copenlu/druid huggingface dataset:
Claim: Gaza has “the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system — anywhere, anytime.” (António Guterres, 2024-03-18)
Evidence (2022-09-22): On 18 March 2024, a UN-backed report sounded the alarm. It stated that the entire population of Gaza was short of food and predicted that famine would arrive in the north sometime between mid-March and May 2024. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said: "1.1 million people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger – the highest number of people ever recorded, anywhere, anytime." [...] In 2004, the UN devised a system for monitoring food insecurity in populations. The system is called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC for short. [...] While this process is going on, famine-like conditions may already be afflicting parts of the country. The IPC report on Gaza published in March 2024 estimated that at least 1 in 8 children were acutely malnourished.
Claim: Gaza has “the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system — anywhere, anytime.” (António Guterres, 2024-03-18)
Evidence (2024-04-22): On January 26, the ICJ had already issued a binding order for Israel to prevent and stop all genocidal acts with immediate effect, allow unrestricted access to humanitarian aid, and stop incitement to genocide. Today, the genocide is worse than ever. Food supply dropped 50 percent in February. Over 30 people, most of them children, have already died of malnutrition and dehydration. Thirty-one percent of children under two years of age in the northern Gaza Strip suffer acute malnutrition. UN Secretary-General António Guterres underlined that "this is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system—anywhere, anytime." Additionally, Israeli military attacks are still killing the Palestinian population in Gaza, including those trying to distribute or access the little food there is.
Claim: Gaza has “the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system — anywhere, anytime.” (António Guterres, 2024-03-18)
Evidence (2024-03-31): An 18 March Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report said that famine is "imminent in the northern governorates of the Gaza Strip and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024", with the entire population of Gaza facing high levels of acute food insecurity. In a 19 March statement, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said that "[t]he situation of hunger, starvation and famine is a result of Israel’s extensive restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, displacement of most of the population, as well as the destruction of crucial civilian infrastructure". Noting that the report found that over half of all Palestinians in Gaza, 1.1 million people, have completely exhausted their food supplies and are facing catastrophic hunger—the highest such number ever recorded by the IPC system anywhere, anytime—Guterres said that the report is clear evidence for "the need for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire" and called on Israel to "ensure complete and unfettered access for humanitarian goods throughout Gaza". [...] Following a 6 March request by South Africa for the indication of further provisional measures, on 28 March the ICJ ordered that Israel shall, among other actions, take all necessary measures "to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza".
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-08): Sanders praised Marxist countries for doing a lot to address the day-to-day needs of their people in housing, food and health care. He criticized their lack of political freedom and democratic practices. He was sympathetic to Nicaragua and Cuba as targets of American policy.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-28): 16. Sometimes, dictators can do good things - Sanders told CBS in February it would be "unfair" to say "everything is bad" about Cuba's communist revolution. Critics then brought up how as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1985, Sanders praised Nicaraguan left-wing Sandinistas strongman Daniel Ortega as "an impressive guy", downplaying reports of rights abuses there. Sanders' fans are sometimes dubbed "Sandernistas". [...] Read more on Bernie Sanders SANDERS PROFILE: Why he likes beating the odds
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2019-02-27): When The New York Times’ popular podcast The Daily broadcast an episode about the field of Democratic presidential candidates, the political reporter Alex Burns described a "full spectrum" of contenders "running from sort of quasi-Marxist to avowedly moderate," with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont situated on its left flank. [...] That’s an entirely defensible analysis. And voters long accustomed to a political spectrum oriented around economic ideology might agree that Sanders, who calls himself a "democratic socialist," is the left-most candidate in the race. [...] I value Sanders’s opposition to corporate rent-seeking, his anti-war credentials, and his universalist approach to our wonderfully diverse democracy, while I dislike the ideological socialism that caused a younger, hopefully more naive Sanders to praise murderous regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua and to spin Sandinista bread lines as a sign of economic health, as Michael Moynihan documents. ("Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America," Sanders once declared.)
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-21): WASHINGTON — In October 1985, a few months after Bernie Sanders traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the sixth anniversary of that country's socialist revolution, the Soviet-backed government suspended the civil liberties of its citizens, including the rights to free speech, free assembly and labor strikes. [...] Perhaps Sanders' biggest move outside the political mainstream was his embrace of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution, well after most Democrats — and regional experts — had labeled the country an authoritarian Soviet client that was violating human rights. [...] Sanders acknowledged Nicaragua and Cuba were not liberal democracies, but "it's not an issue that he dwells on," said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University and a specialist on U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. "He emphasizes the positive things they've done. "
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2023-12-21): Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders warmly praised Cuba and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s after visiting each, dismissing "horrors" in Cuba as right-wing propaganda and praising Soviet infrastructure even as dictatorship prevailed and the country was on the verge of collapse. [...] The documents reveal that Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, evinced enthusiasm for the two communist regimes. [...] In notes attached to a draft of the remarks, Sanders highlighted what he perceives as strengths of the Cuban regime, which includes their system of "democracy," as well as state-provided housing and healthcare.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-25): Sanders’ comments on Cuba have created uproar and outrage in Florida, one of the most important battleground states in the country. [...] Mesa-Lago says Sanders is basing his comments on figures from the 1980s when Cuba was heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed, subsidies dried up, and the economy shrank by around 35 percent. [...] As Sanders’ comments reverberated in Florida on Monday, Democrats scrambled to try to contain the damage his comments may have caused among Cuban Americans and other Latinos who have fled repressive, left-wing governments. Throughout the day, there was a constant flow of condemnation from members of Congress to presidential candidates.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2019-05-02): The Soviet sojourn has long been an extraordinary, if little understood, chapter in Sanders lore. He has for years used it to help explain his views about foreign policy, citing it as recently as last month. The trip garnered brief mention in the 2016 presidential campaign, but earlier this year, a video from a Vermont community television station was posted online that showed a few minutes of Sanders’s unlikely celebration with the Soviets. Right-leaning websites suggested Sanders was cozying up to communists, underscoring how the trip might be used against the senator if he becomes the Democratic nominee. [...] The trip to the Soviet Union was, at that time, Sanders’s most significant foreign venture. U.S. relations with the Soviet Union were in the midst of transformation. Just before Sanders departed, Reagan traveled to Moscow for a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was pushing for openness and reform. As a result, Sanders muted his criticism of Reagan, praising the summit as "a major step forward for humanity. . . . What we are doing is actually the same thing at a lower level."
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-24): Sanders is not the first would-be president to confront scrutiny over long-ago travels. When he ran in 1992, Bill Clinton faced questions over a 1969 trip to the Soviet Union. John F. Kerry, the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, took heat from Republicans for a 1985 visit to Nicaragua — the same year that Sanders visited. [...] Sanders’s visit to the Soviet Union in the late spring of 1988 offered a more complex picture. The CCTV video marking the trip — which was posted online just last year — begins in an unlikely place: Sanders’s sun-splashed wedding on the shores of Lake Champlain. The next day, the newlyweds were off on what Sanders has described as "a very strange honeymoon." [...] William Taubman, an Amherst College historian of the Soviet Union who was living there at the time, said Sanders’s comments need to be understood in the context of the moment, which was dominated by then-leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of opening and liberalizing his nation. Sanders appeared to have found cause for optimism in such a transformation, while also casting a critical eye on the Soviet past -- and on the status quo that Gorbachev was attempting to change.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-24): Walker also made the claim in a column and several earlier tweets, one of which invoked Sanders’ oft-cited Soviet Union honeymoon. President Donald Trump said the same in a Feb. 2, 2020, interview before the Super Bowl. And former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg invoked communism while criticizing Sanders’ monetary policy at the Feb. 19, 2020, Democratic primary debate. [...] When we asked Walker for evidence of his claim, a spokesman cited a laundry list of past actions, including Sanders praising leaders of communist governments, visiting the Soviet Union on his honeymoon and traveling to several communist countries. [...] Lowell Barrington, associate professor of political science at Marquette University, said Sanders has made himself "vulnerable" to attacks like Walker’s because he has spoken positively of communist leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But he echoed others in saying Sanders’ proposals are more in line with the northern European brand of socialism than the authoritarian communist regimes seen in the Soviet Union, Cuba and the People’s Republic of China.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-18): Bernie Sanders is facing stepped-up attacks over his record of friendly words for authoritarian regimes as he gains support in the early Democratic primaries and caucuses. [...] "Socialist Workers Party leader Bernie Sanders supported Ayatollah Khomeini against the US, condemned president Carter for imperialism, and accused the hostages of being CIA spies. [...] The Washington Examiner, Bernie Sanders campaigned for Marxist party in Reagan era, May 30, 2019
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-25): Sanders was guilty of minimizing, and even idealizing, these regimes when he talked about Cuba in the early nineteen-eighties, and the U.S.S.R., after his visit there in 1988. His infatuation with the Soviet Union was both understandable and forgivable. He visited just as perestroika was kicking into gear; it was a moment of unprecedented openness and self-criticism in Soviet society, and Sanders described this mood eloquently at a press conference following his trip. Perhaps more important, Sanders was then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, not a federal official or a candidate for national office. If he wanted to be bamboozled, it was his right and his personal choice. In making this choice, Sanders acted in a way that has long been characteristic of some members of the American left, who gloss over the crimes of totalitarian regimes as though they were footnotes to a greater story, or jokes. This tendency is typified by one of New York’s literary dive bars, KGB Bar, where I have missed many a friend’s book launch or reading because, as I always have to explain, I can no more see myself spending time there than I can see myself drinking at a bar named for, say, the S.S. ("It’s in no way pro-Soviet," a friend recently assured me. Imagine explaining away a Nazi name that way.)
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-04-10): In "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Karl Marx famously commented that human beings "make their own history . . . but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The career of Senator Bernie Sanders, who this week ended his second bid for the White House, has illustrated Marx’s point. After getting elected to Congress, in 1991, as an independent democratic socialist—the first self-identified socialist to be sent to Capitol Hill in decades—Sanders spent more than twenty years as a marginal figure. Although he caucused with the Democrats, and even chaired the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, his leftist views set him apart from much of the Party, including its leadership. Then came the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, when almost all elected Democrats cleared the field for Hillary Clinton, and Sanders stepped into the vacuum as the anti-establishment candidate. Initially, many political analysts dismissed his campaign as a quixotic venture that would go nowhere. But these analyses ignored the historical "circumstances," which, for Marx, refers to the economic environment, and how they had changed over the previous three decades. [...] The recognition that society is an organic whole in which all sorts of people do indispensable things, many of which go under-rewarded by market economies, has long been the basis of socialism and social democracy. Sanders accepted this solidarity principle a long time ago. Even as he departs the Presidential stage, the "circumstances" are making the egalitarian agenda he promoted more relevant than ever.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2019-06-13): Thus Sanders name-checked Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but remained silent about Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. And while he rightly decried the autocratic tendencies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he neglected to mention leftist autocrats such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, or North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. Indeed, the only connection between socialism and autocracy that Sanders was willing to acknowledge is the one that exists in the feverish imagination of the ignorant right: He decried the "red-baiting" in which Republicans have long engaged. The implication was obvious. Anybody who was hoping for a clear account of the differences between Sanders’s political ambitions and those of autocratic socialist regimes is a fellow traveler of Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Donald Trump, and the Heritage Foundation.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2019-07-12): This little exchange hasn’t made it into most of the stories about the Sanders’ Soviet adventure. The media usually treats the trip as a comedic piece of trivia that accentuates just how outside the mainstream Sanders has always been — the honeymooners take Yaroslavl! — rather than part of a complicated tradition of lefties visiting the USSR and what they chose to pay attention to and what they chose to ignore. [...] By the time Sanders visited the USSR, though, Solzhenitsyn's stark accounts of the Gulag and Soviet cruelty had helped open a schism within the intellectual left about how to reconcile the brutal legacy of communism with the dream of socialist revolution. And by then, the American political visit to the Soviet Union had a long, tortured history of truth, belief, and deception. For decades, the USSR courted American dissidents — many of whom had deep, correct criticisms of the US government's racist subjugation of black citizens — and presented many with a false view of Soviet egalitarianism. [...] When Sanders returned from the Soviet Union, he talked of how impressed he was with what he felt to be people’s openness to criticize their own society, but Solzhenitsyn remained blacklisted, his work banned, his exile in force. Five months after Sanders got back, the Kremlin’s top ideologist said that "to publish Solzhenitsyn’s work is to undermine the foundations on which our present life rests."
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-08): No, Bernie Sanders did not collaborate with Marxist regimes [...] It continues: "The Vermont Senator collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba in the 1980s when America was on the verge of winning the Cold War." [...] A Facebook post said Sanders collaborated with the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba. The term "collaboration" does not match what Sanders did.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-02-24): Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday stood by his partial defense of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, stating bluntly: "The truth is the truth." [...] He added: "I have been extremely consistent and critical of all authoritarian regimes all over the world including Cuba, including Nicaragua, including Saudi Arabia, including China, including Russia. I happen to believe in democracy, not authoritarianism." [...] Addressing Sanders’ comments in his own CNN town hall later Monday, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said, "As a Democrat, I don’t want to be explaining why our nominee is encouraging people to look on the bright side of the Castro regime going into the election of our lives."
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2020-03-26): He has not hesitated to reaffirm his praise and support for governments that crushed civil liberties and brutalised their populations. Even after some of his more cringeworthy endorsements of Stalinist regimes were reported in the press, Sanders refused to apologise or express any contrition. He has been enamoured of the communist regime in Cuba ever since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. [...] This could not be written off as youthful naiveté. Sanders was far from a teenager or credulous student when he went as a revolutionary tourist to Cuba, Nicaragua and, in 1988, the Soviet Union, where he praised the Moscow Metro and expressed hope that after "a dismal history" the USSR could move "forward into some of the early visions of their revolution". [...] While there is no evidence that Sanders is a Marxist-Leninist, his long-ago political alliances and contemporary nostalgia for repressive regimes and circumventing the rule of law suggests that his political surge portends a future struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
Claim: Say Bernie Sanders “collaborated with Marxist regimes in the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Cuba.” (Bloggers, 2020-02-08)
Evidence (2022-01-06): Similarly in the very lightly attended Sunday morning plenary dealing with left parties in government there were presentations by leading figures of the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, El Salvador, Brazil, and Venezuela. Carlos Fonseca Terán, speaking for the FSLN of Nicaragua — which has become a very authoritarian and conservative government — praised the role of the Soviet Union and Cuba in supporting Nicaragua, and of course later Venezuela. Though on that panel the spokespersons for Uruguay and Chile actually admitted that problems of corruption existed among exiting left governments. The speaker for the Chilean CP which forms part of the very broad and heterogeneous New Majority coalition admitted that members of that coalition had engaged in corrupt practices, though his party members had not. Those were virtually the only critical reflections in any of the plenaries.