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WASHINGTON — U. S. officials released an intelligence report Friday that rejected several questions raised by those who argue COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab, reiterating that U. S. spy agencies remain divided over how the pandemic began.
The report was released at the request of Congress, which in March approved a bill giving U. S. intelligence agencies the right to do so. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security has 90 days to declassify intelligence related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Intelligence officials under Biden’s direction have been forced through lawmakers to release more documents about the origins of COVID-19. But they have continually argued that official obstruction of independent investigations by China could make it less likely how the pandemic began.
The latest report angered some Republicans who argued that management is wrongly withholding classified data and researchers accusing the U. S. of the wrongful misconduct of classified data. UU. de be available.
John Ratcliffe, who served as U. S. director of national intelligence. U. S. Secretary of State President Donald Trump accused Biden’s management of “continued obfuscation. “
“The lab leak is the only theory backed by science, intelligence and common sense,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.
There has been news from investigators following the revelation this year that the intelligence branch of the Department of Energy has released a report advocating for an incident involving the lab.
But Friday’s report says the intelligence network went no further. In four agencies, the virus was transferred from animals to humans, and in two agencies, the Department of Energy and the FBI, the virus leaked from a lab. The CIA and some other companies have not. made an evaluation.
Located in the city where the pandemic allegedly began, the lab has come under scrutiny for its previous studies on bat coronaviruses and reported safety lapses.
The Wuhan lab has created genetically modified viruses as part of its research. But the report says U. S. intelligence”However, he has no information to indicate that any genetically engineered paint from the WIV refers to SARSCoV-2, a very similar progenitor, or a spinal virus. “That’s similar enough to have the pandemic. “
Reports from several lab researchers who returned with respiratory symptoms in the fall of 2019 are also inconclusive, according to the report, claiming that some of their symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.
U. S. intelligence, according to the report, “continues to assess that these data do not refute any of the hypotheses about the origins of the pandemic, as the researchers’ symptoms may have been caused by a number of ailments and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. “
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — U. S. theme park chain SeaWorld, mired in controversy in recent years over its remedy for orcas and other marine mammals, has opened a large new water park in the United Arab Emirates, the first outdoor park in the United States. .
The $1. 2 billion venture with public developer Miral includes the world’s largest aquarium and a cylindrical LED display. There are no orcas here, but the park is home to animals such as dolphins and seals, whose captivity and education for profit and entertainment are also criticized as unethical. through animal rights groups.
The new facility, which opened last month, gives the Orlando, Florida-based company a foothold in a fast-growing foreign tourist destination and a chance to continue its rebranding after years of complaints and accusations of animal cruelty.
SeaWorld and Miral declined requests for interviews. They also did not answer written questions or allow Associated Press reporters into the park.
SeaWorld’s review reached a crescendo after the release of “Blackfish. “The 2013 documentary focused on the life of Tilikum, a 12,000-pound orca who killed trainer Dawn Brancheau when he dragged her into a pool at SeaWorld Orlando in 2010. The film implied that orcas were more competitive in captivity.
The film caused the number of visitors to the 3 Sea-World parks in the United States to plummet. SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. later agreed to pay $65 million to settle a lawsuit in which it was accused of misleading investors about the impact on the documentary. having on its back line.
In the face of mounting criticism, SeaWorld halted its orca breeding program and whale performances in 2016. That same year, he announced plans to build an orca-free park in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
BAMBER BRIDGE, England — The town of Bamber Bridge in northwest England is proud of the blow to racism in the U. S. military during World War II.
When an all-black truck regiment was parked there, citizens refused to settle for the segregation entrenched in the U. S. military. U. S. Ignoring the tension of the British and American authorities, pubs welcomed the soldiers, local women chatted and danced with them, and English infantrymen drank alongside the men they considered allies in the war.
However, simmering tensions between black infantrymen and white army police erupted on June 24, 1943, when an outdoor argument in a pub turned into a night of gunfire. Private William Crossland was killed and dozens of foot soldiers from the Truck Regiment were court-martialed. When Crossland’s niece learned of her uncle’s death cases, she called for a new investigation to find out how he died.
The network chose to focus on its anti-segregation stance as it commemorates the 80th anniversary of what is now known as the Battle of the Bamber Bridge and the United States reevaluates its remedy beyond black men and women in the military.
“It’s a sense of pride that there is no fanaticism towards (the soldiers),” said Valerie Fell, who in 1943 was just 2 years old but whose circle of relatives ran Ye Olde Hob Inn, the 400-year-old thatched-roof pub where the clash occurred. began. ” They deserved respect for the uniform they wore. “
Black infantrymen made up about 10 percent of U. S. troops in Britain during the war. Serving in separate ensembles led by white officers, the maximum was relegated to non-combatant roles, such as driving trucks. The government has sought to expand those policies beyond its bases, asking pubs and restaurants to separate races.
The Bamber Bridge, which then housed some 6,800 people, is not the only position to resist. In a country then almost entirely white, there is no culture of segregation.
What’s another is the preference of other local people for keeping their history, said Alan Rice, co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire.
“If you’re fighting fascism, which those other people were, it’s ridiculous, surely ridiculous, that the U. S. military would be fighting fascism. “The U. S. government (encourages) a form of fascism: segregation,” Rice said.
Clinton Smith, head of the Black History Group near Preston, needs others to take a closer look at what happened. “History is simply allowed to wither on the vine. “
Despite their friendship with the soldiers, the villagers may not have shied away from violence when black soldiers, frustrated with their remedy and angered by the race riots in Detroit, clashed with military police armed with batons and guns.
On that hot June night, Private Eugene Nunn was sitting in the Hob Inn bar when a white Army police officer threatened to arrest him for wearing the uniform. British foot soldiers and civilians intervened.
“Everyone says, ‘Leave him alone. He just needs one drink. It’s hot,'” Fell said as she told her mother’s story. “People just didn’t perceive this evil. “
When Nunn left the pub, the police were waiting. Tempers rose. A bottle crashed into the windshield of the police Jeep. Things escalated and it wasn’t until four o’clock in the morning that order was restored.
The military government called for harsh penalties: 37 black infantrymen were charged with mutiny, rioting and illegal possession of weapons. Day, many had their sentences shortened so they could be sent back to the war effort.
While the court-martial criticized white officers for their lack of leadership, there is no record of them or the army police being sanctioned.
Ken Werrell, a graduate of the U. S. Air Force AcademyA retired U. S. Department of Agriculture and history professor at Radford University in Virginia, he studied debates and reviewed military records for a paper published in 1975. He told The Associated Press that blacks were mistreated.
The bigger story is that high-ranking generals, focused on improving morale and performance, temporarily ordered adjustments in the treatment of black troops. Many commanding officers of the black ensembles were replaced and the army deployed more combined police patrols.
“The Bamber Bridge case is more than a minor incident from World War II,” Werrell wrote. “This is one of many incidents in the ongoing crusade of blacks and America for freedom. “
President Harry Truguy in 1948 ordered an end to segregation in the military, it took years to be fully realized. Lloyd Austin, a black man and retired four-star general in the military, is now secretary of defense.
That progress was too long overdue for Crossland, a former railroad employee who died when he was 25. Court-martial testimony only indicated that he was seriously injured, with a bullet near his heart. Officers said they believed he had been trapped between two teams of blacks. Soldiers
January 1950 June 26, 2014
No longer through our looks still in our hearts, you love us and we still miss you. Wife, mother, grandmother and loving friend to many.
CHARLESTON, S. C. – When the International African American Museum opens its doors to the public Tuesday in South Carolina, it becomes a new place of return and pilgrimage for the descendants of African slaves whose arrival in the Western Hemisphere begins at the docks along the coast of the countries. low.
Overlooking the old Charleston Pier, where nearly a portion of the enslaved population first entered North America, the 150,000-square-foot museum houses exhibits and artifacts exploring how the work, perseverance, resilience, and cultures of African Americans have shaped the Carolinas, the nation. , and the world.
It also includes a center for genealogical studies for families to account for the adventure of their ancestors since their arrival in the territory.
The opening comes at a time when the very concept of black survival through slavery, racial apartheid and economic oppression as the epitome of American history is being challenged in America. Museum officials said their lifestyle is not a refutation of existing attempts to suppress history, rather an invitation to discussion and discovery.
“Show me a brave Array, show me an open Array, show me one that finds me where I am, and then takes me where I asked it to go,” said Dr. Brown. Tonya Matthews, president and CEO of the museum.
“I think it’s the superpower of museums,” he said. The only thing you want to bring to this museum is your curiosity, and we will do the rest. “
The $120 million facility includes nine galleries involving nearly a dozen interactive exhibits of more than 150 antique items and 30 works of art. One of the museum’s exhibits will rotate two or three times a year.
As space enters, 8 video screens play a looping preview of a diasporic adventure spanning centuries, from cultural roots on the African continent and the horrors of the Middle Passage to the regional and foreign legacies that emerged from the dispersal and migration of Africans. . through the earth.
The screens are tilted as if to draw giant windows and a balcony at the back of the museum, revealing striking perspectives of Charleston Harbor.
A unique feature of the museum is its gallery committed to the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee people. Their isolation on rice, indigo, and cotton plantations on the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida helped them bond with West African cultural traditions and Creole language. A multimedia chapel-sized “house of praise” in the gallery highlights Gullah Geechee’s religious expressions and shows how those expressions are imprinted in black American gospel music.
On Saturday, the museum’s grounds vibrated with excitement as its founders, staff, elected officials and other visitors engaged with the grounds in impressive ways.
The show was hosted by actress and director Phylicia Rashad and included appearances through poet Nikky Finney and McIntosh County Shouters, who perform songs passed down through enslaved African Americans.
“The fact makes us loose, loose to understand, loose to respect and loose to appreciate the full spectrum of our shared history,” said former Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. , widely credited with bringing the museum to the city.
Planning for the International African American Museum dates back to 2000, when Riley called for its creation in a State of the City address. Many more years passed, due to fundraising setbacks and adjustments in the museum’s leadership, before the structure began in 2019.
Originally scheduled to open in 2020, the museum has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as problems in the chain of origin of fabrics for the entire construction.
Gadsden’s Wharf, a 2. 3-acre oceanfront site where up to forty-five percent of enslaved Africans brought to the United States in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are estimated to have walked, sets the tone for how the museum is experienced. The pier built through Revolutionary War character Christopher Gadsden.
The land is now part of a deliberately designed ancestral lawn. Black granite walls were erected over an ancient warehouse, an area where enslaved humans perished while awaiting shipment to the slave market. The walls are adorned with lines of Maya Angelou. poem, “And I still rise. “
The main design of the museum touches on the sacred grounds on which it stands. Instead, it rises above the platform through 18 cylindrical columns. Underneath the design is a shallow fountain in homage to the men, women and young people whose bodies were inhumanely chained. in the bellies of the ships of the transatlantic slave trade.
To dissuade visitors from walking on the raised contours of chained bodies, a walkway was created amid the pier’s tribute.
“There’s something incredibly significant about reclaiming an area that was once the landing point, the beginning of a horrific American adventure for captured Africans,” said Malika Pryor, the museum’s director of learning and education.
CHICAGO — School librarian Jamie Gregory has been called a “pedophile” and “caring,” bombarded with private messages threatening to do harm, accused of distributing pornography in schools and her house covered posted on social media.
She takes it on her chin. ” I’m just not going to stop. I’m not going to let them call me that, especially when I’ve worked my whole life to get to where I am,” said Gregory, who named 2022 South Carolina. School Librarian of the Year.
The “shocking” accusations made him think: “All my adult life, all my education and all my paintings, what if it was all over?I won’t let that happen,” Gregory said Saturday to a packed room. One hundred fellow librarians at a school consultation on anti-book bans at the American Library Association’s annual meeting in Chicago.
Participants applauded Gregory’s statement.
Book bans and how to combat them are at the center of this year’s ALA convention. Help them hopefully tackle e-book challenges, combat legislative censorship, and ensure some reading freedom.
The ALA convention welcomes thousands of librarians, library painters, authors, publishers, and educators as several states work to limit books in schools and libraries, primarily those dealing with race, ethnicity, and LGBTQ issues. The agreement released data in March with a record 1269 library book censorship requests in the United States in 2022, a 20-year high.
“Combating e-book censorship and protecting the intellectual freedom of library users, protecting the ability of librarians to provide data in their communities, is at the forefront of this year’s meeting,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom of Reading Foundation.
Throughout Saturday, participants were invited to climb on a chair to read their favorite forbidden book.
Gregory settled on “Gender Queer,” Maia Kobabe’s autobiographical comedian about what it means to be non-binary and asexual, the source of the typhoon opposite to her and the most hotly contested e-book of 2022, according to ALA. He also chose Ashley Hope. ” Out of Darkness” by Perez, an old fiction novel about interracial romance among young people.
“This one drives them crazy,” Gregory said as he patted the copy of “Gender Queer” and climbed the scissor ladder to the huge velvet reading chair, books in hand.
Librarians “make data available to other people freely and fairly,” and Gregory said he plans to continue doing so.
“I don’t impose my own ethical formula on academics or clients,” he said. “They have to have theirs, that’s not my job. “
At Gregory’s conservative network in Greenville, South Carolina, the public library board is pushing branches to Pride exhibits. In March, he testified against a bill that would allow parents to challenge any educational fabric they say violates prohibited teachings about white privilege and implicit bias. .
Still, Gregory said she feels the majority of her network supports her, despite the vocal minority.
“A lot of other people have contacted me and I don’t even know them, saying, ‘We think we’re doing a wonderful job,’ even the parents at school,” she said.
Parents still have a right to what their children read, but they don’t have the right to limit access to the entire community, said Christine Emeran, director of the Youth Freedom of Expression Program at the National Coalition Against Censorship, a First Amendment advocacy group. organization.
“You can’t just give in to the demands of a specific parent organization and libraries for censorship,” he said.
Emeran, who is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion titled “Help!They come for our e-books!” At Sunday’s conference, he began to realize that the backlog of e-book bans will begin in 2021, at the start of President Joe Biden’s term. the Black Lives Matter movement.
Local libraries are calling out the National Coalition Against Censorship more than ever. In the past, the organization has been concerned about a few e-book bans a year. “Now we get two or three a week,” Emeran said.
“Librarians are under pressure and they feel frustrated, discouraged,” said Emeran, who encouraged readers to visit local libraries, attend school board meetings and care in their communities to protect the right to read.
Groups like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Citizens Defending Freedom have had a huge effect on what is allowed to read, he said.
“Most can oppose censorship as a whole. But most are silent,” Emeran said.
Gregory and fellow panelists Lindsey Kimeri, library coordinator for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, and Chris Chanyasulkit, library administrator-elect in Brookline, Mass. , urged attendees on the most productive way to address demanding e-book situations in their communities.
Attentive faces leaning over notebooks followed every word.
“No more humble boasts, no more silence, no more ‘silence in libraries,'” Chanyasulkit said. be noisy. The others are, and we’re not doing enough. “
As politicians fight for gay rights in state houses across the country, it’s unclear exactly how many other people identify as LGBTQ, and experts say a lack of knowledge may be crucial.
That’s because the U. S. decennial census is in the U. S. In the U. S. , gold accurately composes the U. S. population. In the U. S. , it does not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity beyond a strict male/female binary.
There are estimates. Nonprofit experts estimated in 2020 that there were more than thirteen million LGBTQ people nationwide, but estimates can vary wildly depending on the method and, most likely, insufficient coverage of the general population.
This can be a significant challenge in a country where, often, investment for everything from health care to housing is decided through the number of other people you would help in a given region.
“There is a significant amount of resources and decision-making similar to the Census Bureau data,” Erin Knott, executive director of Equality Michigan, a Kalamazoo-based LGBTQ advocacy group, told The Detroit News. “Being invisible in the system, being partially counted, is problematic. “
Experts agree that it’s time to make inquiries about sexual orientation and gender identity, but getting there wouldn’t be as undeniable as making a query on a form.
LGBTQ identity is a complex thing for other people to put an express label on, and the concept of “going out” on a government census, especially with the passage of increasingly anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country, can be scary.
“It’s hard to get excited about filling out a questionnaire like the census when your privacy and human rights are being actively violated by governments and state institutions,” Knott said.
What LGBTQ census questions are there?
Some Census Bureau surveys ask explicit questions about a person’s LGBTQ identity. The Bureau mentions, for example, the American Housing Survey, the National Crime Victims Survey, and the Household Pulse Survey.
But those surveys are not as extensive as the decennial census, which seeks to measure each and every user in the country every 10 years. Questions about same-sex households, for example, don’t come with other LGBTQ people who don’t live together, or families where one or either partner is possibly gay, but not same-sex.
“We know that, at most, only 20 percent of LGBT people live in households with same-sex partners,” said Kerith Conron, director of studies at UCLA’s Williams Institute, the leading think tank for studies on sexual orientation and gender identity in relation to law and public policy. “We don’t know anything about the other 80%. “
Having family knowledge of same-sex couples has been helpful, Conron said, however, other LGBTQ people tend to be younger, restricting the number of other people who would marry in the first place, Conron said.
Such questions also have a tendency to make other trans people “invisible,” she said, only asking about a person’s male or female identity.
“At this point, many other people feel that what we call SOGI (sexual orientation, gender identity) is just another demographic characteristic,” she said. form and survey, especially anonymous ones, collected through federal and state agencies, because we deserve to be tracking the outcomes and well-being of other LGBTQ people as well as each and every one of the others. “
The Census Bureau says it is conducting studies on how it can measure LGBTQ populations in the United States, adding that it “actively and systematically engages with LGBTQI leaders and stakeholders to better perceive their wants and concerns. “
Questions about the decennial census come from a variety of sources, according to the bureau, adding congressional mandates, public comment, guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, etc. The office did not say whether it planned to upload new questions to the decennial census. But noted that it had secured $10 million to look up the load of questions about sexuality and gender identity in the American Community Survey and that it is testing proxy responses (when a single user at one address answers questions from everyone living there) in the American Housing Survey.
However, until it appears in every country, it can be tricky to allocate resources well at the federal point or even fully track things like disparities in fitness and civil rights enforcement.
How can we ask questions about LGBTQ in the census?
Experts agree that one of the most productive tactics for other people to answer questions about your identity would be to raise awareness that knowledge collected through the Census Bureau is confidential, as required by law. Nothing identifiable is published for 72 years after a decade. census, and the Census Bureau noted in one that the census and surveys “may not be used for law enforcement or other purposes other than statistics. “
But worry can cause other people to not answer honestly or skip census questions altogether. Citizens of several states were not counted.
To make other queer people feel comfortable answering honestly, Shoshana Goldberg, director of studies and public education for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said she would like to see a public education effort on how census information is used.
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