Consular officials are scrambling to help children separated from their parents, but they did not know how many there are or where they have been placed.
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Peace marchers from Helmand look to change Afghanistan’s narrative
Photo of the peace march taken from the Etilaatroz news website and used with permission.
A total of 10,453 civilian casualties — 3,438 people killed and 7,015 injured — were documented in 2017 in Afghanistan. After Kabul, the capital city, it was residents of the southern province of Helmand that had it worst.
The #HelmandPeaceMarch movement led by youth from the province tells a story of fatigue from war and spotlights the next generation’s search for a better life in a country riven by violence.
The march has now reached Kabul, after 700 kilometres on foot through four of Afghanistan’s most insecure provinces –Helmand, Zabul, Ghazni and Maidan Wardak. On their way, marchers held meetings with villagers and explained the purpose of their march. They began as 7 people but acquired 59 others over the course of their journey.
The Peace marchers’ caravan arrived Kandahar. They moved from Helmand toward Kabul to seek peace and security for their homeland. These dears should be praised and welcomed. Their determination, honesty, and hard-work are admirable. I hope their voice will be heard and they will get the desired result.
Helmand is a strategic prize for both the government and the Taliban. It is often assumed that the local population of Helmand has reached an accommodation with the insurgents, who control more territory there than the government.
The march sought to to defy that stereotype.
This rural-born peace movement grew out of a Taliban bombing in Helmand in March left 15 dead and scores wounded.
First, several sit-in tents popped up in Helmand and other provinces: Herat, Nimruz, Farah, Zabul, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Ghazni, Paktia, Kunduz, Kunar, Nangrahar, Balkh, Parwan, Daykundi, Maidan Wardak, Bamyan and Jawzjan. Hunger strikes followed.
The march from Helmand to Kabul has four main demands:
- Respecting the holy month of Ramadan, all sides of war should declare a ceasefire.(Ramadan ended last week and despite a brief ceasefire, the Taliban have recommenced attacks on government targets);
- Specific channels and addresses for peace talks should be identified among all sides of the war, and peace negotiations should be launched;
- Considering Islamic and national values and interests, practical steps should be taken for forming a system that is acceptable to all sides;
- Based upon the agreement of all sides in this war, a specific timeline should be set for the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan.
The marchers have been mostly welcomed warmly by people on their way to Kabul. Some even responded to their protest with flowers and songs for peace.
#Peace Caravan from #Helmand province has just arrived in Shajoi district & they will continue to walk capital #kabul. The have staged a “walk protest” & demanding immediate ceasefire between #Afghan Govt and Taliban.#LongMarch2Kabul pic.twitter.com/9qTiWEdfkm
— Obaid khan Rahemi (@engr_raheemi) May 30, 2018
#Helmand2Kabul and #HelmandPeaceMarch hashtags have widely shared on social media by men, women, boys and girls of all ethnic backgrounds.
#Hazara #girls in #Ghazni province standing in queue to welcome #Pashtun boys of #Helmand province, who stage nearly 600-km walk calling for peace. The Strong message is “#War & violence do not recognize ethnicity” & Everyone is victim of #violence in #Afghanistan @IntizarKhadim pic.twitter.com/W2YgqkRVA2
— Syed Anwar (@Sayed_Anwer) June 8, 2018
#Kabul is waiting to host #HelmandPeaceMarch – @ArtLordsWorld is painting a series of murals on the highways leading to Kabul to welcome our #PeaceHeroes #HelmandPeaceMarch2Kabul pic.twitter.com/KrJoz4byz5
— Omaid Sharifi (@OmaidSharifi) June 4, 2018
The Helmand Peace March is in Kabul now. Mom and I went to greet them. They are in front of the Mosque and Madrassa complex facing Habibia School. Seeing them was a moment of joy and healing for mom and me. Let’s welcome them to Kabul with warmth and support.
— Shaharzad Akbar (@ShaharzadAkbar) June 18, 2018
On June 19, the marchers met with President Ashraf Ghani, not in the lavish presidential palace in Kabul as officials initially offered, but on the street, where their movement began. The Taliban have so far refused to meet with them in any official capacity, the marchers said, although they have met and talked with fighters from the group along their way.
Written by Farkhonda Tahery · comments (0)
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When racism in Israel becomes the ‘legitimate right’ of its Jewish citizens
Protests against Arab families moving into a Jewish city are a reminder that until everyone is free to choose where they want to live, the Israeli regime will remain segregationist and racist at its core.
By Suhad Bishara
Illustrative photo of demonstration by far-right Israelis. (Activestills.org)
Jewish residents of the northern Israeli city of Afula protested last week against the sale of a home to an Arab family and the possibility that the city would have a mixed Jewish-Arab population. I have no doubt that every person who believes in freedom and justice will view this protest as an expression of pro-segregation racism reminiscent of South African apartheid.
The protest comes just a few months after Sivan Yehieli, the head of the Kfar Vradim Municipal Council, announced that his pastoral town must maintain its Zionist-Jewish character after 58 Arab citizens won bids to build their homes in the town.
Let’s make one thing clear: 150 protesters are not an aberration in Israel. They were simply expressing overtly the racist segregation upon which Israel’s land regime was founded. This is precisely how military rule over Israel’s Arab citizens – in effect from 1949 until 1966 – functioned: “cleansing” vast swaths of land in order to settle Jews and to ensure reserves of land that would continue to exclusively serve Israeli Jews.
This “cleansing” process was implemented, among other ways, via the construction of hundreds of new Jewish towns and communities, as well as through the establishment of admissions committees in kibbutzim, moshavim, and other communities.
Yehieli faithfully represents the Israeli planning authorities’ policy aimed at demographically re-engineering the country. He represents an Israeli legal system that refused to allow the implementation of its own decision to allow the internally-displaced Palestinian residents of Iqrit and Bir’im to return to their villages, that gave the green light to the Admissions Committees Law, and that allows the state to uproot the residents of Umm al-Hiran in order to replace them with Jewish citizens – just like during and immediately following the Nakba. And we can expect much more of the same.
Bedouin women collect their belongings from the ruins of their demolished homes in the village of Umm al-Hiran, Negev desert, January 18, 2017. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)
It is no coincidence that the proposed nation-state basic law includes a clause that authorizes the state to “allow a community, including those belonging to one religion or nationality, to maintain separate community living.” This proposed basic law will constitutionally and normatively affirm Israel’s policy of segregation. In effect, Arabs’ citizenship will continue to be contingent, provided that it does not conflict with Jewish statehood and supremacy and the “right” of Jewish citizens to choose to live separately without other citizens sabotaging their desire for homogeneity.
Much of the criticism leveled at the racism of Afula’s residents focuses on the lack of development in Arab communities, which results in the necessity of young Arab citizens to seek housing solutions in nearby Jewish towns.
This thinking prevents envisioning a situation in which an Arab citizen of Israel has the right to choose where she/he wants to live simply because it suits her/him to live there. It buys into the paradigm of a discriminatory, racist, and apartheid-like land regime that forces them to find a circumstantial explanation for the phenomenon, rather than simply calling it by its name: racism and segregation.
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Imagine a scenario in which the Israeli government takes unprecedented steps to allocate land for the development of Arab communities. Imagine that it begins developing Arab communities of all kinds — cities, villages, and agricultural communities — while also ensuring the development of industrial and commercial zones in accordance with the principles of distributive and restorative justice.
But yet, even in this scenario, it remains the right of every Arab citizen to decide where he or she wants to live — be it Kfar Vradim, Tel Aviv, or Afula.
As long as Israeli state authorities cannot or will not imagine the country’s land as open to all, we cannot talk about justice or constitutional rights. The Israeli regime will remain segregationist and racist at its core. Segregated living will remain racist, even under the guise of “separate but equal.”
Imagine protesters demonstrating against Jews buying homes in a Christian town in Europe. Israelis would declare them racists and anti-Semites, and Israel’s prime minister would surely remark that it reminds him of the dark days leading up to the Holocaust. Inside Israel, however, an almost identical scene is framed by Afula’s former mayor Avi Elkabetz as such: “The residents of Afula do not want a mixed city. They want a Jewish city — and this is their right. This isn’t racism.”
Thus racism in Israel magically becomes the “legitimate right” of the Jewish citizen.
Attorney Suhad Bishara is the Director of the Land and Planning Rights Unit, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. This article was first published in Hebrew on Haokets. Read it here.
Nebraska Farmers Return Land to Ponca Tribe in Effort to Block Keystone XL
In a move that could challenge the proposed path of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline—and acknowledges the U.S. government’s long history of abusing Native Americans and forcing them off their lands—a Nebraska farm couple has returned a portion of ancestral land to the Ponca Tribe. At a deed-signing ceremony earlier this week, farmers Art and Helen […]
Tesla saboteur claims to be whistleblower

The former Tesla employee, whom the US e-carmaker accuses of sabotage and stealing company secrets, has claimed he was sacked because he wanted to speak out about the company’s flawed production and resource waste.
Romania police arrest German journalist covering protest in Bucharest
Police are alike world-wide – they repress because they can and mean-spirited and cruel control freaks are drawn to the work.

German journalist Paul Arne Wagner never expected to be arrested while covering an anti-corruption protest in Bucharest. More than a week later, Romanian authorities have failed to provide a convincing justification.
Inside the bunker where Westpac wages a nightly battle on the frontline of cyber war

Westpac reveals it can often come under cyberattack as many as three times in a 24-hour period, with each attack met by staff trained in war game-like boot camps.
The families being torn apart by US immigration policy
The warning, shared from cell phone to cell phone by migrants along the border, is an audio recording of a Salvadorian child crying.
AT&T Successfully Cripples California’s Net Neutrality Law –
Crap! will never, ever, ever buy AT&T services

AT&T wins again. As we’ve been noting, California had been making great progress in passing one of the toughest net neutrality state laws in the nation. Scott Weiner’s SB822 was called the “gold standard” for state-level net neutrality laws, going even a bit further than the FCC’s discarded 2015 rules in terms of policing anti-competitive behavior. It not only banned ISPs from blocking or throttling competitors’ websites, but it also prohibited ISPs like AT&T from using usage-caps anti-competitively, most commonly by exempting an ISP’s own content while still penalizing competitors like Netflix (aka zero rating).
AT&T, fresh off of its $86 billion merger with Time Warner, has dreams of using its combined new media and broadband market power to dominate competitors in the streaming video and online ad wars to come.
AT&T saw California’s restrictions as a serious threat to those ambitions. As a result, it did what the company always did: it used cash-compromised lawmakers to kill the legislation before it could truly come to pass.
AT&T this week first began circulating a misleading study by an AT&T-funded group named CALInnovates that claimed that preventing AT&T from abusing usage caps anti-competitively would somehow harm the state’s minority populations (absurd and decidedly false, it should go without saying). The California law didn’t ban zero rating, but it did require that if ISPs are to zero rate it should be for entire classes of traffic (like video), preventing ISPs from giving any one specific company an unfair advantage.
After AT&T had successfully confused lawmakers into misunderstanding zero rating, its lobbyists then convinced California Assemblyman Miguel Santiago to introduce a series of last-minute secretive Tuesday night amendments that severely weakened the original proposal. Those amendments eliminated rules governing usage caps and zero rating, interconnection and ISP efforts to double dip by charging companies “access fees” just to reach their broadband subscribers.
Santiago then quickly rushed the amendments through without letting the committee or the bill sponsor even discuss them. The amendments were approved 8-0 by a committee of four Democrats and four Republicans happy to work in perfect unison to give AT&T what it wanted. Wiener then pulled the bill entirely, noting the remaining scraps would not adequately protect California consumers.
“What the committee just did was outrageous,” Wiener said at the hearing. “These amendments eviscerated the bill–it is no longer a net neutrality bill. I will state for the record…I think it was fundamentally unfair.”
That’s a bit of an understatement, and net neutrality activist groups had notably less polite words for what occurred.
“The level of corruption we just witnessed literally makes me sick to my stomach, said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future. “These California democrats will go down in history as among the worst corporate shills that have ever held elected office.Californians should rise up and demand that at their Assembly members represent them. The actions of this committee today are an attack not just on net neutrality, but on our democracy.”
Weiner could try and reintroduce the legislation, but it would need to be passed, intact, by next Friday, something local activists tell me isn’t likely to happen. This isn’t likely the end of the fight for California’s efforts, though it does once again highlight the absurd power AT&T wields over state lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike.
My relatives were on the Mayflower – and I sued to strike down the unconstitutional Muslim travel ban: Julia A. Shearson (Opinion)
Our country was founded on the principle of religious freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court must uphold fundamental American values by striking down the unconstitutional Muslim ban; no one should fear because of how they pray, writes Julia A. Shearson.
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