Cambodias Prime Minister Ditched Facebook But His Followers Arent Following Him

“I have decided to stop using Facebook, on which I have more than 14 million followers,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told his followers on Telegram last week.

The announcement came just hours after the Oversight Board of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, recommended his account be suspended. But before Facebook could break up with him, the 70-year-old strongman ruler swiftly ditched the platform first.

Now, however, it seems like Hun Sen is finding it hard to recreate his popularity elsewhere.

While his Telegram channel, launched in May last year, has amassed close to a million followers, his one-week-old TikTok account sits at just about 100,000 followers—both a far cry from what he had with Facebook.
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Read More: 40 Years After the Fall of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia Still Grapples With Pol Pot’s Brutal Legacy

Once a prolific Facebook user, the Prime Minister regularly broadcasted his daily life and political activities to 14 million followers on the platform—a whopping audience, though he faced allegations of buying likes to boost his profile.

Now, in perhaps a sign of desperation, the strongman appears to be resorting to unconventional measures to boost his following.

On Thursday, Hun Sen requested to meet the owner of a TikTok account dedicated to posting content about him—one of several such accounts that have significantly more followers than he has himself—saying that he “may take control of the unofficial account as the followers of it are his fans anyway,” the pro-establishment newspaper Khmer Times reported.

Here’s what to know about the situation.

Why exactly did Hun Sen Leave Facebook?

Last week, Meta’s independent internal review committee advised Facebook to suspend Hun Sen over a video he posted in January. In the now-deleted video, which had amassed 600,000 views, the Prime Minister told his political opponents to choose between the “legal system” and “a bat,” and threatened to beat them up.

“Given the severity of the violation, Hun Sen’s history of committing human rights violations and intimidating political opponents, as well as his strategic use of social media to amplify such threats, the Board calls on Meta to immediately suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook Page and Instagram account for six months,” the Oversight Board said in a statement.

Read More: Facebook’s “Oversight Board” Is a Sham. The Answer Is Regulating Social Media

Cambodia’s foreign affairs ministry decried the recommendation as “political in nature.” But international observers hailed the Oversight Board’s decision as a precedent for other autocrats.

“This kind of face-off between Big Tech and a dictator over human rights issues is long overdue,” Phil Robertson, Deputy Asia Director of Human Rights Watch said in a statement issued on Thursday.

“The stakes are high because plenty of real world harm is caused when an authoritarian uses social media to incite violence—as we have already seen far too many times in Cambodia.”

Following the Oversight Board ruling, Hun Sen threatened to ban Facebook in the country last week—but walked back on the threat just hours later, citing the large number of people in the country who rely on the platform to sell products. Cambodian authorities did, however, announce on Tuesday that the 22 members of Meta’s Oversight Board were no longer welcome in the country.

“A clear trend has emerged: Cambodia is slowly untangling its politics from Facebook,” Will Brehm, an associate professor at University College London who researches political economy in Southeast Asia, tells TIME. “Given Facebook’s role in eroding democracy in many countries around the world, this is good news.”

The social media giant has previously received criticism for its record of—inadvertently or otherwise—aiding authoritarian regimes around the world, from stifling free speech in Vietnam to amplifying anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar.

But in recent years, the company has demonstrated a greater proactiveness to sanction even the most prominent public figures: former U.S. President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook in 2021 after he praised those engaged in the violence at the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, though his account was reinstated earlier this year.

Does Hun Sen even need social media popularity?

Facebook has long been an important way for Hun Sen to connect with the Cambodian public. Over the past decade, he has “artfully mobilized the platform to support his increasing hold on power,” Astrid Norén-Nilsson, a senior lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, tells TIME.

“He encouraged people to express their concerns to government officials on Facebook for greater accountability, and used his own Facebook page to cultivate a novel emotive, intimate relationship with the populace through carefully curated selfies and select photos inviting followers into his private family circle.”

But even if Hun Sen fails to find the same popularity on TikTok and Telegram, experts say that his social media presence may have little effect on his dominance at the polls this month, as his election campaign kicked off over the weekend.

The upcoming election has been widely criticized as neither free nor fair and has been labeled by opponents as a “joke” after the only opposition party was disqualified, leaving Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party to maintain its grip on power.

Read More: Outcry at Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Bid to Shut Down Independent Media

“The spat with Facebook will likely have no impact on the July elections,” says University College London’s Brehm. “He has effectively silenced any opposition long before the Meta Oversight Board announced its decision.”

Still, despite Hun Sen’s high-profile departure from Facebook, it seems that other politicians in the country are unlikely to follow suit. As the country’s top social media site—boasting 11.6 million users among a population of 16.6 million—Facebook has proven to be an important tool for political mobilization and publicity. And Hun Sen’s struggles to gain a following on TikTok aren’t likely to inspire a wider shift.

“Facebook is the social media platform of choice in Cambodia, across generations and demographic groups,” says Norén-Nilsson, adding that the “enmeshment of private and political life on Facebook” has become an “ingrained habit” across the country.

Tellingly, Hun Manet, Hun Sen’s son and expected successor, remains active on Facebook—where he just shared a video montage of his recent visit to a local garment factory.

source https://time.com/6292120/cambodia-prime-minister-hun-sen-facebook-telegram-tiktok-followers/

The World May Have Just Experienced the Hottest Day Ever Recorded

The entire planet sweltered to the unofficial hottest day in human recordkeeping July 3, according to University of Maine scientists at the Climate Reanalyzer project.

High temperature records were surpassed July 3 and 4 in Quebec and northwestern Canada and Peru. Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon to Tampa, Florida have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Beijing reported 9 straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35°C (95°F).

This global record is preliminary, pending approval from gold-standard climate measurement entities like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. But it is an indication that climate change is reaching into uncharted territory. It legitimately captures global-scale heating and NOAA will take these figures into consideration when it does its official record calculations, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Center for Environmental Information, a division of NOAA.
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“In the climate assessment community, I don’t think we’d assign the kind of gravitas to a single day observation as we would a month or a year,’’ Arndt said. Scientists generally use much longer measurements — months, years, decades — to track the Earth’s warming. In addition, this preliminary record for the hottest day is based on data that only goes back to 1979, the start of satellite record-keeping, whereas NOAA’s data goes back to 1880.

But Arndt added that we wouldn’t be seeing anywhere near record-warm days unless we were in “a warm piece of what will likely be a very warm era” driven by greenhouse gas emissions and the onset of a “robust” El Nino. An El Nino is a temporary natural warming of parts of the central Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide and generally makes the planet hotter.

Read More: El Niño Has Begun. What to Know About the Weather Phenomenon

Human-caused climate change is like an upward escalator for global temperatures, and El Nino is like jumping up while standing on that escalator, Arndt said.

The global daily average temperature for July 3 came in at 17.01 degrees Celsius or 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a common tool often used by climate scientists for a good glimpse of the world’s condition. The reanalyzer is based on a NOAA computer simulation intended for forecasts that uses satellite data. It is not based on reported observations from the ground. So this unofficial record is effectively using a weather tool that is designed for forecasts, not record-keeping.

This average temperature may not seem that hot, but it’s the first time in the 44 years of this dataset that the temperature surpassed the 17-degree Celsius mark.

Hotter global average temperatures translate into brutal conditions for people all over the world. In the U.S., heat advisories are in effect this week for more than 30 million people in places including portions of western Oregon, inland far northern California, central New Mexico, Texas, Florida and the coastal Carolinas, according to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. Excessive heat warnings are continuing across southern Arizona and California, they said.

When the heat spikes, humans suffer health effects.

Read More: How Extreme Heat Impacts Your Brain and Mental Health

“Those hotter temperatures that happen when we get hotter than normal conditions? People aren’t used to that. Their bodies aren’t used to that,” said Erinanne Saffell, the Arizona state climatologist and an expert in extreme weather and climate events.

Saffell added that the risk is already high for the young and old, who are vulnerable to heat even under normal conditions.

“That’s important to understand who might be at risk, making sure people are hydrated, they’re staying cool, and they’re not exerting themselves outside and taking care of those folks around you who might be at risk as well,” she said.

—Borenstein reported from Washington and Walling from Chicago.

source https://time.com/6292103/worlds-hottest-day-preliminary-record/

Israel Targets Jenin With Drones and Troops Killing at Least 8 Palestinians

JENIN, West Bank — Israel struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank and deployed hundreds of troops Monday in an incursion that resembled the broad attacks carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

The assault began with drone strikes and continued with troops, which remained inside the Jenin refugee camp at midday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting. It came amid growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting attack last month that killed four Israelis.
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Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp while exchanges of fire rang out and the buzzing of drones was heard overhead. Military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces.

The Palestinians and neighboring Jordan and Egypt and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the violence, along with the United Arab Emirates, which established diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was “proceeding as planned,” but gave no indication when it would end. Fighting continued some 14 hours after Israel entered the camp.

Read More: What It’s Like in the Palestinian Town Attacked by Israeli Settlers

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said a brigade-size force — roughly 2,000 soldiers — was taking part and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes.

Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday’s strikes were an escalation unseen since 2006 — the end of the last Palestinian uprising.

Smoke billowed from within the crowded camp, with mosque minarets in the backdrop. Ambulances raced toward a hospital where the wounded were brought in on stretchers.

Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was “alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation,” noting the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and put snipers on rooftops. The tactics signaled the operation could drag on for some time.

“There are bulldozers destroying the streets, snipers are inside and on roofs of houses, drones are hitting houses and Palestinians are killed in the streets,” said Jamal Huweil, a political activist in the camp, predicting the operation would fail.

“They can destroy the refugee camp but will fail again because the only solution is the political solution in which a Palestinian state is established and the occupation ends,” he said.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded — 10 critically. The dead were identified as young men and Palestinian youths, including a 16-year-old boy and two 17-year-olds.

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression,” said Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

On Monday afternoon, the Israeli army said it had uncovered three weapons-making facilities, confiscated hundreds of explosives and shot two Palestinian gunmen during shootouts.

The army also reported exchanges of fire between Israeli security forces and Palestinian gunmen at a mosque where soldiers found explosive devices, weapons and military equipment.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022.

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, accused archenemy Iran of being behind the violence by funding Palestinian militant groups.

“Due to the funds they receive from Iran, the Jenin camp has become a center for terrorist activity,” he told foreign journalists, adding that the operation would be conducted in a “targeted manner” to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the camp. For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week. The rockets exploded shortly after launch, causing no damage in Israel, but marked an escalation that has raised concerns in Israel.

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

“Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin,” tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill thousands of militants if necessary. “Praying for their success.”

Israeli military experts said they expected the operation to wrap up within hours or a day or two. Prolonged violence and heavy casualties would risk attracting increased international criticism and drawing militants from the Gaza Strip or even Lebanon into the fighting.

“From the Israeli point of view, the intent and interest are to end this very limited operation ASAP and to make sure it does not become a regional event,” said Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general and former national security adviser.

Read More: Column: I Witnessed a Shocking Attack on Palestinian Civilians. What I Saw May Be a Sign of What’s to Come

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, threatened to launch attacks from its Gaza Strip stronghold if the fighting dragged on.

“If the Israeli aggression against Jenin does not stop, the Palestinian resistance will do what it has to do in a short time,” said Dawood Shehab, a spokesman for the group.

Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group also condemned the attacks, saying in a statement that the Palestinians have “many alternatives and means that will make the enemy regret its acts.” Hezbollah fought a monthlong war against Israel in 2006.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also been killed.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.

Federman reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Omar Akour in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/6292006/israel-targets-jenin-west-bank/

July 1776 Was a Shotgun Wedding

During our own time of troubles, it is important to remember that in 1776 the men in powdered wigs who drew up the Declaration of Independence overcame political difficulties far more perilous than our own. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, in fact, one wrong move in the Continental Congress might well have led to the secession of a regional bloc of states, whether New England, the Middle states, or the Southern states, with possibly cataclysmic consequences for all thirteen: continental civil war.

An apt metaphor capturing the spirit of the early republic is that of a shotgun wedding. If the New England, Middle, or Southern states had split apart into separate confederacies, civil wars would have broken out over finances, commerce, and, most of all, land. For this reason—the prevention of bloody mayhem—the founders reluctantly bound themselves into one Union. They united with the guns of civil war pointing at their backs, but, to their everlasting credit, they also practiced the art of cooperative political maneuvering in order to save the Union from self-destruction.
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Consider early July 1776. American founding myth would have us believe that after years of British abuses and usurpations, the leaders of the thirteen colonies amiably adopted the “unanimous” Declaration of Independence.

In fact, the battle over the Declaration of Independence was an epic tale of secession threats, fears of intercolonial bloodshed, and furtive politics engineered to rescue the Middle states from tragically falling into civil war against New England and the Southern states.

Observers of the American scene had long since forecast that an independent America would self-destruct in civil wars. As James Otis, patriot and author of the influential “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” averred in 1765, “Were these colonies left to themselves tomorrow, America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion.” An English traveler visiting the colonies in 1759 and 1760 concurred, warning, “Were they left to themselves, there would soon be civil war from one end of the continent to the other.”

These were hardly isolated forebodings. After the British Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts in 1774 to punish Boston for its wreckage of more than 340 chests of tea in the harbor, newspapers were filled with anxious prognostications about the consequences of independence: American civil wars.

Read More: The Origins of the Declaration of Independence’s Most Famous Words

“Whenever the fatal period shall arrive,” Reverend Samuel Seabury of New York asserted that year, “in which the American colonies shall become independent on Great Britain, a horrid scene of war and bloodshed will immediately commence. The interests, the commerce of the different provinces will interfere: disputes about boundaries and limits will arise. There will be no supreme power to interpose; but the sword and bayonet must decide the dispute.”

Most of all, Seabury worried about the aggressive tendencies of the four tightly-bound New England colonies. In the event of independence, Seabury predicted, those colonies would “form one Republic,” and, as a result, “a state of continual war with New England, would be the inevitable fate of this province [New York], till submission on our part, or conquest on their part, put a period to the dispute.”

By this time, the founders had already witnessed firsthand the deadly centrifugal forces of disunion acting upon the Continental Congress. Most menacing, four of the five delegates from South Carolina had walked out of the First Congress in an act of nullification of the Continental Association, a proposed trade embargo against Britain that South Carolinians argued grossly disadvantaged their staple-crop economy far more than the diversified economies of the Northern colonies.

According to the South Carolina delegates, the nonexportation clause of the Continental Association, as written, overwhelmingly favored “the Northern Colonies” due to a combination of existing legal patterns of commerce, ship ownership, trade relationships, and those colonies’ expertise in smuggling. Therefore, they demanded a revision, exempting rice and indigo for the sake of the economic survival of their constituents.

When other delegates pushed back, the planters stiffened, declaring not only that they would not sign the embargo without this exemption but also that they would take their leave and return to South Carolina. To evidence their sincerity, they did actually stage a walkout. To prevent the break-up of the Union, the Congress compromised, yielding on rice but not on indigo.

As one South Carolinian delegate, John Rutledge, explained it, defense of their home colony’s economic interests motivated the walkout. The Continental Association, he argued, was biased in favor of the Northern colonies. And, he professed trenchantly, “he could never consent to our becoming dupes to the people of the North.”

By early 1776, the imperial situation had worsened considerably, forcing the question of independence upon the delegates with new urgency. Among other galvanizing events, Lord Dunmore in Virginia had issued an emancipation proclamation freeing all enslaved people who would join British forces, sending shock waves through the Southern states; King George III had declared all-out war on the colonies; and some New Englanders were contemplating the formation of a Northern confederacy because so many delegates from the Middle and Southern colonies continued to insist on reconciliation with Britain.

Primarily owing to the fact that New England soldiers were the ones dying on the front lines in the war with Britain, that region’s delegates in Congress were desperate to obtain a lifesaving military and naval alliance with France. And, as most everyone agreed, King Louis XVI was never going to ally with America until it first declared independence.

Therefore, numerous New England delegates began privately to consider forming a Northern confederation for the purpose of issuing a united declaration of independence. As Sam Adams of Massachusetts wrote to his cousin John Adams, referring to a conversation he had recently held with Benjamin Franklin, “We agreed that it must soon be brought on, & that if all the Colonies could not come into it, it had better be done by those of them that inclined to it. I told him that I would endeavor to unite the New England Colonies in confederating, if none of the rest would join in it. He approved of it, and said, if I succeeded, he would cast in his lot among us.”

In spite of the known risks of disunion, by June 8—the first day of formal debates on a resolution for independence for all thirteen states—representatives from the Middle colonies and South Carolina refused to go along. According to Thomas Jefferson, many of the delegates from those colonies drew a bright red line on the floor of the Continental Congress. “That if such a declaration should now be agreed to,” Jefferson recorded, “these delegates must (now) retire & possibly their colonies might secede from the Union: That such a secession would weaken us more than could be compensated by any foreign alliance.”

So tense and precarious were the battles over independence that the delegates shut down debates altogether, postponing further consideration until July 1, when they agreed they would cast definitive votes.

A letter written by South Carolinian Edward Rutledge in late June to fellow delegate John Jay of New York casts light on at least one American leader’s desperate fears of confederation and independence. Chiefly, Rutledge warned about the present and future dangers of New England dominating the American confederated government. Rutledge made explicit reference, too, the two means by which that region would exercise its oppression: military and naval might and power politics exploiting a weak constitution.

Bragging that he did not fear losing military engagements against New England, the South Carolinian did insist to Jay that entering into a single confederated government with that region of America was a dangerous proposition. “The force of their arms I hold exceeding cheap,” Rutledge declaimed, “but I confess I dread their overruling influence in council, I dread their low cunning, and those levelling principles which men without character and without fortune in general possess, which are so captivating to the lower class of mankind, and which will occasion such a fluctuation of property as to introduce the greatest disorder.”

Nevertheless, as scheduled, the delegates voted on independence on July 1, but before this they heard speeches. The most emotional and impassioned of them was delivered by Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, who begged the other delegates to reject independence. One reason he gave for this course of action was that if the thirteen colonies ever embarked upon a common path of independence the New England colonies would not long remain faithful to the American Union.

Looking into what he called the “Doomsday Book of America,” Dickinson conjectured that New England would break off from the rest within twenty or thirty years of a declaration of independence, making war on New York to gain control of the Hudson River, with unknown cascading consequences for all the colonies. This scenario of American civil war sparked at the Hudson River, he said, was too “dreadful” to contemplate.

Still, they voted on July 1, and the results were disastrous. Only nine states cast ballots for independence. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted no. Delaware divided, rendering its vote null, and New York abstained, because it lacked permission either way.

This was a moment of extraordinary peril for the American Union because by now diehard New England and Virginia, for sure, had no intention of backing down on independence, and, as the vote evidenced, a supermajority of Congress (nine colonies) was ready to move immediately to a declaration. So, the delegates agreed to work overnight to break the impasse, revoting the matter of independence the following day.

We do not know what was said—or threatened—during the debates of July 1 or later that day and night. What is certain, however, is that the Middle colonies and South Carolina were left with a life-and-death decision to make. Were they going to engage as allies in a war with New England and the other pro-independence states—or against them.

Especially the Middle colonies, squeezed as they were geographically between the New England and Southern colonies, were caught in an impossible military situation. Doubtlessly, if they did not aid New England and the Southern colonies in their war effort, allowing free passage on roads and rivers, as well supplying their armies, chances were that Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York would become the worst fields of blood on the continent in the expanding imperial civil war, now pitting American against American.

Therefore, for the sake of self-preservation, the Middle colonies and South Carolina chose the lesser of two evils. On July 2, under an injunction of “Join or Die,” they threw in their lot with the pro-independence colonies. On that day, twelve states voted for independence, with New York promising to assent to the resolution as soon as it received formal approval by its state legislature. It was indeed a shotgun wedding, one that created a nation.

The Continental Congress formally adopted the resolution for independence on July 2, catapulting the U.S. into an unpredictable future. Two days later, the delegates ratified the “unanimous” Declaration of Independence, dissolving all political bands with Britain and proclaiming to the world that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

As Delaware delegate Thomas McKean later recalled about the high-pressure, perilous days of early July, “Unanimity in the thirteen states, an all-important point on so great an occasion, was thus obtained. The dissension of a single state might have produced very dangerous consequences.”

The founders did it. They adopted the improbable Declaration of Independence. They formed a republic and won the war. And, in the Treaty of Paris, they successfully secured the entire trans-Appalachian West stretching to the Mississippi River, doubling the size of the nation.

George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and the rest accomplished these stunning feats not only in spite of the tactical advantages of the British army and navy, but also in spite of the overwhelming centrifugal forces of disunion and civil wars that were acting on them every day.

That is one reason Adams predicted that the sacred day the thirteen states launched into independence “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.”

source https://time.com/6291967/american-independence-july-1776-was-a-shotgun-wedding/

What Killing Affirmative Action Means for the American Workplace

There is good reason Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson worked into her much-talked about dissent in the cases where the majority killed race-based affirmative action, her sense that education saves lives.

So, I write this with no hyperbole intended. Some of us are probably going to die.

Yes. The net effect of the decision to end, at all but the nation’s military academies, race-conscious affirmative action but leave in place admissions preferences for athletes, people related to faculty, alumni, and major donors – a group that a 2019 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found included 43% of Harvard University’s white students and just 16% of other groups – is going to be that significant.
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Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

The reason is a simple matter of math, but also the complicated but foreseeable effects of what it means when a country, only growing more diverse by the hour, fails to do all that it can to develop a well-educated and diverse workforce. As Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent:

“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

The idea that a nation needs an educated workforce is at most times – outside of a presidential campaign swing through a part of America where college-graduation rates sit below the national average – beyond dispute. Away from the ecosphere where alarmist conservative information outlets assign continued white dominance oxygen-like importance, the same is true of U.S. Census Bureau’s population projections. They indicate that by 2045, white Americans will no longer comprise the American majority.

Yet when we talk about affirmative action, much of the focus is what it means for colleges and universities, for individual students and their sincere hopes and dreams. And there are, no matter what Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion or seethed about since his Yale University Law School years, well-documented educational and social benefits to a diverse student body. But it also matters a great deal what happens after those accepted to these institutions graduate. If we do not have a diverse group of students reflective of our country on campus, we will not, as the nation itself becomes one with no single racial or ethnic majority, have a diverse professional workforce. The absence of that will have a profound effect on our courts, our schools, our hospitals, and just about every other major institution and function of American life. If nothing else, know this: companies with more diverse leadership also tend to be more profitable for the simple reason that different experiences and perspectives often produce different ideas.

Higher education has so long been central to American conceptions of leadership and readiness to captain the critical institutions and experiences that shape all of our lives that nine out of the first 10 Presidents – all white – were college men, most of them educated at the College of William & Mary or Harvard University. (The 11th President was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the schools, along with Harvard University, at the center of the affirmative-action cases decided last week.)

Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

And in the 1940s when the U.S. government planned for the post-war future and what turned out to be one of the largest, longest, widest-spread economic boons, Congress passed what would become colloquially known as the GI Bill. The policy was supposed to cover the cost of a college education for some 15 million soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War II, keep them off the unemployment rolls, prevent another depression, and better equip the country with a workforce ready for the coming world. But the GI Bill got the unanimous support of Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt’s signature in 1944 only after what ought to be a notorious compromise: States rather than the federal government would administer access to the benefit, a demand of Southern members of Congress worried about how to maintain a social order with white people at the top and Black people at a nearly inescapable bottom if education and other relatively new federal creations like the 40-hour workweek and Social Security were available to everyone.

Overall, the share of American adults with bachelor’s degrees or more rose from 4.6% in 1945 to 25% in 1995, according to the National Archives. (That figure is almost 34% today.) But Southern administrators denied GI Benefits to most of the more than 1 million Black returning soldiers. Black veterans were also denied the bill’s housing benefits that helped large numbers of white male GIs get bank loans and buy homes after the war.

All of that has something to do with the way that higher education remains such a profound source of anxiety and attention, the base element of a potent cocktail that’s left some people drunk on entitlement and belligerent or at least irrational about anyone else getting a sip.

“But there is a way in which the narrative about affirmative action gets spun in such a way that it seems raceless, ‘We just want fairness,’” says Shaun Harper, a professor and provost of business and education at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, about the language often used of late by those who argued that race-based affirmative action simply had to end. “White people feel that they are being discriminated against and their highly deserving children are the victims of reverse racism.”

How else does one explain why debate, disputes, and court cases related to affirmative action have all but raged since only a few years after it began? Why else did two of the whitest states in the union – Idaho and New Hampshire – bother to ban affirmative action in college admissions, public-agency hiring, and several other arenas in 2020 and 2012, respectively?

How else shall we make sense of all the chatter about fairness in college admissions when the K-12 feeder system is anything but? Here, in the wealthiest country in the world, we have a patchwork quilt of education policy and quality yet one persistent pattern. That is a massive funding gap between K-12 schools serving mostly white students and those educating kids who are not, says Kimberly Robinson, a onetime roommate of Justice Jackson at Harvard Law, who today serves as a professor of law, education, and human development as well as public policy at the University of Virginia. That’s the school that Thomas Jefferson built in 1819, the start of what the university describes as a “bold experiment – a public university designed to advance human knowledge, educate leaders and cultivate an informed citizenry.” As recently as 2016, the nation’s K-12 racial school funding gap amounted to about $23 billion, according to a report released in 2019 by EdBuild, an education research and funding advocacy organization.

“We do not distribute educational opportunity equally,” Robinson says. “What I think is so interesting is the perception that we have equal educational opportunity. People think we have that.”

Read More: How the End of Affirmative Action Could Affect the College Admissions Progress

If there are any bits of good news on the access-to-education front, they are this: Community colleges and other schools that enroll most of the people who apply – all but about 150 to 190 of the most selective schools – have in the last decade seen overall college-graduation rates (after six years) rise to a high of 62.3%. And while transfer and completion rates at community colleges after six years suggest there’s much work to be done, in the last decade or so, the number of colleges trying to connect community-college students with opportunities to complete their educations at schools up and down the prestige ladder has grown, says Nolvia Delgado, executive director at Kaplan Educational Foundation.

Still, it is the more selective colleges and universities, which have higher graduation rates for all groups of students and often lead to greater professional opportunities, that are at the center of public conversations about considering race in admissions. And, according to Tim Wise, an activist and the author of books like Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America and Dispatches From the Race War, far too many of these discussions echo the arguments once made by the likes of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who in the 1990s managed to secure nearly 40% of the vote in Louisiana’s Republican gubernatorial primary with a version of white-grievance politics including opposition to affirmative action on the grounds that it discriminated against white Americans.

The way we talk about the debate has shifted over the years, but the idea that accounting for historic and ongoing disparities in education, access to the resources and knowledge of the tactics that allow some students to test well, family inexperience with the college-going process, or the added obligations that a poor student, for example, may need to take on to help keep their family housed causes harm to others – that is, allowing special consideration for Black and Latino applicants means fewer opportunities for white and Asian ones – remains at the heart of the arguments made by affirmative-action opponents, including conservative activist Edward Blum, co-founder and president of Students for Fair Admission, which was the plaintiff in the affirmative-action cases decided last week.

“He’s a man with a crusade,” says Wise, who first encountered Blum in Houston in the 1990s when Blum was challenging a program that sought to diversify who receives public contracts for goods and services like construction. “And he’s spent the last three decades, in and out of court, more or less shopping for the ‘perfect’ victim of affirmative action.” Blum was directly involved in affirmative-action cases that went before the court in 2003, 2013 and 2016, which did not produce the results he wanted. In 2013 he was also involved in a case that ultimately toppled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In a decision similar to the majority’s view in the affirmative-action cases decided last week, the majority held that federal oversight of changes to voting districts and voting-related activities in places with a history of discriminatory activity was no longer necessary. It effectively differentiated and victimized those states, and it was the states and counties subject to the law that were in need of the court’s protection.

And yet Students for Fair Admissions never produced a single student with a specific and personal claim of direct harm, says Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, an affiliate of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the nation’s largest and only pan Asian civil rights organization. Instead, the organization submitted statistical analyses and argued that Asian American students had now become the victims of affirmative action at Harvard and white and Asian students at UNC. It traded on the racist appeal of the model minority myth – the idea that Asian Americans are uniformly smart, capable, hardworking, and humble living evidence that there’s nothing wrong with America or its systems except whatever ails Black people themselves – and garnered a lot of public attention with news stories that seemed to accept Blum’s claims as fact, Kohli says. Students for Fair Admissions even purported to speak for Asian Americans, she says, as if Blum’s take were the Asian American view, which it is not.

Read More: The Ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement Went Far Beyond Affirmative Action

Affirmative-action opponents like Blum have argued lately that not even people of color favor race-based considerations. But the nation’s attitudes about affirmative action are complex and often difficult for pollsters to accurately capture, says Sally Chen, an economic-justice program manager with Chinese for Affirmative Action, a California-based civil rights group. Chen is also a Harvard University graduate, a first-generation college graduate and one of only two students who submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in the Harvard University case. The precise language of poll questions about affirmative action and the language in which they are asked appears to significantly shape the measurement of Asian American opinion, Chen says. Those where pollsters ask respondents if they support values that were the goals of affirmative action and do so in more than one language tend to produce data showing a majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action. What’s more, social media platforms and other channels of information exchange have, over the course of the case, been inundated with false information in multiple languages and dialects to which Chen and her colleagues have begun to organize pushback.

“In the face of such intense misinformation, I am proud to see that there is still a very strong contingent of Asian Americans who support affirmative action,” Chen says, “even if TikTok is flooded with ‘I didn’t get into blah, blah, blah university’ videos.

A majority of all but two subgroup of Asian Americans supported affirmative action in a multilingual Pew Research Center poll of 7,006 adults completed in January. Chinese American and Vietnamese American support came close at 45% and 48%, respectively.

In many ways, the language and the methods keep evolving, but the point remains unchanged. Justify racial exclusion and subordination for social, economic, and psychological gain and then, when the consequences of those choices show up in exponential disparities, point to that as so-called evidence that the oppressed group should continue to be constrained to a position from which it is difficult, if not a statistical anomaly, to climb.

Read More: How the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision Affects the AAPI Community

Of course, if declaring the enduring influence of race and ethnicity in life opportunities and outcomes simply over because you say so retains some appeal, consider this: a diverse collection of doctors and biological scientists, many of them far from the manor born, probably saved your life in the last five years.

In January 2020, when then President Donald Trump, a man history will no doubt consider a specialist in the dark arts of white grievance and entitlement politics, went over to the National Institutes of Health, he wanted to meet with the people most essential to the work. At the table were world-renowned vaccine and infectious-disease specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Barney Graham, and the man who led the human-genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH. They are all older white men. Sitting next to Graham was Kizzmekia Corbett, an NIH research fellow, a then 34-year-old Black scientist whom Graham had named the scientific lead of the vaccine-development team.

When Corbett and her team – scientists scattered all over the country, including a white man who, like Corbett, was the first in his family to go to college, and a Chinese American immigrant trained at an American school – figured out the molecular key to a working coronavirus vaccine and early human trials proved effective, Corbett and Graham were working from their respective homes. But they each broke down and cried.

Today, Corbett, a viral immunologist, is an assistant professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an assistant professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She’s there and she was at the NIH, her mother told me back in 2020, because her third-grade teacher, a Black woman, told her parents an ugly truth: get this child to a better school district, do anything you must because this one will never allow a little Black girl into the classes to develop the capacity the teacher could see Corbett already had.

That is the thing. None of us know where or how or even what form tomorrow’s challenges will take. Assuming that the answers and the leadership needed to face and surmount them rests with one shrinking population poses a tremendous risk to all of us.

Or as Justice Jackson said in her dissent, “Do not miss the point that ensuring a diverse student body in higher education helps everyone, not just those who, due to their race, have directly inherited distinct disadvantages with respect to their health, wealth, and wellbeing.”

source https://time.com/6291900/affirmative-action-workplace-diversity/

A Year After Roes Fall Emboldened U.S. Religious Conservatives Are Lobbying to Restrict Abortion Access in Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya — Nowhere in the world has a higher rate of unsafe abortions or unintended pregnancies than sub-Saharan Africa, where women often face scorn for becoming pregnant before marriage.

Efforts to legalize and make abortions safer in Africa were shaken when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the national right to an abortion a year ago. Within days, Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio declared that his government would decriminalize abortion “at a time when sexual and reproductive health rights for women are being either overturned or threatened.”

But some U.S.-based organizations active in Africa were emboldened, especially in largely Christian countries. One is Family Watch International, a nonprofit Christian conservative organization whose anti-LGBTQ+ stance, anti-abortion activities and “intense focus on Africa” led to its designation as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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In April, Family Watch International helped to develop a “family values and sovereignty” meeting at Uganda’s presidential offices with lawmakers and other delegates from more than 20 African countries. The organization’s Africa director also is advocating for his country, Ethiopia, to revoke a 2005 law that expanded abortion access and dramatically reduced maternal mortality.

“It’s kind of like the gloves are off,” Sarah Shaw, head of advocacy at U.K.-based MSI Reproductive Choices, an international provider of reproductive health services, said in an interview.

In a September speech to the African Bar Association, the president of Family Watch International, Sharon Slater, alleged that donor countries were attempting a “sexual social recolonization of Africa” by smuggling in legal abortion along with sex education and LGBTQ+ rights.

“Sexual rights activists know if they can capture the hearts and minds of Africa’s children and indoctrinate and sexualize them, they will capture the future lawyers, teachers, judges, politicians, presidents, vice presidents and more, and thus they will capture the very heart of Africa,” Slater claimed.

Her speech in Malawi was attended by the country’s president, a former leader of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God movement.

After lobbying lawmakers in the southern African nation not to consider a bill that would have allowed abortion under certain circumstances, the U.S.-based Catholic group Human Life International told its supporters in March that “thanks to you, Malawi is safe from legal abortion.”

The African Union two decades ago recognized the right to abortion in cases of rape and incest or when the life of the mother or fetus is endangered or the mother’s mental or physical health is at risk.

A growing number of countries have relatively liberal abortion laws. Benin legalized abortion less than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, though Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, allows abortion only to save the mother’s life.

African experts say events in the U.S. could reverse gains in the availability of safe abortion procedures, especially since the U.S. government is the largest global donor of international reproductive health assistance.

Such changes could deeply affect the lives of women of reproductive age in sub-Saharan Africa, where 77% of abortions, or more than 6 million a year, are estimated to be unsafe, the Guttmacher Institute, an international research and policy organization with headquarters in New York, said in 2020.

Unsafe abortions cause 16% of maternal deaths in the World Health Organization’s largely sub-Saharan Africa region, the U.N. agency said last year, “with variations across countries depending on the level of restrictions to abortion.”

Abortion opponents are especially outspoken in East Africa, where countries publicly wrestle with the issue of teen pregnancy but offer little sex education and access to legal abortions in limited circumstances.

A sexual and reproductive health bill introduced in 2021 is still under debate by the East African Community, whose member nations include Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Some Catholic and other conservative organizations have criticized a section that would allow a woman to terminate a pregnancy in cases of rape, incest or endangered health.

Earlier this year, the Protestant Council of Rwanda directed all health facilities run by its member institutions to stop performing abortions, although Rwandan law permits them in certain cases.

“We are having a very strong anti-rights narrative,” Brenda Otieno, research coordinator with the Kisumu Medical and Education Trust in Kenya, said during a Tuesday webinar about the global effects of the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Abortion providers are often harassed, Otieno said, and a year ago, Kenya passed a national reproductive health policy that paid little attention to safe abortion care.

In Uganda, one rights watchdog said the issue of abortion access is taboo, with advocates facing discrimination, even as some women resort to self-mutilation.

“We’ve seen a number of people losing their lives,” said Twaibu Wamala, executive director of the Uganda Harm Reduction Network.

Abortion is illegal in Uganda, although it can be legally carried out by a licensed medical worker who determines that a pregnancy threatens the mother’s life. But many doctors, fearing medical complications, only offer post-abortion care that may be too expensive or too late to save a woman’s life.

In Ethiopia, civil society workers have asked the government to investigate what they fear is a new trend: fewer public health facilities providing abortions and more women seeking care after unsafe abortions.

Groups that oppose abortion in Africa’s second most populous nation are mostly incited by outsiders and “consider the Supreme Court decision as fuel for them,” Abebe Shibru, the Ethiopia director for MSI Reproductive Choices, said.

___

Associated Press writer Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, contributed.

source https://time.com/6291884/abortion-rights-africa/

Putin to Meet Xi Modi in First Major Summit Since Armed Rebellion Rattled Russia

NEW DELHI — President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.

This year’s event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It’s the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the country’s growing global clout.
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The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia’s war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say.

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.

“This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

AP Photo/Manish SwarupSecurity personnel check the main venue of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) council of foreign ministers’ meeting, in Goa, India, May 4, 2023.

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, “it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders,” Kugelman said.

India’s relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to China’s growing ambitions.

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies’ summit in September. It’s also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.

“India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where it’s wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time,” said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls “cross-border terrorism” — a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty — a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.

“The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India’s independent foreign policy,” said Madan.

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.

“For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. … I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding,” said Kugelman.

source https://time.com/6291877/putin-modi-xi-shanghai-summit/