TV News LIES

A school district board in upstate New York is investigating school officials amid accusations that the district may have confined elementary school students inside wooden “timeout” boxes.

Images of the boxes, which resemble tiny padded cells, first spread on social media last week, after a former member of the Salmon River school district school board accused officials of building them to seclude children with disabilities. The images unleashed an immediate uproar in the small district, which teaches about 1,300 children and lies on the border between New York state and Canada.

In addition to investigating the officials, the Salmon River central school district board of education announced last Thursday it had placed three officials, including an elementary school teacher, on leave. It also reassigned the district’s superintendent to “home duties” and is cooperating with a New York state department of education investigation.

While the district superintendent acknowledged that the district had set up three of the wooden crates at two elementary schools, he also said that the district had removed the boxes and that no student had ever been confined inside them. However, at an emotional and tense community meeting last week, multiple parents said they suspected their children had been inside the boxes, the Albany-based Times Union reported.

One parent of a minimally verbal child said his son told him: “If you are happy or if you are sad, this is the place you have to go to calm down.”

More than 60% of Salmon River students are Native American. For several community members, the controversy over the boxes evoked memories of abusive residential schools, the US government’s boarding school system that sought to force Native American students to assimilate to white society. Nearly 1,000 students died at those schools, which operated as recently as the 1960s.

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Israeli occupation forces and illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers carried out widespread violations across the occupied West Bank on Saturday, including home invasions, abductions, shootings, among them the killing of two Palestinians, including a child, road attacks, and coordinated colonizer assaults on Palestinian towns and villages.

The incidents were concentrated in the governorates of Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Hebron, Jerusalem, and Salfit, reflecting a continued escalation in military operation and colonizers’ violations.

Ramallah: Road Attacks and Village Invasions:

In the central West Bank, Israeli forces shot and seriously wounded a Palestinian young man before dawn Saturday, in the village of Qarawat Bani Zeid, northwest of Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank.

illegal Israeli paramilitary colonizers accompanied by Israeli soldiers invaded the main road near Ein Yabrud, east of Ramallah, attacking Palestinian vehicles, damaging property, and obstructing traffic.

Israeli forces shot and seriously wounded a Palestinian young man before dawn Saturday,

Later in the day, armed colonizers invaded Shuqba, northwest of Ramallah, reaching the northern edge of the village.

During the invasion, they broke into a home and a playground, tampered with their contents, and withdrew under military protection.

Israeli forces also abducted several Palestinians in Silwad and nearby towns, stopping vehicles at checkpoints and detaining passengers.

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Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians.

Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughly disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

Bassett’s ouster from the center, since denounced by hundreds of Harvard faculty and students, is not an isolated institutional failure. It exposes a deeper crisis in three intertwined domains often treated as guardians of modern moral universalism: human rights institutions, global public health organizations, and American universities.

All have long claimed to speak for everyone. All have repeatedly insisted that their missions transcend partisanship, borders, racial and gender differences, class, and interest groups. And all – when confronted with the political pressures surrounding Palestine – have shown how conditional their commitments have always been.

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A leading Muslim civil rights group in the US has sued Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, over his order designating it and another organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, saying the directive was unconstitutional.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as Cair, has more than 20 chapters across the United States and its work involves legal actions, advocacy and education outreach.

The lawsuit was filed late Monday by the Cair-Foundation and Cair-Florida, its affiliate in the state. The suit asked a federal judge in Tallahassee to declare DeSantis’s order unlawful and unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced.

“He has usurped the exclusive authority of the federal government to identify and designate terrorist organizations by baselessly declaring Cair a terrorist organization,” the lawsuit says.

Cair said in the lawsuit that it was targeted by DeSantis for defending the free speech rights of people in cases in which state officials and officials elsewhere had tried to punish or silence those who had expressed support for Palestinian human rights.

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At dawn on Tuesday, Israeli occupation forces escalated their invasions across multiple areas of the occupied West Bank, deploying reinforcements toward Nablus in the northern West Bank while continuing widespread military operations in refugee camps, towns, and villages.

Troops broke into and ransacked dozens of homes, abducted many Palestinians, and set up military roadblocks, further tightening restrictions on Palestinian movement and daily life.

The soldiers invaded several neighborhoods including al-Makhfiyya and Rafidia, breaking into homes and abducting young men, including Mohyeldin Abdul-Haq, Ali Shami, and Bassem al-Qutub, in addition to three siblings.

In Balata refugee camp east of Nablus, soldiers stormed homes and abducted Semih Thiab as a means of pressuring his brother to surrender.

Troops also invaded residential buildings in Rafidia and advanced into the city from the military roadblocks of Beit Furik and Deir Sharaf.

In Asira al-Shamaliya northwest of Nablus, the soldiers broke into homes and abducted a young woman, Du’a’ Jarar’a.

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