August, 19 2019, 12:00am EDT
WASHINGTON
Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) just became the first 2020 presidential candidate to call for a complete ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition surveillance. While other candidates, including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker have previously expressed concern about face scanning and biometric surveillance, so far none have incorporated a ban on the technology into their platform.
"The rapid spread of facial recognition surveillance is one of the most urgent threats to our basic freedom and human rights today. Every single 2020 candidate should be calling for a ban on this invasive, biased, and dangerous technology," said Evan Greer, deputy director of non-partisan digital rights group Fight for the Future (pronouns, she/her). "Banning facial recognition is not a radical idea. It's common sense. Allowing government agencies to build a face scanning panopticon with no oversight or accountability is reckless and puts people in danger. There's growing bipartisan support to rein in biometric surveillance. Any 2020 candidate that wants to be taken seriously on tech and civil liberties issues needs to be calling for a ban."
The Sanders announcement comes amid growing backlash to facial recognition surveillance that has been spreading across the country. Last month Fight for the Future launched our BanFacialRecognition.com campaign, along with an interactive map showing where in the US facial recognition surveillance is being used, and also where there are local and state efforts to ban it. San Francisco, Somerville, MA, and Oakland, CA, recently became the first cities in the country to ban the technology. Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA are also considering bans, and bills to halt current use of the tech are moving in the Massachusetts andMichigan legislatures. In Congress, there is growing bipartisan agreement to address the issue, but it could easily stall under pressure from law enforcement and big tech.
Fight for the Future, which is a non-profit that does not endorse candidates for office, opposes attempts by the tech industry (including Amazon) and law enforcement to pressure Congress to pass an industry-friendly "regulatory framework" for facial recognition that would allow this dangerous technology to spread quickly with minimal restrictions intended to assuage public opposition. But we support narrower efforts to ban or restrict specifically egregious uses of this surveillance, such as a bill introduced recently to ban the use of facial recognition in public housing. For more on our position, read our op-ed in Buzzfeed News: "Don't regulate facial recognition. Ban it."
Fight for the Future is a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible. We fight for a future where technology liberates -- not oppresses -- us.
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Extreme Flooding Kills Hundreds in Climate-Vulnerable Afghanistan
"This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they're bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much," one aid worker said.
May 14, 2024
Severe flooding in Afghanistan over the weekend has killed more than 300 people and destroyed thousands of homes in rural villages.
The flash floods—prompted by heavy rainfall—came on the heels of an extreme drought in one of the nations that is most vulnerable to the climate emergency, yet has done little to contribute to it.
"They're not net emitters of carbon," Timothy Anderson, head of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in Afghanistan, toldCNN. "This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they're bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much."
"How many more tragedies must happen for the world to prioritize climate action?"
The rain and flooding inundated 21 districts in the northeastern provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan, Takhar on Friday and Saturday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The extent of the flooding caught many villagers by surprise.
In Folo in Bulka district of Baghlan province, the rain began during Friday prayers, softly at first, and then quickly building in intensity.
Resident Barakatullah told CNN that it does not often rain so high up in the mountains and that villagers had to scramble as the situation "turned dire."
"People fled to higher ground, seeking refuge in mountains and hills," he said. "Unfortunately, some individuals who were unable to leave their homes fell victim to the floodwaters."
The WFP toldThe Associated Press that more than 300 were killed, and the U.N. Children's Fund reported that at least 51 of them were children. The government said Sunday that the storms killed 315 and injured more than 1,600.
The survivors were left to bury the dead and tally their losses. All told, the disaster destroyed or damaged 8,975 homes, according to OCHA. In Baghlan province alone, the floods washed away at least six public schools, 10,200 acres of orchards, and 2,260 livestock and damaged 50 bridges and 30 hydroelectric dams.
"Lives and livelihoods have been washed away," Arshad Malik, the Afghanistan director for Save the Children, told Reuters. "The flash floods tore through villages, sweeping away homes, and killing livestock."
Farmer Abdul Ghani told the AP that he was visiting family in another province when he learned of the floods. Rushing home to the Nahrin district in Baghlan province, he found the road he usually took to his village erased, his wife and three of his children dead, and another child missing.
"My life has turned into a disaster," he said.
Muhammad Yahqoob, who lives in the same district and lost 13 family members, told Reuters, "We have no food, no drinking water, no shelter, no blankets, nothing at all, floods have destroyed everything."
He added that out of 42 houses that used to stand in his village, only two or three were left.
"It has destroyed the entire valley," Yahqoob said.
Anderson of the WFP told CNN that losing livestock for many villagers meant losing all or part of their livelihoods. Further, the flooding disrupted the lives of people who were already struggling due to drought and destroyed measures they had taken to adapt, such as dams for rainwater and irrigation canals.
"It was already pretty grim. And now it's catastrophic," he told CNN.
The current disaster also follows rains and flooding in April that killed 70 and destroyed around 2,000 homes in southern and western provinces, according to AP.
The U.N. lists Afghanistan as one of the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, and it also lost a signficant amount of foreign aid when the Taliban took control in 2021. The aid has only decreased in the years since.
While decades of war means that Afghanistan faces unique challenges, it's not the only country that has been inundated with severe rain since the start of 2024. Extreme flooding this spring has displaced nearly a quarter million people in East Africa and half a million in southern Brazil.
"The climate crisis continues to rear its ugly head," Teresa Anderson, the global climate justice lead at ActionAid International, said in a statement. "With the latest incident, Afghanistan joins a long list of Global South countries grappling with floods this year. And this is as the world continues funding the climate crisis by expanding fossil fuels and industrial agriculture."
"How many more tragedies must happen for the world to prioritize climate action?" Anderson asked. "It's time to back climate action with the necessary climate funding. Communities, like those in Afghanistan, need this money to build resilience to climate impacts and pay for the losses and damages already caused by the climate crisis."
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Florida Farmworker Bus Crash Kills At Least 8, Hospitalizes Dozens
Cannon Farms said that "we will be closed today out of respect to the losses and injuries endured early this morning in the accident."
May 14, 2024
At least eight people were killed and dozens more hospitalized, including eight patients in critical condition, after a bus carrying farmworkers to a watermelon farm crashed at around 6:35 am on Tuesday in Marion County, Florida.
The Florida Highway Patrol and Marion County Fire Rescue said that 53 people were on the privately owned 2010 International bus that collided with a 2001 Ford Ranger truck on State Road 40 between Ocala and Dunnellon.
🚨#BREAKING: A Mass casualty incident has been declared after numerous people were killed on a migrant bus crash incident with over three dozen injured
📌#MarionCounty | #Flordia
Currently, numerous law enforcement and other emergency crews are on the scene of a mass casualty… pic.twitter.com/7omhzpazVf
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) May 14, 2024
According to the Ocala StarBanner:
A witness told troopers that for some reason the Ranger moved into the westbound lane and the vehicles collided.
The bus ran onto the south shoulder, struck a board fence, and struck two trees. The bus then overturned, troopers said.
The workers were headed to Cannon Farms, which said on social media Tuesday that "we will be closed today out of respect to the losses and injuries endured early this morning in the accident that took place to the Olvera Trucking Harvesting Corp."
"Please pray with us for the families and the loved ones involved in this tragic accident," added the farm, which is located in Dunnellon. "We appreciate your understanding at this difficult time."
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Biden Rebuked Over 'Ever-Shifting Red Lines' as Israel Expands Rafah Attack
"It is time for the Biden administration to admit the obvious, fully cut off the flow of weapons to the Israeli government, demand an immediate cease-fire, and hold Israeli officials to account for their crimes against humanity," said one critic.
May 14, 2024
Looking on as the number of people forced to flee Rafah neared half a million and Israel began expanding its assault on the southern Gaza city, human rights advocates on Tuesday demanded that U.S. President Joe Biden enforce the so-called "red line" he set months ago and end his support for Israel's war on Palestinian civilians.
Just over a week after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seized control of the Rafah crossing, cutting off aid as the United Nations warned of "full-blown famine" in parts of Gaza, the U.N. said about 450,000 people have now fled the southern city.
NBC Newsreported Tuesday that the IDF had begun sending tanks into residential areas of eastern Rafah including the neighborhood of Al-Jneina. Two U.S. officials told the outlet that the troop movement indicated potential expanded operations in Rafah.
Biden said in March that an invasion of Rafah, where more than 1 million people have been displaced since October as Israel decimated other Gaza cities and ordered civilians to move south, would be a "red line" and would push him to cut off military aid to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. The White House paused a shipment of weapons last week and reiterated that the IDF was "not going to get our support" if it went through with a full-scale Rafah attack.
With at least 450,000 people once again forced to flee and Israel continuing to block humanitarian aid, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) executive director Nihad Awad was among those who said Biden must follow through on his threat to Israel.
"The Israeli government continues to flout all of the Biden administration's ever-shifting red lines on Rafah, as well as U.S. law that forbids aid recipients from blocking humanitarian deliveries," said Awad, referring to the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act, Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. "Just like in other cities across Gaza, we are witnessing the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land and the slaughter of countless civilians. It is time for the Biden administration to admit the obvious, fully cut off the flow of weapons to the Israeli government, demand an immediate cease-fire, and hold Israeli officials to account for their crimes against humanity."
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, announced Tuesday that Israel's incursion had forced it to shut down Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital and send 22 remaining patients to other facilities as the group could "no longer guarantee their safety."
"We have had to leave 12 different health structures and have endured 26 violent incidents, which include airstrikes damaging hospitals, tanks being fired at agreed deconflicted shelters, ground offensives into medical centers, and convoys fired upon," said Michel-Olivier Lacharité, head of emergency operations for MSF.
Israel's evacuation orders in Rafah over the past week have garnered international outrage, with one official at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) refuting Israel's suggestion that it was carrying out an "orderly evacuation" and calling it a "grave breach of humanitarian law."
Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said Israel's evacuation orders show its incursion is not the "limited operation" Netanyahu has claimed to be undertaking.
Israel has repeatedly ordered civilians in Gaza to flee to so-called "safe zones," only to then bomb the areas as officials claim to be targeting Hamas.
Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that eight family members who obeyed Israel's orders to leave Rafah in recent days were among those killed in a bombing at Nuseirat refugee camp.
"This shows that there is no safe space in the Gaza strip, even if the Israeli forces warn Palestinians to evacuate from a place to another, this does not get a guarantee that you are evacuating to a safe place," said reporter Hind Khoudary.
At The Hill on Tuesday, former State Department Middle East policy expert Wa'el Alzayat noted that as Israel is intensifying its assault on Rafah, "the Biden administration has continued to send offensive and defensive weapons to Israel" following its pause on one shipment.
"The president must enforce his own policy and suspend weapons deliveries to Israel," said Alzayat. "Failure to do so would only embolden Israeli [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore U.S. warnings and move forward against Rafah with disastrous consequences for the people of Gaza and the region."
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