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MANCHESTER UNITED striker Mason Greenwood has been banished by England.

He will not be considered for Three Lions selection until any potential legal proceedings against him are completed.

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Greenwood was released from custody on bail 'pending further investigation' by Greater Manchester Police yesterday after being arrested on suspicion of rape.

Police also announced further investigations into allegations of assault, sexual assault and making threats to kill.

United have suspended the 20-year-old, while sponsors including Nike have distanced themselves from him.

SunSport understands England boss Gareth Southgate has no interest in even considering selecting the striker until legal proceedings end.

Greenwood has not featured for England since being sent home from the Nations League squad in Iceland in September 2020.

After making his debut in Reykjavik, he was told to leave - alongside Manchester Citys Phil Foden - after they broke Covid quarantine guidelines to meet two women in the team hotel.

The FA will respect both Uniteds stance and the criminal process but there are no plans for Wembley chiefs to get involved yet.

Greenwood was suspended indefinitely from United hours after the allegations surfaced on social media.

Greater Manchester Police confirmed on Wednesday that the 75,000-a-week star has now been bailed.

A statement said: "A 20-year-old man arrested (on Sunday 30 January 2022) on suspicion of the rape and assault of a woman has been released on bail pending further investigation."

Police crime scene investigation vans were seen parked outside the footballers house after the claims were made on Sunday.

Security staff, thought to have been provided by his club, were present at a second home he owns nearby and they confirmed that his parents were inside.

In a statement, Man Utd said: "Manchester United reiterates its strong condemnation of violence of any kind.

"As previously communicated, Mason Greenwood will not train with, or play for, the club until further notice."

The Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) tweeted: The club has now confirmed that Mason Greenwood will not return to training or play matches until further notice.

"MUST fully support the decision of the club in this regard."

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Mason Greenwood banished by England amid rape probe as Gareth Southgate rules out selecting suspended Man... - The US Sun

A loud explosion shook the neighborhood around 28 Poppy Lane in Palm Coast early this morning, drawing a response from the Flagler County Sheriffs Office, a road closure and the summoning of the St. Johns County Sheriffs bomb squad.

School buses were redirected from the area, and students asked to avoid it. Poppy lane is a relatively short street that connects to two ends of Poplar Drive, which branch off of Ponce de Leon in the citys P Section. The sheriffs Crime Scene Investigation unit was also at the scene, as was the Palm Coast Fire Department. The state fire marshal was also dispatched, as was a K-9 unit.

We did respond to a report of a loud explosion this morning, and when we arrived we found some evidence that thered been something occur, Palm Coast Acting Fire Chief Kyle Berryhill said. There was no active hazard. The scene was cleared to enable the sheriffs investigation to continue. The state fire marshal aside, the local fire department is not involved in the investigation.

The explosion, heard as far south as the areas of Royal Palms Parkway and Point Pleasant Drive, was reported shortly after 5 a.m. It wasnt initially clear whether it came from within the house or outside of it. Residents reported it smelled like fireworks. Transformers explode atop utility poles from time to time, with bright flashes and explosive bangs that can be heard throughout a neighborhood. In this case, however, a hole in the ground was reported in the propertys yard, and there were early indications that a makeshift device was the source of the explosion.

We saw nothing to indicate that it would be a transformer, Berryhill said. Were not in the determination business per se, once it gets in the investigation level.

Eric Robinson, 30, the resident at the Poppy Lane address, has been on community control, or house arrest, after failing to successfully complete a three-year drug-offender probation term for cocaine possession and tampering with evidence. Last July his probation officer filed a probation-violation report charging that hed not been making his required paymentshe was $360 in arrears, according to the reporteven though hed been working at a boat manufacturers in Volusia County. His probation was revoked on Aug. 5.

The property at 28 Poppy is adjacent to that of Carol Bacha, known as Mother Elizabeth, the former candidate for Flagler County School Board in 2020 and for Palm Coast mayor last July.

Read the original here:
Explosion Rocks Neighborhood Around 28 Poppy Lane in Palm Coast; Investigation Ongoing - FlaglerLive.com

Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

Most of us dont know what we think, really. Throughout our lives we encounter so many influential entities from our family, our culture, our schools, by advertising, by the media that we rarely have thoughts that are totally original. Most are variations of what we already know or have been conditioned to think and feel.

How might we learn which thoughts really belong to us, and which are thoughts planted by others? Which shared thoughts are helpful for social cohesion? Do we have curiosity to explore new thoughts, together?

Exploring the concept of thinking is called critical thinking. It may be our path out of the division and turbulence within the United States and lead us to a new social contract. Critical thinking, however, is no easy task. It requires exposure and openness to new ideas, followed by healthily dealing with the discomfort of our new thoughts.

As a result, we often hear calls for censorship because new ideas are considered dangerous. Unknowingly. the thought police are here; and it is us.

Our freedom of speech is paradoxically a tool for authoritarian mindsets to demand censorship. Broadly speaking, there are several main arenas where censorship and freedom of speech are currently debated. As you read the following, what are your thoughts? Do you find yourself celebrating one area of censorship while decrying it in another?

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This last point about how we tell the story of our shared history has especially captured my attention because I have two friends who hold opposing views, which naturally challenges my own thinking.

One is a friend who saw a tweet claiming that "ethnic studies" was a cover or code for teaching CRT in California schools. She feels national pride is necessary for social cohesion and that CRT will cause students to be ashamed of our nation. In previous conversations, she shared with me her school and home experiences growing up in post-war Germany. When she would ask her mother about World War II, mother wouldnt talk about it, presumably feeling ashamed. National pride was lost and my friend emigrated to Canada and then the United States, where she became a naturalized citizen.

My other friend is concerned about history being erased, and young minds being assimilated into the dominant culture, which would cut off people from their ancestral roots. He drew a similarity to the Babylonians, who attempted to erase the history of the Israelites, as chronicled in the book of Daniel. This friend is a Baptist minister, and discovering his ancestry has taken extra effort, due to our nations history of enslavement. His identity was not connected or represented in American history. His family was not included in the dominant culture, but have shared their stories within their communities that other Americans either dont know or cannot resonate with.

This is the tension that leads to censorship in schools. A fear of shame about our past and/or anger at being left out of the story. An accurate representation of history gives us the opportunity to learn from the past mistakes of others. It helps us understand why people behaved as they did and why they may behave the way they do now, and which in turn helps future generations to become better citizens. This is why the full teaching of history will shape our future. Its one element to build social cohesion.

Its why we fight over censorship, too. Some people like to surround themselves with like-minded people and avoid challenges to their thinking. This is known more scientifically as confirmation bias. They short-hand and denigrate group-think in others with labels like snowflakes and cult members, recognizing tendencies in others but not themselves.

As we hear increasing calls for censorship, how might we engage to think more critically instead? And how might we come to understand that some of those uncomfortable thoughts can help us learn and grow? We need outliers.

Outliers were defined by Malcolm Gladwell when he chronicled people whose achievements fall outside normal experience, and are a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential. Outliers challenge our assumptions and point them out. Outliers can prevent group-think. Outliers are often mistaken as conflict entrepreneurs (or provocateurs) because of the discomfort they create while challenging the status quo as insufficient.

Whereas conflict entrepreneurs exploit our divisions as a way to profit, while claiming outlier status. How might we distinguish between them?

When exposed to an outlier, I will think or feel:

When exposed to a conflict entrepreneur, I will think or feel:

Youll notice that outliers invite curiosity, engaging in a way that allows us to find our own way to agree or dream with them. The exploration is the point. The conflict entrepreneurs speak with certainty and offer answers, so we can bypass the analysis of points of view, the judging based on evidence, and the forming of opinions based on deductive reasoning. This is the essence of critical thinking needed to build social cohesion.

I crave more critical thinking. More connection. More exploration. I dont crave more censorship. What do you think?

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Critical thinking on censorship - The Fulcrum

If the great campaigners for free speech of the past, such as Baruch Spinoza or Mary Wollstonecraft or Frederick Douglass, were alive today, they would surely declare the 21st century an unprecedented golden age. So suggests Jacob Mchangama in his new history of free speech.

Its a claim that might raise a few eyebrows. This, after all, is an age in which, from China to Saudi Arabia, dictatorial rulers imprison and kill political opponents with impunity. An age in which governments in formally democratic nations such as India use the judicial system to try to silence critics. An age in which more than 1,400 journalists have been murdered in 30 years. An age in which governments across the globe desperately seek ways of curbing speech on social media they consider dangerous. And in which, in the west, there is a constant debate about cancel culture and the erosion of academic freedom.

Mchangama, a leading campaigner for free speech, is not trying to dismiss the reality of contemporary censorship. He is suggesting, rather, that in historical terms, we have never been more free to speak our minds. But this leads to a paradox. The very fact that, certainly in the west, we live in far more open societies has led many to be sanguine and dismissive of the threat that restrictions on speech can impose upon us. The very success of historical struggles can obscure the lessons of those struggles.

Historically, the demand for free speech was at the heart of the fight for social justice. From the challenge posed by freethinkers in 10th-century Islam to the abolitionist struggle in 19th-century America, from the suffragette movement to campaigns for liberation from colonial rule, there has long been a recognition that democracy, social justice and free speech go hand in hand and that censorship was a weapon wielded by the powerful to stymie social change.

Today, though, the issues seem more confusing. Much censorship, particularly in liberal democracies, is imposed in the name of protecting not the powerful but the powerless or the vulnerable: laws against hate speech, for instance, or restricting the scope of racists or bigots. And where once the left was clearly opposed to censorship, many now support restrictions in the name of the progressive good. As the left has vacated the ground of free speech, the right and the far right have become encamped upon it. This has further distorted the debate, the cause of free speech coming to be seen as the property of the right, making many on the left even more wary of the idea.

One of the ironies, though, is that many arguments used today to defend speech restrictions as protections for the powerless are often the same as those once used by the powerful to protect their interests from challenge. When the US abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois, a southern newspaper blamed him for his own death, as he had utterly disregarded the sentiments of a large majority of the people of that place. A century and a half later, we heard the same arguments in calls for the banning of The Satanic Verses or in claims that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were responsible for their own deaths, because they, too, had disregarded the sentiments of many Muslims.

Or take hate speech. In the 1950s, there was a major debate about the wording of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one of the seminal documents of human rights, adopted by the UN in 1966. The draft proposal sought to prohibit any advocacy of national, racial or religious hostility that constitutes an incitement to violence. The Soviet Union wanted to delete the reference to violence and make any form of hatred illegal. Such a move, warned Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, would be extremely dangerous as any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred and consequently prohibited. Half a century on, Roosevelts warning seems highly prescient.

Instances in which the expansion of speech has facilitated the spread of obnoxious or dangerous ideas are well-documented: from the newly invented printing press giving fuel to witch-hunts in early modern Europe; to newspapers playing a major role in whipping up the racist frenzy that led to lynchings in 19th-century America; to the medias role in the 20th century in fomenting hatred against Jews in Germany and Tutsis in Rwanda.

Yet we can also see from the historical record that while it is necessary to legally curtail incitement to violence, trying to combat hatred more broadly through censorship can be both ineffective and dangerous. One of the deepest-held beliefs about the dangers of free speech is the Weimar myth: the belief that unrestrained freedom of speech allowed the Nazis to spread their poisonous ideas in 1920s Germany and that restrictions on speech and the suppression of antisemitic propaganda would have stalled the rise of Hitler. In fact, the Weimar republic, while constitutionally supportive of free speech, possessed what we would now call hate speech laws and powers to shut down newspapers. Hundreds of Nazis were prosecuted under these laws. Between 1923 and 1933, the viciously antisemitic newspaper Der Strmer was either confiscated or tried in court on 36 occasions and its editor, Julius Streicher, twice jailed.

Many scholars argue that despite such laws Weimar courts were unduly lenient towards hate-mongers and that judges sympathised with Nazi aims. Other studies suggest that such leniency was the exception, not the rule. Wherever the truth lies in this debate, the primary failure in preventing the rise of Nazism was not legal but political. And this is true of hatred and bigotry today.

We often forget, too, that the victims of censorship are more often than not minorities and those fighting for social change. From Indian climate change activists being charged with promoting enmity between communities to British police charging feminists with hate crimes, censorship in the name of preventing hatred is widely used to target social activists.

We are the inheritors of centuries of struggle against restrictions on what we are able to say. If we forget the lessons of those struggles, we are in danger also of letting the gains of those struggles slip away.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columist

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Freedom of speech was too hard won to be cavalier now about censorship - The Guardian

In the last six months, the American Library Association has seen a spike in book challenges and bans in both school and public libraries, mostly targeting books that center on race and LGBT identity. At the end of 2021, Wake County experienced its own high-profile censorship controversy.

Gender Queer, a graphic memoir about author Maia Kobabe's journey towards identifying as transgender, was removed from Wake County Public Library in December after complaints that it was pornographic. The removal was met with outrage from some in the Wake County community, including an open letter from librarians in protest. In response, WCPL announced on January 10 that they would return Gender Queer to the shelves and work on revising their removal policy.

In October of last year, a video surfaced of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson's remarks calling books about LGBT identity filth. When many North Carolinians expressed outrage, Robinson defended his comments and targeted three books specifically for removal: Gender Queer, Lawn Boy, and George, which he described as pornographic and inappropriate for schools and libraries.

Last fall, Wake County residents complained about these same books. Jessica Lewis spoke on behalf of a group of parents at a December Wake County school board public meeting.

Why do our kids have access to this obscenity in our libraries? Who is going to be held accountable for this?" Lewis asked as she quoted segments of the books. "No matter what gender you are, these books have no business being in our libraries.

Nine mothers filed a criminal complaint against Wake County Public School System in December. Among them was Julie Page, who called the books R-rated, if not X-rated, and said that having them available in the public school system was a violation of state and federal statutes protecting minors from obscenity.

Wake County librarian Megan Roberts, who is also a member of the American Library Association, says that its difficult to accept the argument that these complaints arent about race and LGBT identity when they most often target books with those themes.

Although book challenges and bans have a long history, a representative of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom said they saw an "unprecedented" number of book challenges in the fall of 2021. From September 1 to December 1, the ALA received 330 book challenge reports, more than twice the number of reports for the entire year of 2020.

Six of the top ten most challenged books in 2020 were about racism, books which not coincidentally were also on many of the antiracist reading lists being passed around that year. The complaints described these books as "divisive" or "containing an anti-police message."

Last Thursday, Maus, the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, was banned by a Tennessee school district. In North Carolina, in just the last week, Dear Martin, about a Black student in a white school who writes letters to Martin Luther King, Jr, was pulled from assigned reading at a high school in Waynesville after a complaint. George, a children's novel with a transgender protagonist, was unsuccessfully challenged in Moore County.

Richard Price, associate professor of Political Science at Weber State University in Utah, is an expert in censorship, particularly through book challenges, and runs a blog called Adventures in Censorship. They agree with oft-banned childrens author Judy Blume, who has often said that book challenges were driven by fear.

When it comes to representations of people of color and civil rights concerns, or queer inclusion in literature, the attack is contextually about something else, said Price. They dress it up and claim it's about swearing, or the book has sex in it. But in reality, most of this is driven by parents who don't like seeing their world change.

Price sees this recent uproar as a confluence of three things: the nationwide moral panic about the myth that Critical Race Theory was being taught in schools, which picked up around 2019 with the release of the 1619 Project; then, the pandemic causing more tension between parents and schools with shutdowns, online schooling, vaccine and mask requirements; and in 2021, a return to in-person school in most districts.

Megan Roberts, Wake County librarian

The ALA has said that restricting access to books is a violation of minors First Amendment rights, but Price said that its not always simple. In the 1982 Supreme Court case Board of Education v. Pico, a plurality of judges ruled that a politically motivated removal of books violates free speech rights, but that removal based on grounds of pervasive vulgarity or educational suitability would be constitutional and that leaves room for interpretation.

Still, Price feels that schools and libraries have a responsibility to accurately represent the truth. There's no such thing as neutrality between inclusion and exclusion, said Price. So if you're telling me that I have to be politically neutral in a classroom, and that means I can never talk about LGBTQ people or issues, that's not neutral, that is exclusionary.

Megan Roberts, the Wake County librarian, doesnt believe that its the job of librarians to protect readers, no matter their age.

There's definitely something in every library that will offend any reader, any person. But that's one of the reasons I think it's so important to have books on a diverse array of viewpoints, said Roberts. Representation is really important. And it's a way to understand yourself and those around you. And I think that matters, and everyone should be able to see themselves in a book at the public library.

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How a national debate over book censorship is playing out in North Carolina - WUNC