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Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/nyregion/college-protests-columbia-campus.html

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Opinion | Student Protest Is an Essential Part of Education - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/opinion/student-protests-columbia-israel.html

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The transformation of the protests into a national political football is perhaps inevitable — everyone up to President Richard Nixon sounded off about students in ’68 — but it is still a shame. Because student protests, even at their most disruptive, are at their core an extension of education by other means, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war.

The hallowed notion of a university as a bastion of discourse and learning does not and cannot exclude participation in contemporary debates, which is what students are being prepared to lead. From Vietnam to apartheid to the murder of George Floyd, universities have long been places for open and sometimes fiery debate and inquiry. And whenever universities themselves have been perceived by students to be complicit or wrong in their stances, they have been challenged by their communities of students and teachers. If the university cannot tolerate the heat, it cannot serve its primary mission.
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The counterargument, of course, is that without decorum and calm, the educational process is disrupted, and so it is proper and necessary for administrations to impose order. But disruption is not the only byproduct; protests can also shape and enhance education: a disproportionate number of those who rose up at Columbia in 1968 went into social service of some sort, fired by the idealism and faith in change that underpinned their protests and by the broader social movement of the ’60s.

I have a snapshot embedded in my memory of groups of students milling about the grounds, which were littered with the debris of the confrontation, many of them proudly sporting bandages from the injuries inflicted by the violent sweep of the Tactical Patrol Force. Psychedelic music blared from some window, and a lone maintenance man pushed a noisy lawn mower over a surviving patch of grass.

The sit-ins had been ended, and order was being restored, but something frightening and beautiful had been unleashed, a faith that mere students could do something about what’s wrong with the world or at least were right to try.

The classic account of Columbia ’68, “The Strawberry Statement,” a wry, punchy diary by an undergraduate, James Simon Kunen, who participated in the protests, captures the confused welter of causes, ideals, frustrations and raw excitement of that spring. “Beyond defining what it wasn’t, it is very difficult to say with certainty what anything meant. But everything must have a meaning, and everyone is free to say what meanings are. At Columbia a lot of students simply did not like their school commandeering a park, and they rather disapproved of their school making war, and they told other students, who told others, and we saw that Columbia is our school and we will have something to say for what it does.”

That’s the similarity. Just as students then could no longer tolerate the horrific images of a distant war delivered, for the first time, in almost real time by television, so many of today’s students have found the images from Gaza, now transmitted instantly onto their phones, to demand action. And just as students in ’68 insisted that their school sever ties to a government institute doing research for the war, so today’s students demand that Columbia divest from companies profiting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza. And students then and now have found their college administrators deaf to their entreaties.

#Occupation°_universités #Mouvements_étudiants #1968 #Gaza

Opinion | Harvey Weinstein and the Limits of ‘She Said, She Said, She Said’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/opinion/harvey-weinstein-conviction-me-too.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_2024

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Those following Mr. Weinstein’s legal battles always knew there was a possibility that his conviction would be thrown out on appeal. But the nature of the decision, and its focus on several women who testified that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, even though none of those allegations had led to charges, revealed something that unsettled me.

Until Thursday, it seemed that we had entered a new age of accountability, legal and social, not just for Mr. Weinstein but also for the abusers who’d come after him. Even as the #MeToo movement fell short in some ways, the Weinstein case felt like a cultural marker — an Arthur’s sword in the stone moment, in which something irreversible happened. The monster of #MeToo had been vanquished, and it changed something about the way we understood vulnerability and power.

And then, suddenly, it didn’t.

To be clear, Thursday’s ruling will not spring Mr. Weinstein from behind bars. He already faced an additional 16 years from a separate conviction in California, and he may be sent there to serve out that sentence.

But in establishing the limits of these so-called prior bad act witnesses — an attempt by the prosecution in the case to show a pattern of coercion — the ruling did something else: It highlighted the striking gap between how we’ve come to believe women inside the courtroom and outside it.

While Mr. Weinstein’s accusers could, as Ms. Kantor wrote, fill a courtroom — and the women who proclaimed #MeToo in their wake could populate a small country — much of Mr. Weinstein’s appeal rested precisely on the argument that those voices ended up hurting, not helping, the case. As I read and reread the ruling, I realized the same swelling chorus of victims that made it possible for Mr. Weinstein to be held to account in the court of public opinion had somehow saved him in the court of law.

“What I tell my students is to think about the courtroom as an alternate universe,” said the legal scholar Deborah Tuerkheimer, when I called her to ask if I was crazy not to have seen this coming. A former Manhattan prosecutor and the author of the book “Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers,” she explained that, indeed, there is a tension between the principles of criminal prosecution — which tend to limit a defendant’s “other bad acts” or past behavior — and public perception of a credible allegation.

It is frustrating, of course, that the very reason there are so many women available to speak out is that the legal system has failed them from the start. In the Weinstein case, many of the accusations were about sexual harassment, which is a civil, not criminal, violation. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations.

But the legal system is not adequately set up to prosecute people accused of being serial sexual predators like Mr. Weinstein; it is, rightly, supposed to protect innocent people from being judged by their past behavior. (A person who has stolen once is not a lifelong thief, for one.) But sex crimes are more slippery than that, with patterns and power dynamics and less likelihood witnesses. Which can leave prosecutors in a Catch-22: To any casual observer, Mr. Weinstein’s history of accusations of abuse seems as though it should be admissible, and yet it was not.

#MeToo #Weinstein #Justice

Even With Gaza Under Siege, Some Are Imagining Its Reconstruction - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/business/gaza-economy-rebuilding.html

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The plan centers on a series of major projects, including a deepwater port, a desalination plant to provide drinking water, an online health care service and a transportation corridor connecting Gaza with the West Bank. A fund for reconstruction and development would oversee future undertakings.

The most forward-looking components, such as reducing customs barriers to trade and introducing a new currency in place of the Israeli shekel, assume the eventual establishment of Palestinian autonomy, a step that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to resist. He has also brushed aside the prospect that the future governance of Gaza could include a role for the Palestinian Authority, the most obvious potential partner for the reconstruction initiative.

The enormous price tag of any rebuilding is another impediment. The toll of the damage to Gaza’s crucial infrastructure has reached $18.5 billion, according to a recent estimate by the World Bank and the United Nations. Half the population is on the verge of famine, and more than a million people lack homes.
[...]
While visions of modern transportation systems may now seem tangential to Gaza’s essential needs, the plan is governed by the assumption that even temporary structures like emergency housing and health care facilities must be thoughtfully placed to avoid squandering future possibilities.

“Temporary tends to become permanent very quickly,” Mr. Choa said. “Someone says, ‘We’re going to put this big refugee camp right here,’ but that could be exactly where you want to put a wastewater treatment plant or a transit line in the future. You then create an obstacle.”
[...]
The ideas that have emerged from the workshops extend into the next quarter-century. These include the erection of a cutting edge soccer stadium and the elevation of the existing soccer team to a more internationally competitive level, and the creation of a strategy to encourage a Palestinian film industry.
[j’avoue mon scepticisme, voire mon effarement, sur cette affaire de stage]
The deepwater port would be established on an artificial island built from the nearly 30 million tons of debris and rubble that are expected to cover the territory whenever the conflict is over, with removal anticipated to take as long as a decade.

The plan proposes the establishment of a degree-granting Technical University of Reconstruction in northern Gaza that would draw students from around the world. They would study strategies to dig out from disaster and spur development, using postwar Gaza as a living laboratory.

The destruction is so extensive that the usual means of administering aid and overseeing rebuilding will be inadequate, said the World Bank official.

American government agencies face legal restrictions on working directly with the Palestinian Authority. Other institutions are reluctant to transact with the Palestinian Authority given its reputation for corruption. All of this makes private companies critical elements of the plan, even as they too will grapple with the risks of investing in a highly uncertain climate.
[inévitablement, le pont aux ânes de la pensée néolibérale]

While the largest projects require clarity over the future political administration of Gaza, other initiatives, such as those aimed at encouraging small businesses, could begin as soon as military activities cease.

“I want to focus on how we open the bread store, how we get factories up and running,” said Jim Pickup, chief executive of the Middle East Investment Initiative, a nonprofit that finances development projects. “Every truck that is going to remove rubble is a small business itself, supporting a family.”

Les #déblais sont à la fois une contrainte, très lourde à gérer et à manipuler, au sens propre, mais aussi une ressource susceptible de générer des revenus par son transport et sa transformation, et une matière première à réutiliser dans ce projet de #port, dont il me semble des entreprises israéliennes ont déjà proposé des visions il y a quelques mois. En tout cas, en 2017, les Israéliens avaient déjà diffusé des images de tels projets : ▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/israel-minister-for-intelligence-promotes-plan-for-gaza-island/2017/06/27/4e30586e-5b30-11e7-aa69-3964a7d55207_video.html
#urbanisme #reconstruction
Tout cela est un peu délirant alors qu’on ne sait pas vers quelle gouvernance de Gaza on va, et surtout quelle souveraineté l’entité aura... ce type de projet présuppose d’emblée une forme très forte de dépendance. Sans doute l’idée c’est : le gaz paiera. Je suis surpris que les Emiratis, les Saoudiens et les Qataris ne soient pas mentionnés dans l’article (sauf à l’état de fantasme : « The new initiative has yet to engage with the Gulf countries, Mr. Choa said. »)

Campus Protests Over Gaza Intensify Amid Pushback by Universities and Police - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/college-protests-spread-austin-dallas.html

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Ca n’a pas l’air d’intéresser du tout Le Monde qui n’en dit mot ce matin :

A wave of pro-Palestinian protests spread and intensified on Wednesday as students gathered on campuses around the country, in some cases facing off with the police, in a widening showdown over campus speech and the war in Gaza.

University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.

At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio. Students expressed solidarity with their fellow students at Columbia, and with a pro-Palestinian movement that appeared to be galvanized by the pushback on other campuses and the looming end of the academic year.

Protesters on several campuses said their demands included divestment by their universities from companies connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, disclosure of those and other investments and a recognition of the continuing right to protest without punishment.

Opinion | How ‘The Squad’ and Like-Minded Progressives Have Changed Their Party - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/progressives-democratic-party-aoc.html

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Ah si Jean-Luc Mélenchon pouvait s’inspirer d’Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez...

When the far-left politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley were first elected to Congress roughly half a decade ago, many moderate Democrats saw their unapologetically progressive vision for America as an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party.

That certainly seemed to be the view of Democratic leaders, who seemed intent on making “the squad,” as the progressive caucus is known, a group of permanent outsiders.

“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, told Maureen Dowd in 2019. “But they didn’t have any following,” Ms. Pelosi said of the squad. “They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.” At the time, Ms. Pelosi was bristling from criticism the progressive members had levied against her over her support for a funding bill the progressives said failed to protect migrant children, a major issue during the Trump presidency.

Five years later, Ms. Pelosi has stepped down from the leadership position she long held. The House progressive caucus has grown to nearly 100 members and has become a significant force within the party. The progressives have outlasted not only Ms. Pelosi, but also moderate Democrats who once led the party, like Representative Steny Hoyer, who has also bowed out of his role leading House Democrats. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the new minority leader, isn’t a member of the progressive caucus. (He left the caucus when he became leader of the House Democrats.) But he has been far friendlier to the group’s members and their agenda than his predecessor, Ms. Pelosi, a nod to the blossoming role of progressive politics within the Democratic Party and its voter base.

And in recent months, the insurgent group of unapologetic leftists has gained even more sway within the Democratic Party. Some of this is clearly a reaction to the extremism of Trumpism and far-right House Republicans. But the progressives have gained power in Washington amid rising anger over the U.S. role in Gaza.

For the first time in decades, possibly since the anti-Vietnam War and environmental movements, the left wing has led the center of the Democratic Party in a new political direction on a major issue — one sharply critical of the Israeli government, impatient with the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and increasingly willing to use American leverage to curb Israel’s military plans.

#Politique #USA #Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez

F.T.C. Bans Noncompete Clauses - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/noncompete-clause-ban.html

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The rule would prohibit companies from limiting their employees’ ability to work for rivals, a change that could increase competition and boost wages.
Listen to this article · 0:49 min Learn more

J. Edward Moreno

By J. Edward Moreno
April 23, 2024, 3:42 p.m. ET

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday banned employers from limiting their workers’ abilities to work for rivals, a sweeping change that the agency says could help raise wages and increase competition among businesses.

The move bars contracts known as noncompetes, which prevent workers from leaving for a competitor for a certain amount of time, in most circumstances. The agency has said the proposal would raise wages and increase competition.

The proposal was approved by the agency in a 3-2 vote. Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew N. Ferguson, two Republicans, voted against the measure.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

#Droit_travail #FTC #Lina_Khan #Action

Opinion | The Beginning of the End for PFAS, or ‘Forever Chemicals’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opinion/pfas-cancer-forever-chemicals.html

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The E.P.A.’s move this month to regulate PFAS is a significant next step, but even in places where the groundwater is not highly contaminated, we will all still be exposed to unregulated PFAS without further government action. The chemicals are used in a staggering number of consumer products, including carpet, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn, yoga pants, bags and toiletries like dental floss, shampoo and cosmetics. They are still key ingredients in some firefighting foams; many fire departments still use these foams in emergencies like chemical plant fires. And in Texas, thousands of pounds of PFAS are being shot into the ground to lubricate drill bits for fracking.

We already know that high levels of exposure to PFAS have been linked to disastrous health impacts like birth defects, liver damage and many kinds of cancer. Yet the rate at which PFAS are being released into the environment far outpaces toxicologists’ ability to study their consequences for human health. Some 31 percent of groundwater samples in places with no known source of PFAS have shown contamination levels that exceed E.P.A. limits. And in some locations with established sources, like military and industrial sites, the levels of PFAS are far higher than the standard set by the new rule.

We now need a federal ban on firefighting foams containing PFAS and regulations that are enforceable by law to limit not just specific compounds in our water, but the whole class of highly pervasive chemicals. Mandates should identify the historical sources of pollution to hold industries accountable and avoid further straining the communities exposed to PFAS with the additional cost of their cleanup. On Friday, the E.P.A. helpfully put two PFAS compounds under its Superfund authority, shifting accountability for cleanup from taxpayers to polluters.

#PFAS #Pollution

Ghost Kitchens Are Disappearing, Squeezed by Demand and Complaints - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/business/ghost-kitchens-restaurants-pandemic.html

Delivery-only operations boomed during the pandemic. Now Wendy’s, Kroger and mom-and-pop food businesses are rethinking their operations.

Biden says he’s ’considering’ wrapping up Julian Assange prosecution - Washington Times
▻https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/10/biden-says-hes-considering-wrapping-up-julian-assa

President Biden said Wednesday that his administration is mulling whether to end the prosecution of Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks founder who is facing criminal charges for publishing thousands of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables.

#opportunisme_crasse mais #bonne_nouvelle potentielle malgré tout

Boeing Engine Cover on Southwest Plane Falls Off - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/business/southwest-boeing-engine-takeoff.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource

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Les déboires de Boeing sont un condensé de ce que propose le néolibéralisme qui sacrifie la maintenance et la sécurité aux impératifs de rendement et de rentabilité.

The plane returned safely to Denver on Sunday after the crew reported that the cover came apart during takeoff and struck a wing flap. No injuries were reported.

#Boeing #Neolibéralisme

How to Clean Your Cast Iron. Plus, More Kitchen Questions, Answered. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/dining/kitchen-myths.html?smtyp=cur

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Apart from the best way to cook rice, nothing gets cooking-science types more riled up than cast-iron pans. If you haven’t cooked in one, you might wonder what all the fuss is about, both on the cooking and the cleaning front.

For cooking, cast iron has a great weight and a porous surface — slightly rough, compared with smooth stainless steel or a nonstick coating — that makes it ideal for searing. The surface absorbs oil, which hardens over heat and over time into a shiny, nearly nonstick patina. This process is called seasoning, not in the sense of adding salt to taste but in the sense of developing a well-used, trusted tool.

I have been told that a truly well-seasoned cast-iron pan can cook an omelet without sticking, but I am too chicken to try. I have also been told that the best way to clean my skillet is to boil it, to bury it in the sand, and to never wash it at all. None of these seem like practical options.

The prohibition against soap comes from a time when all soap was made with lye, which could eat through a patina in minutes. And it’s true that most of the time, soap is unnecessary. Most of your cleaning power should come from hot water and gentle scrubbing or brushing, the way cast-iron pots like Chinese woks and Indian kadai are traditionally cleaned.

John Sinclair, 82, Dies; Counterculture Activist Who Led a ‘Guitar Army’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/us/john-sinclair-dead.html

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They gave him ten for two
What else can the bastards do ?

John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82.

His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.

As the leader of the White Panther Party in the late 1960s, Mr. Sinclair spoke of assembling a “guitar army” to wage “total assault” on racists, capitalism and the criminalization of marijuana. “We are a whole new people with a whole new vision of the world,” he wrote in his book “Guitar Army” (1972), “a vision which is diametrically opposed to the blind greed and control which have driven our immediate predecessors in Euro-Amerika to try to gobble up the whole planet and turn it into one big supermarket.”

He also managed the incendiary Detroit rock band the MC5. Their lyrics — “I’m sick and tired of paying these dues/And I’m finally getting hip to the American ruse” — were a kind of ballad for the cause.

Malheureusement, l’histoire a donné tort à son très beau programme :

“We thought,” Mr. Sinclair wrote in “Guitar Army,” “that political organization and political theory were things of the past which had no relevance to the contemporary situation, that whatever happened would have to happen spontaneously if it was going to mean anything at all, and that all we had to do was to keep pumping out our propaganda as hard as we could and then just wait for the right moment to present itself, at which time there would be a huge apocalyptic flash and the future of the world would be settled in a matter of days.”

Le monde n’a malheureusement pas autant changé que cela, et la nécessité de faire voter des lois protectrices reste d’actualité, et pour cela les activistes ont besoin de relais institutionnels. C’est la contradiction de la période qui a suivi l’espoir des années 1960 et 1970 (mais aussi la désespérance de l’ère Mitterrand, qui a montré que sans les activistes, le pouvoir restait bien gentiment derrière les déjà puissants).

#John_Sinclair #Contre-culture #Activisme