international relations

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Judge Ashley Tabaddor Files Suit against Department of Justice for Violating First Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1964

 

August 12, 2014, Los Angeles, CA – The Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) was today informed of a suit filed against the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) by Judge Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge for the U.S. Immigration Court. In this suit, Judge Tabaddor challenges an order that indefinitely recuses her from hearing cases involving Iranian nationals, citing that the order violates her First Amendment rights of free speech and association. The suit also notes that the order is racially discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The suit, Tabaddor v. Holder et al., charges that the DOJ based its disqualification order on racially-motivated and discriminatory criteria, specifically Judge Tabaddor’s Iranian heritage and her leadership role within the Iranian American community.

 

Source: www.payvand.com

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Cornel West: “We won’t stand for annihilation” in Palestine – YouTube

 

Dr. Cornell West speaks at the pro-Palestinian march on Washington, where he juxtaposes issues facing Palestinians to issues facing African Americans in The United States today.

 

Filmed by Ford Fischer (@fordfischer on twitter)

 

Source: www.youtube.com

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Beyond the border: the US’s deadly immigration crisis

 

Texas has become the deadliest state in the US for undocumented immigrants. This four-part series from the Guardian and The Texas Observer looks at the lives affected by the humanitarian crisis.

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In Brooks County alone, the bodies of at least 294 people who died trying to hike around the Border Patrol checkpoint were recovered from February 2011 to March 2014.

 

Source: www.theguardian.com

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Israel-Gaza conflict: Right-wing Israeli politician calls for Gazans to be ’concentrated in camps’ – and then all resistance ‘exterminated’

A senior Israeli politician has called for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip” and the deportation of Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlers.

Source: www.independent.co.uk

 

Where have we heard this kind of thinking before?

 

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U.N. Says ‘Evidence’ Points to Israel in Gaza School Attack

 

UNITED NATIONS — Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday that “all available evidence” suggested that Israeli artillery had hit a United Nations school in Gaza full of civilians who thought they were in a safe zone.

“Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children,” the secretary general told reporters…

– Click through to read more –

Source: www.nytimes.com

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The U.S. Has Deported More Than 30,000 Guatemalans This Year Alone

 

“Sometimes they have been sent back five, eight or even nine times,” said Rafael Amado, Communications Director at the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “The government has several initiatives to encourage them to stay, but it’s not enough.”

After a long trip with their ankles and hands tied down, and an unspecified amount time spent in detention before that, the returnees must face the very thing they left: A country where 54 percent of the population lives in poverty, where the rate of young children with chronic malnutrition is the fourth highest in the world, and where drug cartels and gangs rule the streets.

 

Source: time.com

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U.S. Turns Back on Child Migrants After Its Policies in Guatemala, Honduras Sowed Seeds of Crisis – VIDEO – Democracy Now!

 

DANA FRANK:
Yeah, when we talk about the fleeing gangs and violence, it’s also this tremendous poverty. And poverty doesn’t just happen. It, itself, is a direct result of policies of both the Honduran government and the U.S. government, including privatizations, mass layoffs of government workers, and a new—in Honduras, a new law, that’s now made permanent, that breaks up full-time jobs and makes them part-time and ineligible for unionization, living wage and the national health service. And a lot of these economic policies are driven by U.S.-funded lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which itself is funding the corrupt Honduran police. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is the other piece of this. Like NAFTA did for the U.S. and Mexico, it opens the door to this open competition between small producers in agriculture in Honduras, small manufacturers, and jobs are disappearing as a result of that.

So, with this poverty that we’re seeing that people are fleeing, it’s not like people are like, “Let’s go have the American dream.” There are almost no jobs for young people. Their parents know it. And we’re talking about starving to death—that’s the alternative—or being driven into gangs with tremendous sexual violence. And it’s a very, very tragic situation here. But it’s not like it tragically just happened. It’s a direct result of very conscious policies by the U.S. and Honduran governments.
Click through for VIDEO and transcript.

Source: www.democracynow.org

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57,000 Possible Cases of Asylum

 

Mr. Obama called the surge in children from Central America an “actual humanitarian crisis on the border,” and said it “only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all.”

 

Source: www.nytimes.com