Category Archives: Viva!

Hungarian police reopen Budapest Keleti railway station to migrants

Hungarian authorities have opened up Budapest’s Keleti train station, cordoned off by police for the past two days. Hundreds of people camped outside of the train station are expected to board trains bound for Germany.

Guatemala jails former President Perez Molina as corruption probe continues | News | DW.COM | 03.09.2015

Stealing from the state?Perez Molina’s resignation came on the heels of prolonged protests and demonstrations, which often turned violent.Perez Molina, a retired general, cast a forlorn appearance as prosecutors read their accusations before the Supreme Court, lowering his eyes as wire-tapped phone calls were played that implicate him in a scheme to defraud the state.Prosecutors have already charged Perez Molina’s former vice president Roxana Baldetti, who stepped down in May, with taking $3.8 million in bribes during 2014. Morales claimed Perez Molina was also “part of a criminal group in operation since May 2014 with the objective of stealing from the state.”

Source: Guatemala jails former President Perez Molina as corruption probe continues | News | DW.COM | 03.09.2015

European Residents Offer Support, Homes to Refugees

Many Syrian cities have been reduced to piles of rubble, as a civil war that is now well into its fifth year shows no signs of abating. Desperate refugees are fleeing to Europe to escape the fighting. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

Many Syrian cities have been reduced to piles of rubble, as a civil war that is now well into its fifth year shows no signs of abating. Desperate refugees are fleeing to Europe to escape the fighting. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

As the migration crisis in Europe continues to grow and government response remains slow, European citizens have taken it upon themselves to act by opening up their homes to those in need.

In a Facebook group entitled ‘Dear Eygló Harðar – Syria is Calling’, over 15,000 Icelanders have signed an open letter calling on their government to “open the gates” for more Syrian refugees.

The open letter, initiated by author and professor Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir on Aug. 30, addresses Iceland’s Minister of Welfare Eygló Harðar and calls on the government to reconsider capping the number of refugees at a mere 50.

The week-long campaign, which ends on Sep. 4, aims to gather information about available assistance and to create pressure on the government to increase its quota.

“Refugees are our […] best friends, our next soul mate, the drummer in our children’s band, our next colleague, Miss Iceland 2022, the carpenter who finally fixes our bathroom, the chef in the cafeteria, the fireman, the hacker and the television host. People who we’ll never be able to say to: ‘Your life is worth less than mine’,” the open letter states.

Many have posted their own open letters, offering their homes, food, and general support to refugees, to enable them to integrate into Icelandic society.

One Icelander posted on the group: “I’m a single mother with a six-year-old son […] we can take a child in need. I’m a teacher and would teach the child to speak, read and write Icelandic and adjust to Icelandic society. We have clothes, a bed, toys, and everything a child needs. I would of course pay for the airplane ticket.”

The open letter has sparked more people around the world to express words of support and to offer their homes to those in need.

One mother of a 19-month-old baby from Argentina wrote in the group: “I want you to know that I would like to help in any way I can, even if it is looking at the possibility of hosting some boy or girl in my house […]. I don’t have a comfortable financial position, but I can provide what is necessary and a lot of love.”

Similar efforts to house refugees have begun in other parts of Europe.

Refugees Welcome, a German initiative, matches refugees from around the world with host citizens offering private accommodation.

Once hosts sign up to offer their homes, Refugees Welcome works with local refugee organizations to reach out to find a “suitable” match.

Though only Germany and Austrian residents can currently be hosts, over 780 people have already signed up to help and more than 134 refugees from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Iraq, Somalia, and Syria have been matched with families in the two countries.

Refugees Welcome also stated that the initiative has been picked up and may be expanded to the United States and Australia.

“We are convinced that refugees should not be stigmatized and excluded by being housed in mass accommodations. Instead, we should offer them a warm welcome,” says Refugees Welcome on its website.

European Union’s border agency Frontex revealed that in July 2015 alone, over 100,000 people migrated into Europe. Germany has stated that it expects up to 800,000 asylum seekers by the end of the year.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

In this together: Pay attention to Europe’s refugee crisis

For weeks now the so-called “Migrants Crisis” has dominated headlines in Europe. While I traveled across the continent a few weeks ago it was a top story again and again in the UK, Sweden, and Denmark, with headlines blaring out from airport and railway newsagents’ in a dozen languages. But it has garnered considerably less attention in the United States until very recently. As I write this, a stunningly tragic picture, one of those pieces of photojournalism that defines an era, is now blasted across the top of the Huffington Post website: a Turkish police officer carrying the limp body of a drowned boy from a resort beach Wednesday morning.

Death stretches across the Mediterranean and into Europe’s mountainous interior. Refugees, many fleeing from Syria’s civil war and Iraq’s ISIS-fuelled violence, were found dead by the dozens in the back of a truck in Austria. More had to be taken to a local hospital after another overcrowded vehicle was found by Austrian police. Hundreds die annually trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, thousands more are now caught in the vertiginous limbo of refugee life in impromptu camps in Calais, France, near the mouth of the Eurotunnel, and throughout the Balkans.

As I write, hundreds of refugees are camped inside a Budapest train station, many of them are ticket-holders but are being blocked by police from boarding any westward bound trains. Desperate refugees have clashed with often abusive riot police firing tear gas into crowds of people that include children and the ill throughout the southeastern EU, from Greece through Macedonia to Hungary. Many of the refugees wish to push on to Northern European countries.

But the reaction has, obviously, been an embittered one, and the image of non-white refugees as a crowd seeking access to European states has created no small measure of panic on the far right. We are now seeing an apotheosis of cruelty in Europe, including repeated firebombing of asylum-seeker hostels in Germany, and mass slander perpetrated on the refugees and migrants at Calais by the British media — aggression which is only now beginning to be met with organized displays of humanity and kindness, such as a crowd of well-wishers greeting a train full of refugees in Vienna.

This deserves the full attention of American feminists.

Much of the racist rhetoric directed at this new stream of migrants and refugees is entirely of a piece with the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment that has accompanied the improbable rise of Donald Trump as a Republican presidential candidate. Indeed, his resonance with a violently angry core of American Nativism is, I would argue, part of the same phenomenon as the success of the UK Independence Party in Britain, Jobbik in Hungary, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and the Danish People’s Party in Denmark.

Liberal democracy is being profoundly tested at this moment in our history; we’ve become so inured to the spectacle of hysterical bigotry on rolling news that we may be taking a gradual coarsening for granted. Much of the fire behind Britain’s renewed push to break away from the European Union has to do with the (false) idea that EU-wide human rights infrastructure is preventing Britain from “securing its borders.” Meanwhile the far right is on the march in countries like France and Sweden. Closing borders and hardening hearts seems to be what one grim chorus in Europe is calling for.

At the same time, back across the Atlantic, Canada, which has been lumbered with a conservative government for years, has been turning the screws on its immigrants and making it ever more difficult to obtain Canadian citizenship. In addition, the nation has opened a terrifying legal Pandora’s Box by passing C-24 which, among other things, creates a two-tiered citizenship system whereby Canadian citizens who are dual-citizens or had immigrated to Canada can have their citizenship revoked at any time by the government.

The fight against immigrants and the fear of a world with looser or (heaven forfend) open borders is increasingly a global phenomenon (I haven’t even mentioned the slow-motion tragedy of Australia’s militaristic approach to asylum seekers).

But there is an example that I conclude this SOS with.

***

The Öresundståg is a remarkable train that speeds across the five mile long span of the Oresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden. It is as much an inspiring civic ideal as it is a feat of engineering. After a conference in Malmö, Sweden, I hopped on the train to Copenhagen to spend a long weekend before flying home, riding between two separate countries with different languages and cultures, as easily as if I were taking the subway from the Bronx to Manhattan, and in the same amount of time (approximately 35 minutes).

No immigration control or passports checked, no humiliating security theater, just a free flow of people and ideas between nations. On the train I saw families speaking a variety of languages — Spanish, Danish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swedish — and people speaking Nordic languages who were non-white. Backpackers, professionals, families young and old. Muslims, Christians, atheists, and at least one witch.

It puts the march of the far right in Europe into perspective, and the recent success of racist parties in both Denmark and Sweden into stark relief. Targets were painted on the backs of so many people I saw on that train, on the idea that the train represented, even.

This is by no means to gloss over the real challenges that these many people may face; New York City’s diversity does not, after all, absolve this city or its leaders of ongoing struggles with racism and police brutality, for instance. But there is something beautiful in the idea that so many diverse people were able to move from one country to the next without so much as a glance at documentation. Somewhere over the Oresund lay the spirit of free movement; there were no hordes, no lawlessness, no crime or vulgarity, just people in motion riding towards the sunset in another land, denuded of mystery and magic, woven into the fabric of their everyday lives.

That is as it should be, and it is an ideal we should recognize as being threatened worldwide. The days for liberals to look to Europe and Canada as secure harbingers of a progressive future are well and truly over, and we must raise our voices in defense of the ideals we claim to hold dear, athwart parochialism and chauvinism.

Header image credit: Wikipedia

UK: Support strikers at the National Gallery in London

Staff at the National Gallery in London, organised by PSI affiliate the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), have been on strike since February 2015 following the Gallery’s decision to privatise two thirds of staff, including those who look after the paintings and help the gallery’s six million annual visitors.

Source: UK: Support strikers at the National Gallery in London

Major European Pension Fund Divests from Pharmaceutical Company Linked to Executions

The Dutch public employees’ pension fund, Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP (ABP), has divested from the pharmaceutical company Mylan after learning that the Virginia Department of Corrections had supplies of one of Mylan’s products in stock for use in executions. A spokesman for ABP – which with net assets of $416 billion is the world’s third largest pension fund – said, “As the Dutch government and Dutch society as a whole renounced the death penalty a long time ago, we do not want Dutch pension money to be involved in that.” Although Mylan states on its website that its products are not intended for use in executions, fund managers were not satisfied with the company’s measures to keep the drugs out of lethal injections. ABP held €25 million shares in Mylan in 2014, but began selling them off during 9 months of unfruitful discussions with the company. ABP says it sold its remaining €9 million ($10 million) Mylan holdings in full because “We thought we have only one step left to show our disapproval.” The divestment is part of ongoing efforts by European officials to discourage executions in the U.S., which the European Union regards as a human rights violation. European companies are banned from exporting drugs for use in executions, and several European drug companies have put distribution restrictions in place to stop their products from being used in lethal injection.

(T. Escritt, “Largest Dutch pension fund exits Mylan over death penalty concerns,” Reuters, August 29, 2015.) See Lethal Injection.

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UMWA says talks with Patriot Coal buyer ‘the most unproductive’ negotiations the union has ever seen

130416 Patriot STL DHK 107

Here’s the latest word on the Patriot Coal bankruptcy hearing, via The Wall Street Journal’s Jacqueline Palank:

A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday “strongly” recommended that Patriot Coal Corp.’s would-be buyer and the union representing its miners head back to the bargaining table one last time to try to reach a deal on the miners’ future employment.

After presiding over a four-hour trial, Judge Keith Phillips of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Va., declined to rule on Patriot’s request to reject the collective bargaining agreements with the United Mine Workers of America union.

Patriot has warned that its pending sale to Blackhawk Mining LLC—and the ultimate survival of its business—depends on its ability to shed the agreements, though the union says Patriot hasn’t made a good-faith effort to negotiate new deals.

“Based on what I’ve heard today, I think there [are] arguments to be made from both sides,” the judge said.

Instead, Judge Phillips urged Blackhawk and the union to try to reach a deal, pointing to what appears to have been some progress before talks apparently broke down.

“I’m going to suggest strongly that Blackhawk get engaged and that Blackhawk and the United Mine Workers association sit down across the table from each other…and try to come to some kind of accommodation,” the judge said.

The story continues:

After exchanging six proposals for a new labor agreement between Blackhawk and the union, Mr. Lucha said he believed talks were at an impasse. The company then asked the bankruptcy court for permission to reject the agreements.

Bankruptcy laws allow such rejections, but a company has to prove it engaged in good-faith negotiations, among other things. UMWA attorney Sharon Levine said that wasn’t the case.

“This has been the most unproductive, least effective negotiation that the UMW has ever seen,” she said.

Trump on Denali Name Restoration: “I will change back!”

Republican presidential candidate Donald TrumpPublished September 2, 2015NEW YORK— Donald Trump, Republican seeking his party’s nomination for president, has weighed in on the Obama administration’s restoring America’s highest peak to, Mt. Denali, its original Native name.The announcement to restore Mt. Denali to its original Alaskan Native name came from the White House on Sunday, one day before President Obama left on his historic trip to Alaska where he becomes the first sitting president to visit the Alaskan arctic.“President Obama wants to change the name of Mt. McKinley to Denali after more than 100 years. Great insult to Ohio. I will change back!” Trump, who has not shown himself to be Native-friendly in the past, tweeted on Monday.Mt. Denali, as it has been known to the Koyukon Athabasan for centuries means the “high one” or the “great one.”The mountain was named for President McKinley, an Ohioan, who was the 25th president of the United States. On Monday, the Ohio Congressional delegation proclaimed its ire at the Obama administration’s decision to restore Denali’s name.The state of Alaska has tried to get the mountain restored to Denali from Mt. McKinley since 1975.The post Trump on Denali Name Restoration: “I will change back!” appeared first on Native News Online.

Source: Trump on Denali Name Restoration: “I will change back!”