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      ‘We can’t keep living like this’: Michigan governor denounces campus shooting

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      ‘We can’t keep living like this’: Michigan governor denounces campus shootingGretchen Whitmer calls for action on ‘uniquely American problem’ after gunman kills three Michigan State students and wounds five Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, denounced the “uniquely American problem” of gun violence on Tuesday after a gunman murdered three students in a mass shooting at Michigan State University on Monday.Three people killed in shooting on Michigan State University campusRead moreWhitmer spoke at an emotional press conference in East Lansing at which authorities identified the shooter, who died by suicide, and revealed other details about the attack that left five students critically wounded.“We cannot keep living like this,” the Democrat said, noting that Tuesday marked exactly five years since 17 students and staff were killed in Florida in the worst US high school shooting.“We’re all broken by an all too familiar feeling. Another place that is supposed to be about community and togetherness shattered by bullets and bloodshed.“We know this is a uniquely American problem. Today is the fifth anniversary of the Parkland shooting. We’re mere weeks past the lunar new year shooting at a dance hall [in California] and a few months past a shooting at an elementary school at Uvalde [in Texas], and looking back at a year marked by shootings at grocery stores, parades and so many other ordinary everyday situations.“Our children are scared to go to school. People feel unsafe in their houses of worship, or local stores. As parents, we tell our kids it’s going to be OK. But the truth is words are not good enough. We must act and we will.”University officials named two of the victims.Alexandria Verner, a junior from Detroit, was “a beautiful soul” who enjoyed playing basketball, softball and volleyball in her years at Clawson high school, according to her father, Ted Verner.Brian Fraser, a sophomore from Grosse Point, Michigan, was also identified. The name of the third victim was being withheld at their family’s request, officials said.Joe Biden said he and the first lady were praying for the victims, their families and the Michigan State community in a statement renewing the president’s call for an assault weapons ban.“Every American [should] exclaim ‘enough’ and demand that Congress take action,” Biden said.He said the justice department was awarding $231m to 49 states and territories “to create and implement crisis intervention projects” including red flag programs and for mental health and substance abuse supports.At a lunchtime event in Washington, the president said there was “no rationale” for assault weapons.“Three lives have been lost and five seriously injured. It’s a family’s worst nightmare. It’s happening far too often in this country. We have to do something to stop gun violence ripping apart our communities,” Biden said.The interim deputy chief of Michigan State campus police, Chris Rozman, named the gunman as 43-year-old Anthony McRae, who he said had no affiliation to the university.He said McRae shot dead two students and wounded several at Berkey Hall before walking to the student union building less than a block west and killing another.McRae “quickly fled that building – he was not in the building for that long”, Rozman said. “We have absolutely no idea what the motive was at this point.”Rozman said the shooter was located in Lansing at 11.35pm, about three hours after the shooting, after a tip from “an alert citizen” from a photograph released by police.McRae died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Rozman said, adding that he was unable to provide details of the firearm recovered and that investigators executed a search warrant on a residence connected to McRae.Cellphone video showed students running across campus in panic as shots rang out while others barricaded themselves into classrooms and bedrooms for several hours.“The shooter came in our room and shot three to four times,” a student, Dominik Molotky, told ABC News. “I’m pretty sure he hit two students in our classroom.”The Democratic Michigan congresswoman Elissa Slotkin echoed Whitmer’s calls for reform, saying she was “filled with rage” at having to address another press conference only 15 months after a high school shooting in Oxford township near Detroit left three dead and eight injured.“We have children in Michigan who are living through their second school shooting in under a year and a half,” Slotkin said. “If this is not a wake-up call to do something I don’t know what is.“You either care about protecting kids or you don’t. You either care about having an open, honest conversation about what is going on in our society, or you don’t, but please don’t tell me you care about the safety of children if you’re not willing to have a conversation about keeping them safe in a place that should be a sanctuary.”Whitmer, fighting tears, said Biden had called to offer condolences and support.“Our Spartan community and Michiganders across the state are devastated,” she said, referring to the nickname of Michigan State’s sports teams. “Spartans will cry and hold each other a little closer. We will mourn the loss of beautiful souls and pray for those fighting for their lives in the hospital.”The chief medical officer at EW Sparrow hospital in Lansing, Denny Martin, said four of the five wounded required surgery and all remained in critical condition.The Michigan State interim president, Teresa Woodruff, said all classes were canceled until at least Monday.According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of Tuesday there had been at least 67 mass shootings in the US in 45 days in 2023. The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four people are wounded or killed, not counting any shooters.TopicsMichiganUS politicsUS universitiesnewsReuse this content More

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      Harvard Kennedy School condemned for denying fellowship to Israel critic

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      Harvard Kennedy School condemned for denying fellowship to Israel criticACLU and Pen America back former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth and say decision ‘raises serious questions’ Leading civil rights organisations have condemned Harvard Kennedy School’s denial of a position to the former head of Human Rights Watch over the organisation’s criticism of Israel.Harvard blocks role for former Human Rights Watch head over Israel criticismRead moreThe American Civil Liberties Union called the refusal of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth “profoundly troubling”. PEN America, which advocates for freedom of expression, said the move “raises serous questions” about one of the US’s leading schools of government. Roth also received backing from other human rights activists.But the Kennedy School found support from organisations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW, particularly over the group’s report two years ago that accused Israel of practising a form of race-based apartheid in the Palestinian occupied territories.The Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy offered Roth a position as a senior fellow shortly after he retired as director of HRW in April after 29 years. But the school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, allegedly vetoed the move.A professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School, Kathryn Sikkink, told the Nation that Elmendorf said to her that Roth would not be permitted to take up the position because HRW has an “anti-Israel bias” and its former director had written tweets critical of Israel.Roth told the Guardian that Harvard’s move was a reflection of “how utterly afraid the Kennedy School has become of any criticism of Israel” under pressure from donors and influential supporters within the school of Israel’s rightwing government.The director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, urged the Kennedy School “to reverse its decision”.“If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling – from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint, he said. “Scholars and fellows have to be judged on their merits, not whether they please powerful political interests.”PEN America also backed Roth.“It is the role of a human rights defender to call out governments harshly, to take positions that are unpopular in certain quarters and to antagonize those who hold power and authority,” the group said. “There is no suggestion that Roth’s criticisms of Israel are in any way based on racial or religious animus.“Withholding Roth’s participation in a human rights program due to his own staunch critiques of human rights abuses by governments worldwide raises serious questions about the credibility of the Harvard program itself.”The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which promotes free speech on college campuses, wrote to Elmendorf saying that the Kennedy School “undermines its laudable commitment to intellectual diversity and free inquiry when it rescinds a fellowship offer based on the candidate’s viewpoint or speech”.But Harvard found support from organisations that have been highly critical of Roth and HRW over the group’s reports on Israel.NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based organisation that campaigns against humanitarian groups critical of Israeli government policies, accused HRW under Ross’s leadership of seeking to “delegitimize Israel”.“The dean at Harvard was not fooled by the moral facade granted to Roth and HRW. He recognized Roth’s central contributions to legitimizing antisemitism,” NGO Monitor’s president, Gerald Steinberg, said.UN Watch, a pro-Israel lobby group, described the Kennedy School’s move as “good news”.“Ken Roth had a pathological obsession with singling out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment, disproportionately to shocking degrees, with the apparent aim to portray the Jewish state in a manner that would evoke repulsion and disgust,” it said.Roth has long been the target of a personalised campaign of abuse, including charges of antisemitism, even though his father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He said HRW faced similar attacks on its motives when it released its report titled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, even though leading Israeli politicians have also “warned that the occupation has become a form apartheid”.“The irony is that when we issued the report, the Israeli government was at a loss to find anything wrong with it. They fell back on the usual arguments of, ‘you must be antisemitic’. I take that as a … victory because if all they can do is name call, they have nothing substantive to say,” he said.The Kennedy School did not respond to requests for comment.TopicsUS newsUS politicsHarvard UniversityHigher educationUS universitiesIsraelPalestinian territoriesnewsReuse this content More

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson grills lawyer in case seeking to end affirmative action

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      Ketanji Brown Jackson grills lawyer in case seeking to end affirmative actionNewest member of US supreme court seems to reject idea that affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional The newest US supreme court justice and the bench’s first Black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, made a clarion call in favor of keeping race as one of many factors in US higher education admissions, as America’s highest court heard oral arguments on the issue of affirmative action.The court is hearing two back-to-back cases brought against the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Harvard University by a conservative activist group, Students for Fair Admissions, but has not ruled.The group aims to block colleges from diversifying their student bodies by taking race into consideration alongside academic achievement and multiple other elements, essentially claiming that such a policy gives an unfair leg-up to African American and Hispanic students, who are underrepresented on campus, and discriminates against white and Asian American students.US students on why affirmative action is crucial: ‘They need our voices’Read moreA supporter of affirmative action, Cecilia Polanco, previously told the Guardian that: “A lot of the assumption is that someone less qualified than me took my place. That’s not what affirmative action does. It offers support to students who are just as qualified and may have different life experiences.”With a 6-3 conservative super-majority now on the court, affirmative action is deemed to be in jeopardy.Jackson has somewhat controversially recused herself from the case being heard second, against Harvard, because she attended it, though other current supreme court justices also attended Harvard but have not recused themselves.But Jackson spoke out stridently on Monday in the first case, involving UNC at Chapel Hill, when arguments were heard at the supreme court in Washington, where protesters on both sides gathered outside.Against Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for the plaintiff, Jackson said: “You haven’t demonstrated or shown one situation in which all they [the universities] look at is race. They’re looking at the full person.”Strawbridge said affirmative action violates the US constitution’s equal protection guarantees and federal non-discrimination statutes.Jackson said: “What I’m worried about is that the rule that you’re advocating, that in the context of a holistic review process, the university can take into account and value all of the other background and personal characteristics of other applicants, but they can’t value race … that seems to me to have the potential of causing more of an equal protection problem than it’s actually solving.”The justice was nominated in February by Joe Biden upon Stephen Breyer’s retirement. She was confirmed by the US Senate in April and had already been making an impact in the court’s new term.‘It means the world to us’: Black lawmakers’ euphoria greets Jackson confirmationRead moreOn Monday she explained her reasoning to Strawbridge by giving a hypothetical example of two aspiring students applying to UNC.She said: “The first applicant says, ‘I’m from North Carolina, my family has been in this area for generations since before the civil war, and I would like you to know that I will be the fifth generation to graduate from University of North Carolina. I now have that opportunity to do that. And in my family background, it’s important to me that I get to attend this university – I want to honor my family’s legacy by going to this school.’She continued: “The second applicant says ‘I’m from North Carolina. My family has been in this area for generations since before the civil war, but they were slaves and never had a chance to attend this venerable institution. As an African American, I now have that opportunity and given my family background it’s important to me to attend this university. I want to honor my family legacy by going to this school.’“Now, as I understand your no-race-conscious admissions rule, these two applicants would have a dramatically different opportunity to tell their family stories and to have them count.”Jackson added: “The first applicant would be able to have his family background considered and valued by the institution as part of its consideration of whether or not to admit him, while the second one wouldn’t be able to because his story is in many ways bound up with his race and with the race of his ancestors.“So I want to know, based on how your rule would likely play out in scenarios like that, why excluding consideration of race in a situation in which the person is not saying that his race is something that has impacted him in a negative way – he just wants to have it honored, just like the other person has their personal background family story honored – why is telling him no not an equal protection violation?”Strawbridge said the university could take into account factors such as whether a student would be the first generation in their family to attend and whether they may be economically disadvantaged, but he said that race should not be relevant these days.TopicsUS supreme courtUS politicsUS universitiesnewsReuse this content More

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      Penn State students outraged over invitation to far-right Proud Boys founder

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      Penn State students outraged over invitation to far-right Proud Boys founderUncensored America, a conservative student group, has invited Gavin McInnes to speak at the school in late October Students at the prestigious US university Penn State are outraged that Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys, is coming to speak at their Pennsylvania college on Monday.The Proud Boys, an often violent US extremist group, have been labeled a terrorist organization by New Zealand and Canada. Many of its members align with white supremacist, antisemitic or Islamophobic ideologies. And five of its members were charged for their actions during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.‘Start smashing pumpkins’: January 6 panel shows Roger Stone discussing violenceRead more“My friends and I are pretty disgusted,” said Sam Ajah, a third-year student. “The university can’t just abdicate all responsibility. They’re giving [McInnes] a platform, access, legitimacy.”Ajah, a 21-year-old geography major and president of the Penn State College Democrats club, is one of many students who feel strongly about the university hosting McInnes. Although organized by Uncensored America, a conservative student-led group at the cost of roughly $7,000, Penn State is holding out against pleas to cancel or ban the event.“As a public university, we are unalterably obligated under the US constitution’s first amendment to protect various expressive rights,” the school said in a statement. It also acknowledged and criticized the hateful rhetoric that speakers like McInnes are known to espouse.Such an event is not a first for Penn State. Last year, Milo Yiannopoulos, a British “alt-right” political commentator, was hosted by Uncensored America at a talk on campus.Yiannopoulos, who told a crowd at the University of Massachusetts a few years prior that “feminism is cancer”, often plays off his offensive remarks as ironic jokes. “Pray the Gay Away” was printed on a red poster advertising his talk in Penn State’s student union hall.Students were opposed to that earlier event too, but the tension surrounding this upcoming talk is different – it is palpable.“I mean, Yiannopoulos is offensive and kind of a clown,” said Mia Bloom, a former professor at Penn State who researches extremism, conspiracy theories and the far right.“But Gavin McInnes is actually dangerous. This event is deliberately provocative. It’s not a free speech issue if it endangers the student community.”McInnes established the Proud Boys during the 2016 presidential elections. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, white nationalists and neo-Nazis cite him as a gateway to the far right.Since then, members of his organization have been regulars at Make America Great Again rallies, recognizable for wearing black and yellow clothing, and they are frequent participants in street riots across the country.“We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you,” McInnes said during his Compound Media show in 2016.Ajah and many of his peers will not attend the protest against the talk scheduled for 24 October, partly out of fear of violence. They feel this is the best message to send. Ajah wants students to think twice about their safety.“It’s not my place to go as a black queer person,” he said. “Why would I when people are espousing hateful rhetoric at you for just being you.”Ajah disagrees with Penn’s “lackluster and hands-off approach”, which the school also came under criticism for after the Yiannopoulos talk last year.“It’s not our job to verify or take into consideration speakers like this just because they are palatable to a certain student audience,” Ajah said. “In ignoring the hateful stuff McInnes has done, the university is just accepting it.”When Kevin McAleenan visited Georgetown University’s law school in 2019 to give a lecture, he was effectively driven from the stage. McAleenan, then the acting secretary of homeland security under Donald Trump, could not be heard over chants such as “Hate is not normal” and “Stand up, fight back” from the audience.Georgetown has since re-evaluated the school’s free speech policies.TopicsThe far rightUS universitiesPennsylvaniaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Why oh why don’t kids these days look hot, laments Fox News host, 58 | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Why oh why don’t kids these days look hot, laments Fox News host, 58Arwa MahdawiGreg Gutfeld’s creepy rant is just the latest example of the US right’s obsession with sex Sign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter​ on feminism and sexism sent every SaturdayFox, 58, host complains college kids not hot any moreKids these days, eh? They’re all “deliberately ugly-fying themselves”. That’s according to Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, anyway. The 58-year-old recently went on a weird tirade about how college students aren’t adhering to his beauty standards. “You see them on TikTok, they’re out of shape, asexual,” Gutfeld said on Thursday, during a conversation about college loans. “They’re rejecting the truth in beauty, they all look like rejects from a loony bin.”The world is done with Wife Guys. Thank goodness for that | Arwa MahdawiRead moreThere’s nothing particularly surprising about a Fox anchor going on a creepy rant about the physical appearance of people three decades younger than him. Ninety per cent of the “news” on Fox, after all, seems to be bizarre commentary on how women look. (Remember when they speculated about whether anyone would listen to congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she “was fat and in her 60s”?) However, Gutfeld’s little outburst is worth noting because it underscores just how sex-obsessed rightwingers are. The party of supposedly small government is constantly inserting itself into other people’s pants. They want to ban sex education in schools; they want to restrict contraception; they want to force women to give birth; they want to ban women from wearing revealing clothes; they want to complain that college students aren’t wearing revealing enough clothes. Republicans don’t have any meaningful or coherent policies, they just have a fixation on controlling women.While rightwingers are busy sexualizing college students young enough to be their own kids they’re also, of course, simultaneously shouting about how liberals are “groomers” who are trying to “recruit” children. The moral panic over “grooming”, it must be said, is starting to look a lot like projection. Let’s not forget, after all, that Matt Gaetz, a sitting Republican congressman is still under investigation for underage sex trafficking. Meanwhile Matt Walsh, a prominent rightwing commentator, has suggested that we should be pushing for more teenage girls to marry and get pregnant because it is “technically when they’re at their most fertile”. The party of family values, ladies and gentlemen!Gutfeld’s spiel on “asexual” college students, doesn’t just exemplify the right’s sex-obsession – it’s also an example of the Republican’s fixation with attacking higher education. While anti-intellectualism has been a key part of the Republican party for a long time (Ronald Reagan wanted to eliminate the Department of Education), it has ramped up recently. At the beginning of the 2010s, 58% of Republicans believed higher education had a positive impact on the course of the country, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2015 that number started dipping dramatically and by 2019 only 33% agreed colleges and universities were shaping the US for the better. Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, have been vying for more control over state universities and trying to regulate what can be taught about race and identity.You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand why universities terrify Republicans: they teach critical thinking skills. And the very last thing Republicans seem to want is for people to think for themselves.Elon Musk blames communism for the fact his teenage daughter doesn’t want to talk to himAccording to the Financial Times, Elon Musk has “blamed the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists”. (Sticking with the theme of rightwingers hating higher education.) Musk told the FT that “It’s full-on communism …  and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil.” Blaming “neo-Marxists” for your daughter severing ties with you is certainly an interesting argument!Employers in the US are cutting back on parental leave, survey showsA new survey has found that the number of organizations offering paid maternity leave dropped from 53% in 2020 to 35% in 2022. The number offering paid paternity leave dropped from 44% to 27%. And people wonder why nobody is having kids any more!South Korean president tries to scrap gender equality ministry to ‘protect’ women“Abolishing the gender ministry is about strengthening the protection of women, families, children and the socially weak,” South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk-yeol, said. How does that work then?French author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel prize for literatureErnaux’s first book, Cleaned Out, is an autobiographical novel about getting an abortion when it was still illegal in France. She wrote it in secret, telling the New York Times that her husband had made fun of her after her first manuscript. When the book was picked up her husband was annoyed. Ernaux said: “He told me: If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, then you’re capable of cheating on me.” Reader, she divorced him. Outcry in Spain over male students chanting abuse at female studentsFootage of the incident shows one student calling women “whores” and “fucking nymphomaniacs” and telling them to come “out of your dens like rabbits”. Spain’s equality minister said the episode was “the clearest proof” of the need for education on sexual consent. Young women are trending liberal, young men are notForty-four per cent of young women described themselves as liberal in 2021, compared with 25% of young men.The week in pawtriarchyPerhaps you’ve heard there is cost of living crisis and the economy is pretty dire? That news seems to have bypassed San Francisco which is home to a new fine-dining restaurant exclusively for dogs. Dogue serves a $75 three-course tasting menu for pampered pooches; sample dishes include green-lipped mussels with fermented carrots and wheatgrass. I love dogs but this is just an obscene example of how out of control inequality is. It’s also completely pointless: anyone who has ever met a dog knows that they happily eat their own vomit. Serving them $75 wheatgrass is just barking mad.TopicsFox NewsOpinionUS universitiesUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Dr Oz dropped by Columbia amid pro-Trump Republican Senate run – report

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      Dr Oz dropped by Columbia amid pro-Trump Republican Senate run – report‘He’s been a huge danger to public health,’ says prominent medical ethicist Dr Arthur Caplan The TV doctor Mehmet Oz’s move into politics appears to have been a step too far for administrators at Columbia University, who have quietly purged his presence from their website as the Republican seeks to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate.JD Vance’s Senate run is a test of Trump’s influence on the Republican partyRead moreFor more than seven years, the private New York university has resisted calls to cut ties with Oz, a heart surgeon who has used his TV platform to push medicines ranging from ineffective diet pills to discredited Covid treatments.According to the Daily Beast, that changed this year, within weeks of Oz, 61, declaring his candidacy for the Senate seat being vacated by the Republican Pat Toomey.Oz, a friend and acolyte to Donald Trump, who has endorsed him, no longer has personal pages on the website of Columbia’s Irving Medical Center, the Beast reported, noting he once held senior titles including director of surgery and director of integrated medicine.Columbia did not respond to an inquiry from the Guardian.The Beast suggested the decision was political. Faculty leaders stuck with Oz through numerous medical controversies, including his 2014 Senate testimony regarding his plugging of “sham” diet pills on The Dr Oz Show, which ended its 13-season run this year.Following the testimony, a group of distinguished physicians wrote to Columbia, claiming Oz had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine” and shown “outrageous conflicts of interest or flawed judgements about what constitutes appropriate medical treatments, or both”.“Worst of all,” the letter continued, “he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”One of the signatories to the letter, which Columbia rebuffed, was Scott Atlas, who would himself be criticized for spreading misinformation as coronavirus adviser to the Trump administration.In 2011, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) branded as “misleading and irresponsible” a report on the Dr Oz Show suggesting apple juice contained dangerously high levels of arsenic.The prominent medical ethicist Dr Arthur Caplan, who in 2014 accused Oz of “promoting fairy dust”, told the Guardian he was not surprised Columbia had “quietly eliminated” Oz.“They won’t have a press conference in the middle of this guy running for the Senate saying they were throwing him out … it could be seen as trying to influence an election, it could be risking bad blood should he become a senator,” said Caplan, professor and founding head of the Grossman School of Medicine Division of Medical Ethics at New York University.“My question becomes, ‘What took so long?’ He’s been a huge danger to public health in the US and around the world for a long time with respect to quack cures for Covid and touting quackery to treat diseases.“I was among the voices saying he had to be removed years ago. And I still think it’s the right thing to do because he really has forfeited credibility as a doctor. Whether that will matter in terms of the election, we shall see.“I think it should, I doubt it will.”The Oz campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Polling for the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary on 17 May shows Oz trailing David McCormick, a hedge fund manager, by between 2% and 11%, according to Real Clear Politics.‘TV is like a poll’: Trump endorses Dr Oz for Pennsylvania Senate nominationRead moreMany analysts see the race as a test of Trump’s grip on the Republican party. At a rally in Selma, North Carolina, earlier this month, the former president called Oz a “great guy, good man … Harvard-educated, tremendous, tremendous career and they liked him for a long time.“That’s like a poll. You know, when you’re in television for 18 years, that’s like a poll, that means people like you.”Trump and Oz will appear at a rally in Greensburg, Pennsylvania on 6 May.Trump previously endorsed Sean Parnell, who withdrew after being accused by his wife of abusive behavior, which he denied.TopicsUS universitiesRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Abolish Trump-era ‘China Initiative’, academics urge, amid racial profiling criticism

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      US universities Abolish Trump-era ‘China Initiative’, academics urge, amid racial profiling criticism Stanford University professors say the programme is fuelling racism and harming US competitiveness, rather than uncovering spies in universities Vincent Ni China affairs correspondentTue 14 Sep 2021 22.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 22.02 EDTCalls are growing to abolish a controversial Trump-era initiative that looks for Chinese spies at US universities, which critics say has resulted in racial profiling and harmed technological competitiveness.In a letter sent to the Department of Justice, 177 faculty members across 40 departments at Stanford University asked the US government to cease operating the “China Initiative”. They argue the programme harms academic freedom by racially profiling and unfairly targeting Chinese academics.The letter follows the acquittal last week by a US federal judge of a researcher accused of concealing ties with China while receiving American taxpayer-funded grants. “We understand that concerns about Chinese government-sanctioned activities including intellectual property theft and economic espionage are important to address,” the Stanford academics wrote. “We believe, however, that the China Initiative has deviated significantly from its claimed mission: it is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fuelling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.”The Guardian view on anti-Chinese suspicion: target espionage, not ethnicities | EditorialRead moreOn Thursday, a federal judge in Tennessee acquitted Anming Hu, an ethnic Chinese nanotechnology expert at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who had been accused of concealing his ties to Beijing while applying for research funding to work on a Nasa project. The judge said the US government hadn’t proven its case.“Given the lack of evidence that defendant was aware of such an expansive interpretation of Nasa’s China funding restriction, the court concludes that, even viewing all the evidence in the light most favourable to the government, no rational jury could conclude that defendant acted with a scheme to defraud Nasa,” US district judge Thomas Varlan wrote in a 52-page ruling.Responding to the decision, the Department of Justice said “we respect the court’s decision, although we are disappointed with the result”, according to US media. Hu’s attorney, Phil Lomonaco, said the academic was focused now on recovering his tenured position at the University of Tennessee.“Many universities should have learned from the experience that professor was forced to endure,” Lomonaco said. “The Department of Justice needs to take a step back and reassess their approach on investigating Chinese professors in the United States universities. They are not all spies.”‘There’s a better way’The high-profile trial came after a series of arrests of US-based researchers who had been accused of not properly disclosing their work in China in recent years. After a jury deadlock, Hu’s case ended in mistrial in June. An FBI agent admitted that he had “used false information to justify putting a team of agents to spy on Hu and his son for two years”, according to local news reports.Confronting hate against east Asians – a photo essayRead moreThe Trump-era China Initiative began in 2018. In justifying such an operation, Department of Justice said on its website: “The Department of Justice’s China Initiative reflects the strategic priority of countering Chinese national security threats and reinforces the president’s overall national security strategy.” It also publishes a list of successful prosecutions – with the latest one on 14 May.But critics say while it is necessary for the US to protect its national security, such a programme that targets an entire ethnic group would end up in discrimination against Asian Americans – in particular those who are of Chinese origin.On 30 July, 90 members of the US congress urged the Department of Justice to investigate what they called “the repeated, wrongful targeting of individuals of Asian descent for alleged espionage”, in a letter to attorney general Merrick Garland.Last week, Democratic congressman Ted Lieu demanded the Justice Department apologise to Hu. “You should stop discriminating against Asians. You should investigate your prosecutors for engaging in what looks like racial profiling. If Hu’s last name was Smith, you would not have brought this case,” he wrote.Hate crimes in US rise to highest level in 12 years, says FBI reportRead moreThe recent round of calls came in the wake of growing violence against Asians in the US. According to an FBI annual report last month, the number of reported crimes against people of Asian decent grew by 70% last year, totalling 274 cases.Margaret Lewis of Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, who has been calling on the US government to rethink its approach to research security, said: “I understand the need to be concerned about the Chinese government’s behaviour that incentivises violations of US law, but the US should first not engage in rhetoric that fuels xenophobia and racism.“It worries me that people with certain characteristics might fall under suspicion,” she said. “Let us not pretend there’s no concern about Beijing, but there’s a better way to do it. Getting rid of the name is the first step.”TopicsUS universitiesChinaDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS foreign policyAsia PacificnewsReuse this content More

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      Florida bill would allow students to record professors to show political bias

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      Republicans in Florida have stepped up their assault on what they call “Marxist professors and students” in the state’s public universities and colleges with a bill that encourages the reporting of lecturers perceived to be stifling “viewpoint diversity” on campus.The bill, currently awaiting the signature of the Florida governor and Donald Trump ally Ron DeSantis, will allow students to make recordings of lectures without their professors’ consent, and present them as evidence of political bias.It requires all 40 of Florida’s state-funded institutions of postsecondary education to conduct an annual survey of faculty and students to establish how well intellectual freedoms are protected on campus; and to “shield” students from efforts to limit their “access to, or observation of, ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.”Any institution that blocks a student’s access to such “expressive activities”, the definition of which includes the content of lectures as well as “all forms of peaceful assembly, protests and speeches,” exposes itself to legal action, the new bill states.Opponents say the shield clause, a late addition to the bill’s text as it worked its way through Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature, opens the door for white supremacist or other rightwing hate groups.“As we saw in Charlottesville, if you give them an opening like that they will come,” Dr Karen Morian, the president of the united faculty of Florida (UFF) union of more than 20,000 educators, said. “And if it’s at FAMU [the historically black Florida agricultural and mechanical university] and they think they’re going to be able to intimidate black college students, they will come. That’s actually pretty scary.”Morian said the clause allowing the clandestine recording of lectures is also problematic, despite the insistence by the bill’s defenders that educators have no right of privacy in a publicly-funded institution.“It carves out our classrooms as a public space, whereas in actuality the general public cannot walk through it during class,” she said. “They can walk across the campus, or from the parking lot to the office, that’s public space. But my classroom has never been read as a public space.”The Florida bill appears to align with the position of rightwing student activist groups such as Turning Point USA, which has long railed against what it sees as the left’s domination of campuses nationwide and maintains an online watchlist of radical professors who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.The politicians who shaped the Florida law acknowledge there is no evidence that political bias is a problem in the state’s 12 public universities and 28 publicly-funded colleges, but argue that legislation is needed to find out if it exists.“We have a lot of anecdotal evidence of largely conservative students feeling very uncomfortable sharing their viewpoints in university classrooms, they’re getting shut down,” said the state congressman Alex Andrade, a co-sponsor of the bill.“It’s a common joke [among] conservative students that they have to tailor some of their essays to make them more progressive or left-leaning to get a better grade. When there’s at least anecdotal evidence that people are concerned about action against them for their political viewpoints it’s an issue we’d like to collect some data on.”Opponents say there is no need for the law and state that mechanisms already exist for students to report offensive or egregious behavior by lecturers. “It’s based on national news reports and not related to any incidents in Florida,” Yale Olenik, an attorney and legislative specialist at the Florida Education Association, told lawmakers at a February hearing. “Florida’s colleges and universities are not reporting issues, students are not complaining.”Andrade rejected the criticism. “Anytime a university professor is afraid of information that potentially makes them look bad, they translate ‘the solution in search of a problem’ because university professors have a pretty bad habit of always being right,” he said.“This is just a strict collection of data related to people’s concerns about their viewpoints, whether progressive or conservative, being held against them on college campuses.”The law’s architect, the state congressman Spencer Roach, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment but in a tweet when the bill passed the Florida senate earlier this month he framed the bill as a “protection of intellectual diversity”.“Freedom of speech is an unalienable right, despite what Marxist professors and students think,” he wrote.Democrats who voted against the bill pointed to a series of aggressive educational manoeuvres that Republican lawmakers have attempted during Florida’s current legislative session, which ends next week.Politicians backed down on a proposal to withhold scholarships from students pursuing degree courses they perceived as liberal, but are still advancing plans to end guaranteed funding for certain scholarships and tie their availability instead to the vagaries of state budgets.This week, the Florida house voted to expand a school choice program that critics say strips money and resources from public schools and sends taxpayer money to private institutions with discriminatory practices.“I’m not surprised that Republicans are hobbling public education from kindergarten to college because they are afraid of educated voters,” the state representative Omari Hardy said.“Republicans have done poorly in recent years with college-educated voters, which has fed their belief and fear that colleges have become indoctrination camps. They believe college students are these frail and fragile intellectual creatures but there’s no data showing that professors are indoctrinating their students.” More