Arab League urges Bolsonaro to reconsider embassy move

BRASILIA/PNN/

Brazil’s right-wing President-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, was warned in a letter on Monday that his plans to move the Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would seriously harm relations with Arab countries. Arab diplomats are expected to meet in Brasilia to further discuss the intended embassy move, along with Bolsonaro’s plans to close the Palestinian mission in Brasilia.

Natanyahu praised the planned move: “I congratulate my friend Brazilian President-Elect, Jair Bolsonaro, for his intention to move the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem, a historic, correct and exciting step!” Bolsonaro is due to be sworn in on 1st January 2019, and Netanyahu reportedly hopes to attend the inauguration ceremony.

A diplomat from the Arab League stated: “the Arab world has much respect for Brazil and we want not just to maintain relations but improve and diversify them. But the intention of moving the embassy to Jerusalem could harm them.”

Hanan Ashwari, member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s executive committee, condemned the plans, stating “these are provocative and illegal steps that will only destabilize security and stability in the region.”

Currently, the United States and Guatemala are the only nations with embassies located in Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv. The Organisation of Islamic Countries has called on member states to abstain from importing cardamom from Guatemala, and not to conduct high level visits to this country or to organize joint cultural, sportive or artistic events” until its embassy is removed from Jerusalem. The organization has announced that similar measures will be taken against countries which relocate their embassies to Jerusalem.

According to Reuters, the president-elect’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, said the embassy move was “not a question of if, but of when”, speaking after recently visiting Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner at the White House.

Brazil is among the largest exporters of halal meat to the arab world, and this move would threaten the trading relationship in the future. However, as Bolsonaro attempts to align himself with Trump and position the nation favourably with regard to the US, it is doubtful whether the potential economic interest at stake will weigh heavily enough against the embassy move.

San Francisco Police Have A Bizarre Habit of Charging 89 Percent of the Youth They Arrest With Non-Specific Offenses

San Francisco police fail to specify charges in nearly 90 percent of youth arrests in 2017

by Mike Males

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) deviates from all other law enforcement agencies in California in two key ways: it continually fails to report Hispanic statistics separately (Open Justice), and it fails to specify exactly what offenses it charges nearly nine in 10 arrested youths.

In 2017, 869 of the 974 arrests of youths under age 18 in San Francisco (89.2 percent) resulted in a charge under three unspecified categories of “other felony” and “other misdemeanor” offenses, as shown in tabulations from the 2017 arrest file provided by the California Department of Justice (DOJ). In California’s other 57 counties, just 1,525 of the total of 56,249 youth arrests (2.7 percent) resulted in charges under these three codes. San Francisco, with fewer than 2 percent of the state’s juvenile arrests, accounted for 36 percent of arrests for unspecified offenses.

Table 1. San Francisco juvenile arrests by offense and reporting agency, assorted years 1995-2017

The SFPD’s unique failure to specify exactly what criminal codes nearly 90 percent of youth arrestees are charged with raises multiple issues. First, the Bureau of Criminal Statistics codes (96, 99, and 990) under which 869 arrests of San Francisco youth were made in 2017 are a grab-bag of more than 700 offenses including rare, obscure offenses such as violating fishing regulations, drugging a racehorse, mishandling explosives, and tampering with a signal light. In contrast, just 61 youths were arrested for specified violent or property crimes and none for drug offenses. Since it is unlikely that San Francisco’s 869 youth arrests in 2017 were for obscure offenses that rarely generated arrests in other jurisdictions or past eras, SFPD should provide the exact criminal codes for these youth arrests.

Mike Males, Senior Research Fellow, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice

Second, while SFPD reports 974 youth arrests in 2017, the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department reports receiving just 551 petitions from the District Attorney for juvenile arrestees. Given prosecutorial discretion, the release of some mistakenly arrested juveniles, and the time lag between arrest and petition, we would expect some divergence between police and probation department numbers – but not the large difference we see today. Since 2003, the proportion of juvenile arrest petitions reported by the probation department compared to arrests reported by SFPD has fallen from 98 percent to 57 percent. What happened to more than 400 arrested youths in San Francisco in 2017 who apparently were not referred to juvenile probation?

Third, while the police department specified the offense in just 11 percent (105 of 974) juvenile arrests, the probation department specified the offense in 97 percent (536 of 551) petitions for arrest referrals it received during the same time period (Table 1). This large discrepancy is disturbing.

The SFPD’s increasingly haphazard reporting prevents accountability in terms of what offense police even arrest youths for, raises major questions about their validity and distorts local and statewide numbers. Importantly, the SDPD’s reporting gaps extend to adult arrests as well. The SFPD reports much higher than average proportions of adults arrested under unspecified codes (30 percent of the state’s unspecified felonies, and 5 percent arrested for unspecified misdemeanors) compared to other jurisdictions.

The SFPD’s deficient statistical practices severely hamper transparent analysis, especially with regard to youth arrests. Supervising agencies, which have passively allowed this situation to deteriorate, should take steps to bring SFPD arrest reporting by race, ethnicity, and offense into line with statewide standards, to hold the SFPD and SFJPD accountable for explaining their discrepant statistics, and to correct any past error.


Editor’s note:  Author Mike Males contacted the SFPD for additional information on the unspecified categories  but they have yet to reply.


Mike A. Males is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), where this essay first appeared. Dr. Males has a Ph.D. in Social Ecology from U.C. Irvine and over 12 years of experience working in youth programs. He is also content director of Youth Facts.

Germany: AfD′s ′white men′ Advent calendar sparks controversy and ridicule | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 11.12.2018

Germany’s right-wing populists said they sought to celebrate the contributions of white men, who faced “rampant discrimination” in society. The calendar was promoted with the hashtag “yes to white men” on Twitter.

Source: Germany: AfD′s ′white men′ Advent calendar sparks controversy and ridicule | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 11.12.2018

The Trump administration unveils a stealth attack on people with preexisting conditions

Trump administration officials apparently are prepared to go to their graves insisting that they did everything possible to protect Americans with preexisting medical conditions, even as they pull out the stops to undermine those protections.

The latest example of this subterfuge came in late October,…

‘Yemenis are left so poor they kill themselves before the hunger does’

Saudi death squads!

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As peace talks to end war in Yemen continue, three local aid workers from the Norwegian Refugee Council describe its devastating impact

More than 10,000 people in Yemen have been killed and 3 million forced to flee their homes as a result of almost four years of fighting. An estimated 22 million people are now in need of aid and up to 13 million face starvation. As talks to end the conflict continue in Sweden, three Yemeni aid workers from the Norwegian Refugee Council talk of the physical and emotional destruction the fighting has brought to their country.

Continue reading…

Putinism a Greater Threat to Humanity than Anything the West has Faced Before, Yakovenko Says

via aleksey godin

Paul Goble
            Staunton, December 10 – Speaking to the Forum of Free Russia in Vilnius, Igor Yakovenko says that “over its many thousand years of history, humanity has not once been faced with any challenge and mortal threat comparable to the Putin regime,” a regime that exploits the strengths of Western countries against themselves.
            The Putin regime, the Russian commentator says, is “a new threat” that is especially dangerous because few know how to describe or classify it, preferring instead like old generals to use terms from the past even though “not one of them” is appropriate for describing the state Putin has put in place (yakovenkoigor.blogspot.com/2018/12/blog-post_9.html).
            The Putin regime has no ideology. “We know the ideology of communism, Nazism, fascism and liberalism.” But try to imagine a book with the title “Putinism.”  “Inside it, you would find only blank pages.”  The Kremlin leader uses whatever seems to work for whatever aggression he is carrying out at the time, unconstrained by any ideological principles.
            Because that is so, Yakovenko continues, it is vitally important to convene an international tribunal to make clear what Putin and his regime are about, a tribunal that in the nature of things will combine both the arrangements of the Nuremburg trials of the Nazi leadership and the Russell-Sartre intellectual tribunal of Western crimes.
            On the one hand, the tribunal will include mostly non-governmental experts and activists, he says; but on the other, it will be able to define the nature of the Putin system and its crimes and thus involve governments to take actions against them in order to defend the values that inform Western countries.
            The tribunal should focus on three categories of crimes by Putin and his entourage: the usurpation of power, the war against Ukraine, the war in Syria, and crimes in the information sphere including but not limited to the subversion of the electoral process in Western countries, Yakovenko says.
            In each case, it will become obvious that Putinism does not fit into any of the categories Western analysts typically use for it.  Instead, “it speculates on the values of the civilization of the West and uses them in the ways a parasite does against a host. In this it resembles international terrorism.”
            Today, the commentator continues, the Putin regime is able to maintain itself because “world public opinion and in the heads of world leaders there exists a false picture of the world,” one which talks about the importance of Russia rather than the criminal nature of the Putin regime. A tribunal even with limited powers can help change that.
            “Our task,” Yakovenko says, “with the help of an open public process, is to show the entire world the falseness” of the picture people have of Russia and to “show that Putin’s gas and  oil are toxic and that with their help Putin corrupts Europe, America and the entire world and that to deal with Putin and his appointees is to bring the world closer to catastrophe.”

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