Tag Archives: WorldNews

Keira Knightley: ‘Iraq was the first time I’d been politically engaged’

7232.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

In an exclusive interview, the actor talks about her new film Official Secrets, in which she plays Katharine Gun, the whistleblower who tried to stop the Iraq war

• Read an interview with the real Katharine Gun

The role of Katharine Gun in Official Secrets is played by Keira Knightley. Earlier this summer, a few weeks before her second child was born, Knightley, 34, sat down and talked exclusively to the Observer about why she took the part, and why she felt she believed that the film was coming out at a timely moment.

Did you spend much time with Katharine to prepare for the part?
Not a huge amount. I had lunch with her, and she came to the set once. I really liked her. Gavin Hood, the director, had said he didn’t want a characterisation of her. I mean, I don’t look anything like her. She has an interesting accent because she was brought up in Taiwan. I really wanted to do that, but Gavin wouldn’t let me. I’m not a journalist, of course, so this was the first time I had asked anyone any questions that they legally could not answer. What is amazing about Katharine is that her point of view is so utterly clear. As far as playing her, that point of view had to come across. This is a story told through her eyes.

Continue reading…

Donald Trump is no hero of the working class. And the GM strikers know it | Robert Reich

3210.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

The walkout at General Motors is a predictable and powerful result of the president’s own kind of capitalism

Donald Trump pretends to be a tribune of the working class, standing up for American jobs. Last week nearly 50,000 General Motors workers went on strike to get what they see as their fair share of its profits and stop further layoffs. Trump’s response? A shrug.

Related: ‘It’s devastating’. End of GM in Ohio town as Trump fails to bring back midwest jobs

Continue reading…

New agreement gives US plenty, Salvadoran migrants nothing

Alexandra-Hill-Kevin-McAleenan.png

El Salvador’s Foreign Minister, Alexandra Hill, was in Washington, D.C. yesterday to sign an agreement with the US Department of Homeland Security.  In the agreement Hill signed, El Salvador pledges to work with the US to become a country where refugees from third countries can seek asylum.  Reuters reported on the joint press conference announcing the agreement:

“The core of this is recognizing El Salvador’s development of their own asylum system and committing to help them build that capacity,” Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan told reporters in Washington after signing documents with El Salvador’s minister of foreign affairs, Alexandra Hill. 

“Individuals crossing through El Salvador should be able to seek protections” in the Central American country even if they were intending to apply for asylum in the United States, he added. 

Neither official said when the arrangement would take effect or provide details on how it would be administered. It was unclear how such a deal would work, given that most migrants from other countries take routes that avoid crossing the small, poverty-stricken El Salvador. 

“We are going to work out operational details. This is just a broad agreement,” Hill told Reuters upon leaving the signing ceremony.

There should be no doubt that this agreement is not part of some humanitarian interest by the US in creating a region-wide system of humanitarian protection for refugees.  Instead, this agreement is a piece in a Trump administration agenda to make asylum claims impossible in the US with a legal argument that refugees who pass through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras can and should have applied for asylum in those countries and thus are not entitled to asylum in the US.

You can watch the complete joint press conference here.

Hill started her remarks by stating “My president, president Bukele, since day 1, has changed policy 180 degrees.   We are now allies of the United States after a decade of a government that was pro-Chavez.”  Then, Hill talked about two subjects which are not advanced by this agreement at all.  First, she described as “the main issue” the plight of Salvadorans who have fled as migrants because of violence or economic necessity.   And yet the agreement she signed appears to have done nothing for such migrants.

This agreement does not contain measures for Salvadorans who might currently be on the migrant journey, stuck at the Mexican border by metering policies, imprisoned in immigration detention centers, or dumped back in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols to wait out their immigration court proceedings.   While Hill invoked the images of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 26, and his toddler daughter Valeria who drowned in the Rio Grande as she spoke about the predicament of Salvadora migrants, this agreement does nothing to change the Trump administration policies which force migrants to attempt dangerous journeys across the Rio Grande or through barren deserts.

Hill also talked passionately about the 195,000 Salvadorans in the US on Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) which the Trump administration is attempting to cancel and force them to return home.  Hill stated that these TPS holders have deep roots in the US and put their hands over their hearts for the US national anthem and also for the national anthem of El Salvador.  She made it clear that the Salvadoran government was advocating for a path which would allow TPS holders to remain in the US. 

However, Jonathan Blitzer of the New Yorker magazine  tweeted that Hill was having no success on this point:

According to a senior Trump Administration official, gov’t of El Salvadoran asked U.S. to extend T.P.S. for 200K+ Salvadorans living in the U.S. in exchange for signing asylum deal announced today. And was told that T.P.S. was a non-starter for US. Salvadorans signed anyway.

El Salvador would almost be starting from scratch in creating a system to accept refugees.   Although El Salvador passed a refugee law in 2002, I searched in vain across current Salvadoran government websites to find any information about current activities of  “CODER,” the commission which is established under the law to accept refugee applications.   The only mention was a press event in 2016 where then foreign minister Hugo Martinez stated that 49 persons “in recent years” had been accepted as refugees in El Salvador. 

One also has to question whether El Salvador seriously plans to accept any quantity of refugees from other countries like Venezuela or Cuba in the future, given its need to devote resources to the needs of thousands of Salvadorans being deported from the US and Mexico each year.

So what does El Salvador get out of signing this agreement?   There is probably some additional security funding which will make its way to El Salvador to fight gang violence on the grounds that such violence is a push factor for migration.  El Salvador also looks to see progress on agricultural guest worker visas for legal migration.   Finally, the agreement pushes Nayib Bukele’s argument that he is the best partner for the US in the region, as he continues to seek investment and backing for his other ambitious initiatives in the country.

But for the Salvadoran migrant outside of the country, despite the words of Foreign Minister Hill, this agreement offers nothing.

The Tories are learning that Boris Johnson is electoral Marmite | Gaby Hinsliff

3000.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

The prime minister’s walkabouts were meant to be a pre-election charm offensive. Instead, he has been confronted by people who are sick of austerity

Life is just too short, Siobhan McArdle said, to be a chief executive in the NHS right now. In an unusually blunt resignation letter earlier this month, the outgoing leader of the troubled South Tees hospitals foundation trust said her hospitals had delivered millions in so-called “efficiency savings”, but now the cupboard was bare. The trust had already been severely criticised by regulators for a bed shortage that was hurting patients; it couldn’t, she suggested, keep cutting without care suffering. It’s rare for a hospital boss to throw in the towel so publicly, but many in the NHS will understand where she was coming from.

The number of patients waiting for NHS surgery is now at its highest since records began in 2007. One in 11 NHS posts are lying vacant as staff quit and aren’t replaced. If we didn’t have a winter crisis last year, or not in the classic sense of patients piling up in corridors, that’s arguably because what was once an acute seasonal shortage of beds has become a chronic one rumbling all year long. For months all this has rather puzzlingly failed to get much political traction. But now, thanks to the father of a very sick baby girl, it has.

Continue reading…