Category Archives: Viva!

Trump administration to continue deporting Venezuelans despite crisis

They care only about the oil, not the people.

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  • US as yet unwilling to grant temporary protected status
  • Senators accuse Trump of ‘having it both ways’ over Maduro

The Trump administration has said it is not yet willing to grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans, meaning it will continue to deport people back to a country it says is being destroyed by a tyrant.

The news comes amid a humanitarian crisis that could forcibly displace as many as 8.2 million people by the end of 2020, and the same month that the United Nations accused the Venezuelan government of killing thousands of its own citizens.

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Trump fires again at congresswomen, accusing them of ‘spewing vile things’

Racist and traitor says anyone who disagrees with him is attacking the America that he has laid open to Russian hacking!

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President also accused Democrats of giving them a ‘free pass’ as House will vote tonight to condemn Trump’s initial remarks

Donald Trump fired another volley in what has become an all-out rhetorical war between the president and four progressive Democratic congresswomen Tuesday morning, accusing them of “spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate”.

He also accused the Democratic leadership of giving them a “free pass”.

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‘Police officers demanded to see my books’: Elif Shafak on Turkey’s war on free-speech

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The author once put on trial for ‘insulting Turkishness’ explains why writers, academics and especially women, face escalating hostility in Erdoğan’s Turkey

One day two months ago I woke up to thousands of abusive messages on Turkish social media, many of them generated by bots and trolls. Sentences had been plucked from one of my novels, The Gaze, and were being circulated by people demanding fiction writers be put on trial for “obscenity”. My new novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was also targeted. Both books explore difficult subjects – sexual harassment, gender violence and child abuse – and I was far from the only writer targeted in this way. Soon the hysteria turned into a kind of digital lynching of Turkish authors who had even slightly touched on similar issues in their novels and short stories.

I received a distressed call from my Turkish publisher the same week, informing me that civilian police officers had come to the office demanding to see a number of books. Not only my fiction but titles by Duygu Asena, a leading feminist who died in 2006. The books were taken to the prosecutor’s office to be investigated.

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