Six In The Morning Tuesday December 19

Amtrak traveled 80 mph before it derailed, NTSB says

By Madison Park, Ralph Ellis and Jon Ostrower, CNN

Updated 0911 GMT (1711 HKT) December 19, 2017

The Amtrak train that derailed Monday in Washington state was traveling 80 mph in a 30 mph zone, National Transportation Safety Board spokeswoman T. Bella Dinh-Zarr said.

It's too early to tell why the train had been traveling at that speed, she said. But NTSB investigators arrived Monday to DuPont, where a passenger train had run off the tracks, killing at least three people and injuring more than 100 others. They'll spend their first full day at the scene Tuesday.

The Amtrak Cascades 501 was making its first trip on a new service route between Seattle and Portland when most of its train cars derailed, tumbling several of them off the Interstate 5 overpass with rush hour traffic below, authorities said.

Reckoning with a culture of male resentment

In the face of a male backlash to the recent debate over sexual harassment, is it time to accept that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others? By Dayna Tortorici


Tuesday 19 December 2017 05.39 GMT


Three years ago, around the time I became co-editor of the magazine where I work, I began to notice a shift among the men of my profession. Writers, editors, academics and artists – men I’d known to be confident, easygoing, or arrogant – were beginning to feel persecuted as a class. They remarked on it obliquely, with jokes that didn’t quite sound like jokes, in emails or in offhand remarks at parties. Irritation and annoyance were souring into something worse. Men said they felt like they were living in Soviet Russia. The culture was being hijacked by college students, humourless young people who knew nothing of real life, its paradoxes and disappointments. Soon intellectuals would not be able to sneeze without being sent to the gulag.


Women, too, felt the pressure. “Your generation is so moral,” a celebrated novelist said to an editor who was, like me, in his late 20s. Another friend, a journalist in her 50s, described the heat she got from online feminists for expressing scepticism toward the idea of creating “safe spaces”. “I’m conservative now,” she said, meaning in the eyes of the kids. But the most persistent and least logical complaint came from men – men I knew and men in the media: that they could not speak. And yet they were speaking. Near the end of 2014, I remember, in the US, the right to free speech under the first amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.

Rohingya crisis: Burma's military targeted fleeing children and elderly, say Muslim refugees

Minority in exile in Bangladesh accuse soldiers and Buddhist leaders of carrying out systematic campaign of murder and burning villages

Laura Paterson

Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Burma have told how the military targeted children and the elderly in sickening attacks.

The Muslim minority refugees said soldiers and Buddhist leaders carried out a systematic campaign of murder and burning villages - accusations that military leaders have denied.

Shawkat Ara, 38, said soldiers attacked her village in the middle of the night and she hid in the jungle with fellow villagers as they watched their houses burn.

She said: “The military told the young boys to stand in a line and told them to run. When they were running they rushed them from behind and they were falling in ditches.

Only half of 'dangerous' Islamists actually dangerous - German police

German police are applying more sophisticated criteria in their assessment of what they call Islamist "endangerers." The new RADAR-iTE instrument is meant to help identify risks more accurately.

Only around half of the people currently identified as dangerous Islamists in Germany are actually dangerous, according to a new report by the German federal police (BKA).

The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, along with public broadcasters NDR and WDR, reported on Monday that of the 720 Islamists in the country categorized as Gefährder (literally "endangerers") by German domestic intelligence, half are not particularly dangerous, while the other half are, according to the newspaper, "highly dangerous."

Hospitals in Peshawar dump dangerous medical waste on the street

Musarrat Ullah Jan

 

An Observer based in Peshawar, Pakistan's sixth-largest city, sent us photos of piles of toxic medical waste spilling into public streets outside the city's Lady Reading Hospital. Hospitals in the city are failing to dispose of medical waste safely, which can lead to environmental and health problems for the local population. 

Lady Reading Hospital is the largest hospital in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, with 13,000 inpatients daily on top of the 7,000 outpatients who come in for treatment and leave within 24 hours.

An average 1,700 kilograms of waste is generated in a teaching hospital every day, according to World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Pakistan. Hospitals are required by national and provinicial legislation to segregate medical waste such as used medical equipment, pharmaceutical products and human waste, and to dispose of it separately. Instead, many hospitals all over Pakistan dump their hospital waste in general waste sites without segregating, disinfecting or treating it first.

THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY IS USING A NEW CYBER-CRIMES LAW TO CRACK DOWN ON DISSENT

Jesse Rosenfeld

SURROUNDED BY ISRAELI SETTLERS, checkpoints, and empty streets closed by the military, human rights activist Issa Amro spent his first day out of jail at home, in campaign mode and planning his next moves to resist Israel’s occupation of his city.

Amro’s nonviolent activism with his group, Youth Against Settlements, or YAS, has won him international recognition — he recently traveled to Capitol Hill in Washington and met with members of Congress — and drawn the ire of Israeli security forces. His latest detention and interrogation in early September, however, wasn’t in an Israeli military prison. Instead, Amro was being held in a Palestinian Authority jail.