standards prohibit discrimination against a client’s sexual orientation and gender identity.

    Republican Sen. Janne Myrdal, of Edinburg, voted against the bill, but said she plans to support others that align with her belief “that God gives you your identity and your sex at conception.”

    North Dakota lawmakers will consider other bills this session that would obstruct transgender and non-binary people from using their preferred pronouns, criminalize doctors providing gender-affirming care, deter transgender youth from joining school sports teams, penalize drag-show performers and more.

    More than two dozen bills seeking to restrict transgender health care access have been introduced in at least 11 other states — Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — for the legislative sessions beginning in early 2023. Bills targeting other transgender issues have been filed in many of the same states and are expected in several others with GOP majorities.

    Rahrich, who testified against the bill, said he lived in North Dakota until he was 25 but moved away in 2016 after “a series of escalating brushes” with anti-LGBTQ violence.

    “I could wax poetic about the rolling prairie, or how much I miss the enormity of the sky,” he said about North Dakota. “But what I can’t do is compel you to see me as a human being.”

    ___

    Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow her on Twitter: @TrishaAhmed15

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  • Backlash follows finding that soccer manager who used ‘offensive, racist and Islamophobic’ language is ‘not a conscious racist’ | CNN

    Backlash follows finding that soccer manager who used ‘offensive, racist and Islamophobic’ language is ‘not a conscious racist’ | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Anti-racism groups and England’s Football Association (FA) are denouncing an independent panel’s finding that a British soccer manager who used “offensive, racist and Islamophobic” language is “not a conscious racist.”

    Former Crawley Town FC manager John Yems was accused of making at least 16 offensive comments between 2019 and 2022, with each comment including “a reference to ethnic origin and/or colour and/or race and/or nationality and/or religion or belief and/or gender,” said the FA, English soccer’s governing body.

    An independent Regulatory Commission appointed by the FA investigated and suspended Yems from all football and football-related activity for 18 months up to and including June 1, 2024, for 12 breaches of FA rules, the organization said in a statement on January 6. He had been suspended from coaching duties in April pending the regulatory commission investigation and was let go from the club in May.

    Reacting to the independent panel’s findings, the FA said in a statement Wednesday that it was “considering legal options” following the ruling, adding: “We fundamentally disagree with the independent panel’s finding that this was not a case of conscious racism.”

    Yems admitted to one comment and denied 15, the FA said. During a hearing, the independent Regulatory Commission found Yems to be guilty of 11 breaches and could not prove the other four, the FA added.

    Yems, 62, testified to the panel that he was not a racist. He said that he himself came from “traveling stock” and that his wife is from an immigrant family. He did acknowledge not being careful enough about speaking in a “politically correct manner.”

    In its findings, the independent panel said they found “11 of the 15 extant Charges to have been established on the balance of probabilities.”

    The report, reviewed by CNN, outlines a number of clearly racist statements by Yems, including slurs and crude stereotypes of Black people, Muslims and people of Caribbean and South Asian origin.

    But despite the “offensive, racist and Islamophobic” comments, the panel – led by Robert Englehart KC and including Wolverhampton Wanderers FC general manager of football operations Matt Wild and Tony Agana, a former football player and specialist arbitrator on the FA Claims Panel – found Yems was not a “conscious racist” and did not merit a stronger punishment, such as a permanent suspension.

    “We have accepted that Mr Yems is not a conscious racist,” the panel wrote, detailing that they reached this conclusion after reviewing written submissions from both parties. “If he were, an extremely lengthy, even permanent, suspension would be appropriate.

    “Nevertheless, Mr Yems’s ‘banter’ undoubtedly came across to the victims and others as offensive, racist and Islamophobic. Mr Yems simply paid no regard to the distress which his misplaced jocularity was causing,” the panel added.

    Crawley Town FC and the English Football League declined to comment when contacted by CNN.

    CNN has also offered Yems a right of reply via the League Managers Association, the organization which represents English soccer coaches.

    Anti-discrimination group Kick It Out also criticized the panel’s findings, saying in a statement: “The discriminatory language outlined in The FA independent panel report is simply shocking.

    “Given the seriousness of the incidents detailed, it is very hard to understand how The FA independent panel have concluded that ‘Mr Yems is not a conscious racist.’ We do not share that viewpoint. The behaviour outlined in the report must be called out for exactly what it is, racism and Islamophobia.

    “To speak plainly, a fifteen month ban given the severity of the 11 proven charges is a slap in the face to the victims of the discriminatory abuse detailed in this report and anyone who has been subject to racism or Islamophobia,” they added.

    Meanwhile, anti-racism educational group Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC) said it was “incredibly disappointed” by the comments highlighted by the report.

    “Racism, ‘conscious’ or not, has a deeply damaging impact on the individual,” added the group.

    “In addition to the sanctions from the FA, there needs to be robust and extensive anti-racism education training, otherwise the perpetrator will never understand the impact and trauma that the individuals have experienced as a result of their ‘unconscious’ actions,” said SRtRC.

    “It is important that at all levels of the game people see that the football family stands united to eradicate racism from the game and wider society.”

    The panel noted that Yems reported having participated in two online courses, but said he should still undergo an education program, which it did not detail.

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  • FEC dismisses RNC complaint that Google’s spam filters were biased against conservatives | CNN Business

    FEC dismisses RNC complaint that Google’s spam filters were biased against conservatives | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Election Commission has tossed out claims by the Republican National Committee that Google’s spam filters in Gmail are illegally biased against conservatives, according to an agency letter obtained by CNN.

    The decision resolves a joint FEC complaint filed last year spearheaded by the RNC that alleged Gmail’s automated filters had sent Republican fundraising emails to spam at a higher rate than for Democratic candidates during the 2020 election cycle. The RNC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The FEC decision to dismiss the complaint and close the case is the latest defeat for Republicans who have sought on multiple occasions to bring the agency’s powers to bear against tech platforms over allegations of anti-conservative bias. In 2021, the FEC dismissed a similar RNC claim against Twitter over the company’s decision to temporarily suppress the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop, saying the content moderation decision appeared to have been made “for a valid commercial reason.”

    The FEC took the same stance on the Gmail filtering issue in a letter to Google last week, and which the company provided to CNN on Wednesday.

    In the Jan. 11 letter, the FEC said its review “found no reason to believe that [Google] made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions” to Democrats in the form of more favorable email filtering treatment.

    In order to be considered a violation, the FEC wrote, “a contribution must be made for the purpose of influencing an election for federal office,” adding that Google’s public statements have made clear its spam filtering exists “for commercial, rather than electoral, purposes.”

    Even if it were true that Gmail spam filtering happened to favor Democratic campaigns over Republican ones, the FEC wrote — an allegation the commission neither explicitly endorsed nor rejected — that outcome would not necessarily make Gmail’s underlying conduct an illegal campaign contribution.

    In its letter, the FEC cited Google’s public statements claiming that its reasons for spam filtering include blocking malware, phishing attacks and scams.

    “In sum, Google has credibly supported its claim that its spam filter is in place for commercial reasons and thus did not constitute a contribution within the meaning of the [Federal Election Campaign Act],” it wrote.

    Documents related to the case will be made available to the public by Feb. 10, according to the letter.

    “The Commission’s bipartisan decision to dismiss this complaint reaffirms that Gmail does not filter emails for political purposes,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson. “We’ll continue to invest in our Gmail industry-leading spam filters because, as the FEC notes, they’re important to protecting people’s inboxes from receiving unwanted, unsolicited, or dangerous messages.”

    While the FEC did not weigh in directly on Gmail’s practices, the letter highlighted the limitations and context surrounding a 2022 academic study that the RNC had leaned heavily upon in its initial complaint.

    The study by North Carolina State University researchers had involved an experiment testing the spam filters of Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Mail. Its findings suggested that of the three email providers, Gmail was the likeliest to mark emails from Republican campaigns as spam.

    The RNC had cited the study’s findings as evidence of “illegal, corporate in-kind contributions” to Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, and called for an FEC investigation.

    But the FEC’s letter cited several factors that cast doubt on the RNC’s interpretation of the research, including the study’s own statements of limitations and a Washington Post interview with one of the study’s lead authors, who had said Republicans were “mischaracterizing” the paper.

    The study itself acknowledged that it covered a short period of time, and that its findings could have been affected by campaigns’ own tactical decision-making as well as other variables the study did not account for, the FEC wrote, adding that in its response to the RNC allegations Google had said the researchers used a sample of 34 email addresses “when Gmail has 1.5 billion users.”

    “Though the NCSU Study appears to demonstrate a disparate impact from Google’s spam filter, it explicitly states that its authors have ‘no reason to believe that there were deliberate attempts from these email services to create these biases to influence the voters,’” the FEC added.

    Meanwhile, a separate RNC lawsuit against Google over the same Gmail filtering issue is still ongoing. And Google has continued with an FEC-approved pilot project that allows political campaigns to bypass Gmail’s spam filters. More than 100 political entities are participating in that program, a Google spokesperson told CNN on Wednesday.

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  • ‘I Have a Dream’ is MLK’s most radical speech — not because of what he said then, but because of how America has changed since | CNN

    ‘I Have a Dream’ is MLK’s most radical speech — not because of what he said then, but because of how America has changed since | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    It’s been called “the moment that changed everything,” the day America “turned the mystic corner,” and “the greatest political speech of the 20th century.”

    As the nation celebrates the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday tomorrow, millions of Americans will once again hear what has become the day’s unofficial soundtrack: King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

    The speech King gave 60 years ago in Washington has been endlessly replayed, dissected and misquoted. It’s his most famous speech. But here’s another way to look at it:

    It is also the most radical speech King ever delivered.

    That declaration might sound like sacrilege to those who will point to King’s thunderous takedowns of war, poverty and capitalism in other sermons. But “I Have a Dream” has arguably become his most radical speech — not because of what he said but because of how America has changed since that day.

    Forget the nonthreatening version of the speech you’ve been taught that emphasizes King’s benign vision of Black, White and brown Americans living in blissful racial harmony.

    The core concept in King’s dream is racial integration – and it still terrifies many people 60 years later.

    Integration is “too threatening to the status quo to ever consider fully,” says Calvin Baker, author of “A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and the Future of America.”

    The concept of integration that King evoked in his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most “radical, discomfiting and transformative” idea in US politics, adds Baker, a novelist and professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

    “It’s the thing the mainstream fears the most,” he says. “It’s a beautiful speech and it’s descriptive of integration. It sounds really good. And then you understand – whew – the work that’s required.”

    This is the tragic irony behind King’s holiday. Millions of Americans applaud the idyllic vision of integration he depicts in “I Have a Dream.” But many of America’s schools, churches and neighborhoods remain racially segregated today — a racial status quo that people on both the left and the right have come to accept.

    If that seems like an overstatement, consider this:

    When was the last time you heard a prominent religious or political leader use the term “integration” while talking about solutions for racial injustice?

    To understand why King’s message is so radical, it’s good to ask what he meant when he evoked integration at the climax of his speech.

    At first glance, the answer seems to be physical proximity. In his speech King declared he dreamed of a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”

    But King didn’t just preach that all Americans should be able to sit at that table, historians say. He also said they should all have an equal chance at getting a slice of the economic pie being served.

    “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee,” King once said.

    Historians say King never saw integration as assimilation – urging people of color to act like White people.

    “He didn’t have in mind a romantic mixing of colors, or what I would call a kind of ‘rubbing shoulders and elbows’ approach to integration,” says Lewis V. Baldwin, author of “The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.” “Dr . King meant mutual acceptance, interpersonal living and shared power.”

    Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. waves to supporters on August 28, 1963, on the Mall in Washington. His speech spoke of Black and White people sitting together

    The power part is what often gets edited out during the ritualistic replays of King’s speech. There is an economic component of King’s dream that’s hardly ever mentioned. The original title of that August 28, 1963, event, for example, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

    “Integration is not just hanging out (together). It’s having access to credit, it’s seeing the value of your home increase, it’s accumulating wealth,” says Leonard Steinhorn, co-author of “By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and The Reality of Race.”

    “It involves employment, quality education and all of those things together.”

    Historians say King’s ultimate goal was not just equal economic opportunity but something even more ambitious, and even spiritual: An America where mutual mistrust between races and religions would be virtually eliminated by people living, worshiping and going to school together. They would see their common humanity and celebrate their shared identity as Americans.

    “We must always be aware of the fact that our ultimate goal is integration, and that desegregation is only a first step on the road to the good society,” King said in a speech called “The Ethical Demands for Integration.”

    It can all seem abstract, but Steinhorn distills what that world might look like in one pithy example:

    “If an African-American knocks on the door of a White neighbor and asks for a cup of sugar, that White neighbor should see a neighbor.”

    Here’s another reason why King’s dream was so radical. His concept of integration is what Baker, the scholar and author, calls “the biggest threat to the existing racial order.”

    The existing racial order is still defined by one dynamic that shows little signs of changing: Many White Americans, on the left and right, refuse to stay in communities where the ratio of Black people exceeds a certain level. When non-White people arrive in larger than token numbers, Whites invariably tend to move out. Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon – it’s called a “racial tipping point.”

    Members of the New York Youth Committee for Integration sit at a lunch counter in a Woolworth's store in April 1960 to protest segregation.

    Although many US suburbs have grown more diverse, this stubborn dynamic is why residential and school segregation remain high 60 years after King’s speech, even though there is some evidence that racial segregation is slowly declining. It’s why Black homeowners often must hide any signs that they live in a home they’re trying to sell, because home appraisers often devalue Black-owned homes.

    It’s why even some progressive White folks with Black Lives Matter signs in their lawns get angry when they’re asked to send their kids to a public school where most of the students are minorities.

    This dynamic is why what looks like a racially mixed neighborhood is often one that’s on the way to becoming all-Black, says Steinhorn, who is also a professor at American University in Washington.

    “Integration exists only in the time span between the first Black family moving in and the last white family moving out,” Steinhorn wrote in “By the Color of Our Skin.”

    This impulse to flee communities turning Black and brown goes deeper than abstract debates over property values, neighborhood schools and freedom.

    It’s deeply rooted in American history, as the late author Toni Morrison said in an interview with Time magazine.

    She said every immigrant group learned that to be associated with Black people is to be associated with someone at the bottom.

    “In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me – it’s nothing else but color,” Morrison said. “Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, ‘I am not that.’

    Neighborhood kids of fictional Hawkins, Indiana, in Netflix's

    Steinhorn says many White Americans prefer something he calls “virtual integration.” Their primary exposure to Black people comes through TV series, movies and ads, he says. In that virtual world, King’s dream comes alive: Black, White and brown people drink beer together, trade jokes and visit each other’s homes.

    To Steinhorn, virtual integration functions like a placebo: it gives White Americans the feel-good illusion that they are having repeated contact with Black people.

    “With the possible exception of the military,” Steinhorn says, “the television screen may be the most integrated part of American life.”

    Here’s another irony associated with King’s acclaimed speech.

    King’s potent critiques of capitalism, war and poverty were shocking at the time. He turned off allies when he called for the redistribution of wealth, argued for a guaranteed income and came out against the Vietnam War.

    Those positions don’t sound so radical anymore. After the 2008 Great Recession, the failed Iraq War and polls showing a majority of young Americans now hold a negative view of capitalism, his views on those issues wouldn’t sound out of place today.

    But his calls for integration have been virtually banished from public discourse. Many don’t even use the word’s close cousin, “post-racial,” anymore.

    The concept of integration that King evoked has become so discredited that even many of those who believe in its goals no longer use the term.

    Students enter Central Elementary School in Petoskey, Michigan, for the first day of the 2022-23 school year.

    Amanda Shaffer is one such person – and someone who says her life was enhanced by her experience with integration. She was a White student who was bused to a Black public high school in Cleveland, Ohio after refusing to follow her friends to a White private academy. She credits the experience with given giving her a level of empathy she would not have found otherwise.

    “It shifted my point of view,” Shaffer told CNN in 2014 for a story about being a White minority in Black settings. “It’s like when you go to the optometrist, and they slap those new lenses on you — you see the world differently.”

    Shaffer works today as a diversity consultant and a professional coach. She says she still believes in the necessity of people of different races living, working and going to school together and tries to promote those values in her work.

    Still, she won’t use the term “integration” in her diversity work. She says the term “triggers” some White people.

    “For me, integration is left over from all that 1950s and ’60s stuff that made a lot of people feel bad,” she says. “The problem with integration is that it feels like mixing or assimilation, and that’s where you get some of these folks who think, ‘If everybody is intermarrying and then we’re all shades of brown, where does my identity go?’ Integration is a term that pushes against people’s identity.”

    Perhaps it only pushes against people’s identity if they define themselves by their color and not as Americans.

    One reason King’s speech is so powerful is that it goes to the heart of how Americans are taught to define themselves: By adherence to a set of ideas, not by superficial physical appearances. The nation’s motto is “Out of Many, One.”

    It’s no accident that King quoted from or evoked the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address in his epic speech. In his telling, integration was seen as a fulfillment of the American dream – the endpoint of the pursuit of a more perfect union.

    An estimated 250,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington to hear King's speech that day.

    “It was the ultimate expression of the melting pot idea, that the most victimized and vilified part of American society could be integrated seamless into mainstream life, and the white majority could overcome its prejudice and welcome Black Americans as full brothers and sisters in our national community,” Steinhorn wrote in “By The Color of Our Skin.”

    How many Americans still believe that is possible?

    Not Baldwin, the King scholar who has spent his life studying the civil rights leader.

    He talks movingly about growing up in segregated America and going to hear King speak in person two years after the civil rights leader gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Close your eyes when Baldwin talks and his rich, honeyed Southern baritone even sounds like King.

    Baldwin says the election of former President Trump, a new wave of antisemitic harassment and the rise of Christian White Nationalism has convinced him that King’s vision of an integrated America really is just a dream.

    He, too, doesn’t use the term “integration” anymore.

    “People tend to want to be associated with their own kind. That seems to be a natural tendency in the human spirit,” Baldwin says, adding that he questions “the full actualization of the kind of integrated society Dr. King had in mind.”

    If racial integration is implausible, though, that leads to another question:

    Without racial integration, can the US still call itself a democracy?

    King didn’t think so, Baldwin says.

    “Dr. King made it clear that integration occurs before you have a multiracial democracy,” he says. “We have to learn to live together as a single people before we can create this kind of democracy.”

    Baker, the author, says the country can’t continue to give up on the dream of integration.

    “When hope dies, you’re defeated,” Baker says. “If you believe that it is possible, it is in fact possible. If you stop, you’ve given up the race before it’s started. It’s hard and demanding, but it’s deeply necessary.”

    Ten Black shoppers were gunned down in a racially motivated massacre at Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, New York. The gunman later pleaded guilty to charges of domestic terrorism as a hate crime.

    Steinhorn says he puts his hope in a new generation of young Americans. The Gen-Z generation, those from the late ’90s onward, is the most racially diverse in the nation’s history. He says polls show that they are more open on questions about race, ethnicity and sexual identity than any other American generation.

    “When you have a critical mass of that generation that subscribes to those principles and sets them as their North Star to be able to live in a society like that, that gives me a little bit of hope,” Steinhorn says.

    King believed in hope, too.

    “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope,” he once said.

    What’s the alternative to losing that infinite hope? Bill Moyers, a former White House press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson, once offered an answer while describing Johnson’s views.

    “He thought the opposite of integration was not just segregation,” Moyers said, “but disintegration – a nation unraveling.”

    What would that unraveling look like? It might look something like what we’ve seen in this country in recent years: The Jan. 6 insurrection, a resurgence of antisemitism, the “very fine people” marching with torches in Charlottesville, and White supremacist groups being designated as the nation’s biggest terror threat.

    It may no longer be fashionable to talk about integration, but the alternative is worse:

    A nation unraveling.

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  • New York City man pleads guilty to hate crime in death of Asian man, district attorney says | CNN

    New York City man pleads guilty to hate crime in death of Asian man, district attorney says | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    More than a year after an Asian man died after being assaulted in New York City, Jarrod Powell pleaded guilty in his death and will serve 22 years in prison, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced Thursday.

    Powell, 51, pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter in the first degree as a hate crime as part of a plea deal, the district attorney’s office said.

    In April 2021, Yao Pan Ma was collecting cans when he was approached from behind on an East Harlem corner, struck in the back and, after he fell to the ground, kicked in the head multiple times, according to police.

    Ma, who was Chinese-American, was unresponsive and in a state of unconsciousness since being admitted to a hospital to be treated for his head injuries. He died from his injuries eight months after the attack, on December 31, 2021.

    “This unprovoked attack took the life of Yao Pan Ma and took away a sense of security for so many in the AAPI community in New York,” District Attorney Alvin Bragg said after the plea. “Jarrod Powell attacked Mr. Ma because of his race and is now being held accountable. My thoughts are with Mr. Ma’s family and friends as they continue to mourn this loss.”

    Powell’s attorney, Liam Malanaphy, declined CNN’s request for comment.

    Powell “admitted in his plea to this hate crime” that he targeted Ma because he was Asian, according to the district attorney’s office.

    The attack came amid a surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans that prompted the New York Police Department to deploy undercover Asian officers on the streets in an attempt to stem the violence.

    Reported hate crimes against Asians in 16 of the nation’s largest cities and counties rose 164% in 2021, according to a study from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University San Bernardino.

    The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office says it has 44 open cases related to anti-Asian hate crimes as of January 2023.

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