Category Archives: Fail!

With a Dream of Return: Deportees in Mexicali | Latina Lista

“I feel like I am drowning but everybody around me is breathing.”

This is what I was told by Esmeralda, a dreamer who grew up in Arizona, and in 2010 was detained at a checkpoint, coerced to sign her voluntary departure, and was deported to Mexico, where she was told her high-school diploma from the U.S. was not valid. Esmeralda’s story is one of the 2 million people deported by U.S. Immigration authorities during the Obama administration–the largest number of deportations in the history of the U.S.

In March 2014, I traveled to the border city of Mexicali, where thousands of people are deported every month. Last year alone, it is estimated that 113,539 people were deported to Mexicali, a city with a population of 700,000. There, in the City of the Deportee, I visited the Hotel of the Migrant, a place that have assisted 200,000 deportees since 2010. The Hotel of the Migrant is a former abandoned Hotel that now serves as the only city shelter open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Managed by a non-profit organization, the hotel is located just a few blocks from the Calexico Port of Entry. Usually, deportees are dropped off in the middle of the night in poor conditions.

via With a Dream of Return: Deportees in Mexicali | Latina Lista.

Israel/Palestine: Free 3 Abducted Youth | Human Rights Watch

{My question is this: I thought nearly all cell phone were traceable – so why have they not been found?}

Any Palestinian armed groups unlawfully holding three Israeli teenagers should release them immediately and unconditionally. Israeli forces searching for the three should respect the laws of war with respect to the Palestinian population in the occupied territory and not carry out mass, arbitrary arrests. The three teenagers apparently were abducted in the West Bank on June 12, 2014.

Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gil’ad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel, both 16, were reported missing after they tried to hitchhike home from the southern West Bank, near the Kfar Etzion settlement. The three attend Jewish religious schools in Kfar Etzion and in Kiryat Arba, another settlement, Israel media reported.

“There is no justification for abducting civilians,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “It is a disgrace to drag children into this conflict, whether Israeli or Palestinian.”

One of the youths called an Israeli police hotline at about 10:30 p.m. on June 12 and said, “We’re being kidnapped,” before the call was disconnected, Israeli news media reported. Human Rights Watch could not confirm two separate reported claims of responsibility by Palestinian armed groups.

via Israel/Palestine: Free 3 Abducted Youth | Human Rights Watch.

Deadly “Buddhist” Violence Erupts in Sri Lanka – NYTimes.com

{Who would have thought there could be Buddhist Fascists?}

In some of the worst religious violence in Sri Lanka in decades, three people have been killed and 78 injured in riots between Buddhists and Muslims in this southwestern coastal town after months of rising tensions, officials said Monday.

The riots on Sunday followed a protest march by a hard-line Buddhist group, Bodu Bala Sena, which is led in part by monks. Its name roughly translates as “Buddhist Power Force.” Shops and homes in the area, many of them owned by Muslims, were set ablaze and vandalized in violence that continued throughout the night. Mobs shouting anti-Muslim slogans and hurling gas bombs and stones advanced on a Muslim part of the village of Welipitiya, where men were protecting a mosque.

Three mosques and several Muslim prayer houses were set on fire, according to unofficial reports. “They fought us face to face for two hours,” said M. Hussein, a Muslim man involved in the fighting on Sunday night. “The police didn’t show up until after people were dead.” Police teams eventually appeared in the early morning hours of Monday to transport the dead and injured, Mr. Hussein said.

Muslim residents said Monday that their lives had changed forever.

“They finished the Muslims in this area,” said M. Farina, who added that the police watched impassively Sunday evening as Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim shops and homes.

The Sri Lankan justice minister, Rauff Hakeem, denounced his own government’s inaction.

“The law and order machinery completely failed,” said Mr. Hakeem, who is the leader of the country’s largest Muslim party and confirmed the number of dead and injured. “For 72 hours, we begged the government to prevent this rally from taking place on Sunday for fear of riots.”

“I am ashamed,” he added. “I couldn’t protect my people.”

via Deadly Religious Violence Erupts in Sri Lanka – NYTimes.com.

Hathos Alert « The Dish

A Kagan never disappoints. Several of them are being deployed right now across the neocon triangle to argue for the necessity of another war … to fix the catastrophe their first war created. But this paragraph is so special it deserves a place of its own in the annals of self-awareness:

Rejoining the fight means immediately sending air support; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets; air transportation; Special Operations forces; training teams; and more military equipment back into Iraq. It does not mean re-invading Iraq.

My italics. I’m laughing because the alternative is too painful.

via Hathos Alert « The Dish.

Send Kagan! By self.

Estonia remembers the Soviet deportations – Estonian World

In the summer of 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939. In the aftermath of World War II, Estonia lost approximately 17.5% of its population.

via Estonia remembers the Soviet deportations – Estonian World.

Japan kills 30 whales in first hunt since international court halted its Antarctic whaling – “survey” indicates no one feels more patriotic or manly!

Japan has caught 30 whales off its northern coast in its first hunt since an international court ordered the halt of its annual expedition in the Antarctic, officials said Friday.

The Fisheries Agency said a coastal whaling fleet killed 30 minke whales during the April-June season as part of Japan’s northwestern Pacific research hunt. Another group of whalers is still at work in a more distant area of the Pacific.

via Japan kills 30 whales in first hunt since international court halted its Antarctic whaling.

I remember Mosul, but Iraq 3.0 is what happens when you exit a war early | Colby Buzzell | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Sometime in the 2020s, San Francisco

One day my son is going to ask me at the dinner table: Daddy, why did we lose the Iraq war?

I won’t ask him if his teacher put him up to it, because 10 years from now, it will probably be common knowledge that, yes, we did lose the Iraq war. Everybody – teachers and historians, liberals and conservatives – will agree.

I have years to prepare an answer for my son. Right now, this is what I think: We were winning when I was there. We were winning when we were there.

That’s about all I can say. We lost.

Of course, I could also say the same same thing my father thought about his alma mater: A lot of good Americans died in the war.

Period. End of discussion.

What else can you say?

via I remember Mosul, but Iraq 3.0 is what happens when you exit a war early | Colby Buzzell | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

28 injured, 8 detained in fierce clashes at Al-Aqsa | Maan News Agency

Twenty-eight Palestinians were injured and eight detained during clashes that broke out after Israeli forces stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City after Friday prayers.

Israeli forces stormed the holy compound, which is the third-holiest site in Islam, after worshipers began marching in support of more than 125 Palestinian administrative detainees who have been on hunger strike for more than 50 days.

The march left through the Moroccan and Chain Gates, at which point groups of special forces began firing stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets toward worshipers.

Special forces also began beating worshipers with batons, including ambulance crews and journalists on the scene, while another Israeli unit besieged the worshipers in the Al-Aqsa Qibli Mosque and closed the doors and launched stun grenades and pepper gas into it.

A fourth unit besieged worshipers inside the Marwani Mosque, and fired stun grenades and gas at worshipers, who were mostly elderly, according to the Al-Aqsa mosque director.

After the end of clashes, police set up a checkpoint at the doors of the Al-Aqsa mosque and began checking identity cards. They detained eight Palestinians during the checks, according to police.

via 28 injured, 8 detained in fierce clashes at Al-Aqsa | Maan News Agency.

If this were US, British, or German police doing this to worshipers – what would we say?

Dip of the week! Hates Prairie Chickens and loves campaign payoffs! To reverse the Department of the Interior’s listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to prevent further consideration of listing of such species as a threatened species or endangered species under that Act pending implementation of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-Wide Conservation Plan and other conservation measures, and for other purposes. (H.R. 4866) – GovTrack.us

H.R. 4866: To reverse the Department of the Interior’s listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the …

… Endangered Species Act of 1973, to prevent further consideration of listing of such species as a threatened species or endangered species under that Act pending implementation of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-Wide Conservation Plan and other conservation measures, and for other purposes.

via To reverse the Department of the Interior’s listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to prevent further consideration of listing of such species as a threatened species or endangered species under that Act pending implementation of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Lesser Prairie-Chicken Range-Wide Conservation Plan and other conservation measures, and for other purposes. (H.R. 4866) – GovTrack.us.

The gun lobby’s new tactic: redefining ‘school shootings’ so they don’t count | News | theguardian.com

In short – as far as I can follow the logic – the message to parents concerned that there are loaded weapons going off on school property, and that their sons and daughters are at risk of being hit by bullets from those weapons, is this: it doesn’t really count unless the shooter is a pupil, not involved in a gang, who made a pre-meditated plan to massacre a large number of students.

And not in the parking lot.

(If you think this kind of absurdity is confined to the fringe, see this only slightly less mendacious CNN piece, which brings the figure down from 74 to 15 by excluding, among others, shootings motivated by “personal arguments, accidents [or] alleged gang activities and drug deals”. Johnson says the cable channel stole his work.)

What’s especially dispiriting about this flat denial of reality is how little prospect it offers for rational discussion or compromise. Even if you’re a supporter of gun control, you can still hold a reasoned discussion with somebody who believes that the benefits of widespread firearms ownership outweigh the harms. You can discuss international comparisons; and how no comparable country experiences anything like this level of gun violence; the other person can seek to establish why those comparisons aren’t relevant; or that, yes, violent deaths are actually in decline in the US, and so on. But when the pro-gun side of the argument consists of simply insisting that the gun violence that people are so distraught about isn’t real gun violence? Then there’s no clear way forward at all.

And let’s not forget the bigger point here. A pro-gun journalist applies the most stringent imaginable criteria to the term ‘school shooting’; he rejects every instance he possibly can, for reasons many might regard as spurious, and then triumphantly declares that there have only been … seven bona fide school shootings in America since December 2012!

Only seven school shootings since December 2012.

I hope I never to get to the point at which the word “only” in that sentence makes even the slightest bit of sense.

via The gun lobby’s new tactic: redefining ‘school shootings’ so they don’t count | News | theguardian.com.