Oakland is ready to receive $15 million from California to shut gaps in local web speeds – a grant that faced objections from industry giants Comcast and AT&T, who argued the town doesn’t have a slower web connection than another place.

A bunch of advocates had struggled throughout much of the pandemic to persuade state technology officials that Oakland deserved a bigger share of the federal COVID-19 response funding for broadband improvements.

But recent funding announced this week goals to fund the “last mile” of fibre optic connectivity by connecting neglected areas to a wider backbone along major highways.

The group, called OaklandUndivided, fought in the course of the pandemic to persuade California authorities that East Oakland neighborhoods were being neglected in existing broadband expansion funding plans.

With the brand new funding, Oakland joins the ranks of other communities classified as “underserved” by the California Public Utilities Commission, including San Francisco ($10 million), Fremont ($7 million) and Plumas County ($7 million).

These are communities in Northern California which might be “just a short walk or drive from the development of some of the world's most famous high technologies,” but “they are on the wrong side of the digital divide,” CPUC Commissioner John Reynolds said, in response to a press release before voting for the funding.

In their written objections to the $15 million grant, Comcast and AT&T argued that 100% of the Oakland neighborhoods targeted for improvements were covered by high-speed web.

But utility officials found that the providers' web sites listed a number of the addresses included of their maps as “not receiving fiber service.” They also noted that “many of the locations complained of by the providers were outside” the intended service area.

Oakland Connect, a civic organization led by a former city school teacher, had rejected the objections with reports that Oakland's Internet connection was slower than the speeds advertised to the general public by Comcast and AT&T.

Tests by technology company HubbleIQ found that greater than a 3rd of 8,000 addresses had slow download speeds, in response to data seen by this news organization.

Young students in East Oakland told this news organization in previous interviews that they’d trouble accessing the web when the pandemic forced entire families to remain home. One teenager, a highschool student named Santiago Preciado, said he “missed a significant portion of eighth grade because of it.”

These inequalities, that are also noticed by teachers and mentors in after-school care, often go unmentioned in political discourse in Oakland – but they seem to contribute to the performance gap between different neighborhoods.

“This is an information justice issue,” said Patricia Wells, who heads the Oakland Housing Authority. “All people, regardless of income, have the right to access reliable and affordable high-speed internet, just like other essential utilities like water and electricity.”

Originally published: July 12, 2024 at 16:24

It is just not entirely clear when Europe's largest grandstand received its now famous name, but it surely actually happened later than most individuals think.

German writer and author Uli Hesse described the Yellow Wall at Borussia Dortmund's Westfalenstadion in 2018 as something that Bayern Munich, the country's most successful and powerful club, didn’t have: “a huge grandstand that seemed like a throwback to the golden era of football.”

This architectural behemoth can accommodate 24,454 spectators for Bundesliga matches – greater than twice as many as Celtic's fabled “Jungle” within the Sixties and only barely lower than the utmost capability of the Kop at Anfield in the course of the same period, a golden age in Liverpool's history.

“Unlike Jungle or Kop, the term Yellow Wall is not very old,” Hesse stressed, pointing to Kicker, Germany's hottest football magazine, as a reference point for its relevance. It was only in May 2009 that the outline “Yellow Wall” appeared there for the primary time, based on the thoughts of then Dortmund goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller when he learned that 10,000 of the club's fans had traveled to a match against Eintracht Frankfurt.

“It’s unbelievable, even when we play away, the Yellow Wall is there,” said Weidenfeller.

Another 21 months would pass before the expression was used commonly in “Kicker” and thus established itself as a term in the worldwide football language.

This was across the time when Dortmund, under the leadership of Jürgen Klopp, won the Bundesliga for 2 seasons in a row, having transformed an unsuccessful giant right into a club that competed for domestic and even European titles.

His Dortmund team lost the Champions League final at Wembley Stadium against Bayern in May 2013.

This weekend, the club has the prospect to win the identical trophy at the identical venue in London for the primary time since their only triumph within the competition in 1997. This time, their opponents are Real Madrid and Dortmund, who finished fifth within the Bundesliga this season and are 27 points behind champions Bayer Leverkusen, are a talented team but not quite as fit as they were 11 years ago.

Klopp's charisma and success helped make Dortmund the second biggest club for a lot of football fans across Europe, but iconography was also a key aspect of Dortmund's appeal.

Their popular former manager, who left Liverpool in May after almost nine years, described the sight of the Yellow Wall as one emerges from the bowels of the Westfalenstadion as an almost out-of-body experience.

“This dark tunnel is exactly two metres high (just under 2.00 m), and when you come out, it's like being born,” said the 6'3″ Klopp. “You come out and the place explodes – from darkness into light. You look to the left and it looks like there are 150,000 people up there within the stands, going completely crazy.”

Weidenfeller was a leader in Klopp's team: “When you’re the opponent, it crushes you, but when you have got him as a goalkeeper behind you, it’s a implausible feeling.”

This view was also supported by Bayern's Champions League and World Cup winner Bastian Schweinsteiger, who later played for Manchester United and MLS team Chicago Fire. When asked if he was more worried about the Dortmund players or their coach Klopp, he replied: “The Yellow Wall scares me probably the most.”

The sheer size of the structure alone offers a number of vantage points. “From the front of the lower tier, you possibly can almost scratch the goalkeeper's back – and right at the highest under the roof, where it has an angle of inclination of 37 degrees, it resembles a ski jump,” concluded the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

According to Hesse, Daniel Lorcher, born in 1985, was “roughly responsible” for inventing the term “Yellow Wall”. In 2004, when Dortmund was on the verge of collapse on and off the pitch and its financial situation was getting increasingly dire, the club's largest Ultras group created a mosaic that paraphrased an aphorism by Oscar Wilde: “Many walk down dark alleys, but few take a look at the celebrities.”

Lorcher was a leading member of The Unity and stood in the middle of what was then known simply as the South Stand, just behind the goal. Their job was to make as much noise as possible, but Lorcher felt this was better possible in Dortmund due to the size of the stand. If the Ultras could involve other fans, for example by persuading them to dress in bright yellow and hold up flags and banners of the same colour, the effect would be surprising and would help Dortmund's players and potentially create a more intimidating atmosphere for opponents.

Not only was a huge amount of fabric needed, but it also had to be the right shade of yellow.

Lorcher and other ultras contacted a Danish retail chain that had branches all over Germany. “They sold us greater than five kilometers of material and we produced 4 thousand flags,” Lorcher told Hesse. “We rented sewing machines for weeks after which needed to learn the best way to use them. It was labor, but we had plenty of fun.”

As the 2004/05 season drew to a close and Dortmund escaped oblivion, “the flags bathed the entire grandstand in yellow” before a home game against Hansa Rostock, Hesse wrote in his book “Building The Yellow Wall.”

One of the banners read: “At the end of the dark alley the yellow wall shines,” and another read: “Yellow Wall, South Stand Dortmund.”

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Since 2005, the Westfalenstadion has been called Signal Iduna Park after the club decided to reduce debts through a sponsorship contract, which it finally repaid to the bank Morgan Stanley three years later.

Many factors contributed to Dortmund's precarious financial situation during this period. One of them was the demand to convert the stadiums into all-seater capacities after the Hillsborough disaster in England in 1989.

In the summer of 1992, the north stand of the Westfalenstadion was converted into a seating area, reducing the total capacity from 54,000 to less than 43,000. The club management realised they could charge more money for a more comfortable experience, but they were reluctant to subject the southern Südtribüne (as it is still called by older Dortmunders) to the same treatment after having discussions with fans which made them realise that the stand was the club's only real marketing tool.

After Dortmund beat Juventus 3-1 in Munich in May 1997 to win the Champions League title, the south stand was doubled in size. As the stadium became bigger and safer, Dortmund spent more money than ever on players. But success failed to materialise and by 2005 there was a real danger that the club could go bankrupt.

Today, Dortmund's stadium is the largest in Germany and its average Bundesliga attendance is higher than any other Bundesliga club – including Bayern: this season, an average of over 81,000 spectators came to Dortmund and 75,000 to Bayern's futuristic Allianz Arena. Between Dortmund and the third and fourth placed teams (Eintracht Frankfurt and Stuttgart), the difference was almost 26,000, which is just a little more than the capacity of the Yellow Wall alone, a stand that could accommodate the inhabitants of a medium-sized city.

Although the stadium's capability is reduced to seated only on European nights, the three clubs with the bottom attendance figures within the Bundesliga (Union Berlin, Darmstadt and Heidenheim) could easily fit all their fans into the south stand. However, the clubs have probably not tried to capitalise on this directly.

Hesse even claims that the “Yellow Wall” “harms” Dortmund on this sense because the doorway prices are kept so low.

On average, season ticket holders pay 14 euros per game. However, if Dortmund created seats there and charged more, the club would lose its soul, based on Hesse.

The incontrovertible fact that Dortmund should not even among the many top 20 clubs in Europe when it comes to matchday revenue, based on financial experts at Forbes and Deloitte (despite having considered one of the continent's biggest stadiums), is a mirrored image of the attitude that prevails of their region, Germany's industrial heartland. Instead, there’s a financial co-benefit from the Yellow Wall, with corporations resembling chemicals giant Evonik, brewery Brinkhoff's and pump manufacturer Wilo wanting to be related to a creation that’s authentic to a working-class region of the country.

The Westfalenstadion has develop into a tourist attraction, however the Yellow Wall stays untouched in the intervening time.

The biggest decision for visitors, says Hesse, is whether or not to affix the party on the terrace or watch her smile from afar.

Most Americans don't prefer it pay or pay their income taxes. But yearly, about 85% of them will voluntarily pay the complete amount of taxes he owes.

Nevertheless, the IRS believes so loses over $400 billion in revenue yearly because people don't file their taxes, under-report their income, or underpay the quantity of tax they owe.

Most of those losses are the results of deliberate tax evasion schemes aimed toward lining the own pockets of unscrupulous taxpayers. However, some people take a less greedy and more principled view: they refuse to file tax returns or pay all their taxes for moral or ethical reasons. Essentially, they view the choice to not pay income taxes as a type of civil disobedience.

Although the federal government has not released much data on these individuals, it estimated that within the late Nineteen Nineties 47,000 of them had debts of about $540 million in federal income taxes.

As a tax professor and Scholar of judgment and decision makingI categorize individuals who don’t pay taxes for moral or ethical reasons into one among two groups that I call “tax deniers” and “tax protestors.” Although their motivations could also be different, the federal government and courts are inclined to reply to them similarly unfavorably.

Tax dodgers

The first group includes individuals who deny that the state has the correct to gather income taxes. These so-called Tax evaders are legally and morally against filing tax returns and paying taxes due to false belief that taxes are unconstitutional or otherwise invalid.

Tax evaders present quite a few arguments None of this was accepted from courts or the IRS. For example, some tax evaders consider that the sixteenth Amendment The Constitution, which provides Congress the ability to levy income taxes, was never properly ratified. They note that the text of the amendment, which was ratified in 1909, differed from the text originally proposed by Congress since it contained the next: Differences in spelling, capitalization and punctuation.

Others argue that federal income taxes are illegal because they violate the law Fifth Amendmentwhat the federal government forbids Taking private property without due process The Law.

Tax evaders use quite a lot of methods to avoid taxes. Some simply refuse to file a tax return, while others accept it complicated systems using offshore trusts Hide income from the federal government.

Tax protesters

Unlike tax deniers, tax protesters don’t deny the federal government's right to lift taxes. Rather, they refuse to pay some or all of their taxes to protest government-funded policies and programs which can be inconsistent with their ethical and moral beliefs.

Common examples of presidency spending they object to This includes military spending and medical research.

Tax dodgers have existed because the American Revolution Quakers refused to pay taxes to the colonial governments for military purposes. In the Sixties, public figures like Joan Baez and Gloria Steinem withheld paying their federal income taxes protesting the federal government's involvement within the Vietnam War.

Many tax filers file accurate tax returns but refuse to pay some or the entire tax owed. For example, some war tax advocates determine the share of income tax revenue goes towards military spending after which withhold that percentage of their tax while they pay the remainder. Groups just like the War Resisters League provide protesters with information to assist them resolve how much to withhold. The group expects this to occur in 2025 45% of presidency spending goes to the military and suggests that folks withhold that portion of the whole tax they owe.

In some cases, protesters are redirecting taxes they don't pay to 1 or more charities. Other tax opponents take an approach that’s more inside the law, consciously earn as little as possible in order that their income falls below the extent required to file a tax return.

The government's response

Not surprisingly, the IRS disagrees with the arguments of each kinds of objectors. The agency has repeatedly stated that a The taxpayer has no right to refuse Paying taxes based on religious or moral beliefs.

The IRS also warns taxpayers who engage in the sort of civil disobedience should expect to pay a price – including fines, penalties, interest and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS also has the authority to do that seize a taxpayer's wages and other assets to settle any unpaid tax debts.

Tax deniers and tax opponents did the identical as all residents the correct to appeal any actions the IRS takes against them. But way back to the nineteenth century, courts have consistently ruled in favor of the federal government, holding that tax liability doesn’t rely on a taxpayer's compliance with government programs or policies.

For example, within the 1860s, a Massachusetts suffragette refused to pay property taxes unless women got the correct to vote. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ordered her to pay, and when she continued to refuse, authorities turned on her confiscated and sold their property to cover the unpaid taxes.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government was mortgaged the property of celebrities who refused to pay taxes that were speculated to be used to finance the war.

More recently, actor Wesley Snipes was taken to court in 2008 after arguing that he had no obligation to pay income taxes and saying the federal government was illegally collecting taxes from its residents. Snipes was convicted of a misdemeanor count of willful failure to file federal income tax returns sentenced to a few years in prison. After an unsuccessful appeal, he served 28 months.

Objecting to income tax shouldn’t be in itself against the law. But not actually paying it’s one other matter. This puts people liable to paying fines, having their wages garnished and serving prison time.

National News

The University of Southern California said it has canceled plans for a commencement speech by this 12 months's valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, who’s Muslim. The school said the choice was resulting from security concerns after several pro-Israel groups objected to its social media posts supporting Palestinians.

The decision immediately drew criticism from the Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in addition to Tabassum, a biomedical engineering student.

“I am both shocked by this decision and deeply disappointed that the university is succumbing to a hate campaign designed to silence my voice,” Tabassum wrote in a press release. She has identified as a first-generation American of South Asian descent.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, free speech controversies have plagued many universities. University officials have had to interact in heated debates over pro-Palestinian student protests, which many Jewish students and alumni say often descend into anti-Semitism. Protesters say the pushback is an try and censor their political views.

USC's decision to cancel the speech was announced Monday by Andrew Guzman, the principal, who said he made the ultimate decision to decide on Tabassum.

“In recent days, the discussion about the selection of our valedictorian has taken on a troubling tone,” Guzman wrote. “The intensity of sentiment, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has spread to many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of initially creating significant security risks and disruptions.”

Guzman acknowledged that the choice to cancel a valedictory speech violated university tradition, adding, “To be clear, this decision has nothing to do with freedom of expression. There is no right to freedom of expression at a hearing.”

The university, a personal institution, didn’t immediately respond Tuesday when asked whether it had received a reputable threat.

Tabassum couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. In a written statement released on her behalf, she questioned the university's motivation. “Serious doubts remain as to whether USC’s decision to revoke my invitation to speak was made solely for security reasons,” she wrote.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, released a press release condemning the choice to cancel the speech as “cowardly” and demanding that USC reverse it.

The university announced April 5 that Tabassum, a native of Chino Hills, Calif., can be the 2024 class valedictorian. She was chosen from greater than 200 students who met the tutorial qualifications – a grade point average of at the very least 3.98. From this group, a range committee of college members evaluated greater than 100 applicants.

The announcement of Tabassum's selection cited her volunteer work with nonprofits within the Los Angeles area, including a mobile blood pressure clinic that visits homeless shelters and a gaggle she co-founded that distributes medical supplies to needy areas world wide.

Shortly after the announcement, a campus group called Trojans for Israel released a press release saying that Tabassum “openly spreads anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” It quoted her social media bio, which included a link to a page that calls Zionism a “racist settler-colonial ideology.” The group called on University President Carol Folt to reconsider Tabassum's selection.

This article originally appeared in .