Category Archives: Viva!

As the Trump Administration Seeks to Remove Families, Due-Process Questions over Rocket Dockets Abound

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The U.S. government is operating accelerated dockets to handle the rising number of cases of families in immigration court. While it is essential to have timely, fair case processing and removal of those who have truly had their day in court and been found to be removable, using “rocket” dockets to speed up proceedings only heightens the breakdowns that are a recurring feature of the court system on its best day, as this commentary explains.

Petula Clark: ‘Elvis angled for a threesome – he was raring to go’ | Music | The Guardian

From child star to superstar, the singer is still performing at 86. She talks about being consoled by John Lennon, her friendship with Karen Carpenter – and her close encounter with the King

Source: Petula Clark: ‘Elvis angled for a threesome – he was raring to go’ | Music | The Guardian

‘I was scared I’d get sick’: the pregnant migrant women detained by the US

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Esther Ramos lost 20 pounds when she was sent to a Texas facility while pregnant – and critics say experiences like hers are becoming more common

Esther Ramos was 16 years old and two months pregnant with her second child when she, her husband, Fredy Aldana, and their then 19-month-old daughter, Milagro, crossed the border in Tijuana to seek asylum in the US on 13 January.

Upon entry into the San Ysidro border station, Esther and Milagro were separated from Aldana and they haven’t seen him since. Esther and her daughter spent three days in a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding cell, where she said she wasn’t offered any food on her first day and she hardly ate during the next two days.

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We’ll block trade deal if Brexit imperils open Irish border, say US politicians

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Johnson-Trump plan could fall foul of Congress if Good Friday agreement is threatened

Any future US-UK trade deal would almost certainly be blocked by the US Congress if Brexit affects the Irish border and jeopardises peace in Northern Ireland, congressional leaders and diplomats have warned.

Boris Johnson has presented a trade deal with the US as a way of offsetting the economic costs of leaving the EU, and Donald Trump promised the two countries could strike “a very substantial trade agreement” that would increase trade “four or five times”.

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Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes | Andrew Gawthorpe

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Trump’s persistent hold on his base shows the power to be had in reinventing anti-American values as patriotic

Amid the global rise of rightwing populism, “fascist” has become a common – indeed over-used – epithet. The F-word is convenient for critics of the new wave of populism, seeking as it does to tie their opponents to historical movements which nearly all of mainstream society regards as deplorable. But the word is convenient for the right too, allowing them to wave away their critics as overwrought and deranged while avoiding serious discussion of the substance of their policies and rhetoric.

Even the Trumpified Republican party is not a fascist movement and Trump is certainly no Hitler. Full-blown fascism usually emerges under the pressure of economic collapse or existential war, but it is constructed from pre-existing social and political raw materials. But while the Trump era hasn’t seen the rise of a true fascism in the United States, it has given us sharp and painful insights into the raw materials out of which a future American fascism might be constructed.

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Blaming Leo Varadkar for no deal is bizarre – even for Britain’s media | Roy Greenslade

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The Telegraph and Sun are making ludicrous claims to make the Irish taoiseach the Brexit bogeyman

Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, is being demonised by the Brexit-supporting section of the British press. His determination to stick by the backstop provision in the EU withdrawal agreement has particularly outraged the Daily Telegraph and the Sun.

Both papers, with tacit support from the Daily Express, are engaged in a tactic familiar to those who, down the years, witnessed the treatment that has been handed out to homegrown politicians such as Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and, of course, Jeremy Corbyn.

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Sinn Féin: vote on Irish reunification must follow no-deal Brexit

Mary Lou McDonald challenges Boris Johnson on Northern Ireland at Stormont meeting

It would be “unthinkable” if a no-deal Brexit was not followed by a poll on Irish reunification, the leader of Sinn Féin has warned Boris Johnson, also telling the prime minister that no one believed he was impartial on Northern Ireland.

“In the longer term, we have advised him that constitutional change is in the air. He can’t say that he hasn’t been told,” Mary Lou McDonald said after meeting Johnson at Stormont on Wednesday morning.

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