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Published by Radar Online MEGA India Arie is calling out Joe Rogan for his history of using the N-word as she calls for Spotify to remove her music from their platform. Mega The singer addressed the situation on Instagram. Arie’s post includes not only her asking for her music to be pulled from Spotify but also includes multiple video compilations of Rogan making more than tasteless jokes about black communities and his nonchalant use of the N-word throughout the years. The singer begins the video by saying she is asking her music to be taken off of Spotify followed by an old clip of Rogan comparing black neighborhoods to the Planet of the Apes. She clarifies that she empathizes with other artist like Canadian- American singer Neil Young who are protesting Rogan due to COVID misinformation and believes they should. Mega She also said she believes that the controversial podcaster has the right to say anything he wants to say – but she believes that goes both ways. Arie points out that artists like her make 0.003% of the money generated from Spotify. She asks for her music to be taken off the platform specifically because she doesn’t want money she makes for them to go towards what she believes to be problematic and racist. The singer also included a 30-second video of Rogan saying the N-word over and over again throughout the years openly on several podcasts and interviews. Arie clarifies her thoughts “[Joe Rogan] shouldn’t even be uttering the [n-]word. Don’t even say it, under any context. That’s where I stand. I have always stood there.” The singer’s final statement in the video sums it all up. “We have this person who is offensive to a lot of people and is paid $100 million. The backbone of Spotify is the music. You pay the musicians .003 to .005 percent of a penny and take this money generated over here and use it to invest in this guy? Do you what you want, but take me off. Or pay me too. I mean us. Pay artists like me too. Pay podcasters of color too.” Mega View the full article

Published by Reuters By Jonathan Landay and Ted Hesson WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A lack of flights and the search for a new U.S. reception center are among the hurdles facing the White House as it races to speed up the evacuation of at-risk Afghans from their homeland, according to a senior U.S. official and others familiar with the new plan. Other obstacles include difficulties in obtaining passports and an affordable housing shortage in the United States, they said. The plan’s goal “is just to make this more enduring and less of an emergency operation,” the senior U.S. official said in describing the revamp, requesting anonymity to discuss internal operations. The Biden administration has been under pressure to speed up Operation Allies Welcome from lawmakers, veterans groups and others angry that tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and others at risk of Taliban retaliation were left behind when the last U.S. troops departed in August after 20 years of war. Human rights organizations and the United Nations say the Taliban has stepped up detentions, abductions and killings. Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Sayed Khosti has rejected the accusation of reprisal killings, saying no evidence had been presented. “People left behind are getting more and more desperate and we’re going to start seeing more of the consequences of that, whether mass movement of refugees or meeting grim fates in Afghanistan,” said a second senior U.S. official. Advocacy groups say Washington should ensure the new plan will not suffer the types of setbacks that have hampered Afghan arrivals. “We want to see enough resources applied to these issues so that even if one area fails or falters for a moment, there are options to make sure the pipeline isn’t cut off,” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and president of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of advocacy groups. President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered that up to $1.2 billion be made available for the effort, the largest operation of its kind since the Vietnam era. About 80,000 Afghans have been resettled since August. The new plan calls for shifting the processing of Afghan evacuees for admission to the United States from reception centers on U.S. military bases that are being closed to a base in the Qatari capital of Doha. FLIGHTS ARE ‘MAIN CHALLENGE’ But two U.S.-chartered Qatar Airways flights a week from Kabul to Qatar’s al Udeid military base are needed, with the goal of adding more flights, the U.S. official said. The flights are the “main challenge,” said the official. Differences between Qatar and the Taliban triggered a suspension of regular charters before Christmas. “We’re hoping we can get to regular order,” the U.S. official said. The Qatar Embassy and foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Qatar has told Washington it intends to close the reception center in September ahead of the World Cup, the U.S. official confirmed. The official said the U.S. was looking for alternatives, including reopening the air base center after the World Cup. Once Afghan evacuees are processed for admission, they will be flown to the U.S. and placed with relatives or friends, provided housing by resettlement agencies or sent to a the planned reception center to help them resettle. The Biden administration has housed tens of thousands of such evacuees on bases in the United States while their admission and resettlement arrangements were finalized. The Pentagon has been closing those reception centers, with the last two expected to shutter this month, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said, after the roughly 6,500 people there have been processed. One of those two centers will remain open until the administration finds a civilian site, but a location has not been selected yet, the senior U.S. official and a congressional source said. The State Department plans to process Afghans for refugee status within 30 days beginning in March, two U.S. officials said. That is far faster than typical refugee processing, which can take years. To be sure, that creates additional challenges that the second senior U.S. official said would be difficult to surmount. Speeding up the operation, the second senior official said, will require an agreement with the Taliban to prioritize passports for evacuees or a deal with Qatar to allow travel without them, more U.S. officials in Doha to process evacuees, and a “higher tolerance of risk to speed up vetting.” Afghans entering the United States through the refugee resettlement program will be able to proceed directly to their destinations on U.N.-funded flights. The department also will complete the processing in Doha of tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and have applied for Special Immigration Visas (SIVs), according to the official and two congressional aides. The goal is to process and fly to the United States 1,000 refugees and 1,000 SIV recipients a month, the official said. (Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Mary Milliken and Gerry Doyle) View the full article

Published by DPA A museum dedicated to Avicii, the late superstar DJ from Sweden, is set to become the latest tourist draw in Stockholm. Yui Mok/PA Wire/dpa Stockholm, already a world capital of pop music heritage with its renowned ABBA museum, is now on its way to becoming a pilgrimage site for electronic music fans with both a city landmark and museum dedicated to the late Swedish DJ Avicii. Almost four years after the superstar DJ’s sudden death, the city is now preparing to open the Avicii Experience on February 26 – an interactive tribute museum to the electronic musician whose real name was Tim Bergling. The exhibition will feature photos, videos, memorabilia and previously unreleased music by the artist and tell the story of how Avicii became a star of the electronic music scene. Curators say the Avicii Experience will track Bergling’s life “from a reclusive music nerd to a celebrated superstar, from his boyhood room where it all started to the Los Angeles studio where the biggest hits were created.” City politicians had also announced in 2021 that a memorial site dedicated to the house musician is in the works. The memorial site, located in the upmarket district of Ostermalm where Bergling was born, grew up and went to school, will be a place where people can sit down for a while for some peace and quiet. Tim Bergling, known for hits such as “Levels”, “Sunshine” and “Wake Me Up”, was found dead in Oman in April 2018, aged 28. He stopped touring and performing live in 2016, but continued to record music and worked as a producer. View the full article

Published by Reuters UK LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence about Russian plans to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine show shocking evidence of Moscow’s aggression, British foreign minister Liz Truss said on Thursday. “This is clear and shocking evidence of Russia’s unprovoked aggression and underhand activity to destabilise Ukraine,” she said on Twitter. “This bellicose intent towards a sovereign democratic country is completely unacceptable and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” (Reporting by William James; editing by Michael Holden) Read More View the full article

Published by Reuters By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Texas man accused by U.S. federal prosecutors of threatening to kill election and government officials during a wave of violent rhetoric by believers in former President Donald Trump’s false claim of voter fraud is due in court on Friday. Chad Christopher Stark, 54, of Leander, Texas, is accused of posting a Jan. 5. 2021 message on Craigslist that read in part: “Georgia Patriots it’s time to kill … It’s time for us to take back our state from these Lawless treasonous traitors.” Stark is the first person charged by a new federal task force formed shortly after Reuters published the first in a series of investigative reports that have documented more than 850 threats and menacing messages to U.S. election workers. Stark could not be reached for comment. He is expected to be appointed a federal defender. The Stark indictment did not identify the victims of his threats, but Reuters previously reported that two of the officials include Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp. Both Raffensperger and Kemp are Republicans who defended the integrity of the Georgia election despite intense pressure from Trump, who in January 2021 called Raffensperger and told him to find enough votes to overturn his loss. Trump continues to falsely claim he lost the November 2020 election due to widespread fraud despite multiple court losses and audits confirming Joe Biden’s victory. Remarks Trump made on Saturday at an event in Texas prompted a Georgia prosecutor who is conducting a criminal investigation of the former president to ask the FBI for protection. Stark is currently out on bond and scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Russell Vineyard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia at 10:30 a.m. ET (1500 GMT). His case is one of dozens under investigation by federal authorities. The Justice Department last week unveiled charges against a second man – Gjergi Luke Juncal, 50, of Las Vegas who they accuse of making threatening phone calls to a state election worker. He has pleaded not guilty, and a trial was tentatively scheduled for the end of March. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Lisa Shumaker) View the full article

Published by AFP US Reprepresentatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have been targets of the Republican Party's right wing for months Washington (AFP) – Republicans were set to censure two lawmakers Friday in a significant escalation of the drive to oust dissidents seen as disloyal to former US president Donald Trump. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the lone Republicans on the House committee investigating Trump’s role in last year’s US Capitol assault, are regarded as adversaries of the ex-president, who retains his iron grip on the party despite losing the 2020 election. The party’s 168 national committee members, gathered for their winter meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, will vote to approve a formal censure of the pair. Hardline Trump loyalists have been pushing for months for the two to be expelled, particularly as the investigation into the January 6 2021 insurrection has closed in on the former president’s inner circle. The measure is expected to get a strong vote of approval from the committee. But with Kinzinger retiring from Congress after the November midterm elections, and Cheney in danger of losing her Wyoming seat, the party leadership is said to be keen to put the issue behind them. Republicans are hoping instead to focus on hitting President Joe Biden on his stalled domestic agenda, spiraling inflation and the stubborn pandemic ahead of the midterms. Cheney responded to news of the censure by doubling down on her Trump criticism. “The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon January 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy,” she said in a statement Thursday. “I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge,” Cheney added. “I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what.” View the full article

Published by DPA Lutz Leichsenring, spokesman and member of the executive board Clubcommission e.V., speaks at a press conference. Berlin's world-famous club scene is hoping to relaunch in March if coronavirus restrictions are lifted as hoped, a group representing the venues said on Friday. Britta Pedersen/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa Berlin’s world-famous club scene is hoping to relaunch in March if coronavirus restrictions are lifted as hoped, a group representing the venues said on Friday. Clubcommission said in a statement that clubs in the German capital would be ready to reopen within two or three weeks of such an announcement, citing the results of a recent survey. Around 80% of venues polled are currently closed completely, while others are still hosting cultural events or offering bar service. Dancing is currently banned in clubs under Berlin’s current Covid rules. Even as calls for the easing of restrictions grow in Germany, club owners said they are worried about renewed closures further down the line. They also cited a lack of staff and financial problems as a result of the restrictions as major concerns. If the clubs are to open, most would be prepared to allow in only vaccinated and recovered persons, while also requiring a recent negative test result at the door. They said that reopening with mask-wearing and social-distancing was out of the question. “If it is decided to reopen the clubs in the coming weeks, a strategy on the part of the politicians is urgently needed to ensure long-term planning security for event operations and thousands of employees,” Clubcommission press spokesperson Lutz Leichsenring said. Clubcommission chairperson Pamela Schobeß spoke of “light at the end of the tunnel.” “When it is clear that the intensive care units are no longer at their limits and the critical infrastructure workers are no longer absent due to illness, we too must finally be allowed to reopen for our guests,” she said. View the full article

Published by Reuters By Andrew Osborn and Mark Trevelyan MOSCOW (Reuters) -China and Russia proclaimed a deep strategic partnership on Friday to balance what they portrayed as the malign global influence of the United States as China’s President Xi Jinping hosted Russia’s Vladimir Putin on the opening day of the Beijing Winter Olympics. In a joint statement, the two countries affirmed that their new relationship was superior to any political or military alliance of the Cold War era. “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation,” they declared, announcing plans to collaborate in a host of areas including space, climate change, artificial intelligence and control of the Internet. The agreement marked the most detailed and assertive statement of Russian and Chinese resolve to work together – and against the United States – to build a new international order based on their own interpretations of human rights and democracy. Steeped in ideological discourse, it was not clear whether it would immediately translate into an increase in tangible and practical cooperation despite Putin trumpeting a new gas deal with China on Friday, or was intended as more of a statement of general policy intent. Jonathan Eyal of the London-based RUSI think tank said the declaration marked a “frontal rebuttal” of the U.S. and Western view of the world and a possible building block towards a military alliance between Russia and China. “It’s the most explicit articulation of the ‘making the world safe for dictatorship’ strategy,” he said. “It is a historic point because they both feel cornered and they feel their moment has arrived to state their vision of the world and promote it aggressively.” The two countries have moved closer together as both have come under pressure from the West on a host of issues including their human rights records and Russia’s military build-up near Ukraine. The timing of their announcement was highly symbolic, at a China-hosted Olympics that the United States has subjected to a diplomatic boycott. Each went significantly further than before, Eyal said, in explicitly backing the other over key bones of contention with the United States and its allies: – Russia voiced its support for China’s stance that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposition to any form of independence for the island. Moscow and Beijing also voiced their opposition to the AUKUS alliance between Australia, Britain and the United States, saying it increased the danger of an arms race in the region. – China joined Russia in calling for an end to NATO enlargement and supported its demand for security guarantees from the West – issues at the heart of Moscow’s confrontation with the United States and its allies over Ukraine. The two countries expressed concern about “the advancement of U.S. plans to develop global missile defence and deploy its elements in various regions of the world, combined with capacity building of high-precision non-nuclear weapons for disarming strikes and other strategic objectives”. Elsewhere, without naming Washington, they criticised attempts by “certain states” to establish global hegemony, fan confrontation and impose their own standards of democracy. TECH AND ENERGY In the technology arena, Russia and China said they were ready to strengthen cooperation on artificial intelligence and information security. They said they believed that “any attempts to limit their sovereign right to regulate national segments of the Internet and ensure their security are unacceptable”. Meanwhile Russian state energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft on Friday agreed new gas and oil supply deals with Beijing worth tens of billions of dollars. The deals capitalise on Putin’s drive to diversify Russian energy exports away from the West, which started shortly after he came to power in 1999. Since then Russia has become China’s top energy supplier and cut its reliance on the West for revenues. The Kremlin said the presidents also discussed the need to broaden trade in national currencies because of unpredictability surrounding the use of the dollar. U.S. President Joe Biden has said Russian companies could be cut off from the ability to trade in dollars as part of sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine. Moscow denies any such intention, but has used a build-up of more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s border to grab the attention of the West and press its demands for security guarantees. The Chinese gas supplies are not directly linked with Russian gas exports to Europe, and more Russian gas for Beijing does not automatically mean less for Europe. However, they serve Putin as an addition revenue cushion amid the rising threat of U.S. and EU sanctions. (Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London; Editing by Angus MacSwan) View the full article

Published by New York Daily News Gay and lesbian adults in the United States have higher COVID-19 vaccination rates than heterosexual adults, health officials said Thursday. According to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lesbians and gay men age 18 and older reported higher vaccination coverage overall (85.4%) than their heterosexual counterparts (76.3%), whose rates were similar to those of bisexual adults (76.3%) and transgender adults (75.7%) Additionally, gay and lesbian adults were also more likely to trust in the efficacy of the potentially life-saving shots than heterosexual adults. W… Read More View the full article