Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed the proposed overhaul in late March but opponents want it scrapped.
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Israel to protest against the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to pause the contentious proposals.
More than 100,000 people participated in the main demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday, according to Israeli broadcaster Channel 12, and smaller demonstrations took place across the country. Counterprotests were also planned in several locations.
Protest organisers, who have held these weekly protests for more than three months, aim to maintain momentum and increase pressure on Netanyahu and his government until the proposed changes are scrapped.
Facing opposition from civil society, parts of the army and even within his own cabinet, Netanyahu paused the overhaul plans in late March, saying he wanted “to avoid civil war”.
The plan would give Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, and his allies in Israel’s most hardline government the final say in appointing the nation’s judges.
Tens of thousands took part in the Tel Aviv protest [Ariel Schalit/AP Photo]
It would also give parliament, which is controlled by his allies, authority to overturn Supreme Court decisions and limit the court’s ability to review laws.
Opponents have said it will destroy a system of checks and balances by concentrating power in the hands of Netanyahu and his allies in parliament.
They also have said that Netanyahu has a conflict of interest at a time when he is on trial.
Extreme views adopted by some local, state and federal political leaders who try to limit what history can be taught in schools and seek to undermine how Black officials perform their jobs are among the top threats to democracy for Black Americans, the National Urban League says.
Marc Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who leads the civil rights and urban advocacy organization, cited the most recent example: the vote this month by the Republican-controlled Tennessee House to oust two Black representatives for violating a legislative rule. The pair had participated in a gun control protest inside the chamber after the shooting that killed three students and three staff members at a Nashville school.
“We have censorship and Black history suppression, and now this,” Morial said in an interview. “It’s another piece of fruit of the same poisonous tree, the effort to suppress and contain.”
Marc Morial, center, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban League, talks with reporters outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, July 8, 2021, following a meeting with President Joe Biden and leadership of top civil rights organizations.
Susan Walsh / AP
Both Tennessee lawmakers were quickly reinstated by leaders in their districts and were back at work in the House after an uproar that spread well beyond the state.
The Urban League’s annual State of Black America report being released Saturday draws on data and surveys from a number of organizations, including the UCLA Law School, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The collective findings reveal an increase in recent years in hate crimes and efforts to change classroom curriculums, attempts to make voting more difficult and extremist views being normalized in politics, the military and law enforcement.
One of the most prominent areas examined is so-called critical race theory. Scholars developed it as an academic framework during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The theory centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.
Director Taifha Alexander said the Forward Tracking Project, part of the UCLA Law School, began in response to the backlash that followed the protests of the George Floyd killing in 2020 and an executive order that year from then-President Donald Trump restricting diversity training.
The project’s website shows that 209 local, state and federal government entities have introduced more than 670 bills, resolutions, executive orders, opinion letters, statements and other measures against critical race theory since September 2020.
Anti-critical race theory is “a living organism in and of itself. It’s always evolving. There are always new targets of attack,” Alexander said.
She said the expanded scope of some of those laws, which are having a chilling effect on teaching certain aspects of the country’s racial conflicts, will lead to major gaps in understanding history and social justice.
“This anti-CRT campaign is going to frustrate our ability to reach our full potential as a multiracial democracy” because future leaders will be missing information they could use to tackle problems, Alexander said.
She said one example is the rewriting of Florida elementary school material about civil rights figure Rosa Parks and her refusal to give up her seat to a white rider on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 — an incident that sparked the bus boycott there. Mention of race was omitted entirely in one revision, a change first reported by The New York Times.
Florida has been the epicenter of many of the steps, including opposing AP African American studies, but it’s not alone.
“The things that have been happening in Florida have been replicated, or governors in similarly situated states have claimed they will do the same thing,” Alexander said.
In Alabama, a proposal to ban “divisive” concepts passed out of legislative committee this past week. Last year, the administration of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, rescinded a series of policies, memos and other resources related to diversity, equity and inclusion that it characterized as “discriminatory and divisive concepts” in the state’s public education system.
Oklahoma public school teachers are prohibited from teaching certain concepts of race and racism under a bill Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law in 2021.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses the crowd before publicly signing HB7, “individual freedom,” also dubbed the “stop woke” bill during a news conference at Mater Academy Charter Middle/High School in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., on Friday, April 22, 2022.
Daniel A. Varela / AP
On Thursday, the Llano County Commissioners Court in Texas held a special meeting to consider shutting down the entire public library system rather than follow a federal judge’s order to return a slate of books to the shelves on topics ranging from teenage sexuality to bigotry.
After listening to public comments in favor and against the shutdown, the commissioners decided to remove the item from the agenda.
“We will suppress your books. We will suppress the conversation about race and racism, and we will suppress your history, your AP course,” Morial said. “It is singular in its effort to suppress Blacks.”
Other issues in his group’s report address extremism in the military and law enforcement, energy and climate change, and how current attitudes can affect public policy. Predominantly white legislatures in Missouri and Mississippi have proposals that would shift certain government authority from some majority Black cities to the states.
In many ways, the report mirrors concerns evident in recent years in a country deeply divided over everything from how much K-12 students should be taught about racism and sexuality to the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Forty percent of voters in last year’s elections said their local K-12 public schools were not teaching enough about racism in the United States, while 34% said it already was too much, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the American electorate. Twenty-three percent said the current curriculum was about right.
About two-thirds of Black voters said more should be taught on the subject, compared with about half of Latino voters and about one-third of white voters.
Violence is one of the major areas of concern covered in the Urban League report, especially in light of the 2022 mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. The accused shooter left a manifesto raising the “great replacement theory ” as a motive in the killings.
Data released this year by the FBI indicated that hate crimes rose between 2020 and 2021. African Americans were disproportionately represented, accounting for 30% of the incidents in which the bias was known.
By comparison, the second largest racial group targeted in the single incident category was white victims, who made up 10%.
Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said when all the activities are tabulated, including hate crimes, rhetoric, incidents of discrimination and online disinformation, “we see a very clear and concerning threat to America and a disproportionate impact on Black Americans.”
NEW YORK, April 12, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Social work students across the United States are joining a National Week of Action led by Payment for Placements (P4P), with the intention of bringing attention to unpaid internships in social work education. The P4P National Week of Action will run April 10-14, 2023.
P4P is a student-led movement calling for fair payment for the mandatory practicums that social work students must complete in order to graduate. Currently, undergraduates must work 400 hours to complete their field education, while graduate students are required to work at minimum 900 hours. For the majority of students, this labor is entirely unpaid. P4P aims to make the field of social work equitable and accessible, citing the financial hardship and emotional distress experienced by students. Across the country, P4P chapters will be staging walkouts, holding rallies, and conducting social media and letter-writing campaigns to organize their student bodies and bring national awareness to the problems that unpaid field practicums cause for the profession.
“Right now, the current model calls for social work students to go to class and somehow pay living expenses, all while balancing a schedule that requires them to work for free for 20-40 hours per week. This is a structurally unjust and almost impossible model that discriminates against low-income students, and, disproportionately, students of color. This contributes to the fact that Black social workers carry roughly 50% more debt from social work education than white students,” said Beth Wagner, an organizer with FED UP, a P4P chapter at the University of Texas, Austin.
“Social work students across the country know that unpaid field placements are a burden upon the entire social work profession,” said Elana Metz, Co-chair of P4P at San Diego State University and national P4P leader. “We’re unable to bring our best selves to our studies because we have to balance our unpaid placements with classes and paid work. We skip meals. We drop out. We never enroll in the first place. Today, we’re showing the CSWE and NASW that we’re no longer accepting the status quo of unpaid field placements.”
“As social workers, we are required to abide by the values outlined in our Code of Ethics, including service, social justice, self-care, and the dignity and worth of a person,” said Elise Colquitt, P4P UGA Co-Chair and national P4P leader. “We are asking for the field of Social Work to extend these values to its very own students by reversing the status quo of unpaid fieldwork. We are ready to work with the CSWE and NASW to make these necessary changes to better align ourselves with the Code of Ethics and support Social Work students as they enter the field.”
### Contact Beth Wagner, 301-800-1497, p4p.national@gmail.com, or follow @p4pnational on Instagram.
Support grows for “Tennessee Three” after two lawmakers expelled from state legislature; The Olde Pink House is serving up southern charm and delicious food.
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After two lawmakers were expelled from the Tennessee legislature and a third representative barely kept her seat on Thursday, protests against the the decision have only increased. Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to Nashville this weekend. Scott McFarlane has more.
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Palestinian assailants carried out a pair of attacks on Friday, killing three people and wounding at least six as tensions soared following days of fighting at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site, officials said. Earlier in the day, retaliatory Israeli airstrikes had hit Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, sparking fears of a broader conflict.
Israeli authorities said an Italian tourist was killed and five other Italian and British citizens were wounded when a car rammed into a group of tourists in Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial hub.
Israeli security forces examine the scene of a shooting near the Israeli settlement of Hamra in the occupied West Bank, in the Jordan Valley, April 7, 2023.
Nasser Nasser/AP
In a separate incident, two British-Israeli women were shot to death near a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was calling up all reserve forces in Israel’s border police, a paramilitary force usually deployed to suppress Palestinian unrest, “to confront the terror attacks.”
The additional border police would be activated Sunday and join other units that have recently been deployed in Jerusalem and Lod, a town in central Israel with a mixed Jewish and Palestinian population.
In a statement late Friday, the State Department said that the U.S. “strongly condemns today’s terrorist attacks in the West Bank and Tel Aviv. We extend our deepest condolences to the victims’ families and loved ones, and wish a full recovery to the injured.”
Friday’s attacks marked a further escalation in the region following violence this week at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site. Friday’s strikes in southern Lebanon came a day after militants fired nearly three dozen rockets from there at Israel, wounding two people and causing some property damage. The Israeli military said it targeted installations of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, in southern Lebanon and Gaza.
In the Tel Aviv car-ramming late Friday, the alleged attacker rammed his vehicle into a group of civilians near a popular seaside park, police said. Israel’s rescue service said a 30-year-old Italian man was killed, while five other British and Italian tourists — including a 74-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl — were receiving medical treatment for mild to moderate injuries.
Police said they shot and killed the driver of the car and identified him as a 45-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel from the village of Kafr Qassem.
The shooting in the West Bank meanwhile killed the two sisters, who were in their 20s, and seriously wounded their 45-year-old mother near an Israeli settlement in the Jordan Valley, Israeli and British officials said. The family lived in the Efrat settlement, near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, said Oded Revivi, the settlement’s mayor.
Medics said they dragged the unconscious women from their smashed car, which appeared to have been pushed off the road.
No groups claimed responsibility for either attack. But the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza praised both incidents as retaliation for Israeli raids earlier this week on the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third-holiest site in Islam. On Tuesday, police arrested and beat hundreds of Palestinians there, who responded by hurling rocks and firecrackers at officers.
The exchange of rocket and missile fire and the latest apparent attack on Israeli civilians came at a time of heightened religious fervor, as Jews celebrate Passover, Muslims are in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan and Christians begin Easter weekend. In 2021, an escalation also triggered by clashes at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound spilled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Associated Press correspondents in the area said several missiles fired by Israeli warplanes struck an open field in the town of Qalili near the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh, close to Lebanon’s coastal southern city of Tyre, while others struck a bridge and power transformer in the nearby town of Maaliya and a farm on the outskirts of Rashidiyeh, killing several sheep. No human deaths were reported.
Lebanese civilians check a small bridge that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Maaliya village, southern Lebanon, April 7, 2023.
Mohammad Zaatari/AP
Israeli strikes in Lebanon risk drawing Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia into the fighting, which could lead to war. The Iran-backed group, armed with thousands of rockets and missiles, holds sway over much of southern Lebanon and is viewed by Israel as a bitter foe.
The Israeli military was careful to note in its announcement about Friday’s attack that it was targeting only sites linked to Palestinian militants. In recent years, Hezbollah has stayed out of other flareups related to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which stands on a hilltop revered by Muslims and Jews.
Hamas issued a statement condemning the Israeli strikes, while Israel’s military said it had struck targets belonging to the militant group in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in response to the rocket attacks.
“The (Israel Defense Forces) will not allow the Hamas terrorist organization to operate from within Lebanon and holds the state of Lebanon responsible for every directed fire emanating from its territory,” it said in a statement.
In Washington, principal deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said Israel had “legitimate security concerns” and “every right to defend themselves,” but he also urged calm, saying “any unilateral action that jeopardizes the status quo [around the al Aqsa Mosque] to us is unacceptable.”
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly appealed Friday for “all parties across the region to de-escalate tensions.” He condemned the rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and Lebanon, and also criticized Israeli police for “violence” inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.
In a tweet early Friday morning, Lebanon’s national army said it had discovered a rocket launcher with unfired missiles in the south of the country, only about five miles from the border with northern Israel, and that work was underway to dismantle the device.
Fire and smoke rise following an Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip, April 7, 2023.
Fatima Shbair/AP
The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro, said he was in contact with Israeli and Lebanese authorities early Friday. The force, known as UNIFIL, said that both sides had said they do not want war.
In Jerusalem, before dawn prayers on Friday, violence erupted again at the hilltop compound as Israeli police stationed at one of the gates forcibly dispersed vast crowds of worshippers who chanted praise for Hamas while pushing their way into the limestone courtyard. Videos from the scene showed police beating large groups of Palestinian men with sticks until they stumbled backward, falling and knocking down vendors’ tables.
The current round of violence began Wednesday after Israeli police twice raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. That led Thursday to rocket fire from Gaza and, in a significant escalation, the rocket barrage from Lebanon.
Israeli police detain a Palestinian man at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound following clashes that erupted during the Islamic holy fasting month of Ramadan in Jerusalem, April 5, 2023.
AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty
The Israeli military said the rocket fire on its northern and southern fronts was carried out by Palestinian militants in connection to this week’s violence at Al-Aqsa where Israeli police stormed into the building with tear gas and stun grenades to confront Palestinians barricaded inside on two straight days. The violent scenes from the mosque ratcheted up tensions across the region.
In a briefing with reporters, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, said the army drew a clear connection between the Lebanese rocket fire and the recent unrest in Jerusalem.
“It’s a Palestinian-oriented event,” he said, adding that either the Hamas or Islamic Jihad militant groups, which are based in Gaza but also operate in Lebanon, could be involved. But he said the army believed that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government were aware of what happened and also held responsibility.
The mosque — the third-holiest site in Islam — stands on a hilltop revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. The competing claims to the site have repeatedly spilled over into violence over the years.
No faction in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the salvo of rockets. A Lebanese security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media, said the country’s security forces believed the rockets were launched by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant group, not by Hezbollah.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the firing of rockets from Lebanon, adding that Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers were investigating and trying to find the perpetrators. Mikati said his government “categorically rejects any military escalation” and the use of Lebanese territories to stage acts that threaten stability.
Hezbollah has condemned the Israeli police raids in Jerusalem. Both Israel and Hezbollah have avoided an all-out conflict since a 34-day war in 2006 ended in a draw.
The current escalation comes against the backdrop of Netanyahu’s domestic problems. For the past three months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating against his plans to overhaul the country’s judicial system, claiming it will lead the country toward authoritarianism.
Key military units, including fighter pilots, have threatened to stop reporting for duty if the overhaul is passed, drawing a warning from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Israel’s national security could be harmed by the divisive plan. Netanyahu said he was firing Gallant, but then backtracked as he put the overhaul on hold for several weeks. Critics could also accuse him of trying to use the crisis to divert attention from his domestic woes.
Netanyahu said that the domestic divisions had no impact on national security and that the country would remain united in the face of external threats.
Jerusalem — Israel said two people were killed in a suspected terror attack near a West Bank Israeli settlement Friday as it launched rare strikes in southern Lebanon and continued bombing targets in the Gaza Strip, marking a further escalation in the region following violence this week at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site. Friday’s strikes in southern Lebanon came a day after militants fired nearly three dozen rockets from there at Israel, wounding two people and causing some property damage. The Israeli military said it targeted installations of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, in southern Lebanon and Gaza.
With tension mounting, Israeli officials reported a suspected terror attack near the Israeli settlement of Hamra, in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s military said “a shooting attack was carried out on a vehicle” and troops were searching the area for suspects. Denis Polkov, a spokesman for Israel’s national emergency medical service, said two Israeli women were killed and a third was seriously injured.
The exchange of rocket and missile fire and the latest apparent attack on Israeli civilians came at a time of heightened religious fervor, as Jews celebrate Passover, Muslims are in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan and Christians begin Easter weekend. In 2021, an escalation also triggered by clashes at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound spilled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Lebanese civilians check a small bridge that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Maaliya village, southern Lebanon, April 7, 2023.
Mohammad Zaatari/AP
Associated Press correspondents in the area said several missiles fired by Israeli warplanes struck an open field in the town of Qalili near the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh, close to Lebanon’s coastal southern city of Tyre, while others struck a bridge and power transformer in the nearby town of Maaliya and a farm on the outskirts of Rashidiyeh, killing several sheep. No human deaths were reported.
Israeli strikes in Lebanon risk drawing Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia into the fighting, which could lead to war. The Iran-backed group, armed with thousands of rockets and missiles, holds sway over much of southern Lebanon and is viewed by Israel as a bitter foe.
The Israeli military was careful to note in its announcement about Friday’s attack that it was targeting only sites linked to Palestinian militants. In recent years, Hezbollah has stayed out of other flareups related to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which stands on a hilltop revered by Muslims and Jews.
Hamas issued a statement condemning the Israeli strikes, while Israel’s military said it had struck targets belonging to the militant group in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in response to the rocket attacks.
“The (Israel Defense Forces) will not allow the Hamas terrorist organization to operate from within Lebanon and holds the state of Lebanon responsible for every directed fire emanating from its territory,” it said in a statement.
In Washington, principal deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said Israel had “legitimate security concerns” and “every right to defend themselves,” but he also urged calm, saying “any unilateral action that jeopardizes the status quo [around the al Aqsa Mosque] to us is unacceptable.”
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly appealed Friday for “all parties across the region to de-escalate tensions.” He condemned the rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and Lebanon, and also criticized Israeli police for “violence” inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.
In a tweet early Friday morning, Lebanon’s national army said it had discovered a rocket launcher with unfired missiles in the south of the country, only about five miles from the border with northern Israel, and that work was underway to dismantle the device.
The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro, said he was in contact with Israeli and Lebanese authorities early Friday. The force, known as UNIFIL, said that both sides had said they do not want war.
In Jerusalem, before dawn prayers on Friday, violence erupted again at the hilltop compound as Israeli police stationed at one of the gates forcibly dispersed vast crowds of worshippers who chanted praise for Hamas while pushing their way into the limestone courtyard. Videos from the scene showed police beating large groups of Palestinian men with sticks until they stumbled backward, falling and knocking down vendors’ tables.
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes on Gaza resumed early Friday, after militants fired more rockets from the blockaded territory, setting off air raid sirens in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon. The military said targets included the entry shaft to an underground network used for weapons manufacturing.
Fire and smoke rise following an Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip, April 7, 2023.
Fatima Shbair/AP
The current round of violence began Wednesday after Israeli police twice raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. That led Thursday to rocket fire from Gaza and, in a significant escalation, the rocket barrage from Lebanon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his Security Cabinet for a three-hour meeting late Thursday. “Israel’s response, tonight and beyond, will extract a heavy price from our enemies,” he said in a statement after the meeting.
Almost immediately, Palestinian militants in Gaza began firing rockets into southern Israel, setting off air raid sirens across the region. Loud explosions could be heard in Gaza from the Israeli strikes, as outgoing rockets whooshed into the skies toward Israel. For now, Palestinian militants have fired only short-range rockets from Gaza, rather than the long-range projectiles that can reach as far as Tel Aviv and typically invite harsher Israeli retaliation.
Israeli police detain a Palestinian man at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound following clashes that erupted during the Islamic holy fasting month of Ramadan in Jerusalem, April 5, 2023.
AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty
The Israeli military said the rocket fire on its northern and southern fronts was carried out by Palestinian militants in connection to this week’s violence at Al-Aqsa where Israeli police stormed into the building with tear gas and stun grenades to confront Palestinians barricaded inside on two straight days. The violent scenes from the mosque ratcheted up tensions across the region.
In a briefing with reporters, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, said the army drew a clear connection between the Lebanese rocket fire and the recent unrest in Jerusalem.
“It’s a Palestinian-oriented event,” he said, adding that either the Hamas or Islamic Jihad militant groups, which are based in Gaza but also operate in Lebanon, could be involved. But he said the army believed that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government were aware of what happened and also held responsibility.
The mosque — the third-holiest site in Islam — stands on a hilltop revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. The competing claims to the site have repeatedly spilled over into violence over the years.
No faction in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the salvo of rockets. A Lebanese security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media, said the country’s security forces believed the rockets were launched by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant group, not by Hezbollah.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the firing of rockets from Lebanon, adding that Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers were investigating and trying to find the perpetrators. Mikati said his government “categorically rejects any military escalation” and the use of Lebanese territories to stage acts that threaten stability.
Hezbollah has condemned the Israeli police raids in Jerusalem. Both Israel and Hezbollah have avoided an all-out conflict since a 34-day war in 2006 ended in a draw.
The current escalation comes against the backdrop of Netanyahu’s domestic problems. For the past three months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating against his plans to overhaul the country’s judicial system, claiming it will lead the country toward authoritarianism.
Key military units, including fighter pilots, have threatened to stop reporting for duty if the overhaul is passed, drawing a warning from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Israel’s national security could be harmed by the divisive plan. Netanyahu said he was firing Gallant, but then backtracked as he put the overhaul on hold for several weeks. Critics could also accuse him of trying to use the crisis to divert attention from his domestic woes.
Netanyahu said that the domestic divisions had no impact on national security and that the country would remain united in the face of external threats.
New delay to signing of deal to restore the military to civilian transition prompted fresh protests.
Pro-democracy activists in Sudan have marched against the army and paramilitaries as the civilian opposition marked a key anniversary in the decades-old struggle against military rule with new protests.
April 6 is a symbolic date for Sudan’s civilian opposition. It marks the anniversary of uprisings in 1985 and 2019 that ended up ousting two leaders who had seized power in coups.
In central Khartoum on Thursday, protesters could be heard chanting “no militia can rule a country”.
Huge crowds blocked main roads and marched in several other cities, facing heavy tear gas fired by security forces.
Many were seen breaking their Ramadan fasts in the street.
Marchers also chanted “Soldiers back to barracks” and “The people want civilian rule”, as well as chants calling for dissolution of the government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed.
Accused of committing war crimes in Darfur in 2003, the Janjaweed were run by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the second in command behind Sudan’s military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Marches were also reported in Wad Madani – south of Khartoum – and in Darfur itself, where protesters carried placards asking “Where is the peace?”
Sudan is still ruled by Burhan, the military leader who seized power in an October 2021 coup, aborting the transition to civilian rule agreed after the 2019 overthrow of Islamist general Omar al-Bashir, who himself seized power in a 1989 putsch.
The agreement, which provides for the formation of a civilian government and is strongly supported by the international community, is meant to end a political vacuum that followed the 2021 coup.
But the signing was postponed for a second time late on Wednesday as the army and the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continued negotiations over what commitments they would make on military restructuring.
Created in 2013, the RSF emerged from the Janjaweed that Bashir unleashed a decade earlier against non-Arab ethnic groups in the western region of Darfur. The militia has since been accused of war crimes.
The agreement faces opposition from pro-democracy “resistance committees” that reject negotiations with the military and have led anti-military protests since the coup, which derailed a previous political transition.
The Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), a coalition of civilian parties that back the deal, blamed the postponement on members of Bashir’s outlawed National Congress Party, who in recent weeks have made public appearances in banquets during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as well as other events.
“We know that elements of the deposed regime are actively trying to spoil the political process and sow discord between military institutions,” said prominent civilian politician and FFC leader Khalid Omer Yousif.
The signing ceremony had been pushed back “due to a resumption of talks between soldiers”, the FFC said.
Analysts say the sticking point has been the integration into the regular army of the powerful paramilitary RSF, led by Burhan’s deputy Dagalo.
The two have been at loggerheads over the timetable for the RSF’s integration and analysts have pointed to a deepening rift between them.
Twitter says it has removed thousands of tweets showing a poster promoting a “trans day of vengeance” protest in support of transgender rights in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
“We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them. ‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or support for peaceful protests is ok,” Twitter’s trust and safety head, Ella Irwin, wrote in a tweet.
In removing the tweets, Twitter said it used automated processes to do it quickly at a large scale, without considering what context the tweets were shared in. Because of this, both tweets that were critical of and those that supported the protests were removed.
This appeared to anger many conservative Twitter users who said the rules were unfairly applied to them because they were posting the image of the protest flyer to speak out against it.
Anger from trans activists
Trans-rights activists were quick to point out that “trans day of vengeance” is a meme that has been around in the trans community for years and is not a call to violence, saying that Twitter is misguided in its reasoning for removing the tweets in support of the protest.
Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit liberal advocacy group Fight for the Future, said Twitter’s actions are “the latest example of Big Tech companies employing double standards in content moderation.”
“They are slow to moderate content targeting trans people, but quick to silence us when we speak out or push back. ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ is not a specific day or a call for violence. It’s a meme that’s been around for years, a way of expressing anger and frustration about oppression and violence the trans community faces daily,” Greer said. “Context is everything in content moderation, which is why content policies should be based in human rights and applied evenly, not changed rapidly based on public pressure or news cycles.”
The poster in question is a largely text-based digital flyer. It reads “we want more than visibility” on top, followed by “trans day of vengeance” and “stop trans genocide” as well as the date and time of the planned protest.
Many of the tweets Twitter removed were from conservative users sharing an image of the flyer in an attempt to connect the planned protests with the recent school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. In the aftermath of the shooting, some right-wing activists and commentators have seized on the gender identity of the shooter to denounce transgender people and advocates, as well as insinuate they are planning to engage in violence.
Taylor Greene’s account suspended
Twitter this week temporarily restricted the congressional account of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene after the Georgia Republican tweeted a graphic that referred to the “Trans Day of Vengeance” following the shooting. Greene posted a screenshot on her personal account on Tuesday of the notice that said some of her account’s features were being temporarily suspended for violating Twitter’s rules.
“My Congressional account was suspended for 7 days for exposing Antifa, who are organizing a call for violence called ‘Trans Day of Vengeance.’ The day after the mass murder of children by a trans shooter,” she tweeted.
Twitter’s trust and safety head, Ella Irwin, said it had to “sweep” the platform to remove more than 5,000 tweets and retweets of the graphic.
The shooting is still under investigation. As of Wednesday, police have shared no evidence that the shooter’s gender or gender identity played a role in the shooting.
“Fighting against false narratives”
On its website, the group organizing Saturday’s protest said it does not condone violence. In a statement posted on the site, the Trans Radical Activist Network and other organizers also strongly rejected any connection between the school shooting in Nashville and Saturday’s protest, which organizers said was planned before the shooting took place.
“Vengeance means fighting back with vehemence,” the protest’s organizers wrote on their website. “We are fighting against false narratives, criminalization, and eradication of our existence.”
Twitter, both currently under Elon Musk and before the billionaire bought the company, has long prohibited the incitement of violence in tweets. In early March, Twitter announced what it called a new policy prohibiting “violent speech” on its platform, though the new rules appear similar to guidelines against violent threats that the company had on its books before Musk took over.
Among the updates, Twitter had expanded its policy to include a ban on “coded language,” which is often referred to as “dog whistles,” used to indirectly incite violence. It also added a rule that prohibits “threatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.”
Protests intensify against President Emmanual Macron’s plans to raise the retirement age.
Changing France’s state pension system to one that is more affordable for the government was a central plank of President Emmanual Macron’s re-election campaign.
However, the reform, which includes raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, has become the central issue in French politics and highly unpopular among the public.
Strikes and protests against the move intensified this week, some turning violent with hundreds arrested in Paris.
Transport and other public services have been hit. Mounds of uncollected rubbish remain on the streets, ensuring a constant and unpleasant reminder of the dispute.
Macron used his executive powers to push through the changes because he could not get enough support to pass them in parliament.
This has increased the opposition he faces – but also, it seems, Macron’s resolve to force through the measures.
He condemned this week’s violence but does not appear to be budging on the issue.
So why is Macron so determined and the opposition so intense?
Presenter: Adrian Finighan
Guests:
Axel Persson – union representative for railway workers at the General Confederation of Labour
Lara Marlowe – Paris correspondent for The Irish Times
Paul Taylor – contributing editor at Politico and senior fellow at the Friends of Europe think tank
Australian climate campaigner Deanna ‘Violet’ CoCo found herself facing a 15-month prison sentence after she and three other activists drove a truck onto Sydney Harbour Bridge last April and blocked one of its lanes during the morning rush hour.
The group lit orange flares and livestreamed their protest leading to gridlock in Australia’s largest city. After about 25 minutes, the police arrived and arrested them.
CoCo and her fellow activists were charged under the Roads and Crimes Amendment Act, passed only days before in response to similar previous protests and created new criminal penalties for any damage or disruption to major roads.
CoCo, who told Al Jazeera she staged the protest to highlight “climate breakdown”, was initially found guilty and given a 15-month jail term (the law allows a maximum of two years). But after the 32-year-old appealed, the verdict was overturned.
A police report claiming the protest had obstructed an ambulance was found to have been falsified.
“[New South Wales police] went to quite a lot of detail to stress this ambulance had been blocked,” CoCo told Al Jazeera.
“It wasn’t just in the fact sheet that there may have been an ambulance. There was a whole sentence describing this ambulance that had lights and sirens on. It was a huge aggravating factor in not just my sentencing, but my intense bail conditions.”
Along with three days in a cell on remand, CoCo was placed under 24-hour curfew for 20 days, with a further 126 days of restricted movement. District Court Judge Mark Williams, who overturned the sentence, described her bail conditions as ‘quasi-custody.’
Australia is not the only liberal democracy where civil liberties and other political freedoms are under threat from ever more draconian laws introduced by governments that have struggled to deal with new forms of protests.
Pioneered by groups like Extinction Rebellion, small groups of protesters have taken increasingly radical approaches to draw attention to their causes — from blocking roads like CoCo did, to sit-downs and defacing artworks.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is one of the city’s main thoroughfares and Deanna CoCo was accused of creating traffic gridlock by blocking one of its lanes during the morning rush hour [File: Saeed Khan/AFP]
CoCo says part of her protest was to challenge the state-based legislation, which had been passed in New South Wales just four days before she drove onto the Harbour Bridge.
“Many Australians didn’t know that these laws had been brought into effect. And so as much as this protest was about climate and climate breakdown, it was very much also about exposing these laws and challenging them.”
In the late 1800s, women held protests to demand the right to vote, while public action against the Vietnam War attracted thousands of people in the late 1960s.
More recently, Australia’s Indigenous communities have used the power of protest to raise the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody, attracting tens of thousands of people every year. Climate change action — including public disruption and protests at mining and logging sites — has also continued.
New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet, however, insists draconian laws are necessary for the authorities to cope with the new types of protest.
“There’s no place in our state for that type of behaviour,” he told reporters after the court overturned Coco’s jail term. “If you want to protest in NSW, you’re free to protest. But when you protest, you do not inconvenience people across NSW.”
Critics say the laws are not really about protecting residents from “inconvenience” but protecting state governments’ close economic ties with extractive industries, such as mining, logging and coal seam gas. The states of Queensland and Tasmania have also toughened laws on protest.
The Australia Institute — a public policy think tank — released a report in 2021 demonstrating that state and federal governments provided 10.3 billion Australian dollars ($6.9bn) in subsidies to major fossil fuel users, the equivalent of nearly 20,000 Australian dollars ($13,405) per minute.
“Coal, oil and gas companies in Australia give the impression that they are major contributors to the Australian economy, but our research shows that they are major recipients of government funds,” said Rod Campbell, research director at The Australia Institute.
“From a climate perspective this is inexcusable and from an economic perspective it is irresponsible.”
Like many liberal democracies, Australia has a long history of protest, but governments are introducing new legislation limiting that right [File: Peter Parks/AFP]
Greens Senator David Shoebridge told Al Jazeera that “state governments are so close to the extractive industries that they’re protecting through these anti-protest scores, the logging industry, the mining industry, the fossil fuels industries.”
“We have seen them, literally passing the laws that those industries want,” he said.
Shoebridge plans to introduce a bill at the federal level which will protect the right to protest and rebalance state-introduced legislation — such as the New South Wales law which saw CoCo arrested — around protest.
“Those are laws that have gone well beyond the traditional legal sanctions for people engaging in disruptive but not violent protest,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The hope is that at a federal level, there’s more political distance from those industries. That’s why we’re progressing with drafting a proposed bill to protect the right of protest.”
Anti-protest
The crackdown on protests in Australia mirrors similar moves in countries such as the United Kingdom, where a bill was introduced at the end of 2022 to make ‘locking on’ style protests a criminal offence, and another introduced to restrict strike action.
The CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks the democratic and civic health of countries across the world, recently downgraded the UK’s status to ‘obstructed’, placing it alongside countries including Hungary and South Africa.
“The government’s interference with protests and negative attitudes towards civil society have serious and troubling implications for its liberal democracy standards and human rights norms,” it said, adding that the government was increasingly hostile towards those speaking out against its policies in areas such as climate change and refugees.
The rights group also downgraded Australia to ‘narrowed’, citing “a deterioration in fundamental freedoms due to concerns around freedom of the press, the targeting of whistle-blowers, anti-protest laws and increased surveillance”.
Piero Moraro, a criminologist at Edith Cowan University, told Al Jazeera that the rapid erosion of civil liberties was concerning.
He told Al Jazeera that Australia’s anti-protest laws were “passed extremely quickly in parliament”.
“I think this is not coincidental,” he said. “I think it’s because the climate change movement has stepped up. And as a response, the anti-protest legislation has stepped up as well.”
He said that threats of prison time and hefty fines were implemented as a deterrent to protest.
“The goal is to deter because they don’t want people to protest,” he said. “There is a deep danger that many human rights and civil society organisations are highlighting that these will eventually undermine the right to protest altogether.”
CoCo’s appeal against her conviction also raised questions about the police handling of such cases.
Police had originally asserted that the protest had presented an “imposition to a critical emergency service [which had] the potential to result in fatality,” while the sentencing magistrate had stressed the fact that the protesters had “halted an ambulance under lights and siren” as part of the justification for imposing a more severe sentence.
Politicians point to more radical action by groups like Extinction Rebellion to justify their crackdown on rights [File: Matt Hrkac/Extinction Rebellion via AFP]
At the appeal, however, the presiding magistrate noted that the police had falsified the facts and that there had been no ambulance.
CoCo was given a 12-month conditional release which she described as “basically a good behaviour bond”. While the conditions of her release do not prevent her from engaging in ‘lawful’ protest, she would breach the conditions with an action such as blocking the Harbour Bridge — an illegal act under the new legislation.
While the New South Wales Police Force would not comment on the specifics of the case, they told Al Jazeera that they recognised and supported “the rights of individuals and groups to exercise their rights of free speech and lawful assembly in a safe environment”. The force added that it had facilitated “hundreds of lawful protests every year” and would continue to do so.
“That includes working with protest organisers and community groups before — and during — protests to ensure their right to protest in a lawful and peaceful manner is met, and public safety is maintained with minimal danger or disruption to the wider community.”
Certainly, the new laws have not deterred Coco.
She says the issue of ‘climate breakdown’ was simply too big to be ignored.
“They can sentence me to 1,000 years in prison, and that will not be more terrifying than thinking about every single person that I love facing climate breakdown,” she said.
Police in New York are setting up metal barricades near the Manhattan courthouse as the investigation into former President Trump appears to be nearing a conclusion. Trump claimed on social media he would be arrested Tuesday, although officials have not said so. CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa has the latest.
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Former President Donald Trump calls for protests and says he expects to be arrested as a grand jury investigates hush money payments. Also, two troubled banks get bought by rivals. All that and all that matters in today’s Eye Opener.
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Havana, Cuba – On June 9, Amelia Calzadilla, a 33-year-old mother of three, posted a video to Facebook. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision that would transform her into one of Cuba’s most prominent new dissidents.
“I never had any interest in being famous, in being an influencer or a journalist. I’m interested in telling the truth,” she said. Now, Calzadilla is involved in a public battle with the Cuban government, which has been trying to censor her for months.
She has become part of an emerging force in Cuba’s political resistance: mothers who are making their daily struggles known as the country contends with one of its worst economic crises in recent history.
In the video, Calzadilla makes a simple request: She asks local authorities to run a gas line to her block. Her family lives in one of the few areas in Havana without government-provided natural gas service, and the bill for her electric stove had shot higher than her monthly salary.
“I exploded on social media because there was no formal way to submit complaints to anyone who could possibly help,” she said.
Her video took off, getting tens of thousands of likes in its first 24 hours online.
Calzadilla began sharing more videos with openly anti-government perspectives about Cuba’s worsening living conditions. It was a risky thing to do: Voicing dissent can not only be taboo but illegal on the island.
Now, Calzadilla juggles activism on top of caring for three children and working a job in the island’s struggling tourism industry.
Women like Calzadilla are increasingly filling a void in Cuba’s opposition movement. In 2021, the country experienced historic protests on a scale not seen since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. But the government responded with a crackdown, and human rights groups estimate 1,400 people were ultimately arrested, many of them young men.
Hundreds have since been sentenced to up to 30 years of prison time. Many of the island’s most visible dissidents have either been arrested or have fled.
But in recent protests across the island, mothers unable to feed their children have blocked highways with human chains, holding hands with their children and each other.
And during the country’s frequent blackouts, matriarchs are often seen leading protests through the streets, banging pots and pans sometimes for hours until the electricity resumes. Local media have reported that more than 30 such protests have occurred in small towns over the past several weeks.
Economic reforms, coupled with the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic, a decrease in foreign tourism and the continued US embargo, have left Cuba’s economy in dire straits. The country is plagued by shortages of basic supplies like food, medicine and fuel, and the median salary in Cuba roughly equates to $19 a month.
Calzadilla sees the country’s struggles mirrored in her household. “If a mother has a problem, that’s Cuba’s problem, even if it isn’t affecting everyone personally,” she said.
Previously, Calzadilla explained, she was a vocal defender of Cuban-style communism. She even worked for the Cuban government in the Ministry of the Interior after graduating from the University of Havana. But the changes she observed in her country have spurred her to action, she said.
“Now, the areas of agriculture, public health, housing and basic goods are in complete crisis, in need of restructuring that isn’t happening,” Calzadilla said.
She said she believes officials are more interested in keeping up appearances than addressing Cuba’s economic crisis: “I no longer believe they have the consciousness or preparation necessary to resolve these issues.”
So Calzadilla has taken it upon herself to make dozens of videos and write posts outlining how she believes the current government has mismanaged the country’s finances.
The Cuban government has responded to the popularity of Calzadilla’s Facebook videos by spreading allegations on national television that she is a contractor for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, citing remittances she received from the US.
A quarter of Cuban households, however, receive remittances from the US, mostly from relatives. Calzadilla explained that she relies on support from her family in the US to provide food and clothing for her children.
Calzadilla admits that she has since been afraid of facing a sham trial and being thrown in prison, but the fear does not inhibit her.
“It’s like the fear of losing your job for anyone in a capitalist country,” she said, brushing it off as a commonplace anxiety.
Mothers like Calzadilla have been important figureheads in resistance movements across Latin America, particularly in Mexico and Argentina, according to Elva Orozco Mendoza, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut.
“Mothers feel the effects that certain policies or certain government inaction might have on their children,” she explained. That, in turn, prompts the women to act, and their participation can serve as powerful symbols to protest movements.
“This larger history of mothers resisting injustice also legitimises their direction,” Orozco Mendoza said. “The public in general tends to think their struggle is legitimate.”
Elizabeth Leon is among the mothers in Cuba inspired to speak out against what she sees as government injustices. On July 11, 2021, Leon, who is in her 50s, heard shouts erupting on her street, so she walked outside and joined a protest in her neighbourhood.
One of her sons took a video of what happened next: A police officer struck her repeatedly with a baton, knocking her to the ground. Leon’s three adult sons intervened to defend her, but they ended up beaten too.
That evening, they took photos of their blood-stained faces, arms and chests. Leon said her shoulder was knocked out of place by the officer’s baton and remains sore to this day.
“We documented everything and posted it online just to prove that it was real,” she said.
The next morning, police went door to door, detaining dozens of people. They arrested all four of Leon’s sons.
One, Adonis, had not even been at the protest. Leon was able to prove he was elsewhere, but it took 52 days to secure his release.
Her two youngest sons, however, were sentenced in March last year to eight and 10 years in prison. One of them, Frandy Leon, struggles with a learning disability. At age 27, he is functionally illiterate.
Leon’s lawyer told her there was a chance she could fight for the release of her eldest son, José Antonio — who sits in jail, awaiting sentencing — but it would mean throwing the two youngest brothers under the bus, possibly extending their sentences.
Leon decided to share her predicament online, as well as through local underground journalism collectives, in a bid to raise awareness and free the three sons who remain incarcerated. She also uses Facebook to post videos and updates about her sons’ cases.
Each son has two or three young children, and Leon’s extended family has suffered with three fewer salaries to rely on. Adonis and the girlfriends of those in prison now raise their children together in Leon’s house, which is falling apart at the seams.
Nearly all of the furniture is ripped and leaking stuffing. The stairs at the entrance have crumbled, making the only way to enter the home a rickety wooden ladder. And several walls have fallen away, replaced with plastic sheets to shield the rooms from rain.
At mealtimes, the kids eat first, and the adults make due with the leftovers. The family’s allotment of bread, powdered milk and rice, provided through the government, is not enough to keep even the youngest children fed. Leon has begun to sell off items from her home to buy packets of hot dogs.
“I had no choice but to turn to online activism even though it could hurt my case,” Leon said. “They’re punishing us for living — for living and having nothing.”
In her grief, Leon has consulted a santería religious leader and constructed an altar near the entryway of the home, featuring plastic dolls and old photographs meant to bring positive transformations to the lives of those within.
“I’ll do anything at this point,” she said as she turned to the huddle of children behind her and attended to their lunch: milk with bread rolls.
Several hours later, when the electricity would go out once more, Leon would be out on the street again, back where everything began, banging her pots and pans.
The governing party of the nation of Georgia has decided to withdraw proposed legislation that would have require some organizations and independent media outlets to register as “foreign agents.” Stephen Jones, the director of the program on Georgian Studies at Harvard University, joined CBS News to discuss.
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Nearly three dozen people have been detained after flaming bottles and rocks were thrown at officers during a violent protest at a new police training center that’s been the site of prior demonstrations and the death of a protester, Atlanta police said.
Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said at a midnight news conference that several pieces of construction equipment were set on fire Sunday at the site for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County.
Surveillance video released by police show a piece of heavy equipment in flames at the facility under construction that critics have dubbed “Cop City.” It was among multiple pieces of construction equipment destroyed, police said.
In a statement, police called the incident “a coordinated attack” on equipment and officers by individuals who they allege “used the cover of a peaceful protest” to access the premises before changing “into black clothing and entering the construction area.”
This image provided by the Atlanta Police Department shows construction equipment set on fire Saturday, March 4, 2023 by a group protesting the planned public safety training center, according to police.
/ AP
Protesters dressed in all black threw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers Sunday at the construction site, police said.
Other police agencies stepped in to assist city officers, and no officers were injured, Schierbaum said. Officers used restraint and nonlethal enforcement methods to disperse the crowd and detain those involved, he said.
“The agitators destroyed multiple pieces of construction equipment by fire and vandalism,” the Atlanta Police Department said in a news release issued on Sunday night. At the time, 35 people had been detained in connection with the protest, according to the police department.
“The illegal actions of the agitators could have resulted in bodily harm. … With protests planned for the coming days, the Atlanta Police Department, in collaboration with law enforcement partners, have a multi-layered strategy that includes reaction and arrest,” police said in the release.
At the press conference, Schierbaum described the protest as “a very violent attack.”
“This wasn’t about a public safety training center,” he said. “This was about anarchy … and we are addressing that quickly.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said the people involved “chose destruction and vandalism over legitimate protest, yet again demonstrating the radical intent behind their actions.”
“As I’ve said before, domestic terrorism will NOT be tolerated in this state,” Kemp said in a statement Monday.
“We will not rest until those who use violence and intimidation for an extremist end are brought to full justice,” he said.
The names of those in custody and the criminal charges against them were not immediately available early Monday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. But Schierbaum said many were not from the Atlanta area.
In January, a 26-year-old environmental activist was shot to death by law officers in the forest where the training center is being built.
More protests are planned in coming days, police said.
“The Atlanta Police Department asks for this week’s protests to remain peaceful,” police said in a statement.
Mounting clashes between environmental activists and law enforcement officers in Atlanta gained national attention earlier this year. In January, a confrontation between police and protesters at the “Cop City” construction site — which unfolded as officers attempted to clear people from the area — ended with gunfire. One protester was killed and a state trooper was wounded, but the details of what happened remained unclear.
Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, a “forest defender” who went by the name Tortuguita, died in the shooting. Teran’s death sparked outrage and debate across the country, and fueled tension between environmental advocates and law enforcement in the Atlanta area. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said the shooting was not recorded by police body cameras.
The $90 million, 85-acre center, which includes a shooting range, mock city and burn building, among other facilities, will “reimagine law enforcement training and Police/Fire Rescue community engagement,” said the Atlanta Police Foundation, a not-for-profit that helps fund police initiatives through private-public partnerships in a statement on its website.
But the training center drew opposition almost immediately, coming on the heels of a tumultuous year of high-profile cases of police brutality and strained community relations.
Protests continued in Greece as thousands of demonstrators demanded accountability and improved safety following the deadly train collision that killed at least 57 people.
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Tens of thousands rally for the ninth straight week against government plan to overhaul court system.
Protesters have taken to the streets of Israeli cities for the ninth straight week to reject a government plan to overhaul the country’s court system.
Tens of thousands took part in Saturday night’s demonstrations in Tel Aviv and other locations which continued peacefully, unlike protests earlier this week that descended into violent clashes with police.
“I came to demonstrate against the regime revolution, which the Israeli government forced upon us,” 53-year-old history teacher Ronen Cohen told the Reuters news agency. “I hope that this huge demonstration will affect and prove that we are not going to give up.”
The marches have attracted huge crowds on a weekly basis since early January, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government took aim at the Supreme Court.
The protesters oppose legislation that Netanyahu and his right-wing and religious allies hope to pass that would limit the Supreme Court’s powers to rule against the legislature and the executive, while giving legislators decisive powers in appointing judges.
Judicial reform is a cornerstone of Netanyahu’s latest administration, an alliance with ultra-Orthodox and far-right parties which took office in late December.
Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, presented the overhaul as key to restoring the balance between the branches of government in a system he has argued gave judges too much power over elected officials.
Thousands took to the streets in Tel Aviv [Tsafrir Abayov/AP Photo]
The legislation would give more weight to the government in the committee that selects judges, and would deny the Supreme Court the right to strike down any amendments to so-called “Basic Laws”, Israel’s quasi-constitution.
These provisions have already received first-reading endorsements from legislators.
Another element of the reforms would give the 120-member parliament power to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority of 61 votes.
Analysts have said such a derogation clause could allow lawmakers to uphold any annulment of the corruption charges Netanyahu is being tried on, should parliament vote to absolve him and the Supreme Court then ruled against it.
Netanyahu has denied the charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and rejected any link between the reforms and his own court case.
The intensity of the protests increased this week when Israeli police fired stun grenades and scuffles broke out in Tel Aviv on Wednesday during a nationwide “day of disruption”.
“There’s a great danger that Israel will turn into a dictatorship,” 68-year-old high school teacher Ophir Kubitsky said on Saturday. “We came here to demonstrate over and over again until we win.”
Thousands protest against president’s policies, accusing him of trying to stifle basic freedoms including union rights.
Thousands of Tunisian trade unionists have held protests across the country over worsening economic woes and the arrest of a top union official.
The North African country is in drawn-out talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan, which the powerful UGTT workers’ federation has warned could entail painful austerity measures.
Demonstrators in Sfax, where the largest protest took place on Saturday, chanted “Tunisia is not for sale!” and “No to removing subsidies!”
Some raised loaves of bread as a symbol of protest at soaring living costs.
The protests in eight cities marked an escalation in the union’s confrontation with Tunisian President Kais Saied and followed its criticism of the recent arrests of several anti-government figures including politicians, a journalist, two judges and a senior UGTT official.
The coordinated arrests have raised fears of a wider crackdown on dissent and prompted the UN Human Rights Office to call for the detainees’ immediate release.
Protesters demanded the release of senior UGTT official Anis Kaabi, who was arrested on January 31 following a strike by toll barrier workers, in what the union has described as “a blow to union work and a violation of union rights”.
Othmane Jallouli, the UGTT’s deputy chief, told demonstrators that “the government has failed to put the country on the path of economic and social reforms. All it has succeeded in is attacking the union”.
A supporter of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), carries bread as he shouts slogans during a protest against President Kais Saied’s policies in Sfax, Tunisia [Jihed Abidellaoui/Reuters]
The latest protests came a year and a half after Saied sacked the government and seized almost total power in the birthplace of the 2011 pro-democracy uprisings that rocked the Arab world.
Cracking down on dissent
Since those moves, which opponents have called a coup, Saied has been repeatedly accused of dragging the country back into authoritarianism.
“Today, any union member can be sacked simply for expressing an opinion,” Jallouli said.
Following the protest, Tunisia expelled the head of the European Trade Union Confederation after she took part in it.
President Kais Saied declared Esther Lynch, who is Irish, persona non grata and said she must leave Tunisia within 24 hours. Her participation in the protest and remarks she made there were “blatant interference in Tunisian affairs”, the government said.
Earlier, Lynch had addressed the crowd in Sfax, delivering a message of “solidarity from 45 million workers around Europe”.
“We say to governments: hands off our trade unions, free our leaders,” Lynch said.
The government must “sit down and negotiate with the UGTT for a solution” to Tunisia’s woes, she said, adding that the UGTT represented “workers who are struggling to make ends meet”.
Political analyst Tarek Kahlaoui told Al Jazeera from Tunis that at the same time that UGTT is galvanising their base, “They are reaching a point of finalising the political initiative of dialogue.
“They are trying to have a dialogue with the president. Until then, I don’t think that we have a cohesion of Tunisian opposition groups, between civil society and political groups. There are still major divisions within the political landscape in Tunisia,” Kahlaoui said.
Tunisia, heavily indebted and import-dependent, is in the grip of a long-running economic crisis that has worsened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with regular shortages of basic goods from sugar to petrol.
UGTT members protested across Tunisia at the same time as the Sfax demonstration, from Tozeur in the south to Bizerte in the north.
More demonstrations are planned in other cities in the coming days, concluding with a rally in the capital, Tunis, early next month.
Kaabi faces trialonm February 23 on charges of “using his position to harm public authorities”.
Five former United States police officers have pleaded not guilty in the killing of Tyre Nichols, whose death following a violent traffic stop in the city of Memphis set off protests and renewed calls for an end to police violence.
Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr, Emmitt Martin III and Justin Smith made their first court appearances with their lawyers on Friday before a judge in Shelby County Criminal Court.
The former officers pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression in relation to the January 7 arrest of Nichols, which was captured on video.
The footage shows the officers beating the 29-year-old father and FedEx worker for three minutes in an assault that the Nichols family’s legal team likened to the 1991 police beating of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King, which was also videotaped.
“I am numb, just numb as I can be right now,” Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, said on Friday as she walked into the courtroom dressed in black.
After the court hearing, Wells dismissed the officers’ not-guilty plea, saying that it was expected.
“I’m going to leave it up to the district attorney’s office to get them prosecuted… and then they’ll find them guilty,” Wells told reporters outside the courtroom. “So, them saying they’re not guilty, that’s a preliminary thing. Everybody’s going to say that.”
She pledged to attend every session in court going forward.
“I want each and every one of those police officers to be able to look me in the face. They haven’t done that yet. They couldn’t even do that today. They didn’t even have the courage to look at me in my face after what they did to my son,” Wells said.
Nichols, who died in hospital three days after the traffic stop, attempted to converse with police as they shouted orders and threatened him with violence during the ordeal.
“You guys are really doing a lot right now. I’m just trying to go home,” he said at one point as he sat on the street and officers stood over him.
“Stop! I’m not doing anything,” Nichols said, just before breaking free and running.
When police caught up to him, he was beaten while being restrained, clubbed with a baton and kicked while on the ground. He cried out for his mother several times.
The five officers, all of whom are Black, have been fired from the police force, and the special unit they were members of has been disbanded. They were all released on bond as they await trial. Their next hearing has been scheduled for May 1.
“Be patient. Work with your attorneys,” Judge James Jones Jr said to the officers during Friday’s court appearance. “There may be some high emotions in this case.”
Nichols’s case has recalled the 2020 killing of George Floyd, who died when a police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death set off mass protests worldwide that demanded an end to racism and police brutality.
Memphis police said Nichols had been suspected of reckless driving, but no verified evidence of a traffic violation has emerged in public documents or in video footage.
The city’s police chief, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, has said she has seen no evidence justifying the stop or the officers’ response. Davis also previously said the video footage of the fatal incident depicted “acts that defy humanity”.
One white officer who was also involved in the initial traffic stop has been fired while an additional officer who has not been identified has been suspended.
The Memphis case has stood out for the speed in which the officers were fired and charged.
On Friday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump – who is representing Nichols’ family – warned against “any unnecessary delays” in prosecuting the former officers. “It’s important that we move swiftly towards justice,” He told reporters.
