Category Archives: Fail!

4 Ways ICE Doesn’t Hold Immigration Detention Facilities Accountable : Immigration Impact

ICE fails to penalize contractors that don’t meet key detention standards. All facilities with an ICE contract are supposed to follow national detention standards. The standards generally define the facility’s responsibilities, services, and safety and security requirements. ICE’s own inspection process—which the OIG previously found to be inadequate—uncovered more than 14,000 instances of deficient standards at the contract facilities between October 2015 and June 2018. Despite identifying deficiencies, such as failing to notify ICE of sexual assaults or allegations of staff misconduct, ICE imposed a financial penalty on bad contractors only twice. That’s 0.014 percent of identified deficiencies.

Source: 4 Ways ICE Doesn’t Hold Immigration Detention Facilities Accountable : Immigration Impact

Trump’s National Emergency? Think Again | Human Rights Watch

We have seen Trump’s fear-mongering before. There are real humanitarian problems at the border, but they have largely been manufactured by the Trump Administration, for example, by blocking asylum seekers from entering at ports of entry and lodging claims. Processing increasing numbers of children and families seeking asylum is not a crisis; it is not only manageable but a responsibility any country should willingly bear.

Source: Trump’s National Emergency? Think Again | Human Rights Watch

The VA Is Paying for a Top Official’s Cross-Country… — ProPublica

Selnick is a prominent critic of the VA’s government-run health system. In between his time in government, he has worked for Concerned Veterans for America, a political group funded by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch that has advocated for expanding private care for veterans. In 2016, Selnick signed onto a report that called the VA “seriously broken” with “no efficient path to repair it” and proposed shifting all veterans to the private sector.

Source: The VA Is Paying for a Top Official’s Cross-Country… — ProPublica

The Predators of Instagram | Dame Magazine

In one case from February, a popular model and photographer named Jess Linnet posted an account of her negative experience with a photographer along with the experiences of a dozen or so others whom she had spoken to. Within less than an hour, Instagram suspended her account without offering any explanation, leaving the photographer’s account untouched. Jess wrote multiple impassioned emails that explained the difficulty of being a female artist on Instagram and eventually Instagram reinstated her profile. Missing, however, were the accusations against the photographer.

Source: The Predators of Instagram | Dame Magazine

German bank to determine whether Jewish peace group is anti-Semitic | +972 Magazine

Bank für Sozialwirtschaft says it will conduct a ‘scientific review’ of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East after the group was accused anti-Semitism over its support for the BDS movement.

Source: German bank to determine whether Jewish peace group is anti-Semitic | +972 Magazine

The pressure on both Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East and Bank für Sozialwirtschaft, began in 2016, after the Jerusalem Post published an article on several Jewish German groups that had demanded the bank shut down the organization’s account over the latter’s support for BDS. The bank gave in and the account was shut down — the first time a German bank had shut down a Jewish organization’s account since the fall of the Nazi regime — only to be re-opened in 2017.

Measles: WHO warns cases have jumped 50% | Society | The Guardian

In 2018 measles caused approximately 136,000 deaths around the world, according to the WHO’s preliminary figures. The highly contagious disease can cause severe diarrhoea, pneumonia and vision loss. It can be fatal in some cases and remains “an important cause of death among young children” according to the WHO. The disease can be easily prevented with two doses of a “safe and efficient” vaccine that has been in use since the 1960s, the UN agency says. Facebook under pressure to halt rise of anti-vaccination groups Read more Up until 2016 the number of measles cases had been steadily declining but since 2017 the number had soared, according to Katrina Kretsinger, who heads WHO’s expanded immunisation programme. “There are a number of outbreaks … which are driving some of these increases,” she told reporters, pointing to significant outbreaks in Ukraine, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad and Sierra Leone. In Madagascar alone “from October 2018 through 12 February 2019 a total of 66,278 cases and 922 deaths have been reported”, the WHO said.

Source: Measles: WHO warns cases have jumped 50% | Society | The Guardian

Top Leader at Interior Dept. Pushes a Policy Favoring His Former Client – The New York Times

As a lobbyist and lawyer, David Bernhardt fought for years on behalf of a group of California farmers to weaken Endangered Species Act protections for a finger-size fish, the delta smelt, to gain access to irrigation water. As a top official since 2017 at the Interior Department, Mr. Bernhardt has been finishing the job: He is working to strip away the rules the farmers had hired him to oppose.

Donald Trump’s SOTU, AOC, and the History of Red Baiting DJT has no problem with Fascist Russian Dupe though – lol

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” Donald Trump said in his State of the Union speech, adding that, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

Source: Donald Trump’s SOTU, AOC, and the History of Red Baiting

Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’ | Environment | The Guardian

“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.” He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached “alarming proportions” over the last two decades. Advertisement He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: “They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs.” This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.

Source: Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’ | Environment | The Guardian

Will Chinese company’s stake in Reddit normalise censorship? | Emily Bell | Media | The Guardian

The creation of concentration camps for a million Uighurs in Xinjiang has not been enough to persuade any of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs receiving funds from Chinese companies to refuse the cash. Neither is it apparently enough of a deterrent to stop the US companies investing in China to stop their plans to enter the market. Trade tensions between the US and China revolve entirely around tariffs and not around human rights. Most troubling of all, against a background of demonstrably tightening censorship, internment camps and an extension of totalitarianism, the narrative of western companies is that their presence in China, and the presence of Chinese money in western companies, is helping ease those restrictions. All the evidence says this is not true.

Source: Will Chinese company’s stake in Reddit normalise censorship? | Emily Bell | Media | The Guardian