Long March Takes Its Toll On Members Of Migrant Caravan

(November 2, 2018 at 1:53 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Long March Takes Its Toll On Members Of Migrant Caravan

You mean the violent thugs Trump has sent the troops at and told they can shoot.

(November 2, 2018 at 1:58 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:

(November 2, 2018 at 1:53 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Long March Takes Its Toll On Members Of Migrant Caravan

You mean the violent thugs Trump has sent the troops at and told they can shoot.

The very ones.  The people trying to enter the US legally are to be shot at.

Boru

Trump Wants to Make it Hard to Get Asylum. Other Countries Feel the Same.

Quote:How Asylum Is Meant to Work

The basic principle is straightforward.

If you make it to the border of a foreign country, you have a right to request asylum. That country is obligated to hear and evaluate your claim. It cannot kick you out while it’s processing you — which can take months or years — or if you face a credible threat of persecution at home. If the country finds you meet the definition of a refugee, it is obligated to shelter you. If you don’t, only then can it expel you.

These rights came out of World War II, which created huge numbers of refugees in Europe. The war’s victors spent much of the next decade setting up what became the international order, enshrined in laws that regulate things like warfare or that establish universal rights.

Protection for refugees made the list because it was an urgent issue at the time and because it was seen as a way to uphold stability and basic rights amid any future humanitarian crises.

And after the United States and others had turned away Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, the world felt compelled to promise “never again.”

Refugees’ rights became enshrined in international law through global agreements signed in 1951 and again in 1967, when the end of colonialism brought more crises.

Not all countries signed these pacts; the United States ratified only the 1967 agreement and several Middle Eastern and Asian countries signed neither. But they are considered to be to be so widely agreed upon that they constrain everyone.

Still, what makes asylum one of the world’s strongest norms is that it is written into the domestic laws of many countries, including the United States. After all, asylum is administered by domestic governments and courts.

This means that a leader like Mr. Trump cannot simply defy his obligations by ignoring or abdicating the 1967 agreement, for that would mean breaking American law.

But on the world stage there is no enforcement mechanism. There is nothing to stop a country from repealing its asylum laws or, if the leader can get away with it, ignoring them.

Countries have generally complied with this norm, because they want to be seen as responsible actors, or to avoid angering their neighbors or the United Nations. And even if countries might care little about refugees themselves, they know that they will benefit if everyone else complies.


Why the Asylum System Has Been Eroding

This system held up at least moderately well until the 1990s.

In retrospect, it has become clear that Western countries complied with refugee rules, and pushed other countries to do the same, less out of altruism than because of Cold War gamesmanship.

In the first few decades after World War II, many refugees came out of the communist bloc. For Western leaders and their allies, accepting the refugees, along with those from non-communist nations, was a way to position the West as morally and ideologically superior.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western nations became less interested in championing refugees. They looked for ways to cut corners on their obligations.

That year, the United States Coast Guard began interdicting boats of Haitians fleeing political turmoil at home. Rather then let the boats reach Florida, which would oblige the United States to grant the Haitians refugee protections, the Americans shipped many back to Haiti or diverted them for processing at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay.

This practice may have violated the spirit of refugee protections, but the Supreme Court ruled in 1993, by an 8-to-1 vote supported by the Clinton administration, that this complied with international and domestic law.

This loophole — a country can avoid its responsibilities toward refugees by forcibly preventing them from reaching its borders — has since become common practice among Western countries.

Australia diverts would-be refugees to grisly facilities on foreign island nations like Naura. The European Union partnered with brutal despots, like Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, to prevent refugees from reaching Europe.

When that plan faltered, it avoided assisting boatloads of would-be migrants, even as hundreds died on the journey.

And now Mr. Trump has deployed thousands of troops to prevent a Honduran caravan from reaching the southern border.


Could the Asylum System Break?

This is already happening as Western countries continue to hold out rights and protections, and push burdens onto poorer countries that are less likely or able to protect refugees.

Despite European and American hand-wringing over the arrival of Syrian refugees in their countries, for instance, the vast majority reside in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.

Knowing that Western powers will look the other way, those countries feel less compelled to grant full protections, preventing refugees from working or restricting where they can live.

Or they might force refugees home before it is safe for them to return. And certainly they will prevent refugees from reaching European borders.

As a result what we have now isn’t a global refugee system so much as a loose network of occasionally and partially observed norms.

This means that there is no reliable process for relieving the political, social and economic pressures that sudden refugee influxes create. This creates dangers primarily for refugees but also for the governments that have deconstructed the system.

We have seen in Europe in the last few years just how significant the political impact can be.

And we should expect this to get worse. Scientists anticipate a near- and medium-term future in which climate change drives large population movements, either directly as people abandon areas rendered inhospitable by rising temperatures or extreme weather events, or indirectly as climate change exacerbates violence.

The resurgence of populist and nationalist politics also bodes poorly. Us-vs-them movements, skeptical of international agreements and immigration, have little interest in asylum’s foundational concepts of global burden-sharing or universal rights.

If asylum rights were declining even in the era of sunny 1990s global liberalism, it is hard to imagine their doing much better in the era of Donald J. Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir V. Putin.

“It takes a really, really long time to build these norms, especially when they restrict government actions in some way,” Ms. Schwartz said. “It’s so much easier to take them down.”

Nigerian Army Uses Trump’s Words to Justify Fatal Shooting of Rock-Throwing Protesters

Quote:The Nigerian Army, part of a military criticized for rampant human rights abuses, on Friday used the words of President Trump to justify its fatal shootings of rock-throwing protesters.

Soldiers fired this Monday on a march of about 1,000 Islamic Shiite activists who had blocked traffic on the outskirts of the capital, Abuja. Videos that circulated on social media showed several protesters hurling rocks at heavily armed soldiers who then shot fleeing demonstrators in the back.

The Nigerian military said three protesters were killed, but the toll appears to have been much higher.

Amnesty International and leaders of the protest said more than 40 people were killed at the march and two smaller marches, with more than 100 wounded by bullets. A Reuters reporter counted 20 bodies at the main march.

Human rights activists and many Nigerians were outraged at the military’s response, which echoed a similar confrontation in 2015, when soldiers killed nearly 350 protesters from the same group, the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, the largest and most recognizable face of Shiite Islam in the country. The group organizes frequent protest marches.

Early Friday morning, the military responded to the criticism.

The army’s official Twitter account posted a video, “Please Watch and Make Your Deductions,” showing Mr. Trump’s speech on Thursday in which he said rocks would be considered firearms if thrown toward the American military at the nation’s borders.

“We’re not going to put up with that,” Mr. Trump said in the clip. “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back.”

The army deleted the post hours later without explanation after it had caused an uproar on social media.

“We lost five out of six seats in ethnic areas. Ethnic people are not satisfied with our performance on the peace process,” said NLD spokesman Myo Nyunt (Myanmar elections)

Quote:Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) expects to have won only seven of 13 seats up for grabs in by-elections, a spokesman said on Sunday, conceding that Myanmar’s ruling party needed to do more for voters from ethnic minorities.

The polls, held on Saturday, will not alter the balance of power but were seen as an early test ahead of a general election in 2020.

Nobel laureate Suu Kyi promised to make ending the country’s decades-old ethnic conflicts her government’s top priority, but peace talks have stalled and fighting has intensified.

“We lost five out of six seats in ethnic areas. Ethnic people are not satisfied with our performance on the peace process,” said NLD spokesman Myo Nyunt, sharing the party’s understanding of the results ahead of an official announcement by the election commission.

“This result is a lesson for us. We will come up with a strategy for each constituency for the coming election.”

Suu Kyi has led Myanmar’s civilian administration since winning a majority in both houses of parliament in 2015 elections that ended decades of military rule.

But she must share power with the army, which automatically takes 25 percent of parliamentary seats under a military-drafted constitution.

(November 2, 2018 at 1:53 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Long March Takes Its Toll On Members Of Migrant Caravan

If they are not gang members, then I don't know who is.

Germany slowly running short on gasoline. Government opening its energency stocks.


The reason is: drought

Germany is currently (still) experiencing the worst drought in its history. Water leves of many rivers have gone so low that shipping is almost impossible. It is shipping down the Rhine river from Rotterdam that transports much of the needed fuel upstream to where its needed. Ships already have to travel only loaded halfway, or they wouldnt be able to travel at all. If we didnt have dug up the Rhine into a "water highway" 200y ago, shipping would already have been stopped completely long ago.
Hence many gas stations, particularly in and around Frankfurt and other major cities are starting to shut down, or will be doing so soon.

I went down there with my camera this summer:
I am standing in the riverbed looking at the dam. You can see the normal water mark somehwere halfway up.


P.S.: This is the spot where Pattons 3rd Army crossed the Rhine in March 1945.