That’s a thing I began learning during my years working in schools, but I’ve really picked up a great deal more from fellow blogger Barry. Here is his Autistic Pride Day blog post!
June 16, 1961 Following a meeting between South Vietnamese envoy Nguyen Dinh Thuan and President John F. Kennedy, the United States agreed to increase the presence of American military advisors in Vietnam from 340 to 805, and to provide direct training and combat supervision to South Vietnamese troops. The number of U.S. personnel rose to 3,200 by the end of 1962. President Ngo Dinh Diem and President Eisenhower in DC, five years earlier
June 16, 1965 A planned civil disobedience turned into a five-hour teach-in on the steps and inside the Pentagon about the escalating war in Vietnam. In two days, more than 50,000 leaflets were distributed without interference at the building that houses the U.S. Department of Defense. A World War II artillery officer, Gordon Christiansen, turned in his honorable discharge certificate in protest.
June 16, 1976 South African police opened fire on black students peacefully protesting the requirement to learn Afrikaans, the language of the small white minority that enforced the racially separatist regime known in Afrikaans as apartheid. Neither black nor colored (other non-white or mixed race) South Africans could vote or live where they chose. Over 150 South African children were killed and hundreds more were injured in the shooting—what became known as the Soweto Massacre. fact: Soweto stands for: SOuth WEst TOwnships The History of Apartheid in South Africa Read more on Soweto
June 16, 1992 Former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was indicted for his participation in the Iran-Contra affair, charged with four counts of lying to Congress and prosecutors. He had concealed the secret arrangement to provide funds to the Nicaraguan insurgent contra rebels with profits from selling arms to Iran, which in turn were to encourage the release of hostages held by groups allied with Iran. President Ronald Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan, discussing the President’s remarks on the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan administration (1981-1989) had been circumventing the legal ban on material support for the terrorist activities of the contras. Iran had needed the weapons for its war with Iraq, and it was hoped that Iran would respond by encouraging the release of hostages being held by Islamist groups in Lebanon. President Reagan had publicly and repeatedly promised never to negotiate with terrorists, and had maintained the break in diplomatic relations with the Iranian revolutionary government. Weinberger and the five others charged were all pardoned by President George H.W. Bush six months later, days before the trial was to start, and shortly before President Bush would be leaving office. More on Iran-Contra pardons
The party was loud and boisterous, but the drinking games were boring for sober spectators like Ellie. She’d just stepped outside for some fresh air and a break from the nonsensical cacophony when she noticed a strange, red light out near the garden shed. Thinking it might be a fellow teetotaler having a smoke break, she walked out towards the red glow to say “hello,” but paused when she realized that she didn’t smell any smoke… and what had appeared in the dark to be a garden shed was actually some sort of spacecraft. But by then it was too late.
“Ah, hello, I’m overjoyed to meet you,” rasped the figure. It stepped closer, and Ellie saw a reptilian face, gazing at her through the ruddy illumination cast by some sort of penlight. “Wonderful, I can’t detect any of that alcoholic poison in your bloodstream. You’ll make a lovely host mother,” the creature proclaimed. Ellie promptly fainted.
She was awakened by bird song as the sun began to rise. She realized that she was lying on the ground in her host’s backyard, but the UFO and ET were both gone. She leaped up as she heard a voice behind her, dripping with corrosive judgement, “Well, wouldn’t you know it? Here she is. What are you doing out here, you scared the hell out of us!” It was her buddy, Harry, the one who’s dragged her to this disastrous shindig. Great, now he thinks she was passed out drunk, and he’ll never invite her anywhere again. Though considering how this night had gone, that might not be such a bad thing. She decided that it would be best not to mention Lizardman, though, lest she incur even more criticism.
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A few weeks later, Ellie missed her period. She’d been worrying about what the reptilian extraterrestrial might have done to her during the hours that she’d spent lying unconscious on Harry’s lawn. The positive pregnancy test confirmed one of her worst fears.
After a lot of soul searching, she decided to keep the unexpected baby. At 42, she wasn’t likely to have another opportunity. So she duly set off to visit Doctor Abrams. “Well, because of your advanced maternal age, you’ll need to be more careful than usual. Let’s do an ultrasound and see how the little guy is doing.” He ran the probe over Ellie’s belly, commenting as he worked: “Hmmmm, nice strong heart beat. Good, it seems very healthy. But… what the hell is that? It looks like a tail!” Dr. Abrams was getting more worked up by the second. Ellie stared at the screen, realizing that her unborn child looked familiar… the tiny fetus bore a strange resemblance to the lizard-like creature from Harry’s garden. Her contemplations were interrupted by the thudding sound of Dr. Abrams falling to the floor in a dead faint. Ellie quickly dressed and rushed home.
But she knew she couldn’t stay home. She was nervous that somebody from the hospital might show up, demanding that she abort her alien pregnancy. She needed to find a place that would be safe for her and her future offspring.
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Ellie’s childhood friend, Bert, lived out in the country. Bert was a lovable goofball and they’d always been best friends. He liked animals better than most humans, and worked as a veterinarian. Even though he was legally limited to the treatment of nonhuman animals, he was always open to helping out with a little illicit medical aid to his human friends when necessary. Bert was a bit ‘out there,’ but Ellie knew he was someone she could trust. Bert always accepted absolutely everything at face value. He not only believed Ellie’s bizarre story about her immaculate conception of a baby space lizard, he was super excited at the prospect of being allowed to deliver the scaly child.
“Ellie, this is so COOL,” he crowed. “I can’t wait to meet your baby! Can I be its godfather?”
Ellie smiled and nodded. Maybe the next few months wouldn’t be so bad after all.
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Ellie’s pregnancy was uneventful. The labor wasn’t too bad, either. Ellie supposed the fact that her baby girl was smaller than an average human child made everything easier. Bert was great. He coached her through the whole thing, and was only slightly freaked out as he examined the newborn, announcing, “Whoa, no umbilical cord! I wonder how she was nourished? Maybe sort of like a parasite?” Realizing that such thoughts were unworthy of a doting godfather, he contented himself with cooing at the little lizard girl as he cuddled her. At least HE didn’t pass out. Ellie named her Ignatia, but affectionately called her Iggy.
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Ellie and Bert raised young Iggy together. His veterinary skills helped in figuring out how to tend and feed the growing creature. They home-schooled her, realizing that there was no way that she would be able to attend a public school. She was a bright and affectionate child, and as her dietary needs progressed from crickets and mealworms to larger sources of protein, she respected the squeamishness of her foster parents and was discreet in the capture and consumption of her prey.
Eventually, the day that Ellie had expected and feared arrived. She looked out the window into the backyard one night and saw that the spaceship had returned. This time, she invited the extraterrestrial into their home and introduced Bert and young Iggy. “You’ve done very well! Thank you for taking such good care of the young one! She has grown up stronger and wiser than I could have ever hoped.” She — for as it turned out the older lizard creature was female — explained how her race had been scouting around various planets, seeking a home for their future children. When a possibly suitable planet was located, they then sought out suitable hosts to carry their eggs and raise the offspring to adulthood. Ellie’s pregnancy had been the result of an implanted lizard person egg.
Bert was worried. “But what about us humans? I’m not sure that the average Homo sapiens is sapient enough to get along with your species.”
The lizard woman grinned, a potentially terrifying sight if not for the fact that they knew she was friendly. “You’re right,” she agreed, “but fortunately for us and unfortunately for your species, your race is slowly dying out. Iggy’s children will have a clear playing field, someday in the distant future.”
Ellie was sad, but she realized that this fate had been a long time coming. At least she would be able to help raise Earth’s next dominant species. “But how will she reproduce,” she asked, “are there more like her?”
“Iggy’s the only one of her kind on Earth, but she will someday be able to handle the job herself. You see, we reproduce by parthenogenesis, one offspring every twenty years. That is why we are all female, and is also why our species will never overrun the resources of this planet,” she explained. “I must fly off to check on the others. I am most grateful and will see to it that you will never lack for anything.”
Ellie and Bert knew that their biological genetics would be lost to history. The human race was doomed. But their values, their beliefs, their thoughts, their legends, their dreams — these would live on in Iggy’s memory and she would teach her descendants to remember as well. And maybe that would be enough.
June 15, 1917 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft for America’s recent declaration of war with Germany in World War I. They held a number of rallies to discourage young men vulnerable to the new draft from cooperating. They laid out their position in the nearly 100,000 fliers they distributed with their NoConscription League Manifesto. “. . . this democratic country makes no such provision for those who will not commit murder at the behest of the war profiteers. Thus the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ is ready to coerce free men into the military yoke.” The Emma Goldman Papers The No-Conscription League Manifesto Alexander Berkman biography
June 15, 1942 The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in Chicago by a group of students including James Farmer and Bayard Rustin. They found inspiration in Mahatma Gandhi—and his nonviolent victory over British colonial rule of India—for their struggle to achieve full legal rights for African Americans. CORE history Read more about CORE
June 15, 1966 The James Meredith March Against Fear [see June 6, 1966] arrived in Granada, Mississippi, and was met by hundreds of members of the local Negro (African-American) community. A rally was then held in the town square to encourage voter registration. During the rally, a representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) placed a small American flag on a Confederate War Memorial (it was later removed, considered a desecration by the local white population). Grenada County had recently hired four Negro voter registrars and, following the rally, and again following a speech that night by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., ßhundreds lined up at the courthouse to register to vote, 160 just on this day, a total of 1300 over the next two. Shortly thereafter, however, the Negro registrars were fired, and 700 registrations were invalidated for alleged technical violations of the local ordinance.
June 15, 1970 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Sisson that conscientious objectors, those who refuse military service or to bear arms for moral or religious reasons, need not base their beliefs on the tenets of an organized religion. Visit the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors
June 15, 2011 Three months after the meltdown at the local nuclear power plant, the Fukushima, Japan, city government announced it would give dosimeters (devices that measure the intensity of radiation) to 34,000 preschool, elementary and junior high school students.
Federal officials have begun carrying out President Donald Trump’s orders to enforce a World War II-era criminal law that requires virtually all non-citizens in the country to register with and submit fingerprints to the government.
Since April, law enforcement in Louisiana, Arizona, Montana, Alabama, Texas and Washington, D.C., have charged people with willful “failure to register” under the Alien Registration Act, an offense most career federal public defenders have never encountered before. Many of those charged were already in jail and in ongoing deportation proceedings when prosecutors presented judges with the new charges against them.
The registration provision in the law, which was passed in 1940 amid widespread public fear about immigrants’ loyalty to the U.S., had been dormant for 75 years, but it is still on the books. Failure to register is considered a “petty offense” — a misdemeanor with maximum penalties of six months imprisonment or a $1,000 fine.
In reviving the law, the Trump administration may put undocumented immigrants in a catch-22. If they register, they must hand over detailed, incriminating information to the federal government — including how and when they entered the country. But knowingly refusing to register is also a crime, punishable by arrest or prosecution, on top of the ever-present threat of deportation.
“The sort of obvious reason to bring back registration in the first place is the hope that people will register, and therefore give themselves up effectively to the government because they already confessed illegal entry,” said Jonathan Weinberg, a Wayne State University law professor who has studied the registration law.
But the Trump administration also has another goal. It says one purpose of the registration regime is to provoke undocumented immigrants to choose a third option: leave the country voluntarily, or, in the words of the Department of Homeland Security, compulsory “mass self-deportation.” Those efforts, alongside the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and a more aggressive approach to immigration raids, are meant to achieve a broader, overarching campaign promise: the largest deportation program in the history of America.
“For decades, this law has been ignored — not anymore,” the department said in a February announcement that it would enforce the law. The department called “mass self-deportation” a “safer path for aliens and law enforcement,” and said it saves U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer questions about its enforcement policies.
A long dormant law will now affect millions
The Alien Registration Act was passed in 1940, amid fears about immigrants’ loyalties. A separate provision of the statute criminalizes advocacy for overthrowing the government. For about two decades, that provision was used to prosecute people who were accused of being either pro-fascist or pro-Communist.
The registration provision, though, remained largely dormant, and had not been enforced in 75 years. It applies to non-citizens, regardless of legal status, who are in the U.S. for 30 days or longer.
Certain categories of legal immigrants have already met the requirement. Immigrants who have filed applications to become permanent residents are considered registered by DHS, for example. And even some undocumented U.S. residents are already registered: U.S. residents who have received “parole” — a form of humanitarian protection from deportation — are also considered registered.
Still, DHS estimates that up to 3.2 million immigrants are currently unregistered and are affected by the new enforcement regime. The administration has created a new seven-page form that non-citizens must use. The form requires people, under penalty of perjury, to provide biographical details, contact information, details about any criminal history and the circumstances of how they entered the U.S.
After DHS issued regulations to enforce the registration requirement in April, the administration announced that 47,000 undocumented immigrants had registered using the new form.
A legal challenge and a series of prosecutions
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and other advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s move to revive the registration requirement in March.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, initially expressed skepticism toward the administration, saying in a recent hearing that officials had pulled a “big switcheroo” on undocumented immigrants. But McFadden in April refused the plaintiffs’ request to temporarily block the policy, saying the Coalition likely lacks the legal standing to sue because it has not shown that it would be harmed by the policy. The group has appealed McFadden’s decision.
In the meantime, the administration has begun to prosecute people for failure to register for the first time in seven decades.
The prosecutions so far have stumbled.
On May 19, a federal magistrate judge in Louisiana consolidated and dismissed five of the criminal cases, saying prosecutors had no probable cause to believe the defendants had intentionally refused to register.
Judge Michael North wrote that the Alien Registration Act requires “some level of subjective knowledge or bad intent” behind the choice not to register. The prosecutions, the judge wrote, are impermissible because most people are simply unaware of the law, and the government “did not provide these Defendants — as well as millions of similarly situated individuals here without government permission — with a way to register” since 1950.
But North also pointed out that the government may have an easier path to proving probable cause in the future, given that DHS created a new registration form in April. And government attorneys have appealed the five dismissed cases.
The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana declined to comment on recent charges filed under the law.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said the office “is aggressively pursuing criminals in the district and will use all criminal justice resources available to make D.C. safe and to carry out President Trump’s and Attorney General Bondi’s direction to support immigration enforcement.”
The other federal district attorneys whose offices filed charges did not respond to a request for comment.
Michelle LaPointe, legal director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrants’ rights advocacy group, said these initial cases are the “tip of the iceberg.” LaPointe is among the attorneys representing the Coalition in its lawsuit against the administration.
“I don’t expect them to abate just because there were some dismissals,” LaPointe said, pointing to North’s statements about future charges. “They have already stated that they intend to make prosecution of the few immigration-related criminal statutes a priority for DOJ, and it’s very easy for them to at least charge, even if they’re not always gonna be able to sustain their burden to secure a conviction.”
Weinberg, the Wayne State law professor, agreed that the administration will likely continue attempting broad enforcement.
“If they bring a whole lot of prosecutions and end up losing all, they may step back,” Weinberg said. “If they bring a whole lot and win a few, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the basis on which we can move further’” and appeal — potentially all the way to the Supreme Court, he noted.
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