Daily Archives: August 9, 2021

Literacy opens the door and opportunity to freedomto engage in a world separate from the one in which you reside. If you allow yourself to enter, your options are endless. Frederick Douglass said, Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. Literacy offers that opportunity. It opens a door to freedom that can be conceived only once it is obtained.

However, lacking in this ability connects to a prison of the mind, a prison that holds many of our Black and Brown children hostage, and a prison that can prevent all students from experiencing the joy that we know literacy can bring to their lives.

Teaching to dream

Finding the joy in literacy requires the ability to dream. We know our students come with many different needs and differences. But the ability to dream should be afforded to everyone regardless of skill level or ability. A dream is a cherished ambition, aspiration, or ideal.

As educators, we must believe for our students what they sometimes do not believe for themselves. Your dreams for your students achievements and expectations go hand in hand and can open the door for a reality that can supersede your greatest expectations. Having great aspirations for your students will increase their desire to reach them.

Research has proven that high expectations improve performance. What you believe about your students can be a motivating factor in or a deterrent to their progress. You may see scores you dont like or a curriculum that does not support your aspirations for your students. But I urge you: Do not allow your eyes or your present reality to deter your dreams. Believe what can be. Help your students by allowing them the freedom to dream. Let the dreams that you have become the goals that you set. Communicate the dreams you have about your students to them so they know you believe. Make your dreams visible so students can see them. Display vision boards so students can connect with what you envision.

Help make dreams become reality. Push for necessary changes to curriculum. Do not let policies stifle the possibilities that are endless when dreams and high expectations collide.

Time for change

I can speak confidently because of my special education background. I have seen students find their joy in literacy. For eight years, I was immersed in it. I taught high school life skills. My struggle daily was having to use a reading program that lacked both a focus on phonemic awareness and texts that were grade-level appropriate. Students reading levels were between first and fourth grade but their ages were 1421.

Once my district found a program that concentrated on phonics, as well as grade-level culturally responsive texts with diverse representation and relevant topics, dreams became realities. I saw Lexile levels soar 30 to 50 points in three months. Confidence that I never saw before in the eyes of my students appeared, and I saw the doors of opportunity and possibility open, and areas of darkness become lightened.

Opportunities were on the horizon for my students. That same possibility can exist for more students if we just begin to shift the narrative and change our perspective. I never stopped dreaming no matter what my reality was. Because of that, I firmly believe that all students can walk in freedom and the joy of literacy.

Trene Chimre Lurry has been a special education teacher for the past eight years. She is a firm believer that representation matters and there is a greater need for it in our schools. This led her to pursue her masters in educational leadership, which she completed in May 2021.

This post is a companion piece to the July/August/September issue of Literacy Today, ILAs member magazine, which focuses on the theme of Joy in Literacy Instruction.

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The Freedom of Literacy - Literacy Daily

We are headed toward a market correction which will dial down breakneck speed transformation and in its place will emerge a disruptive era, where change occurs, but does so in a more measured way. It seems that after the pandemic accelerated the pace of transformation, while also ratcheting up consumer expectation, brands need to take a beat to process the enormity of the shifts that have occurred and begin to finely hone them into strategic acts of disruption.

Samsung Nexts Angie Lee on Striking Balance Between Rigor + Freedom to Iterate in the Age of ... [+] Disruption

Because of this watershed moment, I thought it would be helpful to speak to someone who has sat at the intersection of measured innovation and fast-moving transformation her whole career, as well as most specifically in her new role as Global Head of Brand + Marketing for Samsung Next. Angie Lee is a career marketer who has a unique perspective on how to take the best of the past and marry it with the future, while also building teams that have the qualities of both startups and legacy brands. She is an industry veteran having served as a senior marketer at brands such as Industrious, General Assembly and IDEO. Following is a recap of our conversation:

Billee Howard: Awesome to be speaking with you Angie! Let's start out with you telling me about your role at Samsung Next and some key trends that you're seeing.

Angie Lee: Great to be catching up, Billee. To start, let me explain that Samsung Next is the organization within Samsung that's focused on investing, acquiring and partnering with the world's boldest startups. We are really focused on a longer time horizon where we help shape the future by identifying trends that point to the direction where technology is headed.

I'm the Global Head of Brand & Marketing and have two key areas of focus. The first is making sure that the story about what Next does and what we hope to achieve is crystal clear to external audiences. We're focused on making sure that as a brand, we are growing our presence in the tech community, especially with Founders. The second part of my role is really supporting our portfolio companies. When you join the Next ecosystem, you enter a community of world-class founders and corporate partners who are actively shaping the future of technology. I lead a brand marketing communications practice that provides consulting services for all of our portfolio companies, at no charge to them.

Howard: With that really unique vantage point and going back to a lot of what we discussed in our initial conversation, I'd like to talk about the market correction point we are at right now where we are really needing to find a balance between steady transactional innovation and breakneck speed transformation. What I'm calling it is a new point of disruptive leadership and time for measured change. What are your thoughts on that?

Lee: I love the fact you brought this up, because I think it's something that we're seeing broadly across the industry. My career has actually spanned both corporations and startups. What's so interesting is that both sides tend to downplay the experiences or the benefits of working in the other. For example, Ive lost count of the number of times Ive heard: OK, you've done a great job, Mr. Founder; now it's time to bring in the grown-ups. The suggestion being that you need to have a corporate leader to come in with more corporate experience to shepherd the company into the next stage of growth. This is such a disservice to the immense effort that all of these founders have put forth. They've taken on challenges of disrupting an industry and come up with entirely new business models to think about a new way of serving consumers worldwide.

Conversely, you often hear a startup say We don't want to work with corporations because they're slow and don't have the capacity for innovation. However, I think that we all know companies like 3M and others have a long legacy of innovation. Take even Samsung, which has an immense legacy of innovation, having grown from humble roots of selling dried anchovies and groceries, to becoming a mega conglomerate. I think to your point, what we need is to have some moderation in between. The best things happen at the intersection of those two, which embraces change, experimentation and a mindset of disruption, with also the measured discipline and resources that come along with a large company. I think that there is an opportunity for us to redefine innovation and transformation through a lens of disruption, which is a form of moderation versus either extreme.

Howard: Excellent points and very well said. If you had to identify the top qualities to take from both startups and legacy companies to best meet the new era of disruption that is upon us, what would they be?

Lee: I think that's a great point. To come up with that form of moderation in that in-between point, you have to cherry pick and hopefully find ways of integrating the best qualities and the best processes from both sides. What makes startups so powerful and unique are their appetite to disrupt classic industries. This comes from their willingness to approach solutions to problems from a different perspective. They are not being weighed down from how things have been done in the past, and can focus on how things can be done in the future. Its just a totally different mindset and I think that that's actually quite powerful. The other quality is really to embrace the idea of experimentation and iteration. In the sense, what I've observed is that with startups, you often have less of a fear of failure. You're willing to listen to market feedback and then quickly iterate on that original approach as a process, as opposed to often being weighed down by processes and established ways of working.

On the flip side of that, I really appreciate that corporations have the rigor and discipline that comes along with planning; that comes with really measured thought. So on one hand, you might say, let's run this experiment. Yet, there's a complement to that, too, where people could say, well, how do we design the experiment to be as thoughtful and to be as measured as possible across our many different stakeholders? That discipline, while it may slow down the process at times, actually improves the employee experience. One of the biggest pain points for employees in startups is the whiplash, how the whims and fancies of individuals are changing their minds. Youve really got to have a more measured approach to change. Big companies think more strategically and really take the time to think through the design processes and community response to it.

Howard: Lastly, what I want to get into, especially from where you sit, are key technologies that marketers, or leading organizations overall, need to stay abreast of over the coming 12 to 18 months so that they can drive disruption and also do what you and I both have a passion for, which is striking that right balance between art and science.

Lee: Yeah, that's always a tough one, because everyone wants to know if there is some kind of clear line with that when evaluating different opportunities that come our way. I think the adage that often comes to mind is what got me here won't get me there, in the sense that when you get to a certain point in your career working in brand and marketing, you often say, you know, I've been successful because Ive done things a certain way. It is much easier to say, let me point to these things in the past that were successful and then I can say that these same things will also be successful moving forward.

However, you cant ignore that disruptive technology will redefine the ways we all will work and live. For example, take blockchain. A lot of people didn't understand how blockchain could be applied and they were quick to label it as a trend. Even today, there are naysayers who dismiss crypto because of its volatility. That's a really dangerous mindset for everyone, especially marketers because they are missing the fact that these new technologies will change the way people engage with the world. And if you dont understand your customers then you miss out on an opportunity to excite or inspire them.

I think the second area that's driving this factor is the fact that demographics, as we all know, continue to press forward and are constantly evolving. The next generation of leaders are emerging in the space and they understand that consumer values are changing as quickly as their expectations. As a result, they're going to be making decisions differently. I think brand marketers really need to constantly challenge themselves to be open to really listening and seeing the sense of possibility with different platforms, with different opportunities for marketing and communication and storytelling to consumers.

My way of approaching new technology is with a form of moderation. I would say you should treat it as an and, not an or. For example, I do not have to trade off The New York Times for a Substack strategy. One does not have to say let's completely abandon conferences so that we can focus on some of these new emerging technologies or platforms for social media. One has to say, how might those two be complementary? How might this different tactic complement more traditional means so that you can then do the right level of experimentation?

More practically speaking, what this means is allocating a certain amount of your budget as just a pool for experimentation. Or assigning projects to members of your team who get really excited about emerging technologies and giving them some freedom to test new things out. This way you can continue to learn and gather those insights and feed them back into your strategy in an iterative way.

The rest is here:

Samsung Nexts Angie Lee On Striking Balance Between Rigor And Freedom To Iterate In The Age Of Disruption - Forbes

Sadly, we are approaching a time in America during which our elected public officials will assault the liberties we have hired them to protect. Whatever the cause, the government will soon blame its failures to contain a virus on a small portion of the population and then impose restrictions on the inalienable rights of all of us.

We cannot permit this to happen again.

During the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln thought it expedient to silence those in the northern states who challenged his wartime decisions by incarcerating them in military prisons, he was rebuked afterward by a unanimous Supreme Court. The essence of the rebuke was that no matter the state of difficulties whether war or pestilence the Constitution protects our natural rights, and its provisions are to be upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, in good times and in bad.

Whether COVID-19 is coming back or not, our central planners have panicked. We do not have a free market in the U.S. in the delivery of health care; rather, we have thousands of pages of statutes, regulations and controls at the federal, state and local levels.

Those controls were revealed as manifestly deficient the last time around. The feds were so protective of their control of health care an area of governance that the Supreme Court has ruled is nowhere delegated to them in the Constitution and, but for their power to tax those who defy them, is nonexistent that they insisted that only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta could be trusted to test for the virus.

It took weeks of begging by governors and mayors and health care professionals for the feds to relent. Of course, once they acknowledged that labs throughout the country were as competent as theirs, they realized that their incompetence had deprived all physicians as well as most private sector and state government-owned labs of the test kits themselves.

We all know how central economic planning diminishes freedom, produces scarcity and adds to the cost of products. Now we know that central micromanagement of health care kills people.

But these mayors and governors were not to be outdone by the feds in their totalitarian impulses. Many of them issued decrees that are as profoundly unconstitutional as Lincoln's efforts to silence dissent.

They ordered the closing of most businesses and nearly all retail establishments. They acted as if they, and not we, owned our faces. They shuttered religious institutions. It took a year for the courts to interfere partially with this madness.

The fulfillment of these totalitarian impulses put millions out of work, closed and destroyed thousands of businesses and impaired the fundamental rights of tens of millions all in violation of numerous sections of the Constitution that the totalitarians swore to uphold.

And now they are threatening to do this again.

The Contracts Clause of the Constitution prohibits the states from interfering with lawful contracts, such as leases and employment agreements. The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the states from interfering with life, liberty or property without a trial at which the state must prove fault. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation when the state meaningfully interferes with an owner's chosen lawful use of his property.

Taken together, these clauses reveal significant protections of private property in the Constitution. Add to this the threat of punishment that accompanied these decrees and the fact that they were executive decrees, not legislation, and one can see the paramount rejection of basic democratic and constitutional principles in the minds and words and deeds of those who have perpetrated them.

Add to all this the protection in the First Amendment of the rights to worship and associate, and elsewhere the judicially recognized right to travel, and it is clear that these nanny state rules were profoundly unconstitutional, indisputably unlawful and utterly unworthy of respect or compliance.

Why is this happening again?

Throughout history, free people have been willing to accept the devil's bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety. It doesn't. This is the government's dream dominance without resistance.

This happened here with the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s when the Federalists feared a second revolution and punished speech critical of them, during the Civil War when Lincoln feared dissent and Congress feared defeat and they locked up innocents, during World War I when President Woodrow Wilson punished the speech he hated and feared, and during the Great Depression when President Franklin D. Roosevelt feared economic calamity and seized property without compensation. And, after 9/11, fearing another attack, Congress secretly crafted the Patriot Act's circumvention of the Fourth Amendment and authorized the creation of the total surveillance state.

Of course, just one year ago, we free people were all in "lockdown" a word used to describe confining prisoners to their cells.

This sordid history came about when the public was fearful of the unknown and trustful of the government's bargain. But the liberty that was sacrificed for the safety that was promised is being taken away again.

Liberty is natural and personal. You can sacrifice yours, but you cannot sacrifice mine. Thus, personal liberty the Declaration of Independence calls our rights inalienable, and the Ninth Amendment reflects freedom's nature as limitless is insulated from totalitarian and even majoritarian interference.

Today, the fear of contagion again gives government cover for its assaults on freedom and poses a question the government does not want to answer: If liberty can be taken away in times of crisis, is it really liberty; or is it just a license, via a temporary government permission slip, subject to the whims of the politicians in power?

We cannot permit this to happen again.

Andrew Napolitano's column is syndicated by Creators.

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Andrew Napolitano: Freedom in the coming time of madness - The Winchester Star

After spending nearly 15 months cooped up for lockdown, Ive pretty much gone feral. Becoming a person again isnt easy, but Im working on it. And you know whats helped the most?

Doing things poorly.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Ive been telling myself this, daily, since getting vaccinated.Ive found that its easier to act if you lower the barrier, so Ive been ridingthe momentum of small, incremental actionsto get big stuff done.

I spent most of lockdown in what I call my couch burrito: the blanket on my couch where I cocooned into a glorious hot mess, bingeing TV shows and eating an unspeakable amount of comfort food.

During that time, I lost a lot of what made me feel like me. I became untethered from my world in more ways than one. It felt like I had to get back to Meat least a little bitbefore I could comfortably dive back out into the world.

My life changed a lot in the past 15 months. I bet yours did too.

In my case, I made an abrupt career change because of safety concerns. The chaos, uncertainty, and left me also de-prioritizing the foundational habits that make me feel most comfortable in my own skin. Habits like:

I know these things make me feel better, and through the lockdown, Id tell myself Ill start doing themtomorrow. And, then, instead of getting back on the wagon, like clockwork my crippling mental health issues would pick up the reins and spin my wagons wheels into a rut. Everything felt pointless and out of my control, so who cares if I felt good?

As the vaccine hit my arm, a wave of relief, hope, anddreadwashed over me. I wasnt the same person who went into lockdown. In some great ways for better, but in a lot of uncomfortable ways, for worse.The thought of entering the post-pandemic worldespecially in a new cityoverwhelmed me.

I was vaxxedand vexed.

I knew it was time to push the wagon out of the self-created rut. But, after 15 months of not moving, the rut was deep, and I couldnt find traction to get out.

I felt like I had fallen behind, on everything, by about 15 months: 15 months of pressure built up in my brain at once; 15 months of shoulds, expectations, and stress-eaten pints of ice cream possessed me. The lure of getting back into my couch burrito to watch a solid season of Catfishtempted me like a person who, well, got catfished.

Its hard to start. Its harder to start when you expect constant perfection from yourself.

High standards are part of how I landed a job at Zapier, which is good. But high standards can also paralyze you. I expected so much from myself after going through several once in a lifetime events in a 15-month span. It was exhausting and soul-crushing. I knew I wanted to resume my healthy habits so I could feel like me, but I thought I had to do everything perfectly immediately.

It didnt work.

I wasnt able to rise to my own expectations, and I realized that maybe those high, pre-pandemic expectations were the problem.

Perfection wasnt working. It was time to do things poorly.Looking back at my list of habits, I told myself:

The walk you take is better than the intense workout you dont do.

The $15 you save at the end of the month is better than $0.

Hitting the snooze once is better than hitting it three times.

The paragraph you write is better than the page you dont write.

The text you send is better than the card you dont send.

Taking one deep, mindful breath is better than not doing a 20-minute meditation.

First up for me was exercise. I wanted to get back into my high-intensity kettlebell training and just . . . move more in general.

Jumping back into the level of training I was hitting in the beforetimes was like trying to join Rocky in the middle of theEye of the Tigermontage. It wasnt happening, so I started poorly.

On the first day of doing things poorly with exercise, I set a five-minute timer on my phone. For those five minutes, instead of sitting, I used my standing desk. The timer went off. I did 10 air squats.

That was easy, I thought to myself. So, I set another five-minute timer and ended up doing five more rounds. Standing and air squats wasnt much compared to my beforetime exercise peak, but it was more than I had been doing.

My first day of doing things poorly went well.

I left my desk in a standing position at the end of the first day. The next morning, upon seeing the standing desk, I remembered I was doing things poorly. And that doing things poorly the day before had gone well. I felt good about what I had done.

The second day,I went for a casual 20-minute walk before I started working. Then I stood and did air squats while I worked.

The third day, instead of doing air squats when I needed a screen break, Id head into my garage and do 20 kettlebell swings.And over the next few weeks, casual neighborhood walks slowly but surely evolved into hikes in the Boise foothills with friends.

Momentum was building.

A little bit of poor work toward what you want will get you much closer than no perfect work. The momentum will feel good. Youll start feeling safe to just show up.

I slowly started to feel like myself again. And after a few days of doing things poorly, it suddenly wasnt such a huge jump to start doing things well. The more I thought about it, the more the hypothesis resonated. Doing things poorly was an argument for small, nonjudgmental, incremental progress each day.

More importantly, I was no longer striving for impossible perfection, putting enormous pressure on myself, and cursing myself when I didnt follow through on or meet gigantic expectations. The effort I could give at any given moment was more than enough, and I was finally OK with that.

I was slowly relearning that life outside of my couch burrito was something to feel good about. I was doing it without the obligation of doing it well.

All action is valuable. Even poor action breeds feedback, insight, clarity, consistency, and, above all else,improved action. And for me, doing it poorly showed me I could be Me again.

Im not fully there yet. Im still semi-feral. But Ive started, and thats better than not starting.

This article originally appeared on Zapiers blog and is reprinted with permission.

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Life-changing freedom of doing things poorly - Fast Company

Add a faulty engine component to the seawater ingress, rust management issues, and damaged drive shafts to the list of problems the Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) have already sustained.

One Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship, the USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, needs significant parts retrofitting after the Navy discovered a faulty engine combining gear. This refit will be complicated and costly due to the classs particularly complex engine design.

Littoral Combat Ships

The Freedom-class featured several new technologies that were supposed to make the class incredibly capable. The Freedom-class's theoretical top speed is a spectacular forty-seven knots, thanks to two gas turbine engines and a pair of diesel engines that power four waterjets. However, the ships gearing components linking the machines are faulty and need replacementbut its not an easy repair, as the parts are located deep in the belly of the ships hull.

Its a very complex fix to replace the bearings on the combining gear. Its a very tight space, theres a lot of interferences that have to be removed, an LCS deputy program manager told USNI News. We completed that, were in the process of putting the ship back together and we will conduct at-sea testing of LCS 21 in the September timeframe.

Thanks to the combining gear bearings hard-to-reach placement within the ship, various methods have been devised by the Navy and the ships manufacturers, Lockheed Martin and RENK, to replace them. One way requires a hole to be made in the ships hull to access the bearings. Another requires replacing the gears bearings but not the gear itself, while another requires a complicated Tetris-like shifting of equipment within the ships hull.

The United States Navys Littoral Combat Ships record is not very long but is very troubled. The ships, the Freedom- and Independence-classes, have been plagued by problems almost from their inception.

Faulty Design, Extensive Repairs

The list of problems both Littoral Combat Ships have suffered is extensive. Several Freedom-class ships have had seawater penetrate their engines due to faulty gasket seals. An Independence-class ship suffered driveshaft damage. One Freedom-class clutch failed to disengage.

As a consequence, both classes entered service later than planned and were massively over budget.

We expect to validate the combining gear year effects at sea and at which point we will continue to implement with providing our fix across new construction and in-service ships in that, that those details are still being worked, the LCS deputy program manager explained to USNI News. In addition, two other Freedom-class ships will need to be retrofitted, like the USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul. However, the last two Freedom-class vessels will implement the fix before entering service with the Navy.

Postscript

Thanks, both to the Littoral Combat Ship's exorbitantly high costs and the far very problematic design, it is no wonder that some of the LCS hulls have already been retired from service by the United States Navy.

Caleb Larson is a Defense Writer with The National Interest. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture.

Image: Flickr

Link:

Yet Again, the Navy's Troubled Freedom-class Has An Issue - The National Interest

Social media activist Gul Bukhari speaks to the Associated Press in Lahore, Pakistan, on June 20, 2018. (K.M. Chaudary / AP Photo)

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IslamabadPakistans press, once a fertile breeding ground for reporters and activists, has become a graveyard of murdered careers. Such is the case of Asad Ali Toor, a journalist and vlogger based in the capital who is known as an outspoken critic of the military.

At around 11 pm on May 25just two weeks after the festival of Eid Al-FitrToor opened the door of his Islamabad apartment and found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. What followed, within moments, was a beating so severe that it left him flapping on the ground like a fish.

By the time they were done with me, he tells The Nation, I was so badly wounded that there were drops of blood falling from my fingertips. That was the most pain Ive ever felt in my life.

Toor says his attackers identified themselves as belonging to Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)Pakistans military intelligence agencyand forced him to chant slogans in support of the army, as well as others denouncing Israel, Afghanistan, and India. MORE FROM Hasan Ali

I couldnt understand how they expected me to speak with a rag in my mouth. All I could do was make silly sounds.

In spite of the traumaor perhaps because of ithe is keen to draw attention to the heroics of his snow-white cockatoo Barfi, who apparently had her wing broken while trying to defend him. The relief, however, is distinctly short-lived, and he quickly returns to the topic of press freedom. To be very honest, I dont see a ray of hope for the future. The establishment has become so powerful that there is nothing a few voices can do to disturb them.

The media landscape in Pakistan is notoriously complicated. Though there are more than 40 news channels on television and as many as 700 newspapers in print, the space for dissent is vanishingly small. The country ranks 145 out of 180 on the Global Press Freedom Index, and its prime minister, Imran Khan has just been named a predator by Reporters Without Borders. It is a climate that has become so unsafe for journalists that some have fled the country in terror.Current Issue

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One of those to have left is Gul Bukharia liberal commentator and social activist who used to write a regular column in the English-language press. Speaking to The Nation from London, where she has lived in exile since 2019, she gives a detailed account of her abduction in Lahore and the circumstances that forced her to leave the country. It is the first time she has spoken about the incident in public, and her thoughts are punctuated by chasms of silence.

I couldnt believe what was happening, she says, looking away. I thought I was going to be raped and killed.

On the night of June 5, 2018, while she was traveling to the studios of Waqt News, her car was intercepted by a cavalcade of trucks and forced off the road onto the pavement. When she came out to demand an explanation, she found herself surrounded by a dozen armed men, who violently bundled her into a car.

Bukhari believes these men were from ISI and had been sent to punish her for her views on the military. There is only one organization in Pakistan that has the power to abduct people in this way, she says.

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To stop her from screaming, one of her assailants started choking her and did not let go until she signaled her compliance. Her dupatta (shawl) was then used to tie up her hands and her eyes were covered with a dirty rag. They drove me around for an hour to disorient me and then took me to a safe house for an interrogation.

At the time of her kidnapping, Bukhari had emerged as one of the armys harshest critics. She had repeatedly condemned the armed forces for their incursion into politics and for committing human rights abuses against the Pashtuns, topics she claims made up the bulk of her interrogation.

Her high profile probably saved her life. News of her abduction went viral within minutes, and the pressure on her assailants became so strong that they were forced to take her back to her house.

My son was in his room. His friends had told him what had happened. He was very brave in that momentbut the effects of the trauma came out later.

For Taha Siddiqui, who survived an abduction attempt in January 2018, the trauma is something that never goes away. I had to go and see a psychologist because of all the flashbacks.

As the journalist responsible for investigating the armys extrajudicial killings in covert prisons, Siddiqui has often been accused of maligning the establishment. Like Bukhari, he too is living in exilein his case in Franceand the atmosphere he conjures when describing his life in Paris is one of suffocation, paranoia, and a perpetual sense of jeopardy.

In December 2018, while visiting Washington, D.C., for a conference, he claims to have been tipped offunder the Duty to Warn directiveby US Intelligence of a plot to kill him. From what I understood, they were spying in Islamabad when they came across this information, he says. They told me, Dont go to Pakistan because theyre gonna kill you for sure there; dont go to a Pakistan-friendly country because our assessment is that they might target you and be safe in Paris because anything can happen anywhere. In his hometown of Karachi, his parents still receive threatening phone calls and interrogatory visits.

The attacks on Siddiqui and Bukharispaced just six months aparttook place in a year of profound upheaval for the media. In the run-up to the general election of 2018, Pakistans biggest television network, Geo TV, was taken off the air on the orders of the military, allegedly because of the way it was covering the news. There then followed a brief period of negotiations that allowed Geo to return, but not before its management made a number of concessions. According to a source familiar with the terms of the settlement, the military and judiciary were not to be criticized; there was to be no reference to vote rigging or pre-poll manipulation; and all reporting on former prime minister Nawaz Sharif had to follow the narrative that he was guilty of corruption.

According to Asad Ali Toor, the capitulation of Geo management became a watershed moment. The establishment wasnt setting the boundaries for a single outlet; they were setting the boundaries for the entire media. The only journalists who were able to survive were the ones who agreed to follow these red lines.

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Certainly, it is difficult to argue with Toor when one considers the fate of those who rejected these commandments. In the past three years, the three big beasts of Pakistani journalismNajam Sethi, Hamid Mir, and Talat Hussainhave been taken off air and banned from working.

Talat Hussain was the first to go; he was removed from his job shortly after Imran Khan came to power, apparently because of pressure from the military establishment. We have dealt with fairly tyrannical regimes that were elected and dealt in repression, but it was episodic, he told The New York Times last year. This time it is structural and complete, and its hard to breathe.

In the case of Najam Sethi, exclusion was inevitable. Known for his wit and political wisdom and for the anonymous sources he likes to call his little birds, he was responsible for pioneering a pedagogic form of talk show in which he would tutor his cohostand by extension the audienceon how to interpret the news of the day. My problem was that I was being asked the question of why things were happening. Now my view was that they were happening because of the intervention of the military. I couldnt analyze anything without making reference to the powers that be.

The choice for Sethi, then, was simple: fall in line or fall out with the establishment. He chose the latter, and had his show suspended by the management of his channel.

Hamid Mir, who still carries two bullets inside his body from a failed assassination attempt in 2014, managed to stay in his job for a little while longer, despite walking out on the broadcast of the 2018 general election. In a free and fair election, Imran Khan would never have become prime minister, he tells the Nation. The whole thing was rigged, and I wasnt allowed to cover it.

Since May 28, when he gave a speech condemning the attack on Asad Toor and threatened to expose the secrets of the military, he hasnt been able to cover anything at all. I am living proof of censorship in Pakistan, he says.

To counter the censorship being imposed by the military, several prominent journalists have started broadcasting on YouTubebut this avenue is also on the verge of being closed. The government is proposing a measure to make the freedom to publish on social media contingent on obtaining a license from the state. If passed, the Pakistan Media Regularity Authority ordinance would be the latest in a long series that have been used to put limits on freedom of expression. Raza Rumi, who directs the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, attributes this suppression to the nature of the Pakistani state. You have to remember that this is a postcolonial state with the same attitude towards the press as the British Raj, which saw it as some kind of threat to security.

In fact, by making freedom of the press conditional on maintaining the glory of Islam and the integrity, security, or defense of the country, even the Pakistani Constitution restricts the medias ability to report. In the opinion of journalist and civil rights campaigner Munizae Jahangir, these constitutional restrictions make it difficult for the media to speak truth to power. You cannot critique the armed forces when, unfortunately, they have been at the heart of politics in Pakistan and the main decision-makers for most of our lives.

For Najam Sethi, who has just returned to the airwaves after a protracted absence, the situation in Pakistan is part of a worldwide phenomenon. Now that the media via technology is open to globalization and to completely new populist impulses, the urgent need of establishments everywhere to hide whatever they are doing has never been so ubiquitous. Whether its America or Pakistan, or anywhere else, laws are changing to manage the media in democracies and to control the media in autocracies.

The implications for Pakistan, however, are more serious than for most others. That is the view of reporter Azaz Syed, who thinks that future generations will suffer the consequences of this crackdown. When theres an entire era in which you havent told the truthits like youve distorted history, he tells The Nation. If you murder critical thinking in a society, it means you end up with a country thats only raising soldiers, people who only know how to follow instructions.

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Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in Pakistan - The Nation

The Congress on Monday condemned the actions of Twitter and accused it of adopting double standards and violating the freedom of expression under the diktat of the Modi government. This comes days after Rahul Gandhis account was temporarily suspended by the microblogging site and a tweet he had posted with the family of the nine-year-old Dalit rape victim was taken down.

The party also claimed that the Twitter handle of INC-TV was also suspended Monday morning, news agency PTI reported.

AICC general secretary organisation, K C Venugopal said the issue of temporary suspension of Rahul Gandhis Twitter account was discussed at the meeting of general secretaries, in-charges and PCC presidents held on Sunday.

The atrocious stance is nothing but another instance of anti-SC and anti-women mindset and inherent prejudice of the Modi Government as also a violation of freedom of expression by the Twitter India under the diktat of Modi Government. All present universally condemned this prejudicial mindset of BJP and decided to take up this matter at all levels, he said in a statement later.

The double standard of Twitter is too obvious as statutory commissions, BJP leaders and those holding statutory offices had put up similar pictures on Twitter on 2nd and 3rd August, two days before Rahuljis visit, Venugopal added.

He further stated it was resolved that the party will continue the fight undeterred until securing justice for the family.

Instead of curtailing atrocities against Dalits across the country, the prime minister and the government are up to suppress the voice of leaders like Rahul Gandhi who are in the forefront to fight for justice, he said.

In a tweet on Sunday, Venugopal had said, See the double standard! @TwitterIndia how fearful are you of the Modi govt that you are singling out Shri @RahulGandhis account, when Govt bodies have done the exact same thing.

The double standards of Twitter India continue. Even as accounts raising a voice for justice continue getting blocked, Twitter handles related to the govt like @NCSC_GoI & @anjubalabjp face no action for posting the same images. Remember, truth and justice always prevail, the Congress said on its official Twitter handle showing a picture of the blocked account of INC-TV.

On Sunday, the Opposition party had accused the government of intimidating Twitter.

Based on a complaint by theBJP, the Twitter account of Rahul Gandhi has been locked. Instead of giving justice to the 9-year-old Dalit girl, the BJP and the Narendra Modi government are far too preoccupied in intimidating Twitter as also illegally chasing Rahul Gandhi. Had PM Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah used this time in ensuring justice for the Dalit girlDelhi would have been a safer place, Congress communication department head Randeep Surjewala had told The Sunday Express.

To Twitter India, we say, Daro Mat, the Congress had tweeted with an image alleging that the Modi government is intimidating Twitter to lock Rahul Gandhis account for demanding justice for Delhi rape victim.

Meanwhile, the Indian Youth Congress Monday staged a protest in the national capital against Twitter India for blocking Rahul Gandhis account.

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Congress accuses Twitter of double standards and violating freedom of expression - The Indian Express

The CW has created a new initiative, called Freedom To Vote, to both protect eligible voters and combat voter suppression in upcoming elections.

Announced on the 56th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by The CWs Mark Pedowitz, Freedom to Vote expands on the networks 2020 voting campaign Vote Actually, which helped encourage young people to cast their votes in local and national elections. The CW has partnered with Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law and Vote.org for the new voting initiative.

Also teaming up with The CW for the latest campaign are some of the networks most notable stars. The Flashs Grant Gustin, Stargirls Brec Bassinger, Kung Fus Olivia Liang, Dynastys Sam Adegoke and Liz Gilles are among the The CW faces lending their voice to the multiplatform campaign, which launches today. Additional participating talent are Tala Ashe, Coby Bell, Kaylee Bryant, Melonie Diaz, Camrus Johnson, Nicole Kang, Jeanine Mason, Perry Mattfeld, Kennedy McMann, Candice Patton, Danielle Rose Russell, Azie Tesfai, Elizabeth Tulloch, Anjelika Washington and Karimah Westbrook.

The star-studded PSAs will be broadcast during the networks primetime lineup, across the CWs digital platforms and social media outlets.

Voting is the very foundation of our democracy. We all deserve the right to vote, and the right to fair access to cast those votes safely and securely. The CW has an opportunity and a responsibility to engage our multi-platform audience in the efforts of our esteemed partners to encourage leaders in Washington and around the country to protect and strengthen the freedom to vote, said Pedowitz. Last year, we were so incredibly proud to have contributed in some way to getting more young people than ever to vote in the 2020 presidential election through our Vote Actually campaign. Now, through our Freedom to Vote initiative, we want to make sure that those young voters,and every one of the240 million eligible voters, can continue to be able to make their voices heard in future national, state and local elections.

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The CW Launches Freedom To Vote Initiative To Combat Voter Suppression - Deadline