cliffside
cliffside's JournalWhy Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia - NYT full article
"East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/world/africa/saudi-arabia-kenya-uganda-maids-women.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6E4.ym8s.bTK7pccglwmG&smid=url-share
"On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.
Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.
While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year...."
Autocrats roll back rights and rule of law -- and cite Trump's example - WAPO full article
"Trump’s statements, policies and actions are providing cover for attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of expression and the rule of law around the world."
https://wapo.st/4izPxHF
Under Hungary’s antigay “propaganda” law, bookstores were fined for selling LGBTQ+ themed tomes without sealed plastic wrappers and a museum director was fired for allowing minors into an exhibit with images of same-sex couples. But the autocratic government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban stopped short of targeting the community’s premier event: the annual Pride parade...
What changed? According to Orban, it was the return to the White House of President Donald Trump.
Gergely Gulyas, Orban’s chief of staff, told journalists that the change in administrations in Washington had lifted the “American boot” off the chest of the Hungarian government, making it easier “to breathe.”
... The new Trump administration “is bringing together autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world,” said Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe. “What they share is a radical right agenda, and they are much more connected in their policies and goals than we have been assuming.”
Doctors Told Him He Was Going to Die. Then A.I. Saved His Life
“ Scientists are using machine learning to find new treatments among thousands of old medicines.”
Full article
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/well/ai-drug-repurposing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.504.JXUi.hR9b4DlgcqFw&smid=url-share
“A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?
Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.
“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”
But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit…”
Watch this US anti fascist educational film from 1945 - Don't Be a Sucker
2 minutes ... short version. See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Be_a_Sucker
full version on YouTube 22 minutes "Don't be a Sucker" not linked.
transcript from link
"0:00
I've heard this kind of talk before but
0:02
I never expected to hear it in
0:04
America this seems to know what he's
0:07
talking prot yes he knows all right away
0:10
from us what's the answer what are we
0:13
Real Americans going to do about it
0:15
you'll find it right here in this little
0:17
pamplet excuse me young man but are you
0:19
actually going to read that stuff sure
0:22
why not you heard what he said going on
0:24
in this country yes I heard find do you
0:26
believe in that kind of talk and you'll
0:28
find out who makes pretty good sense to
0:30
me I'm speaking to you as an American am
0:33
and I tell you friends we'll never be
0:36
able to call this country our own until
0:38
it's a country
0:41
without without what yeah without what
0:44
without
0:45
Negroes without alien foreigners without
0:49
Catholics without
0:51
Freemasons you know these people what's
0:54
wrong with the Masons I'm a Mason time
0:56
for to get together and hey that F's
0:58
talking about me and that makes a
1:00
difference doesn't it these are your
1:03
enemies I was born in Hungary but now I
1:05
am an American citizen and I have seen
1:08
what this kind of talk can do I saw it
1:10
in Berlin what were you doing there I
1:13
was a professor at the University I
1:15
heard the same words we have heard today
1:18
but I was a fool then I thought Nazis
1:21
were crazy people stupid
1:23
fanatics but unfortunately it was not
1:26
so you see they knew that they were not
1:29
strong enough to conquer a unified
1:31
country so they split Germany into small
1:34
groups they use Prejudice as a practical
1:36
weapon to the
1:38
nation of course that was not easy to do
1:41
they had to work hard to do it you see
1:45
we human beings are not born with
1:48
prejudices always they are made for us
1:51
made by someone who wants something
1:53
remember that when you hear this kind of
1:55
talk somebody is going to get something
1:57
out of it and it isn't going to be us oh"
Which Dem leaders have been/are going to Wisconsin in support of the Dem candidate for Supreme Court ...
see this post for more info.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220153653
Donald Jr was there rallying support, Musk flooding the race with money.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/17/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-2025-musk/
"...The race to fill a single open court seat with a 10-year term has ramifications not only for abortion rights, where the two contenders in the past expressed vastly different views, but also for how elections are conducted in what was last year’s most closely contested presidential swing state. It also could determine whether two congressional districts will be redrawn and put in easier reach of Democrats, which could affect control of the U.S. House..."
Ayman is on MSNBC tonight at 7pm, wonder what happened to the others that were taking over this time slot ...
after just a couple of weeks?
Trump administration slashes division in charge of 26,000 U.S. artworks
Source: WAPO
"The fate of holdings dating to before the Civil War is uncertain after the dismissal of most workers in the General Services Administration’s fine arts and preservation units.
The future of a vast collection of public artwork is in doubt as the Trump administration plans to fire workers who preserve and maintain more than 26,000 pieces owned by the U.S. government, including paintings and sculptures by renowned artists, some dating to the 1850s.
Fine arts and historic preservation workers at the General Services Administration told The Washington Post that at least five regional offices were shuttered last week and that more than half of the division’s approximately three dozen staff members were abruptly put on leave pending their terminations. Workers expressed fear that the cuts will threaten a collection of precious art housed in federal buildings across the country, including Alexander Calder’s 1974 “Flamingo” at the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago and Michael Lantz’s 1942 “Man Controlling Trade” outside the Federal Trade Commission building in D.C.
.... According to former staffers, the agency is looking to end its lease for a storage facility in Northern Virginia that holds hundreds of paintings and sculptures, including pieces sponsored by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program responsible for some of the nation’s most iconic images. Federal government watchdogs over the years have sought to reclaim WPA artworks, some of which were sold on eBay. When the works were commissioned, artists were paid as much as $42 a week in 1934, or roughly $1,000 a week in today’s dollars, for finished pieces..."
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2025/03/11/gsa-fine-arts-layoffs-trump/
Tuberculosis Resurgent as Trump Funding Cut Disrupts Treatment Globally
Source: NYT
"...The whole system of finding, diagnosing and treating tuberculosis — which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious disease — has collapsed in dozens of countries across Africa and Asia since President Trump ordered the aid freeze on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.
... Family members of infected people are not being put on preventive therapy. Infected adults are sharing rooms in crowded Nairobi tenements, and infected children are sleeping four to a bed with their siblings. Parents who took their sick children to get tested the day before Mr. Trump was inaugurated are still waiting to hear if their children have tuberculosis. And people who have the near-totally drug-resistant form of tuberculosis are not being treated.
... Without testing that confirms whether a person is infected and what type of TB they have, family members cannot start on preventive therapy.
The United States paid for the half-dozen tests that patients need before beginning treatment for multi-drug-resistant TB, to make sure their bodies will be able to tolerate the harsh drugs. These tests can cost $80 or more, beyond the reach of many patients. Without the tests, clinicians don’t know what drugs to prescribe very sick patients. Prescriptions stopped...
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/health/tuberculosis-kenya-us-cuts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3U4.4Pax.58R_GOCT49bn&smid=url-share
Rachel tonight, putting the blame on TRUMP, exactly where it belongs, not on Musk ...
let's not allow him to blame someone else!
En Route to Autocracy in America - OCTOBER 11, 2020
Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
Masha Gessen of the New Yorker concludes that United States is in the first stage of an autocratic transformation
https://prospect.org/politics/en-route-to-autocracy-in-america/
"Alexander Heffner: Masha, if the United States became an autocracy in recent years, when precisely do you think it happened?
Masha Gessen: Well, I don't think it did. In my book I use I use a taxonomy proposed by a Hungarian political scientist named Bálint Magyar, who has worked a lot on what has happened in Eastern Central Europe and developed an entire sort of set of terms and signs for understanding these autocratic transformations.
He proposes that there are three stages of an autocratic transformation: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. They're pretty self-explanatory, but the defining characteristic of an autocratic attempt, what distinguishes it from the later stages is that it's still possible to reverse it through electoral means. According to that model, which I think is extremely useful for understanding what's going on here, we're in the autocratic attempt stage, right? At least until November, at least theoretically.
..... If you look at the amount of damage that he has been able to do in the first 3-1/2 years, while having the threat, at least the potential threat of not being reelected, hanging over him, you can imagine how much, how to what extent he would be emboldened by reelection...."
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