Category Archives: Viva!

US administration defining BDS movement at American Universities

Censorship of US citizens on mass scale being planned

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The US administration is considering measures to ban and sanction the international movement to boycott Israel, from U.S. universities where the movement thrives.

Hebrew sources said the U.S. administration has already started taking steps to ban the BDS movement in American university, after Kenneth L. Marcus  was appointed as the new director of the Department of Civil Rights in the United States.

Marcus announced the start of an investigation into old cases, the most important of which was the Rutgers University case in New Jersey, where there will be an investigation into its activities, and deal with a number of reported anti-Semitic incidents against Jewish students  several years ago.

The Obama administration closed the file at the time, however, Marcus told the Zionist Organization in America that he would cancel the decision of the Obama administration and reconsider the case to see whether this is a case of religious hatred or attacks on ethnic groups.

According to Israeli media, the Trump government also began to define the activities of the boycott campaign against the State of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Arab and Palestinian activists and supporters at the United States expressed their disappointment with the anti-BDS decision, saying that the US administration has taken a side in the conflict and “decided to accuse all those who sympathize with the Palestinian cause as anti-Semitic.”

More US underwear to come from El Salvador

US consumers may look on tags on their underwear and find that it is “hecho en El Salvador” — made in El Salvador.  El Salvador garment factories have long been a source of underwear for the US market and that trend is continuing.

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An article on an apparel industry website today notes that HanesBrands is investing to expand its factories in El Salvador where underwear for the US market is sewn:  According to an article in Just-Style, the garment manufacturer will invest a total of $10.4 million on its facilities here and increase employment by 430 jobs.

HanesBrands decision to increase investment in El Salvador is attributed in the article to a new customs union among Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as well as the country’s decision to cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan. 

You can read HanesBrands public relations pieces about its operations in El Salvador here.

Balance those public relations pieces with a 2010 inspection report by the Fair Labor Association which found numerous violations of workers rights at a Hanes facility in El Salvador. 

D.C.-Based Pro-Israel Group Secretly Ran Misleading Facebook Ads to Target Pro-Palestinian Activist

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by Justin Elliott, ProPublica, and Josh Nathan-Kazis, The Forward

In 2016, as Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi performed at college campuses around the United States, his appearances seemed to spark student protests.

Before his visit to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, a page called “John Jay Students Against Hate” appeared on Facebook with Kanazi’s face next to a uniformed cop, painting Kanazi as anti-police. When Kanazi crossed the country a few days later to visit San Jose State, a nearly-identical Facebook page popped up, this one called “SJSU Students Against Hate,” with Kanazi’s face superimposed over an image of military graves. Paid Facebook campaigns promoted both pages.

Despite their names, the Facebook campaigns were run by professional Washington D.C. political operatives who work for a group called the Israel on Campus Coalition, according to promotional materials obtained by ProPublica and the Forward.

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In the materials, which the Israel on Campus Coalition distributed to its donors, the group describes each of the Facebook pages as an “anonymous digital campaign.” The group says it paid to promote the campaign, which reached tens of thousands of people.

The social media campaigns provide another example of how well-funded advocacy organizations are using deceptive strategies to promote their cause online. The Israel on Campus Coalition launched these campaigns during the 2016 election season, at the same time that entities linked to the Russian government bought misleading Facebook ads on a range of political issues.

The Israel on Campus Coalition didn’t respond to requests for comment. The group had a budget of $9 million in its fiscal year ending in June 2017, according to federal tax filings. Its funders include the foundations of billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer and philanthropist Lynn Schusterman.

Asked about the Israel on Campus Coalition pages, a Facebook spokesman said they “violate our policies against misrepresentation and they have been removed.”

In response to criticism of Russia-linked ads, Facebook recently created new rules requiring disclosure of who is paying for political ads on the site. How the company defines what is political remains murky.

Anonymous digital campaigns appear to be a central part of the Israel on Campus Coalition’s efforts to combat pro-Palestinian activism on U.S. campuses. This past spring, the ICC appears to have set up at least one anonymous website to oppose a George Washington University student government resolution that called on the school to divest its endowment from certain companies that students said were profiting from Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, the Forward reported.

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s leaders discussed their covert social media tactics in an unaired Al Jazeera documentary featuring hidden camera footage of Washington, D.C. pro-Israel advocacy officials.

“With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, what we found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted Facebook ads,” said the Israel on Campus Coalition’s executive director, Jacob Baime, in the Al Jazeera documentary, which was filmed in 2016. The film was viewed by ProPublica and the Forward.

Baime also said in the documentary that his organization’s work is based on a doctrine used to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “It’s modeled on General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy,” Baime said. “We’ve copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for us, actually.”

McChrystal, who led the U.S. military’s special forces and the NATO war effort in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, emphasized so-called “offensive information operations” to embarrass and discredit violent insurgents.

The Al Jazeera documentary, in which a journalist went undercover as an intern for a pro-Israel advocacy group in Washington, has been the subject of months of international intrigue and has never been aired by the network. Decrying the undercover tactics, pro-Israel groups and members of Congress have pushed back against the documentary series and Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera. The network, which has faced public criticism from its own journalists for not airing the documentary, said in April it did not buckle under pressure from a pro-Israel group in deciding not to broadcast the program. A spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Footage in the documentary also shows Israel on Campus Coalition officials describing their working relationship with the Israeli government.

Baime says in the documentary that Israel on Campus Coalition officials “coordinate” or “communicate” with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli government department that has become the hub of the Israeli government’s overt and covert efforts against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in the U.S. and around the world. A spokesman for the agency didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the same hidden camera footage, Ian Hersh, the Israel on Campus Coalition’s director of operations, said that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs participates in the group’s “Operations and Intelligence Brief,” a regular strategy meeting.

In recent days, some aspects of the Al Jazeera documentary as well as a short clip have been posted on the website Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian news site whose executive director, Ali Abunimah, appears as an interviewee in the film.

Baime and Hersh didn’t respond to requests for comment about the footage of them in the documentary.

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s online efforts against Kanazi, the Palestinian-American poet, began in November 2016 while he was touring college campuses to promote his book, “Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up From Brooklyn to Palestine.”

According to the Israel on Campus Coalition’s donor materials, the group identified and worked with a non-Jewish military veteran and San Jose State University student to write a blog post critical of Kanazi. The precise nature of the group’s work with the student is unclear from the donor materials, and the student did not respond to requests for comment.

The Israel on Campus Coalition then created and paid to promote the “SJSU Students Against Hate” page, which linked to the blog post.

“Kanazi preaches hate on the campuses he visits,” the student wrote in the post, which appeared on the website Medium and has since been deleted.

Kanazi said that he does not recall being aware of the anonymous Facebook pages at the time. “These insidious tactics are part of a larger campaign to smear students, professors, and anyone who dares speak up for Palestinian human rights at universities,” he said in an email.

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Authorities Can Now Deny Visa and Green Card Applications Without Giving Applicants a Chance to Fix Errors

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Kavitha Surana

As President Donald Trump wages a vocal battle against illegal immigration, his administration has been working more quietly to cut down on legal pathways to immigrate to the U.S.

On Tuesday, a new policy kicks in, allowing officers with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to outright deny any visa or green card application that is missing evidence or contains an error. Around 7 million people apply every year.

Previously, officers were required by an Obama-era policy to send notices, giving applicants a chance to correct such problems instead of closing the process. Officers can still choose to do so, but they can also opt to skip that step if the application is deemed frivolous.

Without the notices, applicants won’t have the opportunity to intervene before a decision is made, potentially adding months or years of extra paperwork and thousands of dollars in fees to the already lengthy process. In the case of those trying to renew their visas while they’re still in the U.S., they could be placed in deportation proceedings the moment their visas expire.

USCIS spokesman Michael Bars said the policy was changed to cut down on frivolous applications. The agency has said applicants sometimes file substantially incomplete placeholder applications, knowing the back-and-forth with the USCIS will buy them time. “Under the law, the burden of proof is on the applicant,” Bars said, “not the other way around.”

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But immigration lawyers worry that there is not enough oversight or clear standards to ensure fair handling. USCIS officers will now have near-complete discretion to make complex judgments behind closed doors.

“They can deny you on the fact that, subjectively, they feel in their mind [the application] is not approvable,” Pierre Bonnefil, an immigration attorney in New York, said.

One reason the lawyers are worried is that they’ve seen a barrage of scrutiny directed at once-standard immigration applications since Trump took office. ProPublica spoke with a dozen lawyers and reviewed documentation for several of these cases.

Many responses cited technicalities: One application was not accepted because the seventh page, usually left blank, was not attached. Another was rejected because it did not have a table of contents and exhibit numbers, even though it had other forms of organization.

“It seems like they are just making every single submission difficult,” Bonnefil said. “Even the most standard, run-of-the-mill” application.

The lawyers call this minefield of onerous paperwork an “invisible wall,” designed to make legal immigration as difficult as possible.

“People who are here legally, doing everything through proper channels, now feel as unsettled and unwelcome and uncertain about the future as people who don’t have documents,” Sandra Feist, an immigration attorney in Minnesota, said.

Under Trump, this has meant that cases drag on for weeks or months as lawyers scramble to address notices. Some lawyers have noticed an uptick in denials recently, but most say that strong cases still eventually make it through.

It remains to be seen how broadly the new policy will be used to outright deny even strong applications. The memo said the new policy is “not intended to penalize filers for innocent mistakes or misunderstandings of evidentiary requirements.”

Apart from technicalities, lawyers have noted an increase in detailed requests for evidence. Some of the new questions fit with Trump’s 2017 Executive Order called “Buy American and Hire American,” which directed the Department of Homeland Security to find ways to make sure specialty work visas are awarded only to the most highly skilled and highest-paid foreign workers, to fill jobs that couldn’t be filled by an American.

To some, the increased scrutiny of work visas is welcome.

In particular, the H-1B visa category has often been the subject of controversy. Intended for high-level workers with specialized skills, it has been used to outsource ordinary jobs. In 2014, for example, Disney laid off about 250 long-time workers in computer jobs so that they could replace them with workers flown in from India. The Americans were required to train their replacements before they left. A federal court found that Disney did not violate any laws and the case was eventually dropped, but Republicans have often pointed to similar cases to call for tougher oversight of foreign worker programs.

“It’s almost like it’s a subclass of employee that they can take advantage of and can work them extra hard for smaller pay,” said Rennie Sawade, the communications chair of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. He has experienced increased competition in his own search for jobs in the tech industry and in that of his son, who is 24 and has an associate degree in robotics and computer networking but is still struggling to find work. “These visas should be used for what they are intended for, so you definitely need more scrutiny in how they are being used.”

But lawyers argue the stepped-up examinations go beyond what’s required to assess an immigrant’s eligibility and seem intended to simply make the process more burdensome for all immigrants. Under Trump, the extra layer of questions has not been limited to H-1B cases, but applied to all types of work visas, family-based green cards and humanitarian cases. The extra questions are also directed toward people who have lived and worked in the U.S. for more than a decade and are applying to extend their visas.

Foreign workers once considered to have slam-dunk immigration cases — an internationally recognized physicist, an Alzheimer’s disease researcher, a biologist doing “cutting edge” work on vaccine development — are now finding themselves tied up in extra requests for evidence to prove their skills are truly specialized.

One Iranian professor, in the process of launching a graduate degree program at an American university, included 10 letters of recommendation from experts in his field and evidence of his awards and publications. Feist, his lawyer, said she felt certain his petition for a green card under the “outstanding professor” category would sail through.

Instead, she received a notice of intent to deny, reviewed by ProPublica, pointing out a slew of quibbles: The professor had published frequently in his field, but was he cited often enough? He had won awards, but the reviewing officer didn’t think they were truly prestigious. The professor had served on panels and presented at conferences, but those were not really sufficient to prove influence, the officer wrote.

“This is just one example of pretty typical aggressive requests for additional evidence that I’m seeing that are far outside of the norm that I’ve seen in the past 17 years,” Feist said.

Michael Cataliotti, an immigration lawyer in New York, recalled a case in which he printed and attached email correspondence between a client and his employer, to demonstrate the client had been offered a job. Because the email was printed from his work computer, Cataliotti’s name appeared at the top of the paper.

This seemed to confuse the USCIS official handling the case. “The document has been altered, and as such, is inadmissible,” the official wrote.

Other examples show an overly strict reading of the rules, sometimes applied incorrectly. Courtney Morgan-Greene, an immigration attorney in California, said the USCIS tried to deny a religious worker’s request for a visa extension because she had taken some time off from her job — in order to give birth, and then to mourn the death of her child after 11 months.

The response from the agency began, “While USCIS sympathizes with the death of the beneficiary’s baby,” and went on to deny the case based on the time she took off. Morgan-Greene emailed the quote to ProPublica.

USCIS policy allows breaks in employment “such as sick leave, pregnancy leave, spousal care and vacation as long as they do not exceed two years.” Morgan-Greene said her client’s two periods of leave combined did not add up to two years. “Not only is the decision incorrect as a matter of law, it shocks the conscience,” she said.

Employers are just as frustrated as immigrants trying to obtain green cards and visas. On Aug. 22, a group of CEOs representing major U.S. companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Cisco Systems, American Airlines, Apple, Coca-Cola and Texas Instruments, sent a letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen with their concerns with recent USCIS policy changes.

“Inconsistent government action and uncertainty undermines economic growth and American competitiveness and creates anxiety for employees who follow the law,” they wrote.

They added: “USCIS actions significantly increase the likelihood that a long-term employee — who has followed the rules and who has been authorized by the U.S. government multiple times to work in the United States — will lose his or her status. All of this despite the Department of Labor having, in many cases, certified that no qualified U.S. workers are available to do that person’s job.”

Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said examples of H-1B misuse are “highly concerning,” but she said that there’s no clear data to prove how widespread it is. “We know there are a lot of legitimate employers that use this program as well,” she said.

Pierce said targeted approaches — such as limiting contractors from hiring H-1B workers or going after companies that mainly depend on H-1B workers — would be better solutions than a blanket approach making it difficult for all companies to hire foreign workers.

But Trump has made it clear that he would like to see a reduction in all immigration. “One thing really unique about President Trump is he views not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration through the context of it being a security threat and an economic threat to the United States,” Pierce said.

Even when cases are ultimately approved, Feist says employers have told her they will reconsider going through the process again. Workers stuck in limbo have told her they’re considering other options, too.

Cataliotti agreed the strategy seems designed to frustrate, “so either one or both parties says: Forget it, I can’t do this anymore, the position is gone, or I might as well go to Canada.”

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My country is being poisoned by populism. The EU must stand with Hungary | Ádám Fischer

I conduct orchestras all over the world, and I know that only if we work together can we have harmony

Human rights are under attack from populist and nationalist movements across the world – in Hungary, Italy, Poland, the US and elsewhere. These forces encourage their supporters to look inward and reject the outsider, whether it is an idea or a migrant on a boat. We need to overcome this narrow focus and look out for the interests of everyone.

Related: MEPs to challenge Orbán over rule of law Hungary

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‘Repugnant, racist’: News Corp cartoon on Serena Williams condemned

No editor looked at it? Racists.

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JK Rowling and daughter of Martin Luther King Jr criticise cartoonist Mark Knight’s caricature of tennis star

News Corp has come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon depicting Serena Williams in its Melbourne paper.

The cartoon by Mark Knight, published in Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun tabloid on Tuesday, depicted the tennis star having a tantrum on the court at the US Open after she lost to Naomi Osaka on Saturday. The depiction of Osaka has also been criticised as making her appear as a “white woman”.

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Polio outbreak in Papua New Guinea reaches capital Port Moresby

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First case confirmed in the capital which is preparing to host high-level Apec summit

An outbreak of polio in Papua New Guinea has reached Port Moresby, with the first case in the nation’s capital prompting an emergency vaccination campaign.

A six-year-old boy from the capital’s Five Mile settlement was confirmed as infected after laboratory tests were conducted in Australia.

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Fascist fight clubs: how white nationalists use MMA as a recruiting tool

Bust them up!

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Far-right groups across Europe and North America are using mixed martial arts to swell their numbers, spread their ideology and fight their enemies

“You will not replace us.”

This was one of the slogans chanted during a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on the night of 11 August 2017. Approximately 100 young white men – most of whom brandished tiki torches to intimidate watchers and light up their path – marched through the streets in scenes reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan rallies that once blighted the southern Unites States. By 10pm that evening, the group of white supremacists — now chanting “Jews will not replace us” along with the Nazi phrase “blood and soil” – had reached the University of Virginia campus, where counter-protesters awaited them with banners and slogans of their own. By the end of the weekend one of the counter-protestors would be killed, struck by a car.

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