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Please join the Black Law Students Association at Columbia Law School and TheEric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rightsfor the 2023 Paul Robeson Conference opening fireside chat. This conversation will feature Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. CC73, LAW76, and Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia Journalism School and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, as they discuss Attorney General Holder's new book, Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote.

6:00 - 7:30 p.m. | Jelani Cobb in Conversation with Eric Holder on Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote& Audience Q & A

7:30 - 8:30 p.m. | Reception (refreshmentswill be served)

Registration for this event is required.

Please Note: This event is open to CU affiliates only.

AboutOur Unfinished March

A brutal, bloody, and at times hopeful history of the vote; a primer on the opponents fighting to take it away; and a playbook for how we can save our democracy before its too latefrom the former U.S. Attorney General on the front lines of this fight

Voting is our most important right as Americansthe right that protects all the others, as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Actbut its also the one most violently contested throughout U.S. history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmarkShelby County v. Holdercase in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trumps effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy. The vote seems to be in unprecedented peril.

But the peril is not at all unprecedented. America is a fragile democracy, Eric Holder argues, whose citizens have only had unfettered access to the ballot since the 1960s. He takes readers through three dramatic stories of how the vote was won: first by white men, through violence and insurrection; then by white women, through protests and mass imprisonments; and finally by African Americans, in the face of lynchings and terrorism. Next, he dives into how the vote has been stripped away sinceShelbya case in which Holder was one of the parties. He ends with visionary chapters on how we can reverse this tide of voter suppression and become a true democracy where every voice is heard and every vote is counted.

Full of surprising history, intensive analysis, and actionable plans for the future, this is a powerful primer on our most urgent political struggle from one of the countrys leading advocates.

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2023 Paul Robeson Conference | A Conversation with Eric Holder ...

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Traffic, rent problems, scrolling Twitter all day, and talking to women it's all part of a strange new life for the men who conquered Kabul.

The Taliban captured their nation's capital and seized power in 2021. They had promised then to take a more progressive approach compared to when they ruled in the late 1990s, saying they would allow women more freedoms and treat its citizens fairly.

Instead, the fundamentalist regime has continually cut back on allowing women to attend schools and universities, and has been killing protestors over the last year. Under Taliban rule, conditions in Afghanistan have returned to what they were in 2001, before the US invaded, retired US General Jack Keane said.

Some Taliban soldiers have been installed into positions of privilege in the government. But, whisked away from their gun-toting, rural lives as holy warriors and now clocking in as mere pieces in the ruling machine, five Taliban solders say they've become jaded with city life, according to a report by Sabawoon Samim, an independent researcher.

Samim's late 2022 interviews with the five men a commander, a sniper, a deputy commander, and two fighters were published on February 2 by the non-profit organization Afghanistan Analysts Network, or AAN.

They portray how the five fighters, aged from 24 to 32, have gone from watching the skies for drone strikes to grappling with everyday urban battles like internet addiction and difficult bosses.

"The social influence of living in an urban context on these Taleban is noticeable," Samim wrote in his report.

"Rural and urban, fighters and civilians, madrassa and school-educated, victors and those they now rule, women outside in public with 'open' faces and men whose female relatives live in purdah are all now mixing," the researcher added.

"The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Huzaifa, a 24-year-old sniper now working at a police district in Kabul, told Samim. "Life's become so wearisome; you do the same things every day."

Huzaifa, like his four brothers in arms, is married and has kids, according to the AAN report. All five were just children or weren't even born when US-led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001. Most had never seen Kabul until 2021.

They'd spent between six and 11 years fighting for the Taliban, joining when they were teenagers, Samim wrote.

Now working in the interior ministry, Kamran, 27, a deputy group commander, still misses "the time of jihad," he said, per the AAN report.

"Now, when someone's nominated for a government job, he first asks whether that position has a car or not," Kamran told Samim. "We used to live among the people. Many of us have now caged ourselves in our offices and palaces, abandoning that simple life."

Abdul Nafi, 25, a fighter now working as an executive director in the government, said he had to learn how to use a computer for his new job, per the AAN report.

Yet there isn't much work for him to do, and so he spends most of his time on Twitter, he told Samim.

"We're connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujaheddin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter," he said.

According to Samim, another new source of worry for Abdul Nafi is speaking with women, who international watchdogs say have had their rights repeatedly crushed since the Taliban took power. The Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law means its leaders believe men and women should be segregated in public spaces.

Abdul Nafi described his astonishment at having a woman in the same computer class as him, and said he had been afraid to approach the local bazaar because of meeting women, per the report.

Huzaifa, the sniper working in the police, said he and his coworkers initially hid from women who approached them for help, because "never in our whole lives have we talked to strange women."

The Taliban authorities had to tell them that it was legal in Islamic law to speak with the women, because it was their job as law enforcement, Huzaifa told Samim.

For Omar Mansur, a 32-year-old commander thrust into a high-ranking government position, traffic and rent are two of his biggest gripes in Kabul.

"What I don't like about Kabul is its ever-increasing traffic holdups. Last year, it was tolerable but in the last few months, it's become more and more congested," he told Samim. Omar Mansur earns $180 a month, and said rent is too high for him to afford bringing his family to Kabul, even at his level of seniority.

Abdul Salam, 26, a farmer who fought for the Taliban several times, now mans road checkpoints, and complained that he felt the Taliban's treatment of fighters worsened because the soldiers were no longer precious manpower in peacetime, according to the AAN report.

"There is a proverb in our area that money is like a shackle. Now, if we complain, or don't come to work, or disobey the rules, they cut our salary," he told Samim.

Salam, along with several other Taliban fighters interviewed, felt the public had also stopped respecting them.

He told Samim he tried to hitch a ride back to his home province of Kandahar. When a car stopped along the road, he foundan elderly man who'd paused in his old Corolla to tell him he shouldn't need help because he was supposed to be running the nation, he said, per the AAN report.

Samim and the Afghan Analysts Network did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

See the rest here:
Some Taliban Fighters Sick of 9 to 5 Grind After 2021 Victory: Report

They wont wipe out conventional computers, though. Using a classical machine will still be the easiest and most economical solution for tackling most problems. But quantum computers promise to power exciting advances in various fields, from materials science to pharmaceuticals research. Companies are already experimenting with them to develop things like lighter and more powerful batteries for electric cars, and to help create novel drugs.

The secret to a quantum computers power lies in its ability to generate and manipulate quantum bits, or qubits.

Today's computers use bitsa stream of electrical or optical pulses representing1s or0s. Everything from your tweets and e-mails to your iTunes songs and YouTube videos are essentially long strings of these binary digits.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, usequbits, whichare typically subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Generating and managing qubits is a scientific and engineering challenge. Some companies, such as IBM, Google, and Rigetti Computing, use superconducting circuits cooled to temperatures colder than deep space. Others, like IonQ, trap individual atoms in electromagnetic fields on a silicon chip in ultra-high-vacuum chambers. In both cases, the goal is to isolate the qubits in a controlled quantum state.

Qubits have some quirky quantum properties that mean a connected group of them can provide way more processing power than the same number of binary bits. One of those properties is known as superposition and another is called entanglement.

Qubits can represent numerous possible combinations of 1and 0 at the same time. This ability to simultaneously be in multiple states is called superposition. To put qubits into superposition, researchers manipulate them using precision lasers or microwave beams.

Read the rest here:
Explainer: What is a quantum computer? | MIT Technology Review

Putin Cleared the Room for NSA Ajit Doval, Talked Perception Sharing: Inside the Closed-Door Meet  msnNOW

Read more:
Putin Cleared the Room for NSA Ajit Doval, Talked Perception Sharing: Inside the Closed-Door Meet - msnNOW

Twenty-five years ago the Tawana Brawley case enflamed race relations in America and catapulted Al Sharpton into the national limelight. But Sharptons race demagoguery had begun years before that, and his notoriety as a racial arsonist continues up to the present, as testified by his leadership role in turning the Trayvon Martin shooting into a national racial confrontation.

The Tawana Brawley case is the subject of a short, excellent new documentarybyRetro Report that expertly combines historic photos, documents, and news footage with recent interviews (including with Al Sharpton himself) along with important perspectiveon the tactics and sordid record of one of Americas most (in)famous agitators and race hucksters. Surprisingly, the New York Timesand Newsweek/Daily Beast, two of the MSM flagships that helped boost Sharpton to prominence and shield him from the consequences of his violent advocacy, have promoted the recent Retro Report expos of Sharpton. The Daily Beast article went further, not only highlighting Sharptons role in the Brawley affair but also touching upon the Rev. Als incendiary role as both the gasoline and the spark in the Crown Heights riots and the Freddys Fashion Mart murder/arson tragedy.

Tawana Brawley: Rev Als Launchpad

In November 1987, Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl from Wappingers Falls, New York, knew she was in trouble. Although she had been grounded, she had gone out with her older boyfriend anyway and had been gone for four days. She knew from past experience that when she went home she could expect a beating from her mothers live-in boyfriend, a violentex-conand alcoholic who had served time for murder. To avoid those consequences she concocted a lurid story that ended upbeing transformed once Sharpton got ahold of it into a racially polarizing incident at the national (and then global) level.

Tawana claimed that she had been abducted, raped, and abused by a group of white men, who smeared her with feces and wrote B****, KKK, and N***** on her clothes and body. If true, this would have been a horrendous crime. But Sharpton turned this hoax of a troubled teen into a malicious cause clbre to advance his own career. Sharpton and his fellow activists, attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, turned the case into a three-ring media circus that ran for months in 1988, capturing the top headlines of many of the MSM daily news cycles.

Under Sharptons tutelage, two of Miss Brawleys four anonymous white men developed names: local police officer Harry Crist, Jr. and local prosecutor Steven Pagones. Not only that, but Sharpton accused Gov. Mario Cuomo and other state officials of covering up the crime. Officer Crist, who, according to testimony of family and friends, was already dealing with despondency over personal issues, committed suicide, very likely pushed over the edge by the onslaught of defamatory accusations and hateful publicity orchestrated by Rev. Al. But Sharpton, ever the audacious opportunist, even exploited the Crist suicide, accusing Pagones of murdering Crist to keep secret their rape of Miss Brawley. As with all of his other outrageous charges, he offered no evidence.

A special New York State Grand Jury composed of both white and black members spent seven months examining evidence and hearing from 180 witnesses, including forensic experts. One of the witnesses, a black woman who was a resident of the apartment complex where Tawana Brawley was found in a garbage bag, said she had seen Brawley climb into the bag. Forensic experts said there was no evidence of rape and the evidence overwhelmingly indicated that the alleged abuses were self-inflicted. While the Grand Jury was conducting its investigation, Sharpton & Co. were conducting daily rallies and marches, as well as busing in demonstrators to lay siege to the Grand Jury and milk the MSM press corps for as much publicity as they could get. The Grand Jury released its 170-page reportin October 1988. In its conclusion, after summarizing the key evidence, the Grand Jury stated:

Based upon all of the evidence that has been presented to the Grand Jury, we conclude that Tawana Brawley was not the victim of a forcible sexual assault by multiple assailants over a four-day period. There is no evidence that any sexual assault occurred.

(The conclusion of the Grand Jury can be read here.)

The Grand Jury also exonerated prosecutor Steven Pagones, who later was awarded$345,000 in a defamation lawsuit against Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason.

Sharpton: Brawley Case Will Make Us the Biggest N*****s in New York

However, even several months before the Grand Jury issued its report, one of Sharptons top aides revealed Sharptons mercenary motive.Perry McKinnon, a decorated black Vietnam vet and former police officer,told federal investigators that Rev. Al had admitted privately that he didnt believe Tawana Brawleys story, but intended to ride it to fame and glory. McKinnon stated:

Sharpton acknowledged to me early on that The Brawley story do (sic) sound like bull****, but it dont matter. Were building a movement. This is the perfect issue. Because youve got whites on blacks. Thats an easy way to stir up all the deprived people, who would want to believe and who would believe and all [youve] got to do is convince them that all white people are bad. Then youve got a movement. It dont matter whether any whites did it or not. Something happened to her even if Tawana dont (sic) it to herself.

Perry McKinnon submitted to a lie detector test administered on camera and passed all questions. In the Retro Report video, McKinnon further remarked, on camera:

This whole situation is not about Tawana Brawley. Its about Mason, Maddox, and Sharpton taking over the town. Their exact words were, We beat this, we will be the biggest N****** in New York.

Tellingly, when Sharpton is confronted with McKinnons accusations, he doesnt deny them. In his interview with Retro Report, Sharpton utilizes his standard evasiveness and weasel-worded response. He refuses to apologize, admit that he was wrong, or concede that Brawley was lying. He resorts to his standard line that something happened, as if that absolves him of all the unethical and criminal activities he and his team employed. Whatever happened, youre dealing with a minor who was missing for four days, so its clear that something wrong happened, Sharpton says. He goes on in a pathetic attempt to cloak his activities in righteousness, declaring: Even if you think I was wrong on some cases, dont act like I wasnt geared towards social justice.

Yes, no matter how wrong, corrupt, dishonest, or criminal his tactics, they can all be rationalized as acceptable, or even good, because they are employed in the pursuit of Rev. Als warped definition of social justice.

As Sharpton predicted, the Brawley hoax did indeed catapult him to new levels of fame and political power, even though it should have landed him in jail and forever exposed him as a malicious charlatan. The Tawana Brawley hoax cost New York taxpayers over a million dollars, but the far greater cost in terms of poisoning black-white race relations is incalculable.

Serial racial arsonist, liar, demagogue, media celebrity

Even before the Tawana Brawley case had made him a household name, Sharpton had established himself as a racist demagogue. An in-depth, 49-page report by Carl F. Horowitz entitled Mainstreaming Demagoguery: Al Sharptons Rise to Respectability(published by the National Legal and Policy Center) traces Rev. Als sordid career as an incendiary race baiter and race hater from the famous 1984 Bernard Goetz Subway Vigilante shooting, through the Howard Beach conflict (1986), the Tawana Brawley hoax (1987-88), the Central Park Wilding rape case (1989), the Bensonhurst siege (1989-90), the Crown Heights riots and Rosenbaum murder (1991), the Freddys Fashion Mart murder/arson tragedy (1995), the Amadou Diallo shooting (1999), and much more.

Rev. Sharptons sordid career also has been ably summarized by John Perazzo in The Nine Lives of Al Sharptonfor FrontPageMag.com.

Sharptons role in the vicious racist campaign against Jewish storeowner Fred Harari, owner of Freddys Fashion Mart in Harlem, that resulted in the murder of seven people, should have spelled curtains for the hate-spewing reverend. Sharpton and Morris Powell, a lieutenant in Sharptons National Action Network (NAN), organized an ongoing street demonstration against Freddys, with escalating rhetoric that culminated in a shooting rampage by one of Sharptons followers, Roland J. Smith, aka Abubunde Mulocko, who burst into the store and shot four people, torched the shop, and then shot himself. Three others died in the fire. In all, eight people, including Smith/Mulocko, died. Sharpton immediately tried to distance himself from the deadly debacle, insisting he had nothing to do with it. However, it was Sharpton and Powell who launched the incendiary boycott and demonstrations against Freddys, and Sharptons man Powell who daily stoked the rallies with vitriolic denunciations of the Jewish crackers. It was Sharpton who publicly denounced Fred Harari as a white interloper and an outsider, even though he had been a Harlem merchant for decades. Sharpton turned up the vitriol in his speeches attacking Freddys in broadcasts over black radio stations WWRL, WLIB and KISS.

What neither the Horowitz or Perazzo exposs mention is that Sharptons radical racial activities go back much further, to his activities with Communist Party activists and violent revolutionaries and terrorists in the 1970s.

The KeyWiki website points out, for instance,that as far back as 1971 Sharpton was supporting the Communist Partys effort to aid terrorist Angela Davis, who later went on to run twice as the official candidate of the Communist Party USA for vice president of the United States. In 1971 Sharpton endorsed the Communist Partys Free Angela Davis campaign. Moreover, he has worked closely over the years with communists and Marxist-Leninists, and radical racists such as William Kunstler, Sonny Carson, Ben Chavis, Khalid Muhammad, Malik Zulu Shabazz, Ron Kuby, Michael Ratner, Leslie Kagan, and many others.

Why do NBC, MSNBC, Fox promote this Sociopath?

Considering his toxic record and his cartoonish, buffoonish persona, Al Sharpton should be considered a pariah, a leper, whom no politician and no media organization would dare go near or quote. But Rev. Al leads a charmed life and serves a purpose for various powers that be; not only has he not paid a price for his despicable actions, he has actually prospered.

In his Daily Beast article cited earlier, Stuart Stevens writes:

There are a lot of angry, twisted individuals in America and Sharpton is hardly alone in having spent decades vomiting hate, leaving innocent victims in his wake. What distinguishes Sharpton is the willingness of powerful people and organizations to look past the hate when they believe it may benefit them.

The Democratic Party and its candidates for president in 2004 were perfectly content to have Sharpton appear in presidential debates. Not one candidate called Sharpton out for his outrageous history of hate.

And today one of the great American news organizations, NBC News, is spending millions of dollars to rehabilitate and promote Al Sharpton. Americans have been pretty good at sniffing out and discarding haters, but here is Al Sharpton on NBC and MSNBC being promoted as a credible source of information. Sharpton has gone from manipulating the news with vile accusations to delivering the news for NBC. When the Boston-bombing story broke, there was Al Sharpton delivering breaking news for MSNBC.

Yes, the man who has set back race relations in America more than David Duke, the KKK, and the Aryan Nations combined, has been rewarded with his own network platform. He can be viewed daily on NBCs Politics Nation with Al Sharpton, where he continues his attacks on conservatives, white America, Republicans, capitalism, and traditional morality, while promoting Big Government, gun control, homosexual marriage, and other pet hobby horses of the far-left agenda. But NBC is far from being Sharptons only media gig; he also has a regular blog on the Huffington Postand has replaced his friend and ally Jessie Jackson as the go-to black leader the MSM pundits shower with the most face time.

Fox, OReilly, Hannity: What Gives With the Sharpton Lovefest?

If the MSM love affair with Sharpton is reprehensible, the ongoing romance Sharpton enjoys at the Fox network has been doubly so. The top offender at Fox has probably been Bill OReilly, who has featured Sharpton as a guest many times, according him a credibility he does not deserve. Moreover, the tough guy OReilly treats Sharpton with kid gloves, never calling him out on his outrageous antics and never giving him the bully treatment he (OReilly) dishes out to conservatives.

Back in 2007, Accuracy In Medias Cliff Kincaid called OReillyout for his support of Sharpton, pointing out that the Fox celebrity anchor was also a featured special guest at Sharptons annual National Action Network conference, along with Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Edwards. That Democrats such as Edwards, Clinton, Obama, Kerry, et al, find it expedient to associate with the likes of Sharpton is at least somewhat understandable, considering that the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson long ago gave up any pretense of being shocked at the even the most extreme radical-left political activities or the sexual scandals of its heroes (think Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner). But what is it that makes Foxs Bill OReilly, Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, or politicians such as Newt Gingrichso chummy with charlatan Sharpton? Its not like Rev. Als sordid record is any secret. In fact, regular Fox commentator Michelle Malkin has repeatedly exposed Sharpton over the years (see here,here,and here).

Stuart Stevens concluded his Daily Beast column with this common-sense recommendation:

Heres a simple test that doesnt involve market research or complicated board meetings. If you are an NBC exec and have kids, sit down with them and watch the Times documentary on Tawana Brawley. And when your kids ask why your colleague Al Sharpton is working for NBC, you can explain to them why everything youve tried to teach them about honesty, fair play, and decency is wrong and Al Sharpton is right.

Sound advice not only for NBC, but also CNN, ABC, CBS, PBS, FOX, and all the other MSM organizations that regularly give Sharpton a platform for his hate mongering and racial agitation.

Photo of Al Sharpton: AP Images

Related stories:

Gingrich, Sharpton Still Odd Couple

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Sharpton, Jackson, Media Silent About Hate Crime in S.C.

Medical Report Shows Martin Attacked Zimmerman

Originally posted here:
Al Sharpton: A Lucrative Career Built on Hate and Racial Conflagration ...