Elizabeth Taylor. She was famous for being a film star and for her romances. And, as a result, you should avoid books about her that were published after the 1970s. Kitty Kelley probably wrote the definitive biography on Taylor and that was published in 1981 and entitled Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. Now William J. Mann published a great book on the actress, How To Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor In Hollywood, in 2009. How did he do that? He didn't try to tell the entire life story. He focused on a select period of time.
I bring that up because of J Randy Taraborrelli Becoming Beyonce - The Untold Story.
Beyonce is in the news this week -- see Kat's "Beyonce, Judas Priest, and the non-comeback kid Justy Timberlakes" -- and I happened upon this book for $3 bucks when I was grocery shopping -- $3 bucks in hardcover. It apparently didn't sell well back in 2015.
Beyonce is number one on the country charts.
She shouldn't be. The lyrics? Bitch is part of the chorus. One "bitch" would be enough to keep a song from playing a country music station. Then there's the video. Is she 18 starting out so allowing herself to be used? I don't need your boobies, Beyonce. I know your ass got you where you are but I still don't need your boobies. That video is not empowerment, it's embarrassment.
So this was the week to read up on Beyonce.
If there was a good book.
But J Randy has written a piece of garbage. He thinks Beyonce has lived Elizabeth Taylor's life, apparently, and that every detail is interesting and important. No, it's not. And trying to cover everything leaves him with a glorified time line passed off as a book.
J Randy is someone a lot of us know from Soul and other magazines. He decided to become an author. Early on, he could write. Even his vicious Call Her Miss Ross was readable.
For those who don't know, Call Her Miss Ross helped rip apart Diana's name and image. And it was lies. J Randy republished it as an 'update' (rewrite) as Diana Ross: A Biography. The difference between the two books? He took out a lot of the lies. He had chosen to believe bitches like crooked Martha Reeves and Gladys Knight. There's a reason Martha served on a city council briefly -- look it up for yourselves. At Motown in the sixties, Martha was jealous of Diana. Martha slept with anyone she could -- including the Papas of the Mamas and the Papas -- and she did everything she could to become a star. Didn't happen. She was popular on the radio but tended to repulse in front of a camera. She tried to have a solo career but no one wanted to hear her voice without the backing vocalists. So her career ended with the sixties. It must be very humiliating when she compares herself to Diana. Diana wasn't just a popular singer in the 60s, she was a record breaking one. She was a trendsetter in fashion as well. A trailblazer for Black artists and for all women. She went on to have a successful solo career and she was a box office star (the first Black woman to be one) who was also nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Diana is a legend. Martha, on a good day, is a "who?" And then there's Gladys. Black America's MAGA queen. If Orrin Hatch hadn't died two years ago, Gladys would still be up his ass. She's a Mormon and she really can't relate to most of us Black Americans. She also can't have a hit without others. Her brother and her cousins propped her up for years. Every attempt to go solo failed. She feels mistreated by Motown so she took it out on Motown. Go to hell, MAGA Gladys and take your scorn for Colin Kaepernick with you.
J Randy's book was vile and disgusting (yet readable) and he owes Diana Ross a huge apology. But God has a way of setting the balance. Call Her Miss Ross finally let J Randy find a White audience. But it's the last readable book he ever wrote. Call is the Lord's justice or karma.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
•
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re going outside the British High Court, where we’re joined by Matt Kennard, who’s been closely following the hearings. He’s head of investigations at the journalism website Declassified UK. His new book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the American Empire, is out in June.
Matt, welcome back to Democracy Now! Thanks so much for joining us. This is the lunch break of the High Court. Yesterday, the lawyers for Julian Assange made their case. Today, the lawyers for the U.S. government argued he should be extradited to the United States. Can you talk about what the judges who are hearing this case have been most interested in, and your assessment of the presentations so far?
MATT KENNARD: Well, firstly, I should just say that this case, this hearing today and yesterday, is merely about whether Julian Assange has a right to appeal the extradition to the United States. That decision was made a couple years ago, and he wants to appeal it on the substantive issues.
And yesterday, his lawyers went through the main issue, which is that this is a political prosecution, which is prohibited in the U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty of 2003. You can’t send someone to the United States for political offenses. They argued they’ve even taken at its highest — the U.S. indictment is indicting him under the Espionage Act, effectively as a spy, and that is a political offense. So that was how it started. They also argued that it contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 7 is about foreseeability. In 2010, when he began releasing the U.S. cables, he had no way of knowing that what he was doing was a criminal offense, because it’s never been prosecuted by the U.S. government before, even revealing the names of human informants. And then they went on to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is about freedom of speech and free expression and press freedom — again, a huge violation of that, of course, if Assange goes to the United States.
And today, the U.S. lawyer, effectively, her case was about trying to differentiate Assange from journalists. They were saying he’s not a journalist, he’s a hacker, he’s a computer scientist — when, of course, it’s clear to everyone that Assange is a journalist. He revealed more criminality by the world’s most powerful country than anyone’s ever done in history.
So, for me, watching the case, the arguments being given by both lawyers today, it’s clear that Assange should be allowed an appeal on the substantive issues, because the original ruling in 2021, January 2021, by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, but on very narrow grounds. She agreed with every dot and comma, effectively, of the U.S. indictment, but said that he was a suicide risk, and the extradition should be blocked on those grounds. The U.S. then appealed, won that appeal and said that “We won’t treat him in the ways that the district judge assumed. We won’t put him under SAMs,” which is extremely onerous prison conditions. But that was then against — and that judge favored the U.S. But Assange was never allowed to appeal that original ruling on the substantive issues.
So, we must, for British justice, for global justice, because, of course, this case is about global journalism, because Assange is an Australian citizen who committed these so-called crimes that the U.S. is indicting him for outside of the U.S. So, if Britain does extradite Assange to the United States, that gives the U.S. extraterritorial reach to go anywhere around the world, pluck any journalist who’s publishing information they don’t like, and bring them to the United States. It’s hugely worrying for — not just for journalists in this jurisdiction, but any jurisdiction around the world.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Matt, you mentioned that Assange is an Australian citizen. On Wednesday, Australia’s Parliament overwhelmingly approved a motion calling for his release. Is this significant at all in terms of the course of these hearings or what might follow?
MATT KENNARD: Well, I mean, I don’t think it is, unfortunately, because we know the political pressure that has been brought on the United States government. There’s been presidents all over the world, from Lula to Petro in Colombia, and they’ve all been calling for the United States to drop this case and saying it’s a huge violation of freedom of the press, but it’s not happened. And then you’ve got civil society organizations, NGOs all around the world interested in press freedom saying that this is a huge violation of press freedom, and it’s had no impact on either party, because, of course, this indictment was first brought by the Trump administration and then carried on by the Biden administration, so this is a bipartisan consensus in Washington that they want to get Assange.
But what should protect Assange in this case, when he’s being persecuted by the political system in the United States, is an independent judiciary in Britain. Of course, that’s how we’re told it works. But, unfortunately, I believe that the U.K. judiciary has been captured by the state in this case, which is one of the surest signs of authoritarianism, and not only captured by the U.K. state, but captured by the U.S. state.
That also goes for the penal system. Why is Julian Assange in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London? This is called “Britain’s Guantánamo.” It’s full of rapists, pedophiles, terrorists. He’s never been charged and convicted of anything other than a bail violation in the U.K. And that conviction was spent in under two years. He’s still there on remand. And it’s nearly five years he’s been there.
So, the whole thing has been irregular from the start, so I don’t hold up too much hope for the British justice system. I think that what we — where there is hope is global public opinion. And as you can hear behind me, the people on the ground are really coming out to support Julian Assange in Britain. We don’t have the support in the same way from the mainstream media or even civil society as much as it should here, but that could change the game. So, hopefully, that pressure will tell. I do believe that it may look so bad for the British justice system to not allow an appeal, that they will allow this to go forward. But we don’t know. This case has been irregular from the start.
Peter Greste -- the journalist who spent more than a year locked up in an Egyptian prison — has said the Australian government took too long to finally call for the release and return of Julian Assange.
Assange took his final appeal against extradition to the United States to the UK’s highest court this week -- a last bid to stop him from being sent across the Atlantic to face espionage charges.
[. . .]
Now, Mr Greste is a professor of journalism and executive director of the Alliance for Journalist’s Freedom.
On this week’s episode of ‘Court in the Act’, he explained why Assange should be released from prison and allowed back to Australia – while also saying he still does not believe some of the 52-year-old’s actions were journalism.
“Even if I disagree with the way that he handled information, even if I think it’s not journalism — the way that the US government is using the Espionage Act to come after Julian for publishing the information that he did has serious implications for journalists,” Mr Greste said.
“It sets a very, very dangerous precedent that can be used against legitimate news organisations and legitimate journalists.
“It’s very difficult to have a sensible conversation about Julian Assange because everybody wants to push him into either of those camps. A hero or villain.
“It’s not just possible but important to hold those two contradictory truths together and recognise that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.”
+ Tim Sebastian: “You go on supplying them [Israel] with hardware to do these things, you own this operation every bit as much as they do, don’t you?”
Nancy Pelosi: “No, we don’t. We don’t…there’s nothing that we have sent since Oct. 7 that has contributed to this brutality.”
+ Pelosi comes off as ancient under Tim Sebastian’s questioning: she’s confused, arrogant and ignorant of basic history. But consider this: by the time Pelosi entered Congress in 1987, Joe Biden had been serving in the Senate for 15 years!
+ The compulsion to lie when literally everyone knows you are lying is the defining political pathology of our time…
+ As Pelosi continues to write her own dubious political obituary, consider that for nearly two years of increasing tensions, the Pentagon didn’t have direct communications with the Chinese military, after Pelosi’s provocative trip to Taiwan in 2022. The hotline was only recently restored.
+ As I wrote in my Gaza Diary last week, Israel is committing war crimes so brazen & outrageous that no one had even thought of legislating against them. What’s more, almost every act of this war can be independently documented, often in real time. The entire war is a crime.
No end to the trauma of those impacted by the horrors unleashed on 7 October.
No end to the suffering and desperation of the people in Gaza.
No end to the regional turmoil.
I was in Gaza this week to see first-hand the unfolding tragedy and to meet with our tireless and brave teams on the ground who face impossible challenges to deliver life-saving assistance to Palestinian civilians in the Strip. What I saw was shocking and unsustainable.
I am deeply concerned about a possible full-scale Israeli military operation in the densely populated Rafah area, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering and where we have the only points of entry of humanitarian goods.
I cannot stress enough how urgently we need a deal that will bring about a humanitarian ceasefire and the release of hostages. I reiterate my call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages and for a humanitarian ceasefire.
In the meantime, I will continue to urge all concerned – including Israeli authorities - to address the key impediments to our humanitarian response on the ground. We need more safety measures, greater security and the tools and access points to scale up aid, particularly in the north of the Strip.
I am also continuing my extensive engagements in the region and internationally, to both support all efforts toward a ceasefire and bring about a more common understanding and coordinated approach to addressing the complex humanitarian, security and political crises affecting not only Gaza, but the whole of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel and the region.
I am convinced that there is no time to lose in laying the framework for Gaza’s recovery and for a long-term political resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including by advancing meaningful, irreversible steps towards a two-State solution.
Madam President,
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, from 18 January through 16 February, 4,327 Palestinians were killed and over 7,000 injured in fighting and Israeli operations in the Strip, bringing the total Palestinian fatalities in the war to more than 28,000, many women and children.
The IDF has said that over 10,000 Palestinian fatalities are militants.
In addition to the approximately 1,200 fatalities on 7 October in Israel, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported 235 security forces personnel killed in Gaza since ground operations began. Of the 253 hostages kidnapped on 7 October, some 134 are believed to be still held hostage by Hamas, 112 have been freed, and 11 bodies recovered.
160 UN staff have been killed in Gaza – the largest single loss of life in the history of the Organization.
Madam President,
Battles have continued across Gaza, including a campaign in Khan Younis that began in late January and, more recently, intensified airstrikes in the densely populated Rafah area.
Hospitals, schools and other protected sites continue to be severely impacted by military operations. l, albeit at reduced frequency and range.
Also briefing the Council was Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders.
Fearful of further deadly Israeli attacks, he said he was “appalled” by the United States’ repeated use of its veto power to obstruct efforts to adopt the most evident of resolutions: one demanding an immediate ceasefire.
“We live in fear of a ground invasion” in Rafah, he said.
Calling Washington’s new proposed draft resolution “misleading at best”, he said the Council should reject any resolution “that further hampers humanitarian efforts on the ground and leads this Council to tacitly endorse the continued violence and mass atrocities in Gaza”.
“Attacks on healthcare is an attack against humanity,” he said, noting that while Israel claims Hamas is operating in hospitals, “we have seen no independently verified evidence of this.”
Not 48 hours ago, Israeli shelling and gunfire killed and injured MSF staff and their families in Khan Younis, despite notification to the warring parties of the location, which was marked with an MSF flag, he said, recalling that some were trapped in the burning building, which active shooting delayed ambulances from reaching them in what has become an “all too familiar” pattern of Israeli forces raiding hospitals, bulldozing MSF vehicles and attacking its convoys.
“This pattern of attacks is either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence,” he said, adding that his colleagues in Gaza are fearful that as he speaks to the Council today, they will be punished tomorrow.
“The laws and the principles we collectively depend on to enable humanitarian assistance are now eroded to the point of becoming meaningless,” he said.
In the face of killings and maiming of aid workers, “the humanitarian response in Gaza today is an illusion,” he said, adding that efforts to provide aid are “haphazard, opportunistic, and entirely inadequate”.
“How can we deliver lifesaving aid in an environment where the distinction between civilians and combatants is disregarded?” he asked, adding that his teams are exhausted. “Calls for more humanitarian assistance have echoed across this Chamber, yet in Gaza we have less and less each day – less space, less medicine, less food, less water, less safety.”
Since 7 October, MSF has been forced to evacuate nine health facilities, and medical teams have added a new acronym to their vocabulary – “W.C.N.S.F., Wounded Child, No Surviving Family”, he said.
Citing a new draft resolution being negotiated by the US he said that Gazans "need a ceasefire not when ‘practicable’, but now". “They need a sustained ceasefire, not a ‘temporary period of calm’. Anything short of this is gross negligence.”
On Thursday, at least 40 people were killed and scores wounded by Israeli attacks in Gaza’s Deir al-Balah that flattened houses.
One attack on a tent by an Apache warplane killed two and injured many members of the al-Ramlawi family who were seeking shelter in the west of Deir al-Balah.
“My cousin, who lost his daughter, [woke up to the] horrors, with the sound of the Apache warplane getting louder and louder,” said Hassan Al-Ramlawi, 33, one of the family members.
“It’s just a tent. They are displaced and evacuated from the north here to seek refuge. They were sleeping. Why were they attacked? Even in tents, we are not safe.”
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, the host of this year’s annual Group of 20 gathering, began the meeting by decrying the “paralysis” at the U.N. Security Council, where Washington vetoed a third resolution for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza this week.
“This state of inaction results in the loss of innocent lives,” Vieira said.
The top diplomats at the gathering, which included Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, offered their views on various geopolitical issues in a session that was closed to the media so officials could express themselves more candidly.
But by mistake, a small group of journalists, including from The Washington Post, were able to listen in on the session because the audio headsets continued broadcasting the remarks, unbeknownst to the Brazilian hosts.
Australia, a close ally of the United States, supported an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and strongly warned about the “further devastation” that could result from Israel’s announced military campaign in the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1 million displaced Palestinians have sought shelter.
“We say again to Israel — do not go down this path,” said Australia’s representative, Katy Gallagher. “This would be unjustifiable.”
South Africa, which has accused Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza, a charge Israel strenuously denies, said world leaders have “allowed impunity to hold sway.”
“We have failed the people of Palestine,” said Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation.
Kennedy stated he does not think biological males should be allowed to compete against women in consequential sports where scholarships or careers are at stake, as it would not be fair.
The death of a non-binary 16-year-old in Oklahoma has left LGBTQ+ Americans overwhelmed by anger and grief this week.
Hallway cameras inside Owasso High School West Campus show the student, Nex Benedict, before and after the Feb. 7 fight, Owasso Police Department spokesman Nick Boatman told NBC News.
Boatman said investigators have reviewed the video and will release it “at some point.” He did not provide additional details about what the video shows.
Notably, Sue Benedict said in an interview with the Independent that her child had started to be bullied by other students last fall. The bullying began shortly after the Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, signed a bill that prohibits transgender public school students from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
“I said ‘you’ve got to be strong and look the other way, because these people don’t know who you are’,” she told the publication. “I didn’t know how bad it had gotten.”
Stitt offered his condolences to Nex’s family in a statement on Wednesday, calling it “a tragedy” and said that “bullies must be held accountable”. The statement seemed hollow to LGBTQ+ people across Oklahoma – several of whom told the Guardian this week that their state has become increasingly hostile towards transgender and non-binary people.
“This is a direct result of hateful rhetoric about two-spirit and LGBTQ people,” said Sarah Adams, a two-spirit member of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma. Two-spirit is a contemporary term used by many Indigenous cultures to describe a person who lives outside the gender binary of male and female.
Oklahoma lawmakers have proposed more than 50 anti-LGBTQ+ laws in 2024 alone, more than any other state this year, according to the ACLU. In 2022, Oklahoma became the first state to enact an explicit ban on non-binary gender markers on birth certificates.
Just two weeks before Nex’s death, the Oklahoma’s schools superintendent, Ryan Walters, appointed the far-right social media influencer Chaya Raichik to the state committee that reviews the appropriateness of school library content. Raichik runs Libs of TikTok, an anti-LGBTQ+ social media account.
In a video released by the Oklahoma department of education last year, Walters described trans children as a danger to their classmates who put “our girls in jeopardy”.
The basics of the story are ugly, but we cannot look away, because this is what we have become: a country that wages a one-sided legislative war against trans kids. We are a country where Benedict was bullied for being nonbinary. We are a country where on February 7, Benedict was beaten with a trans friend in a bathroom, and the adult on bathroom duty did nothing for two minutes before stepping in. We are a country where the school administrators, instead of calling an ambulance or the police as Sue Benedict wanted, was sent home with a two-week suspension for “fighting.” Sue took Nex Benedict to the hospital with a badly bruised and scratched face, the back of their head hurt from hitting the bathroom floor, but the hospital quickly discharged them. The next morning, they collapsed and died.
But school officials aren’t the only people who failed Benedict. Libs of TikTok fascist and far-right social media influencer Chaya Raichik hounded a beloved teacher who supported Benedict at Owasso High School out of his job through her heavily edited viral videos. The superintendent of public schools Ryan Walters appointed Raichik, a former New York real estate agent, to the state of Oklahoma’s library advisory committee. Walters has refused to comment on the beating death of one of his students, as if Benedict did not exist. (Since Benedict’s death, he has found time to post worshipful thoughts about Donald Trump.)
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