Category Archives: Viva!

Why I will never forget the day I was racially abused in front of my young son

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ABC journalist Giselle Wakatama and her six-year-old son were at their local swimming pool when she became the target of racial abuse.

‘Internal matter’: Govt slams anti-CAA resolution in EU Parliament

Neo-fascism is of global concern. In a strong response to EU Parliament’s draft resolution against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the government on Sunday said that the matter is entirely internal to India. “EU Parliament should not take action that call into question rights and authority of democratically elected legislatures,” sources said.

Trump to meet with Israel’s Netanyahu and Gantz on peace plan on Monday

Any meetings with US Congress – oh never mind – he thinks he is King Kong… U.S. President Donald Trump will hold back-to-back meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz on Monday, and likely share some details of his Middle East peace plan, a U.S. source familiar with the plan said on Sunday.

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The BBC is a pillar of civilisation. No wonder populists want to destroy it | Will Hutton

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Enlightenment values are anathema to parties that only thrive amid widespread ignorance

The most alarming feature of our times is the disintegration of a shared belief in the values and principles of the European Enlightenment. They were never shouted from the hilltops, but were key to what we used to hold in common, and their collapse was a chief cause of Brexit. Unless they are quickly rediscovered and seen as a point around which to reunite, the BBC will now fall as well.

Enlightenment values come in an interconnected bundle. First and foremost is the idea that there are objective truths and an accompanying public realm, held for all citizens, in which these truths can be tried and tested by argument, evidence and reason. It follows that there must be freedom to think and freely express oneself – otherwise no argument is possible. Science and fact will thus trump partisan ideology and superstition.

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Independence Day will expose Brexit as a ruse to free an imaginary nation | Fintan O’Toole

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Next Friday, Britain officially leaves the EU but it’s difficult to see who or what is being liberated. Perhaps an England without London?

We know what the week running up to the glorious day of Brexit is supposed to be like. A few nights before the original chosen date of 29 March 2019, Boris Johnson was “in conversation” with his old boss at the Telegraph, Charles Moore, at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. Johnson was out of office then, and free to indulge himself without constraint.

He told the audience that this “was meant to be the week when church bells were rung, coins struck, stamps issued and bonfires lit to send beacons of freedom from hilltop to hilltop. This was the Friday when Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussex, half blind with scrumpy, singing Brexit shanties at the tops of their voices and beating the hedgerows with staves.” Moore replied that Johnson was right, “but in fact I had already stood these good people down, since I could see what was coming”.

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Seven months detained: seven-year-old is longest-held child migrant in US

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Maddie Hernandez and her father, Emerson, fled crime in Guatemala. After months, her parents says she has changed

Emerson Hernandez and his daughter Maddie have withstood hunger and thirst.

They’ve been dumped in a threatening border city in Mexico, a foreign country with nowhere to shelter. And, for seven months, they’ve been locked up at what critics call a “baby jail”.

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‘Whitewashed’: how gentrification continues to erase LA’s bold murals

Occupiers the same globally. Tries to wipe indigenous people from history and culture. Ultimately, it will not work but will cause years of tension and reactions harmful to both communities.

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The artwork in the Highland Park area told the story of its history and culture – until newcomers decided to wipe it out

Kathy Gallegos remembers the first time she saw John “Zender” Estrada’s striking mural of an Aztec warrior flanked by two eagles. She was parking behind a music venue in Highland Park, a heavily Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and couldn’t help noticing the bold imagery of a piece that Zender had painted in the wake of the 1992 riots to urge ordinary Angelenos to “resist violence with peace”.

“I remember thinking, that’s a really nice mural,” Gallegos recalled. “Next thing I knew, the place was bought and it was gone.”

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