Category Archives: Viva!

Canada hits US with retaliatory tariffs: ‘We will not back down’

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Country announced taxes on items including ketchup, lawnmowers, whiskey and yoghurt amounting to $12.6bn

Canada has announced billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs against the US in a tit-for-tat response to the Trump administration’s duties on Canadian steel and aluminum.

Justin Trudeau’s government released the final list of items that will be targeted beginning 1 July. Some items will be subject to taxes of 10 or 25%.

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More than 700 anti-Trump protests planned across all 50 states

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Mass events, spurred by immigration policy and supreme court, urge unity in trying times: ‘It’s not about red or blue’

Organizers of demonstrations expected to take place across all 50 states on Saturday are calling for Americans outraged by Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the prospect of a supreme court swinging sharply right to put aside party differences and protest with one voice.

“This is an all hands on deck, stop the madness moment. It’s not a red or blue thing,” the national protest organizer, Ai-jen Poo, told the Guardian.

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Resources to help child immigrants & fight family separation

nicolayoon:

via Today.com (How to Help Immigrant Children)

  • Together Rising Love Flash Mob. Organized by best-selling author and blogger Glennon Doyle through her non-profit organization, the fundraising effort will go to provide bilingual legal and advocacy assistance for 60 children, aged 12 months to 10 years, currently separated from their parents in an Arizona detention center. Their first priority will be to establish and maintain contact between children and their parents, with the ultimate goal of reunification and safety and rehabilitation for the children.
  • The Florence Project and Refugee Rights Project. This organization provides legal assistance and social services to detained immigrants in Arizona.
  • The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. This organization works for the rights of children in immigration proceedings.
  • Kids In Need Of Defense (KIND). This organization works to ensure that no child appears in immigration court alone without representation.
  • Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. They work to prevent the deportation of asylum-seeking families fleeing violence.

via slate.com (How you can fight family separation)

• The ACLU is litigating this policy in California.

• If you’re an immigration lawyer, the American Immigration Lawyers Association will be sending around a volunteer list for you to help represent the women and men with their asylum screening, bond hearings, ongoing asylum representation, etc. Please sign up.

Al Otro Lado is a binational organization that works to offer legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S.

CARA—a consortium of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—provides legal services at family detention centers.

The Florence Project is an Arizona project offering free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children in immigration custody.

Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers too.

Kids in Need of Defense works to ensure that kids do not appear in immigration court without representation, and to lobby for policies that advocate for children’s legal interests. Donate here.

The Legal Aid Justice Center is a Virginia-based center providing unaccompanied minors legal services and representation.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras is an organization that provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S.

RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.

• The Texas Civil Rights Project is seeking “volunteers who speak Spanish, Mam, Q’eqchi’ or K’iche’ and have paralegal or legal assistant experience.”

Together Rising is another Virginia-based organization that’s helping provide legal assistance for 60 migrant children who were separated from their parents and are currently detained in Arizona.

• The Urban Justice Center’s Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project is working to keep families together.

Women’s Refugee Commission advocates for the rights and protection of women, children, and youth fleeing violence and persecution.

• Finally, ActBlue has aggregated many of these groups under a single button.

This list isn’t comprehensive, so let us know what else is happening. And please call your elected officials, stay tuned for demonstrations, hug your children, and be grateful if you are not currently dependent on the basic humanity of U.S. policy.

Selfie in jail: Defenders of migrant children jailed over Trump’s genocide and torture of children at border

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Eleanor Chavez said, “In the jail cell at State Police on Cerrillos in Santa Fe. Arrested at the governor’s office.”
“We are in jail — but where are the children?”
The New Mexico Governor’s office was occupied on Thursday in protest of New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez’ support of Trump separating migrant children from their parents at the border.

Iowa law forcing women to wait 72 hours before abortion ruled illegal

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  • Iowa supreme court finds law violates state constitution
  • Ruling does not affect new ban on abortions after 20 weeks

The Iowa supreme court on Friday blocked a law requiring a 72-hour waiting period before a woman can get an abortion.

Related: Abortion rights in ‘dire, immediate danger’ as Anthony Kennedy retires

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Massacre at Newspaper a Result of Trump’s Words

By Arturo Castañares / La Prensa San Diego Publisher and CEO

Thursday’s shooting rampage at the Virginia Capital Gazette left five people dead and the world of journalism in fear of continuing to do its job of reporting the news of the day in today’s America.

A disgruntled man that had unsuccessfully sued the paper for libel in 2012 walked into the newspaper’s offices with a shotgun and began shooting employees, finally surrendering to police when confronted.

Although no one is sure yet of the killer’s true motives, journalists everywhere feared something like this would happen in our current political environment where the President nearly daily criticizes the media as purveyors of fake, misleading, and flat out slanderous news he’s labeled as “fake”’simply because he disagrees with the stories.

From the very first press briefing held by the Trump White House in January 2017, then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer aggressively confronted the media like adversaries, that day repeatedly making the obviously false claim that the crowd for Trump’s Inauguration was the largest ever. Period.

Spicer’s confrontational style was so bombastic and rude that Saturday Night Live famously spoofed him with comedian Melissa McCarthy playing an over-the-top version of the real press secretary’s dismissive interactions with White House correspondents.

Trump’s early morning tweets have often called out media outlets he detests, especially CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Trump calls them “fake news” for reporting the everyday happenings in politics, only agreeing with those outlets when they report news Trump likes.

Two days after his summit with the North Korean dictator, Trump claimed the greatest threat to our country is fake news. Not the nuclear missiles still held by the unpredictable Kim Jong-on, not terrorists, nor even Russian hackers that meddled in our elections.

No. The press. But not all the press, it seems.

Trump personally tweets glowingly about the news coverage from Fox News, and even promotes their upcoming shows with anchors he likes, and sometimes even tweets policy changes based on Fox News broadcasts that have just aired. Completely biased (admittedly so) hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are fine, in the world according to Trump.

And just like he did during his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump continues to attack the mainstream media at every rally he attends, usually wrongly decrying that the media will misquote him, not show the rally, or in some way spin his message, even as CNN carries the event live.

As we’ve seen in other aspects of Trump’s messaging, his followers adopt his rhetoric and share his views in ways that very few politicians have ever experienced.

This week, during a campaign rally in South Carolina for the Republican governor seeking re-election, the crowd turned against CNN’s Jim Acosta, a constant presence at the White House briefings who often spars with current Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

People in the crowd chanted “Go home Jim” and called the well known reporter “Fake News Jim.” One person held up a huge cardboard sign that read “CNN SUCKS.”

Granted, some news outlets have made mistakes, gotten stories wrong, and a few have even made stories up from hole cloth, but to dismiss serious professional journalists from distinguished outlets as a whole is against all that this country stands for.

From the inception of what would later become the United States of America, probing and critical journalists have helped shape the outcome of this country.

Benjamin Franklin, who wrote letters in his brother’s newspaper that strongly criticized England’s tyrannical rule over the colonists, signed them under the pen name Silence Dogood, a fictional widow.

Some of Franklin’s Dogood letters upset the English Colonial Assembly so much that his brother James was jailed for months for refusing to identify the author of the letters.

Franklin would, of course, go on to print his own newspaper and humbly signed his letters “B. Franklin, Printer.” His letters would lay the foundation for the revolt that ultimately led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of this great country we all call home.

Since Franklin’s time, newspapers, radio, TV, and now all forms of digital media have continued the important work of not only criticizing, but also challenging our leaders.

A free press is so ingrained in our political DNA that it is enshrined in the protections of the First Amendment, along with our individual freedom of speech and religion.

The First Amendment protects the press from government censorship and control, but that’s only from official laws or actions of the government that would limit or control the press.

What Trump has done is far more dangerous.

Instead, Trump has set out to discredit the media, and make anything journalist say questionable to the general public. He has sown distrust in the media and has made everyday citizens suspicious of any story, especially ones that disagree with his views.

Now he has debased journalists so much that average Americans are openly cynical of the news media in a way never before seen in our country.

It was investigative reporting that discovered and exposed the Watergate scandal. In that case, when a sitting president said the stories were not true, an informed public and, eventually, Congress found out the truth only through the diligent work of tireless reporters.

Since Nixon’s resignation because of Watergate, dozens of other politicians from both parties have been exposed for wrongdoing, from Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair, Senator Gary Hart’s actual affair, John Edwards love child, and Governor Sanford’s illicit trip to Argentina. In each case, it was news reporting that ultimately surfaced hidden secrets that voters rightfully should have known.

In the nearly 300 years since Benjamin Franklin first used the power of the pen to check government’s actual power over its citizens, the press has continued to question, prod, and provoke our leaders to ensure a more transparent and accountable government.

In Trump’s world, that kind of examination of him, his administration, and his actions is a direct threat to his political and economic survival.

In his form of zero-sum politics, the press is the enemy. And in only 18 months in office, one of his most successful campaigns has been to pin Americans against the media.

We may not always agree with all news reports, but there is no denying that, as a whole, professional journalists try to get the facts out to the public.

Not counting political commentators, bloggers, and Internet trolls, the media is not the enemy, and reporters should not be harassed, threatened, or, as happened this week, killed.

Reporters have been killed in war zones, by drug cartels, and even by terrorist. But this week, it was a fellow American. That is unacceptable.

A misinformed public is far greater danger to the long-term survival of our democracy than any false news reports.

It’s our job as Americans, and more importantly as voters, to find out what’s going on, from whatever reliable source we can find. And always, always ask questions.

A. Castanares. Printer.

  • PUBLISHED THURSDAY, JUNE 28 AT 7:47 P.M.

US criticises Ireland for insufficient action on modern slavery

Stealing babies from Guatemala and El Salvador is new US slavery!

People trafficking report highlights forced labour in Irish fishing industry

Ireland has been downgraded by the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report for failing to do enough to tackle modern slavery.

The 2018 TIP report, released on Thursday, gives Ireland a Tier 2 ranking, on a par with Indonesia and India, because of what it describes as the government’s failure to adequately protect victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation and labour abuse, and failure to convict traffickers.

Related: ‘We thought slavery had gone away’: African men exploited on Irish boats

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‘What’s wrong with our society?’ Annapolis mayor voices concern at hostility to media

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Gavin Buckley says Capital Gazette ‘reports on our kids’ soccer games and good, local, interesting stuff’

Gavin Buckley, the mayor of Annapolis, was distraught in the wake of the mass shooting at his city’s local newspaper, telling the Guardian: “What’s wrong with our society that we’re this tightly wound that you can be this upset at a newspaper that reports stories on cats being stuck up a tree?”

Although Buckley made clear that the Annapolis Capital-Gazette, the newspaper where five people were shot dead on Thursday, was a good paper; he was just still in shock that it was a target. After all, when he was told that there had been a shooting at the Capital, his initial response was to think of Maryland’s state capital in the heart of downtown Annapolis.

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Birdbrainy: New Caledonian crows make tools using mental images

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Study finds birds have design templates in their minds and may pass them on to future generations

New Caledonian crows use mental pictures to twist twigs into hooks and make other tools, according to a provocative study that suggests the notoriously clever birds pass on successful designs to future generations, a hallmark of culture.

“We find evidence for a specific type of emulation we call mental template matching,” co-author Alex Taylor, director of the Language, Cognition and Culture Lab at the University of Auckland, told AFP.

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