Sikh man beaten, told to 'go back to your country' in US

Agencies
August 6, 2018

New York, Aug 6: A 50-year-old Sikh man was beaten up multiple times by two white men who yelled racial slurs that "You're not welcome here!, Go back to your country!" in the US state of California, prompting police to investigate the "heinous" hate crime, authorities said.

The incident happened last week near the intersection of Keyes and Foote roads in California as the man was putting up campaign signs alone along a rural stretch on the outskirts of Keyes, the police was quoted as saying by The Sacramento Bee.

Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson said the assault is being investigated as a hate crime.

"This is a random despicable criminal act against a member of the Sikh community," Christianson said.

Sheriff Sergeant Tom Letras said the 50-year-old victim was placing signs for local candidates when two white men wearing black hooded sweatshirts ambushed him and beat him to the ground.

He was struck multiple times as the assailants screamed, "You're not welcome here!" and "Go back to your country!" They then spray painted his truck, Letras said.

"This is a heinous crime and we are aggressively investigating it," Letras said.

The victim required medical attention so an ambulance was called and he treated on the scene for cuts and other wounds. According to a Facebook post, the man was beaten on the head with a rod. But he escaped major injury because of his turban, which is traditionally worn by Sikh men, the report added.

Also, the post shared an image of the pickup truck, which was spray painted in large black letters with the words "Go back to ur country" alongside a Celtic cross. The image is a well-known white supremacist symbol, according to the Anti-Defamation League which tracks anti-Semitic and other hate crimes across the country, the report added.

The department is looking for help identifying the suspects or witnesses to the crime. The incident is considered an assault with a deadly weapon and hate crime. The victim's identity is not being released at this time, Letras added.

Hate crimes against the Sikh community have raised alarm in the Central Valley numerous times over the years. After 9/11, a spate of local crimes against Sikh people were attributed to misplaced anti-Muslim bigotry.

The valley has one of the largest and oldest Sikh populations in the US. The first Sikh temple, or gurdwara, in America, opened in Stockton in 1912. There are an estimated 500,000 Sikhs in the US and 25 million worldwide making it the fifth most popular religion.

Earlier, The Sikh Coalition, a national Sikh advocacy and civil rights group, issued a statement saying they were seeing a "new wave of hate crimes" against the Sikh community. It reported that Sikhs in the US are experiencing an average of one hate crime per week since the start of 2018.

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News Network
April 19,2020

Washington, Apr 19: President Donald Trump has expressed his doubts over the official Chinese figures on the number of deaths in their country due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, claiming that the fatalities were way ahead of the US.

Trump's comments come two days after another 1,300 fatalities were added to the official count in the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started. The revision puts China's overall death toll to more than 4,600.

"We are not number one; China is number one just so you understand," Trump told reporters at a White House news conference on Saturday. "They are way ahead of us in terms of death. It's not even close."

According to Trump, when highly-developed healthcare systems of the UK, France, Belgium, Italy and Spain had high fatality rates, it was O.33 in China.

The president asserted that the actual number was much more than the official Chinese death toll figures, which he said were "unrealistic".

"You know it, I know it and they know it, but you don't want to report it. Why?" he asked. "You will have to explain that. Someday I will explain it."

He also highlighted that on a per-capita basis, the mortality rate in the US was far lower than other nations of Western Europe.

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Agencies
June 7,2020

Boston, Jun 7: Dozens of scientists doing research funded by Mark Zuckerberg say Facebook should not be letting President Donald Trump use of the social media platform to spread both misinformation and incendiary statements.

The researchers, including 60 professors at leading US research institutions, wrote a letter to the Facebook CEO on Saturday asking that he consider stricter policies on misinformation and incendiary language that harms people," especially during the current turmoil over racial injustice.

The letter calls the spread of deliberate misinformation and divisive language the researchers' goal of using technology to prevent and eradicate disease, improving childhood education and reform the criminal justice system.

The researchers' mission "is antithetical to some of the stances that Facebook has been taking, so we're encouraging them to be more on the side of truth and on the right side of history as we've said in the letter, said Debora Marks of Harvard Medical School, one of three professors who organized the letter.

The other organisers are Martin Kampmann of the University of California-San Francisco and Jason Shepherd of the University of Utah.

All have grants from a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative program working to prevent, cure and treat neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The initiative is run by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

They said the letter had more than 160 signatories. Shepherd said about 10% are employees of Chan Zuckerberg foundations.

The letter objects specifically to Zuckerberg's decision not to at least flag as a violation of Facebook's community standards Trump's post that stated when the looting starts, the shooting starts after unrest in Minneapolis over the videotaped killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer.

The letter's authors called the post a clear statement of inciting violence.

Twitter had both flagged and demoted a Trump tweet using the same language.

The Associated Press emailed the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative press office for comment. It did not immediately respond.

Some Facebook employees have publicly objected to Zuckerberg's refusal to take down or label misleading or incendiary posts by Trump or other politicians. But Zuckerberg who controls a majority of voting shares in the company has so far refused.

On Friday, Zuckerberg said in a post that he would review potential options for handling violating or partially-violating content aside from the binary leave-it-up or take-it-down decisions I know many of you think we should have labeled the President's posts in some way last week, he wrote.

"Our current policy is that if content is actually inciting violence, then the right mitigation is to take that content down not let people continue seeing it behind a flag. There is no exception to this policy for politicians or newsworthiness.

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News Network
January 6,2020

Aboard Air Force One, Jan 6: US President Donald Trump threatened sanctions against Baghdad on Sunday after Iraq's parliament called on US troops to leave the country, and the president said if troops did leave, Baghdad would have to pay Washington for the cost of the air base there.

"We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that's there. It cost billions of dollars to build, long before my time. We're not leaving unless they pay us back for it," Trump told reporters on Air Force One.

Trump said that if Iraq asked US forces to leave and it was not done on a friendly basis, "we will charge them sanctions like they've never seen before ever. It'll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame."

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