Here’s a speech which the headlines largely neglected yesterday, but J.K. Rowling didn’t! This morning, Rowling tweeted:
Daily Archives: March 25, 2018
Orange snow transforms eastern Europe into ‘Mars’
How do you deny how connected the earth and its climate is?
Dust and sand from storms in northern Africa carpet ski resorts in Russia and Romania
Dust from a sandstorm in the Sahara desert is causing snow in eastern Europe to turn orange, transforming mountainous regions of Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria and Romania into Mars-like landscapes.
The unusual scenes are believed to be created by a mix of sand, dust and pollen particles stirred up and swept across from storms in northern Africa. According the meteorologists, the phenomenon occurs roughly every five years.
Editorial: An Ohio Bill Would Ban All Abortions. It’s Part of a Bigger Plan.
Republican state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would outlaw abortion, period. It’s unconstitutional, but that’s the point.
At Tel Aviv rally, a Mizrahi-asylum seeker alliance is born | +972 Magazine
View on Instagram https://ift.tt/2pB9lSD
ZAA Closer (Official Music Video)
via Blogger https://ift.tt/2G6b5h7
Salvadoran migration to the US in numbers
Good policy analysis requires good data. With little commentary, here is a collection of the best data estimates I can assemble related to migration of individuals from El Salvador to the United States:
- Estimated population living in El Salvador in 2017 — 6,582,000
Source: El Salvador DIGESTYC - Estimated number of Salvadoran immigrants living in the US as of 2015 — 1,420,000
Source: Pew Research Center - Estimated number of second generation Salvadorans in the US (at least one parent born in El Salvador) as of 2015 — 935,000
Source: Migration Policy Institute
- Estimated number of Salvadorans currently in US without legal documentation: 725,000
Source: Pew Research Center
- Number of Salvadorans granted permanent residence in US (green cards) between October 1, 2016 and June 30, 2017: 18,800.
Source: Pew Research Center
- US Department of Homeland Security estimate of number of Salvadorans who held Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in January 2018 and will lose it September 19, 2019: 262,500
Source: DHS, Federal Register Notice, January 18, 2018
(Note: — This figure seems questionable, since the previous Fed Register notice for the extension on July 8, 2016 put the figure at 195,000).
- Estimated number of Salvadoran who re-enrolled for Temporary Protected Status by March 19, 2018 deadline: 175,000
Source: El Salvador Foreign Ministry
- Salvadoran youth who are recipients of DACA protection: 25,900
Source: USCIS - Salvadorans deported from the US back to El Salvador:
January 1, 2017- December 31, 2017 – 15,691
Source: El Salvador DGMEJanuary 1, 2018 – March 22, 2018 — 3129
Source: El Salvador DGME
- Pending deportation cases in US immigration courts involving Salvadorans: 144,360
Source: Syracuse TRAC immigration database.
- Unaccompanied minors from El Salvador apprehended at southwest US border:
10/1/2015 – 9/30/2016 — 17,512
10/1//2016 – 9/30/2017 — 9,143
10/1/2018 – 2/28/2018 — 1,385 (3,324 annualized)Persons in family units of at least one child with an adult apprehended at southwest US border:
10/1/2015 – 9/30/2016 — 27,114
10/1//2016 – 9/30/2017 — 24,122
10/1/2018 – 2/28/2018 — 4,197 (10,072 annualized) Source: US Customs & Border Patrol
- Among all those persons worldwide who were born in El Salvador and now live either in El Salvador or elsewhere – 23% reside in the U.S
Source: Pew Research Center
- Family remittances received in El Salvador during calendar year 2017: $5.02 Billion.
Source: Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador
Much could be said about these numbers, but I will only point out two items. First, note the fairly dramatic reduction in levels of child and family migration across the southwest US border since October 2015 as measured by apprehensions. Second, note the approximately 18,800 persons deported since January 1, 2017 and compare that to the 144,360 pending deportation cases against Salvadoran nationals and the additional 200,000 Salvadorans who are losing TPS next year. El Salvador is facing a wave of returnees much, much larger than it is currently experiencing.
Elon Musk Joins #DeleteFacebook With a Barrage of Tweets
Mr. Musk deleted the Facebook pages of two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He and the Facebook C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, have, er, not always gotten along.
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? – Facts So Romantic
On Twitter, in a thread that went viral, François Chollet, an A.I. software engineer at Google DeepMind, argued, “Facebook is, in effect, in control of your political beliefs and your worldview.”Photograph by Joe Penniston / Flickr
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and C.E.O. of Facebook, admitted recently his company knew, in 2015, that the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which assisted with Donald Trump’s election campaign, had improperly acquired information on 50 million Facebook users. “This was a breach of trust,” Zuckerberg said, in a Facebook post. “We need to fix that.”
But that’s not the only thing Facebook needs to fix. “The problem with Facebook is not just the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon,” said François Chollet, an artificial intelligence and machine learning software engineer at Google DeepMind, in a tweet yesterday. “The more worrying issue, in my opinion, is its use of digital information consumption as a psychological control vector.” He elaborated on this point in a thread that’s been shared thousands of times. I caught it when global-surveillance critic and The Intercept writer Glenn Greenwald quote-retweeted Chollet, calling it a “great thread” on “Facebook’s…
Read More…
The Observer view on the danger John Bolton poses to world peace | Observer editorial
He has no power to order anyone to do anything – therefore is no more threat than others who work for #45. Those who have worked for #TraitorTrump have been slow to figure out that anyone who works for #45 is just baggage to be tossed when convenient or used as a scapegoat or diversion when it suits #45.
The arch-hawk’s advocacy of pre-emptive military action suits Donald Trump’s nationalist agenda but it could spell disaster
John Bolton, Donald Trump’s latest choice as national security adviser, belongs to a band of Washington armchair warriors who are rarely happier than when sending other people’s children to die in foreign wars. Like his former Iraq comrades-in-arms, George W Bush and Dick Cheney, and his bellicose new White House boss, Bolton avoided military service in Vietnam as a young man. But he is no peacenik. Far from it. Bolton the conservative arch-hawk has become infamous over the years as a reckless advocate of pre-emptive, interventionist military action in pursuit of what he perceives to be America’s interests.
The Observer is the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, founded in 1791. It is published by Guardian News & Media and is editorially independent.
Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News 