elias rome 🦇

19-year-old Khalil Al Habil's liver and kidneys are failing. Shrapnel damage from the bombardment that killed his baby brother Omar has gone mostly untreated due to a lack of funds and resources. The ill effects of this damage have progressed to the point that the organs are losing their ability to function. Khalil urgently needs 3 rounds of treatment to combat the effects of his deteriorating liver and kidneys.

We've paid off the first round of treatments but Khalil has two treatments that he still needs. The second costs about $1,250 usd, but we haven’t made much progress in more than a month and his condition is getting progressively worse. We need to meet this second goal ASAP!!!

Current: $10,052 out of $10,407 usd (12 May)

Need to raise: $355 usd

The lethargy and fatigue caused by his deteriorating organ function only make reaching out more difficult. He is in very, very bad shape, and I’m extremely worried about him.

He has gone so long between sessions that he requires additional medications to sustain him between treatments. With a price of $1500 for the treatment for his failing organs, and $500 for supplementary medications, this is where we are for round 3:

Current: $10,552 out of $12,407 usd (7 June)

The bombing, death, hunger, and displacement do not stop for a single moment. What has actually stopped is the world's interest, questions, and follow-up. We do not know if they have grown tired of us and become accustomed to our tragedy, or if the media has deceived them and contributed to misleading them!

Help Mahmoud's family from here

The Israeli government's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit has closed the crossings into the Gaza Strip following Iranian missile attacks on Israel.

The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”

What went wrong? The Post continues: “Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the country’s largest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.

The massive review raises questions about the veracity of not just expert hair testimony, but also the bite-mark and other forensic testimony offered as objective, scientific evidence to jurors who, not unreasonably, believed that scientists in white coats knew what they were talking about. As Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, put it, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.”

This study was launched after the Post reported that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to possibly hundreds of wrongful convictions for rape, murder, and other violent crimes, dating back at least to the 1970s. In 90 percent of the cases reviewed so far, forensic examiners evidently made statements beyond the bounds of proper science. There were no scientifically accepted standards for forensic testing, yet FBI experts routinely and almost unvaryingly testified, according to the Post, “to the near-certainty of ‘matches’ of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work.”

In some way, I hope you can help Maha.

The mother, Maha, is 31 years old and, as we explained, has a history of stomach problems. She contracted a serious case of viral gastroenteritis, which is circulating in Gaza. She is suffering from a high fever, abdominal cramps, and vomiting, and requires immediate intravenous treatment.🤕🤒

The cost of her treatment last week was 1000€, and doctors have indicated that the treatment period will be extended for at least another week and could reach 2000€.💔😭

@northgazaupdates2 @spacebeyonce

A systematic national campaign organized by the US federal government in co-ordination with state and local police and intelligence units in order to destroy the party, included sowing dissidence, mass arrests, political trials for conspiracy, and assassinations of Panther leaders. Such techniques succeeded in suppressing the Panthers everywhere except in its original home - the Oakland area.

In 1968 and 1969 Black Panther offices were raided 18 times by the police, three Panthers were deported from the US, and 21 cases of police harassment of individuals were documented.

During this period 768 members of the Black Panthers were arrested on a total of 1,003 charges, including 178 charges of possession of weapons, 96 of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, 92 of attempted murder, or conspiracy to murder, 38 of conspiracy to bomb, 16 of rioting or conspiring to riot, 36 of illegally selling newspapers, 11 of unlawful assembly and one charge of setting up an unlawful table. A high proportion of the charges were eventually dropped, which suggests that many arrests were for purposes of harassment. In those cases where data exists, there was a conviction rate of 80%.

Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was charged with the murder of a policeman and spent 22 months in jail before being released. The other most prominent Panther, Bobby Seale, was tried as one of the 'Chicago Eight, for conspiracy to cross state-lines with the intent to riot (although he had participated in the events only at the 1968 Democratic convention as a substitute speaker at a rally). Seale was also arrested and jailed for alleged involvement in the murder of a New Haven Black Panther. Twenty-one leading New York City Panthers were arrested in 1969 for ‘conspiracy to bomb department stores and murder policemen’ and were held in jail for over two years before being acquitted. The climax of the nationally coordinated police suppression of the Panthers occurred in December 1969 when Chicago police raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, head of the Panthers’ Chicago section, and killed him in his bed. A Grand Jury investigation of this incident found that 83 to 99 shots were fired, all but one of which were from police weapons.

In summary, the US state in the late 1960s responded as it had in any comparable period when there was a growing threat to the dominant system of property and privilege. Repressive measures grew in harshness parallel with the growth in numbers and the radicalism of the left. Repressive measures were focused on what was seen as the most important danger threatening the Black movement and the possibility of Black Nationalist-white Marxist unity. Repressive measures were cancelled and even publicly repudiated in the mid-1970s after both the Black nationalist and New Left movements had been decimated.

Between 1974 and 1980, there was no challenge of any consequence to the dominant system of property and privilege and no effective movement opposed to US foreign policy, and thus it was one of the most tolerant and least politically repressive periods in US history. When there is no need for repression, there is no repression. In the early 1980s, at the beginning of the Reagan administration and with the imminent probability of a revival of US imperial intervention overseas, cutbacks in social programmes at home, and the consequent probability of a rebirth of the anti-war, student, and national minority movements, it can be expected that the state will once again resort to the appropriate measures to ensure ‘law and order’ (privilege and property).