Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

President Biden signed on Thursday an executive order for “reopening and continuing operation of schools and early childhood education providers”. The goal was to “ensure that students receive a high-quality education” during the pandemic.

This order was one of 10 signed by Biden in conjunction with the release of a new 200-page strategy from the White House on COVID-19 response. This strategy included a goal of administering 100 million vaccines in Biden’s first 100 days in office and a plan to invoke the Defense Production Act.

The guidance for colleges, elaborated by the CDC, leaves discretion to institutions and states, resulting in a variety of approaches across colleges.

On the other hand, Joe Biden revoked a recent initiative from the Trump Administration—called Donald Trump’s presidential 1776 Commission—to promote “patriotic education” in schools.

In an executive order signed on his first day in office, this Wednesday 20, Biden disbanded Trump’s project, depicted by several historians as “false and fashionable ideologies.”

IBL News | New York

The College Board—which administers the SAT college entrance examination—announced yesterday that it is dropping the Subject Tests and the optional essay section for students in the U.S.

From now on, colleges will decide how to consider students’ Subject Test scores.
Regarding essay writing, the College Board recognizes that there are other ways for students to demonstrate their mastery.

Both exams have been fading as fewer American colleges require them. Also, the competitor ACT has lately received a boost.

In addition, the pandemic shut down testing centers.

“The pandemic accelerated a process already underway at the College Board to reduce and simplify demands on students,” the organization acknowledged in a statement.

Students in the U.S. will automatically have their registrations canceled and receive a refund.

For international students, the College Board will provide two more administrations in May and June of 2021.

However, it added that it would continue to develop a digital version of the SAT test with live proctoring. The organization didn’t give a time frame.

“There’s still a clear demand from students to take the SAT as a way to show their strengths to colleges. Most immediately, we’re working to provide as many opportunities as possible for students in the class of 2022 to take the SAT this year.”

Critics said in The New York Times that the College Board’s decision was financial due to the costs of administering the SAT during the pandemic.

They also say that the organization was likely to use the elimination of the subject tests to try to convince elite high schools to offer more Advanced Placement (AP) courses, whose tests it also administers.

IBL News | New York

ProPublica.org published yesterday a collection in a chronological timeline of over 500 videos recovered from the now-shuttered Parler social network app, offering an unfiltered, eye-opening look at the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

New York City-based nonprofit news outlet reviewed thousands of videos uploaded publicly by Trump supporters to Parler before the site was taken offline by the AWS hosting company.

“Taken together, they provide one of the most comprehensive records of a dark event in American history through the eyes of those who took part,” said ProPublica.

ProPublica disclosed that before Parler went offline, an anonymous programmer downloaded more than 1 million videos — nearly all the videos ever uploaded to the service. Then a staff of journalists selected 500 newsworthy videos.

IBL News | New York

Harvard University students started to circulate a petition that seeks for revoking degrees from President Trump’s aides and supporters who attended the institution.

The initiative “Revoke their Degrees” points to three Harvard graduates, all described as “violent actors”: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Senator Ted Cruz, and Representative from Texas Dan Crenshaw. None of them are being investigated for inciting last week’s riot in D.C.

The letter—disclosed by FOX Business—argues that Trump’s supporters were involved in spreading the “disinformation and mistrust” that lead to the assault on the US Capitol.

The campaign—started by five students who attend Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—calls on the university to be “prepared to take a stand for representative democracy and against violent white supremacy.”

These students consider that “a Harvard degree is a privilege, not a right.”

As a precedent for revoking degrees, they cited Harvard’s decision in 2010 to revoke a degree from a Russian spy, Andrey Bezrukov.

• PDF: Harvard Letter 2021

IBL News | New York

Right-wing groups are moving online conversations from social media platforms to chat apps out of view of law enforcement—or at least harder to track.

These apps are Telegram, MeWe, and Gab.com, among others. Their popularity is surging after Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and AWS cracked down on conservative groups in light of the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In this regard, police forces are concerned about being able to predict and respond to protests and potential attacks in the days leading up to the January 20th inauguration.

Dubai-based Telegram was this week the second most-downloaded free app in the U.S., while Signal, another encrypted chat app, was the Number 1.

The alternative to WhatsApp platform Telegram offers both encrypted chat rooms and public-facing groups anyone can join after a simple search. For example, @proudboysusa has 32,000 subscribers on Telegram.

A major selling point for the app is its security via deeply encrypted end-to-end messages. Users can set up secret chats that disappear in time.

The platform claimed that this week it surpassed 500 million users after a surge of 25 million new downloads in just 72 hours.

Until this week, all kinds of right-wing organizations were freely operating on Telegram, but the company took down several public groups filled with racist messages, as the FBI was tracking down rioters.

A terrorist and extremist researcher at Canadian Queen’s University said yesterday to The Washington Post, “With Parler and Gab down, and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram becoming less hospitable, Telegram will be the main platform they turn to”.

In the past, Telegram was used heavily by Islamic State supporters before accounts were taken down.

IBL News | New York

Gab.com—one of the alternative social media sites, along with MeWe and Rumble, is attracting hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters. This week, started to face increased scrutiny from pro-Biden organizations.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called for the Federal Government to investigate Gab and its CEO and Founder, Andrew Torba, to determine its role in the U.S. Capitol assault. “Gab intentionally served as a forum for people to plan, coordinate, engage in, or otherwise facilitate the criminal activity that took place on January 6,” ADL argued.

Andrew Torba denied any culpability in the attack and insisted that his “free-speech platform” did a “phenomenal job” of mitigating violent content in the weeks prior while reporting to law enforcement about it.

“We’ve been removing this stuff for weeks and weeks, working 18 to 20 hours a day to make sure no illegal activity, no threats of violence are happening on Gab,” said Torba. “There’s a difference between lawful First Amendment-protected speech and violence, which we have always had no tolerance for,” he added. “I’m not going to censor lawful First Amendment-protected speech.”

The shutdown of Parler—which went offline after AWS dumped the platform from its cloud system—has significantly benefited Gab, MeWe, and Telegram.

Gab reported 1.7 million new users in the past four days and 52 million visits in the past week. Gab has built its own web browser, servers, social network, and payment processor, to avoid any potential crackdown from “Big Tech”.

This surge in traffic is resulting in timeout errors and website inaccessibility.

Gab’s CEO Restores the Tweets of President Trump Deleted by Twitter

In addition, the Gab CEO and Founder saved a backup file of all of the contents from the President’s Twitter account before it got blocked from this platform. He then put the recreated version on Gab’s platform, including all comments. Trump’s videos from other platforms had their space on Gab, as well.

Meanwhile, MeWe said it has added 400,000 users every day since Saturday and now has more than 14 million members. Now, MeWe ranks as the fifth most popular free app on Apple’s App Store and Google Play this week. It has 100 content reviewers who examine posts on its platform.