#All U.S. state officials are to be named state criminals against humanity & in this regard

[jonathanbowmanus]

read contacts in full @ https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_795 https://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Contact_Report_811

Smashing idles.

[zerotoninrp]

Below you will find our Earth timeline. We hope that this puts our vision of the world of ZEROTONIN into focus, and gives you inspiration and ideas for your wonderful characters. Note that our site is explicitly canon divergent and follows the inception of many of our well known heroes and villains. However, it is ultimately at your discretion where your character may fit within this unique universe. Of course, this is a non-exhaustive list which does not cover every important point in history. 

If you are interested and have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out.

______________________________________________________________

➔  PRESENT DATE: New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day; January 1, 2000

1942: The secret military “Manhattan Project” created to develop the first US nuclear weapons, as part of the nuclear arms race between the United States, the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

1945: The first US nuclear bombs are used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, ultimately leading to the end of World War II. Succeeding the war’s end, world governments competitively spend massive amounts of money to further the advancement of warfare weapons and technology, particularly weapons of mass destruction.

1947: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is formed to collect and distribute information regarding foreign policy intelligence and analysis.

1950: Top secret Tamarind expedition executed. Many of Earth’s population note these UFO sightings, however this is not the first time it’s been recorded throughout human history; sightings and interaction date back to the early civilizations, though no scientific evidence is made public.

1957: Major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are made.

1958: The National Aeronautics and Space Act is signed, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Shortly thereafter, a top secret facility in Nevada named “Area 51” is revealed to be used for testing related to space findings and “other experiments.”

1962: In reaction to the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy makes a similar show of force by unveiling new military weapons: particle beams, mother boxes, and boom tubes. Ultimately, however, the Soviet Union and the U.S. agree to not engage in any acts of war.

1969: Hover cars and boards hit the market.

1970: Justice Society of America (JSA) formed; the birth of “super” heroes.

1972: As the Watergate scandal breaks, Americans are glued to their phones and TVs, watching the debacle unfold through holographic broadcasts.

1974: Infant found amidst the debris left by a crashed UFO in Smallville, Kansas.

1981: Thomas Wayne, owner of Wayne Enterprises, and his wife Martha Wayne are murdered on Park Row in Gotham City.

1985: Much to the surprise of political pundits, despite his instrumental role in the development of the particle-beam gun, scientist and professor Thomas Morrow is appointed Secretary of Defense.

1986: A.I. pop group, New Kids on the Block, take the world by storm with their debut.

1988: LexCorp trades publicly for the first time, setting record high opening days on the U.S. Stock Market in only its first year.

1991: The end of the Cold War and the advancement of technology marks a seismic shift in priorities for the CIA. Responsibilities have grown to now include counterterrorism, nonproliferation of advanced weapons and weapons of mass destruction, warning/informing American leaders of important overseas events, counterintelligence, cyber intelligence and warning/informing American leaders of extraterrestrial threat/contact.

1992: Beating advancements made since the 60’s in Japan, America’s first high speed rail system is finally completed, with its grand terminal built in Central City, allowing for cross-country travel in only a matter of hours. Rogue scientists alert the media of the use of a cosmic force known as the speed force to aid the system.

1992: The first exoskeleton brain-implant is a success. Corporations make a mass move to implant exoskeleton chips into employees' brains. The landscaping and many manual labor intensive fields—construction, many of the skilled trade jobs—see rapid implementation of these originations.

1993: Women now make up half of the workforce, as the proliferation of automated robots in homes have alleviated traditional gender roles for most families.

1993: The Supreme Court of the United States rules in the first criminal action against a sentient A.I. A.I. who randomly gain sentience may still be punished by the State.

1994: The “Crime Bill” passes, leading to President Clinton’s commission of Arkham Asylum. The asylum is effective in cleaning up Gotham’s streets, and is hailed a massive success.

1996: Grounded cars officially phase out of the market, with manufacturers that were unable to keep up with hover car production going out of business (e.g. Ford, Honda). 

1996: Kids go crazy for simulations. While they had been slowly gaining popularity in the workforce, allowing for greater employee training, they have now been fully monopolized by the entertainment industry. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC go on to become the largest sellers of simulation merchandise.

1996: Congress debates exoskeleton control after another black market exoskeleton death occurs.

1996: Supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell popularize synthetic high fashion.

1996: Reputable publications rank Metropolis the “Best City in the World”.

1996: The southern states grow weary of the country’s hyper-advancement, fearing these developments threaten their states’ rights to decide how best to allocate their resources.

1997: The Daily Planet building in Metropolis completes its reconstruction; at over 2,700 feet, it becomes the tallest building in the world.

1997: Civil rights activists complain of Arkham Asylum’s rising population and accuse the prison’s doctors of inhumane experimentation on patients.

1997: President Clinton lodges sanctions against Gotham City, New Jersey for its apparent-resurgence of crime, restricting their access to hover cars. Gotham is the only city to still rely on grounded cars.

January 17, 1998: Clinton-Lewinsky scandal breaks.

January 27, 1998: A resolution to amend the U.S. Constitution and allow the secession of the then-colloquially dubbed “Federalist States” is introduced in Congress.

August 1998: Florida man attempts to marry his automated robot.

November 3, 1998: The Arkham Asylum riots become the most violent prison riot in American history, resulting in several breakouts, deaths and thirteen officers taken hostage.

December 19, 1998: Bill Clinton is impeached by the House of Representatives.

January 1, 1999: Atlantis reappears.

January 7, 1999: The Senate trial in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton begins.

January 21, 1999: The United States Coast Guard makes the largest drug bust in American history, intercepting a ship with over 16,500 pounds of cocaine aboard headed for Gotham.

February 12, 1999: President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the Senate.

March 21, 1999: The Matrix—a movie with an all-A.I.-cast—becomes the first of its kind to win Best Picture at the Oscars following its January release.

April 8, 1999: Alexander Luthor surpasses $200 billion, edging out Warren Buffet and Bill Gates as the richest man in America.

April 1999: Through approval from Congress and states, cessation of the old U.S. South is finalized. Reorganization begins.

July 1999: Crime in Gotham City reaches a new peak, officially making it one of the most dangerous cities in the entire world; it holds the highest poverty, crime and murder rate in North America by a large margin. As a result, President Bill Clinton has military blockades set at its borders to prevent easy entry or exit, in hopes of keeping the crime wave contained within the city and managed.

August 1999: Sales of violent virtual reality video games and other media depicting graphic violence are limited across the country amidst the Gotham influenced panic, with experts warning of a wave of copycat criminals who will replicate their brutality.

August 1999: Tony Hawk became the first to land a “1000” on a hoverboard, following his “900” trick just months before on a skateboard.

October 1999: The New American Supreme Court rules LexCorp is in violation of antitrust laws, citing "unregulated and unreasonable practice" toward its competitors.

November 1999: The Tamarind expedition of 1950 is exposed by way of leaked CIA documentation. The dark web becomes a new priority for the reorganized government.

December 1999: Diana of Themyscira leaves Themyscira and sets foot on “Man’s World.”

December 31, 1999: The “New Reformation of the United States” and the “Federalist States of America” are recognized internationally as new territories.

January 1, 2000: Brainiac appears.

January 1, 2000: Independent news outlets report with alarm that Atlantis has become the international target of interest after Brainiac’s decree.

[gear-project]

How much information of the events in the story does public know about?

Most people assumed Sol along with the Sacred Order were responsible for killing Justice back in 2180 after she broke out of her Seal (nobody knew Testament was part of the cause, or that Human Gears even existed).

The incident that happened in former London, England was kept private by the International Police Force, and Sheevus’ Blackard Company was shut down without much external questioning about it.  Most assumed the dormant Gear Hydra just stirred and caused trouble, and the former Sacred Order members dealt with it.

After that, the Data Disc Ky found was destroyed and kept under wraps... only Zepp’s higher ups knew about the incident, though the Jellyfish Pirates kept fragments of their data disc as a memento. 

A lot of rumors circulated about what happened to the Gear Dizzy back in 2181, but nothing factual was leaked to the public, at least where Ky is concerned.  It was officially stated that Jam Kuradoberi collected the bounty.

Most of what happened between 2181-83 was kept under wraps by the Postwar Administration Bureau, trying to cover their own tracks and fall in line with the Conclave’s rulings.  The public would learn about the PWAB’s darker underbelly sometime later, however.

As of 2184-85, people were just getting used to the United Kingdoms of Illyria being founded as a new nation, with Ky Kiske being the High King, Leo Whitefang as Second King, and King Daryl as the Third King of the nation.

Most knew the Conclave and Sanctus Populi (along with the United Nations) were behind the founding of Illyria, but not the inner plannings or conspiracy involved regarding it, nor its connection to the PWAB.

Ariels became Pope Maximus sometime before this, taking the place of Pope Hapinus prior to his “untimely death”.  People knew about it, but they didn’t talk about it much, that is until Valentine and the Vizuel Army invaded Illyria’s Capital.

Valentine not only invaded Illyria, but she destroyed several dormant Gears there while she was at it, hence the name of the event being called “Baptisma 13 incident”.  13 Gears that were kept under Illyrian watch disappeared, basically... or so the public knew at least.

After that incident, Ky made a public announcement as High King that he would be giving sanctuary to Sentient Gears within Illyria’s borders... and that REALLY got people talking.  It was a controversial subject... and also something people could hardly believe was real.

This also painted a huge target on Ky’s back for anti-Gear protests, calling him a Gear sympathizer, among other things.  A lot of politicians considered disassociating with Ky after this as well.  This was also around the time the Conclave decided to use the PWAB to put a bounty on Sol’s head.

Sol getting a bounty on his head raised a few eyebrows within the Bounty Hunting community... since he was pretty infamous among them.  But Ky later exposed this fake bounty as a sham and part of a conspiracy (and this wasn’t the first time fake bounties were posted, either).

In 2187, around this time Pope Ariels began circulating Anti-Valentine Opus detachments around the globe, as a means of “protecting the people against the Valentine threat”, (but was actually part of her scheme to use Gears to dominate the world.)  Most people thought Opus were some man-made robot, it never occurred to most that they were actually Gears.

At this point, nobody really knew what the Conclave were doing, that is until Ramlethal Valentine made a global War Declaration (Elphelt’s warning to Ky was kept a government secret by the way, only the U.S. President Vernon seemed to be given intel about her via Leo).

This, of course, was a ruse, and in fact the Conclave were hovering over the city of Babylon, about to completely destroy its Population (why they chose Babylon as their first target, isn’t exactly clear... but it might have some symbolic value internally).

By the time Sol and Ky finally caught on, Babylon’s people were gone...  It was as tragic as might imagine all over the globe, people mourning for lost friends and family who had once lived there.  A great catastrophe.  I’m sure many blamed Ramlethal for the incident as well, even if she was only indirectly involved.

The public also caught wind of the Illyrian Knights pursuing what they were calling “The Cradle” to the Black Sea... and there was a huge dustup about all the military presence there.  Nobody knew the Cradle had anything to do with Justice, however.

Around November 1st, 2187 Justice reappeared (according to reporters) right next to Illyria’s Central Organ Tower... though nobody really knew how that was even possible, and even considered the idea that Justice was supposed to be dead for years.  Local residents of the capital were temporarily evacuated, and that was about the size of what happened at that time.

Shortly after this incident, Pope Ariels made a public announcement that everything was connected with the “Universal Will” who had declared war on Humankind.  She used this speech as a way of giving hope back to the people, to encourage them to keep fighting on despite who their enemy was... nobody even knowing the truth of the matter.  She also used this as an opportunity to let the Japanese people be released from their quarantine, as a show of good faith (again, another ruse).

Not long after, several earthquake-like explosions in the form of Information Flares occurred around the globe... and nobody really knew the cause, or that they were even connected with Ariels and the Japanese.  Even one of Illyria’s major cities was destroyed, thankfully most people were evacuated (this was when Ramlethal was caught in Ariels’ trap).

Then, during the Feast of Victory (the anniversary of the End of the Crusades), Ariels publicly shot one of her own staff, and went on to reveal that she herself was the Universal Will.  At the same time, several cities in Illyria were invaded by Anti-Matter Gears and a contingent of Ariels’ Swiss Guard, the Phalanx Nine.

Several people were killed in the incidents, but due to everyone involved, no major destruction occurred.  In particular it was revealed a certain Winged-woman was seen protecting the people of Illyria above the city (which was reported in the local newspaper, and speculated upon).

At this point in time, two major bites of News Information have been revealed: Pope Ariels is now in Illyrian Military custody, while the International Criminal known as “That Man” or “The Gearmaker” is now in U.S. Military custody.  Both are pending a Tribunal, which is being discussed in an upcoming G4 Summit.

No one has publicly stated or speculated connections between any of these chains of incidents, other than the fact Gears were involved.  It was, however stated that the PWAB would be reformed and the Assassins Organization officially dismantled.

So far, the public discussion in Illyria seems to be embracing the idea of working alongside Sentient Gears (thanks to open comments about them from the Illyrian Military), though that seems to only apply to certain regions within the nation... no other outstanding opinions in other countries have been stated.

[veryruinswombat]

UR RIGHTS THAT WERE ROLLED BACK BY TRUMP IN 2018

Info from: https://civilrights.org/trump-rollbacks/

On January 4, Sessions rescinded guidance that had allowed states, with minimal federal interference, to legalize marijuana. This move will further reignite the War on Drugs.

On January 8, Trump re-nominated a slate of unqualified and biased judicial nominees, including two rated Not Qualified by the American Bar Association.

On January 8, the administration announced it would terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for nearly 200,000 Salvadorans.

On January 11, the Trump administration released new guidelines that allow states to seek waivers to require Medicaid recipients to work – requirements that represent a throwback to rejected racial stereotypes.

On January 12, the Trump administration approved a waiver allowing Kentucky to require Medicaid recipients to work.

On June 29, a federal judge struck down Kentucky’s Medicaid work requirements.

On January 16, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Mulvaney’s leadership announced it would reconsider the agency’s payday lending rule.

On January 17, the administration announced its decision to bar citizens from Haiti from receiving H2-A and H2-B visas.

On January 18, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a proposed rule to allow health care providers to discriminate against patients, and within the department’s Office for Civil Rights, a new division – the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division – to address related claims.

On January 18, the CFPB abruptly dropped a lawsuit against four online payday lenders who unlawfully made loans of up to 950 percent APR in at least 17 states.

On January 25, the Census Bureau announced that the questionnaire for the 2018 End-to-End Census Test will use race and ethnicity questions from the 2010 Census instead of updated questions recommended by Census Bureau staff. This suggests that the Office of Management and Budget will not revise the official standards for collecting and reporting this data, despite recommendations from a federal agency working group to do so.

On February 1, The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice was effectively closing its Office for Access to Justice, which was designed to make access to legal aid more accessible.

On February 1, reports surfaced claiming Trump’s Labor Department concealed an economic analysis that found working people could lose billions of dollars in wages under its proposal to roll back an Obama-era rule – a rule that protects working people in tipped industries from having their tips taken away by their employers.

On February 1, multiple sources reported that acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Mick Mulvaney had transferred the consumer agency’s Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity from the Supervision, Enforcement, and Fair Lending division to the director’s office. The move essentially gutted the unit responsible for enforcing anti-lending discrimination laws.

On February 2, the Trump administration approved a waiver allowing Indiana to require some Medicaid recipients to work.

On February 12, the Trump administration released its Fiscal Year 2019 budget proposal, which would deny critical health care to those most in need simply to bankroll the president’s wall through border communities. The proposal would also eliminate the Community Relations Service – a Justice Department office established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which has been a key tool that helps address discrimination, conflicts, and tensions in communities around the country.

On February 12, the Trump administration released an infrastructure proposal that would reward the rich and special interests at the expense of low-income communities and communities of color and leave behind too many American communities and those most in need.

On February 12, BuzzFeed News reported that the U.S. Department of Education would no longer investigate complaints filed by transgender students who have been banned from using the restrooms that correspond with their gender identity. On the same day, the department released a statement saying Trump’s budget “protects vulnerable students” – a dubious claim.

On February 26, the U.S. Department of Education proposed to delay implementation of a rule that enforces the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The rule implements the IDEA’s provisions regarding significant disproportionality in the identification, placement, and discipline of students with disabilities with regard to race and ethnicity.

On March 5, the Trump administration approved Arkansas’ request to require some Medicaid recipients to work.

On March 5, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education released a new Case Processing Manual (CPM) that creates greater hurdles for people filing complaints and allows dismissal of civil rights complaints based on the number of times an individual has filed.

On March 12, Attorney General Sessions announced the Justice Department’s ‘school safety’ plan – a plan that civil rights advocates criticized as militarizing schools, overpolicing children, and harming students, disproportionately students of color.

On March 23, Trump issued new orders to ban most transgender people from serving in the military – the latest iteration of a ban that he had initially announced in a series of tweets in July 2017.

On March 23, Trump signed a spending bill that included the STOP School Violence Act, which civil rights organizations are concerned will exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline crisis, further criminalize historically marginalized children, and increase the militarization of, and over-policing in, schools and communities of color.

On March 26, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced that he had directed the Census Bureau to add an untested and unnecessary question to the 2020 Census form, which would ask the citizenship status of every person in America.

On April 6, Attorney General Sessions announced that he had notified all U.S. Attorney’s offices along the southwest border of a new “zero tolerance” policy toward people trying to enter the country – a policy that quickly, and inhumanely, separated hundreds of children from their families.

On April 10, a federal official announced that the Department of Justice was halting the Legal Orientation Program, which offers legal assistance to immigrants.

On April 10, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to push for work requirements for low-income people in America who receive federal assistance, including Medicaid and SNAP.

On April 25, Secretary Ben Carson proposed changes to federal housing subsidies that could triple rent for some households and make it easier to impose work requirements.

On April 26, the Trump administration announced it would terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation in 12 months for approximately 9,000 Nepalese immigrants.

On May 4, the Trump administration announced it would terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation in 18 months for approximately 57,000 Honduran immigrants.

On May 7, the Trump administration approved New Hampshire’s request to require some Medicaid recipients to work or participate in other “community engagement activities.”

On May 11, the Federal Bureau of Prisons released changes to its Transgender Offender Manual that rolled back protections allowing transgender inmates to use facilities, including bathrooms and cell blocks, that correspond to their gender identity.

On May 18, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it would be publishing three separate notices to indefinitely suspend implementation of the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule.

On May 21, Trump signed a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, which repealed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) guidance on indirect auto financing.

On May 22, the Trump administration issued a draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) designed to block access to health care under Title X and deny women information about their reproductive health care options.

On May 24, Trump signed the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which will undermine one of our nation’s key civil rights laws and weaken consumer protections enacted after the 2008 financial crisis.

On June 6, Mick Mulvaney fired all 25 members of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Advisory Board.

On June 8, a Department of Justice filing argued that the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional. The brief was signed by Chad Readler, a Justice Department official who Trump nominated to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

On June 11, Attorney General Sessions ruled that fears of domestic or gang violence was not grounds for asylum in the United States.

On June 11, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director L. Francis Cissna announced the creation of a denaturalization task force in a push to strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship.

On June 12, the Department of Justice sued the state of Kentucky to force it to “systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the registration records.” This voter purge lawsuit was filed one day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s voter purges in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.

On June 18, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, announced that the United States was withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council.

On July 3, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded guidance from the Departments of Justice and Education that provides a roadmap to implement voluntary diversity and integration programs in higher education consistent with Supreme Court holdings on the issue.

On July 10, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced cuts to navigator funding for outreach to hard-to-reach communities for the fall 2018 Affordable Care Act open enrollment period.

On July 25, the Department of Education proposed new borrower defense rules, which would further exacerbate inequalities – making the already unfair and ineffective student loan servicing system even more harmful to all students, particularly to borrowers of color. The proposal would strip away borrower rights and would not protect students from predatory practices in both higher education and student loan servicing.

On September 12, a federal judge struck down DeVos’ attempt to weaken the rule. In October, the Department of Education said it would no longer try to delay the Obama-era regulation.

On July 26, the Trump administration failed to meet a court-ordered deadline to reunite children and families separated at the border.

On July 30, Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a religious liberty task force at the Department of Justice, which many saw as a taxpayer funded effort to license discrimination against LGBTQ people and others.

On August 13, Secretary Ben Carson proposed changes to the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which aimed to combat segregation in housing policy.

On August 15, the Federal Register published a Trump administration proposal to restrict protest rights in Washington, D.C. by closing 80 percent of the White House sidewalk, putting new limits on spontaneous demonstrations, and opening the door to charging fees for protesting.

On August 29, The New York Times reported that the Department of Education is preparing rules that would “narrow the definition of sexual harassment, holding schools accountable only for formal complaints filed through proper authorities and for conduct said to have occurred on their campuses. They would also establish a higher legal standard to determine whether schools improperly addressed complaints.”

On August 30, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief opposing Harvard College’s motion for summary judgement in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, choosing to oppose constitutionally sound strategies that colleges and universities use to expand educational opportunity for students of all backgrounds.

On September 5, the Trump administration sent sweeping subpoenas to the North Carolina state elections board and 44 county elections boards requesting voter records be turned over by September 25. Two months before the midterm elections, civil rights advocates worried this effort would lead to voter suppression and intimidation.

On September 6, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services announced a proposal to withdraw from the Flores Settlement Agreement. The Flores Agreement is a set of protections for underage migrant children in government custody.

On September 13, the National Labor Relations Board proposed weakening the “joint-employer standard” under the National Labor Relations Act, which would make it difficult for working people to bring the companies that share control over their terms and conditions of employment to the bargaining table.

On October 1, a policy change at the Department of State took effect saying that the Trump administration would no longer issue family visas to same-sex domestic partners of foreign diplomats or employees of international organizations who work in the United States.

On October 10, the Department of Homeland Security’s proposed ‘public charge’ rule was published in the Federal Register. Under the rule, immigrants who apply for a green card or visa could be deemed a ‘public charge’ and turned away if they earn below 250 percent of the federal poverty line and use any of a wide range of public programs.

On October 12, the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest opposing a consent decree negotiated by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to overhaul the Chicago Police Department.

On October 16, the administration released its fall 2017 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions. The document details the regulatory and deregulatory actions that federal agencies plan to make in the coming months, including harmful civil and human rights rollbacks.

On October 19, the Department of Justice ended its agreement to monitor the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County and the Shelby County Detention Center in Tennessee, which addressed discrimination against Black youth, unsafe conditions, and no due process at hearings.

On October 21, The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering an interpretation of Title IX that “would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with” – effectively erasing protections for transgender people.

On October 22, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued new guidance on the Affordable Care Act’s 1332 waivers that would expand a state’s flexibility to establish insurance markets that don’t meet the requirements of the ACA.

On October 24, the Department of Justice filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that federal civil rights law does not protect transgender workers from discrimination on the basis of their gender identity.

On October 30, Axios reported that Trump intends to sign an executive order to end birthright citizenship. In a tweet the following day, Trump said “it will be ended one way or the other.”

On October 31, the administration approved a waiver allowing Wisconsin to require Medicaid recipients to work. It was the first time a state that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act was allowed to impose work requirements.

On November 5, the Department of Justice filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to circumvent three separate U.S. Courts of Appeals on litigation concerning the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

On November 7, on his last day as Attorney General, Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum to gut the Department of Justice’s use of consent decrees.

On November 8, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice announced an interim final rule to block people from claiming asylum if they enter the United States outside legal ports of entry.

On November 8, the Department of Labor rolled back guidance issued by the Obama administration that clarified that tipped workers must spend at least 80 percent of their time doing tipped work in order for employers to pay them the lower tipped minimum wage.

On November 16, the Department of Education issued a draft Title IX regulation that represents a cruel attempt to silence sexual assault survivors and limit their educational opportunity – and could lead schools to do even less to prevent and respond to sexual violence and harassment.

On December 11, Trump declared that he would be “proud to shut down the government” – which he did. It resulted in the longest government shutdown in U.S. history (35 days), which harmed federal workers, contractors, their families, and the communities that depend on them.

On December 14, BuzzFeed News reported that the Department of Housing and Urban Development was quietly advising lenders to deny DACA recipients Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans.

On December 18, the Trump administration’s School Safety Commission recommended rescinding Obama-era school discipline guidance, which was intended to assist states, districts, and schools in developing practices and policies to enhance school climate and comply with federal civil rights laws.

On December 21, following the recommendation of Trump’s School Safety Commission, the Departments of Justice and Education rescinded the Dear Colleague Letter on the Nondiscriminatory Administration of School Discipline. Both departments jointly issued the guidance in January 2014.

[juchechat]

Withdrawal of U.S. Hostile Policy towards DPRK - Indispensable Prerequisite for Peace and Stability on Korean Peninsula: Institute for Disarmament and Peace of DPRK Foreign Ministry

[June 25 Juche 109 (2020) KCNA]

70 years have elapsed since the bursts of gunfire of war were heard on this land.

The Korean War forced by the United States inflicted painful scars and tremendous human and material losses upon the Korean people. Continuing into this moment is the suffering of national division whereby kinsfolk of the same blood are compelled to live apart.

As the Korean nation still suffers from the heartrending wounds of war, it is stronger than any other nation in respect of its cherished desire to live on a peaceful land without war, and has long persevered in its efforts to realize the desire, but in vain.

Its underlying cause is the sinister design, that is, the U.S. hostile policy towards the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The Institute for Disarmament and Peace, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK Thursday releases this paper with a view to lay bare before the whole world the truth behind the Korean War ignited by the U.S. in the 1950s of the last century and to reveal the aggressive and predatory nature of the U.S. hostile policy towards the DPRK, which imposes immeasurable misfortunes and pains on the entire Korean nation.

The Korean War was an inevitable product of the U.S. hostile policy towards the DPRK

The Korean War is a criminal war of aggression which was systematically prepared and provoked by the U.S. under thoroughgoing plans to stifle the DPRK by force of arms and hold in its hands the Asia and the rest of the world.

Even though the U.S. continues to fabricate all sorts of tricky information designed to cover up its aggressive crimes of having provoked the Korean War, the truth of history can neither be covered up nor obliterated.

Since more than one century ago, the U.S. adopted it as its state policy to invade and dominate Korea, a gateway to the Asian continent, and desperately pursued the hostile policy towards Korea for its implementation.

The U.S. ruling circles presented the "proposal on opening Korea" to the Congress in February 1845 and perpetrated a series of incidents such as intrusions of ship "General Sherman" in 1866, ship "Shenandoah" and ship "China" respectively in 1868, and large-scale armed invasion in 1871.

After signing the "Taft-Katsura Agreement" in 1905, the U.S. backed the occupation and colonial rule by Japan over Korea while systematically attempting to turn it into its eventual colony. By the end of the World War II, it perfected its plan to occupy our country.

In the letter sent in March 1951 to Joseph Martin, Senator of the U.S. Congress, MacArthur, the then Commander of the U.S. Forces in the Far East, wrote:

…

"If we lose this war to Communism in Asia, the fall of Europe is inevitable.

By conquering all of Korea we can cut into pieces the one and only supply line connecting Soviet Siberia and South …, and control the whole area between Vladivostok and Singapore. Nothing would then be beyond the reach of our power." (Herschel Meyer, "Modern History of America", p.148)

In a word, the U.S. regarded Korea as a "dagger" to cut off a "lump of meat" which meant Asia.

Korean War was badly needed for the American munition monopolies which had been too fattened by piles of money they had amassed during the World War II.

The economic crisis which had started in the U.S. from the end of 1948 became more acute by 1949.

The industrial production plummeted by 15 percent compared to the previous year, the prices nose-dived, and the investment in machinery and equipment reduced sharply, which resulted in the bankruptcy of over 4,600 companies and the increase of the unemployed to 6 million during the first half of year 1949 alone. The revenue of the monopolies shrunk from US$ 36.6 billion to US$ 28.4 billion during the period between September 1948 and March 1949.

Soon after the Korean War broke out, American publications headlined that "the business called Korea revived the economy" and "the outbreak of the Korean War exorcised the evil of recession that had been agonizing the American commerce since the end of the World War II." This fact speaks itself that a "special recipe", i.e. a war, was needed for the U.S. at that time in order to rid itself of the economic crisis.

This is how the U.S. chose, pursuant to its strategy for world hegemony, Korea as a "unique point of tangency between the American military system and the Asian mainland", an "ideological battleground", a "test ground" of showdown for realizing world domination, and also as the only way to get out of the economic crisis after the World War II.

The true aggressive colours of the U.S. who took the lead in preparing for the Korean War are also clearly revealed by working out the war scenario.

The plan of the U.S. to occupy Far East was divided into three phases: The first phase begins with the Korean War (A) and in the second phase the war is expanded into China (B) and in the final phase, Siberia is occupied (C). The start of operation was slated for 1949.

A Japanese magazine dated September 1964 disclosed the story behind the scene by citing a former colonel of the Imperial Japanese Army, who had been involved in this conspiracy for the war, as follows:

"The operation was divided into three phases. First, 10 divisions comprising the U.S. Army and south Korean Army are deployed along the 38th Parallel, and two operation zones, i.e. the east zone and the west zone are formed. The west front directly advances to Pyongyang and a landing operation at northern Pyongyang with the cooperation of the Navy and Air Forces is conducted in parallel with it. The east front chooses Yangdok as its left flank and ensures the connection between Pyongyang and Wonsan and its right flank will march directly towards Wonsan. Here again, a landing operation at northern Wonsan is conducted by a naval unit. These two fronts advance together up to River Amnok and break through the Sino-Korean border. This was the first phase of the operation and a detailed plan based on data provided by the former Japanese Army was worked out. Next, the operation enters the second phase the moment the Sino-Korean border is broken through, followed by participation of the Japanese army and the UN forces. This was the sequence."

With a thoroughgoing plan and concrete preparation, the U.S. at last ignited the Korean War by inciting the south Korean puppet army at 4 a.m., June 25, 1950.

On the eve of the war, Robert, the then head of the U.S. military advisory group in south Korea gabbled as follows: "We have chosen the 25th and this explains our prudence. It is Sunday. It's the Sabbath for both the United States and south Korea, Christian states. No one will believe we have started a war on Sunday. In short, it is to make people believe that we are not the first to open a war."

After the provocation of the Korean War, the U.S. manoeuvred cunningly to cover up its true colour as aggressors.

On June 25, the U.S. asked for convening the United Nations Security Council meeting, and forged the UNSC "resolution" 82 which designated the DPRK as "aggressor" and on July 7, it forged yet another UNSC "resolution" 84 which "recommended" to make the allied forces available to "a unified command under the U.S." and "asked" the U.S. to designate its commander and "authorized" the usage of UN flag.

The DPRK was thus termed a "provoker" of the war and the Fatherland Liberation War of the Korean people an "aggression", and the "UN forces" made an appearance as a belligerent party to the war.

The previous UN Secretary-Generals officially admitted that the "UN Command" is not a UN-controlled organ but purely a war tool of the U.S.

In June 1994, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the then UN Secretary-General, admitted that "the UNSC did not establish the 'Unified Command' as a subsidiary organ under its control and it became to be placed under the authority of the U.S." (June 24, 1994 Letter from the UN Secretary-General to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK)

In December 1998, Kofi A. Annan, the then UN Secretary-General, said that "none of my predecessors have granted any authorization to any State to make the use of the name of the UN" when he had referred to the forces and command dispatched by the U.S. into the Korean War. (December 21, 1998, Letter from the UN Secretary-General to the President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly of the DPRK)

On July 27, 2004 and March 6, 2006, the UN spokesperson confirmed that the "'UN Command', despite its name, is not the army of UN, but a U.S.-led force."

It is not the UN but the U.S. which has the power to appoint the "UN commander." It is not the UN but the U.S. administration which has absolute power to decide on either reduction or increase of the U.S. forces in south Korea that are wearing the helmets of the "UN forces."

Despite all these facts, the UN flag is still brazenly hanging in Panmunjom, which is the shame on the part of the United Nations.

This fiercest war ended in the miraculous victory of the heroic Korean people who were under the leadership of President Kim Il Sung. Yet the human and material losses suffered by our nation were indeed tremendous.

The nefarious atrocities of massacre committed by the U.S. imperialists in particular cannot be detailed on this short paper.

The U.S. imperialists, who had wormed into Sinchon County in October 1950, committed all kinds of atrocities of massacre against 35,380-strong innocent residents, equivalent to 25% of the County's population, in 50-plus days. They burnt the innocent residents to death, drowned them in reservoir, shot to death, burnt them on the firewood, ripped apart the limbs of living persons and cut off the abdomens of pregnant women.  These facts lay bare before the world that the U.S. imperialists are no less than wild beasts and bloodthirsty wolves in human shape.

According to an official statistics alone, the U.S. imperialists, during the Korean War, killed more than 1.23 million people in the northern half of Korea and more than 1.24 million people in south Korea, and attempted to eliminate our nation by mobilizing even the chemical and germ weapons.

In 1951, an investigation team of the Women's International Democratic Federation, which investigated the atrocities of the U.S. imperialists on the site, wrote in its report: "The massacres and tortures committed by the U.S. troops in the areas of their temporary occupation are more atrocious than those committed by Hitler Nazis in Europe."

Openly clamouring that they would "wipe out 78 cities and towns of north Korea from the map" and "leave nothing intact", the U.S., throughout the Korean War, dropped almost 600,000 tons of bombs and napalm on the northern half of Korea, which are 3.7 times the amount of bombs dropped on the Japanese mainland during the Pacific War.

Severely destroyed owing to the atrocities of the U.S. imperialists during the Korean War were 50,941 factories and enterprises, 28,632 buildings of schools at all levels, 4,534 buildings of medical facilities including hospitals and clinics, 579 buildings of scientific research institutions, 8,163 buildings of press and culture organs, 2,077,226 dwelling houses. Also 563,755 hectares of farming land got damaged, and the total reduced area of paddy and non-paddy fields amounted to 155,500 hectares.

When the war was over, there was nothing left but ashes, and the U.S. bragged that Korea would not recover even after 100 years.

All these facts eloquently show that the U.S. imperialists are the very provokers of the Korean War and the sworn enemy of the Korean people, and prove that peace will never settle on the Korean peninsula as long as the U.S. hostile policy towards the DPRK persists.

Criminal Acts of U.S. – Systematic Abolition of Armistice Agreement

The U.S. hostile manoeuvres towards the DPRK after the Korean War can be characterized in a word as a pursuit of permanent division of the Korean peninsula and ceaseless nuclear threats and blackmail against the DPRK.

The Korean War, which Truman, a war chieftain, described as no less than the World War III, came to a pause with the conclusion of the Armistice Agreement. But it meant neither the end of war nor the conclusion of a peace agreement.

The Armistice Agreement, at the time of its conclusion, constituted no more than a transitional step aimed at withdrawing all foreign troops from the Korean peninsula and establishing lasting peace on it.

No sooner had the Armistice Agreement been signed than the U.S. drove the situation of the Korean peninsula to the brink of war in a flagrant violation of the Armistice Agreement, driven by its wild ambition to make our people its slaves by all means and seize the whole of Korean peninsula.

Around 22:20 p.m. on July 27, 1953, less than half an hour after the Armistice Agreement became effective, the U.S. army fired several machine gun shots towards our side's area and since then, fired shells into our side's area successively for several hours at intervals of tens of minutes.

In disregard of the Paragraph 10, Article I of the Armistice Agreement which stipulates that only pistols and rifles can be carried in Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) including the Joint Security Area (JSA), the U.S. army introduced automatic rifles and machine guns and, moreover, cannons, tanks, flame throwers, helicopters etc., and opened gunfire towards our side's posts and guardsmen indiscriminately almost every day.

Since 1968, the U.S. army mobilized the fully armed troops to repeat the military operations which it had once conducted in the areas along the 38th parallel including Mountain Songak just before the provocation of June 25 War.

The U.S. army committed innumerable acts of provocation in Panmunjom JSA, including Panmunjom incident on August 18, 1976 and the incident of gunfire towards our security personnel on November 23, 1984.

The U.S. nullified Paragraph 60, Article IV of the Armistice Agreement which envisages the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea and the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.

Paragraph 60 of the Armistice Agreement stipulated that within three months after the Armistice Agreement becomes effective a political conference of a higher level is to be held to negotiate the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the Korean peninsula and the ways for peaceful settlement of the Korean question.

At the preparatory talks for a political conference that were convened at Panmunjom on October 26, 1953, the U.S. laid artificial obstacles, only clinging to the obstructive manoeuvres, and on December 12 same year, it unilaterally withdrew from the meeting room. Thus the talks didn't proceed to the main conference, but was ruptured in the preparatory stage.

Afterwards, the Geneva Conference was convened for the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, but the U.S. deliberately disrupted the conference.

On August 8, 1953, the U.S. staged the ceremony of signing of what is called a "Mutual Defence Treaty" with south Korea in order to legitimize permanent stationing of U.S. troops in south Korea.

On January 2, 1955, the then Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff made reckless remarks that the U.S. army would station, for an indefinite period, in south Korea which is of great strategic significance in its world hegemony, and that it would continue to hinder the peaceful coordination of the Korean question.

After the UN resolution on dissolution of the "UN Command" for the durable peace on the Korean peninsula was adopted at the 30th session of the UN General Assembly in November 1975, the U.S. clinged more openly to its scheme for the permanent occupation by cooking up the U.S.-south Korea "Combined Forces Command."

In early March 2006, the U.S. worked out the plan and got down to its implementation for expanding and reorganizing the nominal "UN Command" into a permanent organization of multinational forces by way of increasing the role of belligerent states of the Korean War and permitting them to take part not only in the formulation of emergency and operational plans but also in detailed activities.

Thus, the process for converting the Armistice Agreement into a peace agreement miscarried, and the unstable state of neither war nor peace continues on the Korean peninsula.

In August 1953 the U.S. went totally against Sub-paragraph 13(b), Article II of the Armistice Agreement and unilaterally drew the "northern limit line" in the West Sea of Korea, which is an act of illegal and outrageous crime, thereby transforming its surrounding areas into the world's most dangerous hotspot. It is also attempting in every way to impose a blockade on our country under the pretext of "Proliferation Security Initiative", running counter to Paragraph 15, Article II which prohibits any kind of blockade against the DPRK.

The U.S. nullified Sub-paragraph 13(d), Article II of the Armistice Agreement which called for a complete cessation of introduction of all military materiel from outside of the Korean territory and turned south Korea into a world's weapons exhibition hall.

The U.S. incessantly threatened and blackmailed the Inspection Teams of Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission which were mandated according to Sub-paragraph 13(c), Article II of the Armistice Agreement to supervise and inspect the introductions of military materiel from outside of the Korean territory, and eventually expelled them from south Korea in June 1956, thereby paralyzing their inspection functions.

In May 1957, the then U.S. State Secretary openly stated in public that "the U.S. should consider sending more modern and effective weapons to south Korea," and on June 21 same year, the U.S. Army side that attended the 75th meeting of the Military Armistice Commission(MAC) announced its unilateral abrogation of Sub-paragraph 13(d) of the Armistice Agreement.

The U.S. shipped into south Korea more than 1,000 nuclear weapons during the period between the late 1950s and the 1980s. As a result, south Korea was converted into the most highly deployed area of nuclear weapons in the world, their number being over 4 times that of "NATO" member states, and into an advanced outpost for outbreak of a nuclear war. The U.S. also formalized the provision of nuclear umbrella to south Korea at the 14th session of the U.S.-south Korea Annual Security Consultative Meeting held in March 1982.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. designated our country as a target for preemptive nuclear strike in its "Nuclear Posture Review" and shipped into south Korea the warfare equipment worth an astronomical amount of money, along with nuclear weaponry.

The U.S. deployed in south Korea all sorts of ultra-modern offensive arms such as "F-117" stealth fighter, "F-15" and "F-16" fighters, "Shadow 200" tactical reconnaissance drones, Apache, new-type "Patriot" missiles, "Stryker" armored vehicles, guided missile destroyers, "Abrams M1-A2" tanks, "ATACMS" ground to ground missiles, Mine-Removing Armor-Protected(MRAP) special vehicles,  and even  introduced the THAAD system.

And recently, the U.S. introduced to south Korea "F-35A" stealth fighters, "Global Hawk" high-altitude reconnaissance drones, AWACS and many other ultra-modern offensive weapons, thus transforming south Korea into literally a showcase of lethal weapons.

The U.S. went to the length of abolishing the MAC and the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), the only remaining supervisory bodies for implementing the Armistice Agreement.

In the 1950s, it dissolved the Neutral Nations Inspection Teams under the NNSC and the Joint Observer Team under the MAC which were provided for by Paragraph 23, Article II of the Armistice Agreement. On March 25, 1991, it staged a farce of designating as a senior member of the U.S. Army side to the MAC a puppet army officer of south Korea which is not a signatory to the Armistice Agreement and therefore does not have any qualifications or authority to handle issues relating to the Armistice Agreement.

With this, the MAC, which had functioned for more than four decades, ceased its existence, and the NNSC, too, having lost its counterpart, withered away by itself.

The U.S. also abrogated the Preamble and the Paragraph 12 of the Armistice Agreement, which provides for a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea.

Since 1954, when it staged "Focus Lens", the first joint military exercise with south Korea, the U.S. has ceaselessly conducted all kinds of war drills so far, to include "Freedom Bolt", "Team Spirit", "Ulji Focus Lens", "Joint Wartime Reinforcement Exercise", "Key Resolve", "Foal Eagle" and "Ulji Freedom Guardian."

These exercises far exceeded any other war exercises taking place in different regions of the world in terms of frequency and scope, and all of strategic nuclear triad such as nuclear aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and nuclear strategic bombers were mobilized in its nuclear war drills aimed at the DPRK.

The nature of the exercises became more aggressive and provocative by changing their masquerades into "decapitation operation", "precision strike", "invasion of Pyongyang", etc. throwing off the "annual" and "defensive" veneer.

The pre-emptive nuclear strike scenarios were further specified into "OPLAN 5026", "OPLAN 5027", "OPLAN 5029", "OPLAN 5030", "OPLAN 5012", "OPLAN 5015", "OPLAN 8044", "OPLAN 8022", "OPLAN 8010", "tailored deterrence strategy" and "OPLAN 4D."

As is evident from the above, the U.S. left no stone unturned in abrogating each and every article and paragraph of the Armistice Agreement which consists of 5 Articles and 63 Paragraphs in total and as a consequence, the Armistice Agreement was dumped like a scrap of waste paper.

Owing to the hostile policy of the U.S. and its endless nuclear threats and blackmail towards the DPRK, the Korean peninsula has turned into the world's hottest spot, where a nuclear war could spark off at any moment.

If we had not considerably strengthened our self-defensive deterrence, the Korean peninsula would have fallen into the ravages of war more than hundreds times and a catastrophic third world war would have already started.

Strengthening the war deterrent is our final option

It is 67 years since the gunfire of war ceased on this land. But, there is one thing that has not ceased at all.

It is none other than the U.S. hostile policy towards the DPRK.

The United States is becoming ever more undisguised day by day in its scheme to annihilate the DPRK by force and gain military dominance in the Asia-Pacific region and, by extension, to realize its ambition for world hegemony at any cost.

The government of the DPRK put forward a number of peace proposals and initiatives including the proposal (1970s) for concluding a DPRK-U.S. peace agreement and the proposal (1990s) for establishing a new peace mechanism, all of which were rejected outright by the U.S.

In the second half of 1990s, the four-party talks were held involving the DPRK, the U.S., China and south Korea for an establishment of durable peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula, but owing to the insincere attitude from the U.S., no fruit was produced.

In the new century, we put forward the proposal for bringing earlier a declaration on an end to the war and the proposal for convening a meeting at the earliest possible date for replacing the Armistice Agreement with a peace agreement by 2010, 60th year of the outbreak of the Korean war. But the United States turned down all of those proposals.

Instead, the U.S. openly designated our country as "axis of evil", "outpost of tyranny" and "target of pre-emptive nuclear strike" and illegally labelled us as "sponsor of terrorism", "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction", "human rights abuse", "money laundering", "counterfeiting", "drug trafficking" in order to justify its hostile policy towards the DPRK.

It did not even hesitate to make reckless remarks of "total destruction" of the DPRK and run amuck in order to overturn our ideology and system.

The hostile policy of the U.S. towards the DPRK is well evidenced by the fact that it posed nuclear threats to us, openly talking about using nuclear weapons.

The U.S. had openly stated that it would drop atomic bombs on the DPRK during the Korean War, and gradually escalated its nuclear threats against us after the conclusion of the Armistice Agreement.

When its armed spy ship "Pueblo" was captured in January 1968, the U.S. reviewed the option of nuclear attack against us, and when the large-size reconnaissance plane "EC-121" was shot down in our territorial airspace in April 1969, it kept the nukes-mounted tactical bombers on emergency standby while the then U.S. President Nixon made reckless remarks that he decided to approve the use of  atomic bombs in case north Korea strikes back. Such nuclear threats and blackmail by the U.S. on the DPRK are only the visible tip of iceberg.

The war in Kosovo triggered by the U.S. from March to June 1999 was a war of injustice, simulating a second Korean war.

The former Yugoslavia served as the U.S. test ground for a new Korean war, because the country has the natural and geographical conditions similar to the Korean peninsula and its distance from the U.S. mainland is almost same as the distance between the U.S. mainland and the Korean peninsula.

The facts that the U.S. together with NATO conducted ceaseless and indiscriminate air raids of zero operational significance and ruthlessly used depleted uranium bombs and WMDs that spread toxic bacteria, serve as an oblique scene of the second Korean war being plotted by the U.S.

With the turn of a new millennium, the nuclear threats by the U.S. against the DPRK became ever more blatant.

On June 6, 2001, Bush announced a so-called "North Korea Policy Statement" where he claimed that the U.S. would wield its military strength including nuclear weapons if the DPRK does not accept its demand of nuclear inspection, suspension of development and launch of missiles, and reduction of conventional weapons.

In 2002, the U.S. stated that it could be the first to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and it will develop small-size nuclear bunker busters to this end, thereby making its preemptive nuclear attack on the DPRK a fait accompli.

In 2009, at the 41st session of the U.S.-south Korea Annual Security Consultative Meeting, it announced in writing that it would provide extended deterrence such as nuclear umbrella, conventional strike capabilities and missile defense system to south Korea.

The American nuclear threats against the DPRK reached its peak in the year 2017.

The U.S. pushed the Korean peninsula onto the threshold of a nuclear war by deploying nuclear strategic assets and the latest warfare equipment including the super-large nuclear-powered aircraft carriers "Carl Vinson" and "Ronald Reagan", nuclear strategic bombers "B-1B", "B-52H" and "B-2A", nuclear-powered submarines "Columbus", "Tucson" and "Michigan" in south Korea and its surrounding areas.

The U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threats against the DPRK became further aggressive after the DPRK-U.S. Summit held in Singapore for establishing a new bilateral relationship and building a lasting and durable peace mechanism on the Korean peninsula.

Despite the fact that we voluntarily took crucial and meaningful initiatives including the discontinuation of nuclear test and ICBM test-fire for the sake of building a mutual confidence, the U.S., far from responding to these initiatives with corresponding measures, conducted tens of joint military drills, which its President personally promised to stop, and threatened the DPRK militarily by way of shipping into south Korea the ultra-modern warfare equipment.

The U.S. conducted a test simulating the interception of our intercontinental ballistic missile, followed by test launches, without hesitation, of all kinds of missiles including ICBM "Minuteman-3" and SLBM "Trident 2D-5", thus maximizing the nuclear threats against us.

Even amid the unprecedented crisis triggered by COVID-19, the military threats of the U.S. against us have not been abated at all. If anything, it staged a joint air drill and marine corps joint landing drill in April this year.

No other nation on this planet has so directly suffered from nuclear threats for so long as the Korean nation, and to our people, nuclear threat is not at all an abstract concept but actual and concrete experience.

Our nation suffered directly from the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our nation is the second largest victim after the Japanese people.

To our people, who personally experienced the horrible ravages of nuclear bomb, the atomic bomb threat of the U.S. during the Korean War was literally a nightmare, and a procession of "A-bomb refugees" streaming from the north to the south appeared on the Korean peninsula in the period of the Korean War.

Many families who couldn't move together sent only their husbands or sons to the south in hopes of carrying on their family lines.

This is how the separated families of millions of people came into being, and they still live separately in the north and south of the Korean peninsula and abroad.

In order to eliminate the nuclear threats from the U.S., the DPRK government made all possible efforts either through dialogue or in resort to the international law, but all ended in vain.

The option left was only one, and that was to counter nuclear with nuclear.

This brought to an end the nuclear imbalance in the Northeast Asia, where the DPRK only had been left without nukes and all other countries had been equipped with nuclear weapons or nuclear umbrella.

All these speak clearly to the fact that the root cause of aggravation of the situation on the Korean peninsula lies in the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threats towards the DPRK and the dark cloud of a nuclear war can never be cleared away from the Korean peninsula unless the U.S. withdraws its hostile policy that treats the DPRK as an enemy and a belligerent state.

The U.S. might have its own calculations in keeping the dogged persistence of its hostile concept towards the DPRK and continuing the belligerent relations with the DPRK.

While the Far Eastern strategy of the U.S. had been shifting to "Nixon doctrine", "Neo-Pacific doctrine", Pivot to Asia-Pacific strategy and Indo-Pacific strategy, the environment surrounding the ceasefire on the Korean peninsula was abused to militarily deter the potential adversaries of the U.S.

In recent years alone, the U.S. deployed the high-altitude missile defence system "THAAD" in south Korea under the pretext of "missile threat" from us, thus making it possible to watch over the northeastern areas of China and the far eastern region of Russia like seeing the palm of its hand, and the U.S. is also openly releasing its evil intention to deploy intermediate-range missiles in our surrounding areas on the ground that the INF Treaty has become null and void.

As a result, it has now become a matter of time when a nuclear arms race starts around the Korean peninsula, and the U.S. military moves to contain China and Russia are bound to grow more pronounced as time goes by.

Under this circumstance, there is no guarantee that a second June 25 won't be repeated in case the U.S. interests coincide with the ones of 70 years ago - a far departure from being interested in keeping the armistice on the Korean peninsula.

To our people who were subjected to disastrous disturbances of war on this land owing to the U.S., the strong war deterrent for national defence came to stand out as an indispensable strategic option.

It is an indisputable, open and above-board exercise of the legitimate right to self-defence that we further consolidate the war deterrent for defending the national security and guaranteeing our development.

70-year-long history of the DPRK-U.S. confrontation is graphically showing that any self-restraint or broad-mindedness would not serve to contain the U.S. high-handedness and arbitrariness, aggression and war manoeuvres, but would encourage them instead.

It is no less than the despicable double-dealing tactics for the U.S. to talk about a sort of dialogue while maximizing its attempts to oppress the DPRK politically, economically and militarily, and its repeated harping, like an automatic responding machine, on denuclearization betrays only its brigandish intention to disarm us and open up the way to an aggression war.

At the Fourth Enlarged Meeting of the 7th Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea, Comrade Kim Jong Un, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, set forth new policies to further bolster the national nuclear war deterrent and operate the strategic force on full alert in accordance with the overall requirements for building and developing state armed forces.

Under the condition where the U.S., the biggest nuclear power and the only user of nuclear weapons, clings to the pathological and inveterate hostile policy towards us, while indulging itself in extreme nuclear threats and blackmail, we will continue to further build up our strength to contain the persistent nuclear threats from the U.S. and we will never shrink from this road we have chosen.

Nobody in this world could block the victorious advance of our people and army who have inherited the heroic spirit and mettle of the great generation of victors that had defeated the U.S.-led gang of imperialists in the Fatherland Liberation War – a de facto confrontation between a rifle and an atomic bomb.

[bonjourmoncher]

Hamilton Lindley Waco Business Leader at Neighborly Brands, a Compliance Officer Profile

A consistence official ought to force rules with a tone of sympathy. The best outcomes happen when a consistence official talks delicately, tunes in without interference, and talks gruffly. Be that as it may, it is important that the dull talk isn't rough. Individuals don't listen when they feel unjustifiably censured. Hamilton Lindley, a consistence administrator at Neighborly Brands has a one of a kind way to deal with be a consistence official.

While talking obtusely, advise individuals your goal is to instruct them. "Tell the individual that 'I'm not condemning. I'm teaching.' when depicting an approach to improve." Hamilton Lindley says.

Hamilton Lindleysuggests that graciousness goes far. "Everybody wants to be heard. Furthermore, despite the fact that it might be difficult to hear, they merit it." Hamilton Lindley says. Through his time with the world's biggest home administration franchisor, Hamilton Lindley has made extraordinary outcomes by talking delicately and conveying a major stick. "Abraham Lincoln said that the needed to be iron enveloped by velvet. That is my way to deal with these troublesome discussions." Says Hamilton Lindley.

Hamilton Lindley contemplated worldwide business law while his companions were playing kickball. Quick forward to today, and he has composed more emphatic letters than you've eaten cuts of pizza. He appreciates making convoluted things straightforward. Furthermore, he knowsthat calls merit an arrival that day. Hamilton Lindley methodologies worries as a down to business colleague. Not from an ivory tower.

Following 10 years in Dallas, Hamilton Lindley moved his group of five to the home of the Baylor Bears in Waco, Texas. Hamilton Lindley understood the mentally programming of his little girl was finished after she accepted that the Baylor Bear mascots rest simply in the wake of "eating all them Longhorns." If you want to see an excessive number of photographs of his family, you can discover Hamilton Lindley on Facebook Hamilton Lindleyand Hamilton Lindley Twitter and Hamilton Lindley Instagram.

While in Dallas, Hamilton Lindley was perceived as Best Lawyer in Dallas by D Magazine and President of the Dallas Federal Bar Association. Hamilton Lindley was named a Texas Super Lawyer from 2010-2016 and The National Trial Lawyers perceived Hamilton Lindley as a "Best 40 Under 40" legal counselor and a "Main 100 Trial Lawyer."

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To begin with, Break every one of the Rules

Start with Why

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The Formula of Success

Demonstrating Fraud on the Market

Hamilton Lindley is frequently referenced in the news, including the accompanying stories:

Waco Personal Injury Attorney Hamilton Lindley Receives Top Trial Lawyer Award

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Waco Personal Injury Attorney Hamilton Lindley Receives Top Trial Lawyer Award

Waco individual damage lawyer, Hamilton Lindley, has been named one of the Top 100 Trial Lawyers in Texas by The National Trial Lawyers Association. As a first time beneficiary of the honor Mr. Lindley is eager to have been chosen for such a high respect.

The National Trial Lawyers Top 100 touts itself as a welcome just association made out of the chief preliminary attorneys from each state in the country who meet stringent capabilities as common offended party or potentially criminal protection preliminary legal counselors. Choice depends on an intensive multi-stage process which incorporates peer designations joined with outsider research. Enrollment is stretched out exclusively to the chosen few of the most qualified lawyers from each state who show prevalent capabilities of authority, notoriety, impact, stature and open profile.

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Lawyer Hamilton Lindley Named Among Best Lawyers by D Magazine

The Dallas preliminary law office Deans and Lyons is satisfied to report that Hamilton Lindley has earned a spot on D Magazine's posting of "The Best Lawyers in Dallas." Mr. Lindley was perceived among Dallas' top legal counselors for his work in protections prosecution and authorization.

To accumulate the rundown of the city's top lawyers, D Magazine requested selections from 9,000 legal counselors and judges all through North Texas. Individual lawyers vote in favor of chosen one's that exhibit exclusive expectations as far as nature of work and honesty in the legitimate calling. The distribution's editors at that point worked with a blue-strip board of legal advisors to conclude the posting, which is highlighted in the May 2014 release of D Magazine, and will be accessible during the time at

Hamilton Lindley is routinely perceived among the top legal counselors in Texas. He has been highlighted in the Texas Super Lawyers posting of the state's top legal advisors since 2010.

"Speaking to the two offended parties and respondents in protections prosecution encourages me give one of a kind understanding to my customers," Hamilton Lindley said. "I am respected to be chosen by my friends for this posting in D Magazine."

'Licentious PART OF LAW'

Recently, enormous payouts to the central government have turned out to be progressively normal. Over the most recent two years, organizations have paid FCPA fines and ejections worth more than $2.6 billion, almost triple the estimation of settlements in the earlier four years, as per information assembled by law office Shearman and Sterling. In investor cases that please the impact points of a major FCPA settlement, juries are progressively disposed to be thoughtful to the offended parties, legal advisors state. Worry about huge potential decisions can trigger enormous settlements.

"Renumeration is a lustful piece of law. It's something that individuals can comprehend — and it gets them furious," said Hamilton Lindley, a partner at six-attorney Goldfarb Branham in Dallas, one of around two dozen firms that have recorded FCPA-related claims in the most recent year.

Offended parties' legal counselors are likewise attracted to these cases since organizations under government gift examination normally have just persevered through awful press and burned through millions on outside insight and globe-jogging measurable bookkeepers. Avon Products, for instance, burned through $48 million in the initial a half year of this current year on an interior examination started by a representative's case that organization staff made ill-advised installments to Chinese authorities. After the organization uncovered the claims to the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, which opened examinations, three investor suits were recorded in U.S. Area Court for the Southern District of New York. An Avon representative declined to remark on the examinations or the private case.

In Huron outrage, shadows of Arthur Andersen

Lawyer Hamilton Lindley of the Kendall Law Group, a Dallas-based law office, said he expected a class-activity protest to be documented for the benefit of investors this week.

"It's normal to investigate whether the way of life of Arthur Andersen seeped over into the way of life of Huron Consulting," Lindley said. "That is an inquiry we will seek after in our examination."

The unintended results of the Justice Department's FCPA arrangement essentially keep on mounting. The extreme criminalization by U.S. government attorneys of conduct that ought to never be approved, however is all inclusive efficient, has created numerous results. Meet one of them: Hamilton Lindley, an expert protections class-activity legal advisor. Over the most recent couple of months he has pursued corporate exposures of FCPA examinations by suing the sheets of chiefs of Weatherford International, Parker Drilling, Avon Products and Pride International. Lindley is presently investing a fourth of his energy in the FCPA and is very genuine in saying he is simply following the lead of the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"I think the way that these organizations have been submitting unite abroad honestly is an intriguing point for juries to hear," Lindley let me know. "It's the new authorization system of the DOJ and SEC so private practice attorneys are keen on what government legal counselors are doing."

In the claim Lindley documented against Weatherford and its board, for instance, Lindley has made sense of by taking a couple of minutes to peruse a SEC recording that the "Weatherford Board has caused an astounding $108 million in expenses and costs regarding FCPA-related examinations," which does exclude the "monetary punishment that Weatherford is probably going to need to pay to determine the DOJ and SEC examinations." So the general thought is for Lindley and his firm, Goldfarb Branham, to likewise make some cash off of Weatherford's lead.

Offended party's Lawyers Join the Bribery Racket

The unintended results of the Justice Department's FCPA approach basically keep on mounting. The serious criminalization by U.S. government attorneys of conduct that ought to never be approved, however is universally deliberate, has delivered numerous results. Meet one of them: Hamilton Lindley, an expert protections class-activity attorney. Over the most recent couple of months he has

[tearsoftheearth]

WHAT IS BIO WEAPON AND HOW ARE WE ENTERING INTO THIS BIO-WEAPON ERA?

"Nothing is going to hurt this country, not bioweapons, not a nuclear weapon, not a terrorist strike-there is nothing that can hurt us if we stay united and move together and a vision for moving to the future right away “~Wesley Clark.

 Sure enough 'united we stand divided we fall’, but examining the factors that endanger our unity could be the first step towards safeguarding mankind.

 We are aware of several ammunitions that have been used in human history as media of hate, revenge and power acquisition. With the intervention of science and technology, the weapons are gaining a holocaust capacity.

 One such weapon is Bio-weapon. Biological weapons (often termed "bio-weapons", "biological threat agents", or "bio-agents") are living organisms or replicating entities. As the name suggests they are obviously weapons used in war. So bio weapons are used in biological warfare. Biological warfare agents are a group of pathogens and toxins of biological origin that can be potentially misused for military or criminal purposes. Anthrax, plague and smallpox are regarded as the most dangerous biological weapons by various institutions. They may be developed, acquired, stockpiled or deployed by nation states or by non-national groups. In the latter case, or if a nation-state uses it clandestinely, it may also be considered bioterrorism.

 According to NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), "All diseases caused by biological weapons may also occur naturally or as a result of a laboratory accident. Risk assessment with regard to biological danger often proves to be difficult. In this context, an early identification of a potentially dangerous situation through experts is essential to limit the degree of damage”. Certainly, the bioweapon designed could perhaps wipe out the whole human race including the creator of it, if a single accident happens. Its fatality should be taken into consideration and also stringent steps to control its outbreak before initiating its making.

 Biological agents have the ability to adversely affect human health in a variety of ways, ranging from relatively mild allergic reactions to serious medical conditions, including serious injury, as well as permanent disability, even death. Genetic modification may enhance their lethal properties, or render them impervious to conventional treatments or preventives. Since many bio-agents reproduce rapidly and require minimal resources for propagation, they are also a potential danger for lifeforms worldwide.

  Laws regarding banning of bioweapons

 The Biological Weapons Convention (1972) is an international treaty banning the use or stockpiling of bio-agents; as of February 2015, there were 171 state signatories.

Laws will be made but its implementation is what fulfills its virtue.

 History of bioweapon attacks

 Biological warfare has affected our wars, our peace, and our research throughout this century. During World War I, animals were deliberately infected with glanders. During World War II, biowarfare research was carried out by Japan, Germany, England, and the United States. Japan carried out biological warfare attacks in China. England used biological warfare for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. In the 1950s and 1960s, Army researchers released bacteria over U.S. cities in biological warfare tests.

 In current scheme of world involvement in Coronavirus pandemic, the previous weapon- fought world wars, cold wars and war against terrorism have been superseded by this “Virus invasion” global war. Is China really a trigger for this bio World War Third?

 Coronavirus as a bioweapon

  The blame game has started for blaming nations for the coronavirus outbreak.US, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has repeated the charge that the virus was a creation of the Chinese military while others source it to North Korea. US President Donald Trump has been roundly condemned for “a racist remark” after describing the deadly disease as “a Chinese virus. “US intelligence officials are probing the possibility that America’s enemies might use the coronavirus as a bioweapon, according to an alarming report. The Department of Defense is monitoring for the potential of the virus to be weaponized, possibly against prominent, high-level targets. Andy Weber, who served as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense program under President Barack Obama, said "In its natural state, the current virus could be used as a bioweapon by less sophisticated groups, or, for a nation-state with a more advanced biological weapons program, this virus could be given enhanced characteristics"

However, there’s no evidence yet to back up a theory that the virus originated in a lab in China or that it was intentionally created to be used as a weapon.

   Apart from all the drama, death rate is increasing manifolds.197,859 people have died so far from the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak as of April 25, 2020.There are currently 2,846,536 confirmed cases in 210 countries and territories. The fatality rate is still being assessed.

 All these numbers represent human lives and not commodities. Weapon or not, war or not, we are losing lives. That’s a real threat. Even if this was designed for a war, let us be honest that this battle is not doing anyone any good. It is a catastrophe. It is a reality check; a wakeup calls for us to stand side by side and not opposite. We're one, this weapon sees us as one, attacks us as one. Science is a tool in our hands. It is up to us to either make it a boon or a bane.

[jumpinjamesjr]

What Are the Biggest Problems Women Face Today?

It's been a memorable year for ladies. There are more serving in Congress than any other time in recent memory, and a record number are as of now running for president in 2020. Yet, even with these critical increases, ladies—both in the U.S. what's more, around the globe—can in any case discover sex equity subtle.

For International Women's Day this year, we solicited some from the most intriguing ladies we know—including a few of those previously mentioned administrators and presidential competitors—to let us know: What do you believe is the greatest test confronting ladies in the U.S. today? Furthermore, what do you believe is the greatest test confronting ladies globally today? This is what they needed to state.

The absence of ladies in places of intensity

Amy Klobuchar is a Democratic U.S. congressperson from Minnesota. She is running for president in 2020.

One of the battles that underlies the entirety of our approach fights is the proceeded with absence of ladies in places of intensity. From corporate meeting rooms, to the courts and political administration around the globe, the absence of ladies in senior positions keeps on obstructing progress on issues from pay to compassionate guide to segregation in the entirety of its structures. The sooner we comprehend that the absence of ladies in positions of authority keeps down ladies, however all individuals, the sooner we will have the option to propel society all in all.

Male controlled society

Keisha N. Blain shows history at the University of Pittsburgh and right now fills in as leader of the African American Intellectual History Society. She is writer of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and co-editorial manager of a few books, including To Turn The Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019).

The greatest test confronting ladies in the United States today is male centric society. This is particularly apparent in the domain of governmental issues. Despite a lady's understanding, instruction or capacities, the man centric nature of U.S. society encourages the observation that ladies are less qualified and less able than men. What male controlled society has done is persuade individuals that a solid and astute lady speaks to an issue; an interruption to the social request as opposed to a vital piece of it. One-sided media inclusion of ladies government officials—stories that attention on ladies' style and takes a gander to the detriment of their thoughts on strategy—underscores this point. It is accordingly no happenstance that the U.S. is totally out of venture with the remainder of the world with regards to choosing a lady as president. While ladies have kept up the most elevated office of authority in Liberia, India, the United Kingdom, Dominica and numerous different countries over the globe, the equivalent can't be said for the United States.

From a worldwide viewpoint, probably the greatest test confronting ladies is instructive imbalance. Regardless of the numerous additions of current women's activist developments in the Americas, Africa, Asia and past, many despite everything accept that ladies are less deserving of the equivalent instructive open doors stood to men. While there is no denying that neediness, geology and different components add to tremendous variations in instruction, male controlled society legitimizes this forswearing of chance. It takes care of the message that men ought to use the force and ladies ought to possess a subordinate situation in every aspect of society. This obsolete, yet constant, perspective powers instructive imbalance and a large group of different abberations along the lines of sex on national and global levels.

Insufficient ladies at the table

Kamala Harris is a Democratic U.S. congressperson from California. She is running for president in 2020.

I don't believe it's conceivable to name only one test—from the economy to environmental change to criminal equity change to national security, all issues are ladies' issues—yet I accept a vital aspect for handling the difficulties we face is guaranteeing ladies are at the table, deciding. Something I've seen again and again in my own vocation is that ladies in power bring an alternate point of view, a basic viewpoint. We made incredible walks in 2018, with an extraordinary number of ladies pursuing position, and more than 100 ladies sworn in to the 116th Congress. Be that as it may, we despite everything have far to go; the U.S. positions 75th out of 193 nations as far as ladies' portrayal in government. Also, this is really a worldwide issue. In case you're attempting to handle the world's issues, you ought to get notification from a large portion of the total populace. Along these lines, we have to keep shouting out for the benefit of each lady's entitlement to be heard and understand her capacity. My mom used to tell my sister and me, "You might be the first, however ensure you aren't the last." I've always remembered that.

Sexism, bigotry and monetary imbalance

Rebecca Traister is an author everywhere for New York magazine and The Cut.

The very intense blend of sexism, bigotry and monetary imbalance—this may appear too expansive an answer however it essentially covers it on both a local and worldwide front. The entirety of the individual difficulties we might be enticed to rank are symptomatic of these enormous fundamental force awkward nature, working couple.

Injury focused women's liberation

Christina Hoff Sommers is an occupant researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the writer of a few books including Who Stole Feminism? what's more, The War Against Boys. She co-has The Femsplainers. Follow her @Chsommers.

The risk of mischief is a human consistent, yet by any sensible measure, American ladies are among the most secure, freest, most beneficial, most open door rich ladies on Earth. From multiple points of view, we are not simply doing just as men, we are outperforming them. In any case, all over the place, particularly on school grounds, young ladies are being instructed that they are powerless, delicate and in up and coming peril. Another injury focused woman's rights has grabbed hold. Its essential center isn't uniformity with men—yet rather security from them. This past June, the Reuters Foundation discharged an overview reporting that the U.S. was one of the best 10 most perilous nations on the planet for ladies—more risky than even Iran or North Korea. The investigation was unbelievably defective and ended up being a study of "observations" of anonymous "specialists." But in the present condition of dread and frenzy, different news associations revealed the ridiculous discoveries. This new ethic of dread and delicacy is noxious and incapacitating—however it's making progress. American ladies should fight the temptation to imagine the world is fixed against us when it isn't.

The image is distinctive in the creating scene. In nations like Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia and Egypt ladies are fighting with practices, for example, respect killings, genital mutilation, corrosive burnings, youngster marriage and sexual orientation politically-sanctioned racial segregation. Be that as it may, there is uplifting news. The quantity of taught ladies in these nations has arrived at minimum amount and they are making their quality felt. Wajeha Al-Huwaider has been known as the "Rosa Parks of Saudi Arabia." In 2008, she made a universal sensation by posting a video of herself driving a vehicle. Until a couple of months back, ladies were not permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia. On account of ladies like her, the laws are starting to change. Dr. Hawa Abdi, a 71-year-old Somalian specialist and legal counselor, is said to be "a balance of Mother Teresa and Rambo." She established a medical clinic and exile camp in country Somalia that offers a sheltered space to almost 100,000 of the world's most jeopardized men, ladies and kids. Under her authority, the settlement is advancing into a model common society. The difficulties confronting ladies in the creating scene are overwhelming. In any case, without precedent for history, a considerable armed force of bold and unflinching ladies is on the walk.

Access to rise to circumstance

Ertharin Cousin is recognized individual of Global Food and Agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the previous official executive of the United Nations World Food Program.

As the previous official chief of the World Food Program I was regularly lowered by ladies in struggle or emergency circumstances who, when gotten some information about their needs, needed nothing for themselves except for asked that we instruct their little girls. Instruction, these moms accepted, would give their little girls open doors they, in light of their sexual orientation, were denied. Sadly, even with satisfactory training, ladies here in the United States just as ladies across a great part of the world despite everything need equivalent access to circumstance.

Notwithstanding many years of outstanding advancement, at home and abroad, a reality where openings are not characterized by sex presently can't seem to be all around accomplished. Much all the more vexing, in such a large number of spots the world over, ladies practicing or in any event, looking for their fundamental rights is deciphered as a direct and destabilizing challenge to existing force structures. A few systems are presently attempting to move back the hard-won privileges of ladies and young ladies. Hence, today I join the voices of ladies pioneers from around the globe requesting governments, the private segment and common society revitalize and reinvest in the strategies just as in the lawful and social structures that will accomplish overall sex fairness and consideration.

Here in the U.S. we as of late chosen a record number of new congressional agents. In different pieces of the world, political powers take steps to disintegrate the advancement that we have made at both the national level and through milestone worldwide motivation. Regardless of whether these powers succeed will rely upon whether ladies pioneers and backers of today and tomorrow, and all who remain with them, perceive the desperation and risk of inaction. Moms and fathers whether in South Sudan or the South Side of Chicago, are doing their part to request quality training for their little girls. It is up to ladies pioneers and promoters, including the recently stamped congressional pioneers, a considerable lot of whom profit by past aggregate exertion and remain upon the shoulders of such a significant number of, to push and hold all the way open the entryways of chance. Guaranteeing each lady and young lady. If you interested about it read more

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Headlines

U.S. senators push for sanctions on Turkey, Erdogan confirms visit (Foreign Policy) In a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday, senators from both parties urged the administration to place sanctions on Turkey if it is violating the cease-fire agreement in northeastern Syria. The lawmakers cited reports that Turkish and Turkish-backed forces are moving beyond the so-called safe zone and attacking Syrian Kurds. Meanwhile, Turkish officials confirmed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington next week, after reports that he might call off the visit.

Rising violence in Mexico (Washington Post) President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Wednesday rejected U.S. suggestions he adopt more aggressive security policies after a massacre of fundamentalist Mormons in northern Mexico, saying that approach has been a “disaster” in the past. The barbaric killings Monday in the northern state Sonora of the nine members of the extended LeBaron family--dual U.S.-Mexican citizens--has raised pressure on López Obrador’s leftist government, which has pledged to use social programs to address the root causes of violence. President Trump, however, suggested a more aggressive approach on Tuesday, tweeting that “this is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!” Other American politicians have also expressed alarm at the violence surging south of the border. But Mexican authorities noted pointedly on Wednesday that the bullets used in the attack were .223 caliber, produced by Remington, a U.S. firm. Those bullets are typically used in M-16 and AR-15 assault rifles. Mexico’s public security secretary said 70 percent of all the weapons tied to a crime in Mexico were smuggled from the United States.

UN votes overwhelmingly to condemn US embargo on Cuba (AP) The U.N. General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the American economic embargo of Cuba for the 28th year, rejecting U.S. concerns about human rights on the Caribbean island.

Top Brazil Court Ends Early Prison Rule in Decision That Could Free Lula (Reuters) Brazil’s Supreme Court decided on Thursday to end the mandatory imprisonment of convicted criminals after they lose their first appeal, a politically charged ruling that may lead to the release of former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Protests in Chile spread into wealthy Santiago neigborhoods (AFP) Demonstrations in Chile against the government of President Sebastian Pinera spread into Santiago’s wealthiest neighborhoods Wednesday, tainting previously untouched enclaves with violence amid the country’s deadly protests. Hundreds of demonstrators marched towards the Costanera Center, South America’s largest shopping mall and a complex that includes the region’s tallest building--a symbol of the economic expansion that has made Chile one the region’s most stable countries. Riot police stopped the demonstrators. The demonstrations then spilled into the wealthy Providencia neighborhood, the hub of Chile’s financial sector, where protesters lit fires, battled with police, looted a pharmacy and at least two banks, and damaged government buildings.

Europeans look to China as global partner, shun US (AP) When France’s president wants to carry European concerns to the world stage to find solutions for climate change, trade tensions or Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he no longer calls Washington. He flies to Beijing. President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China this week suggests that the United States risks being sidelined on the global stage under President Donald Trump. One moment spoke volumes: Chinese President Xi Jinping sampling French wines, which Trump’s administration recently slapped with heavy new tariffs. Macron portrayed himself as an envoy for the whole European Union, conveying the message that the bloc has largely given up on Trump, who doesn’t hide his disdain for multilateralism.

Torrential Rain in England Strands Shoppers, Floods Streets (AP) Torrential rain has drenched parts of north and central England, forcing some to evacuate their homes and stranding a small group of people in a shopping center overnight.

German Airline Lufthansa’s Crews on Strike for 2nd Day (AP) Germany’s flagship airline, Lufthansa, has canceled hundreds of flights as a strike by cabin crews enters its second day.

Iraqi Protesters Step Up Their Tactics (Foreign Policy) Mass protests are still escalating in Iraq, with demonstrators blocking three main bridges in Baghdad this week as they continue to push back against the political elite. As Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi fails to quell the unrest, the protesters are adjusting their tactics, calling for civil disobedience and strikes. More than 260 people have been killed since the protests began last month, and one person was killed by security forces on Wednesday. The protests are the largest in Iraq since Saddam Hussein fell in 2003, and the demonstrators are demanding the removal of the factions and political elites that came to power in the years afterward, who are seen as corrupt and subservient to other powers--such as the United States and Iran.

Ex-Lebanese PM questioned over how $11 billion was spent (Reuters) Former Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora was questioned by a state prosecutor on Thursday over how $11 billion in state funds was spent while he was in power.

Head of U.N. Palestinian agency quits amid crisis (Foreign Policy) Pierre Krähenbühl, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) resigned on Wednesday after two probes into his management. The agency has come under fire in recent years from the leaders of Israel and the United States, which cut $360 million in funding to UNRWA last year. Now the agency is operating in the red, and an ethics report’s findings could mean that it loses more funding.

Authorities say 2 inside Twitter spied for Saudis (NYT) The Justice Department accused two men of using their access to Twitter’s internal systems to obtain information on American citizens and Saudi dissidents. The men--one American, the other a Saudi citizen--were charged with acting as agents of a foreign power inside the U.S. Both men left Twitter in 2015. The case raised questions about the security of American technology companies. It also underscored the broad effort that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and his advisers have conducted to silence critics both inside the kingdom and abroad.

90 Minutes a Day, Until 10 p.m.: China Sets Rules for Young Gamers (NYT) Officials say the regulations are meant to curb video game addiction, which they blame for a rise in nearsightedness and poor academic performance.

North Korean name-calling (Reuters) North Korea on Thursday called Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe an “idiot and villain” who should not even dream of setting foot in Pyongyang, in a media commentary laden with insults in response to his criticism of a North Korean weapons test. North Korea tested what it called “super-large multiple rocket launchers” on Oct. 31, but Japan said they were likely ballistic missiles that violated U.N. sanctions.

Attack on Canadian company in Burkina Faso (Foreign Policy) On Wednesday, armed men shot and killed 37 people in a Canadian mining company’s convoy as it traveled to a gold mine in eastern Burkina Faso. The Montreal-based firm, Semafo, said the five company buses had military escorts. Government officials said another 60 people were injured. Burkina Faso was once regarded as an oasis of stability, but violence has escalated recently.

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Jeh Johnson

Jeh Charles Johnson (born September 11, 1957) is an American civil and criminal trial lawyer, and the current United States Secretary of Homeland Security. He was the General Counsel of the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012 during the first Obama Administration. Johnson is a graduate of Morehouse College (B.A.) and Columbia Law School (J.D.), and is the grandson of sociologist and Fisk University president Dr. Charles S. Johnson.

Johnson's first name is taken from a Liberian chief, who reportedly saved his grandfather’s life while he was on a League of Nations mission to Liberia in 1930.

Career

Johnson served as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1989 to 1991. From 1998 to 2001, he was General Counsel of the Department of the Air Force under President Bill Clinton. Prior to his appointment as General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Johnson was a partner at the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, in which he was the first African American elected partner and to which he returned after his four years at the Defense Department. He was elected a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2004.

On January 8, 2009, he was named by President Barack Obama to be General Counsel for the Defense Department. In December 2012, he resigned this position effective at the end of the year to return to private practice.

Ten months later, on October 18, 2013, Johnson was nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Homeland Security.

Family

Johnson was born in New York City, the son of Norma (Edelin), who worked for Planned Parenthood, and Jeh Vincent Johnson, an architect.

On March 18, 1994, Johnson married Susan Maureen DiMarco, a dentist, at Corpus Christi Church (New York City). The pair grew up across the street from each other in Wappingers Falls, NY. They have two children, Natalie Johnson and Jeh Charles Johnson, Jr.

Experience in the 9/11 attacks

On September 11, 2001, Johnson (on his 44th birthday) experienced and witnessed in person the 9/11 attacks in New York City. After the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, Johnson wandered the streets of Lower Manhattan, asking many survivors "what can I do?". Today, he recalls in many speeches he presents his experience in the attacks of 9/11.

Federal prosecutor

Johnson began as an associate at Paul, Weiss in November 1984. In 1989 he left to serve as an assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, a position he held until the end of 1991. In that position, Johnson prosecuted public corruption cases.

Air Force General Counsel

Johnson returned to Paul, Weiss in 1992 and was elected partner at the firm in 1994. In 1998, Johnson was appointed General Counsel of the Air Force by President Bill Clinton after confirmation by the U.S. Senate. As General Counsel, Johnson was the senior legal official in the Air Force and Governor of Wake Island, in the Pacific Ocean. His tenure coincided with Operation Allied Force in 1999. He was awarded the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service for his efforts.

Private practice

After his service in the Clinton administration, Johnson returned to Paul, Weiss in 2001, where he was an active trial lawyer of large commercial cases.

Johnson was a member of the Executive Committee of the New York City Bar Association. From 2001 to 2004, he served as chairman of the City Bar’s Judiciary Committee, which rates and approves all federal, state and local judges in New York City. In 2007, Johnson was nominated by the New York State Commission on Judicial Nomination to be Chief Judge of New York though the incumbent, Judith Kaye, was ultimately reappointed by former Governor Eliot Spitzer.

Democratic Party involvement

Johnson was active in Democratic Party politics, as a fundraiser and adviser to presidential campaigns. Johnson served as special counsel to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, and was an early supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, active as a foreign policy adviser and as a member of his national finance committee.

General Counsel of the Department of Defense

On January 8, 2009, President-elect Barack Obama announced Johnson's nomination as Department of Defense General Counsel. On February 9, 2009, he was confirmed by the Senate.

As General Counsel of the Defense Department, Johnson was a major player in certain key priorities of the Obama Administration, and he is considered one of the legal architects of the U.S. military's current counterterrorism policies. In 2009, Johnson was heavily involved in the reform of military commissions, and testified before Congress numerous times in support of the Military Commissions Act of 2009. In February 2010, the Secretary of Defense appointed Johnson to co-chair a working group, along with Army General Carter Ham, to study the potential impact of a repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. In November 2010, following an extensive study, Johnson and General Ham reported that the risk to overall military effectiveness of a repeal would be low. The report was hailed as a thorough and objective analysis. The Washington Post editorial page wrote:

The report is remarkable not just for its conclusions but for its honest, thorough and respectful handling of a delicate subject. It offers a clear-eyed, careful, conservative approach to implementing policy change. It doesn't play down the hurdles or denigrate the opposition. It is, in short, a document to be taken seriously, especially by those who may have lingering doubts about allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly.

In August 2010, Johnson was part of the public dialogue over the WikiLeaks release of classified Pentagon documents known as the Afghan War Diary. "The Department of Defense will not negotiate some 'minimized' or 'sanitized' version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional U.S. government classified documents," he wrote in a letter to Timothy J. Matusheski, a lawyer representing the online whistle-blowing organization. In August 2012, Johnson also wrote to the former Navy SEAL who authored the book No Easy Day, a memoir by a Navy SEAL who participated in the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, and warned him of his material breach of his non-disclosure agreements with the Department of Defense regarding classified information.

In January 2011, Johnson provoked controversy when, according to a Department of Defense news story, he asserted in a speech at the Pentagon that deceased civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite King's outspoken opposition to American interventionism during his lifetime. Johnson argued that American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq were playing the role of the Good Samaritan, consistent with King's beliefs, and that they were fighting to establish the peace for which King hoped. Jeremy Scahill of Salon.com called Johnson's remarks "one of the most despicable attempts at revisionist use of Martin Luther King Jr. I've ever seen," while Justin Elliott (also of Salon.com) argued that based on Dr. King's opposition to the Vietnam War, he would likely have opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the covert wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Former assistant U.S. attorney Cynthia Kouril has defended Johnson's remarks, arguing in her blog that his speech has been misinterpreted.

In a February 2011, speech to the New York City Bar Association, Johnson "acknowledged the concerns raised" about the detention of alleged WikiLeaks source Private Bradley Manning and "stated that he had personally traveled to Quantico to conduct an investigation", according to human rights attorney and journalist Scott Horton. Horton wrote that "Johnson was remarkably unforthcoming about what he discovered and what conclusions he drew from his visit."

Johnson's tenure as General Counsel was also notable for several high-profile speeches he gave on national security. In a speech he delivered at the Heritage Foundation in October 2011, Johnson warned against "over-militarizing" the U.S. government's approach to counterterrorism: "There is risk in permitting and expecting the U.S. military to extend its powerful reach into areas traditionally reserved for civilian law enforcement in this country." At a speech at Yale Law School in February 2012, Johnson defended "targeted killings", but also stated:

[A]s a student of history I believe that those who govern today must ask ourselves how we will be judged 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Our applications of law must stand the test of time, because, over the passage of time, what we find tolerable today may be condemned in the permanent pages of history tomorrow.

Finally, at the Oxford Union in November 2012, shortly before his resignation, Johnson delivered a widely noted address entitled "The conflict against al Qaeda and its affiliates: how will it end?" in which he predicted a "tipping point" at which the U.S. government's efforts against al Qaeda should no longer be considered an armed conflict, but a more traditional law enforcement effort against individual terrorists. Johnson stated:

"War" must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. War permits one man—if he is a "privileged belligerent," consistent with the laws of war—to kill another. War violates the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war parents bury their children. In its 12th year, we must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the "new normal." Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives.

The Oxford Union speech received widespread press attention, and editorial acclaim as the first such statement coming from an Obama administration official.

Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under presidents George W. Bush and Obama, said that Johnson "proved to be the finest lawyer I ever worked with in government—a straightforward, plain-speaking man of great integrity, with common sense to burn and a good sense of humor" and that he "trusted and respected him like no other lawyer I had ever worked with."

Department of Homeland Security

Johnson was nominated by President Barack Obama to be the fourth U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in October 2013, and was subsequently confirmed on December 16, 2013, by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 78–16. He was sworn in on December 23, 2013.The Washington Post reported "Johnson, an African-American, would bring further racial diversity to Obama's Cabinet."

When Johnson entered office one of his top priorities was to fill all of the high level vacancies. By April 2015 the President had appointed and the Senate confirmed all but one of Johnson's senior leader positions. One of Johnson's first major efforts as Secretary was his unity of effort initiative to set the conditions for the Department to operate in a more unified fashion and develop a culture that recognizes and responds adequately to the diverse challenges the Department of Homeland Security faces.

In the spring and summer of 2014 the southern border of the United States experienced a large influx of immigrants, many of whom were children, coming from Central America. Secretary Johnson and his Department worked with the Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate a response to address the immigrants' needs. In June, U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services asylum officers were reassigned to conduct credible fear interviews, while prioritizing the cases of recently apprehended unaccompanied children, adults with children, and other recent border crossers. At the same time, Secretary Johnson asked for the support of Congress to increase border security and prevent more spikes like this from happening again. After the flow of immigrant children to the United States, the Department of Homeland Security established three family residential centers, and they immediately became the focus of much controversy. The ACLU has compared them to Japanese internment camps and in July 2015 a U.S. District Court Judge in California ordered that the family residential centers comply with a 1997 settlement concerning the detention of children.

During the summer and fall of 2014, Secretary Johnson oversaw the Department of Homeland Security's response to the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa. The Ebola epidemic was the largest in history, and impacted multiple West African countries. In response, the Department of Homeland Security developed policies, procedures and protocols to identify travelers for screening who could have been potentially infected to minimize the risk to the traveling public. This response was chosen by the Department over limiting travel visas to the United States, which Secretary Johnson contended would have been a mistake given the leadership position of the U.S. and likelihood of influencing other countries to take the same action.

After the House of Representatives failed to act on S. 744, Secretary Johnson and President Obama issued ten new executive actions on November 20, 2014 to address the 11 million undocumented individuals in the United States. These actions included, among others, a new Southern Border and Approaches Campaign Strategy, a revision of removal priorities to focus on criminals and national security threats, the end to the Secure Communities program replaced by a new Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), the expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the extension of DACA to Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). Johnson is said to have worked heavily on drafting the executive actions at the behest of the President.

In a 60 Minutes profile of Secretary Johnson that aired in April 2015, it was stated: "[s]o far he's gotten high marks, even from the Republicans in Congress. When he came on board, nearly half the senior management jobs were vacant; he's filled all but one; he's boosted morale; and improved the coordination and dissemination of threat information throughout the government."

In May 2015, Secretary Johnson issued reforms that helped minimize detention time for families in residential centers. In June, one year after the increase of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border, Secretary Johnson committed publicly to continually evaluating the policy of family residential centers. The Secretary made personal visits to the family residential centers and spoke with dozens of Central American mothers at the facilities before issuing additional substantial changes to the Department's detention practices with respect to families with children. One major change included releasing families who establish eligibility for asylum or other relief under the law.

During his service Secretary Johnson has given several high profile speeches. On June 8, 2015 he gave a speech at Rice University's James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy. He focused on the Department of Homeland Security's border security efforts, describing the trends in border crossers decreasing over the past year, and the Obama administration's executive actions issued to address the millions of hard working undocumented immigrants in America. In July he presented the Landon Lecture at Kansas State University. He warned of the evolving terrorist threat, from terrorist group trained and directed attacks to terrorist group inspired attacks, and described the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to keep Americans safe.

Secretary Johnson also gave the 56th Green Lecture at Westminster College, the same place where Winston Churchill gave the "Iron Curtain" speech. In his Green Lecture, Secretary Johnson emphasized the use of history as an important tool in shaping the decisions of those in public office. Specifically, he discussed the need to be wary of government overreach when responding to threats and crisis, and how it is during these moments when the U.S. government must work its hardest to preserve the values it cherishes. Johnson stated:

"We can erect more walls, install more screening devices, and make everybody suspicious of each other, but we should not do so at the cost of who we are as a Nation of people who cherish our privacy, our religions, our freedom to speak, travel and associate, and who celebrate our diversity and our immigrant heritage. In the final analysis, these are the things that constitute our greatest strengths as a Nation."

http://wikipedia.thetimetube.com/?q=Jeh+Johnson&lang=en

[jonathanbowmanus]

[socialjusticeartshare]

Can Trump Administration Officials Be Prosecuted for Immigration Policies?

An adviser for Physicians for Human Rights says that immigrant family separation cases meet all four United Nations criteria for torture.

The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, launched in 2018, attempted to stem immigration through measures including separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border — actions that legal and human rights experts say resulted in the separation of nearly 3,000 parents from their children. Hundreds of children remain lost as of this writing, and zero tolerance was only one of a set of policies that sowed chaos and misery in the name of drastically reducing border crossings. It could leave administration officials open to prosecution.

A report released earlier this year by Physicians for Human Rights concluded that the Trump administration’s family separation policies “rise to the level of torture,” which is prohibited under domestic and international law.

The authors write: “As defined by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, torture is an act 1) which causes severe physical or mental suffering, 2) done intentionally, 3) for the purpose of coercion, punishment, intimidation, or for a discriminatory reason, 4) by a state official or with state consent or acquiescence.”

One of the report’s authors, Ranit Mishori, senior medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, told Capital & Main that all of the family separation cases that PHR documented meet all four criteria for torture, including statements by Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, architect of some of the worst immigration policies in the Trump administration: the Muslim travel ban, family separation, using Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to terrorize undocumented immigrants and the attempted deportation of 700,000 “Dreamers.”

“We have [Stephen Miller], a state actor who conceived of the policy saying ‘we’re doing this to deter people from coming into the country,’ and clear evidence that they are inflicting trauma,” said Mishori. Both torture and disappearance are human rights violations, Mishori added. But according to legal experts, it may be tricky to find a legal body with jurisdiction to prosecute officials responsible for the disappearance of migrants, and other possible crimes, at the U.S. border.

Prosecuting torture in international court

Located in The Hague, in the Netherlands, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the body responsible for trying individuals for war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity. If any administration figures were to be held accountable and prosecuted, the ICC would be the agency to bring the indictments.

In a blog post, Tasnim Motala, a fellow at Howard University School of Law, used an example of the ICC response to forced displacement of Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar government to determine that the ICC could at least investigate allegations of torture against migrants at the U.S. border. But she admitted that “even if the deportation of asylum seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border meets the criteria of the crime against humanity of forced displacement, it is unlikely that the ICC will initiate an investigation into the abuses.”  

The International Criminal Court could, in theory, investigate U.S. crimes perpetrated on a member country’s soil, such as Mexico.

  That might be because the ICC raised the ire of the Trump administration earlier this year when it allowed an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by the U.S. in Afghanistan.

The ICC also might pass on the torture allegations due to jurisdiction. Although the U.S. led negotiations that created the court, it was one of only seven countries — including China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen — to not sign on to the Rome Statute, which is the treaty that established the ICC in 1998. That means the ICC has limited authority in which to investigate possible crimes in the U.S. But it could, in theory, investigate crimes perpetrated by the U.S. on a member country’s soil, such as Mexico.

Uzay Yasar Aysev, a consultant with the international legal service Global Rights Compliance, is suggesting a possible workaround to prosecuting U.S. officials, although an ICC member state, such as Mexico, would have to bring charges of violating international law.

See Other Stories in this Series

“The ICC can exercise jurisdiction over any of the crimes listed under article 5 of the Rome Statute (i.e., crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes) if at least one legal element of the crime or a part of it is committed on the territory of a State Party,” Aysev said.

“Mexico is a State Party to the Rome Statute, meaning that if it can be proven that a part of the alleged crimes committed by the United States officials have occurred in Mexico, the Court can exercise jurisdiction over the totality of the crime in question. This is regardless of whether the majority of the criminal conduct took place in the United States.”

In other words, as long as the crime “spilled” into Mexico, a State Party to ICC, the court could exercise jurisdiction over that crime, including any criminal acts that were committed in the United States.

Aysev laid out the logic of how this could happen: “Without any regard to their internationally recognized right to seek asylum and have their request for asylum reviewed, the Trump administration [has] systematically forced these victims out of the U.S. Since the victims have been deported to Mexico, this crime could be said to have partially occurred within the territory of a State Party (Mexico) to the Rome Statute.”  

A Texas prosecutor could bring charges against a Trump official on behalf of a separated child or parents. That’s assuming the official doesn’t have immunity from prosecution — and very often they do.

  A third reason that the ICC may never investigate alleged torture by Trump officials is because its mandate is active when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals. So, could officials face trial in the U.S.?

Legal action in U.S. courts

If there is at least one victim, a prosecutor or private attorney in a U.S. state can bring a criminal charge against a government official, according to Claudia Flores, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “But the criminal charges would be brought in state court depending on where torture happened,” she said.

In theory, then, a prosecutor in Texas could bring charges against a Trump official on behalf of a separated child or parents. That’s assuming the official doesn’t have immunity from prosecution — and very often they do.

According to Francisco Rivera Juaristi, founding director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Santa Clara University School of Law, Stephen Miller, as a senior adviser to the president, and, importantly, a government employee, is immune from prosecution.

“Under the Federal Tort Claims Act, to sue a government agent for a tort involving wrongful or negligent acts, you would have to allege that s/he acted outside the scope of her or his office or employment, in order to overcome a government employee’s absolute immunity defense,” Juaristi wrote in an email.  

“I’m not saying it’s impossible to sue [Stephen Miller] personally, but that there is a high threshold.”

— Francisco Rivera Juaristi,  International Human Rights Clinic at Santa Clara University School of Law

  If Miller’s actions were within the scope of employment or office, then the tort lawsuit must be against the government itself, not Miller, Juaristi adds. “Federal employees only have qualified immunity for alleged violations of clearly established federal law and the U.S. Constitution. I’m not saying it’s impossible to sue him personally, but that there is a high threshold.”

Accountability beyond prosecutions

Until January 20, migrants and their children may still be at risk. In December CBS News reported that Customs and Border Protection officials admitted to violating a court order prohibiting the U.S. from expelling dozens of children at its southern border.

Mishori told Capital & Main that she and colleagues at Physicians for Human Rights want, at the very least, accountability — that the actions of the Trump administration will be remembered as torture.

Accountability “could mean criminal charges, or a truth and reconciliation commission. At the very least we want people who suffered to get an apology from the government, and reparations and mental health services. Of the 500 families who were separated, 628 [children] have still not been found. They all will need mental health services.”

Other groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, are taking a look-forward approach to ensure such immigration abuses don’t happen under future administrations. “Trump has shown a shocking level of callousness and we are hopeful Biden will move toward a fair and orderly immigration system,” said Kelli Garcia, SPLC’s policy counsel.

Before turning his justice department on anyone in the Trump administration, if he even does, President Biden first must clean up the immigration mess left behind, human rights advocates say. That requires reuniting children with their parents — difficult when the Trump administration deliberately didn’t keep records. And, says Garcia, Biden would have to restore migrants’ access to the courts so that their cases can be heard.

During the final presidential debate, then-candidate Biden declared Trump’s family separation policy “criminal,” and often has vowed to reverse many of the restrictionist policies. But President-elect Biden has made no mention of prosecuting anyone for crimes, and may be tempted to look forward, not backward, especially as a pandemic ravages the nation.

Article Source

[petescholtes-blog-blog]

You send me: Why Minneapolis elected Ilhan Omar for this moment

(Mural by Mohammed "Aerosol" Ali in Birmingham, England, July 2019, painted in "solidarity" with her; photographed by the artist for BBC News.)

Why is my freshman congresswoman being "primaried" in the August 11 election, by a political newcomer who raised six times as much money between April and June, including half a million dollars from big donors favoring conservative policies toward Israel?

You probably already answered that question as near to your satisfaction as you can, if you live in the Fifth District of Minnesota and can vote, or mailed your ballot in anticipation of alleged presidentially-induced delays at the post office.

But if the suspicions raised by this race about either leading candidate remain, like piles of un-recycled mailers, I have a theory as to why: A politics based on the presumption of guilt came to town. It lost, or won, but affected us either way. Because suspicion poisons everything. Without the ability to really test the null hypothesis — the default truth that what you see is a coincidence — belief can be a light out of the darkness, a north star into a black hole, or the sparkle in the eye of a face at the bottom of a well.

So let's talk about what we know. As Rachel Cohen reports in Jewish Currents, the contest here for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination for Congress doesn't seem to be about actual policy differences between the candidates regarding Israel or the Palestinians. Omar and her lead challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux, have the same position on the Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS) movement, for example, which is really more of a BD movement at this point. Both candidates defend the right to boycott, as Omar did last year with a resolution co-sponsored by John Lewis, a right most federal courts have also upheld, overturning recent anti-BDS laws in three states (though not Minnesota, where Omar argued against the law that passed). Both candidates also oppose BDS strategies, reasoning that they're counterproductive to encouraging negotiations toward a two-state solution. To the same end, they join most Americans in opposing Israel's plan to annex much of the West Bank, though Omar would condition aid against it, and Melton-Meaux would not.

Beyond that consensus, Omar has expressed approval of BDS itself, via a single text message from a campaign aid to the website Muslim Girl in 2018, stating that Omar "supports" the "movement." That message, along with her refusal (on expressly articulated principle) to join the House in condemning BDS, gave reporters license to call her and Lewis's resolution "pro-BDS," and Omar the "face of the movement." On the same narrow basis, Melton-Meaux claimed in April that the congresswoman "supports sanctions on Israel."

People are what they do, and I'm not here to attack Melton-Meaux, who seems to have done good things before writing that astoundingly disingenuous op-ed. But his campaign is about Omar, not him, or rather about someone who isn't really Omar at all, which is the problem. Omar never called for sanctions against Israel or any other country. To the contrary, she has consistently and vocally opposed sanctions, sometimes to a political fault: Her "present" vote on the Armenian genocide was a stand against sanctions on Turkey. Her argument in every case is that sanctions harm people, not governments — which appears to be right, to take the example of Iran. Even her bill to sanction Brunei, for stoning people to death for being LGBTQ, targets the travel and assets of officials, not civilians.

Whatever you think of that position, it's integral with Omar's opposition to arbitrary force or punitive retribution of any kind. She's called for an end to the "cycle of violence" everywhere, whether from undeclared war, terrorism, riots, repression, or criminal justice that metes out more harm, as she sees it. Nine months after being smeared as a coddler of terrorists for writing a judge to ask for leniency in the sentencing of a young man who had not yet taken up arms with Isis, Omar did the same for the middle-aged man convicted of threatening her life. In both cases she asked for a "restorative" approach that would help the person repair himself, not just the community.

With similar trueness, after she and Lewis introduced their "right to participate in boycotts" resolution, Omar spoke of "support" only for "efforts to end the [Israeli] occupation and achieve [a] two-state solution," and argued against condemning BDS on the grounds that "if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means."

A Somali-born refugee and the first Muslim to wear an hijab in Congress, Omar may recognize better than most how essentialist judgments can thwart a person's autonomy. That she became the media "face" of BDS, while her identically-voting white colleagues of Christian or Jewish heritage did not, is one of many such ironies not lost on her, I imagine. But acting as if some double standards are too contemptible to dignify with an answer, or even an acknowledgment, seems to be part of her armor against them.

(Hugging John Lewis in 2018, in an uncredited photograph posted by the congresswoman this year on his 80th birthday.)

Of all the falsehoods sent sailing like stones at Omar, none bothers me more than the idea that the personal attacks against her didn't happen — that a massive, dangerous smear campaign was just "Twitter fights" with the president, or criticism of her "record." The torrent of Omar fictions began in August of 2018, a week after her primary win, and by July 2019 reached a crescendo of six fake stories per month debunked by Snopes. In the first month of her term, she was accused of defending Isis, based on that letter to a judge, a claim pandering to "sharia" conspiracists like her would-be assassin. In February came unfounded and increasingly dishonest charges of antisemitism, based on Omar's seemingly unwitting use of two antisemitic tropes (hypnotism and money), for which she apologized unequivocally, followed by a third one (dual loyalty), for which she did not, by that point apparently not wishing to enable those seizing on her words to keep changing the subject from what she'd been talking about: the Palestinians, and how any discussion of their treatment is policed out of existence. This time, the charges against her pandered to Christian evangelicals, with the apparent hopeful side-goal of alienating some Jewish voters from her or her party's base. But the criticism of her words was roundly picked up by Democrats, whom Omar joined in the House to vote for a resolution condemning antisemitic language. Only Republicans voted against it.

Then came the video in April shared by the president of the United States, a montage of Omar and 9/11 that aimed far beyond the earlier audiences, this time to falsely link the congresswoman with the worst attack on U.S. soil in history. If the videographer thought Democrats wouldn't defend her, they were wrong. But death threats against Omar increased. April also brought a disinformation campaign about Omar and U.S. and Somali casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, this time aimed at veterans, whose benefits the congresswoman has consistently voted to keep and expand.

In July came the apotheosis: the president's serial fabrications about Omar on camera and at rallies. He riffed on much of the above, but added the lie that she had expressed "love" for al-Qaeda, that she said al-Qaeda made her "proud," an appalling implicit incitement to violence that Republican leaders mostly played along with. It was, I wrote at the time, "the break with reality that a more fundamental break with humanity requires," in a month of detention center atrocity stories in the news, and with growing numbers of young Jewish activists arrested in front of ICE offices across the country chanting "Never again is now," including here. Trumpists were plugging their ears and going "na-na-na-na-na-na-na" to all this. Which was scary, because a reality war could go anywhere — and that's exactly what it did. The president’s tweet of a video with a September 13 timestamp claiming to show Omar celebrating 9/11 was the same basic impulse that would kill 150,000 Americans in a viral pandemic due to denial, inaction, and corruption.

The warning of a year ago also came after the Poway synagogue shooting in April, which brought home, as Omar and Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky were early to note, how much antisemitism and Islamophobia had merged on the extremist right. Muslims and Jews had already been grappling with their entangled oppressions for years, partnering on issues like gun violence, as a local group of women did here starting in 2016. Particularly in the wake of the El Paso shooting, the ongoing lying about Omar's immigrant community had a uniting effect outside the president's cult.

(Volunteers sweeping and painting names at the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, June 12, 2020; photographed by me with the subjects' permission.)

None of those lies will wash here, where the George Floyd street memorial is a garden of flowers and art six miles north from the Bloomington mosque that was bombed three years ago, in the neighboring Congressional Third District. Contrary to Islamophobic fantasy, the Fifth is 63% white, with an active Jewish left and center, of which many are also on record in support of Omar, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Given the math of her 2018 landslide, Omar could have won her seat without a single Somali American vote. Her current campaign's internal polling shows an approval rating of 74%.

To supporters I know across demographic categories, Omar is someone there for everyone — and a threat exactly because she challenges leaders who aren't. Like the largest protest movement in American history, which began in her district on May 25 — she puts the moral dilemma of American exclusion, of all exclusion, at the center of politics. Her "radical love" is the inverse of John Lewis's "good trouble," because left humanists have a parent's love of country, not a child's. They hold the world to something better. A month ago, Omar called on reporters to ask state and U.S. senators who were blocking meaningful police reform these questions: "How come you are not listening to the cries of the mothers and the fathers in our communities? How come you are not listening to the people who are telling you that we don't feel like our lives matter equally in this country?'"

I have never seen a U.S. representative host so many town hall meetings on issues important to her poorest and least powerful constituents — two events per month, from one spring to the next. At one, on Black mental health, I watched an audience member literally seek help for herself and her family from the experts onstage. Observing such events, New Hope city councilman Cedrick Frazier wrote that at every meeting with Omar he saw, she "stayed long after the event ended to talk with and answer questions from the people in attendance."

She has also consistently shown up at important protests, not necessarily to speak, but just to be there, as when she went unrecognized in her mask and headscarf at the first, overwhelmingly nonviolent George Floyd protests. She meets regularly with important local activist groups, like MN350 and MIRAC, whose memberships spiked last summer. That increase, beyond our physical proximity to Floyd's life and death, suggests why the movement and unrest happened here as it did. Fifth District residents who took to the streets in response to his killing — (again) overwhelmingly with nonviolence, often numbering in the tens of thousands, and protesting every weekend day for six weeks after the last fires from three nights of riots were out — built on already record-high levels of left activism and organization before the pandemic: for immigrant rights, the climate, and Black lives. It was protesters — medics but also ordinary participants — who used their bodies to shield and rescue all but two souls in the uprising.

This outcome reflected a culture as well as an infrastructure, and it touches everyone. Omar's teenage daughter, Isra Hirsi, helped lead the U.S. chapter and St. Paul march of the global Youth Climate Strike on September 20 — one of the largest international protests before the Floyd marches. Young MN350 volunteers poured into presidential primary campaigns, especially for Omar's friend Bernie Sanders, whose local appeal to voters was headquartered out of her own campaign office. MIRAC's Mari Mansfield painted the long list of names on the street at the George Floyd memorial on 38th and Chicago, of unarmed people of color killed by police. "It's all civil disobedience now," she said, when I lamented missing a MIRAC training on it before the pandemic. The Black Lives Matter protests in every corner of Minnesota will have similar ripple effects going forward.

Omar herself turned her office into a food distribution center after the unrest, and raised hundred of thousands of dollars for local organizations seeking to transform policing. “I saw Ilhan in the streets nearly every single day," wrote Minneapolis city council vice president Andrea Jenkins. “Unbeknown to most of us at the time, Ilhan’s father was in the hospital with COVID-19.” Nur Omar Mohamed’s death was announced on June 16.

(”Close the camps” protesters blocking traffic outside the ICE office at Fort Snelling on July 30, 2019; Youth climate strikers in St. Paul, September 20, 2019; both photographed by me.)

My point is not that Omar is a leader for this moment, but that this moment already elected her two years ago. The congresswoman speaks to both left and humanist values because both of those things are resurgent in mirror opposition to Trump. Like so many of her constituents, but also American leftists more generally, she draws no distinction between appealing to the best in everyone and defending like a sister those left out of that "everyone." "We need to jettison the zero-sum idea that one person's gain is another's loss," she wrote in the Washington Post earlier last month. "I want your gain to be my gain; your loss to be mine, too."

At her police reform press conference, with the Minnesota Legislature's People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, Omar set off another extremist conservative firestorm when she announced that, "We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in healthcare, in employment, in the air we breathe." But that statement is threatening only if you believe, as some Americans apparently do, that "systems of oppression" benefit you.

In her first 19 months in the 116th U.S. Congress, Omar introduced 39 bills, four of which have passed, all amendments. She also succeeded in getting her MEALS Act — providing kids school lunches regardless of whether schools are open in the pandemic — included as part of the CARES Act. You can read the other 34 bills and judge for yourself if there's a wasted effort among them. (She's made a case for each, which is for you to weigh.) But there's something self-fulfilling about claiming a lawmaker doesn't get anything done when you're blocking or ignoring their legislation. Much as the burden of proof is always on the accuser — because you can't prove a negative — I'll leave it to Omar's opponents to make the argument that any of these laws would be bad for the United States: that, no, we should not eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, keep corporations convicted of fraud out of politics, cancel student debt, award grants to zero-waste projects, stop stigmatizing kids unable to pay for school meals, make school lunches free, cut off military aid to human rights abusers, or join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Similarly, in a pandemic, I'll let them explain why we should not aid small businesses, cancel rent and mortgages, cancel school lunch debt, or move food stamps fully online.

Omar co-sponsored 601 other pieces of legislation, 72 of which passed the House, nine the Senate, and seven into law by the grace of the president's signature. Those dramatically dwindling numbers suggest a political problem that is not Ilhan Omar. She has addressed that problem, whether you agree or disagree with her, by endorsing progressive candidates nationwide, including here in her own district, where she campaigned for Richfield mayor Maria Regan Gonzalez and Crystal city councilperson Brendan Banks. She's also built her Democratic coalition. After the censure from Democrats and the president's attacks on her last year, she made a public show of unity with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has now endorsed her.

Omar is not the Mother of Dragons some imagine. She's just been through the worst fires of war and politics, and has come out the other side a congresswoman from Minneapolis. Most likely, that's what she'll remain next term.

[lodelss]

Trump’s War on Asylum-Seekers is Endangering Pregnant Women CBP officers are forcibly returning pregnant asylum-seekers to Mexico in violation of their own rules.

The view from the Matamoros, Mexico side of the Rio Grande — just across from Brownsville, Texas — reveals an unsettling scene.

Young women and children bathe openly in the murky green water, while others wash their clothes on the bank of the river that has claimed so many lives – most recently those of Idalia and her 21-month-old son Iker. This is the new painful reality of seeking asylum in the United States.

These families are not at the river by choice. They are being forced to wait in perilous conditions as a result of the Trump administration’s forced return to Mexico policy, which it perversely calls the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). 

Under the policy, which the ACLU and partners are challenging in a federal lawsuit, people fleeing persecution and legally seeking asylum in the U.S. are forced to wait in Mexico for months on end while their cases proceed in U.S. immigration courts. The Trump administration wants people to think that the policy is benign, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Since going into effect earlier this year, MPP has been actively putting the lives of asylum-seekers in grave danger. For the most vulnerable people, including pregnant women, young children, and babies, this danger is particularly acute.

Women, children, and men bathing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, just across from Brownsville, Texas.

Recently, an 18-year-old Ecuadoran woman named Carolina,* who is more than four months pregnant, was sent to Mexico for a second time after attempting to legally claim asylum in the U.S. She was immediately placed into MPP and returned to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a city which according to the U.S. State Department is as dangerous as Afghanistan or Syria. A foreigner to Mexico, she had no safe place to go or community to which to turn. Alone, pregnant, and vulnerable, she was kidnapped and threatened with being sold or killed unless her family paid a ransom.

Carolina was eventually released by her kidnappers. Traumatized, she again returned to the international bridge in Laredo, Texas seeking safety that she believed only the U.S. could provide. But the kidnapping and fear of death was not enough for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. They instead sent her to the same city where she had been kidnapped, failing even to refer her to an asylum officer to have her fear of returning to Mexico evaluated. 

In Mexico, Carolina fearfully stayed close to the gates of the port of entry, terrified that local cartel scouts were waiting to kidnap her again. Thankfully, Carolina’s family had contacted advocates who tried to get her released from MPP. They were unsuccessful, but were able to help Carolina flee to Mexico City for safety. There, she is currently waiting for her next immigration court date — set to occur in an ad hoc “tent court” in Laredo, Texas — hundreds of miles from Mexico City and just across the river from where she almost lost her life.

Hundreds of heartbreaking stories, just like Carolina’s, began to surface immediately after this policy went into effect in January 2019, and more so after the rapid expansion of the policy to Laredo and Brownsville, Texas in July. Nearly 50,000 people have been placed into MPP so far. One woman interviewed by attorneys described a CBP officer telling her she should abort her unborn child because “Trump didn’t want any more pregnant people here.”

A young pregnant mother holds her toddler in a makeshift migrant encampment created to house asylum seekers sent back to Mexico as a result of the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

MPP is part of a consistent pattern of xenophobic and racist efforts by the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials to prevent people from lawfully being granted asylum in the U.S. Instead of welcoming asylum-seekers, as the U.S. has successfully done for decades, the Trump administration has engaged in a campaign of misinformation to provide cover for unlawful policies against people fleeing persecution. 

This inhumane policy is not aimed at any national security interest or protecting us from serious criminals; it’s an attempt to make it nearly impossible for anyone, no matter what terror they’re fleeing from, to enter into the U.S.

MPP’s impact has been made even worse due to how federal agents are executing it. DHS is well aware that there are populations with special needs that should be exempt from MPP. In fact, it has written guidelines that outline the exemption of vulnerable people — specifically pregnant women — from being forced back into Mexico.

And while DHS knows that northern Mexican border cities are incredibly unsafe, particularly for migrants and asylum-seekers who are unable to defend themselves from being victimized, it continues to send the most vulnerable back to danger. In fact, it has been well documented that asylum-seekers subjected to MPP have faced rape, kidnapping, assault, extortion, and death after being forced to return to Mexico

The policy has also forced migrants and asylum-seekers to live in squalid conditions without access to proper housing, food, or sanitation. This has caused outrage in the medical community. Physicians for Human Rights has publicly warned that the health and lives of mothers and babies are at risk due to grossly unhygienic living conditions, insufficient nutrition, lack of medical care, and inadequate access to potable water at makeshift encampments of people forced into MPP.

The safety and health conditions that pregnant women are forced to endure while languishing in Mexico are abhorrent and unacceptable. And it is happening right at our doorstep.

That is why the ACLU of Texas and ACLU Border Rights Center interviewed 18 pregnant women, including Carolina, and filed an official complaint with the DHS Office of Inspector General, demanding a return to safety inside the U.S. for all pregnant women in MPP. 

Each of the women listed in the complaint have their own harrowing story of legally seeking refuge in the United States, and instead being cruelly denied protection and sent to Mexico without any regard for their safety.  

MPP must end. Every day it is in effect, lives are in imminent risk. In the meantime, the special exemptions for pregnant women and other vulnerable groups must be followed by U.S. immigration authorities. Because what happens along the Rio Grande and the entire borderlands reflects on the conscience of our entire nation. 

*Carolina is a pseudonym used to protect the asylum seeker from reprisals.

Published October 3, 2019 at 09:15PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/2VgCelB

[lawyerkapil]

Civil Law

Civil law is an area of law concerned with the rights of individuals, corporations, and the government. An individual may be the victim of a criminal act by another person or business, for example. Civil law covers lawsuits for injuries, wrongful death, property damages, or personal injury claims.

Civil law provides a framework for contract law. If you are getting married, for example, your civil rights are protected under civil law as long as both parties consent to the marriage. Certain circumstances can make a valid marriage invalid, but the statute of limitations and other legal requirements can apply in determining validity. The tort law system also protects your civil rights.

The Civil Law is created on Social Law, which was written centuries ago when European settlers arrived in North America. The idea was that the property of Native Americans should be preserved. However, the natives would also be granted certain rights and privileges, and the whole concept became muddled. The changes were completed during the American Revolution when the colonies established their governments.

In many ways, the concept of the social contract is still used today. As long as society can create common good and maintain it, the general will is held responsible for a free society. A society that allows those in power to exploit the common good and deprive the community of its fundamental rights will eventually collapse.

After Sept. 11, the United States was confronted with one of its most pressing issues, civil rights. Among the newly formed American states, Louisiana passed a law that explicitly stated, "All citizens of the state are equal before the law." The bill was held up by more conservative Christians who worried that the political correctness of the law might allow "terrorism" to take hold in the United States.

As the matter was brought to the forefront of the public's attention, Sept. 11 occurred. Several civil rights leaders were martyred in the attacks, and the law was changed so that the phrase "all citizens of the state are equal before the law" was stricken from the law. It seems like a hollow victory, but the purpose was to provide basic rights to all citizens of the state.

Civil law is not the same as "general law." The general rule is simply another name for the statutes of the states. The statutes are the things that govern our day-to-day lives.

The laws of civil law are an inclusive term that is sometimes used to describe legal processes such as the right to be represented in court, to have the right to a jury trial, to have the right to appeal from a jury verdict and more. Those that have extensive knowledge of the law to know that the rights in civil law cover only the government and the law enforcement officials. Not even private citizens can initiate a lawsuit against another individual or entity. Any violation of the civil law is deemed to be a criminal offence.

The first fundamental human rights that were granted to people were those regarding the property. Since then, there have been many more, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and many others. Each time new civil rights are granted, the old rights are augmented. For example, the first free-speech rights were granted to slaves in the American South.

There are two basic types of civil law: federal and state. Federal Legislation was found under the U.S. Constitution. Many state laws come under the state constitution and state law codes govern them.

State law attorneys are at a disadvantage when trying to defend a civil case in a state where there is no state attorney general. For these reasons, most countries use a specialized lawyer to handle civil cases.

[metinbhr]

Making and unmaking of an IRGC agent

Was Mahdi Sharifi an Iranian intelligence agent in Rojava?

From the onset of the Syrian Civil War, the Iranian regime deployed military advisors, soldiers, artillery and every type of death machine at its disposal to Syria to meddle in the Syrian affairs. High-ranking officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) such as General Hamedani were killed in the conflict.  While Iran and Assad regime did little to fight ISIS, for the Kurdish militia known as the YPG (people's protection unit) destruction of ISIS remains a priority.

Rojava's leftist revolution which is based upon the idea of democratic confederalism and principles of equality, self-determination, woman's right and ecology is perhaps the antithesis of the Iranian regime. For that reason, Iranian regime has had little success in exploiting the Rojavan Revolution. Also due to cultural and linguistic differences, Iranian regime has been unable to infiltrate the Revolution, although, at least two farmer YPG members have appeared on Iranian state TV in 2017 and have engaged in denouncing their past affiliation.

Another former YPG member who defected to Iran did damage to YPG intelligence operations, and is suspected of revealing the names of YPG personals, some of whom were in close contact with the subject, according to Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) officials.

The case of this YPG member Mahdi Sharifi (also spelled Mehdi Sharifi) who has also been identified as Abdullah Sharifi by some Iranian media is a peculiar one. Sharifi is an Iranian who lives in the city of Karaj and was born in 1985. He came to Rojava to fight ISIS in 2014 and choose the name “Massiha” for himself. Unlike the vast majority of the Iranians who join the YPG, he is not from Kurdish origin but he knew the inner workings of YPG’s operations across Rojava. He did not talk about his military background or job when he came to Rojava but his military skills were unquestionably superb even though he did not initially brag about his skills. According to Sharifi, after unsuccessfully seeking official channels of the Iranian mercenary forces to fight ISIS, he had decided to go to Kurdistan to join the YPG. Sharifi who could only speak Persian and did not speak the main local languages i.e. Arabic or Kurdish, was assigned to international units of the YPG commonly known as the Lions of Rojava.

His compatriots in that unit describe him as friendly, cordial, brave and brotherly. Sharifi who spoke little English at the time, did not miss any opportunity to inquire about seeking political asylum in one of the Western countries from the internationals. Perspective of some of Kurds who did speak Persian was drastically different. One Kurdish comrade who spoke with him in Persian described him as a misogynist. His remarks raised some eyebrows but no one thought that he was a spy.

In one of his interviews Sharifi claims that for the duration of his stay in Rojava he had no access to phones, newspapers, or even internet. But he goes on to contradict himself in the same interview. In the aftermath of death of the first Iranian YPG member, Mohammad Hossein Karimi, Sharifi interviewed BBC Persian on his cellphone. According to some YPG fighters, during the battle for Kobane’s freedom and while staying in the mountains, he always used his prepaid phone; despite the fact that he had not traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan for months to buy prepaid phone cards. He would use the internet and social media as well as the phone to communicate with the outside world. Yet again, no one at the time thought he was an Iranian intelligence agent.

In April of 2015, as the war against ISIS was temporarily winding down; Sharifi who had become depressed, decided to leave Rojava. He had hoped by using his YPG connections, he would migrate to Europe or north America but there were a few obstacles in his way. Having an Iranian passport, only allowed him to travel to a limited number of countries in the world. So he decided to interview BBC Persian in order to prepare a political Asylum case for himself since interviewing BBC has been criminalized by the Iranian regime. By gaining the trust of some Kurdish friends, he was also able to visit the PKK leadership in the Qandil mountains.

In his interview with Fars News Agency he described PKK’s leader Cemîl Bayik as a “poorly-literate” person who “kept insisting” that Sharifi should “study ideology.” In the same interview, he also describes YPG members as illiterates and he justifies his claim by stating that even though he, himself, has a high school diploma; he is more educated than most people whom he met in YPG.

Then he goes on to say: “In this interview, I only refer to PKK since YPG and PJAK, or many other names created by PKK have no external existence outside of PKK, but in relation to PKK's behavior in Syria, I can say that PKK's behavior is not different from the ISIS, they seize, they murder and they plunder, and this similarity between PKK and ISIS is very interesting.” The absurdity of Sharifi’s statements requires no supplementary explanation. Allegation of YPG’s occupying, murder and plundering have not been corroborated by any reputable news agency in the world.

Sharifi's prospect for leaving Kurdistan suddenly changes when he's introduced to an American girl on Facebook by another member of the YPG’s international unit. He seizes this opportunity to migrate to the United States. While he tells a Kurdish comrade that he used to pick up runaway girls back home but now because of the YPG; an American girl is willing to marry him.

While the two quickly fell in love and subsequently got married, his misogynistic remarks raised some suspicions among his Kurdish compatriots. Yet, unable to travel anywhere in the world with an Iranian passport, he goes to the Iranian Consulate in Erbil.

For the past four decades the Iranian Consulate in Erbil has been a hotbed for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard members such as Mohammad Jafari Sahraroudi who was one of the main components in the plot to assassinate Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou; a Kurdish leader who was perceived as an existential threat to the regime in Tehran.

Sahraroudi, who has had a destructive role in all four parts of the Kurdistan for the past quarter century has meddled in Kurdish affairs at every opportunity. Sahraroudi's IRGC's agents are infamous for occupying the Iranian Consulate in Erbil. While Sharifi was still in Erbil, he contacts a number of YPG members who were born in Iran and tries to lure them to go back to Iran; knowing full-well that they would face prosecution by the regime. One of those people who was lured by Sharifi was Foad Shabakeh Fard who had met Sharifi in Kobani while fighting against ISIS. Shabakeh Fard who was a former worker’s right activist and a prisoner in the Iranian Kurdistan visited Sharifi in his hotel in Erbil. Shabakeh Fard states that Sharifi was carrying stack bundles of $100 bills at the time of their meeting. Shabakeh Fard’s statements cannot be independently verified but he further claimed that since he had financial difficulties at the time he had asked Sharifi for help.

Afterwards, Sharifi goes back to Iran and since 2015 multiple interviews by him have been published by various intelligence and IRGC affiliated news agencies.

At the end of one of his interviews Sharifi makes a statement which has been eliminated from some of the websites which republished his interview.  He states that he is in custody of the Iranian Judiciary system which could very well signal that he is in fact in custody of the IRGC and his this statements are not to be taken at face value. Yet some of these statements were actually made by him while he was free and he contacted people to lure them to go back to Iran. He also repeated some of these propaganda while he was still embedded with YPG in Kurdistan and they are certainly his own words.

Perhaps some of these statements were not made by him and they are the work’s of the pius men of god in the IRGC. At the same time, since he has never denied the statements in these interviews, presumably they were not made under duress or torture. No news of his imprisonment in Iran has been published for the past four years. He has also published a picture of himself which shows him wearing a T-shirt with the face of an infamous IRGC member who was killed in Syria. He has never recanted his a statements or apologized to those whom he wronged. His interviews are republished by multiple news agencies in Iran.

Even some of his statements with regard to his personal life are factually incorrect. For instance, in the beginning of an interview with Fars News Agency which is closely affiliated and founded by the Islamic Republic of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, he claims that his occupation was a professional diving instructor in Iran before going to Rojava.  However, photos that Sharifi has published of himself on social media contradicts this claim.  These photos show Sharifi in different military gears and in various military outfits while in addition to diving he is mountain climbing, parachuting and high wire crossing while wearing military outfits in Iran.

These photos indicate that least at one point he was a member of an elite unit of the Iranian military or IRGC. Many YPG soldiers who fought alongside him were jealous of his capabilities on the battlefield.

Most of the other claims made by Sharifi in his interviews are the usual talking points which are routinely repeated by Iranian, Turkish, FSA, Bashar Assad and Barzini crime family’s propaganda machines and have been actually disputed. Some of these claims are also occasionally perpetuated by U.S. and Saudi media outlets. These claims include but are not limited to allegations of PKK's drug trafficking and human smuggling or PKK's belief in Marxist ideology.

Other claims which have been widely disputed include YPG's engagement in child slavery and recruiting child soldiers in northern Syria, acts of genocide, dislocation of Arab populations and other such unfounded rumors.

And then there are claims which are more twisted and less repeated. In an extraordinary twist Sharifi claims that YPJ and PKK female fighters live under semi-slave conditions and female fighters are forced to dig 180 meter long caves or tunnels. According to him digging these 180 meter tunnels is for no apparent military reason but rather the purpose of these digging is for controlling their “female minds”. Fabricating the martyrdom of YPG members for the purposes of propaganda is another twisted claim made in the interviews.

Many of the claims made by Sharifi are demonstrably false and have been dismissed by many international outlets. Other claims are too eccentric to entertain and some are just too rare and unbelievable which makes one question the very nature of his state of mind and the condition under which these statements were made.

 The full scale of damage Sharifi caused to Rojava is not known. It came as another intelligence failure and is being brought to light after many years. The penetration of the secrets inside military operations intelligence and the form of communications revealed to Iranian agents is unknown. It is not certain if Sharifi came to Rojava to gather intelligence or certain factors led to his defection to the Iranian regime. His brave acts on the battlefield makes him an unlikely agent but his subsequent conduct leaves much doubt about his character.  Regardless of his actual inclinations, his background with the Iranian armed forces made him a natural choice to become a defector or an agent.

https://www.eghtesadonline.com/%D8%A8%D8%AE%D8%B4-%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%B1-2/99392-%DA%AF%D9%81%D8%AA%DA%AF%D9%88%DB%8C-%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%AC%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B4%D8%AF%D9%87-%D8%A7%D8%B2

https://youtu.be/9UwjMoj4MXM?t=119

http://www.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=13940618000985