FirstCircle

A medic who worked at Sde Teiman's field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped "of anything that resembles human beings" and that the harassment and torture are done not to "gather intelligence" but "out of revenge" for the October 7 attacks.

Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process. Human rights organizations have documented Israeli forces' brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees, including women and children.

"A 19-year-old detainee told an Al Mezan lawyer that he was tortured from the moment he was arrested," the group said. "He described how three of his fingernails were removed with pliers during interrogation. He also stated that investigators unleashed a dog on him and subjected him to shabeh—a form of torture which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods—three times over three days of interrogation. He was then placed in a cell for 70 days, where he experienced starvation and extreme fatigue."

A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13612789

Finally had my performance review with my boss. (It's about a month late and I'm the last one on the team to get it.)

Objectives: 💯 Goals: 💯 Feedback: FenrirIII is great. Keep up the good work! No negative feedback. Bonus: 100% Raise: 0%

I find out that there was an incident that cost me my raise (i.e. my director denied it).

Earlier in the year, my Sales team fucked up and screwed up a deployment, which has nothing to do with me. I went out of my way to fix their fuck up because they punted it over to me. It took 2 weeks and a lot of favors to get it fixed and running.

That same Sales team blamed the whole thing on me (again, not involved until they screwed up) and told the customer (who had never met me) to tell my VP and Director that I suck when they met them in person at an event. Unbelievable. Now, I'm expected to go work with these sabotaging assholes and keep breaking my back to keep them from torpedoing me again.

Fuck that. It's quiet quitting time and job hunting elsewhere. There will be other asshole Sales people out there, but maybe I can get a pay bump out of it.

The Utah team was staying at the Coeur d’Alene Resort after it was selected to play in the NCAA Tournament hosted by Gonzaga University. As team members walked from the hotel to a downtown restaurant, they were followed by a driver in a truck who was shouting racial slurs at them.

When they left dinner to return to their hotel, the driver and others who were recruited to harass the team followed them back to the hotel, revving their trucks’ engines and harassing them further, according to a police report.

Cecil Kelly III, a longtime resident of Coeur d’Alene, was not shocked by what happened, but he is saddened.

Kelly remembers in the 1960s there were agreements between the business community that “you would not rent a room to a Black person.”

“And you would not feed a Black man,” he said.

New Mr. Deity video.

More details in TFA. Nice recipe for turning your state into an intellectual+educational backwater.

A new Indiana law allows universities to revoke a professor's tenure if they don't promote so-called "intellectual diversity" in the classroom.

Supporters of the measure say it will make universities more accepting of conservative students and academics. But many professors worry the law could put their careers in jeopardy for what they say, or don't say, in the classroom.

"I'd say it ends tenure in the state of Indiana as we know it," said Ben Robinson, associate professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University.

Tenure is supposed to mean indefinite employment for professors, where they can only be fired for cause or some extraordinary circumstance. According to Robinson, the status "allows faculty the freedom to pursue their inquiries and their teaching without fear of reprisal."

But some academics in the state are worried that the new law allows university boards of trustees to interfere with tenure, which normally is handled by university departments.

That's not how supporters see it.

Republican state Sen. Spencer Deery, a former chief of staff for the Purdue University president and the bill's sponsor, said the new law would help conservative students feel more comfortable expressing their opinions on campus.

"The American public and Hoosiers as well are losing faith and trust in higher education," Deery said. "One of the strong reasons for that is, frankly, higher education hasn't done a great job of making every viewpoint feel welcome."

The law also creates a system where students and staff can submit complaints that could be considered in tenure reviews.

The Purdue University Senate passed a resolution denouncing the bill.

The law does include some protections for faculty, preventing trustees from disciplining professors for criticizing the university or engaging in public commentary.

Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said protections don't go far enough.

"This is a big deal. This is a national thing," she said. "I've read the bill, and it's absolutely chilling."

Indiana is the third state, after Florida and Texas, to redefine tenure in recent years. A survey of Florida faculty found that after its law passed, nearly half of professors said they planned to seek employment in another state.

"We are seeing the brain drain that we predicted in Texas and Florida, and I think Indiana will follow suit there," Mulvey said.

The Tennessee Senate has passed a bill targeting "chemtrails."

SB 2691/HB 2063, sponsored by Rep. Monty Fritts, R-Kingston, and Sen. Steve Southerland, R-Morristown, passed in the Senate on Monday. The bill has yet to advance in the House.

The bill claims it is "documented the federal government or other entities acting on the federal government's behalf or at the federal government's request may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere, and those activities may occur within the State of Tennessee," according to the bill.

The legislation would ban the practice in Tennessee.

"The intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight is prohibited," the bill reads.

The bill is scheduled to go to the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday.

People who were aboard a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet whose door plug was explosively expelled after departing an airport in Portland, Ore., in January are being contacted by the FBI about a criminal investigation.

"I'm contacting you because we have identified you as a possible victim of a crime," the letter from a victim specialist with the FBI's Seattle Division begins.

The message, a copy of which was shared with NPR by Mark Lindquist, an attorney representing passengers, lists an investigative case number and tells the passengers they should contact the FBI through an email address set up specifically for people who were on the flight.

Boeing had been accused of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration, as the regulator evaluated its 737 MAX airplane.

"Federal prosecutors say key Boeing employees 'deceived the FAA,' misleading the safety regulators about a new flight control system on the 737 Max called MCAS," as NPR reported in January of 2021.

The deferred prosecution agreement had been set to expire three years after it was filed on Jan. 7, 2021. But the agreement also allows the DOJ's Fraud Section to extend its heightened scrutiny for up to an additional year if Boeing is found to have failed to fulfill its obligations — including the airplane company's promise to strengthen its compliance and reporting programs.

On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.

Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.

Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.

Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.

LYNCHBURG, TN—Saying the spirit had been blended with construction workers, farmers, and airline pilots in mind, distiller Jack Daniel’s unveiled a new whiskey Thursday designed to be consumed while operating heavy machinery. “Whether it’s a forklift, dump truck, or crane, nothing lightens the load of handling large industrial equipment like Jack Daniel’s Blue-Collar Label Whiskey,” said company spokesperson Luke Montgomery, who added that the white oak barrel-aged whiskey also takes the edge off for workers operating a drilling rig in a coal mine or on an offshore oil platform. “It’s perfect for sipping discreetly from a thermos while barreling down a cornfield in a combine harvester toward screaming farmhands, or down a runway in an Airbus 320 toward screaming baggage handlers. The next time you’re in the business district of a major city swinging around a 12,000-pound wrecking ball, consider the bold, distinct flavor of Jack Daniel’s.” Company officials later clarified that the new Jack Daniel’s was perfect for “plain old drinking and driving” too.

Paramilitary snowflake is nabbed in Vermont.

Daniel Banyai, owner of the controversial former Pawlet gun range and paramilitary training facility known as Slate Ridge, was charged Wednesday with aggravated assault on a protected person and resisting arrest after a traffic stop led to an altercation with a Pawlet constable, according to Vermont State Police.

Banyai is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon in Rutland Superior criminal court. He was held overnight at Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility for lack of $15,000 bail, according to a state police press release issued Wednesday night.

Banyai, 50, has had an active arrest warrant since last year after an Environmental Court judge found him in contempt of court orders to dismantle unpermitted structures on his Slate Ridge property. He was ordered to turn himself in to the Vermont Department of Corrections.

According to state police, Banyai was a passenger in a vehicle that Second Constable Tom Covino pulled over for speeding around 2:20 p.m. in Pawlet. Police said Banyai “engaged in a physical altercation” with Covino, who then used pepper spray “to gain his compliance” before arresting Banyai.

In December, an environmental court judge reissued a warrant for Banyai’s arrest after finding him in contempt.

“The threat of incarceration is the only remaining tool at the Court’s disposal to encourage compliance,” Judge Thomas Durkin wrote in his ruling, ordering Banyai to turn himself in to the Vermont Department of Corrections by Dec. 22.

In Banyai’s absence, his attorney, Robert Kaplan, argued an appeal before the Vermont Supreme Court against the arrest warrant and more than $100,000 in fines. The state’s highest court rejected that appeal earlier this month.