NNB BUILD ENTERTAINMENT

China’s State Council will expand property-tax reform trials to more areas and start taxing residential property owners, official news agency Xinhua reported.

The plan, approved by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, China’s top legislative body, is designed to guide rational property buying and will last for five years, according to the report. The locations and number of areas where the trials will be undertaken were not specified.

Property prices in China have skyrocketed to unaffordable levels since private home ownership was introduced in 1998, and the government has faced an ongoing battle to control speculators. Authorities started property tax trials in 2011 in Shanghai and Chongqing, levying annual charges on second or high-priced homes.
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READ: Why China Could Be Serious About a Property Tax Now: QuickTake

Residences owned by individuals are currently not subject to taxes, according to a law imposed in 1986, while there is an annual tax on commercial properties. Local governments earn income from developers mainly through land sales, collecting a total of 8.4 trillion yuan ($1.3 trillion) last year.

Industry experts say details of the plan are unclear so far.

“We don’t know yet what the differences will be in this plan than in the current trials in Shanghai and Chongqing, but it’s likely to have something new,” said Liu Yuan, vice president for property research at Centaline Group. “The government may not want to make all the details public immediately for the sake of expectation management. But I think this aims at hedging the ongoing property-market supportive measures so home prices won’t rebound again.”

China’s new-home prices fell for the first time in six years and sales plunged 16.9% in September from a year earlier, as the country’s second-largest real estate developer, Evergrande Group, plunged into a debt crisis, which led to a property slowdown nationwide.

The country recently loosened restrictions on home loans at some of its largest banks, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 15.

(Adds analysis from an industry research firm starting in the fifth paragraph.)

–With assistance from Jacob Gu.

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Trapped in 'cruel' forest, migrants express regrets at the Belarus border

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Mexican farmers cut cempasuchil flowers ahead of Day of the Dead

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Trump’s Tech SPAC Could Make Him Billions With Meme-Stock Frenzy

Donald Trump’s sagging fortune is suddenly poised to get a massive boost from meme-stock mania.News late Wednesday that the former president’s nascent media enterprise, Trump Media & Technology Group, is planning to go public via a special purpose acquisition company has sent retail investors into a frenzy, even with few details released. The stock gain drove the implied value of the new venture to more than $8.2 billion.Based on figures from press releases and filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, it appears Trump will own more than 50% of the combined company. At its current value, that would make him the richest he’s ever been, up from his estimated net worth now of $2.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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In the roller-coaster world of Reddit-fueled trading and grandiose SPAC hype, those gains are hardly firm. But the money betting on a Trump media conglomerate marks a sharp turnaround for a post-presidency that hasn’t been kind to the billionaire’s business empire.

His Washington hotel, which was first put on the market in 2019, is still for sale, while the flagship midtown Manhattan tower that bears his name has growing vacancies. This summer, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization was charged with tax fraud. Trump’s net worth has declined by about $500 million since he entered the White House, with the pandemic and fallout from January’s Capitol riot delivering added blows to his business interests.

Now comes the arrival of the social-media outlet that Trump, the leader in polls for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, has been teasing at for some time. There are many reasons to be skeptical of the valuation. It will be months before the new venture publicly releases its first product, a social-media platform called Truth Social. And there are already technical issues. On Thursday, the Truth Social page was hacked to make it appear that Trump shared a photo of a defecating pig.

It’s also unclear how Trump plans to build a social-media platform on the scale of Twitter over the next few months, let alone a streaming service, which is the next phase of Trump Media’s plans, according to the press release announcing the company. That statement was light on numbers even by SPAC standards.

“We have no financials. We have no business plan. We don’t know how they got to the valuation. We have no information,” said Kristi Marvin, chief executive of research firm SPAC Insider. “That’s the fundamental problem.”

Representatives for Trump and Trump Media didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The business has ambitious plans that also include a potential “tech stack” to compete with Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS and Google’s Cloud, among others, according to a presentation on Trump Media’s website. As of now, Digital World’s board is light on members with media experience. Its chief executive officer, Patrick Orlando, is a former Deutsche Bank AG derivatives trader who co-founded a sugar-trading company and started a banking firm, Benessere Capital, before more recently embracing SPACs.

So far, retail investors have little concern. Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp., the shell company merging with Trump’s new venture to take it public, closed Friday at $94.20 — up from $9.96 before the deal was announced Wednesday. It’s also an increase of more than 800% from a $10 offering price that’s typically used in a SPAC merger agreement.

The press release said the new company would have an initial enterprise value of $875 million. Assuming that calculation used a $10 a share offering price and the $293 million Digital World has in trust, the SPAC’s owners will get about 42% of the combined company after accounting for shares the sponsor receives if a deal gets done.

That leaves 58% for Trump and any partners he has in Trump Media. That stake is worth nearly $4.8 billion, based on Digital World’s last price. The whole enterprise is being valued by the market at about $8.2 billion, compared with Twitter Inc.’s almost $50 billion equity valuation.

With the new media company’s valuation dwarfing the $875 million enterprise value agreed to by Trump, he may have been able to negotiate a sweeter deal. Terms of the agreement will need to be more fully disclosed and could still change before an agreement gets voted on by shareholders, an event that is probably months away.

Business Strains

Most of Trump’s current wealth is tied to the Trump Organization, a sprawling real estate business that has been hurt by the pandemic and legal troubles. There’s also at least $590 million in debt coming due in the next four years linked to the company’s properties, more than half of which is personally guaranteed by Trump.

In April, the company scored a win when its partner in two skycrapers, Vornado Realty Trust, refinanced debt tied to its San Francisco tower, bringing $617 million to its owners. The Trump Organization also appears to be closing in on a sale of Washington’s Trump International Hotel, which was a hotspot for political allies, lobbyists and conservative media figures during his administration.

“We are one of the most under-leveraged real estate companies in the country relative to our assets,” Trump’s son Eric Trump said at the time of the Vornado deal. On paper, he and his brother Donald Trump Jr. have been leading the Trump Organization. Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg stepped down from his various roles after his indictment. The company was also charged with 15 felony counts in New York.

Trump hasn’t signaled that he’ll return to the Trump Organization. His focus now is on dominating the Republican party and his new media project, which would give him an avenue to connect with supporters and raise money after he was banned from Facebook and Twitter. That would be key if he chooses to seek a second term in 2024.

When Trump first ran for president, he claimed to have a fortune of $10 billion. Now the retail trading frenzy may bring him somewhat closer to getting there.

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Stacey Giggs rushed to hospital in the middle of the night 'in agony' after slipping a disc - Daily Mail

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LIVE! | BRIGHTON V MAN CITY | PREMIER LEAGUE | MATCHDAY LIVE SHOW - Man City

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Erdogan orders removal of 10 ambassadors, including US envoy

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Alec Baldwin shooting: 24-year-old armourer on film set 'wasn't sure' if she was ready for role - Telegraph.co.uk

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Trump is 'hungry' to go head-to-head against Biden for president and can only be stopped by a 'prison sentence': former advisor

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Stephen Merchant: ‘I see The Outlaws as a suburban, low-rent western’ - The Guardian

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Covid adviser fears 'another lockdown Christmas' as he blasts inaction as 'unacceptable' - Manchester Evening News

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Boris Johnson urges eligible people to get Covid booster jab as cases reach 'high levels' The Telegraph
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Christmas lockdown 'could happen' as government adviser issues 'fearful' concern - Lancs Live

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Saturday 23 October 2021

The sad, twisting saga of Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie – and what it tells us about America - The Independent

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CDC director: U.S. may change definition of "fully vaccinated" as boosters roll out

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What’s Allowed on Trump’s New ‘TRUTH’ Social Media Platform—And What Isn’t

In the wake of former President Donald Trump announcing plans Wednesday to launch a new social media platform called “TRUTH Social,” the site’s terms of service quickly came under scrutiny.

Despite advertising itself as a platform that will “give a voice to all,” according to a press release, TRUTH Social’s terms of service state that users may not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.”

In other words, any user who criticizes Trump or the site can be kicked off the platform. TRUTH Social did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment clarifying this clause.
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In a statement included in the press release, Trump said that he created TRUTH Social and its parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech.”

Having been permanently banned from Twitter and suspended from Facebook for at least two years following the deadly January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, reports have swirled for months that Trump intended to start his own social network. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” he said in his Wednesday statement.

But while portraying itself as a refuge for free speech and the “first major rival to ‘Big Tech,'” TRUTH Social’s terms of service make it clear that the platform not only intends to moderate content—just as Twitter and Facebook do—but reserves the right to remove users for any reason it deems necessary. The terms go on to say that if TRUTH Social decides to terminate or suspend your account, the platform may also sue you—something that Twitter and Facebook’s terms don’t say.

“In addition to terminating or suspending your account, we reserve the right to take appropriate legal action, including without limitation pursuing civil, criminal, and injunctive redress,” TRUTH Social’s terms state.

The terms also prohibit users from using the site to advertise or offer to sell goods and services, engage in unauthorized framing of or linking to the site, trick, defraud or mislead the site and other users, and attempt to impersonate another user or person or use the username of another user.

Maybe most notably, the site’s list of prohibited activities includes the “excessive use of capital letters,” an idiosyncrasy that Trump became known for on Twitter and that no other major social network specifically bans. TRUTH Social’s terms also contain some sections written in all-caps.

Additionally, as reported by the Washington Post, TRUTH Social’s terms of service appear to indicate that the platform is hoping to lean on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields digital platforms from lawsuits over content posted by their users, in order to protect itself from legal liability.

“We are not responsible for any Third-Party Websites accessed through the Site or any Third-Party Content posted on, available through, or installed from the Site, including the content, accuracy, offensiveness, opinions [or] reliability,” the terms state.

During his presidency, Trump staunchly criticized Section 230, calling it a “very dangerous and unfair” law and saying it should be “completely terminated.”

The TRUTH Social app will be open to invitees in November and to the public in the first quarter of 2022, the release said. However, mere hours after the Wednesday announcement was made, hackers claiming affiliation with the group Anonymous were reportedly able to gain access to a pre-release version of TRUTH Social and create fake accounts for Trump and his former aide Steve Bannon. The beta testing site was then taken offline.

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Alec Baldwin voices ‘shock and sadness’ over shooting of Halyna Hutchins on film set - The Guardian

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EU leaders give Merkel an ovation at final summit - BBC News

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Boys 'murdered' man after street row with suspect's girlfriend, court told - Liverpool Echo

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Vladimir Putin: I'll protect Russia against Western liberalism like cancel culture and transgender rights - Telegraph.co.uk

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Sports quiz of the week: Mo Salah, Rory McIlroy, NBA and Steve Bruce - The Guardian

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In Lawsuit Against Texas Redistricting Maps, Plaintiffs See History Repeating

The first time Thomas A. Saenz saw a fight about Texas redistricting up close and in person, it was 2003. He’d been out of law school a little over a decade and was dispatched to Texas to play what he describes now as a small legal part in a suit brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) to challenge the redistricting plan the state had first begun to develop two years prior.

There, at multiple hearings, Texas’ Republican Attorney General, John Cornyn, argued on behalf of a set of election district maps that—as part of the normal process of accounting for population changes detected in the latest Census—a state redistricting board, controlled by Republicans, had approved. Saenz and others at MALDEF, as well as a number of other groups, were working to show that the maps had been drawn specifically to limit the number of districts where Latino voters made up a majority. Most of the time, Saenz’s bosses kept him so busy that he didn’t watch then Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, also a Republican, at daily press briefings.
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The list of redistricting twists and turns in Texas is long. In that particular case, civil rights lawyers in the U.S. Justice Department eventually deemed the state’s Congressional maps unconstitutional, before being overruled by political appointees as the process of adjusting the maps dragged into the following years. Some questions on the subject went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the state won. When it came time to redistrict after the 2010 Census, a legal battle over the maps and power happened again. A compromise was ultimately reached. By that time, Saenz had risen through the ranks to become president and general counsel of MALDEF. Cornyn was a U.S. Senator; Cruz would join him in 2013.

Today, all three men remain in those roles. And, just like the cast of characters, not much has changed in the fight over the maps. On Monday, MALDEF filed suit to stop yet another set of district maps approved by the Texas legislature.

Much as the state’s proposed maps did in 2001 and again in 2011, the 2021 maps bolster the number of districts where white voters dominate. That’s despite the fact that 95% of the state’s population growth in the last decade came from families of color. And the majority of those new Texans are Latino Texans. Yet the maps drawn up by the legislature would reduce the number of districts where Latino voters make up the majority and will likely be able to elect the candidate of their choice. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, is expected to approve the maps. MALDEF’s redistricting suit has been assigned to a three-judge panel based in El Paso, as state officials seek to have the case moved to Austin.

Governor Abbott and Deputy Secretary of State Jose Esparza have not commented on the litigation. Requests for comment were referred to the state’s current Attorney General Ken Paxton, who did not respond to a request for comment. Right now, Republicans hold 23 of Texas’ 36 Congressional seats.

“There’s a continuity … in patterns and issues, but people too,” Saenz, who along with MALDEF is based in Los Angeles, tells TIME. “In Texas, there’s discrimination against Latinos, as the largest group, but also against Blacks and also against Asians.”

The situation in Texas is not unique. In late September, the ACLU and other voting rights groups challenged Ohio’s new map, accusing it of “entrench(ing) a Republican veto-proof supermajority in both chambers of Ohio’s General Assembly for the next four years.” That same month, two Democratic Alabama senators and four voters sued the state for its current congressional map—enacted in 2011— alleging that it packed “Black voters in a single majority-Black congressional district and minimiz[ed] their influence in five majority-white districts.” On Oct. 15, the NAACP and the United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations sued Illinois over its new state legislative district maps, which they allege undermine the Black vote by splitting Black residents into multiple House districts in an effort to secure victory for white Democratic incumbents. And MALDEF has filed a suit alleging similar things about the impact of Illinois’ plans on Latino voters.

But in Texas in particular, those fighting the new maps see themes of the past repeating themselves in the present. Among the individual Latino voters and civil rights organizations suing Texas and counting on MALDEF to present their case in federal court is the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), a non-partisan Latino voting rights organization based in San Antonio. It was founded in the late 1960s after President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat and a Texan, pushed the Voting Rights Act through Congress. Latino activists around the state began to talk about forming organizations that could imitate, customize and further capitalize on some of the civil rights gains secured by organizations like the NAACP’s Voter Education Project and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the organization behind Brown v. Board of Education and many other major cases.

But Johnson’s legislative victories creating civil rights enforcement in voting, housing and other arenas also helped shift the political map. Johnson, in a legendary and perhaps apocryphal comment, is said to have predicted as much to an aide as he signed the Voting Rights Act into law: “We’ve lost the South for a generation.” White voters in the South who were opposed to civil rights gains for people who were not white responded in droves to subtly and overtly racist appeals to move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Today, most white Southerners are Republicans and Southern states deep red.

Back in the ’60s when the SVREP was getting started, says the organization’s current president Lydia Camarillo, Texas was a place where signs were not hard to find that made who had power—and an overt and sometimes brutal form of it—plain. Those signs, plastered on doors and water fountains and storefronts read, “No dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans.”

“It feels like it’s that time all over again,” Camarillo, who is based in San Antonio, says. “The atmosphere… We’re in the same place.”

Yes, the signs and legal segregation are gone, Camarillo acknowledges. But when a coalition of about 30 Latino civil rights organizations drew up redistricting suggestions that would have preserved all the state’s majority-Latino Congressional districts while adding two new ones, and leaving the state’s majority Black districts in place, they didn’t even have a chance to present their ideas.

In addition to the redistricting dispute, the Southwest Voter Education project is suing the state over a new law that will, among other things, bar 24-hour voting sites, an adaptation made in 2020 in the county that includes Houston and much of the state’s Latino population growth. MALDEF is providing the group’s legal work in that case too.

“We want to make sure that Latinos have a voice,” Camarillo says. “Voting for a candidate of their choice is fundamental in democracy. And not having that option and that choice tears down democracy.”

When she talks to voters, these days often via Zoom, Camarillo tries to put that in the most evocative terms that she can. She talks about disparate school conditions and she poses a question. How can it be right, she asks, that in a state that is getting the only new Congressional seats in the country to come out of the 2020 Census count, a state where population growth has been driven by communities of color, those populations would find that “they no longer have what they have today”?

Right now, there are nine Latino majority Congressional districts in Texas. The new maps leave the state with seven. By the task force’s calculations, Texas should be a state with 11 majority Latino districts.

Similar patterns have pervaded redistricting, Camarillo says, for at least five decades.

“Why would the Texas legislature bother doing this?” she says. “Power and greed.”

When the case gets to the stage where each side will make its arguments, Saenz anticipates that state officials will argue that the maps do not violate the Constitution because the districts have been drawn for a partisan advantage. In June 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that drawing district lines to create partisan advantage—what most people call gerrymandering—is legal. But, in practice, MALDEF’s lawyers will argue, the maps that the Republican-controlled legislature approved rob Latino voters of political power, give it to white voters and, Saenz says, veer into illegal racial gerrymandering.

These arguments, too, are not new—but there is new reason, Saenz believes, for urgency on the side of those who support the new maps. By 2001, it was already clear that Texas was less than a generation away from becoming a so-called “majority-minority” state—more accurately, a state where people of color make up the majority of residents and, with time, eligible voters. In the summer of 2019, the Census Bureau estimated that nearly 60% of the state’s population were people of color. Now, state demographers estimate that sometime later this year the Latino population alone will grow larger than the number of white residents.

In Texas and the rest of the United States, race and ethnicity remain closely connected with everything from when and in what health one is born, to the jobs for which one will be considered and how much one will be paid, whether one will have the funds to retire and, finally, when one will die. That’s why those factors are also closely linked with party identity. In Texas, there are exceptions, but the majority of white voters are Republicans and the majority of Black, Latino and Asian voters are not.

“That’s why it was a contested state in recent elections,” Saenz explains. “It had not been for quite some time. So, yes, there’s a certain increased anxiety, even desperation, I think when it comes to retaining the level of power enjoyed by the Republican Party in Texas today.”

But, the fight for voting rights isn’t a partisan issue, and shouldn’t be, Saenz says. MALDEF is a non-partisan nonprofit organization. Its work in Illinois, for example, involves a suit alleging that the Democrats who control the legislature have drawn district lines that will make it more likely that the white politicians already in office will keep their seats. In Illinois, as in Texas, MALDEF argues that district lines have been drawn to intentionally disperse Latino voters rather than give them the mathematical possibility of electing who they wish. That person could be the white incumbent, or perhaps someone else, Saenz says. That possibility is what the law and the democratic tradition demands.

Besides, anything else eventually runs aground, he says. Political investments and voter mobilization work combined with significant population change in Georgia proved that to be true in 2020, Camarillo points out.

Right now, in Texas, Saenz argues, instead of shifting its positions to appeal to a changing population, the Republican party has instead shifted district lines. And, in the Trump era, they have doubled down on “a more open and aggressive” anti Latino, anti-immigrant stance, Saenz argues, and silenced more moderate voices including those of famed GOP political strategists Karl Rove and Lionel Sosa, who has advised Republicans how to win Latino voters going back to the 1970s.

California Republicans took a similar turn in the 1990s, alienating Latino, Black and Asian voters, and eventually white women, along the way. Since that time just about every state office in California and most federal ones have been held by Democrats.

“If you alienate Blacks, Latinos, Asians and white women, you can’t win an election,” Saenz says. “That’s the reality right? You can get a short term gain… but after that, California is as blue as they come.”

—With reporting by Sanya Mansoor

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After Senate Republicans Block Voting Rights Legislation, the Filibuster Is Back in the Crosshairs

President Joe Biden said on Thursday he would be open to doing away with the filibuster in pursuit of protecting Americans’ voting rights, bolstering voting rights’ advocates calls to abolish the controversial rule after Republicans blocked federal voting legislation from advancing for the third time this year.

Wednesday’s 49-51 Senate vote barred any debate from occurring on the Freedom to Vote Act, a bill that would have enacted automatic voter registration, guaranteed at least 15 consecutive days of early in-person voting and allowed for no-excuse mail voting in federal elections among other measures.

For many Democratic lawmakers and voting rights advocates, the vote reinforced their view that getting rid of or carving out an exception to the filibuster —the Senate rule that requires a supermajority of 60 votes to end debate on an issue —is the only path forward to pass federal legislation targeting voter suppression and gerrymandering. So far this year, 19 states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
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“It is absurd that we would allow some arcane rule—a rule that has historically been used to obstruct the advancement of civil rights—to preclude these critical measures from proceeding,” says Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Biden’s comments, made during a Thursday CNN town hall, were the strongest indication that the President has given that he may be supportive of the move. While the President has previously been vocal in his support for federal voting rights legislation, calling the rollbacks on voting access by Republican-held state legislatures the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” many civil rights groups have criticized him for not pressing harder to get rid of the filibuster to allow the legislation to move forward.

In speaking more broadly about Republicans threatening to use the filibuster to put the U.S. in danger of not paying its debts and using the procedure to block various proposals that Democrats support, Biden said, “I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster.” Using the filibuster to not raise the debt ceiling is “the most bizarre thing I ever heard,” Biden said.

The filibuster is used much more now than it was in the past, and, Biden said, starting “immediately,” senators should have to actually speak on the Senate floor continuously—as they did decades ago—for a filibuster to be in effect. He did not lay out a specific plan on how the filibuster rule should be changed, and said it “remains to be seen” what that would entail.

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Republicans have been steadfast in their opposition to new federal voting rights legislation. Senate GOP lawmakers blocked a more expansive version of the Freedom to Vote Act twice already; the current version was adopted after Sen. Joe Manchin attempted to reach out to Republicans and Democrats compromised on some aspects of the bill.

Before Wednesday’s vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his party to fall in line with blocking the measure on the basis that the law impinged on states’ rights to run their own elections. “It is my hope and anticipation that none of us will vote for this latest iteration of Democratic efforts to take over how every American votes all over the country,” he said on Tuesday.

Vincent Hutchings, professor of political science and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, says Democrats’ attempts to get Republicans onboard with voting rights legislation are counter-productive. The filibuster has been used before to shut down progress on key civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching legislation in the 1940s, he says, and Republicans have little incentive to expand voting access and “support legislation that will empower people who will not vote for them.”

Others also see Wednesday’s vote as evidence that compromise isn’t working. “This is further confirmation that paring down the bill isn’t going to make a difference,” says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in election law. “[Democrats] haven’t come close to getting the vote of a single Republican Senator—let alone 10 Republican senators—so we’re nowhere near anything like a 60-vote supermajority.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has previously said, when asked how far Democrats will go to push through voting rights legislation, that “everything is on the table.” But for now, getting rid of the filibuster may not be an option. Both Manchin and fellow Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have said they are not on board with getting rid of the filibuster or filibuster reform, and their votes would be needed to move ahead with either.

Finding a way around the filibuster could be one way forward, if Democrats could get Sinema and Manchin onboard. It’s been done plenty of times before: since 1969, Congress has created at least 161 special procedures to prevent a filibuster on specific measures, according to research published in 2017 by Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

The reason Neil Gorsuch is sitting on the Supreme Court right now is because Senate Republicans carved out Supreme Court nominations from the filibuster rule, says Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, an advocacy organization focused on promoting democracy. Democrats did the same for President Barack Obama’s nominees when they were appointed to the D.C. circuit, he says.

“It’s not unprecedented at all. It’s now a choice to keep the filibuster in place rather than pass legislation that would protect the freedom to vote,” Spaulding says.

For now, it’s possible—although not guaranteed—that Democrats may be trying out all other potential options before resorting to the tackling filibuster, says Rachael Cobb, an associate professor and the chair of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University.

Schumer has said he plans on bringing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which is designed to strengthen the weakened landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, up for a vote next week. “Republican obstruction is not a cause for throwing in the towel,” Schumer said on the Senate floor on Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the White House was largely focused on getting out the vote and voter education in their efforts to combat voter suppression and restrictive voting laws that states enacted this year.

Barrett of NAACP LDF says that the idea that voting rights groups can out-organize voter suppression is “insulting, because it suggests that we’ll just accept that there are these blatant efforts to suppress the votes of certain populations in our country.”

“That really should not be the answer. The sustainable answer is the policy response,” Barrett says.

She remains hopeful that lawmakers may still take action on the filibuster, especially after the latest attempts at compromise and debate have been unsuccessful. “People needed to see that even after a lot of negotiation and compromise, that what we’re really left with is obstruction.”

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Orionid Meteor shower 2021: when to see it peak, and other dates to watch out for in the UK - Telegraph.co.uk

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Sajid Javid’s NHS plan would open GPs up to more abuse, says head of BMA - The Guardian

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The blackheads on your nose are actually a form of acne. Here's how to get rid of them for good.

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UK steel: European rivals laughing at us over energy crisis - The Guardian

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Apple Says High Power Mode on 16-Inch MacBook Pro With M1 Max Designed for Tasks Like Color Grading 8K... - MacRumors

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Friday 22 October 2021

The ‘Forrest Gump of Activism’ Who Helped HIV/AIDS Patients Get Life-Saving Treatment Information

About a twenty-minute walk from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, in a city of sites dedicated to heroes of the American Revolution, there’s a tribute to a hero of the city’s LGBTQ+ community at the Philadelphia FIGHT community health center. It’s dedicated to Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a gay civil rights activist and co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front movement’s Philadelphia chapter who revolutionized the way HIV/AIDS patients got reliable information about the virus.

The center’s Critical Path Learning Center is a free computer lab for HIV/AIDS patients. It’s named after the “Critical Path Project,” a pioneering newsletter and 24-hour hotline that Kuromiya managed, providing reliable information about the HIV/AIDS and treatment in the earliest days of the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Kuromiya was born May 9, 1943, in the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a Japanese-American incarceration camp in Wyoming. At the age of two, his family moved to Monrovia, Calif. He remained on the West Coast until college, when he moved cross-country to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There, he had a political awakening. Che Gossett, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University who is writing a book about Kuromiya, said he would later refer to himself as the “Forrest Gump of activism” because he was involved in so many different movements.

He participated in civil rights protests, and in March 1965, traveled to Montgomery, Alabama where he was beaten unconscious while participating in the Selma to Montgomery march—he had to get 20 stitches in his head, according to a June 17, 1997, interview with Marc Stein, creator of the Philadelphia LGBT History Project. He was also an ardent anti-war demonstrator. In April 1968, he posted fliers inviting UPenn students to the university’s Van Pelt Library to watch a dog being burned in a protest over the use of napalm (which was deployed widely during the Vietnam War). When more than 2,000 outraged and curious students showed up, they found a flier that read: “Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam.”

In the early 1980s, as the AIDS virus was beginning to devastate the gay community, Kuromiya re-focused his activism around AIDS patients’ rights. As one of the founders of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, he co-wrote its first standard for care for AIDS, the first document of its kind. In a 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer profile, the paper described him as “the city’s most knowledgeable layman about HIV.”

And Kuromiya was early to see the benefits of the potential of online newsletters for getting more life-saving information on HIV/AIDS treatment to patients in real time. “You didn’t have to wait for the next journal to come out in the month; you could get on the very day… the information that might be the difference between your surviving another month or not,” says Chris Bartlett, who met Kuromiya through ACT UP Philadelphia in 1990 and is now the Executive Director of the William Way LGBT Community Center, home to Kuromiya’s archives—conference materials, scientific articles, newspaper clippings he collected about HIV/AIDS.

In addition to helping people stay safe with HIV/AIDS, he worked to safeguard relevant information from online censorship in a culture where anti-gay, conservative forces were trying to do just that. In 1996 he participated in one of the court cases that led to the overturn of sections of the Communications Decency Act aimed at blocking “patently offensive” material online. In his testimony, Kuromiya argued it could lead to the censorship of sexual information necessary to help curb the spread of HIV/AIDS. “I don’t know what ‘patently offensive’ means in terms of providing life-saving information to people with AIDS, including teenagers,” he told a panel of federal judges.

Kuromiya also took care of AIDS patients. “In the days before there was really any treatment, [he] was doing on an ad hoc basis what we would call hospice care now,” says Jane Shull, CEO of Philadelphia FIGHT, who met Kuromiya at an ACT UP meeting in the late 1980s. And his activism was personal. He found out he was HIV-positive in 1989, and died on May 10, 2000, at the age of 57, from complications of AIDS, according to a New York Times obituary.

His diagnosis had only emboldened him to work towards destigmatizing HIV/AIDS. Explaining why he was so focused on his work to Philadelphia LGBT History Project creator Marc Stein in their 1997 interview, Kuromiya said simply: “I really believe that activism is therapeutic.”

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