Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova Opens Up About Moscow Arrest: 'We Are the Many and They Are the Few'

13 September 19

---

If You Are Going to Stay, You Have to Help

The budget is too thin to do this. We have many, many more readers than donors and it is breaking the process down.

We understand that we will lose some readers, although we haven’t lost many yet, if we do we do.

If you stay we need your help and we need it now.

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

Update My Monthly Donation

---

If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611

12 September 19

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

WE WILL NOT SIT BACK PASSIVELY AND ALLOW RSN TO TANK - Right now everything we do is threatened on an immediate basis by lack of funding. That is amplified by this month’s lack of support. We are not just going to stand idly by as the organization is destabilized by we amounts to very minimal support. If that offends you, be aware that it offends us too. Please donate what you can. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova Opens Up About Moscow Arrest: 'We Are the Many and They Are the Few'

Nadya Tolokonnikova, The Daily Beast
Tolokonnikova writes: "Imagine a situation: the second you step out of your house you're immediately, brutally arrested with no explanation why, then you're brought to the police station where you spend your next six hours till 1 a.m."





See Pussy Riot’s call to free political prisoners in Russia.

READ MORE


House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump's Impeachment One Step Closer to Reality After House Judiciary Committee Sets Guidelines
Jay Connor, The Root
Connor writes: "If only Operation Trump Gotta Go was as easy as signing a Change.org petition and changing all the locks in the White House."
READ MORE

Joe Biden. (photo: AP)

Joe Biden Is Demanding Financial Transparency While Concealing His Own Wealth
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "The Bidens have used their home state's financial privacy laws to shield his income from public view, by setting up two tax- and transparency-avoidance vehicles known as S corporations."
READ MORE

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty)

Newspaper Owned by Richest Man in the World Lays Off Non-Union Workers
Naomi LaChance, Splinter
LaChance writes: "Management at the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, announced plans on Wednesday to scrap the Express, a free newspaper for local commuters."

EXCERPT:

According to the newspaper’s union, the Washington Post Guild, many of the people losing their jobs are young, female employees. The union said that all Express employees were underpaid and excluded from the newsroom’s union contract, and that some of these workers noticed they were not being fairly compensated and started looking into unionizing. 

The Post Express’ last issue will be Thursday. Dan Caccavaro, the executive editor of Express, told DCist he was unsure what would happen to the “hawkers,” workers who distributed the papers every day. 

Washington Post Guild@PostGuild

The Washington Post Guild condemns the shutdown of Post Express and the layoffs of 20 friends and colleagues. https://postguild.org/blog/2019-09-11-guild-condemns-post-express-layoffs-and-shutdown/ …

437

2:49 PM - Sep 11, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

314 people are talking about this

In a post on its website, the Guild condemned the layoffs:

These employees, many of them young women, performed the same jobs as other staff in our newsroom for substantially lesser pay. They published our journalism, and we published theirs. They were excluded from a union contract that would have protected them only by legal and bureaucratic fictions that labeled them a different entity within our company, though Post Express and The Washington Post are both owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world.

Earlier this year, a number of Express employees recognized this disparity and explored unionizing — and they had not given up on that hope. When these layoffs came, without a union, our colleagues in Express were not guaranteed the same protections as guild-covered Washington Post employees.

That sounds gross as hell, and also, depressingly, right on par with the terrible business practices at Bezos’ other operations, like, say, Amazon warehouses.

The Post’s public relations team explained in a blog that the change is part of a digital shift: “more and more readers are consuming the Post’s content digitally, and the Post will continue to serve those who commute via Metro with digital products, including its mobile site, apps, newsletters, and podcasts.”

The Post’s paywall is pretty stubborn, so now commuters will miss out on any kind of free news service, although they are eligible for a free 60-day trial. But my biggest issue here is that exactly no one should think Jeff Bezos, Mr. Amazon himself, would be worried about a little declining print advertising revenue from the the internet’s takeover.

READ MORE

Morningstar Mercredi suffered a salpingectomy without her consent. (image: Arvid Kuhnle)

Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent
Ankita Rao, VICE
Rao writes: "Her son was whisked away and she was wheeled into an operating room. Scared they were going to cut into her, she kept saying, 'What are you doing?' and 'Please don't do this.' She was ignored and transferred into another bed by a brusque man."

EXCERPT: 

At the turn of the 20th century, the eugenics movement was at its height in the U.S. and Canada. As part of the movement, both governments were looking to promote the Anglo-Saxon way of life, and to control the Indigenous population, which had been sovereign and out of reach of mainstream law and culture. Two provinces in Canada—Alberta and British Columbia—created legislation such as the Sexual Sterilization Act to promote the procedures. Hitler himself applauded this movement. 

“What he did to the Jews, they were already doing to the Indians here—the forced removal of people,” said Juana Majel Dixon, a California-based Indigenous law scholar and secretary of the National Congress of American Indians, who herself was sterilized by the Indian Health Services when she was 16 years old.

At the time, Indigenous people were often subjected to IQ testing to establish mental deficiency as a diagnosis for sterilization. IQ tests are widely known to be problematic—ill equipped at measuring the acumen of people raised outside of a traditional Western education system. This meant a disproportionate number of Indigenous people were diagnosed as mentally defective and subsequently sterilized.

Canada’s implementation of the Indian Act, which heavily restricted First Nations communities from traveling and practicing their culture, pushed Indigenous children to go to residential schools, away from their parents, where they were forced to learn Christian ideology. “If you don’t understand the context of systemic racism, and how colonization shaped these interactions, it amounts to individual bad people doing bad things,” Stote said.

READ MORE

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo: EPA)

ALSO SEE: Netanyahu, Putin to Meet as Russia Condemns Annexation Plan

Netanyahu Makes Pledge to Annex a Third of West Bank
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to annex the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank if he wins next week's general election."
READ MORE

In this July 11, 2018 file photo, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks to EPA staff at EPA Headquarters in Washington. (photo: AP)

Trump Admin to Drop Obama-Era Water Protection Rule on Wetlands, Streams
John Flesher, Associated Press
Flesher writes: "The Trump administration is revoking an Obama-era regulation that shielded many U.S. wetlands and streams from pollution but was opposed by developers and farmers who said it hurt economic development and infringed on property rights."
READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN

Update My Monthly Donation