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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is weighing whether to issue sweeping pardons for officials and allies who the White House fears could be unjustly targeted by President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, a preemptive move that would be a novel and risky use of the president’s extraordinary constitutional power. The deliberations so far are largely at the level of White House lawyers. But Biden himself has discussed the topic with some senior aides, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity Thursday to discuss the sensitive subject. No decisions have been made, the people said, and it is possible Biden opts to do nothing at all. Pardons are historically afforded to those accused of specific crimes – and usually those who have already been convicted of an offense — but Biden’s team is considering issuing them for those who have not even been investigated, let alone charged. They fear that Trump and his allies, who have boasted of enemies lists and exacting “retribution,” could launch investigations that would be reputationally and financially costly for their targets even if they don’t result in prosecutions. While the president’s pardon power is absolute, Biden’s use in this fashion would mark a significant expansion of how they are deployed, and some Biden aides fear it could lay the groundwork for an even more drastic usage by Trump. They also worry that issuing pardons would feed into claims by Trump and his allies that the individuals committed acts that necessitated immunity. Recipients could include infectious-disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was instrumental in combating the coronavirus pandemic and who has become a pariah to conservatives angry about mask mandates and vaccines. Others include witnesses in Trump’s criminal or civil trials and Biden administration officials who have drawn the ire of the incoming president and his allies. Some fearful former officials have reached out to the Biden White House preemptively seeking some sort of protection from the future Trump administration, one of the people said. It follows Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter — not just for his convictions on federal gun and tax violations, but for any potential federal offense committed over an 11-year period, as the president feared that Trump allies would seek to prosecute his son for other offenses. That could serve as a model for other pardons Biden might issue to those who could find themselves in legal jeopardy under Trump. Biden is not the first to consider such pardons — Trump aides considered them for him and his supporters involved in his failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in a violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But he could be the first to issue them since Trump’s pardons never materialized before he left office nearly four years ago. Gerald Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon” in 1974 to his predecessor, Richard Nixon, over the Watergate scandal. He believed a potential trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States,” as written in the pardon proclamation. Politico was first to report that Biden was studying the use of preemptive pardons. On the campaign trail, Trump made no secret of his desire to seek revenge on those who prosecuted him or crossed him. Trump has talked about “enemies from within” and circulated social media posts that call for the jailing of Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sens. Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. He also zeroed in on former Rep. Liz Cheney, a conservative Republican who campaigned for Harris and helped investigate Jan. 6, and he promoted a social media post that suggested he wanted military tribunals for supposed treason. Kash Patel, whom Trump has announced as his nominee to be director of the FBI, has listed dozens of former government officials he wanted to “come after.” Richard Painter, a Trump critic who served as the top White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said he was reluctantly in support of having Biden issue sweeping pardons to people who could be targeted by Trump’s administration. He said he hoped that would “clean the slate” for the incoming president and encourage him to focus on governing, not on punishing his political allies. “It’s not an ideal situation at all,” Painter said. “We have a whole lot of bad options confronting us at this point.” While the Supreme Court this year ruled that the president enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for what could be considered official acts, his aides and allies enjoy no such shield. Some fear that Trump could use the promise of a blanket pardon to encourage his allies to take actions they might otherwise resist for fear of running afoul of the law. “There could be blatant illegal conduct over the next four years, and he can go out and pardon his people before he leaves office,” Painter said. “But if he’s going to do that, he’s going to do that anyway regardless of what Biden does.” More conventional pardons from Biden, such as those for sentencing disparities for people convicted of federal crimes, are expected before the end of the year, the White House said.New Orleans police arrest man accused of killing paradegoers during multiple mass shootings
This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site. ___ Authors: Mark Turin, Associate professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia; and N̓a̓ṇ̓gáinúx̌v - Robyn Humchitt, Digitization, Information & Technology and Archival Manager, Heiltsuk First Nation When it comes to digital access and internet technologies, some languages are still more equal than others. Speakers of majority languages, who type in English or text in Korean, assume their message will be transmitted accurately. But Indigenous language communities don’t share this same confidence. Computers and smartphones don’t come with the ability to type all letters in all languages. The unique characters integral to many Indigenous languages are often mangled as they travel across the ether. However, the inclusion of two capital letters needed to write Haíɫzaqvḷa in a recent update of the Unicode Standard means this Indigenous language can finally be written and read on all digital platforms. Why did it take so long? And what challenges do Indigenous communities face when wanting to type in their languages? Haíɫzaqv: “to act and speak correctly as a human being” Haíɫzaqvḷa is the language of the Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) Nation whose traditional homeland is Bella Bella, British Columbia. The language has had its own orthography — an agreed written form with established spelling conventions — since the 1970s. Working in partnership with native speakers, a Dutch linguist was invited by tribal leadership to document their increasingly endangered language and develop learning resources. The results of this collaborative work included an alphabet chart, storybooks and a dictionary. Before the advent of digital technologies, Indigenous communities used specially modified typewriters to represent their languages in print. Customized typewriters designed to support the Latin, Syllabics and Cherokee scripts allowed users to publish in Indigenous languages like Haíɫzaqvḷa. The digital divide The digital age has created many opportunities and some new challenges. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the first computer text encoding standard, introduced in the early 1990s, did not support 44 of the 129 letters in the Haíɫzaqvḷa orthography. Special fonts and keyboards were required to render these characters on early desktop computers. Designers around the world produced countless fonts to support typing in digitally under-resourced languages, each using a unique font-keyboard pairing to encode a specific language. But this system had a major weakness: when files using custom fonts were shared, both the creator and the recipient needed to have the same font installed on their device. And if a recipient wanted to send a reply, they would need a keyboard input system that paired with that same custom font. Without these elements in place, the missing characters would be shown as “tofu,” or worse yet, rendered as a random string of meaningless characters. The Unicode Standard’s goal is to represent all characters required by all of the world’s languages and writing systems in digital form. Unicode now defines 154,998 characters covering 168 scripts and has fast become the chosen standard for digital character encoding. Yet, until version 16.0 of the standard, released in September 2024, two capital letters needed to write Haíɫzaqvḷa remained absent. Encoding Haíɫzaqvḷa Through a partnership between Heiltsuk Revitalization, the University of British Columbia and international type design company, Typotheque, we have been working to ensure that each and every Haíɫzaqvḷa character is consistently represented and accurately reproduced on all digital platforms and devices. Before this community-led collaboration, it was not possible to fully encode Haíɫzaqvḷa in digital text. This meant that community members couldn’t access the full range of characters they needed to input their language digitally. That would be like typing English without having access to capital E or S, and relying on workarounds like Σ for E or ∫ for S. Ensuring accurate character encoding that is predictable on all operating systems is a cornerstone of language justice. Yet the burden is still on communities to petition Unicode to have their scripts included, and the process is exacting. Harder still, a proposal must consider whether other languages that use the same script might be impacted by the proposed additions, and then mitigate and navigate potential conflicts. The stakes are high for changes to the encoding standard: decisions are almost impossible to reverse on account of the need to maintain stability and ensure both backward and forward compatibility. Important projects like the Script Encoding Initiative have for decades been helping communities to prepare technical proposals for the encoding of scripts and characters that are as of yet not supported by Unicode. There is still much work to be done. Language rights and government documents 'Cúagilákv — also known as Jess H̓áust̓i — is a Haíɫzaqv leader, parent, educator and poet from Bella Bella. In 2021, H̓áust̓i approached Canadian government agencies, both provincial and federal, to change Haíɫzaqv identification documents to remove colonial anglicizations and reclaim the correct spelling of their name. H̓áust̓i was informed that the existing backend systems were unable to accommodate the representation of diacritic marks. “The reason why I have an incorrect name is because it was anglicized by Indian agents. I didn’t create the problem, but I’m not getting any help to fix that,” H̓áust̓i told CBC News in 2021. “I feel that it’s important to honour my ancestors and my language by spelling and pronouncing it correctly. I would love for my children to grow up with the correct spelling of their name on their ID.” The ability to fully encode Haíɫzaqvḷa in the Unicode Standard means the language can now be successfully input into any Unicode compliant system. This is a baseline requirement for the elimination of many remaining digital language barriers. Beyond bilingualism Canada is fond of celebrating its commitment to bilingualism. Extensive provisions are in place to support English and French. But the origins of these colonial languages lie in Europe, brought by settlers as they first traded and then colonized; and both have vibrant speech communities in their original homelands and around the globe. In 2019, the Canadian government passed the Indigenous Languages Act designed to support the revitalization, maintaining and strengthening of the languages Indigenous to this land. As Canada works to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it should also simultaneously realize the slogan of the Unicode Consortium: “everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers.” The challenges to achieving universal encoding for historically-marginalized languages are no longer technical; they are bureaucratic and political. In 2009, Canada’s then Commissioner of Official Languages, Graham Fraser, was quoted as saying: “In the same way that race is at the core of ... American experience and class is at the core of British experience, I think that language is at the core of Canadian experience.” Through ensuring linguistic justice for all of its citizens, Canada can exercise global leadership in language policy and planning. This article was co-authored by Bridget Chase, a language technologist and researcher, and Kevin King, a typeface designer at Typotheque. ___ Mark Turin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. N̓a̓ṇ̓gáinúx̌v - Robyn Humchitt has received funding from the First Peoples' Cultural Council in British Columbia, Canada. ___ This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article: https://theconversation.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-type-in-indigenous-languages-245247 N̓a̓ṇ̓gáinúx̌v - Robyn Humchitt, Digitization, Information & Technology and Archival Manager, Heiltsuk First Nation, The ConversationBurton, Muntu score 18 as Western Michigan defeats Youngstown State 73-62
Federal appeals court upholds law requiring sale or ban of TikTok in the USNone
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