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UltraViolet Statement on the Firing of Steve Bannon
Statement from Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, in response to news of Bannon's firing:
"Good riddance Steve. The larger and more urgent crisis however is that a white supremacist sympathizer is the president of the United States."
WASHINGTON
Statement from Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, in response to news of Bannon's firing:
"Good riddance Steve. The larger and more urgent crisis however is that a white supremacist sympathizer is the president of the United States."
UltraViolet is a powerful and rapidly growing community of people mobilized to fight sexism and create a more inclusive world that accurately represents all women, from politics and government to media and pop culture.
LATEST NEWS
Gaza Doctor Corrects CNN Anchor: 'This Is Not a Humanitarian Crisis... This Is Genocide'
"History books will be written on this and countries will have to reckon—media agencies will have to reckon—with their major role in the genocide," said Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan.
Oct 11, 2024
Human rights advocates on Friday highlighted a rare instance in which a U.S. corporate media outlet allowed a pro-Palestinian voice to set the record straight about Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Earlier this week, CNN "News Central" aired a panel segment on the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel and Israel's retaliatory war. Anchor Kate Bolduan noted that around 1,200 people were killed during the Hamas attack—although she did not say that at least some of them were slain by Israeli forces in "friendly fire" incidents and under the Hannibal Directive—and that 250 others were kidnapped.
Bolduan also acknowledged that nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and another 2 million displaced by Israeli forces, calling the situation in Gaza a "desperate humanitarian crisis."
"A humanitarian crisis is what you deal with when you have a hurricane, what you deal with when you have an earthquake."
The anchor asked panel participant Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan—an American pediatric intensive care physician who volunteered for two weeks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip—for her thoughts on the matter.
"In all honesty, a humanitarian crisis is what you deal with when you have a hurricane, what you deal with when you have an earthquake," Haj-Hassan replied. "This is not a humanitarian crisis."
"Kate, and I'm going to say it very clearly for your viewers to hear, this is genocide," the doctor stressed.
Haj-Hassan continued:
When 70% of the population that are killed are women and children, when the population is starved of food, of water, of medicine, when you have attacks, repeated attacks on all the hospitals, the clinics, the aid distribution sites, the humanitarian aid agencies that tried to help, more [United Nations] workers have been killed in Gaza than in U.N.'s history. When you have over 900 families that have been exterminated, that have been taken off of the civil registry, killed, when you have over 17,000 children that have lost one or both parents, when you have bakeries, aid distribution sites, churches, mosques, schools, and in the last three days—in the last 24 hours in fact—a hospital today that was bombed, as you just reported, the hospital where I personally was working, and I can tell you, they are working every second of every day to try and sustain life.
"And so it's really hard to hear it over and over and over again, framed in the way that it's being framed in the media, which, frankly, Kate, is very misleading," Haj-Hassan said. "It is very misleading. Three hundred and sixty-five days of this. Death tolls that are so far outdated we have... no idea how many people are killed."
"But I am... genuinely afraid about what we're going to find out when the dust settles. History books will be written on this," she added. "And countries will have to reckon—media agencies will have to reckon—with their major role in the genocide of an entire population and in the destruction of humanitarian law and rule of order."
Some observers noted the absence of voices like Haj-Hassan's in U.S. mainstream media coverage of Gaza, which is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and almost never airs the word "genocide"—even as Israel is on trial for the crime at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The New York Times, for example, ordered journalists covering the war in Gaza to eschew terms including "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and even "occupied territory," even though Israel has indisputably occupied Palestine for over half a century and the ICJ recently ruled that the Israeli occupation is a crime of apartheid that must end immediately.
"The media may be forgiven for missing a carefully hidden story. For missing some details," Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft executive vice president Trita Parsi said Friday on social media. "But when a genocide is there for everyone to see and you help conceal it, forgiveness is not in the cards."
Another social media user offered mild praise for Bolduan—who has been criticized by Israel supporters for previous interviews in which Palestine defenders accused Israel of genocide—writing that the anchor "didn't seem happy" to hear what Haj-Hassan was saying.
"Hard to say whether it was because the truth is so horrible or because CNN doesn't want to report that truth—but she did let her say it," the user said of Bolduan.
Allegations of Israeli genocide remain highly contentious—even taboo—in the United States, which provides the key Mideast ally with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover including multiple vetoes of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions that were overwhelmingly supported by other countries.
In the United States, Palestinians, Palestinian Americans, and human rights groups are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit a lawsuit they filed accusing President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin of complicity in the Gaza genocide.
In July, a three-judge panel of the federal court dismissed the lawsuit, in which the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California previously found that "the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law," but dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds.
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'One of the Most Pathetic Things I've Ever Seen': Watch Vance Refuse to Say Whether Trump Lost in 2020
A New York Times interview carried echoes of Vance's "damning non-answer" in the vice presidential debate.
Oct 11, 2024
Characterizing questions about whether Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lied about his 2020 election loss as an "obsession" of the media, vice presidential contender JD Vance on Friday refused five consecutive opportunities to acknowledge the election results.
In an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of The New York Times podcast "The Interview," Vance repeatedly attempted to suggest that questions about whether Trump refused to accept the results of a democratic election were unimportant, saying he was "focused on the future."
"Do you think he lost the 2020 election?" asked Garcia-Navarro, point-blank.
"I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election," Vance replied. "I think there's an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I'm much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable."
When Garcia-Navarro asked him the straightforward question a second and third time, he claimed tech companies' censorship of a New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop "cost Donald Trump millions of votes," still refusing to answer whether President Joe Biden was, in fact, the election winner in November 2020.
"I've asked this question repeatedly, it is something that is very important for the American people to know," said Garcia-Navarro. "There is no proof, legal or otherwise, the Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election."
Vance later said he would not have certified the 2020 election if he had been in Congress at the time, citing his claim that "industrial scale censorship" cost Trump millions of votes.
"Vance definitively stated that he would have voided the votes of millions of Americans, and paved the way for installing Trump, after Trump lost the 2020 election," said lawyer and writer David Lurie.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar called Vance's refusal to answer the question "one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen."
The interview came days after Vance faced Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in a debate. Vance responded to a direct question about whether Trump lost in 2020 with his favored refrain and more claims of censorship.
"Tim, I'm focused on the future," Vance said at the debate. "Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?"
Walz condemned Vance's "damning non-answer."
Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, responded to Friday's interview by calling Vance "the Project 2025 enabler of Trump's dreams."
"Donald Trump chose JD Vance to be his running mate for one reason and one reason only: He will do what Mike Pence wouldn't and put Donald Trump over our Constitution," said Chitika. "His refusal to acknowledge the simple fact that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is proof that if Trump wins, there will be no one left to check his worst instincts and stop him from gaining unprecedented, unchecked power to do whatever he wants and put our country at risk."
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Climate Crisis Made Hurricane Milton 'Wetter, Windier, and More Destructive'
World Weather Attribution found that "Milton's rainfall was made 10-50% more intense and about twice as likely due to climate change, while wind speeds were around 10% stronger."
Oct 11, 2024
With rescue and cleanup efforts underway in Florida following back-to-back disasters wrought by hurricanes Helene and Milton, scientists on Friday released an analysis highlighting how the latter storm was "wetter, windier, and more destructive because of climate change" driven by fossil fuels.
Hurricane categories are based on wind speed, and scientists have connected quick jumps in ratings to the climate emergency. Milton rapidly intensified to Category 5, the highest on the scale, while in the Gulf of Mexico but made landfall late Wednesday as a Category 3 storm—less than two weeks after Category 4 Helene hit Florida and then left a trail of destruction across the Southeast.
Based on modeling, "climate change was responsible for an increase of about 40% in the number of storms of this intensity, and equivalently that the maximum wind speeds of similar storms are now about 5 m/s (around 10%) stronger than in a world without climate change," World Weather Attribution (WWA) said Friday. "In other words, without climate change Milton would have made landfall as a Category 2 instead of a Category 3 storm."
WWA also detailed how the warming climate is connected to the water that Milton left in its wake. As the group said: "In 3 out of the 4 analyzed datasets we find that heavy one-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are 20-30% more intense and about twice as likely in today's climate, that is 1.3°C warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change. The fourth dataset shows much larger changes."
"These results are based on observational data and do not include climate models and are thus higher than the overarching attribution statement given for Hurricane Helene, where we combined observations and climate models. Nevertheless the results are compatible with those obtained for other hurricanes in the area that have been studied in the scientific literature," WWA continued. "Despite using different temporal and geographical event definitions, as well as different observational datasets and climate models, all these studies show a similar increase in intensity of between 10% and 50% and about a doubling in likelihood. We are therefore confident that such changes in heavy rainfall are attributable to human-caused climate change."
Both storms have generated fresh calls to "make polluters pay" for the damage and deaths caused by extreme weather exacerbated by fossil fuels. There are ongoing state-level lawsuits against Big Oil and recent demands for prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against companies, using attribution science to make their cases.
"This study has confirmed what should already be abundantly clear: Climate change is supercharging storms, and burning fossil fuels is to blame," Ian Duff, head of Greenpeace International's Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign, toldReuters about the WWA findings out Friday. "Millions of people across Florida—many of whom lack insurance—now face astronomical costs to rebuild shattered homes and communities."
Milton killed at least 16 people—on top of the over 230 deaths tied to Helene—and could cause up to $50 billion in insured losses for property owners in Florida alone, Fitch Ratings said Thursday. As of early Friday, over 2 million state residents still lacked power, according toCBS News.
While Milton barreled toward Florida on Wednesday, WWA published a report detailing how climate change was a "key driver of catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Helene that devastated both coastal and inland communities."
That followed a Monday analysis from the research organization Climate Central showing that high sea-surface temperatures that fuled Milton's rapid intensification were made 400-800 times more likely by the climate crisis.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed to both of those studies on social media Friday, in a series of posts promoting his appearance on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" earlier this week.
During Khanna's MSNBC appearance, he pointed out how Democrats on Capitol Hill have fought for more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which responds to disasters like Milton and Helene, while Republicans have opposed it.
Speaking to reporters last week, before Milton made landfall, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that FEMA is urgently in need of more money for this hurricane season, which lasts until November.
"We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting," Mayorkas said in anticipation of Milton. "FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season."
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