Also on today’s menu:
Memphis Officers Charged With Murder
Giving ‘Integrity’ A Bad Name
A New Generation Of Militants
With home prices high and rental prices beyond the range of many workers’ ability to afford apartments, even people with housing vouchers have been unable to find a landlord who accepts them. That has led to a crisis in homelessness that is being played out in Manchester, where the city recently evicted about 50 unsheltered people in an encampment outside the Families in Transition shelter which usually has all 138 beds filled.
Last month, eight New Hampshire mayors called upon Governor Chris Sununu to provide state support to address the crisis, but Sununu said the responsibility of finding solutions lies with the local communities.
Manchester has opened warming stations and plans to provide other emergency shelters where cots are available. There are 40 emergency cots at the Cashin Senior Activity Center and 14 more for women at the former Tirrell House, a state-owned facility. The city also is preparing to open a 24-hour shelter with 40 beds at an abandoned factory.
Memphis Officers Charged With Murder
Five Memphis police officers who were fired following the death of Tyre Nichols, were charged in his murder on January 26. Video of the January 7 traffic stop shows the officers savagely beating Nichols, a 29-year-old father and FedEx worker, for three minutes.
Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy said that, although each officer played a different role in the killing, “they are all responsible.” They face charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression.
Publicity in the case has focused on the fact that Nichols’ death was another case of a black man dying at the hands of police — “We also cannot ignore the fact that fatal encounters with law enforcement have disparately impacted Black and Brown people,” President Joe Biden Jr. said — but in this case, the officers involved also are black.
Giving ‘Integrity’ A Bad Name
“Integrity matters more,” declared SINO (Speaker In Name Only) Kevin McCarthy as he announced the appointment of extremists to top committee assignments — including Marjorie Taylor Greene. Although he once said the Republican Party should not be associated with anyone who is anti-semetic, McCarthy knows that Greene has attended a white supremacist-organized conference, endorsed violence against her Democratic colleagues, compared Covid safety protocols to Nazi repression, and harassed her colleagues through vulgar publicity stunts.
Now, McCarthy says he would “never leave” Greene, the conspiracy-theorist Republican congresswoman from Georgia who is being touted as a potential vice-presidential contender for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run, after she backed him through the right-wing rebellion that required 15 rounds of voting and major concessions to the extremists for him to gain the position of U.S. House speaker.
Greene famously said that, if she had been in charge of the Trump supporters who attacked Congress on January 6, 2021, “we would have won”.
A New Generation Of Militants
Last spring, Israel launched operation “Break the Wave” amid a surge in Palestinian gun and knife attacks targeting Israelis. Some were carried out by Palestinian citizens of Israel who supported the so-called Islamic State group, but many were Palestinian gunmen from Jenin.
Now, in what the Israeli military says was an operation to arrest Islamic Jihad militants planning “major attacks”, the forces conducted the most deadly Israeli raid into Jenin refugee camp in nearly two decades.
A new generation of militants in Jenin and Nablus have rejected the Palestinian Authority, which has limited governance powers in Palestinian cities, and apparently is not answerable to traditional hierarchies. Calling themselves the Jenin Battalion and the Lion’s Den, they have American-made weapons smuggled from Jordan or stolen and, although many are too young to remember the destruction of 2002 in Jenin, they are old enough to be inspired by stories from it.
Facing diminishing work prospects, the restrictions of a military occupation, no faith in a political future, and the prospect of more Israeli military raids, “These are people who are willing to fight and willing to die,” according to an Israeli journalist.
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