The Daily Moth 11-18-19
Four shot and killed at backyard party in Fresno | Impeachment hearings to continue this week | Walmart Shooting in Duncan, Oklahoma | China’s mass detentions of Muslim ethnic minorities | Chemistry professors accused of making meth on campus |Pete Buttigieg spotlights Deaf education needs in disability policy proposal
[Transcript] Hello, welcome to The Daily Moth! It is Monday, November 18. Hope your weekend was good. Ready for news?
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Four shot and killed at backyard party in Fresno
Last night in Fresno, California a gunman opened fire on 30 to 40 people who gathered to enjoy a football game at a backyard of a home.
The group was a mix of family and friends. The gunman sneaked into the property through a side access door and started shooting at people who were outside.
Four young men were killed and six others were wounded, but are expected to recover. There were several children in the house but they were not injured.
The gunman, whose identity is not known, is still at large. Police said they do not know if the gunman knew the victims.
The four men who died were Asian men between the ages of 25 and 30. Three of them died on the scene while the fourth person died at a hospital.
Police said they are going door-to-door to look for surveillance footage that can help with identifying the suspect or his vehicle.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/18/us/fresno-mass-shooting-football-party/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/nine-shot-multiple-killed-family-gathering-fresno-california-n1084706
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Impeachment hearings to continue this week
The impeachment hearings against President Trump will continue this week with eight witnesses scheduled to appear in five hearings, starting tomorrow morning with Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, who works in the White House and listened to the phone call in July between President Trump and the Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Another closely-watched testimony will be Wednesday morning when George Sondland testifies. He is the U.S. ambassador to the EU and helped to coordinate communications between Trump, his top aides, and Ukrainian officials on military aid to Ukraine and investigations on Joe Biden’s son.
President Trump said he would strongly consider testifying in the inquiry, but in writing. He has continued to call the inquiry a hoax and a witch hunt.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) predicted that the House would continue with their inquiry until Christmas, which would mean the Senate trial will happen in January. He said he can’t imagine a scenario in which President Trump would be removed from office with 67 votes in the Republican-controlled Senate.
If the trial is in January, it would cause travel conflicts for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who are running for president and trying to get Iowa voters’ support by the Democratic caucuses on Monday, February 3. The dates would conflict with the trial.
https://www.axios.com/trump-impeachment-hearings-schedule-7a2f29de-03cf-4562-9fab-7e9e89fa5aa0.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/impeachment-hearings-live-updates/2019/11/18/6bba93b4-09f1-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html
https://www.axios.com/sondland-briefed-trump-officials-on-ukraine-wsj-17b0adb2-b151-4471-8d22-d3c646b7692c.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/470957-mcconnell-cant-imagine-a-scenario-in-which-senate-removes-trump
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/mcconnell-suggests-house-impeachment-inquiry-timing-could-push-senate-trial-n1084931
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Walmart Shooting in Duncan, Oklahoma
A gunman shot and killed two people at a Walmart parking lot in Duncan, Oklahoma, then shot and killed himself.
Police said a woman and a man were found dead in a car riddled with bullets and a man was dead outside of the car. A handgun was recovered.
A witness said he was at the Walmart at 9:45 am and heard nine shots and saw a gunman. He then saw another man, a “good guy,” walking up with a pistol, placing it on the gunman’s head, and told him to stop shooting. The witness saw the gunman put the gun to himself, but the witness looked away.
There are reports that the shooting is an act of domestic violence.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-walmart-shooting-leaves-three-dead-n1084891
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/18/walmart-shooting-several-wounded-attack-duncan-oklahoma/4228530002/
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China’s mass detentions of Muslim ethnic minorities
On Saturday, the New York Times exposed over 400 pages of leaked internal Chinese government documents that brought more light on secretive mass detentions of ethnic Muslim Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others in China’s western Xinjiang region.
Al Jazeera reported that experts from the United Nations say there are at least one million who are detained in camps.
The documents from the Times were instructions on what Chinese officials and police should say to college students who were returning home to the Xinjiang region — to explain them where their family was and to tell them that they were at a “school” that they couldn’t leave. The students were warned that they must not “believe or spread rumors” and that their conduct would affect how long their family members were detained in “school.”
If the college students asked if their family members committed a crime, the Chinese officials and police were instructed to say that they have not broken a law, but that their “thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts” and that they needed to have the “virus… eradicated.”
The mass detentions appears to be an idea of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was motivated to create a strong policy after 31 people at a train station in Kunming were stabbed to death by a group of terrorists from Xinjiang who wanted to separate themselves from China. There was another attack a few months later in which 39 people died from terror attacks in Xinjiang in which there were bombs. The incidents pushed the policies.
The detention camps expanded rapidly in 2016 and it’s consistently received more and more media attention, especially in the past several months, probably because the Hong Kong conflict is causing many to look at China with a wider lens.
In September, an anonymous person posted online drone footage that showed hundreds of shaven, blindfolded, and shackled men, who are believed to be ethnic Muslims, being led away by uniformed and armed guards.
In October, a Uighr Muslim woman who escaped from Chinese camp and was granted asylum in Sweden said inmates were gang raped, tortured, forced to go through medical experiments, and forced to eat pork.
The latest news related to this situation is when two politicians from Australia were denied entry in China after they criticized the country. One politican said China was similar to Nazi Germany and the other said that the Communist Party was partly responsible for the violence in Hong Kong.
So, this is a long summary of the mass detentions in China and the news and criticism that it continues to generate.
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html
Drone Footage: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/23/china-footage-reveals-hundreds-of-blindfolded-and-shackled-prisoners-uighur
Uighr Muslim woman: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-xinjiang-uighur-muslim-detention-camps-xi-jinping-persecution-a9165896.html
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside-1.7994216
Australians: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50452829
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Chemistry professors accused of making meth on campus
Two chemistry professors from Henderson State University in Arkansas were arrested on Friday and accused of making meth on campus. Their names are Terry Bateman and Bradley Rowland and they’ve drawn comparisons with the fictional character of Walter White from “Breaking Bad.”
The two professors have been on administrative leave since October 11 after there were reports of a chemical odor at a university science center that led to tests that showed there was an elevated presence of a specific chemical that could be used to create meth, benzyl chloride.
The two face up to 40 years in prison if convicted of manufacturing meth.
The science center was reopened on October 29.
There is not much more information on the two men or their motives. They will appear in court in the future, but it is not known when.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/11/17/pair-arkansas-chemistry-professors-are-accused-cooking-meth-school-lab/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/18/arkansas-chemistry-professors-charged-making-meth-school-lab/4226884002/
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Pete Buttigieg spotlights Deaf education needs in disability policy proposal
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, released a 19-page policy agenda for people with disabilities on November 2nd that includes a plan to address language deprivation among deaf people.
In the very first paragraph of the document, Pete mentions Deafblind lawyer Haben Girma as one of America’s most notable people with disabilities.
On page six, in a paragraph under a heading that says “Promote access to effective communication and language-rich environments in schools,” Pete mentions that “90 percent of Deaf children are born to hearing parents” and that “professionals often encourage families to focus on spoken language, which can lead to Deaf children not acquiring a fully developed language in critical early years.” Pete said he will work with the Department of Education on “early intervention through transitions to college and careers.”
Also on page six, in a paragraph under the heading, “Increase funding to recruit, support, and retain special education teachers,” Pete said he would “support improved recruitment, support, and retention of Deaf teachers in Deaf schools.”
Pete’s paper used capital D in all references to deaf people.
There are several parts of Pete’s paper that have policies that would benefit deaf people — such as making sure that jails and prisons fully abide by ADA regulations, improving people’s access to and earnings under SSDI or SSI programs, and supporting the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (which has several sections that recognize and respect deaf people’s right to sign language).
It’s yet another sign from Pete that he’s ready to work with and embrace Deaf people. He had a deaf RIT student, Andy Pleasants work with him during his campaign over the summer. This is the same person that gave Pete his sign name on a Twitter video, which prompted Pete to respond in a video with ASL. I did a story on that on April 25.
Pete was at the top of a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa with 25% of likely Democratic caucusgoers saying he was their first choice for president. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is in second place with 16%. Former Vice-President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders are tied in third at 15%.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pfa-webapp/documents/PFA_Disability_white_paper.pdf
https://www.dailymoth.com/blog/pete-buttigieg-signs-asl-response-to-deaf-supporter
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2019/11/17/pete-buttigieg-leads-new-iowa-poll-warren-sanders-biden-follow/4198100002/
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That is all for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light!
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