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The White House announced Wednesday it will not join a global initiative, launched in the wake of a massacre in New Zealand two months ago, to tackle racist and extremist online content.
“By not standing alongside other world leaders to fight hate,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center in response, “President Trump has shown once again that he doesn’t understand the importance of white supremacy in fueling terrorism.”
The Christchurch Call—which has the backing of 17 countries plus the European Commission and eight major tech companies including Twitter, Google, and Facebook—was launched Wednesday by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron.
The initiative comes exactly two months after the terrorist attack on worshipers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a gunman who professed racist hatred against Muslims and immigrants livestreamed his slaughter of 51 people.
“This attack was part of a horrifying new trend that seems to be spreading around the world,” Ardern wrote in an op-ed at the New York Times last week. “It was designed to be broadcast on the internet.”
She denounced the “staggering” scale of the video’s reach:
Original footage of the livestream was viewed some 4,000 times before being removed from Facebook. Within the first 24 hours, 1.5 million copies of the video had been taken down from the platform. There was one upload per second to YouTube in the first 24 hours.”
The right to free expression, she wrote, “does not include the freedom to broadcast mass murder.”
Ending that threat, she added, necessitates collaboration—thus the Christchurch Call.
It calls on “governments and private corporations to prevent the posting of terrorist content online, to remove it quickly when it does appear, and to prevent the use of live-streaming to broadcast violence,” as the Irish Times reported.
The Trump administration gave the initiative a hard pass.
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While saying it supported the call’s “overall goals,” the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy said in a release that “the best tool to defeat terrorist speech is productive speech, and thus we emphasize the importance of promoting credible, alternative narratives as the primary means by which we can defeat terrorist messaging.”
In the wake the Christchurch attacks, Ardern’s government passed a ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons—a move praised by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“Sandy Hook happened six years ago and we can’t even get the Senate to hold a vote on universal background checks w/ #HR8,” the freshman congresswoman tweeted at the time. “Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to get weapons of war out of the consumer market.”
The inaction has Ardern scratching her head.
Speaking to CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour, Ardern said this week: “Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest, I do not understand the United States.”
Lady Gaga is kicking off 2018 by embracing her curves. The singer took to Twitter to share a photo of herself basking in the glow of the new year in a barely-there thong bikini that leaves little to the imagination.
“Happy New Year. To happiness. Health. Love. And to the simplicity of beautiful unforgettable nature, life,” she wrote on Twitter alongside the photo, which shows her looking at the sky as she poses against driftwood on the beach in a matching swim separates.
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Not only was her figure on full display, but the photo clearly shows off her array of tattoos. From the angle of the photo, we can see her David Bowie tat along her rib cage, which she got in honor of the late singer, as well as an intricate bouquet of roses, and unicorn on her thigh, just to name a few.
If the bikini bottoms look familiar, Gaga wore them last year when she did a photo shoot of herself in a swimsuit on the beach in Miami. While that beach side getup included heels, she definitely went more low key this time around, keeping it simple with no jewelry and her blonde hair swept up in a low bun.
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Jennifer Garner has recently taken to social media to show off her Ina Garten-inspired skills in the kitchen—and now she’s sharing her go-to healthy breakfast.
The mom of three says she began whipping up a smoothie she learned from nutritionist Kelly LeVeque to help get in shape for her role in the upcoming action movie Peppermint. “I started working with @bewellbykelly a few months ago to get ready for #PEPPERMINTmovie and have had her smoothie every day for breakfast since,” she shared on Instagram on Monday.
In September of last year, the actress signed on as a co-founder of Once Upon a Farm—a company that sells cold-pressed organic baby food and applesauce. For her smoothie, Garner takes the recipe she knows and loves but gives it her own spin replacing fresh blueberries with the fruit purèe.
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“Today, I decided to play scientist and see if my @onceuponafarm cold-pressed, organic purée (or baby food, if you’re a baby, but whatever) could be a substitute for fresh blueberries when I didn’t see any in the fridge. Yep, it could,” she wrote.
Garner also includes a few more ingredient to make it that much more tasty and nutritious, including chocolate coconut collagen protein powder, almond butter, chia seeds and almond milk. Get the full recipe below!
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Jennifer Garner’s Go-To Smoothie Recipe
2 scoops collagen protein powder
1 tbsp. ground flaxseed
1 tbsp. chia seeds
1 tbsp. almond butter
1 ½ cups unsweetened almond milk
Handful of fresh spinach
Small handful of ice
Very small handful of blueberries
Mix all ingredients together in blender and enjoy.
“Receiving a free, real hair wig has a very positive impact on a child or young adult at such a difficult time. We hope that this donation will encourage others to consider supporting the charity in the same way,” charity manager Monica Glass said in a statement.
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One lucky little child is wearing a wig made of the royal’s hair, though it won’t be all Middleton’s. “The wig manufacturers are the skilled specialists who blend the hair donations together, as it can take between 7-10 individual donations to make a single wig,” the Little Princess Trust explains.
Middleton continues to delight us with her quiet acts of generosity.
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President Donald Trump’s near-total ban on immigration to the U.S. from Muslim-majority countries, known colloquially as the “Muslim ban,” is having widespread negative effects on refugees in the Middle East, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
In the new report, The Mountain is in Front of Us and the Sea is Behind Us, Amnesty interviewed nearly 50 refugees stuck in Lebanon and Jordan due to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban. Hundreds of families from war-torn regions of the Arab world, from Sudan to Syria, are “locked in an impossible limbo” waiting for the U.S. government to act either way on their asylum applications.
“These are families who put their trust in the United States at their most desperate hour, and now find themselves on the brink of catastrophe through absolutely no fault of their own,” Amnesty researcher Denise Bell said in a statement.
One refugee interviewed by Amnesty, named in the report as “Malik,” has been waiting to go to the U.S. from Beirut after fleeing Baghdad with his family for fear of religious persecution due to their Christian faith. As Malik told Amnesty, he tried to do everything the right way, but it didn’t matter:
Malik’s family had gone so far as to complete trainings to prepare for their new lives in the U.S. after his case was approved. Since the Muslim Ban was signed in 2017, his case has been held up due to what he is told are “security checks,” even though it was previously approved.
When asked what he would say if he could speak with President Trump, Malik said, “We are refugees. We’re human refugees. We’re refugees because there are difficult situations that made us flee . . . Please, so that we’re able to live. We want to live; we want to live in peace.”
The Trump administration has cut refugee intake into the country by 71 percent over the last three years, and for Syrian refugees, the reduction is even higher. As the report notes, “at the end of April 2019, only 219 Syrian refugees had arrived to the United States from Jordan and Lebanon this calendar year, putting the USA on pace to resettle just over 650 by the end of 2019. In contrast, in calendar year 2016, 11,204 Syrian refugees were resettled to the USA from Jordan and Lebanon.”
The administration’s attack on refugees is a growing problem for human rights, said Amnesty grassroots advocacy and refugee specialist Ryan Mace. Mace called on Congress to hold the White House accountable and to use the opportunity provided by the report to press for better protections for those affected by the policies.
“Congress must do its job and hold the Trump administration accountable to refugees,” Mace said. “This means rejecting the president’s proposed devastating cuts and instead providing life-saving humanitarian aid to refugees and displaced populations.”
“The administration must ensure that the United States does not discriminate against refugees based on how they worship or where they come from,” Mace added.
As Amnesty points out, it’s not just the refugees in Lebanon and Jordan who are suffering. The entire program has been slowed down by the White House.
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The U.S. has historically resettled the largest number of refugees annually from around the world. Since the modern U.S. Refugee Assistance Program was established in 1980, the average number of persons being resettled each fiscal year was 80,000. This changed in 2017 when one of President Trump’s first acts in office was to cut the refugee admissions goal from 110,000, which President Obama set in his last year in office, to 45,000—the lowest refugee admissions cap ever set to that point. Barely 22,000 refugees were resettled by the end of FY 2018—the lowest number admitted in the history of the program. Under the current U.S. administration, refugee resettlement has dropped 71 percent in three years.
Amnesty hopes to convince the administration to take in 30,000 refugees in total in 2019 and increase that number to 95,000 in 2020.
While President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have spent the past several years claiming foreign migrants and refugees pose a threat to Americans, a pair of massacres in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio over the weekend has compelled two Latin American countries to warn their own citizens of the travel dangers lurking in the United States.
The foreign ministries of Venezuela and Uruguay issued urgent warnings to people in their countries who may travel to the U.S. following the deaths of 31 people in the two mass shootings. Both countries informed their citizens of the “indiscriminate possession” of guns by the U.S. population and the refusal of the federal government to address the problem.
“These increasing acts of violence have found an echo and support in the conversations and actions impregnated by racial discrimination and hatred against migrant populations, pronounced and executed by the supremacist elite who holds political power in Washington.”
—Foreign Ministry of VenezuelaTravelers from Uruguay were specifically urged to “take precaution amid the growing indiscriminatory violence, specifically hate crimes including racism and discrimination,” following the shooting deaths of 22 people in El Paso on Saturday by an accused gunman who reportedly posted an anti-immigrant, white supremacist manifesto online minutes before the attack.
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The foreign ministry listed several crowded public venues which could pose a threat to travelers: “theme parks, shopping centers, festivals, religious events, gastronomic fairs and any kind of cultural or sporting events.”
Nearly all of the places listed have been the sites of mass shootings in the U.S., although the list was hardly exhaustive. As of Tuesday, the 218th day of 2019, there have been 255 mass shootings in the country.
Venezuela also pointed to the “recent proliferation of violent acts and hate crimes” as reason to exercise caution regarding travel to the U.S., and slammed the country for the “inexcusable, indiscriminate possession of firearms by the population, encouraged by the federal government.”
“These increasing acts of violence have found an echo and support in the conversations and actions impregnated by racial discrimination and hatred against migrant populations, pronounced and executed by the supremacist elite who holds political power in Washington,” the foreign ministry told Venezuelans in its travel warning.
In Detroit on Sunday, the Japanese Consul also alerted Japanese nationals with plans to travel to the U.S. that they “should be aware of the potential for gunfire incidents everywhere in the United States,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
A minority of U.S. households own guns, yet a 2017 study found that there were 120.5 civilian-owned firearms for every 100 people in the United States. Other countries like Australia and New Zealand have instituted strict gun control measures and even weapons bans after a single mass shooting while the U.S. has allowed hundreds to take place each year.
Travel warnings were mirrored by stunned international coverage of the two shootings, which took place within 13 hours of one another and in which both gunmen used high-capacity magazines and military-style semi-automatic weapons, which are legal in the states where the gunmen bought them.
An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald on Sunday condemned the United States’ “white nationalist terrorism crisis.” The Argentinian newspaper Clarín reported “another massacre in the U.S.” on Saturday, while the Dutch publication Algemeen Dagblad published a graphic explaining to readers that while the Netherlands is known for having more bicycles than people, the U.S. has more guns than people.
The reaction of officials in Venezuela and Uruguay as well as the international perception of the U.S. as a dangerous country was unsurprising but dismaying to observers on social media.
“The world is watching,” wrote organizer Dan Knudsen.
George Clooney is making his big return to TV! The Academy Award–winning actor is set to direct and star in a new limited series, his first since leaving ER in 2009.
So what could be big enough to get this movie producer back on the small screen? According to Deadline, Clooney is directing a six-part series based on Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22, a 1961 satire about the U.S. Army. The film is set in Italy during WWII and tells the story of a U.S. Air Force flyer named Yossarian, who is ordered to keep increasing the number of dangerous missions he must fly to complete his service. If he makes any attempt to avoid those missions, he’ll be in a total “Catch-22” because of a “hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule.”
Gregg DeGuire/Getty
According to a new report from The Hollywood Reporter, the show set to hit Hulu, which scored the deal after Paramount Television and Anonymous Content announced its development last year. The series is also closed-ended, meaning it will tell the story over six episodes and will not return for a second season. Clooney plans to shoot across the globe in locations that hold true to those described in the book.
Here’s how Deadline previously described the new show: “A concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that are real and immediate is the process of a rational mind; a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but a request to be removed from duty is evidence of sanity and therefore makes him ineligible to be relieved from duty.” Basically, there’s no way out.
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The new dad will star as Colonel Cathcart in his first acting role since 2016’s Money Monster. In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, Clooney announced he would be cutting down on his acting roles because he doesn’t “need money.”
“I have money, so I can fight to make movies I want to make,” he said.
Catch-22 is expected to start filming in early 2018.
Katy Perry might want to pay more attention to where she’s “swish swish”-ing from now on. The singer started 2018 with a nasty sting after she unintentionally met a jellyfish up close.
During what was supposed to be a fun-filled day of flyboarding, Perry got a little more than she bargained for when she jetted into the air and then landed right on top of the critter in the water.
On Thursday, she posted an Instagram with video footage of the incident and a picture of her injury. In the clip, Perry blows kisses into the air and even pulls down her bikini bottoms to moon the camera person at one point. But the fun and games turn sour when Perry takes a tumble and apparently hits the jellyfish.
“#tbt to when I thought I was winning 2018 and then fell into a jellyfish. kewl,” she captioned the post.
Watch it here:
The welt it gave her blossomed over most of her knee, and it looks pretty painful.
On Tuesday, Perry hit the red carpet for Stella McCartney’s “Stella-chella,” but she wore a long gown that covered her legs entirely.
Let’s hope Perry will be able to avoid tumbling in the future (or at least pick jellyfish-free waters).
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In a move immigrant rights groups decried as the White House’s latest inhumane attack on those fleeing violence and persecution, President Donald Trump late Monday ordered sweeping changes to the U.S. asylum system, including restriction of work permits and a fee for asylum applications.
“Once again, he’s hell bent on persecuting the most vulnerable and gives access to lifesaving refuge only to those who can afford it,” tweeted advocacy group Voto Latino.
“He’s hell bent on persecuting the most vulnerable and gives access to lifesaving refuge only to those who can afford it.”
—Voto Latino
Under Trump’s directive, detailed in a presidential memorandum released Monday night, asylum seekers who come to the U.S. outside of official ports of entry would be denied work permits.
Trump also moved to impose fees on asylum applicants and ordered that all asylum cases be settled within 180 days.
The president gave his administration 90 days to craft regulations that would carry out his proposed changes.
“Not only will asylum seekers with legitimate claims not make it through the asylum system because they cannot pay fees, but also because they cannot make their case within 180 days,” said Voto Latino.
“Our country is not a Trump hotel. It does not ‘fill up,’ and you do not have to pay a fee to enter and remain. The Statue of Liberty is not a toll booth,” the group added. “We are more than malicious executive orders aimed at the most vulnerable, and in 2020 we will be heard.”
Other immigrant rights groups and commentators voiced similar outrage at Trump’s plan to hit asylum seekers with a fee to seek refuge in the United States.
Trump’s order comes amid an ongoing “purge” at the Department of Homeland Security, where the president is giving xenophobic hardliners like senior adviser Stephen Miller more power over immigration policy.
Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, told the New York Times that the president’s new directive would turn “asylum on its head.”
“The entire idea of asylum is that it’s something that you need because you are fleeing some sort of violence or persecution, and to then say that it’s only accessible to people who can pay a fee doesn’t make sense,” said Brané.
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What kind of economic system is most conducive to human wellbeing? That question has come to define the current era, because, after 40 years of neoliberalism in the United States and other advanced economies, we know what doesn’t work.
The neoliberal experiment—lower taxes on the rich, deregulation of labor and product markets, financialization, and globalization—has been a spectacular failure. Growth is lower than it was in the quarter-century after World War II, and most of it has accrued to the very top of the income scale. After decades of stagnant or even falling incomes for those below them, neoliberalism must be pronounced dead and buried.
Vying to succeed it are at least three major political alternatives: far-right nationalism, center-left reformism, and the progressive left (with the center-right representing the neoliberal failure). And yet, with the exception of the progressive left, these alternatives remain beholden to some form of the ideology that has (or should have) expired.
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The center-left, for example, represents neoliberalism with a human face. Its goal is to bring the policies of former US President Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair into the twenty-first century, making only slight revisions to the prevailing modes of financialization and globalization. Meanwhile, the nationalist right disowns globalization, blaming migrants and foreigners for all of today’s problems. Yet as Donald Trump’s presidency has shown, it is no less committed—at least in its American variant—to tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and shrinking or eliminating social programs.
By contrast, the third camp advocates what I call progressive capitalism, which prescribes a radically different economic agenda, based on four priorities. The first is to restore the balance between markets, the state, and civil society. Slow economic growth, rising inequality, financial instability, and environmental degradation are problems born of the market, and thus cannot and will not be overcome by the market on its own. Governments have a duty to limit and shape markets through environmental, health, occupational-safety, and other types of regulation. It is also the government’s job to do what the market cannot or will not do, like actively investing in basic research, technology, education, and the health of its constituents.
The second priority is to recognize that the “wealth of nations” is the result of scientific inquiry—learning about the world around us – and social organization that allows large groups of people to work together for the common good. Markets still have a crucial role to play in facilitating social cooperation, but they serve this purpose only if they are governed by the rule of law and subject to democratic checks. Otherwise, individuals can get rich by exploiting others, extracting wealth through rent-seeking rather than creating wealth through genuine ingenuity. Many of today’s wealthy took the exploitation route to get where they are. They have been well served by Trump’s policies, which have encouraged rent-seeking while destroying the underlying sources of wealth creation. Progressive capitalism seeks to do precisely the opposite.
This brings us to the third priority: addressing the growing problem of concentrated market power. By exploiting information advantages, buying up potential competitors, and creating entry barriers, dominant firms are able to engage in large-scale rent-seeking to the detriment of everyone else. The rise in corporate market power, combined with the decline in workers’ bargaining power, goes a long way toward explaining why inequality is so high and growth so tepid. Unless government takes a more active role than neoliberalism prescribes, these problems will likely become much worse, owing to advances in robotization and artificial intelligence.
The fourth key item on the progressive agenda is to sever the link between economic power and political influence. Economic power and political influence are mutually reinforcing and self-perpetuating, especially where, as in the US, wealthy individuals and corporations may spend without limit in elections. As the US moves ever closer to a fundamentally undemocratic system of “one dollar, one vote,” the system of checks and balances so necessary for democracy likely cannot hold: nothing will be able to constrain the power of the wealthy. This is not just a moral and political problem: economies with less inequality actually perform better. Progressive-capitalist reforms thus have to begin by curtailing the influence of money in politics and reducing wealth inequality.
There is no magic bullet that can reverse the damage done by decades of neoliberalism. But a comprehensive agenda along the lines sketched above absolutely can. Much will depend on whether reformers are as resolute in combating problems like excessive market power and inequality as the private sector is in creating them.
A comprehensive agenda must focus on education, research, and the other true sources of wealth. It must protect the environment and fight climate change with the same vigilance as the Green New Dealers in the US and Extinction Rebellion in the United Kingdom. And it must provide public programs to ensure that no citizen is denied the basic requisites of a decent life. These include economic security, access to work and a living wage, health care and adequate housing, a secure retirement, and a quality education for one’s children.
This agenda is eminently affordable; in fact, we cannot afford not to enact it. The alternatives offered by nationalists and neoliberals would guarantee more stagnation, inequality, environmental degradation, and political acrimony, potentially leading to outcomes we do not even want to imagine.
Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron. Rather, it is the most viable and vibrant alternative to an ideology that has clearly failed. As such, it represents the best chance we have of escaping our current economic and political malaise.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University. His most recent book is The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Among his many other books, he is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents, Free Fall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, and (with co-author Linda Bilmes) The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for research on the economics of information.