Study of Current Events 2019

      On Wednesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would stop running political ads. Dorsey said he believed that political reach "should be earned, not bought." This comes after Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook would allow all forms of political ads, whether or not they had misinformation or not.       Zuckerberg's position on keeping political ads on Facebook is based on the network being founded based around giving people a voice and also said his company stood for free expression. This decision has received backlash from Democrats, including former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.       Meanwhile, Twitter's decision to ban political ads has been criticized by the right. Trump's campaign manager for the 2020 election Brad Parscale said Twitter's choice was a partisan one. In contrast, Democrats like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez support the ban on political ads. She herself sa...

      On Wednesday, the Phoenix Police Department fired an officer who pulled his gun on an African American family over a shoplifting report.       This story hit the news back in May, when a one year old girl shoplifted a Barbie doll from a dollar store in Phoenix. The girl's parents were unaware she had taken the doll until the police pulled up behind them. What happened next had conflicting reports from the police and bystanders.       The police reported the family was slow to comply while shouting at the officers and appearing to make moves to reach for weapons.       However, video evidence from bystanders and the family that got arrested. The officer pulled a gun on the family, asking them to get out of the car. One of the officers pushed the father's head onto the car, kicked him in the legs, and then punched him in the back even though he was following the officer's orders. Meanwhile, another officer pointed his gu...

    Since the late 19th century, Chicago has been a heavily Democratic city with strong teacher activism. This activism has been especially clear recently, when in December of last year Chicago was the site of the first teacher strike within a charter school network.      This year, the city's activism has not changed. On Wednesday, teachers in Chicago announced they would be going on strike on Thursday, prompting class cancelations in the nation's third largest school district. This strike for Chicago's school system is the first since 2012.       For months, the city and Chicago Teachers Union have been in tense negotiations. While there were signs of progress, as the midnight deadline on Wednesday drew nearer, the new mayor Lori Lightfoot canceled classes for Thursday as signs indicated a walkout was inevitable.       These walkouts are one example in a string of over a dozen protests by teachers across the country since early...

On Wednesday, 2 people were killed in Halle, an eastern German city. There were shots in multiple locations, including outside a synagogue and near a Jewish cemetery. These attacks occurred as Jews were observing Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Because of this and the other locations of the attacks, Germany's Interior Minister has said authorities must assume this was an anti-Semitic attack. The original thought was that two or three people carried out the attack, but now authorities are looking into the attack being done by one person, with a suspect currently in custody. On top of this, shot were also reportedly fired 9 miles away in Landsberg. In addition, a gunman tried to invade a synagogue, firing shots as well as throwing Molotov cocktails, but the building's security withstood the attack, with 70-80 people inside. After these attacks, security has been increased at synagogues in the cities of Leipzig and Dresden. The federal police have also reinforced security ...

        Recently, Harvard was sued over an allegation that they had biases in their admissions process. Harvard won the court case, but the affirmative action fight is not over.         For background, affirmative action permits racial consideration in college admissions without mandating specific racial quotas. This has been true since the Supreme Court case University of California vs. Bakke in 1978, where they first ruled in favor of racial consideration. However, over 40 years after that decision, the debate is not over.        The case against Harvard was one in a string of cases, all hoping to eventually end up at the Supreme Court. There was Fisher v. University of Texas in 2016, which did reach the Supreme Court and upheld the system of racial-conscious admission. In that case, it was a white girl who claimed she was not admitted to a university because a black student took her spot. The law suit against Harvard was b...