#like how many migrant workers and refugees died this week

[cruelsister-moved2]

i just honestly just hope those people on the submarine were dead all along like the handwringing is tedious & that amount of money and resources should never have been devoted to going down there & shouldn’t be devoted to saving them either but i just cant think of anything worse than being trapped in there for days & days waiting to die literally horrifying and unthinkable i hope they died instantly

[newstfionline]

Monday, May 17, 2021

Colonial shutdown shows how Americans pay the price of efficiency (Washington Post) The drivers stuck in gas lines after the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, the Texans freezing in their homes after the February grid collapse, the Californians sweltering through their own power failures last summer—all were paying the unintended and unexpected price of efficiency. The market-driven energy sector has spent a decade or more cutting costs, streamlining and digitizing. Four big oil refineries have shut down in Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 2010 because it’s cheaper to bring in gasoline by pipeline from the Gulf Coast, 1,500 miles away—as long as that pipeline stays in operation. Texas and California have driven the price of electricity down by throwing out the old regulatory structure—the structure that made sure utilities earned enough to invest in backup resources. In the name of efficiency, “resilience was assumed,” said Daniel Yergin, a historian and author of “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.” But even as American fossil fuel producers proudly declared the country to be energy independent once more in recent years, the energy sector has stripped redundancy out of its systems, at the risk of leaving customers in the lurch when things go wrong. Some companies have declined to take the precautions needed to survive the unexpected, whether it’s bad weather or a cyberattack.

Police in Cities Across U.S. Brace for a Violent Summer (WSJ) Police departments in New York City and other large metro areas across the U.S. are bulking up patrols and implementing new tactics to prepare for what they say could be a violent summer. States lifting Covid-19 restrictions and more people out in public spaces in warmer weather increase the likelihood of more shootings, as well as less-serious crimes, officials say. Many crimes, including violent ones, normally rise in summer. Gun purchases also rose during the pandemic and cities have seen an increase in guns being used in crimes. Shootings and homicides in big U.S. cities are up this year again after rising last year. In the last three months of 2020, homicides rose 32.2% in cities with a population of at least one million, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report. In New York City, the number of homicides has reached 146 for the year so far, an increase of 27% from 115 during the same period in 2020. In Dallas, police have counted 75 homicides this year, up from 58 during the same period last year. Chicago police have recorded 195 homicides, up from 160 in the year-ago period.

Tensions Among Democrats Grow Over Israel as the Left Defends Palestinians (NYT) With violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories forcing the issue back to the forefront of American politics, divisions between the leadership of the Democratic Party and the activist wing have burst into public view. While the Biden administration is handling the growing conflict as a highly sensitive diplomatic challenge involving a longstanding ally, the ascendant left views it as a searing racial justice issue that is deeply intertwined with the politics of the United States. For those activists, Palestinian rights and the decades-long conflict over land in the Middle East are linked to causes like police brutality and conditions for migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Party activists who fight for racial justice now post messages against the “colonization of Palestine” with the hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter. With President Biden in the White House, traditional U.S. support for Israel is hardly in question from a policy perspective; he has made his support for the country clear throughout his nearly 50 years in public life. Still, the terms of the debate are shifting in Democratic circles. On Thursday, a group of leading progressive members of Congress offered a rare break from party unity, giving fiery speeches on the House floor that accused Mr. Biden of ignoring the plight of Palestinians and “taking the side of the occupation.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York directly challenged the president, who had asserted that Israel had a right to defend itself. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” she asked in an impassioned address. “Do we believe that? And if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.” “The base of the party is moving in a very different direction than where the party establishment is,” James Zogby said. “If you support Black Lives Matter, it was not a difficult leap to saying Palestinian lives matter, too.”

Bleak futures fuel widespread protests by young Colombians (AP) Thousands of young people and college students have been at the forefront of Colombia’s antigovernment protests for more than two weeks, armed with improvised shields made from garbage cans and umbrellas. They have taken the brunt of the tear gas and gunshots from security forces, and dozens have paid for it with their lives. The young men and women have become the voices for Colombians fed up with a government they say has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic and crushed hopes of a better future. “To a large extent, we found that there was no fear of death. Sometimes it is the only thing that remains when the system is starving us and there are no opportunities,” said Yonny Rojas, a 36-year-old law student who also runs soup kitchens in one of the poorest areas of Cali, the city where the government response has been especially violent.

Pandemic triggers new crisis in Peru: lack of cemetery space (AP) After Joel Bautista died of a heart attack last month in Peru, his family tried unsuccessfully to find an available grave at four different cemeteries. After four days, they resorted to digging a hole in his garden. The excavation in a poor neighborhood in the capital city of Lima was broadcast live on television, attracting the attention of authorities and prompting them to offer the family a space on the rocky slopes of a cemetery. The same plight is shared by other families across Peru. After struggling to control the coronavirus pandemic for more than a year, the country now faces a parallel crisis: a lack of cemetery space. The problem affects everyone, not just relatives of COVID-19 victims, and some families have acted on their own, digging clandestine graves in areas surrounding some of Lima’s 65 cemeteries. The desperate lack of options comes as the country endures its deadliest period of the pandemic yet. More than 64,300 people who tested positive for COVID-19 have died in Peru, according to the Health Ministry, but that figure is almost certainly an undercount. A vital records agency estimates that the true figure is more than 174,900, counting those whose possible infection was not confirmed by a test.

UK readies for major reopening but new variant sparks worry (AP) Travelers in England were packing their bags, bartenders were polishing their glasses and performers were warming up as Britain prepared Sunday for a major step out of lockdown—but with clouds of worry on the horizon. Excitement at the reopening of travel and hospitality vied with anxiety that a more contagious virus variant first found in India is spreading fast and could delay further plans to reopen. On Monday, people in England will be able to eat a restaurant meal indoors, drink inside a pub, go to a museum, hug friends and visit one another’s homes for the first time in months. A ban on overseas holidays is also being lifted, with travel now possible to a short list of countries with low infection rates. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are following similar but slightly different reopening paths.

Turkey eases COVID-19 restrictions but keeps many curfews (AP) Turkey’s interior ministry on Sunday lifted a full lockdown that had ordered people to stay home to fight COVID-19 infections, shifting to a less-restrictive program that still involved curfews on weeknights and weekends. Shopping malls will be able to reopen. Some businesses will remain closed, including gyms and cafes, but restaurants will be able to offer take away in addition to delivery. Preschools will resume in-person education but upper grades will continue remote learning. Turks can return to their workplaces but will have to stay home from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. on weekdays and all day Saturday and Sunday, with the exception of walking to a market to buy food. Civil servants will continue working remotely or in shifts in offices. Foreign tourists and workers with special permits are exempt.

Syria’s Surprising Solar Boom: Sunlight Powers the Night in Rebel Idlib (NYT) When the Syrian government attacked their village, Radwan al-Shimali’s family hastily threw clothes, blankets and mattresses into their truck and sped off to begin new lives as refugees, leaving behind their house, farmland and television. Among the belongings they kept was one prized technology: the solar panel now propped up on rock next to the tattered tent they call home in an olive grove near the village of Haranabush in northwestern Syria. “It is important,” Mr. al-Shimali said of the 270-watt panel, his family’s sole source of electricity. “When there is sun during the day, we can have light at night.” An unlikely solar revolution of sorts has taken off in an embattled, rebel-controlled pocket of northwestern Syria, where large numbers of people whose lives have been upended by the country’s 10-year-old civil war have embraced the sun’s energy simply because it is the cheapest source of electricity around. Solar panels, big and small, old and new, are seemingly everywhere in Idlib Province along Syria’s border with Turkey. “There is no alternative,” said Akram Abbas, a solar panel importer in the town of al-Dana. “Solar energy is a blessing from God.”

India to start evacuating parts of west coast as cyclone approaches (Reuters) India is preparing to evacuate thousands of people from low-lying areas along its western coast as a powerful cyclone is expected to make landfall on Tuesday morning in the state of Gujarat. Cyclone Tauktae, which formed in the Arabian sea, is expected to cross Gujarat with wind gusts of up to 175 kmph (109 mph) and is expected to make landfall in the state the following morning. The meteorological agency warned that there could be destruction of houses and flooding of escape routes. Disruption to railway services was also expected until May 21.

Israel stages new round of heavy airstrikes on Gaza City (AP) The Israeli military unleashed a wave of heavy airstrikes on the Gaza Strip early Monday, saying it destroyed 15 kilometers (nine miles) of militant tunnels and the homes of nine alleged Hamas commanders. Residents of Gaza awakened by the overnight barrage described it as the heaviest since the war began a week ago, and even more powerful than a wave of airstrikes in Gaza City the day before that left 42 dead and flattened three buildings. There was no immediate word on the casualties from the latest strikes. A three-story building in Gaza City was heavily damaged, but residents said the military warned them 10 minutes before the strike and everyone cleared out. Gaza’s mayor Yahya Sarraj told Al-Jazeera TV that the airstrikes had caused extensive damage to roads and other infrastructure. He also warned that the territory was running low on fuel and other spare parts. The U.N. has warned that Gaza’s sole power station is at risk of running out of fuel. The territory already experiences daily power outages of 8-12 hours and tap water is undrinkable.

Ethiopia again delays national election amid deadly tensions (AP) Ethiopia has again delayed its national election after some opposition parties said they wouldn’t take part and as conflict in the country’s Tigray region means no vote is being held there, further complicating Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts to centralize power. The head of the national elections board, Birtukan Mideksa, in a meeting with political parties’ representatives on Saturday said the June 5 vote in Africa’s second most populous country would be postponed, citing the need to finish printing ballots, training staffers and compiling voters’ information. The board said she estimated a delay of two to three weeks.

Sharks use Earth’s magnetic field as a GPS, scientists say (AP) Sharks use the Earth’s magnetic field as a sort of natural GPS to navigate journeys that take them great distances across the world’s oceans, scientists have found. Researchers said their marine laboratory experiments with a small species of shark confirm long-held speculation that sharks use magnetic fields as aids to navigation—behavior observed in other marine animals such as sea turtles. The study sheds light on why sharks are able to traverse seas and find their way back to feed, breed and give birth, said marine policy specialist Bryan Keller, one of the study authors. “We know that sharks can respond to magnetic fields,” Keller said. “We didn’t know that they detected it to use as an aid in navigation ... You have sharks that can travel 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) and end up in the same spot.”

[route22ny]

Volunteers with the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths walk with buckets of food and jugs of water on May 10 near Ajo, Arizona. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

***

6/22/2019

I gave water to migrants crossing the Arizona desert. The government charged me with a felony.

By Scott Warren Scott Warren is a geographer living in Ajo, Arizona.

AJO, Ariz. — After a dangerous journey across Mexico and a difficult crossing through the Arizona desert, someone told Jose and Kristian that they might find water and food at a place in Ajo called the Barn. The Barn is a gathering place for humanitarian volunteers like me, and there the two young men were able to eat, rest and get medical attention. As the two were preparing to leave, the Border Patrol arrested them. Agents also handcuffed and arrested me, for — in the agency’s words — having provided the two migrants with “food, water, clean clothes and beds.”

Jose and Kristian were detained for several weeks, deposed by the government as material witnesses in its case against me and then deported back to the countries from which they had fled for their lives. This week, the government will try me for human smuggling. If convicted, I may be imprisoned for up to 20 years.

In the Sonoran Desert, the temperature can reach 120 degrees during the day and plummet at night. Water is scarce. Tighter border policies have forced migrants into harsher and more remote territory, and many who attempt to traverse this landscape don’t survive. Along what’s become known as the Ajo corridor, dozens of bodies are found each year; many more are assumed to be undiscovered.

Local residents and volunteers organize hikes into this desert to offer humanitarian aid. We haul jugs of water and buckets filled with canned food, socks, electrolytes and basic first-aid supplies to a few sites along the mountain and canyon paths. Other times, we get a report that someone has gone missing, and our mission becomes search and rescue — or, more often, to recover the bodies and bones of those who have died.

Over the years, humanitarian groups and local residents navigated a coexistence with the Border Patrol. We would meet with agents and inform them of how and where we worked. At times, the Border Patrol sought to cultivate a closer relationship. “Glad you’re out here today,” I remember an agent telling me once. “People really need water.” In a town as small as Ajo, we’re all neighbors, and everybody’s kids go to the same school. Whether it was in the grocery store or out in the field, it was commonplace for residents and volunteers to run into Border Patrol agents and talk.

(Five myths about the U.S.-Mexico border)

Those kinds of encounters are rare these days. Government authorities have cracked down on humanitarian aid: denying permits to enter the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and kicking over and slashing water jugs. They are also aggressively prosecuting volunteers. Several No More Deaths volunteers have faced possible imprisonment and fines of up to $10,000 on federal misdemeanor charges from 2017 including entering a wildlife refuge without a permit and “abandonment of property” — leaving water and cans of beans for migrants. (I face similar misdemeanor charges of “abandonment of property.”)

My case in particular may set a dangerous precedent, as the government expands its definitions of “transportation” and “harboring.” The smuggling and harboring laws have always been applied selectively: with aggressive prosecutions of “criminal” networks but leniency for big agriculture and other politically powerful industries that employ scores of undocumented laborers. Now, the law may be applied to not only humanitarian aid workers but also to the millions of mixed-status families in the United States. Take, for instance, a family in which one member is undocumented and another member, who is a citizen, is buying the groceries and paying the rent. Would the government call that harboring? If this family were driving to a picnic in the park, would the government call that illegal transportation? Though this possibility would have seemed far-fetched a few years ago, it has become frighteningly real.

The Trump administration’s policies — warehousing asylees, separating families, caging children — seek to impose hardship and cruelty. For this strategy to work, it must also stamp out kindness.

To me, the question that emerges from all of this is not whether the prosecution will have a chilling effect on my community and its sense of compassion. The question is whether the government will take seriously its humanitarian obligations to the migrants and refugees who arrive at the border.

In Ajo, my community has provided food and water to those traveling through the desert for decades — for generations. Whatever happens with my trial, the next day, someone will walk in from the desert and knock on someone’s door, and the person who answers will respond to the needs of that traveler. If they are thirsty, we will offer them water; we will not ask for documents beforehand. The government should not make that a crime.

***

“The Trump administration’s policies — warehousing asylees, separating families, caging children — seek to impose hardship and cruelty. For this strategy to work, it must also stamp out kindness.”

source: https://neilyoungarchives.com/#/news/1/article?id=I-Gave-Water-To-Migrants

[rightsinexile]

The deadly consequences of proposed Canadian asylum restrictions

This short piece was written by Jaymie Hellman, Professor of Latin American History, University of Alberta, and originally published by The Conversation on 14 May 2019. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.

Seidu Mohammed lost all 10 of his fingers to frostbite in December 2016, exposed to the harsh cold of a Manitoba winter when he avoided official border crossings on his trek from the United States into Canada.

Six years earlier, a man named Nesan lost his life. The refugee aboard the MV Sun Sea died from dehydration and starvation as the ship crossed the Pacific from Thailand to British Columbia.

If the Liberal government proceeds with its proposed changes to Canadian refugee law, these kinds of injuries and deaths will mount. Migrants will get hurt and some will die, but they will not stop trying to come to Canada. They would rather risk their lives in perilous journeys than face certain death at home.

Tightening Canada’s borders

Bill Blair, Canada’s border security minister, has begun discussions with US policy-makers to harden the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA). As it stands, the STCA prevents asylum-seekers from requesting refugee protection in Canada if they are entering from the US at official border crossings. But if asylum-seekers enter Canada irregularly — outside of formal border checkpoints — they are still able to make asylum claims. Seidu Mohammed and nearly 40,000 others have crossed the border into Canada in this way just since 2017.

Canada’s Liberal government seems to think that closing the loopholes in the STCA and introducing drastic new restrictions on refugee claims will stop asylum-seekers from crossing Canada’s land and sea borders. That will not happen. Instead, their journeys into Canada will simply become deadlier.

Deterrence doesn’t work

Although most Canadians associate the cry of “build the wall” with Donald Trump, construction of border walls in the US began back in 1994 with a policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence.

By building border walls along all but the most inhospitable deserts and rivers, Prevention Through Deterrence was supposed to discourage migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. Instead, those walls have funnelled desperate men, women and children into deserts, where temperatures soar during the day and plummet precipitously at night, and to rivers where many drown.

Since 1999, well over 3,000 migrants have died in the Arizona desert because of these dangerous conditions. Those migrants were not “deterred,” they were all but condemned to death.

If Canadians think similar deaths could not happen in this country, history shows otherwise. Following a tightening of Canadian refugee laws in the late 1980s, a Mexican man and a Salvadoran man were thrown from their rubber raft in 1991 as they tried to cross the freezing Niagara River into Canada. The Salvadoran survived; the Mexican did not.

Other dangerous crossings have been over oceans. In 1986, 155 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees landed in Newfoundland after they had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in lifeboats. The MV Ocean Lady carried Sri Lankan Tamil refugees across the Pacific in 2009, followed by Nesan’s boat, the MV Sun Sea, in 2010. Other desperate migrants have crossed our northern borders. In 1987, a Salvadoran man and a Mexican manentered the Yukon from Alaska.

Dangerous to cross, deadly to remain

These “irregular” migrants made such difficult, dangerous journeys because their very survival was at stake. They are fleeing gangs and governments that threaten them with death, and they are fleeing the climate change that is making it impossible to feed their families.

A Honduran woman recently told of fleeing her country after gang members made unpayable extortion demands, forcefully recruited her eldest son into their ranks and then gave her three days to leave the country or be killed.

She escaped with her two sons, aged seven and 10, joining a migrant caravan and walking to the United States.

“Do you think I wanted to come here with my children?” she asked Amnesty International workers in the US. “Never. I’d never have wanted to leave my country if life was different.”

This kind of story is playing out in Canada, too. A Colombian family reached out to various Canadian and American NGOs in 2005. They were about to be deported from the United States, and they knew that if they were sent back to Colombia, they would be killed.

But, as the NGO workers explained, the STCA meant there was no way for the family to make a refugee claim at the border. A few weeks later, members of that family were in Canada. We don’t know how they got across the border, but the reason they came is clear: they had no other choice.

If the Canadian government hardens the STCA and implements its proposed restrictions on asylum, refugees like this Colombian family, Seidu Mohammed, Nesan and countless other will still cross into Canada. But they will do so in places where the chances of injury and even death are significantly greater than by passing through a formal border crossing.

Seidu Mohammed, whose refugee claim was ultimately accepted, appeared recently at a House of Commons committee into the proposed changes. He testified: “This bill would put a lot of people at risk and I don’t think it should be passed. I’m pleading with you guys … this bill should not be passed.”

[orbemnews]

They see one man's death as an urgent reminder of what Biden needs to do And something she says she’s heard too many times already. It was the first death in ICE custody since President Biden took office. And immigrant rights advocates describe it as a glaring reminder of what they argue his administration needs to do: stop using private prison contractors to detain immigrants. “Their interests are not providing people the best care that they need. Their interests are in maximizing their profit,” says Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for Project South. “And therein lies the problem.” CoreCivic, the private company that operates Stewart, maintains that the health of detainees and staff are its top priority. “This commitment is shared by our government partners and we have worked closely together with them to respond to this unprecedented situation appropriately, thoroughly and with care for the well-being of those entrusted to us and our communities,” spokesman Ryan Gustin said in a written statement detailing numerous safety protocols put in place during the pandemic. Private contractors save taxpayers money and are better able to handle fluctuations in migrant populations, he said, describing their role in the US immigration system as “valued but limited.” “The government would have to spend billions to build its own detention facilities and employ thousands of new federal workers,” Gustin said. “Additionally, ending the use of private contractors like us would lead to more and worse humanitarian crises.” The Biden administration has already said it’s pulling away from some private prisons Growing government use of private prisons has sparked debate for years. And in 2016, the Justice Department announced it was “beginning the process of reducing — and ultimately ending” the use of privately operated prisons, stating they don’t meet the same level of safety and security as government facilities. That policy shift was quickly rescinded after President Trump took office. In his first week in office, the Biden administration put it back on the table, directing the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prisons. But that decision didn’t apply to other government contracts with private prison companies. Shahshahani, who’s campaigned for years to shut down Stewart and other similar facilities, says it should. “That seems like an immediate next step that they could take,” she says, “cutting out the role of private prison corporations in the imprisonment of human beings.” Asked about the President’s plans this week, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden has “spoken about his concern with these facilities in the past.” But she added that the White House didn’t want to get ahead of newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the matter. “But we’ll have more — we’ll defer to the secretary of Homeland Security for more specifics about the path forward,” Psaki said when asked why privately run ICE facilities hadn’t been included in the executive order Biden signed. In response to questions from CNN about whether the possibility of ending ICE detention contracts with private companies was being discussed, the Department of Homeland Security said it’s “committed to ensuring that all those in our custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments.” “Secretary Mayorkas will review many immigration policies in the weeks to come,” the statement said, “including detention policy.” Some advocates want the government to go even further Groups that support immigrant detention facilities argue the practice ensures detainees will appear in immigration court and also protects public safety. Immigration law requires detention in some cases, but advocates have long argued that officials have a large amount of latitude in who they choose to hold behind bars. Some groups have been pressing for years for an end to the civil detention facilities that hold immigrants facing deportation, arguing that inhumane conditions inside these facilities endanger detainees’ health. And since Biden took office, the calls for action have intensified. “This is an opportunity to reset and end the mass immigration detention system that we have, to end this system as we know it,” says Denise Bell, researcher for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International. For years, ICE has outsourced a large part of its detention operations to the private sector. A 2016 report found that about 65% of people ICE detained were held in for-profit facilities. Detaining immigrants has been a default response for too long, Bell said, “particularly with the involvement of private companies running a lot of these facilities.” “We have a multi-million dollar industry here,” she said. “There are built-in incentives to detain people.” Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesman, dismissed those allegations as “broad generalizations from special interests playing politics rather than looking at the facts. “The fact is we don’t set immigration policies — the federal government does. We don’t control immigration patterns — they change based on numerous geopolitical factors,” he said. “We also don’t enforce immigration laws or decide why or for how long people are detained.” The number of people in ICE custody has decreased significantly in recent months as the agency released detainees due to health risks during the pandemic, and advocates argue that scaling back even more and shutting down facilities is more in reach than it’s ever been. There are less than 15,000 people detained in ICE facilities currently, according to the agency’s latest statistics. That’s far less than the average daily population in ICE custody in the 2019 fiscal year, 50,165 people. “The current number should only trend down,” Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, said on a recent call with reporters. “This has shown us that moving away from detention is actually something we can do.” Nearly half the Covid-related deaths in ICE custody have been tied to one facility On January 16, ICE officials notified the Mexican Consulate in Atlanta that Montes de Oca, who’d been held at the Stewart Detention Center in southern Georgia, was sick with Covid-19 and in serious condition, Mexico’s foreign ministry said in a statement. Two weeks later, he was dead. Stewart, located in a rural area far from public view, was the focus of CNN’s 2018 four-part series, “Inside America’s Hidden Border.” It’s one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the country. And according to the latest data from ICE, it’s currently the facility where the largest number of detainees have been held this fiscal year, with an average daily population of 773 as of January 11. Since the pandemic began, Stewart has also ranked among the facilities with the largest number of detainees who’ve contracted coronavirus — and the largest number of Covid-related deaths. More than 480 detainees there have tested positive for Covid-19 since February 2020, according to the agency’s latest statistics. Only one other facility — the La Palma Correctional Facility in Arizona, has seen more positive tests. Four Stewart detainees who contracted coronavirus have died since the pandemic began — the largest Covid-19 death toll tied to any one immigrant detention facility in the country. There’ve been a total of nine Covid-related deaths in ICE custody since the pandemic began. Asked about the higher number of deaths tied to Stewart, ICE spokesman Lindsay Williams said the agency couldn’t release any additional information, due to its ongoing investigation of the recent death. “ICE is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive, agency-wide review of this incident, as it does following all deaths in custody,” the agency said in its statement announcing the death. Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesman, said the company has “rigorously followed” guidance from local, state and federal health authorities. “Stewart Detention Center has followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which have evolved over time, since the onset of the pandemic, and we’re continuing to work closely our government partners to enhance procedures as needed,” he said. Shahshahani says she and other advocates who’ve been decrying conditions at Stewart for years are devastated, but not surprised, by the numbers. Even before the pandemic, she says, officials weren’t doing enough to provide adequate medical care at Stewart. She hopes the new administration will change course before the death toll climbs again. Source link Orbem News #Biden #Death #Immigrantdetention:Advocatessayoneman'sdeathisareminderofwhatBidenshoulddo-CNN #mans #reminder #Urgent #us

[dipulb3]

They see one man's death as an urgent reminder of what Biden needs to do

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/they-see-one-mans-death-as-an-urgent-reminder-of-what-biden-needs-to-do/

They see one man's death as an urgent reminder of what Biden needs to do

And something she says she’s heard too many times already.

It was the first death in ICE custody since President Biden took office. And immigrant rights advocates describe it as a glaring reminder of what they argue his administration needs to do: stop using private prison contractors to detain immigrants.

“Their interests are not providing people the best care that they need. Their interests are in maximizing their profit,” says Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director for Project South. “And therein lies the problem.”

CoreCivic, the private company that operates Stewart, maintains that the health of detainees and staff are its top priority.

“This commitment is shared by our government partners and we have worked closely together with them to respond to this unprecedented situation appropriately, thoroughly and with care for the well-being of those entrusted to us and our communities,” spokesman Ryan Gustin said in a written statement detailing numerous safety protocols put in place during the pandemic.

Private contractors save taxpayers money and are better able to handle fluctuations in migrant populations, he said, describing their role in the US immigration system as “valued but limited.”

“The government would have to spend billions to build its own detention facilities and employ thousands of new federal workers,” Gustin said. “Additionally, ending the use of private contractors like us would lead to more and worse humanitarian crises.”

The Biden administration has already said it’s pulling away from some private prisons

Growing government use of private prisons has sparked debate for years. And in 2016, the Justice Department announced it was “beginning the process of reducing — and ultimately ending” the use of privately operated prisons, stating they don’t meet the same level of safety and security as government facilities. That policy shift was quickly rescinded after President Trump took office.

In his first week in office, the Biden administration put it back on the table, directing the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prisons.

But that decision didn’t apply to other government contracts with private prison companies.

Shahshahani, who’s campaigned for years to shut down Stewart and other similar facilities, says it should.

“That seems like an immediate next step that they could take,” she says, “cutting out the role of private prison corporations in the imprisonment of human beings.”

Asked about the President’s plans this week, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden has “spoken about his concern with these facilities in the past.” But she added that the White House didn’t want to get ahead of newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the matter.

“But we’ll have more — we’ll defer to the secretary of Homeland Security for more specifics about the path forward,” Psaki said when asked why privately run ICE facilities hadn’t been included in the executive order Biden signed.

In response to questions from Appradab about whether the possibility of ending ICE detention contracts with private companies was being discussed, the Department of Homeland Security said it’s “committed to ensuring that all those in our custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments.”

“Secretary Mayorkas will review many immigration policies in the weeks to come,” the statement said, “including detention policy.”

Some advocates want the government to go even further

Groups that support immigrant detention facilities argue the practice ensures detainees will appear in immigration court and also protects public safety.

Immigration law requires detention in some cases, but advocates have long argued that officials have a large amount of latitude in who they choose to hold behind bars.

Some groups have been pressing for years for an end to the civil detention facilities that hold immigrants facing deportation, arguing that inhumane conditions inside these facilities endanger detainees’ health.

And since Biden took office, the calls for action have intensified.

“This is an opportunity to reset and end the mass immigration detention system that we have, to end this system as we know it,” says Denise Bell, researcher for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International.

For years, ICE has outsourced a large part of its detention operations to the private sector. A 2016 report found that about 65% of people ICE detained were held in for-profit facilities.

Detaining immigrants has been a default response for too long, Bell said, “particularly with the involvement of private companies running a lot of these facilities.”

“We have a multi-million dollar industry here,” she said. “There are built-in incentives to detain people.”

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesman, dismissed those allegations as “broad generalizations from special interests playing politics rather than looking at the facts.

“The fact is we don’t set immigration policies — the federal government does. We don’t control immigration patterns — they change based on numerous geopolitical factors,” he said. “We also don’t enforce immigration laws or decide why or for how long people are detained.”

The number of people in ICE custody has decreased significantly in recent months as the agency released detainees due to health risks during the pandemic, and advocates argue that scaling back even more and shutting down facilities is more in reach than it’s ever been. There are less than 15,000 people detained in ICE facilities currently, according to the agency’s latest statistics. That’s far less than the average daily population in ICE custody in the 2019 fiscal year, 50,165 people.

“The current number should only trend down,” Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, said on a recent call with reporters. “This has shown us that moving away from detention is actually something we can do.”

Nearly half the Covid-related deaths in ICE custody have been tied to one facility

On January 16, ICE officials notified the Mexican Consulate in Atlanta that Montes de Oca, who’d been held at the Stewart Detention Center in southern Georgia, was sick with Covid-19 and in serious condition, Mexico’s foreign ministry said in a statement. Two weeks later, he was dead.

Stewart, located in a rural area far from public view, was the focus of Appradab’s 2018 four-part series, “Inside America’s Hidden Border.”

It’s one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the country. And according to the latest data from ICE, it’s currently the facility where the largest number of detainees have been held this fiscal year, with an average daily population of 773 as of January 11.

Since the pandemic began, Stewart has also ranked among the facilities with the largest number of detainees who’ve contracted coronavirus — and the largest number of Covid-related deaths.

More than 480 detainees there have tested positive for Covid-19 since February 2020, according to the agency’s latest statistics. Only one other facility — the La Palma Correctional Facility in Arizona, has seen more positive tests.

Four Stewart detainees who contracted coronavirus have died since the pandemic began — the largest Covid-19 death toll tied to any one immigrant detention facility in the country. There’ve been a total of nine Covid-related deaths in ICE custody since the pandemic began.

Asked about the higher number of deaths tied to Stewart, ICE spokesman Lindsay Williams said the agency couldn’t release any additional information, due to its ongoing investigation of the recent death.

“ICE is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive, agency-wide review of this incident, as it does following all deaths in custody,” the agency said in its statement announcing the death.

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesman, said the company has “rigorously followed” guidance from local, state and federal health authorities.

“Stewart Detention Center has followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which have evolved over time, since the onset of the pandemic, and we’re continuing to work closely our government partners to enhance procedures as needed,” he said.

Shahshahani says she and other advocates who’ve been decrying conditions at Stewart for years are devastated, but not surprised, by the numbers.

Even before the pandemic, she says, officials weren’t doing enough to provide adequate medical care at Stewart.

She hopes the new administration will change course before the death toll climbs again.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/migrants-trying-to-reach-europe-pushed-to-deadly-atlantic-world-news/

Migrants trying to reach Europe pushed to deadly Atlantic | World News

CANARY ISLANDS, Spain (AP) — CANARY ISLANDS, SPAIN— The only person who wasn’t crying on the boat was 2-year-old Noura.

Noura’s mother, Hawa Diabaté, was fleeing her native Ivory Coast to what she believed was continental Europe. Unlike the 60 adults on board, only Noura was oblivious to the risks of crossing the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean in an overcrowded rubber dinghy.

As the waves quickly got bigger and people more nervous, Noura told her mother, “Be quiet, mama! Boza, mama! Boza!”, Diabaté recalled. The expression is used by sub-Saharan migrants to celebrate a successful crossing.

After several hours in the ocean, it was finally “Boza.” Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service brought them to safety on one of the Canary Islands.

Migrants and asylum-seekers are increasingly crossing a treacherous part of the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago near West Africa, in what has become one of the most dangerous routes to European territory. Noura and her mother are among about 4,000 people to have survived the perilous journey this year.

But many never make it. More than 250 people are known to have died or gone missing so far this year according to the International Organization for Migration. That’s already more than the number of people who perished trying to cross the Western Mediterranean in all of last year. In the week that The Associated Press spent in the Canary Islands to report this story, at least 20 bodies were recovered.

————

This story was funded in part by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

—————

The increase in traffic to the Canaries comes after the European Union funded Morocco in 2019 to stop migrants from reaching southern Spain via the Mediterranean Sea. While arrivals to mainland Spain decreased by 50% compared to the same period last year, landings in the Canary Islands have increased by 550%. In August alone there were more than 850 arrivals by sea to the Canaries, according to an AP tally of numbers released by Spain’s Interior Ministry and reports by local media and NGOs.

Arrivals this year are still low compared to the 30,000 migrants who reached the islands in 2006. But they are at their highest in over a decade since Spain stemmed the flow of sea arrivals to just a few hundred a year through deals with West African countries.

The striking shift in migration back to the Canaries has raised alarms at the highest levels of the Spanish government. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s first trip abroad following the pandemic lockdown was to Mauritania, one of the main departure points. Most recently, the interior ministry announced a donation of 1.5 million euros in border surveillance equipment to six West African countries.

But human rights organizations say those arriving to Spanish shores are only a fraction of those departing.

“We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Sophie Muller, the United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees’ representative in Spain, who recently visited the archipelago. “They are taking impossible routes.”

It can take one to 10 days to reach the Spanish islands, with the closest departure point being in Tarfaya, Morocco (100 km, 62 miles) and the furthest recorded this year in Barra, in The Gambia (more than 1,600km, 1,000 miles). It is common for migrants to run out of food, water and fuel after only a few days.

On August 19, 15 lifeless Malians were spotted inside a wooden boat by a Spanish plane 148km, 92 miles from the island of Gran Canaria and towed back to port. At nightfall, workers pulled the bloated corpses, one by one, out of the boat with a crane. The next day, police collected what was left behind as evidence: a wallet, a dozen cell phones, windbreakers and waterproof boots.

Less than 24 hours later, another migrant boat was rescued and brought to the island with 12 people and four dead, as the AP watched. The survivors had witnessed their comrades die along the way.

“They almost didn’t speak,” said Jose Antonio Rodríguez, who heads the regional Red Cross immediate response teams. “They were in a state of shock.”

One of the 12 rescued died before he could reach a hospital.

Human rights organizations aren’t just concerned with the high number of deaths.

“There’s been a change in profile,” said Muller, the UNHCR representative in Spain. “We see more arrivals from the Sahel, from the Ivory Coast, more women, more children, more profiles that would be in need of international protection.”

The Interior Ministry of Spain denied requests by the Associated Press to share nationalities of recent arrivals to the Canary Islands, claiming the information could impact international relations with the countries of origin. But UNHCR estimates that around 35% of those arriving by boat come from Mali – the nation at war with Islamic extremists where a coup d’état recently toppled president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. Around 20% of arrivals are women and 12% under 18, Muller said.

Kassim Diallo fled Mali after his father was killed in an extremist attack targeting an army base near his village in Sokolo in late January.

On Feb. 29, the 21-year-old got aboard a rubber boat in Laayoune in the Western Sahara with 35 other men, women and children. After nearly 20 hours in the water, his group was rescued and brought to the island of Fuerteventura.

“It is not normal. A human being shouldn’t do this. But how else can we do it?” said Diallo.

Like most of those who crossed by boat to the archipelago this year, Diallo has been stuck on the islands for months. Although forced return flights to Mauritania have been halted by the pandemic, the Spanish government has also forbidden newly arrived migrants from going to the mainland, even after travel restrictions were lifted for nationals and tourists. Only a few groups, mainly women and children, have been transferred on an ad-hoc basis via the Red Cross.

“Blocking people from leaving the Canaries has turned the islands into an open-air prison,” said Txema Santana, who represents the local office of the Spanish Commission to Help Refugees.

Until Diallo is granted asylum, which he has yet to apply for, he cannot work. He would love to learn Spanish, but there aren’t classes available to him.

The Canary Islands were meant to be just a stepping-stone to reach “The Big Spain” or continue to France where he can at least understand the language. But for now, he remains closer to Africa than to continental Europe.

“On a European level, it should be like managing a land border,” said Ángel Manuel Hernández, an evangelical pastor whose church is the main shelter for rescued migrants on Fuerteventura. “Borders are meant to be areas of transit, not areas to stay.”

Hernández’s church, the Modern Christian Mission, went from hosting 30 migrants two years ago to 300 this summer.

“We don’t have the resources or the capacity to care for all these people with the dignity and the respect that these human beings deserve,” he said.

As shelters fill up, recently arrived migrants sometimes have nowhere to sleep. More than 100 people, including women and children are currently sleeping on the floor in makeshift tents on the docks of Arguineguin, on the island of Gran Canaria, following disembarkation. The coronavirus only adds another layer of difficulty as passengers on migrant boats must be tested and quarantined as a group if any of them are found to be positive.

In response to questions emailed by the AP, Spain’s government delegate in the Canary Islands Anselmo Pestana wrote: “Our effort has to focus not so much on thinking “how we distribute” immigrants, but on working at origin, so that we can prevent anyone from risking their life.”

Spain’s government has yet to reveal where it will place hundreds of migrants now housed in local schools when classes resume in September.

Ironically, half of the islands’ hotels and resorts are closed due to the effects of the pandemic. Across the island, tourists sunbathe in the largely empty resorts as exhausted Spanish maritime rescuers continue their every-day search in the Atlantic for migrant boats in distress, hoping to reach survivors before it’s too late.

Diabaté, the Ivorian mother, hopes one of them will be her eight-year-old son Moussa. They got separated back in Morocco as smugglers rushed them to the beach and onto the rubber boat that would take them to the Canary Islands.

Moussa stayed behind.

“I’ve been crying every day from the moment I got on that boat,” she said.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 01/24/2019

Image of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering a speech. Source.

MLK's Radical Legacy

The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most: "The U.S. would drop more explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it did on all of Europe during World War II, and the news brought vivid images depicting the carnage inflicted on Southeast Asian civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom would die. It was in this context that King called the U.S. 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.'"

It’s More Important Than Ever That The World Understand How Radical Martin Luther King Jr. Was: “To empower current and future leaders during a time of blatant hatred, King must not be seen as a symbol of centrism or the Black moderate—his life and labor must be a tool and resource for radical work and change.”

Technology

Google Urged the U.S. to Limit Protection For Activist Workers: “Google, whose employees have captured international attention in recent months through high-profile protests of workplace policies, has been quietly urging the U.S. government to narrow legal protection for workers organizing online.”

Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear: “There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.”

Graffiti by Banksy on the corner of a wall of cinderblocks. One side of the corner shows a small child, arms spread wide, standing on a dark night and sticking their tongue out to catch snowflakes. Around the corner, the snowflakes and blackness are revealed to be coming from a dumpster fire. Source.

Issues

Cambodian Deportees Return to a 'Home' They've Never Known: "Anti-deportation advocates argue that American dereliction of duty regarding these Cambodian refugees is twofold: The U.S. bombed Cambodia, bolstering the Khmer Rouge’s rise and contributing to the creation of this refugee population, whom the U.S. then resettled through a defective program, subsequently priming them for poverty and criminality. (In 2000, 29.3 percent of Cambodian Americans lived in poverty, and the community remains among the poorest in the United States. Post-traumatic stress disorder is endemic.)"

Big Dairy Is About to Flood America’s School Lunches With Milk: On the nefarious but unsurprising forces manipulating the US public school lunch program for their own gain.

Economics as a moral tale: “The story that philanthrocapitalists told was a great one: history marching forward, heroes and villains, and a Hollywood ending. History has a way of surprising us, however, and most of the script ended up on the cutting-room floor [...] As for the rich people who were meant to save the world, almost to a man, they chucked the script in the bin: for every billionaire funding a progressive cause, there would be dozens who used their wealth to support conservative campaigns to further roll back the state’s social provisions.”

Sticker showing Gritty, the bright-orange hockey mascot, tackling a swastika-wearing frog. Surrounding this scene is a circle with words reading “Good Night Alt-Right”. Source.

Activism

“Wet’suwet’en Strong”: Indigenous resistance in Canada: The Wet’suwet’en struggle in British Columbia is the latest Indigenous resistance that builds on hundreds of years of organizing against colonial Canada. "Colonialism in Canada is alive and present. It wields enormous ongoing violence against us Indigenous people through disappearing and murdering our women, two-spirit, and trans people; through lack of clean drinking water; dire housing conditions and shortages; and the highest rates of poverty, and incarceration, of any group of people within Canada. The underlying motivation that propels all of this violence is the state’s age-old war for Indigenous land."

Women Convicted for Leaving Food and Water for Migrants: "On Friday (January 18), federal judge Bernardo Velasco found four women volunteering with humanitarian organization No More Deaths guilty on federal charges for aiding migrants crossing the Arizona desert. […] The women left life-saving supplies—including water and food—inside Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, an area of Ajo, Arizona, that is often called the 'Trail of Death.' The ominous moniker refers to the 155 border crossers who have died in the area going back to 2001, with many others missing."

A yellow CAUTION sticker attached to some kind of maintenance panel. Instead of warning about what the panel contains, the sticker says: CAUTION, Beware of unreliable narrators. Source.

Direct Action Item

Do you feel like you’re part of a community? This week, think about ways to grow and strengthen your community.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[spicynbachili1]

Inside Libyan detention ‘hell’ where refugee burned himself alive | News

It has been practically three weeks since Abdulaziz, a 28-year-old Somali, doused himself in petrol earlier than burning himself to loss of life in Triq al Sikka migrant detention centre in Libyan capital, Tripoli.

Different detainees, who witnessed what occurred, stated he killed himself shortly after a go to from the United Nations Refugee Company (UNHCR), claiming officers had instructed him he had no likelihood of being evacuated from Libya.

Abdulaziz had been within the detention centre for 9 months, and felt utterly hopeless, they stated. 

“First he began in secret, then he was shouting, individuals have been operating, then it was already over,” stated one detainee in regards to the suicide, including that others tried to avoid wasting him, however it was too late.

The UNHCR says the Somali’s loss of life had nothing to do with their go to, and Abdulaziz was scheduled for evacuation to Niger subsequent month, although it is not clear why he hadn’t been instructed about it.

Within the following days, refugees collected small quantities of cash, despatched from their households, to purchase espresso, biscuits, and candles, and rejoice his life.

Nevertheless, their ideas rapidly turned to who would possibly die subsequent.

1000’s of refugees and migrants are presently being held in indefinite detention by Libya’s Division for Combatting Unlawful Migration (DCIM). Many have been deported again to Libya after the boats they have been on, en path to Italy, have been intercepted by the EU-funded Libyan coastguard. 

Amongst them are individuals from Somalia, Eritrea, or Sudan; international locations at battle or dictatorships the place gross human rights abuses are happening.

They are saying they can not go dwelling, and needs to be evacuated to a protected nation. 

Of the centres in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, Triq al Sikka, which holds greater than 400 individuals, is frequently described by refugees and migrants as one of many worst, due to the degrees of neglect and abuse.

“It is similar to hell,” one former detainee stated. “An abomination.”

‘Day and evening is identical for us’

Al Jazeera has spoken to 6 present and former detainees in Triq al Sikka. Some say they’ve stayed so long as a yr, whereas others escaped throughout latest clashes within the metropolis. Calls to DCIM went unanswered.

Detainees described spending day-after-day at the hours of darkness, with guards who will not go close to them, for concern of contracting illness. “Day and evening is identical for us,” one man stated.

Previously few months, the scenario has reached a disaster level. For 3 weeks, detainees say these contaminated with tuberculosis have been given no treatment, after workers from the Worldwide Rescue Committee (IRC), which has offered medical care there since early September, turned fearful they have been contracting the illness.

The Lust for Libya: How a Nation was Torn Aside | The Massive Image

Now, they concern each male has it. One detainee described a person coughing blood beside him. “Could God assist him. Yesterday they took him to the entrance door however the guards stated there isn’t any physician. So the quantity (of sick individuals) might improve, except there’s a resolution. We live by the ability of God.”

Thomas Garofalo, IRC Libya nation director, stated workers have been “overwhelmed.” 

“We had been working with the Nationwide Centre for Illness Management to doc and diagnose circumstances of TB, and we try to try this however the circumstances within the centre are simply not ample, that is the issue.”

He stated IRC has identified 25 circumstances of TB in Sikka, and those that have been deemed contagious have been eliminated and remoted, however this course of was suspended final week after workers examined constructive for TB. They’re conscious the illness could now be spreading.

“The issue is just not unmanageable, however Libya cannot or will not deal with it, and we want different international locations, on a humanitarian foundation, to supply assist and supply asylum if wanted, or at the very least to work with the Libyan authorities in order that we will have extra humane therapy of those individuals.”

The format of the centre means greater than 200 males and older teenage boys are all crammed into one darkish corridor, with virtually 230 ladies and youngsters in one other, extra open, space. Sick individuals are saved with everybody else.

Detainees are primarily Eritreans and Somalis, thought there are additionally Ethiopians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Syrians and South Sudanese, they are saying.

Amongst them are roughly 30 married . Husbands and wives can meet and converse for about ten minutes every week, in accordance with detainees. “At that second, the guards (stand) about one metre from you,” one commented. “You get afraid to the touch one another as a result of they do not love. The police do not prefer it.”

Abdulaziz, the Somali man who killed himself, was married, and his spouse stays within the centre. There are additionally youngsters there, together with new child infants.

Others locked up are pining misplaced loves; one man instructed Al Jazeera of his girlfriend who died within the Sahara desert on the way in which to Libya.

Detainees stated that, in addition to TB, individuals frequently undergo from fevers, kidney issues, and numerous different illnesses.

Some are disabled from accidents acquired earlier on the migration route.

“If I spend time extra right here it means I’m ready to die, as a result of the scenario could be very dangerous,” one man stated.

Present and former detainees say there have been anyplace between seven to twenty deaths in Triq al Sikka this yr.  Al Jazeera was unable to verify these deaths with any organisation working there. 

“Once they die, (the guards) simply take the physique and that is it,” stated one man, including if migrants did not maintain their very own remembrances or attempt to inform households, “nobody would do something”.

As proof of the tight maintain on data coming from the centre, telephones are strictly forbidden. Three former detainees stated they’d by no means ask guards to contact the household of somebody who died, for concern of being dropped at a small room and overwhelmed with metals or sticks, or disadvantaged of meals. 

When international guests come to Sikka, detainees stated injured or tortured individuals are hidden in the back of the corridor, put sitting between buses, or locked within the guards’ bogs. Three former detainees stated that UN workers all the time name earlier than they arrive, and guards warn detainees “should you say one thing adverse about us we are going to torture you”.

A international journalist who visited Triq al Sikka final yr confirmed he witnessed beatings there, and that it “gave the impression to be a punishment”. 

“Libyan guards don’t care about these individuals in any respect. That was clear to me throughout each place I visited. They actually did appear to contemplate these individuals like animals,” he stated. 

In late August, heavy combating broke out in Tripoli, as rival militias vied for management of the capital. In the course of the clashes, a missile fell near Sikka, and within the chaos some detainees escaped. However others, together with these with wives and youngsters, thought it was higher to remain the place they have been moderately than danger being on the streets, the place they might be killed or kidnapped.

Although a ceasefire was reached, detainees say they nonetheless hear occasional combating. “Everybody has weapons and on a regular basis we’re listening to the sounds of weapons,” one man stated.

In the course of the combating, medical groups monitoring TB circumstances misplaced observe of a few of these contaminated, in accordance with IRC’s Garofalo. The sounds of warfare additionally added to the trauma suffered by individuals who have already been via torture by smugglers, extortion and abuse alongside the path to Libya and the frustration of being returned from the Mediterranean after they tried to flee. 

Trauma means some detainees have begun to speak to themselves, sleep in the bathroom, get indignant, or “play with soiled issues,” one detainee instructed Al Jazeera.

“You already know jail could be very delicate for the thoughts. Whenever you keep a very long time with out something in jail it’s important to grow to be loopy or die. This jail could be very, very onerous for human beings.” 

When requested what was the worst factor they noticed in Sikka, former detainees have been unanimous. They stated it was when guards promote detainees to smugglers.

“These Libyans solely consider you as an trade,” one stated. 

Accused of working with smugglers

Human rights teams, together with Amnesty Worldwide, have beforehand accused the Libyan authorities of working with smugglers.

Different detainees say they really feel their solely hope is to return to unlawful routes, although figures from September present just one in ten migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean from Libya are making it to Europe.

“I haven’t got hope to evacuate by UNHCR,” an Eritrean stated. “I solely know that I’ll pay cash and check out once more to the ocean.”

All detainees Al Jazeera spoke to stated they realise that spending all day in cramped quarters, with little vitamin and poor sanitation, could have well being implications that might stick with them for all times.

One man stated he feels his face and physique now look ten years older than his precise age, due to all he is been via.

“This jail will get very soiled inside, there is not any place to stroll, so for 24 hours we’re sitting,” he stated.

“Due to the scarcity of meals, clear water, no treatment and never sufficient sleeping house, it’s extremely soiled with a nasty odor. We stayed a very long time with out recent air, daylight and no communication with our households and others,” he added.

“I miss outdoors a lot.” 

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from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/inside-libyan-detention-hell-where-refugee-burned-himself-alive-news/

[architectnews]

COVID-19 Demands New Utilitarian Architecture

COVID-19 Demands A New Utilitarian Architecture

Joel Solkoff’s Column Vol. VI, Number 4

Covid 19 has accelerated the need for a new utilitarian architecture: Architecture for the vulnerable (like me)

This photograph shows your columnist requiring assistance so I could stand upright for more than one minute. Two physical therapists helped. The date was October 2019 when three times a week I drove my electric wheelchair (scooter) for less than five minutes from my Liberty Lodge residential hotel room down past the parking lot to Phoenix Rehabilitation’s Lycoming County Office in Pennsylvania, US. My younger daughter Amelia Altalena took this photograph while on a brief break from being a police officer on active duty in the South.

“All Politics are local.” — Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Tip O’Neill 

Today, in Covid-spreading Lycoming County,—where the worst has not YET happened—returning to physical therapy would be unsafe. For movement–essential for paraplegics like me– I have to create an in-room gymnasium of sorts. Nothing fancy. Sinks at a safe height so I can I can briefly pull myself upright and then safely return to the wheelchair.

Architects: When you design housing, do you keep such necessities in mind? Or do you design from an Americans with Disability Act or other government official standards created by people other than those of us who do not walk, hear, or see?

This is a screen shot I took of me as an avatar in a 3-D gaming engine model

Who is an architect? This is the theme of today’s September 2020 US Covid-19 column.

Let us start with my editors

here at e-architect who for the past ten years have supporting me in my steadily increasing grandiosity:

e-architect co-founders Isabelle Lomholt and Adrian Welch introduce the first Architects for Change webinar this summer

Sunset for the vulnerable and what architects can do about it

Sunset photograph by me taken from the wheel-chair friendly balcony at the entrance to my residential hotel room. For nearly two years, I have lived at Liberty Lodge a three-story structure until April housing migrant construction workers and those in the oil shale industry. This summer, these workers had left. My hotel and the EconoLodge complex adjacent have become welfare hotels housing refugees from frequent downtown Williamsport fires and unsafe living conditions. Last month, a man living on my floor–four doors down— was arrested for heroin distribution. Daily the Pennsylvania State Police circle the parking lot writing down license plate numbers then followed by arrests. This new wave of my fellow residents who have not been Covid-19 tested has turned my residence from safe to dangerous to my health.

Dateline: Thursday September 3, 2020. Rural beautiful Lycoming County Pennsylvania, United States. After a lifetime of living somewhere else, this is my perch to learn from its rich architectural history.

Lycoming County—population 116,110—is also the dangerous perch:

+ where I live in a community with severely-limited pandemic testing

+ where health care workers have not been tested regularly

+ where doctors offices and hospitals do not have computer systems capable of handling the data demand of day to day let alone a pandemic

+ where mask-wearing and social distancing practices are openly defied; example. last week my health aide Frank Rasole Jr. (whom everyone calls “Frankie”) attended with his lady friend Jamie a neighborhood swimming pool where over 100 others bathed and frolicked at close distance–few wearing masks

+ where a decaying infrastructure makes inter-county Rust Belt transportation difficult; especially ( as happened not that long ago when I/) one is an ambulance speeding to the hospital and the ambulance is forced to stop because the shocks could not handle the potholes/

When I was a passenger in a central Pennsylvania ambulance forced to stop because the ambulance shock absorbers could not handle the potholes in the road, I asked the attendant to use my iPhone to take this photograph of the driver. N.B. For years now, the American Society of Civil Engineers has repeated given US infrastructure a D+ grade. In February 2020, Tom Smith, ASCE Executive Director. said, “Our nation is at a crossroads. Deteriorating infrastructure is not only impeding our ability to compete in a thriving economy, but it is also holding back advances to prepare us for the future. Each American family is losing $3,400 in disposable income each year – more than $9 a day – due to poor infrastructure. Modernizing our infrastructure is one of the only areas today where there is bipartisan agreement, and Americans were finally able to hear from the candidates on their ideas to modernize our roads and bridges, water systems, electric grid and more. We are thrilled many of the candidates have plans devoted to infrastructure and we look forward to working with our nation’s current and future leaders- in a bipartisan manner- to modernize our infrastructure and ensure that our country is sustainable, resilient, innovative and globally competitive.”

Who are the most vulnerable–most likely to die from the Corona virus

I am.

I am a 72 year old paraplegic who has survived cancer four times. Because my spleen was removed, my immune system is compromised. Plus, I am a paraplegic–unable to walk for the past 26 years. My daughters and granddaughters live hundreds of miles away. This year–2020– I had two serious surgeries–each successful despite a regional health care system incapable of handling the Covid-19 pandemic when it will soon strike the Rust Belt of Pennsylvania with disastrous consequences.

During my time here in Williamsport, county seat of Lycoming County, the Jewish community has been supportive (an understatement). Specifically, I am a member of the Orthodox Congregation Ohev Shalom, lover of peace. Ohev Shalom is the only wheel chair accessible synagogue in the area.

My original intention was to publish a photograph of the Ohev Shalom building, constructed in the 1950s. The reality is the architecture of the Jewish religion is the torah scroll. The torah is the first five books of the Old Testament; namely, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. According to the tradition, when Moses received the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai God also dictated the Five Books of Moses to Moses. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Biblical scholars are united in concluding that was a long time ago, “16th and 13th centuries BCE to after 750 BCE.” Unfortunately, Moses’ transcription has been lost. It was not until between the 7th and 10th centuries of the Common Era (CE) that a compete text of our Bible (known as the Masoretic text) became available. The Torah scroll here is a faithful reproduction of the Masoretic text written in permanent ink on lambskin.Over the course of the year, all the words in the Torah scroll are chanted. When Congregation Ohev Shalom acquired this new torah scroll earlier this year, I told Synagogue President Larissa Simon I would write a poem to mark the occasion. Because of Covid-19 no celebration took place, no Passover sedar, no regular services. Given the age of our synagogue membership–several of whom are in nursing homes–the pandemic is likely to kill Congregation Ohev Shalom founded over 100 years ago.

Rabbi Hillel asked three rhetorical questions:

Enter the Covid-19 related wisdom of Rabbi Hillel the Elder, our greatest rabbi

If I am not for myself who is for me?

If I am for myself along, what good am I?

If not now, when?

Enter Susan Dooha, Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CID-NY):

In answer to Rabbi Hillel’s first question “If I am not for myself who is for me?” Susan Dooha is not only for me, she is me. (Don’t tell her.} During the years when I have been able to walk I have been searching for a powerful disability rights organization that eschews rhetoric and represents me. Susan Dooha’s Center for Independence for the Disabled (CID-NY) is my organization. Susan knows how to win. I am especially interested in her successful law suit against New York City’s homeless shelter system where she is empowered to make changes. I am hereby lobbying her to insist that all barbed wire fencing be removed from New York City housing shelters.

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Let us pause on Rabbi Hillel’s questions and return to rural Pennsylvania

Last year, I became friendly with my next door neighbor here on the third floor of Liberty Lodge. My neighbor was a construction project manager for a federally funded project. He did not want to be identified; also, he regarded the project’s out of state architect as irrelevant to the design decisions he ordered his construction workers to perform. Here is the video I made of our four mile expedition to the Lycoming College building site in Williamsport.:

Lycoming County is 130 miles ( 209 KM ) northwest of Philadelphia and 165 miles (266 km) East northeast of Pittsburgh, IAs I write from RoomP 310 of Liberty Lodge, reality forces me to focus on these facts, Last month (August 2020), a thousand US Americans died each day–the highest rate in the world. Here in the US, an American dies every minute.

Screenshot by Joel Solkoff

Now would be a good time to hear Bruce Springsteen sing the theme song for today’s column

My City of Ruins (Live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2006) by Bruce Springsteen

Published in accordance with YouTube permission standards

Lyrics

My City of Ruins by Bruce Springsteen

There is a blood red circle On the cold dark ground And the rain is falling down The church door’s thrown open I can hear the organ’s song But the congregation’s gone My city of ruins My city of ruins Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up! Who is an architect?

There are good architects and bad architects. It is time for degrees and licensed professional architects to understand the reality: The customer is king.

Wake up architects and you engineers and construction executives who comprise the AEC community: You work for me. For ten years, I have been publishing here for e-architect on the necessity to design housing for people like me. People like me are Baby Boomers born after World War II dying in record numbers in US nursing homes designed by architects who did not realize that opening the window and letting in fresh air would prevent pandemic deaths. This is a screen shot I took of me as an avatar in a 3-D gaming engine model

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Twenty six years ago, when I was losing the ability to walk, I tripped on my feet

I fell against the couch (purchased impulsively after having admired it so) and dislocated my shoulder.

While waiting for the ambulance to arrive, Amelia, then four years old, asked, “Daddy, does it hurt?” I wanted to lie to my daughter, but reality intervened. The pain from my shoulder came so quickly, that all I could say was “Yes.“

Here I stood a few years earlier with Amelia in my arms and my elder daughter Joanna (to your right). I did not realize I was about to become an architect,—paraplegia being the school of hard knocks in lieu of an architecture degree.

This is the house where I lived when I lost the ability to walk. There was no ramp, of course, to make it possible for me to enter the front door of my house. At first, I was able to climb my way up the staircase from the garage where I parked my car. Worse than the House was the neighborhood. The grocery in Durham, North Carolina ( just down the road) was inaccessible given the absence of sidewalks. Eventually, I began a book “Renovating Existing Housing to Make it Wheel Chair Accessible” with this injunction:

“When you become disabled in the suburbs where the vast majority of US Americans live, the best thing you can do is move.” Moving is what I did to the Silicon Valley of California. In the process, my interaction with the built environment caused ad hoc architect me to make me realize: To make a house a home, the house must comfortably interact with the workplace, the grocery store and other community making sites— requiring an ad hoc architect to become a PNC ad hoc town planner.”

Note: My next column will contain an e-architect exclusive: An hitherto unpublished chapter on designing a bathroom, the most dangerous room in the house for paraplegics like me.

Publishing disability perspective on e-architect

For ten years, I have been publishing for e-architect articles, columns and videos on my disability perspective.

When I began writing here, I thought of myself as an outsider to architects in effect saying, I may not be an architect, but I know people like me who cannot walk nor stand for more than one minute can make your design more more effective. It is in response to the deadly pandemic that I helped e-architect launch the first Architects for Change webinar series organized around Rabbi Hillel’s three questions. The remaining two questions will be discussed in the next column.

To return to quetion “If I am not for myself who is for me? the two principal presenters in July ( stay tuned for more presenters) were Susan Dooha, representing the shameful present, In New York City ( as elsewhere in my country the failure of the design community to prepare for this shameful present is an daily (nay, hourly) concern for the Center for Independence of the Disabled, NY. Please go to the CID-NY website and hit the donate button. Susan needs your money. https://www.cidny.org/ ]

As a grandfather, my self-concern is for the future as well as whatever present is left to me. Enter Chris Lepine, Director, Zaha Hadid Architects, London who presented the future.

A segment from the Architects For Change webinar series featuring Chris LepineChris Lepine has been a member of the Zaha Hadid team since 2006, and has experience in large-scale international projects and the use of advanced digital technology to resolve complex design challenges. Chris was formerly an associate at Foster and Partners where he had many leadership roles in completed, international projects including lead designer and project architect for a prestigious winery in Spain. He also worked with Foster and Partners’ exclusive Specialist Modeling Group. Chris obtained a Master’s degree at Clemson University in South Carolina, where he received both the top graduate prize and the best thesis project award. He also holds a degree in finance from the University of South Carolina’s Honors College.

My editors beckon: “All right, stop writing, Joel.”

Isabelle Lomholt and Adrian Welch, Editors at e-architect:

“Good night and good luck,” as Greensboro, North Carolina born Edward R. Morrow, my hero, used to say.

My hero Edward R.Murrow broadcast this 1960 example of classic investigative reporting.This documentary was broadcast on Thanksgiving Day where I watched it at my maternal grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn. I was 12 years old at the time.Murrow’s documentary shaped my future career in measurable ways. Note the hideous conditions of farm worker housing. Little effort would find in Florida and Canada- where inadequate housing for migrant workers in danger of spreading the Corona virus have been reported. Think Black Lives Matter when you hear the words of a grower Murrow quoted: “We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them.”

1960: “Harvest of Shame”

Joel

Selfie, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, USA

jsolkoff@gmail.com 2019: East Third Street Williamsport, PA, US 17701 

Please feel free to phone me at US 570-772-4909 

Copyright © 2020 by Joel Solkoff. All rights reserved.

Coming soon to this column, Abraham Lincoln’s Washington. While pursuing the hotly contested Republican nomination in 1860, Lincoln gave a speech of his soon-to-be Civil War (1861-1865) Age which reverberates in our Covid-19 Age (March 2020 and for the many years that will follow)

Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

First Inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861. (In the 20th Century, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who spent a lot of time changing things, moved the inauguration date to January 20th which is when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will take the oath of office next year after a Democratic majority Senate and House are sworn in.

Architects take note and do something about the coming reality of billions of additional emergency housing dollars being poured into combatting Covid-19. As this 1861 photo shows, the Capital was under construction when Lincoln took the oath of office “to protect and defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. The following month, when the Civil War began, there was a lot of defending required to do and few resources left to do it. Even so, President Lincoln over the worst years of the bloody Civil War, made sure the Capitol dome was completed and expanded following the British in the War of 1812 who burned down the Capital (and also portions of the White House).

Washington DC was a malarial swamp at the time. President Lincoln could have cleaned up the swamp in the area now The Mall and cleaned out the mosquitos. The mosquitos may very will have given Lincon’s beloved son Todd the malaria that killed him. Princeton historian Jon Mecham insists that completing the Capitol (which happened four years later) was critical to the War effort whose purpose was to bring our country together.

Equally critical to the Covid-19 battle, Professor Meacham insists, is establishing the kind of strong federal process comparable to the US response to The Civil War and more immediately in daily comparisons to he bombing of Pearl Harbor. I will have you remotely visit my Capitol and the Washington DC designed by Pierre L’Enfant whih did not turn out entirely as he had planned.

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Belt and Suspenders Routine – Joel Solkoff’s Column

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[newstfionline]

Friday, October 30, 2020

U.S. refugee admissions (Foreign Policy) The number of refugees allowed into the United States in the coming year will be at its lowest level in modern times, after the White House announced just 15,000 refugees would be allowed settle in the country next year. According to a White House memo, 5,000 of those places will go to refugees facing religious persecution, 4,000 are reserved for refugees from Iraq who helped the United States, and 1,000 for refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras; 5,000 open slots remain, although refugees from Somalia, Syria, and Yemen are banned unless they can meet special humanitarian criteria. The future of U.S. refugee policy hangs on Tuesday’s vote: Former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to increase annual refugee admissions to 125,000, while the Guardian reports that a second Trump administration would seek to slash such admissions to zero.

Days From Election, Police Killing of Black Man Roils Philadelphia (NYT) There is a grim familiarity to it all. In the final days of a bitter election, it is a reprise of the terrible images that the country has come to know all too well this year: The shaky cellphone video, the abrupt death of a Black man at the hands of the police. The howls of grief at the scene. The protests that formed immediately. The looting of stores that lasted late into the night. It began on Monday, when two officers confronted Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old with a history of mental health problems. A lawyer for the family said that he was experiencing a crisis that day and that the family told officers about it when they arrived at the scene. In an encounter captured in video that appeared on social media, Mr. Wallace is seen walking into the street in the direction of the officers, who back away and aim their guns at him. Someone yells repeatedly at Mr. Wallace to “put the knife down.” The officers then fire multiple rounds. After Mr. Wallace falls to the ground, his mother screams and rushes to his body. Mr. Wallace later died of his wounds at a nearby hospital, and the neighborhood exploded in rage. In the days since, dozens have been arrested, cars have been burned and 53 officers have been hurt. On Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf called in the National Guard. On Wednesday, the city declared a 9 p.m. curfew. And once again, the people in the neighborhood where it all took place were left to consider what had happened and what, if anything, could be done about it.

Zeta soaks Southeast after swamping Gulf Coast; 6 dead (AP) Millions of people were without power and at least six were dead Thursday after Hurricane Zeta slammed into Louisiana and made a beeline across the South, leaving shattered buildings, thousands of downed trees and fresh anguish over a record-setting hurricane season. From the bayous of the Gulf Coast to Atlanta and beyond, Southerners used to dealing with dangerous weather were left to pick up the pieces once again. In Atlanta and New Orleans, drivers dodged trees in roads and navigated intersections without traffic signals. As many as 2.6 million homes and businesses lost power across seven states, but the lights were coming back on slowly. The sun came out and temperatures cooled, but trees were still swaying as the storm’s remnants blew through. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said the state sustained “catastrophic” damage on Grand Isle in Jefferson Parish, where Zeta punched three breaches in the levee. Edwards ordered the Louisiana National Guard to fly in soldiers to assist with search and rescue efforts and urged continued caution.

Violent criminal groups are eroding Mexico’s authority and claiming more territory (Washington Post) Organized crime here once meant a handful of cartels shipping narcotics up the highways to the United States. In a fundamental shift, the criminals of today are reaching ever deeper into the country, infiltrating communities, police forces and town halls. A dizzying range of armed groups—perhaps more than 200—have diversified into a broadening array of activities. They’re not only moving drugs but kidnapping Mexicans, trafficking migrants and shaking down businesses from lime growers to mining companies. It can be easy to miss how much the nation’s criminal threat has evolved. Mexico is the United States’ No. 1 trading partner, a country of humming factories and tranquil beach resorts. But despite 14 years of military operations—and $3 billion in U.S. anti-narcotics aid—criminal organizations are transforming the Mexican landscape: In a classified study produced in 2018 but not previously reported, CIA analysts concluded that drug-trafficking groups had gained effective control over about 20 percent of Mexico, according to several current and former U.S. officials. / Homicides in the last two years have surged to their highest levels in six decades; 2020 is on track to set another record. Mexico’s murder rate is more than four times that of the United States. / Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes to escape violence; the Mexican Congress is poised to pass the country’s first law to help the internally displaced. / More than 77,000 people have disappeared, authorities reported this year, a far larger total than previous governments acknowledged. It is the greatest such crisis in Latin America since the “dirty wars” of the 1970s and 1980s. / The State Department is urging Americans to avoid travel to half of Mexico’s states, tagging five of them as Level 4 for danger—the same as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has created a 100,000-member national guard to reclaim areas with little state presence. It’s not clear that will make a significant difference. Years of Mexican and U.S. strategy—arresting drug kingpins, training Mexican police, overhauling the justice system—have failed to curb the violence.

Many Cubans hope US election will lead to renewed ties (AP) Not so long ago the tables at Woow!!! restaurant in Havana were filled with tourists ordering mojitos and plates of grilled octopus. But as President Donald Trump rolled back Obama-era measures opening Cuba relations, the restaurant grew increasingly empty. Now entrepreneurs like Orlando Alain Rodríguez are keeping a close eye on the upcoming U.S. presidential election in hope that a win by Democratic challenger Joe Biden might lead to a renewal of a relationship cut short. “The Trump era has been like a virus to tourism in Cuba,” said Rodríguez, the owner of Woow!!! and another restaurant feeling the pinch. Few countries in Latin America have seen as dramatic a change in U.S. relations during the Trump administration or have as much at stake in who wins the election. Former President Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations, loosened restrictions on travel and remittances and became the first U.S. chief of state to set foot in the island in 88 years. The result was a boom in tourism and business growth on the island. Trump has steadily reversed that opening, tapping into the frustrations of a wide segment of the Cuban American community that does not support opening relations while a communist government remains in power. He put into effect part of a previously suspended U.S. law that permits American citizens to sue companies that have benefited from private properties confiscated by the Cuban government, put a new cap on remittances, reduced commercial flights and banned cruises. The president has also forbidden Americans from buying cigars, rum or staying in government-run hotels. A Trump reelection would likely spell another four years of tightened U.S. sanctions while many expect a Biden administration to carry out at least some opening.

Winter gloom settles over Europe (Washington Post) The clocks were dialed back an hour across Europe this week, and the long nights come early now. The hospitals are filling up, as the cafes are shutting down. Governments are threatening to cancel Christmas gatherings. As new coronavirus infections surge again in Europe, breaking daily records, the mood is growing dark on the continent—and it’s not even November. The reprieve of summer feels a long time ago, and Europe is entering a serious funk. Germany and France announced national lockdowns Wednesday to try to get the virus under control. The new measures are less restrictive than in the spring, and yet they face more resistance. People are no longer so willing to remain confined to their homes, venturing onto balconies in the evenings to applaud health-care workers. Many people remain scared of covid-19, but they are exhausted and frustrated—and growing angry and rebellious. In a sign of the times, the head of the World Health Organization recognized the “pandemic fatigue that people are feeling” but urged “we must not give up.” The smugness in Europe about having bested the Americans under President Trump is fading with the daily record-breaking counts.

Young and Jobless in Europe: ‘It’s Been Desperate’ (NYT) Like millions of young people across Europe, Rebecca Lee, 25, has suddenly found herself shut out of the labor market as the economic toll of the pandemic intensifies. Her job as a personal assistant at a London architecture firm, where she had worked for two years, was eliminated in September, leaving her looking for work of any kind. Ms. Lee, who has a degree in illustration from the University of Westminster, sent out nearly 100 job applications. After scores of rejections, and even being wait-listed for a food delivery gig at Deliveroo, she finally landed a two-month contract at a family-aid charity that pays 10 pounds (about $13) an hour. “At the moment I will take anything I can get,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s been desperate.” The coronavirus pandemic is rapidly fueling a new youth unemployment crisis in Europe. Young people are being disproportionately hit, economically and socially, by lockdown restrictions, forcing many to make painful adjustments and leaving policymakers grasping for solutions. Years of job growth has eroded in a matter of months, leaving more than twice as many young people than other adults out of work. The jobless rate for people 25 and under jumped from 14.7 percent in January to 17.6 percent in August. Europe is not the only place where younger workers face a jobs crunch. Young Americans are especially vulnerable to the downturn. In China, young adults are struggling for jobs in the post-outbreak era. But in Europe, the pandemic’s economic impact puts an entire generation at risk, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

3 dead in church attack, plunging France into dual emergency (AP) A man armed with a knife attacked people inside a French church and killed three Thursday, prompting the government to raise its security alert status to the maximum level hours before a nationwide coronavirus lockdown. The attack in Mediterranean city of Nice was the third in two months in France that authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists, including the beheading of a teacher. It comes during a growing furor over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were republished in recent months by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo—renewing vociferous debate in France and the Muslim world over the depictions that Muslims consider offensive but are protected by French free speech laws. Other confrontations and attacks were reported Thursday in the southern French city of Avignon and in the Saudi city of Jiddah, but it was not immediately clear if they were linked to the attack in Nice.

Germany does not believe Thai king has breached state business ban: source (Reuters) Germany does not believe that Thailand’s king has so far breached its ban on conducting politics while staying there, a parliamentary source said on Wednesday, after lawmakers were briefed by the government. Following a meeting of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, the source said the government had briefed lawmakers that it believes the king is permitted to make occasional decisions, as long as he does not continuously conduct business from German soil. When asked about the status of the king, the government told the committee he has a visa that allows him to stay in Germany for several years as a private person and also enjoys diplomatic immunity as a head of state. Thailand’s political crisis has made the king’s presence a challenge for Germany, but revoking the visa of a visiting head of state could cause a major diplomatic incident.

China’s New Confidence on Display (Foreign Policy) The Chinese leadership is currently meeting in Beijing to set economic and political goals for the next five years. In the run-up to the plenum, speeches by President Xi Jinping and others have demonstrated a bold confidence that this is China’s moment. As economic policymaker Liu He put it, “Bad things are turning into good ones.” Despite the damage to China’s global reputation this year, its leaders seem to believe that Western economic weakness and mishandling of the coronavirus have created opportunities. That may be true, but it may also encourage dangerous overconfidence, as happened in 2009, when the Chinese leadership was convinced the economic crisis had significantly weakened Washington. That overconfidence is most frightening when it comes to Taiwan, where recent saber-rattling has again raised the specter of an invasion. Distinguishing signal from noise on Taiwan is difficult, but the traditional restraints on Chinese military action—fear of U.S. intervention, reputational damage, and corruption inside the People’s Liberation Army—have weakened. The odds of Chinese action in Taiwan increase if the U.S. election doesn’t produce a clear result, or if a lame duck President Donald Trump embarks on a scorched-earth program on his way out—since Beijing may be convinced that a distracted Washington has no will to block it.

[ladystylestores]

Your Thursday Briefing – The New York Times

Xi’s chance to cast himself as indispensable

President Xi Jinping of China has seized on the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity in disguise — a chance to redeem the Chinese Communist Party after early mistakes let the pandemic spin out of control.

Shaping the narrative: Beijing is focusing on the disarray in the U.S. and other countries as China appears to have its outbreak under control. It is a dramatic turnaround from only months ago, when Mr. Xi faced a shaken public whose frustration even censors could not fully silence.

What Mr. Xi wants: To restore the pre-pandemic agenda, including his pledge to eradicate extreme poverty this year, while cautioning against complacency that could lead to a second wave. If he succeeds, he could chart a path to another term.

Biggest challenge: The economy contracted for the first time in more than four decades. Mr. Xi will have to keep hope in his leadership alive even as rise in prosperity on past levels is no longer certain.

“Great historical progress always happens after major disasters,” Mr. Xi said during a recent visit to a university. “Our nation was steeled and grew up through hardship and suffering.”

Cyclone slams into India’s coast

Cyclone Amphan knocked down trees, brought ropes of rain and sent villagers rushing into shelters when it made landfall on India’s eastern coast on Wednesday afternoon. Meteorologists say it is one of the most powerful storms in decades.

India and Bangladesh are still under coronavirus lockdown, which complicates a huge evacuation operation. One of the biggest challenges is how to protect people from getting infected while they are packed inside emergency centers.

Around three million people have been sent to shelters, but there are now fewer of them because the government converted many into quarantine centers.

First reports of deaths: At least two people were killed, including one child who died after a mud wall collapsed on top of him, according to Indian news reports.

What we’re tracking: Nearly a million Rohingya refugees are preparing for the worst in camps near Cox’s Bazar, in Bangladesh. And Kolkata, one of India’s historic cities, sits directly in the cyclone’s path.

Since the coronavirus broke out, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrant children alone — in some cases, without notifying their families. This is a reversal of years of established practice. Above, Sandra Rodríguez with her son Gerson, 10.

Our reporter looked at the policy shift and spoke with families, who described confusion, fear and chaos. One 16-year-old, Pedro Buezo Romero, was taken from his bed in a shelter in New York and told to pack a suitcase for a court appearance in Miami. Instead, he was put on a series of flights over two days and finally told he was being deported to Honduras.

Israel cyberattack: Israel was behind a cyberattack on May 9 that disrupted operations at a major port in Iran, according to intelligence officials and experts. The hacking of the port’s computers was in response to a failed Iranian cyberattack on an Israeli water facility last month.

What we’re listening to: The podcast “Wind of Change,” which explores a rumor that the 1990 ballad in the title, by the German band Scorpions, was written by the C.I.A. as part of a plot to change hearts and minds behind the Iron Curtain. Mike Wolgelenter, one of our editors in London, writes: “What’s not to love about a heavy metal-tinged deep dive into Cold War espionage?”

Now, a break from the news

Cook: A comforting, one-pan tuna casserole is just what we need right now. It has creamy white beans and a crunchy potato chip topping.

And now for the Back Story on …

Coronavirus rejiggers Germany’s politics

Germany’s measures for containment and careful reopening have been viewed as a model of a science-led approach. Melina talked to Katrin Bennhold, our Berlin bureau chief, about how the coronavirus crisis has shifted the political landscape in Germany, with the far right sidelined.

Something seems to have shifted for the far-right AfD, or Alternative for Germany, party during this pandemic. Their approval rating has been down in some national polls. Can you explain?

The pandemic has marginalized them. In February, the fallout from an inconclusive election in a small eastern state showed what a potent and disruptive force the AfD had become. It ultimately brought down Angela Merkel’s anointed successor. But when the pandemic hit, everything changed. Their narrative didn’t cut through anymore.

They struggled for three reasons: Merkel rose to the occasion. Her government basically managed to avoid the disaster that was unfolding in neighboring countries. Her approval rating surged — and this was a chancellor whose party had been tanking. So it became hard to attack her when about 80 percent of public opinion was behind her.

Second, AfD’s signature issues — especially migration — were no longer salient.

Third, the government was doing a lot of the things in the context of this health crisis that the AfD had been arguing for. Suddenly Merkel was closing borders — she became emblematic of a strong nation-state.

Will that last?

The reopening has given them a chance to step back into the national conversation. They’re trying to sort of turn Merkel’s measures around and say, Look, it’s possible to close the borders, and the nation-state is actually the relevant entity, not Europe, not the world. They are trying to co-opt some of the corona protests that are currently playing out on the streets of Germany.

The ultimate test will be the country’s mood after the economic crisis that has only just begun. The far right is banking on a meltdown, and the government is throwing money at this. For example, a short-term work program allows employers to cut employee hours while the government makes up some of the difference.

What does Germany’s reopening actually look like, and why did the containment work so well?

Success in this pandemic is basically a combination of some things that were already in place, like a robust health care system, and then a science-led approach. Merkel consulted very early with scientists, got testing off the ground and then coordinated with state governors. There was a sense of unity.

The reopening is happening in phases, and Merkel handed it back to the states this month. First it was shops and some schools. Restaurants opened last week in Berlin, where I live. It felt like a big moment.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Melina and Carole

Thank you To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is on racial disparities in the coronavirus death rate. • Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Worker in Santa’s workshop (three letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • The Times won six medallions and three merit awards in the Silurians Press Club’s Excellence in Journalism competition for work from the Metro desk.

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[pensarelvirus]

The pandemic is a portal /  Arundhati Roy

. Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

.

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.  

 The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

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On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

 As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.   

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual.

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

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State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

 As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

*

Arundhati Roy’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’

Fuente: https://www.ft.com/content/Arundhati Roy

[Publicado 3/abril/2020]

[mastcomm]

Your Wednesday Briefing – The New York Times

Hong Kong limits travel to curtail outbreak

As the number of known cases of the Wuhan coronavirus rose by nearly 60 percent on Monday night into Tuesday, Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, said the territory would strictly limit travelers from mainland China starting on Thursday.

The move followed days of rising pressure from health care workers, experts and even lawmakers who support Mrs. Lam’s government, and reflected distrust of the mainland as evidenced both from recent protests and the 2003 SARS crisis, in which nearly 300 people died in Hong Kong alone.

Elsewhere, officials in Germany and Japan reported the first known cases of human-to-human transmission of the virus — meaning countries now have to worry not only about quarantining infected travelers, but also about keeping the virus from spreading within their borders.

Toll: At least 106 people have died, China said on Tuesday, and the number of cases increased to 4,515 on Tuesday, from 2,835 on Monday, according to the National Health Commission. The youngest confirmed case is a 9-month-old girl in Beijing.

What’s next: China has extended the Lunar New Year holiday to Feb. 3, and some major cities have gone further, telling businesses not to open until the next week.

Britain declines to bar Huawei

The Chinese telecommunications giant can be part of Britain’s new high-speed 5G wireless network, the British government said, despite intense American arguments that Huawei could be used by the Chinese government as a channel for control and surveillance.

Both the U.S. and China, vying for tech supremacy, had tried to sway Britain’s decision. A Trump administration official said the U.S. was “disappointed.”

The decision did not name Huawei, specifying instead that “high-risk vendors” posing “greater security and resilience risks to U.K. telecoms networks” would be able to provide equipment in some portions of the network, like antennas and base stations, but not parts of the nerve center like servers.

Implications: Britain’s membership in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group, along with Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., gives the decision added significance. And it comes as Germany is also deciding whether to work with Huawei.

Boris Johnson’s balancing act: The prime minister is risking a rift with President Trump ahead of negotiating a new trade deal with the U.S., but the potential of 5G makes the gains from a deal look paltry.

How an N.B.A. star dazzled Asia, too

Over his two-decade career with the Los Angeles Lakers, Kobe Bryant played an important role in the basketball league’s international expansion.

His stature as an international celebrity, honed by both the N.B.A. and Nike, crystallized during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, when he was swarmed by fellow athletes. In China, he routinely had the highest sales of shoes and jerseys.

Bryant was a frequent visitor to China for basketball camps and promotional stops, and he appeared in commercials, like one with the Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou. He was also popular in the Philippines.

The investigation: All possible causes for the helicopter crash on Sunday that killed Bryant and eight others are still being considered, but the hillsides around the flight’s destination near Los Angeles were enveloped in a nearly blinding fog at the time. The helicopter was not carrying a cockpit voice recorder, and federal investigators aren’t expected to reach a conclusion for months. Here are the latest updates.

Another angle: We spoke to a high school teacher that Bryant considered a mentor and “muse” about their remarkable friendship: “He has left such a void behind,” she said.

Long awaited, Trump peace plan favors Israel

President Trump unveiled his Middle East peace plan on Tuesday in the presence of only one party to the conflict, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

What Mr. Trump called a “win-win” proposal would give Israel most of what it has sought and create a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. The Palestinian leadership immediately rejected the plan, which discards the idea of a full-fledged Palestinian state.

Analysts saw the document as a distraction offered by a president under impeachment working with a prime minister under criminal indictment.

The details: The plan would guarantee Israeli control of a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any West Bank settlements. Mr. Trump promised to provide $50 billion in international financing for the new Palestinian entity and to open an embassy there.

At the impeachment trial: The president’s legal team made its last oral arguments on Tuesday. Senators will now have 16 hours to ask questions of each side.

A vote on whether to hear witnesses in the trial is expected on Friday, with a few Republican senators appearing to favor calling John Bolton, the former national security adviser whose book manuscript corroborates a central accusation: that Mr. Trump tied Ukraine’s military aid to politically motivated investigations.

If you have 6 minutes, this is worth it

Japan’s skateboarders roll out of the shadows

Japan has an Olympic skateboarding team that is likely to win more medals than that of any other country in the first such competition. But most of its members would not dream of taking out their boards on Japan’s streets, where the sport has long been seen as a pastime of unruly children.

This year’s summer Olympics could give its Japanese adherents something new: everyday acceptance.

Here’s what else is happening

India: A state visit by President Trump is planned for late February, according to Indian officials. The visit could be seen as an endorsement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent policies that have deeply divided India and set off deadly nationwide protests.

Belgian king: After a court-ordered DNA test to resolve a decade-long paternity claim, King Albert II, 85, conceded that he was the biological father of the artist Delphine Boël, 51, who has long said she was conceived during an affair between her mother and Albert before he ascended the throne.

Snapshot: Above, a Syrian asylum seeker at a migrant camp in the Turkish-controlled part of Cyprus. The tiny island now hosts the most refugees per capita in the European Union, the result of a loophole within its vexing political situation.

What we’re looking at: These photos in The Atlantic of the locust swarms in East Africa. “For those keeping track of the plagues hitting the planet,” writes Andrea Kannapell, the Briefings editor.

Now, a break from the news

Go: Momcations, a getaway designed for tired mothers, are on the rise. While some see it as profiteering, others say it’s a sign of “the mainstream telling moms they deserve a break.”

Smarter Living: Breaking up with a therapist can be nerve-racking. But doing it with these tips in mind can turn it into an opportunity for growth.

And now for the Back Story on …

Reporting in Wuhan

Chris Buckley, our chief China correspondent, is reporting this week from the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. Mike Ives, on the Briefings team, spoke with Chris by phone.

What is it like with these unprecedented restrictions in place?

It may be difficult to envisage just how thoroughly people have retreated from the streets and from public life. I had to cross one of the big bridges across the Yangtze for my reporting. And there I was, on one of these Chinese share bikes that are everywhere, on an almost completely empty bridge, spanning one of China’s biggest cities, crossing its biggest river. And there were just two other people on the bridge.

A lot of people wonder how long the shutdown can last. Even now people are worrying about the jobs they may lose, the businesses that will close, the school semesters that they might miss.

You’ve reported that the anger on Chinese social media is intense.

Yes, and you hear that here as well. People erupt with a kind of anger and exasperation over how it was that this dangerous pathogen was among them but they didn’t understand, in many cases, how serious it was or what was going on until the city was shut down.

But that’s leavened by a sense among many people that the most pressing thing is to get through this crisis — so that as few people die as possible and life can return to a kind of normality as soon as possible.

What else are you seeing there?

You see a combination of reactions when you approach people to talk. First of all, there’s a natural wariness about getting close to anybody. But once you reassure them — you’re outside, at a distance of a good 10 feet — they can be very open and also very generous.

How does that compare to the response you normally get?

The reaction you get as a foreign reporter varies quite a bit across China. But I think these circumstances, where people feel that they — and, in a sense, we — are all in this together, and that you’re there somehow experiencing this as well, make it easier to create that connection.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Melina

Thank you To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about the ripple effects of John Bolton’s coming book. • Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: What causes Pinocchio’s nose to grow (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • Jason Polan, a New York sketch artist, produced hundreds of illustrations for the print edition of The Times. He died on Monday at age 37.

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Deported to Death: What It Means to ‘Go Back’ to Somalia

GettyMOGADISHU, Somalia—Ahmed Salah Hassan walked across Africa and Latin America to get to the United States. He traversed nearly 20 national borders, hiked the Darién Gap—a 60-mile patch of untamable jungle and swamp—and braved the checks at the U.S. southern border. But Hassan, looking for freedom and safety, never found it in the United States. When he finally, legally, crossed into Brownsville, Texas, in the spring of 2015, he was detained immediately. That set off a two-year odyssey through immigration detention centers—first at the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Louisiana, then at Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, before he was deported back to Somalia, the country he’d fled nearly a decade earlier.Hassan’s story started well before Donald Trump claimed that Somali-born U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other women of color in Congress should “go back” to the countries they came from. But that is what Hassan was forced to do.His time in America ended in late January 2017, less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, when he was put on a chartered flight full of deportees to Somalia. And in March of this year, Hassan died in a restaurant bombing in the Somali capital Mogadishu, killed in the sort of violence from which he’d fled in the first place. * * *The Paper Trail* * *The Daily Beast obtained Hassan’s temporary travel document issued by the Embassy of Somalia in Washington, D.C. It says he was 29 years old when he was deported. Hassan’s death certificate, issued by the Somali Sudanese Specialized Hospital, says he was 30 when he was killed. It also says he died on his way to the hospital. He was married to a woman named Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed. His daughter, Amran Ahmed Saalah, is 6 years old. Friends and family said Hassan believed there could be no life for him in Somalia, and he was right. But he was wrong about another country: There could be no life for him in the United States, either. “My country is burning, he would say,” recalls a friend and co-worker who knew Hassan in South Africa, before he decided to keep moving to the States.The policies that left Hassan imprisoned for two years, denied asylum and detained under the Obama administration, and finally deported, have accelerated at lightning speed since Trump took office. Today, more people are being held and then returned to deadly environments from which they fled than ever before, and the administration is making moves to deny asylum claims almost entirely. “I think there are numerous variables that contribute to an individual being unable to prevail with an asylum claim,” says Priscilla Olivarez, a managing attorney for immigration legal service provider American Gateways. “However, we have seen changes in policy and practice under the current administration that have made it significantly more difficult for asylum seekers (including Somalis) to win their asylum claim.”  In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hassan’s wife, Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed, said she thought that sending someone back to Somalia was like sentencing them to death. There is little doubt, certainly, that Somalia is a dangerous place to live.On Thursday the mayor of Mogadishu died from wounds received when a suicide bomber walked into his compound on July 24 in the midst of a high-level meeting, detonating bombs that killed 11 people in all. Two days before that, a car bomb killed at least 17 people at a busy checkpoint in the city. Ten days before that, 26 people were killed, and approximately 50 injured, in the southern port city of Kismayo after a complex attack on a popular hotel. Al Shabaab, the Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for all of these attacks. * * *State of Denials* * *Five days after Trump was inaugurated, he issued mandates related to immigration. One called “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” would have the most impact on people like Hassan because it almost entirely ended the opportunity for migrants to leave detention after they arrived in the U.S. Experts and activists say this change sentenced most asylum seekers to deportation before they even went before a judge. “Asylum seekers who are denied parole and remain in detention have a much harder time finding attorneys, which asylum seekers are not guaranteed or given for free, but are crucial to winning an asylum case,” Yael Schacher, a senior advocate at Refugees International, told The Daily Beast. Before the order, migrants and asylum seekers who came to the border as "arriving aliens" would always be locked up, but would be eligible for a parole hearing that would allow them to be released (sometimes on bond) as their case proceeded. The new order said, "The Secretary shall immediately take all appropriate action to ensure that the parole and asylum provisions of Federal immigration law are not illegally exploited to prevent the removal of otherwise removable aliens.”  What that meant in practice was revealed in a memo from then-Chief of Staff John Kelly issued to the Department of Homeland Security less than a month later. “The President has determined,” he said, that “the lawful detention of aliens” deemed unfit for parole was the most sensible way  to “enforce immigration laws at our borders.” Essentially, anyone who was not paroled would be detained for the duration of the court proceedings. Parole, the memo said, should be used "sparingly.”  With these new rules, those seeking freedom via parole would need to make much stronger cases for release, furthering their chances of staying locked up even if they met parole criteria, researchers and activists contend.Since Kelly’s mandate was issued the number of people detained by ICE continues to break records. In March, The Daily Beast reported over 50,000 people were detained, an apparent all-time high. The number hasn’t gone down; as of today ICE has the current population at 52,100. Here’s How Some Africans Joined the Migrant Caravan Heading for the U.S.ICE presents reasons for denying parole as a checklist. According to documents shared with The Daily Beast, Hassan was denied parole because, as per the checklist, any documentation he submitted to prove his identity was deemed insufficient and he couldn’t prove that he was not a flight risk.  On May 30, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU filed a joint suit against the Trump administration claiming it is “categorically denying release” to detained immigrants. * * *The ICE Odyssey* * *After a short detention in Texas, Hassan was held in La Salle Detention Center in the middle of Louisiana, then after his asylum claim was denied he was moved to Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden in northeast Alabama, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  He was in each facility for about 300 days, according to ICE.  Hassan’s wife, Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed,  said they spoke “many times” while he was in detention in the States and she in Somalia. Asked if he seemed stressed, she said, “He didn’t want to share his emotions with me, he was hiding [them].” In Gadsden, Alabama, Hassan ran into his friend Qeys Bare, a fellow Somali. Hassan and Qeys had worked together in the same mall in South Africa, before xenophobic violence there motivated them to try their luck in the States. Qeys doesn’t describe Etowah Country as a holding cell, he describes it as a “jail.”Indeed, Etowah is part-detention center, part-prison, with about 350 beds for people detained by ICE and about 500 for people in jail, says Resha Swanson, the policy and communications coordinator for Adelante Alabama Worker Center, an organization does two to four visits a month to Etowah. Swanson says inmates told her that they sometimes received a half a tomato and a slice of bread for a meal, and that there aren’t enough refrigerators so food often spoils.  “Etowah is where people are sent to be broken and to sign their deportation papers as quickly as possible,” Swanson told The Daily Beast.* * *Lawyering Down* * *As Europe slams its gates to newcomers via new policies to stop people from leaving Libya, record numbers of African refugees, migrants and asylum seekers have been attempting to come to the United States instead. According to Mexican authorities, from January to July in 2016 almost 8,000 people from Africa and Asia presented themselves at Mexican immigration checkpoints, compared to 4,261 in all of 2015 and 1,831 in 2014. A Reuters report last month with data from Mexico’s interior ministry suggests that migration from Africa this year will break records.Libya’s Migrant ‘Holding Areas’ Have Become Death CampsBesides the shift making indefinite detention extremely probable, it is now also becoming more likely that once the case is processed, the asylum claim will be denied.“It has always been very difficult to win an asylum claim,” says Carl Bon Tempo, a professor of history at the State University of New York-Albany and author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War. “Asylum is a very hard legal status to achieve.” To win an asylum case an applicant has to put together extensive documentation, which is often difficult to marshal when fleeing a war zone and usually requires the assistance of an immigration lawyer, who may be expensive and hard to access when one is detained. “It is especially hard for asylum seekers to find pro bono or low cost attorneys if they are transferred to detention facilities in remote areas,” says Schacher of Refugees International.  “These transfers also take them to jurisdictions of immigration judges with low asylum grant rates. Prolonged detention is isolating, traumatic and demoralizing—the food and medical care are poor, there is no education and little recreation, making phone calls is expensive. African asylum seekers have also faced discrimination and worse conditions than others. Under these circumstances, many would ‘choose’ to give up their claims.” * * *Un-Appealing* * *Hassan did not have an immigration lawyer. His case for asylum was denied in Oakdale Immigration Court in Louisiana in August 2016. The presiding judge, Agnelis Reese, has rejected every single asylum claim that has crossed her desk—over 200 hearings in five years. Hassan did not appeal the decision but Hassan’s wife, Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed, said he was surprised by the outcome: who would send someone back to Somalia? We will never know exactly why Hassan did not appeal his decision. Qeys expects that Hassan’s reasons were much the same as his. “I didn’t take the appeal,” he said in a WhatsApp message, “because I was tired in prison. I wanted to be free somewhere.” But Hassan’s wife said he didn’t feel that way. Hassan was upset to leave detention. He would rather have stayed there than come back to Somalia. Key members of the Trump administration including Stephen Miller and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions have re-ignited a long-standing argument that says many people fleeing their homes are not legitimate victims of persecution, they are economic migrants looking to optimize their situation. Sessions has long said asylum seekers are “gaming” the system.“The credible fear process was intended to be a lifeline for persons facing serious persecution. But it has become an easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States,” Sessions said in his comments to the Executive Office for Immigration Review in October, 2017, a few months after Hassan was deported.  “This argument has been going on since the 1930s,” Bon Tempo said. “You saw it in opposition to European refugees,” when many Jews were turned away from American shores. “You have people saying they're not victims of Nazi persecution, they're people trying to get out and have a better life.” As with detentions, asylum denials hit a record high under Trump, with 65 percent denied last year according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).This increase could be due to a backlog of cases of people that have been sitting in detention that are now getting more quickly processed because quotas have been raised for immigration judges. More than 42,000 asylum cases were decided in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2018, the most since TRAC began compiling this data in 2001.Denials climbed after former Attorney General Sessions announced women fleeing gang and domestic violence would not be granted asylum. Like detention and denials, physical deportations back to war zones have peaked under Trump, with Somalis being one of the most targeted groups. There has been a greater than 135 percent increase in the number of Somalis deported under Trump compared to the Obama administration (750 in FY 2017/2018 compared to 318 in FY 2015/2016) according to statistics from the Department of Homeland Security show. * * *Un-Safe at Home* * *Back in Somalia, Hassan looked for work, but the country’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the world—67 percent for people under 30, according to the United Nations—and he couldn’t find anything. His wife says he especially wanted to work for a travel agency.  Even though the decision to deny Hassan asylum was made under the Obama administration, and Trump was less than a week in office when he was loaded onto a charter plane for deportation, Hassan’s wife said he still blamed Trump. Hassan was convinced he was deported because of this president who campaigned with a promise he would ban virtually all Muslims from entering the United States.Hassan’s wife saw him for the last time at 8:00 on the morning of Thursday, March 28. They talked three times that day, she recalled. Their house was undergoing some renovations, so they’d gone back and forth about that over the course of the day. Then Hassan’s cousin called her around evening prayers to say he’d been in the attack, and she rushed to the hospital. He’d already died in the ambulance. He had wounds from shrapnel in his side and in his head, she recalled. Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed, now a widow, has heard about Trump telling Ihhan Omar to go back to Somalia, and she said that his willingness to level such language at a sitting official shows how much he hates refugees, Muslims and black people in general. Still, she told us if she could say anything directly to Trump, she would tell him, “We are helpless, me and my daughter.” She would want Trump to give them a new life in the United States.“I don’t think he will hear me,” she said. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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GettyMOGADISHU, Somalia—Ahmed Salah Hassan walked across Africa and Latin America to get to the United States. He traversed nearly 20 national borders, hiked the Darién Gap—a 60-mile patch of untamable jungle and swamp—and braved the checks at the U.S. southern border. But Hassan, looking for freedom and safety, never found it in the United States. When he finally, legally, crossed into Brownsville, Texas, in the spring of 2015, he was detained immediately. That set off a two-year odyssey through immigration detention centers—first at the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Louisiana, then at Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, before he was deported back to Somalia, the country he’d fled nearly a decade earlier.Hassan’s story started well before Donald Trump claimed that Somali-born U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other women of color in Congress should “go back” to the countries they came from. But that is what Hassan was forced to do.His time in America ended in late January 2017, less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, when he was put on a chartered flight full of deportees to Somalia. And in March of this year, Hassan died in a restaurant bombing in the Somali capital Mogadishu, killed in the sort of violence from which he’d fled in the first place. * * *The Paper Trail* * *The Daily Beast obtained Hassan’s temporary travel document issued by the Embassy of Somalia in Washington, D.C. It says he was 29 years old when he was deported. Hassan’s death certificate, issued by the Somali Sudanese Specialized Hospital, says he was 30 when he was killed. It also says he died on his way to the hospital. He was married to a woman named Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed. His daughter, Amran Ahmed Saalah, is 6 years old. Friends and family said Hassan believed there could be no life for him in Somalia, and he was right. But he was wrong about another country: There could be no life for him in the United States, either. “My country is burning, he would say,” recalls a friend and co-worker who knew Hassan in South Africa, before he decided to keep moving to the States.The policies that left Hassan imprisoned for two years, denied asylum and detained under the Obama administration, and finally deported, have accelerated at lightning speed since Trump took office. Today, more people are being held and then returned to deadly environments from which they fled than ever before, and the administration is making moves to deny asylum claims almost entirely. “I think there are numerous variables that contribute to an individual being unable to prevail with an asylum claim,” says Priscilla Olivarez, a managing attorney for immigration legal service provider American Gateways. “However, we have seen changes in policy and practice under the current administration that have made it significantly more difficult for asylum seekers (including Somalis) to win their asylum claim.”  In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hassan’s wife, Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed, said she thought that sending someone back to Somalia was like sentencing them to death. There is little doubt, certainly, that Somalia is a dangerous place to live.On Thursday the mayor of Mogadishu died from wounds received when a suicide bomber walked into his compound on July 24 in the midst of a high-level meeting, detonating bombs that killed 11 people in all. Two days before that, a car bomb killed at least 17 people at a busy checkpoint in the city. Ten days before that, 26 people were killed, and approximately 50 injured, in the southern port city of Kismayo after a complex attack on a popular hotel. Al Shabaab, the Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for all of these attacks. * * *State of Denials* * *Five days after Trump was inaugurated, he issued mandates related to immigration. One called “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” would have the most impact on people like Hassan because it almost entirely ended the opportunity for migrants to leave detention after they arrived in the U.S. Experts and activists say this change sentenced most asylum seekers to deportation before they even went before a judge. “Asylum seekers who are denied parole and remain in detention have a much harder time finding attorneys, which asylum seekers are not guaranteed or given for free, but are crucial to winning an asylum case,” Yael Schacher, a senior advocate at Refugees International, told The Daily Beast. Before the order, migrants and asylum seekers who came to the border as "arriving aliens" would always be locked up, but would be eligible for a parole hearing that would allow them to be released (sometimes on bond) as their case proceeded. The new order said, "The Secretary shall immediately take all appropriate action to ensure that the parole and asylum provisions of Federal immigration law are not illegally exploited to prevent the removal of otherwise removable aliens.”  What that meant in practice was revealed in a memo from then-Chief of Staff John Kelly issued to the Department of Homeland Security less than a month later. “The President has determined,” he said, that “the lawful detention of aliens” deemed unfit for parole was the most sensible way  to “enforce immigration laws at our borders.” Essentially, anyone who was not paroled would be detained for the duration of the court proceedings. Parole, the memo said, should be used "sparingly.”  With these new rules, those seeking freedom via parole would need to make much stronger cases for release, furthering their chances of staying locked up even if they met parole criteria, researchers and activists contend.Since Kelly’s mandate was issued the number of people detained by ICE continues to break records. In March, The Daily Beast reported over 50,000 people were detained, an apparent all-time high. The number hasn’t gone down; as of today ICE has the current population at 52,100. Here’s How Some Africans Joined the Migrant Caravan Heading for the U.S.ICE presents reasons for denying parole as a checklist. According to documents shared with The Daily Beast, Hassan was denied parole because, as per the checklist, any documentation he submitted to prove his identity was deemed insufficient and he couldn’t prove that he was not a flight risk.  On May 30, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU filed a joint suit against the Trump administration claiming it is “categorically denying release” to detained immigrants. * * *The ICE Odyssey* * *After a short detention in Texas, Hassan was held in La Salle Detention Center in the middle of Louisiana, then after his asylum claim was denied he was moved to Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden in northeast Alabama, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  He was in each facility for about 300 days, according to ICE.  Hassan’s wife, Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed,  said they spoke “many times” while he was in detention in the States and she in Somalia. Asked if he seemed stressed, she said, “He didn’t want to share his emotions with me, he was hiding [them].” In Gadsden, Alabama, Hassan ran into his friend Qeys Bare, a fellow Somali. Hassan and Qeys had worked together in the same mall in South Africa, before xenophobic violence there motivated them to try their luck in the States. Qeys doesn’t describe Etowah Country as a holding cell, he describes it as a “jail.”Indeed, Etowah is part-detention center, part-prison, with about 350 beds for people detained by ICE and about 500 for people in jail, says Resha Swanson, the policy and communications coordinator for Adelante Alabama Worker Center, an organization does two to four visits a month to Etowah. Swanson says inmates told her that they sometimes received a half a tomato and a slice of bread for a meal, and that there aren’t enough refrigerators so food often spoils.  “Etowah is where people are sent to be broken and to sign their deportation papers as quickly as possible,” Swanson told The Daily Beast.* * *Lawyering Down* * *As Europe slams its gates to newcomers via new policies to stop people from leaving Libya, record numbers of African refugees, migrants and asylum seekers have been attempting to come to the United States instead. According to Mexican authorities, from January to July in 2016 almost 8,000 people from Africa and Asia presented themselves at Mexican immigration checkpoints, compared to 4,261 in all of 2015 and 1,831 in 2014. A Reuters report last month with data from Mexico’s interior ministry suggests that migration from Africa this year will break records.Libya’s Migrant ‘Holding Areas’ Have Become Death CampsBesides the shift making indefinite detention extremely probable, it is now also becoming more likely that once the case is processed, the asylum claim will be denied.“It has always been very difficult to win an asylum claim,” says Carl Bon Tempo, a professor of history at the State University of New York-Albany and author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War. “Asylum is a very hard legal status to achieve.” To win an asylum case an applicant has to put together extensive documentation, which is often difficult to marshal when fleeing a war zone and usually requires the assistance of an immigration lawyer, who may be expensive and hard to access when one is detained. “It is especially hard for asylum seekers to find pro bono or low cost attorneys if they are transferred to detention facilities in remote areas,” says Schacher of Refugees International.  “These transfers also take them to jurisdictions of immigration judges with low asylum grant rates. Prolonged detention is isolating, traumatic and demoralizing—the food and medical care are poor, there is no education and little recreation, making phone calls is expensive. African asylum seekers have also faced discrimination and worse conditions than others. Under these circumstances, many would ‘choose’ to give up their claims.” * * *Un-Appealing* * *Hassan did not have an immigration lawyer. His case for asylum was denied in Oakdale Immigration Court in Louisiana in August 2016. The presiding judge, Agnelis Reese, has rejected every single asylum claim that has crossed her desk—over 200 hearings in five years. Hassan did not appeal the decision but Hassan’s wife, Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed, said he was surprised by the outcome: who would send someone back to Somalia? We will never know exactly why Hassan did not appeal his decision. Qeys expects that Hassan’s reasons were much the same as his. “I didn’t take the appeal,” he said in a WhatsApp message, “because I was tired in prison. I wanted to be free somewhere.” But Hassan’s wife said he didn’t feel that way. Hassan was upset to leave detention. He would rather have stayed there than come back to Somalia. Key members of the Trump administration including Stephen Miller and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions have re-ignited a long-standing argument that says many people fleeing their homes are not legitimate victims of persecution, they are economic migrants looking to optimize their situation. Sessions has long said asylum seekers are “gaming” the system.“The credible fear process was intended to be a lifeline for persons facing serious persecution. But it has become an easy ticket to illegal entry into the United States,” Sessions said in his comments to the Executive Office for Immigration Review in October, 2017, a few months after Hassan was deported.  “This argument has been going on since the 1930s,” Bon Tempo said. “You saw it in opposition to European refugees,” when many Jews were turned away from American shores. “You have people saying they're not victims of Nazi persecution, they're people trying to get out and have a better life.” As with detentions, asylum denials hit a record high under Trump, with 65 percent denied last year according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).This increase could be due to a backlog of cases of people that have been sitting in detention that are now getting more quickly processed because quotas have been raised for immigration judges. More than 42,000 asylum cases were decided in the fiscal year ending September 30, 2018, the most since TRAC began compiling this data in 2001.Denials climbed after former Attorney General Sessions announced women fleeing gang and domestic violence would not be granted asylum. Like detention and denials, physical deportations back to war zones have peaked under Trump, with Somalis being one of the most targeted groups. There has been a greater than 135 percent increase in the number of Somalis deported under Trump compared to the Obama administration (750 in FY 2017/2018 compared to 318 in FY 2015/2016) according to statistics from the Department of Homeland Security show. * * *Un-Safe at Home* * *Back in Somalia, Hassan looked for work, but the country’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the world—67 percent for people under 30, according to the United Nations—and he couldn’t find anything. His wife says he especially wanted to work for a travel agency.  Even though the decision to deny Hassan asylum was made under the Obama administration, and Trump was less than a week in office when he was loaded onto a charter plane for deportation, Hassan’s wife said he still blamed Trump. Hassan was convinced he was deported because of this president who campaigned with a promise he would ban virtually all Muslims from entering the United States.Hassan’s wife saw him for the last time at 8:00 on the morning of Thursday, March 28. They talked three times that day, she recalled. Their house was undergoing some renovations, so they’d gone back and forth about that over the course of the day. Then Hassan’s cousin called her around evening prayers to say he’d been in the attack, and she rushed to the hospital. He’d already died in the ambulance. He had wounds from shrapnel in his side and in his head, she recalled. Kaafiya Ibrahim Mohamed, now a widow, has heard about Trump telling Ihhan Omar to go back to Somalia, and she said that his willingness to level such language at a sitting official shows how much he hates refugees, Muslims and black people in general. Still, she told us if she could say anything directly to Trump, she would tell him, “We are helpless, me and my daughter.” She would want Trump to give them a new life in the United States.“I don’t think he will hear me,” she said. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

August 09, 2019 at 09:42AM via IFTTT

[thisdaynews]

Migrant mental health crisis spirals in ICE detention facilities

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/migrant-mental-health-crisis-spirals-in-ice-detention-facilities/

Migrant mental health crisis spirals in ICE detention facilities

Men stand in an Immigration and Border Enforcement detention center in McAllen, Texas, on July 12 during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence. | Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post via AP, Pool

health care

ICE struggles to handle migrants with serious mental illness.

Federal inspectors visiting a California migrant detention center made a shocking discovery last year: Detainees had made nooses from bedsheets in 15 of 20 cells in the facility they visited.

The inspection revealed the extent of a largely unseen mental health crisis within the growing population of migrants who are being held in detention centers in border states. President Donald Trump’s 2017 decision toreversea policy that encouraged releasing vulnerable individuals while they await deportation hearings has left U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unequipped to deal with conditions ranging from anxiety to schizophrenia.

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One estimate puts the number of detainees with mental illnesses between 3,000 and 6,000. Some advocates and lawyers who work with migrants in the facilities say it’s probably more. Many of the migrants with mental illness are not stable enough to participate in their own legal proceedings, so they languish in detention.

While treatment of immigrants has become an explosive national issue, the plight of mentally ill migrants has scarcely registered.

“This is a system that, for a long time, has failed to understand, neglected, and even ignored the mental health needs of folks caught up in it,” said Elizabeth Jordan, director of the Immigration Detention Accountability Project at the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center. “But under this administration … it has gotten so much worse.”

Only 21 of the 230 ICE detention facilities offering any kind of in-person mental health services from the agency’s medical staff, according to a 2016 agency oversight report. ICE is ill-equipped to screen and treat a detainee population that’s grown more than 50 percent since 2016, to nearly 53,000.

ICE did not respond to several requests for comment over the past two weeks about the mental health issues at detention centers.

The agency’s inspector general and immigrant advocacy groups that work in the detention centers have chronicled how ICE has handled mentally ill migrants. Some have been placed in solitary confinement. Others have reported waiting weeks and months to see a doctor, according to a September 2018 report from the inspector general, the same one that found the nooses made from bedsheets at the ICE Processing Center in Adelanto, California.

The report said that local ICE management hasn’t taken the issue seriously and doesn’t believe it’s necessary to address the issue of detainees making nooses out of bedsheets.

One detainee told the agency interviewers, “I’ve seen a few attempted suicides using the braided sheets by the vents and then the guards laugh at them and call them ‘suicide failures’ once they are back from medical.”

ICE in January opened a 30-bed unit in a Miami detention facility where migrants with mental illnesses are treated by a team that includes a psychiatrist, psychologists, licensed social workers and resource coordinators.

Thirty beds isn’t enough. The care reaches only a minuscule subset of patients — and advocates say it’s not clear who gets access, or why the unit isn’t always at capacity.

The treatment of mentally ill migrants — whose conditions can worsen during detention, which can be prolonged if they can‘t take part in their deportation hearings — has been overlooked in the larger focus on immigrant detention.

Migrants enter detention centers after they are stopped at the border, apprehended within the United States or released from prison. Under the Trump administration, more are staying custody until a deportation hearing is scheduled. One advocacy group’s review of detainee death records found at least seven of 45 migrants that died in ICE custody from 2011 to 2018 were suicides.

Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who helped develop the 30-bed pilot program at the Krome detention center in South Florida before he left ICE in May, said between 3,000 and 6,000 people in ICE custody are thought to have mental illnesses. Other immigration advocates say the number is far higher — possibly 20 or 30 percent of the total detainee population.

“My only regret is that this important work wasn’t started sooner as the need is so great and the population is so desperate for care,” said Lorenzen-Strait, now director of children and family services at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Lorenzen-Strait said he was influenced in part by migrants with mental health conditions he saw languish in detention because they weren’t of sound mind and couldn’t move through immigration courts. His group studied how prisons treat mentally ill inmatesbefore coming up with a concept for ICE.

ICE was actively looking at expanding the Krome project before he left, but the idea faces internal resistance, Lorenzen-Strait said. ICE did confirm that the pilot exists, but wouldn’t comment on its plans.

Advocates say that migrants with mental health conditions should get priority and be released while they await immigration proceedings.

“Often detention can be a triggering place for people with mental health conditions,” said Royce Murray, managing director of programs at the American Immigration Council, which filed a complaint in June about medical and mental health care at ICE’s Aurora, Colorado, detention center, which expanded capacity this year to 1,532 beds.

Two immigration lawyers who have visited the Miami pilot project say that it is an improvement over existing mental health care in ICE. Detainees have access to daily counseling in anenvironment that resembles a residential treatment center.

Still the lawyers are skeptical of the agency’s commitment to the 30-bed facility, saying it’s never been at full capacity.

“Who qualifies for the program is shrouded in a bit of mystery,” said Jessica Schneider, director of the detention program at the Americans for Immigrant Justice. Schneider, who has received a tour of the project, said at one pointshe spoke with a migrant in the program who said that people who had been in solitary confinement weren’t admitted in the facility, a point she said that she couldn’t confirm independently.

ICE didn’t respond to questions about its selection process. An ICE spokesperson said the unit is intended to help stabilize detainees before immigration proceedings. But lawyers say that theyhave seen peoplesent there after proceedings were underway or even completed, including some who had been ordered deported.

“There are glitches in the system,” said Randolph McGrorty, executive director of Catholic Legal Services in Miami, which provides Know Your Rights presentations to detainees. “We’re seeing people in the program after they have been through the court system.”

Migrants with serious mental disorders are entitled to lawyers in immigration proceedings as the result of a 2015 class action lawsuit settlement. But an immigration judge must first decide whether they are competent to have their cases heard, and the settlement does not apply across the country.

Meanwhile they languish in a system unprepared to handle them.

Disability Rights California published a report in March that details “punitive, prison-like” conditions at the Adelanto facility, “inadequate” mental health care and underreporting of suicide attempts by GEO Group, the private company that runs the facility. The group documented a case where guards pepper sprayed a detainee attempting suicide.

“The response to people who have a mental health crisis is to punish them,” said Pilar Gonzalez, an attorney with Disability Rights California. “This system is not made to deal with people with intense trauma.”

The GEO Group disputed the claim that it underreports suicide attempts and said in an emailed statement to POLITICO that the facility presents a “humane alternative” to housing immigrants in prisons.

“Investing in mental health services to provide high quality care is one of our top priorities,” said Pablo Paez, the company’s executive vice president of corporate relations.

ICE operates some acute mental health inpatient facilities, including a facility in Columbia, S.C., for detainees who can’t go through immigration proceedings. But once they are stabilized, migrants end up back in a detention center.

Advocates say that the process ends up prolonging overall detention stays and argue that while the Miami pilot program could be an improvement, migrants with mental health conditions shouldn’t be locked up at all.

“Should ICE be in the business of rehabilitating people?” said Hannah Cartwright, supervising attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “At the end of the day, the best way to get their treatment is not to be detained.”

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