read more: https://thehardtimes.net/music/hockey-arena-dj-waiting-for-perfect-moment-to-play-welcome-to-the-jungle/

The UN Human Rights Council passed its first ever resolution on Thursday 4 April over tackling discrimination against intersex people, despite opposition from several countries to the terminology used. The resolution passed in the 47-member council with 24 votes in favour, none against and 23 abstentions.

read more: https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-news/2024/04/04/intersex-people-un-resolution/

read more: https://clickhole.com/environmental-fail-nostalgia-ftw-this-3-mile-wide-garbage-patch-in-the-pacific-ocean-is-100-composed-of-troll-dolls/

read more: https://clickhole.com/3-classic-norwegian-fairy-tales-parents-used-to-scare-their-children-out-of-going-on-shark-tank-without-a-clear-pitch/

Every year on April 5th, Palestinian Children's Day is observed, where Palestinian children have historically lived under extremely difficult conditions due to the occupation. Since the early years of the occupation of Palestinian territories until today, the occupation has targeted children through various means and methods directly, without any consideration for agreements guaranteeing their rights. Through its practices against children in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, the occupation considers targeting children as one of its main objectives in its war against the Palestinian people.

read more: https://addameer.org/node/5309

Filmmaker Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World follows a production assistant on a long day’s drive to screen injured Romanian workers for a workplace safety video — painting a bleak, darkly funny portrait of a hollowed-out world.

**D |**o Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, the latest film by Romanian writer and director Radu Jude, opens with a phone alarm going off at the ungodly hour of 5:50 a.m. As the overworked, underpaid film production assistant (PA) at the center of the story reaches out to silence the alarm, we see her nightstand, littered with the detritus of a hazy night in: an overturned beer bottle, a mostly empty glass of wine, and Marcel Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Call it greeting the day with a grimace.

Throwing on a sequined dress, Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache) stumbles to her van to start an unending day of driving around Bucharest. As is so often the case in the industry, the hours of driving will go on interminably, stretching well into the night. Jude himself was once a PA, and he has said that the death of a fellow PA in a car crash — a stunningly frequent occurrence in the industry — was part of the film’s inspiration.

Angela’s route is determined by a local production company that has been tasked with making a workplace safety film for an Austrian conglomerate that is seeking to polish its reputation and reduce its liability. The conglomerate wants to have a worker who was injured in its Romanian factory appear in the video, and Angela’s task is to prescreen the many candidates. She goes from one shabby apartment to another, filming the borderline-destitute disabled workers as they audition, hoping for the 500 euros that come with the role. Their desperation is palpable, the anxiety radiating off the thin walls. Some of the workers’ families plead with Angela to put in a good word, but the decision is up to the Austrians; after all, she’s just another worker being exploited by the wage differential between her country and that of the corporate overlords.

In crowded homes, workers recount their misfortunes for the screen. One fell off a platform in the factory, but because she had taken a sip of alcohol handed to her in celebration of a coworker’s birthday, the corporation claims it was her fault. Ditto for a worker with a disturbing facial scar who lost the ability to speak following his accident; Angela breaks the news that the corporation is unlikely to choose someone who is mute. Then there is Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan), the worker who the Austrians ultimately choose, a family man who was hit in the head with a rusty piece of metal being used as a barricade in the company parking lot: the impact put him in a coma, then paralyzed him from the waist down.

This is not a safety video; it’s pure propaganda. The conglomerate clearly shares some of the blame for the injuries, yet the most important part of the script, as Angela tells one worker, is when they implore employees to wear the company’s protective gear and not take irresponsible risks, as if it were their own mistakes that left them injured.

About half an hour into Jude’s film, it occurred to me that I was in for a nearly three-hour car ride with Angela. Claustrophobia threatened as I watched her listen to pounding club music and heavy metal, sucking down energy drinks to try to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. (“I can’t go on like this,” she tells a doorman at one point, to which he responds, “That’s what you think.”) That her driving is only ever interrupted by phone calls, usually from her employer, which her phone announces with the “Ode to Joy” (the European Union’s official anthem), only made the atmosphere ghastlier. Much like Jude’s 2021 Berlinale-winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Much From the End of the World has some trying moments. Spending all day stuck in traffic does suck.

Thankfully, Angela’s deliriously scattered dialogue pulled me back down another rabbit hole before my dread could take hold. She’s a magpie, as familiar with Karl Marx and Jean-Luc Godard as she is with celebrity gossip and raunchy jokes (one story she tells, about a porn star who had to pull up PornHub on his phone mid-scene to stay hard, is especially memorable). The jumble of referents evokes social media: specifically TikTok, with its jump cuts and chaotic juxtapositions. And as it turns out, Angela is big on TikTok.

Or rather, her alter ego, Bobiţă — an Andrew Tate–like figure who tells ludicrously pornographic, deeply offensive anecdotes — is big on TikTok. Angela uses a filter to become Bobiţă, though she betrays no concern that her blond hair and body are often visible in frame, overrunning the bounds of the unsettling filter (at the press screening I attended, we received cutouts of Bobiţă’s face; when I texted a photo of the bald, bushy-browed visage to a friend, he informed me that he had immediately deleted the picture).

read more: https://jacobin.com/2024/04/radu-jude-romania-film-review/

For months, Israel has been forcing Palestinians in northern Gaza to starve on a tiny fraction of their regular daily calorie needs, a report finds as experts warn of an unprecedented widespread famine across the region.

A new Oxfam analysis has found that, since January, people in northern Gaza have had access to less than 12 percent of the 2,100 calories they need per day on average. This is equivalent to an average of only 245 calories per day — fewer calories than are in a can of fava beans, or about a single cup of cooked rice.

“Before the war, we were in good health and had strong bodies,” one mother who is trapped in northern Gaza told Oxfam. “Now, looking at my children and myself, we have lost so much weight since we do not eat any proper food, we are trying to eat whatever we find — edible wild plants or herbs daily just to survive.”

The lack of food is being caused by Israel’s blockade of all forms of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which is only expected to get worse in coming weeks. Israel has informed the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) that it will no longer allow any food shipments into northern Gaza. Meanwhile, after Israel bombed a convoy of international food aid workers with World Central Kitchen earlier this week, killing seven of them, a number of other food aid groups have announced that they are stopping their efforts in Gaza because of the high risk of being killed by Israeli forces.

This downturn in food aid shipments comes as international food insecurity researchers have warned that half of the population of Gaza, or about 1.1 million people, are at imminent risk of famine, with the entire population already facing a food crisis. Israel’s famine campaign in Gaza has no precedent in modern times in terms of speed and severity, experts have repeatedly warned, and dozens of children have already starved to death as Israel’s genocide goes on.

read more: https://truthout.org/articles/palestinians-in-northern-gaza-only-have-access-to-245-calories-a-day/

When Tamera Hutcherson was arrested on January 8 in Dallas, she says, she was ordered by a woman officer to remove her hijab and lift up her shirt with the instruction: “Lift up your top like it’s Girls Gone Wild.” When she did, her waist beads — worn as part of a deeply-held spiritual belief — were revealed, and the officer allowed her to continue wearing them.

But then, she says in a new lawsuit, she was escorted to take a mugshot. Another officer, a man, ordered her to remove her hijab again, this time in view of both men officers and inmates. She tried to explain that she wore her hijab — a head covering — for religious reasons but was ignored. Hutcherson eventually complied but was shaking and crying so violently that the photograph had to be taken three times just to capture an in-focus image.

Hutcherson was arrested alongside two other women wearing hijabs that day — Donia El-Hussain and Nidaa Lafi — after participating in a protest demanding that the Biden administration call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The three women have filed a civil lawsuit against Dallas County, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and the individual officers involved, saying their religious garments were unlawfully removed for mugshot photos. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Huma Yasin, the lawyer representing El-Hussain, Hutcherson and Lafi, said she hopes this legal action prompts policy changes.

read more: https://19thnews.org/2024/04/women-dallas-lawsuit-hijabs-mugshots/

read more: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2024/04/ford-doubles-down-on-refusal-to-build-fourplexes-until-someone-explains-to-him-what-they-are/

Flock Safety — a relatively recent entrant to the surveillance tech arena — is branching out. It’s courting cops with cheap ALPR cameras, unproven claims about crime reduction, and a little lawbreaking of its own.

But it hasn’t abandoned its roots. It first hit the scene with plate readers it pitched to the Fun Police: homeowners associations and the even deeper pockets overseeing our nation’s many gated communities.

Flock tells HOAs and the heads of carefully curated communities things like “Flock Safety is the only security camera that stops property crime.” It’s a laughable claim. For one, Flock’s cameras are cameras and pretty much any security camera will have some effect on crime. Second, cameras don’t prevent crime. They simply make it easier to investigate crime.

The ALPRs sold to HOAs by Flock may have a bit more of a preventative effect. “May” is the operative word — one not found in Flock’s advertising materials. And, given what’s already been reported about Flock’s HOA inroads, it appears Flock views itself as just another cop shop, albeit one that has (until recently) courted private markets.

It apparently encourages private purchasers of its cameras and plate readers to regard themselves the same way. As this report by Eli Wolfe for The Oaklandside points out, Flock customers are doing what the city of Oakland can’t (at least at this point): filling neighborhoods with ALPRs and providing cops with access to whatever’s been collected.

read more: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/03/california-hoas-are-buying-up-flock-license-plate-readers-giving-cops-open-access-to-them/

Swiss federal ministers are giving up their free annual ski passes worth around $4,000.

Switzerland recently voted in favor of a referendum for greater social welfare that was opposed by the majority right-wing coalition government, which warned against the roughly $5 billion cost.

Social media posts noted that government officials received perks like $200,000 pensions and, notably, free ski lift passes for Swiss slopes every year.

read more: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/03/2024/swiss-federal-ministers-are-giving-up-their-free-ski-passes

In the video, the breathless mother is face to face with her son in his dark blue press gear. With all telecommunications severed for fourteen days, he’d been gathering reports on the besieged hospital. They who bomb hospitals and inherit the earth, who fear defeat by social media posts, were done murdering this one. [Editor’s note: This hospital’s cause of death could not be independently verified.] The Palestinian mother says to her son, Habibi Yamma. She holds his hands, turning them over, she’s an anatomist turned fortune teller, circling his waist, running her fingers around his hips—and he lets her. As if she is the tailor of his soul. As if she had seen his death in a recurring nightmare for two weeks, and in it, his hands were crushed, his love handles blown. She’s refusing to accept his wholesome appearance is real. The massacre is over, and it is the hour of the crow. The bulldozers are done with the earth: corpulent, corpuscular, corpsy, corpacetic. The killers fertilizing our memory with our ghosts and laughing: that their memory is immune to our ghosts. Her son has a full head of grey hair. She is wearing a headscarf. She kisses him, and he lets her. He turns one cheek then the other. A Jesus in him. A Jochebed in her. A Hagar. And Fatima is in her, that’s her name. Fatima or Zaynab. Bespectacled, he removes his glasses, gestures at taking off his vest as proof that he’s hiding neither scratch nor wound. “Why did you come, Mother? You didn’t have to come.” He says it tenderly, emitting a calm, a decoy of the horror inside them. She says, “My heart wouldn’t let me, Yamma.” In a second, I am filled with panic over the wickedness that may hunt down one of them to spite the other. The video’s gone viral. In a second, my tears bring my mother’s prayers to my knees. Her visions of safety and ruin, their history in her gasping heart. All her life, all of mine. In Rafah, in 1956, she’s seven, standing at her front door and shouting the names of abducted young men spared their execution—as they reappear on foot, one by one, into the neighbourhood, their mothers unable to ululate their joy next to less fortunate mothers. And me, some two decades later, a third grader, swallowed by his mother’s exhausting grief towering over the precipice, a portent for the rest of my days: No, Yamma, the school bus did not crash. Yes, the field trip was a blast. Habibti Yamma, I lived. Habibi Yaba, I’m alive. I drank from the only well in the only garden of the only heart I have. The well had been fed for years by tears of every type. And all around me are half-strangers. Half-stranger, will you let me give you back your sight? Or do you still think your heart is all yours—that it isn’t like my mother’s country?

link: https://proteanmag.com/2024/04/03/habibi-yamma/