Jimmy Carter, out of office, had the courage to call out the “abominable oppression and persecution” and “strict segregation” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He dedicated himself to monitoring elections, including his controversial defense of the 2006 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and championed human rights around the globe. He lambasted the American political process as an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
The Soviet Union was asked by the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to intervene to help fight against the Afghan mujahideen that the US was arming: Soviet-Afghan War
President-elect Donald Trump threatened on Saturday that the U.S. would reassume control of the Panama Canal if it felt that Panama wasn’t honoring the terms of a 1977 treaty regarding the waterway’s legal status.
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.
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In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.
Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.
Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.
But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
Communities targeted by escalating right-wing violence are learning from their own histories how to keep each other safe.
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“In moments where I have seen [community defense], it’s always been something that has been asked for explicitly,” says Snow. [Yellow Peril Tactical] YPT formed in 2020 amid a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes. Organizers from around the U.S. met through activist networks and began supporting each other not just in learning self-defense and firearms skills but also in creating more visible networks of care and connecting their ideas about community empowerment to international struggles such as supporting anarchists fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Historians and other critics are responding with fierce condemnation to this week’s Wall Street Journalreporting that “U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates a popular museum on the National Mall, have sought to de-emphasize negative parts of U.S. history.”
On September 13, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) announced that it was appointing Victoria Nuland to its Board of Directors, effective immediately.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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